by David Weber
Each of the four machine gun emplacements on each side of the valley poured at least two hundred rounds at the monstrous beasts leading that airborne onslaught, and none of their targets even tried to dodge.
Cerlohs Myr watched in utter horror as both his remaining yellows ran straight into the massed fire of the Sharonian weapons which shouldn't have been there. Geyrsof and his wingman had been concentrating on their assigned target, not looking for machine guns on the tops of mountains a good mile and a half short of the target that didn't know they were coming. Myr had no idea what those guns were doing there. Indeed, he could hardly even find them! The brilliant flames of their muzzle flashes illuminated the shadows wrapped around their positions like chain-lightning, but they were so solidly dug-in, with so many sandbags and so much earth piled on top of their positions, that the muzzle flashes were all he could see.
Well, that and the consequences of those muzzle flashes.
Graycloud and Skykill seemed to stagger in midair. The fire wasn't even coming in from below, where their scales were thickest, and the massive bullets punched through their sides like white-hot awls. One of them-Myr had no idea which-managed to scream in mortal agony, and then both of them went smashing down out of the heavens in bloody, shattered ruin that bounced and skidded onward along the valley floor like toys that flailed broken wings like pitiful, tattered banners.
The three reds behind them went the same way before their pilots could react. The rest of the attack flight responded instinctively, rocketing steeply upward. But the deadly flanking fire tracked them as they climbed, and another red and one of the blacks went down, as well, before they could clear the threat zone.
Myr looked back from his own dragon as Razorwing bounded upward, and saw the broken bodies of seven-seven!-of his precious dragons and their pilots sprawled grotesquely across the valley floor.
The cheers were deafening.
Rof chan Skrithik found himself shouting right along with the rest of his men, bellowing his triumph, and he knew he was shouting even louder because of his reaction to the sheer size of the Arcanans'
winged monstrosities.
But Janaki wasn't cheering.
The crown prince reached out and caught chan Skrithik by the front of his uniform tunic. The regimentcaptain's eyes widened in surprise at the strength with which Janaki grabbed him and literally yanked him forward. He started to say something, but then Janaki turned his head to look at him, and chan Skrithik's mouth closed with a click.
He'd thought there were ghosts in his crown prince's gray gaze before; now he saw the reality.
Janaki's eyes were huge, the pupils far too dilated for the strengthening morning light, unfocused on anything of this world. They didn't seem to be looking at anything about him, and yet chan Skrithik had the eerie sensation that Janaki didn't simply see him; he Saw right through him.
"They aren't going to give up that easily," the Crown Prince of Ternathia said in the clear, distant voice of a Calirath in fugue state. "They'll be back-soon." He pointed directly overhead. "There."
Chan Skrithik nodded, and looked at Senior-Armsman Isia.
"Overhead watch," he said harshly. "Alert everyone."
"Yes, Sir!"
Isia saluted sharply, then closed his eyes, and one of the small stacks of message canisters on the parapet beside him began to disappear with the preplanned dispatches, written well ahead of time against this very moment.
Almost simultaneously, the canisters began to appear at their destinations. Company-Captain Mesaion glanced at his copy, and began shouting orders of his own.
Cerlohs Myr counted noses with a sense of total disbelief as his remaining dragons circled well to the west of those murderous machine guns.
After transfers and rearrangements to make up for his earlier losses, the 3012th had headed into action this morning with eleven dragons. Now it had only four … and both of his precious yellows were gone, simply blotted away.
He lay in his cockpit, forcing himself to think as clearly as possible despite the shock and white-hot rage blazing within him. The loss of seven battle dragons-seven!-before any of them had even fired a shot was far worse than merely devastating. It represented almost half of his total available combat strength … and a third of all the battle dragons deployed to this entire chain.
The long-term implications of that level of losses, especially in light of the Air Force's low total inventory of battle dragons, were something he resolutely refused to contemplate. Not yet. There would be time to think about that later, and he wasn't looking forward to it.
