Liberator

by Richard Harland

  Septimus kept talking, but Col was no longer listening. He was busy with his own thoughts. He did love Riff, and he had to trust that she loved him. It was as simple as that. He would fight for her.

  ‘Disengage propellers.’ Gansy called out the order from the raised level of the Bridge.

  Down among the control units, Shiv repeated the orders into a voicepipe, while Padder and three other Filthies pulled levers and checked dials. Col, Victoria and Albert stood on the raised level with Gansy, gazing out through the curved strip of windows at the front.

  ‘Engage rollers.’

  There was more repeating of orders, more pulling of levers. A shudder ran though the juggernaut like a change of gears. After the Liberation, they had changed from rollers to propellers for journeying by sea; now they changed back for land. The Filthies had already mastered the procedure.

  Further orders followed in swift succession. ‘Forward drive. Quarter power. Three knots.’

  There was another kind of vibration as the rollers rode up over the seaboard shallows. They had been closing in on the coast ever since dawn broke on an overcast day, half an hour ago. Directly before them were the wooded green headlands enclosing the harbour of Botany Bay. Other man-made shapes showed out behind, spiky and metallic and incomprehensible.

  Col was still trying to make sense of the shapes when three new figures entered the Bridge on the lower level. Riff, Lye and Dunga were dressed for their role as Menials accompanying the Imperial party.

  Col would have been amazed at the transformation, except that he’d seen Riff in Menial disguise before. They wore loose, sack-like uniforms, their skin had been rendered pale with powder and ash, and their greyed hair tied back in buns. Even Lye’s jet-black hair had been made to look drab and dull.

  Victoria groaned. ‘Oh no! Not those things again.’

  She was staring at the crowns carried by Riff and Dunga: the massive steel-and-gold one for Her Majesty and the smaller one for His Highness. Obviously Victoria and Albert were expected to dress up in full regalia.

  Riff shambled her way forward to the front of the Bridge. Her movements were no less convincing than her physical appearance. She must have been teaching the others, because Dunga moved in a similar way. Only Lye seemed half-hearted about her performance.

  ‘Okay.’ Riff halted before the raised level and snapped out of her act. She addressed herself to Col. ‘Give us the facts about coaling stations.’

  ‘Now?’ Col frowned. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  ‘So talk fast.’

  Col launched into a compressed version of all that Professor Twillip and Septimus had told him. He found he could remember whole slabs of information word for word.

  ‘Coaling stations are what’s left of the old colonies. Before the French Revolution, the nations of Europe started up colonies in every continent – British, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese. Britain had the most. After the Revolution, when the wars between France and the rest of Europe dragged on and on, the fighting took up all of their manpower and resources. Especially with the race to industrialisation. They didn’t have time to worry about colonies any more.

  ‘Britain held on longest, until Napoleon invaded and encouraged the English working classes to revolt. Then everything was concentrated on crushing the uprising. Britain’s colonies went the way of the rest. They had to look after themselves, not very successfully. Native tribes drove them back until they held only the ports they’d started out with.

  ‘They’d have vanished completely except for the Age of Imperialism. With Europe in ruins at the end of the Fifty Years War, the juggernauts became the new mobile colonies travelling round the globe. They needed to refuel and restock without ever returning to their home countries. That’s where the remnants of the old colonies came in. They turned into coaling stations and storage depots and repair yards.’

  ‘What about this coaling station?’ Riff demanded. ‘What about Botany Bay?’

  ‘It used to be called New South Wales until it shrank back to just a port,’ said Col. ‘It was the last British colony founded before the French Revolution, mainly as a place to transport convicts. Britain was still sending convicts right up to the time when Napoleon dug his tunnel under the English Channel. Soldiers and colonists turned the convicts into a slave labour force.’

  ‘Like us, then,’ put in Dunga. ‘Like the Filthies.’

  ‘Anything else we should know?’ asked Riff.

  Col searched his memory. ‘They’ve been self-governing for over a century and a half, but they still think of themselves as loyal subjects of the British Empire. And they mine their own coal nearby, unlike most coaling stations.’

  ‘I can see coal,’ said Gansy, pointing ahead.

  Col swung around to look. Liberator was passing through the headlands and riding higher, now almost wholly out of the water.

  The bay was a mazy patchwork of mud and pools and channels; the land seemed to have been mashed and re-mashed into a kind of porridge. All around stood great conical pyramids of coal, a hundred times bigger than the mounds on Bottom Deck. The blackness of the coal spread into water, mud, land and every part of the landscape. It was an infinitely dreary sight.

  ‘Slow. Straight ahead, one knot,’ Gansy called back to the operators among the control units.

  The spiky shapes turned out to be metal structures along the shoreline, almost as tall as Liberator itself. They looked like a nest of spiders on towering, spindly legs.

  ‘Any other juggernauts?’ Riff called out. She couldn’t see through the forward windows from the lower level of the Bridge.

  ‘None,’ answered Gansy.

  Little by little, two broad tracks of brick and gravel surfaced out of the bay. Liberator’s prow was approaching a slipway.

  Riff clapped her hands. ‘Time for the Imperial party to get moving. Let’s go.’

  She strode off with Dunga and Lye. Victoria, Albert and Col descended from the raised level and followed.

  ‘Careful, my dear,’ Albert called out, taking Victoria by the arm.

  They were heading for one of the scoops, which would lower them to the ground. They went down twenty levels by steam elevator, then walked through the manufacturing decks.

  Col registered a change when the vibration of rollers suddenly fell away. The juggernaut had come to a halt.

  ‘Hurry up,’ said Riff. She stopped before the entrance to one of the sorting trays. ‘Here’s where you start acting,’ she told Victoria and Albert.

  Reluctantly, the ex-royal couple accepted the massive crowns on their heads.

  ‘Now you walk in front,’ said Riff.

  So Victoria and Albert walked out onto the sorting tray, followed by Col, with the three Council members shuffling along behind like mute Menial servants.

  The air outside was fresh, with just a hint of rain. The scoop lay in the middle of the tray, ready to be lifted and lowered by a crane overhead. But before they could climb in, there was a mighty grinding, rumbling noise.

  ‘Something approaching,’ said Col.

  ‘See what it is,’ ordered Riff.

  Col walked around the scoop to the lip of the tray at the front. There was no barrier, just a sheer, sudden drop. He stopped a couple of paces back and looked out.

  The source of the noise was a skeletal steel frame coming towards them. It moved on wheels in the strangest way, expanding and telescoping outwards and upwards.

  ‘I know,’ said Victoria. The others had followed Col to the front of the tray. ‘It’s coming to meet us.’ She turned to Albert. ‘Do you remember the Cape?’

  ‘Um, Africa? We visited the Governor there, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, and a thing like that came to meet us. With a little trolley . . .’

  ‘There it is!’ said Albert, pointing.


  An open-sided vehicle was trundling along the top of the frame, even as the frame continued to telescope outwards and upwards. Five officers rode in it under a tent-like canopy. At the back, a brass and copper engine puffed out clouds of steam.

  ‘We travel in that?’ muttered Riff from behind.

  ‘Yes,’ said Col. ‘No need to go down in the scoop.’

  All at once, the officers in the vehicle began waving their arms with great excitement.

  ‘I think they’ve seen us,’ Victoria observed.

  ‘I think they’ve seen your crowns,’ added Col.

  Riff spoke to the other Council members. ‘Do as I do. Not another word.’

  The frame creaked and veered, angling towards the lip of their particular tray. Soon the trolley was within hailing distance.

  ‘Welcome, Your Imperial Majesty!’ cried the officers. ‘Welcome, Your Imperial Highness! Welcome to Botany Bay!’

  The officers attached a metal plate like a gangplank between the frame and the juggernaut, and helped Victoria, Albert and Col across to the trolley. Muddy smears and coal grime somewhat marred the effect of their smart black jackets and red epaulettes. The sham Menial servants were left to make their own way across.

