Dragons Of Englor rb-24 Read online

  Doubtless this was a caricature, no more accurate than wartime caricatures usually were. But Blade still found it intensely interesting, as an example of how the people of Englor saw the Red Flames of Russland, their enemies.

  There was also something uncannily familiar about the poster. The rifle the Red Flame soldier was carrying seemed an exact duplicate of the AK-47, the standard assault rifle of the infantry formations of the Soviet Army! Another weird echo from Home Dimension.

  On the wall directly behind the duty constable’s desk hung a framed photograph, in the place where the portrait of the Queen hung in the police stations of Home Dimension. This photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man of about fifty, with dark hair going gray and a full beard. His face was square but fine-featured. He appeared to be wearing a military uniform tunic of some sort, dark blue gray with small shoulder straps and a high collar stiff with gold lace.

  On the bottom of the frame was a small brass plate, and on it was engraved:

  His Imperial Majesty Charles VI, Emperor and Supreme Protector of Englor

  Blade’s night in jail passed quietly, except for one noisy moment when a particularly quarrelsome drunk was brought in and deposited in the next cell. Morning came, a breakfast of coffee and sticky porridge came with it, and after breakfast two more police officers to escort Blade before the magistrate. He was given underwear, shoes, and a patched prison coverall. Then they hustled him into the same van that had brought him in last night and drove off.

  Blade’s was the first case on the morning’s docket. Either the magistrate had a busy morning ahead or he didn’t believe in wasting words. He was brisk, businesslike, thoroughly unsympathetic, and almost painfully precise in his speech and movements. Blade wondered if he starched his wig each night, to keep it so rigidly immobile above his long, thin face.

  «Your offense is a serious one, sir. It shows a lack of any sense of decency or consideration for others. Such a lack is particularly reprehensible at the present time, when the Empire needs the most and the best that every man and woman can give.»

  The magistrate drew some papers toward him and cleared his throat. «Normally, I would impose the maximum sentence of ninety days without the option of a fine. However, you have not aggravated your offense by drunkenness, destruction of property, or resisting the arresting officers. You also appear to be an able-bodied and alert man.

  «Therefore, I am going to offer you the option of enlistment in His Imperial Majesty’s Armed Forces. If you volunteer, I will consider remitting half the sentence. If you are accepted for enlistment, the sentence will be entirely remitted. I shall also direct that your offense be stricken from the records, so that you may enter His Majesty’s service without any stain upon your character.»

  The offer was an agreeable surprise to Blade, for several reasons. It gave him the chance to do something with his time in this Dimension, other than spending most of it doing whatever petty criminals did in Englor’s jails. In fact, it gave him one of the best opportunities to study this Dimension that he could hope for, and above all to study its technology. With war hanging over the Empire, the armed forces would be getting the best its scientists and factories could produce, and as fast as possible.

  There was a final reason why the offer was good news for Blade. It suggested that no one saw anything unusual or mysterious about his sudden appearance in the park, stark naked and in broad daylight. They might think he was not quite right in the head, but certainly no one seemed to be considering him a «man from nowhere,» whose origins required a full-scale investigation. They seemed to be taking it for granted that he belonged here.

  Enlistment in the armed forces wouldn’t be all good news, of course. There would be all sorts of tests. There would also be an investigation into his background that might be sufficient to make someone suspicious.

  Once he was in the army, there would be the usual boredom and idiocy of basic training. Even after that, he would not be as well off in Englor’s army as he had been in a number of less civilized forces over the years. In civilized armies there was no chance to rise from private to general by catching the eye of the ruler or the ruler’s wife. Without any education that he could prove, he would probably have trouble even getting a commission. He would very likely spend the war as a private or a corporal, and possibly without even a chance to distinguish himself in combat.

  There was nothing he could do about any of this, however. He’d been given the best chance he was likely to get, and the only thing to do was take it.

  The magistrate was staring hard at Blade, obviously waiting for an answer. Blade raised his eyes, met the magistrate’s gaze, and said quietly, «My lord, I volunteer for His Imperial Majesty’s Armed Forces.»

  Chapter 4

  Blade passed all the physical and mental tests with flying colors. In fact he held himself back on all of them to avoid doing well enough to cause comment.

  He was able to manage fairly well in presenting himself as a man without any past that needed to be checked out. He claimed to be a foundling with no known relatives, no friends, and no fixed place of residence for a good many years into the past. That still didn’t account for a good many things, among them his excellent physical condition and the impressive array of scars on his body.

  The induction officers and sergeants must have occasionally wondered about Blade, but they kept their wonderings to themselves. Blade thought he knew why. In the first place, any man so obviously fit and ready for service was a gift horse a wise man wouldn’t look in the mouth. With war imminent, the officers and sergeants knew they’d be taking the lame and the feeble-witted before long. Richard Blade was one of the finest pieces of raw material anyone could hope for.

  In the second place, the recent history of this Dimension offered a plausible explanation for Blade’s skills, scars, and obscure past. Russland, the great enemy, had absorbed a number of small countries along its borders in the past two generations. In some of those countries, there had been little colonies of Imperial subjects. Many of them had been born in those countries and lived all their lives there.

