‘One size fits all, it seems,’ Smith said, pulling a red robe over his head. ‘Or rather, nobody. On the plus side, the hoods hang down so much, you can hardly see your face.’
‘Well, it’ll suit Suruk, then. I can hardly see anything,’ Carveth said. She looked, Smith thought, like a cross between a monk, a ghost and Little Red Riding Hood. Seen from the front, it appeared as if the robe was animating itself. ‘I look like something from science fiction.’
‘You mean speculative fiction. Science fiction has talking squids.’
‘Same difference. Oh – don’t forget your passcard.’ She passed him a plastic card on a chain. The Handymen had access, theoretically speaking, to anywhere on Deliverance, provided that there were repairs required.
If the Edenites dressed like this all the time, Smith reflected, no wonder they were so hot and bothered. Still, stealing the robes had left a convenient space in the cupboard, now occupied by the acolyte, tightly bound and gagged with a wad of his own pamphlets. Smith bundled up a spare robe and shoved it down his front. Nobody noticed them slipping out through the door.
‘Now we just have to find Suruk,’ Carveth said.
‘That’ll be easy,’ Smith replied. ‘He does rather stand out.’
‘In a horde of psychotic pirates? Actually, I think he’ll be invisible.’
A great roar arose to their right. Smith glanced round, and for a moment he thought it was Suruk himself. Then he realised that it was about thirty coarse voices spilling out of the Booty Shack, raised in raucous song:
‘Who. . lives in a spaceship that’s made out of rust? Suruk the Slayer!
Born of battle and war and bloodlust? Suruk the Slayer!
If decapitation is what you fear
Then heave away, hearties, from his big spear!’
Smith looked at Carveth as an accordion solo began. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is where you’re wrong.
Follow me, crew!’ he declared, and he strode to the door and threw it open.
Two pirates lay on the floor, either dead or dead drunk. A thing like a bladed grappling hook stuck out of the ceiling. An enormous boar of a man, shirtless and bruised, was flat out across one of the tables. Suruk stood on the next table down and, around him, two dozen of the galaxy’s most raucous buccaneers waved their fists and tankards in the air.
Smith slipped past a filthy corsair and approached the table. ‘Suruk, come down from there!’
‘Gar!’ cried the corsair, ‘it’s the fun police! Come for our women and drink, have ye?’
A growl of fury rose from the crowd. ‘Ah, ye medieval knob! They promise us plunder, and try to make us join their cult. What would ye do, Eden – school us freebooters to bow before your Great Annihilator, eh?’
The space pirates surged forward. At the entrance a voice cried, ‘And here’s another – a spy he’s been hiding, the sly old bugger!’
Suruk reached for a knife. Smith twisted aside, dislodging a hand from his shoulder, reached up and threw back his hood. ‘That’s enough!’ he cried, using the Bearing, and the Shau Teng style made the crowd of reprobates pause.
‘My name is Isambard Smith, and I am no Edenite. I have stolen these robes in order to infiltrate this facility.’
‘Er, Boss?’ Carveth took a step back towards the door, but trod on the hem of her robe and narrowly avoided falling over. ‘Ah, bollocks to it,’ she said, pulling her hood down.
‘The young lady you see there is under my protection, and I will kill any man who lays a hand on her, Edenite or not,’ Smith declared. ‘The fellow before you, Suruk the Slayer, is my friend.’
At the rear of the room, a pirate laughed. It was No-Nose, the madman from the cinema. His left hand gripped a pint of beer; his right, the bottom of a young buccaneer girl. ‘So you say, Eden. But to claim company with this great fighter here? That can’t be. Him, an alien warrior hungry for glory, an’ you, stiffer than a ship’s biscuit. I’ll wager ye’ve never even met.’
‘I know this man.’ Suruk hopped down from the table. ‘He speaks truly, and together we have spilled the blood of many a foe. He is called Mazuran in my tongue, which means “the quick brown fox that jumps over the lazy dog”. Be sure of one thing, if this man walks concealed among you, there is danger and bloodshed afoot, of the finest vintage.’
‘Suruk’s right,’ Smith replied, before anyone could challenge him again. ‘This is subterfuge, gentlemen. I came here to sink a spaceship – none of yours. I have a debt to settle with these Edenites, and I call on you to lend me your ears.’
‘How about a nose?’ No-Nose laughed. Beer exploded from his nostrils. The buccaneer girl shifted down the bench.
‘Listen,’ Smith replied. ‘Let me ask you something. What is it that you stand for? Is it booze?
Plunder? Women? Senseless violence? Yes to all of those, probably. But what really drives you? For what does every space pirate truly thirst?’
Eyes and patches met across the room. Hands and hooks scratched battered heads.
‘Shanties?’ a voice suggested.
‘Revenge on the Navy, damn ’em?’
‘You’re all wrong,’ Smith replied. ‘It’s fun. You all want fun.’
‘Fun?’ No-Nose snorted derisively, with unpleasant results. Then he frowned. ‘So what if we do, swabby?’
‘Fun,’ Smith replied, ‘is the very thing your new allies hate.’
A rumble ran through the room. The space pirates, never the most analytical thinkers, experienced a moment of contemplation.
