Judas Unchained

“Tomorrow then,” Orion said in a whiny voice. “Promise me tomorrow. It’s not fair we get back and I have to stay in the whole time. I want to meet some girls.”

“All right, tomorrow,” Ozzie said, anything to divert the boy.

“So what do I do tonight?” Orion asked. It was already dark outside, with ground lights ringing the hotel shining green and red through the windows.

“Access something. I’ll show you how. Tochee might like to see something of the Commonwealth as well.” He ushered them into the suite’s main lounge, and accessed the room management array. The big hologram portal lit up with a huge unisphere category menu. Ozzie hurriedly loaded in restrictions that would stop the boy wading through porn all night long—for Tochee’s sake, obviously—and switched the array to voice activation function. He slotted a direct translation routine in for Tochee, and left them to it.

***

The Guardians’ vehicles were almost down to the bottom of the deep inlet where Shackleton was situated when Adam’s narrowband link back to the train dropped out. He told Rosamund to send the drone back to inspect the gateway. Even as the little bot turned a sharp curve through Half Way’s clear red sky he was certain what it would find. Vic had been right. Judging by the silence in the armored car and the way everyone was keeping quiet on the general band, he wasn’t the only one with that thought.

The image in his virtual vision showed him the simple hoop of equipment that anchored the Half Way end of the wormhole. For a moment, it was illuminated by one of the powerful blue-white flashes in the sky. The stab of light revealed the interlocking machinery inside the arch. There was no wormhole.

“Well,” Morton said. “I’d say getting back is going to be a tad difficult now.”

“There are still planes at Shackleton,” Adam said, keeping positive. He didn’t want anyone to start panicking. Not yet, anyway. If they started thinking about how isolated they were, they’d lose it very quickly indeed. All he could think of was the one remaining wormhole on this godforsaken planet, and the fact that the Starflyer was going to reach it first. He had to admit, as traps went, this one was a beauty. All the Starflyer had to do was get through to Half Way and blow the generator behind it, leaving them stranded on a world with no link to anywhere, in an environment that would slowly kill them. And who would come looking? Sheldon might. Possibly.

Adam’s e-butler told him Bradley was calling on a private link. “This isn’t good. Did you ever examine this scenario?”

“Stig and I reviewed what would happen if the Starflyer blew the Port Evergreen wormhole generator as it returned. That was a year ago. We believed there would be sufficient resources on Far Away for the clans to complete the planet’s revenge. But that assumed they already had the Martian data, and we’d got more equipment through. The Far Away freight inspectorate division screwed that up for us, which is one of the reasons why we switched to the blockade run scenario.”

“But we expected to do that before the Starflyer’s return,” Bradley said.

“Exactly. Then the Prime attack threw another spanner in the works. And I certainly didn’t predict anything quite this personal.”

“So what are our options?”

“There’s only one: get to Port Evergreen before it.”

“And can we do that?”

“Even if it hasn’t sabotaged the planes, it has a thirty-minute head start. We don’t have aerobots. Or even air-to-air missiles.”

“I see,” Bradley said. “Is there any way we can call ahead, and reverse this trap on the Starflyer? Get our clan warriors through the wormhole at the other end, and secure Port Evergreen before the Starflyer arrives? That way it will be trapped between us.”

“The planes only have short-wave radio in case of emergency. There are no satellites here, only a seabed fiber-optic cable between Shackleton and Port Evergreen to link Far Away to the unisphere.”

“So someone stays behind and when the next cycle begins they send a message through to Stig.”

“The Institute is blocking all communications, has been for days.”

“Then we have no choice but to make the flight and hope Stig can help us out somehow.”

“Without knowing what’s going on?”

“He’s not stupid. He’ll know the Starflyer is returning, and that we’re on our way as well.”

“I hope you’re right.”

The vehicles arrived on the shelf of rock where the pressurized huts and vast hangars were laid out a hundred meters above the sea. Two of the hangar doors were open, the regular flashes from the planet’s odd double star revealing their empty cavernous interiors. When the drone made its early flyby, its active sensors revealed the remaining seven hangars each contained a Carbon Goose.

“Our vehicles will fit into one,” Adam announced.

“I don’t mean to intrude, but isn’t that a little too risky?” Bradley queried him. “All our eggs in one flying basket.”