There Ain't Gonna Be No World War Three, Chapter 7

7. Writing in the Snow

Gigantic mugs of steaming latte stood on the table. Each one bore the message EIN GESCHENK AUS FERNEM MÄRCHENLAND. Ant had no idea what this meant, but strongly suspected that fairytale castles would somehow be involved. Cleo's hands were coiled round her mug like a python round an antelope. Outside, the air seemed to be mostly snow. The terrace chairs and tables were almost buried in it. Inside, it was warm and dry.

"My name is Jochen", said Jochen. "My grandfather is Hermann Friedrich von und zu Spitzenburg. He is a very old and proud man. My family are the owners of this castle for a very long time, since the Mittelalter, you know, the Middle Ages? They were knights of the Deutschem Orden, and fought in the Crusades. They fought the Turks, and the Mongols, and the Protestants. And each other. Later on they fought Napoleon, and the British, and the Russians."

"We have also fought the Russians", said Ant.

"Though some of them are jolly nice chaps", added Cleo.

Jochen looked at both of them as if they were certifiably insane, then looked at the man on the floor and appeared to revise his opinion. "My father, meanwhile...he is not here any more."

"I'm sorry to hear that", said Cleo.

"It must be terrible", said Ant.

"No, no, no." Jochen waved his hands for calm. "My father is alive...that is, we believe he is alive. My grandfather, he retired many years ago, and gave the hotel and the café to my father. My father liked women and -" he made a dice-shaking movement with his hands.

"Gambling", said Ant.

"Yes. He liked those things very much. He gave the Märchenschloß terrible debts. And then one day he just disappeared. A lot of very angry people want to know where he is."

"I'm sorry to hear that", said Cleo. "Did you lose the castle?"

Jochen shook his head. "Although my father still owns it, I am afraid. My grandfather and grandmother worked very hard to make money from it, and they made many agreements with the banks. Grandfather has sold all his medals, and he was very proud of his medals. My grandmother has sold her jewels. We wait now for my father to become officially dead; that will happen in two years' time, and then", Jochen concluded wearily, "Spitzenburg castle is mine. Some people get a new car as a seventeenth birthday gift. I get a million Euro of debt."

He looked down at the corpse on the floor again.

"So", he said. "This man. He was not human."

"Technically he might not even have been alive", said Cleo. "But he was human once."

"He was probably quite a good man", said Ant. "It's only the good men who need to be controlled like that, like a puppet. The bad ones, the ones who let the parasite in voluntarily, can harbour it in their brains and still look perfectly normal."

"You seem to know a lot about this", said Jochen.

"It's not an exact science", said Cleo. "We've only had a few examples to go on so far."

"Luckily", said Ant.

"And this...blue stuff...it comes from up there." He pointed outside at the sky, though there was nothing in the sky but snow.

"We honestly have no idea", said Ant. "It's been encountered on two worlds, both a long way from Earth. In both places, the colony had been wiped out. Not just killed - annihilated. Not one body was found."

"No survivors?" said Jochen.

Cleo grinned. "You're looking at them. We and one other person are the sole survivors of the attack on New Dixie, orbiting Barnard's Star. And we only survived by not being in the main colony when the attack happened."

Jochen's brows lowered. "It is not possible to travel between stars", he said. "It would take hundreds of years. Because it is not possible to travel faster than the speed of light."

"Not in Euclidean space", corrected Ant. "Erm. Imagine an onion."

"Oh my god", said Cleo. "Ant - I suspect that when Glenn Bob explained Euclidean space to you, you did not fully understand the concept."

"I so did too. Jochen - there is this onion, right? And we live on the outside of the onion. And for us, it takes a really long time to travel from one side of the onion to the other."

"No it does not", said Jochen. "Onions are very small."

"Look", said Ant, evidently at the end of his tether, "it's a very big onion, right? Now, imagine that on the inside of this very big onion, is a very small onion."

Comprehension began to dawn on Jochen. "Ah! You are talking about Riemann space."

Fear crept across Ant. "I am?"

"Yes. Topologically, the big onion and the small onion map onto one another, yes?"

"The answer is yes, Ant", said Cleo. Ant looked vengefully back at her.

