The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  There was a rising tone to her voice, a resonance to go with the clenched fist on the red diary. Ray had the sinking feeling that Chester was about to give a speech, the type of oration that she had been famous for in the short-lived Forum of Ailan, a place where the great and good had liked to be seen offering theoretical solutions to esoteric issues while the poor in the Free Towns died from practical problems due to starvation issues. At this point, Ray wasn’t sure whether it was better to stop her midflow or wait until she had finished. Lacky twirled a finger in small circles, indicating it was better to let her run.

  “My mother broke the rules,” Chester said, “and it cost her something she could never replace. Not my toe. I can live without a toe or two. It was that, or they slit my throat. So she did what anyone would do. I wish I could tell you that I tracked the men down and got my own back, but I didn’t. That’s one of the things that still cuts me deep, even after half a century in the military and close to three-quarters of a century on the planet: the fact that there are bad people in this world. People who get away with things they have no right to get away with. It’s juvenile but their liberty hurts me more than this ever did.” She rubbed the stub where her toe should have been and the friendly chatting tone in her voice vanished. “My mother never recovered from this. I cannot risk Ailan never recovering from your family’s personal vendetta with each other.”

  The mop-bot screeched into life, its rubber blade dragging down the window so hard it looked like it would scratch it in two. An unnatural blue cleaning fluid bled down the outside of the glass, Ray could practically smell the detergent through the bulletproof panes.

  “I cannot help you,” Chester said with a solemn shake of her head. “If I am to solve this problem with Ailan and Randall Soulier, I will do it without the help of the people who are responsible for that problem. You do not send a wolf to count sheep, do you?”

  “You’re afraid,” Ray said. “Afraid of acting in case you fail. You’re worried about trying and losing more than your toe.”

  “If hate and ignorance are the same side of the coin, fear is the metal that coin is made of.”

  “What?”

  “Just a thought,” Chester said, jotting it down on a piece of paper.

  “You are scared.”

  Chester chuckled, softly. “Ray Franklin, my dear boy. You are brave, principled and loyal. But you are no negotiator nor orator. Your attempts to rile me will not work. I will deal with your half-brother in due course but I am not going to help you. Captain Lacky will show you out.”

  “Why did you agree to meet me?”

  “To be sure of my choice. Goodbye, former captain Franklin.”

  With that the mop-bot squirted its blue froth over the window. It stained the moonlight that filtered into the room and turned Chester’s cropped white hair green.

  Chester’s cat, fur bushed out, leapt onto her lap and hissed his agreement. In the time-honoured tradition of a superior dismissing her subordinate, the field-marshal casually disengaged her gaze and turned her attention elsewhere, in this case the red diary. Ray caught the name Donarth written across a page before he was escorted out the door by Lacky.

  Ray thumped a fist into the corridor wall. “She’s blind!”

  “She’s still your superior. A little respect wouldn’t go amiss.”

  “I’m a deserter, Lacky. She’s not my anything anymore except a pain in the arse.” He thumped the wall again, felt the skin scrape off the knuckle.

  Lacky offered a little shrug. “A little respect goes a long way. Real respect,” he added as he led Ray down the corridor. “Not people who think anything other than insipid deference is a lack of respect. And by letting you walk out of here, I think Chester has shown you more respect than your behaviour deserves.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Show a little respect, son, and maybe I’ll stop with the chiding. Here.” He held out one of the patches. The golden tree stitched into the dark green fabric glittered in the corridor lighting. “Chester’s rushed these through. I get the feeling she’s been planning this for a while, at least after her last attempt at a coup failed.”

  Ray rubbed the patch between thumb and forefinger. “Chester’s rebranding the army again? What happened to the dragon idea?”

  They stopped at the junction. A lift lay at one end of the corridor. The lift was fashioned from burnished steel. The call button was a Bakelite knob shaped like an arrow. Lacky gestured to the patch. “Not sure about the dragon, but Bethina had a tree on her office balcony. She called it her Folly Tree.”

