HIGHEST AMBITIONS

SOVEREIGNS OF THE STORM – BOOK ONE

*

MALCOLM J WARDLAW

Highest Ambitions

Copyright © 2021 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

Note to the Reader

During this book and its sequels, you may find it useful to refer to maps and other information found in the Appendix at the end:

Map of south-east England in 2072

Map of Old Greater London in 2072

The money used in 2072

Books in the Annals of the Glorious Resolution

Sovereigns of the Storm series

Book 1: Highest Ambitions

Book 2: Darkest Ambitions

Book 3: Deadly Ambition

Sovereigns of the Collapse series

Book 1: Death by Decent Society

Book 2: The Night of Blind Ambition

Book 3: The Church of Nuclear Science

Book 4: Operation Ultimate

Book 5: Nuclear Nightminster

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 25

Chapter 26

APPENDIX

Chapter 1

[Bermondsey, Old Greater London, England, July 2072]

Explosive banging on the front door!

Nightminster froze, staring into the grotesque image returned by the blistered silvering of the bathroom mirror. An ulcer the size of a plum flourished where his mouth should have been. Within that ulcer glistened a cluster of tiny droplets, the contents of a pustule on his jaw that had been the focus of his exasperation until a few seconds ago. The acne of adolescence was fading as he became a man, and now, it would appear, the affairs of a man had intruded upon a poor family trying to have breakfast. The aggression with which those knuckles had rapped the front door hinted at more than just the passing-by of a neighbour.

This was a call from the big-shots’ world.

He slipped through to his bedroom where he extracted a neat little Makarov 9mm pistol from the drawer under his bed. Armed and ready, he poised at the top of the stairs, which slalomed down through a tight corner to the kitchen, and he listened, blood panting in his ears. He havered between the cold will of a killer and the impudence of a boy with a toy gun. Would he shoot, if he had to?

He heard his father unlatch the door.

The caller’s tone was poncing. Typical. Nightminster pictured a coward with his nose stuck up, too haughty to look at Father.

Father answered coolly. Yes, we are the Nightminsters. Prentice is my son. You thought such a letter too grand for a plebby little flat like ours—didn’t you? He called up the stairs:

“Prentice! You have to sign for a letter.”

Nightminster de-cocked the Makarov, slipped it in his trouser pocket and descended the narrow stairs, ducking his head under the beam at the corner. The front door into the stairwell was wide open, allowing in the smell of damp and stale rats’ piss. The caller was a messenger in his early twenties, whippet-thin under his scarlet uniform from dashing about on his steel safety bicycle dodging steam trucks and man-hauled wagons. His face bore that infuriating self-righteousness of petty officials. Nightminster loomed six inches over him and made the point just that little bit clearer by leaning over the threshold, until the reek of sweat repelled him.

“Yes?” he snapped.

The messenger’s eyes dropped. He seemed to find something interesting about Nightminster’s collar.

“Um… Are you Mister Prentice Nightminster?”

“Indeed.”

“Please sign for this letter.”

He offered a fancy thing; hairy, Prussian blue, with ribbons and gold trimming. Nightminster snatched it and scribbled his signature on the receipt pad, which he tossed back before slamming the door in the messenger’s face.

“Arsehole,” he said.

Father chuckled.

“That’s it, isn’t it?”

Nightminster’s mother pressed against his elbow, wheezing with excitement. The envelope was of vellum and stitched with black thread. From a black seal hung a ribbon of the same rich blue with gold trimming. Nightminster stepped into the light from the kitchen window. There, in grandiose swirls of gold Roundhand, the addressee had been laid down:

To Mr Prentice Wyston Nightminster,

Of Bermondsey industrial asylum,

London,

Known in that place by:

The Mail Office of the Chadderton Engineering Partnership.

He tore off the seal and pulled out the folded parchment within. The director of undergraduate admissions of the University of Oxford was pleased to offer him a place to study physics beginning October 2072. He would be advised of his allocation to a college in due course. If he wished to accept the offer, he must pay the fee for the Michaelmas term of 208 Troy ounces, 14 penny-weights and 21 grains of gold by September 1st. The faculty staff looked forward to welcoming him on October 1st.

Dazed as if having sunk a tumbler of gin, Nightminster proffered the letter to his parents. Mother collapsed over the kitchen table, bawling with joy. Father hugged him, his eyes glistening.

“You’ve done it! You’ve won!”

Nightminster displayed anything but joy.

“Aren’t you delighted?”

He remained pensive, looking down at his father.

“I never dreamed they’d let a common slummy like me into a place like that,” he whispered.

“I never doubted you’d make it. With a degree from Oxford, you will achieve your highest ambitions.”

So far as Nightminster was concerned, he was on target to reach his highest ambitions without Oxford. He did not need three years stuck in a medieval time capsule. A man must have laid the foundations of success by twenty-five, or else he would not achieve his highest ambitions. Dotage would claim him first.

“Don’t you understand what this means?” Father pressed. He took a few paces back, confused by his son’s apathy. “If it’s the fees you’re worried about, nobody’s expecting you to pay them. Dr Horrocks told us you’d easily win a scholarship.”

Dr Horrocks was Nightminster’s former physics master. It had been at his insistence that last winter, the schoolboy had travelled to the city of medieval authority, with its monastic quads and chapels and that fanciful tower, the Radcliffe Camera. The place was a museum from the reign of lords. Oxford had passed clean through the excesses of the Public Era and the calamity of the Glorious Resolution to remain a place of carefree youth on rickety bicycles, punting on the Cherwell, vast lawns combed by petrol-powered cutting machines… Something deep in him had railed against the place. He sensed a subtle mediocrity in the air. In his eyes, the students lacked the dreams to succeed in life, or else, they lacked the courage to try, so they served time amongst these beautiful old buildings to gain a blessing. There was a price to pay, of course. They would never learn what they could have been. Perhaps they never really wanted to try. At the time, it had never occurred to him the genteel dons, with their punctilious elocution, would waste time on a slummy who struggled to distinguish ‘home’ from ‘Ohm’.

“I’m not worried about funding, Father,” Nightminster said. He could have paid the fees out of his own pocket. He hugged them both and kneeled to lace up his boots in silence. As he stepped out into the stairwell, a rat waddled across the landing. He kicked it squealing down the steps. He had already decided he would ignore the letter. The road to his highest ambitions was paved with gold. He did not need a piece of paper from a medieval time capsule.

He passed out to the street, which was heavily overgrown with foxgloves, cascades of purple buddleia, bishop’s weed with its white trumpet flowers, and nettles. Already at this hour of just after 7 am the insects were roaring in the heavy air. He did not linger in the pong of stale urine that always hung about the communal doorway. He proceeded along a track filtering up the middle of the weed-clogged street, making for a boulevard a couple of hundred yards distant. He resented the hemmed-in feeling caused by the long blocks of decrepit Public Era flats along both sides. When he spotted another rat, he whipped out the Makarov, took quick aim and fired, blowing its head off. Faces lurked in the gloom behind dirty windows nearby, and retreated when they saw who was shooting. There was a meanness about his mood this morning. Why did stunning good fortune anger him so much? He was probably the only person amongst the sixty thousand or so inhabitants of Bermondsey industrial asylum to be offered a place at any university, let alone famous Oxford. So why this smouldering sense of injustice?

He knew the reason. For him, Prentice Wyston Nightminster, there would be no easy climb. His would be a long, lonely, dangerous ascent to achieve his castle in the sky, for he had not been born in a palace set on the hard earth.

Chapter 2

Nightminster joined a stream of workers rumbling along duck boards laid at the sides of the boulevard to reduce mud in winter and dust in summer. Today was a ‘sweet’ day, which is to say that the wind carried the stench from the Sulfurman rendering plant into the wastes of the Eastern Marshes. With his long strides, Nightminster overtook a team of eunuchs hauling a wagon towards Sulfurman’s. It was heaped with dead surplus gathered off the public highways. These ones were a bit further gone than usual, with eyes pecked out and red meat and guts gaping where scavengers had fed. One cadaver resembled President Abraham Lincoln of the United States of the Public Era, except that the flesh had gone from the jaw so that the teeth chattered at every bump.

Nightminster diverted up onto to a former railway viaduct that ran across Bermondsey industrial asylum, effectively cutting it in two. Now he was above the smells and crowds of the common streets. Indeed, he was above the rooftops and could see out to the wider world. Once upon a time in the Public Era, this elevated super-highway had carried no less than eleven railway lines. Of those eleven railway lines, nothing remained. Nowadays the viaduct was a spread of gravel beaten smooth like a pale grey canal between the brick parapets. It was used as a private driveway by the local big-shot Johnny Albert and his thugs, with their eight-wheeled armoured limousines. Common residents of Bermondsey were not allowed up here and got whacked if caught.

From the elevation of the viaduct, he could look two miles up the River Thames to the white dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and even further to the towering hedges that surrounded the palaces of Mayfair. That was proper big-shot country, where the sovereign caste lived, the Big Seven dynasties: Krossington, Shellingfield, Versailles, Montina, Dasti-Jones, Fiesler-Cohen and Shenton-George-Hathaway. These big-shots were so ‘big’ that a mere slummy like Nightminster never set eyes on them. He walked backwards for some paces, staring at the ruler-flat tops of the tallest hedges. There must be servants who worked sixty or seventy feet off the ground to keep those hedge tops so neat and flat. A burning flower of rage blossomed in his guts at the insolence of sovereign presumption. He imagined the sovereign gentry behind those hedges, doubtless still lounging under silk sheets in four-poster beds, brother and sister together, so smug, so mediocre, so entitled. One day, the name Nightminster would doom their lives. He murmured:

“But by the time you know my name, it will be too late. I’ll be tossing the lot of you into the shitpit of history.”

He set his back on the rich core of London and returned to the realities of Bermondsey industrial asylum. All he had were his ambitions, his very highest ambitions. Only they kept him alive. Sixty thousand human rabbits seethed in a warren of dilapidated blocks of flats wrapped around gaunt factories festooned with rusty ducting, and surrounded by groves of belching chimneys that rose as high as the wheeling seagulls. Such was an industrial asylum. He descended from the viaduct back to street level and joined the flow under a wrought-iron archway into the Chadderton Engineering Partnership, the largest employer of Bermondsey.

*

Nightminster had a job to do, a delicate one. His work was to dismantle, inspect, reassemble and tune a kind of electronic gadget called a cavity magnetron. Each gadget was about the size of a cat, although much heavier as it had a steel core. These gadgets were the vital component in radar sets used to shoot down aircraft that strayed over the lands of the sovereigns. The laws of trespass were about as consistent as the weather, since sovereign landowners made up their own laws as it suited them. If an aircraft was too ugly, or too noisy, or too low, or too slow, or too fast, or the landowner just happened to be in a bad mood, 155mm guns ranged by centimetric radar would blast it from the sky. If the gunners missed due to poorly-tuned radar, sovereigns got exceedingly upset. They had the clout—and certainly the spitefulness—to ensure the guilty grunt back at the factory got sacked.

Nightminster sank into concentration. He loved this total immersion in the task at hand, the devotion to craft and detail that could be honed to a prized skill, something to distinguish him from the rest. To be excellent was to be safe. His body would never get shovelled off a public highway and carried to Sulfurman’s to be rendered into glue, pig feed, paint and a vile sludge called bio-mazut used to fire boilers and heavy engines.

From beyond the white-washed brick walls of the Precision Engineering workshop came noises of a more basic, energetic world: the screams of grinding wheels, the machine-gun clattering of rivetters, the groans of shearing blades and from time to time, when the hammer forge was in action, a primeval shuddering of the very ground as if the demons of the underworld were at war. Beneath all that was a faint rumble, so constant as to be normally not noticeable. This was the engine of the power house, from which numerous electric cables and transmission shafts spread like rays to machine shops where belts carried power down to lathes, drills, looms and presses. The engine consumed bio-mazut—the very best of Sulfurman’s—at the rate of three buckets every hour.

Around half past eleven, as he was sipping a cup of roasted-barley coffee and joking with some colleagues, his manager turfed open the door and yelled down the workshop:

“Big Knight! Get down here, God wants you.”

Nightminster got much ribbing and jibing about what awaited him in the office of David Chadderton, the senior partner of the sprawling Chadderton complex. Privately, the most morbid, frightful possibilities held him silent as he followed his manager. If he was searched and they found the Makarov pistol, he was finished. Firearms were strictly forbidden within Chaddertons’. His unease grew as he was not led up towards the executive suites. Instead, his manager took him outside to the central dock, where materials came in off the River Thames and finished products went out. A triple-expansion steam engine was being lowered into a sailing barge, probably destined to drive some sovereign’s pinnace. Nightminster eyed a beautiful red motorbike—an ersatz Laverda Mirage—getting crated up. What he would have given for such a machine!

He spotted David Chadderton standing with a huddle of other big-shots in suits. Their forms were dwarfed against a mighty wagon bearing something the size of a carthorse shrouded in tarpaulin. Chadderton was an easy spot due to his coarse black hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and the red stripes down the seams of his trousers. The three other men sported pale-blue bow ties and dark grey business suits. Nightminster summed them up as typical corporate ‘skittles’. He noted their haughty expressions. On getting closer, he further noted their ‘poncing’ accents and wondered what he had done to deserve the blessing of such esteemed company.

“Excuse me, your excellencies. Permit me to present Nightminster,” his manager said, rigid at attention and bowing his head. Chadderton thanked him and let him go, leaving Nightminster alone with the big-shots. With his unusual tallness, he remained aloof, looking over their heads while ‘God’ introduced him as if he were a champion racehorse.

“This is Nightminster, the young man I was telling you about. He is the best in London, without question the man for this job. Nightminster won joint best mechanical and electrical apprentice trophies last year even though he was attending public school at the same time, to which he won a scholarship at the age of fourteen. He received three ‘A’ grades in his A-levels, with a distinction in physics. He has also pursued a career with General Wardian glory trust since joining as a cub at the age of twelve, achieving Golden Cub and Golden Scout as well as being their national pistol-shooting champion for 2071 and 2072. As I speak, he is the youngest corporal at Euston depot. He also swam for his school and won the London Schools Championship Freestyle for Under-16s. And this morning, I received the brilliant news from his father that Nightminster has been accepted by the University of Oxford to study Physics.”

One of the three skittles spoke. He was the shortest of them, and the oldest. With his calm and condescending manners, he was obviously their leader.

“Young Nightminster, you are truly a superman! And that is just as well, since it will take no less than a superman to repair our sick projector. Otherwise, we would have done it ourselves.”

“These men are from the sovereign Household of Krossington,” David Chadderton explained. “They have entrusted to our works an exceptional task. Beneath that tarpaulin—.” He pointed up at the bulky load on the back of the wagon. “—is a priceless heirloom of the Public Era, a planetarium projector built in the 1960s when the world was still split into so-called Communist and so-called Capitalist blocks. This particular projector was built by Karl Zeiss of the so-called Communists, although that does not make it a bad machine.”

“It’s a magnificent machine when it works,” the Chief Skittle said. “Unfortunately, Jupiter and Saturn are no longer obedient and the precession of the Earth has drifted.”

“Show me this machine,” Nightminster said, becoming intrigued. His abruptness aroused embarrassment. The household skittles glanced at one another and at David Chadderton, who uttered an apologetic cough. He laid a hand on Nightminster’s shoulder.

“For all his outstanding accomplishments, young Nightminster has had a rough and ready upbringing. He is not habituated to the use of styles. Nightminster, please address this gentleman as ‘Your Excellency’.”

“I should be grateful to inspect this device, Your Excellency.”

“Of course.” The Chief Skittle turned and clapped his hands. A flunky yelled orders. The heavy tarpaulin was untied and hauled off by some of the abundance of wagon-pullers hanging about. Nightminster took several paces backwards, marvelling at the exotic artefact revealed. It was a crazy beast from a nightmare! It stood on two mighty steel legs with a body formed of segments like a hornet. There were masses of eyes all over and a tiny head with yet more eyes. It seemed a creation of madness. But only at first sight. Its purpose was to cast thousands of stars, the planets, the moon and the sun onto the dome of a planetarium. He had heard of such projectors, but he had never seen one in real life. He could already guess different segments of it would mimic the rotation of the Earth on its axis, the Earth’s rotation about the sun, and the orbits of the other planets. The moon probably had its own specific lens and gearbox.

“Aren’t you horrified at the prospect of fixing such a complicated mechanism?” the Chief Skittle asked.

“Not at all, Your Excellency. The impossible is only a matter of time and willpower.”

The four men heeled with laugher. There followed some diplomatic breezing. David Chadderton said he was taking their excellencies for lunch; did young Nightminster have any last questions?

“Have you any engineering drawings, Your Excellency?”

“Nothing at all, I’m afraid. We know nothing of the machine’s history. His Decency Wilson Krossington gifted it to the clan more than three decades ago, having come across it by accident in a warehouse near Bristol. Given the complete disorder of the Glorious Resolution…”

“I understand, Your Excellency.”

While David Chadderton ushered his guests to a no doubt long and liquidly-reinforced lunch, Nightminster asked to have the projector hauled to the Precision Engineering department where his manager had a storage bay cleared out to create a place to work. Everyone scrammed and left him alone just as soon as they could. No one wanted anything to do with such an eccentric project. In contrast, it was precisely the kind of puzzle Nightminster relished. He spent a couple of hours inspecting it from end to end, getting a feel for the thinking of the long-dead engineers who had created it. He noted various labels with instructions in German, a language he knew little of. The projector was driven by a single electric motor via shafts, gearboxes, and tiny cogs and chains. There was nothing electronic in it. It pre-dated the digital explosion of the Public Era, which was just as well, as he could not repair plastic centipedes. No one could nowadays.

David Chadderton came strolling in around the time Nightminster was thinking of knocking off for lunch. After some pleasantries, his voice grew stern.

“Let me make something absolutely clear, young Nightminster. This planetarium projector has got to be dismantled, repaired, rebuilt, tested and ready to ship in full working order before you depart for Oxford. I don’t care how you do it, it simply must be done. This projector is the famous centrepiece of the Krossington clan’s New Year celebrations. If we fail to return it to the Krossingtons in perfect working order, the Chadderton Engineering Partnership will be shunned for having humiliating the most powerful sovereign clan in Britain. That would be very dangerous for our reputation. Very dangerous. Upon your shoulders rests the livelihood of all the ten thousand who work under this roof!”

Nightminster was well aware the Krossington clan was the richest sovereign dynasty on the Island of Britain. They owned, or at least dominated, most of the land to the south-west of Old Greater London all the way to the south coast of England. That was what made them Chadderton’s greatest customer. He would sweat in this workshop through the summer so that gentry would be entertained for an hour or so on New Year’s Eve. He supposed life was like that for the sovereign caste, an endless succession of distractions and pleasures, but not work, never work, for work was done by masses of toilers like Nightminster.

“I respect that, sir. It will be done.”

Chapter 3

After a hasty lunch, Nightminster moved to his place of private business, a narrow cupboard on the ground floor of the Precision Engineering department. It was one in a line of such cupboards, which he rented for one Troy ounce of gold per month. There were a couple of customers waiting when he arrived.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said.

“G’morning Big Knight,” they replied. He unlocked the cupboard. It was about six feet deep. The shelves were loaded with stock. Mechanical film cameras, a mechanical calculating machine, typewriters, clockwork toys and alarm clocks, in short, heirlooms of the Public Era that could be fixed and sold.

He pulled forward a chair upholstered in black leather, sat down, and aimed his black fountain pen at the first customer. This was a man of about thirty with an apologetic air, cautious and approval-seeking in his manners. He had lost the thumb of his right hand and used a strap-on wooden prosthetic. He handed over a bag of coins. Nightminster emptied them out and absorbed himself in totting up their value on a note pad, converting the silver to gold at this week’s exchange rate as posted over the Chadderton cashier’s office. This customer had borrowed 2 ounces and 8 pennyweights of gold two weeks previously. Nightminster charged interest at the rate of 10% per week. He did not bother compounding interest. Repayments were rounded up to the nearest pennyweight. The repayment was therefore 2 18/20 (that is, 2 ounces and 18 pennyweights) for a profit of 10 pennyweights, or half an ounce of gold. He determined that his customer had included too much silver and refunded two silver sovereigns to the pathetically grateful man.

“I can always trust you, Big Knight,” he gushed. He signed the master ledger to close the loan. Nightminster filed the carbon copy in his back-up ledger and thanked him. He glanced at his wrist-watch–the lunch break was only an hour–and then beckoned to the next customer.

This was an older, craggy-faced man with a disgruntled mouth and angry eyes. He introduced himself as James from the Chassis Shop. James went to great lengths to explain what a reliable man he was, having worked in the shop since Chaddertons’ was founded thirty years previously. Those years had ruined his hearing. This problem was so common that Nightminster kept a conversation pad handy, and he used it today. James was obviously spinning out a tale in the hope of exploiting what he doubtless assumed to be Nightminster’s boyish credulity. It did at least make interesting social history. The family had been rich before the Glorious Resolution. They lived in a house up in Hampstead and kept a 25-ton yacht at Cowes. The disappearance of first money, then the Internet and finally the government had left them fighting for their lives on an island that in the best of times could not feed itself, and the Glorious Resolution was the worst of times. It was only by the grace of God that some of the family had survived to find asylum with cousins in Bermondsey industrial asylum. James had by this time dropped to his knees with tears trickling down the creases of his face. Nightminster thought him a very fine actor.

James seized Nightminster’s knee.

“I need a loan of ten ounces!” He pulled an old camera from his tool bag. “It’s the best, this is, a Nikon, Japanese made, precision engineering at its best.”

“I don’t pawn,” Nightminster said. “Although sometimes I buy outright.” He gave the Nikon a quick inspection. It was an early Nikkormat model of the 1960s, totally manual, no electronics and no batteries. In good condition, it could have fetched 150 or even 200 ounces at the Kensington auctions, where agents of the sovereign caste vied to acquire the finest heirlooms of the Public Era. This camera’s lens was scratched, the body dented and the mechanism jammed. “This is just a piece of junk.”

James started to argue but Nightminster cut him off.

“I said I don’t pawn. If you want a loan, you’ll need a letter of recommendation from your foreman, or bring him here in person.”

“But−“ James’ face twisted like that of an angry child. “I’ve got to have the money, you stupid brat. My wife got hit by a wagon and she can’t work.”

He crowded in, brown teeth bared and hands clawed. Nightminster head-butted him on the chin, knocking him back with a clap of false teeth. Springing from the chair, he stamped on James’ right toe cap and punched him in the Adam’s apple, knocking him flat on his back. As James rolled about coughing and gasping, Nightminster shifted from the toecap to grind the ankle, hard. James gargled with pain. He was a strong man, but it turned out he crumpled like a paper bag in a fight.

“Don’t come here again.”

Nightminster tapped a golden jaguar badge on the lapel of his waistcoat. This badge marked his good standing with the local chief thug, Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey. He released the ankle and booted James in the backside. “Understand?”

James lumbered to his feet and shambled out of sight limping and snivelling. No doubt he would simmer and fantasise about vengeance—cowards always did. Nightminster was accustomed to living under the threat of such people. The Makarov pistol was one precaution, the gold jaguar badge another. Such was the life of a money-lender.

*

Nightminster loathed usury. It degraded both parties and required the threat of violence. He knew from lessons at his old public school that during the Public Era, the Fatted Masses spent their lives under the shadow of the debt-collector. The ruling classes of those times tempted the common people into debt servitude with houses, motor cars and holidays in order to control them. After a year as a loan-shark, Nightminster was not remotely surprised the Public Era came to a bad end. Despite this loathing, he stayed in the business. Being a loan-shark was good cover. People derided him as a punk who grovelled to the local big-shot thug for protection. They had no idea how much gold he was raking in from his other business interests, building a heap that was lifting him towards his highest ambitions.

After working the afternoon shift in the Precision Engineering department, he continued business until 6 pm. Craggy James made no further appearances. Nightminster closed loans for a profit of almost 7 ounces and issued new loans to the value of 100 ounces, which would yield 10 ounces per week without him so much as picking his nose. He was very effective at keeping his business activities under the radar screen of the big-shots. If Chadderton became aware that his dutiful technician was pulling in gold as a loan-shark, that could be awkward. Not that Chadderton was actually dangerous, though. He did not employ thugs to beat people bloody with steel cracker pipes. There were other big-shots who did, though. There was the thug-chief Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey and big-shot within a confederation of thug-chiefs that called themselves the ultramarines. He employed hundreds of thugs. What was worse, he was unavoidable; Nightminster tutored his four children. That was how he had gained the right to flourish the golden jaguar badge of good standing. The coming evening, he had to go up to Johnny’s palace to give the children their lessons.

By now, Johnny Albert was bound to know about Nightminster’s offer from Oxford. His street intelligence was uncanny, and he was the type who could always transform your advantage into his. For once, though, Nightminster was not troubled. He was confident Oxford was a long way beyond the reach of an asylum thug-chief.

Chapter 4

Nightminster left his parents’ flat after supper and made his way up Druid Street, one of the main boulevards across Bermondsey industrial asylum. He kept to the middle of the road to avoid the filthy side streets. There was no motor traffic. There had been a turn-down in spending by the sovereigns for some reason, and most factories had stopped overtime and night shifts. Nightminster knew the cut-backs would increase demand for his loans but make debt collections harder. That meant he had to brace for more threats and violence as required.

His generally resentful mood intensified as he walked along a particularly poor stretch of Druid Street. Here the side streets were narrow and dusty, weeds never got a chance under the torrents of feet. Swarms of dirty boys tore about yelling taunts at girls huddled on the steps of apartment blocks. Scraggy cats jostled on heaps of rotting meat and fish dumped from the central market. Skinny, gnarl-faced women dug over the heaps in one lane, while in the next, three hags fought over a screeching chicken, which got ripped apart before his eyes. Women nattered in circles, their faces set bitter from the trap they lived in, this trap of decaying apartments, agonising childbirth and agonising child death. Most of these people lived one family per room, not per flat, and some bedded down in a stairwell each night. They glared at the tall, prosperous figure of Nightminster strolling past in gleaming brogues, pressed green pants, pure white shirt and black waistcoat. The black waistcoat in particular drew envy, for it marked him as Chadderton staff, paid a salary rather than by the piece.

The blocks of flats on the right-hand side came to an end and a high barbed wire fence ran beside the boulevard with guard towers armed with machine guns at regular intervals. Behind the fence spread a prison camp of long wooden sheds, row after row extending for a quarter mile down to the River Thames. The camp housed Johnny Albert’s workforce of ten thousand, that is, the same as the workforce of the Chadderton Engineering Partnership. The difference was, these were slaves, not employees. They were known as the Night and Fog, a term borrowed from the Nazi Empire of the Public Era. Every industrial asylum in London had an owner like Johnny Albert, and they all exploited thousands of Night and Fog. It was their way of staying rich.

Just beyond the far end of the prison camp, Nightminster approached Johnny Albert’s palace. It was long and low, not grand, a functional brick structure, albeit with no noticeable limit. It had been built more than two centuries ago as London Bridge train station. Nightminster knew that trains were large steel machines that—like all Public Era transport—tore along at terrific speeds gorging on vast amounts of energy. He had seen films of them in history classes at public school. After the Glorious Resolution, this train station had been taken over by Johnny Albert for his palace as the Owner of Bermondsey.

Nightminster reached a broad, arched entrance where two of Johnny Albert’s guards stood on duty. Both wore black steel helmets, black woollen tunics and black pants. Their boots shone like glass, despite the dusty gravel road. So did the holsters containing their Colt pistols. They wore the black uniform of the ultramarines, the confederation of thugs that ran the industrial asylums and had a fancy club house somewhere on the north side of the River Thames where ‘owners’ like Johnny Albert gathered to laugh about gold. Nightminster showed his ID booklet, issued and signed by Johnny Albert himself, and the two thugs let him in.

*

The Owner inhabited a sprawling bungalow with ornamental gardens on the roof of the palace, directly under the evening sky. The household staff knew Nightminster by sight and did not challenge him. He made his way inside to the school room of Johnny Albert’s four children, where he found them waiting at their desks as he stepped in the door a few minutes early just before 7:30 pm.

“Good evening, my students,” he said.

“Good evening, Mr Nightminster,” they replied.

The peace of busy minds reigned over the school room until Nightminster was startled by the blow of a mighty hand upon his shoulder. He turned to meet the face of the boss, Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey. He made an impressive figure in his personalised uniform, with its high, gleaming leather belt over the black tunic, shoulder strap, silver escarbuncle on each sleeve and collar tab, and pistol holster up level with the elbow. The dagger hanging in its ebony sheath clonked against Nightminster’s desk.

“Got a minute, Big Knight?”

“Of course, Captain.”

The Owner led him through to a ‘lounge’ the size of a gymnasium. The external wall was entirely formed of floor-to-ceiling plate-glass panes. Supposedly these panes had been gleaned from a great skyscraper called The Shard, which had stood behind the palace in the Public Era. The wall of windows looked upon an ornamental roof garden, which was enclosed by a tall cedar hedge and so did not provide any view of the prison camp.

Johnny Albert served them both tumblers of Tobermory whisky from far away in Scotland. Johnny Albert, whom everyone addressed as ‘Captain’, was a heavily-built man of about six feet tall, although he seemed bigger due to long, powerful arms, large head and bulging, reptilian neck. He was at first sight something of a baby-face, with wide-set brown eyes under a nearly flat line of heavy eyebrow. A casual person might suppose he was a gentle giant in his mid-thirties, probably a bit simple. In fact, he was fifty-four, he was not gentle and certainly not simple.

For several minutes, they savoured the malt, or at least, Johnny Albert presumably did. Nightminster sipped, on edge, sensing confrontation in the air. Johnny Albert seemed deep in thought, his eyes flickering at ideas in the sophisticated brain they illuminated.

“I was twenty years old when the Glorious Resolution began,” he announced. The eyes shifted to Nightminster. “Only a bit older than you. I grew up in the old Public Era and I was making plans for my life, just as you are now. I started boxing when I was fourteen. My father was a doctor and he was horrified. He feared I’d be punch-drunk before I left school. They had funny ideas about fighting back in the Public Era. The nation state had nuclear missiles that could kill a million people in a flash, but schoolboys couldn’t scrap without all manner of cushions and rules and such nonsense, so I went underground—not literally, I mean out of sight, or ‘illegal’ as they said at the time. I took up bare-knuckle fighting. Very hard stuff; it made me a man. I did well at school just the same, got into university and had plans to start my own fighting academy, then—wham! The Glorious Resolution. The whole world crashed down like a landslide and everyone got smothered in the same dust.”

Nightminster assumed this ramble was leading somewhere. The Owner did have a habit of being obscure. Even his lieutenants struggled over exactly what he was getting at sometimes.

“Everyone was asking the same question: how do I survive this fuck-up while other slobs die? Well, it’s a funny thing how human instinct works. Everyone saw the same answer—join a tribe. May the best tribe win, survival of the fittest and all that, that’s how it was. The trick was to jump into the tribe that was going to win. Most people jumped the wrong way, or else, they were such dumb rabbits they never jumped at all.”

Nightminster thought of his parents. They were in their late twenties when the Glorious Resolution hit the world. They had never said much about their experiences. On the rare occasion when he asked them, they winced and muttered and that was the end of the matter. He knew they had lived in a town outside London called Slough and had flowed to gain asylum with his (now deceased) grandparents in the flat where the family still lived. His parents were kindly, modest people who just wanted to be left alone. They were closer to rabbits than the wolves like Johnny Albert who had won.

“I am making a point, my lad,” Johnny Albert said, observing the drifting attention. “The tribes that survived all had something in common—they won. We made alliances with winners outside our patch. That was how the Ultramarine Guild got started. Did that posh school teach you any of this?”

The ‘posh school’ was the public school on the richer, northern side of the city, to which Nightminster had won a Chadderton scholarship at the age of fourteen.

“They taught me that modern history began in 2040 with the Declaration of the Glorious Resolution by the Westminster Assembly. The sovereign landowners claimed they ruled the Island of Britain. No one else had the guns and gold to argue with them, so rule they did. The sovereigns created the glory trusts from the armed forces and police of the old nation state to ‘defend public order’, which meant to protect their estates and palaces. I never learned anything at school about asylums, or surplus flows, or the Nameless Gone. Seamen at the Port of Erith told me all sorts of lurid tales about what happened in places like India and China. Rivers choked solid with bloated bodies, more bodies heaped like kelp on beaches, the Smoke of Flies swirling over cities like thunderstorms. I don’t know how much of it is true. Probably no one does. Recording technology at the end of the Public Era was digital, and of course all that solid-state stuff was useless after the Internet died.”

“Very true, very true. The point I wanted to make, in my very own roundabout way, is that this modern world, as you call it, is about tribes. Nobody survives alone, you have to be part of something greater—you have to wear a uniform. I wear black, so the world knows exactly what I stand for. But you, you turn up at my house in all the bloody colours of the rainbow and it makes me wonder what the hell you’re planning for your life.”

Nightminster glanced down. He was wearing the brogues, green dress trousers and white shirt of a corporal of General Wardian glory trust, and the black waistcoat of a member of staff at Chaddertons’. The golden jaguar badge of good standing with Johnny Albert slunk along one lapel.

“These are my best clothes, Captain. I’m not making a statement.”

“Two little birdies have fluttered on my shoulder today, bringing most interesting tidings about you, Big Knight. The first little birdy told me all about the loan-sharking.”

Immediately, Nightminster thought of James from the Chassis Shop. He must have cheeped to the Owner out of spite. No doubt the sparrow had got his miserable ten ounces.

“Not that it was news to me. I’ve known about your little business for quite a while. I’ve known you undercut my people and use my badge to impress losers. It’s disappointing, very disappointing.”

Nightminster came under the direct force of those hard brown eyes. He repressed his indignation that an ultramarine of all people was criticising him. The ultramarines did some good things, like enforcing hygiene laws to get waste out of the asylum every morning, quarantining suspicious fevers, and whacking petty thieves and scallywags. Nightminster had himself been whacked across the arse several times as a kid for such pranks as firing eggs into the market place using an enormously powerful catapult inspired by a Roman ballista (they’d whacked him especially hard for that one, as he'd only just missed one of Johnny Albert’s lieutenants). For all these positive duties, the ultramarines were still just thugs who squeezed gold from rabbits. They even extracted tribute from the Chadderton brothers, although no one knew how much. Plus, they creamed in good gold from their Night and Fog slave-labour racket. They were medieval.

Nightminster said nothing. So, Johnny Albert continued.

“I rated you as clever but lazy. Being clever is only as useful as you make it. Your mum and dad are clever, but they haven’t the guts to use their brains, so they’ll die in a mouldy little flat. Four years ago, you won a Chadderton scholarship to study at that posh school across the river with the rich kids. Supposedly you can babble ancient Babylonian from the Behistun Inscription—on that I’ll trust your word. You speak good French too, according to Frenchies in my crew. Yet what are you doing with these great brains of yours? You loan-shark using my badge and you haven’t the grace to offer me tribute—you’re a punk. And it’s such a waste. That’s why the tidings of the second little birdy were a great surprise.”

“In what way, Captain?”

“The second little birdy told me you’ve won a place at the University of Oxford. Very impressive. Not many kids clamber from a dump like this to party with sovereign gentry amongst those ancient spires. I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

He offered his big slab of a hand. Nightminster reached across the bar and grasped to shake it. Johnny’s hand clamped around his, crushing the fingers. Johnny Albert hauled him bodily over the bar, grabbed a handful of waistcoat and dragged him across the lounge and outside down the gravel path, through the cedar hedge—this was not looking good. The edge of the roof of the palace was coming up fast. It was a twenty-five-foot drop to hard-packed gravel road. If he got thrown off, the best he could hope for was two broken ankles. At the edge of the roof, Johnny Albert stopped, panting heavily. Nightminster noted that. The big man was not fit any more. He was gripping Nightminster by the hand and waistcoat, apparently ignorant that neither hold was much of a challenge to escape after a kidney jab or knee to the groin. He contemplated the consequences of beating the Owner of Bermondsey on the roof of his own palace. Nowhere on the Island of Britain would ever be safe again. He would get plenty of French practice, indeed, he might have to learn German or Spanish, or both, but his highest ambitions did not involve linguistic accomplishments.

He waited while Johnny Albert caught his breath.

“Now then, young Big Knight. Here we are on the edge of justice. For the loan-sharking I ought to chuck you into space—and be bloody well assured I’d do exactly that if I hadn’t greater plans for you.” He shook Nightminster, who remained passive. “You’re going to be my lad at Oxford, rubbing shoulders with sovereign gentry. You’re going to get me introductions. No ultramarine has ever made friends with the sovereigns. I can definitely make it worth your while to bridge that gap.”

Not only had the big man lost his fitness, he had grown social aspirations of the most ludicrous sort! With his arm around Nightminster’s shoulders, Johnny Albert ushered him back inside the lounge, apparently unaware of the young man’s struggle to contain himself. What a picture it made–big tough Johnny and his fat wife twirling beneath the chandeliers of some grand salon uptown. Could he honestly not see the sovereigns would laugh at them like performing poodles? From beneath the bar, Johnny Albert pulled out a large black canvas bag, a neatly-made thing with leather handles, and duffels of polished bone. He unfastened the duffels. Nightminster now saw the bag contained a uniform, the black uniform of the ultramarines, including steel helmet and Browning pistol.

“Welcome to my crew, young man. You’ll find it’s an excellent fit. I had my tailor make it from your General Wardian stuff.”

“Thank you,” Nightminster said, woodenly. In the space of a single day, Johnny Albert had bribed someone to get details of the kit issued to Corporal P.W. Nightminster of General Wardian glory trust and arranged a complete ultramarine uniform made up. Medieval throwback with absurd social pretensions he might be, Johnny Albert was not to be underestimated. This was exactly the sort of trouble Nightminster had foreseen the moment he read the letter of acceptance that morning. Greedy, violent people were closing in for a slice of his success.

Walking home that evening lugging the bag, Nightminster stared up at the sky, now deep blue with Jupiter shining silver. What a simple life a planet must have, wheeling about the sun aeon in and aeon out. What should he do? To step into the black uniform was to step into a society that would keep him safe, feared and fed to the end of his days. But it would cost him his life. He would never reach his highest ambitions.

Tomorrow was Friday, one of his two days off (the other being Monday). It was time to be rash, to accomplish something exceptional. He would go further into the wilderness south of London than ever before, seeking gold.

Nothing fuelled his daring like the gleam of gold.

Tomorrow, he would explore the legendary Binns of Croydon!

Chapter 5

Nightminster’s alarm clock jangled at 5:30 am. His parents grumbled in the next room, annoyed at being woken so early. He wrenched himself from bed, slapping his face to beat off sleep. He tipped water from a jerry can into the bathroom sink and washed his face, keeping his lips tight shut from life-long habit. The water was not safe to drink.

Back in his bedroom, he pulled in place a plastic cod-piece fashioned from the case of a Public Era radio ‘liberated’ from a heap of such detritus in a yard at Chaddertons’. Next, he reached for two sheets of stainless-steel armour. He strapped these in place over his tee shirt, one covering his front and the other protecting his back. In the Public Era, these sheets had been kitchen sink units somewhere out in the suburbs of London. Nightminster had ‘liberated’ them one night from a mountain of such units in another yard at the back of Chaddertons’ and worked them into something resembling ancient Greek armour using shears, an old tree stump, and a mallet, his ears stuffed with rubber plugs to avoid needing a conversation pad in later life. The final protective feature was the gold jaguar badge of Johnny Albert.

He lifted his 12-guage sawn-off shotgun from a drawer under the bed and loaded it with #1 buckshot, dropping a handful of cartridges into a pocket of his dungarees. He also secreted the neat little Makarov 9mm pistol. An ordinary asylum resident found bearing arms would get whacked with steel cracker pipes at the very least, while on-the-spot execution would not be out of the question. As a resident bearing the golden jaguar badge of good standing, Nightminster could do pretty much what he liked short of making a pest of himself.

Around each ankle Nightminster buckled a pouch containing fifty Bermondsey crowns, which is to say gold coins about the size of a thumbnail issued by the local mint. Each pouch weighed about twelve Troy ounces, almost a pound. While the baggy dungarees hid the pouches completely, their weight made walking feel as if his boots were balled with mud. He would travel by safety bicycle today, so the burden of the gold would not be much of a hindrance.

Nightminster gulped down slabs of bread spread with walnut butter and beet jam—it was going to be a long day—whilst filling two steel canteens with drinking water, which had been strained overnight through a ceramic filter pot beside the stove. He tossed into his knapsack a dried pork sausage, a stick of bread and a bag of raisins. Lastly, he set a trooper’s helmet on his head. He collected the steel safety bicycle from his private cupboard inside the Chadderton works and set out into the wilderness.

Once outside Bermondsey, the gravel turnpike scored across dense and pungent banks of weeds, already seething with bees and butterflies. Crumbling walls leaned at frightening angles. Birch trees thrust from empty windows, bamboo groves burst from blackened shells, copses of skinny, fast-growing trees reached out over the gravel. Nightminster was riding through the abandonments, the desolation once called suburbs, where millions of the Fatted Masses lived before the Glorious Resolution. Not much remained of all those lives. Anything of value like copper pipes, slates, wiring—and stainless-steel kitchen sinks—had long ago been stripped out by gleaning gangs.

He arrived in the small town of Deptford, noted for the pools at the side of the turnpike from which lobster and crab merchants scooped their catches. Nightminster’s business of the day did not involve pincers. He veered off the turnpike onto another well-beaten gravel way running south, away from the river and deeper into the southern abandonments.

It was getting hot now, and the road heaved over long, slow waves of land. He began to encounter other traffic. A column of Night and Fog marched past the other way, guarded by a squad of ultramarines armed with submachine guns. A convoy of steam wagons chugged by, each towing a bowser containing fifteen tons of water. These were Johnny Albert’s trucks pulling in Bermondsey’s daily water supply from lakes that formed in what had been railway cuttings and tunnels. The water was safe enough for washing vegetables and one’s person, but the Nightminster family never drank it unfiltered—there were plenty who did, though. There were people who bathed in the River Thames rather than buy ‘fresh’ water, but that did not make it healthy.

He began to pass lanes piercing into the abandonments on both sides of the turnpike. At the mouth of each lane were stacks of bricks sorted by colour: red, tan, dark brown. Some stacks were arranged fancifully in spirals. Each lane struck off straight as a rod into the distance, with fields on both sides. This land had once been crowded with suburban houses for the Fatted Masses, row upon row, mile upon mile. Now, gleaning people were pulling down the ruins and chipping apart the walls into individual bricks to be reused, mostly by the sovereign lands far outside London where the big gold was. The mortar chippings were offered in hessian sacks for road surfacing.

This was deconurbation, the clearing of abandonment for agriculture. From the air, deconurbation took the form of a herring-bone pattern. At school, he had seen aerial photographs in geography textbooks. According to research by the prestigious Krossington Institute at Oxford, deconurbation was analogous to the deforestation of the great Amazonian rainforest of the Southern Occident, which had been of such concern during the latter decades of the Public Era. Just as loggers had cut down the forest for timber and used the cleared land for agriculture, so the gleaners demolished suburban shells, sold the bricks and worked the cleared land. Deconurbation was a sensible reallocation of resources, according to economists, as the millions of Fatted Masses who once lived here were not coming back—they had vanished into the Nameless Gone. The Krossington Institute had calculated that most of the abandonments of London would become agriculture within thirty years.

Nightminster was not in the market for bricks or any other produce of the gleaning people. He pedalled on.

He was now further south than he had ever before explored, almost ten miles according to the counter of his bicycle. He could no longer see St Paul’s Cathedral or the twin towers of Tower Bridge. He pedalled stretches of highway surrounded by dense bushland without any other soul in view, and he was daunted by feelings of alienation. His ears grew hyper-sensitive to sounds of wild animals, especially wild dogs. Rumours abounded of the strange creatures that lived in these outer fringes of habitation. Supposedly cheetah, hyena and leopards survived out here, descended from animals released from zoos during the Glorious Resolution. He stopped the bike and pondered, balancing risk and reward, in the end deciding he must keep his nerve to reach his objective.

Only a few minutes later, he arrived amongst pyramids of smashed concrete snarled with rusted steel rods twisted into writhing snakes. This must be his goal. These pyramids must be the famous Binns of Croydon. Back in the Public Era, London had bristled with skyscrapers, particularly here at Croydon in the south of London. By decree of the Westminster Assembly, all skyscrapers within three miles of Piccadilly Circus were demolished before 2045 to protect the privacy of the new sovereign palaces of Mayfair. The ultramarines had been even more prolific levellers of the skyline. Anti-socials would snipe from skyscrapers all over London at whatever targets provided entertainment–vain thugs in black uniforms were especially tempting. The Binns of Croydon were all that remained of edifices that once stood higher than St Paul’s Cathedral.

A few minutes later he reached a wide public highway of earth and pulverised Public Era tarmac hardened by summer heat and lots of feet. It ran east-west. He found a hideaway in a row of terraces, long ago gutted by fire, from where he could watch the highway unobtrusively, and settled down to wait.

