Another War

Chapter Nine

One moment he was falling down, then falling sideways. He was totally unprepared for the abrupt twist in vertical and landed face first in the grey dust of the Ankhani’s world.

Up close, it was the same fine, desiccated debris that lay around the hall. Long, long ago, those cold, greedy creatures had used up all the vital energy of their once life-giving planet. Now they used their science to suck it from other, younger realms.

Adams was on his feet quickly, turning and looking for a target. ‘I swore I’d die rather than come back here, Major.’

‘And we would have died.’ Thacker spat out grey phlegm and picked up his own appallingly dusty rifle.

‘There’s nothing for us here. If they shut the door on us, we’re trapped forever. The last bullet will be for me, but the second to last is yours if you don’t think of something fast.’

‘Get a grip, man. The Land Rover is on top of the machine. They can’t get to the controls.’ He looked back at the floating door, the hole in the air that led back to the hall. At first he could see only sky, but by looking obliquely through it, he caught glimpses of fallen wall, broken vehicle, shifting ash.

‘But we can’t go back.’

‘There must be something here.’

‘No Ankhani. They’ve all crossed over.’

The landscape was barren. Devoid of anything, living or dead, and ground down through aeons of wear that the highest relief was a small hill. Perhaps once it had been a mountain to rival Everest: now it was only a pimple on a plain.

Adams looked around for a second time. ‘We need to get to the Cathedral.’

‘The what?’

‘The place where they took Jack for his… changing. It’s a sort of building.’

‘Where is it?’

‘If we climb the hill, we can see it.’

The Ankhani sky was populated by dim, blood red suns, exhausted to the point of collapse. Thacker nodded. ‘Be lucky to see anything in this light.’

‘You get used to it.’

‘I’m sorry, Adams. I thought what I did was best. I wasn’t going to let those monsters take us.’

Adams kicked the ground. ‘I meant what I said, although I suppose we can have a look, see what we can find.’

‘Thank you.’

Thacker had been an army officer for a long time, long enough for most of the people he knew to be in the army or connected with it in some way. People who were used to either giving orders or being ordered. Adams was neither to him, and it was Adams who had realised it first.

So they walked side by side up the hill, and from the top they could see in the distance a tall spire that seemed to grow straight from the blighted ground.

‘I take it that’s it.’

‘There were Ankhani there, in the shadows. They didn’t interfere with us, mind. Just looked on.’ Adams’ expression showed he’d rather go anywhere than that grotesque building. ‘I don’t know why. They could have killed us a hundred times over.’

‘Second guessing these things is pointless. They do what they do because they want to.’ Thacker gazed at the spire. ‘Or they have to: biological imperative and all that.’

They kicked dust as they walked, Thacker’s stride becoming increasingly weary.

‘When we were here before, Master Robert thought we might be a very long way from home. He couldn’t recognise any of the stars in the sky. Have your astronomers found their planet?’

‘They’re your astronomers, too, Adams. No, I don’t think so. I don’t even know if this place should exist. The sky back home is full of bright stars, wherever you look, however far away you look. Here, it’s dead. Like we’re at the very end of time itself.’ Thacker looked up again at the dying light. ‘Einstein said space and time were the same thing, that one was just an expression of the other. I suppose, there might be some part of the universe like this◦– the first to be created would be the first to dissolve back into the void.’

‘Some Eden,’ snorted Adams.

‘Perhaps they fell further than your name-sake.’

They had arrived at the cathedral. It was fantastically tall, stretched like Jack Henbury to be a hideous parody of what it faintly resembled. Walls flowed like molten skin, arches stretched like strands of mucus, the dark spaces breathed in restless sleep.

‘We went in,’ said Adams, seeing Thacker hesitate.

‘You’re a braver man than me.’

‘That might be so, but it’s a long way to come for nothing.’ He stepped over the threshold, and let his eyes accustom to the gloom.

Thacker held his rifle ready, and reluctantly joined him.

Inside, it only had the semblance of darkness. Thacker found that he could see rather well. The walls themselves seemed to ooze weak light like a cave sweats beads of moisture. There were no shadows: only his and Adams’ bodies were formless because they were unlit.

In the first large hall, they found Jack’s instrument of torture, a great shining metal wall streaked with blood and excrement, tears and sweat.

As Thacker looked up at it, Adams spoke quietly in his ear. ‘Would you do it? Would you give yourself up to pain like you never knew before, just to save England?’

‘If it was the only way? I don’t know. But we haven’t got eighty years. We need something that’ll work now.’ And Thacker was glad that he didn’t have to step up to the wall and let it tear him apart as it turned him into a god.

