CHAPTER THREE
Twenty thousand feet above the southern Adirondaks
(Two hundred miles south of Akwesasne)
May 18, 2123
Ready your mounts!
The command blared inside Ragnar’s skull without warning; as always, the suddenness and sheer volume of the order rocked him.
It likewise drop-jawed his trio of henchmen. No longer armed with broadswords and spiked battle axes, Viking warriors once devoted to killing, taking spoils, and laying waste now wielded flat-bladed, short-handled shovels. Viking warriors who once answered only to him, now had other captains—as did he.
Anvindr, ravager of countless Norman maidens, stood beside a wheelbarrow already half-full of liquid dung and dung-fouled straw. He had enormous, bushy brown eyebrows and no front teeth, upper or lower—they had been bashed out by sword pommel in a skirmish now lost to time.
A white streak divided Einarr’s orange beard and hair; the blaze followed the track of a gruesome scar that split chin, lips, cheek, forehead, well up into his receding hairline. Einarr, who had set afire hamlets from the Loire to the Volga.
Fenrisúlfr, the “Swamp Wolf,” had slanted eyes, a mouth that upturned at the corners, and a wispy, golden, boy’s beard—although he was by no stretch of the imagination a boy. Countless fine lines seamed his face. A line for every defeated foe and hapless victim.
Ready your mounts!
The first time Ragnar had heard that deep, resonant voice speaking inside his head, he’d thought it was Odin, the God of Gods, awakening him from a nightmare of struggling, suffocating death. When he’d opened his eyes, he’d found a most welcome surprise: though the world that surrounded him was strange beyond imagining, it wasn’t made of primordial ice; it wasn’t the lowest pit of the Land of Mists. It appeared that he and his hundred brigands—their crimes notwithstanding—had somehow escaped the depths of Niflheim and been raised like heroes to the heights of Valhalla. Conclusions reinforced by the voice’s display of godlike power. It knew where they were and what they were doing at all times; and if they did not obey without question, it made skulls fly apart with an explosive bang, like so much overripe fruit.
Ragnar and his band had soon discovered that the God of Gods wasn’t giving the orders; they came instead from faceless, hidden masters. The same hidden masters who had rescued them from the frigid waters of the bog and the punishment decreed more than a millennia ago by their own Viking king. While Ragnar and the others lay unconscious, on the verge of death, a tiny communication, location, and summary execution device had been planted inside each of their skulls.
It was not Valhalla, either.
A wet, rappetty-frappetty-frappetty noise accompanied a blast of warm air that stirred and lifted the hairs of Ragnar’s long red beard.
And then, crashing down on him like Thor’s Hammer, came the stench.
Eyewatering, throat clamping-shut foul, worse than a battlefield heaped with fly-blown dead in midsummer. It made the digestive off-gassings of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, and humans seem like delicate floral bouquets.
No one spoke, not even to utter a curse.
As sure as moon followed sun, there was worse to come.
From an aperture beneath the offending creature’s immensely broad, tapering tail, an orifice roughly at the six-foot-six-inch-tall Norseman’s eye level, a gusher of steaming liquid excrement rained down onto the matted straw that covered the deck plates.
Red pigtails bobbing, Ragnar stepped lively to keep the torrent of splatter off his sandals and fur leggings.
It looked exactly like bird shit—granular, greenish black slunk topped with swirls of milky white. Only there were barrels of it.
With a sputtering hiss the onslaught finally came to an end. In grim silence they set furiously to work with their shovels, Ragnar included—under the new regime all former divisions of rank had vanished. It was either keep up with the flow of crapulence, or skate in it as they prepared once again to wage war.
Overhead, the towering dome of the cargo deck roof was braced with filagreed silver struts. The hold itself was a circle a hundred yards across, lit by thousands of tiny white suns that studded the ceiling. Vibration from massive engines made the soles of Ragnar’s feet tingle and loose bits of straw dance and jitter on the deck.
The airship tilted under him, then hurtled downward in a power dive. When the craft leveled off, his stomach hit bottom, somewhere below his knees. The disturbing sensation in the even-stranger environment pained his poetic Norse soul: Ragnar longed for the erratic pulse of the windblown sea, a somber gray horizon, and the smell of burning villages.
Swaying high above the 40-foot-long, 15-foot-wide stall, suspended by rope and pulley from the girders, was an enormous saddle: four connected seats trailed four sets of stirrups and multiple cinches.
A dragon’s saddle.
