I’m inside a mountain, thought Jake. It possibly started out as a natural cave system, but centuries of Cáirneach occupation had given it corners, well-trodden paths, and scientific gibberish filling every nook and cranny. Once again, Jake was amazed that the Cáirneach got this far using human technology. But then again, if the pace of the current microchip revolution had been sustained for hundreds of years...

"Where are we?"

"Wales. South. Come along, I’ll show you the prize."

There were thousands of people. Jake remembered what Silver had said about chapters, and shivered. All this was going on, and nobody knew. His musings took him right into David’s back.

"Sod it. A Harlequin."

The Harlequin was doing magic tricks, making a stream of butterflies appear from its sleeves. Curious scientists were measuring the figure in rabid curiosity. It suddenly stopped, pointed at Jake, then walked through a wall. A breathless technician reported that it had vanished.

"Yes, I’ll bet it did. What did it want with you?" Oddly, David was more accepting now that the Harlequin had intangibly approved of Jake.

"No idea. Does it do that a lot?"

"Jake, don’t be flippant. In past centuries you would have seen a Harlequin as a bearded prophet, or maybe a fairground fortune-teller. Those beings are more powerful than the Sisterhood’s idea of a goddess."

"I don’t want to annoy them, then."

"No. Nghaire, you better not be running with a test tube of sulphuric acid."

"It’s shattered!"

"What has?"

"The clapper on the bell!" The young woman wrung her hands, tucking the stoppered tube behind her ear first. "The bell is metal but the clapper is some kind of quartz, right? Well, when the Harlequin showed up in the Bell chamber the clapper just fell to powder."

David swore. "It wasn’t quartz. It’s some native stone of Du Cray. Bugger! Why is all suddenly going wrong?"

Jake looked up. "Suddenly going wrong?"

"Oh, there’s been a lot of things. Lots of Independents, like you and Silver, have gone missing, there’s only a handful left."

"Dreck and Marla?"

"Yep. There’s Catriona, the so-called Victorian lady, she’s not actually human, but everyone humours her... and of course Lord Kirm- after your Silver’s body, she’s not what you’d call enthused- and of course-"

Nghaire laughed. "All right, that’s enough. The point is, Jake, that there used to be thousands. Now there are only about thirty. The Knights of Du Cray are growing older, which isn’t good news when the Unity hunts you down for sport, and even the Sisters have been making themselves scarce. Everyone but the Unity is growing weaker."

David sighed. "I can admit this to you, but we live on a tightrope. The dimension we inhabit isn’t stable, there’s no natural ecosystem, in fact, beyond the hunters in the Outside, there’s no nature at all."

"Downer, but aren’t you forgetting something? I need your help, in fact I think I need that bell, but said bell is no longer an option. We’re stuffed."

Weaver shook his head, forgetting he was on the phone. "No, thank you, We’ll handle it." She hung up, and turned to Silver.

"Little place in France, near Toulouse. We’re working on getting the Stargazer launched, could take a while."

"We don’t have a while. I get the bell, which contains the correct wavelength, then the Stargazer projects the signal, and the grid forms a protective net of sound around the whole Earth. God, this is complicated. Anyway, Jake’s sorting out the bell, you’re sorting out the Stargazer, and that just leaves me to go talk to Watson about the grid."

"Are you going to use the Portal to get to France?"

"Yes, probably. Why?"

"Nothing." Weaver shuffled his feet, and Silver’s face softened.

"Charles Weaver, author of ‘Interstitial Dynamics: The Reality Next Door’. Laughed at by the rest of the scientific community, presumably leading to your appointment here."

"Only two hundred copies were ever sold."

"One was to me." Silver smiled. "Which is kind of how I got myself into this mess. Anyway, I guess if you want to come too, you can."

A guard coughed. "Sir, you need to be back soon. The board of finances want to see-"

"Sod ‘em. Ms Silver, give me thirty seconds to grab my passport."

Twenty-six point eight seconds later, Weaver returned with a passport in one hand, and a file marked ‘Watson, S.’ There was a general sigh from his staff. They were presumably used to their chief being impulsive.

"Good," declared Silver, "Let’s do it."

Actually, she added in the privacy of her own skull, it wasn’t as simple as that. It was one thing cutting a straight line through the Outside to get to the other dimension, but quite another to cut a tight curve, so that she wound up in the same dimension as she started. And only a few hundred miles, too. Ideally, she’d have liked a little more room to manoeuvre.

Like Jake, Weaver didn’t appreciate his first trip much. He lay on a stranger’s lawn clutching his knee and saying he was never going through that again.

"Fine. Channel Tunnel’s up and running, use that."

"You’re a hard woman, Silver." Weaver pulled himself up. "Not to worry, the files still intact. Let’s see. Stephanie Watson, usually known as Steve, thirty-eight years old, but most of her background is classified."

"Oh. What’s she like to work with?"

