Chapter 297 - 290:The Me262 weapons
"Kessin."
"Yes sir"The technician immediately turned to brakka
Get the weapons up."
The technician sprang up and went to fetch the weapons.
The heavy rotary gun came up on a low trolley, its cold steel six-barrel cluster gleaming under the grease, and slid into the housing beneath the nose.
Then came the ammunition chain — ammunition hand to hand down a line of three men, the brass links clanking rhythmically, the count called out as each section fed in.
"Forty-one."
"Forty-one in."
"Forty-two."
"Forty-two in."
Near the end, the armor-technician lying on his back under the nose stopped merely nodded, his face smeared with grease, until Brakka barked at him from the wing root.
"Two hundred and fifty," the man grunted.
"Two hundred and fifty. Tray full, hinged, locked,the ammunition is full."
Brakka got down on his knees and inspected the latching mechanism himself before anyone was allowed to stand up.
Then came the pods came out of the armory shed under heavy waxed canvas. Two meters long and thick as a oak trunk — a drum of eight steel tubes set in a ring, open at both ends. Four men to lift one pod, two more to steady the wing loading hardpoints while the pins were driven.
One under the port wing. One under the starboard.
"What are those things under the wings?" Lucas asked, squinting against the harsh sun.
Brakka didn’t look up from torqueing the mounting bolts. "Wait a while and see for yourself."
They loaded the rockets from the rear, one tube at a time, walking round the ring. Eighty-millimeter, each rocket as long as a man’s forearm, finished in dull grey primer with a blunt nose fuse.
"Sixteen," Kessin called out, slapping the launcher casing. "Eight a side. Seated, pinned, safety wire pulled,rockets ready sir."
"Then everybody get clear of the airframe."
The target range lay eight miles north, tucked into a sheer limestone valley Cedric had surveyed months ago. The targets had been standing in the dust for a week.
Four hundred dummies lined the valley floor, arranged in tight ranks four deep, spaced the exact way infantry march on a cobblestone road. Stuffed with straw over rough timber frames. From two hundred meters away, they looked enough like living men that the carpenters who built them had hated every hour of the work.
At the head of the valley sat six full-scale siege engines. Two iron-shod rams, three mobile siege towers, and a massive trebuchet. Built out of heavy timber.
Behind them stood forty wooden carts loaded with heavy earth sacks, drawn up tightly in the formation of a halted supply column.
On the eastern flank, set apart on their own ridge, stood eleven heavy armor plates mounted in timber frames at forty-five degrees — cut straight from the metallurgical batches intended for a Warhound’s armored hull.
"Nobody out there has tanks," Malen had remarked, watching the crane hoist the heavy steel plates into place days ago.
"No. That is precisely why they are useful." Brakka had tapped a wrench against a frame. "That plate is one of the hardest alloy anyone in this world knows how to forge. If a thirty-millimeter round goes through it, there is nothing a demon can wear, ride, or hide behind that it will not shred." He knocked his knuckles against two specific frames. "These two are doubled. I want to know where the tungsten stops."
Tomas took off at half past eleven, engine roaring as he climbed hard to the north. He reached five thousand meters in under four minutes, a speck against the pale sky.
Then rolled the aircraft onto her back, pulled the stick through, and dropped the nose straight through the horizon.
The engine note shifted violently as she went into the dive, rising higher and harder until it became a screaming whine that made every man at the observation post lean back against the mud wall.
Two rockets snapped off the port pod at eight hundred meters, half a second apart, trailing thick plumes of blinding white smoke.
BOOOM. BOOOM.
Two towering columns of pulverized earth exploded sixty meters short of the primary siege ram. The aircraft was already pulling out, wings flexing hard as she climbed back into the blue before the debris even hit the ground.
"Short by sixty feet" said the observer, his brass glass fixed on the dirt craters.
Tomas’s voice crackled down through the signal set, sharp and clipped.
"Short by sixty feet.She’s dropping fast in the dive. By the time the rockets cleared the rails, the airframe was lower than when I took the mark. The sight tells me where the nose is pointing right now. It doesn’t account for the drop half a second later." A pause over the static. "I have to aim above the target and let the arc fall into it."
Second pass. Sight held a full length high over the target. Four rockets ripped from the starboard pod.
BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM
The warheads walked across the ram. One detonated directly beneath the chassis, tearing upward through the heavy oak structure. Shattered timber blew forty meters sideways into the air.
When the dust drifted off on the valley wind, four overlapping craters scarred the ground. The ram lay broken in two halves, the forward assembly crushed flat on its side.
"That is a ram out of the war," the observer muttered, lowering his glass.
Third pass. The trebuchet. All eight remaining rockets in a single, continuous ripple.
BOOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOM-BOOOOM
The impacts arrived too fast to separate the blasts into individual sounds. The entire upper end of the valley erupted into a wall of flash and white smoke.
It took nearly a minute for the haze to clear.
Where the giant siege engine had stood, eight craters formed a neat, jagged line running straight through the firing position. The trebuchet itself had ceased to exist; splintered oak lay scattered sixty meters in every direction. The massive iron counterweight had punched straight through its own frame and sat buried in a hole of its own making.
