By the time the crew of the Vigra got back on shore Alice was three glasses of wine down and starting to notice that the Murdos (who by then were on to arguing about whose turn it was to be pessimistic) had not even slightly been having her on about the strength of the stuff - she was already starting to feel a bit tipsy and generally not as stable on her feet as she was when sober.

Brigid pointed out that her siblings were getting the boat moored when it was crossing the bay from where the keepers were apparently positioned not far from the fishfarm cages on the other side of the bay; she and Alice watched as someone (from the size of him and the fact that Elf was visible leaning out of the wheelhouse side window, it was presumably Nick) caught the mooring buoy with a boathook, pulled the rope up, and affixed it to something close to the Vigra's bows; with that done he used the buoy rope to pull what Brigid called 'the tender' (a rowing boat) in to the Vigra's side; someone switched the Vigra's engine off, then Elf and (presumably, going by the height) Neil came out of the wheelhouse and all three climbed down into the rowing boat, whereupon Brigid jumped up onto the table and started jumping up and down, yelling, and waving her arms around; Elf saw her and waved back as the person Alice was now certain was Neil rowed it over to where a couple of ropes ran down the beach a short distance to the east of the easternmost pier; Alice couldn't get a great view of it from where they were sitting but after doing something at the front of the rowing boat someone started pulling on one of the pair of ropes, which Murdo London explained were what he called a 'running mooring' - a loop of rope running through a shackle on a big sunken concrete block at the far end and round a post at the beach end; pull the side the boat isn't attached to and the other goes out, taking the boat with it.

Elf and Neil came walking up the waterfront as the rowing boat was still moving outwards, and Elf said, "Brigid; Alice. Fancy meeting you here."

"We thought we'd come and meet you lot because it's something to do," said Brigid, getting down off the table; in the background the rowing boat stopped moving and Nick appeared, scrambling up from the beach.

"Oh aye, got bored?" Neil asked.

"Well, no so much, but," Brigid said, and glanced at Alice.

"But I could probably do with spending a lot of time being distracted from thinking too much about, well, about what happened," Alice said with a sigh, and that caused Elf to nod and sit down across the table from her.

"Aye, that makes sense," she said, fishing around in her pocket - she came out with a roll of paper money of a styl very unfamiliar to Alice, peeled off a couple of notes, and handed them to Neil. "What's yourselves having? You too, Murdo and Murdo."

"I've been drinking elderflower wine," Alice said, indicating the nearly-finished third glass.

"Small beer, please," said Brigid.

"A pint of stout for myself, and the same for this great teuchter," said Murdo London. Neil nodded and headed into the pub.

"How's the fishing then Elf?" Murdo Macrae asked, ignoring Murdo London's crack about teuchters.

"It's been a bloody good day," Elf told him. "We've finally managed to actually find the crays out near to Eilen na Uilbheast, it'll be a bloody fine payoff this week," and Murdo Macrae smiled.

"Aye, I was telling you it was worth looking for them out there," he said with a nod. "They're buggers to be finding, but when you do..."

"Eight of them out of one net, six out the other, and a wee one turned up in one of the parlours," Elf said, nodding back.

"So how's the crabs and the lobsters been treating yourselves then?" Murdo London asked.

"Well enough, it's been a good day all over," Elf said as Nick, who had been ambling along the shorefront, arrived and Neil came back out the pub with a couple of glasses, which he handed to Brigid and Alice before heading back in.

"So," and Elf turned back to Alice, "Distractions, aye?"

"What is there to do around here apart from, you know, coming down here and getting drunk?"

"Well I'm going through to Inverness with Annie and Mackie on the morrow, you could come along for the spree," said Nick.

"Could take a turn up to Duirnish or down to Mallaig on the train, or maybe come with us when we're getting the shellfish shipped on Thursday?" Elf suggested. "Hell, if you were wanting you could come out on the boat for a day's fishing at some point."

"Isn't there a band playing down in Ullapool on Friday?" Brigid asked.

"Aye, that lot from Stornaway who've been all over the internet just lately, we could head down for that," Nick said. "And there's surely other stuff we can work out to be doing."

"I don't think we need to be particularly regimented or anything," Alice said. "I just..."

"It's no any bother," Elf said. "We'll make things up as we go along, aye?"

"Yeah - sounds good."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The first thing Brigid said when Elf sat down at the breakfast table on the morning of Tuesday 27th was, "Alice has been having nightmares."

She then looked at Alice, whom she had woken up from a nightmare in which she'd been walking towards that Godforsaken bomb aware of what was going to happen and unable to change anything, a couple of hours earlier, and added, "I know you didn't want to make a fuss about it but that's silly, if you don't say anything nobody's going to know to do anything."

Alice set her spoon down with a click and a glare.

"Yes. Every time I close my bloody eyes I'm right back there getting blown to bits again. What's anyone going to do about that? It's me dreaming,"

"I think we should put a ban on her bed and you're better at that stuff than I am," Neil told Nick.

"... A you what?" asked Alice, the wind very effectively taken out of her sails.

"You know, a ban - just a wee bit of edges being edges," Nick said with a frown, then added a slightly surprised, "You don't have a clue what I'm talking about, do you? Okay basically edges and boundaries and that sort of thing have, well, have an effect on the world and if you know what you're about you can be using that to do a lot of things. Oh, watch this," and he went and got a scrap of card and a biro off of the computer table, sat back down, and started making a whole series of little marks along the edge of the card with the pen.

After a moment, the card vanished without a trace; Nick put the pen down and made as if to hand the card to Alice, who numbly extended a hand for it only to find she could feel it: it was currently invisible.

She looked from the invisible bit of card to Nick and back a few times, and Nick took it back off of her, ran his finger along the edge, and scribbled at part of it with the biro; it abruptly reappeared.

"Basically that," he said.

AliceOS has unexpectedly closed.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The astonished silence that had engulfed the Macbane family when Alice got up and walked out the house with a totally lost expression on her face was eventually broken by Nick, who said, "Er,"

"Hell was that about?" said an equally befuddled Ian, glancing around at the looks of confusion on the faces of his entire family.

"I, er, don't think she's ever seen anything like that before?" Brigid suggested.

"Okay, sure, how?" asked Elf. "That's just impossible, this sort of stuff is everywhere," and she pointed at the once-again visible bit of card.

"I think," said Neil, "We're radically underestimating just how not like this wherever Alice is from is, I mean you couldn't have got a more mindboggled expression showing a caveman a fusion rocket."

"I think I'd better go and see if she's okay," said Nick, rising to his feet; his father nodded.

"I'm coming," Brigid told him, getting up too, and the two of them hurried out of the house.

