The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5)

by Robert Kroese

  “You fared unexpectedly well against the holographic versions,” said Dornen, straining to be diplomatic. “But those scenarios were designed to be winnable, at least in theory. If we were to attempt an assault on Izar, the odds would not be so favorable.”

  “Even if we had a man for every suit,” Freya said, “I don’t see how they could take an entire planet.”

  “Izar is a strange world,” Dornen said, tapping keys on a console in front of him. An aerial photograph came up on the wall display. “It is ninety percent ocean. Surveillance indicates that the Izarian population is mostly confined to that big island near the equator. Near the center of the island is a city of sorts, made up mostly of factories for the construction of machines. There are other factories on other islands that make other sorts of machines, but the big island seems to be the nerve center that coordinates the construction.”

  “Material versions of the ghosts we have been fighting,” Eric said.

  “Military bots, yes, and a few other sorts of machines. We have identified six distinct models.” He tapped buttons on the console in front of him, bringing up a map of the city. It resembled a spoked wheel, with six thoroughfares spreading out from a central hub. “At the end of each of those main roads is a factory. Each factory produces a different type of machine. Three of the six are military models.”

  “What are the buildings farther out from the factories?” Freya asked.

  “Power plants,” Dornen said. “Helium-3 fusion reactors, we think.”

  “There must be thousands of war machines in the city,” said Eric.

  “Most of the machines are shipped off-world,” Dornen said. “They are needed—were needed—to put down human insurgencies on a score of worlds. And the production of machines has slowed over the past few years. Still, you can expect to face several hundred military bots—and that’s assuming Varinga can get past their planetary defenses and you don’t get shot out of the sky during the drop. We expected fifty percent casualties before our troops even hit the ground, and that was with a full battalion. Fewer targets for the enemy means a higher casualty rate.”

  “Even if we could take the city,” Freya said, “would it stop the production of war machines? Wouldn’t they just shift production to other factories?”

  “For all the Izarians’ prowess as a military power,” Dornen said, “they seem to have a strangely centralized production process. We’ve found factories on several other worlds, but none that produce any of the six semi-autonomous models. For whatever reason, they’ve put all their eggs in one basket.”

  “Our objective would be to smash the factories?” Eric asked.

  “You could do a lot of damage by blowing up one of those reactors,” said Freya.

  “Either tactic would be effective,” said Dornen. “But we think there’s a simpler way of crippling the Izarians. All their production seems to be coordinated by that central hub.”

  “Maybe that’s where the actual Izarians work?” said Freya.

  “Possibly,” said Dornen. “Or a more sophisticated type of machine. We don’t know. But if we can take that building, we’ll control the Izarians’ means of production.”

  “It seems way too easy,” said Freya.

  Dornen laughed humorlessly. “Tell that to the millions who have died in this war. The Izarians have built an incredibly effective apparatus for genocide. After many years of brutal war, we’ve identified one potential weakness, which we are still far from being able to exploit. We certainly aren’t going to take the city with fifty mech-suited Vikings.”

  “What are you suggesting, Commander?” Freya asked.

  “Supplementing our forces.”

  “With what?” Eric asked. “Did you find one of your fringe worlds while you were gone?”

  “There are—were—several planets where marines had been deployed before the CDF fleet was wiped out at Toronus. Most of those planets have probably already been hit with a planet-killer. There is, however, one that they probably have not targeted. There is a helium-3 mining operation on a planet called Voltera that was attacked by the Izarians about half a standard year ago. The Izarians have seized the mine, apparently with the intention of shipping helium-3 to fuel their reactors. The last intelligence report we received, however, indicated that only three shipments have left Voltera since the Izarians seized it.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Eric.

  “Meaning that they are having trouble getting the helium-3 off planet. Either they’re having difficulties with the mining operation, or their ships are breaking down. Or both.”

  “Sabotage,” said Freya.

  “Yes. There was a company of CDF marines stationed on Voltera before the attack. The CDF command lost contact with them, and it was assumed they’d been wiped out. But I suspect at least some of them are still alive and active, doing what they can to slow down the Izarian war machine. If we can get Eric’s men on the ground, we may be able to make contact with them and get them aboard Varinga.”

  “Is the slowdown in the Izarian production of machines caused by a shortage of helium-3 for their reactors?”

  “Unlikely. Helium-3 is labor-intensive to mine, but it is hardly rare. There are several planets closer to Izar that have an abundance of helium-3. We know they have the capability to mine it.”

  “How old is this information?”

  “Besides the Janthus probe, the last beacon to emerge from hyperspace in range of our position was twenty-eight days ago. At the time we received its transmission, the information was twenty-two days old.” The translator rendered all measurements of time greater than twenty-four hours in days, because the Truscan calendar differed significantly from the Julian calendar used by the Norsemen. The Truscan week was only five days, and their year was four hundred ten days. Their day, however, was nearly the same as an Earth day: twenty-three hours and forty Terran minutes. And like the Terrans, they divided their day into twenty-four hours of sixty minutes, which were further divided into sixty seconds. A Truscan second was, therefore, slightly shorter than a Terran second, but it was close enough to be interchangeable for most purposes.

