David Clarke

Excelsior

Chapters 17-20

Chapter Seventeen

My socks, trousers and coat hadn't dried out very well and the rain was still coming down, even if it wasn't as heavy as it had been before, so all in all I wouldn't have chosen to go out for a walk at that point. But when people are pointing guns at you there isn't a lot of choice about it. Pasha led us off towards the south, which at least meant that he didn't see the crater, which was north of the little ridge next to which we'd pitched the tent, and I decided that I wasn't going to tell him about it, whatever he threatened me with. And from the friendly way he chatted to me while we were walking I found it hard to believe that he was actually going to threaten us at all.

"It's surprising how warm it is up here, isn't it?" he said. "It's warmer here than it is in Moscow, which is more than twelve degrees further south, or Petersburg. We're on our way to Romanov-na-Murmanje, which is about the same latitude as this, but it's already below freezing there."

It took me a moment to remember that this was the Imperial Russian name for Murmansk, and if that was where Pasha and his men were heading, I really wanted to persuade him to let us go before they left, because I definitely didn't want to find myself locked up in Russia's northernmost city. I decided that being friendly would probably be the best way to achieve this.

"That's one of the reasons why we wanted to come here," I said. "It's actually warmer here than it is in Oslo. It's something to do with ocean currents, apparently. Have you been here before?"

"No. Actually this is my first time in Norway. My father wanted to get rid of me for a bit, so he sent me on a tour of the frontier regions."

"Why would he want to get rid of you?"

"Oh, I'm a bit of a stain on the family's honour." He grinned at me. "Like I said before, I tend to play a bit rough, and while it doesn't matter too much if the odd serf gets damaged, when it happens to the sons of landowners people sometimes kick up a stink about it. I can't imagine why… anyway, my father decided that it would do me good to spend some time seeing what actually happens in the countries we govern. 'Maybe you'll learn what duty means', he said."

"And have you?"

"I already knew. Don't get me wrong: I might like to have fun in some rather unorthodox ways, but my country always comes first. Always. If I thought you were a threat to our security I wouldn't hesitate to kill you, or anyone else who threatened us. Of course, if I can use my more, er, exotic hobbies in the service of my country, so much the better. After all, there's no reason why you can't enjoy doing your duty, is there?"

"I'm sure there isn't," I agreed.

"There you are, then. I just hope a chance to combine business with pleasure comes my way. In the meantime I'm flying patrols along the frontiers and doing mundane things like delivering the mail. It's not very exciting, but it is a chance to see some different scenery."

"And have you got your own æthership?"

"Not officially. It's something I'd like to do, though. Of course, I'd want to do it as a privateer, rather than in a navy ship. When you're a privateer you can go where you want and do whatever you feel like, and you get to serve your country at the same time. I think I'd really enjoy that. Whether my father will let me is another matter, though – I think he expects me to become a soldier, like my boring brothers. But I'd hate that – lots of mud and blood and smoke, and most of the time you have to guess what's going on. I mean, I'm sure I could do it: most of the men in our family do some soldiering, and my father's been at it for about thirty years. But there aren't even any decent campaigns on at the moment. In the west we seem happy just to sit and wave at the Froggies across the Rhine, and in the south we haven't moved for years. I have heard a whisper that we're going to have another go at India shortly, but I expect it's just rubbish, like most of the rumours that go around."

"I don't think you ought to be telling me stuff like that," I pointed out. "Even if it's just a rumour it's probably still supposed to be secret."

"So who are you going to tell? Some German nobody in Oslo? He won't care – why should he? Even if you swam to England and yelled it into the king's ear he wouldn't do anything. The English don't have an army to speak of. True, their navy is a bloody nuisance, but it wouldn't be much use in the Himalayas, would it? And the Frogs wouldn't stick their necks out for the Indians, either. But, like I said, it's probably just crap anyway. And even if it isn't, I don't fancy slogging my way over some stupidly high mountains and then hacking through a jungle full of snakes and tigers and stuff. That's no way to fight. Give me an æthership and a decent crew and I'll be happy to show my father what I can do. So – and assuming for a moment that I decide not to kill you or keep you – what are you going to do when you grow up?"

"I really don't know," I said. "I don't even live in my own country, and since I can't speak Norwegian there isn't a lot I can do here. I'll probably have to go back to Prussia to find work."

"Maybe I could get you a job working for us?"

"I don't think so," I said. "Nothing personal, but it seems a bit dishonourable to work for the people who are occupying your country."

"The word is 'practical', not 'dishonourable'. Plenty of Germans are working for us. Besides, if stupid people can't accept reality and try to commit sabotage, it simply makes life difficult for all their fellow citizens. We have to clamp down and restrict movement and shoot people. If everyone inside the Empire simply accepted things as they are, life would be a lot easier for everyone."

By now we had walked around the southern end of the ridge and were heading east. We crossed a small wooden bridge that took us over a stream, and five minutes later I could see the sea ahead of us. We crossed one more low crest, and there, down a gentle slope on the far side, was a hamlet of half a dozen small stone houses and a rather rickety-looking jetty, partly sheltered by a crumbling harbour wall, with a grey warship tied up at it. And at one end of the village street there was a large æthership moored to a post and pegged down

"When did you get here?" I asked.

"Just before midday. It was blowing a gale, too – I don't mind admitting I was worried. But the captain got us down safely. Apparently he's used this place before – he does the Bergen to Romanov run regularly. Anyway, that's how we knew you were there, because we caught a glimpse of your tent as we were on the approach. I thought it was an odd place for a hike, so once the rain eased a bit I thought I'd come and see who you were."

"So how do you know about the English æthership? It must have gone long before you got here."

"That was the destroyer. They put in here because of the weather as soon as the wind started to get up, and one of their crew spotted the English ship. In fact the man thought he saw more than one – he said there was another one in the distance – but that seems a bit unlikely. Still, I can't imagine that even one English ship would come to a desolate chunk of rock like this, so maybe he was right. Perhaps you'll be able to enlighten us about that."

I shook my head. "I only saw one," I told him.

"Well, we'll see. Let's get under cover, and then we can talk properly."

We walked down the slope into the hamlet. As we got closer I realised that the place was uninhabited: the houses were in a poor state of repair, with broken panes of glass in some cases, and tiles missing, and in one case the house had partially collapsed.

"This place has been empty for quite a long time," Pasha told me. "We're a bit too near the north coast, and it can be very stormy here, especially in the winter. Further south there's more shelter, and the sea between the islands and the mainland is much less dangerous, so most of the locals do their fishing there. But of course you probably know that already."

"We can't speak Norwegian, remember?" I told him. "And not too many people here speak German. We've done our shopping by pointing."

We reached the hamlet and Pasha led us into the semi-collapsed house. The main room at one end was intact, though the windows had been boarded up.

"Would you mind putting your hands behind your backs?" he asked, and when we obliged he snapped a pair of handcuffs onto each of us.

"Thank you. Don't worry, we'll take you somewhere a bit warmer shortly, but I need to make some preparations first. And in case you're wondering, yes, there will be soldiers outside, so even if you manage to get out… anyway, you get the picture."

He grinned at me once more, and once again I was astonished by just how wide that smile was.

"You know, I've enjoyed playing along with your bullshit," he told me. "But there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, and you've just passed it. When we talk next I'll expect the truth, starting with your real name. And don't try pretending you're German, either: I know you're not. See you later!"

He turned and went out, closing and locking the door behind him and leaving us in the dark.

"Now what?" asked Tim.

"Now we wait," I replied. "My uncle speaks German well enough, so he knows where we are – in a ruined hamlet on the coast east of where we left the tent. There's a Russian warship – a small one – here, and a Russian æthership, but no other Russians apart from their crews."

"How does he know that?"

"Because the radio is turned on and transmitting – at least, as long as the battery hasn't run out, it is. The only issue now is how far away he got blown and whether he can get back here before nightfall. I hope you're getting this," I added, switching to English for the benefit of Joe or whoever else was manning the radio on Excalibur.

"Do you think he was serious about killing people?" asked Wolfie.

"Probably not," I said. "I mean, he's no older than we are, and if he'd really done that I'm sure he'd be locked away. I'm sure he was just trying to wind us up."

We waited in the derelict house for around twenty minutes, and then the door opened once more and Pasha came in.

"Sorry to keep you," he said to me. "Come on, I've got somewhere a bit warmer for you. You other two, stay here – I'll be along for you shortly."

He waited just outside the door. I couldn't see that there was anything to be gained by not going with him – after all, I was feeling more than a little cold, probably because I was still wearing wet clothes. So I followed him out into the street and along it to another house that appeared to be in better condition. This one was also divided into two main rooms, and the larger room was definitely warmer: there was no furniture in it at all except for a table against one wall, but there was a brazier burning in the middle of the room.

"I always think I ought to put a couple of pokers in the brazier," he said. "Somehow the sight of a couple of hot pokers seems to make people want to talk to me. But I'm sure such crude nonsense isn't necessary with someone like you, is it? Turn around and I'll take the cuffs off for you."

I did that and he removed the handcuffs and passed them to one of the crewmen who had followed us into the room. Two of them were carrying machine guns and had taken up position on either side of the door. The third one appeared to be an officer, and he and Pasha spoke to each other for a couple of minutes. Of course I didn't understand a word of it, but it was clear that Pasha was giving the orders. After a bit the officer nodded, backed out of the room and closed the door behind him.

"Right, then," said Pasha. "Now let's get a little better acquainted, hmm? To start with I'd like you to empty your pockets onto the table – and mind you don't miss anything: if we find anything in your pockets later I'll send for a poker after all!" And there was that dazzling grin once more.

I suppose I should have seen this coming, but somehow I hadn't. There wasn't anything in my pockets that had my name on, but there were some English banknotes in my wallet and some English coins loose in my pocket. But there was no avoiding it, so I put my wallet on the table along with my pen, the compass, a handful of mint humbugs, my watch, my keys, my comb and the whistle I carried for signalling by night. Finally I pulled the coins from my trouser pocket and chucked my handkerchief nonchalantly on top of them.

"Excellent. And now your bag."

There wasn't a lot in my bag, but while I was fishing out the mallet and the spare tent pegs I managed to turn the radio off and move the channel selector. Then I put the radio on the table with the rest.

"What the hell might that be?" asked Pasha.

"I've no idea. It belongs to my friend. He's keen on geology, and it's supposed to analyse the ground or something. He's got a lot of kit like that – you'll see when he empties his own bag."

"Very well. And now you can take your clothes off. Put them on the table and then step back into that corner. And if there is anything still stuck in a pocket, this is your last chance to tell me about it."

Unenthusiastically I removed my coat and laid it on the table. Then I removed my jacket, shoes, trousers, socks, shirt and vest. I kept my underpants on. Then I stepped into the corner. Pasha said something to one of the soldiers – presumably 'cover him' or something, because the man shifted his machine gun to point in my general direction – and then crossed the room to the table and began to look through my clothes, checking every pocket carefully.

"Sensible," he commented when he came up empty. "So now let's see who you really are."

He picked up the wallet and opened it, fishing out the banknotes inside.

"Well, goodness me," he said, grinning once again. "It's His Britannic Majesty King James the Fifth. How on earth did he find his way onto a German banknote? And, oh look, he's on all of them! After all, these must be German notes, because they're definitely not Norwegian, and obviously a German boy couldn't have English money in his wallet… Is there anything you'd like to tell me?"

"Not really," I said.

"Fair enough. Stand up against the wall and spread out your arms."

I wondered if he was going to have me shot out of hand. I didn't think so – after all, he didn't need me to stand in a particular position: all he had to do was tell the nearest soldier to shoot me where I stood. But I was definitely scared by now, so I did what he told me to without arguing.

Making sure not to get between me and the soldier, Pasha handcuffed my right wrist to a thick metal ring set into the wall, and then came right around the room – again, to avoid blocking the field of fire – and cuffed my left wrist to another ring on my other side. There seemed to be several of these rings around the room. I don't know what their original purpose was – perhaps nets were suspended between them to dry, or something – but Pasha had found an alternative use for them now.

Next he pulled a large knife from his belt and used it to cut off my underwear.

"Next time I tell you to do something, it means I want you to do it," he told me. "Not some of it, or most of it, but all of it. Please don't forget that. This is the only time the consequences won't be extremely painful."

He stepped back and eyed me up and down.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Fourteen."

"Really?" He looked at my genitals and gave me another dazzling smile, and then he turned on his heels, said something to the man on the left, and went out with the other one following him. They came back a couple of minutes later with Wolfie.

"You do speak German, I hope?" he said to Wolfie. "Sadly, my English is rather limited."

"I am German," Wolfie replied.

"Forgive me if I tell you that I've heard that one before. Please push your friend's stuff up to the far end of the table and then empty your pockets."

Of course, the money in Wolfie's pocket was English as well, a fact which made Pasha smile knowingly. But when he told Wolfie to undress and Wolfie removed his greatcoat, the sight of his white military uniform clearly came as a surprise.

"Well, I know you want me to believe that you're German," said Pasha, "but isn't this overdoing it a bit? Where the hell did you get that uniform?"

"He's a bit slow," I said, hoping to protect Wolfie's identity. "He likes dressing up."

"Is that true?"

"Well, I'm not slow," said Wolfie, glowering at me. "But I do like uniforms, and when I saw this one in the militaria shop I just had to have it."

"You bought this in a militaria shop? Pull the other one – it's a perfect fit!"

"Well, obviously I had to have it tailored to fit me. You don't think they actually make generals' uniforms in my size, do you?"

"They might. I've got some fairly exalted uniforms which were made especially for me. So where was this supposed shop, then?"

"Oslo."

"Oslo. You bought this Prussian Brigadier-General's uniform in a second-hand shop in Oslo."

"That's right."

"You must think I'm completely stupid. All right, get the rest of your clothes off and then go and stand next to your friend."

"Please could you help me with my left boot? I can't do it myself – you'll see why in a moment."

Pasha spoke to one of the soldiers, and the man handed his gun to Pasha and came to help Wolfie remove his left boot. Once it was off Wolfie thanked him and removed his trousers.

"Ah," said Pasha. "Yes, I can see why you needed help. How did that happen?"

I had a bad fall," Wolfie told him. "It smashed my leg up so badly they had to take it off."

"You have my sympathy. Still, if you like I can cut the other one off as well – at least then you'll have a matched pair again! Now take the rest off – all of it – and go and stand next to your friend."

Wolfie didn't try to keep his underwear on – I suppose seeing me naked indicated fairly clearly that this was inevitable. He came and stood on my right, and a few seconds later he was cuffed: his left hand was cuffed to the same ring as my right, and his right to another one further along the wall.

Once again Pasha and one of the guards went out and this time they came back with Tim. He took one look at us and emptied his pockets without an argument. His wallet proved to contain not only English money but a couple of French banknotes too.

"Stranger and stranger," mused Pasha, contemplating the portrait of Napoleon VII. "Naturally you're a German too?"

"Of course," said Tim.

"Of course," echoed Pasha. "Very well. Take your clothes off and go and stand with the others."

"Is that really necessary?" asked Tim.

"No, not at all. If you prefer I can just have you shot straight away. You only have to say."

"I think I'd prefer to get undressed."

"I thought you might. Get on with it, then."

A couple of minutes later Tim was cuffed to the wall to my left. Pasha then stepped back to the table and opened Tim's rock-testing kit.

"What's this, then?" he asked.

"I'm interested in geology," Tim told him. "That kit will tell me what sort of rock we're standing on, and that in turn tells me a bit about the history – well, the prehistory, really – of these islands."

"Told you," I couldn't resist saying.

"Yes, you did. You also told me you were German and on a walking holiday, and since those statements are blatantly untrue, you'll forgive me if I don't immediately decide to believe anything else you tell me."

"What makes you think I'm not German?" I asked.

"Your grammar. You have an impressive accent, but every now and again you make a little grammatical slip-up, enough to indicate that you're not a native speaker. An incorrect case or a wrong gender, that sort of thing. I know I do the same thing myself. These two… no mistakes so far, although they haven't said much yet, but I'm keeping an open mind. But you, definitely not. You're English, aren't you?"

I shrugged, as best I could with my arms in that position.

"Oh, good," said Pasha, flashing his perfect teeth once more. "I'm going to get to play some games!"

He turned to one of the soldiers and spoke to him for a few seconds, and the soldier nodded and left the room. Pasha and the other soldier then picked up the table and put it down next to the brazier in front of us. The soldier returned to his position by the door while Pasha sat on the table facing us, swinging his legs.

"Torture," he said, happily. "It's an interesting concept, isn't it? Usually the very thought of it is enough to make people talk. Did you know that in the fifteen-hundreds in England they used to take prisoners to have a look at the rack the day before they were due to be questioned? They were then locked up overnight to think about it. The majority decided to talk without the rack actually needing to be used at all, which saved a lot of effort all round and still reached the same conclusion.

"Now I'm sure you're expecting me to produce a couple of pokers at this point and stick them in the brazier for a bit, and I suppose I could do that, but – as I said earlier – that's really a very crude method…"

The door opened and the second soldier returned, accompanied by a boy of around fifteen in a baggy red shirt. He was carrying a glass bottle about five inches [12 cm] tall.

"Personally I find this far more effective," said Pasha, taking the bottle and a long pipette from the boy and setting them on the table. "It's concentrated sulphuric acid. Its big advantage over the poker is that it can be used internally, as I'll be only too happy to demonstrate when I come back. Right now I'm going for a bite of supper, but when I come back I'm going to ask you some questions, and I really do advise you to answer them honestly. Think about it while I'm gone."

He stood up, gave me another big smile and left the room, the boy and the two soldiers going with him. The door closed behind them.

"Is he serious?" asked Wolfie.

"I'm not sure. It could all be an act and that bottle could be full of water, but I don't think so. There's something about him that makes me think he's capable of doing it. Did you hear that bit about him having some special uniforms? That would suggest he's a noble, and if so perhaps he is free to do what he wants. And the way he spoke to that officer – if he's in charge, nobody's going to stop him. I think we might have to tell him something. Can either of you think of a good reason for a British æthership to be here?"

