Chapter 3 - Space beyond Space.

The following morning, Saturday 14th, an hour or two before she had any real desire to be awake on a weekend after having been up so late, Alice found herself once again enduring Annie's pickup and this time wishing she hadn't asked if she could accompany Annie up to the company depot over by the flying field.

This proved to be one of the industrial units, albeit of a different design, it was a bigger building for a start, in the same row as the gun shop where they'd got Mackie a short shotgun a few days prior. The structure was two-height, with a low-laying set of offices along one side and a big warehouse section with a set of rolling doors you'd be able to back a truck through - there weren't many signs of life, no vehicle movement, just a couple of guys visible in the offices at Annie's father's company's building, sitting at desks with assorted security equipment and screens and a thing that looked like a halfway house between a suit of armour and a backhoe excavator; this thing got up when Annie and Alice were getting out of the pickup, and had opened the door by the time they'd walked over to it.

"Miss Kelly," it said. "And friend, come on in, what's up?

"Morning Tony," Annie said. "This is Alice, don't mind the never-met-a-walkertank-cyborg-before expression, she's never met a walkertank cyborg before. Pick up your chin before you dunt it on the doorstep, Alice."

"Sorry," Alice said, realising she'd been gawping in slack-jawed astonishment at the realisation that the pile of heavy machinery was in fact a person.

"No big," the cyborg said, ushering them into the offices. His tread was heavy enough to shake the entire building. "Everyone does that the first time they meet someone like me, it's just part and parcel of the lifestyle and anyway they call blokes like me 'walkertanks' for a bloody good reason, a few double-takes and having to mind your footing is a small price to pay - and for that matter awing people is a hoot."

"Anyway as far as what's up goes, I find myself with a sudden unexpected need for thermograph equipment, there wouldn't happen to be any in the warehouse would there?" Annie said.

"Thermograph equipment? Well, I'd expect so, we ship them out often enough - hey Ed, what do we have in the way of thermograph equipment?"

"Just got a load of that gear yesterday so we've got stock of goggles, closed-circuit TV gear, gunsights, and type-2 cybereye upgrades," one of the two not-a-massive-cyborg men in the office said, looking up from what he'd been doing - paperwork. "Oh, morning Miss Kelly,"

"Morning gents, I need a dozen sets of thermograph goggles, enough equipment for a dual-camera closed-circuit installation, and call it four gunsights," Annie declared, causing Ed to rise to his feet with a nod.

"Sure, just you explain to your dad why you're walking out the door with a few thousand pounds worth of equipment this time," he said, and headed through to the main part of the warehouse, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. Tony shook the mass of sensor equipment and battleship plate he used for a head.

"Wow, what crawled down his throat and died there," he said.

"Eh, that's mostly my fault, I nearly got Ed sacked a while back," Annie told him. "Dad was thinking 'very expensive pilfering' until he noticed me with equipment he hadn't known I had, that 'coincidentally' matched stuff that'd 'gone missing' from here - that was the year before you joined the company. Ed's never let me live it down and when all is said and done I can't really blame him."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well," said Mary Macbride, "That's not a small piece of machinery."

The 'that' in question, which Nick had just got off of a suitably impressive trailer attached to his van, ran to most of a three-axle Albion articulated lorry tractor unit. It had been involved in an overturn accident; the wrecked cab and damaged engine were, along with the gearbox, still in the scrappers, leaving a rolling chassis with fuel tanks but without engine, drivetrain, or bodywork of any sort.

Sitting on top of it and held in place with ratchet straps were the cab from a very different lorry - an armoured Schammel military lorry - an engine taken from an agricultural tractor which had had again been ruined in an overturn accident, the gearbox out of a Thornycroft bus - this, unlike the original Albion crash box, would operate like a car's gearbox - a load of random plate metal and angle iron, and some old van doors.

"It's going to be a bigger van," Nick told her with a shrug, eyeballing it. "The Albion's a great van but it's no ideal for the job at hand, for one thing it's no armoured and we're pretty much expecting to be shot at in whatever we end up using. That's the cab off of one of the army's armoured lorries they use for field logistics, it's an older type, been gathering rust in the scrappers for years. I'll be needing to get ballistic matting or spray foam - I'm thinking that Abotex stuff they use for armouring big cars for politicians and such, it's nae all that cheap but I should be able to get hold of it - to sandwich between steel for the loadbed body, and I'll be filling the tyres with that expanding insulation foam, but none of that's a big deal."

"Wouldn't it be easier to just get an armoured car?" asked Andy. Nick laughed and shook his head.

"Aye," he said, "It probably would, and cheaper too if I was paying money for it, but for one thing I got this for nowt and for another the cops keep a hell of a tight eye on those and it's no exactly hard for the likes of you or I to get hold of information on who's owning which armoured vehicle - unlike any of those this thing'll be completely off of the book, no paper trail at all, and that's the entire point of the exercise. Only way these vampires'll be finding it is by physically following us, and we'll no exactly be pulling in here while any old twat can see now, will we. Either way I'll be a whole lot happier about having Alice sitting inside of fifteen ton of armour plate when we're out and about, I've nae said anything, I'm nae good at phrasing that sort of stuff, but we made a bad call taking her into that bloody house last night - she wasnae joking when she was saying she's nae much of a one for fighting, didnae really clock how bad she meant before that - and I ken the others are thinking along the same sort of lines."

Andy nodded and glanced around the yard behind his mother's pub. It was surrounded on two sides by buildings, on the third by a bridge abutment, and the fourth by an eight-foot-tall gate you couldn't see through. The only way you'd get eyeballs on what was parked in there was from the air.

"We'll be needing to make sure nobody's finding it with a drone," he said. "Tarps I'm thinking."

"Aye, good call," Nick agreed. "We could tarp over the entire yard," and Captain Thompson nodded.

"What'll you be doing for weapons?" he asked. "I've a couple of old Sten guns on the ship you can be having the use of - you'll no want to be getting caught with them though, they're no legal."

"That'll be handy," said Nick with a nod. "We'll see what else we can be turning up before saying one way or another, but I think we'll be able to find a good use for those Stens - if you're no minding having them in your back room," and he nodded to Mary.

