by Damon Alan
Somehow it just sounded pathetic if someone else said the idea.
“We need a map,” Harry said. “We have to stick to the abandoned areas if we’re going to find food without looking like arses or fools.”
“We can’t drop our passenger off in an abandoned area,” Tim said.
“If we have to, she can walk south,” Harry said, uncomfortable with the idea. “But if we see refugees, she joins them.”
“What do you think of that, Wilkes?” Timothy asked the driver.
Wilkes didn’t answer, instead shifting the lorry up a gear. “We’ll need diesel too.”
“Abandoned towns,” Harry reasserted. “That’s the way.”
Wilkes nodded.
Chapter 19 - On Top
May 27, 1940
Ernst and his team were on a prototype aircraft, a Henschel HS-130. This plane’s first flight was a mere week before and it had performed well enough at altitude that it was selected to give Ernst’s team a look at the gate over Rotterdam.
The aircraft was a slow climber, but it was perfect for what they needed. It had a service ceiling of over 12,500 meters and a range of over 2,500 kilometers. The payload was a camera package in what would normally be the bomb bay. They needed it to take pictures of the gate for later study.
An oxygen canister hung at Ernst’s side, although the cabin was pressurized. As a prototype, nobody was entirely sure the HS-130 would even return to base with the cabin intact. Everybody kept a canister on them in case of a panel blowout and stood ready to connect to the pipe air supply if problems arose.
It was cold, causing Ernst to shiver in his chair. The control panel for the reconnaissance cameras was on a table, which normally would seat four controllers for the optics. For this mission there was only one, and Ernst sat at one of the open positions.
“It’s all about Saint Lawrence Cathedral,” Ernst told the cameraman. “If you get nothing else, get that image.”
“I will try, Herr Haufmann.”
“You will succeed, or I will give you a look up close and personal. Without a parachute,” Ernst threatened.
“But we must develop the film to know, I can’t do that here.”
“Then if you fail I will find a different fate for you.”
The man responded to the threat with silence, which Ernst decided was a sign of understanding. The stakes were very high for this mission. He clicked his earmuffs over to the pilot’s channel.
“—assieren 8.000 meter,” one of the men up front said.
8,000 meters. Good. Ernst knew what the dragons could do. He didn’t know what their limits were. The higher the plane went, the safer he felt. Either the dragons wouldn’t see them at such a distance upward, or the dragons wouldn’t be able to climb so high.
If one of those things didn’t save them, then this trip would be short and his pretend suicide a week ago would have been better if it had been real.
He keyed his microphone, still on the pilots’ channel. “How long until we’re over Rotterdam?”
“Thirty minutes, Herr Haufmann,” one of them replied.
“Good. Advise me ten minutes out. I wish to see this with my own eyes.”
“Heil, von Krosigk!” the man said as an answer.
“Heil, von Krosigk,” Ernst answered dully. The Third Reich’s Finance Minister was now the Führer. How droll. As if funding wasn’t already tight enough.
Ernst closed his eyes and studied the drone of the aircraft’s massive twin engines while it struggled higher.
“Wir passieren 9.000 Meter,” the pilot said, rousing him from his reverie.
“Dragon!” someone shouted on the channel. “Six o’clock low, beating his wings to catch us.”
Ernst unstrapped himself from his chair, then made his way aft. He passed the camera package to see a man lying on the floor of the fuselage, looking out a window facing downward. He tapped the fellow on the shoulder.
The man rolled partially on his side and uncovered an ear.
“Are you the one reporting a dragon?” Ernst yelled at him.
“Yah,” the fellow confirmed. “Down below, some distance away. Closing fast.”
“Let me see,” Ernst commanded, and the man slid to the side to share the viewport.
It took Ernst some time to find the creature, it was so distant. The man was good.
“How far away is it?” Ernst asked.
“Five kilometers is my guess, but I don’t know. It depends on the size.”
Ernst stared. This dragon was red, which should have made it easier to find, but didn’t. He stared at it, pondering if this was the end.
An unsettling fear gripped his stomach. That wasn’t normal. He wasn’t one to cringe.
He steeled himself and looked out the window again. It was gaining on them.
“How far below us?” he asked the man.
“A thousand meters,” his viewing companion answered.
As time passed the dragon was clearly not on an intercept course. It was catching them over the ground but would probably not be at their altitude when it did.
“Do you know how high we are?” Ernst demanded.
The man looked to his side, where a small bank of gauges stared back at him. “In a few seconds, 10,000 meters.”
Maybe the creature did have a maximum altitude?
Two minutes later it was directly below them, probably eight hundred meters distant according to his viewing companion.
Its head turned to the side and it glared upward at the aircraft. Ernst felt fear in the pit of his stomach again, and the man beside him yelped.
“Tell the pilots not to look down under any circumstances,” Ernst ordered the man. “Have them climb as fast as possible.”
The dragon rolled over on its back and its neck lanced upward toward their flight. The belly of the beast glowed orange, which quickly rose up the neck plates. The mouth opened, and fire shot toward them in an ever expanding wall of flame.
Ernst screeched in unison with his companion.
