Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

A fusillade of Zind shells ripped up the ground harmlessly nearly three hundred yards short of Feric’s tank.

“The Zind gunners are blind now. Best,” Feric said. “Increase our speed by five miles an hour and veer five degrees south; the swine will then be firing at phantoms.”

A moment later, the Helder artillery spotter was on the air broadcasting coordinates. Over a distant rideeline, Feric could see flashes of explosions lighting up the sky and billows of smoke as the Helder dive-bombers pounded the enemy.

Then the very universe seemed to tremble with the incredible massed thunder of seven hundred Helder tank cannon firing in unison. The fusillade was visible as a flashing steel meteor swarm tearing through the sky toward the east. A moment later the sky beyond the hills became a vast aurora of orange flame and rich black smoke. Then a mighty rumble was heard; this was immediately wiped out by the gargantuan roar of the next barrage being fired.

Firing nearly once a minute, the Helder tanks swept forward at fifty miles an hour, smashing through radiation Jungle, grinding pallid bluish grass beneath their massed treads, an irresistible juggernaut of fire and flesh and steel sending holocaust before it and leaving a wake of total destruction in its van. Soon Feric had led the massive strike force over the last ridgeline; the Warriors of Zind were suddenly visible in the valley below.

Havoc had already been wrecked upon this Zind horde.

The crest of the far ridgeline was a steaming junkyard of mangled and fragmented dreadnaughts and war-wagons.

In the valley itself, perhaps ten thousand Warriors had been arrayed in long ranks facing the Helder advance.

The bulk of these vile creatures had been converted to a midden of bloody bits and pieces that set off the gray lunar landscape of smoking shell holes and bomb craters with great smears of bright red. As for the rest of the ten-foot giants, more of them than not were running about aimlessly in all directions firing their rifles wildly in the air, spattering their fellows with acrid yellow urine, grunting, pummeling, and gibbering, for the valley floor was littered with the burnt-out hulks of dozens of war-wagons upon which their Dom controllers were now naught but charred corpses.

One last quintet of dive-bombers plummeted through the air, dropped their loads in the midst of a formation of naked brawny Warriors, swooped above the resultant explosions, and then rejoined their comrades winging back to the bases in Heldon. One of the final bombs landed squarely upon one of the remaining war-wagons, blowing it and the Dom on it to scattered atoms. Immediately, the surrounding tight formation of Warriors broke ranks and began running around in individual random circles, colliding with each other at every turn, hitting each other with aimless rifle fire, defecating, drooling, thrashing, and grunting.

As the vast armada of black-and-red Helder tanks surged down into the valley, cannon were leveled at point blank range, and a massed barrage of high-explosive shells blew thousands of the brainless giants into the air to return to earth as a red rain of bone and gore. Two more devasting fusillades were fired; then Feric led his troops straight into a boiling cloud of gunpowder, dust, rubble, and flesh. Machine guns opened up with a shattering clatter, and flamethrowers spurted rivers of clinging fiery petrol at the enemy.

Feric homed the firing stud of his machine gun and held it there as the mighty weapon bucked and screamed in his grip like a thing alive. There was no point in aiming at anything in this roiling chaos. The tank was inundated in a vast sea of huge naked creatures with tiny, virtually faceless heads and limbs like tree trunks. These monstrosities fired their rifles wildly, clubbed at everything within reach with great truncheons, clawed blindly at their fellows or even the armor plate of the tanks, spitting and mewling. It was like plunging into a vast nest of enraged vipers.

The wall of Helder tanks pressed forward into this huge herd of mindless rampaging filth-caked protoplasm behind a river of flame and a gigantic drumfire of machine guns.

Warriors burned like tallow candles, screaming, urinating, and setting their own comrades aflame in their death throes, filling the air with the oversweet stench of roasting flesh. Like scythed grain, the putrid creatures fell before the massed machine guns of the tanks, and were ground to a thin bloody gruel beneath the steel treads of the Helder juggernaut.

Within five minutes, Feric’s tank had gained the crest of the far ridgeline, with the huge phalanx of tanks close behind. In their wake was a vast steaming ditch filled with the crushed, mangled, and burnt bodies of ten thousand Warriors, nothing more than an immense smear of blood and flesh ground into the shell-pocked landscape. For the endless wave of motorcycle troops that roared along in the van of the tanks, there was no mopping up to speak of to be done. The ten thousand Zind Warriors guarding the border with Malax had been reduced to a carnage heap of pulverized bone and reeking gore by the overwhelming might of Helder air power and armor.

Best turned to Feric, his blue eyes shining. “My Commander,” he said, “this is the greatest moment of my life.

To have fought at your side in this grand and glorious battle!”

Feric clapped the lad on the shoulder. “This is nothing compared to what lies ahead,” he said. Nevertheless, his soul vibrated with joy at the thought of the manner in which the host of the Swastika had swept at last into Zind: on the heels of glorious and total triumph.

The countryside of Zind was a landscape of nightmare.

Vast putrid patches of purplish radiation jungle which sprawled across the land like formless amoeboid carcinomas alternated with scabbings of scoured rock and bleak poisoned earth upon which not even the rankest mutated travesty of vegetation would grow. Here and there were fields of gray grass or scraggly rows of some crop mutated beyond all decent recognition clawing its way desperately through the surrounding matrix of seared wasteland and pestilent jungle.

These pathetic farms were presided over by the same sort of motley rabble that had made up the extinct Wolack and Borgravian peasantry—Blueskins, Parrotfaces, assorted crooked dwarfs, spindly giants, half—men with hides that seemed pure cancer, Toadmen; the usual revolting assortment of mutants. However, the slaves of Zind, unlike the countryside rabble in the conquered territories, stood their ground pointlessly, trying to hold off the Helder juggernaut with scythes, clubs, rocks, and an occasional firearm. No doubt each farmstead was enmeshed in the dominance pattern of the local Dom; the mutant rabble flung itself under the treads of the tanks by psychic order, not by choice. All to no avail, for every bit of farmland and radiation jungle in range of the huge army was purified with flame; the Helder force drove deep into the western farmlands of central Zind leaving a wake of fire ten miles wide and scores of miles long blazing like the shaft of some immense flaming arrow behind its sharp point of steel.

Into the afternoon and through the night, the Helder army barreled through Zind without meeting any serious opposition. The Zind horde assigned to defend this area was a bloody pulp far to the rear, in countryside now thoroughly pacified by the advancing Helder infantry. In effect, the border of Heldon was now the prow of Feric’s tank as it thrust into the territory of Zind at forty miles an hour.

Scout planes had reported that there was nothing of significance between the Helder army and the great Zind horde a hundred miles to the north, which even now had wheeled about and was moving south to greet the conquerors along a wide front. Feric estimated that the great battle would commence shortly after daybreak, about four hundred miles inside Zind and five hundred from Bora; at dawn, he would pivot his army to the north to meet the Zind counterattack.