Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 1 Read online

  Chapter 3

  The wreck looked more like a collapsed bridge than a machine of the air. It was piled about the base of a sturdy oak tree, which had endured the assault with nothing worse than a split bough to show for it. The immense biplane wings had folded forward like a swimmer performing the butterfly, while the central section including the engines had collapsed forward on the cockpit. Somewhere in that mess of broken struts and crumpled fabric were fuel tanks the size of bathtubs full of an explosive prehistoric mineral liquid called petrol. The only sound now was the clatter of the petrol leaking out.

  Some local natives gathered around Donald where he lay on soil after his escape from the wreck. A deadweight apathy had settled over him now that he was clear of the danger of being incinerated. The natives gabbled in a dialect he could not understand. One of the natives kneeled beside him and put an arm around his shoulders.

  “You intact?” he said. He spoke in the slow, careful manner of one with limited command of a foreign language. He was a man of about twenty, with a thick beard in which a set of excellent teeth gleamed. He wore a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and pale canvas trousers but went bare-foot, perhaps having just come from some task like treading grapes or bating animal hides.

  “You intact?” the native repeated.

  “I think so.”

  The huddle of natives around him started to wail and call appeals. They were staring at a figure who had risen into view from the upper deck of the flying boat. It was Cecil Tarran-Krossington. He rested against the windscreen of the promenade deck, slowly turning his head this way and that, as if trying to see beyond the mist hanging in a circular curtain around the crash site. His expression was of dawning horror. He lifted something from the pocket of his brown motorcycle jacket—it was an automatic pistol—and a crazed intensity came into his eyes.

  “Aurum vita est!” he screamed.

  He opened his mouth wide as for a dental exam, inserted the muzzle of the pistol and fired. A gout of blood leaped from the top of his head. Blood poured from his mouth as if a tap had spun open, streaks of it ran down the side of the hull, the whites of his eyes flashed just before he toppled over backwards and dropped from sight.

  The natives around Donald bowed their heads and crossed themselves. They started a fervent muttering that was probably prayer. The suicide left Donald in a state of paralysis. Were the two women going to kill themselves too?

  There came a rising pounding of hooves. Donald looked behind to see a line of impressive Clydesdale horses cantering out of the mist. An officer rode the lead horse, which was clearly not enjoying the ploughed ground and proceeded sullenly with its big hooves throwing out fans of earth and pebbles. As the mounted troops approached, the huddle of natives around Donald seemed to shrivel, sinking to their knees and bowing their heads.

  The officer jumped down, his heels landing with a whack about ten feet away. Donald observed that he was in his mid-twenties, with a square, bold-jawed face. He wore the olive-green uniform of General Wardian glory trust, as confirmed by the silver corporate motif on each collar of the tunic. Two red stars on each epaulette and sleeve marked him as a team lieutenant, a middle rank not commonly attained by such a young man.

  He strode over swinging his riding crop and stopped, glaring first at Donald and then at the rough-and-ready group of natives. He raised the riding crop and lashed it across the back of the bearded young man who had spoken to Donald.

  “Be from sight, riff-raff.”

  The natives scuffled away on hands and knees until well clear of the riding crop, whereupon they jumped up and sprinted off towards a cluster of what looked like toy houses along the edge of the field. Donald only had time for a glance at these odd hovels, vaguely discernible through the mist, before he felt the tip of the riding crop under his chin. The officer leaned over him. By this time the squad of horsemen had dismounted and gathered behind their officer.

  “What are you?” the officer demanded.

  “My name is Donald Bartleigh Aldingford. I’m a commoner in transit for a sovereign client.”

  “Your business?”

  “I’m a barrister.”

  “I see the Krossington coat of arms on that wreck.”

  After a pause, Donald said: “Yes, indeed you do.”

  “How many were aboard?”

  “Eight. Three on the sovereign deck and four crew in the cockpit. I was alone on the commoners’ deck.”

  “Do you understand you will be interned under the law of Frite?”

  “I do understand that, yes.”

  “Can you stand up?”

  Donald found that he could, although his legs shivered and his head pounded.

