Jani and the Greater Game (The Multiplicity Series Book 1) (37 page)

“What happened, sir?” Alfie whispered.

“What happened? He pulled the trigger again, and again... And I stared him in the eye, unflinching, and I knew that the last bullet had me name on it, and I was ready. I’d said me prayers and I was going to see me maker, and there was nothing Gunga Din could do to make me show me funk.”

“But...” Alfie asked. Despite himself, despite the position he was in, he wanted to know how Smethers had lived to tell the tale. “But how did you...?”

Smethers rocked forward, gathered himself and sat upright. He blinked and shook himself with the theatrical shiver of a drunk attempting to instil sobriety. He focused on Alfie with evident difficulty. “Gunga Din raised his piece and I stared at him, and he wavered, his cocksure grin slipping, his eyes shifting under the gaze of his men... I just stared at him, willing the bastard to do it, to pull the... the trigger...”

Smethers mumbled to a stop, his head nodding.

Please,
Alfie prayed,
please fall into a coma before...

The colonel snapped his head upright. “And Gunga Din’s trigger finger tightened, and I heard a shot – a single shot – and he topples from the chair, dead, a neat bullet hole in his left temple. And Brigadier Rogers, bless his heart, Rogers and his men burst in through the French windows and... and twenty seconds later every stinking sepoy, every man-jack of them, lay on the floor dead or dying.”

He looked up, stared at Alfie and raised his revolver.

Alfie swallowed.

“Then I went into the bedroom to say me goodbyes to Mary, and then went across to the armoury, bagged meself an Enfield, joined the Brigadier and went into town and accounted for as many of the little black bastards as humanly possible.”

Alfie nodded. He tried to smile. “I see, sir. Well, I must say... Jolly brave of you, and all that...” He willed himself to dive from the chair and wrestle Smethers to the floor, but he was paralysed by gut-wrenching fear.

Smethers stared at him, his head lolling. “Two more shots, Littlebody. Are you a betting man? What say the next one is the one, hm?”

He raised the revolver, closed one eye, took aim...

Alfie pressed himself into the back of the armchair, willing himself not to whimper out loud, as Smethers’ aim wavered, his hand shaking, his head lolling...

Ten seconds elapsed – the longest ten seconds of Alfie’s life – and then, just as Alfie was about to close his eyes and accept that the end was nigh, Smethers groaned and pitched forward, face first, onto the floor, the revolver falling from his grip and skittering across the rug.

Alfie gave a strangled cry of relief. His every limb trembling, he pushed himself from the chair and staggered across to where Smethers’ revolver lay.

He picked it up in shaking fingers, snapped open the cylinder and looked for the bullet with his name upon it.

But the chamber was empty.

Weeping tears of rage and relief, Alfie staggered over to the comatose Smethers and stared down at him. “You bastard,” he said. “You contemptible, sadistic, utter
bastard
...”

Then he crossed the gondola to the lavatory and locked himself in as the airship powered east to Nepal.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Jelch tells a fantastic story –

The threat of the Zhell – The Masters of the Cosmos –

“The less you know...”

J
ANI FOUND A
mirror in the tiny bathroom and examined her face. A dozen dots of blood like scarlet dewdrops marked where the pinions had pierced her flesh, and her skin was puffy and sore to the touch. She dabbed at the tiny wounds with an antiseptic gauze from the first-aid kit, wincing at the pain. Jelch had reassured her that she would not be scarred, though at the moment Jani was more concerned about the possibility of infection.

She stepped from the bathroom to find Anand curled sleeping in an armchair, his hair sticking upright in an unruly shock and his mouth open.

She looked across the lounge at the baize door, made up her mind and crossed to the control cabin. She stepped through, closing the door behind her, and perched on a ledge beside the pilot’s seat.

“Is there any sign of the RAF?” she asked.

“They’ll be unable to follow us through the cloud,” Jelch said. “I expect they’ll be turning back and dreaming of the mess and mugs of sweet tea.”

She rocked with the motion of the flight, gripping the crossbar and staring at the creature.

“You admitted earlier that you are using me,” she said, “and I accepted the fact. But... I would like to know by whom I am being used, and to what end? Who are you, Jelch?
What
are you?”

He affected scrutiny of the controls. “It is enough for you to know that I am not human, Jani. As to our goal – as I said, you will find out in time.”

“You patronise me. On that very first occasion we met, in the wreckage of the airship, you said that my young mind would be unable to comprehend the truth. I think you owe me that, at least: the truth.”

His thin lips compressed, becoming even thinner. He adjusted the controls and peered into the convex mirror.

Exasperated, she said, “Then let me guess.” She took in his domed, elongated skull, his attenuated torso. “You are manifestly not human. I thought at first that you were a wild creature from north of here, a yeti or a Siberian chuchunaa. But I have revised my opinion somewhat. I think now that you do not hail from this world, as you resemble nothing I have ever seen in the animal kingdom. You are educated, intelligent...”

