This Is Not Earth

Strange Planet

Jamie was skimming along a dried-up riverbed on his hover-bike when his helmet radio buzzed for the third time. He tried to ignore it and concentrate on the sheer joy of the ride, the cool wind in his face, the planets pink sky above, the purple sand sweeping past beneath him.
But the buzzing wouldn't go away. It kept on and on, like the irritating whine of an insect trapped inside his ear. Eventually, Jamie could stand no more, and slowed the hover-bike to a stop. He had known all along that he couldn't avoid speaking to his parents.
"Hey, Dad," he said. He didn't have to touch anything on the helmet - the reply function was voice activated. "Er... what can I do for you?"
"Well, you could answer your radio for a start," said his father. "This is the third time we've tried to call you. We were beginning to get worried."
"Sorry," said Jamie. "I should have realised you'd want to stop me having fun. It's probably bad for me to be out in the open air."
Jamie had always been close to his mum and dad, and wouldn't usually have talked to them like that, but a few weeks ago he had guessed what they were planning, and he'd been angry with them since then. So there had been a lot of arguments. Today, however, it seemed that dad had no intention of reacting to his son's tone of voice.
"Just come how, Jamie," he said with a sigh. "We need to talk."
"I can't wait," muttered Jamie, and angrily broke the connection. He boosted the power on the hover-bike once more, rose out of the river bed, and grimly headed back towards his parents farm.
The surface of the planet stretched before him - a dusty, purple plain ringed by hills, with colossal, white-capped mountains rising beyond. It was an alien world, slightly smaller than Earth and orbiting a distant star, a red giant. But Jamie didn't think of it as alien, for he had never lived in humanity's original home. Of course he had seen films on Earth, and pictures of the beautiful place it had been before endless wars and pollution finally ruined it for human life.
The survivors had abandoned the wrecked cities and dying lands and poisoned oceans, and taken off in a fleet of starships to find somewhere else to live. Jamie's parents had met on the Galileo in the first few months after The Great Exodus, as it was now called. And that's where Jamie had been born, 12 Earth-years ago - in deep space.
Until a while back, all he had known was life on a starship. If you could call it life. Jamie scowled as he remembered the Galileo. Dozens of families packed into a filthy tin can, the air stale, the food produced by machines and almost inedible, disputes always breaking out because nobody had any privacy. Then there was the sickness the doctors couldn't cure, however hard they tried. Space Fever killed many, and left the lucky ones - like Jamie - with nasty sores to remember it by. The sores were often raw and painful, and seemed permanent. Jamie and his parents had hoped that living on a planet might help, but it hadn't.
Jamie reached the crest of a hill and let the hover-bike slow to a stop again. He sat there for a moment looking down on the farm, a cluster of silver domes in a small valley. He scratched the weeping sore on his hand and thought of the day when he and his parents had landed. He'd been happy enough when he'd found out they'd been given the chance to colonise a planet, even one that didn't have a name, only a code number, K1754. But he'd never imagined just how incredible it would be.
The clean, crisp freshness of the air, the sense of wide-open spaces and total freedom - Jamie loved the place from the moment he stepped out of the shuttle craft that had brought them down from the starships.
In the year since then, Jamie had spent as much time as he could roaming on the hover-bike his dad had built for him. The planet was mostly desert, with scant rainfall and few plants. There weren't many animals either, apart from squirrel-like rodent, some tiny reptiles, and strange flying creatures that resembled large bats. Even so, the more Jamie got to know this world, the more it felt like the home he had always wanted. But his parents didn't feel the same, and that was the problem.
Jamie's helmet radio buzzed once more. "OK, OK," he sighed, zooming off down the hill. "I'm on my way..."