Chronicles of Isambard Smith 05 - End of Empires (36 page)

‘Slow him down,’ he said, and he broke the gun open. Rhianna closed her eyes, and Smith took out the solid shell, and replaced it with shot.

The first beast strode a little slower now, but each step was still enormous: it could march straight through the castle. The ground shook, rocked. The second monster lumbered into view.

‘The other one!’ Smith shouted. ‘Make them friendly!’

The first beast was nearly on top of them now. The huge legs boomed around them, crashing down like pistons in a starship’s engine room. Something like a huge fleshy pendulum swung from above, and Smith thought, That’s a funny place to have a tail –

‘I will fill their hearts with love!’ Rhianna cried, beaming.

‘That’s not its heart!’ Smith yelled back, and tugged her out the way. They dashed aside, between the first beast and the second, through a storm of dust and panicked animals. Suddenly they were clear, and as the first ravnaphant passed them, Smith pulled up the gun and fired both barrels into its rear.

It lumbered to a halt. The lemming men riding it shouted and tried to goad it on. The ravnaphant’s back twitched as the realisation that it had been shot travelled from its backside to its brain. A red mark swelled from the point of injury: the shot had been like a slap across the arse.

The second ravnaphant paused, took a good look at the red bottom in front of it, drew the obvious conclusion and leaped onto its comrade’s back.

In a second, two hundred lemming men died horribly. Those not flattened outright were ground to paste by the vigorous motions that followed. Smith was reminded of the liaison between his aunt’s Jack Russell and a table leg.

The first ravnaphant dimly realised what was going on, and reminded the second that they were both male by kicking it in the groin. The second beast roared and staggered, sending lemming men flying into the forest like water off a wet dog’s back. The ground rocked and shuddered as the two beasts bellowed at each other.

Smith stood there a moment, overcome with awe, and then Rhianna grabbed him. ‘Isambard, we did it!’

They stood there, gazing at two of the galaxy’s most majestic creatures in one of the galaxy’s less majestic spectacles. ‘And so did they,’ Smith replied. ‘To each other. Or at least, they tried.’

Together they walked back to W. He stood upright, leaning against a tree, smoking a roll-up. ‘Did you bag them both?’

‘Good as,’ Smith replied.

‘You should get them mounted,’ the spy replied.

‘Actually, they mounted each other.’

‘That was some bloody good work,’ Smith said as they started back towards the trapdoor. He squeezed Rhianna’s hand.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t all that hard to communicate with them. They’re a lot like men, really Their brains are in their –’

A rumble ran through the air. Smith felt it in the ground, too, under his boots. ‘Not again!’

The sound rose, and the branches above them trembled. This time, the noise was coming from the South, not the East, but it was still set to crash into them.

Smith looked at Rhianna. ‘Can you slow this one down?’

She looked vague, but grim. ‘I’ll try. I’ll see what I can do.’

She walked out to meet it. Smith followed, W lurching along beside them. They looked up at the forest. And the trees burst apart before them. The ravnaphant came lumbering through, striding forwards, and Smith saw a castle on its back, studded with howitzers: Union Jacks dangling along its flanks, and galloping in its wake, row upon row of lancers riding great green beasts.

‘Mildred!’ he cried.

Someone blew a bugle, and the ravnaphant lifted her head and bellowed. A tiny figure stood between her eyebrow-ridges: legs braced, arm out before it.

‘Look!’ Rhianna cried. ‘It’s Suruk! And he’s surfing the ravnaphant’s head!’

* * *

The Yull could no longer flatten the castle, but they could still storm it. They poured in now, and the defenders retreated upstairs as if from a rising tide, closer and closer to General Young. A thick carpet of fallen lemmings covered the lower floor, but the Yull did not care. Victory was worth any price.

The mechanical maneater fought like the monster that it was. The humans didn’t matter much, but the M’Lak – Grimdall’s people – were in danger. The reckoning with mankind could wait. Bayonets broke on its metal skin; armour and fur crumpled under its massive claws.

Susan ran out of powerpacks for the beam gun. She grabbed a laser rifle from a dead soldier, and moved on to two revolvers when that ran out. Craig was jabbed in the thigh and Nelson dragged him upstairs. Wainscott took a gash to the chest from a Yullian axe, shortly before throwing the axe’s owner over the banisters.

They regrouped in the tertiary ballroom, an immense chamber in the centre of the fifth floor. The ground was already strewn with lemming men, their fur stiff and red.

