Heinrich knelt on the scorched earth of his laboratory, tears running down his face. His colleagues looked on stoically, he didn't know if it was the English 'stiff upper lip' or that they had less vested in the project. Either way, it annoyed him. He shifted, trying to stem the tears but they kept coming.

This had been his life's work. Every solder joint and mathematical formula had been created on the back of his work, his idea. He had seen the speck of truth in others' work, had seen the possible use of faster than light particles.

He had struggled for years to persuade the old government that he was onto something, scraping by on handouts and minuscule grants, borrowing and stealing the equipment to try to prove his theories. Even when he could show proof, even when he could show them that he could win them the war they didn't listen, they didn't throw manpower and money at the project. Even now, after successfully demonstrating the strategic benefits of his machine they ignored him. Two guards, that was all they had guarding the most monumental discovery ever. As soon as he showed that a man could be teleported across Europe in the blink of an eye he should have had the most monumental budget and security that the Reich could supply. He should have been in an underground bunker with a cavern the size of a cathedral and an army of POW test subjects to experiment on.

Now, look at it, more thoroughly shelled than the British high command, a field of twisted metal and blackened wood. There was nothing left, not even the emitters with their extremely rare metals. He had saved for years, building those four plates one at a time from ore smuggled from Asia. The manufacturing process to get the emitters to produce a consistent wave profile had been developed specially by a genius metallurgist back in Germany. If he couldn't find them amidst the wreckage he would have to return, cap in hand to the science commission. If he did that then he would have to find legal sources of the metals, something that may prove impossible, especially for the thorium.

He had reluctantly stored some of his research in the military vaults, somehow he needed to get that back. That may be more of an issue than anything, they were happy to put things into the vault but if you asked to copy something out, well, it usually didn't happen.

He looked at the scientists around him, wondering whether together they could recall enough of the essential information to avoid that onerous task. Suddenly he realised something and his eyes narrowed, "Who told them?" He hissed. "Who told those damned ignorant dreckfresser!"

The Englishmen all professed their innocence, holding their hands up in surrender, he knew though, there had to be sympathisers. "The soldiers will find out, they will make you tell." He rose to his feet and spat on the ground, not caring now that the tears rolled out from under his glasses, "We could have destroyed them, forced the world to bow at our knees but no! You filthy English arschgeige have to stick your noses in."

He turned sharply and marched from the compound, heading to speak directly to the Oberstleutnant, the highest-ranking officer in the town.

***

Nik looked up from his paper, "Ouch! Did you just have an argument with a bus or were the Fritz having a quiet word?" He pulled himself out of his seat and fetched the first aid kit whilst Colin eased himself into his chair. At some point in the weekend, a bug had appeared in their break area, at least, the place where they sat to think whilst drinking tea. Nik relayed this fact with hand gestures as Colin sat down.

"They were rather insistent that they wouldn't pay their bill." His words were a little slurred from the bruising on his jaw. "I told them I couldn't afford to have the suction truck paid for and they accused me of bombing the place! I told them I couldn't have, I was on the phone with the guard hut at the time it happened. Of course, then they accused me of passing information to the rebels and wouldn't listen when I said I had nothing to do with it."

Nik cleaned the blood from Colin's face, wincing at the cuts and bruises, "That one needs a stitch." He said, pulling out the suturing kit. "This may hurt."

Colin's cry reverberated through the workshop, almost deafening Nik as he pulled the thread taught. "Don't be a baby, the cut must have hurt way more than that little prick." He said making a knot.

"Yeah, but the German at least telegraphed the punch, that was not enough time for a warning!" He leaned back in the seat after Nik snipped the thread.

"You won't like this then," Nik said and dabbed rubbing alcohol on the worst wounds. Colin's language would have made a sailor blush. "Told you. Now, off with the shirt, let me see the bruises."

The bruising stopped him from raising his arms over his head so Nik had to help Colin reluctantly shed his shirt, seeing for the first time the blooming blue stains across his own torso. "Wow, those don't look good."

"You obviously haven't looked in a mirror. Your face is way worse!" Nik looked at the bruising and pressed a few locations, causing Colin to tense up and wince. "Well, probably nothing broken. I'm not having you take your trousers off, you can look down there on your own."