  “A tree on a balcony near the top of a skyscraper sounds stupid to me.”

  “I believe that was the idea, to remind her of what should and shouldn’t be. It was also where the VP hung her.” There was a catch in his voice. “Bethina and Chester were well respected, if not loved by all.”

  “Bethina, not the president? You liked her?”

  “I served her,” Lacky replied, looking at his boots. “I let her down.”

  “You loved her.” There was no question of it in Ray’s mind.

  Lacky turned an implacable gaze on Ray. “Respect is often demonstrated through silence. Maybe you should try it?”

  “Are they flip sides of the same coin too?”

  Lacky laughed, deep-bellied and dirty, a laugh that belonged in a bar full of friends, not a converted power station full of the wealthy and worried, people petrified of spilling drinks on their carpet or eating with the wrong type of fork in public. Ray took the outstretched hand. “Thank you for saving me from that muscle-headed sergeant in the lobby.”

  “Thank you for having the grandfather you did.”

  “Not much to do with me,” Ray said. “I’m no expert on genealogy but even so, I don’t think genetics is retrospective.”

  He started down the corridor and flipped the call lever on the lift. Lacky was watching. Out of respect or to make sure he left?

  “Tell me,” Ray called back over the soft hiss of cables unwinding. “Why Chester? Why not retirement?”

  “Guess this old dog needed someone to serve after Bethina died. Too much freedom wouldn’t be good for me, but too little freedom under the wrong master would be even worse.”

  22

  VIPER

  (Carnage)

  Willa Chester wiggled her four-toed foot in her boot. One of the socks had snagged a nail. She raised her chair. Lowered it. Adjusted her screen. Then she did it all again. That was the third time in total. Damn Franklin — why did he have to come here? He was taking the fight to Randall Soulier, keeping Rose’s rebellious flag flying, while she sat here, docile, waiting to call the VP as commanded. It made her feel impotent. The mop-bot thumping at the window behind her did nothing for her mood. It sounded like the damn thing was scraping off layers of glass instead of dirt. Another clunk. Louder this time.

  The machine splurged blue foam all over the glass as if its existence depended on it. Chester was considering using the thing as target practice. Instead, she wiggled her toes, adjusted her chair and screen for the fourth time. The lines of static across the latter still wavered. She thought she could hear the white noise they gave off, even with the volume down. As her errant sock tugged painfully at a nail, the screen cleared and the VP’s face snapped into focus. “You’re late,” he said.

  He looked to be in one of his underground lairs again. This one was thick with cobwebs and pregnant-to-bursting steel pipes. In the background, a child was crying. Chester could only imagine what was going on. The VP, it seemed, had given up any pretence of decency.

  “You said five minutes. This was five minutes,” she replied.

  His eyes flicked to one side. “Six.”

  “It was five when I called you.”

  “Just.”

  Chester wanted to shrug or fly him the eagle (the middle-finger salute the legions used to indicate that special type of respect), but didn’t think it fitting of a decorated field-marshal in her seventies. Especially
seeing as Captain Lacky had just reentered the room.

  “Fair enough.” The VP, unlike Chester, did shrug, though it struck her as an uncomfortable gesture, as if his skin was too tight for him. Maybe that medical-witch of his, Professor Wu-Brocker, could carve some space in it for him. “I trust you read my memo?” he asked.

  “Yes. There will be no war.”

  Randall’s gaze had been staring at a point behind Chester. At the last comment, they snapped onto her. One blue eye, one green. “Bethina may have tolerated your backchat, considered it advice. As far as I am concerned, it is treason. Do you understand?”

  The urge to salute was so deeply ingrained in a soldier that she had to fight to keep her hand in her lap. Lius, however, gave her an easy way out by jumping on her knees. Chester may have been a decorated field-marshal in her seventies, but she took great, though juvenile, satisfaction in knowing that Randall Soulier had over ten seconds of seeing nothing but the cat’s backside in all its wrinkled, puckered glory. He didn’t seem to appreciate the view. “The 13th Legion, the Unsung, are mine,” he said.

