Future's Beginning

by Frank Tayell

  “I… I accept. Guilty. Can I just say—”

  “No, you can’t,” Kennedy said. “Next.”

  Sholto felt a tug at his arm. It was Leo Fenwick. Five-foot six, and only in his mid-forties, the stress of the last few weeks had added deep lines to his face. Like most in Belfast, he’d shaved his head, and while that masked his receding hairline, it only aided in prematurely ageing his appearance. Like almost everyone else in the command centre, he wore the blue and grey uniform, but his stance was anything but martial. The councillor nodded towards the far corner of the room. Sholto followed him over.

  “Was your sister always like that?” Sholto asked.

  “She was worse before she was married,” Fenwick said, and then seemed to realise what he’d said. “Her approach is for the best, I think. Don’t you?”

  “I’m impressed, if anything,” Sholto said. “How many are on today’s docket?”

  “There are two more,” Fenwick said. “A divorce, and a petty-thief who needs the services of a psychiatrist more than a judge. What news from Dundalk?”

  “Not much,” Sholto said, thinking furiously. Fenwick was on the council. They’d not got around to writing a constitution, but a strong argument could be made that, in Mary’s absence, he was in charge in Belfast. The reality, that even Fenwick would admit, was that the admiral was in charge, with Sholto, as always, existing somewhere to one side.

  “There has to be some news,” Fenwick said.

  “They’re low on ammunition and food,” Sholto said, opting for the truth, but a slow version of it, in the hope the admiral would return before he reached any parts he’d have to omit. “They had an accidental death last night. Otherwise, they haven’t lost anyone since the crash. Does that count as good news?”

  “It’s so hard to say, isn’t it? When will they leave?”

  “A good question,” Sholto said, and one to which he could give an honest answer. “The New World is ready for them to embark, but, at present, they don’t have any way to board the ship. They’re looking for a suitable place of embarkation along the seafront today. I figure it’ll take most of tomorrow to move people and gear to the shore. I’d say forty-eight hours before they’re all aboard. That’s at the earliest. Weather and the undead could delay them.”

  “I see. Not sooner than that? When is the latest? How long will it be before The New World arrives here?”

  Before Sholto had to lie, a hush swept through the room. It began at the door as the sentries snapped to attention, then spread to a quartet of off-duty soldiers playing cards in the corner, then to Judge Kennedy. Slightly more slowly, the hush reached the bickering couple arguing over why they shouldn’t get divorced. Soon, the only sound was the chainsaw-snore coming from Private Petrelli, asleep on his bunk.

  “Carry on,” Admiral Janet Gunderson said from the doorway. Lieutenant John Whitley was at her side. “Mr Sholto,” the admiral continued, heading over to him, “I heard the helicopter’s return. I trust you bring good news?”

  “I’d say it was considerably complex,” Sholto said, using the previously agreed form of words that the lack of privacy in the close confines of the harbour made a necessity.

  The admiral nodded. “Mr Fenwick, how is the economic policy developing?”

  “The… ah, do you mean trade?” Fenwick replied.

  “It can’t begin until we have a currency,” the admiral said, “and we can’t have one that’s easily forged. Encourage trade, and we encourage self-reliance. Do that, and we’ve solved half our problems.”

  “I… I have a few ideas,” Fenwick said.

  “Are they ready to be implemented?”

  “Not yet.”

  The admiral raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes,” Fenwick said. “Yes, of course. I’ll get… get back to work. Thaddeus.” He hurried off, and Sholto followed the admiral to the office.

  In the corner of the warehouse were two shipping containers, stacked one on top of the other. Windows had been installed during the building’s previous incarnation so that management could watch labour. The admiral had installed curtains so that enlisted couldn’t so easily spy on leadership, but the doors and walls were thin so Sholto kept his voice low.

  “Currency? You didn’t mention that this morning,” he said.

  “It’s not entirely make-work,” the admiral said as she removed her coat and handed it to the lieutenant. “Some of our newer recruits were caught trading items they found in the city. Tablets and phones for the most part. Some books and… and what else, John?”

