Chapter 345 - 336 — What England Bought I
The gatehouse was a real building.
James had not expected that to matter and it did. After two hours of caravan road and dry riverbed and a stone corridor with things living in the walls, the Eastern Gatehouse was a curtain wall twelve metres high with two square towers on it and a paved yard behind the doors, and the paving had been swept.
There were men on the wall head with bows. There were more in the yard, in mail, and two of them took the horses off Finn without being asked and had the harness off the bay’s shoulders inside a minute. Somebody came out of a doorway with a bucket.
Behind them, out through the open doors, the badlands went away west in the late sun — flat, ochre, enormous, with the notch of the pass a dark line in it about a kilometre off.
The wagon sat where it had stopped with a hole in the roof and a wheel that did not match.
James stood and listened to the horses breathe.
Both of them were blowing hard through their noses in long ragged pulls, heads down, legs splayed. The bay’s flank had gone stiff and black where the ghoul had raked it. The repaired wheel was ticking as it cooled — an irregular metallic sound every few seconds, the rim settling.
There was dust on everything. In James’s eyelashes, in the hinges of his knee plates, along the top of the coat’s new panel. Finn had a beard of it. Cillian’s hands were grey to the wrist.
𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖
And there was dried blood all down the inside of the wagon bed, on the boards, on the frame where Maeve had braced her heels, and on both of Maeve’s forearms up to the elbow.
Two women came out of the building at the back of the yard with a stretcher.
They got into the wagon, and one of them said something to Maeve, and Maeve answered, and then they lifted Halden out through the tailboard and carried him across the yard at a pace that told James they had done it before.
Somebody took the satchel out of his fist on the way past.
It took them a second to get it.
---
Maeve came over wiping her hands on a rag somebody had handed her and not getting them any cleaner.
"Well?"
"They’ve got a proper healer in there and a room for it, which is two more things than I had." She looked back at the doorway they had carried him through. "I’d say yes. I’m not certain."
"Will they tell us?"
"No," said Maeve. "The floor’s over. They’re not a country, James, they’re a condition that got met."
`[FLOOR EXIT SEQUENCE INITIATED]`
`[LIVE BROADCAST ENDING]`
**[GalwayGoblin]:** THIRTY EIGHT SECONDS
**[ZeroFan]:** THIRTY-EIGHT. SECONDS.
**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** MAEVE WAS IN THAT WAGON FOR TWO HOURS
**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** he raised a HORSE
**[CorkClimber]:** 2 hours of escorting one man and the scariest thing was a WHEEL
**[FloorTheoryIE]:** they cleared a floor by fixing a wagon. i need everyone to sit with that.
`[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]`
---
`[HP RESTORED]`
`[MANA RESTORED]`
`[MANA: 3,100 / 3,100]`
Finn’s forearm closed over where the Harpy had opened it. The bruise across Cillian’s back went. The thing in James’s shoulder that had been getting worse since the roof of the wagon stopped existing.
Ronan’s shield still had a split in the rim and a caved boss and would have both of those things until the armoury did something about it. Finn’s left pauldron was gouged to the backing. James’s coat had four holes in it, one of them through the panel that had been fitted that morning.
The Waiting Room did not care about any of that and never had.
`[FLOOR 33 AVAILABLE]`
James looked at it.
"No," he said, before anybody asked.
"Nobody was going to," said Cillian, who was sitting on the floor.
---
They were back in the building by nine.
It took forty minutes, most of which was the armoury, because Ronan finally handed the shield over and had to stand there while a man with a clipboard itemised everything that was wrong with it.
The recruits were still in the north hall at that hour, which nobody had told them to do. Somebody had put a second whiteboard up beside the first. Two of the ops staff went past with a delivery manifest, arguing. The screening office had one light on in it and a person behind the light.
None of it required James, which had stopped being a novelty about six weeks ago and had started being something he relied on.
"Four days," said Maeve, in the strategy room, with her coat still on. "Gear, sleep, and I want Cillian looked at properly because he’s been saying he’s fine since the riverbed and he’s said it too often."
"I *am* fine."
"You’ve said it four times."
"Because I’m fine four times."
"Four days," said James. "Thirty-three on Friday."
Nobody argued, and that was the whole meeting, and they went home.
♢♢♢♢
---
The wind at Shoeburyness came off the estuary with salt in it and did not stop.
It was a flat place. That was the first thing about it and the most important — the ground ran east from the ranges in long low tidal levels toward the mouth of the Thames, grey-brown mud and grey-green scrub and standing water in the dips, and then grey water, and then a horizon with four container ships on it and the Kent shore beyond that as a smudge.
Nothing stood up out of it except what had been built.
Concrete firing positions in a row, numbered. Observation blocks behind them with reinforced glass in narrow horizontal slots. A road along the back of the line with a chain-link fence beside it and a second fence eighty metres behind that, and red flags up on both of them, snapping flat in the wind.
Range sirens went off at eleven minutes past nine and every gull within half a mile left at once.
Boots on wet concrete. Machinery idling behind the firing line — two vehicles, diesel, a low vibration coming up through the standing area that you felt in the knees before you heard it.
Heavy equipment came down the range road on a flatbed with a man walking beside it.
