DARKEST AMBITIONS

SOVEREIGNS OF THE STORM — BOOK TWO

*

MALCOLM J WARDLAW

Darkest Ambitions

Copyright © 2023 by Malcolm J Wardlaw.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is entirely coincidental.

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Cover design by MiblArt

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 1

[Bermondsey industrial asylum, Old Greater London, New Year’s Eve 2072]

When a man from nothing, nowhere asks a woman from land and gold to a party, he must brace for disappointment. Prentice ‘Big Knight’ Nightminster was bracing for disappointment. Nine o’clock had come and gone. He paced to and fro, lizards writhing about his liver, hands restless like nervous crabs. Perhaps this New Year of 2073 was going to be the end of his dreams. He was certainly not going to the biggest New Year’s party in London alone. He fell into gloom faced with being stood up on his date with destiny. Without Her Decency Victorina Krossington, Target Hundred Thousand died inside his head.

He cast a last glance through the stone arches of Tower Bridge. Three young men were emerging from the shadows of the northern tower about thirty yards away. They wore black ushanka hats against the spikes of ice in the breeze. He hesitated, looking harder at the man on the right, drawn by his manner. This man had the broad-set shoulders and stiff neck of a military type. He kept looking back down the bridge and above at the faux battlements of the tower, as if fearing ambush.

Then the ‘man’ in the middle, tall and strangely elegant, brushed their ushanka. Spilling bright red hair shot a thrill from Night- minster’s heart to his groin. He had assumed she would arrive in a bloody great armoured limousine with Perspex turret and twin Browning machine guns ready for action. He waited, straddling the crack where the two lifting spans of Tower Bridge met in the middle between the Gothic towers. Victorina’s hands fluttered like nervous chaffinches and her face betrayed a woebegone reluctance. It was obvious she had not accepted Nightminster’s invitation, rather, Marcus-John had told her to accept it. Nightminster stepped forward to greet them.

“Welcome to Bermondsey industrial asylum, Your Decency,” he said. Victorina responded by looking away into the darkness. Her bodyguards closed in like a couple of Rottweilers.

“Is this Mr Nightminster, Your Decency?”

“It is, Lieutenant.”

“Where’s your ID?” the lieutenant asked.

“Here.” Nightminster retrieved the ultramarine ID booklet from inside his evening suit and held it open, snapping it beyond the lieutenant’s reach when he tried to take it. “Where’s your ID?”

“We’re not required to justify ourselves, commoner.”

Nightminster pointed at the crack between his shoes where the two spans of Tower Bridge almost touched.

“That’s the frontier of the estate of Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey, your host of this evening. Once you cross that crack, you have to justify yourselves exactly the same as any common resident.”

Victorina rolled her eyes, cheeks stiff with anger.

“I’m not in the habit of bearing such a thing as an identity booklet. Why didn’t you explain this in your invitation? I think your planning is lamentable, Mr Nightminster, simply lamentable.”

“The Owner has to ensure the safety of his subjects, just like any ruler. I’ll try and get you in under my ID.”

He tried to slip his arm inside hers, but she lurched away, elbow tight against her side.

“Keep your distance, Mr Nightminster! I am present only in a diplomatic capacity, lest you misapprehend the situation.”

Despite his burning embarrassment, Nightminster saved some face by rejoining smoothly:

“Evidently our asylum ways are a little gallant for Her Decency.”

Privately he was staring into the hours ahead with rising dread. This was going to be an endurance test—or worse. From the first moment he had ever thought of inviting Her Decency to Johnny Albert’s New Year’s party, he had known he was venturing into a dangerous arena where sawn-off shotguns and champion marksmanship would not save him. If she humiliated him by taking off with one of the lieutenants, or Johnny Albert himself, he would forever be the buffoon who leaped from the gutter only to land very publicly in the shit-heap of failure. He led the two bodyguards and Her Decency in tight silence off Tower Bridge to the crossroads with Druid Street, where he bore to the right, towards the palace of Johnny Albert—and ran straight into a road block that had not been there an hour ago.

Like any asylum, Bermondsey was about as illuminated as a forest after dark. A big, glaring acetylene lantern set on the gravel of Druid Street completely obliterated the wider world beyond. To one side was propped a stencilled metal sign, red letters on yellow: “Stop! Show ID”. Beyond, only faint suggestions of movement and shapes could be made out. As Nightminster reached the lantern, a harsh voice from the darkness instructed:

“Halt! Hold up your ID for inspection.”

Nightminster had no doubt that a veritable porcupine of submachine guns covered all four of them. Once again, he produced his ultramarine ID and held it open. Probably the squad leader was reading it with field glasses.

“What about the other three?”

“They are not required to show ID.”

There followed only the dripping and hiss of the acetylene lantern and a distant roar from some relief valve of the Chadderton works at the far end of Druid Street. Even on this, New Year’s Eve, some processes of industry never slept. The squad manning the roadblock was probably gawping at Her Decency. In the clean white light of the acetylene lantern, Victorina’s face appeared almost ghostly against her black mink coat, her mouth an impatient warp of deep red washed with steam wisping from her nostrils. Propped up on high heels, she stood six feet tall. She did not deign to lower her eyes. Her two bodyguards just hung about as if waiting for an old gate to be opened.

“My name is Nightminster. I am in the highest standing with the Owner.” He gestured. “This is my guest, Her Decency Victorina Krossington, and these are her two bodyguards.”

By standing close to the lantern, he got a better view over its glare. Now he could see a couple of troopers in a sandbag nest hunched behind an evil weapon with a perforated shield around its barrel. It was an MG42 machine gun. He could hear the tiny rustling of snow landing on its breech and a faint grating caused by Victorina twisting a stiletto heel into the frozen-packed gravel. In glancing down, he noticed she wore only strapped high-heels and tights. Her feet must be bloody freezing—no wonder she was so pissed-off.

“Why aren’t you in uniform?” the squad leader demanded.

“I’m not an ultramarine.”

“Then you’re committing a capital offence, boy.”

“How?”

“By impersonating one of us.”

“Do I look like a capital prick? Read the fine print! My ID explains I tutor the Owner’s children.”

Strictly speaking, he had not tutored the Owner’s children for five months. The ID carried no more authority than the fact Johnny Albert had never asked for it back. Movement stirred. A squat character emerged into the light. He was a master sergeant, rotund and middle-aged, with the eyes of an angry cur not quite brave enough to bite the human that had just kicked it.

“That?” He pointed at Victorina, who ignored him. “Very nice looker. A Krossington? We never heard about no sovereign coming to the Owner’s bash. Come on love, what have you got to offer?”

His fingers waggled insolently to demand her documents.

“Sovereigns do not carry ID, it is beneath their dignity,” Nightminster said. “Perhaps her bodyguards could indicate their status?” He leaned towards the marine lieutenant, in such manner as could have been interpreted as a bow.

“We are Krossington marines. I’ve already told you we don’t justify ourselves to anyone except clan, and certainly not to some gaggle of commoners.”

“Oh Christ,” Nightminster said. He drifted like mist, at his wits’ end. Everyone stood like wax statues. An eerie sensation came over Nightminster that he was alone with corpses frozen solid in the night.

“You fucking people are like a bunch of stone-cold corpses frozen solid in the night!” he seethed. He circled around the backs of the two marine bodyguards, addressing everyone. “The whole point of Her Decency’s presence—“ He stuck his face in the master sergeant’s fat mug. “—is to open diplomatic intercourse between our Owner and the Krossington clan. You’re blocking healthy intercourse!”

A couple of the troopers beyond the lantern gasped with stifled laughter, gaining a furious glance from the master sergeant. Victorina tucked her chin down, trying to hide her mirth.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Nightminster said. “I’ll take Her Decency and bodyguards to my parents’ little flat down near the market place and we’ll enjoy a perfectly charming New Year there. When Johnny asks why we missed his bash, I’ll explain that some excuse of a prophylactic prevented our intercourse.”

Victorina let out a great cackle and turned to strut away.

“That’s not a bad idea, Big Knight. My feet are blocks of ice and I can’t stand fat little fools messing up my New Year.”

Nightminster broke after her, casting back one last jibe:

“Do tell the Owner we called.”

He was at least slightly confident a humble celebration with his parents would appeal to Her Socially-Conscious Decency. All was far from lost.

“Wait! Wait a minute!” The master sergeant was wailing. “What about your ID?”

“Keep it for the Owner.”

“But—you’ve got to give me time!”

The master sergeant was almost stamping his jackboot in dismay. Some of his troops laughed openly. That was how it was with ultramarines. Pitiless derision for those who failed their rank. Nightminster came jumping back in great bouncing strides, getting more laughs from the troops. The master sergeant’s face was screwed up puce in the harsh acetylene light. He threw down Nightminster’s ID on the gravel.

“Oh, get on by with your damned floozy, you insolent whelp.”

Nightminster’s whistle halted Her Decency at the limit of the light cast by acetylene lantern.

“We’re on, Rina, the evening is ours.”

As she came mincing past, smirking, she hooked her elbow for an arm and squeezed his hand.

“Thank you for promoting healthy intercourse, Mr Nightminster.”

“Always a pleasure.”

“I won’t forget your face, Nightminster,” the barrel of a master sergeant groused from behind them.

They ignored him.

Chapter 2

“What’s all this barbed wire for?” Victorina asked, sweeping her right arm at the fence and guard towers lining Druid Street, dimly visible in the light from the half-moon.

“That’s where the Owner’s keeps his Night and Fog gangs.”

“I can’t see any lights.”

“Foggers go home for Christmas and don’t report back until the first Monday in March. There’s no point keeping them through the winter months eating gold when they can’t work.”

“And they turn up like schoolboys in the spring?”

“They’ve no choice. The penalty for escape is—” He recalled the gallows hanging with ‘fruit’ on the occasion last summer when Johnny Albert had extracted him from Reigate fortress to provide a little ‘education in life’. “There are no second offenses, put it that way.”

“The Night and Fog is a squalid business.”

She turned to him. Her mouth was right under his chin, he could smell liquorice on her breath.

“Don’t you agree?”

Images from last summer of medieval serfs labouring in the fields of the sovereign lands came to mind. Was it politic to mention them, after having won at least her arm? He grunted and lurched, missing a pace. Victorina had elbowed him under the ribs, and none too gently either.

“Share the big thoughts, Big Knight.”

“I was contemplating natives ploughing your sovereign mud with tools a medieval serf would laugh at.”

Now her smile hardened as she leaned so close that her warm breath smoked about his face.

“And where does your gold come from?”

She was truly furious, hissing at him. He had to press his lips tight not to grin. Bull’s eye!

“Since you ask, in seriousness, I will answer, in seriousness. I am an alchemist. I transform danger into gold. Once upon a time, I would have been called an arbitrageur, although nowadays I get called anything from punk to scoundrel.”

He did not look at her in saying this, and for several seconds supposed she considered the answer grandiose. However, she slid her arm inside his again.

“You know something, Big Knight Nightminster, you are a true original. I’ve never met anyone like you.” Her voice altered to a kind of wistfulness. “I do so like an original.”

He clasped hands with hers and smiled into her eyes, and in that moment, he sensed he had made a hit and the rest of the evening was going to be just fine.

“Let’s keep off politics tonight.” She stepped a little ahead and looked back up into his face. “You’re such a mystery. You got out of this terrible world—the people here are so angry and violent.”

“You wanted to stay off politics.”

“How did you do it?”

“Would you waste your life in a dump like this?”

“Most people get stuck where they’re born.”

“That’s because they choose to get stuck.”

“I detect a certain heartlessness.”

“You detect no such thing! Every scrap of gold I earned by sweat and fear. Why are there not more like me? Because the largest organ in the human body is the rabbit, as I’m sure you’re aware from your study of anatomy. Most are content with their warren because it’s safe and a few nibbles of grass suffice.”

“I can understand why Marcus-John holds you in such high esteem. Exactly the same scathing attitude towards the mass of humanity. You’re a lot alike, actually. He’s always jumping in people’s faces to bet five thousand or ten thousand ounces on a yacht race. Our father Maurice sent him to Eton College, and Eton College sent him back for swearing at the headmaster in Proto-Indo-European.”

Nightminster erupted in a long, rich bellow.

“You’re hasty in your judgements, Redhead. I have dedicated my highest ambitions to the service of the people.”

“Your atomic dream? The impossible is only a matter of willpower and time?” Her smile was insufferably patient and extremely charming.

They reached the end of the queue for Johnny’s party. Nightminster waved the bodyguards to catch up, as they could only get in under his invitation. Victorina had introduced them earlier as Lieutenant Telford and Sergeant Ogilvy, which had in no way warmed their stand-offishness.

A rigid finger jabbed Nightminster’s shoulder. He turned to confront one of Johnny Albert’s lieutenants with a master sergeant and a tail of heelers festooned with submachine guns.

“And who might you be, young man, with such a fair lady? Why aren’t you in uniform?”

Nightminster did not know the lieutenant’s name or anything about him, except what was evident from a range of six inches; a pair of cold eyes and a razor-lipped mouth accustomed to ordering all manner of barbarities.

“Oh, for God’s sake, not again,” Victorina groaned.

Nightminster passed over his ID, which the lieutenant read carefully, page by page. He then looked at Lieutenant Telford.

“Who are you?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Nightminster lifted one of Victorina’s slender hands. “This is Her Decency Victorina Krossington. These are her marine bodyguards. They’re what you might call uppity.”

The lieutenant returned Nightminster’s ID booklet.

“The Owner told us to expect her. You, Nightminster, are totally responsible for ensuring they uphold our rules. Outsiders can’t take guns into the palace.”

“We have our own rules,” Lieutenant Telford said.

“You’ll have to hand over your pistols.” Nightminster savoured his moment of authority over sovereign arrogance.

“Nope. No chance.” Telford shook his head.

“Then you’ll have to stay out here. All night long.”

Victorina wrapped her face in her palms, spitting incomprehensible expletives. She clenched her fists and attacked Nightminster, beating his chest, her eyes bright with rage.

“Damn you bloody people and your poppycock orders! Damn all of you with your stupid martial pride and guns.”

“You can always go back to Marko.”

Nightminster took a stand beside the lieutenant. The gleam went out of her eyes and she slumped.

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t dismiss my own guards and they won’t give up their guns.”

“We could bring a table out,” Nightminster suggested. This drew no reaction. “May I suggest a compromise? I shall bear the arms of these two men inside the palace—how does that suit Her Decency?”

Telford and Ogilvy looked to Her Decency for instructions.

“If that’s the only way we can make this work, then so be it. Please hand your guns to Mr Nightminster.”

He accepted two smart Glock automatic pistols, slick plastic Public Era heirlooms, light, with fat handles for a large capacity of rounds. Previously, he had only ever seen the most senior glory officers with such treasured pieces.

“We’re not going through all this crap yet again at the entrance.” He looked meaningfully at the lieutenant.

“Follow me,” the lieutenant said.

Chapter 3

Nightminster led Victorina into the main atrium of Johnny Albert’s palace. It held no surprises for him. It certainly did for her. The immensity of the hall stunned her, left her simply speechless gazing from one end to the other. The Public Era ceiling of slatted wood over mighty steel beams faded away in both directions into a haze from smokers and crackling torches.

“This really is a palace. I hadn’t the faintest idea there existed such splendour—“

“In the shitty asylums.”

“Please don’t be like that. Shit! I’m so embarrassed by that tantrum out there. I’m not being much of an ambassador. I just wasn’t prepared for all the ludicrous bickering amongst prickly little toy soldiers. They keep our world split into selfish fiefdoms, each with its tiny mindset.”

“You and I are pioneering. No sovereign has ever hallowed an owner’s palace. Pioneering is hard. One must battle the legions of orthodoxy, and they are plenty.”

“You sound almost Biblical!”

For some awkward seconds, they stood alone amidst a bustle of complete strangers. Panic started to gnaw on his nerves. He calmed himself by plotting priorities. As an absolute minimum, he had to present Her Decency to the host of this grand party, Johnny Albert. With that, he fulfilled the promise he had made to obtain the invitation in the first place. Afterwards, he was free—and so was she.

“I’m burning up, let’s get rid of these jackets,” he said.

This was easier said than done. The atrium was mobbed with ultramarines in their fine dress uniforms of black with silver trim, accompanied by wives and children. A jazz band flared and jigged from one direction while a waltz oozed from another. The clamour of chatter and laughter intimidated Nightminster. He was a nobody adrift on a lake of strangers. Victorina pulled off her ushanka and shook out her hair in a red curtain down her back. She looked up at him with an edge of annoyance. He was far from alone in noticing this revelation of her beauty. No few of Johnny Albert’s toughs swung about to stare, obviously judging his suitability to accompany such class as somewhat lacking. He put his arms around her.

“You look so extremely lovely tonight.”

“Thank you! Now I feel I’m with a gentleman.”

She patted his shoulders.

“Lead on and we’ll get rid of these coats.”

Being accustomed to servants who relieved one of outdoor clothing, Victorina was curious about the process of queuing yet again to hand across belongings at a counter and get a numbered brass token.

“I feel like a native now,” she laughed. “I’ve got a number, how wonderful!”

He stood back to admire her. She wore a tight, jet black, strapless evening gown. When she took a pace, the split opened to the top of her thigh. After having torn his own eyes away, Nightminster was all too aware of sly rubber-necking by others.

“You look simply fabulous,” he murmured. “That’s beautiful satin.”

She stepped right up close with the bridge of her nose almost touching his lips.

“It’s sateen! Marko wouldn’t lay out for silk because he said this was just a slummy’s bash and you wouldn’t feed strawberries to a pig, or some such crap. He’d be astounded to see this palace and all these amazingly-dressed people.”

She stood back and looked Nightminster up and down in his tailed black evening suit. It was a creation of Johnny Albert’s tailor. “You must have paid a fortune to look that cheap,” she said. “Are you still carrying all those guns?”

He lifted the Makarov from a trouser pocket, one Glock from inside his evening jacket, the other from the back of his belt. She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“I never knew the outside world was so gun-crazy. Every man here is bearing a pistol.”

“It’s part of the uniform.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the women were loaded beneath their gowns.”

“Neither would I—to kill each other! Ultra wives are simply dreadful.”

“Can’t people live without guns?”

“Without guns, we’d be slaves.”

“At least I’ve a guardian angel armed like a battleship! Just don’t shoot yourself out of being a father.”

“Not happening.” He smiled with great confidence. “The bullet would ricochet.”

She proceeded to make a discreet wafting gesture. Telford and Ogilvy melted off towards one of the bars. “Come on, let’s have a dance and get a drink.”

She pulled him out into the swirling world of ballroom dancing. If there was an alien place on earth for Nightminster, it was the dance floor. Victorina keeled over laughing at his first efforts to box-step, which ended in his long legs tangled up in each other. She stood before him, picked up his left hand and told him to put his right hand on her back.

“Not in the small of my back, up at my shoulder blade,” she said. She laid her left hand just below his shoulder and talked him through his first box-step, leading him in the count of one through to six. After a couple of tries he found the footwork appealed to his practice from boxing lessons in General Wardian. She nodded him on as he began to take the lead, swirling the pair of them about—he burned self-conscious and foolish surrounded by other dancers all of whom were far more accomplished than he. Out of the reeling couples emerged a hollow-cheeked gorilla with a petite blonde. It was Lieutenant Jordan, the ultramarine officer who had challenged Victorina at her stall on Bermondsey market place a month ago. He jumped in shock at the sight of her, and jumped again on recognising Nightminster.

“Big Knight! Having a good time?” he asked. He let go of his partner and bowed low before Victorina. “We are truly honoured by your presence, Your Decency.”

“Please don’t call me that! I’m just plain Rina.” She offered her hand. Lieutenant Jordan very decently kissed it and then gave her a wink and a nudge to show he was just kidding.

“Now let’s try something a bit more challenging,” she said as they got going again. “Try slinking as you move, as if you’re dancing with a woman, not sparring with a man.”

Nightminster obliged, doing his best to loosen up. He took a couple of champagnes from a passing waiter and after a few gulps he started to relax and enjoy himself. His swagger could be a bit clumsy, as when he barged into someone and spun around to apologise to find Johnny Albert dancing with his deliciously pretty eldest daughter Lucinda, whom Nightminster had tutored for a year.

“Well, well, my young Big Knight, I wondered where you’d got to. And this lovely young lady charms our party! I’m thrilled to entertain you, allow me to introduce my own daughter Lucinda. Now then, Lucinda, you can practice your etiquette on Her Dec—”

“No! I’m just plain Rina. No titles! I can’t stand being addressed as anything special.”

Johnny Albert recoiled at being so bluntly cut off, and in public too. Startled eyes flickered Victorina’s way from nearby dancers. Most people—men at least—who displayed such disrespect got a swipe. Instead, Johnny shrugged and said to Lucinda:

“Forget the etiquette then.”

“It’s lovely to meet you,” Victorina said. She reached down to catch Lucinda’s hand and shake it before Lucinda, who was confused over what to do, had time to curtsey.

“Have you eaten, my two fine young guests? No? You come and join our table,” Johnny Albert said.

So it was that Nightminster and Victorina gained an ‘official’ place at the biggest table of the party with Johnny Albert’s extended family. They met his wife, four children and his two younger brothers and their families, including a few grandchildren, mercifully fast asleep in their cots despite the clamour around them. The circular table was so large that it featured a cut-out passage through to the middle for waiters bearing platters of feast.

“I’m absolutely famished,” Victorina said.

They scoffed their way through pork sliced straight off a whole roast hog presented on a silver dish the size of a coracle, along with strange preparations that Victorina identified for him: aubergine fried in batter, capsicums stuffed with spiced potatoes, amaranth, sweet potatoes… He found the fare greasy and fussy. Roast wood pigeon and potatoes and broccoli would have suited just fine.

As he bit into a sweetcorn burger, a siren yowled. The roar of conversation died away. He laid down the burger. Suppose Telford and Ogilvy ran up demanding their pistols back? The siren faded, to be replaced by humming from public address trumpets. A stern voice hailed for Lieutenant Chen’s D Company to assemble for the next patrol shift. Several troopers left their families and hastened away. From one of Johnny Albert’s brothers, Nightminster learned that the night guard around the palace was much heavier than normal tonight, with all ten companies being rostered to share guard duties through to morning. The Owner was concerned radical riff-raff might attack in vengeance for the massacre on the market place that ended the November riot.

“That was a fascinating experience!” Victorina blurted on returning from ‘spending a penny’. “I’ve never used a public lavatory in my life before. The gossip! I mean, not at all lady-like. Someone called Lieutenant Anders has balls like plums, and there’s a master sergeant who’s hung like a horse. All these fat wives were screeching like a gaggle of seagulls!”

Nightminster rocked forward laughing. “Back when I was twelve, I went to my first summer camp as a cub with General Wardian. There was this corporal who used to stand outside his tent with his flies open—"

“Must you? I’m trying to savour this excellent pork.”

His attention drifted as she slid pork between her lips. It was strange how time disappeared as they galloped from joke to joke after such a cantankerous start to the evening. He loved how her eyes flashed when she laughed—the coarseness of some of her jokes startled him. A sovereign upbringing did not appear to be any less lusty than for kids up to mischief around the asylum. The sexes had their games, tricks, dirty jokes, pairs disappeared and reappeared. He caught her a couple of times staring up at him with her intense, slate-blue eyes, just as she caught him admiring her smooth neck and her breasts over which the black sateen stretched like a second skin, and she gave him a coy smile that could have meant anything. She did not mention Algernon, the bland consort of their previous encounters. She wore no ring. Beyond that, he gleaned no hint of whether she was in a relationship, or not.

He prompted her to tell some family history.

“We Krossingtons weren’t grand before the Glorious Resolution, not at all,” she said. “We rose from nowhere. Grandad Wilson grew up in what used to be called the Fens of Norfolk, and now isn’t called anything because it’s a wilderness of marshes from Cambridge to The Wash infested with bandits and primitives. The Krossington family lived in a brick terraced house in a little village called Rumford Parva. They weren’t at all rich. The father wasted himself in drink, same as my dad. That’s why Marko’s teetotal and TK and I hardly touch the stuff. Grandad Wilson was the oldest and I suppose he felt duty more heavily. He was the head boy of his school and went to a famous university in London called Imperial College, which doesn’t exist anymore.”

“This village, Rumford Parva, is now lost in the wilderness?”

“It was wiped off the map in the Great Flood of ‘35. It was below sea level, near The Wash, so they never stood a chance. Grandad Wilson lost his brother. Our Great Uncle Christopher and his family simply disappeared into the mud. I also had an Uncle Leon I never met because he was killed a few years later in the Glorious Resolution. We’ve suffered just like any other family.”

Nightminster refrained from pointing out that most families vanished completely. The national records of the state’s passport office were digital and vanished with the failure of the Internet. Hence the expression ‘they vanished into the Nameless Gone’. However, he was not here to mirror her social conscience. The Krossington family’s origins in the Fens had piqued his interest.

“Rumford Parva must have been within the Dominion of Libertaria,” he said. This was a wild guess to keep her talking.

“Interesting you should mention that. Grandad Wilson once called the Dominion of Libertaria the detonator of the Glorious Resolution. He had a farm near The Wash, but we’ve never got much out of either him or Rosalind about what happened to it.”

“The living carry a burden of guilt,” Nightminster soothed. “For every one of them, nine vanished into the Nameless Gone. But let us not dwell on the morbid. A character as forceful as Wilson K would have relished the Dominion of Libertaria.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It was the prototype sovereign land, the first open expression of private power to challenge the degenerate democratic state. School textbooks claim it helped to preserve order through the turmoil of the Glorious Resolution. I’ve read other opinions since leaving school textbooks behind. A club of wealthy opportunists dived like wasps upon the Great Flood’s disaster zone and declared an independent country, while keeping the king as head of state. They were too popular to suppress using the armed forces. The impasse smouldered for three years until the Glorious Resolution closed the Public Era and opened ours.”

“Grandad Wilson taught us not to trust textbooks. I wish I could get Rosalind and him to write their memoirs, they’ve got priceless history in their heads and it’ll vanish with them unless they open up.”

“How did he end up ruling such a damned great slab of southern England?”

“As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, by accident. Grandma Rosalind grew up on a farm near a village called Taslingham. Grandad Wilson and she settled there after he’d spent his life building huge dams to make electricity for cities all over the world. He was world-famous in his field. That was why he made a natural choice to lead the new country that is now the Lands of Krossington. We still live in the same house they bought back in the old world.”

“You mean, this place Taslingham became Castle Krossington?”

She nodded, grinning cheekily. Although he remained calm on the outside, Nightminster was staggered—and not slightly alarmed—to be given such a secret.

“You trust me so much?”

“You want to be a friend of the family. Marko can’t work out what you want, but he knows you want something. And since he respects you, he’s ready to listen. He wanted me to make that clear.”

Nightminster opened his mouth to nudge her on to provide details of how Grandad Wilson the dam builder became ruler of the Lands of Krossington. There had to be juicy secrets in such an implausible ascent. His words never uttered. The night beyond the skylights flashed and boomed. From overhead burst a vicious, juddering roar, followed by a hushed echo, then more juddering roar from another section of roof. Like everyone else, Nightminster instinctively ducked. His hand rested on the grip of the Glock in his jacket. Some of the ultramarines were standing, pistols at the ready.

“What in God’s name was that?” Victorina murmured. “I hope it’s nothing to do with me! I bring bad luck like the plague.”

She was leaning forward, breasts nearly on her plate. The bands groaned to silence along with the dancers and diners. Hundreds waited, parents hushed children, a baby wailed and got carried away by the mother.

“Those roars were MG42 machine guns. Not a pleasant weapon to be at the wrong end of.”

In the peace he could hear the pulsing of the heavy oil generator in the basement. Then some shouts on the roof. He spotted Lieutenant Telford and Sergeant Ogilvy quick-marching along the wall of the banquet hall. An ultramarine lieutenant clattered down a flight of steps nearby and lifted a speaker for the public address system.

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm. Some fireworks rockets were fired over the palace from the abandonment; as you will have heard, we replied in kind.” General amusement. “Please continue to enjoy your New Year.”

Telford and Ogilvy halted, conferred, and then filed discreetly from sight without Victorina having seen them.

“What’s the killing range of MG42 machine guns?” she asked.

“A long way. In General Wardian, I once fired at a ruin three miles away. I hit it too! The MG42 spews out so many bullets that you’re virtually guaranteed to get a few hits.”

“And suppose the people who fired the rockets can shoot back with MG42s?”

“Then they’d have done so. It’s virtually impossible for civvies to get their hands on weapons like that. They’re all numbered and catalogued. And besides, an MG42 is about the size of a broom, it’s not the kind of thing you can hide in your pants.”

A few minutes later, Johnny Albert returned to the table and shared more details. A wave of rockets had indeed been fired over the palace. Thanks to the night exercises he had organised since the attack in November, he was able to despatch F and J companies into the abandonment on trucks to sweep back towards the asylum with the aim of trapping the guilty like fish in a net. That is, any that had survived the sprays of bullets from the MG42s on the roof.

With the return of the Owner, Nightminster’s evening met an abrupt end. Victorina laid her knife and fork together.

“You’ve made a most entertaining host, Big Knight, I must say you’re far more rounded and offbeat than I’d expected. But now I must be about the purpose of the evening, that is to say, intercourse of a diplomatic nature, as you promised earlier, so now I must away.”

She stood up and moved around the table to occupy the seat of Johnny Albert’s wife, who had just departed with some pals to the bingo hall. This ‘change of scene’ pleased the Owner. Within moments they were bantering together and she was flat on the table laughing at his mimicry of one of his wife’s friends, a notorious snob. Nightminster observed with outrage as Johnny Albert turned up the charm. Victorina was virtually eating out of his hand—and then the pair of them were off in a terrific flurry towards the jazz band, and Nightminster watched, a dull rage behind his eyes.

The Owner had swiped his date. Just like that.

Chapter 4

Lucinda Albert was catching his eye from the far side of what was left of the roast hog. Damn was she not pretty, with her thick chestnut hair and brown eyes, her face so eager? He drifted innocently around the table and sat next to her. This was more like approaching a family friend, they had plenty in common, he had tutored her for a year and she was more or less from his world. The conversation got going on a little chit-chat about what she was up to, and she amused him with a few catty barbs about certain of the lieutenants’ wives, some of whom were scandalously unfaithful. Lucinda and he were soon shoulder to shoulder in a world of their own. It was perfectly obvious he would meet absolute zero resistance if he got her up top behind the leylandii hedge. Just to make the situation totally clear, she produced a key for a cabin on the roof of the palace behind her father’s bungalow. It was one of a little hamlet of cabins used by her father’s lieutenants when they wanted a little quality time with their mistresses (she grinned, her eyes alive with bed). Nightminster suddenly felt the danger towards which this flow was taking him. She was only just seventeen. Granted, he had contraceptives, top quality from his favourite Kensington gentleman’s boutique, he was covered on that front. It was the political ramifications of bedding the Owner’s daughter that gave him the jitters.

Racket suddenly poured around them. Johnny Albert’s wife had returned from bingo and was fuming to find her husband disappeared with ‘that sovereign vixen’, while her glare upon Nightminster displayed anything but pleasure at his intimacy with her eldest daughter. Clearly, discretion was the better part of valour.

“I need to make a call,” he murmured to Lucinda, who was scowling up at her mother. It was getting to that time of the evening when rows broke out. Nightminster performed a kind of sideways rotation out of his seat followed by a pretence of stooping to get clear before he stood upright and marched off with great purpose, and not a glance back. A sharp left up the first flight of steps and he was on the first-floor balcony. He had lost his date and now the backup too. Truly, he was a spare prick and must at all costs not look it. He discovered plenty to explore in this upper gallery. Johnny Albert’s force of ultramarines included all sorts of enthusiasts, from photographers to motorcycle customizers to constructors of a model railway layout the size of a tennis court. Most of the small boys thronged here leering over the beautiful Public Era models and painstaking scratch-builts whirring around the tracks.

Not just small boys leered, either. There was a big boy here too, a familiar one. This boy had changed uniform since Nightminster last knew him. Billy Nieuport in the uniform of an ultramarine leading heeler stooped over a table studying a model locomotive. He had been in Nightminster’s squad in the 2nd City of London Reserve regiment. Billy Nieuport had helped lift Nightminster to shoot Jumping Jackson at the Parliament Square riot.

He decided to give his old comrade a little surprise, and worked his way around in the cover of the crowd, hiding his height by leaning low to inspect this water tower or that pasture of plastic cattle. At the moment of triumph, he dropped a hand on Billy’s shoulder. Billy jerked upright and craned about, his jaw chewing furiously on a gobful of reaction. At the instant of recognition, his eyes stretched and bulged, a spasm flashed across his face. Even amidst the chatter of excited boys, Nightminster heard a quivering rasp of hyper-ventilation.

“Why it’s Billy! How are you doing, old mate?” he chanted.

“Big Knight?” The words wheezed out like ghosts. Billy coughed and plastered his hands over his face. He folded forward as if punched in the stomach and when he straightened up stood blinking and wiping the sweat off his forehead. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as you, passing time with the boys while my date’s off having fun, damn her.” Nightminster played cheery while being puzzled by Billy’s peculiar reaction.

“Why aren’t you in uniform?”

“I’m just a civvy.” Nightminster pulled out one of the Glocks from his evening jacket and held it before Billy’s face. “But beautifully armed!”

“Bloody hell, Big Knight, you must be raking good gold to have stuff like that! A Glock no less! But I heard you got pushed off somewhere after the Parliament Square shooting.” The words babbled out as he recovered from the raw shock of meeting his old squad leader. “There were all sorts of rumours, that you’d been discharged or even fogged. The last I heard, you’d been made a sergeant. What’ve you really been up to?”

“I’m at Oxford University studying physics.”

“What’s Oxford University?”

“It’s a bunch of medieval colleges far up the River Thames.”

“You always were the clever one. I don’t reckon I really understand what ‘medieval’ means, so I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

“When did you jump ship to Johnny’s boys, then?”

Billy was not remotely a good enough actor to hide his guilt.

“A while back.”

“Soon after Parliament Square?”

“Not really that soon.”

“Did Veitch Thomas come with you?”

Billy’s square face came over sort of sick hangdog.

“Yeah, we came across together, seeing as we’re mates.”

“That’s just how it is, Billy, we’re good old comrades who shared danger. Well, you look after yourself, I’ve got to get back downstairs to reclaim my date.”

“Have a great New Year, Big Knight.”

“You too, Billy.”

They shook hands. Nightminster did not leave directly, but made a slow ramble around the far end of the model railway layout before drifting back towards the door. He took a couple of surreptitious glances at Billy Nieuport. After leaning on the model table looking pale about the gills, Billy left the room in a hurry.

Nightminster descended to the banquet hall, grim reflections in mind. Had Billy been a better actor, he could easily have convinced his switch to the ultramarines was innocent. Most ultramarines started in the glory trusts and jumped ship for better pay, or just a more settled life in their home asylum. It was Billy’s ill fortune to retain too much honesty to succeed as a squealer. His guilt had squealed in turn at the crucial moment.

*

From the top of the stairs, Nightminster could see around Victorina’s bright red hair that the chairs on each side of her were empty. She sat lonely and despondent, hands clasped on lap, a beautiful young woman who has lost her Prince Charming. Across the table, Johnny Albert was jammed between a messy tower of blonde hair, his wife, and a beehive of implausibly intense black, her snobbish friend. The two ladies gossiped at the tops of their voices while he hunched between them sipping a glass of water. He was in the doghouse. Lucinda sat by her mother, arms crossed, very cross.

Into this happy family scene Nightminster breezed and sat beside Victorina.

“I suppose you’re angry at me,” she said.

“Not at all; the divertissement proved useful.”

“You’re supposed to be aggrieved.”

“I would describe myself as enlightened to the ways of the world, but not uplifted.”

“What must I do to win your forgiveness?”

He grabbed and French-kissed her. She shuddered trying to laugh under his lips. When he let her go, he looked past her shoulder into the beaten eyes of Johnny Albert. Well fuck you, Nightminster thought, doing his best to achieve telepathic communication. You swiped my lay and now you’re pecked all over.

“Johnny and I were jiving to jazz,” Victorina said, wiping lipstick off Nightminster’s face with her napkin. “It was terrific fun. Then his cow of a wife charged in—you’d be astounded how fast she can move considering she’s the size of a Jersey—and called me a sovereign siren and slapped Johnny’s face. She did! In front of everyone.”

It was fortunate that Johnny Albert’s attention had drifted, for Nightminster was struggling not to laugh openly.

A band was getting ready at the top of the hall to play in the New Year. The conductor cussed the drummer taking too long to get his kit ready. He rapped his baton. Johnny Albert stirred, put down his glass of water and stood. His extended family were streaming back to form a circle around the table. Everyone crossed arms. Nightminster held Victorina’s hand in his left and that of Johnny Albert’s youngest brother in his right. Johnny Albert addressed the hall in his rich stage voice and counted off the seconds to midnight from his Rolex watch. On his count of midnight, everyone cheered in 2073 and burst into “Auld Lang Syne”. The bells of St Paul’s Cathedral rang across London and from farther away fireworks boomed over the sovereign palaces of Mayfair.

A little while afterwards, as the party was thinning out and bleary husbands were being pulled home by their wives, Johnny Albert beckoned Nightminster off to one side.

“Well young man, that’s a fabulous young lady you’ve got yourself there—my Lucinda’s furiously jealous, heh heh! What you’ll want is a nice little place to take her. You grab this key and up you go to the top deck. Around the back of my place are some cabins, quite fit for her ladyship.” He winked and gave Nightminster a soft pat of farewell. Nightminster wondered at the Owner’s true motivations. Victorina and he had got on well enough, but he was far from confident she would make a night of it. He suspected Johnny Albert was well aware of this and was indulging in a little spite.

“What about her bodyguards?”

“Very comfortably taken care of, don’t you worry about them.”

Nightminster returned to sit beside Victorina and, for once, was totally at a loss how to proceed.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose it’s time to get our coats.”

She tilted her head, obviously not quite sure how seriously to take him. They communicated in silence. An insane boldness seized him.

“You’ve never fucked outside your caste?”

She threw her legs out and slapped the table laughing.

“You crude devil!”

He held up the key. She stood up.

“Lead on.”

He escorted her up to the top deck gardens. An inch of snow had fallen and more was whispering down. At the back of Johnny Albert’s sprawling bungalow complex lay another garden, enclosed by neat little brick cottages built on higher ground for discretion. The cottage doors were numbered in the quaint Public Era style, just like houses in Oxford. Nightminster located the correct one from the keyring and let them both in, pleased to find the interior already warm from a wood-burning stove. It was a single large room, one big bedroom. The lighting was not intended for reading. Four dark orange bulbs hung from the walls by cast-iron brackets. The carpet was deep, soft and such a red as to appear nearly black, while the walls and ceiling glowed a dusky orange.

“Oh. My. God,” Victorina gasped.

Nightminster was also eyeing the bed. He would never have imagined beds were produced to such extravagant dimensions. It could be fairly compared to the stage for a quartet. With a swipe he unzippered the back of Victorina’s gown. The black sateen flopped about her waist. Under other circumstances, he would have been irked that her hips stopped the whole thing from dumping about her ankles. Instead, he stood transfixed with shock. The perfect, soft white skin of her back had been clawed to leave long red weals.

“What in god’s name happened to you?”

“That was Marko. After the Bermondsey riot, he flew into one of his rages and attacked me with a dog whip. It’s plaited leather with a point that curls around and stings like a brand. TK—Tom—tried to beat Marko off, but he’s like a wild animal when rage takes him and—” She started to sob. Nightminster held her tenderly, kissing her hair.

“It’s all right. He won’t do it again. I’ll kill him if he tries.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that. He’s very powerful. He controls everything through the Household Cabinet. The staff call him Genghis behind his back, and they aren’t joking.”

“He’s a bigot with a big mouth—but that’s only good for his little world of jack-in-the-box servants. I live in another world, a far vaster and more powerful world. You sovereigns—” He was about to launch into a tirade about sovereign power being nothing but a spell over people too ignorant to know better. This was the time for love, not pontification. He kissed one of the scars. It was more in the way of a burn than a cut.

“The marks will fade with time.”

“And Marko is far away.”

He took a grip and yanked the gown from her hips to her heels.

*

The night beyond the windows broke into their passions not once but twice with concussive booms powerful enough to make the frames rattle. They heard pounding boots and yells, and eye-to-eye agreed without words to ignore it all. The world could blow up and they would still be loving on the bits and pieces. In the morning, they lay staring at the ceiling for a while as daylight waxed through the gaps around the curtains.

“Do you think anyone got killed last night?” Victorina asked.

“It’s a strange thing how life issues luck and fate.” He slipped his arms around her. At this very moment he resolved to build himself a bachelor pad, somewhere fit to host Her Decency. It was out of the question to take her to the squalid Camden flat of Preston Walker, with its odours of dry closets and rotting mice.

“Isn’t there a little cottage deep in your lands where no one would find us?” he murmured.

“We’ll go up to Oxford. We’ll have the whole of the Krossington Institute to ourselves.”

They both jumped. Someone was banging on the door.

Chapter 5

Nightminster hauled on his trousers and shirt to answer the door. Through an inch gap, he saw it was Johnny Albert in full dress uniform as the Owner of Bermondsey.

“Big Knight?” His voice was hardly more than a murmur. “Do me a favour and get Her Decency far away from here.”

Nightminster stepped outside and shut the door behind him. He stood in bare feet in two inches of snow with his toes beside Johnny Albert’s mighty hobnailed boots.

“What’s happened, Captain?”

“Those rockets last night were a lure. My blokes came back through the abandonment and walked straight into a trap. Bombs set off by trip wires. Four of my guys are dead and three are in my NHS, not looking good.”

The NHS was the hospital wing of the palace.

“Are you saying the riff-raff who fired those rockets planted landmines?”

“No. There’s a new acronym in my vocabulary. IED. Do you know what those three letters stand for?”

“Improvised explosive device. Making bombs from common-or-garden things. In General Wardian, we learned about making camphine bombs with beer bottles and rags, and booby traps using grenades. I can’t believe riff-raff got their hands on hand grenades, though.”

“These were pipe bombs packed with heavy shot inside glass flagons, to judge by the injuries. I’ve got guys with IED expertise from their glory days sweeping the area. If we can find a bomb intact, maybe we’ll get some clues.”

The cold was starting to bite Nightminster’s bare feet.

“Victorina is a fourth-year medical student. She could help tend the wounded.”

“No.” Johnny Albert shook his head, most decisive. “She’s not to know about this. I don’t want news getting out, not even to other owners. We’re up against something far more sinister than mindless thugs. Behind this lurks a clever and dangerous mind.” He tamped a tear in the corner of one eye with a handkerchief. “You get Her Delightful Decency away just as fast as you decently can. Come back later, and we’ll talk about that idea of yours for a Night and Fog camp lost in the wastes of the Fens.” A ferocious rage swelled up his neck and flushed his face. “I’m going to need a dumping ground for vermin, if you get my meaning.”

*

Nightminster relaxed beside Victorina again.

“What’s wrong?”

“The Owner was just wondering about your travel arrangements. Where’s your armoured limousine?”

“In the garage of Wilson House. I assume Mr Albert can send a messenger to fetch it.”

“We’ll ride together up to Oxford?”

“Weeell.” She twisted her mouth, thinking. “I have to stop at Wilson House to write a report for Marko of my experiences in the world of the slummies. It must catch the afternoon plane to Portsmouth to be couriered up to Castle Krossington by this evening. If I’m late, he’ll have me dragged in by Telford and Ogilvy to explain myself. He’s such a bloody tyrant. Can you get to Oxford under your own steam?”

“I would not describe a Moto Guzzi as a ‘steamer’ but it will get me there.”

“It sounds like a pizza!”

“It’s a one-litre motorbike, ersatz but still brilliant when it’s in one piece. At present it’s all over my garage for its winter rebuild.”

“You’ve got a motorbike? How fast does it go?”

“If I can find a road smooth enough, she’ll do a hundred and thirty.”

“God that must be exciting! How I’d love a bike of my own. I get such a miserable pittance from Marko I can barely keep myself in rags.”

“Don’t you earn fees as a doctor?”

“Not yet, I have to pass my finals and complete the internship. Two more years.”

“You were seventeen when you started medical school?”

“Um-humm.”

“You’re twenty-one now?”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eight—?” She reeled away in nervous laughter. “You look much older than that. Eighteen? Marko and TK will slag me to death for snatching babies.”

Nightminster just let that one by.

“I began living young.”

“You definitely did that. It made me so ashamed when you told me about getting up at five to earn a bit of silver helping the merchants lay their stalls and sweep the flags around the shops.”

“That was when I was still at street school. I have happy memories of those mornings. It was such a quiet, fresh time of day, and everyone treated me decently. Then I’d get my satchel and go to school and fight the bullies. But I’ve had the last laugh. Today those bullies are nothing, porters, loaders, stokers, or they hang around the market begging to get hired for the day. When I pass, they drop their eyes in the dirt.”

