An uncle!' he said to himself. Typical of Jane to get caught up in
the history of it all and name Minardi's first native after the planet
itself.
Sam was just
thinking about this when he caught sight of movement by a rock wall
about a mile ahead of him. He began to walk towards the wall flipping
his transmitter on as he went. 'This is Sam to base, can you read me,
Jim?' he asked.
'Yeah, this is Jim, what's up, Sam?'
'I just thought I
saw something moving out here, Jim, right by one of the rock formations
near marker fifty-one. It could just have been a dust cloud but I'm
going to check it out.'
'Okay, Sam, just be careful okay? With that blip last night...'
'Come off it Jim, you know as well as I do that that was just a fault with the radar.'
'Yeah, sure thing, Sam. Listen, just keep in touch. Oh and Sam, congratulations.'
'Thanks, Jim. Sam out.' he said flipping off his transmitter.
It took a while
to arrive at the rock wall but when he got there he couldn't see any
sign of life but that wasn't surprising as the barren surface of Minardi
Prime consisted only of rocks with a little dust for good measure.
There was no mud for the racks to be left in or bushes to be disturbed.
Sam began to make his way around the wall.
As he did so, a
large metallic object came into view. 'Oh Christ,' muttered Sam, as he
flipped his transmitter on. 'Jim, this is Sam again. Listen, there's
something out here, it's a ship of some kind. I'm going to
investigate...'
As Sam crumpled
to the ground, his chest feeling as though it were on fire due to the
fact that his rib cage had just been shattered and his lungs crushed by a
fist of steel, his last thoughts were of how he would never see his new
niece,
'Sam, Sam are
you there? Sam can you read me?' Jim called frantically into his
microphone. He flipped to another frequency and said in a slightly
calmer voice: 'Harry, this is Jim. Listen, Sam's not responding. He was
telling me that he'd just found something that looked like a ship when
he was cut off in mid-sentence. His transmitter's still on, but he's not
responding. Take Squad B over there and see what's going on.'
A voice with an unusually strong Scandinavian accent came over the radio, 'Okay, Jim, we'll get right on it. He's probably just tripped over in the excitement and knocked himself out.'
'Okay, Harry, but arm the Squad, just in case. Jim out.'
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
he
infirmary was a mass of chaos. Filled with more people than it was
designed to hold; doctors bustling about, nurses dashing from room to
room. The sound of shouting of people offering quiet prayers, of doctors
giving slow and deliberate orders and screams of absolute agony
creating a cacophony of noise.
ypical.'
Sam muttered to himself. Half of the colony was gathered at the
infirmary to support his sister through her labour and here he was
patrolling the damn perimeter. And all because of some stupid blip that
had shown up on the radar scanners last night. Regulations said that it
had to be checked out even though it was probably just a glitch in the
computer's software or a meteor that had, like most, failed to burn up
in the thin atmosphere of this remote colony world. After all, it was
the fifth one this month and non of the others had turned out to be
anything exciting.
