Day 1 Report

Daily word count: 1,115. Slightly less than my daily target of 1,667, but not bad for sorting out where the story is going. I'm having a minor technical issue with transferring excerpts from my Palm and office PC, where I'm doing most of the writing, onto the computer that is connected to the Internet. As soon as that is worked out, I'll be posting longer excerpts, but for now, here's a few bits from my opening.

"We have to leave now," Jo called from the front door.
"What?" Skeet yelled back from the bedroom. "Worried they'll leave without you?"
"Yes." Jo fingered the case of memory chips in her pocket.
"I thought you said the Martians needed you."
Jo suppressed a laugh. Skeet talked like they were little green men, not refugees from Earth. "The research colonies need a lot of us. They're going to launch ahead of the shutdown whether I'm on the rocket or not. It would disappoint them to leave me, but they would do it to get the
rest off this rock while they can."
"Relax, " Skeet said, appearing out of the bedroom with a duffle bag slung over one shoulder. "You'll get there."
He spoke with the cockiness that was his family's hallmark on and off the road. In all her time on the Hansen Team's engineering staff, she had never heard any of the drivers less than absolutely certain about themselves...Skeet was a fifth-generation driver, an endurance champion, and had even run and won drifts back when they were illegal. If anyone could beat
the feds to the launch site, he could, even if no one knew what time he was shooting to beat.
Jo hadn't told anyone how she was getting to the Mojave Spaceport. Aside from Skeet and a few off-world colleagues who had helped the arrangements, no one knew she was leaving at all, and she'd only told Skeet because he was her best shot at getting there...

...Faced with a draft into the service of the Defense Department, which had been on the offense so long now that the name was blurring the line between being a quaint relic and an Orwellian joke, most of the formerly-exempt scientists were booking passage to one of the independent off-world stations. So many were leaving that the commercial space ports were running at peak capacity just to keep up. Now rumors were circulating that the governments were going to deprivatize the remaining civilian space ports to stem the tide. Nothing had been announced yet, but no one expected the feds to give a warning...

...The city gave way to fields. Skeet cranked up the driving. Jo had been allowed in the cars occasionally when he test drove new components, but she'd never seen him drive a full-on drag from the inside. The fields blurred. They drove on in silence, Jo knowing far better than to break his concentration. She turned different phrases over and over in her head. None sounded right...