Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 37: The Failure (Patreon)

For the location, I'd picked the canyon where the Air Garden was, but further from the Garden itself, where the crack between the walls narrowed, the qi background was lower, but the winds were still fairly merciless, driving fine dust and slightly coarser sand along with them. Officially, we were testing the portal's resilience to adverse natural conditions. Something that needed doing one way or another, though most evacuations were expected from zones with no atmosphere at all.

I couldn't see or sense Artem's bugs, which was rather bugging me. Though I understood that was the whole point: only a xeltar's eye could spot them by the faint traces of their control techniques. Evidently, they were hiding in the cracks of the walls, blending with their colour, same as the diversion bugs, which I'd also left to Artem.

Johnson and I flew out here together on boards, and dragging him along had been one hell of a hassle. He'd resisted as hard as he could not to be left alone with me. I'd insisted it be him, but tried to make it look as though I sensed his fear and rather enjoyed it.

In the end Pascal simply ordered him to fly with me.

The first thing Johnson did upon arrival was pull out a camera and ask, "Did you pick this spot on scientific merit, or on the criterion of 'nobody will ever see'?"

His wariness was a problem. I needed an angry enemy, not a cautious one. His camera was an unwelcome complication, it could well be the reason he wouldn't dare do anything, but I was hoping he had a proper AI agent and could edit the recording however he liked. He had to. I certainly had one.

Since the armour hid my face, I made sure my voice sounded as mocking as possible. "I'll bury you right over there," I said, pointing at the base of the canyon wall.

"Ha… ha…" Johnson replied sourly.

"Get the equipment out," I ordered him.

I handed him all the test instruments, literally putting the chance to alter the settings into his hands. I kept the portal itself, though its structure wasn't monolithic, still reliably sealed, but the ‘important’ nodes could be popped open with large latches in an instant, if needed. So Johnson only needed a split second to screw me over.

Of course I played up my distrust, my fear that he'd actually do it, so I set up a stationary observation camera on a tripod, almost identical to Johnson's. I aimed it at the spot where I'd later set up the portal itself. I positioned it so the wind would carry sand straight into the ring, otherwise, what kind of stress test would this even be?

Johnson unpacked his testing equipment and pointed it at the portal, checking the readings on his tablet, and once again couldn't resist reminding me, "This configuration is going to cost someone their life one of these days."

Good. Very good.

"We've had four lab tests," I reminded him.

"I suspect you cheated somehow," he said.

I turned to fire back, but that was exactly when the diversion kicked in. A dozen winged insects, the colour of the canyon's stone and the size of poodles, tore off the wall behind my back.

"What the—" said Johnson, spotting them first, and pulled vines out of his spatial pockets.

I immediately drew my discs and struck a threatening pose in front of him.

"What?" he said, startled, and pointed behind me. "No, you idiot, those are Stone Termites!"

"Calling me an idiot?" I asked, giving the termites time to close in.

The insects attacked, dropping onto me, onto the portal, onto the cameras.

Because they flew fairly slowly, the defensive formation didn't kick in properly, and one termite landed on my helmet and scratched at it with its mandibles. I swatted it off, along with a couple of others.

"You are absolutely an idiot!" said Johnson, starting to swat termites away with his vines. Whatever they might have wanted, the creatures posed no real danger to us, so we got rid of them quickly.

According to the original plan, one of the termites bit through the tripod leg and made off with my camera. Stone Termite soldiers behaved rather like Earth magpies, they'd throw themselves at anything shiny. In these parts, shiny usually meant a beetle's shell with soft, juicy flesh underneath. I'd deliberately picked the shiniest camera available.

Johnson's camera was black, but Artem decided to send a termite after it too, to take it out of action. The portal ring was shiny too, but it was solid metal, so they couldn't damage it; they just tilted it slightly.

We wiped them out almost instantly. I gave the termite fleeing with my camera a bit of time, but couldn't drag it out too long, so I caught up to it with a Monkey-Stroll hybrid and grabbed the insect, tearing off its head and taking the camera back.

At that moment, I was closer to the top of the canyon than the bottom, so I jumped a bit farther and vaulted onto the rim, where I turned to face Johnson below and held up the camera.

"Camera's trashed," I said, though I had to squeeze it a bit harder to crack the lenses. "Anything else damaged?"

"My camera," he said, and walked over to the tilted portal. "The termites popped open the safety compartment," he said, and closed it.

"Don't touch anything!" I said. "Step back from the portal! I'll be right back."

"And where exactly are you off to?"

"Looks like there's a nest somewhere nearby."

"And why the hell do you care? This crap's worth pennies!"

He was against it. Good, that looked organic.

"I want to know where to expect trouble from!"

I dropped my board under my feet, turned it towards where the insects had come from, and gunned the jets, ducking behind the ridge for a moment before rising back up over the canyon. I needed to give Johnson time, but not too much. And I needed to call Artem without being seen.

"Got the picture?" I asked.

"Clear as day," Artem answered. "He's righted the portal and opened the safety compartment."

"Great, let's give him a bit more time."