The behemoth whose backside faced them was ten feet high at the shoulder and rump, 28 feet long, and weighed more than 20,000 pounds. Big as an elephant, but instead of two tusks, this beast had three—wickedly pointed horns a yard long decorated its immense skull, one over each eye; and a third stump of a horn decorated the long, beak-like snout. The uptilting frill of bone that framed the back of its head was as tall as the eye horns were long. Its five-hoofed hands and four-hoofed feet were anchored to the deck by ankle chains made of the same bright metal that formed the rails of its stall and the plates of the floor.
The creature’s skin was inches thick and incredibly tough—pebbly, not scaled like a lizard or snake, and in places the diamond-shaped granulations were pointed and sharp enough to cut through flesh. Overall, its body was a dark shade of gray-green, but patches of orange discoloration marked its flanks and snout, and the dorsal side of its tail.
They had named the beast “Meinfretr.”
Not a silly term of affection; more a precise description.
Stink-fart.
This animal was, in fact, Meinfretr the Third. Numbers One and Two had been blasted out from under them by cannonfire and landmines in previous battles; their huge bodies had absorbed the explosions’ shock and shrapnel, protecting Ragnar and company from serious injury. It appeared that there was an endless supply of replacement Meinfretrs.
Ten identical stalls stood side by side on the cargo deck. Inside were 10 dragons, or “dinos” (die-nose) as the hidden masters called them, with a total weight in excess of two hundred thousand pounds. Each beast was tended to by a quartet of raised-from-the-dead Vikings. The remainder of Ragnar’s captive brothers-in-arms had been spirited off to unknown missions elsewhere.
Through their drooling mouths, the dinos moaned a chorus of misery. The corticostimulator implants in their brains made it impossible for them to move, to even blink of their own volition, but they were conscious enough to feel pain. Their nostrils were plugged as well—this out of concern that despite the implants, the faintest whiff of food could send the purposefully-starved herd into a frenzy.
Unlike the shaggy Icelandic ponies the Norsemen had ridden in happier days, these dragon steeds could never be tamed. Too huge, too wild, too stupid to learn even the simplest commands—they were ten-ton battering rams with bottomless appetites and brimming bowels.
When the frantic shoveling was nearly complete, Ragnar and Anvindr left the others to finish the task and hurried for the front of the long stall. They gathered up the beast’s headgear from where it lay draped over the gate. The armored helmet wasn’t made of chain mail, but a finely-woven fabric the color of oatmeal. Dinos always attacked with lowered heads, shielding their vitals with wide, heavy skulls, tri-horns, and frills; as thick as the bone was, it was no defense against volleys of bullets or sprays of shrapnel. The fabric armor protected the animal’s head from incoming fire and the riders on its back from skull and frill through-and-throughs. The hood had been tailored to fit, with holes for the three horns, the eyes, and the nostrils. It was held in place on top by the horns and secured by a series of flexible straps under the chin.
As Ragnar and Anvindr unrolled the headgear, first over the short horn, then the longer ones, the creature shuddered, full length. Staring into a dilated black pupil as big as his fist, Ragnar caught a fleeting glimpse of panic—and hate. Beneath the induced paralysis, it was aware of its helplessness.
He and Anvindr had to climb the stall’s side rails to pull the rear of the hood over the top of the skin-covered frill. The hood in place, they untied the ropes from the railings and lowered saddle onto its back. All around them, Vikings were scurrying and other saddles were being lowered from the ceiling.
The engines’ howl shot up two ear-splitting octaves and the immense ship lurched, braking in midair over its intended target. The cargo deck’s claxons began to wail and the thousands of tiny white suns in the girders changed color, casting a deep crimson glow over everything and everyone.
Then the voice that wasn’t Odin’s bellowed inside his head: Prepare to attack!
Einarr and Fenrisúlfr threw aside their shovels and helped lash down the saddle, first around the neck, then around the trunk behind the forelegs. The last cinches were slipped under the belly in front of the back legs, between them, and out the rear. Ragnar and Anvindr quickly pulled up the ties on either side of the wide tail. Working close to Meinfretr’s backend was tricky business—and not just because of the unpredictable eruptions. Its tail was as dangerous as the three horns and beak, powerful enough to break a man’s neck with a glancing swipe.
As the ship made a slow, grinding descent to earth, Ragnar felt the pulse of its banks of energy weapons firing. Wave after wave of static electricity coursed through his body, making his testicles ache, and the acrid smell of ozone cut through the hold’s overwhelming reek of dung.
After hurriedly grabbing broadswords, shields, and axes, and donning horned metal helmets, Ragnar’s men boosted him up to the front stirrup and pommel. He swung into the driver’s seat behind the frill. The breadth of Meinfretr’s neck and shoulders forced him to spread his knees uncomfortably wide.
