Of Battles Both Small and Great.
Nipper!’ I cried.
He was alive, thank Heavens, and a medical gent from Colonel Q.’s company bent over him at once and said, ‘He’ll live. Some of you chaps help me staunch the bleeding.’
‘The rest of you, aboard that ship!’ bellowed Colonel Q., rising to the occasion. ‘Charge!’
The charge of the Verdant Meadows Retirement Colony Militia was a leisurely affair, for many of the gentlemen were in bath chairs and most of the others needed their walking sticks to help them climb the steep slope of the gangplank. Charity, Mr Munkulus and myself were well ahead of them and reached the top before they were halfway up. Mr Munkulus led the way with all four cutlasses drawn, and Charity and I peered between his arms into the cabin.
It had been shipshape when we left it: tidied and swept and cleared for battle. Now it was a chaos of burst lockers and upturned chairs, and in the middle of it stood our ungrateful prisoner, Miss Thsssss, a hatchet in one hand and a belaying pin in the other. The rest of the Sophronia’s crew stood round her, keeping out of reach of that flashing hatchet blade. Grindle, cursing inventively, trained a revolver on her. I wondered why he had not simply shot her down—and then saw the reason. Jack lay pinned beneath one of the creature’s armoured feet. If Grindle’s shot did not kill her outright, she would have time to bury that hatchet in Jack’s skull before he could fire again!
I guessed at once what had occurred. Jack must have been questioning our prisoner, hoping to gain some extra scrap of knowledge about the moths and their masters, and she had taken the chance to escape and arm herself with some of the arsenal of weapons which stood ready in racks around the cabin.
‘Sssurrender!’ Miss Thsssss hissed, glaring round at us. ‘Sssurrender, or I shall kill your little captain!’
‘Golly!’ exclaimed Charity. ‘She speaks English!’
The Snilth laughed. ‘Of course. We Sssnilth learn ssswiftly; the Mothmaker made uss that way sso that we could more easily conquer and enssslave you lesser racesss! I began to learn your language the insstant you brought me aboard thisss reeking—21 of an aether-ship.’
‘Then why didn’t you say so?’ Jack asked groggily. ‘Why did you make me muck about with all that silly sign language?’
‘It is not silly!’ cried Charity indignantly, but no one listened.
‘Because it meant that you had to free my handsss to let me make the ssigns,’ Miss Thsssss said. ‘I waited for my moment, and now the ship is mine! We shall take it to meet the Mothmaker and join in the conquessst of this sssun and all its worldsss!’
‘All of them?’ said Colonel Quivering, who had arrived, panting, at the top of the gangplank. ‘I say! That’s a bit greedy, don’t you think?’
Miss Thsssss ignored him. ‘Come, sssister!’ she said, and I realised that she was talking to Ssilissa, who stood in the doorway of her wedding chamber, looking on, the only one of the Sophronias who had not snatched up a weapon when she saw her captain’s plight.
‘Don’t listen to her, Ssilissa!’ said Jack, who was rewarded with a fierce kick.
‘Ignore her, Ssil,’ said Mr Munkulus, taking a step towards our blue friend, but Ssilissa waved him angrily away.
‘Can you not sssee what you are?’ the other Snilth insisted, sensing that she had Ssil’s sympathy. ‘You are like me! We are the children of the Mothmaker! How can you let these inferior creaturesss keep you as their pet? How can you sside with them in the ssstruggle? Help me and I shall take you into the presence of the Mothmaker!’ Ssilissa turned a colour I had never seen her before: a pale blue-white, like moonlit snow. She did not move.
‘Join me!’ Miss Thsssss entreated her. ‘Will you betray your own ssspecies for the sssake of these doomed creaturess?’
Slowly, gingerly, Ssilissa walked towards her fellow Snilth. Her head twitched from side to side, birdlike, as she studied Miss Thsssss’s strange, familiar face.
‘Can you imagine how I have longed to sssee a face like yours?’ she asked gently. ‘Can you imagine how I have always dreamed of meeting sssomeone elssse like me? It has been my dearessst wish, ssince I was jussst a hatchling. But if I have to choose between you and my friendsss, I choose my friendsss. These are the people who care for me, Miss Thsssss. I have lived among them all my life, ever ssince my egg was found frozen in the ice of a wandering comet in orbit about this sun.’
