Wrath of the Lemming-men (21 page)

A little light-headed, Carveth picked up a scone from one of the plates. Its bony owner grinned at her. ‘These’ll make you fat,’ she told the skeleton.

Suruk tapped her on the arm. ‘Go quietly. Dead men eat no scones.’

Rhianna leaned close to Smith. ‘What happened here?’ she whispered.

‘Marty,’ he replied. ‘A walker must have hit them. A low-power dessicator beam could do this.’

Green strode over. ‘It’s Marty alright. There’s ruddy great holes in the car park. You don’t want to see it. Half a dozen dead bodies lying there, sticks still in their hands, hankies still in their belts. Bastards must’ve hit them mid-dance.’

‘Morris dancers?’ Smith looked at Rhianna; she raised her eyebrows. ‘There were Morris men here?’

Green nodded. ‘You a Morris dancer, then? You could get a good session going here,’ he added. ‘Maybe set up a square on this grass here, have some light refreshments over there. . . Gertie don’t Morris dance,’ he added darkly, and he walked off to join his men.

‘Morris men,’ Rhianna said. In the dark it was impossible to tell where her hair ended and the night began. She looked as if she had formed out of the air, Smith thought, alluring and otherworldly, like something from folklore. An elf, or a gnome or something. Maybe not a gnome. ‘I wonder who they were?’

‘The last of the Hospitable Tipplers, perhaps,’ Smith said. ‘Who knows? Maybe they came here to study the artefacts, just as we mean to. Maybe they got too close to the truth and that drew the enemy here. That and the sound of bells.’

‘And for all that they were murdered.’ Rhianna looked very sad. ‘The last of the Morris people,’ she said.

‘This senseless violence won’t go unpunished,’ Smith promised. ‘We’ll find some aliens and blast the crap out of them.’

Morgar beckoned from further ahead. Smith went first, making sure that Rhianna was close behind. They scurried under a battered sign that read ‘Branwell’s Tea Shoppe’ and reached the door.

Smith turned to Morgar and Green. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘It’s my mission, after all.’

He took hold of the door handle and turned it. He pushed gently. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Locked,’ he whispered.

‘Pull,’ Carveth whispered back.

Smith pulled and the door swung open. He stepped over the threshold, rifle in hand.

He looked into a long corridor, its high ceiling exaggerated by the whiteness of the walls. There was a pedestal on Smith’s right, like an empty lectern. On the opposite wall a little brass plaque hung under a big discoloured space. Smith peered down the hall. There were glass cases, racks of leaflets and no exhibits at all.

He took a leaflet from a dispenser and unfolded it as the others followed him in.

‘We’re in the 20th Century hall, from the looks of it,’ Smith said. ‘This must be where they kept all the cultural artefacts. . . but it looks like they’ve gone.’

‘Gone?’ Carveth turned from one of the brass plaques, appalled. ‘Gone? Are you telling me we’ve gone halfway across the galaxy to find it’s all bloody gone?’

‘Shush,’ Smith replied. ‘We’re in enemy territory. Come on.’

One of Green’s men waited at the end of the corridor. ‘You won’t like this,’ he whispered.

Smith looked around the corner, into the entrance hall.

The hall was decaying, but it had once been magnificent. Behind a ticket box, a grand staircase rose to the upper levels of the museum. A ten-foot statue of Saint George dominated the foyer, his uplifted sword almost brushing the chandelier above his head.

The hall had been looted. Ropes and posts had been thrown through the windows of the ticket box. The heads of the two lions that crouched at the bottom of the stair-case had been smashed to dust. A sooty mess in one corner showed where a fire had been made from books, leaflets and pieces of broken chair.

But the statue was the worst; that was sacrilege.

Someone had drilled two holes into the saint’s forehead and thrust bits of metal into them so that they jutted out like antennae. A rope had been tied around his waist, attaching a rusty barrel to his rear so that it stuck out of his backside. They had turned Saint George into a Ghast.

‘Bastards!’ cried Smith. ‘That’s Saint George! They’ve given Saint George a metal arse, the filthy swine!’

A shadow moved on the staircase. ‘
Ak?
’

Green gave Smith a hard look. ‘That’s torn it. You’ve got them going,’ he whispered.

‘They’ve got
me
going,’ Smith replied. ‘How dare they do that!’ He reached to his side, for his sword.

‘What’re you doing?’ Green hissed.