In front of the pommel, strapped to a collar around the beast’s neck was the control apparatus placed there by the hidden masters. It consisted of a small box with a joystick and a row of toggle switches. The box sent wireless commands directly into Meinfretr’s brain. Commands it had to obey.
Claxons wailing, energy weapons still blasting, the ship continued its vertical descent. One by one, Anvindr, Einarr, and Fenrisúlfr scrambled up into the seats behind him.
Perched high above the floor, Ragnar could see deckhands running down the wide central aisle, preparing for the mass exodus from the hold. They were the size of human beings, and they moved on two legs and swung two arms like human beings, but there the resemblance ended.
Ragnar had first encountered these and even more bizarre two-legged creatures on the Darkside moon base, where he and his men had awakened from their near-drownings. In order to avoid a second, equally ignominious death of exploding heads, he and his men had joined with the not-men/not-beasts, fighting at the whim of the hidden masters.
The deck hands included Hornet people, a combination of man and insect, bone and chitin. They had six limbs—the middle ones on either side of their torsos were vestigal, shriveled, but with fully-formed hands and fingers. Bristling antennae stubs jutted from their flattened, but otherwise human-looking foreheads. Their overlarge, multi-faceted eyes were inhuman, as disturbing as they were unreadable. Shiny black chitin armor formed breast, shoulder, and back plates, joining the pink skin on their stomachs just below the ribcage. Like their tiny wasp brethren, they had poison glands and stingers, but not in the customary place at the tips of their abdomens. Cruel black thorns, retractable hypodermics, were concealed under their wrists, along their forearms, above knees and ankles. In hand-to-hand combat, these built-in weapons could deliver multiple doses of poison—which in seconds caused adversaries’ throats to swell shut, cutting off their airways.
A different variety of misbegotten took a position directly in front of Meinfretr, on the far side of the stall gate. Typical of the Bat people, this creature was hunchbacked, with extra-long, scrawny arms and very short legs. It walked upright, but with an awkward, capering gait. Except for ears and nose, and the eight bare patches on its chest, its body was fringed in sparse brown hairs. The beady eyes were set extremely low on the face, on a level with the nostril slits. The top of its head came to a rounded point, which was the anchor for powerful jaw muscles. It had needlesharp fangs, four upper and two lower, capable of tearing out chunks of flesh down to the bone.
This particular Bat was female. From the bare patches on chest and stomach hung drooping, flattened bladders; unappetizing dugs in two rows of four, capped with dark nipples of various lengths and angles of inclination. A set of protective goggles sat on top of its head—the Bat people had very sensitive eyes, but the protection was unnecessary after sundown and in the hold’s red light. Like the rest of its breed, this creature was wingless. Long, tapering fingers matched its skinny arms, with claws trimmed close so it could operate the stubby assault rifle hanging over its shoulder and the semi-automatic pistol strapped to its hip.
The Hornets and Bats’ handguns and automatic weapons reflected the pecking order of the hidden masters’ minions. Deemed overexcitable and dull-witted, Ragnar and his Vikings weren’t entrusted with firearms, only with the dinos and edged weapons. Whether they carried guns or not, all of the masters’ lackeys had powerful explosive charges buried in their heads. All of them took orders directly through communication implants.
The moment Ragnar had set eyes on the menagerie of horrifying chimeras, he knew they were not the work of Odin, Vili, or Ve—the primordial Norse gods who had breathed life and perception into the first human beings, turning tree trunks into the progenitor couple, Ask and Embla. Ask and Embla, whose lineage had survived the great flood that punctuated Ragnarök, the first Apocalypse, and then continued on to repopulate the earth. From humanity’s instant of creation, the gods had kept its chain of life unbroken and distinct from the rest of nature.
Nor could present circumstances be the work of the Norn—three giantesses who, by weaving past, present, and future, formed the web individual and collective human destinies, or Wyrd. Urd, Verlandi, and Sculd could not tinker with the flow of time, could not move living things or objects forward or back; no god of the Norse had the power to do that, not even Odin. Time’s inexorable unfolding was part of Orlog, the first law of the Universe, which ruled over all of existence.
It was clear that Wyrd and Orlog had been somehow bypassed—or even shattered. Which told Ragnar that unthinkable, incomprehensibly dark forces were in play.
As the airship touched down, its engines dropped in pitch, then fell silent. The sirens continued to wail, and the red beams began pulsing on and off. With a mechanical groan, a section of the craft’s far wall split open and a broad ramp slowly lowered to the ground. Daylight, wind, and the sounds of combat poured through the widening crack—the shriek and sizzle of energy weapons, violent explosions, clattering gunfire.
