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Save Point: Hobbes Stone Farm

The Dragon has gone kaiju and is smashing things.

That's the first impression Cleo gets as she wanders hazily back into consciousness, only to realize on checking her internal clock that it's only been a couple of seconds since she hurtled over the railing and slammed into the dirt. Really, there's been too much unconscious today for mere mortal beings. This has got to be the third or fourth time.

As she gets to her feet, again, she sees the jump bike slewed up sideways against the exterior fence on its side in a trail of ploughed-up dirt and grass that's left green stains on the finish. Nothing is conspicuously broken, but after an impact like that, it's going to take hours in a workshop with lots of fine tools to get everything finely calibrated enough to get it to work again.

Writing off the bike, she staggers sideways, coughs to get her ribs to unlock again in a abrupt spasm, and leans against the fence. It looks like she completely cleared the outer frame, the whole set-up a farming-style gate like an airlock, one outer and one inner.

Just as she is wondering how she'll get through the inner gate - climbing does not appeal, at least not for a couple of minutes - the Dragon screams in that terrible high-pitched chainsaw shriek that claws its way across all the registers, making black static crawl across her thoughts, and then picks up a small storage silo of some description, only about a storey tall, not even that large compared to its current size, and hurls it overarm in her general direction like a cricket ball. Like a grown man throwing a small pebble at a kitten to scare it away - and accidentally killing the cat.

The silo sails past a couple of feet from her face after hitting the ground with such force that it bounces, rising up and tearing the left jamb of the gate away completely and severely deforming what remains on the right. The detached gate also flies past, but behind her where she can't really see it except for the rush of wind past her shoulders.

It's all just a bit too much, she decides calmly as none of it touches her and it all seems to occur in complete silence. Then suddenly the sounds catch up and tear past, yanking at her hair as the silo clears the fence and is lofted into the wheat-fields beyond, crashing to a sliding halt hundreds of feet away. The Dragon has been watching gojiro movies or something, maybe also a little hentai-with-tentacles porn, and seems to be committed to a path of impressive destruction.

Now that she has occasion to look at the torn-open gate, there's something so familiar about it. She's seen it it dreams, it's not something she could mistake, custom made out of bars of decorative twisted iron, no two the same, hand-made by a modern-day smith for some wealthy client. And yet it is also beyond dispute that she has never been here before....

What would you do if you woke up in a place you had never been?

....and by extension, that she could never have seen these gates. She checks and the padlock that had been holding the inner palings together is exactly as she knows it should be, a round, perfectly circular disc of metal in which the bar is a crescent cut of the main disc, polished to a high silvery shine, like a UFO. 'A symbol of the desire for wholeness and unity' as Jung would put it.

In the dream there had been silvery spheres hanging against a stormy sky and a huge black cat curling its tail against the twisted ingots at the threshold.....

She shakes it off, realizing the entangling effects of one hit to the head too many, and runs in more of a stagger to the nearest inner corner of the gateway space, anything that might constitute some sort of cover. There's no way she could survive getting hit by something like that, she'd be smeared across fifty feet of fresh blood-stained wheat in an epic splatter-house demise.

Off to the right is a peculiar free-standing structure that she can't quite process - a gatehouse? Some sort of very small guard post just large enough for a small child to stand inside? But as she takes cover alongside it, she realizes it's a sort of display stand designed to explain to any members of the public who might stumble in exactly what is going on here. There's a detailed colour picture behind a thin sheet of plexiglass, all inside a slightly angled niche, at convenient eye level within a square pillar that seems to have been made from much older pieces of scavenged stone.

She takes a mental snapshot of it as she goes past, but there's no time to read it all, so she has to settle for impressions....

"HMS Hobbes Stone Farms... named after the ancient standing stones that once stood here... today a centre of high tech government innovation... part of the MB21 transmission network... other locations include the famous Crabwood radio mast..."

