It had a barrel-shaped body, short, thick legs with large, pyramid-shaped feet and cylindrical bearings instead of knees. Its face was flattened into the shape of some kind of ancient conical oil can, with the sharp end pointing forward. The openings in its upper section were like eyes, and the projections above them were reminiscent of eyebrows raised above the bridge of a nose. This gave the metal face something like a human expression – a kind of sad curiosity. One of the warrior’s arms ended in a steel club and the other in a bell mouth, covered with a grating that had a somewhat industrial look.

  The metal warrior lifted up its face and made a long, drawn-out sound that was like a sad bugle call, so mournful and loud that Grim’s ears were blocked. Then, as easily as if it were playing, it knocked down the ladder sticking up in front of it and strode forward.

  Another section of the wall collapsed and Grim saw a second metal giant standing inside it. And it looked as if there was a third one too. At least it would have fitted in.

  ‘Orderly Grim! Snap out of it, you dope!’

  Grim felt someone shaking by the shoulder and with an effort he tore his eyes away from the metal warrior. Standing there in front of him was General Hrol.

  ‘Go to the Kagan,’ the general ordered. ‘Tell him to send the fire-thrower units over here! Urgently! Tell him Orks are laughing as they die! A glorious battle!’

  Grim realised that the general was just as scared as he was.

  ‘Understood!’ he yelled and dashed towards his moped.

  This time it took almost a minute for the engine to engage and Grim watched, spellbound, as the battle unfolded while he kept prodding at the red button with his finger.

  The metal warrior moved up close to the Orkish ranks. The stormtroopers started tearing around it, trying to thrust the points of their serrated pikes into its knee-joints.

  ‘That’s smart,’ thought Grim, ‘very smart!’

  And then the metal warrior waved his lattice-like bell mouth. There was that familiar grinding sound again and some invisible force instantly squashed several Orks flat. It was as if they were transformed into red steam and blown out of their armour, and the armour was left looking like ironed clothes smouldering on the ground. No smoke or flames came flying out of the bell mouth, but the air around it trembled as it does in hot weather above the heated surface of a road.

  The metal warrior swung his club and brought it crashing down on a crowd of Orks. Then again, and again. It struck slowly, and the Orks had time to dodge out of the way, but Grim realised that the warrior wasn’t trying to kill as many men as possible – it was working for the cameras that were swarming around. Its movements really did look awesome.

  Then Grim noticed that the second metal warrior was clambering out of the ruins. But at that point the moped finally started and Grim hurtled off.

  After a few unpleasant moments in the labyrinth, where the panels of fabric had already lit up with advertisements for gadgets of one kind or another, he finally caught sight of the coconut palms of the Hill of the Ancestors, with the black sea of the Orkish reserve forces surging around it.

  Grim hurtled up to the Kagan’s barge.

  Torn Durex was no longer on the bridge. Following Orkish tradition, he had gone down into the hold, where the leader was supposed to drink volya and sing valiant songs during the battle – so that the spirits of the ancient heroes would descend from the merry meadows of Alkalla to assist the Orks engaged in combat. None of the Orkish top brass actually believed in Alkalla, but many of them did believe in conspiracy theory and so tried to keep as far away as possible from the coconut palms. Grim even thought he heard the sovereign’s low voice, warbling something like this:

  ‘“Heigh-ho,” said the old bitch, “we shall see what we shall see …”’

  But he wasn’t sure – they were making too much noise all around him.

  Marshal Spur was in command of everything. Having heard the report, he grimly issued his order to the orderlies and soon Grim saw a large detachment of Orks, their barrels of fuel oil at the ready, set out for the right flank. When they disappeared behind a fabric panel dangling from the sky – the one with a motorenwagen advert on it – Grim started wondering what he should do. According to regulations, he was supposed to obey the orders of the commander to whom he had been sent by his latest order. And that was Marshal Spur.

  But the Marshal had forgotten about him – and now Grim probably ought to wait until he remembered.

  The Marshal had no time for Grim. Dispatches were constantly arriving for him from the other sectors of the front, concealed behind the flying walls. Grim tried to stay in the Marshal’s sight, waiting for him to notice him – and before long, from the snippets of conversation that reached his ears he had put together a general picture of the way the battle was going.

  On the left flank, where the green container-hillocks were located, the Orkish savages had been attacked by gigantic lizards, who were now ripping and tearing them with their teeth and claws. They had managed to bring down two or three of the lizards, but when they started cutting the lizards’ necks with their flint hand-axes, the primary tendons proved to be too well protected.

  The retiarii were brought in, but the lizards easily tore the nets with their horns. The soldiers were asking for strong ropes that they could use to make nooses, and more pointed logs. Spur gave instructions to fetch those urgently from Slava, but the order was taken by another orderly.

  After that things went from bad to worse on the left flank: the people lowered a black curtain from the sky – to fence off the retiarii from the scene of the battle with the lizards, and sent in mammoths to attack them. The huge beasts trampled the Orks underfoot and crushed them with their tusks – the casualties mounted up quickly. The mammoths were very well protected – there was almost nowhere where the tridents could pierce their hides, and they were only afraid of blows to the stomach and under the knees. One especially large mammoth, carrying warriors in metal armour with crossbows and spears, kept apart from the others. Intelligence decided that this was the command vehicle and suggested concentrating all forces against it.

