Arkland

(A Covenanter Story)

Coastal drifts; a soundtrack for a life of serious endeavour. A world bound by the languid curl of surf wrapped in the thin blanket of an early autumn night, surf rolling across sand and pebble and rocky pools, driven by a sliver of moon and a light but persistent breeze. A chill in the small hours heralding the winter yet to come. A cloud covered night, the darkness almost absolute in the absence of coastal lights and curtained windows and headlight reflections. Waves ventured landwards, waited a moment, as if checking to see how much higher they could still rise, and then drew back in a noisy scurry, with just a hint of white foam visible under the sleeping sky to mark their steady, invasive progress.

A broken coast line; broken by cliffs and rock falls and the half-submerged remains of the lost landward foundations of a saturated and submerged society. Thirty metres of sea rise on this exposed southern coast. A landscape desolate now, and dark and pitted with craters. Even so blighted it was still a relative place of safety compared to other, gentler inclines, where waters and boots and ‘fugee terrors still washed ashore on a tidal heartbeat. In this sector, the southern slopes comprised washed limestones and sandstone bridges. A mixture of tangled beaches, small bays and narrow inlets beneath towering avalanche layers of mudstone and shale, lifted and buckled by the colliding worlds of Pangaea and Laurasia three hundred and twenty million years previously. This was a place once beloved of retiring gentle folk, but now a last sentinel post for the superannuated soldiers of The Covenant.

To be precise, according to a satellite fed, tactical geolocation display perched on an overturned plastic beer bottle crate, these were the ruins inland of drowned Weymouth. These badlands were the last sentinel post for Jack Hunter, a latter-day limitanei, a veteran and now semi-retired sergeant in the The Covenant Defense Force. Weymouth was a generally quiet sector. A ghost land. A shallow puddle, adrift with scraps and fragments of former worlds. A shoreline knee deep in plastic bags and refuse. A shoreline suffused with blood and bone and so many forgotten ‘fugee fragments. A shore line littered with bricks and concrete and rebar palisades. Jack Hunter was fifty-two years old. He was now two years into a five year stint as a Covenant reservist. An old soldier. A time-served mucker on light duties now that he was declining in his material faculties. Jack Hunter was a battle scarred Centurion born of this archipelago, this new way of being, awaiting his pension and his next, hard-earned step up on The Covenant’s ladder of slippery privilege.

These lengthening autumnal nights, with the breeze whipping in off of the Channel, driving spikes of arthritic pain into his joints, were easily as hard to bear as any that he had known when younger. Jack had spent years in dugouts like this, surrounded by cobbled and sandbagged and bandaged technology that The Covenant used to keep at bay the ravening hordes from across the bloody seas. Back in the day, when he was still vital, when he commanded the elite legions, time passed quickly by dint of order and action. A soldier still always had too much time to think, too much time for the cold to seep into a head as well as the fabric of bone and cartilage and tendon, but these days of inaction in literal backwaters appeared worse. Jack shrugged the sense of frustration off. He was hardly alone in contemplating the things that he had done and the things that he had seen and wished he never had.

These mental stresses and physical disorders were commonplace. The Covenant hinterland bristled with the spikes and the curses of the battle-scarred. Jack blasphemed against the night darks and that slight breeze that somehow found every gap and slit and hole in the dugout camouflages. He reached for a flask set beside the satellite display and shook it. Cold and empty. “Fucking hell!” It was three o’clock of a brisk autumn morning and he was scanning a dark and forgotten corner of the new coastal chaos. Four hours until watch change. “Fucking bone!”

Jack closed his eyes, breathed in deeply and switched off, reverting to automaton mode. Scanning monitors. Infrareds. Motion sensors. Flying eyes. Night vision. Early warning. He sat in a dark, muddy hole in the ground surrounded by patched up tech, all of it sitting smugly blank, as if taunting the old man, saying ‘we don’t feel the cold, Jack, we don’t need to pee on our boots in the dark, Jack, we don’t count the wasted minutes of a dwindling life…’

Jack opened his eyes wide and forced a yawn. Stimulation. Time to snap out of the three AM jitters. He double-checked the equipment. A status screen for each combat effect sat mounted above a target plotter and the main ops controller. Dragonflies; air drones with light arms and medium cluster ordnance types. Orcas; sea drones sporting an array of micro-torpedoes, bomblets and erratic, waterproofed machine guns. Grizzlies; auto-killer gun emplacements lining the shoreline with their autonomous motion detectors and their extreme prejudice, so long as the ammunition lasted. Scorps; autonomous mobiles, each one sporting twin machine guns, sniper ordnance and grenade launchers. Behind the dugout there was an array of automated mortars covering Jack’s sector. As a final line of defence Jack patted the stock of his automatic carbine. He felt the weight of his combat pack full of taped together magazines. Snug.

