“No.”
“I’d get gay fast if I were you. It’s only men here, big man. Have fun while you can”.
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
The front of the column rose up over a dyke and dropped from view on the far side. When Lawrence reached it, he found himself on top of an old sea dyke overlooking a tidal basin as big as Trafalgar Square, if not larger. Seagulls on the far side were mere dots. Beyond them, miles away across sand bars, a rime of breakers marked the surf of a retreated sea. To the landward side, towards which Lawrence glanced warily having checked that SMS London was not looking, the view was marsh mottled here and there by pools and clumps of autumn-blazing woodland. It was obviously fenland. That in itself did not tell him much. Large areas of eastern England had reverted to marsh since the Glorious Resolution in the late 2030s. This place could be anywhere between the Thames Estuary and Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Back in the Public Era, the sea had been held back by an extensive system of dykes, pumping stations and drains. Then as the nation state disintegrated, the sea returned. Evidently this prison was built on an island surrounded by miles of marsh.
Down in the basin, a steel sailing barge lay grounded on the mud. It was an outstandingly neat little ship, one might describe it as prize-winningly neat. The hull was jet black above the waterline and red lead below it. The rigging was cloud white, the steel cables spiral-bound with dark tarred strip. Lawrence observed the hull was of welded steel plates. That meant it was a Public Era heirloom—no shipyard had built a welded hull since the Glorious Resolution, welding being a ‘lost technology’. Its fine condition belied a true age in excess of seventy years.
What did the observation tell him? This: those barges were what the outside world saw of the Value System. The outside world thus saw prosperity, which meant safety, which meant a powerful sovereign benefactor. Such impulses as curiosity or envy would be assuaged by the presentation of a fundamental respectability. The Value System would keep its secrets.
Up ahead, the lead ultramarines marched towards the barge by means of a wooden causeway across the mud. This instantly placed the location in Lawrence’s mind. This was of course was the very same barge that Pezzini, Gnevik and he had arrived on last night. The wooden causeway was a floating pier at high tide. Descending into the basin, he gained a feeling of sinking from the world; the wind died away, the air was close and thick with a primeval smell from the mud. On the sunny side of the barge waited a stocky, older man, who was bald apart from white flashes over the ears. His tag was Beta388, which meant he had been around a long time. His moniker was Tricky Fingers and he was the leader of Gang 4, Lawrence’s ultimate boss. He lifted his face and called out:
“Where are you Spiderman?”
“I’m getting there.”
A short man pushed past Lawrence. He was like an orangutan, great shoulders and long, powerful arms, a small round head and short little trotting legs like a boy’s. He had been around a long time too; his tag was Beta707.
“Up you go, Spiderman.”
Spiderman gripped the anchor chain of the barge and ambled arm over arm up and over the gunwale. He dropped a ladder and more value seethed up onto the deck where they got busy in what was obviously a practised operation. Lawrence gathered they were opening the hatches of the hold.
The carts arrived, including the one bearing Serial Sidney. Most of the gang hung about, watching the work up on deck, waiting.
“What’s the bloody hold-up?” Master Sergeant Ratty’s eyes glittered with anger at the delay. Lawrence guessed he was flustered by the presence of his boss, the ominous SMS London. That made this situation dangerous.
“Just loading up the first pallet now, Master Sergeant Ratty.” Tricky Fingers spotted Lawrence down below and beckoned him up on deck. “Get up here, Zeta729, you need to see this.”
Lawrence started up the ladder. It seemed the whole gang stopped their murmured conversations to watch him ascending, rung by rung. Those on deck were grouped towards the stern, around an open hatch, from which direction Lawrence caught wafts of a vague sewage smell. Spiderman waved one long arm to draw him.
“Get a look at this lot, Zeta729.”
