"Six-foot-two tiger-woman road-warrior in a cavalier hat," said a rather frazzle Fiona Macleod, slowly shaking her head and trying to ignore the way the group's attention was making Shiva preen.

"With crossbow death rays on her gauntlets," Nick reminded her.

"With crossbow death rays on her gauntlets, because of course the tiger-woman road-warrior has crossbow death rays on her gauntlets, Alice, why in the name of Jesus and dead puppies did your mind go straight to 'tiger-woman road warrior'?"

"Well, actually it didn't, it went from thinking about making my not-a-kitten into a guardian to hands being useful, and Fat Bloke suggested a 'big tough cat-girl', and after last night I seem to have catgirls on the brain, and she basically developed from there," Alice said. The topic of conversation, to whom Alice had just concluded introducing everyone with the right to be nosing around unaccompanied inside her portal, looked smug. "Tiger because that's obviously a big cat suited to the 'guard' part, then she had to be armoured because of course she had to be armoured, then the outfit just sort of grew from there into something that looks cool, then crossbow death rays on her gauntlets because obviously she has to have crossbow death rays on her gauntlets, and finally a nice hat, it just wouldn't be proper if she didn't have a nice hat. One step at a time, all very logical."

"Your mind is a very scary place, Alice Liddell," said Fiona with another slow shake of her head.

"Well if I'm going to be on the receiving end of wonderland jokes for the rest of my life I might as well have something better than a grinning moggy, and airship pirate catgirls are definitely cooler than Cheshire cats," Alice said with a shrug.

"Hey Alice, talking of Lewis Carrol wouldn't it be worth seeing if you can disguise your portal as a looking-glass?" Annie suggested. "Just to fuck with people, you know?"

Alice gave her a very stern look, and said, "I don't want to encourage the sort of idiot who thinks I haven't heard all the bloody Wonderland jokes ten thousand times before... oh for pity's sake Annabella bloody Kelly, talking about fucking with people?"

Nick solemnly declared, "Braaaaaaains. What? It's new material."

"Har de har har har, farmboy."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Huh," said Fat Bloke, curiously looking down at the little catgirl whom Nick had given the monicker of 'Silent', who was giving him a cautious look in return. "Stronger than she looks, you say? This is really starting to tickle at something I heard about somewhere."

"Gie us an arm-wrestle, I can show you how much strength it took me to hold her down," said Nick, who was sitting at his desk; Fat Bloke, still looking very thoughtful, nodded and came over.

"Okay," he concluded, once Nick had easily pushed his knuckles to the table. "Jesus, she's a sight stronger than I am, I know I'm a fat bastard but I'm not exactly a wimp. This... what the hell am I remembering, what the hell am I remembering, oh... Huh. Nick, there's something I'm going to have to look into with Sane Dave - Vrotch - and the Hamster if that's okay?"

"Oh aye, like what?"

"I've got a couple of mates down in South America, anyway one of these blokes is a bush pilot, flies an old Yank propeller plane - he does a lot of cross-border stuff, charter flights mostly, anyway apparently a while back he got talking with these blokes down in Argentina who were just back from the Falklands," and they all saw the way Silent's head snapped round to focus on him, "And they told him one hell of a story, apparently their unit had been on Mount Pleasant when the Commandos hit it, he said they were doing fine and holding their ground until this fucking giant black cat-thing that walked upright like a man and was swinging a full-sized machine gun round like it was a toy came up the bloody mountain just absolutely slaughtering everything in its path. These blokes reckoned they'd seen it tear a full-grown man's arms off like you or I breaking a fucking wishbone, they called it something that pretty much means 'Devil Cat', they said there were at least three, maybe four, of those things and trying to take them on was like trying to fight off an avalanche with a water pistol, they just rolled up the mountain and damn near routed three regiments."

"You think that entire 'Empire super-soldier program' thing is real?" Nick asked.

"I don't know, but it's about the only lead we've got," Fat Bloke said, and he turned to Silent and asked her, "What do you think, am I onto something?"

She stared at him for nearly a minute before giving one tiny nod.

"Is that what you are?" Nick asked her, and she quickly shook her head. "Okay, are you related to what these Argie blokes saw, as in family?" and she nodded. "Well, that'll be why when I headed down that way at lunch there was a bunch of military vehicles parked round that burned-out wreck of an illegal pub then."

"There was?" Fat Bloke asked. "Better stay well away from the place for a while, mate."

"Don't tell Neil," Alice told Nick.

Nick gave her a funny look and said, "Huh?"

"Remember when he was going on about how he worked out I'm... uh, not from around here? That whole rant about 'really stupid conspiracy theories'? One of those was this 'empire super-soldier program' thing. We don't breathe a word of this until we know for sure and can prove it," Alice explained, and Nick burst out laughing.

"Aye," he said once he'd finished cackling. "There's a fucking plan!"

"Okay, what am I missing?" Fat Bloke asked.

"Well basically one of my brothers, Neil, is full of himself," Nick told him. "He's a smug little bugger, right up his own arse and convinced to hell and back he knows everything and anyone who doesn't is stupid and he's always on about it, and even disregarding the way it's the sort of lesson he's really needing his face when he finds out he's repeatedly been declaring that only an idiot is going to believe something that turns out to be very real is going to be absolutely priceless."

"I see," said Fat Bloke, who clearly didn't. "Anyway, I'm gonna skedaddle - I need to get Sane Dave and the Hamster to help with this one, they're, uh, rather better at getting into military databases than I am, so I'll see you all later. Just, yeah, just don't get noticed by the army."

"Aye, I'm staying well away from that place for a while," said Nick with a nod, and then, after a moment of thought, added, "One thing I am for definite doing soon as I can though."

"Yeah, what's that?"

Nick gave Silent a side-on look, and said, "Learning sign language."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The first thing the Munching Hamster said once Fat Bloke had finished explaining the rumour he'd heard was, "Interesting, and I know at least one place I can check."