The Bat people ducked under the stall rails to unchain dinos’ legs, then, in a strict order, they began opening the gates, one by one—this to avoid a catastrophic stampede for the exit.
As the first dino lumbered from its enclosure, its riders unsheathed their swords and waved battleaxes in the air, shouting, “Odin! Odin! Odin!”
All forty Vikings, Ragnar and his passengers included, picked up the joyous war chant. They yelled over the wailing siren, screaming thanks to their god for the battle that was about to unfold. To their way of thinking, it was far, far better to die with bloody sword in hand than bound, gagged, half-garrotted, and left to drown in a cold, peaty bog.
When Meinfretr’s gate opened, Ragnar tripped one of the toggle switches, which in turn unblocked a small portion of the creature’s brain. He gripped the joystick and pushed it forward. With a moan, the beast shuffled out of the stall in slow motion, lifting its legs with difficulty. The implant controls selectively scrambled the beast’s nerve impulses, offering the driver degrees of hobbling.
At the top of the ramp, gazing out over Meinfretr’s frill, Ragnar took in a long lake nestled between heavily-forested foothills, which vaguely reminded him of home. The airship had landed on a flat table of shoreline. High on the hilltop above them, the forest was in flames, as was a log-walled fortress that would not have been out of place in 900 A.D. The spiked perimeter was already breached, sections of the outer walls had toppled inward and were burning.
Two more gleaming silver airships hovered on either side of the fortress; the wind driven by their spinning rims bent the treetops and whipped the lake’s surface to a fine froth. From the domes on the ships’ undersides, bolts of pure energy shot to earth, squealing and crackling like lightning, raising towering clouds of mixed smoke and dirt. The assault was answered, albeit feebly, by scattered volleys of gunfire from behind the fort’s breached walls.
When all the dinos had been off-loaded, the Bats, their protective goggles down, pulled out the nose plugs.
The instant Meinfretr’s nose came unblocked, its eyes clamped shut, its huge head lifted and turned, then stopped as if locking on a target. As it sucked down the scent riding the saucers’ wind, its back quivered beneath saddle and stirrups. Dinos dearly loved the taste of the vega-men, the younger the better. Short of a direct hit by cannon fire they were unstoppable forces of nature when it came to rooting out tender green flesh.
Meinfretr let out a mournful moan, pawing feebly with its front hooves. Incoming bullets from the high ground whined overhead and slapped the soft earth all around them.
Attack! The command rang inside Ragnar’s head.
There was no need to warn his passengers to hang on; they knew what was coming. He tripped the remaining toggles, giving Meinfretr’s brain—and instinct—access to the power of all its muscles.
The other dino drivers got the same order in the same instant and obeyed it at roughly the same moment, which launched an earthquake of enraged, starving, ten-ton beasts. Leaving the not-men to follow on foot, the dinos charged up the hillside en masse, jostling each other, racing for the source of the delicious aroma. Ragnar and his henchmen bounced wildly on their saddle, hanging on to pommels and stirrups for dear life.
There wasn’t room on the well-worn path between lake and fort for two dinos, let alone ten, so they made their own paths to the dinner table, rampaging overland, throwing up great divots of soil and grass, bellowing into the gale of the saucers’ turbine wash.
Halfway up the slope, bullets from the toppled bulwarks began smacking into Meinfretr’s armored hood and frill. Ragnar kept his head down as the distance to target rapidly closed.
Despite the conditions of his servitude—the constant threat of being rendered summarily headless, the loss of his hard-won command, the endless flow of dino shit—he was still every inch a Viking. Seconds away from close-quarters combat, he felt a powerful stirring in his blood..
As the wave of beasts neared the log perimeter, the saucers stopped firing energy bolts into the compound.
Bracing himself, Ragnar peered over the top of the frill and saw that Meinfretr was beelining for a breach in the wall. A jumble of fallen, unpeeled logs lay directly in their path. The huge creature bounded over the obstacle and came crashing down inside the fort.
They were greeted by clattering gunfire from behind the ruins of a series of log breastworks set out like rows of spears across the central common area. Ragnar could see vega-men huddled behind the barriers that were still standing. So could Meinfretr. So could all the other dinos pouring through the gaps in the wall. The beasts charged the sharpened log battlements, flying over them or stomping them flat, scattering the defenders. Ignoring the fallen celery people, those cooked or exploded by energy beams, the dinos chased down the live ones—fresher was tastier.
