The Overlords of War

Chapter 17

They emerged above a broad plain tufted with smoke. The sky was pinkish and across it ran palpitating veins, so unlike anything Corson had ever seen that he shivered. On the horizon, beyond a low but sharply defined mountain range, rose three pillars of mingled fire and ash.

They were descending rapidly. Below, what looked like sparkling insects darted and whirled. Astonished, he recognized armored knights on gaily caparisoned horses. Out of tall grass they charged with lances at the ready. A movement in undergrowth… and Red Indians stood up uttering wild cries, letting fly a volley of arrows at the order of their feather-bedecked chief. Some of the horses reared up, and a melee broke out—but already the pegasone’s slanting course had carried them past.

The almost invisible beam of a blazer tore the air. The pegasone shied away from it through time and space. The mountains were in a slightly different position. The plain was barren now and sown with craters.. Dull rumblings arose from it, as solid-seeming as hills of pure sound. But the sky looked just the same.

A movement attracted Corson’s attention. A few hundred meters away a monstrous mass was shifting very slowly across country. Only its geometrical form betrayed its mechanical nature. A tank? If so, it was infinitely the largest Corson had ever seen. A crater like those stamped into the ground seemed to open right in the middle of its near side, but that was illusory, due to a reflection. Corson thought it must be heading toward a low hill nearby, which might conceal a fortress or might itself be a still vaster machine. Hanging on the pegasone’s flank, he felt dreadfully exposed. He would rather have landed and sought a hiding place in this blasted terrain.

Something black and lens-shaped, with a scythe-sharp edge, came spinning from the hill toward the tank, flying a complex curve. It struck the side of the tank as though it were the blade of a circular saw. Huge sparks flashed out. Then it blew up, causing no apparent harm to the target. A bright square patch of bare metal was the only trace of the attack. The tank rumbled onward, impregnably.

Then, without warning, the rough ground opened, giving way like a pitfall under the tank’s weight. Tilting, it spat out forward extensions that struggled for purchase on the far side of the crevasse. But in vain. It tried to go into reverse, slithered, slid inexorably toward the pit. Irises opened on its sides and vomited men, in good order, wearing camouflage netting which changed color to match that of the ground and rendered them almost invisible. They hurled grenades into the pit. Flames and black smoke burst upward. The trap subsided a little farther yet, then was immobilized. But the slope was already too steep and the surface too slippery for the tank to climb out again. Finally it skidded, teetered on the very brink of the pit, and toppled forward, jamming there almost vertically. Its engines, hitherto silent, roared desperately, and quit. A few more men abandoned it and joined the others who were taking cover. A salvo of missiles darted from the hill and wiped out everything in its vicinity, making a solid layer of flame in which men were instantly consumed. The few who did escape vanished into the rugged landscape.

The whole thing could have lasted only half a minute. The pegasone had already left the fortified hill to its left. It flew so low that it had to swoop upward to avoid one outcropping hillock after another as the earth shifted in response to vast unseen forces. At last it landed in the shelter of a crag that seemed relatively stable.

Corson hesitated. He was unable to control the pegasone. So he had to rely on the creature’s instinct of self-preservation and assume that for the moment it had brought them to a place which was safe from attack either through time or in space. Of course, the pegasone might have a very different notion of what constituted an attack than did its riders. It might not bother to dodge an acid gas cloud that could dissolve their space suits. Or it might wander off by itself.

Still, Corson decided, it was worth taking advantage of this respite. He undid his straps and helped Antonella down.

He looked the scene over. Some rocks had tumbled down the hillside and offered precarious shelter at its foot. Taking Antonella’s hand, he urged her to a run. Halfway to their goal he noticed a red flower bloom on the plain. He flung himself to the ground, dragging her with him, and by rolling over and over they reached a hollow between the foot of the hill and the pile of rocks. A missile struck the hillside with a gigantic hammer blow. When the dust settled, he saw that the pegasone had vanished.

“At least that warhead wasn’t nuclear,” he said dryly.

He risked a glance over the surrounding country.

“So this is Aergistal! It looks like one vast battlefield—the father and mother of all battlefields.”

Antonella wiped dust from her faceplate. “But who’s fighting? And against whom?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Corson said. “To me the whole thing looks absolutely crazy.”

You could call this total war and mean it—or so it appeared. An ordinary war implied two sides more or less clearly opposed to each other, a shared or maybe two comparable technologies. Here, everybody seemed to be fighting everybody else. Why should armored knights be charging a tribe of Red Indians? Where could you hide the cities, the empires, which you would need to support such forces and which must constitute the stakes that they fought for? What was the nature of this pinkish and rather repulsive sky, featureless, boasting neither sun nor moon? Even the horizon looked somehow wrong, infinitely far away as though the whole of Aergistal were nothing but an endless plain. But if this was a giant planet, why should its gravity be normal or nearly so?

“The air seems to be okay,” he announced after glancing at the gauges on his sleeve. That too was a mystery, given the amount of dust and probably radiation that these ceaseless explosions must be hurling into the sky. Still, the gauges were definitely working. He took off his helmet and filled his lungs. The air was cool and odorless. A breeze brushed his face.