But they couldn't, and neither could I. I supposed that we could claim it was a reconnaissance flight, but this was hardly an area of enormous strategic importance, and in any case reconnaissance wouldn't explain what the three of us were doing on the ground in a tent. So would it matter if we told him about the meteor? After all, they knew about their value already, and the raid on Thann proved that they also knew that we knew. On the other hand, I didn't want to make them a present of this meteor, and it was essential that they didn't find out who Tim was. I decided that I'd try not to talk – after all, maybe he really was bluffing…

When Pasha came back an hour or so later it was getting dark outside. This time he was accompanied by two soldiers and two boys, the crop-haired older one who had produced the acid and a younger boy of about twelve who was carrying a camera. The younger boy came in wearing a shin-length blue coat and a fur hat, but the brazier was still warm and pretty soon he removed his hat and coat, revealing that he was wearing a baggy red shirt with a belt, like the older boy, underneath. Both had short curved swords attached to their belts.

"So," said Pasha. "I hope you've decided to be sensible… no, actually that's a lie. It'll be a lot more fun if you haven't. Anyway, before we start we're going to take your photographs. They'll be sent to the Intelligence Service at Romanov. If you're even remotely important you'll be identified, so that's another reason for you to tell me the truth now. Look at the camera and smile nicely. I'm sure I don't need to tell you what will happen if we have to force you."

He said something in Russian to the younger boy, who stepped forward and took a head-and-shoulders shot of each of us, and then stepped back and took a couple of full-length shots.

"Those are for my personal collection," Pasha told us, grinning yet again – he was clearly very happy in his work. "Now, then, it's decision time. What's your real name?"

Was he bluffing or not? Would a boy of my own age really be capable of inflicting torture? I supposed it was time to find out.

"I'd rather not say," I replied.

"Excellent!" he said. "I suppose you think that because I'm well-educated and nobly born that I won't dirty my hands with this sort of thing. That just shows that you don't know much about Russia and that you know nothing about me. If we were at home, this would be where I bring in one of my orphans to demonstrate that I never bluff. Sadly I don't have any with me. But there are three of you and I only need one to talk, so… let's start with Coppernob. He's damaged already, so a few burns won't make a lot of difference."

He unlocked Wolfie's cuffs and the older boy and one of the soldiers dragged him to the table, shoved everything on it except the acid to the floor, and pinned Wolfie on his back on top of it.

"I imagine that even now you think there's only water in the bottle," said Pasha to me. "You'd be wrong about that. We have got a water bottle…"

He spoke to the younger boy, who put down the camera, went to his coat and produced a bottle from one of the pockets. Pasha meanwhile took the stopper out of the acid bottle and used the pipette to draw up a small amount.

"…but this is the real thing," he went on. "And just to give you an idea of what it's going to feel like to your red-headed friend…"

He stepped in front of me and released a drop of acid onto my right forearm. For a second I thought it really was water, but then it started to burn, and the pain grew and grew until I thought my whole arm was going to fall off. I screamed, and Pasha took the water bottle from the younger boy and poured some over my arm. The pain subsided a little but didn't go away.

"So now you know," he said, and went back to the far side of the table. "Now, as I said before, this can be used far more accurately than a poker. For example, a drip in the ear does wonders for ear-wax, but it's likely to damage the eardrum as well. If you're lucky it'll burn itself out dissolving the little bones inside the ear, the ones that control balance as well as hearing; if you're not it'll keep going into the brain. Dripped up the nose it can certainly clear the sinuses, and with care it can be used to eliminate tooth decay… and teeth, unfortunately. But my favourite use is this."

He drew a little more acid into the pipette, wiped the tip very thoroughly with the remains of my underpants, and then brought it towards Wolfie's body. At that Wolfie's control went and he began to scream and struggle frantically, and it took both soldiers and both boys to hold him down. The older boy slapped a hand over Wolfie's mouth, muffling his screams.

"You know, it's really up to you," Pasha told him, conversationally. "But if your flailing about jogs my hand you're likely to get a fair amount of acid all over your stomach. Really you'd do better to keep absolutely still and hope your friend is sensible."

By now the tip of the pipette was hovering close to Wolfie's genitals, and as he realised that he seemed to freeze completely.

"That's much better," said Pasha, and he looked up at me once more. "Now, I'm sure you can imagine what sort of damage this can do," and very carefully indeed he inserted the end of the pipette into the tip of Wolfie's penis and pushed it well in. "So I'm going to ask you one more time: what is your name?"

I could scarcely breathe – in fact I was so shaken that I could see little dots in front of my eyes, and for one horrible moment I thought I was going to faint. But then I managed to gasp in a breath.

"Leo!" I yelled. "My name's Leo de Courtenay! Please don't do it – please!! I'll tell you everything you want to know!"

"Yes," said Pasha. "I know you will. So what are you doing here?"

I still hadn't been able to think of a good cover story, and even if I had I wouldn't have risked it in this situation.

"I came from the English æthership," I admitted. "We all did."

"And why is there an English æthership in this godforsaken corner of Norway?"

"We were looking for a meteor. We know you use them to make armour for your Eagles, and we need raw material so that we can work out how to do it ourselves."

"Ah, now that sounds like the truth. Go on – why were you there personally, and why in that spot?"

"We saw a little crater, which they said was probably a small piece of the meteor that broke off. We were supposed to get a sample to take back to the ship – the scientist on board would then have been able to analyse it. Tom here is his junior apprentice – they didn't send anyone more senior in case they found the main impact site and needed the real experts there."

"So that's why you've got all that stuff with you. And did you get your sample?"

"No. We found the crater all right but then it started to rain really hard, so we decided to wait until it stopped raining. Only you found us before the rain stopped."

"Right." He pulled the pipette out of Wolfie's penis and my shoulders sagged in relief. But he hadn't quite finished with us yet. "Where exactly is the crater you found?"

I glanced out of the window and saw that it was dark outside – too dark for him to mount an expedition to find the crater, I thought.

"It's about two hundred metres [600 ft] north of where we put the tent," I told him, "and maybe fifty metres [150 ft] away from the slope of the ridge. We can show you if you want."

He let the acid drop back into the bottle.

"Suddenly you're being helpful," he observed.

"The word is 'practical'," I said, reminding him of his own comment earlier, and he caught the reference and laughed.

"I'm definitely starting to like you," he said. "Of course you're right, but you should have started being helpful a lot sooner than this. If you had been I might have considered letting you go, but as it is I think you can come and join my orphan collection. You might not actually be orphans, but your parents aren't going to be in any position to object to anything that might happen to you. Still, because I like you I think I'll add you to the Black Sea collection – I'm sure you'd prefer the weather there to what you'd find at my Siberian place."

He said something in Russian and the two soldiers helped Wolfie to sit up. He was trembling so badly that he couldn't actually stand, falling over when he tried, but the soldiers helped him to his feet and returned him to his previous position, chained to the wall next to me. Somehow he kept his feet under him this time.

"Tomorrow morning we'll go and have a look at your crater," he said. "I suppose there's a danger that your ship might come back, but they'll be in trouble if they do, because they don't know about the destroyer: it's got anti-air rocket batteries. And we'll have our own ship in the air too, just in case. And once we've had a look at the crater we'll be on our way. Once we get to Romanov we'll send a couple of ships of our own to retrieve the meteor, and you and I can take a nice train ride down to Feodosia and your new home. If you're really, really good and keep me entertained you could live for quite a long time – you might even last long enough to reach puberty!"

And with a final flashing grin he and his colleagues left the room, pulling the door closed behind them.

"Oh, God," I breathed. "Wolfie, are you okay?"

"Just about. I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life, not even when we jumped out of Daedalus and I lost my grip on you. That boy must be insane. Still, at least we're all right now."

"No, we're not. If they've got a photo of you in Murmansk – Romanov – we'll still be in trouble, because you're far too important to end up in some minor noble's zoo. They'll lock you up in a fortress in Petersburg. And if they've got a photo of Tim we'll be in even deeper trouble, because they'll force him to work for them instead of us. And if he loses both of you I think Pasha will be so angry that he'll take it out on me, and I really don't want…"

I trailed off, feeling sick and trying not to think about what might happen to me.

"We have to hope my uncle gets back here in time," I said, when I was able to speak again. "It depends how far south they were blown, because they won't be able to navigate properly in the dark. We just have to hope that they're in sight of the coast, or the islands, as soon as the sun gets up."

"Uncle Gil's a very good aeronaut," said Wolfie. "If anyone can find us in time, he can. And if the Russians decide to dig the meteor out before leaving it might keep them here until he arrives."

"Not if they do what Laughing Boy said," I said gloomily. "He said they'd leave the meteor and sent a team out from Romanov to deal with it."

"Then we'll have to change his mind. If we tell him that unless they dig it out tomorrow our ship will get to it first, and then…"

The door opened and Pasha came in, followed by the younger boy, who was carrying three mess-tins.

"I thought you'd be hungry," Pasha said, "so we brought you some supper. I'd hate you to starve before we get home. I expect Coppernob is still feeling a bit queasy, so we'll do him last."

The other boy put one mess-tin on the table, took a spoon from his pocket and began to feed Tim, while Pasha began to do the same for me. It was meat in some sort of cream sauce, and it was pretty good. I ate it all.

"Good, isn't it?" he said, putting the empty tin back on the table. "It's from the S78 – the destroyer. Their galley is a lot better than ours. Of course, you've flown yourself, so you know the limitations of galleys in the air."

"It was good," I said. "Thank you."

"Goodness me, courtesy from a prisoner! You really are a nice, polite boy, aren't you? Still, I like that – in fact, I like it a lot. Maybe it deserves a bit of a reward."

He spoke to the boy, who began feeding Wolfie, and then went out, returning a couple of minutes later with a bottle, a bucket, a long length of chain and the older boy, who was carrying a gun. He put everything down on the table and came and stood in front of me.

"That crack of mine about puberty was a bit unfair," he told me, tugging gently on my few pubic hairs. "You might not be as far into it as your friends, but there is something happening, isn't there? Of course, I could fix that for you: if I'm very careful I could use my acid to burn away your hairs and do just enough damage to prevent them from growing again…"

"No, thanks," I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling. "If you've got something that will make them grow a bit faster I'd definitely be interested, though."

He burst out laughing. "My God, I'm really glad I found you," he said. "You're going to do me a world of good. Keep it up and I might not kill you after all. Now, you won't get a lot of sleep if I leave you like you are, so I'm going to let you sleep on the floor. But I want your parole first. The door will be locked and the window is welded shut, but I still want you to swear that none of you will try to leave this room until I come for you in the morning. Are you prepared to do that?"

I barely hesitated. I was pretty sure we'd never get out of this room unassisted anyway, and if we were going to be rescued at all it would be when – or if – my uncle and the other ships returned, and that wouldn't be during the night.

"You have my word," I said. "None of us will try to leave until you come for us."

"Thank you. Now Sergei is going to undo some of your cuffs. Please be sensible – I'd hate it if we had to shoot you."

He stepped back, spoke to the older boy, who unslung his machine gun and aimed it at the floor in front of us, and then handed the younger boy a key. The boy came and rearranged the cuffs, and when he'd finished I was linked directly to Wolfie and Tim, but not to the wall. Wolfie was only attached to me, and Tim was attached to me on one side and to the long chain, which was itself attached to the wall, on the other. So the only link to the wall was on Tim's left wrist.

"You should be able to lie down now," Pasha told us. "Try, please – I want to be sure that the chain is the right length."

We did that, and Pasha moved the table and our clothes to the far corner of the room, where we couldn't reach them, but tossed our overcoats to us.

"Use these as blankets," he said. "You've got a bottle of water between you and a bucket to piss in. Get some sleep and we'll see you in the morning."

"Thank you for this," I said. "We appreciate it."

"So you should. Normally I'd have left you against the wall. I can't think what came over me." He headed for the door and his two colleagues went out, but just as he got there his eye fell on something on the ground. He bent and picked it up.

"Is this yours?" he said to me, holding up my watch.

I nodded.

"It's a good one," he said, opening it and checking the time. "I think I'll hold on to it for you for now. It would be a pity if it got damaged." And he gave me another brilliant smile and went out, and I heard the door lock behind him.

With my friends attached to both my wrists it was difficult to wrap my coat around myself properly, but I didn't really need it straight away because the brazier was still warm, even if it was starting to burn down. I sat with my back against the wall and tried to think if there was any way out of this mess, because if my uncle didn't get back in time and we were carted off to Russia, I couldn't see any way that we would ever get home.

Half an hour passed, and nothing had sprung to mind. But fortunately I wasn't the only person who had been thinking.

"Wolfie," said Tim, "if we all stretch out as far as we can, could you reach my bag?"

"I don't know. Let's try."

So Tim stretched the chain attaching him to the wall out straight and we did our best to get Wolfie close to our bags, but they were still a metre beyond his grasp.

"Use your coat," said Tim. "Chuck your coat over the bag and try to drag it towards you."

This took a few attempts, but eventually Wolfie managed to cast the collar of his coat over Tim's bag, and it snagged well enough for him to be able to drag the bag into range.

"Now what?" I asked.

"Now we can get free from the wall at least, because I have some acid, too. Not very much, but probably enough to burn through this chain."

"Then what?"

"Well, then at least we can reach our clothes and get dressed, and we'll have a fair chance of ambushing them in the morning. If we can grab a gun and take Pasha hostage, maybe they'll let us go."

I wasn't by any means sure that they'd let us go, but I thought maybe we could keep them in a standoff until my uncle came to rescue us.

"Right," I said. Go for it."

Tim rummaged in his bag and found a little vial, and my heart sank when I saw how small it was. "Is there enough?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. It'll do this chain for sure, and there might even be some left over."

He very carefully poured some of the acid onto a link close to the cuff around his wrist – though not so close as to risk it hitting his arm – and we waited. I saw a little white smoke rising from the chain, and then Tim pulled hard and the link gave way. The three of us were still linked to each other, but we were no longer connected to the wall, which meant that we could move around the room.

"Is there any left?" I asked.

"Some," Tim told me.

"Enough to open the window?"

"Nothing like. Anyway, I thought you gave your parole."

"I wasn't thinking of leaving now. I thought we could use the table to barricade the door and leave via the window as soon as they try to open the door. I said 'Until you come for us', remember?"

"Right. But there still isn't enough. We might manage to weaken the link between your cuff and mine, or between yours and Wolfie's, enough to break it, though."

"Then let's do that. Do it on the one between you and me – at least then you'll be a free agent."

We walked over to the table and put our wrists on it, and then he carefully poured the remainder of the acid onto the chain link nearest to the cuff around his wrist. Again there was a little smoke, but this time pulling wasn't enough to break the link. Tim delved into his bag and found one of the bits from his drill, and by putting that through the weakened link and twisting he was finally able to open the link enough to separate the two cuffs. That left Tim free and me attached only to Wolfie.

"Now what?" asked Tim.

"Now we get some sleep," I said. "After all, there's no way out of this room, even if I hadn't given my parole. In the morning we'll jump Pasha as soon as he opens the door, hold him hostage and then hope my uncle gets here quickly."

"I suppose it's as good as anything," agreed Tim. "But perhaps it would be a good idea if we could hold them up a bit, otherwise they could just burst in on us while we're asleep."

He took the smallest drill-bit he had, walked to the door and tried to jam it into the lock, and when that didn't work he ground some materials from his work kit up, added a little water to make them into a paste, and used a slightly larger drill-bit to force it into the lock.

"I don't suppose that'll hold them for long," he said, packing the rest of his kit away, "but it'll gum things up for a few seconds at least – long enough for us to get ready, anyway."

"Nice one, Tim," I said, approvingly.

We all got dressed – at least, Tim got dressed completely and Wolfie and I put on our trousers, socks and footwear: we couldn't put on anything above the waist while we were cuffed together – and then we settled down to get some sleep. I supposed our situation was a little better than it had been, but I was far from convinced that our sketchy plan was going to work: unless Pasha was the first person into the room it wouldn't work, and even then if he had just a single armed man with him it would almost certainly end in disaster. And even if we did managed to grab him, unless we could get hold of a weapon as well they could just shoot us, either through the door or, if we managed to barricade it, through the window. The more I thought about it, the more hopeless our situation seemed.

Chapter Eighteen

I didn't sleep very well: not only was I lying on a hard floor, but I was also attached to Wolfie, and every time he moved in his sleep it woke me up. This didn't usually happen: generally when we shared a bed we both slept very well indeed. But tonight my arm was hurting because I hadn't been able to do anything about the acid burn except to tie my handkerchief around it and soak it in cold water. That's why I was awake when the first hint of daylight crept through the window.

I wondered how long it would be before Pasha came for us. I guessed that he would want to go and find the meteor before too long, but with a little luck he'd wait until he'd eaten breakfast at least. I hoped he was hungry: every minute he waited would be another minute for my uncle to move closer to our position.

The other two were still asleep, and I made no attempt to wake them up: I thought they might as well rest while they could. But when the shooting started a short time later I changed my mind straight away.

I put the first shot down to a nervous sentry, but when it was answered and followed by more shots and people shouting I decided that they had to be shooting at someone, and the only people they could be shooting at would be on our side.

"Change of plan," I said, shaking the others into wakefulness. "We'll never manage to jump Pasha now, because he's sure to come with guns. I think our best bet would be to barricade the door and try to keep them out until whoever's attacking them gets here."

"What if it's only a few men and the Russians drive them off?" asked Wolfie.

"Then we're probably in deep trouble. But then we were already in deep trouble, and I don't think trying to block the door will make it any worse. Come on, let's get the table in front of the door."

So we did that, and I was pleased to discover that the table was fairly heavy. I hoped that if we all pushed against it they might find it hard to shift us. However, that still left a serious weak point.

"Tim," I said, "get your drill and use it to fix one of our coats over the window. If you use four different bits, drill through the coat and leave the bit in the wall each time it should hold it fairly well. Obviously it won't hold them for long, but at least they won't just be able to smash the glass and shoot us straight away."