"Oh yeah, what's that?" Vrotch asked. The three of them, and Vicky, were lounging around in the foyer of Vrotch's sanctum - the part that looked like the inside of a caravan - with the majority of the cast of young women who constantly seemed to surround Vrotch having been shooed out; Vicky, of course, had refused to go. Wasn't like Vrotch could look out for himself if trouble came knocking.

"I know a guy who was on Mount Pleasant when the Brits came up," the Hamster told him. "His name's Werner Stutz, yes he's white but he's okay, he lives over in Shinhama, he's married to a friend. I'll see what he thinks later but for now we might as well go and have a poke around in the MoW's servers and see what shakes loose."

"Sounds like a plan, what are we waiting for?" asked Fat Bloke, and the three cybermancers immediately put action to words, ducking into one of the big monitors Vrotch kept handy for that exact job - in Fat Bloke's case his weight made this very funny to watch, and the Munching Hamster rippled and visually changed on her way through, becoming a bright red and exaggeratedly female stylised cartoon hamster clad only in a tight white vest with FREE NIHON written across the boob region and a little spinning chomping hamster logo encircled with the words 'Yet Still The Hamster Munches' rotating like a wheel in between her tits - this overall look was her avatar, both what she chose to look like where they now were and the image she presented for herself as the world's number one most wanted hacker. Word down the line was that the TLA - the American's primary military intelligence agency - would be willing to pay a seven-figure number for information leading to her apprehension; Vrotch wished them lots and lots of hilariously epic failure in their quest to rid themselves of his dearest friend.

The space beyond, a visual representation of the architecture of the servers his primary systems were hidden in was, unlike his sanctum space, not made so people walking in the portal didn't realise they'd stepped out of meatspace and into a reality that was an expression of the flows of data through the information technology of the human race, and it was the sort of sight that never failed to give you pause - all around them sprawled a towering city of the information stored on those servers, with data packets expressing as these sort of hovering driverless lorry type things that zipped every which what where along thin silver road surfaces representing the connections, software and hardware alike, through which the traffic of the ordinary operation of the data centre in which Vrotch had hidden his kingdom.

This, in a very real sense, was Vrotch Vosk's home ground. Out there in meatspace, he was a skinny, physically weak, knobbly-jointed and very unfit man with absolutely no capacity to fight; in here, he was a god.

It took but a moment to create a packet of data - just a few kilobytes of junk data generated using Perlin noise and the first eight bytes from a sample of Big Ben chiming as the seed number - as a vehicle for them to travel aboard, and to send it through a dizzying array of connections and hosts and proxy servers to obfuscate where it had come from into oblivion - all the software tools to do it were readily at hand, there was a very good reason he'd chosen a data centre belonging to the TLA in which to squirrel away the few trillion bits of easily-missed data he used as a home, that way if the Ministry of War did manage to trace them well, they'd know exactly who to glare at for the ordinary day-to-day cyberwarfare op and they'd totally disregard any cries of 'wasn't me' now, wouldn't they?

It was not an unusual choice for a cybermancer, in so much as there was such a thing as a normal cybermancer; to his knowledge Vrotch was one of exactly twelve people who had ever actually seen the incredible plane of existence some unknown process had caused to spring up and connect itself to and become an expression of (and means to get at and influence) every last byte of data in the solar system.

The one down side of that was the way this resulted in nothing looking like it really should look. There weren't any giant cyberspace fortresses, the military servers they were heading from and to didn't look or feel even remotely military, everything was just these vast information-cities with completely empty featureless space between them; if you weren't paying careful attention and keeping sharp track of which IP addresses you were passing through it was very, very easy indeed to get hopelessly lost, Vrotch wouldn't have been surprised to learn that more people than the lucky dozen had found the place only to get utterly lost and die there but he'd never seen any evidence to support that theory.

Their arrival at the data-city representing the Ministry of War was uneventful, at least as uneventful as travel through a realm like this could be - it involved a satellite bounce or two which was always a spectacle, you could almost pick out the shape of Earth's continents just from the locations of the data-cities and the umpteen ever-shifting connections into space made for a visually arresting sight - and actually getting into the Ministry of War was a snap, they just used a backdoor that had been put in by Vrotch's mentor, Reg Bethnal, deliberately designed to be usable only by a cybermancer; he had, after all, been the only cybermancer anywhere ever when he created it.

Then the real work began.

The Ministry of War had a preposterously enormous crapload of classified data with no way to search it if you didn't know exactly which specific keywords and serial numbers you were looking for, of which there was no digital reference list, and that meant the only way to find anything in there was the hard way. They at least stored related information together; if, for example, one wished to get the lowdown on Operation Gormhegast and the Gormhegast apparatus it would all be in the same place, presumably because someone high up in their cybersecurity department was better at being tidy than at being secure, the way they relied so heavily on that one stop point followed by security by obscurity was bloody infuriating, what a bunch of bloody amateurs. One of Vrotch's fellow cybermancers, McBangBang, who a few weeks prior had very much surprised him by not being the five-foot red-robed girl with cat ears and a lot of extra cybernetic limbs s/he looked like in cyberspace, was trying to get them off of their backsides and properly secure and in all honesty Vrotch wished her/him well even though this made it a lot easier to find full lowdowns once you actually found the subject you were looking for, it was just embarrassing how bad their internal security was. It was almost like someone of influence wanted their biggest secrets spilled, ridiculous as that idea was.

Ergo, they were going around looking for very large folders that had been updated recently, which meant wandering down long rows of data receptacles checking last-updated times, and the three of them had been doing that for about half an hour perceived time - which meant about a second in meatspace - pulling the odd one out for a quick look at what was in it then shoving it back when it turned out to be logistical minutae from bloody Pluto Fleet Station or some other such crap Vrotch couldn't work out why was being treated as an enormous carefully-guarded secret, when the Hamster shouted across, "Hey, Sane Dave, Fat Bloke, come and have a look at this."

Vrotch hastened that way, and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor between two rows of data receptacles one aisle across from him with one pulled out and its contents poured all over the floor; she was reading a document with an intrigued look on her hamster face.

