Kingdom: The Complete Series (58 page)

Mark shakes his head,
his shoulders slumping. “I don't know if I can do it.”

“
Physically?”

“
Not
just that. It's way worse than I thought it was.”

“
What
is
it then?”

Mark sighs, downs the
beer and tosses the crumpled can behind him. “You two have killed people,
right?”

Jamie shrugs.

Trespasser One nods.
“Yeah. You have too, right? During the whole Destroyer thing?”

“
That
was fight or die stuff, I mean like... pre-meditated, had a plan to kill
someone and went through with it.”

“
I
was a Trespasser,” says Tony, “that was essentially my job.”

“
Why?”
asks Jamie. “You starting to feel bad about killing the King?”

“
That's
the thing,” says Mark. “He can't die.”

“
We
think.”

“
He's
fairly certain – the same way that we just know what our powers and their
limits are: he knows he can't be killed.”

“
If
he can't be killed -” the Trespasser begins, and Marks cuts him off with a
raised hand.

“
He
can't
be. He can, however, be stopped – but it's going to be horrible.
Almost unfathomable.”

“
How
so?”

Mark opens his second
can and leans back.

“
You
guys know the legend of Prometheus?”

Jamie frowns. “Greek
guy? Roman?”

“
Something
like that. Greek, I think. Stole fire from the gods, gave it to man. His
punishment was to be chained to a rock, where every day a raven – or an eagle,
whatever, it changes in the telling – would come and eat his liver. It would
grow back by the next day, and he'd have to endure it all over again.”

“
Didn't
he escape in the tale?”

“
I
think so, eventually. I don't know, to be honest,” says Mark. “My point is –
that's
hell. Constantly suffering, being unable to stop it – and worse, being
unable to die. I'm talking about putting the King through an ordeal so terrible
that I don't know if I'll be able to live with myself.”

“
This
is what you were researching, right?”

“
Right,”
says Mark. “He's invincible. Can't be killed. Stronger and faster than me,
probably powerful enough to survive a nuclear strike. He told me that there's
no prison that can hold him. Nowhere we can keep him that he won't eventually
break out of.”

“
Seems
that way,” says Jamie, sipping his beer and pulling his jacket around himself
as the breeze picks up and the sky darkens.

“
Well,
there's one place I can send him. Theoretically. Provided that I can learn to
fly.”

The Trespasser sits his
beer down and leans forward, looking at Mark with an alarmed expression on his
face.

“
Hold
on a bloody minute -”

“
I
can throw him into the sun.”

“
What?”

“
Escape
velocity for Earth's gravity is seven miles per second. Provided I make him
miss the moon, he'll drift at constant speed until either the Sun or Jupiter's
gravity pull him in. He can't fly, and even if he could, the speeds and forces
required to break free of their gravity wells are so high it's pointless to
consider.”

Jamie crumples his
finished can. “Isn't Jupiter just gas?”

“
We
think the core is rock. Metal liquid hydrogen maybe. Unbelievably strong
gravity would crush him, and he'd drown over and over again in boiling acid. If
he misses Jupiter and ends up in the sun? Well, we don't think a nuclear strike
will kill him, but a constant nuclear fusion reaction as intense as the sun?
With that much gravity? Provided he
can't
die, he'd sink to the
middle
of the
sun
and be trapped there, burning, crushed, over and over for
eternity. For the next few billion years. By the time he finally escaped, the
universe would mostly just be brown dwarf stars and black holes. I'm talking
about sending a man – a human being – to hell, for eternity, to die over and
over and over again, alone, billions of miles from home.” Mark looks at them
both, his face gaunt and pale. Neither have anything to offer him. “I need to
know,” he goes on, “that there's no other option available. That there is no
alternative than to inflict this upon him. Because I will – if there's no other
choice. I will. It would take him, what, hundreds of years to even hit anything
at that speed. Hundreds of years just floating through space, alone, freezing
to death repeatedly. Unable to die.”

