The East Anglian Bombardiers And Grenadiers

by Stephen Jennison-Smith

  “The real one doesn’t have to be blue does she?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good, if it’s possible I’d like a green one, like the Orion animal women on Star Trek the Original series.”

  “I thought you said you’d only seen one woman?”

  “One real one.”

  “Oh, well go on then, get daydreaming.”

  So Sid fell into a deep daydream, if there is such a thing, where he was snoozing in the arms of a green dwarf woman...

  “She doesn’t have a beard does she?” he inquired, part way through the daydream.

  “Erm, I’ll say no. We’ll pretend that green dwarf women don’t have beards, a bit like American Indian men.”

  “Good,” daydream snoozed Sid, “I don’t like women who shave, even though I’ve only met one before.”

  Anyway, back to the description, they canoodled in a canoe like two Canucks playing Cadoo.

  “What is your name my love?” he asked his daydreamed date.

  “Arthur,” she said.

  Which shocked him out of his daydream. He had actually fallen asleep and was grabbing Arthur around the waist and really asked the colonel, “What is your name my love?” he quickly separated himself from Arthur.

  “Daydreaming Colour Sergeant?” asked his commanding officer.

  “Yes Sir, about my new green wife.”

  “Green you say? What, green like Green Eggs and Ham or green like the Jolly Green Giant.”

  “No, like She Hulk.”

  “Oh, I see. Because of your slobbishness you can make the tea, help us all think you see.”

  To recap. So, Sid is no longer daydreaming, but making the tea. Gunby should be going through the code book with Plattington. Chatteris is guarding the door. Tresham is guarding the other door (the new one that is now available because the electric shield is down.) Arthur starts looking at the other things in the room. Robo Sid, Robo Arthur and Ruhtra are having a game of paper, scissors, rock, lizard, Spock to see who will wind Arthur up next.

  “This looks like a Modigliani,” mused Arthur as he looked at a painting that was also stored in the same room as the code book.

  Ruhtra won the game and so he took the form of a statue, the Venus de Milo.

  “Do you believe that,” asked the colonel as he saw the statue, “they have a copy of the Venus de Milo.” He looked away for a second to see if anyone was listening to him. Ruhtra made a funny face at him, Robo Sid and Robo Arthur saw this and began to do their robotic giggles. Arthur looked back at the statue, everything seemed normal.

  Sid could see what was happening also and decided to join in. “Why would they have a copy of the Venus de Milo? Surely it’s the real one and the one on earth is the fake.”

  So Arthur peered deeply into the statue’s eyes.

  Ruhtra couldn’t keep the ruse up and spat a goggle of Zathanian fluids into Arthur’s wide open eye.

  “Yaargh!” screamed Arthur and flew into a rage while everyone else guffawed with laughter.

  From the doorway Chatteris laughed but from the corner of his eye he saw a shadow.

  He looked up to the top of the steps to see two guards there looking down at the open door. Hiding in the doorway he looked at the others who were still laughing, he started waving at them to be quiet. It was impossible, so he started to hiss loudly. Robo Sid came over, “Are you a snake or something?”

  “Someone’s coming,” he said anxiously.

  As per the real Sid, Robo Sid was up for a fight, so he stepped out and met one of the guards as he was getting near the bottom of the steps.

  “What are you?” asked the guard, quite confused at a metal man coming towards him.

  “A metal man with Sid the dwarf’s AI in its brain.”

  “Uh?” uhed the guard just before Robo Sid shocked him into unconsciousness with a stun attachment to one of his fingers that I just made up.

  “I didn’t know I had that,” said Robo Sid as he looked at his finger, “I was going to bash him one.”

  The other guard started to run for help. Holding up his arm Robo Sid looked as though he was going to shoot something from his other hand, but nothing happened. “I thought you were going to help me out with something there Author.”

  Chatteris warned the others, who had just about finished laughing.

  “What?” shouted Arthur, “quick let’s be off.”

  “B..but,” butted Sid, “the kettle hasn’t boiled yet!”

