TEASER

OPEN TO BLANK SCREEN

CAPTION READS:

PRIVATE VESSEL MERRIWEATHER , MAYFLOWER-CLASS
EN ROUTE TO EZRA, ETA TWENTY MINUTES
THIRTY YEARS AGO

Girl’s voice : Read.

FADE UP TO: GIRL’S BUNK ABOARD THE MERRIWEATHER ; the bunk is clearly similar to those aboard Serenity , but the Merriweather is a much larger and better-equipped vessel than an Aught-Three Firefly, custom-built to carry colonists.

Considering this is a little girl’s bunk, there’s a surprising lack of pink - the predominant colours are red and green in various shades. She’s lying in bed, a soft toy by her side, listening to an Encyclopaedia reciting the history of Ezra. She’s blonde, very pretty, has a strongly-boned face and is about seven years old.

Encyclopaedia : Ezra - one of the first outer worlds to which the science of terraforming was applied. Access reference ‘Terraforming’?

Girl : No, I know what that is. Continue.

Encyclopaedia : It was envisaged that the planet would develop a liveable but hot environment, owing to its proximity to its primary, and that the cost of settlement would be recouped in short order by mining its mountains for the enormous mineral wealth detected there by the probes which first discovered it. However, the processes involved in terraforming were, at that time, not fully understood. It is still unclear as to precisely what errors were committed in the case of Ezra, but the result was that violent and unstable weather patterns were created in the newly engineered atmosphere; these manifested primarily as extremely destructive cyclone systems which formed spontaneously. Access reference ‘Cyclone’?

Girl (tiredly) : No. Continue.

Encyclopaedia : One of these, which became known simply as ‘the Storm’, persists to this day, for reasons still not understood, and shows no signs of dissipating. It is speculated that the forces which drive the Storm are similar, though opposite, t