He reached the slate-topped reception counter, and slapped his hand down on the polished brass bell. Two largish assistants from the concierge desk were moving into place behind him. The duty receptionist, a man in his late thirties wearing the hotel’s gray blazer uniform, gave Ozzie a reproachful look. “Yes.” Pause. “Sir.”
Ozzie smiled from inside his extravagant beard. “Like, gimme the best suite you’ve got, man.”
“It’s booked. In fact, all our rooms are booked. Perhaps you should try another establishment.” He looked over at the two assistants, hand rising to beckon.
“No thanks, dude. This is the only five-star in town.” Before the receptionist could stop him, he reached over the counter and pressed his thumb against the i-pad on the hotel’s credit array.
“Listen, pal—” the receptionist began. Then blinked as the hotel system registered Ozzie’s bank tattoo and identity certificate. “Oh.” He swayed forward slightly, peering closely. “Ozzie? I mean, Mr. Isaac, sir. Welcome to the Ledbetter.”
The assistants froze. One of them actually smiled.
“About that suite?” Ozzie said.
“My mistake, sir, our penthouse suite is available. We’d be honored to have you stay here with us, sir.”
“Glad to hear it, man. Now, about this penthouse; I expect you get a lot of important people here, people who don’t want everything they do splashed on the gossip shows.”
“I believe you’ll find us most discreet, sir.”
“So far, so good. Is there a service elevator to the penthouse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Even better. Now listen carefully. There’s a very large alien sitting in a car in one of your delivery bays out back. I want it into the service elevator and up into the suite without any fuss and without anyone seeing. I do not want to look out of my window tomorrow morning and see Alessandra Baron or any other media dudes camping outside.” He shunted a very large gratuity to the Ledbetter staff general account. “We cool on that?”
The receptionist’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I will make your request quite plain to the other members of staff.”
“Good man. Now, do you guys have a decent room service menu?”
“We do indeed, sir. Our restaurant has the finest menu in town. Would you like to see it now?”
“No, just send the food up to the suite.”
“Yes, sir. Er, which items?”
“All of it.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah, and just to play safe: twenty-five lettuce as well.”
“At once, sir.”
The en-suite bathroom to the master bedroom featured a circular sunken marble pool, large enough for several people. But not quite big enough for Tochee. The alien lay on a bed of towels beside it, and scooped the warm soapy water over itself. Its manipulator flesh gripped two of the largest combs to be found in Eansor and raked them through its colorful fronds, pulling out the flecks of dried leaves, and grit, and mud spots, and grass stalks, and all the other detritus it had picked up in the feathery appendages as they moved between worlds.
Orion, wearing just a huge canary-yellow towel around his waist, was working around Tochee with the shower hose, washing off the foam that Ozzie had rubbed into its fronds after they’d been combed.
“We do not have ‘shampoo conditioner’ on my world,” Tochee told them. Several of his cleaned fronds quivered at the slightest movement; they were becoming dramatically soft and vibrant as the water dried away. “I would become very important if I were to introduce such a thing.”
“It’s the little things in life that count, man,” Ozzie said. Like Orion, he was wearing a big towel and nothing else. He’d probably have another shower once they were done with Tochee’s beauty therapy. Three in one day! The water washing down the drain in the first one had been vile.
They’d eaten after their all-important first wash with real soap, the three of them moving along the line of trolleys laden with the restaurant’s finest cooking. Ozzie had wolfed down the perfectly cooked French-blue steak. Sampled the fish, the game, the risotto, the sweet and sour chicken, the Thai spice dishes, the pasta. Fries! A whole mountain of them. Beer, drunk as if it had been passed down from Mount Olympus.
Tochee had stuck to the vegetable dishes. How anybody, alien or not, could eat two bowls of raw carrot sticks intended for the dips was beyond Ozzie. The lettuce had been a good idea, too; Tochee ate half of them.
Orion and Tochee both tried ice cream for the first time ever. Finished every spoonful on the trolleys, and sent out for more. Ozzie munched his way through the other puddings, taking a couple of spoons from each.
After the bacchanal meal, they’d brought in clothing store staff from the city, with big cases of the latest fashions. It had taken an hour to choose a wardrobe for both of them. The hotel’s in-house salon sorted out Ozzie’s beard, and gave him a proper manicure. He wouldn’t let them cut much off his Afro; he kind of liked it so explosive. Orion got a similar treatment. It only ended when Ozzie politely rescued the poor girl who was styling the boy’s hair.
