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

ever known and to watch it gradually recede and become simply a glowing disc, eventually a mere pin-prick.
    At least one of them had escaped the gravitational pull of Harpers Reach. ‘Lucky you, Sean…you did it.’ There was surprisingly no bitterness in that. She was genuinely pleased for him.
    The light on the recycler changed color. It had been green and now it had changed to red. She heard the thin reedy whine she had grown used to inside the recycler drop in tone and then cease. The red light then dimmed and finally went out.
    This is it then.
    The air in the mask and the machine’s ‘lungs’ would last her another minute or so then quickly degrade. She found herself thinking…
    Actually, I’m not scared.
    Ellie smiled. In the last minutes of her life she decided she’d discovered a profound truth, a little gem of wisdom that she would have liked to pass on to the countless millions of other pointless losers like her in the universe.
    It really isn’t that bad…dying.
    *
    Aaron Goodman switched on the floods and descended to thirty feet as he approached. The beacon had come on again. By now he reckoned he should soon be able to pick out the dark form of any vehicle against the lighter ground. But he could see nothing yet.
    The range marker began counting down the distance in hundreds of feet.
    …eighteen hundred feet…
    …sixteen hundred feet…
    …fourteen hundred feet…
    He could see nothing. He cut the speed and engaged vertical thrust to prevent the shuttle stalling and dropping. The large vehicle now pushed forward at a crawl, its pug-faced cockpit dipping downwards. The shuttle rocked and wobbled uncertainly under momentum solely from the VTOL thrusters.
    …Six hundred feet…
    …five hundred feet…
    …four hundred feet…
    The floodlights panned across the ground, picking out nothing but the occasional sharp spur of weatherworn rock. He was virtually on top of the damned beacon but he couldn’t see anything at all; no sign of a craft, crash damage, debris. Nothing.
    ‘So how the hell does a beacon get out here on its own?’ Aaron mumbled with growing irritation.
    As the range marker counted down the last one hundred feet, his floodlights finally picked out what looked like a small body lying inert on the dusty ground.
    He set the shuttle down.

CHAPTER 11
    It happened from time to time, bad luck.
    Life, no matter who you are or how important you are, deals out the crap pretty evenly.
    Researcher Rowan Brown was pleased at the way that truism sounded. It had that kind of lived in feel, like an old saying, almost poetic. He made a mental note to try and slot it into the next conversation he was undoubtedly likely to have about his boss, the late Master Researcher, Dr Edward Mason.
    Dr Mason died two days ago. Although the news was incomplete and had not officially been confirmed through normal channels, the story seemed to be that the transport ship carrying him down to Pacifica for a couple of weeks of sun and sea had lost its entry shield and disintegrated in the upper atmosphere. There had been twenty other workers from the Lab aboard and, of course, the flight crew. None of them had survived either, but the only name of significance and likely to be newsworthy when the story broke was that of Dr Mason.
    Search and rescue teams had scanned the sea below the grid co-ordinate at which the craft had vanished. But being so high up, virtually in orbit, the debris spray radius was enormous. They had recovered the telemetry box which would have had a transmitter inside it, but found nothing else floating in the vicinity other than a twisted sheet of partially melted beige plastic that had been identified as a seat-mounted fold down table.
    There had certainly been no bodies so far and there probably never would be. Pacifica was all water. Any sections of the transport ship that had survived the atmosphere were now at the bottom of a very deep ocean.
    For now, and maybe a day or two more, the story