"Found it?" he asked.

"No, it's nothing to do with what we were looking for, but you're going to want to take a look at what I have found," she said, and picked up one of the spilt documents and handed it to him.

It was a video file - he played it, and discovered it was recordings from some sort of magnetic telescope - hadn't there been something on the news about the Navy setting up some giant new magnetic telescope a few months back? - but what it showed was definitely neither the scientific research the news report he'd seen had been all about or the recordings of the movements of other nations' spacecraft he'd expected that thing to really be about as soon as he'd heard of it, because duh, a rocketry fusion reactor involves a bunch of really big really powerful magnets of the sort you can clearly image from a couple of AU away with a system cobbled together from parts taken out of old mobile phones, of course it was for watching other people's spacecraft.

However, what he was looking at most definitely was not the magnetic silhouette of a fusion-powered spacecraft; instead it was this weird thing shaped almost like a flowerbud, made out of giant curved magnetic segments, and he was just about to ask what he was looking at when the image suddenly snowed out.

It cleared up a little, then snowed out again, and repeat. He timed the snow-outs - they were happening at just over one a second.

"What am I looking at?"

"Something the Royal Navy spotted falling insystem beyond the orbit of Neptune with that giant magnetic telescope they've got set up for spying on the Russians and the gaijin," the Hamster said. "They've pretty much worked out it's an Orion-drive vehicle - you've heard of those, haven't you?"

"Like the one the Yanks ran for a couple of years before they stole our fusion reactor designs?" Vrotch checked, and she nodded. "Huh, that's... actually yeah, that's very interesting, so who's actually got an atomic pulse propulsion vehicle running now? I thought everyone who's got the ability to build an atom bomb has had fusion rocketry since the late seventies?"

"They do," the Hamster said, and looked up from what she was reading. "That's the initial magnetic footage their Deep Sky Magnetic Observatory team picked up of it at the end of August - it appeared out of absolutely buttfuck nowhere in a big flash, there's Longsight footage of it appearing over there," and she pointed at another file.

"Hamster," said Vrotch, "Am I seriously looking at an honest-to-god magnetic-imaging video of a freaking alien spaceship?"

The Hamster said, "The Navy thinks so, yeah. It's on a trajectory for a Venus intercept - they've been transferring every warship they have out there since the middle of last month."

Fat Bloke came scrambling over the line of data receptacles, having caught that last exchange.

He had a look around, then said, "I think we'd better get the others together."

They looked at each other, then they made copies of the files, put the originals all back in the receptacle, closed it, and left the Ministry of War's servers immediately with the sudden unexpected cat-girl completely forgotten about, in the case of Vrotch and Fat Bloke quite unaware of the red-robed G.I.R.L. who had been watching them from above.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Thursday afternoon Annie gave Alice a run up to the hospital for her appointment; the problem with her eyes turned out to as they'd been hoping be a software glitch as opposed to anything mechanical meaning to her great relief her face did not need to be partially disassembled, and it didn't take much effort to get Dr Clayton to add that little metal switch to the software Alice's brain was already running (and wasn't that a scary thought) although to Annie's immense disappointment her own eyes were not able to have that little mental switch added to their functionality; the glitch had in fact been with the controls for Alice's eyelids, and while to Alice's slight shock hers were cybernetic, Annie's eyelids were fully natural.

Probably a good thing too, Alice privately admitted to herself as they were driving back down to the town and she was practising turning the death-glare on and off in the mirror on the pickup's sunvisor, Annie was plenty enough of an unstoppable force without it.

(She took great delight in throwing the glare at Kevin Murchison at the first available opportunity - passing him in a hall Friday morning - and to her brief but extreme satisfaction he flinched. The fact that Fiona got a front-row seat served merely to make it even more satisfying.)

On that note Fiona had, since the night of the explosions and fire at the goods yard, been gone more and more - she hadn't spent more than one night in a row actually in the digs and was visibly starting to fray around the edges, and Alice was starting to get quite worried about her.

The cops had lost most of their frenzy by Saturday though there was still a lot of military about the east end of the goods yard and no-go, and there was no mistaking the growing air of tension in the whole town; Alice mentioned it Saturday night while they were driving around on the west side of the River Ness with Nick looking for vampires to do terrible things to, and he nodded.

"Aye," he said. "That there is - Scotty Johnson is someone basically everyone knows and pretty much everyone who knows him likes him, if he is a crook he's an honest one, he never rips his customers off, he's polite, he's friendly, he's respectful, he acts like every customer is just as important as every other customer, he runs - was running at this point, I guess - hands down the best gun shop north of Glasgow, I'd say near to half the 'bought' as opposed to 'made' guns in the north came from Scotty and that means with him being knocked out of business there are a hell of a lot of very nervous people in the north of Scotland at the moment. This stinks of another land war, aye, everyone is indeed on edge."

"I've heard that term, land war, a few times. Nick - just the hell is going on in Scotland? What is a land war?"

Nick didn't reply for long enough she was about to elbow him, but he chose that moment to finally answer her.

"I cannae say it's a surprise they're no teaching you about that one in their schools down south," he said. "Alice, what you have to realise is that most of Scotland has effectively been in a state of armed rebellion for over two centuries - closer to two and a half come to think of it."

"... What."

"It started out with the Jacobite rising, the Bold '45, that was back in 1745," Nick told her. "Well, actually it'd been going on for a good thirty years by then. After that... well, the government didn't take too kindly to the Highlanders rising up and trying to overthrow their Dutch kings now, did they. I guess it's not entirely fair to shout 'the English! The English!' over and over for all that some dafties who should really ken better are doing that all of the time - at about that sort of a time the old Clan chiefs, the lairds and landlords, were increasingly living down in Edinburgh and looking at their clansmen as a burden... It really got going down in Kintyre in the latter half of the eighteenth century, basically one of the lairds decided he was going to get better money by using 'his' land to farm sheep than by collecting rent from families that'd been biding there since stone axes were still modern. It... got messy, very quickly. He sent gangs of armed men, evicted the entire population of a village and had anyone who tried to resist or just bloody get all their belongings out shot. Then when he sent men to another village a bit further north, they found hundreds of armed crofters waiting for them. Two of the baliffs escaped alive, a dozen were lynched that night, and most of the rest of them shot or beaten to death."

