Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  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.”

  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

  Guy

  The Next Night. November 31st, 1979. Heathrow

  Guy had put the dragons in the customs hall. He went in to check on them again at midnight. This was the quietest place in the airport, the silence disturbed only by the dragons’ rustling as they motitated to stay warm. The grooms greeted him with wordless salutes. They had nothing to say to Guy. He had nothing to say to them except the one word he could not utter: Sorry.

  Outside the night was cold and clear, an almost-full moon dominating the sky. A fleck travelled across the orb in a straight line. Guy heard a distant drone. He held his breath. The noise grew louder. He started to walk. Then he ran.

  “Get down!” By the time he reached the departure lounge where they were holding the hostages, he had to shout over the noise. “Under the seats!”

  The hostages needed little encouragement. They scrambled under the hard plastic benches, which would give them little protection if Oswald Day bombed the terminal.

  “Away from the windows!” he screamed at his men: hostages guarding hostages. “Get away from the windows!”

  The noise splintered into a mechanical hammering. Outside the floor-to-ceiling observation windows, something whumped. A blossom of light silhouetted the passenger planes parked on the tarmac—and running men, Overwhelm sentries caught in the open. The terminal building juddered as if the earth were quaking.

  Guy belatedly took his own advice and flung himself to the floor. He did not crawl under a bench, since they were all occupied by hostages. Six feet from him, a small girl lay sobbing by her father’s side. Her eyes met his with a stare of tearful, uncomprehending terror.

  The hostages—seventy-two in number—had behaved well in the first night and day of their captivity. They had sorted themselves into a hierarchy with a British Airways pilot as their leader, allotted the best sleeping spaces to the children and pregnant women, and organized teams to forage and cook (in the airport’s restaurants, under guard, on open fires after Day turned the electricity and gas off). Inevitably, after twenty-four hours—and especially after Guy had given them permission to have a fire for warmth in the middle of the departure lounge—the place smelled like a cave inhabited by savages. But they had done their best to stay clean. After Day cut off the water, rendering the toilets unusable, they had helped to dig an outside latrine. They had even been getting matey with Guy’s men.

  The airplanes came back for a second pass.

  Raising his head, Guy saw smoke drifting over the runways, illuminated by scattered blazes.

  A fireball of biblical proportions bloomed.

  The entire stretch of observation windows blew in.

  Smoke boiled into the terminal, instantly reducing visibility to a few feet.

  Coughing, Guy jerked his scarf up over his nose and mouth. He started to crawl, telling everyone whom his fumbling hands encountered to be calm. A panicked hostage attacked him, but crumpled into sobs when Guy drew his pistol. Something crashed on the floor inches from his nose, and when he crawled forward again, the stabbing pain in his hands and knees told him it had been a skylight. The hammering in his woolly, deafened ears might have been machine-gun fire or the pounding of his own heart.

  The enemy planes droned away, leaving the terminal building filled with the thick, greasy smoke of burning jet fuel and the screams of the i
njured. As Guy blundered through the chaos, the smoke dispersed little by little, revealing a scene from a war newsreel, lit in a palette of sepia and black by the burning airplanes outside.

  He tracked down a sergeant and ordered him to organize first aid for the casualties. “Use our regimental saints, on my authority. Cure the hostages first, our men must wait.” As the wind blew in through the shattered windows, the temperature in the departure lounge was dropping. The mercury stood at zero outside and soon it would be just as cold in here. “When you’ve calmed them down, move them into the departures hall.” He jogged down the length of the east wing, boots smashing through the broken skylights.

  The departures hall seemed comparatively undamaged. Guy sensed movement all around him. He flinched and shone his torch around. In the wind that now coursed through the building, a storm of papers was blowing off the ticket desks, skimming over the dirty floor. He trod on more glass, and looked up. The moon shone above, bisected by a strut. The skylights in here had been famous, a hagiographic frieze commissioned by Uncle Tristan twenty years ago, and now they were gone.

  More movement. This time it was Dierdre.

