by Pat Kelleher
In the crater, the chains clinked as the slack was taken up and took the weight of the tank. The remaining creepers, unwilling to give up their prize, clung desperately to it, like a mother at a railway station whose son was setting off to war. But in this case, as with that, the army’s pull was relentless. It ripped the tank from the creepers’ grip, and those that didn’t release their hold were wrenched from the ground by their roots as the ironclad machine was dragged inch by inch from the crushed and broken tanglewood that had saved it.
“Whooooo!” Owen waved his battle bowler as the Ivanhoe advanced foot by foot through the pulverised bower, back along its own track towards the jungle’s edge.
When, with agonising slowness, the tank began to crawl up the scree slope, Talbot pushed his steel helmet back on his head. “You know, I never reckoned this would work, but they’re only bloody doing it.”
Fletcher clapped him on the shoulder and grinned. “That’ll be a tanner you owe me, then.”
ATKINS AND 1 Section took up position in the ruins of Nazarr to defend the approach to the Croatoan Crater, along with the men of 2 Section. The ruins had collapsed inwards on the subterranean tunnels, leaving obstinate pinnacles of wall standing here and there. Had it not been for the exotic vegetation already reclaiming the barren ground, it could have been any small Belgian village bombed to buggery by German shells.
“We’re so close I can feel it,” said Atkins as they kept watch on the jungle beyond the ruins. “We should be down there, going after Jeffries.”
“You’re certain Jeffries knows a way home, then,” asked Gutsy.
“Not certain, but he claimed to have brought us here. I just want to get back to Blighty, and if there’s the slightest chance he knows how, then I think we have to take it.”
“I thought you said he was just a bloke,” said Gazette. “Are you telling me you believe all that magic stuff now? You’re not starting to believe your own press, are you, Only?”
“Blood and sand, of course not!” protested Atkins. “You know what happened. I told you. I didn’t start those bloody rumours about me battling black magic. In case you forgot, it was believing those tales that got Chalky killed. Whether that diabolist gubbins has any truth to it, who knows? All I know is I didn’t see any.”
“You have to admit, that mumbo jumbo stuff does seem to follow you around though,” Porgy chipped in. “There’s that thing with the Chatt, Chandar, too—all that Kurda stuff about how you two were connected by some web of fate or something.”
Atkins rolled his eyes. “Give me a break. Look, I’d just like my soddin’ life back, all right? My life, to do with as I please, not have all these people with expectations, telling me what I should be, and what I should be doing.”
“Shouldn’t have joined the army, then,” said Mercy with a smirk.
“So you don’t put much store in Mathers’ mad prophecy, last time we were here, then,” asked Pot Shot, mischievously. “In the spira when the Breath of GarSuleth grows foul,” he intoned portentously, “the false dhuyumirrii shall follow its own scent along a trail not travelled, to a place that does not exist. Other Ones will travel with the Breath of GarSuleth, the Kreothe, made, not tamed. Then shall Skarra, with open mandibles, welcome the dark scentirrii. There shall emerge a colony without precedent. The children of GarSuleth will fall. They shall not forsake the Sky Web. The anchor line breaks.”
The rest of the section just looked at him as if he’d gone doolally.
“I memorised it,” said Pot Shot warily.
Atkins raised his eyebrows with disbelief. “You memorised it.”
“I thought it might be important.”
“And is it?”
“I couldn’t say,” Pot Shot admitted with a lop-sided grin and shrug. “I don’t know what any of it means.”
His mood lightened, Atkins shook his head softly, smiled, and cuffed the lanky Fusilier around the head with his soft cap. “Daft ha’p’orth.”
A thing the size of a man’s forearm, like a corpse rat crossed with a spider, skittered out of the undergrowth.
Almost preternaturally fast, Gazette swung his rifle round, following the movement, before dismissing it.
“What the fuck?” Another ran through Porgy’s legs.
Then a gaggle of the critters scuttled out of the undergrowth.
Atkins’ eyes narrowed as he stared into the gloom of the forest surrounding them. Something had made those things funk it. Another gesture and the rest of the section sought hasty cover behind the lip of the old Nazarrii edifice, scrambling at their chests for their gas hoods.
