It was hard to grasp. But, perversely, it was easier to believe from orbit. Everything would be lost, from the history and culture of Britain to ... to everything. His brother, his relatives - the ones he liked, the ones he hated - would be gone. Everyone he knew would be gone; their individuality stolen by the virus. They would be nothing. Less than nothing. The power struggles below would be meaningless. Human culture, good or bad, would be erased. Art and drama, literature and pulp ... it would all be gone. The survivors, if there were any, would be nothing more than host-bodies. The virus had to be stopped.
And if that meant serving as an admiral, if that meant giving up his command to take up a role that no one else could do, then that was what he had to do. He would do everything in his power to stop the virus.
He took a long breath, then turned away. He had work to do. He had his duty.
And he would mourn the dead in private.
The End
The Ark Royal Universe Will Return In
The Lion and the Unicorn
Coming Soon
Afterword
When I wrote the first three trilogies in the Ark Royal series, I deliberately intended to have the war - as seen through the main characters - start and finish within the trilogy. This time, I decided to do things differently. Invincible would see the start of the war, and fight a number of major actions, but she wouldn’t see the end of the war. The final trilogy - provisionally entitled The Lion and the Unicorn - will continue the story of the Third Interstellar War.
I’m not sure - yet -when I will begin writing. My health isn’t good at the moment, unfortunately, and I have a number of other projects to complete. Please bear with me a little.
And now you’ve read the book, I have a couple of favours to ask.
First, it’s getting harder to earn a living through indie writing these days, for a number of reasons (my health is one of them, unfortunately). If you liked this book, please post a review wherever you bought it; the more reviews a book gets, the more promotion.
Second, I’ve attached chapter samples from books written by two of my friends. Have a read - and, if you like them, feel free to check out the complete books.
Thank you for your time.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Edinburgh, 2019
Appendix: Glossary of UK Terms and Slang
[Author’s Note: I’ve tried to define every incident of specifically UK slang (and a handful of military phases/acronyms) in this glossary, but I can’t promise to have spotted everything. If you spot something I’ve missed, please let me know and it will be included.]
Aggro - slang term for aggression or trouble, as in ‘I don’t want any aggro.’
Beasting/Beasted - military slang for anything from a chewing out by one’s commander to outright corporal punishment or hazing. The latter two are now officially banned.
Beat Feet - Run, make a hasty departure.
Binned - SAS slang for a prospective recruit being kicked from the course, then returned to unit (RTU).
Boffin - Scientist
Bootnecks - slang for Royal Marines. Loosely comparable to ‘Jarhead.’
Bottle - slang for nerve, as in ‘lost his bottle.’
Borstal - a school/prison for young offenders.
Combined Cadet Force (CCF) - school/youth clubs for teenagers who might be interested in joining the military when they become adults.
Compo - British army slang for improvised stews and suchlike made from rations and sauces.
CSP - Combat Space Patrol.
Donkey Wallopers - slang for the Royal Horse Artillery.
DORA - Defence of the Realm Act.
Fortnight - two weeks. (Hence the terrible pun, courtesy of the Goon Show, that Fort Knight cannot possibly last three weeks.)
‘Get stuck into’ - ‘start fighting.’
Head Sheds - SAS slang for senior officers.
‘I should coco’ - ‘you’re damned right.’
Jobsworth - a bureaucrat who upholds petty rules even at the expense of humanity or common sense.
Kip - sleep.
Levies - native troops. The Ghurkhas are the last remnants of native troops from British India.
Lorries - trucks.
Mocktail/Mocktails - non-alcoholic cocktails.
MOD - Ministry of Defence. (The UK’s Pentagon.)
Order of the Garter - the highest order of chivalry (knighthood) and the third most prestigious honour (inferior only to the Victoria Cross and George Cross) in the United Kingdom. By law, there can be only twenty-four non-royal members of the order at any single time.
Panda Cola - Coke as supplied by the British Army to the troops.
RFA - Royal Fleet Auxiliary
Rumbled - discovered/spotted.
SAS - Special Air Service.
SBS - Special Boat Service
Spotted Dick - a traditional fruity sponge pudding with suet, citrus zest and currants served in thick slices with hot custard. The name always caused a snigger.
Squaddies - slang for British soldiers.
Stag - guard duty.
STUFT - ‘Ships Taken Up From Trade,’ civilian ships requisitioned for government use.
TAB (tab/tabbing) - Tactical Advance to Battle.
Tearaway - boisterous/badly behaved child, normally a teenager.
UKADR - United Kingdom Air Defence Region.
Walt - Poser, i.e. someone who claims to have served in the military and/or a very famous regiment. There’s a joke about 22 SAS being the largest regiment in the British Army - it must be, because of all the people who claim to have served in it.
Wanker - Masturbator (jerk-off). Commonly used as an insult.
Wank/Wanking - Masturbating.