Tim grabbed his kit and pulled out the drill. As there was no immediate sound of anyone trying to get through the door Wolfie and I were able to hold the coat while he used his first bit to attach it to the wall, but he had just started with the second bit when I heard someone trying to turn a key in the lock. Wolfie and I scuttled back to the table and leaned on it. We could hear someone swearing – at least, I think it was swearing – on the far side of the door as Tim's gunk stopped them turning the key, and then I heard Pasha's voice shouting some terse orders. He didn't sound happy. Eventually the person with the key managed to force it around and the handle turned, but the table prevented the door from moving. Someone shoulder-charged the door on the far side and for a moment it opened an inch or two, but Wolfie and I shoved as hard as we could and forced it closed once more.

Pasha shouted another order and five seconds later there was a bang: someone had fired a rifle at the door. But nobody in this world had heard of chipboard: this door was a thick, solid piece of Scandinavian timber, and the bullet failed to penetrate.

There was some more shouting from behind the door and then the door was shoved violently forward. We dug in and held it, and then Tim dropped his drill – by now he had three bits holding the coat in place – and dived across the room, adding his weight to ours and forcing the door closed again. We could still hear shooting from further away but it didn't seem to be getting any closer, and I wondered if help was going to reach us before the Russians got past the door. Fortunately the door was fairly narrow, so it was hard for more than one of them to shoulder-charge it at a time, but I thought that before too much longer they'd start using tools on it.

Then we heard the glass of our window break and something pushed against the coat. Tim went back to the window and grabbed the corner that hadn't been drilled into place, but whoever was outside wasn't going to be held up by something like an overcoat. Suddenly the blade of a large knife or bayonet came through the coat and began to slice away at it, and I realised that we were finished: as soon as he had cut a hole in the cloth he'd be able to shoot us through the window.

Then there was a heavy thump on the door that didn't sound like a shoulder: apparently they had found a big hammer, or perhaps an axe. The others looked at me, but I was out of ideas: all we could do was wait for them to break in. A couple more blows and we knew it was an axe, because the edge of the blade appeared through a crack in the door.

But now that the window was broken the sounds of gunfire outside the house were a lot louder, and we could hear more shouting and the crash of a heavy gun too. There was another flurry of shooting and then a scream from right outside the window. It sounded as though the guy with the bayonet had been hit.

The axe struck a couple more times, making a hole about half an inch across. A couple more hits and they'd be able to aim a gun through it. But then there was a shout of command from outside the house and I heard Pasha yell "Nyet!!" in reply. The axe struck once more, the command was repeated more forcefully and Pasha screamed his refusal once more, but the voice outside was insistent. I'm fairly sure that what Pasha said next was not very polite at all, but then he switched to German.

"Leo de Courtenay!" he called. "This is not over! You understand? THIS IS NOT OVER!"

There was the sound of footsteps moving away and more shooting outside. Of course I stayed exactly where I was at first, fearing a trap, but then when there was nothing more to be heard outside the door I risked putting my eye to the crack left by the axe, and I saw that there was nobody there. I gave it another minute or so to be sure and then we pulled the table away from the door, opened it carefully and went out into the hallway. The outer door was open and through it I could hear the noise of guns, and also the sound of engines.

"Tim, get Wolfie's jacket," I said, and when he had handed it to me I waved it out of the door. Nothing happened, so I put my head cautiously around the corner. There was nobody in sight, but we could still hear shooting from elsewhere. Directly ahead of us was the harbour, and we could see that the Russian destroyer had put out into the channel between this island and the next one and was firing one of its rocket batteries at an æthership that had been heading north up the channel. The æthership veered away inland and I recognised Sparrowhawk, which was itself firing at something at the north end of the village.

Stepping a bit further into the street I was able to see the Russian æthership climbing away from the village. I thought it was in trouble here: the destroyer might have managed to distract Sparrowhawk, but there were two other ships moving in on it, the grey-green Caberféidh closing in on its left and another ship, which I thought was Excalibur, up ahead of it. Caberféidh fired its guns and I could see that at least two shots had hit the Russian, but that armour was good and it kept going. One of its turrets fired a pair of Congreves, and although one of them veered crazily away into the sky, the other hit Caberféidh just behind the nose. There was a bang, a flash and a spurt of flame, and I realised that one of the hydrogen bags had caught fire. The Scottish ship lurched and swung away, heading for the low ridge to the west of the village, and I realised that Seaforth was hoping to clear it and find shelter behind it.

The Russian kept climbing and then suddenly swung to the right, and at the same time there was the loudest noise I'd heard yet and a huge gout of water splashed into the air next to the Russian destroyer. Looking north I saw a much larger warship, a heavy cruiser at least, nosing into the channel, and at the same time the destroyer swung south and speeded up. Apparently the Russian æthership had seen the cruiser, realised that its current course would take it straight over what was clearly an enemy vessel, and had taken evasive action.

Excalibur fired a pair of Hale rockets, one of which missed the Russian's tail fin by a matter of inches: a hit there would have disabled the enemy's rudder. But the Russian survived, now heading more or less due east, and vanished out of my sight behind the hills on the neighbouring island. I half expected Excalibur and Sparrowhawk to go after him, but maybe they were worried about possible Russian rocket emplacements closer to the mainland – or possibly they had spotted the three of us standing in the street and realised that we weren't aboard the Russian ship. Belatedly I remembered the radio and, dragging Wolfie behind me, ran back into the house to grab it.

"Leo to Excalibur, over," I said.

There was no reply, but then I remembered that I'd changed the channel. I moved it back to Channel One and tried again, and this time Joe answered.

"Stay where you are," he told me. "We can see your position. We're going to check that there are no more Russians around and then we'll land. Don't go away."

I had no intention of going anywhere. We went back to the street and leaned against the house, watching as the cruiser sailed past us in pursuit of the destroyer. A couple of minutes later a group of French soldiers appeared a little further up the street, so we called to them and waved Wolfie's jacket, just to avoid any unfortunate accidents.

I let Tim do the talking, and whatever he said did the trick, because one of the soldiers went away and came back three or four minutes later with a large pair of bolt-cutters, which he used to separate me from Wolfie. And that meant that by the time Excalibur landed we were both fully dressed once more, although Wolfie's greatcoat had been sliced up rather badly by the man with the bayonet before he had been shot by a French sniper.

We said thank you to the French and walked to the north end of the hamlet, where Excalibur was just settling onto the stretch of grassland newly vacated by the fleeing Russian ship. The mooring cables hadn't been deployed, indicating that my uncle wasn't intending to stay, so as soon as the bridge door opened we scrambled aboard. My uncle immediately ordered us back into the air.

"Are you alright?" he asked us.

"More or less," I replied. "I wouldn't want to go through that again, though. Why didn't you go after him – and what happened to the French? Where are they?"

"We didn't go after him because that wasn't part of the mission: we're here for the meteor, not to go chasing Eagles all over Scandinavia. The brief was to see off any Russians, not to see how many we could kill. Besides, for all we know there's another naval base nearby. It turns out that Admiral Faulkner's intelligence was wrong, because there is a Russian base at Bodø, and somehow your friend Pasha got a message to them. Perhaps that destroyer did the job.

"See, yesterday afternoon the freighter broke down, and they were still trying to fix it at daybreak this morning. We'd found the surface fleet yesterday afternoon, but the storm took us past them, and it wasn't until close to daybreak this morning that we found them again. By then they'd rigged a tow line from the freighter to one of the cruisers and so were under way once more, but they were moving very slowly. I thought we needed to get back here as quickly as we could, so the three of us, the French troop ship and Bosquet came on, leaving Rapp and Joffre to stay with the surface ships. One of our cruisers and its escort came with us, too.

"Our problem was to try to get fairly close to you without being seen by their sentries, so we decided to drop the ground troops a couple of miles away. But the light still wasn't very good and the troop ship landed a bit too heavily and cracked some struts, so we had to leave Bosquet to keep an eye on them while they made repairs. That's why it's only the three of us, and the cruiser, who are here now.

"So, what happened to you after the radio got turned off?"

I explained the basics of our capture and imprisonment but without going into too many details: I didn't think Wolfie would want to have to revisit his experience with the acid.

"Sounds like a charming boy," my uncle said, when I'd finished giving him my forthright opinion of Pasha. "Well, we think we know who he is: Joe tells me that when he was speaking to his men they called him "Imperial Highness", and we know that his father's name is Mikhail – he gave you his patronymic 'Mikhailovitch – and that he has two brothers who must be older than him if they are already in the army. So he has to be the Grand Duke Pavel Mikhailovitch Romanov. He's the Tsar's nephew."

"No wonder everyone jumped to do what he told them," I commented. "I'm surprised they managed to drag him away at the end, in that case."

"I imagine that the ship's captain knew how much trouble he would be in if anything happened to him," said my uncle. "To be honest, that's another reason I decided not to go after them: it would have been immensely useful to have captured him, but actually killing a close relative of the Tsar – which would have been far more likely if we'd shot him down – would probably have resulted in serious repercussions, particularly if it happened in Russian-controlled territory. I thought it better to let him go."

By now we'd crossed the ridge to the west of the hamlet, and so we could see Caberféidh, which had landed on the plain beyond the ridge. The fire was out but there was a significant hole in the armour and I wondered how much damage had been done to the internal structure. Sparrowhawk was circling overhead, so we signalled them to keep an eye out and then landed close to Caberféidh.

"Mr Silver, could you ask Rapp for an update, please?" said my uncle.

Joe got on the radio. "There's good news," he said. "The freighter is under way again and should be here in a couple of hours at the outside. And they've beaten off the Russian cruiser and its escorts. The bad news is that we've lost the Joffre: a rocket took out the bridge and started a fire that spread to the gas envelopes. They fished some survivors out of the sea, but not very many."

"What Russian cruiser was that?" I asked. "I only saw a destroyer."

"There were a cruiser and a pair of escorting destroyers in the harbour at Bodø," my uncle explained. "That's what I meant about Faulkner's information being wrong. Someone must have told them that there were British ships south of the Lofotens, because they came out to investigate. We outgunned them and we had air cover, but it seems that they still did some damage. Very well, Mr Silver, acknowledge that and suggest that Rapp remain with the freighter until it gets here. We'll try to identify as much of the meteor as we can find so that it's ready to be dug out as soon as the machinery arrives."

"From what I've seen so far we could dig it out with a couple of shovels," I pointed out.

"There's more than you've seen so far. We've spotted another fairly significant crater and a couple of smaller ones. Yes, we could possibly dig it all out by hand, but I want to concentrate on getting Mac airworthy again as quickly as possible, just in case your friend Pasha comes back with some friends. I'm going over there now to see how much help he needs. You stay here and rest for a bit."

I felt that I ought to be doing something, but I did feel tired and I thought a short rest would do me good. So I made my way up to the storeroom on Deck Two, grabbed a blanket and a pillow and lay down, and the next thing I knew Wolfie was shaking me awake and telling me it was almost midday.

"Feeling better?" he asked as I sat up groggily. "Good. Come on, Tim wants us to go and look for more bits of meteor."

I followed him through the ship and out onto the grass. The wind had dropped, which was probably a good thing, because I could see several ladders propped against the side of Caberféidh and several crewmen from both ships fixing some sort of temporary sheeting across the hole. A little further away I could see activity around the hole where the first piece of the meteor had struck: there was a large steam tractor at work and several people around it. We walked that way and I saw that it had a big shovel attachment on the back, like a JCB, and I agreed that this would definitely be faster than digging the meteor out by hand.

Tim had borrowed a compass from somewhere, and once we were well past the meteor site he got this out and moved it around before striding off in the direction of the ridge. Using the compass he identified half a dozen minor impact points, some less than a metre across.

"Is it worth bothering with these?" I asked, peering into one small hole, at the bottom of which lay something no bigger than a golf ball.

"It's all worth having," Tim replied. "Put it this way: we're unlikely to get another chance to collect material like this without reverting to the original plan of scouring Greenland, so while we're here I want as much of this stuff as we can get."

The digging went on throughout the afternoon, using shovels for the small bits and the steam JCB for the bigger ones. At various points the ætherships – the three surviving French ships had now rejoined us – took it in turns to land close to the harbour where the freighter had docked and to refuel with the coal that it had carried, and by late afternoon we were just about ready to leave. Originally we had intended for the meteor to be transported by the freighter, but since there was a lot less of it than anyone except Tim had expected, and also because we knew that there were Russian warships in the area, we decided to take it back on Excalibur instead. To me the total amount of material looked insignificant, but Tim was positively ecstatic about it.

"There's almost two hundred kilos here!" he said. "That's almost twice what I'd hoped for. It's true that there's a fair bit of earth mixed in, but even so this is going to be really significant. I'll be able to carry out several different experiments and will have more than enough left over to make some proper armour – at least, I hope so. And if it's even half as good as I hope it'll still be better than what you're using now."

Well, that sounded like excellent news. Of course, we had to get it back home first, but there was still no sign of interference from the Russians, and it would soon be dark: provided we could get airborne and under way in the next hour or so we'd then be protected by the darkness until we were more than halfway back to Scapa.

Caberféidh had been patched up as best we could. The main problem was that there was no way to replace the hydrogen that had been lost: there was no æthership base closer than Shetland – at least, not one we could use – and no way to manufacture more ourselves. The damaged envelope had been repaired and so it would be able to take steam, but the lift from steam was significantly lower, and the only way to get the ship airborne and manoeuvrable again was to strip her of absolutely anything non-essential: guns, rockets, equipment and all but a skeleton crew, mostly stokers, engineers and essential bridge crew. There would be no relief watches for most: they would have to work non-stop until we got back to British territory.

The guns were spiked and the rockets and extra crew divided between the other ships, and then we watched as she climbed slowly into the air.

"I think she's going to make it," commented Mr Hall.

"If anyone can get her home, Mac can," agreed my uncle. "Very well: let's get under way."

We were the last ship on the ground, so once we were back in the air we were able to form up on the others – this time Sparrowhawk was going to lead the way – and begin the journey south. The surface ships had already left, and it had been decided that we would stay with them until it got dark, as that would offer protection from any Russian attack, so once we caught up with them just south of the island we slowed down until it was too dark to see. We'd sent then a final 'good luck' signal just before we lost sight of them, and once they were invisible we settled into line astern and speeded up to forty knots, which was about the best that the troopship could manage.

This time I did take a watch during the hours of darkness, but actually it was easy, because now that we weren't leading I simply had to make sure I kept in position behind the red light at the tail of Caberféidh. The only danger was falling asleep, but Wolfie kept talking to me, and in any case I benefitted from the rest I'd had during the morning, and when Mr Hall relieved me at around midnight I was able to report that all was well.

It was still cold and my arm was still a bit sore, but at least I'd finally got rid of the bracelets from the cuffs: one of our engineers had drilled out the locks. In any event I slept fairly well, and when I woke up next morning I felt much more like my normal self. I went and had a quick wash, grabbed a bowl of porridge from the galley and then returned to the bridge.

"How are we doing?" I asked my uncle, whose watch it was.

"Well enough. The wind is still more or less with us, so we're making good progress, and as far as I can tell we're still all together. The sun should be up in an hour or so, so we'll know for sure then. And if we're where I think we are we should be back in Orkney not too long after lunchtime."

My watch started just as the sun was appearing on the horizon, and it revealed that all six ships were still together. I'd given the third radio, the one we'd used on the ground, to Seaforth, so that he could call us if the temporary repairs looked like failing, so as soon as Joe had taken his place at the communications desk I asked him to call the earl for an update.

"It's holding together," Joe reported. "As long as the wind stays where it is he's confident it'll get him back to Orkney."

Well, that was good news, and in fact my watch was completely uneventful. When I handed over to Mr Hall at midday we were already over the Shetlands, and we reached the base at Scapa around three hours later. Seaforth managed to land safely, and soon there was a ground crew at work on his ship. I thought that the rest of us would keep going, but my uncle said that there was no rush, and that it would be no bad idea to give everyone a proper break and to get the ship checked over by a professional engineering crew while we had the opportunity.

"We'll stay here tonight and then fly through tomorrow night," he said. "That'll get us home on Friday morning. We might as well take it easy now: we've done the hard bit."

The only disadvantage of spending an extra day here would be that it wouldn't leave us much time to get Joe back to his world in time for school on Monday morning. If the portal was open on Friday evening or Saturday, well and good, but if not…

"I'm not too worried, to be honest," he said, when I explained our schedule. "I'm sure I can get away with being a day or two late. In any case, I'm definitely thinking about coming back here, provided I can talk my parents into it, so it won't matter too much what the school thinks."

"Are you sure this is what you want?" I asked. "It might mean more missions like this, and you know by now how dangerous it can be. A lot of the French crew on the Joffre didn't make it."

"I know, but I'm sure I'd be better off here than back in the other world. I mean, what's my future going to be like there? The way it's going at the moment I won't have a job, and even if I get the grades to go to uni it'll cost a fortune to pay the fees. I don't fancy being twenty thousand pounds in debt before I even start working. Whereas here I'm sure you can help me a get a job – actually I wouldn't mind working for your homeless charity. Ben's told me all about it, and I'd like to help. And I really like flying, and if Tim can make the armour you've all been talking about it'll be safer too, won't it?"

"Safer, yes, but it's still going to be dangerous. Mind you, that won't stop me doing it, and it'd be great if you were with us… Anyway, obviously you won't be able to decide until you've talked to your parents, but if you do decide to come back I'll be happy to take you – and I'm sure we can find work for your father if you manage to persuade the whole family to come with you."

I didn't bother going to the debrief meeting with Air Admiral Faulkner: I was sure that my uncle could handle that without me. Instead I went for a wander round the base with Wolfie and my other friends, watching the repair work being done on Caberféidh and the French troop carrier (some of the cracked struts were being completely replaced) and looking at the various types of coastal defence ships belonging to the British Air Service. After that we walked to the waterfront and had a look at some of the surface ships out in the anchorage, marvelling at the size of the largest of them. This world still believed that big was beautiful, and the largest battleships in the harbour must have been around seven hundred feet [200 meter] long.