"Look, the important thing to realize", he said, "is that however far from anywhere you are in normal space, you can nip into hyperspace and be there in a couple of hours -"

Cleo drew in her breath in shock.

"Cleo?" said Ant.

"Are you all right?" said Jochen. "Would you like a glass of water?"

Cleo's eyes were still clearly seeing things Ant and Jochen could not. She put her hands on the café table, as if needing to steady herself.

"BLOODY HELL", she said. "It was so OBVIOUS. It was STARING ME IN THE FACE."

"Is the coffee too hot?" said Jochen.

"No", said Cleo. She blinked, and appeared to be back in Euclidean space. "No, the coffee's fine, thank you. Ant - remind me, I have something to tell you later. Something very important. Anyway, panic over. I'm quite all right."

Ant shrugged.

Cleo looked the body on the café floor over. "He's in his twenties by the look of him...that's a military haircut if ever I saw one."

"The goop can crawl into your brain through any break in the skin", said Ant to Jochen. "Ears, nose, throat, open wounds, and all the holes you have in you south of the equator. Once in the brain, it can either take over your mind if you cooperate, or kill you if you don't and use you as a human puppet. But it seems to need a lot of itself to do the puppet thing, and the amount of control it gets is a lot smaller."

"It took over one of our military commanders", said Cleo. "More of them may be infected. Our people are trying to get them all to submit to a medical exam. But that may be difficult. We're talking about some pretty high-ranking officers."

"In this...United States of the Zodiac", said Jochen.

"Yes. But also in the Royal and US AeroSpace Navies. Who are the bad guys."

"Though some of them are good guys", said Ant.

"It's complicated", said Cleo.

"The United States of the Zodiac are the rebel colonies", said Jochen. "They have declared...independence. Unabhängingkeit."

"Bless you", said Ant.

"And the blue goo, or the controllers of the blue goo, they are trying to start a war between the United States of the Zodiac and the British and the Americans?"

"And the Russians", said Cleo. "There are Russians in space too."

"This man was probably on one of the ships that were attacked by the goop too", Ant said. "The Xenophon or the Spotsylvania."

Jochen shook his head. "I don't think so. He was speaking German." He poked the corpse's arm with a toe, and recoiled as the arm fell to one side, exposing its inner surface.

"Teufel!"

"What is it?"

"Guck mal." The man's arm bore a fresh black tattoo, a string of numbers.

"Gosh", said Ant. "They showed us this on the History channel at school. That should mean he was in a Nazi concentration camp, doesn't it?" He looked up at Jochen in huge embarrassment. "Erm. Sorry to mention the whole Nazi concentration camp thing."

"That's all right", said Jochen. "He is much too young to be a concentration camp survivor. And anyway, this tattoo is letters, not numbers. Concentration camp victims had numbers."

"Those are letters?" said Ant.

"German script", said Jochen. "Very old, not often used nowadays. Those are the letters 'AB'."

"Maybe AB is his girlfriend", suggested Cleo.

There was the sound of an engine outside.

"Customers?" said Cleo.

Jochen shook his head. "That is an air-cooled Volkswagen motor. Can't you hear it? There is only one man in Spitzenburg who will drive a Volkswagen Beetle to Spitzenburg castle when it is snowing."

"Who is that?"

Jochen shrugged. "The man who drives a Volkswagen Beetle and lives in Spitzenburg castle. My grandfather. He has taken Tante Ilse to the town this morning."

A car door slammed outside.

"Tante Ilse?" said the girl, who asked far too many questions, without answering nearly enough.

"Grandfather calls all his cars Tante Ilse", explained Jochen.

"Why?" said the boy.

Jochen shrugged. "Who knows why the geese do not wear shoes?"

Ant looked at Cleo for a translation into English; Cleo shrugged in turn.

Ant felt nervously for the Orgonizer in his coat pocket. Heavy steps were crunching on the snow outside. "Hadn't we better do something about, you know, the dead guy in the middle of the café floor?"

"He is my grandfather, not a Health and Safety Inspector."

