The Ironclad Prophecy Read online

  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.”

  The three men shouldered their rifles and moved off.

  Napoo and the Clan elder came over to Atkins.

  “This urman is Haradwe,” said Napoo.

  The urman Clan elder grinned in hospitality, white teeth beaming out of his weathered face, but his eyes betrayed his sorrow and pain. Atkins held out his hand only for the man to reach out and clasp his forearms.

  The elder shook his head. “I have heard tales of your Clan, the Tohmii; the Urmen who challenge the Ones and who have Skarra fighting by their side. Naparandwe says you will protect us.”

  “If you’ll accompany us back to the encampment, to our enclave, and add your number to ours. Gather your people together and we’ll take you now. Mercy, help them round things up, just what they can carry – and don’t nick anything.”

  He saw Nobby running back down towards him through the trees. “Only! Corp! Gutsy told me to tell you he’s found something for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise, Gutsy said.”

  Atkins mouthed an obscenity and followed Nobby as he trotted out of the trees and up a small hillock. Gutsy and Gazette were lying just below the crest. Atkins crawled the last few yards to keep out of sight.

  He was aware of an insistent thrumming. “What’s that bloody noise? Sounds like something crunching with its teeth.”

  “I think we’ve got a problem, Only.”

  “We wouldn’t be the bloody Pennines if we didn’t,” said Atkins bitterly.

  Gutsy thrust his chin towards the summit. “See for yourself.”

  Enfield cradled in the crooks of his arms, Atkins crawled up the crest on his elbows, lifted his head cautiously above the lip and peered out across the open veldt.

  “Fuck!”

  He slid back down a few feet in shock and looked back at Gutsy, who gave him an apologetic shrug.

  Atkins crawled back to the top again. Not taking his eyes from the plain in front of him, he thrust his right hand back, feeling blindly in the air until Gutsy put a pair of binoculars into it. He peered through them.

  There, far across the veldt, he saw chatts. Khungarrii. Thousands of them, column after column of a vast army on the march. Great caterpillar-like beasts writhed along in front, clearing a path through the tube grass, followed by massed ranks of Khungarrii scentirrii, their rear-most ranks lost in the dust cloud of the vanguard.

  The rhythmic thrumming he heard was the marching step of the chatts muted by the distance, as they banged swords, spears and electric lances against their thorax plates.

  They were marching on the British encampment.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “All Our Might and Main...”

  THEY RAN.

  Atkins and his men half-jogged, half-walked, sure they were hidden from sight of the approaching army, but cajoling the weary and frightened urmen on anyway. The speed of their initial flight had gained them some ground, but now the logistics of moving families slowed them down.

  They briefly stopped to let the last of the stragglers catch up, an urman urging on an old woman, and casting anxious glances behind them.

  The Khungarrii were in no hurry to reach the Tommies’ stronghold. Their pace was steady and persistent and their chanting and clicking relentless and pervasive.

  Chalky mumbled something. Gutsy bent his ear to listen.

  “Nah, don’t you pay it no heed, boy. That racket there, it’s meant to frit you. Don’t you let it get to you. Bloody hell, Jerry’s done worse than that. They’re just chatts out there. No artillery, no trench mortars. Once we’re back in the trenches they can’t touch you, so buck up, lad.”

  Atkins was reminded of the Old Contemptibles’ tales of the Battle of Mons, as the BEF retreated across Belgium before an advancing German army. He’d seen photographs in the newspapers and war news magazines of fleeing Belgian peasants, on the move with nothing more than they could carry. Then, the British had turned up and made a stand. And they would here, too. But right now they still had a way to go.

  Atkins scanned the sky, hoping Tulliver might be up there in his aeroplane, but he realised he hadn’t heard the insistent drone of its engine all day. Tulliver would have spotted the chatts’ movements in plenty of time. These days, however, Everson didn’t allow Tulliver to go up except for urgent missions. His machine may have been a marvel of modern mechanics but it was made from spit, string and paper and there were things here that would tear it out of the sky in an instant.

  Nobby stumbled and fell, and Prof picked him up.

  “Not now, there’s a good chap,” he rasped. “Be terribly inconvenient.”

  The clumsy private dusted himself off and mumbled an apology.

  Gutsy rolled his eyes at Atkins. He shrugged his shoulders in return. Nobby suffered from a natural-born clumsiness and was the bane of many an NCO’s life, which was how he ended up in Atkins’ section as a replacement. Atkins wondered how he managed to fall over in the first place since he never raised his eyes from his feet.

  “Going to be one hell of a scrap,” said Gazette, cradling his rifle.