It was not until mid-afternoon that his patience was rewarded by the sound of horses and bridles and the rumble of wooden wheels. A caravan of travellers’ wagons was approaching. The arched roofs of the wagons, their garish colours and the jet-black suits of the men all confirmed this. He prepared himself mentally like an actor working up behind the curtain, rehearsing his lines, reciting his escape plan, checking that ammunition for the Makarov and sawn-off were to hand. In truth, he was shit-scared. He wavered with fear and had to exert the utmost effort to force himself from cover onto that hot and dusty stage. He waved and hailed.

“Yo-there! What do you have to trade?”

The men did not look friendly. They were like other travelling people he had traded with over the last few months; well-fed to the point of chubby, with scathing hostile eyes. These sorts of people had nothing to do with the rest of humanity. They only went into the towns and cities to gather en masse to make merry and sell their crafts, for which they were renowned. At other times, travelling people roamed the highways in their caravans. It was this isolation that made them of interest to Nightminster. Travelling people knew the value of jewellery and prosaic Public Era artefacts like mechanical cameras and watches in working order. But concerning the value of more obscure items, they did not have a clue. That was Nightminster’s chance.

“Be there just one of you?”

An ageing man—probably their chief—spoke in the jaunty, quick-fire accent of Kent. Getting no response, he jumped down and marched towards Nightminster, who was struggling to keep his breathing steady and clutched the Makarov in his pocket. He summed the man up as prosperous, lazy, had been a prize fighter when young and might still be dangerous. This much could be read in the gait, belly and scarred eyebrows. The man’s eyes flickered between Nightminster’s face and the sawn-off hung from his shoulder.

“I am seeking ivories, polished stones, silverware, and jewellery,” Nightminster said. He was not interested in any of these, but he knew travelling people sold them. Once he had some guarded rapport, he would nudge them towards what he really wanted.

The leader slowed, the cockiness turning into wariness. Nightminster had learned that a fixed stare boring down from his six foot three stature had a ‘calming’ effect on other men, even tough guys like this. A man of fifty was past starting fights just for the sake of it.

“We might have some things to trade,” the man said.

“Bring out what you have and lay it there,” Nightminster said, banging the gravel with his heel.

There were eight wagons and at least twenty males ranging from adolescent boys up to a white-haired old man. Nightminster stood no chance in a full-blown shoot-out. His calculus depended on the intimidation he could project by his size, steel helmet and shotgun. Their leader was certainly in no hurry to die. He turned and shouted to those on the wagons, and a couple of boys came scurrying out bearing goods. Once the haggling started, the air seemed to mellow, although Nightminster never relaxed. He had emerged from the north side of the highway so that no one could attack out of the sun while he was kneeling to inspect their merchandise. He was careful to keep watch on every one who got down from the caravans and never laid the sawn-off aside. He tested their knowledge of the exchange rate between silver and gold and determined they were pretty clueless, at least about London rates. Knowing this, he was happy enough to give what they thought were good prices for a couple of silver broaches. This encouraged the travellers to show more stock. They brought out some beautiful shoes and a couple of leather jackets. He did have to admit that they were top-class produce, the leather being marvellously silky soft—he had never encountered such fine leather before—excellently dyed and stitched too. They wanted thirty ounces for one of the jackets. Tempting though it was, he was not in the garment trade.

By this time, he had twice caught one of the young men trying to creep around his blind side. Each time, he jumped up and levelled the sawn-off, shouting at the miscreant to get back in front. The young man was fleshy with good eating. He squinted through sly little eyes in a narrow face with a bulge of double-chin flab about the collar. When Double-Chin tried a third time, Nightminster gripped the sawn-off in both hands and lashed the muzzles into Double-Chin’s fat face, knocking him down, following up with the hardest dead-leg kick he could manage. While Double-Chin groaned and rolled about spilling blood on the gravel, Nightminster covered the rest of the caravan with the sawn-off.

“I told you to stay in front. Next time, I shoot to kill.”

He assumed they would pack up and go. Instead, the leader shouted some orders and a couple of young men jumped down and helped blubbering Double-Chin back inside the second caravan in the line. Another young man appeared with a pint of beer, so cold that it drooled with condensation.

“I am sorry about that. Please do accept a chilled beer by way of a peace offering,” the leader said. Nightminster was puzzled that these primitives would carry ice or a chiller unit. Refrigeration was a sophistication far beyond the needs of such people, who would simply keep animals alive until it was time to eat them. Much as he would have savoured a cold beer, he obeyed his instincts.

“I am a Methodist and do not touch alcohol,” he said sternly. The leader grew insistent that Nightminster drink the beer, but he would not budge. It was clear the trade was over. The young men were gathering in all the jackets, jewellery and silver cutlery which had been laid out.

“We have something that might suit your type,” the leader said. He ordered ‘the box’ be brought out. A young man disappeared to the back of the convoy and returned with a plywood box, which he threw down at Nightminster’s feet. It was exactly what he had been hoping for. This was their box of bling—rubbish to tempt fools. It was supposed to be an insult. In fact, he knew at once he had struck gold.

“That’s just a load of crap,” he jeered.

The leader spat, tipped out the beer and tossed the glass away. With a great overhead sweeping gesture he hailed the convoy into motion, making his last few paces quick to catch the leading caravan as its two horses pulled ahead. The other seven caravans followed, from each came spits and curses. A pretty, dark-haired girl put her head and shoulders through the rear flap of one caravan and tossed something red and white at him, which he identified with disgust as a sanitary cloth. He kept the sawn-off levelled on the caravans for several minutes until they had drawn from sight, whereupon he scooped the box under one arm, retrieved his bike and got the hell out of the area as fast as he could.

That was a close call, but he was sure it would prove worth the danger.

Chapter 6

Rather than return home, Nightminster took the western branch of the fork at Crystal Palace village and made for Elephant and Castle, the next asylum up the River Thames from Bermondsey. On the market place there was a branch of the Rafati pawnbroking empire, distinguished by its extravagant etched-glass windows. Nightminster pushed inside.

“Mmmph,” greeted the proprietress, as he bear-hugged her from behind, biting her neck whilst communicating how hard she made him. She shrugged him off, although not unkindly, and returned to checking her accounts.

Mirana was tall for a woman, slender, with thick golden hair that she threw about like an Arabian mare tossing its mane. Her face was dominated by a long, arched nose and Ancient-Egyptian brown eyes with which she would observe a man distantly, her chin tipped up and a faint sneer of disdain playing about her wide mouth. Her name meant ‘prosperous’ in Farsi, which was quite appropriate. Nightminster would have added “deadlier than the male,” but hey, what was life without the frisson of danger? She was ten years older than he was. Her brothers would have thumped a common slummy like him for so much as looking at her, had he not thumped them first.

He scooped her up in his arms and settled on a sofa in a little lounge at the back of the shop. Her weight drove the edges of the armour into his belly. He unbuckled the armour plates, pulling each one out of his shirt and leaning it against the end of the sofa beside his steel helmet. They returned to their cuddling.

“I’ve got some merchandise.”

He had sorted through the contents of ‘the box’ before starting the long ride back to civilization. He now produced his winnings from the pockets of his denim overalls, laying them on the coffee table. All were Public Era heirlooms. None looked valuable to the naive eye. The travellers had perhaps kept them simply because they looked neat and new. The least interesting was a collection of dull grey tokens, all with one countersunk hole through the middle. Such tokens might have been used in a board game. Some were square, some diamond, some triangular. They were of a dense material, not heavy enough to be gold, but too heavy to be silver. Nightminster recognised them as tungsten carbide machine-tool bits. Every machine shop craved these Public Era heirlooms for cutting steel components. Otherwise, they were forced to cut steel with steel, a predictably frustrating process.

“These have never been used. You should take them to ZEEBRI at Brent Cross,” Mirana said, inspecting them one after another. “They’ll give you ten ounces a piece, maybe more.”

Nightminster had never ventured to Brent Cross. The asylum was an oddity. It lay four miles beyond the limits of Old Greater London, all on its own to the north-west. It was the home of ZEEBRI, the largest factory on the Island of Britain. He had heard tales of inbreeding and jokes about how it took five hundred ‘Brenties’ to paint a house and so on and so forth, beyond that, he knew nothing of the place. An expedition was in order! He decided he would go there on Monday, his next day off after his duties with General Wardian glory trust over the coming weekend.

Also in the haul were pens and pencils. Illiterates saw no value in items of mere steel and plastic. They did not know that Public Era Parker 51 and Montblanc Meisterstueck fountain pens and Caran d’Ache propelling pencils commanded good prices at the Kensington auctions. Nightminster expected to get 100 ounces for the three pieces, and Mirana, with her expert pawnbroker’s eyes, agreed.

But the most intriguing item was a gadget that had at first mystified him. It appeared to be a steel pencil sharpener, as it featured a steel barrel with a turning handle at one end. However, there were also slots in the sides. It called itself a Curta. Nightminster had eventually worked out that it was a mechanical calculating machine from the pre-digital phase of the Public Era.

“That’s a Curta,” Mirana said, looking it over.

“It says ‘Curta’ on it—I can read too.”

“What did you pay for it?”

“Nothing. I got given everything you see as a box of crap.”

“You can’t possibly be serious.”

He kissed her neck.

“Yes I can, at least occasionally.”

“Who gave you this stuff?”

“Travellers. Thick people. Who else?”

Mirana sat up, her face severe, and punched him in the chest.

“Big Knight! I’ve told you again and again not to go anywhere near those people. They’re dangerous.”

“They are dangerous, I agree, so I take precautions.” He put on his steel trooper’s helmet and patted the sawn-off shotgun on the coffee table.

“Those people are sub-human. They are cannibals.” She almost spat the last word.

“Look, they’re stupid enough to hand me a fortune, that’s stupid enough for me.”

“Do you want to be eaten and your skin made into a jacket?”

“Oh come on! You don’t really believe that drivel do you?” In saying this, he was recalling the beautifully soft leather jackets on offer by the travellers.

“They drug people with beer and then cut them to pieces after they’ve passed out.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure they do,” Nightminster said sarcastically, although with far less conviction. He was not forgetting his suspicions on being offered chilled ale with such insistence. Why go to the bother of keeping chilled beer handy?

“Well, you survived and you’ll do well with a haul like this,” Mirana said. She pulled out a recent auction catalogue and leafed through it. “I’m sure I saw a Curta sold a few weeks ago… Yes! Here it is. I made a note. 196 ounces. That’s a good haul for a day’s work, Big Knight, even if you did almost end up as a pair of lady’s boots.”

Nightminster relaxed back, filled with elation at the payoff from the risk he had taken. He stood to make the best part of four hundred ounces from one day’s work. It took his father eighteen months to earn that sum, and he would save but a fraction of it. Nightminster also realised the day meant more than a great haul.

“Today, I passed a milestone in my life,” he said.

“Oh really?” Mirana was used to his bragging.

“I now have savings of two thousand ounces of gold, or I will do after the auction next Thursday.”

Mirana kissed him a smacker on the mouth.

“Well done! But you won’t reach three thousand if you keep trading with cannibals.”

Nightminster was not listening. He had drifted away into the early years of his boyhood.

“I can remember my very first bag of pay. I was twelve years old, a brand-new cub with General Wardian. We were given little twists of paper containing our first-ever pay of four gold sovereigns, almost an ounce. The other boys spent theirs on boozing, or flash clothes, or they went exploring on the charabancs, and a few never came back—I wonder if travellers got them? But I couldn’t bear to part with my gold, except to give my mum a sovereign for upkeep. I resolved I’d save ten ounces, just for the challenge of doing it. God, did it take forever.”

Mirana laid her head on his shoulder so that her rich brown hair tickled his face as he spoke on.

“So I reached ten ounces. I was better paid by then and got more gold doing odd jobs around the market before school. I used to get up at 5 am. By the time school began at nine, the day was half over. I remember how I agonised over Target One Hundred. It took me days to work up the nerve to commit to it, and afterwards, I felt doomed to the life of a miser. But after a few weeks I settled into it and the money built up, then I started at Chaddertons’ filling grease boxes for the overhead power shafts, and I moved up to the scouts with General Wardian, and the magic day came just before my fifteenth birthday when my account exceeded one hundred ounces. That same day, I set myself Target One Thousand. It looked impossible and so I threw myself at it. Looking back at the six-foot stick insect I was then, I can see what an exceptional education gold has been. It’s taught me that the impossible is a matter of time and willpower. And that is how I will accomplish Target Ten Thousand.”

Mirana started laughing again. She held his head between her hands and kissed him on the mouth.

“That’s what I love about you. Iron drive. And while we are on the topic of iron drive, I will now shut the shop.”

A flush of exhilaration electrified Nightminster.

“I’m dirty. I’ve been pedalling all day.”

“Then I will have to bathe you,” she called back from the shop.

*

“Are you hungry?” Mirana asked, an hour later. They were lying naked on the floor of her bedroom, not having quite made the bed after vacating the bathroom. The bedroom was peaceful, above the shop and facing the rear yard, away from the noise of the market place. On Friday evenings in summer, the bands started early.

“Starving,” Nightminster said. “I’ve had nothing but wrinkled sausage since early this morning.”

Mirana collapsed laughing. She grinned up at him, about to say something when from downstairs they heard a terrific rapping, as if someone was hitting the famous etched windows with a hammer. Their eyes met, exchanging alarm. Only arrogant people hammered like that. Big-shots. Ultramarines.

“What could they want?” Mirana murmured. She pulled on her dress and threw a long shawl about her head and shoulders to obscure the lack of a bra. In bare feet she descended to the shop. Nightminster made out a brief exchange with a gruff person. She returned with a pre-occupied air, eyeing Nightminster curiously.

“What’s wrong?”

“That was an order from Johnny Albert served by a couple of his thugs. Johnny wants you on duty at 8 am tomorrow. You never told me you’d joined the ultramarines.”

“He just wants me as his messenger boy–and he can bug right off.”

Nightminster saw himself yanked across the roof of Johnny’s palace. The memory still rankled. That kind of thing had not happened since he was about thirteen, when older boys still poked fun at his name: “Hello Pwentiss, how is little Pwentiss today?” and then slapped his face. Soon after, he shot up a foot in a year to become Big Knight. The moniker had created its own reputation, in every classroom, on every playing field, in every boxing ring. With furious spirit, he had fought to vindicate that reputation. Now a single bastard of an ultramarine had shaken him up like a puppy.

“I’ll get dinner. We’ll discuss it while we eat,” Mirana said.

She cooked up grilled rack of lamb with couscous, grilled tomatoes and feta cheese, washed down with chilled lemonade from her turpentine-fired refrigerator. Nightminster described how Johnny Albert had jeered over the Nightminster family and then played the bully card like the thug he was. However, it was not Johnny Albert’s behaviour that caught her attention.

“Did I hear you say you’ve been offered a place at the University of Oxford, and you’re not going to take it?”

“In seven years, I’ll be twenty-five years old. I must have laid the foundations of my highest ambitions by then, or I will fail. Wasting three years in a pretty city far from London is simply not in my plan.”

“Are you such a fool? Don’t you grasp you’re being lifted to the grand society of the sovereigns where no one talks about gold, because they don’t have to?”

“How will I reach Target Ten Thousand stuck far from London amongst a bunch of swots and snobs?”

“It’s who you know that counts, not what you know.”

“My highest ambitions involve a great deal of study and a great deal of gold. Highest ambitions by definition are not the soft option.”

“You’re suffering from Eternity Syndrome. I’ve seen it in my brothers. They tear about picking fights and taunting glory troops as if Death were just a fairy tale. I’ve warned you about the dangers of travellers. Sooner or later, they’ll catch you out, or something else will, a gang of bandits will ambush you, or a pack of hyena. Unless you settle into the work of life, you won’t last.”

Nightminster cut away at the rack of lamb, smouldering. His rational self could not dispute she had a point. One day, he might not return from the abandonments. He would simply vanish into the Nameless Gone. His rational self also knew danger was the only resource he could exploit. There had never been an age when gold poured down the burrows of rabbits.

“Unless I take the dangerous paths, I will not achieve my dream.”

“Your dream? What dream? Of all the people I’ve met, no one dreams less than you do! You’re a dream-free zone! It’s all iron will to reach the next target.” When he did not respond, she asked: “What’s the great dream, Big Knight?”

He chewed over his thoughts, took a sip of lemonade, wondering if he had ever really admitted to himself the magnitude of the ambition that had come into his life during the last few months.

“I’m going to sweep away the rule of the sovereigns,” he said.

“You’ve joined the SUN Party?”

“No. My dream is based on power. The Public Era was a tale of machines liberating the common people from millennia of toil. Electric power is the key. Today, it is sovereign gold that pushes everything that happens in this world. Tomorrow, electric power will push the world. Electric power will drive the factories and the people will consume the production. That was how the Public Era worked. Once the common people get money, landowners will be museum pieces. Therefore to swipe aside the sovereigns, we must have electric power. The correct source is atomic power. The best coal and oil got taken by the Public Era, but there must be plenty of nuclear stuff left over. There once were thousands of nuclear weapons poised to obliterate the world. All that plutonium must be somewhere. It’s just a case of tracking it down.”

“You’re talking to a simple girl who can’t grasp how a flame makes ice inside my refrigerator, no matter how many times you explain it to me. I don’t have your head for machines. I will ask one obvious question though; what’s stopping you?”

“To build an atomic power station for London will cost at least two million ounces. That’s one thousand times what I have saved so far.”

Mirana folded across the table laughing.

“But the impossible is just a matter of time and willpower!”

He smiled patiently. His ideas were a little more sophisticated than hoping to save two million ounces of gold. That was an impossibility, like reaching out to touch the moon. But he could amass a hundred thousand ounces. He was certain that was doable, although as yet, he had only vague ideas about how to make it happen. He would have to employ hundreds or thousands of people to accumulate his capital. With a hundred thousand ounces, he would have the credibility to win support from big-shots and they would put down the remaining one million, nine hundred thousand ounces.

Mirana sat up, laughter finished, her expression serious.

“Johnny Albert wants you on duty at 8 am tomorrow morning. If you defy him, he’ll banish you from Bermondsey.”

“Tomorrow I’m on duty with General Wardian.”

“Dangerous, Big Knight. Very dangerous.”

“Let’s play some records.”

Mirana had a Public Era record player, of which she was justifiably very proud, and a collection of pop music from the Public Era. She hesitated, obviously caught on whether to keep arguing. She shifted to a maternal approach.

“You’re big and tough and clever and you’re convinced you can beat everything in this world. You only get to be wrong once.”

“And I can be right, once—by achieving my highest ambitions. I only have to do it once,” he finished. Instead of saying more, he waddled over to her on his knees and pounced. They toppled over giggling, arms wrapping around each other. Her smile was so lovely, her golden hair splashed around her head, their mouths met and they romped away into the night.

Chapter 7

“Pah-raaayyyd… SHUN!”

The crash of boots echoed around the hall of Euston depot. Once again Nightminster was in a concrete hall that had been a great train station during the Public Era. He was in uniform too, the olive-green battle dress of a corporal of General Wardian glory trust. The commander of the garrison, Account-Captain 1st Class Kumar, stepped forward, lifted his head, and addressed his troops. He was a lanky, brown-complexioned man with thick, black hair, a drooping moustache and heavy brows. Life as a glory officer had moulded his face into an expression of tranquil righteousness. He spoke with the braying superiority typical of senior officers.

“The exercises planned for this weekend have been cancelled. Today, a rabble of SUN Party activists will flow across the river by Westminster Bridge and pool on Parliament Square, right in front of the Palace of Westminster.”

Nightminster had heard about the SUN Party at Chaddertons’ from time to time, probably more in recent weeks. Mirana had mentioned it the previous evening. He understood the SUN Party to be some sort of gobby strain of radicology. He took no interest in yappers. Today, apparently, his duties as a glory trooper would bring him into contact with the SUN Party. Account-Captain Kumar continued:

“The president of the SUN Party plans to deliver a petition to the Palace of Westminster requesting that ten so-called ‘people’s seats’ be created—free of charge—in the Westminster Assembly. Our executive-marshal expressed the strongest objection to such indulgence of radicalism, as did the chiefs of our fellow glory trusts, Universal Parrier and Guards to the People. Despite this expert assessment, the city council granted the radicals their wishes. Apparently, there is a view that giving an inch will render the radical party harmless. Any fool knows that when you give an inch you lose a mile. But the situation is what it is and our duty is to ensure the rabble is contained within Parliament Square and drains south back across Westminster Bridge afterwards. You, the City of London 2nd Reserve regiment will assist the regulars of the battalion in this task. You will be paid at double-time. Be as firm as required in your duties—know that the full authority of General Wardian will support any action. Now I will pass you over to the team-lieutenants to carry out detailed briefings.”

Nightminster had sensed there was something special brewing. He had seen boxes of ammunition dragged off lorries and stacked on the platforms. The full-time, regular troops marched and saluted with a graver poise than normal. The certainty that there would be action this day thrilled him. It swept away the dull mood he had carried since leaving Mirana’s bed at 5:30 am to walk five miles to Euston depot for a free breakfast and to change into battle dress. In normal circumstances, he was paid 3 11/20 ounces for a weekend of duty. The 7 2/20 ounces he was actually going to get was still pocket money, but he did not serve as a glory trooper for the money. General Wardian was a far larger corporation than Chaddertons’, having a staff roll of forty-five thousand regulars and perhaps double that number of part-time reservists like him. It was not easy to become a glory trooper. One needed references from school or an employer. Glory troopers had to maintain high standards of discipline and progress. In return, the corporation was a wonderful teacher. General Wardian had taught Nightminster to shoot a pistol, a rifle and a machine gun and to defend himself in unarmed combat. He knew how to use demolition charges. He could instruct a battery of 155mm artillery to pulverise an acre of countryside five miles away. He was licensed to ride a motorbike and drive big vehicles like trucks (both steam and diesel) and armoured cars. He planned to obtain a flying-boat licence now he was eighteen. At camps, he had met people from far-off places like Glasgow, Bristol, and Newcastle and even a few who had moved to the Island of Britain from France or the Netherlands. So, the pay might not be much, but the education was beyond value.

After Account-Captain Kumar had finished his briefing, the regiment drifted into separate groups of about a hundred to be briefed in detail by their team lieutenants. Nightminster learned his team would be positioned in Abingdon Street at the southern end of Parliament Square behind regulars from the City of London battalion. The reservists would only be called in if the regulars came under pressure. Nightminster thought this pretty lame. The whole day could pass in listening to a bunch of gasbags ranting from their soap boxes. Corporal Nightminster was issued a pump-action shotgun (manufactured by the ZEEBRI complex of Brent Cross, according to its badge), a bandana with forty rounds of double-aught buckshot cartridges and three clips of 9mm Parabellum rounds for his Browning Hi-Power pistol.

He now concentrated to think through possibilities, to prepare himself for any test. There could be real, live, deadly action today. Being the youngest corporal in the regiment, he sensed many eyes would be upon him, hoping he screwed up. After their platoon commander had given a briefing, Nightminster gathered his own squad of ten basics and leading basics to give them a pep-talk.

“First and foremost, we act as one. Stand shoulder to shoulder. They’ll shout and swear at us. Be Christians and turn the other cheek. But if there’s so much as a hint of fire bombs, crossbows, knives, or anything that could do real harm, shoot first and forget. I’m taking ten out, and I’m bringing ten back.”

*

The troops on station in Abingdon Street first heard the radicals as a distant rush, uncannily like the rapids of a river. The noise grew, there were horns and drums and whistles, shouts and chants. The glory troops waiting in ranks looked at each other in askance. Someone behind Nightminster said:

“They make Camden sound human.”

Camden football fans had a reputation for being particularly primeval. The jibe raised a laugh. Still, the pounding drums and the roaring of thousands took their toll on the nerves of the waiting troops. Nightminster sent one of his basics to get a look at Westminster Bridge from Victoria Tower gardens just behind them. The basic reported a dense flow “like treacle with a lot of confetti in it” oozing across the bridge. The head of the flow appeared at the far side of Parliament Square, taking the form of a large flag, dark green with an orange circle in the centre. Nightminster had noticed staff at Chaddertons’ sporting a painted metal badge in exactly that design on their waistcoats. It must be the emblem of the SUN Party. With the advantage of his height, he was able to see over the tops of helmets by lifting himself on the balls of his feet. The dark flow stayed together just like a snake sliding out of its hole. The snake completed a circuit of Parliament Square, after which its head broke apart into what was clearly a planned routine. Figures erected folding tables and clamped them together to form a platform outside the black railings of the Palace of Westminster.

During the Public Era, this enormous Gothic building held the government of the supposedly ‘democratic’ nation state of the United Kingdom. Now it was the club house of the Westminster Assembly, a most private place, members only. In theory, anyone could join, provided they could afford the exorbitant annual subscription. Mostly it was a sovereigns’ club, unsurprisingly, although a few bosses of the bigger factories joined in. David Chadderton was a member. The ultramarines had their own clubhouse in Holborn and (according to Johnny Albert) scorned the Westminster Assembly. Normally, the sovereigns were so far above Nightminster’s world of drill and training that he had never been conscious of serving their interests—until today.

Two horn-shaped wooden loudspeakers, microphones and bicycle-style generators to power the sound system appeared from crates and got wired up by the bustling SUN Party technicians. The snake continued to flow and the square filled up. Nightminster’s hands sweated onto the shotgun. He could not be alone in growing uneasy, a succession of messengers was feeding updates to the team lieutenant. Apart from the scale of numbers, the display of rowdiness was most striking. Whoops and yells, blasts of horns, and chants of solidarity, unity, nation, the slogan from which the SUN Party supposedly gained its name (although one nearby trooper claimed it stood for stupid utopian nonsense).

“That, gentlemen, is what they call ‘democracy’,” Nightminster announced. “That is power to the people before your eyes.”

This raised a laugh, with a nervous edge to it now. The leading basic beside him, Nieuport, asked in a muted voice:

“What if them lot ran at us all together? All our ammo won’t kill a tenth of that mob.”

“They won’t,” Nightminster said. “One blast of double-aught will scatter them like deer.”

In saying this, he stopped to consider an alarming fact: the mob’s only exit was by Westminster Bridge. If the mob turned feral, there was no way it could drain by that little exit. It would detonate like a boiler, bursting through the plugs of General Wardian troops to rampage all over central London. He shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it except hope it did not happen. Probably Account-Captain Kumar was thinking exactly the same thing. He had appeared a few minutes ago to confer with the team lieutenant and other officers. Their faces expressed foreboding.

And yet, the event commenced peaceably enough. If Night-minster had one complaint, it was that the speeches for the most part were long and boring, although the crowd lapped them up, clapping and hailing on cue. It was clear the speakers were adept at working their audience, just as the audience was willing to be worked. For Nightminster, it was fascinating to observe this interplay between performers and their following. The similarity to comedians who worked market places and taverns was too striking to ignore, although he felt comedians much the more entertaining. This was how ‘power to the people’ worked? It was but a theatre running a boring play. Yet this was the bridge of the ship called democracy. No wonder that ship went down in the Glorious Resolution!

The president of the SUN Party, one Vasco Banner, took the microphone. He was a skinny character of about thirty wearing a badly-fitting, pale brown suit. Nightminster thought him a classic wet intellectual of the type sent packing by a good kick up the arse. He had encountered plenty of such people at public school. Banner had already made one dreary speech in a heavy northern accent Nightminster struggled to follow. The prospect of another dose was not uplifting.

Banner mentioned the name ‘Krossington’. Nightminster lifted his heels to get a better view. A new raptness fixed the glory troops. The crowd fell silent. A young man and woman ascended to stand beside Banner. The young woman wore a black dress and a white shirt, from which Nightminster supposed she must be a maid. Her hair was red like the autumn blaze of maple, so thick that it obscured all but the tip of her nose. The young man was of squat build. His head was impressive, his hair thick and curly, his neck powerful. He wore a rough white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up about his muscular forearms, and black trousers. At a guess, Nightminster supposed he was a carpenter or a blacksmith. Then Banner announced this man as Tom Krossington of the great Krossington clan. Banner did not say more, as it was not necessary—or diplomatic—to explain that the Krossingtons were the richest sovereign dynasty on the Island of Britain.

The news electrified party faithful and glory troops in common astonishment. For Nightminster, this was his first glimpse ever of the sovereign caste in flesh and blood. So that was what they looked like… From the excited comments he heard nearby, this was a ‘first’ for everybody else too.

He reappraised Tom Krossington as a credible figure despite the lack of height. There was a calmness in how he surveyed the lake of heads before him, his jaw set firm and his mouth flat. He began to speak. Although clear, his accent was recognisably similar to seamen from the south coast of England whom Nightminster met from time to time at the Port of Erith. Nightminster would have expected a sovereign to speak with the unctuous hauteur his own public schooldays had sought, but failed, to inculcate in him. He concentrated on what Tom Krossington had to say.

The Glorious Resolution had been the most terrible calamity in recorded history. Not even the Black Death of the fourteenth century compared to it. Only the collapse of the Mayan civilisation in the eleventh century and the near-extermination of the Inca following the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century could compare. Centuries of progress in science, technology, medicine and social justice had blazed to ashes in a few years of nightmare known to history as the Glorious Resolution, because that was what the Westminster Assembly behind him had declared it to be.

Yet for all its catastrophic effects, the causes of the Glorious Resolution were all in the mind. No meteorite, super-volcano, nuclear war, pandemic, solar flaring or any other such calamity was involved. The Public Era had been a fools’ paradise. The Fatted Masses enjoyed lifestyles the envy of any emperor, yet their pleasures of the day were funded on a tower of debt quarried from the future through contractual rituals of finance that simply baffled the contemporary mind. When the tower exceeded plausibility, it collapsed with such a crash the society itself imploded. Governments and great corporations vanished, for the social fibres of the Public Era were but illusions of habit that could not survive the aching bellies of billions. And so, the great flows of surplus began, the search for asylum that for most had ended in a heap of bones.

In the thirty-two years since the Glorious Resolution, a new order had coalesced from the shambles. These arrangements might appear advantageous to the fortunate few, but only amounted to a state of emergency that had to be reformed. Its iniquities were intolerable and stifled the recovery of working-class affluence. The SUN Party was dedicated to reform through patient diplomacy year upon year. It would not tolerate in its ranks militants who believed that violence paved the road to the new world.

This drew hoots and jeers from certain distinct patches in the lake of heads. Nightminster returned his attention to Tom Krossington, who was wrapping up his speech and handing over to his dear younger sister Victorina Krossington. The ‘maid’ with the autumn maple hair stepped up to the microphone accompanied by an explosion of wolf-whistles and cat-calling from the same sections of crowd that had jeered her brother. These patches of crowd were packed with young men of a type familiar to Nightminster—louts and thugs too crude even for the ultramarines and certainly not inclined to the discipline of being glory troopers. No, these were the type who rampaged after football matches, drinking themselves into feral swarms and brawling with rival gangs on the market places of the asylums. If they became too much of a pest, the local ultramarine owner would pull in their leaders and beat their teeth out with his cracker pipe. Otherwise, they simply had to be avoided.

Victorina Krossington was certainly something to look at. Tall and willowy, she brushed the red hair behind one ear with a quivering hand. Unlike her brother, she was nervous before a crowd. To begin with, Nightminster thought she looked like a ‘swotty’ girl, with a high forehead and firm mouth, despite a delightfully pert upturned nose; retroussé, the French would say. Several of the troops near him were grunting the most crude comments. One behind him said:

“I would fuck sense into that uptight bitch.”

Nightminster swung around.

“You couldn’t wank idiocy into your own right hand.”

This drew much nearby chuckling.

Victorina was not a success as a speaker. Her soft voice barely carried even through the loudspeakers. The ‘usual suspects’ in the crowd laughed, erupted in jungle hoots, whistles and carnal grunting, such that several times Vasco Banner interjected to tell them to be quiet or they would be ‘excluded’. One of the rowdies leaped up and yelled:

“Exclude me then! Come on!”

Having watched these rogues off and on for some minutes, Nightminster had come to identify that particular individual as the leader, at least of that patch, but possibly of a broader imposture of rowdies and thugs within what was otherwise a peaceful gathering. The young man had crew-cut dark hair and a bony, square face. He was only about fifty yards from Nightminster, close enough to make out scarred eyebrows and a chunk missing from one ear. Nightminster guessed this was a self-appointed ‘king-tough’.

In between keeping an eye on King-Tough, he tried to hear what the lovely Victorina Krossington had to say. Despite her poor voice and the insolent heckling, she stuck at it for fifteen minutes, describing the disgraceful lack of medicine in the industrial asylums and the need for free basic healthcare, especially for pregnant women and young children. This was the primary objective of the SUN Party’s fund-raising.

She won a strong ovation and stepped back smiling and ducking her head modestly. Nightminster’s eyes followed her every move. That smile transformed her into a smashing-looking girl, so classy and elegant, with the same unassuming south-coast accent as her brother. He sighed as she turned away to descend from view off the speakers’ platform. He concentrated, imprinting her face and glorious red hair in memory, knowing he would never see her again in his life.

Vasco Banner now gave the closing speech. Nightminster was not alone in mentally stepping down, considering the day over at last. His feet ached with the hours of standing. In half an hour or so the radicals would be back across Westminster Bridge. His mind was drifting ahead to the evening party at Euston depot. Plenty of young women came in from all over London. Some were a bit rough but there was always plenty of choice. The thought of them left a sad, soured mood while Victorina Krossington still lingered on his mind’s eye.

Damn! It looked like the rowdies were kicking off. Part of the crowd had swept over the speakers’ platform like a breaking wave. King-Tough yelled and waved his arms about from the platform, exhorting his gang. There was a scream, high as a violin. Some kind of fight started up. A head and shoulders jumped and dived forward, arms flailing punches. The glory troops and officers around Nightminster were, like him, squinting to see what was going on but not really that interested. If radicals wanted to have a punch-up, that was their business so long as it did not endanger prime real estate like the Palace of Westminster.

The maple red hair of Victorina Krossington lifted above the crowd. She screamed. Then she was up high flat on her back like a prize on the shoulders of a bunch of toughs lined up as if they were carrying a rowing galley. At their head, King-Tough jumped about punching the air and clapping, his teeth bared in snarls of triumph.

“That poor kid’s going to get it now,” someone muttered. Nightminster’s head pulsed in anger as he watched her fighting to free her arms hopelessly clamped by those carrying her. She was within a bulb of troublemakers. Nightminster squinted, frustrated by distance. The fighting had suddenly gone vicious. An axe flashed, knives plunged, steel pipes bashed, mouths screamed and blood sprayed. There was a sense of the ground falling in front of him. The regular glory troops poured forward into the crowd like a log shoved through mud, ploughing a wave of demonstrators aside with the muzzles of their pump-action shotguns. Nightminster had not heard any order.

He stared at his grade lieutenant. The young officer made a great ‘forward’ sweeping gesture. Nightminster yelled to his men “Forward!” and they were off into action. Behind the front ram of regulars the crowd was beginning to close together again. Nightminster assumed it was the task of the reservists to hold an escape route open, which they did with their shotguns levelled and their expressions menacing. Having the height to see across the mob, Nightminster shouted a commentary to those near him. Another thrust of General Wardian troops had broken into the crowd from Victoria Street, almost at right angles to Nightminster’s regiment, fighting towards the bunch that had abducted Victorina Krossington. As Nightminster watched, she sank from view struggling furiously whilst a couple of the bastards kept trying to clamp her mouth and she kept biting their fingers.

Nightminster looked back and was alarmed to see the crowd closing off their own exit back down Abingdon Street. The area of toughs around where Victorina had disappeared seemed bigger, as if more groups had joined the first, or else there had been a mass infiltration of chancers hoping to join the fun. Whatever had happened, the flash-army of toughs had grown and it had reeled around, throwing many in the surrounding crowd to the ground amid screams of fear and pain as men and women, old and young, got trampled. The General Wardian troops pushing from Victoria Street were forcing the flash-army of toughs to fall back directly towards the thin line of Nightminster’s squad. Both he and his squad were getting barged to and fro by pressure waves throbbing across the mass.

“Get ready to fire!” Nightminster yelled. He ordered two of his men—Leading Basic Billy Nieuport and Basic Veitch Thomas—to lift his legs for him to see better. This raised his head and chest into full view—he was well aware he now made a choice target—to see across the seething mass. In the middle of the flash-army was an open space, a ragged oval about big enough to fit a motor car, and in it two men were jumping about as if Morris dancing, a triumphal prancing, over and around something on the ground. One of the dancers was King-Tough, the other was a bigger character with a long body and a head shaped like the top of a carrot.

Something impacted Nightminster on the right pectoral, a blow so powerful he would have gone over backwards had his two supporters not been jammed in by the pack. An axe clanged on Nieuport’s helmet and fell to the ground. The blunt top of the axe had struck Nightminster’s chest. Had the blade struck him in the face, it would have killed him.

He took quick aim with the Mossberg—and forced a freeze to cool down, his training arresting his passions to check what he was aiming at. Beyond Carrot-Head one character was waving a crow bar while another was jumping up and down ranting something and brandishing what looked like a marlin spike. Nightminster fired from a range of about twenty yards. Carrot-Head’s cranium burst into fragments of spinning skull. King-Tough got a load of mess in the face and ricocheted about blinking, screaming and thrashing his arms as blood streamed off his cheeks. Nightminster dropped from view just as a shower of crowbars and knives flew overhead to clang on helmets and draw out bellows of pain.

He lunged through compressed bodies with the Mossberg, roaring for a clear path and swiping aside faces and necks, by sheer ferocity cleaving a way through a solid pack of miserably frightened people who desperately wanted to be anywhere but their current location. As he closed in on the outer fringes of the flash-army he grew wary, Mossberg up, aiming from face to face against anyone pulling out a pistol or coming at him with a meat cleaver. His own squad were right at his back and more troopers from other squads were pouring in behind. The flash-army suddenly lost its guts and opened before the lance of heavily-armed troops, who fanned out into the space, Mossbergs levelled. In retreat, the valiant soldiers of King-Tough were trying to jump over each other and hollered and punched at everyone blocking their way. Their retreat exposed the form of Victorina Krossington flat on her back on the gravel—incredibly, she had not been trampled in the melee. More General Wardian troops were driving in, sealing off escape routes, whacking with shotgun butts. The blood-drenched King-Tough had vanished. So had the corpse of Carrot-Head—plenty of blood on the gravel, but of the rest of him there was no sign.

Nightminster kneeled by Victorina Krossington. She was white with shock and possibly from the effect of a blow over the right eye, which had left her forehead bleeding. He wiped a tail of red hair off her face and laid a hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were a dark, slate-blue. He stared into them, captivated as much by her beauty as by the impossible span of society compressed into the eighteen inches between their faces.

“It’s all right now, you’re safe,” he said. Her eyes communicated by slight twitches, the subtlest quivers of the eyelids. But what? This beautiful alien from another world spoke a foreign language. Some person grabbed his shoulder. He jolted and scowled up, angered at the moment broken.

“Step back, Corporal, I’ll deal with this.” Account-Captain Kumar had arrived. He shouted to bring up a stretcher. Then he asked: “You’re Nightminster, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good shooting and excellent aggression. You knocked their guts out. Well done.”

“Thank you, sir.”

With the end of violence, Nightminster was reliving the last couple of minutes—that burst of blood and bone as a fist of shot destroyed Carrot-Head’s life. With the dispersing of adrenaline, his blood failed and he began to tremble. He feared a collapse. He, alone, had fired and he, alone, had killed before thousands of people. A dreadful suspicion was growing across his future that as long as he lived, he would never be free of that split-second in which his finger pulled the trigger

“Are you sure you’re okay, Nightminster? You’ve gone paler than putty.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“It’s shock, it will pass.”

“Yes sir.”

“Where’s your grade-lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, sir. Everything got confused.”

“It certainly did. Take your squad back to Abingdon Street and wait there for orders.”

“Yes sir.”

Nightminster dragged his leaden legs into motion, forcing his attention to the tasks ahead, broken by a glance back at Victorina. She raised her head to stare from inside the shadow cast by the flared brim of his helmet. Another stride and the shadow moved, she flinched at the sun and lay back again into her gleaming copper hair. It was with a bitter resignation that Nightminster pushed her image to the fringe of his mind with the other awful stuff to get back to his own little life and its prosaic responsibilities. He had to gather his squad and get any injuries appraised and treated if necessary. He would have to review his men’s performances and highlight excellence in his report to the team lieutenant.

With the trouble-makers scattered and no doubt trying to look as innocent as everyone else, Vasco Banner regained command of the crowd via the loudspeakers. He reassured everyone that Madam Victorina Krossington had been recovered and was unhurt, and urged everyone to obey the Party ushers, who would be managing the flow off Parliament Square onto Westminster Bridge. He respectfully requested the personnel of General Wardian to withdraw from the square to reduce crowding.

“Don’t say ‘thank you’, mate!” Nightminster yelled at him. It brought a laugh from the other troopers near him.

He did not see any bystanders laughing.

Chapter 8

Now it was Sunday evening and Nightminster was back in the locker room at Euston depot. He took his time getting changed into civilian clothes. An unavoidable obstacle blocked his life. He was going to return the bag with the black uniform to Johnny Albert and cancel his tutoring of the man’s children. It might mean a fight. He had youth and height on his side, although painful ribs, courtesy of the axe that had struck him the previous afternoon, were not on his side. Whatever happened, he could not remain in Bermondsey. He would have to build a new life elsewhere.

“Nightminster!”

A sergeant with a red and sweaty face stood in the door of the locker room. He was a notorious character, always stomping about scattering sputum as he ranted at juniors.

“Get moving, the boss wants to see you.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Nightminster followed the sergeant into the administration complex at the back of Euston depot and up to the top floor where the boss, Account-Captain 1st Class Kumar, had his office. Nightminster felt upbeat about the summons, assuming he would get a commendation for helping to rescue Victorina Krossington. However, Account-Captain Kumar greeted him in a cool style. He was a slender-framed man of a little over six feet tall, brown-complexioned, with a broad face and dimpled chin. The mouth turned down and sloped to the left. He carried about him an air of great satisfaction with the world. Nightminster and he sat down together at the office conference table.

“To begin with, I would like to communicate the gratitude of the Krossington clan for your effective action at Parliament Square yesterday. Your leading the charge into the main group of rabble was singled out for praise by His Decency Tom Krossington. I am pleased to tell you that Her Decency Miss Victorina is none the worse for the experience, although a good deal wiser in the ways of this world.”

“I am pleased to hear that, sir.”

“I will be mentioning your name in my despatch to Northumberland Avenue.”

Northumberland Avenue was the corporate headquarters of General Wardian glory trust. It was a grandiose stone building of Public Era vintage virtually next door to the Palace of Westminster.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Second item. Rather a different matter.” Kumar unfolded a small type-written memo. “It is not often that I receive correspondence from an owner of the Ultramarine Guild, in fact, it has never happened before. The Owner of Bermondsey, one Mr Johnny Albert, wishes that I congratulate Corporal P. W. Nightminster for having fired the crucial shot that killed one Jumping Jackson, notorious gangster of Brent Cross, and saved Her Decency Miss Victorina… Etcetera etcetera. So, you have an admirer. How do you feel about that?”

Nightminster had managed to recover from his initial shock by the time Kumar had finished speaking. That Johnny Albert had learned who fired the fatal shot was as baffling as it was frightening. Since the riot, Nightminster had accumulated scores of accounts from other glory troopers. Even within his own squad, there was great conflict of opinion over the identity of the shooter. Most thought the shot came from another squad. Everyone had been concentrating on the trouble in their face, because that trouble could kill them. They heard a shot followed immediately by the turmoil of the charge. So far as Nightminster was aware, only two troopers knew the truth, the pair who had lifted him to get a better view. One was Leading Basic Billy Nieuport, the other Basic Veitch Thomas. He had asked them to keep quiet. Nightminster was certain neither would have squealed to Johnny Albert. However, someone had squealed. Someone had squealed to Johnny Albert the details of Nightminster’s uniform.

“Nightminster?”

“Who else knows I shot that thug?”

“That is impossible to say”

“Half of London could know my name by now!”

“No,” Kumar said. “We’ve picked up nothing to suggest you’re a public figure. One ultramarine owner knowing your name does not make you a public figure. Your comrades in the regiment are bound by their oath of silence.”

“Yet someone squealed to Johnny Albert.”

“Do not worry about becoming a public figure.”

That sounded more like wishful thinking than reality, but Nightminster did not bother to challenge the smugness of a senior officer. He patted the arms of his chair to prompt Kumar to get a move on to make his point. Kumar leaned forward, studying Nightminster’s face. “There is nothing in your service file about a relationship with an ultramarine owner. Why did you not report this as a competing interest?”

“It isn’t a competing interest. All I do—did—was tutor the children of the Owner of Bermondsey. About a year ago, a couple of his thugs arrived at our flat and told my parents their ‘brainy’ son was going to tutor the Owner’s children. They left a down payment of five ounces, which is about what my father earns in a week. The way it works in the asylums is, what the Owner wants, the Owner gets. Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?”

“Of course, but you should have told us. This letter set Corporate Audit off like frantic rats.”

Nightminster’s alarm must have shown, as Kumar added, smiling: “You need not worry. The rats confirmed what you just told me. They learned much else. I had no idea you led such an active life.” As Nightminster refused to be drawn by such fishing, Kumar added: “Do you understand what the Owner of Bermondsey is really saying?”

