The Ironclad Prophecy (4 page)

Bell sighed heavily. “I know that, Lieutenant, and I have tried. I have wracked my brains. And I can assure you, if I remember the slightest thing you’ll be the first to know.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Then give me more aid for the shell-shock patients,” she asked. “Captain Lippett has no time for them. He believes they’re nothing but shirkers and malingerers. They’re ill. You can’t keep them in the Bird Cage, like prisoners! You just can’t!”

“Nurse Bell, Captain Lippett is the Medical Officer here. I don’t think he’d appreciate you going over his head. Please do try and stick to the proper channels,” said Everson with a sigh. “Do I have to tell Sister Fenton?”

Padre Rand coughed politely outside the rubberised canvas flap that formed the dugout’s door.

“Enter!”

He stepped inside. Everson was at his desk. Scattered in front of him was Jeffries’ coded occult journal and various maps and papers they had taken from his dugout. Sat opposite, Nurse Bell took the opportunity to end her interview. She stood up, brushed down her nurse’s apron over her part-worn khaki trousers and bobbed a slight curtsey to Rand as she passed him. “Padre,” she said curtly, pulling the canvas door aside and stepping out into the light.

Everson looked up from behind his desk, sweeping a hand across the papers and journal before him.

“No matter how many times I look at this stuff, I come up with nothing. Nothing but that damn Croatoan symbol with which Jeffries seemed to be obsessed. The rest I can’t make head or tails of, even after three months.”

The Padre felt for him. Lieutenant Everson was a good officer, respected by the men, but where the blame for bad decisions might be passed back up the line to Battalion HQ or the General Staff, here the buck stopped with him. He was the highest-ranking infantry officer left. Whatever credit he had with the men was running out. He had turned more and more frequently to the scattered papers looking for answers, as another might turn to the bible or the bottle.

Everson gave him a weary smile. “Tea, Padre? Nichols!”

The man called Half Pint clumped into the room from an office beyond. He was twenty four, but looked twice that age. He’d lost his right leg below the knee at Khungarr. Unfit for duty, Everson had taken him on as his batman.

“What do you think, Padre?” he said with a grin, thrusting out his new peg leg. “Mercy – Private Evans, that is – carved it out of a lump of wood he found. Mind you, hurts like the blazes. Rubs something awful on me stump, it does. Me wife were the same about her new teeth when I bought her the highland clearances for a wedding present. Serves me right, I suppose. What goes around, comes around she’d say.”

Everson cleared his throat.

“Sorry, sir. Tea, was it? Right away, sir,” said Half Pint, hobbling off.

The Padre looked down at the scattered papers littering the desk. “There’s a whole world out there, Lieutenant. He could be dead by now. But somehow I doubt it. Man has the luck of the devil.”

“You can say that again.”

“If he’s alive, a man like him won’t stay hidden for long. He needs to show off. He wants people to know what he’s up to, how clever he is. He only has us who would understand. We’ll hear from him again, you take my word.”

“I hope you’re right, Padre. Sending men out to find his trail is becoming too costly. Sending the tank has become the only choice. It’s practically impervious to anything this place throws at it.”

“Running a risk, though, isn’t it?”

“So Sergeant Hobson keeps telling me. The Khungarrii are still afraid of us. Well, of the tank, really. So they seem to be taking it out on the urmen, stepping up reprisal raids against them. You told me they’d a mind to cull us and, after Jeffries betrayed them, it’s probably no more than I’d expect. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

S
PURRED ON BY
the incessant rhythm behind them, Atkins ran, pushing his men on through the tube grass, harassing and chivvying the urmen onward. The day had started out so well, too, at least for this place...

“Take your black hand gang eve-ward out round the edge of the veldt,” Lieutenant Everson had said. “Napoo informs me that there’s an enclave of urmen out there this time of year. Try to convince them to side with us. The more influence we have, the better our chances of dealing with the Khungarrii.”

That and “keep an eye out for Jeffries,” an order repeated so often that it was now becoming a standing joke amongst the men.