  Spur gave instructions for a company of stormtroopers from the right flank, armed with pikes, to be sent in against the large mammoth, ordering them to take the nets from the retiarii and to strip to their underpants before the attack. Then it was reported that the mammoths were afraid of fire, and Spur sent the second detachment of fire-throwers to the left flank.

  And then a new orderly arrived from the right flank. General Hrol reported the first great victory. They had managed to topple one of the metal warriors – they had thrown ropes over it and it had slipped in the blood. Many stormtroopers had been killed, but as the metal warrior fell, it had slit open, with its ray, the chest of the second warrior, which was coming to help it. The second metal warrior had given out a shower of sparks from its chest, and stopped dead. But the first one, even though it had tumbled over, could still fire, and now the Orks all around it had laid down in order not to get caught by the ray. So far the third warrior was still standing in the wall without moving, and they were afraid to approach it.

  Hrol proposed digging a trench and detonating a bomb made of gas cans under the fallen warrior. (Grim didn’t even know that the Orks had such a serious weapon.) But Spur ordered him to save both bombs for the main thrust and instructed him to light a stinking fire of fuel oil, oakum and fat in the space that was mined under the metal warrior, in order to burn through the warrior’s wires and smoke its silicon brains.

  And then news started arriving from the central axis, where the most serious slaughter was just beginning. Every dispatch was worse than the one before. The people had split up the flood of the Orkish attack into several sections and set about annihilating them separately. This tactic was impossible to counter. The central front had turned out to be very wide, and from the very beginning the people had divided it up into small separate sectors with flying walls. In each sector a special army fought against the Orks. Fortunately, the differently dressed enemy detachments didn’t come to each other’s aid.

  The Orks had been familiar with elves and gnomes for centuries, and the battle against their detachments was being conducted in accordance with principles mastered long ago. The slingmen and spear-throwers fought the elves, hiding from the arrows behind siege shields, and the gnomes were bombarded from a light catapult with dead moles that had been prepared in advance. It was assumed that a direct hit would immediately deactivate a gnome, since their programme algorithms considered a mole to be a bad sign and foul in the extreme.

  The Orks had already encountered some of the other enemies before. For instance, mounted knights encased in steel (there weren’t many of them) and vampires in black cloaks, who rose up out of the ground for a few seconds to inflict a fatal bite in the throat. The Orks knew more or less how to fight against them. Pikes stuck into the ground helped against the knights – the horses ran their bellies onto them. But the vampires had to be killed with fire and aspen wood – the point at which they were about to jump up out from the ground could be identified in advance from the cameras hovering over it.

  Some of the enemies were unfamiliar, and it was against these that the Orks suffered their worst losses. The cross-eyed warlock proved to be the most terrible – a grey-haired old man floating in mid-air, surrounded by flaming trigrams. He was playing a dulcimer, directing at the Orks some kind of coloured waves that sent rank after rank tumbling to the ground, and the cross-eyed host behind him joyfully flung their conical straw hats up in the air.

  There was also plenty that was new in the sector where the Orks were fought by the upper people’s own heroes. The old soldiers said that the only ones left from the old times were Batman and the X-Men. No one knew the others. They fought strangely and mercilessly – in this area the Orks were no longer advancing, but only trying to hold the front.

  One by one the finest warriors departed from this life. Grub was crushed by a battle mammoth when he tried to chop its foot ligaments with his cleavers. Fagg was shot by musketeers in cloaks with Maltese crosses when he threw himself into the assault on their little mobile bastion. Dolt was vanquished by a knight with a yellow shield, and Hern was killed attacking a square of infantry in red tunics, which lumbered out to fight the Orks on the central front. Bamboleo died a hero’s death in the battle against a chameleon jumper. As for Alejandro, he was still dashing around the field in his black sleeping shorts, waving his ornate pike about, but death remained indifferent to him.

  On the left flank the terrible beasts carried on pressing the Orks hard, despite the reinforcements that had been brought in, so Hrol decided to send part of the reserve there, and after them an anti-retreat unit of Ganjaberserks disguised as retiarii, with orders to wipe out every last Ork if they started retreating, and to die themselves. Grim had no doubt that the butts would carry out at least the first part of their order. They had never been found wanting as a blocking detachment.

  Then absolutely disastrous news started pouring in from the central sector. Orderlies reported that where the Orks started getting the upper hand, the cameras came to the rescue of the people, firing bullets with a special plug, so that the wounds were invisible. And victory did not fall to the upper people when their hero was stronger than the Orks’, but when a camera decided that the right moment had arrived.

  As proof, the orderlies had brought the bearded head of a stormtrooper – there was a patch stuck on the forehead, exactly the same colour as the skin – Grim would never even have noticed it. An orderly tugged at it with his fingers, exposing a bloody hole in the head. It was reported that almost all the Orkish heroes had been defeated dishonestly, and this had happened especially often in the vicinity of Batman, who was really old and decrepit, and fought badly, just putting on a show.

