Sister Ships and Alastair

The sun was warm on his back, despite the cool of the morning. The shadows of the buildings - Woolworth's, the Co-op, Lloyd's - were still long on the brickwork. An occasional tramp or early morning cleaner ambled past. The Council seating had been made to last rather than to provide a positive bum-to-seat experience. The cheeks of his backside were lightly refrigerated through sitting on what was effectively a large seat-shaped lump of cast iron.

The I-Spy Book of Spacecraft, the most recent book on space travel he had been able to get from the library, had been written in 1969 by someone calling himself 'Big Chief I-Spy", though Ant doubted that this was the name he had been christened under. Big Chief I-Spy had rather optimistically included a set of tick boxes readers could fill in if they saw any of the spacecraft mentioned.

His dad was late. The clock on the Italianate Church had already struck nine. Mum had dropped him off over an hour ago. Her new boyfriend, who drove a Mercedes, had offered to buy him a cappuccino at the expensive new Caffè Hyperactivo over the road. Reasoning that his dad might see him, Ant had refused. There was always an expression of crestfallen emptiness in his dad's eyes whenever anyone with money bought anything for Ant that his dad would normally tell him was too expensive.

Someone seemed to be hammering at something somewhere in the distance. He tried to ignore the sound, and concentrated instead on the Soviet Vostok space capsule in the book. Perhaps to confuse NASA, the Soviets had written 'BOCTOK' down the side of it instead of VOSTOK. It had supposedly been the first manned craft to fly in space. On April 12, 1961, said the book, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted into the record books in Vostok 1. To Ant, who knew that the first voyage to Alpha Centauri had been made in 1951, it was laughable. The Soviet space capsule looked like a pepper shaker with a rocket where the filler hole should have been. The Apollo capsule on page 30 looked like its salt-shaking equivalent.

Space had not only been explored to a far greater extent than almost anyone on Earth suspected - it had been colonized, by shadowy government agencies of whose existence the present-day Presidents and Prime Ministers of the United States, Russia and Britain knew nothing. Now, those colonies in space had revolted, seeking independence; and a secret war was being fought out in the stars.

The Vostok flew once round the Earth, announced Big Chief I-Spy's I-Spy Book of Spacecraft, before returning its two tonne re-entry capsule to Engels in the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Ant felt like scribbling the tonnage of a Revere-class cruiser in the margin -

He could hear a tiny voice, like a pixie yelling from the bottom of a well. "earth calling ant! come in ant!"

He looked up. Someone was banging on the window of the Caffè Hyperactivo.

"vincent anthony stevens! this is the voice of god! look up and notice the funny black people yelling at you from over the road!"

The embarrassment was devastating. Someone had seen him waiting in vain for his father. "...Cleo?"

"there's no use talking, i can't hear you, nimrod! for god's sake shut your mouth, you look like a fish breathing! i am screaming at the top of my voice in here!"

Cleo and her entire extended family were standing in the café window, banging, making faces and waving. Behind them, the café staff were trying desperately to quieten them down. Ant sprang into action, gathering up his rucksack full of physics books and hoisting it hastily onto his shoulder. The café window erupted in a silent cheer, and Cleo's family sat down en masse.

Entering the café, trying to ignore the glares of the other diners, Ant looked at Cleo's family in bemusement. Cleo's father, who always wore a polo shirt round the house, was wearing a suit. Cleo's mother, who was never normally seen outside jogging bottoms, was wearing not only a gigantic polka-dot dress, but also a gigantic polka-dot hat. And every other member of the family, Cleo included, was dressed to kill.

"Did someone die?" said Ant.

The Shakespeare family doubled up in laughter at Ant's expense. "We're going to church", said Cleo's mother gently. "We go to the Christ-Centred Pentecostal Good News Church of God the Redeemer every Sunday. And so should you", she added with mock sternness.

"It's not the Christ-Centred Pentecostal Church any more", said Cleo's father. "It's the Ecumenical Rainbow Faith Church of the Army of Jesus. They changed the sign again last week."

Ant was amazed. "You're Christians?"

"I'm afraid so", said Cleo, with an embarrassment apparently even huger than Ant's. "Despite the best efforts of a scientific education, my father still believes in a big bearded man on a cloud." She looked around herself and added in a whisper: "I think we'd better keep it down now. The waitress just came over and told us to be quiet in Polish."

"I can be quiet in Polish", said Ant. The Shakespeare family laughed dutifully; Ant was a guest of the family, and his jokes had to be laughed at. Encouraged, Ant continued. "I can be quiet in a number of languages.". He pursed his lips and screwed up his eyes for several seconds. "That was Persian", he said.

Cleo's father stared at Ant for one long moment, then collapsed in hysterics - specifically in Jamaican hysterics, which were far louder than ordinary hysterics.

Besides her Sunday best, Cleo was also wearing a watch set into a bangle in the shape of a double-headed serpent. A coiled serpent also framed the watch face. The whole thing reflected light in an expensive way that suggested silver rather than chrome.

"Isn't it great?" said Cleo, noticing Ant's interest. She held up her wrist and shook it so that the bangles chattered like magpies. "It's a present from my beautiful parents for trying hard in my Applied Science homework."

Ant, who had never received any interest in his school performance short of being docked pocket money for fighting, looked at the watch and said: "It's very nice."

"Hello Ant", said Tamora, Cleo's sister. Ant's teeth ground together involuntarily as she added: "So you just happened to be here, did you, Ant? At the same time Cleo was."

"Yes", said Ant. "A mind-boggling coincidence, what with us living in the same town and all, but true, Tammie."

"I'll believe you", said Tamora. "Thousands wouldn't. My name's not Tammie", she added.

"I know", said Ant.

"How can you be a Christian and a trade unionist at the same time, dad?" said Cleo sulkily. "Where are your socialist principles? Religion is the opiate of the people. The top three girls in school all have parents who are practising atheists. Statistically, you are stunting my educational growth."

Cleo's father shrugged. "Break your leg and you'll find out opiates are wonderful things. Besides, I can't believe that something as complex as a human being can exist for no reason."

"Yes, and that reason is Darwinian evolution", said Cleo. "Darwin -"

Cleo stopped unaccountably dead in mid-sentence.

"Darwinian Evolution is Cleopatra's religion at the moment", said Cleo's mother.

"Ecumenical Rainbow Darwinian Evolution", corrected Cleo's dad.

Cleo would normally never have tolerated being called Cleopatra, but her attention was elsewhere staring out of the café window at the other side of the street.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Shakespeare.

"Oh my god", said Cleo. "Oh my god. You give people advice, and they throw it into the wind and chuck up after it."

Ant followed Cleo's gaze.

"Oh, my", he said. "Oh lordy, but that is wrong."

Two black-suited, black-tied, white-shirted figures wearing opaque black sunglasses were approaching the café. Each wore a smart black hat. One seemed to be male, one female; their hair, however, had been slicked back so fiercely that they appeared almost identical.

They entered the café. Every pair of eyes inside the building and out was fixed on them, apart from Ant's and Cleo's, which were intently examining the lino.

"Do you know these people?" whispered Cleo's mother. "Are they churchgoers?"

One of the figures raised its hand in a salute. The little and index finger of its hand were protruding.

"Respect."

"Big ups", said the other figure, "from the posse of where we originate."

Cleo's father sat in bemusement, then weakly raised a hand and parted his fingers in a Vulcan greeting.

"Ah...live long and prosper?"

The two figures looked at one another. Then, one bent down to Cleo and whispered:

"You told us no-one ever actually did that."

Cleo hissed back through the corner of her mouth: "WHAT in the name of FLIPPING HECK are you DOING?"

"Following instructions", said the man, clearly hurt. "Absorbing the culture of the last twenty years." He slid out a DVD case from the inside pocket of his jacket. The cover read The Blues Brothers.

"We've also been reading Mixmag", said the woman.

Cleo made a come-hither gesture with a finger. When the woman bent her ear to listen, Cleo hissed into it: "In the shop where you bought that movie from the nineteen-eighties, did you see another movie from the nineteen nineties called Men In Black, in which sinister men wearing black ties and sunglasses are the secret representatives of aliens from another planet?"

The man looked at the woman. She shook her head. He turned back to Cleo and shook his head.

"Are we incorrectly dressed?" said the woman. "I have to admit the film made little sense."

Lieutenant Turpin and Lieutenant Farthing looked ridiculous, but it was easy to see how they might not realize the fact. They were, after all, used to wearing grubby and threadbare flight uniforms, and to breathing the lead-free air of Gondolin, a smaller world orbiting a very different sun. They were citizens of the United States of the Zodiac, a set of rebel colonies in space that fiercely protected its independence from its mother countries, Britain and America - and here on Earth, they stuck out like sore thumbs on an octopus.

"Aren't you going to introduce us, Cleopatra?" said Mr. Shakespeare.

"This is my elder brother", said Ant quickly, despite Cleo's eyes flaring like angry supernovae as she mouthed NO! STOP DIGGING NOW! "And his girlfriend." This time it was Lieutenant Farthing's eyes that bounced out of her head. She threw Ant a look that promised stern retribution later on.

"We're from out of town", explained the man.

"Where are you from?" said Mrs. Shakespeare.

The man's eyes bulged with geographical effort.

"The Orkney Islands", he said finally.

"Oh really", said Mr. Shakespeare. "Letitia and myself once went on a walking holiday in Orkney."

The man beamed at Mr. Shakespeare as if the act of ceasing to beam might cause his brain to stop functioning.

"It was very nice", said Mr. Shakespeare.

"It is very nice", said the man. "The sea is very nice. The way it surrounds the islands on all sides."

"Mr. Turpin", said Cleo in a strained voice. "Miss Farthing. What are you here for?"

"We're just hanging", said Lieutenant Turpin.

"With our peeps in the hood", clarified Lieutenant Farthing.

"I thought your name was Stevens, Ant", said Mr. Shakespeare.

"My brother kept my mother's maiden name", said Ant.

"Digging deeper and down", said Cleo. "Gosh, is that an unexploded bomb under your shovel, or is it just another sewer pipe?"

"Would any of you like a cappuccino?" said Mrs. Shakespeare.

Turpin's face contorted as if he were being strangled by an invisible man. Cleo nodded at him sharply.

"...Yes?" he managed.

"I believe I would also like a cup of Chino", nodded Farthing.

Mrs. Shakespeare reached for her purse. "Decaffeinated?"

"No", said Lieutenant Turpin. "It's just the way I'm sitting."

"Skinny?"

Turpin and Farthing looked at one another. Turpin locked his eyes on Cleo with the expression of a man who is absolutely sure he is right.

"My name", said Cleo hotly, "is not Skinny."

"Do you want skimmed milk", explaind Mrs. Shakespeare, as patiently as the situation allowed.

"No, just the Chino, thanks."

"It's very rare for someone to take their mother's maiden name", said Mr. Shakespeare.

"My brother doesn't get on with my father", said Ant.

"That sounds terrible", said Lieutenant Turpin. "Tell me about it."

"YOU'RE MY BROTHER", hissed Ant.

"I'm joking, of course, haha", said Turpin. "It's quite simple. My father and I belong to two rival dance styles."

"Tell me you didn't get out Breakdance Two: Electric Boogaloo too", said Cleo.

Lieutenant Turpin reddened and cleared his throat. "I am a pure breakdancer, whereas my father has strayed away from the true path. He" - he lowered his voice dramatically - "does robotics."

"I can do robotics", said Mr. Shakespeare brightly.

"You can so not do robotics, dad."

"You don't sound Scottish", said Tamora to Lieutenant Turpin.

"Do I need to be?" said Turpin.

"If you come from Orkney, I believe so."

"He was resettled in Orkney", said Ant. "On a witness protection programme", he added desperately.

"Yes", said Turpin. "That is true."

The conversation died like the wind in the sails of a becalmed galleon.

Mr. Shakespeare unwisely broke the silence.

"I, um, hear there's a lot of secrecy in these witness protection programmes." Despite a tremor in his voice that indicated he knew this was terribly, terribly wrong, he nevertheless continued: "It sounds very interesting. Tell us about it."

"I can't", said Mr. Turpin helplessly. "It's a secret."

At that moment, all conversation became inaudible as a deafening roar shook the plates on the tables and a massive shadow closed across the sun. Man-high letters scrolled across the café window, stencilled on corrugated steel with the enigmatic word: HUOLINTAKESKUS. Despite herself, Cleo yelped in fear and ducked under the table.

"Is there a planet Huolintakeskus?" she said to Turpin and Farthing.

"No", said Ant with weary resignation. "But there is a Finnish international shipping company Huolintakeskus who write their name on the side of their containers."

Pneumatic brakes spat, and a black and evil-smelling cloud of diesel fumes drifted in through the café doors. Ant attempted unsuccessfully to merge with his surroundings.

"Hey", said Mr. Shakespeare. "Is that your dad, Ant?"

Outside, someone was arguing with a traffic warden. One of the waitresses marched out to add her own voice to the argument, which appeared to be coming inside.

"- BUT I'VE GOT A DELIVERY TO MAKE -"

"- I'm sorry, you can't park an articulated lorry here whether you're making a delivery or not -"

"CO KONTYNUUJE TUTAJ??" demanded the waitress.

"I'd better go", said Ant.

Ant's dad poked his head in through the doors.

"DOUGIE!" said Mr. Shakespeare. "WAZZZUUPPP!!!"

"Dad, people don't say WAZZZUUPPP any more. In fact, I suspect even Americans only ever did it in Budweiser commercials -"

Mr. Shakespeare turned and winked at Cleo. "Check out THESE moves, daughter of mine."

He rose from his seat in a series of fluid yet mechanical jerks, moved across the room to Ant's dad, and offered his hand for shaking with the clumsiness of a robot. Mr. Stevens stared at the hand as if its owner were a lunatic. On Mr. Shakespeare's face was now written the sheer terror of a man who has suddenly realized he has committed a social faux pas of awesome magnitude. However, he had now begun the movement, and had to finish it. Continuing the same series of stumbling, shuffling steps, he walked out through the café door into the street and carried on walking, robotically.

"Mr. Shakespeare sometimes gets like that", said Ant. "It's a medical condition."

"He's had it his whole life", said Mrs. Shakespeare grimly.

"Oh." Mr. Stevens shook his head to clear it. "Well, I'm outside." Conscious of the presence of the traffic warden, he added: "Heck of a coincidence. What are the chances, eh? Sorry I'm a bit late."

The traffic warden folded his arms. "If you do not move on in the next ten seconds, you will get a ticket."

"JEST TEN WASZ SAMOCHÓD CIĘŽAROWY???"

Ant grimaced at the Shakespeares. "See you later." He hurried out of the café with his rucksack of books.

"Well, I have to say, you really don't get on with your father at all", said Mrs. Shakespeare to Lieutenant Turpin. "He never even gave you a look."

"There's a terrible feud between us", said Turpin.

"I cannot believe you people", said Cleo. "The Blues Brothers represents modern European society about as much as Return of the Jedi represents life on other planets."

"Return of the Jedi is actually surprisingly accurate", cautioned Turpin.

"Apart from the Ewoks", said Farthing.

"Ewoks!" chortled Turpin. "The very idea!"

"I mean, you could see they were just cleverly trained monkeys", said Farthing.

"Monkeys don't make tree villages or ride motorcycles", said Cleo coldly.

"They don't?" said Lieutenant Turpin blankly.

"They were very little people in furry suits."

Turpin clicked his fingers in sudden realization. "Little people!"

Farthing nodded. "Furry suits."

"Of course, it's obvious now she says it." Lieutenant Turpin patted Cleo's hand on the table. "You see, that's why we need you. You're the expert."

"What do you need me for today?"

"We're on a mission."

"From God?" said Cleo with mean untrusting eyes.

"Higher up. From Commodore Drummond's commander's commander. The head of the US Zed. President Mathews."

"Gosh, I'm impressed", said Cleo, who wasn't. "What are you here to do?"

"Find out whether we and Earth are about to go to war."

2. The Story of Skyboy

"How you doing?" said Ant's dad, spinning the wheel with an airy unconcern Ant wished he shared. On past performance, somewhere at the back of the truck, concrete bollards were probably being wrenched from the pavement.

"Fine", said Ant. This was the normal limit of his communication with his dad.

"All set for the trip?"

"All set."

Ant's dad slapped Ant's leg jovially. "Excited?"

"Very much so", said Ant unconvincingly.

"They've got a Chill-Out Zone and a bunjee-jumping high wire act telling the story of Skyboy", said his dad. "That's what it says in the programme."

"The story of who?"

"Skyboy. Like in Star Wars, I reckon. Luke Skyboy, that was his name. Probably have a load of stormtroopers catching aquaphibians on the flying trapeze."

Ant's imagination balked at the thought of hordes of bunjee-jumping jawas. "That's Luke Skywalker, dad. And they're not aquaphibians, they're gungans. It sounds really, really lame. Why couldn't we go to the National Space Centre? I've, er, got a school project to do on space travel."

"Because Shawna wanted to go to the Millennium Dome. It's got to be a great day out. They've spent millions on it. It'll be like the Great Exhibition in 1951." Ant's dad frowned into the windscreen. "They looked like aquaphibians to me."

"Dad, aquaphibians are wooden puppets from a TV show made when you were young and dinosaurs ruled the Earth. They look awful. Gungans, meanwhile, are highly complex 1990's CGI creations rendered using gigabytes of computing power."

"That still look awful", said Ant's dad, a smile plastered across his features.

"That still look awful", parrotted Ant, grinning despite himself.

"Shawna wants you to come. She's looking forward to meeting you. And so is Jordan."

"Jordan?" Ant's voice stiffened in alarm.

"Her little lad. Well, I say little, he's a bit taller than you are, actually. It'll be like having a big brother."

"WHAT?"

"Nothing. Er. Did I say something?"

"You did. You said it'd be like having a big brother. You did."

Mr. Stevens backtracked with delicate crablike grace. In the distant world out beyond the windscreen, he narrowly missed a Keep Left sign and a herd of cyclists. "I didn't really say anything -"

"They're moving in with us. Aren't they."

"Well, we thought, I'm not earning as much from the truck as I did, the mortgage is going up, the rent on Shawna's flat is going up too, it'll do us good to have a woman round the house -"

"Dad, just you nearly hit a woman in a wheelchair."

"How many times have I taught you the Highway Code? The ones with wheels aren't pedestrians, they're traffic."

***

"I thought you were already at war."

"Cold war", whispered Lieutenant Farthing. "We stare at them across a few light years of space, they stare back. They send in their reconnaissance ships to photograph our installations, we send ours in to photograph theirs. Occasionally we knock one out, capture the pilot and exchange him for one of ours the enemy have captured."

"But you think the war might turn hot", whispered Cleo. Someone hissed at her to be quiet from the pew in front.

"WHY DO I SEE SO MANY UNHAPPY FACES IN THIS CONGREGATION HERE TODAY?" yelled the minister from the pulpit. Cleo, Turpin and Farthing were jammed into the last pew at the back.

"One of our reconnaissance flights made a pass over the US colony at Newer England, Alpha Centauri Four", whispered Farthing. "That's the closest base they have to our main industrial centres at Hertzsprung-Russell 4523 and Delta Pavonis. A whole squadron of deep space attack ships looked like they were loading cobalt bombs."

"HAVE YOU NOT HEARD THE GOOD NEWS OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST? LET ME HEAR YOU SAY HALLELUJAH!"

"HALLELUJAH!"

"What's a cobalt bomb?" whispered Cleo.

"Well", whispered Lieutenant Farthing, "if you take an ordinary two-stage fusion-boosted fission device and equip it with a cobalt tamper -"

"Okay, okay. It's a bomb and it has cobalt in it."

"Broadly accurate."

"Do you have cobalt bombs?"

"No. We've never built any due to the Morgan Doctrine. Levi Morgan, the USZ's first president, declared that we would rely on threatening to expose the American and Russian governments' secret colonies in space, rather than build cobalt weapons ourselves -"

"WILL YOU BE QUIET!" hissed a huge lady in a huge fuchsia frock from the pew in front.

"NO MATTER WHAT SIN YOU HAVE COMMITTED! NO MATTER WHAT EVIL OR INIQUITOUS ACTS YOU HAVE PERPETRATED! NO MATTER WHAT DRUG YOU HAVE TAKEN, NO MATTER WHAT BLOOD YOU HAVE SPILT! YOU ARE FORGIVEN BY THE EVER-LOVING LORD!"

"Looks like your first President pretty much stuffed you up", whispered Cleo.

"He was a great and wonderful man", said Farthing. "But a few nukes would have solved our immediate short term problems, yes."

"LET ME HEAR YOU SAY PRAISE THE LORD!"

"PRAISE THE LORD!"

"So what do you propose to do?"

"Find a newspaper we can tell American colonies exist in space", said Lieutenant Turpin eagerly, producing and unfolding an entire tabloid unashamedly in a mass of rustling. "We found this American one; it has a wide circulation, and many of its stories concern extraterrestrial life -"

Cleo glanced briefly downward. "It's the National Enquirer."

"Is that bad?"

"The front page headline says Celine Dion is a killer robot programmed by aliens."

Turpin shrugged. "We don't have the Celine Dion background to make an informed judgement."

Cleo looked at Lieutenant Turpin sharply. "Are you saying Celine Dion might be an alien?"

"Well, aliens certainly exist." Turpin looked at the front page photograph again. "Though I doubt they'd design a robot that looked quite so obviously alien."

"She isn't alien. Only Canadian."

"Gosh." Turpin showed the paper to Farthing. "Look, Pen, that's what Canadians look like."

"Oh, the poor things."

The lady in the pew in front now had her hand up, like a tell-tale at school, and the other finger pointing indignantly down at Cleo, Farthing and Turpin.

"I BELIEVE THERE ARE PEOPLE IN OUR MIDST TODAY WHO ARE NOT HEARKENING TO THE WORD OF THE LORD! YOU ARE FORGIVEN! YOU ARE FORGIVEN! COME FORWARD!"

"What?" said Cleo out loud.

"YOU, CHILD! YOU!" Reverend Adebayo's finger was jabbing not down towards Cleo, but towards Lieutenant Turpin.

"Me?" said Turpin, pointing to himself for emphasis.

