Warbirds of Mars: Stories of the Fight!

by Неизвестный

  Myers tagged along with the old man as he limped over to a metal table that separated them from the stoic Khresmoi. Atop its dented surface lay a manila folder framed by the glaring beam of the light hanging overhead. His hand shaking just enough to be noticeable, Brickman opened the file and exposed a small stack of black and white photos. Myers patiently awaited further details. When none were forthcoming, he reluctantly sought out the doctor’s steely gaze. However, the only answers those eyes offered him was a dour stare and silence.

  Hesitating a moment longer, Myers pressed his lips together until they formed a frustrated line, and then he hunched over the pictures. An unconscious product of his concentration, he squinted and studied the first print intently. A high, aerial view of some kind of fortified warehouse, he could clearly discern a defensive perimeter inside of which were a dozen or so Martian ships. The next photograph showed the same depot from the ground, its imposing height and girth revealed more fully by the tiny alien and Nazi soldiers lost in its devouring shadow. The building’s high, square windows were blacked over by some unknown material, preventing anything inside from being glimpsed. Like the clenched maw of some angular behemoth, a pair of gigantic sliding doors protected the warehouse’s face from intrusion. Resembling a skeletal tongue, a wide track exited the warehouse through a gap beneath the gate and continued off to the side. In the background, Myers could see several Martian anti-aircraft guns watching the skies warily, their futuristic barrels glinting in the sun.

  Eager to understand the meaning behind the pictures, Myers moved on to the third one. It was clearly taken inside the depot and showed what looked like a modified canon. Ten times the size of any he had seen in the war, it was wrapped in seemingly extraneous pipes that ran up its sides, made sudden right angles, and then disappeared into its superstructure. On each of its rear flanks, a row of three enormous bubbling vats of some vicious-looking ooze stood out. The gun’s spiraling barrel looked big enough to drive a Sherman tank through without its sides hitting the walls. To raise and adjust the aim of the canon, a mass of various-sized hydraulics had been attached to a triangular hinge at its terminus. Finally, the whole apparatus had been affixed to a wide dais half the height of a normal man and set atop a train cart whose sturdy wheels straddled the beginnings of the track Myers had seen in the previous photo.

  The last series of photos started with a shot of the claustrophobic main street of some middle-sized European city. Every glass pane in the gothic brick buildings that loomed over the avenue had been shattered, creating a field of glittering shards. Seemingly mesmerized by whatever had caused the destruction, several men, women, children stood gaping in the street or along the sidewalk. Something about the stoop-shouldered figures made Myers break out in a cold sweat, but the picture held on to its secrets with grainy hands. As he moved on to the last couple of prints, he quickly realized that the preceding picture’s blurriness had been a blessing, not an obstacle. Taken at close range, the last pictures showed the townspeople horribly transfigured: their pupils appeared to have been erased, leaving their eyes nothing more than milky orbs. Black, branching veins peered out from their nearly translucent skin. Worse of all, they looked completely insensate, their mouths hanging open stupidly and bodies bent into fragile postures that recalled sick geriatrics. Martians and smiling Nazis posed with the enfeebled humans, some of which had been tied to leashes or pushed to their knees like animals.

  Teeth bared, Myers lifted his head and confronted Brickman.

  “What the hell am I looking at here?” the younger man growled, his taut body trembling with outrage.

  “They’re copies of pictures from a report headed to Martian high command detailing the successes of their weapons development program,” answered Brickman forebodingly. “A Nazi courier was carrying these in Berlin when a young woman with ties to the resistance recognized him. Putting the needs of humanity above her own dignity, she seduced him and then snapped copies of these while he slept. I showed these to everyone I could scrounge up who had been a scientist, theorist, or intelligence officer before the invasion, and they all came to the same conclusion. The bastards have completed a working prototype of some kind of brain scrambling ray that can lobotomize whole populations from hundreds of miles away. Now, look at this.”