"Oh," said Alice.

"After that..." Nick shook his head again. "They never stopped trying to evict villages, and the attempts got bloodier and bloodier. There was a raging gun battle not far from Stornaway in 1810 - realistically that was the first actual land war. It spread, hundreds of baliffs and revenue men were hanged, shot, some poor bastards were even burned at the stake and there's at least a couple of cases where men were buried alive, thrown off of cliffs, or thrown into the sea with old millstones tied to their legs, and after that it never really went away. The government made an attempt to shut it all down in 1884 but there was some sort of big mess in the Sudan going on then something kicked off in China, most of the men and equipment they'd been going to send north had to be sent out there instead, then one thing after another and basically there was just one war after another and Scotland was just sitting there not doing anything and by the time they had the time to turn their attention north at the end of the first world war things had pretty much broken down to the point it is today, apart from a handful of military bases, mostly navy or RAF, there's basically no government presence north of the line of Loch Ness and south of here to the border is tenuous at best. Today, on paper at least, ninety-eight percent of land in Scotland is owned by just fifty people, only two of which actually live in Scotland - Annie's dad's one of them - and less than a dozen of them have ever actually come north of the border - and over a third of the country's population are living under eviction notices that were served to their great-grandparents. I can still clearly remember the look on Annie's dad's face when he learned that courtesy of the land he bought along with the railway he had over twenty thousand tenants living under century-an-a-half-old eviction notices, I've never seen a man look so ashamed before or since, and even old Ali Beag Macleod was willing to be seen with tears in his eyes when Sir Joe had those notices rescinded."

"Oh," said Alice.

"I don't know why it's never truly ended, or why the government puts up with it," Nick told her. "I don't know why the shooting always peters out just before it can actually get anywhere either, and I don't know why Scotland has been kept the only part of the Empire where there is no law about security of tenancy on the books. All I can tell you for certain is that we are living in the last lawless land in western Europe - here in Inverness is the very northernmost point any government law enforcement happens at all in this country and it's tenuous, that's why they drive around in those bloody tanks and that's why the no-go is called the no-go, it's because any cop who drives in there is going to be blown up with a roadside bomb or pelted with home-made rocket launchers or if he gets out of his tank he'll be shot - come to think of it that's most likely why the vampires have had as much success up here as they have, there's nae many cops will even think to look if someone disappears and there's a hell of a lot of folks up here the government doesnae have any documents about at all. North of here there's not one cop or coast guard between here and Norway in one direction, the Faroes the other, what happens in the way of law enforcement north of here is always done by the militias and mostly consists of troublemakers getting beaten up or if they've pushed it too far kneecapped with a shotgun or just hanged. There's been actual ceasefires but they always end with the landlords trying to take advantage of them - the last successful evictions took place while a lot of men were away fighting in the second world war. Most of us are standing by to fight for our homes and our neighbours homes, nobody with a lick of sense wants it to happen but we all know it'll happen anyway, and at the end of the day all of us are wondering when in the name of Christ we're finally going to be left in peace."

He paused, and glanced across the cab at her.

"Alice," he said, "There's something I've been thinking, have thought for a while in all honesty. I know you're nae comfortable around guns, Brigid was pointing it out to me and once I'd seen it it was pretty clear to see, but at the end of the day you need to learn to shoot," and he must have caught her expression - it still wasn't an idea she was at all keen on - as he added, "Nae pressure, Alice. Whenever you're ready there's an open offer to help you learn - I'm a bloody awful shot but I know the mechanics of it well enough. Just... in all honesty I've a strong sense you're going to need to know how sooner or later."

Alice thought about that, and decided to take it in the vein it was patently intended.

"I'll think about it," she said. "Just remember though, this," and she raised her left hand, the index finger pointed, "Is always loaded."

-/-/-/-/-/-

At that exact moment, the last of the eleven living cybermancers was just arriving on Vrotch's home server, specifically McBangBang, in his red-robed cat-eared extra-robotic-limbed twelve-year-old girl guise. Kitty Katty - an American naval cybersecurity specialist who had made the leap two years prior, currently in his guise of a rather Tex Avery-looking cartoon cat - had been the first to join Vrotch, the Munching Hamster and Fat Bloke post the Hamster calling the meeting a couple of hours prior; second to arrive had been Hawkeye, a Russian hacker who online looked like a triangular pyramid with an eye on each face; third to come was the Flimflam Man (a Vietnamese chap dressed as your traditional pointy-hatted fantasy wizard with the addition of a trademark Viet Cong sub-machine gun with 'Magic Wand' written upon it, on a sling) and fourth was Dr Mayhem - splendidly Australian and quite mad, and a brilliant cybersurgeon who had made the leap to cybermancy from there; fifth to arrive was Mr Long, an Imperial Chinese national who took the appearance of a traditional Chinese dragon; sixth was Hammergirl, another Brit, who looked like a friendly roly-poly kids comic woman with a friendly roly-poly kids comic hammer drawn upon her pullover; seventh came Sutekh, whose background Vrotch did not know but he appropriately enough looked a great deal like the Egyptian god of the same name, in hieroglyphic style; and last was McBangBang with a big smile on his/her currently-female-looking face.

"Sorry I'm late old sock," s/he said. "Had something I couldn't get away from, what's all the fuss?"

"McBangBang, there you are," Vrotch said. "Kitty Katty was just confirming that his lot have been tracking this thing too," and he indicated one of windows that was floating open over the construct of a tabletop that was hanging in a nice open patch of localspace.

"You're Limey Fleet Space Arm," Kitty Katty said, gesturing at it, "What've you heard about this thing?"