This intelligence had a most surprising effect on Miss Thsssss. She drew back, staring at Ssil. She hissed and flickered her black tongue like a viper. ‘You lie … ’ she said, and then a jumble of spitty phrases in her own language. ‘It cannot be … ’ she hissed. ‘Show me your tail!’
Ssilissa looked bewildered by this request, but Jack, from his position on the deck beneath the Snilth’s foot, said, ‘Do as she asks, Ssil!’ So she shrugged her tail out from beneath her skirts and raised it in front of Miss Thsssss, so that Miss Thsssss could see the bony club upon its end, quite different from the six little spikes on her own tail.
The Snilth prisoner’s eyes widened and she let out a sort of sigh. Then, to our great astonishment, she flung aside the hatchet and belaying pin (‘Ow!’ cried Mr Grindle, as the latter landed on his toe), got down off Jack and crouched before Ssilissa, bowing her head and spreading her hands in a gesture of submission.
‘Forgive me!’ she said. ‘I did not know!’
‘Didn’t know what?’ asked Jack, sitting up and rubbing his head.
But there was no time to enquire further, for just then, from outside the ship came a great loud boom, and then another. Preoccupied as we had been with the battle inside the Sophronia, we had missed the beginning of the greater conflict in the skies above Spooli!
While Yarg and Squidley dragged the Snilth prisoner back to her quarters, the rest of us turned to the open hatchway. Nipper, already much recovered, was limping swiftly up the gangplank, pointing with his pincers to something in the sky above the city. High above, a flower of black smoke stained the sunset. Higher still, something blazed and glittered.
‘A ship is coming off the Golden Roadsss,’ said Ssilissa. ‘And look, another! And another!’
Pulses of light danced silently across the sky. High over the shoulder of Ganymede, warships were letting fly with broadsides of cannon fire. The pale beams of Rokeby-Pinkerton phlogiston agitators blenched the stars.
‘But the Snilth don’t have ships, do they?’ asked Jack. ‘They just ride moths, I thought … ’
As if to prove him wrong, something came swooping down out of the heavens, low over the sea, rushing towards Spooli like a storm wind. It was a ship, and yet it was like no ship ever seen before in the realms of the Sun. It was built in the form of a huge fish. Behind the windows of its eyes scuttled the tiny, armoured shapes of its Snilth crew, and from turrets and gun-emplacements on its back, banks of guns shot green explosions at the British warships which pursued it, hammering it with cannon fire. And as it came howling over Spooli’s rooftops, its broad mouth hinged open and it spewed out a cloud of moths!
‘An advance force!’ cried Colonel Quivering. ‘A surprise attack! Oh, the sneaky blighters!’
‘Take us up!’ shouted Jack, and at once Mr Munkulus started heaving up the gangplank, trapping Colonel Quivering and half his venerable army inside the ship. Ssilissa ran into the wedding chamber, Jack took the wheel and Grindle, Nipper and the Tentacle Twins leapt to their stations at the ship’s guns.
‘Miss Cruet,’ I cried, as the engines howled and the Sophronia shot upwards into the noisy sky, ‘can you fire a cannon?’
‘Well, it is not something I have ever done,’ said Charity, ‘but I am sure it cannot be all that difficult … ’
I snatched a ramrod from a rack and threw it to her, and then, as we broke gravity, picked up a canister of grape-shot in either hand. Together we flew to the nearest gun, ready to play our part in the defence of all that is Good and Decent!
Now, if you read an account of a battle, it is usually all very clear and easy to understand. You will learn how General So-and-so deployed his troops upon this ridge, while Marshal Such-and-such placed his cannon upon that hillock. There may even be maps, with little coloured squares to represent each regiment and arrows to show you where one advanced and another retreated. But when you are actually inside a battle, caught up in the rattling, rushing machinery of it, it is not at all like that. So please bear in mind while you read this account of the Battle of Jupiter (as it has come to be called) that most of the time I had no idea where I was, nor what was happening.
What became clear afterwards was this. That fiendish Mothmaker, hoping to catch us with our long johns down, had sent a dozen or more of those fish-shaped ships speeding ahead of her moth-cloud to breach the defences of the Jovian moons. Fourteen of them had appeared in the aether around Ganymede and from each there poured out a monstrous regiment of moths.
All I knew, as I clung to my cannon in the Sophronia’s main cabin, was that there was a whole lot of shaking going on, and that great balls of fire were bursting ever and anon in the void about us, causing the entire ship to shake, rattle and roll in a most alarming fashion!
