by Susan Price
At the briefing beginning each shift, this “special duty” had been announced, together with a warning that it was dangerous and a reminder of the gagging clause in their contract. Double time for anyone who volunteered.
There’d been plenty of interest. These men earned peanuts. They were going to show interest in anything that doubled their pay, even if only to the amount that Windsor would spend on postcards.
It was Bryce’s gloomy opinion that the best men—the ones he would have chosen—were the ones who, when they heard what was demanded of them for the doubled pay, shook their heads and said they wanted no part of it. Some of them had been ex-soldiers.
Their reasons had differed. Some had been quick to point out that the time left for planning and training was bloody short. Others had groaned when they’d heard they’d most likely be armed with cheap Kalashnikovs. And then there’d been those who said they didn’t like taking automatic rifles against “them poor sods.”
Those were the men with the kind of caution and forethought Bryce liked. The men who, as Cromwell had said of his unbeaten troops, made “some conscience of what they did.” They were, almost to a man, the ones who’d walked away.
Three good men, all ex-soldiers, had signed up. They needed the money, they said. What the hell! The three of them weren’t enough.
The rest—they were what Bryce had dreaded. Football hooligan types, full of piss and wind and hate. The type who thought a good night out was getting drunk and beating somebody up: a black or a queer, but anybody would do. Some quiet bloke walking down the road— “Get the snotty bugger!” Kick his head in.
Even worse were the fantasizers. The ones who liked to dress up in World War Two and Vietnam uniforms and play war games on weekends, who daydreamed of shooting hordes of gooks and wading through blood, and having chests full of medals, but who couldn’t stomach the discipline of the real army. The type who signed up as mercenaries, ready to tear the enemies’ living hearts out with their bare hands, but came home two days later in tears because—fancy!—real bullets and real grenades hurt and killed people.
They were such a bunch of losers they deserved their kalashnikovs. Bryce had warned Windsor that, when you had to supply guns fast, cheap and without red tape, what you got were the worst Kalashnikovs. They might have been made in Korea or China or Vietnam or Hungary or Nigeria. You never knew what crap they’d been made from, or whether anybody had ever bothered to check if they worked or were safe. Barrels machined from old steering-wheel columns. Stocks shoddily manufactured from plastic, or carved out of whatever cruddy old wood happened to be lying around.
The barrels split and peeled back, the magazines jammed, the stocks broke, the safety catches couldn’t be released or couldn’t be put on.
But never mind, they were only going up against peasants armed with sticks. The first time they let off a round, the Sterkarms were going to fall down and worship them as gods. Yeah, right.
He supposed it might happen. The effect of Land Rovers and automatic-rifle fire on people who’d never seen or heard them would be demoralizing. Despite all his foreboding, if he had to put money on this little outing, he’d back the 21st. But he’d be willing to bet more money if he’d been able to go in better prepared, better equipped and with better men.
God help the Sterkarms if this shit shower got turned loose on them! No discipline, no esprit de corps, no restraint.
He’d spoken to Windsor about the quality of the men. He’d spoken of looting, rape, maybe the massacre that Windsor himself had feared. “I don’t want any of our men killed,” Windsor had said. “I don’t want my backside in a sling because some widows and orphans are dragging FUP through the courts for years, claiming compensation and sniveling to the media. But as for the Sterkarms—they chose to play hardball.”
The amazing thing, Bryce thought, was that Windsor was quite open about saying this.
Bates was braying again. “I’m going to have me a piece, I am. What? Got to, aint’cha? Ain’t leaving without having a piece; don’t care what anybody says.”
“Could be your great-great-grandmother,” somebody said.
“I’m up for that!”
Bryce rubbed his hand over his face. He hadn’t had much sleep over the past four days. If Windsor was insisting on ridiculously short preparation, then he had to give up sleep to cram in what he could. He’d been studying maps and collating information on the tower. Plastic explosive would soon bring the walls down. He had only to get one man to the wall while the others distracted the Sterkarms—and he had his three ex-soldiers to help him.
