David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

Balkar chan Tesh was on his way back to his command bunker opposite the center of the portal's northern aspect when he heard the sharp, explosive sound. He spun toward it, and his eyes widened in sudden speculation. The sound wasn't quite like any explosion he'd ever heard, but it was too violent to call anything else.

He was too far from Loumas' and chan Synarch's position to see what had actually happened, but he knew. Somehow, he knew.

He stood for one more moment, and then some instinct made him look up.

Commander of One Hundred Horban Geyrsof watched the lead elements of his 3012th Strike separate and dive steeply.

The entire First Provisional Talon had approached the objective from the east. That had kept the portal itself between them and the enemy's lookouts, who'd been located at its western end. No one knew whether or not a portal would have the same effect on these "Sharonians'"thinspace"" so-called "talents" that it had on spells, but according to Five Hundred Neshok, it appeared to. Geyrsof wasn't particularly fond of phrases like "appeared to" when it came to planning operations, but given the description of the enemy's horrific weapons, he was more than willing to play for any possible potential advantage.

Now, as Five Hundred Myr's flare announced initial success, all eight of the 3012th's reds split into two separate four-dragon flights which broke left and right, then came slashing back in diving turns. They stooped upon both faces of the portal simultaneously, wings swept, approaching speeds of two hundred and fifty miles an hour as they used the advantage of their altitude ruthlessly.

Geyrsof would have preferred to lead the initial attack himself, and not just because he possessed an abundance of the aggressiveness and self-confidence which were the fundamental qualities of a successful battle dragon pilot. This was the first Air Force attack on a regular, organized military opponent in two hundred years, and Geyrsof's Graycloud was a yellow. His poisonous breath weapon had been expressly designed for missions just like this one, but he was one of only three yellows-all in Geyrsof's strike-which Thousand Toralk had been able to scare up.

That was the problem. This wasn't just the first attack in two hundred years; it was also the first Air Force attack ever on an enemy from an entirely different universe, and they had too few yellows to risk losing them in the very first attack. Especially when no one had the least idea how well Air Force doctrine was going to work against such an opponent, or how effective the other side's weapons were going to be against Geyrsof's dragons.

Those were two of several things they were about to find out.

The instant he saw the impossible beasts screaming down out of the very heavens, Balkar chan Tesh knew the sledgehammer about to come down on his positions would be far worse than any attack even he had imagined in his worst nightmares. The… the dragons, for want of any better word, would be horrendous opponents even if they simply landed among his men with talons and fangs. He'd never imagined anything outside a whale which could possibly have matched their size, and the mere fact that anything that big was actually capable of flight was enough to flood his mind with atavistic terror. But it wasn't just their size, for something gibbered in the back of his brain that if they looked like dragons, and if they flew like dragons, then they probably breathed fire like dragons.

Yet even as the primitive part of his mind recoiled from those horrifying images, the thinking part of his mind had already grasped a far more terrifying implication. If these people could fly, then every calculation and estimate of the relative mobility of the two sides had suddenly become meaningless.

And if that explosion-like sound had come from where he thought it had, then he had no way to get a message out to chan Baskay for Rothag to relay to Halifu's Voice. Which meant no one else could possibly know what he'd just discovered.

Those thoughts blazed through him like thunderbolts while he watched the trio of dragons coming straight at him.

And then they began to belch fire.

Commander of Twenty-Five Tahlos Berhala led the attack.

"Commander of twenty-five" was a purely Air Force rank, one which Berhala was perfectly well aware the other branches of the Union of Arcana's military deeply resented. He didn't really blame them for their anger over the Air Force's "rank inflation," although he had no intention of giving up the privileges

(and additional pay) which went with his commission. But the Air Force had decided long ago that anyone responsible for flying a battle dragon had to be an officer. Once upon a time, Berhala knew, there'd been quite a few noncommissioned combat pilots, but they'd been eliminated in the course of the Air Force's build-down of its combat strength. If there were only going to be a limited number of battle dragons to go around, then by all the gods, they were going to have officers in their cockpits!

Which explained how one Tahlos Berhala and his red dragon Skyfire found themselves flying point for the first inter-universal air strike in history.

He concentrated on the targeting display projected across the inside of his helmet's visor, trying to shut out all the other distractions, all the fear, all the excitement. He watched the incredibly clear image Skyfire's draconic vision produced, and the spellware built into his helmet's sarkolis crystal put a strobing amber crosshair directly in the center of his vision. He moved his eyes until the crosshair settled on one of the open-topped weapon pits and watched it flashing more and more quickly as the range dropped.

His fingers stroked gently, gently in the control grooves, and Skyfire swung slightly to port. Airspeed was still building when suddenly the crosshair stopped blinking. It settled into the steady, blood-red glare that indicated he was in range, instead, and he inhaled deeply.

"Sherkaya!" he snapped, and Skyfire's entire body seemed to buck indescribably beneath him as the oneword command-the ancient Mythalan word for "fire"-triggered the helmet spellware's release code.

Balkar chan Tesh watched in belly-knotted sickness as the first fireball impacted directly on top of the pit occupied by Morek chan Talmarha, his senior artillery officer. There was no overhead cover, nothing to impede the attack in any way. The fireball seemed to move impossibly slowly, yet at the same time, it flashed directly to its target, and it was obviously many times more powerful than anything the Arcanan infantry support weapons could produce. The mortar pit was almost a hundred yards from chan Tesh, but the searing flash of the fireball's ear-stunning detonation seemed to singe every hair on the companycaptain's head.

For one bare fraction of a second, all he heard was that sharp, concussive almost-explosion. But then came the shrieks, the screams of men far enough from its center to have been spared instant death in favor of a far more terrible fate. He saw flaming torches, rolling on the ground, trying to beat out the flames consuming them, and then the ready ammunition stored in the pit began to cook off, as well.

Berhala saw his target go up in flames, although he had too little time for any sort of detailed evaluation.

The maximum attack range for any red was under two thousand yards. At better than two hundred miles per hour, it took barely fourteen seconds to cross that distance, which gave him time for two shots, maximum. Under the circumstances, he decided to assume that the leaping pillar of fire meant he'd knocked out his primary target and turned his head. His eyes moved as well, tracking the crosshair onto one of the sandbag-covered emplacements to the west of his primary target, and then it settled into position.