by Mick Farren
'Sure, sure. This 471.'
'Where do we find the Free Corps command post?'
The Uruk pointed.
'Down that way.'
The Rainman put the machine in motion and swung it down a deeply rutted track. They were now in the heart of the Dur Shanzag lines. The snouts of light cannon and mortars poked from foxholes. Shell craters dotted the landscape, and all round them squads of Shirik sappers sweated with picks and shovels enlarging the foxholes and dugouts.
They passed a Shirik stripped of his uniform, suspended by his hands from a wooden frame that had been erected beside the track. He was obviously undergoing some kind of punishment. Around his neck hung a placard on which was a single word in the strange script they had seen used throughout Dur Shanzag.
A ditch ran for some distance along the side of the track, and every so often Billy noticed huddled shapes, the bodies of men and mules that lay half in and half out of the muddy water, where they had been pushed off the road and left to rot. They rolled past crisscrossings of tangled barbed wire and Billy saw to his horror that in the middle of a particularly thick section, a skeleton was hanging with shreds of clothing still adhering to it. It seemed as though the war had crossed this area and moved on.
Eventually they found what they were looking for. A huge dugout where a collection of olive green tents huddled under the protection of sandbagged ramparts. In front of the tents and tunnel entrances, a group of humans lounged round a huge black field piece. Three fighting machines, similar to their own, were parked beside it.
The Rainman pulled in beside the other machines, and the three of them climbed down and walked over to the men squatting round the cannon. They were all unshaven and filthy, and wore a motley assortment of combat suits and work clothes. At their belts they carried a vicious array of knives and side arms. None of them looked up as Reave, Billy and the Rainman approached. They seemed totally to lack interest in anything that went on around them. Billy stopped and cleared his throat.
'Where can we find whoever's in charge?'
A big man with blond hair and a black eye patch spat a stream of tobacco juice in the dust.
'I am, I'm Axmann, M of W for this section. You replacements?'
Billy nodded, and gave him the envelope.
'These are our orders.'
Axmann seemed to have no interest in opening them.
'You better get settled in.'
He glanced back at the men beside the gun.
'You, Duck. Show these replacements where to bunk, and explain the facts of life to them.'
A little bald man with a rodent's face and extremely short legs scrambled to his feet. Axmann turned back to Billy, Reave and the Rainman.
'Duck will show you round. Oh, just one thing. You boys don't plan to be heroes, do you?'
'It's not our greatest ambition.'
'Good. The last thing we need is heroes.'
Duck led them inside the bunker. It stretched way back inside the hill, and housed the command post, stores and sleeping quarters. The roof was low, scarcely four feet high in places, and they had to move in a half crouch. The walls of the excavation were shored up with an assortment of scrap timber and here and there someone had stuck a pin-up. These served to highlight rather than disguise the appalling squalor. Duck pointed at three empty wooden bunks.
'You can take them three. The guys they belonged to took a direct hit. They won't be needing them any more.'
They dumped their gear on the beds, and Duck led them out of the bunker and up the hill a little way.
'If you keep your heads down you'll be okay. You can see the whole battle zone from here.'
The plain beneath them was gouged with craters and scarred by trenches. At irregular intervals a boom and an eruption of dust would mark a shell landing. Small figures would scamper out of a trench, and rush into the section of no man's land that ran between the lines of either side. Inevitably, before they'd gone very far, the figures would fall and lie still. Overhead, off in the distance, two clumsy flying machines, cigar-shaped objects with a collection of umbrella-like repulsors on their top sides, circled each other warily. One carried the eye and flames markings of Dur Shanzag, while the other bore the seven-pointed star of Harod. Billy watched in appalled fascination.
'How long has this been going on?'
Duck shrugged.
'Who knows? Maybe a generation. Maybe more.'
'But I thought the Presence was winning.'
'Sure he's winning, We've gained maybe a hundred yards this year. I guess another twenty years will see us at the gates of Harod.'
'Twenty years.'
Duck dug the heel of his boot into the dirt.
'Twenty, maybe twenty-five. Attrition's the name of the game. The only thing that could prevent it was if the Shirik stopped breeding. The Shirik do most of the fighting. They're sent up the line. They rush the enemy, most of them get slaughtered, but they keep coming, and we keep gaining little bits of ground. If they start losing too many of them, we have to take our tin cans in and sort it out. Beyond that we try and keep out of the fighting and stay healthy.'
'Doesn't anyone want to fight?'
Duck scowled.
'Who needs it? Except the Shirik, who can't get enough. Occasionally one of our boys goes kill crazy, but when that happens they usually start on the Shirik, and we have to go down and fuse them before they do too much damage. Beyond that, it's like I said, we do our best to keep out of it. We all hate this goddamn war.'
Billy scratched his head.'
'I don't see why any of us go on with it.'
Duck looked at Billy in contempt.
'Did you ask to come here?'
'Nah, we were in jail. We didn't have no choice.'
'Neither did anyone else, sonny boy. Get stuck inside of Dur Shanzag and you wind up at the front before you know it'
'What are the enemy like?'