The staff leisure facilities at Dilsmead Hall included a shooting range, and he’d taken his men there and given them some instruction in using their rifles. A farce, but then, if the best your opponents had were short-range pistols that fired one ball at a time, the Kalashnikov was a formidable weapon. When it worked. And they’d been able to find and discard one rifle that had its safety catch permanently jammed on. That was one less thing to go wrong in the field.
The laughter of the men behind him changed its note, became sniggering, stifled. Bryce looked up and saw Windsor coming toward them around the corner of the main building. Windsor was dressed in camouflage too, with polished boots and a beret. Bryce had issued the other men their fatigues. He hadn’t issued any to Windsor. He hadn’t wanted Windsor to come and hadn’t done anything to encourage him. He didn’t think that Windsor had ever been in the army. The man had gone somewhere and bought the uniform.
“All set?” Windsor called out, and struck his own leg with a swagger stick. He had a swagger stick! He’d gone and bought a swagger stick!
“All set, sir,” Bryce said. He struggled with himself, but then saluted.
“Perhaps I should say a few words—to the men,” Windsor said.
Oh God! Bryce thought. He kept his face blank and looked away into the distance. “If you think it’s necessary. But I’ve briefed them.”
Windsor wasn’t a fool. He saw what lay behind Bryce’s strained politeness. “Oh well, perhaps not.” He was only trying to do the right thing. “Let’s not waste any more time.” Giving his leg another thwack with the swagger stick, he went across to the entrance of the lab. Bryce followed.
As Windsor passed, the men whistled quietly and made cooing noises. Bryce glared, and the noise subsided but started again behind them.
Seeing Windsor, the lab supervisor came forward. She looked exhausted and ill. The technicians had been working around the clock too, to wire up the new Tube and make it operational.
“We can’t put too much strain on the system,” she said.
“Does it work or doesn’t it?” Windsor demanded.
“It works,” the supervisor snapped back. Weariness made her less easy to intimidate. “But we had to skimp on some of the fail-safe systems. We’ll send you through, and then we’ll shut down.”
“We’ll be stranded?” Windsor said.
“Obviously we’ll come on-line again at intervals—every six hours for the first day, Mr. Bryce suggested.”
Windsor looked at Bryce, who nodded.
“And then every four hours, and then at decreasing intervals—repairs are ongoing. Performance should be improving all the time.”
“Is it safe?” Windsor asked.
“For the time it takes to send you through, as safe as it ever was. You won’t end up with a fly’s head!” Windsor looked at her, and her smile turned apologetic. “Perfectly safe for short spans.”
Windsor didn’t look convinced, and Bryce hoped that he might decide to stay behind. But he whacked his leg with his swagger stick. “Let’s go.”
The wreckage of the old Tube had been cleared away and lay on the lawn at a distance. The new Tube was completed but unpainted. The floodlights, on tall scaffolds, erected to allow the laborers to work through the night, hadn’t been taken down yet, and ripp
ed bags of cement, heaps of gravel, shovels and wheelbarrows littered the area. The place looked like a construction site.
One Land Rover was already drawn up on the platform at the top of the ramp. The men sitting in it were silent, looking into the Tube.
Except for the roadway, its inner surfaces weren’t finished. They could see the steel frames holding the circuitry.
Bryce and Windsor climbed into the Land Rover. Two others drove into line behind them. The lights at the entrance of the Tube changed from red to green. The Tube began to hum, to roar, to scream—and was then silent.
At Bryce’s nod, the driver started the engine and drove forward into the Tube. Windsor felt a creeping sensation along his neck as they entered it. Despite the assurances of safety, he could not throw off a suspicion that, this time, there would be no way back.
But the men cheered, and though even with the echo of the Tube, it sounded thin and forced, it raised Windsor’s spirits. “Phasers on kill!” one of them shouted, and there was laughter. They were in good humor, then. Morale high. And they had automatic rifles.