  “The other legions still answer to me.”

  “But you answer to me. Do you really want to play that power game?”

  Did she? No, not yet. She’d tried once and failed. Her attempt at usurping him had been premature. Next time, she would wait until she had the high ground and he was wading through the trenches before she turned both barrels on him. A gentle, repetitive knocking on the window stopped her thoughts. The mop-bot lurched across the glass, its muzzle-like mouth as ugly as Randall’s was smug. He needed to be stopped and she would start with that grin of his.

  “Ray Franklin was here and he wants to kill you.”

  His smile vanished. “You said no, though, didn’t you, Chester?”

  Vile, the VP may be, but he was quick. The sobbing in the background was replaced by the chattering of a man’s voice: “Benn. John. Benn. John.” The question was, would the VP work out why she had said no? She could see Randall’s mind racing from here. He’d be wondering—

  Why did she say no to Franklin? He pulled his jacket tight. The damp of these underground rooms was getting to him. Chester, face inscrutable, watched. That filthy cat of hers crawled about her lap like a leech in search of flesh. Randall’s irritation at having to deal with the woman was being fuelled by that bumbling idiot of Wu-Brocker’s. Benn-John was staring at his scarred hands as if he couldn’t work out which one was left and which right.

  Chester picked the fur-wrapped, flesh-scratching, rat-munching arsehole off her lap and dumped it on the floor. It padded away, tail arching arrogantly in the air. Just like its master — ungrateful and rebellious and due a harsh lesson in how the food chain really worked. Maybe I should play her a different way? Unsettle her. That’s what Bethina would have done. “My apologies, Field-Marshal. It’s been a difficult few days, what with Bethina’s selfish suicide.”

  Chester bristled like a cat dumped in a pond. “She was murdered.”

  “You have proof?”

  She didn’t. It was obvious from the way her face tightened.

  “The reins of power are heavy, Chester.”

  “Then hand them to someone without such limp wrists.”

  “There is no one else.”

  Behind Chester the blue foam that streamed out of the mop-bot gave her the appearance she was drowning. It suited her. “There is always someone else,” she said, angry now, though she was desperate not to show it.

  “Is that why you’re a spinster?” The VP was already bored of playing Bethina’s way.

  “How dare you!”

  “I believe you had an interest in the younger lady who died in your apartment, what was her name?”

  “Jann—” she began, and with a grim satisfaction, he saw the woman’s name choke off in her throat. “You—”

  “—bastard.” The word fell from her mouth like an angel thrown from heaven. Her nose was full of the smell of Jann’s blackened flesh. “She was murdered! That psychotic thug of yours did it, the one who spent his childhood being abused by that puppet-president Luke Hamilton.” Lacky hadn’t reacted to the revelations about Chester’s interest in Jann, but at this, even the stoic captain couldn’t keep the shock off his face. Good, Chester thought. This all works better for me. “Brennan should be in therapy, not in the military. As should—”

  “As should I?” Randall’s question filled the space left by Chester’s sudden silence. “May I congratulate you on a beautiful display of disobedience worthy of that excuse of a legion, the 10th.”

  The incessant muttering

  (“Benn. John. Benn. John. Left. Right. Right. Left.”)

  behind the VP was replaced by the child wailing for his mother.

  And then the VP was staring at her, odd-coloured eyes gleaming. “You will do what I say, Chester. When I say it. Or I will strip you of more than your rank and hand you over to the Unsung. My legion has some new men in it who have ideas of pleasure that are deviant at best and brutal at worst. Most should be chemically castrated and put in jail, or better, castrated, beheaded, burnt and the ashes scattered in a septic tank rather than being put in a government-sanctioned uniform.”

  “You bring shame to the legions.”

