Rise of the Horde - Chapter 772 - 771

Valden lost his third rider on the twenty-fifth night.

The dive was clean. The approach was textbook. The high-altitude release from fifteen hundred feet, the adaptation that the shamans’ atmospheric compression had forced, placed the frost bolt on the trajectory that fifteen hundred feet of descent and the compressed air layer’s deflection combined to produce. The bolt struck the ammunition wagon behind the battery position at the angle that the high-altitude release dictated. The thermal detonation began. The wagon cracked.

The boomstick fire that rose to meet the climbing griffon after the release was the boomstick fire that twenty-five nights of attacks had trained the barbarian anti-air defense to produce: sixty weapons aimed at the climbing beast’s trajectory, the balls rising in the converging pattern that sixty boomsticks’ spread produced when sixty shooters aimed at the same target.

Sir Corwyn’s griffon took seven balls.

The first struck the left wing’s leading edge armor and deflected. The second struck the saddle’s rear guard and penetrated, lodging in the griffon’s lower spine. The third through seventh struck the griffon’s unarmored belly in the cluster that sixty boomsticks’ convergence produced when the beast’s climbing angle exposed the belly to the shooters below.

The griffon’s wings locked. The spinal wound’s neurological disruption severed the nerve pathways that connected the beast’s brain to its wing muscles. The wings, extended in the climbing position, froze in the extended configuration, the muscles no longer receiving the neural signals that the muscles required for the rhythmic contraction that flight demanded.

The griffon fell. Not dove. Fell. The specific uncontrolled descent that a twelve-hundred-pound animal produced when the animal’s flight capability ceased and gravity became the only force acting on the mass. The wings, locked in the extended position, provided the aerodynamic resistance that slowed the fall from vertical to the angled glide that locked wings produced, the glide carrying the beast and its rider three hundred paces south of the battery position before the altitude’s exhaustion produced the ground contact.

Sir Corwyn’s frost dome activated on impact. The dome held for six minutes, the knight’s Fifth Realm reserves providing the sustained energy that the dome’s maintenance required. The barbarian infantry that converged on the crash site found the dome and waited. Six minutes of waiting. The dome cracked. The infantry closed.

Sir Corwyn fought for forty seconds. His sword found two barbarian warriors before the third warrior’s boomstick fired at point-blank range and the ball struck the knight’s visor and the visor failed and the ball entered the knight’s face.

* * * * *

Valden received the loss through the communication crystal’s terminated signal. The second signal to terminate in seventeen days. The second silence where a rider’s presence had been.

Two griffons. Two riders. Two sceptres. Against fifteen thundermaker batteries that the night’s work had not yet addressed because the night’s work had been interrupted by the loss that the night’s boomstick fire had produced.

Valden looked at his remaining rider. Sir Harath. Twenty-three years old. Three months out of the Griffon Knight academy’s advanced course. The youngest qualified griffon knight in the order’s current roster. The rider whose combat experience consisted entirely of the twenty-five nights of the guerrilla campaign that had killed two of his squadron mates and that would continue killing until the thundermaker count reached the threshold or the squadron reached zero, whichever came first.

“Sir Harath.”

“Baron.”

“We continue.”

“I know, Baron.”

“The thundermaker count is sixteen. The threshold is fifteen. One more. One more thundermaker battery destroyed and the count reaches fifteen and the mathematics change and the army’s numerical advantage becomes the decisive factor.”

“One more.”

“One more dive. One more frost bolt. One more ammunition wagon. The kingdom’s survival is one dive away.”

Harath’s face carried the expression that twenty-three-year-old knights produced when the knight understood that the mission’s next sortie might be the sortie that ended the knight’s life and that the understanding did not change the mission’s requirement.

“I am ready, Baron.”

“I know you are.”

The two griffons climbed into the predawn sky. Two beasts. Two riders. One more thundermaker to destroy. The threshold was one dive away.

The compressed air layer was present above the battery positions, the Seventh Circle shamans’ atmospheric manipulation sustaining the anti-griffon defense that had reduced the dive’s effectiveness and increased the dive’s risk. The compressed layer extended from ground level to fifteen hundred feet, the same dimensions that the previous nights’ encounters had established.