Lawrence stooped over the coaming of the hatch. The floor of the hold was covered with bolts of fabric, some long and thin, some short and fat. They were soaking. Several value stepped amongst the bolts, which sluggishly shifted. Lawrence thought they might be sharks or seals wrapped in ice. One of the value looked up and called to hoist away, whereupon a winch turned by two value began to lift a loaded pallet out of the hold in a smooth ascension like a rising balloon. A couple of value on the deck pulled the boom across to swing the pallet out over the side of the barge. In the clear sunlight, Lawrence saw these were not bolts of fabric, nor sharks or seals wrapped in ice. They were corpses. Only the dead have that flattened, absolutely boneless settlement. The pallet descended onto one of the carts, hands reached over and unhooked the ropes, the corpses slid off as the pallet was winched away. Arms and legs and breasts broke out from the folds of sodden robes. The pallet was already diving back down into the hold to carry up another batch. Lawrence eased upright, having almost fainted over the coaming. He trembled all over.
“Give us your breakfast, Blondie,” Spiderman said, with a twisted smirk.
Lawrence spat in his face and turned away. Spiderman bellowed and caught Lawrence under the kidney with a terrific swipe from one of his long arms. Lawrence buckled a moment, then jabbed with the heel of his hand, catching a lucky mark on Spiderman’s cheek, knocking him off balance and for sure sending him over the gunwale had he not been caught by a couple of value. Lawrence sensed a sudden cold mood. The gang closed in. He took a fighter’s stance and waited. From out beyond the folded-in world of their fury came the familiar clack-clack of an automatic pistol being cocked. Down on the mud, Senior Master Sergeant London aimed his Browning Hi-Power at Lawrence’s chest.
“Value Zeta729, I would normally despatch you to the Beyond, but on this first day I’ll give you a chance—one chance. Shake hands with Spiderman.”
Lawrence dropped his fists.
“Yes, Senior Master Sergeant London.”
He offered his hand to Spiderman. They shook, on Spiderman’s face a thin, forced smile.
“No hard feelings.”
“None at all,” Spiderman said, with such an off-handed flippancy as to promise a stealthy retribution later in the day. Lawrence knew well enough he had been a fool to blow up—double bloody fool to do it with SMS London’s presence added to the tension. Now he had to get his head down and be the willing slave.
“Sit down and watch what happens,” Tricky Fingers, the gang boss, said. “Tell me when you’re ready to work.”
“I’ll work now.”
“Get down in that hold and load pallets… No, take off your overalls and boots, it’s filthy down there—and do not touch your ear tag or you’ll infect the wound.”
Lawrence stripped down to his shorts. Tricky Fingers openly leered at his chest and muscular arms. Lawrence ignored him. He jumped off the coaming of the hatch.
The impact nearly broke his ankles. His feet hit a surface like a pile of logs. Under the wrappings of dark robes were hard ribs and limbs, just as hard as timber. He paired off with Yip-Dog, who told him to drag, not lift, or he would bugger his back.
“Don’t touch your face, these cadavers are plastered in filth, and work on your knees, it stops your legs sinking in and freezing.”
Sliding about on his knees, Lawrence sank into soft bellies, slid off the hard balls of skulls, winced at sharp edges that must be teeth. Mostly he worked by feel. Many of the shapes were small, more like dogs. These were children. When he accidentally pulled their clothes off and then sought to preserve their modesty, Yip-Dog yelled at him to stop bloody wasting time, the dead don’t blush. Christ what a place, Lawrence thought. I’m going to see more kids’ genitalia in one shift than Gnevik did in his
entire life.
Apart from shouting at Lawrence to do this or that, they worked without speaking, six of them, in a hold about the size of a big bedroom. Clearing the area around the ladder was the toughest part, as the cadavers were snarled like kelp about a propeller. They had to be loosened through a combination of untangling limbs and brute force. Many had gashed hands and torn fingernails. These ones must have fought like desperate animals in their last moments. Others lay in peaceful heaps, confident of welcome at the gates of the Beyond.
The value heaped pallet after pallet. The level of cadavers gradually fell. Lawrence’s knees registered hard domes, biting edges and now and then a large mound that could only be the abdomen of a pregnant doe. His hands were also coming across bags, suitcases and rifles. Undoubtedly in all these robes and jackets there must be pistols. Lawrence merely registered the point without being tempted. This was a mature prison camp, with a population long in the habit of docile complicity. If others made no move to arm themselves, there was definitely a good reason for it.
