by Pat Kelleher
“Why?” it asked.
“Because it’s the right thing to do. Because I am a good man. We’re not all like Jeffries. And because no one deserves a death like that. We have to move.”
The shaft angled down steeply and Atkins could feel a strong, cold draught blowing over him as they slid down for what seemed a long way. The Chatt in front of him suddenly dropped and Atkins found himself sliding out of the vent and falling to land heavily below.
“Steady, Atkins,” said Everson, helping him as he climbed to his feet. Atkins pulled off his gas hood to see Edith looking nervously at the Chatt, who cowered against the wall of the passage.
“Shouldn’t you shoot it?”
“No, Bell, I don’t think so,” said Everson, wincing with pain from his shoulder wound.
One of her eyes was starting to puff up and bruises were blooming on her cheeks. Her hair was in complete disarray. She looked like some kind of wild woman. Atkins felt a surge of anger at what Jeffries had done to her, immediately followed by self-recrimination. Was he really any better? Oh Flora, what had he done? His whole world had been turned upside down. Again. If she was pregnant, then it wasn’t going to be hard for anyone to work out it couldn’t be William’s child. She would have to bear the barrage of gossip, the barbed comments, the withering fire of disapproving glances and the machine gun stuttering of tutting. And she would have to bear it alone.
He was aware of Lieutenant Everson shaking his shoulder.
“Atkins, where’s Corporal Ketch?”
“Gone west, sir. Gas.”
There was a series of explosions high above. Rubble erupted out of the vent followed by faint wisps of chlorine gas and, from somewhere behind them, the noise of gunfire grew louder.
“Damn.” Everson crouched down in front of the Chatt. “Which way to the fungus farming chamber?” he said. The Chatt looked up at him. “Do you understand me? Can you speak?”
“Yes, this one can speak Urmanii.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Chandar.”
“Well, Chandar, we need a way out and you’re going to have to show us. On your feet.”
The Chatt rose as Everson ushered it to the fore. Atkins took up the rear, making sure that Bell was in front of him as he cycled his rifle bolt. They hadn’t gone a dozen yards when Atkins heard shouts and shots behind him.
“Sir,” he said turning round at the sound of running feet. Sergeant Hobson, Gazette and Pot Shot came hurtling round the bend.
“Sir?” gasped Hobson. “How the hell did you get here?”
Everson nodded towards the smoking vent. “Snakes and ladders.”
The burly sergeant took it in his stride. “Right you are then, sir.”
There were several bursts of rapid fire from behind them as the rest of the Black Hand Gang, freed Tommies and nurses crowded along the passage, pulling the sleds with the injured Napoo and Half Pint on them, Poilus among those at the back fighting a rear-guard action.
“They’re hard behind us, sir,” called Hobson.
“Only!” called Porgy pushing through the throng. “Only! Where’s Edith? Did you find them?” Atkins smiled as he turned aside to reveal Edith Bell stood behind him.
“Edi!” squealed Nellie Abbott, pushing past Porgy and flinging herself into Edith’s arms, then stood back and looked her up and down, taking in the khaki trousers. “Edi Bell! I never took you for a suffragette.”
“Times change,” said Edith.
“You did good,” said Porgy, clapping Atkins on the back.
Atkins didn’t feel as if he had. He could hardly bring himself to look his mate in the eye. “Where is the bastard? Did you get him?” Porgy pressed.
“Jeffries? Got away,” said Atkins. “But he won’t get far out there, even if he makes it. He’ll be something’s meal by night-time, I’ll bet on it. Ketch bought it, though. Gut shot and gassed.”
“Hell’s Bells,” said Porgy. “Can’t say I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t wish that on a bloody Hun.” Nellie and Edith broke their hug and he caught sight of Edith’s face. “What’s the bugger done to her?” Porgy cried, starting forward.
Atkins grabbed his shoulders. “Not now, mate. She’s fine. She’s a tough old girl.”
Reunited, the Black Hand Gang pressed on, fighting a rear-guard action against the pursuing Chatts, the tunnel taking them inexorably downward. It soon became clear they’d missed the fungus farm chamber that marked the way to their excavated exit point. They were lost.