“He’s got me by the balls—he wants me as his messenger boy. If I won’t comply, he’ll make my name public.”

“You’d certainly be a catch. Clever, well-educated, a risk-taker. These are not qualities that just drop off trees. So, yes, he wants you in his mob, and yes, he might well make your name public unless we make it clear you’re a vital asset of General Wardian who is staying within the corporate family.”

“That is most reassuring, sir”

“You are going to make yourself useful.”

“I already have made myself exceedingly useful.”

“It has come to the notice of this corporation that you sought admission to the University of Oxford. You were interviewed by a panel of academics. It has further come to the notice of this corporation that you gained admission to study physics. That is a remarkable achievement for one from your humble background. I can assure you of my deepest admiration.”

Nightminster’s head was starting to pound.

“How did you learn this?”

“Corporate Audit followed a rumour you failed to get a place. Our personnel department checked with the admissions office at Oxford, who confirmed that you did in fact have a place, although as yet they have no acceptance of the offer. You need not concern yourself with funding, General Wardian will cover all fees.”

Account-Captain Kumar beamed. He held out his hand. Nightminster just stared at it.

“This is all coming thick and fast,” he said.

He was starting to grasp that an incredible flurry of action involving dozens of people and extensive bribes must have been executed to assemble all of this information in only twenty-four hours. He shook Kumar’s hand, although his movements were slowed by suspicion.

“You people want something—badly. What is it?”

“Yes. We want something in return, and you are right, we want it badly. Your adventurous lifestyle tells us you will be perfect. One senior officer considers you a ‘once in a generation windfall’.”

“What do you want?”

“It is only July, whereas the university term does not start until 1st October. You will now transfer away from London to complete the Securitician B course and gain your sergeant’s stripes. That will be a useful advance in your career and keep you out of London until it’s time to go up to Oxford.”

“No! No, I’m not transferring anywhere.” He jack-knifed forward, his face flushing with outrage. “My life is a damned sight more than General Wardian.”

“Nightminster, you are a glory trooper. You will obey orders.”

“I just resigned.”

Nightminster shot up, knocking his chair on its back. He was halfway to the door before Kumar caught up and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He tried to usher Nightminster back to the table, but the young man was having none of it and locked to the spot like a concrete post.

“Do not be impetuous, young Nightminster. General Wardian is a most sympathetic family. We will reach a mutually acceptable solution.”

“That’s better.”

Nightminster retrieved his chair and set it upright at a distance from the table and relaxed with his legs stretched out crossed and his hands clasped behind his head. So far as he was concerned, Kumar was a long way from closing any deal.

“There is one obvious problem,” he said. “If I disappear from the regiment, everyone will guess the reason.”

“We are transferring a number of people, some because of excellence, others because they failed.”

“All right, but I’ll bet you aren’t sending any of them up to Oxford, so what’s that all about?”

At this, Kumar recovered his humour, smiling and lifting his chin knowingly.

“Oxford is the intellectual core of the SUN Party. Its president Vasco Banner is a don there, so is the head of policy Tom Krossington. His younger sister Victorina, the Party’s public health convener, is a student of medicine. You will arrive at this notorious bastion of privilege from humble roots, so it is only natural that you will take an interest in the party of reform—the deepest possible interest, right into the very core of that party’s militant agenda.”

Nightminster held his silence, thinking, watching Kumar’s irritating smile. This was interesting new data, no question about it. He was not forgetting the sliding dismay as he watched beautiful Victorina Krossington descend from view after giving her speech. In those moments, he believed he would never see her again in his life. About ten minutes later, he was kneeling over her flat on her back, looking into her eyes through a plate of class barrier.

“I’m not interested in politics.”

Kumar expressed a kind of convulsion of exasperation, which amused Nightminster.

“You’re being sent on a mission for which you will be well paid, quite apart from your fees being met by General Wardian.” Kumar’s eyes were growing bright with frustration. “Have you no gratitude?”

“Yesterday I killed a man in a very public, very memorable way in the course of serving General Wardian. I have an unpleasant suspicion that act is going to haunt the rest of my life. If there is a balance of gratitude to meet, it is not from my side.” He stood up and turned towards the door. “I’m sure General Wardian knows my life well enough to locate me if desired. In the meantime, adieu.”

After a wave of good-bye, he marched off along the corridor and down the stairs, feeling good to have pushed back against an arrogant big-shot to defend his own agenda. By the time he returned to the locker room, however, his mood had folded back to the grim prospects he faced after departing Euston depot. For all his cockiness with Kumar, there were unpalatable facts out there in the big wide world. Someone had betrayed him to Johnny Albert. They might have betrayed him to others. Thugs in Brent Cross could at this moment be contemplated vengeance upon the killer called Nightminster from Bermondsey industrial asylum.

The thought of a fight with Johnny Albert no longer seemed daunting.

*

Everything back home in Bermondsey appeared typical of a Sunday evening in the Nightminster household. Mother was marking the arithmetic tests of local children she tutored for a little extra income. Father was in the sitting room, which doubled as his workshop, making a toy steam truck from wood and brass ‘liberated’ from Chaddertons’. He sold such toys to shops in Kensington. The toys were very detailed and took a long time to make, but it brought in a modest additional income.

“You’ve lost your job with the ultramarines,” Father said. “A couple of the Owner’s thugs barged in this morning and took away a bag of stuff from your room. They said it belonged to the Owner, and who were we to argue? We really have no idea about what you get up to these days.”

This news left Nightminster as if floating with relief. Now there was no need to go near Johnny’s palace, not ever again. There lingered a suspicion it was all too easy, which Nightminster set aside as not an immediate problem.

He made a thorough reconnaissance of the streets around his parents’ flat before going to bed that evening. The very air felt dangerous. He was now the prey of thugs who gang-raped for a laugh. The protective golden jaguar badge of the Owner of Bermondsey was of course now forbidden to him, so he had to proceed with great caution, knowing that if he blundered into Johnny Albert’s ultramarine troopers with the sawn-off, he faced a bleak termination. They would beat him to a bloody mush with their cracker pipes and leave him for the wild dogs that roamed the asylum’s back lanes at night.

Despite an hour spent creeping along pitch-dark streets and scanning the late-night bars of the market place with binoculars, he saw nothing to alarm him. He found reassurance in the dark maze of lanes and the monotony of the blocks of flats. It was quite tricky even for him, lifelong resident, to find his parents’ flat in the darkness, for there were no lights or lanterns in the side streets, and on a Sunday night even the boulevards remained unlit. The only pools of light were cafes on the market place. He decided that yobs from Brent Cross had no chance of locating the Nightminster flat after dark. Even in daytime, their hunt would be a struggle. Asylum residents did not have addresses. The letter from the University of Oxford, for instance, could only be delivered because Father had known it was coming and left detailed instructions with the Chadderton mail office. The one authority who did maintain a master-plan of exactly who lived where was… Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey. Nightminster did not believe any owner would stoop to share secrets with foreign hoodlums.

He climbed steps onto the railway viaduct that crossed Bermondsey and gazed to the west, beyond the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, gleaming white in arc lights, to the sovereign palaces of Mayfair. A soft glow radiated over the district, cast by flood lights hidden behind the grand hedges. Damnation, he could not get the beautiful face of Victorina Krossington out of his mind’s eye. It was more than a matter of beauty—lovely faces were not exactly uncommon, there were several stunners who lived in his street—for a few seconds there had been a connection. He had sensed fascination with the stranger in uniform who brushed her face and reassured her. Or was it all just the wishful thinking of a lonely young man?

He sighed. He descended the steps to the shadows of ground level and felt his way back home. And so to bed in the cramped little room of his boyhood, which smelled of damp and mice and gun oil, in which the bed was too short by about three inches, for which reason he slept with his feet out at an angle. Sleep was long in coming and ambushed him. He blundered around a palace trying to get out but always finished up at the bottom of a grand marble staircase, where he was presented to Her Decency Victorina Krossington by a ponderous voice very like Account-Captain Kumar’s. And this is Nightminster. He is a usurer who profits off the sweat of the poor, a con artist who exploits the trust of the ignorant, a profiteer and above all a killer who shoots first and forgets. In short, he is a parasite and a punk. And this is Nightminster. He is a usurer who profits off the sweat of the poor, a con artist who exploits the trust of the ignorant, a profiteer and above all a killer who shoots first and forgets. In short, he is a parasite and a punk. And this is Nightminster…

He sat up in bed, sweating. He must have drifted off to sleep again as he woke from exactly the same nightmare. After the third time, he could see light through the curtains and he got up and made a cup of catnip tea. It was ten past five. Monday yawned with a daunting emptiness. A generally hollow, listless mood was upon him. What he needed was a task, something tough that served Target Ten Thousand. How about a venture to Brent Cross industrial asylum to sell the tungsten carbide tool bits he had won from the travelling people on Friday?

Someone in a history book—a British officer of the Second World War of the Public Era—once said that the boldest measures were the safest.

“Danger draw me to your breast,” he murmured, wondering if it was a quotation.

Chapter 9

After leaving the flat, Nightminster grew increasingly fearful. The lack of Johnny Albert’s golden badge left him like a mouse under circling hawks. He carried the sawn-off shotgun strapped to the back of his thigh, where it was not noticeable under the folds of the baggy dungarees, and the Makarov in an ankle holster. At this early hour of the morning few were about except eunuch gangs collecting night soil and urine from the communal doorways of the apartment blocks. Hopefully ultramarines would still be in bed.

He pedalled his bike straight out of Bermondsey past the still-shut tollhouse of the turnpike. Once on the deserted turnpike, he relaxed a bit. It was very unlikely he would be stopped and searched out here, provided he acted like a normal dude going somewhere. He leamed forward into the prevailing wind. It took until 10 am to reach Kew Bridge over the River Thames. He had reached a long way upriver from Bermondsey, having looped south into the abandonments to avoid the industrial asylums that nestled along the River Thames: Elephant & Castle, Battersea and Wandsworth; places full of ultramarines. The counter of his bicycle told him he had covered twenty miles and his watch told him it had taken three hours. He was hot, tired and thirsty.

Kew Bridge was loud with the shanties of Night and Fog gangs. There were plenty of ultramarines here, but these did not worry him. The men in black had their energies fully occupied directing their Night and Fog gangs to haul wagons burdened with giant wooden casks, to turn capstans that lifted wooden casks from the holds of barges loafing high and dry on the gravel shore of the river, deposited there by the falling tide. The thick, swampy air over the river reeked of pine forest. Nightminster recalled a geography lesson of his schooldays. Kew Bridge was a major port of the turpentine industry. He was watching casks of raw turpentine being off-loaded from sea-going sailing barges—Thames barges they were called—which gathered their loads from numerous beaches and creeks along the east coast of England. The raw turpentine was hauled up to Brent Cross where it was distilled into other things.

He bought some water from a seller who issued it scalding hot to prove its hygiene. Nightminster had to wait a while, blowing on it before it was cool enough to drink. He bought a slice of lemon to squeeze and gulped down half of the quart and tipped the rest into his flask. He also bought two freshly-baked cheese scones drooling with ice-chilled butter—by God were they delicious. Much invigorated, he paid the (expensive) turnpike toll of five silver sovereigns and joined the traffic on the busy route to Brent Cross industrial asylum. There were plenty of other cyclists, which provided anonymity. He was more worried about becoming tomato soup. The turnpike was a chaotic place. Man-hauled wagons competed with steam and diesel trucks, while cyclists and those on foot played at minnows, doing their best to stay out of the way. He passed a couple of trucks that had crashed head-on, smashing the wooden cabs to splinters. A steam line in one truck had burst, scalding nearby unfortunates who were now laid out poached and swollen like bleached toads. Both drivers sprawled very dead on mats of bloody gravel. Nightminster did what everyone else did, he pedalled on by wincing at the howls of a scalded woman who was going to die slowly and painfully and knew it all too well.

Nightminster could see Brent Cross in the distance long before reaching it, and knew he was approaching a place on a different scale from Bermondsey or any other asylum he knew. The chimneys were taller and smoked more, there were more of them over a greater area, reaction towers streaked with tar belched steam and brown fumes, the roofs of production sheds ran along the skyline like black escarpments.

At the frontier of the asylum he faced a major challenge to his nerves. A large board advised that possession of firearms without a licence signed by a Brent Cross employer was a capital offence. Offenders received “automatic execution for the people”. No excuses accepted. His instincts told him these people meant business. He retreated half a mile back down the turnpike and secreted the sawn-off and the Makarov in a collapsed cellar fifty yards from the landmark of a massive electricity transformer of the Public Era still swimming in its own oil. However, the Brent Cross frontier guards still had a surprise in store. To get in, everyone had to show ID. He cussed with exasperation. What an infuriating place! He could show his ultramarine ID, his General Wardian ID, or his Chadderton staff ID. In the end, he showed the latter.

The frontier guard frowned at it. He was a fanciful figure, garbed up in black leather armour like a Japanese samurai and armed with a long, black steel cracker pipe. Behind him were a couple of colleagues at the ready with submachine guns. Nightminster was puzzled that the frontier was not guarded by ultramarines. And it was employers, not the local ultramarine owner, who signed the firearms licences. This place really was different!

“What is your business here?” the frontier guard asked.

“I am selling heirlooms to the ZEEBRI complex.”

“What kind of heirlooms?”

“Tungsten carbide machine tool bits.”

The guard handed the ID booklet straight back.

“That is excellent. Welcome to Brent Cross.”

And that was that. Nightminster was in.

*

Brent Cross was a place of such massive anonymity that any twinge of concern about encountering friends of Jumping Jackson disappeared before Nightminster was even a quarter of the way across the market. Like most others, he wore a sun hat, in his case a coarse-woven Panama hat, in the shadows of which his face was obscure under the burning sunlight. He doubted any thug from Parliament Square would have recognised him anyway, they were dancing and prancing when he fired, not looking for shooters. He strolled about for a while, impressed by the size of the market and the range of goods. Perhaps this scale of bustle in which he was irrelevant affected him. A glumness descended on him. He, of an asylum, could never get rich by respectable means. He could only get ahead by trickery, by misleading people, by flitting between the worlds of the poor and the rich, exploiting the ignorance of one world against the conceits of the other. He struggled against an eery sensation of being an undead thing floating amongst strangers who never looked twice at him, did not care about him and would not have noticed had he vanished in a puff of smoke. It was the same feeling that had troubled him on Friday on the lonely highway to the Binns of Croydon. This was the experience of one who belongs nowhere, who only seeks from the world, and so the world wants nothing of him.

He gave himself a shake. He was alone in the world with his highest ambitions and he had to get used to it.

*

The ZEEBRI complex proved to be a concrete structure like a pale escarpment dominating one side of the market place. It was plainly of Public Era construction, like a stack of concrete sheets laid one on top of the other with gaps left between. He wondered if it might once have been a nuclear bomb shelter from the Cold War era. Popular knowledge held that twenty-five thousand people laboured in the galleries of ZEEBRI. In passing through the gates, he learned that ZEEBRI stood for Zelewski, Elmes, Edkins, Brankner, Randell and Ignatovitch, the big-shot owners. Nightminster followed arrows to the General Enquiries counter, where he explained he wished to sell heirloom tungsten carbine tool bits. A messenger escorted him down a long concrete passage, which seemed more like a mine as it opened into enormous, low-ceilinged galleries along the way. He paused, mesmerised by a giant winding machine laying miles of wire to form the barrel of a Long-75 cannon, the mighty weapon so beloved of ultramarine owners and for which ZEEBRI was famous. He saw torrents of rifle rounds spill from one machine and freshly-cast hand grenades roll from another. The messenger confirmed what was apparent before his eyes, that ZEEBRI was the greatest armoury on the Island of Britain. Further on they emerged in sunlight on the far side of ZEEBRI. The air was loaded with aromatic fumes and coal smoke. He stared out over a chemical works of steel tanks bound together by masses of pipes and rusty gantries. The reaction towers he had seen from afar now loomed close enough that he could feel their heat and hear the shuddering of the processes contained by their steel plates. The messenger, a skinny little guy who flew up and down steps like a bolting fish, explained this was the turpentine refinery that separated the lighter fractions used in fuels from the residue, the rosin, which was used in electrical solder, soap (for which Brent Cross was of course famous), marine varnish, glues and inks. Another plant issued various blends of camphine (ethanol mixed with distilled turpentine) for lanterns, motorbikes, luxury cars and trucks. Nightminster commented that there must be a heap of gold in all this. The messenger nodded with heavy seriousness. There was a river of gold in energy, because that drove everything else. He had repeatedly been told by managers that ZEEBRI made most gold from just two sectors: energy and armaments.

They arrived at the office of the expert responsible for machining processes in ZEEBRI. Madam Cowper inspected Nightminster through thick spectacles, obviously amused by something about him as she smiled keenly whilst continuing to turn over an iron piston  with her short, plump fingers. She asked what he wanted. Without a word, he pulled a leather pouch from his pocket and emptied the tungsten carbide bits onto her desk.

She gawped, sat up very straight, and dropped the piston.

“Fabulous!” she gasped.

She flipped them different ways to sort them out.

“Can you get more of these?”

“Possibly. What’s your best offer?”

“Do sit down.” She bustled him into a chair and called through to the next office for tea and biscuits. During the next ten minutes she pummelled him with questions about himself and where he had obtained the bits. He was open in showing his Chadderton ID as Mr P. W. Nightminster of Bermondsey. He was beginning to grasp the significance of this visit to ZEEBRI. This vast place could be his future. A River Thames of gold must flow through the refinery and the armaments workshops. There must be gold and skills enough here to build an atomic plant, surely?

“Why have you come all the way across London when you could have offered these bits to Chaddertons’?” Madam Cowper asked, dragging him back to earth.

“Wanderlust,” he said. “I’ve never been to Brent Cross. I’m impressed. This place puts Chaddertons’ in the shade.”

Madam Cowper tilted her head, thinking.

“We hold the Chadderton brothers in the highest respect. They make radar sets for anti-aircraft guns. No other factory on the Island of Britain has that expertise. They win many specialised jobs to restore Public Era heirlooms. I recall some months ago we bid to repair a planetarium projector— a contraption the size of a cannon that can recreate the night sky inside a dome. Yet the Krossingtons gave the job to Chaddertons’, not to us.”

Nightminster savoured a surge of pride in his skill as an engineer. It hardened his conviction that going to Oxford University was an irrelevance he did not need. Somehow, he had to wrap Target Ten Thousand together with Chaddertons’ and ZEEBRI. Somehow, he had to make himself into something bigger than a five-ounce grunt in the eyes of people like Madam Cowper.

“What were you expecting for these bits?” she asked him.

“About ten ounces apiece.”

“Hmm? Well, tungsten carbide bits have not been made since the Glorious Resolution. They are museum pieces. It’s virtually a crime to use them.”

“Then use them well, or not at all.”

“We like to establish long-term relations with enterprising young people like you. You see, there are things that can’t be made without these tungsten carbide bits. Turbine shafts, machine tool beds, high-pressure valves and much else. If we can make things no other factory can, that wins ZEEBRI prestige, and that is beyond value.”

“Yes, it must be.”

“So I’m going to ask the Treasury to issue ten ZEEBRI shares.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Nightminster had only a vague idea of what a ‘share’ was, but withheld revealing his ignorance. Madam Cowper wrote out a form with a fountain pen, stamped the form, put it in an envelope which she sealed with wax and handed to Nightminster. He made a little bow, thanked her once more and departed with the messenger in tow.

“You did all right there. You did quite all right. The Treasury is on the top deck where it’s all carpets and walnut panelling,” the messenger said.

“Do lead on.”

Five minutes’ later, Nightminster emerged from the Treasury office with ten beautifully-printed share certificates secure in his jacket pocket. He happened to glance down a flight of steps on the way back to reception and saw a familiar flag. It was dark green with an orange circle in the middle—the flag of the SUN Party.

“Why is there a SUN Party flag down there?”

“Because ZEEBRI hosts the national headquarters of the SUN Party—the one, true core of the party. Our bosses are right behind it. The SUN Party wants everyone to be rich again like our grandparents back in the Public Era, that means ZEEBRI and all the other factories will have to breed like rabbits to make stuff for the people. We’re going to make a fortune. Are you a party member?”

“I can’t say that I am.”

“Don’t you want everyone to be rich again?”

“Of course I do!”

Nightminster could not help but be impressed by an insight he would never have seen without actually being in this place. The SUN Party might have more potential than he had realised. Its aims were roughly in line with his own dream of simply by-passing the sovereigns with atomic power. “Can I take a look?”

“I’ll take you down.”

A ludicrous fantasy entered Nightminster’s head that he would step into the SUN Party office and his eyes would meet those of Victorina Krossington across the room. He smiled to himself at the foolishness of such day-dreaming, a bad habit he held in particular contempt, even if he routinely caught himself at it. He peered through the entrance into the bay that was home to the SUN Party. It was an ants’ nest. During these middle hours of the day, ZEEBRI workers got released for lunch in phases over a three-hour window. Many of them were spending the time here. The party offices were long wooden buildings assembled on the concrete floor of a typical ZEEBRI production bay, a space similar to an aircraft hanger, although with a low ceiling propped with ranks of concrete columns. ZEEBRI staff in their burgundy overalls crowded amongst the buildings, listening to speakers or, in one area, watching a slide show that appeared to be about assembly lines in the early period of mass affluence just after the First World War of the Public Era. Nightminster watched the show for a few minutes, captivated by how similar the technology of that time was to contemporary industrial asylums. The renaissance of mass affluence was tantalisingly close.

All it needed was an atomic Henry Ford!

At the far end of the bay was an attraction so popular that the crowd confounded Nightminster’s view. All he could see were a couple of flags hung crossways. One was the flag of the SUN Party, the other a red flag with yellow hammer and sickle, which he recognised from history books as the banner of the ‘communist’ societies of the Public Era. By opportunistic edging, he closed in. A queue snaked out from an exhibit. People were signing a book, offering some gesture of respect—a bow, crossing themselves or a salute—and moving away. It was a shrine of some sort to a young man with a sunny smile and a thatch of curly hair. The black and white photo was grainy and obviously an enlargement. Nightminster wondered if he had been killed in an accident within ZEEBRI. A tribute was scripted on a notice under the photograph.

The name was John Martin Jackson, popular as Jumping Jackson due to his prowess in the ZEEBRI basketball team. Murdered at the People’s Rally on Parliament Square by an unknown trooper of General Wardian glory trust whilst fighting for freedom. Justice shall prevail!

Nightminster was too big and too close to pull back. Everyone around him was waiting to sign the book of condolences. He let himself be carried closer, looking into the sunny smile of the young man he had killed with a fist of lead shot. He knew his face must be burning—with anger. The man he shot was a scumbag dancing on the threshold of gang rape. This shrine was a lie. He clenched his teeth against the urge to yell what a damned lie this was. When his turn came to sign the book of condolence, he wrote ‘I. M. Witness’ with a flourish and glowered into the eyes of Jumping Jackson before he cleared the way for the next mourner.

So that was the truth of the SUN Party. They canonised rapists. The SUN Party made a hero of a lout who had abducted the public health convener of the SUN Party! What a peculiar bunch they were.

On his way out he was distracted by a voice emanating from one of the long wooden sheds, a voice with a heavy Brent Cross accent—a little more Midlands than standard Cockney—but it spoke with poise and authority. Nightminster supposed one of the senior managers must be a member of the SUN Party and evidently wished to pass on his wisdom about the nature of money, not the most digestible of lunchtime topics. The speaker was deriding gold as a medium of exchange, claiming it served the sovereign caste’s monopoly of the money supply (whatever that was). What a strange cocktail this place was, canonising rapists on the one hand while intellectualising rebellion on the other!

Nightminster stepped through the open door of the shed.

In his shock, he staggered backwards onto the messenger, who was much the smaller and must have felt like a horse was falling on him. Nightminster twisted about to regain his balance. He panted with stress and the only imperative in his mind was to get away, get away at any cost. He marched out of the SUN Party’s bay to the open air, launched himself back up the steps and along the corridor across the building towards the main exit.

“I just remembered, I’ve an appointment with my lawyer at 3 o’clock,” he said, when his escort caught him up.

The messenger gave him an odd look, but merely said:

“The main reception is this way.”

Nightminster got away from ZEEBRI as quickly as he decently could. It was not until he was outside Brent Cross industrial asylum in bushland retrieving his sawn-off and Makarov that he felt able to reflect upon his incredible encounter. How could anyone possibly have imagined that a square-headed thug with half an ear gone could stand before a shedload of devotees declaiming with authority upon the evils of gold and the virtues of paper ‘fiat’ money issued by a national ‘bank’? There he was, King-Tough of Parliament Square, spick clean-shaven as a missionary in a black suit and white shirt with SUN Party bow tie offering his economic wisdom to a packed house.

Nightminster remained quiet, alone in the bushland, his arms wrapped about his legs, chin dug in his knees. Unpalatable realities chased around and around inside his head. He had implanted his existence into the consciousness of a senior manager of ZEEBRI, host of the party in which King-Tough was a prominent official. Madam Cowper’s office was two floors above the SUN Party headquarters, literally a two-minute walk.

It was a time to think with care, not panic. The situation was no different from any other happenstance of life. One could shrivel in fear or hug opportunity. He had no reason to suppose being known by a ZEEBRI manager was in itself dangerous. In contrast, learning that King-Tough was a senior official of the SUN Party was priceless knowledge. It gave him an edge. King-Tough must have close relations with the bosses of ZEEBRI. He could pressure them to pour gold into the search for the shooter of Parliament Square. Nightminster knew he must take fair warning of the implications.

His instinct at the time of the shooting had proved correct. Although he had never entertained a moment’s doubt that his actions were justified, he had acted alone before thousands and in doing so condemned his future.

Why the hell had he not fired high?

“Well, you didn’t fire high,” he muttered. “So now you have to live with the consequences.”

He stood up. Enough was enough. He must not be a mewling cry-baby. The past was done and had to be borne by toughness. He pulled out the envelope containing the ZEEBRI shares and extracted them, spreading all ten into a fan. After staring at them for almost a minute, he closed the fan and put the envelope away, but this time buttoned into an inside pocket. He had gained shares to the face value of 200 ounces. Their market value would be even higher. That was twice what he had expected to get for the tungsten carbide bits.

*

Nightminster passed the rest of that week in a mood of deepest pessimism. He carried the Makarov at all times, despite the consequences should he be stopped and searched by Johnny Albert’s ultramarine thugs. He walked to work at Chaddertons’ along the boulevard when the crowds were greatest. He ate a packed lunch sitting under the planetarium projector in the Precision Engineering department. He issued no more loans and only attended his place of business at the cupboard between 7:30 and 8 am, his back to the wall, Makarov gripped at the ready in his pocket. In the evenings, he kept to his bedroom and read The Count of Monte Cristo. He remained fully dressed to sleep. If a cur howled below his window, he bolted awake in a sweat. Once, he heard stealthy movements outside in the early hours and braced for deadly confrontation. In the morning, he heard a drunk had dropped asleep further down the lane and been mauled by a pack of wild dogs.

He could not go on like this. He was going to have to disappear until the hue and cry died down. Sooner or later, the shooting would fade into yesterday’s world. Provided one had gold, it was not hard to vanish. A successful businessman could set up house in a strange place and be accepted without question provided his bag of cash never failed. This slowly-formulating plan received a boost from his one expedition of the week. On Thursday evening, he attended the Kensington auction with Mirana and her father. He sold the Curta calculator, fountain pens and propelling pencils. After the auction house had taken its cut, he transferred 247 ounces to his account at the Balancing House of Kronstein in the Port of Erith. Combined with the face value of ZEEBRI shares, that single expedition to the Binns of Croydon the previous Friday had netted almost five hundred ounces of gold. Despite Mirana’s warnings and his own anxieties, the sheer productivity of that one day was building in him an aggression to venture into the abandonments the next day, Friday, seeking more danger, more gold.

That evening, he pored over an old Public Era A to Z road atlas of London, planning a route for the next day’s expedition. There came a rapping on the door of the flat. He sat up, grabbed the sawn-off shotgun from the drawer under his bed and waited. Mother answered the door. He expected the thunder of Johnny Albert’s thugs charging up the stairs and wondered if he would have the guts to give them both barrels, or whether he would take their cracker pipes like a roll of carpet. Mother called up he had a message to sign for. Puzzled, he laid the shotgun aside but pocketed the Makarov before descending to find a scarlet-uniformed messenger waiting. He signed for the letter and shut the door.

“Who’s it from?” Mother asked.

Nightminster passed it across to her. It was from Account-Captain Kumar. Corporal P. W. Nightminster was to report to Euston depot in dress uniform tomorrow morning at 10 am.

“I’ll iron your shirt,” she said.

“Thanks, Mother.”

What was this? Would he be ushered into a court martial? The problem was, he valued the training he could get with General Wardian. He had applied to get a flying boat pilot’s licence. He liked the camaraderie and excitement of field exercises, with artillery blasting away and waves of paratroopers descending from the sky. Kumar’s arrogance had riled him, but for all that, he was loath to wave two fingers at General Wardian.

Chapter 10

Next morning, he reported to Euston depot at 10 am, arriving in the great hall of the former train station to find it already bustling with steam trucks and troops milling about waiting to be despatched to sovereign lands around London. The Personnel Registration desk directed him to wait in the Sergeants’ Mess of the depot. Nightminster passed the time leafing through back copies of the Glorious Gazette, the corporate news journal of General Wardian glory trust. He wondered how it would report the riot on Parliament Square. How would they present the shooting? They would not name him, surely? He found reassurance in its generally discreet style. Most of the content concerned promotions and appointments, such as of new account-captains to lead the garrison of this or that sovereign land. It listed graduates of each of the grades of the securitician certification system (A, B and C). Several troopers were named after being awarded medals for long service or acts of gallantry in actions that were not described in detail. Suppose they awarded him the Britannia Cross for gallantry? Would that be enough for SUN Party hit-men to read between the lines?

He sighed, tapping a nervous index finger on his knee. The trouble with acting alone on the stage of the world was that it opened a new world of possibilities. 

*

A messenger arrived in the mess around eleven o’clock to escort him by a strange, meandering route to an obscure doorway at the rear of the main administration block of the depot. The messenger said someone would fetch him, after which, he was left alone looking at a blank, locked door.

About five minutes passed.

The door swung inwards and an officer waved him inside to a plain little space at the bottom of some steps. The officer shut the door and proceeded, still in silence, to inspect Nightminster under the electric light with such intensity that he wondered if the man was a homosexual. The most striking thing about this officer was his triangular face. The brow was large and broad, and the eyes wide set, while from the cheekbones the face narrowed to a sharp chin with a small mouth. He was a dapper, slightly built man of about five foot nine, with a calm and studious face. The uniform of an account-captain 2nd class was finely-cut, but could not conceal a modest frame. Whatever accomplishments had raised this man to the rank of account-captain 2nd class by the age of about thirty—an unusual achievement—Nightminster could not imagine they were in the martial realm. Rather, he suspected this man was a headquarters intellectual; a courtier. Therefore, his expectations were not high.

“You’re going to be more of a challenge than I was led to believe,” the account-captain announced. He spoke with the nasal haughtiness Nightminster associated with public schools. This did nothing to raise his expectations. “A spy should be forgettable, a flake in the snowfall. But you… There is not a soul who, having set eyes on you, would forget the encounter. It’s not just your height. Your Roman—or is it Jewish?—nose and broad temples are reminiscent of Caesar.” This appraisal hardly reassured Night-minster, who was acutely aware of what a simple ID he made for the hunters of the Parliament Square shooter. The account-captain stepped back. Now he had the remote dissatisfaction of a breeder who, having inspected a bull, has decided to move on.

“Do you have Jewish ancestry?”

“No, sir.” Nightminster now wondered if this man was a bigot. “My forebears moved to the Thames Valley from humble origins in rural Kent. My family has curled-up old photos of rustics living in cottages without electricity or indoor privies as late as the 1950s of the Public Era.”

“How quaint. Well, do follow me.”

They climbed the narrow, deserted staircase to an attic. The floorboards were bare and creaky, the plaster walls hung with dusty cobwebs. To both sides opened store rooms stacked with shelves of files, and stacks more files congested the floors. A grey snow of dust layered all. The account-captain unlocked a door near the end, drawing Nightminster into a long, thin office with several desks down its length. The window looked out immediately beneath the ceiling of the concours of Euston depot. After shutting the door firmly and locking it, his host said:

“I am Account-Captain Roberts.”

“Corporal Nightminster.” Despite the gulf between their ranks, he still thought himself superior to this bureaucrat.

Roberts took a seat at one of the desks and Nightminster at the next, swivelling about and adopting a nonchalant pose. There was growing in him a determination not to tolerate any rank-pulling. This was going to be trade between equals or else he was out that door.

“I will be your handler during the Oxford assignment.”

“You make me sound like a dog. Shall I bark like a dog?” Nightminster sat up with his hands pawed and uttered a couple of sharp yaps. A tired look came over Roberts’ face.

“No. You are not required to yap like a Chihuahua. The term ‘handler’ has a meaning in espionage. I am your sole point of contact. Information gets passed to me and only to me. If your landlord is a pest, or you have money problems, you come to me and I smooth your problems out. Is that clear?”

Roberts spoke quietly whilst pinning Nightminster with eyes of a predatory raptness. The effect was to anger, although at the same time unnerve Nightminster.

“If you say so.”

“Have you spoken with anyone about your Oxford assignment?”

“No.” Not least because Nightminster had not the least inclination towards any ‘Oxford assignment’.

“Good. Keep it that way. Now, what do you know about the SUN Party?”

Nightminster’s honest response would have been ‘too bloody much for my own good’. To reveal he had visited the Brent Cross HQ would require that he justify being inside the ZEEBRI complex. Roberts just did not need to know.

“My personal experience is that they are trouble-makers.”

“You say they are trouble-makers, yet you risked your life to rescue one of their senior officials, Her Decency Victorina Krossington. Why?”

“Because I was ordered to.”

“Who ordered you to rescue her?”

“No one did. But the intent of our advance into the mob was obviously to protect sovereign property, or in this case, sovereign life.”

“Who told you that?”

Nightminster thought Roberts was being an ass. “So we advanced to get a better view of Her Decency Victorina K being gang-raped?”

“You shot a man dead. I wish to understand the chain of circumstances leading to that.”

“She was snatched off the platform by a gang of scallywags, louts of the lowest order. One of them threw an axe that could have split my skull open. After being certain my field of fire was clear of fellow troopers or civilians, I shot one of the ring leaders and then led the charge to rescue Her Decency.”

“You describe the incident quite clinically.”

“How else am I supposed to describe it?”

“For most people, to kill another human being is a shattering experience.”

“I would not describe it as ‘shattering’. I’ve never suffered any remorse over killing that particular individual in that particular circumstance. He was going to lead a gang rape; need I say more?”

Roberts eyed him for some seconds, as if not quite sure that he was being serious.

“Don’t you regret your action?”

“Fuck yes! I killed in a very public way and in that instant, I became a hunted man. Thousands across London are hunting the killer of Jumping Jackson.”

“Have you suffered strange mood swings, depression, apathy, euphoria, feelings of alienation from the world, even from yourself?”

Nightminster thought about that.

“Yes, there have been such feelings, from time to time.”

“You’re not quite cold-hearted, then. Not that I’m looking for a saint, I just don’t need a psychotic killer.”

“I did what my duty… No, I won’t have that. I did what my conscience directed.”

“As you said, you acted in a very public way. That intensifies the shock. Of course, it also hardens my conviction of your value as an agent. You are self-contained. You act on your own judgement, not that of the herd. Cattle aren’t much use in this game.”

“They’re best restricted to gastronomy, I agree.”

“We are sending you into a dangerous situation, Corporal. I’m not going to obscure that what happens at Oxford might affect the rest of your life. We will compensate you for the risks. But you must understand there is more to the SUN Party than appearances suggest. Tom and Victorina Krossington may look thoroughly respectable, that does not mean they really are, and even if they are, the SUN Party is far more than those two Krossington offspring. The man you shot, so-called Jumping Jackson, was a dangerous gangster and radical. You may see him as one less crook, but to the people of Brent Cross asylum he’s a hero. Thousands of them turned out for his funeral on Tuesday afternoon. All the factories granted a long lunch so the workers could pay their respects. That’s what we’re up against.”

“Then why don’t the glory trusts occupy Brent Cross and clear these trouble-makers out.”

“We could only do that by direct order of the Westminster Assembly. There simply isn’t the appetite amongst the sovereigns to release good gold for such an operation. So far as they’re concerned, the industrial asylums are pig sheds. In short, we face an enemy we can’t attack—at least not openly.”

“Yet we did attack in Parliament Square—very openly. How does my killing a man square with political neutrality?”

“It was in flagrant breach of political neutrality.”

“I think I get the picture. There are those in high places who want me put on trial to placate the outrage of the masses?”

“There has been such talk, at a certain level, but rest assured General Wardian would never betray a loyal trooper.”

Ah! There it was in black and white. Do as you’re told or up you go for public execution. For the people!

“Am I in danger here in Euston depot?”

“Your appearance today is safe enough as no reservists are on duty during the week. But you must avoid this place from now on, and do not attempt to make contact with any of your former comrades. I will be your only point of contact in General Wardian.”

Nightminster was getting the message. His future had been decided and there was nothing he could do about it.

“All right. I’m a political liability and so I have to do as I’m told. I get the message loud and clear. What do you really want?”

“I shall explain some history, to provide context. The SUN Party was formed during the Glorious Resolution.” Roberts spoke in a new, narrative tone. “We don’t know a great deal about the early years beyond that it was a network of decent, mostly religious people who met to discuss a better world while doing nothing to bring it about. Its character began to change about fifteen years ago when a group of Brent Cross factory bosses, known to the world as ZEEBRI, added a more pragmatic, executive style. The talk was of a new world and of how to reach it.

“About five years ago, the SUN Party’s character changed again with the Unilateral Declaration of Affluence by a group of dons at Oxford University, one of whom was Vasco Banner, the current Party president. They established a new headquarters at Oxford. We have only poor intelligence on them. We don’t even know where their head office is, or the extent of their following or funding—it’s part of your remit to find those things out—but we estimate that membership is in excess of fifty thousand and growing rapidly. We’re especially alarmed by the appearance of sovereign gentry in the Party’s ranks. The Krossingtons are not alone in being involved, although they are the most prominent due to the forceful characters of Tom and Victorina Krossington.”

“This is all very interesting, but what’s the goal?”

“Now that’s what I like—a goal-oriented young man! You can appreciate from the history I’ve just outlined that the SUN Party is not one organisation but in fact two, the older Brent Cross party and the newer Oxford party. We don’t know anything about how they relate to one another, if at all. Are they rivals? Allies? Enemies? Can we make them enemies?”

Nightminster could take a fair guess they were enemies. Otherwise how could a senior official from Brent Cross lead a squad of louts to abduct a senior official from Oxford? That looked like a power play amongst gangsters. Not that Roberts needed to know.

“I’ve no idea. Why ask me?”

“You are going up to Oxford as a General Wardian scholar.”

Rather than spit back, Nightminster held his peace. If he said ‘no’, that was it, he was on his own to face the justice of the SUN Party. This was a moment for realism.

“I’m so looking forward to this exciting opportunity,” he said.

“What do you know about economics?”

“According to Dr Horrocks, my old physics master, economics is a sophisticated articulation that legitimises the exploitation of the common people by the rentier super-caste.”

Roberts winced.

“Well, you’re going to have to leave Dr Horrocks at home. When you go up to Oxford, you’ll need what is known as a gambit, by which I mean you’ll need a credible motivation to go to SUN Party meetings. You’ll need intellectual curiosity to contribute, challenge and debate their economic ideas. That’s how you’ll attract attention and get invited into the core of the Party. And that’s how you will gain access to the information we’re seeking.”

Nightminster reeled back, genuinely impressed by the ability of this apparently inconsequential man to drive action through ideas. It provided at least a glimpse of how Roberts had achieved account-captain 2nd class at an early age.

“I understand the plan.”

“There are two months before the Oxford term starts. You’re going to be busy. We’re fast-tracking you through the Securitician B so you’ll get your sergeant’s stripes and in addition I want you frequenting the corporate library at our Northumberland Avenue headquarters—I will provide a membership card—to mug up economic history.”

“I’m flattered by your faith in my brilliance, sir, but not even I can be in two places at once.”

“You won’t be pursuing the conventional Securitician B course. You’ll never serve in a regular unit, so there’s no point. You’ll do the political lectures and the field exercises—no harm in learning how to extract nests of infestation and so forth. But you’ll get time for your own studies here in London.”

“I’m not spying for free.”

“After the start of the Oxford term, you’ll earn 250 ounces per calendar month until the mission is completed. That’s on top of full-time pay as an NCO and student allowance.”

Nightminster was not overwhelmed by the offer. In the last week he had earned almost twice that. It might have been a lucky week admittedly, but then again, he might be getting better at transforming danger into gold.

“I want you out of London from today,” Roberts continued. “So I’ve arranged for transport to leave Euston this afternoon at 5 pm. That gives you time to go home, say your farewells, pack and get back here.”

Nightminster’s impulse was to refuse. He could not just switch off his life. He had loans to close with more than a score of debtors. He had to complete the planetarium projector–so far, he had only dismantled one section of it. He was slowed down by having to take copious photographs and notes in the hope of being able to put it all back together again, and he still had not determined exactly what was wrong with it. He certainly was not betraying David Chadderton just to please a bureaucrat of General Wardian.

For once, Nightminster resorted to the fine art of diplomacy.

“May I ask, how will I visit the corporate library at Northumberland Avenue?”

“You won’t be far from London. There’s always plenty of traffic to and fro to hitch a lift.”

The situation did have merits. He would disappear from London still within the corporate bosom of a powerful corporation.

Roberts added:

“Don’t live with your parents when you’re in London. Find yourself a flat in another asylum and use an assumed name. Landlords don’t bother about ID checks provided you put down the deposit and a quarter’s rent in advance. Get receipts and General Wardian will refund your costs.”

Nightminster now understood the situation, and grasped how he had scored a sort of victory over these bureaucrats. They were offering a compromise of part-time transfer to satisfy corporate vanity and part-time staying in London to suit him, with a free flat thrown in with the deal. It was certainly an advantageous arrangement. He could still pursue Target Ten Thousand. He was going up to a posh university. He was even being paid to meet Victorina Krossington again. He wavered over that thought, dreading the re-encounter with that eighteen-inch-thick, steel-hard plate of social division otherwise known as slummy status.

*

At 5pm that afternoon, an eight-wheeled steam truck carried him with a squad of other corporals out of London along routes that he knew well from his trading expeditions. He had a pretty good idea of where the truck was going long before it finished puffing its way up the long hill out of the abandonments of southern London. It was still early evening when the corporals jumped from the back of the truck onto the bricks of a strange parade ground to be yelled at by another sergeant with a red sweaty face and a yelling gob.

“Dress off! Move you horrible turds!”

The air here was sharp and smelled alien, something of damp grass and earth, under which lurked a deeper sweetness that Nightminster would come to recognise as perhaps the most ancient scent known to humanity, that of the forest. The mouthy sergeant informed them they were in Reigate fortress high in the Lands of Krossington. That was sovereign soil beneath their boots. They must forget about the useless raggle-taggle outfits they came from. If they worked their arses off during the next eight weeks they might be accepted into a proper army, the 10th Division of the Landkeeping segment.

Throughout General Wardian, 10th Division (Landkeeping) was revered as the ‘crack squad’. It guarded the frontiers of General Wardian’s most famous, most loyal customer, the Lands of Krossington.

Chapter 11

One Tuesday morning in early September, during the second-last week of the Securitician B course, Nightminster was walking across the parade ground of Reigate fortress when he encountered black uniforms—ultramarines. These ultramarines were posturing about the parade ground affecting a superior air, which reminded Nightminster of parents at speech days of his old public school in London. He thought this behaviour quite insolent, given that they were guests on sovereign turf.

“Big Knight!”

Nightminster spun around, afflicted by at first disbelief and then consternation. Striding towards him with a vast grin across his face was Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey. His barrel chest and reptilian, bulging neck were unmistakable. Nightminster received a clap of welcome on the shoulder that knocked him sideways a pace. Johnny Albert grabbed his hand and pumped it.

“Fancy meeting you here, old lad! How are you getting on?”

“Fine. Absolutely fine, Captain.”

“You come for a ride with me.” His arm slipped around the back of Nightminster. To begin with, Nightminster resisted, locking his legs so that Johnny Albert came close to dragging him across the brick paving of the parade ground.

“You can’t muscle me here,” he said. “You’re way off your estate.”

“This is my estate,” Johnny Albert said quietly.

“No. This is Reigate fortress, territory granted to General Wardian on Krossington sovereign land.”

Johnny Albert let go of Nightminster.

“Would you permit me to demonstrate that the territory of General Wardian and my estate are one and the same thing?”

“You can certainly try.”

Nightminster followed willingly enough now as Johnny Albert led him towards a beast of an armoured limousine drawn up in dramatic style before the fortress administration building with all its eight wheels splayed at full lock.

“What brings you up here, Captain?” Nightminster said. He was confident that out here on the bosom of General Wardian, twenty miles from Bermondsey, no ultramarine could be dangerous. For the last six weeks, Reigate fortress had been a place of sanctuary where he felt completely safe in a way he never did during weekly trips into London. There, he lived a fugitive existence from a flat in Camden asylum under the name Walker Preston.

