The Great Troll War

The Dibble Jars so placed, the captain gently raised the periscope up to ground level, which also allowed us a quick view of the inside of the HENRY. There were six Trolls sitting around looking bored, and next to them, a large cage on wheels. Feldspar had been right. It had definitely been a trap.

‘The Mighty Shandar is clearly unable to catch you himself if he assigns the task to Trolls,’ said the captain, also having a look. ‘He fears you. Where do you want to go once the jars are filled?’

‘Time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted,’ I replied. ‘Think we can get beneath Shandar’s skyscraper? It’s just north of Exeter.’

Feldspar and I marked on a map where the replica of the Chrysler Building was sited, and the navigators pulled out their charts and found that they could follow the trans-Dartmoor Expressway, then hook up with the Sticklepath fault-line before hanging a right into the Crediton trough – and all through ready-dug tunnels.

‘If we clear all traffic from the tunnels ahead of us we can get to Dig-Zero in three hours,’ said the captain. ‘After that it will take us seven more hours to burrow the mile to Shandar’s tower, although I think we might be able to shave half an hour off that if we hoof it and don’t stop for lunch.’

I told her that would be admirable.

‘By your command,’ said the captain, again saluting smartly, and the crew readied the craft. And as soon as the jars were full, we were off.

Breaking the Spaniel Barrier

There is no standardisation of measurement in the UnUnited Kingdoms. In Wales, for example, distance is measured in Coracles. A KiloCoracle is a thousand Coracles, a MicroCoracle one thousandth of a Coracle, and so forth. Because of this, measurements across the Kingdoms are often arbitrarily chosen so everyone has a vague idea of magnitude – weight is in apples, distance in telephone boxes and speed by comparison to animals. Subterrains in pre-dug tunnels were measured in Spaniel Speed.

As soon as the jars were glowing green with a full load of wizidrical power, the captain ordered ‘Full Ahead Both Engines’ and we were away, the communications officer alerting by radio any Subterrains in the tunnels to pull into a siding as they were on a ‘Code Red: Vital War Business’.

This part of the journey was the most exciting as at least you could feel that we were moving along. We had to stop once to reconsolidate a tunnel owing to a partial collapse, then again to move past another Subterrain taking Eat List refugees down to Free Penzance. I chatted to a few off-duty ratings and learned the Subterrain was crewed entirely by women as men were considered bad luck.39 There had been loud grumblings of doom from the older earth-lags when Feldspar arrived as they considered him an omen of bad fortune. I had explained to them that he was only male by virtue of his default to a gender pronoun, and they then wanted to know why he was defaulted to male and not female or even nothing at all, for which I had no good answer. The crew calmed down, however, when the captain told them of the unique nature of the mission, and promised extra grog rations.

Time passed quickly, and after several hours we had made the journey – or at least, as far as we could go without digging a fresh tunnel.

‘We’re a mile from the building,’ said the chief navigator to the captain as we walked in, having been summoned to the bridge. ‘Open country, possibly sheep pasture.’

‘Good. Depth?’

‘Thirty-two feet keel to greenside,’ said a rating.

‘Constanza?’ said the captain, addressing the geo-navigator.

‘Twenty-one feet of soft Permian breccia, then soil,’ she said, staring at an instrument bolted to a bulkhead.

‘Okay, then,’ said the captain. ‘Periscope up.’

There was a mild shimmering sensation as the periscope bored its way up through the rock. To avoid giving the sub’s position away, the viewing head of the periscope could be disguised in many ways, depending on the area in which it was surfacing: a stone on a beach, a discarded crisp packet in a lay-by, a single shoe on a motorway or a duck in a pond. On this occasion, the periscope would be camouflaged as a fly agaric toadstool – chosen specifically because the red and white head is well known to be poisonous and would not be touched. The subterfuge was necessary. Because of its slow getaway speed, a Subterrain was vulnerable to attack – the most effective countermeasure being an earth-harpoon attached to a small car with a steel hawser. You’d soon know where the Subterrain was headed as it dragged the car through hedges and houses as it moved.

‘Okay,’ said the captain as she stared into the periscope and clicked the magnification to full, ‘see what you make of that.’