Her Majesty's Western Service Read online

  Her Majesty’s Western Service

  Her Majesty’s Western Service

  Leo Champion

  Published by Henchman Press

  Copyright 2014 Leo Champion

  Her Majesty’s Western Service, copyright 2014 Leo Champion

  Cover image copyright 2014 Leo Champion

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941620-00-7

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Markell; as promised.

  …the Great War lasted from 1881 to approximately 1887, engulfing first the European Powers and then the rest of the world. However, it could just have easily run from 1875 to 1882, 1900 to 1905 - or 1914 to 1918.

  Given the stage set by the Franco-Prussian War, the era’s tensions made such a war inevitable at some point - and given the social turbulence of the industrialized Late Nineteenth Century, its outcome was certain. After years of bloody, costly and inconclusive conflict, Powers began to collapse under the strain; riots and revolution led to disease and famine, while a few exiled remnants watched from remote colonies.

  While the United States had mostly stayed neutral in the war, its industry and bankers had financed the Powers heavily. When Europe disintegrated, America was bankrupted; the ensuing Great Panic ripped a nation, already straining under bitter class and regional conflicts, apart at the seams into social apocalypse.

  In 1914 a new US Federal Government declared itself, backed by an expeditionary force from the rebuilding British Empire. However, only twelve States were represented in that election - the South, although its slaves were gone, accepted unification only at gunpoint, while new nations had come into being across the Rockies. The west had become wild again…

  From the introduction to A Young Person’s History Of The World, Volume VII; written by W. Churchill, illustrated by A. Hitler. London Press, 1945.

  Chapter One

  Early March 1963; New York City, New York.

  “These machines are destroying our livelihoods! This machine is destroying our livelihood!” Marko shouted at the workers. He pounded a shoe on the collapsible table. “This capitalist, imperialist machine – the British Empire, their submissive stooges in Washington, their other puppet governments across the globe – is crushing us!”

  There was a roar of approval from the small crowd. Forty or fifty strong; the employed minority were union men, for the most part, Local 404 oilers and 501 shovelers for the most part of those. They waved beer and whisky bottles; two thirds of them were drunk and the rest were well on the way.

  In the background, the boilers of the factory floor chuffed loudly and steadily. Intermittent clicks came from the mechanical brain directly behind Marko. Arc lights in the ceiling blazed a misshapen glare across the floor, and the three-inch gold ring in his left ear glinted a hard refractive wink.

  “Are we, the workers, going to just stand there?” Marko yelled. He pounded one of the shoes, again. It was a steel-toed workman's boot with a pound and a half of gelignite stuffed inside it. “Are you just going to let them take from us our hands? Our minds” – he gestured the shoe at the machine behind him – “our manhoods?”

  “No!” shouted the crowd. Some of them swigged from whisky bottles.

  “Fuck them!”

  “Traitors!”

  “They are traitors!” Marko shouted. He was swarthy and dressed in black; six-five but very lean, with a flowing Gypsy moustache. “My friends, my brothers as men, they are traitors to us all! Because we are thinking, feeling men, not cogs in a machine! When you lubricate the chains, when you fuel the boilers - are the engines serving you? Or are you serving the engines and the plutocrats? As our forebears said–”

  “To King Lud!” one man thrust a bottle in the air.

  “Gen’rl Lud!” others yelled. Beer sloshed from the cups others waved. The arc lights flickered, and Theron Marko gave a broken-toothed smile.

  “The capitalist bastards can burn in hell, I say! We will not serve the machines! We will not serve the plutocrats who want us to be no more than subcomponents! Men are free men, and the engines be damned!”

  “They can't take our work from us without a fight!” yelled the same man who'd waved the whisky bottle a second ago.

  “We're no pieces of a fucking machine!” cried the man next to him.

  Marko thumbed a switch in the heel of the shoe he'd been pounding, raised its brother in his other hand.

