In the distance there’s a small grey four-legged shape. As it gets nearer, the three little pigs can make out the lolling tongue, the small round black eyes.

‘Incoming,’ Desmond snaps. ‘Big bad wolf at bearing three-three-zero-mark-five-Alpha.’

Julian, the small pig, just has time to wire up the last few connections and throw the lever as the wolf reaches the outer perimeter of the security zone. Like all wolves, he doesn’t look such a big deal when viewed from a distance; just a grey, long-haired Alsatian with a long nose and sad eyes. (And, by the same token, Australia looks like it might be a nice place to live, when seen from space.)

‘Standing by,’ crackles the intercom in Julian’s trotter.

Julian takes a deep breath. He can’t clench his trotters because trotters don’t clench; but he folds them back as close to the knuckle as they’ll go. ‘On my mark,’ he mutters. ‘Steady. And, activate!’

Suddenly the air is alive with blue fire. The humming from the wires all but drowns out the wolf’s all-too-familiar little speech. On the cue blow your house down, Desmond flicks the toggle that controls the remotely operated traverse of the Planetcracker-class laser cannon. There’s a flash, like a fuse blowing in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and—

‘Missed,’ Desmond growls under his breath; then, into the intercom, ‘Julian, I’ve forgotten. How d’you set this thing for a wide-dispersal beam?’

‘Red dial on the instrument panel, three full turns clockwise,’ the intercom crackles back. ‘Get a move on, will you? He’s through the fence, God alone knows how. I wish someone’d explain to me how he manages to do it.’

‘Search me,’ Desmond admits, ‘I wasn’t watching. Must have got under it somehow. It’s all right, though, he’s walking straight into the Claymore field.’

‘Aha! At his command post, Julian clasps his front trotters over his head in a gesture of triumph. ‘This time he’s for it. All right, commencing remote detonation procedure on my command. And go!’

The Earth shakes; then it starts raining divots. Then, as the smoke clears, the three little pigs are just able to make out the shape of a vulpine tail wagging on the edge of the drawbridge.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Julian howls. ‘That’s impossible. An anorexic gnat could just have squeezed through on tiptoe if it’d had a copy of the minefield layout. All right, Desmond, turn on the cyanide gas. He’ll soon realise he’s just making things harder for himself.’

Desmond reaches for the dial; but before he has a chance to twist it, the wolf takes a deep breath. A huff, even.

‘I don’t like this,’ Eugene mutters, not looking up from the long bank of monitors in front of him. ‘I knew we should have spent the extra money and laid on air-to-surface support.’

‘Try calling Strategic Air Command just in case,’ Julian replies. ‘You never know, there may still be time…’

The wolf exhales, letting out just enough breath to shift a small, lightweight leaf or project a very thin smoke-ring halfway to the ceiling.

‘Oh Christ,’ Eugene groans. ‘He’s about to puff.’ Julian growls. ‘All right,’ he says grimly. ‘All power to primary deflector screens. Eugene, shut down the weapons systems if you have to, but keep those screens.

Puff. The ejected carbon dioxide buffets against the side of the house like a half-hearted assault with a limp feather duster. The wolf breathes in—

‘Exactly like the last time,’ Julian observes. ‘Hey, Desmond, why’re you taking so long with that damn gas?’

‘Should be through any sec—’

This time, thanks largely to the steel cladding, at least it was different. When the wolf blew out, instead of simply collapsing in a cloud of dust and flying masonry, the house crumples and twists like a squashed beer can. At first the metal stretches; then it begins to tear, and razor-edged seams unzip from the footings right up to the top storey windows, until the whole building peels back like a banana skin. Fortunately for them, the three little pigs are thrown clear at an early stage. They land, with more velocity than dignity, in their own moat, more or less at the same moment as the roof hits the ground.

‘Woof,’ says the wolf cheerfully.

Wearily the pigs roll onto their fronts and piggy-paddle their way to the bank of the moat.

‘It’s precisely this sort of thing that puts you off owning your own home,’ Desmond grunts bitterly, hauling himself up out of the water. ‘Mortgage interest relief is all very well, but maybe this time we should seriously think about renting somewhere instead.’

‘How about an underground bunker?’ Eugene says. ‘Even he’d be hard put to it to blow it down if it was underground.’

‘He’ll find a way, don’t you worry,’ Julian replies, picking a needle-sharp splinter of steel out of his ear. ‘What I want to know is, why? What harm have we ever done him? Is he just psychotic, or is he the Dirty Harry of the local planning department?’

‘Planning permission we got,’ Desmond points out. ‘They know me so well down at County Hall, I’ve even got my own mug with my name on it. No, I reckon the only course of action left to us is a bloody hard pre-emptive strike. Unless we want to be doing this for the rest of our lives, we’ve got to waste the bastard.’

Julian lifts his head sharply. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘you might just have something there.’

‘Why not? We’ve got precious little to lose, after all. And there’s three of us.’

‘Tell it to the chipolatas.’ Julian shakes himself, spraying water in all directions. ‘This isn’t something we can do ourselves, you know. Think about it; if we can’t nail that overgrown granddad-of-a-terrier with laser cannon and Claymore mines, then creeping up on him while he’s asleep and hitting him with a big stone’s probably not going to work either. No, if we’re going to do this, we’ll have to hire someone.’

Eugene’s little piggy eyes widen. ‘An assassin, you mean? A hit-pig?’

Julian nods. ‘Something like that. Only probably not a pig. And not an assassin. Villains hire assassins and we’re the good guys. Good guys hire champions.’

‘Ah.’ Desmond wrinkles his snout, a symptom of increased mental activity. ‘What you’re saying is, we need to hire an odd-numbered company of adventurers and soldiers of fortune, each of them a rough diamond with a heart of gold who’ll claim they’re only in it for the money but who nevertheless are revealed as having a deeply felt vocation to right wrongs and fight for justice, freedom and the rights of the underpig. Yes?’

‘You got it,’ Julian says. ‘Took the words right out of my snout.’

Eugene rubs his ear against a large stone. ‘Why do I get the feeling,’ he says mournfully, ‘that the word magnificent is just about to feature in this conversation?’

Julian looks at him. ‘You’re way ahead of me,’ he says. ‘What we need is the Seven.’

Desmond and Eugene ponder this suggestion for a moment. ‘You’re sure?’ Eugene asks. ‘You really think they’ll be up to it?’

‘Oh yes,’ Julian says confidently. ‘Just so long as they stand on a ladder.’

‘Mirror!’ screamed the wicked queen.

The mirror looked at her.

The face was gone. In its place was a nightmare of jumbled components; as if Baron Frankenstein had dropped the drawer he kept all the bits of face in, and by some random, million-monkeys-with-typewriters fluke they’d fallen in a pattern that wasn’t quite a face, but almost.

‘Bad command or file name,’ it croaked offensively. ‘Trees reply.’

She sighed, and switched it off again. Then she slowly turned her head and gave the girl a long, long stare.

‘Well,’ she said.

The girl looked at her shoes. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

‘You’re sorry,’ said the wicked queen. ‘You invaded my house, sabotaged my magic mirror and crashed the operating system for this entire dimension, and you’re sorry. That’s all right, then.’