Disclaimer: The only character I own is Dave. Further OCs may appear later. The aircraft design is also mine, and mine alone.
I wrote this primarily for fun over the Easter break. I know how implausible it is, but so what?
The Silver Bird
Or:
Some Stuff They Don't Want You to Know About
I imagine that it'll be twenty years before they ever let this get published, so I posted it here so my voice would be heard. Name's Dave Marshall, by the way.
The events leading up to my eventual involvement in inter-dimensional warfare, and crashing an aircraft into the nicest kebab house in Northampton, are documented in a series of excellent books whose source of information I am not at liberty to disclose (because I haven't a clue what they are). They got it dead-on, mostly, but there were quite a few loose ends left. Fate abhors loose ends...
I only got involved in all this because of a chance encounter with Jonathan Parry on a bleak moor somewhere in the Falklands, where I'd ended up after I was shot down by a lucky shot from a Mirage fighter towards the end of the campaign. You would rapidly become friends with the group of men who have personally trekked about forty miles through two days and nights of unending rain to rescue you, I'll bet.
The upshot of this was that I was deputised by an informal committee of John's friends and former colleagues to look after Will, God knows why, whilst his mother received care and treatment. He and Dr Malone filled me in on what happened. I only half-believed it at the time, to be honest. Fortunately, so did most of the government, and as far as they were concerned the matter was closed- an attitude they were later to regret.
We resume direct narration some eight weeks after the climax of events. It was a dull evening, and Will was slumped in front of the television. I was in the kitchen, attempting to fit a new strip-light, and drill noises and cries of "oh, dear," or words to that effect could be heard filtering through the door. This did little to alleviate the gloom Will had been sunk in since he had sealed the portal.
It seemed wretchedly appropriate that Sliders was on two channels. Will switched off the TV, and decided to abandon the evening and go to bed when a thought struck him. Mary had sent a package this morning, but he hadn't had time to open it before school and had forgotten it until now. He found it on the table by the front door of my small riverside flat, a repository for keys, loose change and junk mail I hadn't got around to throwing away.
It contained a thick document and a note: Thought you might be interested in this. He hastily turned over the bundle of papers. It was a research proposal, entitled Inter-Dimensional Microfissures: Their Properties and Exploitability for Travel between Parallel Universes.
Will's joyful whoop could be heard all over the building, but it was cup final night so nobody said anything.
The next fortnight is a bit of a blur, really. Will practically lived in Mary's lab, after badgering me into filling out a permission-to-be-absent form for his school. It was quite a work of fiction, I can tell you! I was quite surprised when they called me at the office of the small aviation firm I work for a month later, and somehow talked my boss into patching them through to the radio of the plane I was in.
I was on the return leg of a test run of our most recent acquisition, a third-hand Grumman turboprop passenger/freight carrier. It had gone smoothly, but I was still concentrating rather hard on looking out for something going horribly wrong.
"Hello?" I said rather hesitantly.
"We've done it, Dave! We've figured out a way to travel between universes!" Will half-yelled. I winced, and dialled down the volume of my headset. Mary came on at this point, and rather more calmly described something of the physics.
"A powerful enough beam of EM radiation on a gradually broadening waveband will force a fissure open far enough to admit a vehicle, probably an aircraft, then close behind it with no contamination," she explained.
"What contamination?"
"Exotic dark matter from the other universe; from both, in fact. It's something to do with the Law of Conservation of Energy." I didn't wholly understand this bit; it sounded like something to do with lightbulb wattage or something, but anyhow.
"So," I asked, "where do I come into all this? I assume you're calling now because it's urgent."
"I mentioned an aircraft. How many other pilots do I know?" Aha.
She rang off, and was replaced by the voice of my boss. "What was that all about, then?" I was relieved to realise that he hadn't been listening in; I'd never hear the end of it if he knew the content of that conversation.
"I'll explain when I get back on the ground," I replied. "ETA about two hours from now." I told him an edited version, carefully skipping over such details as Will travelling between universes by another means, and concluded with the explanation that they needed a pilot for a specific part of the research.
"Well," he replied, "if you want to travel to an alternate dimension you can do it in your time off- and you've got six months of it piled up- unless this Malone woman meets our fees."
"God, Frank, you're a mercenary bugger sometimes!" I laughed. "I'm going to do this off my own bat, and for free, for two reasons. Firstly because this research is founded upon data which one of my closest friends died to obtain, and secondly because I'll get more fame and money this way."
After some cautious experimentation, we figured that the baseline minimum speed for us to successfully pull this off was about Mach 2. I reckoned a safety margin of 0.3 would be advisable; having the portal close on us and cut the plane in half was NOT something I fancied trying out. So we needed an aircraft that could exceed twice the speed of sound, land on any terrain, and accommodate the three of us as well as a fair number of scientific instruments.
We split this Herculean task into two elements; drive system and vehicle. Mary handled refining the technology of what we christened the Malone Drive (patent pending), whilst I was put in charge of designing the aircraft itself.
