The cat-Amazon finally came round about an hour and a half later, by which time they were in the digs and everyone was crowded into Alice and Fiona's room with said cat-Amazon - about whom they were getting quite worried, head injuries being head injuries - laying on the same blankets that had served as a bed for Silent the first few days.

Fiona was just saying something about ignoring the bollocks they show on the telly, if someone who's been knocked out doesn't come round in a few minutes they're probably not going to, when the cat-Amazon apparently named Sprocket went from unconscious to sitting bolt upright without any apparent intermediate state, and sat there blinking and looking rather startled.

"About time you woke up," said Annie. "I take it you're okay then, what were you doing jumping out in front of a van up the arse end of Dornoch direction like that,"

The cat-Amazon didn't answer her, instead looking down at herself, slowly raising her hands, and giving them an astonished stare.

"Oh wow," she said. "I don't know the back of my own hand."

She glanced around, blinked a couple of times, and then continued, sounding a bit lost, "Uh, where am I? Who are you? Um, actually for that matter who am I? Do you, uh, do you know what my name is? I, uh, I can't seem to remember anything."

There was a long and rather startled silence as the yes-the-fact-she's-still-unconscious-is-worrying shoe finished dropping, and finally Nick gave voice to his frustrations, loudly declaring, "Of all the, fucking amnesia."

The cat-Amazon started to look rather worried.

"Um, seriously, I don't know who I am to the point I don't actually recognise my own hands, and um, does anyone know who I am, please?" and she sounded twice as lost as Alice had that morning in Grace Mitchell's living room.

"Amnesia, bloody typical," Nick muttered. "Right when we think we might be on to something, suddenly actual god-damned amnesia,"

"This is what we get for using it as an excuse over and over," said Fiona with a sigh, glancing at Alice; she then had the decency to realise what she's said and blush.

"Well apparently yourself's named Sprocket and apparently you're Silent here's aunt," said Mackie. He then unconcernedly noted, "Ow," as Silent kicked him in the shin.

"If you slap my catgirl I'll duff you up," said Nick, causing Silent to add a very dubious look to the kick she'd just given Mackie.

"Well it's a moot point since myself was nae going to be slapping her anyway," Mackie said with one of his laid-back farmboy shrugs.

"Recognise these?" Alice asked, holding up the dogtags then taking them close enough for the cat-Amazon to read; she looked very surprised.

"Huh. No, but actually the name 'Sprocket' sounds right but I don't know why - um, does anyone know what I am? I, uh, I don't think cat-thingies are normal... are we?" and this time she asked Silent, who just looked worried.

"Nae idea," said Nick, echoed by everyone bar Silent, who nodded and kept looking worried.

"You... know who I am?" Sprocket asked her.

Nick rested a hand on Silent's shoulder, and said, "When I find out who burned my catgirl's tongue out I am going to make them very dead."

"Probably via anal Claymore implant," said Val.

"I think strapping the 'face towards enemy' side of a Claymore to someone's nadgers then setting it off would work better than shoving it up their arse."

"Um, it's a big sword," said Nick.

"Oh," said Sprocket. "Um, there is a sort of directional mine that's called a Claymore isn't there? Because when you said Claymore my brain went 'goes bang thataway'."

"Aye," said Nick. "That there are, Yank things, but they're a right bastard to be getting hold of."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Twenty minutes later they pulled into Vrotch's caravan park, where the ambience was as per usual, and piled out of the van and Annie's pickup - they didn't have the Bigger Van handy, they'd dropped it off at the Harbourmaster's on the way to the digs.

Alice knocked on the door to Vrotch's caravan and stepped to one side to allow the gangly-limbed mage to make his usual energetic exit, this time with a scream of "Fuck the Jesus beam?!?"

He as usual skidded to a stop as soon as he realised who it was, and spent a few moments peering critically at the group.

"Oh yeah, it's that day, you're back in town," he said, then nodded to Nick, who had Silent, the wolf and the panther all on leads, and added, "Wow Nick, you've found some awse pets when I wasn't looking, and..." and he turned to Alice, "YIKE! Big kitty-lady thingy!"

"Um... hi?" said Sprocket.

"What's with you dudes and cat-peoples?" Vrotch asked, regaining what passed for equilibrium.

"It is starting to become a bit of a theme, isn't it," said Alice

"Not contented with brewing her own, now she's joining Nick in the finding-strays club," Fiona added; Alice stuck her tongue out at her.

"This one's why we're here," said Annie, indicating Sprocket.

"Okay, I guess you'd better come in," Vrotch said with a thoughtful nod, and turned back into his caravan; they trooped inside behind him and got themselves settled, and Alice and Sprocket explained what little they knew about her

This ran to that they had quite literally run into her on the way through from Loch Allen not far from the end of the single-track, that she was why the front of the Albion was now very bent as apparently a 40mph van would lose a fight with her, that her name was for some reason 'Sprocket' and that this was on her dogtags, which she handed to Vrotch, that she was apparently Silent's aunt, and that she appeared to actually have the complete retrograde amnesia they'd spent months claiming Alice had, and Sprocket summed it all up with, "And that's about all we know about me. For my part I can't remember anything whatsoever about who or what I am or where I'm from or probably-important stuff like that."

"Okay, I guess I'll see if I can find anything based on this barcode then have a look for anything the Ministry of War have on the army serial number looking bit on this, we copied their entire database onto the Hamster's server last week - hey, is it the same barcode as that one on that eartag thingy?"

"I don't know, why don't we check?" Alice said.

It was, and Vrotch spent a couple of minutes fiddling with his computer, and said, "Not poodle."

"What've you found?" Nick asked.

"Hang on, man, I'm still looking," said Vrotch, continuing messing with his computer; after a couple of minutes he said, "Huh."

"What've you found?" Nick repeated himself.

"Not a lot, man. I've got a not poodle, a name, a place, and a photograph," said Vrotch. "The not poodle - specifically teriyaki - is what came up when I ran a straight search on that barcode number so don't scan her ear down the shop or you'll be charge half a shilling for it. As far as what the Ministry of War have it seems a lot like almost everything they has is stored on dead trees, I've got the name 'Project Elaan', something called, er, 'Eye-lan Nar Oily-by-east' and I don't think that's how it's pronounced but I bet it doesn't rhyme with 'yeast', and a hilarious amount of 'redacted', and then there's this photograph," and he opened an image file - specifically a scanned-in paper document with everything but the page header and what had been a taped-on photograph blacked out - and pointed at the photo.

