“Acknowledged,” said a voice. It was a voice I knowed well. I already had heard it before. It was the dead voice that sounded out of the DreamSleeve when we first come to the ship and was begging to be picked up out of the water. Now it was coming from the statue at the end of the room, as if that big sword that was stuck inside the rock could talk. “Voice authentication is complete.”
Lorraine pushed Stanley forward. He took a faltering step, and then another, and then went down on his knees in front of the statue.
“Please don’t make me,” he said. He sounded much younger than he was.
Lorraine’s hand was still on his back. Her fingers flexed, pressing against him, letting him know she was there. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “My darling boy.”
He put out his hand and grabbed hold of the sword. He didn’t take it by the hilt though: he wrapped his fingers round the blade, right above where it went into the rock. Just as he reached out and before his fingers closed, I seen how dark and discoloured the metal was there. The green that showed through the gold everywhere else was gone to black in that one place.
Stanley winced, and a gasp of breath was squeezed out of him. A trickle of blood oozed out from underneath his clenched fist and run down the sword’s blade.
Then it was gone. The blood just soaked right into the metal, like the blade had sucked it down.
“Genetic authentication is complete,” the deep voice said.
I didn’t move an inch while all this was happening. I had forgot my plan of pushing Paul and Lorraine hard enough to send them through the glass. I had almost forgot who Koli Faceless was. I was on my knees right where Stanley was, remembering the words that had been hammered into me in Dr Kelly’s practice sessions a hundred and a thousand and a thousand thousand times, until they come without me calling on them. So though it was Stanley that was saying the words, it was not his voice I heard but mine.
“In the name of Albion, and in my own name, I authorise the commencement of Operation Flatland. Launch code is splendour.”
“Accepted.”
“In the name of Albion, and in my own name, I authorise the commencement of Operation Phoenix. Launch code is Excalibur.”
“Accepted.”
“In the name of Albion, and in my own name, I authorise the commencement of Operation Overreach. Launch code is Eden.”
“Accepted. Commencing operations.”
Something was happening way down below us that was hard to believe even though we was seeing it. The deck of the ship split open in the middle and the two halves of it gun to move apart, slow and steady. Cup cried out and Ursala gasped, but the memories come into my mind again to tell me what was happening. I knowed Sword of Albion was not going to break in pieces and sink.
It was much, much worse than that.
Out of the spaces under the deck – the same spaces Cup and me had walked through – great platforms rose up slowly into the light. Ravens was sitting on top of them like so many chickens roosting, except that these chickens was as big as houses. The moving platforms locked together like bricks in a wall, filling up the gaps that had opened in the big ship’s hull. The deck looked the same as it did before, only now it was full from end to end.
Trapdoors at the sides of the deck swung open too, and thousands of the small drones gushed out like water from a pump, streaming upwards into the sky.
Out of the doors at the base of the towers, the drudges marched, then drawed theirselves apart to let the big battle wagons roll through.
Lorraine reached out her hand, and Paul took it.
“All things fall,” she said.
“And are built again,” Paul answered.
I remembered that poem, but I had never liked it. Old civilisations put to the sword. Oh yes. But unless you bury them at the crossroads, with a stake through their hearts, they don’t really die.
That was the Stannabanna part of me thinking them thoughts, while I was watching the horizon. We was still a long way from the land, but it was not a flat line at the edge of the ocean any more. There was green hills there, rising up, and a thin streak of yellow that might of been a beach.
Stanley sunk down on the floor and sobbed. Lorraine dragged him up again with a hand on his arm, rougher than she needed to. “You have to be a man now, Stanley,” she said. “You’re about to conquer a country. And then a world.”
It was like them words was a key that turned inside my head. The memories I had got out of the sensorium was hard for me to understand because they was planted deep inside me like seeds is planted in a field. They rose up and sunk down again without my help or hindering, and when they come they was just big, heavy boulders that rolled in between me and the thoughts I was trying to think. Mostly I tried to look past them, or over them.
Now it was like I was seeing them whole for the first time. I knowed what all them operations was, and what Stanley needed an army for. A cold horror rose up in me like my whole body wanted to give out a scream. I gathered myself and stepped forward, knowing as I did that it was much too late. I hit Lorraine high up on her back, but all the force I could bring to it from such a short run-up was not enough. It was like hitting the trunk of a tree. Lorraine didn’t budge from where she was, but only turned to look at me. I think she had forgot until then that I was there, if things such as she and Paul was could forget anything.
“I think we’re done with these three now,” she said.
Cup drawed her knife. No, she drawed two knives – the one she had stole from the breakfast table and sharpened to a rough and ready edge, and her own that Stanley had give back to her below decks. She took a fighter’s crouch. “Let’s talk about what’s done and what isn’t done,” she said. “You come on over here, and I’ll go first.”
Lorraine didn’t move from her place. She glanced at one drone, and then the other. She flicked her eyes towards Cup, and I didn’t need no stolen memories to tell me what that meant. Both drones turned their red eyes around so they was facing the same way. Ursala give a yell – I don’t know if it even was a word, it was just a frightened, furious sound – and put herself right in front of Cup.
The drones’ eyes lit up, too bright for me to look at. They fired, both at the same time.
But they turned halfway round again as they was doing it. The bright red beams raked across Lorraine’s face and chest, leaving ruin behind them. Her jacket and shirt, that she called her Albion blues, catched fire. The skin on her cheek blistered and boiled and run down her face like treacle. She staggered, but didn’t fall.
Paul moved so quick he didn’t seem to move at all, swatting one of the drones out of the air with his big fist. It fell to the floor and bounced, bent almost in two. The other drone turned its fire on him, the red beam cutting a furrow across his shoulder.
“Run!” Ursala shouted. I was ahead of her for once, but I wasn’t aiming for the stairs. I grabbed Stanley’s arm. He was just kneeling there all this time like he was asleep, but when I touched him he cried out and pulled away from me.
“Stanley!” I yelled. “We got to go!”
He looked wildly round the room as if he was seeing it for the first time. Then he scrambled up and run, and was out in front of me when we got to the stairs.
So I was the rabbit’s scut, as they say – the last to go out of the room. As I run, I looked back. The one drone that was left was swinging in big, wide arcs into the high corners of the room and then around and down in between Paul and Lorraine as they tried to catch it or knock it out of the air. Both of them beared the marks of the red beam, but it was only Paul’s shoulder I seen clearly. Cloth and skin and flesh was scorched right off of it. What was underneath was shining bands of red-brown like tight-coiled rope, all moving each against other. When you took his skin away, Paul was a mole snake nest.