Yank/Yankee - Americans
And now, take a look at Leo Champion’s latest, Warlord of New York City:
In the twenty-second century, global civilization has moved into networks of arcology-skyscrapers that tower hundreds of stories above streets abandoned to anarchy. Inside the arkscrapers, a neo-Puritan cult of social justice rules absolutely; on the streets, feral gangs raid between feuding industrial tenements.
Diana Angela is a hereditary executive in the bureaucracy that runs the world, with a secret life as an assassin on the streets. A burned-out idealist, she’s long ago given up on trying to change the world – the best intentions of the past have only led to greater misery.
And she has no reason to think precinct boss Jeff Hammer’s intentions are even good. A former mercenary who may be a military genius, Hammer’s narrowly taken control of a small tenement. Now he’s facing vengeful exiles, aggressive neighbors, and uncertain internal politics.
Which might be the least of his problems now that he’s drawn the attention of one of the city’s most dangerous women…
Chapter Four
Traffic moved on the city streets at night, but carefully. Enclosed vehicles or semi-enclosed ones, modified with hand rails and running boards so that escorting troops could ride on their outsides. Sometimes they were led by advance bikes whose role it was to spot or trip any ambush; those guys tended to be twitchy with their flashguns. Foot traffic – anything that couldn’t outrun a streetganger or sewerganger ambush had better be prepared to avoid or fight it – moved by stealth or in numbers.
Stealth had always been fine for Diana Angela; streetgangers were practical and eminently self-interested, and probably wouldn’t bother some cloaked loner who looked like they could put up a fight but didn’t look wealthy enough to justify risking death over. Her implant’s thermal vision let her spot and avoid lurking groups of them anyway, because you could never be too sure. She carefully skirted around more than one potential trouble spot as she made her way through the uncontrolled country of uninhabitable high buildings south of Times Square.
As she’d surfaced she’d taken a dark silk skirt and shawl from the biggest of her pouches, cloaking herself as the crones and the crippled did. People would assume she was one, un
less they scanned her or noted her boots. The dark shrouds, which would rip easily if someone grabbed them in a fight, gave her a degree of anonymity without compromising agility, and she moved swiftly through the dark streets.
Floodlights covered the approaches to Times Square, though. It was familiar enough at night, but still unsettling in her sudden vulnerability to the snipers on the wall that blocked most of Eighth Avenue immediately south of Thirty-Eighth Street. She fell in behind a three-vehicle convoy – some VIP in a black town car, guarded by two pickup trucks whose trays were loaded with musket-armed tenement soldiers who seemed relieved to have made it to safety.
Just behind her, and she hustled to get in front of them, was a convoy from some other tenement, a hundred ragged and starving tenement workers pulling five wagons loaded with refined scrap, guarded by a company of several dozen musket-toting tenement troops who seemed just as happy as the ones in the pickup trucks to have made it safely through the dark streets. The industrial slaves of the convoy who could crowded ahead to get in sooner, moving around her through the one-lane-wide gate in the wall across Eighth.
Midtown’s guards wore black body armor, shined boots and black-visored riot helmets, and carried better weapons than most tenement soldiers’ pipe muskets. Two of the four soldiers posted just inside the barrier had pump-action shotguns; the other grunt had a scoped rifle and the sergeant, with three gold chevrons pinned to each shoulder of his chainmail T-shirt, cradled a drum-fed submachinegun. They didn’t bother to disarm the tenement soldiers riding guard on the convoy ahead of her; in fact, they didn’t even bother to sneer at the convoy guards, which in the past the Association’s troops had. It would go badly on the visiting guards’ home tenement if there was trouble here.
Diana Angela was fairly certain that if the sergeant didn’t have an explant under that riot helmet of his, he had an implant scanning for whatever metallics people had under their clothes. But her weapons were nothing special for the city, so the Midtown guards paid no mind.
Sometimes they did stop her, mostly when they realized she was a pretty young woman they could feel up. Slapping them wasn’t a good idea but you could buy your way out of a search; it would just be cash she didn’t appreciate having to put in some randy thug’s pocket. And she had to be careful about dismissing them as randy thugs; Roman Kalashov’s men had murdered the writer John Kiska four years ago, burned him screaming alive on the steps of the Public Library not far from here. They were not to be taken lightly.
But this time they either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she was no raff crone. She was in amongst the neon and the noise of Times Square, a party that ran twenty-four seven inside the gates of Midtown. There was the hustle of the markets to the left, through what had once been the Port Authority bus terminal between Fortieth and Forty-Second Street, the Independent Hotel rising up to her right on Forty-Second through Forty-Fifth.
From street level to tenth floor the Independent was the same garish blaze of neon and digital billboards as the rest of Times Square, some of them advertising products that had not been affordable on the streets for a century. Above that, the hotel reached a hundred and some stories, half the size of the shorter arkscrapers but connected by skyways to their network while still accessible from the street. It was the only building on Manhattan that allowed arkies and streeters to meet face to face and it was the most secure, most neutral place in the conurbation because of that.
