“Your Decency?”
“Cost-Centre Lieutenant L. M. Aldingford was court-martialled and found guilty of the smuggling on a grand scale of high-value contraband from my Loch Sunart Nature Reserve. The stolen goods included elephant ivories and hides, amethysts and agates, lion skins, bear skins, shark hides and teeth, and modest quantities of gold from panning streams. In recognition of the gravity of the offence, he was sentenced to eight years of Night and Fog.”
Donald was too horrified to speak.
“It’s been done quite discreetly,” TK said. “They buried the details in an appendix. The July report merely refers to the appointment of a new officer to the Oban garrison. The court martial was a General Wardian process, so there was no obligation for Oban Castle to report details. No formal obligation, that is.”
He sat back, turning in his seat to address Wingfield.
“What do you make of this?”
“It’s awkward. If the news filtered south, society would assume we hid the bad news to protect our common appointed regent. Marcus-John would leap into action ranting and yelling. I think we could expect a storm of sputum, Tommy-Boy. ”
“This thing is a time bomb. We must defuse it—fast.”
The silence dragged. It was Donald who broke it. Afterwards, he was amazed at the spontaneity of his opportunism.
“I would like to make a suggestion, Your Decency. I owe Miss Newman the deepest of apologies. I would also like to meet her again to get more details about what happened to Lawrence. I’m sceptical he’s guilty of anything more than being unpopular.”
“He must have done something wrong to get court-martialled. Unpopular officers just get pushed elsewhere,” TK said.
“He probably had an affair with the account-captain’s wife. Haighman said Lawrence was a womaniser. I can certainly verify he was promiscuous as a teenager.”
“Most unlikely. That kind of spiteful—albeit thoroughly justified—retribution would be thwarted by corporate HQ here in the Central Enclave. For an officer as senior as he was to get flushed to the Fog, he must have done what it states on the charge sheet.”
“I can’t accept that, Your Decency. Lawrence was not a thief or a cheat. People just don’t change that much. Think back to those you grew up with; the dumb stayed dumb, the cheats kept cheating, sneaks and liars became functionaries, bullies went into business, the top crust took responsibility and a few sad failures hanged themselves or took to drink. Lawrence had two vices: girls and insubordination. If they threw him out, it was because of one of those two flaws—that charge sheet is a lie.”
“If he made it to cost-centre lieutenant, they found him useful,” TK said. “We’ve dismissed womanising, so it must have been insubordination, by your logic.”
“The only way this works is that Lawrence threw a cruel truth in the faces of those who would not tolerate it,” Donald said. Privately, he was sure Lawrence must have impressed one person too many with his radical views on the causes of the Glorious Resolution. However, it was not a suspicion he could share with TK. Instead, he just finished: “Now he’s wasting his life beating gravel.”
“There is another possibility worth considering,” Wingfield said. “Lawrence could have been set up by corrupt senior officers. It’s a common scam in the glory trusts—I’d go further and say such corruption is endemic. Corrupt senior officers protect themselves by pulling cronies up to create private hierarchies. I’ve worked with the Corporate Audit of General Wardian to clean such bastards out of our home lands, but Oban is a distant satellite, very much a little world of its own.”
“That’s an excellent point—under the circumstances we’ll have to look into it—fast,” TK said, making a note. To Donald, he said: “How are you going to find Miss Newman?”
“I had her documents photographed,” Donald said. “She holds a passport of the Friendly Cooperative of North Kensington basin. The basin isn’t on any Public Era atlas I could find. However, my butler informed me it’s a perfectly civilized place just outside the Grande Enceinte along a short stretch of turnpike. It would be a simple matter for me to go there and meet her.”
TK rubbed his palms up and down his face and sighed. He was obviously exhausted by the strain of problems from all directions. He did not need another problem. That was why Donald was trying to give him the solution.
“Well,” TK said. “There’s no harm in your going out to North Kensington basin to see her. It’s a low-risk endeavour. Can you fix that, Wings?”
