Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 1 Read online

  SOVEREIGNS OF THE COLLAPSE

  BOOK ONE - DEATH BY DECENT SOCIETY

  *

  MALCOLM J WARDLAW

  Death by Decent Society

  Copyright © 2020 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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  Note to the reader

  During this book and its sequels, you may find it useful to refer to maps and other information in the Appendix (see Table of Contents below):

  Other Books in this Series

  Book 2: The Value System

  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

  Appendix

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  [Broadstairs Garrison, Kent, England, early October 2106]

  The cell door banged shut behind Prisoner Aldingford.

  Grit shaken from the ceiling settled on his shoulders. Bolts rapped home in short order one-two-three, top, middle and bottom. Hobnailed boots crackled back to the languor of the guard room.

  Swaying with exhaustion and shock, Donald Aldingford absorbed his new reality. The cell was only a bit wider than the corridor outside. The single block of wood that formed the bunk took up most of the distance from the door to the far wall, with a thoughtful bit extra for the latrine bucket, which had been even more thoughtfully fitted with a gleaming steel lid. The walls were of white-washed brick. There was no window, just a tiny ventilation grill over the door. The ceiling was of rough-finished planks, through which came creaks and thuds from the offices above.

  It was the ache of cold in his left foot that finally prompted him to move and sit on the bunk, pulling off his one remaining shoe from the right foot before stretching out his legs with a long groan—more of pain than despair. He felt as if he had been thrown off a bull and trampled. The most painful wound was a laceration in the top of his right thigh, barely a hand’s width from his groin. The flesh had been sliced open by a splinter from an anti-aircraft shell. Blood from the wound had soaked the front of his trousers during the long walk from the site of the crash. However, it was a gash over his right eye that most concerned him. He touched it, feeling the edges and the scabs of dried blood. The skull behind the wound throbbed. He wondered if his skull was cracked. Finding the wooden pillow an unsympathetic rest for a throbbing head, he sat up, pulled off his jacket and rolled it into a ball to make a pillow. Now he lay amid petrol fumes wafting up from the folds of oily silk and wool.

  He supposed he should consider himself lucky. A few inches the other way and the shell splinter would have left him without manhood. A harder bang on the head would have killed him. Of the eight people who had taken off that afternoon, only two were still alive. The other, a young woman, had left the crash site slung over a trooper’s saddle, still out cold with her backside bare to the world. Perhaps she was dead after all.

  Had he had been knocked out during the crash or not? He recalled uncomprehending shock on seeing an oak tree of prodigious dimensions directly ahead of the flying boat and he recalled dangling upside down from his left foot in a shower of what he at first thought was frigid water. Between the two memories there was a blank. A blank five seconds? A blank five minutes? No, it could not have been five minutes. Just after his return to the world, the frigid water splashed in his eyes and stung like onions. It was petrol, not water. He shuddered as he relived that searing shaft of terror on realising he was getting doused with petrol. That could not have been five minutes after the crash. The petrol was only beginning to seep down through the wreckage from the fuel tanks in the upper wing. The blank must have been mere seconds.

  He could remember little of his escape from beneath tons of flying boat piled up against the oak tree. A white blaze of panic in his mind, wrenching his foot from the trapped shoe and fighting like a desperate animal burrowing and flattening himself with splintered ends of broken aircraft scoring down his back like the claws of a monster, a gasping relief of deliverance to see the wide open sky above and inhale cool, clean air...

  So, now he was in some big-shot landowner’s jail. To get back to life would require the payment of a ransom. How big a ransom? Donald was not a big-shot, he was but a humble barrister travelling under the instructions of a client. It would not be a big-shot’s ransom then, but even a humble barrister’s ransom could amount to—what? Six months’ income? There was no way in hell Donald’s precarious finances could survive that kind of gouging. No chance. Zero.

  No, if Donald was ever to see his daughters again, it was his client who would have to pay the ransom. And that was the essential question now preying on Donald’s mind: would the client bother? Did he value Donald Bartleigh Aldingford that much?

  As he stared up at the rough planks of the ceiling, Donald struggled for optimism.

  The words of his grandfather Sir Bartleigh Aldingford came to mind. Sir Bartleigh had dropped dead from a heart attack when Donald was six years old, despite which his pithy sayings had lingered in memory. There was one in particular:

  “The high times come from the dark times.”

  Sir Bartleigh was actually referring to the rise of the sovereign caste after the worst calamity ever to befall humanity; the Glorious Resolution of 2038-40. For Donald, lying in a jail cell in the depths of his own ‘glorious resolution’, the words brought a surge of inspiration verging on euphoric optimism.

  At least for a few moments.

