He couldn't believe it. They were actually coming out of their fortifications! He hadn't noticed them quickly enough, either. By the time he could have retargeted and Skyfire's head could have followed the crosshair around to the exposed Sharonians, they would already be past them. But why—?

Then he realized. They couldn't have fired their own weapons against the attacking dragons from inside their prepared positions. So they'd come outside in order to be able to shoot back.

He felt himself tightening internally, some of the exuberance and wild adrenaline rush giving way to the sudden awareness that the same impossible weapons which had ravagedthe Andaran Scouts were about to be fired at him.

Ground fire was a part of any red dragon's life. The reds' breath weapon was short ranged enough that they almost had to come into even arbalest range in a firing pass, and infantry and artillery dragons—the support weapons, not the living creatures—had more than sufficient range to engage any strafer. But the good news was that dragons, as a whole, were relatively resistant to the lighter versions of their own breath attacks which the artillery and infantry support weapons could throw. And while arbalest bolts could penetrate and lacerate the relatively thin, translucent hide of their wings, the heavy scales protecting a dragon's undersides and throat were another matter entirely.

And anything they've got will have to get all the way through Skyfire before it does anything to me, he reminded himself.

They shouldn't have come straight in on us this way, chan Tesh thought. They should have come in at an angle—made us lead them with our fire.

The company-captain had been on enough quail and duck hunts to know just how difficult a deflection shot against a passing bird could be. Of course, he'd never fired at a "bird" the size of one of these things in his life! But it didn't really matter very much, either, with the monsters coming straight down his men's throats.

Model 10 rifles began to crack viciously, spitting .40 caliber cupro-nickel jacketed hate back at their attackers. It was impossible for chan Tesh to see what—if any—effect the rifle fire was having, but then the Marine machine-gunner he'd noticed earlier began to turn the crank on his weapon.

The Faraika II was a much heavier weapon than the Faraika I he'd had available for his own attack on the Arcanans' original infantry position. The Faraika I fired the same round as the Model 10 rifle; the Faraika II had been designed, among other things, as an anti-small boat weapon. It fired a .54 caliber round, which weighed better than three times as much as the lighter round, at an even higher muzzle velocity and with better than five times the muzzle energy. The Spitzer-pointed rounds had a range of close to four thousand yards, and the thunderous bellow as the weapon began to fire was stunning.

Even with four burly Marines heaving their full weight on the tripod, it was almost—almost—

impossible to hold the machine-gun steady against the hammering recoil, but they managed. And every fifth round was tracer. They weren't as visible in the bright morning sunlight as they might have been in poorer lighting, but chan Tesh's eye followed them as they streaked towards the dragon flying just off the leader's right wing.

Twenty-Five Berhala heard—and felt—Skyfire's harsh scream of mingled fury and pain. The dragon shuddered under him, muscles bucking and jerking again and again, but Skyfire never hesitated, never even tried to swerve. He held his course, and the crosshair blinked suddenly crimson once again.

"Sherkaya!" Berhala shouted, and another fireball ripped away. Like its immediate predecessor, it impacted directly on one of the squat, thick fortifications ... and achieved absolutely nothing.

Berhala's lips drew back in anger and frustration, but then he heard a sudden, ear-tearing shriek from his right. His head whipped up and around, rising dangerously close to the slipstream howling just above his cockpit, and his face went white as Cloudtiger's mighty wings seemed to crumple and the huge dragon slammed into the earth at almost three hundred miles per hour.

"Yes!"

Chan Tesh's fierce exclamation of satisfaction was lost in his men's baying shout of triumph. The stupendous creature hit headfirst, tumbling, rolling, broken wings flailing, and the man who'd been strapped to its back went flying like a discarded, broken doll. He hit with an impact which must literally have broken every bone in his body, and Balkar chan Tesh bared his teeth in ugly satisfaction.

It might be small enough recompense for what that dragon and its companions had already done to his command, but at least the treacherous bastards knew now that their victims still had a sting.

Berhala's mind refused to wrap itself around what had just happened. None of the training texts had ever suggested anything like what had claimed Urkora and Skyfire. Damage from ground fire, yes. Even the occasional loss of a battle dragon. But not this sudden, almost casual blotting away.

It wasn't possible—shouldn't have happened, his mind insisted. It was—

All thought of his wingman chopped off abruptly as Skyfire made a sound Berhala had never heard out of the dragon before. It was a plaintive, mournful, moaning sound, and the rhythm of the beast's wings seemed to falter suddenly as another blinking icon appeared on Berhala's visor. The image of a bloodred sword flashed before him, and his hands moved instantly, instinctively, in the control grooves.

