Overhead, the canopy thrashed as startled creatures bolted in terror and a tense silence descended. The jungle seemed to pause.
No predatory growl rose from the intruder to challenge them.
Half hidden by the dappled shade and torn foliage, the intruder clicked and groaned. Large leafy fronds sprouted from its tracks, caught in the track wheels. Shredded leaves and broken boughs lay strewn over its hull. The drivers’ visors hung shut and the ironclad’s great guns lay listless and bowed.
It was just another dead thing. Nothing to fear.
The sounds of the jungle began to trickle back into the silence, timid at first, but slowly gaining in confidence. Soon, the raucous chorus resumed.
Emboldened, scavengers loped through the undergrowth towards the ditched ironclad, perhaps sensing easy prey.
Inside the belly of the tank, Alfie Perkins opened his eyes.
Although the festoon lights had died, shafts of light punched their way in through pistol ports, boring down through the smoky haze that filled the compartment, criss-crossing the dark space like searchlights seeking out a Zeppelin.
He coughed as he breathed in the smoke. It smelled of burnt grease. He dragged himself into a sitting position, so his back was against the sponson door. The spasm of coughing set off a chain reaction of other pains, which only subsided when he stopped hacking. He was slumped in the gangway. He looked up to see the starboard six-pounder gun and Hotchkiss machine gun, its spent cartridge casings rolling around him with a tinkle of brass as he moved.
To his right, filling the centre of the compartment, the huge Daimler engine ticked to itself as it cooled.
His hand was covered in blood that had collected in a sticky pool on the gangway planks. In a surge of panic, he checked his body. His forehead felt tender, swollen. He shifted his weight and sharp pain flooded his right leg. His hand groped down the leg of his coveralls. Another jangle of pain. Broken, probably. At least he’d still got his leg. For the moment. He felt something warm and sticky below his knee. It was blood, but not enough to cause the sticky pool around him.
The blood that lay thick and pooled about him on the gangway wasn’t his.
He saw a crumpled shape further up the gangway.
“Lieutenant?”
There was no answer. He waited a moment for his nerves to stop screaming, and for his eyes to adjust. Lieutenant Mathers, the tank commander, was crumpled on the starboard gangway, having fallen from the commander’s seat at the front, his leg twisted and caught awkwardly under the bucket seat.
“Sir?”
There was no answer. Alfie struggled to recall what had happened. It would be easier if the pain in his head would stop. The last thing he remembered was the fire extinguisher flying towards him.
Frozen pictures, like shell-flash afterimages, burst in his mind. The Ivanhoe toppling over the edge of the crater. Falling. Mathers. A gunshot. The pyrene fire extinguisher. Blackness.
He looked at the slumped body in the gangway. He saw the glint of the Webley revolver and the sheen on the blood as it spread from Mathers’ head. Alfie remembered now. Possessed by some alien parasite, in a moment of lucidity, the Lieutenant had shot himself.
Alfie tried moving again, but couldn’t find the strength. He searched around, his hand groping among the scattered ammo boxes and tools within reach. It closed around a wrench. Steeling himself for a moment, he banged on the side of the sponson with what strength he had and yelled with as much gusto as he could muster.
“Help! In here! Anybody?”
Panting, he waited for a reply. None came.
He tried again and again, each time weaker and with less conviction that there was anyone outside to hear. Eventually he lost his balance and his broken leg twisted. He screamed, and when the pain had passed, he closed his eyes.
His voice low now, almost like a prayer: “Anybody.”
He woke up. Minutes later? Hours? He didn’t know. The only thing he knew was that he didn’t want the Ivanhoe to become his tomb, as Mathers had known it would become his.
Alfie breathed deeply of what faint traces of petrol fruit fumes were left to dull the pain, and then hauled himself to his feet. He waited for the nausea to pass. He pulled the handle on the sponson hatch and pushed. The hatch gave a little, but didn’t open. He put his shoulder to it and shoved. It gave a little more, but recoiled back. There was something against it outside, preventing it from opening.
Feeling his strength ebb, he kept his weight on his good foot and shoved again. This time light briefly flooded the compartment, and he could see a mass of russet leaves.
Gathering his strength, he shoved the hatch again, roaring. This time it gave, swinging open. Alfie lost his balance, tripped over the lip of the hatch and fell out, screaming as he caught his broken leg.
His fall was cushioned by the tangle of shrubbery in which the tank had come to rest. He shook his head, trying to clear the fug of pain that threatened to smother him.
A deep, mucus-addled panting filled the air. Alfie felt waves of warm, foetid breath wash over him.
He twisted his body to see, barely twelve feet away, a huge mouth, lips pulled back in a snarl, long serrated incisors dripping with drool. From deep within its thick matted pelt, two dark eyes regarded him with seeming contempt as it crouched on its six legs, pondering.
A growl began building in the back of its throat.
Never taking its eyes off Alfie, the creature let out a roar and pounced.
CHAPTER ONE
THE SMALL, FLIMSY flying machine puttered across bright blue space, defying possibility; the persistent putter of its tiny engine echoed through the vast vault of the alien sky, belying its small size, like a skylark rising to sing.
In the forward cockpit, Lieutenant James Tulliver wiped the speckled build-up of oil from his goggles and revelled in the cold air. Fresh and sharp, it made him feel more alive than he ever did on the ground. Beneath the scarf wrapped round the lower part of his face, a broad grin spread until it almost ached. This was why he’d joined the Royal Flying Corps. At a thousand feet, the two-seater Sopwith 1½ Strutter had the alien sky all to itself, while winged creatures wheeled and soared on unseen currents below.
Lieutenant Everson had sent him up on a recce flight out to Croatoan Crater to check on the stranded tank crew. It was a simple flight. It had to be; compasses didn’t work on this Godforsaken world. He had to fly by sight, from landmark to landmark, and that meant keeping below the cloud cover as flocks of cumulus drifted along overhead. While Everson rightly valued the aeroplane, he was as a needy child with a cock linnet in a cage who never let it spread it wings. Tulliver resented that. What the hell use was a grounded pilot? Granted, the alien sky wasn’t without its dangers. There were jabberwocks, mountain-dwelling wing predators, and the huge atmospheric jellyfish-like Kreothe and a dozen other vicious air raptors, any one of which could reduce his bus to kindling and rags. But then, dodging airbursts of Archie on the Western Front hadn’t exactly been a joyride either.
On top of that, for the last several days, dud weather had kept him grounded. Still, he was up now. He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Maddocks, his observer-come-gunner, seconded from Lieutenant Baxter’s Machine Gun Section. It always paid to have two pairs of eyes up here, although his own were keener than most; things seemed brighter, sharper, as though he had just got spectacles after being myopic for years.