by Aeryn Leigh
Ella looked the other way. No sign of Grieg or the seaplane. He couldn't have lived. A point-blank double-shotgun blast and the elephant-hunting rifle slug for good measure had — had — to kill you.
It was over. The man who'd tormented her for over a decade, the master of puppets, was dead.
Too bad there's no corpse because I'd love to bury him just to piss on it. She started laughing, but stopped, her whole body now telling her in no uncertain terms everything was sore, cracked, shot or in malaise.
The minutes passed by, as did the clouds, and for a lot more after that.
For the first time in fifteen years, she had a holiday. A break. No obligations, no rushing around, no expectations. I'm broken, and at last have five minutes alone.
Chapter One Hundred Three
Amongst Mates At Last
"Easy there, Old Man, easy," said Mick, helping Laurie down to the ground. "It's dead. You got it. The last tank." Laurie fell onto his back, into a stream of blood, the entire beach one tributary of red flowing out to sea. Fingers still curled around the sword's hilt, as Laurie started to shake, and then convulse.
"It's okay mate, it's okay," said Mick. He knelt then sat beside his friend and captain in the red sand, pulled him up into a sitting bear hug, wrapping his short arms around, and holding tight, as Laurie John surrendered to, no fuck that, accepted, the physical safety of comradeship.
"Never leave your mates behind," said Laurie, his voice a whisper between breaths. "I've left so many behind Mick, so many," slowly rocking in Mick's arms, the tremors easing. "Gallipoli. Passchendaele. Somme. Flanders. I tried to save them. You must believe me."
"Oh, we do mate, we do. We all do," said Mick, giving the thumbs up to Griffin, then Bear, as they all stood by, as Laurie buried his head down into his chest, amongst mates at last, amongst the charnel house of the bay, victorious.
Chapter One Hundred Four
A Small Matter
The rhythmic drumbeat rolled across the waves, and broke her contemplations. What on Earth is that? It grew closer, and now, voices chanting in low, phonic waves. The voices stopped, as did the accompanying regular splashes. But a bigger splash, then another, and footsteps through the shallow water.
Something warm and rough as sandpaper licked her cheek.
"There's the warrior," said the low voice. "Magnus, crane that engine on board quick. You lot. Salvage what you can. Pick up her weapons. Manx, stop licking her face."
Beowulf Hffylson, King of Vikings, knelt by her side, and smiled. He reached under her torso, then as gentle as if she were a new born foal, picked her up, and carried her to Hellsbaene.
"Sorry about the delay, Ella. The beasts are out of fuel. But we must hurry back," said Beowulf.
"Why?" said Ella, being lifted over the side. It hurt to even talk.
"Oh, a small matter." She was placed upon a sheepskin rug, next to the Merlin's, on a bench reserved for the injured.
"Rest. Recover your strength. Odin will need you." He pulled a woollen blanket over her body, as he looked at the main invasion force, the Inquisition blotting out the horizon further than his eyes could see, in the twilight of the day.
Chapter One Hundred Five
A Friendly Card Game
Eight sunsets later, the latest arrivals from Earth gathered in the front hall, the smell of smouldering timbers and burning oil from war machines reaching their housing in the Pit all the way from the hard-won battlefield miles away. But with the news of the second, much larger fleet just sitting outside the Bay's entrance, waiting for hells knew what, it didn't feel like a victory. Two long, back-breaking days of tending to the wounded, followed by strengthening and repairing defences, resupplying, piling up bodies, trying to match limbs with torsos, heads with chests - for the first time in a week, the Inquisition just sitting there - they had a night off.
Just them.
"It's down to you and me, Mick. I know you're bluffing. I raise you ten."
"Yeah right mate. I'm just an honest man hard done by. I'll see your ten and all in. Let's seem ‘em." Abraded hands pushed the pile of rations across the table.
Daniel considered his cards. "I know you're bluffing. This is the only pack of cards we have. They're getting marked from old age!"
"Less talk sunshine, more action. You folding or not?"
The entire crew of Damage Inc. stood behind their man. Hade's Express stood behind theirs. The last remaining food and comfort items from Earth laid in the middle of the long, trestle table in the front hall. The bomber nose art hung behind each side, adding their moral weight. Each man had helped finish the first beer keg, and now all deep into the second. Except for the puppies and their mother, who traitorously puddled together in front of the roaring fire, gorged on dinner.
"Wait, how did we get to this?" said Andrew, fidgeting. "It was supposed to be a friendly game?"
Griffin glared at him, his left arm in a sling. "Go for it, Dan," he said. "I want those cigars." He spoke louder. "Plus, I'm dyin’ to hear what happened to Amelia down in the emergency caverns. Never seen the kid so damn happy. Hurry up and end the game."
"Bugger the cigars," said Laurie, "that coffee is mine." Everything might just turn out okay, he realised. Even with the main enemy force breathing down their necks, waiting for who knew what, even what that unresolved threat — look at them. Us. We've done the impossible, and that makes us notable. Mighty even. Whatever happens now, they'd never diminish that. Just take a look around this room.
That's defiance.
Maybe that’s why we were brought here. We held the line.
"Blow it out your barracks bag Old Man," said Lucius, grinning. "He's bluffing. Go Dan."
The navigator all the way from the U.S.A. wiped his brow, and finished his mug, slamming it on the table. "You Aussies are so full of it." Bruised hands laid the cards down. Andrew sucked in a breath. "A full-house, queens over jacks. Suck on that, losers." Arms reached out to sweep up the pile.
The Australians groaned. Laurie sighed. Except for the bloke from Brunswick, Melbourne, who just smiled. "It's a friendly game. We won't take all of it. I'm not that much of a bastard."
The Americans and Australians alike looked at him. Mick picked up his covered cards and laid them face up on the table, one by one, and stood up, to all their incredulous faces.
"Four Aces High. Now let's all go see how our Maiden is doing?" The short Australian paused. "Besides, we're running out of beer. Lead the way, Old Man."
Chapter One Hundred Six
Full Circle
"The doctor says you broke your collarbone Mummy, and got concussion. And dislocated your elbow. You've been asleep for a week!" Amelia jumped up onto the side of the hospital bed, oblivious to the grunt that came from the top half of the mattress. "They got the bullet out. Mick showed me. We won the battle! Do you want to see it?" She leapt off again, and went running from the room.
How long have I been out? A whole week!? What are those fading bruises on Amelia's neck?
The room spun, and she paused for breath. Beneath the sheets, her stomach rumbled. Her thoughts calmed.
This is the new hospital in The Pit. Outside the room, the faint echoes of moaning and distress penetrated the thick walls. The hospital sounded full, and hectic. Well it would be. I remember getting into the longboat and then I just woke up, with Amelia next to me. That's her cot over there, with Message Bear. She must have slept here all week.
The sounds of running feet, the delicate sound of thunder, and Amelia returned, with the pack of puppies jumping next to her. "No Amelia don't —"
Her beloved child landed on the mattress once more, tossing her up, and Ella said some very inappropriate words. But then her daughter hugged her, and kissed her on the cheek, and right then and there, she decided, that everything was going to be okay.
Hell, if it wasn't, she'd bloody well make it be.
"Can you read me the story again?" said Amelia, leaning back from the bedside table, raising her ha
nds. Hands in her leather gauntlets, making them look like over-sized boxing gloves. In it, the pulp fiction. "In the Bogart voice, but with a touch of Mick. Here, I'll hold the book up for you."
Words on cream coloured paper shoved up hard against her face, the smell of old printed pages. Chapter One.
Life, thought Ella Gruder, never ends.
Author’s Note & Info
Hi! If you loved what you've read, then check out the next in my series, Painkiller: Odin's Warriors, available now!
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www.aerynleigh.combookclub
Or if you prefer, I can talk about the legal ramifications from the infamous Spanish court case from 1854 involving a squirrel and an errant donkey and how the sitting judge was found in contempt because he owned the squirrel, but I digress*. Have you signed up yet?
Because it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission, reviews matter a lot for Indie writers, especially new authors. Could you please? Thank you!
The Real Author's Note
Thank you for reading my first ever book! If you stick with me, I promise I won’t let you down. I’ve got your back. No Robert Jordan decades between books. Or waiting for the next written instalment in Games of Thrones…
Well. I didn’t see that one coming! A twin Merlin V-12 powered longship?! Oohh yeah. I’ll take two!
As a kid, I had all the aircraft in this book as 1:32 or 1:64 plastic models, painted and all. Even a P-38 Lightning, and a SR-71, next to a Sopwith Camel and a ‘32 Ford hotrod. A M4 Sherman tank. And a red ‘84 Mazda 323 with a 6/71 supercharger taken from another kit stuck on the bonnet.
Yeah, been a motorhead (and Lemmy fan) forever.
I've tried to keep the engines, guns, aircraft, and engineering as accurate as possible, without becoming too bogged down in details and not seeing the story for the trees. I'm not quite sure how a Merlin-V12 would go being stuck in a longship and marinated in beer and Viking sweat whilst lathered in corrosive sea-spray for weeks on end, but I guess you'd get a few solid hours out of them, at least, before you'd need to pull them out and cover everything in fish oil. Again.
Okay. The book inspiration. Years ago I’d read about the Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler incident, singular enough for the authorities to classify it secret. On the 20th December 1943, “when, after a successful bomb run on Bremen, 2nd Lt Charles "Charlie" Brown's B-17 Flying Fortress (named "Ye Olde Pub") was severely damaged by German fighters. Luftwaffe pilot Franz Stigler had the opportunity to shoot down the crippled bomber, but did not. After an extensive search by Brown, the two pilots met each other 40 years later and developed a friendship that lasted until Stigler's death in March 2008.”
That’s inspiring. How could it not be? From that, mixed with what happened around Christmas 1914 in WWI, the story idea for Odin’s Warriors popped into my head one day in November when out driving for work, remembering the incident out of the blue whilst stuck in Melbourne’s traffic with an Aha! moment and by the following day, I’d written a rough outline from the following question:
What if a fleeing female Luftwaffe test pilot (albeit a nicer Hanna Reitsch) met up with a couple of returned Allied bombers over Europe and got sucked into a Bermuda Triangle to another world by Norse entities in a twisted case of Battle Royale?
If this happened to you dear reader, hypothetically, driving down Interstate 65, the M1, or the Hume Highway on your way home from work, and you hit a grey storm, and got spat out on a world with two suns — how would you react? Would you flip and go bonkers, or do your damnedest to believe nothing is out of the ordinary? I think I would do the same as these characters — go through all or most of the five stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
And a whole lot of beer.
I’ve been there. I think we’ve all been there, whether we admit it or not, when confronted by realities we’d rather not admit. Head meet sand.
And from that, this story kaleidescoped out. And here we are!
Now onto the itty-gritty details!
Ella Gruder is loosely-based upon Hanna Reitsch (but without the pro-Nazi ideology), mixed with Elenor Ripley’s (Aliens) attitude and hiding a dark secret. Maybe a dash of Imperator Furiousa. Her sexuality drives a lot of her plot back story and why Grieg hates her so, but it’s not her primary all-consuming identity. First and foremost, she’s an aviator. A pioneer. Then a mother. Ella is inspired by all the amazing, strong women in my life I’ve met, warts, farts, and all. And her daughter, well, keeps her grounded. And well read!
As for the fateful moonlit night of Laurie and Lucius’s bombing mission, that also is based upon the March 30, 1944 RAF bombing raid to Nuremberg to destroy ball-bearing factories, where 95 bombers out of 795 were shot down, more than the entire RAF losses in the Battle of Britain combined. That disaster received no mention for decades afterwards, and if it did, was only a footnote. You had a better chance of surviving as a WWI infantryman in the trenches than serving as a bomber crewman in WWII.