  “Four tablets, twelve phones, twenty-three paperbacks, headphones, an old oil lantern, shoelaces, and a hypoallergenic pillow,” Whitley said. “The pillow was what tipped off the sergeant. They’d collected the loot while searching houses for the undead prior to the firewood-gangs going in to rip up the floorboards.”

  “We don’t have a law against responsible scavenging,” Sholto said. “In fact, I’d say we encourage it.”

  “Sailors burdening themselves down with unnecessary trinkets reduces their readiness,” Whitley said.

  “Perhaps,” the admiral said, “but the real issue is that those items were looted to order. They were trading them for cleaning and sewing, and… well, I shall take their word that was all it was for. Trade will happen. It will always happen, and if we don’t control it, someone will sell bullets for fish. Hence Mr Fenwick’s task: to find us something we can use as a currency.”

  “It does keep him out of the way,” Whitley said. He hung the admiral’s overcoat, and then his own. Where he wore the blue and grey uniform, she was dressed in a navy-blue suit with gold braid on the sleeves. The suit had come from a department store, the braid from a costume shop, but it passed muster in their increasingly makeshift world.

  The admiral sat in her brown leather recliner. Whitley took his chair on the immaculately ordered side of the two desks. Sholto took Kallie’s chair on the far messier side.

  “What news from Dundalk?” the admiral asked. “What do you have to share you didn’t want Mr Fenwick to hear?”

  “It’s nothing good, but nothing too bad,” Sholto said. “But it is news. Or a change of direction coming straight from our elected mayor. Things haven’t turned out as any of us planned. Or hoped for that matter. Perhaps too many of our dreams were fantasies that we clung to for too long.”

  “What’s the edict from Mrs O’Leary?” Whitley asked.

  “I’ll get to that,” Sholto said. “First, I think it’s time we put our cards on the table, cleared the air, so to speak. I’d more or less made up my mind before I arrived here in Belfast. After that debacle on the motorway, I’d confirmed it. I planned to return to Anglesey, take the plane and Sorcha Locke, and fly to the U.S. I’m still uncertain whether Kempton had an underground storehouse there, though Locke claimed to know the location of one. As to whether it contains more supplies than were in Birmingham or Elysium, I’ve no idea. I was still working through the hows-and-whys of implementing the plan when we were forced to abandon Anglesey. I wasn’t intending to fly into the unknown on some hare-brained suicide mission. That doesn’t change the fact that I wanted to take the plane and use that, and the satellites, to force everyone’s hands. I dare say, on balance, you and your people wouldn’t have minded bringing a ship across the Atlantic, but I would have taken that decision from you, from Mary, from the council.”

  “I… I see,” the admiral said. “Do you know where this underground warehouse is?”

  “Nope, and there is a chance it doesn’t exist, or that it’s already been emptied, or that it’s occupied by Kempton’s people. People like that woman who shot Kallie.”

  “And what would you do if you found them there?” Whitley asked.

  “As I say, I hadn’t worked out all the details, but we do still have a submarine with its nuclear warheads. I figure one of those missiles would have taken care of them. We’d have to find a way of firing them without satellite-guidance, but if all else failed, I reck
on we could tie the targeting to a signal from a sat-phone.”

  “You’d call in a nuclear strike on your own head?” Whitley asked.

  “Yep,” Sholto said. “If that’s what it took. No amount of canned food is worth handing over the future of our species to someone like Kempton. Look, when I left America, I had no great hope of finding my brother. I hadn’t much more of even reaching Britain. But when I allowed myself to dream, to envelope myself in some future fantasy, because I had nothing else with which to keep myself warm, I pictured us on a farm amid the sage, in a world free of the undead. What was clear, after I reached Britain, after we reached Anglesey, was that a future for the children would take more effort than Bill, Kim, and I could provide. It’ll take more than a village, but that’s about all we have left. Regardless of the consequences to me, regardless of what sacrifice I had to make, I was ready to force everyone’s hand. But, before I could, we had to abandon Anglesey. The plane’s been lost, and with it my plans. Nevertheless, that was what I’d planned. Those are my cards, so what are yours?”

