Everywhere Emily looked, scorch-marks marred the rooftops.
Long, thin lines of brown traced where falling threads had etched out the natural dyes impregnated into the surface layer of the siliplas slabs that topped the surviving buildings. Elsewhere, broader swathes of black and grey, and a few wrinkled smears of melted plastic, showed where the dragonets' had made their remarkable defense of Landing and its people. The latter were most heavily concentrated above homes with children and the busier workplaces, but even there they were in the minority.
The ground, ground she'd fought for, ground she'd studied, teased, nurtured and built a new home upon... the ground told its own story.
Gone were the gardens, the turfed sports-fields and recreation grounds, and the bluer shades of the native vegetation. So strange, those slightly off-colour vistas had seemed during those first busy years of the colony. So familiar, they'd since become; the brown-black scar of their absence was almost viscerally repellant to her now. The threads that had fallen had stolen them all, right down to the unplanned grassy verges that had once surrounded the siliplas greenhouses. The larger greenhouses had survived, but the poly-tunnels and the young fruit plants they'd sheltered had been thoroughly destroyed. Pern's youngsters would never know the taste of strawberries, or raspberries, gooseberries, boysenberries, loganberries and the like. The tart delights that Pierre had promised her he'd make of the first crop would remain an imagined dream.
Memories of the summers on First spent with her children, the better days before the war, dipping fruits into bowls of sugar and cream... Emily had hoped to evoke those softer times once again with taste and smell... but, like her children, such simple remembered pleasures were lost to her, trapped in the past, nothing more than memories inside her aging mind. Bramble might have survived, had they brought it with them - it had survived the planetary winter brought on by the Nathi bombardment, and the wrinkled, bitter fruits had saved lives in the last, starving year of the blockade when their hopes had grown as thin as their bodies - but she herself had vetoed it from the expedition, along with rabbits and nettles, for the very reason of their profligacy.
In what had once been Landing's orchards, all of the apple trees had been lost, along with acai, apricots, cherimoya, and the heart-fruits of First. She and Paul had overflown it several hours earlier, both equally appalled by how easily the neat rows of four thousand young trees could vanish. In their place, dark lumps dotted had the ground seemingly at random, the husks left behind by the falling threads. Not even the scorched-earth policy of the Nathi had damaged the land as brutally as this... this nightmare! Half of her old agronomy crew had already been at work, down on the land beneath her, taking samples and examining the destruction. At her suggestion they'd landed, briefly, so she could offer them some words of encouragement.
Half an hour later, she'd left again, with tears in her eyes and the too-small weight of a wedding ring in her pocket. Apples could easily be regrown. Lives... not so much.
I am old, she thought to herself as she walked. Too old for this by far.
A curtain twitched as she passed beside another home, briefly revealing the side of a pale face and a long plait of dark hair. The emergency curfew had been lifted some hours ago, but it was understandable that some people were still too fearful to venture outside. That would have to change. If the situation worsened, if these thrice-damned threads fell again as soon as Xi and Jim feared they would, everyone would be needed. Besieged from the skies, they might well be facing a fight for their lives and the colony's survival, the bucolic idyll they'd all dreamed of devoured acre by acre by a voracious, mindless belligerence. Emily knew all too well what such a fight for survival could entail. The innocent would suffer and starve. The young and strong, those hale enough to take the fight to an alien enemy, could and would die in unbearable numbers. Even the old, like herself, would have hard work to do and hard choices to make. Madam curtain-twitcher might not have the skills needed to pilot a sled through the air, but there was more she could do besides cowering behind her drapes!
Emily firmed her lips into a tight smile and paced onwards. She lifted her hand-held recorder to her mouth and with a few terse words added 'curtains' to the list of Landing's non-essential resources. The blue-green fabric, woven from the fibrous strands of the native grasses, could be put to better use, she was certain. The woman behind them... she double-checked the street name and counted back to get the right house number, then fished through her mind for the woman's name and job. Pern's human population might have almost tripled since the Landing, but it hadn't grown so far or so fast as to be beyond her to know all the adults by name, if not by an incomplete sight. Ah, that was the woman: Solveig Poulsen-Ulubushtu, one of the stevedores from Stores. The needs of the living demanded that everyone pulled together... and if Solveig didn't bloody fancy helping the living, there were several graves that needed digging today, weren't there? She spoke another reminder into her recorder, and moved on towards the crossroads.
Beyond the crossroads, the road extended only a little further before it ended in the open expanse of the Bonfire Square. It was eerily quiet. Emily made her way over the well-trampled dirt to the very centre, to where a pile of brush and boughs of native wood had stood only forty-eight hours earlier, ready for the celebrations held at the end of every working week. The threads had taken it, right down to the very last twigs. It was even worse than that, she suddenly realised: the damnable stuff had even gorged itself on the ashes! She'd set that straight as soon as she could, assuming the colony could afford to waste wood on a fire that warmed no homes and cooked no food. No, they could, and would! Joel might well argue against it, but this fire warmed the heart and fed the soul. It gave hope and light to the community, right in its very heart. Morale was the most vital resource the colony had, and she wouldn't see it fail without a fight, oh no!
As she scowled down at the empty ground a light breeze lifted her hair away from her face and set the wires of the flagpole jangling. Emily sighed, and lifted her eyes skywards towards the top of the tall metal post, and the empty space that she'd been trying not to see. She hurt and grieved for the families of the lost, but this absence angered her in a completely different way. She'd chosen the design herself, from the shortlisted half dozen. Had held the wrapped banner, tenderly against her chest on the shuttle flight down to the surface, like the children she'd borne and would never see again. Had seen it unfurl, a fluttering blue, white and yellow welcome, as she and Paul had claimed this world for their own. It was a symbol, but symbols were important, especially in times of war and disaster.
Emily crossed to the far side of the square, and pulled a bundle of fabric from out of her carry-sack. Bandages and clothing and bedding, even they didn't have as high a priority as this, not to her. It took a few minutes for her aching fingers to wind the wire all the way down, to be sure that the fastenings were secure. She made no ceremony to accompany its raising, beyond the deep ache in her heart as she stilled its ascent at half-mast, where it hung, limp, barely stirred by the light wind. A flag was no weapon against the threads; some might say that it was as useless as a scrawny, grey-haired old woman like herself. In itself, it could neither fight, nor preserve and protect. It was a symbol, no more than that... but, just like herself, it stood for a place and a people under threat.
For her, the fight began here and now, to save her people and their new home. And, by all the holies, this place and these people were well worth fighting for!