Wrath of the Lemming-men

by Toby Frost

  ‘Curse you!’ Suruk growled. ‘I will not leave my father unavenged!’

  ‘There is no choice,’ the Dark One hissed, and his arm shot out. As it did, a hand slapped down on his shoulder and dragged him back. A second ghost stood beside it, a broomstick in its free hand.

  ‘Hello, Suruk,’ Agshad said.

  ‘Father?’ Suruk glanced left, then right. He lay before a semicircle of his ancestors, those who had wielded the spear before him and, now that it had been broken, had been freed from within: Agshad Nine-Swords, Urgar the Miffed, Brehan the Blessed, King Lacrovan. . .

  ‘Unhand me!’ the Dark One snarled as Agshad pulled him backwards. ‘This warrior is dead!’

  ‘Dead?’ Brehan the Blessed chortled. ‘Suruk’s alive!’

  Agshad opened his mandibles and smiled. The Dark One thrashed in his grip. ‘Promise me one thing, son.’

  ‘Name it, father.’

  ‘Go and get a proper job, would you?’

  He vanished. Vock screeched in triumph as Suruk sprang into a crouch. The axe whipped down and he darted under the blade and caught the shaft in his left hand. For a moment they stood there straining, strength against strength, and then Suruk drove his right fist up and punched Vock in the jaw.

  Vock was lifted clean off his paws, tossed ten feet and dropped in a clattering heap of armour plate. His limbs flailed and he whirled upright into a fighting stance, paused, frowned, and patted the end of his snout. Alarm spread across his face.

  Suruk raised his right fist. Wedged in the back of his hand were two long teeth. ‘You seek these, rodent?’

  ‘Bathtard!’ Vock screamed. ‘Dirty offworlder bathtard! Die!’

  Suruk felt no fear as Vock sprang. He leapt to meet him, the axe flew past, and Suruk hit Vock’s breastplate –grabbed it – turned him upside down and drove him head first through the lid of a wheelybin.

  Suruk landed in a crouch and rose slowly to face the wheelybin. Vock’s legs protruded from the top of the bin, kicking furiously. Arms pinned to his sides, he could do nothing but howl with rage into his echoing plastic prison.

  ‘Let me go, offworlder! I am the dignified and honourable Mimco Vock! You shame me with your cowardith!’

  Suruk chuckled. As he strolled over, he cracked his knuckles. ‘Greetings, Colonel.’

  ‘Offworlder, you die slow! You will beg for merthy—’

  ‘I think not. Now, Colonel, you are my prisoner. Listen and understand. Your war is over, as it shall soon be for all the Yull. I shall take this bin to my people and, when they crave your skull, I will plead clemency, so that you may remember this moment for as long as you live, when I drew your teeth and – what is the phrase? – dropped you into the shit. Not for you a death in battle, but a life of captivity and shame. This I do in honour of my father, whom you murdered like the coward you are when he bested your men. This, however, I do for fun,’ he said, and he punched Vock in the groin. Vock’s head made loud contact with the bottom of the bin. Suruk smiled

  *

  Eight bent down and lifted Smith up by the collar. ‘So,’ he said, ‘to the death. How amusing. Tell me, Space Captain Smith, what gave you the impression that you could defeat me? I am most intrigued.’

  Smith drove the side of his hand into Eight’s temple, a blow that would have floored a praetorian. ‘What do you say to that?’

  Eight frowned. ‘What’s that? Oh, I see – you were try-ing to slap me across the face.’ He raised his pincer arms.

  ‘Amateurs. Believe me, Smith’ – and his arm flicked out and knocked Smith’s head to one side – ‘when it comes to slapping people across the face – I – wrote – the – book! And – the – appendix!’

  As if batting aside flies, Eight whacked Smith’s head left, right, left and right again. Then he tossed him onto the ground: Smith slid along the floor and into the wall.

  Eight sighed.‘It is too bad that I will not be able to listen to some opera while I rip you apart, Captain Smith. Then this moment would be almost as perfect as myself.’ He brushed a spec of dirt from his lapel. ‘Why do you people bother? Tell me, captain, can you wrestle an ant-wolf? Plan an invasion? Write a piano sonata – before breakfast? I don’t think so. You humans are utterly outclassed. I mean, is there anything you have that I don’t?’