The design approach I adopted was as unconventional as the mission we were undertaking. The most flexible fixed-wing aircraft I could think of was a flying boat, and I dug up everything I could on them. I was actually quite surprised to learn that jet-engined amphibious aircraft weren't totally novel; The US Navy experimented with the Sea Master transport and even a fighter, the Sea Dart, but aircraft carriers made them redundant and their full potential was never realised. One Sea Master prototype was preserved in a museum, and I managed to talk to one of the test pilots. I learned valuable lessons about the theory and practice of combining aviation with seamanship, and incorporated many of the Sea Master's better design features into my own work.
I also had access to a remarkable hull material; the manganese/titanium alloy that had been used in the manufacture of the Knife. It proved to be lighter than aluminium, though slightly heavier than titanium alone on a gram-for-gram basis, and unbelievably resilient. The hull wasn't much more than a millimetres-thick skin, yet it would withstand anything up to 30mm cannon fire. We sold it for a favourable sum to Corus, and found ourselves with enough money to set up the whole expedition.
"Let's just hope the Army don't start making bayonets out of it," Will remarked at the time. We never figured out how to create a monomolecular edge to the material, but it was a bit worrying.
Early on we decided that both the aircraft and we should be armed. At least one universe's government didn't like the idea of travelling between dimensions, and were unlikely to regard us as peaceful explorers. 'Walk softly but carry a big stick,' as the old saying goes. Partly for diplomatic reasons, partly for the sake of aerodynamics, every weapon was retractable or otherwise hidden. Our armaments included six missile pylons (we settled on four Sidewinders and a pair of Sea Eagles) a pod of 40mm antitank rockets with helmet guided sighting, and no fewer than ten M134 miniguns split between the nose and three turrets. I also added a full countermeasure suite; chaff, flares and ECM. I sincerely hoped we wouldn't need any of this stuff, but it looked impressive. Given the trouble I had getting hold of it I should hope so, anyway!
When it was completed, the aircraft looked like a hybrid. Her high wings and boat-like keel resembled that of a Catalina, whilst the lack of floats and single Rolls-Royce turbine on each wing could have been from a jet airliner. She was about sixty feet long, with a forty-foot wingspan, and her lines were far from graceful. She'd do the job, though. The hull contained living quarters for four people, a vast store of spare parts, and a large amount of data gathering and recording equipment. I'd even squeezed a Zodiac inflatable onboard.
"So, what do you reckon we should call her?" I asked as we supervised the last components being installed. "It's like with ships. Bad luck to sail her without giving her a name," I elaborated in response to the blank looks I was getting.
"I reckon we all ought to have some input," said Will.
Mrs Parry had insisted upon going along, she told us, because of a conflict of interest. "John would have liked him coming with you," she explained, "but there is no way I'm letting that boy out of my sight for a minute!" We needed an extra hand, and we didn't dare risk bringing any outsiders to the scheme, so despite everybody's misgivings she was invited to train with us. She picked up the skills needed phenomenally fast, and it actually speeded her recovery for her to feel she was doing something to help achieve some kind of closure about her husband. My efforts at glossing over the issue of weaponry, particularly regarding Will, came to nothing when she rather firmly insisted that he be given the knowledge and means to defend himself. Will did nothing to alleviate the sense of total foolishness I felt by explaining that he'd been training with small arms in secret all along. None of us could help laughing at her expression.
Once we got that little matter sorted out, training had proceeded apace over the next two years. We discussed the naming issue over one of our regular planning sessions, which were conducted over a meal in the restaurant/bar on Sywell airfield. We all drew a blank except for Mrs Parry herself.
"How about the 'Aurora Borealis'?" she suggested. "It was what the scientists in John's party were researching when they stumbled on these portals, if I remember rightly."
"I don't remember that from the letters," Will said, thoughtfully sipping his Coca Cola.
"I heard it from him in the last phone call he made before he set off," she explained.
"I like it," Mary remarked, "but isn't there already an aircraft called the Aurora?"
"The US airforce swear blind it doesn't exist, and even if it does they probably call it something else," I replied. "Anyone got another idea?" Nobody did. "Motion carried, then." The next day, with solemn ceremony, we painted Aurora's new name on her hull.
* * *
The day of reckoning had arrived. We all carefully suited up, and kitted ourselves out with survival equipment, sidearms and a few personal mementoes and good luck charms. I always carried a piece of the fuselage of the Harrier I came down in all those years before; it had saved my life then when most planes would have killed me. The rest of it now forms part of the collection in the Falklands War museum in Port Stanley. Mary had a St Christopher medallion, Mrs Parry a photograph of her and John together. Will's was the hilt of the Knife, which now had a conventional blade of nothing more exotic than Toledo steel.
Then, we all boarded our vehicle, which was parked in my firm's hangar on Sywell field. Frank had gone on holiday, leaving his secretary/girlfriend in charge, and she had let us use the hangar in his absence.
Our cover story was that this was a prototype cargo aircraft, which our firm had been hired to flight test and evaluate prior to it being put into full production by a small manufacturer. We got a short article in an aviation magazine, but I was able to keep them out of the cockpit by explaining that until the manufacturers gave a press release everything about Aurora was commercially confidential. This was partly true; we planned to sell the design, somewhat modified, to an aircraft builder for that very purpose.
