Earth Star

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?’

‘They took their vid bees off to explore northern linkway 7155. I asked them to be back before portal lockdown. They probably think I’m paranoid.’

Some flexiplas chairs and a lot of cushions had appeared in the main hall. It was full of people lounging around and talking. Earth Rolling News was still chattering away on the far wall. I went over to take a look.

‘… ninety minutes to lockdown. Evacuation status is at 98 per cent. The Military request that everyone not in Ark should head there immediately. Time to lockdown is only an estimate, and you may be in danger if you don’t reach Ark. If you require assistance, call community services at once, as they will evacuate to Ark within the next twenty minutes. Hospital Earth evacuation is already complete.’

Fian appeared next to me, and handed me a sealed carton. I looked down at it in confusion.

‘Food,’ he said, waving another identical carton at me. ‘Eat.’

I pulled off the lid, and felt the carton grow hot. Inside was what appeared to be stew.

Fian handed me a spoon. ‘It’s quite good.’

I tried a mouthful of stew. He was right. I hadn’t been hungry in days, but now I was starving. I ate my way to the bottom of the carton at high speed. ‘They didn’t have cheese fluffle?’

Fian expressed his opinion of cheese fluffle by making a rude noise, and nodded at the Earth Rolling News coverage. ‘Some people still haven’t made it into Ark. What are they doing? Still trying to get the family pet into a carrier?’

‘Some may not take the warnings seriously, or just not want to come because …’ I frowned, threw my carton in a waste bin, and made a frantic call on my lookup.

Fian stood watching me. ‘Something wrong?’

‘I hope not. What’s taking him so long?’ I cancelled the call, and made it again, flagging it as emergency this time. ‘Come on, Keon, answer your lookup or the next time I see you I’ll …’

Keon’s face appeared. ‘Is there a problem, Jarra?’

Things sounded very noisy wherever he was, so I raised my voice. ‘I just wanted to make sure you’d got Issette into Ark. I know she thinks it’s creepy and …’

‘Relax! We’ve been in Ark for four hours,’ he said calmly. ‘I was hardly likely to let Issette stay outside when the Military kept screaming it was dangerous.’

‘You might have decided it was too much effort to argue with her.’

Keon laughed. ‘I’m not nearly as useless as you think I am. I’m perfectly willing to put in effort on something important, I just think most people waste a lot of energy on things that aren’t. You’re a classic example, always insisting on doing things the hard way.’

I stuck my tongue out at him.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘There’s a wild party going on here, and Issette’s in the middle of it, alternating between being happy about our new Twoing contract and panicking about being in Ark. I don’t want her getting powered in an attempt to calm her nerves.’

I felt horribly guilty. I’d been occupied with my own problems and totally forgotten Issette and Keon were renewing their Twoing contract today. ‘I should have congratulated you both. Mutual joy!’

‘Thanks,’ said Keon. ‘I may bring Issette over to visit you tomorrow. We’re only about an hour’s walk away, and I’m sure archaeologists will be much safer company than Issette’s medical student friends.’

The call ended, and my lookup chimed with an incoming mail. That was the Military forces moving to alert level 3 as planned. There was less than an hour before portal lockdown would cut off Ark from the rest of the universe. Over on the Earth Rolling News display, the red numbers started flashing urgently.

Fian and I stood with the crowd, watching the numbers slowly count down, then suddenly both our lookups chimed again. I checked my mail, saw the Military had moved from alert level 3 to level 2, and looked around wildly to check the display on Earth Rolling News. There was still twenty minutes to portal lockdown, so why had …?

We headed for the Alpha corridor, and as soon as we were out of view of the crowd we broke into a run.