In the canteen at seven there were only a handful of us there, me and Murdo and Farhad and Kelly the secretary and Liam the site engineer. We all sat at the same table with our microwaved dinners.
“Did you find your bandit?” Murdo asked.
“Aye,” I said. “They have a wee place up behind Attadale.”
“Get anywhere with her?”
“Would I be here if I had?” I said.
Murdo laughed.
Liam put down his fork and looked over at me.
“What’s this about bandits?”
“They’re no bandits,” Murdo said, before I could get a word in. “Just poachers and tinkers.”
“All the same,” said Liam. “Let’s hear what Jase has to say about it.”
I told him about the settlement, leaving out all the awkward moments.
“That’s worrying,” he said.
“What’s worrying about it?”
“An armed gang living a few klicks from our power line? That doesn’t worry you?”
“Aw come on,” I said. “They’re nae threat to anybody. And anyway, there’s new age settlers dotted all over the place. All along the glen, for a start.”
Liam nodded. “Exactly. We haven’t taken this seriously enough. It’s a security risk.”
“It is no!” I said. “Why would they want to damage the power line anyway? They think the whole world’s going to hell in a handcart already, without them helping it along.”
“Groups with these kinds of beliefs can turn very ugly,” Liam said. “End of the world cults don’t always just wait for the end, you know. Sometimes they try to bring it on. Or they get influenced or”—he paused, and jabbed with his finger—“infiltrated by others with a more militant approach.”
Murdo laughed loud. “Yon tinks might end up working for the Bodach?”
“Or some other extremists, yes,” Liam said. “Whether they knew it or not.”
I lost my appetite all of a sudden.
“They’re not a cult,” I said, “and they’re no extremists either. They’re just”—I shrugged—“daft.”
“You said yourself you were threatened by a small child,” said Liam.
“That was just a wee boy playing soldiers!”
“Yes, with a lethal weapon.” Liam looked like he was thinking hard. “You know, the child protection angle… I wonder what kind of education that kid is getting.”
“He can read,” I said.
Liam just smiled. “I’ll give this some thought,” he said. He glanced over at Kelly. “Tab it in my diary?”
The secretary nodded.
Later that evening I saw Liam off in a corner of a corridor talking to himself. Then I realised he was talking on his phone. I hoped he was just calling home, but I knew I couldn’t count on it.
* * * *
X
MONDAY MORNING FEELING
I woke about seven just as it was getting light. But it wasn’t the light that woke me. And my alarm hadn’t gone off. I lay staring at the little red numbers on the clock stuck to the bunk above me and wondered what had woken me up. Then I heard it: a deep, distant throb, growing by the minute.
A helicopter. The sound always feels like a threat. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
I swung my legs off the bunk and sat up. Everybody else in the hut was still sound asleep. I padded to the door, went out quietly and looked around the side of the hut. I was freezing in my thermals but I could see right along the loch. It was grey and still under a low ceiling of cloud. The chopper was a fat black drop heading straight towards me. Just as it passed level with the village it banked to my left and swung around to the south. It was one of those big two-engine chinooks. A troop carrier.
The racket from it washed over the site. The chopper flew low over Strathcarron and skimmed the skyline. It disappeared behind the hills but I could still hear it. The chopper’s heavy throb stayed steady. I guessed it was hovering.
“That’s it for your bandits,” said Murdo, from behind me.
I turned. He stood like me shivering in a vest and long Johns, staring after the thing. I felt like giving the Lewisman a clout in his gloomy satisfied face. There’s this with the Lewis folk, they expect the worst and are not often disappointed.
“Send soldiers after new age settlers?” I said. “What are you on? It’ll be just an exercise.”
Murdo shook his head.
“Don’t kid yourself. You know fine what it’s hovering over.” He snorted. “I’m sure Social Services will be along in a while. Once the soldiers have secured the place.”
“I wish I’d kept my trap shut,” I said.
“You learn fast for a Glasgow boy,” said Murdo.
I wanted again to clout him but I just smacked my fist into my hand.
“We’ve got to do something!”
He gave me a funny look.
“We do, eh? Speak for yourself. But what can we do?”
“We can go up and see if we can help.”
“We can’t fight the soldiers.”
“No, but we can maybe pick up anyone who gets away. Or help them to move their stuff.”