I rolled the door open, taking care not to make excessive noise, and let Mary gently taxi Aurora out into the predawn gloom. We went through our respective pre-flight checklists; me for flight controls and weapons, Will for radar, Mary and Mrs Parry for everything else. It was all green across the board, so I eased the throttles open and pulled the stick back, and lifted us from the short grass runway. I didn't even need to use the afterburners; whoever bought the design from us would make a fortune on it.
We climbed to six thousand feet, and Mary got busy with the fissure targeting system. She still had the spyglass- it was part of her survival gear- but she'd worked out the chemical composition of whatever she'd coated it with. It's not that I don't know the story behind that, but I don't believe a word of it, OK? This substitute chemical, which was of poorer quality but sufficed, coated a small camera in the nose just above the Malone Drive. The monitor connected to it had a set of simple vinyl crosshairs on it, which allowed her to point us in the right direction.
"Okay," she said through her respirator, "starboard three degrees. Up one degree... Got it! Go for approach." I put the throttles up to full, and cut in both afterburners. We needed a six mile run up to reach optimal jump speed, apologies to whoever we woke up that morning by the way, so Mary used a high magnification lens to orient on a fissure a suitable distance away.
"Right," Mary said a little breathily as the G-force took effect, "activate jump system in 3...2...1... MARK!" I flipped the safety cover off the button on the control yoke and pressed it with only slight trepidation. Nothing happened for an instant but then, WHAM! I was thrown forward in my seat as an intense white light blazed through even the phototropic windshield and my tinted visor. It disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, and I was left dazzled for several seconds. I throttled back to cruising speed and kept us on what felt like an even keel whilst my eyes recovered.
"Okey-dokey, valuable lesson learned there, everyone; a proper tinted windscreen rather than this fancy variable-tint one," I said shakily. "God, that was like having a flash-bang go off in the cockpit."
My vision returned to near normal, and I took a look around. The land spread below us looked vastly different; there were more hedgerows dividing fields, like in an aerial photograph taken before farming metamorphosed into agribusiness. According to the inertial navigation system, which compared distance travelled with our last GPS reading, we should have been over a big housing development. There was none to be seen.
"It worked," I said in incredulous delight. "We've travelled to an alternate dimension!" I looked around at the others, and was utterly astonished to see a cat sitting on Will's lap.
"Where the HELL did that cat come from?" I exclaimed. Then, realisation dawned; it was a 'daemon', some sort of external projection of a person's consciousness or soul or whatever. Apparently you have to know exactly how and where to look to see your own, let alone other people's, in our world. I'd always figured this was a form of collective disbelief- if you disbelieve something exists hard enough you can't see it- but evidently it's a bit more complicated than that.
The implications of this were not lost on Will. I guessed what he was thinking. "Stick your parachute on, then, lad. You'll find a box of Milk Tray in the cupboard," I joked, before turning serious. "Keep a close eye on radar, because if you're right about this Magi-thing we could get a rather chilly reception HEADS UP EVERYONE!"
A prop-engined monoplane resembling a Spitfire shot across our nose. The others scrambled towards the gun turrets, then stopped as the fighter simply took up a station-keeping position on our left.
"Looks like they're reserving judgement," I said thoughtfully. "If we start poking machine guns out at that bloke he might change his mind. See if you can work out what radio frequency he's on, Mary, and we'll have a go at talking to his superiors." An idea struck me, and I began flashing our wingtip navigation lights in Morse code: WHAT FREQUENCY ARE YOU USING? Before he could answer, Mary shouted that she had picked up radio traffic to and from the plane, and hastily patched it through to our headset earphones. We only caught the tail end of the conversation, but it was enough.
"...permission to engage and destroy unknown aircraft, over." "Roger, wilco, out." Well, I thought grimly, we'd just have to see about that. I swung our nose over, and treated him to a quick burst. Four tongues of stabbing flame darted out at the fighter, perforating its tail fin and causing the pilot to heel over and evade. "Get to the gun turrets!" I roared, slapping the switch dropping the ventral and rear turrets into position and raising the dorsal guns.
There was no need to look at the radar; this was air combat the old way, all eyes and instinct. The fighter came roaring over in for a frontal attack, guns rattling all the way. I fired off a quick burst, but our relative speeds were too fast for me to come close. Mary had little more luck in the dorsal guns, but Will sent twin rods of lead boring into the fighter as it passed us, blowing it sky high. If the thing wasn't a Spitfire, it had the extra fuel tank in exactly the same place behind the pilot's seat, by the look of things.
"What the hell was the point in that?" I wondered aloud. I tuned my radio to the VHF frequency the fighter had been using. "Attention, whoever ordered that aircraft to attack us," I said icily. "We had no hostile intent and were forced to defend ourselves. An explanation for this unprovoked attack would be appreciated, and an apology even more so." Silence, broken only by the beeping of the hydraulics warning and the loud and creative swearing which followed.
