by Aeryn Leigh
ODIN’S WARRIORS: KÖNIGSTIGER
Book 3
AERYN LEIGH
Hellsbaene Publishing
Copyright © 2018 by Aeryn Leigh
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
And watch out for those lava rapids – always wear 50+ sunscreen.
for the honour
CONTENTS
The Last, Full Day
1. In The Beginning
2. A Small Bonfire
3. Let Them Burn
4. The Beasts Of Fairholm
5. Backup
6. Shades Of Grey
7. Trial Of Fire
8. The End Of Civilisation
9. An Axe To Grind
10. The Pendant Is The Key
11. Revolution Of A Hydrogen Atom
12. Writhing Octopuses
13. Harry Bosch
14. Friends, Tanks, And Beer
15. Cavern
16. The Drums Of Valhalla
17. Armada
18. Laurie’s Plan
19. Wetworks
20. Shadows
21. Landfall
22. Why Can’t We?
23. One’s Oath
24. Careful What You Wish For
25. Spanish Fort
26. Welcome To The Insanity
27. More Mysteries
28. Good Old Days
29. Moving Out
30. Crop Dusting
31. The Refinery
32. And That Was That
33. Mein Gott
34. If It Bleeds
35. All Hell Broke Loose
36. Who The Hell Are You?
37. Vale The First And Last
38. What We Have, General
39. Odin’s Warriors
40. Machines Of War
41. Open
42. Gate Of God
43. Quid Pro Quo
44. An Ocean Of Gas
45. Wheat And Blood
46. The Die Is Cast
47. Known Unknowns
48. Nordic Riddles
49. Meanwhile
50. Spot Fires
51. For The Hell Of It
52. 9/8 Wagnerian
53. Fear Control
54. On The Eighth Day
55. Swarm
56. Temper
57. Fresh Meat
58. The Space Between
59. Vale Fairholm
60. Gods Of Violence
61. Epilogue
Author’s Note & Info
THE LAST, FULL DAY
Another Russian artillery shell struck the forward armour, ringing it like a church bell. Major Wolfgang Mauss and his four crewmen involuntarily braced themselves even harder, and the Major adjusted himself. Like being inside a church bell, followed by an instant flashback of going through on that dare as a small boy in Germany, sticking his head inside a great iron church bell whilst his friends struck it, laughing hysterically.
He lost his hearing for a good number of days after that, and twenty years later, grimacing as he remembered, he'd come full circle.
Eighteen centimetres of hardened armoured plate, right up front, did have its advantages after all, even if it did shake every part loose. The Major reached up and unlocked the commander's top hatch, and, ignoring conventional wisdom, lifted himself up so that his upper torso now stuck up from the top of the tank, and raised his field binoculars.
In the grey, overcast, Polish skies, and in the dying light of the day, at the end of the mountain valley he had been tasked with defending to help cover the retreat of the 501st Heavy Tank Battalion, and by extension, the Seventh Panzer Division, he spied the latest challengers, a trio of T-34s, the mainstays of the Russian army, between wisps of smoke from the last trio of enemy tanks, still burning from the last attack only hours earlier. He dialled closer. T-34/85s, about sixteen-hundred metres out, where the valley opened wide.
Just one tank, and a single infantry squad equipped with an MG 42, huddling behind the rear of his tank, had managed to hold the Soviet advance for two entire days, in the long, tight, narrow valley. Mercifully, the weather had helped, reducing the chance of airborne strafing attacks, but as a ten-year veteran of the Panzer corps, he knew it was only a matter of time before their position was overrun.
He thumbed the throat mike, and slid back down into his seat, closing the hatch above.
"Three thirty-fours," he said. "Engage."
His loader, Jürgen Weber already had a fresh 20kg projectile in the breach, the grumpy Austrian not even asking what shell type to use, because there were only five shells left, all armour piercing incendiaries.