He uncovered a small bundle that on exploration contained a baby. He carried it to the pallet and laid it there, to the jeers of Yip-Dog and the others.
“You’ll be howling like a baby next,” Yip-Dog said. “And don’t touch any of the guns or bags.”
“Not long now, lads, good work.” Tricky Fingers leaned over the coaming of the hold, squinting into the shadows.
Lawrence began to tire. He had a physique like a wrestler’s from the months at Chatham beating gravel roads with a thirty-pound timber pile. Yet a deep ache of weariness dulled his arms and legs and down his back. When he tried to stand up straight, he fell over. Finally, he had to admit to Yip-Dog that he was all done in.
“You work like a horse, I’m impressed. On my first shift, they had to carry me out after an hour. It’s the shock, you’re quickly over it though. Now get on deck and clean up…” He pointed to the steel ladder up to the hatch. “We’ll finish off. I’ll make sure Ugly Toes puts in a good report about you.”
“Thanks, Yip-Dog.”
Lawrence had to clutch his way up the ladder one rung at a time and crawl out flat onto the deck, where he lay soaking up the sun. Someone dragged him to his feet. It was Ugly Toes. He told him to stop lazing about—get down to the sea and wash. As he was pulling his boots on afterwards, someone gripped his shoulder. It was Tricky Fingers. He pulled Lawrence’s arm out and pushed the sleeve back, to reveal the meaty, swelling muscles of the forearm. His knuckle stroked up and down the smooth, white skin.
“You’ve got beautiful hide. You really are a very lovely young man. Tell me, in the outside world, did you prefer men, or women?”
“Women, Tricky Fingers. Only the ladies.”
“It’s only men here.” He patted Lawrence’s forearm. “So get used to it. Life is hard enough without being uptight. By the way, have you a moniker yet?”
“I’ve been called Big Blondie, Mighty Whitey and Big Silver so far.”
“How about Perfect Princess?”
The radiance of thinly-restrained fury indicated this was not a good suggestion.
“Wee Larry will do,” Lawrence said. That was his nick-name as a low-ranking trooper in General Wardian.
“Perhaps.” Tricky Fingers changed his tone. “Now come with me. I will show you how this operation works.”
With an arm around a wary Lawrence, he ushered him forward up the deck.
“What do you think is going on here? What is the operation?”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Lawrence said.
The dreadful, cattle-like moan of the previous night had not been some echo of distant breakers, that was clear enough.
Tricky Fingers beckoned him over to four steel hand-wheels just aft of the main mast. They were each about as big around as a dinner plate, arranged in a square. The axles passed through the deck to perform some duty in the hull of the barge.
“These wheels are connected to valves on the bottom of the hull. Last night the barge came in on the rising tide. The crew opened these valves and buggered off down the floating pier, leaving the barge to flood. Inside, it’s pitch-dark as the freezing water creeps up the load until the sea closes over the deck and water cascades down through gaps between the hatch covers. The load will feel the bump as the keel settles on the bottom. It will be aware of what is happening. It will know death is next.” He scowled, reflective. “Not much different from this place, really. Just faster. Minutes instead of decades.”
Lawrence turned a putty pallor, his eyelids trembling. Gripping his mind now was the dreadful truth: for certain, he was here forever. This was a callous pit of evil from which no escape could be tolerated. Death in pitch darkness, face rammed against steel plate, lips pouting to suck the last inch of air before it escaped to freedom and life above, then the wait, lungs burning... What happened in those last minutes? The snarled limbs and torn fingernails answered that question—Nature took its course.
Disaster being what it is, one seeks palliatives. Lawrence breathed deeply. Now he knew the worst. From here, it had to be upwards, getting established as a respected member of the gang.
“There is something I have to tell you,” Tricky Fingers said. “Unloading is not the worst part of the process. You’ve had a fairly gentle introduction, believe it or not. It’ll probably be something less savoury this afternoon.”