  “Never mind that now Colour Sergeant, we must get back to the airship in case we get captured.” He started through the door towards Robo Sid who was starting to ascend the steps.

  The last up the steps was Robo Arthur who was guarding the rear. Chatteris was running as fast as he could across the courtyard to the airship. The others were too far behind. Just far enough so that they could be surrounded by a force that was far too big to have been assembled so soon.

  “Oh no,” exclaimed Arthur, “it looks like we’re going to have a big battle scene for the next chapter!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sixty. That is the number of guards that surrounded Arthur and his main party in the courtyard of the Tower of Tarrelo. Ruhtra slurped away, into a drain. Initially there was a stand off as the captain of the guard called for them to, “Lay down your arms and surrender.”

  Gunby looked at Arthur to see what they were going to do. He held on tightly to his hipped Hotchkiss cannon, finger on the trigger.

  “Have you got an itchy trigger finger?” Tresham asked him.

  “No, I’ve been using that cream,” he replied.

  Robo Sid and Robo Arthur detached their arms and let them fall on the floor.

  “Fools,” derided Sid when he saw what they were doing.

  Seeing that it was probably useless Arthur ordered, “Right men, surrender.”

  “Sorry, do you want us to surrender?” asked the captain of the guard.

  This stunned Arthur, “Er, why yes!”

  Then the king of Andacia turned up, “Now then, what is happening here?”

  The captain bowed deferentially to the king, “Your highness, I did not know you were visiting the Tower.”

  “Snap visit my man, just testing your security arrangements. These are my men pretending to be British soldiers.”

  “But your highness, they have been in the strong room.”

  “Yes I know, it wasn’t very strong, was it.”

  The captain looked very confused, “Um...”

  The king snapped at him again, “Well come on, we must be off, I have a country to invade.”

  The captain moved aside, allowing Arthur and the others to pass. The king led them back towards the airship.

  Robo Sid and Robo Arthur didn’t know what to do, they couldn’t pick up their arms because, well, they didn’t have any arms. They looked desperately at each other.

  Two of the nearest guards picked up the arms.

  “Here, plug it in here,” gestured Robo Sid with his head pointing towards his right shoulder socket.

  A guard plugged an arm in.

  “You’ve plugged the left arm in, give me another left arm.”

  “Now hang on there,” moaned Robo Arthur, “that’ll be one of my left arms.”

  “I know, we’ll sort it out later, on the ship. Unless I have at least one right arm...”

  “They’re both left arms.”

  “I need one correctly plugged in arm, the right/left one doesn’t connect properly, so it’s useless, a bit like you most of the time.”

  Robo Arthur bounced up and down a little in frustration, “Just plug me a right arm into my right arm socket,” he told the guard who was trying to help him, “then I can hit him with something.”

  The other guard complied, put a right arm on Robo Arthur and handed him the other one. Robo Arthur then proceeded to chase Robo Sid, passing Arthur and even the king, brandishing the other right arm.

  Now things would have gone quite well for them all except t
hat I decided that the king (of course you knew it was Ruhtra didn’t you?) walked through a quite randomly placed electric field. As you also know, electric fields destabilise the shapechanging ability of shapechangers. Ruhtra tried to hold himself together, as somebody might do just before they think they can stop themselves from vomiting. He started to go a luminous green, his head got bigger, he clenched his lips together, then flubbled into a green gelatinous ooze on the floor.

  “The king is dead,” cried the captain of the guard when he saw what happened.

  “What do we do now?” thought Arthur.

  “What do we do now?” chimed the captain of the guard (almost, with the slight inflection on the we.)

  (I suppose Arthur and the others could get on the Talent and escape, that would be quick. Except that I haven’t done enough words or the thing that I was planning to. How to get them there though?)

  One of the guards, who was a bit detectiveish, put his finger in the goo that both was and is Ruhtra, “This is not the king!”

  (No that won’t work, that starts a big battle with 60 guards that they just shouldn’t be able to win.)