"That'll no be a problem," she said, and batted her eyelashes. "Unregistered guns, whatever do you mean officer? Oh my, I knew I should get round to going through the rubbish the previous occupant left behind, and that's if they're actually turning up with a warrant out of the blue, if they turn up wanting a look around the way they always do I'll make out that I think that they're wanting to frame me for something to do with my late husband having died in a land war the way I always do and insist they come back with a letter from a judge, as usual, and by the time they're getting one of those the guns'll be parked up a forestry track with the still and the untaxed booze and dope in the back of that," and she pointed at a beat-up Bedford van that was in one of the sheds. "Again."

The shattering roar of an unsilenced and overpowered engine announced the return of Annie and Alice; Andy went and opened the gate to let the wreck of a Holden in.

"Got the gear?" Nick asked the moment Annie had piled out and killed the ute's engine.

"Aye, no problem," Annie declared, heading straight for the loadbed - she started hauling anonymous brown cardboard boxes out and rowing them up on the roof. "Mary, there's your cameras, I got enough parts and screens to cover the yard and the porch at the same time - we might as well be seeing about getting those set up while Nick's starting in on his wee welding project."

"You want me to drive something that size," said Alice, giving the chassis a dubious look.

"Och it's no all that big and I'll be fitting it to drive just like a car," said Nick, waving it off. "And don't worry about the steering circle, I'll set it up so she'll all but turn on the spot - this thing'll be ugly, perils of building it in a roaring hurry, but it'll work. Anyway I'd better be getting up to the digs to be getting my tools."

"Aye," said Annie with a nod. "See if you can be dragging Fiona and Val and Mackie down here while you're at it, it's high time those numpties were out of their beds."

"Aye, aye," said Nick.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Needless to say the 'bigger van' was not, in fact, ready in time for the inaugural attempt at a vampire hunt once the sun was down that evening - Nick had just got mounts sorted out for the new engine and gearbox.

However, what was ready was three different sets of numberplates to fit his existing van he'd stolen out of the scrapyard while he was at it, and with one of those sets on the Albion and everyone geared up in combats (complete with Annie complaining bitterly about how much she hated trousers, she claimed that they 'crawled right up her arse' which seemed a bit weird given she apparently liked the sort of knickers that vanish at the back) and ski masks, most of them with utility vests over the top with the pockets stuffed full of useful things like first-aid kits, ammunition, and a pocket full of big cable ties in case they had a reason to kidnap another vampire - Andy rode shotgun with a set of thermo goggles while Alice, drove - the entire assembly was rendered as close to anonymous as they could get with the passenger window being wound down and Andy craning his head out as he had quickly discovered that glass is opaque to thermographs, leading Nick to arrive at something else the Bigger Van was going to need; a way to see out of it with thermo without winding the window down and sticking your head out, and Annie immediately suggested another camera matching the ones at the pub.

They all became very quiet when Andy identified the fifteenth vampire in as many minutes halfway through their slow drive through the town centre - then he spotted a group of them piling into a car, and as per Annie's immediate instructions, Alice turned the van to follow.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well," said a mud-encrusted Nick as he and the others climbed back into the van. "Well."

"How bad?" Alice, who had stayed in the van with the engine running and a shotgun-toting Andy for company, asked. The others had just exited the building - a lonely farmhouse in the middle of nowhere halfway to Aviemore - and all were splattered in mud and looking rather subdued.

"Well there's five dead bodies in there, all dumped in a pit in the cellar with their heads off and half of them started to smell," Annie told her, ditching the Sten gun she'd been using. "And twenty-odd sets of muddy clothes that used to be vampires, and signs of I don't know how many people dying in there. That place is a fucking charnel-house, I've half a mind to burn it."

"Let's set fire to that car and leave the house," said Mackie, pointing at the car they'd followed up. "With the door to the house standing open and no signs of life that ought to get attention onto the place - there's a phone box just up the A9 there, we can phone in the fire from there, make sure it's no missed."

"Not a bad idea, aye. Let's do it," Annie said, and they did.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The silence of the drive back down to the town was finally broken just as they were turning off of the A9 and heading into the town when out of the blue Andy - who was still wearing the thermograph goggles and craning his head out the window - jerked and said, "Jesus, that eejit's taking his chances,"

"You what mate," said Nick, who'd taken over driving duties.

"That eejit who pegged it over the road just back there?"

The others looked at each other. Nick said, "What eejit?" and Andy gave him a very odd look.

"The one," he said, "You just nearly drove over?"

"You're seeing things," Alice, who was in the centre front seat, said.

"There's another one," Andy declared, pointing at nothing. "And another, and another, Jesus, where are these wankers coming from?"

Alice picked up one of the spare sets of thermograph goggles, switched them on, scrambled half onto him to stick her head out too, had a look around, and said, "Okay, that's weird."

"What's weird?" Annie asked. By way of an answer Alice passed her the goggles.

She too spent a few moments peering critically out the open cab window, having to really crane her neck, at the strings of men and women visible only via thermograph who were coming out of the disused airbase to the north of the Longman Road and high-tailing it into the industrial estate, then started giving Nick directions.

The old airbase was easily got onto - the gates were long gone and though the tarmac may have been raggedy and scattered with the occasional abandoned car the van was up to it - and they very quickly found themselves sitting in a van watching in infra-red as dozens of people invisible to visible-wavelength light poured out of the old control tower, from which a strange - and to Alice weirdly familiar - yellow glow could be seen.

They sat there for some twenty minutes with no end in sight, then Nick started the van, turned it, and headed back towards the Harbourmaster's without saying a word.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"That bad?" asked the Captain as Annie Kelly very heavily seated herself at the bar.

"Aye," she said, "I figured it had to be pretty bad but, shit, I'd never thought it'd be anything like this. The whole town's just heaving with 'em, we saw thirty-odd vampires just driving up from here out past the mart, then on the way back in we started seeing these people invisible to the naked eye, visible on thermal imaging, pouring out of the old airfield, dozens of 'em, too many to count - they're coming out of the old control tower over there, they must've been packed like sardines in there."

Alice glanced around, and noted that as per Andy's claims none of the varied groups in the bar were taking any notice of what Annie was saying - admittedly the place had thinned out a good deal since they'd taken off, there were three remaining groups of gamers and half a dozen seamen - but still.