It had seemed simple enough. They’d left the encampment that morning on routine patrol with the new replacements. Everson had ordered that every patrol have an urman guide, and now Napoo led the way down into a small valley through a wood of tall jelleph trees, with their smooth, bulbous trunks and broad, flat damson-coloured fronds.

Behind him, Gutsy and Porgy were talking in low voices. Every so often, a snort of laughter would burst from them only to be stifled as Atkins glanced back. Time was, as a private, when he’d be in on the joke.

Porgy ambled up to him trying to suppress a smirk. “Here, Only, I want you to meet Chalky. He’s a big admirer of yours. Hey, Chalky!” he yelled.

The eager young private came running up the file, “Here, sir!” he said with a salute.

Atkins sighed. “It’s just Corporal, Private. I’m not an officer.”

Chalky looked at Atkins in awe.

“What?” he asked irritably.

“It’s just, the stories? Are they true, Corp?”

Atkins shook his head in exasperation. The stories around his and Everson’s confrontation with Jeffries had started shortly after they returned from the Khungarr raid. They spread like latrine rumours, embroidered with each retelling until men were swearing it was true, as true as the Angel of Mons.

Right now, he was up there with St. George or the Phantom Bowmen. Christ, in some quarters you’d think he’d tricked the very devil himself. But it didn’t happen like that.

That was why Atkins liked it out on patrol, away from the curious stares of those who believed the stories, those who sneered at them and those who resented him, thinking he’d spread them himself for his own glory. In truth, he didn’t know who had started them, but he wished they hadn’t.

He scowled at Porgy and shook his head in disappointment.

Porgy beamed, having got just the reaction he wanted, and steered Chalky away. “Later, Chalky, later.”

Atkins saw a faint smudge in the air ahead, above the trees.

“Gazette?”

Gazette had the sharpest eyes in the section. They narrowed. “Smoke. That’ll be the urman enclave Napoo told us about.”

Through the damson-coloured foliage came a scream. At first, they hesitated. Men had gone charging off in aid of a human-like scream before only to end up gored to death. Then a second and a third pierced the leaden air.

“Stand to!” said Atkins.

The screams continued, mingled with inarticulate shouts of rage. Atkins began to trot along the forest path, keeping parallel to the valley floor. He wanted to try and see what they were up against before they went charging in. A creek roared and tumbled below them, as if to drown the screams, but the urgent notes rose above it. Great wet fronds of saltha weed slapped at them as they passed and small creatures, startled by their passing, crashed away through the undergrowth.

The strains of battle now reached them. Through gaps in the trees they caught the familiar blue flash of Khungarrii bioelectrical lances. Atkins held up his hand and the section came to a halt.

“Load,” said Atkins hoarsely, fishing a fresh magazine from his webbing. He slotted the magazine home, flicked open the magazine cut-off and pulled the bolt, cycling a bullet into the chamber. From the noises around him, the rest of the section did the same, finishing the routine drill within split seconds of each other. They only had twenty rounds and one Mills bomb apiece.

Beyond that, they each had a bayonet; seventeen inches of cold British steel. Some had constructed trench clubs, brutal wooden clubs with hobnails or other protrusions. And Gutsy, Gutsy had his best butcher’s cleaver, Little Bertha.

As the vegetation thinned and the camp below became visible, the source of the screams and blue flashes proved to be a circle of a dozen crude huts, several of the thatched roofs ablaze as the Khungarrii scentirrii attacked.

They were hard to miss. The arthropod soldiers were the size of a man, but thickly built and heavily armoured with a natural chitinous shell covered with sharp spines. Their face shells were broad, flat and ugly with small antler nubs, and long antennae sprouted from the tops of their facial shells. In their abdominal section, they had the two vestigial claw-like limbs common to all chatts. They moved quickly on legs which were jointed so their knees faced backwards, giving them a powerful leap.

Twelve urmen were under attack from three times their number. They fought back with swords and spears, putting up a valiant fight, but they were losing and the encircling scentirrii were closing in.

