by Toby Frost
As the docking arm folded down from the roof, putting them last in line to leave the ship, Carveth reflected that it could have been worse. After all, nobody was shooting at her yet.
*
It was pitch black in the hold of the John Pym. The power was almost completely down, the engines off except for a slow retro-thruster to hold the ship out of the battlezone. Soon the Pym would register to scanners as nothing more than a lump of metal.
‘Sounds like bloody madness to me,’ Major Wainscott growled. ‘Believe me, I know lunacy when I see it. Sometimes even when I don’t,’ he added, glancing around. ‘It talks to me, you see.’
‘So do I,’ Susan said. She pointed at the major. ‘He’s right. This sounds mental. But if it works, I’m game. Better than sitting in that dreadnought waiting to get a rocket up the arse.’
Dreckitt helped Smith get the mirror up on end. ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘The whole deal’s a jump ahead of the nut factory, but how does that change anything?’ He stepped back, admiring the mirror. ‘So how do we work it?’
‘Smith knows,’ Susan said. ‘Is there an on switch?’
Smith wore the Civiliser on his right hip and his sword on the left. His hunting rifle was slung across his back. ‘Right chaps, here's the plan: The enemy have an engine powered by this mirror, somehow. It’s obviously still working. So, we cross into this netherworld and make it part of the Empire.
As soon as any headman appears, we grab him and find out how to nobble the stealth ship. Simple.’
‘Great,’ Wainscott replied. ‘Let’s go!’
Dreckitt said, ‘Just one thing. If you’re with us, Smith, and Rhianna’s doing her shielding thing, who’s been driving this crate?’
A sinister laugh came from the front of the ship.
‘It’s alright,’ Smith said. ‘We’re plotting a course away from the fighting. . actually, I’ll just check that.’
Suruk strode out of the cockpit as he approached. ‘I am ready,’ the alien announced. ‘Let us test the new hunting grounds.’
They called in to wake Rhianna from her trance. She equipped herself with a satchel and a very scuffed pair of boots. It was the most practical gear Smith had ever seen her use. He kissed her while Suruk pulled a face and looked away.
‘Let’s go,’ Rhianna said.
Together they returned to the hold. ‘Right then,’ Smith said, ‘let’s get cracking. Wainscott, could your chaps get out of the line of sight? We need to have the jump here.’
‘Course,’ the major said, and the soldiers drew back.
Smith bent down and got to work on the frame. He turned the dial as Carveth had shown him, the puzzle solving itself as he rotated the little symbols. The diamond clicked into place. He moved across to the clubs. The mechanism spun easily, as if luring him in.
Suruk gave a thoughtful little growl. ‘The air has changed.’
‘I can feel it,’ Rhianna said. ‘It’s kinda chilled – in a bad way.’
‘Nix, lady,’ Dreckitt replied, ‘Just your imagination,’ but his pistol was in his hand.
Smith stood up and began to adjust the little spade in the top right corner, as if tuning a radio. He was unpleasantly aware that his groin was up against the glass. There would be nothing to prevent the nether regions of Hell having full access to the nether regions of Smith.
‘One more,’ he said. Susan checked the beam gun.
Smith turned the little pieces, rotated each quarter and clicked them together. He pushed the heart down the groove, into the corner. All four pieces were in place. He stepped aside. Rhianna stared at him from the edge of the room. The whites of her eyes looked huge.
They stood in the hold and waited for something to change. For ten seconds, the room was silent.
‘Ah, bollocks,’ Wainscott said. ‘Bloody woman was talking rubbish. It’s these androids, Smith.
You ought to get her looked at – change her oil or whatever it is they do.’
Suruk stepped forward, levelled his spear, and calmly pushed the butt through the glass. It met with no resistance. He withdrew it, looked at the end and gestured to Rhianna. ‘Ladies first.’
‘I’ll do this,’ Smith said. ‘Gentlemen, follow me!’ He approached the mirror, took a deep breath and stepped into it.
There was a loud noise and Smith staggered back, clutching his head. Rhianna ran to his side. ‘It must be psychic feedback,’ she said, pressing her hand over his. ‘Ummm.. . has anyone got any aloe vera?
Raw kelp?’