Johnny Albert swung about and asked:

“Who’s your boss?”

“Cost-Centre Lieutenant Tatchell.”

“Titchy Tatchell? We’re ever such good mates. Let’s nip up and see him.”

Johnny Albert swept Nightminster past the armoured limousine, through the Reception area of the administration building and up to the second floor. He knew the way without hesitation to the office of the cost-centre lieutenant, a towering, skinny man in his mid-thirties who was one of the best marathon runners in the whole of General Wardian.

“Hi there Titchy. Mind if I borrow Big Knight for the rest of the day?”

Tatchell had been stooping over his desk gathering lecture notes. His face shot up in a mask of shock. He forced a shaky grin.

“Oh, hello, Captain. You want to take Corporal Nightminster?” He hesitated, his eyes lingering on Nightminster’s face. “You will bring him back, won’t you?” It was a question, not a command.

Johnny Albert patted Nightminster’s shoulder.

“I’ll bring him back fed, watered and much the wiser, don’t you fret, Titchy.”

“Well… See you tomorrow Nightminster.” Again, that shaky grin.

A few minutes later, Nightminster was sinking into a burgundy leather seat within the spacious cabin of Johnny Albert’s ‘truck’ (as he called it). The eight-wheeled armoured limousine was fitted with a battery-powered electric starter, something Nightminster had never encountered before. Normally engines had to be crank-started with brute force. Once on its way, the limousine gave a smooth, quiet ride, vastly superior to the lurching troop carriers that Nightminster was used to. He peered through a viewing slot to observe their descent to the frontier of the Lands of Krossington and thence out onto the M25 public highway, the great Public Era heirloom that formed a loop fifty miles in diameter around Old Greater London. Unlike General Wardian’s vehicles, Johnny’s limousine drove straight through the frontier checkpoint without any formalities.

Nightminster considered his options. He could make a run for it, or sit tight and await developments. He was not armed. Camden lay twenty-five miles distant. He rated his chances of crossing the abandonments of south London on foot, alone, unarmed, with the ultramarines hunting him as negligible. He decided to sit tight.

The armoured limousine made swift progress over the potholes and banks of gravel that had accumulated on the public highway in more than thirty years since the Glorious Resolution. Within a few minutes they overtook a column of men in General Wardian uniform. Being accustomed to seeing military units on the march, Nightminster estimated the formation was roughly the size of a battalion; more than five hundred but less than a thousand men. They all wore a black armband.

“I come up to Reigate every quarter to hand back Night and Fog that’s done its time and pick up a new batch. That lot will march the twenty miles down to Bermondsey,” Johnny Albert said. “I’ve lots of friends up here. Lots of very good friends.”

“Where are you taking me, Captain?”

“I thought a little trip would freshen you up. Just relax and enjoy the ride while I do a bit of admin.”

About half an hour passed in which Nightminster looked out at monotonous bushland and, from time to time, Night and Fog gangs loading bricks purchased from the gleaning people onto wagons to be hauled off to new uses.

The driver turned off the highway into a single-track lane winding amongst ruined apartment blocks in the process of being overwhelmed by birch and rhododendron groves. The lane led into a compound enclosed by a palisade of former railway sleepers topped with snarls of barbed wire. There were rows and rows of narrow wooden barracks that looked cold even on a roasting summer’s day. The armoured limousine stopped on a central parade ground, very dusty. It was a place of execution. A line of nooses hung from a wooden gantry. Four bodies hung today—quite dead, their necks crimped and bent as if their heads rested on invisible pillows. It was not the first time that Nightminster had seen executions. From time to time, criminals would be strung up over the market place of Bermondsey, as in any asylum.

“Now then, Big Knight, I want you to do a little job for me,” Johnny Albert said. “You get over to those swingers and collect their dog tags.”

Nightminster did absolutely nothing. He neither moved nor spoke. Seconds passed. And more seconds passed. Johnny Albert did not repeat himself and made no move to enforce his order. It was his driver that made it happen. He started to turn his head slowly around from the driving seat. He was a bear of a man, much larger than Johnny Albert even, a giant. Nightminster shoved open the armoured door and stepped down to the dust. To reach the neck of each dangling man, he had to stand on the stool that had been kicked away at their execution. He used his heirloom Swiss Army knife to cut the cords of the dog tags. After collecting all four, he returned to the limousine. Johnny Albert held out his hand and Nightminster laid the dog tags.

“Thank you.”

“What did they do?”

“Escape. The sad dumb bastards got picked up at Southampton. The local constabulary caught them in a spot-check, found they had no papers and contacted the Ultramarine Guild in case they were Fog on the run.”

“General Wardian ordered them hanged?” Nightminster was incredulous. He had never heard of a glory trooper being executed in all the six years he had spent in General Wardian, from cub to scout to trooper.

Johnny Albert shook his head.

“No. General Wardian is like any glory trust—they provide us free labour and we provide them a free penal system. It’s called symbiosis in biology; a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

Nightminster was of course well aware that glory troops could be sent to the Night and Fog for serious misconduct. He had never heard of troopers being hanged by the ultramarines, though.

“You were a reservist,” Johnny Albert added. “You’ve no idea what a bunch of scallywags there are in the regular units. The Night and Fog is the only way to keep them in line—and for some, it’s not enough.”

“What about those tags?”

“I’ll send them back to General Wardian HQ at Northumberland Avenue. They’ll inform any next of kin and shut the troopers’ files, if they haven’t lost them. Troopers in the Night and Fog don’t get paid, so their glory trusts have absolutely no interest in them until we give them back—if we give them back. Any family that kicks up a fuss gets a visit from our boys to tell them—in the politest possible terms—to shut it. So it goes.”

Johnny Albert dropped the tags in a pocket beside his seat. Nightminster stared out of the viewing slot, seeing nothing. Johnny Albert could drive into a General Wardian fortress in the powerful Lands of Krossington—sovereign territory—and extract a trooper from beneath the very nose of his commanding officer. He could string that trooper up and send his dog tag back to the HQ of the corporate family and they would do absolutely nothing. Conclusion: there was no corporate bosom. There was Johnny Albert.

Who kills wins!

“I know what you’re thinking,” Johnny Albert said. “You think I’m a vindictive cunt. But that’s not the way it is. What I’m giving you is a lesson in life you’d do well to heed. Never trust bureaucrats. Never trust a corporation. Only trust family. If your family’s not up to much, that’s a major-league handicap. You have to find an ersatz family and become a close friend—not an easy thing to do. Do you understand what I’m saying?"

"Yes, Captain. You have made your point.”

“Good. Now, when we last met, we had a little contretemps on my palace roof, and on reflection, I regret what happened. You and I have too much to gain from friendship to waste our time bickering. So, we’ll be friends.” He offered his hand. Nightminster shook it, reasonably confident he was not going to be snatched and dragged as this would have been hard for Johnny Albert to accomplish from a sitting position.

Johnny Albert pulled a kind of mirthless smirk, jutting his chin and scratching his throat. “Your action on Parliament Square was noticed in the right places. You won some admirers, and I like you the more for it too. It’s useless to appease fanatics.” He paused. “We’ve got a problem.”

“What is this problem?”

“Have you ever met the Owner of Elephant and Castle?”

“No.”

“I thought you might have, with you having that fancy girlfriend on his estate. He’s not patient and diplomatic like me. He’s what you might call a disciplinarian. He had trouble with SUN Party militants. They kept getting drunk and smashing the place up, so he cracked down, sticking the ring leaders in his dungeon. Next thing a storm of the bastards hit Elephant and Castle beating people on the market place with crowbars and hammers and chucking Molotov cocktails about like confetti. A few of them brought pistols and killed some of us in black. Then they disappeared into the abandonments as suddenly as they’d arrived. All very well-planned and executed—there’s definitely a mind at the back of this.”

“When did this happen?”

“Yesterday.”

Nightminster had heard not a whisper. He supposed that as the attack had not involved a General Wardian client, no one at Reigate Fortress really cared.

“Do you know if the pawnbroker’s shop was hit?” He was thinking of the etched plate glass of the Rafati’s shop. It would cost a fortune to replace.

“It wasn’t, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t touched.”

“Mirana Rafati is not in the SUN Party, if that’s what you’re thinking, Captain. She’s not interested in radicalism.”

“Others in her family could be.”

Nightminster hesitated, and suffered a jab of fear thinking about exactly that point. He had stayed with Mirana last Saturday night. Early in the evening her younger brother Rostam had passed by and ranted against the sovereigns and the glory trusts. Fortunately, his pals pulled him off to a dance over the river in Spitalfields. If he joined the Brent Cross SUN Party, that would bring danger awfully close to home.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Nothing, directly, but a lot indirectly. I knew the SUN Party’d challenge the Ultramarine Guild sooner or later and now it’s happened. The other London owners think it’s just a one-off, not part of some grand strategy to undermine our authority. I think otherwise. I think there’s a power-play going on between Brent Cross and Oxford. That’s what the barny at Parliament Square was really about, one faction humiliating the other faction. But they’re after the same prize.

“What scares the hell out of me is knowing the SUN Party’s headquarters is right inside ZEEBRI, far and away the greatest arsenal on the Island of Britain. Suppose the owners of ZEEBRI have decided to use these SUN Party thugs to take over London? What’s to stop them? We need ZEEBRI’s camphine and guns a damned sight more than they need anything we have.”

Johnny Albert stared at Nightminster, genuinely wide-eyed with consternation. Nightminster decided to be totally candid. Some decisions just have to be made on raw instinct, and this was such a moment.

“I’ve been inside ZEEBRI to sell Public Era heirlooms. I’ve been inside the SUN Party headquarters.”

Johnny Albert leaned closer, probably unconsciously, still wide-eyed, consternation turning to incredulity.

“Christ on a bike, Big Knight, I’ve never ceased to respect your abilities, but you still bloody amaze me. I’ve been pulling hedgehogs from my bleeding arse trying to find someone trustworthy who’s actually been inside ZEEBRI and you’ve gone and done it for free! Brent Cross is like another planet. It’s the one asylum around London where us lot in black are not welcome. We don’t have the pull of a dormouse in there.”

“There’s no Owner of Brent Cross?”

“Absolutely not.”

This was interesting. It explained the peculiarities of Brent Cross, such as the firearms carry licences being issued by factory owners rather than the local ultramarine owner. So, here was the great Johnny Albert with his tongue hanging out for intelligence.

 “The SUN Party HQ is quite a spread, a whole production bay. There’s a shrine to Jumping Jackson, the scumbag I shot at Parliament Square—they’ve canonised a scumbag rapist. What really shocked me shitless was seeing Jackson’s pal King-Tough–the chief of the gang that snatched Her Decency Victorina–he’s a clean-cut official of the SUN Party. He’s no moron either, I saw him respectable as a missionary preaching the evils of gold and the virtues of something called fiat legal tender. The guy is some kind of party guru.”

“This is absolutely fantastic stuff, Big Knight.”

Nightminster adopted a more suave, confident tone, as of one who is holding the best cards–because he did hold the best cards.

“I’m going up to Oxford where there’s another head of the SUN Party Hydra. I’m in a unique position to penetrate both organisations—but at risk to myself. I don’t lay my cock on the block for free.”

“I never ask anyone to lay their cock on the block for free.”

Johnny Albert opened the top of the armrest between them and lifted out a bar of gold, which he dropped right into Nightminster’s groin, cackling as the young man buckled forward ramming both hands about his manhood. Nightminster sat up, red-faced, hefting the bar. It was a one hundred ouncer, which is to say it weighed almost as much as two bricks, despite being only the size of a packet of five slim cigars.

“Call that a ‘golden handshake’,” Johnny Albert said. “Give us it back and I’ll put it on your account. I take it you’ve got an account?”

“Balancing House of Kronstein at the Port of Erith,” Nightminster said. He recited the account number.

“There’s plenty more where that one came from, believe me. You are now my kingpin spy for the whole Ultramarine Guild—not that you need worry over word getting about. Only I will know—knowledge is power! Heh heh!

“Now, you listen carefully, young Big Knight. If anyone gives you grief about our little trip today, you were down at your girlfriend’s place in Elephant and Castle to let her know how much you cared. You get your snout back into that course and get your sergeant’s stripes. I assume General Wardian is dropping gold in your pocket to spy for them too?”

“250 ounces a month from 1st October.”

“I’ll match that, plus we’re friends now, which is more precious than gold from bureaucrats. You’ll be back in Bermondsey after the course?”

“For a week.”

“Drop by before you go.”

“That I shall do.”

Chapter 12

That night, alone with his thoughts, only the tramp of boots at midnight for the changing of the fortress guard, after which, just the occasional scream from the woods outside the walls as some wretched animal met a nasty end for another’s dinner. Nightminster thought about those wild, dark woods and the lethal freedoms that pervaded them. For most of his life, he had dreamed of being a schooner captain free on the wild seas to the far end of the Mediterranean returning with cargoes that commanded top prices at the auctions of the Port of Erith. His father had taken him ten miles down the Thames Estuary to the port every birthday from ages ten to fourteen (after which, he went on his own whenever he liked). The beautiful schooners made a deep impression, with their immense booms, and the immense crewmen who raised them. Chromite, carpets, raw iron, oranges, lemons, olives, avocados, lignum vitae, African blackwood, wolframite and of course gold made valuable cargoes. Why not just walk out to that life in the morning? General Wardian had proved to be a false family, and he no longer had to prove that he could survive by his own efforts.

He struggled to answer the question. He had to make a decision proved by numbers, because that was the kind of person he was. After thrashing this way and that, he conducted a thought experiment by imagining himself on his twenty-fifth birthday looking back six and a half years. As an absolute minimum, he had to have achieved Target Hundred Thousand by then. So, were his chances best at sea or on land? This seemed like a mysterious question to resolve, until he realised it was actually very simple. The more people he employed, the faster he got richer. To build a business of, say, five hundred workers on land was something he believed possible. But to employ five hundred sailors meant a fleet of ten or more big schooners of several thousand tons each. That was an absurdly grandiose plan. Such large ships had not been built since the Public Era. And moving stuff across anarchic seas was risky. That was why only buccaneers dared the long voyages to the Mediterranean, and they earned a packet from that daring—if they got back.

So that was settled. A land-lubber he would be.

His real problem was the escalating challenges of adding zeroes to targets. To rise from Target One Hundred to Target One Thousand had been the achievement of a lad fresh from school, self-contained and industrious. He had no doubt he could achieve Target Ten Thousand the same way, entirely through his own will-power. He was already more than a quarter of the way there.

Target Hundred Thousand loomed as a towering Himalaya that never seemed to get any closer no matter how long he trudged up the winding valley towards it. To conquer that peak on his own was surely impossible. It could not be done. He had to face up to a reality that clashed with every fibre of his wilfulness. The celebration of Target Hundred Thousand would be a party. General Wardian would not join that party obviously, they were just a warren of gutless rabbits. So who would be there? Johnny Albert? Nightminster contemplated the education in life he had received that day. Johnny Albert was a killer, pure and simple. Hanging Night and Fog was integral to his business model. To partner with such a character was to partner with an especially scheming hyena. Johnny Albert would watch Target Hundred Thousand grow and, at the moment of his choice, gulp the lot into his own empire and spit out the pip, Nightminster. What was to stop him?

Nightminster fidgeted with the dog tag about his own neck. There was nothing to stop Johnny Albert doing exactly that. He was a big, bad hyena, every bit as ruthless as the Nazi functionaries of Public Era history books. Violence was the real currency of his empire. Gold was just the lubricant.

For some period of time, an hour or hours, Nightminster drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming and wondering until the two joined in a haphazard stream of images.

In the weeks since coming out to Reigate fortress, Nightminster had learned a great deal about what lay behind the glamorous facades of the sovereigns’ Mayfair palaces. By motorbike, he had made a thorough survey of the lands of Krossington and the neighbouring lands of Shellingfield and Shenton-George-Hathaway. That had been a journey back in time a thousand years to a medieval world of innumerable hamlets and strip fields ploughed by human sweat. In truth, the sovereigns were nothing but scoundrels freeloading off the backs of a vast army of peasants who ploughed, planted, and reaped the cold earth by hand. The sovereigns were no better than the ultramarines, who squeezed gold from the rabbits of the asylums the Night and Fog slave-labour racket. All big-shots were the same; their palaces floated on the same ocean of poverty.

He shuddered awake, the idea so powerful, so obvious, that the impact left him dazed.

Use them both!

Gain favour from Johnny Albert and from the Krossingtons. They would never trust each other. Target Hundred Thousand would exploit that mutual paranoia.

He lay sweating and chuckling at the ceiling and sweating some more. It would be a hellish dangerous game, like dancing with a lion and a hyena, playing off their hunger for him against their loathing of each other. The beauty was, Johnny Albert was actually paying 250 ounces per month for Nightminster to ingratiate himself with the Krossingtons. The sad, dumb bastard had no idea he was paying an agent who was going to build a trap.

Suddenly, Oxford was crucial to Target Hundred Thousand, no longer just a pain in the arse to be escaped from at the earliest opportunity. These plans must have settled his turmoil, for the next thing he knew, the master-sergeant was banging on the door for reveille.

*

Nightminster excelled during the remainder of the Securitician B course. He graduated at the top of the class with a distinction despite being younger by seven years than the next candidate. He was particularly commended for his originality and leadership during the climax of the course, a week-long series of field exercises set around calamitous irruptions of surplus through a frontier breach. On the day of graduation, a couple of journalists from the Glorious Gazette, the news journal of General Wardian, turned up to photograph the class. They also took photographs of him in dress uniform with gleaming new sergeant’s stripes before they dashed off to their next assignment at Crawley fortress further south.

*

Nightminster had to get the Krossington’s planetarium projector rebuilt and tested at Chaddertons’ to prove it fit for purpose. He had promised this much to David Chadderton and he meant to stand by his word. Now he was getting down to the wire and, back in London for the last week before going up to Oxford, he had to drive himself through one last burst of effort to get the job finished. He worked eighteen hours a day in three six-hour shifts to get the job done, with touching support from David Chadderton, who dropped by with cups of real coffee. Nightminster screwed down the last access plate in the long carcase of the projector and was thankful to find no tiny cogs or screws left over. The next morning, David Chadderton and he began a program of systematic tests based on astronomical tables. Steadily they confirmed each function of the projector until every last quirk of the night sky was checked true in the casting of thousands of tiny dots of light on the test dome. Incredibly, every last one of the multitude of gears, axles, shafts, belts and chains worked to perfection. It was almost midnight when they finished. Apart from the night watch, they were the only people left in the enormous factory complex. David Chadderton poured a couple of shots of Cognac imported from far-away western France. Nightminster had never encountered the exotic liqueur before. They toasted the success of the project.

“You’ve proved loyal far beyond any employee I’ve ever known. I sense a certain fanatical perfectionism. That bodes well, you will rise to the top in whatever field you choose,” David Chadderton said. “Even if you never return here, keep in touch. I sense you and I will be allies in the struggles to come.”

“What struggles?”

“There is no question of the sovereigns allowing return to a wealthy, industrialised society. The SUN Party has maintained the most restrained promotion of our cause, yet repeatedly the answer has been violence. Violence at the Parliament Square rally, violence in the asylums.”

“That’s because of rowdies and thugs. They’re just friction, they’re not deep truth.”

“There are so many rumours churning about it’s impossible to know what’s actually going on. The shooting at the Parliament Square was the action of a single trooper, but the bosses of that trooper must have encouraged him to act as he did, or he would not have dared kill another human being. Had it not been that trooper, no doubt some other would have fired seconds later. Fundamentally, the troops in that square viewed the people’s will as enemy action.”

Now that was a startling insight. Nightminster was quiet for a while, thinking over how he, who dreamed of being the atomic champion of the people, had looked across their gathering with such contempt. He could not hide from himself that, on the day, he had considered the rally an absurdity.

“Eventually the Brent Cross SUN Party will find that individual,” David Chadderton continued. “I know the ZEEBRI owners have set professional detectives on the case. They’ll put the culprit on trial under a legality having no stronger basis than the improbability anyone will challenge it. The hanging will solve nothing, although I can think of a certain sinister character in the Brent Cross branch who will make the execution a grand celebration of himself.”

The conversation lapsed into solemn silence. Nightminster avoided lifting his glass. He knew his hand would tremble quite blatantly. After nerving himself up, he snatched the glass and downed it in one. He was not normally one to seek solace in drink, but on this occasion the scorching heat spreading from his gullet calmed him down. David Chadderton topped up his glass.

“To your new life at Oxford,” he said. They toasted.

*

Nightminster spent his last evening in London at Mirana’s flat. While they were relaxing after dinner, her younger brother Rostam dropped by. She had warned Nightminster already that Rostom was now a SUN Party zealot. At the sight of Nightminster, he dived straight into the attack.

“You’re a sergeant,” he said, obviously having been told by Mirana. “How many natives have you murdered?”

“I was promoted after passing the Securitician B certificate.”

“Now you’re qualified to kill people in their own homes!”

Nightminster hesitated. It was perfectly true that much of the Securitician B concerned extracting nests of infestation and mopping up after calamitous irruptions of surplus flow. And while the official jargon was vague, candidates were left under no illusions that taking captives was not a priority. Nightminster had heard many a tale of disgraceful massacres of extracted infestation. The truth was, there were glory troopers who enjoyed mowing down dispossessed people, whom they regarded as unworthy of life. For him, it had all seemed remote stuff, since he would never serve in a regular unit. Now, faced with Rostam’s fanaticism, it was remote stuff no longer.

“I won’t be clearing nests of infestation at Oxford University.”

“What unit are you in?”

“I’m not in any unit. I’m a student.”

“But you were a reservist.”

“I was with the City of London 2nd Reserve regiment for just over two years. Why do you ask?”

“Then you were at the Parliament Square rally! The Party knows your regiment attended.”

“It’s hardly a secret, we were in Abingdon Street.”

“Which end is that?”

“The south end.”

“You were right at the shooting! You must have seen who did it.”

At this, Nightminster’s temper started to glow. He had been lying with an arm around Mirana on the sofa in her room. Now he sat up, sliding his hands forward ready for action, at which Rostom lost his hunting-dog focus and took a step back, glancing at the doorway.

“Don’t tell me what I must or must not know, you insolent toe-rag. I heard the shot and thought it was a signal from Abingdon Street to pull back. It sounded from behind us.” He had in fact heard several troopers say this afterwards. “No one could see a yard in all that turmoil. Everyone was watching their mate’s back and trying not to get a chisel in the ribs. There was a bang and when I looked around, I saw a bunch of guys surge forward and there was a sort of thick knot that broke up and seeped away into the rest of the crowd. I’ve no idea who fired, and I’ve never met anyone who does.”

“We’ve got a name.” Rostam’s eyes laughed into Nightminster’s. “Charlie Banneville.”

Nightminster dearly hoped he was a better actor than he felt. Charlie Banneville was in the 1st Reserve regiment. He was tall, athletic and had a big nose. Someone, somewhere was onto a lead.

“He certainly wasn’t in the 2nd Reserve regiment. Where did you get the name from?”

“Brent Cross HQ has detectives all over London asking questions.”

“They’re wasting their time. All they’re doing is laying rumours on innocent people who can’t answer back. Imagine you’re this poor bastard Charlie Banneville, supposing he actually exists, and you wake up one day surrounded by rumours you’re a killer. That’s a disgrace.”

“He’s right. You shouldn’t spread rumours, Rostam,” Mirana said. “Only cowards do that kind of thing.”

Rostam departed with a final sharp glance at Nightminster, who was not able to settle down afterwards, even after making love. Mirana sensed his tension, which he deflected by saying he was nervous about going up to Oxford. They bantered about the toffs he would meet and have to address as ‘Your Decency’, ‘Your Grace’ ‘Your Eminence’ and so forth.

The brutal truth was, the shooting at Parliament Square was not fading into history. He ought to have foreseen it would endure. There was the shrine to Jumping Jackson in the Brent Cross HQ of the SUN Party. It was a relentless instruction to the party leadership to find the killer, or at any rate, some poor bastard like Charlie Banneville who could be set up as the killer. Only one way existed to beat such a threat; by finding bigger friends than those of the Brent Cross SUN Party.

Until he had such friends, he would have to watch his back.

Chapter 13

A few days before departing for Oxford, Nightminster received a letter from his old physics master Dr Horrocks. It was by way of a last pep-talk from one who could have no idea how much his former pupil had changed in the six months since leaving school.

Dear Prentice, You are about to embark on a great adventure in life; intellectually, emotionally and perhaps spiritually. The Oxford that will be your new home is utterly transformed from the city of vibrant intellectual striving I arrived at forty-five years ago, and so I find myself at a loss as to what advice to give. Nowadays, it is a place of sovereign excess on the one hand, and a conditioning centre for lackeys on the other. I’m told the law students are the most industrious in their toadying to gain favour with their future clientele. On the other hand, I’m assured the school of physics is still a place of academic rigour, even if it is now so small as to be more like a tennis club.

The best advice I can give you is this: make no enemies! Find advantage in the best of the place and steer well clear of the worst. Remember that education prepares one for the enjoyment of life!

Account-Captain Roberts had been more pragmatic in his final advice at their meeting the same day in a Camden pub.

“Your entry into this new world is crucial, because that will set the rest of your time there. That’s why freshers’ week is so important. The people you meet in that first week will form the core of your social life. Avoid toadies and sycophants. The type for you is the sceptic, the critic, the outsider, possibly exhibitionist, certainly know-it-all. And one last point; do not attract attention, do not incite curiosity. Oxford is a small society in which it will be hard enough for one of your background to stay in the background.”

*

Nightminster arrived at Oxford as a ‘fresher’. That is, he was supposedly a fledgling taking their first flutters into ‘real life’. He joined ‘freshers’ week’ on a rumbling great Moto-Guzzi motorbike, full of the highest ambitions, wanted for murder in the eyes of certain people he did not consider a threat sixty miles from London.

On his first day at Oxford, Nightminster strolled with a casual aloofness down the High Street. He saw young women’s eyes flicker his way as they pedalled by on ramshackle steel bicycles. He saw huddles of young swells in tweed jackets and baggy corduroys measuring him up. So, this was the world by which the crust of British society renewed itself; a thousand students sustaining an intellectual tradition a thousand years old. Nightminster’s first impression was of something closer to packs of puppies scampering about yapping, heedless to everything around them.

One freshers’ week later, he sat through his first lecture and looked about at the twelve other students commencing the study of physics that year. They were the same as the capering revellers with which he had passed freshers’ week, just kids. They looked like kids, spoke like kids and giggled like kids. Carruthers was here, the podgy swot from his old public school. One might say they were household pets, kept safe and fed in cages from birth. They were staggeringly ignorant of the realities of the rough world that surrounded the city and began not a five-minute walk from the school of physics.

Concerning Target Ten Thousand, Nightminster soon came to the conclusion that Oxford was a waste of time.

In the Public Era, Oxford had been encircled by main roads. He discovered that to the west of the city, the main road had become Turnpike 34. Travelling people avoided turnpikes. They did not like paying tolls. To the east side of the city, the old main road had decayed to a muddy band through woods and fields, kept open by drovers and seasonal flows of natives from the sovereign lands. He looked for the horse dung and wagon tracks typically left by travelling people. If they came this way at all, it certainly was not in these autumn months of the year. They had disappeared from the roads around London in the latter weeks of August, so he was not surprised by their absence here.

Oxford was a lonely city. That was his conclusion. The sovereign lands of Versailles and Montina spread beyond the old ring road. Like other sovereign lands, they were inhabited by a peasantry descended from survivors of the Glorious Resolution to a state of parochial ignorance, working the soil by hand as if thrown back to the Middle Ages. The closest remnant city was Coventry fifty miles to the north, then there was Bristol sixty miles to the west and London sixty miles to the south-east. Oxford could only be approached on turnpikes guarded by the ultramarines, or else by the Oxford Canal, which was also guarded by the ultramarines. So, Nightminster concluded the city to be barren in terms of profitable trade with travellers.

By way of keeping a low profile, he did not live in college, nor did he ride the Moto-Guzzi into the city. None of his fellow physics students even knew he owned a motorbike. He had taken lodgings on the northern fringe of Oxford on a quiet road that led into the abandonment. A couple of miles out was a village called Wolvercote, an ultramarine depot on the Oxford Canal. If he ever had to disappear, he would scram to Wolvercote and gain asylum with friends.

*

Nightminster was obliged to respect he was being paid five hundred ounces every month to spy on the SUN Party. He fully expected that building friendship with the Krossingtons would challenge his powers of improvision. What he did not expect was complete inability to find the SUN Party.

Oxford was not a big city. The total population was no more than ten thousand, hardly a tenth of what it had been at the height of the Public Era. That was why abandonments and deconurbation spread for miles around the ancient core. The university population, students, post-graduates and academic staff, all told did not exceed 1,500 persons. It ought not to have been difficult to track down the leading radical party of the land. He truly expected to see their decencies Tom and Victorina Krossington routinely in the High Street or St Giles.

He searched the beautiful old city in every lane and back court, but found no sign or wall plaque. He read the various student newspapers assiduously, without gleaning so much as a hint of political dissent. It was all jolly tally-ho stuff about rising athletic stars, rugby tournaments, polo matches, winners of scholastic prizes, charity bashes and whimsical accounts of ‘hearties’ being ‘discouraged’ by the university guardians after bawling dirty songs at 3 o’clock in the morning.

He scoured the colleges and union to no effect. He kept his ears open and he gently prodded other students during chat in cafes, clubs, pubs and parties, without getting any leads. Common students did not get involved in radicology, full stop. They wanted a good degree and their tutor’s reference confirming their reliability. The least whiff of political ‘voyeurism’ would have destroyed their chances of professional success. The SUN Party at Oxford was evidently an especially well-concealed nest of political infestation.

There were actually two universities. The university of commoners was open access. The university of sovereigns was strictly private. Sovereign students inhabited parallel lives behind the medieval walls of certain prestigious colleges and clubs that were their preserve. They travelled about in fanciful battery-powered contraptions truly justifying the description ‘horseless carriages’, for with their gilt bling and giant wheels they looked straight out of the eighteenth century. It was rare to set eyes on their persons as they preserved their modesty behind mirror glass and curtains. Of course, it was quite possible sovereign offspring strolled around in the streets of Oxford every day, dressed just like everybody else. If so, neither Tom Krossington nor Victorina Krossington ventured out so, at least, not in Nightminster’s presence.

This was not to say encounters between commoners and sovereigns never happened. During freshers’ week, he picked up gossip about young women being snatched into horseless carriages and made off with, to return to the world with all manner of tales, from champagne baths and mass orgies to waking up next morning having been drugged and raped. These stories came without such details as names or places. The victims knew better than to point fingers at any particular sovereign clan, still less submit a complaint. One evening, Nightminster was walking along the High Street in a group of pub crawlers, mostly language students, when they heard a furious screech from behind and everyone had to leap for their lives as a horseless carriage shot by at breakneck speed, hearties yelling and throwing out bottles of champagne.

This kind of recklessness was more or less the norm late at night. A couple of evenings later, Nightminster was stumbling back into the city centre from a party at St Hilda’s College, which lay in the south of the city on the very edge of the abandonments. He had been chasing a red-headed student of Spanish and Portuguese who, he had to admit to himself, reminded him of Her Decency Victorina Krossington. She vanished while he was taking a piss and he decided to call it a night. Blazing floodlights coned him, a siren bleared, furious curses. Get out of the fucking way, commoner! Confused by the brilliant headlights, he tried to get off the road but apparently ran up the middle as the lights followed with the growl of engine closing in, followed by a couple of pistol shots. At this, he stooped and drew the Makarov from its ankle holster, turned with eyes shut to cracks and let fly, shooting out both headlights before sprinting into the gap between a couple of ruined houses. Afterwards, once he was sober, he realised fleeing into the abandonment had saved his life. A fusillade of bullets chased him, cracking through branches and smacking off brickwork. Whoever it was, they generated a great deal of drunken ranting and fired off at least a score of shots into the bushes while Nightminster put more brick shells behind him. He took a long detour to get around the city centre and its street lights by heading west until he hit the Oxford Canal to follow its dark and deserted tow path north to his digs. After that, he left the Makarov at home. A common student caught bearing arms in the city faced automatic expulsion. His height made him an obvious match with the ‘terrorist’ who shot at motor cars. He was in fact stopped and searched three times by plain-clothed guardians in the next few days, after which the hue and cry apparently died down.

One major coup was breaking into a social network normally closed to students, whether common or sovereign, that of the college porters. The porter of his college was a biker too, proud custodian of his great-grandfather’s smoky Kawasaki 750 triple. Once he grasped that Nightminster had leaped from an industrial asylum, and was a biker too, his reserve vanished completely. Like all the porters, he viewed students as entitled brats who did not have a clue about real life. Nightminster curried the friendship in a city pub frequented by porters, including those of the sovereign colleges. He was not so crass as to pump them directly for information, instead, he just listened in, and built up a treasure trove of knowledge about life behind the medieval walls of the older colleges. He learned that the Shellingfield clan shared a college with the Montina clan, and the Versailles clan shared another with the Fiesler-Cohens. Scions of the great clans did indeed snatch young common women (and occasionally young men) for their parties, at which there occurred excesses of feasting, drinking, group sex, opium-smoking, vomiting and wanton destruction of the glassware fit to rival Nero’s court. One interesting tit-bit was the induction of legal talent into clan society. All the big sovereign clans scoured the school of law. Prize-winning students got chased like beautiful young women–especially if they were beautiful young women–and had their pick of which sovereign land to grow old in. The Krossington clan apparently was the first choice for most, due to its tradition of liberal intellectualism passed down from its founder, Dr Wilson Krossington. The Shellingfields were a more ‘esoteric’ choice, due to their clan language of Esperanto and dogmatic hierarchy, although these traits did appeal to some.

Nightminster could at least be assured that if ZEEBRI detectives came up to Oxford to snoop about, it was exceptionally unlikely his college’s porter would fail to catch on and tell him.

A greater intimacy of contact with sovereigns could also be had. Nightminster learned this from a middle-aged man who accosted him early one evening at a café in Cornmarket Street. This character sported curly blond hair, which looked bleached, and a fixed rubbery grin. Was this a gay come-on? Nightminster maintained a neutral politeness. The conversation swung to business. Nightminster’s interest stirred. A young man of such outstanding physique, and doubtless mighty virility, was of great interest to well-born women. He could get himself a powerful motorbike, or a motor car, a fine horse. The relationship might blossom. A life of rural ease and luxury could be his. Once he realised this character was genuine, not taking the piss, Nightminster did not even waste time laughing. He politely excused himself and got away.

Perhaps it was the sleaziness of this episode that finally switched him off Oxford. Or perhaps it was learning the student of Spanish and Portuguese who reminded him of Her Decency Victorina had been killed one night by drunken fools tearing down St Giles’ in a sports car. Sometime during the third week of term, his attendance at lectures and laboratory classes slumped. The lure of danger–the lure of gold–goaded and nagged until he could resist the call not a day longer. There was a whole new world to explore across the Midlands north of Oxford.

Target Ten Thousand beckoned.

Chapter 14

Nightminster heeled the roaring Moto Guzzi to dodge yet another convoy of trucks lumbering along at twenty-five to his ton. The bike leaped and writhed. It slashed through banks of weeds. The front wheel caught a rut and threw the bike terrifyingly towards a high-side, only by a terrific wrench on the handlebars did he flick it back on course as the convoy flew behind as if pushed off a cliff. Mile after mile of woods and bushland swept behind in a hypnotic sweep of speed until the front wheel leaped from a rut and he smacked his cheek on the rev counter. After that, he eased off the power, running the engine down from an urgent drumming to a languid thud-thud-thudding at around 50 mph. The bike had no speed dial. Instead, there were two marks around the outside of the rev-counter, one marking 40 mph and the other 100 mph in top gear. The engine could rev well beyond the higher mark. Supposedly the beast could reach 130mph, faster than most flying boats.

At the next overpass, he pulled into the long grass at the verge and switched off the engine. He needed a stretch and relief from the battering of wind and ruts. The undergrowth nearby was impenetrable except with a machete, which made the risk of ambush by locals very low. From the mile counter and his tally of overhead bridges he located himself on his Public Era road atlas on Turnpike M40, formerly a motorway of the Public Era, a few miles short of its junction with the great Roman road, the Fosse Way.

It was not yet 10 am. His fellow physics students would be trudging from an electromagnetic radiation lecture to an hour of classical mechanics. He savoured the peace around him and the beautiful, powerful bike with its scents of camphine and castor oil. This was living, They were just rabbits lolloping from hutch to hutch.

As he lifted his leg to kick the engine over, he was perplexed to observe a sodden patch in the dirt beneath the bike. As he watched, the patch spread by trickles. He stooped and peered under the engine. Clear liquid was dribbling from a brass tube running down the side of the gearbox. The liquid was camphine, that was obvious from the smell. He followed the brass tube back to the left-hand carburettor. Still curious more than worried, he shut the petrol tap and waited until the splatter of camphine ceased.

He understood the problem well enough from training with General Wardian. The float valve inside that carburettor had stuck open, probably jammed by grit in the fuel. As the carburettor was fed by gravity from the fuel tank, camphine had overflowed down the brass tube and pissed into the dirt. He flipped open the bottom cover of the carburettor and rattled the float valve, hoping to clear it without taking the mechanism to bits, a tricky operation at the roadside. It did the trick. When he refitted the cover and opened the fuel tap, he heard the carburettor bowl refill with a gurgle. The brass overflow tube remained dry.

Now he straddled the bike and removed the filler cap of the fuel tank. He had to rock the bike between his knees to gauge how much fuel remained. He had left Oxford with six gallons, enough to ride more than 250 miles. Now, only a thin sloshing answered. The damned tank was almost empty! In barely fifty miles of riding, that effing carburettor had dumped most of his fuel in the dirt of Turnpike M40.

“Fuck and blast,” he said.

A single grain of sand had cast the valiant explorer hapless upon the wilderness.

*

This was a business trip. It was meant to get him closer to Target Ten Thousand. He reasoned that profit came from a mixture of luck and wit in spotting things in Place X that were valuable in Place Y. The further apart X and Y were, the more likely one was to strike it rich. His destination, the great industrial asylum of Soho in central Birmingham, was a long way from ZEEBRI. They were connected by turnpike and canal, but that did not make them ‘close’. It took a barge up to three weeks to transit from one to the other. Travel by turnpike was obviously swifter, but for non-ultramarines, the tolls were expensive. Add to that the cost of camphine. To fill the tank of the Moto Guzzi at the Wolvercote depot, Nightminster had paid about three ounces, almost one third of his weekly income as a glory sergeant. Even so vast and wealthy a corporation as General Wardian restricted road travel to distances of no more than 30 miles; beyond which freight and troops went by sea, or canal, or else they stayed put.

All in all, Nightminster had rated this trip a fair prospect for turning up something profitable, given enough nosing about talking to strangers. Now, he was chugging along at the speed of a truck to eke out the remaining dregs of camphine as long as possible. This rendered him more vulnerable to ambush, for which reason he kept well out to the centre of the turnpike, despite the rougher gravel and banks of weeds, sawn-off shotgun to hand. He approached a line of surplus flow, which turned to stare and would have attacked with their scythes and sickles had he not waved the sawn-off and put on his most ferocious face. They were a scruffy lot, lean faces scornful, dungarees torn and ragged, a few walking in makeshift wicker sandals. He left them behind, dreading that the fuel would give out while they were still in view. After a few more tense miles, he took an old Public Era road to Royal Leamington Spa, where he felt sure there would be a port of the canal network, and he could buy camphine.

*

The old Public Era road was grown over with withered nettles and foxgloves except for a central lane beaten to mud and gravel on the crumbling old tarmac. The heavy bike slithered and jolted. All around were abandonments being consumed by the usual suspects of Nature’s opportunists, hazel, willow, alder and birch. Not even gleaning people had bothered to clear the area. He overtook locals in sheepskin smocks and clogs, their arms and legs bare. Their apathy was such that none so much as glanced at the passing bike.

The road crossed the Grand Union Canal by a concrete span with a deck as wide as a ship’s. To his dismay, there was no ultramarine depot. He halted and looked down from the bridge at the neat towpath and serene, black water of the canal running beneath. A little convoy of narrow boats was approaching from the left, the west. They must be coming from Soho, 25 miles distant. A long team of Night and Fog, two abreast, crawled like a centipede hauling the line of three roped-together narrow boats. The pace was so gentle that only slight vees of wake rippled off the bows. He revved the engine to draw attention. The Moto Guzzi then sobbed to a stop. The camphine was at an end. An ultramarine and a bargee on the lead boat stood up to look at him. He cupped his hands and hailed.

“I’m in good standing with the Owner of Bermondsey. I can pay good gold for camphine.”

The ultramarine uttered a sharp order to the team of Night and Fog, which stopped dead still, silent and pensive. He called back:

“And I’m in good standing with God Almighty and I can take your good gold and that good bike and boot your arse over the bleedin’ horizon.”

The bargees and Night and Fog all cackled, glad for diversion in a dull morning shift. The ultramarine was an under-sergeant of about thirty with broad, bony shoulders and a skinny frame. The tight fit of his belt was uncharacteristic. Most ultramarines already had a paunch by their mid-twenties. It was a sign of status to be well fed. Nightminster thought the under-sergeant’s eyes cold and humourless for a smartass.

“Can God Almighty direct me to the nearest camphine depot?”

The under-sergeant and the bargee conferred.

“What have you done to your face?” the under-sergeant called.

“I whacked it off the rev counter.”

More cackling.

“Where did you get that bike?”

“I bought it from one of your lot in Bermondsey.”

“Who?”

“Thrasher Brooks, master sergeant.”

“Thought I recognised it. You get her down here and we’ll take you along to Braunston.”

“Where’s that?”

“About twenty-five miles on. We’ll be there tomorrow around lunch time.”

Nightminster hesitated. It would mean missing another day of classes. Then again, his options at this particular time were not exactly abundant.

“What’s Braunston basin?”

“It’s where the Oxford Canal crosses this Grand Union Canal. Now stop asking and get shifting.”

*

The first lesson of narrow boat travel was forbearance. The three barges were returning to Paddington basin in London bearing forty tons of sugar beet and twenty tons of potatoes. The cargoes entirely filled the simple pencil cases, which was how the narrow boats appeared to Nightminster. Jakub Newman the head bargee stood at the tiller of the lead boat and his younger brothers steered the other two. Passengers were not the norm. Nightminster fell below the status of the Newmans’ Public Era mountain bikes and so was ‘accommodated’ on the tarpaulin covering the beets in Jakub’s boat. They were about as comfortable as sitting on rocks.

And the second lesson? Time was not of the essence. It was slow. From the lead barge a rope extended and splayed out into a fan of drag ropes, which was taken up by the team of Night and Fog haulers lorded over by the two ultramarines. A couple more foggers wheeled the Moto Guzzi along the tow path. This duty was rotated every shift, as it was rather a skive by comparison with hauling more than 70 tons of load. The Newman brothers maintained a superficial heartiness with the two ultras, in between nipping off on their mountain bikes to get a break from watching trees creep by towards Braunston basin. The average speed was 3,600 yards every 55 minutes as stated in the haulage contract, comparable to an elderly couple ambling on a Sunday afternoon.

An hour after darkness fell, the convoy laid up alongside the bank. It was almost November and the temperature dropped sharply after sundown. The Night and Fog gang pitched all the tents, gathered firewood and cooked up a meal of sausages and roesti with nettle tea for their masters and porridge with beet jam for themselves.

The atmosphere grew friendlier after Under-Sergeant Zak, the smartass with cold eyes, produced a flask of the most gaspingly powerful gin Nightminster had ever encountered. As the mateyness developed, Jakub and Zak started to talk about themselves. The ultramarines were both motorbike riders—that was how Zak had recognised the Moto Guzzi. They roved the length and breadth of the Island of Britain in heavily-armed gangs, indulging in orgies and drunken battles, crashing their bikes and fighting glory troopers.

Jakub Newman sketched his family’s history. Back in the Public Era, his grandfather Oliver Newman had owned a restaurant up in the Fens north of Cambridge. At that time, the Fens were the most productive farmland in the country, the North Sea being kept out by dykes and electric pumps. The problem was, much of the Fens lay below sea level, and when the Great Flood of ’35 swept in, there was no way back to normality. To this day, the Fens remained a vast morass of marshes and tidal channels abandoned to savagery. The Great Flood forced the family to move to London. Savvy Oliver did well in the chaos of the Glorious Resolution. Early on, he realised the canal network would become vital again. He claimed a spot in Paddington Basin in central London from which his business grew. The Newmans were now one of the richest barging families in the south of England.

Listening to this, Nightminster latched onto two points. One, there was a great wilderness, the Fens, not far from London, say a couple of days’ sailing. Instinctively, he knew this was going to be vital for Target Hundred Thousand, even if at present he could not articulate exactly how. Two, he had struck gold in meeting Jakub Newman and must nurture the friendship. It was virtually certain Target Hundred Thousand would need barges to shift its freight, so making friends in the barging industry was vital. Possibly the Newmans would shift the freight of Target Hundred Thousand out of the Fens? But what freight? That question was his abiding frustration!

