"Well that was suitably hilarious," said Fiona Macleod, surveying the burning mess that had become of the four Bedford pickups that had came roaring round the corner and found out how much preparing for another driveby had been done since the first go-around; their first port of call once they were no longer under attack had involved removing anything and everything illegal from the premises, which this time meant five minutes slinging things through Alice's portal before driving the Bigger Van through and parking it in her 'airship's' for-the-job-enlarged portal room then hiding the portal in a light bulb Nick had drilled a convenient hole in, and they were now standing around surveying the aftermath while waiting for the inevitable law enforcement response.

"What? I'm barely hearing you," said Alice, rooting around in her ear with the tip of her pinky. The amount of gunfire going in both directions (along with the sound of lead flattening against steel plate) had been roughly as quiet as leaning against the bass bins at a particularly loud rock concert, with the result that the ears of everyone who'd been in the pub when what was now a splatter of mud opened fire were still ringing.

"Aye, fucking hell that was loud," Mary agreed, looking enormously pleased with herself. "Haha! That learned those wee bastards,"

"Oh for the love of Christ, is this going to become a habit?"

"I don't know," said Annie with a shrug. "You'd have to be asking that lot," and she pointed firmly at the smouldering wreckage, getting a groan out of the freshly-arrived cop who'd spoken.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"This is getting beyond the pale," was the first thing out of Andy Macbride's mouth when they sat down for an impromptu council of war a couple of hours and a cleanup and the departure of some irate coppers later.

"Aye, though I'm not hundred percent on how we're going to see them off any more thoroughly," his mother agreed.

"We're going to need to find where they're based out of and get rid of whoever's calling the shots," said Annie with a frown.

"Easier said than done," said Vrotch, who they'd phoned after the shooting stopped - he'd come right over as soon as the police were gone. "For one thing the surveillance network in Inverness is godawful and constantly being sabotaged because land wars, and for another any vampire that makes it past the first century or so is not going to be the sort of idiot you've been wholesale wiping out. I've been able to pick out 'gang colours', basically, and whoever that lot were," and he angled his thumb at where the wrecked pickups had been pushed out of the road and were awaiting transport to a scrapyard, "I've picked them up on camera multiple times but haven't a clue where they're operating out of."

"Maybe," Alice said, "We should be looking into our own surveillance setup."

"Actually that's not a bad idea," Annie said, scratching her chin.

"Okay," said Fiona, "How?"

"Drones," said Alice.

"What?"

"Drones, you know, remotely-piloted vehicles. Hey Nick, how hard do you think it'd be to build pretty much a miniature airship with a bunch of cameras and stuff for Vrotch to remote-control it? No, I'm not just suggesting it because I like airships, though I do like airships, airships make me happy, I'm suggesting it because it'd have a much better battery life than something that stayed up by propellers."

"Piss easy," said Nick, "We could use mostly scrapyard parts even though we're going to want to get one of your mates, Vrotch, to get the electronics down in London or pinch them or something so when one inevitably gets fucked it doesn't immediately get traced back to us from the serials and that because if we do this these things are not going to be exactly legal."

"Easy enough to be putting a simple ban or two on these things to help keep unwanted eyes away from them," said Fiona. "That and something to help stopping the wind getting behind the things and thrashing them to bits."

"How big are we talking? And I think the word you're looking for is 'aerostat'," said Vrotch.

"Aero-what?" Nick asked.

"Aerostat, that's what the technical term for what you're describing is, I think."

"Oh right, anyway how big is going to depend how heavy the power and electronics end up being. Going to need to put a big old battery into it if we're going to have the loiter time, uh, and I think we'll be needing somewhere to be operating them from."

"My caravan park should fit the bill, if they're not too giant we can just put up a big shed or something," Vrotch told Nick, who nodded. "Anyway once you've worked out what electronics you're going to need for these, these mini-Zeppelins, let me know and I'll see what shakes loose."

"That'll be the big kicker, we're going to be needing stuff like thermal imagers and light-amplification gear if it's going to be any use for finding the living dead," said Val.

"No problem," said Vrotch with a shrug. "Give me a few days and I can even get the sort of magnetic resonance imagers they use in mining space-suits too."

"You can? Hey, how detailed are those things anyway?"

"They're supposed to be being pretty good," Mackie said. "Ourselves might as well be getting a hold of one while yourselves are getting this wee airship designed and find out how good it is, being able to be spotting guns on the undead when they're thinking that they've been hiding them sounds like a fantastic idea to myself."

"Aye, I wouldn't be arguing with that," Annie agreed with a nod.

"Okay," Vrotch said. "Tell you what, I'll just pick up some of any sensors I can get a source for and we'll test them out, how's that grab you?"

"Awesome, thanks," said Nick. "So that's ourselves with a plan for an eye in the sky, what else will we be doing?"

"Set up a bunch of sensors at the ends of this street," said Annie. "We can use Vrotch's test samples."

"Plan, aye. Well, we've got a..." and Nick suddenly drifted off and his head rotated to look at Silent, who was minding the wolf and the panther and looking quite content.

"Huh," he said.

"Huh what?" Annie asked.

"It just occurred to me we should be having a wee look at Eilen na Uilbheast as soon as we can and I'm thinking these aerostat jobbies will be the business for that," he said. "See what we can be finding before we're going blundering into what could just be an anthrax test site."

"Okay," said Mackie, "Now myself am a lot happier about this whole mine flail plan."

-/-/-/-/-/

On Saturday afternoon, Vrotch turned up at the Harbourmaster's with Vicky, who was toting an aluminium flight case nearly as big as she was as if it weighed nothing; it proved to contain a mess of beyond-cutting-edge sensor equipment that Vrotch smugly declared had fallen off the back of a lorry in San Fransisco, and this they spent half the afternoon playing with, as a result of which between them they spotted no less than six identical sets of those twin girls they'd been seeing since the end of September all jumping off of different goods trains, each and every one of which Annie identified as having come from Fort William direction - and they saw another three sets of them in the course of their Saturday night vampire hunt too.

