scylla
S C Y L L A
The bottom of a mine is dark.
The wavering light of a torch is absorbed by the rock. Two miners are working with hammer, pick and shovels. Clothes grimy with dust and soil. The work is hard and dirty. They pant softly with exertion.
The man, BRODY, is in his fifties. Longish grey hair, beard. He shovels away debris.
The woman, WYA, is around 30. Lean muscles gleaming in the dull light. Long, dirt tangled hair. She swings the big hammer until rock finally shatters.
BRODY
That’s done it... give me the light.
Wya passes him the torch. Brody eagerly examines the rock closely. He smells it - tastes it. He sags.
BRODY (cont’d)
Nothin’. Nothin’ at all.
He sits, despondent.
WYA
We’ll dig deeper.
BRODY
Won’t make no difference. The vein’s tapped.
Wya raises the hammer and begins to beat at the rock.
BRODY (cont’d)
Wya -
Wya hammers even harder; desperately.
BRODY (cont’d)
- there’s nothin’ there!
Wya throws down the hammer with an almost animal cry.
BRODY (cont’d)
It was a fool’s dream to begin with.
Wya stands a moment, accepting it. And now she turns and walks back up the tunnel.
BRODY (cont’d)
Where you going? Wya?
Wya turns; stares a moment.
WYA
Home.
She turns and disappears into the dark.
AT THE TUNNEL MOUTH -
Wya comes out of the mine into a clear, star-lit night. She stands a moment looking out a vast, desolate vista. She walks down towards the campsite. Brody now comes out. He bangs the dust from his battered hat. He follows.
EXT. CAMPSITE - NIGHT
A campfire crackles. Wya and Brody sit staring into the flames, drinking coffee. Their pack animals stand just out of the light, in the shadows.
BRODY
I ain’t gonna miss this god forsaken place, that’s for sure.
He spits a stream of coffee. Something small and leathery scurries into the brush to avoid it. Wya is silent.
BRODY (cont’d)
Ah, who am I foolin’. Give me a good drunk, a grubstake and I’ll be back in a month trying to strike it rich again.
A moment.
BRODY (cont’d)
I grew up near an ocean. I ever tell you that?
WYA
Only about a million times.
BRODY
I know, I talk too much. You don’t talk enough. Where you from? You never said.
Wya is staring up the vast star filled sky.
WYA
Earth.
SUDDEN REVERSE ON - An icy moon wreathed in a sparkling, frozen ring, so close you could seemingly reach out and touch it. Beyond it, several other planets are set against the glitter of alien stars.
A flock of enormous serpentine shapes streak across the night sky and then are gone. The pack animals shift nervously - are caught by the light - their bodies are like mules but their heads are alien - long tendril-like ears - trunk-like noses - eyes on the front and sides of their heads.
Wya throws the remains of her coffee into the fire. Sparks flurry and scatter, then rise towards the stars.
CROSSFADE TO:
To the increasingly frantic beat of metallic drums:
Something metallic floats in space.
It is at the epicenter of a small system of planets and moons. The big planet, Ajax, and its ringed moon, Odin, are much closer than all the rest. Twin suns hover in the distance.
A SHUTTLE -
- breaks our POV, heading in.
CLOSER NOW:
Scylla. A mythological Greek monster. A devourer of ships.
It is a city, a space station. It resembles nothing so much as the interlocking spindles from a children’s game of jacks. The spindles surround one huge, central spindle.
It is a rusting and pitted, industrial plant of towers and plasti-domes, of docking ports and cargo cranes, of glowing reactors and oxygen plants. Nothing pretty about it. Scylla is esthetically pleasing as a foundry.
Barges bring an alpha class freighter to berth. Other space-frosted freighters are moored at the spindle tips. The freighters are all emblazoned with a capitol “C”. The “C” outlines a planet within an open hand. The Company.
The shuttle glides towards an interior docking bay on one of the spindles. It is a Charlie class, used to ferry passengers and goods to and from the planet and moon.