The Islanders

Meequa / Tremm BEARER OF MESSAGES / FAST WANDERER THE DRONE

The drones came in at nightfall. If she had completed her day’s tasks at the observatory, Lorna Mennerlin would shut down her terminal then scramble down the uneven cliff steps to the beach. From there she could watch the aircraft returning as they flew in low above the sea.

When the sea was calm, the brightly coloured LEDs in the belly of each of the drones mirrored back from the surface of the waves. On some evenings the machines flew over one by one, sometimes separated by several minutes, but most evenings they arrived in such numbers that they swarmed towards the island in a glittering formation. As they passed over the beach and responded to the radar sensing of the rocky cliffs rising beyond, they would adjust their height in unison. In their wake was a breathy susurration from their silenced vanes, a feeling of secretive distances already crossed, covert explorations, unstated winds.

As a precaution against the security staff coming across her and challenging her for being on the beach at that time, Lorna always took the tabulator down to the beach with her, but this evening, as on most evenings, she did not switch it on.

The tabulator hung on its strap against her side. She could feel it vibrating gently in stand-by mode as it responded to the locating pulse of each of the incoming machines, separately identified. In this mode the tabulator’s detection of the drones was numerical: so many of them recognized and logged, so many accounted for. She would return to evaluating the more complex quantified results the next morning, after they had been downloaded at the base and sent along the landline to the MCI’s computers.

In the chartroom the staff would view the coverage of the ocean, then become absorbed in the task of tracing each drone back to its launch point, using the satellite returns to analyse its route. Working with the other cartographers, Lorna then laboriously transferred the images to the master data store. But even with a full complement of staff they were endlessly running behind — they were still trying to untangle the reports from more than two years before. Tonight’s mapping data would probably not be properly evaluated for another two years or more. Gradually, the backlog was increasing.

Lorna should have left the MCI and Meequa Island several months earlier, at the end of her contract, but she felt trapped by Tomak’s sudden disappearance. How could she leave until she knew what had become of him? Patta, her roommate, obviously thought it was time for her to move on, but that was for Lorna irrational and impossible. Tomak had left her with so many things unsaid, so many personal decisions unmade.

She still ached with love for him. Why had he left her that way? It was impossible to re-adjust until she found out what had happened.

She stared across the sea, under the scattering of drone lights, at the dark offshore island where Tomak had been posted. This was the real reason she came down to the beach every evening whenever she could, but it was becoming a habit. No longer a hope. Silence was the cruellest burden.

The other island had a name: Tremm, named after the mythological companion of Meequa, who was the bearer of messages. Tremm was Meequa’s outrider, the guard, the protector, the fast wanderer who passes. But the island which carried his name was dark and low against the twilit horizon, stolid and heavy-looking, as much unlike a fast-moving wanderer as it was possible to imagine. Tremm was directly opposite the cove, an hour or more by boat from Meequa, across the shallow strait, and whenever the drones swarmed in she would see the paths of their LEDs veering to one side or the other of the island.

Tremm had been charted years before, but ironically it was one whose details were the least known because of the secrecy that surrounded it. It was one of several closed islands in the vicinity of Meequa, taken over by the military many decades before. The drones were programed to avoid it. No one could go near it without permission. Anyone who did go there had to sign security pledges, and never spoke about the use the island was put to. Most rarely admitted they had even been on the place. Officially it had ceased to exist. Even to look at it was, in theory, to break military law, although the civilian cartographers at the MCI, and the ordinary people who lived in the town, could and did use this beach.

On the map of the Midway Sea Tremm did not exist. No island was drawn in its place. It was shown as an area of the sea, a dishonestly blank zone south of Meequa. Someone had fancifully added oceanic depths, and blue contour lines. The legend said in small blue letters: DANGER

Gradually, the chart of the Dream Archipelago was taking shape, but because the drones were self-guided on reactive principles (programmed to avoid each other and solid objects, rather than seek out certain targets) most of their data was produced along randomized paths and therefore much of it overlapped. The returns inevitably revealed unidentifiable stretches of ocean.

Digital images of land, or better still of coastline, were comparatively rare, a fact which often surprised visitors to the mapping institute. To most people, the sea seemed crowded with so many islands that it was unbelievable that it would be difficult to chart the areas of land. However, less than five per cent of the Midway Sea was solid land, the rest being ocean, lagoons, rocky shallows, beaches, and so on. This percentage was a working assumption. The actual figure would not be known until the mapping was complete. Satellite images, invariably unreliable because of the temporal distortion zones, had provided the working estimate, but drawing detailed, reliable maps was a matter of urgency.

At least the MCI was well funded. People who ran wars needed maps.

The terrain of many of the islands, viewed from above, was unbroken forest, or unexceptional farmland with few distinguishing features. Many islands were desert. Where there were rivers they were usually short or narrow, or both, or overhung with foliage. Lakes were few. Mountain ranges were also a problem for a technical reason: the drones had a maximum working altitude, and when they approached that ceiling they were programmed to veer off. Coastlines were always more satisfactory to work with: the ports, peninsulas, cliffs, fort installations and river estuaries could usually be identified and located to particular known islands or even existing maps made by the locals.

The drones were programmed to detect and map roads, towns, railway lines, airfields, factories, homes, sources of pollution, and many more man-made objects. Mostly they found traces of sea.

Progress was therefore infinitesimally slow. When she began working in the Meequa Cartographic Institute as a young graduate, Lorna had imagined they would be mapping the whole shape and extent of the Dream Archipelago. As she quickly discovered, this gigantic task was still barely started, buried under an ever-growing mound of data. The only reliable trace they had was the individual path taken by each drone on each trip, and although this could be tracked against satellite data and computer records the amount of overlap and sheer number of indistinguishable images was overwhelming them.

More recently, as her youthful idealism was replaced by experience, she had found herself following the example of her colleagues. She started to concentrate on a single group of islands, ignoring all other data or passing it to colleagues.

Her chosen speciality was the cluster of cays, skerries and small islands in the southern seas close to Paneron, known informally as the Swirl, which comprised more than seven hundred different named places. Her first task had been to tabulate the names, itself a mammoth task. Many names were duplicated, many islands were named in different ways, and throughout the Archipelago, the Swirl being no different, local patois would use a locally recognized name while the inhabitants of other islands, some of them adjacent, knew the island by a different name. At least half of the known islands in the Swirl had no discernible name at all, yet her database had already passed five thousand separate names for the islands.

No one at the MCI had been to Paneron or the Swirl, no one at the MCI even knew anyone else who had been there. There were no formerly existing aerial photographs or drawings of the Swirl, and of course no charts were available. The satellite images, randomly distorted as always, suggested a spiral of islands, those towards the centre made to look larger than they probably were, those on the outer fringes smaller, and the rest warped in proportions whose extent could not be calculated.

A hundred books described the Swirl, but some of the accounts were only vague or lyrical, while most of the rest were written in the seductive rhythms of Archipelagian literature. A collection of seafarers’ yarns, told in archaic marine argot, happened to have become one of Lorna’s most reliable guides. Sailors were used to navigating, measuring, keeping logs, for all their fanciful stories of monsters and mighty tempests. Names were the only certainties — the culture of the islands was oral and textual, not visual.

Occasionally, one of the drones passed over an area of tiny islands and crags, and every now and again Lorna could make a matching identification and fit one more piece into her slowly shaping jigsaw.

Out of the known seven hundred she had so far charted three Swirl islands.

Such was the task. She knew that even if she lived to be an old lady, and worked in the MCI until the end of her life, no more than a quarter of the islands of the Archipelago would by then have been mapped. Maybe all of the Swirl would have been completed, perhaps many of the large islands elsewhere. But not all. Even by then.

