Sister Ships and Alastair - Chapter 4

4. Flossie and the Girls

"The hangars were built to house airships, back when Britain still built airships", said Ant. The Ordnance Survey map was spread out on the large toadstool that constituted the table, whilst Ant, Cleo, Farthing and Turpin sat round it on the smaller toadstools.
"Doesn't Britain make airships any more?" said Farthing.
"No", said Ant. "They catch fire. But the sheds are still there. They're huge, set back quite a way from the road."
"Are there fences?" said Turpin.
Ant searched his memory. "I don't think so. No really high wire, no barbed wire, nothing that looked like it belonged on a military base or a post office in Manchester. Maybe a chainlink fence round the perimeter, I wouldn't have thought that was unusual, most places have that. Up to, you know, about seven or eight feet high."
"So you think it might have a fence, but you're not sure", translated Cleo. "You're a big help."
"He's telling us what he knows, and that's good enough", reproved Farthing. "We can get through a fence. We have wirecutters. What about mines? Do you think there might be a minefield?"
Ant's jaw dropped. He thought for a moment.
"I am absolutely certain there is no minefield", he said.
"How can you be so sure?"
"This is England. No matter how many KEEP OUT signs there were, some idiot would have blown himself up by now."
"Armed guards?" continued Farthing. "Robot sentries? Point defence railguns?"
"I don't think so", said Ant. "I'm sure About Anglia would have mentioned it."
Turpin and Farthing exchanged glances. "Maybe that isn't the place."
"It has to be", said Ant. "The sheds have got to be two hundred metres long. There's no other building remotely that size anywhere near here."
"Well", said Lieutenant Farthing, coming to a decision, "we'll know when we see them. When I say we, I mean the three of us. Lieutenant Turpin will stay here while we make our way to the base on foot. The rain seems to be stopping outside."
"My clothes", said Cleo, "are still wet through."
Farthing nodded. "We'll turn on the Fantasm's drive and hang your things on the primary heat sink. They'll be dry in no time."
"And in the meantime", pointed out Cleo, "I will be naked."
"Tush and piffle! You've got underthings." She looked at Cleo in apparently genuine concern. "You do have underthings, don't you? Things that go under your overthings?"
Cleo smiled back humourlessly. "Female underthing technology has advanced significantly in the last forty years. We have a thing called Marks and Spencer."
"I have seen their catalogues", said Lieutenant Farthing. "Richard always seems to bring one back for some reason. Much of it looks frightfully impractical."
"Yes, I'd imagine you're still wearing some sort of whalebone thing Howard Hughes designed for Jane Russell, that a troop of housemaids have to winch you into."
Farthing ignored the remark and opened the shower room door. "You can stay in there till your clothes are dry. Pass them out to me when you're ready."
"What about me?" said Ant. "My shirt's soaked."
"Boys", said Farthing, "are less fussy about that sort of thing."
***
The buildings were huge, as if someone had built a wall across the world. The cars parked at their bases looked ridiculously tiny.
"A hundred metres of open ground between wire and walls", said Farthing, "on all sides. We've walked the whole perimeter now. That cluster of pipes on the north side is interesting if it is what I think it is." She adjusted a dial on the top of the box she was looking at the southern shed through. Ant could only assume the box did the same job as a pair of binoculars. Farthing was resting it on top of a fence post, looking over empty fields towards the wire that surrounded the hangars. On the other side of that wire, not a human being, not a dog, not a bird, not an insect had moved since they had started watching.
Above them, the sun had now decided to shine. Ant's shirt and trousers were steaming in it like a fresh-laid cowpat. He felt wretched. He smelled, he was certain, worse.
Lieutenant Farthing had left her hat, jacket and tie behind at the Base of Operations, and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. She looked noticeably different in that she no longer looked like a man. Cleo, meanwhile, had completely transformed herself, loosening her scrunchie, shaking out great heavy masses of hair, and pruning them into a towering Afro with the help of soap and water. She had folded the blouse she was wearing and pinned it up to make a thing she referred to as a 'crop top'. This proved to be Female for a T shirt that was too short to cover her belly button. She had rolled up the legs of her trousers, and pinned them up too. She was wearing Lieutenant Turpin's black jacket and sunglasses. Her fingers barely reached the end of the jacket's arms, so she had fixed it to the shoulders of her shirt with still more pins. Ant had never suspected that, somewhere on Cleo's person, was a large and sophisticated pin repository. She now looked like a gangster equivalent of Cleo.