  When the Red Flames of Russland moved in, most of those from Englor died-killed in the fighting, executed, or starved and tortured to death in concentration camps. Those who survived lost homes and families and had to flee for their lives, suffering ordeals often too nightmarish to retell. A few of the bolder spirits remained behind and joined the guerrillas and underground movements in the various countries. Over the years, these became among the most formidable fighting men in the whole Dimension.

  After a few days, Blade understood that he was generally assumed to be one of these ex-guerrillas. No one ever asked him directly, so he never had to give any specific information. He merely had to look reasonably wise when the history of those unhappy countries that were now Red Flame satellites was discussed.

  Blade was tested and passed as fit for service at an induction center on the outskirts of London. Then he and thirty other recruits piled aboard a bus, under the eye of a large, beefy, but far from stupid sergeant. The bus took them to a railroad station, and the train they boarded there took them north to a training camp.

  Blade did his basic training at a camp in the East Riding of Yorkshire-a name common to both England and Englor. They were not far from Whitby. In Home Dimension, Whitby was a fishing and coastal port and a resort town. In Englor it was the same, but it also supported a fair-sized base for the Imperial Navy and two airfields for the Imperial Air Force. Sailors, soldiers, and airmen on business or liberty packed the town’s narrow streets, sometimes seeming to outnumber the local inhabitants. They gave the town a lively night life-sometimes a good deal livelier than the local inhabitants wanted.

  At least this was what Blade heard from the soldiers at the camp who’d been there long enough to be entitled to passes. New recruits got none during the first six weeks of training. After that they got one evening pass into town every ten days. Blade never took his. He spent what
free time he had devouring books and magazines in the camp library. When he absolutely couldn’t stand the sight of tents and sandbags any longer, he would take a brisk, solitary walk along the nearest beach. This habit strengthened his image as a man alone, cut off from the rest of the world by a past he would not discuss.

  The training was rigorous from the beginning, with the day starting at 5:00 A.M. and ending with «lights out» at 10:00 P.M. The hours between were filled with calisthenics, basic military courtesy, weapons training, testing for special skills, more calisthenics, more testing, and twice a week a twenty-mile route march with a fifty-pound pack.

  The «square-bashing» or close-order drill that the British Army had always enjoyed so much was largely omitted from the training program. Blade mentally chalked up a large point in favor of whoever was in charge of the Imperial Army’s training. They’d realized that there were only a certain number of hours in each day, and every hour devoted to close-order drill meant one less hour that could be spent teaching things more useful on a modern battlefield.

  Not that the discipline was lenient. The drill sergeants and training officers came in all shapes and sizes, but they were all loud and demanding. Everything except eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom was usually done «on the double.»

  Nor were living conditions particularly comfortable. The battledress was of such stiff fabric that it rasped the skin like sandpaper and was impregnated with something that smelled like an open sewer every time it got wet. All the clothing and footgear came in the two standard military sizes-Too Large and Too Small. Blade usually wound up with Too Large, something of a feat for the supply sergeants, considering that Blade stood six feet one and weighed over two hundred pounds.

  The food was abundant, but the cooks seemed to believe there was something sinful or undisciplined about soldiers being able to enjoy their meals. So the meat was either burned black or half-raw, the cabbage stringy, the potatoes as hard as alloy-steel forgings, the tea indistinguishable from the water used to scrub the floors, and so on.

  The barracks were new, which meant no vermin and only small pieces of plaster falling down on the recruits while they slept. On the other hand, the windows and the hot water hadn’t been installed. Blade went to sleep every night with the breeze whistling past his ears, and woke up every morning to shave and shower in cold water.

  After the first six weeks, the recruits went on from basic orientation on their rifles to marksmanship training. Blade made no effort to conceal his skill with firearms.

  On the first firing for a rating, he shot 278 out of a possible 300. That was not only the highest rating in his recruit company, it was one of the three highest in the entire history of the camp. Blade found the rifle instructors looking at him with respect now, as well as curiosity.

  Like any other modern force, the Imperial Army of Englor armed its men with a good many weapons besides their rifles. There were hand grenades. There were grenade launchers. There were the Uzis and two other kinds of submachine guns. There were launchers for firing half a dozen different kinds of small rockets, to demolish tanks, pillboxes, snipers, or low-flying enemy planes and helicopters. There were a dozen kinds of mines, demolition devices, and booby traps.

  There was also map reading, camouflage, night movement and concealment, and all the other hundred and one skills that a modern army needed even in its private soldiers. Blade found it impossible to conceal all his great skill and comprehensive knowledge. This worried him at first, for it seemed likely to make him unpleasantly conspicuous. Then he realized that he would probably make himself more conspicuous and suspect by obviously holding himself back. So he stopped worrying and did his best.

  His best was so impressively good that it was not long before even some of the sergeants could be heard admitting that Private Blade knew as much as they did and would know more before long. Blade knew it would not be much longer before he was tapped for an Officer Training Course. Hopefully the authorities would still consider him a gift horse, not to be looked at too closely. His status as someone who was probably an Englor refugee from the Red Flames would help. The authorities were usually more than happy to give such men the best possible chance to strike back at the Russlanders, whom they hated with a passion.

