by Toby Frost
The shots rang around the corridor. Smoke rose from torn leather. Smith kicked the Ghast’s gun away and hurried to Benson’s side.
Rhianna crouched beside the old spy. His glasses were broken and a thin trickle of blood ran from a gash in his forehead. ‘He’s alive,’ she said. ‘It knocked him out.’
Carveth glowered at the dead Ghast, screwdriver in hand. ‘Nobody eats my hamster,’ she said, and she ducked back into the cockpit.
‘It is dead,’ Suruk said, prodding the corpse.
‘Right,’ Smith said, getting up, ‘Benson’s out of the running. Let’s get him to the medical bay.’
‘We don’t have a medical bay,’ Rhianna replied. ‘We could use the kitchen table, I guess. . .’
‘Good plan. We can eat off trays for now. Can you and Suruk get him down to the kitchen?’
‘Easily,’ Suruk said. ‘The seer here can lift his legs and I will take his head. . . not like that.’
‘Thanks,’ said Smith. ‘Good chap. Carveth,’ he called, ‘set a course for Paragon Docks, Albion Prime.’
The simulant called back, ‘No can do, Cap.’
‘What? Why not?’
‘Well, there’s a space battle in the way.’
Smith thought: I am in a nightmare.
‘ What? ’ he cried, and he ran into the cockpit. Far off, in the very centre of the screen, lights flashed. It looked like a strange mix of neon and flame: lasers and burning ships.
Smith dialled up the scanner. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘Carveth, keep on course. We’ll need to help out.’
She whirled around in her seat. ‘Are you mad and stupid? Boss, we’ve got no guns! They’ll fry us alive!’
Smith frowned. ‘I don’t care, Carveth; we have to help defend the Empire.’
‘But—’
‘Now, look: if we’re to have any chance of getting out of this mess, I need your complete co-operation. You’ll have to forget about your inherent cowardice for a moment. Remember, Carveth, there’s no ‘I’ in teamwork.’
‘Yeah, but there’s a messed-up “me”. Cap, this isn’t just stupid, it’s – wait a moment, incoming message.’
The radio crackled. ‘Smith? That you?’
‘W!’
‘Where are you, Smith?’
‘In orbit. Bloody enemy raided Tranquility. We got out just in time.’
‘Did you find Benson?’
‘Sir, yes. A dirty Ghast jumped him in the loo.’
W spluttered with fury. ‘Bollocks!’
‘He’s still alive, but out cold. We’re headed for Albion Prime right now. If you’ve got a medical team—’
‘Keep away!’ W barked. ‘For God’s sake, Smith, the Ghasts and Yull have raided the system. There must be two dozen warships up against us. Albion Prime is under siege. We’re holding them back, but there’s no chance of getting anything past them.
‘They want you, Smith; they want Rhianna Mitchell!
We’re holding them as best as we can, but we’ve lost the Frobisher and the Staines. I don’t know how long we can hold them back.’
Fuzz rose up and swallowed W’s voice. There was a muffled, distorted explosion on the far end of the line.
Voices yelled and screamed; flame roared.
‘Sir!’ Smith called. ‘W! Dammit, man, what’s happening? What do you need us to do?’
The voice that came back was little more than a croak, a whisper at the bottom of a well. ‘Your ship can still fly, can’t it?’ W gasped. ‘Then fly it, you fools!’
*
‘Of course, you could never understand.’ Colonel Vock tightened the bandage on his arm and prodded himself in the chest with a drunken finger. ‘ I follow a code, the ancient teachings of the god of war. This gives me dignity.’
He took a deep swig from the neck of a bottle of dandelion wine and let out a raucous burp.
‘Fascinating.’ 462 sat on the other side of the little room, watching as Vock stuffed his cheek pouches with sunflower seeds, storing them for the campaign. Vock’s binging disgusted him. Any Ghast soldier doing that would be shot for wasting materiel. 462 thought back to his own diet of pulped minions and Ghastibix and reflected that he could not recall asking for a second helping in his life.
The Yull were quartered in one of the auxiliary holds of the Systematic Destruction, 462’s own ship. Vock’s tastes were frugal: apart from a heap of malodorous sawdust in the corner, his only addition to his room was a painting of one of his illustrious forefathers, standing on a cliff-top and glowering.
