Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  Across the river was the railway line south to London. It was a rare Public Era artefact as most railways had been ripped out in accordance with the Frite laws. He could hear a diesel locomotive rumbling and a clunk of shunting. Ahead, the old town bridge was lit by a string of floodlights. It seethed with glory troops and armoured cars. Those inside the artificial sunlight must be night-blind, so he felt confident to approach within thirty yards, close enough to see faces, ranks, teeth. The string of lights curved north, towards the central railway station. It was plain this was a major operation.

  The ancient lanes and courts of the medieval core around the cathedral were dark as a mine and deserted at this hour. By touch, he found his way around to the far side of the cathedral and approached the railway station along an alley lined by high brick walls. He found the wide street in front of the station floodlit, as he expected. Troops halted with a crisp stamp, got bawled at by their team lieutenant and broke up at the double to disappear inside the low brick façade of the station.

  Immediately to the right of the station entrance, a poster broadcast a message to the world. Even from the far side of the street and somewhat up an alley, the image and block text were clear. The image was his own face. The block text read: “Reward 50 TAu for the recovery of Lawrence Aldingford, Night and Fog fugitive. To be apprehended on sight and brought before your superior officer.”

  ‘TAu’ was short-hand for Troy ounces of gold. Fifty ounces was equivalent to two or three months’ pay for low-ranking troopers. Lawrence retreated to think. Two things were obvious. One, he absolutely had to be clear of Peterborough by dawn. In these dirty, Value System overalls he would be picked up anyway as a vagrant, after which identification was a foregone conclusion. Two, there must have been a calamitous irruption—a severe one—on a sovereign land. Troops were being rushed to repair the frontier and extract infestations. That train was his way out—a gift he could not miss.

  Keeping to the dark alleys of the town centre, he tried to get north, beyond the floodlights. Familiar buildings, pubs and night clubs appeared, disappeared and reappeared. Damn these medieval streets! He happened to glance down a passageway and remembered it was a short-cut through to the main road. After various exasperating wrong turns and dead ends, he found his way to a bridge over the tracks just north of the station. The risk of broken ankles did not hinder him—one glance over the parapet, then down the bank he went on his backside to the permanent way of the railway.

  This was a good position. From the deep shadow beneath the bridge, he had some leisure to survey the scene in the light cast from the floodlit platform. The train was made up of troop coaches at the front and flat cars loaded with armoured vehicles to the rear. The last wagon was a so-called ‘stinger’, an armoured box equipped with machine guns to guard the rear of the train. What he had to do was get on a flatcar without being spotted from the stinger.

  He rolled across the lines beneath the bridge and crawled along the far side of the shunting area until he was half a dozen flat cars forward of the stinger. What he now had to do was cut back across the tracks—devoid of cover—and get onto a flatbed.

  From down the line came the rising bellow of locomotives. The train started to move, to begin with disarmingly gently although with a persistent acceleration like a rope disappearing off a cliff. He sprinted, tripped, sprawled across a set of points banging a knee, jumped up again spitting in pain to find the train was gaining and the stinger was catching up. His right shin whacked some obstacle and he flew beside the singing wheels. By sheer instinct he grabbed a chain fixing down an armoured car and was yanked faster than he could run, his boots banging and bouncing on the blur of sleepers. His feet would be smashed if he could not get them up. An extra great stride, a spasm like a high-jumper, one boot hooked on the edge of the flatbed while the other swung at the wheels... A writhing slither and he was under that armoured car. Barely had he begun to exhale a blast of relief when something grabbed his shoulders and dragged him out again. A couple of glory troopers stood over him, pistols in his face.

  “Get up!” shouted one of them.

  He climbed to his feet, rocking due to the wagon motion, hands raised. He faced a basic and leading basic—two guys barely out of childhood. They quailed back, alarmed by his unexpected size. He made a disarming gesture.

  “Easy… Do not shoot. I’m one of you… Let’s go into the stinger and I’ll explain everything.”

  Every scrap of the social poise, the elocution, the calm superiority of his background went into those words. A little of their edginess relaxed. The leading basic wagged his pistol and shouted above the clatter of the wheels:

  “Keep it nice and slow. It’s nothing to us if you go under the train.”

  *

  Lawrence ripped open his laces, dragged the filthy boots off and shoved his feet at the stove. A flustered grade lieutenant second class winced at the foul reek rising from the body now starting to fume in the cosy air of the stinger.

  “What do you think you’re doing, trying jump onto our train?” he twittered.

  “Please excuse my presentation, in particular the feral odours. I have been on a field operation for several days.” Lawrence extended a dirty hand to the grade lieutenant.

  “Cost-Centre Lieutenant Lawrence London for your information.”

  The grade lieutenant’s eyes were on Lawrence’s left ear, which was still pierced from the Value System tag. “Do you have ID, sir?”

  “No. We never carry ID into the field. If we were killed or captured, it could be used by the bandits.”