Hood in hand, Atkins called out. “Don’t fire unless you have to. We may have to repel more than one attack until they can haul the Ivanhoe up.”
“And then they’ll be in for a surprise,” said Porgy, his voice muffled by the layers of chemically impregnated flannel.
Atkins removed his soft cap and tugged the hood over his head, tucking it into his collar. The world yellowed and cracked, filtered by the mica eyepieces. He could feel his forehead begin to prickle with sweat under the thick cloth.
For a moment there was only silence and tension. Sweaty palms gripped barrels. Eyes scanned the wall of forest from behind dirty lenses of the gas hoods.
Zohtakarrii scentirrii swarmed out of the forest like cockroaches, leaping from the cover of the trees with angry, rattling hisses. Those with swords and spears bounded like grasshoppers, covering the space between the forest and the ruins in seconds.
One launched itself over the shattered wall. Atkins, braced against a large block of rubble, thrust up with his bayonet, slipping the seventeen-inch blade up into the soft abdomen, and used the Chatt’s momentum to swing his rifle like a pitchfork. He threw the Chatt over his head, pulling the trigger as he did so. The Chatt flailed through the air and fell against the rubble blocks, where its carapace cracked and a thick dark ichor seeped out of its broken body.
Gazette settled down into cover and picked off charging Chatts with mechanical precision, flanked by Pot Shot and Porgy.
The ruins, though, were in danger of being overrun. Further afield, Atkins heard the sound of shooting. The Chatts were flanking them and attacking the main rescue party. And he and his section were about to be cut off from the rest of them.
“2 Section! Fall back and give covering fire!” yelled Atkins.
They didn’t have to be told twice. The section retreated to the rear of the ruins to give covering fire to Atkins and his Black Hand Gang.
ON HEARING THE first shots, Everson barked orders. “Stand to. Fix bayonets. Gas, gas, gas!”
There was no gas, of course, but the hoods protected against the Chatts’ acid spit and the command had been drilled into the men. Everson saw no point in changing it.
Everson turned to the Fusilier astride the battlepillar as it and its partner continued their obstinate plod forward, each footfall hauling the tank nearer. If they could get the tank to the top, then it could turn the tide for them. They might not be able to drive it, but its machine guns and six-pounders would bring much needed support. They had to cover Woolridge and his battlepillars for as long as possible.
He called up. “Woolridge, whatever happens, keep pulling. We need that tank. We’ll buy you as much time as we can.”
Woolridge waved his acknowledgement from Big Bertha’s howdah. Ferris and Carlton manned the battlepillar’s forward machine gun. Merrick and Bailey took the rear.
Woolridge saw Atkins and the two rearguard sections retreating towards the main party across the no man’s land of scrub, with the lines of Chatts advancing behind them.
“Covering fire!” he yelled.
Ferris and Carlton opened fire, their elevated position giving a good beaten zone. The Lewis gun chuddered out in short bursts, shattering carapaces and felling advancing Chatts.
The rest of the platoon, having taken cover, yelled encouragement as Atkins’ men pelted towards them, some helping injured or blinded comrades.
They reached
the safety of the firing line, hurdling over the crouched soldiers.
BIG BERTHA AND Big Willie were now advancing beyond the front line towards the Chatts, as they continued to haul their ironclad load from the crater. For Woolridge to do his job, Everson couldn’t afford to lose ground to the enemy.
There was nothing for it; they would have to attack and defend every yard they could. Their only problem was lack of ammunition. Whatever they faced today, even if they were to repel it, they would still need to conserve ammunition for whatever happened afterwards. To be out here this far from the trenches without ammunition would leave them effectively defenceless.
Everson summoned the nearest private. “Ellis! Tell the NCOs. On my order, we’re going to advance towards the enemy. Single-round fire.”
“Sir.” The Fusilier dashed along the line as the first wave of Chatts sprang towards them.
Everson blew his whistle and the sections stepped out from behind cover.