  “There’s still a young woman inside the hull,” he said.

  “Where’s the crew?”

  “Under that mess.”

  Donald pointed to the heap of wreckage against the base of the oak tree. As the mist had thinned somewhat, he could now see there was an awful lot of open field in which the flying boat could have landed pretty much intact on its tough hull, designed as it was to withstand landings on the open sea. He guessed the pilot had aimed for the tree to get it over with rather than survive to be executed by Cecil Tarran-Krossington, as he certainly would have been.

  The team lieutenant ordered his men to search the wreck, adding they must take the most extreme care against causing sparks as the site was soaked in petrol. The squad of ten glory troopers made quick work of searching the wreck. From within the hull they extracted the body of Cecil Tarran-Krossington, bloody and limp, and the body of one of the young ladies, her head and chest a mass of blood. A blanch-faced sergeant returned from poking about near the tree and confirmed all four crewmen were definitely dead meat.

  “One of the engines fell into the cockpit,” he said. “It was still hot and turning when it landed.”

  The team lieutenant ordered a couple of guards put on the wreck. He explained to his men that it would be left overnight for the petrol to evaporate. In the morning, a team would come out to drain the remaining petrol from the tanks and cut the bodies of the unfortunate crewmen free. After that, the wreck would be taken into storage as evidence in the legal proceedings to come.

  “I’m required by our client’s regulations to handcuff you and lead you by the neck,” the team lieutenant said to Donald. He was in no way apologetic. A glory trooper with the rank of basic snapped handcuffs on Donald’s wrists and buckled a leather collar with a tether about his neck. The team lieutenant and the rest of his troopers mounted up and at a languid slouch led Donald off across the furrows into captivity, limping, bleeding, one shoe missing, stinking of petrol. The other young lady was apparently alive but unconscious. She was thrown across the saddle of one of the troopers, who promptly lifted her dress so his pals could savour the fact she wore no underwear. Then a yell from the team lieutenant halted the tomfoolery.

  *

  Naclaski: the National Clear Skies Initiative.

  Frite: the Full Rights of Territorial Exclusion.

  Naclaski and Frite, the laws that defined the meaning of privacy, the laws that provided Donald Bartleigh Aldingford his professional income. Now, they were the laws under which he was being taken into captivity. He limped along behind the slouching buttocks of a Clydesdale ridden by a mere basic of General Wardian glory trust. Just to keep going required concentration against the pains from his knee, face and thigh, and he kept suffering waves of trembling all over.

  After an exhausting walk of two hours and seventeen minutes according to Donald’s Rolex, which had apparently survived the crash without harm, the column entered a red brick fort. The team lieutenant jumped down from his horse and ordered the collar and handcuffs removed from Donald.

  He was then taken to his cell.

  Chapter 4

  Half an hour later, a sergeant collected Donald from the cell. He followed the NCO across a parade ground into a two-storey brick administration block. On
the upper floor, they arrived at the office of the team lieutenant who had led the troops at the wreck. The team lieutenant was tilted far back on his chair with his boots up on the desk. He thanked the sergeant, then yelled for Cooper. A little man of about thirty scurried in with all the stooping subservience of a hamster.

  “Get behind that typewriter, Cooper. It’s a Section 21, offences against Naclaski, and a Section 28, offences against Frite.”

  He looked at Donald for the first time.

  “I’m Dick Haighman. Welcome to the Broadstairs garrison, a true cow’s arsehole of this Earth where incest is not just a word, that is, if the locals aren’t duelling with broken bottles or drowning in the marshes. I could strangle my wife for nagging me into transferring south. I had a bloody wonderful number up north but she whined non-stop about the weather. As if a bit of bloody rain ever hurt anyone—”

  He sighed, dropping his boots to the floor with a bang.

  “Right,” he said. “First we have to get some bureaucracy done. You can’t drop a turd in General Wardian without filling in a form and sending it up to the boss—the form, I mean, not the turd, tempting though the idea is.”

