Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  “Here.” Leonie shifted Fiona onto her hip, picked up Queen Adolfina’s relic. “Have a cuddle of your mum and you’ll feel better in the morning.” And they could make sure the relic was still working.

  Madelaine cringed away as far as the narrow bed allowed. “No. Don’t make me.”

  Leonie puffed in exasperation. She understood the allure of the healing sleep. It was sheer bliss to check out, spend ten or twelve hours in a dreamless void and awake with no pain. What she did not understand was why Madelaine resisted it.

  “Your Highness. A bit of a sleep would do you good.”

  Madelaine stared up at the ceiling, which was as far away as the roof of a church, the plaster bulging like clouds. “I don’t want to waste her on me.”

  Leonie thought about the sanctity crisis. The saints aren’t what they used to be, can’t find a good saint anywhere. People were always saying that sort of thing. She herself was healthy in general, so she never paid much attention, but maybe she should. She thought about Sam, and Queen Adolfina’s relic possibly having stopped working, and all the people who were too sick to hold jobs, and the way that everyone in historical films was portrayed as strong and healthy, which seemed to be just fantasy, but maybe it reflected the simple truth. She thought about the plague scares that ran through the realm from time to time, frightening everyone into going to church and sending the price of holy dust through the roof. Black ague, Prussian flu, typhoid, polio, cholera, smallpox. Diseases that spread through the air and the water. You couldn’t not eat, not breathe …

  Fiona wriggled in her arms.

  Leonie slid to the floor with the baby, took out the the packet of chocolate biscuits she’d bought, gave one to Fiona and ate one herself. “I’ve got a sister with chronic lung problems.” At least, I hope I still have. I hope I still have a home. “She’s not incurable. It’s nothing like that. She’s an intractable. You know what that means?”

  Madelaine nodded. “She’s got a chronic disease … that returns even after a miracle.”

  “Exactly, and we can’t afford the caliber of saint that’d knock it right out of her lungs, someone like your mum here. There’s not many saints this good even available to the public, and those that are, the prices they charge, it’d make your eyes pop out of your head.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “You’ve got a slight fever and a headache. Your mum could knock that back in a few hours, and you’d be up and about again. Instead you choose to lie here feeling sorry for yourself, when there’s thousands that would literally kill to have a relic this good!” Leonie’s voice shook. She shut her lips tight.

  The Next Morning. November 30th, 1979

  Bright and early the next morning Leonie was back at the Accuchuin Haede Estate. Familiarly known as the Aching Head, this was the sort of place that in her Company days, she wouldn’t even have driven past alone. Much less gone into.

  Brown brick tenements kinked around a maze of cul-de-sacs, spiraling out from a central area intended as a sort of village green, which was now a sea of mud where broken bicycles and litter floated in ice-rimmed puddles. The terraces were pockmarked with demolition sites so long neglected they might have been actual bombsites left over from the Great War. Thistles and goosegrass grew out of the rubble.

  The one thing the Aching Head had going for it was the view, and even that was bleak today. The sky spat rain.

  She sat in the Mini at the edge of the muddy ‘green,’ fighting the urge to slide lower in her seat, knowing that dozens of invisible eyes had registered her presence. Both sides of the street were parked solid with cars ranging from wrecks on blocks to tarted-up drifters. The chimneys smoked. The streets were empty of human life.

  Three minutes ago, a platoon of Ravens had driven in from the Shankill Road.

  Leonie knew because she had been waiting outside the estate for them to go by, and had followed them in. Now she was waiting again, fingers resting lightly on the stock of the Myxilite, window rolled a few inches down.

  She’d tipped MI5 off herself, an anonymous phone call. She’d been afraid they weren’t taking her seriously. But they must be. For the platoon had driven into Holly Street, where the address Pod had very specifically not given Leonie was, and they hadn’t come out.

  They hadn’t come out … The back of her throat hurt. She had no way of knowing if Dave was with them. What’re the odds? she tried to reassure herself.

  Something thudded. Leonie jumped a mile, although she’d been waiting for it. A splintering crash. That’ll be the door going. Hoarse yelps of charged-up aggression. The bright-edged sound of breaking glass.

  A moment of breathless quiet.

  Blam. One isolated shot, another, then the yammering racket of full automatic panic.

  Leonie took off the handbrake, rolled downhill to the end of the green, stopped where she could see straight down Holly Street.

  One of the patrol’s LongHOGs was parked across the far end of the street, blocking it off. The other one stood outside a house halfway down. Two soldiers, neither of them Dave, were flattened to this side of the vehicle, pointing their rifles around it.

  The gunfire had stopped and inside the house a man was screaming.

  A bloke burst out of the front door. Shaggy brown hair, built like a 4x4, naked but for briefs and a t-shirt. Dragging a child by the wrist. The Raven sentries aimed their rifles, yelling warnings, but they did not fire. It would have been blatantly against the rules of engagement. In bitter fury Leonie let the Myxilite clatter into the footwell.

  The bloke wrestled with the door of a car parked near her end of Holly Street. He pushed the child into the back and leapt into the driver’s seat. The Raven sentries gave chase. Too late. The car—an old blue Mobilo—rocketed down the street towards Leonie’s position. She got a clear look at the driver’s face as he screwed the car around and took off up the hill. She’d never seen him in her life before.

  She let out the clutch and wrenched the Mini into gear. The suspect might just lead her to Alyx O’Braonain.

  He drove out of the estate, taking the corners so tight that the Mobilo jounced over rubble spilling out of the empty lots. The Shankill Road stretched straight downhill for a hundred yards to the lights. She thought he would run the red, but he must’ve got a grip on himself; he waited until it changed and she caught the same green light, dawdling behind him, letting other vehicles fill the gap. Listening for the yowl of sirens, the throb of a chopper overhead, or a loudhailer blaring from an unmarked MI5 car that had been lying in wait.

  Should have been lying in wait, if the Ravens weren’t the most useless tossers in the entire realm of tosserdom that was the British Army.

  How could they have cocked it up? An unarmed man and a child!

  From time to time the child—a boy of nine or ten with short blond hair—turned to stare through the back windscreen as the Mobilo sedately proceeded towards Belfast city centre.

  Wary of being spotted, Leonie stayed as far back as she dared, which meant that twice she lost sight of the Mobilo and had to squeak through a red light so as not to lose it altogether. It was bloody hopeless trying to do this without backup. If the suspect was switched on at all, he’d have noticed her by now. He had his little rear observer on the job, too. Her only hope came from the fact that he hadn’t attempted any evasive maneuvers. Maybe he was overconfident, with his home turf advantage, and thought he’d gotten away.

  He turned aside from the city centre. The traffic thinned out and sped up, rushing along a stretch of brand-new four-lane highway. On either side the city morphed into country. Pocket-sized orchards of leafless fruit trees, fields tucked into the crevices of the hills, forested peaks looming inland, black under the rain that was washing away yesterday’s light snowfall.

  To the seaward side of the road, the vista opened out. Flat marshland, scrubby trees, the odd housing development.

  A roadside pub appeared on the right, a tacky pile with mock crenellations and an enor
mous letterboard announcing FILLIGAN’S FREIDAY BRISCIDH—DOMMIE HATHAWAY & HIS BAND!!

  The suspect swung across traffic, into the parking lot.

  Shit!

  Half a mile down the road, Leonie turned around and returned to Filligan’s. Scanning for the Mobilo, she saw the suspect first. He was sitting in the bus shelter at the edge of the parking-lot. He had trousers and a coat on now. The little boy was swinging around the support pole of the bus shelter’s roof, earning glares from little old ladies.

  Leonie parked out of sight of the bus shelter. She left the Myxilite under the seat and locked the car. Scraping coins out of her jeans pocket, she walked towards the phone box outside the pub.

