Blackwolf: Truth Sister, #2

By Phil Gilvin

DISEASE STALKS THE LAND LIKE A WOLF, BUT THE FIGHTING GOES ON. AND IF YOU'RE CAUGHT UP IN IT, WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

 

2150, the Women's Republic of Anglia. The world, transformed by climate change, dwindling resources and successive epidemics, is in danger of descending into chaos. Ex-Truth Sister Clara Perdue, having escaped the great flood of London, has become separated from her friend Jack Pike and is now trying to reach Wight, where her mother Sophia is in prison. But once she makes it there, how can she avoid capture herself? And how can she help Sophia?

 

Meanwhile, Jack has fallen in with Hurn, a warlike chieftain in the lawless lands between Anglia and Wessex. Can he find new friendships and forget Clara? And when the Wessex army attack, can he face his doubts and fight?

 

And while Hurn seeks to steal a virus weapon, another plague is sweeping through Britain. Can Clara and Jack survive?

 

Word count: 93,000

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phil Gilvin
• Release date: Jan 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9780995780033

Phil Gilvin

Phil Gilvin lives with his wife in Swindon, UK, nestling in the rolling downland of Wiltshire amid neolithic barrows, ancient droveways and stone circles – and the M4 motorway. When his children grew too old to have stories read to them he turned to writing, going to lots of workshops and winning a number of short story prizes. His short stories have regularly been shortlisted in magazine competitions and have featured in local anthologies. Truth Sister is his first published novel (his first two, unpublished, got consigned to the “that’s how you learn” pile). Phil is a retired physicist, and he now enjoys walking in aforesaid downland as well as listening to classical music and prog rock, and murdering folk songs.

Book preview

Part I

1 A Bag of Tools

Clara Perdue stood by the roadside and watched the long queue of women waiting to go through the gates. She felt the cold wind toying with her hair, blowing it first this way then that, free like a bird. Free, like she wanted to be. But she wouldn’t be free, would she, until the task was complete, until she’d made amends.

She fished out a faded ribbon and tied her hair into a ponytail. After all the years of wearing her hair respectfully short at the Academy, she enjoyed having it long. But, she thought, the wind’s blowing it about here already. It’ll be even worse at sea. Next, she bent and hefted the rucksack onto her back. She’d done a good job of packing the tools – the wire cutters, the hammer, the hacksaw, all securely wrapped in clothes and rope. A nice tidy bundle. It shouldn’t make a noise, a noise that might give her away.

On the panelled fence in front of her a big white-stencilled sign read:

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Gosport-Forton

Motor Ferries

Wight – Coast – Soton Water.

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To one side was a double-doored gate through which a steady train of horse-drawn carts was passing, each thoroughly searched by Republican Security Guards armed with clipboards and guns. Repsegs. Clara knew what Repsegs were like. In fact, she knew more about them than most people.

She stepped forward, her gaze passing over the familiar Republican slogans painted on the dockyard walls, the Sisterhood and Strength, the Cloning for Purity, the Save us from Evil Men. There were, too, the usual posters offering rewards for information about terrorists, or about unlicensed Naturals. Unlicensed Naturals like her. Above a booth another sign read, less emphatically, Ferry Tickets. Clara squared her shoulders and joined the queue. Women of all ages, all sizes and all complexions pushed and elbowed and sidled their way forward. Clara could smell sweat, perfume, onions, oil, pepper. One or two of the women had coughs. A few dragged fretting girls along by the hand. Others carried huge holdalls. Some were already pulling out their purses, anxious to make sure they had the right money.

Clara, on the other hand, knew she had the right money. She’d found out the hard way just how much a ferry crossing would cost: she’d visited this very dockyard nearly a year ago, soon after she’d lost Jack. She winced at the thought. And then, she remembered, she’d had to trudge back inland. Dismayed by the cost, she’d wondered what to do. She could never steal that much money. No-one would give it; no-one would lend it to her.

