When Uncle Larry arrived early the next day, he said that shooting passengers was not something the service normally encouraged, but admitted that, in the circumstances, he didn’t know what else William could have done. Letting the girls roam loose in the countryside could have been disastrous.
‘It’s just unfortunate,’ he added, ‘that you were dealing with the daughter of one of the most powerful people in the Federation. When you upset someone like Silas T. Barnes, he can find ways to make life very uncomfortable for you, however right you may have been.’
‘And you think I’ve upset him?’
‘I’d say shooting his daughter might mean you’re not on his Christmas list,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘but if he does make a fuss we can point out that you could have made it much worse. You could have reported the girls to Federation Security – in which case they’d still be locked up – and you could have sold the whole story to the news networks. So in a way he ought to be grateful.’ Uncle Larry sipped thoughtfully at his tea. ‘Let’s hope Silas sees it that way, eh?’
A message from Silas T. Barnes arrived the following morning and, to William’s relief and Uncle Larry’s surprise, it contained neither complaints nor threats of revenge.
The hologram was of a small, ordinary-looking man with large brown eyes, standing in what looked like the main waiting area of a railway terminus, except that all the trains were floating several feet above the ground.
‘I got your message, Mr Seward,’ said the hologram briskly, ‘and I would like to offer my sincere apologies for the behaviour of my daughter and her cousins while they were on your station. My daughter has told me it was entirely her fault and I hope you will accept the attached credit note as a small compensation for the trouble you were caused.’
It looked for a moment as if he was going to say something else, but there was someone talking to him and Mr Barnes gave a brief nod and the hologram abruptly switched off.
‘His daughter told him it was her fault?’ said Uncle Larry. ‘Well, I’m jiggered! I thought she’d be the one screaming for revenge. And Emma tells me the small compensation is a hundred credits!’ Uncle Larry patted William on the shoulder. ‘That should buy you a few star-miles. But promise me you won’t shoot any more passengers for a month or two, eh?’
Fortunately, in the weeks that followed, William didn’t have to shoot anybody. Some of the passengers were a little more demanding than others but he was learning how to handle even these.
It was not the way he had expected to spend his summer holidays and part of him, particularly at the start, had missed being with friends. He had felt a pang when Craig rang up to ask if he could come over, or David’s mother called to ask if he’d like to go swimming but, as time went by, the regrets had lessened. After all, it wasn’t everyone who had a chance to look after a Star Portal. It was interesting, and so were the people who came through it. William liked meeting them, he liked being with them… and there was something else.
Rather to his surprise, he had noticed that, important and wealthy though the passengers might be – and most of them were – when they came through the Portal they all needed something. Some just wanted peace and quiet, others wanted entertaining, some needed exercise… But it was very satisfying somehow to be the one who could provide it and send them off six hours later, happy and relaxed.
Like the time Mr Forrester, the manager of one of the Federation’s largest banks came up through the Portal. He was a tall, worried-looking man with steel-grey hair, a tightly buttoned black jacket and an almost permanent frown. When William welcomed him to the station, his reply was no more than a curt nod as he walked straight through to the sitting room, saying that he had a great deal of work to do and would appreciate it if he was not disturbed at all for the duration of his stay.
It left William with a difficult choice because the week before, down in his father’s workshop, he had found what Emma told him was a model of a Wrovian battlecruiser, with a note attached in his father’s handwriting that said simply Gift – for Mr Forrester. It was a wonderfully detailed model, but the bank manager didn’t look like the sort of person who’d want to be given a toy spaceship, especially after he’d asked not to be disturbed under any circumstances.
Should William go in and give him the model anyway? Should he wait until Mr Forrester was about to leave and give it to him then? Or would it be better to leave the whole thing until the next time he came through, when perhaps he wasn’t so busy?
William was still thinking about it when, two hours later, Emma said that Mr Forrester had requested a glass of water. He got a jug and a glass from the kitchen and, as an afterthought, placed the model on the tray beside them. In the sitting room, Mr Forrester was sitting on the sofa, studying a hologram that seemed to consist of nothing but numbers. William put the tray on the table and was about to leave when he was called back.
‘What’s this?’ Mr Forrester asked, pointing to the model.
‘It’s from my father,’ William explained. ‘I think it’s a Wrovian battlecruiser.’
‘You’re nearly right…’ Mr Forrester picked up the model and studied it. ‘It is in fact a Y Class Fleet Command battlecruiser whose name translates as the Don’t Mess With Me. She took part in the Borgan Wars and was lost with all hands in the Battle of Gravelans.’ He looked at William. ‘Your father wanted me to have this?’
‘Yes,’ said William. ‘There was a note on it reminding him to give it to you next time you came through.’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said William. ‘It’s a gift.’
‘Well, that certainly sounds like your father.’ For the first time a faint smile flickered across Mr Forrester’s lips. ‘I remember, when I told him how we could make a fortune by re-opening the Old Star Portals, all he said was that money wasn’t everything!’
William wondered why anyone would want to use the Old Portals. ‘Didn’t they take three and a half years just to get to Q’Vaar?’ he asked.