Nightminster snapped back into the chat. The elder ultramarine, Zak, was talking about the SUN Party. There had been another rampage three days ago, this time in Camden. A wave of hooligans surged from the abandonments hurling camphine cocktails and beating everyone they encountered with crow bars. Some of them—apparently a crack squad within the group—brought pistols and engaged the ultramarines. Then a rocket burst overhead and the attackers vanished leaving blood and bodies. A couple of dead attackers were recovered, but there was nothing by which to identify them. Nobody had any idea where they were from. The Official SUN Party at Brent Cross issued a statement, via leaflets and market criers, condemning the attack and calling on the Ultramarine Guild to yield up the guilty.

“The flipping cheek of those people!” Zak finished.

“You think the SUN Party sent out that attack gang?” Jakub Newman asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I can see the attack on Elephant and Castle back in September was personal. The local owner thumped the SUN Party, so the SUN Party thumped him back. But I don’t know of any grief at Camden. That attack was simply pointless. Why would folk risk their lives for nothing? It makes no sense.”

“It makes a lot of sense, actually,” Zak said. “The attacks make us ultramarines look useless. Power is not what you do, it’s what you get away with.” Nightminster thought of the vicious liberties sovereign offspring took at Oxford (by all accounts, it was exactly the same at Cambridge and St Andrew’s up in Scotland). Zak had spoken a deep truth. “If these attack squads keep whacking the London asylums and keep getting away with it, the SUN Party will get power and we’ll be surplus.”

“But no one knows who’s behind the attacks. There’s no proof!”

“Everyone knows it’s the SUN Party. It can’t be anyone else. The problem is, there are two SUN Parties. The Oxford branch claims it’s the one true path and the Brent Cross branch calls itself the Official SUN Party and swears it’s the one true path. But who is right? And who is sending these attack squads?”

“What’s it all leading up to?” Nightminster asked, playing dumb to coax the ultramarines. “It must be building to some kind of climax, but what?”

“Fucking hell, you clever types can be stupid,” Zak said, shaking his head. “The SUN Party wants our action—they want the asylums of London. Because of the way London is central to the canal network, the SUN Party’s zealots could force their politics on the whole Island of Britain.”

Jakub rolled on his side laughing. His brothers joined in. The two ultramarines stewed with anger.

“I’m sorry I laughed, it’s just that I’ve never heard such fanciful reasoning,” Jakub said. “I could equally claim the sovereigns are sending in these attack-squads to discredit both factions of the SUN Party. I think the rally on Parliament Square scared the sovereigns. They had no idea until then how well-organised the radicals had become.”

Zak just shrugged and looked peeved.

“Well, I will say this. Brent Cross is a big problem for us in the ultramarines. We’re not allowed in there. It was always its own place with its own ways, because it could afford to be. The world needs their camphine and weapons more than they need us. It’s the perfect base for a coup d’état to grow from.”

Rather than argue on, Nightminster reminded himself why he was lying here beside a canal with a group of complete strangers fifty miles from Oxford and more than a hundred miles from Bermondsey. He wanted cheap heirlooms to sell dearly at ZEEBRI.

The conversation drifted on to canal tolls and more yarns and jokes until it was time to turn in. Nightminster had no bed roll or blankets. He spent a cold, unpleasant night on the Newman’s tent floor shivering under his waxed cotton riding jacket.

Chapter 15

A man burst from the woodland bordering the towpath. He was middle-aged, with a pocked face and bulbous nose of the kind not gained by excessive amounts of tea. His beard was messy like a bird’s nest and reached almost to his eyes. Those on the barges could hear his urgent panting before he said a thing.

“Help us! Please help us,” he wailed.

“Fuck off,” Zak said.

“You must help, we’ve—”

“I said fuck off, buddy.” Zak was standing in the bow of Jakub’s narrow boat with his Colt pistol drawn.

“We have sick, we don’t know what’s the matter with them.”

“Then stay away!” Now Zak had the Colt aimed with both hands. “We don’t want your damned plague.”

The man wore a smartly-cut black leather coat, green tweed plus fours and pale brown boots clearly of excellent crafting. The voice was not rough and ready. He sounded more like one of the academics of the physics course at Oxford.

“What do you want?” Nightminster called. In the corner of his vision, he saw Zak scowling at him.

“You are widely-travelled people and may have seen this illness before. It’s not contagious. My wife has been wasting away since the summer.”

“Could be diabetes, could be cancer,” Zak said.

“There’s something I don’t get,” Jakub said. “There must be thirty convoys a day along this canal. Why do your jumping-jack routine now, if your wife’s been in bed for weeks?”

“Yeah, that’s a good point.” Zak tightened his aim. “What are you up to?”

“I’ve appealed to many others. Couldn’t you at least take a look? We’re only just through the trees.”

Nightminster sensed this was a scam. He could not bear to walk away from a mystery.

“I’ll take a look,” he said, jumping across to the towpath. He was confident the Makarov inside his jacket would see off any trouble.

“You’ve got five minutes,” Zak said gruffly. To the Night and Fog, he said. “You lot take your noon break early.”

Nightminster followed the bulky, middle-aged man into the woods. He introduced himself as Alfred. He had moist lips, which he kept licking, and his manner was fawning and flattering. Nightminster rated him a weakling. He started to pick up whiffs of smoke and heard children laughing. Alfred and he arrived at the top of a bank. At the bottom was some kind of way, not much, just patches of gravel amongst a lot of grass and bushes. Clearly, it was not a way much taken. Through the trees he saw caravans, the shafts down and fine Clydesdales munching and snorting in the roadside grass.

“You’re travellers.”

He drew the Makarov and hefted it. Alfred’s eyes widened in fear.

“Have mercy! We mean no harm.”

“Let’s see this sick wife of yours.”

Alfred led on. There were children dashing about playing a game that involved the possession of what appeared to be a brown wig. They were on the chubby side, smartly turned out in bright red and green leather smocks and black boots. The caravans proved to be longer than those he had seen around London, with four rear wheels and two steering wheels. The cabins of the caravans were planked like upturned boats, with small, finely-paned windows along the sides. These were prosperous travellers.

“Where have you come from?” he asked.

“We’re on our way south from Nottingham to winter near Hereford. However, illness has delayed our travels.”

“How many are ill?”

“My wife and brother-in-law, and two of my children.”

“Any fevers?”

“No. Some weeks ago they seemed to suffer some kind of poisoning—unable to take food, flushed—then they recovered but lately they have grown weak. I do not believe it can be diabetes. There is no history in our families.”

Nightminster squinted as he followed Alfred up into the lead caravan. He had never been invited inside a travellers’ caravan before. He replaced the Makarov back in his trouser pocket. It seemed unlikely an ageing, overweight man could do him much harm. The interior proved restricted to a narrow passage between bunks and cupboards on both sides, as well as an iron stove, a small kitchen and a middle section packed with leather garments smelling of butch rawhide. Across the rear end of the caravan was a bay window, its panes latched open to the spicy airs of marsh. Nightminster watched a fat young man stride past leading a couple of the Clydesdales.

Alfred presented the four patients. They were laid in bunks to both sides of a central dining table. There could be no question of the realities of the illness. The wife was gaunt, bald, her greying hair stored in a wicker basket under the table. All of them had suffered hair loss. Nightminster’s curiosity hardened. Her right hand was inflamed and swollen. The brother-in-law was in worse condition. He must once have been of similar bulk to Alfred, but now his skin hung off in folds from his wasted state. His right leg was grossly swollen as if pumped full of water, black down the outside of the thigh. Nightminster did his best to hide his revulsion at the reek of corrupting flesh. Gangrene. The poor bastard was rotting to death.

“I’m terribly sorry about what has happened,” he said. “It looks like they’ve been exposed to some terrible poison.”

Alfred had been up forward in the kitchen and now returned with a fine China tea cup.

“Take a shot of this, rum with green tea. It’ll help.”

Nightminster gulped the cup down to the dregs and appreciated the scintillating sensation that spread through him.

“Thank you,” he said. He swayed as the caravan lurched and grabbed the table for support. The eyes of a sick child stared at him.

“Could it be they were injured by toxic waste left from the Public Era?”

He swayed some more. His knees felt like rubber, and his face was in the process of going numb from the lips outwards. He sat on the edge of the table. A bald, cold-faced man appeared from forward wearing exactly the same black leather coat as Alfred.

“Where’s Alfred?” Nightminster mumbled.

“Gone,” said the cold-faced man. He held up a mass of whiskers in one hand and a floppy bolster in the other. He smiled like a gargoyle. Nightminster fell backwards through the table into darkness where he could hear a muffled voice, far away, as if on the far side of a high wall. He tried to open his eyes but could not raise his eyelids. Someone shook him. Jakub called from close by:

“I think he’s back with us!”

Boots clumping around. Peering through slits, Nightminster lifted his head, rolled to one side and vomited repeatedly until he lay panting and exhausted. His mind was now catching up with the situation. Those bastards! But he had only himself to blame. Like a fool moth, he had teased the flame until it scorched his wings. With a sigh he pushed himself to a crouch and stood up, listing and feeling hit by the worst hangover in the world.

“Here’s your money pouch and your pistol back,” Zak said, handing them over. Nightminster buckled his belt, catching up in mind with the devilish trickery by which he had so nearly been sent to the Nameless Gone.

“These are the most fiendish scum I’ve ever encountered!” Jakub fumed. “I would never have believed such depravity if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, and I’m still not sure I believe it.”

A row of ten or so adults, men and women, was laid out bound hand and foot and gagged beside the caravans. In taking in the scene, Nightminster grew confused again. The caravans were now pulled up on a wide gravel turnpike, not on an old lane in woods.

“What the hell happened?” he asked weakly.

“I owe you an apology,” Zak said. “When you didn’t come back, we left you to it. It wasn’t until the next break at one that we started to get worried and Jakub went back on his mountain bike. That’s what saved you.”

“I found the place where you went off into the woods—eventually,” Jakub said. “I came down to an empty road and saw fresh horse dung and guessed they’d made off with you. I followed the dung to the turnpike into Rugby and all I could do then was guess. Travellers don’t go into cities, so I headed the other way, but the guys at the next tollhouse hadn’t seen a thing. That was when I thought you must be a goner. But as a last try, I went up onto that bridge back there.” He pointed at a concrete flyover about half a mile away. “I caught this lot just pulling onto the turnpike from the woods having dodged the tollhouse—very cheeky! The guys in the tollhouse went after them and here we are.”

Nightminster lifted out his pocket watch. It was 2:38 pm. He must have been out for two and a half hours. The time had passed in a flash, although he supposed Eternity passed in a flash at the kiss of Death.

“I’m struggling to grasp what’s going on. I saw people who were really ill—clearly dying.”

“Bait,” Zak said.

“I didn’t use the word ‘depraved’ lightly,” Jakub added.

“What’s the scam here?”

“I’ll show you. You’ve puked so much you won’t have much left. Then again…”

Zak and Jakub led Nightminster to the last of the three caravans. This caravan had no windows. Jakub climbed steps and pulled open the door. What looked like steam wafted out, although this steam sank instead of rising and was cold. The walls around the door were lined with cork six inches thick. The interior was freezing. The floor was congested with steel buckets of red steaks. Cages of ice chunks hung from the roof and dripped with an irritating monotony. Racks of ribs congested on shelves. Sheets of what could only be skin hung in tight rows, shades running white through to dark brown on one side and pale fatty on the other.

“Cannibal tailors,” Jakub said. “I’ve heard rumours for years, but never believed them until now.”

“You’d be surprised what some folk will do for gold,” Zak said. “A lot of gold too, I reckon. Let’s see if we can find it.”

“Just a minute, there are kids. And sick people. Really sick people. What’s going to happen to them?” Nightminster asked, having come to his own conclusions about what lay ahead for the adults.

“The Owner of Rugby has already taken them. He’ll look after the sick and see the kids are fostered to nice homes.”

“What was wrong with the sick ones?”

“A doctor came out from Rugby with the Owner, or a quack at least, I can’t imagine a genuine doctor would spend his life in this shitpit. He reckoned they’d been burned in some kind of Public Era midden. They’re all over the place up here, long forgotten.”

Zak and Jakub shut the cold store and led Nightminster to the head caravan where the sick had been. Zak lifted out the leather garments from the store in the middle of the caravan, laying them out on the dining table. There were jackets, shirts, trousers and mini-skirts. Zak selected one of the jackets. It was beautifully supple, the leather gleaming and smooth and mottled in shades of brown. The lining was gorgeous pale blue silk.

“Top-notch stuff,” Jakub said.

Zak started poking about with a bayonet, looking for gold behind the walls or under the floor. Nightminster had recovered enough to begin his own snooping. The leathers were too bulky and would not be of interest to Madam Cowper at ZEEBRI. Zak would no doubt lay claim to any gold on behalf of the ultramarines. Just possibly, these cannibals had other sorts of artefacts stashed away?  Under one of the bunks in the forward section of the caravan he pulled open a drawer and victory flooded his blood. Light bulbs! Incredibly, most were still in their Public Era carboard boxes decorated with the motifs of global corporations long vanished. These were light-emitting diode type bulbs, very highly sought after due to their long lives and trivial demand for electric power. Nightminster had only ever seen them in physics classes at school and at the Kensington auctions, where they commanded 20 ounces and more apiece due to their snob value. What he was looking at was four or five hundred ounces straight off.

He descended to where the adult travellers were laid out gagged. ‘Alfred’ was easily distinguished by his bald pate and drinker’s nose amongst the flabby bodies. Nightminster kicked him in the thigh and pulled down the gag.

“Where did you get the light bulbs?”

‘Alfred’ just glared up at him with the eyes of a trapped fox.

“Was it the same place your kin got poisoned?”

This time the gleam in the eyes softened.

“What sort of place was it?” Nightminster pressed.

“Was it the bulbs that did them?” This was the real Alfred speaking. He was a Yorkshireman.

“No. But something there must have done it.”

Alfred’s head sank to the gravel and he stared past Nightminster’s toecaps for a while.

He began to cry.

“That’s my mum and dad you saw. At least they’ll be looked after. I can’t see my dad living, mind, with that leg, and the kids are finished. I should’ve guessed there was something evil in that place. It was a basement that Candy—my kid sister—found. In the middle of nowhere up towards Nottingham, but not near any place. It was all concrete getting grown over, as if there was once a big building there. Down under it was this place like a garage full of huge contraptions big enough to lie inside. I took some heavy things that looked interesting, cuz I thought they must have gold in ‘em. What’s left is still in there.”

He nodded towards the head caravan.

“Where?”

“In the crate under the driver’s seat.”

Alfred was a good actor, but he could not quite hide a sly satisfaction as he relaxed on the gravel. When a man about to be executed seems helpful, he is trying to kill you. Nightminster took fair warning. The crate was easily located on a shelf under the driver’s bench of the caravan. Alfred was not joking about the weight. It took an enormous effort just to budge it. There had been some kind of corporate motif on the lid featuring yellow and black, although it was long since worn to obscurity. Nightminster was contemplating how to open it safely when he heard a roar like pouring gravel from within the caravan and cheers from Zak and Jakub.

“Big Knight! Come and see this!” yelled Jakub. Nightminster hastened within to gape in astonishment at a scree of gold coins a foot high built up on the deck under where the leather jackets were hung. Zak prodded a few coins out with a knife.

“This lot was behind a false wall,” he said. “Fuck’s sake, that’s a Mexican 50 Pesos, and there’s a Swiss 20 Francs.”

“Who gets that lot?” Nightminster asked.

“The Owner of Rugby, seeing as we’re on his estate. He’ll probably give us a share though.”

“On the other hand, these jackets do not belong to the Owner of Rugby,” Jakub said. He pulled a mottled brown jacket across the table. “That looks about your size, Big Knight. Give it a try.”

“Are these really human skin?”

“Beautifully done aren’t they? Softer than lambskin.”

“How can you even touch them?”

“Oh come on, Big Knight, don’t be such a prude.”

“Just put it on, the poor sod who died for that jacket isn’t coming back,” Zak said.

The two other men pulled on their jackets. Despite his revulsion, Nightminster was struck by just how sharp they looked. Zak commented that he had seen worse priced at 75 ounces in trendy Kensington boutiques. Nightminster slipped on the jacket Jakub had pushed his way and instantly liked how well it fitted, the sleek lining, its softness and the way it brought out his shoulders, muscular as they were from swimming and pull-ups.

“Fuck me, Big Knight, you’ll be up every gash in Oxford with that outfit,” Zak said. “What a dandy!”

“Just look at the jacket you could have been!” Jakub said, at which the caravan rocked with their laughter.

“So, what’s going to happen to those cannibals?” Nightminster asked.

“Neck-shot for the people,” Zak said. “You can join in if you like. Why not do that cunt Alfred?”

In that moment, Nightminster did not feel any urge towards vengeance, or justice, or whatever it might be. He did not particularly feel anything beyond the maturing effect on a young man who had considered himself immortal, because Death was still so far away, who then returns from the Nameless Gone. Were it not for Jakub’s vigour as a cyclist, his mind would no longer exist. He sat away from the others on the far side of the turnpike, thinking, knowing that he had traversed a critical experience. A kind of innocence was gone forever. He would take Death more seriously now. Had he been more inclined to religion, he would have believed God had given him a lesson for his own good. He was not that way inclined, although he did accept God would have had a point.

The philosophical mood faded. Resentment grew. When he came back across the turnpike, Zak and Jakub were preparing to carry out the executions. There were eleven cannibals: Alfred and two other men, three women, two older girls and three older boys. They were such ugly; monstrous caricatures of humanity. These scum would have taken his life, eaten his flesh and made his pale skin into a jacket. An overpowering rage burst inside him. He drew his Makarov and rammed the muzzle into the nape of Alfred’s neck, whose eyes bulged with terror. From beneath the gag he uttered a thin scream like a doomed rabbit. Nightminster pulled the trigger. The eyes leaped, blood poured from mouth and nose. Nightminster staggered back as shock dropped the blood into his legs. While he collapsed on the gravel, Jakub and Zak took turns neck-shooting up the line until the job was done.

Chapter 16

Nightminster returned to Oxford and its dull obligations. The one satisfaction he savoured was knowing the mysterious, undoubtedly dangerous, but possibly valuable cannibals’ artefact was secure in its wooden crate aboard Jakub Newman’s barge along with the box of precious LED lightbulbs. It would take eighteen days for the convoy to reach home at Paddington basin in central London, including delays at locks and for changing teams. There was no other way of getting the artefacts to London, where Nightminster intended to sell them—he could hardly carry them on the pillion of his Moto Guzzi.

The following Monday morning, Nightminster arrived early for the 9:05 am Applied Physics lecture.

“Nightminster! How good of you to join us!”

The hearty welcome came from Father Arthur Richardson, an ordained priest of the Church of England. He was a big, bulky fellow, older by about five years than the rest of the physics first year. Despite this, Nightminster thought of him as a giant toddler, from the podginess to the incredulous blue eyes with which he gazed at the peculiar creatures in the world around him.

“That’s a smart jacket, Big Knight,” Carruthers the swot said in his soft, tired way. He always sounded too weary to speak, which perhaps explained why he spent most of his time swotting.

“You didn’t get that in Oxford,” Father Richardson said. “Nor the bruised cheek. You were on the tiles in London and got in a fight over some floozy; yes or yes?”

Nightminster took his seat. In a class of only thirteen students, absenteeism got noticed. The Faculty of Science had long ago abandoned lecture theatres and grand research laboratories due to lack of enrolment. Physics was not a popular choice. Commoners came up to Oxford to study Law, languages or domestic management, because those subjects opened a respectable career. Sovereigns pretended to study English literature or Greats during three years of games, parties and sexual dissipation, finished with a bribe for a pass degree and home to the manor. Only true afficionados broke these norms.

“Where have you been?” Father Richardson pressed.

“I had a domestic crisis to resolve.”

“Her brothers had a go at you? Hmmm?”

Nightminster did not particularly like Father Richardson. He found him needling and judgemental. He ignored him. Father Richardson leaned over, sniffing and snuffling.

“Amazing how the smell of pork endures.”

Nightminster ignored him again.

The lecturer arrived and gave Nightminster a thoughtful look, said nothing and got started on his exposition. Nightminster took copious notes and asked questions. It was all an act. This acoustics stuff with its equations like giant haystacks might suit those who learned just for the sake of it. He was not like that. Upon those things relevant to his highest ambitions to be the atomic lord of London, he was certain his intensity was more ferocious than any of the other students, for he was impelled by the lure of power and fame in a way they were not.

He knew in his heart he was not going to last in this ‘conditioning centre’. The challenge was to last long enough–Oxford was the only chance he had to meet the Krossingtons.

*

At lunchtime Nightminster joined the other first years in the restaurant of the physics building. Much to his surprise, on this particular day, he picked up a critical lead from an unlikely source.

Father Richardson was a great one for holding forth to any assembled company he happened to join. This lunch time, he held forth on how he liked to chat with his betrothed by means of a shortwave radio transceiver. She lived two hundred miles to the north in a place called Sellafield. There was no risk of being overheard as they used Public Era scramblers provided by the Anglican Church to all senior clergy. He also enjoyed roaming the airwaves seeking strangers for gossip. He spoke fluent Ecclesiastical Latin, and so was able to chat with fellow educated persons as far off as central Russia. There were not many ‘educated persons’ on shortwave, it had to be said, perhaps only a score across the continent, but that was enough to learn that most other places were a great deal more dramatic than staid old Britain. Food riots in northern France, massacres in Italy of flow from the Balkans, massacres in the Balkans of flow from Turkey, massacres in Turkey of flow from The Levant, the endless Eastern War, sometimes in Prussia, sometimes Poland, sometimes Belorussia or Ukraine, smouldering year in and year out like a burning coal mine. Of course, none of these areas existed as nations any longer, but there was no agreement about what to call their remains, so most people continued to use the old names.

What irked Father Richardson was the arrival in recent weeks of an irritant, an imposture that called itself Reaction Radio of the Official SUN Party. Its hosts did not even speak what would have been the King’s English had there still existed a monarchy, let alone Ecclesiastical Latin. These SUN Party fanatics preached every folly of the Public Era, from democracy to paper money to collective ownership of factories. It was quite deplorable how such mass stupidity could recrudesce, as if the sewer of history had backed up.

Nightminster broke in.

“Where can I buy one of these shortwave radio transceivers?”

“You can’t, they’re not manufactured anymore,” Father Richardson said. “You have a taste for radicology?”

“Not in the least. I’m a sergeant of General Wardian on a scholarship.” Nightminster flipped open his ID booklet just to make the point clear. “The appeal is keeping in touch with those back home, just as for you.”

“Then you’ll need two transceivers. They aren’t difficult to make, I mean, for people like us who understand physical reality. There’s an emporium here in Oxford called King of the Sparks where you can get the bits. It’s tucked away off the High Street in an awkward little back court you’ll never find without detailed instructions, so I shall now proceed to provide them. Electronic components are quite expensive, by the way. A pair of transceivers will set you back 50 ounces. Can you afford that?”

“I have savings.”

“Good man! And what are you saving for?”

“Rainy days, just rainy days, Father.”

“Ah! The mysterious, discreet sort.”

The cleric was the most appalling, nosey parker, which made him dangerous. Fortunately, Richardson was satisfied this time and provided detailed directions to King of the Sparks.

*

Later that day, Father Richardson proved the unwitting source of yet more inspiration. During the afternoon laboratory class, which involved demonstrating Bernoulli’s Principle by pouring water down a glass tube with bulges in it, Nightminster’s boredom lifted as he zoned in on the cleric’s blethering once again. To begin with, it appeared that Father Richardson had a particular interest in atomic power. Then Nightminster learned something fascinating. There was an heirloom atomic reactor still operating in Father Richardson’s home town of Sellafield, which lay in the far north of England. It provided heat and light to an area called Cumbria. There was an electrified railway, and the agricultural machines were powered by storage batteries. The people lived decent lives in the towns while machines worked the fields, just as in the Public Era.

This news greatly boosted Nightminster’s confidence in his convictions. Now he had hard data that an atomic plant for London really would lift the standard of living just as he believed. No one could laugh at his ideas now.

*

Nightminster knew the location of the prestigious Krossington Institute. He had walked past it on one of his first evenings in Oxford. He had hard data from his contacts amongst college porters that all of the Krossington clan at Oxford resided there, at any rate when they were not off in Cambridge or London. Locating where Tom and Victorina lived had never been an issue.

The problem was the approach. He could hardly dash up in the street and gush his adoration of the SUN Party, especially given his status as a sergeant of General Wardian glory trust. The only result would be an embarrassed brush-off, supposing he was not simply run down by their horseless carriage or beaten up by their bodyguards. What he needed was a gambit, just as Account-Captain Roberts had said, an idea that would arrest their attention. Father Richardson had unwittingly provided exactly that.

Nightminster crafted a letter to Drs Tom and Victorina Krossington to explain he was a physics student convinced that Sellafield, Cumbria was the social model the SUN Party should strive for: the people liberated from grinding drudgery by atomic power and protected by a benign hierarchy.

He laid out his knowledge of the heirloom atomic industry from the Public Era. His old physics master Dr Horrocks had been involved as an advisor in the mothballing of the atomic power stations during the Glorious Resolution. There were twenty-eight of them, to this day maintained in working condition (supposedly) by engineers of the Anglican Church. Nightminster explained why these plant were all useless. To start a Public Era plant required a good, strong kick, no different from a motorbike. Except that a Public Era atomic plant required a bloody great kick as powerful as the largest ships of the Public Era. Such engines no longer existed. Even if they had, the power generated in the atomic plant could not reach London because the power lines had been ripped out by landowners after the Glorious Resolution. The pylons became battle towers to guard frontiers, and the miles and miles of aluminium cable were transformed into heaps of aluminium money.

For all these reasons, progress demanded a fresh start, an atomic plant designed and built for the London of today. Such a plant did not have to be extravagantly complex like a Public Era marvel. Just as sleek jet airliners had been replaced by wood and canvas flying boats, so the new plant could be basic; boilers of rivetted plates, fuel rods lifted into position with hand-cranked hoists. The imperative was to stop families dying of cold and starvation every winter. The Public Era’s silly dread of radiation no longer applied.

He rounded off by emphasising he had years of experience working in the Chadderton Engineering Partnership and so had considerable practical knowledge, as well as contacts essential to building the atomic plant. He was totally committed to raising the living standards of the people.

The following day he copied it out with his best fountain pen onto a messenger’s standard sheet and paid over a gold sovereign for its despatch to the Krossington Institute. He did not expect a quick response. Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night were major events in the social calendar of the sovereign caste, celebrated in Mayfair in the old, rich core of London. Halloween was one of only two occasions of the year (the other being New Year’s Eve) when sovereign youth could call at the palaces of other clans without fear of abduction for ransom. All this Nightminster had learned from his porter contacts.

*

He was a model student for more than two weeks—a display of compliance that alarmed him. This kind of thing could turn into a bad habit! He saw it as insurance. He had to build a record as a diligent student to make up for the back-sliding of the first few weeks. On the Wednesday of the third week, a reply arrived at the Jenkins’ house from the Krossington Institute!

It was not Dr Tom Krossington or Dr Victorina Krossington who met him in a cafe on Holywell Street on the eastern side of Oxford, but a post-graduate student of economics. He was a smooth-faced, jaunty sort of fellow, almost bashful in his superiority. It amused him that anyone would study physics (“Isn’t it just nit-picking over stuff normal people take for granted?”). He explained that President Banner and their decencies Tom and Victorina Krossington received numerous proposals and could not possibly respond to all of them personally. Nightminster’s atomic ideas were hardly original and certainly not useful given the limitations of technology.

Nightminster just held his cool, let the know-it-all have his say and got away quickly. To begin with, he consoled himself that anger was the fire of aspiration and smugness the clarion of mediocrity, and no, he was not going to give a damn about mixing his metaphors.

*

Defeat at the hands of the Krossingtons was a punch in the guts. This was personal. He had laid his atomic dream before the eyes of Tom and Victorina Krossington and been brushed off like a piece of fluff. That evening, when he was alone and the Jenkins’ house was quiet, outrage smouldered. Was he the only atomic visionary on the Island of Britain? Or was he just the biggest fool?

No. He was not the biggest fool. If he were, he could never have reached Oxford on top of three thousand ounces, every one earned by his sweat and fear, not scraped off the backs of fifty thousand slummies, or a hundred thousand serfs.

There was a particular grief trickling in the back of his mind, quiet but insistent. Victorina had dismissed his atomic dream. He did not like the feel of the awful void that opened in his chest as he imagined her shaking her head before turning her mind to more serious matters. He felt like a grub, an insect. There was a terrible ominousness about this void, as if it was incurable.

Might it be that his highest ambitions were the repressed desperation of a young man who had glimpsed love on the far side of eighteen inches of plate class barrier? What did he know of her? He had seen her once from a distance giving a speech and once again, for a few seconds, flat on her back—on the far side of eighteen inches of plate class barrier. They had spoken not a word. In eye contact, she had transmitted signals he could not decipher.

He jumped up, cursing himself. Now he really was the biggest fool on the Island of Britain. He was talking himself down to the bottom of a pit when he knew, from observation and calculation, that the sovereigns were utter frauds. They presented glamour to the world, while they chiselled off serfdom. He towered over them. He must never again use the wheedling approach. The next time, he would come at the Krossingtons with an offer they could not refuse.

*

Later that same evening, Nightminster soothed his nerves with a walk across a couple of miles of abandonment to the ultramarine depot in Wolvercote village on the Oxford Canal. He checked the post restante mailbox in the village pub. He had mail! Carried up the canal from London by bicycle messenger was a letter from Jakub Newman. The convoy of barges had reached Paddington basin in London. Nightminster’s ‘artefact’ was ready for collection along with “a nice little surprise”. That was three days ago. Nightminster wrote a reply for the first messenger of the morning, that he would be at Paddington basin early on Friday morning to collect his goods.

Chapter 17

Dawn had progressed far enough to bring colour to the world by the time a chilled Nightminster arrived at his destination, Paddington basin in northern London He received a warm welcome from the troopers of the Owner of Paddington. They led him to the owner’s garage where the ersatz Moto Guzzi would get the turnpike muck washed off it, polished, refuelled and oiled by high-caste Night and Fog who in one way or another had wangled a soft billet for themselves as garage attendants. Following the ultramarines’ directions, he had no difficulty in locating the residence of the Newman barging family. They were in the best of standing with their ultramarine protectors.

Nightminster could not suppress a twang of jealousy in observing how Jakub was set up in life. At twenty-six years old, he was married to a good-looking and hard-willed wife, Matty, master of the business administration. Jakub openly admitted he just could not be bothered with the paperwork of business and would have been hopelessly lost without her. The couple had three sons, the oldest, Bartram, being a fearless lad of four who bounded up and down the narrow boats and leaped over the reeking brew of the basin without hesitation. Jakub watched philosophically.

“He’ll be doing that all his life, so he may as well get plenty of practice now,” he said.

Jakub, Matty, their sons and the families of Jakub’s two younger brothers were a self-contained society that secured the present and ensured their future without having to hang off orders from a boss class. That was what Nightminster envied. For the same reason, he was growing uneasy about involving Jakub in the opening of the ‘artefact’. He had no wish to render Matty a widow through his own recklessness.

“I’m confident that crate is safe provided it’s kept shut,” he said. “Otherwise, it would have killed every one of those abominations. But once I lift that lid, all bets are off.”

“You think what’s in that crate made the cannibals sick?”

“I’m sure of it. So was Alfred. That’s why he encouraged me to open it.”

“All four of those sick cannibals are dead. We got the news from Rugby a few days ago.”

That settled it so far as Nightminster was concerned.

“I’ll handle this alone.”

“Like buggery you will. You’ll need a car to get it out of town anyway, so don’t argue.”

Nightminster succeeded in appearing unsurprised the Newmans owned a car. Not that he doubted their prosperity, they just did not seem the sort to waste gold on status symbols. He discovered the ‘car’ was actually a rugged steam wagon built by Jakub’s grandfather Oliver Newman. It burned wood, which was essentially free, and its crude components required no great skill to repair. They used it for delivering freight by road to local places the canals did not go.

Nightminster jumped at the opportunity to exploit mention of Oliver Newman.

“Do the canals still run into the Fens, where your grandfather Oliver owned a restaurant back in the Public Era?”

A cunning expression came over Jakub as he added kindling to the furnace of the steam car’s boiler.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’d like to have a look around the Fens.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason I went with Alfred the cannibal, because I’m curious. I explore where others fear to tread.”

“The Fens are nothing but hundreds of square miles of bog, marsh and woods out of which nothing ever comes. I’ve heard not a small number of tales about that wilderness from the crews of Thames barges that come down the east coast. They tell of being almost run down in fog by crazy high-speed ships going so fast the bows are out of the water like a speedboat. I’ve heard that kind of thing too often for it to be made up, and I’ve seen exactly those motor ships running up and down the Thames, every one owned by this or that sovereign clan. They must be up to something in that dead-end known as The Wash, but you won’t find anyone in a hurry to follow them in. Sovereigns don’t mess about when it comes to guarding their secrets. Take fair warning and keep out.”

“So the sovereigns, or at least some of them, have an interest in The Wash?”

“Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Nightminster dropped the subject, for the time being.

They added progressively heavier wood until the fire under the steam car’s boiler was drawing with a soft rush. After about fifteen minutes the boiler had fifty pounds of steam, still going up with much ticking and hissing.

“Time to get the load,” Jakub said. They carried the wooden crate between them from the cabin of one of the narrow boats to the cargo bed behind the steam car’s cabin. The crate’s great weight made them wobbly like a calf taking its first steps. It was not large. Except for its heft, it could have contained a lantern or a big coffee pot. They lashed some tarpaulin over it and got into the car. Nightminster stoked the furnace with lengths of split log while Jakub negotiated out to the gravel streets of town and they chugged up to a respectable speed with wind wafting their faces. Within minutes they were driving through abandonment. Jakub pulled off into what had been a suburban street and ploughed in, crushing down banks of weeds and spindly trees grown up since the last clear-cut of firewood.

“This should be okay,” Jakub said, “but keep a pistol handy, because you never know.”

They lugged the crate of mysteries to a place chosen by Nightminster, where he set up his precautions and retreated. They stood on the bonnet of the steam car to get the best view. Nightminster pulled a cord that ran through a pulley dangling from a convenient branch and down to the handle of the lid of the crate. The lid, having already been unlatched, lifted open. Nightminster studied what was revealed with binoculars. He was looking at the top of a metal pot or flask with a heavy metal handle on pivots like a bucket to lift it from its snug housing. They could not hear, smell or see anything suspicious. Nightminster was not forgetting that sly satisfaction in the eyes of the doomed Alfred. Something about that flask could kill, and kill most unpleasantly.

On approaching it, he noticed scratches and scores left by attempts to hammer loose the top, which obviously unscrewed. First, he tried to lift the flask. He had to straddle it and heave with his arms locked and back straight, all the force coming from his legs. The damned thing weighed a hundredweight, or near enough. The flask must be made of solid platinum. That was big money—fifteen hundred ounces straight off. He crouched and started to unscrew the top. It turned easily on threads of a precision found only on Public Era heirlooms. After about twenty turns, feeling the top loosen, he leaned well away from the flask and tried to lift the top off at arm’s length. He failed; it was too heavy. Jakub fetched a crowbar from the car and Nightminster used that to flip the lid off on its back. The flask and lid were solid all the way through, just as he had expected. At the core of the flask was a small cartridge of shiny metal slightly proud of the surrounding body of the flask. It was a bit thicker than a 12-guage shotgun cartridge, not unlike the primer for the charge of a 155mm artillery round. These had to be treated with care, but they did not require encasement in a meaty flask.

“Do you have any pliers in the car?” he called to Jakub. After some rummaging around, Jakub proffered a pair of heavy-gauge cable-cutters with handles a yard long—not exactly delicate, but they would have to do. Nightminster gripped the end of the cartridge in the cutter jaws and started to lift. After fumbling the grip on the cutters, the cartridge fell back in place with a loud clunk. He flinched and cursed. Well, he was still alive, so, keep going. On a second try, he lifted the cartridge clear. It was bigger than a 12-gauge cartridge, smaller than a pepper pot. Its form niggled an old memory. It was familiar, he just could not place the previous encounter. He rotated it to get a look at the underside. Recognition hit him with such raw fright he dropped everything and threw himself away, whirling over and over to get clear.

“Get away! Get behind the car!” he yelled.

Panting and trembling, he joined a bemused Jakub on the far side of the steam car.

“What’s all the sweat about?”

Nightminster did not answer for some seconds. The gangrenous leg of Alfred’s father was before his eyes, the smell of rotting meat in his nostrils. He might go that way if—. The rat’s eye port in the bottom of the cartridge had never pointed at him. Just as well he used the cutters and never touched it. Otherwise, he would now be facing life without a right hand.

“I can understand why it killed ignorant cannibals,” he said. The weakness of relief was like after making love, oddly. “I’ll get that cartridge back safe and sound in its flask. Then we’ll get over to ZEEBRI.”

“But what is it?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

*

More than an hour had passed, and still Jakub and Nightminster sat waiting in Madam Cowper’s office. She was the machining expert he had met on the previous visit to ZEEBRI, so it made sense to ask to see her again. She had greeted the flask with suspicion, which hardened as Nightminster explained what he believed it to be.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said. “I’ll have to get Madam Edkins on this.”

Madam Edkins was one of the Es of ZEEBRI, definitely a high heid yin, a big-shot. To rise to her notice was a quite unexpected triumph, although Nightminster held himself to a more realistic expectation of being dealt with by some underling, probably just as snooty as the graduate economics student sent by the Krossingtons to rubbish the atomic dream. The waiting chafed Nightminster’s nerves. Logically, the strongest defence he had against being named as the shooter of Parliament Square was to behave as if such a charge were preposterous. If he was really the shooter, why would he come to ZEEBRI, the home nest of the Official SUN Party? After all these months, was it plausible that detectives could unearth irrefutable proof of his guilt? What was irrefutable proof? Even signed statements by the only witnesses he knew of, Billy Nieuport and Veitch Thomas, could be rebutted with contempt. All of this was logical, but it did not stop the uneasy ramblings of his imagination.

“I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “Guard the fort, will you, while I go downstairs and meet the SUN Party.”

“What do you want with those people?”

“Just curious.”

At this mid-morning time of day still another hour or more to lunch time, the passages and stairways of ZEEBRI were quiet. He descended a couple of floors and ambled into the HQ of the Official SUN Party. It was virtually abandoned, so quiet that he felt like a trespasser. Gone were all the posters, cine shows and speakers. He looked down to the far end. Gone was the shrine to Jumping Jackson! He glanced into a succession of long wooden cabins. In one, a single young woman cradled a massive tome like a baby. In the next, black-suited officials sat around a table, attention rapt upon a speaker—King-Tough! The man himself, just as before, spick as a missionary in black suit, white shirt and party tie, orange circle exactly in the middle of the knot. For all the respectability of his dress, his face was that of a thug, the mouth set in a curl of grievance, the eyes haunted by some outrage eternally just beyond his nose. Nightminster slowed as he stared in the window. Distracted, King-Tough glanced back, frowning a moment. A lunatic urge took Nightminster to go in and say ‘hello King-Tough’ just to taunt fate.

At the far end of the bay, where the shrine to Jumping Jackson had been, he stopped, gazing pointedly at the empty place, remembering the long queue to sign the book of condolences and his own sarcastic addition. That had been two days after the shooting on Parliament Square when outrage was running high. Now, more than three months later, that outrage had apparently abated to empty space.

“Can I help you, sir?”

An official had just emerged from the nearest cabin and was walking smartly his way. At first sight, in the party suit, he seemed an upright, reputable young man with good physique and poise, of brown complexion and thick black hair suggesting Asian ancestry. It was only when he was quite close and revealed his right cheek that Nightminster noticed the laddering of a knife wound. That did not make him a thug, but it was not promising.

“There used to be a shrine to a gallant young man called Jumping Jackson. I signed the book of condolences when I was here in the summer. Now it’s as if he never existed. What gives?”

The official was eyeing Nightminster with hard and thoughtful attention. This did not trouble him. Even if a description and the name Nightminster had reached these people, they would need a damned sight more than hearsay to condemn a man in fine standing with the high heid yins of ZEEBRI.

“It was deemed that celebration of that person was not compatible with the objectives of the Official SUN Party.” This was spoken with the deliberation of one reciting what he had learned by rote.

“The Official SUN Party?”

“We are the true arrow of reform.”

“What about that poncy lot up in Oxford?”

“We shall wax, they shall wane.”

That was a slogan.

“Is the person who killed Jumping Jackson still at large?”

“I’m not aware of anyone being apprehended. The Official SUN Party is a vehicle of reform, not a police force, still less a vigilante squad.”

Policy statement.

“What about the hooligans that trashed Camden? Have any of them been caught?”

“The most recent attack was at Wandsworth the day before yesterday.”

“Damnation! I was up north and didn’t hear. Were any of those loathsome vandals captured alive?”

“They’re no different from marsh savages, they kill themselves as soon as step forward—a lot of folk are saying malicious persons unknown are recruiting these hooligans from the Eastern Marshes. The Official SUN Party has condemned the attacks absolutely and we’ve appealed to all citizens of London to come forward with information. Someone must know who they are.”

“To what effect?”

“I’m not aware of anyone being apprehended.” After an awkward pause, Scarface added: “Would you like to take some policy documents?”

“Definitely. In particular, those regarding energy policy and industrial development.”

“Allow me to oblige.”

As Nightminster was leaving, Jakub appeared. After a brief, vaguely curious taking-in of the layout of cabins, he said:

“Action stations upstairs—that crate has set off quite a flap!”

Nightminster accepted a couple of booklets from Scarface, whom he thanked with a smile before hurrying after Jakub.

*

Undoubtedly Madam Edkins had not fobbed them off with some supercilious underling. Here were Jakub and Nightminster sitting in her office on the top deck of ZEEBRI admiring the view across steam and brown fumes rising from the reaction towers of the turpentine refinery and camphine-blending plant. Nightminster sipped at excellent, and genuine, Indian tea in a China cup and saucer with a silver spoon. He considered sipping with little finger erect, but decided this was not the time for levity.

The office was large, with rude, steel-framed windows along two sides meeting in the corner. These must have been added in converting the great concrete fortress that was now ZEEBRI from its Public Era purpose as a multi-storey car park for the Fatted Masses. Nightminster and Jakub had learned this history during the climb from Madam Cowper’s office. The furniture was of dark wood and black leather, sleek and clean in style, perfectly replicated in a way only Public Era mass production could achieve. It was the office of a practical technocrat, not some popinjay fixated with status.

Madam Edkins was a very upright and sturdily-built woman in her early sixties. She reminded Nightminster of his old mathematics teacher at public school. She wore the same flat shoes, black academic’s gown over tweed jacket and mid-length skirt. She exhibited the same habits, such as removing her glasses to glare at anyone she suspected of telling lies, which was how she received him. He stared her back, occasionally allowing his eyes to roam away as he issued his account of how he had discovered the crate that was the cause of their meeting. She was correct to suspect him of lying. He contrived a version of how the cannibals had found the crate, whilst omitting the cannibals. She heard out his spiel without comment.

“Did either of you touch the inner capsule?” she asked.

“No. I used a pair of cable-cutters.”

“What made you suspect the hazard?”

“My old physics master had a source. He used to show us how gamma rays would ionise high-pressure xenon.”

“Which school was that?”

Nightminster gave the name. It was a public school established near Aldgate in buildings that had belonged to the University of London before the Glorious Resolution.

“What was the master’s name?”

“Dr Horrocks.”

“I knew him. We were at college together.” She ambled over to the windows looking south into the abandonments towards the River Thames, probably recalling times from the world of her youth, times long gone. Perhaps they had been lovers in that old world of light. “What do you want?” she asked, without turning around.

“A sale.”

“Really? You’re obviously not a scrap-metal merchant. Why take such risks for a bit of gold?”

“I think it’s worth more than ‘a bit’. That flask is either platinum or uranium. Either way, it’s worth something.”

“Actually, it is tungsten, and you’re right, it is worth something. However, I don’t believe you are interested in gold for gold’s sake.”

“I do have higher ambitions, it is true.” Nightminster sensed this might be the moment of a lifetime. “I would say they are the highest of high ambitions: to change the world by atomic power. The sovereigns would be helpless against the renaissance of affluence through an atomic plant for London. The plant would be sited downwind of the city in the Eastern Marshes. It would not have to be some grandly over-complicated marvel like a Public-Era power station. We could use boilers like those of steam locomotives, set vertical so that the nuclear fuel would be lifted by cables into the tubes and dropped into a pool should the reaction get ahead of itself.” Madam Edkins buckled over laughing. She had to steady herself with a hand on the conference table. Nightminster clenched his teeth and pressed on. “I think what really killed the Public Era was love of complication. Everything had to be as fancy as possible. They pressed the point beyond the limit, and their society, for want of a better way of putting it, simply evaporated. An atomic plant just does not have to be fancy. We can use nineteenth-century steam pressures for our nineteenth-century industries.”

Madam Edkins straightened up, warming him in the radiant smile of an admiring schoolgirl. Suddenly, forty years vanished. Nightminster blushed—and he very rarely blushed, least of all because of a woman’s smile.

