Justice

By Graham Pryor

Jonny is on a mission to punish careless political leaders. He is also a scientific researcher, having volunteered to be the subject of a daring cryonics trial that aims to push the bounds of human existence. Jonny has a habit too, he’s just a little over fond of the occasional opiate or cannabinoid. It makes life that tiny bit more complicated for a young man on a moral crusade, a journey in which ups and downs become one and the same and what goes around always seems to come around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9780244618599

Graham Pryor

Graham Pryor studied American Studies and English at the University of Hull. Subsequently, he pursued a career in information management, leaving his childhood home in Hythe, Kent, for the north-east of Scotland, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. Cerberus is his fifteenth novel and, he says, his favourite.

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Justice

Justice

Graham Pryor

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2017 by Graham Pryor

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First printing: 2017

ISBN 978-0-244-01584-8

Contents

1 – A RANT AND A RESOLUTION

2 - SUBMARINE

3 – BELOW 180

4 – AFFECTIONS AND APPETITES

5 – ASPECTS OF GARTH

6 – OUT WITH THE OLD

7 – MELTING POT

8 - DIALECTICS

9 - ZUGZWANG

10 – REVISIONIST

11 – PROUD NATIONS

12 – SUPREME RULER

13 – THE ESSENTIAL POLITICIAN

14 – LAZARUS

Author’s Note

1 – A RANT AND A RESOLUTION

Written on my iPad, Christmas Eve 2017

It is one of those family anecdotes, the sort that gets trotted out on particular birthdays, or when a visitor or (much worse!) a new girl or boyfriend is subjected to the dreaded photograph album, or when memories are jogged over too convivial a festive get together. Whatever the occasion that inspires this power of awkward recall, it is a commonplace that just one such of those sketches can serve to define the dearly departed: in this case the story that Grandfather wept when Tony Blair finally demitted office as Prime Minister on 27th June 2007.

But unless the teller did not finish this particular story, or if the clamour of conviviality drowned your hearing, let me explain: it was not sorrow but rage that drove the head of our family to tears. When the weasely little man concluded his final session of Prime Minister’s Questions with And that is that – the end, it was of course his prerogative to finish the elected term of office he had negotiated with his lacklustre chum. But outside the snug little chamber of the House of Commons it was certainly not the end for the millions whose world he had brought to the brink of devastation.

It was that, the way in which he could put everything down and walk away, leaving behind the wreckage of Iraq and its much larger repercussions in the region, as if it had been a game he had tired of, a mess for someone else to clear away now that he had finished. It was that which drove my grandfather to tears, the image of Teflon Tony strutting away unapprehended, exercising the idemnity of individual politicians under the rules of a parliamentary democracy that protects them from the natural reckoning of responsibility.

It was the same with Blair’s partner in infamy across the Atlantic. George W Bush, at the end of his term of office, able just to walk away. Times up, off we go, whatever we’ve done over the past eight years, no matter. Shock and awe – great slogan wasn’t it, better than anything written for Marvel comics. But now it’s game over, time to move aside, there are other players waiting. As he said to his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, in 1999, As a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. Nor, it seems, be required to account for them.

We saw it again last year, in 2016, (thank God Grandfather was no longer with us). That blowhard Cameron, whatever the outcome of his foolish referendum, vowing to stay on as Prime Minister, promising to negotiate Britain’s exit from the EU if the vote went that way. How long did it take him to change his mind? It was the next day, yes no later than the next day, 24th June 2016! Just watch him if you can, it’s all online, how he unnecessarily forces a referendum on the country in a risky delegation of power to the people, the result of which triggers massive social unrest and economic uncertainty, and then he disappears. A bit like a teenage arsonist, some might say, gone to ground. Not that we’d have had him in our gang: he wouldn’t have had the balls to put a lighted distress flare in the pillar box at the end of our street. We weren’t the sort of hoodies he’d have wanted to hug you can be damned sure.

Anyway, that’s what was bugging him, by all accounts – my grandfather, I mean. The way in which elected politicians seem to be impervious to the normal rules of accountability. It still goes on and it irks me too. Seriously.

So I decided to do something about it. Time to kick ass.

2 - SUBMARINE

The submarine under my command is a sleek fifty metre Avenger class with a polymeric skin, surface search and navigation radar, active-passive attack sonar, and long-range passive sonar. Built in 2127 and still fresh in the water it is cold fusion powered, one of the first, driving a 1280-kW 880-V generator that provides power directly to the two 3000-BHP electric motors connected to each propeller. With respect to armaments, it has four torpedo tubes in the bow and two short tubes for antisubmarine defence in the stern. On the fore deck is a plasma gun that can be fired remotely when the ship is underwater. Critical in these altered environmental times is the rigid ice breaker that graces the bow, a saw-toothed arc of engineered steel that produces a halo of white spray when we are under power at the surface.

I have a crew of one: Dolores, a Muskdyne 2000 quantum computer system who not only runs the ship but effectively is the ship, for her presence is everywhere. She’s in my ear at the moment, telling me we are 100 nautical miles from our target. She’ll give me a countdown update now every ten miles. She is also offering breakfast in the galley but I need to be alert and hunger in my gut will feed the hunger in my soul. I’ll stick to the amphetamines for now.

On approach there will be the usual hazards, nomadic radio mines and autonomous thwarts on ceaseless patrol, but at this latitude I am more concerned to avoid the submerged walls of ice that rear from the depths, courtesy of the long Trump Winter.