Sunday they spent installing sensor gear up and down the side of the harbour, spotting another seven pairs of those girls in the process and finally leading Fiona to say that they should probably think about looking into that, only for the others to shout her down again - whoever those lassies were and wherever they were coming from, Annie said and the boys heartily agreed with, they weren't bothering anyone. They would, she declared, say hello if any of these pairs of lassies came into the Harbourmaster's, but apart from that? The entire vampires thing was happening because the buggers couldn't tell the difference between people and food, and as far as Annie saw it, she said, being weirdly identical wasn't doing anyone any harm.

Then, of course, Monday came around and Alice found herself with an overnight bag in hand and standing on the platform in Inverness waiting for the train to Thurso.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Dr Portendorfer was waiting for them when they got off the train - it had been a pleasant journey on the whole, and had quickly turned into one long discussion of the ancient past of the landscapes they were rolling through - this little back-end-of-nowhere village had first seen mention in the works of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD while a dig a few years past had turned up signs that it'd already been inhabited for two thousand years when Ptolemy began thinking about cartography, that river there was the site of a neolithic industry making stone axes, the famous outlaw Rob Roy had escaped from a manhunt in these woods here, and all in the same engaging and-isn't-it-nice-to-know way that made Mrs Pritchard's lectures such a treasure - but all that was spoiled when they got off the train to an air of tension; there were a lot of grim-faced armed men and women on the street in Thurso, as many aboard the ferry, and there wasn't a smile to be seen once they got off the boat in Kirkwall - not that any of it was directed at them, mind, but even then it wasn't much fun to be walking across the town to the museum through the middle of while Dr Portendorfer wrangled his vehicle - a 40-foot articulated lorry with a comprehensive laboratory built into the trailer - through the cramped and busy streets; an awful lot of armed and numperplateless vehicles were out and about and Alice quickly picked up on and joined in with not looking at them so she wouldn't be able to describe the people aboard them - all in, it was a relief to get into the museum, and from there aboard a minibus out to the site of the planned survey.

The plan was to undertake two different kinds of electronic survey - the only equipment actually in the possession of the museum team at Kirkwall, ground-penetrating radar, available to them as a local man had built and given them the equipment, was less than ideal in the soil conditions found at the Ness of Brodgar and in fact in most parts of Orkney - it generally performed better in even, sandy, soils - though it'd provided enough of a data set to actually get the other equipment loaded into Dr Portendorfer's lorry for the trip north.

The first step of all was to mark the area of the survey out into a regular grid using long pieces of string, spaced carefully in a chessboard-like pattern using tools that'd be instantly familiar to anyone who'd ever done an architectural survey; each of the one-foot squares thus marked out was assigned a number to be used to keep track of all the data they were about to generate. This took all the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday too.

On Monday night Alice finally got to hear what had the islands on a hair trigger - the proprietors of the hostel that they stayed at explained that a small army of heavily-armed hired men had arrived aboard a freighter a few days earlier with armoured vehicles in tow, with orders to see to the eviction of four families from a small village north of Kirkwall called Harray, whose on-paper owner, a high-placed member of the government, apparently wanted to build a golf course on 'his' land. A siege was ongoing in Harray as they spoke, and their hostess voiced the opinion that an outbreak of shooting wasn't further away than the following week.

Began on Tuesday at one end of the site while they were still getting the grid set up at the other was what's called an electrical resistance survey, which involved inserting metal probes into the ground to test the local electrical resistance of the soil - somewhere there was a hidden stone structure, for example, would increase the electrical resistance of the soil, while an old rubbish dump's traces of organic matter would increase the conductivity of the soil, though of course 'reading' the results was a skill in and of itself. This had once been a laborious process involving inserting sets of electrodes into the ground by hand, but was rendered rather less so by the so-called wheeled array, a little trolley sort of an affair with four spiky wheels that the varied undergraduated accompanying the four archaeologists from down south took it in turns to trundle up and down the field, going over each grid-square at closely-spaced intervals, which even still took the best part of three days to get the entire site done - in several locations where he deemed the readings 'interesting' Dr Portendorfer insistently went over at much finer spacings with a set of hand-inserted electrodes, blithely ignoring the joshing that this got him from his fellow scientists.

The second set of equipment was brought into action as soon as the wheeled array had began being trundled back and forth; this was a device called a magnetometer, used to measure the strength of the magnetic field at any given point on the grid, with a full magnetic map of the site generated by carting the thing back and forth across the peninsula in much the same way as any of the other equipment. An awful lot of things we don't normally think of as being magnetic, Dr Portendorfer explained to an interested Malcolm Laing, are in fact magnetic; a magnetometer will react very strongly of course to iron and steel, but also to things such as brick, or more importantly to a site of this age burned soil and certain types of rock, and hearing that Malcolm predicted and was proven correct that a specific location near the corner of the field would come up as a 'hot spot'; it, he explained, was where he routinely burned off the flammable rubbish that inevitably builds up upon a croft, as had his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather and so on for generations.

(Malcolm, over the course of the week, had several long conversations with Mrs Pritchard on the history of the Ness as he remembered it and had been told it by his paternal grandparents, amounting to an extensive oral history of that particular small region of Orkney; the two of them really rather hit it off.)

Together with the results of the ground-penetrating radar that Kirkwall Museum had used, by Thursday evening they had enough data to build up an elaborate picture of what might lay under the soil of the Ness of Brodgar, and that got everyone crowded into Dr Portendorfer's lab lorry round a monitor to decide where the last days of their visit would, should the weather remain clear, be spent actually making holes in the ground - they were not, Dr Douglas hastened to add, actually going to dig a trench, there wasn't enough time or the likelihood of continued dry weather available to them during this visit, what they'd be doing was drilling holes in the ground and examining what the drill brought up, with the overall results of that and the electronic examinations so far done going together to allow them to plan where to actually start excavating when they brought a fully-blown team of archaeologists north the following summer.

"There would appear to be enough here," said Dr Portendorfer, "To keep a small army of archaeologists busy for quite a few years, I do believe this is something rather special."

-/-/-/-/-/-

On Saturday morning the air in Kirkwall had gone from 'simmer' to 'steam' - guns had gone from slings to hands, and land-rights banners and the accompanying 'red beastie' flags were flying - the latter, Mrs Pritchard explained, was the royal standard of Scotland, a rampant red lion on a yellow background with a knotwork-cornered red border, and had through one thing and another mostly it being made illegal to fly become the de-facto colours of Scots separatism.

The air on the ferry wasn't much better; several heavily-armed numberplateless vehicles joined Dr Chaucer's minibus in the vehicle hold (Dr Portendorfer and his lorry were on Orkney for another week, along with Drs Douglas and Fremantle; Dr Chaucer was accompanying the majority of the undergraduates back to Edinburgh) and just about everyone was armed to the teeth and waiting with an air of anticipation - and they were about half an hour out of Kirkwall when Alice, having excused herself to go to the toilet, stepped back out of the lavatory and straight into a gun barrel.

The owner of the gun - a stone-faced man with close-cropped hair, clad in a drab grey suit, gave her a dead-eyed look and said, "Stay quiet and do what you're told and you'll stay healthy," in a faint East Midlands accent and Alice was just about to splatter him across the corridor via the very direct application of magic when an abrupt interruption presented itself.

The half-second burst of fully-automatic gunfire was both completely unexpected and absolutely deafening in the confines of the corridor, and as the goon went down like a puppet with its strings cut Alice realised he had half a dozen bullet holes in one side of his face and half the other side of his head pretty much torn off - and then Mrs Pritchard of all people appeared; the adorable little old lady had a smoking 'Glenmoray crackler', a home-made T-shaped sub-machine gun, in her hand and her entire manner, her bearing and her expression, had changed so radically that it took Alice a moment to recognise her, and not only because the person who she had up till this exact moment taken to be utterly harmless had about as much of a reaction to having just gunned a man down as most would have to putting the bins out.

Two old men in Trade Union hats were coming up the corridor behind her - both were holding similar compact sub-machine guns, one of them with a wooden shoulder stock.

"There's not any more of the wankers is there, boys?" Mrs Pritchard asked, and two more old crofters appeared, one holding a Sten gun and the other a self-loading rifle, along with Dr Chaucer, who'd acquired a pump-action shotgun from somewhere.

"Willie threw one of them over the side and the other two are down in the car hold with their throats open from ear to ear," the man with the Sten said.

"And good riddance to bad rubbish, what are Baker Street calling training these days," said Mrs Pritchard with a sniff. "Are you okay there, dear?" she asked Alice.

"I'm okay, I'm okay," Alice told her, and the old lady transformed back from a killing machine into the utterly inoffensive dumpy figure she'd seemed before.

"Well that's good then - I don't believe you have a gun, you'd better take that," and she indicated the one the dead goon had dropped on his way to the floor. "If you gentlemen would throw that," and she poked the corpse with her foot, "Over the side?"

"Aye, I'll be getting that," the man with a rifle said. "Ian, Andy, Doc, you'd better be getting up to the bridge - there'll be a warm welcome for us onshore like as not and we'd better be ready for it, there's a good chance we'll be having to beach the ferry."

Alice carefully picked the gun up, and gave it a dubious look - it was similar but slightly different to one of the guns Nick and Brigid and Nat had persuaded her to have a go with that first week after she woke up.

"Never handled a Welgun before, dear?" Mrs Pritchard asked.

"Once, back in August which was about the first time I've ever actually held a gun, and it was a bit different to this," Alice told her. "I know you point that end at what you want to make not live any more and pull the trigger."

Mrs Pritchard sniffed and shook her head.

"The bolt is connected to that sleeve - pull it back and release it like you would with a self-loading pistol to cock it," she said. "That's the magazine release, this is a mark-4 Welgun so it uses Sterling magazines, the magazine holds thirty-four rounds. That's the safety catch - it's set to safe at the moment, rotate the catch forwards to set it to fire - it does not have a semi-automatic setting. This one has what's called ghost-ring sights, peep through the little hole there, line this little pointed thing inside the foresight ring here up so it appears at the centre of the hole, then place your target on top of the pin and keep your bursts short, just tap the trigger so it doesn't climb out of control. And for the love of Christ don't point it at anything you're not willing to kill - always, always, always know where your weapon is pointed. Now, let's accompany these gentlemen up to the bridge and see about hijacking us a ferry."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The ferry's skipper's reaction to what amounted to a small armed mob barging into his wheelhouse was not quite what Alice expected; he took one look and asked, in a Shetland accent, "Harray?"

"Aye, that's the start of it," said the old crofter whom Alice had gathered was named Ian. "With a wee side-show about some southern nancies trying to kidnap this bonnie lassie," and he angled a thumb at Alice, "On our bloody ferry."

"So what's the plan," the skipper asked, "If you're wondering I've got visual on the ship they've got the Harray families aboard and our tanks are full to the brim, range is nae a problem lads."

"Do we ken where the bastards are taking them?" one of the men who'd joined them on the way up to the bridge asked.

"Couldnae say, that coaster may not look like much but you could easily fit the fuel aboard her to make Australia and her design's oceanworthy," the skipper said. "That said there's a good chance he's planning on transferring them to another boat at sea, or there being an 'accident'," and that got growls out of most of the men.

"Are we fast enough to be catching up with him?" one of the old crofters asked.

"Aye, that we are - it'll take us most of the day, he's headed south at full steam and we're only a wee bit faster than he is, but that we are."

"Well," said Willie, "There's three haggis guns and fifty-odd Strathcarron toothpicks aboard - we'll see about getting them up onto your foredecks and see about giving him a warning shot through his fucking wheelhouse when we catch up with him," and that got dark laughs out of the men. "Then we're just steaming for land, we put into the nearest port we can and it doesnae matter where."

"Inverness?" Alice ask/suggested.

"It'd depend how far south we're catching up with that coaster, but that's nae a bad plan," said Willie with a nod.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"It's all kicking off," were the first words out of Andy Macbride's mouth, yelled, when he came barging into the Harbourmaster's on Saturday a little after lunch - the place was well crowded with the usual mixture of hobbyists, seamen, and his friends' small vampire hunting team.