"YOU!" said Reverend Adebayo triumphantly. "YOU! THE LOST WHITE SHEEP OF THE FLOCK!" This drew a nervous titter from the congregation; Turpin and Farthing were clearly the only white faces in the church. However, to his credit, the preacher pounced on the churchgoers with his finger in turn. "DO NOT LAUGH! FOR I AM SAVING THIS POOR SINNER! WHAT IS YOUR NAME, CHILD?"

"Richard", said Turpin.

"RICHARD! RICHARD THE LION-HEARTED?"

Lieutenant Farthing snickered.

"Actually, I'm a bit of a cowardy custard", admitted Turpin.

"ARE YOU NOT GOING TO COMMAND A GLORIOUS CRUSADE TO SMITE THE HEATHEN?"

"Well, no", said Turpin. "I quite like Mr. Singh, actually."

"ARE YOU AWARE OF THE LOVE OF JESUS?"

"I am." Lieutenant Turpin licked his finger and dived into his newspaper with suspicious speed. "Here on page five, he is described as being alive and well and living in Cleanspot, New Jersey. Look, there's a picture, he's burning holes in a pagan idol with bolts of laser light coming from his eyes -"

Cleo leaned sideways and whispered out of the corner of her mouth. "He's enjoying this."

Farthing's hands gripped her Book Of One Hundred Songs Of Praise For Voice And Acoustic Guitar so hard that the cover squeaked. "I am only just beginning to realize as much. I suspect he has also quite deliberately, on the very first time I've ever visited Earth, walked me down a High Street in an outfit every single person was staring at as if I was mentally defective. He will pay. The next time I maintain his in-flight toilet, oh yes, he will pay."

***

Cleo and Lieutenant Farthing stood at a discreet distance on the large traffic island occupied by the Ecumenical Rainbow Faith Church of the Army of Jesus. Sunday morning traffic zoomed around them. Twenty yards away, Lieutenant Turpin was still standing talking to Reverend Adebayo, beatific smiles etched into both their faces. Occasionally Reverend Adebayo would tap the copy of the Good News Bible he was holding for emphasis; occasionally Turpin would tap his National Enquirer in answer.

"They seem to be getting on well together", said Mrs. Shakespeare.

Cleo shook her head. "They hate each other. Reverend Adebayo makes a big show of making friends with everyone he can't bully."

"Cleopatra!" said Cleo's mother, slapping her lightly on the shoulder, but hiding a guilty smirk with her other hand.

"They're smiling", agreed Farthing, "but their teeth are gritted."

"Do you have Reverends where you come from?" said Cleo.

Lieutenant Farthing shook her head. "Not like this. There aren't enough of us. We have Father Serafino, but he doubles as a Flight Systems mechanic and hydroponics engineer. It's very easy to sidetrack him off the Miracle of the Virgin Birth and onto the gravity braking system on a Hawker Harridan."

"Hydroponics!" said Mr. Shakespeare. "Is there a lot of that in the Orkneys?"

"In our part of the Orkneys", said Farthing.

"Funny", said Mr. Shakespeare. "I'd always imagined crofting was the main form of agriculture in the Orkneys."

"Hydroponic crofting", said Lieutenant Farthing, with such grey-eyed sincerity that Mr. Shakespeare found himself nodding earnestly in agreement.

"So you have a problem", said Cleo. "And you need us to solve it. Or you wouldn't be here."

"Captain Yancy insisted that we enlist trustworthy local assistance", said Lieutenant Farthing.

"That wasn't exactly what he said, was it?" said Cleo.

Lieutenant Farthing pursed her lips. "I believe what he actually said was 'You dumb space monkeys are only one step up from walking up to gas pumps and asking them to take you to their leader'."

Cleo grinned. "So what's the problem?"

"We have no real way of knowing whether planetkillers are being loaded up at Alpha Four or not. All we have are some very blurry photos taken during a pass at point nine lightspeed that seem to show rather bigger stand-off missiles on the loading rails than usual. Now, those stand-off units could be made of cobalt and uranium, or they could be made of plywood. All this might just be an attempt to frighten us. The whole of Alpha Four, you see, is a military district. Any of our ships travelling much slower than lightspeed wouldn't get with a hundred kilometres of the strat-attack bases. But the U.S. and the U.K. military are very methodical people. Every time they load a planetkiller up at Alpha, they ship a replacement up from weapons assembly on the far side of Earth's moon. They store planetkillers on the far side in case of accident, in case one of them goes off on the side facing Earth. Unfortunately, the lunar far side is also a military district. But every time they ship a planetkiller off the Moon, they replace that too, and they do that by sending up transports from Earth, from where the warheads are made in Bedfordshire. And we can land anywhere we want in Bedfordshire."

"Back up here a moment", said Cleo. "You have now said the word 'planetkillers' four times. When you say 'planetkiller', do you by any chance mean a thing that -"

"Kills planets, yes." Farthing nodded. "If a suitably-sized cobalt weapon goes off on a world with surface life, Cobalt-60 fallout will sterilize that world to a depth of a metre or so into the bedrock, making it uninhabitable by most life forms for between fifteen and twenty standard years."

Cleo's face had gone ash-grey with shock.

"Missiles", said Mr. Shakespeare, who had been listening intently.

"Not real missiles", said Cleo hastily. "It's all a big, uh, role-playing game. Yes, a role-playing game is what it is. Penelope here is a Royal Princess of the Planet Galactia. She's searching for the Lost Crystal of Argh, which is the only thing that can restore peace to the galaxy."

Lieutenant Farthing's pupils bounced big and small in her head. Otherwise, she did not react.

"That is absolutely true", she said.

"To be quite honest, she's quite unnaturally obsessed with it", confided Cleo.

"It sounds that way", said Lieutenant Farthing.

"Well, are we ready to go?"

Cleo turned. Lieutenant Turpin was standing behind her, all smiles. Cleo looked from her mother to her father.

"Erm", she said, "normally I'd love to go. It's just that it's the beginning of the summer holidays, and -"

"And Cleo has Christian Adventure Retreat to go on", interposed Mrs. Shakespeare firmly.

Cleo's face went from ashen to whiter-than-Ant. "What?"

"It never did me any harm", said Mrs. Shakespeare, folding her arms with pre-emptive finality.

"But we talked about this!" said Cleo. "We have to sleep in dormitories. They make us sing songs. Happy songs. About Jesus."

"You haven't anything else to do for the whole of the summer", said Mrs. Shakespeare. "You'll only get under my feet. Besides, someone's got to look after your sister."

"I do not need to be looked after", said Tamora.

"Excuse me a moment", said Cleo, flipping out a highly expensive pink mobile phone.

Lieutenant Farthing leaned close. "What are you doing?" she whispered. "Is that a pocket calculator?"

"We're in trouble", said Cleo, dialling furiously. "It's time for the Antphone."

***

Ant's phone, a massive bargain-basement device only marginally smaller than a laptop computer, rang in his bag. It would, after all, not fit in his pocket. He struggled it out of the bag and up to his ear. "Hello?"

"Ant. We have a problem. I am going to be forced to sing happy songs with Christians."

Ant paused to assimilate this. "How is that a we problem?"

"Because it will make me HIGHLY DISAGREEABLE TO BE WITH, Ant."

"Okay, okay, you sold me on the we. I am going to the Millennium Dome."

There was a shocked intake of breath at the other end of the phone. "Oh, Ant, the sadists. Have you thought of checking in at a police station and telling them you're being abused?"

"Believe me, I have. We are spending a lovely day at the Dome, and then nipping down to Shawna's mum's caravan on the Isle of Grain. I will be sharing that caravan with my dad, Shawna, and my New Big Brother, Jordan. There will be ample opportunity for enjoying myself birdwatching, beachcombing, and playing healthy games of British Bulldog with all of Jordan's friends -"

In the seat next to Ant, Ant's dad sat smiling serenely into the distance, gazing out at a clear mental picture of Paradise.

"It's all right, Ant, don't panic. Deep breaths. We will get you through this. I have a plan. It involves Mr. Turpin and Miss Farthing and will solve all our problems in one bold stroke. There is only one small unpleasant detail. Listen carefully..."

Cleo's voice dropped to a whisper, which was good, as the speaker on Ant's brickphone could be clearly heard six feet away.

"Ant? Ant, are you still there? Stop making that strangling noise. It is not that bad. If I were a thin-skinned person I might feel quite insulted. Ant?"

***

"Dad, you were right all along. Cleo and I are going out. We are a couple. An item. She is my girlfriend."

Ant's face was fixed on the speeding traffic in case his father tried to read it. His father, meanwhile, turned round enthusiastically in his seat.

"WOO-HOO! I knew it! Oh, it's going to be so romantic! An autumn wedding!"

"We're not getting married, dad", said Ant through gritted teeth. "We are thirteen years old."

"She's a looker, though! You rascal! And her dad must have a few bob!"

"I can't say I've ever noticed. Dad, the roadblock."

Ant's dad whipped his eyes front. There was no roadblock. "There's no roadblock", he said.

"Made you look, made you stare", said Ant, looking in the truck's side mirrors. "Hey, is that the same Renault as five minutes ago?"

"Yes", nodded his dad. "Been following us the last half mile. Same registration."

Ant was amazed. "How do you know that? You hardly look at the road."

Mr. Stevens shrugged. "I drive this thing around all day, old son. We'll be parking up behind the Super Sausage and switching to the car in a minute. Then we'll see if he's got the guts to keep following."

"You think he's following us?"

"Oh, yeah. He's been doing it all week."

Ant's stomach did a flip inside him. "What's he look like?"

"Little guy, fat, white, bad moustache. Nothing like the Man With The Van, if that's what you're worried about."

That was something at least. The Man With The Van had been chased away by Cleo's and Ant's combined dads when they'd found Ant and Cleo in the woods over a year ago. This had happened only minutes after Ant and Cleo had returned from their trip into space. To explain their absence, they had prepared an elaborate lie in which they had been kidnapped by a desperate criminal who drove a white van. This fictitious man had kept them prisoner for over a month for no apparent reason, then inexplicably released them. On returning to Earth, they had had the good luck to run into just such a man, who had actually been scouring the woods for them. Although this had helped their parents and the police to believe their story, the fact that the man actually existed was worrying. The British government had been hunting Lieutenant Turpin in those same woods when he had kidnapped Ant and Cleo from Earth. Almost certainly, that meant that the Man With The Van was a government agent - and if that meant Ant and Cleo were now suspected of being sympathizers with the rebel colonies in space...

"The thing is", said Ant, "I sort of promised Cleo I'd spend the next couple of weeks with her. On her Christian Retreat", he added quickly.

The streets continued to motor past at an unsafe speed.

"Christian Retreat?" said Ant's dad. "I see. Does it cost anything?"

"No", said Ant confidently. He could almost hear the clank of calculation in his father's head. Christian Retreat at no cost versus Millennium Dome at cost of three tickets @ twenty pounds each rather than four...and he knew perfectly well that his dad would not have booked tickets in advance.

Sure enough, things lurched ponderously down the path of least expense. "All right", said Ant's dad. "But just this once, mind." Mr. Stevens looked secretly relieved at not having to spend a week confined to the same caravan as both Jordan and Ant. Unsettlingly, however, he also looked disappointed at having missed an opportunity to introduce Ant to his new family.

"You tell your mum, though", he said. Ant nodded. He was used to acting as an intermediary between his mum and dad. At least he wasn't doing this while they were both in the same house any longer. "Tell your father this." "Well, you tell your mother that." Tell her yourself, she's only in the spare room upstairs.

***

"The only trouble is, mum, I told Ant I'd spend a couple of weeks with him in Dougie's partner's mum's caravan on the Isle of Grain."

Mrs. Shakespeare blinked.

"LEONARD", she said.

"Does Dougie know about this?" said Mr. Shakespeare quickly.

"Oh yes", said Cleo. "He would have to. It's a very small caravan. We girls are all sleeping in one room, the boys in another. Can I take my sleeping bag? I don't think they'll have one spare."

Mrs. Shakespeare looked meaningfully at Mr. Shakespeare. Mr. Shakespeare drew in his breath and frowned, contemplating the imaginary horrors that might await his daughter in a caravan on the Isle of Grain, and balancing them against the very real horrors that would result if she was not allowed to get her own way.

Finally he looked up and said:

"Is this going to cost money?"

3. Out of Way, Monkey Head

The Shakespeares' Volvo pulled into Ant's drive. Further down the road, Mr. Stevens' eighteen-wheeler was parked across Miss Purbright's, Mr. Carslaw's and Mrs. Gooch's front drives, as usual. Normally, bitter complaints would result if a truck was parked across an entrance, but Miss Purbright, Mr. Carslaw, and Mrs. Gooch were all OAP's, and Mr. Stevens' truck brought them cheap cigarettes, Belgian chocolates and gin. For this, they were prepared to let it take up five parking spaces on a semi-permanent basis.

Mr. Shakespeare wound down the window and looked across at the truck.

"Well, Dougie's here."

"I still think this is too much to let a young girl do at Cleo's age", said Mrs. Shakespeare. "I never let you sleep in the same caravan as me at her age."

"Yes", said Mr. Shakespeare, remembering grimly. "But times change. And Dougie is in charge. If Dougie is involved, it will be all right."

Mrs. Shakespeare sat with her hands twisting in her lap as Cleo manoeuvred her enormous suitcase out of the car. "I don't know what you see in him."

"I wanted to give up", said Mr. Shakespeare softly.

"What?" said Cleo.

"When we were looking for you in the woods. I wanted to give up. You know, I kept telling myself, statistics say that after the first couple of days a child is missing, the chances are the child isn't coming back. But Dougie, you see, he doesn't have my fine education and he doesn't give a damn about statistics. He would have stayed in those woods searching till the Moon fell out of the sky. He shamed me into staying."

Mrs. Shakespeare, Tamora and Cleo, struck dumb, sat and stood still, not daring even to look at each other, or at their own reflections in the car's mirrors.

"See you in two weeks' time, princess", said Mr. Shakespeare, and wound the window up on the driver's side. Cleo stood back from the car as the engine fired up and the wheels span on the gravel.

Ant walked out of the house, catching an accusing glare from Tamora in the Volvo's back window. Ant waved cheerily at her as the car sped away.

"Oh my god", said Cleo. "My dad gave up looking for me."

"That's nice", said Ant. "Tamora suspects."

"What, suspects that we're about to go into outer space? That's one deductive little sister I've got there."

"Possibly not. But certainly she thinks we're not going to the Isle of Grain."

Cleo nodded. "Our first stop has to be an internet café. You need to know everything there is to know about St. Ignatius de Loyola's Faith-Based Prescribed Christian Activity Centre, and I need to know everything there is to know about the Isle of Grain."

"It's flat and it stinks at low tide", said Ant. "That's all you need to know."

Lieutenant Turpin and Lieutenant Farthing rose from their hiding place behind the bushes outside Number Thirteen.

"Have they gone?"

"Yes. Where's the space ship?"

Lieutenant Turpin looked at Cleo as if she were mad. "Space ship?"

"Yes. You came here in a space ship, out of space?"

Turpin looked at Farthing, who evidently shared his concern for Cleo's sanity. "Well...yes, but, as I said, we're going to Bedfordshire. Bedfordshire's not a very long way away."

Cleo looked coolly at Turpin. "It is if you walk there, buster."

"I thought we might use one of your earth cars", said Turpin. "They move on the planetary surface under power." He made a motion with his hand of a car moving on the planetary surface under power.

"Got a driving licence?" said Ant.

Turpin shook his head. "No. What's one of those? Does it have anything to do with golf?"

"Lieutenant Turpin, you were driving a van when we found you last time."

Turpin shook his head. "George Quantrill drove the van. All those pedals and levers scare me."

Ant ignored this. "Couldn't we just take off in your ship and land again a little bit to the south?"

"Go ten miles? In a Fantasm fighter? A ship designed for travelling across astronomical units of space?" Turpin looked shocked. "I dare say it's physically possible...of course, we'd have to get there first."

"We didn't land as close to here as we might have", confided Farthing.

"Where did you land?" said Cleo.

"Bedfordshire", said Turpin, smirking bashfully.

"Lieutenant Turpin suffered a navigational incapacity", said Lieutenant Farthing.

"I landed us on the right island on the right planet in the right solar system", complained Turpin. "In astronomical terms, we might as well be in the next room."

Cleo fixed Turpin with a hundred-watt stare. "Mr. Turpin, you are being deliberately obtuse. You got from where you landed to here somehow. How did you do that?"

"Via what I like to call the Universal Planet Earth Transportation System", said Turpin.

"Which is?" said Cleo.

Turpin grinned and stuck up his thumb.

***

"I not suppose to pick up hitch hiker", said the young, shaven-headed man driving the Transit. "But in my country half of country hitch hike. No-one have car. OUT OF WAY, MONKEY HEAD!" He leaned on his horn with his elbows, shooing a dawdling driver out of the fast lane, lit a foul-smelling cigarette with his free hand, and tossed a crisp packet out of the window with the hand he should have been using to hold the steering wheel.

He took a drag on the cigarette and offered it to Ant.

"I'm sorry", said Ant. "I'm too young."

"In my country", said the man, "everyone smoke cigarette, since pop out of mama." He offered the cigarette to Lieutenant Farthing, who shied from it like a horse from a snake.

"Don't you have lung cancer in your country either?" said Cleo from the back of the van.

"Oh yes, pretty lady. We have big communist nuclear reactor ten kilometre outside capital city, melt down, everyone got cancer, so smoke as many cigarette as want, not matter one tinker's flying cuss." A mobile phone rang somewhere down by his groin. He rummaged for it, barely mising a slow-moving Sunshine Coach full of old people. "HELLO? I RUN HALF HOUR LATE, IS TERRIBLE TRAFFIC. I RIGHT NEAR SCOTCH CORNER, BE WITH YOU IN TEN." He winked at Lieutenant Farthing. He had been doing a lot of winking at Lieutenant Farthing.

"Where do you come from exactly?" said Cleo.

"I not sure exactly. Name of country change on regular basis. Was once part of Hostro-Ungarian Hempire. LOOK IN MIRROR, IDIOT MAN, YOU SEE HOW YOU SO UGLY!"

In the back of the van, Lieutenant Turpin was sitting watching the traffic sail past, his whitened knuckles gripping the shelf rails in the walls.

"Mr. Turpin, you are such a baby", said Cleo. "You're used to travelling near lightspeed, and we're barely doing a hundred and ten."

Turpin swallowed something that seemed to object to being swallowed and fight its way back up his throat. His face was pale, his eyes pleading. In the front of the cab, Lieutenant Farthing looked similar.

"I just saw a sign for Bedford", said Ant.

"That's good", said Cleo.

"It was on the northbound side. We're southbound."

"You no worry. You Uncle Prawo he get you where you want to be got." Ant's Uncle Prawo handed him a business card. "I also install you new nice central heating, all British Standard, no foreign rubbish. MOTHER OF A PIG, YOU USE ACCELERATOR IS NEXT TO BRAKE!"

"We're going in the right direction", said Turpin gently. "We need Sapphirey Park, just like I said."

"Never heard of it", said Ant.

"Is famous tourist attraction!" said Ant's Uncle Prawo. "Beautiful country house, get visit by many British peoples, drive round in cars with windows shut, lose windowscreen wipers." He began making hooting noises and beating his chest for no apparent reason.

Ant stared at him blankly.

"I'm sorry", he said. "That one lost something in translation."

Then, just to the left of Uncle Prawo, he saw a thing that caused the blood to freeze in his veins. In the fast lane, hanging back a hundred yards, was a navy blue Renault, and sitting in its driving seat was a short fat white man with a bad moustache. What had the registration been? Impossible to remember.

"Er, Prawo", said Ant. "I think we're being followed. You understand 'followed'?"

Prawo looked in his mirrors in puzzlement. "Is no police."

"It's not police", said Cleo.

"No police? Then they eat my, how you say, ekshaustor! Is no man follow Prawo Jazdy we need next exit I think yes?"

"...yes", said Ant doubtfully, as the next exit sailed past, lost, to their left.

The van changed down a gear and the seat hit Ant in the back with a whiplash-inducing impact. The van's sides rocked, trying desperately to escape their chassis; twin trails of boiling rubber smoked on the road behind them. The Transit swerved across two HGV's to nip into the junction to a fanfare of horns. Behind them, through the back window, Cleo saw a blue Renault frantically change lanes, trying to follow the Transit, only to smash into the driver-side wing of an unsuspecting white Nissan in the centre lane. Bits of car flew everywhere. The BANG of the two cars coming together could be heard even inside the Transit. In seconds, the road behind them was a mass of skidded collided cars. Drivers emerged and began arguing with each other. Two well-dressed men in suits, both holding bleeding noses, were getting out of the Nissan.

"He no follow nobody no more", said Prawo in satisfaction as the Transit drew up to the lights at the top of the junction. "I am James Bond! I drive like I love! I install low cost domestic plumbing solution!" He thumped his chest proudly.

"I can't see any signs for Sapphirey Park", said Ant.

"Is here", said Prawo. "You trust." His mobile phone went off again; he seized it and yelled "HELLO IS VERY BAD TRAFFIC SORRY LINE IS BREAKING UP. I AT HANGER LANE GYRATORY, BE WITH YOU BEFORE YOU KNOW, FIX YOU NICE MIXER TAPS, YES?"

***

"You can drop us off here", said Turpin suddenly.

Prawo looked up and down a long, completely empty stretch of road. To one side, a very high brick wall separated them from huge, high old trees. On the other side were hedges and farmland.

"This is it", said Turpin. "Sapphirey Park."

Prawo nodded and braked with surprising gentleness. "Is true. But entrance is on other side."

"We're not going in by the entrance." Turpin pointed to a stretch of wall that looked as impassable as any other stretch of wall. "Here will be fine." He extended a hand. "Thanks very much."

"Is no problem for Prawo! I am iron man!" Prawo handed Turpin a card. "Reinstall you boiler, rates very reasonable." He winked once more at Lieutenant Farthing as Ant and Cleo hopped out of the van, and Farthing and Turpin slithered sickly out of it like crocodiles off a mud bank. It was good to have their feet on the ground again after an hour of driving and plumbing-related conversation. As Prawo burned away waving in a cloud of rubber and diesel, Farthing said:

"Did he just call me a boiler?"