“Calm down! Sometimes your eyes glaze over with a crazed rage and it frightens me”

Enveloped in her warm arms, he melted against her. This really was a most pleasant situation. After some minutes of contentment, Victorina asked:

“What were those booms we heard last night?”

“It’s known as the earth moving.”

She gave him a light slap. More seriously, he said:

“It was just pranksters messing about with oil drums. You turn a drum upside down and fill it with acetylene from a lamp, then ignite the mixture with a spark plug. It blasts the barrel a hundred feet high. My old physics master showed a few of us how to do it. He was always teaching us mischief like that, not the whole class, just me and a couple of others he trusted not to kill themselves.”

“You had more fun at school than I did! I was tutored at home until I was sixteen and then sent to this castle in the Alps of Switzerland to study domestic economics. It was unspeakably banal. Household accounts and how to lay the table for a banquet, the important things of life. I was threatened with arranged marriage to a cousin.”

“How the hell did you get from that to medicine at Oxford?”

“Good fortune. My father killed himself racing his Ferrari at the Haslemere circuit. Marko had enough shit to sort out with the mess the old man left without a grumpy sister on his hands, so he let me get my way.”

“And the rest is history. Now you’re the public health convener of the SUN Party. And you have a rival in the form of the Official SUN Party of Brent Cross. Have they contacted you at all?”

“They sent us a pompous letter in November to claim Brent Cross was once again the beacon of reform on the Island of Britain. Then we got a swanky notice the new president was one Sebastian Smith. He enclosed a manifesto—quite detailed, although it seemed mostly copied from ours. TK just laughed. He rates them as a branch too big for its boots.”

“Are you aware they have the full support of ZEEBRI, the Chadderton Engineering Partnership and the Chance and Buckley works?”

“So what? They’re just factories.”

“Have you any idea how much economic might ZEEBRI commands? It’s the centre of the camphine industry and the greatest armoury on the Island of Britain.”

“I really don’t know anything about that kind of thing.”

“Well I do. Once the world comes back to life in March, you are rapidly going to discover just how powerful the Official SUN Party has become.”

“TK is always saying that power flows from gold. As long as gold flows from the sovereigns into the asylums, the sovereigns will hold power. A little bunch at Brent Cross can’t change that, however much noise they make. They can’t match the real difference our vaccination programmes will make when we finally get the blasted doses made. It takes so bloody long to get anything done when everything has to be voted through this party committee and then the budget approved by some other committee. Meantime another thousand children have died!”

He wrapped his arms around her. She hugged him. They lay at peace. He knew he should get her away from the palace. The motivation to move was lacking. Once she drove away in the limousine, a wall of security rose between them. She did not control that wall of security. Brother Marko did.

*

Nightminster got Victorina out of the palace by the same route she had come in, to be joined by Lieutenant Telford and Sergeant Ogilvy under escort by a squad of ultramarine troopers. The bullnosed limousine with the twin Brownings drew up. Nightminster did not linger over farewells any more than he took offence at the bodyguards’ surly recovery of their Glocks. The limousine swung around and rumbled away. He watched it cross Tower Bridge to the north bank of the River Thames and then he returned inside the palace to seek an audience with Johnny Albert. The Owner was visiting the ‘NHS’, the hospital at one end of his palace, comforting the wounded and their families. It was nearly an hour before he returned to his sprawling rooftop residence, and another half hour before he worked through other matters with his lieutenants and could get a few discreet minutes with Nightminster in a corner of his picture window lounge.

“Did you get Her Decency away all innocent?”

“It depends what you mean by ‘innocent’. She knows nothing of ambushes in the night. I can’t speak for her bodyguards.”

“We kept them out of harm’s way in the visitors’ wing until Her Decency called for them, whereupon we took them straight down to that limo. They don’t know anything.”

“Did your guys recover any bombs?”

“My chief expert is a gal, actually, and she found two. Primitive, but effective. A length of two-inch pipe stuffed with gun cotton and sealed with screwed caps, laid inside an old pressure-cooker with nuts and bolts and broken glass. Triggered by a trip wire of black twine. Not easy to spot in bushland even in daylight. Fortunately, my guys and gals spent years in glory trusts clearing these things from around nests of infestation. They know exactly what to look for.”

“The clever mind at the back of this is a vengeful bastard,” Nightminster said. “Rockets and cooker bombs take a lot of planning. How did the miscreants escape the area so quickly?”

“My dogs followed a path along an overgrown street for about half a mile to a lane that led out to the Rotherhithe marshes. The dogs lost the trail in the old Surrey Quays. These trash will have got away in rowing galleys, silent, fast, invisible at night. They could be anywhere now.”

“Anything revealing in the bombs you found?”

“It’s all heirloom, nothing made in our times.”

“What about boot marks?”

“Standard issue in any glory trust.”

“They must have got the gun cotton from somewhere.”

“Empty a hundred shotgun cartridges. Thousands and thousands of households around London are registered to keep a shotgun, and I’ll bet there’s that number again not registered.”

“Nutters could plant these bombs on the turnpikes any night of the week.”

“Then why haven’t they done it already? Because they’re not after Night and Fog gangs or traders or regular folk. They’re out to show us ultramarines who’s boss. It’s them or us. And I want you, Big Knight, to apply your considerable brains and balls to ensure it’s us that wins.”

Nightminster had no particular interest getting pulled into a war against an invisible enemy. His highest ambitions lay elsewhere. That said, he had to remain in Johnny Albert’s highest standing.

“The only real advantage we have is the killing of thirty-two of them on Bermondsey market a month ago. Those dead must have come from somewhere. It just isn’t possible to hide thirty-two fighting-fit men vanishing into thin air. I’ve not heard any whispers over in Camden or anywhere else, though. Have you?”

“Nope,” Johnny Albert said.

“My suspicions point to Brent Cross, but it’s a huge place and ZEEBRI only employs about half the working people. The thirty-two could have come from a dozen or more little workshops scattered across the asylum.”

“Our best bet is to trap the next attack. My people are angry enough now they’re prepared to drill every night to perfect an encirclement. We might trap a couple of hundred, or even more. Then we have a disposal problem and that’s where your idea of a Night and Fog camp deep in the Fens becomes very appealing. Instead of all the nastiness of mass executions and digging graves the size of docks, we just export them. What I want to know is, are you making progress?”

“Yes. My camp now has a name. It will be called the Value System.”

“I do like that! Very to-the-point.”

“And I’ve thought up a refinement.”

“That being?”

“Undead Nameless Gone.”

“Vampires?”

“Think of all the Night and Fog you owners string up. The dog tags go back to the glory trusts and that’s the end of it. Instead of hanging them, pass them to my Value System to live out an afterlife. I will save their lives, and they will be grateful. True, they can never return to the outside world, but they’re in a pleasant, peaceful location where they get a fair amount of freedom and can take pride in craftsmanship. They’ll be far more productive than hooligans who chuck camphine bombs at children for a laugh.”

Johnny Albert took the idea with a quiver of amazement and much blinking.

“It’s bold. But I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s ethical. There are those would say we’d be taking advantage.”

“We would be taking advantage; in old business textbooks, it’s called competitive advantage.”

“I mean, we could run into serious trouble with other owners. It’s always been taken as read that each owner was responsible for maintaining discipline. Sneaking condemned men away for profit could be taken as breach of honour.”

“It will be seen as progress, provided we make it look like progress.”

“It’s all in the presentation, is what you’re saying,” Johnny Albert said. “Well, all of this is academic unless you can find a location.”

“I’ve made some progress there. Victorina told me her Grandad Wilson grew up in the Fens and owned a farm near The Wash when the Dominion of Libertaria took the area over in 2035. I’m going to do some research on that farm.”

Johnny Albert pulled a most sceptical face.

“There won’t be any records now, everything got lost when the Internet went down.”

“Maybe, and maybe not. General Wardian’s reference library is reputed to be amongst the best on the Island of Britain. The problem is, I was dishonourably discharged from General Wardian after being expelled from Oxford.”

“But you’ve been reinstated at Oxford.”

“Lazy bureaucrats aren’t going to lift a finger unless I give them a kick in the ass to run the paperwork to reinstate me in General Wardian.”

“So are you in the game or not?”

“I need a pretext to contact a senior officer of General Wardian who was my handler at Oxford.”

“You need my help?”

“No. I think Doc Tom Kross is my man. He’s an Oxford academic and highly reputable—no offence, but Bermondsey is not Oxford.”

Johnny Albert just smiled at that. Nightminster continued:

“I’m going up to Oxford tomorrow to ah, reinforce diplomatic intercourse with the Krossingtons. I’ll use that as cover to see TK, and then use him as cover to get into General Wardian.”

“Christ on a bike, Big Knight. You take this espionage stuff pretty seriously.”

“That’s because this espionage stuff has become pretty serious. You lost four men last night and three seriously injured. I have an unpleasant feeling that’s only the beginning.”

Chapter 6

Nightminster was on the verge of death by freezing at the main entrance of the Krossington Institute of Oxford. The sixty-mile ride by Moto-Guzzi on fresh snow and through showers of more snow had left his nerves in tatters or else dead numb. He hobbled like an old man and banged on the steel shutters over the main entrance. Maybe a few shots from the Makarov would draw a reaction? The option never proved itself, for he could not articulate his frozen fingers to form a grip. He huddled about the Moto-Guzzi’s hot engine. This was serious shit. The evening was coming down. He would have to go up to his digs, which he still maintained, and endure torrential scolding from Mrs Jenkins for the reckless abandon of riding a motorbike up the turnpike in the middle of a snow blast. He decided to explore for another entrance, whilst hailing at the top of his lungs for anyone at home. It was entirely possible that Marko had called Victorina south, as she had feared.

Around the back of the Institute, he pulled up a rusty old fence prop and used it to rap the steel shutters over the lower storey windows. There was also a steel shroud so large it must protect the entrance to a garage, so he rapped that too. A door in the shroud opened and Lieutenant Telford leaned out. He looked annoyed.

“Stop that bloody racket, commoner.”

“Her Decency Victorina is expecting me.”

“That doesn’t entitle you to use our institute as a flippin’ kettle drum, commoner.”

“No one answered the front door.”

“There’s an intercom, commoner.”

“What’s that?”

“You press a button and talk into the wall.”

“What has the wall to say about that?”

“Just bring your bike around and we’ll get it secure.”

Five minutes later he was standing in the concrete garage of the Institute in the company of Victorina’s armoured limousine, an armoured car mounting a 37mm machine cannon and a line-up of perhaps a score of the fanciful battery-powered horseless carriages used by sovereign students to maintain their separation from the commoners. The Moto-Guzzi dripped and drooled as slush started to melt from the tyres and mudguards. Nightminster tried to stop trembling and failed.

“Follow me.”

He tottered behind Lieutenant Telford. The temperature rose as they climbed into habitable parts. This place was no palace. The corridors were narrow, with plain white walls and ceilings of some kind of speckled tiling, probably of Public Era vintage. The stairs were tight and steep. Due to the lack of windows, Nightminster had no idea whereabouts in the building they were until they reached the top floor, where he snatched a glimpse across some inner gardens. There were fountains iced into spluttering wet candles, some iron tables and chairs still covered in snow, and bristles of cut-back roses black upon white. Not a single trail of foot prints blemished the snow.

“Is no one else here?” he asked.

“Me, you, Sergeant Ogilvy, and the janitor. The staff are on holiday and their decencies are at home in the south.”

They stopped outside a plain veneer door just like any other, in one dead-end corridor of a number they had passed.

“Your Decency? The commoner Mr Nightminster has arrived.”

A great deal of red hair and her pale, delicate face appeared around the door. Her smile faded into anxiety as she stared at the turnpike filth sprayed over his boots and waders, and his visible trembling.

“I can feel the cold off you from here,” she said. “Thank you, Telford, we’ll manage now.”

“Yes, Your Decency.”

After Telford boots had clumped away down the stairs, they stood eyeing one another.

“You must administer staunch doses of feral heat to prevent my arms and legs from dropping off,” he commanded.

She seized his arm and dragged him into her room, whereupon he cursed his useless fingers trying to open the duffels of his waxed canvas top coat. Victorina’s deft fingers flitted over buttons and zippers, layer after layer dropped off and the clothes piled in a heap about him until he stood naked except for heavy socks. She pushed him into the poky little single bed. Despite twice sliding off onto the floor amongst his mucky clothes and boots, they achieved feral heating and afterwards lay with his heavy canvas riding jacket over themselves to keep warm, although their feet stuck out the bottom.

“Let’s get up to the bed,” she said. He heaved his depleted body back up to the little bed. It was hardly more than a cot. The room was much like his quarters at Reigate Fortress during the Securitician B course of last summer. It contained a (strictly) single bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a couple of ordinary wooden armchairs. It was not meant as a store for stacks and stacks of books and papers, reports and cardboard filing boxes. These covered the desk and most of the floor around the walls. He decided they would shift venue to his digs. It was roomier and the bed bigger, even if it squealed and Mrs Jenkins would be creeping about the landing outside in her damned nosey way.

“This is a broom cupboard, yet the building is the size of a college,” he said.

“It was a business school before the Glorious Resolution. These rooms are all exactly the same because the students were all at exactly the same status. After the Glorious Resolution, there were no more business schools. Grandad Wilson just took over an empty shell. I love it, everybody is equal. Most of the clan hate it for exactly that reason.”

“Let’s go up to my digs. There’s far more space and it feels like a home, not a hospital.”

“We sovereigns don’t have hospitals, so I can’t comment.”

“Then where do you go to die?”

“Oh! Morbid! What’s got into you? Did ghosts chase you up the turnpike?”

“Yesterday I visited what Johnny Albert calls his NHS. In the Public Era, there was a state organisation called the National Health Service that cared for all the sick in the country, free of charge.”

“The SUN Party is going to resurrect it. The NHS was one of the great triumphs of the Public Era.”

“Well for obvious reasons, Johnny Albert can’t care for everyone, but he does care for his troopers and their families, at least out to grandparents and direct descendants. His ‘NHS’ is the hospital wing of his palace. It’s the most depressing place I ever set eyes on.”

“It’s all a matter of perspective. Most people who go into hospital come out better.”

“Not this place. It’s full of poor old sods dying of cancer, heart failure, liver failure, circulation failure, and some of them aren’t even that old. There’s a lieutenant with bowel cancer who’s only forty.”

“Well, sometimes people are just unlucky.”

“It hardens my conviction that a long, dull life is not its own reward, anything but.”

“Who were you visiting?”

Nightminster started to lie. He found it easy to lie to Victorina, and this worried him, although this worry made the lies no harder.

“A friend of mine. He broke his leg during a night exercise. Fell into a collapsed cellar in the dark.”

This was close enough to the truth to be memorable, for of course, the danger of lies is in the detail. He was actually visiting Thrasher Brooks, the trooper from whom he bought the Moto Guzzi motorbike. While reassembling the Moto Guzzi from its winter rebuild, he decided to add an aluminium cowling to the front to deflect some of the frigid blasts of winter. Thrasher had kept the cowling in his flat on the understanding Nightminster could come and get it whenever he wanted. It was in calling at the Brooks’ flat that Nightminster discovered Thrasher was one of those injured by the cooker bombs. He was recovering in Johnny Albert’s ‘NHS’. And so it was that Nightminster visited the hospital wing and its sad content. Thrasher had badly lacerated legs, but after surgery to remove debris and stitch wounds, injections of tyrothricin and a tetanus booster—all grand luxuries in an asylum—he was off the danger list. His story, at least, would have a happy ending.

“I’m sure your friend will be fine,” Victorina said.

Nightminster gave her a nudge.

“Come on, let’s get dressed and up the road.”

“It’s snowing again.”

“My digs are far more homely than this sterile cell.”

“Telford and Ogilvy will have to come—sorry, standing orders. It’s because of the danger of kidnap.”

“Oh, come on! Provided we leave here discreetly, no one will have the slightest clue who you are. Wrap a shawl over your head and you could be anyone.”

“I don’t make the rules, Big Knight. You’re fixed on this myth we sovereigns can do what we like and throw gold about, but it’s not like that at all, at least not amongst the Krossingtons. We have to do as we’re told, or we get sent home.”

There was unlikely to be a problem getting rooms for Telford and Ogilvy at Mrs Jenkins’ house. With all the lodgers away on holiday, there would be ample accommodation. It was the surliness of the two marines he found hard to bear. They viewed him like dog mess.

A heavy gait approached in the corridor. It sounded more measured than Lieutenant Telford’s.

“Rina? Are you there?” It was the voice of Tom Krossington, TK, elder brother of Victorina.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Nightminster muttered. He swung his legs out of bed, pulled on his underpants and T-shirt, and was reaching for his long-johns when TK knocked. Victorina lay rigid, her face burning scarlet with embarrassment. Nightminster did not see what she had to be embarrassed about. She was twenty-one years old. It was entirely her business whom she spent time with. Having received no response, TK added:

“The chamberlain at Wilson House advised you had proceeded here so I followed to find how New Year went.”

Victorina expressed a thin whine he obviously took as an invite, as his bulky form appeared around the door. He was wearing a shabby, dark green pullover, tweed plus fours and grey woollen socks pulled up to his knees. He twitched with shock on confronting big Nightminster towering in underpants and T-shirt. He glanced at blushing Victorina with the sheets clutched up around her chin and turned away, grunting:

“I’ll be back in ten.”

On his return, Victorina sat stiff upright on the bad, knees together and hands bunched on her lap, restless. Nightminster sprawled at the desk, one foot propped on the end of the bed and the other on a pile of folders.

“Why are you here?” TK demanded. “You certainly aren’t meant to be here, and you aren’t welcome.”

“Neither are you.”

“You don’t belong here.” TK glanced at Victorina and then back to Nightminster. “Come with me,” he said.

His heavy paces thudded off up the corridor. Nightminster shrugged and followed TK to a lounge at the far end. TK shut the door, baring his lower teeth at Nightminster. Despite being a little under average height, TK’s great shoulders and impressive head made him a formidable confrontation. Nightminster felt vaguely like a birch sapling before a boulder. TK paused a few seconds to compose himself.

“You must understand your position, Nightminster. You’re an outsider of no standing. I do not approve of separating people into gentry and commoners, but the brood I was born into do. Technically, you were Victorina’s local agent, just in case you failed to grasp the realities of the situation. That duty is now at an end.”

“We like each other.”

“You can’t be so obtuse as to suppose your little love nest floats in space and time unfettered by worldly matters. She is of the prime family of the dynasty. She is a public figure. It’s totally out of the question for her to match with an outside commoner, least of all the very one who, many will claim, forced His Decency Charles Krossington-Darcy to be excluded from Oxford under humiliating circumstances. There are people back home who would kill you just like that—” He snapped his fingers. “—for this carry-on.”

During the rant, Nightminster took pains to remain calm. At a crucial moment like this, emotion could doom his entire future. He said:

“That commoner secured the return of your planetarium projector in time for the clan’s famous New Year show. I assume it performed as required?”

“It certainly did! Unfortunately, you cannot be famous for that achievement, since we in the prime family cannot admit there was any question of the projector’s being in jeopardy.”

“In my world, there’s such a thing as gratitude whether it can be publicised or not.”

“Marko and I are grateful. We are in your debt. But my sister’s love life can’t be kept quiet. Not that Telford or Ogilvy will say a thing, they’re devoted to her, but you can see we lead our lives in public, in front of the clan, the Household Cabinet, the Land Council, not to mention an army of staff. Many of the staff are bribed by other branches of the clan to keep an eye on what we get up to. You’d never get used to our way of life, even if we accepted you.”

“I haven’t the least intention of getting used to your way of life. She is coming into my world.”

“Well…” This obviously amused TK, in the way that a terrier doing a backwards flip might amuse him. “What have you to offer? Student digs? Your parents’ flat in Bermondsey? Is it as grand as Johnny Albert’s palace?”

Nightminster came awfully close to punching TK. Sneers at his own life bothered him not a bit. Sneers at his parents he would not tolerate. He budged the conversation away to safer ground:

“During my Securitician B training, we got lectures about the political structure of the Lands of Krossington, although they were so tedious I don’t recall them clearly. Your Land Council is a sort of mini-parliament for the Lands of Krossington. That’s where the 104 independent manors of your lands and the various branches of your clan meet to discuss their mutual interests. Have I got that right?”

“You flatter the place. It’s a converted town theatre where lots of spoiled, empty-headed people assemble to bicker, try to seduce each other’s wives with varying degrees of success, have a flutter at the race track and then go home for another month on the manor, where nothing much ever happens.”

“Your Land Council meets in Haslemere?”

“It does indeed.”

“I recall riding through it last summer on a motorbike from Reigate Fortress. Haslemere is amazing, like a time capsule from the Public Era. Beautifully smooth tarmac roads painted with gay lines that bring narky little wardens if you don’t obey them, lots of little shops selling delicious cakes and pies, racks and racks of wild fowl, corn on the cob… The townspeople never felt the Glorious Resolution, it passed them by like a wave rolling under a vast ship.”

“Is that what they told you? Ugly things happened there, don’t be fooled by the lack of abandonments. Still, things went far uglier in Portsmouth, just twenty-five miles to the south.”

“That’s right. A short distance can make a big difference. Sixty miles from here is Brent Cross, the home of the Official SUN Party. What do you make of them?”

“We’ve heard of them obviously. They sent us what they called an official communiqué to say they were now the one true path of the party. That was back in November. They’re just a branch too big for its boots. Once Rina’s vaccination program gets started in earnest, we’ll iron out local upstarts.”

“Aren’t you concerned about these massed attacks on the asylums? One of them nearly killed Rina.”

“We’ve heard a mish-mash of reports from our network. It’s so hard to get information from the asylums. As academics and sovereigns, we’ve no direct social links into those places. We have to rely on whatever we can get out of SUN Party branches on the spot, which at best is at Nth hand. We’ve looked into hiring detectives, but they aren’t geared up for political work. I proposed recruiting snoops from Wilson House staff, as some of them come from the asylums, but the chamberlain ruled that out absolutely and Marko backed him up. That’s why Victorina’s meeting with Johnny Albert is so important to us. It could open a whole new corridor of communication.”

“At best, you’ll learn what Johnny Albert wants you to know.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

Privately, Nightminster was shaken at just how isolated the Oxford party was. He had assumed the Krossington clan had informers teeming in all the asylums. His discovery to the contrary demanded a drastic shift of plan.

“The attacks are being organised from the Brent Cross branch,” he stated.

“You know for certain the Brent Cross branch is behind these attacks?” TK was incredulous. “How?”

“The attacks aren’t being organised from here, evidently, so they must be organised from Brent Cross.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Hooligans do not just gather and attack asylums spontaneously. They have to be inspired to risk their lives. It’s extremely dangerous to make war on the Ultramarine Guild. More than thirty attackers were killed at Bermondsey and others must have been gravely injured. There’s a clever mind behind these attacks, and that clever mind is able to incite young men to risk their lives for his dream.”

“Which is?”

“Power.”

“Just power?”

“Are you crazy? How can you say, ‘just power’?”

“No. I’m not crazy. I just don’t follow your logic.”

“You were born into power, so you cannot understand what it is to be powerless.” Nightminster now spoke straight from the heart. “It pressures the soul with a rage you can’t begin to imagine, and that is your misfortune, as you will never understand your enemy."

"But these attacks are mindless, senseless. They achieve nothing."

"On the contrary, they achieve everything. A wise ultramarine once told me that power is not what you do, it’s what you get away with. A political party scorns violence while violence intensifies. Everyone with any sense understands who is responsible and yet no one dares say it aloud because they can’t prove a thing—and they don’t want to be the next target. The party grips the masses first through scaring them and then by telling them what they want to hear.”

“That’s the most bizarre reasoning I’ve ever heard.”

“You would be well advised to heed what I’m saying. I know the slums a great deal better than you do. I have contacts from ZEEBRI to Chadderton and throughout the ultramarine networks. I have contacts in the barging businesses that take goods into the Midlands. You do not appear to grasp just how good a friend I could be to your clan, if your clan would be a good friend to me. Remember what I said at Wilson House, after the Bermondsey riot. All I ask is to be treated as an equal.”

“You can hardly complain about the way Victorina treats you! And I welcome you as a friend without conditions. Even Marko is far more amenable to a relationship than you may think. He does not like you, but he respects you as a fellow gambler. We’re hearing you loud and clear.”

“Let me make a proposal. Admit me to the School of Economics as an undergraduate who has switched from physics. Then I will have legitimate reason to stay in regular contact with you.”

“Did you go back to physics after being reinstated?”

“I scraped the first term by sitting two of the four exams. I managed 97% in Electromagnetic Radiation and 105% in Thermodynamics. They gave me bonus points for my appreciation of Bolzmann’s H-theorem. So, my average across four papers was above 50%. Just.”

“Well! That’s a pretty shaky record, brilliant and dismal at once. You’ll need an impressive proposal for our Dean of Faculty.”

“I’m sure I can arrange something. As for this moment, I will bid my love Victorina good-bye and take my leave.”

“I’m truly very sorry it has to be this way, Nightminster. Regrettably snobbery and spite are not going away any time soon.”

As Nightminster was walking down the corridor, TK called:

“When will you be in contact? Term begins in just two weeks, that’s not a lot of time to get your application sorted, if you get accepted at all.”

Nightminster turned and walked backwards.

“Within one week.”

“Fees?”

“I’ll pay my own.”

“Seriously? How? I could never have afforded my own fees.”

Nightminster indulged in a condescending smirk before turning back towards Victorina’s room.

Chapter 7

A tactical withdrawal to regroup and strike back stronger. That was how Nightminster resolved the next couple of weeks. It enabled him to control his rage, at least most of the time, except for the occasional snarl of fury late at night when he was alone with his reality.

What was the world in which he would live with Victorina? He had no interest in a grandiose palace. What on earth would he have filled a palace with? In search of ideas, he called on Jakub Newman, head of the Newman barging business based at Paddington basin north of Hyde Park.

The whole family was hard at work. They were hauling out their narrow boats with the steam car and scraping the bottoms, chiselling off rust and repainting with home-made red-lead paint. The narrow boat fleet would be gleaming like new for the opening of the trading season in early March.

Nightminster was struck by the practical beauty of the Newman home. It was slotted like a thick book between a couple of warehouses. The timber walls were caulked, laid over with woollen insulation and further sealed with an inner layer of planks. The roof was likewise carefully sealed and insulated. Most impressively, the windows were heirloom double-glazing units. The result was a snug, dry home easily kept warm with a single wood-burning stove that did not consume vast amounts because it did not have to. He saw in this house exactly what he wanted, efficient and unpretentious, no more and no less than what it had to be. As Jakub put it:

“Dazzling people doesn’t pay the bills.”

Nightminster asked about the double-glazing units.

“You won’t get them nowadays except from the glory trusts, they hoarded mountains of windows and bathrooms when they flattened all the skyscrapers back in the forties. You’ll have to pay good gold for them. Nobody’s made proper double-glazing since the Glorious Resolution. As the supply falls, the price rises. Simple economics.”

Nightminster noted the point. This could be what he was after. A study of this quirky market would make a useful proposal for his application to the Oxford School of Economics.

“So, you want to start your own business,” Jakub said, stirring brown sugar into his coffee. The Newman family enjoyed an enviable supply of real coffee from a source Jakub refused to divulge. “What are you going to make?”

“Labour-intensive products with high value density.”

Jakub just sniffed at that, shaking his head.

“You’ve a lot to learn. Reading old textbooks won’t get you very far. A real business sells real things.” He pointed his spoon at Nightminster’s cannibal jacket. “Make those. Labour intensive. High value. Packs well for transport. Looks brilliant. As for raw materials, I don’t know the going rate is for cadavers, but it can’t be much, I mean the rendering plants take wagonloads off the public highways.”

Nightminster spluttered with disbelief at the suggestion.

“I’m talking about a reputable enterprise!”

“I’m talking about making money. Something you have to understand is that the big, bad world out there is steady state. That means if you want to get in, someone has to be pushed out. And that means war. That’s one reason trade is steady state—battles are dangerous. But if you’ve got something new, like jackets and boots and dresses made from a uniquely smooth and soft leather, that’s a different matter. Then you create your own market. That’s how to rake in gold.

“Now, I would definitely be interested in handling your distribution once you get your act together. But you’ll need a place to make your stuff. That’s more hard work. There aren’t empty units you can just take over, not like the early days after the Glorious Resolution when everyone was spoiled for choice. You’ll have to build from scratch. Not easy. Other businesses see someone new in town and they don’t like it. Chances are they’ll burn you out before you open. I’ve seen too many keen young types like you with their dreams left in ashes. So how are you going to get around that one?”

Nightminster decided to take Jakub entirely into his confidence. It was the only chance of gaining complete trust in turn. He explained everything, from the hope of a secret factory near The Wash deep in the old Fens to the use of Undead Nameless Gone. Afterwards, Jakub sat in silence for a while, absorbing it all.

“My God, Big Knight. You must have the most resourceful brain of anyone I’ve ever met. You just don’t look at life the way other people do. If you can pull off a scheme like that—which is one hell of a big if—you’ll cut the sky like a meteorite. But what’s it all for? A guy as smart as you could have a nice steady life climbing to the top of a big factory like ZEEBRI or Chadderton. The partners of those places are well-off. So why chase this mad Value System thing?”

“The idea exists, I can’t just forget it.”

“If you want my advice, your Value System belongs on the heap labelled ‘wild teenaged dreams’. But it’s your life.”

“I remember you said your grandparents owned a restaurant in the Fens,” Nightminster said. “Did they ever meet the Krossington family? Both families must have been prominent in local business affairs.”

“If they did, they never mentioned anything to us, and as they both died a while back, their lips are sealed. I can’t believe they’d have kept quiet about links to the most glamorous clan on the Island of Britain. I’ll nip up and ask my old folks.”

His parent were both in their late fifties and retired from the business. They lived in a flat on the top floor of the family home. Jakub returned after being away about twenty minutes.

“That was fascinating. They told me Grandad and Grandma—Oliver and Margaret—had to flee the Fens to escape from a sort of proto-sovereign land called the Dominion of Libertaria. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Some historians—not the ones you read at school—say it was the root cause of the collapse of the Public Era. There was the Great Flood of ’35, which devastated the low, eastern plains of England. Some wealthy chancers jumped into the disaster area and declared their own nation state, the Dominion of Libertaria. It was never recognised by any established nation state.”

“I’d never heard of it until Dad told me just now. He said it was run by crooks posing as the prophets of a new world. Oliver was like an opposition, and they didn’t like that. They sent in thugs to burn the family out. The family Newman hid out on a farm and then escaped on their restaurant to a new life here in the south. It was a floating restaurant they owned! I never knew that. They must have sold it long before I was born.”

“What’s this got to do with the Krossingtons?”

“Nothing. It’s just a bit of family history I never knew. I don’t suppose I’d ever have known, but for you coming today. Folk just don’t like talking about those times, not even with their kids. Perhaps especially not with their kids.”

Nightminster sighed. He had seemed on the verge of the incredible breakthrough he needed. He pushed the conversation on to talk about the best port for the Value System to import its products into London.

“There’s only one answer to that, Limehouse basin. It’s ten miles down the Regent’s Canal from here, although I can take you over in the steam car if you like.”

Nightminster preferred to explore new territory without arriving as a guest in a conspicuous vehicle. He liked to keep separate parts of his life in their own compartment. He was, after all, a hunted man—like a ship, the more compartments he had, the safer he should be, so long as he was not so careless as to be the Titanic. As he was in good standing with the Owner of Bermondsey, he could expect a friendly welcome from the Owner of Limehouse. He thanked Jakub and extricated himself with due politeness.

*

Limehouse basin lay on the north bank of the River Thames, about two miles downstream from Bermondsey and Tower Bridge. Limehouse was the end of the road. Beyond the port was nothing but the vast wilderness of Romford Great Marsh. Limehouse basin was the gateway linking Britain’s inland canal system to the North Sea and the big, wide world beyond. The port offered much to a young man of highest ambitions!

Nightminster travelled there on foot as a respectable working man in his black leather raincoat over the fine cannibals’ jacket, black canvas pants and a smart pair of cannibals’ boots selected from a crate Jakub had brought south with the radioactive source. A waxed cotton slouch hat completed a practical, almost debonair get up for the imposing young man who strolled along the stone wharfs. Like Paddington basin, Limehouse dated from early in the nineteenth century and had been expanded several times, most recently after the Glorious Resolution to accommodate the increase in canal traffic. The basin served a great range of vessels, from the pencil-case narrowboats of the inland waterways up to mighty 200-tonne Thames sailing barges just in off the North Sea.

The crucial advantage of Thames barges was that they could unload and load without a harbour, thanks to being flat-bottomed. Just by running aground in a creek and waiting for the tide to fall, they made their own harbour. He recalled observing this on his first visit to ZEEBRI, on a baking July day last summer when he watched barrels of crude turpentine being unloaded on the flats by Kew Bridge. The barges could ground on any sandy or muddy tidal shore. Combine that with their speed, seaworthiness, capacious holds and small crews of just two men, and they made a powerful means of export for Target Hundred Thousand, when it existed.

He extended his exploration into the warehouses, seamen’s hostels, grotty pubs, dingy cat houses and Night and Fog barracks, and still further into the more prosperous streets where the trading families lived. Here he was challenged by ultramarine patrols. They were keen about security in these parts. This was the edge of civilization. Beyond Limehouse lived only marsh savages who hunted from sharkskin canoes and lived in wattle and daub hovels. Legend had it they sacrificed children, although privately Nightminster doubted they were quite that far gone, not yet at least.

As for being accepted as a citizen of Limehouse, he had plenty of ID booklets, he was obviously a poised young man, with a certain air of menace. ‘Nightminster, Prentice Wyston’ was entered up in the citizens’ register, which was only accessible to the Owner and his lieutenants. Provided Nightminster brought in gold, they would guard his secrets well.

As for establishing a home, this was not complicated for one with gold to put down right then and there. He found a plot at the end of a peaceful street on the edge of the bush and registered his claim with the local street committee and the Owner of Limehouse. He paid tribute in advance to both, 5 ounces per month to the street committee and 45 ounces per month to the owner. This was not cheap stuff! He shared the street with barge owners and trading families who expected a high level of protection from their local ultramarine. Nightminster had one month in which to effect improvements to his plot of land. That committed him to spending more gold.

The clock was ticking. From now on, gold would flow and he had to make Target Hundred Thousand into a living, cash-flowing business before the gold ran out.

*

Double-glazing was now his fascination. Obtaining a set of window units and a cast-iron bathroom suite involved a convoluted indulgence of General Wardian’s bureaucracy. Nightminster took careful notes as he went through the process. He had to attend an obscure office around the back of General Wardian’s Euston depot, where he was issued with a reference number. He then bicycled 15 miles down the Thames Estuary to the Port of Erith, where he instructed the Balancing House of Kronstein to transfer 132 14/20 ounces to a General Wardian account accompanied by the reference number. The heirloom double-glazing and cast-iron bathroom suite cost more than the rest of his bachelor pad combined! He took the transfer receipt back to Euston depot and left instructions for delivery to his rented flat in Camden. From there, he hauled the load himself to the Newmans’ warehouse in Paddington basin on a wagon he borrowed from his landlord. Later, when the bachelor pad was ready, Jakub Newman bore the double glazing and bathroom suite by narrow boat along the Regent’s Canal to Limehouse basin. In this way, Nightminster scrubbed the trail to his bachelor pad from General Wardian’s bureaucrats.

There was a trail developing that was harder to scrub, in fact, it was becoming a damned nuisance. Word of the mysterious, towering young stranger with pockets full of gold had gone around the young women of the street like a fever. The other residents were all long-established family dynasties inhabiting sprawling compounds. From great-grandparents to squalling babies to cousins twice removed all lived and bred prodigiously together. There was no shortage of young women. They arrived in waves, clan by clan, shyly squinting up at him prying endless questions about his family and plans. They were far worse than the ZEEBRI detectives. He played them off, exploiting their jealousies by seeming to favour this one and then that one, or appearing to develop an affinity for this dynasty or that one. For all the comedy value, there was a deadly truth he had to hide; he was alone. Never before had he been so solemnly aware of being the only child of parents without further family. For the time being, he let it be assumed he was playing his cards close while he prepared a landing pad for a brood to come. He could not sustain the lie forever, or even for that long. By the spring, he had to arrive with a fine young lady at his arm, or else the street would smell fraud and shun him.

The start of the Hilary Term at Oxford University was upon him. It was time to leave nest-building for life-building.

*

After dinner in his Oxford lodgings at the Jenkins’, Nightminster walked into the city. In the vicinity of what had been the railway station, he approached a strange, angular structure with a steel canopy stretching from the façade, creating the impression of an enormous mouth. Its floodlights cast fans across the street, and from the centre of the complex more lights beamed skywards a strange pale blue, incongruously like Cherenkov radiation he had seen in Public Era physics textbooks. This was the prestigious Krossington Institute at Oxford.

Boots crunched his way from the darkness behind. He swung about, right hand gripping a cracker pipe hung from his belt. The pale blue berets and camouflage smocks identified his accosters as Krossington marines. He relaxed. One of them asked his business. He handed over the invitation received from Tom Krossington that afternoon. This immediately resolved their tension.

“Ah, Mr Nightminster, we were expecting you. Please follow us.”

The reception of the Krossington Institute was a small lounge rather than a voluminous atrium. A young woman in a natty grey tuxedo urged him to relax in a leather armchair of devouring comfort while a young man in a natty grey tuxedo relieved him of his Makarov pistol and cracker pipe. Nightminster took an interest in the multitude of paintings that formed a mosaic around the room. He learned they were by artists of the clan. There was a quite decent rendition in the Impressionist style of the jostling High Street of Haslemere during Land Council. In pride of place was a portrait of His Decency the Master, Marcus-John Krossington, which reminded Nightminster more than ever of Cromwell—the same air of mean righteousness. Nightminster’s face burned with raging jealousy on recognising Her Decency Victorina captured in dreamy abstraction combing her long red hair. Might the artist be the fop Algernon? If so, he possessed fingers of a skill that galled Nightminster raw. What had he to compete with that? An atomic dream everyone laughed at?

“Good evening, Nightminster.”

Tom Krossington had slunk up on the sly, obviously amused at the transfixion of his guest. Nightminster indulged in a slow levering upright to his full height, holding TK eye-to-eye all the while rising past to peer down from almost a full head taller.

“You’re looking quite the swell, Your Decency.”

TK wore a black tailed evening suit with sky blue waistcoat and grey trousers. A sky blue bow tie hung at a raffish angle.

“Come come.” He ushered Nightminster with an arm around his back. “Plain old TK is just fine.”

“And plain old Big Knight will do just fine too.”

Nightminster kept his guard up, suspicious at TK’s friendliness.

“When you dined with us at Wilson House last November, you truly riled Big Brother Marko with that crack about ‘Your Ascendancy’.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.”

“You don’t want to be on his wrong side. Not that he’s really as bad as he seems, his problem is that our father—Maurice—sank into alcoholism and left a terrible mess to clear up, financially, socially and functionally. There’s a history of alcoholism in our family, it killed Grandad Wilson’s father too, and I don’t think he ever got over it. Our parents survived terrible events during what we call the Glorious Resolution. They had to get south from a nuclear power station far away in the north during the height of the Glorious Resolution, when dead surplus heaped the roadsides and the air swirled with the Smoke of Flies—that really happened, it’s no legend. They’ve never told any of us kids more than the vaguest sketches about their experiences. It’s the same with Grandad Wilson and Granny Rosalind, you’ll never get a word out of them, just pained silence.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You and I have to work together, that means we have to know each other.”

“Work at?”

“Just come with me.”

The fans of blue light Nightminster had observed from the outside radiated from an enclosed gardens, the very same he had glimpsed snowbound whilst ascending to Victorina’s bedroom on his previous visit hardly two weeks previously. Now the weather was milder, the snow had gone, the fountains sparkled through the Cherenkov floodlights. There were beds of scarlet winterberry and white viburnum around a patio laid with iron tables and chairs. Several high-ranking officers of General Wardian relaxed chatting over drinks. Nightminster spotted an executive-colonel, the highest rank he had ever seen in person. As TK approached, the officers sat up at attention and blazed with gleaming smiles. They chanted “Good evening, Your Decency” in chorus, like children. After TK had exchanged a few pleasantries and moved on, Nightminster asked:

“What are those glory twats doing here?”

“They’re studying business administration.”

“That being?”

“Running a corporation the size of General Wardian is highly complex. It requires the highest standards of leadership, specialists in accountancy, logistics, statistics, communication and strategy.”

“Could I study that stuff too?”

“Only in a class of glory twats.”

“Any chance of distance learning?”

“You aren’t the student type, Big Knight. That’s what I want to discuss with you. Now let’s get upstairs.”

On the second, top floor, TK stopped at a door in a long corridor like any other in this brutally egalitarian place, except that around this door were scrawled graffiti in all styles and colours. “The Toilet of the Revolution”, “Banner scoffs gold and talks crap”, “Abandon Brains All Ye Who Enter”, “Radicology Rock Off to Hell”.

“What is this place?”

“The home of the SUN Party. The fulcrum of the next world. As you can see, attitudes in the clan vary.”

“Your HQ is here? Inside the Institute? How did you get that one past Big Brother Marko?”

“We didn’t. It was during my father’s time. Five years ago, the radical agenda just did not blot the horizon of the sovereign caste. Now it does, I must say it has become a hazard to maintain our head office here, but we’d never get a place anywhere else in Oxford, so here it must remain.”

“Marko approves?”

“Not in the least. After Victorina’s disaster on Bermondsey market place, Marko came within a whisker of shutting this place and banishing Rina and I to the home lands. He only cooled down after you agreed to talk with that character Johnny Albert. Since New Year, Marko, Rina and I have dined with Mr Albert, and I must say it was a great success. I would never have believed the ultramarines were led by such accomplished people.”

“We commoners are ever so practical.”

TK unlocked the door to reveal an office much larger than Nightminster was expecting from the innocuous exterior. It was the size of a school classroom, with blacked-out windows down one side while on the opposite side the view was into an enclosed courtyard. The office was a squabble of filing cabinets and desks in bitter competition except in the central area, which was dominated by a large, oval conference table.

“Let’s get you signed up as a member,” TK said.

“I’m to join the SUN Party?”

“You’re definitely one of us, an intellectual radical. In your application to the School of Economics, you wrote about developing a pricing model for Public Era double-glazing units and bathroom suites. It’s the kind of highly pragmatic field study Banner and I approve of.”

TK unlocked a safe on the floor and drew out a ledger and a steel savings box, both of which he placed on the conference table. In neat roundhand, he added Prentice Wyston Nightminster (preferred style ‘Big Knight’) to the Oxford Chapter of the Party under membership number OX00912, and then filled out a membership booklet, which he handed across. Nightminster turned it over.

“What are you up to?” he asked.

“Most people have to go through vetting to be admitted to this branch.”

“I am privileged?”

“I’m telling you I trust you. It’s a gesture offered in the hope that you will trust me in turn. Don’t you understand quid pro quo? It’s how this world operates in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I take note of the icy charm and feel duly chastened. Thank you.”

“Have you matriculated?”

“Yes.”

“Paid your fees?”

“Of course.”

“How? Neither Rina nor I could pay up the better side of two hundred ounces just like that.”

Nightminster affected to wipe a tear from one eye.

“Please stop it, to hear of such deprivation is agonising.”

“Where do you get your money?”

“I transform danger into gold.”

“Rina said you were an arbitrageur; you buy from fools and sell to experts. Is that the sum of it?”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s a fine practical grounding in markets.”

“It’s a fine practical grounding in guns, gold and freedom.”

TK locked the safe and gestured towards the conference table. He got the head chair by beating Nightminster to it.

“I want you to find out what the hell is going on in the asylums of London,” TK said. “I sense real trouble is brewing there, and I don’t like it.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“You did. You introduced me to Reaction Radio. On enquiry, it turns out our marines keep a stock of shortwave radios for certain emergencies. I borrowed one. I do not like what I hear.”

“What do you think Reaction Radio is for?” Nightminster asked.

“It’s impossible to be sure how many people are out there taking part. The greatest weakness of public broadcast is its greatest strength—anyone with a receiver can tune in without the world being the wiser. There could be fifty listeners or fifty thousand. Do a lot of slummies have shortwave radio receivers?”

“Our family has an old one. It needs little dry-cell batteries not made since the Public Era. It’s possible to wire it to a 6-volt lead-acid battery, my father showed me when I was a kid to teach me about electricity. Shortwave went out of fashion long before the Glorious Resolution, and how many shortwave radios survived that mayhem? How many have lasted decades in damp flats? How many slummies will spend their hard-earned gold on a battery to listen in? I’ll hazard a guess that there are some party branches with a communal radio. And obviously some branches have a transceiver, because they call in to the talk shows.”

“When we met at your digs before Christmas,” TK said, “you mentioned it’s possible to determine the location of a transmitter.”

“Not easily. It’s possible to find the direction using a kind of loop called an RDF. In this way, I’ve been able to draw up a series of compass roses each evening I’ve tuned in. There are transmitters in all directions, my RDF has its limitations but I’d judge there’s possibly as many as thirty. Reaction Radio itself is from a different direction each time I’ve tuned in.”

