Randall and Loach decided to go out to Elmhardy farm a couple of days later, while the orcs were still absent and before the human army could arrive. They could sneak out to the place, they thought, have a good look around without the priests finding out and see whether it was indeed the site where the Gorsty Common facility had once stood. If it was they could come back at a later date to excavate the place properly, and if it wasn't they wouldn't need to waste any more time on the place.

They dressed in drab, outdoor clothes, carefully chosen for their camouflage colours. They were hard to come by, as the people of the city liked to dress brightly in reds, yellows and blues, often in garish stripes and patterns, but Randall had his people ask around and before long they had a nice selection of coats and cloaks in dull brown and grey which they shared between themselves. They wore brightly coloures cloaks on top of everything else so as not to arouse suspicion while moving through the city, but they intended to cast them aside the moment they were out of sight of the city wall.

"We'll have to be careful," said Loach as they walked the streets of the city. "There could still be orc patrols roving around. I can handle one or two, but if we come across a larger number we'll be in trouble. We could go back to the club, pick up a few of my men."

"The more we take with us, the less chance we'll have of escaping notice," the other man replied, though. Two men leaving the city is no big deal, we're a pair of farmers going out to see how much of our farm is still standing, but a larger force would look suspicious. People would talk about us and word might get back to the priests."

"I'm worried about us not getting back."

"If you'd rather wait, I'm perfectly happy to go out alone. I can take care of myself."

Loach smiled like a shark. "You saying I'm scared?"

"Not at all. I'm just pointing out that, unlike you, I have actually faced orcs in combat, twice, while you..." He left the sentence trailing, a smile of amusement on his face.

"While I cowered in my club like a little girl? I don't remember you taking your place on the wall, risking your life to hold the line while wave after wave of orcs threw themselves at you. If I remember right, you were huddled with the women and children pretending to have a gammy leg. You only fought when you had no choice."

"But when the time came, I did fight. I killed an orc with my own hands to defend a bunch of children."

"To defend yourself, you mean. Do you know how many men I had to kill to take over Badger's empire?"

"They were just men. I killed an orc. Seven feet tall and twice the strength of a man. Plunged a spear into its throat and felt its blood splattering all over my face. Me, George Randall. Combat veteran." He smiled and held his head high as he strode along the street like a King. "You've got no idea how good it felt!"

"I think I do have an idea, and if you were able to kill one then their reputation must he overrated. I mean, look at you. Flabby, overweight, virtually no upper body strength... Either the orc you killed had been injured in a previous battle or you just got unbelievably lucky."

"Sour grapes," said Randall, still grinning smugly. "You just wish you'd been there. There were half a dozen good looking women who would have jumped me there and then if we'd had more privacy."

"If that's what you're looking for, I expect the opportunity will present itself sooner or later."

"Women who want to be with me because they think I'm a hero. Do you know what that means to me? I don't kid myself that women find me physically attractive. All my life, I've used money to get women. If I hadn't been rich, I don't doubt that I'd have had to content myself with sluts and harlots. I would have ended up in a loveless marriage to some hideous boiler who only wanted children to look after her in her old age and didn't care who gave them to her. That day, though..."

He paused in the street and stared ahead, his eyes unfocused, as if he was searching for exactly the right words. Loach stopped beside him, curious despite himself to hear what the other man would say.

"I felt as if I had earned a woman," said Randall at last. "I felt as if I deserved one. And not just any woman but a good one. The best. Have you ever felt that way?"

"Every day of my life," replied Loach.

Randall stared at him. "I think I may have failed to communicate exactly what I meant."

"No, you communicated it okay. You're saying that, all your life you've felt like a fraud and a loser who could only score with women because you were rich."

"That's not exactly what I meant..."

"Yes it is. Me, though... I didn't inherit money. My brother and I started as homeless street urchins. Starving, dressed in rags and choking on polluted air. We had nothing in all the world except each other. We earned everything we had. Earned it the hard way, with blood and guts. Quite often our own. I knew I'd earned every woman I had because I had the scars to prove it. I knew deep in my very soul that I deserved a good woman, while you knew deep in your very soul that you didn't. What you're feeling is the tiniest taste of what I've been feeling my whole life. So you killed an orc. You got lucky, once. I've spent most of my life with other people's blood drying on my face so don't start telling me what a hero you are. If we come across an orc, stand aside and let me deal with it."

Randall stared at him, crestfallen. He had opened his heart to the other man in a moment of camaraderie and had it thrown back in his face along with a sneer of contempt. Randall faced forward and made himself step confidently along the road, even managing to put a faint sneer of amusement on his face, a disguise that Loach could probably see through to increase his contempt for the other man even further. Inside, Randall simmered with hatred and rage. I will see him dead! he promised himself. When I don't need him any longer I will see him dead, and see how many women he deserves then!

Whatever Loach was thinking, he said nothing more and the two men walked the rest of the way to the stables in an uncomfortable silence.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

☆☆☆

Much to Randall's disappointment, Loach turned out to be just as good a horse rider as he was. As a child, he would have been too poor to have been able to afford a high end computer game, which raised the spectre of an adult crime boss, rsponsible for most of the illegal drugs, gambling and prostitution in London, playing Gunmen of the Apocalypse like a sixteen year old in between dropping incompetent henchmen into the piranha tank and cutting spies in half with a laser beam. A smile appeared on Randall's face as some of his good mood returned.

They both had copies of the maps Jane had photographed in their head phones and had used a piece of software normally used to stitch holiday photos together into a sweeping panorama to create a collage map of the entire area around Elmton. They were able to use it to find Elmhardy farm, which they found to have been thoroughly destroyed. The farm buildings had been burned to the ground, the crops had been trampled and the livestock were nowhere to be seen. Presumably they had been either taken to the city or eaten by the orcs. The land itself still had considerable value, of course, which meant that the owners might well return before long to begin the long process of rebuilding. That was a problem for the future, though. For now, Randall and Loach had the place to themselves.