‘Think about it. Why is it, that when they find something enjoyable, the Edenites have to call a halt to it in the name of so-called piety? Why is it that everything you enjoy is to them a crime to be wiped out? Sex, booze, brawling, doing exactly what you please: the Edenites would see them eradicated like so many cockroaches of, er, joy. Why, they’d criminalise every natural urge in the world if they thought it would bring a little more misery to the human race. When I have a natural urge, I follow it through – and I bet you all do the same.’
‘I used to,’ said one of the pirates, ‘but me shipmates got me some tablets.’
No-Nose stood up and brushed his coat down. ‘Mates, this parley is all very well, but what’s he got to offer us in return? We’ve not come here for nothing.’
‘Ask my crew,’ Smith said. ‘Suruk, what do you want?’
‘Battle, of course,’ the M’Lak replied. ‘Blood, doom and the skulls of my enemies. With my blades I delight my ancestors through the gift that keeps on giving… the heads of ignoble fools.’
A rumble of mixed approval and apprehension came from the privateers. Smith turned to Carveth. ‘And you?’
‘Me?’ She looked appalled. ‘Well, I – I want to stay alive, I suppose. . and right now I could do with a drink.’
‘See?’ Smith said.
No-Nose rubbed his chin. His lack of a nose made him look as though he was in the early stages of turning into Suruk. For a moment he stared at the ceiling fan, and suddenly he exclaimed: ‘Well, damn!
Violence and booze. Perhaps you do have a point after all. I could do with hearing a bit more about pillaging but, curse it, I’m with ye. Enough of this Edenite nonsense! I ask ye, what good is a god who hates his own creation? That’s a theological tautology. Me hearties,’ he added, for good measure. ‘So now…’ he said, leaning closer, and giving Smith a very distasteful view of his nostrils, ‘where might all this entertainment be found?’
*
In true Edenite style, the edges of the Upper Level landing pad were decorated with burning bodies.
Stakes stood along the edge of the pad, surrounded by piles of wood: when important Edenites visited, it was customary to light up some apostates to show them the way in. A huge statue of the Great Annihilator stood at the far end, his fangs bared, a gun in one hand and a time bomb in the other.
On the videoscreens, a reclusive hierarch named Gurt the Spelunker was delivering a furious sermon. Live from his cavern, he railed against the decadence of the democratic world and the prevalence of guano.
Lord Prong’s heart sank as he stepped onto the gantry. A small group of Edenites had gathered on the edge of the walkway, brandishing guns and big placards. Their feathery hats identified them as the True Brotherhood of the Chicken Rampant.
‘Hey, you kids!’ Prong's amplified voice rang around the cavern. ‘Get off my landing pad!’
One of the Brothers Rampant broke free from the others and rushed up. His eyes had a worrying, ecstatic gleam. ‘Lord Prong! How can you stand by and let this travesty happen?’
The Stapulator Documentarium clacked his pincers, and the zealot backed away a little. Prong sighed. ‘What travesty?’
‘This one!’ the young man cried, pointing at his placard. ‘Something terrible is going on. Do you have any idea how offensive to my beliefs that is?’
‘Your sign is blank,’ Prong said. He felt every one of his two hundred and eighty years.
‘It's blank now,’ the zealot replied. ‘But as soon as we figure out what this dreadful thing is, then, by the Annihilator, we’ll fill our signs out and those potential blasphemers will regret the day they were probably born!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Personally, I think it's to do with pornography. We just need to find the right evidence. .’
Lord Prong sighed. He turned to Lieutenant Carsus. ‘If you would, please?’
Carsus grabbed the zealot and yanked him into the air. The young man howled as the Reborn lifted him over the railing. Below, the lava bubbled like hot soup.
‘Tell me, chicken boy,’ Lord Prong rasped, ‘Can you fly?’
Carsus hurled him over the edge. He screamed for a moment and then was lost to view. Only a loud plop and a terrible sizzling hiss marked the young man's passing. On the far side of the pad, the protesters lowered their placards and shuffled away.
Private Leniatus leaned over the railing. He gazed down sadly, and the gantry creaked under his armoured bulk. ‘Now we'll never know,’ he said.
‘Never know what?’ said Prong.
‘If he could fly. 'Cos he's dead.’
*
‘This robe smells of zealot,’ Suruk growled as they approached the gate. ‘Some fool has testified all over it.’
‘We’ll deal with that later, old chap,’ Smith replied. ‘Let me do the talking.’
‘You’ll have to,’ Carveth said, tugging her hood down over her face. ‘You’re the only one of us they’ll listen to. I suppose they don’t let women and aliens into their precious Holy Order of the Handyman.’
‘Well,’ Smith said, ‘it does say Handy man. It’d sound odd if it was handyperson. That just sounds like you’ve got too many arms.’
Carveth flapped her sleeves. ‘Boss, let’s just get this sorted, eh?’
The guard swaggered out to meet them.’
‘Good day, my man,’ Smith declared. ‘My colleagues and I have come to repair your machines.’
The guard scowled. ‘Do I know you? I’m going to have to check that.’ He pulled his commlink close to his mouth. ‘Control, I’m making a confirmation request under Chapter 35 of the Book of Appliances. Handymen, provide details on your work.’
