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By Root 1087 0

for about three months while they ran tests on him, did scans, you name it. Some of the best brain specialists the NHS had to offer came to examine him. Some private guys as well, because he was such a mystery and his case was getting famous in the medical community. No one could figure it out. My gran brought in old photos to show him, his medals, stuff like that. He looked at it and nothing rang a bell. His mates came and he hadn't the foggiest who they were. They told him about things they'd done together, hoping to tweak a memory. Not a flicker. Didn't recognise his own children, or me. It was bizarre the way he looked at me, studying me like he knew he should know me but just couldn't think how. Like when you see someone's face in the street and it's familiar but you can't put a name to it or figure out if you ever actually met them."

"And he stayed like that the rest of his life?"

"Pretty much. His whole memory gone, his whole life, apart from scraps, a few bits and bobs. All the major stuff - fwoosh!"

"Poor bugger."

"Him and my gran got sort of to know each other again, and they carried on living together, but they was like flatmates more than husband and wife. He adjusted, although of course he was never the same again. And we're sure the bomb tests were to blame. Couldn't've been anything else. The radiation planted this, like, time-delay computer virus in his head, and one day it went off and crashed his hard drive and he had to reboot from scratch."

"Don't suppose he tried suing the MoD."

"Yeah, like that ever works."

"Yeah. 'Bomb tests. What bomb tests?'"

"Or, 'You knew what you were getting into when you volunteered. You take the consequences.' I guess that's where my, like, ambivalent attitude to the service comes from. We give everything, they treat us like dogshit in return."

"Not here, though," I said.

"Seems that way. And Gid, don't worry. Seriously. We won't fuck this up. I've got your back, bruv."

I patted his scarred cheek. "Mate, I know you have. I've no worries on that score."

Utgard loomed ahead. The pilots summoned me up to the cockpit for a squint. It was like some amazing dream-city, all shimmering spires and gleaming domed roofs. It rose sheer from the plain of ice, and it was ice itself, white and pale blue and in some places transparent but shot through with sparkling rainbow glints. There were layers to it, layers within layers folded together like the petals of a rose, and hundreds of cylindrical towers capped with spikes, reminiscent of minarets. In all it looked delicate and sturdy at the same time. Unshakeable. Unbreachable. Eternal.

Fair took my breath away.

"I'd never have imagined..." I said. "The frost giants are such honking great clodhoppers, but this..."

"Not bad, is it?" said the first pilot, Flight Lieutenant Jensen. Ex-RAF, and a decent enough bloke. Posh but not stuck-up like a lot of Blue Job flyboys were. Same applied to his co-pilot, Flying Officer Thwaite, who did insist on wearing the most annoying moustache in the world ever. Like a miniature bog brush fastened to his upper lip. He might as well have had I am a bell-end tattooed there instead. And he and Jensen were permanently deadpan, as though there was some massive private joke going on that only they were in on. But still, like I said, decent enough, the pair of them.

"Tall as Canary Wharf, some of those towers," Thwaite said. "And the whole thing's got to cover several hundred hectares, wouldn't you say, Jenners? For what's essentially a castle, that's pretty damn sizeable."

Jensen nodded. "Well-fortified, too. Only one way in or out, far as I can tell - that gate, with the bridge in front. Otherwise, rampart walls a couple of hundred metres high and a huge crevasse all the way round the perimeter. You could defend the place for ever and no one would get in."

"But we're not laying siege to it," I pointed out. "Just going up and knocking on the front door."

"Your funeral," Thwaite offered out of the side of his mouth.

"You'd like us to do a flyby, correct?" said Jensen.

"Make a meal of it,"