Our opponents meant business. Clearly now, in the early morning light I could see they wore desert camouflage, body armour, headsets, and carried enough weaponry to effect a regime change. No words were spoken. They looked tough and professional. Just how tough and professional we were about to find out.
One stepped forward and pulled off his helmet.
Ronan.
The man who had killed Sussman.
We’d ambushed him and now he’d done it to us. I tried not to sag. This wasn’t good. I’d seen what he was capable of.
Close up, he was surprisingly nondescript. No savage scars, no sinister sneer. His dark hair was thinning and his lined face made him look older than I suspect he actually was, but having said that, he looked in surprisingly good condition.
You see, people think it’s easy, living in the past. You turn up with a big bag of gold and enough foreknowledge to ensure you back the right horse, or the right king, or the right dot com companies, and retire to count your money.
It’s not that simple.
Try it in the last hundred years or so and you’ll find the lack of National Insurance number, ID card, or credit rating means you’re officially a non-person and after America closed its borders last year, all sorts of security alarm bells start ringing.
Or, you think you’ll go back a little further before all these tiresome records were invented, but that doesn’t work either. Society is rigid. Everyone knows everyone else in their world. Everyone has their place in the scheme of things. If you don’t belong to a family, a tribe, a village, a guild, whatever, you don’t exist then, either. And you can’t just pitch up somewhere without mutual acquaintances, recommendations, or letters of introduction. Life on the fringes of society, any society in any time is tough. I should know. The four months I spent alone in Rushford had not gone well.
If that was how these people lived then they should look like shit. And so should their pods. Pods need regular aligning or they start to drift. And yet these people looked in reasonably good nick. Better than us at the moment. They had a base somewhere. They had to have. Someone, somewhere, was giving them shelter.
I dragged myself from that problem to the more pressing issues of the moment.
Ronan scanned the rows of kneeling figures. As usual, he showed no more emotion than a corpse. If he felt anything at all, it was all kept within, locked down, stifled. I’m used to St Mary’s, where no one is at all backward in expressing whatever emotions they happen to be experiencing at the time and this quiet, deadly calm filled me with fear.
He pointed, apparently at random. A single shot echoed off the walls and Jamie Cameron fell forward into the sand with part of his face blown away.
The shock of it stopped my heart. Young Jamie Cameron. With his mop of dark hair and perpetually singed eyebrows. One minute alive and the next minute – not. I swallowed down real hysteria and dragged my eyes away. Who would be next? Because there would be a next. There would keep being a next until Ronan told us what he wanted and the Boss refused to give it to him.
They dragged Markham to his feet.
‘Open the pods.’
I held my breath. He’d just seen Jamie die. There was no saying what our uncoordinated little troglodyte would do.
I underestimated him. That boy was gold. Grubby gold, but gold nonetheless.
He drew himself up to his unimpressive height and said quietly, ‘I take my orders from Dr Bairstow.’
Ronan smiled unpleasantly and raised his weapon.
‘Not any more you don’t. Open the pods.’
It was Chief Farrell, of all people, who broke. He jumped to his feet. ‘No. Stop. Don’t do this.’ Two men seized him.
I stared at him in shock. What was he doing?
Ronan regarded him impassively for a moment, then turned back to Markham and fired. Another shot echoed off the rocks and Markham crumpled to the ground, blood seeping into the sand beneath him.
The Boss’s face was bleak and, if he ever got out of this, I wouldn’t give much for Ronan’s chances. Or Farrell’s either.
‘What do you want, Clive?’
‘What do I want, Edward? I want it all. I want your pods, including the nice, big, shiny one over there. I want the contents. Those scrolls will fetch a fortune hundreds of times over. I want you to know that this disaster will end your command of this pathetic little unit. But most of all Edward, I want to leave you here, last man standing, with all your bright young people bleeding to death in the dirt around you. I want you to know I’ve won and everything you have struggled to achieve has just led to me getting exactly what I want.’
Hatred crackled between them. I could feel it twisting the air. They had no thought for those around them. This was up close and personal. We were looking at the end of our St Mary’s. He shouldn’t have come. I’d been wrong to include him. If he’d stayed safely at home then whatever happened to us here would not be the end. He could have rebuilt, somehow. Was this what had thrown Mrs Partridge into such an untypical panic?
‘No.’
Short and to the point. No arguing, no pleading, no messing. Just ‘no.’