‘Sorry?’
‘What’re you here to mend?’
‘Er. . a washing machine?’
The guard muttered into the radio again. ‘Very well. I have confirmation of a sullied vestment on Circle Two. Move along.’
A portion of the great door swung open and they passed inside.
There was something particularly grim about walking under the watchtowers, Smith thought.
This must be what it was like to be an Edenite, or a Ghast or lemming man: forever watched from above, as though some cruel child had lifted the roof off the dolls’ house, waiting for an excuse to punish the toys inside.
‘This way,’ he said quickly, keeping his head down, and they hurried into the sector reserved for true followers of Eden.
It was much like the area set aside for mercenaries, except that most of the damage was caused by decrepitude rather than exuberant cutlass-waving. There were no pubs. The grim housing blocks were broken up by grey concrete buildings that could have been bunkers or churches. Stone angels flanked the road, brandishing flags and sabres, their cold, stern faces raised skyward. Enormous samplers hung down walls, threatening all manner of vengeance.
No sense of architecture, the Edenites, Smith thought. Back in the Empire, from Nexis VII to New Neasden, the places of worship looked proper.
Smith could see the lava bubbling beneath the metal pavement. The sight of it gave him a strange mix of vertigo and hunger for tikka masala. He had started to sweat. He raised a hand, half-hidden by his wizard’s sleeve, and pointed at a column rising to the roof. At its base was a pair of double doors: LIFT.
Halfway to the lift, a horn blared above them. They froze under a concrete angel raising its trumpet, trying not to clamp their hands over their ears. Smith slid his hand under his robes, to the guns and sword stashed there.
A loudspeaker crackled. ‘New Eden is destined to restore purity and moral rectitude to the galaxy,” it proclaimed. “But have you considered the sort of reward you’ll receive in the afterlife? For a smal fee, you can specify the hair colour and dirty pillow size of the virgins you’ll be granted as a reward for your service. Just send your money to. .’
‘False alarm,’ Smith said, and they hurried to the doors.
As the lift rose, Suruk shook his head. ‘You humans should invent some gods that actually like you.’
‘People aren’t all like that,’ Carveth said.
‘Damned right,’ Smith added. ‘Not in the Space Empire.’ He looked down at the little figures below, either swaggering with their guns or rushing from place to place hoping not to be noticed. Some sort of padre had emerged from a temple in a pointy hat, and was shouting orders. Citizens scurried to obey. ‘That’s no way for a fellow to live.’
‘If I were a deity,’ Suruk observed, ‘I would sell hats.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The gods of man love headgear,’ the M’Lak explained. ‘I would open a special shop and sell my attire from it. Then I would be very wealthy, and would purchase a spacecraft in which to put my spears.’
‘But if you were a deity,’ Carveth pointed out, ‘you could just make the money anyway.’
Suruk pondered the issue. ‘But I like hats.’
The lift stopped with surprising smoothness. ‘You have ascended to the Second Circle,’ it announced, and the doors slid apart.
Rows of shuttlecraft confronted them, their nosecones sleek and white like fangs. Smith looked down the row of vessels. Several were covered in presumably sacred scrawl. One or two had a rather nasty fake-marble effect, with gold trimmings. None of them resembled the thing that had attacked the convoy.
Suruk tapped his shoulder and pointed. ‘Mazuran, look.’
It was hard to see what his sleeve was indicating. Then Smith realised: Suruk did not mean the gantry ahead of them, but the one above. Smith looked up to see two immense men lumbering overhead, their boots thumping the perforated floor. Between them was a smaller fellow in some sort of dark uniform and, behind him, a chanting, muttering pack of high-ranking Edenites. He watched as they trooped past over his head and, with a mounting sense of horror, he realised quite what the hierarchs wore under their robes and how distressingly inadequate it was.
He looked down and met the appalled eyes of his men. ‘Chaps,’ he announced, ‘this looks bad.’
‘That,’ Suruk said, ‘was a disquieting experience.’
Smith reached into his robe and drew his Civiliser. ‘Mark my words, men,’ he said, ‘evil is afoot.’
‘It looks more like a small willy to me,’ Carveth replied.
‘I see evil more as a sort of claw,’ Suruk added. ‘But then, humans do have very unpleasant feet.
Is it severing time yet?’
‘That depends.’ Smith glanced around. ‘Look over there.’
Under the gantry was a narrow access ladder. In the red light of the fire below, it looked like a stripe of soot against the wall.
‘I’ll go first,’ Smith said. He climbed the ladder, rung over rung, his boots ringing on the metal. It was hard not to think of the drop below. He stepped onto the upper gantry and waited for the others to appear. The three stood in their robes beside the ladder, looking like ghosts searching for someone to scare as they waited for Carveth to get her breath back.
They walked down the gantry, trying to look as innocuous as armed maintenance-monks could do. Ahead, the walkway swung left and, as they turned, Smith saw the white, pointed hats of the hierarchs sticking up above the railings like a mobile picket fence. They followed, pausing every so often to check non-existent faults in the walkway.
‘We’re close,’ Carveth said. Her voice was small and worried.
‘Chin up, pilot,’ Smith said, and he patted her on the shoulder.