‘Your problem stems from being descended from insects,’ the lemming man explained. ‘Ridiculous little animals.’ He jabbed a finger at 462. ‘And while you are here, I want to make it clear that the conduct of your soldiers is a disgrace. Your refusal to take prisoners is shameful. If you continue with this tactic, I will have no option but to sacrifice my own soldiers to the war god instead. Sacrifices bring us victory!’
‘And yet the beast, Suruk, nearly bettered you.’ 462 was tired of Vock already. These mouse-men lacked discipline, 462 thought: once Vock was of no further use, he would let the praetorians cook and eat him. Indeed, the colonel’s breastplate would make a passable frying pan.
Hephoc, Vock’s civilian servant, slipped in and placed some more wine on the table, then scurried away before Vock could steal his spectacles and hit him on the head.
‘He did not better me,’ Vock said. ‘No scum-frog can better a Yull! Victory was stolen from me by chance. The next time we meet, I shall finish him.’
462 grimaced as Vock took a deep swig from the bottle of wine. Drink did not agree with the Yull – it made them lustful and reckless. Recently, General Rimm had been stripped of his honour after the sacking of Neustadt: not for butchering its inhabitants, but for being found nude and bleeding the next morning in Neustadt Zoo, having attempted to perform an act in the beaver enclosure that dared not squeak its name. 462 scowled and flexed his antennae.
‘I expect to make the first attack on the offworlders,’ Vock said. ‘At close quarters none can survive the ferocity of our assault. It will be my pleasure to destroy the offworlder devils where I can see the terror in their eyes.’
‘By all means. Your willingness to deplete enemy ammunition supplies is commendable. But you will leave Captain Isambard Smith alive. I will deal with him personally,’ 462 added, rising from his seat. He pulled his trenchcoat close around him and limped to the door.
‘Remember, Smith is mine!’ 462 barked, and he lurched into the corridor.
A Ghast captain waited outside. ‘Strength in unity, great one! We have found no trace of the psychic human Rhianna Mitchell among the dead. We believe. . .’ It paused nervously, perhaps wondering how the war was going on the M’Lak Front. ‘. . .that the John Pym escaped us.’
462 nodded. ‘And the assault fleet?’
‘They have made good progress against the British system, but the defences of Albion Prime are holding. There is no possibility of assistance being sent to Isambard Smith. It is regrettable that my minions have not located him yet.’
‘So, Smith is alone.’ 462 chuckled. ‘Excellent! Here is something that will perk up your antennae: before the attack I gave one of the storm teams a suicide order to plant a tracker on the John Pym. They appear to have succeeded.’
The captain snarled. ‘Then we must strike fast and eliminate them!’
462 smiled around his scars. ‘Not yet, Captain. We will bide our time. We shall follow the Earthlanders. They will lead us right to the Vorl and, when the moment comes, we will crush and smash them all!’
‘A brilliant plan, great leader!’ the captain replied, and they shared a few moments of cackling laughter. ‘I must get on,’ the captain said. ‘Things to do, underlings to slap.’
462 stayed in the corridor, watching the captain’s stercorium bobbing as he strode away. He looked at the poster in the passage, one of a series designed to boost productivity. Denounce a minion and you c
ould win a staff-car!
462’s thin hand closed around the tracking device in the pocket of his trenchcoat. Nobody else could track the John Pym, not even Eight. He did not need to win anything. The winning ticket was already in his hand. He had only to cash it in.
*
‘Pay attention, men.’ Smith put the teapot down on the table. ‘Benson’s out of the running and W – well, who knows. To my mind it’s down to us four to find the Vorl, defeat the enemy and rescue Earth. I’ll be mother,’ he added, pouring out the tea.
The old spy lay stretched along the sofa, wrapped in a blanket. The emergency life-support kit was on the floor beside him. Lights flickered on a long, ticking box: slowly, a bellows rose and fell like a plastic gill.
Carveth wandered over from the galley, thoughtfully chewing a biscuit. Suruk crouched on a chair beside the table, waiting. He had mixed up a luminous, evil-looking fluid in his room and used it to seal up the gash in his leg.
He always smelt faintly of ammonia; now he smelt of iodine as well. His wounds did not seem to discomfort him.
‘Now,’ Smith continued, ‘Benson had a number of documents on him. I’ve looked through them, and they all point in one direction.’ He took a swig of tea. ‘We all know there was a connection between Leighton- Wakazashi and the Vorl. None of us knew what it was until now. The connection is this man: Lloyd Leighton.’
He held up a printout of a photograph, folded in two.
It was a group picture, taken at some kind of dance.
Healthy faces in evening dress beamed at the camera; a few raised cocktail glasses. The style of the clothes was not Imperial. In the centre of the picture was a big man with a moustache, smiling broadly.
‘I know him!’ Carveth exclaimed. ‘There was a sort of display about him in the company buildings. Emily showed me a bust.’
‘I thought it was only Mazuran who witnessed that,’ Suruk said.
‘He used to own. . . Blue Moon, is it?’
‘Blue Moon got bought out by Leighton-Wakazashi,’ Rhianna said. ‘My modern dance group staged a satirical protest at their board meeting.’
Smith held up a newssheet clipping. It showed a row of demonstrators baring their backsides at a large building.
‘ Blue Moon face mass-mooning in morning’, he read out.
‘Lloyd Leighton was a powerful man: Lloydland, his theme park, made him very wealthy. He had friends in high places – useless riff-raff, by and large.’
Carveth examined the photo. Smith was right: she recognised several of the faces around Leighton from old magazines. Here was Percy II, the chinless predecessor of King Victor, who had been replaced when he started bleating about the need for strong leadership – preferably the sort with antennae. On his left, Parity Wickworth, the noted socialite, who had famously propositioned Ghast Number One and had received the sort of response to be expected from a sexless, human-hating army ant. Or maybe it was a different Wickworth sister: Calamity perhaps, or Indemnity or Janet.
‘Parasites, the lot of them,’ said Smith. ‘Now, open out the picture.’
Carveth did so. At the edge of the party stood Ghast Number Two.
It looked so horrible, she thought, so unnatural and wrong. Here were all these people, dressed beautifully, smiling away – and in the middle of them, heaped with insignia, stood the sworn enemy of the human race. And they were treating him as a guest!
Carveth said, ‘So Leighton knew the Ghasts. Did they eat him?’
‘No,’ said Smith. ‘He went missing just before the war. Blue Moon was going downhill, and there were bad rumours about Lloydland. For one thing it was in the wrong place: at the far edge of human space, out of the way. But –pay attention everyone – Benson’s file says that just before Leighton went missing he was researching the location of an ancient Morlock artefact which, he believed, would provide the final clue as to the location of the Vorl.’
‘I know of this object,’ Suruk said. ‘It is the Tablet of Aravash. The tablet is thousands of years old and very precious. It is written that the light of the sun must never fall upon the tablet and, that should this happen, the apocalypse will begin.
‘The tablet has a long and bloody history. Some years ago, the Edenites tried to bribe our elders into giving it away for fifty thousand Imperial pounds. Bah! Fifty thousand pounds for the writing of the ancients!’
‘Terrible,’ said Rhianna. ‘Imagine putting a price like that on tribal heritage. What did you do?’
‘We held out for seventy-five.’
‘You sold your heritage?’ Rhianna gasped. ‘For money?’
‘The elders are wise. They caused a hatchling to knock up a copy the night before. After all, one picture of stick-warriors looks very much like another to the untrained eye. When the Edenites found out about the forgery, they were enraged and sent soldiers up the Vargan River to steal the tablet. We threw the soldiers back at the water-side. After that, the elders hid the tablet in a dark cellar, deep underground. And thus it is proven that—’
‘If you can’t take the tablets by water, you should stick them where the sun doesn’t shine,’ Carveth said.
‘Don’t mock Suruk’s native culture,’ Rhianna put in, turning to her. ‘What seems primitive and backward to us may mean something very important to more. . .
authentic peoples. To us, Suruk may appear somewhat—’ ‘Right,’ Smith said, thinking it best to step in before Rhianna’s head talked its way onto Suruk’s mantelpiece.
