CHAPTER NINE

20th June to 3rd July 2084

‘Stop! Stop it!’ Amagat’s screams pierced the still heat of the afternoon. ‘Will you just stop it?’

I slowed to a halt. The trolley gave a final lurch and then stopped. ‘You walk or you ride,’ I said. ‘Which is it to be?’

No words, but Amagat stepped away from the trolley and walked a few paces; that was a good enough answer for me. She stopped and turned around, a surreal sight in these surroundings. From the neck down she was the epitome of the sublieutenant that she was. But the lower half of her head was black and red and swollen and the top half was wrapped in a crisp white bandage. It just didn’t fit with the baked desert around her.

‘Leo,’ I said. ‘Will you look after the sub?’

Jacobi caught up with us and stopped by Amagat. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You forgot this.’ He threw me one of the cowboy hats. He was wearing the straw hat and he placed the big floppy cap on Amagat’s bandaged head.

Cohen joined us wearing the other cowboy hat. The hole in his body-suit gave me another surge of the creeps. I added one of the other shoulder bags to my own and picked up two plastic bags of drinks. Leo couldn’t carry so much while he was Amagat’s eyes and Cohen and the sub wouldn’t be able to manage much.

‘We can stop in an hour, then we keep on,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get away from the plane before they send search parties.’ I re-checked the direction against my mind-map and started to march. In the short time we had taken to organise at the plane, the sun had burnt out to a golden memory of its former self. It was still hot, but it was with the dry heat of the air, not the beating rays of the sun. The going was a lot easier than I had imagined it would be and I found a ray of optimism creeping into my mind. Fool that I was.

I took point, walking four or five metres ahead of Cohen, who was a few paces ahead of Leo and Amagat. I set a stiff pace. We had to get clear.

* * * *

After an hour we paused, drinks of fruit juice welcome in the dying heat of the day. It was strange how the sun died out while its heat lingered on. As the sun sank and seemed to swell into a fiery orange ball I noticed that the heat was coming from the ground; the day’s warmth escaping into the evening. I wondered how long it would last.

The land that had looked so flat from the aeroplane was really a series of gentle slopes, broken by the occasional winding gully. The ground was hard and dry. I guess there must have been rains in the Dust Bowl at some time or other — that would be why the ground was set so solid — but judging by the lack of plant life there had been none for a long time.

At first I had wondered at the naming of the desert, maybe it harked back to the previous century when there had been great dust storms. Back when people had lived out there. But we had been climbing a gentle slope. As we started our descent, I found my feet stirring up little clouds of dust. I saw that there were cracks in the hard ground and that they were filled with a fine grey powder. When we reached the bottom of the first downward slope we came to a gully. Maybe a century ago there had been water winding its way along the bottom of that gully but we found only dust piled in ankle-deep drifts so fluid in their dryness that we had to paddle through them. We all needed drinks after that, just to clear the desert from our throats.

We walked on.

After a time that seemed like forever the last sliver of sun vanished beneath the horizon. The first hour of walking had already taken its toll on Amagat and Jacobi. Amagat grew tired very quickly. I couldn’t find any physical reason, so I guess it must have been psychological. Hell, she had already decided once that day that she was going to die; the crash must have really screwed her mind. Too much deviation from the plan and she was overloading.

Leo’s leg was slowing him down. The first time we stopped, he was so tired he even let me examine it. I guess he believed I wasn’t going to leave him behind by then. It was only a flesh wound, but it was one big lump of flesh that was wounded. I was amazed he was even walking. At least he had been able to stop the bleeding.

My respect for Cohen was still growing. His response to the situation seemed to be that his only way out was to walk. So he walked. I thought I detected a slight limp at times, but decided it was just an effect of the ground he was walking over. His wiry old body seemed almost to have been built for the conditions, but it was his attitude that made me think that if any one of us was going to get out of this desert it would be Cohen.

I was coping well. My only injury was where my zap had been yanked from my median interface. Over the hour of walking I had chipped away the pinpoint of pain in my forearm, but I was left with the tingling sensation of healing. The low currents in the nerves surrounding my median had miraculous curing powers, but they set up one mighty powerful itch. The heat that was left in the desert air was enough to show the limitations of my isothermal suit. It may be isothermal in normal conditions, but its fibres were not enough to shield me from the heat of the desert. My head and hands were not protected at all and the heat seemed to focus in these areas. It seemed to create a haze through my head so that all I could think of was left foot, right foot. Left foot. Right foot.