  “I am the president. It is my call what I do and what is to be considered shameful. My people will soon come to realise this and learn to love it.”

  “Your people? You are not yet president.”

  “I invoked the VIPER ruling.”

  Violent Incident Protocol Emergency Response. Chester knew it. She’d had this conversation with Jann not that long ago, a woman who Chester had craved from afar — the special type of love that got deeper the further apart you were and more nervous the closer together you got. “VIPER allows for some autonomy of the legions,” she said. “It was a failsafe to prevent a—”

  “Dictatorship. Where’s my failsafe to prevent a—”

  “Coup? Simple. Don’t behave like a dictator.”

  “You will obey me.” The fury was radiating off the screen in waves that mimicked the ripples in the picture that twisted Randall’s face.

  “I will do what the law dictates and nothing more.”

  “What the law—” His voice hit a strangled note and died. “You, Chester,” he managed in that forced whisper of someone whose only other volume at that point was an eye-popping scream, “are faithless to the last.”

  “My loyalty lies to Ailan.”

  Randall stared at her, goggle-eyed. If this were a cartoon, he would have had steam coming out of his ears. She was buoyed. Exuberant. The rush she had felt in the Forum after her orations was forgotten. As minor victories went, this was major. She gave herself a self-congratulatory smile.

  “Loyal to Ailan?” Randall’s voice crackled through the screen. “Over me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brennan!” A shadow fell over the VP. Brennan was better as a shadow. Every time Chester saw the man’s face she could see his childhood tormentor’s pasty flesh pressed up against Young Brennan’s skin. It was one of those things that was just too real and horrific to deal with. The VP whispered something to him.

  Brennan’s face was impassive as he said, “Are you sure?”

  The VP’s response, though short, made clear that he was.

  Brennan produced a box which had a button encased in a clear plastic cover. Chester felt a prickling sensation between her shoulder blades, as if she’d just been told someone had a sniper rifle trained on her. Nonsense, the glass in her windows was bulletproof. Lius mewled at her. He was hungry. The shadow of Brennan was gone. Chester’s mouth was dry. Randall’s lips were wet and red. His face filled the screen. “Your loyalty’s behind you, Chester.”

  He disappeared into a white dot.

  “What does that—”

  Lacky’s eyes went horribly wide. He launched himself forwards. The window behind her, weakened by the corrosive mixed in with the blue cleaning foam, crashed down in a waterfall
of glass shards that jarred her ears. Lius squealed, claws cutting into Chester’s legs as he fled. Lacky, a man devoted to Bethina, in debt to Rick Franklin, and doing his best to pay his dues by helping a woman he saw as his closest connection to the dead, tackled her to the floor. Chester realised that, once again, Randall Soulier had played her like a fool.

  Then the gunfire started.

  Lacky was gone. The space on the upper balcony where he had watched Ray leave the lift was empty but for the steel and white walls. Captain Lacky was a good man. A man with a calling to serve and happy with that. Ray envied the simplicity of Lacky’s life. Despite the many rules and regulations the military imposed on its people, that complexity brought a simple, single-minded purpose — do what you’re told and do it well. There was a part of Ray that missed that. Maybe Lacky was right: too much freedom was as claustrophobic as too little. Would he trade places?

  No. Lacky was a man with a debt he could never repay, a debt to a dead man, Ray’s grandfather. Worse, Lacky was in love with a woman he had seen hanging from a tree. Lacky was locked in the past. There was no future in that.

  In the space that had recently been Captain Lacky, a hissing, squealing ball of fur appeared. It hurled itself off the balcony, tumbled down through the air, landed unharmed and hurtled towards Ray. At the last moment, the cat twisted, its tail whipped at Ray’s leg as it leapt into his arms. Ray grabbed it and held its claws away from his face.

  The cat’s fur was matted with fresh blood, red dripping from the end of its tail. A claw slashed a cut in his hand. Ray dropped the cat and it sped off, leaving a trail of feline anger behind it.