"If he did", said Ant, "I'm sure it was a compliment. He obviously cares very deeply about them."

Cleo scowled at Turpin. "We have to get to your ship right now. He was so a government agent. Nobody is that Eastern European."

Ant weighed in in Prawo's defence. "But he got us away from that Renault! And that guy was following us!"

Cleo shrugged. "Maybe he was an agent working for the Other Side. Maybe he only wants his people following us."

Ant span round the landscape, waving at it demonstratively. "Cleo, we are alone. There is nobody on this road for over half a mile."

"Oh, we won't see them", said Cleo, with immense self assurance. "They'd be far too clever for that."

A Mondeo estate was approaching down the road from the motorway, apparently being careful not to exceed the miniscule local speed limit. Ant's, Cleo's, Turpin's and Farthing's eyes locked on to it and continued to stare fixedly at it as it rolled slowly towards them, passed them, and rolled away. A balding, middle-aged man with glasses sat behind the wheel, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Next to him, a middle-aged woman sat underneath a massive perm. Behind them in the back seat, two children of around seven and nine, a boy and a girl respectively, stared back through identical National Health glasses. In the very back of the car, a red setter looked happily out at the world. The driver and the woman looked uncomfortable at being stared at. The boy stuck his tongue out at Ant, and so did the dog.

There was a moment of quiet as the car vanished round a bend in the road.

"They weren't", insisted Ant. "They were so not. They had children."

"Those children", said Cleo, "could have been highly trained dwarfs."

"Little people", nodded Turpin with grim sagacity. "In furry suits."

"The dog was genuine", said Cleo quickly, before Turpin acquired ideas.

"Cleo, this is pure paranoia." Ant turned to Turpin. "And I don't see any spacecraft around here anywhere."

"Of course not. We've hidden ours." Turpin's face assumed an expression of extreme cunning. "We put leaves and branches on top of it."

Ant looked round. Grass, leaves and branches stretched away to the horizon. He rubbed his head to make his brain work harder.

"Well, all I can say is that you've hidden it very well."

"Not here, monkey head", said Turpin. "Over here." He walked up to the fifteen-foot-high wall that flanked the road. "In Sapphirey Park." Bending down into the grass, he picked up a long, forked tree bough, needing to use both hands because of its weight. Staggering about in the grass underneath it, looking up his stick like a plate spinner, he poked it up into the branches of a massive lime that overhung the wall, and hooked a rope off a bough. The end of the rope dropped down to ground level, and Turpin tested it by pulling down hard. Then he set his teeth with concentration and began to walk up the wall, feeding the rope through his fingers. Seconds later, he was balanced on the top of the wall, breathing in great spasming gasps.

"He's really out of shape", remarked Ant.

"He comes from a world where gravity is only eighty per cent Earth normal", said Lieutenant Farthing, looking up the rope nervously. "And so do I."

"I am one hundred per cent sure I am not going up that rope", said Cleo, folding her arms. "Ropes and I don't get on. If I were a rope, I would have no rope friends of my own, and would be very lonely."

Ant grunted in disgust, took hold of the rope, and strolled up the wall. Lieutenant Turpin had still not regained his breath when he reached the top.

"Come on Pen", said Turpin. "You made it on the way out."

Farthing grimaced, spat into her palms, and grabbed hold of the rope. Turpin sucked in his breath, forced himself to his feet unsteadily on top of the wall, and wound the rope around himself, swaying backwards to take the weight off Farthing.

"Richard, remember, we'll fall further if we do fall", cautioned Farthing. "You fall ten metres further in three seconds in this gravity than you do back home."

"Luckily I think we'll hit something before our three seconds are up", said Turpin. "Climb, Pen."

Farthing gritted her teeth and stepped up onto the wall. With every step up the wall, her shoulders shook and her breath whooshed out like steam from a locomotive. By the time she was halfway up the wall, Ant was absolutely convinced she was not going to make it. Her face was beetroot-red, and her knuckles white as raw chicken on the rope.

She made it, rising to an awkward position on top of the wall where she and Turpin were balanced delicately facing each other, connected by the rope. Hugely embarrassed, and obviously trying to touch each other as little as possible, they manoeuvred themselves to left and right until they were both sitting on the capstones of the wall.

The worst, however, was yet to come, Ant knew. As Turpin and Farthing dropped off the wall into the woods on the other side, Ant was still looking down at Cleo, who still had her arms folded.

"I am not", said Cleo, "going up that rope."

"Hey, look", came Turpin's voice from the forest floor behind him. "An animal. Do you think that's a deer?"

"Come on", said Ant. "You can do it. I know you can."

Cleo walked up and down the roadside, glaring at the ground, shaking her head. "You are not looking at Miss British Amateur Gymnastics", she said. "I do not do physical education. My body contains muscles by accident rather than design." She turned around and began sulking in the opposite direction.

"I think it's too big for a deer. Do you think it's friendly?"

"I don't know, let's try feeding it. Do you think it likes chocolate?"

"Look at the nose on it!"

"Couldn't you just try?"

Cleo wheeled around again, her jaw set. She had walked far enough up the road to be on the other side of a large roadsign that had its back to Ant.

A white Nissan was approaching up the road. That in itself would have been unremarkable. But the wing of this particular Nissan was hanging off in plastic rags, pieces of it dropping off as it came on. It was moving slowly, but despite that, it would be with them in half a minute or so.

"Er - Cleo?" said Ant. "We may have a problem."

Had the Nissan's driver been intending to leave at the same junction they had? The Nissan had been in the middle lane, but a sharp and dangerous swerve would still have been needed to make the turn. Hadn't it been the Renault, not the Nissan, that had been following them, though?

Had the Nissan simply left the road because of the accident it had just had?

"Cleo", he said, "I think you should stand very, very still and act like landscape."

Cleo did not answer. Looking back towards her, he saw her with her head raised up high, her eyes wide, reading the other side of the roadsign.

"Ant", she said, "I think we may have a problem."

"I know", said Ant. "I've already seen it."

"Don't be obtuse, Ant. How could you have seen this? Just come down here and look."

Unwilling to leave the relative safety of the wall, Ant crabbed awkwardly sideways along it, conscious all the while that the Nissan was approaching. It had slowed, as if it was taking a special interest in its surroundings. The sign was a brown one, a Tourist Information sign. It was almost edge-on to him, but he could make out the words:

SAFARI PARK

"Oh my god", said Ant.

"Oh my god indeed", said Cleo.

"Oh, he's adorable! Can we take him home?"

***

The Nissan had slowed gently to a stop around a hundred metres down the road.

"What are they doing?" said Cleo.

"Maybe they're confused", said Ant. "Maybe they were only told to watch us. Maybe they're calling in for further instructions. Maybe they're wondering if we've rumbled them or not."

"Maybe they're just ordinary people who've just had a nasty accident."

"Leaving the scene of an accident that fast", said Ant, "is illegal. I should know. My dad does it often enough. If he thinks no-one's been hurt, that is", he added hastily.

Cleo looked up at Ant. "They don't look hurt", she said. "One of them's talking into a really big mobile phone."

"Maybe he's calling the really big AA", said Ant. "DON'T LOOK UP AT ME. They might not have realized I'm here yet." Ant began moving backwards along the wall, feeling for the rope.

"Oh, it's always about YOU, isn't it. They're sure to catch Cleo, but the important thing is that they might not get YOU -"

He found the rope with a groping hand and shook it to get her attention while she was looking in his direction, winding it around himself as he had seen Lieutenant Turpin do.

"No way. Don't even think about it, Antman."

The car squealed suddenly into reverse, its wheels two maelstroms of rubber smoke. Cleo yelped and ran for the rope with a peculiarly feminine gait not actually resembling running so much as a mobile attempt to dry her nail polish. She grabbed hold of the rope, nearly yanking Ant off the wall, and ran up the bricks as if they were horizontal. Cannoning into Ant, she coiled her arms around him like an octopus. The two stood motionless on top of the wall, prevented from moving by the force of Cleo's grip. Ant was acutely aware that, if they started to fall in either direction now, bones would be broken.

"Are they going away?" said Cleo over Ant's shoulder.

"No", said Ant. "They're standing by their car looking up at us. One of them's talking to his big mobile phone again. Now, just bend your knees very slowly, and we'll separate." Cleo's heart thumped against his. Their feet wobbled on the wall as they lowered into a crouch. As they did so, one of the men made a step forward towards the rope. Ant whipped it up into the air. The man stepped back. Both men started to examine the wall to right and left, looking for a break or an entrance. None were apparent for a very long way.

"But I thought it was the Renault that was following us", said Cleo.

"Like you said", said Ant. "They'll be far too clever for that. They're good at following people. They probably do it all day every day."

"Aren't his big teeth fabulous."

"Maybe he's a horse. Horses are bigger than deer, aren't they?"

Cleo raised her voice. "LIEUTENANT TURPIN, UNHAND THAT ELEPHANT."

There was an abrupt but lasting silence, followed by the anxious words:

"Elephant?"

"Down off the wall", said Ant. "Hang and drop. And don't give me any more of that I Don't Do Gym rubbish, or I AM LEAVING YOU BEHIND."

He hit the ground, intending to roll, and instead collapsing into a tangle of limbs with the breath smashed out of him. When he rose to his feet, he also discovered he had had a softer landing than he had intended.

"Elephant poo", he said in disgust, flicking flecks of a fibrous stinking sustance off himself. Flicking did no good. It had the adhesive qualities of superglue.

"There's no need to swear", said Lieutenant Farthing.

"No", said Ant, "I really do mean elephant poo. And what you have there, Mr. Turpin, is an animal of the sort that makes elephant poo. I'll leave you to figure out exactly what sort of animal that is."

The elephant was huge, the height of a building. When they had been on the wall, it had been hidden partially by the trees, but also partially, Ant suspected, by the absolute certainty that an elephant could not possibly be hiding in a clump of trees in Bedfordshire. Its tusks alone were the height of Ant. Its hide was as gnarled and wrinkled as tree bark. Its ears were big as swans' wings which, Ant was aware, were capable of breaking a man's arm.

"But I thought elephants lived in Africa", said Turpin.

"Maybe they migrate", said Farthing.

"Silly", said Turpin. "Britain is an island. We choose to land here because it contains no dangerous wildlife and the police don't carry firearms. Are you sure it's an elephant?" he said.

"It ain't no gerbil", said Ant.

"He's not dangerous, anyway", said Turpin, patting the elephant affectionately on its trunk.

"Not as long as you have an inexhaustible supply of chocolate ", said Ant. "Do you?" The trunk was clearly and deftly searching through each of Turpin's pockets in turn, no doubt for further chocolate. He wondered when Turpin would notice.

Turpin looked worried for the first time. "Er - no."

"Then on no account", said Ant solemnly, "act like chocolate."

Turpin's face went whiter than a Milky Bar. He began patting the elephant's trunk more methodically. "Nice elephant", he said. "Friendly, non-carnivorous elephant."

"Just walk away from it", said Farthing to Turpin.

"I've tried", said Turpin. "But when I do, this happens."

He backed away gently from the elephant. The elephant padded gently forwards and curled its trunk affectionately round his throat. If it had been a cartoon elephant, little red love hearts would have been pouring from it. The elephant liked Mr. Turpin.

"Where's your ship?" said Ant.

"Not far", said Farthing. "We, er, hid it in the trees in a part of the woods there seemed to be no people in."

"This is a safari park", said Ant. "A big enclosure where African animals live, through which people pay to drive with the car doors and windows locked securely, and on no account get out of their cars."

"I see", said Farthing - then, after she had thought further on the matter, added: "Why?"

Ant shrugged. "So they can see what it's like to drive through Africa without ever getting out of their cars", he said. "And with their windscreen wipers stolen by monkeys", he added.

"Monkeys?", said Farthing in sheer unadulterated terror.

"You've been watching King Kong, haven't you", said Ant.

Farthing nodded shamefacedly.

"Real monkeys are smaller", he said.

Farthing exhaled in massive relief.

"You think yourselves lucky you didn't come down in the lion enclosure."

"LION ENCLOSURE?" The terror was back. "There are LIONS?"

"Almost certainly. Safari park staple, lions."

"Are they bigger than deer?"

"Very."

"And how big are deer, exactly?"

Ant let his imagination run riot. "Over twenty feet long."

Farthing gulped. "I see. Do people in Africa drive through enclosures with animals from Britain in them?"

Ant had never thought about this. "I dare say", he said.

The elephant became interested in Lieutenant Turpin's shoelaces. Against all of Ant's prior knowledge of elephants, it seemed to be attempting to untie them.

"We really do need to do something about the whole Mr.-Turpin-being-menaced-by-an-elephant situation", said Ant diplomatically to Lieutenant Farthing.

Farthing observed Turpin's predicament drily.

"Maybe it'll teach him to dress up his friends as idiots and walk them down the High Street", she said. "This is my first trip to Earth! My first trip! I was promised the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon! And instead", she looked around herself with venom, unable to think of a word bad enough.

Ant nodded. "Bedfordshire. Erm, I'm afraid the Hanging Gardens of Babylon aren't around any more. On past performance, I imagine we probably bombed them at some point."

Farthing's expression darkened, and she looked across at Turpin. "Someone is going to be spending a very long time making friends with Mr. Elephant."

Behind them, a squeal and a sound of splintering brushwood announced Cleo's arrival on their side of the wall.

"The ship is over here", said Farthing, for whom Turpin seemed to have ceased to exist. "I tied the tape round that tree over there to mark it."

"I can see it now. Is that camouflage netting?"

"Yes. Luckily we found some in green. A lot of our netting is blue. Instaraquae Saxiphagia, you know. The aquamarine lichen. It covers ten per cent of our planetary surface." Farthing began stripping the net from the ship. Ant had remembered the Fantasm being shiny and bright as silverware. Now it was blacker than black, darker than a P.E. teacher's soul. Inexplicably, it also sparkled like satin. It was also carrying a large number of what Ant judged to be weapons pods slung under its stubby wings.

"Are you sure this is the same ship?" said Ant. "It's a whole different colour."

"It's Twinkle paint", said Farthing. "Supposed to make the ship not show up against a black background. But not just black, you see. Black with stars. It's experimental. Only special ops ships are getting it. It's a bit of a misnomer, really. Stars don't twinkle in space." She began rolling up the netting methodically. "The trouble with it is, we have to put netting over the ship on the ground, or it looks like a big blot of night from overhead. Even in the dark, it looks darker than the rest of the night."

It was the same ship. It could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was - the fastest thing in the sky. In form, the stolen Soviet starfighter resembled a dagger thrust through a hollow steel disc, its leading edges honed to razor sharpness. This particular machine was a training model with an extra cockpit for the instructor; the instructor's cockpit was stencilled HIGHWAYMAN, which Ant knew to be Lieutenant Turpin's call sign. The trainee pilot's cockpit, at the front of the nose, was stencilled JOHNNY REB.

"Who's Johnny Reb?" said Ant. "Is that your call sign?"

Lieutenant Farthing spoke over her shoulder. "No. Do I look like a Johnny? No, my call sign is something depressingly obvious. I'm sure you can work it out for yourself. I'm pretty sure you can work out who Johnny Reb is too."

There was only one obvious candidate, though it seemed preposterous. "Glenn Bob? Is he old enough to learn to fly?"

"The USZ needs pilots", said Farthing. "In the old West, everyone either knew how to ride a horse or starved. On Gondolin, everyone learns to fly a starship."

Ant became suddenly, violently convinced that Glenn Bob was the person he most envied in the entire universe.

"Er, guys", said Turpin, "what shall I do with this elephant?"

The hull also bore lettering in a strange alphabet, all swoops and curls. "Mock Martian", said Farthing, noticing Ant's interest. "Designed to make the ship look alien to UFO spotters. The USZ insignia are still there, just covered over with patches."

"Thank you", said Cleo, dusting herself off behind them, "for helping me to my feet when I was in evident distress." Her nose wrinkled as she caught the scent of Ant.

"Ant, your inner beauty is really making itself felt today. The bad guys are trying to drive round the wall, I think. They shot off to the north." She pointed. "Is that the north? And, um, does he have that elephant under control?"

Ant examined the elephant. It seemed placid enough, though it was currently probing the back of Lieutenant Turpin's collar with its trunk, producing the interesting sight of a man trying to giggle while terrified.

"I'm betting", said Ant, "that you have some chocolate on board your ship?"

"That's the Commodore's shipment", said Farthing, horrified. "Twenty-five kilos of finest Belgian dark." She thrust a key into one of the weapons pods under the wings, which hissed slowly open to reveal clusters of clingfilm-wrapped boxes labelled LEONIDAS, GODIVA and NEUHAUS, crammed with difficulty into the limited space.

Ant nodded. "Just because you're on a mission of dire importance doesn't mean you don't have to shop for the Commodore, right? Well, we need them. Some of them, at least. We need to decoy the elephant away from the Lieutenant."

"But surely elephants are herbivorous", said Lieutenant Farthing. "Richard is perfectly safe."

"Yes", said Ant. "They are herbivores which have been known to gore, trample and pick up passers-by with their adorable noses and bash them against the nearest tree."

The elephant looked at Ant reproachfully. Turpin was both sweating and trembling.

"Don't tremble", said Ant. "Elephants can smell fear."

"He'll be able to smell considerably more than fear in a minute", said Turpin.

"Be nice to him", said Ant. Working a box free of the clingfilm, he handed it to Cleo. "You'll have to do this. My inner beauty is making itself felt, remember."

Cleo looked at the chocolate box as if at an unexploded bomb. "Me? Why do I have to do it?"

"That elephant is an intelligent and discriminating animal", explained Ant patiently as the elephant tested Turpin's hat for edibility. "It is not going to be tempted by food that smells of its own poo. All you have to do", he said, "is walk north from here for around a hundred metres or so, dropping a chocolate every couple of metres. Ideally a brightly coloured one that an elephant would find interesting. I and Lieutenant Farthing will do the rest."

"North", said Cleo.

"Definitely north", grinned Ant.

"And you and Lieutenant Farthing will do the rest."

Ant glowed so red he thought his skin might crisp. Despite the fact that Lieutenant Farthing was standing right next to him and had plainly been able to hear Cleo, she did not react at all, but continued to pack the camouflage netting away extra carefully in one of the storage pods.

"I'm afraid we only brought two flight suits", she said. "So we can't take you out of atmosphere. Safety regulations."

Ant was crestfallen. He had been looking forward to more trips to other worlds, worlds more fantastic and hopefully less dangerous than Gondolin and New Dixie. But the arrangement had, after all, been that he and Cleo would be the USZ's representatives on Earth. If he hadn't seen the flaw in the plan, it was hardly the USZ's fault.

At that point, Lieutenant Farthing, who had uncovered the aft portion of the ship, said a word of which Ant would not have believed her capable. She was standing looking at the fins projecting from the rear hull.

"Is something wrong?" said Ant innocently.

"Wrong? Well, of course there's something wrong! Look at the shape of the portside tachyon collector! What's happened to it?"

Ant had no idea what the portside tachyon collector did, or what shape it should be. However, moving round the vessel and comparing it with the starboard tachyon collector, he was able to make an informed judgement. The collectors were supposed to stick out of the hull at forty-five degrees. The left hand one was bent back like a dog's ear.

"Well, this is only an educated guess", he said, "but I'd say an elephant happened to it."

Farthing was almost hysterical. "Why would an elephant attack a spaceship?"

"It probably didn't attack it", said Ant. "It seems to have quite liked your spaceship. But not as a spaceship; more as a sort of scratching post."

"Great", muttered Farthing. "That's hyperspace communication out the window."

"It doesn't look too badly damaged. If it's soft metal, it might just bend back."

The elephant had found something in Turpin's top pocket. Lifting it out with the dexterity of a pickpocket, it examined it delicately with an enormous tongue.

"Uh...Pen..." said Turpin.

"Don't be wet, Richard. We'll have it away from you in a minute, when Cleopatra gets back."

"I really think you should look at this, Pen."

The elephant now had in its mouth what was clearly, from the pistol grip, trigger and muzzle, a sort of weapon. It was attempting to eat it.

"It'll kill itself", marvelled Ant.

"That", muttered Turpin, "or make itself very, very happy."

"Why? What is that thing?"

Turpin's every muscle was tensed for an inevitable cataclysm. "Richard Gould and Steven Dawkins call it a Personal Orgonizer. It's an experimental non-violent weapons system." He cringed beneath the elephant's massive bulk, as if expecting the trunk to descend and crush him. "It sort of makes people so happy that they don't want to attack you any more."

"Like your humane killer we saw on Gondolin", said Ant. "Oh my god. It was Cleo who told you it had military applications."

"Yes", said Turpin. "Steven and Richard told me to pass on their thanks for that."

"Remind me to stand back while you do. Does it hurt?"

"Hardly. They spent all afternoon firing it at each other. We had to prise it out of Richard's fingers." The sound of the elephant's massive molars working on the weapon seemed to be setting Turpin's own teeth on edge. "The trouble is, I really don't think you're supposed to eat it."

The elephant's gullet suddenly flared green and purple. It shied away violently, tossing its head as Turpin ducked; then, it shivered from nose to toes. It hesitated a moment, then continued chewing; then seemed to sneeze and trumpet at the same time, releasing a shower of sparks and one perfect incandescent smoke ring.

By this time, it was making a most un-elephantine noise, almost like a gigantic, contented purr. It continued to chew happily. Turpin backed away cautiously, but it seemed to have forgotten he'd ever existed.

Cleo pelted out of the woods, holding the half empty box of chocolates like the front runner in an egg-and-spoon race; Lieutenant Farthing grabbed it and began scattering them on the grass. The elephant reached down langorously and began picking up sweets one by one. It appeared to be in elephant heaven. Ant noticed, however, that it seemed to be studiously ignoring the coffee creams.

"They're coming!" said Cleo. "I saw them climbing over the wall!"

Farthing nodded. "Better go." She cast an eye over Ant's jacket. "Better take that off, too. I'm not sharing a hermetically sealed environment with it."

"My dad bought me this."

