“Well, congratulations, sir,” he heard himself say. And perhaps it’s the best that could have happened. If Khan and the others couldn’t save the whole house, at least we have our fucking shed in the back garden.

They returned to the base, and the corps spent the rest of the day unboxing and setting things up. There was a generator and petrol, though Lucas knew that wasn’t going to last long. There was accommodation to sort out, and he watched without much amusement as the pretty boys and girls played one-upmanship to get whichever were perceived as marginally better digs. There was more squabbling over the rota to muck out the privies and wash the dishes; Lucas reckoned Rove had brought him along as sergeant major as much as anything. Leaning on the tenuous authority he carried as someone who walked in Rove’s shadow, he waded in and started giving orders. There were plenty of mutinous looks, and he knew that whatever line these jackbooted children had been sold, it hadn’t included scrubbing the dunnies. They weren’t forces types, that was for sure. They hadn’t had that kind of obedience drilled into them. By the time night fell, Lucas was uncomfortably sure that he’d have to watch his back. When you told people they were the inheritors of the world, none of them imagined sharing.

Still, day one down and nobody had needed punching in the face, which felt like a victory of sorts. He retired to the mess hall, where some of the women were serving mac’n’cheese from cans. Hunting rota tomorrow, Lucas decided, because presumably most of the animals were edible and had no real fear of man. They could make it a good bonding exercise, maybe a reward for the best and boldest. Also tomorrow they could see about clearing ground for planting. There were books, Rove had said, on how to do it, and they could raid south for tinned goods—to keep them going until they’d figured it out. Lucas felt like going to investigate which crates contained the beer, but he reckoned that would be a dangerous precedent right now.

When the chorus of voices rose from outside, at first Lucas thought it was high spirits. Then more joined in and he recast it as panic and hurried outside. Because it was entirely possible that Rove was wrong about this world and an army of angry rhino-men or some damn thing had just broken out of the trees. No enemy was at the fences, though. Nobody was rushing about looking for where they’d put the guns. Instead, people were staring upwards, pointing. Voices that had been shouting had sunk to whispers by the time Lucas joined them.