It didn't take them moments to find Alice - she was in that same corner of the garden as she'd ended up in after Neil opened his trap and got an enormous mouthful of foot two days prior, though her stare out at the world was a whole lot blanker this time.

"You going to be okay?" Nick asked.

Alice didn't react for long enough that he was about to ask again, and maybe try touching her shoulder to get her attention, but right before he moved she turned round and asked, in an utterly lost voice, "Where the hell am I?"

"A very, very, very long way from home," Brigid told her.

"Just how bloody deep is this bloody rabbit-hole anyway?" Alice added, and Nick and Brigid glanced at each other.

"I don't know," Nick told her. "I don't know how far up it you started, or how far up it goes from here."

"I want to go home," Alice said. "I want Mum, but I don't know if she'd even recognise me, Lord knows I don't even recognise myself. I'm standing here with the wrong face, the wrong body, science fiction arms, none of this makes sense and I'm, I'm half convinced the Red Queen is going to come running up yelling 'off with her head' any moment."

"Well if she does I'll give her a good seeing-to," said Nick. He wasn't sure if it'd help, but he'd already started thinking of the lost girl as a friend and not letting any clever bugger mess with you and yours was right at the very top of the Macbane family to-do list.

"God, I'm a mess, aren't I," said Alice, and she started rubbing at her face.

"Who wouldn't be, given the circumstances?" Brigid asked. "I can't think of anyone who wouldn't."

"I'm still half-convinced I've totally lost my marbles and am laying somewhere in a hospital hallucinating all this," Alice told her.

"I think if you'd lost it you wouldn't be wondering if you'd lost it, I don't think mad people even think once about their mad and never mind worrying about it," said Brigid.

"Bit of a sweeping statement but I think you've got a point again," Nick told her.

"Some sweeping statements," Brigid told him with a glare, "Get stated because they're true."

He couldn't help it; he said, "So you keep saying whenever you're making sweeping statements," and then he turned back to Alice and added, "So, are you going to be okay?"

"I don't know," she said. "I think... I think I'm just going to stand here and see if the world starts making sense again."

"You've no finished your breakfast."

"I'm not hungry any more."

"Still wanting to come through to Inverness? We'll be taking off in a couple of hours."

"Ask me again in an hour or so, I can hardly think at the moment," Alice said, and so he did.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Two hours after the blowing of Alice's mind and joined by Brigid, they did indeed walk up to the station - not by the road, instead having left the house by the front garden gate they walked up what Brigid called the cow path - a fenced concrete walkway between the southern side of the house's surrounding garden and a patch of something halfway between marsh, muddy stream, and woodland, prominently featuring ducks - the fences opened out via a gate onto the stony gently-sloping mixture of field and sparse woodland Alice had found herself looking out over after leaving the house on both of the occasions she'd lost ability to handle everything, and a couple of hundred feet later came to a very home-made bridge - a couple of what looked like old railway sleepers with a rusty chunk of steel treadplate bolted to the top of them - crossing what was either a large stream or a small river, the far side of which was a patch of denser woods - almost entirely birch and rowan - followed shortly by the gate out of the croft and onto the moorland stretching out towards Lochinver and the pass over to Kylesku.

Here they turned uphill, following a clearly-defined trodden footpath (which much to Alice's relief proved hard enough her heels didn't dig in) along the perimeter wall of the village - tumbledown drystone about four feet tall with a raggedy battered old fence strung along the top - for the hundred yards up to the railway. This was fenced, with a stile in the fence and a plank pedestrian crossing - a long line of mustard-yellow wagons were parked on one of two lengthy sidings stretching out beside the line itself to the west, while the station area was almost immediately to the right, and a pair of blue-and-yellow locomotives were sitting idling in another, shorter, siding the far side of the station. Nick and Brigid had no visible qualms whatsoever about crossing the tracks on foot, and Alice took that under advisement.

Crossing the stile the other side of the tracks would have taken them straight out onto the widened stretch of road that served as a station car park - there were indeed three assorted motor vehicles, two battered old cars one of which didn't have numberplates and a pile of rusted scrap metal in the rough shape of a van, parked there - however the Macbane siblings turned away from the stile, instead turning eastwards along the railway side of the fence and walking down to lean on the fence near the front of the line of wagons, where Mackie was leaning on a fence post to wait.

"What's the plan?" Alice asked, joining them.

"That's the morning ironstone empties for Stroncrubie," Nick told her, indicating the wagons. "The morning ore train should be here in a couple of minutes, right - that's what the mainline locos over there," and he indicated the blue-and-yellow pair of locomotives, "Are waiting for. Whoever's driving will pick this lot up to head back towards Stroncrubie, Annie's going to meet us off the train in Duchally at the head of the loch."

"What, are you seriously suggesting hitching a lift on a freight train?" Alice, to whom this sort of idea was not exactly everyday stuff, asked.

"Well yeah, it's no like we're down south or anything, hopping on a goods train is nothing unusual up here," Nick said. "We get to ride in style - Annie's dad owns the railway, he's bloody minted, and after they moved over to Stroncrubie on the other side of the loch we, that's myself and Mackie, we started stowing away on the ore trains to head over to visit her, we used to just climb into one of the empties - there's enough of a curve and a slope to the track whoever's in the signal box can't see more than the leading third of the train when it's parked up in the siding here. Well one thing led to another and after a while Sir Joe, that's Annie's dad, came to the conclusion we were going to be keeping getting ourselves onto the trains no matter what he was doing so he just had us start getting rides on the locomotive to be making sure we were no going to be ending up under a train."

"Huh," said Alice.

"There goes the Vigra," Brigid, utterly disinterested in this topic, said, pointing - turning to look Alice could see the smartly-painted green hull and cream deck and wheelhouse of the Macbane's fishing boat, steaming out of the bay below them.

"Vigra," Alice said. "I take it that's a reference to something," She circumspectly avoided making the obvious comparison.

"Aye," Nick said, "That was the name of Shetland Larssen's boat back during the war."

"I have to confess I haven't a clue who he is."

"He was one of the Shetland Bus skippers… that doesn't mean a lot to you either, does it. Well during the war after the Krauts invaded Norway there was a secret ferry set up between Shetland and Norway, using fishing boats to begin with but eventually they got hold of much faster boats of a type called 'submarine chasers'. Leif Larssen was one of the best skippers, possibly the best skipper, that they had - the original Vigra was his boat, she was named after an island no far from Alesund in Norway. We got to talking about what to be naming our boat, and decided there couldn't be a much better name for a boat than the name of that man's boat, he's no a bad shoe-in for the title of the greatest fishing-boat skipper there ever was.

"The train's coming," said Brigid, pointing - sure enough, a huge mustard-yellow diesel locomotive of a kind matching the one Alice had seen at the workshops on Sunday was just emerging from the woods up the line to the east, quickly proving to be at the head of a line of wagons matching the empties they were standing near to.