Once again he risked peering out from the shelter of the rocks* Clear to the slopes of the distant mountains the plain seemed to be uniformly deserted. There were puffs of smoke here and there.

A flash caught his eye and by reflex he dived to the bottom of the hollow. In front of them there was nowhere worth making for.

“We’ll have to get over the hill,” he said. “Maybe on the far side we’ll find… something.”

There was no hope of locating an ally, and probably not even a rational being. They were trapped in this war—this inconceivable war.

A black dot had just appeared overhead. It left a line of smoke and with it was tracing signs in the sky. The first group meant nothing to Corson. In the second he thought he detected a vague likeness to Cyrillic, used on a world he had never visited. The third was just a String of dashes. But he didn’t have to wait for the craft to complete its mission before reading the last.

“Welcome to Aergistal!”

Then the black dot made off at high speed over the crest of their hill, while the symbols and letters drifted lazily toward the mountains.

With a shrug, Corson said, “Well, we might as well move on as stay here.”

As quickly as they could they scaled the steep slope. When they reached the top, he cautiously poked his head over, all his back muscles knotting at the idea of the fine target they would make if someone had a scope or an automissile trained on this spot.

What he saw astonished him so much he nearly lost his footing. The far side of the hill slanted gently down to a beach so straight it might have been drawn with a ruler. A blue and perfectly calm sea stretched away to infinity. A few cable lengths from shore a dozen sailing ships were swapping cannonballs, and a dismasted hulk was on fire. On the beach, only a few hundred meters away, two military encampments faced each other. The tents of one were blue and of the other red. Banners saluted a rising wind. Between the two camps soldiers dressed in bright colors, drawn up as though on parade, were firing at each other turn by turn. Although he was too far away to be sure, Corson thought he saw men falling now and then. He heard rolling musket volleys, the sharp cries of the officers, the sound of trumpets, and from time to time the deep boom of the ships’ cannon.

Glancing inland, he saw bulging from a hollow which hid it from the view of both armies something huge, gray, soft, and almost round. A stranded whale?

But much closer to them, at most a hundred meters distant, at the rear of the blue camp, a man was sitting quietly writing at a wooden table. He wore a blue cocked hat with a white cockade, a peculiar frock coat in white and sky blue with gold braid and epaulettes, and from his belt the scabbard of a large saber hung down to touch the ground.

Corson climbed over the hilltop and led the way toward this extraordinary scribe. When they were only a few paces from him, the latter turned his head and said without displaying either surprise or alarm, “Want to join up, young fellers? We just increased our prize money, you know. I can give you a bonus of five crowns even before you put on our fine uniform.”

“I haven’t—” Corson began.

“Ah, I can tell you’re dying to serve under Good King Victor—‘Old Whiskers,’ as we call him, you know. Conditions are good and promotion comes quickly. The war will last a century or two and you can look forward to winding up as a field marshal. As for the lady, she’ll get on fine with our jolly boys and I predict she’ll make her fortune in next to no time.”

“All I’d like to know,” Corson said, “is where the nearest town is.”

“I believe Minor is the nearest,” said the man. “Directly ahead of Us, only twenty or thirty leagues away. We’re going to take it as soon as we’ve dealt with these clowns in red. I admit I’ve never been there, but there’s nothing odd about that, for the good and sufficient reason that it’s in enemy hands. Still, the trip there will be worth it. Come on, sign here—if you know how to write—so that everything is done according to the book.”

And he jingled some discs of yellow metal that awoke a vague memory in Corson. He guessed they must be cash—no, what was the word? Coik? Coins! On the table in front of the man, on either side of a big ledger, lay two peculiar hand weapons which he would have liked to examine more closely. But Antonella was squeezing his arm hard, and he felt her trembling.

“What about those ships?” he demanded, pointing out to sea.

“That, my friend, has nothing to do with us. Everybody here gets on with his own war, without worrying about what his neighbors are up to. That is, until you’ve got rid of the current opposition. Then you sign up the survivors and go looking for someone else to take on. You’re on the run yourselves, aren’t you? I never saw uniforms like yours before, at any rate.”

“We don’t want to join up,” Corson said firmly. “We only want to—well, find work somewhere.”

“Then I’ll have to persuade you, my friends,” the man said. “That’s both my vocation and my avocation.”

He seized his weapons and pointed them at Corson.

“Kindly sign your name here before I get annoyed and withdraw the offer of your recruiting fee!”

Corson flung Antonella to the ground and leaped at the table, kicking it over. But his opponent, forewarned, dodged back and pulled both his triggers. A bang deafened Corson in the same moment as he felt a violent blow on his left arm. Almost at once he also heard a sort of fizzing noise. One of the pistols had not gone off properly.

He hurled himself forward into thick smoke. The man in the cocked hat had dropped his guns and was frantically drawing his sword. This time Corson was the faster. Jumping the overturned table, he kicked him in the guts and then punched him on the temple. Not too hard. He didn’t want to kill him.

The man keeled over, clutching his belly with both hands.

