He dropped down, pressing even closer to Sky Sabre’s spine, and the big red banked hard left as his fingers stroked in the control grooves.
* * *
“No, you idiot!” Yoril Jerstan shouted, even though there was no way in the world Hostyra could have heard him. He groped for his flare projector, triggering off the yellow-yellow-green sequence that ordered Hostyra to break off, but the young twenty-five paid no attention. His dragon’s dive angle only steepened, increasing his airspeed, and Jerstan swore again.
He fired the break off sequence a second time, and banked Grayscale hard to the right, away from the oncoming Sharonians. The other transports followed him promptly, but Hostyra’s wingman hesitated. He held on in Sky Sabre’s wake for a handful of seconds before he slowly, grudgingly brought his own dragon around to follow the transports back towards Fort Brithik.
* * *
“Action left! Action left!” Platoon-Captain Seljar chan Werkan shouted, and the drivers of the Steel Mules on which Copper Section’s two field guns had been mounted halted almost instantly.
Quickly as they responded, the gun crews were even quicker, stripping off the muzzle covers and breaking open the ammunition locker. By the time the Mules stopped moving, the slim muzzles of the 3.4” “Ternathian 37s” on their specially modified carriages were already swinging towards the black dots so far above them and rising sharply.
They’d practiced the evolution more times than chan Werkan could count during the long, weary march from Fort Salby and they moved with the smooth efficiency of all those endless drills. Unfortunately, this was the first time they’d had actual targets, and no one-least of all Seljar chan Werkan-knew how well all that training might be about to pay off.
The training and elevating wheels blurred, spinning under the gunners’ hands, while the barrels angled up to a preposterous seventy-five degrees.
“Load!” he shouted, and breechblocks clicked with crisp, metallic smoothness.
Fifty yards to chan Werkan’s right, Silver Section’s gun muzzles tracked the same targets.
* * *
Better stay away from those, Gerun, Hostyra thought as Sky Sabre’s eyes picked out the multi-barreled guns mounted atop some of the bigger vehicles. He hadn’t been at Fort Salby himself-he’d been with Thousand Carthos’ command-but he’d had the weapons-“pedestal guns,” he thought the Sharonians called them-described to him in detail.
Now his steady fingers guided Sky Sabre into a deeper left bank, bearing away from the “pedestal guns” towards the smaller, wagon-like vehicles on the Sharonian column’s flank. Some of them mounted some sort of “gun,” too, but whatever they were, each of them had only a single barrel. They couldn’t be as dangerous as the rapidly firing multiple-barrel weapons.
* * *
Most of the Arcanan dragons had broken off, and chan Werkan’s jaw tightened as they headed back towards the Failcham portal through which they must have come. So much for surprise, but it was too late to do the bastards any good. There were no horses in the lead echelons of 3rd Brigade’s column, it was only late morning, and it was clear, open going all the way to Fort Brithik. The Bisons and Mules could cover the remaining two hundred miles in less than fifteen hours, and unless there was already a godsdamned Arcanan Army on the portal, they were damned well screwed.
And in the meantime-
* * *
Three of the 4.3" shells detonated well below Sky Sabre, spraying their potentially lethal clouds of shrapnel harmlessly across the heavens.
The fourth detonated barely twenty yards from its target.
Chapter Forty-Three
April 14
It was very quiet inside the chansyu hut. The ticking of one of the Sharonian “clocks” would have been deafening, and Klayrman Toralk wondered what thoughts were running through Mayrkos Harshu’s brain. It was impossible to tell from the two thousand’s expression, but they had to be grim.
Fifty Jerstan’s frantic hummer message, sent from Fort Brithik, had reached the AEF three days ago. Jerstan himself had arrived with his personal report a day later, his transport dragon obviously exhausted from how hard his pilot had pushed. That arrival had dashed any lingering hope that the original message might have been born of panic and overreaction, because Jerstan had engaged the recording function in his helmet crystal and spent the better part of two hours circling the oncoming Sharonian column…from beyond its apparent artillery range, thus avoiding the fate of yet another overly aggressive young pilot. Commander of One Hundred Tamdaran had analyzed that imagery carefully, and his conclusion was the same as Toralk’s own analysts: there were at least five thousand Sharonians in that column, supplied with scores of artillery pieces.
Toralk had no more idea than anyone else how they could have gotten there. It was obvious they must have followed the Kelsayr chain, but nothing the AEF had seen on its advance to Fort Salby or learned in prisoner interrogations had suggested the Sharonians had the capability to move an entire brigade over seventeen thousand miles in barely four months! Nor did he understand how none of the pickets along that enormous approach route had managed to get off a single hummer message warning of the enemy’s coming.
Not that it really mattered, he supposed. No. What mattered was that the Sharonians wouldn’t have been stupid enough to send what looked like a single brigade of their dragoons so far into the Arcanans’ rear. The force which had annihilated Fort Brithik’s garrison less than one day after Jerstan had spotted it was a powerful formation, but it was also operating twenty thousand miles from the nearest major Sharonian base at Fort Salby, and its own communications would be vulnerable to air attack…assuming, of course, Toralk could find the battle dragons to attack them and get past Forth Brithik to reach them.
“Well,” Harshu said finally into the silence, “at least we know why they’ve been content to sit at the top of the Traisum Cut all these weeks, don’t we?”
His tone was almost whimsical, although his expression certainly wasn’t, and Toralk’s teeth ground together as he thought about the lost months while they’d waited here, confident they could savage any frontal attack. And it had seemed obvious such an attack had to be forthcoming, anyway. There was no other way the Sharonians could get at them, and their threadbare supply of recon gryphons had amply confirmed a steady, massive buildup around Fort Salby. The size of that buildup had made it abundantly clear that his staff’s initial estimates of Sharonian “railroads’” cargo-carrying capacity had been hopelessly inadequate. The enemy had taken longer to get his initial units into position than an Arcanan commander would have, but once those initial units had arrived to stabilize the front, Sharonian strength in Traisum had grown explosively. Coupled with their obvious preparations to assault down the Traisum Cut, there’d been no doubt that they’d read the unpromising menu of their tactical options the same way Harshu and Toralk had.
Yet as the size and power of the impending assault grew steadily and the reinforcements promised by Nith mul Gurthak equally steadily failed to materialize, Toralk had come to doubt the strategic wisdom of holding their position here. The sheer weight of the attack, whenever the Sharonians decided to unleash it, promised to be enormous, and if they did manage to carry the Cut, the AEF was likely to find itself in serious trouble, even with its maneuver advantages. The steady, annoying trickle of operational losses among Toralk’s transports had only increased his uneasiness, since each dragon in the dragon healers’ hands or sent to the rear to recuperate was one less dragon for troop movements if the Sharonians ever once broke free in Karys.