The Iron Dream (30 page)

"One minute, my Commander," Best called out as the upper edge of the sun peered up over the eastern horizon, painting the rolling hills in scarlet and orange as if in anticipation of the battles to come. Feric dogged the hatch shut, adjusted his harness, thumbed his microphone, and ordered: "Start your engines!" The roar of the starting engines was all but drowned out by the thunder of wave after wave of fighter-bombers sweeping low over the great Helder army and soaring into the sunrise.

Best nodded to Feric. "Forward!" Feric shouted.

Best engaged the throttle, and with a mighty lurch, the command tank hurtled eastward, and the earth shook with the weight of the massed Helder armor sweeping forward behind it. To the east, fountains of thick black smoke and rich red flame spouted along a wide front as the planes atomized the paultry fortifications along the Malax border. A few moments later, the long rolling rumbles of the bombardment could be heard even above the terrible din of treads and wheels and engines.

The planes continued to wheel and dance in the sky as Feric led his juggernaut forward across the rolling hills and gentle valleys, pulverizing everything that grew in its path, sending a captive thunderstorm of dust miles in extent into the air above it. The bombs continued to fall as the motorized attack force rumbled and roared like an avalanche of men and steel toward the border; it seemed to 195

Feric as if he were leading his troops straight into a wall of billowing smoke and sudden explosions.

When Feric's tank was a mile or two from this terrible inferno, the thunder of planes could once more be heard overhead as wave after wave of Helder dive-bombers flew westward back to their bases, their bombloads expended, their work well done.

A few minutes later Feric led his forces across the Malax border and into a surreal landscape of destruction.

"Thus might the surface of the Moon have appeared to the Ancients," Best whispered.

Feric nodded. As far as he could see, the land was torn and pitted with great steaming craters, strewn with jagged fragments of rock, metal, and trees; every inch of the soil was overturned and naked as if some gargantuan plow had prepared it for seeding. A dense pall of acrid smoke gave the air a chemical reek, completing the other-worldly illusion. As for the rabble of Malax, nothing was in evidence save a red smear here and there.

"The air force has certainly done its job to perfectioni"

Best exclaimed.

"Yes, Best," Feric said, "a new era in warfare has begun—lightning from the skies, then an irresistible surge of armor, the two mighty steel fists of Heldon acting in close coordination."

"It appears that one fist alone was enough to dispatch Malax, my Commander!"

Feric chuckled wryly, but he knew full well that the vast hordes of Zind would not be swept away from the sky with such foolish ease. Before long, the new style of warfare he had developed would be tested to the ultimate.

He anticipated with relish the thought of bringing his air power and armor fully to bear against the might of Zind, for here was an enemy more worthy of the immense destructive power now at his command.

Feric found the unopposed sweep across Malax an exercise in boredom; there was nothing to be seen but rolling hills, pockets of cancerous radiation jungle which grew ever more numerous and larger in extent as the army moved eastward, fields of pathetically twisted crops, occasional pens of six-legged cattle or grossly bloated swine with vile mottled skin, and here and there a collection of reeking mud huts. Organized resistance simply did not ;S

exist; indeed hardly a Malaxian was to be seen since the t 196 l

dust cloud of the Helder army alone was enough to scatter the mongrels long before Feric's lead tank hove into sight.

Intelligence had indicated that a modest Zind force had occupied the eastern regions of Malax; it was these Warriors that Feric expected to be the first to quench the keen thirst for combat that was building in every Helder soul.

They would not offer more than passing resistance, but at least they could be counted on to hold their ground and fight to the death.

It was therefore something of a surprise when the first contact with the forces of Zind came from the air.

Feric's lead tank had reached an area no more than seventy miles from the border of Zind itself; here the patches of radiation jungle were thicker and more extensive than what paltry grasslands remained. For nearly an hour, all manner of monstrosities had fled from the cancerous jungle as the flamethrowers of the tanks set these cesspits of genetic putrescence aflame: giant featherless birds with four clawed legs and dripping carcinomas where their beaks should be, loping skinless obscenities trailing pulsating organs that flopped about in all directions, pus hounds, swine, and packs of assorted tiny horrors that might be deformed weasels, or badgers, or hedgehogs, or more likely mongrelized hodgepodges of all three.