  The weather grew slowly warmer. The recruits at the training camp began to join the regular units in the area for training exercises. Most of the exercises seemed designed to repel raids by Russland troops coming in from the air or the sea.

  From all his reading and from listening to other men talk, Blade now understood fairly clearly the military situation facing the Empire of Englor. It was not yet a crisis, but it could easily become one.

  For all practical military purposes, Englor and Russland were the only two countries in this Dimension. Russland controlled the entire Eurasian land mass to about where the Rhine would have been. Englor ruled its home islands (including countries called Scotia and Airen) and a considerable overseas empire, including most of what passed for the Western Hemisphere and all of Africa.

  There was nothing like North and South America across the «High Ocean,» as the Atlantic was called here. There was one continent, about the size of Australia, and a great many islands of all shapes and sizes. Control of this overseas empire added a good deal to Englor’s resources, but also even more to the territories it had to defend. Fortunately the Russland navy was substantially weaker than the Imperial fleet.

  To the south and east of Englor’s home islands lay something roughly equivalent to Western Europe. It was not quite the same shape as in Home Dimension, and it was a good deal farther away. The local «Channel of Englor» was over a hundred miles wide. The Nord Sea that lay between Englor and the precariously neutral Republic of Nordsbergen was more than five hundred miles wide.

  If Englor was strong at sea and in the air, the Red Flames of Russland were immensely strong on land. Not surprisingly, the heart of Russland lay about where European Russia could be found in Home Dimension. But the Red Flames were a very different proposition from the Soviet Communists. They were an aristocratic and militaristic order, dedicated to war and conquest. They reminded Blade of the Teutonic Knights of medieval Germany. But the Teutonic Knights had collapsed in the early fifteenth century. In this Dimension the Red Flames had survived, prospered, expanded, come to rule all of Russland, and embarked on a course of expansion and conquest.

  Over the last two hundred years they had expanded east, south, and finally west. During their expansion west they had absorbed nearly a dozen formerly independent countries and peoples. Their march of conquest had stopped for the moment at the borders of Gallia, but only because those boarders were now defended by Imperial troops. Gallia’s army was not large enough or well-equipped enough to meet the Russlanders in battle.

  Now the march seemed to be underway again. The ultimatum over Nordsbergen was the signal. The mainland of Nordsbergen was about the size and shape of Norway and Sweden combined. On islands off its west coast, Englor had radar stations and air bases. The Nordsbergen people accepted those bases, knowing that their precarious «neutrality» depended entirely on them.

  Now the Red Flames were demanding that Englor evacuate those bases. The next step after that would certainly be a Russland invasion of Nordsbergen. Then it would be the Russlanders who would have bases on the western islands, looking directly across the Nord Sea at the coast of Englor less than five hundred miles away.

  A week after the field exercises began, the newspapers and radio announced that the Imperial government was accepting the Red Flame ultimatum and evacuating all facilities in Nordsbergen. There was a good deal of angry grumbling among the men in the camp when the news came out. There was also an increase in the training schedule, starting the very next day. After that no one had the energy to complain any more about the government’s weakness.

  Blade was quite certain that accepting the ultimatum had been no more than a move to buy time. Englor badly needed that time to mobilize a
nd concentrate her army before war broke out. In the air and on the sea the Empire could match the Red Flames more than plane for plane and ship for ship, and with better planes and ships, too. On land, the Empire was outnumbered four or five to one. The Imperial troops were better trained and better armed, man for man, but there were not enough of them. The forces in the Home Islands and on the Gallic frontier would have to be reinforced by new recruits and men brought home from the garrisons abroad. Otherwise the Red Flames might very well overrun Gallia, destroying the Imperial forces there. Then Englor would stand alone, stripped of half her army and with her deadly enemies crouching on the coast of Gallia less than a hundred miles away.

  Blade said nothing about his thoughts along these lines. He did not need any posters shouting LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS to be security-conscious. He’d learned his own security-consciousness in a school far harsher than the men around him had known, one they could not even imagine.

  He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever have a chance in this Dimension to use everything else that he’d learned in that same harsh school.

  Chapter 5

  As the days passed, the training battalions at the camp went out more and more often on route marches and field exercises. Bit by bit they became familiar with the whole area between the camp and the Nord Sea coast, from Whitby well to the north.

  It was a brisk, windy day, with scattered clouds scudding across a piercing blue sky. Blade’s training battalion was marching along a narrow, winding road atop the sea cliffs about twenty miles north of Whitby. They’d been on the march since before dawn. Blade was beginning to look forward to the noon halt that was now only an hour and another three miles away.

  Blade looked back along the double line of his platoon. He was now a Recruit Sergeant, and he stood a good chance of getting at least permanent corporal’s stripes when he left the camp to join a unit. So far nobody had said anything to him about going to an Officer Training Course. Blade was half relieved at that, half disappointed.