  “Take it,” she said, holding out the battered toy sword she had been trying to give him ever since the Elan Valley.

  “You’re not hurt,” he said, touching her face. “Where were you?”

  “Curled up under a desk in the ops room, I’m afraid, with my hands over my ears.”

  “Wise.”

  “Some of the men went outside. They were going to try to shoot the planes down.”

  “Better to try and fail than to fail without trying.”

  “Well said.”

  “Hanna tried and failed. She and her friends from Limerick were killed boarding the Harold’s Joy.”

  “She died well. Take this, in her memory.”

  Indifferently, Guy took the toy and thrust it through his gun belt. It reminded him of the one Ran had found in Wicklow Forest, which he’d tried to tell them was the Worldcracker. The reminder of his sweet, silly little brother made his voice rough. “I suppose I can use all the luck I can get.”

  “It will bring you more than luck. It will bring you victory.”

  At the word victory, Guy laughed hollowly. “Still glad you came?”

  “I’m having the time of my life,” she said.

  They walked towards the west wing of the airport. As they passed the duty-free shops there was a shattering crash. Guy shone his torch into the nearest shop. Overwhelm men crouched on the floor, hugging bottles and cartons of cigarettes. “Sir …”

  He had put sentries on the shops to stop this happening. These were the sentries.

  “They’re looting! Liquor and cigarettes!” Dierdre said shrilly.

  “M’lady … sir …”

  “Oh, carry on,” Guy snapped. After all, what did it matter now? They were doomed.

  He had established his headquarters in the baggage claim area. He spoke with RSM Murphy, confirming his order that the regimental saints be made available to the wounded hostages, then turned to Alan O'Scolaidhe. “Manage to pick any of ʼem off?”

  Soot blackened Alan’s face. “Couldn’t get the fifty-mils elevated high enough without taking them off the HOGs, and we didn’t have time for that. They knew we couldn’t hit them. I swear one fellow waggled his wings at us.” He hacked and spat black on the floor. “If it was who I think it was—”

  “Who?”

  “Malcolm Stuart. I used to go hang-gliding with him before he got involved with those po-faced straight edges in the ROCK. Utterly mad! I broke my neck once. But God, it was fun.”

  The room was filling up with Overwhelmers who’d been felled by shrapnel or smoke prostration. They were being laid on the unmoving conveyor belts. Guy had to do a thousand things, starting with a check on their perimeter. Amid the comms confusion, enemies might have sneaked in unseen or unreported. He was so tired.

  Tibs Cork joined them. “The dragons are all right,” he reported. “Saints! Did you see that explosion when the Streolla 800 went up? She had a full tank of fuel, that’s what did it.”

  “Yes. Good thing we hadn’t fueled any of the other planes,” Guy said.

  “No,” Alan said. “Actually, if you had taken my advice and fueled the two Ulbreichts, we would have been far from here by now.”

  “I’m not running away.”

  “I can fly an Ulbreicht, and we have that pilot, the hostage. We could have reached the Continent—”

  “I am not running away!” Guy heard himself shouting. “Anyway, we haven’t got the airplanes any more.”

  “No. Day’s got us just where he wants us,” Alan said. He sat down.

  * * *

  At first light they went outside to survey the damage. Burnt-out buses, hi-loaders, and planes slumped on their melted landing gear, paint blackened and bubbly. Nothing except a scar on the tarmac remained of the Streolla 800, which had violently exploded. Large pieces of its fuselage were scattered in a ring of destruction.

  Wind-fed flames still twinkled here and there. Without running water, they had no way of putting the fires out. In between gusts of wind Guy could hear birdsong from the trees beyond the runways. Ash blew around their boots like grey snow.

  “Another lovely day,” RSM Murphy said, nodding at the gleam of sunrise in the east.

  An open-topped green Rover banked and jinked through the maze of debris. Alan jumped out. The silver lining, if a disaster like this could have one, was that their own vehicles had been scattered around the airport and so most of them had escaped damage.

