Wrath of the Lemming-men Read Free Page A

afraid of coward humans.
    ‘I’ll show them cowards,’ Smith said. Something at the side of the pod went clunk – decoys being launched, hopefully, and not the steering vanes falling off – and it shook more than before. Smith checked his rifle again. He felt a little sick.
    The counter was whizzing now, too fast for the eye to take in. Smith thought about Rhianna, a billion miles away, working with the secret service’s psychic department and gone for good from him. Then about the DKR  Clauswitz , the vast UE troop carrier that the Yull had rammed to announce their entry into the war. And then the city of Neustadt: overrun and burned to the ground in the same night. The lemming men had rushed headlong from their forest homeworld deep into human space. They called it the Divine Migration: to everyone else, it was merciless war.
    ‘Final descent commenced,’ said the pod.
    *
    The Marshall of the fort was strutting across the courtyard, axe swinging at his side, when the Ghast advisory officer strode over to meet him.
    ‘ Hup-hup ,’ said the Ghast, out of courtesy.
    ‘ Ak nak!’ the Marshall replied. They switched to English, each finding the other’s language difficult to pronounce.
    ‘I hear that you wish to bring the prisoners into the courtyard,’ the Ghast said, rubbing its antennae together.
    ‘Yes!’ the Marshall puffed out his chest. ‘The General wishes to test his axe. Perhaps he will sacrifice some of the beetle people. Most amusing!’
    The Ghast scowled. The left side of its jaw had been badly burned during the street fighting on New Luton.
    Behind the scars, its malevolent eyes studied the Yullian Marshall with contempt. ‘Your petty sadism is inefficient. Drawing attention to this base with a massacre will result in our secrecy being compromised, and that will not be tolerated. Were the humans to attack—’
    ‘Humans, attack? Ant-soldier, you speak rubbish! They would be stupid enough to want to rescue the captives, but they would not dare try. Offworlders are too cowardly to protect their own, let alone these dung-rolling Kaldathrians. Hahaha! We noble Yull will slaughter all stupid talking insects – er, present company excluded, of course.’
    ‘Foolish. Do not say that you were not warned.’ The Ghast pulled its coat tight around its body, stamped and turned on its heel, rear end bobbing behind it in time with its steps.
    Even they are cowards, the Marshall thought. When Earth is enslaved and the M’Lak dead, we shall turn on the Ghast Empire. They may be mighty, but none can stop the Yu—
    An armoured telephone box dropped out of the sky onto his head, bursting him like a water-bomb. The box fell open and Wainscott sprang from it like a showgirl popping out of a novelty cake, a machine gun blazing in either hand.
    *
    ‘I am a khazi in a hurricane,’ Smith told himself, and the bottom of the pod smacked into something, rocked, stopped, shot straight down ten feet and stopped again.
    He sighed. Well, that hadn’t been too bad. He’d had worse journeys on British Monorail. The window exploded and a spear shot through like a bolt of light.
    Smith threw himself down as it slammed into the head-rest. He yanked the chain and the wall in front of him flew off and hurled the lemming man behind it into a pile of crates. It squeaked feebly and died.
    Smith looked around him. He had landed in a bunkroom, crudely hacked out of the rock. Sunflower seeds lay in a pile on the floor; pictures of what looked like dormice in suggestive poses were pinned up beside the bunks. The drop-pod stood in a shaft of light where it had crashed through the roof, as if sent down from heaven.
    Shadow flicked over the light and a figure dropped onto him. Six feet of rodent hit him in the chest with a ragged screech and Smith staggered back, sprang forward and shouldered the Yull as it fumbled for its axe. Its slim, hard paws swiped at his face – he dodged and the two of them were scrabbling at one another