‘I hit my head on the frame,’ Smith said. ‘Come on, men! This way!’
He drew his pistol, bent low and walked into – and through – his reflection. A wave of cold passed over him, like fever, and then he was on the other side.
He stood in a stone hall, vast and empty. Sheet metal had been pinned to the rear wall, so as to mimic the hold of the John Pym. Smith turned around slowly, and took in the sheer size of the hall: an enormous nave, worthy of a cathedral; the floor a chequerboard of tiles. An alien creature had been stuffed and mounted fifty yards above his head amid the vaults; it looked rather like a walrus with wings.
Staircases stretched across the ceiling as if the great chamber had been built upside-down. It smelled of dust and, faintly, of soup.
‘Well, crikey!’ he said.
Suruk emerged next to him. He looked about, nodded, and took a folded top hat from his side.
Tapping it into shape, he placed it carefully on the crown of his head.
‘You came equipped,’ Smith said.
‘When in Rome, one should do as the Romans would do,’ the alien replied. ‘Conquer everything for our empire!’
Rhianna was next. She gazed down the length of the vault and said, ‘English perpendicular Gothic, essentially Germanic but with mid-Victorian influences. . far out!’
Wainscott followed, then Susan, guarding the entrance until the rest of the raiding party were inside the hall.
‘What now?’ Dreckitt said.
Smith reached into his coat and removed a portable radio tripod. He unfolded the little legs at the end and pulled up the telescopic aerial.
‘That won’t work here,’ Dreckitt said.
Smith took the clean Union Jack handkerchief from his back pocket and tied it to the top. ‘It’ll work now,’ he said. He set the rig down on the tiles. ‘I claim this dimension in the name of the British Space Empire! There. It’s ours now.’
‘This is madness,’ Dreckitt whispered.
‘No,’ Smith replied. ‘This is Britain.’
‘Same difference.’
‘And we are all mad here,’ Suruk added.
Wainscott snorted. ‘Compared to Sunnyvale Home for the Psychologically Uneven, it’s pretty dull.’ He checked the ammunition counter on the side of his Stanford gun. ‘I bet they don’t even have a pills trolley.’
Susan gave Wainscott a hard look. ‘Mission first, pills later. Then cocoa.’
‘Right. Let’s explore this place, then get naked and blow it up. What say you, Smith?’
‘Well,’ said Smith, ‘Seeing that we’ve claimed this place for Blighty, we ought to tell its inhabitants the good news. Let’s go.’
Wainscott made a series of swift arm gestures and the Deepspace Operations Group split into two. They moved down the length of the hall, using the columns as cover, keeping to the shadowed walls.
Their boots were almost silent on the stones.
‘Where is everyone?’ Rhianna whispered. ‘You’d think they’d guard the portal, surely. Polly said that she saw horrible things in the mirror when she looked in it.’
‘Perhaps they are waiting for us,’ Suruk replied, and he smiled.
Craig, Wainscott’s infiltration expert, beckoned from the far wall. They crossed the hall and regrouped. ‘Found the way in,’ he explained. ‘I think you’d better look at this.’
It was a broad oak door, studded with iron and flanked by knights carved into the stone. Across the lintel, a stone figur
e smiled down at them. Its head and body seemed to be an enormous egg. ‘What a skull!’ Suruk breathed.
‘And that’s not all,’ Susan said, and she opened the door.
They looked into a castle’s grounds. Stone steps led down into a garden: to the right, a maze of hedges; on the left, thick forest bristling with conifers. A high wall encompassed both and, outside it, a patchwork of fields stretched away to the horizon. On the far side of the wall, a wad of towers rose up towards the cloudless sky. The air smelled fresh. The snickering of shears floated up from the garden.
Dreckitt gasped. ‘Are we – is this England?’
Smith held his hand out palm-up. He felt no rain. ‘I doubt it.’
‘My God!’ Wainscott breathed. ‘Another dimension. I really have gone doolally.’