Captain Thompson shook his head. "Well," he said, then repeated it. "Well."

"Myself am starting to wonder if this is being a bit big for ourselves," said Mackie.

"Only one way to find out," said Nick.

"Let's go and have a better look at that old control tower on the morrow," Annie said. "For now I'm thinking that we should be getting to our beds, it's been a long bloody two days."

-/-/-/-/-/-

By daylight, the old airbase was almost eerily deserted even by the standards of Inverness on a Sunday morning with no sign of the hordes of wraiths from the previous evening - you could easily hear the sounds of the town, church bells ringing, traffic on the suspension bridge over the Moray Firth, seagulls calls, the distant rattle of a diesel shunter over at the harbour, but from within the bounds of the airbase itself there wasn't a whisper - there wasn't a breath of wind that morning.

Every building was still there though overgrown and tumbledown, the entire runway - tarmacced to boot - was still visible, it was like the RAF had simply packed up their tools and flown their planes out of there at the end of the war, leaving the airfield to the elements - over the top of that was at the south end a mess of shanties and over the rest of the site the results of half a century of fly-tipping: dozens of derelict cars in varying staged of decomposition, mounds of old tyres, deserted fridges and freezers, and as they arrived there they found a stack of rotting old pallets had been dumped that very morning beside the control tower.

They pushed their goggles up and exchanged glances; Mackie racked his shotgun's pump, and led the way into the control tower.

"Well would you look at that," he said.

"My God, what is that thing?" Annie, who'd been hard behind him, agreed - Alice stuck her head in and froze.

There was an egg-shaped field of glow, there was no better term for it, the size of a small car hanging in the air a few inches above the detretius-covered floor of the control tower's ground-level hallway, and the moment she got a look at it Alice knew exactly where that shade of yellow light was familiar from. She'd seen it at least twice during the half-awake half-dead time between the bomb blast and coming to in Grace's living room.

"Alice, are you okay?" Fiona's voice penetrated the daze, and Alice by some monumental effort shook it off.

"I'm okay," she said, "I'm okay, I just, I think… that's..."

She stooped and collected a piece of detritus - a beer bottle - from the floor, and lobbed it into the field of glow.

As she'd expected, it didn't come out the other side.

"Well now," said Fiona, "That's very interesting."

"Wait a moment," Nick said, and ducked back outside; the promised moment later he was back holding a plank freshly ripped off of one of the old pallets. He went and shoved the end of it into the yellow glow, shoved it further in until his hand was only a few inches from the glow, then pulled back - the plank came back out of whatever it was intact and not noticeably colder or anything.

"I know what this is," Alice said. "I've seen it before, I'm sure of it... I can just about remember falling through one of these after the explosion, I think I know what's the other side."

"We'd better stick something like a camera, or a seagull on a rope or something, through before even thinking about having a look. Let's face it, what happens if you're wrong and Mars is the other end?" Mackie said, and after a moment Alice reluctantly nodded.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well well well, would you look at that then," said Captain Keith Thompson, shaking his head and puffing on his pipe as he surveyed the glowing yellow portal thing. It was a few hours later but there was still plenty of daylight left, and the whole gang had come over armed to the teeth to get a better look at what Alice was convinced was a portal.

"So what is it then?" Mackie asked him, and he laughed.

"I haven't an earlies lad, I've never seen anything like it before, nae even pictures. Well, let's get that gull through it then," the Captain said.

The seagull in question, captured by the use of a rudimentary snare and the part of Annie's chip supper she didn't want aboard the Captain's ship, had been bundled up in a string bag then tied to a plank. It was glaring at everything around it in an impotent rage with its beady seagull eyes and intermittently going 'WARK WARK WARK' at the top of its lungs.

The plank also had a camera strapped to it, on the bottom underneath the gull - a cable was strung down the plank from the camera to Annie Kelly's laptop, which she'd just finished setting up on the bonnet of her pickup.

"Aye," Annie said. "I'm ready when you lot are."

Mackie picked up the plank, complete with camera and enraged gull, and shoved the gull end through the portal, cutting the gull off mid-wark.

He laid the plank down with the gull inside the portal, and the gang of them crowded round Annie's laptop - the camera was showing what looked to be a very derelict shanty village, all made up of tumbledown tin shacks and abandoned cars and totally deserted. The angle wasn't great; there wasn't a lot could be seen.

Mackie counted out a minute, then went and pulled the plank back through, once again catching the gull midway through a wark.

"Well the gull doesnae look any more scunnered than it was when it went in there so myself am guessing it's being safe enough through there - what's the plan?" Mackie said, but Alice didn't stick around to hear.

Instead, ignoring Fiona's cry of "No, don't," she stuck her head through looking generally down then, on as she expected finding herself still looking at ground, stepped into the light.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Alice Lidell found herself in an impossible alien sky.

The other side of the portal stood, similarly hanging in the air, at the centre of a patch of scrubland and shacks a few hundred yards across and surrounded by nothingness. The entire sky, all around in every direction - including, she found by wandering over to the edge of the patch of land and looking that way, down - was covered in floating islands, untold tens of thousands of them, far far too many to even begin to count, ranging in size from little patches much like the one upon which the portal stood to vast masses like flying continents. They were not oriented to any particular up, most of them were surrounded by odd fields of daylight, and in the far distance beyond them, so mind-blowingly vast it filled half the sky, was the biggest, most dazzling, most unspeakably spectacular, nebula Alice had ever even imagined in her entire life.

"I knew it," she said.

"Alice Lidell are you completely off your rocker what made you do anything even half that dangerous I've half a mind to wring your bloody neck for you!" and her reverie came to an abrupt end for the second time that day; she turned round, and was rather startled to find herself standing on a spur of ground a few inches wide and the apparent thickness of paper stretching out fifty odd feet from the edge of the patch of land, from the middle of which Fiona could be easily heard yelling.

She was just about to freak out about the ephemeral ground she was apparently standing on when it obediently, seemingly in reaction to her lack of a desire to be standing on an earthen tightrope, widened, gained bulk, and generally transformed, in moments becoming a brick pier of sorts.

