Страница 92 из 121
Two of chan Noth's machine guns went with it ... and so did Petty-Armsman chan Yaran and his grenadiers. Half of chan Braikal's platoon was simply gone, and the survivors were shocked, stu
Chan Noth's men had been hit less severely, but they'd also still been in the act of taking up their positions. Confusion swept through them, however briefly, and the defenders' fire faltered.
"Now!" Gyras Urlan bellowed as the fire from above slackened. "Now! Go—go, godsdamn it!"
Young Rahndar had done his job well. In fact, he'd done it too well for his own good. He and most of his section—and another twenty or so of Urlan's troopers—had been caught in the collapse his demolition spell had wreaked. That was unfortunate, but no one could control where the wreckage from a demo spell was going to fall, and at least they had a breach at last.
Half of Urlan's surviving men flung themselves off their horses. They took their swords, their infantrydragons, and their daggerstones with them and charged forward, swarming up over the wreckage, into the clouds of billowing dust and smoke, with the high, howling cheer of the Seventh Zydors.
Lorash chan Braikal stared down into the gap which had suddenly appeared and shook himself. Despite its width, it was choked with rubble that roase to at least a third of the wall's original height.
Unfortunately, enough of that rubble had spilled outward to provide a ramp, and he saw Arcanans in cavalry boots, breastplates, and helmets swarming up it. At least half of them seemed to be carrying the glittering tubes of their fire-throwers, and he snarled in fury.
He jerked the pin out of his final hand grenade and tossed it down into the gap, only to see it lodge in a hollow in the rubble before it exploded. The pocket into which it had fallen absorbed most of its power and only three or four men went down. The others kept coming, and a fireball roared past his ear.
Chan Braikal fired his rifle again and again, until the magazine was empty. He groped for another, but his hand came up empty. He cursed venomously, then kicked his feet over the edge of the gap and went slithering down into the dust and smoke, bayonet-first.
Five Hundred Urlan looked for his bugler, but the man was down with half his head blown away, and without the bugle, there was no way for him to communicate orders to Charlie Company. It should have already been here, and Urlan wanted to curse its commander as a coward. But that would have been unfair, and he knew it. Orkal Kiliron was no coward, but he was aware how valuable the Gifted engineers in his towed pods were. Although the fire from the wall directly in front of Urlan had been largely silenced, more and more rifle and light machine-gun fire was ripping out from the flanks. The smoke and dust hanging in the air was obviously affecting its accuracy, but at least two more pods had gone down, taking their infantry and engineers with them. If he'd been Kiliron, he probably would have assumed the defenders weren't being successfully suppressed and started falling back, too.
The five hundred reached out and grabbed the nearest trooper who was still mounted. The man's head whipped around.
"Sir?" His surprise was obvious, and Urlan shook him.
"Get your ass back there! Find Hundred Kiliron and tell him we need those pods up here right fucking now!"
Chan Braikal hit the bottom of the breach. His boots slipped and slithered in the ankle-deep rubble, and he found himself face-to-face with an Arcanan cavalry trooper.
The Arcanan reared back in obvious surprise, then swung his hand around. There was something in it.
Chan Braikal didn't have a clue what it was, but given the things these people had already done, he didn't intend to sit there and find out the hard way. The other man was still trying to bring whatever-it-was to bear when a fourteen-inch, tempered steel bayonet slammed forward above his protective cuirass and opened his throat.
Chan Braikal drove a combat boot into the dead man's breastplate, wrenched the blade free, and whirled to a second enemy.
More Sharonians hurled themselves forward. There was no unit organization to it. The breaching spell had buried at least sixty men inside the fort. Another forty or fifty had come down with the collapsing parapet. The platoons closest to it had taken the worst casualties, and some of those who weren't physically wounded were too stu
But others were like Lorash chan Braikal. They waited for no orders, didn't worry about where the rest of their platoon, or even the rest of their squad, might be. They drove forward to meet the charging Arcanans with rifles, pistols, shotguns, bayonets, rocks, or even their bare hands.
It was hand-to-hand in the breach.
Urlan could hardly believe the ferocity of the defense. The normal range advantage of the Sharonians'
rifles was meaningless here. His troopers' infantry-dragons and daggerstones were far more lethal than firearms in such narrow confines ... or would have been, if there'd been room to use them. But the Sharonians were charging straight into them, too close for them to use even daggerstones without killing themselves, as well as their enemies. Infantry-dragon gu
They were actually pushing his men out of the breach when a sudden rush of infantry surged past him.
