The UnTied Kingdom (2 page)

Chapter Two

‘Sir! Sir, are you all right?’

That was Tallulah. Grimly, Harker dropped to the stony shore under the Tower’s walls and let the body over his shoulder flop on the pebbles.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Get a doctor, would you?’

She peered closer at the limp body. ‘Is it – is it a person? Is it alive?’

Harker, busy performing mouth-to-mouth and trying not to think about what the drowned woman would be coughing up if she was still alive, didn’t bother to answer. In the background, people were shouting. The guards on the walls had seen him dive into the river and come out with some sort of bedraggled alien.

Well, it wasn’t an alien, Harker was pretty sure. It was a human woman, and she – yes, there she went, coughing up river water through blue lips.

He rolled on to his back and fought the urge to throw up. Who knew what he’d ingested in the Thames’ foetid depths?

People were streaming out of the South Gate now, and a guy with a stethoscope flung over his pyjamas was kneeling by the unconscious woman.

‘She all right?’ Harker said, and the doctor nodded.

‘I think so. We need to get her inside. Can I get a stretcher?’

‘Dunno,’ Harker said, mostly to himself. ‘Can you?’ Patting his pockets, he found his cigarettes – a soggy, unsmokable mess. Dammit. Well, if he couldn’t have a quiet smoke, he’d have a quiet nap instead.

He lay back, closed his eyes, and tried to block out all the noise and the light. It was a trick he’d perfected after years on campaign. These days he could sleep anywhere, any time.

Then a foot prodded his ribs, and he opened one eye, grumpily.

‘Well, then, hero,’ Saskia said, her face demonic in the torchlight. ‘I suppose you’ll be needing medical attention, too?’

Harker waved a hand. Truth be told, he was so wet and cold he was beginning to worry about his extremities. ‘Get me a packet of smokes and I’ll survive,’ he said.

‘I think we can run to that.’ Saskia extended a hand. ‘Come on. Wheeler wants to see you.’

Harker groaned. ‘Why? What’d I do?’

Saskia just glared at him.

‘Oh, right.’ Ignoring her hand, he hauled himself upright. ‘Let’s go and face the fun, then.’

Dripping wet, he squelched through the gate after Saskia and gave the guard there a damp salute.

‘Sir, is it true you pulled an alien from the river?’

Harker rolled his eyes at Saskia. ‘Yep. Blue skin, it had, and one giant wing.’

The young man’s eyes were enormous. ‘Gosh!’

‘Yep.’

‘That wasn’t necessary,’ Saskia said, as they made their way to the General’s quarters next to the mess.

‘Yeah, but it was fun,’ Harker said, looking back at the trail of puddles behind him. A slight commotion at the gates heralded the stretcher, complete with blue-skinned alien, but sadly minus any wings.

‘You never take anything seriously, Harker,’ Saskia said, stepping out of the way of a guard patrol on their way past the White Tower.

‘Nope,’ he said, knowing it infuriated her when he didn’t rise to the bait.

‘That’s probably why you’re still only a major,’ she said, which was an unusually low blow. Harker wondered what he’d done, specifically, today, to make her so angry.

‘Probably,’ he said, and grinned in the gloom as her scowl intensified.

General Wheeler’s office was attached to her quarters in Martin Tower. When the army had moved in, rooms were offered in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings and the White Tower, but General Wheeler had been keen to make the point that the army was not here to stay, and so had taken up temporary lodgings in one of the more luxurious towers.

Harker privately considered that five years was a pretty rubbish sort of temporary, but hadn’t seen any point in saying so.

He dripped up the worn stone stairs to her office, and stood at attention.

‘Ah, Major,’ the General said. ‘At ease. Do take a seat.’

Harker, contrary to his bones, remained standing. Saskia, looking thunderous, sat down. General Wheeler finished writing whatever terribly important document she’d been working on, and set it aside. Her pale blue eyes fixed on Harker like a searchlight.

‘And how is our alien?’

