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So Blade worked the mortars across all six attacking columns before starting to concentrate on any one. The accuracy of the fire was even better than he'd expected. Authority people in Mak'loh might still have problems with Physical activity, but they knew their mathematics forward and backward.
Half the job of hitting the target with any long-range weapon was doing the calculations correctly, so they were off to a good start.
The first salvoes stopped only one of the columns. All six had large chunks blown out of them, and all six were slowed and badly shaken. The smoke screens began to break up as the grenade-throwing androids fell or stopped firing. Instead of the smoke screens, the streets began to vanish in the haze of smoke from the shell explosions.
Blade no longer had to imagine what was happening down there under all the smoke. He could see androids and pieces of androids flying a hundred feet into the air. He could hear extra explosions, as sacks of grenades carried on androids' backs went off. In moments when the smoke eddied, he could see whole sections of street paved from one side to the other with writhing androids. The buildings on either side confined the blast of the explosions and the flying fragments, increasing the effect.
Somehow four of the six attacking columns staggered out into the square. They mingled there like streams flowing into a lake. No one tried to take cover or cross the square. Blade wondered if there were any human beings alive and fit to give the necessary orders.
With grim determination he set out to take advantage of the target the enemy was offering. He ordered all the mortars to hit the square with five rounds apiece. The first salvo came down squarely on target. Before the second one hit, those still alive and on their feet were either ru
A few of the androids were still moving on to the attack, south from the square toward Geetro's perimeter. Blade surveyed them through his binoculars. He counted no more than a hundred. Geetro's humans and androids could sweep them away like a broom. Then it would be time to push north. A determined counterattack could finish off Paron's army for good and win Mak'loh's civil war in a single night. Even if it didn't do that well, it would give Geetro's army the combat experience and the self-confidence it badly needed. Certainly it would do no harm, as long as the mortars kept hammering at Paron's army to keep it from rallying.
Blade was about to order the mortars to bring their shells down along the enemy's line of retreat, when a sudden frantic voice shouted over the radio:
«Blade, Blade! Mortar Four, help! We're being attacked from the air. We're-«The sound of an exploding grenade cut off the voice.
Blade didn't recognize the voice, but a chill hand seemed to be squeezing his stomach. Mortar Four was Sela's assigned battle station.
Sela was half-blinded by the continual sheets of flame from the mortar and more than half-deafened by the roar of the firing. Suddenly the three flyers were there, coming at her out of the darkness.
The mortar crew and the riflemen guarding them were even less aware of the world around them. Sela shouted, but her voice was lost as the mortar fired again. Before she could shout a second time, the flyers swept in over the railing. Rifles flared white from them, half a dozen firing almost together, knocking out the mortar crew and the riflemen.
The flyers landed, close enough that Sela could recognize the man at the controls of one as Paron himself. A man sprang down from Paron's flyer and from the one to the left. Each man pulled a cable with loops and hooks on it after him.
Sela crouched in the shadows, seeing the flyer crews too intent on their business to pay any attention to her. If she kept quiet, they would probably take what they wanted and leave without noticing her.
What they wanted could only be the mortar. Blade said the mortars were the backbone of Geetro's army, and tonight she'd seen how right he was. If Paron got the secret of the mortars ….
Sela brought her rifle up in a single, smooth motion, squeezing the trigger as the muzzle came to bear on the men with the cables. The rifle was set to maximum power, and the men went down as if they'd been clubbed, smoking patches of flesh showing on their backs. She was aiming at Paron, when another man whirled in his seat and fired at her.
The beam missed, but it was set to kill, and it came close enough for her to feel it. It was as though someone had pressed white-hot metal wires into her back and neck. It seemed for a moment that her hair itself had taken fire. She screamed, her hands clutching the rifle convulsively, her finger twitching on the trigger, but unable to close on it to shoot Paron out of his seat.
Paron himself turned, saw her, shouted out in incoherent delight, and leaped toward her. He was a stout man who normally moved slowly, but now he seemed to fly toward her as if he'd been shot out of one of the mortars. Sela tried to get to her feet, to meet him with her bare hands if she couldn't fire her rifle. She'd still be able to take him; he was strong but too slow to meet her, he-
Then a grenade went off between two of the flyers, and all the men on or around them went down. Paron cried out, in rage rather than pain. He towered over Sela as she struggled to her knees. He kicked her wildly in the right shoulder, sending her sprawling on her left side. One of Paron's surviving men fired a grenade into the entrance of the downward ramp, and screams followed the explosion.
Paron kicked Sela hard in the stomach, and she doubled up with the world around her fading in a haze of pain. She was aware of him picking her up like a child and heaving her over his shoulder. The movement made her scream, then vomit all over Paron's back.
She knew that he was loading her into the seat of a flyer; then she heard a distant hiss that she recognized as the sound of a spray injector. The last of her knowledge of the world began to slip away. Just before it vanished entirely, she heard the whine of the flyer's fans and felt it stir under her.
Then there was nothing.
Geetro's army stormed out of the buildings where they'd been waiting. There were five hundred of them, mostly the new recruits from the Houses of Peace, organized in platoons and companies led by Geetro's people from the Authority. The recruits carried rifles, while the officers carried grenade throwers. High above them, Geetro himself rode in a flyer, while from his command post Blade listened in on the radio.
He listened, but he heard very little, Mak'loh's new soldiers were too busy experiencing the powerfully Physical sensations of their first combat. They had no time to waste telling anybody about it.
One group barricaded themselves so thoroughly that by the time they cleared away all the furniture and broken robots from in front of the door the battle was over. The rest dashed forward. They struck the battered remnants of Paron's columns of androids, and the last stage of the battle exploded through the streets of Mak'loh.
The androids had been slaughtered, confused, and disorganized by the mortar fire. They still would not lie down and die. They could not shoot to kill a clearly visible Master, but they could shoot to stun, and they shot, fast and well. The first Physical sensation many of the new recruits felt in combat was being knocked unconscious by android sharpshooters. Some of them felt grenade fragments slicing into their flesh, their own blood flowing, their own internal organs ripped and mangled. Not all of Paron's humans were dead.