They stood and waited as it trundled closer, Brigid waving enthusiastically as it entered the station - the driver, a dark-haired woman an enormous smile, waved back and was greeted with a happy cry of, "It's Kathy Maclennon!" from Brigid as the train swung slightly alarmingly across one set of points then another, aiming it into a second siding parallel to the one the empties were parked in.

The locomotive rumbled past them with a single cheery Gaelic word yelled by the driver, the wagons - which were loaded to heaped with rust-streaked metallic rocks - following it in orderly manner, the whole long stream of them slowly clunking past before eventually coming to a halt with the hindmost wagon more or less parallel to the end empty.

"See the points there?" Nick said.

"What am I looking for?" Alice asked; the point blades moved over with a clunk.

"When you're crossing the track never, ever, put your foot between that part that moved and the rail near to it," Nick told her. "We once found a sheep that'd got its leg trapped that way - the poor bloody thing's leg was just utterly crushed flat, then a train rolled over it. Not a good way to die."

"… I'll bear that in mind," Alice said, deciding she was going to stay the hell off of railway tracks when she wasn't with someone who knew about that sort of thing. From up the tracks near the head of the newly-arrived train, the black smoke blew up again with the distant roar of a diesel engine revving up, and not long after that the locomotive came growling along the track of the main line towards Lochinver and Kylesku; it growled past the points, and came to a halt; the points clattered across again, and a moment later the set nearer to where they were standing changed too, and the locomotive reversed itself again, backing down onto the head of the empties.

It nudged up against them with a mechanical crash as the coupler - this big metal jaw sort of an affair - closed; a set of air brakes hissed to themselves, and the woman Brigid had called Kathy Maclennon exited the door front centre of the cab (revealing herself to be clad in a dark-coloured dress belted tight over a very small waist) and came scrambling down the footsteps with a big smile on her face, closely followed by a large hairy man in a dirty orange boiler suit and Trade Union hat.

"Morning Kathy, morning Alec," Nick said.

"Morning," Kathy declared as the man presumably named Alec went scrambling down the front of the locomotive and began producing rattling and clanking noises from down there in the process of connecting some sort of hose thing. "Yourselves'll be looking for a ride to Stronecrubie then, aye?"

"Only as far as Duchally today thanks," Nick told her. "We're meeting Annie there and heading through to Inverness."

"Oh aye, up to much?"

"Aye, actually, Annie's getting her new eyes in and was wanting a wee bit of moral support, I swear being left in the dark's the only thing in the world herself's the slightest bit feart of," said Mackie, and that got a laugh out of the driver.

"Aye, Doctor Clayton was up and alloying my poor wee blind niece with carbon and now she's made of steel," she said with a fond nod. "And who's your friend?" and she nodded to Alice.

"I'm Alice," said Alice

"Och well, so yourself's the lassie who was in Grace Mitchell's kitchen through in Kylesku then aye?" Kathy asked with a nod as she directed them up the steps into the locomotive's cab - the whole thing was even bigger close up than it'd seemed the previous day - having ushered the five of them into the cab, Kathy vanished back out the front and joined Alec down the front making clanking noises.

"Does everyone know about me?" Alice asked.

"Just about," Mackie said. "People like to talk, ken?"

The cab area was just as spacious as it had seemed from track level - it had multiple lightly-worn comfortable-looking seats some with accompanying controls, several flatscreen monitors built into varied surfaces - actual flatscreens, not the ones with depth - and sets of controls facing in both directions. Everything had a new-but-used and scrupulously clean air with paint just starting to wear on the corners, treadplate flooring just starting to look scuffed, seats just starting to show they'd been used, and a general air of everything being scrupulously maintained.

"Alright," Kathy declared, reappearing and heading for the set of seats pointing east up the line. "That'll be that then," and Alec banged the cab door shut behind himself. "Take a seat."

She settled herself at one side of that end's set of controls, and Alec seated himself the other while their impromptu passengers found places to sit down; Kathy slotted a handle sort of an affair into part of the controls and gave a chain dangling from the ceiling a tug, causing the horn to sound; the horns (or a horn) from the pair of blue-and-yellow locomotives answered. They waited a few moments, then a bell rang somewhere in the locomotive's controls - a happy-sounding 'Ding!' - and Kathy declared, "Signal cleared, and away we go," nudged the handle over a notch, and pushed a lever forwards, causing the engine to gun up and the locomotive to ever so gradually begin to ease forwards under another towering plume of black smoke, and away they did indeed go.

"Aye, and away we go," Alec agreed, then nodded to Alice as they eased past the pair of blue-and-yellow locomotives and Alice realised with a start just how stupidly huge the mustard-yellow monstrosity in fact was - she was looking down on the blue-and-yellow pair's roofs. "So how was yourself ending up in that train? My cousin Wilma was just across the coach from where they were finding yourself, she got out with little more than cuts and bruises thank Christ, and she swears blind she cannae mind seeing yourself,"

"I don't know, actually," Alice said. "I was in London the last thing I clearly remember."

"Och well, that'd be amnesia or something aye?" Kathy asked.

"Or something, aye," Nick said with a nod. Kathy tut-tutted and shook her head; the locomotive rattled across a set of points, tracks (these ones with only two rails) heading away to the left and up-slope as they started to descend.

"Off of the shared metals," Kathy declared.

"Aye, off of the shared metals," Alec agreed.

The line descended steadily down through the woods above the road - looking out the right side of the cab Alice could make out the road through gaps in the trees, soon followed by the sheds she'd seen the previous day - these were now a hive of activity - and not long after they'd passed the sheds another track - the junction accompanied by another signal - coming up from the sheds joined that they were on, heralded by another happy 'Ding!' from the controls, right after which as they entered a sweeping left-hand curve they came out from between the trees and onto a bridge over a large stream with the road visible curving sharply away perhaps forty feet lower than the tracks.

Coming off of the bridge the tracks plunged back into an even denser patch of trees for perhaps a hundred yards, at the end of which as the track turned to curve back the other way they rattled over another bridge, this one with the road beneath, the far side of which they emerged onto an open hillside perhaps two hundred feet above sea level and still heading steadily downhill, with the main part of the village spread out below them.

The tracks slowly descended as they skirted round the edge of the village itself until, by the time they were halfway round and passing over a river that came out where the road on the waterfront started to curve towards the south side of the bay, they were directly across a fence from a line of sharply-sloped back gardens with the mountainside towering over them.

In this place, the world had walls.

