Chronicles of Isambard Smith 05 - End of Empires (8 page)

She stood up, adjusting her utility waistcoat. As usual, she wore a collarless shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and trousers with pockets on the thighs. Today, however, she had accessorised with a red scarf. She tugged a flat cap out of her waistband and jammed it onto her head. ‘What do you think of this?’ she asked. ‘Is this how dangerous anarchists look?’

‘Very good, I think.’ Carveth looked like a sulky, disreputable technician about to down tools and start an argument, which struck him as a clever disguise until he remembered that that was exactly what she was. ‘Where’s Suruk?’

‘Getting ready for meeting the anarchists. I think he’s expecting to have to impress them by creating anarchy. I’m sure they’ll love him: he can barely wash his mandibles without going mental. Have you seen the way he wrings out a face flannel? It’s sinister.’ She sighed. ‘I wish we had someone to back us up. I could do with having Rick Dreckitt behind me. Actually, in front would be better.’ She looked rather wistful, no doubt contemplating her romance with him. ‘It was like
Brief Encounter
with us. Except there was more than one encounter. And it wasn’t all that brief, actually.’

Smith reflected that Carveth had a point. Dreckitt had carved a living as an android bounty hunter before becoming part of the Service: no doubt he had experience of dealing with desperate men. And, in the form of Carveth, desperate women.

That was the problem with working for the secret service: you never quite knew what was going on. In fact, the Service was so secretive that it was doubtful whether any of its members were entirely sure. It had been months since Smith had seen the master spy, W, or even Major Wainscott, head of the Service’s military operations. Admittedly, Wainscott could usually be detected by the trail of devastation, but even that had gone quiet. Perhaps he had been captured by the enemy, or returned by his own side to the Sunnyvale Home for the Bewildered.

The door opened and Suruk entered from the hold. He was not exactly sweating, but he had a slightly ruffled look and his eyes were more bloodshot than usual. ‘Greetings, humans!’ he said, advancing to the teapot. ‘The sun rises on Ravnavar and I thirst for honourable battle. What are the chances of getting a decent fight out of these people tonight?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Smith replied. ‘I think it’s best to work quietly.’

The M’Lak nodded. ‘Fear not. I shall strike from the shadows.’ He sipped his tea. ‘I must say, I find this politics business rather complex.’

‘Really? Well,’ Smith began, ‘it’s quite simple, really. You have the two main parties, who represent the interests of the working people and business respectively. Then you have smaller parties that believe in, er, other stuff. They’re usually crackpots. Personally, I’m a floating voter.’

‘It is only appropriate. You live on a spaceship.’ Suruk sighed. ‘Personally, Mazuran, I see virtue in both left and right. It is only right that there should be social justice for all citizens, but I am also in favour of the interests of the nation. Yet I must make a choice. Why not just make one big party that is both national and socialist?’

‘Perhaps you should just vote Liberal.’

Carveth had given up eating the Rightos and was rooting about in the box. ‘Don’t you lot have political parties, then? How do you know who’s ahead in the polls?’

Suruk frowned. ‘I would look at the top of the pole and see whose head it is. The fact is, we do not have the same problems as you, since humans are somewhat punier. We have no religion, no great desire for property, and luxury is shameful for warriors, so there is little reason for us to fight among ourselves except where there is a formal war being organised. Instead, we M’Lak share a common policy for foreign affairs, entertainment and defence.’

‘Meaning that you all get together and fight someone else.’

‘Exactly. On which subject,’ he added, ‘we have some time before this gathering tonight. Let us ready our spirits with Scrabble!’

Somewhere out there, Isambard Smith thought, there are billions of lemming men getting ready to kill us all. While the Ghast Empire shoots us in the gut, the Greater Galactic Happiness and Friendship Collective will take an axe to our necks. And somehow, this building is linked to it all.

It wasn’t much of a place. Many of the public buildings of Ravnavar were as grand and stately as the empire that had created them, but the old Picture House looked as if it had been put up by frontiersmen who didn’t plan on staying long. There was a strange mixture of haunted house and Wild West saloon in the design, together with a suggestion of the sort of top hat favoured by men who enjoyed tying maidens to railway tracks.

‘This is it,’ Smith said. He stood by the car as the others emerged. In the streets around them, the docks creaked and banged. Cranes stood against the darkening sky like gallows. ‘I’ll do the talking,’ he said.

