UnEarthed E-Book

Rebecca Bloomer

• Herausgeber: Odyssey Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: UnEarthed
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 214

Beschreibung

If you're going to colonise a planet, you'd better be willing to fight for it.

Within Anphobos, there grows a new race. The first generation of humans never to set foot on Earth. They are pale skinned, large eyed and worship no god but science. They possess technological skills and processes Earth has refused to acknowledge. Until now...

"We are Martian. Your religion isn't ours. Our god is Mars. Our religion is science. Anything we do in the service of Mars, is good. Make no mistake, Earth girl, we are both right and good."

Fresh off Earth, Jodi Scarfield doesn't really care for Mars or its politics. Still, accusations of treason will get a girl's attention...

Leseprobe

UnEarthed

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Published by Odyssey Books in 2012

Copyright © Rebecca Bloomer 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

www.odysseybooks.com.au

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Bloomer, Rebecca Alison.

Title: Unearthed / Rebecca Bloomer.

ISBN: 9780987232540 (pbk)

eISBN: 9780987232557 (ebook)

Target Audience: For secondary school age.

Dewey Number: A823.4

Cover artwork by Kerem Dogus

This book UnEarthed is both captivating and fascinating. The story is very different from other YA books, which makes it really interesting.

It’s the type of book that has you wanting more, and has you at the edge of your seat. I love the way UnEarthed can take me from here, to another place; one with more mystery and excitement. It seems realistic and the further in the book you go, the more intriguing and exciting it gets. I have already read it more than once, and I would definitely recommend this book to friends and family.

~ TeeJay Leeon (16)

As a longtime reader of science fiction, I was delighted to come across UnEarthed and its delightful collection of characters. Anyone who is not charmed by Jodi’s precocious and idiosyncratic view of the universe is just not paying attention. I was put in mind of Robert H. Heinlein’s early YA novels, with similar themes and engaging young characters.

~ Steve Harhai

Thoroughly enjoyed this delightful tale of a spunky young woman who finds herself in over her head. The child of not-so-futuristic colonist parents, she winds up imbroiled in politics and power struggles she could not possibly prepare for. Fast-paced and entertaining, the world of a Martian colony is alive with color, seething with resentment and surprisingly close.

~ BG Ruyle

Also by Rebecca Bloomer

Mae-be Roses

Willow Farrington Bites Back

Shades of Grey

Jodi Scarfield made a tight little fist-pump, and sat back from her computer screen with a cheesy grin and the desire to laugh like a maniac. She wriggled happily in the criss-cross of seatbelts that connected her to her seat; best not to make crazy cackling noises when surrounded by other passengers. That took some serious self-control.

Some days she was good. Other days she was very, very good. Today was one of those. Of course, it wasn’t just her, it was her ‘house’, a whole group of people who’d worked in synchronised perfection day and night. She just happened to be the one to make the last, and winning, move. There was a good reason she’d been chosen to do that job; it hadn’t had so much to do with her skills as it did her location. Soon, she was going to be hard to catch, and that was just how she liked it.

“You’re looking a bit too smug, Daughter. What’s going on over there?” Marilyn Scarfield looked up from her eReader and raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing very quickly on this dopey old piece o’ crap computer.”

Her mother chuckled. “You’ve spent so much time on that ‘piece of manure’ as you call it, that nobody here knows what colour your eyes are. Anything newer and you might disappear into cyberspace altogether.”

“As opposed to disappearing into real space?” Jodi quirked an eyebrow right back at her mother. “Comparatively speaking, I don’t think cyberspace poses much of a threat. Besides, if I had a faster computer, I would probably spend less time on it because I’d be doing everything so much faster!”

“Good try but you’re out of luck, kiddo. You’ve got stuff waiting for you in Anphobos so there’s no point in carrying on now. We’ll be there before you know it and then I’m sure you’ll have enough technology to make you happy.”

Jodi nodded and kept her eyes away from her mother’s face. The woman had a way of looking into a person’s eyes and taking the most direct route to their soul. Children of such people learned to keep their eyes constantly averted, especially children who may have done some wrong things for exceptionally ‘right’ reasons.

Her mother took the hint and changed the subject. “What are you doing that’s got you looking so satisfied, anyway?”

