Wrath of the Lemming-men (2 page)

‘
Yullai!
’ he shrieked – and stopped dead as the bristle end of Agshad’s broom struck him in the mouth. He made muffled noises, chewing at the bristles in his rage, and Agshad turned and deftly shoved him over the railings.

Vock’s champion dropped into the rapids, whooping with demented glee. The Tam had claimed its first victim.

Agshad felt tranquil and absolutely confident, as if the sun had risen anew and bathed him in its rays. He was where he was meant to be. His whole life had been leading to this moment: decades as a warrior, followed by the rigorous discipline of accountancy. He looked down at the river, where the body of the Yull bumped against the bank.

‘One,’ Agshad said.

The Yull poured howling onto the bridge. Agshad whirled the broom, braining one and knocking a second flat. The third lemming man fell over the second, and Agshad leaped up and kicked a fourth in the snout. The bodies of the Yull began to pile up and more clambered over them. Agshad pressed on, tallying his kills as he waded into the foe.

It was turning into a beautiful day: a morning’s book-keeping and then a fight to the death, all in very clement weather. One could not have wished for a better end to life. Agshad’s only regret was that his offspring could not see him; they would have been quite impressed. He kicked a lemming man over the railing.

‘Fourteen!’ he cried. ‘Ancestors of mine, children of mine, watch me now, for this is how I die!’

Suruk the Slayer was suddenly awake. He had been sleeping in the traditional way, squatting on a stool like some great bird of prey – in one movement he sprang down from his perch and landed softly in the middle of the room, silent except for the hiss of the blade as he slid it from its sheath.

He stood there in a fighting-crouch, tasting the air, his shrewd eyes flicking around the room. I felt something, he thought. Something was here. . . something very wrong.

‘Who is there?’ he asked softly, speaking the language of his forefathers for no reason he could understand.

‘Father? Is it you?’

The shadows did not answer.

‘It must have been the curry,’ Suruk said, and he shrugged and went back to sleep.

It was a photograph of a young woman, taken in holo-type. She was in her early thirties, pretty, slim, with a vague, pleasant smile. She wore a short top that exposed her tanned midriff, and a cloth band across her forehead to pull her dreadlocks back. She was up to her waist in tea plants. As Isambard Smith rocked the picture back and forth in his hands, the girl waved: she was making the sign for a victory, or for peace.

The picture made Smith tired, then angry. No point keeping the bloody thing. He tried to rip it: the photo did not tear but stretched, and the plastic at the top of the picture warped and whitened above Rhianna Mitchell’s head.

‘Bollocks,’ Smith said. He’d been trying to forget the girl; now he’d given her a halo. He tossed the picture onto the desk, turned it face down and Rhianna disappeared. I wonder where she is now? he thought. Probably with some bloody man, some smart fellow, doing something more important and exciting than she’d ever do with me.

‘Well, better get on with this commando raid,’ he said, getting up.

He picked up the .48 Markham and Briggs Civiliser and holstered it. He checked his sword and put on his coat.

Then he took his rifle from behind the door and left the room, bumping his head on a model Hampden bomber hanging from the ceiling as he stepped into the corridor.

Polly Carveth was in the cockpit, leafing through a copy of
Custom Model
, the fashion magazine for androids.

‘Alright there?’ she said as he entered, not looking up. She leaned over and consulted a brass-edged dial fixed to the dashboard by screws and tape. ‘We’ll be in drop range in. . . oh, two minutes.’

‘Good work, Carveth. Keep us steady.’

She looked around. The light from the consoles tinted her face a sickly green. ‘Still going with the others?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know, when I want to forget my troubles, I just go shopping.’

‘I told Wainscott I would, Carveth.’

‘Well, don’t cock up. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, boss: you’ve always been. . . well, not bad.’

‘Thanks, Carveth. I appreciate that.’

‘Not a prob. I’ll see you off once we’re in position.’ She turned to the controls again: a counter, which for all Smith knew might have been removed from a fruit machine, had begun to spin. He left her to it.

The Deepspace Operations Group waited in the hold.

There were five of them, armed with grenades, pistols, knives and Stanford machine-guns. Major Wainscott, the commander of the group, was demonstrating something to Susan, the team’s beam gun operator.