  “So we’re planning an operation based on information that’s seven weeks old?” Eric said. The translator converted this to cuadrajinta novem—the Truscan phrase for forty-nine days.

  “Rather sketchy information at that,” added Freya.

  “It’s what we have.”

  “Why didn’t you try to make contact with these marines when you first found out about this?” Freya asked.

  “The Izarians are jamming all radio communications near the mining facility, so we have no way of contacting the marines from space. We could land a shuttle, but it would be destroyed by sentinels before it even touched down. I need a strike force to drop from above the atmosphere, make contact with any marines in the area, eliminate any hostiles, and get the marines to an extraction point.”

  “Your mighty ‘marines’ need to be rescued,” said Eric with a smile. “I accept the mission.”

  “There is a complication,” said Dornen. “The other reason we haven’t been able to extract troops from any of the CDF planets is that the Izarians have an interconnected system of hyperspace beacons.”

  “An early warning system,” Freya said.

  “That’s right. The moment we emerge from hyperspace near any Izarian-occupied planet, a beacon scans us, records the data, makes a hyperspace jump to Izar, and transmits the message to the Izarian Central Command. As we’re the only deep space warship left in the entire CDF fleet, we can expect the Central Command to scramble whatever ships are available and get them to Voltera as fast as they can.”

  “How long will we have?” asked Freya.

  “Our best estimate, from the moment we’re detected until the ships arrive, is one hundred twenty hours.”

  “Five days,” said Freya.

  “That should be more than enough time to rescue your marines,” said Eric.

  “It would be,” said D
ornen patiently, “if we were on an even footing with the Izarians technologically. We are not. They have developed navigational algorithms that allow them to jump inside star systems. Our hyperdrives are not nearly as precise.”

  “I do not understand any of this,” Eric groused. Freya sympathized. Despite his stubbornness and lack of formal education, Eric often impressed her with his ability to assimilate new concepts. He understood hyperspace travel about as well as she did. But when someone threw a lot of foreign concepts at him at once, he became sullen and irritable. Trying to get him to understand was then a balancing act between assuming too much and condescension. Freya had learned that stroking his ego facilitated the process.

  “You understand hyperspace travel, of course,” she said.

  “Space is folded like a paper map, so that two distant locations are much closer together,” Eric said. “Traveling between them is like sticking a pin through the map, from the starting point to the destination. A child can understand this.”

  “I assure you,” said Dornen, “that many of my own people do not understand it that well.”

  Freya went on, “The two points on the map are brought closer together, but there is still some distance between them. It takes time to travel that distance. Also, while a pinhole may seem tiny, at astronomical scales a pinhole would represent an area of space many millions of miles across. Basically, what Dornen is saying is that the Izarians have developed a pin so small that you wouldn’t even be able to see it. They can emerge from hyperspace right next to Voltera. Varinga can’t do that.”

  “We could try,” Dornen said, “but there’s no guarantee we’ll be successful. We might come out of hyperspace five days’ travel from Voltera, or we might emerge inside Voltera’s sun. Ordinarily we aim for the outskirts of the system to keep the odds of collision manageable.”

  “It sounds as though we will have to take a greater risk this time,” Eric said.

  “Yes,” said Dornen. “This time I plan to aim for the sun and hope to God we miss.”

  Chapter Ten

  “E

  ric sat in silent semi-darkness, the only light emanating from the heads-up display of his mech suit, which showed the surface of the planet Voltera below, along with several lines of text he couldn’t read. Despite the straps snugly wrapping his arms and legs, he found himself shaking. He was glad his men couldn’t see him now, although he supposed many of them were shaking as well.

  Eric had ridden out North Sea gales in rickety longboats. He had survived murderous plots by his own brothers. He had fought Saxons, Celts and Northumbrians. And he was afraid.

  There were things one could not prepare for, and Eric had a pretty good idea that dropping forty miles to the surface of an alien planet was one of them. Oh, he’d been through the “holosim” training, and he’d experienced six hours of freefall while Varinga was preparing for the jump to the Voltera system. By this time, climbing back into the suit was like meeting an old friend. But none of that stopped the shaking.

  “Commencing drop in twenty seconds,” said a voice in his ear. The voice spoke in Norse; it was not a person, but one of their translation machines. Or was it one of the other machines, what the Truscans called a recording? There was still so much he didn’t understand about the Truscans’ technology. And in a few seconds, he would be trusting it with his life. “Commencing drop in ten seconds,” said the voice. Then it counted down: Nine, eight, seven….

  After the count reached one, a warning klaxon sounded, just like in the training sim, warning that the drop had begun. And just like in the training, the klaxon was shortly accompanied by a loud whoosh! that he knew to be the sound of one of his men being launched toward the planet’s surface. He felt himself pulled forward with a jerk and then stop, and then there was another whoosh! Another jerk, and another whoosh! One per second, his men were being shot out of Varinga’s hull like a bullet from a Truscan machinegun. There were five “barrels” altogether, one for each squad of Norsemen. Eric, as the commander of his squad (as well as the platoon leader), would be the tenth and last man out.

