Honking, hooting grassers flooded from the tunnel mouth. The regulars discovered that a blaster rifle was only of marginal use against a 1,500-kilo monster crazed by an overload of stress hormones. They also discovered that limbs powerful enough to uproot small trees were easily capable of pulling a man’s legs off, and that jaws that could dent armor plate could, with a single chomp, make such a bloody mush of a man’s head that one couldn’t tell fragments of his helmet from fragments of his skull.

The regulars had better luck with their rocket-propelled fragmentation grenades. Fired from point-blank range, one of these grenades could penetrate a grasser’s torso, and its detonation inside would make a satisfyingly shredded hash of that particular grasser. And with five GAVs at hand though their turret guns could not traverse swiftly enough to track the leaping, twisting, sprinting grassers, a steady burst from one of their high-velocity slug repeaters was usually enough to drop a grasser in its tracks—the militia would have survived the grasser stampede with only an acceptable number of losses.

Would have, that is, if the grassers had not been followed by dozens of akk dogs.

Where the grassers had been panicked, acting at random, trying only to survive and escape, the akk dogs pounced like the pack-hunting predators they were: organized, intelligent, and lethal. They bounded among the militia, shredding men with their clashing teeth and breaking them with swipes of their tails. Their keen senses could often tell in an instant if a downed man was incapacitated or only faking; those soldiers who tried to play dead were soon no longer playing.

The slug repeaters of the GAVs were useless against the akks’ armored hide, and their turret guns were of even less use against the agile akks than they’d been against the blundering grassers. The infantry had nothing that could scratch them; they began to scatter, triggering the akks’ herding instincts. The akks overleaped them and slaughtered the leaders, sending the rest retreating in disorder to the killing ground at the tunnel’s mouth.

The militia unit commander, who from his post in the turret of a GAV had seen his dream of victory morph into a nightmarish massacre in less than two minutes, did the only thing he could do.

He called in an airstrike.

The gunships in action at the Lorshan Pass were still engaged in shuttling soldiers from the embarkation point at Oran Mas. When they received the unit commander’s call, at least one third were already headed in the direction of the pass. The Sienar Turbostorm was not by any means a fast ship—it could barely reach point-five past sound speed in a steep dive—but only seconds later the sky over the pass cracked open with two dozen sonic booms. The gunships shed velocity by heeling over and using their repulsorlift engines like retrothrusters. Their troop bays swung open, disgorging twenty arpitroops at a belch, then the gunships righted themselves and swooped upon the battlefield, spraying missiles from their forward batteries.

The missiles ripped into the battlefield indiscriminately, crushing akks but also shredding the soldiers they fought. The akks’ only defense against concussion missiles was evasive action, and they scattered into the trees. Seeing a chance for a daring stroke, the unit commander ordered a charge by his five GAVs: they would drive right up the tunnel ahead with his own in the lead, crushing grassers and knocking aside akk dogs. More heavily armored than the gunships above, he felt they had little to fear—a feeling which he had less than one second to regret as a pair of proton torpedoes streaked from the tunnel’s mouth and blew his GAV to scrap.

At this point, finally, the partisans deployed their one and only piece of mobile artillery: Twelve metric tons of ankkox lumbered from the mouth of the tunnel.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 18