And this was only the first hour of walking. We had days ahead of us, if we could avoid the Callies.

The break breathed some life back into me and I started to walk, feeling much better. Jacobi was guiding Amagat again. I hoped she would recover her sight soon and be able to walk on her own, but I guess even chip-aided healing doesn’t provide instant remedies.

I walked a dozen metres ahead, an eerie chirruping sound teasing me from the growing shadows.

After a few minutes my AW told me someone was catching up with me. Cohen, I guessed, walking alone. ‘Elf owl,’ he said, finally drawing level. ‘Anywhere there’s saguaro, there’s an elf owl chipping away at the dusk. Fundamental rule of the universe.’

We walked on in silence.

A few minutes later I said, ‘What’s saguaro?’

‘Big cactus,’ said Cohen. ‘Looks like it has arms coming out from all over. The owls nest in them.’

Silence again, surrounding us as we walked.

In that second session of walking, the cold crept in around us, held us tightly in its clutches. The night closed in rapidly and soon all we had to guide us was the light of a few dim stars. My body-suit was feeding me with its warmth but, again, the extremes of reality were proving too much for it. And again it was the extremities of my body that suffered the most. I started to shiver as I walked.

‘It’ll get colder, boy,’ said Cohen. ‘It’s the clear sky — there are no clouds to keep the heat in.’ He hugged himself. ‘We won’t get far in the dark.’

‘Tonight we will,’ I said. ‘Even a few more metres could make the difference between being found and getting away. We walk all night. All day if we have to.’

‘We might be able to stumble our way through the cold and the dark,’ said Cohen. ‘But we won’t get more than a hundred yards under that sun.’

‘Maybe,’ I said and waited for silence to descend once more.

‘Where are you from, boy?’ asked Cohen. ‘The moon? My cousin’s daughter emigrated there after the revolution.’ He shook his head. ‘Didn’t like it, though. She came back after three months. Probably still paying off the debts.

‘Are you from the moon?’ he repeated, remembering his question.

‘L5,’ I said. ‘Place called Lejeune. Started my training on the moon.’

Over the next few days I found that most of our talking was broken up by spells of silent walking. The rhythm of the desert, I guess. ‘What sort of a place is this Lejuene?’ asked Cohen, after a time. He was usually the one to break the silence of the march.

‘It’s a Bernal-type sphere,’ I said. ‘A small one. A lot of it’s a farming museum. That’s what I used to do before the draft. We’ve got grow-coils, too. My pa runs them. He had an accident — severe neurone damage. Now he’s wired into the whole system. He says he grows half of L5 ‘s food, but I’ve seen the records and it’s nowhere near.’

‘So you’re a country boy, then.’ Cohen laughed. ‘A country boy from the colonies.’

The cold silence fell again. I wished I hadn’t placed so much confidence in the body-suits. Should have grabbed some warm clothes from the plane before we set out. But I hadn’t and I grew colder and colder. Thankfully the temperature was as low as it was going to get. Any lower and I think my blood would have frozen.

Cohen broke the silence again. ‘I was born on a farm,’ he said. ‘Near a town called Prescott, Arizona. Father ran twenty-two acres of high-intensity glasshouse. That was real farming. Man and machine against the environment, not man-machine against man-made environment.’

‘More sporting, huh?’

He looked at me, the ever-growing darkness obscuring whatever expression lay on his face. ‘No, not sporting,’ he said. ‘More natural.’

A period of quiet took over for a time.

There was something I had been wondering for quite a time and for once it was me that spoke first. ‘Why did you talk to me at the airport?’ I asked.

‘Fate. Who knows?’ said Cohen. ‘Why did you have your leg braced up?’

‘Makes people less keen to search you,’ I said. ‘They don’t like to touch a cripple.’

‘I used to wear a brace,’ said Cohen. ‘Bone disease when I was a baby. There’s a lot of that sort of thing about these days. It’s the environment. Grew out of it by the time I’d finished at college. I suppose you must have reminded me how it used to be.

‘And I suppose it showed how much I’ve changed since my days at college. It was only when you got angry at me that I remembered the humiliation of being handicapped. People holding doors open, giving you their seat on the subway. You got angry very convincingly, I’ll give that to you.’