“Where the hell are we?” Everson asked Chandar, but the Chatt refused to answer.
“Sir,” said Gazette, addressing Everson. “There are more Chatts coming the other way. We’re caught between ’em.”
“Not again,” sighed Everson. “Atkins, I don’t want to get caught between a rock and a hard place. This isn’t a good place for a last stand. See if you can’t blow us an exit.”
Atkins placed a couple of grenades against the wall of the passage and pulled the pins. “Grenade!” he hollered, dashing back round the curve. He was beginning to hate these damned tunnels. There were several dull explosions and Atkins felt his ears crackle and pop like a dropped needle on a scratched gramophone record as the concussion wave overtook him.
A cool breeze blew through the resulting hole. Everson braced his hands on the sides and stuck his head through tentatively.
“What’s through there?” he asked Chandar. “Can we get out that way?”
Chandar peered into the darkness beyond and said nothing.
“We mean no harm,” said Everson. “We just want to leave with our people.” Still Chandar remained obstinately silent. Everson shook his head in despair, and then addressed his men. “Right, 1 Section, secure the other side. Make it snappy. This whole thing’s turning into a shambles.”
The weary warriors made their way cautiously through the hole in the passage. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond, they heard the scuttling and frantic clicks of hundreds of Chatt voices. Atkins’ flesh crawled with revulsion at the sound. The only light came from the familiar luminescent lichens, their faint glow barely illuminating the chamber’s details. Long sinuous dry channels covered the floor, converging on an entrance in the far wall. Atkins noticed the frantic activity in them about halfway across the chamber.
“This’ll brighten the place up,” said Mercy, brandishing his Flammenwerfer. Gutsy opened the valve for him. A fiery orange geyser of flame erupted from the nozzle, casting an infernal glow across the chamber, illuminating pale Chatt and Urmen workers dragging clusters of pearlescent white globes away from the intruders, down the channels toward tunnels in the far walls.
“Poilus, any idea what this place is?” asked Everson.
“It’s their nursery,” replied the Urman with mounting horror. “We are under the edifice now, underground. We shouldn’t have come here.”
Around them, the walls of the chamber were full of recesses. They reminded Atkins of a church crypt, only the bodies that lay in these weren’t dead. Chatts and Urmen moved back and forth among them, dragging out helpless pupae. At the soldiers’ end, however, the cavities had seemed empty until Pot Shot gave a startled yelp. Idly poking about in one with his bayonet, he had come across the desiccated remains of some sort of partially formed nymph Chatt.
“Scared seven shades of shit out of me, that did,” said Pot Shot.
“It’s dead. Mummified,” said Gazette. “Been here a while, has that.”
“Ugly bugger, ain’t it?” said Porgy.
“You’d know,” retorted Mercy.
Its head was enlarged and bulbous, three of its limbs withered and deformed, its metamorphosis gone horribly wrong. And the more they looked, the more deformed, dead Chatts they found.
They advanced slowly across the chamber. A round of rapid fire scattered the Chatts seeking to reach a dry channel filled with large fat, white wriggling larvae. Standing over the limbless grubs, Gutsy thrust his bayonet into one with a vicious satisfaction.
Thick viscous fluid oozed out.
By now, the rest of the men had scrambled through into the chamber behind them.
“Light!” called Everson.
A Very flare arced up and hit the chamber roof. It fell into a channel filled with grubs, spitting out its harsh white light. The larvae began twisting and writhing in the intense heat, throwing macabre shadows on the walls as more Chatt workers, undeterred, crept forward again in an attempt to save them.
Gutsy let loose another burst of rapid fire.
“Stop!” Chandar cried.
“It’s grubs, sir,” said Gutsy with disgust.
“It’s their young!” said Atkins in protest. “What are we now, Bosche baby-killers?”
Chandar, hissed, clicking his mandibles together in agitation. “This is the Queen’s egg chamber. You have threatened Khungarrii young, there is no way out for you now. Rhengar and the scentirrii will crush you. A pity. You are like no Urmen this One has known. Jeffries promised you to us. This One would have liked to have learned more. This One senses there is much he will never know about you, but GarSuleth wills it.”
