The Woman Who Died a Lot

He was talking to Landen, but I already knew that Landen wouldn’t ever get into one again. Although his initial leg injury had been caused by to a land mine, it was the evac on a medical tiltrotor that had necessitated the partial amputation—the craft had crashed due to a gearbox failure sixteen miles short of the military hospital in Sevastopol, and those jeep-ridden sixteen miles, said Landen, were the most excruciating he had ever known. Still, that was almost thirty years ago, and tiltrotor technology had grown by leaps and bounds since then—especially after Mycroft became involved, which explained why they are no longer used militarily. I kissed Landen, we exchanged passwords again, and I climbed aboard the small craft as Finisterre spooled up the reactor, and few minutes later we had left Aldbourne behind us, passed overhead Marlborough and were skimming low across the Downs.

“How’s your day going?” asked Finisterre.

“Interesting so far,” I replied, and he smiled knowingly. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored.”

“No indeed,” I replied.

We swept past the single induction rail of the Southern Bullet Route and dropped down into the Vale of Pewsey. We flew on in silence for a few minutes until Finisterre called air-traffic control for transit permission into the Salisbury Danger Area and orbited twice around Urchfont while we waited for clearance. I had trained on Salisbury Plain myself on tracked vehicles before being dispatched to the Crimea aged only eighteen. We had been briefed never to stray near the Sisterhood’s hundredacre enclave, and it was hard to claim you didn’t know if you did— the convent’s tower soared two hundred feet above the plains, and the main Venerating Chamber was the size of an airship hangar.

“We’re in,” said Finisterre, and we headed off toward the convent, which even now dominated the landscape, though we were still five miles away. We circled the tower once before coming into a neat landing near the entrance, and while Finisterre conducted the power-down checks, I stepped clumsily out and looked around.

I had never been here before; few had. The Salisbury Plain order of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster was the hub from where all other orders received instructions and to where all funds were sent. The Lobsterhood had been the nation’s most populous religious order, with over a hundred convents across the land, and although the Global Standard Deity’s unifying action had subsumed many of those within the order, a few had held out, Salisbury among them. But all that defiance had come to nought the day that He had revealed Himself and confirmed that yes, the game was up, there was only One, and all the silly lobster stuff was indeed transparent nonsense, and cower in the presence of Him. The fact that it was a He after all caused a lot of problems with the feminists. But it might have been worse— He could have turned out to have been French, too.

“My name is Sister Megan,” said the greeter nun who had stepped ahead to receive us, “and you are fourteen seconds late. We cannot abide unpunctuality here in the Lobsterhood.”

“We had to orbit for clearance into the zone,” I explained. “My name is Thursday Next.”

Sister Megan gave a sharp cry and covered her mouth with her hand. I had to get used to this. Joffy’s efforts with the GSD had not always been welcomed, and indeed, before the Lord’s Revealment, over a billion people had wanted him shredded as a heretic.

“Causing trouble already?” asked Finisterre as the greeter nun ran back inside the lobster-shaped double doors.

“I think it’s the connection with my brother. There were many religious orders who found it difficult to accept that they had been idolizing clearly demonstrable falsehoods for hundreds of years.”

“Like the notion of the all-redeeming, ever-knowing and oftnipping ‘Big Lobster’?”

“One of the more sensible ones,” I replied. “You’d better do the talking from now on, and refer to me by my married name.”

But it didn’t come to that. No sooner had we taken two steps toward the convent than another nun had come running out of the doors firing a small pistol and screaming at the top of her voice that I was a ‘procreating girl dog,’ but not using those precise words. I was used to being called that, of course, but rarely by a nun. She had loosed off two shots by the time she’d been adroitly rugger-tackled to the ground by two other nuns, and Finisterre and I, caught out by the sudden violence, had not had time to move a muscle and had simply stood there as one of the shots passed between us at head level with a zip and the second passed cleanly through my shoulder bag, penetrating not just my purse and notebook but also a picture of Landen.