“
Mother
of god,” whispers the Trespasser. “That's a bit more extreme than
killing
somebody,
Mark.”

“
Prometheus,”
he whispers. “I hope against hope that he
can
die. But I'll never know.
If I do this, I'll never find out the truth. And I'll always wonder.”

“
I
don't see an alternative,” says Jamie. “Other than to let him carry on with the
Kingdom, till he eventually takes the world for himself and bends it to
whatever vision he has. I know, for one, that I could never sleep again knowing
that he's out there somewhere, on Earth. If this is the only way to stop
him...”

“
I
think it might be,” says the Trespasser. “Could you hit that speed? I mean,
you've never flown before; now you've got three days to learn to fly fast
enough to leave Earth?”

“
Whilst,”
adds Jamie, “presumably, carrying the King, who will be fighting you the entire
way. Not to mention: you won't be able to breathe past a certain height.”

The Trespasser finishes
his beer. “We could see about getting you a pressurised flight suit and some
oxygen cylinders? Plus – if you go into space, you need to come back down. That
means re-entry – you know, that thing that tends to set even specially designed
spacecraft on fire.”

“
I've
endured fire before,” says Mark. “Anyway, all of these are complications to the
main point. I reckon I
can
do it. The question is: should I?”

Jamie and Trespasser
One look at each other, then back at Mark. In unison, they nod:

“
Yeah.”

“
Then
I might as well start practising. How hard can it be -”

Mark stands up and –
before they can protest – throws himself off the building.

He doesn't fly.

The two men grimace at
the loud crash and the blaring of car alarms far below them. Jamie grabs the
Trespasser's arm and stops time for them both.

“
Jesus,”
he whispers. “Let's get him home before the King's men turn up, eh?”

“
Agreed.”

The squad stand around
a cleared space in the bunker, fluorescent lights stinging their eyes, holding
steaming cups of coffee. Everyone fights smirks as Jamie and Chloe help Mark
into his Trespasser Armour, now spray-painted a regal shade of blue with gold
lining his shoulders, arms and chest.

He turns to the squad
and rotates his arms, spreading them to look at himself. His armour catches the
light, the colour of the summer night's sky. Where the plates separate it shows
the woven fabric below; there are hints of gold and yellow, beaming like
sunlight through the cracks. Chloe and Jamie nod to each other, and then unfurl
the fabric bunched up at his shoulder blades.

A dark blue cape
unfurls, vast and billowing, catching what little breeze there is. It falls to
the back of Mark's calves, where even his Trespasser boots have been painted dark
blue to match.

“
Who
the hell did this?” he asks, impressed.

Donald and Stacy nudge
each other. “You're welcome.”

“
Woah,”
whispers Gary. “Turn really quickly, I want to see the cape swoosh.”

Mark obliges, grasping
one edge of his cape with his hand and turning, pulling it out and upwards. It
sweeps out at his back, glittering in the dim light.

“
Shame,”
says the Trespasser. “It's probably going to get the shit torn out of it.”

“
Yeah,
well,” sighs Stacy. “We can always make him a new one.”

“
He
should probably shave,” says Cathy. “Not very heroic having a hobo-beard.”

“
She's
got a point,” says Chloe as she brushes dust off his cape and stands back to
admire her work.

“
Before
any
of that,” says Jamie. “Let's see it in action.”

“
What,”
laughs Mark, “you want me to punch someone?”

“
No
– give it a go. Try and fly.”

“
In
here?”

“
Just
like; float or something, I don't know.”

“
I...”
he hesitates, and finds himself looking around at the squad. They're looking at
him with something in their eyes, a little ray of hope that he hadn't noticed
before. In the blacks of their eyes he can see himself, a tall, shining figure
in glistening armour, a cape the colour of midnight billowing around him. “Ok,
give me a second.”

He shakes the tension
out of his muscles, stretching like an athlete, and takes a deep breath.
Closing his eyes, he clenches his knuckles and focuses.

The squad watch as he
starts to shake – but nothing happens.