She and the other cartographers had only charted a little over two thousand accredited islands. Another five thousand maps were in preparation. Beyond these were at least ten or twenty thousand more islands of unknown size, importance or position. The entirety of the task was still dauntingly unimaginable.

As the last of the loose formations of drones passed quietly overhead, Lorna walked across the shingly beach to a spur of smooth rock. The pebbles crunched and ground beneath her feet. She balanced the case of the tabulator against the outcrop, then leaned back on the sloping surface that faced the sea. She let her hands swing at her side.

Tomak had been away, presumably still on Tremm, for nearly two years. Never once in those months had she received any communication from him.

He warned her before he left.

‘They mute the islands they use,’ he said. ‘Tremm is shrouded.’

‘But there must be a way to call.’

‘It’s enclosed in a communications shroud. No sounds or transmissions enter or leave. No one without authority is allowed on, no one is allowed to leave.’

‘Then why should you go there?’

‘You know I can’t tell you.’

‘Then please don’t go.’

She had implored him throughout their last three weeks together, but one evening, after they had stood together on the beach to watch the drones flying in, he had been taken in a motor-lighter to a small ship waiting offshore. Before that final evening they spent a short holiday together, a tearful and frustrating experience for Lorna, but Tomak said only that he was unable to resist the force of military law. He promised that he would return as soon as he could, but so far he had not.

As a civilian she was abruptly excluded from his life. Not long after he departed, feeling betrayed by him, feeling abandoned, deep in loneliness, she took a kind of unintended revenge on him. Her physical affair with one of the graphics assistants had not lasted for long, and afterwards she felt a sense of crushing guilt and abhorrence at her own selfishness. Bradd Iskilip, the man in question, was still working in the institute, but whatever there had been between them was emphatically over. It already felt like a long time ago to her, although not nearly as long ago as Tomak’s departure. More than anything she wanted Tomak to return so that she could quietly, silently, close the error for good.

As the darkness of the sky deepened, she took her binoculars from their case and held them to her eyes. She focused on the dark jagged bulk of Tremm, knowing that if one of the patrols happened to come along the beach and spot her she would be in serious trouble. Her status at the mapping centre would be small protection.

At first she could make out little of the island in the dark, its steep mountainous sides almost at one with the sky. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she could discern the central mountains. Five of the highest peaks were visible from this shore.

Her practised cartographer’s eye made an inward plan: the five peaks that could be seen, the three that were out of sight beyond those, the plain on the north side facing her, the rolling terrain on the far side, somewhere a town on the coast. The contours and features taunted her, because she would never be able to check them or plot them. DANGER, it said where Tremm stood.

The first of the fireflies glowed so quickly she almost missed it. She held the glasses steady, hoping for another. After a few minutes she saw a second one, then almost immediately a third. She reduced the focal length minutely, widening the field.

Bursts of light were appearing on the dark slopes of the distant island, a sudden silent flaring, like miniature explosions too distant to be heard. So far away from her, with no hint of the size. She began counting them, as she often did — she had spent so long quantifying data, so to her it was an automatic reflex.

Double figures in the first minute, then a pause. Twenty-five more followed swiftly, followed by another pause so long she thought the display had ended. Then a final outburst of flaring lights, always white and intense, now clustered together, almost a stream of lights, but there was no discernible pattern.

When she lowered the binoculars, she discovered someone was standing a short distance away from her. It was a man, his shape just visible against the white curve of the waters’s edge. She had not heard him walking across the shingle.

Swiftly, she moved the hand holding the binoculars, trying to slip them down out of sight. Just in case he had not noticed them, although of course he had.

‘May I look too?’

‘You know it’s illegal,’ she said. She recognized his voice, of course. Relief, irritation, both coursed briefly through her.

‘So do you.’

‘I was monitoring the drones.’ She touched the side of the tabulator.

‘Oh yes, of course.’ He stepped away from her, lowering his head, staring down at the surface of the beach. ‘You would have to say that. I know why you’re really here.’

‘Leave me alone, Bradd,’ she said.

‘As you wish. Do you know what causes the flares?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘I see you most evenings, looking across.’

‘Then you must be looking too.’ He was stepping to and fro in an agitated way, but somehow he was managing not to make any sound on the shingle. ‘They’re something to do with the military. Or the drones.’

‘Same thing.’

‘The drones are ours.’

‘We use the data from them. That’s not the same as controlling them. If you or anyone else at the Institute had the freedom to decide about using them, would you make them steer at random? Why do they avoid the places we want to see rather than fly over them? You know who finances them.’

She wanted to get away from him, but he had contrived to stand between her and the shortest way back to the steps. She eased the tabulator strap over her shoulder, then walked down across the shingle, going around him. It was getting too dark now to make out details, only shapes, but she knew where he was and she also knew how he would be looking at her.

Her feet crunched on the shingle again, a curiously hollow sound, as if there were just a shallow layer of pebbles above a cavern. She heard Bradd behind her.

As she started to climb back towards the top of the cliff, she took one last look out to sea, towards Tremm. Without using the binoculars it was impossible to be certain, but she felt sure the flares were continuing. She paused, looked back down. Bradd must still be there but it was too dark to see.

She raised the binoculars to her eyes but now Tremm was once again a dark shape. That familiar blankness, unrevealing of anything except the one quality that could not be hidden: its real presence, there across the strait.

At the top of the steps lay the unkept garden that surrounded the Institute, and in the dark the breeze from the sea was more of a presence. It mingled with the scents of the night-fragranced flowers that grew wildly everywhere, slowly cooling as the short night began. Beyond the main bulk of the building, in the valley below that opened out into Meequa Port, the lights of the town were visible, a ribbon of electrical dazzle that followed the course of the river.

Lorna paused, taking a breather after the climb up the cliff, thinking that Bradd would soon catch her up.

The windows of the institute building were lit from within, but every pane of glass was curtained so that it was impossible to see inside. Lorna knew that at this time some of the cartographers would still be bent over their drawing tablets and terminals, but most would have stopped work for the night. Some of them would have stayed behind to use the bar, but a lot of the staff simply went home at the end of the day. Lorna and her friend Patta were unusual in renting one of the institute’s small service flats inside the main building.

Beyond the Institute, the town, the inland heights of Meequa’s range of hills. Sometimes, people who worked in the Institute went on hill-walks up there in the heights, but because of the friable nature of the rocks the hills were not safe for climbing or exploring. Lorna herself had never been far inland from the coast. She preferred to leave the dark peaks a private mystery in the background of her life, an unexplored enigma.

The hills held other more tangible riddles too: Meequa was an important part of the network of military installations and bases found all over this sector of the Archipelago. Large areas of the hill country were forbidden to the public, even to members of the MCI staff, who were nominal collaborators in the drone project. Somewhere beyond the first range of peaks behind the town was the base to which the drones returned, where they landed, somewhere dark, unlit, controlled by computer robots, collecting and storing data, information that was more than just the mapped details that were passed on to the institute: military intelligence, mining data, probable oil reserves, weapons caches, sources of energy. None of that disagreeable practicality was any part of Lorna’s own enigma. She sensed a deeper, more personal absence because of her loss of Tomak.

Tomak’s disappearance was probably explained by the hidden interior of this island, rather than by the uncharted highlands of the other. But Meequa was for her an island like a thousand others in the Archipelago, harbouring a seashore mentality, a littoral culture, turning its back on the engine of military intention and strategy that powered the island economies from inland, looking instead outwards to the unmapped seas, carelessly idle in the warmth, languorous under the sun, dreaming in the days.

