Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 1: Death by Decent Society: Sovereigns of the Collapse, #1

By Malcolm J Wardlaw

Since the financial Armageddon, it's been guns, gold and lots of slaves.

 

It is 2106. Seventy years have passed since our times collapsed into the mother of all depressions; strangely permanent, brutally profound. No one cares about over-population, mass extinctions or climate change, because they don't have to. The world is a post-apocalyptic paradise—for a few.

 

One of those 'few' is Donald Aldingford, a star barrister much in demand by high society. He suffers the catastrophe of being shot down and jailed for trespassing into private airspace. And while in prison, he picks up alarming rumours about his younger brother Lawrence, who disappeared ten years earlier, aged seventeen.

 

Despite the risk of becoming 'disappeared' himself, Donald takes a deeper interest in the world around him. As he closes on the mystery of his long-lost brother, he pierces the last, most dangerous veil of a rotten society.

 

Sovereigns of the Collapse is a gritty dystopian saga about the world we should have seen coming. It contains adult themes and is not recommended for the under-16s.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Malcolm J Wardlaw
• Release date: Apr 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201532246

Book preview

Chapter 1

[Broadstairs Garrison, the Lands of Dasti-Jones, Kent, England,

5th October 2106]

The cell door banged shut behind Prisoner Aldingford.

Grit shaken from the ceiling settled on his shoulders. Bolts rapped home in short order one-two-three, top, middle and bottom. Hobnailed boots crackled back to the languor of the guard room.

Swaying with exhaustion and shock, Donald Aldingford absorbed his new reality. The prison cell was only a bit wider than the corridor outside. The single block of wood that formed the bunk took up most of the distance from the door to the far wall, with a thoughtful bit extra for the latrine bucket, which had been even more thoughtfully fitted with a gleaming steel lid. The walls were of white-washed brick. There was no window, just a tiny ventilation grill over the door. The ceiling was of rough-finished planks, through which leaked creaks and thuds from the offices above.

It was the ache of cold in his left foot that finally prompted him to sit on the bunk, pulling off his one remaining shoe from the other foot before stretching out his legs with a long groan—more of pain than despair. He felt as if he had been thrown off a bull and trampled. The most painful wound was a laceration in the top of his right thigh, barely a hand’s width from his groin. The flesh had been sliced open by a splinter from an anti-aircraft shell. Blood from the wound had soaked the front of his trousers during the long walk from the site of the crash. However, it was a gash over his right eye that most concerned him. He touched it, feeling the edges and the scabs of dried blood. The skull behind the wound throbbed. He wondered if his skull was cracked. Finding the wooden pillow an unsympathetic rest for a throbbing head, he sat up, pulled off his jacket and rolled it into a ball to make a pillow. Now he lay amid petrol fumes wafting up from the folds of oily silk and wool.

He supposed he should consider himself lucky. A few inches the other way and the shell splinter would have left him without manhood. A harder bang on the head would have killed him. Of the eight people who had taken off that afternoon, only two were still alive. The other, a young woman, had left the crash site slung over a trooper’s saddle, still out cold with her backside bare to the world. Perhaps she was dead after all.

Had he had been knocked out during the crash or not? He recalled uncomprehending shock on seeing an oak tree of prodigious dimensions directly ahead of the flying boat and he recalled dangling upside down from his left foot in a shower of what he at first thought was frigid water. Between the two memories there was a blank. A blank five seconds? A blank five minutes? No, it could not have been five minutes. Just after his return to the world, the frigid water splashed in his eyes and stung like onions. It was petrol, not water. He shuddered as he relived that searing shaft of terror on realising he was getting doused with petrol at the dead centre of an enormous plane wreck. That could not have been five minutes after the crash. The petrol was only beginning to seep down through the wreckage from the fuel tanks in the upper wing. The blank must have been mere seconds.

He could remember little of his escape from beneath tons of flying boat piled against the oak tree. A white blaze of panic in his mind, wrenching his foot from the trapped shoe and fighting like a desperate animal burrowing and flattening himself with splintered ends of broken aircraft scoring down his back like the claws of a tiger, a gasping relief of deliverance to see the wide open sky above and inhale cool, clean air…

And now he was in some big-shot landowner’s jail. To get back to life would require the payment of a ransom. How big a ransom? Donald was not a big-shot, he was but a humble barrister travelling under the instructions of a client. It would not be a big-shot’s ransom then, but even a humble barrister’s ransom could amount to—what? Six months’ income? There was no way in hell Donald’s precarious finances could survive that kind of gouging. No chance. Zero.