"There she is, she's no gone far - woah, there's no any far to go," came a shout in Nick's voice as he emerged from between the shacks, pointing in Alice's direction. "Jesus, that pier doesn't look very stable - Jesus Christ!" and his voice raised to a shout as the pier crumbled into nothingness as Alice stepped off of it.

"That pier wasn't there five minutes ago," Alice told him, heading back up towards the portal as Mackie and Val emerged from among the shacks - she found a visibly just as hopping mad as the seagull Fiona and an intrigued-looking Annie and Captain Thompson waiting for her

"Damn," said Annie Kelly, surveying the sight. She repeated it several times, shaking her head the whole time. "What is this place?"

"I've even less of a clue than I had about the 'portal'," said Captain Thompson. "Have to say that it's a beautiful sight though."

"Alice you idiot," Fiona declared. "We don't know anything at all about this place and you just stepped right in!"

"Oh shove it up your arse, for one thing we knew a seagull was still just as alive after coming out as it was before going in, we watched a grand total of nothing react to the seagull or the camera, it wasn't hard to pull the seagull out, and I looked down when I stuck my head in to make sure the plank hadn't been bridging a drop and watched my footing while I was at it," Alice told her. "I have had some sort of experience in highly technical subjects such as putting two and two together."

"I'm thinking," said Mackie as they turned to troop back through the portal, "That we should be attempting to be seeing where all those mostly-invisible eejits are coming from."

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"You what mate?" said Annie.

"Those mostly-invisible eejits who're coming out of here, we should be trying to be seeing where they're coming from," Mackie repeated himself. "It's obvious that they're no all stacked in here now, isn't it,"

"Point, but how are we going to be sure we're hiding properly?" Fiona asked. "It's no like we're sure they're no just growing out of the fucking ground now, are we."

"I'm thinking that's what cameras are for," said Annie Kelly. "Tell you what I'll go and be scrounging a couple of semi-autonomous drone cameras on the morrow, they're about the size of a golf ball and they're tan, they're no hard to hide. We can just dump them in some out of the way places inside the portal there and be back for them Friday and then we'll be seeing what they're getting film of, won't we."

"Aye," said Mackie, "That's sounding like no a bad plan."

So that was exactly what they did.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well," said Annie Kelly. "Well, well, well."

On the Monday she'd taken off up to the Kelbeth warehouse and acquired the promised cameras, both the drones and extra thermal imaging hardware for the Bigger Van, which Nick was progressing on apace; it was now the evening of Tuesday 17th, two very quiet days post the discovery in the derelict control tower, and the gang of people who'd been through what Alice was still insistently calling a portal - minus Captain Thompson, he and his ship had left (fully-laden with 36,000 tons of asteroid iron) with the tide on the Monday, destination Gdansk in Poland - were clustered round her laptop in the back room at the Harbourmaster's.

As per Mackie's expectation, the 'hordes of mostly-invisible eejits' were indeed coming from somewhere and certainly not just popping out of the ground: maybe a quarter of an hour after the sun was down on the Inverness side of the portal (though it was still full daylight inside) a weirdly organic-shaped wooden flying ship with no visible method of propulsion or support had come up from below the patch of world on which the portal stood and began disgorging dozens of men and women of a dizzying range of ages and skin colours, not one of them with anything even vaguely memorable about them, all clad in the same faintly Edwardian manner Alice had come to realise passed for normal, all of whom queued up to troop through the portal and not one of whom even looked for any sort of spy let alone cameras.

The ship returned eight times over the course of the night, and the last of the horde - easily three or four hundred in all though it was impossible to get a real count of them - entered the portal as on the other side the sky was beginning to lighten with the approach of dawn

"Aye," said Fiona. "You have to wonder what the hell they're up to."

"Well how the hell would we go about finding out then?" Mackie asked her.

"Now that," said Annie, "Is the million-pound question."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The archaeology students had a free period on Thursday afternoons, as a result of which Fiona and Andy were already sitting at the bar in the Harbourmaster's when Annie and Val and the Loch Allen lads walked in to begin preparations for the evening's scheduled vampire-hunting festivities - the engineering students got a free period on Thursday mornings, thus Nick's cheerful greeting cry of "Good news all, the bigger van's ready for a - hey, where's Alice? I was wanting to give her a crack with it,"

"I havnae seen her since the end of the last lecture - you seen her Andy?" Fiona asked.

"Well yesterday she said she was finding somewhere quiet to sit for a while to get her head together after dealing with that eejit lecturer with the wee twat moustache, what's-his-face," Andy started.

"Murchison," said Fiona with a heavy sigh. "Miiii-i-ister Kevin bloody Murchison."

"Aye, that ponce, and I'm guessing she's off doing much the same today, Mr Belrose is a lovely bloke but his lectures are already heavy going," Andy concluded with an unconcerned shrug. "Don't worry about it, she'll be back in plenty of time before sundown."

But she wasn't. The sun crept below the horizon without a sign of the girl from another world at the pub, nor was she at the college campus itself, nor when they checked could they find hide nor hair of her at the digs.

And that was when Fiona started to visibly panic.

-/-/-/-/-/-

There was a grim silence in the back of the Bigger Van as Nick drove slowly back towards the Harbourmaster's for the fifth time on the evening of Sunday 22nd of September - even beyond the tension from four days without finding hide nor hair of Alice Liddell, nobody really had the energy left to talk. They'd been going wild all week - it hadn't taken much thought to figure out who had most likely taken Alice, Val and Andy had been going around in the Albion playing spotter while the others, Annie driving, dropped the hammer on each vampire hideout as they detected them.

Thirty-seven vampire lairs later and they were still coming up empty-handed. Nick still hadn't said anything about how convinced he was they were not going to find Alice alive, not at this point, though he was fairly sure the same thought had occurred to everyone else - in particular Fiona had earlier that evening said something flat and broken-sounding about getting revenge on the vampire wandering around wearing Alice's face - but the search was one of those things one simply cannot give up, no matter how tired, no matter how long it's been futile. So long as a slim chance existed that the girl from another world was still alive, they would keep looking.

They were all very surprised to find someone waiting for them in the Harbourmaster's, and none more so than Fiona, who took one look and said, "Vrotch!"