‘Hands off, Boss. If they suspect I’m a woman, they’ll murder me.’
‘They might not realise. It’s hard to tell in these robes.’
‘Okay then, they’ll think we’re both men, touching each other for fun. Because if there’s one thing religious fanatics love, it’s gay handyman sex.’
They crept around the corner. Carveth stopped. ‘It’s here!’ she whispered.
Before them lay the ship. The hull was covered in dirt, half-obscuring the runes burned and painted onto the metal. The systems were powered down, the long chains dangling like dead fronds, but blue phosphorescence still pulsed behind the tinted lenses of the cockpit. Something had scored a grid into the prow of the vessel, criss-crossing it with deep scars as if it had driven at high speed into a gigantic wire fence. Its name was stencilled along the dirty hull: Pale Horse. Something about the ship made Smith’s skin crawl, as if with the fear of being touched by something cold and dead. Even the party of hierarchs kept a little way back.
A light flashed on the wall at the far side of the gantry. Under the light, a pair of iron doors creaked apart and figures stomped onto the landing-pad. Heavy-set and armoured, too broad for humans, they approached the Edenites. Smith glanced at his crew. Under his hood, Suruk bared his teeth.
‘I should have known,’ Smith whispered. ‘The lemming men of Yullia.’
*
The Stapulator clicked his pincers. ‘Lord Prong. The allies approach.’
From a distance, even to Prong's mechanically-boosted vision, the Yull looked like small bears standing on their hind legs. Seen closer, though, they moved with a swaggering grace, supple and poised.
The lead Yull, a white-furred brute of the knight caste, wore a red cuirass like a metal waistcoat. The others carried rifles and long-handled axes pushed through their belts. The Yullian flag, reminiscent of four stylised windmill sails, hung on a gallows-shaped rig rising out of the back of the lead officer’s armour.
Private Leniatus grinned. ‘Reckon they look like rabbits.’
‘Shut up, dummy!’ Carsus replied.
The lemming men huffed and drew themselves up. Prong recognised that pompous look. It was the expression that the Yull tended to assume when practising their favourite hobbies of axe-twirling, murder, denying murder, eating cheese and proclaiming their own greatness to anyone they hadn’t murdered yet.
The loudspeakers played the anthems of New Eden and Yullia. As Smash 'em for the Lord ended and the whooping subsided, the strident tones of Remember You're a Lemming filled the hall.
‘ Hwuphep, dirty offworlder ally!’ the Yullian officer barked. ‘I am Ambassador Quetic the honoured, most reasonable envoy of the benevolent war-god of the Yull.’ Quetic bowed stiffly from the waist. ‘May divine Popacapinyo kill you slightly quicker than you deserve.’
Lord Prong gave the lemmings as deep a bow as his dignity and lower back would allow. ‘May the Great Annihilator spare you from righteous incineration,’ he said. ‘Briefly.’
A low whine came from the lift shaft. Prong looked around and saw the lights rise on the panel beside the doors. He felt a little tension in his gut. Slowly, the light hopped from diode to diode: left to right, then up to the next level, left to right again, then up another line.
The lift banged into place. With a piped fanfare the doors rumbled apart, and a face formed from the shadow inside.
At first it was a metal disc, a coin hovering in mid-air. Then light caught the glass in its centre and it became a lens. Details followed it: steel insignia on a leather coat, a bulbous helmet like a metal marrow and, below it, a scarred red face with a mechanical eye, a pair of nostrils like a skull’s and a malignant slash of a mouth.
The personal representative of the Ghast Empire limped out of the lift. Behind it, a pair of immense praetorian bodyguards looked around and snarled. One held a chain, at the end of which an ant-wolf strained, growling.
Prong felt the urge to look away and he noticed that the lemming men seemed to have shrunk a little: Ambassador Quetic shifted his feet and puffed his chest out, but it made him look weaker than before.
The Ghast officer stopped, and its single eye fixed on Prong, as unblinking and cold as the lens beside it. ‘I am High-Research-Over-Commander Four Hundred and Sixty Two,’ he rasped, ‘and this had better be worth my while.’
From somewhere behind him, Prong thought he heard a British-sounding voice exclaim “Bloody hell! Him again? ” He swung around and glared at the hierarchs. There was some nervous shuffling.
462 turned to the Yullian deputation. ‘Apologies for my late arrival. The minion responsible has made full amends.’ The ant-wolf licked its chops and one of the praetorians belched. ‘I assume you rodents have already indulged in the inevitable self-justificatory prattle about honour, yes?’
Quetic puffed himself up. ‘ Hwot? How dare you insult the dignity of the noble Yull, filthy insect?
Were we not so lovely and in the presence of witnesses, you would die slow – yes, yes, slow!’
‘I shall take that as a yes,’ 462 replied.
It was time, Lord Prong thought, to take the initiative. He needed to show these aliens – these unbelievers – the power of Project Horseman. He coughed loudly and the visitors turned to look at him. He spoke quickly – before the Stapulator could pat him on the back.