“How often is that?”

“A couple of nights a week at most because I have to come up here to Oxford to listen. I can’t move the radio to London as the aerial would stand out a mile. Up here no one cares. You dons are up to so many zany pursuits from bat breeding to radio telescopes that my little wire doesn’t get a second glance.”

“I’ll bat your question back—what do you think they’re up to?”

“On the face of it, there’s no rationale for any radical party to use shortwave to promote itself,” Nightminster said. “99.9% of its audience are slummies who can’t afford a radio. To win the asylums, you have to get out there and meet the people, all the while not getting beaten up by the local ultramarines.”

“Yet, nevertheless, they are taking a good deal of trouble to sustain a broadcasting channel.”

“My best guess is they’re currying favour with the kind of people who use shortwave as a hobby. That’s technocrats. Factory owners and senior managers. It makes sense for the Official SUN Party to reach out to that specific group, because that specific group hates the sovereigns and is rich and powerful in the asylums.”

“Interesting idea. A frightening idea, if it turns out the Officials are sending out these attack squads to wreak havoc in the London asylums,” TK said.

“According to Rina, you believe power flows from gold. So long as the gold flows from the sovereigns to everyone else, the sovereigns are safe.”

“I used to think that. Recent weeks have educated me in other forms of power than money. Fear, for instance. Fear reigns over a certain kind of Paradise where cynics and thugs are lords. It’s hell for everyone else, but they don’t matter.”

Nightminster allowed a pause in the discussion, decided this was as good a moment as any, and said:

“One person snooping around London isn’t going to learn much. To get a picture of what’s going on in the asylums, I need a way to tap into the resources of a powerful organisation like General Wardian. I need a written brief to take to General Wardian HQ on Northumberland Avenue. I hand the brief over the reception desk and ask to speak with someone who can help me study double glazing and bathroom suites for my studies at this prestigious institution. That’s what is known as a gambit. It’s too ludicrous to be suspect. The gambit draws someone from the depths of the bureaucracy. They meet a student on assignment. I establish relations with them and take it from there. That’s how espionage works.”

“I do get the feeling this is not exactly a novelty for you.”

“Never mind your feelings, just provide a nice, official-looking letter.”

“I’m sure I can arrange a very sharp-looking document courtesy of our heirloom electro-mechanical typewriters. It’ll be despatched to your digs by tomorrow evening.”

“And I would like to see Victorina.”

TK tucked his face down so that Nightminster could only see the crown of his thick, curly dark hair.

“Sorry. You simply can’t. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules. Big Brother Marko is emphatic about it.”

“Why? Is he really so spiteful?”

“Not spiteful, no. He merely wants to keep his job as head of clan. If he permits Little Sis to mess around with a common outsider, one who in addition humiliated one of our clan, the Land Council will boil over with fury. I’ve already explained these political realities.”

“There’s more between us than just ‘messing around’.”

“I know that. Marko knows that. The Land Council will not see that. They’ll see whatever it takes to push out the ruling clan. We aren’t popular, it’s just that they dislike each other even more than us, so they’ve never managed to form an alternative coalition.”

“You forget that I am a spy. When I leave this building, I vanish, and so does anyone with me. That’s a promise. Discretion is my sovereign.”

“Well…” A little smile played about TK’s mouth. “Can you make it look like an accidental encounter, for appearances’ sake?”

“Oxford is not big. It’s amazing how people run into each other. There’s a little courtyard behind a cafe where Rina and I once encountered by chance last term. She’ll remember the place. It’s exceedingly discreet, I can assure you.”

“You must understand that if the least sniff gets back to Marko, you’ll never see Victorina again. She’ll be stuffed into marriage with this or that cousin twice removed for a life of bridge and dinner parties. Those are the stakes. Are you sure you want to take them?”

“The question is whether she will take them. If so, I shall be at the place this day next week at exactly noon. In the meantime, kindly ensure that official-looking letter reaches my digs by tomorrow evening.”

Chapter 8

One day later that week, mid-morning, Nightminster strode through the grand rotating doors of the headquarters of General Wardian in Westminster into the echoes of hobnailed boots clattering on granite slabs in the chasm of the grand lobby. He passed under the ominous, gigantic brass chandeliers, fixed like galaxies, and he smiled, as he always did, thinking of the crash they would make if their chains gave way. He was aware of being watched by troopers on duty about the great reception hall. Being in civilian attire, and not obviously prosperous in his long, waxed-cotton motorcycling coat, he stood out in this place of dress uniforms. He approached the marble barge of a reception counter, humble and anxious in manner, and waited. A female sergeant ambled to attend him.

“Yes, young man?”

“Good afternoon. My name is Nightminster. I’m a student of economics at Oxford University. Please could you ensure this reaches Account-Captain Roberts of Corporate Audit immediately? He knows what it’s about.”

He passed across the letter delivered by TK’s courier as promised. It was just folded without any seal. Anyone could read it. That was why he had left it open.

“I’m not sure he’s in the building,” she said. She clip-clopped away to the end of the counter and consulted a register. She knew how to swing her ass, he noticed, and she knew it well, eyeing him up with rising interest as she returned. “You’re in luck. Please take a seat over there by the wall and I’ll send a messenger.”

He waited on a wooden bench, looking up at the arched coffered ceiling about a hundred feet above his head, and at the overlooking galleries with their Corinthian columns, gilded cornices, and fancifully-detailed entablatures. Was it not extraordinary how many people throughout history had held power only through grandiose buildings and the insistence on being addressed by some high-flown style? The scale of this place was inherited from the disappeared British Empire of the Public Era. The building held no power in itself, it offered no physics by which it could drive a society. One day, the Atomic Lord would dictate to the rabbits that inhabited this gorgeous warren. Boiling water inside an atomic reactor would urge steam turbines turning generators creating actual power—real power. Who controlled that power would rule. He—

“Nightminster?”

A modestly-sized man with a notably triangular face and rather small mouth stood before him, very neat in the green uniform of an account-captain 2nd class. Nightminster stood up, rising near a head taller than Roberts, as he had over TK.

“Let’s find somewhere to talk,” he said.

“Your letter refers to double-glazing and toilet suites.”

“I am not here to discuss toilets, Account-Captain.”

“I suspected not.”

“I wish to exchange information.”

“You were dishonourably discharged from the corporation after being expelled from Oxford. What are you up to now?”

“The longer we stand here yapping, the greater is the chance we’ll be spotted by those whose friends are not our friends.”

Roberts turned and walked away. Nightminster followed. Within twenty paces they were through a narrow arch and descending into gloomy corridors of bare brick and stone walls. Other corridors branched off to both sides towards places cryptically described in painted signs: Region K, sector diaries post-2065; Region S, personnel post-2065 induction; Central Region sector audits post-2070 and so on and so forth. Nightminster appreciated the great building floated on a cushion of paper, like any bureaucracy. They ended up in a storage room that appeared to be a dumping ground for decorators’ ladders and wallpaper tables. There was a corner office segregated behind a glazed partition with panes so snarled with cobwebs it was impossible to see through them. Inside was an old desk covered in grit and mouse droppings, and a jam of Public Era office chairs of the type with five wheeled legs and rotating seat. Roberts took one that had been upside down, which meant the seat was still clean. Nightminster was less fussy and sat in the nearest.

“I asked, what are you up to now?” Roberts said.

“The same as before, I’m a student at Oxford, albeit in the School of Economics.”

“Who’s funding that?”

“I am.”

“How?”

“From the money you paid me in the first term.”

“You’ve become quite the amateur of that dismal science.”

“I’ve joined the Oxford SUN Party.”

He held out his membership booklet, which Roberts glanced at briefly.

“Look again.”

Roberts did so, but still failed to see anything of note.

“The signature of my sponsor?”

This time Roberts jolted upright, his lips moving, index finger stroking something in the booklet.

“Tom Krossington?”

“I’ve established close relations with the clan. I’ve dined with Marko and TK at Wilson House.”

“Outstanding! What have you found out?”

“Have you attended courses in business administration at the Krossington Institute?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anything of interest, related to the SUN Party, at all, while you were there?”

“It wasn’t on the syllabus.”

“The Oxford SUN Party’s headquarters is inside the Institute.”

Roberts shrivelled with shame in his seat.

“So you see, I can pass you much from the Oxford branch,” Nightminster said.

“Well just a minute, the story we received from the Office of the Proctor was that you’d been expelled from Oxford University for fighting. Your dishonourable discharge from General Wardian was automatic, I never actioned it. Yet now you’re back?”

Nightminster explained how he had been rehabilitated thanks to the intervention of Father Arthur Richardson of the Anglican Church. He maintained a strictly neutral manner. There was no profit in expressing his disdain of sleepy bureaucrats.

“And you want to be reinstated in General Wardian?”

“That would appear not unreasonable. At the very least, I’m a career trooper who was wrongly accused, and that wrong has now been set right.”

“Certainly true. There won’t be any issues getting your sergeant’s stripes back with full pay and benefits, I’ll see they’re backdated and all reference to the discharge corrected. It will take a few weeks to grind through the system though, what with having to get confirmations from Oxford and so forth.”

“I need a library card for my course studies—I have to research double-glazing units and bathroom suites for appearances. I can’t wait weeks and weeks for officialdom to take a shit.”

“I’ll arrange a visitor’s card today. We get plenty of university researchers in the library, so you’ll blend right in and it’ll be perfect cover for our chats.”

“Could I get use of a motorcycle combination? I do not like riding a big bike on ice.”

“Not a problem. I’ll set you up in the books as a field agent and issue the combo as necessary transport. You’ll be able to get free camphine at any General Wardian depot.”

“Splendid! My day is proceeding like melted butter.”

Truly, this did feel too easy—this was bureaucracy, after all.

“You’ve become a unique asset,” Roberts said. “When we met in Oxford in November, you told me you’d been inside ZEEBRI and I was not much interested at the time. Now you’ve added the Krossingtons to your portfolio. It would be less than candid to deny your visit today was other than a windfall, an outstanding windfall. The challenge is going to be keeping you alive.”

“Why?”

“It’s a convoluted story, so bear with me. It all started after a violent clash on Bermondsey market at the end of November—do you know anything about this?”

“I’m from Bermondsey, so obviously I’ve heard plenty of stories about it, more or less fanciful in nature.”

This was no lie. He really had heard plenty of stories.

“A bunch of hooligans attacked Bermondsey and met their match,” Roberts said. “Between twenty and fifty hooligans were killed. In the back lanes of Brent Cross from which they came, it was impossible to hide that so many men—local toughs and crooks—had died violently on the same day. There was no way of concealing the connection to the battle at Bermondsey. Suddenly a lot of people were asking, why? I have to explain that these cramped lanes are inhabited by extended clans that hate the ultramarines, hate the glory trusts and hate the sovereigns. The very few of our troops who come from those places keep quiet when they’re home on leave. It was only slowly that we started to get news when those troops returned to their units in sovereign lands and told their superior officers, and the news eventually got back to Corporate Audit.”

“How does this affect me?”

“General Wardian troops are coming forward with information in a way that wasn’t the case three months ago,” Roberts continued. “I’ve interviewed about a score of our troops who’ve come forward after being approached by men claiming to be detectives from ZEEBRI seeking the shooter of Parliament Square. The connection with ZEEBRI is that Jackson worked there. The pattern I’m seeing is these so-called detectives are concentrating on the 1st and 2nd Reserve Regiments and not bothering the regular troops much. There’s talk of a list of suspects, although whether it actually exists or not is another matter.”

Nightminster was not overly disturbed by this news.

“I was picking up the same tale before I went up to Oxford. I told you about my radical contact—a member of the Rafati pawnbroking family—who said Charlie Banneville had been called out as the shooter of Parliament Square. Charlie was murdered. For all the months these detectives have been at it, all they’ve accomplished is the murder of an innocent man.”

“They are persistent, and there is cause to believe their progress will accelerate.”

“Why?”

“Support for the Official SUN Party is growing, even in the glory trusts. There’s an economic slump in the asylums, in case you hadn’t noticed. The sovereigns have reigned in their spending due to poor harvests last year. And President Sebastian Smith is a fine speaker. He talks the language of the common people.”

“How do you know?”

“He came to Bermondsey the day after the violence.”

“He did what? I never heard a thing about that—I know Johnny Albert well and he never peeped a word about it.”

“It was very strange, actually. I’m so glad I saw it, I just happened to be there trying to pick up whatever I could about the events of the previous day and Smith turned up on a damned great eight-wheeled Octopus truck complete with loudspeakers and an Octopus radio truck that transmitted everything to the world. Australia could have listened to him.”

“You’re saying Johnny Albert’s boys just let President Smith drive inside Bermondsey and give his spiel?”

“He arrived with Madam Edkins, she’s one of the ‘Es’ in ZEEBRI, and Frank Randell, he’s the ‘R’ in ZEEBRI. David and Frederick Chadderton came out to greet them. There was nothing the boys in black could do against a display like that, so they faded back to their palace and left Mr Smith to it. He spoke very well, I must say, although I sense to a sceptical audience. He preaches paper money, and the people aren’t ready for that.”

After the Bermondsey attack and sojourn at Wilson House, Nightminster had spent very little time in Bermondsey. He had kept from sight as Preston Walker of Camden sweating through the wait for Victorina to accept his invitation to Johnny Albert’s New Year’s party. It was a time of suspended fate. For all that, it shocked him he had not caught so much as a snippet about Sebastian Smith’s speaking in Bermondsey. It was unnerving proof of the power of social silence.

“At least now we know for certain this Sebastian Smith character is sending out the hooligans from Brent Cross,” he said. “Tip off the big-shot factory owners and after that, he’s had it. And without him, the hunt for the shooter will collapse.”

“Just because the rabble, or at least some of it, came from Brent Cross, does not prove he is responsible.”

“How can you be so stupid?”

“I can assure you the senior cadre is rational. Everything I have seen and learned about this Sebastian Smith character is that he’s genuine. He has the full backing of ZEEBRI, of Chaddertons of Bermondsey, of Chance and Buckley of Camden and many other eminently respectable factory complexes. It’s out of the question such people would support an individual having even the slightest doubt over his probity. In contrast to which, the Krossingtons have close historic links with Brent Cross. For decades they’ve recruited castrated boys there. A tradition is held by some that eunuchs lifted from poverty to a life of splendour make fanatically loyal servants. That fanaticism can be directed to organise attack gangs from Brent Cross to discredit Smith and his Official SUN Party.”

Nightminster was sufficiently shaken by this news to fall into silent consternation trying to square civilised people with purloining eunuchs from poverty. He did not believe even Marcus-John would approve of such cynicism.

“You’re obviously no longer quite so confident about the decency of their decencies, the Krossingtons.” When Nightminster did not reply, Roberts added: “Do you disagree?”

“I don’t know what to think. I’ve met Tom and Victorina, and Head of Clan Marcus-John, while you have not. I think they’re genuine, but I also think they’re clueless. They just don’t understand how the big, wide world works. That goes for the whole sovereign caste and I’d go further to state my conviction that sovereign supremacy is fragile. It rests entirely on the brutality of the glory trusts to protect spoiled lives—and now the Official SUN Party is winning hearts and minds in all of the glory trusts. You can draw your own conclusions as to the direction I see events taking.”

“Our immediate concern is to avoid your being hauled up to Brent Cross by these roaming detectives.”

“There does seem to be something personal about the hunt for that shooter. I don’t understand why it’s so relentless, but I have to accept these ZEEBRI people won’t give up.”

“For the sake of appearances, you’ll work within my unit as an auxiliary until your reinstatement papers come through. If the worst happened, we’d change your name and post you out of town to Kent. You can trust General Wardian to look after you, worry not.”

This concern was all very sweet, but Nightminster could not drop his life and vanish. Not now, when Target Hundred Thousand was winning discernible momentum.

“I’m not running from those bloody people.” He savoured a ludicrous dream of blasting the detectives’ office in ZEEBRI to bits with some kind of missile. In seriousness, he could not continue to ignore the threat from the hunters. He had to confront them.

“The boldest measures are the safest,” he said, speaking his mind.

“Do you know who said that?”

“It was some Public Era officer of the British Army.”

“Specifically, it was a major general called Orde Wingate. He led special missions called the Chindits into the jungles of Burma during the Second World War. He was a controversial figure; some said he was mad.”

Nightminster just shrugged.

“Maybe he did things others hadn’t the guts to try.”

Chapter 9

It was not until the late morning of the next day that Nightminster approached the Rafati Pawnbrokers on Elephant & Castle market place. Despite the many hours of preparation, he still felt as if on the edge of jumping down a well. He had absolutely no idea what kind of a reception he would get. He was as prepared as possible. The Makarov was in its ankle holster and he carried a Beretta M9 in the right pocket of his waxed cotton jacket. This Beretta replaced the Browning Hi-Power stolen at the Bermondsey riot. A kindly Johnny Albert had gifted it before Christmas after the good news Victorina would be coming to his New Year’s party. For all the firepower, the only reassurance Nightminster had was the certainty shooting his way out of Mirana’s shop was a damned sight better bet than trying to escape from the rat-trap of ZEEBRI at Brent Cross.

It was a gloomy January day. The etched plate-glass front window of Rafati Pawnbrokers shone as if it were already evening. Behind the counter stood a bean-pole young man with a thick mass of black hair that gave him the appearance of a dusting wand. That was Rostam Rafati, Mirana’s younger brother and Official SUN Party fanatic.

“Rostam! Just the man I wanted to see!”

“Big Knight?” Rostam said. He appeared dumbfounded by Nightminster’s arrival wheeling a shiny black three-speed bicycle. Rostam was about as tall as Nightminster but with stick-insect arms and legs. He was a fantastic long-distance runner. As a teenaged messenger, he had earned many times the normal income simply by completing the runs so quickly. “We don’t take big items like bicycles—why not try the dealer across the market place?”

Nightminster folded over laughing.

“I’m happy to report being a long way from pawning my wheels. Have you ever tried one of these things? They’re brilliant! It’s all steel with three speeds in the back wheel and a generator in the front wheel for the lights. Plus, it’s got pneumatic tyres just like a Public Era car, which is not surprising as it was made in the Public Era too. This is a genuine heirloom!”

“Not my kind of thing, Big Knight.”

“Is Mirana here?”

“She’s off with her new man.”

He said this with obvious satisfaction. Nightminster affected a slight feint that the news was a disappointment, to buy a few seconds while he decided how to work Rostam to help him.

“Who’s this new man of hers?” Nightminster asked.

“You’ll be impressed.”

“She’s bringing him here?”

“She’d better be here in the next ten minutes or I’m locking up the shop and walking out. I’m sick and tired of her romping all over London leaving me stuck in this cage.”

“What’s she up to?”

“Mirana’s gone very political.”

“More political than you?”

“She’s supposed to be here with her new man to get lunch. After that, her man’ll give a speech on our market.”

Nightminster’s confusion must have been all over his face, as Rostam cackled with derision

“You still don’t get it, do you? Mirana’s new man is President Sebastian Smith of the Official SUN Party.”

Nightminster absorbed this, confidence building this was a stroke of exceptional luck.

“Jolly good! I want to meet him.”

“No, Big Knight, I don’t think you do.”

“Is there somewhere I can put this bike?”

“Wheel it through to the back yard.” He seemed to become compassionate for some reason Nightminster could not fathom. “Big Knight, I’m going to give you a break for old time’s sake. You should get away from here and stay away.”

“On the contrary, I’m certain President Seb Smith will be thrilled to hear what I have to say.”

Rostam just pulled an ugly, slick grin and shook his head.

“Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

“Where’s Seb Smith from?”

“Brent Cross—where else?”

“And what’s his claim to fame? How has he emerged as the one, true leader?”

“He’s been at it for years, but it was always inside Brent Cross while he built up a solid base there. Then he saw the Parliament Square rally get violent last summer and he heard about the riots all over London—and saw those toffs up in Oxford doing absolutely nothing. They don’t care what happens down here. Seb knew someone had to take charge of London to get things under control. So, his Official SUN Party has assumed the duty of leading reform on the Island of Britain.”

In listening to this, Nightminster was raking in all he had heard of Brent Cross politics. Evidently ZEEBRI and other factory owners had snatched back the leadership role they doubtless considered to be theirs anyway, and they were being joined by Chadderton, Chance & Buckley and more and more big factories as sovereign spending fell and the yearning for change grew. This Seb Smith character was probably only a figurehead, a boy lifted from nowhere to represent the big-shot factory owners’ interests. Meeting him was still a risk worth taking.

*

Nightminster waited in the little back lounge of the shop for about twenty minutes, during which time several customers came in and argued over the loan offered. One slammed the door in disgust, the rest signed the agreement.

A rapping came up the corridor from the door to the back yard. Surprised, Nightminster wondered if this was a friendly neighbour popping in for something, He ambled down the passageway, unbolted the door and pulled it open.

If ever his heart had leaped with shock and plummeted into his guts, this was the moment. The face looking back at him was broad-browed, battle-scarred like a tomcat’s and not friendly. Part of the right ear was missing. It was a face Nightminster knew very well, certainly he could not have forgotten it from the riot at Parliament Square. This was the King-Tough who had led the snatch of Her Decency Victorina.

“President Seb Smith?” Nightminster’s words came out more as a series of gasps. He had taken a step back unconsciously. King-Tough lurched too, as if catching himself overbalancing, falling back against Mirana, who was looking to one side, probably embarrassed at being confronted by an old boyfriend with her new boyfriend.

“I’m Prentice Nightminster.” He offered his hand. “My friends call me Big Knight. I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you, Mr President.”

“Sebastian Smith!” King-Tough grabbed Nightminster’s hand and pumped it, squeezing hard. He squinted up at Nightminster, his head a little on one side, an expression of rage flaring. Then it all vanished to calm, as if the moment had never happened. “My friends call me Seb, although you and I aren’t friends, not at all, so you call me Mr Smith.”

Nightminster led inside to the little lounge, jangled internally, trembly and sickened by the fear that Seb Smith had recognised him. It was so hard to read that strange flaring of rage. Maybe Seb Smith was just angry at being confronted by a large stranger who could have been an assassin. President Smith came with his own bodyguard, a file of toughs like stokers who flowed in and took up positions without having to be told. Some went upstairs, some watched the shop, some remained out in the back yard.

“This is the Oxford student I told you about,” Mirana said. She otherwise made no effort by way of greeting and her eyes remained down, looking at the carpet. Rostam put his head through the curtain from the shop and pointed at Nightminster.

“That geezer says he’s simply dying to meet you, Mr President.”

Seb Smith took a seat in the middle of the sofa with Mirana to one side. He put an arm around her and gave her a smack on the mouth. Then he faced Nightminster. He leaned forward, his eyes shifting about fractionally over Nightminster’s face, as if reading his thoughts. It gave Nightminster the unnerving feeling of being sliced open and his contents picked over. Seb Smith was not physically anything exceptional. He was about five foot ten with a slender build like a footballer or track athlete. His head was large and rather square. Nevertheless, Nightminster could sense danger radiating from the man. A cat is not remotely as strong as a man, but a crazed attack from one would be terrifying. There was the same wild-animal presence about Seb Smith.

“Mirana tells me you were a reserve trooper with General Wardian. Now you’re studying physics at Oxford University,” he said.

“Actually, I’ve switched to economics.”

“Have you now? Quite a switch, that. It’s a funny thing, running into you like this. Convenient, I suppose you might say. When you were a reservist, what was your unit?”

“City of London 2nd Reserve regiment.”

“You were at the Parliament Square rally.”

Statement, not question.

“Certainly. There was real aggro out in the middle of the square. Someone got shot.”

“My very best friend got shot.”

Nightminster fought the battle of his life to control his breathing and keep his hands flat on his thighs to stop the fingers trembling. He felt a trickle of sweat on the side of his neck. All the time, he was under the stage-lighting of Seb Smith’s eyes, as they flickered about, snapping up details. Damn this man! He was far and away the most dangerous creature Nightminster had ever encountered. The lounge had turned into a death trap. This was much, much worse than the worst-case scenario he had planned for. With all these bodyguards about, he could not hope to shoot his way to freedom.

“Was he?” Nightminster said. He cleared his throat. “I’m so terribly sorry to hear that. I heard the shooter got sent to the Fog.”

“We’ve talked to lots of people. Nightminster isn’t a name to forget. Nor, now I come to meet you, are you a character to forget. We’ve made a shortlist of suspects. You’re on that list.”

In the seconds of silence, incredibly, Nightminster’s fears disappeared. The worst had happened. In a crazy sort of way, it felt like an opportunity.

“I was interviewed by ZEEBRI detectives back in mid-November. I told them all I know and they were satisfied, I’ve heard nothing more.”

“That’s as maybe. We’ve spoke to a lot more folk since then.”

“Well…” Nightminster affected a patient bafflement. “You’ll need to be more careful in how you acquire information. My experience was, the shot came from behind, down Abingdon Street. I—everyone around me—thought it was a signal to withdraw, but then a surge of our guys went in and rescued that silly young woman Victorina K.”

He suffered a long stare, which he met by rolling his eyes impatiently, shaking his head as if in disdain.

“You could be the coolest bastard I ever did meet, or, you might be innocent, as you say.”

“You were there, didn’t you see who fired?”

“I don’t like recalling the event.” Seb Smith dropped the stare and hitched himself up in his seat. “I’ve heard a hundred different stories about the shooter. But that’s by the by. If you had nothing to do with it, that’s fine and good because I’ve nothing at all against honest glory troopers. I was in the cubs and the scouts myself, only they threw me out for getting too uppity with the officers.”

“Same here! I joined General Wardian because it’s the only way out of the asylums.”

“You still with them?”

“I’m a sergeant while they pay me through Oxford. When I graduate, I’ll go to staff college for the Securitician A and then I’ll be on the fast track for senior rank.” This was a low-risk lie. If Smith had access to General Wardian’s personnel archive, he would already have tracked down suspect Nightminster and killed him.

“Fancy that. An asylum lad who got to Oxford. I’ve never heard of such a thing. I have to say I’m impressed.” He said this with what seemed utmost sincerity. Either he meant it, or else his irony was perfect. “So why would a dedicated glory guy nicely set up on the fast track want to meet me?”

“Tom Krossington has given me a job in the SUN Party headquarters at Oxford. The party HQ is actually inside the Krossington Institute! It’s perfectly brazen the way the Krossington clan has subverted our party for their ends.”

“Well something is perfectly brazen,” Seb Smith muttered. “Why has Krossington given you a job?”

“Because he’s my tutor in the School of Economics. He’s got me tracking down information Banner and he need for their research.”

“Exactly what sort of information?” Smith was becoming scornful.

“I’m in London to do research in General Wardian’s corporate library, it’s one of the best on the Island of Britain. TK wants data on how prices of double-glazing units and bathroom suites have increased as the supply from the Public Era has dwindled. We hope to develop a universal pricing model to forecast heirloom prices more generally.”

“Oh yeah? I’ll take your word for it. Personally, I must admit I was stupid when I was young. I messed around at school and got out of it as soon as I could. Bad mistake. The worst mistake of my life was to turn my back on learning. I woke up when I was about eighteen and started going to night school. I learned there’s nothing new under the sun, we’re all living in the nineteenth century and there’s only one way back to the affluent world of my grandparents. To begin with I believed in the Oxford SUN Party, until I saw they were just a bunch of posturing sovereigns pretending they cared. Radical thugs have been smashing up decent folk around London and that Oxford lot do fuck-all! So now I’m running things and the Official SUN Party is the force for reform on this island.”

“I listen to Reaction Radio on my shortwave station.”

“How have you got a shortwave station?”

“I made it.”

“You—? Oh I get it, you being interested in physics and highly brainy. You’re a pretty capable man, I do have to admit. Personally, I can’t get my mind around that wireless stuff and I don’t really trust something any man and his dog can listen to. I leave that to qualified people.”

He paused. When he spoke on, it was in a loftier tone.

“So, Mr Nightminster—I’ll call you that as we aren’t friends, I choose my friends very carefully—why did you want to see me?”

“I can tell you everything that happens at Oxford HQ.”

Seb Smith struggled to contain his mirth.

“Well, let’s at least be honest and agree you can pass on whatever Krossington and Banner want.”

“I’m not expecting you to trust me,” Nightminster said. “All I ask is that you listen to what I have to say.”

“Okay. Then say it.”

“The Oxford party knows staggeringly little about what happens here in London. They’ve no social links outside their caste, and of course the glory trusts aren’t watching the asylums either because they’re not paid to go anywhere near them. That’s our gift.”

“What you’re saying is useful, actually. It confirms my instincts going right back to the Parliament Square rally that the Oxford lot are clueless. Those two Krossingtons were daft enough to stand up in public dressed like servants, expecting us plebs to fall for it. I’m not saying I approve of what my pals did snatching Victorina Krossington, because I don’t, I’m totally against achieving ends by violent means, but I will say this: Tom and Victorina Krossington were fools to try a stunt like that before all those thousands of ordinary folk.”

“Those rioters were friends of yours?”

“Let me clarify what I mean. A friend in my world is someone I’ve known all my life. They’re from my world. We did everything together going back to catching cats and burning rats and all the other stupid shit kids get up to. Even if I might not agree with them about anything, I know them inside out and we’ll stand and fall together. I’ve turned them into gentlemen, but in the past, they may well have done things I don’t like at all. You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Now I don’t mean to hurry you along, Big Knight, but I want some lunch and then I have to go out on that market place and give a speech to thousands about how The Official SUN Party will lead them to affluence, and it’s up to the sovereigns whether they want to join the show, or not. So if you want to say more, can you make it quick?”

“Can I contact you by shortwave radio?”

“Nope. When you want a word, you come to Brent Cross in person and you ask for me at the reception desk of the ZEEBRI complex.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Splendid.” Seb Smith smiled sweetly. This irony was less than perfect. Nightminster got the point. Hearty to the last, he called farewell to Rostam in the shop and departed down the passage for the back door with a cheery wave.

What conversation erupted in that little lounge after the clank of the back yard gates shutting? How Nightminster would love to have known—but he never would. Overall, he had had a brute lesson in bad luck. Nothing could have prepared him for King-Tough being the president of the Official SUN Party. Yet it was stark brilliant luck too. TK and Roberts would unquestionably be impressed!

There remained the question of why Seb Smith had allowed a suspect in the killing of his best friend to simply walk away. Most probably, he did not want to get heavy in front of Mirana. Or else, he was confident Nightminster would come to Brent Cross. Just possibly Nightminster’s thespian efforts had removed him from the shortlist of suspects? He was not confident of this

He did not hang around to hear Smith’s speech. He rode the bicycle out of Elephant and Castle into the abandonments and headed west towards Battersea, stopping from time to time to hide in ruins to check he was not being followed. Once confident he was in the clear, he crossed the River Thames at the Battersea bridge and made his way across the core of Old London to his flat in Camden and his life as Preston Walker.

Now, at least, he understood the relentlessness of the hunt for the shooter of Parliament Square. Quite apart from personal lust for vengeance, Sebastian Smith had to find the shooter to maintain status with his ‘friends’, the backstreet thugs he had grown up with. What sort of proof would convince them? What lure might deflect them? These were questions Nightminster had to answer before he next travelled to Brent Cross.

Chapter 10

On this morning when Nightminster peered through his bedroom curtains, he bunched his fist and exclaimed in triumph. A clear starry sky all over. Crisp as hell, though. The condensation of the previous evening had frozen inside the pane. Not weather for taking a lady out on a motorbike. The motorcycle combination on loan from General Wardian would, however, do just fine. The sidecar had a folding roof and heater, and they could talk on the road through an open window.

The hours of the morning dragged and dragged. He forced himself into arithmetic calculations of cash flow projections for his Value System in its first five years. Despite his best efforts, he struggled to keep his mind on the job. He added up a column three times and got three different answers. A fourth try yielded a fourth answer. He gave up and went down to the garage to polish the combo. Roberts had arranged a staff model meant for officers. The paintwork was a dignified black and grey with a thin gold coachline. Nightminster particularly loved the flat-four water-cooled engine, so smooth, with the torque of a tractor, powering both rear wheels. After soothing his impatience, he returned to his bedroom where he continued to fumble with calculations while his watch crawled around towards noon.

“Tick, you bastard, tick,” he growled at it.

Half past eleven finally arrived. He dressed in his winter-issue General Wardian sergeant’s uniform, which he had kept from last year as they were the warmest clothes he possessed, added a balaclava, topped by an ushanka with the flaps tied about his cheeks and his waxed cotton motorcycling jacket pulled over the top as a wind-cheater and to shroud the military attire. As for protection, which was not intended for himself, he took the Makarov in its usual ankle holster and the Beretta in its holster, under the jacket.

Since learning he was on the suspect list of Sebastian Smith and his Brent Cross thugs, Nightminster had, paradoxically, lost his fear of being attacked, in Oxford at any rate. If they were going to trace and attack him, they would have done so by now. He kicked the combo alive and let it warm up for a few minutes before setting off into the city at leisurely pace, drawing much attention with the mellow rumbling of its engine. He tried to find a place to park in the High Street, but failed. Time ran short. It was four minutes to noon. He grew agitated and short-tempered, cussing the electric carriages of the sovereign offspring that congested all the available parking. In the end, he found a slot near the River Cherwell outside Magdalen College and ran back along the High Street, into a lane that was half-overgrown by a laurel bush and easily missed, down a gloomy tunnel between a paper recycling business and a pen maker’s shop to emerge into a small courtyard. Across the courtyard were steel steps that zig-zagged up to the King of the Sparks, where he had bought the components to make his shortwave radio station. A window near the foot of the steps was open, despite the chill air, and he slowed, fearing disappointment.

Victorina was there. In exactly the same seat as when he encountered her back in early November. Victorina’s slate-blue eyes shone up at him from amongst a mass of red hair. He leaned forward through the window to kiss her, but encountered an eruption of perfume and warmth as she scrambled over the sill into his arms with her legs locked about his waist. They clenched mouth-to-mouth, his erection pressing between her legs. She jumped down with her face almost as red as her hair, grinning up at him and glancing back in through the window where her two bodyguards, Lieutenant Telford and Sergeant Ogilvy watched with po-faces. Nightminster was hardly enthusiastic to see them, but was relieved to observe they wore plain clothes, leather flying jackets and heavy, dark green canvas trousers.

“Allow me to take you for a drive, gentlemen.”

“I’ll lay down the limit,” Lieutenant Telford said. “These aren’t my limits, they’re orders from His Decency TK, and he’s taking a chance at that. You and Her Decency may do as you please until exactly this time tomorrow.”

Nightminster required several seconds to absorb the implications.

“You’re letting us go on our own?”

“We are. I must say I don’t approve—not that I doubt you as a bodyguard. We know you’re a crack trooper from the riot on Bermondsey market. But you’ve only got eyes at one end of your head. So don’t take chances.”

“I won’t take chances.”

At this moment, Nightminster meant these words, although with a fringe of speculation at how to make full use of this incredible windfall of freedom. Telford and Ogilvy waved farewell and filed out of sight into the cafe. Nightminster stood in the wilds of Oxford, quite alone with Victorina, barely able to believe his fortune. Victorina rocked against his chest, laughing. She remained there, her arms around his chest.

“We can’t stay here all afternoon,” she said. “Take me away.”

Nightminster led her out down the tunnel to the overgrown lane and out onto the High Street, where she looked about in wonder.

“I’ve never noticed that lane before. I’ve only walked along the High Street a few times in all the years I’ve been at Oxford. We lead such confined lives, you’ve no idea how lucky you are being free.”

He ushered her along with his arm around her. She wore a dark calfskin coat, which reached down to her ankles. It was the same coat she had worn on visiting his digs for the first time in November. To hide her hair and blend in with the other young women, she tied on a dark green woollen shawl. Now she looked like any common student. The couple attracted no particular attention as they strolled along the High Street to the combination parked outside Magdalene College.

“Good grief!” Victorina exclaimed. “It’s beautiful. Is it a car or a motorcycle?”

“A bit of both, known as a combination.”

“It’s enormous! And so glossy—I love that engine, so smooth and shiny like a steel kettle."

"It’s cooled by water. The hot water runs through a radiator in the sidecar and will keep you as warm as toast.”

“It must have cost a fortune—where do you get your money from?”

“Actually, I wheedled this thing on long-term loan from General Wardian.”

“Given the staggering sums we pay General Wardian to guard our frontiers, it doesn’t surprise me they dish out fancy combinations to mere sergeants.”

She stretched up on her tip-toes to kiss his cheek and scrambled into the front seat of the sidecar.

“This is wonderful, like being in a glider—have you ever tried gliding?”

Nightminster shook his head.

“We fly in the glens of Scotland, it’s fantastic to drift along with the birds.” In a softer, wistful voice she added: “What a pity we have to go so far from people to be free.”

Nightminster slung a leg over and settled on the driver’s saddle. He was feverish, still wondering how to use this incredible blessing of freedom. An idea arrived. The risks so anguished him that he resisted the beautiful logic. The trouble was, if he pulled this one off, President Sebastian Smith simply disappeared from the scene and the road to Target Hundred Thousand lay open and clear.

And if he did not pull it off?

He rested his hand on Victorina’s shoulder to draw her attention. She smiled up at him with eyes transparently longing for a day in bed, and for a few seconds he could barely pull himself off the temptation just to enjoy a safe, snug time with her at his digs.

“Would you like to meet President Sebastian Smith?” he asked.

*

On arrival in central London, Nightminster took a different route to Brent Cross industrial asylum than the most direct one up the old Roman road. He followed a lane through lonely abandonments not so far razed by deconurbation. The way was rutted and poorly kept, forcing down his speed. They encountered a farmer herding sheep and had to grumble along at the pace of sauntering sheep, attracting vicious stares from the three shepherds until Nightminster waved his Beretta, after which the shepherds kept their backs turned and hurried the sheep along. About half a mile on, the road reached a summit called Duddon Hill. From there, the road ran down a long slope to Brent Cross. Nightminster wanted to give Victorina a vista of the place before they went in.

“That’s the greatest concentration of industrial might anywhere on the Island of Britain,” he said.

“Oh God! It’s so filthy and ugly. What are those hideous towers pouring steam?"

"They’re called fractionation columns. That's where crude turpentine imported from great forests in the north of England is boiled and the light parts condensed and mixed with ethanol to make camphine to power the likes of this bike, while the leftover resin is used to make stuff, like famous Brent Cross soap—do you use it?”

“Um… I honestly have to admit, Prentice, that the only thing I know about my soap is the smell. I don’t share your ravenous appetite to understand every last thing in the world around me—you’re just like Tom. I suppose it’s a boys’ thing.”

“And what’s your thing?”

“The people who live in that awful place. You can’t even make out streets, the houses are heaped up on one another, wooden shacks, old shipping containers, tents on the roofs of what look like stables. It’s a shambles, packed with the slaves of iron monoliths. Those black factory sheds remind me of cliffs up in Scotland. Imagine bringing up children in such a place! And I’ll bet only half reach adolescence.”

“Ten minutes from now, you will no longer have to imagine.”

“Are you sure this is safe?” There was fear in her voice that forced Nightminster to think through once again what he was doing and why. She continued: “Twice I’ve stepped out in public and both times it’s ended in disaster. If we go in there, we may never come out.”

“What we are doing is dangerous, but you and I can’t get what we want by staying safe. Through appearing in person at the heart of the Official SUN Party, Smith’s blag about sovereign aloofness is shot to bits. You’ll make him look a fool before his own people without saying a word.”

Privately, he wondered at his real motivations. He could scarcely wait to see Smith’s cocky face as Victorina denounced him for what he actually was, King-Tough, dancing rapist of Parliament Square. After that, the admiration of Madam Edkins, Frank Randell, David Chadderton and others vital to Smith’s credibility would vanish along with the glamour his charade of recent months had gained him. He would drop back to what he really was, a backstreet thug, if he escaped getting lynched by his own mob.

Would Smith dare murder a sovereign in public? The headquarters of the Official SUN Party was a very public place in the heart of the factory owned by Smith’s greatest patrons. He would have to be suicidally stupid to attack Victorina inside a complex that recorded every visitor’s arrival and departure and was crowded with witnesses. In any case—and on this point Nightminster was resolute—he would shoot Smith and then himself if the worst happened.

Chapter 11

Getting into Brent Cross industrial asylum was not a problem. Getting in with armament was a problem. Nightminster pulled up at the frontier and his eyes fell once more upon the sign that had so intimidated him on his first visit in the summer. Those found bearing arms without a licence faced “automatic execution for the people—no exceptions”. He cursed, having forgotten all about Brent Cross’s fussy carry laws. There was no way in hell he was proceeding into the asylum without firepower. Equally, he baulked at chancing the capital penalty. A frontier guard in fancy black leather armour approached, his eyes licking the combination all over, especially the wide, shiny engine with its four chromed exhaust pipes. Nightminster decided on the blunt approach.

"I'm armed but don't have a licence. How do I get a pass on your automated-execution policy?”

“Who’re you here to see?”

The frontier guard was young, with a boyish, lively face. Nightminster thought him the type to be amenable.

“President Smith.”

“Really? When’s your appointment?”

“I don’t have one, but he knows me well enough. I’m Big Knight Nightminster.”

“Just a tick. I’ll come in with you, but I ‘ave to tell the gaffer.”

He had words with his sergeant, who frowned and stared at Nightminster. The sergeant, at least, recognised the name and had grim words with the young guard, who returned and swung a leg over the pillion seat, his bounce gone, now a young man with a serious mission.

“Just drive over to the main gate of ZEEBRI and we’ll get this beast safe in the garage.” He smiled at Victorina. “I’m Nick by the way. How do you do?”

They started chatting as Nightminster drove across to the cast-iron gates of the concrete complex, long and hulking, dominating the market place. Nick and Victorina got in rapid banter, her beautiful teeth flashed as she laughed—no question this Nick character knew how hit on a pretty woman. Nightminster was not troubled. Victorina might enjoy the entertainment of such men, while knowing perfectly well they were vacuous cowards.

Nick exchanged a few words with the gate guards of ZEEBRI. There were no other formalities. A couple of minutes later the three of them were dismounting the bike. Nick did not miss the opportunity to assist Victorina from the sidecar before launching into some kind of ridiculous frivolity that involved tickling the palm of her hand while he guessed things about her that quickly tended towards the saucy.

“Take us to President Smith,” Nightminster snapped, looming over Nick like an angry hawk and getting a sullen glance in return.

“You’ll have to pass over any weapons.”

“Why?”

“No guns inside ZEEBRI. No exceptions.”

“What about you?”

“I’m a frontier guard, guns go with the job.”

Nightminster handed over his Beretta but kept the Makarov in the ankle holster. Nothing, not even the threat of execution, would persuade him to part with that. If Nick frisked him down that was Nick’s tough luck, in fact, it would be very tough luck all around. Fortunately, Nick must have had great faith in the shadow cast by capital punishment, as he carried out no search. He led them from the garage up into the factory, passing bays roaring with lathes and the snarls of grinding wheels, cascades of sparks and booms of hammers. For Victorina, this was the introduction to an alien world. She stared into bays swarming with workers carrying, pulling, whacking, sawing.

“This is unbelievable! It’s so noisy!” she shouted.

“Steel is tough stuff, working it makes a lot of noise.”

“Are there any women in here?”

“Plenty, but not in vehicle repair. The directors will probably give you a tour once they know who you are.”

“Who is she?” Nick asked, swinging around.

“She’s way above your pay grade, pal.”

Nick gave him another of his sullen looks.

“We can make our own way from here,” Nightminster added.

“I’m stuck on you like glue, Nightminster, and don’t you forget it.”

“Then please, do lead on.”

They arrived at the entrance to the Official SUN Party HQ.

“Et voila, the HQ of the Official SUN Party.”

“Oh! It’s like a town in its own right!”

She was right. It was like a town in its own right. Nightminster was appalled at how the Official SUN Party had developed since his last visit in mid-November, when he suffered the grim experience with the ZEEBRI detectives. Now a cram of structures spread over the entire production bay. It was a place with its own avenues and cross-lanes, its own traffic bustling, including barrows full of documents or laden with filing cabinets or heavy canvas bags that he suspected contained coinage. The buildings were long wooden sheds, superficially like barracks, but in detail quite different. They were finished to high quality with close-fitting teak planks caulked tight just like the deck of a ship. The windows were plastic-framed double grazing of high standard even for Public Era heirlooms. From inside the light of cine films flickered. Nightminster supposed this was the Official SUN Party’s conditioning centre, no different from the Krossington Institute.

A young woman in a black suit and trousers—tight trousers, Nightminster noticed—approached them with a business-like mincing. Her black hair was tied tightly back into a bun and her face was set to a poise of authority she could not quite carry off. She looked Victorina up and down with distaste, probably disapproving of her freely-cascading red locks.

“Can I help you?”

“We’re here to see President Smith.”

“He hasn’t any appointments today.”

“Big Knight Nightminster wishes to speak with him. He knows me well.”

The mention of his name caused a subtle hardening of her face. She knew of him too.

“And your colleague’s name?” She asked of Victorina as if she were a grotty little dog.

