by Toby Frost
Four places from Morgar, the Yorkshire pudding disintegrated, prompting uproar, hilarity and more drinking. The admiral’s soggy boat wriggled up the table at the head of a tributary of gravy, and bumped against Morgar’s plate.
‘Does anyone want this?’ Morgar asked, holding up the toy soldier, and the answering roar told him that he had made a very bad mistake.
‘He’s docked!’ Colonel Pargarek exclaimed. He pointed at Morgar. ‘Let the harbour-master lead the drinking!’
A wallahbot approached, carrying an ancient green bottle in its pincers.
Morgar didn’t like the look of this: drinking wine was no problem, provided that it was not fizzy, – CO2 bubbles were highly intoxicating to the M’lak race but he was not certain that this new drink was wine at all.
‘Chateau Perrier, 1987,’ Captain Bargath announced. ‘It was a very good year for carbonated water. We keep a cellar, you know.’
The wallahbot unscrewed the cap and some of the water fizzed out, which pleased the lancers. By now, a sizeable group had gathered to watch the fulfilment of the ritual; even the two fighters had forgotten their duel and were standing on the top table, reverent in their silence.
‘Now then,’ Bargath said, picking up an alarmingly large glass, ‘the correct formation of the first five toasts –’
A horn blasted. Morgar looked around, wondering what grim new aspect of the ceremony it entailed. It took a moment to realise that the others were as puzzled as he.
A lancer stood at the end of the hall. He cupped his hands around his mandibles and roared, ‘Brothers!’
‘Uh?’ Pargarek grunted as if woken from sleep. ‘What’s this?’
‘I bring news from the Parliament,’ the new arrival called. ‘A full offensive is to be launched against the lemming men within the month. We are to make ready to join the fleet heading to Andor. Where others have failed, the Ravnavari Lancers will take the war to the bestial Yull and show them how real soldiers fight. Gentlemen, we are going to war!’
The bellow that answered him threatened to break the rafters. ‘Thrash the filthy rodents!’ Bargath yelled. ‘Teach ’em who owns this galaxy!’
‘Ride on!’ cried Pargarek. ‘Ride on to victory!’
‘Thank the ancestors,’ Morgar muttered. The lancers roared, overcome by the prospects of dishing out a self-righteous walloping. Morgar seemed to be in the eye of the storm. They’ll all go, he thought. It’ll be me and the wallahbots. I’ll be able to design the new restroom facility without one of these lunatics vomiting all over it every twenty minutes. ‘Brilliant!’ he shouted. ‘Go, lancers!’
A hand dropped onto his shoulder. He looked around.
‘Good lad,’ Bargarth said. ‘I knew you were the chap for the job. I knew there was more to you than all that arty-farty nonsense. General mobilisation! You’re got steel, my lad! We’ll ride out together, you and I. We’ll cover the walls in trophies!’
Bargath slapped Morgar on the back, as if to encourage an infant to cough up a foreign body.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Morgar replied.
* * *
‘How do you mean, a game to win?’ Captain Fitzroy sat, or rather lay, in an enormous wicker armchair in the dockside Colonial Club. In the chair opposite, her colleague and occasional paramour, Wing Commander Shuttleswade, was unconscious. ‘It’s all done and dusted, Smitty. And guess who won? I’ll give you a clue – she had the same name as me.’
It hadn’t been hard to find Captain Fitzroy: her bar bill was almost visible from orbit, and the trail of exhausted young men made her even easier to locate.
‘The games ended ages ago. We thought you’d gone off to…’ she glanced at Rhianna, and back at Smith ‘… see the sights. Anyhow, we found a new venue. A young men’s rugby club, as chance would have it. Forty-eight young men, eighteen to twenty-two, so gauche, and yet so charmingly naïve. I’ve been schooling them in the ways of righteousness. Pull up a chair.’ She smiled at Carveth. ‘You too, short stuff.’
On the far side of the club, a M’Lak in the uniform of the 6th Colonial Hussars burst out laughing. Ten years ago, people would have looked down their noses at such conduct, knowing that the M’Lak did not have noses down which to respond. Now, Suruk’s people were needed, and anyone crazy enough to want to fight the Yull was valuable indeed.
‘We had some problems with gangsters,’ Smith said. ‘But we’ve cleared them up.’
