The Ironclad Prophecy (25 page)

Everson unfolded the grubby sheet, read and reread the hastily scribbled note, and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s not possible.”

T
HE PAST COUPLE
of days had meant little sleep for anyone, least of all the medical staff. Captain Lippett had worked long hours in the surgical tent ceaselessly cutting, sawing and sewing, and Sister Fenton, organising the orderlies and the urmen volunteers, seemed indomitable and tireless. Edith Bell
was
tired. The demands of the wounded were constant, from the small, frequent and easily answered requests for water or a smoke to the anguished pain-spurred appeals that only God could now fulfil. All she wanted to do was fall on her little bed and sleep, but not yet. She strode briskly through the fog, over to the compound, to check on her coterie of shell-shocked men.

“How have they been?” she asked the sagging sentry, who shivered in the dawn chill.

“Quiet as the grave, ma’am. Not a peep.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?” A hint of suspicion tinged her voice.

“Not so as I heard,” he said, as he unbolted the gate to let her pass.

There were those amongst the men who couldn’t tolerate any kind of confined space, not the hut or the dugout, who slept in the open as best they could with their tremors and nightmares for company. Letting a soft smile spread across her face, she went to the first pile of bedding to check on the patient. The crude mattress was unoccupied, its blanket thrown aside as if in haste. At this discovery, she merely raised a quizzical eyebrow.

As she went from one to another, she found the bedding heaps of straw-filled mattresses were all empty. That in itself was unusual. Now she was becoming perturbed. Where were their occupants? Her heart racing, she scanned the compound once more, as if to be sure of her eyes, before heading across to the hut with a rising sense of urgency. She pushed the door open. As the pale light from the doorway cut through the interior gloom, the silence that met her only increased her sense of alarm. The self-absorbed muttering, the yelps of alarm, the constant scuffling and thrashing that usually greeted her were absent. Blankets lay abandoned on the floor. The hut, like the compound, was empty.

Her mind racing, she turned and made for the dugout where some of the men huddled for comfort. In her haste, her feet slipped on the crudely constructed wooden steps and she slithered to the bottom, almost losing her balance. She recovered herself and fished in her trouser pockets for a box of Lucifers. Regretting the use, she struck one. The sulphur-bright flame flared and flickered, chasing away the chill gloom. The acrid smell of sulphur hung in the still air about her, clinging to her hair and stinging her nostrils. She held the dwindling match aloft. The dugout was as empty as Christ’s tomb on Easter Sunday.

The guttering glow could shed no light on the mystery, but a shrivelled knot of fear formed in her stomach. She shuddered, dropping the match as she rushed up the steps, trying to quell the irrational panic that rose within her.

“They’ve gone!” she cried. “They’ve all gone!”

E
VERSON HEADED ALONG
the fire trench to the bay where Sergeant Hobson was stationed. By the time he found his old platoon sergeant, the rumours were already beginning to spread. Being a good platoon sergeant, he’d already heard them.

“Is it true, sir?” Hobson asked. Everson had known him since training and the man was a fount of practical knowledge and experience, and had been his right hand man on the Somme through the bloody summer of 1916, but he doubted if even Hobson had seen anything like this.

“Apparently. The message from Hill OP is that the Khungarrii have vanished overnight. Just melted away. Their whole army. At least, that’s what it looks like.”

The sergeant coughed and looked uneasy.

Everson knew the sound well enough. “Out with it, Sergeant.”

“I don’t like to say it sir, but isn’t that exactly what happened to us? There one minute, gone the next?”

“I had the same thought, Sergeant. But it can’t be that, can it?”

“The way our luck’s been running recently, I wouldn’t like the thought of them chatts running round the bloody Somme on our return ticket. If I allowed myself to think of that, I’d fair bloody weep with the injustice of it, sir. But one thing you can be sure of, if we’ve thought of it the men will have, too.”