He disappeared off into the yard, returning a few minutes later with a huge lump of copper. He handed the heavy paperweight to Colin.

"What am I meant to do with this?" He asked, wincing as his stitch pulled when he tried to frown.

"Well, I don't have ice. That thing sits in a bucket of cold water so I figured it might help reduce the swelling in that eye." Nik pointed at Colin's eye which was starting to swell like a boxer's. "So, are they coming to give us the same treatment? They haven't already picked up Rich and Guy have they?"

"I think this was just me, last time was just because we were all together when they came looking. I really do seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time too often for my own health. I think I may become a recluse." Colin moved to the small two-seater sofa and lay down, his legs extending comically into the air past the end of the sofa. "Wake me when it's Monday." He told Nik.

"It's already Monday, it has been all day," Nik replied, wondering if he should check for a concussion.

"No, next Monday," Colin said wearily curling up on his side in a vain attempt at finding comfort on the small couch.

Nik glanced at the clock, wondering how long Guy and Rich would take to refill their gas bottles. He couldn’t help imagining them being picked up and tortured. If Colin actually hadn’t said anything incriminating then Nik’s opinion of him just went up a large measure.

He returned to his work on the tank, leaving Colin to rest. He made sure not to work on anything related to the time machine, knowing that every word spoken and noise made was likely to be dissected by the German intelligence officers who were now undoubtedly following Colin’s every move.

***

Rich looked at Colin as he slept curled up on the tiny couch, “Are you sure he’s okay?” He whispered, concerned at the blue bruises that were very visible.

“Hey, I’m no doctor but he seems to be alright, I’m fairly sure there are no broken bones and he doesn’t seem concussed. I don’t think he will be digging any ditches anytime soon though.” Nik glanced at the object of their conjecture, “Perhaps we should stay at his place tonight to make sure he’s okay?”

Guy piped up from across the room, “One of you should keep him company tomorrow too. I don’t mind being a man down.” He obviously cared for Colin, just not enough to offer his own time!

Nik and Rich shared a look before Rich gave a long-suffering sigh, “Fine, how about we all stay the night and then I will keep him company tomorrow?”

***

The men were careful to do jobs which didn’t require power tools for the rest of the day, going as far as breaking out the spanners rather than using the unka-dunka gun to do up bolts. Nik had to be physically restrained from using his beloved grinder more than once.

When they finally woke Colin at the end of the day he could hardly stand, the bruising on his legs and torso having developed into a dark rainbow of blues and browns. His face looked like he had gone ten rounds in a title fight, only one eye was opening enough to see through and his split lip had swollen to amazing proportions.

They helped him out to their car and drove him carefully back to his house. Uninterested in eating he asked to be helped upstairs.

“Nik, is it a bad sign when your pee is brown?” Colin managed to mumble, knowing the answer.

Nik grimaced, “Yes. I think perhaps I should call a doctor. You just get in bed.”

“Can you call and cancel my appointments for tomorrow? I think I might need a day off.” He slipped into bed and curled up around his sore abdomen.

Nik called the doctor who reluctantly agreed to a house call. He then found Colin’s appointment book and started the laborious process of cancelling all his appointments for the week. Inwardly he cringed at the loss of earnings, knowing the struggle to make ends meet from personal experience.

Guy and Rich had put the radio on in the living room and had then disappeared into the basement via the shed, careful to scan for bugs before opening the hatch. They found that Colin had been busy, there was a box made from thick steel plate and all the stolen electronics had been wired up, Colin had wedged the emitter panels into the box and it appeared he was soldering together an electromagnet on his workbench.

"Wow, the guy has no idea how to switch off, does he? No wonder the Germans are so suspicious of him, he's never in for them to listen to!" Rich pulled some handwritten notes from the bench, "So, what can we do to help him?"

"He is obviously doing those measurements that his friend asked for, I'm not sure how that works without actually making it function." Guy was picking up each of the meters to see what they were measuring, trying not to disturb the connections.

"I think it's actually really hard to synchronise the waves so you just have to run it with the emitters misaligned," Rich told him, trying to decipher Colin's notes. "I think we should do our measurements after cutting down the plates though, don't you?"

