He glared down at the position a mile and a half below and twice that far behind him. The smoke and flame vomiting upward from his flight's initial targets made it hard to pick out details, even with the assistance of Skyfire's incredible vision, and the looming portal made it impossible for him to see what had happened with the strike on the fortifications guarding its southern aspect. But he could see enough to know the dug in positions on this side were still there, still waiting, undoubtedly protecting the devastating rapidfire weapons which had massacred Hundred Thalmayr's company.
Those weapons might not pose a significant threat to Berhala and Skyfire, but the cavalry and infantry coming in behind them would be another story entirely.
He glowered downward for another few heartbeats, then looked back across at Urkora once more and raised his right hand. He was careful to keep it out of the slipstream as he patted the top of his helmet, then pointed back downward. Urkora responded with a dragon pilot's exaggerated nod of understanding, and Berhala returned his hand to the control groove.
"All right, big boy," he said, although there was no way Skyfire could possibly hear him. "Let's try that again."
Company-Captain chan Tesh dragged himself back up off the ground. He felt physically stunned, as if someone had beaten him with clubs, but his many years of experience and training roused quickly, fighting his mental shock.
The destruction of his mortars and supporting field guns meant, ultimately, that his defense was doomed.
To be fair, however, that had probably been true from the outset. If the Arcanans' transport capability was as great as the existence of these "dragons" implied, then they'd probably moved in enough troop strength to have come over his men eventually, no matter what. He simply didn't have enough ammunition to stop the manpower these people could have lifted in by air.
But that doesn't mean we can't bleed the bastards first, he thought harshly. I don't care how fucking good their logistics are, they can't possibly have an unlimited number of men available ... and however many they have now, they're going to have a hell of a lot less by the time they take this position away from my boys!
He turned his head, craning his neck as he looked for the four dragons which had flown directly over him at an altitude of barely a hundred feet after belching their fire into chan Talmarha's gun pits. There!
They were circling around, and his jaw clenched as he realized they were preparing for another pass.
Motion caught at the corner of his eye from closer at hand, and his head snapped back around in time to see six of his Ternathian Marines struggling to drag one of the Faraika II machine-guns out of a bunker.
He started to shout at them to get back under cover, then stopped as he realized what they were doing, and why. They couldn't get enough elevation to reach aerial targets—even targets flying as low as these were—through the firing slits of their bunker.
Obviously, they intended to do something about that.
As he watched, they dragged the two hundred and fifty-pound weapon across to one of the piles of dirt from which the fatigue parties had been filling sandbags. They heaved the heavy tripod to the top of the pile and slammed its feet as deep into the soft earth as they could. The dirt pile tilted the entire weapon at an awkward, unnatural—and unstable—angle, but four of them threw their own weight onto the tripod, bracing it in place while the gunner and his assistant scrambled around to find some sort of firing position behind the gun.
They didn't have much time. The dragons were already sweeping back, sharpening their angle of approach as they dove back into the attack once more. Other Marines and PAAF troopers were pouring out of their bunkers, finding firing positions with their Model 10 rifles, and as he scrambled towards them, he saw at least a handful of troopers with grenade launchers clamped to their rifle muzzles. The rifle grenades were heavy, awkward, and short-ranged, but they were also specifically designed to take out bunkers and strongpoints, and he doubted anything that actually got hit with one of them would—
"Here they come!" someone shouted.
"Make it count, boys!" chan Tesh heard someone else shouting with his own voice, and then the dragons were upon them once more.
The amber crosshair in Berhala's visor began to steady down as Skyfire swept back into range once more. The commander of twenty-five watched with satisfaction as its rapid blinking slowed, but then he frowned.
Graholis! What were those frigging idiots doing down there?
He couldn't believe it. They were actually coming out of their fortifications! He hadn't noticed them quickly enough, either. By the time he could have retargeted and Skyfire's head could have followed the crosshair around to the exposed Sharonians, they would already be past them. But why—?
Then he realized. They couldn't have fired their own weapons against the attacking dragons from inside their prepared positions. So they'd come outside in order to be able to shoot back.
He felt himself tightening internally, some of the exuberance and wild adrenaline rush giving way to the sudden awareness that the same impossible weapons which had ravagedthe Andaran Scouts were about to be fired at him.
Ground fire was a part of any red dragon's life. The reds' breath weapon was short ranged enough that they almost had to come into even arbalest range in a firing pass, and infantry and artillery dragons—the support weapons, not the living creatures—had more than sufficient range to engage any strafer. But the good news was that dragons, as a whole, were relatively resistant to the lighter versions of their own breath attacks which the artillery and infantry support weapons could throw. And while arbalest bolts could penetrate and lacerate the relatively thin, translucent hide of their wings, the heavy scales protecting a dragon's undersides and throat were another matter entirely.
And anything they've got will have to get all the way through Skyfire before it does anything to me, he reminded himself.
They shouldn't have come straight in on us this way, chan Tesh thought. They should have come in at an angle—made us lead them with our fire.
The company-captain had been on enough quail and duck hunts to know just how difficult a deflection shot against a passing bird could be. Of course, he'd never fired at a "bird" the size of one of these things in his life! But it didn't really matter very much, either, with the monsters coming straight down his men's throats.
Model 10 rifles began to crack viciously, spitting .40 caliber cupro-nickel jacketed hate back at their attackers. It was impossible for chan Tesh to see what—if any—effect the rifle fire was having, but then the Marine machine-gunner he'd noticed earlier began to turn the crank on his weapon.
The Faraika II was a much heavier weapon than the Faraika I he'd had available for his own attack on the Arcanans' original infantry position. The Faraika I fired the same round as the Model 10 rifle; the Faraika II had been designed, among other things, as an anti-small boat weapon. It fired a .54 caliber round, which weighed better than three times as much as the lighter round, at an even higher muzzle velocity and with better than five times the muzzle energy. The Spitzer-pointed rounds had a range of close to four thousand yards, and the thunderous bellow as the weapon began to fire was stunning.
Even with four burly Marines heaving their full weight on the tripod, it was almost—almost—
impossible to hold the machine-gun steady against the hammering recoil, but they managed. And every fifth round was tracer. They weren't as visible in the bright morning sunlight as they might have been in poorer lighting, but chan Tesh's eye followed them as they streaked towards the dragon flying just off the leader's right wing.
Twenty-Five Berhala heard—and felt—Skyfire's harsh scream of mingled fury and pain. The dragon shuddered under him, muscles bucking and jerking again and again, but Skyfire never hesitated, never even tried to swerve. He held his course, and the crosshair blinked suddenly crimson once again.
"Sherkaya!" Berhala shouted, and another fireball ripped away. Like its immediate predecessor, it impacted directly on one of the squat, thick fortifications ... and achieved absolutely nothing.
Berhala's lips drew back in anger and frustration, but then he heard a sudden, ear-tearing shriek from his right. His head whipped up and around, rising dangerously close to the slipstream howling just above his cockpit, and his face went white as Cloudtiger's mighty wings seemed to crumple and the huge dragon slammed into the earth at almost three hundred miles per hour.