<h4>Hairy Scottish Biker Productions Presents:


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    HEADS UP: This story takes place in a deeply flawed world, full of deeply flawed people. It is not set in a nice or peaceful world, and most of the cast are to one degree or another not nice or peaceful people. Expect black humour and general insanity; sequals may be prone to antiheroes and villain protagonists, and more than a few of my villains (including a couple of POV characters for sequels) are prone tomassive bigotry of the sort I do not and cannot agree with.


    In short anyone daft enough to take it for utopianism or is utterly mental enough to think I agree with the words I''m putting into characters mouths is going to get laughed at, long and hard, and withthat out the way all that''s left for me to say here is, enjoy the ride;


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    "Are you quite certain of this?" asked Captain Randal Locksley, "Our ‘saviour’," and you could just about hear the air quotes in his voice, "Appears to be in a rather poor condition."


    The captain was not in any sense a small man, in fact he was both the largest man in the entire Fleet Space Arm, possibly even the Royal Navy as a whole, and the largest man known to the majority of his acquaintances, Her Majesty the Queen included. He stood fully seven feet and eight inches tall with a massive bull-necked barrel-chested frame to match and an orderly beard and moustache as befit his status as the captain and commanding officer of one of the British Empire’s most powerful spacegoing warships, the illustrious HMS Dreadnaught.


    His companion released a most indecorous bark of laughter.


    "Oh, that she is," he said, "But observe, my friend – does her heart not continue to beat, what is left of her lungs to draw breath, her neurons to fire? Consider the strength of will that requires, in her condition, in this place. She is exactly what we need, and all we have to do now is see to it that she''s in the right place, at the right time, to encounter one of my ''catspaws'' - who just happens to be the greatest cyberneticist alive."


    "Catspaws," the good Captain said with a scoff and a shake of his head that caused his companion''s grin to widen. "I remain unconvinced."


    "She has the strength of will required to, in a place wherein will is the most powerful of all forces, will air into being as she breathes it, will her ravaged lungs to extract oxygen from it, will her depleted blood to convey it through a devastated circulatory system, even when by all rights she should long since have bled to death or possibly drowned in her own blood. Consider, my friend; if her will is strong enough for her to remain alive through this, quite what might she be capable of when conscious, able, and aware that the destruction in fire of all creation will include the part she’s standing upon? No, she may not look like much now – but make no mistake: this girl is entirely capable of the task at hand."


    "And," said the Captain with a nod, "I suppose that it falls to us to see to it that she remains so."


    "Indeed, though I do not believe we shall see too many challenges in that. As she recovers ability to function despite the small case of shellshock she’ll no doubt shortly be experiencing, I have every confidence that she can and will make of herself a force to be reckoned with."


    The Captain chuckled and shook his head.


    "We shall," he said, "No doubt see… you do have a backup plan, don’t you?"


    "A backup plan singular? And again you underestimate me – I have three dozen such backup plans, our goals are far too important to leave in the hands of just one little girl, no matter how impressive her capabilities – let’s face it, when all is said and done you are one of my backup plans, my friend, and when all is said and done this young lady is in fact plan... Thurisaz, I believe, where you would be plan Ansuz," and that statement got a snort of laughter out of the good Captain. "Regardless, I do not feel a crisis of this magnitude should be left to chance, thus my decision to throw as many plans at it as possible and see what sticks, and either way this young lady both owes me bigtime and has the capacity to make of herself quite some thorn, which we shall endeavour to see finds its way into your ''dear'' father''s side at an opportune moment."


    The Captain gave a single slightly pitying glance to the hideously injured girl who hung, motionless and barely alive, in the void of a place outside of space and time, and then nodded.


    "I suppose," he said, "We may as well get this done."


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    <h4>The Lads from Loch Allen - a Highland Scots urban fantasy.


    Chapter the First: On a Yesterday that Never Was.


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    God, he''s breathing,'' the sensation of laying in a bed surrounded by the smell of blood and oil and warm electronics and a calm collected knowledgeable-sounding Australian man talking about something calling itself an endocrine system with a firm addenda of ‘And as it happens ‘he’ is, in fact, ‘she’,’ and finally an almost profoundly Scottish woman talking about someone called Angus with whom she was evidently quite irate, but as reality reasserted itself it was all drowned out by a quickly-growing rumble-roar almost but not quite like a big jet engine that grew and grew and seemed to pull everything into a semblance of focus as it became all but overwhelming, like a jetliner was right on top of her, then quickly went over her and began to fade a little - the jetliner revved its engines up then suddenly cut them out somewhere in the middle distance, leaving the only part remaining the earthy smokey smell and the woman’s voice as she continued her one-sided conversation with a huff, her speech becoming less and less coherent as consciousness returned until, finally, it resolved itself into an oddly familiar but totally indecipherable foreign language and Alice Liddell began trying to open her eyes.


    inside her eyes, the crystal-clear vision where she’d always been short-sighted and could clearly remember being blinded by something smashing her glasses into her face did not, and she could have sworn her right hand had been gone and that forearm blown to battered ribbons and her legs and left arm just proper off when she passed out – the ceiling was all very rustic and age-stained, great black timber beams looking like someone had taken an entire log and peeled the bark off several generations ago supporting rough-hewn planks, the sort taken out of a log with hand tools, complete with bits and pieces of ancient bark here and there, and there was a faint but perceptible pall of smoke in the air.


    not the hands Alice had spent most of her life seeing upon the ends of her arms.


    white as snow – framing a face Alice couldn’t for the life of her even start to put an age to, she could’ve been anywhere from fourteen to forty, with her eyepatch giving her a strangely piratical air. She had sharply-formed features, olive skin with several visible facial scars, her sole eye was a rather unsettling yellowy-brown, and she was clad all in black – a black turtleneck pullover made of very thick and rough yarn, a long black skirt, and a black militaryesque duty belt of the general sort you’d more expect to see on a policeman, complete with a holstered pistol and a huge belt knife.


    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    not there any more and I''m sure they didn''t, these aren''t my hands, and," and Alice held up her hands for careful examination, "And I know I really needed those glasses… what’s an Inverallen, what do you mean where I’ll be staying,"


    through the bloody looking-glass this time."


    that," he told her. "CRVGS connectors use induction to bridge the gap, the whole thing is electrically insulated at both sides - you can just wash it the exact same way you would a flesh-and-blood hand. These were designed for the military, they''ll work just fine in places like underwater or in a hard vacuum or covered in mud, you just need to poke the muck out and away she''ll go... There we go, everything looking good, you''ve got a slightly elevated heart rate but that''s nothing unexpected given the number and scale of surprises you''ve recently had and your implants are all functioning exactly as expected," and with that he disconnected the cable from his hologram hockey puck thing, paused, and added, "Just pull it, it''ll release automatically."


    another idea that''s going to take a while to get used to," Alice muttered.


    Next up: Alice''s arrival at the Macbane home goes smoother than she fears, less smoothly than she''d prefer.


    ,pass us a quid, keep reading, and get access to each new post twoSaturdays early?


    Cheers,


    Cal.