Prelude Transit (short story)

Prelude Transit was, as the name suggested, a prelude to Transit by Ben Aaronovitch. It did not appear in the published novel.

Summary
An old man is forcibly retired, given a country home and assigned a nurse. He uses a wheelchair, wears an electronic bracelet that monitors his life signs, and suffers from nightmares. A young man (who the old man considers a boy) wearing a UN uniform begins watching over him but the old man, suffering clearly from dementia, no longer recognises who this is.

Eventually, the 'boy' helps the old man mount a horse which had also been put out to pasture, and during the ride both the man and the horse die from the exertion. The old man is buried with full military honours. General Bambera drinks at the wake to try and sleep, only to be woken to hear of an explosion in America.

Characters

 * Old man (implicitly Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart)
 * Boy (implicitly Lethbridge-Stewart's grandson)
 * General Bambera (implicitly Winifred Bambera)
 * Bambera's husband (implicitly Ancelyn)

Continuity

 * Bambera is informed that a mountain in America had just exploded, implied to be the events of the end of PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Warhead. As fits the events of that story, there's heavy pollution in the world and they can't always safely wheel the old man outside.
 * There is a military command around "the school", implicitly making this dacha near UNIT Central Command as the then-recent Battlefield novelisation put it underneath an old Swiss school.