“You cannot be fucking serious.”
“You’d be surprised how fucking serious this place is.”
Many times had Lawrence eaten preserved meats emptied from exactly such jars. It came out in a big mound of jelly and collapsed under its own weight into various lumps of cooked steak.
More ingredients appeared: tanks of filtered sea water, jugs filled with pepper and rosemary. The value grabbed meat from the tubs, cut it into portions and packed it into the jars. The ultramarines paced about leaning in to correct any short-cutting. Every finished jar got inspected by a couple of under-sergeants. Human chains grew out like tentacles from the table to the pressure-cooking boilers, the jars got passed hand to hand up to each boiler hatch and eased down to be stacked by more value inside. When a boiler was full, the value climbed out and bolted the hatch down. Master Sergeant Ratty ordered the furnaces lit. Value lit spades of kindling and eased them inside the fireboxes, where the flames presently caught on bundles of willow. For an hour, the pressure cookers rumbled away. The few on stoking duty or watching the pressure gauges were the only ones with anything to do. The rest degenerated into a catatonic daze, lying about sweating, eyes dulled and sullen, as if shot up with narcotic drugs.
Master Sergeant Ratty yelled an order. Steam roared up the discharge pipes, nobody could speak or think in the racket. Dazed value cascading sweat strung out in human chains whilst Spiderman and the other firemen purged the boilers with cold water. The atmosphere now was a weight of crushing heat. The production cycle repeated. Years of practice had honed the team to a mechanism.
“Big Stak, I want to show you something,” Tricky Fingers said.
Lawrence wore nothing but underpants. He followed, albeit warily, not least to get out of the heat. Tricky Fingers led him to the crating room, so gorgeously cool, where the jars got labelled and packed into wooden crates. The two of them joined in, painting glue and rolling on labels. Each read, “The Captain’s Table. Finest savoury preserves of impeccable quality”.
Lawrence had eaten this brand as a guardian.
“How long has this been going on?”
“When I got here in ‘89, I asked the same question. The longest-served value then was Alpha501, a.k.a. Snap Turtle, who’d done eight years. He told me the place had been running five years when he first arrived. Apparently the first tranche of value built the Square from nothing while they lived here in the Factory. It’s a Public Era heirloom.”
“Thirty years,” Lawrence said. “Christ on a bike. Think of all the poor bastard surplus turned into steaks and boots in that time. I never thought I’d feel sorry for the surplus.”
“I estimate we process fifty thousand head per year. Even allowing for growing the business from scratch, it still makes nearly a million head.”
“Did you eat this stuff, when you were a guardian?”
“Probably. It’s not all human. One of our duties is slaughtering pigs. The meat looks the same and I suppose it tastes much the same.”
“No one would ever suspect a scheme as fiendish as this,” Lawrence said. “It’s extreme economic logic all right, so extreme only a maniac could have conceived it. The question is: why? It’s utterly baffling any mind could have dreamed up such a place as this. The Captain comes across as a cynic, not a maniac.”
“Snap Turtle told me an old story from the early years, when there were just a few hundred alphas building the Square. Apparently, some of those early value recognised The Captain from a previous life—”
“The Captain was here at the beginning? But he’s not that old.”
“He sucks youth from us. We die young and he stays young, damn him. He was a glory officer with General Wardian and a top killer. The full works—led a hygiene unit, then commanded a barge. His real name is Prentice Nightminster.”
Lawrence’s attention closed in like a hawk’s. There was a name—and such an unlikely one. Nobody would ever make up the name Prentice for The Captain.
“Anything more?”
“Nightminster supposedly came from Bermondsey asylum. That could be true. If you listen carefully, there’s the hint of a slummy accent when he says ‘know’ or ‘happen’. Even more supposedly, he went to Oxford University and then dropped out to join General Wardian after some kind of ruckus. One value told me he got in a fight with Tom Krossington and was thrown out. Another said he was caught up in the Sack of Oxford and it warped his mind. There must be a core of truth in the tale—it’s too randomly fanciful for anyone to make up.”
Lawrence guessed this was privileged information, known only to superior members of the gang, passed down from alpha to beta, beta to gamma and so on through the alphabet, decade after decade, another ritual by which the top-dog value distinguished themselves from the undead dross.
“The Captain was certainly a top killer,” Lawrence said. “He was sneering and jeering over my life—”
“He does that to everyone.”
“—and he said things only a top killer could know. It’s obvious in other ways. Where would he get these ultramarine thugs except from hygiene units and barge crews?” By way of a peace offering, Lawrence laid his trust in Tricky Fingers. “Do you think Krossington and his like know about preventions?”
“Of course they fucking do. I’m convinced that’s why I ended up here—I’d seen too much. On paper, I got six months for conduct unbecoming of an officer. All I did was hold orgies to while away the boring weeks patrolling for surplus. In practice, I got this. You and I aren’t the only suckers here with a past, believe me.”
“Someone has to get out and tell the world. Isn’t there some organised radical group? The National Party?”
Tricky Fingers just grunted and shook his head.
“There are always radicals, Big Stak. When I was young, the SUN Party was still around. It got rubbed out after the Sack of Oxford. No, you’ve got to face up to being here for life.”