“Yes. Best keep them Stood To, Sergeant, until we can find out exactly what’s happened. The last thing we need is a damned mutiny. Maybe there’s some other reason, some Khungarrii high day or holy day, perhaps.”

“Then again, maybe the buggers have got a trick up their sleeves, sir?”

“There is that. Either way, I don’t like it, Sergeant. I’ll send Tulliver up for a look-see when the light’s better, but for now I need to know what’s going on out there. I want you to take a patrol out, see what you can find. Take Poilus with you.”

The Sergeant grunted an acknowledgement, glad to be doing something, and went along the first five bays, picking one man from each.

“Wilson, Draper, Cox, Monroe, Carter. With me.”

The men fell in behind him and they worked their way to a spare bay. They pulled up lengths of duck boarding fixed with rope handles for just this eventuality. Leaning a ladder up against the revetment, Sergeant Hobson led the party out over the parapet, four of the privates carrying the duckboards. They made their way over the churned battleground towards the wire weed, hidden by the drifting mists.

Hobson stepped over the twisted, broken bodies of fallen chatts, blackened crusty ichor drying on their cracked carapaces.

The once-bright field of poppies lay trampled and crushed. Here and there, one or two had escaped the melee and still stood erect, their crimson petals unfolding defiantly like bloodied flags in the early morning sun.

The wire weed had begun moving sluggishly in the thin light, its tendrils drawn by the fallen bodies nearby. The party lay lengths of duckboard across the writhing thickets and crossed hurriedly, not wanting the grasping vines to catch them.

Even as they tottered unsteadily over it, they could make out the shapes of bodies, both chatt and human, drawn down and enveloped deep within the entanglement where the weed punctured them with its thorns to leech the nutrients from the corpses.

Beyond the wire weed, Hobson led the party past the partly-charred body of a battlepillar rising from the fog like a beached whale. Thrown catastrophically from their mount, the bodies of its riders lay broken and scattered around it. A blackened hole gaped in the side of its scorched armour, from which drifted the rank smell of partly cooked offal. Shrieking flocks of najib birds squabbled and tore at the flesh, dispersing resentfully as one of the soldiers threw a stone at them.

Hobson set off at a stooped run, using the low mist banks as cover, followed in short order by Poilus, Monroe, Carter, Draper, Cox and Wilson. They were some twenty yards beyond the wire now. He held out an arm and gestured for the men to drop down.

Where Hobson expected the tube grass to obscure their view, they found it trampled and flattened by the huge army that had occupied the veldt a day previously. Through the mist, he saw the shadows of hastily dug earthworks that the Khungarrii had been working on the day before, great heaps of spoil thrown up like breastworks. It looked as if they might have been settling in for a siege and digging their own system of trenches, or else a mine. But why abandon it, if indeed they had done? Hobson wouldn’t put it past the buggers to be hiding underground ready to swarm out over them, just as the bloody Bosche did.

Carter squinted into the mist beside him. “Bloody hell, it looks like they really have done a bunk.”

“You don’t think they’ve really been whisked off to Earth, do you?” asked Monroe.

Draper shook his head. “Don’t see how. It was Jeffries with his black magic got us here in the first place. Known fact, that is. Why would that bastard conjure ’em back and not us?”

“Spite? Fun? Who knows? Necromancing bastard like that. Just because he can, probably. What do you think, Sarn’t?”

“I don’t, son. I’m just paid to follow orders and so are you.”

“Well, I haven’t been paid for over three months –” Cox chirped up.

“Don’t worry, lad. If I hear you grouse about pay again, I’ll give you a thick lip on account,” said Hobson. “That Jeffries is a blackguard of the first order, but I don’t think he’s responsible for this. Our job is to find out what is. How many bombs have you got?”

The men consolidated their Mills bombs. They had eight. It wasn’t a lot, but they needed to check out what lay beyond the earthworks.

“Monroe, Wilson. Bombers. The rest of you on mop up. Hand them your bombs. Ready?”

