Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  “Gift One. He has gone back in again.”

  “Gift Three. The defenders are coming this way in single file. They are moving around to the back of the castle.”

  Leonie heard the king standing up on the roof of the Rover.

  “Haymakers! I am taking command of this unit as of now. Sling … rifles! At ease! Very good. When I give the word you will march towards the motte. Any questions?”

  “When’s scoff, Your Majesty?” someone shouted cheekily.

  Tristan laughed along with the men. “Haymakers … advance!”

  Sir Lancashire slapped the roof. Leonie drove forward at a walking pace. Instead of chauffeuring the king into action, she was leading a bloody parade. She would definitely get back-squadded for this.

  They passed the other two Rovers and jolted towards the rubble of the gate.

  Lord Stuart himself came on the net. “Acre One. Chimera Three, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Chimera Three! I am following orders from His Majesty!” Leonie said woodenly.

  “Acre One, what orders?”

  Sir Kent fumbled for his own pressel. “This is Knight Commander Kent! The king has now taken command of this exercise. The previously existing command structure should consider itself stood down, stood down! Acknowledge, please!”

  The Haymakers clumped up to get through the gap in the wall. Leonie drove ahead of them through the ruined quadrangle, feeling exposed. The other two Rovers trailed after them.

  She could see the defenders now. Weaponless, looking as dispirited as she felt, they formed a cordon halfway around the little hill which the motte sat on top of. What was the king up to? This didn’t feel like a military exercise anymore. It felt … scary.

  HM jumped to the ground, as lean and lithe as a man half his age. “Come on,” he said to Leonie. “Join in.”

  Leonie plodded after him through the wiry brown tangles of grass. She could not see any smoke, black or otherwise, from the south face of the motte. But the—the atmosphere, the aura—of the castle had changed. It no longer looked as if it were telling them to go away. It looked like a huge shaped charge all wired up and ready to detonate.

  The king produced a loudhailer. “Move in! Form a circle around the hill!”

  Leonie ended up between two Haymakers.

  “Sod me, it’s a girlie. What are you doing after this, love?”

  “Probably having a stroll down to the unemployment office,” Leonie snarled.

  The other two assault teams sat on their Rovers, obviously stumped, not knowing what to do.

  The king jogged around the outside of the circle. His hood was down. The rain furred his grey-and-brown-streaked hairknot. “Join hands!” he ordered them through his loudhailer. “Don’t be shy!”

  “’E’s round the twist.”

  “Give us a paw, may as well keep him happy.”

  “Ooh, you haven’t half got calluses. Not like a girlie at all.”

  “I don’t like this,” Leonie said. “Can’t you see something’s wrong? Can’t you feel it?”

  “I’d rather have a feel of you.”

  But the other man said, “I’m all over gooseflesh. Now that you mention it. I thought it was just me.”

  “Circle, step to your right! Good! And we do the happy clappy,” the king intoned, raising a laugh. “But no clapping! Keep holding hands. Keep moving to your right!”

  Leonie shuffled to her right. Anti-clockwise. Widdershins. There was a strange pressure building up in the back of her throat. She didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or sob. As they left the Rover further behind, she looked back and saw the other two assault teams spreading out warily.

  On the net, the observers were trying to locate Colonel Roebuck, the officer who should have been in charge of the defenders.

  Mase squawked, “Frog One, someone’s coming out on the parapet! Might be him!”

  Leonie looked up. She saw someone standing behind the battlements of the motte but it was not Colonel Roebuck. The robe identified the figure as HM’s spairjack maester. He did look like a hedge wizard. He raised his arms. Faintly, she heard snatches of singsong drifting down from the battlements, and all the little hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

  “Look at that.”

  “That’s a heat mirage.”

  “It ain’t sodding hot, if you noticed.”

  The air above the motte had gone wobbly. The sky shimmered—strobed. One second it was grey rainclouds, the next second it was black as night, or maybe the effect was in their eyes. Leonie’s throat felt like she’d got something stuck in it. The air was heavy with static electricity.

