Chapter 23

Portsmouth. June the same year.

It was hot out and Peter was lazing on the bed, half asleep, when he heard the front door open. “Oh bum,” he muttered. He was supposed to be doing revision for his final exams. He tensed, listening to see who it might be. It was more likely to be his mother than his father, but whoever it was was early, he hadn’t been expecting either for another hour.

He frowned as heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. That wasn’t his mother, and his father would normally have gone into the lounge first, and straight to the liquor cabinet. What was he doing coming up stairs?

There was no time to waste. He quickly slipped his feet into some sandals and sat down at his desk, where his revision homework was open and waiting for him. He was a little worried now. Why was his father coming upstairs? He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. He pretended to work. Maybe his father just needed the bathroom. His door opened and Peter tensed, his heart suddenly racing.

“Have you still got your air pistol?” Robbie asked his grandson from the bedroom door.

Peter looked up from his homework in surprise. “Oh, hi Granddad. Yes. I think it’s in the loft.” He shrugged, his heart rapidly slowing as he discovered it wasn’t his father after all. “Not used it in ages.”

Robbie nodded. “Can I borrow it please?”

“Er. Yeah. Sure. Have to wait until Dad gets home. “He knows where it is. He put it up there.”

Robbie was disappointed. He didn’t particularly like his son-in-law, and the feeling was mutual. He also wasn’t sure he trusted the man. Not for certain. “Don’t worry about it then. It’s not important enough to bother your father.”

“Okaaay,” Peter looked at his grandfather curiously. “Why did you want it? I’ve got some pellets somewhere round here I think.”

“Get them put up in the loft with the pistol then. In fact, it might be a good idea to get the whole lot out of the house sooner rather than later.”

“Why? It’s not illegal is it?”

“Technically no. At least I think not. But there was a Political Officer in town this morning harping on about recidivism, anti-revolutionaries, and other such cobblers. You know how much trouble there’s been ever since the government cancelled last month’s general elections.”

“Yeah. Dad thought it a fuss over nothing. He said Earth First were gonna win anyway so why bother, and since in his opinion they ought to win, it would have been a waste of money to hold them in the first place.”

“Odd.”

“What?”

“That your dad still calls them Earth First and not Truth And Freedom.”

Eighteen-year-old Peter looked at his grandfather, his mouth dropping open in surprise. “You know, I’ve never thought about it before. Why is it ‘the Earth First Government’, but the party is ‘Truth And Freedom’? I never really understood that.”

Robbie sank down onto the edge of the bed and Peter spun his chair around from his desk to face him. “It goes back to when the previous government fell,” began Robbie. “That was nominally a Tory government, but due to external pressures it became a cross party coalition. Then soon after all those kids were picked up by the Confederacy at the Buckingham Palace garden party, they lost a vote of no-confidence in the house, and the Prime Minister was forced to call an election.

“He lost the election. Can’t remember the numbers, but I seem to remember it wasn’t by much. But he lost it to a coalition of parties, groups and individuals calling themselves Earth First. Many years ago, a faction of UKIP broke off to become GBIP, basically the same, just a bit less radical. They renamed themselves Earth First, then later Humans First because they wanted to distance themselves from the terrorist attacks that were being committed in mainland Europe and in North America all under an Earth First banner.

“After the coalition was formed, it returned to the Earth First name, but at this stage it was still just the name of the coalition, and by osmosis the name of the government.”

“So Earth First isn’t a party as such?”

Robbie smiled slightly. “Not exactly. Not then anyway. When they won the election though, some of them decided to actually reform or re-create the Earth First Party by formally merging a number of the individual parties and independents. It was a bit of a mutt right from the start.”

“Mutt?”

Robbie grinned. “Heinz Varieties?”

At Peter’s blank look and shake of the head, Robbie sighed. “Where did you grow up?” he asked with a soft laugh. “It means a mongrel. A hybrid. A mixture. In this case you ended up with parties like UKIP which was a right wing party, trying to ally itself with the Humans First, a soft right party, and the Green Party which was, and still is, a left of centre party. Along with various other smaller parties and single independents from right across the political spectrum from fascist to communist. It worked at first, after a fashion, but the government was only in office for eighteen months because of rules that came in during the Cameron-Clegg government years ago, that basically set when the elections were to be held for the rest of the century.”

“Why?”

