Yet even as the primitive part of his mind recoiled from those horrifying images, the thinking part of his mind had already grasped a far more terrifying implication. If these people could fly, then every calculation and estimate of the relative mobility of the two sides had suddenly become meaningless.
And if that explosion-like sound had come from where he thought it had, then he had no way to get a message out to chan Baskay for Rothag to relay to Halifu's Voice. Which meant no one else could possibly know what he'd just discovered.
Those thoughts blazed through him like thunderbolts while he watched the trio of dragons coming straight at him.
And then they began to belch fire.
Chapter Four
Commander of Twenty-Five Tahlos Berhala led the attack.
"Commander of twenty-five" was a purely Air Force rank, one which Berhala was perfectly well aware the other branches of the Union of Arcana's military deeply resented. He didn't really blame them for their anger over the Air Force's "rank inflation," although he had no intention of giving up the privileges
(and additional pay) which went with his commission. But the Air Force had decided long ago that anyone responsible for flying a battle dragon had to be an officer. Once upon a time, Berhala knew, there'd been quite a few noncommissioned combat pilots, but they'd been eliminated in the course of the Air Force's build-down of its combat strength. If there were only going to be a limited number of battle dragons to go around, then by all the gods, they were going to have officers in their cockpits!
Which explained how one Tahlos Berhala and his red dragon Skyfire found themselves flying point for the first inter-universal air strike in history.
He concentrated on the targeting display projected across the inside of his helmet's visor, trying to shut out all the other distractions, all the fear, all the excitement. He watched the incredibly clear image Skyfire's draconic vision produced, and the spellware built into his helmet's sarkolis crystal put a strobing amber crosshair directly in the center of his vision. He moved his eyes until the crosshair settled on one of the open-topped weapon pits and watched it flashing more and more quickly as the range dropped.
His fingers stroked gently, gently in the control grooves, and Skyfire swung slightly to port. Airspeed was still building when suddenly the crosshair stopped blinking. It settled into the steady, blood-red glare that indicated he was in range, instead, and he inhaled deeply.
"Sherkaya!" he snapped, and Skyfire's entire body seemed to buck indescribably beneath him as the oneword command-the ancient Mythalan word for "fire"-triggered the helmet spellware's release code.
Balkar chan Tesh watched in belly-knotted sickness as the first fireball impacted directly on top of the pit occupied by Morek chan Talmarha, his senior artillery officer. There was no overhead cover, nothing to impede the attack in any way. The fireball seemed to move impossibly slowly, yet at the same time, it flashed directly to its target, and it was obviously many times more powerful than anything the Arcanan infantry support weapons could produce. The mortar pit was almost a hundred yards from chan Tesh, but the searing flash of the fireball's ear-stunning detonation seemed to singe every hair on the companycaptain's head.
For one bare fraction of a second, all he heard was that sharp, concussive almost-explosion. But then came the shrieks, the screams of men far enough from its center to have been spared instant death in favor of a far more terrible fate. He saw flaming torches, rolling on the ground, trying to beat out the flames consuming them, and then the ready ammunition stored in the pit began to cook off, as well.
Berhala saw his target go up in flames, although he had too little time for any sort of detailed evaluation.
The maximum attack range for any red was under two thousand yards. At better than two hundred miles per hour, it took barely fourteen seconds to cross that distance, which gave him time for two shots, maximum. Under the circumstances, he decided to assume that the leaping pillar of fire meant he'd knocked out his primary target and turned his head. His eyes moved as well, tracking the crosshair onto one of the sandbag-covered emplacements to the west of his primary target, and then it settled into position.
"Sherkaya!" he barked again.
More fireballs came streaking down to explode on their targets. All of the mortar and gun pits covering the northern aspect of the portal were hit, reduced to flaming crematoria filled with exploding ammunition, and the galloping pattern of overlapping concussions threw chan Tesh from his feet. He landed hard on his belly, and even as he hit, the onrushing monsters turned their attention to his bunkers.
Still more fireballs erupted, but this time the results were different as the thickness of the fortifications upon which he had insisted proved their worth. For all their terrifying noise, all the incredible heat radiating from them, the fireballs simply lacked the penetration to punch through that much solid earth and logs.
Berhala swore in furious disgust even as he pulled Skyfire up and around into a climbing loop. The open weapons pits had been devastated, but those other fortifications-!
He shook his head, unable to believe that anything could have stood up to Skyfire's devastating attack.
But those heaps of dirt and logs were still there, smoking furiously, yet still intact. He glanced across at Lairys Urkora, flying off Skyfire's starboard wingtip on his own Cloudtiger, and the other twenty-five looked up, as if he'd felt Berhala's eyes. It was impossible for either of them to see the other's expression through the reflective, spell-hardened glass of their helmet visors, but they'd flown together for almost a year. Berhala could see Urkora's own astonishment at the survival of their secondary targets in the way the other man cocked his head.
They broke eight thousand feet, converting the speed they'd gained in their original attack dive back into altitude, and Cloudtiger followed Skyfire around. The other two dragons of the flight-Daggerclaw and Deathstar-followed slightly below and to port as they leveled out at just over nine thousand feet, because, despite his junior rank and relative youth, Berhala was the flight's senior pilot.
