Legend of Ellie Quin by Alex Scarrow

Author:Alex Scarrow [Scarrow, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780957516007
Google: 5IcemwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17412601
Publisher: Grrr Books
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Ellie could smell coffee, strong and bitter.

She tried to sit up, but immediately she felt the ache of exhausted muscles complaining. Instead she settled for opening her eyes and found herself trying to focus on the underside of a dirty looking canvas hammock strung only a few inches above her. It was full, and swayed with a stressed creak. She looked down the length of the bulging, oil-stained canvas and saw a hairy leg dangling over the side. It reminded her of a shank of meat. The foot swung lazily in mid air and, from where she was, she could smell the damned thing.

She could hear music playing and vaguely recognized the track. It was something her Mum and Dad listened to, folksy and embarrassing. Above her, she heard a baritone voice rumbling tunelessly along with the music.

Rather than immediately alert whoever lay above her that she was awake, Ellie decided to keep quiet for the moment and get a better handle on her surroundings. It looked like the interior of a vessel of some kind. She had seen enough on the toob to guess that, and in any case she had already detected the subtle vibration and the deep throbbing rumble. She was in transit to somewhere.

Ellie had seen interiors like this in many a toob drama, from adventurous, edge-of-the-Universe scout ships to planet-hopping trade skiffs, usually piloted by some heroic flint-faced, chisel-jawed hunk. She cast her eyes up at the pendulous swinging bulge of the straining hammock. She couldn’t imagine the leg dangling over the side belonged to someone like that.

In one of those stupid toob dramas she remembered a character saying something like ‘…pilot spends enough time out there, he ends up looking like his ship.’

She looked at the grubby interior around her; the improvised washing line suspended across the cabin and at the pasty colored shank of meat that was swaying casually in time with the music and guessed there might be some truth in that.

The hammock creaked alarmingly as the body above lurched without warning. A second leg appeared over the side and with a thud that rang through the metal floor of the cabin the hammock’s occupant dropped into view.

He was tall. Very tall. And thickset. Perhaps that was muscle, perhaps he was overweight, she couldn’t tell beneath the oil stained olive overalls he was wearing.

A coil of long light-colored curly hair hung over his face and he pulled it and the rest of his frizzy hair back into a bushy ponytail and pulled on a faded cap to keep the few stray locks out of his face. His cheeks sported several days’ worth of blonde fuzz.

A buzzer sounded and he leant across a bank of lights and switches to hit a button. A flap opened revealing a steaming decanter of stewed coffee and he turned towards Ellie. She snapped her eyes shut.

‘You want some?’ he grunted.

She did her best to maintain the appearance of being in a deep sleep, fighting with her eyelids to stop them fluttering and giving her away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.