"Sixteen rockets," Maerath said, checking the stopwatch and his clipboard. "Three passes. Ninety seconds total."
"How long to rearm sixteen more?" Lucien asked.
"Twenty minutes on the ground. Assuming the crew is drilled."
Lucas jotted the numbers down without taking his eyes off the valley.
Then came the gun.
Tomas came round from the south, banking low over the terrain, lining up the four hundred dummies along the valley floor.
The six-barrel cluster under the nose spun up to speed with a terrifying mechanical whine.
BRRRRRRRRRRRT
One and a half seconds. Spent brass casings tumbled out of the aircraft’s belly in a golden stream, raining down onto the rock below.
The line of high-explosive impacts walked down the infantry ranks faster than the eye could track. The dummies didn’t simply fall over; they disintegrated where they stood. Wood, sacking, and dirt blew outward in an eight-meter-wide swath of destruction along the full two-hundred-meter formation.
Then the nose pulled up, the aircraft climbed out, and the thunderous roar of the rotary cannon chased her across the ridge.
"How much of the belt used?" Lucien asked.
"About a third," Maerath replied.
Malen raised his field glass, sweeping it slowly along the shredded remains of the infantry formation.
The armor plates were last.
Tomas swept in from the east in a shallow, high-speed dive, inline with the target line.
BRRRRRRRT
Eleven heavy plates struck in half a second. Blinding streams of sparks erupted from the steel line, tossing molten debris into the air. One heavy plate slammed backward so hard in its timber mounting that the frame collapsed entirely.
The aircraft circled once more, engine throttled back, before Tomas checked in over the wireless:
"Woohooo That is the amazing. All of it. Two hundred and fifty rounds, four bursts. I am now flying an unarmed aircraft. Write that down as well."
By one o’clock, the command staff walked the range.
The heavy ram was splintered wood and twisted iron. The trebuchet was gone. Two of the siege towers had been shattered by secondary blast waves. The supply train remained untouched only because the rockets had run out before Tomas could line up on them.
The infantry dummies were the site nobody wanted to linger near.
Malen walked the length of the shredded formation with a wooden tally board, marking down destroyed targets. He walked all the way back in silence.
"Two hundred and eleven."
"Two hundred and eleven out of four hundred. One pass, one and a half seconds of trigger time." Malen lowered the board. "And he never flew within four hundred meters of anything on this field that could have shot back at him."
Further up the slope, Brakka stood at the steel plates.
Lucien found him crouched beside the fourth target, his thick, grease-stained fingers pushed entirely through a clean hole in the armor steel.
"Well?"
"Through. Nine of the eleven. Clean entry and exit." Brakka hauled the frame around so Lucien could see the back. The exit hole was twice the size of the entry, the steel peeled back in jagged, petal-like spikes. "That is Warhound hull plate."
"And the double plates?"
"Punched through the first. Stopped cold halfway into the second." Brakka stood up, wiping his hands on an oiled rag. "So now we know the threshold. And where it stops is a long way past anything a body can wear into battle."
"And the rockets?"
"The rockets aren’t a ballistics question." Brakka gestured back toward the burning craters at the top of the valley. "An eighty-millimeter high-explosive warhead doesn’t care what alloy your armor is made of. It simply deletes the ground the armor was standing on."
Aurethar had walked down the firing line and was staring at the punched steel plates, his arms crossed, touching nothing.
"You have all been standing here for an hour talking about the front of a tank."
Lucien and Brakka both turned around.
"I have never once attacked anything from the front," Aurethar said, his voice cold and flat. "Nothing that flies does." He poked a finger into the entry hole of the fourth plate, then pulled it back. "You come out of the sun, you take the top of it, and you are gone."
"How many of them fly well?" Lucien asked.
"More than you would like." Aurethar looked up the valley toward the lingering black smoke hovering over the crater line. "They will be over your columns at an hour of their choosing. And they will be looking straight down at the thinnest part of everything you own."
Lucien stood in the quiet valley for a long moment, watching the dust settle over the ruined siege engines.
"Malen."
"My lord."
"Put it in the operational doctrine immediately. Every convoy, every column, every supply train that moves anywhere — in our territory or beyond it — carries dedicated anti-air escort. Not parked back at the depot. Moving with the column, crewed, loaded, and tracking the sky from the minute it departs to the minute it halts."
"That means a Vulcan mounted on a heavy chassis at the front and rear of every single column."
"Then that is what it means."
"It is also a massive number of rotary guns," Malen noted smoothly. "And Ironhold’s foundries are already operating at—"
"I know what it costs." Lucien didn’t look away from the smoldering target field. "A supply column with nothing pointing at the sky is just a parade of targets waiting to be dismantled while every soldier in it is staring at the dirt road ahead."
Malen pulled his ledger from his coat and wrote it down. "Every column. From the hour it moves."
"And I want it drilled until it’s second nature," Lucien added, turning back toward the observation post. "I want crews who are comfortable sitting behind a live gun that never fires — for weeks on end, in the mud, on roads where nothing has ever happened. Because the first time something does come out of the clouds, they will have four seconds. They will either already be looking up, or they won’t live long enough to try."