  He slumped down in the chair again until his backside was virtually hanging off it and gazed up at the ceiling while he dictated to Cooper. Battery George had fired a warning salvo of six rounds by radar at 16:18. The warning salvo was out of mercy, recognising that the offender was probably confused by the ground fog. The offender ignored the warning, so Battery George followed up with a ranging salvo and then a further salvo which is believed to have straddled the offender, as the engines were heard to cut out, the usual signal of surrender. The offender descended rapidly and crashed into a tree within the property of the client, the Dasti-Jones clan. On attendance at the scene, the undersigned recorded two survivors, one slightly injured and one seriously injured, and six fatalities, of which one had survived the crash and then self-executed by gunshot. Four cadavers were left in the wreck due to excessive leakage of petrol. Full debrief of the light casualty is appended with this report. Full details of the other survivor, fatalities and manufacturer’s serial numbers from the wreck will follow by close of play tomorrow 6th October.

  “Okay you, let’s see your passport,” Haighman said.

  Donald drew out the leather-bound citizen of London passport from his jacket, or at least, the tatters of jacket that had survived the crash. Haighman flipped through the passport with a thumbnail, taking note of various entry and exit stamps. Donald thought this an outrageous invasion of his privacy but kept quiet.

  “A well-travelled man. You’ve been to the Isle of Man, the Lands of Krossington and the Isle of Wight.” He picked open the first page of the passport where Donald’s personal details lay. Something there obviously surprised him—he jolted and seemed about to speak, but then thought the better of it. He dictated the details to Cooper and then snapped the passport shut and slid it back across his desk.

  “What was a commoner doing aboard a sovereign’s flight?” he asked.

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “It might be useful if I did. As things stand, you’re looking at being discharged to the public drains as infestation, since I doubt the Krossingtons will want you back. Why should they cough up good gold when His Decency Cecil showed you a man’s duty?”

  The point was not lost on Donald. Why indeed should Tom Krossington pay good gold to free a coward?

  “Cecil Tarran-Krossington was a fool whose arrogance caused the crash. The pilot wanted to turn back and His Decency yelled at him to keep going.”

  “Shall I include that in my report?”

  “Go ahead and do what you like.”

  Haighman flopped in his chair laughing, startling poor little Cooper at the typewriter. He wagged a finger at Donald.

  “You are so like your brother Lawrence. Absolute defiance in the face of authority. Let me put the question differently: it’s none of my business, but I’d be interested to know how an insubordinate man like you makes a living from the sovereigns.”

  Donald hesitated. The sudden mention of his brother came straight from the blind side—but one did not succeed as a barrister without the resilience to take such shocks. He set the matter of his brother aside and stuck to the topic at hand.

  “The same way anyone does, I provide them something of value. There is nothing the sovereigns value more highly than face: getting the better of a rival sovereign, publicly. That’s what I provide them.”

  “How?”

  “I’m a barrister. I specialise in disputes arising from the laws of Naclaski and Frite.”

  “Is it lucrative?”

  “Not by sovereign standards—to them, I’m just a higher grade of servant. But as a one-man band, I do quite well, if I say so myself.”

  “Give me an example of such a case.”

  Haighman sat back. He was obviously bored with life at Broadstairs garrison and grasped for any diversion.

  “The most interesting cases are those on the limit of what is testable,” Donald said. “For instance, wild creatures are a constant source of ambiguity. If an eagle nests on one sovereign land but hunts on another, is that in breach of Naclaski? What about a herd of wild boar breaking out of one sovereign land into another? Is that a breach of Frite? The legislation states that animals ‘not related to human endeavours’ are outside the scope of the law, but even that can be hard to interpret. Wild animals may predate upon domestic animals, or ruin crops—wild boar being a case in point. Does that make them ‘related to human endeavours’ or not? These questions sustain a cerebral arena that keeps me out of mischief.”

  Haighman listened to this closely, obviously fascinated to learn about another man’s livelihood, whilst at the same time expressing a rising amusement.

  “I can sense certain parallels with your brother Lawrence,” Haighman said. “You’ve channelled your defiance into a professional income. What about fighting arts? You’re bloody trim for your age; do you box?”

