Black Hand Gang (22 page)

"But couldn't the Lieutenant do anything, Sarn't?" asked Porgy.

The Sergeant's face softened. "He did what he could, lad."

"Shh!" hissed Pot Shot. The column froze.

"I don't hear -"

Muffled by the forest canopy and the undergrowth they heard the faint sound of a whistle blown three times.

"The entrenchment!" Ketch blurted.

Blood and sand
, thought Atkins,
please God don't say the entrenchment is vanishing without us
.

From the fleeting looks of panic on the others' faces, he could tell they were thinking the same thing.

"Make for the rendezvous point" said Lieutenant Everson. Immediately they dropped the carrying pole and sandbags of fruit and pelted back along their trail, hobnail boots pounding out an urgent tattoo.

It took them ten long agonising minutes of occasional stumbling, shouted encouragement and blasphemous urgings to reach the edge of the forest and Lieutenant Baxter's covering Lewis gun section. They had blown the whistle. Between deep wracking breaths, Atkins peered out across the plain; down the trail they'd made though the tube grass. Nothing seemed amiss.

"Baxter?" queried Everson.

"Shooting, sporadic gunfire from the direction of the entrenchment."

"Flare?"

"No."

"Oh, thank god!" muttered Everson.

"Is it vanishing, sir?" asked Pot Shot, through a hacking smoker's cough.

"No. Signal for that's a red flare. From the gunfire, sounds like they're being attacked. Right. Back to the entrenchment at the double. Set up covering positions and OP at the edge of the razed clearing. Stay under cover of the grass. I want to know what we're getting into before we go charging in blindly."

"Christ," said Atkins. "Now what?" he checked his rifle's magazine and flicked the cut-off open. He didn't like surprises. And this planet was just bloody full of them.

For the last hundred yards or so, 1 Section dropped into a crouch and edged their way forward through the bush, fanning out from the path. Everson peered across the charred earth that lay before the tilted muddy escarpment ahead of them. Smoke rose from beyond the lip and the cries of wounded reached them, carried on the wind.

"Hobson, take three men and proceed to the lip of the entrenchments. Hold that position," said Everson quietly. "We'll cover you. If it's all clear, we'll leapfrog you."

Hobson looked around. "Atkins, Hopkiss, Blood, you're with me."

Gazette, Half Pint, Pot Shot and Ketch took up covering positions in the tube grass. The Lewis gun section set up their gun. To their left Atkins spotted another couple of foraging parties that had returned in answer to the shots and now held back on the edge of the tube grass awaiting further orders. Everson indicated they should wait for his order before advancing.

Keeping low, Atkins followed Hobson as they ran across the scorched earth before throwing himself down against the chalky embankment of Somme mud.

"Atkins," hissed Hobson, with a jerk of his head.

Feeling vulnerable without his battle bowler Atkins cautiously peered over the lip of the mud across the remains of No Man's Land and towards the trenches a couple of hundred yards away. He could make out the tents of the Casualty Clearing Station beyond the Front Line. The remains of several tents were smoking. Figures wandered about dazed. Atkins looked back over his shoulder. "Looks like the aftermath of an attack, Sarn't. I can't see any enemy troops."

"Hopkiss, Blood, get up there with Atkins. Cover the Lieutenant's advance."

They scrambled to the top of the lip alongside Atkins, their rifles aimed, unnaturally, towards their own Front Line as the Lieutenant, Gazette, Pot Shot, Half Pint and Ketch scurried past them before dropping down into the cover of a large shell hole. Further to their right, they saw several other sections moving towards the trenches. There was a brief wait before Everson waved Atkins and the others forwards. Atkins leapt up and ran low across the drying mud, kicking up dust as he did. He slid down into the shell hole, Porgy, Gutsy and Sergeant Hobson almost coming down on top of him.

"I can't see any sign of occupation," said Everson. "Hobson, stay here. I'm going to take a butcher's. Atkins you're with me. Straight for the firing trench."

Atkins took several deep breaths and launched himself out of the shell hole. It felt distinctly odd to be charging your own trenches. This is what the Huns must have seen as they attacked. There was a buzz and crack as a bullet crunched into the crust of mud at his feet. He threw himself aside, into a crater.

"Ally Pally!" called Everson. "Ally Pally!"

A head appeared above the parapet. "Sorry, sir. Thought you were another of them Chatt bastards!"