"How would you fancy captaining something like that?" Alex asked me.

"No, thanks. The trouble with being in the biggest ship is that it's always the one the enemy most want to sink. That's why they gave up on ships that big in your world: millions of pounds to build, crew of two thousand, and the whole thing can be sunk by a single torpedo if it hits in the right place. Look what happened to the Hood, and then what happened to the Bismarck when the rest of the British ships caught up with it. Of course in your world aircraft carriers became more important, but that isn't going to happen here – or not yet, at least. No, I'll stick to flying, thank you: better views, you can go anywhere and if you do get shot down you generally have a reasonable chance of getting out alive – as long as there are enough jumpshades on board, of course…"

That night we slept in one of the barrack huts on the base. The beds were too narrow to share, and in any case they were in an open dormitory, but they were comfortable enough and the hut was a great deal warmer than the Deck Two storeroom on Excalibur, so I slept very well. We then spent most of the next day mooching about: the engineers had finished our checkover by lunchtime, but there was no point in leaving then because it would have meant that we would have arrived at Culham after dark. Instead we decided to postpone our departure until shortly before sunset.

We said goodbye to Seaforth and his crew, who would be staying at Scapa for a complete refit, and to the French, who left a couple of hours ahead of us: they had further to go and were handicapped by the slower speed of the troop carrier. Charlie Cardington was going to be travelling most of the way with us, however, and so, just as the sun was touching the horizon, our two ships took off and headed back for England.

Once again I took the watch between eight pm and midnight. I still wasn't completely happy flying into darkness – we were leading again – but it was a clear night and we could at least see lights on the ground, so it wasn't quite as bad as it had been over open sea. And again my watch passed without incident and we were able to go back to the storeroom to rest. After the warmth of the barracks the store seemed colder than ever, but I did finally manage to go to sleep.

I was back on duty at eight o'clock the following morning, by which time the sun was just starting to appear. Mr Hall handed over command and left the bridge, and at the same time Sparrowhawk signalled 'Bon Voyage' and began to angle away from us: by now we were between Leicester and Coventry, about sixty miles [100 km] north of Culham. From here our route was more or less due south, whereas Cardington was south-east of here.

I saw that we had slowed down a little during the night, presumably to make sure that we didn't get back to Culham before dawn, so I ordered an increase back up to cruising speed – there was no reason for us to delay any longer.

Sparrowhawk disappeared off to our left, and we flew on alone for another three quarters of an hour, and then Wolfie glanced out of the back of the gondola, pulled his telescope from his pocket and looked through it.

"There is a pair of coastal defence ships following us," he told me.

"Really?" I said, taking the telescope from him. "So there are. We didn't leave anything behind at Scapa, did we?"

"I don't think so."

"Then it's probably just Admiral Faulkner making sure we get home alright. I don't know who he thought was likely to attack us in the middle of England, though."

I went back to my usual place at the front of the bridge, because we were almost home: Oxford was coming into view. I wondered if my uncle would expect me to land the ship myself. I thought it quite possible that he would, and I hoped I wasn't going to make a complete mess of it, especially with two navy ships looking on.

We flew on, gradually losing height as we flew over Oxford and past Abingdon, and as we approached Culham my uncle still hadn't come to the bridge, so I decided that I should at least line the ship up and make the approach. I could always abort before landing if I thought I'd got it wrong.

"Helm, wind direction is zero-four-two, five knots," I told Billy. "Come around to the west of the field and line up on the upper mast. You won't be able to come straight in on that bearing or you'll hit the house, so come south of the house and adjust once you're clear of it. Engines, three-quarters both."

We began to turn to approach the house from the south-west, and at the same time Sparrer began to take us even lower.

"They're still coming," commented Wolfie.

"Huh?" I said, trying to concentrate on working out which bags to vent.

"The navy ships. You'd have thought they'd turn round and go home now that we're safely back at base."

"As long as they stay out of my way I won't care," I said. "Prepare to vent one and nine on my mark… mark! Okay, that's enough…"

Billy had brought us around the house and we were lining up nicely on the mast. I thought our angle was about right… "Engines, one quarter both," I ordered.

As we cleared the house I could see the two navy ships, now away off the port bow. I agreed with Wolfie that it was odd that they hadn't turned for home. Unusual gondola arrangement, too: I didn't think any of the ones at Scapa had those waist gondolas: I'd only seen those on some of the older French ships. And the one on the left had a really shoddy paint job, too: one quarter of the union flag on the nose cone was crooked…

"Shit!" I cried. "Helm, climb and come to bearing one-eight-zero. Engines, maximum power both!"

Both Billy and Sparrer looked at me as if I'd gone mad, and so did Wolfie, but thank heaven for naval discipline, because both Sparrer and Billy obeyed me after only the briefest of pauses.

"Desk, sound battle stations and get crews to the turrets!" I yelled. "Alex, I want those voided bags at full pressure as soon as you can."

Joe was busy opening all the communication tubes preparatory to blowing the 'Action stations' whistle down them, so I grabbed the radio myself and prayed that the crew on the Rapp had forgotten to turn theirs off.

"Excalibur to Rapp, Mayday, Mayday," I shouted into it. "Please respond."

Joe began blowing his whistle, so I jammed a finger into my other ear and pressed the radio against my head.

"Excalibur to Rapp, please respond," I said again.

"This is Rapp," came a voice in my ear. "What is 'Mayday'? Over."

"It means we need help," I said. "What is your position? Over."

"One moment." There was a pause, during which my uncle came rapidly down the ladder onto the bridge, followed by Mr Hall.

"Leo, what's going on?" asked my uncle.

I raised a hand to signal that he should wait.

"We just approach…Dorchester. Over," said the Rapp's communications office.

"Then please turn and head for Culham as fast as you can. We're being attacked. Over."

"'Ow is this possible? You are at 'ome!"

"Trust me, it's possible. We have two Eagles. I'll try to lead them straight to you. Out."

"Leo, what on Earth…?" began my uncle.

I ignored him and ran to the chart table. "Helm, get us up to one thousand feet [300 meter] and new bearing…two-zero-five," I ordered. "Engines, maintain maximum speed."

I looked out of the back of the gondola and saw, as I had expected, that the two navy ships were still coming our way, and even as I watched the canvas sheet with the union flag painted on it was pulled away from the first ship's nose, revealing a black two-headed eagle underneath. The other ship also revealed its true colours, and at the same time the first Congreve flashed towards us and then veered off to the left and disappeared into the sky.

"Rear turret, you may fire when ready," I ordered. "And Captain? You have the bridge."

"You seem to be managing nicely," said my uncle. "Please carry on. Where did those Eagles come from, and how did you know?"

"Wolfie spotted them first," I said. "I didn't think anything of it at first, but Wolfie thought it was odd that they hadn't left when we reached Culham. Then I saw that the gondolas are wrong for a coastal ship: the only three ships I've seen like that are the Bessières, the Dreyfus… and the Russian ship in Norway. Then I saw that their flag was crooked and I realised it was a canvas. I'll bet you any money we've got Pavel Bloody Romanov to thank for this! Nobody else would know about the mission."

"It could just be a random raid, but I think you're right," said my uncle. "I gather you reached the French. What's the situation?"

"Rear turret, fire at will," I said to Joe, who relayed that order upstairs. "The French were over Dorchester. I told them to head for Culham while we head for Dorset. We should meet them about halfway. Provided the Russians don't hit us first – and they've only got our tail to aim at – we should be able to give them a nasty surprise."

I looked behind us and saw that the two Russian ships had moved apart from each other – clearly they had realised the same thing, and by taking up a wider position they would have more of our ship to aim at. On the other hand it also brought our other two turrets into play.

"Desk, tell Turrets One and Two they may also fire as soon as they have a target," I ordered.

I went back to the table and drew a line between our position south of Culham and Dorchester. It looked to be further than I'd hoped, maybe ninety miles [140 km]. Still, if we were flying south at close to sixty knots and the French were flying north at about the same speed, though perhaps a bit slower if the troop carrier was coming back too… It was like one of those maths problems you get asked at school: 'If two ætherships are flying towards each other and one is flying at sixty knots and the other at forty knots, how soon will they meet if they start out eighty-eight miles apart?'

I did the calculation and didn't like the answer, so I tried again with the assumption that the French would leave the troop ship behind and just make their best speed, and that gave me a slightly more satisfactory answer of about thirty-eight minutes. But that was still a long time to survive with Congreves whistling past, because it would only take one hit to cripple us: I'd already seen it happen to Caberféidh.

One of our missiles hit the left-hand pursuer just above the nose cone, and through the telescope I could see that it had done some damage to the armour, but we'd have to hit the same spot again to get through to the gasbags.

We flew on. I'd hoped that we could outpace them, but I suppose that if they had flown all the way from Norway – or even Murmansk – they would be light on coal by now, whereas we had refuelled at Scapa and so were still carrying quite a lot. I considered dumping it, but once it was in the hopper it was hard to unload it again without a lot of work, and dumping it one shovelful at a time wasn't the answer.

"What if we drop Gondola Two?" I suggested to my uncle. "That would give us less weight."

"It's a bit drastic, and we'd lose lift from the steam bags," he replied. "Better to carry on as we are. As long as they can't get alongside the nets will give us some help – a missile striking at an angle is far less dangerous that one hitting at ninety degrees. It's good to see that you're thinking, though."

About twenty-five minutes into the chase we were hit by our first Congreve. As my uncle had foreseen, it got caught in the chain-link netting and so failed to penetrate the armour, but it was still a frightening experience hearing it roaring somewhere over our heads.

"Excalibur to Rapp," I said into the radio, once I was sure that we were still basically undamaged. "Progress? Over."

"Rapp to Excalibur, we are to the west of Sall-is-bury, over."

"Great – you're doing better than I had dared to hope. We should be with you in less than ten minutes. If Bosquet is with you it might be a good idea if you split up, so you can come at them from two directions. Anyway, I'll leave it to you. I estimate we'll meet close to Amesbury. Good luck! Over."

"You also."

"Call the front observation deck," I said to Joe. "The moment they see the French I want a bearing, okay?"

Another Congreve rattled the gondola in its passing, and for a moment I had a nasty flash of my recurring dream: six inches [15 cm] closer and that rocket would have taken out the port wall of the bridge, exactly as had happened on Daedalus. Were we going to go the same way?

"Should I order the crew to get their jumpshades on?" I asked my uncle quietly.

He shook his head. "The turret crews will have theirs on already, and so will the gun crews. The stokers won't because it's hard to work with a shade on, but someone will have them ready. It's best not to give the order unless you have to, though – after all, there's no need, because you're certain we're going to win. Or at least, that's the mind-set you want the crew to believe."

"French ship spotted at two thousand five hundred yards, bearing two-zero-nine and down thirty degrees," Joe told me.

"Maintain current level and heading," I ordered.

The French captain had done the sensible thing: his ship would be harder to see if it was between the Russians and the ground, and if they were attacking from below the Russians wouldn't be able to use their turrets against them.

"Second French ship, same level, bearing two-zero-four," Joe told me.

"Helm, bring us onto two-zero-seven," I ordered. "And stand by to come about as soon as the French engage them. I'll give you the word."

The ambush couldn't have gone better if we'd been planning it for weeks. By the time the Russians saw the French coming towards them, there were already missiles heading their way, and Bosquet got very lucky with one of its first rockets, which destroyed one of the Eagle's lateral engine rooms. The Russian ship, missing its starboard engine, began to turn in that direction, and by the time its captain had brought it back under control Bosquet was firing at it from a very short range. Three more rockets hit the hull.

"Helm, hard to starboard," I ordered. "All turrets and starboard guns, fire at the damaged Eagle as soon as you have a clear shot."

No matter how good a ship's armour is, when it's being hit several times from two directions, sooner or later a weak spot is sure to appear. I'm not sure whether it was one of our rockets or one of the French ones, but something got through and there was a blossom of flame amidships. Russian ships don't use steam to separate their hydrogen bags, so once the hydrogen was burning, that was the end. The ship began to go down.

"Second target," I ordered. "Helm, come to bearing zero-three-one."

Ignoring the stricken Russian ship Bosquet was now also turning its attention to the surviving Russian, who was exchanging shots with Rapp. But someone on the Eagle obviously saw us coming, because the ship broke away from its opponent and started to climb, swinging to the east. We were close enough now for me to be able to see the ship's name through my telescope, but I couldn't read it because of course it was written in Cyrillic.

"Joe," I called, "come and tell me what that ship is called."

Joe took the telescope. "Alexander Suvorov," he reported, handing it back to me and returning to his desk.

"Who was he?" I asked.

"He was a famous Russian general. Eighteenth century, I think," Wolfie told me.

I'd still never heard of him. But then I saw something just above the name which I thought at first was a mark from a rocket, but when I looked through the telescope I saw it was actually a stylised lightning stroke. A black one.

"The Black Flash," I said almost to myself. "That's Pasha's ship! Engines, full ahead both – I want that bastard!"

The Russian ship continued to climb, and now I could see what its captain had seen: there was a bank of cloud in that direction. If he once got into it he'd be able to lose us.

Now we were doing the chasing, but we weren't able to close the gap and his tail was a comparatively small target. Our rocket crews tried, and so did the French, but soon we were flying into wispy cloud, and then the wisps got thicker, until finally the Russian ship disappeared.

"That's it, Leo," said my uncle. "It'd be far too dangerous to chase an Eagle in this stuff, especially if it has a good captain. We'd be sure to fly into an ambush. Take us out again."

"But…"

I knew my uncle was right, but the thought of having the bastard so close and yet out of reach was intensely frustrating.

"All right," I said finally, acknowledging defeat. "Engines, slow to one half. Helm, take us back out – bearing two-seven-zero, and drop us to one thousand feet again. And watch out for the French – we don't want to fly into them."

"Excalibur to Rapp," said Joe. "We're coming back out. Watch out for us."

I hadn't actually thought of calling them, but it was sensible to do so, and when we made it back into clear air we saw that both French ships had turned and were heading in the same direction.

"Rapp to Excalibur," I heard – Joe had put the radio back on speaker. "Do you need an escort back to Culham? Over."

"Excalibur to Rapp," I said, picking up the radio. "He's probably given up, but… perhaps it would be a good idea, if you don't mind. Thank you."

"Rapp, wait. We will advise Bosquet to escort Perpignan back to France. We left her at the æthership station outside Dorchester."

Rapp's signal arm swung down and began to exchange messages with Bosquet. While the French ships were talking to each other I looked about to see what had become of the first Eagle, and before too long I saw some smoking wreckage on the ground. And then I saw where it had crashed.

"Helm, take us two-nine-five and drop us to five hundred feet [150 meter]," I ordered.

Once again Billy and Sparrer didn't argue, although my uncle stared at me and Wolfie actually started to ask what I was doing. But as we got closer to the crash site Wolfie understood.

"Alex, Joe, you'd better come and look at this," I said, and they stood up and came to join me at the window. Together we looked down at the wreckage of the Eagle, which had crashed squarely into Stonehenge. The arch that led back to their world had been flattened.

Chapter Nineteen

Alex and Joe stared at each other, and I could see that Joe in particular was close to panic.

"Permission for my friends to be relieved, Captain?" I asked.

"Granted. In fact we'll change watches. Desk… ah. Mr Bull, would you mind taking the desk?"

Mr Bull was the semaphore-reader for my watch, and he moved to the communications desk and sat down.

"Thank you. Now please announce a change of watch – Number Three watch to stand down, Number One to take up duty."

The announcement was duly made.

"Thank you," I said to my uncle. "You have the bridge."

"I have the bridge," he acknowledged. "We'll have a full debrief when we get back to Culham. Mr Bull, can you use the radio device until your relief gets here?"

He could – I'd given all the communications staff on the ship a run-through when I'd first brought the radio onto the bridge – and so we were free to leave. I beckoned to Sparrer and Billy, and all six of us made our way up to the Deck Two storeroom, where we closed the door and sat down.

"Joe, are you okay?" I asked, but Joe apparently didn't trust himself to speak, because he simply shook his head. Sparrer promptly went and sat right next to him and put his arm around him – he understood, because he'd seen for himself that the arch was the gateway between the two worlds. Billy, on the other hand, didn't know why everyone was looking so serious.

"What's happened?" he asked. "What's the matter with Joe… and Alex?" he added, because he'd realised that Alex had a tear trickling down his cheek. "Alex, what is it? What's wrong?"

"Billy, you know that Alex and Joe come from another world, don't you?" I said, when Alex didn't seem capable of speaking. "Well, the link between their world and this one was in the Great Circle, through one of the arches in the outer ring. You remember that we were looking at it the first time we went to try to find the hole… anyway, that Eagle just destroyed the arch, so there's no way back."

"Oh," said Billy. "But… I thought you were going to stay here anyway, Alex."

"I was… I mean, I am," Alex answered. "But I wanted my family to come here too. I love it here, but… well, you've got a family too, and I don't suppose you'd want to go to another world without them, even if life there was a lot better than it is here, would you?"

Billy shook his head. "Family's important," he said. "I'm sorry, Alex. I'm sure as we'll all try to be like a family for you, and for Joe, too."

"Yes, we will," I said. "But maybe we shouldn't give up on it yet. If we can get the stones put back in the same place, maybe the hole will open again."

"You think you can rebuild Stonehenge and get every stone in precisely the right place?" asked Alex. "Because I should think that if you're even a millimetre out the hole won't be able to reform. This Stonehenge has to be exactly aligned with the one in my world, I'm sure."

"We don't know that," I said, though in fact I thought he was probably right. "But even if you are, I don't believe this can possibly be the only place where it's possible to get from one world to another."

"Know a lot of Stonehenges, do you?" asked Alex, gloomily.

"There are plenty of other ancient monuments around," I said. "Not just in this country, either – hell, if I have to I'll take you to Australia. Maybe Ayers Rock has a crossing point."

"I think you're supposed to call it Uluru now," Alex pointed out. "And, anyway, I bet Australia is the same as America and Greenland, a no-go area for Europeans."