Jodi shrugged, eyes right, and peeled a rough corner off her thumbnail. “Nothing really, just chatting with Ellie.”

Marilyn exhaled noisily and pushed her seat into the upright position. “You girls! You only just saw one another. Do you really need to chat already?”

Jodi did not look up from her screen. A good offense was only the best defence if you weren’t looking into the eyes of a mind reader. “I know what you mean, Mum. I mean, it’s not like I’m never going to see her again, is it?”

Marilyn returned to her book, scowling and frustrated. “No one can predict the future, Jodi Scarfield. The universe is possessed of infinite possibility and you’re exploring just one. I wish you wouldn’t act like this move is the end of the world.”

“Not the end of your world, Mum, just the end of mine.” Jodi almost smiled; that would shut her mother up for sure.

Jodi had other reasons to smile, though. It was one thing to successfully distract a parent, totally another thing to work a miracle. As it turned out, she’d just finished performing a miracle, one about which she could never tell her mum. There were some things parents should never know. That’s why kids lied. At least, that’s why Jodi lied.

She hadn’t been chatting about clothes and make-up with Ellie; Jodi was neither a fashionista nor a shopper. Jodi was a hacker. Not only did her mother not know she was a hacker, she also didn’t know what kind of hacking work Jodi did. If she did, she’d have a straight-up conniption fit.

Jodi worked in a ‘house’ of hackers. It wasn’t actually a house, just a group of people online who acted together as a single unit. Within the house, individuals described themselves according to what ‘hat’ they wore. White hat – security work mostly. You break through people’s security systems then tell them how to fix it. Grey hat – still security mostly, but sometimes you’d leak a little information to other customers. Black – black hats only hacked for personal gain, to thieve and re-sell information. No one in Jodi’s house ever wore a black hat. Not as far as she knew.

Today, she’d been mostly grey-hatting, but despite her successful completion of the task, it had left her in an intense, almost black mood. This afternoon, she and her house had stopped their own government from committing a heinous crime.

Their government, supposedly elected ‘by the people, for the people’, had sent remote controlled bots to a jungle – correction, not a jungle, the jungle, the last true jungle on Earth, complete with terrified villagers who would most likely die without their trees – despite protests from nearly every faction of Earthen population.

The bots were to mine what was beneath the trees. Minerals and ores that were apparently becoming too expensive to get from Mars. That’s what happened when Earthen and Martian politicians disagreed; life got to be both more expensive and much less valuable, all at the same time.

It amazed her that people, government people, skilled enough to program mining bots for such careful and specialised destruction, weren’t clever enough to build sufficient traps, filters and walls into their bot programs. All those supposedly legendary programmers hadn’t been able to keep Jodi’s house out. Maybe they hadn’t thought anyone would try to stop them. Hacker laws were strictly enforced, and punishment was always jail time, even if you were a juvenile (as all those in her house were).

She stretched her fingers and closed her eyes. She always did a quick content check on sites she was hacking, just to be sure she was where she was supposed to be. Cyberspace could be tricky like that, it was easy to get lost. This afternoon she hadn’t been lost. Her quick peek into the government bots had produced gut-churning images.

Media reels showed natives, still painted in red mud and with feathers in their hair, as they walked away from their homes.

Footage fresh from the bot cameras showed those same natives throwing themselves into bot pincers and being sliced clean in half. Pincers designed to cut down trees did terrible things to a human body. The same was true of the saws and drills. No longer were native bodies red with paint, now they were red with blood.

“Hurry up, Scar,” Angus, her Scottish hat (voted most likely to turn black) had muttered in her ear. Many of her house had turned out for the last scene in their show. They watched from their own screens, all over the world. “There aren’t so many of them, poor beasties. They cannae wait while we tweak about.”

“Look at them,” even Beattie’s British accent, which made everything sound like a tea party, had managed to sound horrified. “Like lambs to the slaughter.”

“Looks like dem natives do’n want to leave them ‘omes huh?” Nobody knew where Ainsley was from, but Jodi figured Trinidad. “They tink dey’s fightin’ monsters. Better die fightin’ dan leave wid no honour, eh?”

Had Jodi not been strapped into a public location, she would have told them all to shut up. Could they not see she was concentrating? But she was sitting right next to her mum, waiting for pre-launch checks to be completed.