To Ant's horror, Lieutenant Farthing bent down to him, hands on thighs, as if to a very small child, before saying: "I'll get you a better one. Now off with it and into the nav seat; you can do less harm there. Quick now, if we take a shot to the hull we won't be going anywhere higher than a mile. One bullethole will suck out all the air in the ship in a minute as soon as we leave atmosphere."

"Time to go", said Turpin. He turned to Farthing. "I was going to set you straight on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I swear."

Farthing jumped into the aft cockpit. "No time to talk. Get in."

"Hey, that's the flight instructor's seat - that's my seat - LEAVE THAT CONTROL OVERRIDE ALONE -"

The cockpit canopy closed and pressurised itself with a hiss. Ant needed no encouragement to climb into the centre cockpit, but found it crammed with beer bottles and Belgian salami.

"Sorry", said Turpin. "Throw that stuff out." He picked up a protesting Cleo and threw her into the centre cockpit after Ant, before vaulting into the front cockpit and dropping his own canopy down. The impetus of the Fantasm's propulsion system powering up shuddered through the hull.

Panic-stricken, Cleo clambered about the cockpit, preventing Ant, who she was sitting on, from moving. "We're taking off! We're taking off! The canopy isn't closed! Ant!" She mouthed THE CANOPY ISN'T CLOSED at Farthing in the rear cockpit. Ant wrestled two handfuls of beer bottles out of the cockpit, but with both Cleo and himself sitting in the navigator's seat, the canopy would still not shut. Meanwhile, Ant was acutely aware that the trees on either side of the ship were growing shorter.

A tiny, insistent voice sounded from the control console. Ant looked down and saw a rubber flight helmet, containing an oxygen mask and earpieces. Quickly, he rummaged down past Cleo's knees, pulled out the flight helmet and dropped it onto his own skull.

"- 's better, can you hear me now?" The voice was Farthing's. Ant looked back at the aft cockpit and nodded.

"Good. We're not going to be able to shut the nav cockpit with both of you in there, so keep your heads down. Try and get the safety belt round both of you if you can. It's behind you to the right and left. I'm going to try and fly gentle -"

Cleo gave a sudden shriek as the entire ship tilted and turned in the air. The canopy flopped uselessly above Ant's head, and he heard a sharp hissing sound as two white contrails zipped past the cockpit. From the ground, he heard excited trumpeting.

"...that settles it...only Special Ops men carry rocket pistols..."

Cleo's backside was sticking out of the canopy; the ship appeared to be reversing in the air, the ground tilting giddily. Ant scrabbled for anything resembling a seatbelt to right and left of him.

"...shoot at MY ship, would you..."

The ship bucked gently in the air; there was a sound like thunder, and the forest below exploded. Leaves, branches and splintered tree bark pinwheeled into the air, filling the world with flying greenness. Ant spat out a mouthful of pine needles.

"FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, WHAT WAS THAT?"

Turpin's voice sounded from the forward cockpit. "Erm, that'll be a violent weapons system, a pair of bow-mounted coil guns...Richard Gould felt there weren't enough guns in the design."

"...can't see too well from back here...I didn't hit the elephant, did I?"

Ant stood up in the seat, looking down on an acre of felled forest in which a fully intact elephant was banging a Special Operations man against a tree stump with its trunk. The other Special Ops man was cowering behind a tree, his hands gripping his head. "I can report a continuing positive elephant situation, Lieutenant."

Then the ship surged forward, throwing Cleo on top of Ant once more, and nothing was visible outside the cockpit but sky.

"...Hang on...let me get some height...I'll try and hide us in that raincloud..."

RAINCLOUD? thought Ant in alarm, and no sooner had he thought it than the cockpit was drenched with cold water. Rain hissed in like a solid mass; his T-shirt was wet through instantly. Above him, Cleo shrieked. She was, of course, getting far wetter than he was.

"- now, if I can just read this map of yours straight..." Having to shield his eyes against the gale, he looked back on himself to see Lieutenant Farthing, snug and dry in the rear cockpit, poring over an unfolded Ordnance Survey map. She saw him suffering outside, smiled and waved.

"Do you know the symbol for a Church With Spire?"

"I think it looks like a lighthouse", offered Turpin.

"The symbol that looks like a lighthouse", said Ant through gritted teeth, a cold drop of combined rain and snot wobbling on the end of his nose, "is a lighthouse."

"Then what's the symbol for a Church With Spire?"

"A circle with a cross on top of it."

"How interesting. Are all of your churches circular?"

"None of them. It doesn't have to look like a church. It's a symbol."

"Why not? The lighthouse looks like a lighthouse."

His stomach turned over suddenly, as if the world had moved underneath him.

"Ant", apologized Cleo in advance, "I'm really sorry, but I think I'm going to throw, and the only thing to throw on in here is you."

"I heard that. Hold on, it's only negative G. You can feel it because we're going down."

"Where are we going down to?"

"You're the local experts. Pick a safe place to land."

Ant dragged himself over the cockpit lip and peered down. Through a haze of driving rain, he could see unfamiliar dual carriageways, a patchwork of fields, a town spreading out across them like a concrete cancer.

"We could head for that big curve of woods east of the town. We could hide the ship in there."

"Trust me, woods usually have people in them", said Ant.

This was news to Farthing. "What sort of people?"

"Usually the sort of people who have no business there. Kids who ignore KEEP OUT signs. Christmas tree thieves. The sort of people who give 'the woods' as their address to the police. Cleo and I have personal experience of running into bad, bad people in woods. That is where we first met Lieutenant Turpin." Ant squinted down into the gloom. "That house there. It's all on its own, with a drive between it and the road, and a lawn surrounded by leylandii, and there's no garage and no cars parked outside either. That means no-one's in. Put us down on the lawn."

"The lawn, you say."

"The slightly brighter green patch just to the left of it."

The ship dropped like an elevator with the cables cut. Cleo screamed louder than a banshee, and held on to Ant with her fingernails and what little spare skin Ant possessed. The torrent pouring into the cockpit seemed to lessen - at least they had the advantage, Ant reflected, that they now seemed to be falling fast enough to overtake the rain.

"- braking NOW -"

The seat slammed into his back, and Cleo into his front. There were a couple of seconds' grace, and then the seat slammed into him again.

"Do you MIND?" yelled Cleo, loud enough for Ant's headset to hear.

"Sorry. The first bump was the antigrav going back on. The second one was us hitting the ground."

"Ground?" Cleo clambered out of the cockpit, fell on the ground and gave it a cold, wet kiss. "Ground! Oh, ground, sweet ground!"

Lieutenant Farthing's landing had not been gentle - the Fantasm's skids had sunk a quarter metre into an immaculately-maintained garden. The lawn was large, the size of a tennis court. The house matched the lawn. Next to it, a three-berth carport stood empty. Whoever lived here was not at home.

Cleo rounded on Farthing and Turpin as they climbed out of the ship. "WHICH OF THE TWO OF YOU WAS FLYING BACK THEN?"

"I was", said Farthing. "Why? Do you have a complaint?"

"Our COCKPIT was NOT SHUT. NEITHER of us was FASTENED IN. WHO THE HELL TAUGHT YOU HOW TO FLY?"

Turpin hid his face in his hand. "Oh, please don't start her off."

"The USZ Flight Combat School", said Farthing. "From which I obtained the maximum grade possible. Would you, perhaps, have preferred me to have taken off according to standard procedure, taking time to unload and strap you both in nicely? In which case, as I'm sure you're aware, both of you would now be dead."

Cleo's face screwed up in an industrial strength scowl.

"If the wind changes", said Farthing, "your face will stay like that."

Cleo snorted in disgust, turned her back on Farthing, and stomped off round the side of the house in a sulk.

"Cleo!" called Ant, tumbling down the side of the ship. "Are there any notes for the milkman?"

Cleo blinked uncomprehendingly at Ant.

"Saying 'NO MILK TILL THURSDAY, BECAUSE THERE WON'T BE ANYONE AT HOME, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO BURGLE THE HOUSE'?" prompted Ant.

"I'm sorry", snapped Cleo. "I don't have your in-depth knowledge of the art of burglary." She walked through the carport to the front of the house. "Yes, as a matter of fact, these people are thick as well as loaded. They're not going to be back for a week." She unfolded the paper further. "And they hope the milkman's well and that his lump has gone down." She unfolded it still further. "And they promise to bring him back a snow shaker from Dubai. Somewhat ambitious, I feel."

"Thank heaven for that", said Lieutenant Farthing, raising a hand to smash a window.

"STOP", said Ant. Farthing's hand stopped in mid-swipe. "What?" she said.

"Either they're rich and thick, or rich and very confident in their alarm system."

"Alarm system?" said Farthing, much in the same way another person might say 'Unicorn?'

"Yes. All big well-to-do houses have them."

"Alarm systems", said Cleo, "or dogs."

"Dogs", said Farthing, her face pale.

"You're going to ask me how big dogs get now, aren't you", said Cleo.

"I know", said Farthing acidly, "how big dogs get. I am not stupid. I have seen Hong Kong Phooey."

"Well, here's the thing", said Cleo. "Dogs don't normally walk on two legs, wear clothes, and fight crime."

Farthing and Cleo glared at one another across the rain-sodden lawn.

"I have a suggestion", said Ant. "We are still getting wet. What about the garden shed?"

The shed filled the bottom end of the garden, backed by leylandii. It was the size of a small house in itself. The door was secured with a padlock. Ant and Lieutenant Turpin broke it open with a set of hedge clippers hung neatly under the eaves.

"Oh, this is fabulous", beamed Lieutenant Farthing, poking her nose inside. "I've dreamed of living in a room this big."

The inside of the shed was decidedly un-shed-like. There were bunk beds. There was laminate flooring. There was a table and chairs painted to resemble toadstools. There were drawers filled with wooden and plastic toys. There was a heater, a small room containing a toilet and a shower, and a small portable TV. A mansized teddy bear sat on a wooden rocking chair in one corner, observing them malevolently.

"It's a Wendy house on steroids", said Ant in disbelief. "Someone's mummy and daddy have way too much money."

By the bunk bed, on a little table, rested an immaculate little book with an embossed leather cover. The book's title was THE CHILD'S SIMPLIFIED BIBLE. Up on the wall, a tiny sampler had been framed and mounted. It issued instructions to the Lord as to what the Lord was to do if the maker of the sampler died before she woke up.

"And", said Ant, "way, way, way too much religion."

"There is nothing wrong with religion", said Cleo. "And this will do well as a base of operations." She opened the Child's Simplified Bible at the place marked by a leather bookmark, looked at the page. "Leviticus. Yeuch. I claim dibs on both the toilet and the shower. Now", she said, turning to Farthing and Turpin sternly, her arms folded, "do you people actually know where you're going?"

"It's a few miles south-west of here", said Turpin.

"It's a secret government installation", said Farthing. "You should be able to see it from the road. Maybe there are signs."

"I've been driven past Bedford a few times", said Ant. "Most of my holidays involve sitting in the back of my dad's truck. But I've never seen flying saucers landing."

"It would be a huge building", said Turpin. "It would have to be."

Farthing nodded. "Cobalt bombs are big. The ships that carry them have to be bigger."

Ant clicked his fingers. "The airship sheds!"

Cleo looked blank. "The what?"

4. Flossie and the Girls

"The hangars were built to house airships, back when Britain still built airships", said Ant. The Ordnance Survey map was spread out on the large toadstool that constituted the table, whilst Ant, Cleo, Farthing and Turpin sat round it on the smaller toadstools.

"Doesn't Britain make airships any more?" said Farthing.

"No", said Ant. "They catch fire. But the sheds are still there. They're huge, set back quite a way from the road."

"Are there fences?" said Turpin.

Ant searched his memory. "I don't think so. No really high wire, no barbed wire, nothing that looked like it belonged on a military base or a post office in Manchester. Maybe a chainlink fence round the perimeter, I wouldn't have thought that was unusual, most places have that. Up to, you know, about seven or eight feet high."

"So you think it might have a fence, but you're not sure", translated Cleo. "You're a big help."

"He's telling us what he knows, and that's good enough", reproved Farthing. "We can get through a fence. We have wirecutters. What about mines? Do you think there might be a minefield?"

Ant's jaw dropped. He thought for a moment.

"I am absolutely certain there is no minefield", he said.

"How can you be so sure?"

"This is England. No matter how many KEEP OUT signs there were, some idiot would have blown himself up by now."

"Armed guards?" continued Farthing. "Robot sentries? Point defence railguns?"

"I don't think so", said Ant. "I'm sure About Anglia would have mentioned it."

Turpin and Farthing exchanged glances. "Maybe that isn't the place."

"It has to be", said Ant. "The sheds have got to be two hundred metres long. There's no other building remotely that size anywhere near here."

"Well", said Lieutenant Farthing, coming to a decision, "we'll know when we see them. When I say we, I mean the three of us. Lieutenant Turpin will stay here while we make our way to the base on foot. The rain seems to be stopping outside."

"My clothes", said Cleo, "are still wet through."

Farthing nodded. "We'll turn on the Fantasm's drive and hang your things on the primary heat sink. They'll be dry in no time."

"And in the meantime", pointed out Cleo, "I will be naked."

"Tush and piffle! You've got underthings." She looked at Cleo in apparently genuine concern. "You do have underthings, don't you? Things that go under your overthings?"

Cleo smiled back humourlessly. "Female underthing technology has advanced significantly in the last forty years. We have a thing called Marks and Spencer."

"I have seen their catalogues", said Lieutenant Farthing. "Richard always seems to bring one back for some reason. Much of it looks frightfully impractical."

"Yes, I'd imagine you're still wearing some sort of whalebone thing Howard Hughes designed for Jane Russell, that a troop of housemaids have to winch you into."

Farthing ignored the remark and opened the shower room door. "You can stay in there till your clothes are dry. Pass them out to me when you're ready."

"What about me?" said Ant. "My shirt's soaked."

"Boys", said Farthing, "are less fussy about that sort of thing."

***

The buildings were huge, as if someone had built a wall across the world. The cars parked at their bases looked ridiculously tiny.

"A hundred metres of open ground between wire and walls", said Farthing, "on all sides. We've walked the whole perimeter now. That cluster of pipes on the north side is interesting if it is what I think it is." She adjusted a dial on the top of the box she was looking at the southern shed through. Ant could only assume the box did the same job as a pair of binoculars. Farthing was resting it on top of a fence post, looking over empty fields towards the wire that surrounded the hangars. On the other side of that wire, not a human being, not a dog, not a bird, not an insect had moved since they had started watching.

Above them, the sun had now decided to shine. Ant's shirt and trousers were steaming in it like a fresh-laid cowpat. He felt wretched. He smelled, he was certain, worse.

Lieutenant Farthing had left her hat, jacket and tie behind at the Base of Operations, and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. She looked noticeably different in that she no longer looked like a man. Cleo, meanwhile, had completely transformed herself, loosening her scrunchie, shaking out great heavy masses of hair, and pruning them into a towering Afro with the help of soap and water. She had folded the blouse she was wearing and pinned it up to make a thing she referred to as a 'crop top'. This proved to be Female for a T shirt that was too short to cover her belly button. She had rolled up the legs of her trousers, and pinned them up too. She was wearing Lieutenant Turpin's black jacket and sunglasses. Her fingers barely reached the end of the jacket's arms, so she had fixed it to the shoulders of her shirt with still more pins. Ant had never suspected that, somewhere on Cleo's person, was a large and sophisticated pin repository. She now looked like a gangster equivalent of Cleo.

Ant was no longer wearing his jacket.

"Don't you think using those space binoculars might call attention to you?" said Ant. "I mean, they're not exactly standard birdwatching issue. Someone could be watching us from somewhere in there."

"Almost certainly. That's why I'm using these. They're electronic. I'm not looking down a set of lenses; I'm looking at two TV screens. The British Colonial Administration protect their installations with devices that are designed to discourage people who look at them through binoculars. Have you ever heard of lasers?"

"Lasers can't be used as weapons", said Cleo, sitting with her back up against a wall, sucking a blade of grass.

Farthing looked away from her binoculars in surprise. "Yes. How did you know that?"

"I have the internet", said Cleo. "Lasers were supposed to be the ideal weapon to use in space, but they lose energy over distance, and they get bent by planetary atmospheres, just like light gets refracted by a pool of water. You can't aim them at targets on the ground."

"Very good", said Farthing, putting her eyes to her binocular box again. "But there are things lasers are good for. What happens when you look at the sun through binoculars?"

The stalk dropped out of Cleo's mouth. "No. Oh no, that's horrible."

"What is?" said Ant. The conversation had left him behind.

"It certainly is horrible", said Farthing. "You can't shoot a hole in a tank with a laser. But you can rig up a low-powered laser and get it to scan a battlefield like a cathode tube scanning a TV screen. Every now and again, the beam hits an enemy trooper in the eyes, and BANG! You've knocked that man out. No man can shoot what he can't see. But the really great thing about it is that even if you set it to scan on low power, people still get blinded if they look at your side of the battlefield magnified, through a telescope or binoculars. Special Operations use these devices, they're standard issue, and our military hospitals are full of people who've been hit by them. We are dealing with", Farthing searched her vocabulary for the worst insult imaginable, "some really bad eggs here."

"You look too much like yourself", said Cleo to Ant. "You should let me cut your hair or something."

"I'm happy being myself", said Ant. Tamora had told him horror stories about what happened when Cleo was let loose with scissors on the human head.

"Take a look, local expert", said Farthing, passing Ant the binoculars. This involved momentarily coming within smelling range of Ant. Farthing wrinkled her perfect nose.

"You know, you boys really could stand to be more fussy about washing."

Ant accepted the binoculars miserably. Through them, the sheds leapt closer.

"There's the gate at the front", commented Farthing. "It's chained and padlocked. We can cut that. We have boltcroppers."

Ant swept the binoculars up and down the great rusted wall of corrugated iron, seeing no sign of any human being. "I don't think that would be a good idea."

"Why not?"

"Because there's honeysuckle growing up the middle of the gate. That gate hasn't been opened for months. Maybe even years."

"Then how do they get into the building?"

"Not through the gate."

"That doesn't make sense. They'd have to accept deliveries. Heavy deliveries. Fifty tonnes or more. The warheads are so big that they have to be built on site from prefabricated segments."

"There's only one sort of truck that can take that sort of weight. Tank transporters. Big military artics."

"What's an artic?" said Farthing. "Ooh! I know this! It's Earth geography! Is it the opposite to an Antartic?"

"It's an articulated lorry, a truck that bends in the middle. And it puts a lot of stress on the road. Up to twenty-five tonnes of axle weight. It couldn't drive down most roads without shaking the surface apart." He swept the glasses round the horizon, experimenting with the focussing dial. "Aha! Now that is interesting."

"What is?" said Farthing.

"Can you see, just to the right of the shed nearest to us, maybe about a half kilometre from it, a house with a garden full of flowers?"

"Now is not the time to be thinking of horticulture, Anthony. Though they are nice, I must admit. I like the way the gardener has interspersed the musk roses with the reds."

"White goes with everything", agreed Cleo.

"Yellow would not have worked", said Farthing.

"It's not the flowers I'm looking at", said Ant. "Look at the drive turning off the main road up to it. It sweeps away on either side so widely, they've put a traffic island in the middle to disguise it. Cars don't need to turn that gently. And the road surface isn't bitumen, it's concrete. That's not someone's front drive. That's a truck turn-off."

"But the house is a long way from the shed", said Farthing.

"You see that line of grilles leading between the house and the shed? The ones that are steaming as if they're full of boiling water? Those are air conditioners. Pumping in fresh air and pumping out condensation. Underground car parks have to have them. That isn't a house. It's the way in to the base. Trucks drive in and out of it."

"He's right", said Cleo, who had poked her head over the fence.

"How do you know?" said Farthing, bemused.

"The house doesn't look like it has any curtains. Does it?"

Ant shifted his view up to the house. "No."

"And no TV antenna, satellite dish, or catflaps?"

"No to all of the above", confirmed Ant.

"Nobody lives there", said Cleo. "Human beings need either a television or a cat for survival. And there's no frosted glass", she concluded, as final damning proof, "in the bathroom."

"It's got CCTV cameras, though", said Ant. "I can see at least three. Two of them face out over the fields."

"They won't be ordinary cameras", said Farthing. "They'll almost certainly see you by the light of the sun in daytime, and by your own body heat after dark."

The fields around the house were deserted, populated only by grazing sheep. Ant flicked the binoculars down onto the sheep. They were fat sheep, identical in every respect. There were no rams, and no lambs. He watched his target sheep for what seemed an age until, eventually, its head dipped down to the ground and began cropping grass, green blades flying from its jaws like cuttings from a lawnmower. All this seemed, to Ant, to be perfectly acceptable sheep behaviour.

"I have", he announced, lowering the binoculars, "a way in. We will need Lieutenant Turpin. And pins. And a diversion."

***

"I still don't see why it's me who has to do this", said Cleo out of the corner of her mouth, walking with difficulty in Lieutenant Farthing's comparatively enormous trousers, feeling like Charlie Chaplin.

"You have superior knowledge of the Bible", said Lieutenant Turpin out of the opposite corner of his own mouth as they approached the house.

Ant and Cleo had been right about the house. The whole site was designed, not around the house, but around the driveway. A concrete approach road wide enough for trucks and spotted with old diesel oil stains swept up to the house, where it dropped down a shallow ramp to a garage door far too big for cars, built into the house's basement. The house itself was hardly the size of Cleo's grandmother's bungalow. It looked smaller than its own garage. Parked next to it in a set of bays marked out with white paint were no less than three cars, each with a paint job that made the metalwork gleam like black glass. Two were Vauxhalls, and the third was a vehicle Cleo had seen before many times - once in real life, and many times after that in nightmares. It was the sort of car people either got married or assassinated in, massive and substantial, night-dark wings sweeping in curves around its wheel arches. The front of the car glittered with an acreage of chrome on headlights, grille, and bumper. All three cars were parked picture-straightener-perfect between the white lines.

"Erm. We might want to reconsider this", said Cleo, stopping short of the house.

"Why?" said Turpin.

"Because I know who's here. I've met him before."

Turpin turned and looked at the car.

"Oh", he said. "Him. Yes, he has one of those. Could this not just be someone else's, though?"

"I looked it up. It's a Lagonda Three-Litre. It was built between 1953 and 1958. There are only twenty left like it in the world."