Ant had attempted a disguise too. He was no longer wearing his jacket.
"Don't you think using those space binoculars might call attention to you?" said Ant. "I mean, they're not exactly standard birdwatching issue. Someone could be watching us from somewhere in there."
"Almost certainly. That's why I'm using these. They're electronic. I'm not looking down a set of lenses; I'm looking at two TV screens. The British Colonial Administration protect their installations with devices that are designed to discourage people who look at them through binoculars. Have you ever heard of lasers?"
"Lasers can't be used as weapons", said Cleo, sitting with her back up against a wall, sucking a blade of grass.
Farthing looked away from her binoculars in surprise. "Yes. How did you know that?"
"I have the internet", said Cleo. "Lasers were supposed to be the ideal weapon to use in space, but they lose energy over distance, and they get bent by planetary atmospheres, just like light gets refracted by a pool of water. You can't aim them at targets on the ground."
"Very good", said Farthing, putting her eyes to her binocular box again. "But there are things lasers are good for. What happens when you look at the sun through binoculars?"
The stalk dropped out of Cleo's mouth. "No. Oh no, that's horrible."
"What is?" said Ant. The conversation had left him behind.
"It certainly is horrible", said Farthing. "You can't shoot a hole in a tank with a laser. But you can rig up a low-powered laser and get it to scan a battlefield like a cathode tube scanning a TV screen. Every now and again, the beam hits an enemy trooper in the eyes, and BANG! You've knocked that man out. No man can shoot what he can't see. But the really great thing about it is that even if you set it to scan on low power, people still get blinded if they look at your side of the battlefield magnified, through a telescope or binoculars. Special Operations use these devices, they're standard issue, and our military hospitals are full of people who've been hit by them. We are dealing with", Farthing searched her vocabulary for the worst insult imaginable, "some really bad eggs here."
"You look too much like yourself", said Cleo to Ant. "You should let me cut your hair or something."
"I'm happy being myself", said Ant. Tamora had told him horror stories about what happened when Cleo was let loose with scissors on the human head.
"Take a look, local expert", said Farthing, passing Ant the binoculars. This involved momentarily coming within smelling range of Ant. Farthing wrinkled her perfect nose.
"You know, you boys really could stand to be more fussy about washing."
Ant accepted the binoculars miserably. Through them, the sheds leapt closer.
"There's the gate at the front", commented Farthing. "It's chained and padlocked. We can cut that. We have boltcroppers."
Ant swept the binoculars up and down the great rusted wall of corrugated iron, seeing no sign of any human being. "I don't think that would be a good idea."
"Why not?"
"Because there's honeysuckle growing up the middle of the gate. That gate hasn't been opened for months. Maybe even years."
"Then how do they get into the building?"
"Not through the gate."
"That doesn't make sense. They'd have to accept deliveries. Heavy deliveries. Fifty tonnes or more. The warheads are so big that they have to be built on site from prefabricated segments."
"There's only one sort of truck that can take that sort of weight. Tank transporters. Big military artics."
"What's an artic?" said Farthing. "Ooh! I know this! It's Earth geography! Is it the opposite to an Antartic?"
"It's an articulated lorry, a truck that bends in the middle. And it puts a lot of stress on the road. Up to twenty-five tonnes of axle weight. It couldn't drive down most roads without shaking the surface apart." He swept the glasses round the horizon, experimenting with the focussing dial. "Aha! Now that is interesting."
"What is?" said Farthing.
"Can you see, just to the right of the shed nearest to us, maybe about a half kilometre from it, a house with a garden full of flowers?"
"Now is not the time to be thinking of horticulture, Anthony. Though they are nice, I must admit. I like the way the gardener has interspersed the musk roses with the reds."
"White goes with everything", agreed Cleo.
"Yellow would not have worked", said Farthing.
"It's not the flowers I'm looking at", said Ant. "Look at the drive turning off the main road up to it. It sweeps away on either side so widely, they've put a traffic island in the middle to disguise it. Cars don't need to turn that gently. And the road surface isn't bitumen, it's concrete. That's not someone's front drive. That's a truck turn-off."
"But the house is a long way from the shed", said Farthing.
"You see that line of grilles leading between the house and the shed? The ones that are steaming as if they're full of boiling water? Those are air conditioners. Pumping in fresh air and pumping out condensation. Underground car parks have to have them. That isn't a house. It's the way in to the base. Trucks drive in and out of it."