‘I’m off to get some exhibits for the Dirty Moonman display.’ He drew the sabre. ‘Get a glass box ready, Green – I’m going to pin some insects.’

Green grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Let me do this,’ he said.

Step by step, the Ghast descended into view. It was an early-model drone, Smith saw: brutish and slightly porcine, like a school bully. The thing was cautious. It approached as if on unstable ground, its disruptor gripped firmly in both hands.

Smith slipped the Civiliser out of its holster.

At the bottom of the stairs, the Ghast turned left and Green ducked into the shadow of the statue of Saint George.

The Ghast approached, picking up its feet to avoid making noise. Its coat creaked softly. Green crept out behind it.

Green’s hands snapped around its helmet, his leg tripped the Ghast and he yanked its head back and up.

Smith heard Green grunt, saw the Ghast kick once, and there was a sound like a branch snapping in cloth. Slowly, Green lowered it to the ground, grabbed its coat and dragged it back into the shadows.

Suruk made his purring, croaking sound. Smith nodded approvingly.

‘Ugh,’ Carveth said. The whole scene reminded her far too much of a man trying to ravish a lobster.

‘Looks like they’ve sacked the place,’ Smith said. ‘I suggest we split into teams and see what’s left.’ He stepped over the dead drone and took a handful of Family Fun Maps from the leaflet rack. ‘Here. We’ll take the Yothian Cultural Artefacts hall.’

The hall was broad and high, lit by ferroglass panels in the roof. It felt desolate and cold – haunted. Carveth peered into a glass display case, which showed a dummy wearing Yothian formal dress. The Yothians were tall and broadly conical, with little yellow heads. The dummy looked like a huge road cone.

‘What an amazing civilisation,’ Rhianna said.

‘Do you think they stack?’ Carveth replied. She squinted at the metal plaque. The light was bad, and it was hard to make out the words.

‘Only in the mating season,’ Smith said. ‘Come along, men.’

They walked on. There was no sign of the tablets, nothing that would indicate where they had gone. This part of the museum had been largely left alone by the Ghasts; it was clear that it would never have housed anything of M’Lak origin.

‘Look!’ Carveth said, pointing into one of the Yothian display cases. ‘That one’s pulling a moony!’

‘The model’s fallen over,’ Rhianna explained. ‘The Yothians are far too dignified a people to do that.’

Carveth huffed. ‘Another “higher” lifeform.’

Rhianna quickened her pace to catch up with Smith and Suruk, her sandals flapping.

Carveth stayed behind, struggling to read the plaque beside the fallen model. She reached out and ran a finger over the embossed words. ‘
In courtly dress
,’ she made out, ‘
which is
—’ Confused, she ran her finger back and forth before realising that she was trying to read the head of a screw. A screw in the dark leads to confusion, she thought, reflecting that this was probably worth remembering.

Behind the plaque, something went
thump
. She sprang back, stared into the gloom and looked down at her hand.

The wall had shaken; she’d felt it in her fingers. Surely not. But here was the proof: as if into quicksand, the plaque was sinking into the wall.

‘Boss?’ she said, much quieter than she had intended.

‘Boss!’

Ten yards away, Smith looked round. ‘Shush!’ he hissed. ‘Keep it down, Carveth. Come on.’

‘But I—’ The wall split open. Air blasted into the hall and light shot around the edges of the glass case with the fallen Yothian as if a door were opening into heaven.

The case swung back, and blinding light flooded the hall, turning Carveth into a silhouette. Smith ran to her side, pistol ready. Suruk raised his spear ready to throw.

A figure stood before them in the centre of the light.

The rush of air set her skirt and sleeves fluttering. Slowly, gracefully, the woman stepped into view. Wise blue eyes looked them over. She smiled.

‘Halloo! Come here for the tour, have you?’

The woman stood at the edge of the doorway. She was attractive, Smith noticed, and vaguely familiar. She was an android, he realised, and a remarkably pretty one.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘welcome to my abode! A lady and gentleman, a Morlock and a fellow simulant. Certainly makes a change from school parties.’

Smith took a step forward. ‘Good evening, madam. Do you live here?’

She smiled again. ‘Yes, indeed I do! For I am the Archivist, you see. Ah, the Yothian seems to be pulling a moony again. He does that. Very bad. Really must sort that out.’