Systems all reading in the green. Jack could sit here, one man buried in the sand, and launch the equivalent fire-power of a combined arms regiment at any ‘fugee desperate and stupid enough to try and sneak into this Covenant Arkland. Jack logged the emptiness and the silence dutifully on his wrist pad. This was how they protected the Ark. Hard and brutal and necessary. He was getting long in the tooth, that was certainly true, but he was an expert sector commander. When questioned by the kids and the folks back home, when he did the dutiful rounds of communes and schools, he always said publicly that he still got a pretty fundamental kick out of protecting something so special.

Except that Jack no longer felt quite so certain about that feeling of satisfaction that should come with a job well done. He could rationalise. He frequently did with the cadets that they sent him, the youngsters destined to switch from apprentice-mode killer to the full blown berserker. Jack’s sector backup on this watch was a young girl from the Elmet Collective, far to the north of these southern coastal wastelands. Janet. Janet Mustafi. Not so sweet sixteen. A volunteer squaddie. One metre sixty-two of rapidly emerging gym and steroid enhanced brawn under a puppyish mop of blonde, scraped-back hair. She still sported childishly full cheeks full of rosy charm, but Janet also had coal black eyes that sparkled when she stripped down and cleaned her personal firearm. She was Covenant, all right, and brimming with teenage confidence and certainty, just like Jack had been back in the day.

Ten minutes until check-in. Ten minutes until the inevitable text tirade from Janet. Standard operating procedures. Squads on watch checked in with each other just before the hour. A five minute window in which the youngster invariably exercised her texting fingers and thumbs on her personal cell. Unofficial. Unapproved. Hackable. Jack carried a cell too. Everyone did. Jack used his single digit lack of dexterity as a way of throttling back the conversation. The Zob’s back in the headshed turned a blind eye so long as you didn’t abuse the situation. Ten minutes to rehearse the conversation. Ten minutes to mentally rehash Covenant mantras and catechisms before the latest batch of insufferable teenage gobshite.

*

The official protocols. Earpiece and mic linked via wrist-pad. Embedded subcutaneous military issue transponders. The itch in the wrist. A faint hiss of static as the earpiece popped into life. Jack Hunter initiated the check.

“Hunter Four Four. This is Hunter Four Four. Radio check, over.”

“Hunter Four Four, this is Juliet Mike Five Niner. Loud and clear. Five by five, over”

“Hunter Four Four, copy. Request Watch Station Beta Sit-Rep, over”

“Watch Station Beta. Sit-Rep. All clear landward. All clear mobile. All clear aerial. All clear seaward. Way too much zero-dark-thirty, Bossman, over”

Hunter caught a stifled laugh just before Janet Mustafi lifted her finger off the send icon on her wrist-pad. Bloody kids.

“Juliet Mike Five Niner. Concentrate and cut the crap. Stay frosty. Hunter out.”

Telemetry readouts on his screens confirmed Five Niner’s manual observations. He killed the connection just in time to feel his cell vibrate in his shirt pocket. Old school. Patched into a sub-carrier on the military circuit. Texting time.

‘Hey Bossman’

Bloody kids. No respect. He half smiled in the darkness. He liked Janet. She wasn’t wired properly yet, but she had more balls than most of her male cadet colleagues. He waited for the next installment.

‘Tell me ag. Why we freeeeeeezing butts out here? No dice. No game. I ken nuthin smiler. All bone…’

Slow fingers. Cold joints wrapped in thin cut-off woollen gloves. Single digit messaging.

‘Orders, girlie, orders. We do wot Ruperts say coz we r good boys n girls. Eyes peeled. Not in mood for nuvva hist less.’

A moment staring at the display. Basic icons. Most of them redundant. Email. A music app but he had nothing to upload out here. Major mistake. Camera. Disabled. Calendar to count down the days on shift. A clock. Likewise the minutes. A health app. Funny. Weather. Even fucking funnier. Calls. There hadn’t been a working public cell network in decades. But still they made the phones and the kids patched them into sub-carriers and redundant loops on government networks. Just like he had done in the way back. Just like he still did.

