“Sir,” the Senior Scanner Officer interrupted him, “We have several hundred of our ships from Fifteenth Fleet emerging from the Trionic Web, one hundred thousand kilometres from this position.”
“Good,” the First Admiral replied and smiled to himself, as did many in the War Room, “Please thank Second Admiral Tesdinar for his intervention and ask him to set a security cordon and stand by as we mop up the last of these Traing vessels.”
“Congratulations, sir,” Marrhus Lokkrien, his Chief of Staff, intercepted the First Admiral and offered him his hand, “a little insurance policy?”
“Thank you,” the First Admiral replied taking the offered hand, “Well, you just never know in this game, do you?” he smiled broadly, “and, how did the boy do?”
“Alive and well, sir, several kills to his name,” Lokkrien said proudly of his grandson.
“And no doubt more tall tales to tell than his grandfather, eh?” the First Admiral laughed good naturedly.
“No, sir, every single one of them will be true,” Lokkrien said with mock severity, and then his face broke into a broad grin.
“Excellent……send him my regards,” the First Admiral smiled, and broke the handshake, “now go and make sure that Admiral Bettayam hasn’t appointed himself King of Priteria, and come over to my quarters at twenty forty-five hours…and bring a bottle.”
“Sir!” Lokkrien snapped a salute with his left hand as was the Universal Alliance Fleet tradition.
A little celebration drink was certainly in order, Lokkrien considered.
With his Chief of Staff sent on his duty, the First Admiral was able to escape into the sanctuary of his Private Quarters. Feeling emotionally and physically exhausted, he was finally able to release the burden of tension and stress he had been carrying for the last two months. In the gloom of his living quarters, a welcome relief from the harsh bright lights of the War Room, he de-materialised the footwear of his P.E.S., and slumped onto the very large comfortable bed installed in the otherwise sparsely decorated room. His bed was the one real luxury he allowed himself on campaign, and he planned to make the most of it now.
Dimming the lights to almost nothing in the room, via voice control, he rolled onto his side, drew up his knees, folded his arms across his chest, and closed his eyes.
Within a few short moments he had allowed the blessed relief of sleep to claim him.
Chapter 10
The Past (Earth Year: 1985) – Planet Earth
“Billy!” a female voice from the distant kitchen yelled, “it’s time to get up and go to school!”
The well recognised voice pierced the shallow depths of his slumber, and brought him awake with a start. Looking at the shabby dented bedside clock, it read half past seven. The harsh sunlight filtered through the flimsy light and dark blue patterned curtains in his room throwing shadows onto the carpet and orange papered walls like the shimmering of the seabed below the waves on a bright summer day. Outside, the song birds were trilling their final morning greetings before attending to the business of surviving and feeding their offspring.
His stomach lurched at the prospect of yet another day at school. Yet another day of fear, vigilance and intimidation lay ahead for William Caudwell. He had grown used to the feeling every morning of constantly wanting to throw up. It was as much a part of his life as breathing and eating. The never spoken of Code of the Playground ensured that no one would know of each day’s harrowing ordeal for William Caudwell, known to everyone as Billy.
“O.K., mum!” he replied, throwing back the covers to make the first run of the day to the bathroom.
The carpet on the floor, of blue, red and yellow roses which had seen better days and more prosperous times for the family, felt rough and coarse to his bare feet. It had survived as floor covering for his room over the last three homes he had lived in. At least this home was a proper house, he thought to himself, with a bit of stability for the family.
His mother would always tell him it was a chance to meet new friends. Yet, he never did. He was never really in one place long enough to make any friends.
“Billy, will you hurry up!” his mother called “I have to get to work by half past eight!” she chivvied him.
“All right!” he mumbled as loudly as he could through a mouthful of toothbrush, his mouth rimmed in sweet tasting foamy toothpaste.
Looking into the small shaving mirror on the window ledge, Billy sighed. “That’s not a pretty sight,” he thought, scrutinising the reflection. The wiry, scratchy light ginger stubble mingled into the white downy growth, combined with the angry white headed eruptions of acne, made a ghastly accompaniment to the copious crop of random brown freckles that adorned his slightly chubby face. Each evening, he would undertake the solemn ritual and draw the circular bladed electric razor delicately over the cratered and fissured moonscape of his face.
Every morning there seemed to be more and more of the white-headed eruptions appearing.
Like every fourteen year old Billy Caudwell was not happy with how he looked. He was medium height at about five feet seven inches, with the stocky, broad-shouldered robust physique of his father. But, to Billy Caudwell, he always seemed to be heavy. Fat, he called it. He wished he could be thin like those boys on the football team. Not that he was interested in football. He just didn’t want to see himself, or be seen by others, as fat.
Worst of all, his head was crowned with a crop of unruly fiery red hair; just like his mother, that stood like a burning beacon over his sharp blue-grey eyes.
Washed and dressed, in four minutes flat, he parked himself on the backless stool situated between the table and the opened kitchen door. Billy preferred something solid at his back, it made him feel safer. It was a seat traditionally reserved for him through years of custom and attendance at the breakfast and dinner table. A bowl of some nondescript cereal drowned in ice-cold milk was deposited in front of him with little ceremony by his harassed mother.
