by Toby Frost
‘Imagine dropping an EMP in the middle of all that stuff,’ Wainscott whispered. The major’s eyes gleamed with excitement. ‘You’d close the whole place down in one go. Can you imagine it? Actually shutting them up.’
He sighed, and the light in his eyes died down. ‘Of course, I don’t know how. You’d have to get an EMP bomb under the radar. And every vehicle that goes past gets searched. . . goodness knows how it could be done.’
Sounds rose up from the palace now. They were loud and distorted, blasting out of great speakers nailed to the roof. Lumps of plaster must be falling out the ceiling, Smith thought.
‘Only the Hyrax is great! All hail the Grand Hyrax! Only the Hyrax is great!’
Seemingly at random, the God-Prophet’s voice came on:
‘– severing the accursed hand from the arm, the wretched head from the neck! The eye that will not see – blind it to make it see! The mouth that will not announce the glory of the Hyrax – fill it with the dentures of faith! The Beast lurks among us, stirring lies against the earthly paradise of the Grand Hyrax – anyone denying the earthly paradise will die! Obey me and live! I hope you’re listening to this, harlots of Babylon especially! Crusade!’
With great finality Rhianna said, ‘What a colossal jerk.’
‘Of course, at the moment he just sounds like an idiot,’ Smith said. ‘But if they manage to stop people drinking tea, his powers may start to work. And then the people of Urn will be like lambs to the slaughter.’
Suruk had been studying the city in silence. ‘I wish I were in the palace,’ the alien said. ‘Swinging my blade, striking down my enemies, liberating someone from something or other. . .’
‘Well, you’d be busy,’ Wainscott said. ‘Look over there.’
Smith turned the scope on the west of the city, where the spaceport and industrial areas were. They looked dead. Smoke rose from a few chimneys, but otherwise, the place was deserted. The warehouses were locked up, the streets empty – wait a moment. He turned up the amplification on the gunsight.
A column of praetorians turned the corner, three abreast. Light caught their helmets and the leather of their coats. At the front of the column, like the head of a Chinese dragon, was a black banner bearing the antennae’d skull of the praetorian legions. Beside them ran beast handlers, hauling back the ant-hounds the Ghasts used to guard their fortresses.
The main impression Smith had was of bulk. They were taller and thicker than normal Ghasts, more bullish; a blunt, effective tool for killing and intimidation. Smith watched them carefully, feeling a kind of cold readiness run over him. They were bred to terrify, but what he felt now was eagerness to fight.
The praetorians yelled something in unison. A warehouse door rolled open, the column stormed inside and it slammed behind them. Then they were gone, but for the brief moment that it had been open Smith had caught a glimpse of movement behind the doors: swarming Ghasts, rows of vehicles and weaponry.
‘They’ll be formidable enemies,’ he said. ‘Super game, too.’
Wainscott nodded. ‘At this range you could pick one of those lobsters right out of its tank.’
‘Too risky. Shame, though.’
A thin line of dust crept from the East gates. Light glinted on laser proof armour. Vehicles rolled into the countryside, towards the wilting tea plantations.
‘Patrol,’ Wainscott said. ‘Edenites.’
A sun dragon whirled above the convoy, soaking up heat from the engines. Gunshots popped from the column and it screeched and spun away, tracer fire chasing its tail.
No fire discipline, Smith thought. The Edenites had a combination of enthusiasm and paranoia that made them unpredictable when armed – which was always.
‘Best get going,’ Wainscott said. ‘They might get nervy and bung a missile up here.’
Quietly, they turned and climbed back down. The slope was steep and unreliable, and Suruk went ahead to catch Rhianna if she should fall. Smith watched her make a long job of descending and found that Wainscott was at his side.
‘Funny bird, that,’ Wainscott observed. ‘All that
“masculine dominance”, “phallocentric myth”. . . is she any good in the sack?’
‘I really wouldn’t know,’ Smith replied.
2 Many Types of Adventure!
They climbed into the jeep and returned to the main forward camp, by the railway station. Smith was astonished at how busy the place was. Men and women worked ceaselessly: regular soldiers from the Colonial Guard and scouts from the teasmen were unloading equipment from trains, discussing tactics and pouring over maps.