  Smith hauled himself upright. There was blood at the corner of his mouth. ‘I have a nose, you alien bastard,’ he snarled. ‘Beat that.’

  ‘Not quite what –’ Eight began, but Smith roared and charged straight into him. His shoulder slammed into the massive Ghast, he snatched something from Eight’s belt while his left hand shot up and grabbed Eight’s singed antennae. He yanked them forward and with his right fist he punched the monster once – twice – three times in the jaw. He pulled back his arm for a fourth massive blow –and Eight opened his mouth. It was a mantrap, a tunnel lined with fangs, and Smith’s hand disappeared into it.

  Eight slammed his jaws together, bit down and shook his head like a terrier killing a rat. His head tore free in a bloody flurry and Smith staggered back, clutching the half of his right arm that remained.

  Eight tossed his head back and, gannet-like, swallowed Smith’s hand. He drew himself up and struck a pose suitable for a raconteur. ‘As I was saying,’ he began, smoothing his trenchcoat. He paused and looked down at his belt. ‘Odd. Where’s that grenade gone?’

  Smith’s face was white. The world lurched and flickered before him like a badly-tuned television screen. Eight’s question only just reached him, but he smiled nonetheless.

  ‘It was in my hand,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Eight’s eyes widened: his mouth fell open. Like a toddler he thrust his fists into his mouth, stumbling around as he tried to reach his gullet. ‘ What? No, no!’

  Eight bellowed around his hands. ‘You can’t do this! I’m better than you!’

  With the last strength left to him, Smith raised his left arm. Slowly he folded his fingers, and gave Eight the ancient gesture his people had bestowed upon invaders for a thousand years.

  Eight burst like a dropped egg: strange organs and leather scraps spattered the ceiling and the walls.

  ‘Pillock,’ Smith said, and he passed out.

  Smith woke up in his bed on board the Pym. His room was quiet and dark, and the model spaceships hanging from the ceiling looked as tranquil as soaring birds. He felt numb and a little sleepy.

  The last thing he could recall was giving that big Ghast the V-sign. He smiled. Yes, he’d shown that bugger. He could remember the thing bragging about its genius. Not anymore, he thought. Eight wouldn’t even be able to play the spoons, let alone write a sonata.

  Smith paused, vaguely sure that there was some fly in the ointment of victory. Nope, it was gone. He yawned and stretched, and noticed that he was not stretching quite as far as he’d expected.

  ‘Balls,’ he muttered, remembering. ‘He bit off my arm.’

  The right arm of his pyjamas was neatly folded and pinned just above the elbow. Or the place where the elbow would have been. A drip stood beside the bed, wired to Smith’s other arm.

  Suruk stepped out of the corner of the room.

  ‘Wainscott’s medicine woman fixed you to that tube,’ he said. ‘I assisted as best I could, but your biology is strange to me. Besides, I dislike needles almost as much as I dislike bees.’

  ‘Thanks. Damned nuisance, this. Rhianna and Carveth – how are they?’

  ‘Bizarre and futile, respectively. They are well.’

  ‘And yourself? Did you. . . ?’

  Suruk smiled. ‘I did indeed. My father is avenged. The warlord Vock lingers in the hold, pinioned within a plastic bin. Now we take him back as our prisoner, for trial.’

  ‘Good work, old chap! Excellent stuff.’

  Smith realised that he could hear the hum of engines.

  An, ugly crunching noise from the cockpit told him that the John Pym had just gone up a gear. ‘We’re moving,’ he said.

  ‘We travel to Ne
w Luton with our new comrades. Major Wainscott follows us in his craft, warlike and probably nude. I like him. The Ghast vessel and its spawning factory are no more. Now we shall conclude our mission.’ The alien frowned. ‘As your medic, I advise you to rest. Your arm is growing back much too slowly.’

  ‘I see. Look, I know the Yull are bastards, but I don’t want you roughing Vock up too much, or the prisoner—’

  ‘I shall not injure the prisoner; there would be no challenge to it. Besides, for Vock a long life in captivity will be far more satisfying. In the meantime I shall do nothing more cruel than play him Les Fleurs – several hundred times. Per day.’

  ‘Well, as long as we don’t have to listen to him banging on about his honour all the time—’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Suruk said. ‘Sooner or later he will either go mad or hibernate.’