  “What do you mean?” Whitley asked.

  “The sabotage changed everything,” Sholto said. “It can’t change the fact that Heather Jones took her fishing fleet to Elysium, not to here.”

  “We had nothing to do with that,” Whitley said.

  “John, no, he has a point,” the admiral said. “Besides, he wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t know the answer. Yes, Mr Sholto, you are correct. We had a plan of our own. It is, essentially, the same as yours, though different in the manner in which it was to be implemented. Like yours, it was lost with the plane. From the moment we stepped off the Harper’s Ferry and onto Holyhead’s damp shore, it was obvious that there was nothing holding the people of Anglesey together. There was no great victory, no passion for country, no love for one another. Events proved me right. Too many still wanted glory, fame, or recognition, as evidenced by the sheer number of people who put their names forward in the election. Too many desired power, as proven by the acts of John Bishop and Rachel Gottlieb. On Anglesey, where we had little but immediate security, too many were willing to take rather than make. Too many others were willing to sail into the unknown rather than stay and face uncertain dangers with us.”

  “And your plan?” Sholto asked.

  “To strip Elysium of the turbines and solar panels, take those to an island off the Irish west coast. That would become our base on this side of the Atlantic while I took my people back home. We’d have found a secluded bay if not a serviceable harbour, and there we would have made landfall. Heather Jones and her people would be able to forge a rough life subsisting on fish while the Harper’s Ferry was repaired. By March, it would have been able to cross the Atlantic with all who wanted to come.”

  “All?” Sholto asked.

  “We’d make as many trips as necessary.”

  “But only departing from your small island? It would be a self-selecting group.”

  “No one would be forced to join us,” the admiral said. “But we wouldn’t leave anyone behind. All who wished to join us would be welcomed. Not everyone would want to come with us, or go to America. I thought that some, many, might remain in Belfast, and in a place we’d done as much as we could to make liveable.”

  “Yet those who left would do so wearing your uniform?” he asked.

  “I’d say a good dose of military discipline is precisely what’s needed,” Whitley said.

  Sholto shrugged. “Maybe. It’s more or less what we thought. More or less what we feared.”

  “It’s more or less what you were trying to engineer with a hasty flight across the Atlantic,” the admiral said.

  “Not intentionally, but yes, I can see how that would be the logical outcome,” Sholto said. His plans, though, were partly a reaction against those of the admiral’s that he, Bill, and Kim had discovered while on Anglesey. “Ah, but those plans have truly gone awry,” he continued aloud. “I have to say, though, I’m surprised Heather Jones was willing to leave Wales behind.”

  “She can’t return to Anglesey now that the reactor has begun to leak,” Whitley said. “Not in her lifetime.”

  “It’s leaking? I didn’t get that report.”

  “Chief Watts is off the coast of Anglesey with Sophia Augusto,” the admiral said. “They called in while you were in Dundalk.”

  “Ah.” Sholto had deliberately made it difficult for people to communicate with the sat-phones, forcing all calls to come through a central switchboard. That had been an attempt to control the means of communication, and thus the destiny of the survivors. A futile attempt, as it had turned out. “You and I aren’t the only ones who had plans and schemes,” he added. “You know Scott Higson wanted to fly back to Australia. If we’d managed to bring the plane here, I think he’d have taken it within a week.”

  “And we’ve had to stop two attempts to seize the Amundsen and sail her west,” the admiral said.

  “You mean your crew mutinied?” Sholto asked.

  “No,” Whitley said. “It was a difference of opinion over the continued integrity of the chain of command.”

  Sholto parsed that, and decided it amounted to the same thing. If that was the fiction they’d concocted to avoid having to punish their crew, that was their business. What was his business, and that of everyone else, was that the mutiny had not been discussed.

