Alpha One - Chris Burton [8]
Carla’s sister, Joely, left the family home in Melbourne, Australia, two weeks before Carla’s sixteenth birthday. Joely was nineteen when she took off and said nothing to her parents. She told Carla succinctly “Come to Titan. You will find me.”
Carla’s parents despaired, but in time, respected their elder daughter’s decision and they didn’t follow her.
Within forty-eight hours, Joely made contact, assured her parents that all was fine and that she was pursuing a path she must take because of her faith. Carla’s parents agreed that when Carla finished her studies, she could seek out her sister and Carla waited patiently for an opportunity. Within a year, Joely stopped returning Carla’s comm links and then there was nothing.
Then finally, a place on the exchange became available and Carla volunteered, in the knowledge that she could ‘kill two birds with one stone’. Carla spent many hours researching the ‘faith’ to which Joely became involved with. It became a personal obsession, one which she told no one about, including her parents, Steve or Jake. Her research led her to three possible locations on Titan, all reachable by Modular transport and all within a few hours travel of each other. She was finally on her way to Titan and determined to use all of her spare time during the trip to find her sister.
Titan was a product of Beta Forming. Long before man first visited the outer planets, it was thought Titan stood a realistic chance of being able to support and sustain ‘Life’. Prior to the first contact being made with an Alien race, humans developed a fascination with, if not a tainted view of, the prospect of life on other planets, believing that stories of ‘little green men’ on Mars were nothing more than fiction. When the first human set foot on Titan, in the form of female Cosmonaut Ulga Tiviranovski, it was clear that there was no sign of life. There was water and plenty of it, beneath the frozen porous rocks of Titan’s barren surface.
In the year 2125, the combined atmospheric conditions made Titan the perfect candidate for the inaugural Beta Forming Project. Over the next twenty-five years The Beta Forming transformed the barren, lifeless rock into a vibrant ecosphere, a veritable haven for all manner of Earth species, which lived largely in harmony with a plethora of compatible species from other planets. The Beta Forming Project was a complete success and led from its humble origins on Titan to become a huge industry over the next fifty years. Labeled a planetoid, Titan became an Earth Colony and millions flocked to the new world to establish a new and permanent home in the stars.
The rich mineral deposits of both Titan and its fellow moons and planetoids turned the colony into a business and industrial center and huge cities such as New Portsmouth, which eventually became the planets Capitol, appeared. The beauty and dramatic landscape of Titan, its proximity to Saturn and its other moons, and the controlled but perfect climate, turned the industrial planet into a tourist haven, especially once the Space ways from Earth were made safer following Alpha’s inauguration.
The Eagle shuttle landed at Forest Gate, the main New Portsmouth space port at midday. Carla headed straight for the Modula Transport link on clearing security, departing immediately for the first of her three destinations. She had all afternoon to herself and she planned to use the time wisely.
Like Carla, Joely studied languages. She hadn’t opted for the Alpha graduation route to fuel her fascination for language, culture and interplanetary diversity. She joined the co-ed group known as AUSWAS, an Australian division of the World Organization for Interplanetary