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ECHELON'S END©
Book 2
Marooned
By
E. Robert Dunn
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Prologue:
Six Aidennian survivors jettison in a terra-forming conestoga Pioneer Pod after surviving a hostile and deadly ambush against their terra-forming probeship. Now, a young male echelon couple and their fellow crewmembers must deal with a reality in which their peaceful existence is shattered by war and prejudice.
The only solace appears in the form of an unknown, arid planet in a ternary star group. Upon the Pioneer Pod 4's descent into the planet's atmosphere, a defense planetary shield activated and caused the Pod 4 to crash land in an ancient, dried-up seabed.
This set the Aidennians on a jarring adventure where survival is a game of chance with the life forces of the Universe…
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“Terra Nova”
CHAPTER ONE:
Dawn came to the crash site.
The pale primary sun burned away the morning chill and the clinging damp mist, revealing a gigantic silent world. The gunmetal sheen of sunrise bathed the craggy terrain where ancient waterways once cut their tortuous paths. Enormous outcrops of rock with bases forty retems in diameter rose two hundred retems overhead.
Curtains of gray moss-like vegetation hung down in a tangle from the upthrusted rocks; parasitic flowers sprouted from all along the stony trunks. At ground level, huge cacti, gleaming with moisture, grew higher than a male's chest, and held the low ground fog. Here and there was a spot of color: red blossoms of deadly poison that only opened in the early morning sprouted forth from blue vines.
The Pioneer Pod 4 had careened onto a supercontinent that centered itself on the alien planet's equator. It consisted of a million and a half square mets of silent, mysterious desert. This primeval area stood unchanged and unchallenged. The expanse of the dead zone remained inviolate with thousands of square mets.
The continentscape all over was a blighted land. Bits of it were dullish gray, bits of it dullish brown, the rest of it rather less interesting to look at. It was like a dried-out marsh, now barren of all sizeable vegetation and covered with a layer of dust and dark under the heavy weight of cloud.
Pioneer 4’s crash trajectory had brought the podship in from the western horizon, up from the planet’s southern pole through the supercontinent’s gulf. The providence in the angle of the podship’s northeastern descent in relation to the caldera’s meteor crater’s weathered western wall couldn’t have been a better land feature than if the whole depression had been built with a runway. The crash site’s caldera crater’s basin floor had been desiccated by an original meteor impact and subsequent volcanic eruptions, and now it consisted of about a kiloretem’s depth of lahar eolian sediment, underlain by a hard cake of brecciated rock, formed during the brief but stupendous pressures of the volcanic eruption that had blasted away the magma cone and left in its place a hollowed-out depression. These same pressures had also caused deep fracturing that had allowed unusually large amounts of outgassing from the interior of the planet. Volatiles from below had seeped up and cooled, and the water portion of the volatiles had pooled in liquid aquifers, and many zones of highly saturated subsoil.
Some sixteen mets southwest away laid the active volcanic mountain range the podship had just barely overflown during its crash dive. Crescent shaped, the range curved round the region in a jagged half-circle aglow with over seventeen active volcanoes; it was extremely rugged, with many of the lesser peaks steep and glaciated. The valleys were quite low, resulting in great local relief, and major passes resembling plateau country which extended north and east from the range's terminus. Beyond the foothills was the crash site’s arid plateau that was created 16 million cycles ago as a coalescing series of layered flood basalt flows. Together, these sequences of fluid volcanic rock formed a 200,000 square mets (520,000 kr²) region out eastward.
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A major break in the landscape was in the form a gorge that exposed uplifted and warped layers of basalt from the plateau.
The air was clear and warm, almost sweltering within the caldera basin.
In the distance, expanding out on the caldera floor and beyond to the desertscape, gourd-like structures studded the horizontal line between land and sky. They were some fifteen stories high, standing on a matrix of root-like stilts. Their engorged trunks were filled with a spongy, water absorbing material. Overall the basic impression of the environs encompassing the crash site was of a vast, oversized, gray-yellow world -- an alien, inhospitable place.