'I ain't seen 'em close to 'cept maybe a few times. They looked like regular guys to me. Just like us, 'cept they're fighting for their lives. You'll get called out soon enough, and then you'll see for yourselves.'
Chapter 16
A.A. Catto came home from the party in another artificial sunrise. Once again, she was bored. Juno Meltzer had done her best, but when A.A. Catto finally came down to it, nothing new really happened. It was yet another party where she had finished up with her brother. It was an indictment of the lack of stimuli that someone like Valdo was superior to most of the other available men.
She made a mental note that she really should stop doing it with him, particularly in public. People were beginning to label them, and there was nothing more tiresome than being labelled.
Inside her apartment A.A. Catto tore off her black Art Nouveau party dress and flopped on the bed in her underwear. She grinned at how her silk stockings and basque corset had come from the pornography of a slightly later period, but nobody had even noticed. With the exception of Valdo, she decided, the people she knew were exceedingly ignorant,
She kicked her legs and stared at the ceiling. It was the morning problem again. Sleep or stay awake. It was a choice between dormax or altacaine. A.A. Catto rolled over and watched the sunlight begin to filter through the perspex of the balcony. She glanced at the clock. It was 08.15. She reached out and punched up Information. The blonde in the pink uniform flickered into life and smiled.
'Information. May I help you?'
'What's going on this morning?'
'There is a full directorate meeting at 10.00. All family members are expected to attend, Miss Catto.'
'Don't tell me what to do.'
'I'm sorry, Miss Catto. I'm only relaying information.'
'All right, all right.'
She hit the off button. The directorate meeting would wipe out anything happening for most of the day. She might as well sleep right through it. She was reaching for the dormax when a thought struck her. Maybe it would be fun to go to a meeting once. If Valdo was there to b
ack her up, between them they might throw some shocks into those old fools. She punched Valdo's combination, and another pink-clad Hostess-l appeared.
'Mr. Catto's residence.'
'Is Valdo conscious?'
'If you'll wait one moment, please, Miss Catto, I'll find out.'
The screen dissolved into a pattern of neutral colours. It stayed that way for almost a minute, and A.A. Catto tapped her silver nails impatiently on the console. Finally Valdo's image appeared on the screen.
A.A. Catto had often thought that the reason she liked her brother so much was that he resembled her so closely. He had the same straight nose and large blue eyes. He even had the same full mouth. It was something that didn't quite fit on a male. Valdo revelled in the fact that he was definitely borderline.
The image on the screen was far from Valdo at his best.
He still had on the pale blue wig that he had worn the night before, and his makeup was smudged and streaked.
'What do you want, sister? I thought you'd be dormaxed out by now.'
'You look awful, brother. What do you plan to do this morning?'
'Sleep. There's nothing happening except a directorate meeting.'
A.A. Catto pretended to be scandalized.
'You mean you're going to miss a directorate meeting?'
Valdo scowled.
'What are you talking about? We always miss directorate meetings.'
'I thought we ought to go to this one.'
'You're joking?'
'I thought it would be a good idea if we went to the meeting.'
'Have you gone mad, sister? Directorate meetings are boring, tedious, and, very positively, no place to be.'
'Think about it, brother. If we took on maybe three pay-loads of altacaine, and then went along and caused trouble for the parents, I thought it would be fun.'
'Aren't you rather scraping the barrel?'
'I thought if we worked on it, we might be able to force through some dictates that could make life more amusing.'
Valdo looked unconvinced.
'Like what, sister?'
'Maybe we could have a war.'
'There's no one worth having a war with.'
A.A. Carto waved his objections aside.
'I only just thought of it. We can work out details later. Say you'll come.'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Listen, sister, I'd rather sleep than spend the day with those boring old farts.'
'But we could take it over, brother. We could really put them through.'
'It still seems like a waste of time. A whole day spent in pursuit of the tiresome. It almost seems an insult to good drugs to take on a load and then sit with awful, OLD people.'
'It's because we never go to meetings that these old awful people have it their own way. That's the reason that the entertainments are so wretched.'
'My dear sister. Is it that you've become a concerned citizen?'
A.A. Catto's eyes flashed with anger.
'Don't be disgusting.'
'It does rather sound like it. I never thought I'd see my dear sister wanting to go to a meeting. Perhaps you're getting old.'
'You can be very insulting when you try.'
'That kind of remark isn't going to persuade me to come with you.'
'Then will you come?'
'I'll consider it. You haven't tried to bribe me yet.'
'What do you want?'
'I don't know. There's very little that you have that I want.'
A.A. Catto's mouth twisted.
'You didn't say that four hours ago, brother.'
'I was simply accommodating you, sister dear.'
'Then accommodate me now.'
'Will you promise to come back here and allow me to use you in a cruel and original manner for a whole hour if this meeting's as boring and loathsome as I fear it will be?'
A.A. Catto nodded quickly.
'Yes, yes, anything you like. Say you'll come?'
'I'll come.'
'Wonderful. I'll see you at 10.00 outside the Boardroom.'
Valdo grimaced.
'Oh god, sister, don't say you want to be punctual.'
'Sorry, make it 10.45.'
'That's a little better.'
'Thank you, brother. You won't be disappointed.'