He turned, grabbed Lawrence and kissed him on the mouth. Lawrence fell back in shock, wiping his mouth and spitting. He glared at his gang leader.
“Don’t do that again.”
“You don’t want me for an enemy.”
“You don’t want me for an enemy.” Lawrence marched from the crating room. The confrontation was too embarrassingly camp to continue. Back in the heat, Spiderman was still tending his pressure-cooking boiler.
“Where have you fucking been?”
“I was labelling with Tricky Fingers.”
“Turned you already, has he?”
“I’m not going to last.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“What do you make of Tricky Fingers?”
“He’s an arsehole, don’t mind him. There are no genuine crooks here, we’re a bunch of dumb saps who obeyed orders and a fat lot of fucking good it did us. The real crooks are running the slums, or making a packet ripping off the glory trusts.”
“Has he ever made a pass at you?”
“People don’t make passes at me, I’m ugly.”
“He keeps hassling me for sex.”
“That’s because you’re pretty,” Spiderman said. “There’s always excitement when a fit new deb like you arrives. The gals are drooling over you, even more than over Zeta728’s tits.”
“I’ll beat that shithead to a jelly if he makes another pass at me.”
“Shall I let him know?”
“It wouldn’t do any harm.”
“I wouldn’t count on that, Big Stak.”
Lawrence just shrugged. Doom lay heavy on his chest.
Chapter 8
Lawrence survived a month. He survived six weeks. He survived…
A depressive mood afflicted the population as the days slid into the dreary gloom of autumn. Two arrivals hanged themselves in the toilets on their first night. Another, undead Zeta408, got scalded in the Cannery. He opened the vent of a boiler when the pressure was still 0.5 Bar. The steam shrieked louder than he did and misted
up the whole Cannery leaving him writhing and screaming, flailing his own skin off in sheets. Even Master Sergeant Ratty was shaken. He ordered the poor bastard dragged outside, where he ‘anaesthetised’ the unfortunate young man with shot through the head. Two more arrivals ran off in the night. The Captain displayed their remains at the following days’ evening parade. The eye sockets were stuffed with purple-grey bulbs. Lawrence asked Spiderman about these.
“Balls,” he said. “Testicles. Done when they were still alive, I’ll bet. Spayed and blinded. What a way to go.”
The dead vanished like pigs in the slaughterhouse. No one spoke of them again. Too many people died to remember them all, and what was the point anyway? There was no history here. The only plan was to survive this current day intact. Lawrence was learning to appreciate every instant of clean wind, a shade of blue over the evening horizon, a laugh with Spiderman, the soothing peace of the marsh on the way to the Tidal Basin, taking joy from the soaring gulls. Every instant of beauty or mirth had to be snatched and savoured before it was gone, for the next instant could be death, and after death, nothing—the void of the Nameless Gone.
In a matter of just over six weeks, Lawrence progressed half-way across the back row of the gang block, one twentieth of the way to the elite position occupied by Tricky Fingers, Ugly Toes and the other aristocracy of the gang. Of course, progress did slow down. Those who lasted three months could last three years, those who lasted three years had a fair crack at surviving a decade. Spiderman told him the line-up of the front rank had not changed in the last year.
What caused Lawrence most alarm was the speed at which he got used to the whole abominable operation, from unloading to separating to bating to canning to hanging skins in the smokehouse. All this he got used to as a great bore that had to be endured every day. The corrupt, stinking callousness of the place was seeping into his flesh and polluting it forever. It vaguely disturbed him that he did not suffer nightmares, although this was also a safety feature. Those who broke the sleep of the dormitory got harsh treatment, as he was to discover.
Learning a craft in the Workshop—how to make a leather jacket, how to make boots—would at least have yielded the satisfaction of creation. It was a privilege only earned through time and good standing. Of the eighteen hundred head of value, he estimated no more than four hundred joined in the Workshop, not one of which was a zeta. Of course, the psychology of granting privilege to those who embraced their fate was not lost to him. By Lawrence’s estimate, eighteen hundred head of value were held in their state of subjugation by no more than 150 shareholders, even granting that at any one time some shareholders must be away on annual leave in the outside world. A rebellion would end it all in five seconds flat. So why did it never happen? For the same reason troops obeyed officers they hated: conditioned servility. Or else, the virtually guaranteed suicide of attempting to organise a conspiracy of hundreds in a population seething with petty gripes and rivalries. Or simply the narcosis of routine. Lawrence could feel this invisible enemy rotting his moral fibre as weeks disappeared into a growing blank of empty time gone. Most ominously, he ceased to be aware of the tag through his ear. Sometimes he brushed it accidentally and was surprised to find it there.
