Chapter 19

Dusty confronted Whitney.

“So, who was on the gunship?” Dusty asked the heavily pregnant woman.

“What gunship? Rupert’s ship is here,” Whitney replied, perplexed at this line of inquiry.

“Well, we just blew one up. It was going to attack the Farestar,” Dusty replied, suspicion still evident in her voice.

Whitney frowned as she rubbed her bulging stomach. “Show me the prisoners. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the ward of late, and I don’t eat with the pirates. I’ve never been privy to Rupert’s schemes other than the one to breed the prisoners. That wasn’t a secret to anyone.”

Dusty escorted Whitney so she could look at the people in the storerooms. They were all still sleeping off the drug injected by the darts. Whitney looked carefully at each face and started naming them and which ship they crewed.

“Wait! Carl Rigger and Haiti, his woman, aren’t here. They took the last lot of slaves to Terra on the Horizon. We have been waiting for them to get back. They were supposed to be back here weeks ago. That’s why we have been rationing the food.”

“He would have had to purchase a smaller ship to come back. I’ve heard talk that the settlement ships now had guards, so maybe they decided to pick up another gunship instead of a freighter.”

“Carl had put the four shuttles they had confiscated from the other ships aboard the Horizon before he flew it away. He could have exchanged them for the gunship. Selling the people on the ship would have pulled a small fortune, too.”

“Strong, healthy men are worth a lot, so I’ve been told. Rupert made me test them and he only kept the ones who had a chance of breeding. He sent the other men he had previously kept and who failed the fertility test on that ship, too.”

“Do you know where he planned to sell the people?” Dusty asked.

Whitney shook her head, “Sorry, I wasn’t privy to that information.”

Dusty let her go check on the pregnant women in the cube.

Whitney had been flabbergasted when she realised how much space was available in the cube.

She was even more shocked by how they had been set out. Dusty grinned at Whitney’s shock and then told her they had a couple more on the ship and that they could spread the people out in the morning.

James was going to pilot the gunship, and Pat was going to fly the freighter. They would come back for the troopship later. Aaron and Bella volunteered to keep James company.

Just after midnight, they lifted off and headed south and east. They were flying into the dawn, and it took them two hours by their clocks to get to the bay Dusty had picked out. They arrived as the bay turned into the sun, and they all agreed that it was very beautiful from the air.

James, being in the small ship, found a rocky outcrop near the river, just big enough for him to land on. Aaron and James both had Nature and Physics skills, and Bella had Earth and Energy, so they put them to good use.

James had learnt a lot in the last three years and found that his transmogrifying skills were up to the task when his energy was boosted by Aaron and Bella. They used their magic to clear a 300m square area.

They trimmed and then cut the 80m high trees to 4m lengths and roughly 50cm wide slabs. They drove them a metre into the ground, alternating the skinny widths of one end to the thick widths off the other to form a 3m high solid fence around the new compound.

They left two, 10m wide gate spaces in each wall to accommodate roadways. This effectively divided the area into nine equal spaces. They compacted the earth around the fence’s base to lock the slabs into place. They then sealed the edges of the wooden slabs so the walls were firmly locked together.

The big trees here reminded James and Aaron of a form of eucalyptus trees. However, they grew a lot taller and straighter than any they remembered from back home. The boys both loved the scents the trees released into the fresh, clean air as they cut and trimmed them using their magical abilities.

Using the spaces for the gates, they divided two-thirds of the area into six quadrants on the riverside and left the other third of the area for the ships to land in. They had left some of the smaller clumps of trees that were only 30-40m high and several taller trees for shade around the edges of the six smaller squares.

The rest of the trees were stripped and sliced to 4m or 6m lengths before they were stacked into piles in the centre square for later use. Some of the trees were over 3m across at the base.

They used the materials from the leaves, smaller branches and bushes they had removed, mixed with earth to form compacted road surfaces from gate to gate and created 10m wide roads to form the six squares to be used for putting up the buildings.

The three Mages then smoothed, flattened and hardened the back square into a landing zone. Their efforts left the ground fairly barren in the building zone, but that was a problem for another day.

Once they were happy, they signalled to Pat that she could land.

They left the gunship on the ledge for now as they made their way down to the new compound.