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Wreathed in early morning mist, the village was an oasis of rural tranquillity. Nobody seemed to be astir, which wasn't particularly surprising at this hour of the morning. The one and only shop was closed, houses were curtained or shuttered, and nothing moved on the road. "It looks very beautiful," Victoria said wistfully. "But not quite right, somehow, without any people at all." "If they've got any sense, they're in bed," Gia said. "They'll just have to get up, then," Samantha said. "That's if they're people at all. Like I said, we don't even know this is Earth." "It looks like Earth." "Yeah, but it could be one of those parallel worlds where everything's the same but a bit different. They have them on /Star Trek/ all the time. You know, where the Romans won the Battle of Hastings or whatever." "I thought that was the Vikings," Zoë said. Victoria winced, but forebore to correct them. "If it is a parallel Earth, there's no point in asking anyone what the planet is," Gia said. "Because a parallel Earth would be called 'Earth' too." "Earth Two?" Jamie asked innocently. Gia sighed. "That is not what I meant." "Don't worry," Isobel said. "He only does it to annoy. We'll just have to fall back on watching out for people wearing goatees or eyepatches." "At the moment, we still need to find people, full stop." They found nobody until they reached the far end of the village. Here, the quaint rustic architecture gave way to a collection of corrugated-iron sheds which, it seemed, served as the local garage. In the forecourt stood two petrol pumps, of antique design but freshly painted. Between the pumps and the sheds could be seen various examples of agricultural machinery, in states of repair ranging from pristine to dismantled. Bending over a stripped-down tractor was a young man with crew-cut blond hair, whistling cheerfully as he tinkered with the engine. "Hello," Samantha said, walking across the forecourt to where he was working. The mechanic looked up. "Morning. You're up and about early." Samantha gestured to the tractor. "Seems like we're not the only ones." "Early to bed, early to rise. What can I do for you ladies?" "This is gonna sound daft," Samantha said. "But... Where is this place?" "King's Medford, of course. Finest village in the land." "There you are," Zoë said. "Just where we should be." Samantha made a face at her. "A fluke. That's all it was." She turned back to the mechanic. "Thanks, mate. You're a star." "Any time." "See you later. Do you have a name?" "Call me Mike." "Nice to meet you, Mike. I'm Samantha." "Then see you later, Samantha." They walked back to the road. "I think you just picked up a new admirer," Isobel said. "How do you do that?" Victoria asked. "You've had a disturbed night, your clothes aren't anything special, you look, pardon me, as if you'd been dragged through a hedge backwards... and you still had him eating out of your hand." Samantha grinned. "I'm just that good," she said. "I reckon I could pull on the Mersey Ferry in a force ten gale." Victoria turned slightly green at the thought. "Please don't feel any compulsion to try on my account," she said primly. "Excuse me," Zoë said. "Now we've established that your slurs on my navigation were totally unjustified, don't we need to decide how to proceed?" "We stop that motorbike," Jamie said firmly. "Just in case you've all been too busy chasing after men to remember." "Oh, I think we've got a jealous Jamie," Samantha said. "Don't worry, I wouldn't forget you." She hugged him. "There, is that better?" "Maybe, but you're not going to stop a crook on a motorbike by giving him a cuddle or two." "Call me old-fashioned," Victoria said. "But I think we should go to the police." - * - "So," Sergeant Peters said, glancing at his notebook. "You claim that a gang of smugglers is intending to transport something valuable, but you don't know what it is, through this village, and you think I should stop them." "Aye." Jamie prodded the desk in frustration. "Look, we're wasting time. They could be here at any moment." "Do you have any proof of your story?" Jamie scratched his head. "Well, Isobel's got the sketch-map. Look, if you send someone to the Daneswarren Hotel the lady there will tell you we're not lying. They knocked her out and tied her up and if it wasn't for us she'd still be there." "So you were at the hotel recently?" "Aye, this wasn't more than half an hour ago." "And yet you've somehow managed to get here before the alleged smugglers." "Zoë did something to a café and it flew into space and brought us here. Look, we're getting nowhere." "I quite agree." The Sergeant snapped his notebook shut. "I never heard such a preposterous story in all my born days. Now get out before I arrest you for wasting police time." Jamie emerged from the police station -- nothing more than a house with a blue lamp outside -- to find the others waiting for him. "How did it go?" Victoria asked. "Not so well." Jamie perched himself on a windowsill. "I don't think I should've mentioned Zoë making yon café fly. He thought I was a spleadhadair." "A what?" "That I was telling him a tall story." "Oh, *Jamie*!" Zoë said. "I might have known you'd ruin