"Take your disbelief and fire a shotgun at it."
'Tebor' on my story on FP. Make what you will of this.

At this precise moment, Will was running like hell, as were Elaine and myself. Some eagle-eyed bobby was blowing his whistle and running full pelt after us. Colleagues of his were joining the pursuit by the dozen. A revolver crashed, and chips of stone peppered my clothes. Oh, for enough breath to swear!
We rounded a corner, slightly ahead of the pursuit, and ducked into an alleyway. It proved to be a dead end, but enough dustbins, boxes and other junk facilitated climbing over the wall before they caught up. We fetched up in a small walled enclosure; some part of the botanical gardens, by my reckoning. The gate proved to be padlocked on the outside, and the wall offered no footholds.
"Oh, just bloody marvellous," Elaine groaned. "What are we going to do now?"
"Wait until they give up," I replied, "and then kick in that gate and make a break for it." I stripped off my flight suit, revealing my old T-shirt and jeans, and bundled it under my arm. The others quickly followed suit. Then, to my alarm, the gate began to open.

Lyra pocketed the key, and started in the direction of the bench when a hand clamped firmly over her mouth. "Please don't scream," a desperate voice implored her. "We won't hurt you, but you have to promise not to make a sound, or we're dead." Pan searched for something to attack, saw a cat-daemon nearby, and leapt. It dodged nimbly, hissing like a cobra, but pulled up short before attacking. "Just a minute..." it-or rather she-said in astonishment.
"Let go of her, Dave, it's all right!" hissed another voice, a familiar one. Lyra blinked; surely it couldn't be...? Her elbow shot backwards, catching her assailant neatly in the crotch. Then she ran towards the boy leaning against the bench. "Will! Oh Will, I knew you'd find a way back, I just knew it!" Before either of them knew it, they were rolling over and over on the grass, kissing, laughing and crying each other's names.

When I emerged from the foetal position, Will and Lyra were still locked in a passionate embrace, apparently oblivious to the presence of his mother. Elaine and I exchanged amused glances, and let them carry on for another few minutes. "Now that you've had a chance to catch up a bit," I said, totally deadpan, "can we think about getting out of here before the police realise what happened to us?" Too late! Two voices were approaching, one of them sounding suspiciously official.
"Well, if these miscreants did climb over the wall, they couldn't get out again. The gate is kept locked. Only myself and my goddaughter are allowed in, you see." Oh, terrific. As if we weren't in enough trouble already, now we were trespassing as well! The gate opened once more, to reveal a distinguished-looking old man. He looked about him, and nodded solemnly to me. My expression promised dire consequences if he raised the alarm.
"Good morning, Elisabeth," he said pleasantly. "Up with the lark for once, I see. You didn't happen to see any suspicious persons lurking about, perchance?"
"No, sir," Lyra replied, prim and proper as a character from a Bronte novel. "There you have it, constable," the man replied. "Fair enough, sir. I'm sorry to have trespassed upon your time. Good day." The old man, who I gathered to be the master of Jordan College, returned to the garden.
"I presume you are the travellers from another world," he said politely. "It is good to make your acquaintance."
"And I yours, sir," I replied. "I apologise for the rather dramatic circumstances. I trust I didn't wake you when I landed our aircraft a short distance from here."
"Oh, not at all, not at all!" he said. "I was already awake, and Lyra here could sleep through the Apocalypse. Tell me, how exactly do you facilitate travel between worlds?"
"A wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum focused on a microfissure between worlds, gradually widening to force it open long enough for a fast aircraft to traverse the portal," Mrs Parry explained. "Our science expert hasn't perfected it yet, but it works pretty well. Cross-contamination is negligible, and it doesn't leave gaping holes lying about in the fabric of reality." He nodded, looking almost like he understood a word of what she'd just said.
"Seeing as we've solved that particular problem," I put in as politely as I could, "I fail to fully comprehend the attitude shown to us thus far. What exactly have we done to annoy these people?"
"It conflicts with the long-established view of there being only this universe and the kingdom of God," the Master explained (sounds very Doctor Who put like that, doesn't it?). "I don't imagine young Lyra's father helped matters by attempting a coup d'etat against Him." I'd heard about this. Well, as obvious as it was that Lord Asriel was nine-tenths bonkers, you could say this for him; he thought big. It's rather a shame he didn't get hold of something like the Malone Drive, or he might have pulled it off.
"I don't suppose you'd have any theories about where our aircraft might have fetched up, I suppose?" I enquired hopefully. "Fascinating as the opportunity to explore a whole new parallel culture is, to remain longer puts both ourselves and anybody who aids us in a lot of danger." The old man regretfully shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't help you there," he replied. A thought seemed to strike him. "However, I think a mutual acquaintance of ours may have more luck..." Lyra already had the altheiometer out of the rather student-ish leather satchel she carried around with her. "Come on, come on," she said under her breath, twisting the dials. "Aha! Got it. She's in the Fens, not far from a gyptian town."
"Right, then," said Elaine in a determined voice. "We'd better be getting out of here before the police come back. If we get a train as far as Norwich we ought to be able to link up with Mary inside of a day."
"Yeah, let's go," I agreed. "I take it you would like to come along, Miss Silvertongue?"
"It'd take a cavalry charge to stop me!" she replied. Who was I to argue with that?