The screen dimmed. Another second or two passed. The screen lit up and Hunter’s cell vibrated once again.

‘Shirt on Bossman. Got any new jokes?????????’

‘Yeah - u hear about the teenage girl who shut the fuck up????????’

‘OOOOOOHHHHHHHH! Scary. Who gonna come around here?????? You????? And whose army????? AHAHAH xxx’

A sound. A single wail. A synthesised ghost trail. The faintest flicker on a needle dial. A screen waking. Readouts. A wide-eyed moment in time. Then flatlines. A gul, perhaps? Another tech glitch? Hunter waited for a confirmation. Nothing. Silence. The breeze tugging vainly on the camouflage. Feeling the cold ache in his bones, he shifted, sitting up and hitting active scan controls. Everything reading in the green. A second flash and a half smoked vapour trail across the monitored horizon. Fingers suddenly warm and fast forward.

‘You got anything up there? Left flank? Just a slight…’

Before Hunter finished typing out his message his cell vibrated in his fingers. ‘Flash. Burton Island. Inside Portland ring. Point beyond Chickerell landings. Single burst. No intel on top scans. Birds?’

“Hold.”

Hunter killed the cell and opened up main ops comms.

“Hunter Four Four. This is Hunter Four Four. Attention, Bincombe Down. Request Scan Drone. Portland Ring. This is Hunter Four Four. Attention, Bincombe Down. Request Scan Drone. Portland Ring, over.”

Static. Vital seconds. Screens blank but brooding. Hunter could feel his pulse rate rising. He felt a heaviness bite across his chest. His eyes were turning to grit. He wiped his hand across his eyes. Hard. A break in the static.

“Hunter Four four. This is Bincombe Down. Roger that. Telemetry correlation. ETA three minutes. Activate counter-measures. Repeat. Activate counter-measures, over’

‘Bincombe Down. This is Hunter Four Four. Roger that. Over and out.’

One of the local command sub frequencies lit up an icon. Incoming. Hunter flicked his wrist-pad screen to the right to connect. As he listened, Hunter was already spinning up controllers and pulling up the battlefield holo-projection. “Hunter Four Four, this is Juliet Mike Five Niner. Loud and clear. Copy that too. Activate counter-measures, over.”

Hunter patched in his full combat link to Juliet Mustafi. Auto send and receive. “We’re off main grid, Five Niner. Combat comms only. Combat ready. Keep talking, girl, keep talking. Eyes and ears. Putting up local Dragonflies. Orcas one through four in the water. Grizzlies activated. Scorp One heading Chickerell sector. Make sure your transponder is A-OK. Repeat Transponder check. No collateral, please.”

Juliet was, all of a sudden, chillingly well behaved. “Copy, Hunter. All in the green. Eyes open. Sats online. Sensors online. Feeds five by five. You should be seeing what I see. Big fat nothings.”

“Copy that, Five Niner. Affirmative. Seeing… nothing… yet… over...”

Hunter double and triple checked his screens. A big, fat zilch. Probably another false positive. He and Janet would have to spend a god-awful hour post shift cleaning the Orcas. But he decided that he should not grumble. He focused on the here and now, all the while playing out a series of subliminal images in his mind’s eye. These moments, these periods of intense, nervous preparation always made him think back on the world as it once was. As a child he remembered the walls going up. The oceans were already substantially higher then, and driving a terrorised and despondent humanity ever onwards across the land and the sea. Waves of Middle Eastern and African ‘fugee catastrophe overwhelmed the Mediterranean and then the Balkans. Spain and Italy disintegrated. The Swiss were the first to proclaim Ark status and slam shut their doors. The continental north held on precariously.

Hunter remembered city streets crumbling as people hurled up barricades to protect their own kind, barricades behind which they starved and dehydrated. Water was the worst of it. Ironic. A city, a town, gone to hell in a few days when the water stopped flowing. Ghettos and warlords and burned out shells. Although he couldn’t have been any more than four or five years old, Jack Hunter remembered being dragged by his father to a compound, his young body covered in dust and the smell of burning rubber. A Covenanter camp. A place of safety. Hunter was vaguely aware of the older religions. It was a time of blood and sweat and suffering. The Covenant tendency was decidedly collective in outlook. He thanked his Gods for that. His father had died within the year. Hunter was co-opted as a military orphan. His life was ordained.