everything!" "Well, how was I tae ken he'd be such a stick-in-the-mud? That sort o' thing happens at Nameless all the time." "But obviously not here." Victoria sighed. "This must be one of those quiet little English villages where nothing ever happens." "Until one day it does and the police don't realise the danger until too late," Isobel added. "Now what do we do?" "Och, that's obvious enough," Jamie said. "We catch whoever it is ourselves." "Sounds good so far. How?" "Block the road. And hide behind the hedges. When they come, we jump out on them." "That's not a bad idea," Zoë said. "How do we block the road, though?" "I thought yon fellow at the garage might have something we could use. Bollards or what-not." "He'd hardly give them to us, would he?" "He'd give them to me," Samantha said. "With the right persuasion, of course. And if he doesn't, we can just bash him over the head and nick what we need." "Samantha!" Victoria said. "That's the sort of thing those smugglers would do. Can we at least try to keep to the moral high ground?" Once more, they set out for the garage. - * - "You're a real friend in need," Samantha said, giving the mechanic a dazzling smile. "Yeah, well, I shouldn't really be doing this, but if it's like you say..." "Has anyone got any other ideas?" Zoë asked, watching the negotiation with scientific detachment. "We could really do with a backup plan or two, just in case." "I thought we could dress up like the police," Isobel said. "To make them stop, I mean." "Where, in this village, would we get six police costumes?" "That was the next thing I thought. So I didn't suggest it." Zoë smiled. "I'd have liked to see how the uniform looked on you, though." "Perhaps next time there's a fancy-dress party." "No other ideas, anyone?" "I've got one," Gia said. "A short-range, tightly focused, electromagnetic beam to disrupt the function of the vehicle's engine." "Oh, aye, and where are we going tae find one of them?" Jamie asked. "That sounds even harder than the uniforms." Gia smiled in triumph. "Zoë, give me your phone." Reluctantly, Zoë dug out her mobile. It looked rather like a slab of silvered glass, with rounded edges and no surface markings at all. "Come on," Gia said. "Hand it over. I'll get you a new one, promise." Zoë wordlessly dropped the telephone into Gia's outstretched hand. "Thanks. Now, I'll need an assistant." "I don't think I could bear to watch," Zoë said. "You'd be overqualified. I just need someone to hold my soldering iron--" "--And tell you how clever you are," Jamie interrupted. "Sounds like you've just volunteered," Isobel said. At this moment, Samantha rejoined them. "It's all sorted," she said. "Mike's gonna lend us a handcart to put the stuff on. We'll have to load it up ourselves." "Can the rest of you deal with that?" Gia asked. "I really need to make a start on the pulse generator. Oh, and could you ask your friend Mike if he's got a soldering iron I can use?" "Aye," Jamie said. "And we need tae find out the lie of the land in these parts. None of this'll be any use if we end up on the wrong road." "Come with me, then," Samantha said. "We'll get you set up in no time." "At least back up my files first!" Zoë called after them. Isobel looked from her to Victoria. "Come on, you two. We need to get this cart loaded. There's not a lot of time." - * - "Just about here," Gia said. She crouched down, being careful to bend her legs rather than her back, and deposited the car battery she was holding in the long grass at the base of the tree. "Not before time," Jamie said, placing another battery alongside Gia's. "What are these things made of?" "Lead," Gia said. "And count yourself lucky we've got the cart, or you'd have had to carry them all the way from the garage." She waited while the other four positioned their batteries, and then began to wire them together. "Now all we need is someone to deploy the pulse generator," she said, twisting the last few wires together as she spoke. "Meaning what?" Jamie asked. "Climb the tree with this." She held out Zoë's telephone. Its casing was now cracked and held together with duct tape. At one end a hole had been drilled into it; from this, a long flex emerged, most of which was slung over Gia's shoulder in a neat coil. "Attach it to that branch, so this end points downward." She indicated a branch, ten or twelve feet up, which projected over the road. Everyone looked at each other, and then at the tree. "I reckon we need a ladder," Samantha said. Isobel gave the tree a dubious look. "Or one of those lorries, you know, that they use to change the bulbs in street lamps. With the long arm." "You mean a cherrypicker," Gia said. "Do I? Anyway, I don't see how we can do it on our own." "We could climb on each other's shoulders," Zoë suggested vaguely. Victoria looked around the group. "Am I to understand that none of you can climb a tree?" "We're city girls," Samantha said. "We don't do trees. Can't Jamie do it?" "Wi' you lot standing at the bottom and keeking up my kilt?" Jamie asked indignantly. "We wouldn't look. Promise." Samantha crossed her fingers behind her back, and seemed to be finding it difficult to keep a straight face. Victoria sighed. "Give me the equipment, please, Gia." "You?" "I