A shadow fell across the tables outside. The café door opened. A small, hard-faced man entered. Despite frost-white hair and a face heavily attacked by time, his back was ramrod-straight, and he moved with relative ease, if a little slowly and deliberately. Cold blue eyes took in Jochen, Ant and Cleo.

"Kunden?" he said to Jochen. Jochen's face was a picture of guilt. Ant and Cleo had not paid for their coffees.

"We pay when we leave, I think?" said Cleo, producing Euros from her purse and smiling.

Grudgingly, the old man nodded.

"You are English?" he said.

"Yes", said Cleo.

"Touristen", he growled to himself. Then he turned and saw the body. His eyes widened.

"Ach Horst", he said. He crossed himself. He turned to Jochen. "Hast du ihn geschossen, oder?"

Jochen shook his head.

"He was dead before he came here", said Cleo. "There was no need to shoot him."

The old man turned to look at her, as if, if he stared hard enough, he would be able to figure out what she was.

"Wer bist du?" he said.

"We're here to help", said Cleo.

"Weg mit euch!" He waved her away with a leathery hand. "You do not know what happens here."

"I think I know what is happening here rather better than you do", said Cleo. "We are here to help."

He stared at Cleo again. Cleo continued to fail to turn into anything he recognized.

"You are not here to help", he said. "You are here to take. If you understand what he is", he said, stabbing a finger at the body, "where he is coming from, you are only here to take. You will go now. The coffee is on the house. Jochen - diese sind keine Kunden. Sie sind nicht mehr hier willkommen."

Jochen was struck dumb. Cleo rose warily from her seat. The old man looked hard at Ant, who was still seated looking transfixed up at the wall above the coffee machine.

"Ant", said Cleo. "We are leaving. He wants us to leave. Leaving is what we are about to do."

Ant nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from the wall. He rose slowly to his feet, picking up his rucksack, putting on his cap.

"Danke schön", said Cleo to Jochen as they left.

"Bitte schön", said Jochen automatically, inclining his head. It was more of a bow than a nod.

The door shut behind them. It was cold. It was snowing.

***

"What was he saying in German?" said Ant.

"Nothing much. Are we customers, we are tourists, did Jochen shoot him, who are we, out with us, we aren't customers, we aren't welcome."

"He said 'horst'," said Ant. "In geology, a horst is an uplifted area of rock."

"If you'd been listening in your German classes instead of in Geology", said Cleo, "you'd know Horst is also a German name. He knew who the dead man was. He knew his name was Horst."

Ant shook his head. "No, the dead guy just looked like someone the old man knew. He was the spitting image of one of the guys in the photograph. The one behind the counter."

Cleo shrugged her shoulders against the cold, stamped her feet, and zipped her coat up to a point where she could bite the zipper. "Jochen's grandad was in the picture?"

"Yes. Didn't you recognize him? He was the short guy in the middle with his arm round the tall one with the scar. What does the word 'Jagged Kameraden' mean?"

Cleo thought about it. "I think you mean 'Jagdkameraden'. It would mean something like 'hunting comrades'. Why?"

"It was the title of the picture. It was written underneath it in that old German script. The same as the stuff on the dead man's arm."

Hasselhoff padded behind them, sniffing the snow. This was far and away the greatest time he had ever had, even better than the time he had found all that pig dung and rolled in it.

"I hate to say this", said Ant, "but we still need to try to contact Gondolin from the high ground."

Cleo retreated miserably even further into her cavernous raincoat. "Go on, then."

"There's a high meadow next to the castle. We could try there."

The air was crystallizing into visibility. It was possible to see a long way through the trees.

"Go ahead."

Beyond the gatehouse, the woods were thick with snow; Ant's trainers were soon soaked again. He was sure trainers had been invented by shoe manufacturers purely because they got manky and needed to be replaced every time they got wet.

The meadow was a couple of hundred metres through the woods. It was broad, flat, white and featureless under the snow. To Hasselhoff, it was a fascinating canvas holding a detailed picture of everyone else who lived here, lovingly painted in dog urine. His nose was to the ground; he was sniffing contentedly.

The edge of the meadow was unnaturally flat, and had no grass stalks poking out of it. Ant swiped at it with his foot.

"I think this is concrete", he said.

Cleo shrugged. "Maybe it was a car park or a bandstand or something."