‘I chipped it,’ I said. ‘Used my implants.’

Cohen looked away. ‘Might have guessed it wasn’t real. Makes me wonder just how much of a person they leave when they fill your head with hardware.’

‘Didn’t your brace make you a cyborg as much as any EP?’ I said.

‘That’s different,’ said Cohen. ‘I needed it. You don’t need to make yourself into a machine, but you do it.’ The ensuing silence lasted a long time. I walked on in the cold and dark and Cohen dropped back, exchanged a joke with Jacobi that I didn’t quite catch. Pretty soon Jacobi came forward and took over point duty.

‘What about Amagat?’ I asked.

‘Cohen’s got her,’ said Jacobi. ‘I think he wants to ease his rocks on her.’

I dropped back and walked alone for the rest of the night.

* * * *

The first rays of sun the following morning were just about the most precious things I had ever seen. Jewels of pure energy sent to bring life back to my body. We had not stopped often in the night, hardly drank at all. The signal from the GPS beacons told me we had covered around fifteen kay-ems. Not bad going for a group that included a blind woman, a guy with a leg wound and a fifty-year-old CalTex State Rep. Even if that Rep was Luke Cohen, who was turning out to be as fit as any of us, and perhaps a little more determined.

There was a beautiful period of an hour or so when the sun gave off just enough heat to take the chill out of our bones. Somehow it seemed to inspire a feeling of energy in me, as if I had chlorophyll in my skin. Then I began to realise that, nice as the warmth was, I was grateful for the shade of my cowboy hat. Soon even the hat couldn’t prevent the stifling heat from penetrating my good feelings. I began to realise that Cohen had known what he was saying. We would have to take shelter from the day’s heat.

Looking around at the others, I could see that the enforced rest might not be such a bad thing. I had been chipping away through the night, calling on my body’s reserves. So had Jacobi. But I guess Amagat was in no state for that, she looked like she would collapse at any moment. And of course Cohen had only his natural well-being to carry him through. I began to look for somewhere to rest up for the day.

Along with the sun, there was some good luck shining down on us that morning. The next gully we came to was a deep one with a good overhang on one side. At least we would have some shade to rest in.

* * * *

After that first long walk we fell into a kind of pattern. Walk for three or four hours at dawn, then shelter from the day’s heat. Walk again for maybe five hours at dusk and into the cold night. Then we would spend the coldest hours in a huddle of bodies, hoping we weren’t going to freeze.

Cohen didn’t want to share body heat at first. Old body-contact taboos made him uncomfortable, maybe a touch of revulsion at our artificial implants. That was the first crack I had seen in the older man’s armour. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he had said in my ear as the four of us lay shivering in each others arms. There was a good chance he might freeze to death and he was worried about what people would think! I felt a touch sorry for him and was reminded again of the differences between our two cultures. I guess homosexuality is more acceptable in the colonies, most of us try it for size — Max Abelson can vouch for me on that one. But it’s no big deal. It seems most people have some of it in them, yet Cohen was almost prepared to die rather than lie hugging two men and a woman.

After the first night, Cohen forgot his worries. I think he remembered how cold it had been even with our shared warmth. I don’t think he fancied going it alone.

Physically things just got worse and worse. The tiredness, the strain of constantly chipping to keep alert. The thirst was bad even with the drink we had brought along. Thankfully the heat and exhaustion made hunger less of a problem. Sure, there were the early complaints from my stomach, but they didn’t last long and soon settled into a distant throb that I could forget if I set my mind to it. I guess my body had enough to cope with. The damage to my median was slow to heal and an infection found its way in. My feet hurt. My body was just a general cacophony of pain and discomfort. But I chipped an element of control over it all. Kept a level head.

The others didn’t fare so well. The combined slowness of Amagat and Jacobi kept us down to only a short distance each session. I helped Amagat some of the time, a hand on her arm and a verbal warning of any big obstacles. Cohen did his share, too, but mostly it was Leo who limped along with Amagat.

Over the days of the march it was curious to see Amagat steadily improving while Leo deteriorated. The sub’s strength remained almost constant throughout the ordeal — even I lost my strength over those days, but she just kept on at her slow pace. Towards the end she began to say she could see light through her bandages. She began to complain about the pain of her face and the tingling of regeneration as her chip speeded her repairs. I found myself thinking of that moment in the plane when I had admitted to myself that I found her attractive in a strange sort of way. Could I still find her appealing? No way, I thought, but that thought wasn’t me. I remembered Triona, thought a bit more. Injuries shouldn’t get in the way — it shouldn’t matter how someone looks, I tried to tell myself.

