Free Starship Home by Tony Morphett Page A

looking at the screen again. ‘Guinevere,’ he said, ‘how many people were the Slarn actually intending to take?’
    ‘All.’
    ‘All the people? All the people on Earth?’ Zachary could not remember how many people there were on Earth, but he seemed to remember a television documentary he had once switched away from to the football, and it had said about seven billion. ‘That’s a lot of people!’
    ‘The Slarn used every ship in the fleet.’
    ‘There’s no one down there? No one at all?’
    ‘Two in every hundred, left for to breed.’ Guinevere paused and added, ‘‘twas a slaving raid. Did’st thou not know this?’
    ‘Well, your Galactic slaving raids, they don’t come round very often. You know? I mean, this is the first one in my lifetime.’
    ‘The Galaxy is wide,’ Guinevere told him. ‘There is always a market for slaves … to colonize new worlds … for breeding stock … soldiers … always a market.’
    ‘So all our people are going to get sold,’ Harold said in a small, bleak voice.
    ‘I suppose it’d sound tacky if I said I wished I could be there to see my father sold,’ Zachary said.
    ‘It sounds absolutely tacky,’ Meg groaned from her couch. ‘If you want my honest opinion.’
    ‘I won’t say it then.’
    Harold had been thinking. ‘Two percent of people left. You can see why planes wouldn’t be flying, why no one’d be broadcasting.’ He looked at Zoe, then Meg. ‘I mean, we know where my family are, but maybe they didn’t take your people, Zoe or yours, Meg.’ He looked at the main screen. ‘Guinevere, can you get us down there? Down to the road where you picked us up?’
    ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘but get ye to your couches all. I took sore damage on the Leap, and landfall may be a rough one.’

18: LANDFALL
    Cattle looked up at the pale blue dome of the cloudless sky. They could hear a muttering sound, like distant thunder. On the far side of the creek, a group of kangaroos cropped at the brown grass. First one, then another, then all of them lifted their heads, looked around, and hopped away on their strong rear legs.
    Under the trees of the forest, it was cooler, but the blended smells of exotic pine and native eucalypt told of summer heat. There was a child in the forest, a 10-year-old girl, her face tanned and her hair bleached white by the sun. The child’s name was Maze, and she was both afraid and interested. The dreams which had come each night for the past month had today become waking dreams and she knew they were to do with the muttering in the sky.
    That is how the dreams had always begun. With the blue sky, and the mutter of thunder, and Maze by herself in the cool of the forest and…
    There!
    Terror!
    The vast shape appearing from nowhere as trees exploded from its path, making room for the giant stepped pyramid as it settled to the earth with a terrible roaring and crunching of wood and stone! Maze, in hiding, stared at the iron castle which had suddenly appeared in the forest and she knew she had seen its like before, in the sacred paintings on the walls of Our Mother’s hut.
    Within the starship’s bridge, Harold, Zoe, Zachary and Meg got off their couches and approached the main screen. It came alive, showing them the forest outside.
    ‘Where’s this, Guinevere?’ Harold said.
    ‘Where ye came from.’
    ‘You must have us mixed up with someone else. We were in the bus? The metal wagon? It was going along a road, with paddocks either side? Flat grass country with wire fences?’
    ‘This is where ye were.’
    Zachary tried to be diplomatic. ‘Guinevere, what Harold’s trying to say is that maybe you forgot just where you found us?’
    ‘Zachary, I cannot forget. The place is scribed in my memory. ‘tis here the road ran, the farms were, ‘tis here I took ye and your iron wagon within me.’
    They looked at each other in silence. Zoe spoke first. ‘Maybe we should go out. Take a look around.’
    The enormous metallic stepped pyramid