“They were firing at you.”
“I knew my alliance with the insekt menschen was at an end when I came down in the crater, that I would be outcast anduntouchableto them,” he said with a shrug. “I no longer have my machine, so I am of no further use to them. They will not let me out of the crater now. They let nothing out unless it is to kill it. They would leave me here to die, and I do not want to die, Lieutenant.”
“None of us do,” said Everson.
“I am alone,” admitted Werner. “You have your battalion. I wish to put aside our enmity. I wish to be… human again.”
They ducked as another flurry of electric bolts crackled through the air. The remaining chatts had moved to cut the Tommies off from the cavern entrance.
Werner snatched up his pistol. Nobody stopped him.
Gazette squeezed off another couple of rounds. Normally, he’d look for a muzzle flash and target that spot, like any good sniper, but here the blue-white brilliance of the electric bolts left irritating afterimages blotting his vision. The chatts fired and moved, springing across large spaces with inhuman speed, never firing from the same place twice.
“You know what?” said Gutsy, shouting over the miniature thunderstorm that raged briefly around them, “I’m beginning to look back on the days when I could kill chatts in the hundreds using just a candle with some nostalgia!”
He pulled a safety pin from a Mills bomb and lobbed it into the writhing tangle of creepers that contorted around the cavern entrance. The explosion ripped and shredded it like barbed wire, throwing chatt limbs up into the air in graceless arcs.
“They will not let us go,” said Werner. “Nor can they leave themselves. They are dead to the colony. All they can do is carry out their overriding chemical decree; nothing must enter, nothing must leave. They will die to fulfil that precept.”
“Well I’m sure we can oblige,” said Everson through clenched teeth.
“Are you really going to trust a Hun, sir?” asked Mercy, eyeing the German with deep suspicion.
“No, Evans,” said Everson firmly. “I’m going to trust a gentleman.”
TULLIVER CIRCLED THE crater, looking for signs of another telluric blast, but it seemed that the land storm was moving away.
He hadn’t known about Werner’s Albatros for long, but the sky seemed an emptier, lonelier place without it. As he spiralled down, he could see a haze of smoke hanging above the Zohtakarrii edifice. One of their balloons still floated above it on a winch line, on watch.
As he flew lower, he turned round and jabbed down with a gloved finger. He wanted the Padre to keep a look out for the Fusiliers. Behind his goggles, the Padre nodded in acknowledgement.
Tulliver spotted the deflated remains of a chatt balloon hanging ripped and torn in the boughs of a tree below. Then, out of the corner of his eye, towards the crater wall, he noticed faint patches of air shimmer briefly. They erupted with the brief short crackle of electric lances. It looked like the balloon’s passengers had survived.
He flew lower, risking the whipperwills, but they seem to have been shocked into sluggishness by the sheer violence of telluric storm. He flew along the Strip towards the crater wall. There he saw more polished patches of air shine amongst the overgrowth round the mouth of a fissure, birthing more crackling arcs of electric fire. As he circled, Tulliver saw the Fusiliers pinned down by constantly-shifting fire. They couldn’t get a fix on their enemies, but he could.
He brought the bus lower and flew along the Strip towards the fissure in the crater wall, waiting for the patches of strange air to appear again.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered as the Strutter closed on the crater wall. Areas in the undergrowth began to shine, and he fired. From deep within the undergrowth, there came a brilliant flash and a rising puff of white smoke like a photographer’s flash powder.
He pulled on the stick and banked away sharply, climbing away from the looming crater wall.
The Padre patted him on the shoulder and pointed down to the Strip. Tulliver followed his finger and then put his thumb up and let out a whoop of triumph.
BARELY HAD THE roar of Tulliver’s Strutter receded when Atkins heard the slow, squeaking creak and rumble of the ironclad as it clattered along the Strip. As it approached, it ground the hardy growth beneath its tracks and ploughed over the shallow-rooted trees that had clung so tenaciously to life; surviving all that the alien world could throw at it, only to be crushed by something not of this world at all. To Atkins, right now, that felt like tit-for-tat.
The roar of the ironclad behemoth dropped to a throaty growl as the tank came to a halt, but it didn’t stop completely. One track continued to run, turning the tank until it faced the cavern entrance. Astride the tank’s roof, Tarak crouched defiantly behind the driver’s cabin, at least until a belch of smoke from the roof exhaust set him coughing. He stepped sprightly onto the starboard sponson and leapt to the ground.
Napoo glared at the scorched brand on Tarak’s chest, greeted him with a sullen growl of disapproval and turned away, wanting nothing to do with him. Not that Tarak seemed to care. He only had eyes for the cavern entrance.
“The way to the Village of the Dead,” he said, brooding. “My clan passed this way not long since. Soon I will be reunited with them.”
Werner witnessed the arrival of the Ivanhoe with a face that registered first horror and then incredulity as the land ship hoved into view and clanked to a halt.
“Mein Gott, is that what I think it is? I have heard of such a thing, but never have I seen one before. It looks like some kind of primordial beast.”
“It is the hell hound of Croatoan,” declared Tarak proudly, patting the sponson like the flank of a prized animal.
Looking at the ironclad in the confines of the jungle, Atkins had to agree. It was just as much at home here as on the battlefield of the Somme.
“That’s what’s going to beat the pants off your boys in the War, Fritz,” said Mercy with a sneer.
The starboard six-pounder rose, paused and then fired, the report echoing off the crater side and the shell exploding in the middle of the writhing mass of pale creepers, sending a spume of shredded plant matter into the air.
“Now we’ll show those chatt bastards,” said Gutsy gleefully.
In the end, they didn’t have to.
As they watched, the chatts revealed themselves voluntarily, stepping out of their concealment, surprising even Napoo, who had not known where they were. The tank rumbled closer, rolling past the Tommies, who came out from behind the shelter of their buttress roots and logs, falling behind the tank for cover, just in case the chatts were of a duplicitous bent. Even Hepton managed to unclench himself from the bole under which he had hidden in order to witness the scene.
The chatts divested themselves of their clay battery backpacks, put down their lances and weapons, and stood immobile before the tank. They performed a sign of reverence towards the Ivanhoe, touching the heels of their hand to their foreheads and then to their thorax.
“The Skarra thing still works, then,” said Atkins with relief. “I still find it hard to imagine – a dung-beetle god of the Underworld. They must think their time has come.”
“Felt that way myself, sometimes,” said Pot Shot.
Atkins grunted in agreement. They all had, at one time or another. It made the chatts seem a little more human, albeit not enough for him to feel pity. Right now they were all that stood between him and Jeffries, him and a way home to Flora, for he felt sure that Jeffries had been this way. How could he have resisted?
As the tank brought its guns to bear on the chatts, they turned and, without looking back, walked on of their own volition and disappeared into the cavern, entering their underworld as ones already dead, almost as if it were an honour to be escorted into the underworld by Skarra himself. Dwarfed as they were by the scale of the entrance, their bodies looked more insect-like than ever and Atkins watched as the Stygian blackness within swallowed them,.