"He's right", said Cleo, who had poked her head over the fence.
"How do you know?" said Farthing, bemused.
"The house doesn't look like it has any curtains. Does it?"
Ant shifted his view up to the house. "No."
"And no TV antenna, satellite dish, or catflaps?"
"No to all of the above", confirmed Ant.
"Nobody lives there", said Cleo. "Human beings need either a television or a cat for survival. And there's no frosted glass", she concluded, as final damning proof, "in the bathroom."
"It's got CCTV cameras, though", said Ant. "I can see at least three. Two of them face out over the fields."
"They won't be ordinary cameras", said Farthing. "They'll almost certainly see you by the light of the sun in daytime, and by your own body heat after dark."
The fields around the house were deserted, populated only by grazing sheep. Ant flicked the binoculars down onto the sheep. They were fat sheep, identical in every respect. There were no rams, and no lambs. He watched his target sheep for what seemed an age until, eventually, its head dipped down to the ground and began cropping grass, green blades flying from its jaws like cuttings from a lawnmower. All this seemed, to Ant, to be perfectly acceptable sheep behaviour.
"I have", he announced, lowering the binoculars, "a way in. We will need Lieutenant Turpin. And pins. And a diversion."
***
"I still don't see why it's me who has to do this", said Cleo out of the corner of her mouth, walking with difficulty in Lieutenant Farthing's comparatively enormous trousers, feeling like Charlie Chaplin.
"You have superior knowledge of the Bible", said Lieutenant Turpin out of the opposite corner of his own mouth as they approached the house.
Ant and Cleo had been right about the house. The whole site was designed, not around the house, but around the driveway. A concrete approach road wide enough for trucks and spotted with old diesel oil stains swept up to the house, where it dropped down a shallow ramp to a garage door far too big for cars, built into the house's basement. The house itself was hardly the size of Cleo's grandmother's bungalow. It looked smaller than its own garage. Parked next to it in a set of bays marked out with white paint were no less than three cars, each with a paint job that made the metalwork gleam like black glass. Two were Vauxhalls, and the third was a vehicle Cleo had seen before many times - once in real life, and many times after that in nightmares. It was the sort of car people either got married or assassinated in, massive and substantial, night-dark wings sweeping in curves around its wheel arches. The front of the car glittered with an acreage of chrome on headlights, grille, and bumper. All three cars were parked picture-straightener-perfect between the white lines.
"Erm. We might want to reconsider this", said Cleo, stopping short of the house.
"Why?" said Turpin.
"Because I know who's here. I've met him before."
Turpin turned and looked at the car.
"Oh", he said. "Him. Yes, he has one of those. Could this not just be someone else's, though?"
"I looked it up. It's a Lagonda Three-Litre. It was built between 1953 and 1958. There are only twenty left like it in the world."
"Well", said Turpin, "if he's here, that about proves that this is a military base."
"I knew that already", said Cleo. "Nobody marks out parking spaces on their own front drive...If I don't make it out of here alive, remember to tell my Sunday School teacher that someone admitted they knew less about the Bible than I did."
"By comparison with me", said Turpin, ringing the doorbell, "you're the Archbishop of Canterbury. My knowledge of the Bible is as follows: World made in seven days, man made, woman made of man, man eats apple, man loses Paradise. Then a good deal of begetting and smiting, then two of every animal sail around in a big boat for some reason. Jonah is thrown off the boat and eaten by a fish which burps him up in Nineveh -"
"By a fish?" said Cleo, who had thought it was a whale.
"Fish are loyal servants of the LORD", explained Turpin. "Logically, they must be, otherwise the LORD would have seen fit to wipe them out in the Flood along with all those sinful dinosaurs. Father Serafino is very firm on that point; he claims he receives divine revelations from his goldfish. In any case, I believe I'm about halfway through the Bible by now...Whilst the big boat's sailing around full of all the wildlife, Moses solves the same aquatic survival problem by parting the sea, then leads the Israelites all over the shop..."
The lights in the house were on. The sounds of a television set were coming from inside it.
"Don't you recognise it?" beamed Turpin.
Cleo shrugged.
"It's Stars on Sunday", said Turpin. "Call yourself a Christian?"
"If you recognize it", said Cleo, "I think it's likely someone hasn't changed their loop tape for a very long time."
The door opened. Lieutenant Turpin beamed his very best Sunday smile.
"Good afternoon", he said. "May we interest you in God?"
***
"Remind me", said Lieutenant Farthing, "why it's us that have to do this?"