The gunner, Hans Rudolf, was already adjusting the TZF 9b/1 monocular gunsight. In the driver’s seat, Haplo Schumacher took out a stick of American chewing gum and shoved into his mouth.
His tank crew had been together since Stalingrad, in much smaller, short-barrel Panzer IVs, and after all those years, with experience born in blood and battle, words were spoken with economy. Short, terse words, a few odd syllables, grunts, and between the commander, loader, and gunner, the Tiger II fired, the long twenty-four-foot 88mm gun still a joyous sound.
The centre T-34 blew apart. Nine seconds later, the tank on the right suffered the same fate, the turret separating, blown clear off the main chassis. Wolfgang accepted the hot, spent shell from his loader and tossed it out through the rear lower hatch, the infantry, wise enough to leave space.
Jürgen shoved in the third last shell.
"Wait."
Through clouds of billowing smoke from the ruptured Russian tanks, the remaining T-34 was hastily reversing using the smoke as cover. Smart move, thought Wolfgang.
The sun tipped over the horizon, and in the valley, darkness engulfed them all.
The baby of the crew, Andreas Otto, radio operator and machine-gunner, who joined them after the Battle of Kiosk, reached behind and tapped the leg of his commander.
"What is it, Andreas?"
"New orders from the General, Major. We are to proceed at best possible haste to the rendezvous point with our Königstiger."
Haplo laughed, the sound dry.
"Very well. Send the acknowledgement."
Hans was the first to speak. "There's no verdammt fuel to drive five-hundred metres, let alone four clicks, Mouse."
They'd been left with the barest amount of food, water, and ammunition to last three days, no more. Now, at the end of the second day, between themselves and the Wehrmacht squad, they'd almost expended their entire ammo reserves fending off the incessant, rolling waves of Russian attacks.
But no fuel, save for what lay in the Kettenkrad around the corner. Fuel, here in 1945, might as well be unicorn piss. Every litre was priceless.
He leaned back, so the infantry squad could also hear. "Time to go, gentlemen, new orders."
Fifteen minutes later, the Tiger II was positioned across the breadth of the pass, with barely enough room for a man to slip past either side. With the precious 88mm shells squared away on the commandeered horse-trailer attached to the half-motorbike, half-tank, with all the spare parts they could strip out from the Tiger II, the Major had to physically pull Haplo off the exposed rear-engine, still frantically trying to remove the engine belt.
"Enough my friend. Enough." As the still-protesting driver was carted away over Hans’ shoulders, the Major walked back to his beautiful, mammoth, beast of a tank, twisted both handles on his pair of stielhandgranates, and dropped the woode
n-handled hand grenades in the commander's open hatch, slamming the hatch shut.
With a sigh, he turned and dropped the third grenade in the exposed engine bay, and walked away, slowly, but carefully, giving the order to proceed.
Half-a-dozen heartbeats later, the muffled thump of detonations, and Major Wolfgang Mauss sat on the rear lip of the trailer moving off, joining the rest of Sergeant Bismark's squad and his crew massed inside, as seventy tons of the finest German engineering became the best verdammt roadblock in the world.
Even in death, she'd serve the Motherland well.
That was, of course, assuming there'd be any Motherland left. As they passed the bend, and bigger explosions lit up the cold, wet, dark skies, they headed for Gdańsk Bay on the south coast of the Baltic Sea, and the enormous evacuation underway of what remained of the once strong, indomitable, German Wehrmacht army.
Chapter One
IN THE BEGINNING
WHAT COMES FIRST, the thought, or the words? Ella Gruder rubbed the shaved part of her head, the blonde stubble rough against her fingers, from where the neural interface of the power armour attached itself to her skull. She rested against the back of the wooden stretcher she'd fashioned into a make-do work desk. The rest of her hair, at one time dyed red, now appeared to be a light shade of pink, as the vegetable dye washed out, exposing her blonde roots.
