D’Bridie was carrying a backpack.
“How did those two get in on the act?”
“Procurement,” Ned said.
“What?”
“John’s been here before. He knows people. He is going to get in a supply of new cutlery. So that everybody can eat properly. D’Bridie is his assistant. I fixed it with Lewis.”
“What else did you fix?”
“Not much.”
We were met on the landing ground by some heavily armed militia folk, who ushered us straight into waiting troop carriers. If we thought we were going to see the sights on the way to the school we were wrong. The back of the troop carrier had no more windows than The Delegate.
“I don’t reckon this place is quite as peaceful as advertised,” Ned said.
“No kidding.”
The noise in the troop carrier made conversation difficult, so we didn’t talk. The machine rattled and jolted and gave no impression of traveling on a made road. At one stage I thought I heard gunfire, but maybe I was mistaken. We arrived at the school and were hustled out of the troop carriers and into an assembly hall. It was a bog-standard school assembly hall. It could have been on Earth, it could have been on Newharp, there was nothing exotic about it at all. The place was packed; they must have bused in a heap of kids from surrounding schools. They were all talking as loudly as they could. Some of them were sitting on window sills. Scuffles and fights broke out. Teachers were trying to quieten them down, with no success. Our party was ushered onto a wide stage. We sat and looked at the kids. The kids largely ignored us. The proceedings proceeded. In both languages. Everything was translated by babbling translator folk, so everything took twice as long. Finally Ned and I were called to the microphone. Ned used the Skyroan language skills he’d picked up on Earth flogging replacement organs to refugees. He talked directly to the kids in a bastard version of their own tongue, reciting a translation of the epic poem cycle that he and Her Excellency had cobbled together. But the kids started to drum their feet. A slow handclap added to the noise. Ned started yelling, but now he was yelling limericks:
There was a young lady from Skyros
Who’s bum was like a rhinoceros.
She sat on a mouse.
Which shrieked like a louse
And cursed the young lady from Skyros.
I’d never heard such infantile drivel in my life. It was acutely embarrassing to be standing next to Ned. But it began to work. The kids started laughing, and they were laughing with Ned, not at him. After a dozen such limericks Ned had the whole audience in the palm of his hand. He said, “Right. You lot can have a go. Someone come up here and do a limerick. What about you, mate, you look like a champion limerickeer.” He pointed at a rough lout in the second row.
Ned had picked just the right guy. The lout grinned like a cat and bounded over the row of kids in front of him, half squashing a smallish urchin as he did so. He leapt onto the stage, bumped into me, took the microphone from Ned and shouted, “There was a mad crowd from Earth, Whose brains were made out of turf.…”
An explosion on the roof of the hall sent a rain of dust and light-fittings cascading down onto the heads of everyone below, including me. Kids screamed and started stampeding out of all available exits, including the windows. The heavily-armed militia guys rushed the stage and began herding our party out of a back door. The sound of gunfire punctuated their shouted commands. Acrid smoke drifted everywhere. I found myself stumbling along next to Ned, who was conducting a shouted exchange with a militia girl. He turned to me, “She reckons it’s a kidnap attempt. Apparently, Lewis would be worth her weight in cold-fusion pellets. We’re OK, we’re not worth anything.”
“Good to know,” I said.
Out in the playground our party was being bundled back into the troop carriers. I saw Her Excellency propelled unceremoniously into the lead carrier by two beefy militia types. Then someone called my name. I looked round, Flight Regulator Montesquieu was standing next to the open rear hatch of a smallish troop carrier.
“You and Malley, into this one.”
Ned and I climbed into the vehicle. D’Bridie and John Doe were already there. Up front, the driver was accompanied by a couple of grinning militiamen who held their firearms at the ready—they had the cheery demeanor of the recently bribed. Montesquieu didn’t climb into the carrier herself, she yelled at the driver to take us away. The carrier started forward even as the hydraulics were closing the rear hatch.
John Doe said, “I do believe our esteemed colleague, Flight Regulator Montesquieu, has called us a cab of our very own. I suspect the driver will be taking us on a leisurely tour of New Stoke-on-Trent’s main tourist attractions. Pity we can’t see out.”
Doe wasn’t wrong. It took forever to get back to the landing ground. And when we arrived, it was too late.
We stood in the Skyroan dust and watched the runabout take off. It accelerated slowly; it was carrying the ancient, shaken-up Ulrike Lewis, after all. The pilot wasn’t going to subject her to too many g-forces, not if he knew what was good for him. For an eternity the craft seemed to float upside down on the cloud cover, like the keel of a boat seen by an underwater swimmer. And then it was gone, swallowed by the mist. I turned in complete misery to my companions. There was no answering misery on their faces; they had been watching the departing runabout with as much concern as a bunch of commuters who’d just missed a light rail shuttle.
“It’s not going to come back for us,” I said.
“I wouldn’t think so,” John Doe said. “We are marooned. We are castaways of the cosmos.”
“We’re on the wrong bloody planet!” I was nearly crying. “This place is worse than Earth.”
“I’m sure it has some attractions, dear lady,” John Doe said. “Let us look on the bright side.”
“Don’t bloody dear lady me.”
Ned said, “We’ll get you home, Em. We might even get there faster than The Delegate. We’ll be there to welcome Lewis on her triumphal return.”
“How? There aren’t any people smugglers going between here and Newharp. And we’ve got no money. No damn money at all.”
“The space lanes are not empty,” John Doe said. “Interplanetary trade demands the constant plying to and fro of that workhorse of commerce, the humble freighter. The freighter is not to be sneezed at.”
“And how the fuck are we meant to pay the goddamned humble freighter captain? With the clothes off our backs? Here, captain, give us passage to Newharp. Have a second-hand shirt and a used pair of socks.”
“We can always realize our capital,” John Doe said. “Skyroans are discerning aficionados of genuine antiques.”
“Realize what capital? What antiques?”
D’Bridie put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. Silently she kicked the backpack that rested in the dust at her feet. There was a muffled clanking sound. “Spoons, Em,” she said. “Knives and forks. Ceremonial ones. John knows a guy who deals in them. John’s been here before. He’s got connections.
