HAIRY SCOTTISH BIKER PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS:

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HEADS UP: This story takes place in a deeply flawed world, full of deeply flawed people. It is not set in a nice or peaceful world, and most of the cast are to one degree or another not nice or peaceful people. Expect black humour and general insanity; sequals may be prone to antiheroes and villain protagonists, and more than a few of my villains (including a couple of POV characters for sequels) are prone to massive bigotry of the sort I do not and cannot agree with.

In short anyone daft enough to take it for utopianism or is utterly mental enough to think I agree with the words I'm putting into characters mouths is going to get laughed at, long and hard, and with that out the way all that's left for me to say here is, enjoy the ride;

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"Are you quite certain of this?" asked Captain Randal Locksley, "Our ‘saviour’," and you could just about hear the air quotes in his voice, "Appears to be in a rather poor condition."

The captain was not in any sense a small man, in fact he was both the largest man in the entire Fleet Space Arm, possibly even the Royal Navy as a whole, and the largest man known to the majority of his acquaintances, Her Majesty the Queen included. He stood fully seven feet and eight inches tall with a massive bull-necked barrel-chested frame to match and an orderly beard and moustache as befit his status as the captain and commanding officer of one of the British Empire’s most powerful spacegoing warships, the illustrious HMS Dreadnaught.

His companion released a most indecorous bark of laughter.

"Oh, that she is," he said, "But observe, my friend – does her heart not continue to beat, what is left of her lungs to draw breath, her neurons to fire? Consider the strength of will that requires, in her condition, in this place. She is exactly what we need, and all we have to do now is see to it that she's in the right place, at the right time, to encounter one of my 'catspaws' - who just happens to be the greatest cyberneticist alive."

"Catspaws," the good Captain said with a scoff and a shake of his head that caused his companion's grin to widen. "I remain unconvinced."

"She has the strength of will required to, in a place wherein will is the most powerful of all forces, will air into being as she breathes it, will her ravaged lungs to extract oxygen from it, will her depleted blood to convey it through a devastated circulatory system, even when by all rights she should long since have bled to death or possibly drowned in her own blood. Consider, my friend; if her will is strong enough for her to remain alive through this, quite what might she be capable of when conscious, able, and aware that the destruction in fire of all creation will include the part she’s standing upon? No, she may not look like much now – but make no mistake: this girl is entirely capable of the task at hand."

"And," said the Captain with a nod, "I suppose that it falls to us to see to it that she remains so."

"Indeed, though I do not believe we shall see too many challenges in that. As she recovers ability to function despite the small case of shellshock she’ll no doubt shortly be experiencing, I have every confidence that she can and will make of herself a force to be reckoned with."

The Captain chuckled and shook his head.

"We shall," he said, "No doubt see… you do have a backup plan, don’t you?"

"A backup plan singular? And again you underestimate me – I have three dozen such backup plans, our goals are far too important to leave in the hands of just one little girl, no matter how impressive her capabilities – let’s face it, when all is said and done you are one of my backup plans, my friend, and when all is said and done this young lady is in fact plan... Thurisaz, I believe, where you would be plan Ansuz," and that statement got a snort of laughter out of the good Captain. "Regardless, I do not feel a crisis of this magnitude should be left to chance, thus my decision to throw as many plans at it as possible and see what sticks, and either way this young lady both owes me bigtime and has the capacity to make of herself quite some thorn, which we shall endeavour to see finds its way into your 'dear' father's side at an opportune moment."

The Captain gave a single slightly pitying glance to the hideously injured girl who hung, motionless and barely alive, in the void of a place outside of space and time, and then nodded.

"I suppose," he said, "We may as well get this done."

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THE LADS FROM LOCH ALLEN - A HIGHLAND SCOTS URBAN FANTASY.

CHAPTER THE FIRST: ON A YESTERDAY THAT NEVER WAS.

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There were flashes. Impressions. The sense of time passing, or of it having passed.