  The bus came. A coughing monster, striped in the red and daffodil yellow of Sir Somebody’s Transport Ministry franchise, it bellied up to the shelter. People fought their way off. The suspect had one foot on the step. Don’t let him on, he’s barefoot! Leonie mentally yelled. But apparently in Belfast, no one cared about little matters of etiquette like that. The suspect got on, the little boy got on, and Leonie sprinted to the bus and jumped on after them, her coins going into the ticket machine instead of fetching help.

  Packed to the gills, the bus reeked of wet woollies and the fried fish that someone was eating. Leonie hung onto the strap and let her head droop as if she were asleep on her feet. She could not see the suspect. Under her own armpit, she watched the exit door.

  The bus swayed and stopped, swayed and stopped. Someone rubbed a clear space in the condensation on the window in front of Leonie. She glimpsed marshlands.

  Another stop. The suspect’s head vanished out the door.

  She waited to get off last, and by that time the un-id and his pint-size colleague had disappeared.

  She scanned her surroundings. The bus had stopped near a freestanding arch that marked the entrance to a housing development. Not a Crown Estate but a corporate settlement: Sir Somebody’s logo of a magpie done in discolored plastic atop the arch, identikit bungalows plopped on the flat ground beyond. That was where most of the passengers who had got off were heading.

  Just back the way they had come there was a bridge. Giving up, Leonie wandered out onto it. She pretended to fish for a camera inside her coat, although God knows there was nothing for a tourist to photograph. Another bus ought to be along soon to take her back to Filligan’s.

  A canal ran out into the marshland past some sort of factory. Several fat-waisted towers loomed in the rainy distance.

  The suspect and the boy were walking along the towpath.

  Pulse thudding, Leonie searched for the way off the bridge. A slippery concrete stair. She hurtled down.

  If they saw her now, she’d be bubbled for certain. There was no one else on the towpath. And she was unarmed. She loitered, content to glimpse them at intervals when the lazy curves of the canal straightened out.

  A high wire fence separated the towpath from the grounds of the factory. The wind carried a chemical stink from the knots of piping above the trees. The path humped over a set of pipes dribbling petrol-colored waste water into the canal. A heron stood in the reeds, pecking at what looked like a dead puppy.

  Beyond the factory, the country on both sides lay flat and disused. The towers in the distance seemed to be no nearer. There were four of them—no, five—and they must be far taller than she had thought. She could smell the sea, and the canal ran as straight as jousting lists for a mile ahead, and her targets had vanished again.

  She broke into a run. Nothing.

  They must have left the path to cut across country. .

  She’d lost them.

  She wearily logged the location in her mind and trudged back the way she’d come. The day was rapidly darkening, although it was not even noon. A crack of clear sky out to sea glowed blue, which only made the clouds over the mountains even blacker.

  Back at the bridge, a car sat on the verge, idling. The driver rolled down the window. Pod.

  Leonie collapsed into the warm, fuggy cocoon of pop music. Pod turned down the radio and started the car.

  “What’re you doing here?” she said.

  “Thought you might need a ride.”

  “My car’s at a pub a few miles back.” Leonie briefly explained what she’d been up to.

  “You shouldn’t’ve been in the Aching Head.”

  “Well I was, and a good thing too. I followed him all the way here—and lost him in that bloody marsh.”

  “I know. I was behind you most of the way.”

  Leonie felt stupid. She’d been concentrating so hard on the suspect, she hadn’t even looked to see if she had a tail.

  “The Ravens cocked it up good style,” she said. “I heard shooting. I hope none of them’s hurt. Can you find out?”

  Pod shook his head. “NatChiv’s breathing down our necks. Seen the news? The Crown’s fallen out with House Sauvage. There’s lots of Sauvage bondsknights up here, so we’re to watch them to make sure they don’t try anything. All days off cancelled, all other jobs suspended.” He tapped the cigarette lighter in, lit a fag. “My car radio’s on the fritz just now. Convenient, eh? But I don’t think it’ll happen again.”

  Leonie stared at him for a moment, then turned away, waving his smoke out of her face.