He made a sound like a sigh. She went on, “You are, then, evidently not of this world. Am I right?”

“Jani...”

Fury flared in her breast. “I offered you morphine, and for some reason known only to yourself you gave me a coin in return. Later you... you appeared in my dreams... or I hallucinated you... or you in some way projected yourself before me as the Russians held me captive” – he looked up sharply at this, and she thought she had guessed correctly – “and you told me to head east to Nepal, which I did, which I am doing. And in return you vouchsafe nothing! Now, please have the decency to tell me if I am correct! Do you, sir, hail from another world?”

She held her breath as he stared resolutely ahead, and finally turned to look at her. “I’ve said this before, Janisha Chatterjee: you are wise beyond your years.”

She released a pent-up breath and nodded. “When did you come to Earth, and why?” Her thoughts swirled. She was in an airship flying towards Nepal, interrogating a creature from the stars...

He made that strange sound again, a ventilation of breath she thought might be a sigh. “What I tell you now is nothing that the British and the Russians do not already know,” he said. “So even if you did fall into their hands, and they read your mind... then they would learn nothing new. Very well,” he went on. “I am not of this world, but from another world. I came here fifty years ago aboard a vessel that was not mine but belonged to another race.”

She stopped him there. “Fifty years?” she said. “But how old are you?”

His gelid eyes regarded her. “I am almost eighty years old,” he said. “My kind often live to a hundred and fifty years, as you calculate time.”

She stared at the creature, over sixty years her senior, and wondered at the strange and terrible things he must have experienced. She said quietly, “When I last saw my father, before he passed away, I asked him about you. He told me that there was another of your kind, held in London. He said that you told terrible stories of invading armies, stories – according to my father – that were the product of a ranting madman, stories that could not be believed. Is that why you came to Earth?”

“It is why we came to your planet, Janisha. I approached the Russians, and my partner the British. We told them of a race that would, if it had its way, invade your planet and enslave all upon it, or worse.”

Jani stared at him, a knot of fear in her chest. “These beings?”

“We call them the Zhell, though that is our name for them. They call themselves something unpronounceable which translates as ‘Masters of the Cosmos.’”

“And how do you know of these creatures?” she murmured.

“Because, Jani, they invaded my world, and enslaved my people, and slaughtered millions of us. They were merciless beyond imagining. They thought nothing of annihilating the inhabitants of a continent without warning and with no reason. They saw all who were not Zhell as inferior, and therefore expendable. In all likelihood they did not see what they did as evil, much as a human might eradicate a colony of wasps. They came from a populous world, and wanted territory, and slaves to do their work. When they came to my own world and subjugated my kind, my partner and I fled... That is a long and complex story in itself. We escaped to the world of the Vantissar, with the Zhell close behind us. From Vantissar we fled aboard a ship to Earth, with a warning to your world... a warning your leaders chose to ignore, or dismiss as the gibberings of madmen.”

She stared through the viewscreen at the moonlit, opalescent depths of the cloud through which they were passing, her mind expanding as she took in the alien’s words. She recalled what her father had told her on his deathbed.
There is no such thing as Annapurnite
...

She said in little more than a whisper, “Fifty years ago...”

“Jani?”

She made the connection. “Annapurnite... the reason the British are so powerful. My father... he told me that there was no such thing as Annapurnite. Now, I think, I understand.”

Jelch regarded her, his thin lips stretching. “The ship landed in the foothills of the Himalayas. The Vantissar did not fare well on your world; they lived for perhaps ten years, in increasing ill-health, cared for by tribesmen who revered them as gods fallen from the skies, until viral infection killed them off. I trekked north to warn the Russians, and my partner approached the British. The tsarist Russians tortured me, until I escaped and lived a wild and terrible life, constantly on the run, for almost thirty years before being recaptured – this time by the communists, who were even more ruthless.”

“And the British found the Vantissar ship, and utilised the technology they found?”

Jelch inclined his head. “The Vantissar were... are... a technologically accomplished race. Their ship was packed with wonders, even to my people. The British plundered this treasure trove, declared Nepal out of bounds, closed the border and made it protected territory and brought in legions of scientists and engineers to work through the technological wonders they found aboard the ship, though in truth they could but comprehend a fraction of what they found.”

“A fraction?” she said. “But even with that, the world has been transformed!”

Jelch grunted what might have been an ironic laugh. “Transformed – but to what end, if the Zhell succeed in their plans?”

She stared at him. “But that was fifty years ago, and they are not yet here. Perhaps they have changed their minds, altered their plans? Fifty years is a long time.”

“Jani, Jani... fifty years is no time at all in the grand scheme of a race which thinks nothing of quelling a world and taking a thousand years to do so, and only then moving on.”