Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  Oswald hurried straight from his helicopter to the parade ground in the Tower of London, where the lords of the Cabinet were already assembled. In front of the Waterloo Block, the Household troop of the Lions stood in buffed and polished ranks. Their sparkling turnout belied a chronic lack of discipline. In the silence, they shuffled, coughed, and occasionally dropped a rifle.

  In the middle of the drill square, at the bottom of the flagpole, on a specially erected platform, stood Piers Sauvage.

  Anger simmered in Oswald’s mind, inflamed by the presence of his enemies, chief among them old Stuart in his brass and braid and epaulettes, every inch the rock-chewing general at eighty.

  Slightly apart lounged the Household, Tristan’s mob of tourney champions and secretaries without portfolio, looking bored as they all waited for the king to arrive.

  The sun had gone in, leaving a biting chill in the wind. The Wessex flag flapped lazily. The king was late. Piers must have been in mental agony, wondering if even now Tristan was in changing his mind. As Oswald watched, Piers sat down on the steps of the block.

  Oswald thought: Fuck it. He broke ranks with the other noblemen and went to give Piers a cigarette.

  “I think I’ve saved Guy,” he muttered. “He was breathing when I left. He’s in Madelaine’s care.”

  Piers seemed to sag with relief and sit up straighter all at once. His smile spread to his eyes. “By God, Oswald. We could have saved this country between us.”

  Oswald nodded, withdrawing. And now I’ll just have to do it without you.

  It was even odds whether Piers would have supported PREDATOR, anyway. With the wealth of House Sauvage at his back, he’d never had as much motivation as the knights of the ROCK, most of whom came from less-well-off families.

  Oswald returned to his place in the ranks as a sergeant-major bawled: “His sovereign Ma-a-a-ajesty, King Tristan the Second of Great Britain!”

  Tantara-tan-tan! from the waiting trumpets. Everyone stood up. Tristan walked onto the parade ground, unaccompanied, wearing jeans and an old mantle. He cast a cold eye over the assembly. Even Oswald caught himself holding his breath.

  The sergeant-major, splendidly immune to nerves, stamped and bawled: “Parade … shun! Slope arms!” They stood like rocks, trembling and red-faced. “Present arms! Salute!”

  Tristan returned the salute carelessly. His gaze raked the assembled nobles and paused on the technicians standing to attention in front of the mobile plastination system, a van containing dissection equipment and an acetone tank where Piers’s relics would be preserved for return to his family.

  “To hell with this,” the king said audibly. He crooked a gloved finger. Piers stumbled over to him, shackles clanking, shivering in the wind. “See here, nephew. We can all stand here and listen to the priest wittering on for half an hour, then I think there’s some music scheduled, and they tell me you’ve prepared some poignant last words—the mystery of divine justice, not half. Well, we can do it that way. Or you can have death at mine own hand, now, minus the ceremonial bullshit. Your choice.”

  Piers said clearly: “If it must be done, let it be by thine own hand, my king.”

  He dropped to one knee, bowed his head in a graceful obeisance, and crouched with his hands on the ground, braced.

  Oswald felt nauseated. They train them to it from childhood, he thought. He never had a chance.

  Tristan drew the longsword which had been concealed by his cloak, took a single practice swing, and then swung the sword again.

  Piers’s body knelt, gouting blood from between its shoulders, and toppled sideways. His head rolled. The MPS crew scrambled to retrieve it. Tristan stopped them, bloodied blade in hand. He picked up the head by the hairknot. “This is mine. Vivienne can have his other relics.”

  He took a black cloth bag from inside his mantle, dropped the head in, and turned to leave. The whole thing had taken less than two minutes.

  At the back of the crowd a woman wept.

  Lord Norfolk, Minister of the Interior, said distinctly: “Not quite the thing.”

  Earl Stuart said: “Superb swing, though. One clean cut, no faffing about—takes me back.”

  Oswald heard a shutter click. Someone in the Household was surreptitiously photographing the corpse. By nightfall, that person would be a lot richer, and the pictures would be all over the tabloids. How would the commoners react? Oswald had been born a commoner and so he thought he knew. They weren’t stupid. They would see that the king had cut the head off a man who’d committed no crime except being his likeliest replacement.

