The Silvering

Published by: eXtasy Books

Author : Sally Odgers

ISBN :978-1-4874-1993-6

Page :171

Word Count :46196

Publication Date :2018-06-15

Series : Elydian Dawn#2

Heat Level :

Available Formats : The Silvering (mobi) , The Silvering (epub) , The Silvering (prc) , The Silvering (pdf)

Category : Science Fiction Romance

Product Code: 978-1-4874-1993-6

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Elydian Dawn…the legend begins.

Marianne Arcadia expected to marry Jeremiah and raise a family.

Planet surface 18 7 30 shiptime
Marianne Arcadia

“What the flid?” Edsen’s furious voice demanded, and Marianne, who had run out of breath from screaming and reclosed her eyes, heard the sound of an altercation inside the broken shell of the ship.

A few moments later, someone landed across her legs, yelped and started cursing. Edsen, clearly. That was all wrong, Marianne decided peevishly. If she was the first Elysian to set foot, or rather, back, on this planet, then her beloved Jeremiah ought to have been the second. Better yet, they should have stepped forth together, hand in hand. It was too late to consider that.

“Marrin!” That was Jeremiah, and again he’d grasped her uninjured wrist and seemed to be trying to pull her upright. “Are you hurt? Hurt more, I mean?”

Edsen stopped cursing and made an exasperated growl. “Obviously, she’s hurt! She wouldn’t be lying there like a dropped shirt otherwise.”

“I’m not hurt—much,” Marianne said, still with her eyes clamped shut. Her one brief glimpse of that blue, milky sky had scared her silly.

“Why are you lying there, then?”

“I just don’t want to see–that up there.” She jabbed her free hand up to indicate the vastness above.

“Flid!” Edsen said, and she pictured him tossing back his hair. “What is that?”

Jeremiah said, “It’s sky. I remember it from back on Terra. I really missed it when we first came on board.”

His voice shook with emotion, and Marianne decided maybe it wasn’t so terrible. She opened her eyes to slits and squinted upwards.

There was still the same blue colour…blue as the sage flowers that grew in the Garden Level. Patches and stacks and wisps of white interrupted the blue, and it all stretched along forever. She opened her eyes fully, gazing upwards.

“Marrin!” Jeremiah gripped her shoulder.

“She’s all right. She’s stopped yelling,” Edsen said.

Marianne pressed her elbows into the ground, and she levered herself to a sitting position. She saw both young men staring at her and managed a wobbly smile. “I won’t yell again. It was just a shock to fall out and to see that.” She indicated the sky.

“You did know about the sky on Terra though, didn’t you?” Jeremiah asked.

“Yes, I knew. It’s in books. I just didn’t know, if you see what I mean. I didn’t think it would be so big, and so far away. Why is it so far away?”

“It’s something to do with the atmosphere on planets, I think,” Jeremiah said.

Marianne took his hand for comfort, and she looked cautiously about. The surface she’d half recognised lying on was something like leaves, only very fine cut and tall and not the right colour. It lapped around her hips as she sat there, and just a few paces away it gave way to an enormous rip of raw earth where Elysian Dawn had rammed into the planet’s surface. It was, she thought, the same as if she’d knelt by the strawberry bed in the Garden Level, lifted her fist and rammed it down and forward into the soil as hard as she could.

“There’s soil here, anyway.”

“It’s a weird colour.” Edsen crawled over to the edge of the rip in the ground and gathered a handful of the substance. “It’s greyish and gritty,” he said, rubbing it between his fingers and thumb. “Not soft like our garden soil. Smells all right though. It’s got sparkly bits.”

Marianne sniffed and sneezed. There was a strange sharp smell in the air, not citrus sharp, but…she frowned. The smell reminded her a little of the taste of blood.

“What’s this?” She brushed her hand through the leafy things growing around her. “It’s nearly green, but not quite.”

Jeremiah ran his fingers over them too. “Silvery-green, like sage leaves. Only I think it’s some sort of grass. It doesn’t look the way I remember it, but then this isn’t Terra.”

“Grass.” She did know the word and the concept. Horses ate it, right? But of course, no one grew grass on the Garden Level. The horses and goats were all in stas-tanks. Or…

“Grass! Bamboo is grass, isn’t it? And hemp?” They used that to make fabric and paper.

“If it is, it’s very different from the grass I used to run around on.” Jeremiah pulled a few of the silvery-green stalks and sniffed them cautiously and then wrinkled his nose.

“Don’t eat that,” Edsen said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

Marianne got cautiously to her feet and took a few steps through the grass. She liked the way it felt underfoot. Then she stopped and turned in a slow semicircle. Behind her, rearing from the ground, lay the vast hulk of Elysian Dawn. It was far, far too huge to take in at one look, and it took a lot of processing to recognise it as none of them had ever had much of an idea of how it looked from the outside. Even Jeremiah had never seen it, as he, with the other colonists-elect, had been transported into space in a shuttle and had entered through a double airlock.

Marianne peered up at the hulk. Although she had never before seen it from this side of the hull, she was sure it shouldn’t look like this, all buckled, skewed and partially buried in the ground.

“I still don’t know why we’re not crushed,” Edsen fretted.

Marianne glowered at him. “You sound as if that’s a bad thing!”

“It’s not bad, but I don’t understand. We should be crushed. The gravity on this planet should be horrible. We shouldn’t be able to stand. We should be squashed as flat as a splatted tomato.”

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