Will Bradley by Ark Liberty (v1.0)

Author:Ark Liberty (v1.0)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-09T13:39:16+00:00

As a final courtesy the transport helicopter explored ahead for a few dozen kilometers the next morning. By mid-morning the two buses were underway, rumbling through a landscape notably poor in trees. The tough grass, thin and sharp-bladed, stood more than knee-high, covered huge stretches of land, and here and there they saw straggling copses of evergreens, dark blue-green smudges against the paler green of the meadows. But forests no longer existed, at least not in this neighborhood. They had to move due west for a good many kilometers before swinging northward, for a nuclear hit had left a section of northern Virginia radioactive and dangerous.

At least Carin Hawk kept busy during the long day. While the others scanned the landscape, took holos, quarreled about this or that formation and whether some mound was natural or marked a former human habitation, Carin occupied the comm station at the rear of Northstar 1 and tried to establish contact with Ark Appalachia.

Appalachia was supposed to be a surface-underground compound in the Virginia highlands, its exact location no longer certain. According to their best records, though, it was somewhere in the vicinity if it still existed at all. Like Liberty, Appalachia had long ago taken the precaution of erasing exact information about itself from the global information net. Perhaps, unlike Liberty, the installation itself had been wiped out in the chaos of the Spark Wars, in the long starving and the biological plagues that followed. But if Appalachia still lived, this was at least a chance to regain contact, and so Carin scanned the wavebands, called occasionally, and listened to silence.

Or she chatted. Through the satellite link she could talk to friends on Liberty (so strange to think of them safe and stationary on the sea floor while she rattled across a devastated landscape in this contraption). She also spoke to Northstar 2: Marise Lindholm, on the communications station of the second bus, a few hundred meters to their left, reported all calm.

Meanwhile, endless stretches of prairie rolled by: land that had been coastal plain, now built up by deluges that had swept silt-bearing floodwater over it year after year. The tough grasses, along with the stunted, struggling trees and occasional irregular splotches of lichen, were the only visible life. No bird or butterfly sailed the sky, no mouse or lizard rustled the grass as they moved over it.

An insect was an event.

Brea shrieked in delight at the sight of it, and Savatini stopped the bus. They spilled out into waist-high grass, followed Brea’s pointing finger, and finally discovered them: grasshoppers half an inch long, green, but with pinkish eyes. Li accessed the databanks back at Liberty and pronounced the insects a new species, probably a natural mutation. They sang in ragged chirps, and Brea Van Clease wept to hear them.

But grasshoppers could not delay them long. Li holo’d the male and female of the species, then set the specimens free. Life on Liberty was far too precious to allow him to think of killing even a couple of bugs.

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.