The track began to curve to the left again, clattering over another set of points - again heralded by a happy 'Ding!' from the controls - from which narrow-only tracks headed back towards the harbour, and aimed them into what had looked like a slash of green when Alice had first seen the village from the other side of the bay and was, it turned out, a wide slice of flat land not far above sea level, scattered with crofts, that stretched from the bay through between two of the mountains around the village to the shores of Loch Allen proper, with that whole side of the bay and its attendant mountain forming a headland - the track curved to cling to the cliffs along the side of the loch heading eastwards, passing through another tiny patch of woods and levelling out - Kathy poured on the power, the clatter of the engine raising to a heavy roar and the train beginning to pick up speed now the careful descent was done, and the tracks curved past another cluster of white houses, between another stand of trees, and right onto the very edge of the land, running along track that appeared to be laid along a wide ledge on sea cliffs - there was a footpath between the train and the cliff face to the left of the track, and on the right hand side the track was so close to the edge Alice couldn't see the lineside from the cab windows, it was almost like the sea came right up to the train that side.

A small blue-and-white fishing boat, small enough it could've fitted into one of the ore wagons, that Alice vaguely remembered seeing coming into the bay while she was chatting with the Macbane siblings at the pub the previous afternoon, was working so close you almost could've reached out the locomotive and shaken hands with a member of the boat's two-person crew. As Alice watched, a crab pot came heaving out of the water to be neatly caught by a large bearded man in bright yellow oilskins and a grey wooly hat - he turned to plunk it onto a table sort of thing built on the boat's deck, looked up, saw the train, grinned somewhere beneath his whiskers, and waved; his crewmate - a very short young woman likewise clad in yellow oilskins - looked up, and waved too.

Alec waved back, and sounded the locomotive's horn.

The track clung to the cliffs for nearly two miles before the land above began to flatten out and another croft appeared, this time above the tracks on a bit of a bluff - a field sloped away and up from about level with the locomotive's side windows to a small barnyard - greeted by the locomotive with another happy 'Ding!'; the track began to rise a little away from the sea, first wave-swept barnacle-encrusted boulders appearing between the line and the water, then a wide shingle beach with boats pulled up right to the edge of the tracks, and they emerged, their coming heralded by a double blast on the horn, between a pair of barns, coming out right beside another street of white-harled fishermen's cottages and a red telephone box, the tracks laying between the road and the front doors of some of the houses, and a station consisting solely of a short wooden platform with a thing like a bus shelter and a signal on one end of it.

The line kept on like that, curving ever so gently southwards as it went, passing one croft after another and another two tiny village stations, each one preceded by another 'Ding!', the land on the far side of the loch getting more and more rugged and the land on the near side of the loch getting less and less rugged, for some twenty or so miles till at the very easternmost point of Loch Allen amongst land almost completely flat they entered the village of Duchally, heralded by the controls producing a solemn 'Bong!' sound and Kathy beginning to ease the brakes on.

Duchally was surrounded by sprawling fields and crofts and was by a good margin the largest settlement Alice had yet seen since her awakening - it had a church, a fully-grown if single-sided village street complete with a few shops, a pub, and what was clearly a school, a couple of hundred houses, and an actual fuel station that wasn't a tin shed - the railway was separated from the street by a tumbledown drystone wall - with the station, a fully-grown twin-track affair with an actual station building and a signal box and two brick-built platforms, about halfway through the village, directly across the road from the pub. A string of three coaches was waiting on the other track, and Annie was standing on the platform as the train hove itself to a halt - the solemn bell having bonged twice more as the cab came level with the start of the platform - and Kathy went to discuss something with the signalman, taking what she called 'the token' - a circular piece of metal, with attached carry handle, about six inches across with 'INVERALLEN-DUCHALLY' engraved in Victorian-looking block caps on each side, as Alice and Mackie and the pair of Macbanes disembarked from the locomotive.

"Morning," said Annie Kelly. She was clad in much the same style as the previous day, complete with the palm-sized patch of exposed cleavage, though that said she was wearing a different colour dress - a deep olive green instead of wine red. "Good journey?"

"Aye, just fine," Nick said with a nod as they headed out of the station to where Annie's ute was doing its impression of a wreck in the station's modest car park - modest as in about three to four times the size of the car park in Inverallen. The train they'd just disembarked sounded its horn behind them, roared, and began to pull away, and Alice realised how good the sound deadening in the cab had been.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Brigid had, it transpired, been dead on the money as concerned the ride quality in the back seats of Annie's pickup: sitting in the back with Brigid jammed between her and Mackie she could actually hear herself think and the seat wasn't threatening to concertina her spine each time they went over a bump in the road, though it was still rough, smelly, and loud.

The drive to Inverness from Duchally wasn't a short one either; half the distance was on single-track roads, narrow and winding and badly-maintained and generally slow. The land around the road gradually got less and less rugged as they headed east, mountains gradually giving way to rolling hills; conversely it slowly got more and more wooded until, when they got off the single-track at a tiny back of nowhere village called Inveran, they were completely surrounded by forests.

At Bonar Bridge - a very rural town built round the bridge it was named for, full of vehicles that made Annie's wreck look well-maintained, and heralded by a friendly sign declaring that dangerous drivers would be shot - they stopped for ice cream; back on the road it wasn't long before they finally reached Scotland's eastern shore and turned to heading mostly south where the road met and crossed via causeway a broad sea inlet that Mackie, who'd spent the entire journey cheerfully telling Alice what each place they passed was, called the Dornoch Firth.

From there the surroundings steadily got more and more populated as they drove southwards - the empty wasteland of the west coast, which Brigid explained had been deforested to make charcoal with which to smelt iron early in the industrial revolution, had given way to dense woodlands in the centre of the country, which in turn gave way to swathes of farmland sprawled out between towns and villages. The road too steadily changed, becoming both broader, more and more battered, and more heavily trafficked - in all the miles of single-track between Duchally and Inveran they'd passed a grand total of a dozen other vehicles going the other way, by the time they'd hit Bonar Bridge they'd passed twice that, and from the Dornoch Firth there was a steady flow of traffic headed in both directions and steadily getting denser and denser and the overtaking steadily grew more and more insane - and the sight of abandoned and often stripped-out vehicles laying at the side of the road became more and more common.

The road widened again, becoming a dual carriageway that actually appeared to be seeing some sort of maintenance, after crossing another causeway over another long sea inlet which Mackie called the Cromarty Firth, taking them onto what he explained was a big peninsula known for no apparent reason as the Black Isle, on the other side of which - a short and fast drive - the road crossed a long sea inlet via a very impressive suspension bridge - this Mackie named as the Kessock Bridge - that appeared to lead directly into Inverness itself - the Black Isle side was very rural and wooded and scattered with clusters of human inhabitation, the whole Inverness side was urbanised with what looked to be a half-built deep-water port for loading large cargo ships to the left of what Mackie said was the A9, the main road south, with the half-built port in turn surrounded by a mish-mash of mismatched industrial units and with a long strip of construction site extending east out of town - Mackie said that this was going to be a dedicated high-capacity rail link leading to what he called Dalcross Airfield a few miles to the east, though he did not elaborate on why exactly the hell you'd need a dedicated high-capacity rail link for an airfield.

