David Brin - The Practice Effect

They drifted eastward with the wind. It felt like hours, but actually they were soon over the Ruddik heights, where the enemy had made their deepest penetration so far. Stivyung’s contingent floated over the south spur, rimming that side of the canyon. There his aeronauts dropped anchors to waiting men. The L’Toff soldiers below scampered over the rocks to seize the anchors and tie them down.

When Gath’s forces were over the north spur, they repeated the procedure.

The aeronauts had not had a chance to practice the technique. Fortunately, only one balloon from the south contingent drifted free, floating unanchored off to the east, rising rapidly.

That was a smaller loss than Gath had expected. They had planned to send one eastward anyway, with a report to the King of Coylia. Even Kremer’s gliders could not stop the message if the balloon gained enough altitude in time.

If the L’Toff on the ground cheered when the balloons hove into view, the enemy below stared up in dismay. Rumors had already spread of the great, round monster that had roared into Zuslik one night, months ago. And now here were ten of the behemoths, glaring down with fierce, painted faces. The attackers fell back nervously from the high redoubts and muttered nervously while their captains conferred over this new development.

Here, where the L’Toff had chosen to make their chief stand, the terrain was extremely rough. A series of deadly prearranged rockfalls would make any direct ground assault costly.

But all these defenses required that Kremer’s gliders be kept away so the L’Toff fighters on the heights could work unmolested.

That was the purpose for which the balloon detachment had been sent. The test was not long delayed.

“There!” One of the young bowmen in Gath’s gondola pointed.

Against the sunlit clouds, high in the noontime sky, at least two dozen black shapes were outlined. The gliders looked like hawks in the distance, and they stooped, suddenly, like great birds of prey.

“Get ready!” the captain of a neighboring gondola cried.

The enemy looked small and distant for what seemed the longest time. Then, in an instant, they were down upon them! All around Gath, his bowmen were shouting.

“There! Shoot!”

“They’re coming in too fast!”

“Quit complainin’, kid! Just stop em!”

The babble of voices was almost as unnerving as the wicked black wings that rushed amongst them.

“Yahoo! I got one!”

“Great! But don’t get cocky!”

“Watch out for those darts!”

There were screams of pain and cries of triumph, all in a matter of seconds. Then, almost as swiftly as they had come, the gliders were speeding away along the ridgetops toward carefully charted updrafts. They left behind three of their squadron, wrecked and scattered on the rubble below.

One more glider, unable to recover from a tear in its dragon wing, crashed directly into a cliff face as Gath watched. The defenders, both above and below, cheered.

“All right!” Gath yelled hoarsely as soon as he caught his breath. “They’ll be back, and it won’t be as easy to drive them off next time!

“Until they return, though, we concentrate on the enemy on the ground! Mark your targets, and make those arrows count!”

It would be difficult to get more ammunition. Resupply would be slow and chancy by bucket. And now the enemy’s ground commander would certainly throw everything he had at the points where the covering balloons were anchored. Already Gath could see the invaders marshaling their forces for an assault on the other slope of the crumbled canyon, where Stivyung Sigel’s four balloons were moored.

The attacks came, thereafter, at hourly intervals. The archers took a terrible toll of invaders on the ground: But each arrow lost was precious—in the making, in lost practice, and in the difficulty of hauling up supplies under fire.

And the defenders died in ones and twos as the battle went on. The L’Toff fighters on the surface fought to hold their ground and to defend the anchor points. The forces of the barons fought just as desperately to take those ridges.

The long afternoon passed like a slow agony, punctuated by moments of sheer terror Within a few hours, the tactical picture began to emerge.

Here on the northern spur, the defense was going well, for now. Gath’s archers took a heavy toll of attackers trying to climb the slopes and beat back three separate glider sorties.

But on the southern spur things had begun to go badly.

Before the sun passed beyond the highest peaks, two of Sigel’s southern balloons were lost, one when its bag was pierced. It settled slowly to the ground. The other one drifted off over the eastern plains when its anchor point was taken. It was too slow at ascending and finally fell under a rain of darts as Kremer’s gliders converged from all around, like wolves upon a wounded lamb.

Gath wondered if Stivyung could hold out until nightfall. The two remaining southern balloons couldn’t give each other much support.

Gath watched helplessly as enemy reinforcements arrived late in the afternoon…including a dozen fresh gliders. Kremer seemed to have an endless supply of them! Either that or his generals were stripping the other fronts of air support to handle this sticky spot in the center.

As the afternoon wore on, Gath watched as the entire flock of gliders swooped down on the two balloons on the lonely slope. And there was nothing he could do to help!

“Slow down! Slow down!”

Dennis realized that both Arth and Linnora had taken up his chant. The practice resonance was fully upon them.

Silvery fire seemed to dance around the body of the cart, and their acceleration down the tumbled slope did, in fact, seem to be slackening. But that didn’t keep them from moving inexorably toward the cliff. It loomed ahead ten meters, five meters, two meters away.

At the very last minute the robot’s whirling treads took hold and brought them to a stop in a boiling cloud of dust, teetering at the edge of the precipice.

Arth grabbed the narrow trunk of a shattered sapling that had partly broken the cart’s momentum. The little thief held on for dear life.

Dennis wiped floating grit from his eyes and purposely avoided looking down. He tried to clear his throat of dust so he could politely ask the robot to redouble its efforts to back them away from the cliff edge. But the cart chose that moment to settle forward a few more inches. It dropped with a thump, leaving the robot’s treads hanging out over open space.

“Okay,” Dennis sang, a little bit upset by this time. “Linnora? Arth? You folks all right? I’ve got an idea. Let’s all sidle backward, nice and easy.” He felt Linnora begin to loosen her strap. She obviously had the same notion. It was time to get the hell out of here.

Something whizzed past Dennis’s head. At first he thought it was some huge insect, but as he turned he glimpsed a second arrow passing through the space his ear had just occupied a second before.

“Hey!” Arth howled. An arrow quivered in the sapling’s trunk inches from his fingers.

Up the talus slope Dennis saw at least a dozen of Baron Kremer’s gray-clad archers working their way cautiously downward, getting into position to administer the coup de grace. Capture, apparently, was no longer an option at this point.

They didn’t really have to bother, Dennis realized. Arth was visibly weakening and soon would have to let go of either the tree or the glider. He and Linnora could never slide back quickly enough to make a difference.

Is this it? Dennis looked around for some way out—while arrows zinged past them or stuck, humming, to the sides of the cart.

Linnora was fumbling for her knife. Dennis wondered what she was trying to do. Then it hit him.