So she’d worked. Her trudging had taken her to a smithy, near Petrasfield. That was too close to her old home for her to be entirely comfortable, but it had been all she could get. Most of her pay at the smithy went on food and board, but she’d been able to put a little by each week, saving gradually to buy the tickets. And if she hadn’t burned her arm she’d have been back here, catching the ferry, in the Autumn. But an iron bar, five minutes out of the forge and still hot, had rolled and caught her. The pain had been excruciating, the smell sickening. Now she flexed her hand; the scar was still sore. But at last it had healed enough to allow her to travel, and so here she was, waiting for the ferry in the darkest days of the year. She had nearly two hundred boudicks in her inside pocket: enough for a single to Wight and two singles back. Because when she returned, she was going to bring her mother with her.

Buying the tickets was the easy bit. The woman who shivered in the kiosk barely looked at Clara as she said, ‘Wight, please. One out and two back.’

‘East Cowes or West?’ said the woman.

‘Uh, West,’ decided Clara.

As she passed the tickets over, the woman totally failed to notice that Clara’s palm was sweating: one out and two back evidently wasn’t enough to raise her curiosity. With a long breath out, Clara followed the other travellers across an expanse of cracked tarmac that had evidently been laid in the days when searise had made it necessary to build a new dockside. Here she joined another queue. She looked up: grey clouds rolled overhead, high enough to let in some sunlight and pale enough to promise a dry spell. Maybe the crossing wouldn’t be too bad. Looking ahead, she could see the dockside with its row of weathered, ropebound bollards and, beyond, Portsea Island rising from the sea like an ancient castle. Nearer at hand, the footings of long-gone gantries and cranes projected from the water, the remains of once-thriving docks now submerged. But she couldn’t see any ferries – at least, not ferries like the pictures she’d seen in her schoolbooks, the five-deck, many-funnelled steelhulls that ploughed the Channel in the days before earthwarming and searise, before the near-permanent gales came and made the crossing almost impossible. Maybe the ferries were all out at sea just now, she told herself. There’d be one along soon.

Another notice: Security Check. Papers Must Be Produced. Solid barriers, four Repsegs and tables for emptying bags onto. Clara swallowed and pulled her grubby, dog-eared identity papers out of a pocket. No matter that they were forgeries, they’d withstood scrutiny every time they’d been checked so far. Clara found herself clamping her jaws together. That approach worked pretty well, she’d found, as a way to hold back the tears. The idea to get some forged identity papers had been Jack’s, she remembered. He’d had it quite soon after they’d left London after last year’s flood, the one the rumours said had been deliberately caused by the All Mother, Mater Hedera. Clara, of course, knew that the rumours were true. Afterwards, she and Jack had got as far as Mitcham before realising that, with the army closing everything down, they’d need official papers in order to get anywhere. So they’d stolen some hardware from a big house, sold it and used the boudicks to pay for the forgeries. And good forgeries they were, too. Poor Jack. Where was he now? She blinked hard. Gone, that’s where he was. Lost. Just one more person whose life Clara had messed up. Was he even still alive? She swallowed.

The queue inched forward. At the front, a Repseg tipped out someone’s suitcase onto a table; jars of preserve rolled to the floor and smashed. Clara’s stomach pitched, waiting for the woman to remonstrate, to rant, to demand compensation; waiting for the Repsegs to start beating her up. But the woman, it seemed, knew who she was dealing with. With an effort she pulled herself together and started re-packing her case. The Repsegs turned to their next victim.

It’ll be just my luck, Clara thought, if this is the one time when they notice my papers aren’t right – the time when I’ve got tools in my bag, tools I’m going to use to break someone out of prison. She raised her hand to her mouth and made as if to chew her nails, but she stopped. Her fingers were sore, and anyway there were hardly any nails left. She really must kick this habit, she told herself; this habit that had started a year ago. There was no clogged blood under those nails now. Think about something else, she told herself.

