Wrath of the Lemming-men (32 page)

Although their mission would stay secret, W had arranged for the king to meet Smith, Carveth, Rhianna and Suruk before he knighted General Young later in the day. The four of them stood in a smartly-dressed row in the Great Hall of the Imperial Palace on Ravnavar Prime, the Emerald of the Empire.

The hall was the size of a cathedral nave, the walls decorated with polished brass and racing green. Lances jutted from the vaulted ceiling and from them hung banners from a hundred campaigns, many little more than tattered rags. High in the rafters, like a preserved shark, there hung the Hellfire used by the Space Marshall in his first hundred missions, donated to the people when he ran out of room on the fusillage to tally up his kills. The hall was empty apart from a pair of guards at the far end and a prim man in a morning suit who looked entirely dull and was probably a bodyguard-assassin of extreme lethality.

The crew were very excited to meet the king. Rhianna had pretended to be disinterested in the whole procedure, but she was wearing her smartest flip-flops and a skirt tied-dyed in the official colours of New Francisco.

Carveth had reached a level of prattling nervousness that made Smith deeply uncomfortable and Suruk was intrigued by the whole idea of meeting King Victor, ‘son of Elvis, of the line of Arthur’.

King Victor’s vague, pleasant eyes met Smith’s. The King smiled gently and said, ‘Erm. . . so, what do you do?’

‘Captain Isambard Douglas Winston Smith, Your Majesty,’ Smith said, nervousness sending his gut and bladder into an alarming whirl. ‘I’m in charge of the
John Pym
.’

‘Splendid. Good work,’ said the king as a mechanical cherub hovered past, belching out a cloud of lavender essence as it disappeared into the galleries. King Victor put out his hand and they shook. Smith had acquired a bionic arm on the National Health Service to tide him over until his new arm could be attached and it had developed a number of minor twitches from its last user, a commando. Today it was holding out and King Victor’s neck remained unbroken. ‘Um. . . keeping well, are we?’

‘Mustn’t grumble, your Majesty.’

‘Yes, er. . . absolutely. Of course.’

Smith was not sure what to make of Victor Rex, ruler of two dozen sentient species, figurehead of three hundred worlds and organic farming enthusiast. It was an open secret that he and Queen Kylie – who was currently visiting Proxima Centauri to open an orbital sports centre –were simulants, grown to specification. So far, Victor had been unfailingly polite but rather awkward, only showing real interest when he had got into a discussion with Rhianna about the possible sentience of the local foliage.

Still, he seemed harmless enough.

‘Well,’ said the king, ‘carry on, er, Captain Smith. Now then, who might you be, my good green fellow?’

‘Greetings! I am Suruk the Slayer, and I bring you this.’

Suruk was adorned with some of his most impressive trophies, one of which he quickly unhitched from his belt and dropped into King Victor’s outstretched hand. ‘It is the skull of a Procturan ripper. May his death-howls prove sweet music to your noble, if somewhat protruding, ears. May you make soil organically enriched with the bones of our slain foes! In its jaws I have put a list of rewards I would like.’

‘Um. . .’ said King Victor. ‘Yes, very good. And what do you do on board the ship?’

‘I kill everything! If I might inquire,’ Suruk added, ‘which battles exactly are you the Victor
of
?’

They left with the honour of having been thanked by the King himself. A wallahbot gave them picnic hampers and guided them to a gilt lift, and they were whisked up through the centre of a spire, hollow like a scrimshawed horn. The lift’s scrollworked doors clattered open and they stepped onto a balcony that curved around the top of the tower.

‘I shall arrange for your transport, gentlemen,’ the wallahbot grated. It rolled back into the lift and, with a rattle of motors, descended from view.

The view from the palace was astounding. Below them lay the garden city of Ravnavar. The roofs of greenhouses winked at them in the sun. The parks looked almost luminously alive: in one of them the Colonial Guard were drilling; and in another a placid Ravnaphant was giving children rides, forty at a time. An airship drifted past, advertising war savings. Tiny red oblongs rolled through the streets: buses bringing wellwishers to watch General Young receive her knighthood.

‘Ooh, biscuits,’ said Carveth, peeking into her hamper. ‘Now then: who’ll give me a Cumberland sausage for two pots of the King’s Own Jam?’