The short-term implications were something he couldn't avoid thinking about, however. His entire battle plan had been built around bringing the maximum possible weight of fire to bear on Fort Salby as quickly as possible. The yellows were supposed to have been the opening salvo, blanketing any exposed defenders in a lethal, saturating canopy of gas. Had they somehow missed their mark, their escorting reds had been supposed to sweep the fort's exposed interior with fireballs while the yellows looped back for a second pass. Now, with Hundred Helika's 5001st, Myr's weakest strike, detached to support Thousand Carthos' secondary advance, he had only the four shocked survivors of Geyrsof's 3012th-all of them blacks-and the six reds and four blacks of Commander of One Hundred Sahlis Desmar's
2029th Strike.
Part of his brain argued that he had to break off and pull back. That the losses he'd already taken were heavier than the conquest of one more Sharonian portal fort could possibly justify. But this wasn't just one more portal fort; it was the perfect forward defensive position Two Thousand Harshu had been looking for from the moment the Expeditionary Force began its advance. Besides, he wanted these people.
He didn't know why they'd put machine guns in such an unlikely spot. From test firings with captured weapons, Intelligence had determined the approximate range of the Sharonians' heavy automatic weapons, so he knew they had the reach from those positions to cover the railroad and road which connected the portal to the fort and its small, surrounding town. And he supposed that given the initial hostile contact between Arcana and the Sharonians, it would have made sense to devote at least a little attention to defending the approaches from the direction of Hell's Gate. But he also knew how heavy those large-caliber machine guns were, and getting them into position-or just keeping them supplied with ammunition and getting their gun crews up-and-down those mountainsides, for that matter, especially without dragons-must have been an unmitigated pain in the arse.
The elevation damned well gives them good command of the surrounding area, I suppose, Myr thought harshly. But why here and nowhere else?
Another possibility suggested itself to him, but that was ridiculous. If these people had had any idea an Arcanan invasion force was this close to Traisum, they would never have left those work crews and all of that heavy equipment exposed on Fort Mosanik's very doorstep! And even if they had known, how could they possibly have placed those weapons so perfectly? Given all of the possible lines of approach, how could they have picked exactly the right one to cover?
No way! He shook his helmeted head. However it happened, the bastards have to have just lucked out.
Well, his mouth twisted grimly, I suppose things have gone so well this far that it's about time we had a little bad luck, too. But these fuckers are not going to get away with massacring my people this way!
He used his helmet spellware to trigger the combination of a white and an amber flare, and one of Geyrsof's surviving blacks climbed obediently up to his level. The pilot looked over at him, and Myr used dragon-pilot hand signs to order the other dragon back to report to Thousand Toralk and Two Thousand Harshu.
The pilot nodded, and his beast banked away. Myr watched him go, then turned grimly back to the task at hand. No doubt Toralk and Harshu would have their own thoughts about his fiasco, and he wasn't exactly looking forward to hearing them. But by the time his superiors got around to sharing their impressions of his most recent ope
ration with him, that fort was going to be a smoking, smoldering ruin.
Cerlohs Myr owed the First Provisional Talon-and the 3012th Strike-that much.
Company-Captain Mesaion stood tautly in his position, field glasses glued to his eyes, staring up into the early morning sky above Fort Salby.
Chief-Armsman Wesiar chan Forcal stood beside him, but unlike Mesaion, chan Forcal was parked under the very best overhead cover they could give him. The supporting structure above him was made of two crossed layers of railroad ties, thickly buttressed by sandbags. The western side of his personal bunker was the parapet of the fighting step itself, and the northern side was the equally solid adobe and stone of one of the gate bastions. The southern side was a wall of sandbags stacked two-wide at the top and four-wide at the bottom. In fact, only the eastern side was open, and that only so that he could communicate with Mesaion.