Leo began to find that his wound was more serious than he had first thought. Maybe more than he could handle. After the first two or three days it was Leo who set the pace. And that pace became slower and slower. My early estimate of six or seven days increased and eventually doubled. The ordeal dragged itself out.

Walking point became something of a ritual. We had no real need of a man up front: if we were going to be found then there was not a lot we could do about it. But I guess it had a sort of reassuring effect, lent a hint of normality to the situation.

Cohen used to bounce about between the three of us, helping Amagat, taking point with me or Jacobi, sometimes walking alone. But he spent more time with me as the other two made it clear that they didn’t want to talk. Leo didn’t have time for anything but survival and Amagat seemed confused about things. I began to wonder if the only damage she had received was to her face.

One dawn, maybe on the third or fourth day, Cohen said to me, ‘Why do you think they want me?’

‘You’re the State Rep for Northern California,’ I said. ‘Politics.’ I shrugged. ‘Not my line.’

‘It’s everybody’s line, boy. Has to be.’ After a moment or two of silent walking — we were going very slowly, Leo and Amagat vying for last place — Cohen continued. ‘Things have been in one big mess down here for an awfully long time. That’s why your leaders took their opportunity to grab some action in the Union. It’s all down to the greenhouse disaster.’

He paused as we came to a small gully and padded through its dust drifts. On the other side he said, ‘The greenhouse disaster. Melting ice, expanding water, crustal stress. I was born when it really got going, I lived through all the big changes. The US split into a huddle of small squabbling nations. In the Alignment we’ve been trying to re-establish some of the old order, get ourselves sorted out.

‘It’s been one whole lot of confusion in every branch of government. My job is sorting out the military, finding out what our capabilities are. Listen, boy, if you aliens had come down just five years ago you could have had the entire continent. We didn’t even know where our military bases were.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re still finding some, even today.’

‘Seems like a good reason for wanting you,’ I said.

‘That’s not entirely it,’ said Cohen. ‘The reason they want me is because your side is just as confused as we were. They don’t know what we’re capable of doing to them.’

‘You’re fooling yourself if you think we’re worried about how well equipped you are,’ I said.

‘Just because we don’t have holograms and computers in our heads doesn’t mean we’re as primitive as you might think, boy. No you’re not worried, it’s your leaders we scare. They keep that away from the boys on the ground.’

Silence for a while, then: ‘They tell us about the satellites you hit,’ I said.

‘That’s a surprise,’ said Cohen. ‘It must suit their purposes. Do they tell you what happens?’

‘Lasers, or something,’ I said, trying to remember the news reports from just before I left Lejeune. ‘They blind them.’

‘Hah!’ said Cohen. ‘That’s more like it. The truth hurts them. Your spy satellites use huge arrays of scanners. Mosaics. Each one scans a particular area constantly. The old ones could be blinded but, to blind a mosaic, we’d need a laser shooting from just about everywhere in the Alignment. Don’t you think that’s a little impractical?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, losing him somewhere on the way.

‘They’re protected by special filters, too,’ said Cohen. ‘Selective screening. You just can’t blind these things.’ He paused, then after a few more steps said, ‘So we knock them out completely. We use pulse weapons that can destroy entire space stations. We’ve got them scared, Jed, they don’t know how we’re doing it.’ He shook his head. ‘So they send you in on the slight chance you might pull off this crazy mission.’

Somehow the old man’s rantings had disturbed me, found their way through my shell. Hell, I couldn’t still blame it on shock. That crash seemed to have shaken something loose inside of my head and every so often it rattled.

‘All this technology,’ I said, more to myself than to Cohen. ‘Sometimes I think they’re just using us like in a lab, testing out their latest ideas on us, seeing what the results are.’

‘C’est la vie,’ said Cohen.