“Actually, it would be a most valuable trip,” Wingfield said. “It’s notoriously hard to build contacts amongst those barging families—they’re fanatically independent.” He laid a hand on Donald’s shoulder. “Our new man is turning out to be a most versatile operator: appointed regent, chief demographer, economic guru—and now a spy!”
“Right, that’s what you’ll do,” TK said. “I suggest Saturday morning as traffic will be heavy with servants going home for the weekend. Report back to Wingfield afterwards so that we can pursue any leads.”
“I’ll fix you up with a fake passport and ID—this will be such fun!” Wingfield was singing with glee.
Donald almost keeled off his seat with relief. He had not told any lies and he had escaped. Not only had he escaped, he had solved a problem that had confounded him since hearing Vasco Banner’s address to the Westminster Assembly—how to reach Brent Cross asylum on the 30th October to attend the National Party’s annual conference. The 30th was... this Saturday!
Chapter 9
Flash like a blink of sun, thunder that buckled knees and hunched shoulders. Men snarled curses. Women gasped. Donald’s ears hummed with aftershock. Again the flash and again the shudder of blast. Ladbroke fort’s Naclaski battery had fired. Its 6-inch guns lashed windows and clouds and faces with a cat of lightning. Five salvoes, with ten seconds between them. Then silence. A young man yelled:
“Fuck the dogs!”
The queue cheered. Donald cheered, raising both fists into the air. ‘Dog’ was asylum slang for glory trooper.
“Fuck the sovereigns!”
Again the queue cheered.
“Vive the revolution!”
The roar curled like a wave and broke across the Grande Enceinte. In the pre-dawn gloom, shadows rippled along the parapet of Ladbroke fort. The crowd hunched into silence as the rippling shadows became glory troopers aiming rifles at them.
A woman behind Donald whispered: “They’ve never done that before.”
A squad led by a cold-faced young glory officer belched from the gatehouse and formed a funnel of pump-action shotguns. The officer took a microphone from a trooper carrying a loud-speaker like a tuba. This officer addressed them in a coarse, contemptuous voice.
“If you rabble of trash utter so much as one more snigger, we will shut the gate and you can forget about your weekend. Shut the fuck up and stay the fucking shut up.”
He and his squad withdrew inside the gatehouse. The glory troops on the parapet lingered. Donald discovered just what an unpleasant experience it is to find the dot of a muzzle laid on one’s face. The queue shifted forward. More clogs drummed up Ladbroke Grove. Saturday morning meant torrents of servants flowing out of the Central Enclave to the industrial asylums for the weekend.
The process inside Ladbroke fort customs was just as Wingfield had described: a long counter staffed with grumpy glory troopers. Donald stepped forward and laid a passport on the counter. The trooper who served him was a skinny teenaged basic with over-sized hands and a spotty chin. He had cut his nostril shaving that morning. He smelled of polish and soap, which put him on a pleasanter basis than the middle-aged slob in filthy dungarees next along the counter.
The passport was nearly identical to Donald’s real passport. It gave his real name, the real code for his place of residence (in this case, Bloomsbury 00172), a photograph and his occupation (“messenger”).
A messenger was one who carried documents betwee
n customers inside the Central Enclave and businesses out in the industrial asylums. A surprisingly good income was to be had from inherited security clearance that enabled one access to the most exclusive districts of the Central Enclave. In effect, one made a fat living by carrying bundles of paper through a wall. He was dressed for the occasion in old boots, raincoat and denim dungarees. Messengers had to blend in to the asylum population to avoid being kidnapped by ultramarines, gangs of corrupt glory troops, or anyone else out for easy bounty.
The stamps in this passport revealed Donald routinely crossed the Grande Enceinte through Ladbroke fort. It was essential to show routine, as customs personnel pounced on the least suspicion of the unorthodox—such as a barrister dressed as a slummy seeking to leave the Central Enclave without any apparent reason. Indeed, he was exposing himself to the risk of abduction. There would have been interrogation, much checking of documents against City Hall originals, a long report written up in his citizen’s file, followed by escort home like a confused grandad. The gamble was that amongst all the tens of thousands of servants who streamed through going home for the weekend on a Saturday morning, Donald would be stamped as just another face in the crowd.
