Read Online The Warriors of Brin-Hask by Cerberus Jones - Free Book Online Page A

celebrate, I have work to do.’ He poked around the clutter
on his desk and began fiddling with an old music box, undoing the screws.
    ‘Will the Brin-Hask come back?’ Amelia asked.
    ‘Who can tell?’ he shrugged. ‘But I wouldn’t hold your breath. The Brin-Hask wormhole
is not only unstable, it also moves very slowly.’
    ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Charlie.
    ‘It doesn’t need to make sense to you!’ Tom snapped. ‘I’m telling you how it is.
The Brin-Hask connection with Earth only lines up every three or four years, so,
no –’ he looked at Amelia, ‘I wouldn’t count on seeing the warriors again for a while.’
    ‘Three or four years,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I sort of thought aliens could travel
whenever they liked.’
    ‘Don’t you kids pay attention to anything that goes on here? The gateway operates
on wormholes. No wormhole, no travel. The whole point of the hotel is that people
have to wait for the right wormhole. The Brin-Hask and Miss Ardman stayed overnight,
but some guests have to wait for weeks or months.’
    ‘But not Leaf Man,’ said Amelia.
    ‘What?’ Tom gaped.
    ‘Leaf Man doesn’t seem to wait. He doesn’t stay at the hotel, and he told us he was
leaving yesterday afternoon, but then I saw him again last night. Either he was lying
about going or … well, maybe he can control the wormholes.’
    Tom’s face contorted alarmingly. ‘You – nosy – little –’ he began.
    Amelia thought it was a good time to go, before he finished that sentence. There
was a violent bang as a blast of wind from the gateway blew open the door downstairs.
    ‘What was that?’ Charlie yelped.
    Tom looked satisfied. ‘A blowback.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘A good lesson to you two not to get over-excited about the gateway – not to think
you can just ask a couple of questions and know what’s going on here.’
    ‘So what is going on?’ said Amelia.
    Tom looked stern. ‘A blowback is a reminder of how dangerous the gateway is. Not
interesting, not amazing, and not cool ,’ he sneered on the last word as only a grown-up
who thought kids were idiots could. ‘It’s none of those things. It’s raw danger .’
    Charlie was thrilled. ‘But that is cool!’
    ‘Listen to me!’ Tom bellowed. ‘You don’t know what a blowback is. You can’t know!’
    ‘So tell us,’ said Amelia.
    ‘I am telling you! No-one can know. A blowback can be literally anything in the
universe – anything that has wandered too close to a shifting wormhole and got sucked
into the current it creates after itself. Downstairs, the door was ripped open by
wind. Now,’ he said more calmly, ‘it could be that it was only wind – a gust of air
trapped in the wrong place and escaping here. Noisy, but more or less harmless.’
    Charlie sniggered.
    Tom, ignoring him, went on. ‘But it could have carried anything at all with it. Sometimes,
I have been down the stairwell and it’s been full of fish. Or alien leaves. Or enormous
shoes. Once there was half a tree – only half, split down the middle from leaves
to roots, as though the wormhole had sliced it through like a laser. And that could
have easily have been a person standing there. So do you see? There could be any thing
at the bottom of the stairs.’
    Amelia said meekly, ‘So how do you find out?’
    Tom looked bleak. ‘How do you think? I go and look.’
    Amelia stared at him: an eye-patch, a hand missing a finger, the limp that Charlie
believed was a wooden leg. How much of that had been the gateway?
    He sighed deeply and fetched a climbing harness from behind the sofa. It was attached
to a rope that was bolted to the floor with a heavy iron ring. He strapped himself
into the harness, tugged on the rope and then said, ‘You both stay in this room,
understand? Not a single toe beyond the doorway. And if I am longer than a minute,
or if I yell out, or if you hear anything that isn’t me, you go . Don’t hesitate.
You run, close the door behind you