The CRES code

Chapter Forty Seven - Emily Intervenes

     Emily allowed her connection with the pigeon to fade, and as she did so the sitting room of Baron Wright's mansion reappeared around her. The wood panelled walls, the polished wooden floor, the fire burning merrily in the grate and the tall window looking out over the garden.

On the small table beside her someone had placed a cup of tea in a perilously thin and exquisitely decorated porcelain cup and saucer. She picked it up to taste it but it was long since grown cold. She felt a moment of amusement as she imagined the maid bringing the beverage to her only to find her sitting in the wicker chair staring at the far wall, so totally focused on some inner contemplation that she was completely unaware that she had a visitor. What did the maid imagine had so totally seized her attention? she wondered. Maybe she was even now regaling the rest of the mansion's staff with her tale of the Baron's eccentric guest.

     She brought her mind back to the matter at hand. Jane would help her save the Earth, if Emily in turn helped her to convince mankind that her imaginary friend existed. Well, Emily had no problem with that. Who cared what silly beliefs people had so long as they left the natural world alone? They would use Randall and Loach for as long as they needed them, then dispose of them. Maybe Jane could be allowed to live. It would be nice to have someone else from the twenty first century to talk to, someone she could relate to, who understood where she came from. She wouldn't allow herself to become too attached to the other woman, of course, in case it one day became necessary to dispose of her as well.

     The first thing, though, was to find a way to get the orcs away from that city. Which city had it been? She selected the pigeon again for a moment, allowed the images it was sending to reappear in her visual field and looked at the location data it was tagged with. Elmton. Saxony's fourth largest city, marked for destruction by the machines as part of their policy of keeping the human population from growing too large. Right now, though, finding and killing the other three hibernators was top of their list of priorities, so Emily's best hope was to tell the priests that she'd found them somewhere else, a place where the best chance of killing them was to send the orcs after them. That ruled out a large city, therefore, with a police force and a military garrison that could be sent after them. She needed a small town. Too small to have any but the most basic of authorities in charge of it but large enough that, together with the small towns and communities around, it would require the entire orc army to destroy it. The orc army currently attacking Elmton because that was the closest one.

     The priests had given her a modern, up to date digital map of Saxony to help her find the other hibernators, and it was marked with the current locations of every orc and human army so that she'd know the places Randall, Loach and Jane would want to stay away from. She called the map up onto her visual field, zoomed in on the area around Elmton and examined it. The human army on its way to relieve Elmton was approaching from the south and there was another orc army fifty miles away to the north west. She looked east, therefore, and found a cluster of three small towns surrounded by a scattering of small villages about thirty miles away. She picked the largest of the three towns, Howgill, then checked the robo-pigeons to see if any of them were in that town.

     One of them was. It was currently sitting on a wall around a woodyard, bowing and cooing to a female. Emily mentally apologised to the female for taking its suitor away and told the robot bird to take flight and head for the centre of town.

     The town centre was a large open space that hosted a market twice a week when it was packed with stalls piled high with goods and wares, the air filled with the smells of overripe fruit and the shouts of their owners trying to sell them. Today, though, it was empty except for a team of workmen repairing potholes in the packed gravel; one man working, pounding the ground with a thumper, while three others stood watching, chatting happily with each other. Emily had the pigeon watch them for a moment, a smile on her lips as she pondered that some things never changed,. Then she sent the pigeon to look for some townspeople.