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Post By The Hooded Hood Tue Jun 08, 2004 at 09:26:00 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery, Part the Ninth: The Iron Knights and the Whooping Commandos | |
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| Part the Ninth: The Iron Knights and the Whooping Commandos Previously: When Miss Canterbury’s antiquarian father was murdered by Nazis seeking a rare book he recently acquired, the vicar’s daughter teamed up with British agent Sir Mumphrey Wilton to retrieve the volume and discover why the Third Reich was so interested in the diaries of a Victorian explorer. Having translated the volume back to English from its bizarre Vesalian script, Sir Mumphrey and Miss C now need to decode the text and find out what Blanchford Bertram discovered that so excites Nazi torturer Herr Wertham and his mercenary colleague the Expediter. It is December 1941, two days after the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbour… “He’s not here, he’s not here, he’s not here!” the frightened housekeeper kept on squealing, repeating the words she’d been told to say when the men earlier had pressed the gun to her head. She kept saying it even though the nazi agent at the door had been sent sprawling when it was kicked open and the fight had begun. Sir Mumphrey Wilton ducked low under a strength-enhanced punch that would have plastered his head across the cabin wall, caught the arm that swung at him, and diverted it so that the futuristic machine pistol sprayed bullets into two of the other agents lurking in the darkness. Miss Canterbury raced into the room and dragged the terrified Filipino housekeeper behind a heavy oaken desk. “Best we leave the boys to their discussion, hmm?” she suggested. “He’s not here,” whimpered the old woman. “Yes, we noticed there was an absence of expert advisor and a surplus of unnecessary goons,” Miss Canterbury agreed. “My travelling companion is seeking to rectify that.” The thugs who had been shot seemed not to notice the ugly bullet wounds and kept on coming. “Now that is cheating!” objected Mumphrey Wilton. He reached for the large gold pocketwatch that hung on a fob from his paisley waistcoat. Pressing the right sequence of buttons on the Chronometer of Infinity he froze the five bizarre assassins in time while he assessed the situation. As a courtesy he excluded Miss Canterbury from the time stop. “What on earth are they meant to be?” the vicar’s daughter asked as she rose from cover and examined the ox-like thugs with their bizarre metal body parts. “It’s as if someone had grafted bits of machine onto ‘em,” Sir Mumphrey frowned. “Their guns are built into their arms. No wonder bullets didn’t stop them right off.” “How long can you keep them frozen?” Mumphrey glimpsed at the power dial on his pocketwatch. “Not long,” he admitted. “Best find a way of disarmin’ them, hmm?” He looked again at the creatures that future generations would term cyborgs. “Work on electricity, would you say?” “They have to have batteries somewhere,” Miss Canterbury agreed, “But I’m not searching for them.” The eccentric Englishman frowned as he fiddled with the stops and dials on his Chronometer. “Now this is a bit tricky,” he warned. “I’m settin’ the chronal charge so it lets these oiks loose again, but send any electricity in their bodies a half minute into the future. There may be a bit of a discharge. We’d best get under that desk, what?” As soon as Mumphrey and Miss Canterbury were under the table with the time-stopped housekeeper the Nazi agents were released again. Devoid of electrical power they tumbled like the broken machines they were and sprawled on the floor. Thirty seconds later there was a brief crack like lightning as the charge from their batteries earthed itself to the floor. “Now now,” Mumphrey comforted the distraught housekeeper. “It’s all over. Miss Canterbury, would you be so good as to use that telephone thing there to summon assistance.” “What do I say?” “Oh, that we’re at MH’s house, that he’s gone missin’, and that there’s five nasty Nazi machine-men conked out on the floor. That should get us some response. It was December the Ninth, two days since Hawaii had been attacked by the Japanese Imperial Fleet in the notorious massacre at Pearl Harbour. America, shocked and frightened by the destruction of their military might, had gone to war. The island still bore the obvious scars of the brutal assault. MH’s cabin had several boarded windows from aircraft strafing and bombs. But the main damage had been done by the thorough mystery intruders’ ruthless search “What were they after?” Miss Canterbury wondered as they waited for the MPs to arrive. She looked down at the thousands of scattered index cards strewn across the floor. “The same thing as us?” Sir Mumphrey shrugged. “Hard to say. This