He lets out a tense
breath and opens his eyes, looking around embarrassed.

“
Give
me a sec,” he whispers, more to himself, and tries again.

He closes his eyes, and
focuses. It's different this time; the energy is coming from deep within him,
from his heart, not his mind. There is a hoard of tiny quantum-whatever
nano-somethings inside him, he remembers, that give him his powers: and they
work on intent.

Lost in his own
thoughts, he wills himself upwards; he's aware that his body is trembling with
the effort as the laws of physics are bent and broken inside him, but he
focuses himself on his will alone. He barely hears people shouting his name.

Then Jamie's voice cuts
through them all.

“
Mark!”

Mark opens his eyes,
and looks at them in surprise.

“
What?
What is it?”

They seem awfully short
to him.

Mark looks down, and
finds himself floating two feet off the ground.

“
Well
shit -” he manages, then the pain in his head catches up to him.

His nose sputters
blood, and he crashes to the ground, falling to his knees and holding his head,
cringing in pain. Jamie and Chloe catch him, helping him up as he wipes the
blood away. The squad are silent, unwilling to voice any doubt.

“
Get
this man a beer,” Jamie tells them. “Go on. Bring him a few, in fact.”

Stacy and Gary nod and
scuttle off.

Trespasser One steps
forward. “Well that proves it. You want to take a break, Mark?”

“
A
break?” he laughs, waving them all away. “I've got three days to learn this.
Get me those beers, I'm trying it again.”

Episode
9

Atlantic

The River Clyde laps
and splashes against its barriers, the only sound above the whistling night
wind. Lit only by the swollen moon, the riverside rustles as dark figures move
through it, emerging from the hedges and trees.

Trespasser One, his
half-burnt face hidden behind his mask, is the first out onto the exposed
riverside. He carries a stubby black shotgun, and keeps it ready as he scans
around. Finding nothing, he motions to the hedges, and a group of similarly
dressed people – definitely not soldiers – emerge. The first has the same
armour with a long coat draped over it, and keeps a revolver in his hand as the
Trespasser helps him over the side.

“
You're
sure the boat is there?” asks Jamie as he leaps onto the railings.

The Trespasser pushes
him over.

Jamie stifles a scream
as he falls, and rather than hitting the water he finds himself wrapped in a
soft embrace of fabric and foam, which he clambers out of. Seconds later,
there's a much heavier thump, and Mark struggles his way out of the same foamy
blocks. His cape trails behind him as Jamie helps him out, and the rest of the
squad follow shortly after.

Looking around, Jamie
sees the small boat that they are on, a cross between a speedboat and a dinghy
– a darker version of whatever the coastguard use. It's not quite black –
rather, it's the same colour as night, a murky blue-grey that's indistinguishable
from the inky water.

The Trespasser is the
last one to drop into the crates of foam, and rolls out without issue. He
checks the squad over in the darkness, counting them as he walks to the back of
the boat. Once there, he turns to Mark and claps his shoulder.

“
Ready?”

“
Ready.”

“
Then
let's go.”

He guns the motor, and
the water behind them froths and splutters as they accelerate down the Clyde,
heading towards Helensburgh and open water.

Towards the ocean.

Hours later, the boat
comes to a stop far from any land. Even in the pitch black of the open water,
Mark can barely make out the sparkling lights of the coast in the distance.
Above them, the moon glows through a thick layer of clouds. When he tries to
find the horizon, Mark can't tell where the ocean ends and the grubby sky
begins.

“
God,
this is hellish,” he mutters.

Nobody replies.

Stacy and Cathy are
asleep under the same blanket at the back of the boat, whilst Donald and Gary
sit on a bench together, deep in whispered conversation.

Mark pats Jamie's leg,
and his friend wakes up with a start.

“
We're
here, I think,” says Mark.

“
Ugh,
thanks for waking me,” Jamie groans. “Where are we? Is this limbo, or what?”