If Donald was ever to see his daughters again, his client would have to pay the ransom. The essential question preying on his mind was this: would the client His Decency Tom Krossington bother? As head of the richest clan on the Island of Britain, His Decency unquestionably had the wealth to do so. But did he value Donald Aldingford that much?

As Donald stared up at the rough planks of the ceiling, he struggled for optimism. The words of his grandfather Sir Bartleigh Aldingford came to mind. Sir Bartleigh had dropped dead from a heart attack when Donald was six years old, despite which his pithy sayings had lingered in memory. There was one in particular:

The high times come from the dark times.

Sir Bartleigh was actually referring to the rise of the sovereign caste after the worst calamity ever to befall humanity; the Glorious Resolution of 2038-40. For Donald, lying in a jail cell in the depths of his own ‘glorious resolution’, the words brought a surge of inspiration verging on euphoria.

At least for a few moments…

Chapter 2

The day on which Donald fell out of the sky into captivity began normally. He stepped from his limousine just after ten o’clock and entered his chambers, climbing through the storeys to his office on the top floor. It was a corner office with a view down a ravine-like street to the River Thames. Like any barrister, his workload swung between idleness and panic-stations. Just at this time, he was enjoying a little idleness.

Ten minutes after settling into his office, the peace ended. A runner panted up the stairs bearing a message. Donald signed for it and waited until he was alone again, whereupon he ripped off the wax seal to extract a sheet of tracing paper smaller than a man’s palm. It had been tightly folded to fit inside the pouch of a carrier pigeon. It was hand-scripted by Tom Krossington, ruler of the sovereign Lands of Krossington and reputed to be the wealthiest landowner on the Island of Britain. It read:

Donald, please take the afternoon plane from Krossington Quay at 2 pm. I apologise for this abrupt summons and trust that other commitments do not preclude our meeting, [signed] TK.

For at least a minute, Donald stared at the turquoise curls of ink, dumbfounded. There was nothing TK could tell him in the Lands of Krossington that could not be said here in London. If the hand of TK was reaching out to drag Donald into the gloom of sovereign privacy, then something was going to happen there that could not be done here in the Central Enclave of London. Something unpleasant. Something from which he might not return.

People did vanish. Within seconds, half a dozen names poured across his mind, the names of people no longer seen at his sports club, inn of court, or on the party round. A man in Donald’s club called Halthwaite had dropped from sight about three years ago (or was it four?). He was a civil engineer by profession. Some said he had suffered a stroke and was bed-ridden. Others that he was killed in an accident on a sovereign land. There had been no funeral. Beyond that, nothing more could be said, and so nothing was said in public—in private one would that so-and-so had ‘vanished into the Nameless Gone’. One could say no more even in private.

Every London professional sold their brains to a caste of sovereign clans who ruled vast lands with the absolute authority of Roman gentry. That was what made them sovereign. There was no other market, so you put up with it.

Donald folded the tracing paper and put it back in the envelope, which he pushed deep inside his suit. His father Morton had been legal adviser to the Krossingtons for more than thirty years. His grandfather Sir Bartleigh had been a close friend of Wilson and Evelyn Krossington, the founders of the Krossington dynasty. Surely such long family connections counted for something?

I have done no wrong, Donald said out loud.

*

Krossington Quay was a basin several acres in extent connected to the River Thames by a short channel. That afternoon, Donald found the basin dominated by a biplane flying boat of substantial scale moored against a floating pier. Despite his grim mood, he could not help but be impressed by the expanse of the canvas-skinned wings, the towering struts supporting the upper plane and the complex triangular patterns formed by the bracing wires between the wings. Then there were the four mighty radial engines, each as big around as a cartwheel. The hull of the flying boat bore the Krossington coat of arms and the clan motto Aurum Vita Est (Gold is Life). After his admiration of the big machine, he took a seat in the commoners’ saloon and waited.

2 pm came and went. Then 3 pm. This waiting goaded Donald. He wanted to face his fate quickly. About ten minutes later, a ruddy-faced man with white hair strode past the windows towards the flying boat yelling for the bloody pilot. Donald recognised this man as His Decency Cecil Tarran-Krossington, a minor noble of the clan.

Where the buggery have you been? Cecil Tarran-Krossington was glaring at four young men in flight crew uniforms hurrying to join him on the floating pier. Donald hurried after them.

I apologise for keeping you waiting, Your Decency, said the leading young man, evidently the captain. He was about Donald’s own age, mid-thirties, with much the same height and build, around six feet tall and very fit. Donald sympathised with the man’s meekness; servants do not win against sovereign conceit.