“You don’t need to know,” he said, not looking down. “Would you kindly send a messenger? This is an important matter.”

She told them to wait in the corridor while she ‘sought higher authority’. They waited. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. There was not much to talk about and plenty of reasons to be fearful. Nightminster was only too aware that they were trapped in this concrete fortress. Alone, he could have bolted down the corridor and made a break through the refinery to the abandonments. There was no chance of that with Victorina. He had already discovered she was no athlete. His grim speculations were interrupted by the arrival of a familiar figure. This was a tall and slim, clean-cut young man of Asian ancestry wearing the stock Party black suit and tie, the red fist exactly in the centre of the knot. A distinct ladder scar on one cheek fixed him as the young man Nightminster had met on his previous visit to party HQ.

“Hi Big Knight, good to see you again. Seb’s working at home today, so I’ll have to take you into Sidetown.” He shook hands with all three of them, giving Victorina a gentlemanly bow. “I’m Raj by the way.”

“What’s Sidetown?”

Nightminster had not reckoned on their being taken from the shelter of ZEEBRI.

“It’s where we all come from.”

“Can’t he come here?”

“Get real! He’s the Pres.”

Raj led them out to the back of ZEEBRI, where the late-afternoon sun blazed through the smoke and towers of the turpentine refinery. Nightminster chewed his nerves, thinking percentages. He would just have to ride this one out, same as some damned-fool canoeist caught by rapids. If he got frisked down, he would have to trust in his blag and Victorina’s company to save him. They followed Raj along a brick-paved way flanked by circular tanks like enormous warts and steaming bundles of pipes. A heady stench of pine sap and wafts of sour mash from the ethanol distillery accompanied them to the far end of the ZEEBRI complex, which they left by an arched brick gate straight into a cram of houses. Nightminster felt tipped back five centuries into the Elizabethan London of history books. True, sewage did not run down the lanes, nor did anyone hail ‘gardez-loo!’, in fact he was positively impressed by the clean smells of fresh bread, starch and creosote. He walked past open windows and looked straight in at women scrubbing tables or winding mangles or throwing their weight on dough. The houses were mostly wooden, constructed from a mix of railway sleepers and pine beams doubtless gleaned from the rafters of suburban dwellings of the Public Era, which had long since been razed in this area. The paving of bricks would be from the same source. The place was civilized, well organised and proud. The question was, did Smith and his louts so dominate life here that they could get away with murder?

Tears were trickling down Victorina’s cheeks.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just saw a paralysed child pulling itself about on a kind of wheeled cradle. It must have had polio.”

“It could have been a drunken father, or a difficult birth.”

“You’re so unbelievably detached.”

“Bermondsey is no different from here. This is normal, daily life.”

“How much do you actually care about people? Are they any more than ants in your vast dreams of atomic resurrection?”

“Only great machines will liberate the people.”

“An atomic messiah!”

“Give it a rest, will you?”

Within a score of paces, he realised he was alone and called ahead to Raj. Victorina was kneeling by an older man sitting in the doorway of a particularly tall structure made of four heirloom shipping containers stacked up and painted red lead. Behind her, a couple of children were peeling the paint and eating it, a common cause of lead poisoning. The problem was, the paint tasted sweet.

“Rina!” he called. She ignored him. He walked back. She was studying an ulcer on the man’s ruddy face, just below the left eye. Before attending to her, he pulled the two kids away from the container and told them to scram, which they did. He knew they would be back the moment the adults left. He turned and laid a hand on Victorina’s shoulder.

“That’s a squamous cell cancer,” she murmured.

“Can you cure him in the next five minutes?”

“There’s a lifetime’s work just to bring this place up to a minimal level of civilization. In the last three minutes I’ve seen a goitre, a prolapsed ocular cancer the size of a golf ball, a middle-aged man blinded by cataracts and a child with a cleft lip like a… like a keyhole is the only way I can describe it.”

“As you say, it will take a lifetime,” he said softly. He slipped his arms around her and hugged her, and she hugged him. “We both understand our lifetime’s work. I build the great machines that create the wealth for your healing. That will be our life.”

“Are you two love birds coming, or not?” Raj groused.

They started to walk again, side by side, arm-in-arm.

“Hey Prez, he’s here!” Raj called up at a sturdily-build house with a respectable claim to be in the half-timbered Tudor style. It was larger than typical, with a long wooden balcony along the first floor.

“Coming!” called Sebastian Smith’s voice from that first floor. Apparently he abandoned presidential formalities here in his home place of Sidetown. This area must be infested with his ‘friends’, those he had grown up with and knew everything about, trusting them with his life even if he agreed with them about nothing. This was the true heart of the Official SUN Party. This was where Victorina and Nightminster could vanish into mystery. Not a soul in the outside world knew they were here.

Sebastian Smith strode from the front door.

The impact of being confronted with Victorina literally knocked him to a dead stop. His eyes expanded with horror until the whites were visible all the way around. Nightminster heard a peculiar tapping coming out of him, and realised Smith’s teeth were chattering. Nightminster swung slowly to look down at Victorina.

She presented a polite, open expression, offering her hand.

“Hello, Mr Smith. My name is Victorina Krossington. I’ve come here from Oxford so that we can discuss how we can work together.”

Smith’s eyes rolled towards Nightminster, and they radiated a tremendous force of hatred, but also, in that moment, a decision took place behind those eyes, and Nightminster knew he had lost his gamble. Incredibly, Victorina did not recognise King-Tough of Parliament Square. Those terrifying minutes must only linger as a kind of blur of confusion in her memory. This new King-Tough was neatly crew-cut and clean shaven, he wore a smart black party suit and the gimmick fist on the knot of the tie, he smelled of Eau de Cologne, his shoes shone like onyx. Even if she might have been aware of some resemblance, Smith now looked too respectable to be what he was.

Smith’s hand shot out. He seized hers, bowed and kissed it.

“That’s how I meet any lady, just to be clear,” he said. “Here we don’t recognise no decencies this or that. Everyone’s on the level in the same boat. But it’s wonderful to meet you at last and I think that you and I can do business getting your vaccination programs under way. You’ll need lots of admin support and local folk who know where people live, cuz nobody has no addresses in the asylums. But we’ll handle all that, so you don’t have to worry about nothing.”

The only indication of his shock was that he spoke a little faster than normal, although Victorina would not notice this. Smith already had control of the situation. He was ushering her inside his house to meet his mum and sister, apologising not to have laid on something special. Nick, Raj and Nightminster followed them in. He was utterly deflated, so disconsolate at the failure of what had seemed a dead certain bet that to begin with he made no effort to contribute.

He noted the house was a decent one for the area, constructed of a framework of steel beams gleaned from some commercial unit on which the mock-Elizabethan exterior had been hung. A big kitchen/dining lounge filled all of the ground floor. Nightminster reached down and was intrigued to find his suspicions confirmed, the polished limestone flags were heated from beneath Roman-style. On the wall behind the dining table was a rack of weaponry, Mark III Lee Enfield rifles, Mauser rifles, an M1 Garand, several unusual submachine guns with plastic bodies that would date from late in the Public Era. These were desirable heirlooms not normally seen in the asylums, all completely in the open and for the taking, yet not taken. They established the Smith family as one of high status. Beneath the weaponry stood a well-stocked bookcase of heirloom classics. This was clearly a literary family. And the top of the bookcase jostled with trophies and shields, all polished, brass, silver and copper. This was a family of achievers too! In which, Sebastian was by no means the rascal of the brood. ZEEBRI Best Electrical Apprentice 2057, Junior Shooting Champion of General Wardian 2055, 2056, 2057 and 2058 and Senior Shooting Champion 2059. Golden Cub 2054 and Golden Scout 2056 completed his collection.

“Jealousy will get you nowhere,” Smith said, interrupting his family history to Victorina on catching Nightminster’s inspection.

“I have a similar load myself, except I was joint best apprentice in Mechanical and Electrical disciplines at Chaddertons’,” he said, wondering, as he was speaking, if it was wise to tell them so much about himself. It could be argued both ways. If he was the shooter of Parliament Square, would he be so candid? Would he be here at all? He added: “However, I am a perfectionist, not a competitor.”

Smith was plainly intrigued by this response. Although he continued his family history to Victorina, his eyes kept drifting to Nightminster, like a connoisseur who cannot stop returning to a particular painting. Nightminster kept his trap shut while Smith yarned about his family and made a pot of tea. The house belonged to his parents. His granddad had built it in the early 2040s from heirloom steel awarded him by ZEEBRI, where Grandad was an early and distinguished employee. He had worked alongside Harry Ignatovitch to create the metal-stamping shop, travelling around the Midlands to salvage—and in some cases fight for—stamping machines that had once made bits for cars, dishwashers, toasters and so forth in the Public Era. The machines were old and obsolete even then, as they had been rendered surplus by the plastic-moulding industry. After the Glorious Resolution, they became more precious than gold. They were vital to make Shpagin submachine guns and MG42 machine guns to replace heirloom small arms, which wore out or got vacuumed into the vast armouries of the sovereign caste. This close relationship with the owners of ZEEBRI would explain the status manifested by the weaponry hanging openly on the wall. ZEEBRI’s patronage of Sebastian Smith could be no fragile expedience.

Victorina told them something of herself and the Krossington clan. Behind the absurd veils of glamour, the Krossingtons were just an ordinary family with as much love, rancour, spite and discord as any other. They happened to get thrown high by the catastrophe of the Glorious Resolution. She wanted the caste system to dissolve. Her ambitions to lead vaccination programs across the asylums would begin the remixing of the castes. Nightminster winced at her efforts to present her family as ‘regular’, and could see he was not alone. The very air stiffened. Besides Smith, Nick and Raj, at least a dozen big toughs in their black suits had accumulated in the kitchen, drawn in by bush telegraph. Victorina displayed not a trace of alarm at the subtle tightening of their mouths, the settling of their eyelids. They could massacre their impudent guests and no one in this shuttered society would leak a word. The motorcycle combination would vanish from ZEEBRI and that would be that.

“I want to share something major,” Victorina said.

“Sure,” Seb Smith said. “I’m all ears.”

“The SUN Party council are planning to hold a national party conference at Oxford on May Day. I’m really looking forward to bringing the party together from all over the Island of Britain so that we can bury our squabbles and unify behind a common purpose.”

Nightminster did not openly roll his eyes at this naiveté. Smith did not burst out laughing, although his eyes laughed loudly enough, nor did his henchmen openly snigger. Instead, they left Smith to reply for them. Nightminster decided he had to intervene.

“Mr President,” he said, at exactly the moment Smith opened his mouth to commence some articulation of dissimulation.

“What?” Smith asked sharply, frowning at him.

“The afternoon is ending. I have to return Victorina to Wilson House before dark.” What he said next seemed a good idea at the time. He had to get Victorina out of this trap deep in Sidetown. His proposal was natural enough in what was supposed to look like a goodwill mission. “Can I suggest we use the last of the afternoon to get this occasion on film? At a location offering a splendid backdrop?”

“Grand idea, Big Knight! Grand idea! Billy, could you nip out and get that lovely Nikon of yours—didn’t you say you’ve loaded colour film?”

“Nope,” Billy said. “There’s no difference in the films, it’s the development that’s different.”

Billy seemed an unlikely artist. Nightminster would have given him a shovel to dig a canal. He was built like a bull.

“All right, all right, I never claimed to be no chemist.” Smith ducked to peer outside. “I’m seeing the shadows running almost flat, so make those heels fly, Billy, or we’ll miss the light.”

Billy departed at a run, leaving a pensive silence. Nightminster stood up, moving slowly down the dining table, rattling his fingers off it, and passed outside, where he stood in the street with his hands on his hips, appearing to appraise the surroundings. This must be the locale where many families mourned their dead after the Bermondsey attack. He had caused most of those dead with the machine guns of Victorina’s armoured car. He wondered if Smith was aware of the Krossington’s involvement in that disaster. He wondered if that disaster would stop the attacks for good, or just make them more dangerous.

“There’s a concrete flyover fifty yards off where we could get the shots,” he said, returning inside with a panting Billy. The Public Era Nikon camera looked like a packet of cigarettes in his hands. Smith was already getting to his feet.

“That’s exactly the spot I had in mind, Big Knight my man, now let’s all hoof it and break smiles for the shutter.”

The file of more than twenty hurried along a weaving lane to a set of concrete steps climbing to an elevated highway. Billy set Victorina between President Smith and Nightminster and shot them smiling into the afternoon sun of mid-winter against ZEEBRI and its reaction towers and chimneys shining burned orange. Afterwards, Smith was almost bubbling happy and waved his visitors on their way. Nick took them back to the ZEEBRI garage and dismounted the combination as it departed the frontier of Brent Cross. Nightminster drove back towards London by the Roman road, smouldering at having put Victorina in such danger for nothing. Today, he had fucked up badly, but at least Victorina was safe. That was all that mattered. He began to perk up as they came into London with a few high chimneys still gleaming in the sun and the darkness rising to extinguish them.

There was the night! It was time to introduce his future wife to her new life at Limehouse basin.

Chapter 12

“Three weeks ago, my house looked like that.”

Nightminster pointed at the neighbouring ruin, half in and half out of the clutches of wild bushland and half in and half out of the wan orange glow from the street lanterns. “That’s the edge of the civilized world.”

“Is it? Really?” Victorina clutched his arm.

“At this moment beasts of unspeakable horror are peering from the depths of those shadows.”

Now Victorina giggled and gave his chest a light slap.

“Does anything live out that way?”

“It’s just like the Fens of the north, a wilderness of tidal creeks and marshes for miles a.k.a. Romford Great Marsh. You must know it more than I do, as you must have flown over it countless times in clan flying boats.”

“I have, but it all looks the same from high up, just endless green with a few whisps of smoke.”

“It’s infested with illiterate throwbacks returned to Nature, although they keep well clear of Limehouse.”

“Is that how you get a house in the asylums, take over a ruin?”

“Houses only get sold when a family comes to an end, which is not frequent, so… But I wanted to start from scratch. All I had to do was register the plot with the Owner of Limehouse and the street committee. I have to stand two shifts of guard duty every week. If I can’t make it, I have to pay 11 pennyweights for every shift I miss.”

“What a palaver! This place is like the Public Era, having to register here and pay fines there. Grandad Wilson is forever saying you couldn’t do anything back then without having to ask permission from some useless busybody. But how did you build it so quickly?”

“Everyone in the street mucks in to help, and Night and Fog gangs are cheap as chips for the heavy stuff. Of course, it works both ways. I have to help out the neighbours when they need it. We’re not family, but good friends.”

“They seem to be very inquisitive.” She was looking back up the street towards the centre of Limehouse. Nightminster was startled to see the street had come alive in the few minutes since they had rumbled along it in the combination. The noise must have attracted enough attention to set off a chain reaction. Streams of people poured through the patches cast by the camphine lanterns, more flowed out of the gates of the clan compounds that lined both sides. A tide was washing up towards the couple standing arm-in-arm beside the combination. Nightminster began to recognise individuals, heads of family, their sibling assistants, up-and-coming offspring still jostling for status, and a larger mob of the young down to kids hugging their parents’ shins. They all gathered about the combination and the couple, maintaining a little distance, quite different in their attitudes. The older folk displayed satisfaction their estimate of Nightminster had proved true. Younger men stared in frank admiration at gorgeous Victorina. The young women who had swarmed Nightminster glared like outraged cats.

“Good evening,” Nightminster said. “Allow me to present Victorina.”

One by one, each head of family stepped forward and kissed Victorina’s hand, or if they were women, embraced and kissed her cheek. Nightminster had not previously been aware of a distinct hierarchy amongst the clans of the street, which was being revealed by the sequence in which their heads came forward. That was how it worked here. Everyone knew their place. Nobody could lead a private life here.

“I’m so overjoyed by such a lovely welcome!” Victorina gushed. “What fantastic people you are!”

“You’re from Portsmouth?” one head of clan asked.

“Just a little north of there.”

“On sovereign land?”

Nightminster did not like the direction of this curiosity.

“Victorina is from a farm on the slopes behind Portsmouth.” He knew from his travels of the summer such farms existed below the frontier of the Lands of Krossington, which ran along the ridge of hills overlooking Portsmouth. “We met when I was stationed there last summer.” He hesitated, wondering if they were expecting some grand celebration. Was he required to host a street banquet? In January? Fortunately the heads of family were turning away and shooing their clans back home. As one of them said:

“They’ll want peace for themselves.”

Victorina remained silent as the crowd flowed off the street and quietude returned.

“God in heaven,” she said finally, “I’d no idea how alike people are. That was exactly like a newly-betrothed couple being presented at our Land Council. Except these people are genuine, my people are utter hypocrites.”

The significance of what she had just said was not lost on Nightminster.

“Come on, I’ll show you inside.”

The interior was still a little bare. In truth, the place was vast for a single man. The block had originally contained six two-bedroomed flats. Now the ground floor offered a large kitchen and store room, and a self-contained flat with its own entrance where his parents would live. The first floor was divided into a spacious lounge and bathroom (furnished with the cast-iron suite). The top floor offered four bedrooms. There was a cast-iron range in the kitchen, which also heated water for the wool-clad barrel feeding the bath and the central-heating system. 24-volt electricity came from batteries in a shed out the back charged by the street’s communal generator operated from 4 pm to 8 pm each day except Sundays. The double-glazing units and insulated walls and roof kept the house cosy.

Victorina was most drawn by the ornate cast-iron kitchen range with its lion’s-paw feet.

“How old is it?”

“It dates from the 1920s. They aren’t very fashionable at the moment, so I got it cheap at the Kensington auctions.”

Victorina admired the rustic look of the bare beams overhead, the gloss black water pipes running up white-washed plaster wall through the ceiling, and the scrubbed hardwood floorboards caulked and sealed with tar like a ship’s deck to keep out drafts.

“You’re not one for fanciness, are you?” she said, eyeing the long table and chairs, plain as a farmhouse, and the slate shelves resting on blocks of raw spruce.

“Dazzling others doesn’t pay the bills.”

She pressed against him, eager to go upstairs. He led her up spiral steps to the lounge. This was where he had concentrated most of the effort to make a homely place. The floor was laid with a Persian rug, the walls hung with decent Impressionist prints, the sofas and chairs arranged for watching old films on a screen hung on the gable wall.

“We commoners have to make do with 16mm copies of Public Era films. The quality’s a bit iffy, but sink a few champagnes and it all looks the same. Have you seen Dr Zhivago?”

“Oh! It’s one of my favourites, so beautiful and sad. You’ve got a gramophone player too!”

She flicked through the record collection. Nightminster had won a box of heirloom LPs at the Kensington auctions. He had never heard of most of the artists. Victorina snatched out an album.

“Brilliant! The Beach Boys! I love dancing to them.” She put it back and pressed against him firmly, to the point he had to take a step to brace himself. He smiled and put his arms around her.

“Let’s see the bed!” she whispered.

*

“What are you thinking?”

Victorina shifted beside him, squirming to roll over and lay her cheek on his shoulder, hair draped across his mouth. It smelled of the lime oil she sprayed onto her hair after bathing.

“It was a silly fantasy,” she said.

“What was it?”

“I was queen of the good life. Under my reign every home had free drinking water and every district a free school and hospital. And you were lord on your atomic throne, creator of light and power.”

“That’s not a silly fantasy, but it is a life’s work.”

“It’s a silly fantasy until the atomic lord has the gold to build his throne,” she said, giving him a nudge under the chin. “How is the bastard Duke of Normandy going to cross the English Channel and win his Battle of Hastings? Hmmm?”

“At the moment I don’t know how much it would cost to build an atomic plant with the resources of the asylums of London. It’s something I’m looking into at the moment. Once I have a number, I will have a target, and with a target, I can plan, and with a plan, I can achieve.”

This was not the time to tell Victorina about the Value System, for the Value System did not exist except as images in his mind’s eye. They lay silent, listening to each other breathing, swallowing, their hearts beating. For Nightminster, this blissful intimacy came with its own burdens. He could not relax.

*

Victorina commented he was quiet over breakfast next morning.

“We’ll have to go back to Oxford soon,” he said.

“Why don’t we just stay here? They’d never find us in a million years tucked away minding our own business.”

“Is that what you’d like to do?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “And no. It’s a one-way trip. I couldn’t bear never seeing Mum, TK, or Granny and Grandad again, even if Marko the Bastard’s disappearance from my life would not be a tragedy.”

“This nonsense won’t last much longer.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because in a few weeks I shall present Marko a proposal too tempting to refuse, and he will accommodate our lives on our terms.”

“Wow! Tell me more!”

“I’m not ready yet.”

“Big Knight! You’re being coy.”

“It would be tragic to deny you the agonies and ecstasies of anticipation.”

“You and Sebastian Smith are oddly similar. You’ve both risen from nowhere to lay your plans on the world. Do you think you’re going to be allies or enemies?”

This question had plagued Nightminster’s thoughts. He knew the visit to Brent Cross had been a comedy of errors from which the two of them had been damned lucky to escape. The question was, what now? He had shot his bolt and could think of no other way of getting back at Smith.

“What does your female intuition suggest?”

“You two don’t like each other.”

“I doubt our ways will intersect again.”

“He might be the president of London when you’re the atomic lord!”

This chat was needling a mind storming hot and cold with a question that lurked in and out of his mouth. He had to ask it before she disappeared behind the shutters of Krossington privacy. He was far less confident than he appeared about Marko becoming a champion of the Value System. It might be months before they met again. He tried to force the words out but the effort simply exhausted him. He failed. His head drooped in self-disgust. Suddenly he looked up and blurted:

“Will you marry me?”

She collapsed forward laughing on the table. She grabbed his head in both hands and kissed him.

“Of course! Of course! Nothing will keep us apart. They can throw the Himalayas between us and we’ll meet at the pass.” When she settled back down, she shook her head in wonder. “I never wanted to go to that New Year’s party. Marko told me I had to do my duty to the clan or we wouldn’t get the planetarium projector back. But I could hardly face an evening with a glory thug. I’ve heard simply appalling tales about atrocities against so-called infestations committed by glory troops on our lands. They can’t all be made up. What was more, Marko admired you, and that condemned you absolutely in my eyes. But when you made a fool of that ultramarine at the checkpoint, I realised there was more to you than some trigger-happy gun for hire. That party was the greatest night of my life. A complete revelation of how little I knew about the world.”

Nightminster was aware of very little of the rest of their time together. They kissed and kissed shamelessly before Lieutenant Telford and Sergeant Ogilvy until finally TK appeared and, in a dry voice, told Little Sis to behave less like a love-stricken teenager and more like a lady of the prime clan.

And so, they had to part.

Chapter 13

Some days later, after dreary and eye-watering safaris in the corporate library of General Wardian hunting the shyest facts, Nightminster dropped in for dinner with his parents. He brought a hamper of roast chicken and vegetables and a couple of bottles of champagne obtained not cheaply from a French delicatessen in Kensington. This was, after all, a time for celebration, even if his parents would never know the real reason for the indulgence. His parents baulked and groaned at his extravagance.

“You shouldn’t be spending like this!” Mother wailed.

“I have become a man of substance. I assured you that getting thrown out of Oxford had liberated me to pursue my highest ambitions in the world of commerce, and time has proved me right.”

In other words, fake it ‘til you make it.

He backed this up by announcing his new status as a householder of Limehouse. They were all over him like happy children in their joy. He invited them to stay over the weekend. There was lots of room and his place was far drier and warmer than this flat. They were both in their early sixties. Mother limped from an arthritic hip and Father coughed and wheezed from decades exposed to dusts in a refurbishing shop for electric motors. They no longer had to work. He had the wealth to care for them.

“And is there a young lady of the house?” Mother enquired.

“A marvellous young lady, but there are complications. She’s a Krossington.”

“Oh my goodness, you have done well!” Mother gasped. “Is this the young lady you took to the New Year’s party?”

“The very same.”

“Several of Johnny’s boys—and girls—have told us she was the talk of the evening, so beautiful and gracious, not at all what they expected a sovereign to be.”

“She’s wonderful. Her family are simply awful. But you know me, I always find a way to get what I want.”

“Bring her to see us! We’re dying to meet her.”

“Has anyone been asking for me?”

“There’s a couple of messages for you,” Father said. “This one arrived from Chadderton’s mail room yesterday. And one of the Owner’s thugs handed this in today.”

Nightminster started with the Chadderton arrival, which intrigued him more due to its thickness. He sliced the pack open with his pocket knife to find a note from Account-Captain Roberts and two booklets. Roberts had fast-tracked Nightminster’s reinstatement as a full sergeant, having had the dishonourable discharge unconditionally revoked. Enclosed were his new pay and ID booklets, issued using the last photo in his personnel file. He must sign both. At the earliest opportunity, he was to report to the Central Office of the Quartermaster at General Wardian HQ, Northumberland Avenue, Westminster to collect his full issue of kit. He laughed. More uniforms! More guns!

The other message was from Johnny Albert. It hacked his levity to solemnity.

“What’s wrong?” Mother asked.

“A friend has died. His funeral is tomorrow. Johnny Albert’s secretary Lieutenant Hassan sent me an invitation. How thoughtful!”

On reflection, he doubted it was as thoughtful as all that. Ultramarine funerals were normally low-key, and this one would be exceedingly low-key as Johnny Albert would not want any publicity for troopers killed by the booby-traps of New Year. Thrasher Brooks had become the sixth fatality. After days on the road back to full health, he had succumbed to sepsis.

“Poor old mate,” Nightminster said softly. This brought the vicious determination of a certain dangerous, clever mind awfully close to home. He suspected the true reason for the invite was not thoughtfulness, but something more pragmatic. That was appropriate. Nightminster had pragmatic reasons to see Johnny Albert, for his safaris into the General Wardian corporate library had yielded fine trophies.

*

Thrasher Brooks’ funeral took place in a chapel on the ground floor at the NHS end of Johnny Albert’s palace. Nightminster thought it a spartan place, without benches or chairs, without windows, only an oak bier, a dais for the priest and a silver cross on a marble plinth. He stood against the back wall, conscious of being peripheral compared to the Brooks family’s grief and Thrasher’s old motorbiking mates. Billy Nieuport and Veitch Thomas arrived and also stood at the back without even noticing Nightminster’s presence, at any rate not to begin with. Nightminster could not imagine why they had turned up. They were not family, nor were they adventurous types who roamed the highways on motorbikes.

Thrasher Brooks’ lieutenant read a eulogy, Johnny Albert read another, the elder brother read the last. During the reading by the priest from the Gospel of St John, Nightminster grew aware that Nieuport and Veitch were staring at him, but instantly looked to the front when he glanced back. He thought they looked pale and scared, like hunted rabbits. After the service, they scampered off before Nightminster or anyone else had a chance to talk to them.

“Follow me,” Johnny Albert murmured in passing out. In the waiting lounge of the NHS, the Owner spent time in gentle conversation with the family. For him, it must be excruciating to have to face the family of a trooper killed under his orders. He looked pale and strained by the time he approached Nightminster.

“How glad I am that’s over. In the last two months, I’ve buried eight men, and I don’t like it one bit. Before that, I hardly buried a single trooper in a whole year going back to the forties, and more often than not it was some traffic accident.”

He led Nightminster in silence down steps and along tunnels to his garage of beloved Jaguar motor cars. This was where he went to think. He chose one of the larger models, dark green with red interior. To Nightminster it still looked like a cunning beetle about to strike. There was at least plenty of room inside, and a beautiful sweet smell of leather upholstery.

“That little shit Smith is getting on my wick,” Johnny Albert said.

“He’s gaining in the asylums, according to sources I have reason to trust.”

“I’ll tell you something I won’t admit to my own wife: I don’t know what to do about him.”

“I’ve been inside his house.”

“You’ve what?”

“It’s true.” He told Johnny Albert all about taking Victorina to Brent Cross in the hope of denouncing President Sebastian Smith as a snatcher and rapist, only to be thwarted by her amnesia of terror. He made clear that the relationship between the Smith family and the owners of ZEEBRI was of long standing.

“You’re a proper trooper, Big Knight, you really are. The things you get away with simply amaze me.”

“It’s self-preservation. I expect you know this already, or at least have guessed, that character Jumping Jackson I shot at the Parliament Square riot was Smith’s best mate. He’s got ZEEBRI detectives out and about town asking and asking. Sooner or later, they’re going to get a break.”

“It’s a dicey situation we face, you and I. That Smith is after sweeping us ultramarines from London. He sends out his attack gangs to prove we’re useless then he turns up on his truck the next day to denounce violence and promise everyone he’ll lead them back to the Public Era. The dumbest chump can see his plan. He makes it obvious, but nothing can be proved. That’s what frightens me. He’s an enemy we ultras can’t openly attack because he’s got too much support from ZEEBRI and other fools. Even Chadderton is signed up. I can’t believe a guy as smart as David Chadderton can be taken in by such a brazen opportunist.”

“He despises the sovereigns. All the factory owners do. It’s just possible that derision has blinded them.”

“Have you got any bright ideas?”

“I can report gigantic leaps of progress towards the Value System.”

“Your Value System can’t stop Smith.”

“I fancy it might bring his end a bit closer.”

“The last time we spoke you were going to delve in General Wardian’s corporate library for records of Wilson Krossington’s business in the Fens. Did you get anywhere?”

“Yes. But only by the most outlandish luck. The archive of Public Era newspapers and magazines is a disaster area. I was absolutely baffled until one of the librarians explained how it came about. During the Glorious Resolution, everyone was so busy trying to stay alive they hadn’t a thought to spare for such grand schemes as preserving the heritage of knowledge.”

“That librarian is correct. The Glorious Resolution was more than thirty years ago and personally, I still haven’t a thought to spare for such grand schemes.”

“In the last few days, I’ve learned a great deal about the early history of the glory trusts. I never knew General Wardian was founded by an ex-British Army officer as a private company that hired out mercenaries. These companies were known as private military contractors. The Dominion of Libertaria was General Wardian’s first customer.”

“Now you come to mention it, I do recall some aggro in the old democratic Parliament and the law courts about all this. I was at college at the time and didn’t pay a lot of attention.”

“General Wardian surged during the Glorious Resolution. You could say it was boom time for glory trusts. It’s odd to think that complete mayhem was actually good business for some.”

“Complete mayhem is returning, courtesy of Mr Smith.”

“There’s a deep-rooted instinct in every bureaucrat that knowledge is power. That’s why the glory trusts snapped up every library in the regions they occupied, including archives of the nation state.”

“Very interesting social history for some, Big Knight, but maybe more for your academic pals at Oxford than for a practical man like me.”

“What I’m taking my own sweet time to say is that General Wardian was the glory trust of the Dominion of Libertaria, which means local newspaper archives and company records from the Norfolk Fens are held in General Wardian’s library today. The bad news is, it’s a vast mass of detritus on what’s called microfiche, which is microscopic photographs of newspaper pages on a long film you run through a viewer. I can’t tell you how my eyes ached and smarted with weariness after hours and hours of skimming thousands of pages of film. It was dog’s work. But it paid off.”

“What did you find?”

“In the first weeks after the Great Flood of ’35, Wilson K made not just the local but the national newspapers. It was very interesting reading so much from those final years of the Public Era. They seemed to understand they were in trouble with rising sea levels and storms but they hadn’t a clue what was coming.”

“Personally, I think some did—not in the sense they planned the Glorious Resolution, because it was too big to plan. There was a mood going around though, in the last years, that the only way to deal with climate change and all the other problems—especially over- crowding—was some utter disaster that knocked humanity back a century. I have a hunch there were people in high places who could have acted, but they didn’t bother. They weren’t sorry to see the Public Era drop into hell.”

“I can say that Wilson K wasn’t one of those,” Nightminster said. “He really believed in the Public Era. He really believed in his masterpiece, a monster tidal barrage out west in the Severn Estuary. It was going to save Britain. Because he was a civil engineer, he took charge of repairing the sea defences of the Fens after the Great Flood. The trail runs a bit thin after that because the news gets swamped with the declaration of the Dominion of Libertaria. Wilson K pops up now and again furious about the lack of action in repairing the sea defences. Then the local paper stopped printing in September of 2038.”

“Are you having a giraffe, Big Knight? Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“Do you know the Newman barging family of Paddington basin?”

“What if I do?”

“I met Jakub Newman by pure chance on the Grand Union Canal when my bike ran out of juice up north in the Midlands. He told me his Grandad Oliver came from the Norfolk Fens. Oliver hated the chancers that declared the Dominion of Libertaria. He was in the newspapers a lot, constantly denouncing the Dominion’s ruling council. They seem to have been from the same mould as Smith; people were getting murdered all over the Fens but no one could prove anything because the civilian police were in a shambles, split between the old UK and the new Dominion. Eventually Oliver and his family got burned out of their house right in the middle of a village, yet no one saw a thing.”

“So?”

“That’s the end of the trail.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“I never said it was the end of the story. Big Knight does not give up so easily! Jakub told me his grandparents escaped the Fens aboard their restaurant, it was a floating restaurant normally moored in what was then the River Great Ouse south of King’s Lynn. I found its address in an old business almanac, complete with quaint little Public Era post code! So, I did some more snooping and learned the restaurant floated free during the Great Flood and saved hundreds of people before eventually coming to rest high and dry. Some time later it got dragged to the sea and refloated. My hunch is that Wilson K provided the big hauling tractor—there was a picture in the local paper of a bulldozer the size of a house, and lo and behold I spotted the squat form of Wilson K up on the deck of a kind of big barge with Ollie Newman. I also knew Wilson K had a farm in the Fens, because Rina told me at your New Year’s party. There was nothing about it in the business almanac, which I scanned from cover to cover. I thought that possibly the Dominion of Libertaria had pretty lax rules about registration of businesses, seeing as the Dominion’s princelings did not approve of taxation.

“At this point I made one of my wild guesses. The picture of the restaurant getting hauled was taken near the remains of the village of Rumford Parva, which was where the Krossington family came from. Just possibly Wilson K started repairing the sea defences in that area? And just possibly he gave up due to the apathy of the Dominion’s princelings? Leaving some kind of stranded island of heaped-up sand and mud on which he could establish a farm?”

“The Big K was a hydro-electric engineer, not a farmer.”

“Possibly he sensed what was coming and knew land far from the madding crowd would be crucial for survival? I share your suspicion the Glorious Resolution was allowed to happen. Above a certain level in the hierarchy, it must have been openly discussed.”

“Is that all you’ve got, just a suspicion?”

“I’ve started with less.”

“Was this island mentioned in the press?”

“I couldn’t find anything about it. I tried searching nationals and weekly magazines too, but it’s like trying to fish a teacup from the bottom of the Thames. I can only assume this artificial island, if it exists, was never weird enough or funny enough to get reported in the papers. The Public Era mass media were entertainment rather than a serious effort to inform the people. That would explain why such a torrent of information didn’t make the people smarter.”

“And you think this artificial island might still be in use?”

“The sovereigns are up to something in The Wash. All those tales of fast ships must have some basis. Somehow, I’ll have to tempt the Krossingtons to reveal their secret.”

“A secret that might not exist, but if it did exist, would be a very dangerous secret to know.”

“Danger and gold are equivalent, like energy and mass.”

“I’ll bury you in a golden coffin if you keep tempting fate.”

“The boldest measures are the safest.”

“Do me a favour and stay alive Big Knight. You are one trooper I do not want to bury.”

Chapter 14

As a man of multiple addresses, Nightminster had to travel a circuit from his parents’ flat up to Camden, then east out to Limehouse and finally north west out to his digs at Oxford. Almost missing Thrasher Brooks’ funeral had been a sharp reminder about the risks of neglecting his network. So it was that the next morning he caught the morning shuttle bus to Oxford from Trafalgar Square. It was not particularly cheap, as the ultramarine owners each took their cut from their section of the turnpike and provided an escort of an armoured car mounting four Browning 0.303 machine guns in a Perspex turret after the fashion of Second World War bombers. The arrangement was known as a ‘brass-muncher’ and it was becoming more popular both with ultramarines and glory trusts.

At his lodgings with the Jenkins, he found mail waiting for him at its usual place in open view of all the other lodgers on a sideboard in the front ‘hall’, which was really just a length of wide corridor. The envelope was posh-looking, the addressee typed in elegant Univers. On the reverse side lay more type: “If this letter is not collected within one week please return to the School of Economics”. In the privacy of his room, he sliced it open with his Swiss Army knife and read:

Nightminster, come and see me at the School of Economics, immediately. Under no circumstances call at the Krossington Institute.

[signed] Tom Krossington

The letter was dated 25th January, two days previously. Now it was Friday and Nightminster was sceptical much would be going on at the School of Economics or anywhere else in the city centre. Hard-working students of physics and mathematics kept at it right to 5 pm on a Friday, but they made up only a tiny portion of the student body. The bulk of the university was conscientious if it turned up for a morning ‘tutorial’ at which much gossiping and snideness exchanged followed by a leisurely lunch in anticipation of the weekend. The pubs and restaurants were lively as he cycled across the city centre.

He showed his student ID to gain entry to the School of Economics. He had to reflect ruefully on how simple it would have been to reach the Krossingtons during the first term if he had won a place to study economics rather than physics. On the other hand, most probably he would then never have encountered the cannibals and gained the fine jacket he wore, met Father Arthur Richardson and learned of Reaction Radio, or gained an audience with Madam Edkins and 2,000 ounces in gold. Such were the vagaries of chance!

Above the level of lecture theatres existed the peaceful, bland corridors off which faculty staff had their offices. Many an earnest figure frowned over graphs and tables or proof-read some typescript. He arrived at an office unusual because the door was shut. This was the intellectual lair of Dr T. T. Krossington. From within leaked muffled voices. He knocked. The voices ceased. The handle clunked down and the door opened upon TK in a simple white shirt, collar hanging open loose and sleeves rolled up around his mighty forearms.

“Nightminster! I was starting to give up on you. Why don’t you maintain better contact?”

Beyond him, sitting at a circular table, Nightminster observed Dr Vasco Banner in a scruffy brown suit and squint tie. This was the knight the Oxford SUN Party offered to battle Sebastian Smith; a skinny intellectual who gave Nightminster’s jacket more attention than the individual within before returning his attention to scribbling notes in the margins of a text of some sort.

“I’ll come back later.”

TK cleared his throat and with an awkward, apologetic lowering of his head turned back to Banner.

“Would you mind if young Nightminster and I had five minutes?”

“Of course not,” Banner said. He slipped out quick and meek like a goat scampering from a pen. Nightminster thought this unpromising behaviour in one with aspirations to lead the Island of Britain to the New Jerusalem of affluence.

“Take a seat.”

TK shut the door and paced slowly to his desk, lifted open his black leather briefcase and selected a folded sheet of good-quality A3. It was printed in colour. Nightminster assumed he was about to be presented with a Public Era poster of some sort. This did not in any obvious way explain TK’s grumpy head of self-righteousness. He took the sheet and opened it.

President Sebastian Smith, Her Decency Victorina Krossington and Sergeant Prentice Nightminster of General Wardian glory trust gazed with idealistic rapture into a blazing future against the spectacular backdrop of concrete ZEEBRI and its refinery towers bathed orange by the setting sun. The artistic brilliance of the photograph and the care with which it had been enlarged and printed captured his concentration for several seconds before the implications started to flood about him. The photograph was the star image of a special bulletin of the Official SUN Party of Brent Cross.

“What do you make of that?” TK asked.

“It’s very well printed.”

“It’s a propaganda coup of exceptional brilliance for Smith and his Brent Cross brigade. You can read the text later, it’s not germane to what you and I have to discuss.”

Nightminster folded the bulletin and slid it inside his cannibals’ jacket. TK remained standing, pacing out a slow oval as he spoke.

“In addition to littering every asylum around London, that bulletin flitted across the society of our home lands with all the titillated glee of children sharing naughty pictures. Marko has recalled Rina to confinement at Castle Krossington and declared you incommunicado. That means no citizen of the Lands of Krossington can communicate with you, theoretically including me. He’s also declared you excommunicado, which invites clan members, friends, and those who want to become friends, to deliver your corpse to the Land Council.”

Nightminster experienced a heightening of awareness. There was a faint crepitation from the radiator caused by the stoker shovelling coal into the furnace far away in the boiler house. His rage waxed and wilted, at himself and at the world. He had asked for that photograph to be taken. He could, he should, have foreseen how a wily operator like Smith would exploit the opportunity. The truth was, Smith had won that day hands-down. That Nightminster had remained oblivious of the bulletin until now, days after the fact, only ground the point home – he had made an ass of himself.

TK was certainly wrong to claim the bulletins had ‘littered’ the asylums. No one littered asylums, least of all with radical tracts, or else they got thwacked by the nearest ultra trooper. More likely the bulletin had been passed hand-to-hand around local party networks, during days in which Nightminster was deep in the corporate library of General Wardian from 9 am to 9pm. In short, he had some excuses for missing this disaster, but none worth mentioning.

“Your brother has put a price on my head?”

“No. Excommunicado offers no reward beyond the gratitude of our society, although that means more than anything else in the world to some people.”

“Could I be killed here in Oxford?”

“Not likely. That would be washing clan laundry in public. That’s not the way our people work.”

Nightminster did not bother to compare this pompous nonsense to the Spanish Inquisition.

“So what should I do about it? Beyond what I intend to do about it, which is to treat it with the silent contempt it deserves.”

“In theory you could appear before the clan to redeem yourself, but you’ve nothing to offer us, I mean, nothing that would interest our Land Council.”

“I established relations between your party and Sebastian Smith. Now you turn around and treat me like a pariah!”

“It’s nothing personal. I was truly staggered you got Rina into an audience with this Smith character. Rina told me Smith knows you. How is that?”

“By quirk of fate. Smith has taken over an ex-girlfriend of mine.”

“Is that really such a quirk?”

“I don’t think sarcasm is appropriate—two lives have been destroyed by the despotism of your brother.”

“You left him no choice! Once that photo went public, Rina had to be shunned.”

“I fail to see why. There’s nothing in that photograph that shows anything she wasn’t doing last month, or three months ago.” He drew out the bulletin and skim-read the text. “She’s going to work with the Official SUN Party to spread the benefits of vaccination across the asylums. That’s what she was doing last summer.”

“If you weren’t in that photo, she’d have got away with it, in fact, some progressives would have praised her. But Sergeant Prentice Nightminster is in the photo, and that set off certain whispers, which added to spicy rumours circulating since New Year, as rumours will, despite every precaution. Marko blew his top when he saw she’d defied his ban on seeing you. I took responsibility to save her from another thrashing.”

“It’s as well you did. I was not joking when I said I’d kill Marko if he hit Victorina again.”

“Do not make threats against members of the clan.”

“He thrashed you instead?”

“No, but we had a hell of a row. I told him he’s behaving like a bloody fool, that we can’t treat you like any old slummy. I think he recognises it’s wrong, but he’s acutely conscious of the standing of the family before Land Council. Rina’s carrying on with a slummy is bad enough, her enjoying a fling with the slummy who—many believe—caused the expulsion of Charles Krossington-Darcy from Oxford University is verging on high treason in some eyes. You just don’t grasp the pettiness and spitefulness of those born to wealth. Deep down, they know they don’t deserve it. That’s what makes them such a capricious lot.”

Nightminster started to feel an easing of the raw shock that had overwhelmed him on first sight of the bulletin. There were ways out of this mess, tricky though it was.

“You said I had nothing that would interest your Land Council. But you have no idea what I can offer, so you’re not in a position to judge.”

“If you come onto Krossington land—and that includes the Krossington Institute—you could be quite legitimately shot dead on the spot. At the very least, our marines would arrest you and take you back for trial—after a manner of speaking—by the Land Council. They’d scream ‘death!’ just for the fun of a good hanging. Boredom is the other great vice of our society.”

“Don’t I get the right to reply?”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Apparently my crime is being unfit to love Victorina. But in reality I am superior to your fellow stock and at least the equal of Marko and you.”

“This is about snobbery, not reality. You must understand that personally, I hold you in the highest respect and intend to keep you as my student. You’re an excellent agent. But as I’ve said before, I’m not your problem. Even Marko isn’t your problem. It’s the bickering, sniping cathouse of the home lands that’s the problem.”

“Then I shall stay out of sight of the cathouse.”

“That’s what you were supposed to be doing! You weren’t supposed to get broadcast with Rina on mass media like film stars of the Public Era. You weren’t supposed to get engaged. You can’t remain hidden from the world as fiancé to the head of clan’s sister.”

“I’ve already made it clear she will live in my world, I am not going to live in hers.” TK just looked at the ceiling, radiating a condescending patience. “How long will this nonsense will go on?”

“This is permanent, Big Knight. You will not see Rina again. She’s finished with Oxford. Gone. Forever.” Presumably Nightminster showed the disdain he felt, as TK added: “You’ll believe it when thirty’s past and she’s still not around.”

“I need to bring to your attention a serious matter.”

“Big Knight, matters don’t come more serious than the mess you’ve got yourself and Rina into.”

“Do you believe Smith’s Brent Cross brigade organised the four attacks on the asylums last year? Elephant & Castle, Camden, Wandsworth and Bermondsey.”

“You certainly do. You rate Smith as an clever opportunist.”

“And you?”