To their consternation, they found that most of the landmarks on Jane's map had vanished. A group of three large elm trees, a pond, even a small brook that had once formed the boundary between two fields. By using the landmarks that were left, though, they gradually narrowed down the area where the Gorsty Common helicopter landing pad had once been. They were encouraged to find that it was an area of scrubby grass, probably used to graze cattle. "Neved been ploughed," said Randall with satisfaction. "Hopefully because there's a huge sheet of plasteel just a little way down."

"We need something to dig with," said Loach. He looked over at the blackened remains of the farm buildings. "Never knew a farm to be without a few spades and pickaxes. The wooden handles might be a bit scorched but with a bit of luck they might have survived." He walked over to the ruins, Randall following.

Loach was right. The digging tools had been buried by the collapsing roof which had starved the fire of oxygen and saved them from being destroyed. It took them nearly an hour to carefully extricate them from the blackened timbers, but once they brushed the soot and ash away they were pleased to find that the varnished wood of the handles was virtually untouched. They took their prizes back to the field of scrubby grass and began digging.

They had to dig deeper than they'd expected, and when they were half a metre down without finding anything other than hard clay and tough roots they were beginning to fear the worst. Then Loach's spade hit something, though. He shared a hopeful grin with Randall and shovelled more soil out to widen the hole. Before long they were able to get a good look at what lay hidden below.

It was a thin layer of crumbly black gravel about an inch thick. To Randall, it looked as if it might once have been tarmac. Under it was a flat sheet of dull grey looking a little like slate. When Loach banged it with his spade it made a solid sounding thump, but there was the very slightest trace of a hollow sound as well, as if there was open space beneath it. "Dear God!" said Randall, breathing heavily with excitement. "It's real! It's really real!"

"Doesn't look like plasteel," said Loach doubtfully.

"It's been a thousand years, remember?" He hit it as hard as he could with the corner of his spade, then knelt down to get a closer look. A chip of black material had chipped away revealing a deeper layer of metallic blue that glittered like diamond. "That looks like plasteel," he said triumphantly. "Still as strong as the day it was laid down."

"Let's see how big it is first," said Loach, though. "You said thirty metres across, right?"

"That's right."

"Okay, so let's dig over there."

They had to dig nearly a dozen holes, but as the sun was beginning to drop towards the horizon they had confirmed that the layer of plasteel was indeed around thirty metres across. What was more, the ground beside what had once been the giant hatches was filled with ancient bricks and rubble, the remains of the buildings that had once stood there. "There was a sign," said Randall, now glowing with excitement. "Beside the road, in front of the reception building. A large block of plasteel with the words 'Gorsty Common Research Centre' printed on it. The words will have faded by now, but the plasteel should still be there. That'll be the final confirmation."

"So where will it be?" asked Loach.

Randall looked back through his old emails for one he'd received from Gorsty Common. It had an attractive photo of the facility as a background including the sign and the helicopter landing pad. A quick calculation carried out by a 3D modelling app that had come pre-installed on his head phone and that Randall had never used before calculated the precise distance between the two. Forty five metres west and thirty metres south of the centre of the landing pad.

Randall paced out the distance to the spot like a pirate looking for a chest of buried treasure. The spot was still within the field of scrubby grass and when they dug down they found the sign just a few centimetres below the surface, the steel legs that had once supported it having long since corroded to nothing. The plasteel had a rim around the outside that precisely matched the picture on Randall's email. "That's it!" he cried triumphantly. "That's it!"

He ran across to the edge of the field, into what had recently been a field of barley. "The main building was right here," he said. "Masquerading as a horticultural research centre, but somewhere around here is an elevator shaft down to the real facility, deep underground, which, hopefully, is still operational."

"More likely there's nothing left down there but corroded junk."

"Our hibernaculum was still operational," Randall pointed out stiffly.

"Just barely. After a thousand years it was just barely still running. It woke us up because it couldn't look after us any longer, and that place was designed to run for centuries if necessary."

"So was this place. The more maintenance it required, the more likely the secret would get out, so it was designed to be self sustaining and self repairing. I think there's an excellent chance it's still running down there." He looked down, as if the layers of soil and rock had become transparent and he could see the elevator shaft leading down to the control rooms, computer rooms and an engineering lab containing a radio-isotope thermoelectric generator theoretically capable of generating electricity for many thousands of years, not just one. Those rooms had been left empty for years at a time, only occasionally being visited a couple of maintenance men. They would check things over to make sure everything was okay before leaving again, turning out the lights as they did so and plunging the tiny facility into darkness broken only by a couple of blinking lights on a control console as housekeeping systems took care of routine maintenance operations.

Could those lights really still be blinking, all that way under his feet? wondered Randall as he contemplated the immense span of time that had elapsed since the last time those maintenance men had made their quick examination. Soon, he would see for himself. He would take control of Elmton and come back with an army of workmen to excavate the place and uncover the elevator shaft. Then he would have the men lower him down on a rope. Once he was down there it would only take a couple of moments to activate the place and send yama666 up to the machines in space. He would have taken control of the entire solar system before the priests knew what was happening.

If those machines were still working, down there. If those lights were still blinking on that control panel, in the darkness.

He shook himself out of his reverie. The sooner he took control of the city the sooner he would find out, and if they left now they could be back inside the city walls before nightfall. "Let's go," he said therefore. "I've got a lot of work to do."

Loach watched as the other man walked back to where they'd left the horses. A faint, patronising smile curled the corners of his mouth as he followed him.