There was a reason for how elaborately the chief-armsman was protected while his superior was so exposed. Unlike Company-Captain Mesaion, Chief-Armsman chan Forcal didn't need field glasses as he stood there with his eyes tightly closed and his head cocked in an attitude of intense concentration. He was one of the most precious commodities any artillery commander could have; a highly trained, highly experienced predictive Distance Viewer.
"Coming in!" he announced suddenly. "Circling to the north, and climbing!"
Mesaion swung his glasses onto the indicated bearing and saw a swarm of distant black dots climbing in a tight corkscrew, wings laboring. Even with the glasses, he couldn't make out a great many details at that range, but he didn't really need to, either.
Sorry I ever doubted you, your Highness, the artillerist found himself thinking. Then he lowered the glasses.
"Keep your head down Wesiar," he said. "We can't have anything happening to it, now can we?"
He smiled tightly at the Distance Viewer, then turned his own head to look at the crews assigned to the pedestal guns and machine guns mounted atop the walls.
"Okay, boys! The Prince put you right where you need to be! And in just a minute, it's going to be time to show these bastards why!
Hundred Myr's lips skinned back as the 2029th reached its designated pushover altitude. He'd been right.
They might have placed outlying machine guns to cover the railroad and the ground approaches, but they hadn't bothered to put any of them out here in these barren, totally uninhabited mountains. Now, safely above the reach of their godsdamned weapons, he and his dragons headed out towards their objective.
Myr gazed down through Razorwing's vision, examining the fort they'd come to burn, and grimaced.
I shouldn't have argued against sending in the recon gryphons, he told himself bitterly. Obviously, they don't think of this thing as "just one more portal fort," do they? They must have a dozen of those machine guns up there on the walls.
His belly muscles tightened at the thought, but his fingers were sure and confident in the control grooves. Yes, they had a lot of firepower down there, and no one was going to dismiss the threat-not after what had happened to the 3012th. But this wasn't going to be broadside shots into unsuspecting beasts moving on steady, predictable courses. No. These defenders were going to have to fire directly upward, into the teeth of a dozen thirty or forty-ton battle dragons, flying straight at them and belching fire and lightning bolts as they came.
And that, my fine Sharonian friends, Myr thought savagely, is a very different dragon fight, indeed.
"Steady," Mesaion murmured to himself, far too low for any of his gunners to have heard.
"Steady … steady … steeeeeeady …"
The dragons were almost directly overhead now. Surely they would have to begin their attack dive soon.
The artillerist spared one precious moment to look over his shoulder to where Crown Prince Janaki stood on the gun platform beside Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik. The prince wasn't looking his way, which was a pity. Mesaion would have liked to have at least nodded to Janaki in appreciation.
The Yerthak pedestal gun was essentially a naval weapon which had been around for decades. In fact, it had slipped over into obsolescence these days, and it was being steadily phased out of naval service in favor of light quick-firing weapons, like the ship-mounted version of the field artillery's three-point-fourinch quick-firer, because its shells simply were no longer heavy enough for its original design function.
But it remained an effective weapon for many other purposes, and the decision to upgrade the Imperial Navy's tertiary armament meant that a largish number of Yerthaks which had become suddenly surplus to be Navy's needs were finding their way into Customs Service or PAAF use.
In many ways, it was similar to the Faraika, but instead of two to four barrels in a single, fixed sleeve, the Yerthak-depending upon its caliber-had from four to six barrels arranged to rotate around a central axis in a circular motion. Instead of belted ammunition, they fired rounds from huge clips, like oversized rifle magazines, with each barrel firing as it reached the highest point of its circular path. A
pedestal gun's sustained rate of fire was lower than that of the lighter Faraika, and it could maintain maximum-rate fire only briefly, but that was fine with Mesaion. Because, unlike the Faraika, the Yerthak was a genuine artillery piece.