“The situation simply baffles me.”

“Actually, there’s no proof whatsoever that Smith’s bunch are gangsters. That’s our problem. Smith has the public support of the richest factory owners like Madam Edkins of ZEEBRI and David Chadderton of Bermondsey. Smith is respectable. He can turn up in any asylum, make a speech and there's nothing the ultramarines or anyone else can do about it.

“Whereas, there is a view, held by some extremely influential people, that your clan is sending out these hooligans. The story goes that a knot of Krossington conspirators, most probably including yourself, mobilises the violent gangs through servants recruited as castrated boys from Brent Cross. And just to be clear, it was not Rina or any other Krossington or any member of your household who told me about the recruitment of eunuchs.”

TK was clearly mortified by the suggestion. The side of his neck flushed, his mouth compressed.

“Marko stopped the practice. It was an odious excess that developed under the rule of my father, who allowed pockets of barbarity to develop. You mustn’t judge us by that kind of thing.”

“It’s not my judgement that counts.”

“Then whose?”

“Within the senior cadre of General Wardian, it is held with almost religious conviction that the Krossington clan is behind the asylum attacks.”

“But why? They’ve got absolutely no justification for believing that. We’re their most loyal customer!”

“They believe you and Rina are jealous of Sebastian Smith’s popularity. The attacks are your way of discrediting him.”

“In seriousness, this is held to be true?”

“It’s their working assumption.”

“But it makes no sense!”

“You have to view the world through the eyes of a bureaucrat. After six years in General Wardian—almost seven—I’ve gained some insight into how those lifers think. No one will take personal responsibility. Only the corporation is the law, and that law is the world. It means that every external threat has to be configured into something the corporation can solve.”

“I think that’s true!”

“General Wardian can solve the problem of the SUN Party if a clique of Krossingtons is organising the attacks to discredit Sebastian Smith. It’s just a case of laying the proof before Marko, and he will stamp the conspiracy out. On the other hand, if Smith is the organiser, there’s nothing General Wardian can do about it. They don’t have any formal authority in the asylums, least of all in fiercely independent Brent Cross. Therefore, Smith is not the problem, you are.”

“What are you really driving at?”

“Were you aware of what I just told you?”

“No.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Alarmingly so.”

“To Marko as well?”

“Of course. He must know.”

“Then drop this tripe about incommunicado and excommunicado. The whole thing is a ridiculous vanity your clan can ill afford at a time when all manner of paranoia is sweeping through the very glory trust that guards your home lands.”

That caused TK more than a moment’s reflection.

“I have a proposal that could be worth a great deal to your family,” Nightminster resumed. “While these ludicrous Latin words are hanging over Rina and I, you won’t get the details. All I will say is that it makes use of an asset now lost in the wastes around The Wash near what was once Rumford Parva.”

Nightminster stood to go. TK’s face cast stunned and pale at such casual release of what was clearly a deep clan secret. Nightminster could see he had landed the perfect bull’s eye. “Once you’ve dropped the Latin words, I’ll meet the three of you and present what is going to become a most symbiotic relationship.”

TK still had not spoken a word when Nightminster departed, shutting the door quietly behind him.

*

For all the smooth assertiveness mobilised to retrieve at least a tactical retreat in the face of disaster, Nightminster’s excitement after the meeting did not endure. He stared at the photograph of him with Victorina and President Smith. The tall, broad-shouldered biker with the big nose and pointed chin dominated the image. It was a signature silhouette that could be recognised from a hundred yards, even in a crowd.

Thousands and thousands of people across the asylums of London had seen that photograph. It made a most effective ‘wanted’ notice—a point that would certainly not have been lost on President Sebastian Smith.

Chapter 15

From Limehouse, Nightminster rode his shiny three-speed bicycle over to the largest messaging office in London, at Paddington. The location betrayed nothing of his bachelor pad in Limehouse and his lanky frame would be lost in the milling and queuing. He wrote to the Krossington head of clan, Marcus-John:

Get in contact once you have cancelled the Latin words against me. I wish to propose a project that will provide substantial income through making use of what is currently a useless vestige. Reply to this office post restante.

He was in no mood to comply with the niceties of decorum.

*

That evening, he returned to the Paddington messengers’ office to pick up any reply from Wilson House. There was a message waiting for him, in languid, flowing purple ink. It read:

You may be assured the Latin words have been rescinded. Call at W.H. around 8 pm this Friday (3rd February).

It was signed off with that grandiose sprawl of a signature by which Marko Krossington left his mark.

*

Nightminster arrived at the gates of Wilson House on foot, which must have been either rare or unique for an invited guest, as it created a challenge exceeding the competence of the Krossington marines who received him. They quarrelled over how to get him up to the house. One faction declared he should be left to walk up the drive on his own. The opposing faction expressed outrage that a stranger—especially the size of this one—could be allowed to wander the grounds alone. They bickered. A lieutenant turned up. He looked Nightminster up and down and ordered a sergeant and a couple of privates to escort him up. He said a visitor wearing the dress trousers of a General Wardian NCO did not merit escort by an officer—even if that hide jacket was smart. The sergeant was peeved at this but he followed orders. Nightminster wondered what would have happened had he turned up with his usual armament of sawn-off shotgun and Makarov.

The group passed through an arch in a cedar box hedge to face the full splendour of Wilson House. On his previous sojourn in Wilson House back in late November, after the battle on Bermondsey market place, he had never set eyes on the facade or public interiors of the place. It was a plainer building than he was expecting, a long, two-storey façade in a pleasing shade of pale brown brick, the windows tall with square-paned frames painted gloss white. The front door was set in a small porch with a single pair of pillars, also gloss white. The façade shone in the glare of floodlights buzzing on the lawn.

“It looks like a section of tank track,” Nightminster said.

“It’s called the Georgian style, commoner,” the sergeant said gruffly. He rapped once with the brass door knocker. A sub-butler or footman in a black frock coat answered and Nightminster was handed across to the household staff. He stepped into a not overlarge reception hallway brightly lit by electric lights in a highly-polished brass chandelier. The air smelled of lavender and bees’ wax. The pale blue wallpaper was furry, like caterpillar skin. The reception hallway opened out into a circular hall of white marble finely veined in blue, with sweeping staircases climbing both sides to meet on a landing with a pure white limestone balustrade. Higher still, the ceiling domed to a central skylight, at this time black as the night. He baulked for a moment and felt himself sweating, knowing the evening ahead was going to be a trial of nerves. He was on Krossington land now; their law prevailed over his future.

“Please show me your vaccination certificates, Mr Nightminster,” the young servant said.

“I am a sergeant of General Wardian.” He showed his ID booklet, which contained the record of his vaccinations and proved his last chest X-ray was clear of tuberculosis.

“That is acceptable. Please follow me, Sergeant Nightminster.”

The servant led him up the left arm of the stairs rising around the circular hall of white marble and along a wide corridor leading to the rear part of the palace, from which they turned off into a narrower and scruffier passage down a wing. The impression was of being drawn far from the grand salons to some utility room where they stored brooms. He was finally presented in a lounge of sorts, not the same back-room as the meeting of his first visit last November, the day after the battle on Bermondsey market place. This room was sparely furnished, with four well-used fabric armchairs close to the fireplace, a book case untidily stuffed with battered paperbacks along one wall and in the corner a small table cluttered with tobacco detritus. None of the furniture matched, either in style, colour or age. The place reminded him of the reading room of Bermondsey public library. Two men got up from the armchairs as he was led in. One was His Decency Tom Krossington, TK. The other was His Decency Marcus-John Krossington, Marko. Both men wore quite ordinary clothes: plain cardigans and cotton trousers. Nightminster felt overdressed.

“Welcome to the clan,” Marko said. “let young Jamie take that beautiful jacket and get you a drink—what would you like?”

“A glass of water will be fine.” After the four-mile walk from Limehouse, he did not feel like anything alcoholic. In any case, he needed a clear head for the evening to come. In the initial few minutes of conversation, he could detect no veiled hostility or subterfuge. Marko complained that so many of his actions were forced by the petulant shrieking of the Land Council back in Haslemere on the home lands. At any time, the Land Council could vote the Krossingtons out of power. It had never yet happened due to the inability of other branches of the Krossington clan and the independent manors to stop squabbling long enough to form an alternative leadership. Marko regarded them as little more than children, albeit potentially dangerous children.

“So there it is,” he finished. “We sovereigns are not free, we have to answer to our constituents. Yet you seem very much the lone operator. I suspect you’re just a pot of gold and a big mouth.”

“As a matter of interest, how much gold have you gained by your own wits?”

“I’ve won scores of thousands of ounces racing at Cowes—I drive my own yacht to victory—racing my blood at Ascot—that’s horses—and at poker. Strictly as a matter of interest, do you play?”

“My game has just one rule—survive. I figure that if danger separates people, then gold lies in the difference.

“I’d say you’re a buccaneer.”

“At any rate, I’m not a rabbit.”

“You mentioned you have a plan.”

“Would you like to hear about it?”

“Only to the first yawn.”

“Have you ever heard of Mittelbau-Dora?”

“Is she nice?”

“Mittelbau-Dora was a slave labour camp of the Nazi Empire of the Second World War. The Nazi’s had the same problem we have, lack of machines. In their case, the land they ruled just didn’t produce much oil and their production methods were ponderous. In our case, the Public Era guzzled the best oil on land and we haven’t the technology, or the collective will, to get what’s left from under the sea. The Nazis solved their problem with slave labour, as have all societies down the millennia, and we’re no different. It turns out that humans are most satisfactory beasts of burden; two legs are more efficient than four, and so forth, but I digress.

“At this Mittelbau-Dora, the Nazis used slave labour to make revolutionary weapons, three thousand liquid-fuelled V2 rockets and well over a thousand Me262 jet fighters, weapons so ahead of their time the Allied powers had no answers except overwhelming numbers.”

“I don’t like the direction of this,” Marko said. “We have no interest in a private armoury. That’s a political hot potato. No written rules, just an unspoken agreement amongst the Big Seven lands that we won’t manufacture weaponry or raise private armies; we hire glory trusts to protect our frontiers and they answer to our club, the Westminster Assembly. It’s proved to be a stable system, at least to date.”

“I plan to make leather garments, preserved meats and high-value seasonal vegetables.”

“Make those jackets! You’ll be on to a winner.”

“What about labour?” TK asked.

“I’ll use Undead Nameless Gone.”

Marko snorted. “Really?”

“This sounds closer to the stuff of horror,” TK said.

“Undead Nameless Gone are Night and Fog condemned to death. Instead of being hanged, they’ll be secretly exported to my Value System where they will live out afterlives they probably don’t deserve. Such labour will be educated and conditioned to discipline, as well as most grateful to have been spared the noose.”

This must have provided food for thought as neither responded.

Nightminster continued: “My Value System will be a self-contained cycle driven ultimately by the sun. The population will sow crops in the richest soil of the Island of Britain, that of the Fens, negating any need to import food, pigs will reproduce themselves and provide meat and hides for the process, there will be plenty of luxury vegetables to export along with preserved meats and finished leather products. The remoteness of the Value System means no tributes extorted by some local princeling and no security issues. All sales will be profit—pure profit. Every ounce of gold from sales will go straight out as dividends to shareholders. In effect, I have conceived of the perfect business.”

“Then why has nobody done it already?” TK asked.

“Because they never were able to use Wilson Krossington’s artificial island lost in the Fens.”

He waited, sensing dense tension. He heard Marko’s breath wheezing in and out of his nose. TK muttered something.

“How did you find out about that?” Marko asked. His voice was calmer than Nightminster was expecting.

“I deduced it from old media reports and my own experience.”

“Long ago, we sent agents to rake through General Wardian’s media files to destroy any reference to it, but none of them could find anything. We assumed the island was politically embarrassing and boring, so journalists ignored it,” Marko said. “But as usual, you’ve done something no one else has ever managed to do.”

“Am I correct in surmising the island was created from silt heaped by giant shovelling machines after the Flood of ’35? Dr Wilson K planned to form a new sea barrier to defend the Fens, but the Glorious Resolution swept his plans away?”

“You’re close enough,” Marko said. “So, you’re a clever sleuth and you’ve created an interesting scheme. Now you want permission to create this Value System on our island?”

“I’ll pay a fair rent. Once the business is up and running, I expect to provide annual rent—a dividend if you will—of at least 70,000 ounces. That’s not an amount to be sniffed at. I’ve done a lot of work calculating what you sovereigns make from your lands. You aren’t as rich as your glamorous palaces and vast estates would suggest.”

The previous summer, he had explored the south of England by motorbike from Reigate fortress. His careful observations of the use of land had enabled him to put numbers to his curiosity about how rich the sovereign clans actually were.

“By my reckoning, the Lands of Krossington generate about sixty million ounces of gold annually, but your agriculture is so inefficient that most of it is consumed by the natives who work the fields, not consumed as gold, rather as what they have to keep to feed themselves and hold as seed for the next crop. That leaves a surplus of only 12 to 15 million ounces for export to the asylums or France. That’s in a decent year, and the last year has not been decent, as we well know in the asylums. Your General Wardian garrison costs around 8 million per year, by my reckoning, leaving you 4 million ounces. But that has to be shared across 104 independent manors and all of the various branches of the Krossington clan, from the Krossington-Darcys to the Christie-Krossingtons, each with their households and yachts and fancy cars and flying boats. How much does the prime family Krossington need to pay for this palace, and Castle Krossington, and your motor yacht Neptune, and all the other yachts and racing cars and armoured limousines, not to mention your bodyguard of marines, a hundred strong? It’s not cheap sustaining the appearances required by your vanity. I think an additional 70,000 ounces will look mighty attractive, dropped straight into the pockets of the prime family. Am I right, or am I right?”

He did not have to say even a tenth of this. It was not safe to say a hundredth of it. To display such knowledge was downright dangerous, for he had no insurance against their savaged pride. It was a calculated risk. By laying open his knowledge, he was making a statement he trusted them.

The silence in the scruffy little lounge sucked in sounds from the outside world. The soft rumble of a flying boat somewhere out over the abandonments of northern London. A band was practising in a far corner of the palace. They kept starting the anthem of the Lands of Krossington, “Our Land, Our Freedom, Our Gold”, sung to the tune of Parry’s “Jerusalem”, but their synchrony kept falling apart and they had to start again.

Marko sat up in his seat and cleared his throat.

“I do have to admire how you have unravelled the facts of our sovereign economy. If it’s any consolation to you, the Household Cabinet spends long hours wrangling over how to make ends meet without leaking our limitations to outside society.” Marko stood up. Nightminster judged by his expression that he was genuinely impressed. “I’ll certainly think about it. In the meantime, come and meet the family.”

He walked out. TK passed with a bemused glance before following his elder brother. Marko led them along a series of narrow corridors, which Nightminster suspected were normally used by servants. They descended a steep flight of steps into a warmer zone towards the rear of Wilson House, away from the grandiose public rooms used for society occasions. Nightminster was ushered into a surprisingly modest lounge, where his heart stopped dead in mid beat.

Victorina was sitting on the carpet near the coal fire playing with a small boy, and there were some other people and furniture Nightminster did not notice—wrenched by feral jealousy at the sight of her son, everything else blurred. The boy was a sturdy lad of about three in a bright red suit. He chuckled up at Victorina as she zoomed a wooden airplane around just out of reach keeping him dancing for it. It seemed incredible that Victorina could have withheld from him she had borne a son, yet when it came to people trapped by their own facade, nothing could be ruled out of play. He looked away, trembling with shock. She must have been only about sixteen when the lad was born. Probably that was why the family kept the truth in back rooms like this. Might she be married? He had not heard she was not married. The one relief was, on looking around, not seeing the fop Algernon.

TK pulled him down towards the fire where an old couple sat enjoying the heat, watching Victorina playing with her boy.

“I want you to meet Wilson and Rosalind, our grandparents.”

Nightminster stooped over the couple to shake their dry, wrinkled hands, feeling like an oak overhanging them. Although shrunken by old age, both were absolutely alert and moved with an ease not normal for those who must now be almost ninety. Wilson was still mighty shoulders and arms, with the same slab hands as TK, that wrapped about Nightminster’s long and slender offering like a mechanical crusher. He felt himself inspected by eyes tired of the truth, all too acutely learned of the horrors beneath civility. It was easy to believe this man had created the most powerful dynasty on the Island of Britain from the chaos of the Glorious Resolution.

“It’s a fascinating honour to meet you, sir,” he said.

“The young gang have told me a little about you. Did you really chuck physics to study economics? You’re a born engineer with aspirations to bring atomic power to London. What use is courtiers’ sophistry to you?”

“None. But it brings useful connections.”

“You remind me too much of my son Leon.” His eyes grew vague, seeing images of long ago carried down the decades. “He was too brave, and he paid the price. Of course, it’s pointless to tell young men not to be brave. All I can urge is that you take care.”

Nightminster considered his position in the palm of Marko Krossington’s hand. It did not feel a very ‘careful’ place to be. That said, all of these people were witnesses.

“I’ll do my best.” Too late, he realised he had blundered in shaking hands with Wilson before Rosalind. He hastened to take her hand and kiss it. She was tall and well-built, had never accumulated flab with age, any more than Wilson had. He found her grave and unforthcoming and so moved on to a livelier presence by his side, a beaming middle-aged woman, slender, all smiles and eyes bulging with open amorous interest. She looked old above the collar to his fresh-faced teenaged eyes, but her figure was still that of a young woman. Her flourish of red hair and eager smile seemed familiar even before TK introduced her as Vicky Krossington, mother of Marko, himself and Rina, widow of Maurice. Ah! That explained everything. Nightminster could see at a glance Rina’s passion and looks.

“What a fabulous young man you are!” she gushed, stepping under his chin. He knew if he was ever caught alone with her, she would be on him in a second.

“Enchanté!” he replied, stepping back to bow and kiss her hand.

As he straightened up, he felt something soft brush against him and found that Victorina was standing at his elbow. She wore a black cotton blouse and a long skirt, rosewood red, suspended by orange braces. She smelled of sophisticated perfume, a soft genie hinting at orange groves throbbing with heat, cut deep by the last shadows pointing into a summer’s night of sweating bodies entwined—

He pulled himself back to the present.

“Let me introduce you to some friends of the family,” she said, pinching his little finger and giving a light tug to draw him across to where two men were just getting up from a black leather sofa. One was a young man, fresh-faced, about the same age as TK. Victorina introduced him as Morton Aldingford, one of TK’s Oxford friends, a lawyer who provided the clan legal advice in land and water disputes. Nightminster and Aldingford regarded each other with the same distaste as on their first meeting in November after the battle on Bermondsey market place.

“We’ve met before,” he said, merely nodding.

The second man was much older, his white hair thinning and swept back from a deeply-creased forehead. He was at the threshold of old age. Nightminster was surprised to learn this was Morton’s father, Sir Bartleigh Aldingford. He fixed Nightminster with a particularly piercing stare.

“Good to have a proper man on board,” he said with a smirk and a wink.

“And this,” Victorina said in a softer voice, looking down at the little boy in the red suit chuckling up at the adults far above in the forest canopy of his world, “is Donald Aldingford. Aren’t you sweetie?”

Nightminster may have reeled visibly on his feet so extreme was the wash of relief that the boy belonged to Morton and not Victorina. He smiled at the little boy in the red suit, feeling his mood melt into gooey protectiveness. He crouched down, resting his cheek against his knee, which was level with the boy’s head. He shook the damp little hand and ruffled Donald’s hair.

“Are you going to be a lawyer too when you grow up?”

“No!” Donald asserted firmly.

With Victorina close, momentarily a beautiful illusion came over Nightminster that the three of them were a family. What a wonderful thing it would be to have a family. He stood back up to his full height. Beyond Victorina was Marko, eyeing him with a significant intensity. It was obvious enough what was on his mind.

“Excuse me, Victorina, I must discuss things with your brother.”

He left the room still borne in the warm envelopment of having finally won his way inside a clan more than powerful enough to protect him from Sebastian Smith and the people’s justice of Brent Cross.

*

“So now you’ve met the family,” Marko said. They had repaired to an adjacent room, which was used for storing furniture. It smelled of moth balls and stale leather. “With that privilege comes responsibilities I don’t need to elaborate.”

“You may be assured of my discretion.”

“You wouldn’t be here if I was not so assured. One thing I caught clear as a full moon from TK and Rina is that you’re what is known as a sovereign individual. You follow your own laws and you make your own foreign policy just like a sovereign land or a nation state of the old Public Era. And you keep your secrets. I think we understand each other quite well by now, even if we don’t like each other.”

Nightminster let him end the silence.

“You’re more than welcome to visit Grandad’s island in the fens. We call it the Refuge nowadays; you’ll understand why when you get there. Until you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to judge its suitability for your plans. The next relief launch leaves from Krossington Quay tomorrow morning at 7 am. If you miss that, you’ll have to wait until March, so I leave the decision for you.”

“I’ll be there.” He considered raising the matter of Victorina’s freedom, but decided this was not the time. He would let Marko harden his commitment to the Value System before broaching that particularly sensitive issue.

Chapter 16

The Krossingtons’ Refuge was situated in a dead-end trap of tides and sand bars that no vessel would normally go within ten miles of. Nothing of the Refuge was visible from the sea, not even at this barest time of year in early February. The shore was a flat line of Public Era sea defence dyke and here and there some tree tops of the hinterland. Nothing else inland was visible, as it was just pan-flat marsh for miles and miles. For no apparent reason, the slender vessel swung towards the grassy flanks of the sea defence dyke and as if by magic there appeared a narrow channel leading into a basin about the area of a football pitch with a floating pier running out from the muddy shore.

Nightminster stood to one side of the launch’s ‘bridge’, which was just a shoulder-high steel screen to protect the crew from spray that billowed off the bows at high speed. A couple of crew jumped onto the pier and secured the launch fore and aft. Nightminster noted that a reception committee had already arrived, a group of local warriors dressed in deerskin trousers and jackets and comical hats of rabbit skins with dangling ears. They waited at the top of the floating pier. These must be the notorious marsh people.

The skipper ordered the two magnificent sixteen-cylinder supercharged diesel engines shut down. For the first time in 36 hours, their bellow and shrieking supercharger intakes ceased to assail Nightminster’s ears. On paper, the launch—which at ninety feet long was closer to what he would have called a ship—could cruise at 30 knots, slicing over the sea with its bow clear and the propellers hurling gouts of foam astern exactly as barge crews described. During this trip the waves had loomed higher than the bridge and the launch had plunged and heaved along at between 6 and 12 knots with Nightminster curled in a ball of direst misery amongst the ventilator intakes and skylights over the engine room. At this midships location the writhing of the launch was less than in the saloon in the bows. This did not relieve the crew of having to hose his spew off the deck. Only in the last couple of hours had the seas calmed enough that the fine vessel could run her engines up and whisk the waves astern in a blur of speed.

The skipper detailed his first officer to command the ship while he took Nightminster with a couple of well-armed marines ashore. At this, the marsh people backed well away, still watching. They were thoroughly conditioned by terror of invisible death that issued from the weapons of the men in pale blue berets. The party of four filed over the Public Era sea defence dyke and followed a path running east along the shore through marshland. Rustling and splashing to both sides accompanied them, along with yapping and bird-cries. One of the marines fired a burst into the air from his submachine gun. After that, they heard no more sounds of pursuit, and a few minutes later met up with a couple of marines from the duty garrison of the Refuge drawn out by the gunfire.

There was not enough of the day left to make a tour of the property. Nightminster enjoyed a convivial evening in the Refuge building with the marine garrison of six, the relief shift of six, and about half of the dozen crew of the launch, the remainder keeping watch aboard their vessel. The relief shift was led by a man Nightminster already knew from tragic circumstances. It was Lieutenant Stewart, who had headed up Victorina’s bodyguard at the battle on Bermondsey market in November. He was quieter, more introspective now. Nightminster felt sympathy for him. Most probably he had simply not been trained to deal with such a radical situation—but someone had to take the blame for the deaths of two marines, and it could not publicly be Victorina.

Nightminster learned more details about the Refuge and the marsh people who lived around it. The Tidal Basin (as it was unimaginatively known) where the launch had docked had been excavated by a Public Era dredger during the Glorious Resolution, when it was not clear whether the Lands of Krossington could be defended against the surplus flow still bleeding from London and the big towns around it. The original plan had been, as a last resort, to use a former cross-channel car ferry to evacuate the clan and its household from Portsmouth and ground the ship in the Tidal Basin to offload the possessions of the clan from its ramp in the absence of a proper harbour. After the Lands of Krossington became a secure home, the plan dropped off the agenda. The Refuge lived on as an appendix of history. The garrison shifts had the reputation of being so uneventful that they were known as the Lighthouse Watch.

As for the marsh people, there was a tale around the old towns of the Fens that they were descended from lunatics released during the Glorious Resolution. It was not an implausible idea. All the prisons and lunatic asylums were indeed opened up when the state disintegrated. On the one hand, the marsh people inflicted the vilest death rituals on anyone defenceless. On the other hand, they ate from the hand of anyone who massacred their warriors. Possibly this extreme sadism-submission dichotomy was some instinct handed down from criminally insane cases institutionalised after long terms in prison? No one really knew. They were impossible to tame, so Nightminster dismissed any idea they could be used as labour. Their true value would be as free security discouraging escape attempts by the Undead Nameless Gone.

The Refuge building itself was a warehouse of prodigious dimensions situated about a mile inland, hidden from the sea by trees and the sea defence dyke. It was a solidly-built place, with an outer brick wall a foot thick and an inner wall to improve insulation. It was secured by reinforced steel doors and topped off with a curved, corrugated iron roof. The marines occupied only a tiny part of the complex. It was in effect an indoor town, with an internal main street having two-storey brick buildings to both sides and alleys running off into storage yards. There were cold stores as big as flats with refrigeration systems identical in their operation to a refrigerator Nightminster had made only last year for his sixth-form physics project, that is, a circuit of ammonia, hydrogen and water powered by a wood-burning stove. The apartments were still furnished, although inevitably rodents had infested the bedding and upholstery, despite a dedicated army of cats slinking everywhere and crapping in trays the marines refreshed daily. Had the Refuge been needed, the Krossington clan and favoured retainers could have hidden from the world for years on end.

“I’m glad someone’s got a use for this place,” Lieutenant Stewart said. “I’ve always thought it would make an excellent farm. The fenland soil is incredibly productive—the Fens were far and away the best land in the country before the sea came back.”

*

The next morning, Nightminster detected a peculiar tension at breakfast around the mess room dining table. Lieutenant Stewart produced a document and unfolded it. He cleared his throat and said:

“Big Knight, I have to read a statement from the head of clan, his Decency Marcus-John Krossington. I’m going to state straight out that I am appalled by this, but orders are orders. You’re a trooper yourself, so you must understand.”

Nightminster could feel the hairs up and down his spine stiffen in a primeval fight or flight response. Damn and fuck, he ought to have guessed that slippery bastard Marko would beguile him to his fate.

“I quote: ‘Big Knight, you demonstrated great perspicacity in excavating the secret of our Refuge, and under other circumstances I might have permitted you to realise the Value System. Regrettably the times are such that I cannot be confident the Refuge will not be required for its intended purpose within the foreseeable future, and therefore I must decline your initiative, impressive though it was. You will have to remain in that place you identified for your ambitions, for I’m sure you will understand that I cannot have clan secrets wandering the asylums, not under any circumstances. My marines have been instructed to provide you a comfortable life within the confines of that condition you referred to as the Undead Nameless Gone.’ That is all.”

Every one of the twelve marines around the table lifted out their pistols, laid them on the table, and stared at him. Words struggled in his gullet, but failed to articulate.

“But he presented to me to the whole family,” Nightminster managed to utter in a kind of gargling.

“Nothing would surprise me less,” Lieutenant Stewart said, tiredly. “He likes to make it absolutely clear who’s boss.”

*

When a man of eighteen is given a life sentence for the crime of being too clever, he does not accept it. In a week, or a month, Marko would send another message that he was just giving young Big Knight a reminder of who held the upper hand, and now they could get down to serious business. For the first few days, Nightminster did as he was told, biding his time. The Lighthouse Watch prepared a suite for him in an upper floor with a view down to the internal main street of the Refuge. He had a three-bedroomed flat all to himself, including his own lounge and kitchen. He could play Public Era films on a 16mm projector with integrated sound system, should he wish, although normally he joined the marines in the evening for a communal film or game of Scrabble or Backgammon (gambling was strictly forbidden). He kept the conversation away from exile, and so did they.

By-the-by he started to negotiate more freedom. He was allowed to access the curved, corrugated iron roof via a ladder through the top of his suite There was no question of escape. If the forty-foot drop did not kill him, the marsh people who infested the woods behind the Refuge certainly would. From the roof, he could gaze all around at the serene, waterlogged landscape, blemished by smoke rising from the nearby villages of the marsh people. Sometimes their warriors would come through the woods from a nearby water channel and gaze up at him. He called down that his name was Big Knight, but he never understood a word of the gabble and laughter that came back. Some of the older men—that meant mid-twenties as apparently none survived any older—carried a strange kind of bow Nightminster had never seen before. It was as tall as a man, but the handle was at one-third length, not mid-way, creating an awkward, unbalanced impression when drawn to fire. There was no question the bows were powerful and effective. From his rooftop eyrie, he watched their hunting bands stalk deer. They never failed to get a kill first shot, even out to a hundred yards. It gave him an uncomfortable naked feeling as he walked about in the wan sunshine lest one of them take a pot shot at him.

Apart from the marsh people, there was not the least hint of human presence in any direction. He found a pair of field glasses in the flat and studied the horizon, which he knew by the height of the roof and calculation would be about eight miles distant. Nothing but woods, heath, winding tidal channels and purple lakes hemmed by beds of reeds. To seawards, the view of the coast was crazed by the branches of bare trees, although he could observe that at low tide, the sea retreated for miles leaving dark brown sand flats. No captain would come anywhere near this place by choice. According to the Lighthouse Watch records, the last vessel seen was a cutter blown off course in the autumn. It lay on its side a couple of miles out on the flats until the next tide and then it sailed away. Such events happened less than once per year. There was nothing to attract either vessels or aircraft into this dead end. As Nightminster was well aware, seamen dreaded The Wash as a dangerous place where secrets lurked one did not survive learning, as he was now finding out the hard way.

He persuaded Lieutenant Stewart to let him accompany the morning patrol along the coast. It was dreamy calm with the sun eventually breaking through ground haze. To Nightminster, a man from crowded asylums and glory barracks, the peacefulness and vastness of the land were entrancing. In its flatness, there were no thundering waterfalls or mighty crags, no landslides, no torrents in spate. This was a place of serenity. Birds squawked, twittered and kee-yewed everywhere (he identified some of them from books in the Refuge library; reed bunting, bittern, lapwing, moorhen and buzzard). The breeze soughed amongst the bullrushes. The water lay flat out inert. Nightminster’s eyes saw far beyond this gentle landscape. An atomic dome would rise over London to partner the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. His Value System would be but a stepping stone to an atomic estate. Marko Krossington was not going to stop him. He knew it now, with certainly. He could sense Victorina with him. This place was going to be his, whatever it took.

“There’s a kind of enchantment here,” he said.

“People either hate it or love it,” Lieutenant Stewart said. “It’s as well to love it if you have to spend your life here.”

Stewart took him on a tour. The artificial island around the Refuge had been built up with silt to about six feet higher than the surrounding marsh. Those six feet made the difference between firm, usable ground and sodden bog. To the east the island was bounded by a tidal river that drained a large area of the interior. To the west the island ran for about three miles, narrowing along the coast for the last mile. Inland, the deepest extent of firm ground was about a mile and a half from the coast.

Nightminster made a sketch as he was shown around. He learned that the island was cut through by tidal creeks over which suspension footbridges had been hung. There was no other way of crossing these creeks without ropes and mud boards, as the sides were near vertical rising from muck like peanut butter. Nightminster noted that his population of Undead Nameless Gone could be confined into one section of the island simply by raising a drawbridge. This would further simplify security.

“What sort of business had you planned?” Stewart asked.

“Leather products and intensive farming.”

“Were you going to make jackets like that one?” Stewart had several times admired Nightminster’s mottled brown jacket ‘inherited’ from the cannibals. “Where did you get it?”

“Um, it’s a family heirloom. My father bought it in the Far East just before the Glorious Resolution. The leather is remarkably fine and smooth—he said it came from a special breed of pig.”

“You’d have made a bomb selling that quality.”

Nightminster merely pulled a tight smile.

That evening after being shown around by Lieutenant Stewart, Nightminster summarised the resources of the Value System at about 1,500 acres of excellent farmland. There was a small fresh-water lake on the island, as well as the Tidal Basin where Thames barges could be beached for unloading things too heavy for the floating pier. There was also, of course, the big Refuge building. The marsh people, if one wanted to include them as a ‘resource’, were everywhere on and around the island. Stewart explained they were mainly a water people who travelled in canoes all over the Fens, even as far as Peterborough more than twenty miles inland. Nightminster estimated that if the Value System adapted traditional Chinese mixed-cropping enriched by human and animal manure, the island could support a population of perhaps three thousand, or else, generate substantial exports of high-value vegetables if worked by a lesser population.

After this flurry of planning for the future, time started to drag. The days passed. One week. Two weeks. Doubts weighed heavier as his powers of self-deception waned and those doubts looked more and more like certainties. He was stuck here alone guarded by six marines amid a wilderness in which he would not have survived an hour left to his own resources. Suspicions and fears festered. He grew convinced that Victorina had been married off within the clan exactly as TK had predicted. Imagine if she was now married to Charles Krossington-Darcy! That was exactly the kind of spiteful retaliation a bigot like Marko would relish. The next relief might bring the marriage photos with them. Or she might be dead. Perhaps Marko had let her out into the slums for her vaccination program and she had been lynched by a mob.

What really rotted Nightminster was that he had nothing to do. For sure, the library contained years of reading, all the classics, tomes of history, geography, geology, histories of science, and there were shelves and shelves of old thrillers set in the Public Era world of computers, mobile phones with satellite navigation and built-in cameras, jet airliners, weird money—a world so alien that the plots were almost incomprehensible to him. Only the baddies made sense. They chased evil for reasons that were timeless: gold or power, except for the really dangerous ones who chased gold and power. He had access to a large stock of Public Era films, although as with the thrillers, it was hard to take them seriously. The beautiful women in them tantalised his imagination, infected him with fantasies of the like he thought he had left behind in virginal adolescence.

These distractions could not shield him from the fury of his powerlessness. He grew morose. He lingered over the events of the last year of his life, since he had begun to skive off school to begin his early experiments in trading and loan-sharking, when those still seemed like exciting ways to make money. He thought of how many times Death had wrapped him in its black cloak and yet let him live. He thought of the people he had killed. Worst of all, he started to have nightmares. He lay paralysed as the cannibal children unwound his skin and stitched him into jackets before his eyes, leaving him flailed alive running through the streets of Mayfair. After seventy years of exile in the Refuge, he was finally released as a withered, stooped old man to find the Public Era had returned without him and everything and everyone he had ever known was long forgotten. He walked the streets of the Public Era films, crowded with sheet-metal cars driven by fat oafs who bleared their horns and shouted at him while he searched for Victorina in Johnny’s palace, only to find it was a train station again and the Fatted Masses poured through, shoving him aside. He rammed the Browning into the nape of Alfred the cannibal’s neck and pulled the trigger, only to see he had killed Victorina. The dreadfully real horror bolted him awake screaming and he sat on the edge of the bed, panting, too afraid to try and sleep again, until he could hear her beseeching for help from beyond a labyrinth of tunnels he could never get through and he woke, this time on the floor shouting her name. He passed that day in dread of the coming night. Oddly, he slept clean through the bell for reveille and did not emerge until noon for lunch, greeted by much sarcasm from the marines. That night, he dreamed they died together and sank underground, moving through darkness, only aware of each other by telepathy, and he awoke so certain that she was dead he pestered Lieutenant Telford to seek reassurance by sending a carrier pigeon. He assured Nightminster the garrison would be informed within a few hours if such a disaster had struck the ruling family. He grew annoyed with Nightminster’s badgering and packed him off back to his suite like a child in disgrace.

When in his more functional moods, Nightminster could not fail to observe disturbing obstacles to his dreams even if he was released. One night, he stood on the roof of the Refuge, admiring the full moon and the silver glittering of the sea through the boughs of the leafless trees. He thought of sloppy novels in which forlorn lovers gazed up at the moon and dreamed their other was looking up too. Despite his natural disdain of such fancy, he did wonder about Victorina, and the terrible gravity of their lost future crushed him, and he had to look down, blinking away tears. Damnation! His guts must be turning to mush, getting caught by sentimentality like that. He turned his back on the moon, looking west, expecting to see only soothing darkness. He was startled to see flickering yellow and orange fires for miles into the distance, and on turning around, saw the same to the east. Now with a practical task, his surprise sharpened to concentration. He counted twenty-three fires. If each of those fires was a village celebrating the full moon, then the coastal strip along The Wash must be far more densely populated with marsh savages than the Krossington marines appeared to be aware. They believed there were only three villages within a day’s walk of the Refuge. What Nightminster was now seeing suggested almost eight times that. He kept these suspicions to himself, worried that the marines might decide to abandon the Refuge, creating a situation for himself that could not be an improvement on the current one.

His observations of the marines were no more encouraging. Despite the apparent pointlessness of their duty, the Lighthouse Watch maintained a high level of professional conduct. They kept a night watch inside the Refuge building by one marine from 10 pm to reveille at 6 am on a rota system amongst the six men. The daily routines of reveille, shower and shave, breakfast and morning parade ran like a music box. Mornings were taken up with a general patrol of the territory followed by cleaning and repair duties; afternoons with outdoor duties from painting bridges to mowing grass, finished off with another patrol of the territory. Nightminster began to help with these tasks, although he always had to be accompanied, as he could not be given a gun, but nor could he be left to face the marsh people unarmed. Evenings were free time. Nightminster noted that the men compensated for these inconsequential days with an excessive fastidiousness in their dress and upkeep of their quarters. They also pursued intricate hobbies, such as thousand-piece jig-saw puzzles of Public Era splendours, fashioning exquisite models of sailing ships, repairing watches and film cameras, and other achievements revealing substantial skill and patience. Without question, the garrison would put up a fanatical defence if challenged by an invasion. The occupation of the Refuge, if it ever happened, had to be achieved some other way.

The weeks accelerated. In this timeless place, days vanished like snowflakes in steam. February disappeared with alarming alacrity. Soon the March launch would arrive with the relief shift, led by an officer called Lieutenant Krefeld, whom Nightminster had met in the outgoing shift and had disliked as a petulant martinet.

“There are loads of people in the outside world who will be asking questions by now,” he said to Lieutenant Stewart as they made the morning patrol up the sea defence dyke. “My parents will tell David Chadderton I’ve disappeared and he’ll tell Johnny Albert, the ultramarine owner of Bermondsey. Once he’s on the job, this nonsense is on borrowed time.”

“I hope so, for your sake. I’ve told you a hundred times I don’t agree with you being treated like the Man in the Iron Mask. I think Marko Kross is an ass to be honest with you. Most of us marines turned against him after he lashed Her Decency Victorina with that dog whip. But we swear allegiance to the head of clan. We have to obey him. You’re a trooper yourself, you understand that.”

“I’m not having a go at you. All I ask is that you to take a note out to my parents. They’ll be worried sick about me. They’re old and alone in the world.”

“I can’t do that and you know it.”

“Marko Kross won’t ever know who leaked.”

“He’ll blame someone for it, and it won’t be his own family.”

Nightminster did not press the point. He needed to keep Lieutenant Stewart on his side for the long term. Sooner or later, one of them would crack and take a message out.

The relief launch arrived in the middle of the night, a day late, having been delayed first by a breakdown of the air compressor, without which the engines could not be started, and then by poor weather. Lieutenant Krefeld led his men into the Refuge with his typical tense and tight-lipped reserve. He laid his submachine gun on the mess room table—it was still hot from his having given the marsh people a burst—and looked hard at Nightminster.

“You’re going home, Big Knight.”

Nightminster leaped and punched the air, yelling with joy.

“You may not be so delighted when you hear me out,” Lieutenant Krefeld added. “You’re going back to President Sebastian Smith of the Official SUN Party.”

Chapter 17

During the first hour or so of the trip back along the north coast of Norfolk, the sea was calm, so the launch could skim along throwing up great fans of spume. Nightminster clung behind the bridge screen while the captain shouted over the shriek of the supercharger intakes about events back in London, while squalls of spray whooshed inches over their heads.

About a week ago, at dawn, an enormous plug of slummies materialised from a myriad of lanes and paths to gather outside the gates of Wilson House on Piccadilly. This was people-power on a scale the glory trusts just could not cope with and their troops could only watch helpless—their officers were all too aware the rise of Sebastian Smith was a direct consequence of the use of force against the Parliament Square rally. Within minutes, the mob was joined by an enormous Octopus truck, which edged into the middle of the gathering. From the bed of the truck, President Sebastian Smith of the Official SUN Party gave a speech stating that the Krossington clan had imprisoned Victorina Krossington for having the temerity to care about common folk. He demanded that she be freed. The crowd took up the chant. The atmosphere grew charged as thousands yelled over the wall and through the gates.

At the time, neither Marcus-John nor Tom was in residence. Being treated with silent contempt incensed the crowd, which started to throw pieces of wood and scrap metal over the wall, then fresh excrement came flying over, some of it propelled impressive distances into the grounds. The chamberlain ventured alone out to the gates to calm things down and say Her Decency was not in prison, she was at home in the south but had been sent for. This at least settled the crowd, which sat down to wait while a support army brought up field kitchens and braziers, and erected great canopies to shelter the people in their vigil. The Officials even provided temporary lavatories. This was clearly a carefully-planned operation. President Smith and his inner circle led at the front, never leaving, constantly moving in the crowd to keep spirits up and lead radical shanties. To those in Wilson House, this mass challenge to the prevailing order seemed grimly reminiscent of the early phases of the French Revolution.

Around 2 pm, the picket gate in the main gates of Wilson House opened and Marcus-John, Tom and Victorina stepped out alone. This baffled onlookers. Some believed the family must have been in residence all the time and started raving, building themselves up for a lynching. President Smith calmed them by address through loudspeakers, saying obviously sovereigns would have secret ways in and out of their palaces. The boldness of the three sovereigns had an extraordinary effect on the crowd. The people parted, forming a silent bubble in which His Decency the Master led his younger brother and sister into the pack, his face quite fearless, as if he were a botanist wandering amidst a strange forest. None of them were armed. On reaching the Octopus, they ascended steps to join President Smith. Marcus-John, Tom and Victorina each gave a short speech. Victorina was emphatic she had never been imprisoned and she would be happy to return to Brent Cross to continue the vaccination program. Tom said that the Oxford party was organising a national conference for May Day, and he urged everyone to support the event to strengthen the unity of their mighty cause. The crowd reacted with nearly hysterical fervour, and it was a good fifteen minutes before the three could get back to the gates of Wilson House.

“Marcus-John made a speech to the plebs?” Nightminster just could not picture it. “How I wish I’d seen that. Damn! The greatest spectacle since the burning of Buckingham Palace and I missed it.”

“Marcus-John left strict orders that if the crowd seized the three of them, we marines were to show no mercy. We had every MG42 in Wilson House ready to harvest that crowd like September. They would have learned the meaning of discipline!”

To begin with, Nightminster was so overjoyed to be going home, he did not stop to think more deeply about the implications. As the miles to London flowed astern, he did begin to think more deeply, until the launch swung south for the run down the coast of East Anglia and he fell once again to the miseries of sea sickness. He thought nothing much for the next twelve hours. Once they reached the comparative calm of the Thames Estuary, he returned to life and he had to question whether he had been saved, or just transferred to a less pleasant fate at Brent Cross.

*

At Krossington Quay, the first lieutenant of the launch handed Nightminster across to the duty guard of the port. The harbourmaster read out a statement prepared by His Decency the Master:

“I quote: ‘Big Knight Nightminster! You are free to go about your life. However, and this is a condition I strenuously advise you to heed, you must never communicate in any way with Her Decency Victorina, still less make any attempt to meet her. She is always attended by a marine escort well-briefed regarding who and what you are. They will enforce my ban robustly if required to do so. You are an intelligent, industrious young man who is more than capable of flourishing along paths that will not intersect our clan’s again’.

“Now get off Krossington land and stay off,” the harbourmaster said. Nightminster did not hang around to argue. Two minutes later he was lost in back lanes outside Krossington Quay. He was free! No longer screwed up with dread of the people’s justice of Brent Cross.

He was free!

To begin with, he just marvelled at liberty. He wandered amongst strange faces in central London, from prim barristers in wigs and black frock coats mincing with great self-importance, to stokers in grimy boiler suits sloping back after lunch in some pub tucked down a smelly lane. He did not see his first woman in a month until he reached as far as Holborn Circus, where he slowed to eye a cluster of maids chatting with some ultramarines, while a Night and Fog team stood feeding and drinking in the traces. He must never, ever be so foolish as to trust the Krossingtons again. Next time, he would arrange an insurance policy.