  The old man pulled a crinkled map from his back pocket and unfolded it on the tabletop. A circle had been drawn in red ink around an empty spot outside the city of Rouen. From the loop’s northern edge, a crimson line traveled northeast and ended in another, smaller ring.

  “The test target was Calais, the terrible results of which you saw in those prints,” said Brickman, gesturing disgustedly at the photographs. “Given its distance from Rouen, there’s a good chance that if the Big Heads manage to up the output even a little bit more—”

  “They’ll be able to hit London,” rasped Myers, his throat suddenly dry.

  No less affected, the old man nodded weakly, his skin sallow.

  “I was walking home one night after I’d run this dossier by the last of my consultants when I got the feeling I was being tailed. I instantly ducked into the nearest alley, and it was then that the Doctor appeared before me, materializing out of empty air as if he’d stepped from a doorway I couldn’t see. He addressed me by name and began to reveal details about the Martian weapon that were only privy to those whom I’d personally shown the report. Given his strange accent and the classified things he knew, I assumed he was a Nazi assassin, and I went for my gun. Before I could raise it, though, he said something to me. A word in a language I couldn’t understand,” the old man said, his voice trailing off and quivering with uncertainty. “It’s the damndest thing. You’d think I’d at least remember what it sounded like, but whenever I try, my memory gets all hazy, like I’m staring through the side of a glass bottle.”

  “Brickman!” hissed Khresmoi, dragging the bewildered officer back to his senses.

  The old man nodded unsteadily, sweat glistening on his brow. Reaching feebly into his other pocket, he pulled out a white handkerchief and dabbed at his face. Myers had watched Brickman coolly manage a battlefield, while screaming soldiers were torn to shreds all around them, and enemy bullets spattered nearer and nearer like the blind finger of Death randomly searching for its next victim. Men changed, but this was different. Something was rotten, and Myers couldn’t help but feel that the so-called ‘Doctor’ was in on it. Keeping the rest of his body unnaturally still, he slowly rested his hand against the table’s edge, ready to catch hold of it and flip it toward the doctor if it came to that. As prepared as he’d ever be, he gave Brickman a searching look.

  “Are you all right, sir?” he asked, his cautious tone urging the old man to give him a sign as to whether or not they were in danger.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” answered Brickman, waving the damp cloth in his hand through the air dismissively. “Anyway, after the Doctor said whatever he said, his voice constricted around me. Paralyzed, I had no choice but to stand there while he told me things I’m still not sure I understand. And though I’m not convinced you’ll fare any better, I think it’s important you hear what he has to say. Doctor, if you’d please.”

  “As I said previously,” Khresmoi began with an irritated sneer, “there are a thousand dimensions. Despite what your kind likes to think, this one is hardly the most significant. That distinction falls to the first and the last. At one end of the spectrum is Tah’bahast, the Athenaeum of Forms, a place swollen with the ghostly echoes of everything that has ever been or will ever be in the future. Its opposite is Xol, the Crucible of Viscera, a universe stretched to its limit by an ever-expanding wall of flesh. Along its crawling exterior are galaxy-sized patches of chitin, hair, and scales from each of the myriad dimensions’ creatures, whether extinct, alive, or yet to be conceived. Billions of solitary eyes loll sightlessly, while an equal number of disembodied fingers and claws flex without conscious control. Forests of disparate horns erupt upwards out of seeping wounds. Tooth and
fang-filled mouths open and shut as if gasping for air. Beneath them, a seemingly endless network of veins carries a black mixture of all the variously colored bloods in existence to a million different, unnecessary hearts, their beating arrhythmic and out of sync with that of their fellows. Farther down still, a layer of muscle thousands of miles thick covers a wild tangle of bone submerged in a vast sea of humors. Like the tips of thorns that have snapped off deep within a body and slowly been absorbed, planet-like accumulations of every known and unknown element are stuck there inside the biologic mass.