“Let us go and we will leave them unharmed,” said Everson.
“I have not that power.”
“They’re coming through!” said a private keeping watch by the bomb-blasted aperture through which they had entered the chamber.
With no choice, they moved further into the nursery. Everson and 1 Section led the way along the runways between the dry channels. “Which way out?” Everson asked Chandar.
The Chatt gave a kind of shrug, as if any answer was useless now.
Atkins noticed a glint in the shadow beyond one of the apertures, the dull sheen of lichen light on carapaces. From an opening across the chamber came the martial sound of marching.
“Stand To!” said Everson. “We’ll make a stand against this wall, use the channel in front as a fire trench. Sergeant Dawson, set up the Lewis gun on our flank. Hold until they spread out and we can take down the maximum number.”
The group of thirty-odd soldiers, barely even a platoon, fell into a practised routine, seeking what cover they could in the shallow channels and setting their rifles on the banks.
“Otterthwaite, see if you can’t persuade them to stay back in the tunnels a little longer,” ordered Everson.
“Right you are, sir.” The sharpshooter looked down the barrel of his rifle towards the tunnels. He picked his target and squeezed the trigger. A squeal followed the rifle’s echoing report. Otterthwaite fired repeatedly, but the march of feet and the dull clatter of armoured insectile shells grew into a din as the first of the Chatt soldiers emerged from the gloom of the tunnels.
The nurses, Padre Rand, still under the influence of his otherworldly ennui, Half Pint, Napoo and others too wounded to help were set to the rear against the chamber wall. Nurse Bell took up a rifle from one of wounded men. “They’re not going to take me,” she said through gritted teeth when she met Nellie Abbott’s questioning look. The driver acquiesced mutely. A private with an arm in a sling offered her his bayonet. Nellie took it.
Sister Fenton stepped forward and Bell thought she was about to scold them but she, too, nodded sternly at another wounded soldier. “Give that to me,” she said, indicating his bayonet. He handed it up without protest and she gripped its handle self-consciously. The other two nurses looked at her nonplussed. “Belgium,” was all she said. All of England had heard of the Bosche atrocities there in the early years of the war.
In the fire channel Atkins nervously awaited the order to shoot. Seeing the massed ranks of insects before them was unnerving, but seeing them along the rifle barrel, it became business, and a business he knew how to do. He picked his targets and waited for the order.
To his left and right Gutsy, Porgy, Gazette, Pot Shot and Mercy were doing the same. He met their eyes one by one, an unspoken conversation of wordless encouragement and silent goodbyes. If this was it, they would give as good as they got and take as many of the damn things with them as possible when they went. The anger he’d felt at himself, Atkins now turned outwards towards the Chatts.
THE FIRST WAVE of Chatt soldiers swarmed onto the floor of the nursery chamber.
Brandishing his revolver, Everson stepped forward, bringing Chandar with him. “We just want to leave,” he called out across the chamber.
A Chatt stepped forward from the ranks.
“Rhengar,” said Chandar. “Njurru scentirrii of the Khungarrii Shura.”
“Let us go,” called Everson. “Allow us safe passage out of here with our people or we will destroy your young, your nursery!” He deplored the tactic, but he felt he had no choice if he wanted to save his men. They were cornered.
Rhengar hissed. In turn, the Chatt soldiers began to hiss, some beating the flats of their short swords against their chests.
“Well, that’s not good,” muttered Everson, and then nodded to his platoon sergeant.
“This is it, lads,” called Hobson. “Pick your targets. Fire!”
THE LEWIS GUN opened fire, raking across the lines of Chatts who fell, toppling into the partly vacated channels only to be trodden on by ranks of their fellows as their advance continued.
Covered by insects wielding electric lances, spitting Chatts charged forward spraying jets of acid from their mouths, leaving several men screaming and clutching their faces.
Any moment now, they would be upon them. Atkins readied himself for fighting at close quarters.
“We’re going to need something bigger than bullets,” yelled Gutsy to Gazette, hefting a grenade from his pack, from the bottom of which projected a stick. “Rifle grenade.”