Corson felt his left biceps, expecting to find that he was bleeding. But the suit had been tough enough to stop the bullet. He almost laughed aloud; he was going to escape with no more than a gigantic bruise. When he turned, though, his smile froze on his face. The explosion had attracted attention, and from the camp a small squad of men was hurrying toward them.

Corson dragged Antonella to her feet, and—pausing only to possess himself of the fallen saber—broke into a run, forcing her to keep pace. There was only one way open to them. The sole escape route led toward the hollow where they had seen what he imagined to be the body of a whale.

Explosions sent bullets whistling past their ears. Luckily, either their pursuers weren’t taking the time to aim properly or they merely wanted to scare them off. It was obvious that their guns were not self-sighting, and when the fusillade broke off, Corson realized with amazement that they did not even reload automatically. It took quite a while for them to be charged again.

Panting, they scrambled up the outer slope of the hollow. Breasting the top of the rise, they saw it was an old crater, far deeper and wider than they had expected. And the “whale” was a colossal ball of rubberized cloth, enclosed by a net. It floated in midair, tethered to a thick rope that moored it to a boulder. A wicker gondola, half in contact with the ground, hung beneath it. A man in red trousers and tunic, with a sort of turban on his head, was busy making adjustments to a whole collection of valves. His skin was a magnificent black.

He grinned on seeing Corson and Antonella approaching. The grin vanished when he noticed the saber. He reached for a gun, whose muzzle jutted over the edge of the gondola, but Corson checked him with the flat of the sword.

“We’re being chased,” he said. “Can this thing of yours carry three?”

“The regulations don’t allow—” the black man began, casting an anxious glance at Corson. Then he looked further, and saw how at the rim of the hollow heads topped with cocked hats were starting to appear.

“I think it might be a good idea to get away from here,” he finished.

Followed by Corson and Antonella, he jumped into the gondola and hastily began to tip sandbags overboard. The gondola left the ground and began to sway dangerously.

“Lie down on the bottom!” Corson shouted at Antonella. Then, seeing that the black man was wasting precious time on undoing the mooring rope, he slashed at it. A few strands parted. A second cut severed the core of the cable and a gust of wind did the rest. Suddenly released, the balloon took off like a rocket. Shots rang out, but the bullets passed beneath them. By the time the guns had been reloaded the runaways would have made too much height to be hit by the inaccurate fire of Good King Victor’s bullyboys.

Corson, clutching the rim of the gondola, pulled himself up. The abruptness of the ascent had thrown him to the wicker floor, which creaked alarmingly. He glanced at the black man, who was hanging on to the suspension ropes with both hands, and set down his saber before helping Antonella to her feet.

“Whoever’s side you’re on,” he said to the stranger, “I’m glad we ran into you. My name is Corson, and I belong to the crew of the…”

The words tailed away. How ridiculous to speak here of the Archimedes, a battle cruiser involved in the interstellar war between Earth and Uria! Now he really was a soldier with neither an army nor a cause to fight for, a soldier lost. And if it had not been for the enormous battlefield of Aergistal, he might well have forgotten that he was a soldier.

“My name is Touray,” said the black. “I’m a Zouave. Provost marshal and pro tem balloonist with a communications regiment. Originally this balloon of mine was supposed to be captive, but a lucky shot—or maybe an unlucky one—turned it loose.” With a wry smile. “Also I’m a qualified medical orderly, and…

He hesitated. “And—?” Corson prompted.

“Your uniforms made me remember something. I wasn’t always a balloonist. I was an engineer. And a helicopter pilot. That’s why they wished this balloon on me.”

He started to laugh. “You see, I told them I knew a bit about flying. It seemed better to be above the battle than mixed up in the middle of it… And what about you? What war do you hail from?” It was Corson’s turn to hesitate.

“From a war between planets,” he said after a moment. “But I didn’t come direct from there to here.”

“A war between planets,” Touray said thoughtfully. “So you must come from a much later period than me. In my day we were just getting interested in space travel. I can still recall the day the first man landed on Mars. Quite an event!”

He jerked his thumb toward Antonella.

“What about her? Is she from the same war as you?”

Corson shook his head. “No, she comes from… from a period of peace.”

The black face froze. “Then she ought not to be here!”

“Why do you say that?”

“In this world there’s nobody but soldiers, warriors, people who for one reason or another have been declared war criminals. Me, I fired rockets at a village where there were only civilians, somewhere in Europe, on an island that I still remember was called Sicily. I won’t say I realized what I was doing, but I can’t claim that I didn’t know, either. That’s war for you, I’m afraid.”

A question sprang to Corson’s mind.

“You’re talking Pangal. I thought that wasn’t developed until after the invention of star travel.”

“Oh, it isn’t my mother tongue. I learned it here. Everyone at Aergistal speaks Pangal, with some local differences. Dialects, I suppose you’d call them.”

“So what was your mother tongue?”

“It was a language called French.”

“I see,” Corson said. But he didn’t; the word meant nothing to him.

His mind was swarming with insoluble mysteries. Those, though, would have to wait for an answer. So far the balloon had been drifting along the shoreline, but it was showing a disturbing tendency to wander out to sea, and that level ocean seemed to reach to infinity.