No Man's World: Omnibus

by Pat Kelleher

  Pat Kelleher

  Broughtonshaw

  Easter, 2012

  PROLOGUE

  “They Told Me He Had Gone That Way...”

  THE GREAT BATRACHIAN ironclad tumbled into the crater, its tracks gouging broad ruts as it slid down the steep slope towards the tangle of alien jungle below. Poisonous barbed vines lashed its ironbound hide as the Ivanhoe ploughed through them, ripping them out at the roots and dragging them along with it.

  Trills, howls, roars and whoops of alarm reached a crescendo as the intruder blundered through the undergrowth.

  The great steering tail broke free and tumbled through the jungle on its own lazy trajectory, spewing hydraulic fluid as it spun.

  The Ivanhoe plunged on, every impact slowing its momentum, the ironclad only coming to a halt as it collided with the buttress root of a huge trunk with a thunderous, hollow thud.

  Overhead, the canopy thrashed as startled creatures bolted in terror and a tense silence descended. The jungle seemed to pause.

  No predatory growl rose from the intruder to challenge them.

  Half hidden by the dappled shade and torn foliage, the intruder clicked and groaned. Large leafy fronds sprouted from its tracks, caught in the track wheels. Shredded leaves and broken boughs lay strewn over its hull. The drivers’ visors hung shut and the ironclad’s great guns lay listless and bowed.

  It was just another dead thing. Nothing to fear.

  The sounds of the jungle began to trickle back into the silence, timid at first, but slowly gaining in confidence. Soon, the raucous chorus resumed.

  Emboldened, scavengers loped through the undergrowth towards the ditched ironclad, perhaps sensing easy prey.

  Inside the belly of the tank, Alfie Perkins opened his eyes.

  Although the festoon lights had died, shafts of light punched their way in through pistol ports, boring down through the smoky haze that filled the compartment, criss-crossing the dark space like searchlights seeking out a Zeppelin.

  He coughed as he breathed in the smoke. It smelled of burnt grease. He dragged himself into a sitting position, so his back was against the sponson door. The spasm of coughing set off a chain reaction of other pains, which only subsided when he stopped hacking. He was slumped in the gangway. He looked up to see the starboard six-pounder gun and Hotchkiss machine gun, its spent cartridge casings rolling around him with a tinkle of brass as he moved.

  To his right, filling the centre of the compartment, the huge Daimler engine ticked to itself as it cooled.

  His hand was covered in blood that had collected in a sticky pool on the gangway planks. In a surge of panic, he checked his body. His forehead felt tender, swollen. He shifted his weight and sharp pain flooded his right leg. His hand groped down the leg of his coveralls. Another jangle of pain. Broken, probably. At least he’d still got his leg. For the moment. He felt something warm and sticky below his knee. It was blood, but not enough to cause the sticky pool around him.

  The blood that lay thick and pooled about him on the gangway wasn’t his.

  He saw a crumpled shape further up the gangway.

  “Lieutenant?”

  There was no answer. He waited a moment for his nerves to stop screaming, and for his eyes to adjust. Lieutenant Mathers, the Tank Commander, was crumpled on the starboard gangway, having fallen from the commander’s seat at the front, his leg twisted and caught awkwardly under the bucket seat.

  “Sir?”

  There was no answer. Alfie struggled to recall what had happened. It would be easier if the pain in his head would stop. The last thing he remembered was the fire extinguisher flying towards him.

  Frozen pictures, like shell-flash afterimages, burst in his mind. The Ivanhoe toppling over the edge of the crater. Falling. Mathers. A gunshot. The pyrene fire extinguisher. Blackness.

  He looked at the slumped body in the gangway. He saw the glint of the Webley revolver and the sheen on the blood as it spread from Mathers’ head. Alfie remembered now. Possessed by some alien parasite, in a moment of lucidity, the lieutenant had shot himself.

  Alfie tried moving again, but couldn’t find the strength. He searched around, his hand groping among the scattered ammo boxes and tools within reach. It closed around a wrench. Steeling himself for a moment, he banged on the side of the sponson with what strength he had and yelled with as much gusto as he could muster.