Something about the colour yellow, an impossible alien sky, a feel of floating, a splendidly-uniformed sea-captain with a most impressive set of whiskers giving her a look of considerable doubt, more yellow, a great deal of pain, someone lightly touching her chest and the voice of a young woman with a strong Scottish accent saying 'Dear God, he's breathing,' the sensation of laying in a bed surrounded by the smell of blood and oil and warm electronics and a calm collected knowledgeable-sounding Australian man talking about something calling itself an endocrine system with a firm addenda of ‘And as it happens ‘he’ is, in fact, ‘she’,’ and finally an almost profoundly Scottish woman talking about someone called Angus with whom she was evidently quite irate, but as reality reasserted itself it was all drowned out by a quickly-growing rumble-roar almost but not quite like a big jet engine that grew and grew and seemed to pull everything into a semblance of focus as it became all but overwhelming, like a jetliner was right on top of her, then quickly went over her and began to fade a little - the jetliner revved its engines up then suddenly cut them out somewhere in the middle distance, leaving the only part remaining the earthy smokey smell and the woman’s voice as she continued her one-sided conversation with a huff, her speech becoming less and less coherent as consciousness returned until, finally, it resolved itself into an oddly familiar but totally indecipherable foreign language and Alice Liddell began trying to open her eyes.

She spent a moment rubbing at them, before having all but peeled her eyelids open finally finding herself staring blearily at a ceiling that gave her quite a surprise by coming sharply into focus despite her spectacles being totally absent – the absence of spectacles tallied with the near-certainty that last she’d known pieces of them had been inside her eyes, the crystal-clear vision where she’d always been short-sighted and could clearly remember being blinded by something smashing her glasses into her face did not, and she could have sworn her right hand had been gone and that forearm blown to battered ribbons and her legs and left arm just proper off when she passed out – the ceiling was all very rustic and age-stained, great black timber beams looking like someone had taken an entire log and peeled the bark off several generations ago supporting rough-hewn planks, the sort taken out of a log with hand tools, complete with bits and pieces of ancient bark here and there, and there was a faint but perceptible pall of smoke in the air.

She took a look at her hands, stopped, and stared at the totally unfamiliar appendages in front of her. The familiar scars from the times she'd crashed bicycles were missing, there was no sign of the freshly-healed skin from where she'd bust her knuckles seeing off some drunk idiot who got the wrong sort of friendly a few weeks prior, her fingernails were the wrong size and shape and there was no sign of hangnails for the just about the first time ever, even the big mole on the ball of her left thumb were gone, all replaced by the sort of smooth flawless skin she'd never had. Even the proportions didn't look right - too slender. Too dainty. They absolutely definitely were not the hands Alice had spent most of her life seeing upon the ends of her arms.

She pushed herself upright and peered around.

The whole room was squint, the floor sloping, not one straight line in the structure of walls or ceiling or floor, and everything wore its age heavily around it – the room was about twenty foot by ten foot with a ceiling that got lower as it went towards the uphill end, it was all lined in an uneven patchwork of mismatched bits and pieces of wood some of which had bits of writing stencilled onto it, most prominently a board bearing the words STOLEN FROM GARRY DOW CO LTD MALLAIG in black, and there was sunlight streaming in through windows in the wall behind her. She was laying on a folded-out bed settee covered by a thick blanket that seemed to be made out of tweed, and appeared to be wearing a very light dress made out of the sort of cloth you’d make a sheet out of and not a lot else; there was a white plastic medical sort of cuff thing round her right wrist, with a tube leading to an IV drip on a stand beside her bed settee. There was a large honey-coloured-wooden kitchen table in the centre of the room with six beat-up straight-backed chairs around it, a most peculiar set of four shelves made from stone slabs against and built into the wall the far side of it with an ornate wooden box carefully centred on each shelf and a truly extraordinary piratey pistol with several splayed barrels on the top right one, a rocking chair covered in sheepskins to the left of the stone shelves thing, and a worktop and sink built against the wall to the right of the stone shelves thing – between stone shelves and worktop, three assorted rather more contemporary guns (two the sort you might see in the hands of shooting/hunting/fishing types or being toted by a farmer, the third the general sort of thing you only really expect to see in the hands of a soldier) along with an honest-to-God sword of very impressive proportions and a six-foot-long stave of blackened wood, were all leant on the wall in an orderly row, with pegs set into the wall neatly separating them. The short wall to her left, at the uphill end of the room, had a single door in the centre of it and a very square wooden chest jammed into a corner beside that, and the downhill end centred on an open fire that appeared to be burning slabs of dried dark loamy earth – there was a decidedly black soot-encrusted kettle over the fire, perched on what appeared to be part of an old bicycle pedal and sprocket – with another door the nearer side of the fire; unlike the door at the uphill end, this one was standing open.