"Landing gear out, and we're leaking hydraulic fluid everywhere," I snarled. "I'm going to put us down on the Thames, in or near Oxford if possible, and once we've patched that leak we are going to find somebody in authority and get some answers, or by God I'm going to start strafing things!" The faultfinding system isolated the leak, and shut off the flow before we bled off the liquid that operated the steering and half a dozen other functions. Luckily, the only system still affected was the wheels, which restricted our choice of landing site but wasn't an abandon-aircraft scale problem.
In due course, we arrived over Oxford. The river was wider than I remembered, and was accepting a lot of commercial traffic. It looked to have been dredged as well as widened, and most of the barges and other working boats had yet to depart at this hour. Landing was still going to be a memorable experience, however. I retracted the ventral turret and also the rear one, which hung low enough to not quite clear the waterline. Mary stayed where she was for the moment. I lined up very carefully, deployed the airbrakes, and dropped the nose.
It was quite a dramatic landing by any standards, with Aurora skidding for several hundred yards and sluicing down all the barges on the waterfront, and our wings narrowly missing various dockside cranes, gantries and other tall stuff. I had a quiet cigarette before unbuckling my harness, which I needed. Events like this, just one of the hair-raising experiences I would endure in the near future, have done much to argue against giving up smoking.
Once my hands had stopped shaking, I left my seat, removing my helmet, and went to the cabin door. It swung inwards, allowing me to keep a large chunk of metal between the outside world and myself. It's a minor detail, but I'm quite proud of the amount of thought that went into such things. I peered through the small window of bulletproof glass, and saw a number of soldiers assembled on the quay. Most had old-fashioned Enfield rifles, but two were setting up a machine gun on a bipod.
I very cautiously opened the door a small crack, unbuckling the shoulder holster containing my pistol with one hand. "Listen," I called out to the soldiers, "we have no quarrel with you. I don't know what law or taboo we've broken, but whatever it is I'm really, really sorry." A bullet shattered the not-so-bulletproof window. Making a mental not to have a word with somebody about that, I drew my pistol and started firing. Mary retracted the dorsal turret- a tactical error; she could have mown down our adversaries in half a second- and ran for the cockpit, thinking to get us in the air before we were boarded. Mrs Parry appeared beside me, and joined in the fray. By luck, I'd managed to drop both the machine gunners before they could finish setting up, and for good measure I stuck a round into the gun itself, wrecking it. I was distantly aware that Will had got the other door open, and was about to give him a hand when the deck lurched. I caught a glimpse of a man dangling from the wing as I put out an arm to stop Will before he went staggering out of the door, but somehow Kirjava got under his feet and his back slammed into my chest, toppling us both in. Somehow we managed to drag Mrs Parry in as well.
The door, which had no latching mechanism to keep it open, slammed shut. Thinking we were still onboard, Mary shoved open the throttles and took off. It was a beautiful takeoff, however I was too busy trying to swim through a vile mix of oil, domestic refuse and God knows what else whilst under fire to appreciate it.
* * *
I stayed under a convenient jetty for half an hour, waiting for the worst of the hue and cry to die down for a bit, then dragged myself out of the water. Will motioned me over to the old night watchman's hut he and his mother were taking refuge in.
"Are you alright?" he asked. I gave him what I believe is called an old-fashioned look.
"Alright, no. Alive; yes, just about," I replied. "You?" They both nodded. We took stock of ammunition- all our pistols were variations on a theme of nine millimetres- and divided it among ourselves. We then had a grand total of four magazines each.
According to Will and Mrs Parry, who I finally managed to call Elaine, no great effort was being made to find us as we were assumed to have drowned. The current in the river, which had dragged me at least two hundred yards downstream, meant that the search for bodies was taking place outside the city for the moment. This gave us a very short breathing space in which to disappear before they realised we were at large. The biggest problem was the lack of daemons on Elaine's and my part.
"I guess it's because you've been in our own world for a long time," Will suggested. "It's not instantaneous the first time even when you're still young. They'll turn up in a while, I imagine."
"How long is 'a while' going to be?" I wondered gloomily. "Hours? Days? We'll stick out like a nun in a snowdrift until then, whenever the hell it is."
"All the more reason not to hang about," Elaine suggested breezily. "Come on, boys, chop-chop!" She seemed to be enjoying this. Will and I shared a harassed look, and followed her as she strode purposefully towards no definite destination I could gather.
Lyra sat up violently in bed. "What the-?" she mumbled sleepily. "Huh, weird dream." Everything was slightly jumbled in her memory, but there had been a brief image of something like a huge silver bird, and then... "Will." God, it had been two years, you'd think that she'd have learned to get on with her life by now. Pan glanced up, then curled back up without a word. Lyra abandoned the idea of sleep, and dragged on some clothes. Despite the promises she had made to herself about this, she found herself wondering what Will was doing now. //At six in the morning, if he's got any sense, he'll be asleep// she concluded totally incorrectly. It was midsummer's day, she recalled. Their anniversary. She wondered if he had forgotten about the promise they had both made. He hadn't, but was prevented from fulfilling it by simple practical reasons.
