Wrath of the Lemming-men Read Online Free Page A

and a crowd of beetle-people scuttled out. Wainscott struggled into the courtyard after them, dragging what looked like a pile of fur coats behind him. His knuckles were bloody and split. ‘Good work, Smith!’ he said, dropping his burden on the ground.
    ‘Here’s the General – and a fat bugger he is too. Rather a successful trip so far, don’t you think?’
    ‘Yes, very good. Looks like we cleaned out the whole fort.’
    A grappling hook sailed over the wall. Smith raised his rifle, looked down the sights and waited for the furry head to appear – and thirty more hooks followed it. ‘Oh hell,’ Smith said. ‘They’re climbing the wall!’
    A howl of mingled rage and glee rose up from a thousand voices outside the fort. ‘Bugger,’ Wainscott said.
    ‘Everyone take places and prepare to hold!’
    The first Yull appeared in Smith’s sights. He fired: it squeaked and fell out of view. Beside it two more lemming men popped up, and then the Yull were swarming over the wall, clambering onto the battlements. Smith glanced left, then right, then behind, and saw furry bodies scrambling over the wall on all sides.
    Guns rattled and cracked from the courtyard. The Yull leaped at them from the battlements, unable to resist the urge to jump. ‘That’s a lot of lemmings!’ Wainscott called over the stuttering roar of his gun.
    Smith shouted into the radio. ‘Carveth! Where the devil are you, woman?’
    ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ her voice crackled back. ‘You know what a bugger this ship is to park.’
    Smith had a sudden uncharitable mental image of her, boots up on the console, leafing through Custom Model , reading ‘My boyfriend ran off with my RAM upgrade’.
    Howling war cries and waving axes the Yull poured in from all sides. Smith aimed his pistol and put one down at twenty yards; the next got five yards closer before he dropped it, the third reached ten. . .
    ‘Soon they will be upon us!’ Suruk declared, twirling his spear.
    ‘Smith,’ Wainscott called, ‘where’s our transport gone?’
    ‘Up there!’ Smith said, pointing, and in a rush of engines the John Pym dropped down as if from the sun itself, the hold door open. Behind it, a medical ship, specially armed.
    Lemming men rained down around them from the walls. Suruk killed two with his spear.
    The Pym landed, legs creaking under its weight, and Carveth ran down the ramp.
    ‘Did you find them?’ she shouted over the engines.
    ‘Yes,’ Smith shouted back. The beetle people were climbing into the medical ship, supporting one another.
    He saw that several were missing legs and fury rushed through him like an electric charge. ‘Bastards,’ he snarled, and he raised the rifle to shoot another lemming dead.
    Wainscott’s men were pulling back to the ships, closing in as they neared the ramp. The Yull fell like a breaking wave, covering the courtyard in fur. But they kept coming.
    Carveth yanked Smith’s sleeve. ‘Let’s get the sodding hell out of here!’
    ‘Are you deranged?’ Suruk demanded as he bounded up the ramp, pulling his trolley behind him. ‘They have hardly reached us yet!’
    Three minutes later, the Empire sent in a formation of Hornet light bombers and blew Fortress Theodore to bits.
    An hour and a half after that the John Pym reached the Fifteenth Fleet, slipped between the great dreadnoughts and docked with the transport ship Edward Stobart . It took half an hour before they were cleared to open the hatches, allegedly owing to bioweapon quarantine procedures but really, Smith suspected, because the dockers had lost the paperwork.
    Smith leaned back in the captain’s chair, sipping his tea as he watched the warships drifting round the Pym like sleeping whales. He had hoped to see some Hellfires dart between them, but only a post shuttle trundled from one craft to another. After a while the boarding light turned green and at the airlock they said goodbye to the Deepspace Operations Group.
    ‘That was damned good