“It was a badly worded law. Carelessly worded at any rate. Until that point governments could be a maximum of five years, but could be shorter. There was one in the early seventies that only lasted a few months because the PM of the time had a small minority, and he thought he could do better by going back to the country. What the new law basically said was that all governments would now last five years. Prior to that the PM could call an election whenever he or she liked, with just four weeks’ notice. This new law stopped that and said that all governments were exactly five years long, unless special circumstances forced them out early, or the they got enough MP’s to agree to a vote in the house to allow it. And believe me, they often didn’t. What it meant was that a Prime Minister couldn’t just call an election because he felt it was convenient to do so, he had to ask permission of parliament.

“Unfortunately part of the law was badly worded, and in effect it set all the election dates until the end of this century in stone. What was intended was that if a there was an early election, the five year dates would then be recalculated, but because one particular clause of the act was badly worded, when George Brown’s government fell after just three and a half years, and the Earth First government was formed under Neil Conway, instead of them getting a full five year term, they only had an eighteen month term.

“The new Earth First Party won that second election, and with quite a big majority I seem to remember, but there was also a huge intake of new politicians from what would turn out to be an extremist right wing party. In combination with the fact that there were a lot of by-elections that were also producing Truth And Freedom party MP’s, the whole government lurched hugely to the right. Thing is, no one knew they were TaF at first. Most people thought they were just Earth First MP’s. A year or so later Conway, who was totally opposed to the TaF, was forced out of office by a manufactured scandal. This brought in one of Thorn’s toadies, a wonderful gentleman by the name of Peter Lester as PM. The man who banned the Confederacy, and the CAP cards. About that same time, Truth And Freedom revealed itself as a fully fledged political party. Before that people thought of it just as some sort of pseudo-political organisation.

“Could have only been months after that I suppose,” Robbie paused for a moment in thought, “mmm, could have been a bit longer, Lester could have been PM for over a year maybe,” he paused thinking back, “but whatever, Graham Thorn stabbed him in the back, politically speaking, and conned his way into number ten, and that’s where we are today.”

“Is it true Thorn killed someone?”

“I doubt he did any actual killing himself, but everyone believes he ordered it. You’re talking about Lucy Cadwallader?”

“Dunno. There’s stories going around school that he’s killed a few people.”

“Hmm. There’s no real doubt in my mind, and in many others, that he did order her murder. And it’s also strongly believed he ordered other killings as well. Some people believe he was at least partially responsible for the attack on Queen Beatrice just before last Christmas.”

“She wasn’t hurt, was she?”

“No. She was damn lucky though. The bomb went off early, so would have just missed her had she been on time, but of course as you know she was running a few minutes late anyway. More crucially though, it failed to go off properly so the damage and injuries were minor.”

“Oh. So the Government is called Earth First because that was what they were called when they were elected?”

“Basically. There are really only two types of people who still call it Earth First. Those who want to hide the fact that Truth And Freedom are really an extreme right wing party, and to cover it with a veneer of respectability left over from the initial Earth First; and those who want to pretend it’s still what it was, and hope, against all signs to the contrary, that it will go back that way again. Sadly, I think your dad is the former.”

“Did you vote Earth First granddad?”

Robbie shook his head. “No. Right from the start they were rabidly anti-Confederacy, though for many different reasons; sometimes radically opposing and contradictory reasons. I was, and still am, pro-Confederacy.” He looked at his grandson and frowned slightly.

“You do know what the Confederacy is? Don’t you?”

Peter nodded. “I think so. I remember being told about it at school years ago, and for a while it was talked about, but then it just seemed to fade away. I don’t remember people talking much about it at all after that.”

“That was because one of the first thing Conway’s EF government did was to ban any mention of the Confederacy in schools and colleges and in the press, then during the second EF government under Peter Lester they also banned the Confederacy from formally recruiting in the UK, and later forced them to close all their offices. When it was discovered that the Irish Republic was still pro-Confederacy, and people from Northern Ireland were going to the south to get CAP cards and get collected, that border was closed, and all CAP cards were banned. Hence the low levels of troubles that have started erupting in Northern Ireland again. Anyone who had a CAP card was required to turn it in and be registered. In fact though, most people just destroyed them instead and didn’t register.”

“Why?”

“People may have had to give them up, but they didn’t want to go onto some government database saying that they’d had one in the first place. It was about that time that social media began to be much more closely monitored in this country. Getting onto foreign owned or based web sites is much harder than it used to be.”

“Oh. Yes I’d noticed that. Most of the instant messaging apps have been banned as well.” Peter paused for a moment. “Did you have a card, Granddad?”

