Wrath of the Lemming-men (30 page)

For stupid dirty offworlders, they were brave. The humans reached the toilet block and took up positions, shooting into the praetorian flank. Distracted from their Vorl-catching, the Ghasts returned fire.

But Suruk the Slayer was nowhere to be seen. Vock cursed. Gunfights and demon-suction did not matter now.

Honour needed to be satisfied, as slowly and viciously as possible. His hand strayed towards the axe at his side.

Something shoved him: he spun round, ready to fight, and a praetorian strode past, a steel cylinder under one arm. 462 was waiting for it at the bottom of the ramp that led to Eight’s ship.

Taking hold of the cylinder nearly floored 462: staggering under its weight, he turned and lurched awkwardly up the ramp.

Vock ran to 462’s side. ‘Where are you going, disgraceful ant? You must assist in locating Suruk the Slayer!’

462 stopped. ‘I think not,’ he said. The airlock slid open at the top of the ramp and a science-caste drone ran down to help him with his burden. ‘This is
my
moment, Vock,’ 462 said. He stepped inside the ship. The airlock, slammed shut and he was lost to view.

Vock realised that now his soldiers were dead, the Ghasts no longer had room for him in their plans at all.

He stood on the ramp, shaking with fury. ‘Come back! Come back, insect-scum! May Xitipoxispot strike you down with plague!’

He spat, turned and stomped down the ramp. His vengeance, his cruel, beautiful vengeance, had gone dreadfully wrong. 462 had betrayed him, Suruk the Slayer had disappeared and his minions had jumped into an enormous hole. Without Suruk his revenge was gone, his disgrace permanent. Even if he were to seek atonement at some high precipice, Popacapinyo would tear him apart in the afterlife. Grief welled up in his furry breast: he sat down on the ramp and tried not to cry.

Something moved under the ship. Behind the rear legs, something tall wobbled and flexed. Vock leaped up as if on a scent and ran to the leg, flattened himself against it and peeped round.

A man was being pushed into the rear waste-ejection port. He wore a long coat, and he was standing on his comrade’s shoulders to reach the port. Half of his body was in the vent already, and his legs kicked as he was shoved inside.

But it was not the man that mattered. Vock slid his axe from his belt and stepped into view.

‘Pig-face M’Lak!’

Suruk glanced round, saw Vock and gave Smith a massive push. Smith shot up into the ship and the ejection sphincter closed behind him. Suruk lifted his spear. ‘So,’ he said, ‘You have come at last.’

Vock threw back his head and laughed. The grief was gone: his mind swam with bloodlust and evil glee. ‘The time has come, dirty pond-dweller! Your father disgraced me and now I shall have my revenge upon his line. Now I shall deliver your heart to Popacapinyo. . . nice and slow.’

‘Truly, then, the game begins,’ Suruk said, ‘for now the soccer mascot approaches. You killed my father. You know what happens next.’

‘Lies!’ Vock snarled, setting his whiskers twitching. ‘I am entirely innocent and nothing like a soccer mascot. I have crossed this galaxy to avenge the insult done by your father, and to offer your beating heart to the war god to atone for my failure. I, Mimco Csinty Huphepuet Vock, noble warlord of the honourable Yu—’

Suruk yawned. ‘Less prattle, more battle.’

Vock thrust out his axe in both hands and screamed a war cry. For a moment he stood there howling, shaking, gripping his weapon like a live cable, and then he charged.

Suruk ran to meet him, spear raised.

One huge boost from underneath and Smith shot through the hole. The bioship gave a convulsive shudder and he was inside, lying in an unimportant hold beside the air-lock, glistening with sealant gel. For a moment he caught his breath – then he remembered that he was covered in slime, and ripped off his coat and leather flying helmet and tried to kick them aside until the goo stuck to his boot and he overbalanced.

He lay in the dim, empty room, surrounded by pulsing biotech. A door slid open beside him. As he drew back into the shadows a Ghast technician emerged, twitching and muttering. Its white coat was lilac in the sickly light: the lenses of its goggles winked and glimmered.

Smith jumped it from behind. It was hardly sporting, but neither was Gertie. He swung the Civiliser into its bulbous head, and the technician dropped into his arms like a swooning maiden of exceptional ugliness. Smith grabbed a couple of its appendages and hauled it into the shadows. He slipped into the doorway and found a set of spiral stairs. Promising. Gun and sword at the ready, Smith climbed.