Guy thought about that for a minute, "I think knowing the original values might be beneficial, who knows what effect smaller plates would make otherwise."

"Okay, so that means we finish off this magnet and then run a few programs on the computer. That sounds like something we could do." Rich turned on the soldering iron, an antique that Colin might have inherited from his grandfather, "We should probably let Nik cut the panel anyway, he's far neater than us."

It didn't take long to finish putting the machine together, it took longer for them to double-check that all the cables were plugged in correctly and that they were not going to fry anything.

"So, doing this without a lead shield isn't going to give us cancer, is it? Or superpowers, I would far prefer superpowers if we have that choice." Guy asked with a nervous laugh.

"Who knows, there is insufficient data to tell so far." Rich said, flipping the switch with a mischievous smile, "You could be the first." He pressed the button on the computer to run the test program, there was a faint hum for a second, Rich could have sworn the air over the steel box blurred for a moment and then the air tasted slightly metallic. "So, any superpowers manifesting?" He teased.

Guy let out the breath he had been holding since the switch was flipped, "Let's just take those measurements and reset the meters, I will let you know after we finish this."

He quickly wrote the numbers down and Rich ran the second test program. Aside from tiny changes to the readings, nothing different happened. The two repeated the process over and over again until Guy smelled burning. "Damn, I forgot they had a cool-down period!" Rich cursed whilst he hurriedly tried to locate the burning smell.

"I think it's okay, it seems to be the magnet, all the other equipment appears to be okay. They all seem to have temperature cutouts and overvoltage protection built-in. This one obviously trips the protection a lot, it's the only one with breakers rather than soldered in protection." He said, pointing at a box that looked identical to the rest in Guy's eyes.

Guy unhooked the magnet, "We should do that for all of them, including these magnets." He took it to the desk and measured the resistance of the coil. "Nope, it's poked. How much juice is going through these things? They only power up for a fraction of a second, I'm surprised all our tools didn't jump off the bench."

"It's the inverse square law or something, the magnetic field gets logarithmically weaker the further away it is from the source. I think… high school physics was a long time ago." Rich was wishing for the umpteenth time that he had studied more at school rather than making swords on the school's bench grinders.

"Okay, noted. Stand well back if I want to keep my change in my pockets." Guy said, nodding sagely. "Well, not much left to do now. Not until we get replacement magnets."

"We could get a preliminary result, we have enough measurements to plug into that formula James gave us." Rich pulled out a notepad and pen.

"Urg, no thanks. I find it hard enough to balance my accounts, mind if I go check on Colin? The doctor must have left by now." Rich waved him away and promised to be up shortly for food.

Guy was just as careful returning from the basement as they had been entering, checking the coast was clear and even scanning again for bugs before exiting. The doctor had left some time before, he had not been happy treating someone whose wounds were sustained at the hands of the 'rightful authorities', he didn't want to be labelled as a resistance sympathiser. He had taken a brief look, told them it was probably just internal bruising and rushed out, looking very shifty.

"So, no medications or advice?" Guy asked, helping Nik peel the vegetables.

Nik shrugged, "He put a catheter in, gave him some aspirin and told me to feed him lots of water. He says it will probably take ten days to heal." He ducked his head into a cupboard, "Where do you think Colin would keep corn flour?"

Guy ignored the question, "So basically one of you two will have to stay here for over a week." Work at the yard was quiet but not quiet enough that losing a man for a week wouldn't hurt. "Perhaps we can alternate the days. I could stay Wednesday I suppose." Guy admitted reluctantly. "I could do some paperwork or something."

After opening and rummaging in the last cupboard Nik gave up and pulled plain flour from the first cupboard he had opened, "You know, I used to think that a neatly labelled, stacked and alphabetised pantry was pedantic nonsense but I'm beginning to understand Rich's obsession."

"Hey! It's not an obsession! It's a perfectly sensible compulsion to organise things nicely." Rich said from down the hall. The two men in the kitchen shared a knowing nod. "Anyway, what's for dinner?"

"Meatballs, dumplings and gravy," Nik called, rolling the balls of mince in flour. "With carrots and potatoes."

"Yum! How long? I should wash up." He replied, heading for the downstairs facilities.