If you’re reading this on a functioning memory bead I guess you don’t need me to explain all of that, as you’ll have received your education in preglacial history some time in the early to mid-twenty-second century, but if you are a hapless denizen of our further future I need to tell you that we did indeed suffer a nuclear winter lasting for the best part of a century, from Christmas 2017, when the USA lost patience with North Korea (or was it the other way around?) after the despotic juvenile Kim Jong Un sent an ICBM across the Pacific on a poisonous, festive how-do-you-do to Los Angeles. Not known for his patience, the retaliatory tit-for-tat that President Trump unleashed took out the entire Korean peninsula, central China from Shandong province up as far as Liaoning, and the Russian city of Vladivostok. Fortunately his pal in Moscow, the deadpan Putin, was not roused to respond with a nuclear strike, being preoccupied with a face-down on his western border with a very jittery NATO. However, as I was to learn from my friend Garth, the Chinese, already provoked to steaming levels of ire by Trump’s trade war and the installation of a THAAD defence system in South Korea, loosed a spray of thermonuclear invective at the USA’s northern states. The world went dark before anyone one else piled in and with Trump gone (assassinated whilst on a Hogmanay trip to his controversial Scottish golf course) there was no-one back home in Washington with the will to cause more mayhem.

But I forget myself; these names won’t mean anything much to you folk in the future. They’re very much forgotten already, just a little over a century since they were features on the political landscape. Blair, Cameron, Trump and all the rest – long gone to dust for all their bluster, although like Ishmael I am here to tell the tale.

Anyway, so that’s when the mini ice age began, and boy did it come quickly. After years of global warming, when we had watched and squabbled as the polar ice broke up, the floes and icebergs that had been sent scuttling around the upper and lower latitudes now presented climatologists with a bizarre game of join-up-the-dots. First came their proliferation in the aftermath of intense heat, the remains of the northern ice cap set adrift and Antarctica broken into pieces, spewed across the southern seas. Then, with the sun excluded from our skies and the atmosphere’s warming gases substantially depleted by the searing heat of nuclear fission, the cold winds that swept around the planet, sucked into and out of the abysmal crater that once was Korea, found a handhold in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. From the top and bottom of the globe those dispersed islands of ice became the nuclei for fresh glaciation, their expanding white masses merging and tightening their hold across the seas until everything above latitude 40o in the north and below -30o in the south was made a crisp blank page for history to be written upon anew. How it began to be writ is itself an equally ignoble tale.

If the dinosaurs had been possessed of technology they may be here today; for some say they were wiped out by an event with features similar to those of a nuclear winter, a dust cloud pursuant to the catastrophic arrival of a giant asteroid, which packed a punch quite equal to the devices flung between the eastern and western nations during their 2017 Christmas ding-dong. But humankind did have the technology that, eventually, would prevail, and reversal of the big twenty-first century freeze has been on an increasingly positive curve for five years now. Not that the world has been returned to the way it was before that fateful exchange of festive posts.

Perhaps I can explain more about the process later on if I – hah! – have an idle moment, but Dolores tells me we are twenty miles from target and I need to prepare. Suffice it to say that whilst the freeze is in accelerating retreat now that the Gulf Stream has finally been restarted, great slabs of ice the size of the Isle of Wight are still to be found lurking in our oceans, even at mid latitudes, many fathoms deep, tilted and fractured and pretty damned invisible even to the smartest sonar.

You’re probably wondering too just how it is I remember all those events from over one hundred years ago, as a personal recollection, as if I was there at the time. Seems implausible? Well, that is another story, a tale of extreme irony when you consider my survival of the ice age was all down to a providential engagement with freezing. Cryogenics actually, but more of that in due course.

We have stopped at the entrance to the narrow corridor of water on which sits Klaipėda, the former Lithuanian city, now the major port of the Litva oblast, western Russia. I have an appointment with the governor, although he is unaware of that impending assignation. The narrow channel between the mainland and the slender Curonian Spit is ice free but there will be other, man-made, hazards.

I am surprised on that count that Dolores has taken us to the surface, but I was warned to expect surprises from a quantum machine. Having its bit values – or should I say qubit values? –expressed as both 0 and 1 simultaneously, in an arrangement called entanglement, was to my mind always full of the potential for some kind of schizophrenic meltdown. Yet the guys from Aarhus University, the supertechs who designed her, assured me that my concerns were taking Einstein’s description of entanglement as spooky action a little too literally. Dolores was tight, they said, their term for her being impenetrable against a loss of qubit ambiguity. They staked their lives on it, not just their reputations.

Well, this is a surprise. Dolores informs me that the channel is clear. She’s still buzzing the dockside buildings and has found a laser installation, but that can be neutralized. So we move on, somewhat amazed and on high alert, at a quiet six knots.

Norbert Bazalgette, the recently installed governor of Litva, is an Englishman with (until recently) an exemplary career as Member of Parliament for Sector 7, the sunken lands in the south-east, as well as being the Executive’s sometime Man in Moscow. When he turned renegade the English government responded to his defection with public outpourings of vilification, his pension was frozen and his short-lived knighthood rescinded. But no action was taken that formed an appropriate response to what he had done, not even after a barrage of contumely from the media whose posturing outrage never seemed enough to me.

As a scam his strategy had been quite simple, although barely original. For the million or so souls living along the estuaries and backwaters of England’s sunken south-east the outcome had been truly punishing. Starved of cash, the national government in York had effectively washed their hands free of the plight of these boat people, as they termed them, turning instead, through Norbert, to the offices of the International Reconstruction Company, IRCOM, a state-sponsored consortium owned by Russian bankers with the financial might to assemble a vast global engineering resource. Now don’t get me wrong, despite the shadow of the Kremlin IRCOM was a legit operation, principally involved in directing large and expensive civil technology projects designed to return some aspect of normality to the devastated lands above and below the equatorial belt. Draining of flooded lowlands, the construction of new roads, even the conservation of historical and artistic artefacts that had survived the freeze – that kind of thing, big