David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

He'd thought there were ghosts in his crown prince's gray gaze before; now he saw the reality.

Janaki's eyes were huge, the pupils far too dilated for the strengthening morning light, unfocused on anything of this world. They didn't seem to be looking at anything about him, and yet chan Skrithik had the eerie sensation that Janaki didn't simply see him; he Saw right through him.

"They aren't going to give up that easily," the Crown Prince of Ternathia said in the clear, distant voice of a Calirath in fugue state. "They'll be back-soon." He pointed directly overhead. "There."

Chan Skrithik nodded, and looked at Senior-Armsman Isia.

"Overhead watch," he said harshly. "Alert everyone."

"Yes, Sir!"

Isia saluted sharply, then closed his eyes, and one of the small stacks of message canisters on the parapet beside him began to disappear with the preplanned dispatches, written well ahead of time against this very moment.

Almost simultaneously, the canisters began to appear at their destinations. Company-Captain Mesaion glanced at his copy, and began shouting orders of his own.

Cerlohs Myr counted noses with a sense of total disbelief as his remaining dragons circled well to the west of those murderous machine guns.

After transfers and rearrangements to make up for his earlier losses, the 3012th had headed into action this morning with eleven dragons. Now it had only four … and both of his precious yellows were gone, simply blotted away.

He lay in his cockpit, forcing himself to think as clearly as possible despite the shock and white-hot rage blazing within him. The loss of seven battle dragons-seven!-before any of them had even fired a shot was far worse than merely devastating. It represented almost half of his total available combat strength … and a third of all the battle dragons deployed to this entire chain.

The long-term implications of that level of losses, especially in light of the Air Force's low total inventory of battle dragons, were something he resolutely refused to contemplate. Not yet. There would be time to think about that later, and he wasn't looking forward to it.

The short-term implications were something he couldn't avoid thinking about, however. His entire battle plan had been built around bringing the maximum possible weight of fire to bear on Fort Salby as quickly as possible. The yellows were supposed to have been the opening salvo, blanketing any exposed defenders in a lethal, saturating canopy of gas. Had they somehow missed their mark, their escorting reds had been supposed to sweep the fort's exposed interior with fireballs while the yellows looped back for a second pass. Now, with Hundred Helika's 5001st, Myr's weakest strike, detached to support Thousand Carthos' secondary advance, he had only the four shocked survivors of Geyrsof's 3012th-all of them blacks-and the six reds and four blacks of Commander of One Hundred Sahlis Desmar's

2029th Strike.

Part of his brain argued that he had to break off and pull back. That the losses he'd already taken were heavier than the conquest of one more Sharonian portal fort could possibly justify. But this wasn't just one more portal fort; it was the perfect forward defensive position Two Thousand Harshu had been looking for from the moment the Expeditionary Force began its advance. Besides, he wanted these people.

He didn't know why they'd put machine guns in such an unlikely spot. From test firings with captured weapons, Intelligence had determined the approximate range of the Sharonians' heavy automatic weapons, so he knew they had the reach from those positions to cover the railroad and road which connected the portal to the fort and its small, surrounding town. And he supposed that given the initial hostile contact between Arcana and the Sharonians, it would have made sense to devote at least a little attention to defending the approaches from the direction of Hell's Gate. But he also knew how heavy those large-caliber machine guns were, and getting them into position-or just keeping them supplied with ammunition and getting their gun crews up-and-down those mountainsides, for that matter, especially without dragons-must have been an unmitigated pain in the arse.

The elevation damned well gives them good command of the surrounding area, I suppose, Myr thought harshly. But why here and nowhere else?

Another possibility suggested itself to him, but that was ridiculous. If these people had had any idea an Arcanan invasion force was this close to Traisum, they would never have left those work crews and all of that heavy equipment exposed on Fort Mosanik's very doorstep! And even if they had known, how could they possibly have placed those weapons so perfectly? Given all of the possible lines of approach, how could they have picked exactly the right one to cover?

No way! He shook his helmeted head. However it happened, the bastards have to have just lucked out.

Well, his mouth twisted grimly, I suppose things have gone so well this far that it's about time we had a little bad luck, too. But these fuckers are not going to get away with massacring my people this way!

He used his helmet spellware to trigger the combination of a white and an amber flare, and one of Geyrsof's surviving blacks climbed obediently up to his level. The pilot looked over at him, and Myr used dragon-pilot hand signs to order the other dragon back to report to Thousand Toralk and Two Thousand Harshu.

The pilot nodded, and his beast banked away. Myr watched him go, then turned grimly back to the task at hand. No doubt Toralk and Harshu would have their own thoughts about his fiasco, and he wasn't exactly looking forward to hearing them. But by the time his superiors got around to sharing their impressions of his most recent operation with him, that fort was going to be a smoking, smoldering ruin.

Cerlohs Myr owed the First Provisional Talon-and the 3012th Strike-that much.

Company-Captain Mesaion stood tautly in his position, field glasses glued to his eyes, staring up into the early morning sky above Fort Salby.

Chief-Armsman Wesiar chan Forcal stood beside him, but unlike Mesaion, chan Forcal was parked under the very best overhead cover they could give him. The supporting structure above him was made of two crossed layers of railroad ties, thickly buttressed by sandbags. The western side of his personal bunker was the parapet of the fighting step itself, and the northern side was the equally solid adobe and stone of one of the gate bastions. The southern side was a wall of sandbags stacked two-wide at the top and four-wide at the bottom. In fact, only the eastern side was open, and that only so that he could communicate with Mesaion.

There was a reason for how elaborately the chief-armsman was protected while his superior was so exposed. Unlike Company-Captain Mesaion, Chief-Armsman chan Forcal didn't need field glasses as he stood there with his eyes tightly closed and his head cocked in an attitude of intense concentration. He was one of the most precious commodities any artillery commander could have; a highly trained, highly experienced predictive Distance Viewer.

"Coming in!" he announced suddenly. "Circling to the north, and climbing!"

Mesaion swung his glasses onto the indicated bearing and saw a swarm of distant black dots climbing in a tight corkscrew, wings laboring. Even with the glasses, he couldn't make out a great many details at that range, but he didn't really need to, either.

Sorry I ever doubted you, your Highness, the artillerist found himself thinking. Then he lowered the glasses.

"Keep your head down Wesiar," he said. "We can't have anything happening to it, now can we?"

He smiled tightly at the Distance Viewer, then turned his own head to look at the crews assigned to the pedestal guns and machine guns mounted atop the walls.