McBangBang came over for a closer look, as usual tucking his/her hands into his/her sleeves in a manner rather like the stereotypical Mandarin and using some of the mess of robotic arms with their plier-like hands that extended from the backs of his/her shoulders in his/her avatar to manipulate the varied files they had open, and played the indicated file - a video of a rather attractive red-haired woman clad as a Royal Navy officer briefing some politicians and the Queen of Britain on the object Vrotch, Fat Bloke and the Hamster had recently learned of.

"Well I recognise Captain Amundsen," said McBangBang with a frown, and Vrotch realised exactly where the woman had looked familiar from when he saw that news report, she looked a lot like Scotty Johnson's right-hand woman and the fact Mags' surname was Amundsen didn't strike him as any sort of a coincidence. "She's been promoted since this video, superlative officer, she's tapped for command of one of the Dreadnaught-class battlecruisers we're currently close to completing – but the rest, this is the first I've heard of it... It explains a few things, no wonder Whitehall green-lit such a significant ramping up in our heavy assets and sent everything and the kitchen sink transferring for Venus last month. Where'd you get hold of this?"

The Hamster snorted and said, "Don't give me that, I saw you see me and Dave and Fat Bloke nosing around in the Ministry of War the other day. There's oodles of stuff on this, the people in charge at your day job have been falling over themselves over it since the same day this Amundsen woman's team spotted it and honestly I'm surprised they haven't briefed you."

They listened to the rest of the briefing from the illustrious apparently-now-Captain Amundsen, who was referred to by the rank of Commander throughout, and then Hammergirl said, "I wonder if the outsider has a datasphere?"

"That's a thought," said the Hamster. "We should be able to piggyback the M.o.W's tracking - who's up for going for a closer look?"

-/-/-/-/-/-

Riding a data packet several light minutes in real-world distance takes quite a long perceived time; unless you're in a construct deliberately clocked to match real time like Vrotch's sanctum your perceptions speed up in cyberspace, enough so that you can track the movement of individual data packets, but that leaves long trips seeming even longer - and the trip out to the object Hammergirl, whom Vrotch was vaguely wondering why hadn't been nearly as surprised as she should be, had dubbed 'the outsider' was a bloody long wait, taking as it did several real-world minutes, but they got there in the end and when they did they were met with possibly the strangest sight any of them had ever seen in the information realm. It really didn't match what Vrotch was used to seeing - the whole thing was just utterly mismatched, the end aligned with where they knew the engines were was this weird and rather small techno-organic blob with what looked almost but not quite like some sort of strange carnival mirror version of a normal datasphere then floating behind it, and behind and totally separate from that was this truly gigantic pale pink crystal sort of thing both utterly unlike either and just as utterly unlike anything else Vrotch had ever seen in cyberspace before.

"Any of you motherfuckers ever seen anything like this before?" asked the Flimflam Man.

"No, nothing," said the Munching Hamster, "Not even on McBangBang's home server."

"I must say I resemble that remark... Any thoughts on what in the devil causes it to look quite like that, chaps and chapettes?"

"Well for one thing I doubt it has anything to do with the code base our space aliens are using," said Vrotch, "We've all seen how little mere differing code bases and exact architecture do to alter the cyberrealm appearance of a system's infosphere."

"It seems obvious enough that we're looking at a fundamental difference in machine architecture – totally different tech base, one has to question whether they even use transistors. It could potentially be an organic computer?" Hawkeye suggested in its faintly Russian drawl.

"I don't think that's it Hawk, Kelbeth are working on living computers using cloned brain tissue and their dataspheres don't look anything even remotely like this," said Sutekh, poking at the techno-organic blob thins with its staff. "They're just as different from your generic system's infosphere, but not in this way – they're all sort of shroomy."

"Really? Remind me to have a look at that some time, sounds intriguing," said the Hamster.

"Oh it is rather," Sutekh said with a nod.

"You know," said McBangBang, "I can't shake the feeling I've seen something a bit like this before, but I'm dashed if I can think where."

"Yeah, you're right – it does look sort of familiar, doesn't it?" Kitty Katty mused.

"It does, doesn't it?" said Fat Bloke.

Dr Mayhem nodded and said, "My thought exactly."

"Which logically leads," said Mr Long, "To the question, where have you four been that the rest of us have not?"

"It's a big Net," the Hamster said with a sigh. "I'm sure there's plenty of places."

"Well to start off with we're going to have to work out how to get into this thing," Vrotch said, rapping his knuckles on the edge of the alien datasphere. "Look at that – hard incompatibility, no surprise there but until we come up with some sort of translator we're not getting anywhere close to into it."

"And to do that we're going to need to make sense of what makes this so different to our own datasphere, right," said Fat Bloke. "This smells of catch-22 to me."

Kitty Katty laughed and shook his head. "Nah, we've got eleven of the finest minds in the world right here. Between the whole lot of us I don't expect there's much of anything we can't figure out."

"Truth," Fat Bloke admitted.

Vrotch glanced around the group, and then let out a breath.

"Okay," he said. "Whichever way we've got a lot to do - let's get on with it."

He and Fat Bloke and the Hamster had all long since completely forgotten about Nick and the tongueless catgirl.

-/-/-/-/-/-

There were two weeks left before the October break, and Alice split them between college, playing with magic, very carefully not ripping MIIIiiiiIiiiiIIIster Kevin Bloody Murchison's spleen out because she wasn't sure how to get away with it yet, fiddling with things in unspace, putting off thinking about Nick's offer as the idea still made her jumpy, vaguely wondering where Fat Bloke and the Hamster had got to, trying to catch that fox - the little bastard was as slippery as an eel and just wouldn't stay gone - and going out finding vampire lairs the military weren't anywhere near and splattering the ticks - the part about military stopped being a concern by the end of the second-to-last week before they'd be off back to Inverallen when the military personnel that'd been camped out round the burned-out illegal pub packed up and got on the road south.

At the same time the problem with Fiona abruptly went away; after the night they found Silent she'd stopped coming back to the digs every third night, the morning after which she was always visibly overtired but swore blind she couldn't say what was up, then that same morning the army cleared out she came back looking just as tired as ever but rather relieved, sat herself down at the breakfast table beside Alice, and said, "Well thank Christ that's through with."