  “Aye,” admitted Atkins.

  “First decent one we’ve had since we got here, if you don’t count the trench raid on Khungarr. I hope we’ve not got soft and flabby. The Lieutenant’s a good man, but I think the troops may be getting away from him a bit.”

  “Aye. He needs something to bring ’em along. This may just be it,” said Atkins. Inside, he felt the familiar pull in his stomach as the tide of fear sucked at his soul with its insidious undertow. “Or it may be his undoing.”

  “Holy Mary, mother of God!” yelped Gutsy, snatching his foot back from a large crimson growth almost the colour of the soil. It shrank back into itself. “It moved! The damn stuff moved!”

  “What the hell is it?” Atkins asked Napoo.

  “Urluf, good djaja,” replied the urman with an eating mime.

  Some of the urmen quickly harvested the mass, tearing chunks off and eating it on the run, passing the lumps around young and old until it had all been consumed.

  Gazette nudged Gutsy with his elbowas he jogged past. “You know that stuff the mongey wallahs have been putting in the broth to pad it out, that you thought was bully beef?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That’s it.”

  Gutsy gave a dry retch. “And I thought onions in me tea was disgusting enough.”

  “Well the MO said it was fit to eat.”

  “What does he know? He’d give a number nine pill to cure the shits.”

  ATKINS PUSHED HIS men and their wards on as hard as he dared, driven by the awful, insistent gnashing and drumming. Ahead of them across the plain Atkins could see the hills start to rise as they ran towards the valley. From their current position, the stronghold was still out of sight, beyond the spur.

  “Who’s the replacement that knows iddy umpty?”

  Mercy smirked. “That’ll be Chalky.”

  Atkins hung his head. “Bloody hell.”

  Chalky was summoned.

  “I want you to get your mirror out and send a message to the hill-top OP. Warn the dozy buggers, if they haven’t already seen them, that there’s an entire chatt army headed their way. I reckon we’re only an half an hour or so ahead of the bastards, if that.”

  “Yes, Corporal!” he said snapping a salute and turning smartly to carry out his orders.

  Atkins groaned. “Blood and sand, anyone’d think I’d just gazetted him.”

  He felt a tug at his leg. Tearing his gaze from the ominous dust across the veldt, he looked down to see a young urman child pulling at his trousers. He looked around for a parent. His eyes met those of a fair-haired Urman woman, who beckoned the child away from him. It was only when he looked again, as the child threw himself round her legs, that he noticed the roundness of her belly. She was with child. A desperate longing filled him, an ache he could not ease.

  THE HILLS GREW larger, although much more slowly than Atkins wo
uld have liked. At last, they rounded the foothill and came to the valley mouth. He heard the faint, reassuring sound of a bugle on the wind.

  Prof slapped Nobby on the back and they began marching with renewed vigour towards the mouth of the valley. “There you go, lad. Home soon.”

  Atkins stopped and counted his men past, along with forty-three urmen.

  “Come on! Get a move on. We haven’t got all day,” he urged.

  The party made for the encampment at the double, while the noise behind them droned on incessantly until he wanted to stop his ears up.

  They reached one of the main paths radiating out from the stronghold, trampled down by the passing of many feet. Through the tube grass, the odd blood-red poppy bloom caught his eye, until they found themselves walking through a drift of poppies populating the charred cordon sanitaire.

  Atkins could see frantic activity now as, beyond the wire entanglements, platoons moved up communications trenches to man the fire trench. All along the front line, barrels of guns and tips of bayonets flashed cold in the light as the NCOs bellowed orders.

  Over to his left, he heard the impatient putter of the aeroplane’s motor as it ran up. At each new sight, each new sound, his optimism that they could hold the line grew.

  The clashing beat of the massed Khungarrii army’s approach began to echo off the valley sides, amplifying it and momentarily dousing his confidence.

  He had to stop and get his bearings.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, Corporal!” bellowed a familiar voice. Sergeant Hobson beckoned from the trench parapet beyond the wire weed entanglement. He pointed to a section some hundred yards along to his right.

  Wire weed had been trained over a small wooden tunnel to provide a temporary sally port under a ten-yard-deep stretch of entanglement. The wire weed writhed lethargically as Atkins ushered the urmen through. They had to crawl on their hands and knees through the tunnel. For every urman that stopped, getting clothes or skin caught on the spreading weeds, for every child that had to be bawled at and pushed through the barbed thorns, the Khungarrii came closer. At length, the last of the urmen were through and were being escorted back to the safety of the trenches and the encampment beyond. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the Khungarrii army stretching to fill the entire valley mouth.