***

Colin's convalescence was a blessing in disguise, they each used the time to play around with the test rig in the basement, applying their findings to their final rig in the tank the following day. Nik was having great fun, he had pared down the required electronics until it would fit into a single rack mounted case, if barely. Their plan was to make it easy to fit inside the tank without anyone being able to tell it was there.

They even managed to do some work on the engine of the tank, adding parts salvaged from a large diesel generator and a third gearbox, this one a constantly variable transmission that ran off of a separate power takeoff. It was only going to produce about seventy-five kilowatts of electricity with the normal tank engine which was not nearly enough to run the computer, perhaps they would get a little more with the modifications and tuning they had done, along with some good petrol. Back when the tank was manufactured it had been run on an absolutely ridiculous 45 octane fuel, even with the petrol shortages the modern fuel was double that which gave a fair boost straight away. Either way, the low powered control chip that James was working on would be essential.

On Thursday afternoon Colin emerged, hobbling from his bed and looking for solid food, "You don't know how to remove a catheter, do you? I really need to pee."

"No you don't, you just think you do. And stop fossicking in your underwear, especially in the kitchen!" Rich scolded, pointing his fish slice at him.

Colin pulled his hand out as if he had been burnt, "But it feels really weird!" He shuffled to the stove and looked longingly at the frying pan. "Can I steal some bacon?"

"No, the doc says porridge only for just now, perhaps with a little jam." He felt quite bad seeing Colin's pout. "I suppose some dripping on toast might be okay. You need to wash your hands though!"

Colin instantly cheered up and sat gingerly at the kitchen table, "I don't suppose you have something to read? I'm going stir crazy in there. I've been watching the sparrows for so long I almost understand them."

"It's your house, you should know all the books in it unless you want to read Guy's paperwork or some of those dry technical manuals that Nik reads. I could nip out and get the paper if you want some fiction to read."

Colin thought about that for a moment, "Actually, the paper might be nice. Perhaps we can get some insight into what is going on. You know, reading between the lines." He got up and slowly made his way off to the sink to wash his hands. Rich looked at him and winced at the bruises still covering his face, they had spread as the swelling went down and were now a dark rainbow of browns and blues. He put a piece of bread under the grill.

"Perhaps you can sit in the garden for a bit and get some fresh air, we could have lunch outside since it's a nice day." Rich had already checked the garden was safe from bugs, even if they were still concerned about remote listening. He was absolutely fed up with having to bite his tongue, the highlight of his day was the short time they all spent in the underground workshop together when he could discuss things with impunity.

"I am up for that if we can sit in the sun." Colin shuffled down the hall to find a sunny seat in the garden.

RIch finished the cooking and joined him, for all his claim to being hungry Colin ate about two bites before setting the toast aside. They discussed inane things whilst Rich ate.

He finished his breakfast and ate the remains of Colin's cold toast, "How are you feeling? Other than bruised and sore. Okay, perhaps that was a dumb question." Rich looked around, making sure there was nothing obvious in his line of sight. "James says he finished his project. Should I go pick it up for you?" He asked quietly.

Colin just nodded, leaning back and closing his eyes. It was odd to see him so still, he was normally a manic ball of energy, bouncing around even when sitting down. "Want to come and see what we've done?" Rich whispered.

Colin opened his eyes and nodded again before levering himself to his feet. They entered the underground lair via the shed, Rich going first just in case he had to catch Colin. The descent took a long time but once they were in the main room Colin seemed more animated. "You cut them down, do they still work?" he asked, referring to the emitter panels.

"They sure do, Nik did some very careful panel beating work on them to straighten them out, we really did a number on them stuffing them into that truck. We had to run some silicone around the edge to stop it from contacting the metal too, even with the paint it seemed to be shorting slightly. Nik and I have also swapped the interior facing walls of the boxes in the tank for aluminium, that way we can fit the whole thing into those boxes and it won't be obvious anything has changed."

Colin thought about this, "Except for the controls, surely they need to be external so you can twiddle the knobs?"

"Yeah, we ran the cables to the centre of the sponson and I think Nik wants to make it removable, something with a quick-connect cable. That's a problem for future us though. We need to make it go first." Rich said dismissively.