  Oswald ran after Tristan. He caught up with him at the corner of the White Tower.

  “You provoked some fairly strong criticism back there, Sire,” Oswald said, matching the king’s mantle-swirling stride. “My lord Norfolk was heard to say that it was not quite the thing.”

  “Sometimes, Oswald, I simply can’t be arsed.” Tristan glanced down at the bag swinging from his glove. It was dripping. “He appeared to feel the same way. I always did feel that he most resembled me, among the younger generation. He was more like me than Harry ever was, to be honest. Hey?” He addressed the head in the bag. “Weren’t you?”

  “He was a born leader, Sire. He got that from his father’s side of the family, I should think.”

  “Poor Wills. That callous bitch. She chose the Worldcracker over her own son’s life.”

  The barracks dogs sniffed at their heels, drawn by the trail of blood in the dust behind them.

  “What will you do now, Sire? She will seek revenge. She may not have much maternal feeling, but we know she has pride.”

  “Yes. We’ll attaint his assets, of course, but they’ve warproofed the corporation. It’ll take us years to do her any real harm that way.”

  “There’s the weregilt obligation. They must pay that.”

  “As I said. You have not seen foot-dragging until you’ve seen a Sauvage trying to weasel out of his—or her—debts. Any other suggestions?”

  It was just like the old days, the two of them strolling beneath the trees and discussing matters of state. Except that Tristan was carrying his favorite nephew’s head in a bag.

  “Civilian powers, Sire,” Oswald said.

  “Oh, don’t veil your meaning!”

  “Sire, as you know, NatChiv has sandboxed an operation to suppress the terrorists once and for all. We’re calling it Operation PREDATOR. The plan has two phases: first, small groups of special forces would strike at strategic targets throughout Ireland, eliminating or capturing key IRA personnel. Secondly, a dispersed force of regular troops would prevent retaliation by establishing a visible presence in the affected areas, with the aim of winning over hearts and minds—well, never mind that for now. Phase one is what I would like to draw your thought to. It could easily be repurposed as a strike against a single strategic target.” He was working it out on the spur of the moment, calculating how long it would take to juggle the logistics and rehearse the actions on.

  Tristan looked sideways at him. Oswald’s heart sank at the stoniness of that gaze, but the king said: “When I was in the ROCK myself—before and during the Spanish war, you know—I occasionally got mixed up in black ops.”

  Oswald gave an exaggerated flinch. “We don’t use that term anymore, Sire.”

  “No, that’s right. But I do have fond memories of those days. I used to tell you stories about Uncle Stan and his Desert Rats, didn’t I, hey?” He addressed the bag again, then shook his head. “To hell with hearts and minds, Oswald. I want Vivienne Sauvage’s head. And I don’t particularly care if it’s attached to her body or not.”

  Oswald smiled.

  They walked past the workshops where the royal cars were kept. A yew grew outside. The yew always reminded Oswald of one winter when he was small, when he had eaten yew berries, because he was hungry and he had thought anything so pretty must be good to eat. Only the saints at the local church had saved him from dying. Red, red was the color of the dying year: the y
ew berries, the rosehips trapped amidst climbing old man’s beard, the lining of Tristan’s mantle, the ruby-stud sunbursts on the backs of Oswald’s own gloves, the blood dripping from the sodden corner of Tristan’s bag. Wasteful, wasteful, so wasteful.

  “Sire? That relic ought to be plastinated before the virtue goes out of it.”

  “A myth, that,” the king said. “Anyway, I’ve got another use for it.”

  What did the king plan to do with his nephew’s head? Oswald’s nerve deserted him. He changed the subject. They had a lot to discuss.

  20

  Val

  Two Days Later. November 15th, 1979. County Galway, Ireland

  Wipers splashing, Val’s rental car dived into a valley ringed by cloud-caped peaks. Mist tore open below to reveal a long black lake. They were high in the glens of Ben Corr, the tallest of the Twelve Bens, the famed mountain range in County Galway. A hundred lakes dotted the folds of the range. This one had a name: Lough Inagh.