Five Hundred Myr and Hundred Geyrsof had warned him that the effectiveness of their dragons' breath weapons was unproven. Berhala doubted that either of his superiors had truly imagined that they would prove totally ineffective against the other side's fortifications, though.
He glared down at the position a mile and a half below and twice that far behind him. The smoke and flame vomiting upward from his flight's initial targets made it hard to pick out details, even with the assistance of Skyfire's incredible vision, and the looming portal made it impossible for him to see what had happened with the strike on the fortifications guarding its southern aspect. But he could see enough to know the dug in positions on this side were still there, still waiting, undoubtedly protecting the devastating rapidfire weapons which had massacred Hundred Thalmayr's company.
Those weapons might not pose a significant threat to Berhala and Skyfire, but the cavalry and infantry coming in behind them would be another story entirely.
He glowered downward for another few heartbeats, then looked back across at Urkora once more and raised his right hand. He was careful to keep it out of the slipstream as he patted the top of his helmet, then pointed back downward. Urkora responded with a dragon pilot's exaggerated nod of understanding, and Berhala returned his hand to the control groove.
"All right, big boy," he said, although there was no way Skyfire could possibly hear him. "Let's try that again."
Company-Captain chan Tesh dragged himself back up off the ground. He felt physically stunned, as if someone had beaten him with clubs, but his many years of experience and training roused quickly, fighting his mental shock.
The destruction of his mortars and supporting field guns meant, ultimately, that his defense was doomed.
To be fair, however, that had probably been true from the outset. If the Arcanans' transport capability was as great as the existence of these "dragons" implied, then they'd probably moved in
enough troop strength to have come over his men eventually, no matter what. He simply didn't have enough ammunition to stop the manpower these people could have lifted in by air.
But that doesn't mean we can't bleed the bastards first, he thought harshly. I don't care how fucking good their logistics are, they can't possibly have an unlimited number of men available … and however many they have now, they're going to have a hell of a lot less by the time they take this position away from my boys!
He turned his head, craning his neck as he looked for the four dragons which had flown directly over him at an altitude of barely a hundred feet after belching their fire into chan Talmarha's gun pits. There!
They were circling around, and his jaw clenched as he realized they were preparing for another pass.
Motion caught at the corner of his eye from closer at hand, and his head snapped back around in time to see six of his Ternathian Marines struggling to drag one of the Faraika II machine-guns out of a bunker.
He started to shout at them to get back under cover, then stopped as he realized what they were doing, and why. They couldn't get enough elevation to reach aerial targets-even targets flying as low as these were-through the firing slits of their bunker.
Obviously, they intended to do something about that.
As he watched, they dragged the two hundred and fifty-pound weapon across to one of the piles of dirt from which the fatigue parties had been filling sandbags. They heaved the heavy tripod to the top of the pile and slammed its feet as deep into the soft earth as they could. The dirt pile tilted the entire weapon at an awkward, unnatural-and unstable-angle, but four of them threw their own weight onto the tripod, bracing it in place while the gunner and his assistant scrambled around to find some sort of firing position behind the gun.
They didn't have much time. The dragons were already sweeping back, sharpening their angle of approach as they dove back into the attack once more. Other Marines and PAAF troopers were pouring out of their bunkers, finding firing positions with their Model 10 rifles, and as he scrambled towards them, he saw at least a handful of troopers with grenade launchers clamped to their rifle muzzles. The rifle grenades were heavy, awkward, and short-ranged, but they were also specifically designed to take out bunkers and strongpoints, and he doubted anything that actually got hit with one of them would-
"Here they come!" someone shouted.
"Make it count, boys!" chan Tesh heard someone else shouting with his own voice, and then the dragons were upon them once more.
The amber crosshair in Berhala's visor began to steady down as Skyfire swept back into range once more. The commander of twenty-five watched with satisfaction as its rapid blinking slowed, but then he frowned.
Graholis! What were those frigging idiots doing down there?
He couldn't believe it. They were actually coming out of their fortifications! He hadn't noticed them quickly enough, either. By the time he could have retargeted and Skyfire's head could have followed the crosshair around to the exposed Sharonians, they would already be past them. But why-?
Then he realized. They couldn't have fired their own weapons against the attacking dragons from inside their prepared positions. So they'd come outside in order to be able to shoot back.
He felt himself tightening internally, some of the exuberance and wild adrenaline rush giving way to the sudden awareness that the same impossible weapons which had ravagedthe Andaran Scouts were about to be fired at him.
Ground fire was a part of any red dragon's life. The reds' breath weapon was short ranged enough that they almost had to come into even arbalest range in a firing pass, and infantry and artillery dragons-the support weapons, not the living creatures-had more than sufficient range to engage any strafer. But the good news was that dragons, as a whole, were relatively resistant to the lighter versions of their own breath attacks which the artillery and infantry support weapons could throw. And while arbalest bolts could penetrate and lacerate the relatively thin, translucent hide of their wings, the heavy scales protecting a dragon's undersides and throat were another matter entirely.