...and that would explain why there are all those peculiarly British power pylons and high tension lines scattered all around the edges of the site. Oh hell. The dragon has been attracted to the local nexus of earth power, ley-lines, telluric energy distribution, whatever the hell you want to call it. Tons of free juice and the ability to unleash maximum, seemingly incidental havoc upon the entire surrounding countryside that forms part of the network. Not to mention whatever experimental high-end weirdness the British government might or might not be up to in there.

This is where the earth lights had intended to lead her.

She has a sudden mental image of the power failing and the lights going out as seen from space across an entire country, and then the fires flaming as the mob rises up and burns....

There is a sudden crackling inside her ear, where the widget she obtained from the Azatlani ruins in Peru has interfaced seamlessly with her audio systems somewhere at the border of software upgrade and micro-engineering, leaving only a tiny diamond-like crystal embedded in the lower curve of her ear like a jewel. Oddly enough it seems to be addressing her.

Her new friend seems to be "...Sergeant Major Andy Wilkins of the Royal Marine Commandos!" who has finally worked out she is listening in on them (he has a perfect British accent). "Now listen here cat thing. I don't care what the fuck you are. We've set up a five-hundred-foot perimeter around the combat zone. If you leave that area we will fire on you, and you will not survive. I have already called in a fighter wing armed with the latest fuel-air missiles and they will be here in just under ten minutes. So if you're going to do something about this, you'd better damn well do it quick."

"Yeah, like that'd even slow him down," snaps Cleo. "It'd only kill me!"

She has a moment to wonder if maybe she transmitted that and whether the sub-vocalization coms feature is turned on, before she recalls that she's going to need a plan and need it soon. The Dragon is clutching its head and swaying slightly, making low snarls and raging sounds as it steadily loses that battle between sanity and containment, but any second now it'll get it together and then do something else spectacularly destructive. There are much bigger silos and some of them probably contain industrial fuel mixtures or god-only-knows what else.

There was a picture in the centre of the placard, showing the positions of the ancient stones, where the sarsens and menhirs had once stood.

And just like that she has her plan.

First she has to get between the silos and the buildings, where there is a decent level of cover and plenty of objects to break up the Dragons line of sight. Behaving like this, all distracted and crazy, the Dragon may just not quite be able to remember its usual knacks of non-locality and pre-ception, falling back on brute force and clumsy failings like an angry smith with a hammer trying to swat the annoying midge that has invaded his forge. She just has to keep moving and never stay in sight for too long.

The long driveway that leads inside the former farm is paved with a compacted layer of dull grey angular gravel, but at the side of the road there's a ditch, to catch rainwater that runs off the metalled layer overlying the base course. A mere farm ditch wasn't classy enough for the government, so the conduit has been cut deep and lined with concrete, a row of wide aluminium grilles laid along it all the way to the first main building at the entrance.

Recalling the trick that worked so well with the dangerous men and the Bentleys, she sprints over to the nearest grille as the Dragon staggers and its muzzle swings away, pulls up the grille and drops inside. Your average farm ditch wouldn't be wide enough or deep enough to provide enough cover, but this drainage waterway is just wide and deep enough that she can hustle along inside it on all fours like one of her leonine ancestors. A layer of green molder and furry mossy plant growth lines the lower part of the inside walls, indicating that the average water level is only the few centimetres she is currently shimmying through. It's not that cold and it's even reasonably clean. At intervals, a depth marker bar has been incorporated into the walls, very professional, very British, precisely and neatly surveyed. She tries to squelch a slightly crazy giggle and scurries along.

Her tail keeps banging on the underside of the grilles.

One minute down, but well spent. At intervals, the Dragon screams and she clutches her head, then they swap and she keeps going instead. She reaches the near-point to the sweeping visitor-welcome portico of the entranceway, then times it carefully and darts inside.

The same building crew seems to have constructed the facade of both the cultist mansion she just left and the temple of government she's just entered. Someone has made a lot of money off the both of them and it shows.