‘Allies,’ he announced, ‘I, Lord Hieronymous Prong, Sin-Hunter of Eden and Grand Mandrill of the Innermost Conclave, have called you here to witness the harnessing of arcane power in the conquest of our enemies. My minions, with the grace and blessing of this bunch –’ he indicated the hierarchs behind him – ‘have turned their wisdom to mastering the occult. Through the complexities of Dodgson physics, we have created the ship you see before you… the Pale Horse.’
‘Show us,’ said 462.
‘Yes, yes!’ Quetic barked. ‘Demonstrate its capabilities, offworlder, or be shamed!’
‘Ah, pipe down, fluffy.’ Prong felt much better now. He was in his stride. ‘You want to see what we can do? Stapulator, give the order to fire her up. Brother hierarchs, begin the ritual!’
*
Smith pushed his hood out of his eyes. On the gantry, the Edenites were performing some sort of ceremony. One of the pointy-hatted crowd, perhaps their leader, strode to the front and threw up his arms. ‘I get up in the morning, looking for witches,’ he cried. ‘I find some women and set them alight!’
The rest of the hierarchs swayed. ‘Oh, oh,’ they chanted, ‘the Edenites!’
Smith slipped a hand into his robes and drew his Civiliser. ‘Stay here, everyone. I’m going to get a better look.’
Suruk tapped his shoulder. ‘Leave some slaying for me. Oh, and be careful.’
Smith crawled along the gantry, bent double to stay out of sight, and ducked behind a cart full of sensor equipment. The Edenites were still chanting, their white conical hoods wobbling in unison, and to Smith’s astonishment the ship seemed to be answering them. A low electric growl issued from the Pale Horse, like an amplifier before the striking of the first chord. The chains along its length rose in a field of crackling static. Blue lightning played across the hull: first in sparking flashes, then in a continuous dancing light.
And then the spaceship vanished.
‘Oh,’ said Smith. There didn’t seem to be any better way of putting it. Where the devil had the thing gone? He felt rather glad he hadn’t been hiding behind the Pale Horse.
Up ahead, the observers seemed no less astonished than he was. The Edenite hierarchs had gone into a frenzy of chanting, their conical hats bobbing together like teeth in the jaw of some enormous beast. 462, curse him to Hell, had limped several steps back and his guards struggled to keep his ant-wolf on its leash as if barked and snapped. The lemming men gawped in awe. A Yullian officer staggered back, terrified, and one of Prong’s enormous guards picked him up and patted his head.
In a blast of blue light, the Pale Horse reappeared. The cockpit became dark, the electricity subsided. The chains fell limp and clattered across its hull.
‘Where did it go, Prong?’ Quetic demanded. ‘Offworlder, where did it go to?’
‘Silence!’ 462 had taken a scanner from the inside of his trenchcoat. Two little antennae sprang up from the main body of the device. ‘The sensors report a fluctuation in the presence of the vessel,’ he rasped. ‘Either this machine has become inefficient, or your craft. . moved.’
Quetic shook his armoured head. ‘But. . how? How can it be here and suddenly not? Who is responsible for this? And,’ he added, looking round, ‘what is your bodyguard doing with my adjutant?’
‘I got me a rabbit,’ Leniatus said.
The lemming-man thrashed in the ogre’s arms. Smiling, Leniatus patted the Yullian, making the warrior’s head bob alarmingly.
‘Put Adjutant Xeptoc down!’ Quetic snapped.
Leniatus took a step back, hugging the Yullian even tighter. ‘No! He’s my friend!’
‘I meant drop him.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ Leniatus dropped the Yullian.
Adjutant Xeptoc stood up, shuddered and howled. ‘The dirty offworlder patted my head. I am forever disgraced!’ The adjutant turned, shrieked, and hurled itself over the railing. Quetic scowled, 462 smirked, and Leniatus looked sad. Smith crept closer.
‘Now,’ Prong declared, ‘soon you will observe the power unit for the Dodgson drive. It is this piece of techno-arcane genius that enables the Pale Horse to shift dimensions. Once the drive is activated, the Pale Horse no longer inhabits realspace. For your safety, we will deactivate the power unit.’
Smith was hardly listening. With a soft hiss, a hatch opened like a gash on the side of the ship.
Light spilled out. Two figures stood backlit in the entrance, carrying a long, flat object wrapped in a cloth.
A painting, Smith thought. What the hel have they got a painting for?
The figures emerged. They were acolytes of the Order of the Handyman, their red hoods pulled up, robes brushing the ground. The Pale Horse’s airlock had a chequered floor, and the two men looked like pawns. Slowly, reverently, they carried the wrapped painting across the gantry, past the astonished visitors and through a door on the opposite side.
Lord Prong gestured to the spaceship. ‘Shall we take the tour?’
Smith watched the delegates file towards the doors. One by one, they stepped through the doorway, into the blue light.
A voice boomed out of the airlock: deep, commanding and slightly strained, as if on the verge of fury.
‘Welcome aboard our flight to the further regions of experience. A trol ey will appear shortly to cater for your beverage-related pleasures. Passengers are to remain chained in until the light comes on. Smoking is not al owed unless you are being incinerated. You will find emergency exits located nowhere – for there is no escape!’
The doors slammed shut. The hierarchs milled about on the gantry, looking rather like a colony of penguins. It would not have surprised Smith to find them hiding eggs up their smocks.