She led them down a set of steps, spiralling deep into the earth. Smith followed, then the others, and behind them half of Green’s men, their boots clanking on the metal stairs. The Archivist glanced over her shoulder. ‘Nearly there,’ she told Smith.

‘What is this place?’

‘This? Ah, you’ll see. Should be rather interesting, I think.’

The walls were white, as was her dress. It made her seem ethereal. She reminded Smith of the Lady of the Lake, albeit dryer. But she was too smart to be ghostly, too clever and quick. Smith thought it quite appealing.

The stairs ended at an airlock door. The Archivist paused at the lock, ready to dial the entry code. ‘Seeing that you’re not a school party, I don’t think we need to scan for lice,’ she said brightly, and her finger flicked around the dial. The airlock slid open and lights boomed and flickered in the cavern beyond.

They stood at the edge of a warehouse the size of a cathedral nave. Rows of packing cases made corridors and partitions in the vast room, interspersed with relics too large to be packed away. Paintings lined the walls.

‘Blimey,’ Carveth said, which Smith thought was pretty accurate.

Kaldathrian dung-statues stuck their heads above the lines of crates like malodorous giraffes. A Yothian fertility glider hung from cables in the roof, its landing gear dangling lewdly over their heads. Smith recognised a sphere of rock, twenty yards across and etched with symbols: the ball from a game of planet-hockey played by the Voidani space-whales, a sport capable of devastating whole solar systems. Current thinking held that the ancient Voidani had once played this sport near Earth, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs when the ball went off-side and demolished Central America.

‘Behold!’ Suruk pointed to a statue of a huge M’Lak, throwing its head back to laugh – unusually, this one was broad as well as tall. ‘Brehan the Blessed. We are in the halls of the M’Lak.’

‘Amazing,’ Smith said to the Archivist. ‘You compiled all this yourself?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I had a couple of robot forklifts to help, but yes. I’m rather glad you dropped in, to be honest. Terrible conversationalist, your robot forklift.’

‘It must have been a lot of work.’

‘Not really. I mean, a lot of what there was has been lost. The war does that, of course. The best you can do is keep a few things safe. We all need culture, don’t we? Look at that,’ she added, pointing to a framed picture on the wall. ‘I bet you’ve never seen one of those before.’

They stopped. Smith peered up at a poster almost as tall as he was. It looked like Ghast propaganda, but although the style was right, the subject was undoubtedly wrong. It showed a Ghast perched on a stool under a spotlight, legs crossed in front of it. Instead of a trenchcoat and helmet, it wore long gloves and a little round hat and was sticking its stercorium out.

‘What the devil is that?’ Smith said.

‘It’s an advertisement for some kind of show,’ the Archivist replied. ‘It’s almost two thousand years old, dating just before the first Number One took power. Once, the Ghasts had names, lives, identities of their own. But then they had to take the choice that comes to all sentient life sooner or later: the tough option of individual freedom, or the comfort of collective obedience. Mankind chose freedom, after some indecision. The Morlocks have always chosen freedom. But the Ghasts chose. . . poorly.’

‘So they were once proper people,’ Smith said.

‘Foreigners, of course, but still people. Incredible. But not impossible, I suppose. It just goes to show how far you can fall.’

The Archivist pointed at the picture. ‘It may be all the history they have. Once, even the Yull were sane. They had a civilian government, a developing society. . . back then they only jumped off cliffs on special occasions.’

Smith stepped back from the picture, its spell broken. ‘It’s quite something,’ he told the Archivist. ‘You’ve done the Imperial People a great service by keeping all of this safe.’

‘Unless anyone actually wanted their ancient artefacts back,’ Rhianna observed from behind.

Smith didn’t comment: Rhianna had been quiet and a bit sulky ever since they had got here. Her disapproval of the museum had increased greatly since they had met the Archivist, for reasons he could not figure out. Funny bunch, girls. You’d have thought that two intelligent, attractive women would get on very well. He thought about this for a while. Something tugged at his sleeve.

‘—think we’ve found it,’ Carveth was saying. ‘Come on boss, wakey-wakey.’

Smith followed her past scowling statues of famous M’Lak. At the far end of the corridor stood a slab of stone nearly nine feet high, covered by a tarpaulin. At a nod from the Archivist, one of Green’s men pulled the tarpaulin away.

Down one side of the stone were blue characters; down the other, red markings, representing concepts and arguments respectively. There could be no mistake – this had been made by the M’Lak.