Shouting over the din of the engines, I instructed Charity Cruet in the use of the space cannon, and together we loaded it and waited for something to fire it at. There was an isinglass porthole above the gunport, and through it we saw shells and grenades burst brightly in the inky dark, and once a ship a-fire, with sailors crowding into her life rafts and the Union Jack flapping sadly at her stern as she turned over and over, spilling splinters and smouldering debris. The Sophronia cut through that spreading cloud, with flotsam rattling upon her hull, and plunged straight into a mass of flapping wings!
‘Fire!’ I shouted.
‘Dear me, where?’ yelped Charity, and then, ‘Oh, you mean the cannon!’ With that she tugged the firing lanyard and somersaulted aside as the great gun leapt back at her with a ship-shuddering boom. The smoke was quickly left astern and I peered out and saw a vast moth coming into pieces where our shot had torn through it, and its armoured riders cartwheeling into space. Quick as a flash I picked up a second canister and stuffed it into the cannon’s breech. But before we could fire again there was a shrieking crash from close outside, and acid green light shone in at us through countless gashes in the planking. Our gun was thrown backwards, breaking the ropes which held it to the deck, and went tumbling free across the cabin.
‘Lash it! Lash it down!’ bellowed Jack from his place at the wheel.
‘Eh? What’s that?’ shouted Colonel Quivering’s wrinkled space marines, fitting hearing trumpets into hairy ears and frantically spinning the wheels of their bath chairs as they pirouetted in mid-air, tugged this way and that by the wind as air spilled from the shot-holes in the cabin walls. The tumbling cannon batted Colonel Quivering aside and slammed against the door of a cabin, smashing it into splinters which twirled gracefully in every direction.
‘Are battles always like this?’ asked Charity, drifting past me. ‘I had no idea!’
Outside, a hundred ships did battle with a thousand moths along a broad, curving front which stretched clean around Ganymede’s northern hemisphere and away towards the flanks of Jupiter. Who was winning? I could not say. I peeked from a porthole, but wherever I looked I saw mere confusion. Ships were blazing or drifting rudderless or vanishing into great thunderstorms of smoke and flame as they fired broadside after broadside at each other. Moths were flying into dust or fluttering wounded in hopeless, dizzy circles or swooping about in squadrons shaped like arrowheads, their riders flinging bombs far faster than the British tars could fire their cannon.
A rusty old Ionian system-ship went flapping by, with knitted banners unfurling proudly in the winds of space and the Threl Expeditionary Force clustered on its star deck and fo’c’sle, hurling insults and sharpened crochet hooks at any moth which dared to flutter near.
A passenger liner, caught up somehow in the battle, tore past us, with schoolboys in scholars’ caps and Eton collars leaning from the stern-rail to defend their mothers and sisters from the Snilth with catapults and pea-shooters.
And even in those bits of space where no ship fought or flew there were lifeboats tumbling, and huge sections wrenched from exploded ships twirling slowly, and bombs and rockets trailing streamers of smoke, and struggling Snilth clinging desperately to torn-off moth wings.
Looking back, it is strange to think that what I saw was only a skirmish, an outlying part of the great battle which was raging in the aether all around Jupiter. The great, striped face of the gas-world formed a backdrop to our struggle, and it was not long before even the Jovian cloud-tops were showing the marks of war, speckled with sooty black stains where burning ships and bits of ships had plummeted into the swirling atmosphere. I remember wondering what Thunderhead would make of it when he found some of that wreckage falling past him, or through him. And I wondered if it would matter to him whether the rest of the Solar System was taken over by the Snilth and their moths.
The Sophronia shook herself and her old timbers thrummed as Ssilissa brought the reactions in her alembic back under control. Shot-tattered space wings beat at the aether, righting us, while Mr Munkulus, bellowing through a speaking trumpet, encouraged Colonel Quivering’s aged troopers in their efforts to stop the holes in our hull with tarpaulin patches and catch a hold of that dismounted cannon, which still twirled and bounced above our heads.
‘Huzzah!’ I cried, as we plunged into a great struggling mass of moths and British cruisers, and the cabin filled again with the stench of powder smoke and the booming of the great guns. A piece of shattered bulkhead struck me as I spoke, whirled me about and slung me head-over-tip towards the bows. As I righted myself, I found myself face to face with Ssilissa.
‘Ssil?’ I gasped, surprised, for she was the last person I should have expected to meet at that end of the ship. If she was here, then who was it working such miracles in the wedding chamber?