As he had no money, he walked two miles to General Wardian’s Euston depot on the northern edge of the city, where his sergeant’s ID booklet got him a free, very late lunch and his pay book enabled him to draw 5 ounces in cash from his account, by now flush with backpay and his first month’s salary as a sergeant. Feeling more like a gentleman about town, he relaxed in a rickshaw and let the runner do the hard work to get him back south into the shadows of the Tower of London with the Gothic heights of Tower Bridge and Bermondsey asylum dead ahead. He looked forward to lighting the joy of his parents. They must have suffered by his long absence. He would buy his parents dinner on Bermondsey market. There was going to be a celebration.

The rickshaw slowed to a shuffle on Tower Bridge, which was congested with streams of man-hauled wagons going both ways. A wagon loaded with enormous casks of what smelled like ale blocked the view ahead. Nightminster looked up the River Thames, squinting into the low evening sun. A couple of large men interrupted his view. He met the eyes of Raj, the henchman of Sebastian Smith with the ladder-scarred face. Beside him stood a goofy-looking guy with big horse teeth. Both men were staring straight back at him.

“Stop, please.”

Nightminster stepped down and paid off the driver.

“Hi guys, how goes it?” he said, offering his hand and smiling. Behind that smile, he was seething at his foolishness. He just did not seem to be able to keep his wits about him anymore. Tower Bridge was an obvious place to keep watch on traffic into Bermondsey.

“Nah, ahurm, we was just admiring the cruisers down there a few moments while we thought about getting dinner,” Raj said. “Have you met Julian?”

Nightminster grinned and shook hands with goofy Julian, in the process catching hints of a more dangerous alertness in the eyes.

“I heard Seb wants to see me.”

“Who told you that?” Raj asked.

“Marko Krossington’s marines.”

“We’ve not had a peep out of you in weeks—where’ve you been?”

“Out of town.”

“Were you with our mob outside Wilson House when we put the siege on the place?”

“I heard all about it. Fucking grand!” Nightminster teetered on his heels laughing, and they joined in. Good, he thought, they don’t seem unduly unfriendly. “I could have booted my own arse for missing it. The best show since they burned Buck Palace and I wasn’t there.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Julian said. “That Marko Kross is one hardened steel case. I mean, he came out of that gate and the crowd just opened.”

“That’s true!” Raj said. “Seb said he’s changed his mind about sovereigns, the Krossingtons at any rate. That was quality. Marko Kross came out like a lion and no one, and I mean no one, dared touch him.”

Their admiration did not really surprise Nightminster. During his exile at the Refuge, the marines had several times spoken with awe of how Marko Kross had accumulated a fortune relieving other sovereign clans of buckets of gold by out-sailing their best captains at Cowes, out-breeding their blood at Ascot and out-witting them at poker. He was a man closer to Nightminster than Nightminster himself liked to admit. They shared the same ethic that only boldness leads to character.

“So you’ve been away with the Krossingtons?” Raj nudged.

“After a manner of speaking. Now, I was going to get some tucker with my old folks, but if Seb wants to see me, I’ll come right over.”

“You take ‘im,” Raj said with a wink at Julian.

“It’s a flippin’ hike from here, innit? He’ll be at his bird’s place.”

“There’s the charabanc now. Just ‘op on!”

A charabanc hauled by a long team of Night and Fog was edging towards them from the direction of the Tower of London. It was one of an endless necklace of charabancs that flowed around a loop through Bermondsey, Elephant & Castle and Battersea, then north across the river through Fulham, past Hyde Park to the glory depots at Euston and King’s Cross before coming back south to Tower Bridge. Nightminster and Julian paid the driver a couple of white ones each and climbed onto a bench near the back. The view was good from the high ride, and the pace slow. Nightminster contemplated thumping Julian and making a run for it, in the end coming down against, although only on the basis of raw intuition. He did not believe a couple of thugs like Julian and Rajesh could have hidden their glee, or violence, had they believed they were capturing the shooter of Parliament Square. Not that such intuition carried guarantees. He let events carry him, while his nerves bristled. It was nearly dark by the time they jumped down onto Elephant & Castle market place, where most of the stalls had by this time shut up.

The poor of the asylum shifted in droves picking through unsold fish, meat and vegetables left out on ranks of pallets laid in the aisles between the shuttered stalls. Nightminster had never seen this before. Normally, left-overs were just dumped in a general midden on the market. He had never seen so many scavengers picking for dinner. Children with pinched faces huddled about their mothers. There was not enough to go around. Shouting decided who ate the choicest, until fighting had to decide. Hair and claws flew. Wily kids nipped in to snatch fish heads while their mothers were going at it.

"That is a terrible sight!" Nightminster was genuinely outraged.

“That’s bad economics for you. The sovereigns aren’t spending because their crops aren’t growing. It’s the weakest who get it in the neck, the poor bastards,” Julian said. “Good for our side, mind.”

“You mean, the Official SUN Party?”

“They’re flocking to us now. I’ve seen women shouting ultras down in public. I never saw that before.”

Nightminster was tempted to dish out all his cash, but decided he would only add to the angst once his wallet was empty. Charity was not the way out of this. An atomic dome to charge the arteries of commerce with electric life, an atomic lord to raze the market jungle, these would end suffering forever. These were the tasks he had set for his life. He had to remain true to himself. He had to realise Target Hundred Thousand no matter what betrayal, no matter what brutality was required.

“Are you all right?” Julian asked. “I mean, you look as if you’d wipe out the whole of humanity with one sweep of your eyes.”

“The licence of the sovereigns is the rage of my life.”

“I can see that. Seb talks about you a lot. He can’t make you out. The one thing he knows is you’re into that Rina, and I do reckon he’s quite jealous about that, cuz he ain’t getting nowhere with her.” He chuckled to himself. “But as for what the hell else you’re up to, well, don’t try to convince him you’re just some student, no monkey’s going to buy that.”

“Thanks for the advice. Shall we get on?”

It was not a surprise to Nightminster that their destination was Rafati’s pawnbroker shop. What did surprise him was that after 6 pm the shop was still so crowded that they had to wait to get in the door. Mirana, her younger brother Rostam the party fanatic and Mrs Rafati their mother were all hard at work making snap decisions about the value of an immense range of things squeezed from the households of the asylum by ‘bad economics’. The glass-topped display counter was crammed. He caught a glimpse into the back lounge piled everywhere with antiquarian books, boxes of jewellery, boxes of fountain pens, silver cutlery, porcelain figurines laid in tissue paper, vinyl records, watches and clocks, a clarinet, a trumpet, a violin, Kawasaki contact breaker points still in their gaudy Public Era packaging, paintings, bolt-action rifles and pistols and boxes of ammunition and much else. Many locals waited long only to be disappointed. A Public Era mobile phone was quite worthless, it was decades since even museums took them. Same with digital watches, laptop computers, compact disc players, widescreens, all technical marvels in their time and now junk for the lack of the digital signals that drove them. Several customers came close to fighting and had to be pulled out by a couple of heavies. On their way back in, the heavies recognised Julian and cussed him for wasting time in the queue ‘with all that lot’ when he ought to have come right in. Nightminster glanced at Mirana in passing through to the back lounge. She ignored him. His hosts picked their way across the lounge and climbed to the first floor where there was more a sense of normality.

“Oi! Seb! Big Knight and Julian are here!” one of the heavies called.

“Big Knight? You found Big Knight?” Seb Smith put his head out of the door of Mirana’s study. “Well look what the cat dragged in! You look a mite washed-out, just like I probably do.”

Seb Smith was right, he looked finished. Nightminster shook his hand, wondering at this breezy reception, given that at both their previous meetings, Smith had been anything but friendly. He remained on his guard, judging windows should a mad leap for his life be required. With it now being dark outside, he felt moderately confident he could get away if he had to.

Smith returned to a sofa at the back of the office, where he sank in, surrounded by printed reports and typewritten sheets.

“Oi! Julian! Fix Big Knight a coffee will you?” His face grew animated and he started to chatter light stuff about the trials of being a president. “If I’d known being pres involved spending all day reading and writing and being on stage every minute of life, I’d have thought twice about it, to be honest with you. What’s your view on regulating the rate of interest?”

“Economics is like pulp fiction, there’s a tale to suite every taste,” Nightminster said dryly.

“That’s what your fan Madame Edkins says. I suppose you’re both the same, all brains and facts and facing square the unpalatable truths of existence. Politics don’t work that way.”

Nightminster took a seat on the edge of the desk, which was heavily piled up with ledgers, receipts, auction house invoices and the like, and raised his palms in surrender.

“To answer your question by regurgitating what I have read; state regulation of money has an unhappy record. The general view is that manipulation of interest rates led to the Glorious Resolution by drowning the world in debt.”

“I’ve just been reading that the state should tighten its belt if something called the rate of inflation gets too high and blow a load if the rate of inflation falls too low. I’m trying to get my head around this idea of printing money like ZEEBRI running party bulletins off the presses and that money slowly melting away to nothing. That’s why they had to keep the presses running faster and faster until they couldn’t keep up and their world came crashing down. That’s just plain weird, yet seemingly that’s how the Public Era vanished.”

They talked some more. Nightminster sipped an excellent mug of coffee brought by Julian and let Seb Smith lead the discussion. Since Smith did not mention the exile, Nightminster decided to keep quiet. Smith seemed intent in establishing his credentials as being more than a mindless thug. In this respect, he succeeded. His political thrust ran that the industrial asylums should unify into one political block and issue a paper currency from a central bank of London. This would by-pass the gold famine imposed by the sovereign caste, firing a new parallel economy focused on raising wages to raise demand, which would expand production, which would raise productivity and thereby raise wages more and so on in an upwards spiral to recovery. It was similar to the economic plan touted by Banner and TK, except that they wanted to preserve gold as money.

“It will be very difficult to persuade the people to trust paper money again,” Nightminster said.

“Yeah, it will be, that’s the big problem. Anyway, I don’t suppose you’re here to talk party politics. You’ll be after seeing Her Lovely Decency Rina, isn’t that so?”

“Her clan does not make it easy for us.”

“I know they don’t. Us lot—my boys—are on quite good terms with her marines now. Come to think of it, we’re on quite good terms with the boys in black too. It’s funny how eager the ultras are to be our friends, what with so many folk in the asylums openly refusing to pay ultras tribute cuz they’re out of a job. Even funnier how the same folk are giving their tribute to us lot, the Officials, instead. They say we’re the future. What say you?”

“The future is machines—enormous machines, creating enormous power—not politics.”

“You think I’m fooling myself?”

“We have to create an electric power system for London.”

“That’s very deep. You and I have to talk some more. But at this moment I have a warning for you.” Nightminster froze up, suddenly very aware of exactly how far he had to throw himself to clear the window. He knew that below the window was the roof of a lean-to storage area. He would roll down that, hit the yard running and be out over the gate like a stag. “Something serious has come up. Both Rina and her brother Tom have told me their branch are holding a big national conference up in Oxford on May Day.”

“I’ve heard that too.”

“I’ve got bad news. I want you to pass this up the line as fair warning. Certain people in certain places have bad plans for that conference. They’re going to whack it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll come clean and admit I was wrong and you was right. I thought we’d put the slam on all the hooligans running around scaring decent folk and all that. What we’re picking up is that there’s a plan to get a mob up to Oxford to hit the city on May Day.”

After a few moments thought, Nightminster came down in the side of scepticism.

“That’s just talk. Oxford is miles from anywhere and the only way to get there is a turnpike run by the Ultramarine Guild—sixty miles of turnpike. A mob of hooligans could never reach Oxford.”

“Well you can say it’s just talk if that’s what you think, but I’m picking it up from too many different people to be quite so blasé, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“You said ‘hit the city’. What do you mean by that?”

“I mean whack the whole city—isn’t that clear enough for you?”

“Like the Sack of Magdeburg?”

“Well I’ve never heard of any Magda Bird. What I do mean is there’s a bunch working themselves up to sack Oxford. Raze it. Kill everyone. Kill all the sovereign kids and wipe out the SUN Party.”

Nightminster did not even bother to take this seriously. Merely to maintain some kind of engagement, he asked:

“What do Rina and Tom think?”

“Same as you, it’s just cobblers.”

“Who exactly are supposed to be planning this, ah, whacking?”

“There was a time they’d have been called nihilists. We’re talking about nitric acid in human form—vandals and terrorists. They haven’t a shred of positive vibe about them. All they want is to mob up and tear everything to bits. Then they get drunk, fuck lots of women and go home. That’s their idea of a good time.”

“How do you know about this?”

“I can’t exactly say—I’ve got to protect my sources. What I will say is that some of my guys have been saved from that world. I will admit that and I’ll stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any of them because they’ve sworn to put that kind of filth behind them. They may have brothers, uncles, fathers, cousins or whatever who are still involved, and little bits and pieces come in, and I take everything and make a big picture.”

“Are you certain the attack will be at Oxford on May Day?”

“Everything’s in code. I’m working on that but at the moment I know something big is planned for Oxford and all the… chat I suppose you might call it, points to the party conference.”

“Will your Official SUN Party be at this Oxford conference?”

“We’re having our own on the very same day!” He smiled and added: “That Oxford lot’s going to get the shock of their lives when most of the factory owners attend our show rather than theirs, and I don’t just mean the London ones.”

Nightminster tried to read any nuance of dishonesty in Seb Smith’s manner, but detected nothing. Either Seb Smith was telling the truth, or else he was a perfect liar.

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“You’re a trooper. You’re more worldly than any of that Oxford lot. They haven’t got a clue. I mean, the Krossington king, Marko Kross, that guy is solid steel, he really impressed me, and no sovereign was ever going to impress Seb until I met him. He came out of Wilson House like a god and my crowd fell right back. But Tom and Rina aren’t in that league, that twat Banner still less. You keep at them about the attack on their May Day do. They’ve got to take it seriously.”

So, now he was Smith’s messenger boy. Apparently he was, at least, no longer on the list of suspects for the shooter of Parliament Square. Perhaps another innocent bastard had copped it and closed the file, for appearances’ sake if nothing else? Despite being sorely tempted to ask directly how the hunt was going, Nightminster instead enquired:

“Where’s Rina at this moment?”

Seb Smith smiled again; long, wan, and not a little wistful.

“She keeps her own schedule. Last week she was working Battersea, jabbing kids by the thousand, she and her team, and my lot was rounding up the kids to get jabbed. I don’t know where she is this week.”

“I’ll be in touch. Keep up the good work.”

Nightminster was on his way to the door.

“Just a minute, just a minute, before you float off like a mist I need a home base for this mist. In all the time I’ve known you, you’ve slunk in like a cat and then beat it for weeks on end.”

“You’re mixing metaphors.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. Where do you live?”

“If my plans come to pass, I won’t be in London again for several weeks, maybe a month. Contact Johnny Albert if it’s urgent.”

“Uh-huh.” Seb Smith curled his tongue inside his cheek, obviously dissatisfied, but holding it in. “Well, look after yourself, Big Knight, and check in every week or so, I do like our chats.”

“When I’m in London, that I will do.”

Afterwards, Nightminster had time to ponder about Smith’s warning. People can change. Seb Smith had acquired a dogged grasp of economics, which was not such an easy read given all the ideological posturing. The warning could be genuine. Then again, some people do not change. The warning could be Smith’s way of covering himself against suspicion after the fact. It could be his way of telling them straight he was going to knock Oxford out of the picture. It all depended on how brazen one believed him to be.

Chapter 18

“I want two hundred and fifty Undead Nameless Gone and four Thames barges,” Nightminster announced.

Johnny Albert and Lieutenant Jordon eyed him with the bemused distraction of thugs calculating whether to they could be bothered beating hell out of a miscreant, as opposed to just telling him to get lost.

“Normally,” Johnny Albert said, words slowed by a testy patience, “it’s considered good manners to say ‘thank you’.”

Now it was Nightminster who hesitated. This situation was not his first choice for selling his benefactor a dangerous idea. They were standing in the yard of a prison camp, the very same prison camp where on a baking day last summer Johnny Albert had ordered Nightminster to relieve four freshly-hanged Night and Fog of their dog tags. Today, in the mild sunshine of an afternoon in early March, Johnny Albert and his henchman Lieutenant Jordan were executing at the same gallows, this time before an audience of perhaps two hundred Night and Fog in long ranks across the yard. Three of their fellows dangled by the neck still twitching and jolting, three more awaited their end, high on stools, eyes locked to the end of Eternity or else shut tight, their lips blurting last prayers.

“I have an idea that will give you power over the Krossingtons.” Nightminster kept his voice low.

“I’m only going to say this one more time: normally, it’s considered good manners to say ‘thank you’.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Do you know what you’re thanking me for?”

“No, Captain.”

“You can divorce your right hand, Big Knight, you’re back with the living. Isn’t it nice?”

“Yes, Captain. It’s very nice.”

Lieutenant Jordon hitched his boot up against the stool on which trembled the next Night and Fog for execution. This was a short character in his early twenties, a baby-face with a page-boy haircut. Tears streamed down his face. He was almost choking with hysteria.

“It’s not exactly humane to interrupt these proceedings with a lot of chit-chat, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Jordan said.

“Will I find this impressive?” Johnny Albert asked Nightminster.

“Yes, Captain, it’s impressive.”

Johnny Albert gave Lieutenant Jordan a nod. Lieutenant Jordon kicked the stool away and the page boy swung, retching bubbly gargles and dribbling strings of sputum from his thrust-out tongue whilst thrashing so wildly that Lieutenant Jordon had to jump clear.

“He’s a lively one!”

“Right, Big Knight, you come with me and the two of us shall have a little talk.”

They settled in the rear of his eight-wheeled limousine in a scene eerily reminiscent of the ‘education in life’ of the previous summer.

“I apologise, Captain,” Nightminster said.

“You can drop the title, Your Ascendancy, we’re friends here, you and I.”

“I was led to believe by Krossington’s marines that President Smith had forced my release.”

“He forced Victorina’s release. You’ll have heard all about that?”

“Yes.”

“Personally, I think hounding Wilson House was bloody stupid. It back-fired when Marko Krossington came out like Caesar and became a kind of folk hero. From what Victorina’s told me since, that back-fired on him in turn at their Land Council, because the head of clan should not have appeased the common people. These are strange times. Everything back-fires on someone. The question is, Big Knight, are you going to back-fire on me?”

“How was I freed?”

“After Victorina got out into the slums, she sent me a message asking after you. I spread feelers all over and couldn’t scratch up a morsel. No one had seen you in weeks. Your parents were badgering Dave Chadderton and he was just a little bit nippy with me, as if I’d done away with you. That did not improve my mood—I’ve been out of sorts with him since he cosied up with Smith and his Official SUN Party. All the big-time factory owners are being completely fooled by Smith. They’ve no idea what a scheming little shit he is. But I digress. From what Victorina told me, I fixed Marko Krossington as being the last person seen with you and sent him a message that if he didn’t cough you up, the Ultramarine Guild would boycott the clan yacht Neptune. If she turned up at any port of the Island of Britain, we ultras would plain ignore her as if she didn’t exist. She’d get no fuel or stores. Not good for clan prestige.”

“You did that for me?”

“Nope, I did it to show Marko Krossington that I’m the boss, so he can stuff his airs and graces. But it’s ever so lovely to see your pretty mug all the same.”

“The feeling’s mutual, except for the pretty mug.”

“You said you had a plan. So, impress me.”

Nightminster pulled out the map of the Refuge island he had sketched in exile. He told of the month of exile at the Refuge. Johnny Albert laughed and laughed, shaking his head.

“You always burn your fingers and you always get away with it. Damn it, you’ve got the luck of the devil!”

Nightminster now unrolled sheets of cash-flow projections for the first five years of the Value System and took Johnny Albert through them. This took a full forty-five minutes, in which Johnny Albert challenged him repeatedly, although without tripping him up. Nightminster had planned Target Hundred Thousand in great detail during the lonely weeks at Limehouse and at the Refuge.

“You’ve nailed it all right,” Johnny Albert said. “The right time and the right place. Something you won’t be aware of is that the mood amongst the London owners has become bleak. Their residents are pleading poverty, and the factories have been getting stroppy since the attacks of the autumn, saying why should they pay tribute when we didn’t protect them? Yet the owners have to order essentials like working overalls and boots for the Night and Fog from factories that openly support that little shit Smith. It’s demeaning. Your Value System will become our very own in-house supplier. I’ll stuff your business with orders from all over London. There won’t be any ethical issues using Undead Nameless Gone as labour.”

Nightminster hoped he did not look as smug as he felt.

“You say you want four of my Thames barges?” Johnny Albert added.

“I’ll need them as prison ships until there’s a secure barracks on the island. After that I’ll need them to take more Undead Nameless Gone in and freight out.”

“I thought you said there’s no way out of this place?”

“There isn’t. I need to keep the Undead Nameless Gone safe from the locals.”

“I get you. Well, there’s an important issue we have to nail down; how we split the profits.”

“I take all the profits and distribute according to merit.”

“That’s not how business works and you bloody well know it. How much are you sinking into this?”

“All I have: four and a half thousand ounces.”

“A tidy sum for a lad, but only a twig in the woodpile needed to get a business this size off the ground.”

“It was my idea. Only I know where the Refuge is. Only I can occupy it peacefully.”

“None of that counts after Day 1. Building a business is both a science and an art. The science is in these numbers, you have to turn a profit. The art is in the leadership. It’s not enough to shout at people, they have to believe in you. You have to be their fortress. Are you certain you’re up to that?

“Yes.”

“Seriously? You’re just a big kid, I mean really, you’re eighteen. Every one of my lieutenants has a son older than you.”

“Then try one of them.”

“What’s really behind this? I’ve never read you as an organiser. You’ve never led a gang or shown the slightest interest in being an officer. You’re the original lone wolf.”

This point had troubled Nightminster. Of all the struggles to build the Value System, the one he feared most was winning the contempt of his own staff.

“Up until now, I’ve never had to lead others to achieve my highest ambitions. Now my ambitions have sprouted too many zeroes and I can’t proceed alone. I will lead by energy and example.”

“Oh, I’d never question your determination. It’s just that we’re looking at a slave labour camp my Catholic upbringing inclines me to compare with Purgatory. These are darkest ambitions, Big Knight.”

“It’s a means to an end.”

“How many of my guys will you need?”

“Fifty, to begin with.”

“And what’s the wage bill for fifty experienced men?”

“About four and a half thousand ounces per month.”

“That’s your little twig gone—in one month. You’re asking me to put in a bomb and send my guys to this back-of-beyond swamp where they might get malaria for all I know, and you seriously expect to take all the profits and dish them out according to your feelings?”

“The money’s not for me personally. I don’t need anything. I already have all I need; a nice house, a nice motorbike and a fiancée fit to be my queen.”

“Where are you going with this, Big Knight? You’ve really got me flummoxed. I’m not putting a pennyweight into this until I understand exactly what makes you tick.”

Nightminster had never told Johnny Albert about his atomic dream. Now he did. He spoke of the atomic dome that would rise as pale and beautiful as St Paul’s Cathedral, how its heat and power would barge aside the sovereigns, how the atomic lord would rule a clean and just society. There would be streets of light, the factories would breed machines to liberate the wretches who scratched existence from the earth of the sovereigns. Dank hovels would brighten to cosy homes. Just as steam from blazing coal had primed the Public Era, so atomic steam would fuse London into the diamond of the world. At times he struggled to control his emotions recalling the degrading poverty of Elephant & Castle market the previous evening. This exposition had a visible effect on Johnny Albert. His faced softened. A peculiar, shy smile appeared, which Nightminster had never seen before.

“It’s a rare thing to get a share from the mind of a visionary,” Johnny Albert said. “Now I know something I didn’t know before, and it’s not easy to decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. You’re a fanatic. Of all the varieties of the human animal none is more dangerous than the fanatic. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You’ve set yourself a tremendous endeavour in life. I’m honoured to be a part of it. So I’ll tell you how we’ll play this. The money will be mine until I’ve got back what I put in. After that it’s yours, all yours. And we’ll be friends for all time. Good friends. Deal?”

“Deal,” Nightminster said. Several seconds passed in which he had to adjust mentally to being a dreamer no longer. Now he was a grand actor. “Could you help me get a bit of quality time with Victorina?”

“Her guards are on her like fleas.”

“I’ve had an idea.”

“Christ, I was afraid of that.”

Chapter 19

Nightminster let the big vehicle drift in neutral until it rolled to a stop surrounded by daffodils and bluebells of spring. Its engine panted at idle. Ahead, the highway marked on the Public Era road atlas as the two carriageways of the A3 trunk road disappeared into the maws of pitch-dark tunnels running under a densely-wooded hillside. He craned about to speak into the cabin behind.

“Has this beast got headlights?”

“We call them ‘floods’ as we use them for night parades, not driving,” Johnny Albert said. “It’s the third switch along on your right—don’t hit the second, or you’ll fire the smoke screen.”

Nightminster flicked the switch. The engine laboured under the additional load, although in the bright sunshine he discerned not the slightest effect. He set Johnny Albert’s eight-wheeled armoured limousine in motion again, holding to a cautious 20 mph in third as the vehicle slid into the mouth of the concrete tunnel. Now he started to see fans of light ahead. Their intensity crispened as daylight faded behind and the armoured limousine moved inside its own little world surrounded by concrete, rock, the roar of the twelve-cylinder engine and their private sunlight. The interior of the tunnel was clear of vegetation and bone dry, although so carpeted with dust and dried animal dung left by drovers that the eight tyres rolled silently as if on velvet. There was a strong smell of urea and animal pens.

“I’m impressed the concrete has never cracked,” Nightminster said. From the navigator’s seat beside him, Lieutenant Telford said:

“Probably never will. Public Era quality. Their concrete stuff will still be here in a thousand years, same as Roman stuff.”

Nightminster speeded up to 30 mph, still well within the long beams cast by the floods. The first glow of light appeared around the curvature of the tunnel. It grew until Nightminster could switch off the floods and then they were back out squinting in blazing sunshine. A slip-road curved up the hillside on the left to a concrete bridge that spanned the two carriageways.

“That’s the turn-off to Haslemere,” Nightminster said.

“It is,” Lieutenant Telford said.

“You said the Land Council of Krossington is meeting today.”

“I did.”

“I’d love to see Marko Kross get eaten alive.”

Everyone in the limousine broke out in hearty laughter, Johnny Albert, his girlfriend Cissy, Victorina, and her bodyguards Telford and Ogilvy.

“Unfortunately, you can’t just peer through the windows, or I’d do it myself,” Victorina said.

“Have you ever been?”

“The last time was about two years ago when Tom and I turned up and got shouted at for being Marxist traitors, so we’ve never been back.”

“Don’t chance your arm,” Telford said, to Nightminster. “Haslemere is awash with marines when Land Council is in session. We’ve all got copies of your photo. If you’re seen there with Her Decency, I don’t like to think what would happen. His Decency Marcus-John will be fighting for his job as it is.”

“Why?”

“After the siege of Wilson House, the Land Council mobbed him for being too popular with the masses of London. They accused him of degrading the Lands of Krossington by pandering to the common people. They even had a vote on whether to change the name of their lands, although they couldn’t agree what else to call themselves, so they kept as is—if you’ve seen kids squabbling over cookies, you’ve seen enough. His Decency Marcus-John lost even more face when he had to release you after, I quote, ‘a common gangster twisted his balls’. Amongst us marines, he’s seen as a busted duck. We never really forgave him for whipping Her Decency after the trouble at Bermondsey. That was downright uncivilized.”

“By tonight there could be a new head of clan?”

“Quite possibly.”

“Who might take his place?”

“Good question. If it happens, it’ll be a revolution. Nothing will stay the same.”

Nightminster was careful to hide his alarm. Johnny Albert and he had spent recent days in meticulous preparation for the occupation of the Refuge, selecting the most suitable ultramarine troops from those who had applied for ‘a challenging and adventurous enterprise requiring shifts of several weeks outside London’ and gathering Undead Nameless Gone at a warehouse at the Port of Erith. The possibility of the Land Council hurling their plans to the winds had never occurred to either of them.

“What are the chances?” he asked, casually.

“It’s impossible to say, given the caprices of spoiled children. There’s nothing you or I, or anyone else outside, or even inside, the Land Council can do about it. So don’t waste time figuring.”

Nightminster returned his attention to avoiding the larger birch and rowan trees that had established on this section of the old highway where it ran through heavily wooded hills deep in the Lands of Krossington. This beast, Johnny Albert’s limousine, was a fine way to travel. All eight wheels steered and drove. The marvellous twelve-cylinder engine had torque like a steam winch. Add to that power steering, and its fifteen tons disappeared. The only aspect not to like was the fuel bill. Johnny Albert said the beast used a gallon of camphine every two miles—on good roads, even more cross-country.

Officially, Johnny Albert was taking Her Decency Victorina on a pleasure trip to Portsmouth in pursuit of diplomatic goodwill. That his driver happened to be Sergeant P.W. Nightminster was not a matter her bodyguards could control. They could have refused to let her go, but that would have been undiplomatic. So here they were on their way to the seaside. He was looking forward with relish to getting there. Victorina and he would enjoy a little quality time together, courtesy of the Owner of Portsmouth, who was a ‘good friend’ of Johnny Albert.

*

The skyline of Portsmouth was markedly in contrast to that of London. Most of the skyscrapers still stood intact. The reason was quite simple. A range of hills along the coast prevented Portsmouth skyscrapers from offending sovereign privacy, and there were no sovereign palaces in the city to be aggrieved, so most of the towering buildings had survived.

The palace of the Owner of Portsmouth was the tallest skyscraper that was left. The lower part was a concrete box just like ZEEBRI, although at smaller scale. These levels were a multi-storey car park, as ZEEBRI had once been. On top of this block stood a monolithic slab like a grave stone adding twelve more storeys. Johnny Albert explained the structure had been a hotel in the Public Era. It made a fabulous palace, having lots of garaging and storage space for ammunition and field guns ‘inherited’ from the nation state. The Owner of Portsmouth was all too aware his estate made a tempting target for pirates and other nasties from the English Channel and was well-equipped to see them off with long-range artillery.

Neither Nightminster nor Victorina paid a great deal of attention to the pleasantries of social lubrication or the luxurious interiors as they were led up and up inside the palace of the Owner of Portsmouth. They were taken skywards in a kind of steel room called an elevator to the topmost floor. Their hosts were not so mean as to linger with the couple at their destination. All of a sudden, Nightminster and Victorina were alone in the so-called penthouse suite making lascivious faces at each other. Nightminster stepped up to Victorina until her breasts met his stomach.

“Have you ever seen a rhinoceros?”

“We’ve got them on our game reserve in Scotland.”

“Then you’ll know what’s at the end of its snout.”

She cackled as he grabbed her about the waist, hurled her over his shoulder and marched towards exactly the right location for a first session, a tiger-skin rug in front of the fireplace.

*

“I wonder what Marko would say, if he could see us now?”

Victorina was lying on him, her head over his heart. She continued to stare into space as she replied.

“He’ll be striding up and down the stage of the Haslemere theatre shouting at the kids, and the kids will be shouting back. It’s just a noisy pantomime.”

“I have to go away soon, out of London.”

“Why?”

Her voice took a sharper edge. She lifted her head to study him at point-blank range.

“I’m starting a business, a big one.”

“A business? What exactly is a business?”

It could not be such a naive question as it first appeared, since half a minute later he was still thinking how to answer.

“It’s a kind of game. It unites a team to achieve something greater than they are in themselves. It has one divine rule; the outside world must give the players more gold than they give back to the outside world.”

“Then it would take all the gold in the world!”

“There’s another side of the game; the gold kept in the business flows to the shareholders and they spend it back into the world. That’s how the money-go-round works.”

“Is this your atomic fantasy?”

“It’s no fantasy.”

“Tom told me it’s a hopeless daydream.”

“Tom isn’t an engineer.”

“An atomic dome is actually going to rise over London?”

“This business will produce leather goods and food.”

“Is that your sales pitch?”

Her flippant tones were starting to irk him. Probably one of sovereign background, however progressive, just could not grasp the serious aspiration of a new business.

“After this weekend I’ll be out of London at least to the end of March, maybe longer.”

“And I’m to behave myself?”

“By all means take up with Seb Smith.”

She expressed something between a groan and a gasp of disgust.

“I’m sure his heart’s in the right place, but he’s so coarse. I’ve no idea what Mirana Rafati sees in him. She’s really a most poised individual. She makes him look like a backstreet lout who’s rote-learned some big words.”

This was a good point. Nightminster could not understand what Mirana saw in Smith either, unless she was captivated by an illusion he was some backstreet messiah. On the other hand, Nightminster rated Smith far higher than a parrot.

“The mistake you make—I mean collective ‘you’: Banner and TK as well—is to underrate him. He may not talk pwoppah wot like we do, but he’s working a clever plan to gain power over the whole SUN Party and then over the whole Island of Britain.”

Victorina just rolled off onto her back, laughing. She propped herself against the tiger’s head of the rug.

“You’re jealous lest he beats the atomic lord?” She gave him a prod in the ribs.

“He told you the May Day conference will be attacked. He told me too, as none of you took him seriously.”

“Do you take him seriously?”

“I’m not sure what to think.” He recalled the conviction of Account-Captain Roberts that a clique of the Krossington clan was organising the hooligan gangs through eunuch agents to discredit Smith, or perhaps the entire SUN Party. Who could really know what was going on? “I do advise you proceed with care. Choose a venue in central Oxford, somewhere with few entrances, easy to defend.”

“There’s no chance of getting anywhere in the city. We’re trying to negotiate space in part of the old Cowley motor works. Parts of it are still used as a weaving mill by one of Banner’s acquaintances from his Soho days. I suppose a factory is an appropriate venue, really, for what we want to do.”

Nightminster’s mind drifted. Her casual dismissal of his atomic dream rankled. She might have shown faith in him, even if she possessed zero technical knowledge.

“Your clan owns the Centre for Science and Technology here in Portsmouth,” he said.

“Grandad Wilson founded it to conserve Public Era techno-magic. It’s turned out to be a waste of time. Most visitors can’t make head nor tail of what they’re looking at. Even blatant things like jet airliners are too different from our flying boats to make sense, so you can forget about mobile phones or Internet routers.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“We’ll go tomorrow.” She was crawling back onto his chest. He peeked at his watch. It was only half past two. There was time for a another sesh and still get to see the museum before dinner. He turfed her on her back and ripped her shirt open. Buttons flew.

“That’s my only shirt!”

“You can go home topless.”

*

The Krossington Centre for Science and Technology occupied the largest building in Portsmouth. Nightminster learned it had been a shipyard to build cruisers and destroyers for the Royal Navy of the Public Era nation state. Now it was a spectacular museum preserving artefacts of those times. The entry fee of 11 pennyweights, (4 pennyweights for children of 12 or under) would make it a rare treat for ordinary working people of the city. Most visitors were moneyed and had travelled from far and wide. A party of French youth with chaperones had arrived by schooner from St Nazaire in France (he gathered by overhearing their chatter). They spoke with a certain pomp and ponderousness, from which Nightminster deduced they were the Gallic equivalent of sovereigns. He also heard accents from Scotland, the Midlands and Cornwall. He heard Gaelic speakers from Wales and Brittany. He heard speakers of Dutch.

In the museum foyer, Victorina and he encountered a large portrait of Marcus-John Krossington. It presented a younger version at the time of his taking the top job three years previously. Since then, exasperation, frustration and stress had thinned his hair and cut lines of intolerance about his mouth.

Nightminster decided to follow the French party to scrape their chat for news from abroad. The first department was motor cars, rank upon rank of gleaming sheet-metal creations, so lovingly styled, yet the pressed-steel bodies were only skins concealing ugly masses of wires, pipes, levers and casings. Victorina commented how odd it was the Fatted Masses had never seen this feint.

“I think that sums up the Fatted Masses,” Nightminster said. He was growing impatient with the French group. Their chatter was banal, and he was not here to look at old sheet-metal motor cars. One titbit he picked up was that highway bandits were ambushing motor cars on country roads around the city of Nantes, where they were first-year history students at the university. He also heard there had been food riots by les plébés, the commoners, around the city docks. The city’s gendarmerie had dispersed the mob with chlorine grenades and grapeshot.

The French students moved on to aviation, which was getting closer to what really interested Nightminster. Victorina and he made a slow circuit of the famous jet airliner, prize exhibit of the whole museum. At first sight, he mistook it to be some kind of immense agricultural machine, due to its tiny wheels set close together and engines like whirling threshers for sucking in crops. He stood beside one of the main undercarriage legs, overwhelmed by tyres hard as wood splayed out by the weight of the giant, the thick steel legs and struts, the deep well in the wing, snarled with pythons of wires and shiny steel tubes, into which the whole lot retracted. They stared into the engines, which had mouths big enough to stand in and contained metal flowers with keen-edged petals like sabres. A plaque told them the machine weighed 250 tons fully loaded (of which 100 tons was kerosene fuel) and climbed to eight miles of altitude where the temperature was -55 deg C. In that frigid thin air the turbofan engines and swept wings were very efficient. Victorina and he were much less impressed by the interior, which repelled them with its claustrophobic cram of tight-packed seats and low ceiling.

“You get more room on a charabanc,” Nightminster said.

“And fresh air. It must have stunk in here with so many people.”

“They washed more than we do, and they had cheap scent.”

“Cheap scent stinks.”

“I suppose they were used to crowding.”

Crowding was the main theme of the next section, which showed montages of the sheer populousness of the Public Era, the ultimate tragedy of species success. Endless torrents flooding subway systems, strange pulsations of mobs alternating with bursts of motor cars at intersections, beaches packed with bodies and sunshades for miles, avenues as wide as the River Thames solid wall-to-wall with milling people. The two of them laughed at a film of super-long wagons not only stuffed full of people, but so festooned with more sitting on the roofs and hanging off the sides that it took the appearance of a hairy caterpillar. That was Public Era transport in the nation state of India.

“Do you get the impression,” Nightminster asked, “that this museum is subtle propaganda for an empty world?”

“Grandad Wilson would never have intended it that way. He’s not like that. But it’s true almost all of my clan like things the way they are. Empty and quiet.”

“Do you ever suspect the Glorious Resolution was devised to end all this? To destroy the mobs and the noise and the spoiling of Nature, to wipe the world clean for an élite caste of survivors to enjoy all to themselves?”

“I doubt there’s a thinking person who hasn’t suspected that at some point. That’s what Banner believes. But Tom thinks the Public Era was doomed by self-satisfaction, just as an alcoholic is doomed by drink. It was baked into the cake from the beginning.”

“I wonder if we’ll make the same mistake.”

In a few days’ time he would lead a fleet of four barges to fire a renaissance that would never end. From the Value System would rise the atomic dome, and from the atomic dome would rise a new London rich with machines, and from that city would flourish a new international society. Would it last? In truth, he would never know. He would be dead long before the renaissance had proceeded far, but their great-grandchildren might live to see its full glory. He put an arm around Victorina and ushered her along to the section he had come to see, nuclear technology. He knew the museum displayed a mock-up of a nuclear reactor.

This part of the museum unnerved his dreams more than any other. There was a detailed model of the Heysham E nuclear power station, at which Maurice and Vicky Krossington had worked before the Glorious Resolution. At first sight, it looked like so much spaghetti tossed over a Magpie’s nest. With some diligence, he was able to use the numbered key to unravel its complexity, a bit. He still found it incomprehensible that what should be a pretty simple thing required such a heap of guts. He suspected much of it was artificial complexity due to the silly dread of radiation that was common in the Public Era.

An usher passed to say the museum would be shutting in fifteen minutes. Nightminster was beginning to think of dinner and another sesh anyway, and they ambled back to the foyer. He was still angry and puzzled by what he had seen. Under those emotions was growing a heavy dread that TK might be right; the atomic dream he had committed his life to might be impossible. Yet his forceful side railed against such defeatism. The impossible was a matter of time and willpower. Not long ago, a secret estate in the Fens had been an impossible dream, now it was about to happen. He must hold the faith!

They arrived in the foyer just in time to see a couple of attendants heft the portrait of Marcus-John Krossington between them and carry it away via a small doorway into some nether world of things not fit for public view. In place of the portrait hung a placard with some stencilled text on it. Victorina and he floated over, neither quite believing what they feared must be true. The placard read:

Following a vote of no confidence by the Land Council on Friday 10th March 2073, our Lands of Krossington have been passed to the care of the Appointed Regent. He will administer our lands until a new head of clan is chosen, in accordance with the constitution of the Lands of Krossington.

“Oh my God,” Victorina said. “Now everything is going to be turned upside-down.” She must have seen the expression of raw consternation on Nightminster’s face, as she added sourly: “It’s not your problem, you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“We’ve got to get back to London,” he said.

Chapter 20

The four Thames sailing barges cleared the Lower Hope of the Thames Estuary to enter the North Sea at around 3 pm of the next day. Nightminster stood by the helmsman of the lead barge, for the first time in his life wearing the black uniform of an ultramarine, indeed, the very same uniform he had refused to wear last summer. Johnny Albert had kept it all these months. He had known he would land his man in the end, even if he had to admit the circumstances were a total revelation.

Nightminster was struggling not to fall asleep on his feet, for he had known not an instant free of wrenching stress and frustration in the last twenty-four hours. Very fortunately, the four necessary barges were already at the Port of Erith, as were the gathered Undead Nameless Gone. Persuading fifty ultramarine troops to drop their lives and depart for the wilderness had required a stirring sales pitch from a teenager most of them knew nothing about, beyond that their owner Johnny Albert eulogised him. Then there were all the stores to be loaded, under cover of darkness, at a half-rotten quay a few hundred yards outside the main Port of Erith to minimise unwanted attention. The transfer and loading of the Undead Nameless Gone had been accomplished using enclosed cattle wagons, the cargo under pain of death to remain silent.

Now the fleet was at sea and he was alone in command. His uniform bore no badges of rank. A cane tucked under the right arm was the only symbol of office. He knew perfectly well the fifty ultramarine troopers aboard the barges were snickering behind their cuffs at his pretensions. Worse, a few of them, especially the older under-sergeants and master sergeants, could not hide in face-to-face discourse their private contempt of this overgrown teenager so impudent as to seek an estate of his own. These observations set off a storm of suspicions in Nightminster’s imagination. What had Johnny said to these senior troopers in private? Just chuck the kid in with the Undead Nameless Gone once you’ve found this place? What was to stop that happening? The answer opened a frightening chasm beneath his feet. Only his personal force.

In his life, he had learned that no sane person is immune to fear. Courage is how a person uses their fear. He concentrated on the strengths at his disposal. Johnny had selected seasoned troopers between the ages of 25 and 45 who required little instruction to get things done. Nightminster had already struck up a rapport of sorts with one of the younger ones, a powerfully built leading heeler with the moniker London (all the ultramarines disguised their real names with nick-names). London was a phlegmatic Scot from the Port of Leith near Edinburgh, possessing the build and gruff manner of a bulldog. Nightminster had observed the Undead Nameless Gone shifted lively when he was running them.

And the barges were excellent vessels for the business to come. Being a hundred feet long and twenty-four wide they were proper ships with spacious decks one could wander about on. They bashed through the swell at 10 knots just nodding languidly at the horizon. There were ratlines one could scramble up to a crow’s nest from which a ship twenty miles away could be seen in clear weather. Each barge was armed with a 37mm Browning machine cannon in an armoured well forward of the helm and there were two more mountings behind the leeboards for MG42 machine guns (the massive steel leeboards doubled as armour plating for the gunners). Below the deck of each barge were cells to house fifty Undead Nameless Gone, a spacious hold and a modest crew’s quarters. Nightminster and the other dozen ultramarines on the ‘flagship’ barge had set up camp beds in the hold, as the crew’s quarters were only meant for two men and a dog, despite the size of the barge.

The two professional seamen made smart work of the trip. By next morning the barge was already almost half-way to the Refuge, having run through the night. Nightminster permitted the Undead Nameless Gone on deck for the first time, in batches of ten for half an hour’s fresh air.

It was through this order that he faced the first surprise, and first test of character, of the expedition. He had been standing in the bow studying the coast of Norfolk about ten miles distant to port, hoping to identify the dome of the old Sizewell nuclear power plant he knew still existed along this stretch of coast. Unsuccessful, there being haze, he lowered the binoculars, took a sip of hot tea handed him moments earlier by a heeler, and glanced towards movement by the hatch of the main hold. It was the Undead Nameless Gone taking exercise, shuffling around the hatch in their chains. He looked straight into the eyes of Billy Nieuport, his old comrade from the City of London 2nd Reserves. Billy Nieuport, along with his pal Veitch Thomas, had lifted Nightminster at the Parliament Square riot in order to shoot Jumping Jackson. Then they had sneaked away to Johnny Albert’s ultramarine garrison. Now that same Billy was here in the Undead Nameless Gone!

Nightminster turned away and did not look sternwards again until the master sergeant had hailed in that batch of Night and Fog. Was Veitch Thomas also in the load? Keeping it casual, Nightminster descended through a hatch into the hold where a crate of files lay by his camp bed. He explored the personnel files it contained. A quick check brought up the file of Nieuport and then Veitch Thomas too.