It was very grainy, black-and-white, and showed four grinning catpeople, one of whom looked a lot like Sprocket; all had their hair buzzcut short, all but the Sprocket lookalike had fur - dark in the case of the other, much taller, female - and all were wearing full battledress; in the picture the one who was either Sprocket or looked almost exactly like her wasn't wearing spectacles and had an eyepatch over her left eye, and someone had scrawled 'Killed in action' with a black marker over each one of them.

Silent immediately tugged at Nick's sleeve, pointed at the picture, and made one of her tiny wheezing attempts at a noise; Nick blinked, and asked, "You know them?" and she nodded.

"All of them?" Alice asked, and got another nod. "That's Sprocket here with the eyepatch, isn't it?" and that led to more nodding, "I take it the rest of them are just as non-dead as Sprocket then?" more nodding, "Er, are the rest of them related to you too?" yet more nodding, "Another aunt and some uncles?" and Silent paused, frowned, then first nodded then shook her head and wheezed at Alice and looked a bit frustrated.

"Is one of them one of your parents?" Fiona guessed; she nodded.

"Mother?" Nick asked; she firmly shook her head, so he said, "So one of those two lads is your father, then?" and she nodded. He pointed at the taller and narrower one and asked, "Him?" and she shook her head, so he pointed at the shorter and wider one and asked, "Him?" and she nodded then made a very clear yuck face in between her very visible increasing frustration at games of twenty questions.

"So I take it he's Sprocket's brother then?" Annie asked, and Silent nodded again.

"Huh," said Sprocket. "I'm someone's aunt? I feel old."

"Well that's about all there is actually stored electronically," said Vrotch. "The name 'Project Elaan' turns up on a few conspiracy-theory websites, real tinfoil-hat stuff - there's a bloke here claiming it's some sort of IRA thingy about remote-controlling people and his idea of proof is everyone who's really started digging for information on it has got caught in an IRA train bombing. Stinks of false flags to me. Not sure about this eye-lan thingy though, is that Gaelic?'

"Aye it’s Gaelic," said Nick, having had a peer, "It’s pronounced Eilen na Uilebheist," and how exactly you'd arrive at that pronunciation from the spelling she could see on Vrotch's monitor Alice didn't know, "It’s about two hours fast steam west from Inverallen bay, it’s right off the south end of Eilen Shea, in fact it's possible to walk from one island to the other at low tide if you've got chest waders or don't mind getting your everything wet and the narrows between the two are absolutely sodding full of rocks that'll rip the bottom of a boat open like that, for all that it's heaving with crab the only bugger who'll dare fish in there is Struan Flint and he's a bloody chancer. There's an inlet on Eilen na Uilbheist's east shore that's great for lobster, there's a wrecked steamer down there but you've got to be dead careful shooting creels near to it or you'll be finding the rock that put it down there. Oh, and we've got tangle nets down for crays on the northwest corner of the island."

Vrotch said, "Huh."

"There's land-mine warnings up on Eilen na Uilbheist too," said Mackie, "And ourselves have all been seeing the odd seal exploding. The army used to be going in there with a big helicopter every couple of weeks when we were bairns and they're still in and out of there though myself couldna say how, ourselves have all been seeing smoke rising, but that's about all that's ever been happening on Eilen na Uilbheist since the army took it for some sort of testing, bio-weapons the story was, and rumour has it that it was a follow-on anthrax test site for Gruinard Island, back in the 1960s myself am thinking that it was but long story short you're nae wanting any part of that, ourselves are just staying the hell off of it."

"Y'know," said Nick, "Getting across to Eilen na Uilbheist from Eilen Shea should be dead easy and as for land mines I can be making something that'll deal with land mines."

"What? Why?"

"Aye, I mean I'm certainly impressed with Sprocket's ability to take a hit, I ran into her at dead on forty and all that was happening is she was getting knocked about a bit and the van was in a bit of a state, it basically crashed on her, bent one of the frame rails and I had to knock that and the engine mounting lugs straight and give them a bit of reinforcing that side when I was putting the replacement front wing and bumper on, and thinking about it nobody's ever actually officially said what bio-weapons were tested on Eilen na Uilbheast and I'm thinking what if 'bio-weapon' means 'soldier who can be getting crashed on by a van and laugh it off'? That sounds all sorts of bio-weapony to me and then we've got what yourself was saying after we were finding Silent about mind magic, Vrotch - well that fireball-hurling bastard was looking straight at me and he snapped his fingers right before Silent bolted at that fire, there's nae so many vans banging about the north that belong to someone who kens what Eilen na Uilbheist is and kens someone who can be getting information out of a computer the way you can, Vrotch. I think I ken who our mind-mage is, and I'm certain he's wanting us to be poking around on Eilen na Uilbheist, and I'm thinking he has a very good reason for it."

Vrotch thought about that for a long moment and then said, "Point."

"So have yourselves been finding anything more about that space aliens headed for Venus?" Mackie, who had quite lost interest in the current topic, asked.

"Yeah man, it's well weird," said Vrotch. "We managed to get into it last week and the Flimflam Man found a copy of their wiring diagrams and it's just plain weird. There's a chunk of it is almost vehemently primitive, really computers is a bit strong a word, they’re electromechanical stuff we could have built during World War 2 if we'd been able to get the components reliable enough, and that seems almost like it's been grafted on top of a load of more modern stuff or maybe the other way round, I don't know. We don't even have guesses what's going on with the magnetics of that big thing we're fairly sure has to be their payload - at the ranges so far involved nobody's been in a position to get a magnetic silhouette sharp enough to say any better than that it looks like a flowerbud, except the Russians and according to what their top bod had on his laptop last week the GRU haven't digitised what they've got because they know someone's been getting into their military servers. But check this out," and he pulled up a screenfull of what looked to be official documents. "This is the Navy's heavy vehicle's orders, they've got a no-first-shot order in place, see? So basically even the Navy's top bods don't have a clue whether it's baddies or not."

"They could be looking for slaves, or to harvest some tasty humans I guess," said Val.