The heat of the flame caressed his face, but the flames didn’t reach the HS-130. They faded out into black smoke a few hundred meters below, then the smoke rapidly disappeared behind the plane. As they moved past the blackish haze, the dragon was below them and plummeting toward the ground.
So, the altitude limit of that dragon was near 10,000 meters. Was that true for them all?
He’d have to recommend that be tested. Quite a few German aircraft could reach that altitude. Even the fighters, the Bf-109s, would be able to climb above the reach of the dragons if this one dragon’s limitations reflected them all.
Ernst grinned. He may have just found a critical weakness in their new enemy, one only the Germans would know about. If they could take down some dragons from above, maybe the creatures would learn it was best to attack toward France and Britain, not east toward a dangerous enemy like the Germans.
He’d learned the first useful thing of the day.
“Seven minutes to target,” the speaker nearest him called out. He must have missed the ten minute warning in the chaos of the dragon attack.
He rushed forward to the cockpit. Visibility was excellent from the nose viewport, and he planned on sitting in there for the flyover.
“Six minutes,” the pilot said.
Ernst settled into his observation spot with binoculars.
The ground below didn’t look like Belgium. It was a semi-arid terrain, with sparse bushes and clumped grasses.
“Pilot, this terrain isn’t correct,” Ernst observed. “Where are we?”
“We are on course,” the pilot replied, irritation in his voice. “The navigator is good.”
The aircraft lurched.
“Something isn’t right,” the pilot said to his co-pilot, forgetting his channel was open.
“The compass is spinning wildly,” the other responded.
“Your microphones are open,” Ernst pointed out. “Idiots.”
They silenced their conversation, which infuriate
d Ernst. Angry, he jumped up and pushed into the cockpit. “The terrain is wrong. I think we are over the world the dragons come from.”
“We are flying the plane,” the pilot snapped at him.
Ernst stomped back down to the observation deck. Below him something was happening. Lifting his binoculars, he saw a great stone arch running from one point on the ground to another. Wagons and what looked like soldiers streamed through it, disappearing from his view. A dragon sat on the ground nearby, next to a small tower of some kind.
“We are on the other side!” Ernst yelled. “We have passed through the gate!” He keyed up, barking orders at the cameraman. “Get filming if you’re not.”
Ahead of them, to the west, a strange phenomenon arced across the sky. Streaks of energy played along a curved plane, flashing in waves along a clearly defined barrier between Earth and the other world. The sky was clear above them, but ahead, past the energy field, storms flashed in squall lines over what looked like water.
Was that the English Channel?
“What is the weather along the Channel?” Ernst asked the pilot.
“Please Herr Haufmann, we—”
“THE WEATHER. NOW!”
“Storms, squalls from over the North Sea heading south. Cool weather, below seasonal averages.”
He played his binoculars along the storm clouds. Those were definitely over water.
“Take us lower, we need to measure the width of the energy field.”
“What are you talking about?” the pilot asked.
“TAKE US LOWER!”
The plane banked and started to spiral downward. Ernst, with no data to back up his risk, felt that over the gate he’d be safe from the dragons.
He spoke to everyone on the plane. “Does anyone see the city of Rotterdam? The cathedral?”
No answers.
He moved his observations to look in different directions as the plane spun in lazy circles. As they descended he could see more clearly into the other world.
To the north past the gate lay a chain of mountains, snowcapped and rugged. Much like the Alps, maybe taller. It reminded him of his visit to Nepal, as unpleasant as that was.
To the east was a continuation of that mountain chain, only closer. The peaks showed little weathering, the chain was young.
The south presented a dry landscape, with green streaks along rivers that flowed further south from his vantage point.
To the west the overlapping world revealed a desert, one which would make the Sahara proud. He saw sand dunes disappearing into the distance, with rocky buttes jutting from among the waves of sand.
Something caught his eye.
North of the arch a blimp floated serenely over a mass of individuals below. The blimp was short and bloated, unlike the streamlined zeppelins of the German air service.
He zoomed in as far as the binoculars would let him. It was hard to see with the jolting of his aircraft, but it looked like the blimp was powered by a coal fired boiler. Black smoke stretched out behind the craft, and a large single propeller pushed it in what seemed to be a circle over the creatures beneath it.
Either the lift didn’t come from hydrogen, or these people were idiots using an open flame boiler. Ernst didn’t believe an idiotic people would survive long enough to conquer the sky, they’d be smashed by an enemy long before that.
Those creatures on the ground, were they all coming through the gate?
“Are you getting pictures?” Ernst demanded of the cameraman.
“Thousands, Herr Haufmann.”
“Excellent. Keep taking them until we are back over Germany.”
The plane spent fifteen minutes spiraling downward, until Ernst could see the area around the arch quite well.
Were those German troops by the archway? They looked like prisoners, with men in metal armor guarding them. A wagon pulled by elephants, loaded with some of the prisoners, was heading away to the north.
The dragon seemed indifferent to the aircraft. It was now laid out on the ground, asleep as far as Ernst could tell. On the tower two men stood. One in a gray uniform, potentially a German soldier, the other in a blue bath robe or night gown.
