David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

He was still scrabbling at it when one of the second-wave gryphons struck him from behind, like a falcon striking a hare, and snapped his neck instantly.

As the transport dragon came over the palisade and went into its hover, Halesak watched the opening gryphon strike swarm over the defenders.

He'd always hated the strike gryphons. The recon gryphons were something quite different. First, they were almost always female, whereas every strike gryphon was a male, although that was less important than their other differences. The recon gryphons were also bigger, stronger, less maneuverable, smarter … and much, much more biddable. Some of them were actually affectionate, and became quite devoted to their handlers.

So far as Halesak was aware, no strike gryphon had ever been devoted to anyone. Their designers had built them around an almost insane territoriality, a vicious temper, and a voracious hunger. They had one and only one function: to kill anything in their programmed area of attack. Strike gryphons were never trained for their missions, the way recon gryphons often were. Instead, their handlers relied completely on the compulsion spells laid into the creatures' hate-filled brains through the sarkolis chips surgically implanted in the young no more than four or five days after hatching. That was one reason Halesak hated them. There was always the possibility that those compulsion spells might fail, and the last thing any semi-sane soldier wanted was to have a theoretically "friendly" rogue gryphon rampaging through his formation in a killing frenzy.

At least this time the spells seemed to be holding, and it was obvious the Sharonian sentries had never had a clue the attack was coming. Most of them were caught with their shoulder weapons still slung, and very few of them had time to do anything about that.

In fact, very few of them had time to do anything but die.

Namir Velvelig's bare feet hit the floor as the cacophony of screams, shots, and a strange, high-pitched wailing sound yanked him brutally up out of dreamless sleep. He seized his pistol belt, slung it about his waist without even considering trousers or blouses, and raced out of his quarters to the office window which overlooked the parade ground.

At the moment, that parade ground was a scene of barely predawn nightmare.

He saw the hawk-headed monsters ripping and tearing at his sentries, saw the mutilated bodies of his men strewn across the interior of the fort where their killers had dropped them like so much garbage.

And he saw those same killers sweeping back, circling above the barracks where most of the rest of his men were quartered.

Velvelig was an Arpathian. Despite his thoroughly modern education, despite his years as a professional soldier in a modern army, the shamans' tales had prepared him for devils and demons in a way most Sharonians would no longer have understood. His forebrain could only stare in disbelief at the slaughter outside his window. Deep down inside, though, those shamans' tales took over. He didn't have to think to know what a man did about demons, and that part of him instantly determined that his revolver was not the best possible tool for his requirements.

He whirled away from the window. He didn't have the key which was still in the pocket of the trousers he wasn't wearing, and there was no time to worry about niceties. A single shot from his H amp;W blew the lock off the chain through the trigger guards of the racked shotguns.

Velvelig's hands moved with flashing speed as he scooped up one of the weapons. The Model 7 combat shotgun was a purely military weapon, a slide-action weapon with a five-round detachable box magazine and a bayonet lug, and designed to fire brass-cased ammunition which was much more powerful than the standard civilian loads. It was heavy, ugly, and a brute to fire, but it was as lethal as it was unlovely, and there were twenty-four preloaded magazines of double ought buckshot on the shelf across the bottom of the weapons rack. Each cartridge contained tenpellets, each of them the size of a Polshana .36-caliber bullet, and Velvelig racked the action open, slid a loose round into the chamber and closed it, then slapped in a magazine. He had few illusions about what was about to happen, but he took long enough to sweep half a dozen more magazines into a canvas ammunition carrier and slung it over his shoulder.

Then he stepped out onto the planked walkway in front of his office.

Halesak grunted as he fast-roped down from the transport and his heels thumped on the firing step inside the fort wall. He started to bark the order for his men to assemble on him, then ducked as another gryphon came slicing in just above his head.

Something exploded down below him. His ears classified it instantly as the sound of one of the Sharonian weapons, but this one sounded slightly different, somehow. He whirled towards the noise and saw a single man, naked but for a loose white pair of skivvies and a weapons belt, standing on the veranda across the front of what Neshok's sketch map called the office block. He had what looked like one of the standard shoulder weapons, but as Halesak watched the man fired again, and a second gryphon shrieked and collapsed in midair as if it had just flown headlong into a wall. It slammed into the ground in a broken ball of fur and feathers, and the single defender's left hand stroked back under his weapon's barrel and he fired again.

A third gryphon went down, and the man who'd killed it cycled his weapon once more and tracked smoothly, almost unhurriedly, onto a fourth target.

Velvelig had a vague impression of something huge and dark hovering just above the wall. Whatever it was, there wasn't anything he could do about it at the moment, and he was totally focused on the task he could do something about. The veranda roof gave him overhead cover, and he had an excellent view of the monster-besieged barracks. He'd always been a superior wing shot, and these things-whatever the hells they were-were bigger than deer, not doves. He squeezed the trigger, the shotgun's buttplate hammered his shoulder, and a fourth monster smashed into the barracks wall like two hundred pounds of dead meat.

He swung onto a fifth creature and fired. Then a sixth.

Half a dozen of the murderous beasts were down, and he pressed the magazine release. The empty magazine thumped to the veranda floor, and he slammed in another, worked the slide, and brought down a seventh target.

Nothing could ever let Iftar Halesak forget that the Sharonian butchers had murdered one of the greatest men in Arcana's history in cold blood. The hatred that had kindled in his heart was something perhaps only another garthan could truly have understood. Yet as he saw that single defender, standing his ground, firing with such cool, steady precision, he felt an unwilling surge of admiration. It wasn't just the other man's courage, though gods alone knew how much raw nerve it must take for someone who'd never even suspected that gryphons existed to face them with such steadiness. No, it was the other's obvious sense of duty … and his effectiveness.

Even as Halesak watched, that single Sharonian brought down a seventh and an eighth gryphon. The fact that the attacking predators were so focused on the targets designated by the combination of their controlling spellware and their own natural viciousness meant they paid the man killing them almost no attention at all. They were so totally committed to neutralizing the barracks, keeping anyone from getting out of them, as their pre-attack command programming required, that they never noticed the single man outside the office block.

"Yirman!" the commander of fifty barked. "Get the gates open! The rest of you, on me!"

Lance Yirman Farl and the two other man assigned to help him went thundering down the nearest stair to the parade ground below. The rest followed Halesak as he went scurrying along the firing step, looking for a clear fiiring angle.