But that was not all. In the fields nearby stood the first of Agshad’s skimmers, half-hidden by the tea crop. They were ugly, powerful-looking machines, a mix of hover-craft, fighter plane and tank, covered in armour plates and trophies. Some carried slogans and pictures on the side.
Most were red, where the paint had not worn through to show dull metal, greasy with oil. Thin figures moved between them: M’Lak, not quite comfortable here yet, preferring their own company to that of the stubby, pinkish-brown humans.
Wainscott stopped the jeep and Suruk, who was only half-inside anyway, sprang down and looked around, openly intrigued. Smith helped Rhianna out of the jeep –were you supposed to help an enlightened modern woman? Whatever the answer was, he knew he would be wrong – and they headed towards the warehouses.
‘They’re still poisoning the tea,’ Wainscott said. ‘They’re trying to pressure us into making a bad move.’ He looked around. ‘We’ve got six more bases like this one, equidistant from the city. When the time comes, we’ll rush it all at once, somehow.’
They found Morgar with Carveth beside one of the skimmers. Carveth waved and ran to meet them. ‘Hello all!’
‘You seem very cheerful,’ Smith said.
She nodded. She was wearing her overalls, and there was already a smudge of dirt on the end of her nose. ‘Well, it’s nice to be busy, isn’t it?’ Her voice dropped into a loud, hoarse whisper. ‘And guess who’s here?’
Smith peered at the fighters, trying to pick one face from the others. Suddenly he spotted a man of average height, handsome in a battered way and wearing a Panama hat to keep off the sun. ‘Dreckitt,’ he said, as if it were a swear word.
‘Eee!’ Carveth said, grinning.
Rhianna glanced around and said, ‘Where?’
‘Don’t look, don’t look!’ Carveth hissed. ‘He’ll see me in my overalls.’
Smith frowned. Her enthusiasm troubled him. ‘Before you go any further, Carveth, I ought to point out that he was sent to kill you last time you two met. It was a miracle that he decided not to.’
She nodded. ‘You see? He could have assassinated me but he didn’t. That’s a pretty good start for a relationship.’
‘Well, you’re certainly cleared the murder-on-sight hurdle. Next stop, wedded bliss. Honestly, Carveth, I’m not entirely happy with this.’
Rhianna leaned in. ‘We’ll talk later,’ she said.
Morgar strolled over from the skimmers, smiling pleasantly. ‘Hello there. Warm, isn’t it?’
‘As hot as the blood gushing from a severed neck,’ Suruk said.
‘Quite. Picnic weather. Now, Polly, you must meet my friend Ozroth Bloodaxe. He’s quite the auto enthusiast. Ozroth?’
A M’Lak turned from his work and flipped up a welding mask.
‘This is Ozroth Bloodaxe, of the line of Drelcor,’ Morgar said. ‘And this is Polly Pilot, of the line of. . . Pontius, perhaps?’
Smith felt strange, unsettled. His head ached a little. So, this is it, he thought. This is the army that will free Urn or die trying. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was just about to remember that he had forgotten something.
‘Are you okay?’ Rhianna said.
‘I feel odd. Sort of worried, but I’m not sure why.’
‘It’s stress.’ Rhianna nodded sagely, setting her dread-locks in motion. ‘War is very stressful. Getting shot at can actua
lly put your chi out of alignment. Why don’t you have a rest, and then maybe a massage?’
‘Really?’ he said. The thought of it made him feel quite giddy. ‘I mean, from you?’
She shrugged. ‘Sure. You need to relax.’
‘I need to sit down,’ Smith said, still thinking about Rhianna and massage.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Carveth.
*
Smith walked into the station offices. They were empty.
All the men were outside. It seemed oddly quiet here: the eye of the storm.
He pulled out a chair and sat down. He felt slightly ill, as if he had a migrane coming on. Outside, a tall, hawk-like woman was staring into a cup, surrounded by a little knot of Teasmen. She wore robes and seemed to be making some sort of speech. This must be Sam O’Varr, he realised, the Sauceress of Urn. Smith did not believe in tea-seeing: it sounded too much like one of Rhianna’s nonsenses.
