The Iron Dream (24 page)
A vast surge of power seemed to shoot down his right arm and fill his body with inexhaustible energy and superhuman strength. The Steel Commander was a feather in his hand, but his first blow hit with the force of an avalanche, smashing the tiny heads of six Warriors to bloody flinders and sending their bodies writhing in the dust, fountaming gore. He heard a great cheer go up behind him; fired to heroic fervor by the sight of this incredible feat, the SS motorcycle elite guard, led by Ludolf Best, plunged into the fray at the side of their Supreme Commander. Though heavily outnumbered, and by creatures twice their size to boot, the SS fanatics made up for it with speed and superhuman fire, falling upon the Warriors with their truncheons, crushing legs with the wheels of their motorcycles, keeping close to Feric's heels as he cut his way ever deeper into the heart of the Zind horde with the irresistible Steel Commander.
For his part, Feric continued to mow down the hairy sweat-soaked giants in great lots and bunches: smashing through a forest of legs and leaving the crippled howling creatures for the troops behind him to dispatch, then whirling around to pulp a score of the tiny expressionless Warrior faces with the steel fist headball of the Great Truncheon.
Even in this close-quarter combat, the Warriors of Zind showed little if any individual initiative. They simply pressed forward, rank after rank, swinging their truncheons at everything that moved; perhaps even their truncheon blows were automatic behavior rather than individually 157
aimed. As each Warrior fell, another in the solid press behind simply popped into the gap in the line, a replacement part in the great protoplasmic killing machine that was the Zind horde.
Thus the battle assumed an inevitable pattern. Led by Feric, the Holder column tore into the horde at speed, killing everything before it, but taking certain losses due to sheer attrition. For their part, the Dominators simply threw wave after wave of Warriors at the onrushing Helder, for their reserves seemed endless. The consequent slaughter of Warriors was so tremendous that the forward advance of the Helder strike force was limited chiefly by the tangle of smashed giant's corpses that lay strewn in its path.
Soon Feric had fought his way to within a hundred yards of the Zind steam dreadnoughts which had gathered themselves into a defensive circle completely surrounded by Warriors. Behind him came Best, then the four lead tanks, and the elite motorcycle SS bodyguard, their black leather reddened with Warrior blood. To the rear, was the great main formation of SS shock troops advancing through the body of the horde leaving a bloody river of fallen Warriors in its wake.
Suddenly, the tactics of the Dominators changed. The dominance groups of Warriors surrounding the dreadnaughts stood their .ground, switched over from truncheons to rifles, and began to fire volley after volley at point-blank range straight at the unrushing Helder shock troops. Behind Feric, a fine young SS hero screamed in pain, then fell from his motorcycle with bright blood spurting from the deep wound in his neck All around Feric, bullets tore into the SS men, scores of fine specimens shrieked in agony and fell from their mounts into (he dust; a bullet pinged off the frame of Best's cycle and missed his head by inches.
"Machine gunsi" Feric shouted, sheathing the Steel Commander, and drawing his own submachine gun. He gunned the engine of his cycle and led the column on a short flanking sweep to the north, so that the maximum number of Helder tanks could be brought to bear on the enemy dreadnaughts.
Feric then fired his submachine gun directly into the nearest formation of Warriors, cutting down a brace of the creatures. At this signal, the tank cannon opened up. A barrage of high explosive shells crashed amidst the enemy 158
dreadnaughts in a tight pattern, sending a dense pillar of orange fire and black smoke into the air, followed by a heavy clattering rain of sharp metal fragments. Before the flame and smoke had even began to disperse, another massed barrage rocked the Zind dreadnaughts, then another, and yet again another.
In the place where the eight Zind command dreadnaughts had been was naught but a steaming crater filled with shards of smoking metal and bits of bloody protoplasm.
The effect of this destruction on the formations of Warriors who had been defending the dreadnaughts was nothing short of astonishing. The synchronized disciplined formations instantly dissolved; giant brainless Warriors began milling about crazily in every conceivable direction.