To the right of the road was the town itself, sprawling way, way back towards the hills that surrounded the town to the south, east, and west - there was urbanisation as far as the eye could see, with a massive almost triangular swathe of rail yards a few hundred yards from and below the road, and a sea of dilapidated crosses between industrial units and shanty-town more or less filling the area between road and rail yards.

The dual carriageway climbed slowly to cross first three different sets of railway, one with overhead cables strung above it, then a large roundabout which onramps and offramp led to and from - this Annie drove straight past, only to take the next offramp, this one leading up to a crossroads junction at which she turned left onto a flyover back across the A9 and into Inverness proper - the land sloped sharply upwards on both sides of the A9here, climbing up to form a hillside to the east of the A9 and a plateau of sorts to the west. There was another big roundabout almost directly off the west end of the flyover, from which smaller roads spread out into the plateau area in amongst tightly-packed buildings, many of them tall. One of the legs of the roundabout headed back onto the northbound side of the A9.

Annie crossed the roundabout onto the road that went straight ahead - this was the widest of the bunch with two lanes in each direction - then hung a right at the first intersection, taking them first through an unmanned military-looking checkpoint with its gates standing wide open and very little sign of it ever having been used, after which they passed a large billboard reading RAIGMORE HOSPITAL and came out into a sea of car park full of an eclectic mixture of battered old vehicles similar to what everyone seemed to drive back west and these hypermodern-looking affairs that wouldn't have looked at all out of place on the streets of the London that Alice had been attending college in, with a whole line of them plugged into what had to be electric vehicle charging stations; perhaps a third of the vehicles were not battered old wrecks.

"Right," Annie declared, swinging out of the pickup to reach through the hole in the bonnet and switch the engine off. "Let's get this done," and both of the boys nodded and said nothing.

At the reception Annie presented identification in the form of a passport, and they were immediately ushered off into the hospital by a receptionist who had been wearing a look of faint contempt until she scanned the passport and something that made her eyes visibly widen appeared on the screen in front of her, which Alice had been quite unable to see.

The only aspect of the entire place that didn't look downright futuristic was the people, all of whom were clad in that vaguely Edwardian-or-Victorian manner of apparel that had kept turning up everywhere Alice looked since the moment she woke up in Grace's kitchen - there was something downright disconcerting about seeing a gentleman clad in shirt sleeves, tie, waistcoat and Trade Union hat coming the other way with a blue-grey plastic arm extending from one of those sleeves, and the spectacle of a young lady wearing a particularly vicious corset and a dress of overall similar character to that worn by Annie (if sporting somewhat more bare skin at the front and rather more lurid colours) walking along the corridor with a slightly glassy-eyed expression and a cable extending from her handbag and plugged into the back of her neck - the fact that the receptionist was just as wasp-waisted as Annie or the girl with the cable plugged into her neck probably didn't help either, and nor did the ubiquitous patch of bare skin right in the middle of her cleavage or the rather unnecessary magnitude of heel on her shoes.

The receptionist knocked at a door - white, absent a doorhandle, marked only with a four-digit number on a small brass plate - and said door promptly zipped open with a soft whoosh and the receptionist stuck her head in and said, "Miss Kelly to see you, Dr Clayton."

"Ah, prompt as ever," said the unmistakable Ausralian-toned voice of the man himself, and Dr Clayton appeared at the door, looking momentarily startled when he saw Alice, but he brushed that expression off in an instant. "And mates, come on in."

The interior of the room was just as hyperfuturistic as the rest of the hospital interior, and the doctor showed his patient to a seat rather reminiscent of the dentist's chair of tomorrow with the deformed mutant descendent from hell of a set of skiing goggles hanging from a cable behind the seat - there were a pair of entirely non-futuristic office chairs sat one each side of it, in which Nick and Mackie immediately seated themselves.

"Take a seat," the doctor advised Alice and Brigid, gesturing to a line of rather mundane compared to most of the rest of the room moulded plastic chairs sitting against the wall beside the door, then he turned his entire focus to his patient. "We're looking at a much simpler procedure than last time you were through to town, everything is mechanical or electronic at this stage in affairs, though it will require me to switch off the connections to your visual centres."

Annie nodded sharply and didn't say a word to that, though the rest of her manner stayed exactly as laid-back as she'd been at the controls of the pickup or lounging around in Mackie's family kitchen.

"Ready to begin?" the doctor asked her, and got another sharp little nod; he nodded back, and presented Annie with the end of a cable matching the one Alice had plugged into her wrist a few days prior; this she plugged into a socket at the back of her neck.

"Good, now the first thing to do is shut everything down," said the Doctor, and Annie gave him another sharp little nod.

He turned to the hologram that the equipment stand behind Annie's seat was projecting, and poked at it, and Alice abruptly realised the exact moment that 'everything' shut down, Annie's sight included, because that was when her hands snapped out, briefly fumbled, were grabbed by the boys sat each side of her, and clamped down tight, and that was when Alice clocked that the other young woman was absolutely terrified and utterly refusing to show it.

"Hold your head still, Annie, you're doing just fine," the doctor told her, voice gentle; he picked up the mutant hellbeast ski goggles (or maybe they were the decayed corpse of a crash helmet wearing nightvision gear?) up from where they were hanging down the back of the seat and carefully put it onto her head and spent a minute pretty much bolting it on with the grand finale of affixing it rigidly to the chair back. Annie, aside from the increasingly tight grip on the boys' hands, took this with all the aplomb of a well-dressed and rather bored gentlewoman waiting for a bus.

Alice watched, fascinated almost despite herself, as the doctor worked a number of controls on the hologram - the helmet produced a variety of humming and clicking sounds, at each of which Annie's knuckles grew whiter though she did not otherwise so much as make one believe that she might have considered batting an eyelid, then he unfastened a latch on it and hinged the goggle section down, revealing a set of very wide-open unblinking eyelids with utterly empty, metal-lined, eye sockets beneath them making Alice realised with a jolt that Annie Kelly currently literally did not have eyes in her head yet appeared faintly bored anywhere but the knuckles and that made her clock what it was about Annie and trains; the Sutherland Railway lived on high-grade iron and hydrocarbons and what the hell else are you supposed to make steel out of anyway?

The doctor went into that disturbing fixed empty cyborg skeleton stare with a couple of very small Allen keys of all things, carefully removing a small number of electronic components, gently talking them through what he was doing the whole time and repeatedly telling his patient that she was 'doing just fine' throughout the whole process.

