he saw lumps of black flesh flying off the body. Then it flared into orange fire, burning and spinning for the desert floor.
“Tiger Group, time to go home. Call your boys off Tiger Leader, the squids want to play.”
Gurka looked around. Already the American F-15s were heading south, their missile racks empty. “Acknowledged.”
“Head for Dingbat Tiger Group,” Gurka mentally translated that. Dezful. “Some Russian transports have landed with missile reloads for you. Good luck and don’t mix with any naughty ladies.”
“All Tiger aircraft, break off, head for dingbat.” Gurka looked hard to the west. There was a black cloud approaching. “Eagle Eye, contacts to the west.”
“We have the Tiger Group Leader. More harpies, covering the ground force main body. Sea Eagle Group will be handling them. Out.”
The out had a definitive note to it. The Su-30s were out of missiles and very low on cannon ammunition. Eagle Eye up there in his AWACS wasn’t interested in them any more. His attention was steering the group of F/A-18s from the three carriers offshore into the new harpy cloud.
Headquarters of Merafawlazes, Commander, Northern Flank, Abigor’s Army
“The cavalry have gone!”
“They’re through then. Order the flies to pursue the humans and cut them up on the way. The infantry will follow through. Advance on this place the humans call Kirkuk. Ravage it, Abigor will be pleased.”
“No, Noble master.” The messenger dropped to his knees and crawled across the floor to Merafawlazes hooves. “I must tell you, the cavalry have not broken the humans. The cavalry are dead. All of them. The humans killed them all with their magic.”
“What is this insanity? Humans do not have magic.” Merafawlazes’s voice dropped to a menacing growl. “This is not a good time to jest.”
It never was thought Falabrednowsa. Being a messenger was a very chancy and dangerous profession, especially where the recipient of the message was a Duke. They’d been known to eat messengers who brought bad news. “Sire, I fear to contradict you.”
“Good.” Merafawlazes interjected the comment with silky menace.
“But the humans do have magic. They have used it against the cavalry. They can call down thunder from the sky and drown their enemies in fire. They have destroyed our cavalry. It is a horrible sight, our cavalrymen dead on the ground torn to pieces by the fire, the surviving beasts on the ground screaming with pain as they die.” Merafawlazes attention was drawn by a thunder in the skies overhead, a roll of thunder followed by a deafening, hideous scream. “Sire, that is the war-cry of the humans in their sky chariots. A great battle is raging while we speak, the flies fight for their lives against the sky chariots. There is magic there too, the humans throw burning spears that never miss.”
“Our flies do well against them?”
The answer had better be yes was the reply running through Falabrednowsa’s mind. But he was a messenger and it was his duty to speak the truth. “No Sire, they die as the cavalry died. The human sky chariots are so much faster than they are. Our enemies cannot hear them come for the cowards give their battle cry only after they have launched an attack. They travel faster than the wind, they climb faster than any of us have ever seen before. They afraid to fight us in honorable combat so they kill by the hundred with their fire spears without ever coming close. Then, they sit above our fliers and dive on them like hawks. Our flies are worse than helpless against them.”
Merafawlazes grunted and turned his attention to the parchment map on the table before him. It wasn’t much help, it just showed the positions of the cities and his best guess at the locations of his troops. Why had the humans chosen to fight here? There was nothing important to fight for here, the nearest great cities were far away. All there was here were these rolling hills with the strange black strips the humans built across them. As he stared at the map, Merafawlazes got the feeling he was missing something very important.
Twenty minutes later, Merafawlazes strode out of his tent, towards the commanders of his remaining legions. Overhead, the sky was covered with strange, crisscrossing white clouds, although he didn’t know it, the contrails from the F-16C Vipers of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group. The Lawn Dart pilots had, to put it mildly, been having a field day. Merafawlazes didn’t know and didn’t care, he had more important things to think about. “Get the Legions moving forward, all of them. Two waves, seven and seven. Tell all the infantry, the suffering of those who hang back will be legendary even for hell.” Merafawlazes picked a piece of Falabrednowsa’s flesh from his teeth. He’d finally worked out what he had been missing. Breakfast.
The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq
“Isn’t this what they call a target-rich environment?” And that, Guardsman Bass thought, was the understatement of the century. The first wave of the enemy attack had been smashed, it had died on the mines and razor wire, the few survivors had been torn apart by the artillery. That had seemed like a victory until the whole horizon had turned black with enemy infantry. The enemy line was almost 10 kilometers long, the rising sun glittering gold off their bronze tridents. It was a terrifying sight, one that told Bass just as surely as if he could look into the mind of the enemy commander himself that the baldricks had never seen wire and minefields before.
‘Look into the mind of the commander’. Bass rolled the words over in his mind. It would come, it would come. The ability of the baldricks to enter people’s minds and create illusions had been a nasty surprise but it had been discovered. Once something was discovered, it could be investigated and measured. That meant it could be understood and one the scientists understood something they could duplicate it. Once the scientists had duplicated it, the engineers would take that work and turn it into practical tools. Once the engineers had created the practical tools, the armorers would turn those tools into weapons. And once the weapons were available, the soldiers would use them. That was the way it had always been, that was the way it would be now.
Bass lased the enemy line, waited a carefully measured ten seconds then lased it again. The computer in the tank thought for a microscopic second, then translated the two readings into a speed readout, one that made Bass raise his eyebrows a second. “Right lads, they’re advancing at 15 kay-pee-aitch. The brass better know about that.” Another guiding human principle, Bass had no doubt the same piece of data was being transmitted in by dozens of other tank commanders but it was better for an important piece of data to be transmitted a thousand times than never transmitted at all because everybody thought everybody else had done so. The fact that baldricks on foot could move three times faster than a human was very important.
Third Legion, Southern Flank, Abigor’s Army
Krykojanklawas jogged forward, most of his attention devoted to the enemy in front, the rest to the leader of his contubernium. Like most of his fellow demons in the ranks, he was holding his tripod underarm, the points angled upwards so he didn’t stab the demon in front. There might be time for that later. He and his fellows were lucky, the ground in front of them was clear, they wouldn’t have to pass through the hideous scene where the human magic had destroyed the cavalry legion. Word that the humans had magic had spread through the ranks like wildfire, the stories growing with each retelling. They could make the ground rise up and swallow their enemies, the stones come alive and crush their victims. They could conjure up snakes from the ground that would wrap themselves around their prey and slice them apart. That story was true, Krykojanklawas decided, he could see the great circular holes in the ground where the snakes had come from.
He could see something else, the ground ahead of him was littered with strange-looking bars, painted gray- yellow so they were hard to see against the sand and rock. There were a lot of them though. Curiously, Krykojanklawas glanced to one side, there were a lot fewer where the cavalry had ridden to its death. Even as he watched, a demon in the front rank stepped on one of the bars and the explosion threw him in the air, spraying yellow body fluid as his legs spiraled away from his body. The bars were human magic, Krykojanklawas realized the truth as additional explosions added their noise to the death toll that was already far higher than the Greater Demons had expected. He didn’t care much about the expectations of the Greater Demons though, what he did understand was that stepping on the bars was death. He’d heard about human explosives, how they could blast even a Lesser Demon apart so that all that remained was stains and rags of flesh. If they could do that to a Lesser Demon, what could they do to a Minor Demon like him? Krykojanklawas had just seen the answer and it didn’t please him.
So there were a lot fewer bars where the cavalry had died? Krykojanklawas did the obvious and started to edge sideways, being careful not to step on the bars, heading for where the ground was just littered with the scraps of flesh and mutilated bodies of beasts and their riders. All along the ranks of the legions, the other demons were starting to do the same.