Some of the creatures fired their rifles wildly in the air; others simply tossed their weapons away. Many of these suddenly decorticated lumps of muscle began to urinate aimlessly, spattering their fellows. All sorts of disgusting grunts, shrieks, and howls rent the air. The whole mass of creatures around the smoking crater as well as great sections of the Zind horde in the general vicinity were reduced to nothing more than a brainless herd of rioting animals; the Doms controlling this entire section of the horde must have been housed in the dreadnaughts along with the Zind high command. With the destruction of these dreadnaughts, the Zind horde was bereft of overall command, and this particular fighting section was converted into nothing more than randomly twitching muscles.
The cannon and machine guns of the SS mowed down these decorticated former slaves of the Doms like fish in a barrel as Feric led his troops in a zigzag course through the herd of leaderiess and essentially helpless Warriors across the valley floor and up onto the southern ridgeline out of the chaos below. Uncountable thousands of the Zind slaves were dispatched; yet thousands more could have been slain had Feric's tactics called for anything less than continuous disorienting speed.
Instead, Feric led his force east along the ridgeline for a few miles, then down into the valley again, hitting the horde that much closer to Lumb. The Helder troops concentrated their attacks on the war-wagons drawn along by the huge Pullers, for each time one of these mobile firing platforms was blasted to bits, one more formation of 159
Warriors went berserk, throwing their weapons away, firing wildly into the air, attacking their fellows aimlessly, urinating and defecating all over each other like a vast pen of crazed swine. There was no doubt that the controlling Doms were located on the war-wagons; each such Dom slain rendered a thousand Warriors militarily useless.
Again and again and again, Feric led his men in sweeps across the Zind horde, each swing bringing the SS force closer to Lumb and the bridge over the Roul, each traversing of the valley cutting a broad path of massive destruction through the Zind horde.
By the time the eastern outskirts of Lumb were visible, the entire rear echelon of the Zind horde had been thrown into chaos. Tens of thousands of Warriors had been slain, and tens of thousands more, deprived of their Dom masters, had been converted from efficient cogs in a great protoplasmic killing machine into an altogether disgusting self-destructive mass of brainless muscle. Like some great decapitated reptile thrashing about in its maddened and in-terminable death throes, these huge herds of brawny literally brainless giants twitched and jerked about aimlessly, shooting, kicking, urinating, biting, defecating, and striking out entirely at random, slaughtering hundreds of their own number in the process, and as a bonus making it thoroughly impossible for those formations still under Dominator control to operate effectively.
As Feric drove his motorcycle down the wide avenue that led through the thoroughly flattened ruins of east Lumb, the scene he led his troops into was one of nightmare chaos.
The Zind horde had advanced through the city along a wide front. The crude stone-and-wattle buildings had been ripped to pieces and quite literally pulverized; not an artifact was left standing, and the rubble that clogged the rude mud streets was hardly recognizable as the ruins of buildings. The Warriors slew everything in their path and every inch of the city was littered with the decomposing corpses of every conceivable breed of mutant and mongrel, all stinking to high heaven. Apparently the proximity of so many rogue Warriors made it nearly impossible for the remaining Doms to retain tight control of their creatures, for tens of thousands of the grimy giants coursed and surged throughout this ghastly carnage heap, smashing into each other in mindless raging panic, firing into the air, grunting, clubbing at each other or piles of corpses 160
with their truncheons, urinating on themselves, shrieking, spewing oceans of drool from their tiny lipless mouths.
It was a vista that caused the gorge to rise in Feric's throat and the blood to pound in his veins. "This is the future the Dominators seek for the world!" he shouted to Best. "A cesspool planet peopled by naught but drooling mindless monstrosities which the Doms and the Doms alone control! I swear by my Great Truncheon and the Swastika that I shall not rest until their scourge is expunged forever from the face of the earth!"
Gunning his engine, Peric led the SS column down the avenue, an irresistible juggernaut of cannon, machine-gun bullets and truncheons, every last Helder fired to transcendent heroism by utter racial revulsion for the crazed and debased perversions of what was once human germ plasm that rioted and drooled and urinated obscenely all around them. Cutting everything in their path to ribbons, the Helder troops plunged toward the immense pall of fire and smoke that hung over western Lumb. Even at this distance, the roar of the cannon and the immense staccato clattering of thousands of machine guns that came from the great battle on the other side of the river was deafening.
