The Final Nexus – Chapter Twelve

The Final Nexus – Chapter Twelve

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The four riders watched us coming towards them for a few moments and then turned and disappeared from the top of the ridge, and for a moment I wondered if Khan’s entire army might be drawn up on the far side waiting for us. In Xan’s place I’d have sent a couple of riders ahead to scout it out first or, better still, stayed exactly where I was until I’d called up a spotter to have a look at what might be waiting for us. But Xan obviously didn’t work that way, because we rode on until we reached the crest, and there ahead of us was a shallow valley with a wood on one slope, and the four riders were cantering away along its floor, though not at any great speed.

“Come on!” shouted Xan, heading after them.

“Wait!” I yelled, as loudly as I could. “Stop! It’s a trap!”

“Huh?” said Xan, reining in. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s a trap,” I said again. “I think there are more of them hiding in the woods.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because it happens in almost every film I’ve ever seen,” I said. “A small group of men sucker a much larger group into chasing them and then spring an ambush. That wood is ideal for it.”

“What’s a film? What are you talking about?” asked Xan, impatiently.

“He’s right,” said Dec, who had removed his helmet and handed it to Sam. “I’m pretty sure there are people in there. Give me a minute to get my breastplate off and maybe I’ll be able to see for sure.”

“Why do you want to take your breastplate off?” asked Vanya.

“Because I can’t see properly with it on… Jake, give me a hand, will you?”

By now it was clear that the rest of the band thought we’d gone mad, because obviously this sounded insane to them. We hadn’t told anyone about Dec’s abilities, and although the scan that had been done when we first arrived had picked up that he had a pretty impressive amount of brain-power, it hadn’t found out what he could do with it.

Between us we got his breastplate off, and I held it while he stared at the wood.

“Call a spotter up,” I said. “Look, trust me, Xan – if we go down there we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“Scared?” asked Marie, scornfully.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I’m scared that as soon as we’re alongside that wood about fifty guys with rifles are going to pop out of it and blow us all to hell.”

“Infantry with firearms don’t attack cavalry,” Miroslav said. “It’s bad form.”

“All right, so maybe it’s cavalry, not infantry,” I said. “After all, there are only four guys down there – where are the rest of their band? Call a spotter and let’s see what’s in the wood.”

“Well… all right,” said Xan, and he raised his wrist radio and spoke into it.

“We’re at 4644, 1755,” Vanya told him, consulting the device on his saddle.

Xan repeated the co-ordinates into his radio. Below us the four riders had stopped and trotted a short way back towards us, making what were clearly abusive gestures and shouting insults at us, and for a moment I thought Xan was going to react by attacking. But he held himself in check. And then one of the four riders removed his helmet, revealing long blond hair, and then undid his tunic – they weren’t wearing breastplates - revealing that he wasn’t a he at all: she flaunted her breasts at us and called us a host of insulting names, suggesting that we didn’t have a penis between us and wouldn’t know what to do with it if we did. Once again Xan bristled beside me, and if he had been straight it might have been impossible to hold him back, but as it was he responded to my shout of “Wait!” And then Declan said “Thank you very much” under his breath, and suddenly the situation in the valley changed.

The blond girl dropped her helmet, drew her sword and hit the rider next to her with a great backhand swing using the flat of the blade, and it caught him full in the face and swept him from his horse. Next she turned and yelled “Now!” in the direction of the wood, and finally she threw herself at the third rider and dragged him from his horse.

“There are two bands of riders in the wood,” Declan reported. “I’d guess that right now they don’t know whether to stay or come out, but if they do come out we’re going to be seriously outnumbered.”

“How do you know?” asked Xan.

“The blond girl just told me, sort of. Trust me, Xan, we don’t want to go down there.”

The blond girl and the third rider were still rolling around in the grass fighting, until she managed to knock his helmet off, and at that point they stopped fighting each other, stood up and advanced on the fourth rider, who understandably decided he didn’t want any more of this: he rode straight into the wood. And a minute or so later he rode out again with several other riders behind him. At that point Xan gave the order for us to fall back, and we headed back the way we had come.

A minute later a spotter droned over our heads, and a few seconds after that Xan’s wrist radio told us that there were around thirty enemy riders in the valley, but that they seemed to be very disorganised.

“All right,” said Xan, when we were safely out of range, “who’s going to tell me what happened back there?”

“We’d like to talk to you privately about it when we get back,” I said. “There are a couple of things you need to know.”

We paused for long enough to allow Dec to put his breastplate on again – I was damned if I was going to carry it all the way back for him – and then we rode the rest of the way back to the crawler. Xan handed his horse over to one of the ground crew and told me and Dec to do the same, and then he led us up to Deck Two to report our findings. Dec and I waited outside the control room while he made his report, and then he took us to a larger room at the back of the control room.