‘They did,’ said Mr Forrester, ‘and, as I explained to your father, that is exactly the point. You go to Q’Vaar at the speed of light, you come straight back again, and to you it’s taken no time at all but your bank account has been sitting there gathering interest for seven years. A lot of people would pay good money for that to happen!’
He leant forward, clicked off the hologram with the numbers and then gestured to the Don’t Mess With Me. ‘Would it be possible to take this outside?’
The Don’t Mess With Me was a working model. It was controlled by a cylinder the size of a tube of Smarties, and Mr Forrester was surprisingly good at it. Standing on the lawn at the back of the house, William watched as white flames appeared from the engine pods and the ship lifted slowly from the ground, banked to the right, and began picking up speed. Within seconds it was circling the garden faster than William would have thought possible, weaving in and out between the barn and the chicken run, spinning and rolling, changing direction, standing on its end, and finally coming to a halt a metre or two in front of William’s astonished gaze.
‘Wow!’ he said.
‘There’s more!’ Mr Forrester told him. ‘She’s a warship, so she’s fitted with Starbolt cannon and Blackhead torpedoes. I’ll show you what an attack run looks like…’
The ship moved up and off to the right until it was barely visible in the sky, and then came screaming back towards William. As it did so, a beam of light shot out from the front, then another from the back, and a moment later it was firing bolts of light from all sides and all angles, some a dazzling white, some huge, lazy pulses of green that floated towards the ground and then exploded in a shower of sparks. It was like watching a miniature fireworks display, and the noise that accompanied it all was equally dramatic, though Mr Forrester assured him there was no risk of damage.
‘It’s all just light and noise,’ he said. ‘Can’t do any harm.’ He held out the controls to Daniel, who had appeared with Amy from the back of the barn to see what was going on. ‘You want to try it?’
William was not sure this was wise – his brother would almost certainly run the ship into a wall and break it – but Mr Forrester insisted it was perfectly safe.
‘These things are virtually indestructible,’ he said. ‘At least while the force-field’s turned on.’ He thrust the controls into Daniel’s hands. ‘Go on, give it a whirl!’
The controls took a little mastering – it was all a matter of where you pointed the tube and how hard you gripped it with which fingers – but Daniel had the machine running in the end and even did a bombing run that launched two torpedoes neatly through the bathroom window.
‘I’ve been collecting Starfleet warships for nearly twenty years now,’ said Mr Forrester to William as they watched. ‘I knew your dad came across these things sometimes so I asked him to keep an eye out for me. I never thought he’d find something this good, though!’
Mrs Duggan came out then with some tea, and they all sat round the big slatted table on the terrace for scones with cream and jam. As they ate, Mr Forrester told them how, on his home world, collectors would meet and re-enact some of the great battles of the Years of Chaos, with whole fleets of model ships racing around the sky firing at each other. Then Amy told him that Daniel had a collection of skulls and Mr Forrester said he would like to see it, so Daniel brought some of them down to show him.
William had to go and do the bricks at that point and, when he came back, he found Mr Forrester alone on the terrace. He had taken off his jacket and was sitting in his shirtsleeves in the late afternoon sun, quietly whistling to himself, while the Don’t Mess With Me floated gently in the air in front of him.
‘Mrs Duggan had to go and do something to a sheep,’ he said when he saw William, ‘and your brother and his friend have gone down to the river. They said we could join them if we wanted.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said William, ‘but it’s time to go now.’
‘Goodness, already? Right.’ Mr Forrester picked up his jacket and then turned off the Don’t Mess With Me. ‘I’ve promised to bring your brother the skull of a bilkrat, next time I come through,’ he said. ‘They have five interlocking jaws. I think he’d like it.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said William. ‘I’m sure he would.’
‘And of course you’ll thank your father for this,’ Mr Forrester said, tucking the Don’t Mess With Me carefully under one arm, ‘when he gets back from wherever it is he’s gone?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said William.
Down in the station, before stepping on to the Portal, Mr Forrester turned and shook hands. ‘Well, thank you again. For everything. It’s been a very pleasant stopover. Really very pleasant indeed!’
‘It was a pleasure,’ said William, and the curious thing was that he meant it. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand there was something very rewarding about watching someone like Mr Forrester arrive, tense and irritable, and seeing him leave, as he did now, relaxed and smiling.
It gave him the sort of buzz that Daniel might get from finding the skull of a kestrel, or Amy from trying on a designer dress. For some reason, it felt… right.
What didn’t feel right was the way the weeks continued to pass without any news of his parents. The Federation Security Forces still delivered reports saying they had investigated this avenue or that, and Uncle Larry would explain when he visited that he was having someone analyse the contents of Mr Seward’s personal files in Emma, or that they were trying to find a match with any similar disappearances on other worlds… but none of it ever seemed to lead anywhere.
His parents had disappeared, literally without a trace. Not only did nobody know what had happened to them, no one had any idea what might have happened or where they could look. It was only a week or so now until the end of the summer holidays and there had been discussions about what they might do if there was still no news by the time William had to go back to school.
The prospect alarmed William, not because he didn’t like school, but because he still could not believe that so many weeks could have gone by without anyone being even a step closer to solving the mystery.
And, afterwards, he sometimes wondered if it might not have gone on like that forever, if it hadn’t been for Lady Dubb.