The team lieutenant ordered a couple of guards put on the wreck. He explained to his men that it would be left overnight for the petrol to evaporate. In the morning, a team would come out to drain the remaining petrol from the tanks and cut the bodies of the unfortunate crewmen free. After that, the wreck would be taken into 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 other young lady was apparently alive but unconscious. She was thrown across the saddle of one of the troopers, who promptly lifted her dress so his pals could savour the fact she wore no underwear. Then a yell from the team lieutenant halted the tomfoolery.
*
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 two hours and seventeen minutes according to Donald’s Rolex, which had apparently survived the crash without harm, 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 arsehole of this Earth where incest is not just a word, 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 had a bloody wonderful number 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 Cooper. Battery George had fired a warning salvo of six rounds by radar at 16:18. The warning salvo was out of mercy, recognising that the offender was probably confused by the ground fog. The offender ignored the warning, so Battery George followed up with a ranging salvo and then a further salvo which is believed to have straddled the offender, as the engines were heard to cut out, the usual signal of surrender. The offender descended rapidly and crashed into a tree within the property of the client, the Dasti-Jones clan. On attendance at the scene, the undersigned recorded two survivors, one slightly injured and one seriously injured, and six fatalities, of which one had survived the crash and then self-executed by gunshot. Four cadavers were left in the wreck due to excessive leakage of petrol. Full debrief of the light casualty is appended with this report. Full details of the other survivor, fatalities and manufacturer’s serial numbers from the wreck will follow by close of play tomorrow 6th October.
“Okay you, let’s see your passport,” Haighman said.
Donald drew out the leather-bound citizen of London passport from his jacket, or at least, the tatters of jacket that had survived the crash. Haighman flipped through the passport with a thumbnail, taking note of various entry and exit stamps. Donald thought this an outrageous invasion of his privacy but kept quiet.
“A well-travelled man. You’ve been to the Isle of Man, the Lands of Krossington and the Isle of Wight.” He picked open the first page of the passport where Donald’s personal details lay. Something there obviously surprised him—he jolted and seemed about to speak, but then thought the better of it. He dictated the details to Cooper and then snapped the passport shut and slid it back across his desk.
“What was a commoner doing aboard a sovereign’s flight?” he asked.
“You don’t need to know.”
“It might be useful if I did. As things stand, you’re looking at being discharged to the public drains as infestation, since I doubt the Krossingtons will want you back. Why should they cough up good gold when His Decency Cecil showed you a man’s duty?”
The point was not lost on Donald. Why indeed should Tom Krossington pay good gold to free a coward?
“Cecil Tarran-Krossington was a fool whose arrogance caused the crash. The pilot wanted