Adams went to look in another aisle, and came back shortly to report: ‘You’d better take a look at this.’

What he found was the junkyard of millennia. Everything the Ankhani had ever used and exhausted, they seemed to have thrown away here. It stretched, a pile of jumble tossed against one long wall, forever. Most of it had turned to dust, but there were objects embedded in that dust, shapes of promise and warning like bones in a grave.

Thacker chose at random, and dipped his hand in. He came out with a deeply corroded metal bar, as thick as his finger in some places, and pitted to within a hair’s breadth of snapping in others.

‘This is hopeless,’ he said. ‘We could search from now until Doomsday and not cover a tenth of this.’ He threw the bar back, and watched as it fell into the dust and was instantly lost.

‘Then we look somewhere else,’ said the ever-practical Adams. ‘Somewhere we can see what we’re looking at.’

‘But what if it’s here? The very thing we’re looking for?’

‘You’ll have to pray it’s not.’

‘Damn you, Adams!’

‘Damn you too. I never wanted to come here. I would rather have taken my chances with the monsters and had an end to it all.’

Thacker put his hand to his head. It was still bleeding, and he wondered how much blood he’d lost. He felt awful; tired beyond belief, unable to string two thoughts together without the utmost concentration, and above all, weak. ‘We have to try, man. It’s what makes us who we are.’

‘Then get up, Major. Get up and try.’

Thacker realised he’d slumped to his knees. He used the rifle to lever himself upright, and staggered off like a drunkard.

They walked through the vast spaces of the cathedral, looking at the heaps of aeons-old debris, scattering some, leaving others, despairing always.

Then at the moment they thought it useless, they came to an armoury.

At first, they didn’t know what it was: a space, like all the others, different but the same, but this time with massive stone sarcophagi on the ground. The tapered boxes were thick with dust, time having smoothed the edges and erased any symbols.

‘These are huge,’ said Thacker, putting down his rifle and running his hands over the lid of the first one.

‘Shaped like coffins,’ said Adams. ‘Are you sure you want to open one?’

‘No. But this is the only thing we’ve found that hasn’t crumbled to dust.’ He put his shoulder to it, and made no impression.

Adams joined him, and they strained together. The lid moved a fraction.

‘Again,’ said Thacker, ‘we have to push harder.’

It moved again, enough to get the rifle butt in and use it as a lever. Thacker hardly dared look at the contents before the lid was off completely, but he caught glimpses of dull metal in familiar shapes below.

The lid teetered and slipped. It fell with a huge concussion, and split in two ragged halves.

They waited for the cloud of disturbed dust to die down, and looked over the rim.

‘In those days,’ quoted Thacker, ‘giants dwelt in the land.’

Inside the sarcophagus was a suit of armour that Goliath might have worn. Bigger than that, even: Thacker could barely lift the sculpted helmet from the tomb.

‘If you thought you could wear that and fight Jack, you’re wrong.’ Adams picked up a spear resting by the suit, and almost toppled backwards.

Thacker put the helmet down on one of the other boxes and inspected it. It had a visor he could move, on which was carved a stylised face◦– noble, straight nose, high and sharp cheeks, a mouth curved like a bow and framed with a curled beard. Yet the space inside was small. His head would be a snug fit.

He reached back down for one of the segmented gauntlets. Again, the outside was huge, a giants’ hand. Inside, he would barely able to wriggle his fingers.

‘Get everything out,’ he said. ‘I think I know what this is.’

Adams sighed, and started emptying the sarcophagus. ‘You have to be joking. This breastplate is as big as a table.’

‘Remember the myths and fables? Where a mere man fights dragons and Cyclops and half-men, half-beasts? The heroes of old? Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Jason? Gilgamesh, even. This isn’t a suit of armour for a giant. This is a suit of armour for a hero.’

‘That bang on your head has sent you crazy.’

‘Help me put it on.’

‘It’s a trap. Everything these monsters ever made was a trap. Like the machine. Just like the machine.’

‘I’m sorry, Adams. I have to see what happens, and I’d rather it was me than you.’

‘No. You’ll turn into something terrible.’ Adams brought up his gun. ‘You can’t do that to me.’

Thacker stood still. ‘Do we have a choice?’

Adams swallowed hard. Eventually, the barrel of his gun wavered, then dipped. ‘All those heroes came to a sticky end. They did things that weren’t right, even though they started out good. They ended up bad.’

‘It just has to hold together long enough for me to take on Jack. That’s all. I’ve no dreams of divinity.’

Adams dropped his rifle. ‘Then I won’t be needing that anymore. When we’ve done you, and if it works as you think, then getting another lid off shouldn’t be a problem at all.’

