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Post By Counting down now to our Chapter 30 conclusion from... the Hooded Hood Mon Jun 28, 2004 at 07:15:06 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Twenty-Seventh: The Black Dome and the Hero’s Quest | |
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| Part the Twenty-Seventh: The Black Dome and the Hero’s Quest “Faster!” Herr Wertham screamed at the conscripted labour they had marched at gunpoint from the villages in the passes. “Dig faster or die!” “Work them any harder than they will die,” pointed out the Expediter. The mercenary was leaning on one of the massive malachite statues of some fierce guard-beast – possibly a war pig. The robot had been animated before, but it had shut down when the Expediter had used the over-ride amulet from the Sakya monastery. “I don’t fancy digging that deep myself.” Herr Wertham shrugged. “If they die, there are more. Perhaps we should shoot some of their children just to show we are serious?” The Expediter looked down into the white trench the slave labour was carving in the drifted snow. “Bertram wasn’t here in the Himalayan winter,” he noted. “He didn’t face the avalanche season, did he? Let’s just keep on digging till we get to the co-ordinates where his weapon may have cracked open the Dome.” “Make them work harder!” Wertham screamed to his SS troopers. “We should have brought more whips!” “They’re down there all right,” Mumphrey Wilton confirmed from his vantage point higher up the mountain. “Working those poor devils to the grave to find the possible weak spot in that strange dome.” He looked again through his field glasses. “There’s a third chap being carried round on some chair as well, all bundled up,” he noted. “No idea who he is.” “Those poor people,” Miss Canterbury shuddered. “Those villagers. They’re literally working them to death. We have to save them.” “Not possible, I’m afraid,” Mumphrey warned. “They’ve got a hundred and fifty soldiers down there. They’ve even got tanks. And the Expediter’s got the amulet that seems to be able to control those big guard-statue thingies.” “What do you intend to do, then?” Miss C challenged. “I’ve been takin’ chronometer readings on that dome,” Mumphrey answered. “It’s got a massive temporal signature, unlike anything I’ve seen. Whoever put it there to trap those Abhumans was extraordinarily powerful. But I reckon if I used a full temporal charge I could probably shift a small section forward about three seconds – enough for me to slip through.” “So you don’t need the amulet or Knifey’s weak spot?” “Exactly. I can sneak round the other side of the bally Dome and just pop through. In theory.” Miss Canterbury retreated into the little cave they had sheltered in last night and looked away. Mumphrey found her with her arms folded and an unhappy look on her face. “What?” he asked. “No,” she told him. “It’s wrong to let all those poor souls die. You have to rescue them.” “I can’t,” argued the eccentric Englishman. “It’s impossible. My mission is to find whatever the Nazis were after here before they did and make sure they don’t get it. The best way of doin’ that is to slip round the back.” “If it was me down there being worked to death you’d come to get me,” said Miss Canterbury quietly. “Hmph. Well yes, but that’s because I lo… look after you.” Grey-blue eyes flicked up and caught Mumphrey in their dazzling stare. “Mumphrey Wilton, you once predicted that the day would come when I would ask something of you, something important, something impossible, and you would do it. A quest. Was that just idle, gallant chatter or did you mean it?” “I… well I meant it, I suppose.” The vicar’s daughter nodded. “Then I’m asking. Never mind the mission for now. Never mind stopping the Nazis or avenging my father or anything else. Save those poor people, Mumphrey. Save them. I’m asking it. Save them for me.” She raised her chin defiantly and held his stare. “Save them if you love me,” she commanded him. Mumphrey stood stunned for a moment. Then he said, “I shall.” The furthest of the Tiger I tanks swivelled its 8.8cm KwK 36 L/56 muzzle away from the Black Dome and up towards the looming Mount Shishapangma. It paused there with its barrel at full elevation, fired once (nothing seemed to come out), then exploded in a rose of fire. A second, third, and fourth of the tank division followed it to destruction in quick succession as their weapons compartments exploded. “Vas?” demanded Herr Wertham, jerking his head up from the Tibetan peasant girl he had selected to work on to encourage the others. “Vas ist das?” “Right, you Tibetan prisoner chappies,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton called from the ridge where the lookout post had formerly stood. “Get ready to run and escape as soon as the ungodly get smitten.” Nearly five hundred Asian faces looked up in puzzlement and surprise at the eccentric Englishman shouting to