The ultramarines were not martyrs to bureaucracy as the glory trusts were. Billy’s ultramarine ‘personnel record’ amounted to an artist’s portrait sketch and some hand-written sheets in Johnny Albert’s jabby, slanted Roundhand. He had written up an assessment following an interview (the day after the Parliament Square rally) that Billy was diligent, came from a good home, had good references from school and had proved an accomplished trooper with General Wardian. He could be expected to achieve at least the rank of under-sergeant with experience. To this Johnny Albert had added a later note dated 6th March, in a different shade of ink and hastier hand, that Billy’s conduct had lately fallen far beneath that acceptable and he had been ‘permanently transferred’. The same dates and wording featured in Veitch Thomas’ file.

In all of Nightminster’s planning for the Value System, the possibility that former comrades might pass under his command as Undead Nameless Gone had never entered his head. What was Johnny Albert up to? It was rare for ultramarines to so disgrace themselves as to end up condemned to death. It could only have happened following the severest violation. In the absence of details, all Nightminster could do was manage the situation. Certainly he must not show the slightest favouritism. Sooner or later, he would have to carry out executions—that was the unavoidable duty of one who was the de facto sovereign of the Value System. The Undead Nameless Gone must be treated as exactly what they were, the walking dead in Purgatory.

He replaced the files, put the cases of Nieuport and Thomas to the back of his mind and returned to his duties as ‘grand admiral’.

Having the prevailing winds astern most of the way and no severe weather, their barge reached the vicinity of the Value System off the north coast of Norfolk before nightfall, all without a drop of oil burned. This speedy passage enhanced Nightminster’s admiration of the effectiveness of these traditional working boats. In contrast, the two seamen did not admire the strange muddy waters around them, swirling across hidden shoals and breaking over shallows. They were fully in agreement that this Krossington choice of retreat from the world was aptly selected. No skipper in their right mind would bring a vessel into this dead end except to visit the Value System, and even at that, the crewmen were still not sure about being in their right minds.

Nightminster ordered the barge wait out the night well offshore to let the other three barges catch up. The barge had no engine, therefore it needed to keep plenty of sea downwind. The next morning found them becalmed in fog, until a biting bastard of breeze from the east blew it away and the four vessels could spot each other and gather. Nightminster then visited the other barges to go over his occupation plan one last time, shuttling amongst the vessels in a bobbing dory rowed by the deft arms of the skipper’s mate.

Success hung on the first few seconds of contact. If a gunfight broke out with the Lighthouse Watch of the Refuge, the Value System was born dead, and Nightminster’s bid for Target Hundred Thousand would remain forever the dream of a loser.

*

What they were about to do was prosecute an invasion, however one dressed it up. Nightminster was all too aware that any direct challenge to the Krossington marine garrison would ignite a bloody firefight. They were proud, professional troops and would stand by their duties unto death. Therefore, his plan avoided challenging them directly, although it would still be necessary for him, as the leader, to put himself in the line of fire. The critical point was that the current shift of the Lighthouse Watch was led by Lieutenant Krefeld, a martinet not overly popular with his own men, let alone with Nightminster.

From deep in the hull of the barge came a granular sound like squeezing a sandbag. Those on board felt themselves keeling forward as the barge stopped and all had to take a pace to steady themselves. The skipper prodded over the side with a wooden pole.

“We’re fast on sand,” he said. “Water’s about two and a half foot deep.”

Nightminster sat up in the bows on the bowsprit. He could see nothing in the darkness. Although it was near high tide, they might have grounded on a bar half a mile from the sea defence dyke. There followed several minutes of clank-clanking as the crew lowered the towering mast using the hand winch. This meant there was no chance of a lookout on the roof of the Refuge spotting the mast and rigging once daylight came. The barge was now safe from detection until the morning patrol of the Lighthouse Watch walked the sea defence dyke between 8 and 9 am. This should give the prospective tenants time to execute their ‘acceptance plan’.

Nightminster’s wristwatch did not have luminous hands. Therefore, he had to walk back to the helm from time to time to check the chronometer inside the binnacle. At first he thought the light was late in coming, until around 6:20 he saw a vague edge in the sky ahead of them. It took him a few moments to grasp that they had grounded right at the base of the sea defence dyke, and the edge he could see was the crest of it. The first dark-grey screen of daylight was creeping around the curvature of the earth from the sun still below the horizon. Having retrieved a brand-new pig-skin briefcase from its wrappings under his camp bed in the hold, he pulled the shore party together and they descended by rope-ladder to the hard-packed clay shore. They climbed the flank of the dyke to face the prevailing wind blowing off the marshes into their faces. It was surprisingly warm and carried potent scents of myrtles and mints from the boggy hinterland. This ’breath of life’ infused a heady optimism into the party of just four troopers: Nightminster, Leading Heeler London, Master Sergeant Shiny and Heeler Bradford Barney. Volunteers for the Acceptance Party had not been in short supply—every one of the fifty troopers had wanted a place. It was important that the party be kept small so as not to be perceived as a threat. In the end, Nightminster made the selection by drawing lots.

The barge had made its landfall by dead reckoning and so to begin with, they did not know their location. As there were no immediate landmarks, Nightminster chose to head west to reconnoitre along the sea defence dyke for about fifteen minutes in the hope of finding something he recognised. Within a few paces, he knew they were not near the Refuge. There was no path along the dyke, which meant this stretch was not patrolled by the Lighthouse Watch. However, after swishing through long grass for about five minutes, not much troubled about noise due to the nearby rush of the surf, the dyke declined to a muddy shore where they found their way blocked by a channel. They could see in the grey light a far shore only about thirty yards away, so close that the bands of surf almost met in the middle. This was not the Tidal Basin, rather, an inlet he did not recognise. He knew if he lingered dithering, he would succumb to panic in front of the other three, so he just set off at his fastest march to investigate the inlet, his boots squelching in the mud. Tucked out of sight from the open sea was a timber jetty and some kind of hut. On getting closer, he saw the hut was a shipping container, certainly not abandoned as it was painted matt dark green to blend in to the surrounding snarls of gorse bushes. Could this be a little-used outpost of the Refuge he had never been shown? Once they reached the jetty, they saw immediately a cart track leading off through the gorse bushes almost parallel with the coast, just edging a little inland into the distance.

“Let’s chance this lane takes us to the Refuge,” Nightminster murmured. He estimated London was solid, but Shiny and Bradford Barney peered down the lane uneasily. They shifted about like nervous colts. “Do not concern yourselves with the locals.” Nightminster patted the pocket of his leather overcoat, which contained his Beretta. “To them, guns are some kind of magic death ray. Shoot first and forget!”

“The gunfire will alert the marines,” London said.

“Better than getting your dick sawn off by a savage with a flint dagger.”

London shrugged. He looked at Bradford Barney. “You remind me of a lamb getting buggered by an Alsatian.”

“And you look like—”

Nightminster batted both their chests to cut the crap and set out at a brisk rate on his long legs. The track was hard-packed gravel somewhat grassed over with lack of use, on which they could move with little noise. They walked quickly. Time yawned. Nightminster fretted, his face burning with exasperation as they reached each kink in the lane only to find another quarter mile opening ahead. The bushland thickened into woodland. Nightminster exerted every fibre of self-control to resist the impulse to stop, to give up. He was seeing a savage bowman behind every tree they passed. They walked surrounded by boughs twisted and tortured by decades of gales. He kept checking back to ensure everyone was together. He was worried about Bradford Barney in particular, whose eyes were starting to roll on the verge of panic. There were some whiffs of wood smoke. The smell grew stronger. They could see smoke drifting visibly across the track ahead. Through the trees they heard singing and strange cries, possibly of women, apparently chanting. The atmosphere of primeval ignorance sickened Nightminster. What a place of barbaric superstitions he had chosen as the setting of his dreams! He heard London swearing under his breath. In the back of his mind was stirring a dread that his highest ambitions had led him into a trap along with fifty men whose survival hung off his lucky guesses.

The trees thinned and they could see into a village of circular huts with conical thatched roofs. Children scampered about. A pregnant young woman squatted by a camp fire. The four ultramarines ducked and slowed. Nightminster drifted back to Bradford Barney, reassured to find he was perking up with excitement. Oddly, the sight of other humans seemed to have reassured him. The trees thickened again and they left the smoke behind. They passed through a grove of tall pine trees to reach a footbridge across one of the tidal channels of the type Nightminster recalled cut the island of the Refuge into sections. He did not recognise the bridge, although when they emerged through the trees on the far side he cursed with joy. He was looking across an expanse of grass kept cropped by a flock of sheep. There stood the Refuge a quarter mile away. They had to cross the open grass, which they did with as much dignity as one can manage looking back every ten seconds for signs of unpleasant pursuit.

He was amazed to see by his watch that the time was only just after quarter past seven. He had been suppressing the natural urge to keep checking the time, and in his imagination the minutes had been tumbling away in spate. They had managed their arrival perfectly. All six marines of the Lighthouse Watch would be together at breakfast. They always ate together. The four ultramarines took a few moments to check each other’s uniforms. There was little they could do about muddy boots but wipe them on the grass. Nightminster pointed out a dash of mud on London’s left trouser leg, and London brushed some pollen fluff off Nightminster’s shoulder where he had grazed a bush.

“Okay, get set, at attention, action!”

Nightminster stepped up to the steel door and rapped it with the edge of a silver Britannia coin. After about half a minute the electric light over the doorway clicked on. He imagined an eye peering at him through the black fish-eye peep lens in the door. To add an air of levity, his three comrades leaned forward, smiling and waving. They heard the locking bars retract with a thud and the door swung open upon a Krossington marine Nightminster recognised, Sergeant Burton. He was the perfect caricature of a sergeant to a degree that could only be meant with irony. The bushy moustache ended in two waxed tips, perfectly vertical and matched, sharp as spikes. The heavy brows furrowed in permanent dissatisfaction. The large head, broad shoulders and meaty hands diminished the .45 calibre pistol at his hip to a child’s toy. From the bindings of the puttees, to the belt buckle, to the Krossington coat of arms in the cap badge, the man shone with freshly-buffed brass. Scents of soap and bacon wafted through the doorway around him.

“Good morning, Sergeant. Apologies we didn’t get here yesterday, we didn’t quite catch the tide and only got ashore early this morning.”

Sergeant Burton had not moved a muscle since opening the door. If he slammed the door in their faces, the show was over. His eyes were busy, flickering about, taking in rank insignia, finishing with Nightminster’s impressive, broad-brimmed officer’s cap and the gold jaguar badge of the Owner of Bermondsey on his tunic lapel. Burton would not know exactly what it meant, although he probably guessed it was a badge of favour.

“Just four of you, Mr Nightminster? That’s light company for these parts.”

“The full complement will be coming ashore about now.” Nightminster could only hope that the other barges were ashore, not scattered along the coast, and disembarking the gangs of Undead Nameless Gone to start work and work bloody hard. The gangs had to achieve an impression of overwhelming industriousness.

“What might that complement be?”

“Two hundred Night and Fog with fifty overseers. Look, you are supposed to have been fully briefed.” He held up the immaculate pig-skin briefcase. “I’m sure there is a more amenable place to get the formalities done.”

“I’m sure there is, sir.”

At this moment, and possibly this proved to be the critical interruption, from the woods behind there came crackling of leaves and four marsh warriors strode into view aiming directly for the ultramarines. The warriors wore the usual attire of deerskin breeches and comical rabbit hats with flopping ears. Instantly Sergeant Burton’s face contorted with fury.

“Get back! Get back you varmint!”

Bradford Barney came within a couple of paces of being grabbed by the leading two warriors, who came on with a terrifying, silent intent. Nightminster flinched at a flash and bang overhead—Sergeant Burton had fired his Browning .45 in the air. The marsh warriors froze, their gaze rapt on the muzzle of the pistol as it lowered and aimed at the face of the leader.

“Get from sight, varmint.”

The marsh warriors retreated, slowly, sullenly, their eyes still fixed on the Browning. Sergeant Burton said:

“Best if you all come in and we’ll sort out what’s what.”

“What’s going on, Sergeant?”

Lieutenant Krefeld hastened to the entrance as Nightminster was stepping in.

“Well, well! Mr Nightminster! One moment the exile, next the grand ultramarine! That is a fine uniform, I do have to say, very well cut. We weren’t expecting you back so soon—and in such fine company too!”

Nightminster affected a pose of complete astonishment.

“But my operation starts today! I’ve got all the paperwork.” He held up the briefcase again.

“Is everyone safe inside?”

“Yes, there’s just the four of us.”

“Secure the portal, Sergeant Burton.”

Sergeant Burton shoved the door closed and threw the locking lever over. He shook his head and addressed Bradford Barney.

“Sorry about letting them get close, they don’t normally come on so fearless like that.”

“They’ve never seen black uniforms,” Lieutenant Krefeld said. “They think you’re fair game.”

At this, everyone laughed heartily. Nightminster’s spirits began to flicker towards the positive. They were all laughing together. They had seen off a common enemy. There was already a tentative sort of bonding.

“We must repair to the mess, the corridor is no place to do business,” Lieutenant Krefeld said. He strutted back to the ‘main street’ of the Refuge. The three ultramarines behind Nightminster gazed about in wonder at the dimensions of the interior and the peculiar nature of an indoor main street running up the middle of what was otherwise like a big factory. Krefeld led them into a small pub, which served as the garrison’s mess. There was a large dining table, a bar well-stocked with hard liquor on glass shelves and cold cabinets of chilled bottled beer. The panelled walls were hung with enlarged photos of places doubtless dear to marines, such as a fine perspective shot across the façade of Wilson House in high summer, and a quaint scene up the narrow high street of a village of Tudor-style half-framed houses, which Nightminster knew to be Castle Krossington, or Taslingham as it had been known in the Public Era. Nightminster nodded a welcome to the four other marines, who were looking up in surprise from their breakfasts of bacon, eggs, fried tomatoes and slabs of fresh bread. He placed the briefcase on the end of the table and lifted the lid, extracting a typed document of best vellum. It had been drawn up by Johnny Albert’s lawyer.

“His Decency Marcus-John Krossington admired my proposal to make vast improvements to this island,” Nightminster breezed. This was not a lie—it just was not the whole truth. “All I need is your signature to confirm the date of our taking occupancy.” He peeled open the tenancy agreement at the last page and held out a silver fountain pen to Lieutenant Krefeld. “Please.”

Lieutenant Krefeld stared at the pen, frozen by consternation. Seconds passed. He failed to move a muscle. Nightminster started to waggle the pen and spoke in a voice hardening with impatience.

“I require your signature to confirm that we are here and the clock is ticking.”

“But I’ve had no instructions.”

Excellent! Nightminster had read this martinet well. The petty tyrant pontificates to conceal a terrible secret—helplessness. Presented with the unknown, they freeze and bluster. Nightminster turned on a vicious iciness.

“Lieutenant, I am on a schedule that would crush a lesser man. I’m committed to rental payments not of a trivial nature. That means we have got to hit the ground running—today. Now would you kindly sign this agreement so that my comrades and I are able to commence our vital duties of improving this island.”

He glared at Lieutenant Krefeld, privately satisfied to see the normally pompous face infantilised by the worst kind of pressure a company man can suffer; confrontation without orders. His voice came out so hoarse that Nightminster scowled and leaned towards him.

“I’ve received no alert about your arrival.”

Nightminster slammed the table in exasperation. The marines jumped together.

“Not my bloody problem, Lieutenant! I’m committed to paying five thousand ounces per month in rent. Have you any bloody idea of how much business I have to move to cover five grand on the nail every month? For five grand a month I don’t expect to get fucked around by a bunch of pissing amateurs that can’t get their paperwork sorted.” He leaned so close that his breath washed down Lieutenant Krefeld’s cheeks. He lowered his voice. “Sign on the bloody line and stop wasting my time.”

When the lieutenant’s freeze stretched past the count of ten, Nightminster’s mood seemed to ease. He capped the fountain pen, swept up the document and tossed both into the briefcase, which he smacked shut and locked. He eyed the lieutenant with contempt.

“When a competent person is available, locate me at my duties. As for the now, I’m sure we can make our own way out.”

He led the ultramarines from the Refuge.

Chapter 21

“Every one of you was sentenced to death and should by now be glue and pig feed. But I saved you and brought you here to serve out an afterlife, and therefore your afterlife belongs to me.

“Your new world is called the Value System, and I am The Captain of this world. The length and happiness of your afterlife are entirely your responsibilities. Those who make the best of things will find comradeship, fulfilling work, good food, regular parties and holidays. Those who show additional drive will be promoted. But you must understand one harsh reality: you cannot escape from my Value System. You are surrounded by miles of wilderness infested by savages who will spare no cruelty from those they lay their hands upon. Make the best of what we offer and your afterlife will pass more agreeably than you deserve.”

He spoke with his eyes ratcheting up and down the rows of two hundred value dressed off in gang blocks of twenty on the shore of the Tidal Basin. His gaze rolled over Nieuport and Thomas, who were not missing the opportunity to implore him with faces as pathetically appealing as children awaiting a belting. There were older lags amongst the Undead Nameless Gone regarding him with obvious contempt as an upstart just ripe for humiliation. The ultramarines maintained a stern professionalism, although, the older, more senior ones like Master Sergeant Catfeet could not quite conceal the air of patient fathers watching a son carried away in self-importance. Few saw him as more than Johnny Albert’s little boy. Only London, Shiny and Bradford Barney had seen him use raw front to intimidate the Lighthouse Watch into impotence. For all the rest, The Captain of the Value System had yet to prove his heart held no pity. That was the next task. Fear was the only fuel that could fire the Value System to success.

“You will now be tagged with the ID by which you will be known in my Value System. You will forget the name under which you once lived. You will never utter it again. Do not attempt to defy that rule or you will learn the meaning of discipline.”

Under-sergeant Wally called forward Gang 1. Each ‘value’ (as Nightminster had decided to call each Undead Nameless Gone) sank to one knee while Leading Heeler London crimped a tin tag through their left ear lobe. Some screeched with pain. Others just bore it, going back to form up their block with blood trickling down the side of the neck. The very first value of the Value System was tagged A100, the next A101 and so forth. After this, two hundred freshly tagged value were served a generous lunch of thick vegetable soup, bread and parsnip tea in their cells aboard the barges.

In the afternoon, gangs of twenty value departed in separate parties under escort of five ultramarines to work various areas of the Value System. Nightminster had set out an initial roster for the gangs. The imperative was to get the land cleared of trees and bushland and planted with seeds brought on the barges. The more was achieved before the Krossington reaction arrived, the harder it would be for that reaction to stop the process.

*

Of Lieutenant Krefeld and his five marines, the new tenants saw not a glimpse for the rest of the day. Nightminster’s gamble had rested on past observations of the Krossington marines. He had seen their lack of initiative at the Bermondsey riot and later their prickly status-fixations at the gates of Wilson House. He rated them closer to bureaucrats than real soldiers, which is to say, they were just like glory troopers. How does one paralyse a bureaucrat? Simple—starve them of orders. And so, pending orders, the marines remained tucked from sight inside the Refuge. Nightminster estimated it would take a carrier pigeon about four hours to reach the dovecote of Wilson House. Then there would be some indeterminate period while the alert found its way to the desk of the appointed regent, whoever and wherever they might be—presumably far south in the Lands of Krossington, another four- or five-hour flight for a carrier pigeon. A further indeterminate time would elapse while the appointed regent sought advice, made a decision and a bird departed with instructions for the Lighthouse Watch. Nightminster guessed it would take at least two days for a response to arrive.

Provided the nascent Value System made a serious difference to the landscape in the first few days, the legal view from Johnny Albert’s lawyer was that the Krossingtons were unlikely to kick up much stink about what was incontrovertibly damned cheek of the highest order. The Krossingtons would not want it publicised that an ultramarine commoner had pulled a fast one on them—the same commoner whose common friends had forced Marcus-John to back down on the sentence of life exile. This reasoning did not convince Nightminster that the owners would lie down and accept a fait accompli. After the added humiliation of Marcus-John’s being voted out as head of clan, the Krossingtons must be in a dangerous mood. They could not command the marines any longer, but there were plenty of tough young men like Charles Krossington-Darcy and pals who could mobilise into a deadly force armed with mortars and MG42 machine guns.

Nightminster circulated relentlessly amongst the gangs on their first shift in his Value System, urging them on with dire threats of being returned to the outside world for execution if they did not slog their guts out to make the Value System irreversible. Later, he was ashamed of himself, but at the time he was running a high head of fear of what was coming over the horizon in a few days’ time. Already tracts of dense weeds and bushes were being cleared and burned to make way for ploughing.

Before the end of the afternoon, Gang 3 presented him with his first sovereign task: to dispense capital punishment.

Gang 3 had been clearing and burning near the eastern edge of the island, where woodland ran along a tidal channel that drained from the interior. A fight broke out between two value. It was quickly stopped by a couple of warning shots fired into the air. To begin with, Master Sergeant Catfeet was inclined to be lenient as the gang had been working well. Then a head count revealed two value missing. The fight had been a decoy.

The escape lasted barely five minutes. Scarcely had Master Sergeant Catfeet ordered the two fighters handcuffed when sobs and pleas for mercy from the woods turned into screeches barely identifiable as human. Afterwards, Leading Heeler London, who was not of a sensitive disposition, told Nightminster the cries were like being trapped in a nightmare. Several of the value started to cry. Even hardened, mature ultramarines paled. After the last spluttering gasp, there followed whoops and laughter, the bushes parted and a bunch of perhaps ten marsh warriors in their deerskin pants and rabbit hats burst into view and dumped the bloody remains. A young warrior grinned and waved a flint dagger.

“Very good screaming!” he exclaimed with great glee.

Master Sergeant Catfeet stopped the shift early as value and ultramarines alike were badly shaken. He issued orders for the value to make a couple of travois with which to drag the remains back to the Tidal Basin, where Nightminster saw them on the deck of one of the barges. He was not entirely unprepared. TK had made it clear these marsh savages were barbaric to the point of criminal insanity, like the notorious priests of the Maya. Despite this, Nightminster was horrified to his core by the wanton callousness inflicted. Eyes gouged out, penises cut off and stuffed in mouths, fingers and ears chopped off… The victims had been spared no agonies.

Maintaining his poise, if only by the most stiff-faced affectation, he strolled to the stern of the barge to gaze out seawards to think over what this meant.

He reached two conclusions. One was that he would have to deal harshly with the two value who had staged the fight. The other was that he would have to meet the marsh people in order to emphasise his power to inflict brutality on them. He rated them as cowards who fawned on the strong but tortured the weak.

The first of these tasks he dealt with that evening when all the gangs had returned to the barges. He ordered each gang brought up in turn from the cells to view the remains. Under the flickering white glare from acetylene lanterns, the victims’ ghoulish faces seemed to twitch and blink. Some value became almost hysterical as they shuffled past at the edge of the pool of light deep in the endless night of the wilderness. Nightminster was certain he could hear marsh warriors nearby on the mud flats chuckling and yapping amongst each other like wild dogs. He struggled to control the exposed feeling of his back, remembering their prowess with the peculiar asymmetric longbows and knowing his tall form must be silhouetted against the light of the lanterns.

Next, he ordered the two value who had staged the fight brought on deck. At the sight of them he cursed under his breath. Damn and fuck, why did it have to be Billy Nieuport and Veitch Thomas? They knew what was coming and had to be dragged across the deck. Thomas was in tears. Billy Nieuport started begging:

“Big Knight, we’re mates, old mates, we were right there with you on Parliament Square. You can’t shoot us. You can’t shoot us!”

Nightminster flipped his Beretta towards the ladder down to the mud shore propped against the bulwark of the barge. The last thing he wanted was them babbling about the Parliament Square riot in front of a dozen ultramarine witnesses who would soon take their leave in London bearing chat that could reach anywhere, including Brent Cross.

“Get down on the mud.”

“What are you going to do?”

Billy Nieuport staggered as London jabbed him in the kidneys with a cracker pipe.

“Move!”

Both men waited on the mud like frightened little dogs as Nightminster came down the ladder single-handed, still covering them with the Beretta. He waved the pistol to draw them away from the barge to the outer reaches of the illumination from the lanterns, where he faced them with his back to the light.

“Because you’re old mates, I might give you a break others don’t get,” he said.

They were too relieved to speak. Veitch Thomas panted with fear, listing on the verge of fainting. Only Billy Nieuport was still capable of articulation.

“Tell me why Johnny sent you to the Gone,” Nightminster said.

“Everyone thought we were gay because we’re such good mates. But it’s not like that, we’re straight.”

“Johnny doesn’t send people to the Gone for being gay.”

“That’s the only reason we can think of.”

“Well I can think of others. You betrayed me as the shooter to Johnny after the Parliament Square riot—don’t deny it, you sad little drip. You can’t lie well enough to save your life. If you can betray once, you can betray twice and thrice and four times. Could it be you squealed to the Brent Cross mob about Johnny’s night exercises? Could it be the Brent Cross mob used your squeals to lay those booby traps at New Year? Could that be why you were always in the NHS? And you went to the funerals of people you were never friendly with in life? Because you were mortified by the realities of treachery?”

“You’re wrong! You’re wrong! We never betrayed anyone.”

“Did you betray me to the Brent Cross mob?”

“Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because you’re a crap liar.”

Billy Nieuport’s mouth worked without uttering words. Not that anything he might have said could save him now.

“I said I might give you a break, but only if you tell the truth.”

Nieuport stood up straighter, as if he had somehow overcome his fear, or else had a plan.

“You’ll only believe what you want to believe.”

“I know you betrayed me to Johnny, because he told me so,” Nightminster said. It was rare that he resorted to outright lies. This occasion warranted it, since he was 99% sure he was dealing with a couple of traitors. He watched as Nieuport seemed to shrivel, his face became that of a blind man. He was finally looking inwards to see his life for what it was, useless and disgraceful. Now a crucifying grief was asphyxiating his soul, the grief of having betrayed himself to this terrible fate on a muddy shore amidst wilderness.

“Do you not even possess the guts to confess?”

Nieuport just kept staring at the mud with his blind eyes. Veitch Thomas threw himself at Nightminster’s boots and grovelled and wailed for mercy. Nightminster kicked him in the face, furious at his cowardice. It was a waste of time hoping to get final scraps of information from types like these. They would say absolutely anything just to live another miserable ten seconds. He would never be 100% certain why Johnny Albert had sent them to the Gone, but he was at least 99% certain.

“I’ll tell you how it’s going to be. I will count to ten. If you’re still standing here, I’ll shoot you clean and quick. That’s your break.”

“But the savages out there—“

“One.”

Billy grabbed Thomas’ collar and dragged him off into the darkness. Nightminster heard their boots pounding off like a couple of fleeing goats along the top of the sea defence. Even before he had returned to the base of the ladder back up to the deck of the barge, the first screams seared from the darkness. Well, such was the end of gutless fools. Up on deck again, he jutted his chin at the remains left by the marsh people.

“Get those cadavers overboard, let the sea have them.”

The two nearest heelers threw them over the bulwark. The sea came and went in the night and took the bodies away.

*

There was no privacy on the barge. The ultramarines bedded down on camp beds in the hold and rose during the night when called to guard duty. The toilet was a bucket behind a tarpaulin screen in the corner, although most went up top and did it over the side to avoid fouling the air. Hygiene was rudimentary. At the moment, the tide was high first thing in the morning, which tempted a few hard cases like London to take advantage of what they claimed was a refreshing dip. The rest hoped for occupation of the Refuge and its hot showers before their body odour got too pungent. Nightminster served a shift of guard duty between 10pm and 2am, although he did not sleep afterwards due to a headache which had arrived after dealing with Nieuport and Thomas. His brain throbbed. He seemed oddly light-headed. Guilt did not plague him, rather, his head swirled in bewilderment that his highest ambitions could have led him into this hell. Try as he might, he could not see how else he could have configured the resources available to him to reach Target Hundred Thousand. He was rising in a world that worked in a certain nasty way; rule or be ruled, kill or be killed. He would have to shut his feelings against that nastiness and get on with the job.

The deaths of the four value had left the 196 survivors shocked to silence. It had sunk in that they were here for life, and it was going to be a hard life. As for the ultramarines, there was unquestionably a more serious atmosphere in the hold and up on deck during the watch. They approached The Captain with a noticeable deference, and when they used his style, they really meant it. His authority was bloodied. That test was passed. He did not expect the next one to be any easier, however. The reaction from the Krossington clan must come.

It was three days before the reaction arrived. A breathless Master Sergeant Woody tracked down Nightminster organising an experiment. He was holding a race amongst three gangs clearing land to observe the effect on productivity, the prize being a bottle of beer at dinner for each winning gang member. He was spending all day every day from 6 am to 11 pm putting his face about all the gangs, exhorting them, sorting out the surprising number of banal practical problems and disputes that cropped up. Master Sergeant Woody’s arrival with some new wrangle to untangle did not surprise him.

“The lookout reports a motor ship approaching the Tidal Basin,” Woody said.

“Any details, Woody?”

“She’s flying the Krossington coat of arms.”

Chapter 22

Nightminster and Master Sergeant Woody rode bikes from the Refuge to the Tidal Basin. As soon as he crested the top of the sea defence dyke, Nightminster recognised the long and slender relief launch moored against the floating pier of the Tidal Basin. He propped the bike on its stand and advanced along the pier, not particularly confident he would ever walk on dry land again. If the Krossingtons threw a real show of force, he doubted any of the ultramarines would fight back. Visible on the deck of the launch were the captain, his first officer, both at the bridge, and His Decency Tom Krossington standing aft, alone amongst the engine room ventilator scoops. A set of narrow steps had been lowered down the side of the launch to the level of the floating dock. He descended carefully, as the steps were quite rickety.

“Welcome to the Value System, Your Decency,” Nightminster said. His Decency wore hunter’s boots with long woollen socks running up to Harris tweed plus fours and matching waistcoat over a rough, off-white cotton shirt. With a 35mm Canon camera slung about his shoulders in a leather case, he reminded Nightminster of a Public Era tourist from a history book more than a master of the landscape.

“Good afternoon, Nightminster.” He was looking up examining Nightminster’s face. “You look terrible. You’ve aged a decade since I last saw you. But let us not dally with pleasantries as time is short. Kindly take me on a tour of your enterprise.”

Nightminster noted TK carried no visible armament. This, combined with the informal presentation, caused Nightminster to wonder what was about to happen. He hurried after TK, who had set off up the floating pier. Possibly this was a fact-finding mission? Hence the camera to take evidence of industry back to show big brother Marko—or the Appointed Regent?

Nightminster guided His Decency to the open areas of the southern parts of the island where the gangs had already cleared several football pitches of bushland and were in the process of hauling steel ploughs to slice open the rich, dark fenland soil. TK clicked away with his Public Era Canon film camera. The value kept their heads down and the ultramarines put on a greater show of exhortations, for everyone knew what the visit was about, even if they did not recognise His Decency as such. Nightminster took His Decency past the Refuge, commenting that the Lighthouse Watch had not been seen since the first morning’s contact. His Decency showed no interest, and so they moved on. Nightminster explained his plans for different crops and their rotation according to the principles of intensive organic agriculture in which full use would be made of both animal and human waste and the intermingling of crops and livestock to maximise production. Once the available land was fully developed, the Value System would produce a substantial surplus of high-value vegetables: artichoke, cauliflower, sprouts and parsnip in winter and asparagus, garlic, beetroot and tomatoes in summer, in addition to potatoes, oats, onions, beets and lettuce grown to feed the population. Meat would come from pigs and chickens (these latter were already providing eggs in coups still aboard a couple of the barges). Leather would in effect be a by-product of food production. He pointed out that the Refuge would make excellent accommodation for the garrison and the value population of Undead Nameless Gone, and still offer space for production workshops. He refrained from adding that his ultramarine troopers would mutiny and go home if they did not gain the comforts of the Refuge.

Once the basic tasks of clearing and planting the land were completed, Nightminster was going to bring in craftspeople to commence training the population for production tasks: slaughtering, butchering, bating or tanning of leather, pattern cutting, stitching, finishing and the use of two Blake-Mackay machines for stitching the soles of boots to uppers.

“What are you going to do about that lot?” TK asked, pointing to a haze of rising smoke about a mile away. It was the nearest village of the marsh people.

“They will not interfere with my operations.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“They’ve cleared off the island since we arrived. A few marines never scared them much, but hundreds of strangers is too nasty a surprise for their stomachs.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. They have a warrior aristocracy that disappears into the back country to hunt deer. I’d say you happen to be lucky and they’re away. When they get back, you’ll notice the difference.”

Nightminster did not think so. His face must have displayed enough dismissal that TK continued:

“Well, it’s your show, it’s up to you. Let’s go back to the launch and talk.”

TK led the way back to the Tidal Basin and aboard the launch, where he settled in the modest forward saloon. The launch was so full of mighty engines, fuel tanks and ammunition lockers that despite its size, there was little room for passengers. The saloon felt rather like the kitchen of Nightminster’s parents’ flat in Bermondsey, a place of cleverly-used space with folding card tables, recessed drinks cabinets and hooks for slinging hammocks.

“I can’t hang about or the tide will leave us grounded,” TK said.

“What did you wish to discuss?”

TK laughed long and wheezily, finally breaking into a cough.

“You really are the most fucking insolent scoundrel, Nightminster, but I have to admit I admire your style. You caught us in our time of distress, deposed from power by a rabble that’s splintered into a dozen factions all vying and spying without a hope of forming a new regime. Had Marcus-John still held office, he’d have thrown the marines at you.”

“How is the mighty Marko adapting to his new situation?”

“Badly. He marches about Castle Krossington with a shotgun blasting any squirrel, crow or magpie unwise enough to cross his path.”

“What news of Victorina?”

“She’s out in the asylums running the vaccination programs. She stays out at Johnny Albert’s palace more than at Wilson House.”

Nightminster’s furious jealousy was too intense to hide. TK smirked at this.

“I’ve honestly no idea what’s going on, although she’s well away from clan politics, which at present I would describe as ugly. But let us not digress. You have barged your way onto Krossington land, so we must discuss your future.”

“You took legal advice?”

Nightminster had lit the stove and was waiting for the kettle to boil.

“You recall a chap called Morton Aldingford? You met him at Wilson House before Marko packed you off to exile here.”

Nightminster remembered the uptight lawyer without relish. On the other hand, Aldingford’s little boy Donald was delightful. Nightminster and Victorina had ogled over him as if he were their own son. It was such a cosy moment, especially to think of here amidst the primeval struggle to establish the Value System.

“Morton is an expert in these matters,” TK said. “He states that technically we could throw you out, it’s really a matter of whether we want to throw you out or even whether we can risk the publicity of throwing you out. We would require the consent of the Appointed Regent to use the marines. He would be obliged to make a statement to the Land Council, and that mob would likely break out cheering that a little whelp of a commoner had humiliated us.”

Nightminster attended to the kettle, which had begun to sing. He brought the tea things over on a battered plywood tray.

“I’ve made it perfectly clear I’m open to negotiating a fair rent,” he said, handing TK his tea.

“Any rent would appear in our household accounts, and a lot of people see those accounts, the kind of people who ask bloody awkward questions. Remember what I said about inherited status—it creates an atmosphere loaded with all sorts of gripes and grievances. I’m giving you a free lunch for the time being. Just understand that when I see you getting rich, I will press a hard bargain.”

Nightminster sipped his tea and then said:

“The operation would be more profitable more quickly with the use of the Refuge.”

“The Lighthouse Watch is going home for other duties. You’ll get the keys of the Refuge before you leave this ship.” Nightminster was growing suspicious at TK’s diplomacy. This victory was too easy.

“So what’s the catch?” he asked.

“If you can’t see that for yourself, God help you, because nothing earthly will.”

“I’m not as naive as you think. I’m well aware Johnny Albert’s troops out-number me fifty to one. I’m well aware I’ll vanish into the Undead Nameless Gone myself if I don’t prove my mettle. And that’s fine. I have to leap the impossible again and again to reach my highest ambitions. I’ve spent my life defeating the impossible, and I’m going to keep at it until I’m the atomic lord of London and you sovereigns are kissing my ankles.”

“You’re as mad as a hatter.”

“No! I’m stone cold sane. And there’s a tiny flicker of excitement deep in some reach of your mind that grasps how sane I am. You’re curious. That’s the real reason you don’t boot me back to Bermondsey. You want to see what I can achieve here.”

“I’ve written to the Oxford University Registrar’s Office to explain you’ve abandoned the academic life for a career in business. You’re not my student any longer.”

“That wasn’t very amenable.”

“You were becoming an embarrassment. I can only cover so much before the Dean of Faculty starts asking awkward questions.”

“I suppose I have no lingering interest in Oxford. It’s a handy place to keep the shortwave radio until I move it here. Once I’ve done that, I don’t suppose I’ll ever go back.”

TK’s head tipped back, and his eyes lifted. He was obviously struggling to control his exasperation. He said:

“Suppose Seb Smith and his Official SUN Party took over London? All the asylums, all the turnpikes, all the canals. Would that concern you?”

“There wouldn’t be much of London left. It would be like the aftermath of the Second World War—ruins as far as the eye could see. Yes, that would concern me. But you the Big Seven sovereigns hold power over London, not I the little whelp of a commoner, so the question rests upon you, Great Decency, not upon me.”

“The Big Seven sovereigns aren’t going to do a damned thing about Smith until it’s too late to matter. To my sovereign brethren, the asylums rate no higher than a cess tank. That’s an appalling truth, but that’s how it is, and that aloof attitude carries through to the high cadres of the glory trusts. In practice, the only people who are going to stop Smith are a very few people like Johnny Albert, and you, and I, who are savvy enough to see what he’s up to.”

“What about Rina?”

“She doesn’t believe he’s bright enough to be a threat.”

“And you do.”

“And I do.”

“I can’t do anything about Smith—and neither can you or Johnny Albert. High heid yins like David Chadderton and Madam Edkins of ZEEBRI believe in Smith. He’s untouchable. All we can do is wait for him to make a mistake. And that’s it. But you’re smart enough to have worked all this out for yourself, so what are you really doing here?”

“Don’t you grasp that your standing with the clan matters?” TK said. “Victorina is pestering Marko for permission to marry you. She wants to arrange a party at Wilson House to announce the engagement to the clan.”

“There’s something you’re reluctant to say.”

“You’ll never be able to marry Rina. Never. You’d be assassinated by one of the clan if you tried. Not my decision, I’m outraged by it. It’s from Marko, who doesn’t like it either, but he’s been strong-armed by other branches of the clan—the Krossington-Darcy branch not least. It’s a discharge of rage against a killable target after the humiliation of losing the vote of no confidence. That makes it no less dangerous.”

“I couldn’t give a rat’s left testicle. Thugs of your clan will not dictate what I do or don’t do in my life, any more than Smith’s thugs or any other thugs are going to faze me. Bearing in mind the caprices of your lot, I’ve no doubt that in three months they’ll be shoving Rina and I up the aisle. I’m just not going to lose any sleep over this.”

TK sagged deflated, defeated.

“Christ, it takes a lot to scare you. Where does it come from, this brazenness? Will you jeer in God’s face when your time comes?”

“Could you hand over the keys of the Refuge please? My time is not so plentiful that I can afford these metaphysical ponderings.”

*

TK would have been less impressed by Nightminster’s genuine morale, the world of his own mind. In quiet moments, perhaps marching from one gang to the next, or waiting before his population while the troops ran through the count at parade, or sneaking a brief respite in his suite within the Refuge, he was alone with his mind and he could not help pondering upon this life he had chosen. Here he was the master of a private Purgatory, a command he had gone out of his way to achieve for his highest ambitions without a thought to the realities of such a stranded life.

He missed simple pleasures he had once taken for granted. He missed his parents. He missed being able to do what the hell he liked without being watched by scores of underlings. He missed anonymity. The most wearisome burden of this life at the top was being the first man, from the moment he left his suite around 6:30 am to the moment he retired to it after 11 pm, he was up there in floodlights, watched, judged, in constant danger of blurting some flub or speaking his mind too bluntly. A moment’s carelessness could create an enemy in his own ranks.

Could he have married Victorina? What would she have made of this ‘enterprise’? How long would their marriage have lasted with him far away in the wilderness nine days in ten? Would such a young lady of gracious salons have settled on a Limehouse street in the suffocating society of intermarrying, feuding, spying clans lacking any horizon beyond fishing boats or warehouses piled high with pig iron?

He signed and clenched his teeth.

This kind of cogitation was an utter waste of time. The trap he had made for himself had but one route of escape—success. Complete and unconditional success.

Chapter 23

That evening, Nightminster celebrated victory with his troopers in the pub of the Refuge. His ultramarines were like happy schoolboys, having enjoyed hot showers for the first time in five days. Everyone had a proper bed in private quarters to retire to. There was a noticeable pungency of soap and aftershave in the pub—Nightminster had forbidden smoking in the Refuge due to the risk of fire. To indulge in the weed, smokers had to walk to the far end of the indoor main street of the Refuge and use a well-ventilated empty store probably intended for casks of whisky and gin. He was careful to circulate and banter with everyone, for he had no wish to build up any kind of ‘inner circle’. The atmosphere grew boisterous, even the normally taciturn London opened up and had a circle peeling out backwards in blasts of laughter.

There was, however, a touchy problem beneath this hilarity, and it was coming up again and again in discussion as he made his rounds. The barges at the Tidal Basin lay two miles away. To reach them from the Refuge was a long walk on a path filtering through lonely woods and marshes. After the grisly deaths of two escapees on the first day, the ultramarines had retained a caution about moving even in daylight, and when out with their gangs kept everyone bunched as much as possible—the value were only too happy to cooperate. They eyed the surrounding woods with fear and lived in dread of being snatched by savages from the edge of the group. Now that the ultramarine garrison had relocated to the Refuge, those left on guard duty on the barges this first evening were missing the party and enduring a remote vigil. There were fifty head of value in the hold of each barge, retained behind not particularly robust temporary wooden bulkheads, and any number of vicious savages creeping about in the surrounding darkness. Just to add to the misery, it was a wild night of squalls laced with sleet. Nightminster had solved the immediate problem for the party night by organising five shifts of ten troopers (including himself) in two-hour shifts allotted by lucky dip. It was not an enduring solution, it was just better than anyone else could think of. The walk out to the Tidal Basin took forty minutes and the return the same. At certain times almost half the garrison was either walking out to duty or on duty.

Nightminster had made clear that the value population would migrate to new quarters in store rooms of the Refuge the next day. These were solidly-built spaces, with thick walls and floors. Each store could only be accessed by a single steel hatch designed to prevent vermin penetrating—it certainly made the value easier to secure. The problem of guarding the barges would still be a headache. Nightminster could sense real grievance amongst his troops at the prospect of night watches stood at the far end of that lonely walk across wilderness in which even ten armed men could be wiped out by a carefully-laid ambush of marsh savages. He needed an enduring solution, or else most of his troops would go home on their first leave and not come back.

*

Having won the Refuge, Nightminster’s next challenge was to impose a crushing regimen over two hundred value. He was going to tame them through exhibitions of stern discipline compensated by good food, a variety of labour in beautiful countryside under improving weather, and Saturday night parties. The vile deaths of two value at the hands of the marsh people on the very first day, followed by the similar demise of Billy Nieuport and Veitch Thomas, had certainly communicated an appropriate message. Thereafter, the value gangs laboured hard at clearing land, requiring no more than a couple of instances of harsh words from their gang master.

The bulk of the value seemed at least temporarily relieved to be still alive in circumstances far better than a typical Night and Fog camp. They were adapting to the situation and getting on with it. Some were showing a keen drive to become trusted senior value. However, there was a handful of value Nightminster sensed were going to make trouble. This was a clique of old lags in their thirties who—as their files revealed—had circulated through the Night and Fog system many times for insubordination, fighting and drunkenness. He saw them looking him up and down with derision at the three daily parades, doubtless seeing in him merely a puffed-up punk ripe for deflation. The other ultramarines saw trouble too. They called them the Fabulous Five: Chunky, Gorilla, Fatface, Greaseball and Pinky. They were all in Gang 5. The gangs had formed in the warehouse back at the Port of Erith after Nightminster yelled at them to make themselves into ten groups of twenty, with a little help for the slow ones in the form of a cracker pipe across the arse. This was the standard method of the ultramarines. In retrospect, random draw would have been wiser, but it was too late to change the gangs now.

On the afternoon of the day after TK’s visit, Nightminster accompanied Master Sergeant Shiny with Gang 5 out to an inland area being cleared for the planting of the first crops. As the file of value and their guards walked near woodland along the edge of the island, Nightminster heard a sharp hiss followed by a thud to the right. A roe deer frozen against the bushes leaped, staggered a few paces and collapsed writhing, a long arrow deep in its shoulder.