"Well if it's the former they're daft," said Vrotch, "We're more trouble than we're worth, and if it's the latter I'll be obliged to make sure we give them the shits - I mean, not that it's actually likely, right, basically the odds of our entire biosphere not being violently poisonous to anything alien and vice versa is just laughably low, like it's millions to one against us and them not having violent allergic reactions to each other's basic building-block proteins - believe me man, contact with actual space aliens is going to involve lots of environment suits and clean-rooms and decontamination to avoid anyone getting anaphylactic shock."

"Maybe biospheres are valuable?" Sprocket asked. "It might be a stretch but am I right we've only ever found one planetary body - this one - with any form of life on it, aren't I?"

"You mean apart from stuff like extinct Martian bacteria?" Vrotch asked. "If it's higher life you're after there's plenty of weird fish under the ice on one of Saturn's moons but the Ministry of Space classified it on the spot and banned landing there as soon as they clocked that it shares more genetics with us than the least-related known living thing on Earth – meaning that sometime, somehow, it got there from here. Are you thinking ancient spacemen? Because I'm thinking ancient spacemen, which tallies with the ruins, wreckage and human remains that've turned up on the moon, Mercury, Mars, three of Jupiter's moons, two of Saturn's moons, three of Neptune's moons, one of Uranus's moons, two dozen Kuiper belt objects, and fifty-seven asteroids," and that set off a long stunned dead silence as for the first time in a long time Alice found herself one of the least surprised people in the room.

"How," Val eventually asked, "Do you hide something on that scale?"

"By making people think the tinfoil hat brigade made it up," Vrotch told her with a shrug, "And they didn't have to work too hard at it - who makes a spacecraft out of wood anyway? That's the part that really fascinates me, most of the wreckage that's been found out there is wooden. The most advanced metals they've found are a funny sort of bronze, there's nothing ceramic fancier than a stoneware pot, and there isn't any plastics involved at all."

"Aye," said Mackie, "That really is weird."

"Yeah man, but bear in mind I work literal magic with my computer, Alice can make the figments of her imagination get up and start imagining things themselves, and Nick can make things invisible by writing on them - Fat Bloke reckons whoever left that wreckage was using magic nearly as advanced as ours and that's just unheard of, even the Royal Navy are far behind me and my mates - I mean if anyone tells you anything, anything at all, about ancient tomes of mystic knowledge or whathaveyou they're talking out their arse, there's no such thing. Well, there might be, but it'd be about as much use as a medieval medical manuscript and man, the main thing those are good for is fucking people up... There's a few artefacts kicking around, but let me make one thing clear man, all of them could easily be bettered using what I and more importantly the Munching Hamster know, what me and my mates do makes them look about as advanced as a fucking stone circle."

"Stone circle? What's that about?" Alice asked.

"Didn't you know? A stone circle - well, actually, the circular ditch bit, the standing stones are just there to help you get yourself properly lined up to use the thing - is a primitive form of spell focus. Compared to this," and he indicated the ring he'd got on his right index finger, "It's a bit like comparing a stone axe to a chainsaw. I mean it works, you can cast stuff with it and I guess it's better than nothing, but if you've got access to anything as recent as stuff the Romans made and you insist on still using a bloody henge you're wasting time for no gain, if you've got access to modern gear like what the Ministry of War give their rent-a-mages the stone circle would take you ten times the effort for results half as good, if you can get your mitts on a modern focus you'd have to be barking to fart around with a stone circle. Well, not quite, there's the history value part - I've actually been to Orkney and fired up the Ring of Brodgar, that was the first thing I did after the Hamster clocked what stone circles are, I mostly did it to check on her theory, I mean it's really cool when you think about it, it's like four something thousand years old and still works as perfectly as it did the day they finished it, but at the end of the day it was exhausting to run, took both hands and feet to keep control of, and the results weren't a patch on what I can pretty much effortlessly get out of my computer, I mean I'm not harshing on those dudes, it's actually really impressive that they managed to get a working focus together without any sort of metals or access to jade, but it's what it looks like."

"A priceless ancient relic," said Nick, much to the approval of Alice.

"Exactly," Vrotch pleased Alice by agreeing. "Compare to this ring. This ring is a Royal Navy spell focus, the exact same sort they've been issuing since they got Project Warlock - that's the lot behind the Gormhegast protocols - properly going back in about 1940. The Ring of Brodgar is a priceless ancient relic, emphasis on 'relic'. This ring is a completely replaceable day-to-day-use tool. Anyway to cut a long story short whoever left those wooden wrecks scattered round this star system had to be using enchantment on the sort of complexity level the Hamster only just figured out how to reproduce a couple of years ago, I'm glad to say before we heard about them, and the really irritating thing is we haven't been able to check it out, the Project Warlock boys, including the team the Navy have investigating the ancient wrecks, use the most irritating form of security: they don't store any of their info on computers. It's a pain in the arse, I'd love to get my mitts on their data. McBangBang managed to get a look-see at one of the wrecks late last year though... Hey, an important question springs to mind, and that's how magically advanced these space aliens are."

"Another great big unknown, I take it," said Mackie.

Vrotch nodded. "At this point what we don't know about them apart from their computers being weird pretty much runs to 'everything' including how they appeared out of nowhere in a big flash. Course like Val was saying the really important part at this point is their motives, crossing the vast gulf between stars has to be a serious operation no matter how they did it and I'll bet it cost a few bob too - so, why?"

"What I was thinking is basically life actually, you know, starting seems to be a pretty rare thing - I am right about that aren't I?" Sprocket asked.

"'There's only two bodies in the solar system that we can conclusively say it ever happened on - here and Mars and the stuff on Mars stopped happening millions of years ago," said Vrotch. "That's not a very high percentage when you think about it."

"So maybe the space aliens want to do science at us?"

"That's as good a guess as any. One way or another we're going to find out early next year, and when all is said and done I’m going to be all of the readies if it turns into a fight. Anyway, there's something I want to check now - whether Sprocket actually lost her memory when you crashed your van on her."

"You reckon someone's messed with her head," said Nick, suddenly very angry.

"I don't know but I can find out, man," said Vrotch, and turned back to Sprocket. "Basically I'm a psychomancer - that's mind-magic, right - and unlike all too many psychomancers I try to put minds back together instead of finding more and more ways to break them, and while I was saying that I just had a peer inside your head and I've got a mixture of bad and maybe not bad news."

"Okay, let's hear it," said Sprocket, visibly filing that away under 'people who can look inside heads exist'.

"It wasn't being hit by Nick's van that made you lose your memory," Vrotch told her. "Your memories were gone about a month ago, can't tell when exactly, and you'd pretty much been running on autopilot. You were basically programmed to hide in the woods somewhere up the back of Dornoch until today then home in on Nick's van like, today, and when you found it you pretty much jumped out in front of it and did a, well, another reset I guess? Not really that, you seem to have spent the last few weeks in a dream state. You still have all your skills and whatnot, that's why you know things like how to talk and walk, and there's still some emotional stuff tie up with them so you're still going to like doing whatever sort of stuff you used to like doing, but apart from that as far as I can work out you're pretty much a blank slate."

"Vrotch," said Nick.

"Yeah man?"

"Can you no have a wee peer inside of Silent's head and find out what her name really is?"

Vrotch paused for a long moment, and then shook his head.

"Psychomancy, man," he said, "Is bad shit."

He took a long drag from his spliff, noticed that they were waiting for him to continue, and did so.

"It's magic, man. Minds are really really easily changed and magic makes that giant armoured scrap-metal van you dudes ride around in look proper subtle, psychomancy is just the same as any sort of magic: the only easy thing to do is break shit. Wipe someone's mind? Kiddy stuff. Program someone the way Sprocket's been programmed? Almost as easy. Look at anything deeper than surface emotions without destroying everything around it? About as easy as fixing a delicate Swiss watch with a ten-pound sledgehammer, thoughts aren't even vaguely close to the surface, man, you're not 'reading' memories, you're ripping them out and wrecking everything around them, if I went in deep enough to find her name or anything like that we'd know her name and she probably wouldn't even know what names are any more... Basically I could go in and find Silent's name for you man, but I won't and not just because you dudes are my mates either."

"Yourself was finding that out the hard way," Mackie abruptly guessed.

Vrotch nodded once.

"Yeah man. Basically my first spell was psychomantic - it was my point of access to magic and what happened with it is something I'm never going to forgive myself for, let's not go into that. I got lucky in the end, Reg found me going to bits and days away from my head going pop and taught me how to use my existing computer skills to do things that didn't involve destroying someone's mind. Now I really gotta go dudes, and not just because this shit's getting heavy, the Flimflam Man has been making a copy of the space alien's weird-as-shit computers and we're going to start poking at the software side of it uh, basically now."

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

-/-/-/-/-/-

By the time the little vampire hunting team he was starting to consider friends (apart of course from Fiona) were driving back towards the digs, Vrotch was back entering the infosphere where a certain something very, very impressive orchestrated by the Flimflam Man was ongoing.

"I take it," he began his contribution to the conversation that had been ongoing when he got there, "We still don't know how to get into the big crystal thing then?" and his fellow cybermancers - all of whom were in attendance, for once he was the last to get to a meet - turned round to acknowledge his arrival.

"I don't even know where to start with that thing, it's like they've got three different totally mismatched sets of machine architecture," and the Flimflam Man indicated the carbon-copy of the alien spacecraft's infosphere, which was hovering in the middle of the dataspace and looking just as strange as the real thing if minus the big crystal thing, "If it was any weirder I'd say their tech base was downright scizophrenic. As far as that crystal thing goes, well, at this point we still haven't even got a start on figuring out what's going on in there but I can tell you it's totally unconnected to the rest of the vehicle, which at least actually runs on technology we have a direct parallel of even if half of it is hilariously antiquated."

Vrotch nodded, gazing up at the datasphere in front of him and said, "You have to admit what our space aliens are doing is seriously bloody impressive."

"Impressive hell, that engine section is almost like finding a fusion rocket built using leftover parts of canvas biplane," said the Flimflam Man.

"I take it the copy's the size of a barn, yeah man?"

"Not so much, the actually semi-sense-making half runs to an array of twenty separate minitowers. The engine section end though, that is big. Sixty-five ton of mechanical gubbins, more relays and vacuum tubes than you can shake a stick at, and a couple of hundred miles of wire, it's nuts. And it's taking a staff of thirty to keep it running – that's mostly because the components I could get just aren't as good as this thing needs them to be, we're lucky to get five minutes uptime without popping any valves. I built silly amounts of redundancy into the system, that's the only reason we've been able to keep it up for more than half an hour at a stint - in all honesty I'd say these space aliens' backwards retro parts of their hardware are just flat-out better than our equivalent stuff ever got."

"That must've set you back some serious beans," said Vrotch.

"Oh yeah, getting this together on such short notice took a stink of a lot of cash... Not a big deal, Ted Kennedy had the ready."

"Ted Kennedy, what, as in the President they impeached because of that mess in the Malvinas, sorry, Falklands?" Kitty Katty asked.

"Yup, that's the one. He'll be proper furious when he finds his Swiss bank account he thinks nobody knows about down by the nine and a half thousand million it took me to do this but by then I'll be over the hills and far away – besides the people on the ground in St Petersburg think I'm an ex-KGB sort by the name of Vladimir Putin... uh, you're going to be okay with that, right Hawk?"

Hawkeye snorted indelicately and said, "I was MVD, I hate the KGB even more than Katty does."

"This could lead to a highly entertaining pissing match," said the Munching Hamster.

"Hope so, quality spectator sports are hard to find and Teddy-boy versus Vladdy-poos is going to be absolutely hilarious," said the Flimflam Man. "Right, anyway let's get stuck in and really get our heads round what makes this thing tick," and so they split up into pairs and trooped into the recreation of the alien's datasphere, in Vrotch's case teamed with the Hamster.

For her part, the Hamster demonstrated her usual perceptiveness by asking, the very moment they were out of earshot of the others, "Dave... you okay?"

"I'll be fine, had a pretty heavy conversation - remember my story about what happened with Becky? That came up. I'll be okay, just a bit rattled, that's all."

The Hamster, who knew very well how over his attempt to actually mind-read his fiancée Vrotch was never going to be and how much of an understatement 'rattled' always was whenever he ended up talking about it even in a roundabout way, changed the subject.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Nick Macbane woke up at about two in the morning of Monday fourth due to an unfamiliar warm soft presence in his bed.

