Alien: Covenant - Origins by Alan Dean Foster

Author:Alan Dean Foster [Foster, Alan Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785654770
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2017-09-25T21:00:00+00:00

XV

More rain. Lopé didn’t mind the rain so much. In fact, he hoped there would be decent rain on Origae-6. He enjoyed the feel of it, the smell of it.

Sadly, the rain in Greater London hadn’t felt or smelled right for some decades now. Instead of fresh ionized air, the current steady downpour stank of whatever industrial pollutant happened to dominate the local atmosphere at the moment. As for feel, occasionally there was so much superfine grit contained in the droplets that a really bad storm was capable of scouring paint. Fine for the plethora of companies large and small that had sprung up to deal with the damage, not so good for owners and insurance companies.

No wonder, he mused, not for the first time, we have so many applicants for every colony slot. Persuading people to leave the planet forever would have been a hard sell a hundred or so years ago. Now the rush was to get away, in hopes of finding those things people had once taken for granted: clean air, potable water, healthy soil. If cleanliness was indeed next to godliness, then it was plain to anyone who looked around that neither held much ground on planet Earth.

The crowded and overpopulated greater metropolitan areas were the worst. There was no way to keep them clean. In that respect Greater London, despite all its problems, was better than many. He’d seen images from places like Mumbai, Nairobi, Sao Paulo, and more. Tens of millions of people in dire need of water to drink, proper sanitation, enough food, unable even to afford simple cloth masks to filter the air their lungs struggled to process.

With his experience he could have obtained a high-paying job in any of them, or anywhere else—but there was nowhere else. Nowhere like the exquisite historical images he’d perused in videos and picture books. Oh, there were nature preserves, scattered here and there about the planet’s surface. Zealously protected, they survived on the fringes of increasingly polluted terrain, but you couldn’t live in a preserve. Only scientists, authorized researchers, and a few select visitors were permitted entry.

It wouldn’t have worked for Lopé anyway. He liked people, just not what they had done to the planet. Spending the rest of his life standing guard over a patch of rainforest or isolated island didn’t appeal to him. Hallet was in full agreement. If they were going to enjoy the company of others in pure, untainted surroundings, it was going to have to be on another world. So they had applied as a couple, and been accepted to the Covenant colony’s security team.

Lopé had been offered a bigger promotion. He had declined. There was no need to flash an officer’s bar on a deep space colony ship. Being anointed automatically created a gulf between him and those under his command. Better to be one of the gang, a simple noncom.

“Sergeant” suited him just fine.

From the day he had been recruited, he had prepared himself to deal with any

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