  Chapter 2

  The day on which Donald fell out of the sky into captivity began normally. He stepped from his limousine just after ten o’clock and entered his chambers, climbing through the storeys to his office on the top floor. It was a corner office with a view down a ravine-like street to the River Thames. Like any barrister, his workload swung between idleness and panic-stations. Just at this time, he was enjoying a little idleness.

  Ten minutes after settling into his office, the peace ended. A runner panted up the stairs bearing a message. Donald signed for it and waited until he was alone again, whereupon he ripped off the wax seal to extract a sheet of tracing paper smaller than a man’s palm. It had been tightly folded to fit inside the pouch of a carrier pigeon. He frowned. It was hand-written by Tom Krossington, ruler of the sovereign Lands of Krossington, the wealthiest on the Island of Britain. It read:

  “Donald, please take the afternoon plane from Krossington Quay at 2 pm. I apologise for this abrupt summons and trust that other commitment
s do not preclude our meeting, [signed] TK.”

  For at least a minute Donald remained frozen in his seat, aware of his heart pounding and sweat dripping from his armpits.

  The message was a shock. There was nothing TK could tell him in the Lands of Krossington that could not be said here in London. If the hand of TK was reaching out to drag Donald into the shadows of sovereign privacy, then something was going to happen there that could not be done here in the Central Enclave of London. Something unpleasant. Something from which he might not return.

  People did vanish. Within seconds, half a dozen names poured across his mind, the names of people no longer seen at his sports club, inn of court, or on the party round. A man in Donald’s club called Halthwaite had dropped from sight about three years ago (or was it four?). He was a hydraulic engineer by profession. Some said he had a stroke and was bed-ridden. Others that he was killed in an accident on a sovereign land. In truth, no one knew. There had been no funeral. Beyond that, nothing more could be said. It was the same with all the other names; there had been no funeral.

  Every London professional sold their brains to a caste of sovereign clans who ruled their lands with absolute authority. That was what made them sovereign. There was no other market, so you put up with it.

  Donald folded the tracing paper and put it back in the envelope, which he pushed deep inside his suit. His father Morton had studied at Oxford with Tom Krossington. His grandfather Sir Bartleigh had been a close friend of Wilson Krossington, the founder of the Krossington dynasty. Surely such long family connections must count for something?

  “I have done nothing wrong,” Donald said out loud.

  *

  Krossington Quay was a basin of several acres’ extent connected to the River Thames by a short channel. That afternoon, Donald found the basin dominated by a biplane flying boat of substantial scale moored against a floating pier. Despite his grim mood, he could not help but be impressed by the expanse of the canvas-skinned wings, the towering struts supporting the upper plane and the complex triangular patterns formed by the bracing wires between the wings. Then there were the four mighty radial engines, each as big around as a cartwheel. The hull of the flying boat bore the Krossington coat of arms. The clan motto was “Aurum Vita Est” (Gold is Life). After his admiration of the big machine, he took a seat in the commoners’ saloon and waited.

  2 pm came and went. Then 3 pm. This waiting goaded Donald. He wanted to face his fate quickly. About ten minutes later, a ruddy-faced man with white hair strode past the windows towards the flying boat yelling for the fucking pilot. Donald recognised this man as Cecil Tarran-Krossington, a minor noble of the clan.

  “Where the buggery have you bloody been?” Cecil Tarran-Krossington was glaring at four young men in flight crew uniforms hurrying to join him on the floating pier. Donald followed them.

  “I apologise for keeping you waiting, Your Decency,” said the leading young man, evidently the captain. He was about Donald’s own age, mid-thirties, with much the same height and build, around six feet tall with a lean and muscular frame. Donald sympathised with the man’s meekness; servants do not win against sovereign conceit.

  A couple of young women wearing fur coats and not much else followed His Decency Cecil. As they ducked through the access door to board the flying boat, their skirts lifted to reveal that both went commando and did not wax. Donald failed to be discreet in his observations. Cecil Tarran-Krossington glared at him and snapped:

  “Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”

  “My name is Donald Bartleigh Aldingford, Your Decency.”

  “A commoner?”

  “Yes, Your Decency.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing here?”

  “His Decency Tom Krossington requires my presence, Your Decency.”

  The mention of the head of clan had an obvious quieting effect on His Decency Cecil. In a more man-to-man tone, he said:

  “Well keep your eyes to yourself, commoner.”

  “Yes, Your Decency.” Donald kept his eyes down and shoulders a little rounded in submission during the exchange. His Decency Cecil turned to the pilot.

  “Get moving, you. I’ve a dinner party in Haslemere.”

  “Yes, Your Decency.”