It was the native faces that upset Jodi most. You could tell they didn’t understand what was happening. When the blood started flowing, when their men started dying, the women began screaming. Eyes wide with bewildered horror, the women had screamed and slapped at their heads, trying to remove the scene from their skulls. That’s when the running had started.

Media footage showed them when they were too tired to run. The media showed silent images so you couldn’t hear them sobbing.

Her house had shut down the bots. They’d cheered and screeched and laughed when Jodi made the last keystrokes and the bots had gone dead. Jodi had made that one little fisty-pump, and been interrogated by her mum.

Her house hadn’t saved all the natives, but they’d certainly recorded the truth of the matter onto numerous drives: insurance against hacker laws and jail time.

While most of Earth would rejoice at their victory, others would be less than impressed. Government people would be looking for them.

Her house had masked their source locations, and done as much as they could to cover their tracks, including using Jodi to make the last play. Now she just needed to take this last trip and she’d be safe, untraceable and hopefully untouchable.

So would the natives, and that was the point.

Jodi stretched her arms over her head and cracked her knuckles, trying to squeeze the bubbles of adrenaline and triumph out of her skin.

Ellie. Her fingers were on the keyboard before she even knew what to say. Ellie would calm her down and chill her out. Better still, she would not, technically, have lied to her mum.

They really shld pay me better.

There was a brief pause from her out-of-date computer before the reply came.

They don’t pay u at all.

Jodi chuckled.

They shld.

A delicate tinkling down the aisle behind her drew her back to reality. Jodi knew what it was, and felt blood start chilling in her veins. Ice crystals formed between muscle and bone. Her teeth chattered in time with the cart load of glassware moving slowly, slowly toward her.

kk gtg miss u.

Another moment’s wait.

U2.

The trolley, laden with tinkling glassware, arrived beside her. Jodi sighed, closed the wafer thin laptop and acknowledged the visitor. The man standing beside her in his crisp, unfriendly white uniform held up two small beakers and forced a smile. Jodi gritted her teeth. They hadn’t even the decency to make-believe. Wine glasses would have been so much nicer. As it was, her heart began its trip-hammer-stammer. The man looked down his nose at her and waited, bent slightly forward from his waist.

Just a little tipple, young Miss? And maybe a cyanide chaser?

She quelled the psychotic butterflies in her stomach with a good strong huff through her nose.

“So, this is it?”

He nodded and held up her vial of coffee-dark liquid. “This is it. Don’t look so worried. It’s not that bad. By the time you wake up, it’ll all be over and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.”

Jodi smirked. “I bet you say that to all the girls.” Her mum chuckled and Jodi felt a stab of sudden affection for her. They’d spent a lot of time arguing lately, but when it all boiled down, they were in this together.

She turned in her seat, clinked vials with her mum and they upended them in unison.

“Not awful at all!” her mother gasped.

“Smooooth.” Jodi fought for breath around the fumes rising back up her throat.

“Ahh well, it’s all done now,” the delivery-man-cum-nurse soothed. “Nothing to worry about now but the most relaxing sleep you’ll ever experience.”

“’Night Mother.” Unwilling to believe what she’d just done, not wanting to think about what was to come, Jodi closed her eyes, prepared to wait for sleep. This was it. She was leaving, going where no one would ever think to find her. A life of perfect anonymity awaited.

“Sweet dreams, Daughter.”

Behind Jodi’s eyelids, visions of painted natives screamed and bled. Jodi squirmed where she sat before a grey mist wafted through the scene. The noise muffled and the image pixelated. Scores of her own code appeared white, then ran to grey against her eyelids.

Jodi smiled, snuggled into the comfort of her imaginary grey hat, and let black sleep fold her under.

Red Means You’re Dead

The guy had been right. Jodi woke without the hangover most long sleeps leave behind. Rather, she felt refreshed and unnaturally optimistic. Happy had been an alien sensation since her mother had announced her decision to leave. Jodi smiled. No matter how unexpected, this was a happy feeling. Happy and hairy. Amazing what something as simple as survival will do for a person.

“Jumping Jehosephat, it’s like Planet of the Apes in here!” A petite brunette bounced up beside her in the shower queue. “Did you know a body could grow so much hair in four months?”

