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

by Robert Kroese

  ---8

  Bjorn’s was a fish:

  ><>

  And so on. Every man in the platoon had memorized all the others’ identifiers. Each squad had been assigned a symbol as well. These were somewhat more elaborate; Eric’s was a dragon. Another graphic, to the left of the one displaying the individual squad members, showed a wider view, with the different squad showing the relative locations of the five squads. It was a lot of information to keep track of, but the men had grown accustomed to checking their displays for the locations of the other men, and—especially after the debacle of their last real-world training mission in Greenland—enemy units.

  The information they were being fed through their suits came not just from the interlinking of the suits themselves but also from a hundred or so hummingbird-sized drones that had been released from their capsules along with their parachutes. The drones had an unwieldy Truscan name, but the Norsemen had taken to calling them hrafnlingr (“little ravens”) after the birds that were said to be the messengers of the gods. The silent and nearly invisible drones, hovering about thirty feet above the ground, had fanned out to give them a comprehensive view of the terrain around them. They would remain low and close to the mech suits to avoid giving away the platoon’s position. As long as the threat status remained green, it meant neither the hrafnlingr nor the suits had detected any enemy units.

  At the top of the display was a short string of characters that was continually changing. Eric knew it was a sort of clock that counted down the estimated time left for the operation. He focused his eyes on it and said, “Read.” The voice in his ears replied, “Two hours, fifty-eight minutes.” Eric was not used to measuring time in minutes (even the water clock at York was accurate only to the quarter-hour), but it was a simple enough concept. Fifty-eight minutes was two minutes short of an hour, so he had just under three hours to complete the mission. That was when Varinga would land at the drop location to pick up Eric’s platoon and the rescued marines.

  The level of precision seemed a little silly to Eric, as Dornen himself admitted his estimate of the arrival time of the Izarian ships could be off by as much as three hours. The Truscans, he had noticed, had a strange tendency to compensate for uncertainty with imaginary precision. He had laughed out loud when the Truscans’ computer had estimated that they could expect the Izarians to send seventeen and a half ships. The time estimate was on the conservative side, meaning that in all likelihood, Eric’s platoon had a bit more than five hours to get the marines to the extraction point before the seventeen and a half ships reached Voltera. Still, they had no time to dawdle. Eric intended to complete the mission with time to spare, demonstrating to that smug dandy Tertius Dornen that when it came to real fighting, the Norsemen were more than a match for any Truscan or Izarian.

  Scanning the valley floor, Eric could just make out a few of his men in the distance. The other squads were too remote to see without activating the display’s magnification. The suits communicated with each other and with Varinga when possible, so that if any of them spotted an enemy, the others would be alerted immediately. As long as the threat status icon remained green, they were in the clear. Izarian ground forces had undoubtedly been notified by the sentinel drones of a potential threat, and there was a good chance the drop had been picked up by radar, but the nearest enemy units were at least twenty miles away. Eric turned in a circle, testing the suit and getting a feel for the territory. “Leader to Platoon. Squads check in,” he said. He’d had to learn to preface his commands with a salutation so that the suit’s brain would transmit it appropriately. It wasn’t always necessary; the suit would try to figure from his words and the context whether he was addressing the suit itself, talking to himself, or addressing the platoon, a particular squad, a particular infantryman, etc.

  “Bear Squad here,” said Ragnald.

  “Wolf Squad here,” said Halfdan.

  “Eagle Squad,” said Bjorn.

  “Serpent Squad is here,” said Halvar.

  “Dragon Squad is here as well,” said Eric. He was still unconvinced of the necessity of dividing his band—that is, platoon—into five separate groups, called squads, but the Truscans had insisted, and he had agreed. The Romans had certainly proved the efficacy of a well-organized army, and the system used by the Truscans was similar. The Norsemen tended to fight as a single unit, overwhelming their enemies with speed, numbers and sheer ferocity, but then the Vikings generally raided for treasure or simply to terrorize an enemy—objectives that rarely required complex organization. Even the Norsemen, though, sometimes had to split up their horde to flank an enemy or execute a feint to draw the enemy away from a target. In the case of their current mission, which required his men to quickly locate the Truscan marines and get them to the extraction point, Eric could see the advantages.