He looked around and realized Kiliron had given up on getting the pods in across the top of the wall.
He'd grounded them, instead—or some of them, at least—and sent the infantry in at ground level.
"Yes!" Urlan bellowed as the fresh weight of men and weapons hammered the Sharonians back. "Yes!"
Chan Braikal staggered backward.
The cavalrymen had been falling back at last, but now men in infantry boots and equipment harnesses were charging forward. The ragged, disordered knots of Sharonians resisted stubbornly, but the Arcanan infantry were much better at this sort of game than their cavalry compatriots. They came forward with intact unit organization, and this time they were able to maintain enough separation to actually use their spell-powered weapons.
Blasts of flame and lightning swept the gap, maiming and incinerating, and chan Braikal flung himself down as an infantryman swung a daggerstone in his direction. His last-minute dodge saved him from a direct hit, but the very fringe of the bolt crashed over him. It slammed him into the rubble and broken adobe, and he slithered down it, alive but unconscious.
Five Hundred Urlan watched the infantry flowing unstoppably into the gap and groped in his saddlebag for the flare stone. He raised it and triggered the single green flare to a
Fifty Fahrlo saw the brilliant green flare arc up from the far side of the beleaguered fort.
He'd expected to see it sooner, but later was definitely better than never in this case. He looked over his shoulder to make certain the transport dragon who'd been told off to play messenger was already headed back towards the portal with the good news, then turned his attention back to the task at hand.
Now that Urlan was into the fort, it was more important than ever to keep as much as possible of the Sharonians' attention focused on the aerial demonstration. Aside from an occasional rifle shot, absolutely nothing had been fired in his direction this time around, and he felt no particular eagerness to change that. But if he'd been the Sharonians, he'd be looking for anyone he could possibly throw at the attacking infantry. So it was time to encourage them to stay put.
Windlord Garsal watched through narrowed eyes as the intricately weaving dance of dragons flowed closer.
You really don't know what our effective range is, do you? he thought coldly. Well, the PAAF's effective range, at any rate, he amended, for his own horse artillery was shorter ranged and lighter than the heavier field guns from Fort Salby. Not that it mattered who the guns technically belonged to. At the moment, they were his, and he let the range fall to nine thousand yards, then nodded to his Flicker.
"Now," he said softly.
Only one thing saved them, Fahrlo realized later, and that was the fact that the Sharonians' supply of artillery was obviously limited.
The hammering the battle dragons had taken in their direct attack upon the fort had imbued him with a healthy respect for the sheer destructiveness of Sharona's mechanical weapons. Nonetheless, he was unprepared for the puffs of smoke blossoming in midair. For an instant, he couldn't figure out what was happening—then he realized he'd just met another infernal Sharonian device.
Whatever they were firing at him were exploding into veritable clouds of smaller but still incredibly lethal projectiles. Each of those "puffs of smoke" spawned a cone-shaped pattern of death that carved its way into his formation.
Six transports went down in the first salvo, and three more were wounded. The other pilots reacted almost instantly in obedience to the orders they'd received before taking off for the operation. They wheeled, streaking back the way they'd come, and those i
Five more transports crashed to the earth before they could get out of range, and Commander of Fifty Fahrlo swore with cold and bitter hatred as the Air Force found itself hammered yet again.
Five Hundred Urlan had no way to know what had just happened to the airborne diversion. Nor, to be completely honest, did he very much care as his assaulting column pushed forward.
He didn't want to think about the losses the Seventh Zydors had taken getting the infantry into position, but if it gave them the fort, it would be worth it. And it certainly looked as if—
The rifle bullet struck him behind the left ear and killed him instantly.
"Hit them!"
Had he stopped to think about it, Sunlord Markan might have felt just a bit ridiculous waving a sword in the middle of a modern battlefield to urge his men onward. Or perhaps not. There were swords in plenty on the other side of that "modern" battlefield, after all, as well as crossbows and daggers. Of course, there were also dragons, fireball-throwers, and the gods alone only knew what else to go with them.
None of which mattered at the moment as he brought an entire dismounted battalion of elite Uromathian cavalry crunching in on the Arcanans' flank.