Free Paws and Planets by Candy Rae Page A

HUMANS –
THEIR PREQUEL
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    EPISODE 1
-TRUMPET (AL -12)
     
    Cabin 1-G402
was identical in every way to the others of Corridor 4, Colonial
Section 2, (G Deck) of the World Coalition Colony Ship Argyll .
    It contained a
central living area with a table, four chairs and a comfort and
seating area. Three bed recesses, separated from the main area by
sliding doors lay against one bulkhead. On the opposite bulkhead
lay the storage units and the information and entertainment
consoles. Set against the third bulkhead were the emergency
cabinets.
    As Elspeth
McCallum settled the baby in his crib and began to unpack the
family possessions she was thinking hard about the circumstances
which had brought her, her husband Alastair and baby here this
day.
    She was a tall,
thin woman with long, slim fingers and a careworn face. Elspeth
McCallum had taught musicianship before her marriage. She hummed to
herself as she placed her father’s last gift to her at the very
bottom of the lowest storage drawer. Perhaps during their long
journey to Riga she might get the chance to try it out.
    These last
years had been a difficult time for the McCallum family. Her
husband came from farming stock (as did the majority of the
colonists who were now boarding the WCCS Argyll ), her
husband’s family having successfully farmed their Ayrshire farm
since the late nineteenth century.
    Although the
McCallums had worked hard, they had lived in relative comfort, but
that was before the floods had come, not only for one year but then
a second and then a third. In debt, a third of their arable land
under water, Alastair McCallum had bowed to the inevitable and had
sold the remaining ground and stock to one of the large corporate
amalgamated farms. Elspeth’s husband was not emotionally suited to
a position of under-manager on one of these large conglomerates and
had begun to make enquiries. Shortly after the farm had been sold
he had signed up for the third wave of colonisation bound for
planet Riga.
    The convoy
consisted of six transport ships and contained over fifty-thousand
people, all wishing to leave a troubled Earth whose ecology was
disintegrating year by year.
    In the
twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, great strides had been
made to repair the ecological damage made by nineteenth and
twentieth century industrialisation and by increasing population
demands. By the end of the twenty-second century, a precarious
ecological balance had been achieved, hampered somewhat by the
continuing inter-continental rivalries but even this had been
largely solved by the creation of a coalition of the most powerful
countries whose leaders realised that the human race was doomed
unless mankind worked together for the common good.
    The World
Coalition of Nations, set up in 2239AD, had forced through measures
designed to keep the world at peace and to curtail further
ecological damage, using force when necessary.
    Then the sea
levels which had been steadily rising during the twenty-first
century had risen higher. The tidal triggering, which had begun
when the orbit of the moon had skewed made the situation worse,
especially for those who lived near to the coasts.
    What remained
of the McCallum farm, like many others, had become a waterlogged
morass of mud-filled fields.
    When Alastair
McCallum had originally signed up for the colony, it had been
intended that his wife’s parents should go too (his own parents had
died some years before), but Elspeth’s mother had failed the
fitness test that all potential colonists were required to pass and
her father had refused to leave his ailing wife.
    During their
farewell meeting at the spaceport in north-east Scotland, he had
placed in his daughter’s hands his most cherished possession, his
silver trumpet. Elspeth played the keyboard but her talents lay
with vocalised music, but she had a son, named Duguld after his
grandfather and it was to him that the elder Duguld consigned his
final gift. He