God Emperor of Didcot (13 page)

One of the legs touched down. A sensor bleeped, the ship creaked and rocked and as Carveth cut the thrusters they felt the undercarriage settle onto the springs. The engines stopped and suddenly they had landed.

‘What a craphole,’ Carveth said. ‘Let’s have some tea.’

Five minutes later they met in the sitting room. Carveth printed off the screen of the diagnostic computer and spread the sheets across the table. Suruk crouched in an armchair in the corner, sharpening a knife while Rhianna searched through the galley cupboards for anything pleasant to eat.

‘Right, everyone.’ Carveth brushed her small hands together, making her look unexpectedly competent. ‘I’ve had the computer analyse air samples, and it’s good news, sort of. This is a type sixteen unclaimed world in semi-primeval state. Solid ground, light atmosphere, no native life. Rock structures are probably silicate with a high sodium content.’

‘In practical terms?’ Smith said.

‘I have no idea. I just read that off a printout. But it’s breathable.’

Smith sat down at the table and glanced over the print-outs. They reminded him of the last maths exam he had taken when he was fourteen and, incredibly, they made even less sense. He studied the map warily, in case he was called upon to find its hypotenuse. ‘So a human could live out there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Or a Ghast,’ Suruk said. His whetstone slowly scraped down his knife.

Carveth shrugged. ‘It’s a very primitive place. You’ll love it, Suruk. No sentient life forms for you to kill, though.’

The M’Lak peered at the map. ‘Small, windy and without intelligent life. We have found your homeworld, little woman.’

Carveth frowned. ‘It bothers me, though. The odds are all wrong. Naturally breathable worlds are about as common as an Amish striptease.’

‘Well,’ said Smith, ‘what about the signal you mentioned? Might someone be planetscaping it?’

Carveth nodded. ‘It’s possible, although they’ve got a long way to go before it reaches Basic Kent Standard. Someone’s been here, but – well, if it wasn’t for the signal and the building, I’d have thought they were long gone.’

Smith said, ‘Building?’

‘Yes, the one with the shuttle next to it.’

‘Shuttle?’

‘So what would everyone like for dinner?’ Rhianna asked.

‘Dinner?’ cried Smith, and, feeling that he was getting stuck in a rut, he added, ‘What’s the choice?’

Rhianna held up two cardboard packets in a manner that struck him as oddly erotic. ‘Well, we’ve got synthetic ham, or synthetic lentil curry.’

Smith looked at the boxes. Both had pictures on the front: the two meals looked like different forms of toddler sick. ‘I’ll skip the synthetic ham, if you don’t mind. I’ve gone off the stuff ever since they started abbreviating it to Sham. Synthetic lentil curry, please.’

‘Slurry for me too,’ said Carveth. ‘So, what should we do?’

‘Check for our enemies,’ Suruk said. ‘If we have to slay anything – which would of course be a dreadful shame –it is better that we should go hunting for it, and not it for us. We should at least scout the area.’

‘Building and shuttle are next to each other,’ Carveth said. ‘It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes if we took the car, even in this storm.’

‘We’ll drive over there,’ Smith said, ‘all four of us. Will the car still work?’

Carveth shrugged. ‘I can’t see why not.’

‘Right,’ Smith said. ‘We’ll finish dinner, then drive over. It’s going to be nasty out, so wrap up warm. Can someone find Rhianna a pair of boots?’

In the cockpit, the tape was spooling out of the printer.

Carveth had seen the first part of the message, the part that said, ‘Please land on this world’. Now, unnoticed, the ticker was clicking again. More paper rolled out of the slot. It read:
and save us from this hellish place
.

The car picked its way through the storm. Great pillars of rock loomed over them like giants emerging from the mist.

Muffled against the cold, Carveth pointed with a mittened finger. ‘Just over this hill,’ she said. A huge column formed out of the storm and she peered at it.

‘Don’t like the looks of this, Boss.’

Smith’s pistol was at his side. The shotgun was in the boot, along with his rifle. He wore goggles and a hat. ‘No?’

She shook her head and turned the heater up to full. ‘I don’t know. These columns look way too phallic to be natural. It gives me the willies.’ Carveth leaned in and studied the dials on the dashboard. ‘We should be there by now. Almost on top of it—’

A shape burst into view like the prow of a ship cutting through a bank of fog. It looked like a green metal cliff.