Valden and Harath climbed above the compressed layer and surveyed the battery positions below. Sixteen thundermakers arranged in four battery concentrations of four weapons each. The ammunition wagons behind the concentrations visible in the moonlight as the rectangular shapes that the wagons’ canvas covers produced.

“Eastern concentration,” Valden said. “Four weapons. One wagon. I take the wagon. You provide the covering fire on the anti-air defense. Your frost bolt into the boomstick positions while I dive.”

“The covering fire exposes me to the boomstick response.”

“The covering fire’s purpose is to suppress the boomstick response that my dive generates. Your exposure is the thing that reduces my exposure. The exchange is the exchange.”

“I understand, Baron.”

The exchange was the exchange that commanders described when the commander’s plan required one element to accept risk so that another element could accomplish the objective. The risk was real. The exchange was necessary. The objective was one ammunition wagon.

Harath dove first. His frost bolt struck the boomstick positions around the eastern battery concentration at the high-altitude release point, the bolt’s thermal detonation scattering the anti-air shooters with the ice shrapnel that the frost bolt’s impact on the ground produced. The scattering was temporary. Four seconds. The shooters would recover and redirect their fire at Valden’s diving griffon.

Valden dove during the four seconds. His griffon folded its wings and dropped through the compressed air layer, the thick atmosphere slowing the dive to seventy percent of the uncompressed speed, the dive’s duration extended by the atmospheric density. The boomstick shooters recovered from Harath’s frost bolt’s scattering and looked up and found Valden’s griffon descending toward the ammunition wagon at the reduced speed that the compressed air produced.

Thirty boomsticks fired. The balls rose. The compressed air’s density affected the balls’ trajectories as well as the griffon’s, the thicker atmosphere slowing the balls’ ascent and reducing their velocity at the altitude where the balls and the griffon intersected. The reduced velocity reduced the balls’ kinetic energy. The reduced kinetic energy reduced the balls’ ability to penetrate the griffon’s armor.

A ball struck Valden’s griffon in the chest armor. The armor held. The griffon’s dive continued. A ball struck Valden’s left gauntlet and the gauntlet’s dwarven iron deflected the ball away from the hand within. The dive continued.

The frost bolt fired at four hundred feet. Higher than the optimal release altitude. Higher than the accuracy that the target required. But the compressed air’s effect on the griffon’s flight stability at lower altitudes made four hundred feet the lowest altitude that the dive’s trajectory could sustain without the griffon’s damaged wing armor disrupting the flight path beyond the targeting’s tolerance.

The bolt struck the ground eight paces from the ammunition wagon. The thermal detonation’s radius reached the wagon. The wagon’s outermost ammunition cracked. The chain reaction propagated inward. The wagon detonated.

Four thundermakers silenced.

Fifteen thundermakers remaining.

The threshold.

Valden’s griffon climbed through the compressed air, the wings straining against the atmospheric density, the beast’s flight muscles producing the maximum effort that the muscles’ exhaustion and the spinal-wound awareness that the beast’s own body’s proximity to its fallen squadron mate’s fate provided. The griffon climbed because the griffon was a griffon and griffons climbed because climbing was what griffons did when the rider pulled the reins upward and the rider was pulling the reins upward because the rider needed to survive the climb to report the number that the dive had produced.

Fifteen.

The number that changed the mathematics. The number that the Baron of Frost’s twenty-five-day guerrilla campaign had been grinding toward since the first dive on the first night after Harken Field. The number that converted the barbarian army’s thundermaker advantage from the decisive advantage that made seventeen thousand competitive with forty-two thousand into the supporting advantage that made seventeen thousand capable but not decisive against forty-two thousand.

“Fifteen,” Valden said, as the griffon cleared the compressed air layer and the clean atmosphere’s lift restored the wings’ full capability. “The threshold.”

“The threshold,” Harath confirmed.

The two griffons flew south toward the Threian positions. Two riders. Two griffons. The survivors of the squadron that had numbered twelve at the campaign’s start and that numbered two at the moment the campaign’s objective was achieved.

The dawn came. The thundermaker count was fifteen. The mathematics had changed.

The war’s next battle would be different.