A couple of young women wearing fur coats and not much else followed His Decency Cecil. As they ducked through the access door to board the flying boat, their skirts lifted to reveal that both went commando and did not wax. Donald failed to be discreet in his observations. Cecil Tarran-Krossington glared at him and snapped:

Who the bloody hell do you think you are?

My name is Donald Bartleigh Aldingford, Your Decency.

A commoner?

Yes, Your Decency.

Then what the hell are you doing here?

His Decency Tom Krossington has requested my presence, Your Decency.

The mention of the head of clan had an obvious quieting effect on His Decency Cecil. In a more man-to-man tone, he said:

Best keep your eyes to yourself, commoner.

Yes, Your Decency. Donald kept his eyes down and shoulders a little rounded in submission during the exchange. His Decency Cecil turned to the pilot.

Get moving, you. I’ve a dinner party in Haslemere.

Yes, Your Decency.

Donald took a seat on the lower deck where servants and commoners travelled. The ceiling was so low that it would more aptly be described as a tunnel, while the windows were just a couple of feet above the water line. If the flying boat collided out on the river, he stood little chance of escape, supposing a swim in the open sewer known as the River Thames could be described as ‘escape’.

The flight crew bustled through their check-lists. Mechanics climbed up to the engines and wound up the flywheel starters to a thin scream before coaxing the engines to life one by one. A rev of the propellers and they were under way, through the channel and out onto the river. The breath of the sewer of London filtered into the cabin. A human body ballooned up with decomposition flowed past, then another, both so far gone it was impossible to determine either age or sex. Then a dead cow… The flying boat’s nose lifted, waves and foam swept past the port hole, Donald ducked to look up at the underside of Tower Bridge as the flying boat passed under it. The roar of the engines hardened, the propellers droned with strain, a storm of spray flew behind—and all was smooth as the brown river and its stench fell away and the land to either side flattened and slowed. He looked behind at the spectacular red barrier of the Grande Enceinte extending away from both sides of Tower Bridge like an escarpment. This red-brick wall was the frontier of the Central Enclave of London. It had a circumference of nineteen miles and supposedly contained two billion red bricks. As ‘enceinte’ was a French word, it was correctly pronounced ‘on-saint’, not ‘hen-sent’ as the ill-educated claimed. So echoed the words of a primary school teacher from long ago.

The frantic bellow of the engines eased back to a mellower pulsing. The flying boat cruised down the River Thames, past the industrial asylums with their factory sheds and chimneys pouring up plumes of smoke that spread into delicate curtains. The workers’ houses clustered around the big buildings like gravel. Donald was always amazed by how small the asylums looked from the air given the torrents of slummies that poured into the Central Enclave to work as labourers and household servants. The asylums quickly gave way to woodland, strip fields and pastures in which horses grazed. He supposed these must be the petty domains of gangsters.

He knew from previous flights that flying boats were swift conveyances, being able to cruise at about twice the speed of a galloping horse. That was how the machine would be able to land in Portsmouth on the south coast of England just three hours after leaving the Central Enclave of London. Or at least, that would be so if the weather permitted. A little under an hour after take-off, Donald noticed the machine lean to one side and the world begin to rotate slowly under them. He heard Cecil Tarran-Krossington shouting on the deck above. By moving to the front of the servants’ deck, Donald could see up towards the cockpit. The pilot was red in the face and fretting over some papers. Donald looked down through the nearest port hole and immediately understood the problem. To one side fog lay on the sea, spreading away into the distance like a snow-covered plain. However, the air above the fog was clear.

The flying boat levelled out and continued over the white layer of cotton-fluff. Donald guessed that the caution of the pilot arose from the risk of drifting over sovereign land hidden by fog. If this happened, the corporation responsible for defending the privacy of that land—the glory trust—would open fire with 155mm anti-aircraft guns, shooting through the fog using tracking radar. That was how the law was enforced. Having said that, Donald had a minor appreciation of navigation and knew that aircrew were trained to take fixes from the sun to determine position. He returned to his seat, growing bored with the monotonous white view. The sky paled from blue to hazy. They should be turning south to fly through the Strait of Dover about now… And there it happened, the starboard wing dipped to point at the fog layer below and the world beneath rotated.

Only a minute or so later Donald twitched with shock, as if he had nodded off and then snapped alert. There had been a flash nearby. He noticed a cluster of dark puffs falling behind the flying boat, then another cluster appeared and he heard a bang behind him, like someone whacking the planking of the hull with a hammer. When he swivelled around in his seat, he was amazed to see a jagged hole in the side of the hull and a corresponding hole about an inch across on the opposite side.

