gates to hammer her dirty fists on the metal. The entrance creaked open as she stood with her hands on her knees trying to regain her breath, and she stood to stagger inside where the fearsome leader was framed motionless by an armed entourage.
“The Source,” she cried, “has been attacked.”
The Tanaka, the seventeenth leader of the town, kept his face stern and unimpressed, suppressing the savage and violent anger he felt inside.
Turning away from her he gestured to two men stood nearby, and they stepped forward to seize her arms roughly and drag her inside as the gates behind her closed.
Chapter 23
NEW BEGINNINGS
Life inside the ring of metal that protected the returning citizens of Earth began to take on more of an everyday feel. Each morning more people were revived and brought up to speed with their situation. Some took it well, others less so. Some knew or had worked with people who were based in the other sites, and despite the certain knowledge that everything was uncertain when they went under, they still had emotions to deal with. Everyone mourned the loss of the world in their own way, and some showed it more openly than others.
Catarina, alive in her element and finding her expertise in almost constant need, spent more time in her primary profession as she helped the survivors cope with the complex and conflicting emotions they felt. Survivors guilt was what most people experienced, some more intensely than others as they had been forced to choose a limited number of people to join them. That had been one of the main reasons that those selected from the plethora of people with the specialist skills desired had been selected: for their lack of immediate family. Most were single men and women with little or no relatives, but still the sight of the first children walking around with their parents tugged at everyone’s feelings.
A pharmaceutical solution was utilized to get the worst affected through the initial difficult period, and that required diagnosis and monitoring by psychiatric specialists.
Since the second night on the planet, there had been no sign of the small swarm that had encircled the small preserve and that fact gave some comfort where others were experiencing a sense of impending trouble. The engineering teams had branched out from the ring of pods under the protection of the team members and had begun to clear wide swathes of the jungle. They stripped and piled the straight trunks of the new variant of palms and kept their rubbery branches and leaves separate. Those long lengths of straight timber were split and left to dry ready for use in construction and the cleared land was ploughed using the precious few electrically powered all-terrain vehicles. Their immediate surroundings were explored, always under armed protection, and samples of earth, foliage, and the few species of animal life that were encountered were all rigorously tested by the growing team of scientists.
Every single person had a purpose, a list of daily tasks regardless of age but geared to their own individual strengths. Children worked in the kitchens and attended afternoon education in one of the masses of hard-wearing shelters erected inside the walls. Hendricks spent as much time as he could near there without ignoring his primary duties, as his wife was the teacher and his daughter attended the classes.
Another familiar sight to everyone there was the severe and serious Hayley Cole, who appeared without warning all over their compound bearing a heavy-duty clipboard and with a tablet computer slung across her body like a purse. She always smiled, but that smile was part of her corporate training as though she had attended seminars on how to make people work more effectively.
She had, and part of the reason she was so effective in her chosen field was because she had an uncanny knack for motivating people to do something, believing that it was actually their idea in the first place.
A week in, their progress was halted by a sudden and violent downpour as though the heavens simply emptied in one go. People ran for cover, laughing and shrieking at their unexpected soaking, whereas their meteorologist stood looking skyward and ignored the heavy rain.
William Tremblay, heavy set and African American in appearance, had formerly been Canada’s foremost expert on weather systems. Having left his birth country for college and never returning for more than the briefest of visits, he had lived and worked in Miami at the National Hurricane Center where he had been