He started at the feet, kicking off his own army boots and pulling on the heavy footwear from the base of the sarcophagus. They made him look ridiculous, great outsized things like he was off for a fortnight’s skiing. He could barely lift his legs in them.

‘This is all wrong. It’s not going to work.’

‘Shut up and stand still. A few moments of feeling daft won’t hurt.’ Adams offered up a piece of leg armour to Thacker’s shin and it almost fitted itself, tripping catches that locked it onto the top of the boot. ‘See?’

Slowly, British Army khaki gave way to dull Persian bronze. He was encased in metal: arms, legs, chest, each segment slipping into place and holding itself fast.

Finally, the helmet, which would add almost another foot to his height.

‘Do you feel any different?’ asked Adams.

‘I feel wretched. We’ve wasted all this time, and Jack’s still moving towards Banbury. He could be there by now.’

Adams stood on tiptoe and let the helmet slide down onto the neck ring. It clicked.

‘How about now?’ he said.

Thacker was scared to move. If he fell over, Adams wouldn’t have the strength to lift him up, and would have to spend the next few hours working out how to get him out again.

He took a tentative step, no more than a shuffle. He jumped like his feet had springs. He hit a wall, and on trying to recover, span and reached out for the edge of the stone sarcophagus. It shattered in his grasping hands.

Adams was cowering in a corner. ‘Stop, Major, stop!’

Thacker gained control of the armour that seemed to amplify and exaggerate every move he made. Carefully, he picked up the sarcophagus lid that it had taken the two of them to painfully lever off, and threw it. It sailed through the air and crashed onto the floor, snapping in two uneven pieces with the force of the impact.

‘That does it,’ he said. His voice was distorted in his ears, shouted out through the mouthpiece of the visor loud enough to make the chamber ring.

Adams got to his feet and approached in awe. ‘Bugger me,’ he said, ‘It does work.’

‘I have to go and fight Jack. Now.’

‘But what about me? We’ll need both of us.’

‘The army will shoot me on sight, and you too, if you’re in this get-up. I need you as you are, to vouch for me.’

‘You said…’

‘I didn’t. You assumed, and I didn’t tell you otherwise. You’ve gone through too much, Adams, you’ve fought your battle and you’ve survived. I’m not asking you to do any more than to get me to Jack.’

‘But I want to!’

‘I know. But I won’t let you, and now, you can’t stop me. I’m going back, and I’m assuming that you don’t want to stay here.’ Thacker reached out and, as gently as he could, lifted Adams up off the ground with one hand. The metal armour creaked softly. With his other hand he picked up the spear and the shield that was as big as the Round Table.

He put Adams on his shoulder, where the man clung like a child, and then he started to run like he had never run before. He passed in two steps through rooms that previously had seemed endless, moving so fast that everything was a blur. Adams’ thin scream trailed out behind them like a wisp of smoke.

Out, out of the cathedral, running like his feet were on fire, up to the hill then a change in direction to head for the tiny circle of tantalising blue sky in the distance.

At some point, Adams managed to draw breath. He hit Thacker on the helmet with the flat of his hand in an attempt to attract his attention. Thacker became aware of the annoyance and slowed to a halt just before the door.

‘What? What is it?’

‘It’s starting already, Major. You’re forgetting who you are. And you’re not like Jack. You can be hurt in this armour. Before you go through, you need a plan: a good plan, mind.’

The hero’s suit of armour seemed to accelerate everything except his mind. Adams was right. He had to think first. He had to assume that he wasn’t indestructible.

‘The Land Rover is still on the machine, and the back of it is still full of grenades. I’ll set fire to the fuel tank, and that should give us enough time to get away. Then on to Jack.’

‘What about the Ankhani?’

‘I don’t know. I should be able to hold them off with these.’ He brandished his weapons.

‘I was thinking more about me. There are a lot of them. One touch, remember.’

Think, Thacker, think. ‘Climb on my back. Hold on. It’s the best I can do.’

‘The old Major would have cared more.’ Adams clambered up and stretched his arms around Thacker’s massive neck. He could just about grip his own wrists, but there was little purchase lower down. The metal was too slick, and his feet slid off.

‘You can’t do it.’ Thacker was impatient, and he caught himself resenting Adams. ‘You’ll have to get further up.’

When Adams was sitting astride the armour’s shoulders and clinging to the stylised crown on top of the carved helmet, he was satisfied.

‘Ready?’

‘Don’t turn your head quickly, Major. I’ll fall.’

Thacker ignored the man’s warning. He shifted the spear to his right hand and put his left forearm through the straps on the shield. The lion design on the face of it saw the light of day for the first time in four thousand years as it led the way back to Henbury Hall.