Smith looked a little closer, and the details of the scene were like the onset of a hallucination. A bird flew too close to a cloud, and a white tendril shot out and dragged it inside. In the distance, men could be seen painting the bushes in the garden. Hedges slid back and forth within the maze like pieces in a Chinese puzzle. In the yard before the castle stood a dozen statues that looked like plasticine. The towers and buildings were subtly shaped like other things: a top hat, a house of cards. They were not quite still; they changed position as if they had wheels, drawing apart almost too slowly to notice. It’s a watch face, Smith realised , it’s moving like a bloody watch face.
‘Let’s get going,’ he said. ‘Wainscott, how about we split up and work our way towards the central tower– the one that’s central right now, that is?’
‘Good idea,’ Wainscott said. ‘The one with the heart on it?’
‘That’s the fellow.’
‘Two-pronged attack, meeting in the middle. My chaps’ll flank round the maze.’
Smith nodded. ‘Then we’ll head through that little forest. See you there, Wainscott.’
‘Will do,’ the major replied.
I hope this is right, Smith thought as he hurried down the steps. Suruk, Rhianna and Dreckitt followed. If the John Pym was damaged while they were away, they could be stuck here forever. Still, at least it wasn’t raining.
*
The lift was a mass of twisted ironwork and sparks. Captain Fitzroy took the stairs, bounding down the steps three at a time. Emergency lights strobed in the near dark, and she was lucky to reach the bottom without falling end over end.
They were bringing up the wounded from the portside gun deck, wheeling them into the forward mess for triage. Captain Fitzroy flattened herself against the wall to let the gurneys go past. Castors squeaked: deep within the ship, something collapsed on itself with a slow metallic groan. A doctor called for the orderlies to bring up the resuscitating gear.
‘Captain?’
She looked down, recognising the freckled young woman on the trolley. Ensign Driscoll, former right wing, would not be seeing the lacrosse pitch for a while.
‘Tallulah,’ said Captain Fitzroy, ‘what have you been doing to yourself?’
Driscoll spoke through a mix of pain and sedatives. ‘You know that big brass lion attached to the mess wall?’
The captain nodded.
‘It fell on me. I can’t –’
‘Say no more, Ensign. Your captain is here. You’ll be right as rain in no time.’
‘I think – I think I’ve lost my leg.’
‘Lost it? Nonsense, Tallulah.’ She pointed down the corridor. ‘Look, it’s just over there. You see?
There’s nothing to be worried about. Just a quick spell in sickbay and you’ll be on the pitch in no time.
We’ll be whacking balls at the Household Division before you can say… can say – surgeon!’
‘She’s fainted, ma’am,’ the medic replied.
‘Patch her up, dammit!’
She hurried to the port gun deck, ducked under a joist and surveyed the chaos within.
The vast chamber had always looked like a mixture of a cathedral and a pumping station. Now it was bombed out: several guns had been completely destroyed and the emergency systems had barely managed to contain the damage. Most of the fire had been blasted out the airlocks, but shockwaves had buckled the roof and strewn the floor with lidar computers and range-finding gear. Cogs stuck out from the far wall like throwing-stars, hurled there by the force of the blast. An electrical cable with a girth like a python sparked and crackled at her boots.
The chamber was full of people: the injured and those trying to keep them alive. Three technicians in hazard armour sprayed coolant foam onto a small fire. A pair of ratings carried one of their colleagues past her. A gunner hung dead in the rafters, tossed there by the explosion. Twenty yards away, First Lieutenant Collingwood stood beside the wreckage of a railgun, struggling to drag a fallen girder from off the barrel housing.
‘Come on, you idle buggers, lend a hand here!’ he yelled. ‘Mr O’Hare!’ He jabbed a finger at a round-faced ensign. ‘Run to the engine room… tell the chief I want three more technicians and two more sparkies. My orders, tell him – no arguments!’
The lad rushed past the Captain, seeming not even to notice her. ‘Status report, Mr Collingwood!’
He was covered in dirt, she saw. His left trouser leg was stiff with foam. ‘Not looking clever,
Captain.’
‘How long ‘til we can get back in the game?’
He shook his head.
‘Well, how long ‘til the remaining guns are functional at least? Come on, man.’
‘Forty minutes, ma’am, maybe an hour.’ He wiped sweat off his brow. ‘It’s not just that, ma’am.
The crew are done in. And some of the lads think there’s nowt can be done, neither – not against a ghost ship.’