"Yeah, screw future us's, those guys are dicks." Colin was getting more enthusiastic. "Oh wow, are you sure we can do that?" He asked, pointing at a circuit board that had quite obviously been sawn in half. "Will it still work?"

"Nik did all the measurements, he says all the other bits are just chaff. He assures me it will still work."

Colin peered into the enclosure housing all the electronics, "I'm slightly concerned with heat, everything is very close to everything else."

"We measured, it's fine as long as we keep to the cooldown cycle." Rich went and picked up a tiny box from the workbench, "He plans to put a limiter on the controls to prevent it being run before it cools down. That's another one for later though."

"Ha! Those future us guys are chumps!" Colin said with a smile.

"Anyway, we duplicated your detector. It's pocket-sized now and vibrates, you can have yours back for now. We can make you a little one sometime soon." The to-do list was getting a little long.

***

"Is that the newspaper?" Rich asked, amazed to see Nik reading what they both knew to be only a vehicle for government propaganda.

"Yeah." Nik was chewing his lip, never a good sign. "Apparently they are calling up the reserves, if last time is anything to go by it will be full-scale conscription in a month or two."

"Oh no. Didn't they learn? Throwing away lives didn't work last time, why would it now?" Rich lamented, peering over Nik's shoulder to read the article.

"It's those bases they blew up, they're trying to capitalize on the enemy's confusion and fear." Rich threw him a warning look and signalled for him to follow outside. He picked up the bug finder on the way.

Finding no bugs in the yard Rich whispered, "Do you think this was us? Would they have just kept bombing them if we left well enough alone?"

Nik shrugged, kicking a stray bolt on the ground hard enough to mar his shoe leather, "Probably." He gave a heavy sigh, "Spilt milk now though, who knows what they might have done with the thing, this may be the better option. I reckon we finish what we started and skip town."

"Surely we could fix things though? Do something ourselves with the machine?" Rich urged, conflicted over the thought of leaving the mess they had started.

"Do what? Help the Germans or hinder them? Either way, it just leads to them calling up more people. Perhaps if we knew where every single one of the top brass was and took them all out, all that would happen though is the Asian army coming in and we know from experience what that means." Nik was referring to the final conquest of the Middle East. The entire population, what was left of them, had been relocated by force, moved to work in the factories and mines needed to keep the gargantuan empire afloat. The natural resources were strip-mined and plundered to fuel the war machine.

"I don't know. It just feels wrong." He sat heavily on the bare earth, fear and self-loathing causing him to shake. "How did this all happen? The world is just so…"

"Yeah, let Guy tell you about that. He's the history buff. I listened to him for hours the other night, he has about a hundred theories on how the war could have ended in the past. He even has a few ideas about stopping it happening in the first place." The big outdoor bell rang, telling them they had a customer. "I'll get that. Just take a minute and try to calm down. We almost have the machine ready, I know it would only be us, but at least we could escape." He patted Rich on the shoulder as he went back inside to answer the door.

Rich sat on the cold earth, breathing heavily and trying to pull himself together. Nik was right, with the option of time travel either side in this war would become an unstoppable tyrant. Perhaps jumping ship was the only option.

***

The rain was bouncing off the pavement as Rich walked to James' house he had his collar pulled up and was wearing a wide-brimmed hat but he was still soaked to the skin. He had slipped out the back of the yard as the rain started, taking advantage of the excuse to wear nondescript clothing and hurry without anyone looking twice. The clouds made the afternoon almost as dark as night, lit sporadically by lightning somewhere in the distance, the corresponding thunder was long and menacing, it made the trip feel even more nerve-wracking.

They needed to be especially careful contacting James now that they had attracted the attention of the authorities, especially since he had all the incriminating evidence. Rich cringed as he stepped off the pavement into a particularly deep, cold puddle. "Why did I volunteer for this? Surely Guy could have done this… Who am I kidding, I didn't volunteer, I was volantold." He muttered bitterly as he shook his waterlogged shoe. He huddled up, fighting the wind and hurried down the empty street.

By the time he reached James' street he was almost hypothermic, he could no longer feel his fingers or toes, something he currently counted as a blessing as a wave of sleet rolled over him, driven by the biting wind.