Jodi grinned. “I had no idea. Thank god for fast orbit transfers, huh? Imagine if we’d slept twice as long.” The fact that she was wrapped in a bath towel, sporting more leg and armpit hair than she’d ever thought possible, did not dim her mood. That didn’t happen until she’d waited half a lifetime to get to the front of the line. By then, she was just cranky enough that she didn’t care how long anyone else had to wait for her to finish. A girl had to do what a girl had to do.

Much cream, three showers, some tweezing and oceans of shampoo later, Jodi was at least physically clean. She wondered as she brushed her teeth how the craft’s storage tanks were coping with all the suds.

The little brunette reappeared beside her in the long mirror over the hand basins. “From Planet of the Apes to the missing link.” The woman examined her still furry eyebrows. “Millions of years of evolution in only two showers. Not bad progress, eh?”

Jodi smiled. “You too, huh?” It had taken her three showers to get sorted because she’d kept finding missed hairy pieces on her legs. Surely every other woman on the flight would have the same issue.

The woman nodded, winced, and started plucking.

“On the upside, I’ve got a lot more hair on my head, and my fingernails are amazing. I actually thought they’d refuse to grow, just out of fear.” Most times, Jodi was a nail chewer. Correction: unless she was sleeping, which she’d been doing for quite some time now, Jodi chewed her nails.

The woman handed her a nail file. “Here, it’ll help keep you from reverting to form.”

“Thanks.” Jodi took the gift and moved out of the way so others could see themselves for the first time in an age.

Once the accrued grime had gone down the drain, there was only the dirty, creepy feeling left to lose. While she had slept, people had scanned her, tested her blood and monitored her vitals. Quarantine was important and much, much easier when travellers were asleep.

Jodi ran the nail file across the rough edges of her new nails. Staff on the good ship Homeros worked in shifts, so there was at least two of them who knew what she looked like inside and out. That seemed like much more than complete strangers had a right to know. Sure, she’d signed permission forms and stuff, but still … . She shuddered. Gross.

Dressed in a new, clean travel suit, it was time to play tourist. Marilyn was still standing in the communal space, looking and frowning at a mirror while trying to make her eyebrows even and her lips more plump. Taking her window seat, therefore, seemed the best and most obvious thing to do. She zipped past her mum, with a quick salute to her in the mirror, then dodged her way down the aisle to nab the best view in the row.

Jodi strapped herself into the Formafoam seat and waited while the material puffed and squidged itself around her, slowly reforming from her mother’s shape to her own. Only then did she turn her attention to the space around Mars.

Passengers, tourists and immigrants alike were all woken early enough that they got a good sample of space, but not so early that they could be bored or get fidgety in their seats. That also meant that they wouldn’t pester staff who, while they were happy to deliver coffees and meals, were to a large extent trained more for technical and medical purposes than customer service. You could tell that by the lack of fake smiles and the appraising way they looked a person up and down. Much like they’d just seen you naked. Again, so gross. Jodi shivered.

In the window, her face was silhouetted against the darkness outside. With so long asleep, no matter how she tried observing space, her eyes were more interested in her reflection. She was a stranger to herself and weirdly attracted to the process of rediscovery.

Her dark olive skin barely showed up in the reflective surface, but light from inside the cabin glanced off the edges of her features. Even as only a semi-dark face shape, Jodi could tell she had a leaner, narrower face shape than before she went to sleep. She pressed her fingertips to the window, traced the gleaming edges of her reflection, and smiled. No more puppy fat for this sixteen-year-old. A solid diet of nutrient mixtures had whittled her down to her fighting weight.

Her white-blonde hair, all newly washed and combed back out of her face, also reflected the interior lights. Beneath that cap of white, her face looked a bit like an eyeless skull. Too much of a contrast between hair and skin tones, too many angles for a soft, pretty look. Jodi frowned at her dark self. How completely unsurprising: even with a lot of shaving and a little weight loss, space wasn’t a good look on her.

Luckily other, more heavenly bodies beckoned and offered themselves as burning, glittering distractions. Outside the window, beyond her reflection, the blackness was immense. Not night black, this was space black … a deep, scary kind of darkness that came with emptiness.

