The People's Alpha ✔

25: Emergency Congress

Almost as soon as I had fired off the phone call, true to his word, Thurgood had set to work getting this and that person to do his bidding, and soon he'd cobbled together a motley temporary defense force to look after the pack. It was a bandaid solution of the most bandaidy type but it would have to do. Our pack would be contributing to it, although the exact details were still in the works. So that was over and done with, at least for the time being. I could forget about it.

I was on the way to the "emergency meeting" that Adlai had set up. The Moon Goddess hummed and whirred and ticked contentedly to herself. Adlai had set the start time at half past eight in the morning. This was unprecedented, and I debated mentally about whether it was just a rookie error of judgement or he was genuinely weeding the more dedicated of us out for some nefarious purpose, but judging by the scene in the rear view mirror, almost everybody had made an effort. Which was almost similarly unprecedented.

One of the other requests that Adlai had made was that we were to not bring any other pack members. So today I was doing the kind of single-occupant commute that was the butt of Zirconian jokes.

We had never had any cause to travel this way, and neither did most of the other packs, even the ones that lived on the same side of river. There were old stories that it was haunted and the like, the kind of tales that parents told their children, who told their children in turn, and so on, not so much grounded in literal truth, but serving quite well as a general comment on the eerieness of the place.

And it really was eerie, today, at least. There was a fog settled over the forest, the closest thing to rain most of us were were likely to see in some time. The forest here was so thick that there was no way to see through it to gauge the lie of the land as one could in our home turf. The dry spell seemed to have had little effect here. And it was quiet. Even through the little road noise - the road well kept and smooth, far smoother than I had envisioned - and the sound of the convoy of other pack vehicles, you could hear the silence outside.

Like Granite Peak it was quite isolated, both geographically and in other ways. Located in a meander of the Arrowhead River gorge, which also formed the Zirconian border at this point, only a narrow isthmus of land connected it to the rest of the Independent Territories proper. As with the Granite Peak, there was only one road there. As the closest bridge over the Arrowhead was in the Special Industrial Zone, the only option was to cross there and circuitously double back, following the path of the river.

Not that I was particularly pressed for time, and it gave me a chance to take the Moon Goddess out for a spin. The old girl was getting a bit long in the tooth, but she still could do all the old tricks, and I had her all to myself for once, the subtle but tantalisingly sharp crease down the centre of the bonnet, the glint of the metallic-brown paint and the chrome, the sensation of floating above the road.

It seemed a bit counter-intuitive that I, as with many others, had travelled far and wide but never visited this part of my own stamping ground. I supposed it was true for many others as well. Did humans worry about these things? Did they try to visit all the nooks and crannies of their own country before setting off for greener pastures? I doubted this was even a thing that most people thought about seriously, but surely there were some cultures who had some kind of official policy on it.

The first sign that we were nearing the pack was a group of sentries in black fatigues standing by the side of the road, guarding an overgrown dirt path. they didn't look at us as we glid past. The fog was starting to lift as the sun came out. Looking up at the trees, I caught a momentary glimpse of a sentry post in a tree. There were bound to be many of them dotted around the border. You had no hope of getting in here.

It occurred to me, suddenly, that this would be the perfect ambush. All they had to do was wait till we'd all arrived, block the road, and we'd be fish in a barrel. Of course, he wasn't dumb or crazy enough to try that, surely.