  “Men! Real men! We fight the machines!” he yelled. “As our forebears did! As men did, and men will, until we can live as free men!”

  He turned, hurled the boots through an oiling port into the cogitator. Immediately it seized up, delicate gears and reactors clamping on the unexpected, hard objects.

  Some of the men at the rear of the crowd were already moving, and a lot of the others were looking backwards.

  Marko kicked the table over and moved past it himself.

  “Men, tonight we strike a blow – for men! Against dehumanization! For manhood, and freedom! Against the machines that are destroying us!”

  “King Lud!” somebody yelled. Several voices echoed him.

  In the thick of the crowd, now, although they were all running. Some were scattering amidst the floor of the automated factory, amidst machines that processed cotton and the ones that spun it. Defunct already, for the most part.

  “We're men, are we not?” the tall, lean Gypsy in black shouted. The short top-hat on his head slanted sideways; the thick-heeled boots gave him more speed as he ran.

  “We're men!” the workers yelled, as the cogitator exploded behind them.

  Nikolai Krushschev met him in an alley four blocks north of the factory.

  “You’re forty-five minutes late,” the Russian agent said. He was a short, blocky man in his late sixties, with thick white hair and a heavy grey trenchcoat.

  “I was busy.” Marko gestured with his head at the scene. A police dirigible was floating over it, its searchlights stabbing down. From this distance they were partly obscured by smokestacks and buildings, but you could see the refracted light, hear the bells of their ground vehicles.

  “Quite a ruckus.”

  “Every little bit helps.”

  With two fingers, Marko pulled a thin cigar from a pocket, flicked it alight.

  “Another machine destroyed. Some more encouragement,” he continued.

  “A few drunken unemployables enthused. Another bullshit trespass rally. You're worth more than that.”

  “I destroy machines,” Marko said. “It's what I do. You’ve got something more interesting?”

  “You’ve been sidelined here since that Tamil clusterfuck,” said Krushschev. “For two and a half years. Of course I have something more interesting. You know that eventually the hunts grow cold.”

  “For such a disciplined bunch of ordered people,” Marko remarked, “Imperials are remarkably slack about pursuit.”

  “You complaining?”

  Krushchev drew a cigarette, a Virginia Loyal, from his own coat, lit it, and started to walk.

  “You're giving me resources,” Marko said. It wasn't a question. “Adequate ones, this time. Or you can kiss my ass.”

  “The Count himself is involved in this,” Krushchev shot back. “It's his scheme. You have a blank check.”

  “I'll believe that when–”

  “See it,” said Krushchev, and handed Marko a wallet. Marko opened it, glanced at the contents. Blue and green Exchequer negotiables, denominations of two and five thousand.

  He flipped through the st
ack, feeling the quantity. At least a hundred. Squinted at the microleaf and the foil thread. Real, or the very best counterfeit.

  “Count Trotsky himself is involved,” Krushchev repeated. “This is his. You have the resources you need.”

  Marko halted suddenly, just as they reached the mouth of the alley.

  “Then this isn't another insignificant pinprick?” he asked.

  His handler stopped, a quarter-pace after Marko, and turned to glare at him.

  “You implying the Count dirties his hands with insignificant pinpricks?”

  “I'm going to need men, as well as money. For whatever this is.”

  “You'll have men. You've the gilt to hire others, and there's more where those are from.”

  “I've heard that before.” Marko was coldly serious now. “In Romania. Where that asshole priest abandoned us.”

  “We came back. Ilescu and his cronies hung. Remember?”

  “They should have hung in `52.”

  Krushchev shrugged.

  “They hung in `56. What's a few years?”

  “What's a few lives? They shot five hundred men in Unirii Square after that shithead reject from a worthless Georgia seminary decided it wasn't the time and pulled back.”

  “You asked the question,” Krushchev shrugged. “What's a few hundred men? There was turmoil. Isn't that enough for you?”