  “There have been too many secrets, haven’t there,” he said. “Well, that brings us to Dundalk. Mary’s made an executive decision. The broad strokes are that she’s staying in Dundalk, as are the survivors of the wreck. They have found some food in the city. Not much. Maybe enough for a meal or two. Critically, they’ve managed to salvage some grain from the wreck. Since there’s no room on The New World to bring both grain and people back here, they’ll stay until it’s gone, or they’re forced to abandon it. When they leave, they’ll head south to Dublin, and then to France to find larger ships on which we can all live. Cruise ships, freighters, an oil tanker, whatever the satellites can find around the coast of France or in the Mediterranean. Having found the ships, we’ll bring the vessels here, and board everyone. We’ll all live on ships, offshore, and follow the coast from town to town, taking what we need until the undead are finally gone. We can’t dig fields in this weather, and we both know that we can’t farm while the undead are still an ever-present threat. Let’s leave the land behind until it’s safe once more.”

  “I see,” the admiral said slowly. “And off which coast will we be living?”

  “America if you like,” Sholto said. “But we need to look closer than that for the ships. We’ve searched most of Ireland. Since the Royal Navy sank all shipping that strayed into British waters, we know we won’t find vessels around that coast. Those ships that didn’t form part of Sophia’s flotilla had to have gone somewhere. If not Ireland or Britain, it has to be Europe. The Mediterranean is an obvious place to start.”

  “Except you want to start with the French coast,” Whitley said. “What you mean is that you’re sending The New World to look for your brother.”

  “This is Mary’s plan, not mine,” Sholto said. “As for Bill, yes I want to find him, but Leon is closer to the French coast than we are. Nilda will want to find Chester as much as I want to find my brother. For now, I’m leaving that task to them.”

  “I see,” the admiral said. She glanced at the door, then at the lieutenant. “Living aboard ships? What do you think, John?”

  “Where to begin?” Whitley said. “The obvious problem is fuel. The waters around Svalbard are becoming treacherous. It’ll worsen as winter begins. We’ll have to run the Amundsen as a fuel tanker, a task for which it was not designed and for which we don’t have the time to refit her. However, without fuel, regardless of how luxurious the ships we find, there’ll be no power to recharge the batteries. That means no lights, no desalinisation, and no power to the freezers. We can talk about grain, and dream about sailing into a port and finding a warehouse full of canned corn, bu
t the reality is that we’ll be eating fish. You can’t cast a line from the decks of a moving freighter, or throw out a net during a storm. We’ll have to stop, deploy boats, and fill freezers whenever we can. We’ve got to find the freezers first, and then use electricity, and so fuel, to keep them running. In turn, that means more trips for the Amundsen deep into the ice, and there are risks with that voyage, even for an icebreaker.”

  “Then we’ll look for an oil tanker,” Sholto said. “We’ll bring the fuel with us.”

  “Which brings us to the second problem,” Whitley said. “Finding ships that are seaworthy. Anything that’s been untended for months yet is still afloat will be like the John Cabot, and that leaked like a journalist on jury duty. We had an entire harbour to scavenge parts for the repairs, and what we achieved was little better than a welding job. If this is plan is to work, we’ll need vessels like the Harper’s Ferry, but she needs another three months of repairs, and that’s a ship we know inside and out. We might find a few floating hulls, some that might even get us across the Atlantic, but what if the repairs don’t hold? We might reach America, only to be forced to abandon our ships at the first secluded bay we reach.”

  “So we find ships that we don’t have to abandon,” Sholto said.

  “Easy to say,” Whitley said.

  “There is no harm in searching for ships,” the admiral said. “Though I think we should still consider an island off Connemara as an alternative, at least for the immediate future. That being said, announcing that we intend to cross the Atlantic will quell the… the discontent in the ranks. It will also reduce the uncertainty among the civilians, which is currently finding an outlet in fear and violence. Either way, Connemara or America are our two choices: there’s no alternative.”

  “If we can find the ships,” Whitley said.

  Chapter 2 - Surveillance

  Belfast Harbour

  “That’s it?” Kallie asked, her voice dripping with youthful disbelief. “That’s all it takes to move the satellites?”