Autofire rattled from their right flank. Ragnar twisted the joystick in that direction, forcing Meinfretr’s head around to block the incoming rounds.
A quartet of green men were covering a hasty retreat to the row of structures along the back wall.
Meinfretr was on them in three loping bounds. It snatched up one of the runners from behind; then with a toss of its head, flipped his body around in its mouth, trapping him between its jaws, shoulders to hips, face up. Ragnar leaned into the stirrups so he could gaze down at the victim. The vega-man’s eyes bulged from their sockets; the fine, faint ribs in his face turned to brown stripes. On the other side of the dino’s mouth, his legs kicked feebly. Then came a shrill scream cut off by a resounding crunch as Meinfretr’s teeth ground down. Green blood squirted out the sides of its mouth, spattering the churned up earth. The vega-man’s severed head and neck, and the legs below the hip dropped to earth. Meinfretr barely masticated the mouthful of torso before bolting it down. Then it picked up the head and smashed it between its backteeth like a gooseberry.
As Meinfretr went for the severed legs, it stopped short. Its head reared up, then it spun around to the left. Not fifty feet away, two dinos were maniacally pawing and rooting furrows in the ground. Their front horns hooked and tossed aside the ceiling beams of a hidden bunker.
With a snort, Meinfretr charged after them.
The joystick was useless. The dino would not be turned.
It was all Ragnar could do to hold on, a torrent of dirt raining down on his helmet and shoulders, as Meinfretr and the other dinos—60,000 pounds of fury—went frill to frill, horn to horn tearing out the rest of the log beams.
Frantic automatic weapon fire roared up from the widening hole, but point blank rounds to armored heads had no effect. The dinos waded into the shallow pit they had excavated, spiking the trapped fighters on their horns, then flinging the limp bodies off, over their backs.
As the dust dispersed, Ragnar saw the reason for the dinos’ frenzy and the ferocity of the bunker’s defenders. Celery babies. A whole cellar-full of the little green tots looked up from the hole with terrified, weeping eyes. Sensing their end, they began to bawl in unison.
Meinfretr and the others made short work of the sprouts, plucking them up in threes and fours. The celery babies were so tender and juicy, the dinos didn’t chew— they gulped them whole.
Hunger barely dented, the three dinos scrambled from the pit, and rejoined the rest of the herd. Together, they forced the retreat through fire, smoke, and dust to the rear of the compound, where the last of the straggler vega-men slipped behind a wooden barricade.
The barrier held no more than a few seconds under the dinos’ horns, and as it splintered apart, it revealed a cave angling down into the limestone bedrock. Though the beasts were too big to enter and pursue their quarry, that didn’t stop them from trying, and all at once.
Ragnar had to turn off part of Meinfretr’s brain to get it to back up; when it was at a proper distance, he flipped the rest of the control toggles, shutting it down completely. The other dino drivers did the same.
When they dismounted, Ragnar, Anvindr, Einarr, and Fenrisúlfr stamped their feet to get rid of the numbness caused by the jarring steeplechase. As they unsheathed their swords and gathered up their shields, the chimeras finally appeared, walking nonchalantly through the smoke to join the festivities. Given that celery people were so difficult to kill with firearms, there was no rush. The not-men would wait outside until the fight was over, reduced to mop-up duties, finishing off the wounded with close range headshots.
Ragnar and his three comrades were first through the cave’s entrance, blades at the ready.
Apparently out of ammunition, vega-men set upon them with long, curved swords, wooden clubs, and lengths of metal pipe. It was a delaying tactic meant to give the rest of the survivors time to escape.
With just enough height in the cave’s antechamber for an overhead swing, Ragnar jumped straight into the fray. In one mighty slash, he split the head of the first defender from crown to gullet; the force of the blow made the man’s eyes pop from their sockets. Booting the corpse off his blade, he cut a second vega-man in half with a power-backstroke.
Anvindr, Einarr, and Fenrisúlfr pressed past him, dividing the resistance at swordpoint, then chopping it down at the root, slicing off legs, then heads. Einarr feinted, then ducked behind the last defender. He used the gathered momentum to thrust his sword through the green man’s back to the hilt, then lifted his victim off the ground with the buried blade.
The exposed leafy head made a tempting target for Ragnar’s sword. As it flew free of the neck, green gore splattered in a wide arc across the opposite wall.
The stroke barely complete, a familiar voice boomed inside Ragnar’s skull:
Kill them all … and find the stone!
An order which he found irksome. They were Vikings, after all—the first part went without saying.
Continue to Chapter 4