"A car park? We're on top of a mountain! How would you get a car up here?"

The flat terrace went on for long enough to land a light aircraft, then sloped away gently into the grass. All around it in the snow were mouldering red-painted signs saying ACHTUNG!

"Nazis", said Ant, revealing his deep knowledge of the German language, "say Achtung."

"So do Health and Safety notices", said Cleo. "It means Look out! Oi! Careful! Easy there!"

"I wonder why they're saying it", said Ant, walking toward the nearest sign.

"Er, probably because the area around that sign is dangerous and you really shouldn't be going near it?"

"AIEEE!" said Ant, and disappeared into the snow up to his waist.

"Told you so", said Cleo. "Are you all right?"

"...I think so", said Ant, feeling the snow around him with his hands.

"Don't move", said Cleo. "You could work yourself in further. Give me your hand."

She helped him up out of the hole, and dusted the snow off him.

"What do you think it was?" said Ant.

Cleo felt around the hole. "The edges are square...it goes down at a slant. It's too small to be an entrance. I think something big slotted into here once." She looked up at the circle of signs. "If all these other signs have the same holes beneath them, there was a circle of mountings for something. Something big."

“Well, we can’t waste time worrying about that now. We’ve stuff to do.” Ant held up the Idiot Detector to the sky and pressed its one red button. The one red light lit up.

"An idiot has been detected", said Cleo sourly.

Ant ignored this. "Now we wait", he said.

They waited. Cleo jumped up and down unhappily. Hasselhoff chased a squirrel into a tree and barked at it. It was the best squirrel he had ever barked at.

"We should do something to pass the time", said Ant, shivering inside his coat, which was not as warm as Cleo's.

"How long should it take for them to get to us?" said Cleo.

"At the delta vee a Harridan is capable of, it should be minutes."

"Ooooo! Delta vee! Look who's swallowed an astrodynamics textbook! When you say minutes, do you mean minutes as in less than hours?"

"It should be less than half an hour. Of course", said Ant uncomfortably, "they don't know we're waiting for them in the snow."

Cleo trudged miserably off across the meadow. A few flakes of snow drifted threateningly down from the sky.

Suddenly, she stopped dead, rooted to the spot.

"Ant."

"What?"

"Come here, I've found something."

Ant ran over, as quickly as the snow allowed. Cleo was standing in front of three broad indents in the snow. The indents were rectangular, arranged in an isosceles triangle, and the size of an A4 sheet.

"What does that look like to you?"

"Landing skids. Someone landed here earlier."

Cleo looked out across the snow. "We should have been looking for this. There's the footprints of the man who walked into the café, look, going the opposite way to our prints. They start there", she said, pointing down at the snow immediately in front of them, "and the first print is deeper than the rest. That's where he - it - jumped down from the ship. There's only one set of prints...that means nobody else got out. We're on our own down here. That's something, at least."

Ant looked at the indents. "It wasn't a Hawker Harridan. Harridan landing skids are longer and narrower."

"And it wasn't a Fantasm or an Astromoke. Astromoke skids are cross-shaped, and this arrangement's too short and fat for a Fantasm."

"I'm pretty sure from talking to Richard Turpin that the standard American space fighter, the Aurora, has wheels rather than skids."

"So there's an unidentified ship", said Cleo, "somewhere up above us, right now."

Ant did not like the way this was going. "And the last time we ran into an unidentified ship, it was very unfriendly and needed two fighters and a cruiser to kill it..."

"And there's a Gondolin ship on its way down to us, right now..."

Ant looked at Cleo, whiter than the snow around him. "Cleo, we can't cancel the signal. We've no way of warning them."

Cleo thought briefly.

"Yes we have", she said. "It's primitive, but it might work."

She bent down and began scraping at the snow with her hands.

"What are you doing?" said Ant. "Digging for a radio transmitter?"

"There has to be grass down here somewhere - aha!"

The grass was surprisingly deeply buried. Having located the grass, she began tunnelling north, uncovering more of it.

"It's grass, Cleo."

Cleo looked up with a face that indicated Ant could be out-thought by an amoeba.

"It's darker than the snow, Ant."

A lightbulb went on in Ant's head.