“This is the general’s briefing room,” Xan told us. “So brief me: how did you know there was an ambush back there?”

“Well, I thought it was suspicious from the start,” I said. “Just four riders, cantering away at an easy pace – if it had been me faced with superior numbers like that I’d have been galloping flat out. And that wood was just too suspicious. You must have thought that yourself… didn’t you?”

“Well, not really,” he admitted. “Like I told you, I haven’t had my own band for very long, and maybe I’m not as careful as I should be. So it’s a good thing we recruited you two, isn’t it? But what was all that other performance? Why did the girl suddenly attack her own friends?”

“Because she wasn’t wearing a helmet any longer,” I said. “Look, Xan, you know we’re from a different world? Well, Dec isn’t exactly like the rest of us: he’s from a completely different race, in fact, and he can do stuff that you and I can’t. He can see what other people are thinking, and he can make them do what he wants them to as well.”

“What, just by looking at them? Pull the other one!”

“Is anyone likely to walk in on us?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“Go on, Dec, show him,” I said.

We’d all left out breastplates and helmets in the stable, and so there was nothing to hold Dec back. And so Xan stood up and stripped naked.

“See?” asked Dec, releasing him.

“How the hell did you do that?” demanded Xan, reaching for his undergarment.

“I just can, just like I made that rider turn on her friends.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it makes people nervous,” I said. “In his own world people are terrified of Dec’s people, and we didn’t want people here reacting the same way. So we’ve been keeping quiet about it.”

“Obviously I’d never use it against my friends,” put in Dec. “But it still makes people a bit wary of me, and I wanted to avoid that. Everyone’s been really good to me since I got here and I didn’t want anything to change.”

“I can understand why it scares people, anyway,” said Xan, doing up his belt once more. ”I don’t suppose you can imagine how it feels not to be in control of your own body. It’s terrifying.”

“I can, though,” I said. “Dec’s done that to me, too, and he wasn’t the first, either. But we’re still friends and I’d still trust him with my life. You can use his abilities, Xan: he’s on our side, remember?”

“I know, but… the others are going to ask questions, you know. They’re not stupid: they know you had something to do with that girl going mad. But what did you mean about her taking her helmet off?”

“I have a problem with metal,” Dec told him. “We all do. Metal anywhere on the body is a major problem, but metal on the head beats us every time. Get the enemy to take their helmets off and I’ll be able to sabotage them completely, but I can’t touch them while they’re in full armour. And the same thing happens when I’m wearing armour myself: it interferes with my control. On the other hand, I don’t want to find myself out there without armour on: it’s dangerous enough as it is. So I’ll only be able to do my stuff if I’m somewhere safe enough to take the armour off first, and if the enemy aren’t wearing any. So maybe I’m not as much use as all that after all.”

“There might be a way around that,” said Xan. “Our ancestors used armour made of lacquered leather, and there’s certainly still some on board. If we can find you some you wouldn’t have to wear metal at all, but you’d still be well protected. It’ll be a bit heavier than metal, but I expect you’ll manage. What do you think?”

“I think it’s worth a try,” said Dec.

“Of course, you’d look different from the rest of us,” Xan went on, “and so the enemy would probably think you’re an officer. They might try harder to kill you than the rest of us.”

“Then I’ll have to hide in the middle of you somewhere,” said Dec. “I might as well, for all the good I’ll do with a lance.”

“Right, then, I’ll see what I can find. Now you ought to go and rest. It’ll be dark soon, and we don’t send mounted units out at night. Generally both sides simply hold their positions during the hours of darkness; but of course we’ll have some pickets out in case Khan decides to cheat. So go and rest until supper. I’ll join you as soon as I’ve looked into the armour thing.”

Dec and I got up and started to make our way back to the accommodation area.

“Tell me something,” I said. “When the girl got her sword out… why didn’t you make her kill the other guy instead of using the flat bit of the blade?”

“I’ve never killed anyone yet, and I didn’t want to start then. Maybe that’s stupid in a war, but…” And he shrugged. “I didn’t need to kill him, anyway: we got what we needed by just causing some confusion. And as long as I can get the results that way I will. I’m happy to leave the killing to the others.”

“I agree completely,” I said. “But if we get involved in a proper action…”

Of course, I had killed before: the grenade I had thrown at the sleeping Grey soldiers would certainly have killed some of them, and for all I knew I might have killed more with my rifle, both at the Hub and later at the bridge over the Rhine in Torth’s world. But I thought that unlikely, given my shooting ability, and in any case it was harder to think of the Greys as ‘people’ in quite the same way. Khan’s troops were clearly human and I had no wish to kill any of them.