“
This,”
says Trespasser as he swaggers towards them, “is our launch pad. We've got less
than twenty four hours until the Agency drops a neutron bomb on Glasgow, and
Mark has yet to break the sound barrier let alone hit escape velocity. If we're
going to kill the King, he needs practice. Out here, we've got privacy and an
open sky.”

“
Can
I just point out,” says Jamie, “that if Mark falls unconscious or anything up
there then he drops into the bloody ocean; he'll drown.”

“
That's
why he'll be wearing this,” says the Trespasser, grabbing a bright orange life
jacket and tossing it towards Mark. “It inflates upon contact with the water.
You've got a lot of spare drink, too?”

Mark nods, holding up
two silver flasks.

“
Good,”
says Trespasser. “Then let's get started. Remember: don't
jump
from the
boat, you'll bloody well sink it.”

“
I
know, I know,” says Mark. “I need to get used to taking off anyway, it's the
hardest part.”

“
Wait
a minute,” comes a muffled voice from the far end of the boat.

They look over and in
the dim half-light, Stacy untangles herself from the mass of quilts whilst
Cathy still sleeps. Shivering in her combat armour, she staggers to the front
of the boat as it rocks with the waves.

“
We're
out of Glasgow, right?”

“
Nah,”
sighs Jamie, “this is the train station, Stace.”

“
Oh
shut up. What I'm saying is: Tony got us out of Glasgow for this so nobody
would hear Mark go supersonic – if he can; what's stopping us from getting
everyone else out in a boat too? Then we could just
let
the Agency nuke
the King -”

“
Neutron
bomb,”
the Trespasser corrects her. “Big difference.”

“
Whatever.
We could let them
neutron bomb
the King then. If we get all the people
out, what's the issue? You said a neutron blast wouldn't destroy many buildings
right?”

“
Right.”

“
So
why don't we get all the people out?”

“
Because
we only have one boat that I got it as a favour from a very old friend. I can't
swing a bloody freighter, Stace – which, by the way, is what we'd need. There
are thousands of people still in the city centre.”

Gary speaks up from the
back of the boat. “I'm wondering why we're going back at all.”

“
Because
thousands die if we don't, son,” says Donald sitting beside him.

“
Yeah
but if
we
die trying to take down the King then what the hell are people
going to do? Just nuke every city he moves to?”

“
Neutron
-”

“
Aye,
Tony, we know, we know.”

“
Gary's
right, in a way,” says Mark, taking a sip from his flask. “If we fail, the
world is going to have to find another way to deal with the King – and we don't
know if there
is
any other way.”

“
If
they can't find a way,” says the Trespasser, “then that's it. It's over, and
he's won. He'll enforce whatever law he wants upon the world based solely on
his power, and seven billion people will just have to suck it up and try and
get on with it.”

“
Exactly,”
says Mark. “So I'll be back in a while guys; I'm gonna go try and break the
sound barrier.”

Jamie gives him a
playful punch on his armoured chest.

“
Be
careful, man.”

Mark pulls down his
face mask and loosens up his muscles.

“
I'll
be fine.”

His cape catches the
wind blowing from the ocean, and in the cold spray he begins to lift, slowly at
first, off the ground, focusing in silence. The squad watch him lift and
disappear into the air like a balloon, drifting ever upward.

“
He's
not going that fast is he?” asks Stacy, peering into the night.

“
No,”
says Jamie.

Mark keeps his eyes
closed as he ascends, the wind buffeting him as he climbs higher. Mist and rain
begin to dampen his skin, and it feels as though the sky around him is weighing
him down, trying to drag him back to earth. His focus comes and goes, and for entire
minutes at a time he is lost in the sensation of struggling upward against
gravity.

It feels to him as
though his entire body is a hot air balloon; when he focuses with a clear mind,
he fills with fire and shoots upwards. Yet if he tries too hard and strains his
mind, he loses focus and begins to fill with lead.

Holding his drunken
thoughts with clarity is like trying to hold water in his hands. For every
second he manages to see through the mist and train his mind on flight, another
thought barges in and demands attention. Fear pulls his thoughts off in one
direction, keeping him distracted.

