by Andy Graham
Further up the corridor, a mop-bot had managed to get its many arms entangled with the metal pipes carpeting the ceiling. A sweating technician punched codes into his control unit as more units arrived to clean up the mess. A growing procession of impassive steel and rubber machines trundled down the corridor. They were as oblivious to the dazed figure lurching along in an oversized red jumper as she was to them. Rose hurried past them, determined to leave her choice and her signature behind her.
She made it as far as the first corner before the emptiness imploded. Watched by her silent guards, Rose Franklin collapsed, tears pooling on the freshly mopped floor.
Beth massaged her temples as she studied the forms. She was still not sure they had finally resolved this. “Why should Rose be any different to anyone else?” she asked herself. “It’s better this way, for everyone. Isn’t that the fair way to do things – shared responsibility, rewards and risk?”
“Your nouns are in alphabetical order again, Beth.” Rick Franklin’s voice, thick with poisonous dust from the mines, whispered deep in her head.
Her hand strayed up to the mole on her nose. “You’re gone, Rick,” she said softy. “I’ve looked for you. You’re gone. Let me move on.”
With a last glance at the signature, she scooped up the screen. Rose’s choice had also made Bethina’s life easier, though she wouldn’t dare say that aloud, not even down here. The chair hissed as she stood and pushed it away with the back of her knees. “I have to get that noise fixed,” she muttered and made her way to the door behind her desk. The one with the useless handle that Rose had been staring at.
One of the more useful features of the old hospital was the series of service corridors behind the rooms. They ran in parallel with the public corridors but were only accessible through the offices. It meant Beth met very few people on her journey to her private office at the top of the building, no mop-bots either. They still weren’t permitted here after the incident a few weeks ago.
After a wearying climb up the emergency stairs, she crashed down onto a worn leather sofa. Kicking off her shoes, she lay back and stretched out in the sun.
“How did it go?” asked a voice from next to the window.
“Good,” Beth replied between snatched breaths. “It seems fitting that Rose’s twins are the first ones we start the experiments on.”
“She agreed?” The disbelief was obvious.
“Eventually. She’ll give one boy up on its first nameday. We’ll send that one to Camp X517. She can bring up the second in her village of Tear.”
“Where we will keep an eye on him.”
Beth nodded her agreement. A dog padded out of the shadows and lay down by her side. The room was silent for a long time. By the time the other woman spoke again, Beth’s pulse had settled back to normal.
“Any regrets?”
“I don’t think so,” Beth replied. But that also depends on how the changes I made behind your back work out. “You?”
The slim figure turned, oil-black hair gleaming in the light of the moons. “Regrets?” Blue eyes studied Beth. ”You should know me better than that, my dear sister. Of course I don’t have any regrets. Things are about to become interesting.”
The story continues in A Brother’s Secret
A young soldier. An unknown brother. A hidden truth.
Corporal Ray Franklin is respected by his colleagues but distant to his friends. He serves his country faithfully, without asking the questions that keep him awake. But when he discovers he has a brother he never knew, his loyalty is stretched to breaking point.
Ray’s quest to find his family’s hidden truth rips his world apart. He is injured and betrayed, hunted by his own government as he loses those nearest to him. And in a top secret research camp, Ray unearths a secret that punches a hole through the society he once fought to protect.
Set in a future with parallels to life in the 21st century, A Brother’s Secret is Book One of The Misrule series. Part political suspense, part dystopian fiction, part sci-fi action novel, this slow-burning thriller is a compelling, morally ambiguous tale from British author Andy Graham.
Will Ray Franklin risk his country’s future for his own past? Read on to find out.
A map (of sorts)
Instead of a real map, which rarely show up well in eBooks, this ‘written map’ should help you imagine where and when this story takes place.
Fifty years from now, a second moon is ripped into the orbit of planet Earth. The tidal upheaval drowns much of the world. Once the waters retreat, the survivors emerge to find that most of what they knew has been lost. Humanity is reset to a technological year zero.
Post-Flood, as humanity scrabbles to re-establish itself, the still partly-submerged country of England (UK) is renamed Brettia. At an unspecified time before The Misrule starts, Brettia becomes Ailan.
Approximately two thousand years after the Great Flood, we find ourselves in this story. A large part of the action is based in the triangle formed by London, Oxford and Cambridge – now known as Effrea-Tye, Axeford and Camp X517.
Ailan’s territory has spread west, taking a chunk out of its neighbour Mennai (Wales). After centuries of shifting fortunes, Ailan is dominant and Mennai exists as a form of protectorate.
The Donian Mountains (the Snowdonian National Park with a few extra crags and folds and mines thrown in for the sake of the story) straddle the border between the two countries. A race of people from the Middle East took refuge there before the Flood hit. A combination of the harsh conditions and being caught between the Ailan-Mennai feuding, have led to the Donian people developing a proud, warlike tradition in order to survive.