  Not that anyone had come this way for years, judging by the state of the road.

  “Almost there,” Val said, glancing at the BASI loyalty enforcement officer, Connelly, who occupied the passenger seat.

  They skidded down hairpin bends into the valley. Fragments of stone walls marred the slopes, testifying to the past existence of hardscrabble farms. Gorse bushes held what was left of the topsoil together. Brambles bobbed in the spray of slender waterfalls.

  On the far shore of the lake a village could be glimpsed through the mist. Val drove around the shore, the undercarriage scraping on the edges of potholes. So they’d lose the deposit. Stephane Flambeault could bloody well pay for it.

  The closer they approached, the worse the village looked. Sparrows bobbed in and out of holes in the roofs of terraced grey-stone cottages. Off to the left, the drum of a country church squatted on a low rise. Someone had cut back the weeds in the graveyard recently.

  Val killed the engine.

  “What a bleeding dump,” Connelly said.

  Connelly was Val’s ball and chain, here to make sure he didn’t do a runner. At least he wasn’t obvious. He had a strong cuddie accent when he spoke English, and he looked the part of a local as well, with his caterpillar moustache and a missing front tooth.

  It was drizzling. Connelly went around to the back of the car and banged on the rear windscreen for Val to open the boot.

  Men with guns came out of the abandoned houses, faceless in balaclavas and maudies. Val put his hands on the wheel where they could see them. Connelly stuck his hands in the air.

  The snout of a Myxilite knocked on Val’s window. “Out of the car!”

  “Hello, Ragherty.” The drizzle misted Val’s face.

  Alyx pushed in front of Ragherty. Her blue eyes blinked furiously in the slit of her balaclava. “Eejit. Were you followed here?”

  “No,” Connelly said. “You couldn’t hide a fecking sausage on those roads.”

  “Who’s this, then?”

  “Ask yourself that question, Alyx,” Val said. “Who are you? Not the girl I thought you were. You didn’t nut Heinrich Ende like you should have. You held onto him and tried to ransom him back to his employers.” He got it all out, despite the guns pointing at his chest. “That little present you gave me, the ‘proof’ of his death? You took that off him while he was still alive. That was clever. But then you did something incredibly fucking stupid. You took delivery of the ransom and then you knackered on the deal.”

  “There were half a hundred ROCK knights on our necks,” Conn said. “We had to dump the Kraut, he was in no shape to run.”

  “This fellow’s got a BASI brand,” said Black Donnchla from behind Val.

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” Connelly said.

  “We don’t deal with the government,” Donnchla said. “Any government.”

  Alyx was silent, her gaze darting over Val’s shoulder, back to his face.

  “It was a private outfit yon Kraut worked for,” Liam said. “They were willing to pay to get him back. There are men here with families. Would you take the food out of their mouths?”

  “It was a private outfit, yes,” Val said. “A BASI subcontractor. And now it’s BASI you’re dealing with, like it or not. You kill us and you’ll know no peace this side of the grave.”

  The corners of Alyx’s eyes twitched. “I always knew the bloody IMF was just another subsidiary of BASI.” She let her gun ride on its sling.

  Val looked over his shoulder. Connelly had a bust lip, blood trickling down his chin. Donnchla was walking around him with a pistol in his hand.

  “What the fuck?” Connelly said. “Now I remember why I emigrated. You cuddie bastards are so paranoid you’d suspect your mother of informing on you. And stupid with it, by God. You’re getting a second chance from BASI. Not many can say that. They’re even offering to pay you what your cooperation’s worth, although I don’t think it’s worth very much myself. “ His expression was bleak. “The great pretender to the throne of Great Britain. A wee cuddie lass hiding in the mountains.”

  Alyx clapped her hands. “We’ll take them up to the house. Liam, Conn, put their car away. Search it first. If it’s jarked, they’re dead.”

  She walked beside Val up the single street of the abandoned village. Farther up the hill, abandoned pithead machinery drooped, rusted to the same color as the bracken. “I never suspected you’d betray me, Val. Not you.”

  “If you look at me closely, you’ll observe my facial features are not what they were.” The swelling in his nose had gone down, but the hollows of his eyes were still green with bruising.