How does she
know
?
Harker wondered.
It happened five minutes ago
. ‘Still breathing, sir, although not knowing much about aliens I’m not sure if that’s healthy or not.’

‘I really don’t think–’ Saskia began.

‘One eyewitness reports that it was, in fact, a dragon,’ Wheeler said, glancing at a document.

‘No, sir. Not enough wings,’ Harker said, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Or scales.’

‘Really?’ Saskia snapped. ‘And how many dragons do you know?’

Oh, come on, she’s giving you that one.
Harker paused for a delicious second, avoiding Wheeler’s gaze, then said, ‘Oh, a few, Colonel. A few.’

Saskia made a growling noise in the back of her throat.

‘Of course, several watchers thought it was merely a large bird,’ Wheeler said, ignoring this.

‘Still not enough wings, sir, and too many appendages of the arm variety.’

‘But you have no argument with the hypothesis that it may be an alien?’

‘No sir. Happy with that, sir.’

‘And this is because …?’

‘Blue skin, sir,’ Harker said promptly, while Saskia made a noise of impatience. ‘Not a natural colour among humans, sir.’

‘Of course not,’ Wheeler said. She scanned another document – Harker was under the belief she kept a few lying around to make you think she had notes on everything – and added, ‘Unless said human has been in a freezing river.’

‘Werrl,’ Harker said expansively, ‘if we’re going to look at it that way …’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ Saskia exploded. ‘It was clearly a human being in one of those flying machines.’

‘An aeroplane?’ Wheeler said.

‘No sir,’ Harker said. ‘I think it was a glider, sir.’

‘You think, Major? And what do you know on the subject of aeronautics?’

Absolutely nothing, but he’d been listening idly in the mess the other day while a couple of engineers discussed the topic eagerly. If only for want of money, they’d moaned, we could be flying in the air, and that’d show the Coalitionists who was boss! Harker had smiled and declined to comment, because personally he figured that flying in the air would just give the Coalitionists something else to aim at.

‘Unfortunately, sir, it’s impossible to be certain,’ he said. ‘Reason being, that flying apparatus is now at the bottom of the river.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Had to cut it off her, sir. Current had hold of it.’

‘So it’s a female alien then, is it?’ Saskia said sourly.

‘Indeed it is,’ Harker said, smiling at her.

‘Harker, please stop being so silly. You saw her closer than anyone else, you know she’s a human being–’

‘Who fell out of the sky in a country where the only thing coming from the clouds is rain,’ Harker said. ‘Makes her a pretty foreign body in my book. Sir.’

She scowled at the ‘sir’.

‘An illegal alien, Harker?’ Wheeler said.

‘Well, I dunno if flying is exactly illegal in this country, sir,’ Harker said. ‘So far as I know, we ain’t never arrested a bird for it, but I don’t expect we allow people to go around doing it, either.’

‘We do have pilots, Harker,’ Saskia said reprovingly.

‘Either of ’em missing, sir?’

General Wheeler gave a faint smile. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ she said, and Harker knew that if Wheeler didn’t know something, then it wasn’t knowable. ‘Well, then, Major Harker. It seems clear to me that what we have is no more than an aeronaut blown off course. Naturally,’ she went on, before Saskia had even opened her mouth to object, ‘since we have very little in the way of an aviation industry, I expect you to investigate where she came from and why. It is entirely possible that she is a spy.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Saskia said eagerly. ‘I can conduct the investigation–’

‘Colonel, you have much more important things to do,’ said Wheeler. ‘This is clearly a matter for the good people at St James.’ She let her searchbeam gaze settle on Harker, who shifted damply and sighed. St James. Hell.

‘I’ll see to it in the morning, sir,’ he said.

‘Do,’ Wheeler said, turning her attention back to her desk in that way Saskia had begin emulating. ‘Do.’

Outside, someone was doing construction work. Or maybe firing a gun. Eve thought that was unlikely, but then she did live in Mitcham.