  A shot cracked out. Up on the battlements, the old spairjack maester spun, robe flapping. She thought he’d been shot, but then he swept an arm around. The doll-like figure of a man cartwheeled over the battlements and fell into the bailey. Leonie heard the thump when he hit.

  Someone’s having their little joke but it’s not very funny.

  A puff of wind touched her face. It whistled in her ear. Crack!

  Blood of the saints, that wasn’t a blank round!

  Her training took over. She wrenched her hands free and threw herself to the ground. She wriggled into cover behind a stand of spindly alders, rose on her elbows. The Haymakers were scattering, sergeants trying to form them up, some of them firing their rifles. Tracer sputtered bright in the rain. That was all they had to fire, that and blanks, because this was just an exercise. Except someone obviously hadn’t got the memo about that.

  She looked for the ROCK assault teams. She saw one of them stand, bring his PX-80 up to his shoulder, and take aim at the battlements. Then Sir Philip shot him in the back.

  Everyone had gone mad.

  She ran, hoping they would think she was just another Haymaker running for her life.

  Everything looked the wrong size, at once too big and far away.

  Sir Philip Lancashire’s head exploded. He fell over.

  The king burst out of the weeds. He ran through nettles and briars to Sir Philip.

  The ROCK knight in command of Chimera One dashed after him. Leonie recognized the knight by his missing left arm, the sleeve pinned up and flapping. It was Sir Alec Northumberland. His pistol was pointing at the king’s back and he was firing as he ran, at the king.

  Leonie covered the last yards to the Rover, hurled herself in behind the wheel, gunned the engine.

  Alec Northumberland stumbled. He went down and rolled across the rough ground as if someone were kicking him.

  HM’s spairjack maester stood on the battlements of the motte. He swayed in a fighting stance, punching the air. Then his head jerked. He crumpled and fell into the bailey. Raspberry jam, Leonie thought numbly. Like Floyd.

  She braked in a J-turn, slewing the Rover all the way around so that it faced away from the castle. “Sire! Sire! Get in!”

  The king was still kneeling over Sir Philip’s body. He looked up, as if he were too gutted to realize that he was in the midst of a drama. Then another of the ROCK knights shot at him and the bullets chewed up the weeds, missing him by inches. That did it. He ran to the Rover, keeping low, and flung himself into the passenger seat. Leonie was already accelerating.

  Automatic fire crunched into the body of the Rover. The back windscreen shattered.

  Leonie cleared the gap in the curtain wall with all four wheels in the air. “I’ll get you back to Incident Control, Sire—”

  “Keep going!”

  “Uh?”

  “Keep going! Don’t you realize it’s a plot? They’ll have killed Stuart already. Either that or he’s on their side. No telling who’s in on it!”

  “Hold on, then, Sire,” Leonie yelled. The Rover flew over the potholes, scattering Haymakers, past Incident Control, through the rear holding area, and onto the access road.

  There was a police VCP in place at the end of the road. A soft-skin ShortHOG parked halfway across the road, local constables waving stop flags.

  Leonie set he
r teeth and floored it.

  The Rover screamed through the gap in front of the Hog, offside wheels dipping sickeningly into the ditch. She shifted down into second gear, fed the wheel through her hands, and accelerated on the apex of the turn. They shot onto the A27. “Which way?” she screamed. “Sire?” but she’d already chosen the direction she had sandboxed in her mind, towards the hills between here and Crossbush, where neither of the Company OPs had been situated to get a view of the road.

  In her ear, the squawks of the net turned into a monotonous static squeal. That probably meant the traitors had got to Lord Stuart’s control room. Leonie took one hand off the wheel to pull her earpiece out. She ripped off the mic taped to her throat and chucked the whole mess of wiring into the back seat.

  “Treachery!” HM said, grey-faced. “I should have guessed! Should have known … but I trusted Oswald above anyone else. He is my son-in-law!”

  “Yes, Sire!”

  “Philip’s dead. They’ll kill the rest of my lads, too. And Ringgil died saving me. Oh God, Ringgil, old friend … they know not what they’ve done—we’re all lost. Lost.”