"What's Australia?" asked Wolfie.

"It's a massive island – a continent really – between Asia and Antarctica," I told him. I realised it had never come up in geography lessons – at least, not during either of my spells of education in this world.

"Used to be called New Holland, if that helps," said Alex, who was a lot better at geography than I was.

"I think you mean Janszonia," said Wolfie. "It's named after the first European to visit it. Now it's part of the Japanese Empire."

I suppose I should have known that, but at least it meant that there shouldn't be any problem visiting the place if we had to: we weren't strictly allied with Japan, but since they liked the Russians a lot less than they liked us you could say their position towards us was one of benevolent neutrality. Of course I hoped we wouldn't have to go there: a ten thousand mile journey would be a massive undertaking.

I started to try to think of other ancient monuments, preferably rather closer to home than Australia, or Janszonia, or whatever I was going to call it. How about Ancient Rome, or Greece… or what about Egypt? Come to that, there were plenty of other Stone Age formations about in England, and in Western France, and surely Stonehenge couldn't be the only one where you could cross over, could it?

"If that was Pasha's ship," said Wolfie, bringing back from my reverie, "how could he have found us? He couldn't have followed us back from Norway, not with so much of it being done in the dark, and even if he latched onto us straight away he surely wouldn't have had time to recruit another ship."

"Maybe the Russians have a large base nearer than Murmansk," I suggested. "If so he would have had time to go there, look us up in the Security Service records – he had my name and photos of all of us, remember – and, if I'm in it, find out where I live. So he wouldn't have needed to follow us – he could have headed straight for Culham and just waited for us to get back. And if he knows who I am, you can bet he knows who you are, too. I bet he's kicking himself for letting you slip through his fingers."

"Let's just hope he doesn't find out who Tim is," said Wolfie. "I doubt if the Russians would have his photo, so he's probably safe, but if they do find out they'll probably come back."

That was a worrying thought, and I made a mental note to get a message to Admiral Faulkner, warning his coastal defence ships about disguised Eagles that could be identified by their waist gondolas. Of course, it was possible that not all Eagles had the same gondola configuration… but at least I knew that Pasha's own ship did, so hopefully he wouldn't be able to get back past the patrols so easily.

I realised how urgent it was for us to get all our ships fitted with electricity and radios. Once the whole fleet was equipped with radios we'd have a huge advantage, because we'd be able to co-ordinate our movements and change plans as we went, something that was virtually impossible with only semaphore communications. This would have to be a higher priority even than new armour.

"Are you two okay?" I asked.

Alex gave me a nod, and a moment or two later Joe did too, although he still didn't look too good.

"I'm going to get you home," I told them. "I don't care what it takes, but one way or another it's going to happen. I promise."

I went back to the bridge with Wolfie, and we found that we were more than halfway back to Culham. We still had Rapp to starboard of us, but there were no other ships in view, so it looked as if Pasha really had given up, for the time being at least.

Eventually Culham came into view and my uncle began the landing procedure, which I was delighted to discover was exactly the same as mine, right down to choosing the same two bags to vent on the final approach. Once we were safely down I picked up the radio.

"Excalibur to Rapp, over," I said.

"Rapp, go ahead."

"Thanks for your help. I'd suggest that you turn the radio off once we've finished speaking and take it back with you. If your scientists can discover how it works they might be able to make more of them. Certainly we will be trying to do that, so if they liaise with us we can share our findings. If we can fit all our ships with these… well, you can imagine the benefits. Over."

"We can certainly do this. Thank you. Over."

"Bon voyage," I said, in a feeble French accent. "Excalibur out."

The French ship turned to the south-west and flew away, and we disembarked. I looked up at our hull, where I could see the scorch marks on the armour caused by the Congreve that had got caught in our netting, and I wondered what would have happened if it had struck at a slightly less acute angle. As far as I was concerned, the sooner Tim came up with some better armour, the happier I would be.

Before the ship was towed back to its hanger the meteor material was unloaded. I still didn't think it looked much: to me it seemed that we'd made an extremely long and dangerous journey for the sake of what looked like a pile of earth. But then I knew I was no scientist.

"No, you're not," my uncle agreed when I told him what I was thinking. "But I think we might just make a decent æthership captain out of you. I thought you handled the attack very well."

"Really?"

"If I hadn't, I wouldn't have left you in command. But you were doing exactly what I would have done, and as long as you kept that up I saw no reason to relieve you. I'm impressed, Leo. You made a good job of it."

"I'd have gone on chasing him if you hadn't stopped me, though," I admitted.

"I can understand that, after what happened to you on the ground. But when you've got a bit more experience you'll learn when to cut your losses and stop. One on one the Eagles are stronger than we are. You beat them today by leading them into an ambush and then outnumbering them, but until we get better armour you shouldn't think of taking them on without some sort of an edge. And in cloud you're on your own, because even with your radio you can't co-ordinate an attack if you can't see where you are.

"Of course, it can work for you, too: if you're ever attacked by superior forces and there are clouds close at hand – other than thunder-clouds, obviously – run into them. Once you're hidden you can change course, climb a lot or a little or even drop if the cloud is low enough, and the odds are that the enemy won't be able to find you. I'll arrange some war game training for you with some of the other captains before too long, and that will teach you about tactical flying when you're outnumbered, because you won't always have a couple of French allies in shouting distance. Although if we can manufacture more radios it could make a tremendous difference to the way we fight.

"Anyway, as I said, you did well. Your mother would have been proud of you."

He clapped me on the shoulder, smiled at me and then went off to arrange for the meteor material to be moved to the old stable block, while Wolfie and I headed back to the house. We went straight up to my room, got undressed and took a long bath – together, because it's far nicer sharing a bath with a friend than just taking one on your own. We didn't talk much, but I was glad he was there, because I'd also lost something when the arch was destroyed. Although Auntie Megan and Uncle Jim weren't my real parents, I'd intended going back to see them and to ask them if they wanted to come to live in my world. And even if they had said no to that, I'd hoped I would be able to stay in touch with them. But now that chance was gone.

We got out, put some clean clothes on and went looking for the others, eventually finding them – all four of them – in Joe's room. Alex and Joe both looked a little better.

"You okay?" I asked Joe.

"Pretty much. It's not like I've got cut off in hell, is it? I'm happy here. But I am worried about Simon, what with Carmody being in prison and now me vanished off the face of the earth. I know he's got other friends, but I think we were the ones he spoke to most if he was worrying about something. And it's going to hit my parents, too: I don't know if they entirely believed Alex about you living in another world, but whether it sank in or not, there's going to be nothing they can do to find me. That's going to be really hard for them."

"Same here," said Alex. "It'll be not knowing where I am that will get to mine. If I could just send them a message to say that I'm okay I wouldn't worry, but as it is…"

"Well, like I said on the ship, I'm going to find a way back," I told them. "First we'll try rebuilding Stonehenge, and if that doesn't work we'll visit every prehistoric monument in Britain, and then the world, until we find another place where we can cross over. There simply has to be one somewhere."

Straight after lunch I wrote to Sir Edmund de Breville – as he was the Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, Stonehenge was on his patch – explaining what had happened to it and offering to contribute to its reconstruction, provided that it could be done as accurately as possible. Then, not wanting to wait for the normal post, I took it to the stables and asked Mr Francis to choose one of his boys to carry the message direct to Devizes. And that was just about the final part I played in our mission to Norway.

***

We had a quiet weekend, and then from Monday onwards the six of us boys went back to our normal routine of school and everyday life. Alex and Joe resigned themselves to computer-free learning and began to get used to looking things up in our library instead of online; Sparrer continued with his reading and writing lessons and Billy went back to the village school as before. We didn't see much of Tim, who seemed to be spending almost every waking minute with his team of scientists. They were in the process of moving from the old stable block to a former school in the centre of Abingdon which was adjacent to a large park – large enough for an æthership to be able to land there, anyway. Also based at the school was another team of scientists who were working on the material Alex had brought back from his world. He and I had signed any number of papers for a lawyer that our own solicitor had found to handle the copyright stuff, and once that had been done there was nothing further that we needed to do ourselves.

To be honest I was surprised that things were moving so slowly: I'd thought that generating electricity would be fairly easy, and in fact it is, usually. But I was forgetting that in this world none of the components actually existed: basic materials like copper wire had to be made to order, rather than being available on a shelf in B&Q. In this world there was no such thing as a light bulb, a plug or an electric socket, and things that the writers of the internet articles Alex had copied took for granted were completely unknown here.

Nonetheless, the work was going forward, although I didn't get to see too much of it first-hand. Of course, I wouldn't have understood very much of what I was seeing even if I had visited the labs on a regular basis.

October rolled into November and the fires were lit in the bedrooms. Of course whenever Wolfie and I slept in our third floor HQ we had to light the fire ourselves, since none of the servants were supposed to know about it, but actually doing it ourselves was no real hardship and increased our feeling that this was our own special place. All the same, we had told our friends about it, just in case they ever needed to find us urgently when we weren't in our own rooms, but we still hadn't told them about the secret passages. Not that we'd used them recently: it was getting a bit cold in there now. We could have lit a fire in the secret room, and on our last visit there we did go so far as to leave some coal and kindling there, but we didn't stay long enough on that occasion for it to be worth lighting the fire.

We'd warned Air Admiral Faulkner to be on the lookout for ships with waist gondolas trying to sneak over the border under false colours. There wasn't too much that the coastal defence ships could do about ships crossing the coast at night, but patrols had been stepped up and the word had been spread amongst all the landowners who flew as privateers, so it would have been hard for an enemy ship to escape detection for very long. In any event, we saw nothing of either Pasha's ship or any other, and by the end of November we came to the conclusion that he had given up.

At the beginning of December my uncle suggested that I spend a few days in London, visiting the headquarters of my charity and seeing how the work was coming along. The reports that I'd received from Colonel Edwards had been positive: already some premises had been either purchased or leased, and quite a number of homeless children had been rehoused in them. Sparrer was understandably keen to see what conditions were like there, and so I arranged for the six of us to travel to London on Saturday December 3rd. The weather was still fairly mild – at least, it was still above freezing and there was no sign of snow yet – and so the journey gave us no problem, and we were soon settled back into the house near Berkeley Square. This time Sparrer was offered his own room, but he declined, saying he'd prefer to share with Joe. And on the Monday morning we travelled to an office in Gray's Inn Road which Colonel Edwards had leased to serve as the headquarters for our work.

Now I could see for myself the effects of an entire city that relied on coal for heat: as long as the wind kept blowing it wasn't too bad, but as soon as the wind dropped the smoke began to form a layer of grey haze that gradually dropped to street level, reducing visibility substantially and, I suspected, not doing our lungs a lot of good.

"Just think how much better it'll be if we can set up a proper electric supply system, said Alex. "Electric lights, and better still, electric heating. That should get rid of most of this muck."

"Only if it's no more expensive than coal," I pointed out. "And even then it's likely to be a while before people feel comfortable about having electricity running through their houses. It'll need some decent marketing."

"True. We'll have to find a way to keep the price down. But if we can – kerching!"

"I think we're supposed to be doing this for philanthropic reasons," I said, "not to make piles of dosh. Although if it does make money, well and good – maybe we can use it to provide shelter for all the homeless people in London, not just the kids."

"Maybe you'll end up with a statue in Piccadilly Circus," suggested Joe. "After all, plenty of Victorians got statues for good works, so I don't see why you shouldn't."

I thought about that briefly, but quickly dismissed it as ridiculous.

"No thanks," I said. "I'd look a knob as a statue."

"It'd be cheap, though," said Alex. "They wouldn't need a lot of marble to make a statue of a midget like you."

I gave him the finger but otherwise ignored him. In fact I had grown a little since returning to my own world: even though I was still shorter than Alex, Joe and Wolfie I could at last see that I was getting taller. There was even some activity in the trouser department: a little more hair, some of which could actually be seen from a distance of greater than six inches [15 cm], and even a little – a very little – more length. I remembered Dr Daruwala telling me that when my growth spurt began I would probably change quite quickly, and I hoped he was right.

Colonel Edwards was obviously expecting us, as he had the books all set out ready for my inspection. Apparently we had already bought two large buildings and leased two others (we didn't yet have the funds to buy them outright) and were thus accommodating more than a hundred and fifty orphans. Persuading the first ones to move in had been difficult, and would have been impossible if I hadn't told them about Annie and her group, but once they had been living in the first home for a while they put the word about, and soon the orphans were coming to us.

Late that afternoon – once the kids were home from school – we visited the first of the homes, and that gave me a chance to talk to Annie in person. I talked to her on my own, with only Sparrer along in case I needed an interpreter, because I didn't want her to be inhibited by the presence of either Colonel Edwards or the staff who ran the home. But it turned out that this was an unnecessary precaution, because she was perfectly happy with life.

"So they're treating you alright?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's good 'ere. Food ain't bad, eever. Course, it ain't as good as wot the Savoy chucked aht, but it's 'ot, which is better. An' they don't try it on wiv us – yer know wot I mean. Once we're in bed they leave us ter sleep. Like I told yer before, that ain't wot 'appens in some places. An' we're goin' ter school, an' all, and they even reckon they can 'elp us get work when we finish. I still don't get why yer done it, but I ain't 'alf glad yer did."

"I think you can thank Ben for that," I said. "He bumped into us at exactly the right moment."

"'Oo's Ben?"

"That's me," said Sparrer. "I got a noo name nah: I'm Ebenezer Sparrer, gent."

"You ain't no gent, yer little sod," said Annie, grinning at him. "An' I ain't sure abaht 'Ebenezer', eever: it sahnds too good fer the likes of us. Still, 'oo knows? Maybe yer'll suit it one day."

"Annie, I'm going to give you my address before we go," I told her. "If anything ever happens here that you're not happy about, to you or any of the other kids, I want to hear about it, all right? Just write a quick line, put it in the envelope I'm going to give you and put it in a post box. It'll already have a stamp on." I hesitated. "Can you write yet?"

"I'm learnin', but it don't matter – I'll get Albie ter do it. 'E can write proper."

"All right. Just make sure you tell me. Is there anything else you think I ought to know about?"

"Well… I 'ave got a suggestion. See, we got most of wot we need 'ere, but… is there any chance of sortin' us out a little bit of dosh? Jus' ter buy sweets an' stuff. 'Cos uvverwise some of 'em are likely ter go dippin' again, or back on the game. It don't 'ave ter be much – a tanner a week would do."

"Yes, all right, I'll see to it. But I don't want anyone here breaking the law, Annie, understand? Especially not thieving. If kids from one of these places get caught stealing, word will go about and people will stop sending us money, and if we're going to get more kids out of the sewers we have to have people contributing. Make sure everyone understands that, please."

"I will," she said. "And fanks again."

She headed for the door and I took a couple of steps to follow her, but Sparrer grabbed my elbow and held me back.

"'Ang on 'ere a minute," he said. "I'll be back in a mo."

He followed Annie out and returned a couple of minutes later with a slightly older boy in tow.

"This is Albie," he told me. "Albie, this is me mate Leo… well, orlright, 'e's the Dook of Culham, but 'e is sort of me mate. 'E's the toff wot put up the readies ter get us aht of Bazalgette's."

So this was Albie the rent-boy, I thought. And probably quite a successful one, too: he was very nice-looking, although as he got closer I could see that he was actually wearing make-up – not much, but he'd certainly done something with his eyelashes, he seemed to be wearing eye-liner and there was definitely a hint of lipstick. He was just a little bit swishy, too, which I found a little off-putting for some reason: considering the relationship I have with Wolfie it shouldn't have bothered me at all, but I'd never had any contact with any sort of effeminacy before. Still, I didn't think that was any reason not to be polite.

"Hello, Albie," I said. "Forgive me for asking, but are you still… you know… selling…"

"You mean, am I on the game? No, not as such… I rather miss it sometimes, but it's not really all that safe. Quite apart from the danger of being robbed – and that has happened to me more than once – it's a bit like playing Russian roulette with your health."

I stared at him. He sounded nothing like Sparrer – in fact he sounded posher than me. Okay, that's not all that difficult, because I still sounded a lot more like a working class kid from Palmer's Green than a member of the aristocracy, but this boy sounded as if he'd been educated at Eton.

"How long have you lived in the sewers, if you don't mind my asking?" I said.

"About two or three years, I suppose. Maybe less – time moves differently underground, you see. Quite often you don't know whether it's day or night, and I haven't owned a watch since I was twelve."

"How old are you now?"

"Fourteen. I'll be fifteen in a couple of weeks."

"And how did you come to find yourself in the sewers?"

"Ah – you're wondering why I don't sound like Sparrer, aren't you?"

"Me name's Ebenezer nah," Sparrer told him. "Mr Ebenezer Sparrer, Esquire."

"Oh, is it? I wonder how that amazing transformation came to pass?"

"It's 'cos of Leo – 'e reckoned as 'ow I oughter 'ave a proper name, not jus' Sparrer. So I chose 'Ebenezer'. But me mates can call me 'Ben'."

"I see. Well, I can talk like 'im if I want, 'cos reely it ain't that 'ard… but I fort if I wuz goin' ter meet a toff… well, I thought you might prefer it if I sounded a little less sewery. Actually I generally speak Sewer except when I'm with a client who wants something a bit more upmarket… when I was with a client, I meant. Because obviously I don't do that any longer, as I explained."

"Quite. So, how did you…?"

"Ah. Well, I was caught at school doing something that nicely brought up boys aren't supposed to do and they were so shocked that I was asked to leave. Well, not so much asked as physically thrown out of the door. Then the headmaster wrote to my father, and he asked me to leave as well, because no son of his was going to behave in such a flagrant, sinful… well, I'm sure you get the idea. Probably the fact that my father is the Bishop of Welwyn didn't help very much, and I suppose it doesn't reflect very well on him if his son is wearing makeup and indulging in sins of the flesh with other boys.