Valdo yawned.
'Anything to amuse my little sister.'
Chapter 17
Like a wave of coarse flesh the Shirik poured out from trenches and dugouts and charged howling towards the Harodin lines. The enemy immediately opened a withering fire and dead Shirik fell one on top of another. Some dropped like stones while others fell twisting and snarling, clawing at their wounds. Although they died in their hundreds, still more came on, clambering over the bodies to get at the enemy.
One small group actually made it across no man's land and reached the opposite trenches. They discharged their single shot scrap guns and then fell on the remaining defenders, clubbing, hacking and biting. They were shot down, but the Harodin line was breached and more Shirik poured into the gap. A horrible slaughter began in the narrow confines of the Harodin trenches.
Billy wiped the sweat from his face. It was their first time in action. They had hung round the dugout for five days, and then, along with two other machines, they had been ordered to back up and consolidate the Shirik assault.
As he watched, a handful of Harodin leaped from, the forward trenches and tried to run away. They had only gone a few yards when they were cut down by blasts of scrap metal from Shirik guns. The men who had run seemed indistinguishable from the mercenaries. Duck had been right when he'd described them as being regular guys.
From the driver's seat, the Rainman grunted.
'Looks like we'll be moving up soon.'
Billy swivelled the turret a little to look at the other two fighting machines. Sure enough, a red flag appeared through the turret hatch of the lead machine. Billy glanced at the Rainman.
'Okay, here we go, roll it.'
The Rainman eased the machine into gear and it began to move forward in formation with the either two. Billy licked his dry lips and glanced down at Reave, who crouched in the stand-by position, ready to move if anything happened to either of the other two. Billy grinned tensely at him.
'This is it, kid.'
Reave shook his head.
'How the fuck did we get ourselves into this?'
'Don't ask, man. Just don't ask.'
The fighting machines crossed the Shirik trenches and started across no man's land, towards the huge gap the apemen had carved in the Harodin defences. The wheels crunched over the thickly littered Shirik bodies, crushing them into the dust. Billy fought to keep himself from being sick. He dropped a burst of bolts on a section of the forward trench, but saw that it was already in Shirik hands and stopped firing. There seemed to be nothing left for them to do.
A Harodin machine gun opened up on them from an isolated foxhole, and bullets clanged against the machine's armour. Billy swung the flamer round. As he fired he saw the gun was manned by two haggard, bearded men in dirty blue tunics. They looked surprised as the tongue of flame lanced towards them. It was the same look of surprise that had crossed the face of the man he'd shot in Dogbreath. The next instant the flame caught them, and they turned into blazing inhuman things. Billy lost sight of them as the machine dipped and lurched across the first enemy trench. His stomach twisted but he managed not to be sick.
The formation stopped just beyond the Harodin advance trench and took up a defensive position. The Shirik mopped up the last of the defenders. Once the trench was cleared it was their job to guard against a possible counter attack, while Uruk engineers reconstructed the newly won fortifications.
No counter attack came, and at nightfall the mercenaries dismounted from their machines and made a temporary camp. The killing was too strong in Billy's mind to allow him to sit and relax with the other crews. He wandered along the trench, until he came to a group of
Shirik huddled round a small fire. Without going too close he watched the strange subhuman creatures and listened to their grunted conversation. The Shirik seemed to have been issued with fresh meat, possibly as a reward for their victory. They snuffled and grunted over large bones.
'Fight huh? Fight?'
'Some fight. Some fight.'
'Plenty kill huh?'
'Listen . . .'
'Huh?'
'Listen . . . I fight.'
'I fight, I fight.'
'I fight, I hit 'em, I kick 'em an' bit 'em. I had t' fight huh?'
'They get on top of you?'
'Nah . . . I fight. I kill 'em.'
'Yeah.'
'Yeah.'
'All fight.'
'All attack.'
'Hey.'
'Wha'?'
'I . . . fight.'
'Sure, all fight.'
'No, no, I remember . . .'
'Wha'?'
'I remember.'
'Wha'?'
'I . . . I don't remember.'
'You forget.'
'It was before, before.'
'Didn't we surround 'em?'
'Kill 'em.'
'Plenty good killing, huh?'
One of the Shirik waved his bone in the air.
'Good killing, good eating.'
He wined his mouth with a strip of blue uniform, and in a flash Billy realized. The fresh meat was human. The Shirik were eating the bodies of the Harodin. He backed away in silent panic, and as soon as he was well away from the Shirik, he bolted along the trench towards where the machine crews were camped. He stumbled across a figure lying in the darkness.
'Fuck off, I'm trying to sleep.'
It was Reave.
'It's me, it's Billy. Listen, I just saw . . .'
The words stuck in his throat.
'I . . . I . . .'
Reave looked at him in alarm.
'What's wrong, man? You look like you seen a ghost.'
'It's worse than that, man. Much worse.'
'What is it, Billy? You look terrible.'
'You remember how Duck told us about the guys who went kill crazy. How they always attacked the Shirik?'
Reave nodded.
'Sure, I remember.'
'Reave . . .'
Billy's hysteria was holding off by only a fraction.