‘So I snapped it in two and rammed one end up his nose, straight into the brainpan,’ Wainscott said, making a vicious thrusting gesture. ‘Killed him stone dead.’

Susan nodded. ‘And the rest of the Kit-kat?’

‘I ate that for elevenses. Ah, Smith. Still going down with me, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good man.’ Wainscott was scruffy, slight, clever and quick, and probably the bravest and most dangerous man that Smith had ever met. He was also, according to rumour, a former resident of the Sunnyvale Home for the Psychologically Uneven. ‘Now, men: here’s the state of play. The filthy lemmings have fifty Kaldathrian beetle-people down there, and they’ve promised to start pulling their legs off the moment they detect any ships in orbit –hence we’re using assault pods to slip through the radar. We need to rescue these fellows before our main force goes in and plasters the fluffy bastards from on high.

‘The captives are spread between three forts, each with its own codename. We will be dealing with the first fort, codenamed Theodore. Two commando teams from the Indastan army will be taking the other two forts, Simon and Alvin. The Kaldathrians are too big to get on board, so we’ve got a medical shuttle set to follow us down once it’s safe. What’s the word from Polly Pilot, Smith?’

‘We’re lined straight up with the drop zone,’ Smith said.

‘From the looks of it we’ll land in the courtyard of this fort of theirs. The lemmings haven’t detected us, but as soon as they know we’re there, I gather they can be relied upon to go absolutely bananas.’

‘Exactly,’ said Wainscott. ‘So, priority one is to find our people and secure the area so the medic ship can put down and get them away. Priority two is to smash the place up. Wreck it.’ Wainscott grinned. ‘Plus, there’s a bonus. General Wikwot himself is believed to be in one of the forts, probably on a visit to do over the prisoners in person. If he’s down there, we Shanghai the fat sod and drag him back for trial. Understood?’

There were nods of assent from the Deepspace Operations Group.

‘Everything you’ve heard about the lemming men is true. These are the cruellest and most depraved creatures in the galaxy. You are to expect demented resistance. Now, I know the Kaldathrians may not be British citizens, or even human, but its time the Yull learned that nobody messes with the beetle people. They belong to us!’ He nodded towards the row of long sealed boxes at the far end of the hold. Each was the size of a telephone booth, held in a cradle ready for launch. ‘Ever use an assault pod before, Smith?’

‘No,’ said Smith.

‘How about a khazi?’

‘Many times.’

‘Very similar principle,’ Wainscott explained, ‘except this time it’s the ship that drops its load, not you.’ His laugh was hard and barking; arguably indicative of the man as a whole.

From the doorway Carveth said, ‘We’re in stable orbit, ready to go. So just sit tight and wait for the movement to stop.’

‘Good. Now, where’s that alien chap of yours?’

Suruk the Slayer dropped from the rafters, landing with a soft thump between them, like a kitten.

The resemblance stopped there. He stood up, and his mandibles opened to reveal a large, hungry grin. He wore his armoured vest, and there were knives strapped to his belt, arms and boots. Suruk wore a couple of his favourite skulls and the sacred spear of his ancestors was strapped across his back. ‘Greetings, friends,’ he said. ‘Not long now until our blades run red with lemming blood. We shall accost them on their doorstep like the carol singers of doom!’

They climbed into the pods. Inside Smith’s cubicle it was small and smelt of plastic. There were a few controls: a dispenser to his right would print out copies of the mission objective and landing zone; at his shoulder, a chain controlled the emergency door release.

Carveth looked into the pod. ‘I’ll be waiting up here. Good luck,’ she said. She slammed the door and Smith was suddenly alone. He leaned back against the padded seat and strapped himself in.

He felt grimly nervous, like a man with bladder trouble at the start of a rollercoaster ride. The pod shook and fell onto its side, ready to be shot out of the back of the ship – or else Carveth had pushed him over for a laugh. If she has, he thought, there’ll be hell to – and then suddenly the hold sprang open and the assault pods flew out like pips from a squashed fruit.

He was in space, hurtling towards the landing zone.

Bloody hell, he thought, what
am
I doing? The Empire’s work, he assured himself. Bashing the Furries. He flicked on the radio, hoping to pick up the others, or at least the Light Programme.

‘. . . have to break contact until we hit the ground,’ Wainscott was saying. ‘Remember: if you can’t get back, make sure they don’t take you alive. Use your pills. Or better still, a grenade. Hello Smith. Raring to go, are we?’