The second Land Rover drove into the Tube, and another thin cheer went up. By the time the third Land Rover entered, the first was bumping down from the Tube onto the burned black earth of the sixteenth-century hillside. Windsor’s confidence rose again as he looked about at the emptiness. Nothing but bare hills, and air, and sheep. Except for the top of the tower, there wasn’t a building in sight. Not one that could be called a building rather than a heap of turf and mud slowly sliding back into the landscape.
And here were three machined, sharp-angled, powerful vehicles from the 21st, and twenty-four men, and twenty-two assault rifles. Time’s up, lads! he thought. We’re coming to get you. Per Sterkarm shall draw my chariot. I shall exhibit him in a cage.
There was every chance that the boy would be shot dead. Well, that would teach him to fart in church.
Per was lying at full length on his belly, leaning on one elbow, with Cuddy and Swart stretched out on either side of him, when the Elf-Gate opened. The great round stone pipe, supported on a cradle of silvery iron girders, appeared from nowhere, silently, blotting out the greens and russets of the hillside.
Swart moved, gathering his long legs under him and giving a yap of surprise. To both hounds, Per said, “Hold. Stilla.” Stay. Quiet.
Out of the pipe, out of thin air, came an Elf-Cart, moving slowly down the ramp to the grass. Ingram shifted slightly with excitement. The Elf-Cart was a muddy color, not as shiny and resplendent as the one Elf-Windsor had come in, but it was still awesome. It growled and throbbed. Its back was loaded with Elves, all holding—
“Pistols,” Per said softly. He had seen them being used on the far-see in Elf-Land. He was tense with excitement, and a shiver of fear ran through him. Just as Andrea had said, the Elves had come back, fearsomely armed—and the Elves meant to smash their world like an egg, lap up all the goodness and leave them nothing but the dried, shattered bits of shell.
Ingram shifted again, and gasped, as a second Elf-Cart came down the ramp, bringing more Elves and more pistols. And then a third. They watched the Elves jumping out onto the ground, and they picked out the leader easily, by the way he moved, and the places he chose to stand. Elf-Windsor was recognizable too, by his build and movements. Per’s bow and arrows lay beside him—if only Cuddy would get off them. He could hit Windsor from this distance. And would, given half a chance.
When the Elf-Captain looked up toward their wood, they knew what it meant …
The sheer silence of the 16th silenced the 21st men’s cheering and catcalls. They raised their eyes to thick gray sky above them and looked round at the wide rise and fall of hill and valley in the sparkling air. Far below was the gray-and-white running of Bedes Water, and the black cattle that grazed its banks. A damp, chill breeze touched their faces; a mist of rain hung in the air. Around the burned area some sections of chain-link fence lay flat on the ground, thrown down. Other sections were missing, carried away.
They looked back at the Tube and, as they looked, it vanished. The green slope of the hill, and a little stand of birch, filled in the space where it had been.
As soon as Bryce saw the little patch of woodland, he knew it was the most likely place for an ambush. He scanned the Land Rovers. “You, you, you.” The men he chose were the three ex-soldiers, the only ones with anything like the experience to check out the wood. “Get up there at the double. Safety on. No shooting unless you have to. Anybody you find, bring ’em back here.”
The three men made off uphill, looking at least something like soldiers, though two of them were well out of training. Bryce would have liked to go with them, but there was no one he trusted to stay behind with the Land Rovers. Certainly not Windsor.
Bryce took his map from his pocket and spread it on the hood of his Land Rover. It was a rough thing, the first effort drawn up from the geologists’ unfinished explorations, but it was all they had. He’d hardly got it opened when Windsor said, “They’re coming!”
He pointed down into the valley. Bryce tucked the map behind a windshield wiper, unhitched his binoculars and leveled them, leaning his elbows on the Land Rover. He saw a party of mounted men, about ten of them, riding up the hill toward them. “They’ve got a white flag,” he said. Something white, at any rate, was fluttering from a spear.
Windsor had his own glasses leveled. “Surrender,” he said. “Without a shot. I told you the Sterkarms weren’t going to give us any trouble.”
Per, Wat and Ingram, keeping low so that the bushes and long grass would hide them, took up their bows and quivers and moved back into the wood. They didn’t trouble much about the noise they made: The Elves were at a distance and making their own noise. It was movement that would draw the eye and give them away.