Atkins motioned to Gazette, who came and crouched down beside him.

“Chatt scentirrii, all right. About thirty of them. Not good odds,” Gazette offered.

“Trench fighting, no. But we’ve got these,” Atkins said, slapping the palm of his hand against his Enfield. “We’ll even the odds a little first before we go down. Gazette, you stay up here with Nobby, Chalky and Prof. Cover us. Go for the head, stop ’em giving off an alarm scent. We’ll make for the huts.”

Gazette grunted an acknowledgement. Atkins and the others scrambled down through the trees to the rear of the huts, huddling themselves against the wattle-and-daub walls. Atkins peered round into the centre of the enclave.

It was a massacre. The crackling blue arcs of the electrical lances threw men into spasms. Chatts with curved swords and some sort of thorny halberd spat acid from their mouthparts between their mandibles. Urmen screamed as the burning liquid caught their faces or arms.

“Shit,” said Atkins. “Gas masks! They’ve got spitters.”

The men fumbled at the canvas bags on their chests and pulled their PH hoods on over their heads. They were a bugger to fight in for any length of time, but they were invaluable against the acid-spitting chatts, as the scorch marks on several of them attested.

Atkins indicated to Gutsy that he and the others should circle around the huts to flank the Khungarrii within.

He lifted his gas hood, took a whistle out of his top pocket and blew. A rapid fusillade of bullets rang out as 1 Section poured their fire into the settlement. Cracks of sniper fire rang across the open ground as Gazette and the others picked off chatts from the hillside.

A dozen fell before the others knew what had happened.

The Tommies let out blood-curdling, if muffled, roars and charged into the fray with bayonets glinting.

Atkins sank his bayonet blade into the thorax of the nearest scentirrii and twisted it, before stomping forward with his boot to drive it off the point.

He swung the butt of the rifle against the head of another. A dark eye burst as it went down, its mandibles opened in surprise, its small abdominal limbs twitching uselessly as it fell. Atkins stepped over the body.

The air was filled with crunching carapaces and agitated chitters as he moved on his next target, a chatt with a clay battery pack and bioelectrical lance. Somehow, these inhuman creatures were able to store and amplify a natural electrical discharge in these devices. The lance spat out a jolt of blue fire, convulsing an urman before he fell to the ground.

He stepped up behind the chatt, staving in the battery pack with the shoulder stock of his Enfield rifle. As the chatt turned, he thrust the bayonet into the soft unprotected innards of its abdomen and tore it to one side, disembowelling it, ripping delicate organs from its body. It dropped to the ground, where it clawed feebly before Atkins stamped on its head.

Napoo’s attacks were as economical as they were devastating, thrusting at weak joints in the chatts’ chitinous armour.

Gutsy swung his butcher’s cleaver down through the skull of another, splitting the head in half.

Mercy, stabbing and parrying with the bayonet and bludgeoning with the shoulder’s stock, whirled the Enfield around through chatt after chatt with a dexterity that bewildered Atkins. All Mercy had ever said was that someone in the Chink Labour Battalions had owed him a favour. This, apparently, was it.

Atkins wheeled about looking for his next target and found none. Chatts lay strewn on the ground, dead or dying. He pulled off his gas hood.

“That’s the last of ’em,” said Porgy, jabbing his bayonet into a twitching chatt to still it.

Atkins looked around, catching his breath. Napoo was calmly wiping his sword with a saltha leaf.

The huts were ablaze, the dry crackles of the flames mingling with the wailing of women and children as the surviving warriors sought out their families, and those who found no comforting reunion realised their loss and wailed all the louder.

As 1 Section regrouped, Napoo sought out the Clan elder. They gripped each other by the forearms in greeting and talked in low voices, all the time casting glances at the Tommies.

Wanting to secure his position, Atkins called Gutsy over. “Take Gazette and Nobby. Go for a look-see. Check downwind. Make sure nothing’s picked up any alarm scent these things might have got off. I don’t want any more surprises.”