“You were drooling,” he told Orion when the flustered girl had left.
“She was beautiful,” Orion protested. “And really friendly.”
“Oh, man, she was sixty years older than you. Trust me on that, rejuvenation is easy to see if you know what you’re looking for; she wore that much makeup because she’s not actually very pretty; and she was being professionally courteous, not friendly.”
“You’re just jealous.”
Ozzie promptly canceled the massage he’d booked for both of them.
Sprucing up Tochee took a good ninety minutes. But Ozzie had to admit, it was time well spent. Once they’d finished blowing the hair dryers over its fronds, their friend looked magnificent. Fluffier than they’d ever seen it, but wonderfully colorful. “A whole Vegas chorus line worth of costumes in one package,” Ozzie declared.
“Are we going out now?” Orion asked. He’d put on a semiorganic black shirt, wearing a white and scarlet jacket over the top; the pants were green enough to hurt the naked eye. It was an ensemble fashionable with the under twenties, the store assistant had promised. Ozzie felt really old just looking at the boy; no way was he going to walk into a bar with anyone dressed like that.
“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.”
Adam knew he was right. If the Starflyer truly hadn’t wanted them to follow, it could easily have wrecked the remaining planes before it left. So either they’d been sabotaged, or it simply intended to destroy the Port Evergreen generator, leaving them trapped here. Simple is always most effective. And the Starflyer must be improvising to a degree as well. “Okay,” he told the drivers. “Load them up.”
Kieran and Ayub opened the main cargo deck ramps at the back of the Carbon Goose. The Volvos went up first. As the armored car drove under the wing, Adam saw sensorbots starting to fall out of the turbine exhausts to lie flexing uselessly on the sheer rock floor, their sophisticated electronics victim to the micropile’s radiation. He stayed focused on them for a long time as they slowed and finally became inert. It was a bad omen on a world inimical to humans when even the machinery designed to function here proved deadly to standard Commonwealth technology.
Wilson was still in his armor suit when he entered the cockpit. In keeping with the rest of the Carbon Goose, it was a big compartment with seats more like leather recliners than the cramped USAF fighter seats that he used to contend with in his first life. The windshield was a curving transparency six feet high that gave a panoramic view out over the blunt nose. Kieran was sitting in the pilot’s seat, still in his armor, with three high-performance arrays spread out on the control console. They were plugged into the plane’s avionics with thick fiber-optic cable.
“Did you find anything?” Wilson asked.
“No. The software checks out. I’ve loaded some additional monitors in case anything was submerged, but they didn’t really have the time to plant anything sophisticated. There’s no thermal trace of anyone here before us. My opinion for what it’s worth: this is clean.” He climbed out of the chair and unsealed hi
s helmet.
Wilson studied the young face that was exposed. Short hair framing slim features, alert eyes; eager, dedicated, efficient. Me, three hundred forty years ago. God! “When I was in the air force, I learned to always trust my engineering crew. I don’t suppose anything’s really changed.”
Kieran broke into a genuine grateful smile. “Thank you.”
“Okay, let’s see if I actually remember how to fly.” He started to take his armor suit off.
“Admiral. I’m glad you’re here.”
The term surprised Wilson. Thirty hours ago, the navy that he was in charge of had been hunting down the Guardians as if they were a pandemic virus. It made the young man’s faith all the more touching. “I’ll do whatever I can,” he promised.
Oscar and Anna arrived in the cockpit as Wilson was pulling his feet out of the armor’s boots. He was only wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, and the cockpit’s air was almost freezing.
“Here you go,” Oscar said, and dropped a small bag at Wilson’s feet. “Our CST-issue executive travel pack. Essential for survival in hotels and conferences the Commonwealth over.”
“Don’t mock,” Wilson growled as he unzipped the bag. He found a fleece with a CST logo on the chest, and pulled it on quickly before sitting in the luxurious pilot’s seat. “Yow, this leather’s cold.” He put his hands over the console’s i-pads, and reviewed the menus rolling into his virtual vision as the interface was established. The first thing he did was locate the plane’s environmental circuits and switch the heating on full.