The Pegasus Pulp Sampler

III. Touchdown-2

By mid afternoon, Katya yawned, while Misha had fallen asleep beside her, his head resting in her lap. She idly wondered for how long they would be kept here, without food or anything to drink except water from a tank truck on the airfield, let alone a decent place to poop or pee. So far, the kids were using a cluster of bushes for that purpose, but it was woefully inadequate. Besides, the flies were gathering already and soon it would stink abominably.

Maybe, they should all just go home. Except that they couldn’t, for Solonitsyn was twenty-seven kilometres from Katya’s home village, much too far to walk, even if the peacekeepers would let them.

She perked up, as the peacekeepers surrounding the airfield at Solonitsyn shuttleport began chattering excitedly into their comms.

“We’ve got incoming? Is this confirmed?”

Barely a minute later, the public address system activated with a shrill feedback whine.

“Attention, everybody…” a voice, booming and male, announced, “…I have just been informed that a ship will be landing shortly to evacuate you. It’s a space-going vessel, a light cruiser, so for your safety, you’ll have to move back, away from the airfield.”

Katya got up and pulled a sleepy Misha to his feet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“They said there’s a spaceship coming…” Katya explained, “…and we all have to move back.”

“A spaceship?” Misha repeated, suddenly wide awake, “Cool.” At eight, he was exactly at the age where he found spaceships incredibly fascinating.

Katya was worried, though. Because a spaceship meant that they were all going into space, away from Jagellowsk. And if they were going off-planet, that meant that nowhere on Jagellowsk was safe anymore. Not here, not on the West Continent, nowhere.

“Please move back slowly,” the voice from the loudspeaker continued, “There’s no need to rush and we don’t want to trample anybody down.”

Though the peacekeepers guarding the perimeter didn’t seem to have heard the voice, for they made “davai, davai“ noises, as the many kids camped out at the shuttleport moved further away from the airfield, spreading from the grass into the surrounding fields.

Katya hesitated. She was a farmer’s daughter, after all, a child of the country. And so she knew that just trampling down a wheat field, particularly one that was almost ready for harvesting, was wrong.

“But what about the wheat?” she asked one of the peacekeepers, “Won’t we damage it?”

The peacekeeper sighed. “We’ve got permission from the owner. And now move, girl.” Under his breath, he muttered, “And besides, what does it matter at this point?”

Katya was about to tell him that wheat fields and farms mattered very much, because without farmers, no one would have anything to eat. But Papa wouldn’t like it, if Katya argued with a peacekeeper, even if he was blatantly wrong. So she took Misha by the hand and stepped into the field, along with the other children, trying and failing not to trample down the wheat. Cause it still felt wrong. After all, the wheat was almost ripe.

They heard the spaceship before they saw it. A deafening roar, that had everybody, children and peacekeepers both, covering their ears.

The wind came next, flattening even those blades of wheat that the children had not trampled down. And then came the shadow, a gigantic shadow like an enormous bird of death flying overhead, casting everything below into gloom.

Many of the children cowered and huddled together on the ground, scared. But Misha stood tall, entirely unafraid. After all, he had a thing for spaceships and this was the first spaceship he ever got to see up close.

“Look, Katya,” he said, tugging on her hand, “Look how big it is! Isn’t this cool?”

Misha was right. The spaceship was huge, a giant blocky thing of gunmetal grey with bits and pieces riveted to its hull and spiky things jutting out at strange angles.

It worried Katya. Nothing so big ever landed at Solonitsyn, particularly not a spaceship. Spaceships landed elsewhere, at the spaceport in Strugatsky or at the even bigger spaceport in Tarkovsky, the capital on the other side of the world. Or they stayed in orbit and docked at the space elevator that rose out of the fields of the East Continent like an enormous stalk of wheat. But they didn’t land, not here, not on the East Continent where nothing ever happened.

Katya squeezed Misha’s hand and forced a smile. “Yes, it’s cool.”

“When I’m big, I want to be a spaceship captain and fly one just like that,” Misha announced.

Katya flashed him an indulgent smile, for only last week, Misha had announced that he wanted to become a vet and the week before that a farmer and the week before that a circus juggler.

“That’s very nice dear.”

Together, they watched the spaceship touch down, its enormous mass taking up almost the entire shuttleport where normally six of the big grain transporters could land side by side.

The ground shook again and Katya frowned. Nothing about this was even remotely normal.

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