I wrote this primarily for fun over the Easter break. I know how implausible it is, but so what?
The Silver Bird
Or:
Some Stuff They Don't Want You to Know About
I imagine that it'll be twenty years before they ever let this get published, so I posted it here so my voice would be heard. Name's Dave Marshall, by the way.
The events leading up to my eventual involvement in inter-dimensional warfare, and crashing an aircraft into the nicest kebab house in Northampton, are documented in a series of excellent books whose source of information I am not at liberty to disclose (because I haven't a clue what they are). They got it dead-on, mostly, but there were quite a few loose ends left. Fate abhors loose ends...
I only got involved in all this because of a chance encounter with Jonathan Parry on a bleak moor somewhere in the Falklands, where I'd ended up after I was shot down by a lucky shot from a Mirage fighter towards the end of the campaign. You would rapidly become friends with the group of men who have personally trekked about forty miles through two days and nights of unending rain to rescue you, I'll bet.
The upshot of this was that I was deputised by an informal committee of John's friends and former colleagues to look after Will, God knows why, whilst his mother received care and treatment. He and Dr Malone filled me in on what happened. I only half-believed it at the time, to be honest. Fortunately, so did most of the government, and as far as they were concerned the matter was closed- an attitude they were later to regret.
We resume direct narration some eight weeks after the climax of events. It was a dull evening, and Will was slumped in front of the television. I was in the kitchen, attempting to fit a new strip-light, and drill noises and cries of "oh, dear," or words to that effect could be heard filtering through the door. This did little to alleviate the gloom Will had been sunk in since he had sealed the portal.
It seemed wretchedly appropriate that Sliders was on two channels. Will switched off the TV, and decided to abandon the evening and go to bed when a thought struck him. Mary had sent a package this morning, but he hadn't had time to open it before school and had forgotten it until now. He found it on the table by the front door of my small riverside flat, a repository for keys, loose change and junk mail I hadn't got around to throwing away.
It contained a thick document and a note: Thought you might be interested in this. He hastily turned over the bundle of papers. It was a research proposal, entitled Inter-Dimensional Microfissures: Their Properties and Exploitability for Travel between Parallel Universes.
Will's joyful whoop could be heard all over the building, but it was cup final night so nobody said anything.
The next fortnight is a bit of a blur, really. Will practically lived in Mary's lab, after badgering me into filling out a permission-to-be-absent form for his school. It was quite a work of fiction, I can tell you! I was quite surprised when they called me at the office of the small aviation firm I work for a month later, and somehow talked my boss into patching them through to the radio of the plane I was in.
I was on the return leg of a test run of our most recent acquisition, a third-hand Grumman turboprop passenger/freight carrier. It had gone smoothly, but I was still concentrating rather hard on looking out for something going horribly wrong.
"Hello?" I said rather hesitantly.
"We've done it, Dave! We've figured out a way to travel between universes!" Will half-yelled. I winced, and dialled down the volume of my headset. Mary came on at this point, and rather more calmly described something of the physics.
"A powerful enough beam of EM radiation on a gradually broadening waveband will force a fissure open far enough to admit a vehicle, probably an aircraft, then close behind it with no contamination," she explained.
"What contamination?"
"Exotic dark matter from the other universe; from both, in fact. It's something to do with the Law of Conservation of Energy." I didn't wholly understand this bit; it sounded like something to do with lightbulb wattage or something, but anyhow.
"So," I asked, "where do I come into all this? I assume you're calling now because it's urgent."
"I mentioned an aircraft. How many other pilots do I know?" Aha.
She rang off, and was replaced by the voice of my boss. "What was that all about, then?" I was relieved to realise that he hadn't been listening in; I'd never hear the end of it if he knew the content of that conversation.
"I'll explain when I get back on the ground," I replied. "ETA about two hours from now." I told him an edited version, carefully skipping over such details as Will travelling between universes by another means, and concluded with the explanation that they needed a pilot for a specific part of the research.
"Well," he replied, "if you want to travel to an alternate dimension you can do it in your time off- and you've got six months of it piled up- unless this Malone woman meets our fees."
"God, Frank, you're a mercenary bugger sometimes!" I laughed. "I'm going to do this off my own bat, and for free, for two reasons. Firstly because this research is founded upon data which one of my closest friends died to obtain, and secondly because I'll get more fame and money this way."
After some cautious experimentation, we figured that the baseline minimum speed for us to successfully pull this off was about Mach 2. I reckoned a safety margin of 0.3 would be advisable; having the portal close on us and cut the plane in half was NOT something I fancied trying out. So we needed an aircraft that could exceed twice the speed of sound, land on any terrain, and accommodate the three of us as well as a fair number of scientific instruments.
We split this Herculean task into two elements; drive system and vehicle. Mary handled refining the technology of what we christened the Malone Drive (patent pending), whilst I was put in charge of designing the aircraft itself.
