Stop this war or die.
Winnie’s instantly recognizable voice rose in an indignant reply.
“And who the hell are you to make such a demand?”
“Some of you call us the Mi-Go,” came the answer, calm and slow, as if it were addressing a child. “We are your destiny, should you choose it. Stop this war. Or you will die.”
A new image appeared, superimposed over the top of the PM’s desk, like a miniature, moving panorama. I did not recognize the city it portrayed, but it teemed with life—at least at first. The screen filled with a blinding flash of light, and when normality returned the desk was overlaid with a view of a smoking ruin, not a single building left standing, not a single living thing moving in the rubble.
“Stop this war. Or you will die.”
The lights went up and the Brigadier addressed us again.
“Now you know the Jerries; they’re a devious lot. This might all be a cunning bit of propaganda when it comes down to it. But the destruction you saw was real enough. Turin is gone, in a flash like you just saw. Winnie can’t ignore a weapon like that. The boffins have tracked the source back to the Trollenberg range. There’s a plane waiting. No time to lose. Get over there and report back, on the double. Our future depends on it.”
***
And now, thirty-six hours later, we were at the base of the Trollenberg, still no wiser as to what we might encounter, but resolute in our determination to find out.
We started the climb with a diagonal traverse of the northern face. We climbed swiftly over steep, icy terrain with some spots of fresh snow, making good time until the foot of the summit pyramid—and some easier climbing—was only a cliff climb away above us. But we still had some work to do. We had known from our view from below that this would be one of the most taxing parts of the ascent.
It proved to be worse than we could have imagined. The rock face was nearly a hundred feet tall and loomed over us in one massive slab. The captain seemed daunted by the sheer enormity of the task ahead of us, and for my part, it seemed at least as tough as any face I had ever attempted. But Winnie was waiting in London, and the outcome of the war might depend on our actions in the next few hours.
I set to it with a will. I had thought that Pillar Rock in the Western Fells would prove the toughest challenge of my climbing career, but the Trollenberg proved tougher still. All that long afternoon I fought it, with the captain creeping up cautiously behind me, following my every move. Back and forth I went, and from side to side. Several times I had to retrace my route for long periods.
But I would not be defeated. Just as day turned to dusk, I hauled myself up over the last lip, which had been proving a bugger for an hour, and lay gasping at the foot of the pyramidical slope that led to the summit.
I helped the captain up beside me. We just had enough light remaining to see that our route to the top led via a forty-five degree snow slope, which would take us directly to the summit ridge. It was only after we caught our breath that I realized we were not the first to reach this spot. Two sets of tracks led upward five yards to the left of us. I hadn’t seen any sign of other climbers on the way up the cliff, but another man could have taken a different line to the top and evidence of his passing would easily be missed.
The captain went over to examine the tracks.
“Jerry-issue boots,” he said. “Either the Brigadier was right, and they’re at the bottom of this, or they’re just as panicked as we are and have come to take a shufti. Whatever the case, we’re not alone up here.”
I took the hint and had my rifle ready as we made our way up the last slope.
***
It was relatively easy going, and almost peaceful in a strange way. Night fell around us, and a cloudless sky filled with stars. There was no sound apart from the crunch of our footsteps in the snow.
We followed the tracks to where they crested the ridge that led directly to the summit; then, I had to stop quickly as the captain bent to examine the snow at his feet.
I saw the problem immediately. Both pairs of tracks just stopped, seemingly mid-step. It was as if the two climbers had been plucked, ever so neatly, off the face of the hill, leaving no further trace of their presence.
“A sudden gust of wind?” I asked, but I knew already that anyone good enough to come up the cliff would not be stupid enough to let the wind take them down again.
The captain agreed with me.
“No. It wasn’t the wind. But I’m buggered if I can figure this one out, Sandy. Let’s just press on. The answer’s here somewhere—I can feel it in my water.”
We heard the hum before we had gone another step. It started low, a deep bass vibration that I felt in my stomach even before I heard it. The tone rose quickly to a buzzing whine. The snow at our feet slid away below us as the rock beneath it tilted, threatening to drop us back down the slope. We had enough presence of mind to throw ourselves to the ground as the ridge opened up in front of us, revealing not rock, but a metal dome, silver and glistening beneath the stars.
Ice cracked loudly in the night air. Snow flurried all around us and I was all too aware of the long drop that waited at our backs should we slide any further down the slope. Luckily for us the movement of rock and snow slowed and came to a halt.
There was a new feature on the mountain’s summit. Instead of a rocky outcrop, there was now the high silver dome, partially opened to the sky along a central ridge. The captain motioned me forward and I followed, as quietly as I was able, up to where the opening in the dome was closest. We were able to look over the lip with ease, and down into what seemed to be an empty laboratory of some kind. A twenty-foot long tube of silver, brass, and glass coils dominated the space. I had no idea how it might work, but I immediately knew I was looking at the weapon that had destroyed Turin.