Smith locked the car and strode to the doors. He opened them for Carveth and Rhianna, and walked in. Suruk took the rear. The alien was unarmed except for four large knives. Smith carried his Civiliser under his jacket.

The foyer was dim, red and stale-smelling. On the far side of the room, a small man watched them from behind thick spectacles. ‘Help you?’ he asked, folding a newspaper away.

Smith approached. ‘Four for Popular Fist, please.’

The man squinted at them. ‘You?’

‘Yes, us. And I’ll have a copy of your manifesto, my good man. Chop chop.’

Very slowly and deliberately, he looked them over: Smith, in his long coat and red jacket, Suruk, impassive and poised, Rhianna, casually elegant in her hired dress, and Carveth, who was looking for a food counter. ‘What’s the password?’

‘One moment,’ Smith replied.

He ushered Suruk and Rhianna back. ‘Nobody told me there would be a password!’ he hissed.

‘The crimes of our enemies shall be washed away in a crimson torrent of blood!’ Suruk said.

‘Bit long for a password, isn’t it?’

‘Password, Mazuran?’

‘Never mind.’ He turned to Rhianna. ‘Look, Rhianna. Is there any chance you could, you know –’

‘Read his mind?’

‘Exactly. That’s just what I was thinking.’

‘I don’t know how to do that, Isambard.’

Smith glanced back over his shoulder, to give the man behind the counter a reassuring smile, and saw Carveth talking to him. ‘Have you got any popcorn?’ she asked.

‘Welcome, friend,’ he replied, gesturing to the entrance on the far side of the hall.

‘No, really –’ Carveth protested, but by then Smith was pushing her towards the door.

Smith took the lead. He was suddenly in a narrow, dark corridor. It smelled of sawdust and old carpet.

They took seats at the back. A thin man with a goatee beard stood on the stage, haranguing about a dozen people dotted around the hall.

‘What good has the Leighton Wakazashi corporation ever done?’ the speaker demanded. ‘Why does our government trust those crooks, whose only solution to any problem at all is to try to get a bunch of man-eating space monsters through quarantine?’ His voice sank low. ‘I don’t know who’s worse. You don’t see Procturan Rippers screwing each other over for a god-damn percentage. Or wearing those suits with shoulder pads. Or shouting into mobile phones! Do you? Don’t believe it when they tell you that greed is good, or that lunch is for wimps! Leighton Wakazashi claims that wealth trickles down onto the poor. Well, something does, and it’s yellow alright, but it sure as hell isn’t gold!’

Cheering broke out among the listeners. Actually, Smith thought, the fellow had a point. Smith had crossed paths with the corporation’s executives on several occasions, and had been left with a very unsavoury feeling.

‘But that’s enough from me,’ the speaker said. ‘Now for some real fire. Friends, I give you our lady of rebellion, the scholar of the barricades, the woman who turns a moment into a movement: Miss Julia Chigley!’

Onto the stage strode a pale, dark-haired young woman in a boiler suit with a red sash. She stood before the microphone and glared out at the audience for a moment, as if challenging them to throw her out. Then she made a fierce gesture with her fist. ‘Up the people! Up the front!’

Blimey, thought Smith.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ she began, in a surprisingly genteel voice, ‘we are at war. Not just with the Ghasts, not just with the Yull, but with corruption. With insidious forces within the Space Empire that gnaw at its very bowels.’

Smith glanced to his right. Rhianna was watching with great interest. Carveth had started to fidget and swing her legs. Suruk was nowhere to be seen. That was worrying in itself, but there was no time to find him now.

‘I speak of a conspiracy, aimed not only at the loyal citizens of Ravnavar – man, alien and robot alike – but at
you.
A conspiracy that is alive and well.’ She paused and looked into the audience. Given the bad lighting, they must have seemed like blurs in the darkness, but Smith could not lose the feeling that she was looking at him. It reminded him of the last speech he had sat through from end to end, at Midwich Grammar Sports Day about thirty years before.

‘Our demands are incendiary – to those in power, pure dynamite.’ Miss Chigley raised her hand, closing her fingers as she numbered the points. ‘One: free bus passes for our brothers in struggle, the under-fives. Two: the immediate banning of televised talent contests. Three: better tea rations for our boys at the front and the workers who support them. Four: the recognition of moral fibre as a chemical compound. These are our demands, Ravnavar – do you have the strength to meet them?’