  Only two officers made the return journey; the rest remained on guard by the gangplank. One of the two controlled the trolley from the front while the other operated the engine at the back. Victoria, Albert and Col sat in the middle with their servants bundled in behind.

  The officer at the front addressed Victoria with exaggerated deference and a faint peevishness. ‘You should have given us warning of your arrival, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Standard procedure, Your Majesty,’ added the officer at the back.

  ‘Then we could have prepared a proper Imperial welcome.’

  ‘Ah, um,’ said Victoria, and turned to Col for assistance.

  Col thought fast. ‘Our wireless telegraph equipment has been malfunctioning,’ he explained. ‘We’re still fixing it.’

  ‘I see.’ The officer frowned. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Colbert Porpentine. Grandson of Sir Mormus Porpentine. I’m acting as his deputy and representative.’

  Obviously the name of ‘Porpentine’ rang a bell. The officer saluted from a sitting position. ‘An honour to meet you, sir.’

  The trolley’s engine huffed and chuffed, the wheels clack-clacked over the iron track. On either side was a dizzying drop. The frame itself seemed less than secure, swaying and shivering in the breeze. The hint of rain became a light drizzle that blew in over their legs.

  The officer at the front turned again. ‘Do you see our coal-loaders?’ He was pointing to the spidery structures on towering, spindly legs.

  ‘Where’s the coal?’ asked Albert.

  ‘In the pipe at the top. Carried in buckets on a chain inside. One loader can load up to three hundred tons a day.’ The officer spoke with as much satisfaction as if performing the feat himself.

  They travelled on in silence for a while. Then the trolley tilted sharply downwards, and they descended inside the frame on a rack-and-pinion system. The cogs and gears made a tremendous din that rattled the teeth in their heads.

  Down and down they went, bracing themselves until they were almost standing in their seats. Crisscross girders went past in front of their faces, left and right. The girders had been painted a green-grey colour, but were everywhere streaked orange and red with rust.

  At last the descent came to an end. The officer at the front worked levers and handles, the rack-and-pinion system disengaged and the trolley trundled forward on a level once more. In the next moment, they had left the frame behind and were chugging forward along an embankment high above muddy ground.

  Two hundred yards ahead was a curious building, rounded at either end like a boat. It rose from a base of marble steps, four storeys high with verandahs on every side. Its yellow, pink and lilac paintwork looked completely out of place against the coal-blackened landscape.

  ‘The Governor’s Residence,’ announced the officer at the front, with evident pride.

  ‘Where Sir Peggerton Poltney resides,’ added the officer at the back.

  ‘And Lady Poltney.’

  ‘And the Peggerton Poltney household.’

  As they continued along the embankment, the officer at the front drew attention to the buildings on either side. ‘On your left, the convict quarters. On your right, the soldiers’ and officers’ barracks.’

  The barracks consisted of a dozen long, humped buildings made of corrugated iron. The convict quarters consisted of wooden huts and lean-tos, enclosed by wire fencing topped with barbed wire. Several convicts stood gripping the fence as the trolley went past. They wore loose brown uniforms that appeared to be made of hessian, each with a number stencilled on the back.

  ‘Not as submissive as your servants, I’m afraid,’ said the officer at the front. ‘We don’t have the surgical techniques to create proper Menials. We have to use constant beatings instead.’

  Col sensed the silent anger of Riff, Lye and Dunga like a heat in the air. He prayed they wouldn’t give themselves away – and they didn’t.

  Beyond the convict quarters, the ground on the left became a network of sad, dark puddles and ponds of standing water. On the right, the barracks buildings were followed by a storage area, where wheels, pipes and assorted industrial objects had been piled in rusty stacks.

  Directly ahead, the marble steps of the Governor’s Residence rose from the muddy ground like a white beach out of a black sea. Three female convicts struggled to unroll a red carpet under the orders of a red-jacketed soldier with a whip.