The drones went out again before dawn, whispering above the roofs of the town, heading out across the sea. By the time Lorna was awake they had all disappeared, but another swarm of drones sent out earlier would be returning in the evening. The drone journeys were long: the solar-powered batteries could keep the flimsy craft flying for days or weeks. Many never returned. Some were shot down by troops: the enemy, of course, but even friendly gunners were known to use the drones for target practice if they strayed too near a base or a fort. Others crashed when the software failed and they collided with each other or with something on the ground, while more ran out of energy when they strayed too far south or north, and became trapped in a night that was too long for their batteries to be revived by the coming of sunrise.

But there were others, and these were the ones that Lorna loved to dream about. People from all over the Archipelago told stories of drones that became trapped in their own software. They somehow wandered into an area of terrain, a range of hills, a stack of rocks, a pattern of islands that set up radar avoidance patterns in the directional controls, but also closed a loop from which the drone could never escape.

Lorna had heard of more than thirty islands which had acquired attendant drones, constantly touring or circling the mountain heights, or zooming along the seashore, or heading bravely out to sea only to be returned by the detected barrier of a neighbouring island. One pair of islands in the Aubrac Chain had fortuitously created a virtual figure-of-eight, around which the captured drone constantly flew, never escaping, day after day, night after night.

Sometimes Lorna imagined that if the mapping enterprise went on long enough, every island would eventually have its own drone, permanently circling with its flow of silent, silvered wings.

When she arrived in the office that morning she downloaded a fresh set of drone images for the general area of the Swirl — the date identifying them was nearly two and a half years earlier.

She began as usual with the preliminary scanning, which filtered out and discarded approximately ninety-five per cent of everything: these were the unworkable, unusable images of the surface of the open sea, or of unidentifiable patches of land, or were blurred by motion or simply out of focus.

The secondary level of search on the remainder involved the fragments that might be identifiable in some way, and therefore able to be matched with previously stored images: these were usually glimpses of shallower seas, lengths of reef, concentrations of fish, large isolated rocks, or on land surfaces they might be clear images of mountains, or part of a river, or dwellings, or even short stretches of coastline. There were scanning and matching programs which could handle these, so she transferred the images to the computer and left it to sort out what it could. Occasionally, once every few weeks, one of the computers would report a matching image, causing amused relief and ironic cheers from the staff.

The material that was left after all this filtering was for her to search manually. These were the coherent images, the ones that promised to be identifiable. This was the real work for her, where all her time went. Using complex imaging software on her terminal she tried to match and compare the main images.

This morning the most promising result had been produced by a series of fifteen contiguous drone shots. These readily connected into an unbroken stretch of rocky shoreline, for which the computer reported more than a hundred and fifty possible matches with existing downloads. Lorna had to look at each of these herself, trying to match them against the new image. In this particular case, the problem was that many of the rocks appeared to be volcanic in source, which might mean that they had been ejected comparatively recently and therefore would not match with anything. The software made corrections for height, angle and colour variations, but even so the final decision was almost always hers, or one of the other cartographers’.

Then again, the shore might be part of one of the hundreds of Swirl islands she had not so far identified. Even beyond that, it was not unknown for the drone search pattern to be identified or labelled in error. Many hours of wasted search time were regularly lost on searches for the wrong island in the wrong part of the ocean.

The day passed with normal absorption into this routine work: she took a long break at midday and went for a walk with Patta, and towards the end of the afternoon put away the search work and caught up with some correspondence. Various universities were funding the Institute’s cartographic project, and there was a constant traffic of information to and from research departments in every part of the world. All the cartographers in Lorna’s section had to take on some of this daily work.

She was about to close down her desk for the day when her terminal quietly emitted an incoming-data warning and a large file began to arrive.

It was a detailed graphic, loading slowly. The time estimate was two minutes for completion. Lorna’s first reaction was to leave it and examine it properly the next day. It was early evening and she was planning to walk down to the beach as she so often did, to watch the returning drones. As she looked at the screen, though, she suddenly realized what the graphic consisted of, or at least what the title at the top claimed it to be.

It was a highly detailed map of the island of Tremm. It was topographically exact with 3-D representations of the physical features, all towns and settlements shown, as well as roads and unidentified ‘installations’, which Lorna realized at once were probably the military bases. There was even meticulous nautical representation, showing all the offshore sea depths, position of reefs, navigable channels, and so on.

Although she had never seen any depiction of Tremm before, the general appearance of the map was familiar, using the same cartographic conventions they used on all their other work. One unusual marking though, which she noticed at once in her first look at the map, was the presence of many tiny dots, marked in black with a surrounding white emphasis. The map had a legend, which was of course so familiar to her she barely glanced at it. But the one for Tremm indexed the dots with the letter ‘Y’. No other explanation was offered.

The illegal map glared out at her from her terminal, visible to anyone else who might be in the office. Trying to act as normally as possible, Lorna first saved the map to an encrypted section of her personal memory card, then printed a hard copy. As soon as this was complete, she folded it quickly and slipped both it and the memory card into her bag.

She gathered her tabulator and the case holding her binoculars, and headed out of the office, towards the path that led down to the beach.

The first drones were already approaching from the south. Halfway down the cliff steps, Lorna saw the cluster of gleaming LEDs swarming in across the darkening sea. She paused to look, as always fascinated by the weird beauty of the erratic formations, the dodging and weaving amongst each other, the kaleidoscope of lights, the reflections from the sea.

She was disconcerted and a little frightened by the unexpected appearance of the Tremm map on her terminal. She could have no legitimate excuse for receiving or keeping it: the existence of the forbidden zones was known to everyone on the staff, so she would be unable to pretend that she had not realized what it was. Even so, she wanted it: the map of Tremm was a direct link with Tomak, a possible way of finding out where he was, or perhaps even of tracing him somehow.

But it had subtly changed everything. Until the moment the map arrived, Tremm was an unsolvable enigma to her, a barrier. She could dream about the unknown Tremm, but with the physical details of the place in her possession that helpless fantasizing was now replaced by a sense that she should act.

She decided not to continue down to the beach, but returned up the steps to the top of the cliff. As she mounted the last short flight she saw Bradd Iskilip standing there, his large body silhouetted against the lights of the Institute. At that instant she realized who must have sent her the map.

‘Is that what you were looking for?’ he said.

‘How did you get hold of it? I thought — ’

‘All the closed zones are accessible if you really want them. It was easy to locate. I also know how you can get across to Tremm. Do you want to?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about that yet.’

‘Do you have leave coming up?’

Two of their colleagues were walking towards them across the untamed garden. Lorna glanced around in a guilty fashion.

‘We can’t talk about this here!’

‘Is your roommate in the apartment at the moment?’

‘Patta? No — she went out for dinner in the town.’

‘All right. This won’t take long.’

The first wave of incoming drones swept past low overhead, the breathy rush of air, the quiet whirring of the motors.

Bradd turned and walked ahead of her into the main building. Lorna realized he was leading her but of course that was just the way Bradd was. During those few regretted weeks with him last year he was always like that. He wanted to be assertive, decisive, controlling.

She allowed him to lead her to the door of her apartment, but then she went past him, pushed the key into the lock and turned to face him.

‘I don’t want you to come in, Bradd,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that would be right any more.’

‘So you think we should talk about a visit to Tremm out here in the passage?’

His voice was loud, unguarded. He intended that. They both looked from side to side along the corridor. It could hardly be more open to the risk of being overheard.

‘If you come in, tell me what you know, then please leave.’

