'Where are the bodies?' he asked.

'What's her name?' the medic was asking the other girl.

'Janine.'

There were no bodies. Not of people. There were dozens of Vore, almost heaped up in some places.

159.

'Probable compression,' the medic was saying into his radio. 'Request ambulance. Victim having convulsions.'

The girl's arms and legs were twitching.

'You got the one that did this?' the medic asked.

Sergeant Cartwright nodded, a dull sensation filling him.

'Good.'

'What are the creatures doing with the bodies?' Cartwright asked.

All flights to Europe had been grounded, but it was amazing what someone as resourceful as Trix could manage with 150 million in her bank account.

It was getting dark by the time they arrived in British airs.p.a.ce in a courier firm's plane, heading for a landing strip outside Bristol. Virtually the whole of the aircraft was given over to the hold, which was full of relief supplies. There was a small pa.s.senger compartment at the front, right by the c.o.c.kpit. Eight seats, but Trix and Fitz were apparently the only two people in any rush to get back to Europe and they had the plane to themselves.

They'd been virtually out of touch with the rest of the world during the flight, with only scattered pieces of news from the pilots who were monitoring the radio and getting updates from air-traffic control. There was a single ma.s.s of giant insects that had looked like a cloud formation about the size of the British Isles on the satellite pictures, before the satellites went offline. Radar still had them, down on the western seaboard of Africa, travelling at hundreds of miles an hour.

If it was a military attack it wasn't very well researched. Mali and Liberia weren't Trix's idea of high-value targets. She was ashamed to admit she'd never even heard of Guinea-Bissau. She searched her laptop's database for the natural resources the insects might be after. Guinea-Bissau's were rice, coconuts, peanuts, fish and timber. Sierra Leone had diamonds and bauxite, but its chief export was palm kernels.

'They're following the light,' Fitz told her, and he was right. Evening in she looked it up Mansoa on Guinea-Bissau's west coast, night all points east.

'So next, they'll hop the Atlantic.' She had no idea where they'd make landfall. It looked like Brazil, but she made a mental note to ask the pilot about wind direction.

'We should be safe, then.'

'For a while.' It all seemed so abstract from 35,000 feet.

'What's the plan?' Fitz asked.

'We find the Doctor.'

Fitz didn't look happy.

'Come on,' Trix said. 'I'm hoping he's already at the centre of things. We'll probably arrive in time to see him saving the day without us, like he does 160 every time.'

'Not every time,' Fitz said darkly.

Trix shifted in her seat. 'He didn't save Sam, I know, but '

'Or Miranda.'

'You've known him longer than anyone.'

'I've known him longer than he knows himself.'

'Fitz, he'll sort this out. He won't have left,' Trix told him.

She glanced down at the laptop, which was showing the swarm over the Atlantic on course for the Caribbean, unstoppable and unstopped.

'He can't can't have. . . ' have. . . '

As night fell the second moon became visible again. Twenty-four hours after its first appearance tidal waves and abnormally high tides were the least of Earth's problems.

Publicly, the United Kingdom authorities were putting the number of British dead at seventy thousand, but they suspected the total would be between three and four times that. With whole families wiped out, and few corpses, it was hard to come to any meaningful estimate. The government was still functioning, every minister was accounted for.

There was chaos across Europe and North Africa. Millions dead from all walks of life, so nothing at all was working as it should. For the moment the survivors were all too shocked to be angry or scared. Almost everyone was staying in their homes. This wouldn't last. Economies had ground to a halt, and it wouldn't be long before people started to run out of food and ventured out.

As for the monsters, the swarm had long departed but small groups had remained behind. The army were containing them, keeping them away from the population. Attack one, though, and every Vore in the area came crashing down on the person who'd fired the shot. It was a good deterrent.

It was unclear what the monsters' aims were. So far, observatories had seen no Vore on the surface of the new moon, so there wasn't even a proven link between it and the monsters. Jodrell Bank wasn't picking up any radio activity from the planet. The creatures did not have any obvious high technology, not even tools or weapons, and certainly no vehicles or s.p.a.cecraft. There had been no attempt at communication, let alone any demands.

At the end of the first day, all anyone could do was wait and see.

The courier plane was cleared for landing. Fitz had guessed this already from the manoeuvrings, but the captain had just buzzed the news over the intercom to confirm it.

'For once, we won't be held in a stack,' Trix told him.

161.

Fitz glanced out of the window. Fields and towns, strings of lights along roads. Nothing like the maps ever looked. He turned back to Trix, who was packing her laptop away.

A flash of silver in the window opposite.

Fitz tried to get a better look, but whatever it was had gone. It must have been a trick of the light.

'What is it?' Trix asked.

