“Sorry, not tonight. I told you I had some serious datawork to catch up with.” The hotel, indeed Bilma itself, was just an interlude before he got back to his asteroid and thought out what to do next.
“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.”
“I’m prepared to run an inspection on the planes,” Adam replied. “We’ve been running with the possibility of sabotage by Starflyer agents, that’s why I brought the forensic sensorbots. There are enough to check over three planes. But we have to get airborne and fast. Putting all the sensorbots onto one plane will speed the whole process up. We can’t afford luxuries like three aircraft, Bradley, not any longer.”
“I apologize, Adam. This is your operation; I’ll try to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the journey.”
“Don’t. I can still make mistakes. If you see one coming, shout it long and loud.” Adam switched back to the general channel. “Kieran, Ayub, you have decontamination duty. I want it checked thoroughly; we don’t need any surprises over the middle of the ocean.” He made everyone else wait in the relative security of the vehicles while Kieran and Ayub went over to the Carbon Goose in the fifth hangar, which had been left in a minimal power hibernation mode. A swarm of standard forensic sensorbots wriggled over the rock with them, looking like arm-length caterpillars. The machines bristled with gossamer-thin smart-molecule filaments like a downy fur. They circled the gigantic aircraft, testing the rock for any sign that someone had been in the hangar recently.
“Nobody for well over a week,” Ayub reported. “Zero thermal disturbance. No residual chemical dissemination.”
Adam gave them the go-ahead to test the plane itself. Kieran went up to the cockpit and loaded a batch of diagnostic software into the avionics. Ayub supervised the sensorbots as they crawled over the fuselage and slithered in through the airlocks. They wriggled into the structure through inspection ports and grilles, probing every component casing with their filaments, sniffing the air for any trace chemicals, performing resonance scans on the structure. He dropped three into each of the nuclear turbines so they could squirm their way past the fan blades and work their way back through the compressor bands.
“When does the wormhole cycle begin?” Anna asked.
“In just over six hours,” Adam said. “Assuming the Starflyer has a standard flight, it’ll remain open for about an hour and a half after it arrives at Port Evergreen.”
“That just gives us enough time,” Wilson said. “But it’ll be tight.”
After twenty minutes, Ayub cleared the lower cargo hold, declaring it free of booby traps.
“How long does this take?” Oscar asked.
“As long as it needs to,” Adam said resolutely.
“We’re giving them too big a lead time,” Wilson said. “At this rate there’s no way the Starflyer will leave a working gateway at the other end by the time we get there. We have to keep hard on its tail if we’re to stand any kind of chance. You’ve got to run a minimum scan and take the risk.”