The bodies of Rom and Ram Crane had ended up with Nalgath the Scrapper and Mark Twelve, and would provide enough raw materials to replace the cutlery-limbs of hundreds of scrapbots.
‘Smashing,’ Captain Fitzroy replied, gesturing at a wallahbot for more drinks. At the window behind her, a shuttle rose from its pad into the cloudless sky and was lost against the setting sun. No doubt it was carrying a platoon to the ships in orbit.
‘We’re shipping chaps over to Andor, twenty thousand at a time,’ she said. ‘Fancy using the Chimera as a troop carrier! It’s positively demeaning. Still, we’ll be getting a crack at the Yull at last. High Command wants everyone out there. The lemmings are restless, it seems.’
A frigate hung in the sky, half a dozen service-blimps pressed against it like piglets at a sow. Rockets rose from the city, as if the towers of the M’Lak quarter were launching into space. Knowing the Morlocks, Smith thought, it was quite likely that they actually were.
‘This is it, isn’t it?’ said Captain Fitzroy. ‘Our empire against theirs, to the death. They’ve got the numbers, and they’ll never stop coming. The question is whether we’ve got the men and the skill to stop them.’ She sighed, and suddenly she looked like an old teacher instead of a head girl who had raided the liquor cabinet. ‘It’s going to be the end of an empire, no matter what. Best get your booze and bonking in while you still can. On which note,’ she added, brightening, and she leaned over and prodded Shuttlesworth. ‘Shuttles, we need to make use of the map table. I need you to show me where your Big Dipper is.’
Shuttlesworth opened his eyes, and for a moment he looked pleadingly around the room, like a man about to mount the scaffold. Then he said, ‘Right, Felicity.’
‘Good stuff. Best not keep the captain waiting.’ She stood up and straightened her jacket. ‘Adieu, Smitty and Co!’
‘I know I should look out for the sisterhood or whatever,’ Carveth said, ‘and I realise her interests overlap somewhat with mine, but my God that woman scares me.’
Suruk pulled chairs over and Smith fetched the drinks. The waiterbot, a spidery, multi-limbed machine, reminded him of Mark Twelve. Smith turned, glasses in hand, and seeing his crew made him afraid. Soon they would be fighting the cruellest, most demented creatures in the galaxy. Captain Fitzroy had been right, he thought: no matter what, an empire was going to fall.
PART TWO
ANDOR: First planet in the Andorian System: Type 16 semi-civilised world.
Principle land usage: Forest and/or jungle.
Notable Settlements: Riviera (now ruined). Mothkarak Castle. Equeria (alien settlement).
Aliens: Equ’i, pseudo-mammalian sentients (indigenous natives). Society graded as Class V: backward, no serious threat. Yull, pseudo-mammalian sentients (non-indigenous). Society graded as Class IX: backward, extreme threat.
Climate: Sticky.
Notable game: Ravnaphants, Carnotaurs, Gorefangs, Bloodworms, Death Lemurs, Caustic Pigeons, Quanbeasts, etc. See supplementary volumes for full details.
Further notes: Warzone. 43rd to 111th armies amalgamated to form 112th army. Reinforcements expected from Ravnavar. Heavy armour redirected to Ghast Front.
Encyclopaedia Imperialis, updated digital insert.
* * *
In order to achieve victory, you must understand not just the enemy, but your own soldiers. On arriving at base camp, I was greeted by a human officer.
‘You,’ he said to a M’lak adjutant. ‘You take um nice lady for heap big tour, yes?’
Wordlessly, the alien led me around t
he perimeter. After a while, I felt it necessary to explain myself.
‘Me big general,’ I began, tapping myself on the chest. ‘Me boss lady, many warriors.’
‘Oh heavens,’ the M’Lak replied. ‘Not you as well. I realise that we’re somewhat ill-equipped here, but they could at least send one officer who doesn’t talk like a four-year-old.’
It turned out that he had been a stockbroker before the war. I began to suspect that the command structure required a bit of work.
General Florence Young, Memoirs.
General Difficulties
The first thing Smith saw of Andor was the barrier net. Tiny satellites dotted the windscreen like brass buttons on a velvet shirt, and between them, tens of miles wide, hung impact nets made of cable.
