Description
Welcome to Darwin Our planet offers a calm and tranquil space for families to live in an exciting and supportive environment. We believe that wide open spaces are best for everybody and everyone is welcome! You should be mindful of the local fauna which will attempt at every conceivable moment to devour, infect, poison, or otherwise harm you. Please mind the flowers. They're all carnivorous. Lovely perfume, though. The rest of the flora offer a fascinating variety of methods to trap animals and, of course, you. We strongly recommend that you stay off the grass. Try the fishing. Use your friends as bait. Seriously. Stay off the grass. The Story Eleanor "Nel" Kelly is the daughter of Lorraine Kelly and some forgotten random rapist. Living with her mother in the slums of Australia's eastern city, she is orphaned at seven when her mother dies of pneumonia. With no parents and no family worthy of the name, Nel lives her life on the streets with the rest of the unwanted, the Slum Rats. The only way out of the city slums or the towns still clinging to life in the dessicated countryside is to work for the Corporation. The only way to do that without a powerful sponsor is to sign up for the Corporation's off-world enforcement arm, the Australian Exosolar Force. Surviving eighteen months of training is an achievement in itself; surviving the first posting means spending two years on a planet renowned for its less-than-friendly lifeforms, where the animals are not always the most aggressive enemy that will be faced. If you make it through that you only have eighteen years to go until you can return to civilian life. Fate, in her usual careless manner, rolls the dice and comes up with a twist that has Nel scrambling to stay sane and in control, testing her and her companions to their limits and beyond.
1. Welcome To Darwin
