“Are you saying that in all the time you served in the Household Cabinet, you never learned what happened in the Value System?”
“The Value System was merely an item in the income statement. I doubt anyone but TK and his odious bodyguard Wingfield know the full details.”
“Well, you know the details now. I still don’t understand why TK fogged you.”
“I don’t know why he fogged me. My guess is he discovered my intelligence network and feared I would reveal the mystery of disappearing surplus.”
“He’s a dangerous, capricious bastard then. My girlfriend Sarah-Kelly Newman danced with him on the Krossington’s yacht Neptune. She told me he was pure quality, a real gentleman, which is telling because she no more admired the sovereign class than I do.”
“I expect she would say the same of The Captain. Both he and TK are highly intelligent, articulate people.”
“And now those two highly intelligent, articulate people are hunting us. They aren’t going to give us an easy time.”
“The Captain will not tell TK about our escape. He will not tell anyone. The Ultramarine Guild is like a pirates’ club. If they suspected he had put their interests at risk by permitting escape of value from such a place as this, they would execute him.”
“You’re wrong there. The ultras broadcast news of escaped foggers to their network—my pal Mirror-Face got picked up that way. It’s in their collective interest to catch Fog on the run.”
“I do not believe The Captain will do that.”
Lawrence did not waste time arguing. His mind roamed over the dangers ahead, not just the marsh but the hundred miles of public drain to London, the hundreds or thousands of ultramarine eyes that could be looking for them. He stopped the thoughts. They were useless. What they needed was conversation to divert them until dusk. Well, here he was with a man who had worked in the deepest recesses of sovereign privacy—there would never be a better chance to educate himself. He consciously relaxed, willing all the stress and fatigue out of his body to prepare for the coming night. It was good just to lie back and yarn with a friend. They might never get another chance.
“Tell me about Castle Krossington.”
What Pezzini described so amazed Lawrence that at first he did not believe it. Only after pressing for details and tactfully testing those details later did he come to believe Pezzini was telling the truth. Castle Krossington was no vast palace such as the czars of Imperial Russia had enjoyed. It was actually a village where Wilson Krossington had bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse during the last years of the Public Era. His descendants still lived in the same house. The vaunted Krossington Institute was the former village primary school. The Science and Technology depot did indeed exist—although in the Krossington yard of Portsmouth, not Castle Krossington— and was just as full of stunning artefacts from the Public Era as legend held, including a complete jet airliner. That airliner really was as big and heavy as a ship, with a sheet metal skin as smooth as the body of a whale. The Fatted Masses had packed inside it as in a theatre, as proved by the seating plan. The Krossingtons had no need of any palace. Pezzini was not aware of any outsider having been invited to Castle Krossington. Displays of power happened in the capital of the Lands of Krossington, the town of Haslemere. That was where the Land Council met, society postured through fancy-dress balls, there were racing tracks for horses and cars, as well as casinos, nightclubs and bars. The Krossingtons inhabited a self-created world. It was not unusual to meet scions of landed clans who had never set foot outside the frontier and had not the slightest intention of doing so.
Lawrence asked about the Krossington’s oil fields.
“How do you know about them?” Pezzini asked. He was obviously taken aback.
“The oil fields date back long before the Glorious Resolution. There are geology books describing the oil basins of the Island of Britain, although such books have to be tracked down. They show the best wells located in what is now Krossington territory, so… It’s a matter of logic. They’re important today because most Public Era oil came from wells far beneath the sea, or else from places no one would think of going nowadays.”
“You are well-read. Not many glory officers know that. What do you want to know?”
“Do they still produce a lot of oil?”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘a lot’. By Public Era standards, they issue barely a trickle, by our standards forty thousand barrels per year generate substantial income at a yield of eight ounces of gold per barrel.”
“That’s the weak joint in Krossington’s armour, their oil trade. Follow the oil to the gold, follow the gold to the treasury.”
Pezzini chuckled and shook his head.
“Tell me, Pezzini. What are your views on the Glorious Resolution? Do you think the sovereign class plotted the end of the Public Era to destroy the Fatted Masses and gain the world?”
“No. That is an old myth spread by the National Party and the SUN Party before it. The collapse of the Public Era was caused by the foolishness of the people and those who exploited them. They faced problems that
