The Colony Read Free Page B

their windswept, granite home New Hope.
    And for 15 years, the community thrived. At first, it did so purely on a subsistence level. Then a trade of sorts developed. Sheep were bred and wool was gathered and spun and the resultant garments sold. Whisky was distilled. And then the people of New Hope Island simply vanished.
    No bodies were ever washed up on the mainland. There was no wreckage from boats. When curious neighbours went to investigate, they found the dwellings of the community intact. There was food on the tables and recent fires in their hearths. Books were left open at the page their readers had reached. The domestic beasts still grazed what little pasture land they had. But there were no people. Every man, woman and child had gone without trace.
    To Alexander McIntyre, media magnate billionaire and ardent believer in extraterrestrial life, the answer to the question of what had happened was as obvious as the solution to the mystery of the Marie Celeste. He believed the same fate had met the crew of that ship as had befallen the New Hope community.
    Privacy was the hallmark of alien abduction. There were probably many other unrecorded examples down the centuries. But the clue was obvious, wasn’t it? The visitors did not welcome witnesses when they took the humans away. New Hope had met those ideal conditions, in which they liked to harvest, perfectly.
    He had to admit that the troubling apparition caught by David Shanks’ cine camera did not easily fit into this scenario. But it would. When they got to New Hope and his team began to put the pieces of the picture together, the floating girl would find a place in it all somewhere.
    Ballantyne, he considered something of an enigma. Even given the harsh standards of the time, and the brutality common in seafaring life, he must have been a cruel man. The slaves were manacled and packed in rows on the voyage to be sold in the West Indies and America and many of those stored below decks did not survive the ordeal.
    The mortality rate was shocking. They were demonstrably fellow human beings, the argument Wilberforce used, going further and calling them brothers in the biblical sense.
    Personal enlightenment had cost Ballantyne his wife. She preferred marriage to a prosperous master mariner to life with a self-styled preacher with a taste for hellfire rhetoric delivered on street corners. Losing her had clearly not broken his heart or deterred him from his elected path, however.
    What had made Ballantyne tick? McIntyre wondered had the ship’s captain turned religious leader kept a diary on New Hope? He must have been in the habit of keeping a log from his old profession. A diary would only have been the natural expression of what McIntyre suspected had been a substantial ego. What a find that would be, if it still existed to be unearthed.
     
    James Carrick briefed Lucy Church after lunch. In principle she had a choice about taking the assignment but in reality, neither of them felt she could turn it down. They were both familiar with the numbers, since their livelihoods depended on how McIntyre interpreted them and what decisions he made as a consequence. His business was buoyant given the general state of the economy. It had shown a 12 per cent profit in the previous year. But losses at the Chronicle had amounted to almost 20 million pounds. He was paying a lot for the prestige of ownership of a flagship Fleet Street title.
    ‘This story will cost him a fortune to orchestrate,’ Lucy said, after Carrick had told her about the array of experts on board and the security team already on their way to New Hope.
    ‘I think it will show a profit,’ Carrick said. ‘It’s a world exclusive.’
    ‘Only if it’s got the legs to run,’ she said.
    ‘It’s your job to help give it the legs. I want a thousand words for tomorrow’s edition on the human tragedy of the lost pioneers. Or lost apostles, or missionaries or whatever you think calling them will generate the