  “Help! In here! Anybody?”

  Panting, he waited for a reply. None came.

  He tried again and again, each time weaker and with less conviction that there was anyone outside to hear. Eventually he lost his balance and his broken leg twisted. He screamed, and when the pain had passed, he closed his eyes.

  His voice low now, almost like a prayer: “Anybody.”

  He woke up. Minutes later? Hours? He didn’t know. The only thing he knew was that he didn’t want the Ivanhoe to become his tomb, as Mathers had known it would become his.

  Alfie breathed deeply of what faint traces of petrol fruit fumes were left to dull the pain, and then hauled himself to his feet. He waited for the nausea to pass. He pulled the handle on the sponson hatch and pushed. The hatch gave a little, but didn’t open. He put his shoulder to it and shoved. It gave a little more, but recoiled back. There was something against it outside, preventing it from opening.

  Feeling his strength ebb, he kept his weight on his good foot and shoved again. This time light briefly flooded the compartment, and he could see a mass of russet leaves.

  Gathering his strength, he shoved the hatch again, roaring. This time it gave, swinging open. Alfie lost his balance, tripped over the lip of the hatch and fell out, screaming as he caught his broken leg.

  His fall was cushioned by the tangle of shrubbery in which the tank had come to rest. He shook his head, trying to clear the fug of pain that threatened to smother him.

  A deep, mucus-addled panting filled the air. Alfie felt waves of warm, foetid breath wash over him.

  He twisted his body to see, barely twelve feet away, a huge mouth, lips pulled back in a snarl, long serrated incisors dripping with drool. From deep within its thick matted pelt, two dark eyes regarded him with seeming contempt as it crouched on its six legs, pondering.

  A growl began building in the back of its throat.

  Never taking its eyes off Alfie, the creature let out a roar and pounced.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “At Some Disputed Barricade…”

  THE SMALL, FLIMSY flying machine puttered across bright blue space, defying possibility; the persistent putter of its tiny engine echoed through the vast vault of the alien sky, belying its small size, like a skylark rising to sing.

  In the forward cockpit, Lieutenant James Tulliver wiped the speckled build-up of oil from his goggles and revelled in the cold air. Fresh and sharp, it made him feel more alive than he ever did on the ground. Beneath the scarf wrapped round the lower part of his face, a broad grin spread until it almost ached. This was why he’d joined the Royal Flying Corps. At a thousand feet, the two-seater Sopwith 1½ Strutter had the alien sky all to itself, while winged creatures wheeled and soared on unseen currents below.

  Lieutenant Everson had sent him up on a recce flight out to Croatoan Crater to check on the stranded tank crew. It was a simple flight. It had to be; compasses didn’t work on this Godforsaken world. He had to fly by sight, from landmark to landmark, and that meant keeping below the cloud cover as flocks of cumulus drifted along overhead. While Everson rightly valued the aeroplane, he was as a needy child with a cock linnet in a cage who never let it spread it wings. Tulliver resented that. What the hell use was a grounded pilot? Granted, the alien sky wasn’t without its dangers. There were jabberwocks, mountain-dwelling wing predators, and the huge atmospheric jellyfishlike Kreothe and a dozen other vicious air raptors, any one of which could reduce his bus to kindling and rags. But then, dodging airbursts of Archie on the Western Front hadn’t exactly been a joyride either.

  On top of that, for the last s
everal days, dud weather had kept him grounded. Still, he was up now. He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Maddocks, his observer-come-gunner, seconded from Lieutenant Baxter’s Machine Gun Section. It always paid to have two pairs of eyes up here, although his own were keener than most; things seemed brighter, sharper, as though he had just got spectacles after being myopic for years.