was something of a tomboy in my younger days," Victoria said, tying the flex round her waist. "I will freely admit that I'm afraid of Ice Warriors and Cybermen, but climbing trees holds no terror for me. Could one of you put your hands together and give me a leg-up?" It took several attempts, in between which she tended to end up on the ground with the breath knocked out of her, but eventually Victoria made it up the trunk and inched her way along the indicated branch. Despite her earlier boast, she wasn't feeling at all confident. It was a long time since she'd been in the habit of scrambling about in trees, and she'd already had an exhausting day and night. "That'll do," Gia called up to her. "See if you can wedge it somehow." "She's got pluck, I'll give her that," Isobel said, as Victoria secured the telephone and started backing towards the trunk, paying out the wire as she went. "It makes my palms go damp just to watch her." "If she tried that in my time we'd all be sent on a compulsory risk assessment course," Zoë said. "You'd need scaffolding and rubber mats and antigravs and environmental impact statements..." "So no-one climbs trees where you come from?" Jamie asked her. "Space stations don't have a lot of trees as a rule." "Och, ye ken what I mean. You grew up in a City, you said." "Yes. We had properly-organised indoor activity centres with climbing frames. Not trees." "Mind out below," Victoria called down. She threw the free end of the flex to Gia, and started to shin down the tree trunk. "You wouldn't think it to look at her, would you?" Samantha said, watching Victoria scramble down. "It just goes to show, you never can tell." Victoria chose that moment to lose her footing and half-slid, half-fell the rest of the way. More by luck than design, Samantha caught her. "You all right?" she asked. "I think so." Victoria rubbed her arm, where a twig had scratched her. "What should we do now?" "Someone stays here, behind the hedge," Gia said. "When the motorbike comes, they put the brown wire on the red terminal. I'd suggest they wear gloves for that." "Why brown on red? Surely it should be red on red?" "You'd think so, wouldn't you? Frankly I'm amazed this era made any scientific progress at all, when they couldn't even agree what colour meant live. Anyway, it only needs one person to do that. The rest of us wait at the roadblock." "Us?" Isobel said. "You're not going to be the one who stays behind?" "I thought Victoria might like to do it. You start off, and I'll catch up when I've talked her through it. Is that all right with the rest of you?" There was a general murmur of agreement. Gia waited until the rest were out of earshot. "Thanks for agreeing to that," she said. "I think I know why you didn't want to stay behind," Victoria said. "You want to be there with the rest of them when whatever happens, happens. And see how well you cope." "Are you reading my mind?" "No, but I'm probably better at guessing than the other girls." "Thank you." Victoria gave her an encouraging smile. "Good luck." "This is the best spot," Jamie said. "Hedges on either side. We put the barriers across the road here. Then we can hide the cart behind yon gate." "Here's Gia," Samantha said. "Everything OK?" "Everything," Gia replied. "Right, then. Let's get this barrier set up." What was on the cart wasn't so much a barrier, as a kit of parts that might one day become one. Oil drums, painted wooden beams, and ropes figured prominently. "This looks like a team-building exercise," Zoë said, as they started to unload the cart. "A what?" Samantha asked. "You know. Build a bridge across an imaginary chasm against a time limit, that sort of thing. They always seem to involve components like this." "Never heard of it." "You will," Gia said darkly. "They come in a few years after your time, if I remember rightly. And spread like /Bellis fosterii/ and are even harder to stamp out." "Like what?" "I suppose that hasn't been invented in your time either? A genetically engineered plant to clean up chemical spills." "Don't tell me," Jamie said, tying a beam into position. "It was worse than whatever it was supposed to cure." "Got it in one. Anyway, when I was a junior tech at T-Mat, we had to do team-building. Group bonding and things. As soon I was in charge, I put a stop to it." "So how do you build teams, then?" "I choose people," Gia said. "And I tell them what to do, and they do it. Or else." Isobel laughed. "You tell him, sister." Samantha hung the last component of the barrier in place: a piece of plywood, crudely painted with the words ROAD CLOSED. "There," she said. "Looking good." "At least, as good as we're going to get it," Zoë said. "Jamie, what are you doing down there?" "Probably taking another nap," Samantha said, looking down at Jamie's prone form. Jamie, one ear pressed to the ground, put his finger to his lips. "They're coming," he said. In the distance, the sound of a two-stroke engine could now be heard. The ambushing party quickly scattered to either side of the road, climbed over the gates into the fields on either side, and crouched behind the hedges, waiting. Chapter 8: Where Another Man Might Stop
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