Martyrs: part 2

Fists in the air

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: London is under martial law. The Triverse is on lockdown. Tensions are rising across the capital as protests continue to spread…

London. Mid-Earth.
1980. July.

The rain began, grey and filthy as only the skies above London could deliver. The rising smog from the factories along the river mingled with the clouds and fell back to Earth. It would leave a mottled pattern of dirt on every exposed surface, the downpour making the city dirtier rather than washing it clean.

Vahko stood in the doorway of the factory, the big sliding door that would have seen trucks in and out every day at some point in the building’s past. Inside was an army of koth. There were staging posts across in the walled district, and they’d been preparing for this day without knowing when it might come, or what shape it would take.

An unwise amount of trust was being placed upon the humans. Clarke, Kaminski, Chakraborty. A shame Lola Styles was not present, though Vahko understood she was undertaking an equally important task on Palinor. The audacity of the plan had stunned them. Its ambition was why it would work — or, if not, it would at least fail in a most dramatic fashion.

From the moment that Earth First was elected, Vahko had seen the next decade played out in their mind. Others said they were deranged, that they were fear-mongering, that it was absurd. That sort of thing simply didn’t happen in England. English people were a civilised lot. Every one of Vahko’s warnings and predictions had come to pass — had been proven far worse in reality, if anything. All the way, the press and the humans strained to normalise, to rationalise, to explain away what was happening before their very eyes. Even koth, even his closes comrades, refused to see it and employed magical thinking to see anything else. Always waiting for the universe to right itself. For someone else to come and help. For common sense to prevail.

Vahko instead had planned. The day after Nigel Maxwell became Prime Minister, Vahko was putting together a shadow government, a group of trusted koth and aen’fa and humans. An underground resistance, that would be ready. They’d built tunnels, established safe houses, moved as many people abroad as possible. Despite all of that, they’d still been walled into the ghetto, still been shipped out in their hundreds. For five years, the aggressors had kept all the momentum to themselves.

The time had come to reverse that. It had to be done right. It was all about splitting the government’s forces, confusing them enough to enable the rest of Clarke’s plan. And so they watched the wall, and the guard towers, and waited for the sign. Careful instruction had been given: that nobody was to target human guards unless in self-defence; to instead focus on infrastructure — searchlights, gun emplacements, gates, walls, barbed wire.

Vahko was comfortable with not seeing what came next, of not getting to enjoy the spoils of victory. It would be enough to usher it into being, knowing that they would be bestowing it upon generations to come. If that was the part they had to play, so be it.

What happened to former ambassador Vahko did not matter. All that mattered was bringing down the walls.

Zdan shouted at the top of his lungs. “Earth First last! You’re a remnant of the past!” Get enough people bellowing the same thing at the same time and any slogan could become catchy. The protest had moved slowly down the Strand, police seeming unsure as to what to do with such an unprecedented outpouring of anger and frustration. Some people had brought instruments and were banging drums, or blowing on trumpets, undeterred by the rain that was coming down.

Running along the outskirts of the main group, Zdan chucked spray cans to his friends and started drawing tags onto the front of shops and doorways. The protest would sweep through central London and leave it changed. The real question was how far they could push it. There was an idea in Zdan’s head, of getting all the way to Buckingham Palace, and scaling the gates, and climbing up to the balcony and doing the stupid royal wave. Then maybe taking a piss off the edge. Something to be remembered for.

He tugged at his bandanna, carefully positioned to conceal the tips of his ears. This lot might not be signed-up-and-got-the-badge Earth First, but that didn’t mean they were friendly to aen’fa. Something Zdan had learned early on in life was that you could never tell what a human was thinking. They’d either talk about you behind your back or stab you in it. And now he was cavorting along with the rest of them, kicking over rubbish bins and clambering onto the top of trams.

The protest was still growing, people emerging from offices and homes and side streets. It wasn’t entirely clear what they wanted, collectively, other than a general agreement that they didn’t want that.

‘That’ being anything relating to the current government. Only its most die hard fanatics were still on board with the project. Glancing through the crowd, Zdan was fairly sure some of them would have voted Earth First: they had the look. Yet there they were, walking the streets.

The police came for them halfway down the Strand, at the street’s widest point, where fancy theatres and anonymous offices sat alongside cafés and expensive clothing shops. From the west end there came a line of mounted policemen, the horses jittery and huge. From the north and south came riot police with shields and batons. Beyond the line of horses, further back, were armed units. It must have taken them a while to get the response together, but they were making up for lost time. The protesters were forcibly split up and compressed into smaller groups, police setting up barriers on all four sides of each cohort so that there was nowhere to go. They must have looked like medieval infantry squares, ready for battle — except in this case they were stuck.

Zdan found himself in one of the contained groups at the front of the protest, along with one of his friends. “This is bullshit, man,” Zdan said, loudly, to anyone nearby. There was still chanting, the voices of hundreds of gathered people echoing up the sides of the street. The line of horses remained, keeping their distance from the protesters.

An amplified voice cut through the chatter. “This is Overwatch. This protest is over. A curfew is now in place. You will return to your homes. Each kettled group will be released one at a time. When it is your turn, you will disperse. Any resistance will be met with force. Anyone remaining on the streets two hours from now will be arrested. Your identities will be matched to your citizen records, and any further unlawful behaviour will affect your credit rating and employment status.”

