Free Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin by Alex Scarrow

place on this ugly mud ball planet would be sacrificed to produce a breathable atmosphere so that hordes of miserable, so-called ‘colonists’ could spill out of New Haven and fill it up with their unimaginative and ugly homes.
    And when that finally happened Aaron Goodman would go and take his haulage business to some new frontier world and enjoy another beautiful and remote wilderness waiting to be terraformed to death.
    Sometimes he would take his shuttle a few hours further north of the refineries until he could see them no more and then set her down on the virgin snow. Often he camped out over night in the open, nothing but a heated therma-bag to sleep in and a flask of coffee for company. There was no need for an O2 mask or a small, sealed one man dome-tent, up here. The atmosphere was oxygen-rich. He would study the crisp night sky, and pretend he was some ancient Old Earth explorer marking time on a drifting iceberg in the frozen seas of Earth’s South Pole.
    *
    Okay, yes…I’m beginning to panic.
    The plan had been to walk for a couple of hours, then flag the first low altitude craft she saw with her navset. Ellie figured she could hash together some vague story about crashing a dune buggy and seeking help on foot. The crew that picked her up might be conscientious enough to try and locate it with her pointing the way, but of course they would never find the wreckage and then of course they would be obliged to drop her off at their destination.
    Hopefully New Haven.
    She had been walking in a southerly direction for nearly eighteen hours now and had not seen a single craft. She was beginning to wonder whether she had drifted off course and was heading away from New Haven and thus away from the converging routes used by the various transport craft that crisscrossed the planet. Add to that she’d consumed most of the water she had brought with her and the recycler was only going to give her another two to three hours of breathable air.
    To be honest, it was looking a little bit like she was going to die.
    Great.
    Ellie was going to die out here in the middle of nowhere and no-one was ever going to find her body. The message she had left behind at home unambiguously announced that she had run away to New Haven and would get in touch again when she was settled. Mum and Dad would be worried, and they might even be able to bribe the over-worked and undermanned and generally disinterested police force in New Haven to put out a missing person bulletin for her. But of course they would be looking in the city instead of out here in the middle of nowhere where her bones would slowly bleach in the sun and eventually be covered by sand.
    Maybe some archaeologist in the distant future might discover her, but Mum and Dad sure as hell would not.
    She slumped to her knees and started to whimper.
    ‘Stupid girl. You and your stupid dream. You’ve killed yourself, that’s what you’ve done.’
    She pulled Jonny out of the bag and held him to her face. She closed her eyes and rocked gently. It was all over, before it had even fregging well got started. Tears of anger and frustration streamed down her face and she lay down on the ground hugging the stuffed dog.
    ‘A loser’s death, you’re a stupid loser,’ she muttered to herself.
    Half an hour passed and Ellie allowed herself to drift off to sleep. She figured it might be less distressing if her recycler were to run out of power whilst she was asleep. To die that way had to be better than struggling consciously with every breath and experiencing the muscular spasms of oxygen starvation.
    There was a distant rumble.
    Her face jerked upwards. Her eyes opened and darted left and right desperately seeking the source of the noise. She saw it, the subtle glimmer of a thrust jet; a space-faring vessel entering orbit. It was a long way out, maybe too far to pick up the signal. But it was the only thing she had seen all day. Ellie decided to switch on the navset beacon for a few