Louise, Genevieve, and Titreano watched the caravan turn around and head back up the rucked road.
“Are you all right, Lady Louise?” Titreano asked courteously.
Her fingers tightened around the shotgun. Then she took a breath and smiled at him. “I think so.”
They struck out for the aerodrome, scrambling through ditches and over hedges. The fields were mostly ploughed, ready for
the second cereal crop, difficult to walk on. Dust puffed up from each footfall.
Louise glanced over at Genevieve, who was wearing Carmitha’s pendant outside her torn and dusty blouse, one hand grasping
the silver bulb tightly. “Not long now,” she said.
“I know,” Genevieve replied pertly. “Louise, will they have something to eat on the aeroambulance?”
“I expect so.”
“Good! I’m starving.” She trudged on for another few paces, then cocked her head to one side. “Titreano, you’re not dirty
at all,” she exclaimed in a vexed tone.
Louise looked over. It was true; not a scrap of dirt or dust had adhered to his blue jacket.
He glanced down at himself, rubbing his hands along the seams of his trousers in a nervous gesture. “I’m sorry, little one,
it must be the fabric. Although I do confess, I don’t remember being immune to such depredations before. Perhaps I should
bow to the inevitable.”
Louise watched in some consternation as mud stains crept up from his ankles, discolouring his trousers below the knee. “You
mean you can change your appearance whenever you want?” she asked.
“It would seem so, Lady Louise.”
“Oh.”
Genevieve giggled. “You mean you want to look all silly like that?”
“I find it… comfortable, little one. Yes.”
“If you can change that easily, I think you ought to adopt something which will blend in a bit better,” Louise said. “I mean,
Gen and I look like a pair of tramps. And then there’s you in all your strange finery. What would you think of us if you were
one of the aeroambulance crew?”
“Finely argued, lady.”
For the next five minutes as they crossed the fields Titreano went through a series of alterations. Genevieve and Louise kept
up a stream of suggestions, arguing hotly, and explaining textures and styles to their mildly befuddled companion. When they
finished he was dressed in the fashion of a young estate manager, with fawn cord trousers, calf-length boots, a tweed jacket,
check shirt, and grey cap.
“Just right,” Louise declared.
“I thank you, lady.” He doffed his cap and bowed low.
Genevieve clapped delightedly.
Louise stopped at another of the interminable walls and found a gap in the stone to shove her boot toe in. Straddling the
top of the wall she could see the aerodrome’s perimeter fence two hundred yards away. “Almost there,” she told the others
cheerfully.
• • •
The Bytham aerodrome appeared to be deserted. Both hangars were closed up; nobody was in the control tower. Away on the other
side of the mown field the row of seven cottages used by station personnel were silent and dark.
The only sound was the persistent clang of the church bell in the village. It hadn’t stopped ringing the whole time they had
walked across the fields.
Louise peered around the side of the first hangar, clutching at the shotgun. Nothing moved. A couple of tractors and a farm
ranger were parked outside a small access door. “Are there any possessed here?” she whispered to Titreano.
“No,” he whispered back.
“What about normal people?”
His brown face creased in concentration. “Several. I hear them over in yon houses. Five or six are malingering inside this
second barn.”
“Hangar,” Louise corrected. “We call them hangars nowadays.”
“Yes, lady.”
“Sorry.”
They swapped a nervous grin.
“I suppose we’d better go and see them, then,” she said. “Come here, Gen.” She pointed the shotgun at the ground and took
her sister’s hand as they walked towards the second hangar.
She really wished Carmitha hadn’t given her the weapon. Yet at the same time it imbued her with an uncommon sense of confidence.
Even though she doubted she could ever actually fire it at anyone. “They have seen us,” Titreano said quietly.
Louise scanned the corrugated panel wall of the hangar. A narrow line of windows ran the entire length. She thought she saw
a shiver of motion behind one. “Hello?” she called loudly.
There was no reply.
She walked right up to the door and knocked firmly. “Hello, can you hear me?” She tried the handle, only to discover it was
locked.
“Now what?” she asked Titreano.
“Hey!” Genevieve shouted at the door. “I’m hungry.”
The handle turned, and the door opened a crack. “Who the hell are you people?” a man asked.