  It was all thanks to the petrol fruit fuel the bus now ran on. Some hapless Tommy had distilled it in secret. The resulting alcoholic concoction proved to have undesirable side effects, and the commanders had declared it unfit for human consumption, although it did solve their dwindling petrol supply problem. It was another bone of contention between Everson and himself. Ever since they had discovered that the crew of the ironclad tank HMLS Ivanhoe had suffered from the psychoactive effects of its fumes, Everson had been more than a little suspicious of Tulliver, and had him up before Captain Lippett, the Medical Officer. Tulliver had explained at great length that the confinement of the crew within the tank for long periods had increased their exposure to the fuel vapours and heightened its psychotropic effects. He, meanwhile, was in the open air and travelling at almost one hundred miles an hour. Whatever vapours were expelled from the engine were whipped away by the aerial winds. The MO’s examination seemed to bear out this hypothesis, and reluctantly Everson had let the matter drop.

  Tulliver decided to keep his new acuity to himself. He didn’t want to be grounded, and besides, what harm could it do?

  Maddocks was pointing down. A couple of hundred feet below them, a pair of jabberwocks were engaged in territorial aerial combat, luckily too busy to notice the Sopwith.

  Ahead, Tulliver could make out the depressed green circle of the jungle-filled Croatoan Crater. Almost a mile across and over two hundred yards deep, it was darker than the surrounding jungle, its bowl-like depression obvious and ominous. The strange strip of faded, discoloured foliage that cut across it was quite marked from this perspective. It didn’t seem quite natural to Tulliver’s eyes.

  They came in low over the jungle surrounding the great depression. Without warning, the air came alive with cracks and bangs, like gunshots. Tulliver pulled back on the stick, gaining height.

  Across the jungle canopy, huge vine-like things—whipperwills, Maddocks called them, anywhere from twenty to nearly a hundred feet long, sensitive to a combination of air movement and shadow— cracked above the trees, like whips. The fast-moving shadow of the Sopwith set them snapping ravenously behind them, like a living wake.

  The treetop field of whipperwills gave way to the ruins of the Nazarrii edifice, which had belonged to a long-dead colony of Chatts, the race of intelligent arthropods that dominated this planet. It now lay completely destroyed after the Fusiliers’ encounter with the Dulgur that inhabited it, and which had cost them the tank. The ironclad Ivanhoe now lay scuppered somewhere down in the crater. The crew had refused to abandon it and the two members that had gone over with it.

  Tulliver banked the plane and circled over the brush leading to the lip of the crater. With his eyesight heightened by the petrol fruit fumes, they were easy to spot. He waggled his wings. Six small people waved back. A seventh Tulliver took to be the Urman guide, Napoo. He seemed to be intent on some kind of work, squatting on the ground, ignoring the plane. Tulliver turned and nodded to Maddocks, who leant over the side and dropped the tin. As it fell, he saw the tank crew run towards it and then lost sight of them as he pulled out of the bank and set a course back to camp, following the line of the Strip that fortuitously pointed back to the trenches.

  “Hold onto your lunch!” he bellowed out over his shoulder.

  Tulliver performed a few rolls, simply for the joy of it, and then pulled the stick back, climbing up to meet a small flock of clouds. The bus soared over the bright white fairy-tale landscape. Up here, above the clouds, Tulliver could almost believe he was back on Earth again...

  Barely five months ago, on the first of November, 1916, at six twenty ack emma, he and his observer, Hodgeson, had taken off with the flight from the aerodrome at Fine Villas, along with Captain Parkhurst and Biffer, with orders to take down a German observation kite balloon behind the lines near Harcourt Wood.

  Thousands of feet below, flashes of artillery fire glittered like fallen sequins as they bombarded the already pitted and pocked German positions.

  As they closed in on the observation balloon, the Hun observer in the basket beneath spotted them, and his ground crew began winching the tethered sausage balloon down.

  Then Tulliver saw the two Hun Albatros D2s protecting it.

  Parkhurst, red flight-commander’s streamers trailing from his outer wing spars, gestured that they should break and try to gain the higher ground.

  Tulliver pulled back on the stick and indicated to Hodgeson to keep his eyes peeled. Hodgeson, as well as being the observer, also had a Lewis gun attached to the rear of his cockpit, mounted on a ring that allowed him freedom of fire, unlike Tulliver’s forward-facing gun.

  Tulliver raced after an Albatros as it tried to escape them when suddenly, from round the huge mountain of cloud high above them, swooped a third.