The trooper glanced at him, flipped through the many stamped pages, chewed his lip, slowed and became reflective as if something had caught his attention. He studied a page bearing stamps dated back in September.
“The stamps say you were through here four times back on September 18th.”
“That’s true,” Donald smiled. “I had to clear up a mismatch between a purchase order and an invoice.”
Such was the care with which Wingfield’s team prepared its counterfeits. The basic raised his stamp, banged it down and was calling “Next!” before Donald had retrieved his passport. He slid it deep inside his coat pocket and was on his way at a brisk march. It was that easy… As if he had just accomplished a dare, he felt quivery in the knees. The world outside the Grande Enceinte was dark and wide open.
*
To begin with, he walked in the general drift across a pitch-black dead zone. This unlit stretch was the Strip, which is to say, the razed area from which building materials had been gleaned to construct the Grande Enceinte back in the seventies. The way ahead was blocked by a floodlit iron gate. A wood-burning Stirling generator chugged powering the floodlights. In the glare, tradesmen in blue jean dungarees, footmen in cheap suits and corduroys, maids hidden under black veils; all queued to go home for the weekend. Ultramarines loafed about, yawning and smoking. This was the toll house of the turnpike. Donald handed over an aluminium coin called a Georgie (it had St George and the Dragon stamped on it). According to legend, the vast majority of Georgies had been stamped from the metal skins of Public Era jet airliners left derelict after the Glorious Resolution.
The sky to the east shone gas flame blue, then orange. A crack of sun glared into dawn. The display of dawn was a rare treat for one accustomed to canyon life within the congested Central Enclave. Directly ahead, the sunlight caught a pillar of smoke, frozen by its immensity, leaning to the east in the wind. It was miles away. Donald supposed it to be rising from the receiving end of the shells from Ladbroke fort. He thought little of it.
Wingfield had stringently cautioned him against ‘tourism’ (i.e. moronic gawping about). Despite the caution, Donald could not resist a glance back at the Grande Enceinte catching the first rays of dawn on its Naclaski forts. The great wall ran almost straight, diminishing with distance, until it bulged north around Regent’s Park and curved from view, eventually to meet the River Thames at Tower Bridge. To the west, it extended only a short distance to a squat corner fortress at White City. The Grande Enceinte ran for nineteen miles with twenty fortified gates. Supposedly, it contained two billion bricks, although Donald had always taken this to be a boast more than fact. The Grande Enceinte was a physical testament to the shock of the sovereigns following the Sack of Oxford in 2073.
On the left side of the turnpike rose a steep bank topped by a brick wall crested by a turmoil of thorny bushes. This was the frontier of North Kensington basin. The bank had been built from gravel and clay excavated from the basin. The bricks came from houses that had occupied the same area. It was all the work of Night and Fog gangs back in the seventies.
After a quarter of an hour walking up the mild gravel slope of the turnpike, he reached the arched entrance to the Friendly Co-operative of North Kensington basin. Wagons hauled by teams of twelve or twenty-four men rolled in and out. On every wagon sat one ultramarine to crack the whip and another with a sawn-off shotgun. The air sizzled with hobnails and steel-rimmed wheels on gravel. All this action before eight o’clock on a Saturday morning! Donald could not help but be impressed by the sheer scale of disciplined energy. He entered the customs house, a long brick hall across the end of the plaza, feeling a tight nausea reminiscent of his first day at public school. He was surrounded by streams of strangers who knew exactly what to do. Wingfield had been vague on the protocol here. Donald joined one of the queues. He felt slender and scruffy amongst the tough ultramarines in their immaculate black tunics. Most of them were smoking, clouding up the hall, hardening Donald’s aloof contempt.
At the counter he laid down his messenger’s passport and slid it across. The official was a plump young man with sharp eyes and a grin he switched on and off like stage lighting.
“What is your business today, please sir?”