The design approach I adopted was as unconventional as the mission we were undertaking. The most flexible fixed-wing aircraft I could think of was a flying boat, and I dug up everything I could on them. I was actually quite surprised to learn that jet-engined amphibious aircraft weren't totally novel; The US Navy experimented with the Sea Master transport and even a fighter, the Sea Dart, but aircraft carriers made them redundant and their full potential was never realised. One Sea Master prototype was preserved in a museum, and I managed to talk to one of the test pilots. I learned valuable lessons about the theory and practice of combining aviation with seamanship, and incorporated many of the Sea Master's better design features into my own work.
I also had access to a remarkable hull material; the manganese/titanium alloy that had been used in the manufacture of the Knife. It proved to be lighter than aluminium, though slightly heavier than titanium alone on a gram-for-gram basis, and unbelievably resilient. The hull wasn't much more than a millimetres-thick skin, yet it would withstand anything up to 30mm cannon fire. We sold it for a favourable sum to Corus, and found ourselves with enough money to set up the whole expedition.
"Let's just hope the Army don't start making bayonets out of it," Will remarked at the time. We never figured out how to create a monomolecular edge to the material, but it was a bit worrying.
Early on we decided that both the aircraft and we should be armed. At least one universe's government didn't like the idea of travelling between dimensions, and were unlikely to regard us as peaceful explorers. 'Walk softly but carry a big stick,' as the old saying goes. Partly for diplomatic reasons, partly for the sake of aerodynamics, every weapon was retractable or otherwise hidden. Our armaments included six missile pylons (we settled on four Sidewinders and a pair of Sea Eagles) a pod of 40mm antitank rockets with helmet guided sighting, and no fewer than ten M134 miniguns split between the nose and three turrets. I also added a full countermeasure suite; chaff, flares and ECM. I sincerely hoped we wouldn't need any of this stuff, but it looked impressive. Given the trouble I had getting hold of it I should hope so, anyway!
When it was completed, the aircraft looked like a hybrid. Her high wings and boat-like keel resembled that of a Catalina, whilst the lack of floats and single Rolls-Royce turbine on each wing could have been from a jet airliner. She was about sixty feet long, with a forty-foot wingspan, and her lines were far from graceful. She'd do the job, though. The hull contained living quarters for four people, a vast store of spare parts, and a large amount of data gathering and recording equipment. I'd even squeezed a Zodiac inflatable onboard.
"So, what do you reckon we should call her?" I asked as we supervised the last components being installed. "It's like with ships. Bad luck to sail her without giving her a name," I elaborated in response to the blank looks I was getting.
"I reckon we all ought to have some input," said Will.
Mrs Parry had insisted upon going along, she told us, because of a conflict of interest. "John would have liked him coming with you," she explained, "but there is no way I'm letting that boy out of my sight for a minute!" We needed an extra hand, and we didn't dare risk bringing any outsiders to the scheme, so despite everybody's misgivings she was invited to train with us. She picked up the skills needed phenomenally fast, and it actually speeded her recovery for her to feel she was doing something to help achieve some kind of closure about her husband. My efforts at glossing over the issue of weaponry, particularly regarding Will, came to nothing when she rather firmly insisted that he be given the knowledge and means to defend himself. Will did nothing to alleviate the sense of total foolishness I felt by explaining that he'd been training with small arms in secret all along. None of us could help laughing at her expression.
Once we got that little matter sorted out, training had proceeded apace over the next two years. We discussed the naming issue over one of our regular planning sessions, which were conducted over a meal in the restaurant/bar on Sywell airfield. We all drew a blank except for Mrs Parry herself.
"How about the 'Aurora Borealis'?" she suggested. "It was what the scientists in John's party were researching when they stumbled on these portals, if I remember rightly."
"I don't remember that from the letters," Will said, thoughtfully sipping his Coca Cola.
"I heard it from him in the last phone call he made before he set off," she explained.
"I like it," Mary remarked, "but isn't there already an aircraft called the Aurora?"
"The US airforce swear blind it doesn't exist, and even if it does they probably call it something else," I replied. "Anyone got another idea?" Nobody did. "Motion carried, then." The next day, with solemn ceremony, we painted Aurora's new name on her hull.
* * *
The day of reckoning had arrived. We all carefully suited up, and kitted ourselves out with survival equipment, sidearms and a few personal mementoes and good luck charms. I always carried a piece of the fuselage of the Harrier I came down in all those years before; it had saved my life then when most planes would have killed me. The rest of it now forms part of the collection in the Falklands War museum in Port Stanley. Mary had a St Christopher medallion, Mrs Parry a photograph of her and John together. Will's was the hilt of the Knife, which now had a conventional blade of nothing more exotic than Toledo steel.
Then, we all boarded our vehicle, which was parked in my firm's hangar on Sywell field. Frank had gone on holiday, leaving his secretary/girlfriend in charge, and she had let us use the hangar in his absence.
Our cover story was that this was a prototype cargo aircraft, which our firm had been hired to flight test and evaluate prior to it being put into full production by a small manufacturer. We got a short article in an aviation magazine, but I was able to keep them out of the cockpit by explaining that until the manufacturers gave a press release everything about Aurora was commercially confidential. This was partly true; we planned to sell the design, somewhat modified, to an aircraft builder for that very purpose.