The captain pulled me back away, and whispered urgently.
“We’re going in. If that’s the new weapon, we need to find out as much as we can. Leave the radio here. We’re traveling light.”
I divested myself of the radio, and shucked off the parka and snow trousers. I saw the captain pull his balaclava down over his face and I followed suit. We were now two black outlines against the white of the snow.
“Rifles?” I asked.
He shook his head. I had a revolver, four grenades, and a long knife—more than enough to do a lot of damage if need be. I laid the rifle down beside the radio and the parkas, making sure everything was weighted against any wind, and followed the captain over the lip to drop gently down into the dome.
We met no resistance. The laboratory, if indeed that was its function, was quiet and empty. I had a closer look at the weapon but its means of operation continued to elude me. The metals I had taken to be silver and brass seemed on closer inspection to be harder than either, colored alloys with which I was completely unfamiliar. And what I had taken to be glass was instead a peculiar form of opaque crystal containing minute speckles of rainbow flakes. The whole apparatus vibrated and thrummed to my touch, and I pulled my hand away sharpish as it began to glow.
I motioned to my grenades, then to the weapon. The captain shook his head.
“Later,” he mouthed, and motioned me toward a cave mouth to our left, the only entrance to the room. We moved quietly into the darkness and started to follow the passage.
We went down, into the mountain.
***
It was not long before we heard the sound of activity rising up from below. At first it echoed around us, like a great many sibilant whispers. As we descended it grew louder, and we heard it for what it was.
An interrogation, of sorts, was going on; one voice asked questions in a language we could not even begin to fathom, being all sibilant tones and glottal stops. But the other was all too familiar; a male German answered—and the voice was that of a man in mortal terror. He repeated the same thing to every question—Gerd Brunke, Colonel, 734561.
Name, rank and serial number.
The captain and
I crept slowly down the tunnel. The German colonel’s replies turned to wild screams that were far more discomforting than the previous whispers. The screams didn’t last long before being replaced by a pitiful sobbing that was somehow even worse.
We moved faster—the speaker might be German, but his pain was human, and something neither of us would allow. We arrived soon afterward at an opening and looked out over a wider chamber that was artificially lit by a blue globe hanging high above. It cast dancing shadows across a scene from a nightmare.
The German soldiers lay on a long trestle that ran along the far wall from where we stood. The chamber itself was full of equipment built of the same brass and silver shaded alloys we had seen up in the dome, along with a great deal more of the rainbow-flecked crystal. But it was something else that caught our full attention. We had seen its like before, standing in a shimmering image before Winston’s desk in the film we had been shown. But here it was in the flesh.
It was the size of a man, but looked more like a hideous shrimp than any human being. The body was segmented like that of a crustacean, but this was no marine creature—for a start, it had membranous wings, currently tucked tightly at its rear, but judging by their size, more than adequate to lift its weight into powered flight. There were no arms or hands to speak of. I counted four pairs of limbs. The pair the thing used as legs—I use the word loosely here—were more stout and thicker than the rest, each being tipped with three horny claws extended to balance its weight at the front, while a segmented tail completed the tripod behind it. The other appendages looked more flexible and nimble, and as I watched, the thing leaned forward and delicately picked up a tool from the trestle. I got a good look at its face—or, rather, lack of one. Instead of features there was only a mound of ridged flesh, pale and greasy, like a mushroom toward the end of its cycle. A multitude of thin snake-like appendages wafted around the head and I took these to be the equivalent of sensory organs, although quite how they might function, I had no idea.
I did, however, know exactly what it was doing—it was torturing its prisoners. The German colonel screamed again, and the captain and I moved at the same time, running forward and freeing our knives from their sheaths. The thing sensed us coming somehow and turned toward us, but that only served to give me an opportunity to go for its throat. My knife went through the flesh as if it were indeed some kind of fungus, and the beast fell in a heap at my feet, twitching once, then falling still.
The captain gave it a kick to make sure it would stay down, then clapped me on the shoulder.
“If they are that easy to kill, this should not be a problem,” he said softly.
“Do not make the same mistake I did,” a German-accented voice said from behind us. We turned toward the sound. It came, not from the man’s body, but from a screen on the wall. It showed his face, staring straight at us. The captain nudged me and pointed at the prone bodies. It was only then that I saw the apparatus on each side of them—more of the silver, brass and crystal and—most horrifying of all—the brains of the two men hanging suspended inside tall glass jars.
The image of the German officer was still speaking, and I struggled to pay attention.
“You must do something,” he said. “They know we will not bend before them without coercion. They mean to show us again that they are serious. They want us to stop the war.”
“But what are they?” the captain said, looking down at the dead thing at our feet.