"So I moved to London to seek my fortune, but while I found quite a lot of sex there wasn't any fortune, and I suppose I was lucky that on my third night in London I spotted a couple of street boys disappearing into a manhole. So I followed them and found myself at Annie's place, and I've lived there ever since, using my charms to make a little money for them. But I won't pretend I don't like this place a lot more."

"And how do feel about being back at school?"

"There's rather more freedom when you're in the sewers, but I recognise the need to improve myself, so I'm not really sorry. Of course, where I am now is a little less exclusive than my last school, but maybe that isn't such a bad thing."

"What subjects are you best at?"

"Maths, I suppose. And maybe science."

"And… sorry, Albie, but I have to ask… is there any danger of you getting expelled again for the same reason?"

He looked at me. "Do I have to answer that?" he asked.

"No, but… look, we need to avoid bad publicity for this place if we can, because we can't afford to lose our donors. So can you at least try not to get caught?"

"Well, I didn't want to get caught last time… but I have learned to be more careful since then. In any event, I haven't been at the school long enough yet to get together with anyone. But if I do, I don't know that I can make any promises."

I really wasn't sure how to deal with this. I certainly didn't want to have to send him back to the sewers, but the last thing we needed was a newspaper story linking our charity to corrupt morals, or however the establishment was likely to express it. But before I could say anything Sparrer got in first.

"Why don't we take 'im wiv us?" he suggested. "'E's clever, an' 'e likes science an' stuff, so maybe 'e could 'elp Tim, or sumfink. It would sure as 'ell keep 'im aht of trouble. An' maybe 'e can teach you an' Wolfie some stuff wot yer might find 'andy…"

"Ben, I really don't need a personal sex trainer," I said.

"Ah, so you're of the same persuasion as I am, are you?" asked Albie. "Well, I certainly wouldn't mind passing on my years of experience to you – in fact I'd enjoy every moment of it."

"Like I said, no thanks," I said. "And you don't have to flatter me by pretending I'm good-looking, either."

"Who's pretending? Trust me, teaching you the ins and outs would be no hardship at all!"

"Albie, I'm happily… partnered," I said.

"And your point is…?"

"Shut it, Albie," interrupted Sparrer. "Can't yer see yer talkin' yer way back ter the fuckin' sewers? 'E don't know yer like wot I do, an' yer makin' 'im uncomfortable."

"Sorry," said Albie, contritely (and in a much less flirtatious tone). "I rather tend to lay on the limp-wristery a bit when I meet someone new. You'd be surprised how much you can learn about someone from watching their reaction to meeting a screaming poof."

"And what have you learned about me?"

"Well, Sparrer's right: you're not comfortable with me. But I can't see anything in your eyes to suggest actual dislike, and you seem fairly relaxed talking to me, too, which is rather odd: you're a duke and I'm a queer from the sewers, but nobody hearing us talk would realise that."

"You'd be closer if you said that you're a bishop's son and I'm a working class kid from North London," I said. "I'm not exactly your average member of the upper classes."

"I think I'd worked that out long before I met you – after all, most of the titled folk pretend that we don't exist but, as I understand it, you've put a lot of time and money into trying to help us. And of course if you're prepared to consider someone like Sparrer a friend, you simply have to be strange. Actually, I'd have said you have to be mad…"

"Oi, watch it!" said Sparrer. "Any'ow, you an' me are mates, ain't we? So if yer insultin' Leo, yer insultin' yerself, an' all."

"We all make mistakes. Anyway, Your Grace, I'm sorry for coming on to you just now, and if I can be of any use to you, in any capacity, I'll be happy to oblige."

I thought about it. There was no doubting his intelligence, but I wondered if it would really be a good idea to add him to the household. After all, currently we were three happy couples, and introducing a sexual wild card like Albie into the mix could stir up quite a lot of trouble if he decided he wanted to join in. On the other hand, it would certainly ensure that he didn't bring the charity adverse publicity if I took him down to Culham with us…

"How much do you know about steam engines?" I asked.

"Well, I understand how they work. I don't have any practical experience, but I would imagine I could pick it up reasonably quickly."

"Then I can probably use you. But I need you to be a bit subtle about your personal life, all right? I don't think Culham is quite ready for anything too flamboyant."

"I can do subtle," he said. "I can be quite butch when I try."

"And if you can manage without the make-up, that would help. You don't need it, anyway, because there's nothing wrong with the way you look."

"Don't you think so? I've always thought my eyes are too pale – they look a little washed-out without a touch of liner. And my hair's a bit dull, too: it's neither one thing nor the other."

"I'd say that you've got nice wavy dark blond hair and pale blue eyes, and I'd still say so whether or not you wore mascara and lipstick, because they make no difference. In the world where I was living until August you could have worn quite a bit of make-up and got away with it, because there are Goths and Emos in that world who use make-up even though they're not gay, but here…"

"Hold on," he interrupted me. "Suddenly you've stopped speaking English. I know a Goth is a member of an ancient Germanic tribe, but what's an Emo? And why should wearing make-up have anything to do with whether you're happy or not? And what on Earth do you mean about 'the world where you were living until August'?"

"It's a long story," I said. "I'm sure someone will fill you in over the next few days – if you decide to come with us, of course. You don't have to."

"How could I say no? Of course I'll come. And thank you for asking me."

"Alright, but… alright, just go and get packed."

I still wasn't sure about this, but I was thinking ahead to the time when I would want my own crew to fly Excalibur. Albie was clearly intelligent, and if I started his training now, perhaps he'd make a decent engineer by the time I was ready to fly without my uncle.

While we were waiting for Albie to get his meagre bits and pieces together I found Annie again, apologised for taking Albie and told her that in the event of trouble she should just send me the envelope I handed to her, which I had stamped and addressed to Culham, with nothing inside it. If I got an empty envelope I'd know it meant that she needed to speak to me.

Albie returned carrying a small bag and I took him outside to meet the others, and almost immediately I started thinking I'd made a major mistake here, because he took one look at Alex and went straight into flirt mode.

"Well, hello, Gorgeous!" he said, fluttering his still-mascaraed lashes at him. "I wonder why nobody told me about you?"

"Albie!" I snapped, seeing the look on Billy's face. "If you want to stay here you're going the right way about it."

"What?" he asked, trying to look innocent.

"He's spoken for," I hissed in his ear.

"Oh! Shit, Your Grace, I'm sorry," he said, and he sounded as if he meant it. "I didn't know."

"Well, just rein in your enthusiasm a bit. And don't call me 'Your Grace', either. My name's Leo."

Somehow we got through the rest of the day without incident, and I suspect that at some point Sparrer took Albie aside and explained a few things to him, because after supper he came to my room and gave me a proper apology.

"It's going to take me a little while to sort myself out, I think," he went on. "You see, I've been completely open about the way I am for the past two years. I was thrown out of school and my home for being queer, so I decided that I wasn't going to apologise for it any more. People could accept me as I was or not at all, but I told myself that I wasn't going to pretend to be something I wasn't ever again. And so I actually went to the opposite extreme and started exaggerating the way I was. And it felt really good, and nobody in Bazalgette's cared, because that's the one place that will genuinely take all sorts, as long as they can earn a little money to pay for food.

"But now I need to rein it in again so I don't cause you any problems. I know this isn't the same world as the sewers – I was just a bit slow to adapt. It won't happen again, I promise."

Obviously I sympathised: even though I still wasn't completely sure that I was going to be exclusively gay when I got older, I could understand how hard it could be trying to pretend to be something you're not. Probably Alex and Joe could understand that even more easily than I could, too.

"We have a bit of a rule," I told him. "When we're with other people I try to act like an aristocrat, Billy and Ben – Sparrer – call me 'Your Grace' or 'My Lord' and we all try to behave the way the adults expect us to. But when we're on our own we drop all that: everyone calls me 'Leo' and we all treat Ben and Billy as friends rather than servants. So it could be very helpful if you can act sort of straight and responsible in public, but when it's just us boys I don't mind at all if you drop the pretence and just be yourself. I can guarantee that none of us is going to mind in the slightest. But try not to split people up from their partners, please. If you're looking for a long-term partner of your own, fine – there are plenty of boys of our age on the estate, and I'd be surprised if you can't find some who would be interested. But my friends and I – the ones you met today – are off-limits, because at the moment we're all spoken for. Is that all right?"

He nodded. "Of course," he said, and I wasn't sure if I believed him or not, but for the time being I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Then welcome to the household," I said, and I offered him my hand.

He took it and shook it, and then pulled me into an embrace, and then he kissed me – but it was a very gentle kiss on the cheek, and when he let go of me and stepped back, I could see that he was trying not to cry.

"Thank you," he managed to say. "I won't let you down. I promise."

He seemed totally sincere, and at that moment I came to the conclusion that asking him to join us might not have been a mistake after al.

Over the next two days we visited the remaining Homes and found that they all seemed to be well-run and the kids seemed happy enough. I got Sparrer to talk to a couple of kids at each home on a one-to-one basis, because I was sure that, no matter how reluctant they might be to raise a complaint in front of me or Colonel Edwards, they wouldn't hold back in a private chat with one of their own. And Sparrer reported that so far everything was running smoothly: the kids were getting some schooling, and the older ones had mostly been found some training, or even, in one or two cases, an apprenticeship. I was suitably impressed, and told Colonel Edwards so when we went back to the office for the last time. He thanked me and promised to keep me informed of progress.

At the end of the week we went back to Culham. We found Albie a room on the third floor and, after discussing it with my uncle, we decided that he should attend classes with us in the mornings and help out with the research that Tim was doing in the afternoons. In fact there were only ten more days of school to go before the Christmas holidays, but that was quite enough for Albie to demonstrate that, despite having had no education for more than two years, he was a lot brighter than I was. Not that I minded: as I've observed before, the benefit of being a duke is that if thinking needs to be done you can generally find someone brainy to do it for you. And now I had Tim and Albie, as well as Joe, who had settled into this type of schooling very well and was getting consistently good marks.

And then, finally, the school term ended, and we were looking at two whole weeks off. – and Christmas, of course. I was really looking forward to that: Christmas in Alex's world was fun, but it tended to revolve around watching crap on TV, interspersed with adverts for furniture store sales. Somehow the spirit of Christmas seemed to get overwhelmed in all those exhortations to 'hurry down to XYZ Superstore and get your brand new sofa for only £599.99 – but be quick, the sale must end on January 14th!' Christmas in this world, however, was different: no TV, no January Sales, just family and friends relaxing together, maybe playing games, maybe listening to music – I remembered one year when Lord Brookhampton's daughter had sung for us, beautifully…

Yes, Christmas promised to be good, and 2012 promised to be even better: if everything worked out the way we hoped, we'd be able to develop effective armour for our ætherships, equip them with electricity and radios, and then hopefully we'd be able to turn the tide of the war. At that moment the future looked very rosy indeed…

Chapter Twenty

One of the first things I wanted to do now that the holidays had started was to go to Stonehenge and find out how Sir Edmund's workers were getting on with the reconstruction. I knew that work had begun in mid-November, by which time Sir Edmund had acquired just about every photograph ever taken of the stones, and I was hoping that by now things would be well advanced. So on the morning of December 22nd we – myself, Alex, Joe and Sparrer, who grabbed the fourth seat in the auto-carriage before Wolfie or Billy could do so – drove back to the site of the Great Circle.

I was pleased to see that the work seemed to be going well: the remains of the crashed æthership had been removed and about two-thirds of the stones were in position again, including the all-important arch on the north-west arc of the circle. As far as I could tell it was in the correct place – of course there had been clear marks in the ground to indicate where the stones had stood before the Eagle hit them, and so it hadn't been too difficult to put them back in the same place. We were lucky, in that all three of the stones making up this arch were intact: two or three others had been broken by the impact. Of course, if the entire circle had to be in place for the arch to open this was likely to be a big problem, but I hoped that our arch would work independently of the condition of the rest of the monument.

"Have you had any trouble with mist?" I asked the foreman.

"Not so far, Your Grace," he told me. "Of course, at this time of year it's usually a bit too blowy for mist and fog…"

"I suppose so. Well, could you please keep a note of it if you do see any mist around the stones? I'm doing some research into local weather conditions."

He agreed to do that, and I went to have a closer look at the arch that mattered, but of course there was no way of telling if it was in the exact same place as before or if it was a few millimetres out, and nor could we tell if the lintel had been replaced correctly. I supposed that we would just have to wait and see.

We watched the men working for a while. It was quite interesting because they were mostly using very old-fashioned means, like wooden tripods and ropes and pulleys, and with horses and human effort doing the work of moving the stones. Of course they couldn't get a steam crane into the heart of the circle without doing more damage, and so they were using methods probably not so very different from those used by the original builders.

Eventually we got back into the carriage and Murdoch drove us home. The foreman had told me that he expected the work to be finished by mid-January, as long as there wasn't any snow, and I decided that we'd keep an eye on the weather forecast and come back the first time the weather was calm enough for mist to form. Only then would we find out if the hole was going to reopen or not.

Joe and Alex seemed a little more cheerful on the way back. I supposed that seeing that things were moving was responsible for that, although I was a bit worried about how they would feel if it transpired that the hole wasn't going to reappear. Still, I decided that it would be time enough to worry about that if it happened.

We had a little run of birthdays coming up: three of us were going to be fifteen over the next couple of weeks, starting with Albie on the 23rd.

"It's a pretty awful time for a birthday," he told us that evening, "especially if your father is a clergyman. I'd hardly see him in the run-up to Christmas: he'd be rushing about like a blue-arsed fly trying to get everything ready for the big services, and on my birthday he generally only stopped for long enough to thrust a card and a present at me and to shout 'Happy Birthday!' over his shoulder as he disappeared in the direction of the church. I thought it might get better when he became a bishop, but if anything it got worse, because now he seemed to be trying to organise twenty-odd parishes instead of one. And he never gave me what I wanted, either: time and time again I asked him for a nice box of make-up and some homo pornography, but he never delivered!"

He grinned at us. "Actually I wish I had asked for things like that," he went on. "I might have got kicked out of the house a bit sooner, but the look on his face would have almost made it worthwhile."

"Don't you miss you family at all?" Wolfie asked him.

"Of course I do. You can't imagine how often I thought about going back and asking them to give me another chance. But I knew it wouldn't work: even if they did take me back the relationship would have been completely different. And sooner or later I'd have done something else to annoy him… I decided I was better off where I was: I had a roof over my head, enough to eat most of the time and friends who didn't care who I wanted to sleep with. Even having to share a home with Sparrer wasn't enough to change my mind!"

Sparrer promptly hit him. We let them fight for a few seconds and then separated them.

"I'm afraid I don't know where to get you any porn," I told Albie, once order had been restored, "but if you like we can go into Abingdon tomorrow and get you some make-up."

"No, better not," he said. "I don't want your uncle to throw a fit and ask me to leave."

"I don't think he would, but maybe you're right. But… I bet you could get away with it on Excalibur! The officers all dress up in strange clothes for that, and I should think make-up would be perfectly acceptable there."

"What's Excalibur?"

"My uncle's æthership. Come to that, I ought to ask for a flying costume for my own birthday. I can't get shown up by General Wolfie any longer."

"Your uncle has an æthership? Do you think I'd be allowed to come on a flight with you some time?"

"Of course. In fact, that's one reason why I asked you to move down here, because eventually I'll be able to fly missions without my uncle, and I'm hoping to get a crew together of around my own age, so that by the time I get my own ship – when I'm twenty-one, hopefully – I'll already have a trained and experienced crew. That's why I asked if you knew anything about steam engines, because I was thinking you might make a good engineer."

"Are you serious?" he asked, staring at me.

"'E's serious," Sparrer confirmed. "We're all part of 'is crew. I work the telegraph-fings wot tell the engineers 'ow fast ter go. So if you finish up workin' wiv the engines, yer'll 'ave ter do wot I tell yer!"

"Leo must want his uncle's ship to crash if he lets you do anything important," Albie commented. "But obviously I'd really like that, Leo. I can't think of a lot of things I want to do more than fly."

"Wait until you're in a ship full of hydrogen and people are firing rockets at you," said Wolfie. "That has happened to me twice. The first time nearly killed me and cost me my leg… but even so, I would never give it up. Even if it's dangerous, it's still an incredible experience. And maybe if Tim is successful it will be safer."

"Perhaps we'll find out tomorrow," I said, because Tim had stopped me as we returned from Stonehenge and told me that he wanted to give me a demonstration of his progress next day. I wondered how far he was from a finished article. I didn't think he could be there yet, because I was under the impression that science generally takes ages to get anywhere. But of course Tim's father had been working on this project for several months before his death, and so perhaps…

"What do you really want for your birthday?" Alex asked Albie.

"How about a night of wickedness with the most gorgeous boy around?" suggested Albie. "And by 'gorgeous' I mean with blue eyes and black curly hair…"

I opened my mouth to tell him to shut up before Billy exploded, but before I could say anything Albie continued, "and of course 'gorgeous' also includes any blue-eyed, blond-haired cuties you might happen to know. Have you ever tried a threesome?"

Alex had, of course: on the night before he went back to his own world he'd played some games with Sparrer and me, but I wasn't sure that he'd told Billy about it. So I wasn't particularly surprised when he shook his head.

"Then I really hope you'll give me a chance to show you a few ideas," said Albie. "Don't worry, Billy: yes, I'm jealous as hell, but I can respect relationships, so I'm not going to try to get between you. Besides, Leo's already told me that if I do he'll send me back to the sewers so fast I won't know what's hit me."

"I won't," I said. "Instead I'll throw you out of Excalibur at a thousand feet and without a jumpshade. The last thing I want is to have my friends fighting each other, and there isn't much I wouldn't do to prevent it. Obviously if Alex and Billy decide to invite you to join them, that's their business, but I think the best present I can give you would be to sort you out some clothes. You can't go about in that charity collection for too long."

"I'd like that very much," he said. "It's a very long time indeed since I had a really good set of clothes. Thanks, Leo."

"What about you, Joe?" I asked. "You're next in line for a birthday, so what would you like?" Joe's birthday was on the 27th.