  They need to get rid of the guards, then get found out, then encounter the [I know what and you will soon when I start writing about it] but how? Do I have my Christmas mince pie and cuppa while I think about it?

  Still no ideas.) So…Ruhtra managed to slime out of the electric field and coagulated himself into a green ball. It took him a few moments but he managed to form himself into a rabbit and scampered off beneath the tree where the Talent was parked.

  Plattington saw the rabbit, and because we’re supposed to be fleshing out his back story, he had a little rabbit when he was a kid and…

  Now Sid didn’t want the readers to have to suffer from inane babble about bunnies and butterflies so, because he was quite close to a pile of hay bales, he nodded to the others. Arthur milled around a bit, waiting for inspiration.

  Nonchalantly Gunby picked up a couple of bales and positioned them to the left. The others moved the other bales until they had made the redoubt (well, not really, but they used the term in Zulu and so I wanted to.)

  “What’s this?” asked the captain of the guard, who was milling around with Arthur until the bale defences were complete.

  “What?” whatted Arthur as both sides rallied to each other. In the middle of them both he looked every which way but where he was supposed to.

  “Get over to the redoubt,” called Sid.

  “La Redoute?” queried the colonel.

  “I did not mean get over to the French fashion shop that does not exist yet, I meant GET OVER HERE!” screamed Sid as he brandished his plasma rifle and gestured to the colonel.

  “Brandishing and gesturing eh?” commented Robo Sid, “next you’ll be basting and garnishing with all the celebrity chefs on TV, in the future of course.”

  Sergeant Sid decided to let his robo counterpart get away with that one, seeing as it wasn’t very good, then readied himself to catch Arthur who was diving over the hay bales as a hail of bullets heralded battle.

  “That gave me the heebie jeebies,” shivered Arthur.

  “What, the diving over the hay bales?” asked Plattington as he shot two enemy guards with one round.

  “No,” replied the colonel, “all those Hs and Bs in the Author’s description.”

  The battle was underway. An order was given by the captain of the guard to fix bayonets. His second in charge said, “But they’re not broken, and we don’t have any tools anyway.”

  “Are you second in charge?”

  “Of course Sir, why?”

  “Well I want you to charge second in charge. CHARGE!” he ordered the men, of whom only some had fixed bayonets.

  His men bounded after him, well ten of them anyway, the ones who could hear among all the din that was being made. The captain made it to the hay bales but was driven off, in a sports car I think. This made the other attackers think twice, once when they looked at each other for moral support and the other when one of them saw the captain riding around in a completely unrealistic sports car.

  The Hotchkiss cannon blazed into action under Gunby’s direction killing a few but making the others run to cover.

  Seeing that they were outgunned, and after he had got out of the sports car, the captain ordered that the men retreat to the walls.

  When Arthur and his men saw that they were scampering away they began to cheer.

  “That was easy,” Tresham nodded to the corporal/bombardier.

  But that would have been too easy.

  Making his way up to the control centre the captain then spoke through a Tannoy type system (obviously Tannoy wasn’t around yet so what am I going to say? Well, maybe I could have used public address system. The trouble is though that if I had used the initials P.A. you might have thought he was talking into a personal assistant!)

  “Can I get on with the announcement now Author?” he queried me.

  I let him.

  “All G.T.G. personnel get into position.”

  His second in charge spoke back to him through the same system, “Donkins is dead, Tupple is badly wounded.”

  “Get others to take their positions.”

  “But the others are not as well trained as Donkins and Tupple?”

  “We’ll have to make do.”

  “But we might have a limp and a loose left hand?”

  “I don’t care if we walk like an Egyptian as long as we kill the interlopers.”

  From the hay bales Arthur and the others had just about calmed down. “Righto, back to the airship,” he ordered. But first, ominously, they heard a giant creaking from the top of the Tower.

  “Wassat?” lingoed Sid.