She must have made some sort of noise in the course of sitting up, possibly in reaction to not recognising the backs of her own hands, because the foreign-language conversation skidded to a halt and a truly striking one-eyed white-haired woman with a very old-fashioned telephone handset (the mouthpiece of which she had her hand over) jammed between shoulder and ear stuck her head in the door beside the fire.

"Who are you?" Alice asked. "What happened… where am I, um, actually do you speak English," and she started noticing what a very dry mouth she had.

"Aye, well enough to be getting along with," the woman said, immediately answering Alice’s last question, "So yourself’s with us at last then lass, you were having us all a wee bittie concerned there. You can be calling myself Grace – you’re in my home, in a place called Kylestrome no far from Fleet Space Arm Station Kylestrome in the northwest of Scotland, and from your expression the only part of that that’s making a lick of sense to you is ‘Scotland’, isnae it, for all that you’re sounding like you’re English," and the accent and content together made Alice realise where the language the woman had apparently been talking on the phone was familiar from: it was unmistakably Gaelic, for all that she’d last heard it nearly ten years before.

"Murdo," the woman declared into the phone, "All that will be having to be waiting lad, our mystery lass just," she pronounced it ‘Chust’, "Woke up at last whilst myself was speaking to yourself, you be telling Ali Beag myself’ll be getting back to himself in the next couple of days… Aye lad, myself’ll be seeing you then," and she reached back through the door and hung the phone handset up, then came fully into the room.

She was no less striking now she wasn’t craning her head through the door – she had long completely white hair – not bleached, absolutely white as snow – framing a face Alice couldn’t for the life of her even start to put an age to, she could’ve been anywhere from fourteen to forty, with her eyepatch giving her a strangely piratical air. She had sharply-formed features, olive skin with several visible facial scars, her sole eye was a rather unsettling yellowy-brown, and she was clad all in black – a black turtleneck pullover made of very thick and rough yarn, a long black skirt, and a black militaryesque duty belt of the general sort you’d more expect to see on a policeman, complete with a holstered pistol and a huge belt knife.

"Water?" she asked, making a beeline for the sink.

"Please," and Alice gladly accepted the glass that Grace poured for her.

"As to ‘what was happening’," Grace said as Alice drank, "That would be the question for the ages now, wouldn’t it. We’re having no idea how long you were abjectly refusing to die before Elf was finding yourself in the wreckage, but from the state yourself was in it has to have been a while. Tell me… what do you remember?"

"I was, I was walking to work," Alice said, "When there was this… I think it must have been a bomb? I can’t remember hearing anything but there was this sort of blow, then I was laying on the ground and I’m pretty sure I could see rags of just… meat, where my legs should be, and I tried to wipe my glasses but my hand just, it wasn’t there any more, then something hit me and the last thing I saw was my glasses being smashed into my face... I can definitely remember realising I was dying."

She hesitated to mention anything further, particularly the big black dog with the terrifyingly human eyes and horrible axe-murder grin she could swear she’d seen with her ruined eyes as the world had fallen away from her, or the impossibly deep gravelly voice she could clearly remember hearing in her last moment of consciousness, right when she was thinking very hard at any and all gods or other such individuals who might possibly be listening that she’d do anything, anything at all, if they’d just let her live, saying ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

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"Well," said Grace, expression in part relaxing, but well what was going to have to wait as her telephone chose that moment to ring, and that was definitely ‘ring’, as in antiquated mechanical telephone bell; she raised a finger in a wait-one gesture and stick her head into the hall, coming back into the kitchen with the phone handset on the end of its cable as she answered.

