Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [30]
guns.
The headman watched the tourists in their gaudy clothes and silly hats. There were about ten of them, and they all looked as puzzled and uneasy about the army’s presence as the villagers of Jikora themselves. One or two of them had gasped when the commander struck him, and he knew that had been a rash error of judgement on the Indoni’s part. They could not afford to lose offworld goodwill. He heard Juma, one of the younger and more aggressive men of the village, muttering to his friend about stories of Indoni craft attacking Papul villages deep in the jungle interior. He shouted to him in Papul to shut up. These were dangerous times, and they could not afford to stir Indoni wrath. Jikora was a nice little money-maker, and while Sabit took the majority of the proceeds, there were many ways for the villagers to cream away some of the profits without being discovered. A thought struck him, and he didn’t like it: perhaps that was why the soldiers were here – to prevent any more ‘fraud’. Fraud! It was their village and their Mumi. They had a right to make all the money out of it for themselves. But even thinking like that had a habit of getting Papul men killed, so he concentrated instead on providing a good pose for the tourists’ holocameras.
He positioned the Mumi on its log so that it faced the semicircle of tourists, brushing a fly away from the silently screaming maw. He was proud of this Mumi. It was a direct ancestor of his, of course, and maybe when he died, he would be revered enough by the villagers to be smoked and preserved for all time. But somehow he didn’t think so.
It was certainly a gruesome object. Its hands were clenched around its withered knees as if in agony. The head was thrown dramatically back, accentuating the impression that the three hundred rainseason-old chieftain had died horribly. Perhaps he had, but the headman really couldn’t remember the stories. There were so many other things in this modern world to think about.
The Mumi’s eye-sockets were pooled with sunlight now as the holocameras whirred and clicked. The commander stepped up to the Mumi as if judging it and then moved aside slightly for the pictures to be taken.
When the scream came, the headman was sure it was an animal, a Babi maybe, from the village compound. But the look of horror on the faces of the tourists in front of him was too excessive for that to have been the cause. The soldiers looked startled too, and raised their weapons nervously. The commander whipped around and glared at the headman and his Luger was level with the Papul’s head.
The scream came again, and this time it was so obviously eerie and unfamiliar that the headman wondered how he could have thought it was an animal in the first place.
It was coming from the Mumi.
Something else came from the Mumi too, as the headman and Emul remained locked in their shocked tourist-friendly pose beside it. A deathsnake, thin as a Babi tail, green as the jungle. It flailed across the three yards separating the Mumi from the commander and clasped onto its prey.
The commander’s gun fired at the same time as the tiny fangs sank into his adam’s apple, the attack throwing his aim off so wildly it was Emul’s head that received the Luger blast.
The headman watched the soldier and his brother-in-law flop into the dust of the compound simultaneously. The commander writhed, his face darkening into a leafy green, his eyes bugging, veined with green too. Emul didn’t move, his head blown apart like an egg smashed by a spoon.
The Indoni second-in-command was rushing forwards, barking orders to the stunned squad of soldiers. He readied his pulse rifle but a snake got him first as the Mumi moaned again. With the reptile fastened to his left eye, he fell back into a