"You what mate?" said the nearest person to his shout - one of the hobbyists, a lanky skinny six-something lad with a lot of spots, a faint dusting of what might one day become beard, a pronounced wall-eye, and the most unfortunate buzzcut in Scotland, his scalp appeared to be covered in little scars making him look vaguely like an inverted plum duff.

"Hey Mum, turn the radio on," Andy said. "Get it tuned to RFS, they're broadcasting!"

RFS - Radio Free Scotland - was a pirate station run from onboard varied trawlers, broadcasting at 252 kilohertz. It was the primary news source for Scots separatism and the very fact it was broadcasting was a sign that something was in the process of going on; Mary immediately turned to the radio, turned the jukebox right down, and turned the radio right up.

"-fight on the Thurso ferry," the presenter - a man with a strong Gaelic-influence accent, known only as the Mad Count, was saying, his was one of three voices with unknown owners who broadcast on that frequency. "It remains unclear to ourselves exactly what's happening onboard, but I'm seeing that she's diverted from her course and is steaming for the North Sea, and from the fact she's currently about four miles behind the coaster that's got the Harray families aboard I'm not thinking that's a coincidence - more news as we get it. This is the Mad Count, and we're Radio Free Scotland," and with that music - one of the many underground bands they had 'wee arrangements' with - kicked in.

"The Thurso ferry?" Nick said, and glanced at the clock. "Shit, isn't Alice supposed to be coming back to the mainland about now?" and that riveted the attention of every student in the room onto him - the intense dark-clad English girl had left a lasting impression on a lot of people, albeit one with its fair share of negatives.

Annie frowned, pulled her mobile out of her pocket, and dialled; she thumbed it onto speakerphone while it rang through, then when it was answered by a slightly harried-sounding Alice with the rumble of a ship's engines in the background she immediately asked, "Alice, are you okay, we just heard something on the radio about a fight on the Thurso ferry?"

"Yes, I'm okay and so's everyone with me but there was, yeah, there was a bit of shooting and, um, there's some thugs gone over the side with holes in them after they, well, basically they were trying to kidnap me," Alice declared, and everyone in the pub heard Keiko Megami flat-out growl; Jock scuttled down onto her shoulder and started chittering at her. "We're, we're using the ferry to chase some sort of freighter - apparently there's four families who've been evicted from crofts somewhere called Harray in the thing's hold and the plan is to heave the freighter to and get them off, something about firing a warning shot through the wheelhouse with a haggis gun. Tell Vrotch and the Hamster and Fat Bloke and Fiona I may, um, I may have to go loud."

"Alice, be safe, okay?" said Annie.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"I'll be fine, there's a lot of good people here. Just don't get into too much trouble before I get back, I'll be back in town probably tonight."

"Okay, Alice, I'll see you tonight then, just be safe," Annie told her.

"I will," Alice said, and after hesitating for a few moments Annie hung the phone up and turned to face the silent crowd.

One of the old seamen rose to his feet.

"Hamish, Craig," he said, "Get the Resolution's engines warmed up, I'll get Malcolm Mackintosh to bring his bloody big gun down. We're steaming north, catch this damned freighter in a pincer between ourselves and the ferry. You lads and lasses," and he swept a very serious look around the pub, "We'll be relying on yourselves to raise so much hell the southerners are too busy to go chasing after a wee ferry and a trawler. Let's get this land war rolling."

"Tell Malcolm to be rounding up every bloody gun he can be finding and the bigger the better, Adair," one of the other seamen said. "There'll be plenty more than just the one boat steaming north by the time the hour's out."

The lad who'd asked Andy he what the fuck said, "What'd she mean, go loud?"

"It's Alice Liddell, the pretty one who dresses like a widowed granny and has that wee black puzzock," another student, this one from Kyle of Lochalsh and studying welding, said. "What'd you think herself's meaning 'go loud' you ninny?"

"The English spey-wife lassie," said one of the art students. "Oh I wouldnae mind seeing herself going loud, it'd be a sight!"

"Our Alice going loud casts shadows in daylight," said Nick, "Hey Mackie, get the Vickers set up on the hip-ring on the Bigger Van, I'm away up to the digs to pick up my wolf and my panther and Silent - it's time we were getting onto the street and starting an absolute shitstorm."

"Wait," said the lad who'd asked Andy he what the fuck. "You mean you've really got a wolf and a panther? I thought that was part of a roleplaying game!"

"Some bastard who's a dead man the moment I found out who he was decided they were getting too big to be keeping and stranded them on this tiny wee wave-swept islet off the mouth of Inverallen Bay just before Halloween right as that gale was on the way in," Nick told him. "I decided I was keeping them immediately, they're beautiful creatures and they're as tame as that sort of an animal ever gets, I kent they'd been raised amongst humans before we'd finished warming them back up from the hypothermia and trying to release a captive-reared animal like that into the wild doesnae often go well."

"How much," asked the welding student who'd asked what anyone thought Alice going loud meant, "Of the stuff you buggers have been on about wasnae part of a game?"

"I dinnae roleplay," Nick told her, and left while she was still frozen to the spot with her eyes wide.

"... that stuff about vampires," the welding student said.

Andy caught her gaze, and pulled the collar of his shirt to one side; he watched her eyes widen even further as she saw his bite scars, smiled grimly, and let it go.

"Why'd yourselves no warn everyone?" the art student who'd called Alice a spey-wife asked.

"Would yourselves have been believing ourselves then?" Mackie asked him.

"Aye, fair point."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The sun was on the horizon when the coaster's dash south came to a close not far off Tain - her skipper turned east when the trawlers out of Inverness caught his attention, only to find himself boxed in by a couple of deep-water lobster boats out of Wick whose skippers had been keeping 'Strathcarron toothpicks' - home-made rocket launchers - aboard for special occasions.

The coaster's skipper replied to the orders, bellowed by loudhailer, to heave to and surrender by ordering his men to open fire; this was all the excuse the angry men and women aboard the ferry and the varied fishing boats needed to reduce the coaster's bridge structure to a smoking ruin with heavy weapons fire, and they kept pelting the ship with rifle and machine gun until one of the Inverness trawlers came alongside and disgorged the threatened boarders - two dozen angry fishermen and haggis-hunters armed with sub-machine guns and self-loading shotguns.