“There’s no time,” the German replied. “They are from—somewhere else—a dark planet in deep space. They say they have many things to teach us, many wonders to enrich our lives, if we would just lay down our arms and submit. But they have no compassion, no humanity—they are like insects, writhing in their warrens in dark places. The Fuehrer will never sanction a treaty with such as these—they are beneath us, despite their knowledge. They are impure.”
“I can’t see old Winnie giving them the time of day either,” the captain said softly, giving the thing another kick. “But what do you mean about them being serious? Are they planning something big?”
The Colonel’s image was fading away, and his voice was now little more than a whisper.
“They mean to destroy London and Berlin. You must stop them.”
***
The Colonel’s image faded from the screen. I walked over to the men’s bodies. Both had the top of their skulls removed and the brains extracted. There was no life in them. If the men were still awake, still aware, locked inside their brains in those glass jars, it was not a fate I would wish on anyone, enemy or not. The captain guessed at my thoughts.
“Let’s give them some peace,” he said. “Then I think it will be time for a little mayhem of our own.”
He took the German colonel’s jar and I took the other, aware even as I lifted it that I didn’t even have a name to give to the poor chap. In unison we smashed the jars on the ground. The brains lay there, dead meat. I followed the captain’s example and lifted the fleshy ball at my feet to place it back in the skull cavity. It was all we could think to do for them.
“This is not war,” the captain said, more to himself than to me. “This is barbarism. I won’t stand for it.”
He looked over at me as he drew his revolver. His face was grim.
“Get topside and call in the strike,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do about putting a spanner in the works.”
I knew better than to argue—indeed, I agreed with the plan. I made my way back up to the dome, creeping quietly, listening at every step for any sound of pursuit, or for any indication that the captain had got himself into trouble.
I arrived in the dome room with no mishap. The weapon—for that was surely its purpose—sat quiet and still. The only sound was the whistle of wind from outside. I pulled myself back out over the lip of the opening and immediately felt the chill bite at my bones. I had to retrieve my parka from under a new covering of snow, and my already-stiffening fingers fumbled to get it zipped up.
There was a bad moment when I thought the radio was jammed, frozen solid, but the thin layer of ice on the dials cracked readily enough under my fingers. And this time Control came through loud and clear in answer to my call.
I only needed to say one word.
“Hammerstrike. I repeat, Hammerstrike. Over.”
“Broadsword, this is Danny Boy. We read you. Twenty minutes. Over and out.”
Our spanner in the works was going to have to be inserted quickly; in little over a quarter of an hour enough bombs would rain down on this mountain to lower the summit a good few yards. I crawled back up to the lip of the dome, intending to head back inside and join the captain.
He was already there, just below me, held tight between two of the lobster-things. A third one of them was standing next to the long tubular weapon. I fetched my rifle, intending to start some of the mayhem the captain had promised, when he looked up, straight at me, and shook his head.
“Not yet,” he mouthed.
I gave him the OK sign with finger and thumb, made sure I had secure footing, and watched what transpired beneath me.
They had taken the captain’s revolver; it was lying on the ground off to one side, but they had not taken his grenades. They were still there at his belt—either the things did not know their purpose, or they thought that they had the captain under too close control for him to make a move. They didn’t know the man as I did.
For the moment, the captain seemed calm—almost relaxed, as he watched the third creature make some movements above the metal and crystal tube with its clawed appendages that seemed to pass for hands. It spoke, alternately hissing and guttural, completely unintelligible. But the meaning was clear enough as, once again, three- dimensional images formed in the air between the captain and the weapon.
Winnie stood in front of Parliament, and I well remembered the words he spoke, for they had stiffened the resolve of a nation.
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France; we shall fi
ght on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
The picture changed, showing battlefields, mass graves, plumes of smoke from the burning of the dead, prison camps with skeletal figures, villages, towns, cities, all flattened.
“We shall go on to the end.” Winnie said again.
The picture changed—another leader, another parliament. Adolf was shouting again.
“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”
More moving pictures followed in quick succession—armies, vast and implacable, hell-bent on annihilation of each other; a world in flames until there was naught left but a burnt out cinder floating in space.
For a last time the scene changed and split in two. I recognized both cities—London on the left, Berlin on the right. I remembered the German’s words.
They mean to show us again that they are serious.
I saw the captain stiffen, readying himself. And I saw something else, an indecision I did not expect to see, as the creature by the weapon waved a limb and the tube started to glow and throb. I saw the captain look from London to Berlin and back again, and I believe I understood his thought. If the creatures blasted Berlin first, the war could be finished in one stroke—all we had to do was wait and see before acting. And therein lay the danger, for if we waited, it might be London that was taken first, and all we had fought for these past years would be undone.
As for myself, I was only too aware that Hammerstrike was getting ever closer. The captain and I came to our respective decisions at the same time. I hefted the rifle, aimed at the creature bent over the weapon. At the same instant that the captain swiveled and tugged, pulling one of the beasts off balance. I fired; my target stumbled but did not fall, so I put another round in it, trying for the head this time.
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