by Andy Graham
Dr Laudanum rubbed the nape of her neck as she studied the forms, still not sure that they had finally resolved this.
“Why should she 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 risk, responsibility, and rewards?”
She rubbed the small mole on the end of her nose, a habit she hadn’t managed to beat since childhood. Laudanum stood up and pushed the chair away with the back of her knees.
“I have to get that hiss fixed,” she muttered, and made her way to the door behind her desk.
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 that she 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 sun-worn sofa. Kicking off her shoes she lay back, stretching out like an old dog.
“How did it go?” asked a nasally voice from next to the window.
“Good,” she managed between snatched breaths.
“Any regrets?”
“I don’t think so. You?”
The slim figure spun round gracefully, her oily-black hair gleaming in the light of the strip-mining scarred moons, a mole on the end of her nose. Blue eyes studied the reclining figure on the couch.
“No.”
Franklin - I - Twenty-Eight Years Later
Thick clouds of smoke and steam billowed out of the chimneys, an occasional gust of wind sending tendrils into the night sky. The identical chimneys were tightly packed in this area of the compound. Tall yet somehow stunted, they reached to the moons like a scolded child straining to be picked up. Matching semi-circles topped each tower, the rim lights flashing back and forth. They bounced off each other and repeated. All except this one.
Below, where the harsh white light of the designation number didn’t quite reach, a lone figure was sandwiched between the thick, paired steel pipes that snaked through the compound.
The rim lights blowing had been an unexpected bonus. The team had ruled it out as too obvious a decoy, but he’d take whatever edge he could. Two figures emerged out of a red cloud high above the ground, one leading a small box, the other clutching a rifle. They paused to shake the connecting bridge before crossing with the familiar ease brought on by repetition or indifference. Corporal Ray Franklin hoped the bright numbers would hide him from the guard’s infrared sights, despite what he’d been told.
“Hope’s cheap, right?” he murmured. “Until you end up indebted to it.”
If the bright lights didn’t help, then the cold and the guards’ tired eyes would. No one was at their best at this time, no matter how well-trained or paid; these men were neither.
He shifted, squinting up at the moving shadows through his rifle sight. He wasn’t sure if the sweat trickling down the back of his neck was warm or cold. It itched all the same, just like the growing sense of discomfort.
Preparation was everything. He had a gnawing doubt that they’d missed something, and were about to walk into yet another top secret cock-up. Some of his colleagues loved this feeling of marching into the unknown. He hated it. He’d had nightmares about situations like this as a kid, not knowing what to do.
“What can possibly go wrong with no prep time, new weapons, and sabotage in the heart of territory that we’re technically friends with?” Ray could still hear Sub-Corporal Orr joking about it in that odd accent of his.
He eased himself over to get a better view, the smell of autumn wafting through the air. They’d be celebrating Hallowtide back in the Towns tonight. It’d been one of his favourite festivals as a kid: the fire, the dressing up, the stories, sneaking drinks off the adults’ table. Then every year his granddad drank too much and decided to take it upon himself to man up a child with his stories. It was still the same, every celebration. There’d come a tipping point when the spiteful old soak would stop trying to make his abusive put-downs clever and settle on making them obnoxious. Was that why his son, Ray’s dad, had done what he had?
Ray scowled. “Focus,” he muttered. “Wrong time, wrong place.”
The old fool wasn’t his problem tonight, and the bonfire they were planning here would be a good enough celebration of his own. A soft clanking noise from high above snapped his attention back to the walkway, and the itch running down his spine disappeared.
The two figures, one repairing, one guarding, had reached the faulty lights. The faint sounds of their shouted conversation filtered to the ground, before being lost in the background hum of machinery. Ray lowered his rifle and looked away, not wanting to get stung in the same way he hoped the patrol was about to be.
“You do your best work when you’re tired.” They’d had it hammered into them in extended basic training, EBT, a soundbite that echoed the twisted logic of leadership these days. He grinned, remembering Nascimento playing dumb in that class, purely to get their instructor leaning over his desk. She’d finally realised what was going on when he asked her to point out something at the top of the screen one too many times. He’d earned forty-five minutes of up-downs as payback for that, one for each minute of the class that she’d had to “look at his overly-muscled face”. In itself that wouldn’t have been too bad, but the punishment had come on the back of a full day’s training. The next time Nascimento had done them wearing a full pack.
Ray studied the ground in front of him, looking for holes and debris, anything that could slow or trip him. High above, the rim lights flashed on. A burst of light scudded across the underbelly of the acrid cloud. He uncoiled and ran across the floor in a half-crouch, banking on the patrol’s night vision having been lost long enough for him to get out of sight. Skidding as he rounded the tower, he ran into a bulky figure peering round the other side of the curved wall.