‘What? I won’t have that sort of talk. Put me on the main speakers!’
‘Aye aye, ma’am.’ He stepped to the comms post, activated the ship’s address system and rang the large brass bell beside it.
‘Pay attention, team!’ Captain Fitzroy did not lean into the microphone; she just put her hands on her hips and raised her voice. ‘The enemy have gone into the lead: they got the drop on us and dealt us a low blow. But we’re not out of the game yet. Men, this ship is England – a particular playing field of England, where history tells us all battles are won. I know you have suffered, and I cannot blame you if you are downhearted. But as your captain I ask you this… would you see them burn witches in Picadilly?
Would you call a gang of six-foot rodents your lords and masters? Would you have your children live in an ant farm?’
The shouts from the intercom were almost drowned out by those around her.
‘Gather your strength, crew. Let those who cannot fight leave the field, and let those who still can fight refresh themselves on the orange slices of righteousness. Pull your socks up and grab your sticks, girls, for the game is far from over!’
There was a raucous cheer; someone called ‘Huzzah!’ Captain Fitzroy turned to Lieutenant Collingwood. ‘Ready for action in twenty minutes?’
‘Why, no! Ten’ll be plenty, ma’am.’
‘Good.’ She flicked the intercom to the bridge. ‘Mr Chumble, bring us around. We’re going back in.’
*
Suruk took the lead, having the greatest experience as a tracker. The little forest smelled of pine needles and sap. The air was thick and close. Every so often Smith glimpsed the high towers between the foliage and he was relieved that they remained on course.
In fact, this new dimension wasn’t too different to being in the Chilterns, at least not this part of it. It was not unlike some of the trips Smith had been as a schoolboy, apart from the dragonflies with smouldering heads, the thing that had snarled at them from the undergrowth – looking like a cross between a badger and a corkscrew – and the unnerving suspicion that some of the flowers were watching them. At least they didn’t even have to make soup from powder, this time.
The ground was thick with needles, springy underfoot, and Smith was glad that Rhi
anna had worn her boots, even though he couldn’t see her ankles now when she hitched up her skirt. Strange, he thought, how erotic he found her ankles. Equally strange that you couldn’t really do anything with them.
Such poor design pointed to either evolution or a deity without the basic kindness to indulge his sexual peculiarities. It was all very –
‘Look!’ Rhianna said.
The trees parted, and in the centre of the clearing, next to a clump of the biggest mushrooms Smith had ever seen, stood a long table. It was heaped with crockery, as if it had been used as a canteen by a passing army. Plates, cake-trays, samovars, teapots and silver cutlery lay in piles. Some of the silver had begun to tarnish.
‘Hell of a place to chow down,’ Dreckitt said.
‘Well,’ Smith replied. ‘They’ve got teapots. They can’t be all bad.’
Suruk raised a hand. ‘Wait.’
Smith knew that tone. He froze. Suruk had stopped in the shade of a tree, seemingly lost in thought. Dreckitt paused, his hand halfway to his pistol. Rhianna stood with her head tilted to one side, frowning, as if trying to get some water out of her ear.
‘I heard something,’ the M’Lak whispered. ‘A burbling sound.’
‘You sure it wasn’t a brook?’ Smith replied. ‘Brooks burble.’
‘I fear not, Mazuran. There was whiffling, too.’
‘Whiffling and burbling? Sounds bad. Any thoughts, men?’
Dreckitt pulled down the brim of his hat. ‘In my line of work, the only thing that whiffles and burbles at the same time is a wise-guy on a grift. And I’m not talking some bindle stiff pulling a scam behind the eight-ball. Hell, in this joint I’m just glad none of us is called Dorothy.’
‘Thanks for that,’ Smith replied. ‘If you could just transla –’
He was drowned out by a roar from beyond the trees. Something huge ran behind the firs in great bounding hops, the saplings bending to let its massive body through. Each bouncing step pounded the earth, setting the trees shuddering. A great scaly back appeared above the conifers, lifted by flailing, undersized wings. A neck thicker than a man’s waist snaked between the trunks, and Smith glimpsed a hideous face, all horns, buck teeth and glowing eyes. It saw them. It roared again.
