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    Fortune and Glory
    Fortune and Glory
    Fortune and Glory
    Ebook61 pages43 minutes

    Fortune and Glory

    By John Birmingham

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    About this ebook

    Three adventurers bold take on cannibals, pirates and a city of the dead in this ripping tale by best-selling author John Birmingham. Set in S.M. Stirling’s epic storyworld of The Change, ‘Fortune and Glory’ drops readers into the dead heart of post-apocalyptic Sydney.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Birmingham
    Release dateNov 20, 2017
    ISBN9781641861618
    Fortune and Glory
    Author

    John Birmingham

    John Birmingham was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, but grew up in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. Between writing books he contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines on topics as diverse as biotechnology and national security. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.

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      Book preview

      Fortune and Glory - John Birmingham

      1

      The old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian Highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She placed third on corrected time in a Sydney-Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she had been a plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tycoon, one dotcom millionaire, and a pirate by the name of Pete Holder .

      He was a nice pirate though, if you asked him. He only ever stole from the other pirates and when he wasn’t doing that, he was often rescuing damsels and hunting hidden treasures, as the better sort of pirate is wont to do. Commendable pursuits which had furnished him fortune and glory and Jules and Fifi.

      The fortune he’d salted about here and there. A little in the Royal Vault at Darwin. A little more on his account at the Townsville Arsenal. At least half in the First Republican Bank of Tasmania. And a few little trinkets and baubles buried in watertight capsules on lonely, unpeopled islands up and down the Great Barrier Reef. The glory, of course, he carried with him everywhere. Sometimes it even got a little ahead of him and it wasn’t unknown to hear tales of Cap’n Pete that had escaped and run wild and were enjoying themselves hugely at the dockside taverns of Hobart or Fort Lyttelton well before the man himself turned up to help them along with a few more drinks and a little adventurer’s license with the literal truth of things.

      Jules and Fifi meanwhile were crouched below the armoured gunwales fore and aft as Pete steered the Diamantina up the harbour through the dark hour before dawn. Water as black as oil hissed by as he spun the wheel a quarter turn starboard to take them around the rusted hulk of an old guided missile destroyer. The warship had sunk close to shore and her bow knifed into the night sky, silhouetted by fading stars and a quarter moon. The dead city of Sydney held itself closely around them. No camp fires burned where he could see them, which might be a good sign, or very bad news indeed. On the final approach they’d slipped past three large encampments on the northern beaches, spaced at least ten miles apart, and before they’d weighed anchor in Townsville, Shoeless Dan had warned him of a large tribe of Biters living in the cliffs around Bondi.

      Took down a whole salvage company out of Hobart, was what I heard, Pete, he warned over mugs of Old Scrumpy.

      Yeah, but we’re not out of Hobart, FiFi had scoffed.

      She wasn’t scoffing now. As the first birdsong reached them from the overgrown slopes of the inner harbour, Fifi swept the shoreline and the waters behind them with the Diamantina’s swivel-mounted harpoon launcher. The antique whale killer took all three of them more than a minute to load and prime and they couldn’t leave it primed to fire for too long, lest the thick rubber slings that would send the heavy javelin shrieking away, became stretched and lost some of their snap. He’d intended to fit a spring-loaded launch mechanism at the Arsenal. Only half a minute to load, and by just two crew members at that, and another two hundred metres effective killing range, but it was a new technology and the price was too steep, even for the legendarily fat purse of Cap’n Pete Holder. Indeed, the legend of his fat purse may have worked against him there. Sometimes, it turned out, having a reputation as a very well-to-do pirate wasn’t altogether helpful. For instance, when negotiating terms with the Colonel’s First Armorer.

      FiFi crouched over the harpoon. At the bow, Jules used a standard pair of old binoculars to sweep the ridge lines of the north shore, home of the three Biter Clans whose fires they’d seen as they ghosted past, a few miles out. She scoped up and down the shoreline, lowered the glasses, and took in the landscape as a whole. Nothing. The northern side of the harbour had gone back to brute nature harder and faster than the south. All those garden suburbs. And the Zoo of course. The Zoo had been over there too. Jules crab-walked over to the port side gunwale and recommenced her surveillance. The haunted towers of Potts Point were visible as negative space where they blocked out the still bright constellations of the southern sky. The greater density of cement and steel and glass on the southern shore held back the wild with more success, but

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