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 gunners hurled their hate in copper-jacketed bolts and the sledgehammers of high-explosive.
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.
The overhead cover the prince had insisted with equal fanaticism upon providing for the riflemen spread out along the fort's fighting step proved its worth, as well. For all the heat and fury of the fireballs, they lacked the blast effect to penetrate those heaped sandbags.
What they did to Mesaion's exposed gunners, however, was something else entirely.
In less than two screaming minutes of savage action, fifty-three of Lorvam Mesaion's men were killed outright. Another eighteen were wounded so badly death would have been a mercy, and still another seventeen were put out of action. Four of his Yerthaks were destroyed or disabled. He lost five Faraikas, and two of his heavy mortars were thoroughly wrecked as all the ready ammunition in their-thankfully
– unmanned pit went up in a thunderous chain of explosions.
But while all that was happening, his gunners brought down eight more dragons.
One mortally wounded beast crashed directly into the top of the northwestern tower like a forty-ton hammer of scales, blood, and bone, and the impact reduced the pedestal gun crew atop that tower to gruel. The parapet exploded outward in a meteor storm of broken adobe, stones, and dust, and the dragon came to rest, one shattered wing drooping down until its tip trailed on the ground beyond. Its pilot dangled from its broken neck, hanging limp and broken himself from the straps of his flight harness. Another dragon smashed into the southernmost stretch of the western wall. It just missed the corner tower where the wall turned to angle back to the east, and the plunging beast crushed the firing step's improvised overhead protection. At least another thirty men were killed as the dragon exploded through the parapet and slammed to earth between the wall and the nearest gun emplacement.
Smoke billowed up from the fort's interior. The top of the southern tower might have been missed by the plummeting dragon, but it was enveloped in a holocaust all its own where that dragon's fireball had struck yet another of the Yerthaks before it was killed itself. The fireball had ignited the destroyed gun's ready-use ammunition, and two dozen neraby infantry had been killed or wounded. But only four of the attacking dragons managed to pull out of their dives successfully, and two of them staggered off, obviously badly hurt.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mayrkos Harshu's face was completely expressionless as the imagery from Commander of Fifty Fahrlo's recon crystal played back before him. Klayrman Toralk wished his face could be equally disciplined, but that was more than he could manage.
Graholis! What the hells did Myr run into? And what the fuck did he think he was doing with that second attack?!
The imagery concluded with Deathclaw circling overhead while his two wounded wingmates came in for quick, clumsy landings. Toralk didn't have the dragon-healers' reports yet, but he'd be surprised if the more badly wounded of the two survived. And whether the beast lived or not, both of the injured dragons were going to be out