Smith ran back down the gantry, stolen robes flapping around him. He stopped before his men, slightly out of breath. ‘Did you see that?’
‘The invisible spaceship?’ Carveth replied. ‘Yes – I mean, I did to begin with –’
‘Whatever they took off the ship, we have to get it. It’s our duty to acquire useful things for the Empire. That little fellow, Prong, said it was the power unit for the drive that made it invisible.’
‘I agree,’ Suruk declared. ‘We must steal this mystic painting.’ He nodded to the doors at the far side of the gantry. The sill had been decorated with a relief of skull-faced cherubs. ‘Less delaying, more slaying!’
‘Alright,’ Smith said. ‘Follow me. Calmly, now. Remember, we’ve got every right to be here.’
From under her hood, Carveth said, ‘We have?’
‘Of course. I’m claiming this place for the Empire. Come along!’
Smith holstered his pistol and strolled out of cover. Suruk strode casually behind him. Carveth hurried along at the rear, a little figure in red.
They walked towards the doors. ‘Calmly, everyone,’ Smith said, and he pressed the button.
The doors parted, and they looked into a corridor. ‘There,’ Smith said, nodding to a side-room.
The room was bare metal and smelt of grease. At the far corner, under a flag, two robed handymen were locking a large wardrobe.
Smith closed the door. Both handymen turned.
‘What the hell?’ said the first man. ‘What is this?’
‘Don’t look now,’ Carveth replied, ‘but this is a hold up.’
The technician ducked down to get a better look. ‘But. . you’re just a girl.’
‘Wrong.’ Suruk threw his hood back.
‘Begone, demon!’ cried the man, recoiling in terror, and Suruk brought the edge of his hand sharply into the technician’s head. He fell, and Suruk stepped to the second man and causally punched him out.
Smith bent down and checked the fallen Handymen. One carried a hefty metal keyring. He flicked through the keys until he found one that looked appropriate. The key turned easily in the lock, and the wardrobe opened.
Smith reached inside. His hand brushed something soft – a fur coat, from the feel of it – and he stretched further. The fur slid down, and he found himself gripping a hard wooden corner, wrapped in a thin blanket. The painting.
It took up almost the entire back of the wardrobe. He tugged it forward a little, realising that the wrapping was taped into place.
Carveth touched him on the arm.
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t like this, boss. I mean, all this for a picture. Do we have to steal it?’
‘Of course we have to steal it. We’re an empire, aren’t we?’
‘It looks a bit heavy.’
‘Nonsense. Do you think that’s what was going through Lord Byron’s head when he rolled the Elgin Marbles out of, erm, Elginland? Nonsense, he was thinking –’
‘How can I score some laudanum and shag my aunt?’
‘Really, Carveth! Suruk, you take one corner and I’ll take the other.’
They lifted the frame out of the wardrobe. ‘Careful at the back,’ Smith said. ‘Carveth, could you get the door?’
She opened the door and looked straight into the grim face of Hieronymous Prong. She gave a yelp of surprise and slammed it shut.
The door burst open and Lord Prong took a limping step into the room. ‘Well, well,’ he rasped. ‘I’ve been looking for reds under my bed all those years and it turns out they were in the wardrobe.’
There was a huge silver automatic in his hand, scrimshawed with holy writ. Even less pleasant was his smile, which looked like the product of muscle failure. Behind him came Hierarch Beliath and his inevitable smell.
‘Close the door,’ said Prong. ‘Best the allies don’t know these idiots got this far.’
The door clicked. Beliath said, ‘That one’s a dirty alien.’
Prong grimaced, as if trying out his face and not liking the fit. ‘Put my property down.’
‘Gladly,’ Smith replied. As he set the parcel on the ground, he flicked his hand into his robe.
Smith turned holding a Markham and Briggs Civiliser. ‘I’ll put you down too, if you’d like.’
Prong raised his hand. Smith’s gun roared and the Civiliser shell hit Prong in the chest and blasted straight though him. Prong’s pistol clattered on the ground.
Slowly, the Grand Mandrill patted his chest. ‘Only a lung,’ he wheezed. ‘I’ve not used those things for ages.’
‘Pipe down, you two,’ Smith replied. ‘You’re under arrest.’
Prong and Beliath glared at them with guilty rage, like a couple of dirty old men surprised outside a netball court. Carveth produced the shotgun from her robes.
‘How dare you try to stop us?’ Beliath snarled. ‘Don’t you know how offensive that is to us? We are men of faith.’ He drew himself up and cocked his head back. ‘We require special treatment.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Smith replied. ‘You smell terrible.’
Beliath sneered. ‘It is written that deodorant is decadent and washing is weak, just like your society. After all, do I look like a powdered fairy?’
‘More like a smelly gnome.’
‘So move it, King Leer,’ Carveth added, and she pulled her hood back.
Beliath shuddered violently. His eyes, already wild, took on the appearance of poached eggs in the mouldy ham of his face. White specs of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth, joining the assorted detritus already clustered in his beard. ‘A woman,’ he spat, goggling. ‘A woman in the guise of a Handyman!’ Beliath clutched at his robes, yanking wads of fluff from his head. ‘The shame, the brazen, wanton, licentious, dirty, filthy, naked shame of it.’ Gasping, he turned to Prong. ‘Grand Mandrill, we must kill her to wash this stain from our honour. Yes, I’ll burn you, Jezebel, just as soon as I’ve got you out of those robes –’
He lunged at Carveth with both hands, palms out to grab and squeeze. She raised the shotgun and fired.