She raised one blue finger and waved it to and fro in front of her mouth in the universal sign for ‘Be Quiet!’
And then I realised. It was not Ssil at all, but that other Snilth, whom I had forgotten in all the rumbustiousness of battle. That blast which had done so much damage must have smashed the bulkhead she was bound to and freed her! ‘Miss Thsssss!’ I cried—and she seized me and flung me aside, springing past me with an easy grace, like one well used to zero BSG.
I turned to try to follow her, but she had set me whirling like a top and there was, for the moment, nothing I could snatch a hold of to steady myself. Through the smoky air of the cabin I saw her soar up to the ceiling and go scuttling across it, lizardy-quick and quite unnoticed by the rest of the crew, who were all busy with the guns or at the helm. ‘Watch out!’ I shouted—or at least I started to shout it, but just then the rogue cannon, rebounding from a beam amidships, came hurtling towards me, crashed into me (which set me spinning in a new direction) and plunged out through the planking near the bows, leaving a large and ugly hole.
The air swilled out, the winds of space swirled in and I lost sight of the escaped Snilth for a moment. I was going to shout out again and warn the others she was loose, but I decided not to. She could have killed me if she had wanted to, but she had chosen not to, and so it seemed unfair to give her up. Let her escape, I thought, and return to her own people, whose ships and moths were all about us. And I forgot her and began snatching up a few spare shards and slabs of planking to wedge them across the hole.
Charity came to my aid and between us we managed to make a serviceable repair—but no sooner had we finished than the sound of the Sophronia’s engines faltered and died, and we felt the old ship slow and wallow, adrift upon the aether.
‘Ssilissa!’ I gasped.
Kicking off from the makeshift patch I had just made, I swam the whole length of the ship in one swallow-like swoop. Jack and the Tentacle Twins were already on their way to the wedding chamber to see what was amiss, and we arrived together at the door, which stood wide open. The Twins gave little trills of worry, flickering grey and lilac. Jack said, ‘Ssil?’
She was gone. The emergency hatch in the outer hull stood open and I closed it sharply to stop the floating pots and vials which filled the air all flying out and being lost in space. But I could not help thinking as I did it that it would not much matter if they did fly out. For Ssil was gone, and without her what use were all her alchemical powders and potions to us? There was not one of us who could work the great alembic in whose heart the alchemical fires which powered the Sophronia were dying down to ruddy embers.
‘It was Miss Thsssss,’ I said, feeling very ashamed of myself for having let her escape. ‘I tried to warn you … ’
‘It ain’t your fault, Art,’ said Jack. ‘What we must do is find her.’
We ran up on to the star deck, half hoping to see Ssil and her Snilthish captor a-swim in space behind us. But it was impossible to see anything much in the fug of gun smoke which enveloped us. All about us bits of broken moth drifted aimlessly, and now and then a living moth whirled by. Far off, beyond the smoke, a steady hammering of gun fire and the regular stabbing flash of cannons showed us where the battle still went on, but the Sophronia was drifting away from it.
Yarg and Squidley gave shrill twitters of alarm and flashed indigo for danger. Their meaning was clear. The Sophronia had been caught in the gravitational tides of Jupiter and was being drawn slowly, helplessly towards the giant planet!
‘D—it!’ said Jack, striking his fist against the star-deck rail. ‘We shall never find her now. Why did Thsssss take her? I thought she had come around; I thought she liked Ssil. It was all a ruse, I suppose. Throw us off our guard and then grab poor Ssil and carry her off. She’s aboard a moth by now, or in the belly of one of those great ships … ’
One of those great ships passed us as he spoke, cutting through the smoke above, battered and listing, its engines making a dismal moan. When it had passed we began to hear bursts of loud huzzah-ing coming from the shadowy ships which hung about in the smoke. ‘They’re going!’ a distant voice shouted. ‘We’ve won, lads! We’ve seen them off!’
The Sophronia turned lazily about, drifting sideways out of the smoke-bank and into the lambent light of Jupiter. And the feeling of victory that had started to swell in my breast at the sound of those lusty British huzzahs seemed suddenly to turn to ash.
The defeated remnants of the Snilth fleet were high above us, dwindling quickly as they fled towards the Mothstorm. But from the Mothstorm a fresh fleet, even larger than the first, was curving down towards us: a veritable horde of huge moths and still huger ships flapping across the flotsam-strewn and smoky aether. Very fast they came, and on the moths’ backs their armoured riders could be seen fitting bombs into their slings and beginning to whirl them about their heads, ready to hurl at the Sophronia as soon as they were in range!