* * * *

The heat in the middle of the day was a terrible thing, but we were lucky and always managed to find shade to spend the worst hours in. Once or twice I ventured out. Curiosity, I guess. You can’t see much in the half-light of dusk and dawn, particularly as we tended to travel at the darker times, avoiding the heat. One day I stood above our gully and looked around, my tattered cowboy hat protecting my head and eyes from the light, if not the heat. There was flatness in every direction; I almost expected to see the aeroplane on the horizon, a few kay-ems back on our trail. But there was only more horizon. Reading the GPS grid I estimated that we had travelled maybe eighty kay-ems. The vegetation had grown thicker as we moved northwards, Cohen kept saying it would, thin out again but it didn’t. The cacti were more abundant, a shorter variety adding to the saguaro. The commonest plant was a sort of low scrubby bush that seemed to creep its way outwards across the desert.

Standing there, atop the gully, I was surprised and delighted to see the sameness of the landscape broken by a tall figure. It was a sunflower standing brave and alone. For some crazy reason I walked the short distance to it and saluted.

I walked back and sat on the edge of the gully, chipping down the pains in my body. Let my mind just mellow out. Floated. I hadn’t slept much in the desert, the nights were too cold, the days too hot. Somebody had to keep guard anyway. I did doze occasionally, but not for long, my AW snapping me alert every so often to the sound of the wind, or maybe Amagat moving slightly.

My mind mellow, I began to think about recent events. At first it was the shock of the crash that had blunted my killing edge, made me question some of my military training. But it had lasted and I couldn’t still be in shock. Could I? As I felt then, I could never raise a gun against anyone again. Something in me had snapped and I couldn’t go through with soldiering any more.

If this was a new me then what should I do? Go on and deliver Cohen? He would be interrogated, his life not worth the experience; I would be forced back into the military mould. Something in me that felt very tight at that moment might break. But that was my only choice. I couldn’t hand Cohen back to his own people, I’d end up shot or in jail. If the rumours about the Callies were true, then shooting would be the best option. I’d heard that they have an interrogator chip that could force you to tell them anything they want; they just shunt you into a recorder. Only bad design means that a lot of what’s taken out never finds its way back in. It scrambles the brain. No, we had to get to Grand Union, whatever future I chose.

I stopped thinking about it. At least consciously. The thought of some of the things I had been responsible for as a soldier threatened to break me apart at times. I could never think about it for long. I continued to chip down, but somehow didn’t get the same mellow feeling I had experienced a few moments before.

Cohen joined me with Amagat when we set out. We took it nice and easy, so we didn’t catch up with Leo on point. Amagat had learnt to use a stick and she was managing to walk on her own until we reached any tricky bits.

For some reason Gil had lodged himself in my mind. Seeing Cohen in the uniform with the hole in its chest was getting on my nerves. ‘Why did your minder have to start a shooting match, back on the plane?’ I asked him.

The older man’s face dropped. He seemed to be watching the little puffs of dust that his feet kicked up. ‘We were going to hide out the journey,’ he said. ‘Mosander pushed the mask over my head after you shot the steward. She always was quick.’ He paused for a long, steadying breath. ‘I don’t know what we were going to do, we were just hiding.

‘Then I sneezed. There was nothing that could be done. He was going to come for us so Lyn shot him. Then you shot her.’ He looked away again, walked in silence. Losing valuable moisture.

‘It was only a bodyguard,’ said Amagat. I revised my opinion of her: it wasn’t just that she didn’t understand how the Army worked, it was the whole human race she couldn’t follow. Cohen moved away and after a moment or two so did I.

* * * *

In the dusk session on the second of July we only covered about two kay-ems. We were all operating on overdrive, exhaustion weighing us down. Amagat and Cohen shared the few remaining drops of juice out of our last big container before we set out. We had been hiding the empties in little caches as we went but I just dropped this one with my shoulder bag, the effort of hiding it too much for me.

We had about fourteen kilometres to go. With nothing to drink.

We came across an old road late in that session. That fixed our position on my map. I was alone on point and I waited for the others to catch up. A light gust of wind drew great swirls of dust along the road. Probably the only traffic for decades.

‘A road!’ said Cohen, his voice little more than a faint croak. ‘A goddamned road!’

‘Gonna hitch a lift, Rep?’ Jacobi’s voice was about the only strong thing he had left. I guess that was because he hadn’t used it much over the previous days.

‘A road,’ repeated Cohen. ‘Which way do we go?’

‘Straight on,’ I said, nodding across the road at the continuing desert. The horizon was still a straight edge to our world.