"Well", said Turpin, "if he's here, that about proves that this is a military base."

"I knew that already", said Cleo. "Nobody marks out parking spaces on their own front drive...If I don't make it out of here alive, remember to tell my Sunday School teacher that someone admitted they knew less about the Bible than I did."

"By comparison with me", said Turpin, ringing the doorbell, "you're the Archbishop of Canterbury. My knowledge of the Bible is as follows: World made in seven days, man made, woman made of man, man eats apple, man loses Paradise. Then a good deal of begetting and smiting, then two of every animal sail around in a big boat for some reason. Jonah is thrown off the boat and eaten by a fish which burps him up in Nineveh -"

"By a fish?" said Cleo, who had thought it was a whale.

"Fish are loyal servants of the LORD", explained Turpin. "Logically, they must be, otherwise the LORD would have seen fit to wipe them out in the Flood along with all those sinful dinosaurs. Father Serafino is very firm on that point; he claims he receives divine revelations from his goldfish. In any case, I believe I'm about halfway through the Bible by now...Whilst the big boat's sailing around full of all the wildlife, Moses solves the same aquatic survival problem by parting the sea, then leads the Israelites all over the shop..."

The lights in the house were on. The sounds of a television set were coming from inside it.

"Don't you recognise it?" beamed Turpin.

Cleo shrugged.

"It's Stars on Sunday", said Turpin. "Call yourself a Christian?"

"If you recognize it", said Cleo, "I think it's likely someone hasn't changed their loop tape for a very long time."

The door opened. Lieutenant Turpin beamed his very best Sunday smile.

"Good afternoon", he said. "May we interest you in God?"

***

"Remind me", said Lieutenant Farthing, "why it's us that have to do this?"

"Because we need a diversion", whispered Ant, crawling with what he hoped was cat-like stealth across the field. "And if you take the sunglasses off a Man In Black, you have a man who's knocking on your door on a Sunday morning to convert you to Christianity."

Behind him, Farthing was just about managing hippopotamus-like stealth. Ant wished he had not told her that sheep went to the toilet just like humans. Night was falling, and a meadow full of sheep became, after dark, an evil-smelling minefield, particularly if you were moving on all fours.

The nearest sheep stood chewing the cud, looking upward at the sunset, for about six seconds. Then, it dipped its head downward into the grass, and grass began flying from its incisors. Ant sidled up alongside the sheep, feeling faintly ridiculous. Five seconds or so passed, and the sheep began to move forwards, drifting slightly closer to the house. Ant moved with it, keeping it between the house and him.

"Anthony", whispered Lieutenant Farthing, "are you sure this plan is going to work? I mean, it relies, basically, on the sheep wanting to walk in the direction we want them to walk in."

"You stick behind a sheep that's going your way", hissed Ant in annoyance, "and when it stops going your way, you switch to one that is. We have been through this."

Lieutenant Farthing moved up behind him, keeping pace with her own sheep with difficulty due to the fact that she was giving the ground in front of her more attention than the sheep. "We're lucky these sheep don't seem to, well, go very often."

"Sheep go all the time", said Ant. "They just don't think about it,GLOSSOP out it comes. You've probably just been lucky so far." Ant had to admit, though, that his hands were moving through piles of grass clippings when he had been expecting sheep dung. His sheep looked up, chewing the cud, for another six seconds, then dipped its head for another five seconds of chewing, then started to move forward again. This was going to work. They were wolves among sheep, moving slowly inwards towards the base entrance, invisible to the security cameras.

"Anthony". Ant was eyeing a faster-moving ingoing sheep about to cross his path, but was put off his stroke by Lieutenant Farthing.

"What is it now?"

"I was under the impression sheep ate grass."

He looked at the Number-One-cut field stretching out around them. "Your point being?"

"Well, why do they keep leaving it behind them?"

Ant's skin went as cold as if all the air had been sucked out of the world. He realized, suddenly, that he was not a wolf among sheep. He was a wolf surrounded by sheep. Placidly munching herbivores were boxing him in like big trucks surrounding a foolish driver in the slow lane.

"I'm right, aren't I? Anthony?"

"Lieutenant Farthing", he croaked, "I don't think these are really sheep."

In front of him, six seconds having passed, a head dipped down to ground level. Now he was listening for it, he heard the faintest whirr of electric motors as it dipped. As it cropped the grass, he heard a hum of motorized blades. Behind him, he looked back to see Lieutenant Farthing, similarly surrounded.

"Anthony", said Farthing, "I'm very disappointed."

His heart battered itself suicidally against the walls of his ribcage. He wanted to die. He heard a small, pathetic voice say: "Well, I'm a town kid. How am I supposed to know how sheep work?" and the voice was his.

The sheep were now formed up around him in a military phalanx, cubing him in walls of wool. The wool, he was now dismally aware, did not smell of wool. It smelled more like unwashed polyester. He looked into the eyes of the sheep behind him. Inside the glassy eyes, at this close range, he saw camera irises expanding and contracting. The sheep spoke to him, and it said: "...testing testing testing...Can you hear me out there, Intruder?"

Miserably, Ant nodded his head.

"Jolly good. You are looking at the Vickers Ferguson Robosheep Mark Four. The Mark One was a wool-less prototype, the Mark Two had overheating difficulties and tended to explode, and the Mark Three used to mistakenly identify baling wire as grass. This is the Mark Four. All major development difficulties have been ironed out; it is a superior artificial sheep product. Ideal for reconnaissance, superb for security. Who would suspect a sheep? It has been stress tested at temperatures of one hundred below zero and three hundred above. It has also been vibrated in an armature at a frequency of five thousand r.p.m., and proven resistant to small arms fire up to 7.62 millimetres. It can be airdropped into enemy territory from a height of one mile. It identifies grass as grass ninety-nine times out of a hundred, significantly outperforming real sheep, and only ever explodes when we want it to. Do not attempt to run. Do not attempt to resist. Do not behave like grass." There was an ominous snipping sound. "The Mark Four's designers also introduced teeth capable of cutting baling wire just in case of accident. Flossie and the girls are bringing you in."

5. The Moutonotron 9000

"We're not interested in God", said the surly-looking man who'd opened the door. He was white, and wore a black vest top, urban camouflage fatigues, and combat boots. Cleo had come across men had dressed this way at home before, though they tended to have gun cabinets in their halls and halves of cars in their front gardens. The householder had a tattoo on his arm; it might have been a Christian tattoo, a stylized fish like the ones churchgoers stuck on the back of their cars. But Turpin's smile had frozen in his face when he'd seen it.

"You're playing Stars on Sunday", said Turpin, raising an eyebrow and smiling so widely that Cleo was afraid the smile would escape from his face.

Inside the house, another man's voice yelled "HURRY UP WITH THEM BIBLE BASHERS, PETE. FLOSS AND THE GALS HAVE GOT THEIRSELVES A SITUATION IN SECTOR TWELVE."

"My brother plays computer games", explained the man. " We're not of your denomination." The door was only open wide enough for half his face to be visible. Cleo was acutely aware that a gun could be being pointed at them from behind the door itself. There were no less than three chains stopping them pushing through the door.

"We have no denomination", said Cleo quickly. "We believe in an ecumenical conference of all confessions, patriarchies and synods." She pressed the CHILD'S SIMPLIFIED BIBLE into the man's hands. "'And did not Job smite the Ammonites on their Neighbour's Ass?'" she quoted.

The man, who seemed to have accepted the book out of pure politeness, looked down at it in bemusement. "I don't know", he admitted.

"A most painful place to be smitten, I think you'll agree", said Cleo. "We are a multidenominational, faith-based, Christ-centred, God-involving church, dedicated to the one basic truth that God Is Love and Love Is Never Having To Say You're Sorry, don't you agree?"

The man was turning the book over his hands with increasing confusion. "Erm", he said.

"PETE! I need you on Ovine Telemetry NOW!"

The man came to a decision. "We don't want any God today", he said. "We've already got one."

He shut the door in Turpin's and Cleo's faces just as Cleo was about to shout "WE'VE GOT THREE -"

"How rude", said Turpin.

"How stupid", said Cleo, and pushed the door gently open again.

Turpin gasped. "How did you -"

Cleo pointed to her left hand, which, as the door was closing, had slipped a leather bookmark into the gap between door and jamb, preventing the bolt from shooting home. "Now", she said, "all we need to do is break these chains."

"No problem", said Lieutenant Turpin and, fishing down the front of his trousers, extricated an enormous pair of bolt croppers complete with shears.

"I had one handle down either leg", he said. "It doesn't half make you walk funny."

Three snips, and the door was open.

"I think Anthony and Pen are in trouble", said Turpin, moving cautiously into the hall. "Erm. I'm acutely aware at this point that an elephant recently ate the only weapon I have."

"Are you not a human weapon trained in one hundred different types of unarmed combat, then?" said Cleo sarcastically.

"Not as such", said Turpin. "I can give someone a jolly hard punch on the nose on a good day, but that's about it." They were now standing in a hallway furnished entirely by MFI. Woodchip wallpaper, gigantic coloured swirls on the carpet, and a Green Lady on the wall informed Cleo that the room had last seen a decorator in the 1970's. Turpin slowly slid his head round the corner, then beckoned to Cleo to follow. Past an angle of the hallway, all attempt at home furnishing ceased, and there was not even any plaster on the walls. Instead, a rack of rifles were bolted straight onto whitewashed brick. Each weapon was heavy, squat, and finned, presumably to radiate heat, and bore perforations all the way down its barrel. Each was stamped GYROLITE USA MADE UNDER LICENCE BY ROYAL SMALL ARMS FACTORY ENFIELD MIDDLESEX.

Carefully, Turpin eased one of the weapons off its rack and examined it, then flipped open a catch above its trigger and moved a lever freed by the catch up to the ARMED position. A laser dot winked into existence on the floor in front of him. Turpin moved uncertainly towards one of several doors opening off the corridor, in the direction the first man had moved in and the second man had called from. The door was marked ROBOSHEEP CONTROL.

Stars On Sunday, Cleo noticed, seemed to be coming from a speaker on the wall connected to an old-fashioned tape recorder. It was still deafening.

"...TURN THAT GODBOTHERING RACKET OFF FIRST, I CAN'T HEAR MYSELF THINK..."

The door opened. Turpin had his rifle barrel lined up on it. As the face of the man who had answered the door reappeared, a red dot marched up his stomach to his forehead, giving him the appearance of a very white, startled Hindu. Turpin's finger, Cleo could see, was on the trigger. The man's breath was sucking in prior to yelling out for help, and before he could do this, Turpin reversed the gun and rammed it butt first into his gut, pushing all the breath out of him. Unfortunately, this now meant the man had both hands on Turpin's gun, and even as he staggered forward wheezing, his hands were fighting Turpin's for possession of the weapon. The gun was, of course, still armed, and its barrel was now facing towards Turpin. Although both men were of a size, Pete was far heavier-set, and looked far more capable of handling himself. His fingers were creeping forward towards the trigger of the rifle -

"- LORD ALMIGHTY, PETE, TAKE YOUR TIME -"

Cleo acted. She acted, however, not by hammering pathetically on Pete's heavily-muscled back, or by biting his ears, but by stepping to the tape recorder and turning the volume dial right up to the maximum.

"- PETE, THAT AIN'T FUNNY -"

As the man in Robosheep Control yelled in annoyance, a gunshot, muffled by a particularly exuberant Hosannah on the Stars On Sunday tape, had torn a hole in the house's front door. Lieutenant Turpin closed with Pete, now trying to stay inside the range of the gunbarrel; Pete elbowed him in the face, knocking him back against the wall, but Turpin still had hold of the gun and, despite evidently being dazed, wouldn't release it. Further gunshots ricocheted round the walls, ripping chunks out of the brickwork. Pete looked as alarmed by the ricochets as Turpin - he still, however, clearly had the upper hand.

Cleo sighed. "If you want something done..."

She stepped forward, picked up one of the weapons from the rack, flipped up the catch, moved the lever to the ARMED position, slipped behind Pete and shone the laser targetting light directly in his eyes.

Pete screamed and fell back, forgetting the weapon he was holding, his hands held up to his face. Turpin fell back with the gun in his hands, looking down at it in puzzlement as if now surprised he had it. Cleo held up the rifle, carefully moved the lever to the SAFE position, dropped the catch, turned it round again and hit Pete with the butt as if his head were a ball she intended to smack clean over the boundary.

Pete fell like a sack of potatoes. Cleo flipped the catch up, armed the gun, and turned it on the Robosheep Control door just as the other man walked angrily through it. A name tag on his combat jacket identified him as WISE. He was a black man, slighter and shorter than Pete.

"- I'M TELLING YOU, PETE, THIS IS NOT A DRILL -"

Cleo's hand had hit the STOP button on the tape recorder; the house was silent. The man looked down at the laser targetting dot on his chest.

Cleo nodded at Turpin. "He", she said, "is too much of a very nice man for his own good. I am neither nice, nor am I a man. I will shoot you."

The man nodded. He put up his hands.

"So", said Cleo, "you're Pete's brother, are you?"

***

"How do we control these things?" said Cleo. "The user interface isn't very intuitive."

Robosheep Control And Telemetry was a windowless room walled with whitewashed brick, filled with a single gigantic computer console. A manufacturer's label on one side of the console identified it as a MOUTONOTRON 9000. A TV screen set into the console was subdivided into sixteen sectors, most of them displaying a black-and-white image of a sheep's backside. Only five did not. Two showed a picture of a wide open meadow, one an extreme close-up of grass on a wide open meadow, and two of them backsides Cleo recognized.

There was a microphone headset on the console top. Cleo picked it up and put it on her head, flipping the microphone arm down to her lips.

"Ant? Lieutenant Farthing?"

Farthing's voice squeaked in her ear. "Cleo? Is that you? Have those people hurt you?"

"Er, no. Quite the reverse. You seem to be surrounded. I have a very interesting view through cameras SHAUN and LARRY at the moment."

Farthing's voice came back, suspicious: "Who are Shaun and Larry?"

"I think they may be sheep, and I think I may be sitting at their control console right now. Hang on, there must be a user manual here somewhere..."

Behind Cleo and Turpin, trussed up with their own clothes, the two robosheep operators glared hideous promises of vengeance, trying not to breathe too deeply; Cleo had gagged them with their own underpants. Wise wore the same vest top and combat trousers as Pete. Clearly it was a military uniform of some sort, though neither wore any unit insignia.

"...Aha! Vickers Ferguson Mark Four Robosheep Technical Manual. Chapter One - To overhaul your Vickers Ferguson Mark Four Robosheep, stand it upright on a flat dry surface and pull hard on the Robomechanical Innard Release (A)...Gosh, I'd want to make sure I was dealing with an artificial sheep before I pulled down on that...no, maybe that's not it...Vickers Ferguson Mark Four Robosheep Automatic Cannon Loading And Cleaning...Technical Bulletin 1995/7 To All Vickers Ferguson Mark Four Robosheep Operators: Regarding Sudden Homicidal Sheep Malfunction...How To Get The Best From Your Artificial Sheep.."

Lieutenant Turpin had sat down in the Ovine Telemetry seat, and was squinting at the controls with an air of great concentration. "What does this one do?" he said, pressing a bakelite button.

"OW!" said Lieutenant Farthing. "The sheep behind butted me!"

"Mr. Turpin", said Cleo, "I don't think you should press that button."

Turpin sat back from the button. "What about this one - SHEEP AGGRESSION. It has five settings."

One of the TV screens showed Lieutenant Farthing's bottom zooming rapidly at the camera. "OW! It did it again!"

"I think", said Cleo, "it should be turned to zero."

Almost regretfully, Lieutenant Turpin turned the dial round to zero. Lieutenant Farthing's bottom stayed put.

"What about this group of eighteen buttons? SHEEP SELECTOR?"

Cleo breathed in at length and frowned, then nodded. "Go on. What harm can it do?"

Turpin chose a button at random and pressed it. Appallingly bad graphics tracked across another screen on the console, saying CURRENTLY SELECTED SHEEP: FLOSSIE. One of the TV images on the first screen lit up with a flashing black-and-white border.

"There are eighteen buttons", remarked Cleo, "but only sixteen sheep."

Ant's voice buzzed in her right ear: "Cleo, don't get experimental on me now."

Cleo frowned. "Press the white button in the dead centre of the keyboard."

Turpin pressed the white button. Appallingly bad graphics tracked across the screen, saying ALL SHEEP SELECTED.

"What's happened?" said Ant. "Something really bad has happened. Hasn't it."

"What about these?" Turpin pointed to a set of handwritten instructions sellotaped to the side of a keyboard in front of the Ovine Telemetrist's station. He read aloud:

RENAME SHEEP - sheeprename <target sheep> <new sheep name>

"It's a UNIX system", said Cleo. "I know this." She glanced at the subdivided television screen, leaned over Turpin's shoulder, typed sheeprename FLOSSIE BOB. Immediately, the sheep labelled FLOSSIE on the screen lit up as BOB.

"I did it!" said Cleo in triumph. "I renamed a sheep! What other commands are there?"

Ant's voice sounded in Cleo's right ear again. "Cleo, you're meddling. I can hear you meddling."

"What's this one here? SHEEP ADMINISTRATION MENU - Sam." She typed in SAM and hit RETURN. Immediately, the screen filled with gibberish. The first line of gibberish read:

ALLSHEEP;1$

"I think you've done something wrong", said Turpin. At the top of the screen was a menu with four choices - F1 EDIT, F2 SAVE, F3 EXPORT TO SHEEP, F4 SAVE AND EXIT, and F5 EXIT WITHOUT SAVING.

"Well, I don't know what we're editing", said Cleo, "but EDIT sounds nice." She hit the F1 key; the menu disappeared.

"This is rubbish", said Cleo. "Maybe we need to hit the RETURN key."

"Righty ho." Mr. Turpin dutifully began typing out the word RETURN on the keyboard. Cleo was amazed. "What are you doing?" At the bottom of the screen, a message appeared:

INPUT MUST BE NUMERIC!

Mr. Turpin hung his head in techno-shame. "This is one of those computery things, isn't it."

"What are you talking about? Don't you have computers in space?"

Turpin nodded. "But remember, our colonies split from Earth in the 1970's. Our computers are the size of a small cottage, and we program them with punch cards. I wrote a program to count up to ten once", he confided shyly. "It only took up two trays full of cards."

"The RETURN key", said Cleo bleakly, "is the big button on the numeric keypad."

Turpin nodded and pressed a button on the numeric keypad.

"Nothing's happening", said Cleo. "Press it again."

Mr. Turpin pressed the key again. Nothing happened again, so he pressed it nine more times to make sure.

"You're pressing the zero key", observed Cleo.

"It's a big key", objected Turpin.

"It also has a big number zero written on it", said Cleo.

Turpin threw up his arms in exasperation. "Show me the key that has RETURN written on it, then."

"The RETURN key is the one with ENTER written on it", said Cleo. "ENTER is the same as RETURN."

"It is not! They are almost semantic opposites!"

Behind Cleo, Pete grunted in scorn at Turpin's technical ineptitude. Wise's eyes, meanwhile, were rolling in his skull in horror, which unnerved Cleo even more.

"Quiet, you two", said Cleo, "or I'll swap your gags over."

Stunned into silence by this ominous threat, Pete hung his head.

"Hang on", said Lieutenant Turpin. "Something up at the top here's changed."

The first line of gibberish now read:

ALLSHEEP;100000000000$

"I think we've changed something", said Cleo. "I think we should exit-without-saving."

"I can't remember the button for exit-without-saving", said Turpin. "Was it F1?"

Cleo tried F1 without success. Behind her, Wise struggled against his bonds and squealed like a killed piglet.

"Try F2", said Turpin. Cleo tried F2. A line of text appeared at the bottom of the screen:

SAM SAVED SUCCESSFULLY

Wise whimpered.

"I think we'd better get out before we do any real damage", said Cleo. "Try F3."

Turpin hit F3. A line of text appeared at the bottom of the screen:

EXPORTING TO SHEEP

Ant's voice sounded plaintive in Cleo's right ear: "Er - did you guys just do something?"

Cleo ground her teeth together, but said: "Nothing", and then added, "much."

"Cleo, you're grinding your teeth together. You only grind your teeth together when you're lying through them."

Cleo's voice was as bright as a Spring morning. "Haha! Why do you ask?"

"All the sheep in the field have just - well - gone all limp and droopy. They've stopped moving, eating, bleating and, erm, pretending to breathe."

Cleo ran her finger down the list of commands at the side of the keyboard, until her finger stopped at one line saying:

SHEEP AGGRESSION MATRIX - SAM

Next to this line, someone else had written in red biro USE ONLY WITH EXTREME CAUTION!!! and underscored this three times. Underneath this someone had written: USE THE DIAL ON THE CONSOLE INSTEAD, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

"Oh lordy lordy lummox", said Cleo.

"What?" said Lieutenant Turpin.

"What?" said Ant.

"UNIX is case sensitive", said Cleo.

There was a pause.

"What?" said Ant.

"I didn't type Sam, I typed SAM. I wasn't, uh, administering the sheep, I was making them more aggressive." She counted briefly on her fingers. "100 billion times more aggressive, to be precise."

"WHAT?" said Ant. "They don't look very aggressive", he said dubiously.

"That's because they're, erm, rebooting", said Cleo.

"Rebooting -" began Turpin.

"- has nothing to do with boots", said Cleo firmly, raising a warning finger.

"Right", said Turpin miserably.

"They're turning themselves off and on", said Cleo. "Taking on their new system parameters"

And then, when neither Ant nor Lieutenant Farthing said anything in return, she said:

"That means RUN! RUN, you idiots! Run NOW!"

"- all right, all right, you don't have to shout -"

- and the voice in her ear went dead.

Cleo looked up. All the TV screens were blank.

"Ant?" She tapped the microphone. "ANT!"

"Maybe the sheep have rebooted them to death", said Turpin.

"REBOOTING is NOTHING TO DO WITH BOOTS", said Cleo sternly. "All this just means the microphones and TV cameras inside the sheep have switched off along with everything else...oh please please let it..."

The doorbell rang.

"If that's a sheep", said Cleo, "don't let it in."