"What do we want to draw?" he said. "You're trying to draw a message in the snow, right?"

Cleo thought briefly about it (which clearly indicated she hadn't thought about it before she'd started digging). "How about FOR THE ATTENTION OF UNITED STATES OF THE ZODIAC PERSONNEL ONLY! HOSTILE ACTIVITY IN THIS AREA! DO NOT LAND! REPEAT, DO NOT LAND!"

Ant considered this. "How about just DON'T LAND on its own?"

"Ant, that clearly does not convey a clear picture of the situation on the ground. Just because it will not take as long to draw doesn't mean that we -"

"Cleo, we haven't got long. Besides, it could take a long time anyway, because we're going to have to make it BIG. Big enough to be seen from one mile up."

Cleo blinked at him for a couple of moments, then nodded and began scraping at the snow like a demon.

***

"Got the T finished!"

"That does not look like a T! It looks like an I!"

"It so does not!"

"The crossbar isn't big enough!" Cleo began furiously enlarging the crossbar. "Ant, stop standing in the middle of the D! You're making it look like a B!"

A sound of searing, tearing air could now be heard, miles of atmosphere being barged out of the way as the USZ ship dropped towards them out of space. Ant fancied he could see, through the clearing cloud, the dimmest of glints in the south west; that was the direction, due to orbital mechanics, that the ship had to come from. He realized h had his fingers crossed. He did not uncross them.

"That's them, isn't it?" said Cleo.

There was a vapour trail now. The ship was low enough to leave one, its hull red hot, slowing itself down on the atmosphere.

"They're late", said Ant.

"Maybe the other ship's not up there any more", said Cleo. "Maybe it got bored and went away."

Ant shook his head. "It's up there."

"How do you know?"

"Because God really, really hates me."

The entire sky was roaring now, the contrail a smoky arrow pointing directly at them. Then the contrail fired out an incandescent pseudopod, appearing to bend back on itself. The ship had changed direction.

"They saw it!" said Cleo. "They saw it and changed course!"

A second contrail appeared directly above the first. It matched its speed and direction. Tiny festive sparkles appeared at the end of the first contrail.

"Omigod", said Cleo.

"It's got their range", said Ant.

"They have to know they're being fired at", said Cleo. "They have to notice."

Ant had begun counting under his breath.

"Ant", said Cleo. "You're counting, and I don't know why you are counting. I fear things I do not understand. Stop it."

Thunder suddenly filled the sky, like a set of kettle drums falling downstairs. Cleo jumped.

"Thirty miles", said Ant. "They're thirty miles away. The time difference between seeing the shots and hearing them is one hundred and fifty seconds. Sound travels at about a fifth of a mile per second. One hundred and fifty seconds is thirty miles."

The contrail suddenly veered vertically downwards into heavy cloud.

"It hit them", said Cleo tearfully. "It hit them, and they went out of control."

"Out of control ships don't change direction", said Ant. "They tumble. They weren't hit. They took evasive action."

"Then why didn't the enemy follow?" said Cleo. Up above them, the second contrail streaked towards the sky, giving up on the chase.

"I don't know", said Ant. "But we haven't heard any explosion, any sound of impact. Maybe they're all right."

He realized his fingers were wearing a groove in each other.

"They were a long way south west", said Cleo. "What's south west of here?"

"A city", said Ant, "called Regensburg. If they came down, we should see it on TV. The British and Americans won't be able to hush up a crashed space ship completely. This isn't even their own turf, after all."

"What do we do now", said Cleo, "without instructions?"

"I've got a feeling we're already in the right place. The old man and the blue goo guy kept talking about 'it'. What Gondolin want us to do, I think, is figure out what 'it' is, and get the old man to give it to us."

"Or make sure the other side don't get it."

"Whoever the other side are. Can we get to the Freizeitheim from here?"

"Jochen said it was at the other end of the valley. We'll need to go back down to the road."

Ant sighed in resignation, and began trudging back towards the trees.

"MR. STEVENS! MISS SHAKESPEARE! IF I MAY PREVAIL UPON YOU TO STAY EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE."

Ant looked back at Cleo. Wearily, she said:

"Alastair."