“That’s possible,” Murdo said. “I’ll come along for the ride.”
I made a turn as if to dash for the truck. Murdo caught my shoulder.
“Get your clothes on,” he said. “And take a piss first.”
Ten minutes later I was in the cab, Murdo and Euan beside me. Nobody was riding shotgun. Or maybe we all were, if you see what I mean. Euan was filling the air with his smoke, an early-morning kick-start to his brain. I opened a window and turned up the heaters full blast. The sleepy security guard at the gate waved us out. He might have been a bit surprised when I turned left and took off towards Strathcarron.
We bumped across the tracks at the level crossing. I swung the truck to the left again, then right, up the old track. The wheels were off the track at both sides but the gripper tyres did their job all right.
“How far can we take it?” Euan asked as we clawed up the first steep slope.
“Farther than this anyway,” I said.
The truck lurched down and forward. We bounced in our seats. I was worried about what lay ahead of us but I was enjoying this. A few minutes later we were nearly in the cloud. Then the cloud opened in a freezing drizzle that stung like sand. I closed the windows and switched on the wipers and headlights. The squeak and thud of the wipers took over as the loudest noise in the cab. Visibility was about a hundred metres. Up and down we went, mostly up.
Then up and over and looking down into the glen where the settlement was. I stopped there, engine running, neutral gear, foot on the brake. We were leaning a long way forward. The chopper had landed right below us on the shore of the narrow loch, big and black against the strip of white ice.
A dozen or so soldiers in black armour suits and visored helmets ringed the settlement. About the same number of the people who lived there stood on the track in a huddle. The greenhouses glittered with broken glass. Smoke, black and foul, rose from the two houses.
“Christ, man, they’re burning the roofs!” said Murdo. He sounded choked. Euan banged a fist on the top of the dash. His face went as white and tight as his knuckles.
“Clearances,” he said. “Clearances!”
He reached behind him for the shotgun on the rack. I grabbed his wrist and wrenched him away from it.
Two of the soldiers came racing up the slope towards us. They ran to either side of the truck, jumped on the running boards, and banged on the windows. I thumbed the roll-down switch. A visored face leaned in.
“Turn off the engine and get out of the cab now!”
“Right away,” I said.
The soldiers jumped back, and stood with their rifles pointed at us. I looked at the others.
“Well, boys,” I said. “Time to go.”
We opened the doors. Murdo and Euan jumped down from their side. I turned off the engine and jumped down from mine.
The truck was rolling forward before I hit the ground.
I swear I didn’t plan this. I really was so rattled that I’d done exactly what the soldier had told me. I had turned off the engine and got out.
He never said anything about the handbrake.
The big Highway truck careened down the slope. I heard yells, then I heard shots. For a moment it seemed like the soldiers thought they were dealing with a suicide bomber. Then I saw they were shooting at the tyres. I had just enough time to think this was a smart move.
The two front tyres blew out just as the front wheels went over the edge of the path, where it curved off at the shore of the loch in front of the houses. The nose of the truck slammed down. Oh aye, that bit stopped moving all right. The rest of the truck kept right on moving. The back of it rose into the air and seemed to hang there for a second. Then it toppled right over and crashed forward like a falling tree, right on to the chopper. The chinook’s fuel and the truck’s electrics took a couple of seconds to find each other. Just as well because everybody was flat on the ground when the fuel tank exploded. It wasn’t the sort of explosion that hurls debris everywhere. It was a big blast of burning petrol vapour that scorched the back of my neck.
When I looked up the remains of the truck and the chopper were in the middle of one big mass of flame and smoke. It was like what you see on the television from Tehran any day. The soldiers ran towards it and stopped when the heat was too much. Then around the side of the burning wreckage came a dripping figure. It was the pilot, who must have jumped out and crashed through the ice of the loch when he saw the truck bearing down. I felt relieved about that.
I stood up and looked around and noticed that with all this commotion the people from the settlement had disappeared. They’d skedaddled. They were off down the wee glen, then up the slopes like-deer. I saw an officer peering after them through binoculars. Then he lowered the glasses and shook his head and pointed at us.
With that half the soldiers formed a cordon and walked up the hill towards us.
“Looks like we’re for it now,” said Murdo.
“Run for it!” said Euan.
“Nae point,” I said. “They’ll shoot us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Murdo. But we weren’t that desperate. Not then.