The scraggly-haired oddball was sitting at the bar with a pint in one hand and a hand-rolled spliff in the other, looking entirely at home. The girl who had shut his caravan door in their faces during the abortive attempt to seek his help was sitting beside him, likewise holding a pint; there was an air of casual relaxation about both of them.

"Like, hey, Fiona, Fiona's mates - man, you all look bushed, what's up?"

"Vrotch, the hell are you doing here? You made it pretty clear," Fiona started, but Vrotch cut her off with a raised hand.

"Your lot wrecked a vampire den called 'Smedley's Place' last night, well Jenny Devil was in there, I guess you never noticed her, she's back at my digs looking like she's been hit by a tram and with a lot less blood in her than there should be but it's gonna be okay, right, so since now I'm even more pissed off at the vampires than I am at you this is me offering to help with this 'vampires' thing and stuff despite, you know, things, right?"

"You've got some bloody nerve mate," said Annie Kelly, who Nick could tell at a glance was more or less as exhausted as all the rest of them with the additional benefit of having gone from Zero to Bloody Furious the moment she saw Vrotch. "After the shite out of the you last time we saw you, coming swanning in here,"

"Annie, no, calm down, I shot two of his friends and one of them had to have a heart transplant, he's basically right to be that mad at me," Fiona interrupted her.

"Oh shove it up your arse Fiona Macleod, I'm not in the mood for this shite," Annie declared. "Look you," and she wheeled to confront Vrotch, "One of our friends - Alice, remember her, pretty dark-haired lass in black? - has gone missing as of some time Thursday, at this point we're basically assuming we're going to find a dead body and hoping it's no going to be walking around, and I do not need any shit out of you on top of it."

"Have you tried scrying for her?" Vrotch asked.

"You what mate," said Nick, while Annie buried her face in her hand and let out a strangulated angry noise that may or may not have been a half-stifled swear word.

"Well it'd help if any of us bloody knew how to now, wouldn't it," Fiona said.

"Wow, Fiona, the stuff that woman actually taught you has holes you could drive a bus through, scrying is easy enough - okay so it's also very possible to defend against, right, so if you're actually trying to watch someone who knows their stuff it's not very useful, but the rest of the time?" He shrugged, then turned back to Annie and Nick. "I can, like, see if I can find her. Think of it like a dog trying to smell someone, only with auras and you don't have to chase around after them. Only thing is I gotta have access to something she owns, or even better some of her hair or toenail cuttings or something,"

"You wouldn't be getting many toenail cuttings, she's got both legs cybernetic and about the same goes for her arms," Fiona said. "I'm her room-mate up at the college, hey Nick, chance of borrowing your van for a few minutes?"

"Don't tell me you're taking this wanker," and Annie indicated Vrotch, "And his total bollocks actually seriously, what in the fuck."

"Okay," said Mackie, "Myself am calling yourself's bluff. Show us some magic."

Vrotch raised a finger in a wait-one gesture, had a root around in his pocket, and came out with a biro, with which he started making strings of very closely-spaced little marks around the edge of a beermat, before once apparently satisfied with it throwing the beermat on the table; it proceeded to levitate in exactly the same manner as Nick's bit of card had a couple of weeks prior.

He smugly passed the biro completely under the floating mat, then stopped as he abruptly realised nobody looked impressed.

"Give us a shot of your biro," Nick told him; Vrotch handed the pen over, and Nick repeated his performance with making a beermat go invisible, as ever making sure to write the 'T' in the 'Can't' part of the Ogham 'You can't see me' hard enough to feel with his fingertip.

He indicated the floating beermat with the blunt end of the biro and said, "Okay, so you know how to use some sort of form of a ban - so? I don't recognise the exact sort of Writing you used there, it's certainly not Ogham script, but that's no magic - that's just boundaries being boundaries, you can do stuff with boundaries of any sort from the edge of a beermat to a doorway or fence line or even I suppose the border of a country."

With that, he again erased the T on the 'Can't', again causing the beermat to reappear, just like he had back home when he showed Alice what a ban is.

"Wait, what did you just do there man? As you've seen I'm entirely familiar with boundary effect manipulation though I don't recognise your encoding system offhand,"

"Encoding system?" Nick asked. "It's called the Ohham, it's basically just a funny sort of an alphabet that's convenient for going on edges. I wrote 'You can't see me' pressing extra hard when I got to the T in 'Can't' so I'd be able to feel it with my fingertip and then when I wanted it to appear again I scribbled the T out."

"… Huh," said Vrotch. "That's - Ogham? As in what they used to use for inscriptions on rocks and stuff? That's weird - how well does this work across language barriers, man?"

"You have to be using different forms of it for the different languages," said Nick, fishing around in his pocket; he pulled out a battered ring-bound notepad and held it up. "I've nae got the Gaelic forms memorised the way I have the English, that and there's a couple of other styles I'm pretty sure must be Pictish and something else I copied off of old stones round the place."

Vrotch spent a long moment locked in thought.

"Okay... listen, can I get a copy of the English and Gaelic keys? I assume someone very, very smart has basically created a sort of magical 'assembly language' that maps onto written languages in very specific controlled ways - oh, do you know how that works, why a load of little marks make that," and he indicated the levitating beermat, "Happen?"

He got a round of shrugs and Annie said, "Not a clue, so?"

"Elf and Neil might have some idea," Nick said. "That's my big sister and the elder of my little brothers - but getting answers out of those two is like getting milk out of a duck, Elf's most likely to tell you off for asking silly questions she's convinced everyone knows the answer to while Neil will just declare the fact you don't know and he does proves you're stupid."

"Myself am knowing it's working on basically anything myself has ever been seeing anyone trying it on, but myself am no thinking myself has ever worried about why," Mackie declared. "At a guess it's always been seeming a bit like asking why the sea's wet - that's just what it does."

"I take it this," and Vrotch again indicated the floating beermat, "Is a common piece of knowledge where you're from?"

"Aye, pretty much," Annie told him. "There aren't that many folks who can write the Ogham from memory in any language the way Nick does, most of us need a reference sheet, but I've seen stuff in the Gaelic that's basically meant to keep Viking raiders away from the loch - it must've been there a thousand years or more."

