The Religion of Death (Part 1)

"The kitties again?" asked Chandler, equalling her tone.

She offered a sad nod of confirmation.

Chandler sighed for a second time and glanced at his wife. Claire rolled her eyes, then gestured her understanding. He looked at the children, knowing by the time he returned that their playtime — and his — would be over.

"Okay. Let me get my things and I’ll be with you," the governor said finally. He disentangled himself from his wife and headed into the homestead.

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Time on Flint was divided into three equal cycles of ten hours, referred to by the colonists as first and second and third cycles. The forest-desert planet orbited the two suns at just the right angle for them to be an almost equal distance apart, creating the three zones of time. The first cycle was of harsh, hot blue light, the second cycle was ordinary golden sunlight, and the third cycle was ten hours of night when the nine rocky satellites collected from a nearby asteroid field by Flint’s gravity eclipsed, obscured the golden sun while the colony was tilted away from the blue. The colony worked around these time-zones in three shifts; with the exception of important governing positions, all colony workers were divided into two groups and each took an alternate day shift, creating ten hours of work and twenty hours of off-time. Only Chandler and a few others were on-call all the time; like everyone else, he worked a dayshift, usually the second, but could be disturbed during the other cy cles as well.

He usually was.

Seated next to Deanna in the speeder that ate up the ground with uncanny speed but disturbed nothing, gracing the air a meter above, Chandler glanced at the passing surroundings. He noticed a few moments of darkness descend across the enclosed colony land, the cycles changing as they obstructed each other in their daily eclipse, then as gold sunlight caressed his face he removed his protective shades. The difference between cycles was remarkable; his eyes could adjust to the encompassing blue, but it was never as comfortable as what he’d been accustomed to since birth, and the golden light felt about ten degrees Celsius cooler, too.

The Flint colony was a considerable expense for the Confederation and there were many advocates of abandonment residing in the senate. Because of the immense distance between it and other colony worlds, Flint had very few visitors and even fewer immigrants, creating an immense distrust of outsiders and foreigners inside the settlement itself. The planet’s spaceport, inside the colony as was everything else of human construction, except for water and sanitation pipes, was a joke; mainly transports bringing supplies. For now they were safe and protected, but that could change very easily.

Chandler lost that thought as the familiar pain clawed at his chest and stomach and testes, much worse than the earlier bout. All his organs were infected with Eurocoma, were slowly dying, all had been breached except his brain. The daily, sometimes hourly, pain was unbelievable, but his medication patch still worked for now against this fresh wave of agony. After forty years of living with the Eurocoma he was used to it, after such a long time he’d learnt to hide it fairly well. Deanna and the other colonists were unaware of his battle. Only Claire knew and it was she that Chandler protected as much as himself. Tensions in the colony were high and the governor’s family was well respected, it was that respect which held many of the fraying threads of society together. If the truth were known then that respect would be lost for both Claire and the colony in two devastating blows. The risk, as the years went by and the pain worsened, grew more considerable but soon it would be over. Soon. Ver y soon now, or so he hoped with each breath of every day.