Then something he said made Zafirah wheel away abruptly. He caught her by the arm. He turned her back round. His head bent to hers and his voice dropped to an inaudible whisper.
David watched as Zafirah leaned in with her ear close to Steven's mask-veiled mouth — intimately close. He watched as Steven murmured to her, still holding her. He watched her body start to unstiffen. She relaxed. He thought, although he was too far away to be sure, that she even smiled.
And now he thought, or imagined he thought, that Steven's hand was caressing Zafirah's hair.
And now he imagined, or thought he imagined, that Zafirah was pressing her cheek against Steven's face. Had the mask not been there, this would have been a kiss. A lingering touch of lips to cheek. Even with the mask it was still a kiss, of sorts.
Then Zafirah was walking away, confidence restored. She strode straight past David's place of concealment. She didn't see him. He didn't make his presence known. She disappeared down the footpath. Steven turned and ducked in through the command post entrance.
David slumped to the ground, his sake-soused brain struggling to digest what he had just witnessed. It couldn't have been what it had appeared to be, and yet it couldn't have been anything else. Steven and Zafirah in a clinch. Well, not quite a clinch, but as near as made no difference. An embrace too close to be that of just-friends. She had been unsure about something, and Steven had soothed her, as tenderly as a lover would, and they had parted with a kiss.
And where had the pair of them been immediately before that conversation? Indoors? In the command post? Alone together? Was that why Zafirah had needed soothing? To set her mind at ease over something that had happened in there? Something they had done?
It was all leading to one conclusion. David kept trying to reinterpret the evidence, direct it onto a more innocent track. Again and again it steered itself inexorably back towards that same conclusion.
His head swam. The rim of the sun crested the horizon, Ra on the rise. He wanted to get up, go and confront his brother. His eyelids were as heavy as old sash windows. The hard earth felt extraordinarily comfortable beneath him, soft as a feather bed. Steven, the liar. Steven, the traitor. The dawn sky was red. Blood of Apophis, shed by Set. Just a few minutes' rest. Steven, the devious, selfish bastard. Fucked her. Fucker.
''Fkrrr,'' David mumbled, and lapsed into unconsciousness.
And came awake to the scream of jets and the crackle of explosions. A Nephthysian Locust passed a couple of hundred of feet overhead, its roar making the whole of Mount Megiddo tremble. Cluster bombs tumbled from its wings. Rippling patches of ba swelled and popped across the plain like blisters.
David scrambled to his feet, suddenly and brutally sober.
Battle had begun.
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.