He nodded, but it could have meant anything.

Lorna opened the door and they both went inside. She left the light off in the passage, and instead led him straight to her own room. Once they were inside she realized with a second inner thrill of guilt how normal it felt for him to be there with her. At the time of their affair, he had been a regular visitor to this room. Patta, for instance, clearly became used to him turning up at the apartment. Lorna did not want all that to start up again. She was certain about that. But even so Bradd had been much more than a one-night stand, and for a while at least, in that dark time when she realized Tomak was completely out of contact with her, she had believed she might even grow to love him. All that came back as an unwelcome reminder, just from him standing there, being in the room again. But it was over now, had been over for months. It was Tomak she still wanted, only Tomak.

‘You need to get across to Tremm,’ Bradd said. He had kicked the door closed behind him. ‘I know what’s on your mind and I don’t really care any more. You made all that clear last year.’

‘I’m sorry, Bradd. I never meant to hurt your feelings. We said everything then. It was just a mistake — ’

‘Well, it’s in the past, and I’ve moved on,’ he said. ‘I’m all for making a fresh start. I believe I can help you now. I’ve recently gained the use of a friend’s boat, a yacht. I’ve been learning how to sail it and I’ve already made several long trips along the coast here. I think, I know, that I could navigate across the strait to Tremm without any risk.’

‘You mean, without risk of a boating accident?’ Bradd nodded to confirm this. ‘But what about the security?’

‘Where I found the map I sent you — that file also has a lot of information about the way the island is patrolled. In theory it’s as tightly protected as the Seigniory Palace, but in reality security along the coast is lax. If we make the crossing at night, we wouldn’t run into anything.’

‘It’s far too dangerous!’

‘I don’t think so. How closely did you look at the chart of the coastal waters?’

‘Hardly at all. I only had the graphic on the screen for a few seconds. I couldn’t leave it there.’

‘The water is shallow, usually calm. The tidal surge is moderate. There are some rocks, but they’re all at the western end of the bay. The bay itself has a wide beach where I could simply run the boat ashore. The only danger would be if the weather was bad, but we wouldn’t even set out if that was the case.’

‘Why are you doing this, Bradd?’

‘All sorts of reasons.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, for one thing, I feel guilty about what happened last year. We both feel bad about it, but you were on the rebound. I took advantage of you. I want to make amends. I hated what you said at the time but I realize now what Tomak means to you. In some ways I regret nothing because I was genuinely attracted to you. What happened shouldn’t have happened.’

‘Bradd, I told you I was sorry.’

A shadow of a memory was passing overhead, though, breathing a quiet menace. She had heard this from him once before, a different context, not in this room, another. Then it had come with unstated threats — his obsession that she could not cope without him, his repeated claims that she needed him. He built her up and knocked her down, undermining her confidence in herself, in her job, in her belief in Tomak, sometimes even in her own sanity. It had terrified her then, helped make up her mind about him. She had refused to go near him for several weeks. But that was then. A safer distance had grown in the months that passed since.

She said quietly, ‘You said there were several reasons.’

‘There was all that. What happened between us, and trying to make amends. That’s the main reason. The only other one is more complex. It’s because we’re told we shouldn’t go to Tremm, that no one is allowed there. That feels like a challenge to me. We’re both cartographers, Lorna, we’ve been trained to believe that a map should be something of objective fact. If a place is there, if an island exists, then we should be free to chart it. The only reason Tremm is not on our maps is political. Some government somewhere has decided its national interest lies in putting Tremm under its domain, and suddenly the island ceases to exist. But it’s not our government and it’s not our war. It’s one of the countries in the north that must have made some kind of deal with the Seigniory. These things go on. Anyway, the result is ludicrous. We can see the island with our own eyes, every day, every night. Everyone who lives on Meequa knows Tremm is there, so do thousands of other people. So why can’t we put it on a map? To me that’s the challenge. I just want to go there, walk around on it for a while.’

‘And then you would come back here?’ Lorna said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What about me, if I went with you? Are you planning to leave me there?’

‘What do you want to do if I can get you across?’

‘I need to find out what’s happened to Tomak. I know that sounds desperate, but I haven’t heard from him since he left. Anything could have happened to him: illness, accident. Or maybe he was the victim of some kind of crime. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I assume he is, but all I can do is assume that. I’ve no other way of knowing. But until you sent me the map a few minutes ago it never occurred to me I could go to the island. I haven’t already worked out a plan, a list of things I must complete.’

‘Then why don’t we sail across one night, when the tide is right? We’ll land there, walk around for a bit. That’ll satisfy me, and it’ll give you a feel for the place. We needn’t stay long and if it’s as easy as I think we can return some other time.’

‘I don’t know,’ Lorna said. ‘I need time to think about it.’

She was standing with the tabulator and her binoculars still slung over her shoulder. She wanted to put them down, but an instinct warned her that Bradd would see that as some kind of relaxation of her guard. He was rushing her, seeming to want a decision immediately. What would be the point of sailing across to Tremm? How would that help her find Tomak?

‘I’m going to be in the bar for a while,’ Bradd said. ‘If you want to think things over, or know anything more, that’s where you’ll find me.’

He left then, and she followed him out. She waited until he had walked down the corridor and she could hear the swing doors close behind him, before she returned to her room. She closed the door firmly behind her, kicking it, just as Bradd had done. Only then did she ease the heavy tabulator and the binoculars from her shoulder.

She made herself a light meal in the kitchen, drank some tea. Patta would be home soon, so when she returned to her room Lorna made sure the door was closed and locked. Only then did she switch on her computer and put up the graphic map of Tremm. She regarded it at first with professional interest, noting the scale, the density of the contours, the level of mapping detail. But her eye kept being drawn by the undescribed installations. She knew that if Tomak was somewhere on the island, that must be where he was.

Poring over the details she noticed again the dots marked with a ‘Y’. There seemed to be no logical pattern to them: just a cluster of them here, more elsewhere, several more scattered across the face of one of the central mountains. There were dozens of them in all, perhaps as many as a hundred.

When she heard Patta opening and closing the outer door, Lorna quietly shut down the computer, made sure the encrypted data stick was safely concealed in the computer case, then went to find her roommate. She discovered Patta had been involved in an argument with her boyfriend and was crying quietly in her room. Lorna stayed to talk to her for a while.

Afterwards she went to the bar in search of Bradd. It was late, and she was expecting him to have left, but to her surprise he was still there. He was sitting by himself at a corner table, working on his laptop. As she went across to him he swung the screen to shut down the computer and waved to her to sit with him. The bar was about to close — only a handful of people remained, and they were in a group on the far side of the room. The shutter had already been lowered over the counter by the bar staff.

‘Have you decided?’ Bradd said.

‘Decided what?’

‘Do you want to sail across to Tremm one night? I thought you realized what I was suggesting.’

There was a clatter of glasses from the bar area, and one of the staff started music through the speaker system. After a few moments it was switched off again, and someone behind the bar laughed loudly. No one was interested in what Bradd and Lorna were doing.

‘I still don’t see what would be gained by just visiting the island,’ Lorna said. ‘If it’s night-time we wouldn’t see anything, we wouldn’t be able to travel inland and the chances are we’d be spotted and arrested.’

‘So that’s a no.’

‘It’s a maybe. But for now I’d like to find out if you know anything more than you’ve already told me. You said there were some files with the graphics.’

‘I’ll forward them to you.’

‘Is there anything in them that will help me locate Tomak?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘There are those unmarked installations on the map. What do you know about them?’

‘The same as you. You must have come to the same conclusion. They are the buildings used by the military. I ran a comparative scan. There’s an old map in the archives, more than a hundred years old, and at that time there was just the port and a few houses along the coast. Those huts are more or less the only new development since. I don’t see that they have any special interest, as buildings. People have to live and sleep somewhere. But living quarters aside, what the other buildings are being used for is a different matter. There’s something on the island they want to keep secret, so I imagine what goes on in those buildings is part of it.’

Lights in the room suddenly dimmed — the familiar signal from the bar staff that they wanted to close for the night.

Lorna said, ‘There’s something else about the map I don’t understand. Those dots marked with a “Y”.’

‘Well, I can tell you what they are because I looked them up. But I don’t think they’re going to help you find Tomak.’

‘Go on.’

‘Did you ever hear of the artist called Yo? The installation artist, who built underground cavities?’

‘Jordenn Yo. Of course! We studied her work at school. And there was a module on her work at university.’

‘She came from your part of the world, the area you’re trying to map. An island called Annadac, in the Swirl. You probably knew that? All right. She had to leave Annadac under something of a cloud. I’m not sure what happened there, but it was not before she had obtained a massive Lotterie-Collago grant. She used the money to take out a long lease on Tremm. She was working on the island for about five years. She later called it her apprenticeship period. She used the island’s mountains to practise tunnelling and caving techniques. She drilled many tunnels — different diameters, different shapes and depths. Some were simply drilled into the rock, but others penetrated the mountain from one side to the other. It was a huge operation. For a while she had more than a hundred people assisting her. Many of them went across to work for her from here, from Meequa.’

Lorna was feeling a sudden excitement. Art history had been a secondary or optional course for her, but she always considered Yo to be an inspirational figure as a woman who had built and continued her career in spite of endless antagonism and philistinism. There were many islands in different parts of the Archipelago where the intricate and sometimes terrifying tunnels drilled by Yo and her artisans were now recognized as major pieces of modern installation art.

She had achieved her work under a lifelong barrage of criticism and prejudice, sometimes also physical attack, with many of the more conservative islands passing laws that banned her from landing there. She had spent at least two years of her life in one prison or another. But anyone who saw her work today could not fail to be moved by the grandeur of her vision, the sheer scale of her achievement. Her memory was cherished for the great drilled mountains, the artificial valleys and passes, where tides and winds played the harmonics of the sea, the sky and the earth.

‘I had no idea,’ Lorna said. ‘Jordenn Yo, working on Tremm! That’s simply astonishing.’

‘Yo said that she did not want anything she left behind on Tremm to be considered as an example of her real work. She described Tremm as her schoolroom, a test laboratory. She was experimenting with techniques, discovering how rock strata had to be worked with, learning how to turn or reverse tunnels deep inside the mountains, or to tune the passages so that they reacted to the wind. She left Tremm while the lease was still in her name. As far as I know the tunnels are still more or less as she left them.’

Lorna said, ‘Where did you find this information? Have you known it all along?’

Bradd tapped the top of his computer. ‘I looked it up this evening while I was waiting for you. Tremm itself is never mentioned. It’s just like the maps. The censorship has been thorough. But Yo is documented in detail and although Tremm isn’t named it’s possible to work out her connection with the island. How many offshore islands does Meequa have, for instance? Only one, of course. That’s the sort of detail that often slips past censors.’

‘So did she ever return to Tremm after she was famous?’

‘There’s no record of it. But she kept the lease going until she died. After that the title to the island reverted to the Seigniory, and it was then taken over by the people who have it now.’

Suddenly, all the lights in the bar room went out, with just the bar area itself illuminated. The other group of customers had already dispersed. Lorna and Bradd made their way out.

In the corridor Bradd said, dawdling, ‘Well, then.’

‘Thanks for everything you’ve done, Bradd. See you tomorrow at work?’

‘Lorna —?’

‘What?’ But she knew what he wanted. ‘No, Bradd.’

‘No harm would come of it. Just tonight.’

‘No. It’s not what I want. Nor do you, if you think about it.’

She turned away from him and walked towards the part of the building where the living quarters were situated. Without looking back she waved a hand as she turned on to the staircase. She half expected he would be following her, but there was no sign of him when she reached her door. She went inside quickly.

As she made herself ready for bed she could hear Patta in the other bedroom, moving around, playing music. Lorna went to see her. Patta was feeling better, but she was angry about her boyfriend now, not tearful over him. They brewed some tea and sat together companionably. After that Lorna went back and they closed the doors that lay between their rooms. It was silent in her bedroom, and soon Lorna was asleep.

She awoke suddenly, with a dread feeling that she was no longer alone. The air had moved, and something under the floorboards had creaked, a noise she recognized from whenever she moved in that part of the room.

There was a dim, residual light showing from beyond the curtained window, and Lorna saw the dark silhouette of a man standing there close to her bed. In terror she sucked in her breath, tried to make a noise, but she felt paralysed by fear. Her instinct was to sit up, but she always slept naked, so instead she threw an arm across her head, pulling up the covers from the bed, trying to hide everything of herself.

‘Lorna?’

It was Bradd — she knew instantly it was Bradd.

She managed to speak. ‘No, go away!’

‘Lorna, it’s me. Tomak. I still have a key. I didn’t want to frighten you.’

‘Tomak! No!’ She disbelieved him. But the voice was not Bradd’s. She knew it was Tomak, but the way he had come silently in the dark was still terrifying her. She could not throw that off. And for a few seconds everything was unreal. She was still half in the dream she had been in before she awoke, she was unable to move, and her breath was rasping.

She groped towards the bedside lamp, got it on. In the sudden glare of light she saw it was Tomak, or looked like him. He had thrown his arms up to cover his face.

‘No! Don’t put on the light!’ His voice was urgent with fright.

He moved quickly, bending forward with one arm still clamped over his face, the other hand fumbling for the switch. For a few moments he was within touching distance of her, but something made her shrink away from him. His hand found the lamp and he switched it off almost as swiftly as she had turned it on.

Her eyes were dazzled by the after-images from the glare.

‘Lorna — you mustn’t see me.’

‘Tomak, it really is you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then hold me! Come here! Let me see you. Put the light on again.’ A sense of relief was sweeping over her, and she moved quickly so that she was sitting up. She felt one of her pillows slide away to the floor. ‘I’ve missed you so much! Why haven’t you —?’

‘Lorna, you have to trust me. I can only stay for a few minutes and I don’t want you to look at me. There was an accident last year. I was all right, not badly injured.’

‘What sort of accident? Are you hurt now? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

‘The whole place is — we aren’t allowed to communicate off the island. I shouldn’t even be here now. If they catch me I’m in deep trouble. I can’t tell you what happened in the accident but I want you to know I’m over it. I’m all right now. I was close to an explosion, didn’t get away in time, and there was a fire. It’s healed up at last.’

‘This is terrible! Are you burned? Tomak . . . come and sit here with me!’

‘I can’t. But I wanted to tell you this myself. I had to come to see you. I know a lot of what’s been going on. On Tremm we have access to almost everything. I know what happened last year, when you were involved with that other guy, the one who works here. I understand all that. It doesn’t matter. You must be free to do what you want.’

‘Of course it matters! Where have you been and why haven’t you at least written to me?’

‘I can’t tell you. We communicate as passive receptors — you know what that means. We aren’t allowed to send. None of that is important, though.’ His voice was coming out of the dark, so familiar, but sounding sonorous, stilted, alien to her. This was Tomak, whom she had loved so long? As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could again make out his shape. He was still standing a short distance from the bed. There was never much light from outside at night, but there was enough to reveal the shape of him against the thinly curtained window. ‘I know you think I’ve run out on you,’ he added. ‘There was nothing I could do, there is nothing I can do about that. But I also know you’re planning to visit Tremm, and I’ve come to say you must not go there. Not under any circumstances. If you’ve made plans, don’t carry them out. It’s a dangerous place.’