  The trolley came up to the steps and bumped to a halt at the end of the track. Clouds of steam billowed all around. The soldier held the whip behind his back and saluted with his other hand.

  The officers guided Victoria, Albert and Col onto the red carpet. Their three sham servants had to mount the uncarpeted steps at the side. The front door of the Residence swung open as if by magic.

  Everyone trooped through a lobby and into a large reception hall. It was a light, airy space with painted wall-panels depicting pastoral scenes from the Old Country. There were items of furniture from the Old Country too, artfully arranged like museum pieces. Col noted an elaborate carved hatstand, three footstools, a glass-fronted cabinet and an ottoman covered in floral silk brocade. His plan to trade antiques for coal looked like a good one.

  Escorted by the officers, they advanced across the hall to the foot of a grand staircase. While the Imperial party waited, one of the officers hurried upstairs.

  Whispers floated down to them from a higher floor: impatient, irritated whispers. They heard a sound like a stamping foot and an exclamation like an angry quack.

  Then Sir Peggerton Poltney and Lady Poltney appeared. They looked as though they had put on their best clothes in a rush. Sir Peggerton’s high white collar was all askew; his wife was still patting down her hair.

  ‘Welcome to our humble outpost of Empire, Your Majesty, Your Highness,’ Sir Peggerton drawled as they descended the stairs. ‘The Peggerton Poltneys are at your service.’

  ‘We shall shower you with hospitality,’ added Lady Poltney eagerly.

  Her voice was deeper than her husband’s. Although she wore a floating gauzy gown over a dress of pale green flounces and bows, her shoulders were brawny and she was built like a blacksmith.

  ‘As befitting your gracious presence,’ Sir Peggerton confirmed.

  ‘We shall positively drench you with hospitality,’ Lady Poltney gushed. Then she paused and looked to her husband. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have said drench?’

  Sir Peggerton lowered his brows and waggled his neck to show that indeed she shouldn’t have said drench. His neck was his most impressive feature, long and slender. Lower down he
was less impressive, with a rotund little body and short splayed legs. But his neck was very refined, and his chin sloped down into it with barely a hint of projection.

  Col stepped into the momentary silence. ‘Actually, we’d like to do business as soon as possible. We want to trade for a full load of coal.’

  Lady Poltney blanched. ‘Oh, such dirty stuff, coal. So uncouth. Let’s not mention it yet.’

  Sir Peggerton agreed. ‘Yes, formalities first. Due ceremony and etiquette.’ He frowned. ‘You should have given us notice of your arrival. We do have wireless telegraph in the Residence, you know.’

  Col was about to repeat the excuse of malfunctioning equipment, but Sir Peggerton addressed himself exclusively to Victoria.

  ‘I suggest an early luncheon, Your Majesty,’ he went on. ‘Let us forget about matters of trade while we make polite conversation and partake of a light repast.’

  ‘Oh yes, with wine and all our best cutlery.’ Lady Poltney took up the idea with enthusiasm. ‘We can serve it alfresco and out in the open.’

  ‘Your Majesty?’

  Victoria looked uncomfortable under Sir Peggerton’s pressure. ‘Very well. Then a discussion of other matters afterwards.’

  Sir Peggerton craned his neck in triumph. ‘So that’s settled.’

  Col’s spirits sank, but there was nothing to do about it. How long could Riff, Lye and Dunga maintain their role as Menials? How long before Victoria and Albert let something slip? Every minute of conversation increased the danger of discovery.

  The luncheon was not a social success. Col, Victoria and Albert sat with the Governor and his wife under a gaily striped awning on the flat-topped roof of the Residence. The tablecloth was a huge Union Jack, the napkins were smaller versions of the same. Muddy marks spoiled the whiteness of the fine china plates, cups and saucers.

  ‘Oh la!’ Lady Poltney had acquired gloves and a fan on the way up to lunch. She flourished the fan like a flyswat. ‘Such a problem, mud, don’t you find?’