"Apart from a chance to go home, you mean?" He paused. "Sorry, Leo – I know you're trying hard to find one, so I shouldn't have said that. I don't really want anything, because I'm okay as I am. But if you really want to give me something I suppose a change of clothes would be a good idea – I can't keep borrowing Alex's spares."

"I should think that's an even worse time for a birthday than the 23rd," said Albie. "You get caught in the post-Christmas slump, when everyone's had enough of presents and celebrations."

"It's not quite that bad, because I'm Jewish, so we don't celebrate Christmas, and usually Chanukah is earlier than Christmas. This year they actually overlap, which is why I wasn't around yesterday evening and why I'll be disappearing from time to time over the next week, but in general my birthday isn't too close to the holiday. Actually having them coincide this year is quite nice. It won't make up for not having the family around, of course, but it's a lot better than if I had to celebrate my birthday on my own."

My own birthday was on January 7th, which was just long enough after Christmas and New Year for me not to suffer from losing my own special day in the general Christmas rush, although Wolfie had told me that in some of the German states presents were exchanged on Epiphany, which was January 6th, rather than Christmas. I was glad I didn't live there.

"What about you, Ben?" asked Joe. "When's your birthday?"

"I dunno. I ain't 'ad a birfday since I was six, an' I can't remember what day it was. I reckon I'm fourteen, 'cos I'm almost sure me ma died in two fahsand an' free, but I dunno any more than that."

"Then you ought to choose one," said Joe. "You have to have a birthday."

Sparrer shrugged. "It don't matter much," he said. "I'd like a birfday in the summer, though… what abaht August 27th?"

"Why then?"

"'Cos that's the day Leo took me aht of the sewers, so you could say that my life started again then."

"That means you won't get any presents for another eight months!" Joe warned him.

"I don't mind. I fink that'd be a good day fer a birfday, so if I can really choose, I'll 'ave that."

"I'll arrange it," I said. "We ought to get you some proper documents anyway, because you'll need to exist officially in the future. I'll get my uncle to talk to our solicitor about it."

That night I was sleeping in my own room. That may sound obvious, but I generally spent a couple of nights in Wolfie's room, and we had a rule that we should spend at least one night a week in our special room on the third floor. This was good for me – quite apart from the pleasure of sharing a fairly small bed with Wolfie, it obliged me to speak nothing but German for an entire evening and night, something I was keen to do: I was determined to eliminate the little grammar mistakes that had given me away to Pasha. In fact I'd suggested to Wolfie that we should speak German to each other even when we were sleeping in my room or his, and we were doing so this evening.

"Of course I'm happy to speak German with you," he said, putting a little more coal on the fire while I was getting undressed, "but there's nothing wrong with the way you speak it now. Even native speakers make slip-ups of grammar sometimes. Besides, we are most unlikely to be going into Russian-held territory again, so you're not going to find yourself wanting to be taken for a native speaker, are you?"

"No, but I'd still like to get better. Once we've got rid of the Russians I would imagine we'll be spending quite a lot of time in Prussia, and I don't want your servants laughing at my rubbish German."

"Your German isn't rubbish. And aren't you taking a few things for granted there? Even if we end up with better armour and radios, simply having air superiority won't be enough to dislodge the Russians on the ground. If it was, the Russians would have crossed the Rhine a long time ago."

"Perhaps. But radios would make a huge difference to our ground troops, too, and if the armour works on ætherships I imagine it'll work equally well on autocannons."

Wolfie got undressed and sat on the bed and I unstrapped his leg for him.

"I'd like to think you'll be able to go home to celebrate your eighteenth birthday," I went on. "Or at worst, your twenty-first."

"Well, that would be nice," he admitted. "But to be honest I'm perfectly happy right here – at least, I will be provided that you don't disappear again."

"Don't worry," I said. "I have no intention of disappearing anywhere. Wherever I go from now on, including back to Alex's world if we find a way to do that, you'll be coming with me. I'm not going to risk us ending up in different worlds again."

Wolfie wriggled into bed and I crossed the room to turn the lamp off, but before I reached the lamp there was a knock at the door. I called for whoever it was to come in, and the door opened and Albie entered the room.

"Sorry to disturb you so late," he said, "but I need to ask you something."

"Sure," I said, returning to the bed and getting into it, because whatever he wanted to ask, I didn't want to stand about naked listening to it.

"Thanks," he said, closing the door, approaching the bed and sitting on the edge of it. "You see, there's something else I'd like for my birthday, only I didn't want to ask in front of everyone. I don't mind just the two of you, but…"

"Ask away," I invited.

"Well… do you think you could arrange for me to see a doctor? I don't feel ill or anything – in fact I feel fine. But I'd like to be sure that I'm not carrying anything I shouldn't be. I'm sure you understand that in my previous line of work there are certain… hazards, shall we say, and I want to be absolutely certain that I'm clean before I do anything with anyone. Obviously you might prefer it not to be your own doctor, but if you can provide me with an address where I can find one who doesn't know you – I don't want anyone gossiping about you…"

"That's very thoughtful," I said. "I'm sure we can find one – there are probably a number in Abingdon, and if not Oxford is sure to have plenty. But if you're not completely certain that you're… well, you know – what were you intending to do with Alex and Billy if they'd said yes?"

"They did say yes. But you don't need to worry: there are plenty of things I can do without actually using my penis – in fact according to Sparrer you already know about some of them. Have you two actually…?"

"Not yet, no," I said. "I've thought about it, but I don't want to mess it up."

"You won't mess it up. Look, let me give you a quick lesson. There are a few little tricks you can use to make your partner enjoy it even more, and I'd be glad to show you both how to do that."

"What do you think?" I asked Wolfie. "We've spoken about doing this for ages, so what about getting a little tuition?"

"I don't see why not. After all, if we're going to learn something new, it would be a good idea to have an expert show us how to do it."

"You heard him," I said to Albie. "Go ahead."

"Thanks. May I join you, then?"

Without waiting for an answer he began to get undressed, and clearly this was a job he viewed with enthusiasm, because when his underwear came off he had an erection. This was the first time I'd seen him naked, and although he was a little skinnier than might have been considered ideal, I was sure that by the time he'd been with us a little longer he would begin to fill out a bit, just as Sparrer had done. Otherwise he looked good: he was clearly bigger than both of us where it counted, though not quite up there with Alex and Joe – I'd guess at somewhere between five and five and a half inches [12-13 cm] – and his balls were a bit bigger than mine too. He had no hair at all, but of course I already knew from Sparrer that this was because he removed it himself.

He climbed into bed, pushing me towards the middle of it and pulling the covers over us.

"Now," he said, "the most important thing is that there is absolutely no need to rush – unless you're paying by the hour, of course! And you don't need to rush straight down below the belt, either."

He ducked his head under the covers and I felt his lips close around my right nipple. For a minute or so he sucked, licked and even nibbled at it, and then he put his hand on the top of my thigh, stroking around the inside of it without quite getting close enough to touch my balls. Then he switched to the other nipple, and only after working away at that for some time did he finally move his head down my body. I thought he'd start to do something about the state of my erection, but not a bit of it – instead he took my balls into his mouth and started licking and sucking at those.

Next he carefully drew my foreskin down and started licking at the exposed tip, and that felt incredible: I had no idea that I was quite so sensitive there. And finally – finally! – he slipped my penis into his mouth… and then almost immediately took it out again.

"Of course, I could carry on," he said, "but that would hardly be fair on Wolfie. So if you'd like to swap places…"

I've never met a situation where the word 'frustrating' would be more appropriate, but I did as he said and spent the next few minutes watching Wolfie's reactions to being on the receiving end of the same treatment.

Eventually it was my turn again and he picked up where he had left off. He wasn't doing it at all quickly, but the combination of lips and tongue, together with what he was doing with his fingers at the same time – and I was absolutely certain that nobody had touched me there before – was enough to get me very close in a short space of time. And then the bastard stopped again.

"All right," he said, "now you should have the basic idea. There's just one more thing I need to show you, and that's the operating position. Wolfie, if you'd like to turn onto your side so that you're facing Leo… yes, that's perfect. Now Leo, if you'd like to get up and turn round… no, so that your head is nearer the bottom of the bed… up a bit… perfect. And now you should be able to do whatever comes naturally – and remember everything I've just shown you, all right? Splendid – you can tell me in the morning how you get on, because now I ought to be getting along to Alex's room. Night-night!"

He stood up, picked up his clothes and left the room, leaving me contemplating Wolfie's groin from a distance of about six inches [15 cm]. Well, I'd obviously heard about this position, but I hadn't expected to be trying it out. But when Wolfie made the first move by sliding his lips down my erection I decided that it would be better just to get on with it and think about it later, and so I slipped him into my mouth, sliding his foreskin down with my lips and setting to work, and quickly enough we fell into a rhythm with each other.

Really my only criticism would be that it didn't last long enough: with no previous experience of this neither of us was able to hold out for very long. But of course the second time around, after a short rest, gave us plenty of opportunities to experiment, and the results were pretty amazing…

We both slept very well that night, and when I compared notes with Alex the following morning at breakfast I discovered that, despite the presence of a third person in his bed – Albie had apparently stayed through the night – he had slept very well too.

"Aha!" commented Sparrer. "So Albie done wot 'e said an' come ter teach yer 'ow to give someone a proper…"

"Yes, he did," I interrupted – once again there were a couple of servants in the room, which made it imperative to prevent Sparrer from speaking with his usual indiscretion. "Has he been to visit you and Joe yet?"

"'E don't need ter. 'E taught me proper when we was in the sewers, an' it turns out that Joe's really good at it already. See, 'is bruvver an' 'is mate made 'im do it for 'em loads of times, an'…"

"Ben!" interrupted Joe, returning from the hotplates just too late to prevent this interesting piece of knowledge from being aired. "Do you really have to tell everyone everything I tell you privately?"

"Sorry. But you ain't got nuffink ter worry abaht – like I told you before, these are your mates an' they ain't gonna think anyfing bad abaht yer, whatever they hear abaht yer. Don't yer know that?"

"Yes, but there are still some things… oh, never mind."

"Sorry, Joe," I said. "But he's right, anyway: none of us is going to change the way we think about you, whatever we find out. You're our friend, and nothing's going to change that. And he's right about something else, too: you look much better now you've let your hair grow. Long hair suits you."

"You think so?"

"Sure," agreed Alex. "Now all you need is a face transplant!"

Joe obviously couldn't think of an instant reply to that, so he settled for giving Alex the finger.

"Well, since you know about it," he said, "it's true – not long after he saw what was on my USB stick Danny asked if I'd ever sucked anyone, and when I said no he said I could try doing it to him. He's not really my type…"

"An' what is your type?" interrupted Sparrer.

"Oh, I don't know… about five feet [1½ m] tall, brown eyes, wavy brown hair, speaks with a broad London accent, used to live in a sewer, can't keep a secret…"

"I can an' all, if I have ter," said Sparrer, whom this description of course fitted perfectly. "I'd never say nuffink in front of the grown-ups."

"Well, anyway, it wasn't as if I really had a lot of choice, and in any case I'd often wondered what it would be like, and so I went round to Danny's house after school and did it for him. I suppose if I'd wanted to get out of doing it again I could have deliberately done it really badly, but it was sort of interesting, and I thought that it might be a good idea to learn how to do it properly in case I ever got a proper boyfriend in the future – after all, by then I knew I wasn't going to be going out with girls…

"Anyway, I did it a few more times, and he told me things to try and I did a few experiments of my own and in the end I got quite good at it – at least, that's what Danny said. Then, of course, he told Simon and I had to do it for him too, and he really liked it, so I must have been doing it okay. Mind you, Ben's taught me a few new things since I got here, so if I ever get back I'll have some new tricks to show them both…"

He went quiet, and I knew he was thinking once more about being trapped in the wrong world.

"We'll find a way," I promised him again. "You heard what they said about Stonehenge being finished by the middle of next month. And if it doesn't work I'm putting together a list of other places we can try."

"And in the meantime you can keep practisin' on me," Sparrer promised him. "By the time you get 'ome yer'll be better at it than Albie, even."

I thought that might be quite difficult, but I was quite happy to let them try. I was definitely going to try myself, even if it took a very long time to reach that level…

After lunch Tim took us to the old stable block – or rather, just beyond the block – and here he handed me a square of what looked like blue-grey plastic, although it didn't feel quite like plastic, more like china. It was probably about an eighth of an inch [3 mm] thick and perhaps nine inches [23 cm] square, and it was light, seeming to weigh very little.

"Is this it?" I asked, passing it to my uncle. "Surely that won't stop anything!"

"You'd be surprised," Tim told me. "But no, that isn't it: that's just one layer. The full armour will have five layers like that. See, that's one way the Russians got it wrong: their armour is just one fairly thick layer, but it's far more efficient used in multiple thin layers. And it's light because it isn't solid: look at the corner."

When my uncle handed it back I saw that one corner of the sheet had been removed, and now we could see that the interior of the sheet seemed to be composed mostly of small bubbles.

"It starts out as a foam," Tim explained. "Well, actually it starts out as a mixture of metallic oxides and silicates ground together. Then we add a particular metal oxide which has been altered by heating it under pressure at high temperatures with a little of our meteor extract. That gets mixed with the silicates and other metal oxides. Then we add a solution of gum Arabic, mix it thoroughly and aerate it, and that gives us the foam I mentioned before. That goes into moulds and after it's been slowly dried it's removed from the moulds and baked at a very high temperature. And this is the result.

"Its main advantage is the way it dissipates the force of an impact horizontally, rather than vertically. Imagine dropping a piece of soft fruit onto a road: the fruit splatters sideways, rather than sinking into the road, and the same thing happens with most projectiles that hit this. Of course there is some vertical impact, but spread over a much wider area than simply the point of impact, and therefore with much less penetration.

"One other interesting thing is the way you don't get a large ricochet if a bullet hits this, unless it strikes at a fairly acute angle: instead the material absorbs most of the energy, and the bullet will only rebound a very short distance. Oh, and best of all: it's fireproof. But enough talk: time for a demonstration."

He led us in the direction of the low wooded ridge that lay to the south of the house, and we saw that a trench had been dug at right-angles to the ridge, so that it ran from level ground at the field end to a far end that was deep in the earth of the ridge, thus forming a basic firing range. At the far end a much larger sheet of armour had been set up.

"Now I could just impress you by firing a pistol at this little sheet," Tim told us. "It would scarcely mark it. But nobody is going to be shooting at your ship with a pistol, so I think we'll move straight on to the full-scale demonstration."

At the near end of the range there was a large piece of canvas, and when Tim and his colleagues pulled it away we saw that beneath it were a field gun of the type we carried on Excalibur and a single-barrel Hale rocket launcher. Tim had brought a gun crew from Excalibur with him, and we watched as they loaded the field gun, aimed it at the armour at the far end of the trench and then fired. I expected Tim to lead us down the trench to have a look at the results, but instead he indicated to the gun crew that they should move to the rocket-launcher, and a minute or so later a rocket had been sent in the wake of the shell. And now Tim did take us down the trench.

I'd expected to see the sheet of armour in pieces, or at least with a large hole through the middle, but while there were signs of damage the sheet was still intact, and there was no hole.

"That's two close-range direct hits," Tim pointed out. "We estimate you'd need to hit this sheet four times in exactly the same place to penetrate. That's the strength of the multi-layer system. Later we'll test this sheet to destruction to find out exactly what it takes to knock a hole in it, but in any event it's clearly a lot better than what you're using at the moment: it's far stronger and a great deal lighter, too. It's also probably at least twice as effective as the Russian single layer version.

"Of course there are a few disadvantages: first, the only way to make it is using moulds, and that includes moulding in the holes for the screws or whatever else we're going to use to fix it to the ship: it's really difficult to drill through the finished sheet. So you'll have to carry replacement sheets with you: you won't be able to make any new ones. And if you're not carrying a sheet of the correct size you'll have to stick it into place instead of using screws or bolts, and that won't be anything like as secure. Second, unless we get a really huge furnace the sections are going to have to be comparatively small, which means we'll need a vast number of sheets to cover an entire æthership. Again, we're looking for a larger one."

"Do the sheets have to be flat?" asked my uncle. "It would be good if we could protect the gondolas too, but that'll be difficult unless you can make some shaped panels."

"We can make it any shape you like. Most of them will be flat, but we can make the moulds any form you want, so we can certainly produce shielding for the gondolas."

"Excellent," said my uncle. "Thank you. I'll talk to you later about the next stage."

I wasn't quite sure what he meant by 'the next stage' unless it was actually manufacturing enough panels to cover Excalibur, but the most important thing was that the armour seemed to work. Now, if only we could find a way to produce electric generators and radios…

But my uncle said that we could look into that after Christmas, because the next couple of weeks were a holiday for everyone, including our research scientists. I supposed taking a short break wasn't a bad idea at all: after all, there was no great hurry, and everyone would be able to return to work more enthusiastically if they had a chance to stop and enjoy themselves over the festival.

In fact the actual festival kept me quite busy, what with attending church services at midnight on Christmas Eve and then twice on Christmas Day, hosting a party for some of our neighbours on Boxing Day (to be fair, my uncle did most of the work; I just had to greet the visitors, sit at the top of the table and generally act pleasantly) and visiting all of the houses on the estate to greet the workers who lived there and to thank them for their work throughout the year. There was also a rather less formal party for the estate workers on New Year's Eve, and that was rather more fun, if only because I wasn't the only one who felt out of place: by no means all of the farm workers and kitchen hands looked comfortable in their best clothes.

I caught sight of Graham Reed and a couple of the other stable-boys standing in a corner, tugging at their stiff collars and looking as if they wished they were somewhere else, and I went to join them.

"Sorry about this," I said. "If it was up to me we'd be dressed in ordinary clothes and playing cards up in your stable-loft, but my uncle says we have to have this traditional arrangement instead. I'll have to see if I can find a way to change the tradition next year. What's that you're drinking?"

"Flat lemonade," they told me.

"Well, trust me, it's still better than the champagne. Fancy some cider instead?"