As he turned to face forwards again, a brilliant flash burst outside his window with a report like a shotgun, followed by wild screams from the sovereign deck overhead and a stinging pain in his right thigh. Shattered glass whirled about the cabin and a spray of wood splinters covered the front of his jacket. Blood bulged up through a rip across the top of his trouser leg. Although dazed by the blast of the anti-aircraft shell, he now understood they were in breach of the so-called Naclaski law of privacy and were being quite legitimately fired upon. That damned fool of a pilot had taken them over a sovereign’s land!

The deck turned almost vertical, turfing Donald across the cabin. He bounced off the ceiling and then hit the deck on which he was crammed down by an extraordinary force seeking to drive his skull through the planks. The roar of engines cut dead. Now all he could hear was howling from overhead caused by the tornado of their speed in the bracing wires between the wings. By kneeling behind a seat and hugging it, he managed to hold himself in place long enough to see the that world and the sky were reeling around and around and the snowy layer of fog was getting closer and closer.

For all its great size and power, the flying boat was not too big to crash.

Chapter 3

The wreck looked more like a collapsed bridge than a machine of the air. It was piled about the base of a sturdy oak tree, which had endured the assault with nothing worse than a split bough to show for it. The immense biplane wings had folded forward like a swimmer performing the butterfly, while the central section including the engines had collapsed forward on the cockpit. Somewhere in that mess of broken struts and crumpled fabric were fuel tanks the size of bathtubs full of an explosive prehistoric mineral liquid called petrol. The only sound now was the clatter of the petrol leaking out.

Some local natives gathered around Donald where he lay in a ploughed furrow after his escape from the wreck. A deadweight apathy had settled over him now that he was clear of the danger of being incinerated. The natives gabbled in a dialect he could not understand. One of the natives kneeled beside him and put an arm around his shoulders.

You intact? he said. He spoke in the slow, careful manner of one with limited command of a foreign language. He was a man of about twenty, with a thick beard in which a set of excellent teeth gleamed. He wore a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and pale canvas trousers but went bare-foot, perhaps having just come from some task like treading grapes or bating animal hides.

You intact? the native repeated.

I think so. Thank you for your concern.

The huddle of natives around him started to wail and call appeals. They were staring at a figure who had risen into view from the upper deck of the flying boat. It was Cecil Tarran-Krossington. He rested against the windscreen of the promenade deck, slowly turning his head this way and that, as if trying to see beyond the mist hanging in a circular curtain around the crash site. His expression was of dawning horror. He lifted something from the pocket of his brown motorcycle jacket—it was an automatic pistol—and a crazed intensity came into his eyes.

Aurum vita est! he screamed.

He opened his mouth wide as for a dental exam, inserted the muzzle of the pistol and fired. A gout of blood leaped from the top of his head. Blood poured from his mouth as if a tap had spun open, streaks of it ran down the side of the hull, the whites of his eyes flashed just before he toppled over backwards and dropped from sight.

The natives around Donald bowed their heads and crossed themselves. They started a fervent muttering that was probably prayer. The suicide left Donald in a state of paralysis. Were the two women going to kill themselves too?

There came a rising pounding of hooves. Donald looked behind to see a line of impressive Clydesdale horses cantering out of the mist. An officer rode the lead horse, which was clearly not enjoying the ploughed ground and proceeded sullenly with its big hooves throwing out fans of earth and pebbles. As the mounted troops approached, the huddle of natives around Donald seemed to shrivel, sinking to their knees and bowing their heads.

The officer jumped down, his heels landing with a whack about ten feet away. Donald observed that he was in his mid-twenties, with a square, bold-jawed face. He wore the olive-green uniform of General Wardian glory trust, as confirmed by the silver corporate motif on each collar of the tunic. Two red stars on each epaulette and sleeve marked him as a team lieutenant, a middle rank not commonly attained by such a young man.

He strode over swinging his riding crop and stopped, glaring first at Donald and then at the rough-and-ready group of natives. He raised the riding crop and lashed the back of the bearded young man who had spoken to Donald.

Be from sight, riff-raff.

The natives scuffled away on hands and knees until well clear of the riding crop, whereupon they jumped up and sprinted towards a cluster of what looked like toy houses along the edge of the field. Donald only had time for a glance at these odd hovels, vaguely discernible through the mist, before he felt the tip of the riding crop under his chin. The team lieutenant leaned over him. By this time the squad of horsemen had dismounted and gathered behind their officer.

What are you? the team lieutenant demanded.

My name is Donald Bartleigh Aldingford. I’m a commoner in transit for a sovereign client.

Your business?

I’m a barrister.