The skirmish line advanced: the bombers, flanked by riflemen, took advantage of the close bunching of Chatts as Mills bombs arced through the air to explode in balls of fire and red-hot shrapnel, throwing limbs and razor-sharp shards of carapace whirling though the air.
“It’s pig-sticking time, lads!” howled a corporal, and the air was filled with cries and roars honed on English training grounds under the eyes of disdainful NCOs.
The Tommies charged with bayonets and crashed against Chatt carapaces in close quarters fighting, too close for electric lances to be effective, fighting to hold the line. Everson slashed and parried with his sword, taking out his frustrations with every cut and thrust.
Atkins swung his rifle and bayonet, countering parries and thrusts from spears and swords, his khaki tunic becoming mottled and moth-eaten as drops of acid spit burnt themselves away against the thick serge. Chatts swarmed around them, like ants on jam. Again and again he stabbed, countered, swung the stock of his Enfield into the horned and nubbed carapaces, blocked blows with the barrel. As one Chatt fell, another took its place. Under his gas hood, Atkins howled with frustration and rage, and the muscles in his arms began to burn with the effort.
The Fusiliers advanced past Big Bertha and Big Willie. Arcs of electric energy blistering the air around them as the Chatts’ lancers found their range.
The left flank of the line began to weaken and the Tommies were pushed back, but wheeled round to protect the straining battlepillars.
BELOW, IN THE crater, the sound of gunfire and screams echoed off the walls. The working party paused.
“Jesus, what the hell is going on up there?” said Mitchell. “Sounds like an attack.”
“I don’t know. But I’m not going to be stuck down here,” said Cooper. He scrambled up the scree slope, stones slipping out from under his feet as he climbed.
“Cooper, who said you could leave your post? Get back here!” ordered Corporal Talbot.
Cooper ignored him, reached the vine rope by which they’d descended, and began to climb, hand over hand.
“What are you going to do?” Owen asked Talbot.
Talbot’s shoulders dropped in defeat. “Nothing,” he said. “Leastways, not yet. I’ve got his name, and he’s climbing towards a fight, ain’t he? He’s not deserting.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but maybe we should all be up there, Corp,” said Fletcher.
The tank groaned and clanked, clawing its way up the scree, like a faithful hound attempting to scramble up to help its master.
“Maybe we should, but our orders were to see to the tank. That’s our job.”
WOOLRIDGE JABBED THE driving spikes between the segmented plates behind Big Bertha’s head, urging the beast forward.
“Come on, girl, come on,” he urged, willing the larval creature on.
It wasn’t lost on Woolridge that even as the others were forced back, he was slowly advancing towards the enemy, as the battlepillars hauled the twenty-eight-ton tank up the steep incline of the crater wall. To stop now would be disastrous. He knew that whatever happened, he must keep hauling the tank. But he also knew he’d need another fifty or sixty yards to do it. Yards that were slipping away as the Chatts advanced, although the Pennines were making them fight for every inch.
In front of him, in the forward machine-gun basket, Ferris swapped out the last circular forty-eight-round ammo canister from the forward Lewis gun and swore.
“We’re out of ammo!”
Woolridge dug the driving spikes in again, pulling on the reins. Big Bertha reared up off the ground as the advancing wave of Chatts rushed towards it and Big Willie, before crashing down again, crushing half a dozen Chatts, their smashed carapaces crackling under Bertha’s bulk like brittle sheets of cellophane.
Several Chatts sprang up onto Bertha’s panniers, and from there scrambled up the sides of the beast.
Ferris was hit by a bolt from an electric lance. He went into spasm, lost his balance and slipped down Big Bertha’s face. His webbing caught on one of its barbed mandibles; as he struggled to free himself, the battlepillar’s mandibles scythed shut.
COOPER HAD ALMOST reached the top. Even Talbot found himself willing the man on. There was a blue-white flash from beyond the lip, and the rope he was climbing dropped into the crater. Cooper’s body plummeted down the crater wall, hit an outcrop and pinwheeled out into the air.
“Cooper!”
He hit the top of the scree slope with a sound like a wet sandbag. His limbs flopped at sickening angles. The broken body tumbled down the crater side until it slid to rest against the port track horn of the Ivanhoe. The track plates rolled implacably forward, crushing the body beneath its port track before anyone could reach him; the sound of splintering bone and bursting organs was mercifully lost amid the creaks and screeching of shifting iron plates.