The resulting firefight was a brief but bloody affair; two of the hired guns aboard the coaster attempted to use the Harray families as human shields only to discover the weapons (mostly knives and things that might be used as garottes such as bootlaces) they'd managed to secrete about themselves, and by last light the former prisoners were aboard the ferry now steaming for Inverness with the coaster well on fire and sinking by the stern behind them.

It was close to midnight when the ferry passed under the Kessock Bridge, by which time reports over the radio were saying the entirety of Scotland was on the street in force but beyond the events on and around the coaster actual shooting had yet to start - there was an air of mixed tension and excitement in Inverness Harbour - cavalcades of armed and farmer-armoured vehicles were doing circuits of the town centre prominently featuring the Bigger Van, the Harbourmaster's had become a sort of nucleus cum command centre for it all, and more and more people were pouring into town from outlaying communities as the night wore on - it was very visible all it'd take is one idiot pulling a trigger, and that idiot pulled that trigger at roughly four in the morning by which time Alice Liddell was fast asleep in the Harbourmaster's little-used top floor.

The first actual shots fired were up near to Raigmore, not far from the fortress they called the police headquarters - a gang of kids, mostly in their mid teens and including half a dozen livestreamers, had been coming onto the bridge over the A9 at the bottom of the Culloden road any time a police vehicle passed underneath, alerted by friends with 'burner' phones further up the road in both directions, and throwing bricks, rocks, and other debris; a police armoured carrier came up from the direction of Raigmore and parked on the bridge a little after half past three, and was approached from both directions just before four o'clock; the protestors began pelting it with loose objects.

It never became clear who actually fired first - one theory was that a vehicle turning onto the A9 below backfired, but whatever the source of the bang captured by all sixteen cameras filming the reaction was immediate - the police gunner and several someones amongst the woods on the hillside opposite Raigmore both opened fire almost simultaneously, with the carrier's mounted .303-calibre machine gun in the cops' case and with multiple 'Strathcarron toothpicks' in the case of whoever was on the edge of the treeline.

A dozen teenagers died on the bridge in as many seconds, one of the livestreamers amongst their number; most of them were killed by the carrier's machine gun, but two would later be found to have been killed by shrapnel from the rockets; the livestreamer's camera outlived her and continued broadcasting. Of the six rockets fired in the initial salvo one hit the side of the bridge, two went into the embankment to the north of the bridge, two hit buildings further over than their target, and the sixth actually managed to hit the carrier, taking one of its centre wheels off - about par for the course given the dismal accuracy of the improvised weapons.

The carrier immediately began reversing off the bridge and the crowd fled east towards the Culloden side of the road while the police gunner started firing in the general direction of the treeline the rockets had launched from. He was answered by another salvo of rockets with similar effect to the first - two managed to hit the carrier this time, one taking a chunk out of the vehicle's frontal armour and the other damaging, jamming, and knocking off-centre the carrier's steering - the vehicle slewed sharply towards the north side of the bridge, struck the guardrail, scraped along it for nearly thirty feet, then overburdened it and broke through close to the end of the bridge; its rear end dropped six feet to the embankment, leaving the damaged carrier thoroughly ditched in a precarious nose-up position.

The crowd almost immediately turned back onto the bridge, heading towards what was now a crash site with some moving to attempt to aid the varied injured or dead laying on the bridge, while the rocketeers ceased fire and faded; within three minutes the crowd were milling around directly above the stranded carrier, many of them hurling loose objects taken from the damaged parts of the bridge, and by the time a quick reaction force - six armoured cars, three armed with light howitzers and three with machine guns - exited the police headquarters four minutes after the carrier was immobilised the first petrol bomb had just been thrown and the attention of a haggis-hunting team, who had been driving towards Inverness from the south on the A9, had been drawn; they turned up towards Culloden and arrayed their gun vehicles on the road uphill towards Culloden Moor, their big guns aimed back towards the damaged carrier just in time to commence firing on the police QRF vehicles; the crowd that had been on the bridge went over the side in both directions, fleeing north and south along the side of the A9; here the dead livestreamer's broadcast finally ended as one of the police vehicles ran over her camera.

An eight-minute exchange of fire followed - the police vehicles were by far heavier armoured, the haggis-hunters by far heavier armed - ending with the remaining hunters pulling back towards Culloden leaving four burning vehicles behind; on the police side, another two armoured cars had been disabled - one's turret jammed, the other its engine knocked out; the cops retrieved their comrades from the stranded carrier, the immobilised armoured car was hooked up to be towed by another vehicle, and they retreated back to their headquarters where they bunkered down to wait it out as of roughly quarter to five.

By this time nearly a hundred people had already been injured and thirty-seven were dead or dying.

The crowd didn't take long to reform, beginning with another livestreamer coming out of where he'd been hiding under the bridge and heading straight for the stranded carrier - he urged others to join him, live online, and they were quickly followed by a couple of local residents driving out onto the bridge in an effort to assist the dozens of injured people laying thereon. The first 'souvenir' - the mounted machine gun - was taken from the shot-up carrier at around ten past five in the morning, and separatist militia vehicles prominently including the Bigger Van were driving up and down the road past Raigmore Hospital no later than twenty past five, by which time more and more people were removing objects and components from the carrier; just after first light at about ten to six Nick Macbane set the wreck on fire.

Not half an hour later he and Mackie were back down the other end of the town in the Bigger Van, parked in the forecourt of the fuel station across the Longman Road from that section of the college, and had just finished refilling the vehicle's tanks when who should come hurrying across the road but a rather harried-looking Dr Jack Kensington.

"I say," he declared. "I find myself lacking a serviceable motor vehicle, my car appears to have had its wheels stolen and it isn't precisely safe having my accent out on the town today, a lift wouldn't be out of the question would it?"

