Excerpt from Chapter 2.....

The family which Stewart spoke of as being on the verge of welcoming an additional member were chaperoned by two security guards and a woman          who exhibited a frosty, austere expression.  Her gaze was even sharper,     cutting through every effort by the expectant, non-indigenous mother to         return them with friendlier stares.  Even the physical motion of the parting        of her lips to verbalise a little of what she was feeling was rewarded with       stark, ocular disapproval.  The walk that the family of three, plus the child       still in its incubatory period within the fleshy cocoon, took was regimented, devoid of any welcoming gestures on the part of most of the members of staff designated with the task of seeing them reach the place they were to be housed in, until a less bureaucratic form of residency could be arranged for them.  Here and there, an overuse of bleach to keep the corridors fully cleaned and sterile was smelt by the family and by the officials around them.  For the female, pregnancy made the stroll even more arduous, but her husband, or lover – the authorities weren’t certain that the marital status existed on the world they hailed from, so they could only guess, rather than assume as to whether or      not they were a wedded couple or something other than that – stood near enough to the woman’s back to apply gentle leverage when it was needed.     Two left turns around two corridors later, they were facing the door, behind which were the living quarters the authorities had provided.  The stern woman swiped her identity card through the code reader in a downward thrust, and then briskly typed in a four-digit number known only to her: she was careful to stand at the kind of angle that would prevent anyone else seeing the digits she had keyed in.  The prohibitive red light switched to a green one in a split-second after the single beep that heralded ease of access for those who were about to become the temporary residents of whatever type of living quarters awaited the immigrant family who were expected to abide by the laws put in place, as a result of the restructuring of the immigration service: a move that had been implemented because of the first batch of aliens arriving in the manner they       did.  With a hearty tug, the woman with the icy demeanour yanked the door open, revealing a living room that was officious in its decoration and in the     way the furniture was placed.

The walls were white, and there were no windows.  There was only one sofa and there were no appliances that served any entertainment needs: all in all, it was only a couple of steps above in terms of luxuriousness being a prison.  The command  “move” was whipped out from the mouth of the humourless  lady like a bullet, engendering a small amount of fear from the child that had been expelled from its mother’s womb some years ago on a planet many light years from the one he was now encountering, and he noiselessly clung onto the upper thigh of his male parent’s left leg.  The attitude of one of the pair of security guards was softer than his other colleagues and with a gentle pat on the child’s back, did what he felt he could to allay some of the kid’s fear, or rather what the code of professional behaviour pertaining to his job would permit.