‘So where is this tablet? Is it still hidden in a cave?’
‘Ah, no,’ said Suruk. His mandibles parted and he smiled. ‘This is where the true wisdom of the ancients can be seen. They placed the tablet in an ancient fortress, known to men as the British Museum.’
There was a pause. Rhianna blinked. ‘You gave your most sacred artefacts to the British Museum? Suruk, really! The British Museum represents the most rampant forms of imperialist colonialism!’
‘A cunning double-bluff,’ said the M’Lak, flicking his tusks casually. ‘Now the tablet is safe behind glass. Braves may quest to the museum, behold the stone and devour an ice-cream as they do. Everyone is happy.’
‘So after all this time, the clue we’ve needed is on display, on Earth,’ Carveth said. ‘Typical – whenever you go looking for something in space, it’s always where you started!’
‘The British Museum on Dalagar,’ Suruk said. ‘Not on Earth.’
They finished their tea. Carveth put her mug down and said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s pretty clear. We head to this Dalagar place, pop down the museum, get a picture of Suruk’s holy rock then fly out to wherever they tell us and get chummy with the Vorl. All we need is a weepy speech about how this war affects everyone, even psychic ghost-people, and we’re home and dry. Now then, where is Dalagar? Can’t say I’ve heard of it.’
‘Dalagar is its Morlock name,’ Smith said. ‘We call it New Luton.’
‘New Luton?’ Carveth echoed. ‘Then we’re dead.’
7 City of the Future!
Six Ghast fighters screamed over the horizon as the last of the transport shuttles came in to land. The AA lasers opened fire and men and aliens ran for cover. To the West an Aresian deathwalker trained its dessicator on a missile battery. Rockets corkscrewed up from the ground and popped against the walker’s force-fields, overloading them, and then the seventh rocket slipped through and blew the walker’s canopy apart. It staggered into a factory chimney with a yowl of tortured machinery, collapsing in a shower of shattered bricks.
Doors dropped open in the transport shuttles and a horde of beetle-people scurried out. NCOs with loud-hailers awaited them.
‘Citizens! The British Space Empire has rescued your species from lives blighted by idleness and free love! This is your chance to pay back that debt! This city was built as a symbol of our future. Today you join the gallant defenders who unite to say: This is enough! This is where we turn the Ghasts, no matter what the cost! Bloody hell! Duck! ’
&nb
sp; *
The John Pym touched fifty yards further down the landing pad. A medical team jogged over to collect Benson, pushing a stretcher between them like a battering-ram. The air was thick with the drone of gatling guns.
M’Lak braves strolled out of the next craft down, bundles of weapons under their arms. A M’Lak was waiting for them in a red coat. ‘Greetings campers! Welcome to the city of fun!’
‘Ah,’ Suruk said. ‘Package holidays.’
Soldiers were unloading food from the shuttles. Cranes swung out, men shouted to one another over coughing lorry engines. To the right, Smith glimpsed a clanking warbot stride between the shells of two houses, steam pouring from its chimneys.
Smith took a deep breath of the damp night air. It smelt of burning and wet dust.
The four of them hurried from the ship and a ground crew ran in and threw camouflage netting over the Pym. Smith glanced back. With the camouflage the Pym reminded him of a rusty tin overgrown by weeds.
‘Come along, men,’ he said, and they jogged through the gates of the landing pad and into the city itself.
New Luton was in ruins. The Western Sector was in enemy hands: between that and the Imperial camp were six miles of broken masonry and wrecked vehicles. This place had once been the City of the Future, and battered statues of heroes still protruded from the chaos as if drowning in a sea of stones.
Suruk stopped and looked into a crater beside the road.
He stared at his reflection in the stagnant water, his shrewd eyes a little distant behind the stern complexity of his face.
Beside him Carveth said, ‘You alright?’
The alien glanced round. ‘Yes, I am fine. I was just thinking. . . one day I shall spawn into a pool like this.’
‘Spawn?’
‘Create offspring.’ Somewhere far off, a shell whined. ‘Continue the line of Agshad.’
‘You mean – have babies?’
‘I would merely cough up a special pellet full of spores into the water. In time, some of the spores might become adult M’Lak. Most would not.’