  He continued with some chit-chat about the tedious operational reports one had to fill in after a field trip. The forms were real. They had been the bane of his life as a sergeant preventing fenland bandits. He joked about the euphemisms: “ammunition expended on target practice”, “replacement of trenching tools”, “biomass for composting” etc. The hearty manner and intimate knowledge of glory bureaucracy was having its effect, despite the suspicion aroused by the pierced ear.

  “Why did you jump on this train, sir?”

  “It’s part of the op.”

  “But this train is a special, the account-captain only announced it at dinner time—so you could not have known about it in advance.”

  “It was the account-captain who advised me to use it.”

  “Where are you going, sir?”

  “To Norwich.”

  This was a calculated gamble. Most of the Peterborough garrison’s domain lay to the east and included the city of Norwich. A calamitous irruption in any other direction would have been solved by troops from Leicester or Cambridge. In the subtle rustle of wool, the stiffening of alertness, he sensed the gamble had failed.

  “This train is going to London.”

  “It’s what? It can’t be. That makes no sense... In all logic, why would Peterborough relieve London? My briefing clearly stated—”

  The grade lieutenant drew his pistol.

  “There hasn’t been a train to Norwich in two years. General Wardian lost a court case under Frite and had to yield the line. It’s peculiar the account-captain misled you on that point.”

  Lawrence fought with total desperation. In prime condition, he might have beaten them back enough to get the door open and jump, but days of semi-starvation had worn out his magnificent physique. They bound his wrists and ankles with his leather boot laces, before fastening him to a steel frame of the wagon’s structure. Finally, they gagged him to shut up his manic ranting. He writhed about wide-eyed and heaving like a fish landed in a world it could not believe, gaping into a fate too terrible to accept.

  *

  As the hours passed, Lawrence’s plans focused on how to kill himself. A parapet. A passing train. A nervous guard. Death was the price of failure.

  By the by, from the conversation in the stinger, it filtered through his suicidal fixations that there was trouble around the Central Enclave of London. The industrial asylums
around the Central Enclave were afflicted by agitation. Two weeks previously, Brent Cross had been shelled under Naclaski for sheltering a radio transmitter. Then Elephant and Castle got the same ‘education’. Just yesterday, Holloway got it too. These lessons had provoked a torrential flow of outraged slummies down the Holloway turnpike to pool outside the Caledonian fort of the Grande Enceinte. Only rain and high winds had cooled tempers to disperse the pool back to slummy little hovels. The situation required a demonstration of safety features. The brigade on the train was going to occupy Holloway asylum where it would provide a little reminder that guns and gold reigned supreme.

  This reading of events was not universally accepted. While the grade lieutenant and his master sergeant espoused the need for ‘education’, Lawrence saw less enthusiasm from the ordinary ranks, especially the older, passed-over leading basics. Their faces soured and a few of them leaned close and exchanged what sounded like dissent. Now aroused from his funnel of morbid gloom, Lawrence picked up telling details. He was amazed to notice some of the basics and leading basics wore a badge of an orange circle on a dark green background. He recognised the motif as the old symbol of radical politics, a representation of the sun (SUN stood for Solidarity, Unity, Nation, the chant of the nationalist radicals). Times must have changed in recent months for glory troops openly to be displaying sympathies for radicals. Division meant opportunity. The critical point was that none of them recognised him as being a wanted man, nor did any display much interest in him now that he was subdued. Amid all the excitement of embarking on the special train, none of them had paid attention to the poster.

  The train slowed to a dawdle. The troopers manned the machine guns and ammunition belts, while the grade lieutenant and his master sergeant ascended to the observation cupola. The brakes uttered a long scream and the train stopped. Things clanged off the armour. From what Lawrence overheard of the grade lieutenant’s nervous telephone discussion with the train commander, the railway line was broken and they were surrounded by a mob of “riff-raff and sub-humanity”. Lawrence heard shouts and jeers, more things clanged off the armour—stones probably. From the front of the train they heard a roar, the roar of a mob, answered by a vicious, tearing rasp—brass-muncher, the sound was unmistakable. Several troopers openly cursed the murdering swine at its triggers. Lawrence strained and wrenched his utmost at the leather laces binding his wrists. He began rubbing against the rusty edge of a steel frame. Being entirely taken up with events outside, not one of the troopers in the stinger paid him any attention.

  The train lurched, buffers banged, they started to move again. The stinger rumbled over a rough stretch, which must have been the repaired section. The train proceeded at a crawl, the gunners intent at their posts, whilst Lawrence rubbed at the rusty beam with all his force, the effort sliming him in sweat from head to foot. He could feel he was making progress. Quite suddenly, the lace yielded and fell loose. He was free—but now he had to hide it. The train screamed to a halt again.

  The grade lieutenant narrated from the cupola that the locomotive was stopped within sight of the Regent’s Park East fort of the Grande Enceinte. That meant they were virtually at Euston depot. Lawrence would have no chance at all of escape once inside the depot. A frantic grab at the door and run for it? Better than what awaited him inside Euston.