THE CHATTS ADVANCED along Big Bertha’s back towards the driver’s howdah. Woolridge cycled the bolt on his Enfield and fired, sending the first Chatt spinning off to the ground. And the second.
There was a loud wrenching and tearing followed by a snap as the load bearing fibre of the tow ropes finally tore, under assault from Chatt mandibles. Released from tension, the ropes snapped through the air, hurling Chatts from the battlepillar’s back.
Free of its burden, Bertha lurched forward. Woolridge almost lost his footing. He grabbed the side of the howdah to steady himself. He caught sight of the Chatt with its electric lance a second before his world was filled with an agonising white light that faded into a consuming blackness.
LEFT TO BEAR the entire load alone, Big Willie began to lose the battle. The weight of the tank dragged the battlepillar back towards the edge of the crater, leaving a great furrow in the ground.
Electric lance fire burnt through the great ropes and Big Willie was suddenly released from its harness, but its freedom was short-lived. Stray electric lance bolts licked its armoured sides, earthing through it, burning carapace and scorching soft tissue. Thrashing in pain, its rear end crashed against the stock of fuel drums, sending them toppling over the crater edge, like skittles, where they bounced down the side in a succession of hollow, discordant notes.
TALBOT WATCHED AS the tank reached the top of the scree slope and abutted the crater wall. The track horns caught the camber of the wall and began to creep the chassis up the steeper slope.
There was a lurch and the tank rolled back several yards, sending the Fusiliers scurrying out of the way. A huge length of rope dropped, piling up on the driver’s cabin between the track horns like a great fibrous stool.
The tank remained still for a moment, and then with a despairing groan of tortured metal, the Ivanhoe rolled back down towards the jungle, picking up speed in a cloud of dust and chippings.
Watching with horror, Talbot flinched at every sound.
With their arms windmilling, the salvage section ran down after the runaway ironclad, as if they had a chance of stopping it.
EVERSON HEARD THE grating, metallic crash and the rumble of the
tracks, and knew that the tank was gone again.
And with it, the Pennines’ resolve. They found themselves pushed back by sheer weight of numbers until they had their backs to the crater’s edge. They were surrounded. Trapped.
The Chatts closed in around them, bristling with spears, swords and electric lances, mandibles clashing. But they didn’t move in to drive them over.
“I think they want us alive,” said Atkins.
“Works for me,” said Porgy in ragged breaths.
Pot Shot eyed their scything mandibles. “Probably prefer their food live, knowing our luck.”
A large scentirrii stepped forward. It wore a blood-red silk surcoat and its mandibles seemed larger and stronger than any Khungarrii. Its antennae waved. “You are prisoners of the Zohtakarrii.”
The Fusiliers didn’t move, but waited on a command from Everson. He knew they would fight to the last if he ordered them, but what would they be fighting for? Perhaps Bains had been right. This world wasn’t about King and Country and Duty. It was about survival.
“Lower your weapons,” he said, his voice laced with regret. He stepped forwards and offered his sword in surrender.
TALBOT AND THE others strained their ears. It had gone quiet up above. That wasn’t good.
“D’you think they’re dead?” asked Hume.
“If they are, then we’re up shit creek,” said Mitchell. “We’re trapped down here.”
“Maybe they’ve been captured.”
Talbot cupped his hand round his mouth and called up. “Sir!
Lieutenant Everson!”
There was no reply. Fletcher grimaced and shook his head. “Anyone! Hello?”
“We can’t just stay here.”
“Doesn’t look like we have a choice. We were ordered to watch over the tank and that’s what we’ll do until an officer tells us otherwise. It’ll give us shelter, and maybe there are rations and ammo in there.” With many hopeful, but unfulfilled, glances to the top of the crater, they walked back into the tank’s bower. It was dispiriting to find the ironclad embedded in the vegetation pretty much as they had first found it. “Might as well be on the bloody Somme. A day’s misery and no ground gained to show for it.”