  So intent was Eric on calming his fears that he lost count of how many men had been ejected. Thinking there was one left to go, he suddenly felt his weight quadruple as a deafening FOOOM! filled his ears. That hadn’t happened in the holosim!

  And then—nothing.

  No sound, no pressure, no weight. He was floating in darkness, falling weightlessly toward the surface of a world he had never seen before. But he wasn’t shaking now; it was the wait beforehand that had worn on him. He wasn’t scared anymore—Dornen had told them the enemy’s planetary defenses were minimal, and in any case, if he were hit by one of their guns or a missile, he’d be dead before he felt anything.

  He felt the capsule twist and sway, then steady down so that his weight was on his back, weight that built up quickly as the capsule fell through the thin upper atmosphere. The outer shell burned away and sloughed off—unevenly, causing him to tumble. This had happened sometimes in the holosim, though it was much more disconcerting when you could feel it. Then the rest of the shell went and he straightened out.

  The egg-shaped capsule holding the mech suit was opaque, so he still could see nothing but the heads-up display, which showed the surface from the point of view of Varinga as she moved away from the planet. Next to this image was a graphical depiction of his capsule’s status: a tiny human figure inside a larger figure representing the mech suit, wrapped in an egg with a two-layered shell. The first layer had disappeared, and the bottom of the second layer was beginning to glow red. Text scrolled past the images on the left; Eric couldn’t have said what language it was, as he’d never learned to read. Few of his men had. Dr. Bartol had assured him that that literacy was not required to operate the suit; all the important information was presented visually. This was, Eric gathered, not so much because Truscan infantrymen were illiterate but because pictures were more quickly understood, allowing the soldiers to react faster.

  The capsule shuddered as the second layer sloughed off, and there was a sudden jerk as the first ribbon chute deployed. A second later, the chute tore away, having done its job of slightly slowing the capsule’s fall. The second chute, consisting of a wider and longer ribbon, lasted somewhat longer, and then the third, a square canopy nearly twenty feet on each side, deployed. The top half of the inner layer of the capsule was transparent, allowing Eric a view of a deep azure sky overhead. Unable to move his head, as it was still strapped into place to prevent injury, Eric scanned the horizon, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the other men. He saw nothing but sky, but he reminded himself that this had often been the case in the training as well: at this point, his men were scattered over an area of space some forty miles across. This was by design: spreading the men out made it harder for the enemy to target them.

  If Dornen were right about the enemy’s defenses, though, this was all overkill: Voltera had been a remote Concordat planet of middling importance; the Izarians had overlooked it for most of the war, conquering it almost as an afterthought, probably because they figured it would be easier to take control of an existing helium-3 mining operation rather than establish their own. They had sent a single warship, equipped with enough weapons to destroy the CDF’s surface-to-space defense and filled with general-purpose machines, to eliminate CDF ground forces and take over the mining operation. Given the state of the CDF fleet, Dornen doubted the Izarians had bothered to set up any planetary defenses of their own. It was standard procedure, however, for the Izarians to put a ring of sentinel drones in orbit around any planets they held; if the sentinels detected an enemy ship in the system, a beacon drone would immediately jump into hyperspace to warn the Izarian Central Command.

  Eric heard a roar and felt a rumbling as the capsule’s trajectory adjustment rockets kicked in. That meant he was getting close to the ground; the rockets would fire in conjunction with those of the other capsules to close the gaps between them as well as direct the capsules to
avoid enemy fire (if there was any) and dangerous obstacles on the ground. Around him he spied various bits of debris, but nothing that looked like a mech suit. Half a minute later, the rockets cut out and the final layer of the shell blew open, taking the big chute with it. Eric was once again in freefall, his limbs stuck in place, the heavy suit frozen around him. He tried desperately to extract himself from his suit, even though he knew this was impossible—and would be suicide, in any case. Trusting the suit was his only chance at survival.

  The rocky gray-brown ground—not unlike the terrain of Iceland—shot toward him, and wind whistled in his ears. Below him was a dry river valley that ended about ten miles north, at the edge of the huge crater where the helium-3 was collected. The suit rumbled and shuddered, but he couldn’t feel the air moving: the suit was sealed against Voltera’s poisonous atmosphere. He gritted his teeth and readied himself to die, knowing the suit had failed him. Would such a death get him to Valhalla? Would the Valkyries deign to scrape what was left of him off the rocks, even if they could find this godforsaken world?

  Then the suit’s landing rockets fired, and the air whooshed from his lungs as sudden deceleration compressed his innards, jamming him into his seat. A moment later, he was on the ground. The straps holding him in place had retracted, and the suit was back under his control. He stood on a black plain of volcanic sand bordered to the east and west by steep ridges perhaps three hundred yards high. The threat status icon was green, and the heads-up radar display showed him at the center of a cluster of green dots: the men of his squad, their identifiers appearing in tiny letters below them. Ordinarily the dots would be labeled with the soldier’s name, but since few of Eric’s men could read, each of the men had been assigned a string of simple symbols. Eric’s, for example, was a row of three horizontal lines followed by a vertical line that curved inward and then another that curved outward:

  ---)(

  It looked a little like an axe, if you didn’t think about it too hard. Gulbrand’s was a hammer: