The Ironclad Prophecy Page 2

  Mathers was beginning to sweat. He could feel his chest tighten and his breathing become shallower. The sooner he could finish this, the sooner he could get out. Hardly caring now, he pushed the machine to its limits.

  The last obstacle of the course was a steep bank about forty yards long. The other tanks nosed cautiously over the edge, and descended gingerly.

  The Ivanhoe raced over the top of the rise, and dashed down the slope at a terrific pace, sparks flying from its tracks. Despite having no suspension, it bounced as it crashed to the bottom of the slope.

  Inside, the manoeuvre threw the crew about roughly. Cecil cracked his head on the gun breech; Norman slammed against the engine block, burning his arm. Thrown into the steering column, Wally had the wind knocked out of him. All of them were cursing, except Reggie, who managed a heartfelt, “Dash it all!” They fell out of the sponson hatches, badly shaken, coughing and retching.

  Mathers staggered from the tank, gasping for breath, relieved to be in the open air again. The Company commander greeted him with enthusiasm. “Great Scott, Arthur. I was wrong about you. I’ve seen some devilish driving in my time, but that’s the kind of gumption we need if we’re going to stick it to the Hun! It’s always the quiet ones, eh?”

  “You know what,” said Frank, catching his breath and jerking his chin towards where Mathers was talking with the other officers. “I’ll tell you this for nothing. He’ll either win us medals for getting to Germany first, or he’ll be the bloody death of us all.”

  INTERLUDE ONE

  Signal from the HMLS Ivanhoe,

  1st November 1916*

  *Sent by carrier pigeon, this was the last message ever received before HMLS Ivanhoe and the 13th Battalion of the Pennine Fusiliers vanished.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Let the Great Big World Keep Turning...”

  Four months later...

  “RUN!”

  Lance Corporal Thomas Atkins of the Pennine Fusiliers could hear the terrifying rhythmic chittering noise behind him, even over the measured thud of his hobnailed boots on the crimson alien soil.

  Ahead of them lay the vast expanse of the tube grass veldt and, too far away across it, the Pennines’ encampment.

  Atkins and the rest of 1 Section urged and cajoled the ragtag band of urmen, the primitive humans who inhabited this planet, through the shoulder-high tube grass. Bewildered young children shrieked as desperate parents dragged them along.

  Naparandwe ran up alongside him. The middle-aged native guide had been the first urman they had encountered on this world and his help had been invaluable. The men, however, called him ‘Napoo,’ army slang for ‘all gone,’ after his initial habit of finishing everyone’s food when they first met. Like most urmen, he wore a combination of animal skins and insect shell armour. His usually cheerful face was drawn, his tanned forehead creased with concern. “Atkins, they cannot keep this pace up,” he said. “They are tired, hungry, terrified.”

  “They don’t have a choice, Napoo. Not if they want to live. We’ve got to keep moving.” He stopped and waved past a few urman warriors armed with short swords and spears. “Come on, come on!” They, in turn, herded and encouraged their distressed families.

  “Ruined my soddin’ day, this has,” said Gutsy as he jogged past with a young lad on his back. Too exhausted to cry any more, the lad just clung to the brawny butcher’s shoulders, his small chest heaving with dry sobs.

  “Saved mine,” said Mercy, the section’s inveterate scrounger, with a grin. “Nobby was just about to start telling jokes. He’s only got three and they’re all bloody rubbish.”

  “Look at this, nearly took me bloody leg off!” said Pot Shot.

  Mercy glanced down at the lanky soldier’s charred calf-wrapping as he trotted alongside. He shook his head and grinned. “Just be thankful it’s your puttee that kaput-ee, and not you, you grousing sod.”

  The incorrigible Porgy, and Gazette, the best sharp shooter they had, trotted along with several new replacements. Prof, Nobby and Chalky had brought the section up to strength. The other new addition, Shiner, had died three weeks earlier when, on patrol, he’d stopped to take a leak. He peed on something in the undergrowth that took exception to the act. Atkins winced whenever he thought of it.

  An explosion of shrieks and feathers erupted to their right – Gazette wheeled around with his rifle to meet the threat. A flock of grubbing bird-things, startled by their passing, took to the air with raucous cries.

  Atkins watched an urman woman clutching a baby to her breast as she ran, a wild desperation in her eyes. He thought of Flora, his missing brother’s fiancée, now pregnant with his own child. He had only found that out here, after discovering that Ketch, his old corporal, had spitefully withheld her letter from him. She was his Flora, now. Not William’s. Not his brother’s. His sweetheart, waiting for him on Earth. His child, growing up fatherless. Or it soon would be. He’d kept count. Flora would be seven months gone by now. And he was stuck here on this benighted world.

  He felt more alone now than ever. More than once, he thought about confiding in Porgy, but stopped himself. That someone else would take your wife or sweetheart while you were fighting at the front was every soldier’s worst nightmare. He doubted he’d find much sympathy, and he feared the friendships he’d lose.

  He would do whatever it took to return home to Flora, to his child. He wouldn’t rest until she was in his arms again. But to do that he had to survive the day.

  To do that he had to run.

  SINCE THEIR ARRIVAL on this God-forsaken planet, Padre Rand, the army chaplain, had watched the Pennine Fusiliers re-dig the parallel lines of Somme trenches into a defensible stronghold, encircling the area of Somme that had come with them, protecting all they had left of Earth.

  Without the distraction of constant Hun artillery bombardment, they were able to dig deep dugouts, after the German fashion, with the time to construct them properly, dry and strong and deep.

  Now linked by radial communications trenches, three concentric circles of defensive trenches ringed the ground at the centre, now home to a parade ground and assorted tents and crude wooden hutments. Lewis and Vickers machine gun emplacements strengthened the perimeter.