  “In an eternal cycle, the Athenaeum and Crucible spawn the other dimensions between them in a cataclysmic coupling. As the eons pass, the subsequent realms mature. Expanding dramatically, they fill with flora and fauna given shape by the intermingling of the teeming, spectral silhouettes of the first realm and the gelatinous materials of the second. Like most things, though, the lesser dimensions’ time will eventually come. Their boundaries weaken, becoming porous and unstable, and they begin to putrefy from the inside out. If left unchecked, their death throes have the potential to destabilize the realms that neighbor them, and so on and so forth, until the solidity of existence itself is threatened. However, there are immense carrion beings, the Kortha, that shamble from dimension to dimension, feeding off aging realms and collapsing them in on themselves before they can endanger the rest. Upon arriving in such a dimension, the creatures find a suitable place where they can hibernate without disturbance. Before long, the force of their slumber sends out invisible, grasping tentacles whose anesthetizing touch extinguishes the stars, crushes the planets, and draws the remains in until nothing is left. Having inadvertently restored order to the continuum, the beings sluggishly awaken and, driven by their insatiable hunger, go in search of the next ailing dimension. If two or more of these creatures enter a realm where there is but a single, acceptable world within which they might slumber, though, they will attack each other mercilessly. That is what happened in this realm, on this world.”

  As Khresmoi opened his mouth to resume his lecture, Myers quickly cut him off.

  “That’s enough! You can save the rest for some other sucker!” he barked with a disdainful scowl. “I don’t know what you’ve got on Mr. Brickman to make him go along with this insanity, but I’m taking him and leaving!”

  “Is that so?” inquired the doctor, raising his left eyebrow condescendingly before sliding his gaze to the old man. “I guess your faith in your champion was misplaced after all.”

  “Steve...” Brickman wheezed, causing the soldier to face him hotly.

  The soldier’s vehemence was nonetheless immediately checked. He could barely recognize the man standing beside him as the same one that had been there a moment before: the old man’s face was gaunt and his cheeks sunken like that of a desiccated corpse. His chest and torso seemed lost in the folds of the jacket that had minutes ago fit snugly against the counters of his substantial frame. Atop his head, the pink skin that covered his pate was visible through his much thinned shock of hair, a few individual strands of which had come to rest upon his shoulders. Rivulets of perspiration streaked down his countenance and fell in globules from the edge of his jaw, splashing against his shoes or dotting the floor around them. The emaciated officer wiped at his jowls and cringed as if in pain.

  “At first, I didn’t believe him, either,” he admitted hoarsely, looking as if he might topple over at any second. “I was desperate, though, and he swore he could help us destroy the weapon. His story wasn’t any less crazy to my ears, but there was something about it that stuck in my brain like a white-hot piece of shrapnel.”

  Myers stared at the old man with a mix of sadness and pity.

  “I know how it sounds,” conceded Brickman softly. “Nevertheless, after the horrors we saw descend from the stars, I’m less skeptical about a lot of things I used to take for granted. All the same, I demanded that the Doctor show me proof or release me. To my surprise, he agreed to provide me with all the verification I would need. He warned me that there would be dire consequences, but I had to know. Oh, God! The things he showed me!”

  His bulging eyes growing glassy, the old man stared at an empty spot on the wall with abject terror, lost in nightmarish remembrance. Barely parted, his lips trembled as if yearning to expel a scream of abhorrence that dared not leave the safety of its originator’s throat. Suddenly, Brickman’s horrific trance was broken by a fit of coughing so fierce it shook his withered body like the grip of some savage beast. In the midst of his convulsions, he lifted the handkerchief to his mouth and held it there until he finished hacking. When he finally took the small piece of cloth away from his lips, its wrinkled interior was stained by splotches of dark blood.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Myers asked Khresmoi frantically.

  “He dared to gaze upon things anathema to human existence, so that neither you nor any others of your species would have to carry the ruinous burden which even now works to undo him!” asserted the doctor, his tone almost respectful.

  Uncertainty crept into Myers’s features. He gingerly returned his gaze to Brickman, watching as his wracked friend stood hunched forward, his chin nearly resting against his sternum, while he labored to catch his breath. It was obvious the officer and the doctor believed the things they were saying, some details of which seemed to be borne out by the old man’s rapid deterioration and the photos. Nevertheless, Myers’s mind continued to suffer paroxysms of doubt.