He peered around, wondering what was going on and what was against his side for a while, then finally identified it via the dark-haired head with the catlike ears that was pressed up against his arm, and the peacefully sleeping little face beneath it; Silent appeared to have crawled into his bed and cuddled up beside him during the night.

He decided to think about it in the morning, and went back to sleep.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"I am given to understand," said Dr Jack Kensington, "That you've had a rather eventful Halloween, Miss Liddell."

Alice, who had just sat down for her lunch on Monday with Keiko and Andy in the college cafetière when her head of school approached their table, gave him a baffled look and said, "What?"

"Something about a very interesting discovery in Orkney? I have three very excited gentlemen from the Royal Museum of Scotland and one almost as excited gentleman from the British Museum in my office with a proposal that you, and of course a chaperone, wouldn't do to have a young lady gallivanting with a bunch of strange men archaeologists or otherwise without a companion, accompany them to the Northern Isles next week to perform a comprehensive geosurvey at the site you dropped in Kirkwall Museum's lap the weekend before last; naturally I shall see to it that you receive extra credit towards your coursework should you so fit to accept their offer."

"I... what?" Alice asked.

"Our colleagues from Kirkwall spent most of the last week wherever the weather permitted running around with ground-penetrating radar up there and it's turning into the most significant antiquarian find in the north of Scotland in decades," Dr Kensington declared with obvious and startlingly boyish glee making for the first break in his reserve Alice had ever seen. "I could not more strongly advise you to leap upon this opportunity with both feet, let's see a certain person succeed in his attempts to sabotage your education when you're on first-name terms with British Museum personnel, anyway I'm frightfully sorry to interrupt your afternoon repast but we'd probably better pop over to my office so you can speak to them in person."

"I suppose," said Alice, rising to her feet, "That we better had," and she gave her plate (filled with fried things) a what-am-I-going-to-do-with-this look.

"You're welcome to bring your lunch, of course," Dr Kensington said, and she made a grateful noise and picked it up.

She was aware of Nick and Annie arriving at the table behind her, and of Nick asking Fiona "Where's Alice off to?" and of Fiona starting to tell him, but then they were out of earshot.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The four men waiting in Dr Kensington's office all immediately leapt to their feet the moment Alice entered the room, and the visually youngest of the bunch - an almost exaggeratedly burly man with a strong suntan and sun-bleached hair who looked faintly ridiculous jammed into a tweed suit - let out a delighted cry of "Aha, the lady of the hour!" in a mild lowland Scots accented voice. He stuck out his hand, which Alice shook, and continued, "Dr Percy Fremantle, at your service; my colleagues here are Dr Samuel Chaucer and Dr Jeremy Douglas, and of course this is our esteemed colleague from the British Museum, Dr Wilfred Portendorfer."

"I'm Alice Liddell," Alice confirmed, and waited for a Lewis Carrol joke.

"Liddell? That's quite the unusual surname in this day and age, I don't believe there can be many Liddells at all left in the world today - oh, forgive me do, a part of my early studies was on the subject of rare English surnames and I must confess to remaining intrigued by the topic," and that expectation was totally scuppered by Dr Portendorfer, a tall, elderly, very thin and rather distinguished-looking fellow with a pronounced stoop, a walking stick, what was either a tactical vest or a hunting-shooting-fishing utility vest but either way was stuffed absolutely chock full of small hand tools and random-looking electronic contraptions and was slung over a carefully-tailored suit, and profuse quantities of white hair that stuck up and made him look faintly like a hunchbacked Einstein.

"Oh don't badger the young lady, Wilf," Dr Chaucer declared, concluding the several seconds of awkward silence. He was another elderly chap, this time with a ramrod-straight back and vaguely military bearing - he too was wearing a utility vest stuffed full of tools. "Forgive the old codger, he's rather getting on, his mind tends to wander,"

"Oh up yours Sam you rotter, you're still just as five years older than me as you were last time you started putting on airs," Dr Portendorfer sniffed.

Dr Douglas, one of the largest men Alice had ever met, he was even larger than Mackie and was almost as brown as Dr Fremantle, had been slowly shaking his head from the moment Dr Chaucer opened his mouth and this was enough to get a sudden bellow of laughter out of him; Drs Portendorfer and Chaucer gave him good-natured piqued looks then lost it and started chuckling too.

"At any rate I suppose we should be getting down to business," said Dr Portendorfer, shaking it off. "I am the British Museum's resident specialist on antiquities in the north of Scotland mostly due to being one of the few members of staff with the mental bandwidth to operate up here without making a terrible ninny of himself and getting himself shot; Dr Chaucer specialises in electronic means of geosurvey while Dr Fremantle and Dr Douglas's areas of expertise are in the realms of more manual forms of archaeological exploration,"

"We won't be doing a lot of digging next week, mind," Dr Douglas took over, proving to have the faintest trace of a Western Isles accent, "Mid-November in Orkney would be a good time to get any digging washed out - we'll be drilling core samples, weather permitting, to allow us to precisely date the site."

"As to the question of a chaperone - wouldn't do to have a young lady running around with strange men like Wilf," Dr Chaucer started.

"Watch it, you," Dr Portendorfer warned, clearly amused,

"Dr Kensington suggested a member of his faculty, one Mrs Josephine Pritchard, if she would suit?" Dr Chaucer continued, ignoring Dr Portendorfer.

"Mrs Pritchard did in fact suggest herself," said Dr Kensington.

"She'll be fine," Alice said with a nod, not saying that this was because she was confident in her own ability to blast anyone who got a bit too friendly clean across the room with her finger rather than anything to do with the defensive capacity of an inoffensive elderly lady.

"I take it that means you do indeed wish to accompany us to Orkney," said Dr Portendorfer.

"I wouldn't have come here if I wasn't going to," Alice told him, and that got a chuckle out of the old boy.

"Excellent, then it's decided," said Dr Kensington.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"What's that expression about?" asked Nick as Alice came and sat back down at the lunch table opposite where Annie was now sitting where Alice had been before.

"I'm going to Orkney next week with three people from the Royal Museum of Scotland, one from the British Museum, and Mrs Pritchard," Alice told her, and that got a sudden unexpected standing ovation from Nick and Mackie and Fiona.