One by one, however, the sheep's positions were becoming apparent as the TV screens flicked back on. Most of them were still moving round the field, but in a most un-sheeplike fashion. They were circling. They were zigzagging. They were casting about.

One of the sheepcams showed a view of the front of the house, where Ant and Lieutenant Farthing were standing at the front door. Cleo heard a sheep bleat in her earphone, but it wasn't the happy contented BAA of a white woolly creature that bore no ill feeling toward anything but grass. It was a ghastly, mutated BLEARGH. Behind Cleo, Wise was moaning softly.

"LIEUTENANT TURPIN, GET THEM INSIDE THE HOUSE NOW", snapped Cleo in a tone that made it clear her rank was far higher than Lieutenant.

She saw a garden fence sail past under the TV camera, and heard a clickety-click of cloven hooves on concrete. At the same time, she heard a door opening, Lieutenant Farthing's voice saying "Hi, it's us -", Lieutenant Turpin's voice saying "GET INSIDE NOW", a door slamming, and something hitting the front door with the force of a piledriver.

Ant and Lieutenant Farthing were now standing in the hall with faces white as wool.

***

BaaaTHUMP.

Another impact shook the front hallway. Flecks of paint shivered off the doorframe. Elsewhere, unseen hooves could be heard tramping flowerbeds all around the walls. Occasionally, a sheep attempted to butt a wall head-on, sending a shock through the entire structure. As yet, ramming the house had been unsuccessful, but cracks were appearing in the plaster in places.

"What do we do?" said Lieutenant Farthing.

"They'll be in in a minute", said Ant. "That door can't hold much longer -"

- BaaaTHUNK. The doorframe shook again. Cleo could see from the television screen that it was sheep Bob attacking the front door.

"Couldn't we just shoot them?" said Farthing.

Cleo shook her head. "They're designed to be immune to gunfire. We'd only make them mad."

Wise struggled against his gag again, trying to attract Cleo's attention. Cleo bent down and pulled his underpants out of his mouth. His mouth now free, Wise first of all spent a number of seconds spitting out whatever, Cleo could only suppose, had been in his underpants. Then he looked up with a fearful face and said:

"You fools! You should have used the dial! That's why they put in the dial!" He shut his eyes and ground his knuckles into his own temples in frustration. "It says that you should use the dial! On the piece of paper!"

Cleo put both hands on Wise's shoulders and stared earnestly into his eyes. "That's right. I didn't use the dial. Can you make it better again for us?"

Wise shrank back against the wall on hearing another sheepy impact. Then he appeared to come to a decision, licking his lips nervously, looking at the gun in Turpin's hands. "You'll have to free my hands first."

Pete yelled inside his gag at the mention of such treachery; Cleo ignored him, and loosened the bonds around Wise's hands. He thanked her, rubbed the raw skin around his wrists, then dived for Lieutenant Turpin's weapon. This time, Turpin was ready for an attempt to wrestle the gun off him - what he was not prepared for was Wise attempting to jam the gun into his own mouth and pull the trigger.

"SHOOT ME! PLEASE SHOOT ME! WE CAN'T REBOOT FOR ANOTHER ONE THOUSAND SECONDS, AND THEY CAN NUT THEIR WAY THROUGH A BRICK WALL IN UNDER A MINUTE -"

"PEN!" yelled Turpin in panic. "HELP!"

Farthing sighed, drew her Personal Orgonizer, and fired at Wise at point blank range. He collapsed back onto the console with a blissful expression on his face.

"Just for once", said Farthing, "I wish you'd just pull your finger out and shoot somebody."

"It's a Cause For Concern on my psych profile", admitted Turpin dismally. "The doc thinks it makes me unsuited to being a combat pilot."

Wise's eyes crossed in ecstasy as he imagined his immediate future. "I'm going to die! I'm going to be butted and trampled and eaten by things that derive no nutritional value from me...RESULT."

"Now you know how celery feels", said Cleo, kicking him. "Why can't we reboot the sheep for one thousand seconds? Hey! I'm talking to you!"

Wise fell to examining his hands in exquisite beaming detail.

"MMF! MMF!" yelled Pete through his gag. When Cleo released it, he glared up at her, spent several seconds spitting out its contents, and said: "It's to stop us writing system routines that recursively increment sheep aggression above a dangerous level."

"What's a dangerous level?" said Cleo.

"Anything higher than five", said Pete, with no apparent attempt at irony.

"This hand", explained Wise, indicating his right hand, "is like this one, only the other way round."

BaaaCRUNCH. The front door frame jumped a centimetre out of the wall. Plaster swirled in a thick cloud.

"We've got to decoy them away somehow", said Ant. "Give them another target."

Pete's eyes narrowed; Cleo stuck his gag back in his mouth and patted his bleeding head. He snapped at her hand with his teeth. There was nothing playful about the movement.

"We can't throw Pete to the sheep", said Cleo, "much as I'd like to". "But we could give them a target very like Pete." She looked across the room at another, smaller control panel labelled GARAGE DOOR. "The truck tunnel goes all the way to the hangars, doesn't it?"

Before anyone could reply, she had crossed the room and pressed the DOOR OPEN button. Beneath them in the foundations, the gentle hum of an automatic door opening could be both heard and felt.

"Tap the walls!" said Cleo. "Bang on the insides of the walls and draw them round the house to the garage door!"

5. Stinky Will Hear Of This

Beneath them now, sounds of BLEARGH and shouts of terror echoed through the concrete. The garage door was closed, sealing the sheep in with the base staff. Muffled rattles of small arms fire could be heard.

"What are the ways into the base from here?" said Cleo.

"There's a foot tunnel", said Pete. "Separate from the truckway, for safety. Carbon monoxide", he explained.

"Which way?" said Cleo.

Pete indicated the other end of the hallway with his eyes.

"If two of us go into the base, can you make the sheep safe after one thousand seconds?" said Cleo. "Two of us will stay here to make sure you do."

Pete's eyes promised vengeance for the blood streaming from his head. Finally, though he nodded, looking disgustedly at Wise, who was now lying on his back contentedly catching invisible butterflies.

Wise noticed Pete looking horrible slow and painful death at him and sniggered. "Hur! Hur! You got knocked out by a girl!" His tongue moved into the corner of his mouth as he reached up for a particularly brilliant butterfly only he could see. Pete squirmed suddenly and kicked him hard under the jaw. He laughed so hard blood flew from his mouth. "Henh! I fing I bit cleang froo my tong!"

"See if you can find them some aspirin", said Cleo to Ant.

"I'm staying here?"

"You and Lieutenant Turpin are both staying here. Lieutenant Farthing and I are going into the base."

***

"For this trick", said Cleo, "we will need some spare uniforms and a couple of pieces of printed white paper marked URGENT." In one of the rooms leading off the hall, she had found a computer that did things she was more familiar with. Currently it was doing Microsoft Word. She had typed out URGENT!!! at the top of her document, and followed that with To: All Staff From: Officer Commanding. She then followed that with Subject: ROBOTIC SHEEP INCURSION, and underneath this began her memorandum. It has come to my attention that the base is under attack by robotic sheep, typed Cleo, and added: This will not do! Blah blah blah blah blah harrumph blah. Finally, her work done, she clicked Print and crossed the room to retrieve two copies.

"What did you do that for?" said Lieutenant Farthing.

"Someone you don't recognize, in a military base, is an intruder", said Cleo. "Someone you don't recognize, in a military base, carrying a piece of paper, is someone clearly doing something very important who shouldn't be disturbed." She searched round the little office. "Ideally, we should have clipboards. Can you see any clipboards?"

"Shouldn't we have guns?" said Lieutenant Farthing.

"Goodness gracious no. The only other people who'll have guns in there will be sentries, and here's the thing, the sentries will know whether we're sentries or not."

"How did you know all this?" said Farthing.

"Hollywood movies", said Cleo, rifling through drawers. "I watch Hollywood movies, absorb their idea of how to break into a military base, and make sure I do the exact opposite."

"How do Hollywood movies say you should do it?"

"I'd have to paint myself black and green and carry a gun bigger than I am", said Cleo. "Hang gliders, SCUBA gear and snowboards would probably also be involved, often simultaneously. There would be explosions, ones that hurled people through the air without either killing them or fracturing their eardrums. I would probably have to leap the fence on a motorbike or a wild dolphin to escape - eureka!" She pulled a couple of clipboards from the bottom of a drawer.

"These uniforms really don't fit us", said Farthing, uncomfortably discovering more fabric in the groin of her trousers than belonged there. "Pins can only do so much. If I'd had time to cut them and take them in properly..."

Cleo was impressed. "You can take in clothing?"

"Oh, yes. I'm a girl, you see", confided Farthing. "I'm not good at it, you understand, but we only get two new changes of clothes a year on Gondolin. Cloth is in short supply. Everything is in short supply. You sew a patch on what you've got, because you know you won't get a replacement for a long, long time."

Cleo stared at Farthing in horror. "But that's monstrous."

"Monstrous or not, it's life the way we live it out on the wild frontier."

Cleo grabbed on Farthing's arm and looked earnestly into her eyes. "Before you go back home, we are going to solve your clothing shortage. We will find you stocks of quality workwear to take back to your dying quality-workwear-starved world."

"All right. I believe you. You're hurting my arm."

"Sorry." Cleo grinned. "Let's go find that foot tunnel."

***

The foot tunnel ran parallel to the truck tunnel. It was poorly, flickeringly lit, damp, and walled with cement. Sounds of titanic man/sheep conflict could be heard through the walls, gunshots and head-on collisions ringing them like concrete gongs.

There did not appear to be anyone else in the foot tunnel. It made sense. All hands were almost certainly needed to deal with the woolly foe in the truckway.

"It's cool down here, at least", said Cleo between breaths.

"It would be even cooler if we weren't jogging. Why are we jogging, Cleo?"

Cleo checked her watch - eight hundred seconds - and managed to say, with difficulty, "because we have to get there right on time." Having spoken, she returned to her busy schedule of gasping for breath.

"I'm not sure it was safe to leave Pete with Richard", said Lieutenant Farthing.

"Why?" said Cleo, snatching conversation between wheezes. "Do you think Pete will overpower him?"

Infuriatingly, Farthing was jogging along while continuing to talk perfectly normally. "No. I think Richard might kill him. I felt like doing it myself. You know that tattoo Pete has? The one shaped like a fish? That's a Greek letter Alpha. A particular sort of British or American trooper wears that tattoo if he took part in the pacification of Alpha Four. When I say 'pacification', you understand, I mean arrest without trial, torture, death camps..."

Four hundred paces - four hundred and one - four hundred and two -

They were only twenty or thirty paces away from the start of the concrete apron surrounding the hangars. Did the base start where the concrete did? While she was wondering, a voice hissed out of the dark:

"Advance and be recognized! What's the password?"

Cleo was ready for this. Pete had prepared her. She looked at her watch. Nine hundred seconds.

"I am not", she said, "saying that password. Manchester United are by no means the greatest football team on this or any other planet. I support the mighty Charlton Athletic and there's an end to it."

There was a chuckle. A red point of light winked on in the dark. Cleo looked down. A corresponding red dot had appeared in the centre of her chest. Someone was pointing a laser aiming device directly at her.

"You're not Pete", said the voice.

Cleo's heart thumped in her chest. "Full marks for being able to tell a seven stone black girl from Pete. The phones are down. We've come to tell you we have an Uncontained Ovine Situation."

Distant murderous bleating sounded in the dark. Sardonically, the man behind the red dot said: "We are already aware of the situation, thanks."

"Sergeant Roberts is attempting a full flock reboot, but they're trying to break into the control room. When we left they were halfway through the wall."

This woke the sentry up. "At the other end of this tunnel? How many?"

"At least eight."

The sentry's voice became suspicious. The red light drifted away from Cleo, passing briefly over her eyes; she had to turn her head away. "Control says there's twelve in the base", said the sentry.

"They must have counted the same sheep more than once. They should be careful they don't fall asleep. Are you going to let us in or not? And stop shining that light in my eyes."

"I don't recognize you." The light jumped from Cleo to Lieutenant Farthing. "Or her."

"This is Lieutenant Dolce, and I am Private Gabbana. We have just arrived. Our car was destroyed by robosheep. We are lucky to be alive."

The red dot bounced up and down Cleo. "You're very short."

"Thank you. You're very ugly."

"Which base have you come from? What are your orders?"

Farthing sucked in air; and when air came out of her again, it came out at frightening and unexpected volume. "STOP BEING A BLOODY FOOL AND TAKE US TO YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER, PRIVATE."

"I'm not a private."

"NOT YET. DO I LOOK LIKE A SHEEP?"

The sentry sounded slightly less cocky now. "...no, ma'am."

"DO I ACT LIKE A SHEEP? DO YOU OBSERVE ME BLEATING OR GRAZING IN ANY WAY? AM I, PERHAPS, FLOCKING AT ALL?"

The sentry was forced to grudgingly admit: "No, ma'am."

"THEN LET ME PAST RIGHT NOW, OR STINKY WILL HEAR OF THIS." She began walking forward towards the light.

"Stinky?"

"YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER. IT'S WHAT WE USED TO CALL HIM AT SCHOOL. OWING TO HIS CONDITION." Farthing was now standing right beside the sentry, hands clasped behind her back, looking up at him whilst simultaneously, by some bizarre magic, managing to look down on him. He was well over six feet tall, but was somehow contriving to cringe so he looked shorter. He was wearing the same black-and-grey urban camouflage as Pete, but in full battledress rather than just combat trousers, incorporating body armour, a helmet, and a binocular headset out of which the laser beam had come. He was evidently taking no chances in a high risk environment.

Confusion had crept into the sentry's suspicion. "Ma'am, my CO has to be at least fifty years old. You can't possibly have gone to school with him."

"I MOISTURIZE. AND STINKY HAS NOT AGED WELL. HIS CONDITION, YOU SEE." Farthing inspected the sentry's gun, which was still technically pointing at her. "IS THIS YOUR WEAPON, SOLDIER?"

"Yes?" said the sentry, evidently hoping this was the right answer.

"IT DOES YOU CREDIT. BUT IT WON'T DO YOU ANY GOOD AGAINST A CHARGING ROBOSHEEP. TAKE MY ADVICE - IF YOU COME FACE TO FACE WITH JOHNNY AUTOMOUTON, GET YOURSELF BEHIND A GOOD HEAVY DOOR AND STAY THERE."

"I really ought to shoot you at this point, ma'am", said the sentry weakly.

"GOOD MAN. JOLLY GOOD SHOW. WON'T HOLD IT AGAINST YOU IF YOU DO", said Farthing, and walked on deliberately down the corridor, raising a fist in the air. "UP THE REDS."

The sentry raised a fist shamefacedly back. "Victory to the Red Army, ma'am."

When they were out of earshot, Cleo whispered: "The Red Army? Is he a communist?"

"No", whispered Lieutenant Farthing, explaining very gently. "He supports Manchester United. Lieutenant Turpin's information is that half the male population of England does so at any one time."

The light dawned on Cleo. "So you pretended to support Manchester United too. I'm very impressed that you managed to do that."

"So am I", said Farthing darkly. "My grandfather came from West Gorton. My family support Man City."

The base was a warren of claustrophobic corridors lit by flickering yellow corroded bulbs set in rusty iron cages to protect them against flying shrapnel. The walls were helpfully colour-coded in paint that had flaked since the 1960's. Cleo and Lieutenant Farthing were currently following a faint crimson line saying TO WEAPONISATION.

"Weaponisation", repeated Cleo. "Is that even a word?"

The base was also full of homicidal bleating and small arms fire. Occasionally, distant ricochets zipped round corners close enough to leave holes in Cleo's clothing. She checked her watch. "Pete's overdue. Do you imagine one of them could have managed to butt through the wall?"

Farthing grimaced. "Lieutenant Turpin can handle himself."

"Do you really believe that?"

Farthing shook her head sadly.

"I presume", Cleo said, "that this is Weaponisation."

Weaponisation was huge. It had to take up most of the inside of the old airship hangar, and a substantial space below ground too. Inside it were four whole starships - not mere bungalow-sized space fighters like the Fantasm, but vessels the size of towerblocks. Three of them were identical, perched like egglaying insects over some sort of combined assembly line and docking and loading mechanism. The mechanism stretched over most of the length of Weaponisation. The ships were not so much laying eggs as taking them on board - M&M-shaped, smooth, flattened black eggs, each the size of a house in its own right. The eggs were being loaded into the bellies of the nesting vessels on mechanical lifts.

The fourth ship - larger, flatter, and with its basic saucer shape swept back into a stubby delta - looked familiar.

"That's a Revere class cruiser", said Cleo. "Just like the Jervis Bay."

Farthing nodded. "By the look of her cooling fins, it's the Black Prince, probably undergoing refit. And those other ones are Bulge class deep space strike ships."

"Bulge?" Cleo could not believe her ears. "They called a ship the Bulge?"

"Each one named after a famous American victory. The first ship in the class was named after the Battle of the Bulge, you see. Each one carries one cobalt weapon. One weapon, one planet, one big BOOM."

The nearest ship was called the Dresden Doll. The next one in line was Hiroshima Hottie. Cleo shuddered.

"Time to confirm our suspicions", said Farthing, walking out into the weaponisation area. "These definitely look like live loads. The suspensions on these loading trucks are pressed right down to the bump stops; only a live warhead would be heavy enough to do that, unless they've poured a fake weapon full of liquid lead or something. One easy way to find out." She pulled a small electronic device from her tunic, and pressed a button on top of it. Immediately, it began clicking like a field of happy crickets.

"What's that?" said Cleo.

"Geiger counter", said Farthing absently. "Radiation detector." Puzzled, she flicked the counter with a finger. If anything, it clicked louder.

"Are you sure it's working?" said Cleo, stepping closer. The sound rose to deafening intensity. Lieutenant Farthing looked up at Cleo in frank concern.

"Whoah there", said Cleo, stepping back. "Are you saying I'm radioactive?"

"Not very", said Farthing. She stepped forward and waved the device experimentally up and down Cleo. The clicking reached its highest intensity when she scanned Cleo's right wrist.

"Radioactivity causes cancer", panicked Cleo, looking at her hand in horror. "I might have cancer. Cancer of the hand. Hand cancer."

"Wristwatch cancer", corrected Farthing, holding up Cleo's arm and slipping off the new wristwatch her parents had given her. With the watch held over it between Farthing's thumb and forefinger, the geiger counter went crazy.

"Best leave this over here for now", said Farthing, leaving the watch on top of a control station.

"I don't understand", said Cleo.

"Maybe it has some radium in the mechanism", said Farthing. "An atomic battery, maybe. They're common on spacecraft."

"Not on wristwatches", said Cleo. "People have to wear wristwatches and continue to live afterwards."

Farthing had forgotten the watch completely now. "There's certainly a substantial amount of ionizing radiation coming from over here...don't worry, not enough to hurt us..." She climbed onto the assembly line to get a better reading from one of the warheads already on the loading lift.

"I thought you might like to know", said Cleo. "The bleating and shooting has stopped. I think Pete's carried out a successful reboot."

"Good. Excellent. That means we won't be under sheep attack." Lieutenant Farthing heaved herself up the first two rungs of a service ladder. Her radiation detector was clicking like a rattlesnake.

"Erm - it also means the guards and sentries will be concentrating more on guarding and sentrying. We should really leave."

"In a minute. I just need readings from the other two ships -"

There was a sound of men shouting and boots clattering on concrete.

"- PUT A TOURNIQUET ON THAT NOW -"

"- FOR GOD'S SAKE, GET HIM SOME PAINKILLERS, I CAN'T STAND HIM SCREAMING -"

"- THINK WE CAN SAVE THIS ONE FOR SPARE PARTS AT LEAST -"

Cleo shrank back into the shadows of the warhead assembly line. A knot of men jogged into the chamber carrying stretchers. Most of the stretchers contained other men, covered in blood. Two of the stretcher bearers were carrying a battle-damaged sheep, covered in its own electronic innards.

"Oh my", whispered Cleo to Farthing. "I sent the sheep in here. I did that."

A second group of soldiers, all armed, followed the first, escorting a group of men dressed as civilians - very uniform civilians wearing black suits and ties. Some of the civilians were carrying briefcases, laptop bags and bowler hats. One of them seemed to be holding an umbrella, bowler hat, briefcase, laptop bag and mobile phone for the civilian in front, who appeared to be in charge.

Cleo recognized the civilian in front.

His upper eyelids hung heavy over his eyes, as if he were looking through a rubber mask. The eyes themselves were green and glacial, like a lizard's. His face looked like an Amazonian shrunken head, the skin hanging spare on the bone. He was thinner than it should have been possible for a human being to be.

"I am not used to having to interrupt site inspections due to being attacked by livestock, Captain", he was saying in a voice that sounded how fingernails dragged down a blackboard felt. Cleo assumed the soldier managing to trot and cringe simultaneously alongside him was the Captain. "My schedule here has been disrupted for over an hour."

"We believe the flock has now rebooted harmlessly, sir."

"Harmlessly? Three of your men have been hospitalized! Luckily the rounds they fired off seem to have had little impact on the creatures, which I need hardly remind you are valuable government assets, but have you any idea how much a single round of rocket ammunition costs? Your men were firing off clips, Captain! Clips!"

Then, suddenly, a hand somewhere pushed down a lever, and the whole of Weaponisation filled with bright white fluorescent light. Every available shadow disappeared, exposing Cleo as surely as a naked woman in No Man's Land.

Frozen in position by sheer fear, she managed to turn round to the warhead trolley behind her, trying to look as if she was carrying out some vitally important procedure. At the same time, however, she was almost happy, repeating to herself: Nobody got killed. I didn't kill anyone. Nobody got killed -

"YOU."

She knew the word was directed at her; and when she looked up, it was into a green and lifeless pair of eyes.

"I know you." The three words fell like a death sentence.

The Captain turned to look at Cleo. Glad to find someone to redirect the civilian's anger onto, he said:

"I don't. And I should know everybody on this base. Sergeant, take this woman into custody."

