Dragons Of Englor

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 and 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.