The Age of Ra

25. Bombardment

Cluster bombs were a notoriously imprecise and inaccurate form of antipersonnel hardware. Each tennis-ball-sized bomblet had so little mass that it tended to float down rather than fall and was subject to the whims and vagaries of the wind. The primary purpose of cluster bombs, over and above than the taking of life, was to cause panic and disarray. This, at Megiddo, they did not achieve. The Lightbringer's forces were so thinly spread out that the hails of bomblets mostly missed. Crops were destroyed but precious few people. The Freegyptians were amazed and relieved, and consequently kept their nerve. As the planes rumbled into the distance, they steadied themselves to meet them on their next run. The Scarab tanks lofted their blaster nozzles. The Anubian C39s took to the air.

On their second sortie the Locusts were joined by some weightier air cavalry, a brace of Russian-made Typhon bombers backed up by three Serpent attack helicopters, also from Russia. The Typhons, named after the strange doglike beast that was symbolic of Set, were fat, cumbersome things that looked about as likely to get airborne as bumblebees. But then their role wasn't to flit around and look elegant. It was to carry fusion warheads. Lots of them. And deliver them.

The Locusts bombarded the Lightbringer's lines again, but this time the Scarab tanks were ready. Ba spat into the sky in rippling four-shot sequence from their blaster nozzle quartets. The heavy-calibre machine guns were also brought to bear. Tracer rounds marked the trajectory of their bullets in lines of glowing dots, much like the patterns made by the tanks' phased ba fire. The air above the plain was filled with criss-crossing stitches of light, and not all the Locusts came through it unscathed. Planes reeled away with wings and tails alight. One spun cartwheel-fashion, crashing into the side of the valley. Another hurtled past Mount Megiddo and pancaked explosively on the far side, ploughing a fiery furrow through fields.

The Typhons entered the fray shortly afterwards, with their Serpent escorts strafing the ground madly, trying to clear a path for them through the thickets of flak. By this time, however, the C39s were aloft and out for blood. Squadron Leader Nonomura and his men closed in on the Serpents and…

… the only word David could think of to describe it as he looked on from the mountaintop…

… pulverised them.

The Serpents never stood a chance. The C39s took them out with almost arrogant ease. Beams of black ba knocked out their tail rotors, sending them into a terminal spin. Heat-seeking missiles finished them off, like the punchline to a cruel joke.

The Anubians then turned their attention on the Typhons. Thicker armour made the bombers a tougher proposition than the Serpents. So did dedicated defensive gunnery.

The leading Typhon already had its bomb bay doors open and was starting to empty its payload onto the plain below. Two of the C39s attacked its flanks. Red ba sparked from the bomber's mid-fuselage blaster turrets. One of the helicopters bulged with scarlet brilliance and disintegrated. The shielding on the other held out, and it retaliated with a ba bolt of its own that blew the offending turret, and the gunner within, to smithereens.

A third C39 — and somehow David knew it was Nonomura's — tackled the Typhon head-on, flying in reverse and disgorging vast amounts of ba and rocketry at the plane. Anubians did not have access to fusion weaponry, being under the aegis of only one god, not two. But what they lacked in quality of destructive capability, they made up for in quantity. The sheer amount of firepower emanating from the gunship was breathtaking, an almost solid barrage of conventional ordnance and divine essence leaping from it to the front of the Typhon. Bit by bit the bomber's nosecone was flayed, metal skin flaking off in shards till the ribs of the airframe showed through. Its windshield shattered, turning from clear glass to white ice. The Typhon lumbered on, but its bombs were no longer falling. It itself was falling, gradually and inexorably losing height and speed. The C39 continued to hammer at it all the way down, till the Typhon, now rotating around its longitudinal axis, scraped the ground with one wingtip and instantly slammed flat onto its nose, teetered, then keeled over onto its back with a tremendous, dust-billowing thump. Nonomura's C39 sprang triumphantly away into the sky.

The second Typhon, similarly harried by Anubians, tried to get out of its predicament by gaining altitude. This, though, enticed a C39 to nip in under it and blast upwards at its belly. A shot penetrated into the bomb bay. What happened next was as inevitable as it was spectacular. A huge tonnage of Setic-Nephthysian fusion warheads ignited at once. The ensuing ball of light spanned a quarter of a mile in diameter, scarlet shot through with shimmering bands and vortices of purple. The ball erupted then contracted in the space of a couple of seconds, engulfing not only the Typhon but the C39 that had triggered the blast and also another of the helicopters that had been attacking the bomber. What remained, after the dazzling sphere was gone and the echoes of its deafening detonation had faded, was a surprisingly small amount of debris and wreckage, which rained down to earth, trailing ribbons of smoke.

The Locusts returned in a third and final wave but were warier this time around, chastened by the punishment they had taken previously. They came in at greater altitude, which further hampered their accuracy. They dropped whatever was left beneath their wings to drop, then hightailed for home, with the four surviving C39s giving chase. Nonomura's men secured three more kills before the much faster jets poured on speed and disappeared over the horizon.

David, still blinking to clear the gibbous blue afterimage of the exploding Typhon from his vision, surveyed the scene. As the smoke that shrouded the plain thinned, he saw carnage. He saw bodies spilled around patches of scorched ground. He saw a Scarab tank cracked open, eviscerated, like a beetle crushed underfoot. But, to his eyes, the damage seemed considerably less significant than it could have been. The troops were still in their lines. There were still four C39s left, now descending, their vanes making whorls in the smoke. The Nephthysians had tried their damnedest, but the Lightbringer's army had held out.

If only he hadn't known that the air raid was only the beginning. A softening-up exercise.

A ground assault was on its way, soon. Very soon.