"This girl, Captain", said hood-eye. "I believe her name is Cleopatra Shakespeare. I have, this very afternoon, been receiving some very exasperating reports from grown men of mine who I foolishly believed to be capable of successfully following a fourteen-year-old girl. I really should have made the connection." He dismissed the captain with a wave of his hand. "You may keep your commission, Hollingsworth. For the time being. Are you here on your own, Cleopatra?"

Cleo kicked herself for looking up. The hooded eyes, naturally, followed her own. Cleo saw nothing but ten metres of empty service ladder where Lieutenant Farthing once had been.

"No", said Cleo. "Alastair", she added.

"People always look up", said the civilian, "when they're lying. Neuro-linguistic programming tells us this. You seem to have as good a memory for names and faces as I do, Cleopatra, though I'm not quite sure when you would ever have seen mine. How fascinating. Captain, I need a room prepared for an interrogation. It will need an electric fan, running water, and at least two more spare power points after the fan is connected. Arrange it, please; and then come to see me in fifteen minutes."

"Yes, Mr. Drague."

Mr. Drague moved off surrounded by his escort. Cleo looked across at the control station. Her wristwatch had vanished from the top of it. As one final act before being taken away, she felt for the mobile phone in her pocket, tapped several shortcut keys, and clicked the SEND button.

6. Cliff Richard for Eurovision

Cleo had been marched into the cell wearing a blindfold; she had no idea where in the base she was. Most of the marching had been uphill, up metal steps. Most of the intervening floors had also sounded like metal. The holding cell was a steel box, apparently welded together from individual plates. Cleo had entered it through a steel door. There was a single bunk; the bunk had virtually no padding, and its one and only blanket had hooks and eyes to fasten it down over the bunk's occupant. Cleo wondered if the hooks and eyes were there to restrain prisoners. She felt almost certain she would be able to struggle free of them, though her muscles, of course, were stronger. She had been born on Earth. Yes - that had to be it. The cell had evidently been built to house colonials from low gravity planets. Looking up, she saw a spare blanket hooked-and-eyed to a storage shelf on the ceiling. Oddly, it looked far too high to reach.

Besides the bunk, there was a single dim lightbulb, protected from Cleo by a cage. The cell wall graffiti, scratched into the metal, seemed to stop at CLIFF RICHARD FOR EUROVISION. Cleo had the impression the cell had not been used for a long time. She was not sure whether this was encouraging news or not.

The cell smelt of burnt insulation. It was also cold. At first it had been simply cool, a welcome underground cool after the heat of a summer day. Then she had begun holding her arms close to her body to keep in the heat, and finally she had started shivering in earnest. The cold was almost certainly deliberate, an attempt to soften her up before interrogation. Cleo had been interrogated before, and was beginning to feel like an old hand at it.

She began passing the time by imagining a place far, far better. It would be in Cornwall. No, it would be on a Caribbean island. No; it would be a magic place that floated on a cloud. It would be accessible only by a rainbow bridge from the top of the highest mountain. All right, a suitably high mountain. A mountain above cloud level. This was her daydream, why not? It would be in the shape of a castle. A fairytale castle, halfway between château and cathedral, not some draughty mediaeval fortress with walls fifteen feet thick and rooms four feet across. It would have flue chimneys, and underfloor heating, and plumbing. The water would be heated by dragon. There would be a big friendly dragon down in the utility room, obligingly breathing on the boiler. He would be fed maidens, who would be specially selected by Cleo from among girls she didn't like at school. He would eat them feet first so they were forced to watch the whole process -

The cell door opened, and a man flew into the room. He had flown in on the end of a guard's boot. He was short, fat, white, and had a bad moustache. He was sweating heavily, and his trousers were hanging so low that the crack of his backside was visible. Despite this, he turned round and yelled to the guard, "YOU CAN'T KEEP ME IN HERE WITHOUT TRIAL! I GOT RIGHTS!"

The steel door slammed in his face.

He sank down on the bunk next to Cleo.

"You haven't got rights", said Cleo. "Not as far as they're concerned. It's no concern to them whether you live or die."

The new prisoner shook his head. "They won't kill me."

"What makes you so sure?"

He pulled out the waistband of his trousers. "They took my belt. Scared I'd hang myself with it. The tie, too. I know how it works, I used to be a copper."

"What are you now?"

He looked round the walls and grinned mirthlessly. "A prisoner, I guess. But normally, I'm a private investigator." He extended a hand. "Karg's the name. Hammond Karg."

Karg's hand was wet and sweaty; it was like shaking hands with offal. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Karg. I believe you have a blue Renault. Why were you following Ant?"

Karg's face went crimson. "Sorry about that. Wasn't sure whether or not you'd spotted me. Those other chaps, they were following Anthony too, of course...they were really annoyed when I broke up their operation. Very professional. Very unobtrusive. Special Branch or Intelligence Service, I've no doubt."

"Guess again", said Cleo. This drove the colour from Mr. Karg's face.

"Er - who are they, then?"

"What would be the point in having a secret intelligence service that everyone knew existed?" said Cleo sweetly.

"I understand", said Karg. "Top secret. Above top secret."

"Why were you following Ant?" said Cleo again.

"Um, a routine custody case", said Mr. Karg. "Anthony's mother wants proof that his father's not caring properly for him - not feeding him properly, letting him drink and take drugs and so on. I do a lot of it. Shinning up trees and taking photos through bedroom windows, going through rubbish bins and so forth."

Cleo looked at Karg in the utmost disgust. "You do that? For a job?"

Mr. Karg fidgeted uncomfortably. "It's a job", he said. "It's a necessary function in modern society. Who would you have do it, some untrained numpty who just likes opening other people's letters, or a skilled professional? So, these people, do they work for our lot, or for, you know, the other side?"

"Mr. Karg", said Cleo, "it is apparent to me that you have absolutely no idea who the other side are."

"Try me", said Mr. Karg. "Hit me with the info."

"The people on the other side of that door are a secret branch of the World Wildlife Fund devoted to hunting down and capturing werewolves", said Cleo with a face of the utmost truth and sincerity. This shut Mr. Karg up for several seconds. Then he said:

"So, have they captured any yet? Werewolves, I mean?"

Cleo grinned as widely as her mouth was capable. Mr. Karg twitched nervously and edged slightly further down the bunk.

"No, no, that's not true. You're pulling my chain."

"Why isn't that true, Hammond? Do you really think all werewolves are big hairy white men?"

"Did you come here on your own?" said Karg, eager to change the subject. "Nobody knows I'm here. If anyone knows you're here and they get you out, you got to tell them about me. Nobody's coming for me."

Cleo grew bored of pretending to be a werewolf. "I came here with some friends. Don't worry. They'll get me out. I can rely on them." She wished she were as confident as she sounded.

"Where are they now?" said Karg. "Did the, uh, World Wildlife Fund get them?"

Cleo shook her head. "We got into the base by reprogramming the robosheep. Ant and Lieutenant Turpin are still in Robosheep Control. Lieutenant Farthing's still in the base somewhere. I hope she escapes."

"Where do you think she'll hide?" said Karg, apparently unsurprised at the mention of the words 'Robosheep Control'.

"I'm not sure", said Cleo, growing steadily more nervous of this line of questioning. "Why are you interested?"

"Just passing the time", said Karg innocently. "We might be in here for a while -"

He was interrupted by what sounded like the lightbulb. A tinny electronic voice hissed from the light fitting, and said: "All right, Mr. Karg, that will be enough. You've overplayed your hand. At least we now know where two of them are hiding, and that the third is still inside the base. The Highwayman captured alive! Now that really would be something."

The voice was Drague's. On hearing it, Karg nodded and rose to his feet; the cell door opened, and guards ushered him out. The cell door banged shut again.

"Dear me, Miss Shakespeare", said the light fitting, "that really wans't up to your usual high standard, was it? The in-cell interrogation trick is really very, very old. It's said that Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, used to deliberately put his prisoners in a cell with a tiny hole in the wall at which he would listen to them talking among themselves..."

Cleo sat ashen with shock.

"You're right", she said. "And it isn't as if I haven't been interrogated before."

"Really? It can't have been me. I'm sure I would have remembered."

"The Russians", said Cleo. "They were very persuasive."

"Pah! Mere amateurs. They understand nothing but the infliction of physical pain. True interrogation is an art form. Pain can be part of it, it's true, but pain can come in many forms. Please be so kind as to leave your cell. We're going to start in earnest now."

As the lightbulb spoke, the steel door swung open on its massive hinges to reveal the corridor outside. Two guards still flanked the way out.

"The door at the end of the hall", said the lightbulb. "I'll be there shortly. I have some business to attend to. There is a water cooler, and I have arranged sandwiches. We are not barbarians. Do you like egg and cress?"

Cleo did not bother to reply, but left the cell. The guards made no attempt to stop her.

***

Pete was sitting at the Ovine Telemetry screen, Ant and Lieutenant Turpin watching him on either side. Lieutenant Farthing's Personal Orgonizer lay on Turpin's lap. The screen in front of Pete said:

EXPORTING TO SHEEP

Pete sat back slowly and deliberately in his chair, aware that his every movement was being followed by Ant and Turpin as intently as a dog might follow a piece of meat.

"Saints alive", grinned Pete through nicotine-yellowed teeth, "am I that scary?"

Having been taught lying was a sin, Ant nodded. Pete burst out laughing so heartily that Ant expected him to lurch forward at any moment to seize a wrist, butt into a head, poke fingers in an eye. But Pete did none of those things.

"The lights on the console are pretty", said Wise from the floor behind Turpin. Turpin continued to watch Pete, his hand on the grip of the Orgonizer.

"You shouldn't worry about little me", said Pete. "What harm could I do to you?" He winked at Turpin.

"I feel like giving everyone a great big hug", announced Wise. Turpin's eyes stayed on Pete. The screen had now stopped EXPORTING TO SHEEP, and was now showing the contents of the Sheep Aggression Matrix. ALLSHEEP was currently set to 1.

"You might as well", said Pete. "Tie my hands again, I mean. You were thinking of doing that, weren't you?"

Just as Pete said those words, Wise leapt from the floor behind Turpin and gave him a great big hug round the throat.

Ant was too shocked to move. Turpin's voice gurgled in his throat, unable to escape. Pete dived for Turpin's legs.

"- teach YOU to inflict ecstasy on me -" Ant heard Wise yell. Turpin was sagging in Wise's arms. Pete was using Turpin's legs as levers to turn him over and sit on his back while Wise strangled him.

Ant seized up a weapon from the top of the console and trained it helplessly on the three writhing men. It was apparent that if he fired, he would almost certainly hit some part of Turpin.

Despairingly, he turned to the keyboard, leaned on the zero key, EXPORTed TO SHEEP, turned the weapon on the console and pulled the trigger. The weapon hissed in his hands, flames billowing out of the holes in the side of its barrel, and the console exploded in a shower of sparks, plastic keys, and acrid black smoke.

He turned to see whether this had distracted anybody. The result was surprising. Behind him, everybody was laughing. Wise was slapping his knees in merriment, Pete was rolling on the floor crying with laughter, and Turpin was lying on his back chortling at the ceiling, spinning the Personal Orgonizer round one finger.

"You thought the effect hadn't worn off!" guffawed Wise at Turpin, "but it had!"

"He was looking at me the whole time!" roared Pete. "But he should have been looking at you!"

Turpin held up the Orgonizer. "I shot you both through myself!" he sniggered. "It's a sonic weapon! It projects sound waves! Sound travels through solid objects!"

Pete laughed so loud he hugged his insides to stop them bursting out. "When all this wears off, I'm going to be so mad I'm going to bang my head against the wall!"

"Bang his head against the wall!" chuckled Wise, slapping Turpin on the back. "Bang his head against the wall!"

"You're going to have to get me out of here", tittered Turpin to Ant, "before we all come round, or they're both going to kill me!"

"Kill you!" guffawed Wise, collapsing backwards with the sheer hilarity of the situation.

"Bang my head against the wall!" chuckled Pete cheerily. "Bang my head against the wall!" He banged his head against the wall. When his head came back, it was still smiling. "Bang my head against the wall!" He banged his head against the wall again.

Turpin laughed and pointed at the blood jetting from Pete's head. "You're going to have to drag me out of here!" he shrieked. "He's trying to kill the effect with pain!"

"Bang my head against the wall!" yelled Pete. "Bang my head against the wall! Oh, lordy!"

Ant put down the rocket rifle, grabbed Mr. Turpin's leg, and began dragging him out of the room with difficulty.

"Ha ha ha!" yelled Turpin. "That hurts!"

"Ho ho ho!" yelled Pete. "I'm going to want to kill you so bad once this wears off!"

"Of course", giggled Lieutenant Turpin, "you could just shoot him dead." Both Pete and Wise found this hilarious and laughed until they had to bite their lips till they bled to stop the hilarity.

Ant's mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. Furious at the interruption, he stopped dragging Lieutenant Turpin, pulled out the phone and examined it. His face fell.

The phone said: This is a pre-texted message! All is lost! We have been captured! Save yourselves! Luv n hugs, Cleo XXXX

Ant's hand shook on the phone. Setting his jaw, he put the phone away and recommenced the painful process of moving Lieutenant Turpin. Turpin's head hit the doorstep as Ant dragged him right out of the house. He found this incredibly funny. Close by was the nearest in the line of cars, a gigantic, ancient night-black saloon. Ant dragged Lieutenant Turpin towards it. Somewhere there would be keys. The cars had all been valet-parked by the same person. They were too straight in their boxes. And the place a lazy parking valet would put the keys was...

Ant opened the door of the saloon, flipped down the sun visor, and caught the keys before they hit the seat.

The difficult part was going to be getting Lieutenant Turpin into the passenger seat. And convincing the police he was over seventeen if they spotted a car being driven by someone whose head barely cleared the steering wheel. He thanked heaven his dad had given him highly illegal driving lessons.

Now - cars had fewer gears than trucks, didn't they? And the car wouldn't bend obligingly in the middle as he reversed it round corners. He'd have to be ready for that. He couldn't see down and around him at all either - small children and dwarfs would be crushed if he didn't lean out of the window to check they weren't scurrying under his wheels. And the car's mirrors looked barely larger than the ones his dentist used to check his molars.

Heart thrumming in his chest, he began dragging Turpin into the car.

***

The interrogation room was quite cosy. There was a table, on which biscuits and sandwiches had been placed as promised. Cleo had not touched either. There was also, as promised, a water cooler. Cleo had not drunk anything from the water cooler.

There was a comfy sofa, and a metal stool. These faced each other over a desk table. A flexible lamp faced the comfy sofa. Clearly, thought Cleo, the comfy sofa was intended to seat the person being interrogated, who would thus be put at a psychologically important lower level than the interrogator, who would sit on the deceptively uncomfortable stool. The desk light would then be shone in the eyes of whoever had been foolish enough to sit on the sofa.

There was also a tape recorder and, for some unaccountable reason, a rubber plant. On past performance, Cleo suspected the rubber plant to be bugged, or possibly to be some sort of killer robot masquerading as a rubber plant. She avoided it.

It was a long time before Mr. Drague came in. When he did, he was holding the device Cleo had been dreading - a small box the size of a TV remote control. A green light was flashing on its upper surface.

"Ah, so you've seen one of these before", said Drague. "Good, that avoids the banality of having to explain its function and prove to you that it works."

"It's a lie detector", said Cleo. "I know it works. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you any lies."

"I certainly hope not." Drague sat down on the sofa, looked up at Cleo, seemed to realize Cleo was sitting on a higher level than him, and flipped open the arm of the sofa to reveal a control console. Idly, he selected a button and pressed it; the sofa rose a quarter metre into the air. Now looking down on Cleo, he unfolded a set of papers on the tabletop, put down the lie detector with its green light winking, and turned the desk lamp round so it faced in Cleo's direction. Then he cleared his throat and said:

"Testing Testing 1-2-3. The Pope Is Catholic. The Moon Is A Balloon." The lights on the lie detector winked green and red in quick succession.

"Excellent", said Drague, and smiled. "Green for truth, red for lies, you see. So! Cleopatra Nefertiti Shakespeare. Born Chatham, Kent, on the thirty-first of October, 1986, to proud parents Leonard and Letitia. Four feet eleven inches tall. School prizes in fashion studies, information technology, and history, fashion studies three years running, very impressive. Waistline twenty-seven inches, collar size fourteen, dress size eight. Mobile phone number 07866 475165. Website favourites last month: IJUSTCAN'TGETIT STRAIGHT.com (A How-To Guide For Owners Of Afro-Caribbean Hair), 81 hits; Orbital Dynamics for Newbies, 53 hits, Russian for Beginners, 30 hits, and Rate My Fuzzy Wuzzy Noo Noo (an interactive appreciation of the Persian Cat), 1,178 hits. Sister Tamora Alexandra, one family pet, ginger tom named Tailrings, Persian of course, weight seven kilos." Drague looked up dourly from Cleo's file. "Your cat is overweight."

Cloe felt her skin crawling on her bones as if it were trying to escape and leave her skeleton to face the music. "Inspired guesswork", she lied.

Drague raised his eyebrows, put on a pair of glasses with great deliberation, and said:

"Page thirty-three of your diary: 'Lieutenant Turpin is evil, but at the same time smoking hot like Satan. I must resist his influence.' "

Cleo's cheeks went smoking hot like Satan. "I take your point."

Drague took off his glasses, though Cleo was aware the glasses could go back on at any time. "You see, Cleopatra, we have a wealth of information on you. We have been observing you for quite some time."

"My watch", said Cleo. "You've been tracking me using my watch. Lieutenant Farthing said it was radioactive. She made me take it off."

"Very perceptive of the pair of you", smiled Mr. Drague. "You have no idea how much trouble we had intercepting that watch at the jeweller's, and getting the right changes made to it. Don't worry, the amount of radiation really was very small. You'd have had to wear it for around ten thousand years to be at any significant risk of cell mutation. It was only a trick of fate that prevented us from tracking the signal in your watch to your rebel confederates' ship earlier on today. You see, unfortunately, the tracker handsets we have only have a range of around a kilometre. Once you lost my bungling minions by turning off the motorway - something they evidently hadn't considered you might try - they had to cast about for quite a while to pick up your trail again. But now, of course, all is well. You've kindly made us aware of the locations of Mr. Turpin and Miss Farthing, and we'll bring them in. Make no mistake - we will bring them in. Which leaves us with the question - well, let's call it Question Number One, I have simply dozens - where is their ship?"

Cleo stared sullenly back across the table. "If you're so certain you can bring them in, why do you need to know where their ship is?"

"Their ship is stolen property, Miss Shakespeare. It belongs to the Crown."

Cleo's teeth showed in an unexpected grin. "You know, you have no idea just how right and how wrong that statement is."

More wrinkles than usual split Drague's face. "I'm sorry, I don't understand. Please explain."

"I don't have to explain. If I'm a civilian, I have rights. You can only keep me locked up here for twenty-four hours without charging me, which has to be done through the courts and allow me access to a lawyer. And if I'm a soldier, all I have to do is give you my name, rank and number."

"Interesting." Drague's ancient-looking fountain pen poised itself over a memo pad. "What is your rank?"

"That's not the point! The point is that I have a legal right to remain silent! Which I am exercising!"

Drague smirked. "Not very well, it seems."

"I can be silent any time I like", said Cleo huffily.

In order to prove this, she sat quiet for several seconds.

"I could be silent all day. You might not get a peep out of me till the end of this interrogation", she said.

"Dear me. What would the folks on your home planet think of you then?"

"This is my home planet", said Cleo.

"You know which home planet I mean", said Drague.

"Gondolin?" said Cleo.

"Thank you", said Drague, and wrote down 'GONDOLIN' on his memo pad. "So you're working for Drummond. And of course he has an intelligence officer assigned to him by the US Zed, an American fellow who will have given you your orders. So what were your orders in coming here? Sabotage? Theft of nuclear materials? I know the man; that would be his style."

"You've got it all wrong", said Cleo. "Captain Yancy only sent us here to check up on you. The US Zed are scared you're going to do something you'll both regret. You're sending cobalt weapons out to the front line."

"Are we?" said Drague innocently, writing down 'YANCY' on his memo pad. "I hardly even notice these things." The lie detector winked red. "I'd find it most surprising if Yancy had sent just one ship." The lie detector switched back to green.

"Be surprised", said Cleo. "There's only one ship." Drague nodded and wrote down ONLY ONE SHIP. "My men reported the takeoff of a single armed fighter of unidentified type at the safari park", he said. "This surprises me. I would have expected a utility ship like the one Turpin came in last time - nothing larger could get through our defences, and all the USZ's fighters are two-seaters. Besides, Gondolin would hardly send a Bulge class strike ship for a four-man reconnaissance mission -"

"Gondolin has no Bulge class ships", said Cleo. "It has one Revere class cruiser, as you're perfectly well aware."

"Quite so, now", said Drague solemnly, writing down GONDOLIN - 1 REVERE CLASS CRUISER on the memo pad. Then he put the top on his pen, folded his arms contentedly, and said:

"Well now. Gondolin. The Thirteenth Star on the US Zed flag. The mysterious secret colony. The place we don't know how to find. The only US Zed base we couldn't annihilate if we wanted." He grinned widely. "How terrible it would be, how absolutely awful, if we had just discovered its location. We could snuff out the entire US Zed fleet just like THAT." He clicked bony fingers.

Cleo looked down in horror. The lie detector was still winking green.

"Now, Cleo", said Drague. "I'll call you Cleo, because only people you hate call you Cleopatra, and I am your friend. Your supposed new friends from Gondolin are, legally, nothing more than fugitives from British and American military justice. And I can sit here all day asking you questions and writing down what I think your answers are based on the output from this damned contraption." He tapped the lie detector with the pen. "But, don't you know, this machine is fallible. I know this because I've been beating it, in a sense, for the last twenty minutes or so. I find it a very useful interrogation tool not because it provides me with perfect proof that what my interrogation subject is saying is true, but because when I say things to the subject, the subject is prone to look down at the lie detector and blindly trust that what I am saying is true. I have, you see, for much of the last half hour, been lying through my teeth. Whereas you have just told me that your US Zed home planet is Gondolin, that Gondolin's US Zed intelligence attaché is a Captain Yancy, and that Gondolin is only protected by a single Revere class cruiser. You know the number of people I've ever interrogated who've actually ever been to Gondolin? Zero, Miss Shakespeare. You're the first."