“Come on Billy, the bus leaves in fifteen minutes,” she uttered to him standing at the grubby kitchen window, scrubbing at a mark on her work jacket with the coarse back to a dish washing sponge.
She worked in a department store as a sales assistant, and knew she would feel the wrath of her manager if she turned up in less than pristine uniform. Billy dutifully wolfed down the cereal as swiftly as his lurching stomach could bear. Luckily, the bus stop they would both use was only a few yards outside of what remained of the garden gate.
Having been fed and watered Billy trotted up the stairs to fetch his blazer and schoolbag.
Fortunately, the days of short trousers were now far in the past. However, the black blazer complete with archaic school badge, white shirt and red and white striped tie still singled him out as a pupil of a particular school in the centre of the town. This would be the fifth he had attended in his nine year school career. Grabbing his schoolbag from the bedside chair, and a small pink lunch voucher from the strip of tickets on his bedside table, he scampered back down the open plan stairs. Carefully, he avoided tripping over the telephone table, again, to catch the bus that would transport him back to the place he dreaded to go. With his mother ushering him out of the back door he trotted down the path in case the bus failed to halt at the empty bus stop.
If they missed this bus then the next one would be twenty minutes later. Then they would both be late, and incur the wrath of teacher and manager. Sometimes Billy wished that the big red double-decker bus would never draw up to the stop. That the folding doors would never open with the sinister hiss, like a snake inviting it’s paralysed prey to enter the black mouth to oblivion.
Yet, exactly at the appointed time the grimy red double-decker drew to a halt. The bored, dark-grey side-burn bedecked bus driver cursorily viewed Billy’s weekly student bus pass. He nodded his assent for Billy like some ancient Praetorian standing guard at the Roman Imperial Palace. His mother, not being the bearer of a bus pass paid her fare in loose change. The coins rattled into the rec
essed oblong tray before the driver like some sacrificial offering to the gods of transportation.
“Town Centre, please” she intoned, and finding the offering acceptable, the driver then hit the button that coughed forth her passport into town, and her own personal purgatory.
Billy quickly climbed the stairs to the top deck, rather than have to sit with his mother in the smoke filled lower deck. That was “pensioner country”. He preferred to make a bee line for the shabby brown segmented leather front single seat on the upper deck.
From there he could press his face against the cool glass of the enormous window and watch the scenery of the journey pass by. The front single seat also meant no one could sit next to him. However, it left his back and head vulnerable to the badly aimed empty drinks cans and scrunched-up crisp or sweet wrapper missiles volleyed by some of the more boisterous young travellers. Such villains were usually found towards the back of the bus, which was another reason he preferred to avoid those seats like the plague. The back seats were where the pastimes of high jinks, underage smoking of cigarettes, and kissing with members of the opposite sex were practiced.
Kissing girls on the back seats of buses was not something that rated as a high priority on Billy’s personal agenda; what girl in her right mind would want to kiss him, he thought. Well, women were just trouble weren’t they? Billy’s father had said they were, and Billy didn’t want to end up in a dead end factory job like him. No, his father had said, stay away from women, son, nothing but trouble. For several years the mystery of what older women possessed beneath their skirts, and the constant alertness for the opportunity to look down their blouses, was about the extent of Billy’s interest in the opposite sex.
Billy Caudwell, sitting on the top deck of the red local service bus, was blissfully unaware of such carnal delights.
He was equally unaware that the events of this particular day would change the direction of his young life irrevocably and alter the destiny of the entire universe, forever.
Chapter 11
Slowly, Billy’s bus lurched from one stop to another through the never changing landscape of the particular concrete jungle that was the district where he lived. Looking down from his vantage point on the top deck, it seemed to Billy that all these people took on a uniform grey look. They dressed in the same nondescript clothes; the slaves to an outdated form of fashion. They trudged wearily and leaden footed onto the bus with never a word to each other, fearing to make eye contact, fearing to make the simplest of human contact. Billy thought it strange that over twenty people could be in the confined space of a bus, yet, all of them could, shamefacedly, pretend that there was no other person in that same environment.
Billy often pondered those types of questions. Behind the blue-grey eyes there lurked a sharp, intelligent and inquisitive mind that pondered and searched for answers to questions like that. Other children just accepted that they had no answers, or, that their parents’ answers were gospel truth, never to be questioned. In class he seemed to know all of the answers to the questions asked by the teachers, and he was hated by all the other students. He also asked the questions that teachers found difficult to answer.
This frustrated him. He wanted answers. He wanted to understand, and it made him angry that he could not understand. He felt he was the victim of some great global conspiracy to which he was the only party on Planet Earth not to be included. So, he retreated into his own protective shell, once again, to think his thoughts and find his own answers.
Down on the lower deck, his mother reflected that Billy had changed somehow. Only since he had started at that school had he become so isolated and withdrawn. “Socially isolated” and “socially withdrawn” were such harsh words, she thought. Yet, the teachers at the school had all used those very same descriptors. They could not use the label dreaded by every parent that he was “Educationally Sub-Normal”. His school marks were far too high for that charge to be levelled at him. She began to think that her son actually intimidated some of those teachers. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been so protective of him when he was younger,” she thought. After all, he never really settled; moving stations and towns every two years or so. No wonder he never really made any true friends.
