“They’ll be here soon enough,” Jim said.

Alic climbed to his feet. That was when he noticed that John King’s telemetry grid was black. “Oh, shit. Anyone see John? Did he make it out?”

“I got him,” Vic said. “Some of him. The kinetics got through; he must have taken a real pounding. Damn, they made a mess. Chewed him up bad.”

“Crap.” Alic wanted to hit something. Hard. “Can you see his helmet? Did his skull get damaged?”

“No, I think that’s okay; he’s in one piece from the shoulders up. More or less.”

“Okay, his memorycell’s intact. He can be re-lifed.”

“By who?” Jim cried. “This planet isn’t even going to be here by the end of the week.”

“Before we leave, we come back and recover the memorycell,” Alic said. “That goes for all of us. Last man standing has that duty. Agreed?”

“Yes, Boss.”

The other two grunted acknowledgment.

“All right.” Alic stared along the track where the GH7 had gone. The Far Away section force field was a gray-shaded bubble squatting over a cluster of diminutive buildings and warehouses six kilometers away. “We know where it’s going. Let’s get after it. Matthew, get Edmund on-line. It’s about time he earned his money and switched off that force field.”

“Just us four?” Jim asked.

Alic looked around at the gateway. It was still open. I could run through. We all could. It would be so easy. Technically the mission’s over. We’ve proved the Starflyer exists. “I don’t think we’ll be alone for long.”

His visual sensors picked up something moving a kilometer away across the station yard, heading toward them. A laser radar sweep showed him a bike, moving fast as it jumped rail tracks, heading for the wormhole. It picked up a couple of other moving objects behind the bike, possibly small cars. “Let’s move,” he said. “We’ll get run over if we stay here much longer.”

***

Adam eased the Ables ND47 out of the shed and applied the brakes. Narrabri traffic control logged them onto the system, and assigned them a transit code. He had to smile at the file name: Guardian 0001A.

Now we’re The Man.

“Here they come,” Bradley said.

Adam opened the cab door, looked out. A medium-sized truck and a fifteen-seater bus were racing along the service road to the shed.

“Everyone okay down there?” he asked the team crammed into the armored vehicles. The three squad leaders, Kieran, Rosamund, and Jamas, all replied yes. He thought they were all wound too tight. Even for a Guardian, committed since birth, it was quite something to finally know the Starflyer had passed just a few kilometers away. As for him…

I don’t have to take it on faith anymore. It was an astonishing release, almost spiritual. The Starflyer was real, the Guardians were mainstream, and there was a noble cause to be fought. In the middle of a war for species survival with millions already dead he actually felt good.

The bus and truck pulled up beside the two closed wagons behind the Ables ND47. Bradley had already opened the broad side doors, and was extending the ramps. He’d said Sheldon was sending something large. Adam assumed that would be some kind of combat aerobots.

Armor-suited figures were hurrying out of the bus. The back of the truck rolled up, and a thick ramp slid out.

“Fuck me,” Adam muttered.

A Raiel lumbered down out of the truck, its bulky body undulating in long wave motions. It was followed by a woman with wild red hair, who was dressed in a black blouse and short skirt colored almost the same shade as her hair. She’d squeezed a force field skeleton suit on top of her clothes. Even that couldn’t quite account for her inelegant movements. Then Adam realized she was in heels.

Five Guardians spilled out of the armored vehicles to greet the newcomers. Mostly they clustered around the Raiel.

A man in a sharp expensive business suit stepped out of the bus. Adam recognized Nelson Sheldon immediately. His presence sent a little shiver along Adam’s spine as he watched Bradley take his suit helmet off and walk over to shake hands with the security chief. Historic moment. A figure in an armor suit standing beside Nelson handed Bradley a small plastic case, the type used to carry memory crystals.

Her! Adam shivered again inside his armor suit.

As if she could sense his thoughts, Paula Myo turned and tipped her blank helmet up so that she was staring right at him. Even with all his suit’s passive and active layers of protection, Adam felt terribly vulnerable.

“All right,” Bradley announced, “let’s get this show on the road.”

The Raiel started up a ramp into the rear cargo wagon. Bradley had obviously decided it could ride in one of their armored Volvo trucks.

Paula Myo stayed outside, looking up at the cab on top of the Ables ND47. Adam’s e-butler told him she was calling him on a secure local channel. He opened the communications link.

“Mr. Elvin,” Paula Myo said.

“Investigator. Thank you for agreeing to help us.” Total bullshit, of course; he wasn’t pleased. He didn’t want her within a hundred light-years of this train, nor him.

“Just so we understand each other,” Paula said. “When the Starflyer threat is over, I will be arresting you for the Abadan atrocity. Johansson has committed many criminal acts, but they were politically motivated, for which I expect he will be given a pardon. High-level discussions are under way on that subject. You, on the other hand, will not receive a pardon. That has already been decided. Your continued assistance in exterminating the Starflyer might help mitigate your sentencing with the judge, nothing more.”

Adam canceled the link, and gave her the finger. It wasn’t a gesture that came over well in an armor suit.

Paula walked up the ramp into the first covered wagon.

Adam slammed the cabin door shut. He was shaking inside the suit. Even his virtual hands seemed to be trembling when he began manipulating the engine’s systems, preparing the defense hardware for whatever was waiting on the other side of the wormhole.

Pre-combat nerves, that’s all. Not her. She doesn’t scare me. Not anymore. No way.

“Well, they didn’t start shooting at each other,” Nelson said. “That’s something.”

“Not yet,” Nigel told him. He was relaxing in a seat at the back of the converted lecture theater, as good a place as anywhere to see the remainder of this mission through. His expanded mentality now had complete control over the Boongate gateway. CST communications technicians were looking into reestablishing Boongate’s connection to the unisphere. Someone had bombed the primary connection node, and the backup, and the fallback interlink. Emergency laser relays working through the main gateway were now in operation, allowing a remote survey of the damage. Permanent reconnection would mean keeping the main gateway open while technicians went through to do the work. With less than a week left before the evacuation was due to begin, Nigel didn’t favor that option. Besides, the main gateway would soon have to be reduced to zero width to permit final realignment on the generator itself so it could be formatted for temporal transit.

One piece of data that was coming through clear and strong was the images of the rush toward the gateway on the Boongate side. It had only been opened twenty minutes, and already over a hundred vehicles had powered through, from bikes, to cars, buses with tires that had burst on the rough journey over tracks, even a tow truck; so far five guys had cycled through. Sensors on the other side showed a lot of people jogging toward the open wormhole, making good time, too, considering the terminal was five kilometers distant.

A section of his grid expanded into his virtual vision, showing him the Guardians’ train starting its journey across Narrabri station.

“They’ll be through in two minutes,” he told Justine, who was sitting next to him, chewing on a peppermint settler tab.