Three kilometres behind the hovercraft, EE explosions strobed chaotically, while antagonistic streamers of white fire curled and thrashed above the blood-soaked grass.
We did it, she thought, the knights can’t reach us now. The children are going to live. Nothing else mattered, not the hardships, not the pain, not the sickening fear.
“Come on,” she said to them, and the smile came so easily. “We’re leaving now.”
“Thank you, lady,” Jay said.
Kelly glanced up as a figure hiked out of the rain. “I thought you’d left,” she said.
Shaun Wallace grinned. His sodden LDC one-piece was shrunk round his body, mud and grass clung to his boots, but the humour in his eyes couldn’t be vanquished. “Without saying goodbye? Ah now, Miss Kelly, I wouldn’t be wanting you to think the worst of me. Not you.” He lifted the first child, a seven-year-old girl, over the gunwale. “Come along then, you rabble. You’re all going on a long, beautiful trip to a place far away.”
The spaceplane’s outer airlock hatch slid open, and the aluminium stairs telescoped out.
“Get a move on, Kelly, please,” Ashly datavised.
She joined Shaun at the side of the hovercraft and began lifting the exhausted, bedraggled children out.
Horst stood at the bottom of the stairs, harrying his small charges along. A word here, a smile, pat on the head. They scooted up into the cabin where Ashly cursed under his breath as he tried to work out how on earth to fit them all in.
Kelly had the last boy in her arms, a four-year-old who was virtually asleep, when Theo started up his hovercraft. “Oh no, Theo,” she datavised. “Not you as well.”
“They need me,” he replied. “I can’t leave them. I’m a part of them.”
Great bands of sunlight were raking the savannah. The fighting was over. Kelly could see three or four knights on horseback milling about. None of them showed any interest in the spaceplane now. “But they’re dead, Theo.”
“You don’t know that, not for sure. In any case, haven’t you heard, there’s no such thing, not any more.” He stuck his arm up and waved.
“Hell.” She tipped her head back, letting the sweet rain wash her face.
“Come along now, Miss Kelly.” Shaun leant over and gave her cheek a platonic kiss. “Time you was leaving.”
“I don’t suppose it would do any good asking you to come?”
“Would I ask you to stay?”
She put a foot on the bottom rung, the drowsy child heavy in her arms. “Goodbye, Shaun. I wish it could have been different.”
“Aye, Miss Kelly. Me too.”
Kelly sat in the cabin with one eight-year-old boy on her lap and her arms round a pair of girls. The children squirmed round, fidgeting, excited and nervous, asking her about the waiting starship. Lalonde was already half-forgotten, yesterday’s nightmare.
If only, she wished.
The compressor whine permeated the overcrowded cabin as Ashly fed power into the fans. Then they were airborne, the deck tilting up, a press of acceleration. Kelly closed her eyes and accessed the spaceplane’s sensor suite. A lone figure was trudging over the savannah, a well-built man with tousled ginger hair, wearing a thick red and blue check cotton shirt, collar up against the rain as he headed for home.
A minute later a stentorian sonic boom broke across the vast grass plain. Fenton raised his great head at the sound, but there was nothing in the sky apart from rain and clouds. He lowered his gaze again, and resumed his earthbound search for his lost masterlove.