“Not from my rifle you don’t,” said Gazette. “Bugger up your own bore.”
“Well there’s nothing to lose now, is there?” said Gutsy inserting the shaft of the stick into the barrel of his rifle. He put the stock of the rifle butt against the ground and aimed the barrel towards an opening on the far side of the chamber, through which Chatts were swarming. He pulled the safety pin from the grenade and then pulled the trigger. The bomb arced across the chamber and exploded within the ranks of Chatts, shredding body limbs in a hail of shrapnel. Showers of dust and debris rained down from the chamber ceiling.
“Bloody hell, Gutsy, you’ll bring the whole place down on top of us,” said Pot Shot.
The tremors grew stronger and a deep rumble filled the chamber.
“That wasn’t me,” he protested.
The Chatts wavered uncertainly, their leader—Rhengar—holding them in line as the rumbling continued. To the Tommies’ left, the wall began to crack and crumble before exploding out into the chamber with a tremendous roar as the great bulk of an armoured beast crashed through it.
It was the Ironclad, Ivanhoe, covered in the dust and dirt of shattered earthen walls as it rolled implacably forward. It came to a halt, its engines growling and filling the chamber with acrid exhaust fumes, its great six-pounder guns trained on the ranks of Chatt soldiers. Light from the breached wall behind it filtered through the settling dust, bathing the tank in an ethereal glow.
A cheer went up the from the Tommies, while the Khungarrii hissed and backed away from the terrible vision before them, sinking down on their long-limbed legs, cowering as if in obeisance to the enormous beast.
“Skarra,” hissed Chandar, also sinking down.
“Skarra?” said Everson.
“God of the Underearth. Dung Beetle Brother to GarSuleth himself, who takes the dead and guides them through their last metamorphosis so that they can rise and dwell in the Sky Web of GarSuleth forever.”
Another rumble filled the air. Everson looked up at the roof and, in that moment, Chandar saw its chance and scuttled back along the wall behind the line of Tommies to the hole through which they’d entered, now covered by another cohort of Chatts.
“Sir!” said Hobson, swinging his rifle round to follow the limping arthropod.
“No, let him go, Hobson,” said Everson. “Best save y
our bullets. We might need ’em.”
Safe, Chandar turned, and its eyes met Atkins’, who stared back wonderingly before the scentirrii parted and the old Chatt was lost in the swarm.
“Follow the bloomin’ light,” yelled a face peering out from a loophole in the side of the ironclad. A hand pointed needlessly to the gaping hole behind the landship.
Everson ordered the men towards the breach, the nurses and injured going first while a burst of fire from the landship’s forward machine gun kept the Chatts at bay. Everson and 1 Section kept the retreat covered, before abandoning their position and falling back to the tank. The confused Chatts, hampered by their superstition, held back.
Everson banged on the small door in the rear of the left gun sponson. It opened a crack. “You’re not coming in. There ain’t room!” the leather and chainmail masked crew member retorted.
“How the hell did you find us?” Everson bellowed above the growl of the engine.
“We didn’t,” yelled the cockney gunner. “When the explosions went off in the tower, Lieutenant Mathers ordered us forward, we hadn’t got twenty yards across the clearing when the bleedin’ ground collapsed beneath us. How were we to know it were riddled with tunnels and the Ivanhoe here a bleedin’ twenty eight ton behemoth? Wah-la, as the Frogs say. We found ourselves down here.”
“Well thank God you did,” shouted Everson. “They think the tank is the god of their underworld, but I don’t know how much time that will buy us.”
“Well that’s handy to know. You follow the others back to the surface. We’ll keep the buggers busy.” The door clanged shut again.
Everson waved 1 Section back as the tank’s forward machine gun spat another hail of bullets across the chamber, keeping the Chatts at bay. They scrambled back along the tank’s rubble-strewn path of destruction and into the bottom of a wide sinkhole. Ahead men were scrambling up the sides, hauling the injured up with them. Atkins and the others scrambled up the slope after them as the tank reversed back out of the nursery chamber towards them.