And anything they've got will have to get all the way through Skyfire before it does anything to me, he reminded himself.
They shouldn't have come straight in on us this way, chan Tesh thought. They should have come in at an angle-made us lead them with our fire.
The company-captain had been on enough quail and duck hunts to know just how difficult a deflection shot against a passing bird could be. Of course, he'd never fired at a "bird" the size of one of these things in his life! But it didn't really matter very much, either, with the monsters coming straight down his men's throats.
Model 10 rifles began to crack viciously, spitting .40 caliber cupro-nickel jacketed hate back at their attackers. It was impossible for chan Tesh to see what-if any-effect the rifle fire was having, but then the Marine machine-gunner he'd noticed earlier began to turn the crank on his weapon.
The Faraika II was a much heavier weapon than the Faraika I he'd had available for his own attack on the Arcanans' original infantry position. The Faraika I fired the same round as the Model 10 rifle; the Faraika II had been designed, among other things, as an anti-small boat weapon. It fired a .54 caliber round, which weighed better than three times as much as the lighter round, at an even higher muzzle velocity and with better than five times the muzzle energy. The Spitzer-pointed rounds had a range of close to four thousand yards, and the thunderous bellow as the weapon began to fire was stunning.
Even with four burly Marines heaving their full weight on the tripod, it was almost-almost-
impossible to hold the machine-gun steady against the hammering recoil, but they managed. And every fifth round was tracer. They weren't as visible in the bright morning sunlight as they might have been in poorer lighting, but chan Tesh's eye followed them as they streaked towards the dragon flying just off the leader's right wing.
Twenty-Five Berhala heard-and felt-Skyfire's harsh scream of mingled fury and pain. The dragon shuddered under him, muscles bucking and jerking again and again, but Skyfire never hesitated, never even tried to swerve. He held his course, and the crosshair blinked suddenly crimson once again.
"Sherkaya!" Berhala shouted, and another fireball ripped away. Like its immediate predecessor, it impacted directly on one of the squat, thick fortifications … and achieved absolutely nothing.
Berhala's lips drew back in anger and frustration, but then he heard a sudden, ear-tearing shriek from his right. His head whipped up and around, rising dangerously close to the slipstream howling just above his cockpit, and his face went white as Cloudtiger's mighty wings seemed to crumple and the huge dragon slammed into the earth at almost three hundred miles per hour.
"Yes!"
Chan Tesh's fierce exclamation of satisfaction was lost in his men's baying shout of triumph. The stupendous creature hit headfirst, tumbling, rolling, broken wings flailing, and the man who'd been strapped to its back went flying like a discarded, broken doll. He hit with an impact which must literally have broken every bone in his body, and Balkar chan Tesh bared his teeth in ugly satisfaction.
It might be small enough recompense for what that dragon and its companions had already done to his command, but at least the treacherous bastards knew now that their victims still had a sting.
Berhala's mind refused to wrap itself around what had just happened. None of the training texts had ever suggested anything like what had claimed Urkora and Skyfire. Damage from ground fire, yes. Even the occasional loss of a battle dragon. But not this sudden, almost casual blotting away.
It wasn't possible-shouldn't have happened, his mind insisted. It was-
All thought of his wingman chopped off abruptly as Skyfire made a sound Berhala had never heard out of the dragon before. It was a plaintive, mournful, moaning sound, and the rhythm of the beast's wings seemed to falter suddenly as another blinking icon appeared on Berhala's visor. The image of a bloodred sword flashed before him, and his hand
s moved instantly, instinctively, in the control grooves.
Skyfire moaned again, but he answered to the familiar touch, banking with a suddenly frightening clumsiness he'd never before displayed. Berhala closed his eyes for a moment, lips moving in a silent prayer for his mount. Then he opened his eyes once more, looking ahead, and brought the wounded dragon in as quickly as he could.
Commander of One Hundred Horban Geyrsof watched Skyfire hit the swamp like a skipping stone in a long, ragged line of foam and mud. He stared downward, literally holding his breath, then exhaled in ragged relief as Skyfire struggled doggedly towards the nearest islet. At least the beast was still mobile.
That was a good sign; dragons tended to recover-eventually-from anything that didn't kill them outright.
Which didn't change the fact that he'd just lost a quarter of his reds, the 3012th's commanding officer reflected grimly. He'd been one dragon understrength to begin with, with only three yellows-his own Graycloud, Commander of Twenty-Five Sherlahk Mankahr's Skykill, and Commander of Fifty Nairdag Yorhan's Windslasher-to make up what should have been his third four-dragon flight. Now he was down to a total strength of only nine, and the effectiveness of the enemy's fire was dismaying, to say the very least. Especially given the battle dragons' low numbers and the time required to replace one. It would never do to say so where any of the Union's ground troops could hear him, but each of his precious battle dragons was probably as valuable at least a couple of battalions of infantry, and now they'd lost one on only their second pass at the enemy.
Hell hath no fury / David Weber & Linda Evans. Page 8