  “Sir, think about what you’re saying for a minute,” the soldier implored his superior. “If there were giant monsters having a punch-up over the Earth, we would have seen it!”

  “Fool!” snarled Khresmoi, his vehemence striking out at Myers like a bare fist. “That battle took place over four billion years ago! What do you think reduced this world to the bubbling mass that ultimately gave birth to all life as you know it?”

  The young man mulled over the doctor’s words for a moment, hoping to find a snag with which to unravel his loony rambling.

  “Provided what you’ve said is true, shouldn’t this realm already be dead then?” he asked at last.

  The doctor crossed his arms and looked down his nose at Myers, a smug grin slithering across his face.

  “Tch. The dissolution of a realm can take an incalculable amount of time. To the ageless beings who would feed on this dimension’s entropy, however, such a span is like the passing of a handful of seconds. Know that their arrival does not promise immediacy in any form your kind would recognize. Thus, while it’s true that this realm has been dying since well before your species’ misshapen ancestors crawled out of the primordial swamps, it could be several millennia before it takes its final, choking gasp. Would you have humanity spend its last, indefinite hours pinned beneath the heel of Martian aggression?”

  “This is insane,” grumbled Myers through gritted teeth.

  “Please, just hear him out,” Brickman urged his friend feebly. “If you’re still not convinced once he’s finished, that’ll be the end of it. I promise.”

  The thought of refusing the old man’s pathetic entreaty made Myers sick to his stomach. As far as he was concerned, there hadn’t been a finer officer in the Army; Brickman had genuinely believed and cared for his men, crediting every victory to their courage, skill, and discipline without ever mentioning his own role in the unit’s successes. He’d also had an almost supernatural knack for knowing when one of the soldiers was struggling beneath the horror and heartache the war heaped on them, an affliction he would combat with a proffered smoke or a comforting chat. At the same time, whenever a decision he’d made had resulted in the deaths of one or more of their squadmates, he’d immediately and stoically accepted responsibility for it. And though he had never let those harrowing consequences make him weak or indecisive, the dark circles beneath his perpetually haunted eyes spoke to the wounds each and every sacrifice he had been forced to make had left on his soul. With all that in mind, Myers decided he owed the old man at least a fe
w more minutes of his time, even if the whole business was mad as a March hare.

  “Alright,” he sighed, reluctantly turning back to the doctor. “Go on.”

  “Hmph!” scoffed Khresmoi indigently, pausing just long enough to assert that he acted of his own free will and not because the young soldier had spurred him. “Clashes between the Kortha are not uncommon. Usually, the weaker one will ultimately be driven off while the victor stays to claim its reward and devour the realm. The conflict that occurred here, though, was anomalous. Too evenly matched, the creatures’ epic clash continued on and on without a clear winner. In their mindless fury, the warring titans eventually razed the entire world, leaving it smoldering and uninhabitable. Having no other recourse, the beings fled to adjacent dimensions where they have been slowly regaining their strength and waiting for the Earth to heal. However, the advent of the Martian invaders has complicated matters further.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real inconvenience for us, too,” Myers quipped without sympathy.

  “It’s much more than that, I assure you,” promised the doctor, his voice wickedly low. “Martian blood is poisonous to the beings. Taken in small doses, it would most likely sicken them, but leave them otherwise unharmed. However, if the invaders are allowed to proliferate, an outcome which this new weapon of theirs will most certainly ensure, there will soon be too many of them for the beings to safely return. In that time, the Martians will surely plunder the Earth’s resources and leave it barren and useless, just as they did to their own homeworld. Lacking a fitting planet on which to establish a toehold in this dimension, the Kortha will abandon it altogether, and compelled by their insatiable hunger, they will seek out less ripe realms to consume. Meanwhile, this reality will begin to rot, infecting all those around it.”

  “Considering the alternatives, that actually sounds like the best deal of the bunch for us humans,” said the soldier wryly.