MH chappie’s apparently one of the Yanks’ top intelligence people, a genius at collectin’ and orderin’ information. There’s probably enough top secrets in those cards to sink another fleet.” “He’s not here,” the distraught housekeeper told them. She was wandering round the house, avoiding the fallen Nazis, pathetically trying to piece together broken vases. “Is what we want in those cards too, then?” Miss Canterbury wondered. “The location of Herr Bookman, who can apparently decrypt written codes better than anyone on the planet?” Mumphrey looked at the mass of scattered files. “Perhaps,” he sighed. “But we’ll never find it in this lot. We’re probably not cleared to read half this stuff anyway.” “You called that right, you liver-lovin’ Limey-talkin’ sonofaturkey!”, the first soldier through the door growled, pointing his machine gun at the eccentric Englishman. “So put up ya hands or I’ll – Wilton! Sir Mumphrey Wilton!” Mumph turned round in delight to greet the grizzled soldier who blocked the doorway. “Sergeant Drury! I had no idea you were in Hawaii!” Miss Canterbury watched as the two men clasped hands and then smacked each other on the back. “I take it you’ve met, then,” she surmised. “Ah, yes. Miss Canterbury, may I present Sergeant Daniel Drury, of Sleazy Company. And these gentlemen with him are his Whooping Commandos.” “Charmed, doll,” Drury grinned, tossing her a sloppy salute. “I met Wilton here back when some disguise artist guy claimin’ to be from outer space tried ta break into Fort Knox a coupla years back. Boy, did we kick that bozo’s a… did we show him th’ error of his ways.” “It was nothing,” Mumphrey muttered. “A trifle.” “But it turns out he’s okay for a limey intel guy, so I guess we don’t shoot ya this time, your lordship.” “Jolly decent of you, Sergeant.” Mumph looked around the room with a frown. “There’s something dashed peculiar goin’ on here. Did you see those wind-up krauts?” “Oh yeah. Me and the Whoopers had a run in with some more of ‘em sneaking ashore from a midget sub down in Aiea Bay. The Axis must think ‘cause they gave us a surprise lickin’ with their cowardly raid on Pearl that we’re all gonna go home and hide.” “I surmise your, um, Whoopers showed them differently?” Miss Canterbury ventured. Drury gestured to his tattered combat jacket. “We exchanged a few pleasantries, Miss…” “Where are my manners?” Mumphrey chided himself. “Sergeant Drury, may I present Miss Canterbury. She is assisting me in decoding documents her late father discovered, information that seems to strangely fascinate the Bosche.” “But we seem to have rather reached a dead end here,” the vicar’s daughter noted. “We were hoping this MH person could point us in the appropriate direction to get these papers decrypted. We went to a lot of trouble for a translation, but that’s only half the job, what?” “An’ you think these metal bozos were sent to stop you?” “I think they were sent to stop MH. It’s a good thing he was elsewhere. As it is, we don’t know how much top secret material these bounders absconded with. “Nah,” Drury grinned. “But we know where they think they’re rendezvousing with a Nazi sub.” It was just before dawn, and the high canopy of stars was fading in the wide Pacific skies. The seven remaining Iron Knights slipped quietly across the wide sands in the hidden cove. They moved with faster-than-human speed, for their reflexes had been improved when muscle and bone had been replaced with iron and rubber. They moved with quiet pride, for they were the first of the uber-man, the invincible army that their founder, the glorious new creations of Futura, Woman of Tomorrow, the Fuhrer’s shining symbols of Aryan superiority. “Awright you tin-pot yahoos, you got five seconds ta drop your ray-guns and hit the deck!” Dan Drury called from the cover of the reef-rocks. “After that, we frag your shiny asses ta war scrap.” The leader of the Iron Knights turned contemptuously. “Small arms fire means nothing to us, Americaner,” he sneered. “Our improved eyes can see the heat-blooms of your bodies, our superhuman aim pinpoint what part of your body our bullets penetrate.” “Gee,” mocked Drury, “guess it’s a good job be brought along these bazookas then, ya bozos!” Mumphrey judiciously stopped time around the conflict. He scurried over to the Nazis, relieved them of the satchel of stolen documentation from MH’s cabin, then hurled himself into cover again before the chronal charge expired. Then he kept his head down as Drury and his Whooping Commandos expressed their feelings on Aryan superiority. It turned out they felt that Aryan superiority was no match for American rocketry. In our next exciting episode:Our adventurers in Casabalanca, complete with a guy playing the piano again. 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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