“Yep.”

“What did it do?”

“Well, what it would have done, was allow me to be collected by the Confederacy, and also to become a citizen within the Confederacy.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

Robbie smiled slightly and shook his head. “No. Unfortunately this is where some of the hatred and misunderstanding with regards to the Confederacy, and to CAP cards, came from. To get a CAP card, you had to be tested. The testing was done in such a way that afterwards you cannot remember much about it, and what you do remember you cannot easily talk about. Some form of protective hypnosis I expect. It meant you couldn’t prime someone else, tell them what to say or do.

“After the test, you got a CAP score. That was,...”

“What does CAP stand for?” Interrupted Peter. “I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere, but I’m not sure.”

“Capacity, Aptitude, Potential, I believe.”

“Oh, okay, thanks. Sorry. Go on.”

“Um, oh yeah, well the CAP score itself is a number between nought and ten. I was told by my tester that it’s physically impossible for anyone to get zero or ten, and that those who do, have actually got fractionally off that, but it is rounded to zero or ten.”

“So someone who actually only got nine point nine will be rounded to ten?”

“Sort of. CAP scores go up in units of point one, and are made up of lots of sub-scores. When combined, I’ve been told they can end up with any number of digits after the decimal point, so they need to be rounded. A nine point nine-four score will be rounded to nine point nine, but a nine point nine-six will be rounded to ten. Crucially though, a nine point nine-five goes down to nine point nine, not the ten that some might expect. The point is though, that anyone who gets a ten, has probably actually got a 9·96 or something like that. A perfect ten, and a perfect zero, are, I was told, a physical impossibility.”

“Has anyone ever got a ten?”

“Three I believe.” He paused in thought. “Okay. Right, so you’ve got your score. Now what exactly does that do? Well, just having the card, and therefore a score, means you’re allowed to be extracted. If you’ve never been tested, you cannot be extracted, no matter what score you might have got had you been tested. Sadly it’s what the scores mean that’s where difficulties lie.” He paused and stretched his back, rolling his shoulders. “You know your maths, right?”

“Yeah?”

“If the minimum is zero, and the max. is ten, what is the average?”

“Five?”

“Correct. The testing is deliberately designed so that the average score is five point nought. That’s not the whole story though. The Confederacy only wanted the best people. So they set a limit. They set a lower bound of six point five. No one with a score below that was to be allowed to be extracted. Luckily the people negotiating pointed out that that wasn’t entirely acceptable, nor totally suitable, so now people with lower scores can be extracted, but they have lots of limitations in what they can and cannot do. Those people can’t go in their own right, they have to be taken by someone with a higher score. Anyone with a score of six-five or higher can take at least another two people with a lower score with them, but those people become the property of the higher score citizens. Historically that would have been called slavery, which is just one of a number of reasons why people like Thorn and his thugs claim to be against them.

“All children under the age of fourteen, from both the sponsor and the ‘slaves’ can also be taken, without any limitations as to numbers. So one person with a score of six-six, could take two people with lower scores, plus his own under-fourteen-year-old children, plus all the under-fourteen’s of the other people he might take. In theory I suppose, he could end up with a dozen or more children, all under fourteen years old.”

“One of our teachers says those other people were taken to some of the Arab countries as sex slaves. That’s not true is it?”

“No. This is where some of the bad vibes really came from. The lower score people, the ‘slaves’, were taken primarily as breeding stock. In other words, if a man got collected as a citizen, he would take two women with him, and their only job, or primary job at least, was to pump out babies as fast as they could while he went off and fought this alien enemy. The Swarm.”

“But how do you know any of that’s true? How do you know they’re really going into space? How do you know there’s this alien swarm? How do you know? Have you had proof of any of it?”

Robbie smiled sadly. “Yes, actually. Unfortunately it’s not something I can just show you.” He pointed upwards. “Up there are millions of humans, living, fighting, surviving. And dying. Trying to prevent Earth from being invaded. They won’t succeed, not entirely, but hopefully they will buy us the time to set up proper defences and to resist properly when the time comes.”

“So when will they come? These aliens I mean?”

Robbie frowned. “They were originally expected a few months ago. Last autumn I think, so they’re late. The current estimate is about twelve to fifteen months from now.”

“But what is Thorn doing to help?”

“Nothing. And that’s another problem. He has actually made it so bad, that if they landed here in Britain, right now, they would overrun us in days. Hours probably.”