"What's through with?" asked Alice.

"Well I can't really be saying much about it," Fiona surprised her by saying in a low voice, "But to cut a long story short, Grandmother had myself and two others maintaining a watch on one of the coppers who was getting smashed up in that illegal pub, one John Griffths - nasty piece of work, normally I'd just stand back grinning and watch whatever happened to the bastard but Grandmother is thinking he'll be useful to her yet. Any rate just last night someone was skulking their way into his ward at the hospital and trying to inject him with I don't know what, and went to shoot me when I was saying he shouldnae be doing that - I'd been using a wee misdirection so I wasn't being noticed - well one way or another Griffths is off to a police safehouse and Grandmother's cancelled our wee watch on him."

Alice blinked, and then said, "Huh... thanks, Fiona. I... thanks."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The others weren't there yet when Alice got to the Harbourmaster's that afternoon - not surprising, the engineering and computer science courses both had later lectures than the archaeology students on a Wednesday - so having let Mary know to tell the others where they were Alice and Fiona headed directly through Alice's portal to get her experiments with opening the things from the Earth side planned in peace and quiet, and immediately found a rather irate tiger-woman coming stomping back through the trees covered in dust with her hair in a mess.

"Shiva," Alice said. "You look... kinda like you've been dragged through a bush backwards, what's up?"

"That bloody fox again, boss," said Shiva, who sounded just as frustrated as she looked "It just about wrapped me round a tree this time, it's getting even bloody slipperier and the cunning little sod just keeps on coming back for another round, I really don't think I'm going to be able to catch it on my own like this."

Alice said, "Hrm," while thinking very fast, then added, "This place isn't the most conductive to catching things in, is it. I'd been thinking I might as well do something a bit more with it and I guess there's no time like the present.

"It'd be very much appreciated, thanks boss," said Shiva with a sigh, sitting herself down on one of Alice's sofas. "Bleh! I got a branch right in my mouth."

Alice nodded, and started focusing.

She began by making most of what was around them go away - down to just the patch of carpet with sofas, and the pseudo-container she'd made for Fat Bloke; she turned that into a room with wood-panelled walls, added walls and a ceiling around the patch of carpet, then stretched a hallway between the two and up to the portal, around which she made another room with similar decor to the existing ones.

Then she started filling in more rooms - first changing the hallway so it ran along the side of the three rooms instead of between them, then tacking a room onto each end as she decided that yes, steampunk pirate airship was definitely the right way to go; the one at the far end from the portal room became the airship's bridge (or whatever it's called on an airship) and the one at the other became a sort of nautical grand staircase style room with stairs going both up and down - from the one extending down she added another corridor, then rooms along each side of them until the whole thing was roughly boat-shaped.

She then headed up onto the top of the whole thing and started imagining a gasbag with rigid airship internal structure inside it on top, decided she'd made that too small, and remade it much bigger; she'd just got done putting in a zigzagging staircase going up to a sort of crow's nest on top and gone back to the original area to start thinking of what to turn rooms into when Nick came through her portal, and once he'd got done laughing his fool head off about the airship he finally managed to communicate that they were going to go vampire hunting.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Hey, there's another set of those twins," said Andy as the Bigger Van rattled through Culloden. "The one with the long hair's wearing the lead this time."

"Again," said Alice. "That's, what, the twentieth set?"

"Must be closer to thirty by now," said Nick. "I don't know about you lot but I've pretty much seen at least one set of them every day since I was starting to keep an eye out, always busy getting out of town and the only change which one's on a lead."

"Think we ought to be grabbing a pair of them and asking a few wee questions?" Fiona asked.

"Nah, they're nae bothering anyone," Annie decided, and Fiona shrugged and reserved comment, and that was about that as far as conversation went in the Bigger Van save for planning what they were going to do to vampires in Nairn until they were in Nairn and doing things to vampires.

The nest in question was a bit outside the town, set up on a pig farm; there were about fifteen bloodsuckers in all and a particularly horrible piece of machinery set up in the barn - this appeared to be a home-made device for draining the blood from a living human being, and there was no sign of bodies but plenty of signs that a lot of people had been drained then chopped up and fed to the pigs, and after about the third cop-related joke out of Val, Nick told her it wasn't funny.

It didn't take much thought to realise that what had been going on at the farm was the collecting and selling of large quantities of human blood; there was a fridge full of nearly two hundred blood bags, half a pallet of unused empties, a stack of ledgers full of transactions measured in pints with each pint costing half a shilling, several large suitcases stuffed full of money, and a password-protected laptop computer.

"Damn it," said Mackie, surveying the laptop. "Wish myself kent how to get into this thing."

"Isn't Vrotch some sort of computer wizard?" asked Val. "Bet he could get right into it."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Nick! Oh crap I'm sorry man, I clean forgot about your cat-girl because of this stuff we found when we were looking for something about her, man, it's fascinating, sorry man," said Vrotch as soon as Vicky showed the gang of them into his caravan, where he had been busying himself tucking a bunch of paperwork into a big manilla folder.

"Oh aye, what were you finding then?" Nick asked, sitting himself down along with the rest of the little team of vampire hunters.

"Well basically the Ministry of War filing system is bloody awful, man, we were going through it looking for recently updated stuff because we guessed that the file on anything to do with super-soldiers would probably have been updated with whatever happened at that pub of Scotty's, right, and basically the Hamster found this," and he tapped at one of the several computer mice on his desk, causing a piece of video to appear on a monitor - it started with a blank starscape, then there was a bright flash and suddenly there was a spacecraft there.

"Myself am no recognising that one, is that one of those things the Yanks were playing with in the early seventies that got about by setting off atom bombs on themselves?" Mackie asked. "What's with that big petals sort of a thing off the far end from the pusher plate of it?"

"We think so, yeah," said Vrotch. "And we don't know, because get this: what you're looking at is the first Longsight footage of an actual honest-to-God alien spaceship."

