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

by Robert Kroese

  But the Izarians weren’t human. Supposedly they were a race similar to humans, but almost no one had actually seen an Izarian. Not even Commander Dornen, who had been at war with them for years, had ever seen one. Perhaps the machines were the Izarians.

  In all the stories she’d heard about the machines—from Commander Dornen’s tales of space battles to Ragnald’s account of the battle on Voltera—one thing stood out: although the machines were fast, precise, deadly and determined, they were not particularly creative. When faced with an obstacle like a boulder, they blasted it with missiles until it was gone. Although a sort of low cunning had prompted them to send the golems ahead in case of a trap, it never occurred to them to wonder why a lone man would climb up a stone wall in the middle of a heated battle. It was if they’d been programmed with certain tactics but didn’t understand the reasoning behind them. Ultimately, their strategy depended on overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers and firepower.

  If the Izarians were machines, lacking the human genius for invention and problem-solving, they would have a hard time with non-linear challenges. If they ran out of helium-3, they would try to find more of it. They would look on other worlds, but perhaps the conditions on those worlds were not suitable for the mining methods they were familiar with. So they would do what greedy and uncreative human beings did: they would steal it from someone else. And if they ran into resistance, they would throw machines at the problem until it went away.

  None of this, of course, explained where the Izarians had come from, or how they had come to possess the technology they already possessed. Probably there had once been a race of beings who had built the machines for some purpose and programmed certain behaviors into them, but those beings had died off, leaving the machines to replicate and spread across the galaxy, eradicating any beings they saw as competition.

  If her theory was correct, then Dornen had, purely by accident, hit upon the Achilles’ heel of the Izarians. He’d brought Varinga to Voltera looking for a means to defeat the Izarians, and although he might never know it, he’d found it. The Izarians were desperate for helium-3.

  Their response to the insurgency on Voltera and to the arrival of Varinga was not a sign of strength but rather of weakness. They had thrown everything they could at Voltera because without it, their war effort—in all likelihood, their entire civilization—would grind to a halt. All the Norsemen had to do to cripple the Izarians was hold Voltera. In fact, all they really needed to do was destroy the refinery. If she were correct, the Izarians would never figure out how to build another one.

  There was a problem with this strategy, though: it would result, at best, in a stalemate. The Izarians would likely still be able to complete their campaign of deploying planet-killers to wipe out every known human world. The two hundred or so people aboard Varinga were probably already dead, either by the hand of the Izarians or annihilated in a hyperspace mishap. And even assuming that Earth was spared from the genocidal rampage of the Izarians, a thousand years from now what remained of humanity would face extinction at the hands of the Cho-ta’an.

  No, it would not be enough to destroy the refinery or simply hold onto Voltera indefinitely. Freya needed to get off this planet and somehow ensure the survival of humanity.

  All these thoughts raced through her head while she tried to figure out the maddeningly complex controls of the cargo ship. Yet it was not her ponderings on the Izarians and the fate of humanity that were hindering her efforts. Ordinarily she had no trouble working on two problems at once. In fact, she found solving technical problems easier when she let her instincts guide her, allowing her mind to drift. She was missing something.

  She’d mastered the controls of the Gemini spacecraft. She’d learned everything there was to know about piloting IDL ships. And she’d spent four years navigating a Cho-ta’an craft through deep space. It shouldn’t be so difficult to figure out how to fly a simple Truscan cargo ship. After all, the Izarians had done it, hadn’t they? They hadn’t brought their own cargo ships to Voltera; they’d simply appropriated the Truscan ships along with the rest of the operation.

  Of course.

  She didn’t need to fly the ship. The Izarians would already have programmed it. That was why the nav system seemed so complicated. The Izarians wouldn’t bother to stick a golem in the pilot’s chair. They would just upload the instructions directly to the nav computer. She was looking at Izarian programs running on a Truscan operating system. Once she realized that, everything made sense. The nav system wasn’t responding properly to her commands because another program, hidden in its memory, was countermanding her. It was essentially a virus, hijacking the system for its own ends. With enough time, she could probably remove the virus, but that was unnecessary. Fortunately, whoever developed the virus hadn’t bothered to hide their intentions. Once she knew it was there, it was easy enough to figure out how it was going to act.