The shot threw Beliath against the wall. His whole torso was red. His face gawped, as though he had no idea how he had got into this terrible state. Then he dropped onto the floor.
‘Nice,’ Suruk said.
‘I didn’t mean to do that,’ Carveth said. ‘Honest.’
Smith looked at Beliath and wondered how many years’ bad luck you got for killing the Ancient Mariner.
On the far side of the room, Prong coughed. He patted his meagre chest. ‘Praise the Annihilator.
Faith alone has saved me. That and bionic lungs.’
Smith put his gun against Prong’s hat. ‘Your brain’s not bionic. If it was, it would work better.
Prong, I am taking you prisoner. You will return to our ship with us.’
‘So no fast moves, bucklehead,’ Carveth added.
Prong chuckled. ‘Is that the best you can do, captain? A .45 Civiliser? By Edenite standards, that’s a pretty low calibre weapon.’
‘Then it’ll match your brain. Now move.’
Prong opened the door and stepped out. Smith followed, close behind. The door slammed shut and, slowly, the pack of guests looked around.
They stood in a loose row in their various uniforms, the extended family of evil waiting to have its photograph taken. Smith saw whiskers and polished armour on one side, antennae and leather coats on the other and white robes and pointed hoods in the centre, but the differences were superficial. He was still looking at the lowest dross of the galaxy.
‘Hands up!’ Smith cried.
‘Back, rabble!’ Suruk snarled. ‘Keep at bay, or I shall drench the walls with idiot blood!’
There was a moment’s pause. The Edenites glared back at him, their eyes wild and hooded hats high. They resembled an exceptionally butch drag act about damsels. The lemming-men looked at one another, affronted and furious. From the Ghast deputation a thin, nasal voice exclaimed ‘Oh, for Number One’s sake – not you! ’
‘462…’ Smith said. ‘For once, it’s not you saying “we meet again”. It’s me. Well, we meet again.’
‘This is turning into a very tedious day,’ 462 replied, crossing all his arms. ‘Praetorian? Remove these imbeciles.’
One of his guards cocked his gun.
Smith raised his pistol and let off a single shot into the rafters. ‘That’s enough! Right, you bloody savages,’ he called. ‘In the name of the British Space Empire, stop your ignorant gibber-jabber or I’ll blow your filthy brains out!’
‘That’s liberal talk!’ Hierarch Ezron roared. ‘Kill ‘em all!’
In a clatter of guns, knives and axes, thirty of space’s worst villains drew their weapons.
Suruk moved. His robe fell and his arm flicked out to the parcel he carried. There was a long, hooked knife in his hand. ‘Fools, listen. My blade is sharp and poised. Should I fall, it will tear this relic of yours. Strike me down and you will fail your rulers, betray your orders and generally resemble chumps.’
Carveth stepped in, laying the shotgun against the parcel.
462’s tongue slid out of his mouth and moved from side to side. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘That is a powerful piece of materiel. Praetorians, no shooting.’
‘Well said, dirty ally,’ Quetic added. ‘There must be no gunfire. In which case – axe attack!’ He raised his axe and gave a warbling scream of mingled hatred and glee. ‘ Hwuphep Popacapinyo – darhep yul ai! ’
‘Wait –‘ 462 hissed as Quetic’s soldiers came to life around him. They rushed forward, bayonets first, and Smith realised that Prong and the painting were turning into considerable impediments to his escape.
He shoved Prong aside and lifted the Civiliser, took careful aim, and shot one of Quetic’s howling minions in the thigh. ‘Everyone back!’ Smith called, and to his horror he saw that Carveth had pre-empted him and was running flat out the way they had come. Bloody coward, he thought, and a revving sound made him turn to the left.
He dodged back instinctively as a whirling blade swung down. A giant in a dark uniform and a steel breastplate stood before him waving a circular saw of the type used to cut paving slabs. Smith drew his sword, but Suruk dashed past him. The alien leapt onto Carsus’s chest, and with one massive yank on the Reborn’s armour sprang into the air. Carsus looked up, raising the whining saw again – and Suruk’s spear flashed out. Carsus’s head, which had always looked like an afterthought, rolled off his shoulders and his enormous body dropped like a felled tree.
Suruk landed lightly beside the armoured corpse. ‘No helmet. Amateurs.’
Smith looked back just in time. Steel flashed before him before he drove his sword up to block Quetic’s axe. The impact sent them both staggering. The lemming man leaped back in, swinging, but Smith dodged and sliced the alien across the arm. Quetic cursed in Yullian – ‘ Fecinec! ’ – and flopped against the railings, his whiskers flecked with froth.
‘Boss!’ a voice cried at Smith’s side. He looked around, and saw Carveth. Before he could rebuke her cowardice, he saw that she was pushing a porter’s trolley. Suruk heaved the painting onto it.
A fresh batch of guards ran onto the gantry behind them. The Ghasts were readying their guns.
