There were still holes in his memory: a lot he couldn’t remember.
“So you were assigned to this Omega project,” he said. “When?”
Rhys hesitated before replying, as if he wasn’t sure whether Owain was testing him.
“It’s been going on for years,” he finally said. ‘I was drafted in to help with the satellite systems. We had to build them like tanks—none of this featherweight stuff. Cabling as thick as your arm, transformers the size of Cougar turbines.”
Owain had no interest in the engineering details, or his brother’s boasting. But obviously the weapon had undergone extensive testing.
“It’s not clear to me,” he said, “what happens to all the terrain after it’s been excised.”
His brother looked impressed that he had remembered the terminology. He asked Owain for the control panel. Owain tossed it towards him at head height. Rhys managed to bring his hands up just in time, deflecting it down into his lap.
“Take a look out of the window,” Rhys said to him. “Tell me what you see.”
Owain craned his head, but in the end he was forced to stand up to get a good look out.
The sky was beginning to darken, but they were flying low enough that he could see a strip of coastline with the grey sea beyond. In fact it looked like an island, long and thin at either end, hugging the marshy coastline, a coiling river running between it and the sea.
“Orford Ness,” Owain said, knowing that it was linked to the coast by the slenderest spit of land at its northern tip.
“Fount of all secrets,” Rhys replied theatrically, pointing to the screen.
The screen at first showed a perspective from on high before the camera zoomed and began panning across the site.
Apart from its shingle shores, the Ness was largely buried under expanses of concrete and tarmac. There were airstrips, missile ranges, and two squat roofed structures that I knew from my own world were called The Pagodas, built for dummy atom bomb testing in the 1950s. Arrays of radar antennae and clusters of bunkers dotted the bleak snow-covered landscape. The place had been used by the military for the best part of a century. There was scarcely an acre of it that did not bear the imprint of their activities.
“They put us on the site of an old POW camp,” Rhys told him, the picture focusing on a modern-looking installation of overarching girders supporting a ribbed concrete dome. “Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch, most of it underground.”
From a distance it looked absurdly like an unfurled umbrella top. The usual missile batteries ringed it and there was a long landing strip close by, a few planes and helicopters parked around the control building.
“The project’s been running for over twenty years,” Rhys told him. “Dungeness was the first time we knew it might work, though no one anticipated that it would be at the expense of obliterating the entire site.
So the story about an old bomb going off had just been a cover. A bigger version of the lie they’d told him about what had happened in Regent Street.
“Then there were the problems with venting that you already know about. It’s only in the last eighteen months that we’ve had systems robust enough to control it.”
“Venting?”
“Backflash, remember? What goes out, must come in again.”
The picture switched abruptly, showing what at first Owain thought was a huge earthen wall that extended right across the field of vision like a latter-day Offa’s Dyke. It was a moment before he recognised it as a serpentine stretch of the Ness upon which were piled the jumbled remains of military vehicles—tanks, assault guns, artillery pieces—poking out of mounds of boulders, dark earth and broken trees. It was as if everything had been fed into an enormous hopper and dropped from a great height.
“Easier to dump it in our own back yard,” Rhys said. “least at first.”
“It’s displaced terrain?”
Rhys nodded. “Some of it from thousands of miles away.”
The materiel was so battered and buckled as to be unrecognisable. But it was easy to imagine that he could detect the contours of a T-92 or Tiger-X among the morass, easy to assume they were the very same tanks he had excised from the base near Minsk, sent twisting through some unimaginable rift in the fabric of the world to be deposited here in a prodigious topological belch.
“Of course we couldn’t go on fouling our doorstep indefinitely,” Rhys said with all the fervour of the sanctified. “Which is why the latest satellites incorporate re-routing facilities.”
Owain had no idea how it was actually done, but he guessed what Rhys was driving at. “So you can vent wherever you want.”
His brother nodded vigorously. “And where better than another enemy site?”
Owain felt surprisingly clear-headed. The world had once again contracted, this time to the dim confines of the cabin. For the moment only he and Rhys existed.