"Kylestrome 323," she said, "Well that’s convenient – aye Caroline, it’s myself… Aye? Well now myself’ve certainly the freezer space for that then… Aye, and myself’d be more than glad for it – aye, there’s no sense in letting good venison go to waste now, is there… Aye, that’s just fine then… Aye that there is, our mystery lass was just coming round a few minutes ago and as we discussed… No, not a thing... No, it’s no like that… Well, that’s very good of you then… Aye, that they had probably better then. Aye Caroline, myself’ll be seeing you later then," and she returned the handset to its hook.

"Well," she said, shaking her head. "That’ll be making for some good stews come winter, and that’ll be where you’ll be staying settled. Now, myself’ll just be giving your doctor a wee phone call, he’ll be wanting to be giving yourself a checkup before you’re over to Inverallen. Your memories seem to not be too far off of the mark from the condition of you when himself found you – you were in a terrible state and there's no been a soul has been able to be working out how you were finding your way aboard that train."

"What train...? I could swear I remember my hands being just completely not there any more and I'm sure they didn't, these aren't my hands, and," and Alice held up her hands for careful examination, "And I know I really needed those glasses… what’s an Inverallen, what do you mean where I’ll be staying,"

"Aye and myself am," and it would be some time before Alice realised Grace hadn’t said ‘Myself I’m’, "Believing you."

Grace stepped into the hall; she started doing something that made whirring noises that Alice after a moment realised had to be a very old-fashioned rotary-dial telephone. "Both of your legs were essentially as you described them," and Alice put her hand on one of the legs she could feel and see below the blankets, "Your right arm was in fragments from your elbow and we never found a trace of your hand, your left was off at the shoulder, most of the rest of you was no in much better shape and the less said about your face the better, Doctor Clayton can be giving you the full size of it… Johnathon, about time you were picking up, it’s myself… No and myself am no caring either lad, our mystery lass was just waking up… Aye and it seems she was caught in some sort of bombing, she can remember receiving the injuries that you were rebuilding her from, which'd make the key question obvious... Aye lad, you be doing that, myself’ll be seeing you in a few minutes," and she put her phone back down.

"Well," she said, moving the rocking chair to beside the head end of Alice’s bed settee and sitting herself down. "It’ll be a busy house for a bittie then, with Caroline’s son Nick coming over to drop off most of a doe for my freezer and pick yourself up and Doctor Clayton, probably with some of his pals in tow, coming over to be seeing how you’re doing," She smiled. "Never a boring moment."

"If my, if my arms were..." Alice turned her unfamiliar hands back and forth. "How?"

"Pull your sleeve up, lass. That should be answering that."

Alice did, and found herself looking at a distinctly mechanical elbow joint and a clearly-defined seam tracing the lower edge of her shoulder's muscle structure.

"Now then," said Grace. "Are we correct that your name would be Alice Liddell? We were finding it on the odd sort of a bank card that was in your pocket."

Alice spent a long moment running the fingers of the left hand that couldn't exist across the join between flesh and whatever her right forearm was made out of, wondering how in the hell she could feel just fine with even the mechanical-looking parts of it. She pulled her left sleeve up, finding that there was a circular socket - the sort you'd plug some sort of cable into - that had just been hidden by the sleeve right where the medical cuff thing was round her right wrist, and that the arm had an elbow matching her right and a similar mechanical shoulder joint all made out of smooth grey plastic of some sort, each piece shaped to mirror the flesh-and-blood muscles of her right shoulder - she rapped her knuckles against the biggest piece, the one that actually formed the outer curve of her shoulder, getting a hollow clunk a bit like what you'd get if you rapped your knuckles on a car's dashboard and a part of her noting that she could feel it in the clearly-plastic shoulder joint as well as the skin-looking knuckles. She had, she quickly found, feeling in the entirety of both arms. Even the parts that really didn't look like they should.

"That's, yes, that's my name, I'm Alice. Alice Liddell," she finally said when what Grace had just asked penetrated through her absolute shock at the science fiction she had attached to her shoulders.

