Both curator’s clothes were heavily singed and there were still flames on one of their cuffs. Smiling, one of them held up a small book in his hands and the room burst into applause. Staff ran forward to put out the flames and medics ran past the soldiers to give the curators quick shots and an initial burns treatment.
Sam waited until the pair had been assessed and then stepped forward, saluting both of them.
‘Hello Sir,’ said Johannes. ‘Nice to receive a formal welcome. Was your desk boring you again? Are we doing debriefs down here now? I was looking forward to your little date cakes that you hide in your top drawer.’
Sam grinned. At least now he knew who was always nicking them. ‘Debrief as normal. We’ve got a few things going on which I’ll fill you in on after you’ve had a proper medical. But just quickly, did you notice any anomalies? Any gut feeling that something was wrong? Any problems with stepping through just now?’
Jo thought about it and looked at Diana. ‘Nothing, Sir. Perfectly straight forward. No issues beyond normal operational parameters and a smooth step. What’s wrong?’
‘I’ll explain later, but go and get treated first.’
As the pair left the room with the medics, Sam turned to Farnaz. ‘One mission down, two to go. I tell you, I won’t be happy until they are all back and we can then try to work out what the hell’s been happening.’
Sam had returned to the gantry and was leaning on the console, taking in the readings from this Step. Everything looked perfect. If he hadn’t seen it for himself, he wouldn’t have known that, hours earlier, the Q Field had been having some sort of seizure. Now, to all intents and purposes, it was whistling sweetly, toeing its foot in the sand and asking, “Who me?”
Soliman had joined the two of them. No one mentioned the earlier loss of stomach control, studiously avoiding each other’s eye. In the far corner, a technician was looking at his work desk in horror.
‘Are you sure there’s a problem with the gate? These readings appear perfect to me. That team said nothing was wrong.’ Soliman looked around the room with a mild avuncular air. ‘I wonder if maybe you’re all jumping at shadows?’
Sam grimaced. It was bad form to not know the names of the two curators that had just stepped through the gate. It was bad form to criticise the operations team in front of them. It was bad form to undermine Sam’s authority in front of said team, but the biggest breach of etiquette was to do it all with vomit on your sleeve.
‘Sir. Believe me, there is a problem. Johannes and Diana have reported one situation. I personally witnessed a second. And whilst I still have two retrieval teams out in the field, I will be jumping at all the shadows until they’re home.’
Soliman bristled and was prepared to take Sam to task; it was one thing to be unprofessional in private, but here in front of the staff it was unacceptable. Just as he took in a deep breath, a voice cut across him.
‘Clearly it wasn’t their angel then.’
All three turned to look at the engineer.
‘Angel?’ asked Farnaz.
As the man was about to reply, Soliman jumped in. ‘Protocols, man! We do not discuss angels whilst an incident is on-going.’
‘No, wait though. Excuse me, Sir,’ said Farnaz, ‘you are, of course, completely correct, but there hasn’t been an angel incident. Sam?’
Sam looked just as confused. All angel incidents were sent straight to him. If an angel had come through on another shift, Farnaz may not necessarily know about it, but Sam would. And as an act of professional courtesy, he would have informed all shift heads of any events that would affect their routine. Angels were treated as classified events, but in reality they were pretty much open knowledge within the Step room, regardless of which shift they occurred on.
‘Jim, why did you mention an angel?’
‘Because of the one that came through the other day?’ Jim’s face was waxy. He knew the protocol was to not talk about them, but what with the two recent incidents and an angel, he had assumed that everyone would be talking about nothing else. Now the chancellor was glaring at him, and he wondered if he would have a job in the morning.
‘There was no angel,’ said Sam.
‘Yesterday one stepped through on the evening shift. I heard about it from one of the team.’
‘You mean gossiping,’ snapped Soliman, turning to Sam. ‘Is this the sort of discipline that you think leads to an effective task force? One false alarm and they start wittering like little birds on the acacia trees?’
‘I will remind the teams about protocols, but at the moment we have a bigger problem.’
‘And what would that be, exactly?’
‘Where is the angel?’
#33 Neith – Beta Earth
As we got out of the taxi, the front door opened and I bundled Julius into the house before Ramin bolted the door behind us.
‘Are the perimeters secured? New passwords?’
When Ramin confirmed that they were, I relaxed a tad. ‘You were right, Paul’s gone rogue, but I don’t understand why.’
Before I could do any more, I went and double-checked the security for myself. And then, only when I was happy that we were as secure as could be, I returned to the front room and stood by the fire. Julius was perched on the edge of an armchair. Ramin was sitting in another armchair, his head hanging in his hands.
‘So, what did you discover? What the hell has happened?’
My oldest friend looked every one of his years as he turned to me. When he looked up, I was horrified to see he was close to tears.
‘This is my fault. I didn’t believe him,’ he said and gestured at Julius.
‘Claws, I’m so sorry mate. I should have trusted you to know what you were witnessing.’
Julius shrugged. ‘It’s okay. I