  “Funny to think,” Pod said, “I used to be opposed to female operators.”

  “Aren’t you still?”

  “Oh yes. But I’d make an exception for you, Grant.”

  Leonie would once have sparked up at the compliment. Now it left her cold. She didn’t need his praise, she needed help, the help he had just implied she would not be getting from the Company. He probably thought he was being dead loyal just keeping his mouth shut.

  “Got a map-book?” she said.

  “Under the seat.”

  She leafed through pages frilled with notes and marked up with colored pens. Spreading the folder open on her knee, she traced the line of the road they were on, and the canal. Her finger stopped at a lightning-flash symbol. Dargan Marsh Power Station.

  “How old is this map?”

  “Fucking ancient. Budget cuts.”

  Around the lightning flash were five tiny dots. Those towers.

  “There’s nothing else out there.” She tapped the dots. “This’s got to be where they are.”

  48

  Val

  At The Same Time. Dargan Marsh Power Station

  Val knelt on the wet ground, knotting blades of grass together. Loop one around the stem of the next and pull tight but not tight enough to break it, repeat. The grass was slimy with the curse material he’d sloshed on it before starting. He looked forward to reaching the stand of giant dock to his left. The larger weeds would go a lot faster than this scrubby stuff.

  Twenty years ago, the Dargan Marsh power plant had belched plumes of steam you could see from Belfast, and people used to cough up pieces of lung as they walked down the street. Now, nothing remained but the old switching station building, the shell of the generator building, and the cooling towers, which were too big to dynamite without imploding the banks of the nearby canals. The soil was two parts demolition debris to one part coal ash. Hardy little trees grew through the rubble. The rain stung his face, just like the old days, only now the rainwater was pure and his skin was the problem.

  He knotted, whispered, knotted. Futility weighted down his thoughts. What’s the point? No one’s coming. You’ve got no friends left. With his luck, it would be Connelly’s mates from BASI who showed up, if anyone did. Well, if they do, this’ll give them a wee surprise. If he could get it finished in time.

  Two pairs of bare and filthy feet intruded on his field of vision.

  “Don’t step on it! Go around, that way!”

  The feet belonged to Ragherty and Randolph Sauvage.

  “What’re you doing here? And why aren’t you wearing any shoes? I thought you were going to stay with my gran tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Ragherty said. “I’m sorry, Val.”

&
nbsp; Val stood up, woozy. The sickness he had been channeling into his spell flowed back within. A dull headache asserted itself.

  “They killed your grandmother,” Randolph Sauvage blurted. “I hate them. I hate them, I hate them.”

  He stomped away, kicking at the weeds with his bare feet. Val watched him without seeing him.

  “They killed my gran?” he said softly.

  “It was the Crown Army,” Ragherty said. “They broke down the door. I was asleep. Your gran stood in the hallway with a skillet in her hand, ready to defend her hearth. The villains just pushed her out of the way. Went over like a falling tree, poor old bird, hit her head on the hall table. Died instantly … Ah, God, I’m sorry, Val. We barely got away ourselves.”

  “They’ll pay for this,” was all Val could think of to say. “They will fucking pay. Give me a fag.” Ragherty had none. Val got out his own. His fingers made it taste like curse material. He could not weep in front of Ragherty.

  “They’ll pay all right,” Ragherty said.

  The assertions felt like an empty ritual.

  “Alyx was fond of your gran, too. She’ll be devastated.”

  “She’s not here. She’s gone back … to the other place. They all went with her, except Conn. He’s over there in the generator building.”

  “What’s she gone away for? Are the Krauts not supposed to be arriving tomorrow?”

  “Day after.”

  Sea fog wrapped the spinneys and the skeletons of the abandoned plant buildings. Randolph Sauvage balanced on a piece of broken pipe, stretching out his arms. “If I still had the Worldcracker, I would have killed those soldiers,” he said. “I would have killed them all.”

  Ragherty and Val exchanged a look. “Maybe it’s just as well the Black Mother took it off you,” Ragherty said.

  49