The Yerthak Works had produced the weapon in several calibers. The most common were the one-pointfive- inch and two-point-five-inch versions. The two-point-five, like the ones on Fort Salby's walls, came with four barrels and had a muzzle velocity of almost sixteen hundred feet per second and a maximum range of just over six thousand yards with the new "smokeless powder" rounds. And, unlike the onepoint five-inch, it was capable of firing cannister rounds, not simply high-explosive or solid ammunition.
They had been intended for relatively short range actions, meant to smother light torpedo craft in a torrent of high-explosive. As such, their designed elevation was strictly limited. But thanks to Janaki's warning, the available guns were deployed in a wide ring and mounted on firing platforms wide enough to allow the weapons to be traversed through three hundred and sixty degrees. Elevation was still limited, but the Fort Salby machinsts had torched off the limiting stops on the elevation quadrants to squeeze several more degrees out of them. Coupled with the broad base of fire from the way they were spread out around the fort's perimeter, theyhad elevation enough to form a cone much taller than would normally have been the case, and Janaki and chan Skrithik had thoughtfully provided something to help fill the gaps and thicken their total weight of fire. Every Faraika II which hadn't been emplaced in the hillside positions for the opening ambush had been clamped atop improvised post mounts, as well, and they had considerably more elevation then the pedestal guns did.
Now the men behind those guns watched over their sights as an incredible freight train of flying impossibilities dove straight towards them.
A black's lightning bolt would be far less effective than one of the reds' fireballs. Myr knew that. But after the losses he'd already taken, they needed every dragon. Even if that hadn't been true, Myr was a dragon pilot himself before he was anything else. No one else was going to lead the strike-not after what had happened to the 3012th.
He felt Razorwing's determination in the way the big dragon folded his wings and fell into a headlong, screaming dive. Despite the losses he'd already suffered, despite the possibility that he was going to suffer still more of them, Cerlohs Myr had never felt more alive, more confident … more powerful and focused.
That's not a machine gun! he thought abruptly. There wasn't time to try to puzzle out just what "that" was, but the weapon was bigger and bulkier. And the Sharonians were aiming it upward, as well.
Bigger probably means nastier, his racing mind decided, and he moved his aimpoint from the machine gun he'd already picked out to one of the unknown weapons. He barely had time to make the change before the crosshair stopped blinking as Razorwing's longer ranged breath weapon entered its effective range of the new target.
"K
ershai!" Myr shouted, and the arm-thick column of lightning streaked downward.
Company-Captain Mesaion flinched as the solid shaft of lightning exploded across the sky. It was almost blindingly bright, even in the full daylight which had now settled over Fort Salby, and the thunderclap as it struck home was quite literally deafening.
It didn't appear to have that broad a threat zone-probably a circle no more than eight or ten yards across
– but within that zone, it was lethal. It also appeared to be fiendishly accurate. It struck directly on top of one of his Yerthaks, and the gun crew didn't even have time to scream. They convulsed, smoke erupting from their clothing and hair, and then the ammunition in their weapon's magazine cooked off in an explosion that completely crippled the gun.
Mesaion saw it all, but only out of the corner of his eye, and there wasn't really time for it to register before his own people opened fire.
Myr saw the tracers streaking upward as Razorwing started to pull out of his screaming dive. The big dragon banked, twisting sideways, trading lift for evasion. It was a dangerous game to play this close to such mountainous terrain and at such low altitude after such a high-speed dive, but Razorwing was a skilled veteran, and the sheer adrenaline rush filled Myr with a wild sense of exultation. This-this-
was what he'd been born for!
Then Razorwing bucked, bellowing a hoarse scream, as his low-altitude flightpath carried him straight in front of one of the pedestal guns. The rotating barrels flamed, the muzzle blast slammed at the faces and clothing of everyone near it, bronze cartridge cases flicked out of the opening breeches, bouncing and rolling, and Razorwing took two direct hits.
The high-explosive rounds slammed into belly scales which wouldn't have stopped even the far lighter rounds of the machine guns. They penetrated deep, and then exploded.