Dominion Rising Bonus Swag

by Gwynn White

  She met Anton’s eyes. “So…”

  What did that so mean? So you’re nobly born, Anton Orlov. So why are you out here in the Wild East, pickling your brain and working for Remainder scum like Vakhrushev, pissing all over your family’s honor? So how much money will it take to make it worth it?

  “So, Dee.” He smiled. “You’ve always wanted to see Khmeria, haven’t you?”

  Reyes came over to them, smelling of engine grease. “All right,” he said, his face close to Anton’s. He wore a mask of dust. “All right, we’ll take the fucking job! Happy?”

  “It’s not for me,” Anton shouted. “It’s for the guys. Peters: he wants to get married. Segueroa’s got a family to provide for. Erskine’s got a mortgage on his head. Ratty—where would he ever find another job at his age? Brickbolt’s got a sick kid. And Yegor said he wants to hire the B team, too. You can’t turn it down and call yourself a businessman.”

  “I’m not turning it down. Give me his number. I’ll call the fat fuck myself.”

  “Wait—better go and see him. Make him cough up in advance for supplies.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Reyes regarded the 4x4s. His face was blank but Anton sensed he was already thinking about refurbishing their vehicles on House Vakhrushev’s dime. New kit, too. New weapons. Anton relaxed. In the end, you could count on Reyes not to let his personal prejudices get in the way of squeezing the most out of a situation. “Everything rots in the jungle.”

  “But they say Rangoon is lovely,” Dee said, her eyes filled with wistful visions of tropical beaches, mango trees and swimming pools and men in white who’d be more gallant than the scruffy mercs she was stuck with.

  2

  Leonie

  The Same Day. May 15th, 1989. London

  The illegal shrine festered like a pile of rubbish on the corner of Piccadilly Circus. Cellophane-wrapped bouquets glinted under the streetlights. A homemade portrait of St. Jamie Paine leaned against the railings. Even at this hour, a small crowd loitered around the shrine. Fans, weeping into their hands or just standing silently.

  Glass crunched under the tyres of the Jaguar sub-limo as Leonie tucked it alongside the curb. Hard rock throbbed from the stereo, causing people to look around uneasily. When they saw the car, some of them drifted away.

  But not fast enough. “Go, go!” Leonie banged on the wheel.

  The lads spilled out of the car, cackling and whooping. Mase, Simon, Jeremy, and Littlejack. Shaved heads, baggy jeans, bovver boots, and heavy chain necklaces over ripped tank tops that showed off tattoos of skulls, bleeding hearts, and girls with outsized boobs. They staggered drunkenly around the shrine, slagging off the saint it honored. “Boozed himself to death. None too soon either.” Mase fumbled out his cock and pissed on the flowers.

  “Have some respect,” said an older woman.

  Leonie slid out of the car, leaving the engine running, and swaggered across the pavement. She had her eyes done in heavy black extending out to her temples, her hair gelled up in spikes sprayed black and white. Her oversized leather jacket skimmed denim shorts and shitkicker knee boots. “Sod off, you wrinkly old bitch,” she sneered. She trod on the flowers, kicked over the portrait of Sir Paine. Tracts fluttered away. She pocketed one.

  The commotion drew would-be heroes. “Leave the lady alone,” ordered a fat young knothead lugging a briefcase, on his way home from overtime at the Relics Exchange.

  “You leave us the fuck alone, cunt,” Leonie said.

  Littlejack pulled his chains off over his head and advanced on the knothead, razor-edged links swinging from his fist. “What’d you get that bobble for? Sucking the boss’s cock?”

  Jeremy shimmered up, pale and thin as a candle flame. “Lessee what he’s got in that briefcase.”

  The young knight fled.

  “In the name of chivalry,” the lads hooted, and destroyed the shrine. Bouquets went spinning into the road. Teddybears holding custom-printed Holy St. Jamie Save Us! balloons got slashed with flick-knives. Simon set fire to a pile of homemade cards covered in clingfilm. Leonie put her boot through Jamie Paine’s portrait. All the time she was listening for sirens, and soon enough she heard them. “Incoming, lads!”

  She ran back to the car, grabbed the paintgun.