There were occasionally arkies in this crowd, although rarely; it was easy to spot the slumming arkies because of all the personal security they had. They surrounded themselves with platoons of the bodyguards who hung out in the Independent’s lobbies and charged extortionately by street standards for muscle, although to a US-15 or -18 it would be pocket change. Across from the Hotel were bars and clubs, lines in front of some of them.
Vehicle traffic passed slowly through the mobs of people, although some of the tenement bosses had footmen with batons to beat a path. Others rode sedan chairs, surrounded by guards that elbowed a way forwards. There were streetgangers with their blades peace-bonded, pushing their supermarket carts of sorted trash toward one of the Exchanges Midtown encompassed. There were ragged raff workers from across the city, pulling carts or given time off; there were bucket-shop scrip exchangers and a hundred kinds of hustler. It was eight pm but aside from a neon tint to the light it might have been eight am; this place was always in shadow anyway, but the lights made up for that.
Don’t mind me, Diana Angela thought as she made her way past a group of boisterously drunk tenement high-ups in expensive suits with meaningless – the highest tastes in street fashion had always struck her reserved, upper-class self as being tacky, although saying that aloud could get you killed down here – gold bling on their shoulders, aping the insignia of a world that had abandoned their ancestors more than a century ago. Just another raff chick in a hood, hiding some injury you probably don’t want to look too closely at.
* * *
She remembered her first venture up to the streets, driven by curiosity after years of observing from below as she killed vermin after vermin, developing her skills with every success and avenging Ian that much more. She’d found her way during the daytime into tenement bars and coffee houses in Times Square and then Greenwich Village, started to learn the ways of the city’s politics.
They read Charles Dickens on the streets, and a hundred other authors banned or lost to obscurity upstairs. They read Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair and Jack London and HG Wells and Karl Marx, and the Marx was enlightening certain young members of the streets’ upper class to the fact that the raff were in chains and it was their duty, as the intellectual vanguard, to break those chains.
It had been an invigorating time, Greenwich Village in the late 2170s. The tenements’ rulers were at comfortable peace, which had made them prosperous and lax. Ideas had flowed with the coffee and wine, with texts unknown in the arkscrapers and books forbidden by the authorities on the streets. Because etexts and printings of John Kiska were to be found, a brilliant writer who had emerged from the streets themselves.
The man himself was in hiding, two million dollars on his head but still always producing new stories, which came out through underground channels of people who knew people. There were printouts and the young tenement aristocrats, younger children mostly of underbosses and senior associates whose elder siblings were soldiers, shared them with the raff. A lot of the raff had basic literacy; they could read Kiska’s plain, clear, tenement language – his descriptions of squalor that every tenement worker knew in his own life, but had imagined better elsewhere. Kiska’s subject matter had been tenement life, but his message had been: It’s this bad everywhere, but it will get better if you make it better. The people responsible for your misery can be killed.
It had been all over the city, the spirit of the late ‘70s when a better world had seemed possible despite, upstairs, the purging of her visionary mentor Lucius Theron for daring to suggest radical change from above. If it would not happen from above then it could happen from below, she has believed at the time. She had fallen in love with Alex Thomson, son of an underboss but an intellectual with a fiery charisma that had convinced her of it – the world that she lived in was broken. Hundreds of millions lived in squalor on the streets, but the boot holding them down could be thrown off!
She missed the blind optimism of those days, half a decade past now. John Kiska had been killed on the steps of Midtown’s Library Terrace, dragged out of a hidden basement by bounty hunters and executed by Roman Kalashov’s personal soldiers. His death had been the spark that had led to the Greenwich Village Commune, which would be four years ago this May First…
She turned her mind firmly away. She was not going to think about the fucking Commune.
* * *
Roman Kalashov owned Times Square, but his troops with their fancy automatic weapons controlled some areas more thoroughly than others. Or, put another way as Diana Angela
turned down an alley where the neon’s glare was only a reflection on glass and steel in the darkness: some areas paid more vig, and got left alone.
She recognized some of the faces in doorways, whores and madams watching the street pass by. One or two of them called out to her; she made noises of recognition, as alert here as she’d been in the sewers because these alleys could be almost as dangerous.
Down a flight of stairs to a heavy steel door manned by a bouncer with a mouthpiece. She pulled the hood off and looked Nestor in the eye. The burly man gave a a slight nod and murmured something into his mouthpiece. The door slid open. The Last Stand paid Kalashov’s enforcers extra vig to stay well away; it was one of the less regulated places in Times Square, and it had become her home more than home.
There were traveling mercenaries and bikers; there were hitmen and soldiers and the girls who serviced them, the girls who didn’t operate in their own right. There were enough of those to make grabby hands think twice about her, and she made her way through the crowded tavern floor without much cause for concern, although she felt eyes on her.
People knew to feel her up with only their eyes for the most part, although every once in a while you got some idiot stranger who thought it would be fun to pat the ass or the tits of the hot blonde. Much of the time they backed off when they noticed her weapons, far more than the usual holdout pistol or blade that a lot of the call-girls had. Sometimes she had to kick the shit out of someone.
The Right of the Line Page 41