A hundred yards below, the first wellwishers were arriving to cheer the general to the palace. A huge banner had been hung between the mighty Arcadian veen trees on Imperial Avenue, saying: THREE CHEERS FOR AUNT FLO. Quite right too, thought Smith, looking down at the gathering crowd. Had Young not halted the Yullian invasion, the city would be burning by now.

The sun was shining and the pavements looked almost white. The forests glowed at the edge of the city. A light wind blew across the spire, rustling Carveth’s dress and forcing Suruk to push his top hat down over his ears. The smell of roast beef drifted up to them from a kitchen in the palace below.

‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Smith said, holding out his arm for Rhianna to take.

Carveth looked out across the glistening city.

Somewhere out there, past the towers and minarets and the shining forest, there were Ghasts and Yull who hated everyone, and a war that still needed to be won. But on a day like this it seemed as if even nature was on the Empire’s side. God, she decided – not the brutal god of the Yull, but something subtler and more intelligent – was indeed in his heaven, and if all wasn’t right with the world, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘on days like this, I think we will win.’

Smith waved for an air-taxi. ‘Of course we’ll win,’ he replied. ‘We’re British, aren’t we?’

The taxi halted beside them, thrusters humming.

‘Where to, guv?’ it asked, opening a door.

‘Hospital, please,’ Smith replied, and he stepped in. ‘See you this evening,’ he called as the door closed behind him.

There was a small television in the corner of the hospital waiting room. On it, General Young was climbing the steps to the imperial throne, where King Victor waited in fleet uniform. He knighted her and, as the Scourge of Yullia stood up,
Jerusalem
parped out of a choir of hovering trumpet-bots.

W sat on the far side of the waiting room, looking hard and thin. He wore his usual battered tweed jacket, which made him look like an impoverished schoolmaster, but there was a plastic collar around his neck and two wires ran from his temple to a speaker mounted beside his throat. The room smelt of cough mixture.

‘Hallo, Smith,’ W’s speaker said.

‘Hello, sir.’ Smith sat down. ‘How’s things?’

‘Could be worse,’ W rasped. ‘The metal missed my jugular and most of my nerves. The doctors’re putting in a new voicebox this afternoon. Apparently, they’re going to whip my lung out while they’re at it. How about your arm?’

‘This afternoon, too.’

‘Did you meet the king?’

‘Yes, indeed. He seemed a nice enough chap. We’re having a bit of a do tonight. Want to come along?’

‘I may well do. Have to eat ice cream for a few days, what with the new neck.’ The long, solemn face turned to him. ‘Well done on Number Eight, Smith.’

‘Thank you, sir. Just a shame he ended up in so many bits. He’d have looked good over the fireplace.’

‘You don’t know the half of it. Eight was one of the smartest buggers Gertie’s ever bred up. We think he was planning to take over from Number One. With him at the helm, God knows what evil they could have done.’

On the television, General Sir Florence Young was holding aloft the axe of a Yullian general, addressing the attendees. ‘This is for you!’ she declared, and the crowd’s cheering drowned her out.

‘The tables have turned on the Yull,’ W said. ‘They fear mankind now – and they know full well what the Morlocks will do to them once they get the chance. Now we get our own back.’ His eyes half-closed, and he reclined in his battered chair, surrounded by the smell of medicine and dust. ‘They’ve had their last migration,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a hard fight, but our men are the equal of anything they can put into the field. And then the Ghasts – but still, all in good time.’

‘W,’ said Smith, ‘what will happen to the prisoner we took?’

‘Vock’s slave? Oh, he’ll be fine. We keep the few we capture on a farm, under guard. They’ll go back to Yullia once we’ve won the war. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense for the lemming homeworld to have no lemmings on it, would it?’ He leaned forward, his big hands resting on his knees. ‘Tell me, Smith, what will you do with yourself when the war’s over?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll probably go down the pub.’

W raised a thick eyebrow. ‘And after that?’

‘Curry.’

‘Good choice. But the space war’s not over yet, Smith, not by a long way. There’s plenty for us to do. The secret war is going to get pretty damned busy.’

‘Quite,’ said Smith. ‘There’s a lot of work ahead. We’ve got a lot of Ghasts to deal with, and the lemmings aren’t just going to kill themselves, either.’

‘Actually, Smith—’ W began, and he sighed. ‘Anyhow, it’s going to be a tough few years for mankind. And while the army moves on, wreathed in glory, we chaps in the Service will have our own clandestine struggle to win: fighting unseen, relying on skill, secrecy and cunning to see us through – subtle and crafty, known only by our deeds.’