‘Please, Tomak. Just sit with me for a while. I want to hold you.’

‘No.’ They were both silent for a moment, Lorna shocked by the absolute refusal. Then he said, ‘I shouldn’t even be here now.’

‘What’s going on over there? On the island? What is it that has taken you away from me?’

‘The danger. The importance of what’s being built there.’

‘Can’t you even tell me what it is?’

‘Officially, it’s a communications network. That’s all I can say.’

‘Is it something to do with the tunnels?’

‘What makes you think that?’ Tomak’s tone of voice had changed, confirming something.

‘Or the drones. You used to talk about the drones, how useful they are, the potential they have. You always used to call them passive communications devices, passive receptors.’

‘I can’t say anything. I’ve got to go.’

‘Please don’t!’ She started to get off the bed, to stand against him, but he seemed to sense what she was doing and moved quickly in the dark. She felt his hands on her shoulders, pushing her down. ‘Couldn’t you just put your arms around me?’

‘Lorna, I needed to say this personally, because I want you to believe me. It’s impossible to break it to you gently, but I won’t be coming back. It’s over. I’m really sorry, but that’s all I have to say. Stay away from the island, stay away from me.’

He was already heading towards the door, because his silhouette moved away from the curtains. Lorna swivelled around, fumbled with the light switch and threw it on. For two seconds, three seconds, she saw Tomak in the electric light as he dived hurriedly for the door. He was wearing green-grey fatigues that made him look bulky and overweight. His hair was long, rolling around his neck, but there was a bare patch on top. Something had happened to his head: it was larger than she remembered, a different shape.

As he reached the door, in the final half-second, he turned back to look directly at her and then she saw his face. Burn scars bulged and reddened and sucked at his features: he had become disfigured, scarred, broken for ever.

The door slammed behind him and moments later the outer door closed too. She heard a key pinging as it bounced across the wooden floor.

She sat there on her bed and almost at once she began to cry. The tears broke out of her, an unending outpouring of misery. She soaked half a dozen tissues, wept into her bed covers.

Then she stopped.

She remembered the time she had spent with Patta earlier that evening, consoling her friend. Quickly, her unhappiness turned to anger against Tomak, and she remained awake the rest of the night, loathing him for what he had just done and the way he had done it. Then, in distress, she would remember loving and missing him so much and for so long, and in hot confusion she would veer inwardly from rage to wretchedness.

When the sun came up she dressed and went to walk along the edge of the cliffs. Tremm lay golden-hued across the blue-white sea, glowing in the morning light.

Three weeks later, after several sweltering, steamy days of unbroken summer rainfall, Lorna and Bradd went down to the harbour in Meequa Town and loaded food and drink on to his sailing boat. It was much smaller than Lorna had imagined, but it was almost new and was fitted with modern navigation and steering devices. In particular Bradd pointed out the two main sails, which were of material that was non-reflective and almost transparent. Undetectable after dark by sight or by radar, he said, and made of the same material used on the wings of the drones.

The sun, heading down towards evening, was still radiant and waves of humid air rolled in across the harbour. Bradd pulled off all his clothes except a pair of shorts, and set to work preparing the boat to leave. Lorna also stripped down to her bathing costume, and sat half in shade, half in the blistering sunlight until Bradd said they were ready to cast off.

Once they were beyond the harbour wall there was enough wind to provide at least an illusion of temporary coolness. Tremm stood towards the horizon, green-brown in the distant shimmering marine heat.

Bradd steered the boat away from the town, hugging the coastline of Meequa, and within an hour they had reached a small secluded inlet where no other boats were moored. They anchored the yacht, then dived in and swam in the calm cove until the shadows from the setting sun were dark across the water.

Back on board, they snacked on some of the food they had brought. They both kept looking out to sea towards Tremm, where the mountains were catching much of the sunlight slanting horizontally from the west. As night fell the humidity seemed to increase. Lorna lay breathless on the prow of the boat, dangling an arm towards the water, watching the movement of phosphoresence in the shallow sea below.

Bradd went below decks and switched on his night-time navigation gear. Lorna continued to doze in the muggy air, feeling Bradd’s movements in the cabin directly beneath her but thinking yet again about Tomak, what had happened, what he had said that night, the suddenness of everything. It continued to hurt, but it also made her feel resentful of him. It was torment if she dwelt on it but she believed she was recovering at last.

When Bradd emerged from the tiny cabin she sat up to look at him, admiring his supple back, his strong arms. She watched him working one of the hand-winches, liking the calm way he moved, the compact angles of his torso, remembering the times when they had been lovers, thinking the best of him.

By some unspoken accord this trip had been arranged almost as if it had been planned in detail and agreed in advance. Bradd announced two days earlier that he was ready to sail across to Tremm, and Lorna quickly said she would go with him. They had both taken days off work, not knowing how long they would be away. Lorna told herself she needed a break, was owed some time off by the MCI.

There was only a single bunk in the confined space of the cabin. Lorna noticed this as soon as they were on board, but she said nothing. Too much had been said between them in the past. But then before they sailed Bradd casually showed her that in one of the lockers there was a hammock that could be slung on the deck in the open air. She was assuming nothing, and it seemed that neither was Bradd.

With the aid of the inboard motor they left the cove, then Bradd and she hoisted the nearly invisible sails and they began to move out to sea, silent but for the sound of the water against the hull.

Several minutes later one of the instruments gave a quiet warning signal and Bradd immediately used night-sight binoculars to scan the sea near Tremm. After staring through them he handed them to Lorna, indicating where to point them. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the artificially enhanced image, but she was soon able to make out a long power launch, lying low in the water. Because of the foreshortening effect of the powerful lenses it appeared to be close against the foot of the Tremm cliffs. It did not seem to be moving.

Bradd took the glasses back and stared at the vessel for a long time. Meanwhile their yacht sailed slowly on, using the automatic steering device.

‘What do we do?’ Lorna said.

‘Nothing. We’re in international waters. We’ve every right to be here. In theory, we also have the right to land on that island. Every island in the Archipelago is neutral territory — that’s what the Covenant is for. But in reality the moment we cross into Tremm’s waters that launch will come out to find out what we’re up to. It’s a fast-response patrol boat, armed to the hilt. Those people have moved in, grabbed the island, and set up armed patrols to keep everyone else out. It makes me angry! They’re abusing our neutrality by making it into their domain. They do what they want and we can’t stop them, because if we tried to get rid of them they’d claim we were breaching our own neutrality by doing so.’

He glanced towards the sky: it was clear of clouds, but because of tropical atmospheric haze a pale orange wash from the sun, which was now below the horizon, was faintly visible against the stars. The air was warm, but both Lorna and Bradd had put on lightweight shirts. The breeze was steady.

Lorna continued to watch the patrol launch through the glasses. After a few minutes it began to sail away. The movement was also picked up by the navigation gear in the boat. The launch travelled fast along the coast of Tremm, and soon it was difficult to make out the shape of it against the dark rocky cliffs, even with the night-sight boost. Not long afterwards, Bradd’s onboard navigation equipment made a different sound, signalling that the target the radar had picked up was now out of range.

Bradd continued to sail calmly, then as the darkness on the sea became more or less complete, he swung the wheel and the boat headed directly towards Tremm.

‘Are you still intending to land?’ Lorna said.