There was a pause, during which the image suddenly started flashing completely white about once a second with the bit Mackie had called a pusher plate visibly bouncing back between flashes, and then Mackie said, "Yourself's shitting myself."

"No shit man, it appeared out of fucknowhere in a great big flash outside Neptune orbit, did a braking burn to the tune of about two hundred miles per second cause it was on its way through the solar system like a cat with its arse on fire, and is now falling insystem towards a predicted Venus encounter early next year."

"Okay, I see why you were getting a bit distracted," said Nick, his voice somewhat higher-pitched than usual. Welcome to the rabbit-hole, Macbane.

"Yeah man, it's the sort of thing that makes a dude sit up and take notice, isn't it - don't go gabbing about it, man, we nicked most of this stuff off the Ministry of War's secure servers and they get a bit excited about that sort of thing. It'll be a moot point soon enough, in about a month it's projected to pass in front of the trajectory of vehicles transferring from Earth towards Mars and the asteroid belt and which asteroid miner doesn't have a stonking great magnetic imager on his boat because iron, duh, but basically just don't let on you know about it early."

"That," said Annie, who looked even more like she didn't know quite what to think than she had when realising they were dealing with vampires, "Is probably the best idea."

"So what brings you dudes here tonight anyway, I notice an absence of kitties?" said Vrotch.

"Oh, aye," and Annie held up the laptop she was carrying. "Well we found this in the vampire den we hit tonight, place through by Nairn that seems to have been being used to sell blood out of people they were killing, they had this big draining machine sort of thing, nasty stuff. They had a big pile of ledgers but there wasnae anything but names in there, we're hoping there's more than that on this but it's passworded and since you're basically a computer wizard,"

"Nuff said," said Vrotch, accepting the laptop. "Just don't use 'wizard' round the Munching Hamster, basically what you dudes do with stuff like Mackie's nifty shotgun is you're wizards, wizards make and use magical tools instead of casting spells, right, the Hamster gets kinda hung up on that sort of stuff even when it's like semantics."

"Oh, sure," said Annie as Vrotch booted the laptop; he spent a moment staring at the login screen then stuck his head and one arm in through it, spent a moment rooting around in there, came back out, and scribbled something down on a scrap of paper.

"There's the log-in, easy as, have fun," he said, then added, "I'll make sure I remember to have a better look for stuff about your cat-girl, Nick man. Just lemme know if you find anything."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The laptop, when they started going through it Thursday evening at the Harbourmaster's, proved to be a veritable goldmine of information; it was full of names, addresses, tastes, notes on which vampire did what, and what amounted to the blackmail material about other walking corpses collected by a walking corpse - and one of the most prominent names on the list was identified as an information broker.

Thus it didn't take them five minutes to decide where they were going tonight: a fortified 'haggis-proof' farmhouse-cum-stately-home not far from Muir of Ord, and as soon as they saw the name 'Ruilick Hall' they immediately had enough to get an idea of what they were dealing with off of the Internet.

"... Huh, it's supposed to have been built in the 1890s," Annie said, peering at one of the top search results. "Bloke who built it went west on the wrong end of a bull haggis in 1903 it says here, and... huh. So the last listed owner is his wife, who seems to have been on the go and not looking old enough... rather a long time after the place was built."

"I guess we've worked out who our vampire is then," said Andy,

"Was," said Andy.

"Aye, was. Okay, let's go and put what's left of her in the ground then," said Nick.

"The place is a bloody fortress Nick, have a look at this," said Annie. "Proper haggis-proof building and I think it's meant to be crofter-proof as well, it might as well be a pillbox. Well, guess we'll be finding out if it's Mackie 're-railed a locomotive with his bare hands' Romanov-proof."

"It wasnae that big a bloody locomotive," said Mackie.

"No, it wasnae that big, only nine tons," said Annie with a snort; she caught Alice's expression and added, "Aye, that's about the look I had on my face when this great lump just grabbed the bloody Fowler's front buffer beam and lifted. That was when I was starting to realise that all the mad wee stories they'd been telling me when I was blind were nae a bunch of old shite after all."

"What I'm thinking is we rip that strainer out of the fence there and Mackie hies at the door with it, just ram the bloody thing into the door end-on until it goes crunch," said Nick, indicating the hall's perimeter fence on one of the photos on the historic building website they were looking at. "You ken, like a wee battering ram, if this bloody tick's got a wee castle we may as well be getting into it like you're getting into a castle."

"You're bloody having us on," said Andy.

Annie, Mackie, and Nick shared a round of mad grins.

-/-/-/-/-/-

There was a massive bang and cracking noise, and the entire courtyard doorway to Ruilick Hall shook, and Andy slowly shook his head.

"Okay," he said. "Mebbe you were nae having me on."

"Aye," said Mackie, backing off for another go and blithely ignoring the yelling now audible from inside the semi-fortified building; he backed off as far as the arrangement of the entryway let him, lowered the overgrown fence post to about the same height as his first go, charged, and arrived with the post pointy-end first with another massive crunch.

"Nae quite yet," he said, backing off.

"Another couple of whacks ought to be doing it," said Fiona.

Mackie charged again. This time the door visibly buckled a bit and something went bang from inside it.

"That post's starting to splinter," said Annie.

"Nae bother, we'll just be pulling another one out if this one gives up first," said Mackie, and charged for a fourth time. This time, the pointy end of the post went clean through the door, folding one of its planks in half as it went; he let out a cry of "Jesus!" and ducked to one side as a machine gun opened up on the far side of the very damaged door.

"Pass myself the bloody Vickers out the Bigger Van, myself'll be giving these wankers machine gun," he declared, and Nick and Val went running back to the Bigger Van and came back with said gun and a box of ammunition to match in tow, Nick toting the gun and Val toting the ammo.

"Mind the bloody water jacket, it's nae bullet-proof," said Nick.

"Och, it'll be fine, pass us the thermo gogs there Andy," said Mackie; Andy pulled them off and lobbed them over to him, and waited until whoever was inside either let off or stopped to reload then pulled the battered overgrown fence post out and ducked back again; the machine gun opened up again, this time with the occasional bullet coming out of the hole left by the fence post.