“You are a true visionary. We need people like you in the Official SUN Party; architects of a grander tomorrow.” Her attention floated away into her own deepest dreams. “When the six of us—Zelewski, Elmes, myself Edkins, Brankner, Randell and Ignatovitch—established ZEEBRI in 2041, none of us believed recovery would take more than a decade. We were thinking in terms of Japan in 1945, cities totally smashed, no oil, no foreign currency, no transport, no shipyards, no refineries, nothing but the driving will of the people to make their country the envy of a world that despised them. It was only gradually we came to understand how the sovereign caste instituted stagnation. By controlling most of the land, guns and gold, they denied others the chance to make better use of them. That’s the only basis of their power—denial. Stagnation is so entrenched that hardly anyone still bothers to dream of better times. That’s what makes you so refreshing.

“I know of another young man like you—from nowhere, passionate, intelligent and determined to make things better. He now leads the Official SUN Party. You’d make a fine couple. Some other time, I will introduce you.”

Nightminster felt himself expanding with joy. Madam Edkins’ laughter had not been ridicule, as he first thought, so much as a nervous reaction to his audacity.

She continued:

“Concerning the tungsten flask and its caesium 137 radioactive source, these are hard to value as they are so rare there are no market prices available. They are certainly important. We can make powerful light bulbs, X-ray tubes and cutting tools with the tungsten. The caesium 137 enables us to inspect welds and broken bones, and treat cancer. I happen to believe you are a young man who will devote his gold to the service of the people rather than merely a palace for himself, so the award shall be two thousand ounces.”

Nightminster fixed stunned to his seat. Jakub expressed a kind of cough and spluttered:

“My business does well to clear that in a whole quarter!”

He sounded peeved, and Nightminster sympathised. It was Jakub who had saved his life and Jakub who had brought the flask to London by barge.

“We’ll split it 50/50.”

“Nah, that won’t do. I’d never in a million years have thought of keeping it, let alone bringing it all the way here to ZEEBRI. You have it for this atomic plant thing you’re after.”

“Take a cut for the freight, at least.”

“Just let it lie.” His tone was starting to bite. Nightminster let it lie.

During the drive back to Paddington basin in the steam car, he floated on accomplishment. He had attained a vital pass in life. He was in good standing with the Chadderton Engineering Partnership and ZEEBRI, the two most powerful industrial complexes on the Island of Britain, and with Johnny Albert. Anger over the shooting of Jumping Jackson had apparently faded with time. He could not complain about lack of raw materials—but the vital catalyst for success eluded him. He was not intimate with the Krossingtons and had no idea how to become intimate, still less induce them to become friendly with a slum thug-chief.

“By the way,” Jakub said. “The Owner of Rugby was grateful to you for having exposed the cannibals. He’s sent five hundred ounces you’ve to collect from Johnny Albert.”

Nightminster reeled, drenched in good fortune. This was getting scary. Life was never thus good unless a nasty sting was on its way.

“What did you get?”

“Fuck-all. I’m not a friend of Johnny Albert.”

Chapter 18

It was with a jolt of alarm that Nightminster received a summons from Johnny Albert that evening; when someone owes five hundred ounces, they usually wait for you to contact them. The summons had first been delivered to the palace of the Owner of Paddington, who had passed it on to the Newman household, who had directed it back across the River Thames to Bermondsey, where it finally reached Nightminster at his parents’ flat. This prolonged transit caused a message originally despatched in early afternoon not to reach its recipient until 7 pm. The recipient hurried out to the palace, knowing the Owner would by angry at the tardy response, quite apart from whatever matter had prompted the summons.

It was the first week of November. Friday merriment in the pubs and theatres of the market place was not abundant. Work in the factories had been short since the summer due to the turn-down in spending by the sovereigns, so purses were tight. Inside Johnny Albert’s palace he found a more rumbustious atmosphere. The restaurants and cafes around the main concourse of the old station were packed with ultramarine troopers and their families. A quartet sweetened the air with Mozart while a rock band manoeuvred loudspeakers like chests of drawers and unreeled cables in preparation for the evening dance. It was clear the social life of an ultramarine centred very much on the palace of their owner, perhaps not surprisingly, as nowhere out in the asylum offered grilled swordfish, sirloin steak, venison pie, truffles, artichokes dipped in olive oil, platters of French cheeses, a wide selection of Belgian Trappist beers and much else as listed outside the different eateries of the palace

He ascended to Johnny Albert’s rooftop bungalow, only to be sent down to the basement in the old Tube system of the Public Era, now given over to garages, workshops and armouries. He left civilization behind for lonely flights of steps, and grew wary, concerned he was on his way to a beating. He arrived at the end of a concrete passage and knocked on a steel door. After a wait, Johnny Albert leaned out. He wore black pants with big pockets for tools and a dark blue shirt, soiled with grease and sweat.

“What?” he said.

“I’m here, Captain.”

“And?”

“You sent for me.”

“When?”

“The message went across town and came back again. I came as soon as I could.”

“When did I send it?”

“2 pm, Captain.”

Johnny Albert held out a palm, Nightminster laid the message slip on it. Its record of times and places seemed to calm him.

“Come in.”

This was the Owner’s famous garage of heirloom Jaguar cars of the Public Era. It was a long, whitewashed hall, brightly lit, indeed, almost painfully lit, by electric bulbs hanging from the concrete ceiling. The cars filled the air with a blend of sour rubber and a sweetish, heady scent, something of the narcotic density of acetone or neat gin. To Nightminster’s eyes, the Jaguars were tiny. Like stealthy bugs, they crouched with their glass eyes wide, ready to spring. He followed Johnny Albert, keeping his distance, paying no attention to the old cars. Johnny Albert stopped by one that was low even amongst these heirlooms. The roof of the cabin did not even reach his stomach. The front window sloped like the windscreen of a flying boat. Nightminster thought it closer to a sculpture of a fish than a motor car.

“Get in,” Johnny Albert said. He performed a curling, sideways contortion to tuck himself inside the cabin. Nightminster opened his side to find a leather bucket seat about level with his ankles. By bracing himself on the domed roof, he managed to get a perch on the edge of the seat and swing one long leg in. He left the door open to avoid becoming unduly intimate with the Owner.

“What do you think?”

“Did people actually get around in these things?”

“Only a lucky few. The rest dreamed. This is a 1964 E-Type Jaguar coupé. At that time, it cost the equivalent of 160 ounces of gold, although folk didn’t think in gold terms in those days, obviously. Gold had a radically different value in The Public Era. An ounce of gold really meant something then. Strangely enough, the average income at that time was also 160 ounces of gold in a year, not much different from what folk out in the asylums pull in today. The difference is, 160 ounces in the Public Era got you a nice suburban house, a car and holidays in the sun. Today you get a dank shithole and bare subsistence. It’s a funny thing, the abiding truth of gold. They forgot that in the Public Era, and they paid the price.”

It was Johnny Albert’s habit to soften his prey with ramble before striking. Nightminster waited, pensive.

“The Owner of Rugby praised you for exposing cannibal scum working his estate. His envoy assured me his master was spitting fury when he heard what happened to you. The hooligan attacks on Elephant and Castle, Camden and Wandsworth asylums have made us owners touchy about folk taking liberties. We’re not as sympathetic as we once were. Do you know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve been up in those dreaming spires for five weeks now. What can you tell me?”

“Where do you want me to start? I can tell you lots about the depravity of the sovereign kids. They’re killers. They killed a friend of mine with a sports car and nothing happened. Or I can tell you about the utter passivity of the commoners, who just put up with it and hope they aren’t the next to get hit by a car, or beaten up, or raped, or shot by some drunk.”

“That’s interesting stuff, but I’m not paying you good gold for social research. Are the SUN Party behind these asylum attacks, or not?”

“I don’t know. I’ve not even found the SUN Party at Oxford. I’ve looked high and low without finding so much as graffiti in the toilets. I tried to meet Tom and Victorina K by writing to them with an idea, but they sent a minion to brush me off.”

“You say the SUN Party has no presence at Oxford? That surprises me, and it is worth knowing. The question is, do you think the knowledge worth five hundred ounces?”

“No.” Nightminster shook his head. “I think you should take your money back. I don’t like keeping gold I haven’t earned. I’m simply wasting my time at Oxford. As for the Official SUN Party over at Brent Cross, I’m pretty sure they’re legit. I met Madam Edkins this afternoon about an artefact I got from the cannibals up north.” He briefly described the tungsten flask and the radioactive source, and was quite open about having received two thousand ounces for them. “She’s no fool. She would never tolerate a party under ZEEBRI’s roof if there was the slightest doubt as to its legitimacy.”

Johnny Albert remained quiet for a while, staring through the sloping front window as if he were still roaring the marble-smooth highways of the Public Era of his youth.

“I don’t agree with you. I believe the attacks are sent out by the SUN Party. Their hooligans are undermining the authority of us ultramarines. They’ll keep at it until they have a critical mass of support from ZEEBRI, Chance and Buckley, Chadderton and other leading factory owners, then they’ll simply push us out and rule London. With London, they get the Island of Britain, because they get the canal network. The Big Seven sovereign lands and all the Midlands asylums would have to accept the new rulers of London, or they wouldn’t be able to trade.”

“I’ve met other ultramarines with the same view.”

“And you don’t agree?”

“It’s hard to accept Madam Edkins would condone such things.”

“The factory bosses hate the sovereigns and they hate us. However much smiling they do for appearances, they hate us.”

“I would like to present an idea for dealing with the hooligans.”

“Go on, then.”

“I’ve done a lot of reading about the economics of the Public Era, especially the Soviet Union and the Nazi Empire.”

“Those are particularly interesting periods.”

“During the Second World War, the Nazis used slave labour to produce the most advanced weapons in the world. They built jet fighters, ballistic missiles and elektro-boat submarines.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s potential in the Night and Fog system not being exploited at the moment. Suppose we open a camp somewhere quiet, somewhere the outside world will never find it, but not too far from London. In the Fens around The Wash, for instance. And suppose we gather all this street riff-raff and ship it off to this remote place and make it work for us. We’ll rake in a fortune. And we’ll disappear the riff-raff. We kill two birds with one stone.”

“How do we catch the riff-raff?”

“By being better prepared. Learn the art of surveillance. Establish a screen of nests from which any gathering attack will be spotted. Use hard-wired field telephones to alert a command centre and have a reception committee waiting.”

This apparently gave Johnny Albert pause for thought. What Nightminster could not decide was whether the thinking was positive or negative.

“Let me say this, young Big Knight. You won’t find this magic hideaway you seek in the Fens. Some damned sovereign will have got there first. Those bastards claim every scrap of land there is. If it was that easy, I’d have done it myself.”

“I’m pretty confident at least one of the Big Seven sovereigns has an interest in that area.” He told Johnny Albert about the fast ships seen by barge crews in the vicinity of The Wash. “It’s a long shot, but it might be possible to buy a quiet spot for the right price.”

“Don’t waste your time hoping for that. You might as well wish upon a star. Think realistically. And stay alive. You’ve a taste for teasing Death that’s just not healthy.”

“Let me have your balancing house account number and I’ll pay the gold back.”

“Forget about it. But I’m keeping the five hundred from the Owner of Rugby until you get a result.”

“Which particular result had you in mind, Captain?”

“Either Oxford or Brent Cross or both are sending the attack squads. That puts Tom and Victorina K high on my list of suspects. Get close to them and prove it. I know what I’m asking isn’t easy, but then, five hundred ounces isn’t exactly pissy dosh. My senior lieutenant doesn’t clear that in a month.”

Nightminster’s long, slow sigh of exasperation must have been just audible.

“Come on, Big Knight, indulge your friendly neighbourhood Johnny. You know what a good friend I am.”

“I’ll do my best, Captain.”

“I’m not asking for your best, any slob can give their best. It’s results I need.”

“Yes, Captain.”

*

Nightminster returned to Oxford by motorbike. Towards the end of Sunday afternoon, he decided to stretch his legs with a walk into the city to collect mail from his college pigeon hole. There was a letter waiting for him. It was ominously official, from the Dean of the Faculty of Science of Oxford University. He was to appear before the Faculty Disciplinary Committee the following Wednesday to explain his poor attendance record. It was noted that while his marks in Thermodynamics and Electromagnetic Radiation were top of the class, those in Applied Physics and Classical Mechanics were below the minimum acceptable. It was acknowledged that personal problems could affect a student’s performance, for which reason the Faculty Board wished to offer Mr Nightminster every assistance in bringing his record up to standard.

The letter irritated rather than worried him.

The November edition of the Glorious Gazette, the corporate news journal of General Wardian, had made it through the university postal service. When he got back to his digs at the Jenkins’ rooming house, he browsed through it.

Two items so horrified him that he was unable to sleep and spent much of that night roaming through the cold bluster of November in the abandonments between his digs and Wolvercote village. First thing in the morning, he sent a coded message to London from the messengers’ office in the High Street of Oxford. He demanded a meeting with his handler, Account-Captain Roberts.

Chapter 19

Account-Captain Roberts took until the following Thursday to respond to his agent’s call. He arrived as usual as ‘Uncle Robert’, wearing denim dungarees, heavy boots with canvas gaiters, a Shetland jumper and a black leather jacket. An excellent rendition of a London asylum accent completed his disguise as a travelling plaster moulder. Nightminster led the way from his digs to the local pub. The place had probably not changed much since the Glorious Resolution, in fact, it might not have changed since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was a half-timbered inn that lodged students. The gnarled, cracked old beams of the saloon were so low that Nightminster had to tilt his head to clear them. The tables were ornate cast-iron lumps of immense weight. Roberts bought a couple of wooden quarts of Oxford bitter and they settled in an alcove a few yards from the fire. After taking a good glug, Nightminster set his tankard down. Although his impulse was to give Roberts the full blast of his rage, he knew it would be pointless to treat a senior officer that way. He let the account-captain take the lead.

To begin with, perhaps detecting that Nightminster was angry about something, Roberts complimented the mottled brown jacket. He fingered a coat tail, intrigued by the soft leather.

“Where did you get this? It’s beautifully cut.”

“It’s a family heirloom, made from a special breed of pig now extinct.” Nightminster was growing a little tired of having to tell the story, for the cannibal jacket did attract a great deal of attention.

“You requested an urgent meeting and I have not been urgent in my response,” Roberts said. “I apologise for that. Believe it or not, your note took a day to get through the corporate postal system and then it just missed me leaving for Camberley College. Unfortunately, the ways of bureaucracy can be exasperating.” As Nightminster was unresponsive, he added: “Why did you call this meeting?”

“There are some issues we need to discuss. But first I’ll summarise what I have found so far.”

He described the apparent lack of any SUN Party presence at Oxford, and his recent visit to the Brent Cross HQ of the Official SUN Party. He omitted the audience with Madam Edkins, as he considered it none of General Wardian’s business. Roberts was less than impressed.

“It’s up to you to find a way around the social divide.”

Nightminster explained his efforts to do just that: going to sports clubs, debating clubs, dances, trying to befriend snotty law students, even writing to Tom and Victorina Krossington directly, all to no avail. At this, Roberts warmed and nodded, acknowledging his hasty judgement.

“All right, I accept you’ve been a hard-working agent and this is a genuine difficulty. Keep at it. You’re a clever and resourceful young man.”

“Have there been any more mass attacks in London since Wandsworth?”

Roberts explained that the situation in London had worsened. Gang violence against off-duty glory troopers had spread from Brent Cross to other asylums around London. One corporal walking down his home street in civilian attire had been set upon and beaten to death with steel pipes. Nightminster knew all about that unfortunate person. He was about to discuss him in the most forceful terms with Roberts. Two others had survived but were hospitalised. The local ultramarine owners were furious about this challenge to their rule. The most frustrating thing was, no one knew if these attacks were by SUN Party members or not. SUN Party branches in the asylums absolutely denied all involvement, although that did not prove anything.

Nightminster lifted out his copy of the Glorious Gazette and smoothed it on the table. He peeled it open at the obituaries and rapped a finger on a photo of a grinning young man with a long face dominated by an angular jaw.

“That was the corporal who was beaten to death. He was in the 1st City of London Reserve Regiment. His name was Charlie Banneville.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“Not a friend, no, but we looked very similar. He was tall, athletic and had a big nose, just like me. You could say we were natural acquaintances.”

“I can assure you there’s great outrage in the corporation about his murder.”

“Is the corporation aware of rumours weeks old that Charlie Banneville shot Jumping Jackson at Parliament Square?”

“From whom have you heard such rumours?”

“Zealots of the Official SUN Party.”

“You know such zealots?”

“The brother of a former girlfriend told me back in late September that the Brent Cross SUN party had named Charlie Banneville as the shooter.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“Because I was stupid enough not to take it seriously. Now I take it seriously. Which is why I must raise with you my outrage at that.”

He smacked his hand down on the page where graduations of the various grades of securitician were announced. There at the centre of the page was Sergeant P. W. Nightminster freshly graduated with distinction from the Securitician B. Even someone flipping casually through the magazine could not miss it. The blurb included that he was off to study physics at the distinguished University of Oxford, sponsored by the corporation.

“That’s a disgrace. Inexcusable. Absolutely inexcusable.”

“I fail to see why.”

“Do you really not get it? Zealots at Brent Cross must have a description of me—that should be bleeding obvious from them naming and then killing Charlie Banneville. How long before they track down the only other tall guy with a big nose who was at the riot?”

“How are they going to link that article with what happened on Parliament Square?”

“It says I was in the 2nd Reserve Regiment. They know the 2nd Reserve was on Parliament Square. Do I have to spell it out to you?”

“The article mentions nothing about your height. Even if someone happened to read this—and I might add that very few troopers do read the gazette—you’re just one of the regiment.”

“You should have stopped this being published.”

“Nightminster, you’re a rather special person. You graduated with distinction from the Securitician B at eighteen and you’re a student of Oxford University. You are exactly the kind of person the Glorious Gazette writes about. The corporation is very proud of you. To organise some great exception would require at least scores—possibly hundreds—of people to know you are a special case, which could only raise speculation as to why you’re a special case. Do you really think that would make you safer?”

Nightminster sat back, blasting out frustration through his teeth. The smug bureaucratic reasoning merely goaded his outrage. He leaned so close that his nose almost touched the temple of the account-captain.

“If anything like this happens again, I will not be a happy camper, Account-Captain.”

Roberts expressed a silent, tight-lipped nod of suppressed anger and budged the conversation on. He gave Nightminster a pep-talk. The imperative was to understand how Banner and the Krossingtons directed street thugs in the London asylums. Once a chain of command was proven back to the Oxford party leadership, the Westminster Assembly would order the three glory trusts (General Wardian, Universal Parrier and Guards to the People) to suppress the SUN Party.

Nightminster listened to this glib conviction and realised, with a sinking fatalism, that General Wardian had no more of a clue what was going on than Johnny Albert did. The high heid yins of General Wardian were committed to what had started as a guess, became wishful thinking and now was corporate policy.

“You’re really convinced that Banner and the two Krossingtons are pulling the strings of these hoodlums? I’ve not encountered a whiff of the Oxford SUN Party even in Oxford, let alone anywhere in London. I think you want it to be true because it would be simpler. Condemning a few dons is much easier than confronting ZEEBRI, the most powerful industrial complex on the Island of Britain.”

“It’s not like that at all. We’ve no evidence that the Brent Cross branch is anything more than what it says on the tin, a local asylum branch just like any other. Such branches are all over London. They are not the heart of the party.”

Nightminster could not be bothered arguing with him. They parted outside the pub a few minutes later, the account-captain walking briskly away in the direction of the city centre.

Nightminster passed a long and difficult night. The anodyne reasoning of the account-captain did not convince him he was safe. In normal circumstances Roberts would probably have been right, but these were not normal circumstances. Glory troopers who joined the SUN Party would meet people that in ordinary life they would never have got within a mile of. It vastly magnified the chance that someone from the reserve regiment would meet some thug from Brent Cross. After that, Nightminster of Bermondsey asylum would be a hunted man on his home turf.

*

The next day, Friday, Nightminster skipped the last lecture before lunch. He was going to buy components to make a shortwave radio station. He was reaching the level of desperation to give anything a try, no matter how far-fetched. He followed Father Richardson’s detailed directions—King of the Sparks was not a place one stumbled upon. After taking a lane off the High Street, Nightminster came to what appeared to be the arched passageway described by Father Richardson, including the notice ‘Private, residents only’. He walked down a gloomy tunnel between a paper recycling business and a pen maker’s shop to emerge into a small courtyard surrounded by the backs of buildings three storeys high. A staircase of galvanized steel—a fire escape from the days when such regulations existed—zig-zagged up to a balcony enclosed with corrugated iron painted glass black. Well, according to Father Richardson, that was the entrance to King of the Sparks.

Nightminster could hear a woman talking somewhere nearby, her voice amplified by the acoustics of the surrounding brick walls. It was a balmy afternoon for mid-November, a ground-floor window was wide open near the base of the steel staircase. Her voice was soft and friendly, not hoity-toity like most of the students Nightminster met, who made full use of accents acquired at public schools. This was a girl from the south coast, a nice English country accent, not too strong and not at all pretentious. He glanced in through the window expecting to see a couple of maids or shop assistants chatting.

He froze dead to the spot.

Victorina Krossington was sitting at a rough wooden table right there at the window. He could have reached in and touched her. She was holding a cracked mug of tea in both hands, smiling across the table at someone as she told a story, something about a wet camping holiday. Her tangle of thick red hair was clipped back by a steel clasp revealing one ear, delicate and small, with a steel pin in the piercing of the lobe. She seemed weary and dreamy, as if—. Seconds passed. He stood there, dumbed by that eighteen inches of solid plate class divide. Never in his life had he been clamped dumb like this before a girl. He felt strangled. Becoming aware of him, she turned and looked up into his eyes, with her slate-blue eyes, so vivid against her pale skin and bright red hair. She faltered, frowning, becoming wary of this towering presence within arm’s reach. He waited for her to recognise him.

Someone rapped his chest. He jumped, startled from the spell. Two Krossington marines had condensed out of thin air right before him. Their pale blue berets only came up to his mouth level, but he was under no illusions as to how tough they were. Shoulders thick as walls and hard-set, unflinching eyes. They carried automatic pistols in belt holsters.

“Can we help you?”

The man who spoke sported two Bath stars on each epaulette. Nightminster guessed he might be a lieutenant.

“I was just visiting the King of the Sparks.” He pointed to the steel stairs. “It’s an emporium for electronics stuff, just up there.”

“Please present your ID.”

Nightminster produced first his matriculation booklet, then in the hope of gaining sympathy added his General Wardian ID. He was blushing and sweating, feeling utterly foolish reduced to the status of a guilty schoolboy. He knew Victorina must be looking up at him, scrutinising, judging his every gesture, the exact body language, whether it betrayed giggly meekness. He could not understand how she could fail to recognise him from Parliament Square. The officer puckered his lips as he studied the General Wardian ID.

“Nightminster. Now that’s not a common name. Where the hell have I seen that before?”

The sweat turned cold on Nightminster’s forehead.

“Oh I remember, Glorious Gazette. We read it to find talent. You graduated the Securitician B with distinction, there can’t be two Sergeant Nightminsters in General Wardian.”

Nightminster tried to speak. A sort of gasping croak came out. He coughed and cleared his throat.

“You must have a fine memory.”

“A fair memory for what counts. In our job, it pays to have sharp eyes. We’re the bodyguards to Her Decency Victorina whom you were, ah, observing just now. It’s very interesting to meet you, actually. Ever thought of coming across to us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Join the Krossington marines! Enjoy the high life. You could be doing my job guarding Her Decency after you leave these dreaming spires for the real world. Next time you’re in London, you drop by at Wilson House and ask for Lieutenant Bob Stewart, that’s me, and we’ll have a chat about your future.”

“I’ll certainly do that,” Nightminster said, mechanically. Still Victorina said nothing, not even after hearing his name, which had been spoken in her presence by Account-Captain Kumar on Parliament Square. Apparently, she remembered nothing. Or perhaps, she did not care to speak through the plate-class divide. He put away the two ID booklets and in anguishing self-consciousness turned his back on Her Decency Victorina to walk away and climb the steel steps. On turning around at the first landing, he found he was now too high to see in through the open window. He climbed on slowly, his legs heavy and his soul dull. Damn those stupid bureaucrats of General Wardian. Damn and damn them.

*

Later that day, numerous fragments of doubt, frustration, and self-preservation coalesced to a conclusion in his head. He had reached the end of borrowed time. Any action, no matter how drastic, was safer than doing nothing.

What was it that British officer had said in the Second World War of the Public Era? The boldest measures are the safest. That was dead right. That was how it was going to be.

Chapter 20

Saturday. The perfect day of the week for his enterprise. At just after 2 pm, Nightminster dropped a stout wooden crate in the middle of Oxford High Street outside the main entrance to the Covered Market. As always on a Saturday at this time, there were masses of people flowing in and out of the Covered Market and bicycles gliding up and down the High Street. Some were ‘common’ students looking for bargains and some were servants buying whole pigs or sides of beef or crates of grapefruit or sweet potatoes for the Saturday night of their sovereign masters.

Nightminster stepped up onto the wooden box. He held a staff in his right hand, its end stabbed in the gravel of the High Street. He twisted the staff to unravel a home-made rendition of the flag of the SUN Party, an orange circle on a dark green background. Now passers-by were glancing up, some squinting, some smiling in amusement. One or two stopped, probably thinking he was about to start a comedy act.

“People of Oxford!” he exclaimed. He had never made a public address in his life. His voice sounded high and strained. He cleared his throat and pressed on. “Only half a lifetime ago, our city held ten times the number of people that live here today, and they had ten times more money. Motor cars poured along the great highways across farmland that was empty, for in those days, machines did the work for the people.

“But today, today we live in a very different world. Those exact same fields are the daily toil of wretched natives who suffer that a few may pursue lives of the most scandalous idleness!”

He was gathering a crowd now. Regular working men in denim dungarees, boots greased for winter, regarded him with mouths compressed flat, but their eyes already bright with admiration. The older women were more forthright. Already he had two competing hecklers a few yards in front of him.

“Well said, lad!” a stout woman with a dark green shawl exclaimed.

“Bloomin’ disgrace—a student of all people up on his soap box yelling about other folk being idle,” another stout woman with a dark red shawl groused.

“Aw give over, Bessie, he’s right and you know it.”

“He’s just a layabout with a big mouth.”

“People of Oxford!” Nightminster hailed again. “Ever since I was twelve years old, I have worked. I crawled across the ceilings of machine shops to oil the power shafts and at night I studied. Later I stood at a lathe all day and at night I studied. There were days I beat rivets until my hands were numb, yet at night I still studied. In this city there are who have never worked a day in their lives. A few—a very few—own this world we inhabit and rule us like cattle. That is wrong! We the people must organise ourselves, and demand and obtain the nation that is ours by right.” His voice had risen to a crescendo perilously close to cracking. He lifted the staff and shook the flag. “The SUN Party is leading the way. Solidarity! Unity! Nation!”

He repeated the slogan again and again. Many around him started to clap, the chant grew. His audience was swelling rapidly into a crowd as those within the Covered Market poured out, their curiosity drawn by the shouting. Cyclists from both directions paused and formed a knot. More sinisterly, Nightminster spotted a couple of university guardians in their black uniforms hastening closer. These were the university constabulary. They reported directly to the proctor of the university.

Nightminster pressed on. He remembered the speakers on Parliament Square and took his technique from them. Speak in short bursts rising to a climax, reap the applause, give a chant of solidarity, unity, nation to get everyone warmed up, then rinse and repeat. He had written the speech over the last couple of days and memorised it, rehearsing in silence before the mirror above his sink. It was only now in real life that he had to project his voice to fill a city street. His voice was not accustomed to this work and he was getting hoarse.

The two university guardians budged their way to the front of the crowd and stood with their arms folded staring at him from just beyond the two stout women who were still heckling. Nightminster moved on to the most pragmatic part of his speech in which he claimed the SUN Party had membership of fifty thousand. He drew on the history of the Public Era to illustrate the vital need for the workers to unify if they wanted change. The sovereigns ruled by guns and gold, and could plot at leisure against the people in their clubhouse, the Westminster Assembly. The affluence of the Public Era rested on democratic representation of the people and caustic mass media that held those in power to account. Only through mass organised demand could the days of affluence be dragged back from the history books.

He sensed the audience growing restless. Facts and analysis did not captivate a crowd. He cut that section short and roused them with more chants of solidarity, unity, nation. It was a harder task having lost their attention. The outer edges of the crowd were starting to thin and drift away.

As he set off into the final stretch of speech, from his left he heard a tram-tramp-tramp getting louder. This would be a squad of university guardians. He ignored the growing pounding of boots on gravel as he listed the reasons for all of his listeners to join the SUN party to build strength in numbers. He could hear uneasy shuffling and then objections as the squad ploughed into the crowd. The leader’s arrogant voice drowned out Nightminster’s:

“Well what do we have here? A zealot of the socialists no less!”

Nightminster glanced to see a sturdy young man in a tweed jacket at the head of a wedge of young men wearing exactly the same shade of pale bluish-grey tweed jacket. From the size of them, he guessed they must be a rugby team. The squint nose and stumpy, muscular neck of their leader hardened this impression. Nightminster turned to the fore and started speaking again A blow to the back of his knees knocked the legs from under him. He landed hard on the top of the crate, taking the impact on his kidneys. Twisting away to roll off the crate and regain his feet, he confronted his attacker, his fists up by his temples in defence, ducking and flicked his head back to deflect a punch off his left shoulder. He assumed the guardians would wade in and stop this action, for which reason he retreated several paces, rebuffing two more punches, one of which caught him in the side under the rib cage and banged a nauseating shock into him. Snatching a glance, he saw the two guardians had not budged. They stood there grinning like the bigoted oafs they were.

Nightminster attacked with a low kick at the right knee and a quick jab. He was fighting a heavily-built man a few years older than he was, a man with fists like bricks and a furious gleam in his dark eyes. Nightminster feinted with a left and stepped into an uppercut which his attacker snapped back to dodge. By neat footwork the other man danced to the right and whipped in with a left hook. In a fight, seconds last a long time. Breath whooshes in and out, the blood pounds in the ears. Nightminster caught his attacker with a hack down the shin followed by a body-barge that took the fight to the ground, after which any semblance of the art of pugilism was lost as two snarling dogs rolled over and over on the gravel swearing, scrabbling for grip, twisting and kicking, teeth bared and eyes flaming. This was too much even for the guardians. They dragged the young men apart, banged on handcuffs and hauled them off towards the Proctor’s Court while their colleagues ordered the crowd to disperse.

*

Nightminster and Bull Neck were presented to the sergeant on duty in the jailhouse behind the Proctor’s Court.

“Which one of you is that fucking ranting commie?”

When neither of them replied, one of the constables who had brought them in pointed at Nightminster.

“That’s him.”

“Name?” the sergeant demanded.

“Prentice Wyston Nightminster.”

“Pr— What? What kind of a name is ‘Nightminster’?”

“My family came from Kent.”

“That explains a lot—I’m surprised you don’t have three eyes, you inbred twat.” He smoothed down the seam of the receiving register. “What’s your occupation, supposing you have one?”

“I am a student here.”

“What college?”

Nightminster gave it. The sergeant wrote up these details in the register with a fountain pen. When finished, he shifted his attention to Bull Neck in the blue-grey tweed jacket, now scuffed and muddied from the tussle on the gravel.

“Name?”

“Charles Maurice Wilson Krossington-Darcy.”

The effect was as if electric charges had been blasted into the feet of the guardians. The sergeant snapped to attention. One of the constables fumbled with the handcuffs, yanking them off.

“My apologies, Your Decency. You are free to go.”

“Thank you.” Charles Maurice Wilson Krossington-Darcy turned to Nightminster, grinding fist on palm. “We’ll continue our little discussion at a later date.”

Nightminster said nothing as he brushed past. His shoes scrunched off out of hearing.

“Okay, you cool off in the cells and the proctor will see you first thing on Monday morning.”

“Why does he walk free?”

“Put him in Cell 1, that’s the coldest.” The sergeant regarded Nightminster with contempt. “I don’t like you commies. I think the whole lot of you should be rounded up and shot.”

One of the constables pulled Nightminster towards a corridor lined with a dozen or so doors and pushed him into the first cell on the right. After removing the handcuffs, he slammed the door and locked it. Nightminster took a quick look around. The cell was about eight feet long by six wide, with a narrow wooden platform that presumably counted as a bed. There was also a seat, and a latrine bucket with a cloth over it. The walls were white-washed brick and the floor bare concrete. There was one small barred window at his face height. A corner of the window had lost a chunk of glass, allowing a steady leak of November into the cell.

First he inspected his cannibal’s jacket. It was smeared with mud, although beneath that the hide did not appear much harmed, just a few scrapes here and there that could be polished out with patience. After some TLC the jacket would have acquired a ‘lived in’ look, the spanking newness would be gone. He put the jacket back on and considered his position.

Overall, he was inclined to view the day at least cautiously as a success. There was no question that his speech and the fight would be the talk of the town. It was a terrific stroke of luck that his assailant turned out to be of the Krossington clan. That more or less guaranteed a rapid report to Dr Tom Krossington in the top cadre of the SUN Party. As for the preferential release of Krossington-Darcy, this bothered Nightminster not in the slightest. On the contrary, it worked his way by underscoring the very social privileges the SUN Party stood against. The only slight annoyance was that his side hurt when he breathed, following the punch he had taken under the ribs. Charles Maurice Wilson Krossington-Darcy certainly knew how to punch!

However, for the time being, he had to put up with a couple of days of tedium—chilly tedium—until the Proctor’s Court opened. He settled on the planked bed with one knee propping his chin while he practised thought exercises to pass the time.

*

Later that Saturday afternoon, Nightminster had a visitor. This was a skinny, middle-aged man of about average height with prematurely white hair. His neck was vulture scrawny. It emerged from a black academic gown that covered everything—he could have been naked underneath. The visitor introduced himself as Professor Smythe, a member of the university faculty whom the proctor had asked to take a statement from the accused.

“Why am I accused?” Nightminster demanded. “I was attacked whilst peacefully airing my political convictions.”

“The disciplinary process is the purview of the Office of the Proctor,” Professor Smythe said in bland tones. “Kindly provide me your account of what happened. Be as succinct as possible.”

Nightminster complied to the best of his ability. The professor wrote it all down on sheets headed with the heraldry of the Office of the Proctor.

“What am I accused of?”

“My role is purely to gather evidence.”

As the professor collected the sheets and prepared to leave, Nightminster said:

“When will I meet with my counsel?”

“I expect the disciplinary process will be explained at the appropriate time.”

The professor was becoming flustered as he rapped on the door for the duty constable to let him out.

“You expect? What kind of a system is this? None of you knows what’s going on!”

The professor said nothing. He kept his back to Nightminster, and bolted like a rabbit when the constable opened the door.

Nightminster woke on Monday morning without any defending counsel having come to see him or any declaration of the charges he faced. The constables who brought his meals ‘knew nothing’ about the disciplinary process, needless to say. However, they did bring him a sponge, water and polish to clean up his jacket, and they provided soap and a freshly-sharpened razor with which to make himself look presentable for court.

*

“Okay, Nightminster, on your feet.”

Two constables led him deeper inside the building of the Proctor’s Court and up a spiral stairway to emerge into the court through the floor. The court reminded Nightminster of his old public school’s debating chamber. It was square, with a gallery that ran around all four walls from which spectators overlooked the proceedings. The gallery was packed. Scores—possibly more than a hundred—faces greeted him. Cheers and boos erupted. An elderly official banged his staff repeatedly for silence. Nightminster and his escort stood inside a ‘dock’ enclosed by wooden railings. He sat on a bench, his two escorts joining him on either side. Opposite the dock was a wooden throne on which the proctor would presumably sit. The intervening space was occupied by two long wooden desks with seats, presumably for the opposing legal counsels.

The querulous court official finally won silence. A few minutes passed in which Nightminster took a look around the massed faces above. He spotted Carruthers the swot and Father Arthur Richardson, the irksome cleric from Cumbria. Nightminster’s chest thrilled with joy on recognising a tangle of red hair. It was Victorina Krossington. However, she was not looking at him, but speaking with a male neighbour. A few heads along the gallery was her elder brother Dr Tom Krossington, who stood beside the pencil-necked President Vasco Banner of the SUN Party. Banner eyed Nightminster with what could only be described as baleful impatience. On the direct opposite side of the gallery, behind and above him, Charles Krossington-Darcy surrounded by his beefy rugby cronies were bantering. Krossington-Darcy noticed the accused looking up at him and called:

“Did you sleep well?”

“Excellently, Your Decency.”

The court official banged his staff and shouted:

“No intercourse with the accused is permitted!”

This brought a wave of hilarity and cat-calling. Nightminster gazed up at Victorina Krossington as she swayed with her head tipped back, mouth wide laughing. He day-dreamed that their eyes would meet, but her attention was all at her own level. It seemed she was here only because friends were here. She displayed no interest towards the accused beneath her level. After much whacking of the floorboards, the court clerk regained quiet.

“All stand!”

Nightminster and his escort stood up. A file of four men and two women in late middle age, wearing black gowns and mortarboard hats with dangling black tassels, glided in and took seats at the tables. From their stooped postures and stick-insect limbs Nightminster did not suppose they had ever had to chop their own firewood. He recognised only Professor Smythe. After a half minute, a tall, elderly man who looked like his false teeth did not fit, emerged and paced to the throne, where he paused to look all about the court before he sat and declared:

“This court is in session. Accused, please stand.”

Since Nightminster did not move, one of his escorts gave him a dig in the ribs right where Krossington-Darcy had punched.

“Accused! On your feet.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the accused.”

“I’ve not been told of what I’m accused.” Nightminster looked across to the man on the throne and called: “I‘ve not been informed of the charges against me.”

“Then stand up, accused, and you shall have those charges read to you.”

Gritting his teeth with exasperation, Nightminster stood up. Now Her Dear Decency Victorina K was looking down at him, although with no particular engagement. On the two occasions they had met, he had been a silhouette against the bright sky. She must recognise his name, however, as it had been spoken in her presence on both occasions.

“Prentice Wyston Nightminster, you are accused of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.”

On hearing this, Victorina did lean forward. He met her eyes, although perceived no sense of locking her attention. It was as if he was looking back at her from a dark room. After a few seconds, she turned back to her male neighbour, a chap exhibiting calm disdain of his surroundings in line with good breeding.

“What is His Decency Charles Maurice Wilson Krossington-Darcy accused of?”

“How do you plead: guilty or not guilty?”

“I don’t plead. I do not recognise this travesty of justice.”

Nightminster sat down. From the gallery in front of him burst claps and cheers while from the gallery behind lowed boos and jeers.

The proctor turned to the court clerk.

“Kindly summon the first witness.”

For the next hour a stream of witnesses passed through the stand. They were members of the squad who had followed Charles Krossington-Darcy into action. They were all of the Krossington clique: a Christie-Krossington here and a Tarran-Krossington there. The statements had such a systematic quality that it became obvious they were rehearsed. The story laid to the court was that Charles Krossington-Darcy had politely asked the accused to stop breaching the peace of the High Street, whereupon the accused had viciously hacked his shin and punched him in the face. There had ensued a fight as His Decency sought to defend himself from a determined assault.

After each statement, the proctor asked Professor Smythe whether he wished to question the witness. On each and every occasion, Professor Smythe declined with a bow.

A statement was also taken by a doctor who had treated Charles Krossington-Darcy’s wounds. He described serious contusions to the left shin, bruised ribs, a torn shoulder muscle and cuts to the inside of his cheeks and lips consistent with having received blows to the face. The victim had also complained of headaches.

Nightminster was finally called to the witness stand. Professor Smythe coached him through his version of events, while murmurings and occasional outbursts of “What a lie!” came down from the gallery, to raps of the court clerk’s staff. When Professor Smythe was finished, the Prosecuting Counsel soared into action. He spent half an hour making a virtually line-by-line demolition of Nightminster’s statement in relation to the ‘consistent evidence to the contrary by a multitude of witnesses’.

“Their statements are lies,” Nightminster said, many times.

“On the contrary, Mr Nightminster, I am sure this court is swayed by the weight of evidence that it is you who are the liar,” Prosecuting Counsel concluded.

The proctor withdrew to consider the evidence and make his decision. This took him all of five minutes. He returned to cheers from the crowd around Charles Krossington-Darcy. The proctor waited until the court clerk had achieved silence.

“I have reviewed the evidence—which I do not consider in any way inconclusive—and will now report my verdict.” He paused. “The accused Prentice Wyston Nightminster is guilty as charged.”

Cheers and boos collided in the air overhead. Furious banging of the clerk’s staff. The proctor continued, almost shouting. He seemed accustomed to rowdiness in his court. “It must be stated that this court is an institution of the university and is not a court martial, a consistory, or a sovereign land council. Therefore, it has no powers to define punishment. The remit of this court is to determine whether the behaviour of a student or member of staff fell beneath the minimum that will be tolerated within the society of this university. I have taken further advice from the accused’s tutor, who declined to appear in defence of his student. He states that the accused’s studies showed only an ambiguous commitment to our community and that his departure would be no loss. I can reach only one conclusion.

“The offense of assault occasioning actual bodily harm is far beneath what our society will tolerate and therefore I must declare Prentice Wyston Nightminster no longer a member of our society. His name will be struck from the matriculation list. His sponsor will be informed and any balance of fees refunded.”

A cold tension swept over Nightminster. He had risked exactly this consequence and he had lost the gamble. The gallery took the verdict with an applause of fulfilled vindictiveness mixed with cries of “Shame!”. He looked up at President Banner, hoping he would protest, receiving only the same gaze of baleful impatience as from his neighbour, Dr Tom Krossington. The pair of them might have been appraising a pen of goats about to get beheaded for all the concern they displayed. Nightminster saw in Victorina’s face—or was it just that he wanted to believe he saw?—a wince of sorrow before she retreated behind other people. None of the SUN Party group made any move to object to the Proctor’s judgement. It turned out he had risked all for a bunch of cowards.

Nightminster was out of Oxford.

“You’re a free man, Mr Nightminster,” the Proctor said. “From what I have been able to gather, you are an unusually intelligent, self-willed young man who will succeed in life eventually, although not via the opportunities offered by this place of learning. I wish you all the best in your endeavours.”

“And I wish you good riddance!” Charles Krossington-Darcy shouted, to much applause and cheering. That was the fanfare of Nightminster’s exit from the Proctor’s court and the University of Oxford.

Chapter 21

The front doorbell jangled a few minutes after Mrs Jenkins’ grandfather clock had chimed 8 o’clock that evening. Nightminster paid no attention, being absorbed in final checks to his creation, the shortwave radio transceiver inspired by Father Arthur Richardson. He was using a torch bulb and battery to check for short circuits. Electronic components, whether heirlooms of the Public Era or their equivalents copied by the industrial asylums, were not cheap in a society where everything had to be made from scratch by hand.

He heard shoes pounding up the stairs at a rate of knots. A heaving Mrs Jenkins rapped on his door.

“Mr Nightminster! Some visitors to see you! They must be awfully rich, there’s a huge limousine with a gun turret parked outside.”

He slipped a cracker pipe down inside his trousers, hitching the leather loop about a button to stop it dropping to his shoes, and followed his landlady down to the front hall. If this was a visitation from  Charles Krossington-Darcy and friends, Mrs Jenkins was going to be extremely upset as her grandfather clock, collection of China wall ducks and porcelain dogs got smashed in the ruckus. He paused behind the door, calming himself. He wrapped his hand about the cold brass handle and hauled the door wide.

His Decency Dr Tom Krossington stood on the doormat. At his shoulder was a torrent of hair leaning back against another young man. Her Decency Victorina’s face in profile was pure white as ivory contrasted against her vivid hair, deep reddish-orange like a dangerous dawn. She stood about half a head taller than her brother, on only modest heels. Her man was the same bland character she had been with in the Proctor’s Court. He possessed a fine, athletic physique and stood to about her height with the heels on, say six feet dead. Several awkward seconds passed. Nightminster contemplated his Pyrrhic triumph. At last, the Krossingtons, in person if not as yet in friendship! He gave Victorina’s man one sour glance before he said:

“How did you find me?”

“You wrote to Victorina and I a few weeks ago with some hare-brained scheme for an atomic plant.”

Nightminster nodded. Of course, the SUN Party had replied to the Jenkins’ house.

“What do you want?”

“Perhaps we could talk in the hall at least?”

“Mr Nightminster!” Mrs Jenkins hissed from behind him. “You’re being outrageously rude.”

Nightminster let go of the door and left them to make their own way in. He must not give them any hint he wanted to punch the air in triumph at their turning up. Mrs Jenkins uttering desperate apologies and got some grunts from Tom Krossington, who then issued his bodyguards instructions, in which the words “This won’t take long” were notable. Nightminster slouched back up to his bedroom where he took a quick look around for underpants or other embarrassing items. The room smelt of soldering and camphone lanterns and the table was littered with the detritus of construction; sawdust, wire clippings, twisted bits of sheet metal and cut-offs of wood. There were books, papers and lecture notes piled on the chairs and along the sofa. The battery for the radio was as big as a Labrador dog and probably heavier. He dragged it against the bottom of the bed and was starting to clear the chairs as he heard the door open. Tom Krossington entered. He was taller than he had appeared from a distance, around five foot seven, with massive shoulders and arms. Anger at lack of inches in height had evidently provoked blind zeal in pumping weights for inches in breadth. Despite being dressed in common blue jeans and a rumpled, dark green sweater, nobody could have mistaken him for a slummy. The teeth were too white and perfectly aligned. Above all, there was about him an air of semi-interested remoteness not cultivated by the vulgar imperatives of an asylum.