  Donald took a seat on the lower deck where servants and commoners travelled. The ceiling was so low that it would more aptly be described as a tunnel, while the windows were just a couple of feet above the water line. If the flying boat collided out on the river, he stood little chance of escape, supposing a swim in the River Thames could be described as ‘escape’.

  The flight crew hastened through their preparations. Mechanics climbed up to the engines and started them with crank handles. A rev of the propellers and they were under way, through the channel and out onto the river. They were now on the sewer of London, a fact obvious from the breath of it that filtered into the cabin. A cadaver ballooned up with decomposition flowed past, then another, both so far gone it was impossible to determine either age or sex. Then a dead cow... The flying boat’s nose lifted, waves and foam swept past the port hole, Donald ducked to look up at the underside of Tower Bridge as the flying boat passed under it. The roar of the engines hardened, the propellers droned with strain, a storm of spray flew behind—and then all was smooth as the brown river and its stench fell away and the land to either side flattened and slowed. He looked behind at the spectacular red barrier of the Grande Enceinte extending away from both sides of Tower Bridge like an escarpment. This red-brick wall was the frontier of the Central Enclave of London. It had a circumference of nineteen miles and supposedly contained two billion red bricks. As ‘enceinte’ was a French word, it was correctly pronounced ‘on-saint’, not ‘hen-sent’ as the ill-educated claimed. So echoed the words of a primary school teacher of long ago.

  The frantic bellow of the engines eased back to a mellower pulsing. The flying boat cruised down the River Thames, past the industrial asylums with their factory sheds, chimneys belching smoke, masses of workers’ houses clustered around them like gravel. Donald was always amazed by how small the asylums looked from the air given the torrents of slummies that poured into the Central Enclave to work as labourers and household servants. The asylums quickly gave way to woodland, strip fields and pastures in which horses grazed. He assumed these were the petty domains of gangsters.

  He knew from previous flights that flying boats were swift conveyances, being able to cruise at about twice the speed of a galloping horse. That was how the machine would be able to land in Portsmouth on the south coast of England just three hours after leaving the Central Enclave of London. Or at least, that would be so if the weather permitted. A little under an hour after take-off, Donald noticed the machine lean to one side and the world begin to rotate slowly under them. He heard Cecil Tarran-Krossington shouting on the deck above. By moving to the front of the servants’ deck, Donald could see up towards the cockpit. The pilot was red in the face and fretting over some papers. Donald looked down through the nearest port hole and immediately understood the problem. To one side fog lay on the sea, spreading away into the distance like a snow-covered plain. However, the air above the fog was clear.

  The flying boat levelled out and continued over the white, rolling layer. Donald supposed the caution of the pilot arose from the risk of drifting over private sovereign land hidden by fog. If this happened, the glory trust responsible for defending the privacy of that land would open fire with its standard 155mm anti-aircraft guns, shooting through the fog using tracking radar. That was how the law was enforced. Having said that, Donald had a minor appreciation of navigation and knew that aircrew were trained to take fixes from the sun to determine position. He returned to his seat, growing bored with the monotonous white view. The sky paled from blue to hazy. They should be turning south to fly through the Strait of Dover about now… And there it happened, the starboard wing dipped to point at the fog layer below and the world beneath rotate
d.

  Only a minute or so later Donald twitched with shock, as if he had nodded off and then snapped alert. There had been a flash somewhere nearby. He noticed a cluster of dark puffs falling behind the flying boat, then another cluster appeared and he heard a bang behind him, like someone whacking the planking of the hull with a hammer. When he swivelled around in his seat, he was amazed to see a jagged hole in the side of the hull and a corresponding hole about an inch across on the opposite side.

  As he turned to face forwards again, a brilliant flash burst outside his window with a report like a shotgun, followed by wild screams from the sovereign deck overhead and a stinging pain in his right thigh. Shattered glass whirled about the cabin and a spray of wood splinters covered the front of his jacket. Blood bulged up through a rip across the top of his trouser leg. Although dazed by the blast of the anti-aircraft shell, he now understood they were in breach of the so-called Naclaski law of privacy and were being quite legitimately fired upon. That damned fool of a pilot had taken them over a sovereign’s land!

  The deck turned almost vertical, turfing Donald across the cabin. He bounced off the ceiling and then hit the deck on which he was crammed down by an extraordinary force seeking to drive his skull through the planks. The roar of engines cut dead. Now all he could hear was howling from overhead caused by the tornado of their speed in the bracing wires between the wings. By kneeling behind a seat and hugging it, he managed to hold himself in place long enough to see the that world and the sky were reeling around and around and the snowy layer of fog was getting closer and closer.

  For all its great size and power, the flying boat was not too big to crash.