“Get pictures of that tower. Lots of them,” Ernst ordered.
The fellow with the robe started dancing.
“What in the world?” he whispered.
A blue bolt of energy shot from the man’s outstretched hands and raced upward toward them.
“Incoming!” Ernst screamed. “Climb! Climb!”
The pilot swung the plane wildly back to the east, obscuring Ernst’s view of the tower. The turn didn’t block Ernst’s view of the effect the bolt of energy had, however. It shot upward from under the aircraft, slamming through the port side wing. Metal rained upward and then backward. A large hole, half a meter across, was torn through the airfoil. For a moment white smoke poured out, but then stopped.
“South! Away from that tower!” he screamed into the mic.
No more attacks came, but the plane felt sluggish. It felt like the pilot was struggling to keep it from turning left as he climbed southward.
“When you get to 10,000 meters,” Ernst said, “head home. This mission has been wildly successful.”
The pilots didn’t answer him.
Maybe they were working too hard to keep the plane under control with the damage. But he knew they’d heard. Everyone heard Ernst, that’s just how life worked.
Chapter 20 - Toward Nolen
The conquest of the border barricade had gone well. The Iron Company secured maps, some of the spitter sticks, and rations. Strange rations, wrapped in metal plate. Weird that the humans armored their food but not themselves.
Attacking the grays on the north side of the border had been simple, the Iron Company butchered those humans without a loss. The Blue-Grays, as his soldiers were now calling the troops from the south, didn’t help the grays at all. They simply watched as the north squad died.
When the Hearthstone platoon pushed up against the barricade with intention of passing through toward Nollen, the blue-grays became animated. Their leader and Irsu argued for a good while, neither understanding anything about the other or any words spoken, except that the Iron Company wanted to pass, and the enemy didn’t want them to.
It could be an impasse, but that wasn’t the plan. After tiring of hearing what he assumed was no in the strange human language, he slammed down his face shield and stabbed the soldier in front of him through the throat with the spike on the end of his axe shaft.
The rest of the enemy immediately attacked with their spitter sticks, but by then the crossbows were reloaded from killing the first set of soldiers.
It was a slaughter. Forty or more of the humans went down immediately. Inside of two minutes the remaining twenty or so succumbed to the pikes and axes.
Two of Irsu’s soldiers suffered wounds, two more were dead.
“Put ours in the cart. You two wounded, ride there as well. We will tend to your needs when we get to the Lost Hold,” Irsu ordered.
Coragg yelled in his patronly way toward the company, and soon they were all once again in columns. None too soon, the grays were already beginning to twitch as whatever was bringing back the humans from the dead seeped into their corpses.
“Double time,” Irsu ordered. “For a dozen kadros. Then we return to normal pace.”
They ran for fifteen minutes or so, then returned to a normal pace to regain their strength and their ability to fight if need be. The formation was also a lot louder when they ran, something Irsu wished to avoid.
“Do you hear that?” Coragg asked him.
Irsu listened. That sound was familiar. He slipped off his helmet to hear better. The sound echoed back and forth between the hillsides that surrounded them.
Finally he figured it out.
Somehow, the guards on the south side of the border had alerted their comrades further south. How, he didn’t know. The humans weren’t supposed to have magic.
“R
un for cover!” he bellowed. A second later he was bolting for the tree line adjacent to the road, Coragg on his heels, most of the rest of Iron Company was doing the same.
Eight of the air machines ripped over, spitting their venom down on the road as the dwarves raced to cover. The six supply carts were helpless. Irsu watched as some of the lizards and donkeys pulling the carts and a few of the drivers slumped to the ground.
“Zein be damned!” he spat out. “Get your filthy hides into the forest!” he screamed at those of his company still struggling. Some were wounded and crawling on the ground, trying to reach safety.
“You are the right choice for the platoon leaders if I die,” Irsu barked at Coragg as he ran from cover.
He looked to the right and the air machines were banking around as they’d done at the gate. He grabbed a soldier with wounds to his legs and began dragging him toward the trees.
The drone of the machines grew louder, and they spat at him. The gravel of the road erupted around him, around the wagons, and around his fallen. They ripped past again, yet somehow he was unwounded.
The lad at his feet looked up at him with dead eyes.
“You will pay,” he said coldly to the machines as they headed south, preparing to swing around again.
“Irsu, NO!” someone, probably Coragg, screamed from the trees.
He unstrapped his crossbow and stabbed his axe spike into the roadway. He set the crossbow on the axe handle, then aimed carefully at one of the machines bearing down on him.
The crossbow emitted a cracking sound as it fired, the bolt flew straight at the center of the spinning parts. He saw everything in slow motion, until the first slug hit him in the arm. It spun him around, knocked him to the ground, and the speed of life returned to normal as the ground erupted right where he’d been.
He hurt like he’d been bitten by a hydra.
The machines, seemingly satisfied for the moment, roared over once again from the north, this time not spitting their death on him.
He lifted himself to his feet as the other dwarves cheered from the tree line, racing toward him to slap him on the back and scream in joy.
They pointed to the machine burning on a hillside a few kadros to the north.