‘Not this time. That launch is not the only line of patrol.’

Since Tomak, since his visit in the night, Lorna’s inner determination to find out what was happening on Tremm had dwindled. Tomak had at least succeeded in that. It remained a deep impulse in her to find out where he was and what had happened to him, but it was an impulse she found easier to resist with every day that passed. The hurt he caused had stiffened into a defensive anger, now more or less under control, but that remained harder to put behind her than the sense of loss.

Soon after they left the shelter of the cove Lorna went aft to sit beside Bradd in the tiny cockpit, because of the boat’s movements in the waves. The night was hot, making her feel breathless. She leaned back against the coaming, feeling the wind in her hair and the occasional splash of droplets — both cooled her deliciously, while the mild plunging and yawing of the yacht gave her an inner feeling of physical suspense. Her muscles were constantly tensed against the rocking. In spite of her earlier reservations she was succumbing to the sensual nature of this venture. Bradd was close beside her, often pressing up against her as he manoeuvred the boat. She was tingling with awareness of his body, and whereas only two or three weeks earlier she would never have admitted to herself any such response, she was relishing the feeling that somehow she was yielding to him, giving herself up. But it was free of persuasion and without conscious decision.

Here she was, here he was. She could smell the dried salt on his strong forearms.

The lights of Meequa Town had been in view for some time, but as a pale blur against the darkness of the inland hills. Tremm was much closer to them and the immense size of the central range made a dark block against the stars. There were hardly any lights visible on that shore.

‘Something’s moving!’ she suddenly cried as she saw a light sliding low over the sea. It had appeared quickly from behind the bulk of the island. She realized she was tensed against discovery by the patrol boats. Bradd stared across, reaching down into the well of the boat to find the binoculars.

But before he switched them on he said, ‘You know what that is! It’s one of our drones.’

Lorna took the glasses from him but then laid them down. She stood up, balancing herself against the swaying of the boat. The steady, low movement of the aircraft was of course completely familiar, but never before had she been so close to one as it passed across the sea. It traversed their course ahead of the boat, vanishing into the night as the beam from its LED moved away from them.

Soon more drones appeared, heading towards Tremm from all distant directions. The first sight of them was as pinpoints of light, easiest seen when they were grouped together. At first Lorna tried to count them, as she had often done in the past, but was soon unable to keep up. Because of their proximity buffers, the drones always weaved around each other, like strands of wool in an unravelling skein. Before long the first group of them was passing close by their yacht, low and steady over the waves, the multi-coloured LEDs glittering. Lorna was thrilled to see them.

Bradd stood beside her, balancing on the deck over the cabin. The boat was rocking and Lorna held his arm.

He had brought the map of Tremm and now he turned on his torch and held the map so they could both see it.

‘I just took a fix on our position,’ he said. ‘We’re more or less here, still outside Tremm’s waters.’

He indicated the shallow bay on the western side of the island. They were right at the edge of the map. Even though it was dark and much of the island was unlighted, Lorna could pick out the major features — in particular the steep crags of the mountains. The tallest of these, which was the one furthest to the south, was where Yo had carried out many of her test drills. Bradd pointed the torch at that part of the map, where there were the marks of dozens of Yo cavities clustered on the side of the mountain facing towards them.

The first wave of drones passed towards Meequa, some of them flying directly over their boat. Lorna gazed up at them. Their hyaline wings glimmered as they passed beneath the stars. The hush of their motors could barely be detected because of the sounds of the sea. She watched the drones as they wove away from her towards the main island.

‘There are more coming,’ Bradd said, pointing to the south.

Towards the horizon they saw another group of the pinpoints of light, turning in towards Tremm and Meequa. At this distance the lights of the LEDs all looked white, but as they gradually came nearer Lorna was able to see the many different colours. At first they were manoeuvring no differently from the first wave — they all steered around the landmass of Tremm, following the line of the coast, staying low above the waves — but without warning the leading group banked sharply away from the island and began to gain altitude, heading out to sea. Some of them appeared to be flying towards the yacht.

One by one the drones banked again, turning back towards the bulk of Tremm, then circled, continuing to gain altitude. Behind them, the other waves of the drones were beginning the same manoeuvre. For a minute or so the sky above the yacht was a mass of different lights, circling around, gaining height.

Lorna and Bradd stood together on the gently swaying deck, their heads craned back to watch the swarming planes.

At some unexplained signal, every LED on the drones was suddenly extinguished. A transparent darkness soared above them.

Bradd jumped down to the cockpit, retrieved the binoculars and tried to locate the now invisible drones. After a few attempts he passed the glasses across to Lorna, who also tried and failed to see any of the drones.

They could sense the machines were still circling around above them. The warm sea air seemed to hum with the light pressure of their passage.

As her eyes adjusted, Lorna realized she could just pick out a faint disturbance of the starlight, as wings of the drones passed high overhead. She pointed this out to Bradd and they stood together, faces turned skywards, seeing the stars shimmering through the drones’ wings. When Bradd’s hand slipped into hers, Lorna did not resist him.

The first explosion came while they were still trying to spot the drones above them. They heard a low, deep thud, then a rumble, but by the time they had turned towards the source of the sound all that could be seen was the residue of flames and fire-glowing smoke on the upper slope of the most southerly Tremm mountain. While they were still looking, there was a second explosion, and this time they saw the flash before the sound reached them.

‘It must be the drones!’

Another explosion occurred before Lorna could reply. This was lower down the mountainside, almost at sea level.

‘Are they crashing?’ Lorna cried.

‘There’s nothing on board a drone to make it explode like that. It’s just a motor, a guidance system and the scanning equipment.’

But now the explosions were occurring with such frequency that the side of the mountain was half-lit by the flames that had already erupted. Lorna grabbed the binoculars and focused on the mountainside where it was most brightly illuminated. The swaying of the boat, and the fact that she was having to balance, made it almost impossible to keep the glasses trained on any one spot, but she soon found that it was easier with the night-sighting switch turned off.

Bradd took the glasses from her for a minute or so, during which something like twenty more big explosions occurred, then he handed them back to her.

‘Point them close to that high shoulder on the right,’ he said. ‘You can see the drones flying straight into the tunnels!’

Because of the high magnification, and her unsteady hold, Lorna was not able to spot any of the drones in the constantly jerking image. But in the light from the flames she could see that where the drones were crashing in was the area of many of Yo’s tunnels. Lorna repeatedly glimpsed the dark apertures, oddly, precisely shaped: round, square, triangular, asymmetric, tall rectangles, wide rectangles, long ovals.

One bulged with devastating fire as she managed to keep the glasses steady. Something deep within the mountain was exploding or discharging when the drones went in.

The explosions did not continue for long. There was a sudden eruption along the lower flanks of the mountain, like the final flourish of a fireworks display, and then the mountain was quiet once again.

They became aware at the same moment that the navigation gear in the cockpit was emitting a steady warning signal. Bradd turned sharply, looked towards the south.

‘The binoculars . . . quickly!’

She handed them over, flicking on the night-sight as she did so.

‘Climb down to the cockpit, Lorna! That patrol ship is coming for us.’

In the dark it was impossible to see unaided anything on the surface of the sea, but as soon as she scrambled down into the cockpit Lorna saw the radar display. A continuous signal revealed something large approaching them at sea-level, and at high speed. There was no doubt what it was.

Bradd crashed down into the cockpit from the deck, brushing hard against her. He grabbed the wheel, spun it about. The boat responded at once, turning away from Tremm, heading north towards Meequa.

‘We’ll never outrun them,’ Bradd said. ‘But this takes us further away into international waters.’