  Above it all, in the centre of the small parade ground, the torn, tattered Union Jack hung lifelessly from its makeshift flagpole.

  It should be snapping in the wind, the Padre thought, proud and glorious, filling the men with hope and pride. Instead, it seemed limp and forlorn, unable to instil anything in anyone. It looked the way he felt.

  It had been three months since Jeffries had conducted the obscene occult ritual that had apparently condemned them all to this place. The Padre had a hard time dealing with that one. That someone as evil as him could have access to such supernatural power as to bring them here while he, with his prayers and his Almighty, barely seemed to accomplish a thing. He felt insignificant in comparison. It challenged his faith in a way the war itself never had, and he felt unequal to the task now before him, caring for the souls of these castaway men.

  The men had embellished the tale of their arrival, until Jeffries had glowing red eyes and magic bolts coming out of his fingers. As a result, his Church Parades were better attended now than they had been on the Somme, but it gave him little comfort.

  He watched a wiring party at work beyond the front line trench. It was dangerous work, as was everything on this world. Barbed wire was in limited supply, but they had found a lethally barbed creeper they called wire weed that made a living substitute. The men, wearing old sniper’s armour for protection, weren’t so much laying it as cutting back the writhing vines, training it over wooden x-frame knife rests to fill gaps in the barbed wire entanglement in front of the fire trenches.

  Walking over a small footbridge across the support trench, the Padre wrinkled his nose. The sweaty feet, cordite and corpse stench of the Somme had long since faded, to be replaced by the acrid tang of animal dung. Gathered from the veldt, huge ta
rpaulin-covered heaps of it had been left to rot down. They told him it was a saltpetre experiment, an attempt to make their own gunpowder. That, however, was still some months off yet, if they succeeded at all.

  The sun, that was not their sun, was just rising above the valley sides and beginning to take the chill off the morning air, and the poppies were beginning to open.

  He had been surprised to see the poppies when they first appeared. They all had. Their seeds, long buried in the Somme mud, had somehow survived. In the warm climes offered by this foreign world, they had germinated and flowered, dispersing their seeds on the wind so that now a carpet of red flowed across the scorched cordon sanitaire around them and onto the alien veldt beyond in an invasion all of their own. The poppies spread out, like the red of the British Empire across the maps of the world in his old atlas. To the men, they were a cheering sight. A sign of hope. It was as if God had sent a message to say he had not abandoned them after all.

  Poppies hadn’t been the only things to appear. Potatoes had sprouted too: after all, before the war, before the trenches, the Somme was rich farming ground. They cleared some land beyond the encampment for agriculture. They planted the potatoes there and some native vegetables. It all went well until the alien weeds came and the new plants had literally fought each other for dominance until the entire area had to be razed.

  It had put him in mind of the Old Testament story of Joseph and the Pharaoh’s dream, of seven thin and shrivelled ears of wheat swallowing up the ripe ones. That unsettled him deeply, reminding him of his own vision, the terrifying hallucination brought on by the Khungarrii in a heathen ritual he had been forced to undergo, along with Jeffries. The vision itself had faded as the drugs had left his system; he had tried remembering it, but he could not. He was left with an unsettling sense of terror and despair. Recently, he had begun waking with night terrors, things that receded and vanished from memory as he awoke in a sweat. Things that made him afraid. He was terrified his vision was coming back to haunt him.

  He was shaken from his thoughts by Sergeant Dixon across the parade ground, barking out instructions to a platoon of heathen urmen. Nicknamed ‘Fred Karno’s Army,’ after a popular song, they were dressed in skins and customised pieces of armour shaped from the chitinous shells of various creatures. They were drilling with spears instead of rifles, much to the amusement of the Tommies on work parties nearby, who had stopped to watch the entertainment.

  The NCO was teaching them the rudiments of drill, forging into shape a ragtag army of urmen refugees who, displaced by recent Khungarrii attacks, had sought sanctuary here. For the urmen, it would give them the tools they needed to defend themselves against the Ones. It also served to bolster the numbers of the Pennines themselves.

  On one side of the parade ground stood the single-storey log building that was the small hospital. Huddled around it, groups of tents served as wards and surgical theatres. A group of soldiers stood waiting to be seen by the MO.

  Across the small parade ground, in isolation, was a barbed wire compound, ‘the Bird-Cage,’ where those poor souls suffering emotional shock from the Somme, or from finding themselves here, could be kept safe. Some shook uncontrollably, and others rocked themselves incessantly, or cried or howled in torment. A few sought to hide themselves, however they could.

  The Padre said a silent prayer for them, trotted down into the reserve trench and headed for Lieutenant Everson’s dugout.

  Approaching the gas curtain, he heard a woman’s voice tinged with exasperation. He knew the voice well. Only three women had the misfortune to accompany them to this place. Edith Bell had been one of those kidnapped with him and taken to the Khungarrii edifice. She, Corporal Atkins and Lieutenant Everson had confronted Jeffries, who then gutted the Khungarrii edifice and destroyed their sacred library, setting them all even more at odds with the creatures that ruled this world than they had been before.

  Lieutenant Everson sounded just as frustrated. “Nurse Bell, I’m sorry, but I have over five hundred men under my command. It is becoming clearer day by day that we cannot depend on being returned by whatever forces brought us here. If we are to return, then it will have to be under our own cognisance. That map of his you saw. You said yourself he went to a lot of trouble to get it. It’s obviously important. The sketch you gave us was helpful, but short on detail. Anything else you can give me, anything at all, will be most valuable.”

  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.”

  SPURRED 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.”