  Then Spur gave the order to use the first gas bomb against Batman, and it was immediately rolled out of the baggage train.

  It was a trolley with four blue cylinders and a trigger device, made from a salvaged enemy aircraft cannon shell under a firing pin. A nameless Orkish hero (almost as much of a boy as Grim, most likely chosen for his small size and low weight) sat on a narrow chair behind the cylinders, took hold of the trigger cord and smiled sadly, and the suicide platoon pushed the trolley off towards the boundary of visibility. Several unarmed Orks followed it, playing on reed pipes, and Grim’s pride in his own kind actually took his breath away.

  After that some good news arrived. On the right flank the third metal warrior had entered the fray, but his onslaught had been halted, because a private by the name of Blut had made an important discovery by chance: if you turned towards the flying cameras, dropped your trousers and showed them your genitals, the battle quietened down for a while, the fighting machines backed off and the cameras started flying around, trying to find a viewing angle from which the Ork’s private parts wouldn’t be in shot. When they started hovering at a new spot, you had to turn your nether regions towards them again. They had succeeded in nullifying several attacks with this method.

  Marshal Spur beamed – it looked as if this discovery could seriously affect the course of the battle.

  ‘All orderlies!’ he shouted. ‘Get across to your units – and be snappy about it, tell them to remove their trousers and wave their private parts about when they see a camera! Victory will be ours!’

  Grim realised that the order applied to him too – not in the sense of waving his genitals about, but that he had to return to his unit. He felt afraid and relieved at the same time: he’d be ashamed to carry on hanging about in the rear.

  The moped refused to start for a long time again. As soon as it sprang to life, Grim hurtled off into the smoke and haze. After taking a couple of turns between the blinds hanging down from the sky, he realised that he had lost his bearings. Then he started driving slowly.

  Bloodied Orks appeared from out of the stinking haze ahead of him, dragging themselves away from the front line – some of them were scary to look at. Then he came across a detachment of artillerymen dragging along a fire-throwing ballista, and it was suddenly clear that the front was already right there. And then there was the boom of a terrifyingly powerful explosion up ahead.

  Almost immediately the exultant cries of Orkish voices reached Grim’s ears.

  ‘We killed Batman! Batman!’

  This is the central sector, Grim realised. Batman was at the centre. So I’m driving the wrong way …

  He pulled up and looked round.

  At this stage he had completely lost any idea of where he had come from and where he was going. There were Orkish corpses lying all around, swathes of smoke were drifting over the ground, sooty fumes were getting into his eyes and on all sides, almost touching the ground, the flying walls were slowly shifting about, altering the space in which he was trying to find his way.

  Some of the flying walls were pitch-black, and some had gigantic, dazzlingly joyful people on them, proffering from on high drinks, creams and electronic gadgets. The advertising was intended for the news and those Orks who could see the long panels of fabric from outside the walls, without being able to see the actual battle. But all this magical happiness was absolutely not intended for him, an orderly on a malfunctioning moped. Destiny had something else in store for him – a heroic death for the Urkanagate, the Spirit and Will. And for the first time in his life Grim felt that he was entirely ready for it – quite genuinely and seriously.

  Well, there won’t be any problems with that, he thought, turning his moped practically at random.

  Before he had gone even a hundred metres the Orks behind him detonated the second gas bomb and, if the cries of joy were anything to go by, they killed another one of the people’s heroes.

  Several times Grim turned into passages that opened up in front of him, and then he noticed the space around him start changing quickly – the flying walls drifted upwards, coiling up into the scrolls hovering above the ground. It was easier to get his bearings now. Through the gaps in the smoke Grim glimpsed the distant embankment in the central zone of the front.

  It turned out that he was going the wrong way again – the right flank was much further to the right than he had thought. But Grim suddenly realised that there was absolutely no point in taking the commander in chief’s order about the cameras and private parts over there, because it was the soldiers on the right flank who had invented the method. Grim pulled up and the moped died again. He looked round, bewildered.

  A flying wall was rapidly raising up right beside him. What Grim saw behind it was an extraterritorial area, cordoned off with a black and yellow ribbon. The regulations prohibited anyone from passing beyond the ribbon – but as far as Grim could recall, looking beyond it wasn’t forbidden.

  There were at least ten retiarii lying there, hacked to death, and some strange-looking figures towering up over them. At first Grim took them for a medical team. But then the smoke was blown aside, and he realised that they weren’t Orks at all.

  Standing there in front of him were two half-naked women and a soldier.

  The women were well into advanced middle age – but rather well preserved and still slim. They were draped in thin multicoloured bed sheets that kept slipping off their overheated and bloodstained bodies. If the lengths of cloth had not been so exquisite and the women so well-groomed, Grim would have thought they were simply concealing their private parts, like Orkish women around a bathing-place.

  The soldier was stocky and muscular. His face was hidden under a disproportionately large helmet with numerous projecting corners, and there was a red cloak hanging from his back, fastened by a clasp over his shoulder. He was holding a short sword, covered in blood. There was nothing covering the front of his body and it was noticeable that he was still aroused by his lady friends. But they had already disappeared into a triangular hole that had appeared in mid-air.