  “Oblivion to false saints!” She sprayed the shrine down. White paint splattered the railings, coated the rhododendrons beyond. Black paint doused what remained of the shrine, coincidentally putting the fire out.

  “Those’re anti-colors!” someone shouted from across the street. “Police, police! Treason! Vaunters! Treason!”

  The team piled back into the car. Leonie gunned the engine and hurled the Jaguar down Regent Street. The sirens faded behind them. She swung under the el tracks and eased off the pedal.

  Jeremy, in the passenger seat, turned the music down and lit a fag. “I’d an uncle worked at the Exchange. He could pick out a living saint at fifty yards. Kept it quiet, of course.”

  “He must’ve made a fortune,” said Simon, who was Kenyan, five feet five and black as the Wessex lion’s arse, with yellow snaggleteeth.

  “He retired to Khmeria.”

  “I wouldn’t mind retiring to Khmeria,” Mase sighed. “You can live like the nobility on thirty grand a year. Servants and everything.”

  “Who’s got thirty grand a year?” Simon chortled.

  “Until the abos shoot you in your bed,” Littlejack said. “Tell your uncle to keep the yacht fueled up, Jer. One day it’s yessir, nosir, then overnight they’re howling for whitey’s blood.”

  “Got your umbrella tonight, Littlejack?” Leonie said.

  The big man scowled. “Unh?”

  “Cos the sky’s falling, according to you.”

  The other lads laughed. Littlejack was a Lambeth original, a pal of Leonie’s sister Mystie’s ex. She’d only used him once before, and was on the verge of making up her mind not to use him again. She couldn’t be doing with men who needed keeping in line all the bloody time.

  “Next stop’s Notting Hill.”

  She’d give him one more chance, see if he could control his aggression rather than letting it control him.

  The shrine on Piccadilly Circus had been an amateur effort. Or at least it had been meant to look that way. The shrine in Notting Hill, which they had to drive around for half an hour to find, was bad.

  While they waited in the car and watched people going in, Leonie read the tract she’d picked up in Piccadilly. It was your standard hagiographic horseshit. In reality, Jamie Paine had been a marginally talented tourney knight who’d lucked into a gig hosting his own candid TV show, Pullin’ With Paine, in which he took would-be ladykillers clubbing to teach them the art of the pick-up line. He’d drunk himself to death at the age of twenty-nine. Why did people believe the hagiographic crap, when they knew the truth? More to the point, why did they want to believe it?

  Not my problem, Leonie reminded herself.

  Her job was simple.

  Find illegal shrines and smash ‘em.

  The ground floor of this row of decaying tenement buildings held a laundromat, a chip shop, and a cheque cashing joint, all shuttered. These buildings would be owned by the Wessex Corporation, their tenants-in-perpetuity long gone to some safer area. A TIP flat in central London could be a nice little earner for Wessex bondsmen. Leonie’s own family made five hundred quid a month off their own flat in Lambeth, sublet to a multi-generational clan of Kenyans.

  The people furtively slipping into the door next to the chip shop were white British, mostly. Women. Families. The sick, some of them so poorly they were being carried by their friends and relatives.

  “Sod this, they just keep coming,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They filed into the unlocked street-level door. Mase stayed outside on stag. Leonie led the other three up the stairs towards yellow electric light and the murmur of voices, which swelled into a tuneless hymn the second before they burst through the door and reduced the crowd to silence.
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br />   Someone’s living-room, furniture pushed against the walls. About forty—fans? Worshippers. They had been standing, swaying, arms in the air; now they were wilting like flowers that hadn’t been watered. A man in a black cassock stood with his back to a mural of St. Jamie Paine that took up one whole wall. He started to speak. Leonie overrode him.

  “You can all leave now, or we can throw you out. Up to you.”

  There were kids in the crowd, some of them sickly. She didn’t want to get rough unless she had to.

  “You’re a fucking insult to British chivalry,” she added, staying in character. “What is this, a church? Does this look like a church to you?” she asked Jeremy.

  “No, it fucking don’t.” Jeremy pulled a Holy St. Jamie pin off a man’s shirt and threw it on the floor. “It looks like a bunch of saddos praying to a pervy, dead sex addict.”

  A low hum of protest rose.

  “You ain’t even got his relics here!” Simon said. “Fuck off, the lot of you, and get a job!”

  The more timorous worshippers had already fled. Littlejack, Simon, and Jeremy waded into the rest, shoving them with open palms, rattling their vaunt chains menacingly. The priest held his ground. Leonie swaggered up to him. “What’s a respectable God-botherer like you doing in a loony bin like this?”.

  “Jamie Paine is a saint.”

  “Yes, he’s a saint, and his relics are safe at home in Somerset. So this is just a waste of a good wall.”

  She sprayed black and white paint over the mural, also splashing the altar set up in front of it. The sick people cringed, tried to flee faster. Doubled over with pain, hobbling, coughing, pale, feverish, they presented a whole doctor’s catalogue of ailments. But their ragged indigo tunics and jeans said they were too poor to buy remedies to relieve their pain, much less afford miraculous cures.

  If you weren’t sworn to a House with its own saints, or you weren’t lucky enough to have a puissant saint in the family, you were fucked.

  Some people still denied that there was a sanctity crisis. They ought to see this, then they’d know just how desperate people were getting.

  “The Church has been stripped bare of relics,” the priest said. “And so our flock has abandoned us. These gatherings may win back some souls to the Faith.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly the fucking problem, you berk.”

  Leonie wheeled. She had spotted a man shuffling towards the door who was only pretending to be sick. The way his eyes darted gave him away. “Simon, grab that cunt.”

  The man fought. He had a knife. Littlejack wrestled him to the ground. “Ain’t I being nice,” Littlejack said to Leonie. “Look how nice I’m being.”

  “You ain’t gotta be nice to this one,” she said. “Who d’you work for, arsehole?”

  “No one! I’m sick!”

  “And I’m the Pharaoh of Egypt. You’re as healthy as a lord.” She thumbed rouge off his ‘fevered’ cheeks. “You were scoping out this crowd, weren’t you? Picking out the ones that really believe.”

  She turned to the priest, who was flapping around his altar.

  “See what your superstitious wankfest attracted? A nasty little predator. Hunting for believers. ‘Cos as you of all people should know, believers make good martyrs. He’d pick his victim, then he and his friends would kidnap them, and then …? Oh, I don’t know. Starve them to death. Or maybe it would be torture. Then you’d have a saint, all right. Or rather, his organization would. Check him for tats, Jer.”

  Jeremy slit their captive’s sleeves. The man’s right bicep bore an M with a cartoon lion leaning against its left upright, holding a rifle. Leonie’s heart sank.

  “Bloody M Boys forever!” the man howled, from his supine position, since he had nothing left to hide. In a normal voice he added, “And if you lot really were vaunters, you would’ve known that already.” He licked his lips ferally. “Who do you work for?”

  “Oh, bollocks,” Leonie said. Now we’ll have to kill him. Should she let Littlejack do it? Or not? She decided the big man would enjoy it too much. “Do him, Jer.”

  “He’s mine!” Littlejack exclaimed.

  At the same time, Simon shouted in astonishment: “He really has got a holy relic here!”

  Leonie flicked him a glance. Simon had smashed the altar, and out had rolled a linen bag with the unmistakable shape of a plastinated hand inside. Simon seized it before the priest could reach it. Leonie boggled. Jamie Paine’s? It couldn’t be. House Paine was a minor baronetcy sworn to House Somerset, which opposed the Wessex regime, at least to the extent of making sarcastic quips from the sidelines, which was why St. Jamie Paine’s cult had to be broken up in the first place. Of course, it’s just some black-market saint, a fake—

  Littlejack howled. Someone crashed into Leonie from behind. She caught herself on her hands and saw, upside-down, Littlejack on the floor and Jeremy crouching over the captive.

  “He had another blade,” Jeremy said breathlessly. “Taped to his stomach. Littlejack tried to shove me out of the way, I lost hold of his arms—”

  Littlejack was clawing at his right eye, bleating like a lost sheep. Blood streaked his hands, spattered the cheap carpet.

  “Get him down to the car!” Leonie shouted. “Leave that, Simon, leave him, c’mon, go, go, go!”