Passing through their little camp, they collected their cloaks and pulled down their flimsy shelter, carrying the cut branches away with them. Per’s chosen hiding place was a hollow partly filled with the trunk of a thick, fallen birch overgrown with toadstools. Old leaves, bronze and brown, had filled the hollow deeply. Per, with his bow and quiver, burrowed into the leaves, raising a rich scent of earth and decay. Lying on his back, he spread his cloak over himself, its brown, stained, leather side uppermost. He called the hounds under the cloak with him—a wagging tail or twitching ear would be less noticeable under the cloak. The cut branches he dropped on top of the cloak, then he scattered fistfuls of the old, dead leaves over it. The top of his head and his eyes he left uncovered, but he filled his hair with leaves. “Hold. Stilla” he said to the hounds, and then drew his dagger and lay still himself.
The brown of the cloak’s leather merged, an earth color, with the browns of the dead and dying leaves scattered over and around it, and with the branches lying on it and growing around it. The stains and dirt of long use, and its crumplings, further broke up the outline of the cloak. Where the black fleece of its inner side showed, it blended with the black markings on the birch log and with that part of Swart’s black, hairy back that was uncovered. There was nothing about the wrinkled, brown toe of Per’s boot to catch the eye, half covered as it was with leaf mold. The shifting, leaf- and branch-broken light danced over the hollow, melting all outlines. Someone searching for him wouldn’t see him even if they trod on him.
It was easy for Per to hear the Elves coming. The birds, which had grown used to the cousins’ presence, flew up at the approach of the newcomers, alarmed and screeching. The Elves themselves panted, coughed and called out to each other. Their feet thumped, trampled, crushed. They thrashed through the undergrowth, setting branches swinging and rattling.
Per, lying still under the sheepskin cloak with the big, warm bodies of his hounds pressed against him, grew hot. Cuddy lay partly on top of him, and grew heavier every time he blinked. He could feel growls trembling through her, though she was silent as yet. Hardly moving, he pressed his
hand against her and breathed, “Stilla.” She stopped growling but poked a startling cold nose under his chin and unrolled a hot, wet tongue against his neck. He hoped the noise of slobbering wouldn’t carry.
Wat had been right about the hounds: Per should have sent them back. But at the time he’d wanted their company. They wouldn’t give him away now by barking. They never barked. But if the Elves came near, they might snarl, or throw off his cover by leaping up to defend him. “Hold. Stilla.”
The Elves came close by where Per lay. One stood within three feet of him, turning his head and looking about at the height of a man. He never thought to look down. Per sprawled in the leaves and watched them through the intervening branches, his heart beating only a little quicker. He saw them plainly, despite their camouflage gear, because their upright shapes were often dark against the light coming in at the edge of the wood. Cuddy and Swart continued to tremble against him with hatred of the strangers but made only the faintest of sounds, unheard among the sounds of trees shifting in the breeze and the stomping feet of the Elves.
The Elves moved away. Cuddy and Swart, thinking the danger past, stopped growling, and Cuddy licked Per’s face while Swart licked his ear. He screwed up his face and endured the licking while he lay still and tried to listen through the slobbering. In other parts of the wood birds were chattering as the Elves moved through the trees. Only when all the birds were silent in all parts of the wood, and had been for many heartbeats, did Per sit up.
Keeping silence, he hugged the hounds, kissed and patted them, to let them know how proud he was of them. Shouldering him over, they pressed him down in the leaves, showing him how proud they were of him by thoroughly licking his face and hands. One of them alone weighed almost as much as he did, and he couldn’t even sit up with both of them standing on him. He played dead until they were thoroughly bored and wandered a little away. Then he got to his feet fast.
Snatching up his cloak, quiver and bow, he made his way toward their watching place, with the hounds bouncing and panting beside him. Wat and Ingram were already there. Per crawled the last couple of yards, to keep his movements out of sight below the screen of bushes and scrub that edged the wood. The leaves in his hair, as he poked up his head, helped to disguise him.