  It was the top of the Tower. It began to writhe and shudder and creak and cronk. It also began to move, upwards, on giant metal legs. It was a huge steam driven Transformbot (so as not to get done by the trademark police.) When it had stood to its full height of 60 feet it swayed slightly then jumped off the top. It landed and shook the whole courtyard, some of Arthur’s men even fell over because of the shock wave.

  “How are we going to defeat that?” wondered Sid, “Especially without the Author’s help.”

  Gunby turned his Hotchkiss cannon onto the thing’s legs and blasted away, but the Transformbot’s armour plating was too thick.

  The captain of the guard ordered his left arm to, “Swipe at them.”

  The reply was, “Did you say wipe them Captain, because I can’t see a cloth big enough to do that anywhere near the left arm,”

  “Swipe man, swipe!” gurgled the captain at he made the Transformbot shake its head from side to side.

  “The armour is too thick, even for the Hotchkiss cannon,” warned the half giant.

  “Has it got a bundle of wires at the back of its neck, like a metal man?” asked the colonel.

  “I can’t see, it has its back towards us,” replied Robo Sid.

  “Make it turn around then, so we can see.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  “Make it chase you.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re expendable, or at least re-buildable, we aren’t.”

  As best he could Robo Sid tried to pull a disgruntled face, but with what he had to work with it looked more like a serious face. He turned towards the walking tower and yelled at the head, “Your mother was a latrine,” then he started to run through its legs.

  The giant tower wobbled a little from side to side and could not stop Robo Sid from escaping that way. “Did that metal man just say my mother was a latrine?” he asked somebody but somebody wasn’t there to listen to him. He gave commands to the rest of the body, “Legs turn around, give chase to that metal man.”

  Now, as already has been mentioned, the fellow controlling the left leg wasn’t as experienced as the man he had to replace. He had to spin the foot around to go left, but he went right instead. The guard controlling the right leg then moved h
is leg and foot correctly, straight into the left foot.

  “Oh no,” realised the captain, but too late, “I’m just like a rabbit with myxomatosis.”

  Now I wondered how I could fit that into the way Ruhtra turned into a rabbit earlier but I couldn’t warren it.

  The giant walking tower began to fall backwards towards Arthur and those with him.

  “We’re going to be squashed!” whined Sid as he and the others tried to high tail it over the hay bales. He also shouted to Arthur as he ran beneath an arch, “There were no bundles at the back of its neck. Are you happy now?”

  “No, not really, but I’ll have to have a heart to heart with you when we finish this adventure.”

  Crashing down on top of the hay bales served to break the G.T.Gs fall. The crew were protected from harm by their surroundings. “Get to standing position,” the tower commander ordered the arms and legs.

  Now if I wanted a laugh, I could make the GTG get up by doing a bit of a breakdance, I could also talk about my attempts at trying to spin on my back in the early 80s... But I won’t, instead the GTG (I’ve forgotten what GTG means? Something Tower Giant, I’ll have to try to remember the first word later) sat up, put one hand on the floor, bent its knees then started to force itself onto its feet.

  “We need to try to keep it on the floor,” suggested Gunby to Robo Sid and Robo Arthur who were the only three who could possibly take it on physically, “while it’s still crouching,”

  The Robos both ran to the arm that was doing the pushing and together they tried to pull it back. Gunby also joined in and for a short while they managed, between them, to prevent it from pushing itself onto its feet.

  Ruhtra sat on a barrel and began to polish his nails on the collar of his jacket and look at them.

  “Look at him,” said Sid to Arthur, “sitting on a barrel, I wish he was sitting on the barrel of a gun!”

  To no avail, (or to know a veil?) the Robos and Gunby couldn’t hold back the incredible strength of the Guard Tower Giant (remembered!) It stood to its full height and swiped, with its right hand, the three of them away. The Robos and Gunby went smashing through a well-built fence.

  “Is it my turn yet?” asked Ruhtra as he looked at Arthur.

  “You mean you can help?” he thought for a second, “Of course you can, you can turn yourself into another Tower Giant and beat it up!” said Arthur rubbing hands together in glee at his idea.