---
Sir Alistair Pembroke arrived at twenty past nine and did not look at the sea.
He was sixty or thereabouts. Grey hair cut close, a long dark military overcoat over a suit that had been made for him, and a scarf he had not bothered to arrange. He came out of the second car of three, took the folder somebody handed him, and read the first page of it while walking.
He did not shake hands with anyone who did not need him to.
Two staff officers went with him and a woman from the Crown’s legal side and four men from the range, and at the back of the group, carrying nothing, two engineers in Ganner Corp coveralls.
"Batch six," Pembroke said. He had a quiet voice that people leaned toward. "Twelve units."
"Twelve, Sir Alistair. Serials one-four-one through one-five-two."
"Not a trial."
"No, sir. Acceptance."
"Good," said Pembroke, and turned the page.
He had been the King’s Royal Tower and Defence Aide for eleven months. He had inherited a portfolio, a dead predecessor, a diplomatic ruin, and this.
---
They were laid out on racks behind the firing line under a canvas roof on scaffolding, and there were twelve of them, and they were all the same.
`GC-12 LONGBOW — ANTI-CHALLENGER RIFLE`
Each one was about as long as a man is tall from shoulder to ankle. Dark metal, non-reflective, matte enough to look almost soft in the flat light. A barrel thick through the whole of its length with a heavy jacket over the first third of it. A rectangular receiver deeper than a forearm, with a hinged access plate along the left side, sealed, with a serial plate riveted beside it.
A removable housing underneath, the size of a large book, which the crews called a magazine and which the engineers did not.
A reinforced shoulder assembly at the back, padded and adjustable, with a cheek plate and two separate grips. A folding bipod under the front of the barrel with feet the size of saucers.
No lights on them. Nothing glowing anywhere. No visible mechanism at all beyond a bolt handle and the sealed plate, and both engineers had made it clear at the start of the programme that the plate did not come off in the field and did not come off in front of anybody else either.
They looked like equipment.
That was the thing that would have frightened anybody who understood what they were for. Not artefacts, not relics, not one terrible thing under a cloth in a vault. Twelve identical rifles on a rack in the rain with numbers stamped on them, and four sealed green ammunition cases beside each one, and a crew of three standing behind each crew’s own weapon in range overalls with hearing protection round their necks.
---
The acceptance officer gave the briefing off a clipboard and did not perform it.
"Batch six, twelve units, delivered Tuesday. Functional inspection complete, all twelve. Today is live acceptance — two rounds per weapon at eight hundred metres against standard assembly, then one round per weapon at twelve hundred."
"Current in-country figure," said Pembroke.
"Forty-eight accepted and issued, sir. Batch six makes sixty when it passes."
"Passes."
"When it passes, sir."
"Crews."
The officer’s pen stopped for the first time.
"Thirty-one certified crews."
Pembroke looked up from the folder.
"Sixty weapons and thirty-one crews."
"Yes, sir."
"That’s the constraint, then. Not the manufacturer." He wrote something in the margin himself rather than asking anybody to do it. "I want a training pipeline paper on my desk inside a fortnight. Certified crews per month, where the instructors come from, and what the ceiling is if we double the courses. I am not interested in owning equipment nobody can operate."
"Sir."
"And storage."
"Hardened, dispersed across four depots, ammunition separate."
"Issue time. From secure storage to a crew in the field with rounds."
"Under nine hours to any mainland location, sir. Six to the three southern depots."
Pembroke wrote that down too.
Nobody in the group said the name of another country. Nobody said the name of a person. Nobody needed to, because this was not that kind of meeting — it was allocation, throughput and readiness, and it was being conducted by people who did this for a living about a thing they had already decided to have.
---
The target was eight hundred metres downrange and it had taken four days to build.
James Ganner would not have recognised what it was pretending to be, and the engineers who built it would not have claimed it was him.
Nearest the firing line, a projected defensive barrier: a two-metre panel of it, generated off a frame, humming in the wet air, tuned to the upper band of what the Crown’s assessments said a strong combat Challenger could hold across his own body. Behind that, an armour stack — nine plates of high-grade laminate with instrumentation between every layer. Behind that, a witness block of soft alloy two hundred millimetres thick, whose entire job was to record whatever came out the far side of everything else.
Cameras on gantries at forty, four hundred and eight hundred metres. Pressure sensors along the flight path. A team of six on the range floor with tablets, and a further four in the observation block doing nothing but watching numbers.
Beyond the target, three kilometres of empty tidal level, and then the sea.
---
They went quiet for the shot, which surprised James’s uncle’s engineers every time and never surprised the range staff.
The siren went twice and stopped. Somebody said *range is live* on the net and the net answered in four voices, and then there was nothing but the wind on the glass.
At firing position three, a corporal called Beattie went down behind serial 141 on a mat, set both feet, and did not hurry.
He was twenty-four. He had qualified on the Longbow nine weeks ago at Warcop and had fired forty-one rounds through four different weapons since, and the most notable thing about him was that there was nothing notable about him at all. He got the bipod where he wanted it, took the slack out of his shoulder, breathed twice, and stopped moving.
The bolt handle went forward and down with a sound like a bank vault closing.
"Position three ready."
"Position three, you may fire."