Outside the castle, Lt Kim regarded the building skeptically. “That's a castle?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.
Rahab nodded. “That is the home of the minor duke who commands this chunk of the fifth ring.”
Kim looked at it critically. It was a large house rising out of a cluster of smaller houses, surrounded by a piled stone wall at least fifteen feet high. From her vantage point on top of a mound of granite, Kim could see baldricks coming and going through the gate; most were marching in short columns, but one, leading a row of animals that looked like rhinolobsters, but without the long, arching tails, was seated on the beast at the head of the column.
“Note that animal shipment down, Mac,” said Kim. “Brass will want to know everything they can about the economy here.” Beside her, McInery was clicking away with the cameras, documenting as much of the outpost as possible.
Rahab was looking at Kim with a mixture of distrust and curiosity. “What are you planning to do?”
Kim smiled, rather viciously. “You'll see.” Indeed you will, she thought. And it will blow your stone-age mind.
Behind them, Madeuce loomed up, face impassive beneath its mask and goggles as always. “Are you ready to start, ma’am?” he asked.
“You OK, Mac?”
“Yeah, my lungs feel like shit though. Gonna be glad to get out of here though.” Madeuce bit his lip in self-reproach. Getting out wasn’t an option for Kim and her crew. They were stuck here and he’d just rubbed that in.
Kim guessed what was running through his mind. “You’ve earned an out and it’s different for you. This place is ours now, earth is your place. Anyway, this is your last run, kitten will be contacting us soon and then, your on your way home. So, as your final hurrah, take it away, Lieutenant.
The big man nodded, a hint of a smile playing about his lips. He signaled to the other three men accompanying him, and they marched off. Kim detected a hint of motion closer to the wall; through the dim, noxious atmosphere, she could just make out Bubbles planting the last few bricks of Semtex. The perpetual mists and fog of hell were annoying but it made the life of the guerilla much easier. As Madeuce disappeared behind another rock outcropping beside the causeway leading out of Okeraphluxos' stronghold, Bubbles slowly made his way back from the base of the wall.
Okeraphluxos was still sitting in his chamber and thinking when he heard a series of loud pops from the window. The sounds were entirely unfamiliar; curious, he stood up and went over to the window as the cracks continued. The sight that greeted him was entirely unexpected: at the gate, his demons were milling about; some were yelling and screaming, and some were running back toward the barracks. With each pop, another demon yelled and dropped; once or twice, heads literally exploded. The foodbeasts below were panicking, and stampeding straight for the back of the compound. He saw several demons trampled beneath their hooves as the small herd ran in blank terror. Several more cracks, and the remaining demons were also heading back into the compound, abandoning their injured comrades.
Abruptly, the walls around his castle just disintegrated. An instant later, a deafening concussion physically knocked him backward, and a shower of stone fragments flew through the window, lacerating the duke's face. In shock, he felt his face, felt the blood oozing out, then crawled back to the window. The room was still spinning around him, and he fought the urge to retch on the windowsill.
Outside, his castle was a complete wreck. The retaining wall had entirely vanished, the causeway leading through the swamp toward the Dis-Dysprosium road had disappeared, and two of the barracks buildings had collapsed. At first, he thought there was nothing left of the demons who had so recently been busy about their business in the castle, but then, looking more closely, he saw, strewn about the jagged rubble coating the ground, lumps that were smoother and darker than the rock fragments. Then, he did vomit on the windowsill.
It was that move that saved his life. As he ducked to vomit, the stone just behind where his head had been exploded in a vicious arc of fragments as something hit it. Okeraphluxos continued downwards, landing on the floor below the windowsill and crawled away. Just what was happening? Obviously his castle was under attack but he’d never seen a siege start like this before. Oh, sieges were known events, a property might be disputed or perhaps seized as a bargaining chip for some other issue but they ran to a set pattern. The besieging commander would pull his army up and display it in front of the target castle so that the besieged commander could see what he was up against and compare his own forces to them. Then besieger and besieged would meet and decide if the balance of forces made resistance practical. If it was, then the siege was on, if not then the defending garrison would surrender. This sort of sudden attack was unheard-of. And what had destroyed his outer walls?
Okeraphluxos decided to take a better look and was about to do so through the window he had just used when it occurred to him that doing so would be a terminally bad idea. He crawled out of the room, then went to another and used the window there. What he saw appalled him, the remainder of his troops were sprawled on the ground, dead or dying. Yet, across in the swamps, he saw a group of figures moving, six of them, humans by the look of them but colored so they were virtually invisible against the ground and mists of Hell. The six figures ran forward to new positions, spread out in front of his massacred men then dropped to the ground. Okeraphluxos took his eyes off them because as they dropped flat, four more humans, colored the same way, emerged from hiding places and ran across the ground.
One surviving member of Okeraphluxos’s garrison stood up to take a shot with his trident but before he could do so, there was a rapid series of small thuds and he fell down. They’d come from the area where the first group of six humans had gone to ground. He could hardly see them when he tried to make them out and by the time he spotted the first, the second group had taken cover as well. Then, the first group got to their feet and closed in on the large house that formed the keep of Okeraphluxos’s castle. They did something to the door and then retreated. Watching carefully, Okeraphluxos was bewildered, there was no precedent for what was happening. Sieges took a long time, even for a small castle like his. But this time his defenses were collapsing as if they didn’t exist. It was barely a few minutes since the first explosions had taken down his outer wall and now his keep was under attack. The destruction of his keep gate seemed tame compared with the series of blasts that had destroyed his walls but Okeraphluxos new it was the death-knell for his defense.
Outside the keep, Kim couldn’t help but feel smugly satisfied. The sudden, violent assault was doing its work, the baldricks inside the defenses couldn’t adapt to the speed at which the situation was changing. By the time they responded to one development, it was already history and the course of the battle had moved on so their attempted response just led to an even greater disaster. It was a classic blitzkrieg, something that the trackheads in their armor thought they monopolized. They didn’t, infantry could do it as well.
If the baldricks had kept their heads, if they’d been able to respond fast enough, they should have turned the remaining parts of the outer defenses into strongpoints, each of which would have had to be reduced individually. That would have broken the momentum of her attack and allowed the rest of the garrison to stage a counter-attack that would have destroyed her puny force. But, they’d never had the chance, by the time they’d overcome their initial reactions to the unprecedented violence and speed of the attack and started thinking, the opportunity was gone. The outer defenses had fallen and the keep was on its own – and now its gates were gone.