As luck would have it, a distraction arose at once. From behind her came the sounds of motor-horns, of shouted commands and the creak of great wooden gates. Every woman in the queue turned to watch as through the gates came three growling motor-trucks, military transports in khaki and canvas. As they pulled up, the Repsegs forced the queue back and away from the checkpoint, and Clara found herself watching as each truck disgorged twenty or thirty soldiers who formed up immediately into a column. All the troops were identical, each built the same, each moving the same, each carrying their guns the same. At one time Clara had thought, yes, they’re Clones, that’s normal. In those days she’d never have entertained the idea that they could be genetically modified, so-called Geemos, designed as pure fighting machines. After all, the great Women’s Republic of Anglia, the hope of all womankind, had declared genetics illegal. But the Republic, Clara now knew, had lied.

Three officers moved up and down the column, inspecting the soldiers, checking their packs and their rifles, commanding them into order. Then the line moved off, through the checkpoint and towards the quayside.

As the queue resumed its place, the woman behind Clara grunted and turned to her companion. ‘They’ll be off to Portsea,’ she said, nodding towards the east. ‘I ’eard the locals have been eating each other again.’

Her colleague laughed. ‘Never that,’ she said. ‘I heard it was the plague. I reckon there’ll have been looting or something.’

‘I dunno,’ said the first woman. ‘Cooped up on that little island. Too many people, not enough food...’

‘Plague,’ said the second, firmly. ‘There’s a new one going round, nasty it is. Gets yer lungs. Those troops – did you see they’ve got face masks? They’ll be going to lock the place down. Stop anyone getting out.’

Clara shivered, and hoped the nasty plague hadn’t got across to Wight yet. She’d once read that, back at the start of the twenty-first century, epidemics had been less frequent. But since then there’d been many, arriving with the mosquitoes and the migrating birds as the world warmed. And one of those had been Nile Flu, the disease that had killed nearly all the men and made the Women’s Republic real...

With a start, she realised she was almost at the front of the queue. One woman was waved through, her papers merely glanced at. The next had a large holdall; the Repsegs rummaged around and confiscated some alcohol. Then it was Clara’s turn. It was too late to turn back now. The first Repseg, a chunky specimen with a broad mouth, took her papers and peered first at the identity card, then at the Authentication. Forgeries both. Chloe Pardow, they said. False name: another idea of Jack’s.

A second Repseg, tall and slim, had forced Clara’s arms out of her rucksack straps. Now the rucksack was on the table and the Repseg was about to empty it. Meanwhile the first Repseg finished frowning at the Authentication and handed it back. One hurdle over, thought Clara. Only Pureclones were allowed to travel freely, and anyway, at her age she had no business to be anything else. Then the Repseg said, ‘What’s with the tickets?’

‘I’m fetching my mother back,’ said Clara. ‘She, er, wrote to say she’d run out of money.’

But now the second Repseg had clattered the contents of the rucksack out onto a table. ‘Could you come round here, Madam?’ she said with a smirk.

Clara felt her chest heaving, her legs shaking. Other Repsegs now dealt with the next person in the queue, as Clara moved to the table. ‘What’s all these?’ said the Repseg, pointing at the tools.

Clara thought quickly. ‘Oh, please,’ she said in what she hoped was a plaintive voice, ‘don’t confiscate them. I’m looking for work, you see.’

The Repseg frowned. ‘Why d’you need wire cutters to look for work?’

‘They’re samples,’ she replied. ‘They’re to show what I can do. I – I made them. I’ve been working for a smith, but she doesn’t need me any more.’

‘You made these?’ said the Repseg, inspecting the tools more closely. ‘They don’t look new.’

‘No,’ said Clara, ‘I’ve been using them...’

Now the Repseg studied Clara herself. ‘You don’t look much like a smith, either.’

Clara rolled up her sleeve. ‘Burn scar,’ she said. ‘Hot iron. Ow!’ she added, as the Repseg prodded it.

The Repseg shook her head. ‘Pah. Go on, pack up, get out of the way. You’re wasting your time, though. Not much work on Wight.’ She nodded to her colleague, who returned Clara’s tickets, and as Clara re-packed she heard them laughing. Go on, she thought, laugh. You’ve let me through, that’s what matters.

2 The Prison

Clara headed towards the quayside, her knees still shaking and her throat tight. Herring gulls strutted along the dockside, eyeing any travellers who looked like they might have food. There was a strong smell of seaweed. Out in the bay, two low-slung motor launches were already following a buoy-marked channel as they bounced over the swell, carrying the soldiers towards Portsea. The woman in the queue had been right about that, then. The dockside clock told Clara she had another fifteen minutes before the West Cowes ferry sailed. But where was it? She still couldn’t see any boats at all, although a small crane appeared to be hoisting crates straight down over the dockside, into nowhere. She saw a row of destination signs: Southampton. Hayling. Portsea – No Service Today. Fawley and Dibden. Portchester – some twenty women were waiting at this one – E Cowes, W Cowes. But where were the boats?

She approached the edge of the quayside, which ended in a sheer drop to the water. Inching close, she at last saw the ferries. The tide had just begun to flow, and the boats were riding so low in the water that they had yet to rise to the level of the dock. And ferries they were, even though it took Clara a moment to realise it. Short, squat craft, twenty-five feet long, with high incurving sides and a stout roof behind a raised wheelhouse, they bobbed up and down on the swell, thudding against the rubber bumpers that hung down the dockside.

As she hurried along the line of moorings, she passed a woman with her nose in the air and three smirking manservants in tow. Clara studied them. The woman was wearing a polyester-trimmed coat and what looked like nylon stockings, and Clara wondered if she really enjoyed wearing synthetics or if she just wanted everyone to know how rich she was. And then there were the manservants – not one, but three. Down here in South Hampshire there were very few men at all, even fewer than in London, and to see three at once was unusual. She tried not to think of the Scrapers, who’d even been led by a man.

She reached the gate for W Cowes and found that, sure enough, a small boat was waiting. A few passengers had already boarded; others waited on the dockside. Looking at the way the boat was heaving up and down, Clara could see why you’d want to leave it till the last minute. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to a stout woman who stood nearby, reading a copy of The Republican Woman. ‘Is this – is this the ferry for Cowes?’

The woman looked up. Seeing Clara’s expression, she gave a wry grin. ‘Looks a bit flimsy, don’t it?’ she said in a London accent. ‘But they’ve been doing this trip for years. That shape, see – makes it hard for ’em to roll over. On a day like today they’ll be fine,’ she added, looking up at the racing clouds. ‘They’ve made it in a force-seven once or twice, too.’

Clara continued to stare down at the tiny vessel. ‘Don’t people get seasick?’

The woman grinned. ‘Yeah, lots. But that’s better than gettin’ sunk. Or eaten by mozzies, like you do in the summer. Anyhow,’ she went on, tapping her paper, ‘you’re lucky they’re running at all. Says here a tanker’s made it into Coryton oil terminal, now they’ve got that running again. And another’s expected this week, so they’re releasing some of the diesel reserves. There was no ferries all through October, y’know.’

Just then, the crowd of passengers at the Portchester gate began to file forward and descend the rope ladder to their ferry. They were accompanied by more Repsegs.

‘Purewater workers,’ said the woman. ‘Tight security over there,’ she added, nodding towards the high land on the north side of the bay.

‘Purewater?’ said Clara. ‘Is that a place?’

The woman chuckled. ‘You from out in the sticks, love? Nah, it’s a factory. Keeps the Republic’s water clean.’

‘Oh,’ said Clara. ‘I thought it was WaterCo that did that.’

‘Hmm,’ said the woman. ‘That’s a point. Well, so long as they’re not poisoning us, hey?’

Clara was about to tell her that that was exactly what the Republic was doing, but she stopped herself. There was a job to be done. She had to focus on that.

The woman had returned to reading her paper. ‘Speaking of poisons,’ she said, ‘have a look at this.’ As she handed Clara the paper, she tapped a notice that took up a quarter of the front page. Minister Quashes Rumours of Virus Weapons, read the headline. The text went on to say that Mater Betula, a Prime Sister at the Ministry of Defence, had made a special announcement in view of the scurrilous rumours being peddled by enemies of the Republic. The Republic had no virus weapon capability, she said, nor had it ever done so. It would be irresponsible, she went on, to add to womankind’s already heavy burden of disease, a burden caused by men’s greed and by climate change. To allow virus weapons to be developed, or used, would be to repeat the mistakes men made...

‘Do you believe it?’ asked Clara, handing the paper back.

The woman pulled a face. ‘Well, why would they say it? If it wasn’t true, I mean?’

Clara shook her head. ‘Why would they need to deny it?’ she said. Then she wished she hadn’t.

A head appeared over the quayside wall. ‘West Cowes ferry,’ shouted the woman. ‘All aboard. All aboard for West Cowes.’

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A ferrywoman gave Clara a hand as she gripped the railings and let her foot quest downwards for the first rungs of the rope ladder. As she descended, she came face-to-face with slimy, bright green seaweed and huge barnacles that gripped the flat grey surfaces of the dock wall. Below her, another ferrywoman held the end of the ladder, so that as the boat rode up and down it stayed away from the wall; but several times Clara still had to reach out to steady herself.

After what seemed like an age she found herself down on the deck, easing out her aching arms and shoulders. She glanced over the vessel. From above it had looked tiny, almost as small as the last ferry she’d been on, the one that had taken her and Jack downriver from Windsor all those months ago; but from here it looked reassuringly solid. There was a tang of diesel-fumes in the air.

Another vessel passed close by, this one large and open-decked, making the ferry rock in the wake washing against the dock wall.

‘It’s going up the Water,’ said the ferrywoman. ‘Off to the Southampton slave market.’

‘Slave market?’ said Clara, but the woman urged her on as the next passenger descended the ladder. Clara ducked under the low roof that covered the seating area and found herself a place. On each hardwood seat lay a rubber life-ring and a small pail. ‘Wow,’ she murmured. And at the thought of what the pail was for, she immediately began to feel ill. This would be her first sea-crossing and it didn’t look like it was going to be fun. Some of the other women were chatting and laughing, others were clutching their pails and looking green.

She felt the boat rising and sinking in the swell. If she’d thought about it, she decided, she’d have realised that the days of the great ferries were long gone. Those pictures in her schoolbooks had been from a bygone age, an age when people thought nothing of travelling, of exhausting the world’s coal and oil, of polluting the planet. Nowadays everything was smaller and cruder, and the little remaining oil was expensive, and rationed. No wonder her ticket had cost so much.

She shut her eyes tight. Here goes, she thought. I’m on my way to get Mother out of prison. And then the thought came: maybe I’ve been kidding myself. Maybe I didn’t really get delayed in Petrasfield. Maybe I was just giving myself an excuse to put it off. Because when I get to where Mother is, I really have no idea what to do next. Why don’t I just give up?

But she knew the answer to that. It was that there was nothing else she could do. She’d told herself that it was her fault that her parents had been arrested for the crime of mating, of bearing a Natural daughter and then concealing the fact. So she had to make amends, didn’t she? She’d got over parting from Jack, her only friend, and then she’d soldiered on, all through those long months, those wearying hours at the smithy, all the while planning for this: to get over to Wight, where Sophia was a prisoner. If her mother was even still alive. Clara swallowed and looked at her ravaged fingernails again. She had to go on, or all that effort would have been wasted. She had to go on, or she could never live with herself, knowing she’d abandoned her mother. She had to keep fighting. But it was all so hard. So difficult. So frightening.

The engines started.

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By the time she made it to Kettleton Prison, just outside Newport, dusk was falling. The wind, unusually, had dropped to almost nothing and a thin mist was rising. She crouched in the shade of some trees, gazing over waist-high bracken that sloped down to the main gates, some forty yards off. She was stiff, sick and exhausted, but she’d made it. The crossing had been dreadful, with ten-foot waves crashing down over the boat then hurling it forward, with the engine roaring when its screws left the water, and wheezing when they didn’t. Some women had been sick as soon as they’d left harbour, and the bilges ran with seawater and vomit. There had been frightening moments when the ferry seemed to hang in the air between waves, or when it heeled over so far that Clara thought it would capsize. There had been screams, and crying, and even prayers. Clara had held on tightly, eyes closed for most of the time, and hadn’t been sick until the island was in sight.