  “Aye, you look like shite. So what?”

  Val laughed bitterly. “You gave me away, Alyx. National Chivalry caught Ende and he told them everything he knew, including my name. They had me tailed and photographed in London. Then they shared the goods with BASI. I’ve one foot on the block, Alyx.”

  “And what d’you expect me to do about that?”

  “Ende didn’t come here to kill you. He came to make you an offer. They know what you can do, and they want to know how you do it.”

  “How I do what?” Playing innocent.

  “Bring the dead back to life.”

  “Ah, that’s just a rumor.” Alyx tugged off her balaclava. She was smiling. “I don’t bring anyone back to life. They don’t die in the first place.”

  At the top of the village, a dirt path veered off and hooked over a low rise. They slipped and slid down through bracken into a pocket vale that had been invisible from the road. Smoke dribbled from the chimney of a farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings. Goats peered out of the byre.

  “After Niorlain and O’Leary ganged up to push him out of Army Command, my father came to live here,” Alyx said. “He died here in the end, too, just an old man, disappointed, broken.”

  The others went around the farmhouse, pushing Connelly ahead of them at gunpoint.

  “I won’t let that happen to me, Val. I’m not giving up on my father’s dream. I am the true queen of Great Britain.”

  “If you’re ever to be the queen of more than six men and a mountain, you need money.”

  “My father had a few dealings with BASI in his time. They screwed him over, made him look like a traitor to the movement. I’m not repeating that mistake.”

  You already have, Val thought. “You’ll be signing my death warrant.”

  “Stay here, then! Join us. How will they get to you?”

  Through Mihal, Greta, and the kids, was the answer to that. Flambeault had explained to him in gruesome detail exactly what would happen to the Zalyotin family if he couldn’t persuade Alyx to accept BASI’s offer.

  A black dog the size of a pony sprawled in front of the fire in the farmhouse kitchen. Even with his bust nose, Val could smell boiled cabbage and wet washing. Marigh Healy, dumpy and grey-haired, unpinned a rag from the indoor clothesline and gave it to Connelly for his split lip.

  “A million marks,” Connelly said grumpily into the ra
g. “Take it or leave it. Half on signing, the other half on completion.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Your mam always said she’d be a millionaire someday,” Marigh Healy said, and spat into the sink where she was peeling potatoes.

  “This is nothing to do with my mother,” Alyx said to Marigh, furiously. She glared at the others. “And if any of you snitch to her, you’re getting none, either.”

  “Is that a yes?” Connelly said.

  “A million dollars,” Ragherty said.

  “It’s a lie. It’s a trap.” Conn.

  “Well, Val?” Alyx said. “Is it?”

  “It’s not a trap,” Val said.

  “See, Val says it’s the real thing. That’s why they sent him. So we’d trust them.” Alyx’s voice was sing-song, mocking. She jumped up. “Connelly, wasn’t it? Come on. I’ll show you what you’d be buying.”

  They trudged back out to the farmyard. Val felt bone-tired. He sat down on a wheelbarrow and lit a cigarette. Conn dragged out of the byre a large plywood target painted with the bullet-punctured image of the Wessex lion. He leaned it against the stone wall of the farmyard and rejoined the others.

  Alyx stood in front of the target. She spread her arms wide. “Shoot me.”

  “Eh?” Connelly said.

  “You heard me. Haven’t you got a gun? Donnchla, give him yours.”

  “Here,” the black magician said. Connelly checked the chamber, fumbling. The guns of the others were on him.

  “Scared?” Alyx mocked. “Or scared you’ll miss? It’s not even ten yards.”

  “I don’t want to—”

  “Do you believe in me, or don’t you? Do you not want to see what you came here for? Shoot me!”

  Despairingly, Connelly set the rifle against his shoulder and fired. The hills resounded. Shells rained into the mud. Alyx jerked, laid one hand weakly over her chest, and slid to the ground. Blood streaked the target, red on red. Connelly stopped shooting. “Saints in heaven,” he said, and ran to the fallen girl. The others were ahead of him. Val put out his cigarette and picked his way through the mud. The noise of the shots seemed to have jarred something loose in his head.