Therefore, nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Best pointed out some twenty specks flying toward the Helder army out of the eastern horizon. "Some sort of vile mutated bird, no doubt," Feric observed, and paid them no serious heed, for they seemed small and slow.

But a few minutes later, his perspective underwent a sudden shift: rather than small and slow, the things were swift and huge, for quite suddenly they were flying over the tank.

"What nauseating horrors!" Best cried. This was, if anything, an understatement. The creatures consisted primarly of huge fifty-foot wings composed of loathsome translucent slime tissue stretched tight over frameworks of thin bone. Slung under the wing was an almost vestigial torso, also covered with translucent slime tissue, through which pulsating internal organs were clearly visible. There were no heads or other appendages to speak of, save enormous distended sacs hanging obscenely on either side of the thin body.

As the monstrosities passed over Feric's tank in a tight 197

formation, sphincters in the bottoms of the huge bulging sacs opened, and a dribble of noxious green fluid began to fall on the tanks immediately behind Feric's. As this putrid rain contacted the armor plate of the tanks, dense clouds of vile yellow smoke sizzled from the metal.

"Open fire!" Feric cried. He himself opened his hatch, snatched up his submachine gun, and poured a stream of bullets into one of the horrors, tearing scores of holes in the slimy membrane of the wing. Instantly and soundlessly, the creature folded up and the great sacs burst like pustules, showering a tank below with acid rain, before the thing crashed to earth to be pulped beneath the treads of scores of on-rushing tanks. The tank that had been under the monster sent a pillar of lung-searing smoke into the air and seemed to dissolve.

"Try the flamethrower!" Feric commanded his own turret crew, as he continued to fire at the things with his submachine gun, downing yet another of the monstrosities at the cost of one more tank. Even as he spoke, the air above the Helder tanks became filled with red-hot machine-gun bullets; six more of the creatures burst their sacs and crumpled, destroying four tanks in the process.

A moment later, a great tongue of orange flame sprang from a nozzle atop the turret of Feric's tank and caught one of the flying things in a bath of fiery petrol. The thing crisped to blackened ash before it could hit the ground, its acid sacs exploding in mid-air harmlessly.

Seeing this, the commanders of the other tanks opened up with their flamethrowers and caught seven more before the remaining monstrosities abruptly wheeled in unison like a flock of geese, climbed for the sun, and turned tail to head back to the east from whence they came.

"My Commander!" Best shouted, pointing high in the air above the formation of monstrosities as they dwindled into the distance. Five hundred feet above the things was a similiar flying creature; instead of acid sacs, this one had a kind of metal basket slung beneath it in which a humanoid shape was clearly discemable.

"A Dom!" Feric exclaimed. "Of course! There had to be a Dom to control the beasts!" He spoke into his command microphone: "Open fire! There's a Dom in that basket up there, and it's getting away!"

At once the air was filled with whistling cannon shells, tongues of flame, and an incredible hail of machine-gun bullets, all of which were futile. The flying thing was out 198

of range of all but the cannon, and since the cannon shells were not fitted out with proximity fuses, the chances of a hit were a million to one.

After a few moments of this gigantic barrage, Feric saw that nothing was being accomplished but the wasting of ammunition, and he ordered his forces to cease fire.

"Well, we destroyed plenty of the things, my Commander," Best said somewhat dispiritedly as the flying things dwindled once more to specks on the eastern horizon.

"But not the one that counted. Best," Feric said. "No doubt this was more of a scouting foray than a serious attack. Now the Dom who led them will report in detail on our approaching army."

"That's hardly likely to improve their morale," Best pointed out brightly.

At this, Feric's own annoyance was lifted. Best was a good battle companion; the lad always saw the sunny side of things!

With every man in the army keenly alert, Feric led his troops further eastward toward the border of Zind itself.

By now the Zind forces in the border area must be fully alerted and as ready for action as they would ever be, and in a few hours the huge Zind horde to the north would be notified of the true situation and would begin to swing south. A great battle was clearly in the offing; it was essential that it take place as far north as possible and deep inside Zind itself.