  A smile crept across Freya’s face.

  She knew how she was going to beat the Izarians.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I t was a simple matter to trick the cargo ship’s nav computer into thinking it had been loaded full of helium-3 when in fact it held only sixteen Norsemen (including Freya) in mech suits, along with oxygen tanks and various supplies. The ship had launched and was already nearing escape velocity over Voltera when a force of KW23s arrived at the launch site to find the flaming wreckage of two other cargo ships.

  Because the ship was of Truscan design, it was not equipped with the more advanced hyperspace drive used by the Izarians. That meant Freya and the Norsemen had a five-day voyage to the edge of the Voltera system. The cargo hold was a bit cramped for sixteen mech suits, and while it was shielded and pressurized, it did not have its own air supply—hence the need for the oxygen tanks. But the Norsemen, who had on several occasions spent weeks at sea under much worse conditions, did not complain.

  After five days, the ship jumped into hyperspace of its own accord. A few hours of subjective time later, it emerged again at the edge of the Izar system, before spending another five days traveling to Izar itself. Along the way its computer was queried numerous times by robotic sentries, and each time, the virus-infected computer gave the expected answer. A human being who witnessed a cargo ship arriving without advance notice from a hotly contested planet would probably have ordered the ship quarantined to verify that all was as it seemed. No such order was issued. The ship achieved orbit over Izar and then descended into the atmosphere. Freya, having half-expected to be blown out of the sky as soon as they neared the planet, was stunned when the ship settled to the ground. She did her best to hide her shock from the Norsemen, who were ignorant of the string of conjectures that had gone into her plan.

  Freya did not know the exact landing coordinates; only that they would set down on one of the landing areas adjacent to one of the six helium-3 reactors. It didn’t really matter, though: the spokes were nearly identical, and each of them led to the central control hub. The moment the ship hit the ground, Freya threw open the hatch and the Norsemen, led by Eric, poured out. Over the course of the journey, Eric’s grief had hardened into grim determination: he was going to get vengeance on the Izarians for killing Haeric.

  The Norsemen were greeted by a large, crane-like robot that hovered over the cargo, whirring and buzzing as it tried to locate the tanks of helium-3 it was expecting. It was unlikely the machine had the intelligence to recognize the Vikings as a threat, so they left it alone rather than draw attention to themselves.

  Eric led the men across the tarmac toward the power plant in the distance. Stealth was not an option; their only chance was to reach the control hub before the bulk of the city’s defenses had mobilized against them. If Freya was right about the importance of Voltera, the city’s defenses would be minimal, but they couldn’t afford to get bogged down in an extended firefight.

  The landing area’s security forces spotted them before they’d even reached the edge of the tarmac. Fortunately thes
e were just golems whose small caliber guns were no threat, but the machines were in constant radio contact with each other, meaning that the entire city would soon be on alert. The Norsemen didn’t even take the time to cut down the golems with.

  They spotted the first fliers just before they reached the power plant. They didn’t engage with these either, betting that the fliers would opt not to use their missiles so close to the reactor. The fliers harassed them with machineguns, but these were unlikely to do any serious damage as long as the Norsemen kept moving. The men leapt onto the roof of the plant using their suit rockets. Izar’s gravity was slightly stronger than Voltera’s but not as strong as Earth’s. They bounded along the roof of the huge building in two columns as a growing flock of fliers circled overhead and scores of golems raced around the building on either side. Eric and Ragnald each led a column; Freya, who was less experienced with the suit but whose guidance was vital to the assault, followed immediately behind Eric. Gulbrand, behind her, had been tasked with making sure she remained unharmed.

  Several tanks and heavy infantry units had begun to converge on the spoke where the Norsemen were headed. This spoke, an asphalt road some eighty feet wide, led directly through one of the six main factories and then continued to the control hub, which was a roughly dome-shaped building some two hundred yards across. The spokes were connected by a concentric circle of smaller roads. Moving along the road were hundreds of machines of various shapes and sizes, most of which were of one of the six types produced in the six main factories. The areas between the roads were taken up by other buildings, most of which also seemed to have been constructed from a limited set of standard types. Except for the sheer size of it and its circular design, the place looked more like a circuit board than a city.

  The non-military machines had moved aside to make way for scores of tanks, KW23s, light infantry units, and every other type of machine capable of fighting, which moved in perfect sync to block the Norsemen’s advance. Many of the closer machines fired their guns at the attackers, but either out of fear of a reactor leak or confidence in their ability to dispatch the threat without causing major damage to the city, they continued to refrain from using missiles.

  On Eric’s orders, the men fanned out across the roof and fired a volley of missiles in unison toward the gathering of war machines. As explosions erupted ahead of them, Eric shouted another order and the Norsemen suddenly veered to the left. They reached the edge of the roof and leaped off, manually firing their rockets to carry them as high as possible over the city. The fliers scattered, but not before the Norsemen had downed several of them with their machineguns. When Eric’s suit was down to twenty percent fuel, he ordered the men to cut their rockets. They came down like so many stones, their rockets kicking in again just before they hit the ground. They landed in the middle of the next spoke over, some two hundred yards past the machines lined up to stop them.

  Some of the men landed on the road; others flattened machines that were unfortunate enough to be under them. A few, including Freya and Gulbrand, came down on nearby buildings. They quickly regrouped, eliminated a handful of light infantry machines nearby, and then continued their advance. The city was now clearly on high alert: cranes, delivery trucks and all sorts of other non-military machines moved to block their path, while fliers continued to strafe them. Eric’s men leaped over the obstacles when they could and blew them up when they had to. At last they reached the place where the road ran through the factory, blasting their way through a line of delivery trucks and running into the tunnel beyond.

  Machines poured toward them from several smaller roads that branched off the tunnel into various parts of the factory. Fortunately these were not war machines; a few were delivery vehicles or other machines of low intelligence, but most were unarmed golems. Before the Norsemen had reached the far end of the tunnel, they were surrounded by thousands of the man-like creatures, who threw themselves at the attackers like madmen trying to appease a malevolent god. Some of the machines lacked heads or an outer shell; in its desperation the city was throwing unfinished machines from the assembly lines at them. The Norsemen gunned them down by the dozen, carving a path to daylight.

  Freya, following close behind Eric, could hardly fire her guns fast enough to keep the zombie-like golems at bay. They posed no real threat except as a collective barrier; she nearly fell on her face as she picked her way through the metal-and-plastic corpses. Her relief at nearing the end of the tunnel vanished as a wave of fire came at them along with a shockwave that knocked her ten feet backward and left her lying, half in a daze, on a pile of metal faces, limbs and torsos. Even with the suit’s sound dampeners, her ears rang. Eric lay on his side a few feet away, struggling to get to his feet. Ahead of them, just beyond the tunnel, were three tanks, their guns aimed toward the attackers.

  “Up!” shouted a voice somewhere nearby. She became aware of somebody pulling on the left arm of the suit. Gulbrand. She got up as another explosion erupted behind them. Gulbrand ran ahead of her, guns blazing, and she followed, no longer sure which direction they were going. When at last she fully regained her senses, she realized they were somewhere well inside the factory. The only machines she saw were metal presses, lathes, conveyer belts and other bolted-down equipment: anything capable of moving independently had been conscripted to stop the attackers.

  “We have to find another way in,” Gulbrand said. “Eric and the others will keep them distracted.”

  Freya nodded, seeing the sense of the idea. Her display told her that three men had been killed in the tunnel. It had taken them too long to get to the hub; the entire city had been mobilized against them.

  She scanned the factory, using the suit’s variable intensity x-ray scope to map the building. Gulbrand urged her to hurry, while gunfire and explosions sounded from the tunnel.

  “There!” she said, pointing to a door across the factory floor.

  “How…?” Gulbrand asked, and she realized the problem at the same moment. Although it was built by and for machines, the factory—indeed the entire city—seemed to be constructed at a normal human scale. The ceiling here was high enough for the mech suits to stand, but the doors and corridors were standard human size. They would have to ditch the suits.

  Chapter Eighteen

  G ulbrand exited his suit and then helped Freya out of hers. They moved quickly across the factory floor, armed only with handguns and a satchel of plastic explosives Gulbrand had brought from the refinery. Fortunately, the atmosphere was breathable.

  When they reached the door, however, they found it impossible to open. Not merely locked; it had no handle, knob or visible lock of any kind.

  “I will blow it open,” said Gulbrand, unslinging the satchel.

  “Wait,” said Freya, noticing a small lens at about eye level. They had brought the explosives to break into the control hub and destroy whatever they found inside. Not knowing what was in there, they had brought enough charges to destroy a city block. Still, she’d rather not waste them. She found a golem head lying on the floor not far away and held it up to the lens. A thin red beam scanned the barcode on the golem’s forehead and the door slid open. “Let’s go,” said Freya, moving into the corridor beyond with the golem head under her arm. Gulbrand followed her and the door slid shut behind them.

  The corridor took them most of the way to the control hub. Freya had memorized the surveillance photo of the city Dornen had showed them, but she had no way to know how to get inside the hub from where they were. She just had to trust the driving idea behind the city’s design: all roads lead to the Hub.

  The corridor came to a dead end; the only way out was a vertical shaft overhead. A ladder of metal rungs led upward into darkness. Gulbrand insisted on going first, and Freya followed as the distant rumble of explosions continued. She wondered how much longer Eric and his men could hold out. She couldn’t even be certain Eric was still alive, and without his leadership they wouldn’t last long. So far she and Gulbrand had enc
ountered no resistance—no autonomous machines at all, in fact—but this could only be because the Izarians were throwing everything they had at Eric’s men.

  They emerged at an intersection of corridors, and they continued hubward, using the golem head when necessary to open doors. At last they reached a door that would not open. When Freya scanned the barcode, a tiny red light would flash next to the lens, but nothing else happened.

  “I guess that’s as far as this thing is going to get us,” said Freya, making to drop the golem head.

  “Hold on,” said Gulbrand. “Give it to me.”

  She handed him the head, and he proceeded to yank the innards out of it. He then stuffed three of the lumps of plastic explosive into it. “I suspect we are going to meet more resistance beyond this door.” Freya nodded. He inserted one of the detonators, putting it on a five second timer. Then he pulled out another charge and knelt at the door.

  “Where are you going to put the charge?” she asked. The door looked to be solid steel, and if it was like the others, it had no hinges or latch. She had her doubts about the effectiveness of an explosive. Gulbrand was still considering the question when the door slid open without warning. A golem holding a machinegun stepped through.

  Before the machine could get its gun pointed, Gulbrand seized the barrel and pulled. The golem, holding tightly to the gun, stumbled into the corridor. Freya moved aside, slamming the butt of her fist into the side of the thing’s head. The golem’s head smashed into the wall, and she did it again, and again. She didn’t know where the golems’ brains were located, but she’d noticed blows to the head were effective in disorienting them. She would have kept going, but she saw that the door had begun to close. While Gulbrand continued to try to wrest the golem’s gun away, she moved to the door, clutching at it with both hands to keep it from sliding shut. It barely slowed. Bracing her feet against the wall and straining with all her strength, she managed to arrest its movement. Behind her, Gulbrand had gotten on top of the golem and was smashing its head repeatedly into the floor. Beyond the door was a small room that appeared, for the moment, to be empty. Undoubtedly, the golem had already radioed for assistance. The smart thing to do would probably be to let the door close and run. But if they fled now, they would never get to the Hub.