"Feed block," Artem said.

"Looks like he's not leaving anything to chance!" I said, pleased.

"Doesn't look like he's actually changing anything," Artem noted. "He's just examining. Projectors now."

I climbed higher so I'd be visible from the canyon, laid out a wide loop, then turned back.

"Jake, he's getting airborne on his own board… He's activating the portal," Artem said.

"What the hell?!" I said, banking hard, squeezing everything the engines had, and heading straight back to the portal.

I was there within seconds and switched to a comms channel with Johnson.

"What are you doing?!" I barked, watching a black film form inside the ring.

Without me there, the portal really could fall apart, but did I actually need to throw myself into it? Everything had already gone completely off script.

"Interesting how fast you got back," Johnson replied. "Almost like you knew what I was doing!"

Had he figured me out, or was he just suspicious?

The portal opened, but we both just kept hovering in the air, dozens of metres from it.

For about ten seconds nothing happened, only the wind flinging sand across the membrane, making it flicker, though it never came apart.

Then Johnson tucked his tablet away and pointed his board's nose downward. I followed him, but he didn't stop there; he just scooped up the corpse of the farthest termite on the way and tossed it into the portal.

"We had to send something through it anyway," he said. "Besides, I'm curious what I'll find if I cut this vermin open and look at what's inside. Nerves and chitin, or a bit more iron and silicon than there ought to be."

"Shit!" Artem muttered in my ear.

Shit? Fuck! I'd walked straight into my own trap, couldn't come up with a way out, and my silence said more than any confession could.

"The only thing I don't get is what you were actually trying to do," he asked. "Did you want to fail the test and pin it on me? Or did you somehow want to detonate this piece of junk and kill me?"

"I never wanted you dead," I said. "Not literally, anyway, even though you've genuinely been getting on my nerves. And I never intended to cause you any physical harm. Though I wasn't sure you'd behave the same way, given the chance."

"Oh, so you prepared a chance for me? You hear that, Delgado? I told you he was a piece of shit through and through…” he listened to the answer in his ear.

"And?...

"You can head back now," Johnson said cheerfully. "You've got a very serious conversation waiting for you."

"Shut the portal down," I said, intending to take it with me. That was the exact ring I'd planned to write off and rebuild into a personal device, but Johnson laughed.

"Right now, Sullivan," he said, gesturing at the portal. "Delgado's expecting you in her office in five minutes. And we both know your piece of junk is going to come apart any second now."

"Then she can tell me that herself!" I snapped, and a second later saw an incoming call window from my boss.

Well, so much for the hope that Johnson was bluffing.

I had to put Artem on hold.

"I really am expecting you in my office," Delgado said instead of a greeting. Her tone wasn't angry, or even irritated. "I gave you a chance and you blew it. This confrontation needs to end. I'm waiting for you in my office. We'll put on a show of me giving you a serious dressing-down. It'll do a bit to restore Johnson's reputation and, I hope, put an end to your conflict."

"He's not going to stop there," I said.

"He won publicly. This is the perfect moment to stop. If he keeps this up, he risks turning everything on its head, and I'll try to make that clear to him.

"What matters more to you, Jake: winning, or ending the conflict?"

Oh, how badly I wanted to tear his guts out!

Still, Delgado had a point. This was a convenient place to end the conflict.

"Don't screw the equipment!" I said, and tucked away my board, jumping straight for the portal.

I wrapped it in my own Space, stabilised it, and jumped through the membrane, coming out on the other side, in a laboratory whose floor was covered in a thin layer of sand carried through from the other side.

I looked back and watched the membrane collapse before my eyes, saw the wall through the ring.

"Fifty-three seconds," the technician on duty nearby informed me.

"Great," I nodded sourly at him, swept my gaze over the termite carcass, and stepped out of the lab, tucking my armour away as I walked.

On the way I threw a few parting words at Artem, explained what was waiting for me now and asked him keeping an eye at Jonson till the end. I walked to Delgado's slowly. I didn't make it in five minutes, as if the weight of defeat were dragging at my feet.

The boss was keeping a stony face again, but this time I could sense there was something like glee underneath it. I don't know, maybe I was wrong, but the feeling was strong and unpleasant.

"So," she asked. "Are you ready to stop this childish game?"

I opened my mouth to snap back and shut it again at an incoming call from Artem. I raised my hand irritably to swipe the window away, but froze.

Artem knew a tough conversation was waiting for me. He wouldn't have bothered me for nothing.

I hit accept.

"He jumped off his board!" Artem rattled off quickly. "It's still flying towards the campus, and visually he's still there, but there's no signal from the bug I planted on his armour."

"You sure the bug didn't just fall off?" I asked, glancing sideways at Delgado.

"I'm sure I registered a spike of Space Qi from the surface of Verdis right before Johnson dropped off the radar."

"A portal?"

"And camouflage technology."

"A good time to end the conflict?" I asked Delgado, feeling my confidence and mood come surging back.

The bastard couldn't help himself after all: simply humiliating me hadn't been enough.

But what the hell was he actually planning?