  The Rover bombed through Arundel village at seventy. “Which way do you want me to go, Sire? They’re going to be coming after us!”

  A bus pulled out ahead. Leonie double de-clutched, dropped a gear, and overtook blind, the needle of the rev counter flickering into the red. Missing an oncoming car by inches, she dived back into her lane and roared on.

  HM was oblivious, his face slack with despair, hanging onto the roll bar, but slumping. “Oswald was always the most honest of my advisors. I tested his loyalty so often that I came to believe he couldn’t lie to me. But honesty is the greatest lie of all, isn’t it?”

  “Sire, I am your sworn woman and I will lay down my life for you! But you’ve got to tell me where you want me to go!”

  The king sighed exhaustedly. “What difference does it make?”

  A black shape heaved into the rearview mirror. One of the other Rovers. Four up.

  “They’re coming,” Leonie screamed.

  A shot whistled through the shattered back windscreen and the glass in front of Leonie’s face cracked.

  She strained to see, braking, panicking.

  The king smashed his elbow into the windscreen. Crumbs of glass showered onto Leonie’s knees. She could see again. Up ahead there was a hedge on one side of the road and a graveled yard on the other with a big concrete building set back from the road, a sign saying Arundel Creamery. The other Rover pulled alongside her and two of the ROCK knights leaned out behind their assault rifles. It was murder trying to shoot from a moving vehicle but they were so close they couldn’t miss, unless—

  A milk tanker was pulling out of the creamery yard.

  Leonie accelerated across the tanker’s nose and wrenched the wheel over, turning into the yard. Behind her, the other Rover collided with the tanker in an explosion of screaming metal and the whole silver length of the tanker heeled over and hit the ground. A white flood of milk poured from its burst tank. Leonie J-turned, churning the milk up in arcs, using the handbrake to spin the Rover around, the wheel practically pulling her arms out.

  Two of the ROCK knights had escaped the crash. They crouched, firing at her. Leonie screamed and drove straight at them. One threw himself back but the other one was stupid and thought she’d swerve or something and the bull bar picked him up and tossed him into the air like Colonel Roebuck wheeling off the battlements, like Floyd plunging off the top of Wembley Stadium.

  Everyone falls.

  She was back on the road. Driving with a bloody great hole in the windscreen, the rain whipping her face, back in the wrong direction. Through the village again, local yokels running and shouting because this wasn’t Ireland and they didn’t know to take cover, and now a police ShortHOG came lumbering towards her and behind it was Lord Stuart’s staff car with its top down and more ROCK knights standing up in it shouting, “Halt, halt, surrender!”

  The king drew his pistol and fired at the staff car.

  It ploughed up on the sidewalk in front of the post office at fifty miles an hour, and in the back seat, the ROCK knights loosed off rounds.

  Leonie floored the accelerator.

  Her ears were woolly from the noise but she could feel the Rover’s engine making a sound that was not good.

  She dived down the first turning outside the village and then the next one, anything to get away. She was praying aloud, the words resurfacing from the depths of her childhood. “God the Father, have mercy. Ykhos, Lord of Miracles, have mercy. Nioine, Mother of God, have mercy.” When she heard her own voice she made herself stop. “Sire,” she croaked. “All right there?”

  “Yes,” HM said. His eyes were closed.

  “There are farmhouses, Sire, look, we could go in and get help. We could ring the Tower, Sire—your ministers—” Lord Stuart was probably dead by now. “Lord Llywelyn, Lord Lancashire—”

  “No help to be had there,” the king said without opening his eyes. “They’re all plotting with Vivienne Sauvage. I’ve suspected that for some time. That’s why we had to go to such lengths to conceal the true purpose of PREDATOR.” He let out a noise like a sob. “And all the time, Oswald was concealing a purpose of his own …”

  “Sire, please—”

  “I’m alone, do you hear me? Maybe I always was. Alone.”

