A Gluttony of Plutocrats (The Respite Trilogy Book 1)

by Ella Swift Arbok

  I needed Bandstorm to move, but I couldn’t see the combi well. I didn’t know which way it pointed. Better to reduce the opposition. Someone ran a few steps, then crouched to the south of the hut, the opposite end to Briggs. The way she moved was enough for me to know Sy. Another mystery. What was she up to? Was she working with Briggs?

  Briggs stepped into view. “Sir, I heard gunfire.” He looked around the clearing. “What’s going on here?”

  Bandstorm pointed to the woodland. “Oneway’s over there. I think I hit him, but maybe not.”

  Briggs sat a few feet from Bandstorm. He removed his own gun. “I have the Heyho girl on the boat, sir. Shall I get her?”

  “Yes. No, wait here. Guard, go to the cruiser and fetch the girl.”

  So, I was right about Briggs. A great relief, but soon Bandstorm would know for sure he had lied. The guard stepped to the corner of the hut.

  Urgent, urgent now. Reduce the opposition. “Newton, kill the guard.”

  Two bullets headed to the woodland, one hitting the tree that sheltered me, the other thudding high over my head. I could only guess which was Bandstorm’s. When next I looked out, the guard lay in light snow at the corner of the hut, with Briggs crouched over him. “Sir, he’s dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure. Half his head’s missing.”

  Emily still lay on the ground. Mabel sat slumped across her arms.

  Briggs stood. “Maybe we should take cover.”

  If they moved into the stone hut, could Sy and I escape? Not without abandoning Mabel and Emily.

  I removed my backpack and lowered it to the ground. With the elm rod in my hand, blade extended, I stepped forward, under cover of the darkness. “Hector, you seem upset.”

  Bandstorm peered into the gloom. “Is that you, Oneway?”

  I stopped just clear of the undergrowth. My hands shook. I struggled to keep my voice steady. “I thought the picture would please you. You said you wanted the war to end.”

  Again, he picked up the pentagram. “What else can this damn thing do? You tricked me. You made a fool of me, and I won’t forgive that. Damn it, you just killed my guard.”

  I stepped forward, my arms raised. Each step brought me nearer to the hut’s light.

  Bandstorm’s gun pointed at my chest, but I didn’t expect so easy a death.

  “Newton, lose the blade,” I whispered. I had to trust that the elm would also respond to voice.

  Briggs moved behind me. “Put your hands behind your back.” I lowered them, and in the same motion threw the elm toward the far corner of the hut, where Sy hid. Unless my years of juggling had failed me, it would land by her feet.

  Bandstorm turned toward the sound. “Briggs, there’s someone there. Go check.” He grabbed Emily, pulling her up by her hair. By the time her feet settled against the ground again, he had his gun against her temple.

  Briggs grunted. “Sir, I need to bind this villain first.”

  Bandstorm tightened his grip on Emily and reached to the table for his cigar. “Have you ever seen what a cigar can do to a face, Oneway?”

  “You don’t need to do that. You have me now.”

  Sy stood twenty yards behind Bandstorm, clearly visible to Briggs. She had the elm in her hand.

  Briggs released my arms.

  I moved them enough to realize they weren’t bound together. I would have felt safer had he tied them. If Bandstorm learned the truth, I might lose a powerful ally.

  I circled slowly to the north to draw Bandstorm’s attention further from Sy. “I could be useful to you, Hector. With my knowledge of Earth’s science, we could become obscenely wealthy.”

  “I am obscenely wealthy, and I don’t trust you.” He took a step toward me, his arm around Emily’s torso.

  “You didn’t trust Bile, but you worked with him.”

  Bandstorm glared at me. He flicked ash on Emily’s short hair and laughed when it began to crackle.

  She writhed and kicked back, connecting with Bandstorm’s shin.

  He pushed her to the ground and raised a foot.

  Briggs hurried to her. “No, sir.” He brushed a hand against her head, extinguishing the glow. He lifted her, a hand each side of her chest, and set her on the end of the bench, far from Mabel. “She could be useful to you.”

  Bandstorm frowned at Briggs then shook his head. He looked me up and down. “Maybe you and I can work together. Come, Briggs will get us a drink.”