Taking a breath and
grounding himself in the present moment, Mark opens his eyes. It makes no
difference; everything is darkness.

He's drifting, floating
in a bottomless abyss, unable to tell what way he's facing, where land is,
where
home
is.

Fear swells like a cyst
in his gut, and with shaking hands he takes a silver flask from his belt and
raises it to his lips, welcoming the familiar burn of the whiskey. The fire in
him blazes as though he is drinking oil.

A minute later, he
passes through the clouds.

There's silence in the
boat asides from Cathy's snoring, and the gentle splash of the waves against
the hull. Jamie leans back against the side and looks up; he can't see Mark
anywhere.

“
What
are we going to do after all this, Tony?” he asks.

The Trespasser, sitting
on the boat's edge with his shotgun on his lap, lifts his mask to show his
scarred face. Stacy stirs, looking up at him.

“
You
mean after the King is gone?” asks the Trespasser.

“
Yeah.
When everything goes back to normal.”

Stacy laughs. “I don't
know if anything is
ever
going back to normal.”

“
As
close as it'll get then. I mean, after the King; then what?”

Trespasser One leans
back, sighing. “That's
if
we beat the King. A lot depends on that
drunken idiot in the sky right now.”

“
At
least he's
our
drunken idiot,” says Stacy. “We were bloody lucky that
the fire came to people like us – and not more people like the King.”

“
It
would always have picked people like us. The Protector gave us our powers based
on our intentions when it arrived on earth,” says Jamie. “I was desperate for
time when it hit me – I needed time to save Chloe.”

Trespasser One strokes
his chin. “Then I wonder if the Destroyer chose people for their intentions too
– no wonder the King got powers.”

Stacy shrugs. “There'll
always be a job for us, I guess.”

“
Speak
for yourself,” says Trespasser One. “I don't have any powers.”

“
Yeah,
but this is your job anyway. You were fighting bad guys before this, and after
this is over, there'll still be wars to fight. Us lot? We're going to left
standing about doing nothing.”

“
I
don't know about that,” says Jamie. “There's a lot you could do with your
power, Stace. You can manipulate machinery, god, you could do
anything.”

“
That's
the problem with having a power,” says Stacy. “If I don't use it, then what's
the point? It's like my life has already been laid out for me now.”

“
I
don't like to plan too far ahead,” says Jamie. “But the only reason I even went
after the King in the first place – where this all started – was because I
wanted a better life for Chloe and me. That's what I intend to do when this is
all done. Just go somewhere quiet and enjoy life. Maybe travel a bit.”

“
You
could all do anything,” says the Trespasser. “Anything at all.”

“
I
said that to Mark not so long ago,” says Stacy.

“
Said
what?”

“
Imagine
what we could do; if we only stopped getting in our own way.”

“
That's
beautiful; in the 'I don't get it' kinda way.”

“
I
just mean -” she starts, and stops, frustrated. “I dunno. Like; aren't you ever
afraid
of what you could do with your power? Imagine what Mark could do
if he wasn't ashamed of the whole alcohol thing. He could be like the King but,
like,
good.”

“
He
already is.”

“
Yeah
but he could change so much more if he just stopped being afraid of what he's
capable of. We all could. I mean; the King isn't, and look what he's done. Mark
doesn't have to be afraid of people, he could be the kind of leader we just
don't get these days. ”

Jamie looks up at the
sky, still unable to see Mark.

“
Maybe
you're onto something there, Stace.”

Mark is climbing,
accelerating as he leaves more and more behind. His fear drops away as he
passes through the clouds, and where there was once a knotting anxiety in his
muscles there is now strength, growing by the second.

His eyes are open as
the clouds fall away behind him, clear air streaming from the corners of his
shoulder as the cape billows out behind him. The moon is full tonight, casting
silver light over everything. Whistling wind buffets him this way and that,
pulling him to one side.