A lone pontoon bridge spanned the body-choked Roul and as Feric hove into sight of this basically primitive structure, the scene was one of utter pandemonium. A formation of Warriors surrounding a war-wagon was marching across the bridge in perfect synchronized unison; apparently these Warriors, confined as they were to the narrow territory of the bridge bed, were not infected by the general panic and disintegration which Feric and his SS shock troops had inflicted upon their fellows. However, the entire east bank of the Roul was absolutely packed with masses of shrieking, murderous, uncontrolled ten-foot giants. Great presses of these rogue Warriors sought to smash their way past the disciplined troops on the bridge, perhaps out of residual fealty to forgotten psychic commands, perhaps purely as a result of the mathematical laws of random motion. Whatever the reason, rogue Warriors swirled around the bridgehead in great numbers, wrecking havoc with the dominated formation attempting to join the battle on the west bank.
Peric instantly realized that the tanks could not be used to blast a path through the Warriors on the bridge, for even a single misplaced cannon shell might sever this sole 161
link with the west bank of the Roul and leave his force stranded here in this vast pit of twitching decorticated filth.
He therefore drew the Great Truncheon of Held and signaled with it to his troops. The lead square of tanks fell back, then the tanks supporting the spearhead of elite motorcycle SS, so that the vanguard of the strike force behind Feric and Best was now composed entirely of black motorcycles reddened with gore, driven by the most heroic specimens of true humanity, their scarlet cloaks streaming in the wind of passage, their faces visages of fanatic determination, their truncheons drawn. This band of heroes would cut a path through the monstrosities on the bridge with naked steel and iron determination, Howling a battle cry, Feric led this solid phalanx of SS
men straight into the herd of grunting, drooling, rioting giants clogging the entrance to the bridge. With a swipe of the Steel Commander, he decapitated a slavering, red-eyed Warrior, finishing the mighty stroke by smashing right through the barrel-like thighs of two more of the creatures, who fell in agony in an ocean of their own blood.
At his side. Best beat a huge Warrior to its knees with a rapid series of truncheon blows, then dispatched the creature with a swipe that broke its spine. All around, the SS
men layed out scores of the creatures with fire and precision; scarcely a truncheon blow was aimed that did not hit its mark with telling effect.
The SS troop fought its way through the melee, slaying hundreds of the foul creatures and finally throwing the rest into a terrorized panic, so that howling, slavering giants ran madly from the fray in all directions, scattering out of the path of the Helder troops, and clearing the way for Feric and his men to fall upon the rear of the marching formation on the bridge itself.
Before the Dominator on the war-wagon could begin the clumsy maneuver of turning his troops about in this confined space, Feric himself had already attacked the exposed backs of, a score of Warriors, smashing their heads open with the Steel Commander, while the SS, their battle fervor raised to fever pitch by the sight of their leader's heroic efforts, pulped heads, crushed legs, and otherwise dispatched hundreds of the creatures, clearing the first fifty yards of the bridge and allowing the vanguard of tanks and motorcycles behind the spearhead to enter upon it.
By the time the Warrior formation had been turned to 162
confront the onrushing Helder, Feric and his men had fought their way nearly to the great creaking wooden wheels of the war-wagon. A great wall of Warriors pressed literally shoulder to shoulder barred further advance with a deadly threshing machine of giant truncheons. With a final sweep of the Great Truncheon, Peric lopped the arms off a dozen of the creatures, sending their truncheons flying, and their tiny drooling mouths to shrieking.
He then drew his submachine gun and fired a long burst at the mutants atop the flatbed of the war-wagon; from this vantage, it was impossible to tell which was the Dom, so all must be speedily slain. Six of the Zind soldiers were instantly ripped apart by Feric's blast; then Best opened up, and all around him the SS men hammered away at the creatures atop the war-wagon with their blazing submachine guns.
After only a few moments of this withering fire, the last denizen of the war-wagon was a riddled corpse, and chaos overtook the Zind slaves on the bridge. The huge, nearly armless Pullers drawing the war-wagon vented great howls into the air and began running in diverse directions still leashed to the battle cart, which began to totter and weave as it was yanked every which way at once. As for the remaining Warriors on the bridge, they were thrown into the same crazed state as their fellows east of the Roul, thrashing about in all directions, smashing at each other, grunting, urinating, heaving, and shoving their fellows and themselves off the bridge and into the carnage-filled river.