  Now that Sy had our weapon, my only objective was to keep Bandstorm’s attention on me. And to protect Emily and Mabel. “Hector, I could trust you better if my friends weren’t bound.”

  Sy had halved the distance to Bandstorm when some sound made him turn. Sy charged.

  Bandstorm raised his gun.

  I set off at a sprint, my arms free.

  Sy leaped forward and rolled on the ground, slashing at Bandstorm’s feet as she neared him.

  He fell. He screamed. He rolled onto his back and raised one leg. Its foot had been severed. He groaned in pain, moved the other then let it fall.

  Briggs sat beside Mabel and took a cigar from Bandstorm’s box.

  Sy smiled. “Remember me, asshole?” She moved the blade to Bandstorm’s throat, cutting through, I couldn’t see where.

  He lay on the snow, eyes wide. His mouth moved but the only sound that emerged was a gurgle.

  Sy glared. With the elm in her hand, she waved the blade around, settling it against Bandstorm’s groin.

  I hurried to her side.

  Bandstorm, his face contorted in pain, stared at me with my arms swinging by my side. He glared at Briggs.

  Briggs pocketed his gun, took a lighter from his pocket, and lit his cigar.

  I put an arm on Sy’s shoulder. “He was one?”

  She moved the blade and cut off one of his arms, which I interpreted as a Yes.

  I reached for the elm. “Think of Emily. Think of the future.”

  Sy returned the blade to his groin. “He has to die.”

  Mabel pushed herself to her feet. “Free me. Quickly.”

  Briggs took out a knife and released Mabel. “In the hut, turn right. The door’s marked.” Then, he cut through Emily’s bindings.

  Sy’s hand trembled.

  I took the elm from her, placed its blade against Bandstorm’s skull, and glanced at Briggs.

  He drew on his cigar and smiled.

  The blade slid through bone as though it had been Jell-O.

  I wiped the blade in the snow, retracted it, and put the elm on the table. Newton’s voice called from it. “Lemuel, I’m on my way. Seventy minutes. Do not go north of your clearing.”

  Briggs raised his eyebrows.

  Briggs rested his cigar on an edge of the table and headed for the hut. “Let’s have a drink.”

  I sat beside Sy and held her trembling hand.

  Mabel and Emily sat opposite us. Mabel took one of Emily’s arms in hers. She eased it a smidgen.

  Emily winced.

  Mabel released the arm. “This’ll need a bandage. Could be broken.”

  Briggs stepped from the hut carrying a tray, which he set on the table near to his cigar. “There’s brandy and good wine, red or green.” He nodded toward Emily. “If it were my child, she’d have wine, but there’s good water on the boat if you prefer.” He passed Mabel a roll of bandage and a pair of scissors, poured brandy into one glass and downed half in a single motion.

  Emily pointed to the green wine. “I’ve never had a choice before.”

  Mabel reached for the red and poured herself a generous measure.

  Sy gritted her teeth. “I can’t relax until we get out of here. How much longer, Lemuel?”

  I checked with Newton, using the elm again. “Forty-five minutes.” It was fifty-one, but I took an optimistic view.

  Why did I feel nothing? I had killed the guard—a man I knew little about and who had reluctantly hurt a friend. I had cut through Bandstorm’s skull, giving him a swifter deat
h than he deserved. His body lay a few feet from us. He, too, had hurt a friend—a good friend—long ago. Maybe that was why his end meant so little to me.

  More important than who I had killed was that I had killed. The act would change me forever. I felt no shame. I had no fear of eternal damnation. But I had taken a step that nothing in my life had prepared me for.

  So what? Soul-searching would have to wait.

  Briggs finished his drink and poured another. “Six years I’ve worked for that man. Six years of ‘Yes, sir; No, sir.’ And now I won’t even get a pension.” He turned to me with an easy smile. “Just trying to lighten the mood, Lemuel.”

  Sy pointed to a bottle. “Maybe a little. What do I call you?”

  “Briggs is fine.” He passed Sy her drink. “I know what you’ve been through. Not the details of course. I know how it hurts. Not so much the body as the heart, and the soul, and the mind. And the sense of being isolated. And very, very small.”