Wainscott and a captain from the M’Lak rifles began to argue over a counter-attack. Each appeared to want to lead the charge. A group of Sey arrived and reported that they had sawed off the drainpipes to prevent the Yull climbing them.

Carveth stepped over a fallen lemming and hurried to Dreckitt’s side. ‘Rick, have you got any spare ammo?’

‘Nix, kid. Twenty more slugs and I’m down to rubbing out lemmings with brass knuckles.’ He took out a grenade. ‘I saved us a pineapple. In case they try to take us alive.’

‘Alright. I hope I was alright as a girlfriend.’

‘A dame and a moll,’ Dreckitt replied, putting his arm around her.

Something bumped against Carveth’s boot. She glanced down, and saw an empty plastic bottle.

‘Catsup,’ Dreckitt said. ‘Hell of a place to chow.’

‘Ketchup?’ Quietly, she squatted down and touched her finger to the Yullian soldier sprawled at her feet. Her fingertips came up sticky and red. Too red. ‘That’s not blood,’ she said. ‘Rick, that’s not blood!’

‘Hot damn!’ Dreckitt cried. ‘Guys, they’re not dead! The lemmings are playing possum!’

The Yull sprang up around them. The defenders dropped back into a tight circle, suddenly surrounded. They fired and cut, killing dozens of lemmings as they scrambled upright, but the delay was enough. More Yull charged in from the side doors. In a moment, the soldiers of the Space Empire were encircled by a wall of fur and bayonets. Human, M’Lak, Sey and even a couple of beetle people stood in the centre of a horde.

The M’Lak captain tossed his gun onto the floor, and dropped to one knee before the Yull.

Quietly, the M’Lak laid down their guns.

‘No,’ Carveth gasped. ‘Don’t give in! We have to fight!’

The Yull squeaked and jeered.

‘Wait,’ Dreckitt said.

The M’Lak captain put his fingertips on the ground and pushed his hips into the air.

Wainscott drew a machete.

Like a sprinter from the blocks, the M’Lak captain shot forward into the ranks of the lemming men and his soldiers followed him. Carveth saw Susan bellowing something and then she was running forward with them, following the Space Empire’s toughest troops into close combat.

The ballroom windows exploded and a scaly head the size of a space shuttle ploughed into the room. A trumpet blasted, and Carveth recognised the figures on the beast’s head.

She saw Smith, and Suruk, and Rhianna, and then Suruk leaped down to fight. The Ravnavari Lancers raced up Mildred’s tail, over her back, and onto her head, and behind them came the blue legions of the Equ’i. The Empire charged, and the Yull were swept away.

* * *

General Wikwot watched his army fall apart. Despite or perhaps because of all the carnage, he felt numb. A window burst open in one of the towers and a torrent of his soldiers tumbled out, crashing into the courtyard below. Perhaps someone had pushed them, but he suspected that what had sent the lemmings to their deaths was despair.

He called one of his bodyguards over and sent out the order for a general retreat. This would be difficult to enforce: not only had two newly-liberated ravnaphants had a bad effect on the Yullian lines of communication, but the language of the lemming men had no word for ‘retreat’.

Mildred, the Space Empire’s tame monster, had stopped before the castle, and the Ravnavari Lancers were using her tail and neck as a ramp to charge into the upper levels of Mothkarak. A burning lemming dropped flailing from the battlements. It looked like a demon.

It all made no sense. Unrodents were all cowardly and weak: they had no skill or appetite for war. Yet here they were, massively outnumbered, laying waste to his army. For a moment, Wikwot wondered if he had underestimated these stupid, fat, clumsy, timid, shameful, smelly, idle, mangy degenerates, and then an explosion to the right jolted him back to the present.

At first he thought the trees were moving. Then he looked up, and saw that what he’d taken for a trunk was a colossal leg. It was one of the captured ravnaphants, celebrating its new liberty by flattening its former tormentors.

It took a step towards him. A surly rage rose up in Wikwot’s mind and he drew the battleaxe from his belt. He was still the general.

The monster lumbered closer, and its tiny eyes saw Wikwot far below. The bodyguards screamed and scattered. Wikwot hefted his axe as the ravnaphant raised its foot, and a great shadow fell across the ground.

‘Come back!’ the general yelled at his minions. ‘Come back, you cowards! It’s only a ravnaphant!’

* * *

It was, without doubt, time for tiffin.