“Let’s worry about that if it happens,” he said, firmly.

Supper was rather boisterous: obviously we weren’t the only band to have been out this afternoon, and some of the others had engaged the enemy in a couple of minor actions, and as a result there was a lot of shouting and cheering going on. I felt rather less enthusiastic, and I was actually hoping we’d be held back until our next inside rota came up the following evening. I didn’t say so in so many words, but when we settled down for the night Xan was clearly aware of how I felt.

“How long does this sort of engagement usually go on?” I asked.

“That depends. When there were more crawlers in the vicinity someone would generally make a temporary alliance or two, and then the weaker side would generally withdraw. But here, where there isn’t anyone else, this could go on for days, until one of us decides we’ve lost too many men. When that happens one side will withdraw.”

“And how many is too many?”

Xan shrugged. “We don’t know how many they had to start with. Remember that a lot of the wounded will be regenerated, so unless someone is killed outright they’ll be back again in a few days’ time, depending how badly they’ve been hurt.”

“Can’t we just try to attack their crawler direct?”

“That’s difficult. The crawlers usually stay out of range of each other’s main armaments, unless one of the generals is desperate enough to try launching a head-on attack, but that hardly ever happens. And there isn’t much else that can damage a crawler seriously enough for it to matter. Even crashing our spotters into it doesn’t do any serious harm, unless we could actually fly one into their control room, and you can bet there are plenty of guns there to prevent that. I’ve tried doing it to our own crawler during drills, and I’ve never got close.

“Besides, the real point is to test each other’s forces and to prove we’re better than them. Of course it would be amazing if we could knock their crawler out, but really, at least for us riders, it’s about showing how good we are, and how much better than Khan’s lot. And tomorrow we’ll get another chance to prove it.”

“Is it all right for us to use Dec’s abilities, then? Doesn’t that count as cheating?”

“Of course not! We’re entitled to use any means we can – after all, today they were trying to lure us into a place where we would have been outnumbered, and you could say that that wasn’t very sporting, either. No, we can use any method we like, just as long as we win.”

He paused for a moment.

“There is one thing you could do if you’re still a bit nervous about fighting,” he said. “There’s a tradition of it right across the Great Horde. See, there are some soldiers who fight best when they’re drunk. They say that once you’ve had a few drinks you don’t stop to worry about what might happen: instead you just want to get out there and start killing the enemy. Some of the older guys say they fight better when they’re drunk. Or some use a sort of drug called bhang to get them in the mood for fighting. I’ve never tried either myself – well, you know I don’t mind a drink when we’re relaxing in the evening, but I’ve never used it to get ready for a battle – but if you want to try either method I can fix it up really easily.”

I thought about it for a couple of seconds. Yes, maybe in one way it would be good to be so completely intoxicated that I didn’t care what happened, but on the other hand I was sure it would be better if I kept my wits about me.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve only been drunk once, and that was quite enough.”

Two weeks previously we’d finally got around to playing cards with alcoholic forfeits. Before joining the Horde I had hardly ever touched alcohol at all, and although the evening itself had been a lot of fun, the way I felt the following morning was more than enough to put me off alcohol for life.

“Good. I mean, I’m happy for you to do whatever works best for you, but I’d prefer it if you can think straight. If you hadn’t done that this afternoon we might all have been killed. So I suppose I owe you my life, Jake. Whatever could I do to say thank you?” And he grinned at me suggestively.

One thing about the Horde that I liked a lot was their extremely easy-going attitude to sex. I’d thought Elsass and Kerpia relaxed enough, but here nobody seemed to get embarrassed about sex at all, despite the fact that there wasn’t a lot of privacy in our living accommodation: we could hear other couples easily enough through the curtains and, as I’d found out the first time we did anything, they could hear us, too. And nobody seemed to care.

It was, as I’d said to Sam, quite different from having a serious relationship: sex here was more or less a recreational activity with no strings attached. I liked Xan a lot, and he fairly obviously liked me too, but if Stefan had walked through the door I’d have walked away from Xan without a second thought. But as things were I was happy to have some fun with Xan, and so on this occasion I was delighted to suggest a number of ways in which he could say thank you, and by the time we’d worked our way through those I was so tired that I slept through the rest of the night with no trouble at all.

Next morning at breakfast we got our orders, and my heart sank when I heard them: we were going to take part in a large attack in force towards the enemy crawler. This didn’t sound particularly clever to me: after all, Khan would be sure to have spotters out, and so long before we got anywhere near his crawler he’d have mobilised a large force of his own. But then if the idea was to allow the soldiers on both sides the maximum opportunity to prove that they were better than their opposite numbers, this strategy would work perfectly. It would also get a lot of them killed, but nobody seemed to be worrying about that.