A torrent of memories flowed through Zdan, of his childhood, when things were simpler. When their family was still together, before his dad was taken away. It was never an easy life, and he could always tell there was a longing for Palinor in his parents, but they’d got by. He remembered going to the swings in the park, pushed higher and higher by his mum. He remembered racing his dad along the street, realising only in that moment that his father must have let him win. He remembered there was a street party once, and everyone had been welcome no matter where they were from. That was now an impossibility, a notion so fantastical that it sounded too unlikely to have ever happened. He remembered finding the portal tear in the old gym, and telling his dad, and feeling like he’d done something great. His dad being so excited, and having his energy back, a spring in his step every morning, for a time. Then the cops had come, and taken him to jail, and that had been that.

There was a narrow gap between two of the riot police that were containing Zdan’s group. One of the benefits of aen’fa heritage was an athleticism that far outstripped anything a human could manage. He leaned in to his friend, to be heard above the shouting and singing and drumming. “Watch this.”

Only needing a brief wind-up, Zdan hopped into the shoulders of the nearest protester, a burly, broad-shouldered man who glanced up in surprise. It was simple to hop over the heads of two other protesters, then off the top of a riot shield and police helmet, and then he was down the other side, rolling along the tarmac and back up to his feet. He raced away, towards the line of mounted police.

One of the cops moved his horse forward, coming out to meet Zdan. Now that he was closer, Zdan could tell that the horse was enormous. He didn’t even know horses got that big.

Skidding to a halt, Zdan stood tall, stood proudly, arms at his side, face-to-face with the horse, which shifted side-to-side. A hush fell upon the street, as the confined protesters turned to watch. That’s what Zdan wanted. There’d be people with cameras, too, taking his photo. He’d show them how it was done, how to properly stand up to the man.

For a minute, it was Zdan and the horse and its rider, and everything else in the street melted away. Zdan could go no further, but neither could the horse. Not without trampling him. It was a moment of pure defiance.

Dad would like this, he thought.

Then came the shot.

Police Sergeant Michael Stanley had been listening to the radio, hopping between the official Met channels to monitor the brewing unrest in the city centre. Nothing like this had happened for years, but they’d have it contained soon enough. Agitators, troublemakers, looters — they could try as hard as they liked to undermine the country, but it wouldn’t work. They were too disorganised, too violent and chaotic, and — frankly — too stupid.

A request for backup came over the radio. He frowned. It sounded like the protest near the river has got out of hand. He listened carefully for updates. Some of the forces in the east end had been ordered to redeploy in the centre. It made sense, as nobody wanted the protest getting anywhere near the royals or parliament. It was all such a waste of taxpayers’ money. Self-destructive and selfish, as rebellious types tended to be. It’s how their brains worked. From the reports, it seemed clear that one of the rioters had charged at a police horse with a weapon and had been shot dead. That had now triggered more violence from the rest of the mob.

Ah well, they would quickly put it to a stop, and the walled city could make do with a smaller force along the walls for a time. It’s not like the koth had the brains to organise themselves. He looked out the window of his small guard station perched atop the wall, down into the wet streets of the koth ghetto. All seemed quiet.

He put his feet up on the desk, checked the monitors, then sipped at his tea.

---

Meanwhile.

Voice is still not quite back to normal. I’ll hopefully get to the audio for this and last week’s chapters over the weekend.

The big news this week is the announcement of the Lunar Awards, which I was judging:

Announcing the Season 10, Round 3 Lunar Award Winner for Science Fiction

The winner was ‘Twin Planets’ by

J.M. Ransom

. I highly recommend you read the story, and dig into the rest of the submissions. The overall quality was excellent. As I noted in the announcement:

I find that the most satisfying literature is able to walk a clever tightrope, perfectly balancing our desire to be challenged with our need to be entertained. Writing an entertaining story is one thing. Confronting and challenging an audience is another. Doing both at the same time? That’s where you’ve made something special.

Right, let’s jump into notes for this week’s chapter.

Author notes

Was quite pleased to get a small Rage Against the Machine reference into this chapter.

There’s a scene in Rogue One that perfectly summarises the film’s core story: the main characters are all gone, and an unnamed Rebel soldier has the Death Star plans and is trying to escape the ship he’s on before Darth Vader slaughters everyone. He has the plans, and that’s made him think that he’s the lead character, the hero of the piece. Except the door is jammed. He can wait for the door to be fixed, risking the entire mission, or he can simply pass the plans through the small gap — in doing so, acknowledging that he’s not going to escape, is no going to survive. That’s exactly what he does, and it’s a recognition that he’s not going to be the hero getting the medal at the end of the day. He’s not going to live to see or enjoy victory. And, indeed, the camera switches to the other side of the door, another unnamed soldier runs off with the plans, and we see a red lightsaber blade stab through the door. Of course, the dead soldier does become a hero in that moment, but we’ll never know their name. That theme of anonymous sacrifice, of not getting to witness the ultimate victory, has been explored further in Andor.

Ambassador Vahko hasn’t watched Rogue One, but those themes are what they’re thinking about at the start of this chapter. Vahko is clever, and knows history, and has acknowledged up front that they’re unlikely to make it through. They’ve made peace with that. Victory isn’t for them; it’s for everyone else.

Zdan is young and impetuous and doesn’t understand the full politics of what’s happening. He’s not cognisant of the potential consequences of his actions, but he feels the need keenly. He might not be able to articulate it, but there’s more going on than just him being a troublemaker. The concept of him standing before the horse has obvious echoes of similar images from real world protests, whether it’s a horse or a tank or an armed soldier. The unarmed protester is a powerful visual.

I was going to end this chapter with the koth uprising, but it seemed more fun to have the exquisite dramatic irony of the guard not having a clue what’s about to happen.