The plane was buffeted a little and Fitz and Trix exchanged nervous, amused glances. Fitz had flown enough to know that this usually happened around landing. He tried to comfort himself with the thought it was probably the undercarriage deploying, or something to do with layers of air.

The plane banked unexpectedly.

Trix seemed unsure whether to unbuckle or sit tight. Fitz put his hand on her leg.

'Stay seated,' he warned.

She nodded. There was a scratching from the rear of the plane. It was impossible to tell whether it was coming from the inside or the outside.

Fitz looked out of the window. 'We're still pretty high up,' he said. How could a layman judge alt.i.tude? None of the clues a human being used to judge size and distance applied when you looked out of a plane's window.

The horizon was in a different place, there was nothing to scale the ground against. They were a lot lower than they had been, but the houses seemed a long way away. No doubt the thick plastic windows were distorting things too.

The plane rocked like a car that had just hit the kerb.

Fitz turned to Trix and saw she was wide-eyed, staring out of his window.

He turned back.

For the merest moment he saw a pair of insect eyes and a set of mandibles, then the face at the window was gone.

They'd both seen it.

Now a puttering sound: thump, thump, thump from just outside.

'They're all in Africa,' Trix said.

'No they aren't.'

Fitz moved to unbuckle his belt.

'We have to sit tight,' Trix said.

'I just told you that,' Fitz reminded her. He strained to see out of the window.

'Oh. . . '

'What is it?'

The wing was heavy with insects, each his height, hanging on with what was clearly quite some effort. It was like an Indian train, pa.s.sengers on the roof and hanging from anything they could grab on to.

162.

That wasn't all of it, though. The insects were taking turns to leap off the front of the wing, like they were performing a parachute jump. As they did, they were sucked into the engines and there was a thump. Fitz described the process to Trix, who didn't believe him, and moved him out of the way to get a look for herself.

'It's deliberate,' Trix said. 'They're killing themselves.'

'It's going to bring us down,' Fitz replied. Of course it was. He'd read about birds and bits of stone being sucked into the jets, crippling some important piece of the engine. 'Do you think the captain knows?'

The plane was tipping one way, then the other. They quickly got back into their own seats.

'I guess he does.'

'Can you fly the plane?' Fitz asked.

'If I have to. It takes years to qualify to pilot one of these. We've got two guys in the c.o.c.kpit who've been trained to deal with all sorts of emergencies.

There's nothing we can do that they're not already doing. If it crashes, we get out as soon as possible and get clear, OK?'

'Yeah, of course.'

The plane was now bobbing around like a boat on a stormy sea.

'So why isn't the swarm in Brazil, like we thought?' Fitz asked.

'It is. Weather radar won't pick up individuals. It looks like the monsters can work at night too.'

'So neither of the only two things we knew about them are true?'

The intercom pinged, and the captain told them: 'a.s.sume crash positions, brace for impact.'

They were way ahead of him.

The plane was only a hundred feet or so up now. The captain had found an area clear of buildings. Fitz couldn't tell if this was the airfield or not. The plane was steady now, but the engines were straining and spluttering. The moment before they landed the monsters leapt off the wings, spiralling up and leaving the plane to its fate and destabilising it one last time.

There was a roar of air.

Fitz twisted his head to see. A window had broken.

A judder as the plane hit the ground. Normal, but Fitz could already feel the undercarriage giving way. He realised he had taken Trix's hand in his own.

It took a couple of seconds for the landing gear to wrench away. They heard it clattering off down the runway as the belly of the plane hit the tarmac, forcing the air out of their lungs.

The plane swerved, tried and failed to right itself, then scratched its way across the ground, which was hard. The wings were swinging up and down.

Out of his window, Fitz saw the wing tip touch the ground and throw up 163 sparks. This was a runway, Fitz realised, as they ploughed through a cl.u.s.ter of landing lights and on to soft gra.s.s.

The plane slid to a rest.

Fitz was very aware of how heavy his brain was and how much it had sloshed around in his skull.

'Up,' Trix said, already unbuckling her belt.

'Yeah.' He fumbled for his belt. 'Any landing you can walk away from. . . '

'We've not walked away from it, not yet.' She was standing, heading for the door.

'We should check for monsters,' Fitz said, unsteadily.

'No. We should get out of the big metal thing full of sparks and aviation fuel.'

'You're right,' he said groggily.

Trix was pulling handles to open the door and deploy the emergency slide.

'Ladies first,' Fitz told her.

It was two hundred feet of running before Trix looked back and realised Fitz wasn't with her.

They'd come down the emergency slide and started to run. The captain and co-pilot had been right behind them. They'd overtaken Fitz and come alongside Trix. The air had been humming the whole time, and she'd thought it was the blood rushing into her ears after the crash. It was only when she looked up that she saw squadrons of monsters pa.s.sing overhead.