The car bumped past the battered flank of a military shuttle, its green sides pitted and scratched. The cockpit was dirty and there were no lights on. Beside the cockpit, ten feet above the car, the chipped cartoon of an eagle winked and gave them a cheery salute. Letters around the drawing said: UFSAAF.

‘Free States,’ Smith said. ‘It’s allied territory, at least.’

A buggy stood beside the shuttle, a tarpaulin whipping around its wheels. It was solid and heavy, built for this kind of terrain.

Carveth looked up at the shuttle. The wind had scrubbed the paint away from the sides, leaving streaks of bare metal. ‘Must have been here ages.’

‘They wouldn’t have just left it here,’ Smith said. ‘They must have abandoned it for a reason.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Rhianna said. ‘It just feels. . . wrong.’

Smith pointed straight ahead, squinting into the storm.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘what is
that
?’

It looked like the carcass of a gigantic beetle, minus the legs. It lay flat on the ground, sixty feet long, engineered to weather the storm.

Smith stopped the car. ‘Ghasts. Everyone out.’

They opened doors and hurried, heads down, to the back of the car. Carveth opened the boot and took the shotgun. Smith took the rifle. They said nothing as they loaded up. The wind set the bobble flapping on Carveth’s woolly hat.

‘I suppose you’re going to say that we have to look inside,’ she said. Her gloves made heavy work of the gun.

‘The very fact it seems to have been made by Ghasts is reason enough,’ Smith replied. ‘Who knows what evil Gertie has been plotting in there? Ladies, stay here,’ Smith said. He looked at Suruk. ‘Fancy something new for the mantelpiece?’

The alien lowered his mandibles and gripped his spear in both hands. ‘Let us begin.’

‘Can I help?’ Rhianna asked.

Suruk shook his head. ‘It may be booby-trapped. Let us who have no boobies go first.’

Smith jogged out, bent low, rifle ready. Suruk paced beside him. The wind battered them and howled at their ears. Smith glanced left and right, at the high towers around them, and wondered if these too were the work of Ghasts. The dark, sloping side of the building rose up ahead.

Rhianna watched them disappear into the wind. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

Carveth fumbled out a pair of binoculars. ‘Hang on. They’re going in. . . up the back.’

Suruk was first. At the rear of the structure, a high, spherical iris lock stood open, its edges puckered and frozen from disuse. He stopped at one side, waited for Smith to catch up, and nodded at the inside. Smith nodded back, and together they lunged around the doorway.

It was a hall, high-ceilinged and dark, lit only by a few half-dead florescent roof-lights. The floor was ridged, the walls also. Smith had the nasty feeling that he had climbed into something’s ribcage via its fundament.

The remnants of Ghast propaganda posters hung on the wall: Number One shook his claws and fists at Earth; a praetorian gazed towards the future, head titled up in a kind of arrogant rapture; a grinning Ghast, in what might have been conceived as a relaxing setting, was doing something baffling yet vigorous with a set of Indian clubs. They all looked meaningless, like empty threats.

Time comes for us all, Smith thought. Even the Ghasts, with their dreams of conquest, become nothing: just dust and bone. Space swallows us all, turns us to dust. That hole in the wall looks like a doodah. Yuck.

In the centre of the room stood a short, barrel-sized plinth. On top of it was a starfish-shaped control panel, which allowed five operators to work at once. The operators lay around the base of the machine, very dead.

They were Ghast scientists, their white coats spattered with their own blood. Smith beckoned Suruk over and pointed. ‘Shot,’ he said. ‘Bullet wounds.’

The M’Lak nodded. ‘Here,’ he said.

Pipes ran from the base of the plinth to the walls: thick, veined tubes fixed to the floor. There were half a dozen recesses in the walls, big enough for a man to stand in, like sentry boxes.

‘Strange,’ Smith said. The words
dirty alien stuff
sprang into his mind, but there was something uncomfortably familiar about those recesses in the walls.

‘Look,’ Suruk said.

There were humans on the ground. A dozen armoured men and women lay against the far wall in the shadows, as if they had all travelled there to die. They wore camouflage. Smith did not need to see the stripes on their uniforms to know that they were the crew of the shuttle outside.

‘They are all dead,’ Suruk said. ‘Bullet wounds. They shot themselves.’

