Being of the Field by Traci Harding Read Free Book Online

the flight deck. This control centre housed the pilot seat for AMIE and the navigation station that was open to the lift and the observation lounge behind it. It was here that Taren ran into Rory, who was waving a file around. ‘These are the specs on the atmosphere of Oceane, the planet you took the sample from. Lucian thought you’d probably want to compare them to your analysis.’ She handed the folder to Taren.
    ‘Whose sample?’ Starman butted in as he passed by. He took the pilot’s seat behind the huge semicircular console in the flight deck. ‘I was the one who bagged it.’ Zeven began flicking switches and punching in commands all the way around his console.
    Taren knew the young pilot was just fishing for attention, but she played along. ‘Then we shall henceforth refer to the sample as Starman’s stuff. How’s that?’
    ‘That’s more like it!’ He worked the hand controls whereupon the entire ship began to descend.
    ‘Whoa.’ Taren froze on experiencing the odd feeling of moving without movement. She walked over to the large shield windows to observe the gigantic cloud-covered orb while they headed towards the daylight surface of Oceane. Taren could barely feel the motion of the craft in which she stood, although their speedy path through space was plain to see, and she had to give him his due. ‘You are elite, Zeven.’
    ‘There’s no point in doing anything if you can’t excel at it,’ he flirted, placing AMIE on autopilot while he left the pilot’s desk to duck over to the scanner to get a lock on their absent module.
    ‘He’s a bloody show-off, is what he is.’ Rory left, having seen it all before, passing Leal storming into the flight deck.
    ‘You could have waited for me to get here.’ Leal took up his place and Zeven returned to the pilot’s seat. ‘What’s your urgency?’
    ‘We’re running out of daylight in our pick-up zone,’ Zeven justified. ‘And since I didn’t know how long it would take you to drag yourself away from your girlfriend—’
    ‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ Leal insisted. ‘I had a stomachache. I needed to see the doctor.’
    ‘Yeah, right…I’ve never known anybody to get so many minor ailments as you,’ Zeven teased him.
    ‘Well, Kassa is a very good doctor,’ Leal replied winningly, then spotted Taren standing by the shield windows. ‘Hello, Taren.’ Leal, feeling embarrassed, looked at Zeven to get a little of his own back. ‘Now I see what the urgency was.’
    ‘I’ll just be getting along,’ Taren decided. She was none too keen on being in the middle of their payback session and made a beeline for the corridor that led to the launch bay and adjoining labs.
    The initial analysis of Starman’s stuff proved very interesting when compared to Lucian’s reports on the overall atmosphere of the planet.
    Oceane was basically volcanic, but covered by deep water kept boiling by volcanic activity on the ocean floor. They had yet to find life on Oceane, nor did they expect to, due to the mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the atmosphere; without other productive elements it lacked the ability to create amino acids, the building blocks of proteins that are the base ingredients of all terrestrial life.
    However, it seemed that within their sample of gas a primordial soup was being stirred, for there were traces of methane, hydrogen and ammonia, which did have the potential to yield amino acids and thus proteins. The spectroscopy report was all over the place, showing periodic bombardments of everything from infrared to x-ray and gamma ray wavelengths going on inside the great rainbow cloud of matter.
    ‘If this is correct,’ and Taren couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be, ‘we might well have the perfect scenario to witness the miracle of spontaneous generation!’
    How life on her home planet had evolved was still a mystery, as scientists had yet to discover the elusive force that transformed a molecule into a