This is a familiar future: the infrastructure and vehicles are similar to what we have now, as are the weapons and medicine. Fragments of pre-Flood history survive, along with some traditions and technology. There are also differences. Religion has been banned, at least officially. Science is in the ascendant. Government control is ubiquitous.
Most human traits remain, however, both those we aspire to and those we succumb to. This story is built around two of those timeless needs: love and power.
The cast of A Father’s Choice
The Settlements/ Free Towns/ Bucket Towns
Tear
Frederick ‘Rick’ Franklin - corporal/ major (Sci-Corps)
Thryn Ap Svet - Rick’s wife
Rose Franklin - Rick & Thryn’s daughter
Donarth Franklin - Rick’s father
Lenka Zemlicka - Rick & Thryn’s neighbour
Finn Hanzel - The pig herder
The pigs - played by themselves
Axeford
Stann Taille - Sub-Corporal
Edyth Taille (Previously Edyth Gwydr) - Stann’s wife
Donarth Taille - Stann & Edyth’s son
The Gates
Effrea-Tye (The capital city of Ailan)
Edward De Lette – the president
Luke Hamilton – the vice-president
Bethina Laudanum – the president’s permanent secretary
Willa Chester - sub-colonel
Lacky - captain
Lacky - sub-lieutenant (Captain Lacky’s son)
Chel - lieutenant
Private Lee
The Ailan Military
Sub-Colonel Chester
Captain Lacky
Sun-lieutenant Lacky (Captain Lacky’s son)
Lieutenant Chel
Sub-Lieutenant Lacky
Staff Sergeant Donarth Taille
Corporal/ Major Rick Franklin
Sub-Corporal Stann Taille
Private Lee
Private Marka
The Donian Mountains
Marka - private in the Ailan military
The Mennai
Aerfen
Deian - Aerfen’s father
About this edition
A Father’s Choice was first published as Aijlan: The Silk Revolution. (The Lords of Misrule: Book One)
This 2018 edition h
as been re-edited and re-covered. Some of the places within the series have been renamed.
The story remains the same — an honest man faces a choice: risk everything for what he knows to be right or hide behind a lie.
Copyright & Disclaimer
Copyright © Andrew Graham 2016
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters in it and real people, events or organisations is entirely co-incidental.
A BROTHER’S SECRET
The Misrule: Book One
1
Ray Franklin's Monster
‘There are no monsters but those we make of ourselves. Whatever you are told to believe or do, remember that and own your consequences.’ They were the last words Rose Franklin said to her son on the day he signed up. He’d been sixteen years old, chasing glory and brotherhood. Twelve years later, with the dreams long gone, Ray still couldn’t get his mother’s voice out of his head. That needled him. Next he’d be hearing her telling him to stop slouching. He did. But only to adjust the sight on his rifle.
Far above him, clouds billowed out of huge chimneys. An occasional gust of wind sent tendrils of smoke into the night sky. The identical structures were tightly packed in this area of the power plant. Each was topped by semi-circles of flashing red lights that lit up the underbellies of the clouds. All but this one. The lights blowing was a bonus. Ray’s team had ruled out doing it deliberately as too obvious a decoy but he’d take whatever edge he could.
Two figures emerged out of a smog that churned and pulsed crimson as if it were alive. One of the figures pulled a box across the rickety walkways that connected the tower tops. The other clutched a weapon that was probably older than Ray. He sandwiched himself between a pair of steel pipes that snaked through the compound, hoping he wouldn’t be seen.
“‘Hope’s cheap, right? Until you end up indebted to it.’” That was another of his mother’s sayings. He wasn’t sure whether thinking about her when he was one bullet away from his own wooden-box-for-one was healthy or not. Would Rose even turn up to his funeral? She had missed so much of his life, why should his death be any different?
“Stop. Focus,” he muttered and crept along the wall, tracking the men above him. The sweat trickling down his back itched. Just like the growing sense of discomfort. Ray had a gnawing doubt his unit had missed something and were about to walk into another top secret cock-up. He could still hear Sub-Corporal Orr joking about it in his odd border accent. ‘What could possibly go wrong with no prep time and weapons we’ve never used before, when sabotaging shit in the heart of territory that belongs to people we’re technically friends with?’
The irritable bastard had a point, Ray conceded, though none of the squad had wanted to hear it. He shifted to get a better view of the men above him and knelt in a pile of mottled leaves. The damp, earthy smell of autumn wafted through the air. They’d be celebrating Hallowtide back in the Free Towns tonight. It’d been one of his favourite festivals when he was a child: the fire, the dressing up, the stories, sneaking drinks off the adults’ tables. Then every year Stann Taille drank too much and decided to man up his young grandson with his stories. There would come a tipping point in every celebration when the spiteful old soak would stop trying to make his put-downs clever and settle on making them obnoxious.