Victorina’s slim form appeared close behind in a black calf-skin coat that reached down to her ankles. She peered about over Tom Krossington’s head with her delicious retroussé nose aiming this way and that while the slate-blue eyes flickered from the single bed, neatly made, to the construction site on the desk to the piles of books and papers Nightminster was stacking in one corner. She frowned, amused, as if peering into the cage of some mysterious reptile. Her consort hovered behind her. Nightminster supposed he played good tennis and could prattle all afternoon without saying a thing. He knew the type well enough.

“How cosy,” Tom Krossington said. He held out his hand. Nightminster shook it, feeling his own hand long and slender compared with the slab of meat on offer. “My full name is Thomas Thomson Krossington, but everyone calls me TK.”

“Of all the things I get called, Big Knight is the least profane.”

“This is Rina and Algernon.”

“Delighted.” Nightminster smiled. As neither of them even looked at him, he attended to TK. “Do your best to find a seat—I wasn’t expecting company.”

TK displayed no offence at the absence of ‘Your Decency’. He perched on a clear end of the sofa. When Rina and Algernon remained standing, apparently too bashful to choose their own seats, TK pointed to the bed and said: “Sit there.” They did. Rina’s scent wafted about Nightminster, a mix of rosewater and warm flesh. TK leaned forward to inspect the shortwave radio station on the table. By eye, he followed the wires down to the floor and across to the battery at the foot of the bed.

“May I ask what that is?”

“It’s a radio station. I was about to test it. Since there’s a crowd of you, I’ll run it through the speaker.”

“What’s a radio station?”

“It’s a wireless transceiver in the range 3 to 30 megacycles, known in the Public Era as the shortwave spectrum.”

“Oh, you mean public broadcast. Why are you doing that?”

“To talk to strangers far away.”

“What a peculiar man you are! Where does that wire go?”

TK pointed at a cable from the station that disappeared under the window sill.

“Out there,” Nightminster said. He pulled aside the blackout curtain and opened the lower pane wide, to receive a waft of chilly air. “I’ve hung the aerial between this window and a pole fixed to the chimney breastworks of a ruin at the bottom of the garden. It provides a span of a hundred and fifty feet.”

“Fascinating. And where are these strangers far away?”

“On a good night I might reach the Northern Occident, or Eastern Europe.”

“Good God! But why talk to people you’ll never meet? ”

“To hear what they have to say. There’s gold in strangers, and there’s danger too, of course. Gold and danger are equivalent, just as in physics energy and mass are equivalent. E equals MC-squared and all that.”

“You’re a strange, strange man, Big Knight. I’m glad I came out to meet you. Banner thought it an utter waste of time and potentially dangerous. He’s terrified your stunt on the High Street will provoke the university to shut our party headquarters here in Oxford.”

“It’s on our property,” Victorina said. “If we want to host the SUN Party HQ, that’s our business.”

“No Rina, it’s the business of anyone who can catch the ear of Marcus-John.” To Nightminster, TK said: “Marcus-John is our elder brother. He’s the head of the Krossington clan, which makes him lord of the Lands of Krossington and all within.”

“Let’s try the radio,” Nightminster said. He connected up the main battery to the power terminals of the radio and stooped over the warming glass vacuum tubes, alert for sparks or smells of overheating. The station was built on a plywood base about the size of a chess board with the vacuum tubes, resistors, tuning mechanism and so forth set on insulators. Seeing nothing obviously amiss, he put on the headphones and began adjusting the frequency. He picked up traffic almost immediately. The damned thing worked! Just as the mathematics said it would. It was a busy night, or else reception was abnormally good. He caught a signal close to 10 megacycles so clear it could have come from next door. He switched on the loudspeaker with a crack that made all three of his guests jump as one. They gawped in amazement at the alien language issuing from the shoebox-sized speaker beside the radio station. TK smiled. Victorina looked downright alarmed.

“What on earth is going on? What is that thing?” she demanded in a strained voice.

“Don’t you recall how Grandad used to play us noises from the aether?” TK said. He added for Nightminster’s benefit: “Our grandad Doc Wilson Krossington was a famous engineer of the Public Era. He built great hydro-electric dams that powered cities across what was then called South America and Africa.”

“But he played heirloom boxes full of Public Era magic,” Victorina said.

“I don’t recall how a radio works, but I do know it’s all good, solid engineering, not magic.”

“Then what are they saying?”

“It’s German.” Nightminster had learned some of the language in the course of translating the instruction labels inside the planetarium projector. “Something about a Polish advance on Chemnitz having been stopped. It’s probably to do with the Eastern War.”

Victorina leaned towards him.

“But how can we hear them from over the horizon? I mean, Germany is a thousand miles away–I should know, I went to a ghastly school in the Swiss Alps!”

“The signal ricochets between the ground and the ionosphere.”

“What’s the ionosphere?”

Damnation, Victorina’s voice was soft like the caress of a silk scarf. Nightminster looked into her dark, slate-blue eyes.

“Have you ever seen shimmering curtains in the night sky?”

“You mean the Northern Lights?” She looked aside at her brother. “We see them up at Loch Sunart.”

“That’s the ionosphere, maybe thirty miles overhead.”

“You really are a quite extraordinary person, Mr Nightminster,” she said, sitting up straight and stretching both her slim legs out rigid from the bed. “I’ve never met anyone who could build Public Era magic like that. I bet Grandad Wilson would love to meet you.”

“Can we speak to others with your gadget?” TK asked.

“If we can find someone speaking English or French.”

“Make that Latin too.”

Nightminster smirked, imagining them dropping into conversation with Father Richardson and his ‘educated correspondents’ across the Continent.

“What’s so funny?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

For several minutes Nightminster roamed about the spectrum between 3 and 10 Megacycles as this generally carried the farthest at night. Certainly, the darkness was alive with chatter, some clear and some muffled under static. He explored higher frequencies, where the traffic thinned out. He paused, rapt, listening. Could this be the “radicals preaching blood and thunder” Father Richardson had described with such outrage? It sounded like political discourse of some sort.

“I think I’ve found some friends,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Listen.”

The other three leaned in. To begin with, it appeared to be an exchange between two men, one in London and the other in a northern asylum like Soho, to judge from the accents. However, from the quickness of the discussion, it became clear that both were talking into the same microphone and broadcasting to the universe. This confused Nightminster until the speaker with the London accent said:

“For those who have just joined us, this is a Reaction Radio broadcast by the Official SUN Party of Brent Cross to all who seek change. This evening I’m interviewing the owner of a factory somewhere in the north, who naturally cannot say who he is, but he can tell us what he believes and why he’s joined our party.”

The northern accent spoke. It was a full, confident voice, the voice of one accustomed to wielding authority. Nightminster judged this a more honest person than the station host, whose style was nasal and smarmy.

“With the Official SUN Party, almost everyone wins. The asylums win because spending by the new state means more jobs and bigger factories, which means better productivity and that means workers can be paid more. The ultramarines will gain from the increase in trade and everyone will gain from the building of hospitals and schools for the people. There’s only one power block left out and that’s the sovereigns. They know the new state will push them off the stage, so they’ll fight. That’s what makes them the enemy of the people.”

“That’s a forceful vision, although I must stress it is Official SUN Party policy to treat the sovereigns as fellow passengers on the ship called ‘progress’.”

“You’re wasting your time. I’ve seen enough of the sovereigns to know they are utterly selfish. They won’t yield an inch. Look at what happened on Parliament Square last summer. A peaceful demonstration by the people ended in murder. I’m pleased to see your party will shut down the glory trusts. I’d go a lot further than that. I think all officers of staff rank should be executed.”

“Ahem! Now I must stress that the Official SUN Party does not endorse violence. It is possible that criminal charges will be brought against individuals, such as the one who fired the shot at the Parliament Square rally. If that individual were apprehended, there would be a full legal process before a jury of the people.”

TK cleared his throat and said:

“Can you tell where this stuff is coming from?”

Nightminster took several seconds to reply. He was shattered to learn the shooting on Parliament Square was far from forgotten after all these months. On the contrary, he was still a high-profile criminal in the eyes of some.

“Not unless they tell us. But there’s a device for locating the direction of the signal. By taking the direction at two points some miles apart, you can draw lines on a map; the transmitter is where they cross.”

“Let’s hear some more,” TK said.

The host moved on to take questions, which were evidently transmitted from other stations, judging by the variety in the signal quality. No names were given—it was all just voices from the night sky. A woman asked whether there had been progress in finding the shooter of Parliament Square. The host said enquiries continued, the obstacle was the bureaucratic fog of General Wardian glory trust.

“I’ve heard enough,” TK said. “We’ll have to discuss this with Banner and come up with a response. The Brent Cross leadership are flagrantly in breach of party discipline running their own show and not telling us.”

Victorina shook her head.

“They were talking about the trooper who saved my life as some kind of criminal. How can that be?”

Nightminster stood up and positioned himself such that his head cast a shadow over her face. She looked up at him curiously, without the slightest indication she recognised him. Her memory from the time must be hazed or even erased by shock. Account-Captain Kumar had certainly spoken the name Nightminster as she lay on Parliament Square. Yet she obviously retained no recollection.

“How much do you people know about the Official SUN Party of Brent Cross?”

“They’ve sent us some material of a presumptuous nature claiming they’ve taken over the leadership of the party. They aren’t alone in being a branch that’s too big for its boots.”

“Is that all you think they are?”

The discussion was interrupted by a knock on the door. Mrs Jenkins arrived with a large silver tray bearing gleaming silver service and China cups. Nightminster suspected the long wait was due to her polishing everything. TK and he thanked her graciously and Nightminster played the perfect host pouring the tea. It was real tea too, much to his surprise, not the parsnip or catnip ‘tea’ the lodgers normally got served.

“You mind if I smoke?” TK was delving into a leather pouch of tobacco which even Nightminster, who was not a habitual smoker, thought smelled wonderful.

“Roll one for me, then.”

“Are you a thespian?” Victorina asked. Her roving attentions had spotted the stainless-steel armour plates. She leaned from the bed and stared at them

“The Proctor’s Court didn’t think so.”

Victorina tapped the front breastplate with her fingernail—Nightminster noticed she trimmed her nails close and practical.

“What are these for?”

“Protection when I’m out in the abandonments.”

She straightened up, her mouth a poppy of shock.

“You go out into the abandonments? But that’s terribly dangerous.”

“There is some hazard,” Nightminster agreed. He reversed the chair of the desk to face the room and took a seat for the first time. He was becoming impatient. His visitors would not get to the point. TK passed him a rolled cigarette and lit it with a silver lighter. They both inhaled and billowed out smoke around the two brass camphine lanterns hung from the ceiling.

“You were telling us about the abandonments,” TK prompted.

“I seek trade with strangers; as I said, danger equals gold.”

“And what do you do, if danger comes your way?”

Nightminster reached across to the drawer under his bed and lifted out the sawn-off shotgun. While squinting sideways through cigarette smoke, he loaded a couple of cartridges and flipped the barrels shut.

“Number One buckshot wins any argument, any day,” he said.

“Yours is the code of the barbarian.” Victorina scowled at him like a cross child.

“Oh, I’m not so sure about that.” TK tapped ash off his cigarette into an empty matchbox he must have salvaged from the wastebin. “Mr Nightminster knows foreign languages, he can build a remarkable gadget like that radio station and inform us of events we never even suspected. I’d say Mr Nightminster is quite an accomplished chap. But why did you stand up in the High Street and exhort the people to join the SUN Party? You’re the buccaneering type. People like you haven’t time for politics.”

“When I came up here, I couldn’t find the SUN Party anywhere, so I started my own campaign.”

Victorina uttered a chuckle.

“You certainly did that!”

“What are you, Big Knight?” TK leaned forward, finally becoming serious. “Who’s paying your fees here?”

“General Wardian glory trust. I’m a sergeant. After graduation, I’ll go up to Camberley College to get the Securitician A and graduate as an officer. If I kiss enough bums, I’ll rise to the top in time to be executed by the Official SUN Party.”

“I told you he was a glory sergeant,” Victorina said. “We encountered one another last week near somewhere called the King of the Sparks.”

“How could I forget?” Nightminster wondered what lay hidden by her matter-of-factness. The appearance of the sawn-off had, without question, dowsed her rising level of interest. If she was one of those who claimed to deplore violence, whilst enjoying the sanctuary of violence, then she was a hypocrite and a fool. He had no time for such people, however attractive.

“You’re a sergeant at eighteen, that is not a common achievement,” TK said. “And you reached this place from an industrial asylum, which is a vanishingly uncommon achievement. Tell me how a man like you developed such a passion for our SUN Party that he would risk his hard-won future.”

“Growing up in an industrial asylum made me an expert in the wretchedness of life without electricity and railways. We must build atomic power stations and electric trains, after that the natural process of enterprise will recover affluence.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“The example already exists in Cumbria up north, as I pointed out in the letter I wrote to you both. They have a legacy nuclear plant churning out electric power that liberates the people from the toils of the soil.”

TK shook his head. “Eventually the nuclear fuel in that plant will get used up, and the people will go back into the fields. That place is a freak, not the future.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! You accept the present because you lack the courage to reach for the impossible. Yet the impossible is only a matter of time and willpower.”

“Ah-ha! Finally I really understand what makes you tick. You want the SUN Party to fund your atomic dream if we gain power. Yes, or yes?”

“A party has to be visible to gain power. Since you choose to remain invisible, it does not take a genius to see how far you’re going to get. In the meantime, Reaction Radio is spreading across the night sky as we speak.”

His face had flushed. Like any salesman, he could sense he was approaching the make-or-break moment.

“The SUN Party has to keep a low profile here in Oxford. The university is touchy in the extreme about being home to what many regard as a bunch of communists. That’s why you couldn’t track us down. We assumed you were an agent provocateur in the pay of our enemies. Meeting you now persuades me you’re a one-off, although a one off of what is not clear.”

Nightminster leaned forward.

“Let me provide some advice from one who knows the asylums of London very well–advice you must heed if you wish to maintain the leadership of the party. You simply don’t exist down there. It’s your rival the Official SUN Party that exists, and is growing rapidly. If you want to beat them, you must gain favour with the ultramarine owners. They run the asylums. I can provide direct and discreet introductions. You’ll never get anywhere without their support.”

TK emitted a kind of snuffle, as if he could not even be bothered laughing at the idea, while Victorina and Algernon exchanged looks of baffled amusement. TK ground out his cigarette in the matchbox, dropped it in the bin, and stood to go. Victorina and Algernon rose like a couple of dogs.

“I can only wish you well in your life, Big Knight. Perhaps we’ll meet again. I rate you as too ambitious to let expulsion from university hold you back. But for the time being, it must be adieu.”

He departed, followed out by Victorina and Algernon. She left with one, last, enigmatic glance that could have meant anything and which he replayed in mind endlessly during the days to come, without scouring from it more than was there, a sort of Mona Lisa sfumato.

The armoured limousine rumbled off in the direction of the centre of Oxford.

Nightminster strapped on his Browning Hi-Power, pulled on warm clothing and went out for a walk up the public highway into the dark abandonments north of what survived of the ancient city. At night, no one went out on this highway except occasionally ultramarine bikers if there was moonlight. His only company was the sighing of the chilly eastern wind across the ruins of a fallen civilization. The isolation helped him think.

He could not believe he had lost, but he knew he had. The Krossingtons had come, seen and gone from his life. That was it. That was the end of Target Hundred Thousand.

This Oxford episode of his life had finished in complete failure. Now he would return to a London that had not forgotten the shooter of Parliament Square. The very air waves sang with outrage! It was unnerving to think of all the fellow troopers in his old reserve regiment who knew his name. There were more still at Reigate. Because of his amicability and excellent performance, he had become widely known amongst the regulars at the fortress—some of whom were SUN Party members.

One life was over, now a new one would have to begin.

Chapter 22

Nightminster awoke a free man in a flat that smelled of damp and, in one corner of the bedroom, sharply of decomposing mouse. On pulling out the wardrobe, he discovered the offending remains in a trap amongst drifts of dust. He opened the kitchen window and tossed dead mouse and trap still united by dried blood into some bushes of the back garden two floors below.

Since the summer, he had maintained this flat in Camden as his London base. A young man with 20 ounces on his palm for the deposit and six weeks’ rent was above such indignities as ID checks, which made his persona as Walker Preston, bicycle courier saving to buy a flat at the Kensington auctions, simple to maintain. The flat offered a large bedroom with a bay window view from the second floor, a living room, a kitchen with a cast-iron stove, and an indoor toilet, albeit with piss-pot and earth closet—one did not get a flushing toilet for 2 ounces and 9 pennyweights per week. He kept both the ersatz Motor Guzzi and his bicycle in a garage on the ground floor. By asylum standards, this was the high life.

At five minutes to two that afternoon, he entered the palace of Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey, and five minutes later sat opposite him at a table in the picture lounge of his rooftop bungalow. They were alone.

“I’ve been expelled from Oxford University, Captain.”

“You are a stupid twat, Big Knight.”

“It was a useless place.”

“What did you do?”

“Got in a fight with His Decency Charles Krossington-Darcy.”

“What for?”

He sketched his caper on the High Street and the set-up trial. His voice grew strained with humiliation describing the dismissive visitation by Tom and Victorina Krossington.

“Then you gambled and lost,” Johnny Albert said. “You are a twat even if you haven’t yet twigged you’re a twat.”

“I learned a few useful things from Tom and Victorina. They said the HQ of the Oxford SUN Party is on Krossington land. I can only suppose it’s inside the Krossington Institute.”

“It can’t possibly be.”

“And they aren’t sending the attack gangs.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because Banner, Tom and Victorina are transparently genteel people, deferential and intellectual, basically gutless courtiers. You know yourself how quickly you get a sense of people. Even if they pretend to be X, they give themselves away in little hints they’re actually Y. The person or persons organising these attack squads is someone like us, a leader who drives action, not a clique of courtiers sixty miles away. In any case, I still have to tell you about Reaction Radio.”

“What the hell is that?”

Nightminster explained Father Arthur Richardson’s outrage at radicals ‘blemishing’ the airwaves and the construction of his own shortwave station. He made no mention of the ongoing hunt for the shooter of Parliament Square, more because it would have come across as a whine than out of caution.

“The Brent Cross SUN Party is using radio?” Johnny Albert tapped his index finger on the table, as he did when at a loss. “But why? They might as well babble at the world in Babylonian like you do. No one uses public transmission any more, I mean, no one who matters. 99% can’t afford a set and the 1% who can don’t need the publicity. It’s just a cranks’ playtime these days.”

“It appears to be their way of projecting influence across the Island of Britain, at any rate to a network of party zealots.”

“Would you do some more listening? I want to know what those people are up to.”

“I’ll do that.”

“What are your plans, now you’re out of Oxford?”

“I still feel quite abstracted by the whole thing. When you fail as totally as I have, there’s a lot of rancour to absorb.”

“You need to move on–start a business! You’ve got lots of capital now, with that two thousand you got from ZEEBRI, then there’s five hundred I’ve given you, and General Wardian’s five hundred, and probably other bits and pieces I don’t know about. If you put the right idea on the table, I’d definitely lay down gold of my own. I have complete faith in your abilities, Big Knight, even if certain hoity-toity types don’t.”

“Thank you, Captain. I will be starting a business–a big one–when the time is right. I need more data first.”

“Is this your fantasy factory in the Fens? Look, take some advice from an old-timer who’s seen it all. Use what’s to hand now. Don’t waste your life day-dreaming about grand opportunities that never quite happen. Life’s too short for day-dreaming! I started at twenty and it wasn’t until I was forty that I gained any sense of permanence.”

Nightminster must have projected the anguish of passion clashing with pragmatism that he felt.

“Take a holiday with that fancy girlfriend of yours. The Rafatis run a chain of pawnbrokers right across London, those are the kind of practical, realistic people you can learn from. Relax, let your ideas settle, come back with a plan.”

“Mirana?” Nightminster pulled wry a face. “Her bed got cold. I’m not sure what happened. It’s just one of those things. People move on in life.”

Johnny Albert’s face softened.

“You’re not in a good way, Big Knight. No girl and no prospects. Would that five hundred ounces from the Owner of Rugby cheer you up?”

“No. I haven’t earned it. You wanted the friendship of the Krossington clan, and I did not deliver.”

“You’re being very hard on yourself, and I say that as Johnny Albert–not even my worst enemy ever accused me of sympathy.”

Nightminster stood up and pulled on the cannibals’ jacket.

“I’m going up to ZEEBRI tomorrow to sell an heirloom. I’ll look inside the SUN Party HQ and see what they’re up to.”

“You be careful of those people. Even if you think they’re legit, I think they’re dangerous scoundrels.”

They shook hands, and he made his way from the palace.

*

Nightminster departed his Camden villa just after 7 am the next morning. Now it was mid-November, dawn arrived late and dusk early. He rode his bicycle into the dawn twilight towing a contraption based on a Public Era luxury pram with over-sized, overlapping wheels and enormous curling springs from which the steel tub of the cradle hung. His load was not a 10lb infant, but a 35lb heirloom of the Public Era. He had strengthened the springs to enable the cradle to bear its load softly over the merciless potholes and cobbles of asylum streets.

He arrived at the frontier of Brent Cross industrial asylum about three-quarters of an hour later. He was unarmed, having deposited the Makarov near a characteristic twisted tree about a quarter mile back. It was a crisp, clear morning, for which he was thankful, as rain would not have suited his cargo. He waited in a queue of trucks and man-hauled wagons until his turn came with the frontier guards in their fanciful black leather armour.

“I have a Public Era heirloom to sell at ZEEBRI.”

The frontier guards eyed the adapted pram with amusement. Nightminster pulled back the tarpaulin to reveal his cargo. They peered closer, quite baffled.

“What might that be?” The chief of the duty guard had come out, drawn by the oddity of a bicycle towing a pram-like contraption. He was a solemn fellow in middle age, quite fit, with a thick beard and drooping moustache that emphasised his scepticism.

“It’s an IBM Selectric electro-mechanical typewriter. Very rare, very highly prized for its Prestige Elite script. The sovereigns swiped what few survived the digital phase of the Public Era, so this one is quite a turn-up for the books.”

“The letters are cast on that small steel ball?”

“It’s fascinating to watch it at work.”

“Can you show me?”

“It needs a Public Era grid connection, 240 volts at 50 Hertz alternating current. ZEEBRI is bound to have such a supply.”

“And your ID?”

Nightminster showed his General Wardian sergeant’s ID. The instant the duty chief opened it, his face stiffened. Nightminster sensed danger before a word was said.

“Nightminster? An unusual name. I’m sure you’re on the list.”

“What list?”

The duty chief marched back inside the frontier office and returned with a clipboard.

“Yes, I thought so. Anders and Dabrowski, take him inside, McCleod, get up to ZEEBRI reception and tell them we’ve got one.”

When Nightminster first sat inside the frontier house, he was conscious of his whole body pulsing with the pounding of his heart. The one reaction absolutely guaranteed to get him killed was panic. He calmed down by applying logic. They could not have a damned thing on him. His buddies Veitch Thomas and Billy Nieuport would not have betrayed him. It seemed unlikely in the extreme any other witness from the Parliament Square shooting could have popped up after all this time. What he must achieve was an air of confident sympathy with their quest.

After a wait of about a quarter of an hour he was conducted, with the bicycle and its trailer, up to ZEEBRI. His transport got taken away to the main garage. He was escorted to the top deck of the great concrete complex and, by a corridor as monotonous as a ditch, to a busy open plan office clacking with typewriters and clerks bustling about cuddling trays of Hollerith punched index cards. Nightminster was handed across to a couple of dour men in dark grey suits who ushered him into a windowless side room with tired walls yellowed by nicotine. When the door shut, Nightminster’s heart pounded again and he sweated and he could hear the breath quivering in his throat.

The two men were burly characters, both moustachioed, peculiarly alike in their slow movements and lazy-lidded, unimpressed eyes. Both oiled their hair into close-lying wraps of severe neatness. They smelled of Eau de Cologne and sported stainless-steel cufflinks bearing the ZEEBRI corporate motif.

“You are Sergeant Nightminster of General Wardian glory trust?” The question came from the one with a square face, who seemed a bit older than the other one, Long-Face.

“Is it any of your business?”

“We’re detectives of ZEEBRI’s internal security. Normally we hunt thieves and racketeers amongst the workforce. We’ve been tasked with identifying the individual who killed former employee John Jackson, also known as Jumping Jackson, at the People’s Rally on Parliament Square on Saturday 23rd July last.”

“Oh I see. You believe I can help in your quest?”

“Things will go faster if we ask the questions.”

“Actually, I would point out that I am not an employee of ZEEBRI, nor resident of Brent Cross. I have sympathy with your work, however, and so will overlook your impertinence—but be under no illusions that I am in the highest standing with your owners.”

Square-Face clenched his jaw and sat back, glaring at Nightminster.

“Would you kindly justify that statement?”

“I am personally acquainted with Madam Edkins. On my last visit here some ten days ago, I completed business with her personally.”

The two detective exchanged a glance, doubtless reckoning no one would spin such an easily-refuted lie. Now Long-Face took over.

“We have intelligence you were on duty on Parliament Square at the People’s Rally. Can you confirm that?”

“Yes. I was in the City of London 2nd Reserve regiment. That can hardly be a secret.”

At this they both huffed with a weary sarcasm.

“You’d be surprised how long it took us just to establish which units were at which location.”

“I am limited by my oath of honour in what I can tell you, I’m sure you can understand that. That said, I will provide information regarding my personal experience, on the basis that I sympathise with what you seek, and it concerns no one but myself.”

“That would be appreciated.”

Nightminster had by this time guessed exactly who had provided the intelligence and why. Rostam Rafati, Mirana’s fanatic younger brother, must have reported on that last evening at the pawnbroker’s before Nightminster went up to Oxford late in September. For some reason, the intelligence had taken all these weeks to work its way here to the centre of the hunt. Based on this, Nightminster repeated the account he had provided Rostam. The detectives probed for details. They kept saying: “But you must have seen who led the charge to rescue Victorina Krossington.” Nightminster had lied about this to Rostam, so now he was committed to that lie. He excused himself repeatedly by emphasising the furious tension and speed of events.

“You have to understand we’d never trained for such a situation. You get a big crowd together and bizarre effects happen. Individuals lost in a crowd lose their inhibitions, they fire each other on until frenzy prevails.”

The two detectives were nodding thoughtfully. They shifted tack.

“You’re at Oxford University now,” Square-Face said.

“I study physics.”

“And there’s a branch of the SUN Party up there?”

The discussion shifted away from the Parliament Square. Nightminster began to sniff a scent of hope. He spoke at length about life at Oxford, the lethal liberties of the sovereign students and the shyness of the SUN Party. The detectives took extensive notes. This was clearly useful stuff for them. He did not mention being expelled or meeting Tom and Victorina Krossington. His desire was to keep things simple and get out of this windowless trap as soon as he could. God how he longed for fresh air and the blue sky above!

“Thank you for all that. We appreciate you’ve been a cooperative witness. There is one matter. Is it true you transferred out of London after the Parliament Square rally?”

“Yes. I was sent on the Securitician B course for promotion to sergeant. It was in recognition of admission to Oxford, since on graduation I will proceed to staff college. Experience as an NCO will be valuable preparation.”

“You aren’t the kind of guy to hang about, are you?.”

Square-Face stepped in.

“What are you doing at ZEEBRI today?”

“I’m selling a Public Era heirloom, a typewriter.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I bought it broken and had it fixed by a retired craftsman who is a friend of my father.”

“Will he get a cut of the sale?”

“Of course.”

This was not a lie. Nightminster would pass on 10%. Since the rest went to Target Ten Thousand, he did not consider that he was taking advantage. The people of London would get it back eventually in the form of an atomic power plant.

“What do you hope to get for it?”

“If I’m offered less than 175 ounces, I’ll take it to the Kensington auctions on Thursday.”

“That so? You’re a pretty self-willed guy. Eighteen years old and already your own boss buying and selling to get ahead in the world.”

Now Long-Face cut back in:

“Why aren’t you in lectures up at Oxford?”

“I can take a day off now and again to pursue my own affairs. I’ll get lecture notes from friends and make the time back at the weekend.”

“How can we find you again?” Square-Face asked.

This was tricky.

“The best way is poste restante at my college mailbox in Oxford.” He told them the college name, making a mental note to arrange for the porter to forward the mail to Chaddertons’ mail room and thence to his parents’ flat. This would be secure. Neither the porter nor mail room staff at Chaddertons’ would divulge a thing to strangers from Brent Cross.

“Thank you, Mr Nightminster. You’ve been a useful source of information. I’ll have you escorted to the Precision Engineering department where there will be specialists who can provide an offer for your typewriter.”

Less than half an hour later, Nightminster was pedalling away from the frontier of Brent Cross towing a trailer skipping light over the bumps, a transfer statement for 180 ounces to the credit of his account at the Balancing House of Kronstein inside the cannibal’s jacket.

He must never return to Brent Cross.

The jaws of justice had snapped shut, yet by a miracle released him, at least until his damned-fool lies were exposed. If he did not take today as fair warning, he would earn the fate reserved for fools.

He lay on the sofa in his flat that evening, thinking, and listening to mice scrabbling about in the kitchen. Money, at least, was not a problem. He could dig up the old dream of his boyhood; buy a schooner and venture to The Levant at the far end of the Mediterranean in search of exotica to sell at the auctions of the Port of Erith. It would be dangerous. He might lose everything—including his life—in a storm, or fog, or a fight with pirates.

A beautiful Grand Banks schooner heeling as the sails scooped power from the wind and drove sheets of spume off the bows transfixed his imagination, thrilling his heart. Yet it meant abandoning the dear dream that had taken over his life. He could not bring himself to abandon Target Hundred Thousand.

And now he knew there was another dear dream he could not drop at the wayside of life, one he had never admitted to himself. There was a young lady on the far side of eighteen inches of plate-class divide. He sighed, startled by tears springing from the corners of his eyes.

Torn by dreams and fear, he had no idea what to do.

Chapter 23

Days passed. Nothing happened. Like a ghost, he lived unnoticed amongst people and took no interest in them. All of the time, torrents of reason surged in his head, yet formed no action. What truly outraged him was having almost five thousand ounces of gold–about twice his own bodyweight–at the Balancing House of Kronstein. That gave a young man a lot of options. Out of all of the young men on the Island of Britain, he believed not one other, not even the most high-born of sovereign gentry, could look upon such a vista of life’s possibilities as vast as his. Yet all of this magnificent potential counted for nothing, because a life spent alone cannot mean a thing. Wherever he ventured, however rich he became, he could never escape Victorina’s spirit inside his head. Her absence accompanied him everywhere now. He walked out of London up to the fortified town of Highgate for no other reason than to dispose of the hours of that day, and she was with him, silent, watching. He haggled hard for a silk shirt he did not need just to impress her, he ate in the most expensive inn of the town to be fit for her company, he hired a litter at three gold sovereigns to return in her style to the Camden flat, which smelled of stale pisspot and boiled cabbage.

Gradually, he was coming to understand he was up against something new in life, something he had never before had to confront: complete defeat. He could go on in this state of mewling grief and fail forever, or he could get competent and think how to get over this obstacle. Two principles had got him this far in life: always take the harder path, and work as hard as hell. His problem was that he could no longer see any path.

It was during the intermittent dozing of a layabout lying-in one morning that he startled himself with an idea. Instantly, a plan opened into the future. He jumped out of bed and attacked the day.

Only just over a fortnight ago, even if it seemed to have occurred in a dream of boyhood, he encountered Victorina and her bodyguards in a tiny courtyard off the High Street of Oxford. Her bodyguard Lieutenant Bob Stewart recognised the name Nightminster from the Glorious Gazette, which had flourished him as the star of the autumn Securitician B graduations. That was his ticket back into the sovereign world! Not the Krossington’s world, obviously. They would not recruit an insolent commoner who had assaulted one of the clan. An enemy of the Krossingtons, on the other hand, might be interested in a star glory sergeant who had challenged a despised rival. As a sergeant in the marines of a Big Seven sovereign clan like the Shellingfields, he would be far beyond the reach of detectives from ZEEBRI.

He needed more information. Specifically, he needed to know more about the fast ships that tore about in fog almost colliding with Thames barges in the vicinity of The Wash. Did they come from many clans or just one? He would have to talk to barge crews. They might spin all manner of yarns to this gullible landlubber. It would require tact and guile to extract reliable information. On the plus side, he was lucky in the time of year. The trading year came to an end in mid-December and the barges and their crews laid up until early March. Already, the Port of Erith would be bustling with crewmen in upbeat mood looking forward to Christmas and the long, leisurely weeks of winter.

Once he had collected data on those fast ships, he would know, or at least have a better idea, of which sovereign clan to approach. And once inside a new world as a marine sergeant, all sorts of opportunities were bound to open through which he could once again take up the long climb to Target Hundred Thousand. The impossible was but a matter of time and willpower!

*

That afternoon, Nightminster arrived back on Bermondsey market place after his first excursion by bicycle to the Port of Erith. He would need to take a flat or room down there and get a job in the docks. The way to get information from barge captains was to spend time in their world. He would probably learn more by listening in to their pub chat than by direct questioning. The Port of Erith was like any other community, it accepted strangers with trade to ply, but nosey parkers were not welcome, indeed, they were at risk of a crow bar wrapped about their skull. Spying would require slyness and patience, as always.

Bermondsey market was, as usual on a Saturday afternoon, a place of clamour and entertainment. Troupes performed plays, songs and acrobatics. Auctioneers banged through a fascinating and enviable list of Public Era heirlooms. Merchants bawled their wares and, as the old saying goes, dachshunds wore their balls. He wandered about, wheeling the bicycle, listless. It was still a bit early to call on his parents with dinner and a bottle of fizz.

A troupe of mime artists finished their gig and gathered their take of silver and copper–they would not get much from an asylum market. Into the space flowed a team of well-drilled young men bearing folding tables from a cart, setting them up to form a rectangular stall. They laid dark green table cloths and clipped them in place. They unloaded wooden boxes of pamphlets, which they spread on the tables in fans weighted with bricks. Nightminster joined a growing cluster of the curious. Ah! These were do-gooders. The first placard on display proclaimed the benefits of spaying the unemployed to prevent “the perpetuation of useless lives”. Spays really did live longer, healthier lives—so get spayed and get paid! The next placard promoted the benefits of vaccination to prevent diphtheria, tuberculosis, measles, smallpox and other killers.

He started to move on. Such patronising charity was more than his stomach could stand. As he passed the rectangle of tables, he heard several large vehicles rumbling closer accompanied by yells from market-goers forced to get out of the way. Trucks were not normally allowed into the market. The bull-nose of a large armoured limousine rolled into view from behind a store house. It was a six-wheeler with a Perspex turret mounting two machine guns, the kind of vehicle big-shot ultramarines used. However, this one was painted gloss dark green rather than matt black. There was a decoration on the cabin door. Leaning to get a better look, Nightminster was confounded to recognise the coat of arms of the Krossington clan. He had never known a sovereign limousine to venture anywhere near Bermondsey, or any other asylum.

From the driver’s compartment a couple of troops got out. Nightminster knew their smocks and pale blue berets as those of the Krossington marines. Moments later he recognised these specific individuals as the same marines–a sergeant and Lieutenant Stewart–who had accosted him outside King of the Sparks in Oxford. From the cabin stepped a delicate, slender figure, her vivid red hair and strong eyes instantly standing out. It was Victorina Krossington, wearing the same style of black skirt as at the Parliament Square rally in the summer, although now with a brown duffel coat against November’s cold. She turned to others in the cabin, making a brisk gesture to hurry up. The floppy Algernon appeared, dressed as for a cricket match with the addition of leather gloves and a black woolly hat. Some other flunkies followed Victorina into the enclosure behind the tables. She was very much in charge, calling in her soft voice to direct the setting up of a pole carrying the flag of the SUN Party. By this time Bermondsey locals were becoming an audience, albeit one maintaining a guarded couple of yards’ distance from the tables.

Nightminster observed all of this activity with a rising wonder at the diplomacy required to enable it to happen. It was incredible to suppose the Krossingtons had stooped to seek permission from an ultramarine owner. It was equally implausible that they would have planted this set-up on foreign territory without warning.

Victorina started arguing with Lieutenant Stewart. Whatever the dispute was about, Victorina got the better of it. Lieutenant Stewart marched from sight down the side of the limousine. Moments later, engines snorted and the queue of vehicles reversed out to the edge of the market. Lieutenant Stewart then returned and stood alone some yards from the tables with the audience gradually closing in around his conspicuous sky-blue beret. Victorina clapped her hands and started to speak:

“Today the Public Health Committee of the SUN Party has come to this market to tell you how we’re going to improve your lives.”

As her soft voice did not carry well, the general level of murmuring and restlessness in the audience dropped, and other sounds from nearby seemed to get louder. Momentarily, a burst of cheers from a bear-baiter’s show intruded. Victorina waited while it died down.

“We have gathered facts showing that only a third of children in the industrial asylums are vaccinated. This is not the fault of the parents. On the contrary, it is the fault of a society that denies the people any say in how they are ruled.”

This drew great applause, enough to pull some interest off the bear-baiter.

“The SUN Party has raised funds to carry out vaccination programs in the asylums. Vaccinations are free and will be supervised by qualified doctors.”

Again, this raised a cheer. She explained that today they wanted to collect names and addresses of those wishing their children vaccinated. Teams would be working around the London asylums in the next few months to carry out the program.

A middle-aged character with a drinker’s face and pony-tail like an oily brush called out:

“Just to let you know, we don’t have no addresses here, love, and we don’t tell outsiders where we live anyways. But it’s a lovely thought. You’re a very lovely young lady.”

Victorina’s jaw set firm, her mouth flattened and thinned.

“Then they can give their place of work.”

“If they’ve got work, love.”

“Would you kindly stop addressing me as ‘love’? I think it’s very patronising.” Her face had reddened. She was almost spitting.

“I was only trying to be helpful, Duchess.”

Laughter rippled around the crowd. Nightminster was watching Lieutenant Stewart, who could now only be seen by his pale blue beret as he was of squat stature. Somehow, he had to ensure the safety of a headstrong young fool who did not grasp just how suddenly this docile gathering could transform into a lethal mob. He guessed at least a hundred people surrounded the enclosure of tables by now.

“Hello!” Victorina was leaning forward. She seemed to be talking to a child, and indeed, a small girl and her bashful young mother—frail and modest—came forward. Victorina spoke quietly with them, the young mother smiled and then began weeping. More children and parents started to rustle forward from the crowd. Victorina’s focus on one mother and her child had broken the flippant atmosphere set up by the old lag. Nightminster nodded slowly to himself, admiring from a distance. She must be more than a spoiled brat. That slim frame bore a hard will.

His attention was starting to wane into the sludge of everything that had once brought their lives to touch three times, so briefly. Now he was once again just a commoner who aspired to be a sergeant in the marines of a clan that hated the Krossingtons. The outlandish coincidence of this encounter set off a childish conviction the fates were laughing at him. He had just started to edge out of the crowd when there came a whip-crack and an outburst like an angry crow.

Chapter 24

“Open a way! Open a way!”

The crowd split like the Red Sea as a line of black helmets sliced in. Leading the ultramarines was one of Johnny Albert’s lieutenants. Nightminster knew him well enough. It was Lieutenant Jordon. At the best of times, he was not the sort one crossed with. He was hollow-cheeked, with bad acne or smallpox scars and a contemptuous mouth. His fighter’s swagger and form of a gorilla wearing a coal-scuttle helmet with a bloody great cannon of a .44 Magnum on his hip would have forced caution on the toughest individual.

“You communists don’t have permission to be here and you’re not welcome,” he snapped at Victorina. His right hand rested on the handle of his .44 Magnum revolver. She had taken a pace back. Her hands bunched, splayed and bunched again. She stood her ground though, staring him back. The floppy consort Algernon faded against the rearmost table and was visibly trembling. Well, there was a true hero, at any rate. “You’ve got two minutes to be gone. After that, my lads will… assist your departure.”

“We’re here to help your people,” she said.

“One minute and fifty seconds.”

Victorina leaned around Lieutenant Jordan and addressed a child beside the squad of ultramarines.

“Come on sweety, come and tell me your name.”

From the opposite side of the crowd, Lieutenant Stewart was leading in a file of pale blue berets. Nightminster knew instantly this confrontation could turn into a shoot-out—Victorina had not the faintest clue about the danger gathering around her. He dropped his bicycle and chopped into the crowd, ignoring the objections as he knocked other men and their wives out of the way. He reached the tables just as Lieutenant Jordon saw the Krossington marines closing in and drew his .44 Magnum.

“Excuse me, sir, may I assist?” Nightminster said. Lieutenant Jordon glowered at being interrupted.

“It’s Big Knight!” he exclaimed, all sarcastic. “Don’t you just love popping out of your hole like those cute little meercats up in London Zoo—I’ll whack your fucking skull one of these days.”

“I am acquainted with this young lady, sir. It is true that, strictly speaking, she should have asked permission—”

“What the hell are they?”

He jutted his chin at Lieutenant Stewart, who had stopped at the sight of the big revolver, looking to Her Decency for orders.

“Those are Krossington marines.”

“They’ll have to drop those guns.”

“The mission of these people is highly respectable and has nothing to do with the riff-raff and sub-humanity who’ve been causing trouble around London.”

“How would you bloody know?”

“This young lady is a qualified doctor. Her mission is to bring the children of this asylum the protections of vaccination. Surely this is entirely in line with the Owner’s vision to keep diseases out of our home?”

Lieutenant Jordan chewed this over, literally. Nightminster watched his jaw muscles pulsing. Jordan dropped the revolver back in its holster and spoke across the tables to Lieutenant Stewart.

“I want you, sir, to keep yourself and your men out of sight. This is our estate.”

Nightminster caught his eye and made a slight nod. Lieutenant Stewart ignored both him and Lieutenant Jordan and stared at Her Decency like a spaniel, awaiting instructions.

“Is this acceptable, Your Decency?” Lieutenant Stewart asked, leaning towards Victorina. Nightminster thought this a crazy-stupid thing to say. Up until that moment, no one would have suspected Victorina was sovereign flesh and blood.

“Yes, Lieutenant Stewart. It is acceptable.”

So, the Krossington marines pulled back out of sight to their vehicles. Perhaps it was only Nightminster’s imagination, but he sensed there was a new piano-wire tautness in the air. Taking a look around, he realised it was not his imagination. Many in the crowd were glaring at Victorina with eyes that burned with hate. When he turned back, he found she was staring at him across the narrow table. He leaned to within a few inches of her face and murmured:

“Get out of here—now. Drop all your things. Just get back to your limousine and be gone.”

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“Bermondsey is my home. I know it a great deal better than you do. Get away from here and don’t come back—you’re in great danger.”

“I think we should go too, Rina.” Algernon had recovered his courage enough to join the discussion.

“Mr Nightminster’s advice is sound,” Lieutenant Jordan said. His eyes were restless, for he too sensed the pressure of hate around them. “All that’s keeping these people from tearing you to pieces, Your Dearest Young Decency, is my men, or rather, their guns.”

“I came here to get a vaccination program started and I’m not leaving until I’ve done that.”

“You have started,” Nightminster said, tapping her pad. “You have written several names. That’s a start. Now go—I will take over and hand in the list at the gates of Wilson House.”

He limbered over the table and, with the advantage of his height and stronger voice, spoke as he would to troops in the Securitician B course.

“If you have children younger than three years old that need vaccinations, come and give me your name and a means of contacting you. In the near future a team will visit your home to administer the shots. This will be done for free, you need not worry about cost.”

Many people turned and stalked away, disgusted. Others, mainly young women with children, came forward. Victorina and her team started to take down names. Nightminster could not help admiring her stubbornness, foolish though she was. He had to admit this stunt was no more reckless than the expeditions into the abandonments by which he had become a rich slummy.

“We’ll hang around,” Lieutenant Jordan said. “It wouldn’t do for a sovereign—not even a stupid one—to cop it on our turf.”

Nightminster thanked him. The SUN Party stall was surrounded by tents and barns of other traders, which limited how much he could see of the market nearby. He jumped out of the enclosure and made a quick reconnoitre. All seemed to be normal, busy market place.

“You’ve made your point, now it’s time you were gone,” he said on getting back to the stall. When Victorina ignored him, he lost his temper.

“You stupid, ignorant fool!” He snatched the pen from her fingers and hurled it away. She straightened up, at bay and ready to challenge him “If you are too idiotic to save yourself, I’ll do it for you.”

He bowed, curled one arm behind her thighs and straightened up with her folded over his shoulder. Immediately she broke out ranting and beating his ribs with surprisingly hard fists.

“Big Knight!”