Lorna took the binoculars into the cabin and placed them somewhere out of sight. She returned to the cockpit.

When she looked back the patrol boat was so close it was possible to see the dark shape of it unaided. It was speeding towards them, throwing up a huge white bow-wave.

‘They’re going to ram us!’ Lorna cried.

‘I hope not!’

They were both shouting. Terrified, Lorna put her arm around Bradd’s waist and held close to him. The patrol boat was on them in a few more seconds, veering away at the last moment, but passing so close that the bow-wave drenched them and flooded into the cockpit. There was no engine noise audible from the launch, just the rushing of the water.

The little yacht yawed and rolled violently in the immense wake of the larger boat, shipping more water. Lorna and Bradd fell away from the wheel, soaked by the deluge of seawater that flooded into the cockpit. Lorna landed face-down and Bradd fell violently on top of her, his uncontrolled weight forcing her face down into the water. After a struggle to regain equilibrium he managed to lever himself away. He helped her back to her feet, while she spluttered and tried to breathe again.

The patrol boat was already turning for a second run at them. All they could do was brace themselves with the cockpit rail and press against the coaming. When the launch passed this time it was even closer than before and it made a sudden turn, whacking their tiny boat with its grey hull just as the bow-wave lifted it. Bradd and Lorna screamed and shouted in terror as the yacht flew upwards, then side-slipped into the sea in a flurry of spray and a rush of incoming seawater. They were both thrown from the cockpit into the sea, floundering in the dark night and the turbulent water. They were thrust under the surface several times by the strength of the wake and the turbulence of the churning water. Lorna, still gasping for breath after being crushed in the cockpit, was terrified she would lose contact with Bradd, or whatever remained of the yacht, but as the rough waters subsided Bradd’s head broke the surface. She swam to him and they held on, trying to reassure each other.

They found the wrecked yacht not far away. It was lying on its side, almost completely submerged but still afloat.

Bradd yelled, ‘So long as I can get on board . . . we’ll be OK. The boat will right itself. Help me round to the keel.’

They swam to the side of the boat where the hull was showing above the surface. Bradd showed Lorna how to hold on to the gunwales, then he clambered over to the submerged cockpit. She waited in the dark, shivering with fright and the shock of being in the sea. After a while she could feel the boat moving as Bradd did something inside. There was a sudden grind of a motor and almost at once Lorna felt the hull sliding down towards the sea, as the vessel tried to right itself. She struggled to pull herself over the gunwales, but her strength was failing.

Bradd appeared, reached down to her, pulled her up. She slithered, half-fell, into the flooded cockpit. They huddled there together while water splashed around them. She felt chilled through, by fear, by the sudden immersion, by suffering the brutal and ruthless actions of whoever had been steering the launch.

When the boat was upright again, although riding low in the sea, Bradd set a bailing pump going and the water began to jet out of the side. As the flood level gradually fell they went around inside the cabin trying to establish what had been damaged, what might have been lost.

Most of the equipment on the boat was intact, although the navigation gear had been flooded and was inoperable. The auxiliary motors, used for self-righting and pumping, were undamaged. The binoculars were missing, as were most of the food and clothes they had brought aboard. The main inboard motor appeared to be intact, but would not start on the auto-ignition. Bradd kept trying, and after a couple of minutes the engine coughed loudly before running normally.

There was no longer any sign of the patrol boat.

They were intent only on reaching dry land and safety. They removed the sails, which had been damaged in the collision, and headed for Meequa Town under power. They stood together at the wheel, holding on to each other. Lorna could not stop shaking until she was safely ashore.

She remembered Bradd’s house from before. When they went in the familiarity struck her — the piles of books, heaps of old newspapers, the photographs stuck on the walls, his three peculiar cats, the sense of affluent male chaos. The background smell: other people’s places always have a background smell you can never identify but always remember. She was glad to be there, but she went and opened the windows to allow air to move around. It was hot in there — Bradd said his cooling fans were broken. She stood by the window, making herself calm. One of the cats walked over to her and nuzzled her leg. Noise of traffic rose up from the street below; music was playing in the restaurant opposite. Because of the lights of Meequa Town it was impossible to look out to sea: all appeared dark out there.

Bradd put down what he had been carrying and went to stand beside her. He laid a light hand on her shoulder.

‘Your clothes are still damp,’ he said, and ran his hand down her back.

‘Yours are too.’

‘Shall we take everything off?’

So they did and so it happened again. She was not in love with Bradd, but he was familiar and they had gone through something together and survived it. She liked him more now than she ever had. He was making an effort and so was she in her own way. Anyway, she was an adult and he was always good in bed.

In the morning when she woke up next to him, Lorna left the bed and went to stand at the open window, watching the businesses in the town start to open. Traffic was as yet light, and she smelt the scent of flowers on the warm breeze. The sea was silver and glistening in the early sunlight. She could see the dark shape of Tremm, out on the horizon, there but not there.

They made love again, then dressed and went down to the restaurant for breakfast on the terrace, overlooking the harbour. Behind the street where Bradd lived the land started to rise towards the inland heights — because of its view of the harbour, sea and distant islands it was a sought-after zone and many more houses and apartment blocks were going up. It was some time since Lorna had been in this part of the town, and she enjoyed the morning ambience of the shops and businesses, the light in the sky, the clattering noises, the endless sound of voices.

Later they walked down to the harbour to have a close look at the boat, and to work out what needed to be repaired or replaced. In the damp mess of the cabin there was hardly room for them both, so Lorna sat on the boardwalk while Bradd moved around inside. She was wearing a broad-rimmed hat to shade her from the sun. She watched the leisurely activity in and around the harbour, feeling happy for the first time in many months. Every now and then Bradd would emerge and place something next to her on the wooden planks. Once, she leant forward and kissed him. He grinned, then ducked down again into the boat.

A drone went over, its transparent wings glittering with silver highlights in the sunshine.

Lorna stared up to watch it, as did many other people around her. The drones were of course a familiar feature of life on Meequa, but they were rarely seen during the day. This one was flying parallel to the coast, but when it was over the harbour wall it banked steeply and flew out to sea. Lorna shaded her eyes to watch it. After about half a minute it banked again, this time going into a steep turn that directed it back towards the land. Within a few seconds it had passed over the headland and was out of sight.

Bradd emerged into the cockpit.

‘The nav gear is working again,’ he said. ‘I just picked up a drone signal. Did you see it go over?’

‘Yes.’

They thought no more of it, but that afternoon, as they walked through the town, a drone appeared from out of the heat haze, flying parallel to the coast. Lorna was immediately certain it was the same one. She rushed down one of the alleys that led to the harbour and watched as the drone repeated the course it had taken that morning.

Bradd looked up at the mountains and out towards the cliffs that rose to the east of the town. Mountains to be steered around, a complicated, jagged coastline with many rocky tors, other hilly islands in the vicinity. Plenty to avoid.

Later that night the drone again flew across Meequa Town.

By the time Lorna had returned to work at the Institute and was struggling once more to make sense of the photographic traces, the captive drone was a regular sight on Meequa. It went around continually, taking about seven and a half hours to complete its circuit, so that it usually flew overhead three times each day, but every now and then it appeared four times. It flew in the sunlight or in the dark, its iridescent wings refracting the stars or the sun, its motor running silently and faultlessly, the green-glowing LED in its nose sending a brief glimpse of purpose as it swept overhead, the air responding to its passage, and when the place was quiet it imparted a sense of unexplained mission, an unending task, a quiet breath of secrecy.

On Tremm, the nightly explosions continued.