  “There could have been more. Half the city could have gone up if he'd pushed.”

  “We're pushing this one. The Count's been planning this for years. You weren't sent to hang out here by a blindfolded dart at a map.”

  That was news to Marko. He'd always figured the suggestion he go to New York City was that it was a big city where a man could hide, and no more.

  “You were taking me somewhere, and you just gave me enough money to outright buy a couple of these factories,” he said.

  “So put the fucking skepticism aside. You get to burn stuff. Isn't that enough?”

  “We were going somewhere?”

  Fifth Avenue was a crowded jam of traffic. Even at two in the morning, the vehicles were packed so tight they could barely inch along; horse-drawn wagons and coaches, steam-cars, a smattering of newer electrical vehicles. They passed a quadricycle, four five-foot wheels around a skeletal frame and a blocky generator; the rider, a goggled man in a brown suit, was pedaling in neutral, using the time to build up charge.

  “More and more of the fucking things every year,” Marko growled, with a gesture at one of the electricals.

  Krushchev stifled a curse as one of his shoes went into a mound of horse manure that someone had pushed onto the sidewalk.

  “Some say there's not enough.”

  A group of apprentice-enginemen came past them, stumble-hopping on triple-sprung pogo sticks. One of them landed on the edge of a pool of oil, slipped, had to kick out a brass-adorned rubber boot to steady himself. His buddy behind him gave a good-natured jeer.

  Before the Crash, the Upper East Side had been a nice area, home to the mansions of the plutocrats. The mansions were mostly still there, the ones that hadn't been destroyed in the fighting of the late `80s or burned in the Commune that followed, but they were slums now, overcrowded lodgings for the lowest grade of unskilled workers. Here and there was a remnant of vandalized ornamentation, a defaced plaque that might once have held some oligarch's name. Laundry hung from wrought-iron balconies, and off-shift men stood around doorways and entry steps, smoking bad tobacco and drinking from cheap bottles.

  A Metropolitan Police patrol came past, two narrow tandem-tricycles with a fifth man jogging behind. The cops zigzagged through traffic, on and off the sidewalk, ignoring the drinking proletarians. One of the tailriders glanced at Marko for a moment longer than seemed necessary; Marko returned it with an even glare. What the fuck you looking at, goon?

  They crossed Fifty-Ninth, where on the west side smaller factories gave way to the giant industrial estates of Park City. Buildings towered up, nine and ten storeys high, smokestacks jutting a hundred feet above that. A massive freight airship was nested between two of the stacks, unloading by the glare of electrical light. The stack of another building belched, flame and thick soot blasting twenty feet out of its opening.

  From a heavy steel ventilation grate came the grinding of the underway chains, massive conveyor belts that rumbled day-in, day-out to haul passenger cars under the city. It took a staff of three twelve-hundred-man shifts to keep them oiled and smooth.

  More men serving machines, thought Marko, and spat down the grate.

  “Mister? Got a dime?” asked a scrawny waif with a tin cup, as they waited to cross Seventy-Fifth. Steam-driven freight trucks rumbled past in front of them, rubberized tarpaulins covering their loads. “I gotta eat, mister. Got a dime?”

  “Go buy yourself a couple houses,” said Marko, and tossed him two of the intricately-foiled Exchequer five-thousands.

  The urchin studied the unfamiliar bills and spat.

  “Thanks for nothing, shithead.” He contemptuously ripped them in half, threw them away. “Food comes in wrappers.”

  Krushchev ignored the exchange, and rumbling machinery from the factories obscured conversation for the next two blocks. A cigar vendor wearing the elaborate livery of his brand, a tray against his chest, was good-naturedly bantering with a burly firefighter in a heavy, asbestos-threaded, red-and-black uniform.

  A pair of tipsy, middle-aged clericals in dull beige suits staggered up from a dive-bar, one of them tapping his pipe out onto the sidewalk.