  Eric was pleased that the radios were working. Dornen had warned them that the Izarians were using a device to interfere with radio communication, but the suits evidently used a kind of signal that was difficult to jam, at least at close distances. The drones overhead, acting as signal repeaters, helped with this. Three more little icons on the heads-up showed the quality of the current connection to his squad, to the leaders of the other squads, and to Varinga. The first two were green and at full strength; the last was a red X, indicating that Varinga was currently out of contact. The suits were wonderful weapons, but Eric found himself wishing he could charge up the ridge with nothing but an iron sword and a wooden shield. He put the thought out of his mind.

  “Bear Squad, I want you on top of the western ridge. Eagle Squad, on top of the eastern ridge. Double time. Serpent Squad, go south. The rest of you, stay on me. We’re heading north. Platoon leader out.” Eric strode forward, and the men fell in line behind him. Voltera’s gravity was slightly weaker than Earth’s, making them feel light on their feet despite the bulky suits.

  Eric and his men had spent hours going over maps of the area with Commander Dornen and Dr. Bartol, so Eric knew exactly where he was. They had landed at the widest point of the valley, which stretched southward toward a range of spectacularly tall and steep mountains. To the north, the valley narrowed before giving way to a roughly circular plain over two hundred miles across. Dornen had said this plain was actually the bottom of a crater left behind when a gigantic rock hit the planet many years before. It was here that machines scoured the soil for an element called helium-3, which was evidently used to fuel even bigger machines. The stuff was so rare that even on Voltera, where it was relatively common, machines drove all day and night across the vast plain, sifting through the soil to find tiny specks of it. When one of the mining machines was full, it drove its load to a central building (which was also on wheels, so it could be moved when an area had been depleted), where the ore was refined. Then the refined product was loaded onto sky ships to be delivered to other worlds.

  The whole thing seemed preposterous to Eric. Why didn’t they just use coal or wood to run their machines? Why have so many machines in the first place if you just had to keep building more machines to keep those machines running? What did all these machines do, anyway? But Eric had not been dropped on the planet to make sense of the operation; he was here to rescue a company of marines.

  The mountains encircled the mining area, providing plenty of places for guerillas to hide. Surveillance from Varinga, however, indicated that mining operations were currently centered in the southwest region of the plain, so if the marines really were alive and engaged in a campaign of sabotage against the Izarians, they were likely to be within twenty miles to the northwest or southeast of Eric’s platoon. The plan was simple: two squads would search for signs of the marines, one to the east and one to the west. The other three would go north toward the mobile refinery, where surveillance from Varinga indicated the Izarian machines were clustered. In the holosims and the exercises in Greenland (the Truscans called them “hologram-enhanced real terrain training”) Eric and his men had faced a dozen different sorts of Iz
arian machines that had been specifically constructed for combat—from heavy tanks that crawled on metal treads to lightning-fast flying craft that rained fire from the sky. If Dornen’s assessment was correct, they wouldn’t find any of those here: it was thought that the machines the Izarians had sent to Voltera were all of the general-purpose type the Truscans called golems. Golems, of middling intelligence, were the size and roughly the shape of a man. They could learn quickly how to perform any simple task, including guarding a refinery, but they were unimaginative and predictable. Rather than try to seek out the CDF marines stealthily, Eric’s men would go in guns blazing to quickly eliminate the golems and hopefully get the attention of the marines in the process.