He stopped and turned, twirling Victorina like a propeller. She kept beating at his ribs and shouting. Johnny Albert, the Owner of Bermondsey, strode through the space left by panicked mothers yanking their children out of his way. He was sweating and pale, his eyes bulged. Nightminster had never seen him with such a head of anger. His voice was dangerously calm.

“Put her down.”

Nightminster set Victorina on her feet whereupon she hit him a stinger on the face that drew tears from his left eye.

“Is this your fancy little stunt, Big Knight?” Johnny Albert’s voice was a silky hiss of fury.

“Absolutely not! I’m trying to get her out of here—this foolish miss is Victorina Krossington. She came here doing good without a thought for the danger.”

Johnny Albert’s eyes locked on Victorina’s face.

“You’re a full-blood Krossington?” Shock thinned his voice to a whine. He broke into a kind of dance of overwhelmed and helpless exasperation, making a complete rotation whilst flapping his hands in the air. It would have been funny under less lethal circumstances.

“All I fucking need is a full-blooded Krossington emptying her eight pints onto my estate! Next time—” He rammed an index finger into her ribs so hard she groaned and folded over. “—you bloody seek permission before coming down here. I’m sending a letter over to your palace about this. Damned troublemaker!” Addressing Nightminster in easier tones, he said: “All right Big Knight, I’m sorry I had a go at you. This kind of thing isn’t good for my blood pressure.”

When Victorina started to sob, Johnny Albert gave her a hug, wrapping a big, hairy hand around the back of her head.

“Aw, I’m sorry Your Dearest Decency. You’ve got to understand sovereign blood can’t be careless. You people are hated down here.” He looked up at Nightminster, rolling his eyes and shaking his head as to say ‘Women!’. He actually said: “Where’s her wheels?”

“This way, Captain.”

Johnny Albert lifted Victorina under one arm and carried her like a roll of carpet, closely followed by the rest of her retinue including Algernon, down the muddy gravel way to the edge of the market where the armoured limousine waited with an armoured truck. He set Victorina in the doorway of the limousine and gave her a push.

“If you wish to visit my estate again, Your Very Good Decency, my palace is your first port of call,” he said. “That keeps things right for us all.”

“This asylum is not your property,” she said.

Johnny Albert puffed himself up self-righteous, while Nightminster fell back laughing against the armour plates of the limousine.

“As if the Lands of Krossington are your property!” he jeered.

“Every scrap of land was bought and paid for. We have titles with the Land Registry.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, you people created that place to rubber-stamp your ill-gotten gains.”

A clang and they were showered by fragments of brick. Another missile flashed overhead and burst into a fireball against a shed only yards beyond the armoured limousine. Splashes of fire draped across the bonnet while the side of the shed became a mass of writhing flames. Nightminster recognised the piny reek of camphine. Another bottle with flaming taper landed roughly where the SUN Party stall stood on the far side of a stack of barrels. He heard frantic screams. Then from the central area of the market place—just fifty yards away—came a burst of machine gun fire, pistol shots, wild yells. Johnny Albert broke away at a run, craning back to yell at Nightminster:

“Get them away from here—off my estate!”

Nightminster shoved Victorina and unceremoniously turfed Algernon and the two helpers into the cabin, flinching as another chunk of brick burst above the door. He looked back at the armoured truck, wondering what the hell the marines were doing all this while. Lieutenant Stewart and the sergeant had got out, submachine guns at the ready. They were merely on guard amid mayhem, apparently at a loss in the absence of orders.

Half a dozen young men with meat cleavers and crow bars ran around the end of the burning shed and stopped dead at the sight of the armoured vehicles. They wore denim dungarees, dark-coloured sweaters and all had balaclavas pulled over their heads so that only their eyes and teeth showed. Their boots and gaiters were greasy brown with fresh mud. One, who snarled with yellow buck teeth and possessed the furious eyes of a demon, whirled a meat cleaver about his head.

“Kill them!” he yelled.

A mate body-barged him into cover behind the burning shed rapidly followed by the rest. They had seen the marines’ submachine guns and voted discretion the better part of valour. It was in watching this empty-handed that Nightminster recalled his bicycle, which had the Browning Hi-Power stowed in the saddle bag. Damn and damn, the chances of the bike still being where he had let it drop were nil, but he ran around the stack of barrels to find the wooden tables of the stall blazing, having been ignited by a camphine bomb. A woman was screaming. A child stood smoking in tatters of clothing, boy or girl was impossible to say as the face was bright red and sloughs of skin hung off. The mother was fighting a couple of middle-aged men pinning her arms back to stop her clutching the child, which would likely have skinned the poor wretch. Revolted, Nightminster only noted impassively the disappearance of his bicycle. There was zero chance of a steel bike left lying around this market place not ‘winning’ a new owner in short order. He crouched in the cover of a heap of wicker baskets while he gathered in a scene of complete confusion, ultramarines shooting around the corners of sheds, men, women and children cowering under stalls. There was no enemy in sight, although he could hear a murderous roar from the south, the direction of the abandonments, as if a torrent of pure hate was sweeping closer. What a damned pity he had not strapped the Makarov about his ankle as he usually did.

He had not thought today would be dangerous enough!

As he leaned forward to rise to a crouch and return to the limousine, his hand landed on something cold and hard lying by one of the baskets. It was a burned-out camphine bomb, a bottle with the neck stuffed with a rag wick. It must have landed on the baskets, failed to break and the wick had burned out. For want of any better weapon, he took it, and a yard later added a rusty old kukri he spotted forgotten down a cleft between some barrels—it was only because he was crouching that he saw it. Despite its neglect, he immediately liked its balance and the heaviness of its thick blade. Coming back around the barrels he found the scene absolutely unchanged. Lieutenant Stewart and the sergeant stood by their armoured truck looking bemused and the door of the limousine stood open. He could see Victorina inside the cabin leaning forward, her head and shoulders out of sight, apparently talking the day away with the driver. Exasperated by this ongoing stupidity, and all too aware the gang with the meat cleavers could not be far away, he rose and ran to the door.

“What the hell are you waiting for? Get away from here!”

Victorina looked back, still bent over presenting her backside.

“It’s my guardian angel Mr Nightminster once again! You’re very determined to control my affairs, which however are not up for debate.”

“Don’t you grasp what’s happening?”

“I would say some roughnecks are kicking up trouble after a football match or similar. Once it’s over, we’ll get on with what we came here to do.”

Nightminster was not really listening to her. He had just noticed a rack of very nice Mossberg pump-action shotguns stowed on the far side of the cabin. These were not knock-offs from an asylum, they looked like heirlooms from the precision tooling of the Public Era. He pocketed the kukri and tossed away the camphine bomb and reached across Victorina, momentarily aware of the firmness and warmth of her back, to claim a Mossberg. Now he was ready for action!

“What are you doing with that?” Victorina said. She curled around and followed him outside, her face a picture of self-righteousness. “That’s our property, you can’t touch that!” When he ignored her and headed around the blazing shed where the meat-cleaver brigade had vanished, she grew furious. “Lieutenant Stewart! Disarm Mr Nightminster!”

Beyond the crackling shed the lane ran straight out of the market past more sheds, crude structures saturated in creosote. One was ablaze furiously, spits of creosote casting antennae of grey smoke across the lane. The meat-cleaver gang seemed to have scrammed, the only people in view were some locals beating at the fires or just standing about. He was on the point of turning to go back when a bunch of no-goods ran into view at the far end of the lane. He knew they were no-goods from their balaclavas and meat cleavers and—this rivetted his fears—several pistols. He dropped flat. Strangely, they paid him no attention. When he looked back, Lieutenant Stewart with the sergeant and a couple of troopers were filing up to join him. They were paying not the slightest attention to the no-goods. Lieutenant Stewart aimed his pistol at Nightminster’s head and said:

“You must return that weapon to our vehicle, or I will be forced to—”

If the shot was meant at him, the aim was useless. The tail end Krossington trooper dropped to the gravel with a kind of oafish groan and lay flopped flat, blood tumbling off his nose to form a puddle in a matter of seconds. Two more shots. The no-goods were pouring forward into the lane behind the shooters with the pistols. Nightminster took barely an aim before he let fly, pumped and fired, pumped and fired. Both shooters were down, one with half his head blown away, the other an arm only attached by tatters of his jacket. But these no-goods were not so easily deterred. They had taken cover in the gaps between the sheds. Both pistols had been taken up by others now firing from cover. Nightminster shot at one, blowing a bite out of the corner of a shed in ‘removing him from the situation’. Lieutenant Stewart, now finally lying down and behaving like a proper soldier, fired bursts from his submachine gun and then either ran out of ammunition or suffered a stoppage, as he set about whacking the magazine, panting like a dying runner, panicked.

How many rounds did the Mossberg hold? Was it five? Six? How the hell many had he fired? Nightminster thought four. He might only have a couple of rounds left. These no-goods were not giving up. As one got shot, another grabbed their pistol. This tenacity hinted they must know of the delicious sovereign prey that awaited them beyond a couple of shooters lying exposed in the middle of the lane. Nightminster was struggling to retain contact with reality. He might have been lying there twenty seconds or twenty minutes. A near miss threw stones and grit across him. He had to get away from the bullets. The charging imperative of his mind was to get away from the bullets. He yelled at Lieutenant Stewart to get his men back to the vehicles. The fool kept panting and hammering at his magazine. His sergeant just lay there in a glaze of terror and the surviving trooper had burst into tears. Nightminster faced the real, awful decision of running for his life leaving the marines to their fate. One last time he shouted at Lieutenant Stewart and then rolled to the side of the lane and retreated, dancing in and out of the cover between the sheds to throw the shooters’ aim, only too late realising he was drawing their fire. He felt a sting in his left upper arm as he ran through the flames of the burning shed to the safety of its cover. The turret of the armoured limousine! He had forgotten all about it. The two heavy machine guns would make a clean sweep of a whole street of no-goods. He ran straight into the cabin of the limousine, thumbing back the safety of the Mossberg and tossing it at Algernon.

“Hold the fort, big man,” he said. The turret was behind the rear seat of the limousine. He planted a boot between a wide-eyed Victorina and another young man who had been at the stalls. He saw her lips moving but heard nothing, his ears dulled by firing the Mossberg and a rising roar coming from outside. In his haste he fell behind the seat, banging his head on one of the pedals of the turret mechanism as he went down. He felt nothing at the time. He fought up into the turret, getting snarled in his raincoat, tearing it off and climbing up to find everything perfectly to hand in line with his training in General Wardian. Two 0.303 Brownings, which looked genuine, not asylum copies, 150-round cans, a single pistol-grip trigger, bicycle cranks to traverse the turret—they worked smooth as butter—shoulder butts to lay the guns. He cocked them both, flipped off the safety catches and swung the barrels over Lieutenant Stewart and his surviving trooper as they came lurching into view dragging the sergeant, who was writhing this way and that clutching his guts. Like a dark flood, a thick mass poured around the burning shed and seemed to reach out in prongs like fingers to engulf the three marines. Nightminster made no decision to fire. His hand clamped the trigger by reflex, only by a miracle did he fire slightly high over the marines’ heads into the dark mob of balaclava-masked figures. He pedalled a quick right and a quick left, firing, hosing up and down. The tirade of bullets literally tore the mob apart. Fragments of clothing and flesh and bone sprayed up, what had been a solid crowd folded over into a kicking, screaming, bloody mess. The black tarred planks of the shed behind were now sprayed with blood and tatters of clothing and meat.

Nightminster next became aware of two things. One was someone attacking his legs, trying to pull him out of the turret. He looked past his kneecaps to see a furious Victorina screaming at him and trying to wrap her arms about his legs. The limousine lurched. Someone shouted—he thought it was Lieutenant Stewart but his ears were humming from the blast of the Brownings—the vehicle charged forward, acceleration throwing Victorina over the seat leaving her backside presented up as for spanking. The limousine leaned frightfully around a tight corner straining after the armoured car, which was throwing up clouds of thick black smoke as its driver flogged the engine. Someone, a plump, middle-aged man, whirled head over heels off the front of the armoured car, not quick enough to get out of the way and a goner for sure now. Blasts of hooter. Nightminster raised the Brownings and fired quick bursts skywards to help warn those ahead. The two vehicles belted down lanes with people pressed back against the walls, then heeled out onto Druid Street, the main boulevard that led to Tower Bridge and the safety of the north bank of the River Thames. Druid Street was wide and straight and the people milling in it parted like one great zipper confronted with the sirens and roaring engines of the armoured vehicles.

Released from intensity, everything departed Nightminster; fear, rage, love, hate, hope, despair. He drooled inside the turret, his legs dangling helplessly into space and his shoulders slumped. He could barely keep his head up. There was a suspicion growing in his apathetic mind that he was about to become a guest of the Krossingtons at their Mayfair palace, Wilson House.

Chapter 25

That evening as Nightminster wound his wrist watch at just after 10 pm, he wrangled over a question: should he stay in Wilson House or get back to his own life? The longer he waited, the weaker his position, for of course, it revealed he needed them. On the other hand, if he walked out, that was that, he shut the door forever on what might have been.

He waited.

A few minutes after arrival in the garage of Wilson House, an official with the rank of second chamberlain had shown him to this little apartment at the rear of Wilson House. They left a grim scene. The sergeant’s tunic was sodden with blood from chest to groin. Nightminster last saw Victorina blanched with shock, catatonic, slumped in the door of her armoured limousine staring at the sergeant, utterly disabled from her professional capacity as a doctor. Nightminster did not rate the sergeant’s chances. He had repeatedly been told that gut injuries had the poorest prognosis of any except head wounds. He could have been head-shot or spine-shot himself, dancing in the fire of the no-goods as he fled to the armoured limousine. Yet here he was safe, waiting in a palace. So it goes.

The two windows of the little apartment looked out into the rear grounds, which in the darkness he could only distinguish as several strings of lamps along tarmac paths that disappeared amongst bushes. The grounds were hemmed in by the towering frontier hedges he had once viewed with such contempt from four miles away on the railway viaduct of Bermondsey. Now he was inside those hedges and, if he lifted the sash and put his head out, he could hear the faint crackling of the arc lights that beamed up from lawn level. There was also a rumble from the generator house and a soft scrunching of marines on patrol. Although he was not locked in, the second chamberlain had requested—politely ordered—him not to go out, and he was obeying.

Evening passed into night. He discovered pyjamas beneath the pillow and experimented with this novel aspect of wealth. He slid between cotton sheets of a smoothness and crispness he had never known. For all the bed’s comfort, he slept only fitfully. He kept seeing bullets tearing apart the mob. For once, he was troubled by conscience. How many of that mob had meant evil and how many were kid brothers trying to impress an elder? Or sisters? Or just there for a laugh? He told himself it was a battle situation, kill or die. He pictured the child scorched by a camphine bomb, its skin ready to drop off. Surely that was justification for his actions? In the next dream, he was torn apart by bullets himself. This was but a whisker from reality. A bullet had left holes through the sleeve of his raincoat. The graze across the inside of his bicep still stung. A couple of inches further in would have got the bone and taken his right arm. The rusty kukri knife bore a grey smear. In the clamour of action, he recalled no clang as a bullet glanced off the heavy steel blade inside his raincoat and he cheated Death one more time. The memory of how the Brownings had lashed humans still sickened him, no matter how he tried to rationalise it. Those who came through the Glorious Resolution must have seen—and caused—countless such horrors. Sixty million people died on the Island of Britain in just a couple of years. People were like any other animal, if cornered they will fight like demons, just as he had, clenching the trigger of the Brownings on reflex at the sight of the charging mob. Sixty million could not have gone quietly. He understood now, as he never had before, why it was so hard to get people to talk about the Glorious Resolution and more to the point, describe how they had lived while nine in ten vanished into the Nameless Gone. Perhaps his parents had fought like savages, tearing eyes out with their fingernails.

The distant rumble of the generator starting up woke him at 05:30. He listened to the central heating pipes creaking and humming as hot water flowed. A long and vital day in his life stretched ahead and he wondered whether he would pass its tests.

*

The day faded into evening. The only disturbances had been the arrival of breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea and the retrieval of trays by different servants, all non-communicative. He saw little action in the garden apart from cats, foxes, pigeons, and much squabbling amongst the local rooks. For a while he heard a woman sobbing somewhere above until a window shut, and he heard her no more. The little apartment offered a bookcase of Public Era detective novels and thrillers. Nightminster tried reading a few, as usual finding the occupations of the characters and their schemes utterly baffling, quite apart from the impenetrable slang. The day passed slowly. Boredom dulled his mind. Was this ploy tedious for the Krossingtons too? Or were they squabbling over what to do with him?

Around 7 pm, there came a knock at the door. The second chamberlain stepped in.

“His Decency the Master Marcus-John Krossington wishes to meet you, Mr Nightminster. Please follow me.”

*

There were three of them. Sitting around a circular table in a modest room not far from the apartment near the back of Wilson House. To Nightminster, the room suggested activities that went unspoken, such as gambling, or disciplining errant staff. No windows. No carpet. Floor boards tight-fitting and firm like the deck of a ship. Air hot like an engine room from heating pipes weaving up one wall. Someone had jammed a child’s soft tiger in the pipes from where it gazed upon those seated. Only one familiar face, that of Tom Krossington, whose impressive build made his chair appear frail. Nightminster shook off his leather raincoat as he was announced and folded it over one arm. The tip of the life-saving kukri inside the coat pressed into his forearm.

“Mr Nightminster of Bermondsey, Your Decency,” the second chamberlain announced, and bowed.

“Thank you, Schwartz. That will be all.”

Visitor and master shared moments of mutual scepticism as the second chamberlain departed, closing the door softly.

“Well, you’re certainly quite a fellow,” Marcus-John said. He had a gravelly, harsh voice of the type useful for shouting at underlings. “You’re obviously of noble descent with such a cranium. You remind me of de Montaigne.”

“You remind me somewhat of Cromwell,” Nightminster said. He leaned across the table, hand extended. Marcus-John’s eyes squinted inwards at it. His face registered displeasure. This was not a good start.

“The correct etiquette is to bow and ask to join the table, commoner.” Marcus-John’s voice growled low and cold.

Nightminster yanked out the remaining chair with a rumble, draped his coat over the back and sat himself down, hoping his face projected as transparent a grimace of contempt as he felt. He took the knife laid for the place and rapped its handle on the table, flicking its point towards the man seated to his right.

“You’re no sovereign. You’re a flunky. What are you? Lawyer? Accountant?”

The man was in his mid-twenties. He wore a dark-grey business suit and black horn-rimmed glasses. The hair was cropped short back and sides, the neck freshly shaved. In addition to this display of facelessness, he sat with a noticeable stoop, as if his head was too heavy. At Nightminster’s challenge, he stirred and appealed to his master for rescue.

“Mr Nightminster,” Marcus-John said. “This gentleman is our attorney, Mr Morton Aldingford.”

Somehow, without a word spoken or more than a single glance exchanged, there existed a common loathing. Nightminster had seen enough of lawyers at Oxford to despise them as toadies who polished their sophistry to gain status. In his eyes, they were lizards that jump-fucked each other in slime.

“What’s an attorney doing here?”

“And you already know my younger brother Tom, or TK,” Marcus-John continued, ignoring the question. “I am the head of clan, Marcus-John. Normally you would address me as ‘Your Decency’, at least to introduce yourself, but I perceive you are the surly, radical type.”

Marcus-John was much older than Tom or Victorina. His face bore lines of middle age, which had deepened with indignation. His fair hair was combed flat off a ruler parting and his complexion ruddy, that of an outdoors type. A thick neck and lean build confirmed he was not one for the sedentary life. He carried a particular expression Nightminster had seen on senior officers at Euston depot; a slant-mouthed sneer of restrained contempt. Evidently, he expected others to know their place, just as certainly as he knew his.

“Will Her Decency Victorina, be joining our company?” Nightminster asked.

“We dispense with styles at the dinner table.”

Marcus-John’s voice had become deliberate, that of someone balancing on stepping stones from moment to moment. It was clear he was holding back anger, but only just. “Plain old Rina will do. She’s confined to quarters. In utmost disgrace. I thrashed the silly little ass with a dog whip, so she isn’t sitting down, I can tell you that for nothing. Two of our marines are dead for her stupidity, and two more so traumatised I doubt they’ll ever serve in the front line again. She has disgraced the whole clan.”

The death of the sergeant genuinely distressed Nightminster. The wrench of loss took him by surprise. Although a stranger, the sergeant was a fellow trooper who had faced danger with courage, if not much wit.

“I’m extremely sorry to hear that.”

The creases melted from Marcus-John’s face. He displayed a mellow, almost brotherly intimacy as Nightminster continued.

“I deeply regret I did not do more. We were caught in the open and a Mossberg holds only six rounds. That’s not much against a mob of fanatics.”

“Lieutenant Stewart regards you as without question the saviour of Rina, in fact, of the whole deplorable mess she got herself into. You have nothing at all to apologise for. On the contrary, I wish to make the clan’s gratitude clear.”

“Thank you.”

“What is more, and I say this strictly in a private capacity rather than on behalf of the clan, your being thrown out of Oxford only enhances my personal respect. Expulsion is far more distinguished than any double-first in nonsense taught by a bunch of washouts. Academics have absolutely no talent for life. They aren’t like you and I, men of action. What on earth gets into people, thinking they can learn from academics? That’s like sex-education from a eunuch!”

Nightminster clenched his jaw until the muscles ached crushing the urge to laugh loud and long at the outraged glare Tom Krossington directed at his elder brother.

“Now, you asked a few minutes ago why our attorney is present,” Marcus-John said. “He has a few legal matters to tidy up, so I pass the baton to you, my dear Morton.”

This time, Nightminster did not bother to conceal his mirth; he laughed openly.

“According to whose laws are these legal matters?”

Here on Krossington turf he was under Krossington law. If they wanted to sling him in a dungeon, there was nothing he could do about it. He was not worried. They had kept him here more than a day and tolerated his brazen insolence, if only thinly. That meant they wanted something. This venue tucked at the back of their palace and the absence of household staff hinted at a delicate agenda.

The lawyer Aldingford stirred and clasped his hands, soft clean hands that had never held any tool bigger than a fountain pen. It would appear that he had to broach a difficult topic.

“A few days after your departure from Oxford, I received a letter from an acquaintance—an admirer—of yours, an individual of the utmost integrity. He made it clear that your trial was a disgraceful travesty orchestrated by the systematic deceit of our second cousin Charles Krossington-Darcy and friends. He wrote a similar letter to the chancellor of the university.”

It had never even occurred to Nightminster that anyone would speak up for him against the powerful clan Krossington.

“Can you tell me who wrote the letter?”

“A cleric of the Anglican Church called Father Arthur Richardson.”

Unbelievable. That great pain in the buttocks had proved his worth. So there was a lesson in life—even bigots have their uses!

“This kind of thing is an excruciating embarrassment,” TK said. “I told Charles the clan could not tolerate the shame of his being put on trial by the proctor, especially to the favour of a commoner. A scandal like that would have whipped our Land Council into a storm. The whole of London society would have rolled about laughing. Charles issued a full confession and withdrew from Oxford. The chancellor of Oxford has confirmed you will be reinstated with a pardon, or at least, you would be if anyone could find you. You dropped off the face of the earth! What have you been up to?”

“Is she nice?” Marcus-John asked with a keen smirk.

Nightminster struggled to appear enthusiastic, but only for a few seconds.

“It’s welcome to hear justice prevailed after all. However, I did not grieve over leaving Oxford. Being a student was obstructing my highest ambitions.”

Marcus-John displayed mystification. A weary look came over TK. He batted his hands on the table, exasperated.

“Mr Nightminster entertains dreams of building an atomic power plant for London to resurrect affluence and push us sovereigns into oblivion,” he said. “I’ve told him it’s a chimera, but he’s not the listening type.”

“Not the listening type?” Marcus-John appeared very pleased to hear this. “A damned fine thing too! You remind me of our grandfather Doc Wilson Krossington. He never listened to anyone, but then, he was always right so he didn’t have to. Do you know about his life?”

“I was thrilled to learn he was a famous power station designer before the Glorious Resolution.”

“That’s right! He was the most famous engineer in Britain. If they’d listened to him, there wouldn’t have been a Glorious Resolution. But no, fools knew better, they always do. Left-wing gas-bags and right-wing money-snatchers locked antlers and the trap-door of reality opened beneath their civilization. And down the lot of them went to hell.

“You’re just like Granddad Wilson, the doer who carves a new world so the rabble can take it for granted. Economists and politicians are but jays singing from the shoulders of giants.” During this rant, Tom Krossington, the aspirant politician with a doctorate in economics sat with his head lowered and lips tight. “So, I don’t believe you chanced your university career for the SUN Party. I think you were seeking attention to meet us. You need money for your atomic project. Am I right? Or am I right?”

Nightminster was shaken to be so truly skewered by a man he had taken to be just another arrogant big-shot born in a golden manger.

“What am I doing here? It’s hard to believe you’ve hosted me for a day in this fine palace and tolerated my insolence just to tell me I can go back to Oxford. I mean, I’m grateful you took the trouble to investigate what Father Richardson had to say. From what I saw of sovereign youth at Oxford, they can do whatever they like, including kill people, and get clean away with it. You did not have to act on that letter, yet you did. That means you want something. I’m very good at sensing when people want me to solve their problems.”

“We do have a serious problem,” Marcus-John affirmed. “And it’s true that we would like you to help us. We’re capable of significant gratitude.”

“The most powerful sovereign clan on the Island of Britain needs help from a whelp of a commoner such as I? That is a turn-up for the books!”

There followed some seconds in which his three hosts waited for someone else to elaborate. Aldingford’s head sank lower. TK stared at the table, one corner of his mouth twitching. Marcus-John’s eyes lingered with contempt on his brother and then they slowly rolled across to Nightminster. He chewed bile and swallowed, as if the words to come outraged his teeth such that they were refusing to let those words through.

“A certain Johnny Albert, who calls himself the Owner of Bermondsey, has confiscated our planetarium projector in retaliation for Rina’s causing a riot on his estate.”

Nightminster assumed this was humour sovereign-style. He chuckled politely, waiting for Marcus-John or TK to deliver the punch line. However, Marcus-John’s face remained deadly serious.

“Our planetarium projector is famous across London society as the showpiece of our New Year’s celebration. Grandad Wilson founded the tradition. He knew that isolation from reality would be the greatest danger to the survival of the clan. That’s always the way it is with élites. They lose touch with reality, so reality gulps them into history. The Glorious Resolution was a case in point; reality gulped fools into history. So, he created a spectacle to stretch dull imaginations out to the cosmos to look back at Earth. He got the idea from a fabulous old photograph taken from an American spacecraft of Earth rising over the horizon of the moon. It's one of the most famous images from the Public Era.”

“I know of it,” Nightminster said. “It’s called ‘Earthrise’.”

“That’s what Wilson had in mind. The great planetarium display is accompanied by an orchestra and a narration by our clan’s leading actor. The projector casts the sky as it is seen from Australia, the Arctic and the Antarctic. It’s extraordinarily atmospheric and it has a profound impact.

“This year, we discovered the projector had some flaws, so we packed it off to the Chadderton Engineering Partnership for a whizz-kid of theirs to take to bits and put back together again. The whizz-kid was such a whizz that he finished early but we were in no rush and rather stupidly left it there. Now this slum king Albert has taken our property hostage. We have to get that projector back! If New Year comes and we can’t present our famous show, the humiliation will be incalculable. We Krossingtons could be thrown off our lands by our own Land Council!”

“You’re serious? For real?” Nightminster was still unable to convince himself he was not jammed between lines of The Rape of the Lock. “Oh deary, deary me! Poor little Kwossington has lost his pwojector! What is he going to do?”

They received this facetiousness with silent contempt.

“It is apparent, from what Rina and Lieutenant Stewart told me, that you have some kind of rapport with this Mr Albert,” Marcus-John said.

“You could put it that way.”

“We hoped you’d help us extend such filaments of friendship as might bring about the return of our projector.”

“I see.”

“As I’ve already said, we are capable of substantial gratitude.”

Marcus-John and TK watched Nightminster for some seconds, expressing progressively more strident signs of impatience at his lack of response. In truth, he was striving to stretch his imagination around this cornucopia of opportunity served up by the absurdities of sovereign vanity. How much would he screw them for? Twenty thousand ounces? Twenty-five thousand? For several seconds, euphoria carried him away with visions of truckloads of gold rumbling down the turnpike to the Balancing House of Kronstein at the Port of Erith.

“I’m not quite sure how I can help.”

“You must try. You’re our only hope. We’ve offered Mr Albert a substantial ransom, which he dismissed without conditions.”

“I’m not even one of his heelers, let alone a seasoned lieutenant who might stand a chance of bending his ear.”

“How much do you want?”

“I’ve no more interest in your gold than he has.”

“You haven’t?” Marcus-John expressed consternation. “An eighteen-year-old not interested in gold? I think you’re pushing ‘hard to get’ just a little bit strong. No teenager ever existed who did not love gold.”

“What I request is something a little less tangible.”

“Stop being coy.”

“I require your friendship. Friends respect each other. Friends are on the same level. You understand?”

“Mmmmm.” Marcus-John lifted his chin and tapped his Adam’s apple. “Clever commoners are such a nuisance. They don’t fit into the social scheme. We can’t have you addressing us as TK and Marko in front of the staff. It just won’t do.”

“You will owe me a favour.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of this.”

“And one day, I will claim that favour.”

“You are becoming just a little bit cute for my tastes, commoner.”

“And as you insist on your style of address, I shall insist on mine. Fair’s fair amongst equals.”

“Your style?” Marcus-John’s voice was coarse gravel.

“You may address me as ‘Your Ascendancy’.”

Nightminster honestly considered this moment his greatest feat of acting; he kept a straight face. Marcus-John tucked his chin down. His pale blue eyes appeared to dry into hard glass.

“You are sailing damned close to the wind, young man.”

“Could I suggest a compromise?” Aldingford the lawyer said, quietly. “That we avoid meeting in front of staff?”

There followed an awkward silence, in which Marcus-John continued to glare at Nightminster.

“The bottom line is; do you want that projector back, or not?”

“We have to get it back,” TK said abruptly, before his elder brother could respond. “As you are the only avenue through which we can get it back discreetly, we accept your terms. I know enough of you to be confident you will not make absurd demands.”

Nightminster stood up, lifting his chair back against the table. He threw his raincoat over his shoulder, feeling the kukri slap his back as if in triumph. Ignoring Marcus-John and attending strictly to TK, he said:

“You’re going to find my friendship a great deal more valuable than you realise at the moment, but we’ll talk again after the penny’s dropped. As for Mr Albert, I will go and see him now.”

He departed Wilson House on foot a few minutes later, his stride strong and his mood good. He had made their decencies an offer they couldn’t refuse, they just didn’t know it yet.

Chapter 26

A couple of introspective, contemplative, scheming, dreaming, cunning, ultimately daunting hours later, Nightminster entered Johnny Albert’s Bermondsey palace. He knew the next hour would determine the rest of his life.

The palace was as silent as St Paul’s cathedral. So commanding was this hush that he removed his hobnailed boots and proceeded in socks across the granite flags of the main atrium. In the centre of it stood the planetarium projector like a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a small head and lots of eyes. Beneath its chest, three open coffins rested on biers. Within each reposed an ultramarine in the early hours of eternal sleep; a leading heeler, a master sergeant and a lieutenant. Nightminster did not recognise any of them, although, the sergeant could have been his own father and he would not have known. A bullet strike had severely deformed and blackened the centre of his face. Standing guard were an under-sergeant and a leading heeler. Nightminster put down his boots, stood to attention and saluted. He noticed, while doing so, a steel plate resting against one of the legs of the projector proclaiming in neatly-stencilled Antiqua:

“This priceless heirloom of the Public Era is the famous planetarium projector of the Krossington clan. Your Captain will retain it until such times as ‘their decencies’ compensate the people of Bermondsey for the outrages of Saturday 26th November 2072”.

So, Johnny Albert was laying blame for the hooligans’ attack on Her Poor Old Decency Victorina, whose only crime was to do good at the wrong time and place. Nightminster thought this a cheap and theatrical level of politics. It must be patently obvious to every resident of Bermondsey that the attack had nothing to do with Victorina Krossington’s noble intentions of starting a vaccination program. Or perhaps not. Most asylum residents would believe what they were told to believe. Captain Johnny and his boys and girls must feel profoundly shamed by having failed to protect their estate.

“I need to see the Owner.”

“Who the hell are you?” the leading heeler grunted.

“That’s Big Knight,” the under-sergeant said. “He’s all right, in good standing. You go up top to the lounge, you’ll find him there.”

“Thank you, Under-sergeant.”

Nightminster picked up his boots and made his way higher through the levels of a deserted palace to the open, top deck. The front door of Johnny Albert’s was opened by his secretary, most solemn, displaying a black ribbon on his tunic lapel.

“Is it the Owner you’re after?”

“Yes, Lieutenant Hassan.”

“He’s at prayers with the bereaved families.”

Nightminster was too taken aback to respond. Johnny Albert down on his knees before the Almighty? What a hypocrite!

“Best if you came back tomorrow.”

“I’ve come from the Krossingtons, he should at least be informed.”

Lieutenant Hassan recoiled for a few seconds, gathering a scathing riposte to such insolence. Something about the steadiness of Nightminster’s eyes made him change his mind.

“Enter and wait in the pantry.”

The pantry? Yes indeed, he was shown to the pantry and waited perched on a stool beside a plain little table on which the cooks pummelled dough, to judge by the smell and flour. All around him were shelves loaded with sacks of flour, potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, bunches of asparagus and baskets of artichoke. Nothing was stored on the floor. Apparently not even the Owner could escape the predations of rodent infestation.

The door opened and Johnny Albert leaned around it.

“Big Knight?” he murmured. “What gives?”

“I’ve come from the Krossingtons.”

Johnny Albert stepped fully in and shut the door.

“How?”

“I got away in their armoured car—after I blasted a whole wave of riff-raff to hell with the twin Brownings.”

“That was you? I’ve never seen such a mess in my life. Even Lieutenant Jordon went pale as cheddar. There were blokes dragging themselves with guts hanging out, arms shot off… We had to put five of them out of their misery for the sake of human decency.”

A chill fell over Nightminster recollecting the horrors of those seconds when a tirade of supersonic steel lashed human beings, spraying blood and tattered flesh over the creosoted timbers of the wall behind.

“It was them or me.”

“Absolutely! You’re the champion of the day. You got twenty of them and my guys got another dozen, for just three of us lost. That’s a good kill. Even if the bastards got us by surprise, we made them pay. Wherever they came from, they won’t be able to hide that number of folk just vanishing. You can’t hide something like that. Sooner or later, we’ll know exactly who did it, and then it’ll be payback time.”

“Weren’t any interrogated?”

“The ones we put down were beyond articulate intercourse, if you get my meaning. Any lesser injured got away.”

“Weren’t they chased?”

Johnny Albert shook his head, frowning.

“I learned a lot yesterday—and I freely admit you were right about my estate being a sitting duck. I should have bloody listened. Everything has to be planned in advance. Troops have to be trained for weeks. They have to practice manoeuvres. It’s too late for training once the bullets fly. I’ve got my lieutenants planning stuff like night exercises they’d never have taken seriously before. If there’s a next time, we’ll hammer them. But I’m pretty sure there won’t be a next time. Not after the whacking we gave them.”

There followed a pause of some seconds.

“Did the Ks take you back to their Mayfair hutch?”

“They did! I spent the night in a tidy little flat and only just got out to come straight here.”

“Why did they keep you so long?”

“To begin with, they were probably too shaken by the whole business to bother about me. Two of their marines were killed. Marcus-John, the elder brother of—.”

“I know who he is, give me some credit, Big Knight.”

“He went on a rampage when he heard Victorina had taken clan assets into an asylum for a political stunt. Then they received the good news you’d taken their planetarium projector hostage. That’s completely put the shits up them. They’re out on their ear if you don’t give that projector back. It’s a funny thing what decent folk hold dear.”

“Fucking hilarious, I agree.”

“I wasn’t an honoured guest or anything. Strictly the tradesmen’s entrance for me. I don’t even know what Wilson House looks like, because the drive disappears into a basement garage.”

“Just like my place!”

They both laughed.

“The attack had nothing to do with Victorina K’s vaccination stall, and it certainly can’t have been ordered by Banner and TK.”

“True enough,” Johnny Albert said. “But someone has to take the blame, for appearances’ sake.”

“You should give the Krossingtons back their projector instead of blaming her. That fucking arsehole Marcus-John whipped her for the crime of caring, and I suspect that’s not unconnected with your seizing the projector.”

“She trespassed. I can’t have sovereigns flouncing into my estate preaching without asking. It shows disrespect.”

“You go into their estate without asking. You go in and you grab young corporals from Reigate fortress to give them a lesson in life—without asking permission.”

Johnny Albert fingered his wedding ring. This was a known danger signal.

“What’s all this is about, Big Knight?”

“That projector holds terrific significance for them. It’s the centrepiece of their New Year.”

“That’s why I took it.”

“What do you want in return?”

“Just a minute—are you here on their behalf?”

“Yes.”

Johnny Albert’s mouth dangled open scooping spiders. Nightminster had never seen him so stumped with amazement.

“They’ve sent a whelp of a commoner to speak for them?”

“They have.”

“Why?”

“I presume, because they’re at a loss over what else to do.”

“What’re they putting on the table, then, Mr Ambassador?”

“Strictly speaking, I’m a plenipotentiary, not an ambassador.”

“Get on with it.”

“They’ve got no idea what to put on the table. You won’t take their gold, and neither will I, so…”

“Then what are you putting on the table, Little Mr Plenty Potentially?”

“I want an invitation to your New Year’s party.”

“What’s that got to do with them?”

“And I in turn will invite Her Decency Victorina Krossington as my partner.”

Johnny Albert provided a most convincing impression of a baffled hen.

“What for? You’re but a whelp of a commoner. She’s not just sovereign flesh and blood, she doesn’t even like you—she whacked your face! She’ll send back an old jam-rag for such impudence.”

“In normal times, that would be true, but these aren’t normal times.”

“Look, it’s all very impressive trying to stuff above your station, but a sweet little Pekingese like you is never going to get it up a snooty Afghan like her.”

“You can’t draw conclusions until the experiment has run.”

“Oh, come on Big Knight, you’re going to marry her and build your factory in the Fens and live happily ever after? Why not straddle the moon and laugh at us slummies grubbing in the dirt while you’re at it?”

“I said, these aren’t normal times. Unless the Krossingtons are complete fools—and Marcus-John at least is no fool, even if he is a cunt—they’ll grasp the invitation is diplomatic, not romantic. They get their planetarium projector back and pleasure your vanity with Victorina’s very public presence at your New Year’s party.”

Johnny Albert was fingering his wedding ring again. He seemed perplexed rather than angry.

“I’ve got my eyes wide open,” he said. “I know it’s bloody dangerous to play games with the most powerful sovereign clan on the Island of Britain. But I’ve got no choice. I simply can’t turn a blind eye to the cheek of that young miss planting her stall on my market place and preaching the wonders of spaying the unemployed. She was disrespectful to Lieutenant Jordan. I simply can’t let that stuff pass.”

“On the face of it, what I’m proposing runs against the grain,” Nightminster admitted. “One moment she’s a figure of hate, the next honoured guest. But it’s all a matter of presentation. Do nothing for the time being. Let those Krossingtons sweat! Once the funerals of your troopers are over and everyone is getting busy for Christmas, withdraw the projector from public view. I’d be amazed if anyone asks about it. Everyone will assume the Krossingtons pushed out Her Decency Victorina as the ultimate offering. The general view will be that you got a good deal.”

“Big Knight, do you really understand how far you’re sticking your neck out?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Honestly? Suppose you send the invite and she ignores it? Suppose it went public she ignored an invite to my famous party? It’s not your reputation on the line here, because you don’t have any. It’s my reputation. I’ll be the laughing-stock of London. We can’t be friends any more after that.”

“She’ll accept because Marcus-John and TK will tell her to accept. They don’t have any choice. We’re making them an offer they can’t refuse, and they bloody well know it.”

“Okay, Little Mr Plenty Potentially, suppose she does accept and I send their precious projector home and then she doesn’t show on the night? Why should the Krossingtons stand by their word? You know what those people are like, they don’t flick people like us off their cuffs, seeing as they’ve got an army of flunkeys to do it for them.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“You don’t seem to grasp the difference between adventure and plain suicidal impulse. Suppose she accepts and actually turns up on the night? Have you thought about that? Little you the Prince Charming of a beautiful young lady of the landscape like that? How many suitors do you think she has back home with five thousand slaves and a palace? How many suitors do you think will zone in the moment she steps foot in my palace? What are little you? You’re not even a student. No job. No visible prospects. No land to call your own, not a scrap of this planet big enough to land a dinner plate has your name on it, Big Knight. You can’t even offer a half-decent bachelor pad. Where are you going to entertain her? Some manky dump up in Camden? Your mam and dad’s place?”

“I’ll lay my bets and you lay yours.”

“She’ll only turn up to humiliate you. You’ll never be able to show your face in Bermondsey again.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. From your point of view, what matters is that you become the first ultramarine owner ever to host sovereign flesh and blood in total public view. You’ll be the king-cock of the Ultramarine Guild. You hired me to accomplish that, and that’s what I’m offering. So, what’s it to be?”

“I’ll say this; you’re not one to run out of ideas, no matter how dire the situation. As for now–.”

Johnny Albert reached behind him, twisted the door handle and stepped aside as he tossed the door wide.

“If you get that invitation, there’s your answer. And if you don’t, well then, all the best in your life, young man.”

Nightminster was outside on Druid Street two minutes later. If he had fucked up, it was too late to do anything about it now. He had not expected Johnny Albert to be so jittery, truth be told.

He stopped and looked up at the clear night sky. He was remembering that summer night four months ago when he left this same palace after getting dragged to the edge of the roof by a panting Owner, whom he had lacked the guts to challenge. Now, he had challenged far more than a mere local owner, he was teasing the snot-ladder of an entire society. He was commencing a social revolution, even if those directly involved probably did not yet understand what they were in.

Or, he was the dreaming fool intoxicated by his highest ambitions.

The experiment was running.

DEAR READER

Please leave a review on Amazon, here (UK) or here (US). As an Indie author I love to hear from readers!

Read Book Two, Darkest Ambitions. You can get it here (UK) or here (US).

Lust for life, or lust for death?

This question haunts Nightminster as he applies his immense energy to the pursuits of love and gold.

From Victorina, he learns about a fascinating asset of the Krossington clan long hidden in the wastes of eastern England. Through a mixture of detective work and inspiration, he devises the ‘perfect business’, the Value System, to be built at this secret location.

Marcus-John Krossington is certainly impressed, just not in a positive way.

Nightminster is not alone in thrusting enterprise. The new president of the Official SUN Party, Sebastian Smith, is proving an exceptional champion of the people. The asylums of London are falling his way one by one, to the despair of Johnny Albert and his fellow ultramarine owners. Even the great Krossington clan feels the force of Smith’s ambitions.

It's the incredible opportunity Nightminster needs. He stretches his luck to the limit in seizing Krossington land to establish the Value System. In this way, he discovers that highest ambitions may actually be darkest ambitions – but it’s too late to turn back. Success or death are the only options now.

Darkest Ambitions is the second book in the Sovereigns of the Storm dystopian series.

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APPENDIX

Old Greater London and surrounding sovereign lands in 2072

This map shows Old Greater London and parts of the Big Seven sovereign lands radiating out into England around the old M25 circular motorway of the Public Era. Only major routes that form boundaries between the sovereign lands have been shown. Many major roads of the Public Era remain in use within the sovereign lands but have been omitted for clarity. Similarly, only towns and places featuring in the story have been included. A map of Public Era England forms an underlay for reference.

Central London Area in 2072

This map shows the general layout of the major industrial asylums and major routes featured in the story. Most turnpikes and public highways have been omitted for clarity. The geography of London has changed substantially since the Public Era due to clearing land for palaces, flooding, demolition of tower blocks and deconurbation. A map of Public Era London forms an underlay for reference.

Monetary System in 2072

For wealthy people, the basic unit of money worldwide in 2072 is the Troy ounce of gold (31.1035 grams). There are 32.1507 Troy ounces in a kilogram. Sub-units of account are the pennyweight (20 to the ounce) and the grain (24 to the pennyweight).

Prices in 2072 are subject to seasonal surges and falls, as well as yearly changes due to good harvests and bad harvests. Because of all this variability, it is hard to convert the future buying power of an ounce of gold into our paper money of today, especially as our money is also subject to inflation, changes in purchasing power parity and so forth. As a very rough guide, it may be taken that a Troy ounce of gold in 2072 is comparable to the buying power of between $25 and $75 today (USD).

This is less than one twentieth of the buying power of an ounce of gold at the time of writing (2021). The large fall in buying power of gold was caused by the collapse of modern industries and consequent dramatic shrinkage of the human population in the Glorious Resolution. Whereas, the amount of gold in human hands stayed constant. With the same amount of gold available but far less people to use it and far fewer things to buy, the purchasing power of gold had to fall (simple economics). This collapse in gold purchasing power is remembered as the Gold Crest.

Silver, copper and aluminium coins are also used as money by so-called slummies (residents of the industrial asylums), or as we would say, working people.