  I wanted to put a hand on his shoulder to offer comfort, but the gesture lacked an appropriate sense of scale. “Today, you have helped.”

  “Yes. And tomorrow, I’ll go back to Draco, drive for the new boss, and wait until I can help again.”

  I took the scarf from my pocket. Secrecy, even from the once-terrifying Justin Briggs, no longer mattered.

  Material rippled and formed. Newton’s face appeared—dark, gray haired and wrinkled. “Lemuel, you’ve had an eventful day.”

  “Yes, and more to come. You’ll be ready to leave with four of us?”

  “Yes, fully prepared.”

  “You’re taking me?” Mabel stared at the screen. “Is he coming with us? He’s cute.”

  Briggs shook his head and refilled his glass. “First drink in six years. Well, the third, if anyone’s counting.”

  Emily stepped back from the table. Difficult to tell in the half-light, but I’d say there were tears in her eyes. “I thought we was dead. I can’t believe what you did, Lemuel. For me and Mabel.” She sat on the hut’s step.

  Briggs offered me a cigar. I shook my head. Mabel took one.

  Briggs lit it. “Your friend, the one who’s coming. I suppose he’s coming from…” He pointed upward.

  “From the sky? Yes.”

  He frowned. “Will it be seen from Cragglemouth?”

  I turned to the screen. “Newton?”

  On the screen, a local map had the planned descent route marked by a white line. “For four minutes, my trail will show. I could change route and come from the north. That would be less visible, but it adds seven minutes to the descent, and you have ten minutes to decide.”

  I didn’t need ten minutes. “Do it. From when you land, how soon before you can take off again?”

  There were complexities I hadn’t considered. The sides of the landing craft would be hot. Fitting a takeoff harness with all its plumbing required training, which only I had had. The upshot was that we could be inside and safe from Respite’s weapons fifteen minutes from touchdown. But it would be two hours before we took off. I cared about the first figure only.

  My backpack still lay in the woods. In it was a framed photograph of me with Melissa and Lillibeth. There was time to retrieve it, but I chose not to. I didn’t need a photograph to remember them by. One day soon, someone would find it and smile at their good fortune: genuine silver.

  Mabel reached for a bottle to refill her drink.

  I took the bottle and poured half a glass for her. “Just a little, Mabel. I don’t want any of you throwing up during weightlessness.”

  That raised a few questions from around the table. I had some explaining to do.

  Briggs cut me short when I tried to tell him where we were going. “I don’t need to know.” He declined my offer to come with us. “I can do more good here. I’ll be all right. I’ll say I found this mess when I came from the boat, and I didn’t want to disturb evidence.”

  He cocked his head. “Hear that?” Again, he listened. “Military vehicle, I think. They’re not fast, but that one’s close.” He stood, a glass in one hand, a bottle in the other. “I’ll take the cruiser downstream. Might draw them off.”

  By the side of the hut, he paused. “Emily, sit with your friends.” He reached inside the door, turned off the light, closed the door, and hurried toward the river.

  Emily stood behind me. “Are we safe?”

  Briggs returned at a run. He called to Sy. “Change of plans. I’ll take your boat. More likely to turn them.” He thrust out a hand. “Key?”

  Sy took his hand in both of hers, kissed it on a knuckle and let it go. “It’s under the welcome mat.”

  Chapter 23

  How much Briggs helped our escape, I may never know. But we weren’t troubled by the military. Their vehicle crashed into the clearing as we hurried up the landing craft’s steps. Their bullets, Newton later informed me, rattled ineffectually against our craft’s casing.

  Despite my forewarning, Mabel let out a stifled scream when the might of acceleration kicked in, then settled on a wide-eyed stare until the portal opened on Madagascar’s firm soil. Emily found the journey hilarious throughout, even when our descent hit turbulence. As for Sy, she spoke little, but she smiled often.

  Six hours from take-off, after one and a half orbits of Respite, around one corner of a table of waxed oak—room for sixty but set for four—in the grass-carpeted center of a square consisting of homes of various materials in various states of completion, beneath a familiar sun that sat at an unfamiliarly high angle in the sky, we sweltered in the hot afternoon air of Madagascar’s early summer.