"But, My Lord, Mr Francis said as how we weren't to drink anything with alcohol in!" protested Graham.

"Stuff that – it's New Year's Eve. Come with me."

I led them through the room, rounding up my friends as I went, and then slipped out into the hall.

"All right, Ben, you're the expert," I said to Sparrer. "Take us to the pantry and find us some cider."

We found an empty room on the second floor, lit a fire in the grate and spent the next hour or so much more informally. It took the stable-lads a couple of glasses before they started to relax properly, but I told them to undo their collars and take off their shoes, and after a bit they seemed to start enjoying themselves. If I'd been free to choose I would have stayed there for the rest of the evening, but at about quarter past eleven I said that I would have to go back to the party.

"Sorry, Wolfie, but I think you'd better come too, because they'll notice if we're not there for the speeches and stuff at midnight," I said. "But the rest of you, feel free to stay here and relax. Ben, if you need to go and find some more cider, feel free, and if anyone stops you, tell them I sent you. Just try not to get completely drunk, especially you three lads, because if you go back to the stables and puke over Mr Francis, don't expect me to come and rescue you!"

I somehow got through the speeches, toasts and everything else that went on either side of midnight. Probably it was just as well that I'd had a couple of drinks, because otherwise I'd have found the way everyone seemed to want to offer a toast to my 'welcome return to take my rightful place, et cetera, et cetera' unendurable. It still felt impossible to me that I should be the head of this estate and all these workers – the previous New Year's Eve had been spent with just Auntie Megan and Uncle Jim in a small house in North London.

I managed to give a speech – a very, very short one – in response, thanking everyone for the work they had done through the year and for their kind wishes, and concluding with a toast to a New Year of health, happiness and good harvests. And then, thank goodness, I was able to say goodnight and slip away.

I found that our private party on the second floor was still in full swing, though I noticed that Sparrer had found a couple of bottles of lemonade – the good stuff, with plenty of fizz – as well as more cider, so it looked as if the stable lads at least were playing safe. Alex had produced his cards while we were away and a game was under way when we got back, although rather to my surprise they were playing for tokens rather than clothes.

"We were afraid someone might come looking for us," explained Alex, when I asked. "If we're just having a quiet game and a couple of drinks we thought we'd get away with it, but if we were undressed, not so much."

"You're probably right. Well, find us some tokens and deal us in."

By about a quarter past one I was feeling ready for bed, and quite a few of the others were yawning, too: in fact one of the stable lads had already fallen asleep.

"I'm off to bed," I announced. "Graham, if you three want to sleep here tonight, that's fine with me, and I'll square it with Mr Francis in the morning if you need me to. You might as well, because you'll get very wet if you go outside – it sounds like the rain is pretty heavy now."

"Thank you," said Graham. "Maybe we should do that."

"That bed's a bit small for three," observed Albie. "Why don't you let Roger and Ted use this one? There's plenty of space for you in my room."

"Albie…" I began, because so far Albie had been on his best behaviour, wearing fairly conservative clothes and with not a hint of make-up, his accent halfway between Eton and Sewer and his effeminate side completely submerged behind a heavy screen of Butch. I was pretty sure that Graham had no idea of what he might be getting into here.

"Don't worry, Leo," said Albie. "I won't step out of line, I promise."

"Don't," I said. "I'm serious, Albie. Anyway, I probably won't make it to breakfast, so I'll see the rest of you at lunch."

I grabbed Wolfie and headed for my own room, which at least was on this floor: I wasn't sure that I could handle stairs any longer.

I remembered to drink some water before I got into bed, which was something I'd learned after the incident with the half-bottle of wine three years or so previously: I hoped it would be enough to prevent a headache in the morning. And I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as I lay down.

***

2012 began with a bright sunny day: the rain had cleared overnight and from my window everything looked as good as it ever did in mid-winter. I didn't have a headache and I was even awake early enough for breakfast, so I went and had a wash, got dressed, shook Wolfie awake (and he also seemed no worse the wear from the previous evening's festivities), waited for him to wash and dress and then went down to the small dining room with him.

None of my friends had yet made an appearance, but my uncle was already at work on a plate of sausages, bacon and eggs.

"Good morning, Leo!" he said, loudly. "How's your head this morning?"

"Fine, thank you," I said. "I didn't have that much to drink, you know."

"Really? Then I wonder what happened to all those missing cider bottles in the pantry… come on, Leo, surely you didn't think you could disappear last night without anyone noticing?"

"Ah. Well, all right, I did have a little private celebration with my friends – after all, that wasn't the most exciting party I've ever been to, and I really don't like champagne. I thought you could spare me for an hour or so. And I really didn't drink that much."

"Don't worry, Leo, it's fine. I'm glad you came back for the run-in to midnight, though, because it would have been very awkward if you hadn't been there for the toasts."

"I know. But you don't need to worry, Uncle Gil – you've taught me about my responsibilities, and I wasn't going to let you down, last night or at any other time."

"I know that. And I'm proud of you: you've picked up the role of duke very well over the past four months. So if you need some time away from all the formal stuff, that's fine with me, just as long as you're here when we really need you."

After breakfast I went back upstairs to find out how many of my friends were actually intending to get out of bed at all that day, but as I stepped out into the second floor corridor I bumped into Graham Reed.

"Morning!" I greeted him, trying not to sound anxious. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, thank you, Your… I mean, Leo… or are we back to 'Your Grace' again?"

"No, I don't think so: there aren't any adults around who might be scandalized by your 'shocking lack of respect', so 'Leo' is fine. So Albie didn't keep you awake all night?"

"Well, we did talk for a while, mainly about what it was like living underground, but we were both quite tired, and we went to sleep quite quickly. But I like him – he knows masses of funny stories."

"Mostly dirty ones, I imagine."

"Well, some of them were… most of them, I suppose. But we got on well, and he said he'd like to see where I work, so I said as he could come round any time. Maybe I can teach him to ride."

"Maybe you can – and maybe you can teach him a bit about running a furnace, too, because that's something he does need to learn."

"Alright, I certainly don't mind doing that. And thanks for last night: we were dying of boredom down there. I'm just off to see if the others are awake yet, because probably we ought to get back to the stables. It's a holiday today, but I don't want Mr Francis to think as we've run away, or something stupid like that."

"All right. I was on my way to see if the others are awake, so I'll let you go and find Roger and Ted. But thanks for joining in last night: it's more fun with more people. I'll make sure we tell you next time we're having a party."

"Would you? I'd really like that. Just send Albie with a message."

He headed off along the corridor, and I thought that I owed Albie an apology, because it was clear that he hadn't misbehaved overnight – or if he had, Graham certainly hadn't minded…

The next few days were nice and relaxing. We played games, read books and went out on our horses a couple of times, and Wolfie and I spent one afternoon cleaning the cobwebs out of the passage system. We also lit a fire in the secret room, just to make sure that the chimney was clear, and we found that once it had been burning for a few minutes the room became quite warm. So we went and found a couple of chairs and a small table, so that if we ever had to use the room we could at least do so with a little comfort.

There was another church service to attend on January 6th and then came the morning of my fifteenth birthday, the first one I'd celebrated at Culham since 2007. It was traditional here for presents to be offered after breakfast, and so once we'd finished breakfast we went into the smaller reception room.

I hadn't really known what to ask for. Back in Alex's world I would probably have been hoping for video games or a new smartphone, but in a world that had no mobile phones, no internet and indeed no electricity I'd had to try to think of something else, and not much had sprung to mind: there really wasn't very much that I needed.

The one thing I had asked my uncle for was a new watch, because of course Pasha had taken my tenth birthday one. Since we'd returned from the mission to Norway I'd been wearing my old wristwatch, the one I had brought with me from Alex's world, but I knew that the battery in that wouldn't last indefinitely and that I wouldn't be able to replace it when it ran out, and in any case I'd got used to having a pocket watch instead. Of course, ideally I'd have preferred to get my original watch back, but that hardly seemed likely.

There were a few other things waiting for me in the reception room – a penknife, a new chess set, a pack of cards in a silver box, and a few other bits and pieces – but no watch. But I did have one other thing I'd asked for, and that was a proper flying outfit. I'd taken a risk here and asked Wolfie to choose something, rather than picking something out for myself: my only specification was that it should not, under any circumstances, include a steel helmet, with or without a leaping lion on it.

"I asked everyone else for ideas," Wolfie told me, which didn't exactly fill me with hope.

"Yes, I suggested a pointy red hat and a fishing rod," said Alex. "Then you could have spent your time between flights filling in as a garden gnome."

"Up yours, Demetriou," I said. "I'm growing, you know: I'm two inches taller now than I was when I got here."

"Well, so are the rest of us. You're still a midget."

I looked at him and realised that it was true: he was still the same size relative to me as he had been before, so if I had grown, he must have done so too.

"You know, when I get my own ship I'm going to design everyone's uniforms myself," I threatened him. "You'll be wearing a bikini and a bowler hat. Of course, by then I'll probably be taller than you anyway."

That got more of a laugh than I had expected: I hadn't thought it was that funny. I shrugged and picked up the package that presumably held my new outfit and started to open it.

"I know you don't like riding boots much," said Wolfie as I pulled a pair of plain black shoes from the wrapping, "so I thought you'd prefer straight-cut trousers and ordinary shoes instead of riding-breeches. But it'll be easy to change if you decide boots are better."

"No, thank you," I said. "Boots look great with your white uniform, but they're not really me."

"We could add some five inch [12 cm] heels…" suggested Alex, grinning at me. I ignored him and kept unwrapping.

Now I could see that the colour chosen was dark green, and I liked that: Wolfie looked good in white, but I wanted something different. And once it was out of its wrapping and I could see it properly I had to admit that I liked it. The trousers were simply a fairly ordinary pair of trousers in dark green, with no stripes or other decorations, and the jacket, while clearly military, was also fairly simple, with none of the braid and ornamentation that distinguished Wolfie's own uniform. It just had five silver buttons down the front with two breast pockets and two larger ones lower down, all fastened with smaller buttons, and no other decoration at all apart from a small blue and black patch on each side of the collar, on which was embroidered a red Culham lion.

"I know you didn't want anything too flashy," Wolfie said, "so I got you an actual fighting kit, rather than a parade one like mine. It's based on the Saxon uniform, but I've replaced the original collar patches with your own."

"Wolfie, it's perfect!" I said. "Can I try it on?"

"Of course. I'll come and help you."

I picked up the uniform and went out into the hall. I was going to go into the conference room to change, but instead Wolfie shepherded me into the billiard-room, which was on the opposite side of the hall.

"There's a mirror in here," he said when I queried this.

"Is there? I've never noticed one."

We got into the billiard room and found that I was right: no mirror.

"Oh, well, never mind," he said. "Come on, then – let's see what you look like!"

I kept the same shirt on: the uniform jacket buttoned to the neck, so it wouldn't matter what I wore underneath. And everything fitted perfectly, including the belt that went on over the jacket. There was another Culham lion engraved on the belt buckle, too.

"I didn't think you'd want a sword," Wolfie told me, "but you can add a holster for a pistol if you want. You won't trip over that the way I trip over my sword when I'm not careful. Stand up and let's see… well, I think it really suits you. Now, there are a couple of other things that go with it: first, there's a choice of hats. I know you didn't want a helmet, but a hat's a good idea when it's cold. There's a formal one and an informal one."

He dug into his bag and handed me a hat that looked quite like a baseball cap, except that this was green and had a red lion badge on the front. As I've said before, I don't really like hats, but when I tried this one on it was comfortable enough.

"Or there's this," said Wolfie, handing me something that looked as if it belonged on a World War Two German Field-Marshal, except that it had a lion badge instead of an eagle.

"Er, no, I don't think so," I said.

"Go on, try it – please?"

I sighed, removed the informal cap and put this one on. It was the right size, but I was sure I looked a complete idiot. Wolfie, however, didn't seem to think so.

"That looks absolutely perfect!" he told me. "Come on, let's go and see what the others think!"

I thought they would probably die laughing, but then I realised that just one little snigger from Alex would give me the perfect excuse not to wear that hat again. So I allowed Wolfie to lead me back to the reception room. And nobody laughed at all, least of all Alex, who stared at me.

"Bloody hell, Leo, you look amazing!" he said. "I wish I had a camera – too bad my phone battery's been flat for the past three months."

"You don't think the hat is overdoing it?"

"No – if anything, the hat makes it."

"All right," said Wolfie. "Now, I said there were a couple of things to go with the uniform. The hat was one; the other's outside. But I'm afraid we need to blindfold you first."

Well, I don't mind surprise presents, so I removed the hat and allowed Wolfie to blindfold me, after which he led me out into the hall. We paused near the door while he helped me into a greatcoat, and I could hear my friends putting coats on as well. Then they led me out of the house.

I assumed that this was going to be something that wouldn't fit inside the house, like a new auto-carriage. I wondered what the driving age in this world was – could it possibly be as low as fifteen? It didn't seem likely. Of course, I could still drive on private land, and we had plenty of that, so perhaps… Or it might be a horse, because I still didn't actually have one of my own: when I went out riding I just rode whichever one of the horses I came to first.

We walked on. Surely now we were too far from the house for it to be a horse, or even a carriage? What if this was actually a trick: perhaps it was traditional to throw the heir of the house into the river on his fifteenth birthday? But no, that couldn't be it: there was no way that they would push me into the river in my new uniform – and, besides, we were going uphill, not down through the Long Meadow.

Finally we stopped and someone began to undo the blindfold. I heard my uncle's voice say "Happy Birthday, Leo," and the blindfold fell away.

"This," said my uncle, indicating what was in front of me, "is His Majesty's Æthership Excelsior. She's yours. Congratulations!"

I simply stood and stared.

"When we started building her she was going to be an exact twin to Excalibur," my uncle continued. "But over the past three months or so we've changed a few things. To start with, this will be the first ship to be fitted with the new armour – you can see that the nose cone and front twenty metres [65 ft] have already been done. We needed to have that much complete so that we could paint the flag and name…"

I looked at the nose of the ship and saw that the name was indeed there, and above it was the leaping lion of Culham, rather than my uncle's stag.

"It's also going to carry an electricity generator, so it will be lit, and possibly heated, inside. We won't need a gondola purely to generate steam for lifting because this ship won't have any steam bags: once the new armour is in place we believe it'll be safe to use hydrogen in every envelope. Of course, there will still be partitions between the envelopes – Tim said something about fitting gypsum partitions to prevent fire moving from one bag to the next – but if the armour does half of what Tim thinks it will we won't really need them. You can see that there is a gondola where the steam one used to be, but on this ship the steam created in that one will power the electric generator.

"With the added lift, and the weight saving from using the new armour, we're going to give her four engines instead of two, and if you look there," (and he pointed halfway along the hull) "you'll see that we're putting a pair of rocket turrets on the underside as well as the usual ones on top. We'll have to wait until she's fully fitted before we discover exactly what she can carry, but we're hoping for a lot more guns than Excalibur.

"Of course she won't be ready to fly for a few weeks yet: we have to fit the rest of the armour and complete the wiring for the electricity system, and we'll be moving her to Abingdon for that, but as from today you're her captain. Once she's ready to fly I'll draw up a schedule of test flights and trialling with you, and you can also use those to train your crew. Of course to start with we'll be using the Excalibur crew, but hopefully by this time next year you'll be able to fly her with a crew of your own choosing. So – what do you think?"

About the only thing I was capable of thinking at that point was "Wow!" because I hadn't expected to get anywhere near a ship of my own until I was a lot older… and of course that explained why my friends had found my remark about being taller than Alex by the time I got my own ship hilarious. I turned to face them and found them all grinning widely.

"Did you all know about this?" I asked, and was met with a battery of nodding heads.

"You should see your face," said Alex. "Yes, we've known for some time – since before Christmas, anyway."

"See?" said Sparrer. "Told yer I can keep things secret if I have ter."

"So aren't you going to have a look at the bridge?" asked Wolfie. "I think you should."

So I allowed my uncle to lead me onto the bridge. It wasn't finished yet: the usual desks were there, but there were two others that were still in a skeletal state.

"This one will control the electricity supply throughout the ship," said my uncle, indicating the first of these, "and the other one will be for the radio operator – although I have to admit that we haven't made a lot of progress with the radios yet. Apparently they are so strange internally that they might be impossible to replicate. Still, we thought we'd put a desk in, just in case. And you'll see that we also put in chairs for the captain and first officer. I've decided that I'll put one of those on my own ship, too – I'm getting too old to stand up all the time!"

"Try your chair out," suggested Wolfie, so I made my way to the chair, which was at the front of the gondola, to one side of the chart table and right next to the wheel. It was a swivel chair, so I spun it to face me – and saw that there was a small package on it. I picked up the package, sat down – and that chair was really comfortable – and opened the package, which held a small box, which in turn held a watch. Like my old one, this had an engraving of the Culham lion of the front, and inside it was engraved with 'To Leo on his 15th birthday, January 7th 2012'

"Thank you," I said, and I got up, crossed the room and hugged my uncle, not caring in the slightest that my friends were watching. "Thank you very much for everything."

"Well," said my uncle, leading me back outside and heading for the house once more, "I originally thought it would be your sixteenth birthday when we gave you the ship, but the way you handled the Norway mission, and especially the last part of it, convinced me that you were almost ready now. In fact, everything you've done since you came back to us has convinced me that you're ready for the responsibility – the work you've done for the homeless in particular, but the way you've taken on the duties of the estate too. I hope you do manage to find a way to reopen the hole to Alex's world, because I would very much like to meet the people who brought you up while you lived there. They did a wonderful job."

I didn't feel capable of speaking at this point, so I said nothing. Obviously finding a way back to Alex's world was top of my list of things to do, so I really hoped it would be possible to introduce Auntie Megan and Uncle Jim to my real uncle one day. But at that moment, everything else in my world looked perfect: I had a great place to live, I had money, I had some really good friends, and I had my own æthership. Things surely couldn't get better than this…

***

I didn't realise it at the time, but I was absolutely right: things wouldn't get better. In fact, before I was very much older things would get worse – much, much worse…

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