"Aye, and it has to be said that it seems oddly appropriate," Grace said with a sigh. "Myself am afraid that you’re well and truly through the bloody looking-glass this time."

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The clump of booted feet in the porch and men's voices, speaking Gaelic, successfully roused Alice from her reverie, and looking up she found Grace showing a pair of young men into the house. Both were large and both were carrying plastic bags full of cuts of meat, but other than that they were very different.

The shorter of the two - 'only' a couple of inches past the six-foot mark - was lanky, slightly gangly-limbed, and had an enormous amount of mud-brown hair - both a long scraggly mane on his head and a vaguely villainous scruffy beard that made his whole face look pointy. He had grey eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a very prominent nose. The taller of the pair - he had to be on the high side of six foot six with an almost exaggeratedly burly frame to go with it - was this bullnecked bruiser with the mound of muscle charmingly offset by the smiling handsomely boyish face perched on top of it. He had shortish ginger hair in a side parting and a lot of freckles across the bridge of his nose. The shorter one was clad in beat-up dungarees, a check shirt, and an even more beat-up motorcycle jacket, the taller in mangled camouflage trousers, another check shirt, and a weird homebrew-looking rough leather coat with fur on the insides; both had disgorged themselves of footwear, revealing very similar lumpy socks, and they both nodded to Alice as they trooped in.

"So yourself's back with the world then, that's good to be knowing," the bigger of the two said, proving to speak almost exaggeratedly slowly in a Gaelic accent as thick as cement.

"Aye," the smaller of the two agreed. "Och, where's my manners, I'm Nick and that great lump's Mackie," and he paused on the threshold of exiting the far side of the room - the very large young man apparently named Mackie had headed through the door after Grace as Nick identified him.

"I'm Alice," Alice said as Grace started banging about in the room next door. "Alice Liddell."

"So that bank card looking thing the doc found in what was left of your clothes will've been yourselfs right enough then, aye?" Nick asked, in between the thuds of large heavy objects being put on the floor in the room next door.

"I guess, I mean I had my bank card on me last I knew - what do you mean 'bank card looking'?" Alice asked, punctuated by what sounded very distinctly like a chest freezer's lid hitting the wall on being opened from the room next door.

"Well it was looking like a bank card but the wrong size," said Nick. "Wider, no tall enough, too thin and I've no ever seen one with a chip laid out like that," He started passing his bags of meat to Mackie. "That and there's no any of the usual symbols and such, and the bank name on it is from a place that went belly-up back in the seventies because of something to do with the cold war I think Dad was saying,"

"Gudday?" came a very Australian shout from the direction of where the telephone was. "Knock knock? Anyone home?

"Come on in, it's no locked," Grace bellowed back, and the freezer thumped shut as the owner of the Australian voice came sauntering into the slanting-floored room.

He was a very tall - almost ridiculously so - and very lanky, again almost ridiculously so, man dressed like a Victorian gentleman complete with the muttonchop sideburns, monocle, cravat, and splendid moustache - he had a very traditional black doctor's bag in hand, and what looked to be crocodile teeth tucked into the hatband of his otherwise-immaculate stovepipe hat.

"Morning, doc," said Nick, who was just being rejoined by Mackie, both young men actually coming properly into the room.

"Gudday Nick," said the doctor. "Mackie; Grace," and he nodded to each person named. "And of course the lady of the hour, I'm Doctor Johnathon Clayton, but mates call me Johnno. Ready to have a look and make sure all your implants are playing nicely?"

"Implants," said Alice, circumspectly not thinking about the boob-job connotations. "It's going to take me a while to get used to having those... I guess I'm as ready as I'll ever be?"

"They're built as unobtrusive in operation as possible," the doctor told her, sounding as if this were intended to be reassurance. "If I'm doing my job right you won't ever notice any of them day-to- day, all you'll need to do is talk to a doctor if you have any problems just the same as you would with a flesh-and-blood arm or whatnot. You don't need to worry too much about maintenance, there's a few billion nanomachines in your body to take care of that, all you need to do is make sure you get extra minerals in your diet - none of the materials are in any way poisonous to a human body so you don't need to worry about that either."