-/-/-/-/-/-

When Mister Kevin D Murchison heard a knock at his door, the only real heed he paid it was to get his Webley - it had been a gift from a friend, Sir Adrian Blenheim-Parker-McMudd - out of his desk drawer and load it, largely as he was fairly well-versed in the particulars of being a man who appreciates the finer things in life during a land war.

He did not, needless to say, answer the door, and when a minute passed in silence he started to relax - then the knocking repeated.

Mister Murchison shook his head. Idiots. Like he was going to answer that when he could hear machine-gun fire from the other side of the firth. The entire town was going up - yobboes were out on the street in force, most probably with an eye to shooting people for having taken what they deserved.

The next knock shook the entire building, and concluded with a nasty splintering noise.

He seized up the Webley and hastened to his front hallway.

There were no signs of damage - of course there were no signs of damage, the house had been engineered to stop a charging bull haggis, there was no way in hell anything that might knock was going to-

The lock went sailing up the hall as the door thundered open and left a dent in the wall, and a slender dark-skinned and ash-white-haired black-clad woman of utterly indeterminable age, she could have been anywhere between fifteen and fifty, and she had one, horribly yellow, eye, was stood there lowering her leg from where she'd just kicked an armoured door's lock clean off and she said, "Kevin D Murchison," and there was something uniquely, indefinably, terrifying about her voice, and Kevin D Murchison realised that his hands were shaking so badly he didn't know he could get his finger onto the trigger.

"Keep- Keep away!"

"I would have words with you, Kevin D Murchison," and she stepped across the threshold, and the door boomed shut behind her, the lock impossibly rocketing back down the hall and into its place, and the Webley fell to the floor with a clatter as Kevin lost his grip on it, numb with terror.

"It seems, Kevin D Murchison, that you have been playing the fool with Clan - oh, but where are my manners? You may call me the Callieach," and Kevin dropped to his knees with a thump, but the siege was not done yet.

"My second to youngest son tells me that my young ward - Miss Alice Liddell - has found herself subjected to an unseemly display over the past few weeks, Kevin D Murchison, nasty little bugger whose daddy taught him that there were no consequences to misdeeds, nasty little bugger who has found the consequences of a gentleman making an indecent advance upon a young lady."

Kevin couldn't breathe, he couldn't speak, he couldn't look away - a horrible noise like a death rattle escaped from him.

"Ah, you wish to say that you are sorry, Kevin D Murchion? That you would very much like to make restitutions, Kevin D Murchison?" she asked, and he found he was able to frantically nod his head.

"Excellent, Kevin D Murchison," she bit out, "Then die."

Kevin D Murchison's heart chose that very moment to burst, and as his vision dimmed and his life fled him, the last thing he saw was her pleased little smile as she turned away and the last thing he heard, the very last sensation to burn itself into his mind, was the white-haired woman's voice, hissing in a tone almost like a spitting cat, "Thankyou, Kevin D Murchison."

-/-/-/-/-/-

It wasn't until they were driving through Culloden that Dr Jack Kensington finally broke the silence that had encompassed the interior of the Bigger Van after he'd finished giving the boys directions to near his home in Balloch just east of Culloden, and he did so by saying, "I say, I am correct that you gentlemen consider Miss Alice Liddell a friend, am I not?"

"Aye, that ourselves are," Mackie said with a nod. "Why would that be then?"

Kensington gave him a side-on look - he was in the Bigger Van's door seat, Mackie in the centre seat keeping a hold on the wolf and the panther, and Nick was driving.

"Are you aware," said Kensington, "Of the... issues, she has been having with a certain member of the faculty? A Mr Kevin D Murchison, whose address of residence would seem to be on the piece of paper I just accidentally dropped into the footwell."

"Aye," said Mackie, his voice slowly going down in tone and Nick noted with glee the way his accent was beginning to change, always a sign of his oldest friend getting angry, "Ourselves well ken that wee Sassenach bastard's been refusing to accept Alice's coursework, but if yourself's thinking we'll be cleaning up your messes for you..."

"What if I told you that Murchison uses that exact methodology to extort sexual favours from female students?"

"And you haven't dealt with it because?" and with each word Mackie was sounding less and less Gaelic as his other native accent crept in.

"He's connected," Kensington said, "Some sort of high-level connection to some sort of very politically powerful gun club down south," and even Nick could hear he wasn't saying everything, which in itself said something given the pit of black rage he was sitting beside.

"You ken," said Mackie, "I'm not entirely Scottish," and his head glacially rotated until he was staring straight at Kensington, who still looked quite at ease, "I'm part Russian."

Then he demonstrated that he hadn't quite hit the roof yet, by pulling out one of the old horseshoes he carted around for his party trick. He tapped it on the steel plate the Bigger Van used for a dashboard to get a nice clear clank to show it was metal, bent it straight with his bare hands, and he handed the freshly-straightened horseshoe to a suddenly very alert Dr Jack Kensington who had, it seemed, abruptly realised just what he was sitting beside, and then Mackie put the finishing touch by saying, sounding like he'd grown up in the worst part of Moscow, "And we all know what happens if you fuck with a Russian."

"Ask Miss Fiona Macleod about Murchison," said Kensington, still sounding calm though no longer even remotely casual.

"We will be," Mackie told him as Nick drew the van to a halt outside Murchison's address of residence; they sat and watched the deadly-calm Englishman exit, then Mackie leant over and swung the door shut and Nick put the pedal to the metal.

Kensington watched the van go for a long moment, blew out a slightly shaky sigh, recollected his composure, spent a moment turning the battered piece of metal over in his hands, then slipped it into his shirt pocket, dusted off his sleeves, and muttered, "Jesus Christ, Miss Kelly's sodding bodyguards, Jack, bloody hell."

He looked back in the direction the ramshackle armoured carrier had gone, and added a heartfelt and very satisfied, "Godspeed, young men."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"What're we doing?" Nick finally asked as the Bigger Van trundled down towards the town.

Mackie snarled and said something vile-sounding in Russian, the only part of which Nick knew was something that he understood roughly translated as 'bitch', then lapsed back into angry muttering and grumbling before finally asking, "What the bloody hell do you think ourselves will be doing? Here's that wee note himself was 'accidentally dropping',"

"Aye but are we believing himself?" Nick asked.

