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Besides, when it came right down to it, Rof chan Skrithik was a Ternathian himself. He knew how valuable Janaki's life was. He also recalled the Caliraths' motto ... and the quotation attributed to Emperor Halian over fifteen hundred years ago, when he'd rejected all of the arguments in favor of withdrawing from the defense of his Bolakini allies.
"It takes twenty years' training to make an Emperor," Halian had said. "It takes twenty centuries to make an Empire the world can trust."
Janaki chan Calirath understood what his ancestor had said all those centuries ago, chan Skrithik thought.
"What's that?" chan Braikal said suddenly. "There—above the southern hilltop?"
Chan Skrithik couldn't make out what the Marine was talking about, but Janaki answered him. The prince didn't even turn his head to look. He didn't have to ... just as chan Skrithik didn't have to look into Janaki's gray eyes to see the shadows moving in their depths.
"It's starting, Chief," the crown prince said quietly.
"Still think it's a stupid place to put a machine gun?!" Paras chan Barsak shouted in Kardan Verais' right ear.
"Fuck, no!" Verais shouted back.
They had to shout, even though their heads were barely a foot apart, and even then they could scarcely hear one another. The cacophonous bellow of four .54-caliber machine guns tended to make it difficult to carry on a conversation. The heavy Faraikas couldn't sustain maximum-rate fire for very long without overheating catastrophically, but they didn't have to, either.
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 ba
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 prepla
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 co
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 operation 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.