  A burst of machine gun fire from the new machine raked across Parkhurst’s Strutter. Tulliver saw smoke streak from its engine before an urgent thump on his back from Hodgeson alerted him to the fact that there was another Hun on their tail. While the 1½ Strutter outgunned the Albatros, the Hun machine was quicker and more manoeuvrable.

  Tulliver banked hard to avoid a stream of tracer bullets and caught a glimpse of the Hun in his rear-view mirror. Hodgeson let out short bursts from the Lewis gun as the Albatros dived, trying to get below the Sopwith.

  He felt the thud of bullets sewing themselves along the fuselage. Behind him, the rattle of Hodgeson’s machine gun ceased. He risked a glance over his shoulder to see Hodgeson slumped in the rear cockpit, his head lolling back.

  “Hodge!” he yelled. “Hodge, old man?” There was no answer.

  Above, Biffer was trying to shake off another Hun. Tulliver went after it. He came up below the Albatros and, without pity, strafed the machine. Gone were the days of playing the game, of chivalric aerial jousts. These days it was kill or be killed.

  It went down, threading a smoky trail across the sky.

  There was just the glory hound to worry about now. He liked to hang high and dive. Tulliver searched up and around for it, but everything seemed wrong, even the clouds. His compass began spinning wildly. The engine sputtered, misfiring. Try as he might, he could no longer find the horizon. He found himself suspended in a featureless grey miasma that billowed sluggishly around the bus. All sense of movement, direction and speed ceased.

  A deep bass rumble filled the air about him.

  Turbulent currents buffeted the machine, threatening to snap off its planes.

  As he fought with the spade-handled stick to regain control over the Strutter, Tulliver felt a sticky warmth in his ears and tasted the metallic tang of blood trickling from his nose and down the back of his throat. His breathing became rapid and shallow. His eyes flickered shut and lights burst against his eyelids.

  The noise died and the buffeting ceased abruptly. From above, a bright, diffuse light illuminated the encompassing haze. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was in cloud, that was all. He eased the stick forward and dropped. He could get his bearing and fly back along the front line until he came to a landmark he knew.

  He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Spread out below was an unfamiliar landscape: a blaze of green plain and glistening rivers with mountains in the distance. Beneath him, set in a valley that existed on no maps or aerial photographs he had ever seen, he spotted the only remnant of the world he knew: an ugly circular scab of land, pock-marked with shell holes and raked by crenellated fire trenches. A pitiful, pulverised corner of Earth on a world that was not the one from which he’d taken off...

  All that was in the past now, and the alien world was momentarily hidden by the undulant white landscape aro
und them. Vast billowing mountains rose about him and he flew his bus through their wraithlike canyons and gorges; the cloudy cartography of an insubstantial world. At play in the fields of the Lord, as his old flying instructor used to say. He chased their contours until the rigging wires sang and he let out a whoop of exhilaration that the wind snatched from his lips the moment he uttered it.

  He caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye. A fleeting shadow rippled across the face of the cumulus mesa above them. Was there something else up here? A predator? He turned to Maddocks and jabbed a finger in its direction. Maddocks nodded and swung the Lewis machine gun round on its Scarff ring. Tulliver pulled on the stick and banked the bus to look for its source, his head constantly moving as he held up a hand to shield his eyes from the uninterrupted glare of the alien sun.

  The shadow flitted into a narrow chasm between two great cumulus tors as he raced up the vertiginous slopes after it, scanning the shifting vista as mountains roiled up and melted together.

  High above, a haze of cloud moved across the sun and the shadow vanished along with whatever cast it.

  Perhaps it was just as well, Tulliver thought. Nothing up here was ever friendly. The thought that there was a fast and predatory creature existing at this altitude, sliding through cloud like a shark through water, filled him with trepidation. He’d hate to give Everson cause to curtail his flights even more.

  Sooner or later, he would have to find this creature and kill it. He knew that. It might be that it was a rendezvous with death, but it was one he would not fail.

  He throttled back, dropped below the drifting clouds and found himself over the Fractured Plain. It was a barren expanse of uneven cracked and tilted slabs of sand-covered bedrock that looked as if someone had smashed the landscape with a giant hammer.