Wind whipped around the fire escape. The night air was cold and, far below, lights flickered around the chasm.

The sound of gunfire joined the pattering of the rain.

The Archpatron of the Vorl waited. Little whorls of smoke rose from his dark body as the rain passed through him. His empty sockets turned to Rhianna.

‘Hello, patron,’ C’neth said. ‘This here’s Rhianna Mitchell, some sort of human being. She claims to be a hybrid: half Vorl, half organic cereal bar, from the looks of it. Downright bizarre, if you ask me, but there you go.’

‘It is true,’ the Archpatron replied. ‘I know it to be so.’

Its voice was partly psychic, a rasping whisper that cut straight into Rhianna’s mind. ‘You came here for truth, did you not, to learn about your origin?’ It extended a hand to her like strands of toxic smoke. ‘You wondered for so long as to the nature of your father. Now I will show you. Take my hand now, Rhianna. Stand beside me, Rhianna, and know the truth.’

Whoa,’ she said, taking a step back. ‘This is getting a little bit freaky. I’m not sure. . .’

‘Take my hand, Rhianna, and we will face our destiny together.
This
is your father.’

‘Ooh, I
never
!’ C’neth exclaimed. ‘Oh, patron! I don’t know how you can say such things. Lies, awful lies! Don’t believe a word of it, dear. Innocent as a lamb, I am!’

Vock ran in howling and cut at neck-height for a trophy-kill. Suruk darted back, testing him; Vock jumped and whipped the axe down and Suruk rocked aside.

Screeching to his bloodthirsty god, Vock rushed on, cutting and cutting, and Suruk gave ground.

Vock was good, no doubt about it. This was no mere
Mechi’chu’en
, no praetorian: this was an expert, a mighty enemy. Vock might have tested his weapons on prisoners, but he had trained with the best fighters of the Yull. Yet my father drove him back, Suruk thought, and with the thought came fury, and he attacked.

Suruk jabbed the spear like a bayonet and Vock darted aside, but Suruk had anticipated that and he whirled Gan Uteki so that the shaft cracked Vock across the ear.

Vock was thrown over and his armour clattered as he rolled into a crouch. Squatting he looked more like a letter box than ever. He stood up quietly, arms by his side.

‘You fight well,’ he said, ‘for a disgraceful furless coward. Come. Surrender now and no slow killing. Promise.’

Suruk backed away and raised an eyebrow-ridge. ‘Is that so?’

‘Oh, absolutely, mangy offworlder. I would never—’

Vock screamed and leaped. He sailed through the air, his axe swung down. Suruk dropped onto his back and slammed his boot up into the Colonel’s groin.

Vock paused for a moment, held in the air by Suruk’s sole, and he gave a little squeak. He sprang away, yelped his war-cry and charged back in, and suddenly they were carving and dodging, raging back and forth, the air whistling with the sound of blades.

Smith reached the top of the steps and looked out into a massive hall.

The air buzzed with power: it sounded even louder than the electric toothbrush Carveth seemed to keep in her bedroom; a dull thrumming that unnerved the brain, coming from somewhere high above.

Tubes dangled from the roof like roots into a cave. The tip of each touched the rounded end of a cylinder the height and width of a man: translucent things like a forest of mushroom stalks, all linked to some machinery above.

Smith took a step into the hall, between the rows of tubes.

Technicians moved through the room, cackling as they checked their clipboards. A little party of them drew near and Smith pressed himself against one of the tubes, listening to them pass. They carried a metal cylinder between them. Whatever it was, Smith knew that he had to take it from them. Anything Gertie wanted that badly needed to be retrieved, or at least destroyed.

He turned to follow them, and something in the tube beside him moved.

Smith recoiled, his gun raised, and a moment later saw that the praetorian was in no state to fight him. It was not awake, not even finished. The monster was comatose, its limbs bobbing in nutritious sludge, its muscles knotting together under a half-formed exoskeleton. It looked like a peeled, evil prawn. A trenchcoat was growing next to it.

Smith looked at the next tube down, and the rows of tubes after that. ‘Good God,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a bloody ant farm!’

Towards the front of the rows, the praetorians were more complete; at the rear they were little more than bundles of veins and insignia. The tubes must spit them out by the platoon, Smith thought.

He had heard the stories, but he had never imagined what a Ghast soldier-factory would actually look like.