"I don't think there can be a single croft between Caithness and the Mull of Kintyre that doesn't have something to help keeping wild haggii away from the house and barns," Nick said. "We're deep in haggis country on Loch Allen, I don't think there's been longer than a week without a wild haggis going on the rampage in living memory."

"It's going back a sight further than just living memory," Mackie added. "The first ever haggis rampage was on the road westwards out of Duchally in 1810 when the factor of the Duke of Sutherland - a man by the name of Patrick Sellar - was being killed by a bull haggis,"

"Mackie's a bit of the local historian," said Nick

"Okay," Vrotch said. "So basically how is pretty well known in your area, but not why, right?"

"Pretty much, aye," said Annie.

"Okay," Vrotch said yet again. "Well basically magical 'energy', for want of a better word, is all around us, all the time - it flows into and through the Earth-Moon system from deep space, generally from the rough direction of the galactic core thus the seasonal variance in its flow, it's got nothing to do with seasons and everything to do with the 'wake', so to speak, from it flowing over the surface of the sun, it forms eddies and essentially pools round the surface of any solid matter. Edges and boundaries and the likes cause a spell-like ripple in the flow of magic - what we call the boundary effect - and by structuring the edge to sculpt the flow of magic then using an indentation shaped like this at the end of your line here you can force it to peel off and 'compile', for want of a better word, into an active spell effect such as this levitation - at a guess what's happening when you scribble the T out is you're breaking the waveform up, letting the 'S' in 'see' start a new one, causing the completed spell to be 'see me', and make no mistake man, that is a spell. Boundary effect manipulation is the single most basic possible form of spellcasting - and man, do me a favour and don't go looking for more complex stuff."

"Oh aye," said Nick, "And why'd that be?'

"Because once you get to more complex forms of spellcasting, the easiest thing to do is set things on fire, and the easiest thing to do things to is your own brain," Fiona said, reminding everyone else that she was there.

"There are hundreds of would-be mages die burning their own brains out every year," Vrotch said with a nod. "We've started working out how to tell when someone's going to get that far and get them over the danger point, but it's more miss than hit at the moment. It's incredibly frustrating, we're sure there's got to be a reliable way to detect when it's about to happen and intercede but these poor bastards just keep burning their own brains out before we can spot them."

"Ah," said Nick, completely dismissing the idea of learning this stuff, spontaneous bonce combustion really not being his thing.

"Yeah, pretty much man."

"So how about showing ourselves an actual spell of the more complex form of spellcasting sort then?" Mackie asked. "Myself am still waiting to be seeing some actual magic."

Vrotch nodded, and said something percussive in a weird alien-sounding language that gave one a feeling almost as if the entire world had been in a speeding car and the car had just run over a bump in the road, and he vanished with the only trace the smoke still rising from his spliff and the indentation of his backside in his seat.

"So basically yeah," he said, his voice coming out of nowhere, "Magic. That was the spoken form of the spell you encoded onto that first beermat, powered by a human aura instead of a boundary effect ripple and compiled using my voice."

Nick wordlessly handed his van's keys to Fiona, who hastened out the door; Vrotch said something shorter and reappeared, and the old sailor who'd been sitting just along the bar carefully set his whisky down, nodded to Mary, and said, "That'll be me for the night, Mary. Dinnae need to be getting any more pissed at this rate," and lumbered to his feet and trotted out.

"You were saying you and some of your mates were working on figuring out how and why all that works," Annie finally broke the profound silence that had eclipsed their part of the bar. "How far through with it are you?"

Vrotch shook his head. "Good question - 'how much is there left to know', who's going to be able to answer that about anything? We're further along than anyone not us we know about - further along than say the Project Warlock lot for certain."

"Warlock?" Annie asked.

"Oh, you didn't know about them? That's the army's wizards, they're what started off with the people what did Gormhegast," Vrotch told her.

"Gormhegast?" Andy asked "You mean Operation Gormhegast? What's the atomic bombing of Germany got to do with magic?"

Vrotch gave him a funny look and said, "Nah man, the world's first atomic explosion was the Yanks' Trinity test early in September 1946, like twenty-six months after Germany got turned into a really big colander - think about it, how would a Lancaster bomber survive dropping an atom bomb big enough to dig a hole half a mile across? Prop planes just don't fly fast enough or high enough to get out of the area that would pretty much go away if you dropped an atom bomb that stupidhuge before it went off, and never mind fitting that much bomb into a Lancaster's bomb-bay - atom bombs that big are like the size of a barn, man. One of ours has contacts, man. We've seen the Gormhegast apparatus - it's just a really big spell capacitor, which does what it sounds like, you cast a spell into it then it holds it until you hit the release switch, anyway each bomber was fitted out with one of those that had a really, really, really huge disintegration spell pre-cast into it. Open the bomb-bay doors, push the button, and everything under the plane for half a mile around, bedrock included, absolutely anything solid, turns into extremely fine, like molecular fine, grey dust in the space of a heartbeat and man, that stuff burns like hell. Spread that over nearly two thousand bombers and you can kill an entire country in one night and lower the average global temperature by a couple of degrees for decades. That, man, is what Gormhegast was."

"This 'scrying' business isn't going to mess with cybernetics, is it?" Annie checked. "Alice has as much of her meal and plastic as flesh and bone."

"Nah," said Vrotch with a sigh, visibly having to stop himself adding 'man', "That stuff you see in books or games or on the telly where 'technology' takes shit-fits and breaks down if there's 'magic' around, ignore it, it's a load of old bollocks - any technology that could not function in the presence of magic would not work anywhere in the universe because whatever magic actually is, and about that we've got several competing theories we still haven't been able to rule out any of, where there is mass, even just as little mass as interstellar hydrogen, there is magic."

"So what does 'scrying' entail then, what can it be doing for us," Mackie said.

"It's a way of seeing things far away," Vrotch told him. "Now you'll see a lot of people using all sorts of snazzy paraphanalia around scrying, like silver bowls and special brews and chants and shit, but in actual fact so long as you've got something to use to establish a connection to whoever you're trying to scry on, what liquid and what it's in and what you say over it really doesn't matter - I've successfully scried on someone using a lavvie they'd left skidmarks in and my incantation was yelling 'I'm talking to God on the big white telephone' into it, basically most of the pomp and ceremony and shit around magic is just there to make whoever's doing the magic feel like they don't have clinical micropenis."