  ‘I ought to check on things,’ Smith said. ‘Could you help me get dressed?’

  ‘Gladly.’ Suruk bent down and came up with Smith’s trousers. ‘Tell me, which side do you dress on – front or back?’

  Carveth opened the airlock and they stepped out into chaos. The black sky throbbed with explosions and laser-beams: gunfire hid the roars and cries of Ghasts and men.

  Aresian walkers were tearing down the barricades at the edges of the Imperial compound. Praetorians swarmed around their legs like piranhas. Yet Jones’ men fought on, hard and disciplined, the railgun teams covering each other, the fire from small arms and landships holding the waves of attackers at bay.

  Smith heard C’neth’s nasal voice behind him, ‘Gawd, what a dreadful place. You could have at least taken us somewhere nice, not this crap’ole.’

  Jones ran up to meet them. ‘Alright, Smith! God, what happened to you, man?’

  ‘I had a run-in with Ghast Number Eight. Turns out he bit off more than he could chew.’

  ‘Good – bloody hell, man! What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, and this must be the charming local welcome,’ C’neth observed.

  ‘This is C’neth of the Vorl,’ Smith replied. ‘Good to see you, Jones.’

  ‘You too, mate. So you found a Vorl to take back, eh? Rescue party, is it? I’ll give orders to fall back by squads: there’s too many Ghasts to stay here.’

  ‘Nobody’s falling back. We’ve brought reinforcements.’

  Smith looked over his shoulder, at his friends. Suruk was twirling the two pieces of his spear. Carveth was preparing to advance behind Dreckitt. Rhianna was smiling vaguely. Behind them, loading up a fresh magazine, Wainscott stood grinning and fully clothed. His men checked their weapons, looking like dangerousness made flesh. And behind them all, the great ranks of the Vorl rolled out of the two spaceships like a bank of mist, their faces grim and deathly, tendrils of smoke stroking the air like the scarves of a thousand Morris men.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jones whispered. ‘This is a turn up for the books. I wasn’t expecting this!’

  ‘ You’re surprised?’ C’neth said. ‘You’re not the one who’s just found out he’s got a daughter – and she’s solid!’

  ‘Well,’ Smith said, ‘only one thing for it. Could some-one help me draw my sword, please?’

  Carveth helped.

  Smith lifted the sword above his head. ‘Right then,’ he called, ‘you all know what to do. Ladies, gentlemen, Suruk, Jones, Morgar, strange ghost people and Rhianna’s dad – for the Empire, charge! ’

  *

  ‘And that’s how the battle of New Luton was won,’ Carveth finished up. ‘Or at least the bits I saw. I was hiding under a table for quite a lot of it.’

  ‘How. . . er. . . very interesting,’ King Victor replied.

  He gave Carveth a short bow, and she responded with a curtsey that nearly put her on the floor like a broken deckchair. Smith held his breath and forced himself to remain calm as the king moved down the line.

  Although their mission would stay secret, W had arranged for the king to meet Smith, Carveth, Rhianna and Suruk before he knighted General Young later in the day. The four of them stood in a smartly-dressed row in the Great Hall of the Imperial Palace on Ravnavar Prime, the Emerald of the Empire.

  The hall was the size of a cathedral nave, the walls decorated with polished brass and racing green. Lances jutted from the vaulted ceiling and from them hung banners from a hundred campaigns, many little more than tattered rags. High in the rafters, like a preserved shark, there hung the Hellfire used by the Space Marshall in his first hundred missions, donated to the people when he ran out of room on the fusillage to tally up his kills. The hall was empty apart from a pair of guards at the far end and a prim man in a morning suit who looked entirely dull and was probably a bodyguard-assassin of extreme lethality.

  The crew were very excited to meet the king. Rhianna had pretended to be disinterested in the whole procedure, but she was wearing her smartest flip-flops and a skirt tied-dyed in the official colours of New Francisco.

  Carveth had reached a level of prattling nervousness that made Smith deeply uncomfortable and Suruk was intrigued by the whole idea of meeting King Victor, ‘son of Elvis, of the line of Arthur’.

  King Victor’s vague, pleasant eyes met Smith’s. The King smiled gently and said, ‘Erm. . . so, what do you do?’

  ‘Captain Isambard Douglas Winston Smith, Your Majesty,’ Smith said, nervousness sending his gut and bladder into an alarming whirl. ‘I’m in charge of the John Pym.’

