“With regard to wandering around outside the building, you’re free to do that, but stay in sight of the building. There are some big wild fauna here, transplanted from Earth, especially some of the big cats. In the daytime you should be OK, but keep your eyes open. There’s safety in numbers, so it’s better to stay in groups than to go wandering off by yourself.
“If you do get in trouble with the local fauna, call the emergency number on your communicator and run like hell for the closest building. Dodge a bit left and right so snipers on the roof can get a clean shot at the animal. It’s easier to stay in a big group than to try to outrun a big cat, though, so remember that.
“With all that said, let’s start exiting the containers now, and heading down into the building. Our staff people should have been able to get in place while we were talking, and they can help you find your room assignments.
“Welcome to Arcadia, everybody. Khatri out.”
Everybody reached under their seat for their supply box and got them out. Once again, it was a briefcase sized box with a handle, full of bottled water and MREs.
Then they waited for the compartment to be opened.
Each passenger container had three decks, and the thirty-six containers had been delivered to the roofs of the four colony residence halls – the generic name for the hospitals, office buildings, administrative buildings, and school buildings – in stacks of two. The hospital staff started emptying the five stacks of people containers on the hospital roof – thirty thousand people in all – with the bottom decks of the five bottom containers. That was easiest, because no stairs were required.
The Chen-Jasic clan was seated on the middle deck of the lower container of their stack. When it was their turn, the passenger compartment doors opened and one big fellow with a bullhorn of a voice stepped in. Like everyone else, he wore coveralls and booties, though his were in a size extra large.
“OK, everybody,” bellowed Stanley Twardowski, World Authority Police Sergeant Major (retired). “Grab your supply boxes and queue up. We’re just gonna start with the front row and work our way back. That’s the easiest way to keep groups together. There’s one stair ladder to go down to the roof, and it’s steep, so we’re going to go down it backwards. You all already have your room assignments, and you got all day to get there, so let’s take it nice and slow and safe, all right?”
Before they left Texas, Robert Jasic, Chen LiQiang, and Rachel Conroy – as the nominal heads of their groups – had gone to the planet administration table to one side of the planet square, the marked-out open space in which all the colonists for Arcadia were camping out in the grass. There they had registered their individual groups as being combined into the Chen-Jasic group.
Jasic’s group was twenty-seven people from the suburbs of Raleigh-Durham in the Carolina administrative region. Five couples – minus Harold Munson, whom Betsy Reynolds had divorced after another one of his physical abuses – and their total of eighteen children ages fourteen to nineteen, now all paired up as married couples.
Rachel Conroy, her partner Jessica Murphy, and their friends, Gary Rockham and his partner Dwayne Hennessey, were all from downtown Raleigh-Durham. They had met the Jasic group at the shuttleport in the Carolina administrative region before the trip to Texas and merged with them, there being strength in numbers.
The Chen group was Chen LiQiang and thirty members of his family from rural China. LiQiang was the paterfamilias of the close-knit clan. He and Robert Jasic had negotiated the alliance of their groups on the prairie in Texas where they awaited transport to orbit. The peasant farmers had wanted to team up with a group with more diverse and modern skills, whereas Bob Jasic and Maureen Griffith had seen the Chen’s farming skills as a must-have for their own group.
As a result of registering the combination of the groups, the sixty-two members of the Chen-Jasic clan all had room assignments in the hospital together – two rooms, numbered 427 and 428, presumably on the fourth floor of the large building. They would be thirty or more to a room for now, until the temporary housing was set up, but they wouldn’t be out in the rain.
Matt Jasic could see his father talking with Chen LiQiang, the grandfather of the Chen household. They both nodded and then each spoke to one of their group nearby, Chen LiQiang to his eldest son, Chen GangHai, and Jasic to Maureen Griffith. The whisper campaign spread as they stood up and queued for the door.
“Bob and the Chen say we are one group. Do not split into Chinese and American when we get to our rooms. Mix it up. Pass it on,” Jonah Thompson said to Matt.
“Makes sense,” Matt said, and he turned to his wife Peggy Reynolds and repeated the message.
Peggy passed it on to her sister Sally, standing behind her.
Then their row was moving, and Matt Jasic followed Jonah to the door. It was about eight feet down to the roof of the hospital, and there was a steep stair setup, like a ladder on a ship, with two railings to hang onto. Matt turned around, winked at Peggy, and headed down the stairs.
He waited for her at the bottom. The weather was very pleasant, and the sun was bright in the sky. He saw an edge of clouds moving off on the horizon. Matt sniffed the air, and could smell the ocean, so it was only a few miles distant. He could hear multiple diesel generators running.
Matt knew that there was basically no axial tilt on Arcadia, so this would likely be the weather all