Everson glanced at Atkins. Chatts? Atkins shrugged and shook his head. Everson stood up and walked towards the fire trench, Atkins following. Behind them, the rest of the section made their way in, along with other forage patrols, alert and nervous. Atkins grabbed a dazed private with haunted eyes.

"What happened?"

"They came out of nowhere."

Atkins shook him out of frustration. "Who? Who did?"

"Them!" said the soldier pointing at a body on the ground nearby, half obscured by the bend of the traverse. "Dozens of 'em."

Atkins took a step towards it. "Blood and sand! Lieutenant, I think you should see this."

"Good God," Everson gasped as he looked down at the corpse before them. Was it some sort of insect? It would take a more scientific mind than his to determine, although it certainly seemed to elicit that level of primal revulsion.

Porgy and Gutsy came up beside them and stared down at the sight.

The body that lay on its back at their feet wasn't human, although its proportions were. It would have stood between five and six feet tall. Its large black eyes were set in a wide flat armoured head and Atkins realised with a shock that he'd seen ones like them before, staring back at him from his hallucinatory episode. Below the eyes, at the bottom of the fused chitinous plates that covered its head was something he scarcely recognised as a mouth. Two shiny black mandibles, closed over a mucus-slick muscular maw. Four smaller articulated palps lay slack and lifeless about it. At the top of its head protruded two antennae, segmented and each about a foot long. One had snapped and lay at an odd angle. Two wiry looking arms, each covered with a series of barbed chitinous plates, extended from shoulder joints in the thorax. Each arm ended in what may have been a hand with two fingers and a prehensile thumb-like appendage.

Where, on a man, one might expect to find the ribcage, this creature had a hardened plate that shimmered with an iridescent gleam. There was a gaping hole in the plate from which a bluish liquid oozed. Atkins poked it with his bayonet. The edges of the hole gave way with a brittle crack. He drove the bayonet home, just to make sure. The thing didn't move.

He thought of the beetles that used to scuttle about his mam's kitchen. He and William used to crush them under their clogs with just such a frail, moist crunch.

Below this was an unarmoured mid-section from where two smaller, less well-formed limbs projected, each ending with a single curved claw of the same iridescent black as its carapace.

"Yrredetti?" asked Atkins.

Everson shook his head. "Wrong colouring. Besides, Napoo said they hunt alone. This must be Khungarrii."

"They're just big fat bloomin' lice!" exclaimed Gutsy. "Nothing more than vermin!" He kicked the creature's thorax. "'Chatts' is bloody right."

"Atkins, Hopkiss, see what you can find out," said Everson, still staring thoughtfully at the alien body before them. "Jellicoe, Otterthwaite and Nicholls, pull together as many able bodied men as possible. I want this entrenchment secure. Hobson, order the men to stand to."

Atkins and Porgy weaved their way through the fire and communications trenches. They came across several Khungarrii dead, lying among the bodies of their own. They stopped for a line of men, their faces roughly bandaged, one hand on the shoulder of the one in front, led, blind and stumbling, to the Casualty Clearing Station.

"Bastards spit acid," said the Lance Corporal leading them.

From a shelled section of trench, they ascended onto the open ground. Between the lines, they passed Hepton who was excitedly filming a group of grinning Tommies posing with a dead Khungarrii, like Big Game hunters. Amid the chaos and aftermath of the attack, Atkins could see the punishment post beyond the wire. Mercy was still there, crucified. His torso was now one great purple and black bruise.

"Mercy!" He ran towards him, stopping only to find a breach in the wire entanglement.

"Huu -"

"Mercy, you okay?"

"'S it look like?"

"Hang in there, mate."

"Oh, ha ha, very funny," said Mercy through dry, cracked, lips. "You should be in the musical hall, Only." Atkins held him up as Porgy used his bayonet to cut the rope binding his wrists.

"You two, what do think you're doing? I'll have your names for this!" It was Ketch. "Atkins, I might have known it were you!"

"Back off, Ketch," snarled Porgy. "Lieutenant Everson asked us to find witnesses. No thanks to you and Gilbert the Filbert, Mercy here was front and centre for the whole attack."

Mercy managed a weak grin. "Nice to see you, too, Corp," he rasped before insolently hawking a gob of mucus in Ketch's direction.

Mercy sat on an ammo box, Everson and 1 Section gathered round him. He gulped down the proffered water as Everson and the others waited impatiently.