She looked at the Viking journal, its leather cover cracking with age, its pages turning to yellow, and considered the problem yet again. Is it the thought that creates words? And does it matter what language that thought is? Ella's hard work had paid off, for the bulk of the ancient Norse technology now lay within her comprehension. And yet, some tiny, niggling obstinate problems – no doctrines, she corrected herself – remained as ethereal as morning mist.
If only she had Sun Tzu here. Or anything by him for that matter. Military strategies and their arts made her mind hurt, lost in the fog. The fog of war. There was a plan, some great overarching plot, within which her, and her friends, and daughter; in fact everyone on Elysium, was but a cog in the wheel of unknown machinations.
Which, she reminded herself, should be easy, given how easily her and machines got along, given her ability to test fly cutting-edge technology. If only Piers could see this tech. She sighed. Behind her, the large dragonfly hummed, and sang to her in Norse. Rob Lee was out of the induced coma at long last. Ella turned, grinned at the foot-long blue metal insect, and with her crutches, made her way over to the thirteenth suit of power armour, the one containing Rob, and now mercifully, had someone to talk to that wasn't a Nordic artificial intelligence.
"LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT. You've been here on Elysium so bloody long you've forgotten your own language?"
Captain Laurie John stared out over the dark blue waters from the rear deck of the seventeenth-century warship Trinity, then watched the repairs below on the rest of their little fleet. Two whole months stuck on this little island, thanks to being swept onto shallow reefs during wild storms, straight after leaving the Emperor's fortress, on their way to rescue Rob and Ella. None of the Viking longships, or the captured warship escaped unscathed. Funnily enough, only the Inquisition seaplane they towed escaped damage. Not that it would survive what Laurie planned for it.
All that precious time flowing by, but, he conceded, it could have been much worse. No lives lost, no ships sunk, and having a considerable labour pool of captured Inquisition Marines, an entire battalion’s worth, changed the chances of getting going again from Buckley's to some.
No matter how many times he heard it, it still amazed him. Forget your own damn language?
"Yes, Laurie," said Magnus, the Viking scholar and wizard mechanic, drumming his fingers on the wooden rail, his eyes on Hellsbaene in the near distance. Always on her. The flagship of his kin, of their fleet, the modified longship with two bomber turbosupercharged V12 engines, now out of high-octane aviation fuel, her mighty power neutralised. He sighed. "Language is dependent on those alive to teach it, to pass it on. Only takes one generation to create enough of a gap, a wedge, and the gods do the rest."
"English is that pervasive?"
"Take the Inquisition. They were brought here over five- hundred years ago, speaking only your Earth Spanish, their native tongue, and now on Elysium, all this time later, only the priests and their gods-forsaken elite still speak it, and even that is some bastardised Spanish-Latin hybrid. This English, as you say, is the only common thing brought over. Well, mostly, anyway."
"Doesn't seem right, but yeah, give it few hundred years, I can see that." Laurie ruffled the back of his head, his hands between a scruffy mop of salt and pepper hair. "Ella must have good reason to want that journal of yours."
"I don't believe I could have said no, even if I wanted to," said Magnus, eyes suddenly bright with that memory of her, that Valkyrie, and the terrible fury it wreaked on their enemies, wide matte-black wings flapping, slow as the beats of a man about to die. His voice trailed off.
"You are probably in shock," said Laurie. "Mind fuzzy, bewildered, lost for words?" I know the bloody feeling, he thought, remembering the final moments of their last stand against those - monsters - and he shuddered. It wasn't so much the shock of seeing alien creatures as seeing something almost as incomprehensible as a giant figure in metal armour save his arse then go on to obliterate the enemy whilst singing Wagner.
He fiddled with the hilt of his sword, setting off more uncomfortable land mines of memory. The shock of seeing his own sword ignite into blue flame. The blood loss of being punctured by hundreds of fuzzy alien spikes.
I really am on a far-off, distant world, and mate, I still don't know shit.
ELLA STOPPED at the fifth armoured suit, one of thirteen arranged in a circle around the humongous, white set of power armour sitting in the middle on it's throne.