"So you're saying we can use this to,"

"To find your friend, yeah, basically that's what scrying does. That and spying is what it's for."

Fiona chose that moment to come walking back in and Nick abruptly realised how long they'd spent sitting in silence staring at a freshly-reappeared hippy; she had a hairbrush half full of stuck-in hair in a polythene bag in her hand. This she dumped on the bar in front of Vrotch before handing Nick his van keys back; he distractedly shoved them in his pocket.

"That's the brush Alice has been using," Fiona said. "Any use?"

"Was it bought new for her or?" Vrotch asked.

"Y'know I don't know, I've never used it if that's what you're asking,"

"Aye, it's just about brand new, I was buying it for her when we were through here getting her set up with everything she'd need for the college the end of last month," Annie said.

"Choice," said Vrotch; he unbagged the brush, extracted a wad of hair, waved it around a bit, frowned, and said, "Uh, got a bowl of water or something anywhere?"

"Aye, hang on, hang on," Mary said, finally demonstrating that she'd been paying attention the whole time; she had a root around under the bar, came out with a bowl of the sort one might serve salted peanuts in, filled it from the tap more normally used for swilling out glasses, and set it down on the bar in front of Vrotch.

"Awesome, that's perfect," Vrotch said. He dumped the wad of hair in it, passed his hand over the surface, waited for several seconds, and then said, "Okay, that's weird," and fished the wad of hair out. "Um, can I get some new water?"

"Aye, certainly," and Mary dumped it out, refilled it, and passed it back to him.

He had a root around in his pockets, coming out with a roll of test tubes, each of which contained a bundle of hair; he dropped the contents of one of the tubes into the bowl, and passed his hand over it in the exact same manner.

An image of the interior of the pub immediately appeared in the surface of the water, almost like you were looking in from above.

"Okay, that's really weird," said Vrotch, fishing the twist of hair out and popping it back in its test tube. "Another lot of fresh water please?" and the moment Mary had placed the refilled bowl in front of him a third time he collected the soggy bundle of Alice's hair, dropped it into the bowl, passed his hand over it and… nothing.

"Huh." he said.

"So much for your fucking scrying," Annie started.

"No man, that should have found her anywhere in the universe, there is basically nowhere in the entire space-time continuum anything could hide from a scrying attempt, shit, if she was dead or vampired or something it would've shown us what was left of… hey Fiona, where are you going?"

"I'm betting she's the other side of that portal," Fiona fired over her shoulder. "Come on, we'd better see about dragging her arse back through here so I can give her a piece of my bloody mind!"

-/-/-/-/-/-

"I say again," said Vrotch. "Which portal?"

Fiona stopped swearing and gave him a glare. They were now back in the old control tower for the first time since the previous Tuesday: of the glowing yellow portal that had stood in its centre the last time anyone there bar Vrotch had looked, there was no sign.

"Well it was just short of ceiling height, about six to eight inches off of the floor, and wide enough that you couldn't be stepping round it," said Nick. "Oh, and it was yellow. This bright yellow light, bright enough you could see it halfway across the old airfield when it was dark, not bright enough to see outside the building when it was light. You couldn't see through it or make out a shape to it, and I think Val tripped over the edge of it at one point didn't you Val?"

"Yeah, I found the bottom edge," Val confirmed.

"Yellow, huh?" Vrotch mused, fishing a pair of rose-tinted sunglasses out of his pocket; he put them on and had a look around. "Actually yeah, there's plenty of trace resonance here but I really don't recognise what mode the portal was operating in. Yellow and a new mode, that's interesting, I've seen purple portals and blue portals and snot green portals and one portal that was sorta sky-blue pink, but never a yellow portal... Huh. Actually this is really very very interesting… say, do you cats mind if I bring in some, uh, outside expertise?"

Nick and Annie and Mackie glanced at each other, then Nick said, "Like what?"

"I thought I'd see if Fat Bloke and McBangBang could help, Fat Bloke actually knows how to open portals directly between one place in Midgard and another, and the only one out of the nine worlds McBangBang hasn't actually visited is Muspelheim. You're going to need expert advice here and man, those dudes are the experts."

"Do it," said Annie Kelly.

-/-/-/-/-/-

On Monday afternoon not long after classes let out, they met up at the scene of the missing portal, finding Vrotch's car - a crappy old Vauxhall that looked like it'd been crashed more than once - and a very clean Jag, both parked outside the old control tower. Nick parked the Bigger Van - which he was using because the Albion's starter motor had crapped itself that morning - between the pair of cars and Annie's pickup - in which she had just drawn up - and they all piled out.

Inside, they found Vrotch and two other men - one of whom absolutely positively had to be Fat Bloke, he had a gut to him and would've been perfectly at home at any hard rock gig anywhere, ever, while the other was a tall, ramrod-straight-backed and powerfully-built, dark-haired man clad in the splendid uniform of a Commander in the Royal Navy who, to Nick Macbane's educated eye, looked familiar from somewhere.

The man who had to be Fat Bloke was, as they walked in the doorway, saying in a distinctly Londonian accent, "… yeah, no, it's absolutely gotta be unspace."

"Okay so the devil is unspace?" the Navy officer asked in Default Officer English. "Can't say I'm familiar with the term,"

"Basically you know the deep wot darkness was on the face of? It's that," said Fat Bloke. "Fraid that's about all I know about it though, my info's third-hand from a dude who disappeared unscryably a while back and I haven't been able to summon his ghost either."

"You what mate?" Annie asked.

"Ah, there you are," Vrotch said. "Dudes and dudettes, these two are Fat Bloke," and he pointed at the fat bloke, "And McBangBang, who turns out to be a G.I.R.L and not a girl,"

"You what mate," Annie repeated herself.

"Guy In Real Life, I use a female avatar online," McBangBang said with a shrug. "And these clowns took that to mean I was female."

"Shove it you knobber. Dudes, these dudes are Nick, Annie, Val, Mackie, Fiona, and Andy," said Vrotch.

"I thought you said you were bad at names?" Val asked.

"Yeah well that was before I was taking any notice. Anyway their mate Alice is somewhere not inside the universe, I mean not any of the nine worlds, right, and that probably means this portal has something to do with it, right?"