Her head throbbed. Her throat was on fire. She hurt in places she didn’t know she had.

‘Ow,’ she croaked.

‘Oh, you’re awake.’

An unfamiliar voice. Eve cranked open an eyeball and was presented with an equally unfamiliar face, topping a white coat.

‘Apparently,’ she rasped.

‘How do you feel?’

She considered. ‘Like I just got slapped by a really, really big hand,’ she said, and the doctor grinned, handing her a small glass of water.

‘Well, I wouldn’t call the river a hand, but “slapped” is probably about right.’

Eve closed her eyes. Hell, yes. The paraglider. The river. The–

‘What the hell happened?’ she said. ‘It was clear blue sky when I set off. Did a storm fly in or something? It just seemed to switch, bang, like day into night.’

The doctor shrugged. He was scribbling things on a chart by her bed. ‘Don’t ask me about weather,’ he said. ‘You were lucky the Major saw you fall.’

‘Major?’

‘Major Harker, miss. He swam in and pulled you out.’

‘Oh,’ Eve said. ‘Well, I … I guess I ought to thank him.’ She made to push the covers back and get out of the high-sided bed, but as she moved her right foot her ankle gave a throb. ‘Ow!’

‘Yes. It’s a bad sprain. Try not to move it too much.’

Eve’s head felt like someone had filled it with lukewarm water, but a pertinent thought managed to swim to the surface. There was a curtain pulled partway around her bed, blocking off a lot of the room from her view, but what she could see of it looked rather … old-fashioned. The walls and cupboards were painted a sort of jaundiced yellow. It looked like the biology lab at her old school.

Her gaze flickered back to the doctor, who looked terribly young. His lab coat was too small for his gangly frame and an inch of wrist was exposed by each sleeve. Under the coat, he appeared to be wearing khaki.

Industrial paint. Major. Khaki.

‘Uh,’ she said, as the doctor turned to go. ‘This might sound a little trite, but where am I?’

The young doctor hesitated a moment or two. He had a wide mouth, like a child’s drawing of a smile, and with his hair sticking up in a dozen different directions he looked like a cartoon character. ‘Tower hospital, miss.’

‘Is it … I mean … you said there was a major …’

‘Military hospital,’ he clarified for her.

‘Oh.’ Something unpleasant was occurring to Eve, who wasn’t entirely sure why being in a military hospital might be a bad thing exactly … but she was also fairly sure it wasn’t a good thing, either. ‘Um, am I in trouble?’

He hesitated again, which Eve glumly figured probably meant yes.

‘You’ll have to ask the Major,’ he said eventually.

‘Major … what was his name?’

‘Harker.’

‘Right. Major Harker. Is he in charge here?’

‘Well, um …’

Eve rolled her eyes. ‘Can I go see him?’

‘No. Sorry, miss. You need to rest here.’

‘But, look, I can hop or something. Do you have any crutches I could use?’

The young doctor was already backing off. ‘Sorry, miss.’

‘Stop saying that! And don’t go!’

But the door had already fallen shut behind him.

‘Great,’ Eve said, slumping back against the pillows, which were lumpy. ‘Fantastic. That was a load of help.’

‘It’s the military,’ came a voice from behind the curtain, making her jump. ‘They’re not supposed to be helpful.’

Eve froze for a long second, then reached out, balancing precariously, and tugged back the curtain. On the other side of it was a man lounging on a hospital bed, his hands behind his head, his ankles crossed. He, too, was wearing khaki, t-shirt and combats the same faded shade of sludge green. His right arm was bruised, and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in about a week, or had his hair cut in about a year.

He gave Eve a nod, reached into a pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and then, to Eve’s horror, lit one up.

Mistaking her expression, he offered her one.

‘Er, no,’ she said. ‘Um. Should you be smoking in here?’

He shrugged and took a deep drag. ‘Don’t see no laws about it.’

‘Uh,’ Eve said. ‘I’m pretty sure there is one. This is a hospital, right?’

‘Apparently.’