By the time Hunter was sixteen, the same age as Janet Mustafi was now, he was fully committed, convinced that The Covenant and their collective technology bias was the only way. They followed the Swiss example. They too built walls around more and more of the old archipelago, forcing those less ferocious or less capable than themselves back into the seas. Water wars. Hell on earth. Coasts or ghettos. Drone and Grizzly. Occupying high-rise burn-outs to create fields of angry fire. Salvation came with belief in the collective will. Freedom of action, freedom of thought, warlordism… none of it mattered. You believed or you died. The Covenant was a form of radical surgery on a massively diseased societal body.

Covenant tenets and justifications. Hunter had seen the fires burning on London shores. He had smelled charred flesh and practised his sniping skills on the floating, bloated corpses that drifted in the rubble and wire and mud laced shores of the Inner Thames Lagoon. He never saw their faces in his dreams, just the back of their heads. He shuddered. He had been there as wave after wave of boat people were buried at sea. The natural inhabitants of the archipelago had nearly lost everything. It was total war. Total commitment. But here they were, still at it and Jack Hunter was growing old and tired. His conviction was starting to fray at the edges. He shook himself back to the here and now.

“Back to it, Jack, back to it right now. You’re Covenant, Jack. You’re an apparatchik, a missionary, a believer. We believe in the collective. I believe in the collective...” he whispered to no one and to the dim night, pulling the combined views of four Orcas up on his main control holo.

*

Orcas hunted in packs, whether made of flesh and bone or metals and software. Orca One. Right flank. Ahead of Two and Three. In line with Four. Casting a net. Software systems monitoring shapes and heat signatures. If it looked like a boat but had no transponder signal - effect maximum prejudicial resolution. If it looked like a human being but had no transponder signal - effect maximum prejudicial resolution. If it was unrecognised and failed to respond to the briefest of transponder challenges - effect maximum prejudicial resolution. The machines were simple in their modus operandi. Circle. Drive the kill into a tight shoal. Effect maximum prejudicial resolution.

In the shallow waters above old Weymouth, in the sounds between Portland island and the waterlogged rump of the higher old town, now called Burton Island, the Orca pack spread wider and thinner. Between them the effective kill pool was already diffusing alarmingly. On the surface, bobbing and weaving and crashing and shouting, wave after wave of small boats, dirigibles and rafts with converted vehicle engines swarmed and smashed and toppled on the wave-roll. The air was full of clashing light arms fire. The Orcas were the main target, but the frantic revving of outboards and the chopping swirls of current meant that all fire was unfriendly. The ‘fugees were killing each other as randomly as they aimed at the surging Orcas. The air was filling with exhaust smoke and cordite clouds and wild surges of spray and wave top.

Each Orca was equipped with basic video, a tight beam sensor array and pretty fair infra-reds, so the crud clouds posed little immediate difficulty in themselves. The sheer width and depth of the incursion was, however, already beyond critical. As Hunter watched his readouts and telemetry and ops screens he began to realise that this was something more than just another off-load of half starved wretches in a few leaky row-boats. He had red lights flashing on every Orca monitor. Audible alarms. The Orcas were too far apart. They were isolated. Hunter watched as mini-torpedoes launched, smashing into boat after boat and launching metals and wood and skin and bone and blood in fountain bursts among the spray, but for every boat taken out, an exponential number seemed to emerge from the darks just beyond the curling surf tops. One by one the sheer weight of bullets fired at Hunter’s sea drones, no matter how inaccurate, were taking a decidedly heavy toll.

Orca One, out on the right flank, found a volume of clear water and swung to port, back towards the target zones. Infra-reds were stronger there. Machine comms. Orca Three dropped off the network. Orca Four was showing erratic vectors. Orca One picked up a sudden graphic from one of the onboard cameras. Black and silent. Looming above the drone. Unidentified. Orca One was out of heavy ordnance. Orca One turned head on and loosed what was left of its machine-gun ammunition in the general direction of the intruder. The machine-gun jammed. Alarm signals. Telemetry. Orca One dropped off Hunter’s live feed.

“You seeing this, Five Niner?” he shouted into his comms mic, adrenaline and astonishment flowing equally freely. “Sit-rep. How wide? Losing the water. Repeat. Losing the water, over”.