‘Something like that,’ said Smith. ‘Has anyone heard from Suruk?’

‘I am here, friends,’ Suruk growled over the intercom. ‘I was indulging in a brief slumber prior to slaughtering our foes. Are we nearly there yet?’

‘’Absolutely!’ Wainscott said. ‘Now, listen: we’ll cut radio once we hit the upper atmosphere. As soon as we hit ground the comms’ll come back on. Everyone work towards each other and regroup. And keep an eye out for those captives as you do. They’re about the size of a horse, so they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Remember: if you see anything with whiskers and a twitchy nose, kill it. Got me?’

The Deepspace Operations Group understood.

‘Loud and clear,’ said Smith.

‘Best of luck,’ Wainscott said, and the radio went dead.

Smith sat in the rocking, rattling pod, the window too high to look out of. A counter under the door lock began to roll, clicking down. Not long, he thought. The pod lurched and white fire licked at the window.

He closed his eyes and leaned back. It’s just a khazi, he told himself. Just a khazi in a hurricane. And besides, who else is here to do this, if not me?

It was no time to be afraid. The lemming-men didn’t know fear: for them, the only sin was self-preservation.

The Yull were not afraid of coward humans.

‘I’ll show them cowards,’ Smith said. Something at the side of the pod went
clunk
– decoys being launched, hopefully, and not the steering vanes falling off – and it shook more than before. Smith checked his rifle again. He felt a little sick.

The counter was whizzing now, too fast for the eye to take in. Smith thought about Rhianna, a billion miles away, working with the secret service’s psychic department and gone for good from him. Then about the
DKR 
Clauswitz
, the vast UE troop carrier that the Yull had rammed to announce their entry into the war. And then the city of Neustadt: overrun and burned to the ground in the same night. The lemming men had rushed headlong from their forest homeworld deep into human space. They called it the Divine Migration: to everyone else, it was merciless war.

‘Final descent commenced,’ said the pod.

The Marshall of the fort was strutting across the courtyard, axe swinging at his side, when the Ghast advisory officer strode over to meet him.

‘
Hup-hup
,’ said the Ghast, out of courtesy.

‘
Ak nak!’
the Marshall replied. They switched to English, each finding the other’s language difficult to pronounce.

‘I hear that you wish to bring the prisoners into the courtyard,’ the Ghast said, rubbing its antennae together.

‘Yes!’ the Marshall puffed out his chest. ‘The General wishes to test his axe. Perhaps he will sacrifice some of the beetle people. Most amusing!’

The Ghast scowled. The left side of its jaw had been badly burned during the street fighting on New Luton.

Behind the scars, its malevolent eyes studied the Yullian Marshall with contempt. ‘Your petty sadism is inefficient. Drawing attention to this base with a massacre will result in our secrecy being compromised, and that will
not
be tolerated. Were the humans to attack—’

‘Humans, attack? Ant-soldier, you speak rubbish! They would be stupid enough to want to rescue the captives, but they would not dare try. Offworlders are too cowardly to protect their own, let alone these dung-rolling Kaldathrians. Hahaha! We noble Yull will slaughter all stupid talking insects – er, present company excluded, of course.’

‘Foolish. Do not say that you were not warned.’ The Ghast pulled its coat tight around its body, stamped and turned on its heel, rear end bobbing behind it in time with its steps.

Even
they
are cowards, the Marshall thought. When Earth is enslaved and the M’Lak dead, we shall turn on the Ghast Empire. They may be mighty, but none can stop the Yu—

An armoured telephone box dropped out of the sky onto his head, bursting him like a water-bomb. The box fell open and Wainscott sprang from it like a showgirl popping out of a novelty cake, a machine gun blazing in either hand.

‘I am a khazi in a hurricane,’ Smith told himself, and the bottom of the pod smacked into something, rocked, stopped, shot straight down ten feet and stopped again.

He sighed. Well, that hadn’t been too bad. He’d had worse journeys on British Monorail. The window exploded and a spear shot through like a bolt of light.

Smith threw himself down as it slammed into the head-rest. He yanked the chain and the wall in front of him flew off and hurled the lemming man behind it into a pile of crates. It squeaked feebly and died.