David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

"Look," the junior-armsman said, searching for the best way to explain to a non-Ternathian, "if Crown Prince Janaki says a shit storm's coming, then you better believe it's coming and the crap is gonna be really, really deep. Trust me on this. What? You think maybe his family's been doing what it does for so long without figuring out how to get its shit straight?"

"Yeah, but-"

""thinspace"'But' nothing," chan Barsak interrupted. "If the Regiment-Captain wants us up here after talking to the Prince, there's no way in hell-anyone's hell-I'm going to argue with them. And if I'm not gonna argue with them, then you aren't going to."

"Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I got it!" Verais grumbled, swinging the mattock still harder.

"Good."

Andrin Calirath jerked upright in her bed so quickly that Finena reared up on her bedside perch, mantling instinctively.

Andrin never even noticed her beloved falcon. Her sea-gray eyes were wide, unseeing, as she Saw with other senses, another Talent.

How long she sat there, frozen, Watching the horrifying images and sounds rolling through her brain, she never knew. But then, finally, she closed those haunted eyes once more. She sat very still, unmoving in the hushed, comforting midnight silence of Calirath Palace, and her face was white and strained.

"Janaki," she whispered. "Oh, Janaki."

"Are you sure about this, Platoon-Cap-I mean, are you sure about this, Your Highness?" Company- Captain Lorvam Mesaion asked.

Fort Salby's senior artillerist stood on the fort's western fighting step, watching as fatigue parties, reinforced by almost every male civilian above the age of twelve, worked with focused, purposeful intensity.

"Sure about what, Sir?" Janaki asked.

He'd come up to the stretch of wall between the two out-thrust bastions which flanked the main gates and climbed up onto an empty gun platform to gaze out towards the portal. Mesaion wasn't sure exactly what kept bringing the Ternathian Crown Prince back to this position again and again. From his own perspective, it was the ideal place to keep an eye on the preparations for which he personally was responsible, but he knew Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik had been keeping Janaki extraordinarily busy.

Too busy, the company-captain would have thought to be making his way up here every hour or so.

"Sure about putting those things up here," Mesaion said, jerking his head at the sweating, grunting PAAF troopers with sledgehammers who were busy spikingthe base plates of ten Yerthak pedestal guns'

mounts into the solid tops of the towers and bastions. Well, the reasonably solid tops of the towers and bastions; Mesaion had a few private reservations about how well they were going to stand the recoil of any sustained firing. The half-ton weapons themselves sat to one side, and getting those pigs up to the tops of the towers had been anything but easy. In fact, in the end they'd had to move most of them by brute force and human muscle power.

Mesaion just hoped it was all going to be worth it. And that they were going to get off more than a few shots per gun before the masonry's solidity or the crude modifications they'd made to the mountings themselves betrayed them.

Now Janaki glanced at the guns, then arched an eyebrow at the artillerist, and Mesaion shrugged.

"They'll have the reach to cover the approaches from this wall, and from the western towers, Your Highness," he pointed out. "But if you're right about where their attack's going to be coming from, the ones on the eastern wall aren't going to be much help."

"Not against ground targets, no," Janaki conceded.

Mesaion opened his mouth, then closed it again. Although he was from New Farnal, not Ternathia, he'd read enough history to know how well the Calirath Talent had served the Empire over the millennia.

Still … dragons? Flying monsters with the heads and wings of eagles and lions' bodies?

"I know it sounds crazy, Company-Captain," Janaki said with a tired smile. "Just humor me."

"If you say so, Your Highness," Mesaion replied after a moment.

"How are the rest of your positions coming along, Sir, if I may ask?"

"They won't be ready before dawn, if that's what you mean, Your Highness. Aside from that, they're coming along pretty well."

"Good, Sir. That's good."

Janaki nodded to Mesaion and stepped closer to the parapet and leaned his elbows on it, gazing out across the town of Salby and up at the looming portal. Chan Skrithik had loaded up all the women and children he could cram onto the available railroad cars and sent them steaming off towards Salym.

Unfortunately, he'd had space for less than eight hundred civilians, and sheltering the rest was going to pack the fort to the bursting point. Still, that would be far better than leaving them to face the oncoming storm unprotected.

Assuming, of course, that they managed to keep the Arcanans' monstrous winged beasts from turning the fort into nothing more than a conveniently concentrated slaughtering pen.

Janaki's mouth tightened as he contemplated the unspeakable casualties which still might all too readily be inflicted upon people for whose protection he and his family were responsible. Then he made himself relax as he looked down at the dust rising from either side of the ribbon of railroad that reached along the valley floor below towards the portal.

Company-Captain Mesaion might have his doubts about some of the artillery deployments Regiment Captain chan Skrithik had ordered on the basis of Platoon-Captain chan Calirath's Glimpse, but that hadn't prevented the artillery officer from getting the guns deployed as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, Fort Salby, despite the thickness of its walls, hadn't really been intended to be defended against an attack by modern heavy weapons. The fighting steps simply weren't deep enough to mount true artillery-especially not artillery on field carriages, instead of fortress carriages-and the gun platforms had never been intended for anything heavier than machine guns, so Mesaion's filed artillery had to be deployed outside the walls, along the foot of the stair-step-like bluff upon which Salby stood, if the guns were going to be used at all.

That explained a lot of the dust Janaki gazed down upon. The gun pits were going to be only a bit deeper than usual, but chan Skrithik-or, rather, Janaki, to be scrupulously honest-had insisted upon the thickest possible overhead cover. Firing a four-inch breech-loader, or one of the three-point-four-inch quick-firers, with a roof of heavy sandbags only a few feet over the gunners' heads promised to be … exciting. But not as "exciting" as things might have been with dragons raining fire or lightning into the gun pits with them.

Janaki wished chan Skrithik had had more field guns available. Even with the light horse guns Sunlord Markan and Windlord Garsal had brought along, though, the regiment-captain had little more than a dozen pieces. He and Janaki had spent an arduous couple of hours bent over the map table, matching terrain against Janaki's fragmentary Glimpses, to pick the best places to put the guns he did have, but neither of them was happy about the total numbers they had to deploy.

The single three-gun section of 4.3-inch howitzers and the nine heavy mortars Mesaion had available could probably take up at least some of the slack. They, however, couldn't be used from positions with overhead cover, which was why they'd been deployed inside the fort itself. From their position on the parade ground they were protected from direct counter-fire and had excellent three-hundred-sixty-degree command, as long as the targets were far enough away for their high-trajectory fire to clear the walls.

Of course, if the Arcanans' dragons got through to the fort … .

Tin roofs, laid over appropriated railroad ties and covered with layered sandbags, were going up all along the fort walls' fighting steps, as well. They weren't as sturdy as Janaki would have preferred, but they were a hells of a lot better than nothing, and they should offer significant protection against plunging dragons' breath. He hoped so, anyway.