"Open," she commanded in old Norse, and her voice echoed in the large, cathedral-like room. The suit made a small humming sound, soft whirring noises, and then with a set of precise clicks which would make a Swiss watchmaker cry, the front half of the power armour opened like a blooming, radiant flower.
"Rob," Ella exclaimed in joy. "You're awake! Feeling any better? Is so good to see you!"
The USAF airman from the Tuskagee Squadron blinked, then began to panic as he tried to get loose, the suit still preventing him from moving.
"Easy Rob. Just give her a few more moments, and you'll be able to step out."
Rob looked at Ella, nodded, took a deep breath, and Ella took a step forward on her crutches, and offered assistance. Rob put out his right arm, accepted the offer, a black hand met a white hand, palms locked. Then he carefully stepped out of the suit and onto the granite, and for the first time in months, was under his own power.
"Where are we?" He spun full circle, seeing the giant figure on the throne, the circle of armoured suits, the enormous high leadlight windows far above, and then, the piles upon piles of dead alien creatures which carpeted the rest of the room, save for a cleared path to the exit. "Where is everybody? Griffin? Laurie? The Vikings?" His wide eyes never left the dead aliens.
"They are okay," said Ella, "or were at least the last time I saw them. Before I say anything more, and fill you in with what happened, I must offer you my thanks for what you did back on the Catalina."
"I remember going out on the wing, and clearing the fuel line, and the cold. Damn, the cold, and then... nothing. Just waking up a few minutes ago thinking I was dead and entombed."
"Ah," said Ella, drawing a deep breath. "Well you got blown off the wing, body-slammed into the fuselage, you lost consciousness, were pulled inside by Griffin and Merrion, got shot by enemy fighters in a dogfight, survived an alien attack by one of those monsters over there, even though I lost my leg, and if it wasn't for this technology you see around you, and being put inside that suit, you'd be dead. Questions?"
"YOU PROMISED MORE."
"Be glad the Emperor still favours you. For my patience is running out."
/> "There's barely enough to buy what I need."
"When the army plans to depart, signal me as usual. Then, and only then, if your information is correct, and your idea works, will you get what is yours."
The black, hooded shape left from the adjoining booth, and Patrick McKay, metal-worker, and valuable member of the Republic's Engineering Department, slid back down into the shadows of the rear dark room of the busy tavern, and counted his shiny, precious gold, daydreaming yet again of violent, grandiose fantasies.
Fuck the Republic. And especially those bitches. All of them. Their day would come, and when it did, would it be glorious.
He stood, and yelled for another round.
Chapter Two
A SMALL BONFIRE
"SWEAR TO GOD, if I have fish one more time, I'm going to crack the shits." Sergeant Mick Ward: bricklayer, medic, vertically-challenged, devout believer in punching Nazis, and drinking beer, not necessarily in any set order, gazed forlornly up at the cumulus clouds high overhead. He lay on the beach, back against the grey sand, and tried to make the most of his short break from guard duty, and crucially, having the day off from heading out on one of the remaining longships to go fishing for three-hundred and twenty-seven people, every single bloody day.
A shadow passed over him, and he was just about to wonder why this was so, given that the pair of suns were in the opposite direction, when the answer presented itself. A man, one could say, on the far extreme of vertically unchallenged, dropped a leather water skin full of fermented coconut juice right onto Mick's gut.
"There you go, mate," said Gunnery Sergeant Griffin 'Timberman' Huey, "the fruits of our labours. Should take your mind off fish, but I'd go easy on it, lest you forget damn everything." The Nazi punching co-conspirator, lover of bourbon, Greek philosophy, and peaceful solutions via armour piercing fifty calibre rounds delivered el Pronto, eased his big frame down onto the sand and looked out over the shallow surf to where the one-hundred-and-eighty-gun warship lay anchored, so far from its birth place of Spain, back on Earth, three-hundred years odd earlier.