Dragon Raid

Dragon Raid

It barely missed me.

Something small and fast streaked past my right wing, almost close enough to remove fur. I  was  in full downstroke or it would have hit me.

The squad and I were in  extreme rapport and had formed a combat gestalt. We were a battle-borg.  Before the sound of the gunshots even arrived we had  peeled out of recon formation and were diving for the ground. Swirling and fluttering  back  and forth across the sky like falling leaves we were  accelerating to terminal velocity. We fell with the speed of stooping hawks. We presented very minimal targets to the shooter overhead.

The hail of bullets that had missed us had hit  

a camouflaged enemy encampment.

Shiny!!!

Bare seconds before impacting the ground we spread our wings, and zoomed into the camp, at high speed barely off the ground.  We did a little shooting ourselves.  

***

Far,  far overhead,  a body fell.  It  screamed all the way  to the ground.  Considering the altitude it had started from, and thus the time required to fall,  the continual screaming was in some ways impressive. That rat had good lungs.  The dopplered  shriek terminated with a crackling splat as it fell through the roof of  the cook-tent.  The tent was instantly splattered red...from the inside.

 The captain of the rat-ship, far above had summarily executed his belly gunner for stupidity.

Not only had the idiot missed us, he had shot up his own camp and thus revealed it’s presence. No amount of camouflage will conceal secondary explosions from a machine gunned ammo  dump.

***

Even so...as he came screaming out of the sky That gunner almost  got me...again. I barely dodged his sorry ass.

Lamar had given us each two replicas of his six shooter, scaled down to our size, I love those guns.  I  dunno why they’re called six shooters cause they shoot way more than six shots but ...oh...well.  Anyway I was flying along about waist level to the rats who were running back and forth and having a good time shooting them when that body comes screaming in out of the sky.

“Ker-Ploop..crash and tinkle tinkle”

...it distracted me and I  flew smack into a rat.  The rat grabbed me, and there I was.  Nose to nose with a rat.  (they have bad breath).  He was holding me by my wings which left my hands free.  

Bad idea...for him.  My six guns were pointed right at his wish bone and I just pulled the triggers….many times.  

One less rat.  So I was off again...weaving and dodging thru a camp gone berserk.  Me and the boys kinda encouraged the ‘berserk’ part.  We flew all around and through that camp gathering info while we did our level best to mess it up.

We were supposed  to shoot to wound mostly.  Lamar said if we just wounded an enemy then his buddies had to take care of him so that tied up several of them.  If we killed them then they were just dead.  That seemed logical  but I never got the “wound’ part down very good. I aimed for center of mass...

Finally we ran out of ammo and pulled our Bowie Knifes.  That was even more funner and it was easier to wound rather than kill...mostly.  Rats are just full of blood and their heads aren’t stuck  on all that good...  Not when we go past them real fast and hang a blade out about neck level...to them.

I admit I was  a bad boy….so sue me.

But all  good things must come to an end.  We got the recall signal and had to go.  The party was over.   We left just like we came in.  At high speed, at knee level but in all directions.

When I got far enough away from the camp I pointed my nose straight up and headed home...  Back to Lamar.

Wouldn’t you know it...that big gallot was attacking the air ship. Actually it was a pod of airships.  Maybe it was a squadron, or a platoon, or something.  At any rate there were a bunch of them.  Lamar was taking  them all on.

Selfish Texan.  He was hogging all the fun.

Me and the boys hauled ass..we wanted in on some of that before Lamar whupped them all  We swapped out cylinders as we clawed for altitude.  When we got to the dogfight we were all reloaded.

For a big guy that Texan can sure move. He had them outnumbered...there being one of him and only ten or so of them.

Him having twin gatling guns was ruining the rats whole day. His favorite tactic was to overtake a rat airship from behind and stitch it from stern to bow along the keel.  Dead astern seemed to be a blind spot for the rat gunners and he was wreaking havoc.  He broke one of theirspines as we were watching. That airship just broke in the middle and folded upon itself.  It was helpless as it drifted away.  Oddly enough the rats had very few parachutes.

Me and the boys was getting ready to dive right into that furball when Lamar called us off.  He broke contact and gained altitude. He told us to join him.  He’s the boss so we did.  Shortly we boarded him climbing into  the passenger bay along his underside.