The door opened and a nurse looked into the room.

‘Mr Lint? Your lungs are ready.’

She looked at Smith, who shook his head.

‘Eric Lint, please?’

‘Oh, bollocks to it,’ W said, and he stood up.

‘Come on, you buggers, sing up!’ Wainscott stood on the dining table, waving a mug above his head. For his size he had an impressive voice and he bellowed across the room like an enraged ruminant. His eyes had a terrible aspect and he looked like the sort of man who could have wooed Boadicea. Unusually, though, he was still wearing his best uniform – all of it – which was all the more surprising as Emily the android kept trying to finger his epaulettes.

Around him stood, sat and lay the Deepspace Operations Group, Morgar, Tormak the Rune Reader, Jones the Laser, Grocer Green, W (testing out his new lungs with a roll-up and a sing-along), the Grand Archivist and George Benson, who wore a bandage on his head and was in charge of the drinks. And on the wall beside the table, next to the stuffed praetorian’s head, soon would hang the two sacred axes of Colonel Mimco Vock.

‘
Who am I? Who am I?
’ Wainscott roared, and a ragged set of yells joined him for the refrain. ‘
I am the Berkshire
huntsman and this is the Berkshire hunt!
’ The song broke down into cheers; Wainscott stumbled off the table, Jones climbed up after him, promising to show them all how it was really done and Tormak the Rune Reader punched both fists into the air and roared ‘Glorious!’

It seemed like a good moment to slip out and change Gerald’s water. Smith stepped over one of Carveth’s android protégées who had passed out in the doorway like a schoolgirl-shaped draft excluder.

On the way to the cockpit he passed Carveth’s room.

Dreckitt lay sprawled across Carveth’s bed, looking as if he had dropped into it from a great height. He stirred in his sleep. ‘No more,’ he said weakly, ‘Not again, Polly, please.’ Smith ignored him.

Smith wandered into the cockpit, thoughtfully flexing the fingers of his new right hand. The light was on and the slow, steady squeak of Gerald’s wheel pulsed through the room. Smith dropped into the captain’s chair, the sound of merriment filtering up the passage behind him.

The mock leather creaked as he made himself comfortable: drunk and oddly calm, as if he had staggered into the eye of the storm.

He did not feel triumphant. With tranquillity came an odd sense of sadness that he could not have explained even if he had been sober. He looked across the cockpit at the row of novelty items on the dashboard, and remembered the first time he had seen them over a year ago.

They had taken off from New London as beginners, and now they were – well, if not elite as such, at least approaching competence.

‘Hey, Isambard.’ Rhianna slipped into the room with an enticing hiss of tie-dyed skirt. She perched on the arm of his chair and looked down at him. ‘Chilling out?’

‘Yes, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘How’s things?’

‘Pretty cool.’ She sighed. ‘It’s been kind of heavy though. All those lemming people, then meeting the Vorl, then finding out one of them was my father – Mom must have been so stoned,’ she added, with a kind of awed pride. ‘Crazy.’

‘Still,’ said Smith, ‘you did get to go to a theme park.’

‘Yeah,’ Rhianna said. ‘You do take me to some amazing places.’

‘Seeing as we were on a mission, I thought it was pretty good,’ Smith began, a little hurt.

She laughed and patted his shoulder. ‘I’m kidding. It’s cool; just relax. Okay?’

‘Righto. I’ll do that. I’m. . . ah. . . hep to that, daddy-o.’

‘I think I like you better uptight. Want some?’ she added, holding out her hand. A tiny joint was wedged between her fingers; it looked to be largely made of yellowed paper and spit.

‘Fine with the beer,’ Smith replied.

‘Where’s Suruk?’

‘Out in the forest, communing with the ancestors. I would help him, but this is something Suruk has to do on his own,’ he said. ‘After all, no one else would understand a word of it. Goodness knows how he’s planning to fit all those ancestors back into his spear.’

‘I really hope he can,’ Rhianna said. ‘After all he’s been through. . .’

‘I suppose so,’ Smith said. ‘You know, when it comes down to it, we’ve not done too badly – so far.’ He picked up the novelty paperweight from the dashboard and turned it over in his hands. A storm raged around Parliament inside the plastic dome.

Rhianna stood up. ‘I’m going outside for a moment,’ she said. ‘I think I could do with some quiet. I never realised Major Wainscott’s folk singing was so. . .
authentic
.’