Chapter 9

Chorley. January, the following year.

The knock on the door was as loud as it was unexpected.

“Shit,” muttered Jimmy, clutching his chest dramatically.

“Shut up Jimmy,” Joe told him sternly. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Probably more beggars. It’s just ten days into the new year, and it is very cold out.”

Nonetheless, all five men in the room listened as Joe’s wife answered the door.

“Good morning,” came a brisk voice with an accent none of them could quite place. “Would it be possible to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Walton please?”

“And you are?” came Patty’s quieter voice.

“Major Llewelyn Carter,” came the answer. The name also told everyone the accent was Welsh.

“Hmm,” came back Patty’s voice. “I’ll see if he’s free.”

“Invite him in,” Joe said with some asperity when Patty entered the room.

A tall young man entered the room, and the current occupants were all surprised to see his youth. Then Ted snapped his fingers, “Confederation Marines. Right?”

“Sort of,” said the newcomer. “Lieutenant...” he started, addressing Ted.

“I’m Joe,” Joe broke in quietly. “You’ll have to forgive me not standing. The Taliban took my leg way back when, damaging my spinal cord in the process.”

“Sir, gentlemen,” he nodded to the people present and turned back to Joe. “I am Major Llewelyn Carter, Confederacy Intelligence. Please call me Lew.” He grinned. “Or Llew if you can say it.” His grin vanished as quickly as it had come. “May I speak with you alone?”

“These are Captains Bill Sharples and Ted Eckersall, Lieutenant Henry Spode, and Colour Sergeant James Todd.” Joe indicated Patty, “Second Lieutenant Patricia Walton. They stay, or you go.”

Llew nodded his acceptance. “May I sit?”

Joe indicated a chair, and their visitor sank gracefully into it.

“I have most of your names on my list to visit, so this is excellent. I know that you all served together, along with a Thomas Murray?”

“Tommy, Sergeant-Major Murray, died ten days ago, New Year’s Eve,” said Jimmy slowly, quietly. “It’s why we’re all dressed up to the nines. The funeral is in about an hour, and we’re just waiting for our transport.”

“Oh. I am sorry. I’ll go and leave you to it. Weather permitting, may I come back next week to see you all?”

“If it’ll be quick, now will be fine,” said Joe.

Llew nodded. “I’ll be quick.” He looked at Patty. “I’ll have to admit I didn’t realise women served with...”

“Oh I wasn’t in The Regiment with the boys,” interrupted Patty. “I was in Signals and just got myself posted to Hereford to be near my big brother,” she smiled at Ted, “and that’s where I met Joe.”

“The Regiment?” asked Llew frowning. “Oh yes, sorry,” he said moments later, as realisation set in. “Of course. I’d forgotten you refer to the SAS as just ‘The Regiment’.”

“What regiment were you in son?” asked Ted, frowning at Llew’s apparent lack of knowledge.

“Until four years ago, I was a sheep farmer in South Wales. I was collected the week before that terrorist atrocity that killed most of the Royal family at Prince Charles’ funeral. In fact, it was the day before he died of cancer that I was actually picked up.”

“That’s more than four years ago. That’s closer to five,” said Harry, “six maybe.”

“Oh.” Llew looked surprised, shocked even, then chuckled softly and shook his head. “Yeah, I was on Mars for almost two years. Two Mars years. You’d be amazed how easy it is to lose track of time here on Earth.”

“So you weren’t in the regular army? Were you in the Terries?” asked Joe.

Llew again shook his head. “No sir. Until I joined the Confederacy I’d never had any intention of joining the military. As I said, I was a sheep farmer in the Black Mountains.”

“The Brecon Beacons?” asked Harry.

“Just east.”

“Huh. So what is it you do up there?”

“That is why I’m here now, talking to you. I’m afraid to say that I was one of the people who helped to organise the mass exodus from the Buckingham Palace garden party. Fortunately the new colony, led with remarkable skill and determination by young Prince Andrew I should add, is doing very well indeed, especially as in retrospect it would appear that that was not such a good move; it has made our job in extracting from Britain almost impossible.”

“Totally impossible now, I would say,” cackled Jimmie.