It made sense, as much as anything on the Lemming Front made sense: a spaceship hitting the wire at speed would be sliced apart before it could get through to the planet beyond. Given the Yullian love of driving into things, it was a very sensible precaution.
‘Fishnet,’ Suruk said from the back of the cockpit. ‘I approve.’
They slipped past the net, into the atmosphere, sinking through layers of sodden cloud. The surface of Andor was covered in a thick layer of vapour. ‘It’s the planet breathing,’ Rhianna said, but to Smith it looked more like sweat.
‘It’s a bloody pressure-cooker,’ Carveth said, and she put the windscreen wipers on. They filled the cockpit with their creaking.
Down below, something moved through the forest, leaving a trail of brown devastation behind it like an exhaust. Smith lifted the binoculars. It was a wild ravnaphant, a fairly small one, shovelling trees into its maw. Someone long ago had introduced the beasts to Andor, and they had fitted in well – given that the rest of the native life was lethal, it was hardly surprising.
Base Camp lay at the edge of Lake Trondo, at the bottom of a hole blasted through the forest canopy. It spread out beneath them, a picnic rug on a mass of green, and as they sank down half a dozen missile pods tracked their descent. Most of the buildings below were temporary, put up by the army or dropped in from transport shuttles, but a few dated back to happier days. All had been reinforced with sandbags. Automated guns turned slowly on their turrets, scanning the forest for enemies, their clockwork already starting to rust in the hot, thick air. The Union Jack had been braced with a crosspiece to stop it drooping: this low down, there was almost no wind.
The John Pym touched down on all four legs at once, which was a good omen. They collected their gear and gathered at the airlock. ‘Ready?’ Smith asked.
‘Okay,’ Rhianna said. She was in her version of practical clothing: a headband and shapeless, floor-length dress that made her look like a tie-dyed chess piece. It made Smith feel queasy with lust. It was as though she gave off some aphrodisiac, or perhaps it was just the cloud of fragrant smoke that tended to follow her around.
The door swung open. Outside, men and M’Lak carried boxes of food and ammunition between them. A column of soldiers jogged past in body armour, dripping sweat. A sergeant-major with a face like a moustachioed beetroot ran bellowing behind them. Troopers piled cases of rockets as if they were logs and, beside the pile, a Sey tracker crossed off items on a clipboard. It looked like a cross between an ostrich and a small dinosaur.
Smith walked out first, and a curtain of heat met him. For a moment he stood at the bottom of the steps, getting used to the warm, airless air, and then a woman stepped out and saluted.
‘Jaizeh, chaps! Captain Smith, I presume?’ She was in her late forties, wiry and intellectual-looking. She wore army uniform, but no armour. ‘Captain Selena Harrison.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Captain Harrison.’ Something was wrong here, Smith thought: among all the chaos, something was missing.
A tiny brass wiper flicked across the lenses of Captain Harrison’s glasses. ‘It’s a pleasure. Welcome to Andor. This way.’
They started off from the John Pym, across the prefab landing pad, and Smith realised what was not there. He couldn’t hear machinery. Everything was being moved by hand; there were no autoloaders, no wallahbots to do the heavy work.
‘We’ll outfit you for forest fighting,’ Harrison explained. ‘You’ll need to go geared up all the time, I’m afraid. You never know when the furries will try it on.’ Captain Harrison gave Rhianna a suspicious look. ‘You’re not really equipped for fighting here,’ she said. ‘For one thing, the lemmings will hear your flip-flops.’
‘Oh,’ Rhianna said. She thought for a moment, bent down and kicked her sandals off. ‘Is that better?’
‘Yeah, perfect.’ Harrison glared at Smith, who couldn’t see why she looked so annoyed, and quickened the pace. ‘Captain Smith, General Young wants to talk to you in person. You’re a lucky man.’
‘Thank you.’
‘She’s the reason we’re still alive,’ Harrison said. ‘The rest of you chaps are welcome to make yourselves at home. Now, once you’ve been certified fit for action, we can get you armed up.’
One of the automated guns gave a burst of fire. Smith froze, hand half extended to his rifle. A creature about the size of an albatross dropped out of the sky. It landed with a loose thud about twenty yards away.
‘Mosquito,’ Harrison said.
