Thus by the time the gray mottling resolved itself into a sordid assortment of Borgravian mongrels in dull gray uniforms scattered across the line of advance in ragged disorder, twenty swift, sleek, black aerial dreadnaughts were already diving on the foe, one after another in a continuous series of strafing swoops, pinning the creatures down and ripping them to pieces with a steady rain of machine-gun bullets. Like great metal eagles, the planes dipped and soared, catching scores of mutated wretches dead in their tracks as they ran and leapt stupidly in panic, blowing to bits with aerial bombs the few cumbersome old dreadnaughts that the Borgravians boasted; altogether a magnificent and inspiring performance.
"Open fire!" Feric ordered his tank commandTs. "Fire at will as long as there are targets!"
Thunder shook his tank as the cannon fired, shells whistled overhead, and a forest of explosions mushroomed in the ranks of the Borgravians. Again and again and again, the tanks dropped fusillades of high explosive shells on the ragged rabble, while the aerial dreadnaughts continued to strafe the mutants with their machine guns.
Then at last the tanks themselves reached the Borgravian army, such as it was.
A vast untidy mess of trenches and foxholes had been hastily dug on the plain before the burning capital; rolls of barbed wire had been strung almost at random among these rude and ridiculous fortifications. The entire area was peeked with hundreds of smoking bomb and shell craters; the battlefield was cloaked in a pungent gunpowder mist. Fragments of smashed Borgravian equipment 178
were everywhere—shards of howitzers, bits of ruined dreadnaughts, broken and twisted machine guns—and all manner of revolting mutants in gray uniforms lay strewn all about in bloody bits and pieces.
"Hardly anything left worth bothering with, my Commander," Best observed with a certain disappointment.
This was something of a slight exaggeration, for from the cover of trenches, foxholes, craters, and twisted bits of wreckage, Parrotfaces, Blueskins, Toadmen, dwarfs, and creatures with every other conceivable genetic affliction fired rifles uselessly at the tanks, their bullets clattering off the armor plate like so many pebbles.
Feric held down the firing stud of his machine gun, sending a continuous stream of fiery lead into the monstrosities before him as the treads of his tank smashed through a roll of barbed wire and crushed a Parrotface, a hunchbacked dwarf, and a Blueskin huddled behind the wreckage of a dreadnaught. "Use machine guns!" he ordered his tank commanders. "Cannon switch to incendiary shells!"
The tanks advanced swiftly across the battlefield behind a solid wall of machine-gun bullets, crushing wire, trenches, foxholes, and Borgravians beneath their massive steel treads. At point-blank range, the cannon lobbed phos-phorous shells into the ranks of the mutant rabble. Hundreds of crabbed creatures shambled, shuffled, ran and crawled madly in all directions, their uniforms and flesh aflame. The Borgravians in the path of the tanks began to leap up out of then- positions insanely, running a few yards in a cowardly frenzy of fear, only to be mowed down by machine guns and pulped beneath the treads of the onrushing tanks.
The Holder Juggernaut rolled across the plain toward Gormond, driving the remnants of the broken Borgravian army before it; a tight formation of black dreadnaughts and streaming red swastika banners pulverizing everything in its path, leaving behind it nothing but flame, ashes, and the dead bodies of the enemy.
"What a magnificent sight, Best!" Feric exclaimed. "Can you imagine the effect this will have in Vetonia and Husak?"
"Perhaps they will now surrender without further resistance, my Commander."
"Surrender will not be tolerated in this war!" Feric said.
"We must make an example of all these mutants states."
179
In a few minutes, Feric's tank entered the outskirts of Gormond, or rather what was left of the Borgravian capital: heaps of smoldering rubble here and there enlivened by a wooden building still brightly aflame. The corpses of mutants and mongrels were everywhere, many of them decently burned beyond recognition, but all too many clearly displaying the most ghastly genetic degener-ation—tiny pinheads, long dangling arms, mottled skin, of blue, green, brown, or even purple, disgusting hairy humps, chitinous beaks or even carapaces, limbs terminat-ing in clusters of wormlike tentacles, an altogether stomach-turning display of warped and twisted protoplasm.
As the tanks stormed through this flaming chamel heap of genetic refuse, occasionally smashing a freakishly intact structure with their cannon or routing a gaggle of grotesque survivors with their machine guns, Feric's mind was drawn back to the horrid days of his exile, when these foul warrens were alive with disgusting vermin who made his every waking moment an offense to his humanity.
