By the time the grasser tunnels had been marked, at least five thousand militia regulars were on the ground, marching toward the zone of engagement.
Ten thousand more followed close behind.
The militia bore arms that the Grand Army of the Republic itself might envy; provided by the Separatists, which was backed by the financial might and industrial capacity of the Trade Federation and the manufacturing guilds, this armament had been financed by a generous slice of the thyssel bark trade.
Standard combat equipment for the regular militia on Haruun Kal included the Merr-Sonn BC7 medium blaster carbine with the optional rocket-grenade attachment, six antipersonnel fragmentation grenades, and the renowned close-combat trench-style vibroknife, the Merr- Sonn Devastator, as well as Opankro Graylite ceramic-fiber personal combat armor. In addition, every sixth soldier carried a backpack flame projector, and each platoon of twenty was equipped with the experiemental MM(X) dual-operated grenade mortar, also from Merr- Sonn.
Fifteen thousand regulars. Thirty-five GAVs (ground assault vehicles: converted steamcrawlers, retofitted with chemical cannons firing explosive shells in addition to their flame projectors, and high-velocity repeating slug rifles blister-mounted through their side armor).
Seventy-three Sienar Turbostorm close-assault gunships.
All this converged on the cavern base at the Lorshan Pass.
To oppose them, the Korun partisans had roughly four hundred actives, of whom two-thirds were walking wounded, and over two thousand noncombatants, consisting mainly of the elderly and the very young. They were armed with a variety of light slug rifles, a very few light and medium energy weapons, a small stockpile of grenades, two Krupx MiniMag shoulder-fired proton torpedo launchers, and one Merr-Sonn EWHB-10 heavy repeating blaster.
The partisans on Haruun Kal excelled at guerrilla operations, but they were less successful in conventional actions. In fact, in conventional engagements between regular militia and the Korunnai, the militia had crushed the partisans in every encounter. At the Lorshan Pass, they quite understandably expected not only to triumph, but to permanently break the back of the Korun resistance.
Most of the militia regulars at the Lorshan Pass never saw combat. While they were still establishing positions at the mouths of the access tunnels-before they'd so much as fired one blaster or launched a single grenade-the ground shook and the mountain roared, and mighty gusts of dirt and smoke blew out from four of the tunnel mouths.
Scouting parties-a few of the bravest enlisted men, creeping tentatively into the dark- discovered that these tunnels had been entirely sealed with uncountable tons of rock. This left the bemused militia with little to do except break out ration packs and do their best to relax, while taking turns scanning the mountain above with simple nonpowered binoculars for any signs of partisan activity.
Only one tunnel remained open. The regulars at the mouth of this tunnel had a somewhat different experience of the battle.
The detonation of the proton grenades in the other tunnels was taken by the militia unit commander as an opportunity. The tunnel his men faced was intact; he assumed this meant whatever explosives had been used for the local mines had misfired or otherwise failed to activate. He ordered his grenade mortars forward, and launched into that tunnel a number of gas grenades loaded with the nerve agent Tisyn-C.
His men were first astonished, then dismayed, as these same grenades came rocketing back out the tunnel's mouth to land in their own emplacements. Tisyn-C was heavier than air, and though their Opanko Graylite combat armor was rated to protect them from gas exposure, none of the regulars wished to test this capability with a nerve agent known to produce convulsions and dementia, followed by paralytic respiratory failure and death. As the white cloud rolled in to their improvised emplacements, the militia rolled out.
And so they were in the open, more concerned with what was among them than with what might be coming next, when they were hit by the grasser stampede.
Grassers were not bred to fight. Just the opposite, in fact: for seven hundred generations, Korunnai had bred their grassers to be docile and easily led, obedient to commands from their human handlers and their akk dog guardians, and to grow large and fat to provide plenty of milk, meat, and hide.
On the other hand, an adult grasser bull could mass over one and one half metric tons. His gripping limbs-the middle and forward pairs-were powerful enough to uproot small trees.
One of the grassers' favorite treats was brassvine thorns, which had a hardness approaching durasteel; bored grassers had been known to worry off chunks of armor from steamcrawlers.
And seven hundred generations was not all that long a span, on an evolutionary scale.
These grasser bulls had been forced into confined quarters for weeks, under incredible stress and in constant danger from each other. Today they had endured a shattering bombardment that was entirely beyond their comprehension; the most closely analogous event for which their evolutionary instincts had prepared them was a volcanic eruption. The instinctive grasser response to eruption was blind panic.
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 grassers 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.