Skyfire moaned again, but he answered to the familiar touch, banking with a suddenly frightening clumsiness he'd never before displayed. Berhala closed his eyes for a moment, lips moving in a silent prayer for his mount. Then he opened his eyes once more, looking ahead, and brought the wounded dragon in as quickly as he could.

Commander of One Hundred Horban Geyrsof watched Skyfire hit the swamp like a skipping stone in a long, ragged line of foam and mud. He stared downward, literally holding his breath, then exhaled in ragged relief as Skyfire struggled doggedly towards the nearest islet. At least the beast was still mobile.

That was a good sign; dragons tended to recover—eventually—from anything that didn't kill them outright.

Which didn't change the fact that he'd just lost a quarter of his reds, the 3012th's commanding officer reflected grimly. He'd been one dragon understrength to begin with, with only three yellows—his own Graycloud, Commander of Twenty-Five Sherlahk Mankahr's Skykill, and Commander of Fifty Nairdag Yorhan's Windslasher—to make up what should have been his third four-dragon flight. Now he was down to a total strength of only nine, and the effectiveness of the enemy's fire was dismaying, to say the very least. Especially given the battle dragons' low numbers and the time required to replace one. It would never do to say so where any of the Union's ground troops could hear him, but each of his precious battle dragons was probably as valuable at least a couple of battalions of infantry, and now they'd lost one on only their second pass at the enemy.

He glared at the looming portal. There was plenty of smoke, and not a little fire, visible through it, yet it was painfully obvious that the reds' fireballs had proved singularly ineffective against the half-buried fortifications the Sharonians had erected.

He used Graycloud's vision to sweep the enemy's positions as well as he could through all of the smoke, and his mouth tightened. Some, at least, of the Sharonians had abandoned their bunkers, obviously in order to bring their weapons to bear on Twenty-Five Berhala's flight. He didn't know how many of them were still waiting under cover, and that didn't matter at the moment. What mattered was that the enemy who could hurt his dragons had to come out into the open to do it.

He thought about sending the two surviving reds of Berhala's flight back in. They'd have easier targets this time around, and the ground fire wouldn't take them by surprise a second time. But the Sharonians were more dispersed than he'd expected. He didn't know if they'd spread out on purpose, and it didn't matter. The way they'd opened their formation would make the reds' fireballs less effective. The remaining reds could still get the job done, especially if he concentrated all of them into one attack force

—Geyrsof never doubted that—but it would take more passes, give the other side more opportunities to cost him dragons.

His eyes narrowed as he considered his options, and then he nodded in decision.

A yellow's breath weapon was the shortest ranged of all, but it also had the widest area of effectiveness.

It would take at least four passes by all of his his remaining reds to clear the exposed Sharonian personnel he could see from here, and that didn't even consider any of the enemy who remained under cover inside their infernally tough fortifications. But his three yellows could cover the entire Sharonian position in only two passes, and the very fact that their weapon was so short ranged meant that they had been provided with the thickest, toughest ventral scales of any of the dragon breeds. It left them heavier, slower—more ponderous and less nimble—then any of the others, but it also made them much, much tougher targets. Geyrsof doubted that even a yellow could survive whatever it was which had literally blown Cloudtiger out of the sky, but the chances were good that Graycloud's natural armor could defeat whatever had wounded Skyfire.

He used his helmet spellware to fire the white flare which called off the surviving members of Twenty- Five Berhala's flight. Then he fired the yellow flare which announced the attack by his own flight.

For a few minutes, chan Tesh allowed himself to hope that the shock of having one of their dragons shot right out of the air would cause the Arcanans to reconsider their aerial attacks.

He spent those minutes dashing across to join the men who'd left their bunkers. He wanted to order them back into the fortifications' protection, but he dared not. Unless they could keep the dragons off their backs somehow, even the relatively ineffectual fireball attacks would be enough to keep his bunkers pinned down while the rest of the Arcanan forces maneuvered around them.

So instead of sending them back into a position of temporary safety, he spent his time rearranging them.

Spreading them out even further to deny the enemy massed targets and allocating defensive sectors.

He wished fervently that he had more of the Faraikas. Unfortunately, he'd never had more than a single squad of the heavy-caliber IIs. That was only five weapons when it was at full strength, and he'd been one short to begin with. So he'd deployed two of them to cover each aspect of the portal.