For what it was worth, the lie detector flashed green. Cleo looked at the device as if it were the devil himself.

"Don't blame the machine", said Drague. "It's just that isn't very bright. A human being is a far better liar and a far better lie detector. And I know a way to get far better information out of you than I have been getting so far."

Cleo realized her hand was trembling. She grabbed hold of it with her other hand to stop it.

"Relax, Miss Shakespeare. I did explain before that physical pain is a clumsy tool at best. It encourages people to make up anything they think the interrogator wants to hear just to make the pain stop. And that is hardly what we want, now, is it?"

He moved Cleo's file aside to reveal another four files - two extremely thick, one thinner, one very thin indeed. He cleared his throat.

"First file - Leonard Toussaint Shakespeare. Born Kingston, Jamaica, 1956. Left school Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, 1972. Wheeltapper, British Rail Engineering Limited, Wolverton, Buckinghamshire, 1972. Shop steward, National Union of Wheeltappers, British Rail Engineering, Wolverton, 1977-82. East Anglian Area representative, NUW union congress, 1983-93. Graduate in law, University of East Anglia, 1991 - course funded by the National Union of Wheeltappers. President of the National Union of Wheeltappers, 1994 to the present day. School governor. Amateur dramatist. Member of the All Saints' Church Bellringing Committee. Second file - Letitia Floribunda Shakespeare, née Sebastian, born Brixton, London, 1958. Conservative councillor, Abingsley Ward, Northampton Borough Council, 2001 to the present day. Third file, Tamora Shakespeare, born Northampton 1989. Schoolgirl. Captain, under elevens school hockey, 1999-2000. Stated ambitions: To be the very latest an greatest, innit." He glanced up meaningfully before opening the final folder. "Tailrings, born Northampton 1996. Cat. Ginger Persian. Parents - Heironymous Fortescue Simply Superfluous Fur Explosion of Mount Pleasant and Princess Celestia Cutie-Wutie Love Muffin The Third of Fluffy Acres. Occupations - lying in the back garden. Mousing."

Cleo was trembling with rage rather than fear now, and making no attempt to hide it.

"Don't you dare hurt my cat", she said.

"I take it, then", said Drague, removing, breathing on and polishing his glasses, "that we can hurt your parents?"

"Or my parents. Or even my sister. I'll track you down", said Cleo. "I'll hone myself into a living weapon. I'll do weights. I won't rest until I have drunk your blood."

Drague nodded. "I believe you, I believe you. Though I wouldn't drink my blood if I were you - anaemia, you know. And I repeat - I have absolutely no intention at this juncture of physically hurting your parents, or grandparents, or goldfish. I only ask you to imagine this - what would happen to your father if he found himself suddenly persona non grata with his union? With the people who have supported him, paid his way, educated him, provided him with every start he's had in life? It only takes one complaint, however unfounded, one whisper in the ear of a senior official. And your mother - how would she feel, I wonder, if she suddenly found herself no longer welcome in her political party? A discreet press release to an unscrupulous newspaper, allegations of financial wrongdoing - maybe even an aggressive audit by Her Majesty's Internal Revenue? Perhaps someone might use her credit card number - which, by the way, is written down here - and PIN number - written down here - to wreak havoc with her finances. Of course, nobody would actually get hurt. Not physically. But pain comes in many forms, Cleopatra."

Cleo sat staring at Drague in powerless rage. The lie detector continued to flash green.

"So", said Mr. Drague, "you appear to have a choice. Do you continue to work for the US Zed, and watch your family collapse around you, or do you work for us, while working for the US Zed? We can make it worth your while. All the Persian cats, new frocks, and latest-generation mobile telephones you can handle. I know how the female mind works. Exactly the same way as the male mind, only in pink."

He fished in his pocket and put down a device on the table. It looked like a mobile phone.

"It's a mobile phone", said Mr. Drague. "Using it, you will be able to talk to us on any world on which our intelligence network has a presence. That is to say, Earth, Alpha Four, the American colonies and a surprising number of the Russian ones. Send us texts rather than telephoning us - it uses less bandwidth."

Cleo looked at the phone in suspicion. "Won't they know?"

"How would they know? They don't know a mobile phone from a TV remote control, the poor dear things. It will also work as an ordinary mobile telephone, you understand. The only difference is that there is one address in your contacts list that cannot be deleted. It is called BEST FRIEND. If you call it, we will hear you. We will also know your location, no matter where you are on the planet. The phone may grow rather hot in the process. Don't worry about this - the phone is just using more power than it normally would. We will also know if the phone is destroyed, and will of course take this as an indication that we have no deal."

"I can tell you now", said Cleo, "that we have no deal."

"Fine", said Mr. Drague. "Keep the phone anyway. Opinions can change." He pushed the phone over the table. "You don't have to use it."

Cleo stared at the phone. It was quite a beautiful phone, smooth and rounded as a wave-worn pebble.

"All right", she said. "But I'm telling you again, we have no deal."

"Of course we don't", said Mr. Drague pleasantly.

Cleo took the phone and pocketed it. Then alarms went off fit to shake the teeth out of her head.

7. A Bomb That Shouldn't Have Been There

"What's happening?" said Cleo.

Drague looked up from his memo pad. Whatever his reply was, it could not be heard over the alarm. Almost immediately, a group of black-uniformed men burst into the interrogation cell and hauled Drague out of his chair by his elbows. This would have been amusing if it had not also happened to Cleo at the same time. Drague and Cleo were dragged out of the cell and rushed down a gangway beneath flashing red lights; finally, they arrived in a chamber containing nothing but rows of seats bolted to the floor back-to-back. Each seat held a man in uniform, except for two, into which Cleo and Mr. Drague were stuffed, despite Mr. Drague's complaints. Hands then buckled complex four-pointed safety belts that held Cleo and Drague tight in their seats - Cleo heard Mr. Drague breathe out with a yelp as the belt cut into his abdomen. Then the men who had fastened them in rushed to seats of their own as the walls, floor and ceiling began to rumble as if from an earthquake.

Cleo gasped in surprise. "We're in a ship", she said. "The whole time, we were in one of the ships parked in Weaponisation."

"Inside Black Prince, to be precise", shouted Drague in her ear. The floor snapped upwards, as if they had been cricket balls and it had been the bat. Cleo remembered the spare blanket hanging upside down in her cell. It had not been a spare blanket. It had been another bunk. The cell had been designed for use in zero gravity. The hooks and eyes had been there to stop the blanket from drifting off a sleeper.

Mr. Drague yelled at a nearby officer, with some difficulty; his face muscles were having to fight acceleration. He looked like a man having a stroke. "LIEUTENANT, WHAT IS GOING ON?"

"SORRY, SIR. CAPTAIN'S ORDERS. EMERGENCY LIFT-OFF. DANGEROUS CONDITIONS IN THE BASE."

"WHAT SORT OF - DANGEROUS CONDITIONS?"

"UH...WE BELIEVE WE FOUND A BOMB, SIR."

"LIEUTENANT - THIS BASE IS A THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS ASSEMBLY CENTRE - IT IS FULL OF BOMBS."

"I MEAN, A BOMB THAT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN THERE, SIR. AN IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE ON THE SIDE OF ONE OF THE DOOMSDAY UNITS."

This shut Drague up for entire seconds. When he finally spoke, he shouted:

"FINISHED - OR INCOMPLETE?"

"ALL UNITS IN THE BASE ARE INCOMPLETE, SIR. THEY GET LOADED THE MINUTE THEY'RE FINISHED, AND THEN THE SHIP HAS TO TAKE OFF AND GET A MILLION MILES OUTSYSTEM OF EARTH IN AN HOUR -"

"I KNOW THAT, LIEUTENANT - I HELPED DRAFT THAT REGULATION - THERE WAS A UNIT ON THE LOADING LIFT UNDER DRESDEN DOLL WHEN WE WERE ON THE GROUND - BY DEFINITION, THAT ONE IS FINISHED - IS IT THAT ONE?"

The Lieutenant went pale. "UH, NO, SIR. CAPTAIN MULGREW'S GETTING DRESDEN DOLL UNDERWAY. THE BASE STAFF ARE MOVING SANDBAGS INTO PLACE AROUND THE UNIT. EVERYTHING'S SHORTLY GOING TO BE UNDER CONTROL -"

"SANDBAGS? AGAINST A NUCLEAR DEVICE WEIGHING A THOUSAND TONNES? IT'LL BLOW A HOLE - BIG ENOUGH FOR BEDFORD TO FALL INTO. IN THE EVENT HE SURVIVES - INFORM YOUR BASE COMMANDER I INTEND TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH HIM - REGARDING SITE SAFETY."

The Lieutenant gulped, saluted, nodded, and moved away across the compartment. The ship now had to be in orbit. He was floating rather than walking, and Cleo could feel the familiar and uncomfortable sensation of her stomach contents going wherever they wanted.

The alarm died, leaving Cleo's ears still ringing. The crewmen released themselves from their seats and pushed themselves off in all directions to their tasks on board ship.

"Idiots", said Drague to himself, recovering his breath now the G force had released him. "I am...hemmed in by incompetents on all sides...as usual." He gulped in a draught of air voraciously.

Cleo said nothing. Drague looked up at her.

"You think I'm being hard on the poor dear men, of course...Maybe some background is in order. I was sent here to Bedford to investigate why the base was able to assemble bombs so quickly...Bedford were able to build devices twice as quickly as the equivalent American facility in Nevada. Our senior ministers were obscenely proud of it...I, however, was suspicious - and, it seems, rightly so...Even the cursory inspection I've made reveals that they've been assembling up to three weapons while they're still loading another..."

He looked at Cleo as if expecting a response of shocked outrage. He was breathing more slowly now.

"Is that bad?" said Cleo.

"My dear girl, a cobalt bomb is essentially a colossal amount of plastic explosive wrapped round enough plutonium and cobalt to ballast a battleship...When you're assembling a doomsday bomb, for reasons of safety, the plastic explosive and the plutonium should only be allowed to come together right at the end of the process, just before the weapon is loaded into the starship that will carry it...That way an armed bomb capable of destroying planet Earth is only ever on planet Earth for the hour or so it takes to load it and lift off...Do you follow me so far?"

Cleo nodded tentatively. "I think so."

"Now, an unarmed bomb is still a colossal amount of plastic explosive...That explosive is intended to compress the plutonium in the bomb and produce an earth-shattering KABOOM...So what do you imagine would happen if an unarmed bomb went off accidentally, right next to an armed one?"

Cleo frowned. "An earth-shattering KABOOM?"

"There are safeguards against it, but yes, there is a danger of that. It's called sympathetic detonation...The weaponisation bay at Bedford is modelled on the American ones in Nevada...It has unthinkably thick walls capable of containing any accidental detonation of the plastic explosive, stopping it from setting off any other weapon on the base...The idiot that runs that base has been allowing up to four bombs to sit in weaponisation at once. He obviously realized it would allow him to assemble them faster."

"What'll happen to him?" said Cleo.

"Court martial. If I have anything to do with it, he will spend the next ten years on Alpha Four. And if you think that's harsh, what you would do to someone who risked blowing up the world just in order to boost his performance statistics?"

Cleo nodded. "When you put it like that, it seems fair."

"I agree. So how do you feel about your Lieutenant Farthing now?"

Cleo, put off balance, blinked in alarm. "I beg your pardon?"

"She just planted a bomb on the side of one of the cobalt devices. One of the bombs that would destroy all life on Earth if it detonated. Who else could have done that? I need hardly remind you that it would be very convenient for a group of people who see Earth as their only obstacle to independence if Earth ceased to exist."

Cleo's mouth dropped open. She was aware that she was staring at Drague like an idiot.

"Lieutenant Farthing wouldn't lie to me", she stammered. "Lieutenant Farthing wouldn't do a thing like that -"

"Of course", nodded Drague in frank disgust. His breath had now returned completely to normal. "Then in the absence of any other suspects, I imagine one of our highly aggressive robo-sheep must have done it with its little hooves. My, those little devils learn quickly." He rubbed his bony shoulders where the seat restraints had cut into them during take-off. "I believe these gentlemen are waiting to escort you back to your quarters." He cricked his neck up at two armed crewmen who had been literally hovering nervously, waiting to catch his attention. One of the crewmen saluted, propelling himself several inches sideways in the process.

"Beg pardon sir, but Captain Pulsipher says standard procedure is for all enemy prisoners to be secured during flight, sir."

Drague nodded. "Quite so, quite so. Carry on, Able Spaceman."

Cleo, batted about like a volleyball by the crewmen, who were far more experienced in zero gravity movement than she was, was bundled back towards the cell she had been in to begin with.

***

The cell still smelt of burnt insulation. Now the ship was in orbit, it also smelt of dirt that had shaken free from the walls during lift-off and failed to fall back under gravity.

It also smelt strongly of Hammond Karg.

Karg was lying on the second bunk, securely fastened in with the hooks and eyes on the bunk blanket. Despite this, his knuckles were white with holding on to the bunk sides.

"For heaven's sake", said Cleo irritably.

"I'm falling", explained Karg, his teeth gritted against imaginary oncoming impact.

"It's not the falling, it's the bit where the falling stops that kills you. This is free fall. You never stop falling. Therefore, you are safe."

"I thought it was zero gravity, not free fall."

Cleo had researched this subject. "Strictly speaking, zero gravity doesn't exist anywhere in the universe. We're floating around like this in the same way a peppercorn floats around inside a shaker if you throw it in the air. The only difference is that our shaker was thrown so fast, it'll never come down."

"I don't understand any of this", said Karg. "I really am a private investigator. I really was following your friend. I've never been to space. They said they'd let me go if I cooperated."

"They won't ever let you go", said Cleo, shaking her head. "You have a secret to keep. The secret that they're building their own little empire in space. That means you're going to Alpha Four."

"Alpha Four?" Mr. Karg's eyes swivelled desperately in their cage of flab. "Is that a nice place?"

Cleo laughed hollowly. "Oh yes. There are beach hotels and ice-cream mines."

"Thank God. I thought it was going to be somewhere bad. No. Wait. That was sarcasm, wasn't it. I know sarcasm. That means Alpha Four is bad. Oh lord."

"Really, really, really bad, yes." Cleo had never been to Alpha Four, but tormenting Karg gave her a fertile imagination. "Imagine Luton with death camps."

"Luton?"

"I would have worried more about the death camps part myself", said Cleo, "but each to his own. Yes; it is true. Alpha Four has no clearly defined civic centre and acres and acres of terrible Sixties concrete housing. And a very poor traffic system -"

She stopped in mid-sentence. Something had changed.

"Did you feel that?" said Cleo.

Karg hesitated - then, eventually, he nodded. "Yes", he said. "I don't know how to describe it...but I felt it."

It had been definite but indefinable, as if everything in existence had just stretched out flat and taut as a drumskin and then snapped back together.

"We're in hyperspace", said Cleo.

"Gosh", said Karg. "Erm - how do you know?"

"I just do. I've been in hyperspace before. Why have they gone hyperspatial? They only took off to get the ship clear of the base in case a bomb went off. And the ship's halfway through a refit, so it should be in no fit state to go to another star. And there'd be no point in being in hyperspace unless we were under -"

Mr. Karg shrieked as at least a full gravity of acceleration took hold of him and hurled him at Cleo's end of the cabin. Luckily, he didn't fall straight downwards, but collided flabbily with the floor to one side of Cleo's bunk.

"- thrust", said Cleo.

Karg groaned from the floor. Alarms sounded again. There was no alarm speaker inside the cell; this time, the sound was relatively bearable.

"Something's wrong", said Cleo. "They know they shouldn't be in hyperspace either." Hope started to build inside her. "It's Lieutenant Farthing. She's on board. She's come to get me." She looked up at the light fitting. "Am I right, Alastair?"

The light fitting coughed in embarrassment. "Erm - I'm afraid you are. Could you possibly accompany the two gentlemen who are about to enter your cell?"

"Which two gentlemen?" said Cleo. The cell door ground open on millstones of hinges. Two gigantic guards now stood, rather than floated, outside.

"These gentlemen", said the light fitting.

***

In the valley of the River Ouse, thunder rain lashed down, making weird sinuous shapes in itself, so thick that it seemed to have physical form. Rain serpents writhed across cornfields and cow pastures and cast sunlight into bars of solid gold. The bridge across the dual carriageway was one dripping sheet of water. The feet the bridge had been designed for were not human, and a whole herd of such feet were shuffling over it as their owners mooed moronically.

Lieutenant Turpin, who every now and again kept physically slapping himself in the smile to knock the after-effects of the Personal Orgonizer away, was watching the cows with deep suspicion. "Do you think they're genuine?" he said.

Ant sniffed the air delicately. "Unless what I just stepped in is really, really authentic, I'm almost sure of it."

Below them on the dual carriageway, another car had pulled up, and a group of men in camouflage trousers and T shirts had piled out of it to inspect the Lagonda.

"Do you think they've seen us?" said Turpin.

"No", said Ant. "They were in too much a hurry to put their headsets on. They can't see our body heat. That one there next to the car is checking the paintwork to make sure a VIP's lovely car hasn't been damaged. That one behind him is checking the undergrowth to make sure we're not hiding in it. The one who worries me is the one who's looking up at the bridge. They'll be over here just as soon as the cows are."

"He looks nervous", said Turpin. "Every time he looks our way."

"Erm, I think that might be because he's figured out I took this out of the car", said Ant, holding up the immense rocket pistol he had found in the glove compartment. It felt heavy in his hand, and powerful. With it in his hand, he felt invincible.

"Don't try firing that thing", warned Turpin. "The rockets it fires home in on body heat. An untrained trooper firing one often finds out they home in on his own body heat."

Ant dropped the gun as if scalded. In his left hand, he held up other device they'd stolen from the car. It was circular and hemispherical, like a snowstorm shaker, with an array of buttons round its circumference. One of the buttons was large and red. Ant pressed it. Instantly, the shaker lit up from within. A glowing spoke swept round the snowstorm shaker, leaving a three-dimensional residue of glowing snow behind it.

"That's a search beam", said Turpin. "It's some sort of tracking device."

Halfway across the shaker was a hard bright dot, more permanent than the snow static. The dot was labelled CLEOPATRA SHAKESPEARE. Ant turned the device experimentally. The dot was redrawn every time the spoke swept round the screen - and it was always redrawn in the direction of the airship sheds.

"They've been tracking us", said Ant. "Tracking Cleo, at any rate. That's how they were following us so easily. That must have been how they caught us. How could we have been so stupid? And Cleo's still in there."

"Correction", said Turpin. "Whatever they were tracking her with is still in there. There's no guarantee Cleo is. Or that she's alive or dead."

"But we can't just assume the worst!" complained Ant, raising his voice without meaning to. Down below on the road, he saw one of the Special Ops men look up sharply. He froze behind his bush, not daring to move.

"I didn't say that", hissed Lieutenant Turpin, frozen behind his own bush in turn. "If she's alive in there, we'll get her out."

"How?" whispered Ant.

"Erm. That was more of a morale-building reassuring statement than any sort of coherent plan of action", admitted Turpin. "In the short term, we really should be getting out of here. I think the ugly one down there's made us."

A mile away on the other side of the valley, the zeppelin sheds were momentarily visible in low, heavy cloud; then the clouds closed over them again, making them invisible. Somewhere in the middle of an angry sky, thunder boomed and lightning spat.

"I forgot to ask", said Lieutenant Turpin as Ant led them carefully round the edges of a ploughed field, "is all this water safe?"

It took Ant several seconds of bemused blinking at Turpin to realize what he meant. "The rain", he said. "You mean the rain."

"On Lalande 21185 Two, it rains acid," said Turpin. "On Beta Hydri Three, it rains upwards. On 54 Piscium Nine, liquid iron; on Gamma Trianguli Four, fish."

"Our rain is safe", said Ant. "It's just water. I thought you'd spent a lot of time on Earth."

Turpin squinted nervously up into the clouds. "I've spent a lot of time on Earth without dying. And I do that by never taking anything for granted. And this rain feels so cold." His teeth chattered as he spoke, and he hugged his shoulders with his hands.

"It's all right. Cold is about as much as our rain can do to you."

Lieutenant Turpin peered through the rain in the direction of the zeppelin sheds.

"Could the message have been a fake?" he said. "They might have captured Cleopatra's mobile phone, but not captured Cleopatra."

"No", said Ant. "The message was too well punctuated. It was Cleo all right."

As he spoke, the clouds in the direction of the sheds suddenly lit up from within, as if illuminated by highly selective sheet lightning capable of forming itself into a set of concentric rings and rising into the sky at a steady rate. Each ring looked as big around as a motorway roundabout.

"That's a Revere", said Turpin. "And she's lifting off in broad daylight. Why would they take a risk like that?"

"Lucky for them there was this storm", said Ant, "or everyone in the valley would have seen her."

"Luck had nothing to do with it", scoffed Turpin. "Remember that weird-looking set of tubes at one corner of the airship sheds? That's a Lynmouth Gun. It's used to project dry ice and silver iodide into clouds and make rain out of nowhere. The government first tested it on Exmoor in 1952. Apparently they were intending to use it in farming - you know, your version of hydroponics that uses plants planted in earth rather than water. It was so effective that a whole small seaside town was destroyed by a flash flood. Completely washed away. Nowadays they only use it on military installations for camouflage protection. They created this storm to mask the take-off. Didn't you hear the first peal of thunder?"

Ant nodded.

"Didn't you think it was odd that it happened before the storm? It was the sound of the Lynmouth Gun going off."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" said Ant.

Turpin looked at him oddly. "You never asked."

Ant balled up his fists in frustration. "It would have proved this was a flying saucer base!"

"Well, I didn't know that! For all I knew, you might have used Lynmouth Guns on all your military bases, even the funny little ones with the winged air machines -"

"Aeroplanes", said Ant. "We call them aeroplanes."

"Wait a minute!" Ant held the snowstorm up to his eyes again. "Cleo's dot! It's moving! It's going vertically up! She's on that ship!"

"Why would she be there?" said Turpin, and then added: "They're climbing out of there in an awful hurry."

"Can we climb faster in the Fantasm?"

"Are you kidding? We could make the Fantasm to the Moon and back while they were still clearing the ionosphere...of co