Smith nodded. ‘You may as well get the others. Whatever happened here is long finished. For once it’s us who’ve turned up late to the fighting.’

*

‘So,’ said Smith, ‘I suppose they must have come in, killed the Ghasts, and then committed suicide. That would seem to be the only course of events that makes sense.’

‘But why kill themselves?’ Rhianna stood a little way back, looking nervous. The wind howled around the building as if lamenting the dead creatures inside.

‘Well,’ said Smith, looking at the bodies, ‘foreigners are known to be excitable.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Carveth said from near the doors. ‘You mean they killed the guards and had a massacre to celebrate? Most people settle for a couple of beers, not a rifle under the chin. They must have meant to do themselves. Maybe they despaired of being inside a building made from a beetle’s bottom.’

Smith bent down and came up with a piece of paper in his hand. ‘This chap’s holding a note. . . Let’s see. He’s given it a title:
The Thing in the Building
, by Captain Howard Poe. I wonder if this will help.’

He paused, scanned through the words, and began to read.

‘
As these, my final moments, draw to a close, I can only
theorise that the most merciful aspect of the human
psyche is its inability to correlate the horrors it views into
a totality of blackest nightmare, from which it must needs
retreat into merciful oblivion
.’

‘Keen Scrabble player, from the sounds of it,’ Carveth said.

‘
My story begins last May, when my squad and I carried
out a raid on this post on storm-haunted Didcot 5. We
were informed that the garrison was minute, valuing
secrecy over numerical fortitude, and we overcame the
 
Ghasts easily, then paused to celebrate our success. Oh,
Irony! If only I had known of the depths of squamous
terror and cthonian hell to which we would descend!

‘
Now, where was I? Cthonian hell. Right. As we
explored the vault of the Ghasts, we perceived tanks on
the wall, monitored by a barrel-shaped control panel. My
men and I drew closer, and I recalled fragments of the for
bidden, night-swathed book I had once read
—’

‘How do you read a night-swathed book?’ Carveth said. ‘Wouldn’t it be a bit dark?’

Smith shrugged. ‘Probably a metaphor. Now, pay attention. It may be going somewhere. This man was obviously suffering from something serious.’

‘Terminal verbal diarrhoea?’

‘Shush! Listen.’

‘
My men spread out, and I approached the strange,
liquid-filled tanks, my trembling hands gripping my
cock
—’

Smith turned the page.

‘–e
d rifle. It was a scene worthy of Goya or the wildest
Cubists, for in the tank, so far removed from the sane
world of mankind or the comfort of rational law, I saw
that which sent me over the abyss of horror, into the
Stygian night of madness. It was – A MAN!!!

‘
Well, a boy
.’

‘What?’ said Carveth. ‘That was rubbish! Doesn’t he say anything else?’

Smith frowned. ‘It becomes rather incomprehensible now.
Batrachian foulness . . . Ia! . . . it cannot be . . . All-
consuming horror . . . Pencil getting blunt
. . . And that’s it.’

Carveth snorted. ‘Well! It could at least have been a fish-monster or something. And to think that all this time I’ve been damn near weeing myself for nothing.’ She looked at the pile of bodies. ‘Well, they’re all dead. Can I go now?’

‘What a totally horrible story,’ Rhianna said. ‘They all killed themselves. . . that’s really bad.’ She shuddered. ‘Still, I suppose it just goes to show that militarism is ultimately self-destructive,’ she added, brightening a little.

Smith looked around the room. It was a mausoleum for the Ghast scientists and the soldiers who had come to fight them. Whatever had killed them, be it madness or some physical enemy, was gone. Smith had expected a battle, and then had hoped for an explanation, but had received neither.

Smith turned to Carveth. ‘They sent that signal you picked up from their ship. If you head back now, I’ll get to work on the transmitter. I should be able to record a new message. Maybe that way we can warn the Empire about Urn.’ He sighed. ‘It’s worth a try anyway, though I doubt it’ll have sufficient range. You may as well head back, Carveth,’ he said. ‘The sooner you can start on the repairs, the sooner we can be on our way. You could take that buggy outside – those things are virtually indestructible – and we’ll see you back at the ship.’

‘Good,’ she said with evident relief. ‘Typical, isn’t it? I find twelve men and they’re all the wrong kind of stiff.’

‘On second thoughts, that’s an order. Leave.’