Bitter Oath (New Atlantis) - By Nhys Glover Page 0,1

empty for several minutes since Rene’s return. As Cara made her way slowly up the dais stairs, the doorway came alive with showering sparks once more, and the hum returned in earnest.

With a last worried glance back at her Bonded, who had turned his back on her, Cara stepped into the Portal. A second later, the shower dissolved.

Time seemed to warp strangely then, for Anders. What should have been only a few seconds before the Portal reactivated had, instead, become an extended period. There shouldn’t be this kind of gap. No matter how long the Jumper was at the other end, at Start Point they were programmed to return immediately after leaving.

However, it was much longer than that now. Which meant only one thing – Cara was in trouble.

And Jac knew it.

‘Give me a PA, I’m going in,’ Jac barked at him. For a moment, Anders could do nothing but stare at the banned Jumper in stunned horror.

By the time he could find words, Benjamin Kent, the Start Point Manager had answered. ‘You cannot go dressed like that, Jac. Go to wardrobe. I will get the rest of your equipment organised.’ The short, slightly portly man had risen from his console and come to stand at Jac’s side.

‘I can’t wait… I…’

‘Jac, do you want to find her? Do you want to bring her safely back?’ The man’s patient voice was in total contrast to Jac’s panicked tones.

Jac nodded. Words had deserted him.

‘Then get organised. I should send someone else, but I can see you would fight me on this. So, if you want to go after her, Jac, get your head in the game. Get dressed, review her Target’s dossier and the Set Down details. If you go in with your mind in chaos, you will be useless to her. Do you understand me?’

Jac nodded again, but his face took on a fierceness that was uncharacteristic, not only for him, but for their whole populace. No one showed this level of emotion. Ever.

As Anders watched Jac hurry away, he again felt the fear that Rene’s return had instilled in him. It was his own mortality calling out, warning him that time was running out for him, just as it was running out for these other citizens of New Atlantis. Their unchanging, peaceful world seemed suddenly off-kilter somehow, like a spinning top that had hit a stone. It wobbled and slowed, as it tried to find its centre once more. Anders had a feeling it would never find that same centre again.

Rene stood under the shower set for waterfall, as the water bombarded his old, filthy body. It always felt strange to be back here in this unchanging world after being away for a lifetime. Sometimes, when he lay on the hard ground beneath the stars that stretched across the sky like the tiny Christmas lights of his childhood, he wondered if this world was real at all. Sometimes, he felt as if it was simply a dream he had dreamed many times, that had taken on a reality of its own.

Then, when he came back here, it was as if that other life was nothing more than a dream, and this gentle, cultured place was the only reality. But if that were so, how was it that the body that had stood beneath this shower last had been young and fit – his skin only the light brown of weak tea. Yet now, it was old and wasted. And his skin was now as brown as a hazel nut, and wrinkled, thin and dry as vellum.

No, both worlds were real. And he crossed between them relentlessly, for his cause – the resurrection of their barely surviving planet.

Rene had never been a carefree child. From his earliest memories, the weight of the destruction to the Great Spirit’s natural world had been his heavy burden. His mother, an Obejwe of the First People in Canada and a fierce ecowarrior, had laid that burden on him. And his father, a French Canadian from Montreal, who had met his mother on one of her campaigns, and joined her as she fought to save what was left of the Canadian wilderness, was just as purposeful.

She had taught him Mide, the Medicine of the first people, and he had adopted Animism more readily than his father’s Roman Catholicism. When he was old enough, he went to University and became a Naturalist. His cause was an impossible one, by that stage. Everyone knew the planet had already