“I’m visiting the Newman concern.”
The eyebrows twitched. He made a trip up the counter and returned flipping through a file.
“There’s no alert you’ll be here.”
“I’m not expected.”
“Then they won’t see you.”
“They’ll recognise my name. It’s a surprise.”
“Are you armed?”
“Yes.” Donald produced a big top-break Webley 455 revolver and a Colt 38 automatic along with his licence to carry. Wingfield had lent him the Webley as he considered Donald’s Colt 38 a bit light. The licence satisfied the official and Donald put the guns back in his coat pockets.
“I’ll have to send a runner to check with the Newmans,” the official said. “That’ll be a Norseman. If they give permission, your day visa will cost two white ones.”
A Norseman was a ten gramme copper coin issued by the Brent Cross mint. A white one was a silver sovereign, a ubiquitous coin issued by asylum and sovereign mints. Donald picked the coins from his pouch and slid them across. The official checked them with a counterfeit detector balance, after which he dropped the coins in an envelope marked with Donald’s name and Central Enclave passport number and posted the envelope through to the back office.
“Please wait at the back, sir.”
Donald sat on a bench with ultramarines, irritated by the cigarette smoke and dialects mangling English into a gabble.
“Mr Aldingford!”
Surrounding the plump official was brood of yokels, from Grandad with his stick down to a curly-haired kid of about ten gnawing the counter.
“You’re welcome. I’ve stamped your passport. Have a nice day.”
*
The Newmans lived in a three-storey wooden mansion at a prime location on a corner of the basin, with their own mini-basin, cranes and warehouses. They had safety features too, comprised of pump-action shotguns and a brood of enormous Tibetan mastiffs. The Newmans could not get over their astonishment that a “fine upstanding gent of decent society” would come out to the basin, garbed in an old leather raincoat, slouch hat, denims and boots. What was more, he had come out alone. When he showed them his armament, the big Webley and the Colt, they gazed in awed silence.
Well, he must be hungry. They sat him down in the vast kitchen, at a table about the size of a yacht. The other furniture was a cheerful jumble arranged in coves and nooks according to family cliques. A quite decent library of heirloom hardbacks was tucked away off the main room. To start with, clouds of children crowded around
him, grinning and yapping questions—have you ever shot anyone? Why is your name so funny? Do you work out?—until one of the women of the house shooed them upstairs.
Hunks of fresh bread and butter landed along with bacon rashers a quarter inch thick. The bacon was the juiciest he had ever tasted. He gathered that the head of the family was Bartram, the thirty-four year old eldest brother of Sarah-Kelly. He was away with two other brothers on a routine trip up the Grand Union canal to Braunston basin south of Birmingham. By good fortune, they were due back that afternoon. Donald was fascinated. His vision of overland travel was the grim experience of the public drains. He knew nothing of the heirloom waterway system of the Public Era. The family were in turn thrilled by his interest. Rosa, who was the wife of Bartram and obviously the matriarch, threw open a great canvas map on the table. It showed how the whole island of Britain almost as far north as Scotland was criss-crossed with blue veins. The veins climbed across the Pennines, spread east into the sodden wilderness of the fens, even cut across the Lands of Krossington to the south coast of Britain.
Donald fielded a torrent of questions about how he made a living, what his house was like, his family, whether he possessed a motor car… Sarah-Kelly had apparently been spitting rage on her return from being called a liar. Their curiosity arose from his being so in contrast to the “priggish squit with a head-up-her-arse wife” Sarah-Kelly had described. He kept his answers vague or evasive, avoiding any hint he worked for sovereign clients or had ever been to sovereign lands.
He had been in an aeroplane? They closed in, wanting every detail. Had he ever been shot at by Naclaski batteries? What was it like flying through a storm? Or at night? Was it true you were weightless all the time? Apparently, Bartram had a great interest in flying. He was deeply envious of his most important supplier, a flamboyant gentleman with his own flying boat, which he landed on the basin. It embittered him the Newmans never made enough to afford a flying boat of their own.
Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 1 Page 10
