“I owe you an apology, Amalie,” said Bened. “I knew Rodrish had carefully chosen you as a future wife to please Father and Mother. I’m afraid I assumed you’d been equally calculating in accepting his offer, and were more interested in Rodrish’s land and status than him as a person. I realized my mistake when he turned away from you after you fainted, and I saw the bereft look on your face. I’m really sorry.”
I was both startled and embarrassed. “There’s no need for you to apologize for Rodrish’s behaviour.”
“I’m apologizing for my behaviour, not his,” said Bened. “I wanted to anger my parents to breaking point, and being horrendously rude to you was a good way to do it, but I’d never have treated you that way if I’d known you genuinely cared for Rodrish.”
I shook my head in bewilderment. “Why would you want to make your parents angry?”
“Because I want to go home,” said Bened. “I was born on Percival in Year Three of its Colony Ten phase. It’s a very different world to this one, a place of glorious colourful flowers with a constant background hum of bees.”
He paused for a second. “I was almost 10 years old when my parents sent for me to come to Miranda. It’s pleasant enough here, but I could never forget that Percival was my true home world. When I was 18, Miranda came out of Colony Ten quarantine, and I told my parents I was going back to Percival. Mother was upset, and Father made impassioned speeches about how they’d taken Miranda through Colony Ten so their children could live here and be its future leaders.”
“So you agreed to stay?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Bened. “My parents were working on the plans for the Great House back then. They promised me that the house would be mine one day as a reward for staying on Miranda, and I was fool enough to accept the bargain. I married and had a couple of sons, but my marriage was never a happy one because I was so miserable here.”
He pulled a face. “I felt I had to stay on Miranda until my sons were 18. After what had happened to me, I wasn’t going to drag them away from their home world as well.”
Things suddenly made a lot more sense to me. “Your younger son is the same age as me, so he’ll turn 18 this Year Day. You’re planning to go back to Percival after that?”
“Exactly,” said Bened. “Everything started falling into place for me this year. My younger son wants to be a doctor, so he’ll be leaving next Year Day to study medicine in Gamma sector. My older son loves growing things, he’s already a much better farmer than I am, so he can take over my farm. My wife is willing to come with me to Percival in the hope that we can make a fresh start together.”
Bened shrugged. “The only remaining problem was that my parents still didn’t want me to leave. I knew Rodrish would love to own the Great House where he was born and grew up, while all I wanted was a flower farm on Percival. It seemed the best way to help both of us was to tease my baby brother, be rude to you, and make my parents so angry they’d be glad to see the back of me. You’ll be pleased to know my plan has worked beautifully.”
“It has?” I asked warily.
Bened nodded. “After taking you to see the specialist, my parents came home ecstatically happy that your headaches had turned out to be something trivial. Father was eulogizing about you and Rodrish, I picked a brilliant moment to say something unspeakably rude, and my parents finally despaired of me. They made the legal arrangements right away. I gave up all claim to the Great House in exchange for part of their land grants on Percival.”
He laughed and stood up. “So we all get our happy ending. My wife and I will go to Percival and grow flowers to supply the perfume industry. Caden and Patryk will get land and credits to set up their own estates on Miranda. You and Rodrish will have the Jain’s Ford Great House and its estate as a wedding present.”
Bened walked off to the portal, dialled it, and vanished. I sat down on an upturned bucket, and buried my face in my hands. Rodrish would be celebrating right now, thinking he would marry me and live in the Great House, but I was going to destroy his dreams.
Chapter Twenty
I stood at the edge of the silent crowd, facing the huge sheet of flexiplas covered in white paint that had been set up at the far end of the gathering field. One of the Mayor’s husbands was in charge of projecting the live coverage of the Founders Day ceremony onto the makeshift screen. The images from Epsilon Sector News were perfect, but it was a minute or two before he got the sound working properly. That didn’t matter. The first bit of the ceremony was the massed members of the Founding Families saying the words of the Colony Ten oath, which we all knew by heart anyway.
Everyone stood at attention while the giant screen figure of Kellan Jain recited the names of the twenty-three Military officers who died making this continent of Miranda safe for the first colonists. When the last name was reached, the screen image changed to show the flag of humanity. There was two minutes of silence, followed by the music of the hymn. When it got close to the final high note, everyone gave furtive glances sideways at where Koulsy was standing on the nearby hillside, so they could time their salute to match his.
Salute over, everyone relaxed, and the screen swapped to showing Kellan and Inessa Jain. Kellan Jain was holding the crystal globe of Miranda now, the original one that the Military had presented to them when Miranda opened for full colonization.
The image focused in on Inessa Jain as she repeated the words she’d said back then. “This world is called Miranda.”
The crowd responded with the ritual reply that had been said on every new colony world since the handover ceremony for Thetis was interrupted by torrential rain. “May the sun shine brightly on Miranda.”
