The Great Troll War

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.’

I looked into the twin viewing eyeholes of the periscope and could now see the large skyscraper that was incongruously sprouting out of farmland in Devon. Although I’d not seen the original Chrysler Building I knew it well enough from pictures as I was a big fan of Art Deco and had several scrapbooks containing pictures of notable buildings. This facsimile was every bit as beautiful as the original, the decorative tiles and burnished steel shining in the sun, the geometric patterns and automobile motifs quite lovely to behold. The tower was also indicative of just how much magic Shandar had at his fingertips: if he could build something like this as a base of operations, then it would have been with magical power he had to spare; like the loose change you find down the back of the sofa.

I moved the periscope around. There were Hollow Men in abundance guarding the building but no Trolls as far as I could see. Having studied Colin’s aerial photographs, we knew there was a small entrance on the side facing away from us that gave direct access to the M5 motorway and Exeter Airport, where Shandar’s fleet of Skybus aircraft had been moving in and out, presumably with the Quarkbeasts he was so keen to harvest. When I had seen enough, I thanked the captain.

‘Periscope down,’ she called, and there was a soft whirring sound as it retracted.

The captain called for Full Ahead Both and the Subterrain started to shake as the main cutters bit into the rock. I asked Feldspar whether we should send a homing snail but it had been less than four hours since we left Colin and Tiger and they would not yet be heading home.

‘We’ll be under the building in eight hours,’ said the captain. ‘We can probably manage twice the speed of mole in this stratum, more if we hit a softer section. Go and relax.’

It was good advice. Nothing happened very fast in the Subterrain Service. A battle between opposing fleets of Subterrains had occurred only once, during a totally unnail-biting three weeks in the winter of 1953. The slow progress of the engagement ensured that it was, descriptively and literally, the most boring battle in the history of warfare.

I went for a wander around the large craft, partly out of curiosity, partly out of not wanting to play poker with Feldspar, as he had suggested. There were torpedo rooms fore, aft and amidships, as turning the craft was not an easy manoeuvre. All torpedoes were designed like corkscrews and travelled very slowly, but that wasn’t much of an issue as other Subterrains would be similarly slow to take avoiding action, and buildings couldn’t take any avoiding action at all.

Living quarters were by necessity quite cramped, but the galley was Michelin-starred, and the food astonishingly good. The chef gave me a butterscotch parfait which melted on my tongue. Farther aft was the engine room, where two large in-line diesels ran on recycled vegetable oil, which made the whole sub, and everyone in it, smell very much like a fish and chip shop.

I moved on past the storeroom and came to the room where we’d entered the Bellerophon and sat on some sacks of potatoes near the escape pod. I took the photograph I’d discovered in the Beetle’s glovebox out of my pocket and stared at it for some time in silence. I turned the picture over and looked again at a pencilled note in Zambini’s hand that read: ‘The Assetts’, with the date of my induction into the orphanage. It had to be me. I paused then turned the picture back over and wondered who exactly he had been referring to as assets: Zambini, Zenobia, the Quarkbeast, me – even the car? I was just about to put the photo away when something caught my eye. There was a small hand pressed against the rear window, as though a child were inside on the back seat. I could just see the top of their head too, and they had bunches. Most likely a girl. If this were the day of my induction, then the mystery child had not been inducted at the same time. I had been the only one that week.