  ‘Splendid. Good work,’ said the king as a mechanical cherub hovered past, belching out a cloud of lavender essence as it disappeared into the galleries. King Victor put out his hand and they shook. Smith had acquired a bionic arm on the National Health Service to tide him over until his new arm could be attached and it had developed a number of minor twitches from its last user, a commando. Today it was holding out and King Victor’s neck remained unbroken. ‘Um. . . keeping well, are we?’

  ‘Mustn’t grumble, your Majesty.’

  ‘Yes, er. . . absolutely. Of course.’

  Smith was not sure what to make of Victor Rex, ruler of two dozen sentient species, figurehead of three hundred worlds and organic farming enthusiast. It was an open secret that he and Queen Kylie – who was currently visiting Proxima Centauri to open an orbital sports centre –were simulants, grown to specification. So far, Victor had been unfailingly polite but rather awkward, only showing real interest when he had got into a discussion with Rhianna about the possible sentience of the local foliage.

  Still, he seemed harmless enough.

  ‘Well,’ said the king, ‘carry on, er, Captain Smith. Now then, who might you be, my good green fellow?’

  ‘Greetings! I am Suruk the Slayer, and I bring you this.’

  Suruk was adorned with some of his most impressive trophies, one of which he quickly unhitched from his belt and dropped into King Victor’s outstretched hand. ‘It is the skull of a Procturan ripper. May his death-howls prove sweet music to your noble, if somewhat protruding, ears. May you make soil organically enriched with the bones of our slain foes! In its jaws I have put a list of rewards I would like.’

  ‘Um. . .’ said King Victor. ‘Yes, very good. And what do you do on board the ship?’

  ‘I kill everything! If I might inquire,’ Suruk added, ‘which battles exactly are you the Victor of ?’

  They left with the honour of having been thanked by the King himself. A wallahbot gave them picnic hampers and guided them to a gilt lift, and they were whisked up through the centre of a spire, hollow like a scrimshawed horn. The lift’s scrollworked doors clattered open and they stepped onto a balcony that curved around the top of the tower.

  ‘I shall arrange for your transport, gentlemen,’ the wallahbot grated. It rolled back into the lift and, with a rattle of motors, descended from view.

  The view from the palace was astounding. Below them lay the garden city of Ravnavar. The roofs of greenhouses winked at them in the sun. The parks looked almost luminously alive: in one of them the Colonial Guard were drilling; and in anoth
er a placid Ravnaphant was giving children rides, forty at a time. An airship drifted past, advertising war savings. Tiny red oblongs rolled through the streets: buses bringing wellwishers to watch General Young receive her knighthood.

  ‘Ooh, biscuits,’ said Carveth, peeking into her hamper. ‘Now then: who’ll give me a Cumberland sausage for two pots of the King’s Own Jam?’

  A hundred yards below, the first wellwishers were arriving to cheer the general to the palace. A huge banner had been hung between the mighty Arcadian veen trees on Imperial Avenue, saying: THREE CHEERS FOR AUNT FLO. Quite right too, thought Smith, looking down at the gathering crowd. Had Young not halted the Yullian invasion, the city would be burning by now.

  The sun was shining and the pavements looked almost white. The forests glowed at the edge of the city. A light wind blew across the spire, rustling Carveth’s dress and forcing Suruk to push his top hat down over his ears. The smell of roast beef drifted up to them from a kitchen in the palace below.

  ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Smith said, holding out his arm for Rhianna to take.

  Carveth looked out across the glistening city.

  Somewhere out there, past the towers and minarets and the shining forest, there were Ghasts and Yull who hated everyone, and a war that still needed to be won. But on a day like this it seemed as if even nature was on the Empire’s side. God, she decided – not the brutal god of the Yull, but something subtler and more intelligent – was indeed in his heaven, and if all wasn’t right with the world, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘on days like this, I think we will win.’

  Smith waved for an air-taxi. ‘Of course we’ll win,’ he replied. ‘We’re British, aren’t we?’

  The taxi halted beside them, thrusters humming.

  ‘Where to, guv?’ it asked, opening a door.

  ‘Hospital, please,’ Smith replied, and he stepped in. ‘See you this evening,’ he called as the door closed behind him.