A moment of silence. A half heard whisper. “Shi...t”

Protocols. Drills and disciplines. “This is Hunter Four Four. Juliet Mike Five Niner. Situation report, over.”

“Yeah. This is Five Niner. Copy. It’s carnage. Whole of our shore line. Deep waves. Boats out beyond sight lines. Sky lighting up way out on the right flank. Dragonflies dropping. Nine operational out of total complement. Six… make that seven casualties. Correlation, over?”

“Stay with me, Five Niner. I can see what you see. Dragonflies expending full payloads. Getting picked off on return to base. Shit. We’ve got more incoming. This is way heavier than the usual random ‘fugee paddle. This is a friggin’ invasion....”

Decisions. Immediate priority. “Pulling everything back off the water, Five Niner. Shoreline perimeter. All Grizzlies and Scorps on full autonomy. Calling in Heavy Brigade. Heads down, over”

“This is Juliet Five Niner…” Cuts in the static. Breaking words. “... Give ‘em…”

Switching frequencies. Code words. “Hunter Four Four. This is Hunter Four Four. Copy Bincombe Down. Balaclava. Repeat. Balaclava, over.”

Confusion on screens. Wild thoughts. Cutting through the mental chaos. All four Orcas down. Remaining Dragonflies en route to or from rearming. Heavy static. Vital seconds. Scorps brooding in the shadows. Grizzlies bristling. Waiting. Locked. Loaded.

“Hunter Four four. This is Bincombe Down. Copy that. Heavy Brigade previously engaged. We’ve got a ten mile situation, Hunter Four Four. Hostile storm. Repeat Hostile Storm. Hold position AD UNDAS. Repeat, hold position AD UNDAS. Bincombe Down, over and out.’

“Jesus H…” Hunter tried to think clearly. Training. Drills. Just do it, man. Hunter swiped the control screen far left and called up the master systems console. He opened combat comms. “This is Hunter Four Four. Juliet Mike Five Niner. Switching to full battlefield autonomy. Systems operating without license. Repeat. Systems operating without licence. Five… Four… Three… Two… One… Live. Repeat. Live. Over”

“This is Five Niner. Copy that. Over”

“Checkerill forward position, Juliet. Full combats. Transponder and kit on full boost. See you in ten. Over and out”

*

Dawn was still an hour away. Janet Mustafi walked the shoreline along the Checkerill landings. She checked the transponder signal strength on her wrist pad repeatedly as she walked on, dipping in and out of scorched mortar craters. Burnt out Grizzlies lined the immediate foreshore. She could see the tell-tale signature lights on sniper units set on landward buildings. She could sense the far-off click of firing pins hitting empty breeches as some of the machines tried to carry out their prime directives regardless of transponder signals. Burned out boats and rafts littered the surf.

Janet was suffering from a fatigue and horror laced cocktail that made her quite forget how numbers worked. She saw but could not make any sense out of the bodies bleeding out on the mud and sand. The shoreline bobbed and twisted in human form. Jagged splinters of wood driven into the sands stood as markers for the fallen. Wood and fibreglass and rubber danced with St Vitus atop the bloody waves. Janet ducked involuntarily as an outboard fuel tank exploded further down along the shoreline. She was immediately thrust back in her mind’s eye to the forward dugout and and the thick crump of mortars firing and shells bursting in the surf. She could hear the incessant clatter of the Grizzlies and Scorps as they hit out at anything moving on the beach.

The ‘fugee invasion had hit hard but was too low tech. Numbers alone might get them through the first lines of the defense, but heavier fire-power and better telemetry won out. Jack and Janet had added their own crazy weight to the sound and the fury, pumping shotgun shells and carbine fire into the smoke haze in their sector. Janet had registered the odd kicking of dirt and sand as stray ‘fugee bullets ripped at the ground around them, but the awful weight of death was almost totally one-sided once the boats started to hit the shallows.

To cap the night off, the Heavies had charged in after an hour or so of wave top mutilation, just in time to blast the land and the sky to shreds. She and Jack were caught out in the open. They had hit the ground and dug themselves in as hard and as fast as they could, but clusters and fire sheets did not respond to transponders. She and Jack were as much meat for war’s grinder as any ‘fugee invader. That was the sheer bloody mess of it all. That was why Janet was walking the shoreline alone now with her her young teenage heart shot to pieces. She walked on incapable of hearing the cries and the moans of the wounded. Behind her one of the remaining Scorps rattled across the ground, trailing one of its many all-terrain wheels from a shattered rear axle.