There was an exchange of determined glances and curt nods. Cautiously they walked across the No Man’s Land to where the chatts had been encamped. They sank down on their bellies and crawled towards the long line of crimson spoil, using the thinning fog as cover.

When they got to within thirty feet of it, Hobson tapped Monroe and nodded. The party rushed to the earth wall and hunkered below its lip. It was about four feet high and ran for thirty or forty yards. Hobson nodded again and Monroe threw a grenade over the lip. The explosion came seconds later and they felt the wall shudder as dirt showered down on them. Nothing else happened.

With a well-honed howl of fear and rage, they leapt over the earthworks to confront whatever faced them.

They found several hastily delved round-mouthed tunnels sunk into the earth at an angle, the source of the spoil. Monroe flung in a grenade down one to clear it, should chatts be hiding down there. When the smoke, sand and debris cleared, they discovered it to be deserted.

Monroe, Draper and Cox checked out other tunnels. Some went five or ten yards before petering out, each of them empty, as if the work had been abandoned.

Scanning the misty veldt before them, they could see similar lines, the result of other delving and burrowings, all in various states of construction, but their purpose was unknown.

They found weapons lying on the ground, dropped and abandoned, among them swords and barbed spears as well as a number of the clay backpacks that charged the electric lances. Hobson made a mental note to salvage some later. They might prove useful.

Here and there, they found large crude balls of earth, six or so feet across, stacked in pyramids twenty odd foot high. Made from the spoil from the delving, Hobson had seen these things before.

“It’s an important part of their burial ritual,” Poilus explained. “Bodies of dead chatts are encased in clay balls to be rolled into the underworld by Skarra, their god of the dead. They have left them here for him. In the underworld they will undergo their final change into their spirit form and rise to join GarSuleth in his Sky Web.”

Hobson’s face gave away nothing, but Monroe shuddered. “So these are like mausoleums?”

“But there are still dead chatts lying about,” Carter pointed out. “How come they didn’t finish the job?”

“That is strange,” said Poilus. “Never have we known the Ones come in such numbers. Had it not been for the Tohmii, we would have fled and never seen such a sight as this. That may have been the wisest thing to do.”

They almost missed the chatt in the fog, standing as still as it was, tiny beads of condensation forming over its carapace in the chill morning air. The scentirrii was unarmed, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous. Even unarmed, its ability to spray acid was reason enough to stay away from it.

Hobson was actually relieved. A very small part of him really had wondered if the chatts had been sucked back through the aether to Earth.

The chatt didn’t move as they circled it. It should have smelled them, but it gave no indication that it had.

Carter challenged it. “Oi, chatt! Hände hoch!”

“It’s not a bloody Hun,” said Wilson, expecting the worst at any moment.

Carter shrugged. “Sorry, force of habit.”

Even when they surrounded it and thrust their bayonet points towards it, the arthropod showed no recognition of the peril of its situation.

“What’s it doing?”

“What do you think it’s doing?”

“I don’t bleedin’ know. If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”

“Fuck!” Cox fell back a step. Nictating eyelids flickered across the chatt’s eyes. It was the only sign of movement, or indeed life, about the creature. “Did you see that?”

Poilus backed away. “Dulgur,” he hissed. “An evil spirit. They are possessed. We should not be here.”

Hobson was about to press Poilus further when there was a shout from Cox. “There’s more over there, Sarn’t.”

Scattered through the thinning fog like stone angels in an unkempt smoggy cemetery, they found hundreds more of the disorientated chatts spread out over the trampled ground. All of them were standing aimlessly. Their passivity emboldened the soldiers who began to prod them with bayonet points. No amount of cajoling or shoving could induce a reaction.

“All right. A joke’s a joke. I’ve ’ad enough now,” said Private Wilson.

If it had been just the chatts, that would have been disturbing enough, but then they spotted Tommies stood in among them in a trance. All of them, human and alien alike, just standing. In union. Like statues. Not moving. For no apparent reason at all.