Chapter Two
The lightsail schooner was an
enormous ship, easily visible from the ground even with her sails furled. The
dockyard crew lounged in their vehicles on the tarmac, eating, yawning,
grumbling among themselves, idly watching the schooner swing past as she
orbited Ception. It was unusual to have lightsail schooners dock at Ception,
but not unheard of. A landing ship streaked for a few moments across the
artificial atmosphere of Ception’s sky, an atmosphere
that had not existed several years ago but was now rich enough with oxygen to
allow human beings to breathe freely on the surface. The members of the crew
were all veterans of hundreds of such landings, and barely looked over as the
landing ship alighted on the pad, several kilometers distant.
It took several minutes for them to arrive at the ship.
They went through the usual routine of unloading one cargo and re-loading the
ship with another, and scarcely noticed the single passenger that emerged from
the crew compartment. The passenger was a man, carrying a small duffel bag and
wearing, above more comfortable clothing, a somewhat bedraggled, collared tunic
that identified him as an employee of the Tainosen corporation in red pictographic writing. As soon as he had
climbed down the metal staircase to the ground he ripped at the Velcro
fastenings of the tunic and shrugged out of it, dropping it on the ground. None
of the ground crew were watching, or they might have
called after him as he hefted his duffel bag once more and walked away from the
crumpled piece of clothing, toward the distant buildings of the spaceport.
Copyright Elizabeth Bent 2001