"You what mate?" Andy had not been up to date on what they'd been up to the beginning of the previous week, and that put them into an explanation of what was going on - leaving out the parts about how Alice knew where to look once again, and she got this sinking feeling as she realised how many people were listening in, and what exact conclusion they were coming to.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The very moment Alice Liddell was out of earshot Dr Portendorfer drew a deep sigh, turned to Dr Kensington, and said, "Well Jack, you were quite right to call me."

"So she's one of those students right enough," Dr Kensington started, looking as happy as he ever allowed himself to, only for Dr Portendorfer to raise a hand.

"In addition to which the last man by the name of Liddell was killed in the trenches in 1919 and the last woman of that name died of a bad case of age in the 1960s," said Dr Portendorfer. "Between the extinct surname and the reference that it contains - 'Miss Alice Liddell', the young lady who allegedly went through the looking-glass - all in all her handlers might as well have dubbed their invented woman 'Miss Susan Donym'."

Dr Douglas snorted.

"So she's not who she says she is," said Dr Chaucer.

"She's absolutely a plant, and of course the most pertinent question becomes whether she knows it," said Dr Portendorfer with a shake of his head. "Well, alongside whose plant she is, of course."

"Well the SOE's the most obvious," Dr Douglas started, only for Dr Portendorfer to shake his head again.

"Her talent is almost entirely untrained," he said. "I have been butting heads on and off with the Special Operations Executive since the end of the war in Europe and I have never known them to miss that particular trick; no, she is almost certainly not one of theirs."

"Mrs Pritchard concurs, she is quite convinced Miss Liddell is not a product of Baker Street," said Dr Kensington with a nod.

"So, proposals as to whose she is," said Dr Fremantle.

"Certainly no Lexbridge for one thing," said Dr Douglas. "Given she's a young lady and she gives every impression of being capable of saying boo to all of the geese."

"Could be the Yanks, they've been trying to get someone close to the Kellies for years," said Dr Chaucer.

"Young lady positively dripping in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of beyond-cutting-edge cybernetics attends college alongside staggeringly wealthy heiress to the largest manufacturers of advanced cybernetics in the Empire, doesn't take mental gymnastics to think of the potential for her being a private effort on the part of the Kellies," said Dr Kensington.

"If that were the case I should expect her to be in Miss Kelly's course," Dr Douglas pointed out.

"Aha, but you did not sit in an office and listen to Miss Kelly deciding that Miss 'Liddell' was to study antiquities," said Dr Kensington.

"You don't suppose that Miss Kelly has some causative connection to this discovery in the Northern Isles do you?" Dr Fremantle asked with a frown.

"Potentially, her family are certainly heavily involved in our mystery lady's being here - as in at this institution - and the list of concerns able to fabricate Miss Liddell's cybernetics is not a long one even if one is to include the likes of Station IX or whatever the Yanks' TLA use for engineering these days," said Dr Chaucer.

"I don't believe so, if Miss Kelly had been instrumental to the discovery we would know it, she has the approximate subtlety of an atomic bomb," said Dr Kensington. "I believe any causative factor she may have had would be encouraging Miss Liddell to follow up on her instinct."

"Instincts," said Dr Chaucer with a snort.

"Yes well, I am told psychometry expresses itself in quite an instinctive manner," said Dr Kensington. "A few weeks ago - the afternoon upon which I informed Wilf of her - I was witness to a rather impressive display of postcognition on Miss Liddell's part, and it was quite clear to see she had little idea how she was doing it."

"Either way, Kelbeth Industries involving itself in affairs of the prosaic kind? I hope not, we could do very well without finding ourselves pig-in-the-middle for a business concern on that scale starting something with the Lexbridge Shooting Society and the time until one of old Beltran Cortez's little catspaws is drawn to our barely-trained young sorceress is strictly finite," said Dr Douglas, only for Dr Portendorfer to shake his head.

"That horse bolted some years ago, and for what little it's worth it wasn't started by Kelbeth," the old man declared. "You're aware of the circumstances of Dr Reginald Bethnal's death? He was bumped off by one Mr Nigel Berkeley,"

"As in the Lexbridge chief axeman, I see," said Dr Douglas with a sigh. "Oh there'll be hell to pay once whatever Sir Kelly's planning in the way of retribution comes to fruition."

"My thought exactly, yes," Dr Portendorfer agreed with a nod.

"Not helped by the fact that Baker Street recently decided to shove their oar in up here, came a hair's breadth from igniting a mob war and have most likely sewn the seeds of another land war," Dr Kensington said.

"They have? I was not aware of that," said Dr Portendorfer.

"A few weeks ago a member of the crime family largely in control of what passes for a criminal underworld from Oban through Fort William towards the Inner Hebrides, the Innes gang, was bumped off on the edge of the territory of what I can only call the most powerful crime cartel in the north, the Longman Org, a stone's throw from here - we are as it happens currently seated in what is usually regarded as Longman Org territory," Dr Kensington told him. "I dread to think how far out of hand it would have got if the police hadn't identified the weapon used as a Welrod and the Innes gang's private doctor hadn't confirmed it - then the next thing we know the local police special response unit, who quite definitely have ties both to Lexbridge and to the SOE, attempted to bust the leadership of the Longman Org and set the entire north of Scotland onto a hair trigger."

"I see," said Dr Portendorfer.

"Anyway it occurs to me," said Dr Kensington, "That Miss Liddell may very well be Kelbeth's primary approach to retribution for Dr Bethnal's murder."

"Perhaps. Either way we shall most likely gain a little insight into Miss Liddell in the coming week," said Dr Douglas with a sigh.

"And I should expect us to gain insight into Miss Liddell's backers no later than whenever the coming land war kicks off," said Dr Kensington. "We need merely watch Mister Kevin Murchison and see how and when he dies."

"Murchison? Why does that name sound familiar?" asked Dr Chaucer.

"I believe he was a graduate student alongside you. Tall fellow, dark hair, this dreadful little moustache, can't keep his hands to himself around the young ladies."

"Ah, that Murchison, yes, I remember the fellow - what's he gone and done this time?"