The bombing of Hamburg, and it’s resulting firestorm, happened in 1943, and by conservative estimates over 40,000 civilians died.
The crew of Damage Inc. is inspired by the Tuskegee Airmen (and my love of Metallica). I adored reading about them as a kid, I guess it shows. I mean red wing tips. Woohoo! They just had to be part of the story, albeit another version of one of the most heavily-armed, bad-ass bombers in the Pacific Theatre, Old 666 but set in Europe instead. Griffin was inspired by Teal’C from SG1 and Ghost Dog, in effect a warrior philosopher with a penchant for custom, high-calibre weaponry.
The crew of Hade’s Express, well that was easy. I’m Australian. Aussies punch way above our weight class (sometimes yes, a lot of times no, but it’s a nice story we tell ourselves), plus being the first to say Yes to fight in wars, back to the Boer Wars, and who doesn’t love lovable larrakins? Laurie is part my Dad, part Mad Max, and part Wolverine. Classic strong, silent male. Says about ten words a year, apart from the one time you want a quick phone call, and 45-min later your ear is going numb pressed hard up against the phone. Yes, Dad. Uh-huh. Yes, Dad. Yep. Really? Yep. Love you Dad!
Mick is based on my Grandpa (who served in WWII) and almost every single smart-arse Australian I’ve met, and drunk with. Just don’t mention his height.
The character of Merrion was supposed to lose his head to Ella’s shotgun blast. He did. But he convinced me to give him a chance, the rascal. Because once I started typing or dictating, the characters literally took lives of their own. I’d say a prayer to the Muse, open Scrivener, and let the story flow onto the page like I was taking dictation from the quantum soup. I did my best to tell my self-censoring voice to go jump in the fire. Hell, half if not most of the scenes in the book after finishing writing them made me pause and think Where the fuck did that come from? That was awesome!
It also scared me shitless, with every story fossil unearthed.
As a kid, my Mum was MASSIVELY into books. Still is. Fiction and Non-Fiction. Two square metres of American Civil War and both World Wars. You name it, Mum had it. Like every room in the house had a bookshelf. The first big book I read was The Hobbit. Then Lord of the Rings. Mum and Dad also had this huge hardback collection of Time’s Aviation box-set, which I’d read over and over too, tracing over the illustrations and paintings. At the same time, I saw Star Wars IV, and all these Marx Bros. movies, and then, recorded onto a VCR from the TV, a (heavily-edited) Mad Max. Phase IV heads, sucks nitrous! Blues Brothers. Then Aliens (Directors Cut). OMG Ripley! B-Gun down 50%!
That was it. Nirvana. I think I played those VCR tapes so much white-tracking lines appeared at the top and bottom of the screen. About this time, my cousins decided to no longer bring over the Atari 2600, because it being my only a
ccess to computer games, I’d hole up in my bedroom and be anti-social playing River Raid.
I have a clear memory of being stopped boarding the bus leaving school camp, at the age of eleven, because I was halfway into Day of the Jackal by Fredrick Forsyth after just finishing the Odessa File.
“Who gave you that?” asked the concerned teacher.
“Oh, my Mum,” I replied breezily, climbing up the steps past the astonished man. Damn I loved that book. Bad Nazis going boom over a pothole in the finale, exploding watermelons from hollow-jacketed sniper rounds, and a sweet modified Jaguar XJS with triple-carb Webers. See dear reader? I haven’t read it since I was like 13, and I still remember all the awesome bits, because I re-read those kind of books for those exact same set pieces the moment I finished!
Which is why, trying to figure out what genre this book is has given me the verdammt scheissen. It’s sci-fi. It’s military. It’s WWII. It’s alternate history. It’s emotional. I cried at least five times writing it. Laughed at my own jokes. It’s utterly bonkers. There’s Vikings in it. And a kid who loves ‘30s pulp fiction. And reasonably-highly advanced Nordic-entities that can transport matter across time and space at will.
And it’s also about family. And heart. And puppies!