“Not totally, no. We still regularly collect what are known as pre-packs. A group of people led by at least three sponsors, but preferably more, will arrange everything beforehand, contact us, and we will arrange a time and place for them all to be collected in one swift go. When that all goes to plan, we can be in and out in fifteen minutes with anything from thirty up to eighty, ninety, maybe even a hundred people. This month, and it’s still only the tenth of January, we have already picked up well over three hundred people from Britain, and best part of a thousand a month is not that unusual.”

“That’s not huge numbers,” noted Joe.

“No sir, it’s not. We should be collecting many times that number, and more, on a daily basis. But that’s not my job here. Just before the Earth First government came into office, the Confederacy was giving out a lot of replicators. In theory it was supposed to make things easier and help companies if some of their skilled staff were taken. Unfortunately, as you know, the unions got themselves all irate and exercised about it.”

Joe gave a wry smile at Llew’s classic British understatement. “Indeed, go on.”

“Well. What you won’t know, is that all replicators, both supplied by us and those subsequently created here on Earth, can be monitored.”

“Created here on Earth?” interrupted Jimmy.

“Every replicator is capable of creating another copy of itself,” Llew told him, “of converting itself into a larger version, and more than that, each one so created, unless we actively do something about it, contains all the patterns held within the parent replicator. Even those ones are, or can be, monitored by us. To a certain extent it helped us find people like yourselves.

“Importantly though, some were ‘lost in transit’. The Earth authorities never knew about them, were never told about them. They went to people we hoped would use them wisely. It all had to be done on the sly, which is why the one you have access to, like others around the country that have also gone to ex-military personnel in suitable situations, are not known of by the authorities. They are not in the government records.”

“So?”

Llew smiled slightly. “As you might expect, we have been monitoring them to see which are being used as we hoped. In fact most of them are doing exactly what we want.”

“Which is?”

“Producing weapons to help arm the UK population. Virtually all we have done is monitor, and very occasionally tweak. For example, the rifle you tried to fix. You guessed on how it should be fixed, an educated guess obviously given your training and experience, but we supplied the actual correct fix.”

“Yeah,” said Jimmy slowly. “It took me three goes to get that spring right, and I was never quite sure that final one was as I’d designed it.”

“It wasn’t,” said Llew. “One of our technicians monitored what was happening, and dug out the correct patterns for you and remotely downloaded them into your replicator.”

“Okay,” said Joe slowly. “This is all very interesting, but at the end of the day, not very useful.”

“Oh I wouldn’t say that,” said Jimmy. “At least I know the friggin’ council aren’t gonna just walk in and take it. They don’t know of its existence.”

“True they don’t know it exists,” said Llew, “but you still need to be careful so that no one becomes suspicious.”

“Uh huh,” Jimmy nodded. “Makes sense.”

“So why are you here?” asked Joe. “This is all very interesting but...”

“You are all soldiers. Old soldiers, but soldiers none-the-less. You have knowledge and skills we want to utilise.”

“You’re gonna collect us and take us away to fight?” gasped Patty.

“No ma’am,” Llew assured her. “We need you to stay here and do that.”

“With all due respect, young man,” Joe now sounded rather irate. “I cannot stand. Patty is sixty-eight, and all the rest of us are in our seventies. Ted there had a minor heart attack a few months ago, and you think we can fight? Just exactly how do you expect that to happen?”

“Sir. I can fix, or rather arrange to have fixed, almost everything. I can make you look young again, though actually I would recommend against that.”

Everyone was looking at him in stunned silence.

“What I can do, is to transfer you somewhere, put you through a Confederacy device, a device that has some superficial similarities with the replicator, but instead works on living flesh. It can make you all young and healthy again, but to hide you I would suggest you all keep looking much as you do now. You will look your real ages, but inside, your strength, eyesight, hearing, stamina, agility, everything, will be at least as good as when you were at the peak of your fitness, and probably better. It will grow you a new spinal cord, though I suspect it will take you some time to get used to that. It can grow limbs again. Anything.”

“Could I have more children?” asked Patty softly. She looked at Joe, then reached out to grip his arm. “Our son was killed in a road accident when he was thirteen, and our daughter had cancer when she was eleven, and both her ovaries were damaged.”