“Focus,” Ray hissed. The bitter old man wasn’t his problem tonight, and the bonfire the 10th Legion were planning here would be a good enough celebration of his own.
A clanking noise. A shout of annoyance. The itch running down Ray’s spine disappeared. The two figures, one repairing, one guarding, had reached the faulty lights. The faint sounds of their conversation filtered to the ground. Ray looked away, not wanting to get stung in the same way he hoped the patrol was about to be.
The rim lights flashed on. A burst of light scudded across the cloud. Ray uncoiled and sprinted across the floor in a half-crouch. Skidding as he rounded the next chimney, he crashed into a bulky figure.
“Bastard. Who the—” There was a mad scramble that was bitten off as quickly as it started. “Franklin? The fuck, dude?” The other legionnaire lowered his weapon.
“It’s me, Nasc,” Ray said.
“Worked that out, thanks. Who d’you think I was? The Grim Reaper?”
“That camo paint makes you look more like the Dim Reaper.”
Nascimento thumped the body armour on his chest. “Too dumb to die.”
Jamerson ‘Nasty’ Nascimento (and no one used that nickname to his face unless they really did fancy meeting both the Dim and Grim Reapers) claimed to have ‘the dubious distinction of being one of Ray’s closest friends’. The other, Ernest Hamid, was leading the second prong of this attack. The trio had first met in EBT, the Extended Basic Training, required to move up to the 10th Legion. On day one, class one, Nasc had set the tone by playing dumb. His aim? To get their curvaceous instructor
(“Woman got so much goodness oozing out of her itty-bitty uniform I could drown happy in her.”)
to lean over his desk for every question on his test paper. When she had finally realised what was going on, the class had earned forty-five minutes of up-downs in full-kit as payback, one for each minute she’d had to ‘look at Nascimento’s overly-muscled face’. The drill sergeant had then tagged another forty-five up-downs onto the punishment just because he could.
“You do look like you have an overly-muscled face in this light,” Ray said. The red gloom reflecting from the clouds was twisting the black and green streaks on Nasicmento’s skin into demonic lines.
“Dude, it was ‘oddly-muscled’, not ‘overly’.” He pointed at another chimney. “A7. Let’s move.” Nascimento took a step into the darkness, boots crunching in the dirt.
Ray checked the power pack on his new weapon.
“You not coming?” Nascimento asked.
“I outrank you now, Sub-Corporal. Remember?”
“No idea how that happened.” Nascimento clipped his helmet in a mock salute. “Sub-Corporal Jamerson Nascimento, sir. Requesting permission to get a move on, sir. If you don’t mind awfully, please, sir. Hey! Wait—”
They sped in silent shuttles from one tower to the next, dodging patrol lights and ducking under pipes until they reached a low building on the edge of the main power plant. Ray pulled a card out of his belt pouch. “You ever wondered why they have lights on these towers anyway?”
“You been doing thinking again?” Nascimento was on one knee, scanning the area with his rifle sight.
“This is a no-fly zone. Why have warning lights at the tops of tall chimneys if you’re not allowed to fly over them?”
“Maintenance? Aesthetics? Makework? Gonna get a move on or ponder some more?”
A thin groove ran around the inside of the door frame. Ray had one glove off and was trailing the tip of his forefinger along it.
“Come on, Franklin.”
“Got it.” Ray reached up with the card. This was when they would find out how good their source was.
An explosion sent them spinning. Nascimento thudded to the floor. He rolled to his knees, cradling his head in his hands. Ray fought the dizziness as he struggled to his feet. “You good?” he yelled over the sirens.
Nascimento gave him the thumbs up.
Everything had been going too well. The outer doors had opened with no problem. The inside of the building had been deserted. The legionnaires had done what they were here to do — laid the charges. They’d been on their way out and the explosion they’d rigged had hit too soon. Now the corridors were washed in light from the alarms and swirling with dust. It made no sense. The gear was new. It
had been checked but the explosion had almost killed them.
Ray staggered to the remains of the door. The chamber in front of them was huge, as deep as the chimneys it fed were tall. The web of walkways, ladders, stairs and slide poles that spread throughout it were lit red and amber. Churning flames licked at the base of the central column stretching from floor to roof. The technological totem pole was the heart of the Mennai power plant the legionnaires were here to destroy. The lower levels were dominated by a stygian rainbow carved into chunks by metal bands. The higher ones held rank upon rank of control panels, all interlinked by thousands of cables.
