I sighed. His politics hadn’t changed and I didn’t want an argument. I had wanted the war finished almost as soon as I got out there. It didn’t fit into my idea of what a just war should be. Pushing Nazis out of Europe had been just. The fight over the Crimean Peninsula was nothing but xenophobic pride and misguided patriotism.
‘How’s the hand?’ I asked.
Phelps showed me a lifelike left hand. He rotated the wrist and then wiggled the fingers. I was impressed.
‘Remarkable, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘They take the impulses from a sensor—thin gummy strapped to the muscles in the upper arm. If I’d lost the blasted thing above the elbow I’d have looked a proper Charlie.’
He paused for a moment and returned to his first subject.
‘I’m a bit concerned that public pressure might have the government pulling the plug before the offensive.’
‘Offensive?’
Colonel Phelps smiled. ‘Of course. I have friends higher up who tell me it’s only a matter of days before the first shipment of the new plasma rifles arrives. Do you think the Russians will be able to defend themselves against Stonk?’
‘Frankly, no; that is unless they have their own version.’
‘Not a chance. Goliath is the most advanced weapons company in the world. Believe me, I’m hoping as much as the next man that we never have to use it, but Stonk is the high ground this conflict has been waiting for.’
He rummaged in his briefcase and pulled out a leaflet.
‘I’m touring England giving pro-Crimea talks. I’d like you to come along.’
‘I don’t really think—‘ I began, taking the leaflet anyway.
‘Nonsense!’ replied Colonel Phelps. ‘As a healthy and successful veteran of the campaign it is your duty to give voice to those that made the ultimate sacrifice. If we give the peninsula back, every single one of those lives will have been lost in vain.’
‘I think, sir, that those lives have already been lost and no decision we can make in any direction can change that.’
He pretended not to hear and I lapsed into silence. Colonel Phelps’s rabid support of the conflict had been his way of dealing with the disaster. The order was given to charge against what we were told would be a ‘token resistance’ but turned out to be massed Russian field artillery. Phelps had ridden the APC on the outside until the Russians opened up with everything they had; a shell-burst had taken his lower arm off and peppered his back with shrapnel. We had loaded him up with as many other soldiers as we could, driving back to the English lines with the carrier a mound of groaning humanity. I had gone back into the carnage against orders, driving among the shattered armour looking for survivors. Of the seventy-six APCs and light tanks that advanced into the Russian guns, only two vehicles returned. Out of the five hundred and thirty-four soldiers involved, fifty-one survived, only eight of them completely uninjured. One of the dead had been Anton Next, my brother. Disaster doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Fortunately for me the airship docked soon after and I was able to avoid Colonel Phelps in the airfield lounge. I picked up my case from baggage retrieval and stayed locked in the ladies’ until I thought he had gone. I tore his leaflet into tiny pieces and flushed them down the loo. The airfield lounge was empty when I came out. It was bigger than was required for the amount of traffic that came to town; an off-white elephant that reflected the dashed hopes of Swindon’s town planners. The concourse outside was similarly deserted except for two students holding an anti-Crimea war banner. They had heard of Phelps’s arrival and hoped that they could turn him from his pro-war campaigning. They had two chances: fat and slim.
They looked at me and I turned quickly away. If they knew who Phelps was, they might quite conceivably know who I was as well. I looked around the empty pick-up point. I had spoken on the phone to Victor Analogy—the head of the Swindon LiteraTecs—and he had offered to send a car to pick me up. It hadn’t arrived. It was hot, so I removed my jacket. A looped recording came over the Tannoy exhorting non-existent drivers not to park in the deserted white zone, and a bored-looking worker came by and returned a few trolleys. I sat down next to a Will-Speak machine at the far end of the concourse. The last time I was in Swindon the airship park had been simply a grass field with a rusty mast. I guessed that much else had changed too.
I waited five minutes, then stood and paced impatiently up and down. The Will-Speak machine—officially known as a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton—was of Richard III. It was a simple box, with the top half glazed and inside a realistic mannequin visible from the waist up in suitable attire. The machine would dispense a short snippet of Shakespeare for ten pence. They hadn’t been manufactured since the thirties and were now something of a rarity; Baconic vandalism and a lack of trained maintenance were together hastening their demise.
I dug out a ten-pence piece and inserted it. There was a gentle whirring and clicking from within as the machine wound itself up to speed. There had been a Hamlet version on the corner of Commercial Road when I was small. My brother and I had pestered our mother for loose change and listened to the mannequin refer to things we couldn’t really understand. It told us of ‘the undiscovered country’. My brother, in his childish naivetй, had said he wanted to visit such a place, and he did, seventeen years later, in a mad dash sixteen hundred miles from home, the only sound the roar of engines and the crump-crump-crump of the Russian guns.
Was ever woman in this humour wooed? asked the mannequin, rolling its eyes crazily as it stuck one finger in the air and lurched from side to side.
Was ever woman in this humour won?
It paused for effect.
I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long…
‘Excuse me—?’
I looked up. One of the students had walked up and touched me on the arm. He wore a peace button in his lapel and had a pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his large nose.
‘You’re Next, aren’t you?’
‘Next for what?’
‘Corporal Next, Light Armoured Brigade.’
I rubbed my brow.
‘I’m not here with the Colonel. It was a coincidence.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?’
The student looked at me oddly as his girlfriend joined him. He told her who I was.
‘You were the one who went back,’ she marvelled, as though I were a rare stuffed parakeet. ‘It was against a direct order. They were going to court-martial you.’
‘Well, they didn’t, did they?’
‘Not when The Owl on Sunday got wind of your story. I’ve read your testimony at the inquiry. You’re anti-war.’
The two students looked at one another as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune.
‘We need someone to talk at Colonel Phelps’s rally,’ said the young man with the big nose. ‘Someone from the other side. Someone who has been there. Someone with clout. Would you do that for us?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
I looked around to see if, by a miracle, my lift had arrived. It hadn’t.
… Whom I, continued the mannequin, some three months hence, stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?
‘Listen, guys, I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to forget. Speak to some other vet. There are thousands of us.’
‘Not like you, Miss Next. You survived the charge. You went back to get your fallen comrades out. One of the fifty-one. It’s your duty to speak on behalf of those that didn’t make it.’