"Well it's making sense, it's making far too much sense, myself's been seeing a bottle of mouthwash in Fiona's bag for a while," Mackie declared. "But we'd better be checking to be on the safe side, myself am no sure if myself's trusting Kensington there."

"So that means we'd better be finding Fiona, aye," said Nick.

"And if Kensington's telling ourselves the truth..."

"If that's the case, well I don't know about yourself but I'm preferring our Fiona without the roof of her mouth scrubbed raw," said Nick Macbane, and that was the sum total conversation in the cab of the Bigger Van until they had pulled up outside the pub.

Fiona was right where they expected to find her - the Harbourmaster's, waiting for Alice (who was sacked out on a camp bed in one of the disused upstairs rooms post her entirely too exciting ferry trip) to wake up; when the boys walked in she was sitting alone in one of the booths and writing in a notebook.

"Lads," she said as they seated themselves each side of her.

"A wee bird's been telling us that Kevin Murchison bugger has been bothering Alice," said Nick, making a very relevant gesture, and that very visibly wasn't what she'd been expecting to hear.

She looked from one of them to the other, and something about her expression told a whole story.

"It's no just Alice, is it," said Nick, and she didn't reply, but the change of her expression was enough of an answer, and Mackie's accent flipped like that as he finally hit the fucking stratosphere.

"We'll see about that," he declared, and Nick rose to head back to the Bigger Van, his own anger not all that far behind the white-hot tower of laser-tight focused rage that was the unearthly strong crofter's lad descended from the last Tsar of Russia.

Whoever Murchison thought he was, he was stone cold dead the exact heartbeat that he laid a finger on a lass that way in Scotland and Nick and Mackie would only be the ones who put the zombie in the ground because they'd been the first people to hear about it and for some totally inexplicable reason that had Nick a tad concerned she hadn't or wouldn't get it done herself.

(Couldn't didn't even enter the equation. You could see Fiona Macleod of Stornaway could at first glance, apparently unless you were a certain dead body with, as Andy had dubbed it, a wee twat moustache.)

He was going, he concluded, to have a chat with this Isobel Mackenzie person and the sooner the better; it wasn't just Kevin D Murchison who was needing a good seeing-to.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Alice arrived in the bar just as Nick and Mackie were rampaging out of the door with a very thoughtful-looking Fiona watching them go.

"What was that about?" she asked.

Fiona gave her a look, then glanced at where the boys had gone as the Bigger Van's engine snarled back into life; they listened as it peeled off from the kerb with a scream of spinning tyres and a throaty bellow from the engine as Nick put the pedal to the metal, if you knew what you were about you could launch the mechanical Frankenstein's monster in any gear and if you did it at the top of the box oh what a show it'd put on.

"Just a wee bit of cleaning," Fiona said, and for some reason whatever that meant she found it really very satisfying indeed.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Mackie," said Nick as he hurled the Bigger Van round the roundabout from Shore Street onto the Longman Road, "If we're going to kill the bastard there's a few things we'll be needing to pick up - plastic sheeting to keep the bits off of the floor, bin liners, old clothes we don't mind burning, jerrycans of water to get ourselves cleaned off, and something to change into once we're done getting rid of the evidence,"

"No we willnae," said Mackie. "The bastard's going to be committing suicide by jumping off of the Kessock Bridge."

"There's a thought," said Nick with a nod. "I'm recognising the street there, that'll be one of those haggis-proofed houses at the east end of North Kessock, how're we getting the door open?" The address Jack Kensington had 'accidentally dropped' was for a house in Craigton just through North Kessock on the far side of the firth, almost under the northern end of the bridge - this along with Smithton and Balloch outside Culloden functioned as Inverness's 'nob hill' suburbs, you had to be pretty well off to afford to live in any of the three.

"Well," said Mackie with a grim smile, "It's nae like all that many haggis-proof houses are entirely crofter-proof now, is it."

Nick nodded, and they lapsed into silence for the rest of the drive.

Both of them were very surprised indeed, on piling out of the Bigger Van, to find the house's front door standing open - they exchanged glances then headed for the door, and Mackie stuck his head and his shotgun in then immediately declared "Oh you are fucking having me on, myself was wanting to be killing the wee bastard!"

He stomped into the porch and swung a kick at the dead man who was laying flat on his face with his arse up in the air, a look of complete terror frozen onto him and not a mark anywhere on him, halfway through the door between porch and front hall.

"Key's in the inside of the lock," Nick said. "Doesnae look like he fired that either," and he pointed at the Webley that was laying on the floor in the middle of the porch. "Jesus, will you look at his fucking expression, hey and what's that smell?"

"Myself am thinking he was shiteing himself on the way over," Mackie said with a frown.

"Fuck this," Nick said. "Let's get the hell out of here, this is giving me the heebie-jeebies, we'll be wanting to get Vrotch to have a wee sniff around if you're getting my drift."

"Yourself's thinking maybe Alice...?"

"No, nae Alice, I ken she was fast asleep in Mary Macbride's back room all last night and that was herself just off the boat back from Orkney but how many people does she ken who'd most likely be able to be doing that?" Nick asked as they scrambled back into the Bigger Van.

"Should ourselves really be questioning it Nick?" Mackie asked. "Strikes myself someone was doing our Alice and our Fiona a wee favour there."

"Aye, but I'm wanting to be certain it was Alice and Fiona being done a wee favour and no anything that'll be catching or owt."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Nick, Mackie, there you are! Don't use the Bigger Van until the shooting stops, there's a rumour going round that," Mary Macbride started the moment the boys came walking back into the Harbourmaster's, only to be cut off by the unmistakable sound of a missile screaming across the harbour followed by a massive bang, and the two Loch Allen lads seemingly rotated on the spot until they were looking back the way they'd come.

There was a thoughtful silence, which Mary eventually ended by continuing, in a very calm and even voice almost like that of an announcer apologising for a commuter train being late due to the wrong type of leaves, "... The Air Force are going around blowing up separatist armoured vehicles."