"What happened?" asked Porgy, indicating the confusion around them. "Where's Edith?"

"I don't know. Couldn't see much from where I was," he said hoarsely. "They moved fast, rounded up prisoners. I think they must have come in through one of the unfinished OP saps. They must have taken out the sentries. Nobody saw them until they were in the trenches. I heard some shooting, then they swarmed across the top, some leaping ten, twenty feet at a go. Ugly buggers, like great big fleas."

"Yeah, we seen 'em," said Half Pint.

"They were well organised. Some of them spit, like, an acid. Others had lances and backpacks. Looked like a flammenwerfer, but it shot blue crackling fire stuff. Like electricity. But mostly they had swords and spears. They seemed to take a lot of loot as well, trench equipment, weapons and the like."

Among the missing were Captain Grantham, Padre Rand, Lieutenant Jeffries, Napoo, the three nurses and about twenty-five other ranks.

"Seems to have been a well-planned raid," Sergeant Hobson said bitterly.

"We've got to go after them, sir," said Porgy.

"We will, Hopkiss, we will," said Everson. "But first things first. We have to secure the entrenchments. We have to wait for the other Forage Parties to come back. And we have to find out exactly what we're up against. Then we have to put together a plan of attack and get a party together to go after them. Rushing into this won't do us any favours."

It seemed though, from Ration Dump rumour, that wasn't good enough for a section of Jeffries' Platoon, who had grabbed their guns and just gone after them; it was twenty minutes before anyone noticed that they were missing.

"Idiots!" said Everson. He was now the ranking infantry officer in the entrenchment. "Hobson, order the NCOs to take roll calls. Find out if anyone else is missing."

Tulliver and the tank crew returned in
Ivanhoe
from their petrol fruit forage trip, unaware of the raid until they were met with the organised chaos of mobilising infantry.

"Tulliver, how quickly can you get your machine in the air?" asked Everson.

"Give me ten minutes," said Tulliver.

"They've got about three hours on us by now. Can you track them, see which way they're headed?"

"Yes, I can do that but the state of the strip isn't perfect. I don't want to do too many take off and landings there without flattening the ground more."

"Right, I understand, but for now?"

"I'll chance it."

Everson watched anxiously as Tulliver and a couple of soldiers pulled the aeroplane out of its makeshift tarpaulin and brushwood hangar. The pilot waved at him as he stood by his machine. Everson raised his hand in reply and watched the young lad climb into his cockpit and strap himself in. A soldier pulled the propeller. Contact. Tulliver ran up his engine, testing it. Finally, the Sopwith began to run forwards eagerly. Tulliver gave it its head, the tail left the ground before the end of the take-off strip, and it lifted up across the fronds of tube grass. The aeroplane wheeled around the entrenchment before climbing and veering off, following the path Everson told him the arthropod raiders had taken. Everson turned from the aeroplane and headed back towards the trenches and the Casualty tents.

In the dank-smelling tent, Everson sat down next to Poilus. The young savage sat up in his cot, drinking a dixie of water. He looked disconcertingly out of place wearing striped pyjama bottoms. God knows where they'd come from. "Tell me about the Khungarrii," he said.

"They are of the Ones," said Poilus, as if that explained all.

"They've taken my men. Napoo, too. We intend to get them back but we need to know what they're going to do with them."

Poilus sighed. "Khungarrii always take Urmen. They make them work for them in Khungarr; building, mending, growing, cleaning..."

"But not you. They didn't take you."

"The sick and frail are no use to them," said Poilus with a hint of disgust at his own weakened state.

"Because they can't work them as slaves?"

"I don't know this word."

Everson didn't feel like explaining. He pressed on with his questions. "How many Khungarrii in Khungarr?"

"I do not know. Many. A great number."

"And Urmen?"

"Many."

"Damn," muttered Everson. For someone who resented the weight of responsibility, it looked like his load had just become a lot heavier.

Tulliver banked his machine with a little left rudder and turned to follow the trail that was plainly visible from this height, cutting a swath through the tube grasses of the valley, but of the raiders and their prisoners there was no sign. The valley side's fell away diminishing into foothills before a vast veldt opened up below him. He followed the trail across it for some twenty miles until he saw it vanish into a huge forest that seemed to extend for hundreds of square miles. Amid the forest, something glinted in the sun. A large tower-like structure rising above the tree canopy, twinkling as if -