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Trinity Crossing had long been a nominated ‘redoubt position of last resort’ in Colonial military training exercises. Not that anybody had ever imagined any invading force could threaten a position this far north of west, which was probably why nobody had ever thought about lengthening the runway at its only air strip. This was hardly surprising since it was obvious – searingly so – to Bill Fielding, who hardly considered himself to be any kind of strategist, that the Colonial military had given precious little thought to anything in particular about what happened next if their ‘tripwire’ front line was breached in one, let alone all along the line. ‘Tripwire’ was one of those weasel military words, inferring that if the enemy ‘tripped’ the ‘wire’ and thereby, announced his coming, then forces, pre-positioned and equipped reserves, behind ‘the front’ would – as if by magic – miraculously respond and repulse them. However, when push came to shove there had been no reserves, no pre-positioned forces, significant or otherwise, capable of halting, or even threatening to inconvenience the invaders. In the air and on the land, and from what he could guess, at sea, the Spanish had pretty much swept all before them!

There was an old – two or three decades at least – faded map on the end wall of what had been the ‘club house’, mess room and bar of the ramshackle pre-war aerodrome. Rumour had it that the nearby town was ‘dry’, run by a gang of neo-puritan settlers – the country wing, or to be more charitable, country cousins of the East Coast ‘separate development’, or Getrennte Entwicklung, societies of the more extreme wing of the Lutheran Church, of which Bill had been a practicing member most of his adult life until Empire Day, two years ago. Bill had stared at that map; any fool could tell, even from that old, probably not very well-drawn map, that Trinity Crossing, the arroyos and valleys of its western and eastern forks to the north, in no small measure because of the flooding that was likely to inundate the countryside to its south, was potentially excellent ground upon which to consolidate and build-up forces for a counter-attack, perhaps, sometime in the early summer.

The land around Trinity Crossing was generally flat, good land cruiser and artillery country apart from where the rivers cut through the terrain.  A great limestone chalk ridge – the White Rock Escarpment – rose over two hundred feet north to south and effectively, cut off any line of march on the key ‘crossing’ of the Trinity River – the only one for tens of miles north or south – from an enemy coming from the south west. A few mortars, a couple of anti-tank guns and a company of rifleman could hold off an Army for days, possibly for weeks from those heights.

Always assuming, that was, that there had been any reserves in the first place.

Which there had not been, nor would there be in the foreseeable future because clearly, what was patently obvious to a relatively newly-minted non-commissioned officer in the CAF, had not been in any way as obvious to the all-powerful imperial masterminds who were actually responsible for the defence of the Commonwealth of New England.

The rain hammered down, and water from the leaks in the roof trickled and dripped into ever-widening puddles on the dirt floor.

“Okay, chaps!” Greg Torrance called out. “Listen up, please!”

Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.

Bill Fielding’s pilot looked around.

Torrance was a tall man, supposedly a big advantage for a Goshawk jockey because it meant he had long levers to stand on the rudder pedals and haul back on the stick, not to mention it meant he sat higher in the cockpit and was better able to see trouble coming from farther away than a shorter man. He had been fleshier when he and Bill first encountered each other but then, so had Bill; they had been down to hard tack and brackish water by the time they had made their escape.

Having discovered last night that there were no working radio sets at the field, Bill had already surveyed the other aircraft, and all the wrecks, with a view to salvaging the components required to put at least the communications deficiency right.

“Bill’s in the process of cobbling together a radio set,” Greg Torrance announced, “so, we should soon be back in contact with civilisation. In the meantime, we need to get weaving.”

There were murmurs of dissent.

“I’m in charge, now,” the pilot went on, an edge in his voice. “You chaps are in uniform, and I’m the ranking officer. I don’t care what has happened down on the Border. You and I are subject to military discipline and you will obey my orders...”

It was uncanny that this was the very moment that the door at the far end of the shack creaked open and a tall, distinguished-looking man accompanied by three equally soaking wet companions, one of whom was a blond-haired woman, stamped into the building, shaking the rain off their broad-rim hats.