Smith followed her up the path towards the most heavily fortified of the older buildings. It looked like something from a western: the white façade was chipped and the plaster that had not been blasted away was cracked like dried greasepaint.
We’re falling apart, he thought suddenly, and the thought startled him.
‘You first,’ Harrison said, and she swept her arm out towards the door.
The inside was dark and cool. Smith stood in an entrance hall. At the far end, an argument was reaching its conclusion. A tall man with an angular face stood under a tiny camera-blimp like a thought-bubble, ignoring a soldier who seemed to be trying to send him away.
‘Come on, come on!’ the tall man said. He wore a breastplate under his suit jacket. ‘It’s a simple question. Ah!’ he exclaimed, noticing Smith, and he strode across the hall.
‘Wait a moment,’ Captain Harrison began, but the tall man ignored her.
‘Lionel Markham, We Ask the Questions,’ the man said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m Lionel Markham. I present We Ask the Questions, the Space Empire’s toughest current affairs programme.’
‘Oh really? I’m Captain Isambard Smith. Pleased to mee –’
‘So, Captain Smith, what’s really going on here? Who’s in charge here, that’s what I know that people want to know.’
‘Well, General Young, I suppose.’
‘So you’re not sure?’
Harrison stepped forward. ‘Come on, that’s enough. He’s only just got here.’
Markham nodded. ‘So you’ve only just got here and you don’t know for sure what’s going on. What does that say to the rest of the Empire?’
‘I –’
‘Come on, come on! It’s a simple question, yes or no.’
‘What?’
‘Yes or no? Yes or no? Yes or no?’
Smith opened his mouth, Harrison advanced, hand raised to grab the camera-drone, but Markham turned on the spot and directly addressed the machine. ‘So there you have it. The world asks: “Is the Yullian war still a runner, or is the whole front about to collapse?” The Imperial Army is meant to be standing sentry, but is it too sedentiary to prevent a lemming entry this century? You’ve been watching We Ask the Questions. I’m Lionel Markham, being clever so you don’t have to.’
Harrison motioned Smith towards the doors at the far end of the hall. ‘This way, Captain Smith,’ she said. ‘And bugger off, Lionel, there’s a good chap.’
Smith walked into the room. It was large and, by the standards of the Yullian Front, luxurious. Five people – four humans and a M’Lak – sat around a collapsible table on wicker chairs, drinking gin. Smith recognised one of them: the woman at the head of the table,
her hat on the formica before her, was General Florence Young, scourge of the lemmings and victor of the Battle of the River Tam. General Young was at least seventy-five and very small. Had it not been for her skill, the whole front would have been overrun the previous year, when the Yull had launched their most frenzied assault on the Space Empire yet. To the men, Florence Young was a friendly, great-aunt-like figure: to the lemming men, she was a demon in wrinkly, lavender-scented human form.
‘Captain Smith,’ said General Young. ‘Do come in. Tea or gin?’
Smith took a seat. ‘Tea, please.’
‘These are my colleagues,’ General Young said, gesturing down the table. ‘Colonels Hopkirk, Butt and Frobisher. And this is Lorvoth the Bloody-Handed, High Warlord of Zhukar.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the M’Lak.
A man loomed out of the shadows. Smith paused a moment, surprised: it was W, the spymaster. He wore his usual tweed jacket and smelled of mothballs as well as tobacco. W strode over, tall and gawky, and lowered himself into an empty seat.
‘Have you ever seen this man before?’ General Young inquired.
‘Oh yes,’ Smith replied. ‘Loads of times.’
W shook his head quickly.
‘Oh, him? No, never seen him. I must’ve meant someone else.’
W rubbed at his pencil moustache. He looked weary: shadows attached themselves to his face like dirt.
General Young nodded. ‘And if you had worked for him, possibly in a top secret capacity, would you have been responsible for a number of secret operations, including the assassination of Ghast Number Eight and the recovery of the Dodgson Drive, neither of which officially occurred?’
‘Um,’ Smith replied. ‘Probably. Both. Not?’
Captain Harrison brought the tea. ‘You’re I/C distribution, Harrison,’ said Young. ‘From now on in this operation you will be known as “mother”. Percolate and circulate.’
Harrison poured out the tea.
‘You have an impressive record for disinformation, Captain Smith,’ the general said. ‘Your reputation for counter-intelligence is quite remarkable.’