"It transpires that he has taken up affiliation to the Lexbridge Shooting Society, he has the ring, I only found out post his having taken up his duties here, and now he's taken to extorting favours out of his female students," said Dr Kensington with a shrug.

"My God, in Scotland? Is he mad or an idiot?" Dr Fremantle burst out.

Dr Kensington said, "I can but suppose he believes his affiliation to Lexbridge makes him untouchable."

"Mad and an idiot, then," said Dr Fremantle; Dr Kensington frowned for a moment and then nodded.

"And allow me to guess, he has set his sights on the eponymous Miss Liddell," said Dr Portendorfer. "Even before one comes to the matter of allowing such reprehensible behaviour to continue at the best of times, that damned fool risks bringing our entire line of work into disrepute in Scotland. With the several lifetimes worth of stunning prehistoric monuments simply crying for some semblance of archaeological exploration here in the north we cannot for any reason have a sex-crazed idiot's genitalia endanger our access to those sites, and when all is said and done the Scots have a well-regarded absence of patience where concerns an Englishman bothering their young ladies; I would consider it a personal favour if you were to see to it that whichever of Miss Liddell's associates you feel most appropriate hear of it at an opportune moment."

"Associates," said Dr Kensington with a frown. "Hmm... yes, I believe I have just the ones, are you aware of two of this fine institution's other students? A Mr Mikhail Romanov and I assure you the name is no coincidence, we all know precisely how his forefathers behaved when angered, and a young fellow by the name of Nicodemus Macbane, who counts an extensive range of active separatists on one side of his family and Glasgow street hoodlums on the other?"

"Nicodemus?" said Dr Portendorfer.

"Yes well, I have it on good authority that his parents are a little odd where concerns names," said Dr Kensington with a shrug.

"I was under the impression that those two were the bodyguards of one Miss Annabella Kelly," said Dr Chaucer.

"I have had the unique pleasure of their acquaintance. Mr Romanov's family connection and Mr Macbane's odd name aside, they are farmer's boys, from the back of absolutely bloody nowhere in the northwest," said Jack. "I propose to alert them to circumstances during the later stages of the coming land war and allow events to... play out, to their natural conclusion, in as expedient a fashion as possible."

"Yes, that seems eminently sensible, in fact I would consider it a personal favour if you were to drop a quiet word in these two fine young gentlemen's ears, Jack," Dr Portendorfer said with a nod.

"Consider it done," said Dr Kensington, allowing himself a small but rather vicious smile.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"So," said Nick Macbane as he seated himself at the usual table in the Harbourmaster's that evening, "Mine flail."

"I take it you've already got some sort of a plan for this mine flail in mind?" said Fiona.

"Aye, that I have, basically I know where there's a couple of old bulldozers, one's got a broken chassis and the other's got a blown engine and I'm thinking that I should be able to take the pair of them and make them into one working bulldozer, then rebuild the arms on it."

"Oh aye, like where?" asked Andy.

"Well Euan Macrae down near to Stronecrubie has one with a broken frame sitting in the back of his barn, I had a look at it for him and the engine runs and the hydraulics and gearbox are good but the whole frame's twisted and half the suspension is just absolutely fucked, he ran it into a gulley, and there's one that's the same make and model - old Yank-built thing, the army flogged them off for pennies back in the seventies - sitting in the scrappies at Lochinver with nothing wrong with it that a new engine, a gearbox that hasnae been full of water for a couple of years, and new hoses on the hydraulics, wouldnae sort out," said Nick.

"It'll be a bit of work fabricating the thing," Annie said, "Why don't we propose a mine flail for this project in the college?"

"Project?" Mackie, who was unlike Annie and Val not sharing a course with Nick, "What project?"

"The tutors on the engineering course basically have the students set up to get into groups of four and want us to design and build something," Annie told him, and Fiona too. "We're already supposed to be working with us three and Trish Stoker, you ken her don't you?"

"Only in passing," he admitted. "The nice-looking lassie who's awful weird about Alice, aye?"

"Aye, that's her, and she's nae just a pretty face, she kens what she's at with a machine," and that was high praise for anyone regardless of gender coming from the eldest Macbane brother, whose casual competence with old machinery meant he didn't think much of most people's mechanical proficiency. "Aye, it'll nae be bad at all to have herself on board with this build, let's run it past her the morn."

"Okay, sounds like a plan," Annie said with a nod, then added, "So, are we thinking on going and scaring the shite out of a few diddums bloodsuckers tonight then?"

"Aye, I dinnae see why not - anyone seen Alice?" said Nick.

"She's out the back in one of her containers farting about with something, I didn't ask," Val told him.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Alice was, as it happened, finally getting around to that experiment with opening a portal from the Earth side, and was rapidly coming to the conclusion that there was something she was missing and that she should probably speak to the Hamster, Fat Bloke and McBangBang about this.

"Up to much?" asked Nick as he stuck his head in and found an annoyed-looking Alice glaring at a bit of empty container, alerting her to his presence in the process.

"Nothing that can't wait, it's not working how I thought it would," she said. She'd tried doing exactly what she'd done when she escaped from unspace that time and the magical field had, instead of inverting itself into a portal, done little more than disintegrate with the weirdest-looking ripple of light and a sizzling noise, and every alternate approach she'd been able to think of had that same result.

"Well fancy blowing off a bit of steam? We're getting set up to be going and giving a few vampires a bit of a seeing-to."

"Might as well," said Alice. "It's not like I'm bloody getting anywhere here."

"Oh aye, what are you stuck on?" Nick asked as they exited the container.

"Trying to actually work out how to open a bloody portal from the Earth end," she admitted; his stride broke a little at that.

"Aye? Huh, thought you were already long since doing that," he said.

"I hadn't ever actually tried before today. Just never actually got onto it, and it's turning out to be rather more complicated than I thought - I must be missing something but I'm not sure what it is, it's not nearly as intuitive as actually creating stuff on the other side," she said as they entered the pub and turned into the back room, where she paused for a moment; Silent was sitting on one of the old sofas, there was no sign of her wrist plank though she was on the other hand wearing a lead clipped to her collar, the sawn-off Lee-Enfield was in a leather drop-leg holster at her side with what looked very like a pouch stuffed with stripper clips of .303 the other, and she had the wolf and the panther on their leads.

"We taking her with us?" Alice asked Nick, slightly surprised.