Fifty yards away to the left, branches crackled, grass swished. One, two, three marsh warriors strode from a pack of gorse bushes, indifferent to the thorns scoring their bare arms. They were tall and proud, very straight-backed. They wore sleeveless jackets of what appeared to be bamboo bound into a kind of armour by some dark cord, deerskin pants and the comical rabbit hats with the drooping ears. Each carried the peculiar longbow with the handle one third from the lower end. Behind them emerged a file of obviously lesser-status young men in sheepskin tunics. The three warriors strode closer on a collision course with the gang. Nightminster made a hasty estimate that they would pass behind the lead group of ultramarines but cut through the middle of the column of value. He maintained his stride as if nothing had happened, as did the other ultramarines. The value muttered amongst themselves, becoming restless at the approach of the tall leader, whose brown eyes fixed on them with the raptness of a wolf. Nightminster glanced around, measuring him up. He was a fine man, about Nightminster’s own height and build with the same long, muscular limbs. Regrettably, it would appear TK had been correct, the warriors were home and now putting their new neighbours to the test. The lead warrior cut the value like a shark slicing through a shoal of sardines. The trail of sheep-men retainers forced the rear group of the gang to halt.

“All stop!” called Nightminster, who did not want the gang separated. The black-uniformed troops and the value in their waterproof canvas working overalls eyed the file of retainers in sheepskin tunics pass between them. By slicing the newcomers’ group, the warriors had established superior status. Ergo, the warriors now judged the newcomers weak. No one required expertise in psychology to deduce this meant violence. Nightminster watched from the head of Gang 5 as the lead warrior kneeled by the stricken roe deer and opened its throat with a flick of his flint knife At this range of thirty yards, a longbow in the hands of an expert would be a damned sight more effective than Nightminster’s Beretta. He started to walk towards the warrior, slow, dignified paces to communicate authority and menace. As he closed in, the lead warrior rose, wiped his flint knife on the sheepskin tunic of one of his minions, who expressed gratitude, and put it in a leather sheath at his waist. Nightminster and he studied each other. Nightminster sensed high, if primitive, intelligence and curiosity.

“Are you the chief of these people?” Nightminster asked.

“What do you mean by ‘chief’?”

He spoke a Midlands accent, straight out of Soho.

“The highest being.”

“No. That is The Gub.”

“Will I find The Gub in your village?”

“What do you mean by ‘village’?”

“Over there, the houses in which you live.”

“They’re ‘boxes’, not houses, and that’s our ‘chokey’, not a village.”

Ah! Now Nightminster grasped what he was dealing with. It must be true the marsh savages were descended from released criminal lunatics. In their world of teenaged mothers and short lives, several generations had passed in the thirty-three years since the Glorious Resolution. Now, only faded and distorted vestiges endured in their vocabulary. He supposed ‘The Gub’ was their divine being, descended from ‘the govnor’, ‘the guv’.

“Who talks with The Gub?”

“Only I.”

“Will you tell him about us?”

“I will present you to him!”

This discourse took place in calm tones, almost soft tones. It did not appear that this warrior chief entertained any hostility towards Nightminster or his fellow strangers in black. He was too confident in his mastery to bother getting angry.

“You and your warriors must stay off this island. It is our territory,” Nightminster said.

“What do you mean ‘island’?”

“This higher, dry ground we’re on. We will mark our territory with posts. You keep to your side, and we’ll keep to our side. We’ll coexist in symbiotic harmony.”

“I will present you to The Gub in the night of the silver sun.”

Nightminster supposed he meant the next full moon, which gave the Value System some respite as the New Moon was the following night. The chief turned away and addressed his retainers in a guttural patois, which to Nightminster sounded like English spoken backwards. Perhaps the savages’ language was in fact descended from a secret language once used in a lunatic asylum? Four of the sheepskin-clad servants hefted the little deer between them and marched off towards their village to the south.

The warrior chief stepped towards Nightminster, eyes fixed on eternity. Nightminster took a pace back into a boxing stance and when the chief kept coming on slammed him in the jaw with the heel of his hand, knocking him back against the warriors behind. All three went down on their bottoms like dominoes, the chief landing on his bow with a sharp crack. The weapon snapped useless. Nightminster whipped out his Beretta. London and Shiny also drew their pistols. The other ultramarines laughed at the big-shot warrior’s indignity. Even a few of the bolder value risked a chuckle. The chief’s eyes blazed with a raging, insane light as he rolled into a crouch, gripping his flint dagger. Nightminster took aim.

“Don’t move, pal, or I will kill you.”

He was reluctant to fire. His imagination saw the Refuge besieged by hundreds or thousands of marsh savages. They could be mown down with MG42 machine guns, but that was not the point. The Value System could not exist if marsh warriors began sniping from the woods with their deadly bows. Nightminster retained vivid recollections of the Battle of Agincourt from history lessons at public school. English longbowmen killed French knights out to hundreds of yards. The marsh warriors’ eccentric bows did not appear any less deadly.

The warrior chief rose, in no great hurry taking a swipe at Nightminster’s jugular with his flint dagger. He appeared to believe this stranger in the black clothing would go under his dagger as meek as a lamb. Nightminster whacked aside the first swipe with the Beretta, but at the second he fired point-blank. The bullet passed through the chief’s heart and hit the following warrior smack in the face amongst a spray of blood from the exit. Both dropped dead, flopping with a revolting bonelessness. After a few seconds’ silence, the surviving warrior walked around Nightminster towards the gorse bushes whence he had come, trailed by the rest of the sheep men. He showed as much distress as if he were taking a seaside stroll.

“We’ll have to run the shift as normal to prove our mastery,” Nightminster said. He regretted the death of a fine young warrior chief, but felt no guilt. The killing had been a matter of necessity. “We’ll make a loop and cross the bridge into the Northern Section and work there. I doubt they’ll follow us. The marines told me they never saw the savages cross any of the bridges, probably because they’re metal.”

They left the two dead warriors for their own people to gather and ushered the value towards the coast, not quite fast enough to look hurried but certainly not ambling. At the bridge over the main tidal creek that cut the island into a Northern Section and a Southern Section, Nightminster and London waited while the gang crossed. Something was wrong. Something nagged at Nightminster, as if he had forgotten an important task.

“There are five value missing, The Captain,” London said.

“Five?”

“The Fabulous Five.”

“Does Master Sergeant Shiny know?”

At that moment, Shiny came sprinting towards them, his face creased with fury, his bald pate flushed.

“I regret to report five value are missing, The Captain. They must have got away during the barny with those locals.”

Nightminster aimed his Beretta skywards and fired twice. This was the general alarm signal recalling all gangs to the Refuge. There was a dangerous fury gathering in him. First the problem of guarding the barges, then war with the marsh savages, now five value had made a break.

Master Sergeant Shiny and his troopers gathered in Gang 5 and hustled them at double-time back across the bridge to the Southern Section on which the Refuge stood. They had to stretch out along a particularly narrow section of path that ran through woods along the eastern edge of the island. Everybody, ultramarines and value alike, felt danger squeezing them. The column broke into a run, which of course thinned it further. Nightminster made a mental note to get the path widened and the trees cut back to reduce the psychological intimidation, let alone the actual danger of ambush.

Nightminster’s first shot that killed the chief and a warrior had been heard all over the island, of course, and the subsequent recall signal brought in all ten gangs at such haste that a crowd built up at the entrance to the Refuge. The value revelled in the troubles of their masters. Some of them were actually grinning. Nightminster fired his Beretta again and yelled for silence, in such a harsh voice that he got silence and the last of the value filed in the door like sheep. He ordered the value locked down in their quarters behind steel hatches and then gathered his fifty ultramarines and eight professional seamen in the pub. It was just as he was getting onto a bench to address his men that he realised with a jab of sick horror there were no guards on the barges—and the tide was running out. If the Fabulous Five applied their wits, they could get clean away to the North Sea.

Nightminster addressed the eight seamen.

“Gentlemen, take what arms you require from our gun chest and get to the coast to guard your vessels.” When they did not move, he said: “The tide is running out. There’s a grave risk the escaped value could steal a barge and get to sea.”

The oldest of the bargemen crossed his arms. The rest followed suit.

“We aren’t going out there with savages shooting arrows like the last of the Mohicans. Not in our job description.”

“Under-Sergeant Topcat, take your squad and escort these men and remain with them at the barges until relieved.”

For several bleak seconds, Nightminster thought Topcat would defy the order. That would have been the end of the Value System then and there. Topcat made no secret of only just dragging himself to follow orders. His four troopers were no more enthusiastic, but the group of men did file out, in silence, expressing reluctance with sluggish paces and sour faces.

Nightminster described the confrontation with the marsh chief and the escape of the Fabulous Five during the drama. He assured his men there was no reason to expect any violent response from the marsh people now. He stressed that for years Krossington marines had wandered all over the island in pairs and had never lost a soul to the locals. The warriors had never used their bows against the marines, presumably out of fear of retaliation by MG42. The imperative was to sweep the island and recover the Fabulous Five. The ultramarines would split into five teams, hasten out to the Tidal Basin and begin sweeping inland. The value could be left without a guard as they were not going anywhere locked down in store rooms behind rat-proof steel hatches.

“Are you sure it’s safe to leave the value without a guard?” London murmured once they were outside.

“We’ve got to demonstrate total power. If we leak the value so much as a crack of hope, they’ll rebel.”

“Aye, well, you’re a gambling man, The Captain.”

“Life is a gamble, if you want to get on.”

“Now there’s a phil—. What in God’s name was that?”

From out of the breeze washing across the fenland plain they heard a faint, high-pitched piping. The column of ultramarines stopped as one to listen. Under other circumstances, Nightminster would have taken it as a toot from a distant steam truck. There were no such machines within twenty miles. He heard it again. A third, longer screech carried something haunting in its desperate urgency. After orientating himself relative to the Refuge, Nightminster judged the sound came from the marsh people’s village. London cleared his throat and probably spoke for everyone.

“I cannot stand the thought of those ghastly savages. After their insolence this afternoon and now this bloody business, I am ready to purge the gene pool.”

“The Value System cannot succeed without them,” Nightminster said. “They’re an essential resource, the challenge is to exploit them. No different from exploiting a river to make electric power.”

“You shot their chief less than an hour ago.”

“I don’t think their measure of life is the same as ours. They seem to inhabit a borderland at the frontier of Eternity, as if this life were but an ante chamber for the great ascent to The Gub, who is everywhere and everything. I learned a great deal from the Krossington marines about how the savages entrance themselves with magic mushrooms before self-immolating to reach the full moon as the fumes of a bonfire.”

The other ultramarines were becoming restless at what they saw as procrastination. It was time to be decisive.

“I want three volunteers to join me on a little excursion to the savages’ village.”

London and Bradford Barney joined promptly. A third, a keen heeler called Spud (an unkind reference to the shape of his head. although he was long over it) was a little slower. The rest stared at the party of four with incredulity. Nightminster ordered them away to the Tidal Basin to get started with the sweeps.

“Let’s get some serious firepower,” he said. He drew the other three back to the nearly silent Refuge, where they helped themselves from the gun crate in a spare room near the pub. Nightminster smacked a 73-round drum magazine into a Shpagin submachine gun. These guns had a very high rate of fire. One sweep could cut down thirty or forty people in a few seconds. He dropped a couple of spare drums in the pockets of his long leather raincoat.

“Those steel doors are all that’s holding back two hundred head of value from this gun crate,” Heeler Spud said.

“191 to be precise,” London said.

“The doors are quarter-inch steel,” Nightminster added. “They were taken from a Public Era ship, the welding’s far too good for our times. Unless our value have drums of calcium carbide and cutting torches secreted up their bottoms, I don’t think we need worry about them getting out.”

He led the other three for a final check of the store room hatches. Not a sound came from beyond the hatches, not even muted babble. He did not consider the locks particularly robust—they were never intended to secure prisoners. There were so many details like that to be fixed. It would take time.

He moved on to other store rooms at the far end of the Refuge beyond the pub. The three men waited patiently whilst he hunted about. He uttered an ‘Ahah!’ of triumph and emerged with a rusty steel rod about four feet long with one end curled about to form a loop.

“Have you ever seen these before?” he asked. None of them had. “At my old school, the groundsman used these to close areas of the playing fields. He would twist these rods into the earth and then run a rope through the loops to make an enclosure. There’s crates of these poles in that store. It’s a funny thing what matters to posh people—they play silly games to waste all the time they don’t spend working like honest people. I expect the Krossingtons planned to turn the island into one vast complex of rugby pitches, cricket circles, golf courses and no doubt croquet lawns.”

“We’ll need miles of rope,” London said.

“We’ll use barbed wire, the marsh people won’t have a clue what to make of it, they don’t use metal and I think they fear it.”

“We could run twenty thousand volts through it by adapting an ignition system,” Bradford Barney said. “That’s what merchants do to protect their warehouses.”

“We don’t have miles of barbed wire here,” London said, after taking a quick sweep of the store rooms.

“I’ll send a barge to London to buy what we need. Good thinking, Bradford Barney.”

Nightminster was delighted at this creative thinking firing the little team with optimism, even the normally pessimistic London. They were going to need all the optimism they could muster to survive the savages’ village.

“Right, let’s go,” he said.

He set a solemn, measured gait across the open sheep pasture west of the Refuge. Their boots thudded over a drawbridge and onto a cart track. Now they were on the section of the island farthest from the sea. The marsh people’s village was on the extreme tip of this, on the shore of a tidal creek. The four men soon picked up an escort mostly heard in scuffles, mutterings and splintering branches rather than seen. Nightminster’s head began to pulse with fear. It required every last scrap of self-control to maintain the nonchalant manner, while swallowing hard not to throw up into the bushes.

A screech, searing like a siren, ripped the air. He heard London snarl curses and Bradford Barney cock his Shpagin. The path broke out of woodland into the village, the ‘chokey’, an area laid with dried grass and occupied by perhaps a score of circular wattle-and-daub huts with conical thatched roofs. A reek of smoke and decaying flesh pervaded the air. Girls and children scampered from sight into the huts. The men of the village—none older than early twenties—closed to surround the intruders, who forced the ring around them wider with jabs of their submachine guns.

The location and fate of the Fabulous Five were mysteries no longer. The five lags had been hung up like a line of Christs on wooden crosses—crude things of raw birch logs still with bark curling off. Pinky was already dead or nearly so, his ruddy head bowed over such that the crown pointed straight down and a red wire of blood drained from it into blood-sodden mud. The trousers were about the ankles, blood still trickled down the legs from the groin, which Nightminster avoided looking at.

He aimed the Shpagin skywards and fired a burst. The ring of surrounding men dropped flat, faces pressed into the straw. On the other hand a few bigger men, their poise nobler and faces arrogant merely glared at Nightminster with unnerving malignance.

“Are you the new head man?” Nightminster recognised the third warrior, who had survived that morning’s encounter to walk away as coolly as if just declared LBW at a cricket match. He was a few inches shorter than Nightminster, with a broad, flat forehead. His nose was beaky and set rather high in his face, giving him the appearance of a gramophone stylus. He was only a little older than Nightminster—there were no elders here. The reason was evident in the heap of charred human remains at the centre of the village, presumably leftovers from the immolation rituals.

The chief turned away, tugged out the penis of Chunky until it stretched like a bungee. A hack with the flint dagger, a flick of the wrist, the penis twirled into Chunky’s mouth stretched wide as if trying to swallow his own head. The steam-shriek of agony ceased with a slash of the throat. Chunky’s eyes bulged as a fan of his blood splashed down the chief’s jacket of bamboo armour. The chief burst into a rich laugh and turned his back, waving in one of his warriors to deal with the next in line, Fatface.

Nightminster clamped his teeth, kept breathing deeply, fighting against the shadow falling across his vision and muck-sweat on the verge of fainting. He shifted his eyes to look at the top of Fatface’s cross, which would appear to the chief as if he was still observing the vicious ritual. The chief laughed again and gestured to Nightminster with a wave of his dagger.

“Good screaming very pleasing, no?”

“It’s simply wonderful,” Nightminster said.

“Terrific show,” London added, with a gravelly dryness.

Greaseball and Gorrilla begged and beseeched the ultramarines until their turns came to have their eyes pricked and tongues drawn out and sliced off. Then came the emasculations and finally the coup de grâce slashing of throats. The chief cut the bodies down with swipes of his flint dagger, after which he barked in dialect at some low-status sheep-males to gather them up. The carriers stood waiting. It was obvious the bodies were to be taken back to Value System territory. Nightminster addressed the chief in tones he hoped were suitably magisterial.

“Your offerings are acceptable.”

“Your reward is mine,” the chief said. “Very good screaming, very very good screaming.” He bowed to Nightminster. On pure instinct, Nightminster accepted the gesture with a tilt of the head, as of accepting higher status. He held out the rusty steel rod, which caused the chief to take a pace back, eyes fearful, transfixed.

“Mine is the domain from here to the ocean. This steel will mark my domain. If you defy steel, you will be destroyed, as I destroyed this morning. Mine is the power to obliterate you as if you never existed, but I have chosen to be merciful and tolerate you. Stay in your own world, and we can live together.”

He about-turned and strode at the circle of prone men, ready to stamp across their backs if he had to. They burst open a passage as if an army of wasps had erupted from the straw. The file of four men in black uniforms, swathed in weapons and ammunition, returned to the woods. They pulled a tail. The sheep-men were hauling the ‘offerings’. David Livingstone in darkest Africa crossed Nightminster’s mind. Christ, what a place. To think that only half a lifetime ago this area was a tranquil region of farms and nature reserves to which the police rarely came, according to what Jakub Newman had told him about the life of his family before the Flood of ’35 had turned this part of England into the Dominion of Libertaria, detonator of a ‘brave new world’.

Nightminster led the column back to the Refuge where, by suitable off-hand gestures, he indicated the corpses of the Fabulous Five be laid in the grass near the wall and dismissed the carriers with another blasé wave. One of the bodies emitted a long, bubbling sigh as the carriers disappeared into the uncleared bushland.

The four men looked at each other, eyelids heavy with the burden of their endurance. Other ultramarines were hurrying in from the path to the Tidal Basin, drawn by the burst of submachine gun fire. They gathered to stare at the five blood-streaked bodies. Some smiled a deep satisfaction, others paled and some had to turn away, blinking tears.

“I think we’ve won that battle,” Nightminster said, sighing.

Store room by store room, the value were brought out to relish the pleasures of liberty. Nightminster was satisfied to see just how deeply horrified most of them were. Some were reduced to tears, a few threw up, a couple fainted and had to be carried away by mates. After this, he called a second parade on the open grass outside the Refuge and addressed the population in harsh tones.

“Today has been the rankest lesson that any attempt to escape is suicide by the most unpleasant means. Let me give you this advice; if you really can’t stand any more, come to me and I will administer a painless despatch to the Beyond. Otherwise, make the best of an afterlife you never deserved. Now get back to work.”

Nightminster noticed a heavy-footedness about the departure of the gangs to the hinterland. This reluctance was shared by the ultramarines as much as by the value. The display of remains had certainly impressed the 191 surviving population of value, the problem was that it had impressed his own troops too. The leaders of gangs assigned to work in the southern areas approached The Captain to say their men were deeply concerned about working such a lonely duty near the savages’ village. In time, the relationship with the savages would settle down, but at present they were not comfortable about exposing their men to such risks.

Nightminster had to consider this carefully. The ultramarines were more of a meritocracy than a bureaucracy like General Wardian. That meant leaders had to be leaders, not just poseurs who had blagged their way up the greasy pole. Ultramarine troops were entitled in their contract to defy superiors they considered fools—and Johnny Albert would back his own guys over the ‘boy’ Nightminster.

He explained his ruse to plant a frontier of steel stakes and electrified wire. This cheered his men up immediately. It was a plan they could believe in.

“I’ll send a barge back to London this evening to get wire and the other things. In the meantime, we’ll have the gangs plant the iron rods along the frontier of our domain during the morning shift tomorrow—it’s a bloody shame we haven’t the light to do it now, but it’s got to be done in a single shift. Gods don’t goof off leaving a job half-done.”

“I’ve a feeling the value will be as motivated as we are to see those rods in place,” Master Sergeant Catfeet said, smiling. “You’ve played a clever psychology giving us a common enemy.”

“There’s still the problem of guarding the barges at night,” Master Sergeant Shiny said. “I’ll be up front and say I’m not going to hack months and years of trekking out to stand in the rain for hours on end knowing those stone-age throwbacks are out in the darkness. And based on what I’m hearing from others, I doubt you’ll get many takers, to be honest.”

Nightminster knew Shiny would never speak so boldly unless he was confident most other troopers were behind him.

“Do not be concerned, I will solve that problem. Kindly bear in mind there are a lot of details we still have to straighten out. We have to put proper locks on the storage room hatches. We have to widen the path to the Tidal Basin. We have to build a separate barracks for the value in the Northern Section in order to isolate them at night. We have to build a new barracks for ourselves in order to free up The Refuge as an indoor factory for the darkest months, when the gangs won’t be able to work outdoors all day. There is a great deal to be done yet, and you must be patient if you wish to remain as a shareholder.”

“We accept that, The Captain,” Catfeet said, “We just want to make it clear we think the barge problem is the priority. We fucking hate that narrow path to the Tidal Basin and we fucking hate standing guard when it’s pissing wet and freezing. That’s not what we signed up for.”

“The problem only arises when the tide is falling,” Nightminster said. He was thinking out loud and counting on improvisation. “None of the barges have engines, so they can’t get to sea except on the ebb. So that removes half of the problem straight off. We could build a bunker out at the Tidal Basin with all mod cons, heat and light, nice bedrooms for the duty watch.”

“Those throwbacks can still get us on the path.”

Nightminster thought Shiny was being unduly stubborn, but possibly his attitude was a common one? Fundamentally, this trouble arose from ultramarines’ being creatures of leisure. They lorded over slaves and enjoyed a generally easy, languid life. It was this exhibition of languor that established their status above mere common slummies. Plus, the Refuge made such a comfortable and secure home in this savage wilderness.

“What about an armoured car?” he suggested. “The shift could drive out to the Tidal Basin, stand guard and drive back. If the locals turned up in force, the shift could shoot its way out of trouble. We’d need to get a road built and bring in a prefabricated bridge to cross the tidal creek, but none of that is beyond the wit of man.”

The two master sergeants considered this.

“Yeah, that might work, if you can persuade the Owner to lend you an armoured car,” Shiny said. “On which point I’m inclined to scepticism. Then you’ve got to get it here and off-load it, which means serious crane power. Prefabricated bridges aren’t cheap either.”

Nightminster clenched his jaw rather than respond. He was losing patience with their dismissive attitude, whilst being all too aware they were losing patience with him. His garrison outnumbered him fifty to one. Only his conviction could stop them sailing for home leaving 191 value—and possibly him—to the tender mercies of the marsh savages. He was under no illusions as to why Johnny Albert had assigned such valuable, senior people as Shiny and Catfeet. They were insurance. If the ‘boy wonder’ did not make the grade, at least there were experienced non-coms who could shut the shop and get everyone home without loss of face.

That evening, Nightminster called for a volunteer from amongst the master sergeants and under-sergeants. He wanted someone experienced to return to London by barge to procure three miles of 14-gauge, 4-point, two-ply galvanized steel barbed wire in a dozen rolls of 500 yards. He knew this product from his General Wardian days. Each roll was about the size (and weight) of a beer keg and a damned prickly bastard to handle. In addition, the barge would return with scrap plastic pipe, rolls of hemp string and a kit with which to make a high-voltage pulse generator. The plastic pipe would be used to insulate the electrified wire and the hemp would affix the insulators to the steel rods.

The reaction to his call for a volunteer was interesting. They all volunteered. Now, that could be read two ways. Either none of them had any confidence in the Value System and they wanted out quick. Or, they had great confidence in The Captain of the Value System and no longer considered their presence necessary. Nightminster decided to believe the latter, since there was no point in the defeatism of the former. Under-Sergeant Topcat duly won the draw to take the barge back to London.

That evening, Nightminster planned the operation of the next day, to plant the steel rods fixing the frontier of the domain of the Value System. With 191 head of value available, the job would only take a single shift. Each head of value would only have to plant at most three rods, the rest only two. The time would be taken in getting the gangs in position and the rods planted with the right spacing to ensure the limited supply of rods stretched the full length of frontier, but not so far apart as to render the fitting of barbed wire problematic. Some rods would have to be reinforced by struts to resist the tension of the barbed wire at changes in direction. These details being defined, Nightminster was comfortable the task would be completed before lunch the next day. His mood was infectious. This anticipation of achievement sent both ultramarines and value to bed in a strangely collaborative mood.

Chapter 24

Nightminster woke early. Some niggle deep in his sub-conscious pulled him half-awake and then fully awake. He lay wondering about this vague unease. Something was wrong. He had overlooked an important detail. Despite this nebulous alarm, the most systematic imagining of the day to come did not yield any oversight on his part.

Still, something was wrong. He thought of the locks on the hatches of the value dormitories. They could not be the problem. Had the value escaped, they would have slashed his throat as he slept. His restlessness drove him from bed to wash, shave and dress. His quarters as The Captain of the Value System were the same suite in which he had lived in exile. He had plenty of space to himself, if not the oceans of free time that had been such a burden during his exile. He barely had time to dream about Victorina, even, except in the moments before his exhausted mind blanked asleep.

He descended to the main street of the Refuge before half past six to find London and Spud working out in the gym. All seemed normal. The night watch coming off shift reported nothing unusual. The value were just as quiet as the bags of grain that would normally have filled the store rooms. This only intensified the unnerving conviction a subtle danger was about to strike. Might it be only a psychological reaction to victory over extreme odds? He ate a full breakfast of bacon sandwiches with fried mushrooms and hash browns, knowing it was going to be a long, vigorous morning for him getting the gangs spread along the frontier and the rods planted just so. The alarm gradually faded as he concentrated on the exact details of the orders he had to give for the operation to run smoothly. The toughest part of being The Captain was sustaining the facade he really knew what he was doing.

By the time his men had finished breakfast and the value had been fed theirs, it was half past seven and time to get started on the work of the day. Under-Sergeant Wally laid his hands on the bar of the main door to lift it away and shoot back the steel bolts. Rather than admonish him in front of his troops and gang, Nightminster stepped forward and leaned over his shoulder to check via the fish-eye peep hole that all was clear outside the door. He was dismayed that his men were already becoming sloppy about basic precautions and made a mental note to lecture them that evening. He would write a protocol for them to sign. It was the beginning of what would become an operating manual for the Value System.

He looked through the fish-eye lens. He hoped the pulsing of his head caused by the pounding of his heart was much less obvious to others than it was to him. The lens began to steam up.

Outside the door was a firebreak of grass about ten yards wide, kept cropped by the sheep. Beyond the strip spread woods of stunted, windblown oak and ash for a hundred yards down to the tidal channel that formed the eastern boundary of the Value System island. Five marsh warriors stood in view, immobile, their strange asymmetric bows planted before them. They wore the normal garb of bamboo armour jackets, deerskin pants and rabbit skin hats with floppy ears. From their grim expressions, he could scarcely doubt they had come for battle.

He stepped back.

“The morning shift is postponed. Secure your gang in its quarters, Under-Sergeant.”

“Yes, The Captain.”

Nightminster had insisted that never more than one gang be allowed out of the store rooms at one time during the exit for work. In the confines of the Refuge’s corridors, a mob of value could have sprung a revolt and overwhelmed their keepers. He was now mighty glad to have insisted on this precaution over the ‘better advice’ of most of the NCOs, who thought it a waste of time. The twenty value of Gang 1 were easily herded back through the hatch into their quarters, although, they took with them news there was some kind of trouble. They had observed, just as their keepers had observed, that something outside had shocked The Captain.

Under-Sergeant Wally was just as shaken when he looked.

“Thank Christ you’re watching over me, The Captain. They’d have had me for breakfast.”

“Go to the pub and wait there. Keep quiet for the time being. I’ll go around the other doors and find out what we’re up against.”

“Yes, The Captain.”

It took Nightminster only minutes to make a circuit of the other four portals of the Refuge and gain full cognisance of the situation. These tiny fish-eye peep holes were the only means of viewing the outside world from within the Refuge, except by climbing onto the roof. The news he obtained through the little eyes was quite enough to convince him without exposing himself up above. By the time he returned to the pub, all of his garrison had gathered and were murmuring tensely. Very fortunately, there was no duty shift guarding the barges at the Tidal Basin, as the tide was flooding, making it impossible for escapers to get the barges out to sea. He rapped his Beretta pistol on the counter of the bar to get their attention.

“The Refuge is surrounded by warriors of the marsh people. I estimate there are two hundred, armed with longbows.” In fact, he believed the number to be double that, but did not want to panic his men. “They don’t seem to be organised into any kind of formation. They’re just standing, waiting.”

After a long pause, it was Master Sergeant Catfeet who spoke.

“You never said anything about hundreds of warriors.”

“That’s because I never suspected there could be anything like that number in the area. I spent a month in exile here during which I never saw more than five at a time, and the Krossington garrison told me emphatically there were only three small villages in the area.”

None of this was a lie, it was just not the whole truth. It was far too late to admit there could be two dozen villages in the area. He had never told Johnny Albert or any other ultramarine about the night he stood on the roof of the Refuge to admire the full moon and had counted twenty-three bonfires in the night, each one of which might or might not have been a village. Now he knew the truth—too late.

“So what’s the problem? Let’s mow ‘em down with Shpagins,” Heeler Speedy said.

“Try thinking with your brain instead of your ass,” Master Sergeant Shiny said. “If we kill that lot, it’ll just suck more into the area.”

“We could suck in modern folk,” London said. “Then we lose our greatest asset, secrecy.”

“Well I for one am not going out as long as we’re surrounded,” Catfeet said.

“No one is expecting you to,” Nightminster soothed. “But you are expected to bend your mind to a solution.”

“There is no solution,” Catfeet retorted. “We can’t shoot them and we can’t live with them. What’s left to discuss?”

“I think you’ve nailed it there.” Shiny looked at Nightminster pointedly. “It’s up to you, The Captain, to work out how we live with them. Otherwise, we’re off.”

“And you’ll need to make it quick, as I for one am catching the high tide in two hours,” Catfeet added.

“What a bunch of chickie-chickens,” London said. He was surveying those around him with an expression of contempt. Nightminster took a slight reassurance in having at least one stalwart ally. He could sense fear taking the rest. The face of every one of them expressed the same dread of that long, narrow path across two miles of woods and marsh to the Tidal Basin. It was the classic setting for a rout. Those of a more historical bent would be thinking of the AD 9 massacre of Varus’ Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest.

“Suppose they’ve captured the barges?” Leading Heeler Bentley’s question hung in the air.

“The marsh people never touch anything of metal. They won’t touch the barges.” Nightminster’s reassurance merely vanished into the thickening hysteria.

“What you really mean, The Captain, is that you’ve never seen them touch metal yet, just as you never saw more than five warriors—until today you did.” Catfeet seemed on the point of issuing an ultimatum, tantamount to mutiny.

“You got us into this mess, The Captain, now you get us out of it,” Shiny said. He spoke with menace. With his high, bald dome and creased forehead, he did not have to work very hard to look menacing. Nightminster felt a hundred eyes boring into him. For several seconds his strength failed and he experienced a caving-in to desperation. He knew they would fight their way out to the barges and depart forever. He also knew they would leave him to share the fate of the 191 Undead Nameless Gone.

He was not having that. He was not going to die a loser.

“As you lack the moral fibre to face the savages, I will deal with them alone,” he said. London stood up and pushed his way out to join him.

“I’ll stand with you.”

“So will I.” Bradford Barney came out.

“I’d hate to side with gutless chickens,” Spud said, joining in.

It’s a strange thing how thoroughly one can think under duress. Nightminster knew firepower alone would not win the battle. This triumph had to be achieved by will-power. He ushered the three men along the main street of the Refuge and then took a right into a lane. It ended a portal to the outside world, this one opening onto the open pasture that stretched to woodland about a quarter mile away. Most of the warriors had gathered on this side. Crucially, Nightminster spotted the new chief of the local village standing with his warriors about twenty yards from the portal. That was the man to conquer. And if his plan failed? It failed abruptly with a 9mm slug through the roof of his mouth. He was not going to be captured alive by the savages.

“Remove your holsters,” he said quietly. Of the three troops, London nodded slightly and smiled, and started to unbuckle his belt. Bradford Barney and Spud watched in disbelief, frozen in confusion. Nightminster added, still in a gentle voice: “Keep a pistol handy to check out in case—”

“Better to go out our way than their way,” London added in his gruff way. He seemed to have an inkling of what The Captain had in mind, and having tossed his belt away stood waiting, a faint smirk about his mouth. This confidence put backbone into Bradford Barney and Spud. They cast off their belts and pocketed their pistols.

Nightminster stepped up to the door. He lifted off the steel bars and shot back the three steel bolts slowly and loudly. The warriors outside could not fail to know something was about to happen. He laid a palm on the handle and for a moment a dreadful plunging fear arrested him. His heart banged and sweat broke out everywhere. He thought of Victorina, of her warmth and good-heartedness, how appallingly they clashed with the terrible duties into which his highest ambitions had driven him. What did it all mean? His life followed a logic of ambition and effect that was a function of the world around him, he could not change what chance had tossed his way. He rammed down the handle, paused, then let go and stood up close to the door so that he could edge it open with his left boot until it was at right angles to the wall of the Refuge.

From out on the pasture came a screeching gobbling, as if the local cranes were laughing at his pretentiousness. A flight of swans wheezed overhead bound up meeting their own urges of the season. From the right, a bittern woofed in the reeds of the fresh water lake amongst much cackling and warbling of mallards, egrets, chaffinches and other birds. Most comically, a badger waddled along its run through the warriors, passed Nightminster without a glance and continued on its way, ignored alike by the warriors. The wildlife did not care about this encounter of wild humans happening in its midst.

Nightminster set his focus on the trees at the far side of the pasture, vague a quarter mile away through the ground mist shining golden orange in the sun rising behind the Refuge. He paced forward, his arms swinging a little, intensely conscious of exactly how he placed his boots, listening to their swish in the dewy grass, knowing a foolish stumble would bring destruction in seconds. A peculiar numbness had come over him. The warriors seemed to get further away the closer he got to them. This detachment he fought by retrieving his focus to look at the chief of the local village, the one face he recognised. By great good fortune, a straight-line path lay clear between them. The chief had not moved his head, but his eyeballs had rolled to one side to observe the tall man in the black leather coat and dew-splashed boots approach. Nightminster stopped and turned to face him, looking down into his brown eyes. The chief had a sty on the lower lid of the right eye. He had a slight squint, for which reason Nightminster concentrated on the eye with the sty, the active eye. He waited. An odd tranquillity had come over him after that initial numbness. The ears of the chief’s rabbit-hat lay at odd angles. A contempt for the man before him was growing. This contempt expanded to embrace all of them, with their minds full of superstitious drivel that belonged in the palaeolithic. He could hear London breathing behind him. One of the other two sounded as if he was fidgeting. There was not much time before one of them lost their nerve.

Yet Nightminster did nothing. He stared into the right eye of the chief and the contempt for him hardened, and then intensified further into a total faith he could induce this primitive fool to kill himself by telepathic will, and he proceeded to lean all his mental energy towards transmitting images of the chief drawing his flint dagger and slicing his own jugular.

The chief released a hand from where it had been clasped about the bow and lowered it to the dagger in its sheath at his side. He lifted out the dagger, gripping it hooked down as for a strike from high, and he wound his arm back until the dagger was above his head. Nightminster waited no longer. A quick dip into the pocket of his coat, he shot the chief point-blank in the heart with the Makarov. The chief collapsed in the dew-silvered grass before the crack reflected back from the trees at the far end of the pasture. A thin cloud of fumes hung in the air and drifted away, coiling in the turbulence downwind of the Refuge.

A dull realism flattened the last hope from Nightminster’s mind. Death had finally got him. He could feel its cold gown about his body and hear its frigid rasp calling him to Eternity. He was free! He had escaped all terror and all lust and all hate and all time and now the abyssal peace was his. The stars overhead and the earth beneath were family now, to the end of time.

He stood waiting for the end. When nothing happened, he wondered if he should help things along by twisting the Makarov against the roof of his mouth and pulling the trigger. He looked down and saw that all the warriors had thrown themselves flat, their bodies aimed at him as if in a magnetic field. Without any conscious thought, he advanced his right boot and said quietly:

“Kiss me. Kiss me and you are mine.”

The nearest warrior crawled across the grass, the frizz of ginger hair on the backs of his hands becoming matted by dew. Keeping his face always to the ground, he kissed Nightminster’s toe cap and then slithered away until he was beyond the shadow cast by the Refuge, where he stood up and faced the sun, his arms out and eyes shut. Another warrior followed suit and grovelled out to join him. More warriors swarmed in, bunched, crawled over others or shoved them out of the way. The smacking of kisses grew frenzied, disgusting, like calves fighting to lick a block of salt. Saliva dribbled off Nightminster’s toe cap and gathered in the stitching of the sole. He remained impassive, looking at a particular dip formed by the outline of the trees while considering what a tedious duty it is to be a living god. How much effort was it going to require to keep this up? Would he have to appear before them every dawn to have his toe cap kissed? That would get downright tiresome. More and more of them were seething in the grass around the ultramarines as those from the far side of the Refuge poured around the corners, threw themselves flat and closed in to express their devotion. Nightminster was aware of a mass jostling like carp around his boots and dared not glance down even for a moment lest he burst out laughing. He could only stand and wait, hoping he was not taken by faintness, as the living deity could not move a muscle while his true believers were slobbering over his right toe cap. Time passed. An agonising cramp clutched the right thigh, he began to pant with the pain, concentrating on the random woofs of the bittern to distract himself. At last, the frenzy eased. The last of the warriors crawled away into the sun and stood with steam rising around them. Nightminster allowed himself a surreptitious shifting of weight from leg to leg to ease the cramp. He took a couple of slow paces back to stand level with London.

“Do you think they’ll stand there all day?” he murmured.

“I bloody hope not.”

“Let’s gamble they’ll bug off once we retire.”

“You’re The Gub, you can do what you like.”

“I’ll turn around and go inside, you follow like angels.”

“I never seen angels in a line, they’re usually floating about in defiance of the laws of aerodynamics.”

Nightminster had to turn away more swiftly than was quite proper for the dignity of a supreme being, but this was much more proper than showing his face puckering up to stifle laughter. The four men managed a pious display in filing inside, with Spud pulling shut the door behind therm. And they all folded laughing. For several seconds, Nightminster so verged on the hysterical he buckled over with hands on knees ready to vomit. He barged the other three back fearing the marsh savages might hear the hilarity through the heavy, steel-faced door. It was reinforced to be fireproof and resist prolonged assault by battering rams, so his fears were more instinctive than pragmatic. When they reached the cross roads of the Refuge’s Main Street, the rest of the garrison flooded about them pelting questions. They could not understand how a deadly encounter had turned into comedy. After hearing the shot, most of them had started pulling together arms for the breakout to the Tidal Basin, bracing themselves for a running battle to survive. Shiny and Catfeet came hurtling down a flight of steps, their faces flushed with excitement. They must have been watching through a crack in one of the roof hatches.

“That was the most incredible display of balls I’ve ever seen!” Shiny exclaimed, clapping Nightminster across the back and seizing his hand. “You could look God Almighty in the eye and He’d blink first!”

“This guy…” Catfeet paused to gather the attention of all. The main street fell quiet to listen. He gestured up at Nightminster. “This guy just became a living god before our eyes. He can work miracles.” He leaned a bit closer, studying the taller, younger man with a guarded admiration. “You may have surpassed what any sane person would dare do. It’s not healthy to pose as a god. You might just come to believe it yourself.”

“The crisis has passed,” Nightminster said. Heeler Danny Boy called up from the portal that the warriors were dispersing back across the pasture. He was watching them through the peep hole. Leading Heeler Bentley pushed him out of the way, Under-sergeant Wally budged him aside in turn.

“They’ve taken their dead chief with them.”

“Everyone get ready for the morning shift.” Nightminster was The Captain again. His voice cut through the babble. Now he felt like a proper leader. “We must plant the rods exactly as planned to assert our occupation. From now on, it is standing orders to shoot any savages on the island. Wally, get your gang ready. And the rest of you keep it lively, I want all the gangs outside for morning parade in ten minutes.”

And so the machinery of the Value System began to turn. The gangs lined up and their leaders counted them and reported all present and correct. Nightminster gave a brief talk about the importance of accomplishing the morning’s work efficiently and correctly. To have a frontier marked was fundamental to the safety of all.

The emotional after-effects of becoming ‘The Gub’ held him in a distracted, lethargic mood through the morning. Fortunately, he had briefed the gang leaders in detail the previous evening and had little to do beyond wander along the three miles of effort, showing his face and suggesting alternative lines for the frontier in a few places where the land was too sodden to plant the rods. He knew, intellectually, there was no guarantee the warriors would not attack their god. If he failed to act like a god, they would attack the imposter furiously. This possibility did not occur to any of the other men except London, who only mentioned it in his dry way to state there was nothing they could do about it so there was no point in worrying. The rods were all planted by 11 o’clock. Nightminster called another parade, where he thanked everyone for their work and sent them to lunch early. Normal duties would resume at 1pm.

None of the ultramarines reported so much as a glimpse of a marsh savage for the rest of the day. That evening, Nightminster sprawled exhausted in an armchair in his three-bedroomed suite. He was too tired and apathetic to go down to dinner. He had never known such exhaustion in his life. His bones felt like solid lead. He heard a knock on the door, which was open because he always left it open before dinner. He uttered a grunt but did not lift his eyelids.

“The Captain?”

There were three of them, Shiny, Catfeet and London.

“What?”

“We would like to assure you of the admiration of all the men.”

“I’m so glad.”

“There is still the matter of guarding the barges.”

Nightminster said nothing. It would not have helped had he expressed his fury at what he considered juvenile pestering.

“The men want a solution.”

“The ebb does not begin until 2 am. I have already said no duty is required when the tide is flooding.”

“A permanent solution, The Captain.”

Nightminster drew on the last of his reserves of patience.

“I can’t wave a magic wand. You’ll have to put up with the status quo for the next week until routine has bedded in to the point I can get away to London.”

“You have an idea?”

“Yes.”

He did not, but he could not be bothered dealing with their cantankerousness. He shut his eyes again and dropped asleep so suddenly that he was not aware again until cold woke him and he lay for a while in the darkness trying to orient himself in space and time.

He sat up and shuddered. The ajar front door to the suite cast a thin band of light, dimmer than moonlight. From beyond, he could hear nothing human, only the drone of rain on the corrugated iron roof and a couple of cats screeching far away in a lonely corner of the Refuge. Hunger pushed him to his feet and outside to the balcony. The ornate cast-iron standard lanterns of the main street threw drastic shadows into the side lanes. Still he could hear nothing, not even the steps of the night guard. He angled his watch until he could read the time. It was half past three in the morning. No wonder he was hungry, he had fallen asleep without any dinner. Hoping to find something in the cold room of the kitchen, he descended to the main street and ambled into the pub, behind which lay the kitchen. The complete silence began to strain his nerves. Irrational though it was, paranoid even, he could not shake off the suspicion his troops had abandoned him en masse, outraged by what they might have perceived as his off-handed dismissal of their blasted gripes over guard duties at the Tidal Basin. It was a peculiar thing what some people got worked up about. He crossed the pub, which was neat and clean, all tables polished, all glasses washed and put away in their glass cabinets. He lifted the counter gate through the bar and pushed aside the swing-doors into the kitchen, where he encountered a delicious smell of roast lamb. Doubtless a couple of the local flock had made the ultimate sacrifice to provide a celebratory feast. In the cold room were some leftover racks of lamb, which looked greasy for his tastes, but also half a roast swan and, delight of delights, a couple of wigeon. Some delving uncovered several loaves of dark rye bread wrapped in greased cloth to keep them moist. He did a little slicing, added a spoonful of cranberry jam, and retired to the pub where he sat alone eating swan and wigeon sandwiches, listening to his own chewing, as that was the only sound apart from the drone of rain above. He felt a depth of solitude, as if he had been plunged far beneath the surface of the ocean. Success meant aloneness, that was the truth. The more he emerged as the lord of his world, the more alone he would stand, even while the scale of his rule grew huge. The loneliness of lordship could not be endured without a queen for the journey.

He had won the Value System. It was going to be a success. Now he had to win his queen.

And solve the problem of guarding those fucking barges…

DEAR READER

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Now read Darkest Ambitions, the concluding book of this series. You can get it here (UK) or here (US).

What is the deadliest ambition in the world? Wealth? Vengeance? Power?

All three together?

Nightminster forges ahead with his ‘perfect business’ the Value System, discovering depths of ruthlessness he never knew he possessed. Embittered after being shunned by the Krossington clan, he’s more determined than ever to get rich enough to defy them. Back in London, Sebastian Smith and his Official SUN Party are also plumbing new depths of ruthlessness, with alarming success. Nightminster can no longer ignore the threat to his ambitions.

Hoping to broker more peaceful times, Tom and Victorina have announced a national conference to be held in Oxford on May Day. They get plenty of warnings from their great rival, Sebastian Smith, that it’s not a wise thing to do. They press ahead anyway. For the first time in their lives, Nightminster and Victorina enjoy beautiful summer days together.

It's the end of innocence. They are at the threshold of a catastrophe that will change Britain forever.

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