Therefore, Feric wheeled his army slightly northward; once the border defenders had been smashed, it should be possible to penetrate several hundred miles into Zind toward Bora before the massive Zind horde to the north could swing around to block the advance. No time must be wasted dealing with the Zind forces at the Malax border; every hour of delay would place the great battle that much further from Bora. Leaving nothing to chance, Feric called for a fifty-plane air strike to pave the way into Zind itself with the broken bodies and smashed equipment of the defenders.

Half an hour later, ten V-fonnations of sleek, black dive-bombers roared over the Helder army, dipped their wings in gallant salute, and headed eastward across rolling hills thick with rank radiation jungle. Before the planes had disappeared over the hills, there was a sudden loud 199

whistling, and a brace of shells exploded in gouts of turf and smoke not three hundred yards in front of Feric's tank.

"Zind artillery!" Best exclaimed.

Looking east and upward, Feric spotted a tiny black speck high in the sky. Instantly, he was on the radio to the commander of the planes. "There's a Zind artillery spotter above us! Send a plane back to dispatch it. Send another plane forward above the Zind horde to broadcast range and bearings to our tank gunners."

"At once, my Commander! Hail Jaggar!"

Another barrage of shells burst in front of the tank, these several score yards closer. Then, low on the horizon, Feric spied a single flash of gleaming blackness zooming in from the east. Another barrage fell, closer still, peppering the armor of Feric's tank with bits of gravel. The tiny flash of black grew rapidly into a sleek black Helder fighter-bomber; the plane arced upward into the sun, then fell nearly straight downward at the Zind flyer in a swift power-dive. Feric could see the bright orange sparkle of the plane's machine guns; then the noxious Zind flyer folded and fell like a stone. The fighter roared low over the Helder army, executed a smart victory roll, then made a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and returned to the fray in the east.

A fusillade of Zind shells ripped up the ground harmlessly nearly three hundred yards short of Feric's tank.

"The Zind gunners are blind now. Best," Feric said. "In-crease our speed by five miles an hour and veer five degrees south; the swine will then be firing at phantoms."

A moment later, the Helder artillery spotter was on the air broadcasting coordinates. Over a distant rideeline, Feric could see flashes of explosions lighting up the sky and billows of smoke as the Helder dive-bombers pounded the enemy.

Then the very universe seemed to tremble with the incredible massed thunder of seven hundred Helder tank cannon firing in unison. The fusillade was visible as a flashing steel meteor swarm tearing through the sky toward the east. A moment later the sky beyond the hills became a vast aurora of orange flame and rich black smoke. Then a mighty rumble was heard; this was immediately wiped out by the gargantuan roar of the next barrage being fired.

Firing nearly once a minute, the Helder tanks swept 200

forward at fifty miles an hour, smashing through radiation Jungle, grinding pallid bluish grass beneath their massed treads, an irresistible juggernaut of fire and flesh and steel sending holocaust before it and leaving a wake of total destruction in its van. Soon Feric had led the massive strike force over the last ridgeline; the Warriors of Zind were suddenly visible in the valley below.

Havoc had already been wrecked upon this Zind horde.

The crest of the far ridgeline was a steaming junkyard of mangled and fragmented dreadnaughts and war-wagons.

In the valley itself, perhaps ten thousand Warriors had been arrayed in long ranks facing the Helder advance.

The bulk of these vile creatures had been converted to a midden of bloody bits and pieces that set off the gray lunar landscape of smoking shell holes and bomb craters with great smears of bright red. As for the rest of the ten-foot giants, more of them than not were running about aimlessly in all directions firing their rifles wildly in the air, spattering their fellows with acrid yellow urine, grunting, pummeling, and gibbering, for the valley floor was littered with the burnt-out hulks of dozens of war-wagons upon which their Dom controllers were now naught but charred corpses.

One last quintet of dive-bombers plummeted through the air, dropped their loads in the midst of a formation of naked brawny Warriors, swooped above the resultant explosions, and then rejoined their comrades winging back to the bases in Heldon. One of the final bombs landed squarely upon one of the remaining war-wagons, blowing it and the Dom on it to scattered atoms. Immediately, the surrounding tight formation of Warriors broke ranks and began running around in individual random circles, colliding with each other at every turn, hitting each other with aimless rifle fire, defecating, drooling, thrashing, and grunting.