Earth Star(84)

‘Let’s go up to our room,’ he whispered.

Dalmora, Amalie and Krath were busy controlling their vid bees, which swooped around the hall recording images of the crowd watching Earth Rolling News, and of the new arrivals appearing from the portal. Playdon was chatting to Rono. No one noticed us leave.





25





‘Jarra! Wake up!’

I made a noise of protest and snuggled further down into the warm cocoon of my sleep sack, but Fian was implacable.

‘Jarra!’

I reluctantly opened my eyes, and blinked at the strange granite walls around me. Oh yes, we were in Ark.

Fian was smiling down at me. ‘What went wrong there? I intended us to talk but somehow …’

‘Mmmm.’ I made a noise of pure, smug contentment. I hadn’t wanted to talk about the last few miserable days, so I’d shamelessly distracted Fian.

He laughed. ‘I’m afraid you really have to wake up now, Jarra. It’s less than two hours to portal lockdown, and we should check what the Military are doing.’

‘What?’ I sat up, totally grazzed. I’d forgotten about the alien sphere, and the Military, and … How could I have done that? Yes, I’d been completely occupied with my own problems for days, but we’d just evacuated to Ark. If I wasn’t completely nardle, I’d have spared a moment to remember exactly why we were going there.

I slid out of the sleep sack, rapidly dressed, checked no one was in the main room, and then took my Military lookup from my bag and started reading the command event summary. ‘Everything seems to be going according to plan. The civilian experts portalled to the Echo base on Adonis, Alpha sector, four hours ago. Command moved to Ark operations centre two hours ago.’

‘And the fighters?’ asked Fian.

‘The current shift has just begun pulling back towards the portals. They’ll wait there until they get the five minute warning and then portal out to join the rest of the Attack team who are already at Echo base. We’re now at alert level 4, and will move to level 3 an hour before lockdown. Threat team seem pretty confident the sphere won’t do anything drastic until the fighters have gone and the solar storm takes out the portals and leaves us vulnerable.’

I checked the latest figures from the Threat team. ‘Ugh.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a 21 per cent chance of the sphere opening fire when the portal network goes into lockdown. I didn’t think it would be that high.’

Fian frowned. ‘You believe that number?’

‘Yes. The Military have used Threat team evaluations for centuries. There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to aliens, but the same is true of Planet First assessments and …’ The reality of the situation was hitting me now. ‘Fian, there’s a one in five chance that sphere is going to start shooting at us. We still have 97 minutes to lockdown. You should portal to Echo base, Adonis, and watch events from there.’

‘No.’

The sphere had casually used a beam with a tenth of the power of a planetary power supply beam just to take out a bit of passing space debris. I’d seen Ventrak Rostha’s vid of the events on Artemis when a power beam attacked the planet, and the sphere might be able to do the same or even worse.

As a team leader, I’d sat through enough tactical meetings to know exactly what would happen if the sphere attacked Earth. The Military would be forced to portal in to defend us, and in the middle of a solar storm they wouldn’t have time to mess about. They’d use everything they had. Ark was deep underground, but with both alien and Military weapons letting loose it might not be deep enough. The worst-case scenarios had seemed comfortingly remote theoretical possibilities back in those meetings, but now they were terrifyingly real.

This was Fian’s last chance to get to safety. I lost control and yelled at him. ‘Fian, get off this nuking planet and go visit your family on Hercules!’

‘Still no.’

The idiot Deltan just grinned at me. I’d have more luck arguing with the granite wall. I considered knocking him out, dragging his unconscious body down to the portal and … No, I’d never get away with it. Some officious person would arrest me long before I made it to Australia Off-world.

I sighed and gave in. ‘Let’s check what’s going on down in the main hall.’

I daren’t take my Military lookup out in public, so I set it to forward everything to my civilian one, and headed out of the room with Fian following me. Playdon ambushed us the second we entered the main hall.

‘How is everything?’

‘Going according to plan.’ I looked around. ‘Where are the rest of team 1?’