  A salt breeze blew from the west where, in a bay half a mile from us, Newton—or rather, machines under his control—had begun to construct a dock. From the forest beyond the northern edge of the square, the whooping call of a hairy, arboreal reptile like those that had scampered from the square as we entered was answered by others of its kind. Were they curious to know what we interlopers would make of their land? I was.

  Sy had liberated some bottles of wine from the hut and insisted it was the way to greet our new home. She raised her glass. “Do we celebrate or bemoan our lot?”

  Emily stood on the mahogany bench. She turned a full circle. “No disposables. This is good. No more children? I’m not delighted. Not complaining. I’d rather be here than on the streets of Cragglemouth. But so would thousands of others.”

  I held out my arms in an exaggerated shrug. “Emily, we are not fixed here as four forever. I hope to see Dick and Linnet with a boatload of friends, with goats, and horses, and chickens. Any one of you could go back to stay or for a break, now the fuel plant is doing its job. One day soon, we will let Eden and Elysium know that we are here as an independent state. Maybe we’ll have a weekly boat service.”

  Mabel finished her drink and poured another from the bottle Sy had left by her side. “Is that good, Lemuel? I get nervous.”

  I looked from face to face. “Surely it’s safer to claim this land before another state claims it, but it won’t be straightforward. We’re all citizens of Eden. How do we prevent them from claiming it as a distant territory? We can’t stay hidden for long, but we have time to decide.”

  Sy waved a hand. “You can’t do this, Lemuel. We can’t discuss every little detail about our future. You can’t pretend we don’t have a leader. We need one, and unless anyone has a different idea, I say it should be you.”

  I alone objected. But with no clear idea what the leadership of an emerging state would entail, I couldn’t argue. Who else would take the job? Emily, one day? Sy, whenever she chose. Mabel, if she wanted it. Or any one of the friends and castoffs who chose our land as a refuge, or a child not yet born on our island.

  Every day would be an adventure, every day a challenge. Every change would be an experiment. Get it right, it would stand. Get it wrong, change it the next time. Groundhog Day?

  I had only an obscure vision of my goal, based more on what it would not be than on what it would be. We had to
develop institutions, political and economical, free of the corruption that controlled the two major states. But it didn’t need to be done overnight.

  Time to lighten my mood.

  I folded my scarf. “Gather round, if you want to. Let’s see what’s new in Eden.”

  Newton had monitored the news. We had heard snippets in orbit, but it was time for details.

  Ginda Joyle’s death came as no surprise. His body had been dragged from the waters of the River Bar a few hours before I dragged Sy from the icy Craggle.

  Dick had identified the body. He spoke to a camera. “A heart attack, they say. I suppose alcohol was involved, as it was with much of his life. He seems to have bumped against a few lighted cigars while swimming, but that is so easy to do.”

  Sy gasped. “He had a weak heart, but he was terrified of water. Just like me.”

  What had he revealed in his final hours? The fact that Dick was still alive suggested Joyle’s weak heart had got to him before the cigar burns did their work.

  Sy gripped my arm. “When will we see them again?”

  Newton appeared on the screen, sitting behind a cluttered desk. “Lemuel, there is a way to divert attention from your friends. I have completed the necessary experiments, and I can transmit all the data I have on Bandstorm’s party—”

  Sy groaned. “We have to find another word for it.”

  Newton picked up a pencil from his desk. “The name matters, I agree.” He jotted something on a notepad. “I’ll work on it. My question to you, Lemuel, is this: should I transmit? I can show every moment of evil, show every face, and reach every television set on Respite.”

  Sy pulled her legs to her body and enfolded them with her arms.

  I sat back and linked my hands behind my head.

  Mabel looked at Sy then at me. She rolled from her chair and held a hand toward Emily. “Come on, let’s check out that beach we saw.”

  I had a moment to consider while they left the square, a babble of chitchat. “You have to talk over the worst horrors. Not to show them but to describe them. And say you’ll show them in full at a trial. And keep it brief—a half hour, maybe—at the same times each day. And target, if you can, so each region sees those men who live there. We’ll talk again, very soon.”