Louise drew herself up as best she could manage, knowing full well what she must look like to anyone inside. “I am Louise
Kavanagh, the heir of Cricklade, this is my sister Genevieve, and William Elphinstone, one of our estate managers.”
Genevieve opened her mouth to protest, but Louise nudged her with a toe.
“Oh, really?” came the answer from behind the door.
“Yes!”
“It is her,” said another, deeper voice. The door opened wide to show two men gazing out at them. “I recognize her. I used
to work at Cricklade.”
“Thank you,” Louise said.
“Until your father fired me.”
Louise didn’t know whether to burst into tears or just shoot him on the spot.
“Let them in, Duggen,” a woman called. “The little girl looks exhausted. And this is no day to settle old grudges.”
Duggen shrugged and moved aside.
A line of dusty windows was the sole source of illumination inside. The aeroambulance was a hulking dark presence in the middle
of the concrete floor. Three people were standing below the plane’s narrow, pointed nose; the woman who had spoken, and a
pair of five-year-old twin girls. She introduced herself as Felicia Cantrell, her daughters were Ellen and Tammy; her husband
Ivan was an aeroambulance pilot, the man who had opened the door. “And Duggen you already know, or at least he knows you.”
Ivan Cantrell took a vigilant look out of the hangar door before closing it. “So would you like to tell us what you’re doing
here, Louise? And what happened to you?”
It took her over fifteen minutes to produce a patched-up explanation which satisfied them. All the time guarding her tongue
from uttering the word possession, and mentioning who Titreano really was. As she realized, those two items would have got
her ejected from the hangar in no time at all. Yet at the same time she was pleased with her white lies; the Louise who had
woken to a normal world yesterday would have just blurted the truth and imperiously demanded they do something about it. This
must be growing up, after a fashion.
“The Land Union with modern energy weapons?” Duggen mused sceptically when she was finished.
“I think so,” Louise said. “That’s what everyone said.”
He looked as if he was about to object when Genevieve said: “Listen.”
Louise couldn’t hear a thing. “What?” she asked.
“The church bells, they’ve stopped.”
Duggen and Ivan went over to the windows and looked out.
“Are they coming?” Louise mouthed to Titreano.
He nodded his head surreptitiously.
“Please,” she appealed to Ivan. “You have to fly us out of here.”
“I don’t know about that, Miss Kavanagh. I don’t have the authority. And we don’t really know what’s happening in the village.
Perhaps I ought to check with the constable first.”
“Please! If you’re worried about your job, don’t be. My family will protect you.”
He sucked in his breath, blatantly unhappy.
“Ivan,” Felicia said. She stared straight at him, pointing significantly to the twins. “Whatever is going on, this is no place
for children to be. The capital will be safe if anywhere is.”
“Oh, hell. All right, Miss Kavanagh. You win. Get in. We’ll all go.”
Duggen started to open the big sliding doors at the end of the hangar, allowing a thick beam of pink-tinted sunlight to strike
the aeroambulance. The plane was an imported Kulu Corporation SCV-659 civil utility, a ten-seater VTOL supersonic with a near
global range.
“It has the essence of a bird,” Titreano murmured, his face gently intoxicated. “But with the strength of a bull. What magic.”
“Are you going to be all right inside?” Louise asked anxiously.
“Oh, yes, Lady Louise. This is a voyage to be prized beyond mountains of gold. To be granted this opportunity I shall give
full praise to the Lord tonight.”
She coughed uncomfortably. “Right. Okay, we’d better get in; up that stairs on the other side, see?”
They followed Felicia and the twins up the airstairs. The plane’s narrow cabin had been customized for its ambulance role,
with a pair of stretchers and several cabinets of medical equipment. There were only two seats, which the twins used. Genevieve,
Titreano, and Louise wound up sitting together on one of the stretcher couches. Louise checked the safety on the shotgun once
again and wedged it below her feet. Surprisingly, no one had objected to her carrying it on board.
“This is all we need,” Ivan called back from the pilot’s seat as he started to run through the preflight checklist. “I’ve
got half a dozen systems failures showing.”
“Any critical?” Duggen asked as he closed the hatch.
“We’ll survive.”
Felicia opened one of the cabinets and handed Genevieve a bar of chocolate. The girl tore the wrapper off and sat munching
it with a huge contented smile.