Weaver thought for a moment. "She was very bright. Extremely so, but only if she was working with others. Left to her own devices she just sort of floundered around a bit. Not very chatty, but then none of us were on that project."

"But she designed the grid."

"Yes, that was a solo effort. Fascinating principle. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s her house over there. Shall we knock?"

"The grid? Most of... my notes were confiscated. It was nearly all built, you know. We made tremendous progress that last month... I was terribly upset. All that work."

"Yes. You can’t remember how it was supposed to link into the Stargazer?"

"Sorry? The grid was supposed to receive the odd power cell from Stargazer, no more."

Weaver blinked. "That wasn’t what I was told. It was to widen Stargazer’s capabilities."

"Considering who would have had to have created such a link... I assure you there was no such intention."

"But can it be done?"

Watson thought for a moment. "Yes. But why now, after that part of the project was cut? Even your part is on it’s last legs, nobody’s even bothering with a six-month forecast."

"Professor Watson, that’s really not your problem." Silver leaned forward. "One thing, though, if the grid wasn’t designed to link with the Stargazer, what was it for? I mean, they probably won’t have given you details, but you must have been able to deduce something."

"It was a transmission grid. On a wavelength never before experienced, except by particularly gifted humans. We... I went to a lot of trouble-"

"Weaver, run!"

Startled by Silver’s warning, Weaver nearly fell out of his seat. His face abruptly clouded with pain, but he managed a few steps before falling again, this time for good. Silver looked at Watson.

"Tea for two? Me and the entire Unity?"

"We never will get the hang of singular pronouns."

"The German language has sixteen words for ‘the’. I bet you can speak it like a native."

"We speak everything."

"Why sabotage Stargazer? It doesn’t make any sense."

"We believe the Cáirneach are responsible."

"Weaver wasn’t Cáirneach, you know that. No, it’s the grid. You wanted humanity to have the grid... not even you’re crazy enough for that."

"Numbers of Unity are decreasing. The mind is whole, but it has less hands to perform its will."

"Trouble’s breaking out all over." Silver spoke absently, but a nasty chill was running across her. The whole system’s breaking down. The Balance is collapsing. But how? The Harlequins would never allow-

"They are not allowing, they are actively participating."

Silver looked up. "That’s insane. And stop reading my mind."

"You have no mind to read. Just a little speck, roaring in pain. No, there is an analogy in your own mythology. Only this time, there is no Ark. Just the destruction."

"They can’t Balance it up, so they’re going to wipe us out and start again."

Silver stopped her voice from shaking. "Don’t you understand? The vendettas are over. Du Cray, Unity, Sisters, whatever. We need to work together."

"The Unity does not. We will live, by planting ourselves where the Harlequin will not touch us."

"Which brings us back to the grid. You have some cock-eyed plan to Unite the whole Earth."

"No. Not in the way you think. The Cáirneach would prevent us. So the Cáirneach will be destroyed. You have come a long way for nothing. We would not destroy the Earth entirely."

"No, just every lifeform on it. All slaved to the Unity mind. What makes you think a human would be compatible?"

"A half-human was."

Silver went very quiet. "He is Unity?"

"Forever, now. Did you think he was merely a hostage? You stole your husband from us, so we made good the loss."

Silver looked straight into Watson’s eyes. "His name is Sam."

"No name. No memory of the time before. Only unity, only Unity."

"You bastards." Silver slumped. "You wanted a hold over me, wanted to keep me in line, to stop your stupid fairy story coming true. Congratulations. I can’t harm you without harming him. Christ, can’t you leave me anything?"

"The cat survives."

If, as the saying goes, looks could kill, Silver could have halved the population of her adopted dimension with a glare. "Isn’t there any mercy in there?"

"The cat survives."

"Which is more than you two will," said a new voice. "Silver, you really do have to learn to mask your Portals properly."

Watson and Silver swore in perfect unison. Lazily covering both humans with a gun was a girl of about nineteen, a wicked smile one of the more subtle signs that she was only a novice Sister. At first glance, she might have been taken for a Cáirneach, although generally they wore rather more. Come to think of it, most people did.

"Name?" Watson snapped. A Sister was brainwashed into answering any question given in a sufficiently firm female voice.

"Prime Sreen."

Silver snorted. "Okay, Novice Sreen, what’s next? Hang on, I know you. Weren’t you a Knight? Yeah, you used to hang around Adwen."

"Adwen promised. I deliver."

Watson sighed audibly. "The ‘nuns with guns’ analogy is hardly watertight, in the case of the novices."

"I’d noticed." Silver shuddered. In the last ten minutes her relationship with the Unity had just got a hell of a lot more complicated, but she balked slightly at the thought of being on the same side as them. Sreen waved the gun around, which gave Silver the idea that she wasn’t exactly in the presence of an expert here. The smile hadn’t moved, though, and this added to the impression of slightly unbalanced gun-toting mad scientist.

"Shall we go?"

© Naomi 'Ni' Claydon 2000. No copying without permission.