Christopher Nuttall: The Fall of Night

“Good,” Briggs said. There had been several marches where the crowd had fought police officers to free criminals, for whatever reasons made sense to the vast human body; this march, so far, hadn’t turned nasty. “Get them to the vans and transported to the police station.”

He flicked through the images from different CCTV cameras. The march organisers had predicted that over ten thousand interested people would come; it looked to Briggs as if they had been out by an order of magnitude. The elaborate programs scanning the images faster than the human eye could begin to grasp were reporting well over a hundred thousand people in the nearby vicinity, including identifying thousands of people known to the police though Facial Recognition Software. Some of them were people who had had a brief run-in with the police, some of them were famous figures; he spotted two MPs, one MSP and five candidates for the local elections, coming soon. The Mayor of London was there, glad-handing with his constituents, including some that Briggs would never have expected to see together…

Before the world had gone crazy.

One large body of marchers were very openly homosexual; they wore garish clothes and marches with exaggerated movements, designed to shock as much as attract. A second body — several bodies — of marchers was composed of Muslims, marching in a bizarre combination of groups, united temporarily by their dislike for the Americans and suppressing their dislike for the homosexuals. Iran had put a dozen gaysexuals to death the week before the Iran War had begun; the homosexual marchers could expect nothing, but death under Islamic rule. Briggs knew, even if the government ensured that the general public knew little about it, about the young Muslim men killed by their peers… merely for being gaysexual. To Briggs, a practical man, it made no sense; why were two groups with so much reason to hate each other allied?

The answer made itself clear as the first American flag burst into flame. Everyone knew that North Korea had been rattling the sabre — again — in Korea and the South Korean Government had screamed for help. Despite America’s overstretched position in the Middle East, the American Government had organised the hasty dispatch of an American force… ignoring the protests from Europe and Russia alike. American spokesmen had pointed to the ongoing Chinese Civil War; Kang Seung Jae, the Dictator of North Korea, had to know that North Korea was finally coming to the end of its existence… and appeared to be preparing one final gamble.

Everyone also knew that North Korea had nukes.

Page was tapping instructions into one of the consoles. “Sir,” he said, “is that her?”

Briggs peered past the ‘BUSH; WAR CRIMES,’ RAPE KIRKPATRICK NOW’ and the ‘NO MORE BLOOD FOR OIL’ signs, and nodded. “That’s her,” he said, shortly. “Daphne Hammond, otherwise known as the Leader of the Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress, cast-iron stone-cold bitch. Those stunning looks, Harry, conceal a mind that is cold and very calculating.”

Page cocked an eyebrow. Daphne Hammond was around thirty and looked twenty, with long blonde hair, a balcony that someone could perform Shakespeare from, and stunning blue eyes. She was also a trained lawyer, a woman who had outlasted at least two husbands, and privately considered to be the most dangerous woman in the world. He had been on the receiving end of her tongue more than once; as the leader of the Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress, she was formidable… and perhaps destined to be Britain’s second female Prime Minister. Certainly, her name had been put forward as a possible candidate…

Briggs shook his head and wondered; what was Daphne playing at? She might have been blonde, but she was no dummy; she had brought together a coalition that included factions that wouldn’t be impressed by her good looks, or would regard a woman in power as an abomination. The Front had smaller sections all over Europe; as a mainly European Party, it might even have more clout than the figures suggested.

“That’s definitely one of the troublemakers,” another operator injected. Briggs pushed the issue of Daphne’s actions to the back of his mind — it wasn’t as if anyone had any proof that she was involved in anything other than political actions, even if her two husbands had met early graves — and turned to the console. The Facial Recognition Software was certain; the CCTV cameras had locked onto a known troublemaker, someone who had caused more than a few riots… and somehow never jailed. “That’s Baz Falkland, all right. I’m not sure if he is chatting up that girl or if he is up to something.”

Briggs scowled. “Have supporting units moved up,” he said. If it did turn nasty, a lot of people were about to be hurt. “I want…”

Page interrupted him. “Sir, the stewards just muscled him off,” he said. Briggs blinked; he hadn’t known that the stewards had either the knowledge or the determination to move the troublemaker along. Baz Falkland was trouble, everyone knew it; a reputation that had started in Manchester and moved through many of England’s cities. Only sheer luck had saved him from a jail term. “It looks as if they were pretty rough.”

Briggs nodded. “I want additional constables in the area,” he said. He would shed no tears for Baz Falkland, but if the stewards started muscling innocent people around, the police would have to intervene quickly, even if it meant his career. “And someone reassure the Superintendent; everything is under control.”

It said something about the general opinion of the Superintendent that no one even blinked at the scorn in his voice.

“I would have thought,” Caroline Morgan remarked, as her shoulder-mounted camera sensor tracked a set of marchers carrying BUSH MUST FACE THE ICC signs, “that beating the President Bush horse is just a little outdated by now. It is 2024, after all.”

“But it was President Bush who started the American grab for the Middle East,” Daphne Hammond said, her voice almost girlishly innocent. Caroline would have been fooled, perhaps, were it not for her instincts; Daphne Hammond was bad news. She seemed young, and sincere… except for her eyes. They were cold and hard, as if she had seen everything a thousand times over, and hadn’t been impressed the first time. “Even now, the Americans are fighting to hold down the Middle East and extract the last drop of oil from its soil.”

Caroline almost tuned the speech out of her mind, knowing that it was all carefully prepared to impress people who were already inclined to distrust America. According to Daphne Hammond, after CIA operatives had carried out the terrible atrocity of 9/11, the Americans had used it as an excuse to first invade Afghanistan, and then Iraq, before luring the Europeans into first Iraq, and then Sudan… before cutting off their supply lines and leaving General Éclair to take the blame and kill himself, incidentally weakening EUROFOR to the point where it could not provide the counterbalance to America… and then luring Iran into a war. Americans had bombed Israel, for some reason that had only made sense to them, and then allowed their own soldiers to endure two nuclear attacks… and a long and bloody occupation of the Middle East.

As history, it was utterly grotesque.

“Thank you,” Caroline said, as soon as Daphne had finished. “But tell me, what do you really think?”

Daphne’s eyes flickered with rage, just for a second, and then the mask was back in place. “I think that the European compliance with the Americans has gone on long enough,” she said. “It wasn’t anything like enough to evict almost all of the American forces from Europe after that terrible incident in Mildenhall, but instead we have to created a United Europe which can provide a strong and positive voice in the United Nations towards creating a strong and dignified Earth.”