"Yeah, unspace would fit," Fat Bloke said.

"Unspace? Wasn't Brigid on about Grace Mitchell there having said something about that?" said Mackie, and Nick snapped his fingers as he realised what Mackie meant.

"Aye, that she did - oh, what was it, she was saying Grace was saying Alice had to have been somewhere Grace was calling 'unspace'," he said.

"Grace Mitchell," said Fat Bloke, "Who in the fuck is Grace Mitchell?"

"Grace Mitchell? A Kylestrome resident, in that house that looks like it's been continuously half-rebuilt for the last several millennia, directly beside the standing stones just along the road along the north shore of the loch?" the Navy officer asked, and Nick realised where he was familiar from, he'd been in civvies in the Unapool pub the previous New Year.

"Aye, that's the one, why, do you ken her?" Mackie asked.

"Well yes, everyone who's spent more than a week at RNAS Kylestrome knows precisely whom Grace Mitchell might be. Remarkable woman. Bloody irritating, but a remarkable woman regardless," and that definitely confirmed him knowing Grace to Nick's mind.

"And you are?" Mackie asked.

"Commander Michael Compton, Fleet Space Arm - though if you've been speaking to this reprobate," and he indicated Vrotch, "You'll most likely know me by my net name: McBangBang, at your service. If you want my credentials, I'm in charge of Fleet Space Arm information security, effective speaking it's my job to make sure nobody hacks a warship and if I were ever to make an absolute bloody dogs breakfast of it thus allowing anyone bar the Hamster to do so, to make sure it'd never happen again."

"Who the hell," asked Andy, "Is the Hamster?"

"The Munching Hamster, man," said Vrotch. "Basically the finest mind alive today, the Hamster's the fucking goddess of the Net, man. I'm absolutely certain she's a she for all sorts of reasons, I'm almost certain she's at least half ethnic Nihonjin, just for starters she uses 'we' when she's talking about Nihonjin, I know she speaks flawless Nihongo, she's full of enough Nihon separatism she'll most likely be 'killed resisting arrest' if the TLA ever work out who she is, I'm about fifty percent sure she's from Tokyo because of the number of times she's offhandedly referenced stuff that turns out to be in Tokyo, and I think she's probably a cop's teenage kid - thus my sneaking suspicion she's half-white - because she still makes references to once she's into her twenties and she knows way more about Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department internal politics than anyone that young who isn't either a Tokyo copper or related to a Tokyo copper is realistically going to and I don't think TMPD hire a lot of Nihonjin or teenagers, but beyond the bits I've managed to piece together from knowing her for the last three years? Nobody knows who the Hamster is apart from the Hamster, man."

"So what's the prognosis?" Annie asked, indicating where the portal used to be.

"I'm about seventy percent certain it's got to be - have been - a portal into unspace," said Fat Bloke.

"Unspace?" Annie asked. "What in the fuck is unspace?"

"You know that whole, 'In the beginning, all was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep,' thing? It's that," said Fat Bloke.

"You what mate?"

"The deep, the one darkness was on the face of? Unspace is the deep, it's the void that was without form, the potential for creation to occur. Basically it's where the universe came from when the big bang went bang - it's what's outside the universe, surrounding it and underpinning it. That's what unspace is. In a very real sense, it is what came before the nine worlds, and continues to exist outside them. The important part, the part that's where that portal almost certainly came from, is that anyone and anything with enough will can - as long as they can somehow reach unspace - act as a tiny Creator and cause a miniature Creation to occur. It's where a lot of extremely powerful magic users, anyone who can do magic and has the force of will necessary and gets sick of the ant-farm power-game that's going on out here instead of being barmy enough to enjoy it, end up going, they basically find a nice quiet corner of unspace where nobody's going to bother them and pull the portal in behind themselves."

"Okay," said Nick, filing aside the repeated references to 'nine worlds' to be contemplated over beer later on. "So how do we get there?"

"Now that," Fat Bloke told him, "Is the thousand million pound question, ain't it? I don't know, but you're bloody right we intend to find out."

"I propose," said McBangBang, "That we three, and you, young lady," and he nodded his head to Fiona, "Should probably put our heads together and see what shakes loose. Now, we shall require paper, pencils, Sane Dave's laptop, and a substantial quantity of Earl Grey."

"You sure about involving her?" Vrotch asked, pointing at Fiona. "We both know who she's,"

"Actually working for, quite, why exactly do you think I desire her input? Oh for Pete's sake Dave, whatever one may think of Isobel Mackenzie as a person one has to admit that the woman teaches her tools exceedingly well."

The name 'Isobel Mackenzie' was familiar from somewhere too, though Nick couldn't put his finger on where, and as to why Vrotch wasn't arguing about Fiona's level of knowledge less than twenty-four hours after making sarcastic remarks about her not knowing how to 'scry', that was another question.

"I just don't like the idea of her - Mackenzie, not Fiona - learning to access this 'unspace'."

"That ship," said Fat Bloke, "Sailed before anyone in this room was born."

"Can't be," Vrotch said, giving him a funny look. "I know what that woman's like, if she had access to that sort of power,"

Fat Bloke let out a bark of laughter.

"Well she packed in investigating it right sharp when it turned out she is not one of the about two thousand people alive today actually strong-willed enough to enforce their desires on unspace. That sort of capacity for willpower ain't exactly everyday stuff, right, and deep down inside, just like every other bully ever, Isobel Mackenzie is and always will be a massive coward."

"Ouch," said Mackie.

Nick Macbane reserved comment, instead remembering the pier that he'd seen crumble into nothingness as Alice stepped off of it, and more to the point her distracted statement that it hadn't been there five minutes earlier.

He had the strangest feeling that Fat Bloke's 'about two thousand' had gone up by one when Alice Liddell walked into their lives and he knew for dead certain that until they knew exactly what was going on with Fiona, and with Vrotch, and with Fat Bloke and McBangBang, and more to the point which if any of the four they could actually trust with that sort of thing given how very big a deal all four seemed to think this 'unspace' business was, the only person not born in Inverallen with any need to know whatsoever was called Annabella Kelly - particularly as he now fully believed that the girl from another world was still alive.