Janet Mustafi cried to herself as she walked the landings. In her left hand she carried Jack Hunter’s regulation sidearm. In her right hand she held a blood-black rag. Overhead the last of the Heavy Brigade drones were swooping in to finish off the seaward stragglers out in the deep water sounds. Janet preferred not to look. She turned her head away from the shoreline and started to head back towards the forward dug-out. Mop-up squads were starting to appear, men and women in two’s and three’s, methodically terminating the wounded or picking up pieces of shattered and broken military kit. Janet barely registered their presence. She just wanted to sit with Jack. She wanted to hold his hand. She wanted to hear him tell her that everything would work out. She wanted…

It was hard to see the terrain clearly through her tears. Janet stumbled repeatedly, dropping the bloody rag more than once, but she scrambled and scratched and kept that scrap of soiled material as close as she could. The craters were less densely plowed as she made her way towards the shore’s hinterland. She stumbled and scabbed back across the rubble and into the first ramparts along the building line. Janet wiped the grime away from her face with the back of her pistol hand. She finally registered silhouettes against mobile lighting. Armed figures. A shore patrol. Final mop up. Janet remembered her protocols and signalled, pointing to the sector’s forward dug-out. That was where Jack was waiting for her. She would hang out there for a while, away from the slowly emerging day and away from the all too visible horrors of her first ‘fugee battle. Out of sight. Safely tucked away with the machines and the flashing lights and Jack Hunter.

Reaching the forward dugout, Janet swung a length of camouflage netting and tarpaulin up to chest height, bent double and stepped into the darkness. Glowing screens gave off an eerie green light, made softer by the dull yellow wash from a camping light hanging from the dugout’s centre pole. It took a moment for Janet to adjust. She saw Jack sitting up, resting his back against an equipment case. He looked odd, as though he were two people merged into one. Only slowly did Janet realise that the otherness had eyes and that those eyes stared back at her. And there was something else. Janet stopped dead in her tracks, pistol raised. She heard a creature mewling softly, followed by a panicked shushing sound. Jack, meanwhile, sat quite impassively, eyes closed, as if exhausted and sleeping off the night’s excesses.

Janet breathed quickly. A ‘fugee. A woman. A ‘fugee with a bloody child in her arms. A ‘fugee holding a knife that she had been using to dig into Jack’s wrist to find his transponder just before Janet walked into the dugout.

“Fuck…” was all that Janet managed to say. She caught her breath for a moment, trying to hold the pistol firmly in front of her. She hoped that she had left the safety off. She made a conscious effort to slow her racing heart. She should just waste the hostile and be done with the bloody night. She should defend the Ark. Janet watched, uncomprehending, as the woman stopped digging into Jack’s arm, placed the knife gently on his legs, and then reached down beside him and offered up a newborn in old rags and oilcloth.

A voice thick with salt and sand and loss. “You take… please… you take my baby…”

The woman stared straight into the gun barrel. She was barely older than Janet, but here eyes spoke of years of suffering. She was a camp girl. The Gods alone new what price she had paid to make that crossing with the child. Janet could see those time-worn newscasts in the Collective’s common rooms, newscasts designed to show the horrors of sub-humanity and put steel into raw recruits like her. She almost pulled the trigger as a reflex reaction.

At that moment she felt a cold draught of air and the faintest change in the ambient light coming from behind her position in the dugout. The flap lifted. A head. Shoulders. A young squaddie stepping in beside Janet and standing up straight, automatic carbine hanging in the crook of his right arm. He took another step into the room and raised his weapon. Out on the beach Janet could hear the odd crack of gunfire as the mop-up teams did their job.

“Holy fuck…” The young squaddie was laughing as he turned to look at Janet, saying as he did so, “Bugger me, Janet, you’ve only gone and…”

As the young squaddie turned towards Janet she made a decision. A single shot. A moment of silence broken by the muffled cries of a baby whose mother had buried the child deep in her bosom. On this night of nights, one more gunshot would hardly be noticed. Janet rationalised the moment. A life for a life. A life for jack Hunter.

Next Chapter: A Solitude of Stars