Escape from Paradise by Robert J. Szmidt

Author:Robert J. Szmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WordFire Press

TWENTY-TWO

The graviplane flew just above the square roofs of mass-printed houses. Except for the prominent Tower and several high-rise buildings owned by the corporation, identical ground-story bungalows reigned everywhere else in the colony. Their orange, and sometimes pinkish structures in the shape of cubes stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. The squat houses stood row upon row along identical streets, parallel to the maglev line. For a soldier, used to uniformization, this wasn’t a particularly depressing sight—most military barracks looked just like that, though rarely were they as vast as this mining town. Could this landscape please the civilian eye? Darski wasn’t sure, but apparently no one on Delta complained. Here, in the Inner Rim, people had other concerns.

The corporation provided its employees with basic amenities, but as for the rest, they had to fend for themselves. Their wages were good compared to other systems—too low, however, to even think of extensions. That’s why the miners concentrated all their efforts on cultivating their backyard gardens because this gave them a healthier, more varied menu. And so, greenhouses, polytunnels, and ordinary beds stretched between the prefabricated fences, enabling the cultivation of the most popular of Earth’s fruits and vegetables, engineered of course to grow in extraterrestrial conditions. Delta was an agriculturalist’s paradise; with axial tilt of forty-two degrees, summer never ended at this latitude, and with such rotational speed of the globe, a local year lasted twenty-three standard months, while a day was five hours, four minutes and fifteen seconds longer than Earth’s.

The colony’s outskirts were a less densely built-up area; the houses were larger, and while they still stood in walled gardens, the latter were of the traditional sort—made of stone. Even the streets seemed wider, probably thanks to the greenery-covered berms. At almost every crossroads there were entertainment and commercial pavilions. These were typical middle-class neighborhoods, populated by engineers, technicians, supervisors: the fourth- and fifth-level employees on the corporate ladder. Still insignificant, but more important than blue-collar workers. Some could even afford their own means of transport. Today, the sleek and shiny vehicles stood mostly in the parking lots near the maglev stations. They’d been abandoned just like most of the personal belongings because baggage allowance was set at the limit of a hundred and seventy pounds per person in case of arks and fifty-five in case of transporters. Anything over the limit had to fit in the evacuees’ pockets.

Professor Fitz flew over the last buildings and passed the wall, at least forty feet high, beyond which Nature reigned supreme over Delta. Farther down, a fenced road led to a small military compound Olivernest had mentioned last night. At first, Henryan took his words for a slip of the tongue. He couldn’t believe that High Command maintained a secret facility on a planet illegally leased to one of the largest corporations.

There’s something very wrong here, Darski thought, staring at the distant truncated pyramid of a building standing in the middle of a vast complex, where he was about to land in less than sixty seconds.

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