“You’re taking a few liberties there,” Oscar said. “But I do like the imagery.”
“How’s Qatux coming on? Is he going to manage the wormhole?” Wilson checked the stormrider’s status in his virtual vision; so far everything was holding steady as its power output built rapidly.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I worked in the exploration division, remember? That makes me very familiar with the kind of large arrays you need to manipulate exotic matter. There’s a limit to what flesh and blood can achieve, even very smart alien flesh and blood. Our Raiel might just be claiming this to influence our emotional state.”
“MorningLightMountain controls all its wormholes by direct neural routines.”
“And that’s another thing: did anyone back at your supersecret revolutionary council actually verify this Bose motile creature was the genuine article?”
“Stop being such a paranoid grump.”
“First rule of being a lawyer, don’t ask the witness a question when you know you don’t like the answer.”
“Well, here comes the answer. Qatux has finished the power-up sequence.”
Ayub had parked the Volvo containing the Raiel close to the generator building’s door. The big alien had then been linked to the generator’s controlling array via thick bundles of fiber-optic cable that it had attached to the heavy tips of the flaccid flesh stems behind its tentacles. It was an arrangement that reminded Wilson of hot-wiring a car.
He started his level breathing exercise as his heart rate sped up, glad that Tiger Pansy wasn’t around to sense his anxiety. The wormhole opened as smoothly as an iris exposed to the night.
“It’s through to somewhere,” Adam declared.
“Matthew, send a sneekbot through,” Alic said.
One of the little bots scampered through the pressure curtain. Wilson hooked himself onto its feed, and saw a darkened landscape unfold. There was damp ground below the artificial rodent’s feet, ragged blades of grass snagging at its sleek body, arching fronds of tall plants waved in the distance, darker patches of trees. It hurried ten meters away from the wormhole, then raised itself up on its hind legs and scanned around. There were no heat sources within range, no electromagnetic emission points, no visible spectrum light; the only detectable motion was a persistent wind that was heavy with moisture, the tail end of rain.
“It certainly hasn’t come out in the city,” Adam said.
“Could be a city park,” Rosamund said.
“Doubtful, there’s no node carrier signal registering,” Johansson said. “Even dear old Armstrong City has a complete net coverage.”
“All right, we’re going through,” Adam said.
Wilson heard Jamas revving the armored car’s engine, and hurriedly stepped to one side. The low curving vehicle lumbered forward and slipped through the pressure curtain.
“Still intact,” Adam said. “Definitely countryside, no city visible. No wait, I can see something on the horizon. Orange light haze. There’s some kind of settlement over there. Quite a big one, I guess.”
“It should be Armstrong City,” Qatux said. “I believe the wormhole to have emerged twenty kilometers to the southwest of its southern boundary. That was my intention.”
“That should put us in Schweickart Park,” Jamas said. “I recognize the constellations. Dreaming heavens, it’s definitely Far Away. I’m home!”
“Running active sensor scan,” Adam said. “It looks clear to me. Bradley, if there’s anything out here bigger than a rabbit, it’s stealthed perfectly.”
“Thank you, Adam,” Bradley said. “Let’s go through, people, quickly please.”
The remaining armored cars and Volvo trucks started their engines.
“Come on,” Wilson said. He moved forward, feeling the pressure curtain brush against his armor suit like a gentle breeze as the red light faded out around him. And for the second time in his life, Wilson Kime arrived on an alien planet with a single giant step. Gravity fell away sharply. He wasn’t used to that, not on the CST train network; most H-congruous planets were close to Earth-standard gravity and you never really noticed the transition.
One of the Volvos hooted its horn loudly behind him, and he hopped aside. The movement sent him a good half meter into the air. He laughed as he sank down onto the ground again. His virtual hand keyed the suit unlock, and the helmet visor swung up. He sucked down native air, strong with the scent of recent rain and a hint of pine. “They could have done it,” he said wonderingly. “They really could.”
“Who?” Anna said. She dropped down off the back of a Volvo, gingerly holding her arms out for balance.
“The Aries Underground; they wanted to terraform Mars. It would have developed into something like this if they’d ever had their chance.”
“Do you ever stop thinking about Mars?” she asked.
“Not enough atmosphere on Mars to make it H-congruous,” Oscar said. He didn’t sound impressed.
“They had schemes to compensate for that. Hauling in ice from the cometary belt; genemodified bacteria liberating oxygen from the soil, orbital mirrors, transmantle boreholes.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Planets were in those days,” Wilson told him sagely.
The Volvo carrying Qatux drove slowly through the wormhole, tailing its thick bundle of fiber-optic cable behind. Two people in armor suits emerged from the wormhole behind the truck, making sure the cable didn’t get snagged.
“Everyone through, sir,” Kieran reported.
“Thank you,” Bradley said. “Qatux, we don’t need the wormhole anymore.”
Wilson just had time for one final review of the stormrider before the wormhole closed. Like Icarus, its fate was now sealed; the thick current of plasma had pushed it a long way past the Lagrange point, its depleted thrusters no longer had the delta-V reserve to fly it back around. All that remained was the long, leisurely fall to oblivion in the neutron star’s awesome gravity.
The wormhole shrank away to nothing, its final closure sheering off the fiber-optic bundle, which fell back to the ground like a mortally wounded snake. The act of severance reinforced Wilson’s feeling of remoteness; they were truly on their own now. Judging by the silence he wasn’t alone with that thought.
“I don’t have much to say to you,” Bradley announced. “Which is just as well, for we are desperately short of time now. But I’d like to thank our non-Guardian friends for coming with us, and believing in us at the end. For those of you whose ancestors have been with me since the beginning, I would express my gratitude to them for their terrible and frequent sacrifices; it is their blood which has delivered us to this place at this time. As a consequence, the Guardians of Selfhood will be thanked by the rest of humanity for all we have endured so that our species can be free at last.”
Wilson glanced around, seeing all the Guardians who had come with them lowering their heads in respect. He joined in, more troubled than he liked to acknowledge by Bradley’s words. History would show the Guardians in a very different light from now on.
“As this is our time, let’s not waste any more of it,” Bradley said. “Ayub, would you try and contact the clans, please, quick as you can.”
“Stig!” Keely yelled. “Stig, I’m picking up something on the short wave! It’s our frequency.”
Stig leaned forward, frowning. It was dark in the back of the Mazda Volta four-by-four, a refuge where he could brood unseen. The little convoy of Guardian vehicles, five cars and seven of the lightly armored Voltas, had taken almost an hour to drive through the damaged city. All the while he’d been picking up reports from the Guardians covering the Starflyer’s exit route. Their various attempts to strike the big MANN truck had come to nothing. The Starflyer’s vehicles had good armor, and even better force fields. They also responded to any attack with extreme force. Over a dozen buildings harboring Guardian snipers had been reduced to smoldering rubble.