The shrieking of the Bio-Wyverns sounded like twenty rusted sirens plunging through the upper air.
They were ugly, bat-winged amalgams measuring twelve meters in wingspan. Their leathery flight membranes were heavy with man-made carbon-fiber mesh, their long snake-like tails ending in ribbed steering rudders. Clutched tightly within the hooked talons of each wyvern was a swollen, semi-clear living bomb. A five-hundred-two-pound sac filled with volatile bile and combustible phosphorus fluid, designed to detonate upon impact with the castle walls.
If those twenty bile bombs struck Gate 4, the entire concrete gatehouse, the ammunition reserves. The defenders on the wall would be drowned in an ocean of liquid fire.
“All anti-aircraft batteries, open fire!” Valerie Koslov shouted, her heavy mag-shotgun barking toward the sky in bone-shaking thuds.
The guard post’s twin-linked laser turrets crossed upward, their ruby beams cutting through the low clouds. But the wyverns were moving at over three hundred miles per hour, diving at an eighty-degree angle in an evasive corkscrew pattern that evaded the sluggish self-running targeting sensors.
Arthur Vance stood atop the highest watching tower, his left hand resting lightly on Pip’s golden breast feathers.
The raptor’s eyes were glowing with blinding, sun-hot bright glare. Pip’s crest feathers were flared into a crown of pure golden light. His three-meter flight primaries shook with the hum of white-hot sky air. He looked at the diving wyverns not with fear, but with the haughty, territorial fury of an ancient solar deity whose sky had been desecrated by flying…