On the dockside at Cowes, one boudick bought you a hose-down and the use of a towel. After that, your clothes were supposed to dry on their own. Another three boudicks could buy you a tot of brandy, but Clara had decided against that. Then an oared river taxi had ferried some of the passengers up the Medina to Newport, and from there Clara had gone on alone to reach the prison.

She’d done her research. The old Parkhurst gaol was pretty much unchanged since the last century, but the other, smaller prisons that had stood nearby had been knocked down and replaced with this one. And this, she’d discovered, was where her mother was – where they sent revertants, women who’d mated with men and given birth in the old, impure way instead of going for cloning like good servants of the Republic.

But prisons have high walls, walls that are often topped with barbed wire; and they have strong gates; and they usually have a licence to generate electricity. Kettleton was no exception. Clara could hear the generator and see the glow from inside the compound and the security lighting around the walls. Those walls were fifteen feet high, and at regular intervals there were watchtowers. How on earth would she get in?

As she watched, the first inkling of a desperate plan came to her. With a thud and a rumble, the heavy wooden gates began to open. She stood on tiptoe and inched herself further into the bracken as a thick-set horse clopped out through the gates, pulling a heavy cart into the thickening fog. Although a couple of prison warders were watching, there was an air of carelessness about them, of distraction. If carts come out, Clara thought to herself, they must also go in. And when the next one went in, maybe she could sneak in with it. She almost laughed at the irony: trying to break into a prison. And if she got in, what then?

The gates closed with a thud. Of course, with dark coming on, the next cart might not be till tomorrow. Maybe she’d have to find shelter for the night. Clara had known fog only once or twice in her life – usually the world was too windy – but she knew it could make you feel very cold. She resolved to wait another hour and then, if no more carts came, she’d spend the night in town and resume her vigil the next day. She squatted on her haunches to wait, and as she waited, she thought.

She thought of Amy Martin, her friend at the Academy whom she’d wrongly thought to be a Natural, and whom she’d betrayed just to make sure she, Clara, got a first. Last time she’d seen her, Amy had just taken a Repseg’s bullet in her arm. She thought of her parents, Sophia and James, on the night they’d told her that she was no Clone but a Natural; and of the horror on their faces as she shouted that she never wanted to see them again. She thought of the last time she’d seen James, through the fence at a reclamation gang compound before he was taken off to the Thames Barrier to be lost in the great flood. And she thought of Jack, who’d shared her troubles, threatened to kill her, saved her life, and travelled halfway to Wight with her. And then she’d lost him.

She wiped her eyes. She couldn’t go on like that, could she? She couldn’t go on hurting people, letting them down, losing them. Her last chance was before her, a chance to find her mother and rescue her, to at least begin to make amends. She had to take this chance. If she didn’t...

Voices. Hoofbeats on the hard road. The creak of wheels. Clara crouched lower, shifting her rucksack onto her right shoulder. Looking along the road that ran from her left down to the prison gates, she could see the foggy gleam of two oil-lamps swinging either side of a cart, lighting the horse’s flanks and the road beneath. As it followed the curve, she could see it was a box-cart, laden with wooden crates: maybe there was room to jump on at the back. There was only the driver, no passenger. She could squeeze among the crates without anyone noticing, or maybe she could hang on to the underside of the cart. Now – she’d have to go now. She leapt up and ran, stooping, towards where the cart turned under a low arch. But something caught her right foot and she fell, her face ploughing through the bracken, and she came to rest amongst its thick stalks. The rucksack flew from her shoulder and landed a few yards off. She had to get to the cart, she had to. She tried to rise, but her foot was stuck. Something was twisted around it. She pulled and tugged, but whatever it was, it seemed to tighten.

Lights were coming on in the prison. A bell rang, there were shouts. The generator roared. Cursing, Clara felt her ankle. Wire – there was wire around it. She had to get it off. The cutters were in her rucksack. She reached for where it had fallen into