"Because we need a diversion", whispered Ant, crawling with what he hoped was cat-like stealth across the field. "And if you take the sunglasses off a Man In Black, you have a man who's knocking on your door on a Sunday morning to convert you to Christianity."
Behind him, Farthing was just about managing hippopotamus-like stealth. Ant wished he had not told her that sheep went to the toilet just like humans. Night was falling, and a meadow full of sheep became, after dark, an evil-smelling minefield, particularly if you were moving on all fours.
The nearest sheep stood chewing the cud, looking upward at the sunset, for about six seconds. Then, it dipped its head downward into the grass, and grass began flying from its incisors. Ant sidled up alongside the sheep, feeling faintly ridiculous. Five seconds or so passed, and the sheep began to move forwards, drifting slightly closer to the house. Ant moved with it, keeping it between the house and him.
"Anthony", whispered Lieutenant Farthing, "are you sure this plan is going to work? I mean, it relies, basically, on the sheep wanting to walk in the direction we want them to walk in."
"You stick behind a sheep that's going your way", hissed Ant in annoyance, "and when it stops going your way, you switch to one that is. We have been through this."
Lieutenant Farthing moved up behind him, keeping pace with her own sheep with difficulty due to the fact that she was giving the ground in front of her more attention than the sheep. "We're lucky these sheep don't seem to, well, go very often."
"Sheep go all the time", said Ant. "They just don't think about it,GLOSSOP out it comes. You've probably just been lucky so far." Ant had to admit, though, that his hands were moving through piles of grass clippings when he had been expecting sheep dung. His sheep looked up, chewing the cud, for another six seconds, then dipped its head for another five seconds of chewing, then started to move forward again. This was going to work. They were wolves among sheep, moving slowly inwards towards the base entrance, invisible to the security cameras.
"Anthony". Ant was eyeing a faster-moving ingoing sheep about to cross his path, but was put off his stroke by Lieutenant Farthing.
"What is it now?"
"I was under the impression sheep ate grass."
He looked at the Number-One-cut field stretching out around them. "Your point being?"
"Well, why do they keep leaving it behind them?"
Ant's skin went as cold as if all the air had been sucked out of the world. He realized, suddenly, that he was not a wolf among sheep. He was a wolf surrounded by sheep. Placidly munching herbivores were boxing him in like big trucks surrounding a foolish driver in the slow lane.
"I'm right, aren't I? Anthony?"
"Lieutenant Farthing", he croaked, "I don't think these are really sheep."
In front of him, six seconds having passed, a head dipped down to ground level. Now he was listening for it, he heard the faintest whirr of electric motors as it dipped. As it cropped the grass, he heard a hum of motorized blades. Behind him, he looked back to see Lieutenant Farthing, similarly surrounded.
"Anthony", said Farthing, "I'm very disappointed."
His heart battered itself suicidally against the walls of his ribcage. He wanted to die. He heard a small, pathetic voice say: "Well, I'm a town kid. How am I supposed to know how sheep work?" and the voice was his.
The sheep were now formed up around him in a military phalanx, cubing him in walls of wool. The wool, he was now dismally aware, did not smell of wool. It smelled more like unwashed polyester. He looked into the eyes of the sheep behind him. Inside the glassy eyes, at this close range, he saw camera irises expanding and contracting. The sheep spoke to him, and it said: "...testing testing testing...Can you hear me out there, Intruder?"
Miserably, Ant nodded his head.
"Jolly good. You are looking at the Vickers Ferguson Robosheep Mark Four. The Mark One was a wool-less prototype, the Mark Two had overheating difficulties and tended to explode, and the Mark Three used to mistakenly identify baling wire as grass. This is the Mark Four. All major development difficulties have been ironed out; it is a superior artificial sheep product. Ideal for reconnaissance, superb for security. Who would suspect a sheep? It has been stress tested at temperatures of one hundred below zero and three hundred above. It has also been vibrated in an armature at a frequency of five thousand r.p.m., and proven resistant to small arms fire up to 7.62 millimetres. It can be airdropped into enemy territory from a height of one mile. It identifies grass as grass ninety-nine times out of a hundred, significantly outperforming real sheep, and only ever explodes when we want it to. Do not attempt to run. Do not attempt to resist. Do not behave like grass." There was an ominous snipping sound. "The Mark Four's designers also introduced teeth capable of cutting baling wire just in case of accident. Flossie and the girls are bringing you in."