Shards of a New Life

The red emergency lights that bathed the cockpit made Shard's blue skin look purple. He had muted the numerous alarms but could do nothing about the lighting. He felt that he could still hear something ringing, but it was just his skull. He was still suffering from the effect of the stun blast from the unseen assailant who had downed him in the service yard of the Moon Rock casino. He was in better shape than the little courier ship Timely Trader though. The craft had been sitting round for weeks waiting for repairs, but was so old it would probably have been scrapped if anyone had thought about it. In all the chaos, it seemed only Shard remembered it was there.

Emerging into realspace after the fifteen-hour flight from Sosh II, Shard gazed at the yellowy-green sphere of Soarnellat that hung in the centre of his viewscreen. He slipped into a high orbit, intending to check for GalPol activity before landing but, after another glance at the distressed control panel, deciding that perhaps landing sooner rather than later would be the wise course. He had somehow evaded the GalPol troopers who had descended on Kralo Zur's casino HQ as it burned to the ground, crawling out of the smoke and debris unnoticed and making his way cautiously through the City of Pools. Soarnellat was a much quieter planet; he would just have to take his chances.

There was only one spaceport to choose from, near to a small town and surrounded by scrubland. A few trees were dotted around the edges of the landing field and, against the safety rules of most planets he'd ever visited, some seemed to be within the port's borders. Several Brogians manned the spaceport terminal building, their peachy, trilobed heads and friendly features grating on Shard's nerves. It all seemed rather clean, which was a shame as Shard's area of speciality had been running Kralo Zur's shady waste collection service. He was good at it and, as he'd fled Zur's collapsing empire, he'd assumed he could start a similar enterprise elsewhere.

He turned to look out the window while awaiting his ship to be registered and looked across the empty landing field. Empty except for the Timely Trader. Empty, in fact, of any trees. Maybe he'd imagined them.

Shard made his way initially to a nearby hotel, glad of the emergency fund he'd kept apart from any involvement in his life with Zur. As was his habit from years in the waste game, he kept an eye out for bins, waste containers and trucks, litter, integrated waste management technologies and the like. There was nothing. Everything was immaculately clean.

He slept remarkably well that night and awoke full of schemes and plans to get into the local waste scene. He opened the blinds and looked out into the branches of a tree, which he was sure hadn't been there the night before.

Breakfast arrived, brought by a perpetually smiling Brogian woman. Shard nodded at the window.

"Was that tree there yesterday?"

"I wouldn't think so, sir," she said as she put down the tray of food. "They tend to wander about."

Shard hmmphd. "I bet that's inconvenient," he said, thinking of trees wandering across spaceports and roads.

"Not really, sir," she said as she opened the door. "They keep everything lovely and tidy." She closed the door and was gone.

Shard hmmphd again.

Tourism, then. That could be a business worth getting into.

Gareth is from England and mostly writes science fiction, with stories published by magazines both on line and in print. He has a degree in Environmental Science, a subject that, so far, has inspired none of his stories. He claims to be unofficially the second most widely translated science fiction short story author in the world. Links to his published stories can be found at http://www.garethdjones.co.uk/.

Find more by Gareth D. Jones in the Author Index.

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