I couldn’t stop myself giving a surreptitious glance at the sky. I didn’t think that rain at this particular moment would make the nightmare chimera appear from the shadows. I didn’t even believe the superstition about it meaning the next harvest would be a poor one. I was only looking upwards because rain would spoil the rest of the day’s celebrations.
The sky was still a reassuringly clear blue, the solemn ceremony was over, and the screen went blank as the children’s pageant started. Six fearsome green and black lizards appeared from where they’d been hiding behind the flexiplas screen. My brother, Henri, was inside the cloth costume of the leading one. He’d spent weeks practising how to use the wooden poles to snap its jaws together, and had added some red painted blood on the teeth as an extra gory touch.
The crowd booed the lizards, and the children came running forwards. In the front were a group of 12-year-olds, wearing a homemade approximation of Military uniforms and carrying bags of over-ripe fire plums. Behind them was a mob of younger children. Most were wearing the usual glowing moon monkey masks, black and white panda mouse masks, or silver flutterfly masks, but I spotted a couple of girls wearing pink and blue masks that I guessed were supposed to be hummingbirds.
The lizards made snarling noises and charged the children, but the Military stood their ground and fought them off with a hail of well-aimed fire plums. The lizards retreated, rallied, charged again several times, and finally dropped dramatically to the ground and lay still. The mob of Mirandan animals cheered, and danced round the fallen lizards in a victorious circle. I glanced across at Koulsy, wondering what he’d think of this. It was hard to be sure when he was so far away, but I thought he was smiling.
Battle won, the children streamed across to the food tables to get their reward of lurid green cakes decorated with lizard shaped icing, and the rest of the crowd broke up into chattering groups. The flexiplas screen started showing the scene at Memorial again, vision only this time.
I caught sight of Rodrish standing next to his mother. He was looking happy right now, but tomorrow he’d be furious with me. Everyone else was going to be furious with me too. Even my own family would be shocked and horrified at my behaviour, while Shelby Summerhaze was going to be gloriously triumphant, telling everyone how she’d been right about me all along. It was strange to think t
hat Rodrish’s brother Bened was probably one of the few people who’d understand why I was breaking my betrothal and sympathize with me.
I remembered how Koulsy had been alone in the storm, standing among the rain, the gale, and the lightning that night, while the trees tumbled around him. Tomorrow, I’d be facing a different sort of storm. The next few months were going to be ugly, but last night I’d studied the information that Teacher Lomas had sent me, and discovered there was a light in the darkness that was even brighter than the sign over Mojay’s General Store.
I was going to apply to study history at University Asgard, but I wouldn’t be going to Gamma sector at Year End. I needed to complete the Pre-history Foundation course before moving on to do my full degree, and that course wouldn’t be held on Asgard but on Earth itself!
I’d been born on a frontier colony world, only a few years after it opened for full colonization. I loved the fact we were building the future here, but I also loved learning about the past, and I was going to spend next year on the oldest of humanity’s worlds.
Next year I’d be studying history on the world where Sean Donnelly sang his songs, Carla Maria Ortiz founded rejuvenation medicine, Thaddeus Wallam-Crane invented the portal, Amita Patel built her staggering triumphs of engineering, Shakespeare wrote his plays, and Leonardo da Vinci mastered science and art.
Rodrish would hate me for breaking my betrothal and costing him his dream of owning the Great House. I was sorry about that. Breaking my betrothal would hurt me too, because I’d cared about Rodrish far more than he cared about me, but Koulsy was right. People showed their true characters in a crisis. Now I’d seen what Rodrish was truly like, I couldn’t marry him. Bened had wasted decades of his life, living a life he didn’t want for the sake of houses and land. I wasn’t making the same mistake.
I was going to study history on the world where history began, and come back to Miranda to teach others about how the lessons of the past could guide our decisions for the future.
Message from Janet Edwards
Thank you for reading Frontier. Amalie is one of the characters in Earth Girl, Earth Star and Earth Flight, and I have plans for further stories featuring her. You can make sure you don’t miss future books by signing up to get new release updates.
Best wishes from Janet Edwards
Books by Janet Edwards
The prequel novellas:-
EARTH AND FIRE: An Earth Girl Novella
FRONTIER: An Epsilon Sector Novella
The Earth Girl trilogy:-
EARTH GIRL
EARTH STAR
EARTH FLIGHT
The Earth Girl prequel short story collection:-
EARTH 2788: The Earth Girl Short Stories
Other short stories:-
HERA 2781: A Military Short Story
Make sure you don’t miss the next book by signing up to get new release updates
More information at: www.janetedwards.com
About the Author
Janet Edwards lives in England. As a child, she read everything she could get her hands on, including a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy. She studied Maths at Oxford, and went on to suffer years of writing unbearably complicated technical documents before deciding to write something that was fun for a change. She has a husband, a son, a lot of books, and an aversion to housework.
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Janet Edwards, Frontier
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