He carefully looked around under the premise of hiding his face from the cold shower, there was nobody on the street in either direction, not a car or pedestrian so he hurried to James' door and rapped hard enough to bruise his numb knuckles.

The door opened briefly and he ducked into the warm bright interior. "Take off those wet clothes otherwise Carla will kill you for traipsing water all through the house," James said in his slightly off cadence.

"If I take off the wet clothes, I won't be wearing any clothes. I'm soaked right down to my underwear." Rich said, stripping off his jacket and shoes. His trousers and shirt stuck to his skin as he stood dripping waiting for James to make a decision.

"Hold on, I'll go and get you a bathrobe and the wash basket. We can put your clothes through the mangle and then hang them in front of the fire." He disappeared, leaving Rich shivering in the hallway, his face flushing scarlet in the sudden heat and his fingers starting to tingle as the feeling came back.

When he returned Rich peeled the wet clothes off and dropped each item with a splat into the laundry basket. James turned his back politely as he removed his pants and donned the warm fluffy robe. "Oh heaven!" He exclaimed as he followed James, still shivering, to the kitchen to stand in front of the roaring wood-fired oven.

By the time James returned from putting his clothing through the wringer he was feeling much better, even though his feet now had the most intense pins and needles he had ever experienced.

"Okay, let's not disturb anyone." James motioned for Rich to follow him and he padded barefoot down the nicely carpeted hall.

"How can you afford all this?" Rich asked without thinking.

"I get paid a lot to keep the electricity flowing." James replied, "I am very good at my job and there are very few people who can do that job." He opened the door to his workroom, revealing chalkboards full of equations and diagrams and reams of paper which looked to be filled with similar notes.

"Wow…" Rich's mouth dropped open, he didn't understand any of what was written on the boards. "Did you work out how the time machine works?" He asked, examining the boards in awe.

"Oh god no." James pushed his glasses up his nose. "I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. Also, I don't care how it works, the puzzle of getting the right output from the smallest number of controls was all I was working on."

"You aren't interested in how time travel is possible?" Rich asked in disbelief.

"Well, teleportation might be nice but realistically there is nothing I would want to go back and change," James replied with a smile, he retrieved the bulky storage drive which they had delivered months before and handed it over. "I put some new test programs on there, they account for the changed configuration."

"You don't need it anymore?"

"No, I'm done. I finished the interesting part and now it all just seems too dangerous. I will be erasing all of this tonight and burning my notes. I already erased my computer." James pushed his glasses up again, it seemed a constant battle for him to keep them on his nose.

"So, you wouldn't go back and stop the war? Stop some of your friends being killed?" Rich asked him, perching himself on the workbench and then fumbling to keep the robe shut.

"I don't like the war, sure. It would be nice to save my friends from school too, or be altruistic and save everyone. The truth is though, changing anything risks me losing what I have just now, and I like my life." He spread his hands.

"You aren't scared that you may be conscripted?" Rich asked, that being his current worst fear.

"I may seem selfish but my job precludes me from conscription, much like farmers. I am fairly safe right now." He said with an apologetic shrug.

Rich looked around and thought of the nice house, children and beautiful wife and could understand the point of view. "But you're helping us, are you not concerned that we will change things and it won't work the way we think it does?"

James paused, staring Into space for long enough that Rich was concerned, before saying, "I have read the reports, the people sent back didn't change the present so I think it's safe. If I'm wrong, well I doubt I will ever know so I don't think it will matter."

"That's… very weird, actually. Zen-like or something. Philosophical." Rich said with a frown.

James shrugged, "Well I enjoyed the challenge, would you like me to show you?" He asked, gesturing to the chalkboards.

His explanation of the maths went way over Rich's head, there were tiny parts that he thought he understood but he found himself just nodding along, too scared after the first explanation he had triggered by asking questions to ask any more.

"So, we ended up with sixty-four controls, many of which are just switches."

Riches jaw dropped, "Hold on, that was just how we got to the design of the controls?"

James looked puzzled, "Of course, that was the bit I built up from previous knowledge. Working out the settings is the fun part."

