Menial glowered at Fergal for a moment and clutched my hand.
“Glovis, what’s going on?”
“I think we’d better do as he says,” I said. I let go of her hand and edged around the table, picking up the rifle I’d carried and the gear from my belt. I buckled them back on, shoved the sheathed dagger back in my boot and took Menial’s hand in my left, keeping the rifle in my right. Together we backed out of the room. Fergal didn’t watch us go, or even—as far as I could see—notice. He was talking quietly to the sprite in the stone. I pushed the door shut with my toe.
“Do you want to come with me?”
Menial blinked. “Of course I do.”
I hugged her (rather awkwardly with the rifle in one hand, but I wasn’t letting go of it again) and then said, “We better get out before that bastard changes his mind.”
“Or something worse happens. Yes, come on.”
The big work-shop space was still busy, with lights coming on here and there as the evening shadows lengthened—the time, I was startled to realise, was only ten o’clock—and the ambient light reddened. A few people on the overhead walkways glanced down at us curiously, but that was all.
The room in which Druin was being held was only a few quick strides away. I opened the door and walked in, Menial close behind me. This room had only a chair in the middle, with one very bright light above it. Druin was sitting on that chair with a bored, sullen and stubborn expression on his face, while the two tinkers who’d accompanied Fergal stood, one in front of him and one behind. Their raised voices fell silent as we entered. Their rifles—and Drum’s—were propped against the back wall; mine was pointing straight ahead. It still wasn’t loaded, but they weren’t to know that.
Tergal says you’re to let him go,” said Menial.
“What have they been doing to you?” I asked.
Druin stood up and stretched. “Och, nothing to speak of,” he said. “They have merely been boring me with an account of my sins. I have not yet found it in my heart to confess.” He deftly retrieved his weapons and kit. Til thank you to escort us out, gentlemen.”
One of the tinkers found his voice. “I want this confirmed by Fergal.”
“You do that if you like,” Menial said. “But I warn you, he’s not in a friendly mood.”
The tinker opened his mouth and closed it again. He smiled at Menial in a surprisingly complicit way, which made me suspect that he and Menial had some shared experience of Fergal’s moods. “Oh, well, it’s your responsibility,” he said.
We stepped outside the room.
“Wait a minute,” said Menial.
She skipped away up a stair-ladder and ran along a walkway, her feet setting the metal ringing. We waited in uneasy silence until she returned, the two file-folders hugged to her chest.
“That’s us,” she said. “All set.”
The two men walked ahead of us down a long central passage through the machine shop to the building’s ancient green copper doors, then turned sharply left and showed us out through a rather less imposing wooden door.
“Goodbye,” said Druin balefully.
The tinkers ignored him.
“Are you leaving?” one of them asked Menial.
Tm going home,” she said. “I hope I see you again.”
Drain’s truck was just over a kilometer away. We hastened along the quiet road, the late sun in our eyes. Drain strode briskly in front. Menial’s hand was clasped in mine, fingers intertwined. None of us said very much; we had too much to say all at once.
At last we reached the track. Drain stopped and looked at the rifles.
“Och, I forgot, we have some deer to kill.”
He laughed at my face, and took the two rifles and racked them again on the back of the track. We went around to the cab and climbed in. Menial shared the double passenger-seat with me; it was comfortably crowded. For a minute we all slumped gratefully. I passed Menial a cigarette and lit for both of us. The Kyle train clattered past.
“You know,” Drain said reflectively, “I’ve never before had a gun pointed at me, thank Providence. It isn’t an experience I’d want to repeat.”
“I don’t think they’d really have killed either of us,” I said. It was us who marched in with rifles, after all.”
“Aye,” said Drain indignantly, “and I’ve carried a rifle into The Carronade many’s the time, and nobody ever took it ill.”
“Different situation—”
Tergal could have killed you!” Menial interrupted. “If he was in the mood. It was only the possible consequences that stopped him. You did something stupidly dangerous going there.”
“Well, we went there to get you, and to get yon papers that Clovis makes such a fuss about,” Drain grinned. “And that’s what we’ve come out with.”
“What a charming way to put it,” said Menial, unoffended. I leaned past her and frowned at Drain.
“What about you? Fergal said you were working for site security, spying on the unions and on the tinkers. And that you argued for getting me sacked. Is that true?”
“I don’t spy on anyone,” Druin said. That’s just the tinkers’ way of putting it, at least those three who caught us. There’ll be the deil to pay for that, you know!”
“How?” Drum’s non-denials hadn’t passed me by, but this was more urgent.
Druin turned the engine on and began to steer the truck back on to the road west. Talse imprisonment!” he said. “And assault with a deadly weapon, which is what threatening someone with a gun is. You and me, Clovis, we could sue the bastards.” He glanced across at me sharply. “You haven’t any idea, by any chance, why they kept us in the first place, and why they let us go when they did? I mean, with me they just kept banging on about what a scab I was. What did Fergal have to say to you? And, come to think of it, what are you two up to anyway? I know you’re up to something, and that it concerns the ship. Which means it concerns me.”
I slid my arm around Menial’s shoulders. She smiled at me, then gazed straight ahead.
“Tell him,” she said. “Tell him it all.”
So I did, as we pulled out of Dark and drove into the sunset.
“Aye, well,” said Druin, “you’ve told me all you know, Clovis.” He sipped his whisky and flicked at a midge. “Quite a tale! But I haven’t heard Menial’s side, and I reckon that’s more than half the story.”
We were sitting around a roughly made, age-smoothed table in the broad stone-flagged kitchen of Druin’s house, ourselves surrounded by the shelves of crockery, the shining electric oven and a sink with a dripping tap. Arrianne and the children had long since gone to bed. The back door stood open to the warm night, and the smells and sound of the sea-loch. A saucer on the table was filling up with our cigarette-butts. Beside it a bottle of whisky and a pot of coffee were emptying fast.
Menial rubbed her eyebrows, ran her fingers through the wide swathes of her hair and flicked them back behind her shoulders. She had not expanded on any of my account, beyond the occasional corroborative comment or nod.
“Well, all right,” she said. “From my side there’s—well, some of it I’d rather talk about with Clovis—it really is personal, it really is no concern of yours, Druin.”
Druin tilted his hand. “OK. And the rest?”
“Ah, well, it goes back a wee bit, to when I started worrying about… stories I’d heard about what happened at the Deliverance. Basically, it was that the Deliverer, Myra Godwin herself, had set off something that physically destroyed the settlements and satellites, and that in doing so she’d not only killed God knows how many people, she’d created a barrier to anything ever getting safely back into space again. Every orbiting platform that was destroyed would have been broken into fast-moving fragments which in turn would destroy others, and so on until there was nothing left but a belt of debris around the Earth—and anything that goes up now would just end up as more debris! Now, Fergal is a well-respected tinker, apart from his being a… leading member of the International.” She shot us a glance. “Which is not as sinister as you think! But that’s by the way. Fergal’s in charge of the tinkers who’re working on the project, though he doesn’t work on the site himself. So after getting nowhere with the project management, I took it to him, and he said we should try to investigate it for ourselves. It was myself who suggested we could look for someone who might have access to anything the Deliverer left at Glasgow, and that, well, there were students working on the project for the summer who might…”