Rhys, wearing a respirator.
“Don’t take it off!” he warned, and I realised he had put a similar mask on me. He attached the straps and pushed me towards a corner of the cabin. I collided with a table, scattering bottles and champagne flutes, setting off a brief crescendo of shattering glass. Rhys thrust something into my hand before disappearing into the haze.
The mist was thickening everywhere, and already people were stumbling around, colliding with one another, falling. A small group surged towards the door, and there was a burst of firing. All were cut down.
Through the fog I heard more shouts and screams. Cradling the pistol Rhys had pressed into my hand, I glimpsed figures flailing around, some already on their knees, crawling, clutching at others’ legs or the necks of their own clothing. I was totally occupying Owain’s body, and felt that I should do something. But what? There was also the inescapable realisation that if I was utterly here, Owain might have become the person I was in my own world. Action and reaction. I had a flash of him walking out of Broadoaks with Tanya, though whether this was real or a willed figment I had no means of knowing.
Staccato bursts of firing continued for a while, diminishing as the movement of people in the cabin subsided. Most were ="0enmoving heaps on the floor. I could still hear voices, calling to one another, yelling queries and instructions. The Nimbus lurched wildly, throwing me out from under the table, its engine sound switching from a drone to something far more strident.
Already the vapour was beginning to clear. I saw that no one on the floor was actually unconscious: they lay there with their eyes open, immobilised, making little gagging sounds, helplessly imploring.
“Where is he?” I heard someone shout. A few figures still were darting about, though there was no more shooting or mass movement.
Someone grabbed me by the arm and hauled me to my feet.
“Well, major,” Carl Legister said from behind his mask, “the game’s not quite up yet—though you are extremely fortunate to survive this latest skirmish. If it weren’t for your brother I’d be inclined to shoot you.”
Rhys was over by our uncle’s upturned stool, a masked Marisa crouched beside him. Between them and us was a tangle of bodies covered in bloodstains and bits of broken glass. A victory party reduced to a human morass within minutes.
“Escape hatch,” Rhys said, indicating the open door in the truss arch. Inside it lay the body of Stradling. There was a pistol in his hand, but it looked as if he hadn’t had time to fire it before he was shot in the chest. Rhys dragged the body aside to reveal an oval hatch in the dimpled steel floor. “Bolted from below. We should have guessed.”
So Rhys and Legister were in collusion, both working to thwart my uncle. An alliance I would never have anticipated. Legister must have told Rhys about our father’s death some time before, probably trading on Rhys’s growing qualms about Omega.
I saw that Henry Knowlton was also sprawled lifelessly nearby, a bloody froth in his mouth. There was no sign of my uncle or Giselle. They must have fled to a lower deck before the nepenthe could incapacitate them. It looked as if Stradling had deliberately blocked the hatchway to facilitate their escape.
“We’ve little time,” Legister said, and he and Rhys promptly helped me across the cabin, paying scant heed to the bodies in our path. I trod on a thigh, an arm, the splayed blonde hair of a female naval officer whose face had the slackness of an opium addict’s. Below the engine noise I heard the cabin ventilation furiously working. Rhys lifted his respirator experimentally, but swiftly put it back in place.
Marisa was huddled in a corner beside the flight deck door, her eyes squeezed shut above her respirator. The two MPs, evidently loyal to Legister, were also masked. They were busy dragging limp bodies against the main corridor doorway, packing them together as if they were sandbags.
I was bundled down the aisle that led to the flight deck. The corpses of the original pilot and co-pilot had been dumped in a corner. Their splattered white flight helmets were now on the heads of two figures in RAF coveralls. The pilot was a young man, the co-ilot a woman whose face was hidden from me. Through the window I saw two Valkyries of the fighter escort flying lopsidedly abreast of us.
Rhys removed his respirator and started hauling parachute bundles out of hatches. I scrambled my own mask off, the air cool on my clammy cheeks but untainted with nepenthe. The cabin was under positive air pressure that had kept it unpolluted. Legister and Marisa also unmasked, Marisa cowering in a corner.
The woman in the co-pilot’s seat began talking into the radio, speaking English with a French accent, telling someone that the pilot had suffered a heart attack resulting in temporary loss of control. The situation was now stable but Field Marshal Mareddud had ordered a descent to five thousand feet as a precautionary measure. They were heading back towards the coast in case an emergency landing should prove necessary.
Though her voice didn’t sound quite right, I knew it was Giselle. The raucous reply to her radio message sounded questioning in tone. It appeared mollified when she added the information that Operation Niagara had been successfully executed and that they were going to resume radio silence as ordered.
I pushed my way forward past the two dead crewmen under the watchful eye of Carl Legister. He had his pistol trained on me.
“I didn’t know,” I said redundantly to Giselle.
She continued looking straight ahead.
“I thought you were loyal to him.”
“At the expense of bringing catastrophe to the entire planet? Everything has its limits.”
She spoke in a thick voice. The right side of her face was puffy from brow to cheekbone, already blackening.
“Sir Gruffydd did that?”
Her attempt at a smile was not successful. “He’s very useful with his stick. Quicker than you might imagine. He pushed his old friend in front of me so that he took the shot I had intended for him. And hacked me down.”
I was surprised that she could speak of it without emotion, given their long association. All the while she was scrutinising the instrument panel. The Nimbus was still descending, dropping down and down through the gathering darkness.
“Well, major,” Legister said to me. “What is your decision?”
He’d lowered his pistol. I realised I was still holding the one Rhys had given to me.
“You’re too late,” I said. “The weapon’s already been used.”
“What did you expect us to do?” Rhys interjected. “Nothing?”
“The Americans will already be retaliating.”
“Indeed,” said Legister. “Though whether the conflict escalates may depend on how successful we are here.”
“What do you mean?”
Legister looked impatient that he had to spell it out. “Sir Gruffydd represents the extreme of the warmongers among our chiefs of state. He has concentrated his supporters here in England over recent years. Many of them are aboard this aeroplane.”
“Are your men in control of it?”
“Only this forward section. But it will be sufficient for our purposes if we can hold out.”
“Really?” I said sceptically. “How? Are you going to crash the plane and kill everyone? That won’t stop the war. You heard what my uncle said. Other Omega attacks are being launched from continental sites.”
“Not yet they aren’t. Your uncle rather exaggerated on that score—exaggerated the extent of the enthusiasm on the European mainland for its indiscriminate use. Those in charge there do not share your uncle’s unbridled appetite for all-out war.”
“I find that hard to believe.”