The opening bar of the moving mix was not a cannon blast.
It was a nonstop, ear-splitting, metal ring that sounded like a million silver crystal glasses shattering against a marble floor at the exact same instant.
High along the sixty-mile rim, ninety-six self-running 75mm power-coil lances fired at the same time.
Driven by five hundred thousand volts of ice-cold zero-pushback current, the heavy dark metal barrels cycled at twelve hundred rounds per minute per battery.
A nonstop stream of hypersonic heavy dark metal micro-darts, screaming down from the bluffs at Mach three point two, tore through the morning sky.
There was no smoke.
There was no flame.
There was only a blinding web of pale-blue ionization trails that crisscrossed the valley floor like a loom of azure light.