“What kept you?” Nascimento said, pulling his head back. Greasy black camo slashes distorted his features.
“You really do look like you have an overly-muscled face in this light.”
“What?” The big man frowned at him before breaking into a grin. “It was ‘oddly-muscled’, not ‘overly’.” He pointed at another chimney with his out-sized rifle. “A7.”
“I read the script too,” Ray said, checking the power pack on his new weapon.
“Yeah, I know. Let’s hope the others remember their lines as well as we do. Let’s move.”
Nascimento took a step into the darkness, his boots crunching on the dirt. Ray stood still, waiting for the other man to turn back.
“I outrank you now, Sub-Corporal. Remember?” he whispered.
Nascimento rolled his eyes. “No idea how that happened,” he muttered. He clipped his helmet with a gloved hand in a mock salute. “Sir. Sub-Corporal Jamerson Nascimento, sir. Requesting permission to get a move on. If you don’t mind, please, sir. Hey! Wait —”
They sped in silent shuttles from one tower to the next, dodging the patrol lights, and ducking under the pipes. They soon reached a low, square building on the edge of the main power plant. Ray pulled a card out of his belt pouch, breathing hard.
“Have you ever wondered why they have lights on these towers anyway?” he asked as he looked for the swipe.
“What?” Nascimento was on one knee, scanning the area.
“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?”
Nascimento shrugged, rifle sight sweeping the ground in front of them. “Maintenance? Aesthetics?”
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!” Nascimento urged.
“Got it.”
Just above head height on the left, the groove widened. Holdin
g his breath, he wiped the sweat off his hand, and reached the card up. This was when they would find out how good their source was.
Franklin - a brother in search of himself
The Lords of Misrule: Book Two
Amazon UK
Amazon US
A note on series order
Franklin - a brother in search of himself (UK/US) was published in Dec 2015 as book one of The Lords of Misrule. Aijlan - The Silk Revolution was written after Franklin.
I wrote Aijlan - The Silk Revolution partly in response to requests for more information on the events leading up to Franklin (in particular about Bethina Laudanum), and also so I could organise the back story in my own mind.
The 20K word novella (that I envisaged Aijlan being) grew, much like the 75K word novel of Franklin grew into its current length (I need to work on my brevity). At that point I realised that Aijlan was better served as book one of the series and Franklin as book two.
The series currently stands as such:
Aijlan - the Silk Revolution (The Lords of Misrule: Book One)
Franklin - a brother in search of himself (The Lords of Misrule: Book Two)
Rose (The Lords of Misrule: Book Three) - scheduled for release on Dec 1st 2016.
Other stories from The Lords of Misrule:
Droidal - a short story available to those on my mailing list
Contact
You can follow me on twitter, facebook, or contact me through my website (www.andygraham.link).
If you have any comments, questions or feedback, please drop me a line. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Acknowledgements
Once more, I owe a big debt to the people who made this project possible.
The beta readers who read through an early draft of Aijlan and gave (sometimes brutal) feedback: Andy Taylor, Anne Tatlow, Karina Bolan, Haemish Graham, and in particular Liz Knight, whose forensic dissection of my timeline and character motivations was invaluable.
Nicole Ayers a.k.a ‘the comma queen’ for the fantastic editing. Again, any mistakes that have survived are mine.
Alex Mackenzie for the cover design (Image chosen by KG from www.colourbox.com).
Above all, this is for my wife and kids.
The cast of Aijlan
The main characters from the story
The Settlements/ Free towns/ Bucket Towns
The village of Tear - The Franklins
Frederick ‘Rick’ Franklin - Corporal (Sci-Corps) Thryn Ap Svet - Rick’s wife Rose Franklin - Rick & Thryn’s daughter Donarth Franklin - Rick’s father
Old Town - The Tailles
Stann Taille - Sub-Corporal Edyth Taille (nee Gwydr) - Stann’s wife Donarth Taille - Stann & Edyth’s son
The village of Tear - Others
Lenka Zemlicka - Rick & Thryn’s neighbour Finn Hanzel - The pig herder
The Gates
Aijlan-Karth (The capital city of Aijlan) & Smaller cities
The Politicians
Edward De Lette – The President Luke Hamilton – The Vice-President Bethina Laudanum – The President’s Permanent Secretary
Others
Sub-Colonel Chester
Captain Lacky
Lieutenant Chel
Sub-Lieutenant Lacky
Private Lee
The Rukan Mountains
Private Marka
The Aijlan Military
Sub-Colonel Chester
Captain Lacky
Lieutenant Chel
Sub-Lieutenant Lacky
Staff Sergeant Donarth Taille Corporal Rick Franklin
Sub-Corporal Stann Taille
Private Lee
Private Marka
The Somerians
Aerfen
Deian - Aerfen’s father
Copyright and 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.