We raised our hands above our heads and waited for the boots and butts.
* * * *
XI
THE SECOND JIN YANG
The soldiers were maybe twenty metres away down the slope from us when I heard a strange whizzing sound and saw sparkles of light from the hillside opposite. Then a second later a sound came, a steady did-did-did…
I threw myself flat on the grass. I watched six men spin and drop in front of me. Saw the others down by the lochside fall too. It was over in seconds. I lay with my hands clasped over my head and then stood up and puked.
Dark figures popped up on the hillside at the far side of the loch and began to walk down. Men, women, kids, about twenty in all, far more than I’d seen the day before. Two of them lugged a light machine gun. They were Martin and Angus. I had wondered why they hadn’t been drafted. I was wrong. They had done their stint. And once you’ve been in the army, they told me later, it’s not that hard to find a way to find the weapons. Even armour-piercing ammo gets black-marketed.
But that was later.
What happened right then, while the kids were looting the dead, was that Ailiss walked up to us with her face all black and a rifle in her hand. Her grin was very white on her dirt-smeared face.
“That was brilliant!” she said. “God above, you guys are heroes! Running the truck down on them like that!”
“It was him who had that idea,” said Murdo, pointing at me.
Ailiss gave me a dangerous hug, with the rifle still clutched in one hand.
I looked at Murdo and Euan. They looked back at me. I knew what they were thinking. We couldn’t go away now. For a start, there was no way the gang here would let us go. For the very good reason that we would tell everything we knew. One way or another.
Like poor Jin Yang, the Chinese guy on the plane who was mistaken for a hijacker, I never meant to start a war. But I did. The war at home, the war of the veterans and settlers and evacuees and laggers. The war that rose as steadily as the sea level. The war we’re still in. If I’d known what was going to happen, I might have walked away and taken my chances, even if it meant a bullet in the back. I don’t know now, even after all these years. I for sure didn’t know then. All I knew was that Ailiss was looking at me in a way nobody had ever looked at me before. Like she was proud of me.
Laggers, I thought. Too dumb tae draft. But not too feart tae fight.
“Aye,” I said. “It was my idea.”
* * * *
THE PACIFIC MYSTERY
Stephen Baxter
Like many of his colleagues at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for more than a decade now with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the cutting edge of science that bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.
Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the final Hugo ballot twice, and won both Asimov’s Readers Award and Analog’s Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, A Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and The Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. His most recent books are the novel Emperor and a new collection, Resplendent. Coming up are two more new novels, Conqueror and Navigator.
Here he takes us to an alternate world that ultimately turns out to be a lot more different from our own time line than it would at first sight appear to be.
* * * *
Editor’s note: The saga of the return of the aerial battleship Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering to London’s sky, and of the heroic exploits of a joint team of RAF and Luftwaffe personnel in boarding the hulk of the schlachtschiff, has overshadowed the story of what befell her long-dead crew, and what they discovered during their attempted Pacific crossing—inasmuch as their discoveries are understood at all. Hence, with the agreement of the family, the BBC has decided to release the following edited transcript of the private diary kept onboard by journalist Bliss Stirling. Miss Stirling completed the Mathematical Tripos at Girton College, Cambridge, and during her National Service in the RAF served in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. For some years she was employed as a cartographer by the Reich in the mapping of the eastern Kommissariats in support of Generalplan Ost. She was also, of course, a noted aviatrix. She was but twenty-eight years old at the time of her loss.
* * * *
May 15, 1950. Day 1. I collected my Spitfire at RAF Medmenham and flew up into gin-clear English air. I’ve flown Spits all over the world, in the colonies for the RAF, and in Asia on collaborative ops with the Luftwaffe. But a Spit is meant to fly in English summer skies—I’ve always regretted I was
too young to be a flyer in the Phoney War, even if no shots were fired in anger.
And today was quite an adventure, for I was flying to engage the Goering, the Beast, as Churchill always referred to her before his hanging. Up I climbed, matching its eastward velocity of a steady 220 knots towards central London—I matched her, the Beast was not about to make a detour for me. You can hardly miss her even from the ground, a black cross-shape painted on the sky. And as you approach, it is more like buzzing a building, a skyscraper in New York or Germania perhaps, than rendezvousing with another aircraft.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 96
