Guards - actual Royal Guards, with their big black hats and red coats and everything - paraded me, in an astronaut suit, through the streets of London. On either side of us, hundreds of people, thousands of them - stared at the astronaut that had just plummeted into their city. They looked dirty, scared, and beaten down. Some looked angry, on the verge of rioting. Others seemed vacant, as if shell shocked. They had it worse than the people in Chicago. There thirty thousand of them packed into three square miles of city, with hardly any food or water. I kept my eyes down, unable to look at the dirty-faced children running beside me.

Soon I was in a carriage - an actual carriage, with a horse pulling it and everything. A man sat across from me in a sharp business suit. He had a pinched, bird-like face and thin brown hair. He looked incredibly pompous.

"Mr. King. I am Duke Asterly of Plymouth. And I'm the acting King of England. I have a few questions for you -"

"What about the Queen?" I asked, "and all of her kids? They're not dead, are they? There's a line of succession, and I've never heard the Duke of Plymouth being high on that list."

Lord Asterly looked sour. "It doesn't matter. I'm the only person with any noble blood on this Rock, so I'm the King. We can argue about it, or you can shut up and drink this water."

Asterly produced a bottle of clean water and shook it. I snatched at it like a baby reaching for a bottle, desperate to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth.

"There we are. Now. I want a briefing on the situation in Chicago. I want to know your numbers. How many are you, who is in charge, what are your resources like-"

"We've told all of this to General Eastfield," I said, panting. Water dripped down my chin.

"And now I want to hear it from you," Asterly said.

"So you can overrun us and take everything we've got?" I said.

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Asterly closed his eyes. "So I can keep my people alive. Please."

I stared at him, noting the genuine fervor in his eyes. He was tired too, and hungry; I could see the skin on his cheeks sagging. If he'd been starving with his people, he couldn't have been that bad of a King.

"We've got plenty of food. For us. About five thousand people. I don't know about 30,000 Londoners. What we don't have is water."

"We have the ponds in Kensington Gardens and what’s left between the dams of the Thames. They'll keep us stocked with water, and our Royal Scientists are working on finding out ways to preserve it. But we don't have food. We have Biologists working on growing plants, but we don't have enough power to keep grow lights going and there's no sun. Or I don't know, there's light but no sun I can't see. I'm not a bloody gardener, I'm a petty bureaucrat. But for whatever reason I'm in charge of keeping London alive, so I have to try," Asterly said. He frowned, then looked out the window of the carriage as we rolled towards Parliament. "Tell me, boy, is there hope? Do you really think that if London and Chicago connect, somehow, we can avoid the inevitable?"

He looked at me intently, like he carried the hopes of an entire city of desperate people on his shoulders.

"We'll make it work," I said, "we'll do the best we can."

An explosion sounded outside the carriage. The horses whinnied, then reared up, nearly knocking me out of my seat. People yelled outside, and the put put put of a failing plane propeller sounded from the sky.

Asterly and I looked at each other and then scrambled out of our seats. I squeezed through the carriage door in my space suit and spilled into the street.

We were on London bridge, looking out over the Thames. Above us a single trail of black smoke burned a line through the sky.

An ancient looking propeller-plane fell through the sky over the river, directly over our heads. It whirred as it crashed downwards, its left propeller flaming. Crowds gathered, pointing at the figure struggling against a seatbelt in the driver's seat. The plane crashed into the water and immediately started sinking.

"God blast it," Asterly said. He stepped towards the edge of the bridge, threw off his over coat and shirt, and dove into the water. I ran to the edge, watching the plane sink and smoke, and noticed what was painted on the wings.

A red dot, faded as a drop of blood.

The rising sun of Imperial Japan.