  “Perimeter secure.” Alan had changed into a clean uniform to reassure the men. He was turning out to be a better soldier than anyone, including him, had ever guessed. But all to no avail.

  “I’m releasing the hostages,” Guy said. Speaking felt like coughing up knives. He could still taste smoke. “Any of our men who wish it may also leave.”

  “And if they don’t?” said Roger Cork.

  “Then they may stay with me and fight. I expect the final attack will come today.”

  And if it doesn’t? He could see the question on all their faces. What if Day continues to hold off? How long do we hold out here? Guy did not know, either. Releasing the hostages would allow them to stretch their supplies of food and water further. On the other hand, it would remove the only reason for Day not to end the standoff by bombing them to hell.

  “Oh, bother it,” Alan said. “I’ve come this far. I’m in.”

  “Us too,” Roger said, speaking for his twin as well as himself.

  “You’re not getting rid of me,” Dierdre said, causing the men to smile.

  “Murphy?” Guy rasped. It was the regimental sergeant-major, not the officers, who spoke for the men.

  “I reckon I’m in,” Murphy said. “I’ll fight for you, as I fought for your father in Spain.” He stared out across the windswept tarmac, oblivious to the looks of horror on the highborn faces around him.

  “William Wessex-Sauvage was not my father,” Guy said harshly. “I’m the bastard get of a runaway slave.”

  Something happened then that he had never seen before, nor ever expected to see: Murphy blushed, his already wind-reddened face turning puce.

  After a moment the RSM rallied. “Well, sir, can you blame me for forgetting? William wasn’t reckless like Tristan. That’s why they never named him a hero. But he never undertook an operation unless he knew he was doing the right thing. And I reckon you’re like him in that, sir. It may be hopeless, but it’s the right thing to do. And it mayn’t be hopeless, either. Our lads aren’t beaten yet.”

  Guy swallowed, ridiculously touched. “Well said.” He wanted to add that they had something else in common: he owed everything to House Sauvage. But Murphy had just invoked a higher authority, the cause of justice.

  “Never let me forget that’s what we’re fighting for,” Guy said. “The justice Piers was denied.”

  “Oh shit,” Roger said quietly.
>
  They all followed his gaze. Guy heard the subsonic thudding of helicopter rotors. Two, no three choppers flew low from the direction of London. With their backs to the rising sun they watched them come.

  Alan wheeled to the riflemen he had brought with him. “Take the vehicle into cover! Arm the fifty-mils! Comms, tell Sergeant Withall to get the mortar crews out here. They should have re-established their positions by now; where are they?”

  Guy touched his arm. “Alan, it’s only three choppers. It can’t be an attack, unless Day is depraved enough to use magic. But yes: get a couple of our mortars to cover the runways.”

  The helicopters flared out to land as close to the terminal as they could without fouling their skids in the mechanical carnage. Crows fled yarking from the downdraft. Alan’s mortar crews jogged around the terminal, heavily burdened, and raced to set up their guns behind the charred shells of planes. Guy was pleased to see several heavy machine guns also taking up positions in the wreckage, three men to each weapon: one to spot, one to fire, and one to feed the strip into the loading tray. Their fire would enfilade the three helicopters.

  The enemy had landed, but if Guy did not wish it, he would not take off again.

  He might inflict a good deal of damage in the attempt, though. Two of the helicopters were SPiG gunships marked with the sword-and-chalice logo of National Chivalry, equipped—Guy knew—with 16mm rocket pods. He could see the door gunners crouched behind their weapons.

  The third chopper was far smaller, a Spyder painted Wessex crimson.

  Three men got out of the Spyder.

  Guy walked out onto the runway to meet them, followed by Alan’s Rover crawling in bottom gear. The rotors of the gunships, still turning slowly, blew locks of his unwashed hair across his face.

  Oswald Day stopped in front of Guy. He was wearing informal civilian clothing, the collar of his greatcoat turned up around his handsome jaw, his nose pink from the cold. He did not appear to be armed. “Bring out your casualties—your men as well as the hostages,” he said. “We’ll evacuate them.”