Mackie spent the next wait putting the thermograph goggles on and loading his very large gun, then popped its muzzle into the hole left by the post and held down until the belt ran dry.

No answering gunfire returned, so he dumped the machine gun, grabbed his trench gun from where he'd leant it against the wall, reached through the hole, pulled at something, took a couple of deep breaths, then kicked the no-longer-barred doors open and went sprinting in with shotgun barking and Nick Macbane and Fiona Macleod hard behind him.

There was a lot of crashing, banging, splattering noises, blood-curdling screams, gunshots, and general mayhem, then it all went quiet in there and Alice had a cautious peek through, finding the two boys wandering around the large courtyard beyond the recently-knocked-in doors big enough the Bigger Van could fit through and apparently checking there wasn't any vampires hiding among the assorted vehicles parked in the lean-to sheds that lined the courtyard.

"Huh - no many signs of life, or of unlife either," Annie continued, and no sooner were the words out of her mouth than half a dozen yelling, sword-waving, idiots came pouring out of the main door to what looked to be the house part of the building, and immediately got themselves lit up with a salvo of gunfire - one proved to have some sense, waited for Val and Andy to be reloading and then came roaring out the door, which he slammed behind himself. He was clad in a long dark coat, wearing sunglasses at night, and had a katana of all things in his hands - he took one look and went at Nick, whirling his sword at roughly chest-height.

Nick, not being anyone's fool, blocked - the katana met the claymore with a sound vaguely reminiscent of a car crash, and much to the unfortunate vampire's extremely visible surprise the impact left the katana very bent indeed.

"Well that was predictable," said Nick, and hacked the vampire's head off on the backswing.

"Cheap knock-off?" Annie asked, poking at the mangled katana with her foot.

"Nah, one of those probably would've busted in half, that wasnae a bad bit of steel before that eejit decided to smash it edge-on into a slightly sharpened pinch bar with all his walking-corpse might. What a bloody shame," said Nick with a shake of his head.

"Knock knock, wankers!" Mackie roared, and kicked open the door to the house proper (a markedly less massive construction than the structure's exterior doors) ducking back as a machine gun roared into life somewhere within; he hung back until the gunner stopped to reload then hurled a double handful of smoke grenades in, waited until the gunner dried out the next belt, then went in the door in dead silence save for the bark of his shotgun, Nick and Fiona hard behind him.

"We may as well be taking the Bigger Van into the courtyard," said Annie.

"Why'd I nae think of that?" Andy grumbled as the four still standing outside headed back to it with the Vickers gun in tow.

By the time they'd driven in (and ascertained that yes, the Bigger Van's turning circle was indeed tight enough to get round the sharp dog-leg at the housewards end of the driveway into the alcove sort of affair on one side of which the main gates were) there was a great deal of noise coming out of the kicked-in door, so Alice parked the Bigger Van with its rear third blocking the doorway and she and Andy stayed in it with the doors and roof hatch closed and the gearbox in reverse so she could back it into a position where nothing could get into the Bigger Van or out of the main gate, while Annie and Val went and joined Nick and Mackie inside, increasing the velocity and volume of mayhem.

"I dinnae like just sitting out here and waiting," said Andy.

"Me neither, but what can we do - it's not like we've got superpowers the way Mackie has," Alice told him, and he let out a most indecorous snort.

"Remind me which of the pair of us is a cyborg who's learning actual honest-to-God magic."

Alice thought about that for a bit, and finally said, "Oh."

She thought about it a bit longer, and added, "I don't care what you say, I'm not starting running around in brightly-coloured pyjamas and a silly little opera mask."

-/-/-/-/-/-

After about twenty minutes Annie Kelly came ambling back out of Ruilick Hall and over to the Bigger Van, and Alice opened her window.

"Sup?" she said.

"All clear, but there's a shitload of stuff we're taking and the owner of the place to be asking a few wee questions, we could use the extra hands," and Alice pulled the Bigger Van forwards and piled out and into the building.

The foyer within was distinctly Victorian-country-house with a grand double stairway leading up to a balcony round the top - a brass-infested and likewise Victorian-looking machine gun was mounted at the point where the two curved sides of stairway met at their shared top, and there was mud up the ceiling above the gun and a pair of muddy trousers hanging from the chandelier, while Nick was standing beside the gun and laughing at something.

This something was swearing at him in a very posh very English woman's voice, and on arriving at the top of the stairs Alice had to laugh: a woman recognisable from the portrait photograph on the website Annie had found, down to being clad in very Victorian clothing to match her very Victorian house and her very Victorian machine gun, was laying flat on the floor and staked to it by Nick's claymore, which was embedded in her and the floor up to its hilt.

"Aye," said Fiona, raising her thermograph goggles. "Walking corpse, I'd say she's been dead since the end of the nineteenth century."

"The more of this vampires shite we see the more fucked up it gets," Annie said with a shake of her head. "Alrightie dead girl, want to tell us where your everything is and get a nice quick mudding or are we going to torture you then give you a wee suntan for breakfast?"

"Who the devil do you think you are?" the vampiress on the floor declared in the tone of one who has not truly registered their position.

Annie shot her in the foot, waited for the renewed screaming and swearing to subside, and then said, "I think I'm someone who can't abide anything that thinks people are food. Now, are you going to make me ask you again? I can keep this up all night."

-/-/-/-/-/-

In the end, they drove away from Ruilick better off by several computers and a suitcase full of money, with Nick driving one of the vans that had been parked in the courtyard and the dozen assorted people they'd found in an honest-to-God dungeon in the basement in the back of it, leaving the former owner of the hall nailed to the roof and still yelling.

They dropped the victims (and computers) off with Vrotch and headed back to the digs.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Next up - A visit to Orkney, a stormy week back in Inverallen, and the final couple of very unexpected encounters as chapter 5 begins - and a variety of issues start looking for places to come home and roost.