them over the snowfield. “Kill him,” ordered the Expediter, shouting to the crack SS troopers who were guarding the conscripted workers; but the MP-40 machine guns the soldiers carried seemed to have mysteriously rusted, causing some to explode and all to fail. The three emplacements where the larger three-man MG-34s were set on their Lafayette tripods all detonated in unison. The Tibetans screamed along with the Germans, but in the panic of flying shrapnel some were quick to understand that their chains had somehow come loose and an escape chance had come. They began slithering down the mountain towards the road they had dug from the passes. Out of sight of the Nazis they could hide where they would never be found. This land was theirs. Some few of the prisoners actually fought back, using the picks and spades given them by their oppressors to attack the suddenly weaponless SS. The Expediter turned to the monolithic soapstone robots that had been set to ward him from the Black Dome, but which were now under his control thanks to the control amulet discovered by Bertram. “Kill that man!” he commanded the three huge statues. The three creatures shaped like stylised winged war-pigs lurched into action. One moved with terrifying speed across the snow towards Sir Mumphrey. A second turned and tore apart the tank beside it then slaughtered any living thing it could find nearby. The third came straight for the Expediter. Too late the mercenary realised that the soapstone control amulet he had been wearing was now some minutes into the future. “Bazookas!” screamed Wertham, scrabbling in the snow for his spectacles as chaos churned around him. “Destroy them with bazookas.” The Expediter snarled at the effigy that loped before him and pressed the button on his radio detonator. The explosive charges that he had previously packed around the statue’s neck literally blew the creature’s head off. It took another half dozen steps, tottered, then fell over lifeless. Mumph noted the incoming third statue with mild concern, and shifted the snow beneath it back into spring thaw slush. The weight of the creature pressed it down and it slipped and slithered into the mire, and then slid downhill back towards the Germans. “This will not do!” Herr Wertham growled, finally taking control of the situation. Any prisoner that was still alive was now far from the camp. Mumphrey’s raid had been all too effective. “Herr Wechsler, bring the girl to me now.” The very old man who had been carried all the way in a palanquin nodded and wheezed. Ignoring the chaos of the eccentric Englishman’s attack he unwrapped an ancient heavy book from thick protective sacking, opened it at random, and laid his hand upon its yellowed pages. “I summons Fraulein Canterbury,” he rasped. There was a brief ripple as the universe reordered itself at the behest of the cosmic officeholder who was Keeper of the Booke of the Law, and then Miss Canterbury was transported into the middle of the Nazi camp right beside the old lawyer that had helped draft the laws sending the Jews to the camps. Somehow knowing how she had been summonsed from the cave mouth where she had been watching her champion, Miss Canterbury raised the flare pistol Mumphrey had given her for emergencies and shot it into the old man’s stomach. The stormtroopers overpowered her before she could do anything else. Herr Wechsler screamed as the rocket impacted into his frail torso, then again as the Booke of the Law shifted itself away to avoid harm, leaving him powerless. The force of the flare seared into his stomach, toppling him from his chair. He was dead before the hit the snow. “Game over, Sir Mumphrey,” called the Expediter, pointing a Luger at Miss Canterbury’s head. “You will find it somewhat harder to time-stop me again with the precautions I have taken. Surrender before I do something very unsporting to your ladyfriend.” The shell fired by the first tank just before it had exploded, the one Mumphrey was holding in time a few seconds into the future, impacted with the snow-wall of Mount Shishapangma. The falling snow slid down the slope, gathering more as it fell. The avalanche swept inexorably towards the Nazis beside the Black Dome. Mumphrey timeshifted himself to appear from nowhere beside Miss Canterbury, leaped past the Expediter and caught her by the waist. The two of them rolled over towards the non-reflective midnight shell over the Abhuman city. “No time to test this,” muttered the eccentric Englishman. He sent the rest of the Chronometer’s charge at the force field that made the dome, shifting one small area two seconds forward. He and Miss Canterbury fell through. Behind them the avalanche hit. In our next exciting episode: Sir Mumphrey Wilton and Miss Canterbury inside the Black Dome! Note: No Tibetans were harmed in the making of this chapter. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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