I rolled the door open, taking care not to make excessive noise, and let Mary gently taxi Aurora out into the predawn gloom. We went through our respective pre-flight checklists; me for flight controls and weapons, Will for radar, Mary and Mrs Parry for everything else. It was all green across the board, so I eased the throttles open and pulled the stick back, and lifted us from the short grass runway. I didn't even need to use the afterburners; whoever bought the design from us would make a fortune on it.
We climbed to six thousand feet, and Mary got busy with the fissure targeting system. She still had the spyglass- it was part of her survival gear- but she'd worked out the chemical composition of whatever she'd coated it with. It's not that I don't know the story behind that, but I don't believe a word of it, OK? This substitute chemical, which was of poorer quality but sufficed, coated a small camera in the nose just above the Malone Drive. The monitor connected to it had a set of simple vinyl crosshairs on it, which allowed her to point us in the right direction.
"Okay," she said through her respirator, "starboard three degrees. Up one degree... Got it! Go for approach." I put the throttles up to full, and cut in both afterburners. We needed a six mile run up to reach optimal jump speed, apologies to whoever we woke up that morning by the way, so Mary used a high magnification lens to orient on a fissure a suitable distance away.
"Right," Mary said a little breathily as the G-force took effect, "activate jump system in 3...2...1... MARK!" I flipped the safety cover off the button on the control yoke and pressed it with only slight trepidation. Nothing happened for an instant but then, WHAM! I was thrown forward in my seat as an intense white light blazed through even the phototropic windshield and my tinted visor. It disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, and I was left dazzled for several seconds. I throttled back to cruising speed and kept us on what felt like an even keel whilst my eyes recovered.
"Okey-dokey, valuable lesson learned there, everyone; a proper tinted windscreen rather than this fancy variable-tint one," I said shakily. "God, that was like having a flash-bang go off in the cockpit."
My vision returned to near normal, and I took a look around. The land spread below us looked vastly different; there were more hedgerows dividing fields, like in an aerial photograph taken before farming metamorphosed into agribusiness. According to the inertial navigation system, which compared distance travelled with our last GPS reading, we should have been over a big housing development. There was none to be seen.
"It worked," I said in incredulous delight. "We've travelled to an alternate dimension!" I looked around at the others, and was utterly astonished to see a cat sitting on Will's lap.
"Where the HELL did that cat come from?" I exclaimed. Then, realisation dawned; it was a 'daemon', some sort of external projection of a person's consciousness or soul or whatever. Apparently you have to know exactly how and where to look to see your own, let alone other people's, in our world. I'd always figured this was a form of collective disbelief- if you disbelieve something exists hard enough you can't see it- but evidently it's a bit more complicated than that.
The implications of this were not lost on Will. I guessed what he was thinking. "Stick your parachute on, then, lad. You'll find a box of Milk Tray in the cupboard," I joked, before turning serious. "Keep a close eye on radar, because if you're right about this Magi-thing we could get a rather chilly reception HEADS UP EVERYONE!"
A prop-engined monoplane resembling a Spitfire shot across our nose. The others scrambled towards the gun turrets, then stopped as the fighter simply took up a station-keeping position on our left.
"Looks like they're reserving judgement," I said thoughtfully. "If we start poking machine guns out at that bloke he might change his mind. See if you can work out what radio frequency he's on, Mary, and we'll have a go at talking to his superiors." An idea struck me, and I began flashing our wingtip navigation lights in Morse code: WHAT FREQUENCY ARE YOU USING? Before he could answer, Mary shouted that she had picked up radio traffic to and from the plane, and hastily patched it through to our headset earphones. We only caught the tail end of the conversation, but it was enough.
"...permission to engage and destroy unknown aircraft, over." "Roger, wilco, out." Well, I thought grimly, we'd just have to see about that. I swung our nose over, and treated him to a quick burst. Four tongues of stabbing flame darted out at the fighter, perforating its tail fin and causing the pilot to heel over and evade. "Get to the gun turrets!" I roared, slapping the switch dropping the ventral and rear turrets into position and raising the dorsal guns.
There was no need to look at the radar; this was air combat the old way, all eyes and instinct. The fighter came roaring over in for a frontal attack, guns rattling all the way. I fired off a quick burst, but our relative speeds were too fast for me to come close. Mary had little more luck in the dorsal guns, but Will sent twin rods of lead boring into the fighter as it passed us, blowing it sky high. If the thing wasn't a Spitfire, it had the extra fuel tank in exactly the same place behind the pilot's seat, by the look of things.
"What the hell was the point in that?" I wondered aloud. I tuned my radio to the VHF frequency the fighter had been using. "Attention, whoever ordered that aircraft to attack us," I said icily. "We had no hostile intent and were forced to defend ourselves. An explanation for this unprovoked attack would be appreciated, and an apology even more so." Silence, broken only by the beeping of the hydraulics warning and the loud and creative swearing which followed.
