Chapter 50
Static On the Wind
Mat frowned at the display. “That's weird... here, Ezra hand it over, you probably did it wrong.” Ezra shrugged and transferred the communication interface to Mat. “Attention Sanctuary, come in Sanctuary. Research team eleven requesting information, over.” They stared at the interface in silence for several minutes.
“There might be... a mountain or something in the way.” Mat said doubtfully. “Or... I don't know, some kind of anti-wormhole thing blocking communication?” He turned hopeful eyes to Ezra.
“Um... well, I mean, all matter has some quantum uncertainty...” Ezra began cautiously. Mat's face fell, and Ezra hurried to amend, “But of course, it could cancel itself out! There are practically an infinite number of possible pathways between any two points in space that wouldn't support a wormhole, so it's not... terribly surprising that the transmission would fail...” Ezra intentionally failed to add that there were also a limitless number of paths that would work just fine.
“Right,” Mat said a little more steadily, slapping his knee. “So we just wait a little while and try again, no problem.” Ezra nodded slowly, worry gnawing at his stomach.
They tried making contact again every five minutes for the next two hours. Finally, Mat dismissed the terminal in frustration. “Why don't they answer?” he growled. “We're within a few klicks of the portal, but without a connection to Sanctuary we can't even tell exactly where it is.” He peered out into the gathering darkness, scowling up at the light cloud cover. “We may as well stop here,” he called over to Sarah. “We can look around for some landmarks in the morning.” Sarah nodded woodenly and began reducing their speed.
“Wait!” Ezra said, pulling out his wormhole device. “I know it's not perfect, but my controller already finds the best quantum tunneling location when it creates a portal, so if I slow the process down so we can watch it happen...” The holographic display lit up with data, mapping out the best places to begin a wormhole and telling him nothing useful. He frowned at it, then slapped himself in the forehead, “Of course, it would help if I expanded the range of the sample data. Then we can use it to track areas of higher quantum uncertainty, and using a regression mapping algorithm I should be able to–”
“Hawkins, try again, this time like you're talking to people who don't have degrees in wormhole travel.” Sarah sounded tired and grumpy.
“Yeah, man, slow down,” Mat said. “I thought you said you couldn't create another usable wormhole from the skiff's remaining power supply.”
Ezra blinked at him, then shook his head. “No, I'm not trying to... ugh, okay, listen: wormhole creation 101. When a portal is formed, it's created using the path where the most quantum tunneling has occurred, right?” He looked expectantly at his teammates. Mat shrugged. The controls of the skiff creaked under Sarah's hands. “Right,” he continued, “and repeated wormholes make those connections stronger, because we're artificially creating more pathways between the two points. So what I'm going to do is...” Ezra's hands flew as he adjusted the settings on the controller, then linked it into the skiffs network and sat back, looking smug. A wavy line displayed, meandering in a definite direction off to the northwest. “Map out a path of increasing quantum uncertainty density, which should lead us back to the wormhole.” He frowned a little. “In theory, at least. This is kind of like using a mass spectrometer to approximate a dog's nose.”
Mat and Sarah exchanged looks. “Well, better than what we had five minutes ago. Way to step up, Ezra.” Mat clapped him on the shoulder, then went back to scanning the landscape.
The skiff slowly followed the path Ezra had indicated, until Sarah barked out a laugh. “There! I recognize those blighted rocks. They look just like Blair's forehead when he frowns.” She elbowed Mat in the side. “Remember that time that we were walking back to the port and playing that drinking game? I got you and Rob so good with that one.” Sarah froze for a moment, then blinked slowly. “So good,” she whispered, looking back toward the cusp of rocks. An uneasy silence settled over the skiff.
“I hope the townspeople are all right,” Ezra said softly. “Stephen too.”
Mat looked at him miserably, then rolled a shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “Well... the villagers probably made it through okay. The ones that were...” He coughed and cleared his throat. “She really only seemed interested in finding the other fire-kissed, you know? She didn't give a blighted damn about the rest of them. As for Stephen... well...” Mat sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Bad things happen. You just gotta roll with the punches. I mean, at least he got carried off by a really, really sexy lady, right? And he's a fire-kissed, so they won't do anything too bad to him...”
Ezra was about to say something when Sarah cried out, “It's here! Just over that ridge!” The skiff picked up speed as she hurried them toward the wormhole home. They crested the hill, headlights turned on to get a view of the area, and Ezra looked around expectantly, trying to spot the portal rods.
He found them fairly easily, all things considered. Of course, they were in about twenty pieces, and scattered around several blackened patches of stone. Oh, and still sparking, as it they had been recently overloaded.
Or struck by lightning.
Mat stared at the ruined wormhole devices, then mechanically called up the communication interface. “Sanctuary,” he whispered. “Sanctuary, this is research team eleven. The portal rods at our location are not functional, and our skiff will die before we can make it to an alternate spot. Sanctuary, please respond.” The trailing end of his communication was met with ominous static.
He glanced back at Ezra as Sarah rested her head lightly against the skiff's forward paneling.
“Hello?” the communicator crackled to life. “Is there some... –stening?”
Mat grabbed the open terminal, smiling broadly. “Sanctuary? Come again, you're breaking up. We have some interference out here from–”
“–under-struck. Need immedia–” Static cut through the transmission for a several seconds. “–mhole was destroyed. Repeat, we were ambush...” Ezra sat bolt upright, eyes glued to the communicator.
“Mat, that's not Sanctuary,” he said, voice remote. “That's Gal.”