  By the time Eric and the men with him reached the narrower part of the valley, Bear Squad had reached the top of the western ridge. “Bear Squad leader to Platoon leader,” Ragnald’s voice said in Eric’s ear, “We’re at the top of the ridge. Good view of the plain. We see three mining machines at a distance of… about fifteen miles.” The suit’s display would automatically tag any object of interest with a label indicating its distance from the wearer, but most of the men still struggled to read the numbers. Ragnald knew the digits one through nine, but he had gotten into the lazy habit of translating any two-digit number to “about fifteen miles,” which was generally accurate to within five miles, because even with magnification there wasn’t much you could see past twenty miles. “No golems or other enemies detected. Bear Squad leader out.”

  “Eagle Squad has reached the top of the eastern ridge,” said Bjorn. “No enemies spotted. Can confirm what Bear Squad leader said. Three mining machines eighteen miles out.”

  “Eagle Squad and Bear Squad, I want you each to leave two men up high to keep eyes on the plain. Try to make contact with those marines. Directional signal, low-power only.” They had gone over this in the mission briefing, but Eric thought it bore repeating: the idea was to get a signal to any CDF personnel that might be hiding in the mountains without alerting the enemy to their presence. “The rest of you, get started on Objective Alpha.”

  “Roger that,” said Ragnald and Bjorn. Objective Alpha meant fanning out to search for signs of the marines. In all likelihood, the marines would find them first: the suits weren’t exactly stealthy, and both the suits and drones were broadcasting an encrypted message identifying them as CDF-friendly units. Even with the Izarians jamming radio communication, marines with a standard CDF receiver would probably be able to pick up the transmission from a distance of a half-mile or more.

  Eric’s men continued to the north. In the direction of the plain, the ridges on either side of them grew gradually steeper. The valley floor ended at a rocky bluff, which had once been the top of a waterfall that had drained to the crater floor nearly a hundred feet down. To Eric’s left and right the rock walls above them curved sharply outward to merge with the edge of the cliff wall that marked the edge of the crater.

  Eric stepped to the edge, the flexible metal feet of the mech suit gripping the rock in response to a slight curling of his toes. The cliff wall directly below was nearly vertical, but there were several ledges and outcroppings on either side that could—theoretically—be used by a man in a rocket-assisted mech suit to return to the valley from the plain below. The sun, a pale white-blue disc that hung low in the direction they were calling west (although Dr. Bartol had told them this was technically inaccurate as Voltera had no “magnetic field,” whatever that meant), was sinking rapidly toward the distant mountains. Supposedly the suits would protect the men from temperatures far lower than even a winter night in Norway, but Eric was already feeling a chill, despite the exertion of walking.

  “Enemy flier spotted!” said a voice, a moment after the threat status icon went red. The voice belonged to Sveinn, one of the men in Eagle Squad. Peering into the distance ahead, Eric saw nothing but empty sky. A pair of bright red brackets near the center of his field of vision were the only indication that an enemy approached. After a few seconds, though, a tiny black dot appeared in between the brackets. Eric focused his eyes on the brackets and said, “Magnify times forty.” The area inside the brackets suddenly blew up to fill a third of his vision. The thing was now clearly identifiable as an Izarian flier, although of a smaller variety than they’d faced in the past. Numbers underneath the brackets indicated the flier was now less than a mile away and closing rapidly. A flashing red X appeared in the middle of the brackets, indicating it was within missile range. “Leader to Platoon,” Eric said. “I’ve got it. Everybody hold your fire. Platoon leader out. Arm missiles. Target locked. Fire missile.”

  Foom! went the little rocket as it left the launcher on his back. It arced overhead and leveled out, heading toward the little flier, which was now just barely visible without magnification. There was a distant explosion, and the red brackets turned gray, indicating the flier had been destroyed. The threat indicator went back to green.

  “Platoon Leader, this is Bear Squad Leader,” said Ragnald’s voice. “I thought there weren’t supposed to be any fliers. Over.”

  “Just a recon unit,” said Eric. “Don’t get distracted. Find those marines.”

  “Roger that.”