Once the pieces of electronics were out, he started inserting and fastening into place a very different set, then disconnected the night-vision-goggles-from-hell part of the helmet, set it carefully down on a tray, and collected another; he checked something inside it, reattached it to the helmet, went through in there double-checking things, then touched another control on the hologram; the goggle section hinged itself up over the eyeless sockets, clicked a couple of times, then made a couple of humming and clicking noises.

"Good, now to check it's all correctly in place," the doctor said, sounding satisfied; he went over a whole series of diagnostic readouts, again repeatedly pausing to give Annie that same reassurance, before carefully removing the helmet, revealing her eyes were now almost impossibly blue and lacked the visible mechanical iris, though her eyelids were still rigidly wide open in a very unnatural and slightly creepy way.

"That's all in order, now to start everything back up," he said, and put action to words, touching another series of icons on the hologram - Annie blinked, her eyelids relaxed, her eyes flicked around, and she let out a slightly wobbly-sounding sigh and relaxed her grip on the boys' hands.

"There," the doctor said. "How does everything look?"

"Got a mirror?" Annie asked, and you would never have known that a few moments prior she'd been all but frozen as rigid as a deer staring into oncoming headlights; the doctor immediately passed her a rather old-fashioned-looking hand mirror and she added, "Thanks," and started peering critically into her reflection.

"Huh," she said, pulling one lower eyelid down. "That blue's come out even brighter than it looked when we chose it - is my colour range better or something?" She glanced around, and then added, "Huh, aye, better colour range. Lots better, I never realised Brigid's hair was so bright,"

"As good as the real thing," the doctor said with a nod. "Seeing any pixellation? Blurriness? How's your depth of field?"

"I... can't make out any pixellation at all, actually," she said. "That's... huh. Aye, depth of field is miles better than the old set, and I'm going to have to be outside to say anything about focal range, or maybe, " and she peered very closely at the ball of her own left thumb.

"Oh wow, I can see every ridge and furrow in my thumbprint," she said, her newly-fitted eyes lighting up with almost childlike delight.

"There's only four other people walking around with sets of these in their head anywhere so far and that's counting Alice here," the doctor said, sounding very pleased with himself. "These are the state of the art, this stuff is beyond cutting edge - we might be actually selling these in maybe about two to five years - at the moment making them involves micromanipulator waldos and about six hundred hours skilled labour per eye, which as you can imagine does some pretty hair-raising things to the price tag involved. Like 'em?"

"Aye," Annie said with a nod, her calm returning. "They'll be just fine."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well," said Annie as they walked back out the front of the hospital towards the pickup, the only sign of the entire ordeal the way she'd occasionally stop and stare at something (or someone) for a moment with that wonder flashing back into her eyes before shaking it off and resuming walking, "Where now?"

"Rate my chances of getting into college," Alice said, and that got Annie's attention.

"You'll need documentation," Annie said with a frown. "As far as actually getting in this year goes, that won't be a problem - I'm a fabulously wealthy heiress, the name 'Miss Annabella Kelly' tends to cause doors to abruptly pop open and civil servants to become amazingly helpful, and that makes the only real question there what you want to study. As for those documents, fortunately I know most of the cops - which I guess makes our next port of call pretty obvious, though you lot, Nick, Mackie, Brigid, should probably stay at the ute, they tend to get a bit excited about heavy mobs rolling in the door even when they're accompanying people with bank accounts involving funny-money numbers."

She paused, then added, "So... what do you want to study?"

"Archaeology," Alice told her. "It's been what I wanted to do with my life ever since I was little, and I'd just started in college before... well, all this."

"Well, the college here in Inverness has an antiquities department, it was on the flyer with the syllabus, so that's very do-able," Annie said as they arrived at the pickup; she unlocked the padlock that had been keeping the driver's door shut, opened it, leaned in, and used the lock button on the front passenger door to unlock the rest of it then started in on her rocking the gear lever and giving the handbrake a firm pull.

"Are you sure it's okay to just walk into the cop-shop and go hi, I don't have any documents?" Alice asked, after which the conversation had to pause while Annie persuaded the pickup to start.

"Amnesia," Brigid said once the roar and backfires had settled to a thumping tickover and they were all in the pickup and ready to get going. "We already know you don't remember being anywhere in the world, why bother saying you can remember a lot of being in another world?"

"That'd work," Annie agreed. "It's far from the first time someone's walked in there with no idea who they are, and since you're with me they won't bat an eyelid. Trust me, it'll be fine."

Alice very nearly changed her mind about it being a good idea at that auspicious statement.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Things did, however and to Alice's surprise, go just as smoothly as Annie had predicted; after having left the hospital car-parked, parked in another rather more fortified car-park, and left the boys and Brigid loitering in the pickup, whereupon they went round the front of the compound actually containing the police station, through an airlock sort of an affair studded with visible cameras, and into a disconcertingly familiar place.

Alice had watched her share of TV police procedurals, and as a result the room where the public could wander into the police station was pretty much as was familiar to her. There was a bit of a waiting area consisting of a single bench, a heavy door presumably leading to the police station proper, the sole decoration on the wall was a large wood-framed clock, and a 'desk' was built into the wall opposite the bench; this resembled the sort of thing found in ticket offices in railway stations, with a sheet of what was presumably bullet-proof glass separating the desk sergeant from the public.

"Morning, Miss Kelly," said desk sergeant said the moment he saw Annie, rising to his feet. He had a mild home-counties English accent and looked every inch the traditional British 'bobbby', save for wearing a peaked police cap instead of a custodian helmet. "Anything come up?"

"Morning Higgins," Annie said. "Had a bit of an oddity turn up we could do with a little assistance with," and she angled a thumb over her shoulder at Alice.

"Oh aye," and the 'aye' sounded a mite peculiar in an English accent, "And what sort of an oddity would that be then?"

"We found a cyborg with some memory problems," Annie told him. "And she hasn't any documents to her name."

"Cyborg?" the cop asked, and nodded to Alice. "How augmented are you, or is that a part of your memory problems?"

"Eyes, basically my face, one arm from the elbow, other from the shoulder, both legs, probably some of in here," and Alice indicated her stomach, "At least that I know of."

"I see and are you aware of your own name?" the cop asked, as if amnesiac cyborgs were the most ordinary everyday occurrence in the world.

"Yessir, I'm Alice. Alice Liddell."

"Quite down the rabbit-hole, are we?" Somehow, Alice managed to avoid gritting her teeth. "Well, you're with this young tearaway and you look okay, I'll have someone take you through to the office and Constable Joy will sort the relevant documents out. We'll need to run an X-ray over you, get an actual picture of your level of augmentation to be certain nothing untoward has been implanted into you in the midst of your little memory outage, but that's a formality for the main part. Don't look so concerned, you're certainly not in any trouble."

-/-/-/-/-/-

In the end, the entire process was really quite dull and as per Higgins' prediction Alice was not in any trouble.

The cop they were ushered to - a pretty blonde woman with the most gorgeous soft Shetland accent who introduced herself as Constable Pamela Joy having greeted Annie by first name on sight - asked Alice what she knew of events; Alice told her roughly her recollections with a lot of names and what she thought was probably illegality edited out and no mention of remembering being exploded, and again didn't breathe a word about the dog she could swear she remembered seeing; Pam Joy declared that Alice's accent tallied with it, then having got the x-raying out of the way with nothing startling found (according to the cops; Alice did not, in fact, want or ask to see just how much electronics she had inside of her) they spent about half an hour filling out forms before being sent on their way with a sheaf of freshly-printed documents ranging from a birth certificate through a driving license (Alice protested that she couldn't remember having passed her test, but on being told she could remember taking lessons once a week for four months Pam Joy immediately declared that plenty) to a copy of an official notice declaring that Alice's education records had been destroyed through no fault of her own; this, Pam Joy explained, would see to it that should Alice decide to apply to any first-year college course in the Home Islands her application would be fast-tracked and she would be guaranteed an interview, and then they were heading back out of the station with a stuffed document envelope tucked under her arm, whereupon Annie smiled and said, "Told you so."

"Ye Gods, that was even easier than you made it sound," said Alice with a sigh.

"They get this sort of thing all the time when people are trying to get into college, half the population of Scotland lives basically off the record so they get two or three hundred undocumented teenagers coming down here every summer - normally they're a bit more emphatic about it but like I said, it's amazing how many civil servants get really helpful as soon as they hear any name connected to Dad's company," Annie said as they rounded the last corner back to where the pickup was still parked with two young men and a preteen girl lounging around in it - Nick's booted feet were sticking out of one of the rear cab windows and Brigid was sitting back-to-front on the steering wheel while Mackie seemingly hadn't moved an inch from the front passenger seat.

"Huh," Nick said, scrambling to get upright as the girls arrived, "Didn't take as long as we were expecting, I take it from that folder everything went nice and simply?"

"Aye, no problem at all, what'd I tell you?" Annie asked. "Well, let's head down to the college and I can wave Dad's name around, then get Alice the supplies she'll need - no, don't worry about money, I've got the ready - then... is there anything any of you three want to do while we're in town?"

"Nat asked me to pick some bits up from Scotty Johnson," said Nick. "We got a phone call on Saturday, the new barrel for Grandpa's haggis gun finally turned up, we're needing ammunition for that and .303 too, and I'm needing to pick up a couple of parts for the van, she's losing oil and I've no got any gasket paper left."

"Okay - college, town, Scotty's, the garage, something to eat, home."

"Let's do the something to eat first, I'm starving," said Brigid.

"Aye, that sounds about right, it's coming on three and myself's nae had anything to eat since half eight this morning," Mackie agreed.

"Okay, food it is," said Annie, and she coaxed the pickup into motion.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The source of 'something to eat' turned out to be a greasy spoon sort of restaurant named 'Ronnies' just off the side of the railway station run by a smily balding white-haired old man (who turned out to be the titular Ronnie) who appeared to have an eidetic memory as he greeted each of his customers by name, got it right, and insisted on being introduced to the new face IE Alice, and the something to eat in question turned out to involve things like bacon, black pudding, sausages, eggs, and beans all washed down with piping hot slightly spicy sweet tea.

With that out of the way they made a direct beeline for the college campus - just across a big road bridge over what Annie said was the railway headed north towards Kyle of Lochalsh, Cromarty, Wick, Thurso, and Lochinver - and as Annie had claimed the whole process of college application was streamlined beyond belief, a process Alice clearly remembered involving more paperwork than she'd had hot dinners being reduced to a five-minute interview with the man who was, it seemed, to be her head of school - the exact sort of person you'd expect to find teaching archaeology, this shortish tweed-clad and very English dark-haired chap with spectacles, receding hairline and a lot of smile lines, who introduced himself as Dr Jack Kensington in this faintly plummy toodle-pip sort of an accent - and two forms both of which concerned the receiving of a bursary, after which she was handed an induction pack straight out of Dr Kensington's office printer and sent on her way - Annie then took her back into town for supplies and a backpack to stow them in, casually paying for everything without batting an eyelid and utterly disregarding the bank account that they'd started out the afternoon by opening for Alice - not that she had the associated card yet, of course.

Then they went back along the same road as the college campus and a couple of blocks further down turned left into part of the run-down industrial estate cum shanty-town, and pulled up at a large drab building with a big signboard on the side facing the road reading S. JOHNSON & CO GUNSMITHS in red on a white background.

Entering S. JOHNSON & CO GUNSMITHS, one passed through two sets of doors separated by a small square room with walls lined with varied framed awards of some sort, and straight into a room that from the size of it took up only a very small portion of the full site despite being quite large. Tall-ceilinged with large windows - these looked out over a sprawl of waste ground full of abandoned vehicles, piles of rubbish, and shacks, and bore stickers advertising bullet-proof glass produced, according to the stickers, by the Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited - the room was light, airy, and felt a bit cold.

The main feature of the room was however guns.

Lots, as it were, of guns.

The three non-windowed walls were lined with pegboards, on which guns of every shape and size were displayed on pairs of hooks that plugged into the pegboard - one under the front, one under the back - with a discrete sign beside each bearing information about it. Several upright display cases full of pistols were rowed up along the centre of the room, interspersed with much larger weapons sitting on tripods or, in the case of the most obnoxiously huge of the lot - a small artillery piece - just sitting there on its wheels. All had price tags attached, in the case of the cannon with a very impressive number upon it, and there was a total dearth of mention of licensing procedures.

There were in addition a series of carousel stands - the approximate sort Alice was more used to seeing loaded with greeting cards or whatnot - full of a dizzying variety of accessories dotted around the room, seemingly in any free space, and half a dozen assorted customers were browsing.

At the east end of the room, fenced in by a long tall glass-fronted countertop stuffed to the brim with ammunition and high-tech gunsights, was a mixture of office space and workshop - here a small red-haired woman clad in absurdly baggy red-brown camouflage trousers and a very small tube top in grave danger of becoming a belt worn absurdly high - this represented the least clothing up top by a wide margin Alice had seen on anyone whatsoever since waking up in Grace's kitchen - was minutely examining the components of a machine gun, while a lanky to the point of downright scrawny, and charmingly ugly, Latino-looking man with a quiff, a bandit moustache and a cheap suit ditched some sort of paperwork and came out into the showroom floor with a pleased cry.

"Miss Kelly, Nick, Mackie, and little Brigid," he declared with every evidence of delight. He had the strongest Londonian accent Alice had heard in years quite at odds with his Italian-or-Spanish appearance. "And friend, we ain't been introduced," and she found herself having her hand enthusiastically shaken by this hyperactive apparition. "I'm Scotty Johnson, don't ask, me parents were berks."

"This is Alice Liddell," Nick said, getting a startled noise out of the incongruously-named incongruously-accented man.

"Wot, like the little bird wot went down the rabbit hole?" He caught Alice's expression and wryly shook his head. "I take it I'm not the only one with berks for parents then, some kids do 'ave 'em eh luv? So, what can I do for you ladies and gents today then? Oh, yer bruvver's new 'aggis-gun barrel's in Nick, did Mags phone you?"

"Aye," Nick said with a nod. "That she did, and we're needing more .303 ball and Nat's needing 2-pounder hollowpoints too,"

"Busy month," Scotty, speaking while bustling back behind the counter and selecting a nondescript six-foot-long cardboard box, pronounced it 'Munf', "For 'aggis then mate?"

"Aye, we've had six bulls and no less than twelve cows in the last four weeks alone," Nick told him.

"One of the bulls closed the railway north out of Inverallen again to boot," Annie added. "Nothing even remotely as bad as March thank Christ, Murdo McMurdo was driving over and saw it soon enough to get the trains stopped."

"Bloody 'ell," Scotty said with a shake of his head. "I'd 'eard your area's really been getting clouted since the bloody Wrecker but I didn't clock it were that bad, ey Mags,"

The redhead in the tiny tube-top looked up from her gun parts with an enquiring noise.

"Remind me to get the lads down in Birmingham to get the next batch of 2-pounder ammo up 'ere ASAP," Scotty told her. "I want it on the next train norf."

She made an agreeing noise, and went back to her gun parts.

"Now then, 'ow much ammo are you needing today then mate?" Scotty asked Nik.

"Four of the big tins of .303 ought to keep us going, but Nat's needing six cases of the 2-pounder if you've got the stock," Nick told him. Scotty whistled between his teeth.

"Mags," he said, heading for a door to a side room, "We'll need to get onto the Brummies today, Nick's taking two-thirds of what we've got left."

The woman grunted yet again, put her gun parts down, and came ambling over to the counter. She started fiddling with a laptop the back of which faced them.

"Will you lot be getting anything else today?" she asked, not looking up from it. For her part, she had one of those very generic home-counties English accents that's utterly impossible to put a class or location to.

"Nothing offhand here, no," Annie said.

Nick glanced at his sister and Mackie; Mackie shook his head and Brigid shrugged. Everyone looked at Alice.

"What, me?" she asked, and dismissed the idea with a wave. "No, I'm fine."

She couldn't imagine anything that'd cause her to get a gun.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Okay," said Annie as they were exiting S. JOHNSON & CO GUNSMITHS accompanied by Scotty with a pallet truck, "Where to next?"

"I'm thinking that gasket paper. Oh, er, and Mum was giving me a shopping list," said Nick. "We're needing feed for the hens, and a couple of bits out of the cash and carry, we've got a load of eggs Dad wants to pickle so we're needing a couple of gallons of vinegar, and we're totally out of beans."

"Okay, so garage, Mackenna's, the cash and carry, get out of here," and Annie punctuated that by sticking her hand through her wreck of a pickup's bonnet and persuading it to start - it emitted a series of shattering backfires and a huge cloud of blue smoke before so doing.

"Kinell," said Scotty, giving the smoke cloud a dubious look. "You sure that thing's running orright luv?"

"Aye, she'll be fine," Annie cheerfully told him. "The engine's basically mechanically sound, bar a little oil still getting into the fuel somewhere - it's the electrics that need a complete rebuild. Here, the two-pounder ammo and that barrel can go in under the tarp here, you might as well just stick the tins of .303 in the footwell Nick."

"Aye sure," Nick said, going to do exactly that with the smaller ammo boxes as Mackie helped Scotty load the rest of it into the back of the pickup.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Alice didn't bother going into the remaining places - a farming suppliers by the name of J C MACKENNA & SONS and a food wholesalers operating under the title of WILLIE MURCHISON WHOLESALE - instead spending the time sitting in the back seats of the pickup and acquainting herself with her new laptop, and soon enough they were back in the pickup for the gruelling ride back to Duchally, where affairs took another hard right into the Twilight Zone when an unexpected sight met their eyes.

Alice thought nothing of it to begin with - a large mustard-yellow diesel locomotive without any sign of a train was parked in one track of Duchally's tiny station and one of the Sutherland's mismatched multiple units in the other, but then Annie said, "What the hell, there's not supposed to be any light engine movements today," and then everyone in the pickup almost simultaneously spotted the visibly shaken man sitting on the cab steps - the guy who'd been 'co-pilot' or whatever that is in railways on the ride to Duchally that morning - and Annie didn't even pause to kill her pickup's engine as she headed thataway, taking the steps up to the platform two at a time with Alice hard behind her and Mackie and the duo of Macbanes not far behind them.

"Alec, what's happened, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine, Jesus Christ it'll be a while before my heart stops racing, thank Christ your dad decided buckeyes were the way to be going with the new ore stock," the man on the cab steps declared, and Alice realised his hands were shaking. "Bull haggis, bloody huge one, two miles east of Inverallen bashing about on the hillside above the line back there, I cut the couplers about half a heartbeat before the brute turned the first wagon on its side, if we'd still been coupled we'd have been off for sure and with a bull haggis that size stomping around where'd we be?"

"Bad spot for it," Kathy McLennan (who had been on the phone) said, walking back over. "The hunt team cannae get to it from the road, Murdo McMurdo's talking about loading their guns onto the fishing boats in Inverallen but it's going to be a while before they can get the boats round there."

Annie spent a long moment in very visible very deep thought, then snapped her fingers.

"Tell Murdo not to muck about with that," she said. "I've got the gear to be pintle-mounting a Vickers gun in the back of my ute. I'll meet him in Cùldeireadhaonàite, get the ute turned to reverse down towards the haggis, and draw the beast up to the guns that way. Kathy, Alec, you two head for Stroncrubie and get the breakdown train and the PW gang, we're going to need the big hook if we're going to have an earthlies to get the line clear in time to avoid the ore getting backlogged."

"Aye," the two train crew said with matching nods, and headed for their locomotive.

"I'll phone Dad since we've got the new barrel for the gun in the back," said Nick.

"Aye, here, use my mobile," Annie told him, handing it over. "Hey Mackie, Alice, give us a hand getting the ute onto the rails."

-/-/- End: Chapter 1 -/-/-