Night is somethingness. It’s atmosphere and dust and reflected light. It’s the period between sunset and sunrise. There is always an end to night black.

Space is nothingness. It’s a dark that is endless and eternal. Sort of like death, only with planets and stars. Space is a place where things remain unknown, where they hide, far out of sight in the cold.

On Earth the night sky had always felt familiar, a comforting blanket thrown over her world. Some nights, she and her mum had located Mars in the sky, and wondered about what her dad was doing right then. In space, nothing was familiar. She could have studied the books and vodcasts for a thousand years and none of this would have looked like she expected.

What if some stupid piece of junk hit the shuttle? What about the tails of asteroids? Were the heatproof shields designed for that? She really should have paid more attention in the training course. She should have listened when her mother prattled on about Mars and moving. She should have done her own research. She should have believed it would happen. At least then it would have felt known, if not familiar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah … shoulda, coulda, woulda – but didn’t!

Instead she’d done nothing. Actually, she hadn’t done exactly nothing. The one thing she’d done a great deal of was hoping. Well, she’d done two things really, moaning and hoping. She’d moaned every day about the unfairness of the move and she’d simultaneously hoped not to move. Hoped she’d get to stay on Earth with Ellie’s family. Hoped her dad got fired. Hoped the migration shuttle would break down. In fact, she’d hoped for a gazillion different things, anything at all that would keep her from having to move.

Moaning had done nothing except make her feel a bit better. Hope had failed completely. Now there was nothing to do but sit here, watch Mars loom closer, examine the surface of the moon Phobos, and chew thin edges off her newly grown fingernails.

A freaky looking conveyer belt with pods hanging beneath it snaked down through space in a pale slither that ran almost parallel with their own path. It was something to do with carrying minerals from this moon to Mars. She knew that much from science classes at school. Another time, she might have been a fascinated tourist.

Right now, she was a sixteen-year-old Earth girl, squished into a thermo-regulation-hyperspeed-resistant-heat-fire-and-everything-else-proof suit, surrounded by a Foamaform shock absorbing seat, about to land on Mars.

And live there!

She wriggled against the restraints of her seat.

“Stop fidgeting.” Her mum had snuck up and settled herself, without comment, into the aisle seat. Her face was perfectly made up, but from the stillness of her features, Jodi figured her mother was almost as nervous as she about landing. Finally! It was about time the woman showed some kind of concern over this whole ludicrous plan. If only she’d cottoned on sooner, they wouldn’t be here now. If only she’d listened to Ellie’s dad.

Jodi’s BFF was Ellie. Ellie’s dad was a pilot. One night on one of their many sleepovers, she and Ellie had both giggled at the dinner table while Renfield Wu had described being an airline pilot for some of his guests.

“It’s hours of mind-numbing boredom sandwiched between ten minutes of brain-frying terror either end.” He didn’t actually say ‘brain-frying’. He’d actually used a better ‘F’ word; the one that Jodi hardly ever even thought.

From a man who rarely swore, much less in front of children, Mr Wu’s statement had made quite an impact. The guests had nearly choked on their food. Ellie’s mum had gasped and playfully smacked her husband’s arm. Ellie and Jodi had sent secret, admiring non-verbal messages to each other. Brain-frying would officially become part of their vocabulary. Obviously, her mother hadn’t been listening back then or she would have multiplied air travel by, oh, a gajillion times, to arrive at space travel. What exactly was a gajillion times a brain-fry?

This whole move was her father’s plan of course. David Scarfield had been offered the opportunity to manufacture and grow crops in the Anphobos greenhouses. What botanist wouldn’t leap at that kind of chance? That had been his question. There had been no appropriate answer. Botanists had a history of stupid behaviour, and David Scarfield was continuing a fine tradition. That he screwed over his family in the meantime was, apparently, not important.

Jodi kept scraping the little rough edges off her nails. It wasn’t chewing really, so much as trimming.

Martian kids were a pack of self-important psylocrats. The ones she’d met on Earth barely spoke to other kids at school. They treated Earth technology as though it was backward and annoying, and they made constant comparisons between Earth and Mars, as though Earth could never hope to compete. Jodi felt her hackles rise just at the thought. Admittedly – and considering her latest exploits – she wasn’t the globe’s greatest patriot, but she wasn’t stupid either.