Catching a train proved rather more difficult than anticipated. Our survival money, in gold sovereigns, was identical to local currency; the problem was getting past the small battalion of police watching the station.
We found ourselves by the line, in the lee of a signalbox, getting rained on. I perched on a heap of oil-smeared and evil-smelling old ballast, which had been used as a urinal by every tomcat in the district and at least one generation of signalmen, and considered our next move. Lyra and Will were chattering away happily, with the dismal weather having no obvious effect on them.
//All right for some,// I concluded gloomily. I heard a train whistle, and noticed that an empty coaching-stock train was pulling up to the nearby signal. We looked at each other, and stood up. "Come on," I said urgently. We ran headlong towards the train, and I wrestled open one of the doors. We dragged ourselves aboard, Lyra grabbing a handful of Pan's fur and hauling him up just as the signal went green. Elaine rubbed her shin, wincing. "I hope this isn't going to be another one of your oh-so-clever ideas like VTOL for Aurora," she remarked, alluding to one of the more embarassing setbacks we had suffered. No vectored-thrust engine in existence could push us to the required speed, so I briefly attempted to adapt an existing design; a failure that cost some £400000 and six months of construction time in rectifying, as well as putting my life at some risk when testing it.
I ignored this, and turned my attention to establishing precisely where we were headed. The destination board outside the window suggested that this stock would form a train from Northampton in the near future, and getting a train to Norwich from there ought to be a simple matter. Nobody would be looking out for us, because we could only have left Oxford via the railway station, right? Wrong! I felt rather proud of myself for this elegant solution to a formidable problem.
"OI! What do you think you're playing at?" a nicotine-roughened voice demanded. We turned to behold a large man in the uniform of a railway guard. He was holding a heavy stick, and his Rottweiler-daemon was growling.
"Look, we've got a terribly urgent appointment, you see," I protested feebly, digging in my pockets for cash. "What's the fare?" Money would be far better at arguing our case than words, I guessed. I was wrong; he lunged at me, stick raised. I dodged, and came back with a fast jab to his solar plexus. Elaine caught his arms, putting him in a painless but immovable hold; she'd trained in restraining violent people when working as a receptionist at a hospital. His daemon was left facing Will's pistol, and wisely surrendered.
"Now," I said evenly, "I was willing to duly recompense the company for our passage, but you asaulted me and forced us to take action against you. You have only yourself to blame for this." We locked him them in the guard's compartment, and setled in for the journey. Soon, I percieved that we were in lowlying country. It had the flat, unbroken look of reclaimed marshlands.
"This might be even simpler than I thought," I remarked to the others. "If this train stops near Norwich we ought to have an easy time of it from here."
The train came to an abrupt halt a few seconds later. "Or perhaps not," Elaine said sarcastically. I declined to rise to this, and put my head out of a window to try and find out what had happened.
An auto-train, a tank engine and set of carriages with a cab at one end, was blocking the line. Its crew shouted an explanation-locked continuous brakes- and continued scratching their heads over the problem. I stared at the little tank engine, which had a good head of steam built up. A slow smile spread across my face. Elaine read my thoughts. "Well," she conceeded reluctantly, "it beats walking, or sitting around until they sort this lot out."

It was a beautifully executed smash-and-grab raid. I tackled the driver, Elaine sorted the fireman, and Will and Lyra uncoupled the locomotive from the coaches. I released the handbrake, shoved the reverser into full forward, and opened the regulator as soon as the others were aboard.
The next few minutes are a blur of noise, steam and speed. We tore across the landscape, diverting onto a small branch line for no reason I could gather, until it came to an abrupt end. I can only feel grudging admiration for the quick-witted signalman who changed the points and sent us towards a disused and partly collapsed viaduct across an expanse of marshland. We maintained our horizontal travel for quite a long distance, and for a moment I thought we might jump the gap, but we bellyflopped noisily into the shallow water and mud with a gigantic SQUELCH!
"Anyone else still alive?" I asked weakly. There was a chorus of groans, which was encouraging. Elaine's face appeared in my field of vision; her expression was less so. "This," she said coldly, "is the last time I EVER go along with one of your clever ideas."
"You know what?" I replied, lighting a cigarette with hands that shook worse than ever, "This is the last time I go along with one, as well." I asisted Will in digging Kirjava out from beneath the contents of the coal bunker, which had burst open, and then clambered onto the roof in an effort to get my bearings. Helpfully, there appeared to be a canal, with a towpath in reasonable repair, not far from our position.