In the moderate uproar that followed, Smith leaned over to Rhianna. ‘It all sounds rather more, well, reasonable than we’d expected, don’t you think?’

Rhianna opened her hands. ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’

‘We are the greatest empire in space,’ Miss Chigley resumed, ‘but not when we forget our moral fibre. Vigilance is all! In our struggle for justice, we must purge our very language of subversive jargon foreign to the cause. For what is a panini but a cheese toastie with added bourgeois sentimentality? What is a cup-cake but a fairy cake that has appropriated too much icing?’

Well, Smith thought, maybe she was a bit cranky.

The door burst open. Light shot in, and a long shadow fell across the stage.

The first speaker ran for the exit, reached the door, and flew back as if hit by a battering ram. He crashed against the side of the stage and flopped half across it, dead.

A figure stalked into the hall. It was a humanoid robot, dressed like a dandy: red tailcoat, long cuffs, a walking cane in one gloved hand. The machine had one camera-eye – the other was painted onto the smooth metal of its face – and a moustache made from ornate clock hands. On top of its head sat what looked like a chimney-shaped top hat, and was in fact a small chimney.

Policemen ran forward behind it, their blue uniforms like water poured into the room, but it was the robot that Smith looked at, and recognised. It was the dandy from the bank, the one who had gunned down the robber. Mark Twelve had called him the Ringleader.

The police rushed in. Smith thought of his gun, but did not reach for it.

The Ringleader shook his head sadly. ‘What a scene. What a scene! The sight of such uproarious treachery, here in our fair city…’ He waved a hand airily. ‘It saddens my patriotic soul. Officers, you know what to do. Knock ’em down and lock ’em up!’

* * *

‘You know what the problem with this place is?’ the Ringleader inquired through the bars.

Smith looked around the cell. The bench was occupied by Carveth and Rhianna, and so it was his turn to stand up. Sitting on the floor was not a pleasant alternative. In the background, he could hear the rumble of police work, as the officers put money in the drinks machine and filled out forms. It was swelteringly hot.

‘Well,’ Smith replied, ‘It’s got you in it.’

The robot paused. He leaned in, close to the bars, and with a tiny mechanical whine, the tips of his moustache rose until they pointed to ten to two. ‘You’ve got a tongue on you, for now. Tell me something. What do you know of the great gangs of Ravnavar, my loquacious friend? The Jackhammers, the Two-Percenters, the Blueberries? Do you know what unites those deadly warriors?’

‘They’ve all got silly names?’

‘They fell to mine own hand.’ The Ringleader paused, then let out a hard, metallic laugh. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got some fire to you. Perhaps, when this city is mine, you will sit beside me. You, though, and you,’ he added, pointing to Carveth and Rhianna, ‘I discard. You are tepid.’ He waved a hand eloquently, like an elderly royal greeting peasants.

‘I’ve got a friend who’d like to meet you,’ Smith said. ‘You’d inspire him.’

‘To glory?’

‘To violence. His name is Suruk.’

‘A Morlock ape. I don’t dally with savages.’

‘He could turn you to scrap.’

‘Then perhaps he will present himself.’ The Ringleader gestured grandly at the roof. ‘Great men are not born: they are forged. On the streets, in the heat of battle, or, like myself, in a two-part stainless steel mould. Such men deserve the lion’s share.’

‘Did you learn that being a ringmaster?’ Smith inquired. ‘When you were learning how to dress like a clown?’

The Ringleader was silent for a moment. ‘I would… rend you limb from limb, shred you like gerbil bedding. But I will leave you here, with your view. So that when real warriors take over Ravnavar, when we take the lion’s share, you can watch it all burn. Farewell.’

He turned. Rhianna said, ‘Hey.’

The Ringleader paused and looked round. ‘You’ve got something to say to me?’

‘Yes, actually, I have.’ Rhianna stood up, lifting her skirts slightly, and strode to the bars. ‘Do they do vegan food here?’

The Ringleader turned and walked away.

‘Well,’ Rhianna demanded, turning, ‘What do we do?’

‘I don’t know.’ Carveth looked even smaller than usual: police detention seemed to be shrinking her. ‘But we’ve got to work fast. We’re stuck in jail, this robot bloke is planning some sort of coup, and I have to get back and feed my hamster.’