Mackie and Nick exchanged glances, and Mackie eventually ventured, "Myself's thinking we can be calling that rumour confirmed?"

"Aye," said Nick, and then his face fell and he slapped his forehead. "Oh for fuck sake, now I'm going to have to be building another of those bloody things!"

Not twenty minutes later and post the hasty application of a fire extinguisher Mary was spreading the world that a separatist armoured vehicle had been blown up by the Air Force right outside a crowded pub regardless of the total lack of evidence of an aircraft, and the boys were taking the Albion over to Vrotch's to chase after a few answers about Murchison.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well that wasn't anyone I know," said Vrotch, scratching his head. "I'm not sure who it was, a fear spell strong enough to cause a heart attack isn't exactly kiddy stuff but it definitely wasn't anyone I know, the magical signature's all wrong. Don't think it was Mackenzie either, she couldn't psychomance her way out of a wet paper bag and thank fuck for that, and I'm pretty familiar with her magical signature too."

He spent a moment poking at the dead tutor with his toe.

"All I can say for sure is he must've really pissed off someone really powerful somehow. You say this bloke had been pestering Alice, yeah?"

"Aye," said Nick with a nod. "That was the story we were hearing, and Fiona was confirming it."

"Huh," said Vrotch with a nod. He finally stopped poking his foot at the dead man. "Well at a guess when we find out who brought Alice here we'll find out who killed this wanker then."

"What's that supposed to mean, who brought Alice here?" Mackie asked.

Vrotch shared glances with Vicky, then sighed and shook his head.

"Look man," he said, "Being pulled out of the universe doesn't happen by mistake. It takes an absolute shitload of magic, being very deliberately directed, to do something like that."

"Well what about wild magic or," Mackie started.

“Nah man, lemme make one thing clear, magic isn't, well, magic. There's nothing 'mystical' about it, magic doesn't have opinions, magic doesn't go 'Shall I frappe this bloke or shall I sit down in front of the telly with a crate of Pennants and watch Docklanders', magic is as capable of decision-making as any other force of nature – which is to say, not at all.”

“A force of nature, huh?” Nick mused.

"Yeah man – like how a cyclone doesn't decide a bloody thing, it just smashes things that it blows into,” Vrotch said, nodding. “I guess actually it's more like gravity, really. If nobody's doing stuff with it, it just sort of sits there and is. Trust me man, if you ever run into any sort of magical 'force' that seems capable of any sort of decision-making or self-motivation whatsoever, either it's what we in the business call a construct, basically meaning an artificial intelligence – and let me make it very clear that means it's been made by someone, somewhere, somewhen – or it is being controlled by someone. Potentially a bit of both given constructs are generally made as very advanced magical tools, and I'm saying generally as in I've never even heard any rumours above the level of 'silly urban legend' of one that wasn't and we haven't found anything that'd give grounds to believe it's possible either. Well, that or it flat out isn’t magic – like, say, spirit entities, a spirit may be able to use magic but they’re as much a part of it as we are – which is to say, only by it being an underpinning law of the universe much like, oh, like quantums or something. Magic has rules, it is both repeatable and predictable, it is absolutely a part of, of 'physics', of 'nature', if you ever want to complete any sort of grand unified theory of everything or whathaveyou you are going to need to include magic, and the only thing stopping us fully automating the use of it is we don't know how to get a machine to gather a reserve of magical power yet - we can do all of the rest of the process, we can literally build machines that use our personal reserves to cast set spells at the push of a button - mark my word, man, it will happen and it will happen in our lifetime. It's not some sort of grand mysterious pseudoreligious thingummy no matter how various quack witchdoctors and cult leaders may yak on, and get this straight, they do that because they're getting rich off people thinking that - it's an emergent technology one massive kick up the establishment's arse away from mass roll-out, we just use that word, magic, because it's short and convenient and as good a name for it as any and seriously man, think about what using it looks like, what else are we supposed to call it?"

"So you're saying Alice had to have been deliberately brought here," said Nick.

"Yeah man, basically that's the only explanation that makes any sense and the fact she's a near-ideal Immaterialist and a death mage and how, well, how resilient she is, mentally, you know, doesn't strike me as any sort of coincidence either, in fact I have to say I have to think they're both part of why she's here, you know, why her - whatever she's here for, someone chose her very carefully. Interdimensional portals aren't something that just happens, there are some kinds of portal that can happen as a side effect of enormous amounts of magic being put in the same place but they're always between places in the same layer of the same universe. Don't tell her, she's got enough on her plate anyway and I've definitely ruled out anything having messed with her head beyond, you know, a series of major shocks and she's tough enough mentally that she's damn near brushed that all off at this point, but we've been working with the assumption she's basically someone's secret weapon. Anyway I... hang on," and Vrotch suddenly changed track mid-word; he fished a plastic bag out of his pocket, turned it inside out onto his hand, and used it to pick up the revolver that was laying on the floor.

"Hoooo boy," he said, peering at the fancy inlay on the grips. "Not good."

"What's nae good?" Mackie asked.

"See that?" and Vrotch indicated the symbol at the centre of the inlay - a stylised upper-case L surrounded by a wreath sort of affair. "That's something that's never good to see, let's have a better look at this dude," and he had a root around down the front of the dead tutor's shirt, coming out with a gold ring bearing the same symbol as the inlaid grips, currently serving as a pendant on a necklace chain.

Vrotch said, "Fuck," to it.

"What are we looking at?" Nick asked.

"A Lexbridge Shooting Society signet ring," said Vrotch. "These things only ever get handed out to Fellows of the Lexbridge Shooting Society, read the dogsbodies, yes-men, political tools, and private killers for none other than Beltran Cortez - you've heard that name haven't you man? - and when those dudes get dead it tends to get all sorts of attention. Any idea where Alice is right now? And the same goes for Fiona, I guess."

"They were both over the Harbourmaster's last I kent," said Nick.

"Can I get a lift over, man?" asked Vrotch. "They need to be on the look-out, they're both young, pretty, female, magic users, and Fiona even comes predisposed to like being told what to do."

-/-/-/-/-/-