Warning Order (A Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online

the task.
    He hit the water close to the boat and at once saw the reason that it was not inflating: the valves on the gas cylinders were covered in frost and had frozen solid. The words of his science teacher, in a long ago lesson, came back to him: ‘gases cool as they expand’.  The compressed gas from the cylinders was being forced through the valves at such a rate that it had frozen them.
    His patrol joined him. ‘Throw water over the valves, it should raise the temperature,’ shouted Shepherd. Treading water, the four of them began frantically splashing water onto the valves, even though it also filled the boat and swamped the equipment inside. It took an age, for each time one of the valves thawed and gas began to flow again, it refroze almost at once.
    All of them were exhausted and Jock in particular was getting very distressed, as he was not a strong swimmer. Eventually they managed to half-inflate the boat - enough to just bear their weight, and wallowing low in the water, they made it to the beach. They were so exhausted by their efforts that after a very quick reconnaissance of the area they crashed out on the sand.
    They woke to glorious sunshine and immediately went into operational mode. Jimbo and Geordie began a more thorough recce of the surrounding area while Shepherd and Jock surveyed the beach. They worked their way along either side of the surf-line, testing the exposed sand and prodding the sea bed under the water using sticks with balls of plasticine on the end. Each time the plasticine came up covered with a mixture of sand, fragments of shells and bits of gravel embedded in it, enabling them both to determine the composition of the ground below the water line, and to measure the gradient of the beach. They were looking for a combination of sand and gravel that would give the wheels of incoming vehicles some purchase as they hit bottom, and a shallow slope up the beach to allow them a fast exit from the area of maximum danger. While they were doing this, Shepherd could smell something sweet and sickly on the breeze.
    ‘Smell that?’ he asked Jock.
    Jock nodded. ‘Rotting flesh,’ he said.
    ‘That’s what I thought.’
    When they had finished the survey and chosen the best landing site, Shepherd got on the radio and contacted base. ‘We’re ready for the landing.’
    ‘Understood. Standby for further orders.’ 
    Within half an hour, he received a further message, telling them that the landing would take place that night at 00:55.
    When Jimbo and Geordie eventually returned, they were excitable and almost incoherent, insisting that Jock and Shepherd went with them immediately. ‘You’ve got to see this for yourself,’ Geordie said. ‘You won’t believe it otherwise.‘
    ‘What is it?’ asked Shepherd.
    ‘Come and look,’ said Geordie.
    They moved away from the beach through low-lying scrub bush. After a couple of miles they arrived at a village. Even as they approached it, Shepherd could smell blood in the air, sickly sweet with a faint metallic tang.  The village had been torched and the round mud-brick huts with straw or palm roofs were still smouldering. Bodies already crawling with flies and ants, littered the ground around them and as he looked inside the smoking interiors, Shepherd could see still more charred corpses of adults and children. Even more horrifying, in the centre of the village was a large tree stump that had perhaps been used by the villagers as a seat or table, but had now been put to a far more terrible purpose. The horizontal surface of the trunk was stained with blood that had dried to a brownish red in the heat of the sun. In the dirt next to it was a pile of severed hands. Shepherd counted at least a dozen and from their size they were the hands of small children, not adults.
    ‘I’ve heard of this being done to punish adults for voting the wrong way,’ Jock said. ‘They cut off the hand that made the mark on the ballot - but here...’ He broke