Behind us, as the smoke thinned, the crews of other ships saw this new threat too. Their cheering ceased and I heard yells of alarm and the shouted orders of the officers. Battered as we were, how could we hope to hold firm against another onslaught? I clung to the star-deck rail and watched, and knew that the battle was lost and the Sun was setting at last upon the British Empire!
Or so I thought … But just then, the narrowing gap which separated us from these fresh moth-riders was filled by a bright rushing swirl of—what? Smoke, I thought at first, imagining that the Snilth’s bombs had struck us and I was seeing flame-lit vapour venting from our wedding chamber. But the ship did not tremble or shake or fly into pieces. And now, before my eyes, the vapour was curling over, falling away from the Sophronia towards the Snilth and clenching itself like a great smoky fist upon those dreadful moths!
‘It is a storm!’ cried Charity delightedly. ‘It is lots of storms! “O clouds unfold!”’
Out of the haze of Jupiter’s stormy airs, great plumes of cloud were boiling up, for all the world like fists punching out into space. Wherever a Snilthish fish-ship or a concentration of their moths flew, one of these vaporous limbs reached out and seized them and dragged them back into the impossible pressures of the wind-race.
‘The storms!’ I shouted, opening the hatch to share the good news of our deliverance with those below. ‘The storms of Jupiter are coming to our aid!’
‘Good old Thunderhead!’ yelled Jack, and I gasped as I recognised the great storm himself: a pillar of cloud shot through with lightnings and swathed with lesser storms, towering into space. He reached out cyclonic limbs and seized the fleeing remnants of the new Snilth fleet in half a dozen vaporous hands.
And was it only my imagining, or did that tower of cloud turn then towards the Sophronia? And did the top part of it seem to bow towards us? And did the thunder, booming through the gulfs of space, seem to rumble, ‘My regards to your mother, Shaper’s child!’ before, folding in upon itself, it went rushing back down into the wind-race, leaving the aether smeared and speckled with the dust of crushed moths?
I cannot be sure. I think those things happened, but no one else aboard the Sophronia noticed them, for they were all too busy scrambling up through holes and hatches on to the star deck and gazing out across the battlefield from which our enemies had been so abruptly swept. A few wisps of cloud blew past us: remnants of some small storm which had strayed too far from Jupiter’s embrace and disintegrated in the wilds of space. The dust of dead moths drifted all about, filling the aether with undulating silvery veils through which shoals of icthyomorphs darted, nibbling at larger moth fragments.
‘Good old Thunderhead!’ I exclaimed, quite touched by the great storm’s heroic action.
‘And all those smaller storms too,’ said Colonel Quivering. ‘Friends of his, I suppose. Dashed brave. Deserve a medal, every single one of ’em. But where would you pin it on?’
‘Not for nothing did my people worship him in years gone by,’ said Mr Munkulus, pulling off his cap and bowing towards the mighty storm, which could be seen swirling once more in its customary place upon Jupiter’s flank, a little more ragged than before and speckled with dark blots, but still magnificent.
‘But all those poor Snilth,’ said Charity. ‘What will become of them?’
‘The armoured minxes will be squashed flat as old tin cans down in the pressure-deeps,’ said Mr Grindle with a heartless grin, ‘and serves ’em right!’
‘Not necessarily, Grindle,’ said Mr M., still gazing up thoughtfully at Thunderhead. ‘Thunderhead has his own ways and his own reasons. Maybe he’ll keep those poor misguided creatures safe down in the wind-race and let them stay there till they see the error of their ways.’
‘Who cares what happens to them!’ I said gaily. ‘It is over! We have won!’
‘Oh no we haven’t, Art,’ said Mr Munkulus. ‘We’ve won one battle, thanks to Thunderhead, and been granted a little more time, that’s all.’
‘And we’ve lost Ssil,’ said Jack. He was staring aloft, where the surviving ships from the Snilth’s first attack had shrunk to a cluster of speeding stars, bright against the speckled immensity of the Mothstorm. Somewhere in there, if she still lived at all, Ssilissa was a prisoner. Without her the Sophronia was powerless. And despite our victory, the Mothstorm was still approaching, and I did not believe that even Thunderhead could help us fight it!