Elizabeth Caudwell knew deep down in her heart why she was so protective of young Billy, her now only child. It was nothing to do with moving home every two years or moving from school to school.
The miscarriage she had suffered almost eight years ago still deeply scarred her emotionally. It had made her fiercely protective of the only child that she did give birth to. “Angela, my little angel,” as she had planned to name the girl, “would have been seven years old,” she mused, smiling gently to herself. It would have been a lovely birthday party Elizabeth Caudwell had planned for her in her mind.
She would have worn her beautiful long golden hair loose at her shoulders and her pretty new party dress. They would have invited all her little friends round, and played happy noisy games as seven year olds do. There would have been jelly and ice cream and a lovely big birthday cake with pink candles. When the party was over she would have helped her mother to clear up and wash all of the dishes. Then, exhausted by the excitement of the day, Angela would have fallen asleep with her head in her mother’s lap, with her mother softly caressing her long blonde hair.
The jolting halt of the bus at the next stop shook Elizabeth from her reverie. At that same moment, the cold harsh light of reality pushed her heart down through the pit of her stomach and into the bottom of her shoes. She felt a silent tear gently scalding against her cheek. Quickly, she hauled a crumpled paper tissue from the bottom of her worn and battered blue handbag. The elderly man next to her, in a light brown flat cap and green overcoat, despite the warmth of the summer morning, said nothing. His slightly purple-veined nose was deeply buried in the racing pages of a popular tabloid newspaper.
Swiftly, she dashed the tear away and regained her composure, as best she could, to face yet another dreadful day in that shop. Then she checked that her tears had not disturbed her carefully applied make up.
It just wouldn’t do to go into the shop with streaky make up, she considered.
Chapter 12
At around the same time, several hundred kilometres away, Flight Lieutenant James Ian Dinwoodie slowly and gently pushed the throttle levers forward. The massive engines responded to his touch with greater thrust and a shriller whine, and he felt himself being pulled deeper into his flying seat.
“They don’t call it the Flying Brick for nothing,” he thought. The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom had all of the aerodynamic qualities of a house brick. But, with the two massive Rolls Royce Spey engines generating over twenty thousand pounds of thrust each to push it forward, even this house brick would fly, and fly spectacularly well. Dinwoodie sat snugly in the front section of the cockpit of the Phantom. Flight Lieutenant Thomas MacLaggan, known as Tommy, sat behind him. He was operating all of the communication and electronic equipment that made the R.A.F. Phantom the formidable and advanced fighting machine it was.
Wearing their flight suits, G-suits, helmets and cold weather equipment, they looked like two identical peas in a very expensive pod. The two airmen set their sights on reaching the probable intercept point to pick up and shadow an aerial intruder. The Ground Controller knew what he was about; his commands and instructions were brief and to the point to minimise the time he spent on air. Dinwoodie recognised the clipped military business-like voice with the soft East Anglian edge from previous missions.
Some thirty thousand feet below him the North Sea was a dark slate grey colour and as inviting as a wet weekend in a muddy field. The temperature outside the cockpit was well below freezing, despite the sun shining from a clear blue sky above. The cloud ceiling, some eighteen thousand feet below them, heralded rain for anyone below that level. This made Dinwoodie a little more cheerful that he at least was warm and dry above it all. It was yet another intercept mission for unidentified aircraft heading sou
th from the Arctic Circle as a potential threat to U.K. airspace.
There were no prizes on offer for guessing as to who this particular uninvited guest might be. However, the top brass couldn’t afford to take any chances. The usual peacetime Rules of Engagement, or ROE’s, would apply; do not fire unless fired upon, and use the radio as little as possible. If this was a Bear snooping around British airspace, they would be crammed to the flight deck with listening equipment. They would be ready to pick up call signs and radio frequencies that could be useful if the Soviets did launch a strike against the United Kingdom. Not that a strike against the U.K. by one aircraft was particularly likely, Dinwoodie mused.
The daily briefing indicated that currently there were no deadly superpower political stalemates unfolding. The days of the Cuban Missile Crisis which had almost plunged the world into a nuclear war were long in the past. Dinwoodie hoped that lessons had been learned; however, he wasn’t holding his breath in anticipation.
So, unless it were a Soviet pilot gone renegade, or a weapons operator having been drinking the anti-freeze again, as was rumoured to happen in some of the Soviet airbases, it would be yet another intercept and shadow mission for the two Phantoms streaking through the skies.
“Picking up a strong signal from seventy-six, repeat seven sixer, kilometres north, north east,” Tommy’s voice sounded tinnily through the plane’s intercom system.
“Acknowledged,” replied Dinwoodie, feeling slightly bored that he was following the same routine again.
“No response to I.F.F.,” intoned Tommy indicating that the NATO radio frequency which interrogated all aircraft had not received a reply.
“Acknowledged” replied Dinwoodie in his flat monotone, “Let Sector Control know,” he ordered.
Dinwoodie was tired of these intercept and shadow missions.
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