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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 a
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 ski
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 gu
"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 ca
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.
"Kershai!" 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.
Cerlohs Myr and his dragon slammed into the neat houses of the Salbyton at almost three hundred miles an hour.
Mesaion was never really able to sort it all out clearly later. It happened too quickly, too fast to be accurately recorded by the brains of the human beings caught in the chaos.
Machine guns and pedestal guns thundered and hammered insanely. The sky above Fort Salby was filled with stupendous creatures, and the gu
The dragon pilots of Arcana had never experienced anything like it. For the first time, they encountered concentrated fire from a prepared, unshaken position, and the short range of their dragons' breath weapons left them no choice but to enter their enemies' reach.
Lightning bolts lanced downward. Only a handful of the shorter-ranged fireballs were successfully launched, and two of those went wide as defensive fire smashed into the firing reds. Sharonians screamed and died. The fireballs that landed inside the fort's confines exploded with tremendous force, and a tiny corner of Mesaion's mind thanked Prince Janaki fervently for insisting that his howitzer and mortar crews be kept under cover, out of their gun pits, until they were actually needed.