The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [0]
Novels
The Hope
Escardy Gap (with Peter Crowther)
Days
The Foreigners
Untied Kingdom
Worldstorm
Provender Gleed
The Pantheon Trilogy
The Age Of Ra
The Age of Zeus
Novellas
How The Other Half Lives
Gig
Dead Brigade
Collections of Short Fiction
Imagined Slights
Diversifications
For Younger Readers
The Web: Computopia
Wings
The House of Lazarus
Ant God
Cold Keep
Kill Swap
Free Runner
The 5 Lords Of Pain series
Writing as Jay Amory
The Clouded World series
The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson
Pirates Of The Relentless Desert
Darkening For A Fall
Empire Of Chaos
If it's not raining we're not training and if it's not snowing we're not going.
- modern British military motto
First published 2010 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN(mobi): 978-1-84997-230-7
ISBN(epub): 978-1-84997-231-4
Copyright © James Lovegrove 2010
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing
AGE OF ODIN
James Lovegrove
Solaris Books
One
So there I was, driving through the worst snow storm I'd ever seen, in a crappy rental Vauxhall Astra, with Abortion in the passenger seat offering useless advice and trying to get the stereo to work and, when he wasn't doing that, rolling up joint after joint and smogging the car up with skunk fumes. Our rate of progress was roughly ten miles an hour. It was getting dark. We didn't know exactly where we were going.
At what point, I asked myself, was I going to accept the fact that this was the worst plan in the entire history of mankind?
Knowing me, never. Stubborn, I was. Pigheaded, Gen used to say. "Except," she would add, "that's an insult to pigs. Compared to you, they're quite reasonable animals."
The snow filled the windscreen like static on an untuned TV. The Astra kept slewing and lurching, its wheels somehow finding every slippery patch on the road, despite my best efforts. Every half mile or so we'd pass another abandoned vehicle whose driver had had the common sense to admit defeat and dump their ride by the roadside and head off for shelter on foot rather than blunder on. This storm wasn't letting up any time soon. The forecasters predicted it'd last at least another twenty-four hours and maybe longer. Blizzard conditions. Batten down the hatches, Britain. The future's white. No one with any brains is going anywhere.
"Can't be much further now," said Abortion. His eyes were pink and glassy from the weed.
"How can you be so sure, if the place isn't even on the map and all you've got to go on is a bunch of written directions?"
"Dunno, just am. Call it a feeling." He offered me a pull on the joint he'd just sparked up. Abortion's joints were unique. To save on Rizlas, he used segments of pages from a Bible he'd been given by a maiden aunt for his confirmation, so each one had little lines of text running round it. He'd started doing this when he left school. The paper was thin and slick and could be sealed with a lick - just right for the job. Now his Bible had about a hundred pages left in it. He was nearly through the New Testament and coming up to the Book of Revelation.
"Bit of herbal mood elevation?" he asked.
"No, ta."
"Come on, Gid, one little toke won't hurt."
"I've got to concentrate. Need a clear head."
"This clears your head," Abortion insisted through a blur of exhaled smoke.
I was tempted. But those days were gone. The booze, the spliff, the hazy mornings, the lost nights... They belonged