Chapter 4
Despite all the direct experiences of your career, none will have even remotely prepared you for the extreme economic logic I have pioneered in my Value System. After now having experienced Goods Inwards of the Value System, Lawrence was struggling to grasp what in God’s name could have provoked such extreme economic logic. It was hard to accept The Captain’s time as a top killer alone could have spawned it.
Most glory troopers never killed so much as a rat in their entire twenty-year service—and never achieved much rank either. Seventeen-year-old Lawrence observed that only one type of trooper got rank fast, the top killer. No one—that is, no one except the most despicable pen-pushing sycophants—reached senior rank who had not served time in the ‘hard’ units. It was all a matter of choices.
After training, Probationary Basic ‘Wee Larry’ Aldingford served in a hygiene unit on a sovereign land in the Thames Valley. The duty of a hygiene unit was the enforcement of Frite (Full Rights of Territorial Exclusion), one of the two fundamental principles of sovereign privacy (the other being Naclaski). The unit patrolled the frontier searching for smugglers and nests of infestation. The Great West Drain ran within a mile of the frontier so boredom was not a problem. Light entertainment gave relief between shoot-outs with smugglers and rounding up infestations for discharge to the public drains.
There was an old guy who sneaked through a culvert under the local frontier to steal milk from grazing cattle. Lawrence’s section leader, a sarcastic tough called Kalchelik, sent off a couple of basics to fetch Long Tall Sally. She turned out to be a monster rifle with a bipod stand and telescopic sight. She fired a 20mm explosive round about the size of a man’s thumb. Kalchelik took aim at the old git hobbling off with his tin of warm milk.... Long Tall Sally fired with a bang like a sledgehammer whacking a barn door. The old man burst. Everything above the waist vanished in a red cloud of tatters. When the unit went down to look, they found two legs and part of a torso issuing raw guts surrounded by an area the size of a squash court plastered in blood, lumps of flesh and splinters of bone. Someone found the head in a ditch and retrieved it dangling by the white beard with six inches of spinal column drooping from the ragged stump of the neck. At the sight of it, Lawrence doubled over and puked up. Whereupon, Kalchelik kicked him in the arse and told him not to be such a soggy-hearted woosy—this was a hygiene unit, for fuck’s sake.
“You OK, Zeta729?” Tricky Fingers said. “You’re very quiet.”
Lawrence found himself sitting with a piece of rye bread poised in front of his mouth. He took a bite and chewed
without relish.
“I’ve plenty to be quiet about.” All through lunch, Lawrence had been sieving his memory for any clue as to why he had been singled out at Chatham camp for doom in extreme economic logic. He was absolutely certain he had never met The Captain, nor did he recognise any of the ultramarine guards or the population of value. Yet, he was convinced there was something personal about it.
“Be happy,” Tricky Fingers said.
This brought a round of snorts from Yip-Dog, Ugly Toes and Spiderman. Lawrence had been keeping half an eye on Spiderman, while they ate a full lunch of vegetable soup, rye bread and French fries washed down with a surprisingly good tea made from dandelions. Spiderman sat with his dark eyes all inward, grinding and mashing over some unknown outrage. Tricky Fingers continued:
“It could be worse. Think of all the poor saps going deaf beating iron plates, or getting blinded in the acid plants, or coughing their lungs up sorting cotton. Then there’s the surplus flow, starving to death on the public drains. Our food is good. The work is varied.”
The truly alarming thing was that he actually sounded serious.
Lawrence glanced up to find Spiderman eyeing him, now with a surprising kindliness, such a change as if the sun had come out.
“I know how you feel, it’ll pass,” Spiderman said.
Lawrence shook his head.
“It never will.”
Tricky Fingers gave him an impatient look.
“Then you won’t last.”
Lawrence tasted bitter realities. He had no idea where this place was. He had no idea what lay around it. Everyone told him escape was impossible. He fidgeted with the metal tag.
“Let’s agree our new arrival’s moniker,” Tricky Fingers said. “He wants to be called Wee Larry.”
This of course, absolutely guaranteed his moniker was not going to be Wee Larry. Ugly Toes suggested ‘Machine’, as Lawrence worked so hard. Tricky Fingers scratched his throat, thinking.
Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2 Page 3