"Um, good?" Alice said.

The doctor smiled and withdrew a metal thing the approximate size and shape of a hockey puck from his pocket, followed by a cable with unfamiliar connectors on the ends - he plugged one end into the hockey puck thing then handed the other to Alice.

"Plug this into the socket in the back of your left wrist," he said.

Alice pulled her sleeve up and had a quick check to see how everything should align - the plug itself was D-shaped, as was the socket, and as soon as she pressed the one against the other it drew itself sharply into place with a faint buzz and a click. The doctor thumbed a push-switch built into the hockey puck thing, and to her increased surprise a hologram, an actual three-dimensional image, appeared above it, hovering above his hand - it displayed what looked an awful lot like a common-or-garden smartphone home screen.

"What's going to stop dirt and water getting in there?" she asked as he began waving his fingers at the floating image, causing it to start popping up windows.

"No worries about that," he told her. "CRVGS connectors use induction to bridge the gap, the whole thing is electrically insulated at both sides - you can just wash it the exact same way you would a flesh-and-blood hand. These were designed for the military, they'll work just fine in places like underwater or in a hard vacuum or covered in mud, you just need to poke the muck out and away she'll go... There we go, everything looking good, you've got a slightly elevated heart rate but that's nothing unexpected given the number and scale of surprises you've recently had and your implants are all functioning exactly as expected," and with that he disconnected the cable from his hologram hockey puck thing, paused, and added, "Just pull it, it'll release automatically."

"What- oh," Alice said, getting it, and pulled the plug out of her arm; she handed it to him and he stowed the cable back into his bag and pocketed the hockey puck thing.

"Now, let's get the IV disconnected from your right wrist," he said, removing another flat round object - this one white - from his bag, along with a pack of Allen keys. "And then we can check that you're fit to walk around."

"I... how long was I out for?" Alice asked, letting him take her hand.

"Just short of six months. Your muscles haven't atrophied, we've made sure of that," and she decided she didn't want to think about how, "So you should be good to go immediately without any bother with physiotherapy, but it's best to take your first steps with a doctor about," and with that said he pressed the white round thing against the medical cuff sort of thing, which he then pulled open. There was a somewhat different connector attached to a visually similar socket in her wrist underneath it - he put the flat round thing back in the bag, selected a specific Allen key from the pack, tightened a matching screw in the connector, then unscrewed a knurled ring on the connector and pulled it out of her arm. It appeared to go in a good deal deeper than the plug that she'd briefly had in her left arm; once it was out he tightened something inside the socket with the Allen key then got a small metal cap sort of a thing out of his bag, got it out of the plastic bag it had been in, and screwed it into the hole the plug had come out of, tightening it with another larger Allen key.

"We'll swap that out for a CRVGS connector in a couple of months," he said.

"Never seen a cybernetic connector like that before," said Nick, who from the sound of it had on the other hand seen the other type before.

"Intravenous drip connector, it's what we've been using to keep Alice hydrated and most of the keeping her fed for the last few months," the doctor told him. "And I'm not surprised you've never seen one before, they're not exactly common outside hospitals. Of course, we've been making sure her digestive tract has something to play with as well, but I took the tube for that out three days ago when it became clear she was going to be ready to wake up soon. We'll get everything properly blanked off when we rebuild the port, no sense having any blood inside the arm when she doesn't need it."

"And that's another idea that's going to take a while to get used to," Alice muttered.

"Ready to stand up?" the doctor asked.

"As ready as I'll ever be."

It wasn't nearly as much bother as she'd been expecting, and by the time Grace - who had, it transpired, been unearthing clothes - came back down and shooed Nick and Mackie and the doctor out of the room so Alice could get dressed, she was walking freely and without any discomfort or unsteadiness she could detect; it all felt a darn sight more natural than it by all rights should.

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Next up: Alice's arrival at the Macbane home goes smoother than she fears, less smoothly than she'd prefer.

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Cheers,

Cal.