Prong's amplified voice roared at them not to shoot.
‘Boss!’ Carveth called, ‘What do we do now?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Smith replied. ‘In the name of democracy and the British Space Empire… run like buggery, men!’
They tore down the gantry, Suruk pushing the trolley while Smith and Carveth laid down as much covering fire as they could. As one, the mob of enemies surged forward, yelling, hissing and yowling. Smith fired off two more bullets, killing an Edenite thug and stunning one of the praetorians with a shot that made its helmet ring like a gong.
An angel-shaped surveillance drone swung overhead, trilling out a warning. As if in answer, a pair of metal doors burst open on the left and a chanting gaggle of cultists rushed out, wearing large metal bells over their heads. Each carried two hammers, and they would have overwhelmed Smith and his crew, had they not used them to strike their bells. The fanatics staggered like bees in smoke, their dirge muffled by their clanging headgear, and Suruk deftly wheeled the trolley between the swaying bodies, clearly fighting the urge to play a tune on their heads with his spear.
Smith fished the speedloader from his pocket and pushed a fresh set of shells into his pistol.
Carveth reached the lift – she had never realised that legs as short as hers could go so quickly – and thumped the control panel. The doors rolled apart and Suruk pushed the trolley at the gap.
‘It will not fit!’ he snarled.
‘Turn it side-on, you stupid sod!’ Carveth shouted.
‘Apologies, that was foolish.’ Suruk turned the parcel and pushed it end first into the lift. They crowded in around it. Smith fired two more shots down the gantry, deterring nobody, and slammed the door behind them. Slowly, the lift began to sink.
Carveth flopped against the wall. ‘All this,’ she moaned, ‘for a bloody picture. It’d better have some ponies on it.’
She had a fair point, Smith thought – apart from the bit about ponies. After all this effort, he would be severely disappointed if the painting didn’t contain at least one artistically valid set of antiquities: the poetess Sappho admiring some Greek jugs, perhaps, or Guinevere and Lady Godiva – preferably in the same scene. .
The lift rumbled around them. Carveth remembered to reload the shotgun. Above, a bell started to toll, a rapid, urgent pulse. ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Who was that old bloke? Oliver Cromwell or somebody?’
‘More fathead than roundhead,’ Smith replied. ‘A member of the Edenite religious police. Most hierarchs don’t know which end of the red-hot poker to do the poking with, but that fellow – well, if his ship’s anything to go by, he’s a sharp biscuit. And 462, here of all places. .’ He shook his head. ‘I knew that bugger was alive, but I thought they’d have sent him to the Morlock Front, or at least given him a research job. Clearly there wasn’t a backroom big enough for his swollen arse.’
Carveth pointed to the lift controls. ‘We’re nearly at the bottom. They’ll be waiting –’
‘Suruk?’ Smith said. ‘Time to give the signal.’
The alien reached to his side and took out a flare pistol. He held it out to Smith. ‘You must fire it, Mazuran. I have taken the oath to fight only with the weapons of my ancestors. Guns just breed violence,’ he concluded, solemnly drawing a pair of machetes.
Smith turned the pistol over in his hands. ‘I hope this works,’ he said, and the lift jolted to a halt.
As the doors opened, he shoved the gun into the aperture, angled it upwards and pulled the trigger.
The flare sailed up above Deliverance, over the wall dividing the hired men from the devotees. In the Booty Hut, Captain No-Nose Chang saw the light and spluttered with surprise. Grog bubbled up the wrong way, pouring out of the centre of his face like a frothy proboscis. ‘With me, lads!’ he called, stumbling to his feet. His nasal passage fizzing uncontrollably, he charged out of the door, the itching driving him wild. Behind him, his men cheered and drew their weapons.
The lift doors rolled open onto a medieval picture of Hell. As Smith stepped out, the gates exploded. A horde of the galaxy’s lowest piratical scum poured in, unkempt and furious, waving guns, cutlasses, tankards and grappling hooks. Hideous faces grinned behind lank hair and scars. Alarms howled and warning lights strobed in the rafters.
On the far right, the front of a temple flopped down like a drawbridge and a great machine rolled forth: part tank, part grimacing idol. The face of the Great Annihilator glowered down at them, and a mechanical roar yowled from between its fangs. From the brim of the war-god’s iron hat, Lord Prong called down curses on the raiders and the young folk of today. A bevy of cultists swarmed around the caterpillar tracks, flagellating wildly. Occasionally a robe would snag on the workings and a fanatic would be whisked under the war machine, to lubricate the gears.
The pirates met the Edenites in a terrible clash of blades and guns. A rocket sailed out of the pillaging horde and blew the top off one of the mobile fort’s turrets. A couple of hatches dropped down from the idol’s chest and two great rotary guns spun in place of nipples.
‘It’s got laser tits,’ Carveth gasped. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’
Beside her, Suruk gazed at the battle like a small child looking at a Christmas display. ‘Craven
idol,’ he whispered, raising his blades, ‘I will cleave the unsightly knockings from your chest!’
‘No you won’t,’ Smith replied, and Suruk seemed to deflate slightly, like a child that had just
dropped an ice cream. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Smith, ‘we have our artefact. We’re going home.’