"Landing gear out, and we're leaking hydraulic fluid everywhere," I snarled. "I'm going to put us down on the Thames, in or near Oxford if possible, and once we've patched that leak we are going to find somebody in authority and get some answers, or by God I'm going to start strafing things!" The faultfinding system isolated the leak, and shut off the flow before we bled off the liquid that operated the steering and half a dozen other functions. Luckily, the only system still affected was the wheels, which restricted our choice of landing site but wasn't an abandon-aircraft scale problem.
In due course, we arrived over Oxford. The river was wider than I remembered, and was accepting a lot of commercial traffic. It looked to have been dredged as well as widened, and most of the barges and other working boats had yet to depart at this hour. Landing was still going to be a memorable experience, however. I retracted the ventral turret and also the rear one, which hung low enough to not quite clear the waterline. Mary stayed where she was for the moment. I lined up very carefully, deployed the airbrakes, and dropped the nose.
It was quite a dramatic landing by any standards, with Aurora skidding for several hundred yards and sluicing down all the barges on the waterfront, and our wings narrowly missing various dockside cranes, gantries and other tall stuff. I had a quiet cigarette before unbuckling my harness, which I needed. Events like this, just one of the hair-raising experiences I would endure in the near future, have done much to argue against giving up smoking.
Once my hands had stopped shaking, I left my seat, removing my helmet, and went to the cabin door. It swung inwards, allowing me to keep a large chunk of metal between the outside world and myself. It's a minor detail, but I'm quite proud of the amount of thought that went into such things. I peered through the small window of bulletproof glass, and saw a number of soldiers assembled on the quay. Most had old-fashioned Enfield rifles, but two were setting up a machine gun on a bipod.
I very cautiously opened the door a small crack, unbuckling the shoulder holster containing my pistol with one hand. "Listen," I called out to the soldiers, "we have no quarrel with you. I don't know what law or taboo we've broken, but whatever it is I'm really, really sorry." A bullet shattered the not-so-bulletproof window. Making a mental not to have a word with somebody about that, I drew my pistol and started firing. Mary retracted the dorsal turret- a tactical error; she could have mown down our adversaries in half a second- and ran for the cockpit, thinking to get us in the air before we were boarded. Mrs Parry appeared beside me, and joined in the fray. By luck, I'd managed to drop both the machine gunners before they could finish setting up, and for good measure I stuck a round into the gun itself, wrecking it. I was distantly aware that Will had got the other door open, and was about to give him a hand when the deck lurched. I caught a glimpse of a man dangling from the wing as I put out an arm to stop Will before he went staggering out of the door, but somehow Kirjava got under his feet and his back slammed into my chest, toppling us both in. Somehow we managed to drag Mrs Parry in as well.
The door, which had no latching mechanism to keep it open, slammed shut. Thinking we were still onboard, Mary shoved open the throttles and took off. It was a beautiful takeoff, however I was too busy trying to swim through a vile mix of oil, domestic refuse and God knows what else whilst under fire to appreciate it.
* * *
I stayed under a convenient jetty for half an hour, waiting for the worst of the hue and cry to die down for a bit, then dragged myself out of the water. Will motioned me over to the old night watchman's hut he and his mother were taking refuge in.
"Are you alright?" he asked. I gave him what I believe is called an old-fashioned look.
"Alright, no. Alive; yes, just about," I replied. "You?" They both nodded. We took stock of ammunition- all our pistols were variations on a theme of nine millimetres- and divided it among ourselves. We then had a grand total of four magazines each.
According to Will and Mrs Parry, who I finally managed to call Elaine, no great effort was being made to find us as we were assumed to have drowned. The current in the river, which had dragged me at least two hundred yards downstream, meant that the search for bodies was taking place outside the city for the moment. This gave us a very short breathing space in which to disappear before they realised we were at large. The biggest problem was the lack of daemons on Elaine's and my part.
"I guess it's because you've been in our own world for a long time," Will suggested. "It's not instantaneous the first time even when you're still young. They'll turn up in a while, I imagine."
"How long is 'a while' going to be?" I wondered gloomily. "Hours? Days? We'll stick out like a nun in a snowdrift until then, whenever the hell it is."
"All the more reason not to hang about," Elaine suggested breezily. "Come on, boys, chop-chop!" She seemed to be enjoying this. Will and I shared a harassed look, and followed her as she strode purposefully towards no definite destination I could gather.
Lyra sat up violently in bed. "What the-?" she mumbled sleepily. "Huh, weird dream." Everything was slightly jumbled in her memory, but there had been a brief image of something like a huge silver bird, and then... "Will." God, it had been two years, you'd think that she'd have learned to get on with her life by now. Pan glanced up, then curled back up without a word. Lyra abandoned the idea of sleep, and dragged on some clothes. Despite the promises she had made to herself about this, she found herself wondering what Will was doing now. //At six in the morning, if he's got any sense, he'll be asleep// she concluded totally incorrectly. It was midsummer's day, she recalled. Their anniversary. She wondered if he had forgotten about the promise they had both made. He hadn't, but was prevented from fulfilling it by simple practical reasons.
