Ellie Quin Book 3: Beneath the Neon Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

cliff with only a few dozen yards to spare.
    Jez heard a collective out-letting of breath from either side of her. Ahead, the landscape was a brilliant, glittering, plain of white, punctuated here and there by enormous cracks and crevasses that snaked all the way to the edge of the arctic shelf. A world of orange and brown had suddenly been replaced with one of white, blues and subtle violets, in the blink of an eye.
    She felt a passing surge of emotion that almost threatened the precise line of her lips. She wasn’t sure what it was…pride, sadness, loss?…or perhaps a dawning glimmer of realization that she was privileged enough to see something so beautiful; something that would one day be little more than a footnote on some other planet’s Toob-Interactive menu list.
    As the doomed icy wilderness rushed past beneath them she felt like she was beginning to understand why Aaron and Ellie had spoken of it with a mixture of wonder and sadness. She decided to let their passengers enjoy the next few minutes in silence. She understood that what they could take in with their own eyes would mean far more to them than any hastily collated info-babble she could fill their ears with.
    It was all a load of baloney anyway. Even Jez had to admit, there really were moments in your life when the best thing you can do is just shut up for a minute.

OMNIPEDIA:
    [Human Universe open source digital encyclopedia]
    Article: ‘The Legend of Ellie Quin’ > The Eco-collapse of Harpers Reach
    Several hundred years after Ellie Quin’s death, Harpers Reach was once more a deserted planet; it became yet another cautionary lesson in how not to terraform a world.
    The problem had been a miscalculation of the frozen water available. There simply wasn’t enough to create a thick enough and sustainable atmosphere. The thin atmosphere that was produced, soon succumbed to the naturally occurring chlorine and sulfur seepage from beneath the planet’s surface. A process that quickly eroded the already meager ozone coverage above the tropospheric layer.
    Arguably, if the population holed-up in New Haven and Harvest City had been convinced to decamp from their protective domes earlier, once breathable air had become reliable enough, and had pro-actively cultivated the land with UV-resistant oxygen producing crops…they might have turned the tide and consolidated the planet’s atmosphere in time to make it indefinitely sustainable.
    This didn’t happen though.
    As the decades passed after the Oxxon refineries had closed down, the atmosphere gradually decayed to the point at which there was no longer a possibility that life could ever be led outside without the need of an oxygen mask. The one shot they had at turning the planet into a habitable world had been spent and wasted.
    The two cities became over-crowded and conditions inside both domes eventually became unsustainable. When it became clear that Harpers Reach was unlikely to mature into a viable planet that could one day contribute to the economy of Human Space, trade links withered and commercial deliveries began to wane.
    There are many varying accounts of the last fifty years of life on that planet. Some of these historical accounts are truly biblical and utterly grisly in their depiction of the final years. There are tales from New Haven of mass die-offs through suffocation and starvation. Tales of order breaking down and the city divided into various factions that fought viciously for the dwindling resources available. There are horrible tales of barbarism, butchery and cannibalism as the remaining, doomed city dwellers struggled desperately to survive against ever lengthening odds.
    But these are all tales.
    The world, of course, did eventually die; however, most of the inhabitants of the city migrated, as had those of Celestion, to other, better managed, colony worlds in the sector. A few of the more adventurous colonists remained on that muddy, orange world, enduring terrible hardship for