  Gulbrand, coming up alongside him, shot him a concerned glance. Eric met his gaze but didn’t respond. He shifted his view to the plain below, which was now blanketed in darkness. “Assault Team, follow me, advancing in pairs. Don’t crowd the man in front of you, and step boldly. If you don’t clear the bluff, I am not coming back to scrape whatever’s left of you off the rocks. When you hit bottom, move, or you’ll be wearing the next man as a hat. Let’s go!”

  He leapt off the bluff.

  Chapter Eleven

  “F

  or a second he was falling, and once again he was certain the suit was going to let him die. But then the rockets fired, and he grunted as sudden weight compressed his innards. The next thing he knew, he was standing on the plain. Half a second later, Gulbrand thudded to the ground next to him. Gulbrand gave him a grin, and the two moved forward to make way for the next pair. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Two by two the Norsemen landed on the plain. By the time they were all down, the sun was hidden behind the mountains and the sky had turned a gray-violet. The thin atmosphere refracted little light, and soon it would be dark. Already a scattering of faint stars was visible. Voltera had no moon.

  “Platoon, switch to infrared,” said Eric. “Keep your eyes open. Assault Team, wedge formation.” He strode ahead, forming the point of the wedge, and the others fell in line behind him, creating a wedge two men deep. It had taken some work to get the Norsemen accustomed to the idea of coordinated troop movements, but they had become passably competent at some basic formations. Hrafnlingr hovered overhead, mimicking the men’s movements.

  Eric broke into a run, the suit’s sensors transmitting the movements of his leg muscles to the powerful motors that moved the metal limbs, and the others followed. When he had first tried running in the suit, he had found it awkward and uncomfortable: each step landed with a jarring shock that shot up his leg. He had learned, though, that if you ran with long, fluid leaps, rolling your foot from heel to toe, you could cause the suit to flow over the ground like a galloping horse—and nearly as fast.

  They loped across the dark plain toward the distant refinery, under a deep violet sky sprinkled with stars. Eric led the way, a pair of hrafnlingr flying just ahead of him. He let out a bellowing laugh. If he died tonight, all would be well. He had lived a full life, never letting himself be ruled by his fears, and cheated death half a dozen times. He was ready for whatever came after this life, Valhalla or not. He did not expect to die, though: a golem might be more than a match for a man, but Eric and his men were more than men. They were demigods in plated steel, hurling fire from their fists.

  Eric could now make out the lights of the refinery in the distance, as well as several of the huge mining machines. It was misleading to call it mining, he thought; in some ways it w
as more like farming: the big machines rolled slowly over the plain, dragging a wide apparatus that cleaved through the soil like a huge, many-tined rake, sucking up particles of precious fuel that were too small to see. With the infrared, Eric could just make out the striations across the ground where the machines had already passed; they had worked their way across about a quarter of the crater’s bottom. Eric wondered what the Truscans who had built these machines had intended to do with them when the entire plain had been mined. Was there some other place on this planet where helium-3 could be mined? Would they have transported the machines to another world? Or would they simply have left them here to rust?

  He put his ponderings aside as the threat status icon turned red. Up ahead, clustered around the refinery, several red dots had appeared. Good. Those would be the golems. His men would dispatch them, destroy any other enemies in the area, and maybe blow up the refinery if they had time to spare. By that time, the marines would hopefully have revealed themselves, and they could make their way back to Varinga in time for supper. They might even get Dornen to tap into the beer supply.

  As the refinery loomed closer, though, the red lights began to wink out, one by one. That was odd. Were the golems going to leave the thing undefended? Eric held up his hand and slowed his pace. Something was wrong. The only reason the golems would leave the refinery undefended was if they knew they were outgunned and had no chance of holding it. But the golems weren’t men; Dornen had told them they had no desires of their own, only “programming.” They wouldn’t flee to save themselves. So what were they up to?

  “Assault Team, halt!” Eric ordered, taking a few more steps in case the men behind him couldn’t stop quickly enough. He scanned the horizon. There was no sign of any enemies. If they were out there, they were too distant for either his eyes or the hrafnlingr to pick up—and they could be anywhere.