After we had eaten we got changed into our riding kit and made our way to the stable to get our armour on and mount up. The stable was chaotically busy this morning: it looked as if every horse in the place was going out, and there were people milling about everywhere. I thought that if Khan could fly a suicide spotter into the stable right now he could probably kill about a third of our soldiers in one go. But either he hadn’t thought of that, or he’d decided it would be unsporting, or ‘bad form’, as Miroslav had put it the previous day.

While the rest of us were getting our breastplates on, Xan took Dec into a small room at the back of the stable, and Dec re-emerged looking like a Chinese warlord from the Middle Ages: he was wearing a jacket of overlapping leather plates that came down to his thighs and a leather helmet with flaps that fell to his shoulders.

“I don’t know what this looks like,” he said, “but it’s damned heavy. Still, it’s what I need: now I won’t need to get undressed every time I want to do anything.”

We mounted up and rode outside, and there we formed up into a large unit, with other bands around us and, I was pleased to see, ahead of us: when we met the enemy we wouldn’t be in the front rank. Xan seemed less happy about this, but I suppose most of the other band leaders were senior to him and so would have claimed the honour of dying first. Well, obviously none of them thought they were going to die: I seemed to be the only one who was thinking that way.

We rode away from the crawler at a walk, moving up to a trot once everyone had settled into position, and I was pleased to see a number of spotters flying ahead of us: it would be difficult to ambush a unit of this size, but clearly the general was taking precautions anyway.

We rode on steadily for some time. Sometimes the unit had to break up to pass natural features such as woods and steep slopes, and each time this happened I got nervous, expecting an ambush. But nothing happened, and in each case the unit was able to reform once the piece of woodland had been passed.

Still there was no sign of the enemy, and my hopes began to rise: perhaps Khan had moved away during the night. But then there came a shout from the unit in front of us, and looking past them I saw a crawler partly hidden by a wood around a mile ahead of us.

“Surely he’s not going to let us ride up to his crawler unchallenged?” I asked.

“No,” Xan said. “I think he wants us to be in range of his secondary armament, but he won’t let us get closer than that without a fight.”

And, sure enough, a minute or so later a roar went up from our front rank, and I saw enemy cavalry coming towards us.

To say that I felt scared would be an understatement, and for a moment I wished I’d taken Xan up on his offer to let me get drunk or to take a dose of bhang. I was afraid I was going to disgrace myself completely by turning tail, and how I forced myself to keep station next to Xan was beyond me. Then Xan’s wrist radio crackled into life and he yelled at us to wheel left.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Captain Altay wants us to try to flank them. Our front rank will take them head-on, and we’re to wheel and come at them from the side. If it works we’ll smash right through them.”

“And if they see us coming?”

He grinned at me. “Then it’ll be more interesting.”

Obviously I was no expert, but this seemed like a good plan to me, especially since our wheeling movement took us out of sight of the enemy behind a stretch of woodland. Our band and two others were making the attempt, and as we emerged from the far side of the wood we wheeled right and closed up. The enemy were a couple of hundred yards dead ahead now, and at first they didn’t seem to have seen us. By the time they did it was almost too late, because their front rank was already piling into ours, and the cries from behind them did no more than distract them. The second and third ranks of their unit wheeled to face us, but as we hit them we were moving at the charge and they were almost stationary.

I really didn’t want to kill anyone. My only real objective here was to stay alive myself, and so I was concentrating far more on what I did with my shield than with my lance, because I didn’t really care if my lance hit anyone else, as long as their lance didn’t hit me. And so of course my lance hit somebody’s shield full on, and the shock of the impact, which I really hadn’t trained for, unbalanced me completely, and I fell off my horse. I managed to kick my feet free of the stirrups, but I landed heavily on my back, winding myself.

I staggered to my feet a few seconds later. I wasn’t sure where my horse was because there was fighting going on all around me. My shield was still strapped to my left forearm and I still had my sword, which was hanging from my belt, so I pulled it out of its scabbard and then looked around, trying to see my friends. There were a few other unhorsed riders staggering about, some clutching injuries but one or two looking no more damaged than I was, and I tried to steer clear of them. I was lucky in that the third rank enemy unit we had piled into were young teenagers like ourselves, but I still didn’t fancy taking any of them on one-on-one if it could be avoided.

And then I saw something that made me change my mind: a short distance ahead of me Sam, who had not only come off his horse but who had also apparently lost his sword, was being attacked by a tall boy wielding some sort of scimitar. Sam still had his shield and was doing his best to block the attacks, but that scimitar was a heavy weapon and already the shield was showing signs of breaking. So I ran at the tall soldier and slammed my shield into his face, and he staggered a couple of paces away and fell over.

“Are you all right?” I asked Sam.

He nodded breathlessly.

“You’d better find a sword,” I said. “If we stick together…”

I broke off, because out of the corner of my eye I saw the scimitar guy coming back. I swung my sword towards him, intending to warn him off, but I’d misjudged how fast he was coming, because instead of merely threatening him my sword crunched into his ribs. He gave a gasp, the scimitar dropped from his hand and he staggered a bit and then fell over.

“Oh, shit!” I said, dropping to my knees beside him and trying to find a way to stop the bleeding. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean… oh, fuck…”

I dragged the boy’s belt off and did it up again around his chest, using it to try to keep the wound closed, but he was struggling to breathe and I was afraid I’d punctured a lung. And then I looked up and saw a large man with a beard rushing towards me waving a sword.

I struggled to my feet, picking up my own sword and thinking that I might as well have grabbed a blade of grass for all the good it was going to do me against this guy. And then a couple of paces before he reached me the man was suddenly swept off to one side, caught on a lance.

“Keep your guard up, Jake!” advised Ilse, grinning at me from the saddle as she pulled her lance free from the man’s body. “I might not be here next time!” And she rode on.

I took a deep breath and started looking for a way out of this area. But in fact the fighting seemed to be moving away, and by the time Sam came to join me – and he’d found a sword from somewhere, though he said he wasn’t much good at sword-fighting – most of the enemy seemed to have disappeared. There were quite a few dead and wounded around us, but there seemed to be far more wearing the dark blue of Khan’s forces than the red of ours.

A couple of minutes later Xan came trotting towards us, the bulk of his band still with him

“Still alive, Jake?” he queried.

“Thanks to Ilse,” I said. “You haven’t seen my horse, I suppose?”

“Over there,” he said, nodding off to my left, and sure enough, there was my horse, quietly nibbling at the grass. They obviously trained their horses really well, because I’d expected it to be miles away by now. I jogged over and led her back.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we regroup and wait for orders. I think we’re on top at this end of the line, but I hear Khan’s doing better in the centre, so we’ll probably be sent in to help there shortly.”

I looked around. There were a number of other horses standing around, presumably the mounts of the dead and wounded blue-clad riders lying around us. And then I looked up at the enemy crawler, less than half a mile away, and I had an idea. I wasn’t sure if it would work, and it would certainly be dangerous, but it still seemed to be to be preferable to getting involved in cavalry warfare again: next time I probably wouldn’t be as lucky.

Dec had somehow managed to stay on his horse throughout the battle so far, so I told him in Arvelan what I was thinking and asked whether he thought my plan would work.

“Probably,” he said. “Provided we don’t run into too many of them at the same time, and that they’re not wearing armour, of course.”

“I don’t think they’ll be wearing any inside the crawler,” I said. “Let’s see what Xan thinks.”

I gave the reins of my horse to Dec and drew Xan a short distance away from the others.

“I think I’ve got a way to end this,” I said. “If we disguise ourselves in their uniforms I think we can get inside their crawler, and if we can do that I think I know how to win this war.”

“It won’t work,” he said. “We always have sentries on the ramps to stop the enemy doing just this. If we don’t know the password, we’ll never get inside. And even if we do get inside the deck-master will know straight away that we don’t belong there, and he’ll raise the alarm.”

“Not if Dec tells him not to,” I pointed out. “And the same goes for the sentries.”

“The sentries will be in armour,” Xan objected.

“Dec!” I shouted. “Could you ask one of their wounded what today’s password is, please?”

He nodded, got off his horse, found an enemy who was still conscious and bent over him for a moment.

“’One Fat Buffalo’,” he announced.

“Well?” I asked. “Is it worth a try?”

“You’ll never get into the control room,” Xan told me. “It’s always kept locked from the inside during combat, and even if we did get in there’ll be guards in there, probably in armour – but even if they’re not, how many can Dec deal with at once?”

“Four, probably,” said Dec, who must have been following the conversation mentally, because he couldn’t possibly have heard Xan’s low voice from where he was standing.

“It doesn’t matter, though,” I said, “because I’m not intending to get into the control room – well, not that way, anyway. Come on, Xan – think how good you’ll look if it works!”

“Think how dead I’ll look if it doesn’t,” he replied. “But… if you really think it’ll work… why not? How many should we take?”

“How many of their horses are there, and how many jackets that aren’t completely soaked in blood? If we can find five or six, that should do.”

We couldn’t find many jackets with no blood on at all, but we mustered five that were just about presentable, so Xan selected Ilse and Miroslav to join himself, me and Dec, leaving Vanya in charge of the band. The enemy wore smart dark blue jackets with fur trimmings that buttoned all the way to the neck, so all we had to do was to remove our breastplates and put the jackets on over our shirts. We replaced our helmets with their rather less ornate ones and selected five uninjured horses. Xan told Vanya to wait for us in the small wood we had wheeled around earlier, and the five of us rode towards the enemy crawler. Like us, the enemy carried automatic rifles on their horses, so we now had everything we would need.

There was quite a lot of traffic as we approached the crawler: small bands of wounded riding back and fresh reinforcements riding out, and that made it a bit easier to look inconspicuous. But when we reached the various ramps leading into the stables we found each one guarded by fully armoured troops. Xan picked a ramp that was comparatively unused and rode confidently forward.

“One fat buffalo,” he announced, before the sentry could even ask, and that did the trick: the man stepped back out of the way and we were able to ride up the ramp into the stable. We dismounted, and at that point an angry-looking man strode towards us.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. “This isn’t your stable.”

“I know,” said Xan. “But it’s chaos in ours, and we need to get in to report. I’m sure you can understand that, can’t you?”

Of course by now Dec was hard at work, and so the deck-master, who wasn’t wearing any armour, quickly agreed that he understood.

“But you’ll need to move them back to your usual stable as soon as it’s clear,” he added. ”Our own riders will need the space as soon as they get back from kicking Lee’s arse.”

“Of course. Thank you,” said Xan, thrusting his reins at one of the ground crew and leading us towards the door that led into the crawler proper.

“How the hell did that happen?” asked Miroslav, as soon as we were through the door. “Is he completely incompetent? We’d never have got away with that in our place!”

“We’ve got a secret weapon,” Xan said. “We’ll tell you about it later, provided that this works. Come on.”

The layout of this crawler was much the same as ours, though the décor was a little different, and some of the corridors seemed a little narrower. Several times we passed other people, most of whom didn’t give us a second glance – I suppose with a crew as large as this it would be impossible for anybody to recognise everyone. A couple of times a challenge did seem imminent, but in both cases Dec persuaded the challenger mentally that there was nothing to worry about, and we were able to continue our progress.

In due course we reached the central staircase, and I led the party right up to the top deck, pausing outside the door that led to the weapons room.

“Get your weapons ready,” I said, preparing my own, “but don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to. The longer we can go without anyone outside this room raising an alarm, the better our chances are. All we want to do at the moment is to take over this room.”

I reached for the door handle, conscious that if it the door was locked we’d be in trouble. But obviously they didn’t think it would be possible for an enemy to get this far without alarms being triggered, because they hadn’t bothered locking the door. Quickly we stepped inside, closing the door behind us and covering everyone in the room with our weapons.

“Everyone, please keep calm,” I said, hoping that Dec was reinforcing that instruction mentally. “If you do as we say nobody will get hurt…”

“Don’t press that,” interrupted Xan, spotting the communication man’s finger straying towards an alarm button. “Stand up slowly and walk to the other side of the room – carefully!”

“Don’t go for that weapon, captain,” put in Dec, pointing his gun at the deck officer. “Take it out of the holster very slowly, put it on the floor and then go and join your colleague by the wall.”

For a moment I thought she was going to disobey, but presumably Dec persuaded her otherwise, because she did as he had told her to. And at that the rest of the dozen or so people in the room seemed to abandon any idea of fighting, too.

We moved them all into the same area and made them sit on the deck. The only one I kept in place was the man sitting at the console for the main armament, and I only kept him there until everyone else had been moved. Then I told him to remove his helmet and stand up.

“I don’t know what you’re hoping to do,” he said, switching off the helmet and removing it, “but it isn’t going to work. I’m the only person who can operate the guns.”

“I don’t think you are,” I said, taking his place at the console and laying my rifle carefully on the floor. I picked up the helmet, put it on carefully and flicked the switch, and the console lit up. And of course the first thing that happened was that a large panel appeared on the screen asking for my crew number.

“See?” said the gunner. “And I’m not going to give it to you, whatever you do to me. I’ll give you three wrong answers, and after you put the wrong information in three times it’ll lock everyone except the general out. So you might as well give up now.”

“Ask him for his crew number, Dec,” I said.

Dec paused for a moment in front of the gunner.

“It’s Green Five One Seven Hyphen Red North Six,” he told me.

The gunner’s jaw dropped open.

“How the hell did you do that?” he demanded.

“Never mind,” said Dec. “Just go and sit down with the others.”

I tapped in the code using the Chinese part of the keyboard, and the panel disappeared and was replaced by the normal targeting box. I took hold of the joystick and swung the weapon round until it was facing straight forward, and then I began to depress it. Immediately the warning alarm went off, and I did as I had inadvertently done during my training: I overruled the failsafe device, turned the alarm off and fired.