  Leonie felt alone, too. She’d always suspected that Oswald Day was a treacherous bastard, and she would feel hatred and anger towards him when she had time to dwell on it, but she had used up all her aggression on driving and now she was only afraid. She pushed the Rover on down the narrow country road. “This vehicle is going to crap out on us any minute,” she said, trying to sound calm. “Sire, I need to know what to do.”

  “All right, all right! Robert. He can’t possibly be in on it.”

  “Robert?”

  “Penzance, girl! We’ll go to Penzance.” HM sank back, as if making the decision was enough to get them there.

  Leonie knew where Penzance was. Right on the very tippy-toe of Cornwall. A long way from here, but that wasn’t her biggest problem right now. Her biggest problem was the Rover.

  Dump it and crack on on foot? But they were driving between hedges and fields, every square inch farmed. There was nowhere to hide.

  She rounded a bend and there was a little blue Morris pootling along ahead, two up.

  Leonie sucked in a breath. “Sire? Can I borrow your weapon?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not armed, Sire. We weren’t allowed. I’m going to commandeer that civilian vehicle.”

  “Saints. The rule of law ... No.” HM straightened. “If it has to be done, I’ll do it.”

  “Sire, you’ve got the most famous face in the country. We don’t want them to know we came this way.”

  Expressionless, the king plucked his pistol from the holster on his baldric and slapped it into Leonie’s hand. It was a sleek P&K automatic. Rubies made the eyes of a lion on the butt.

  Leonie overtook the Morris and braked, forcing the little car to stop. “You pull your hood up and cross-deck—get into the other car—when I wave.” Without giving herself time to think, she leapt out and pointed the pistol at the driver of the Morris. A little old man in a trilby, an equally old female beside him. “Out of the vehicle! Out of the fucking vehicle!” Leonie screamed. She yanked open the driver’s side door. “Out! Out!”

  Moaning incoherently, the old couple tried to raise their hands. Leonie lost patience and dragged the old man out of the car by his collar. “Get into that field! Run! Run!” She shoved the pistol in the old woman’s face, keeping her sleeve over her hand to hide the ruby-studded butt. “I’m counting to five and if I can still see you when I’m finished, you’re going to be very sorry! Run!”

  They ran, stumbling. The old man stopped to open the nearest gate, fumbling with the latch. “One, two, three, four, oh fuck it.” Leonie fired a shot into the ground behind them. The
y climbed over the gate.

  She waved at the king, who ran around the Morris and jumped in. Leonie got back into the Rover and drove it into the field which the old couple were now fleeing across. She tucked it behind the hedge, then yanked out the ignition keys, hurled them away, and dashed back to the Morris. HM sat quietly in the passenger seat with his hands folded, like a nobleman awaiting his chauffeur.

  The Morris had to be twenty years old if it was a day. Leonie hitched her seat forward, putting herself closer to the pedals for better control. She cursed herself for not waiting until they came up on a fitter vehicle.

  They came to a turn-off with a sign for Portsmouth. That was away from Castle Arundel, so she took it.

  “Thank you,” the king said.

  “Don’t thank me yet, Sire.”

  Stop flapping! she ordered herself. Someone has to keep their head on here and if it’s not him it’s got to be you.

  HM hadn’t quite lost it, but he was obviously sinking mentally. She’d seen it before, on operations in Ireland. The desperate attempt to understand, when there was nothing to understand except that the whole world had gone down the crapper. The loss of ability to react and make decisions. She’d had enough trouble getting Penzance out of him.

  Now he slumped beside her with his eyes closed, knees jammed against the dashboard. She dared a glance directly at the pale face, tormented in its stillness, and felt horribly sorry for him.

  I’ll do whatever I have to do to save you, Sire.

  At the moment, it looked as if that would have to include doing his thinking for him.

  She pictured the maps she’d studied yesterday. “Sire. Sire? Here’s what we’re going to do …”

  27

  Ran

  That Night. Dublin Castle

  Down on that floor with you and say your prayers! Would you want your poor uncle to know what a bold wee thing you are?”

  “Shan’t, shan’t!” Ran danced away. “I’m glad Uncle Tristan’s dead. I hope he burns in hell!”