If she craned forwards, Louise could just see the windscreen beyond Ivan. The plane was rolling forwards out of the hangar.
“There are some houses on fire in the village,” the pilot exclaimed. “And some people running down the road towards us. Hang
on.”
There was a sudden surge in the bee-hum from the fans, and the cabin rocked. They were airborne within seconds, climbing at
a shallow angle. The only thing visible through the windscreen were daubs of insubstantial pink cloud. “I hope Carmitha is
all right down there,” Louise said guiltily.
“I feel certain she will remain free from harm, lady. And it gladdens me that you resolved your quarrel with her. I admire
you for that, my lady Louise.”
She knew her cheeks would be blushing, she could feel the heat. Hopefully the smears of mud and dust would be veiling the
fact. “Carmitha said something to me before she left. Something about you. It was a question. A good one.”
“Ah. I did wonder what passed between you. If you care to ask, I will answer with such honesty as I own.”
“She wanted me to ask where you really came from.”
“But, Lady Louise, I have spoken nothing but the truth to you in this matter.”
“Not quite. Norfolk is an English-ethnic planet; so we do learn something of our heritage in school. I know that the England
of what you say is your time was a pure Anglo-Saxon culture.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. And Titreano is not an English name. Not at that time. After that possibly, when immigration began in later centuries.
But if you had been born in Cumbria in 1764 as you claim, that could not be your name.”
“Oh, lady, forgive me any mistrust I have inadvertently caused you. Titreano is not the name I was born with. However, it
is the one I lived with in my latter years. It is the closest rendering the island people I adopted could come to my family
name.”
“And that is?”
The dignity vanished from his handsome features, leaving only sorrow. “Christian, my lady Louise. I was baptized Fletcher
Christian, and was proud to be named so. In that I must now be alone, for I have brought naught but shame to my family ever
since. I am a mutineer, you see.”
Ralph Hiltch was gratified and relieved by the speed with which Ombey’s senior administration reacted to what they’d taken
to calling the Mortonridge crisis. The people at Hub One were joined by the full complement of the Privy Council security
committee. This time Princess Kirsten herself was sitting at the head of the table in the white bubble room, relegating Admiral
Farquar to a position adjacent to her. The tabletop mutated into a detailed map showing the top half of Mortonridge; the four
towns which the rogue Longhound bus had visited—Marble Bar, Rainton, Gaslee, and Exnall—glinted a macabre blood-red above
the rumpled foothills. Flurries of symbols flickered and winked around each of them, electronic armies harassing their foes.
Once the last of Moyce’s delivery lorries had been tracked down and eliminated, Diana Tiernan switched the entire capacity
of the AIs to analysing vehicles that had left the four towns, and stopping them. In one respect they were fortunate: it was
midnight along Mortonridge, the volume of traffic was much reduced from its daytime peak. Identification was reasonably easy.
Deciding what to do about both cars and towns was less so.
It took twenty minutes of debate, arbitrated by the Princess, before they thrashed out an agreed policy. In the end, the deciding
factor was Gerald Skibbow’s completed personality debrief which was datavised down from Guyana. Dr Riley Dobbs appeared before
the committee to testify its provenance; an apprehensive man, telling the planetary rulers that they were being assaulted
by the dead reborn. But it did provide the justification, or spur, necessary for the kind of action which Ralph was pressing
for. And even he sat through Dobbs’s report in a state of cold incredulity. If I’d made a mistake, shown a single gram of
weakness…
The expanded security committee decided that all ground vehicles which had left the Mortonridge towns were to be directed
to three separate holding areas established along the M6 by the police AT Squads. Refusal to comply would result in instantaneous
SD fire. Once at the holding area, they would be required to wait in their vehicles until the authorities were ready to test
them for possession. Failure to remain in the vehicle would result in the police AT Squads opening fire.
For the towns, a complete martial law curfew was to be effected immediately, no vehicular traffic or pedestrians allowed.
Low orbit SD sensor satellites would scan the streets constantly in conjunction with the local police patrols. Anyone found
disobeying the prohibition would be given exactly one opportunity to surrender. Weapons engagement authorization was granted
to all the police personnel responsible for enforcing the curfew order.