Bloody Rhianna. He felt depressed, in a dull, placid way. It was better if she didn’t massage him. Better not to let her touch him at all, better still to ignore the bloody woman, accept that she was never going to be his and get back to killing Gertie. There was a war to win; the sooner he could forget about sex with girls, the sooner he could get back to bashing the Ghast on his own.
Outside, the sauceress was sharing a joke with a soldier from the Colonial Guard. Smith watched them bang their mugs together and thought: Tea, yes, that’s what I need.
He got up. Glancing across the corridor, he saw a small office kitchen. He wandered in, filled the kettle and put it on. Smith found a mug and a small fridge containing a packet of milk. There were no half-decent spoons, so he took out his penknife. It would do. He opened the cupboard and found a small jar labelled ‘tea’. It was empty. ‘Bollocks,’ he said.
Smith turned the jar upside down in case some stray tea had got caught in it. He shook it, but nothing fell out. It was then that he noticed a single teabag taped to the base. He pulled it free. Obviously an emergency teabag, intended for situations much like this. Sensible chaps.
He put the teabag in the cup and added the boiling water. He stirred it for a while with his knife, squashed the teabag against the side of the cup – interesting aroma –and dropped the bag into the sink. Then he added a little milk and stirred it again, as per the advice of the United Kingdom Tea Council.
It didn’t taste bad. He was unable to identify the sort: it reminded him slightly of Kenyan tea, although the rich aftertaste seemed unfamiliar, as did the purplish tint. Still, it was refreshing enough. Some sort of local brew, perhaps, a speciality of Urn.
Hot tea ran into his innards, refreshing him. He felt a bit better: his head was clearing very quickly. The stuff was sharpening him up a treat, in fact. In a moment he would be able to go back outside and help the men get ready to give some Ghasts a pasting.
Smith opened the cupboard and looked around for a biscuit. There was nothing. What I need now is some tiffin, he thought. ‘What I need now is some tiffin,’ he said, to make sure.
He left the kitchen. Another door branched off the corridor; it seemed to lead to a lavatory. He approached the door. There was a sign on the door. It said, ‘Please leave this toilet in the same state as you found it’.
How absurd. What kind of a fool would find a toilet, presumably needing a wee, and leave it still needing a wee? He chuckled at the stupidity of the idea and had another sip of tea. He stopped chuckling and tried again.
This time the tea went inside him instead of down his shirt-front. ‘Mm, tiffin,’ he said. His nipples hurt a bit from the hot tea.
Smith noticed that no more tea was entering his mouth and checked his cup. It was very deep. In fact, it was one of the largest mugs he had ever seen. Clever thing, technology. He looked down the well-like mug, into its depths. ‘Helloooo,’ he called. The cup was so deep that a man could fall into it, if he was not careful. Smith would not fall into it. No fooling me, he thought.
‘Smith?’
That was his name; he turned around to see Major Wainscott standing in the doorway. Major Wainscott had a beard, which was clever of him. ‘Clever beard you’ve got there, Wainscott,’ Smith observed.
‘What?’ Wainscott demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you, man?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with me,’ Smith replied. ‘I’m the tiffin, you see.’
‘You’re ill, Smith,’ Wainscott said.
‘Piffle.’ Smith wandered back into the office, reflecting that he needed another sit-down. At the edge of his vision, Wainscott was becoming quite agitated. He had run into the kitchen and was making appalled noises, presumably because there was no more tea.
‘Sorry about that,’ Smith said. ‘I had the last teabag.’
Wainscott peered at him. ‘Smith,’ he barked. ‘Smith, you hear me?’
Smith smiled at the absurdity of the situation. ‘Of course I do,’ he said.
‘Smith, where did you find that teabag?’
‘Stuck to the bottom of the pot. Why?’
Wainscott exclaimed ‘Balls!’ and ran for the door.
Terror struck Smith at the thought of being left alone. ‘Wait!’
Wainscott turned around at the door. ‘Smith?’
‘Haven’t got any tiffin on you, I suppose?’
But Wainscott was gone. Smith felt confused and glum.
He spotted a magazine sticking out of a small bin. He fished it out. It was What Ho, the Monolith on Sunday’s colour supplement. The front cover said, ‘Azranath the Butcher shows us round his lovely citadel. Top fashion model Olivia Marshing-Purdah tells us her diet secret’. He opened it.