‘What?’ said Cohen. He seemed hypnotised by the sight of this old dust-covered road. ‘It’s a road,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘It’ll take us somewhere ... They always do.’ He stopped lamely and watched an eddy of dust racing a broken-up bit of tumbleweed down the centre of the road.

I looked to where the wind was coming from, worried by Cohen’s tales of dust storms, but there was no great black cloud closing in on us. Back to Cohen, I consulted my mind-map to be sure of our location. ‘That way — ‘ I nodded to my left ‘ — there’s nothing but deserted ruins until the Rockies. That’s one-fifty kilometres.’ I nodded the other way. ‘Other way, we might find what’s left of Garden City in a hundred or so. Now I don’t want any of your Earthshit complaints, we’re going on. Maybe ten kays, that’s all.’ I walked ahead, annoyed at myself for losing my cool. I’d just about decided that I’d been able to overcome the soldier in me, but my burst of temper was the fighter taking over again. I guess he’d never really gone, was just waiting until the going got better. It was like there was a killer hitching a lift in my body, running whatever programs he found convenient or amusing. I began to wonder if I was going mad, cracking under the strain of it all.

I didn’t come to any conclusion on that one.

We came to a halt when I decided that we were well clear of the road. Hell, we were all losing our senses to some extent and I didn’t want Cohen getting any ideas about heading off along that road on his own.

We settled down amongst a cluster of large boulders. I didn’t sleep at all that night. It wasn’t because of the cold, in fact it was quite a mild night. We started off in the usual heap of bodies, but then we realised that we could stay apart without too much discomfort. I rolled away and sat, hunched against a rock. I had been lying mostly on Amagat and became aware of stirrings for her again. Jeez, I hadn’t felt like that since we had been on the plane. Exhaustion, I guess.

After a time, I heard the repeated sharp yap of a coyote, a sound I had heard a few nights before; it was closer this time. The sound stopped and I settled back again. A short time later my Advance Warning set up a flutter in my head. I stood and looked around but I couldn’t see anything in the dim starlight.

Then I heard a mournful howl and relaxed. The coyotes were close.

I thought of a rumour I had heard in one of the Grand Union cities. St Louis, perhaps. It was said that the Callies had packs of trained animals guarding their borders. They sniffed out invaders and sent signals to troops by radio transmitters built into their brains. Scare-mongering, I had laughed.

Until that desert night.

I shot a burst of blue laser into the darkness, aiming at the spot where I guessed the yelp to have come from. Nothing happened.

I went back to my sitting place and sat. The ground was still warm.

Later in the night a coyote howled in the distance and I decided that it was a good sign. Any life was a good sign after the emptiness the desert had offered us up until then.

The night seemed to last a long time and I set off feeling worse than when we had stopped. I wanted a drink and my head was threatening to ache too much even for my chip to handle. Hell, my chip was overloaded with the other pains of my body. I was wondering just how much it could take. What would I do if it gave out?

My head just got worse and worse. There seemed to be no stopping it. The wind was flicking at my head, sending my hair flapping about, thudding on my skull. I began to feel dizzy. I began to wonder if this was really how it was going to end. Only a few kay-ems to go and my body gives out. I concentrated on lifting and placing my feet, keeping a straight line.

Just walking.

I guess the feeling probably only lasted a minute or two, but it seemed to drag out into hours inside my head. And each second of those hours hurt like hurting was the latest trend.

The whole world was a haze. Thundering in my temples, my neck. Hurting. I felt sick and realised that it was at least partly due to a jabbering of Comtac in my abdomen. Normally I can read Comtac without thinking but not this time. A few seconds and 1 realised it was because it said nothing, it was just a wild stabbing of impulses. My head hurt even more.

I stumbled, fell to the floor, hit my jaw on a rock. The surge of pain and adrenalin cleared my head of everything for an instant and I grabbed that clear moment, chipped up frantically. That was all I needed and despite a wild haze of confusion in my senses I managed to hang onto that moment of clarity, stay chipped as high as I could go.

I looked around. Amagat was walking on with her stick tapping on the ground as if everything was fine. Cohen had stopped, his attention divided between me and Jacobi, who was weaving about all over the place. Jacobi fell over a few seconds later.

I heard a strange whining roar in the distance, getting louder, and I realised what was happening. ‘Get down!’ I shouted. ‘We’re being attacked. Get down!’