  “Girls, girls? We got girls!” shouted a pimp's crier in a bright purple peaked-cap.

  “Dr. Mephistopheles’ Serum,” said a coatless teenager with bright green braces and a pouch of advertising flyers. “Cure anything, only two dollars!” He tried to shove one of the flyers into Marko's hand; he pushed the kid away.

  A pneumatic mail-tube, six-inch reinforced-glass segments between brass joins, emerged from a sidewalk switching-box into a building of low-grade shops and cheap offices.

  For a moment, the kaleidoscope of light, refraction and deep shadow became smoothly bright as the spotlight from an overhead dirigible passed over them.

  “Speelys! Speelys!” shouted a man with a pouch of handbills. “Porno speelys, just a buck! Porno speelys, best in the world, just twenty-five feet and a buck from you!”

  “One of the great cities of the world,” said Krushchev.

  “Wouldn't it be wonderful to see the place burn?” asked Marko.

  They passed Meer Park, the northeast and last remnant of the huge park that until about forty years ago had ruled the center of Manhattan. A beer vendor – and, doubtless, harder stuff under the flat – was doing a healthy business; a busker with a set of bagpipes played at the ornately-gated entrance.

  “More anarchy like this, wouldn't you think?” Krushchev said. “Look. Utter chaos. Everyone out for himself. Fighting” – he gestured at a couple of bruised workers being ejected from a bar by a huge black bouncer –

  “Stealing” – at a young man darting across the street, vaulting over the brass-and-chromed rear boiler of a steam-car, a pocketbook clutched in his other hand –

  “Whoring” – a pimp, accepting money from a grizzled-looking type in a cheap fedora -

  “And trying to raise hell” – a two-bit agitator whose broken-nosed face Marko vaguely recognized, shouting something incoherent outside the entrance to an underway station.

  "The more complex, the bigger the explosion,” Marko shrugged. “Set this place on fire? The riots of the `80s – let alone the `29 Surge – would be nothing compared to how this place would blow now.”

  “And replace it with dead stiffness. Martial law. The Metropolitans, Guard and Army would shoot on sight. Nobody moved without a permit. They didn't want a repeat of the Crash. I was here in `29. Remember?”

  Marko shrugged again.

  “Sorting out the pieces is your job. I just break things.”

  Past 110th, industrial slums be
gan to slowly ease into a more respectable neighborhood. Cops were on foot, in pairs and sometimes singly. Flashing display lights advertised a kinematograph parlor; a pair of buskers, fiddle and accordion, stood in a doorway with an open violin-case in front of them.

  A cop, rather than standing alert as he would have in rougher industrial country, was chatting with the driver of an electrovelocipede, with the checked-black-and-yellow generator-block and passenger-seat indicating a cab-for-hire.

  “Where're we going?” Marko asked Krushchev, as they crossed another underway grating.

  “To meet some people, I said.”

  They passed – one looked as though he was going to shoulder Krushchev out of the way – a pair of shaven-headed men in black, the silver double-lightning-bolt insignia on their collars denoting them as German mercenaries, one or another of the units on Federal contract below the Mason-Dixon.

  “You get all kinds here,” Krushchev noted.

  “Which people?” Marko persisted.

  Krushchev glanced back; Marko followed his look. One of the German mercenaries was arguing with a political pamphleteer they’d seen twenty feet back. His friend stood ready, fists already drawn, and a cop was pointedly looking the other way.

  “People who're going to fuck things up. People who'll help you fuck things up.”

  “Then let's get there. There's a reason we're walking, and not riding, twenty-plus blocks?”

  Joe Ferrer looked around the bar with distaste. More pseudos and wannabes, he thought. More talk and noise.

  No action, although that was what he'd been promised. Tonight was the night he'd meet serious people who were really fighting the System. Not pseudo revolutionaries who thought that passing out drivelous pamphlets about the Marxian dialectic, whatever the hell that was - a language variation? - constituted rebellion.