We trudged damply to the towpath, and thought about our various options. We could follow the canal which would eventually lead somewhere, we could wait for a boat to pass and hitchhike, or we could strike out across open country. None of us felt like walking anywhere just yet, so we decided to give it at least an hour before we started off. I contemplated my last cigarette, but thought I'd better save it until later; there was no telling when I'd be able to get another packet.
Elaine explained the principles of the Malone Drive to Lyra, who picked them up rapidly. "I don't think it creates Spectres," she said, "and if it does Mary's pretty sure she can use the Drive to kill them. The Dust can't get through, or such a miniscule amount does permeate it doesn't do any damage. At more than twice the speed of sound it hasn't got time."
Lyra nodded. "Yeah, I figured that if a window was only open for an instant it wouldn't matter. The real danger's from osmotic action." Elaine looked at Will in a very un-maternal manner.
"Brains as well as beauty," she said with laughter in her voice. "You've got good taste, boy!"
"Aww, Mum!" said Will, suddenly the awkward teenager he ought to have been instead of the prematurely grown man he usually seemed. Lyra giggled as he turned a deep shade of red. I shrugged, and mouthed "Women!" in masculine solidarity.
Before either female could frame a suitably scathing remark, the deep chugging of a marine diesel engine could be heard. A barge came into view, with a gangling lad of about eighteen at the helm. If he was surprised at seeing four people covered in mud and coal dust and with only two daemons between them, he gave no sign of it.
"Need a lift?" he inquired jauntily, with what sounded like a Romany accent. Then he stopped, and stared. "Lyra? Blimey, what are you doing here? And who are this lot?"
"Tony!" Lyra cried enthusiastically. "This is Will. Will, this is Tony Costa, an old friend." Will's eyes narrowed slightly. "Hold up there, kid," I murmered, carefully pitching my voice so that only he could hear. "Remember Leontes out of that Shakespeare play we saw on telly the other night? Look at what happened to him." Tony helped us aboard, grinning. "Ma's down below," he said. I'd better let her know we've got company."
Mrs Costa was a formidable but benign-looking woman, like the sort of teacher even the psyhco kids are scared of but everybody gets on with the rest of the time. She fussed over us spectacularly, and filled us in on her relation to Lyra over mugs of steaming tea laced with whiskey. Will was reassured somewhat, especially when Tony said casually to him: "We've heard loads about you these last two years, it's nice to meet you at last. Lyra only mentions you about every other sentence!" He gave me a knowing look; evidently he'd gathered the gist of Will's and my exchange. I acknowledged him with a barely perceptible nod, and returned to the task of filling in our side of the story.
"So I get roped into this because I'm a pilot," I explained. "I flew fighters for a while, but I went into civil aviation after I left the air force. I taught Mary to fly when we were gearing up for our first trial run."
"Did you build the aeroplane as well?" Mrs Costa asked, rather impressed. "On paper," I replied. "Not with my own hands; I did do the interior, with a bit of help from Elaine."
"Which translates as me sorting out all the things he screwed up," Elaine said laconically. I wonder if John had to put up with this kind of thing? Probably not, knowing John as I had; he never seemed to screw up anything.
Suddenly, there was a hoarse cry of alarm from Tony. I looked around, and beheld a police launch. Its two occupants held rifles. "How the HELL did they find us?" Elaine said incredulously. "They ain't after you, they're after us!" Tony explained, opening a compartment under a seat. I stared at the array of submachine guns, pistols and grenades in fascinated horror. This was really, REALLY turning into a long day.
"Sheesh!" said Will, unfazed. "You planning the Revolution, or what?"
"As a matter of fact we are," he replied seriously, "only this wasn't part of the plan!"
"Then we improvise," said Elaine, drawing her pistol.
We came out on deck, guns raised. "Drop those rifles!" I yelled. "You can't kill all three of us before we kill you!" It was a risky move, and didn't pay off. A round pinged off the deck and gashed Will across the knee. Elaine and I fired back, causing the policemen to duck. Will swore vocally, clutching his leg with one hand and groping for his pistol with the other. It would be his left knee that got grazed! He could barely hold a biro with his right hand, let alone a gun, but it was the only hand not occupied in preventing him from bleeding everywhere. Lyra scooped up the fallen weapon in one hand and took aim. The recoil nearly broke her wrist, and the round headed in the direction of the far horizon.
"No, hold it with both hands!" I instructed her. She complied, and fired again. This time, she caught one of the policemen square in the chest and pitched him to the deck. "That's more like it!" I said with a grin. "Now, the other one's... hellfire!" The other one's eagle-daemon was swooping towards us, claws outstretched.
At moments like this you have to react on instinct. My gun aimed skywards, but without any conscious decision from my brain; it was all the special section of the upper spinal column, the one that tells you to jerk your hand back from a hot surface. I got one round off, and hit it square on. Flames sprayed out from the bird's back, and it vapourised before it hit the ground. It's owner toppled backwards into the water.
"I know what I just saw," I said very, very slowly, "but don't ask me to believe it, OK?"