Judas Unchained

It was the silence he noticed as he cycled along the last stretch of road toward the employee gate. With the office sitting on the end of the CST station’s main terminal, he was used to the constant mumble of the crowd that besieged the main entrance. According to local news shows, over a third of Boongate’s population had now left, with everyone else anxious to join them. Niall wasn’t so sure about the official numbers; he thought it was more than that. Every day he cycled to work from his two-room flat, going the long way around the massive station yard. That way he didn’t get caught up in the huge jam of people arriving on the highway. There were so many cars driven into the verges along the approach roads that the government employed seventeen crews towing the abandoned vehicles away, not that they could keep up. It wasn’t just the sides of the highway that were clogged, of course. A lot of people drove through the same maze of streets he used in the commercial district surrounding the station, and parked on any clear spot before walking around to the front. Some mornings he’d find hundreds of cars had appeared overnight, turning the roads into quite an obstacle course for him to weave his way around.

Anyone who arrived and dumped their car then had a wait of nearly two days as the massive throng of people slowly shuffled their way forward toward the haven of the terminal’s main entrance. Niall didn’t know how many people there were between the highway and the entrance; it looked like the entire population to him. They wore expensive semiorganic coats, or draped plastic sheets around their shoulders to protect themselves from the miserable rain of Boongate’s early winter months. There had been plenty of days when Niall turned up and it had been sleeting. Once it snowed for thirty-six hours. It subdued the crowd, made them miserable, made them bad tempered, but nothing had ever made them fall silent before.

Niall was only three hundred meters away from the employees’ gate when he realized the sound was missing; most days you could hear it over a kilometer away. He steered around a big Toyota ten-seater Lison that was parked across a warehouse delivery bay, and braked to a halt. When he pushed his goggles up, he found it had stopped raining. Good news, yes, but not enough to stop that constant growl of barely restrained anger. He looked up. The force field had come on over the city; dark clouds slithered around its shimmering surface. A second force field was covering the station, deflecting the mists that were trapped under the city’s dome. “Oh, hell,” he whispered in fright. He’d never allowed himself to believe that the aliens would return.

His e-butler’s news filter let through an alert telling him that wormholes were being detected in a lot of star systems across the Commonwealth. His instant response was to glance over at the giant terminal building with its long, curved glass roofs. Instinctive self-preservation kicked in, and he started to work out routes in his mind. As an employee, he had access to several restricted zones inside the station complex; there were a number of ways he could reach the platforms without ever having to join that horde outside.

He let go of the brakes, and began pedaling again. Today, there were eight guards outside the employee gate, all dressed in flexarmor and carrying weapons. Normally, there were just two security staff inside their cabin, who always waved him on when he showed his company pass. This time they made Niall put his palm on a sensor pad one of them was carrying to check his biometric pattern.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the guard snarled from inside his helmet. “A tour company rep?”

“We’re still active,” Niall protested. “It’s genuine. Check my record; I’ve been in every day for weeks. I’ve got groups left on Far Away that are coming back. Somebody’s got to be here for them.”

“I’ve got news for you, sonny, they ain’t going to make it. Look around you.”

“And if they do?”

There was a long pause while the guard referred back to his superior. “Okay,” he said eventually. “You can go through.”

“Thanks.”

The reinforced barrier across the pavement swiveled up. Niall pushed his bicycle through, feeling his skin tingle as he went through the force field. Just as he was mounting up on the other side, the guard said, “Son, if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll go straight to the platforms and catch a train to Gralmond or one of its neighbors.”

“If my group comes back, I’ll do it.”

Not even the thick armor could mask the man shaking his head.

Niall pedaled as fast as he could to the office. His e-butler was supplying situation updates the whole way. Alien ships were pouring into the Boongate system, out around the third gas-giant orbit. Thousands more were emerging in other systems. Local news told him that the wormhole to Wessex had been temporarily closed by CST. “Hellfire.” There’d be a riot. He knew there would be.