  The gunners had faded to silence, their faces pale and grim. They swung their guns from side to side. From outside came a kind of rustling noise. The grade lieutenant muttered from the cupola:

  “Christ, we can’t kill all of them.”

  “The telephone is dead,” the master sergeant said. “They’ve cut the line.”

  Flames belched in. A gunner danced about screaming, his front roaring up flames—the poor sod had taken a direct hit from an oil grenade, probably fired from a catapult. More grenades banged on the outside. Burning oil sprayed from a ventilator grill. Curtains of fire dropped into the centre of the stinger car, followed by two lumps thrashing about, rolling in the blazing oil as it burned off their blistering scalps. What had been the grade lieutenant’s head was bright red, with crisps of scorched skin peeling off it. Someone yelled:

  “Stay at your guns!”

  Lawrence grovelled back against the steel wall, knees against his mouth, fingers working the knot at the back of his ankles. In seconds the stinger would be a gas chamber for all of them, as the flames ate the oxygen. The unhurt troopers crammed the top corners, farthest from the flames, trying to burrow beneath one another. Lawrence pressed a cheek to the steel floor and took a deep breath, sitting up to reach for the wheel of the door—but it was searing hot. He pulled down the cuffs of his overalls and tried again. The wheel turned and the locking bolts withdrew. He threw his shoulder against the door.

  Heavy though the armoured door was, it clanged back against the steel plates and Lawrence fell out onto a bush. Dense grey smoke belched out above him. The air cheered as a pack of hungry beasts with human faces pressed in, leering to pounce, hesitating when he swept back his sleeves to show the bleeding weals from rubbing through the leather bindings. The filthy brown overalls, body smell and pierced ear lobe confused the beasts enough to buy him seconds.

  “I’m one of you—I was their prisoner…”

  With deliberate slowness, he rose to his feet. Being a head taller than anyone else nearby, he could see the train was hopelessly buried within a lake of mob. It had stopped on an expanse of open ground outside the Grande Enceinte, the frontier wall of the Central Enclave. Helmeted heads looked down from its battlements—and they did nothing at all. In healthy times, bursts from brass-munchers would have scattered this mob. Ergo, these were not healthy times.

  The first trooper got thrown into the crowd from the stinger. He was just a teenager, his face smeared by smoke and tears. The crowd surged into the space around Lawrence, jamming him in place solid as if he had been buried alive. Eyes around him bulged wide with panic. He heard wheezes of breath crushed from lungs, while he protected himself by locking his arms. More troopers skeeted over the top of the crowd, floating on heads and punches. A mouth stretched wide, spine arched into a bow. Someone had speared the kid through the chest with a meat cleaver. Another got his throat slashed and scattered blood in all directions to laughter and applause. Another lurch of the crowd and the pressure around Lawrence gave way, bodies dropped unconscious in heaps. Everyone close to him had been suffocated unconscious, while those farther out were all eyes on the slaughter of glory troops, laughing at the pleas of mercy. He ducked under the coupling between the wagons, getting tangled amongst traffic going both ways under the train, some eager to see the fun before it was over, others cursing the slaughter of boys. On the far side, he was just another head and shoulders in a turbulence of anonymity. His size, wild looks and dirtiness prompted those in his path to get out of the way. From the edge of the lake, he looked up the length of the train towards the Grande Enceinte. Now he understood why the great number of troops in the forward carriages had not attacked the crowd. They had managed to extricate themselves by sheer force of numbers, creating a Roman-style hedgehog of bayonet-mounted rifles to create a sanctuary with their backs to the train. With an amoeba-like ability to alter shape as required, the blob-sanctuary was growing forward off the locomotive to bridge the fifty yards or so to the gate of Regent’s Park East fort. Since the gates were currently shut, he wondered, rather idly, what would happen when the tip of the blob got there. He did not care. It was not his problem.

  From this new vantage point, he could see beside the railway a typical blockhouse and raised pole marking the beginning of a turnpike. It was all locked down and, apparently, abandoned. That did not guarantee the far end of it would be locked down and abandoned with the pole raised. Mirror-Face’s tale had imprinted in Lawrence a deep fear of the ultramarines.

  What he needed was this lake of slummies to drain home, wherever home was. The ultramarines would have no chance of spotting him in its midst. Once inside an asy
lum, he would lie low somewhere on bum alley until he got his bearings, made a little money and got some clothes to wear over these Value System overalls.

  Chapter 16

  Riding the thick flow down the turnpike to the local industrial asylum was easy like a leaf riding a stream. It also proved arousing. This was the first time in four and a half months that Lawrence had so much as set eyes on a women. Now they were all around—not many and those present were of pugilistic inclinations—but they were here, their hips swaying inside dungarees, their breasts swelling canvas jackets and woollen sweaters. Christ he could have done with a woman. He had to keep his trap shut, though; a public-school accent would be fatal here. So, he bore his frustrations, mouth shut, ears attuned to clues.