He explained how he had started by developing a more efficient computer program to calculate the outputs required to teleport the tank to the same place in their workshop but at different times, three points each day, this part Rich almost followed.

"You then have to manually derive the dial settings for the difference between what's in the memory and where you actually want to go, if I had a lot more time I could likely create a low power chip that would do that too, it might take a while to calculate though." He showed Rich a control chip that he had programmed, it was tiny, "This can take the settings from the controls, read the values from the memory and combine the two into a usable output for the time machine. I think."

"You think?" Rich instantly regretted the question. The lecture this time had virtually no parts that Rich felt he understood, it also took twice as long. The man hadn't even offered him tea, or a biscuit.

The only upside, and it was a pretty big upside, was that by the time he finished all of Rich's clothes were dry and the rain had stopped.

He was a little disheartened to see the empty chalkboards as they left the room, even more so when he saw James stuff a sheaf of notes into the fire as he slipped out the front door.

***

William was livid, he had worked at the club for years, hoping that he would get a chance to prevent people from getting killed in this pointless war. He had thought that the resistance was the way to do that, undermining the war effort and preventing large scale war, it was all rubbish though. Every action he had seen these old men take had done nothing useful, sometimes the opposite, bringing the might of the army down on relative innocents.

Their latest endeavour however was sheer lunacy, the Germans had been making headway without risking lives. Their secret technology allowed them to bomb those damned Asians without a single soldier risking their lives. William couldn't understand why these English relics decided to stop that.

He didn't care who won, as long as they left him and his friends alone. He couldn't see that happening now. He stared at the paper in his hands in disbelief, conscription papers. He was to be posted to the front lines. They had come in the morning post and it was now noon. He had been sitting, staring at the featureless wall in his room for hours, thinking of the people he knew had caused this.

He screwed up the paper, throwing it into the fireplace as he made a decision. If he was going down, so would the people who caused this.

He surged to his feet, grabbed his jacket and slammed the door on the way out, not even bothering to lock the door.

***

Colin was in his basement hideout, currently dancing but also welding, dancing and welding, at the same time. He was happy, listening to music in his earmuffs and making things, life didn't get any better.

Because of this, he missed the tiny beep of his radio detector and the flashing red light. It was flashing away, trying to get his attention for almost half an hour before he glanced up.

Sighing but not realising how long it had been flashing, Colin stopped his music, stripped off his helmet, gloves, muffs and the heavy leather welding jacket he had been wearing before casually wandering down the steel tunnel towards the ladder. Fortunately, he had gotten into the habit of checking the periscope on the way, as he did this he saw a group of rifle-wielding soldiers in his garden, their shiny boots reflecting the moonlight. He slowly and carefully slid the periscope up into the roof, ensuring the glass in the garden descended below the earth, causing the paver on top to seamlessly hide the gap.

He bit his lip, wondering what he had done this time to earn their attention, he felt a phantom pain in his kidneys as he remembered their last tender reunion. Quietly turning off the lights in the tunnel just in case it leaked around the hidden hatch, he returned to his underground workshop to think.

After their last experience waiting out the militia he had taken an old single mattress down, it sat forgotten in the furthest corner behind the racks, he also stored a large amount of food alongside the tea-making kit. The food had not been a conscious decision, he had simply found that he ate more meals in the workshop than he did in the house and so it made sense to store it down there.

He made himself a mug of tea to help him relax, pacing the length of the room as he waited for the kettle to boil.

He looked at his stripped-down test rig, it was looking rather bare with most of the important parts having gone to the tank. He had the control chip and the original computer, he could easily set either of those up and teleport some bombs up into his house, if he had the other bits.

He supped on his tea, wishing they hadn't butchered the machine so thoroughly. He glanced at the spare parts pile, Nik had stripped every component to its bare functional minimum in an attempt to fit it all in the tank. The entire machine had fit into a single rack-mounted case after he had finished, they had even tested it using the computer, it had gone from one side of the workshop to the other in the blink of an eye. If it hadn't been a shell of what it once was, Colin could potentially have teleported out inside it.

He looked again at the small box. On second thought, he might have had to make the box bigger.

He absently took his unicycle down from the wall and started riding in circles, drinking his tea on the way. Wondering how long he might be stuck down there.

***