Smith wandered through the castle. He was co-opted to help carry some of the wounded to the medical centre set up in one of the larger kitchens. Lemming men lay everywhere.

Light and strange smells flickered from a workshop. Smith peered inside: one of the construction robots had sliced a sofa open and pulled out its padding, and was currently putting the finishing touches to a huge stuffed squol in a spiked collar. W watched from the far side of the room, his arm in a sling and a cup of tea clenched in his fist. He must have reprogrammed the robot to carry out taxidermy. Smith closed the door and crept away.

He found Rhianna and Susan in a drawing room, looking like guerrillas lost in a Jane Austen novel. ‘These dials show power output,’ Susan said, tapping the beam gun on the chaise lounge beside her. ‘Ohms, Watts, Bechdels… Hello Smith. Seen Wainscott around?’

‘I think he’s upstairs.’

‘Just don’t let him take off into the forest. I’ll have to stick posters on the trees:
Lost: one commanding officer
. It’d be embarrassing.’

On the way back, Rhianna and Smith ran into a group of soldiers hurrying to the ballroom. A crowd packed out the area: humans, M’Lak, beetle people, Sey, Equ’i and even a couple of robots listening to the small figure on the stage.

It was General Young. She was short, but as tough and determined as she had been when she’d sent him after Wainscott: a terrier of a woman. Smith caught scraps of her speech. Unused to the concept of retreat, the Yull were in disarray. The remainder of the Divine Amicable Army had simply fled into the forest and were being harried by the lancers. Plans were afoot to destroy the Yullian food stores in order to hinder their retreat: at any rate, Smith assumed that was what ‘blast their nuts with a flamethrower’ meant.

‘But it is you who achieved this,’ the general said. ‘I may have had the idea, but you did the work on the ground. One cannot forge a sword if the steel is not there already. The Yull lost because you fought harder and better than them. I anticipate that the Yullian army will fall back to higher ground, and then jump off it. We will therefore be pressing on, but first we will consolidate our position – and celebrate.’

Smith headed off. He had come lately to the battle for Andor, and the real glory was owed to those who had seen the war against the lemmings from the start, when it had looked likely that the Empire would be finished and its planets overrun. He disengaged Carveth from Dreckitt and discreetly removed Suruk from a conversation with Morgar and Bargath.

‘The lancers are giving my brother a commission!’ Suruk announced. ‘I fear that the Empire is still in great danger.’

Smith found battered wicker chairs and they sat on the verandah, looking out over the forest. Slowly, everyone drank their tea and began to comprehend the scale of the victory.

The sun was rising, setting the sky alight. On the horizon, two ravnaphants, recently freed from the tyranny of the lemming men, were still arguing about which of them was the female. It slightly spoiled the atmosphere, but not much.

‘Bloody good show, everyone,’ Smith said. ‘I mean it. Bloody good.’

Suruk chuckled. ‘A mighty victory. Fierce justice has been served to the foul armies of the Yull. Severed heads and biscuits all round!’

‘Right now,’ said Carveth, ‘I just want to sleep.’

‘Nonsense,’ Suruk replied. ‘This is just the beginning. We will press on and take the war to the lemming men. They know now that there are no warriors to equal us. What other empire has cavalry that ride dinosaurs, which all ride one huge dinosaur? I ask you that. We will clean up the Yull, and dispatch the scum Edenites, and then the Ghasts. They will throw down their arms, and those who do not, we shall hack apart! These are nice biscuits, by the way.’

‘Well said,’ Smith agreed. ‘The lemmings are finished, Carveth. Even now the lancers are shipping the prisoners off to the safari park.’

‘Safari?’ Carveth demanded. ‘That’s a bit soft, isn’t it? You’re talking about pony-killers here.’

Suruk laughed. ‘It’s not
their
safari, little woman. They get the choice: five years’ penal servitude or two weeks on a M’Lak game reserve. We have to train the young warriors up somehow.’

Rhianna stretched and sighed. ‘You know, guys, I think we all learned something today.’

Smith nodded. ‘True. Being deranged isn’t everything. The lemming men may be bizarre and insane, but we British are far more than that.’

‘Yeah,’ said Carveth. ‘We’re
really
crazy.’

‘Speak for yourself, Piglet,’ Suruk put in. ‘Today I surfed a dinosaur. That seems entirely sensible to me.’

Rhianna frowned. ‘No, not that. I’ve learned that we truly are one. Human, M’Lak, Sey, Kaldathrian, if we all just came together as one, we could –’