The sure sign he was becoming institutionalised was a growing hatred of new arrivals. They asked the same irritating questions, had to be taught the same lessons and made the same dumb mistakes. The truly dangerous ones cried out for their mamas in their sleep, or wailed for their girlfriends, or they bleated recriminations at God for this fate. If they were lucky, a few caustic barbs from Buttons or Spiderman got the whole dormitory laughing and the offender took the message and shut up. The slow learners, the victims of nightmares, the incorrigible snorers; they got a different lesson. One night during the third week, there was some kind of angst in the toilets during which Bitchy Ritchy got strangled by Buttons and Gnasher. At the next morning’s parade, The Captain pontificated his outrage at having been robbed of future value. He demanded Gang 4 produce Bitchy Ritchy’s killer. After a tense pause, Buttons and Gnasher grabbed a recent arrival tagged Zeta772 and dragged him out protesting his innocence to SMS London, who ordered him turn and face the wall. Before the whole parade of the Value System, SMS London drew his Hi-Power Browning and shot Zeta772 in the back of the head. Master Sergeant Ratty stooped and snipped the tag from the dead man’s ear.
Why Zeta772? The fat bastard snored like a rotten bellows, so he had to go.
Escape to death was simple. What about escape to life? Lawrence never caught a hint that value had ever got away. It was one of the certainties of life, like the certainty of death, that formed the bedrock of the Value System. Those who fled to the marshes were either deranged, panicked, or idiots. Yet over weeks of nocturnal roaming and furtive daytime observation, Lawrence reached an extraordinary conclusion: the ultras mounted no guards anywhere. The route to the Factory was thwarted by raising the drawbridge over the Tidal Creek after evening shift. The ultras’ own compound was adjacent the football field, across another mud creek with a drawbridge. Evidently the Value System was naturally secured by creeks, impassable marsh and by the utter absence of a farther world of life. No smoke ever smudged the landward sky, no aircraft ever overflew, no flake of sail ever spurred the horizon. Lawrence dreamed of the whole place being swept away in a storm surge off the North Sea or by floods from inland. Yet even this looked a remote hope. The Value System occupied an island critically a couple of yards higher in elevation than the surrounding land. At least so far, this had protected it from inundation.
None of this deterred Lawrence in his planning for a break in the spring. With enough sheer gall, it must be possible to take a barge from the Tidal Basin and get out into the wastes of the North Sea. His toughest problem was, whom to escape with? The gang was naturally cliquey. Lawrence hung about with Spiderman, Mirror-Face and Ugly Toes, because they were steady, reliable people. To extend one’s acquaintanceship became harder as the weeks passed. Speaking to a wider circle risked being taken for a gay come-on. Besides, the vast majority of value were simply a waste of space: Undead Nameless Gone. Everybody arrived in a batch, their misdemeanours to be publicly gloated over by The Captain. There were paedophiles, male prostitutes, honey-traps who blackmailed officers, petty thieves and a large proportion who were simply irritating. Probably two-thirds of value did not get a moniker, for the good reason that they were talentless nobodies. None was the sort Lawrence would risk his life with. He decided to use this dark period of the year to find a partner and set his sights on a break in the spring, when the nights would still be long, but the bitterest of the cold should have passed.
*
The most dangerous aspect of the Value System was its effect on what his Securitician A training had called situation awareness. Every Monday morning, he switched off to insulate himself from the barbaric duties to come. Every Saturday afternoon, he switched back on, got paid and became a human being again to savour the bliss of the Saturday night party.
The danger arose when wielding a knife in the Separation Shop whilst tormented by thoughts that had been stewing around and around for days. It started on a Sunday night as he was waiting for sleep, trying but failing not to think about Sarah-Kelly. An occasion came to mind. On one of their first days out together, Sarah-Kelly and he had climbed up to McCaig’s Tower, the prominent but pointless mini-Colosseum overlooking the town of Oban. They stood arm in arm admiring the view across Oban Bay while the spring breeze whisked her hair against his cheek. Perhaps because the scene was so far removed from the ugliness of Lawrence’s past, she caught him quite off guard when she asked what Naclaski guns fired at.
“Breaches of Naclaski,” Lawrence replied.
“But what is Naclaski?”
Her ignorance so amazed him that he spoke on without thinking ahead to where the conversation might lead. It was easy to forget that regulations fundamental to the duties of a glory officer—as detailed in the training prog
ramme of the Securitician A licence—meant nothing to those whose lives never touched the sovereign class.
“Naclaski stands for National Clear Skies Initiative. The sovereigns claim privacy of the air above their land all the way to outer space.”
“What’s outer space?”
“It’s where the stars live.” He gave her a squeeze. Her education in the port of North Kensington basin had been parochial despite her family’s owning a barging business and being quite wealthy by slum standards. “Basically, nothing is allowed to cross the air above sovereign land. No aircraft, no balloons, no carrier pigeons, no radio transmissions.”
“Carrier pigeons? Come on—”
“Sovereign privacy is a stringent thing. If a flying boat gets lost in a winter storm and strays over sovereign land, it gets shot down by radar-guided Naclaski guns.”
“Who is radar?”
Lawrence laughed. Information about the tracking radar systems was, of course, strictly classified. It was foolish of him to mention it.
“Radar stands for Random Attack Direction Attribution Rule.”
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s a procedure... It doesn’t matter. Forget I said it.”
“What happens to the folk in the plane?”
“They die, unless they’re lucky enough to bale out by parachute.”
Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2 Page 7