The pictures lunged out at him. He blinked and he was falling, tumbling into the photos of famous women caught shopping and noted actors carrying their babies. The gaudy text rushed around him as he fell into the Monolith’s colour supplement. ‘It’s full of stars,’ he gasped, and the last thing he heard was the muffled thud of his head striking paper, and then the floor.
He was in the tea-fields, walking – drifting – through the crop. It stretched on forever, to the horizon and beyond, a carpet of moral fibre under the brilliant sky. He took a deep breath of pure, rich air, that seemed to feed and clean his lungs.
‘Allo!’
He turned: a bearded man in ragged robes stood behind him. The man wore a pointed hat, and carried a long stick in one hand. In the other was an ice-cream.
‘Alright, young’n,’ said the man. ‘Time we spoke.’
‘Hello,’ said Smith. ‘I’m Isambard Smith.’
‘And I am Merlin!’ cried the old man. ‘I walk the land, guarding it for the future. And you, Isambard Smith, must hark at me, for there be a battle coming anywhen soon, and it be up to you to win it. So you may ask of me what you will, and I’ll guide you best as I can.’
‘Ah,’ Smith replied. ‘This is obviously some sort of hallucination. My brain isn’t working right. I’m afraid you’d best come back when I’m feeling better, Merlin.’
‘No!’ cried Merlin. ‘Now is the time, my lad! Ask now, or never!’
‘Very well,’ said Smith. ‘Will we win the war?’
‘Nope,’ Merlin said. ‘Not with what you’ve got now. You feel it, you know it, but you don’t think it. You drink the tea, the tea that grows from the land, but you don’t see how truth lies. This is no scrap between two men – when a man wars with us, he wars with the land, see? You turn the land on him, and you’ll scag the bastard for sure. See?’
‘I think so,’ Smith murmured. ‘Can I ask another question, Merlin?’
‘Speak the words.’
‘Am I ever going to get anywhere with Rhianna?’
‘Get anywhere?’ Merlin’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are we talking runs, a four, or a six past her boundary?’
‘The full trip to the pavilion, I suppose.’
Merlin smirked. ‘Keep your pads on and your bat straight, lad.’
‘What does that mean?’ he replied, but everything was starting to fade.
> *
The sky was a bland off-white. There were planes above him, space-fighters, frozen in the air. He blinked. He was on his bed on the John Pym and he was looking up at the model kits he had hung from the ceiling.
Heads leaned into his vision. People were looking down at him. ‘Hello,’ he said.
They crowded in. He felt like a goldfish in a bowl.
‘I feel odd,’ Smith said.
‘You shouldn’t do.’ This was a gaunt, long-faced man with a thin moustache: W, the spy. ‘By rights, you ought to be dead. You drank the Tea of Death.’
‘The what?’ Smith started to sit up and a hand pressed him back into bed. It was Rhianna. Smith felt pressure on his fingers; she was holding his hand. She sat by the bed, looking both concerned and strangely pleased, as if she knew how to make him feel better again and was looking forward to showing everyone.
‘The Tea of Death,’ Rhianna said. ‘The Tea of Death is a very rare, very potent psychotropic drug, Isambard. You were experiencing a realignment of your consciousness, prompting you to react psychically to both the external world and your inner landscape—’
‘In short, you tripped your nuts off,’ Carveth said.
‘Carveth?’ Smith tried to move again, but Rhianna pressed him down, gently but firmly, and felt his brow. He could get used to that.
‘Be still, Isambard. Sauceress O’Varr says you’re really lucky to be alive. The Tea of Death is actually the product of the blessed crops of Urn that’s passed through the sun dragons to rain down upon the sacred land. Isn’t that fantastic?’
Smith thought about it. He said, ‘Are you telling me I’ve just drunk dragon pee?’
Rhianna laughed. ‘Oh no, the rain part’s purely symbolic. It’s not literally a liquid.’
‘Good!’
‘It’s solid.’
As Smith choked, W interrupted. ‘What you ingested would have killed a man of lesser moral fibre. In fact, we were planning to slip the teabag into the Hyrax’s dinner. The very fact you’re breathing is testament to the nature of the common man of the Empire. The common man, you understand, who will liberate Urn.’