I see the Krossington coat of arms on that wreck.

After a pause, Donald said: Your eyesight would appear to be in order.

The team lieutenant ignored the flippancy.

How many were aboard?

Eight. Three on the sovereign deck and four crew in the cockpit. I was alone on the commoners’ deck.

Do you understand you will be interned under the law of Frite?

I do understand that, yes.

Can you stand up?

Donald found that he could, although his legs shivered and his head pounded.

There are still two young woman inside the hull, he said.

Where’s the crew?

Under that mess.

Donald pointed to the heap of wreckage against the base of the oak tree. As the mist had thinned somewhat, he could now see there was an awful lot of open field in which the flying boat could have landed pretty much intact on its tough hull, designed as it was to withstand landings on the open sea. He guessed the pilot had aimed for the tree to get it over with rather than survive to be executed by His Decency Cecil Tarran-Krossington, as he certainly would have been.

The team lieutenant ordered his men to search the wreck, adding they must take the most extreme care against causing sparks as the site was soaked in mineral essence or, as some called it, petrol. The squad of ten glory troopers made quick work of the task. From within the hull they extracted the body of Cecil Tarran-Krossington, bloody and limp, and the bodies of the young ladies. One was alive but unconscious. The other was confirmed dead by a sergeant, who apparently was some kind of medical orderly. Another sergeant returned from poking about near the tree and confirmed, in a shaken voice, all four crewmen were definitely dead meat.

One of the engines fell into the cockpit, he said. It was still hot and turning when it landed.

The team lieutenant set a sergeant and three troopers to guard the wreck. He explained to his men that another squad would come out from Broadstairs fort in a couple of hours to collect the dead and take them to the morgue in Canterbury, where they would be kept pending terms being agreed for their return to the Lands of Krossington for burial. Or, if terms could not be agreed, the cadavers would be given over to the knacker’s yard for rendering. In the morning, a team of engineers would come out to drain the remaining petrol from the tanks and transport the wreck to storage as evidence in the legal proceedings to come.

I’m required by our client’s regulations to handcuff you and lead you by the neck, the team lieutenant said to Donald. He was in no way apologetic. A glory trooper with the rank of basic snapped handcuffs on Donald’s wrists and buckled a leather collar with a tether about his neck. The team lieutenant and the rest of his troopers mounted up and at a languid slouch led Donald off across the furrows into captivity, limping, bleeding, one shoe missing, stinking of petrol. The surviving young lady was unceremoniously slung over one of the Clydesdales by a couple of troopers, whereupon a great round of tittering broke out at her lack of underpants. The team lieutenant cut this tomfoolery with a yell.

*

Naclaski: the National Clear Skies Initiative.

Frite: the Full Rights of Territorial Exclusion.

Naclaski and Frite, the laws that defined the meaning of privacy, the laws that provided Donald Bartleigh Aldingford his professional income. Now, they were the laws under which he was being taken into captivity. He limped along behind the slouching buttocks of a Clydesdale ridden by a mere basic of General Wardian glory trust. Just to keep going required concentration against the pains from his knee, face and thigh, and he kept suffering waves of trembling all over.

After an exhausting walk of more than two hours through a mix of woodland and sea marshes, the column entered a red brick fort. The team lieutenant jumped down from his horse and ordered the collar and handcuffs removed from Donald.

He was then taken to his cell.

Chapter 4

Half an hour later, a sergeant collected Donald from the cell. He followed the NCO across a parade ground into a two-storey brick administration block. On the upper floor, they arrived at the office of the team lieutenant who had led the troops at the wreck. The team lieutenant was tilted far back on his chair with his boots up on the desk. He thanked the sergeant, then yelled for Cooper. A little man of about thirty scurried in with all the stooping subservience of a hamster.

Get behind that typewriter, Cooper. It’s a Section 21, offences against Naclaski, and a Section 28, offences against Frite.

He looked at Donald for the first time.

I’m Dick Haighman. Welcome to the Broadstairs garrison, a true cow’s butt-hole of this Earth where incest is standard procedure, that is, if the locals aren’t duelling with broken bottles or drowning in the marshes. I could strangle my wife for nagging me into transferring south. I was having a bloody wonderful time up north but she whined non-stop about the weather. As if a bit of bloody rain ever hurt anyone—

He sighed, dropping his boots to the floor with a bang.

Right, he said. First we have to get some bureaucracy done. You can’t drop a turd in General Wardian without filling in a form and sending it up to the boss—the form, I mean, not the turd, tempting though the idea is.

He slumped down in the chair again until his backside was virtually hanging off it and gazed up at the ceiling while he dictated to