Skyborn

Chapter One Sarah sat on a pine-covered hill looking down at the ragged, malnourished group that had arrived at her camp that morning. There were about sixty of them. Too many, really, for her people to handle. They seemed peaceful enough in a bedraggled sort of a way, though a couple of them looked like they could be trouble. She had come up the hill to be alone with her grief and felt almost angry that she now had to deal with these newcomers. He's dying, came the thought. She tried to push it away. The premature ageing disease, progeria, had wiped out many of her friends, would wipe out many more. Sarah stared around her at Sherbrooke Forest, which stretched away in all directions, and noted the odd silence. Was she being stalked? She almost hoped it was that, she felt such an impotent rage building in her. He's so young! But the silence had a different feel to it. Even the sky, even the wind, were still, as if the whole world were holding its breath. Waiting for him to die? Drifting up from what they rather jokingly called the "town square" were the uncertain voices of the family. It reminded her of a time two years earlier when the giant skyworld Colony had first landed and Sarah had stumbled on---and adopted---a member of its crew, cast away to die. Then, too, there had been many arguments for and against admitting the newcomer to the ranks of the family. It would be no different this time. Charity never begins at home. Back then, Sarah's family had been a small band of twelve ragged kids eking out an existence in a post-holocaust city; now, it was a thriving population of one hundred and eighty men, women, and children. They had fought hard every inch of the way from Melbourne to the Dandenongs, and paid for it. At times it seemed everything was against them: hunger, nature, rival gangs, the ever-present threat of the Skyborn, even their own ignorance. But that was the past. Now they had a working farm that provided food and safety and the only home many of them had known. They had a water mill for grinding corn and wheat, and which supplied water via a network of bamboo pipes; a large pond system they had stocked with fish, and corrals of wild boar, sheep, and goats; they lived in cabins made from sunbaked mud and straw bricks, rather than the old portable huts; and had even a burgeoning network of trade with other local communities, which supplemented their crops and provided them with a smattering of finished goods, such as pots and pans. And the size of the family deterred even the most persistent of predatory gangs. They had built a shortwave radio transmitter with a former colonist's help, and were in touch with other communities across the continent and, more recently, New Zealand, or Aotearoa as they now preferred to call it. The radio was manned twenty-four hours a day, mostly by Denton, who had surrendered to an already obsessive-compulsive personality trait. If Colony ever mounted a full-scale attack on the Earthborn, the outposts would warn them. They had also retrieved from the city her prized possession: a library. Schooling was now a compulsory activity, not only for children but for the older kids, too. There was so much to learn. Or relearn. Sarah looked over to the radio shack, listening for something. She could see Denton with his earphones plugged in, as alert as ever. It was unlikely the outposts could have been overrun; they were too cleverly hidden. And Sarah prided herself on expecting the unexpected. Or trying to. Though she hadn't foreseen the newcomers. No. Her unease had another source. Con was dying. She struck a fist against her thigh in sheer frustration, blinking back tears. Con would not last the week. He would die, twenty-one years old, not of wounds sustained in battle, not of the pox, which sometimes reappeared, but of plaiCollins, Paul is the author of 'Skyborn ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780765312730 and ISBN 0765312735.