  “I did at school.” Donald had almost been expelled from the fifth year for fighting. Boxing lessons had been the ‘deal’ to placate the head master’s wrath. “These days it’s wrestling and gym workouts.”

  “Fighting with brains and body. That’s the healthy way for a misfit to survive.”

  Donald said nothing. He would not have described his life as other than a loathsome subservience imposed on him by the caste system—he was not to the manor born on fifty square miles with five thousand natives, therefore he had to work for a living. It was Haighman who continued, perhaps feeling his comment had been taken badly.

  “Is Lawrence still flourishing?” he asked.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Donald said. “Lawrence abandoned the family ten years ago. We only learned he’d joined General Wardian because the school needed our permission to release his records. You’ll know more than I do.”

  Haighman buckled forward in astonishment. “He never said a word about anything like that! I had absolutely no idea he was estranged from his family...” Haighman stared up at Donald in obvious embarrassment. This time it was Donald who filled the silence.

  “Lawrence had a difficult relationship with Father. A daredevil and a disciplinarian are not natural buddies. Each inflamed the other. In retrospect, I should have made more effort to mediate...” Donald stopped, irritated by his own pomposity. He sensed under the pomposity an unexpected wrench of sadness. Odd how a conversation will peel open an unknown corner of the mind. He had never felt remorse for his long-lost brother until this moment. “Then one day, it was too late. Lawrence walked out one summer’s day and that was the last we ever saw of him.”

  Haighman obviously regretting having raised the subject at all.

  “I was just making a polite enquiry,” he said quietly.

  He clasped his hands and planted them on the desk, to emphasise the topic was closed and it was time to be serious.

&n
bsp; “Let me explain what happens now. You will be held here in the cells whilst my bosses inform the Dasti-Jones clan. They will contact the Krossington clan through the usual diplomatic channels. If the Krossingtons agree to negotiate for your repatriation, all well and good. Otherwise, you’ll be classed as infestation and discharged to the public drains. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Haighman’s eyes surveyed Donald up and down.

  “You’re a bloody mess. I’ll get you cleaned up and those wounds dressed. You need a change of clothes too. I don’t suppose our stores will miss a stable hand’s outfit.”

  *

  Six days passed. Donald kept a discreet record of the days scratched onto a brick in the wall under his bunk. He was roused at 06:00 every morning to clean his cell. Provided the nit-picking sergeant was satisfied with the exact squareness of the blanket folded on the pillow, the precise inch between the latrine bucket and the bed and so on and so forth, Donald could then be served breakfast of porridge and tea. Lunch was a couple of thick slices of rough country bread with butter and strawberry jam, dinner was mashed turnip or potatoes with cabbage and a couple of inches of pork sausage or a chunk of cod. Lights went out at 22:00. In between these bursts of excitement, time crawled. He had all the time in the world to contemplate life on the public drains.

  The problem was, he had never seen the drains in his life. All of his travels from the Central Enclave had commenced by flying boat or yacht from one of the quays of the sovereign caste. Such knowledge of the public drains as he possessed came from school lessons. He had been taught that the public drains were once called public highways back in the Public Era. These were ribbons of fossil tar and gravel mixed into a cake called tarmac. Some public highways were as wide as rivers. They were divided up by white dashed lines. The Fatted Masses shot along these ribbons at fearsome speeds in their bug-like sheet-metal motor cars. Not surprisingly, vast numbers of the Fatted Masses were killed in crashes in which their bugs got crushed beyond recognition. On other occasions, the flow of bugs was so great that the system ground to a halt and the Fatted Masses had to sit there like pigs in pens. Donald had a vivid recollection of a photograph in a history textbook showing a jam of bugs reaching the horizon. The caption read: “During the Public Era, population growth combined with rising affluence led to overcrowding”. After the Glorious Resolution of 2038-40; the public highways were abandoned and slowly returned to Nature. The bigger highways made useful boundary strips between the sovereign lands. Other than that, the new world of the sovereign caste had no use for public highways, except as drains onto which to discharge their surplus and infestations.