"Aye, I was getting to thinking about the way she shot with that thing and the way she opened Elf's arm up, so I welded a wee fore-sight blade onto it and got it zeroed and made up a holster for it and here we are," he said, sitting down beside the little catgirl and affectionately resting a hand on top of her head; a smile immediately appeared on her face and she pressed herself up against the side of him, making it instantly very visible to all that the fondness went in both directions.

"Okay - well, why not," Alice said with a nod, vaguely wondering how Sprocket might do hunting vampires; after a moment she put it out of her mind, the poor thing really didn't need the excitement not twenty-four hours after waking up with no memories. "Let's get mobile."

-/-/-/-/-/-

At that very moment in time, a very clean near-new Land-Rover was turning off the main north-south road past the front of RNAS Kylestrome and down onto the road through Kylestrome itself.

It carried on right through the village and past where the road onto the bridge onto the island turned off, then turned up Grace Mitchell's mess of a driveway, splattering the first signs of mud up itself; when it pulled into Grace's barnyard she herself was waiting for it, and she greeted the driver - Dr Jeremy Douglas - with a smile.

"Well, welcome home then lad," she said; they shared an embrace, and then he fished a photograph out of his briefcase.

"This the Alice who was turning up in that wrecked train on your doorstep right enough then Mum?" he checked, showing it to her.

"Aye," she said with a nod. "Have you been able to learn anything of interest about her then?"

"She's got my colleagues all in a tizzy Mum," Jeremy said. "They're half convince she's either 'a private enterprise on the part of the Kellies' or an American plant, Dr Portenorfer clocked onto her being gifted just like that."

"So you're saying that Elf was right, she has the gift?"

"Yes," he said. "I don't know exactly what form of it she has but she definitely has some way of learning things about the ancient past - Dr Chaucer thinks she has the sight but I'm not sure, there's none of the signs you taught me about. And... Mum, what you were saying Elf Macbane was saying about, well I've found out what it's all about."

"Well don't keep me in suspense then," Grace said.

"There's a man at the college, one of the tutors, likes to extort sexual favours out of his female students," Jeremy told her, quite aware he was signing Kevin Murchison's death warrant.

"Well we'll see about that," said Grace Mitchell, her face like thunder.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Ready?" asked Mackie Romanov, punctuating it by pumping the trench gun.

"Aye, ready," said Nick Macbane, his Claymore in one hand and the panther's lead in the other.

They both glanced at the shorter figure standing between them with the sawn-off Lee-Enfield in her left hand and her right, which was also holding the wolf's lead, resting on its bolt; Silent had spent the ride over to their current location, Westhill behind Culloden, fiddling with it and trying out different ways to hold it and had then swapped the satchel of cartridges to her right hip behind the holster, and Nick was already planning a new holster to go on her left leg.

She nodded, and they both caught the wild glee on what was visible of her face under her thermo goggles.

"Knock knock, ticks!" Mackie yelled, and drove the heel of his boot into the lock on the door of the house they had just sat back and watched a couple of vampires, dragging a suspiciously-room-temperature tramp who was doing a suspiciously bad job of resisting, let themselves into. It splintered like matchwood and the three of them went crashing in, the wolf and the panther hard at their heels.

As per their guess the living dead had been waiting for them with an assortment of knives, axes, and bludgeons - the door led into a hallway with a staircase open to it on the left, a small kitchen dead ahead, and a living room to the right and the whole place was lousy with vampires. Mackie went straight down the hall slamfiring the trench gun - working the pump as fast as he could with the trigger held down - and turning that whole side of the house into a whirlwind of buckshot while Nick, along with the panther, exploded into the living room and Silent went up the stairs in three close-spaced jumps the wolf was hard pressed to keep up with; a screaming vampire went head-first down the stairs, landing with the unmistakable sound of splintering bone, the panther hit the undead tramp like a ton of bricks, Nick's sword went through three different would-be ambushers, and the sawn-off Lee-Enfield roared half a dozen times in close succession, and then it was all over bar lopping off undead heads and wiping the muck off themselves before Annie and Fiona and Val had even had time to get through the hall.

"They're starting to think," said Nick.

"Seems likely we're radically increasing the average intelligence of vampires round these parts by splattering all the stupid ones," said Fiona.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The remainder of that first week back was, aside from every lecturer bar Kevin D Murchison taking Alice to one side and enthusiastically recommending that she hie herself off up to Orkney with the man from the British Museum post haste, blessedly quiet; Alice spent most of her free time continuing to bang her head on the portal problem in between putting the finishing touches to the airshipification of her corner of unspace and vaguely contemplating the idea that it could use more people around than just Shiva. The others were pretty busy that week too, Nick for example spent seemingly every spare moment the rest of the week racing around the northwest in the Albion with a big trailer hooked to it, swapping parts for other parts until, on Thursday afternoon, he triumphantly returned to the college engineering faculty with the second old bulldozer (the one with a blown engine) on the trailer, having brought the one with a broken chassis and mangled suspension back on Wednesday.

On Friday evening, however, the peace evaporated when they convened to the pub in preparation to resume their vampire-hunting activities for the weekend, quite unaware of the watchers sitting on a boat a couple of hundred feet away - with the result that a petrol bomb came flying into the Harbourmaster's front porch not five minutes after Alice Liddell had sat down in their usual booth, closely followed by a wall of gunfire rattling like the hailstorm from hell off the four layers of quarter-inch steel plate Nick and Annie and Val had between them spent half their free time over the course of October lining the pub's exterior wall with.

Two seconds later the automated fire suppression equipment, provided and installed by Annie at her father's expense, in the porch activated, and moments behind that Mary McBride threw the switch in between the two joysticks below the panel for her security cameras, the one rather imaginatively marked 'Fuck Everything', and two sets of twin remote-controlled water-cooled machine guns, each loaded with a two thousand round drum of .303 tracer and fitted with armoured security cameras to allow them to be aimed from the safety of the bar, installed by Val who claimed they'd fallen off the back of a lorry, popped out of their concealed mounts each side of the front door - one disguised as a water butt, the other as a rubbish bin - and roared into life as Mary rammed her thumbs down on both triggers with a cry of "Magic, I've been wanting to try these for weeks!"

-/-/-/-/-/-