This time, of course, the weapon was live, and the shot smashed into the roof towards the front of the deck. The main armament didn’t fire shells: instead if projected balls of energy of some sort. I didn’t know exactly how it worked, and neither, so far as I had been able to find out, did anyone else on my crawler: presumably the aliens had built it, made sure that it worked and then just left the crew to pull the trigger when needed. But, however it worked, it did a hell of a lot of damage. My second shot smashed straight through the armour and exploded at the front of the deck, shattering the window and destroying the captain’s desk.

“This might be a good time to call their control room,” I said to Xan. “Everyone else, stay alert: this is the point at which they might get violent.”

Xan checked that the door was closed and locked and stepped over to the communications desk. After staring at the controls for a few seconds he shrugged and said, “Why don’t you just knock a hole in their ceiling, Jake, and then I won’t need a radio.”

So I fired one more shot, and that duly took out the floor of Deck One, leaving a hole down to Dec Two.

“Hello, General!” yelled Xan, leaning close to the hole. “This is Band-leader Xan Temur, of the Horde of General Lee. We have control of your main armament. Would you like to surrender, or would you prefer us to blow your control room to pieces from above?”

I didn’t hear the reply, because at that moment the door to the spotter control room opened and a man with a pistol charged through it and aimed a shot at Xan, which fortunately missed. Ilse swivelled and shot him, and he fell to the deck. At the same time there came a heavy thump from the door that led back to the stairs.

“Call your men off or we’ll fire again,” Xan yelled.

All that happened was that there was another thump on the door, so I fired again, twice, and there were two loud bangs from below. Smoke started to drift up through the hole, and I hoped I hadn’t set the crawler on fire, because otherwise we’d be in serious trouble.

“That was your last warning!” Xan yelled. ”If you don’t surrender immediately we’ll simply keep firing until we’re hitting the tracks, and then we’ll swivel the guns and blow off the back of the crawler, too. Stop now and you’ll be able to repair it: make us keep going and your horde will cease to exist.”

There was another bang on the door, but this time it was immediately followed by a muffled yell from the deck below. The noises outside the door ceased.

“Very well,” came a shout from the deck below. “I seem to have no choice. I accept.”

“Thank you. Please recall all your troops to the crawler. I’ll arrange for a senior officer to accept your surrender officially. Oh, and bring all your spotters in too, please – and remember than from where we are we can easily check on that.”

“Stay alert,” he said to us, quietly. “It would be extremely bad form if he were to renege on a surrender, but you never know.” He spoke into his wrist radio for some time and then took up position against the wall where he could cover the hole in the deck. The others covered the door to the spotters’ room, the main door and the crew, and I sat at the console, hoping the business could be resolved quickly: if I’d been General Khan I’d have been looking for a way to cut all power to Deck One. If he could do that without disabling the entire crawler we’d be in a serious mess.

“Five minutes,” Xan told us. “Once our crawler is within range it won’t matter what happens here, because if ours has its main armament working and this one doesn’t… and our cavalry will be here sooner than that. If we can hold this deck until they get here we’ll have won.”

“Watch the window,” suggested Dec. “He might think of flying one of the weapon-carrying spotters in here – if he can kill us before our people get here he can still get out of this.”

I don’t know whether Khan didn’t think of that, or of cutting the power, or whether he was more honourable than we suspected, but for whatever reason nothing happened for the next five minutes, or the five minutes after that. And then there was a knock on the door.

“Who is it?” called Xan.

“Captain Altay. You can let me in, Xan – it’s all over out here.”

“Who’s my deputy?” Xan called.

“Vanya Kutuzov.”

“How do you know someone hasn’t got a gun to his head?” I asked, as Xan walked over to the door.

“If they had, he’d have given a wrong answer to warn me. You really are suspicious, aren’t you? I told you, Jake, war is an honourable business: once Khan had surrendered I was fairly sure he’d play fair.”

“’Play fair’? It’s not a game, Xan - we’ve been killing each other all morning!”

“Yes, but only according to the rules of warfare. I don’t think you understand our methods of warfare at all. I guess wars are fought differently where you come from.”

“Yes, they are. It’s true that there are some rules about things like the treatment of prisoners and so on, but even the most civilised countries don’t always obey them, and some countries don’t sign up to the conventions at all. There aren’t any gentlemen’s agreements where I come from, and I don’t think there have been any for about two hundred years.”

“Then I’m glad I don’t live in your world,” said Xan, opening the door.

Captain Altay, a short, dark-haired man with a drooping moustache, walked in, followed by a couple of adult soldiers wearing General Lee’s red colours.

“Nice job,” he said to Xan. “I don’t pretend to know how you did it, but the result can’t be argued with. Any injuries?”

“Not on our side,” said Xan. “And we only had to kill one of them, and he really didn’t give Ilse any choice. It turned out to be a clean operation, which I didn’t think it would be when we started.”

“Well, you can come back to the crawler and tell the general about it. He’s waiting for you.”

“Has everything been signed officially?” asked Xan.

“Yes, it’s all on paper.”

“Then it’s safe to go,” he said. “Thanks, Jake, I think you can turn it off now.”

I switched off the helmet, took it off carefully and put it on the shelf where it belonged and then followed Xan out of the room and back down the stairs. But we only got down one flight before we were intercepted by a middle-aged man in a blue robe. He had black curly hair, and if I’d had to guess I’d have said he was Greek or Italian, even though he now had an Asian name.

“Hell, you’re just kids!” he exclaimed. “How the hell did you manage to walk in here without being challenged?”

“We were lucky, I suppose,” said Xan. “We’re wearing uniforms we took from some of your people, and I suppose we just blended in.”

“There’s more to it than that. You’d have had to get past too many people who would have challenged you… anyway, I must congratulate you: however you did it, it certainly impressed me.”

“Can I ask you something, please, General?” I asked.

“Go ahead.”

“Why didn’t you cut the power to the top deck? That would have left us with no weapon.”

“I couldn’t have done it quickly enough. Either we’d have had to open a lot of panels to find the right junctions, or we’d have had to shut the whole crawler down, and that would have been fatal. If we’d had more time of course that’s what we would have done, but you didn’t give us enough. After all, as your officer said, if you’d kept firing we’d never have been able to repair it. But next time… next time we won’t make the same mistakes!”

Next time? I wondered what terms General Lee had imposed if Khan expected to be able to fight us again in the foreseeable future. And when we got back to our crawler I found out.

“A full truce for six months to give them time to make repairs and a defensive alliance with them if anyone else attacks them during that period,” General Lee told me when I asked.

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. Of course, we’ll stay in the vicinity for a couple of weeks at least, in case we can help them out with any spare parts.”

“But I thought you were enemies!”

“Why would you think that?”

“Well, the fact that we were trying to kill each other influenced my thinking a little!”

“Oh, that’s just practice. We fight each other just to keep our hand in until we find some real enemies. Yes, I know you’re going to object and say that soldiers get killed, but that’s life – and, besides, it’s only the bad ones who get killed. The rest get more skilful. And everyone on board has chosen this: if they didn’t want to fight they’d have left the crawler and put down roots in one of our settlements to raise sheep or cattle. Anyway, tell me how you blew up Khan’s control room with his own guns.”

So we gave him a reasonably full debrief, though of course this meant that we had to tell him at least a bit about Dec’s abilities. We told him about his ability to read minds, but managed not to mention that he could compel people to obey him. We didn’t want the general to see him as a possible rival.

Of course, once the story got about – and it didn’t take long – we were besieged by people wanting to hear about it, and we spent large parts of the afternoon and evening giving them the very basic, modest and Dec-free version, in which we had luckily got past the sentries, flukily not been challenged on our way to Deck One, and had jammily taken the crew of the weapons room by surprise so completely that we were in control almost before they realised that we were there. And of course nobody who didn’t work on our Deck One knew that the weapons were protected by a crew number, and so nobody thought to ask how I’d managed to operate their weapon.

By the time we finally went to bed that evening I just wanted to sleep.

“You’re still not happy about this, are you?” Xan asked as we settled down.

“No, I’m not. I killed someone today… at least, I think I did. And I damn nearly got killed, too, and if Ilse hadn’t been there I would have been. And for what? So you can keep your military skills sharp. I’m sorry, Xan, but it just seems wrong to me.”

“Well, look on the bright side: at least you won’t have to do it again. Now that Khan’s been dealt with we’ll be able to have another try at opening a portal, and if it works you’ll be able to go somewhere else, if that’s what you really want. Of course, I’d prefer it if you decided to stay. I wonder if there’s anything I could do to change your mind?”

“I’m too tired, Xan. Mind you, if you ask me again in the morning I might feel more like it…”

“All right. Sleep well, Jake.”

He gave me a brief hug and settled down, and I started thinking about portals again. Certainly in a lot of ways I’d be sorry to leave this world: I liked the people here very much. But their approach to war seemed to me to be completely insane.

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So Jake has survived his first proper cavalry battle and maybe now he'll be able to slip away into a more peaceful world. Or maybe not: he's got another surprise heading his way.

Feel free to write and tell me what you think of the way the story is progressing. In case you missed the change last week, my address is now gothmog@nyms.net

Copyright 2011: all rights reserved. Please do not reprint, repost or otherwise reproduce this or any part of it anywhere without my written permission.

David Clarke