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.
26
Fian and I tumbled into our room, and I yanked open my bag to grab my Military lookup. It seemed to take a couple of centuries to enter codes, and then an image appeared.
‘Oh nuke!’ I projected the image against the cavern wall. Normally, a light background is better for projections than dark, but in this case the dark of granite was perfect. The image showed the alien sphere surrounded by a glowing mist of swirling colours.
‘What’s it doing?’ Fian asked.
Fian might be the family failure, but he still knew an awful lot about science. If he couldn’t work out what was going on then I sure as chaos wouldn’t manage it. I patched in the command feed sound.
‘How much longer before we lose portals?’ asked the familiar voice of Colonel Torrek.
‘Fourteen minutes, sir,’ said a voice I didn’t recognize.
There was a short pause before the Colonel spoke again. ‘Analysis team, is your equipment still coping with the storm?’
‘No problems with the remotes, sir. We’re running multiple redundancy and merge on the data feed to eliminate interference.’
‘Then I want to evacuate the fighters now. Portalling out is the problem, not portalling back. We can watch the situation remotely and send in whatever forces are appropriate. Threat team, am I forgetting anything?’
‘No, sir,’ said the unmistakable lazy tones of Mason Leveque.
‘All fighters portal immediately to Echo base,’ said the Colonel.
‘We’re portalling out now, sir.’ There were faint crackling sounds as Nia Stone spoke, the interference confirming my guess she was out in space with shift 5.
Fian reached for my lookup. ‘Can I just …?’
I missed what he did, but the words ‘Cdr Stone, Attack leader’ suddenly appeared in the top left of the display. These rapidly changed to ‘Cl Torrek, C. O.’.
‘Threat team, what’s your current situation analysis?’
The display informed us Commander Leveque, Threat team leader, was replying. ‘We still believe the sphere has automatically put up shields to ride out the storm. We predicted a 72 per cent chance it would take defensive measures to protect itself from the increased radiation levels in a solar storm. We were concerned it would move into low Earth orbit to use Earth’s magnetic field for shelter, an action indistinguishable from moving into closer orbit in preparation for attack. The fact it is holding position is, in itself, reassuring.’
There was a pause before Colonel Torrek spoke again. ‘Physics team is telling me the sphere is absorbing power in preparation for an attack, and I should order a pre-emptive strike.’
Leveque sounded quite bored by this suggestion. ‘Generating shields uses power, sir. It’s logical to make the shield convert background radiation into energy to replace that power.’
‘They’re telling me the rate of power absorption is too high to just maintain shields.’
‘The sphere has definitely used power for other things, sir, including course changes and meteor defence. Physics team are still arguing it arrived by long distance drop portal shortly before it was detected. Threat team disagrees since Jorgen Eklund’s work states it would be impossible.’
Fian and I exchanged glances at the mention of his great-grandfather.
‘Threat team believes the sphere has spent hundreds or thousands of years reaching Sol system conventionally,’ continued Leveque, ‘and must have been designed to take every opportunity to recharge its equivalent of power cells.’
The Colonel spoke again. ‘Threat team does not advise an immediate attack?’
‘No, sir. We do not.’
‘We will remain at alert level 2,’ said the Colonel. ‘Attack team confirm status.’
‘All fighter teams are launch ready,’ said Nia Stone.
‘Earth Africa solar array status?’
Fian’s gasp of alarm was loud in my ear. ‘They’re keeping a solar array active in a solar storm!’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They may need it to attack the sphere.’
‘But what if they lose control and the beam starts tearing Earth apart?’
‘They’re prepared to blow up the array if necessary,’ I said. ‘Earth has four more. Shhh.’
The Earth Africa solar array control supervisor was talking. ‘Remote controls are fully functional, sir. Off-line mode is holding stable with four wings of the array disconnected. My people are standing by ready to portal in if we need more wings disengaged as the storm builds.’
‘Warn me at the slightest sign that off-line mode is breaking down. I don’t want any risk of spontaneous beam coalescence,’ said the Colonel. ‘Missile status?’
‘Warheads are on final safety. Drop portals targeted and ready to fire,’ said the Missile team leader.
‘We have a Missile team?’ asked Fian. ‘Since when?’
‘Since right at the start,’ I said. ‘They’ve been stationed at Echo base, Adonis, all along.’
‘And now we wait,’ said the Colonel. ‘Physics team are sending me very creative comments about your sanity and ancestry, Mason.’
‘Quite regrettable of them.’ Mason Leveque sounded completely untroubled by the opinion of the Physics team. ‘However I appreciate civilians are unused to this sort of situation and may find it stressful.’
Fian made a choking noise. ‘While Leveque makes crucial decisions involving wars with aliens on a daily basis?’
I pulled a face. ‘These days, yes he does.’
‘How does Leveque stay so calm? Isn’t he human? Even the Colonel is sounding tense, and Leveque’s wife would be leading the fighters in an attack so …’
‘The Threat team have to stay calm and think. The Physics team seem to be having a major panic attack. If Leveque did that …’
‘Why aren’t the Physics team doing their own talking, instead of the Colonel relaying their messages?’
‘I suppose he doesn’t trust them on the command channel. If he has to give an extreme order, he won’t want civilians arguing.’
Fian pulled a face. ‘I don’t think I want to know what you mean by extreme.’
I wished I didn’t know either. The General Marshal himself had gone on formal record stating Colonel Torrek was authorized to take any and all measures necessary to protect humanity, and everyone knew what that phrase meant. If it was necessary to save humanity, then Colonel Torrek would give the command that Tellon Blaze had given about Thetis. He’d order the Military forces to nuke Earth to cinders.
Back in the tactical meetings, I’d been convinced that could never actually happen. Neither the General Marshal nor Colonel Torrek thought Earth was disposable, or the Handicapped mattered less than other human beings.
Here in Ark, I was far less confident. If Earth turned into another Thetis, then Colonel Torrek might have no other choice, but I knew he’d stay and die with the rest of us even if he had the chance to escape.
If the worst happened, if Colonel Torrek did have to say those words, then I hoped I wouldn’t hear them. Even if I did, I’d probably have less than five minutes to panic about what was going to hit us. There were a chaos lot of missiles on standby at Echo base, Adonis, so it would be over mercifully quickly.
Major Rayne Tar Cameron of Command Support team spoke. ‘Interference from solar radiation levels is at medical safety limits. Earth portal network is entering five minute lockdown sequence.’
Down in the main hall, the portal lights would be flashing green. No new portals could establish, and existing ones would close down when the lights turned amber and then red. There was no way for any of us to leave Ark
