Author: Arron

ERLAN (20), a hardy but poor local explorer in an old tiger-striped wetsuit, uses his wrist band TORC to take photographs of the foyer.

Several flashes come from within the foyer. The flashes reveal tiger-stripes on something moving inside.

…The Angels surround it.

Sholdan, Sovda and Erlan walk along a mezzanine that overlooks a training area filled with mortals practising combat situations. There are several office doors.

There is the rumble of BIG JET ENGINES over everything and a much larger, silvery, oil-stained flying boat flies overhead — obviously a converted bomber — belching dark exhaust fumes. Rauk and Quetro are transfixed.

The elevator doors open and Quetro heads off down a corridor by himself. A small crowd of senior officers greet Rauk and Nezafeli but ignore Sovda and Erlan. The two stand and wait to be told what to do or where to go but the crowd has surrounded the others. Without warning, the crowd moves […]

The gleaming starliner looks like a missile and is being loaded with cargo. Over the speakers, a band plays the Demos anthem. Erlan and his parents are at the entrance. Erlan’s mother is hugging him and crying. Erlan’s father looks at his son with concern.

…

We pull back to reveal an ASTRONAUT with a green leaf emblem on her suit.

Three of the Sojucul gunships edge out of the smoke at Suda station.

The shuttle’s engines are off before it leaves the smoke at over one thousand kilometres per hour…

The brakes release and the starliner accelerates down the runway. In five seconds it is in the air. The landing gear retracts and the flames behind extend.

We rise and the station is silhouetted by the planet below. We pull away until the station becomes a dot; a tiny two kilometres across above the planet’s eighteen thousand.

He unclips the astronaut’s tether and pushes the dead woman away into space.

…who puts a gun against her helmet and fires.

She turns and comes face-to-face with a SABOTEUR…

…and two thugs from his politics club — GALIP and METIN.

Aboard are a firebrand PROFESSOR…

She rotates and the wall becomes the surface of an asteroid.

A thick-gloved hand reaches into a service panel in a rocky wall.

If we converted the entire Spirit using fusion, we’d need ten trillion more like her to power us. Instead, the engines scavenge the fuel we need from underneath the fabric of space itself. The shuttle passes the engines towards the centre of the asteroid and heads for the dock.

The shuttle gets closer, a tiny speck as it heads between two of the Spirit’s six-kilometre-tall engines.

An asteroid passes a kilometre beyond the dead woman. Then another. And another. They are connected by tubes. She floats away from the centre of a space station two kilometres across and made from asteroids.

Above the temple foyer is a carved LOGO.

The chake swims towards a fish and makes a deep DAAAP sound. The fish is paralysed and snatched into the jaws of the predator. We speed past to the sea floor below the island.