  They threw Littlejack into the back seat of the Jaguar. Jeremy drove. Simon knelt on the floor, holding Littlejack steady as the car swerved. Littlejack was now making groaning, snoring noises. He hadn’t spoken since he was stabbed. Mase crouched in the open boot, digging in the kit bag. Leonie knelt up on the passenger seat and screamed at him, “Get the fucking relic!”

  “I’m looking for it!”

  “He’s not going to make it,” Simon said.

  “Yes, he is,” Leonie shouted. She had given Littlejack one more chance and it had killed him, because he was just a vaunter from the Stacks, too stupid for this job. “Where’s that fucking relic, Mase?”

  “It’s not here, is it? Some fucker’s pinched it!”

  He sounded panicked, defensive. She realized: You pinched it. You were the one who had the kit to look after last time.

  Mase had served with her in the Intelligence Company. She’d recruited him on the strength of those memories, the trust they’d had, the total faith that your mates would cover your back. But what did that amount to, ten years later, except a sentimental illusion?

  And miraculous relics were fetching whopping prices nowadays.

  Two Hours Later. The Tower of London

  Leonie handed over her P&K and her boot knife to the Wessex sentries. She shrugged off her jacket and undid the EZ-ID diagonal zipper in the shoulder of her t-shirt to show her brand. Gloved fingers roughly probed the Wessex lion, making sure it wasn’t a stick-on. They always checked her ID, even though they knew her. Security at the Macenought Lane entrance had gotten a lot tighter, and rightly too.

  This used to be the bottom end of a secret passage into the Tower of London. The passage was still there but it wasn’t secret anymore, since the queen often used it. The little cobbled mews had acquired a proper checkpoint with floodlights, crash barriers, and liverymen armed with sub-machine guns. No parking, so Leonie’d had to leave her car several streets away. Still, it was less of a song and dance than rolling up to the Traitors’ Gate.

  Down stone steps and then under the moat. She never enjoyed this walk. Couldn’t help thinking about all that water over her head. There was a mouldy, damp smell. But the roof was dry as a bone.

  The passage came out at the dungeon level of the old castle. Another ID check and a patdown, and then she was free to go, on the loose in the Tower of London. It was still a heady feeling. She, a nobody from Lambeth, stood closer to the wellspring of British power than any number of ladies and lords.

  She wandered out into the bailey. Lots of windows were lit in the White Tower. Atop the steeple of the chapel, the brass weathercock pivoted in the night breeze, glinting red in time with the neon on the roof of th
e White Tower.

  The Tower’s chapel housed hundreds of saints’ relics. Nine out of ten were no good anymore. But that left one in ten that were as puissant as anything in the country. If she’d brought Littlejack here…

  He wouldn’t have made it. The security gauntlet would have taken too long.

  The doors of the White Tower opened, letting out several bodyguards in flak jackets. They milled, not knowing what to do when they couldn’t pose importantly with their guns. (No one was allowed to come armed into the Tower of London, no one.) Here came their principal, popping off a cheerful mock salute to someone who remained inside. TV-familiar. Spade-shaped dark beard, well-cut business suit. He trotted down the steps to one of the limos parked around the ornamental lawn, a black six-wheeler with heraldic banneroles fluttering on the bonnet. Leonie couldn’t make out the colors of the banneroles in the dark. None of her business, anyway.

  She went upstairs.

  “You wanted to see me, Your Majesty?” Her voice deferent.

  No response. She let herself into the queen’s bedchamber, latching the door behind her.

  Madelaine Wessex lay on her back on her four-poster bed, an antique so heavy it was a wonder it didn’t go through the floor and all the way to the dungeons, taking the queen with it. The curtains were rolled up and tied to the canopy. At thirty-three, Madelaine still looked like a girl, spindly limbs splayed, chest flat under a skimpy camisole, long dark hair spread out over the pillows. A cigarette smouldered in her fingers. A length of ash had fallen on the sheets.

  Leonie plucked the cigarette from the royal hand. She dropped it in a glass of half-melted ice cubes. Madelaine’s eyelids strained to half-mast.

  “Get up, you old slapper,” Leonie said affectionately. “Put some clothes on.” She tossed Madelaine a cardigan, some old thing that had cost thousands of pounds, judging by how flimsy and ugly it was.