Thousands of years ago, the Ghasts had decided that females were inefficient and, instead of putting up with it like proper people, had shot them all and turned to applied genetics instead. He crept out, weaving between the tubes, following the scientists.

There was a mezzanine a little way ahead. At the top of the stairs coils of pipes ran into a monstrous bio-machine suspended from the roof; a maggot-shaped organ the size of a blimp. It looked like a very old sausage.

Smith ducked back as the scientists connected the cylinder to the pipes. The head scientist turned a dial and the air crackled with static. The blimp wobbled. The scientists stopped for a group cackle and Smith slipped past them and up the stairs, onto the mezzanine.

Vock got first blood, a gash across Suruk’s arm. Suruk went low, tripped Vock and put his knee into the lemming’s snout.

Then their blows started to strike home: a kick to Vock’s chest that buckled his breastplate, then a raking claw to Suruk’s face that missed his eyes by half an inch.

To the left was a row of maintenance sheds and Vock backed away between them. Suruk was taller and had a longer reach; the tightly-packed sheds would stop him swinging his spear. Suruk knew that trick: he stepped out of view and sprang up onto the roof of the nearest building, ran across and jabbed at Vock’s head as if to spear a fish. Vock dodged, yelled and slammed his shoulder into the corner of the shed and it collapsed in a thundering pile of plastic sheets.

Suruk crouched behind the wreckage, waiting. ‘Where are you?’ Vock snarled. Suruk heard the Yull toss a heap of plastic aside. ‘Come out, offworlder!’

Suruk listened: not to Vock’s words, but to work out his location.

‘Being with these humans shames you, Suruk Son of Agshad. Think of what you could become under the General Galactic Happiness, Friendship and Co-operative Collective.’

Suruk waited.

‘These mangy British bleat about kindness. They love the weak. They lack our fighting spirit. We Yull have been warriors for a thousand years!’

‘So have they,’ Suruk said, and he drove the spear through the wall. The blade sliced Vock’s thigh and he yowled and twisted free. The wall fell – Suruk cartwheeled back and Vock swarmed over the wreckage, an axe in either hand, feinting and cutting so fast that it took all Suruk’s skill to avoid being hit, let alone counter-attack.

Vock threw his smaller axe at Suruk and leaped after it.

Suruk knocked the axe away and, just in time, raised his spear to block Vock’s battleaxe. The blade whirled down and Gan Uteki broke in two. Suruk stumbled back, half of the sacred spear in each hand, and tripped. Vock loomed over him, squealing with glee, his axe raised to strike the killing blow—

Smith reached the mezzanine and stopped, incredulous with disgust. Ghast biotech was always distasteful, but this took it to new depths of scatology. Strange, pulsing cables lead from thrumming machines to the far end of the mezzanine, where they fused like veins, reaching up to a sort of elevated throne. On the throne sat a huge Ghast, leafing through a copy of
Exchange and Martian
, humming a marching tune. Beneath the throne the blimp began, like a monstrously swollen abdomen.

The seated Ghast sighed and behind it the blimp quivered. Smith’s stomach followed suit. He was still gawping at the spectacle when the Ghast lowered its newspaper.

‘You,’ it said.

‘Me,’ Smith replied.

‘Well, well,’ said Number Eight. ‘You must be the good Captain Smith. I congratulate you for getting this far. Sadly though, your quest is over. In two minutes’ time my DNA will be spliced with that of the Vorl and a legion of psychic stormtroopers will be mine to command. Your decadent race is finished, Smith.’

‘Decadent? I’m not the one with no toilet door, you bloody freak. What do you think this is, Holland? Put the paper down and no sudden movements.’

‘Silence!’ Eight snarled. ‘Do you not know who I am?’

Smith looked at Eight’s vast back end. ‘Some sort of queen?’

‘I am Number Eight, the first of my kind, the genetic pinnacle of the Ghast Empire. I am the new master of the galaxy. I will—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Smith said, and he rammed his sword into the side of the machine.

He was thrown back in a flurry of sparks. The explosion launched Eight from the throne, hurled him through the air and dumped him in a tangle of limbs and leather twenty feet away. Smith staggered upright, blinked and shook his head.

Eight lay on the ground, propped on all four elbows, shaking his head groggily. Smith’s sword was wedged in the machine, electricity crackling along the blade. He patted his jacket: the Civiliser had fallen out. Bugger.

Eight’s own pistol lay on the ground: Smith picked it up between thumb and forefinger and tossed it over the railing.