Goliath Was Unlucky
Morrigan’s encampment, the Black Hill four miles from Lanark
During the day (before the meeting that Cooper stormed out of) twenty, five-man crews had surrounded Black Hill with their AS90 Braveheart self-propelled howitzers from far enough back to be out of sight, or so they thought, digging themselves in as General Franklin Quinn looked on in amusement from miles away in Morrigan’s camp, with no need for binoculars.
As night fell, and the moon crept behind heavy rain clouds, the bombardment started. The twenty howitzers firing at a rate of a shell every three-seconds, the loaders working furiously fast, sweat lashing off of their brows.
The 155mm projectiles arced high in the air, travelling at a mile a second, their trajectory set to take them under the flying monsters and strike at the periphery of Morrigan’s army.
At the same time, twelve battalions (some six thousand troops) were mounting an assault from the other side of her camp.
They were relying on the distraction of the artillery assault and firing smoke grenades to get them over the open ground, where there was little or no cover.
As the shells rained down, the massive dragons dived to intercept them, explosions bursting against their thick hides with all the impact of flicking peas against a brick wall.
The guns boomed over and over, as the boobrie ravens snatched shells out of the air, flapping their giant wings, squawking painfully loudly as they swooped down, dropping them on the big guns they came from with pinpoint accuracy, the explosions blowing soldiers high into the air.
Meanwhile, the troops attacking her encampment were being slaughtered methodically and mercilessly, despite being armed with bazookas, grenade launchers and their normal hand weapons.
All six thousand of them died within minutes, only taking one hundred and seventeen of her thralls with them.
A squadron of Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II jets roared out of the clouds firing air-to-surface missiles, targeting the throne, but the rockets hit a solid wall of dragons to little or no effect.
The boobrie dived from behind them, crushing the fuselages in their massive claws and snapping the planes in half. Most of the pilots ejected, but the birds gobbled them right up, parachutes, ejector seats and all.
As more British soldiers surged forward ten regiments, (some fifty-thousand) of Morrigan’s thralls surrounded the town in a pincer movement, closing off all escape routes.
A bloody battle of gun and grenade versus sword and axe erupted on the outskirts of the town, only lasting for a few minutes and forcing the soldiers to retreat, leaving the battlefield littered with the dead and the dying, fifty of theirs to every one of hers.
Minutes earlier, General Alcott-Browne had stood stunned in his command-and-control centre as he watched an aerial view of a petite blonde woman kill ten heavily armed soldiers single-handedly and still fight on, apparently unhurt.
She was under five foot tall, which made claymores and battle axes unwieldy due to them being longer than she was, so she used two, twelve-inch long dirks instead to devastating effect.
Moving in a blur of speed, she sheathed one dagger on her belt, broke the barrel off of an SA80 assault rifle barehanded and embedded the jagged end in the owner’s chest. A burst of semi-automatic gunfire hit her stingingly in the back. She whirled around, pulled the dirk back out and leapt fifteen feet in one bound to decapitate the soldier who fired at her by clashing both of her blades together from either side of his neck. The picture cut off abruptly when a boobrie swallowed the broadcasting drone.
A warlock by Morrigan’s side had cast a spell that allowed her to see everything through the boobrie, night-vision eyes, and it emotionally draining and satisfying, watching pain and death was better than sex for her.
The command-and-control centre fell silent as the monitors switch to black, “SIGNAL LOST” lettering over snowy screens one at a time, the ten soldiers who sat there were almost happy, as at least they didn’t have to look on helplessly as their comrades were massacred.
A brick hurled through the big window at the far end, shattering the silence as glass showered into the room, followed seconds later by the witch Tracy McInally flying on her broomstick.
She was a dumpy, middle-aged woman wearing a fancy dress witch’s costume, complete with pointy hat that she’d bought online and had worn to Halloween parties for the last few years. Even though she’d always felt that she was a witch, nobody was more surprised than her when she found out she was actually right.
The solders jumped to their feet and drew their sidearms as she pulled her willow wand from a pocket in her long dress, dropped the broom, and shouted, “neo-stuthach!” As she waved it.
She immediately became intangible, the volley of bullets going right through her, riddling the wall behind, she filed her nails with a bored expression on her face as she hoped the ammunition would run out before the spell did.
There was a lull as they reloaded, “I’ve no intention of hurting you and now that you know you can’t hurt me can I say something?” she said with an annoying smirk on her face.
She was praying (and not to Morrigan) that they wouldn’t shoot again as the flying and intangibility spells had stretched her abilities to their limits, which was why she’d had to break-in the ordinary way.
Alcott-Browne signalled the soldiers to lower their weapons as she started to speak again, “I’m going to reach into my pocket slowly to fetch a piece of paper, so don’t go getting trigger happy and wasting your bullets on a target you can’t hit,” she bluffed as she pulled a scroll from her skirt.
“This is a pronouncement from the supreme Celtic goddess of war,” she said as she unrolled it, clearing her throat before reading the contents out loud. Morrigan had dictated it to a scribe as only those chosen by her druids were now allowed to read and write, on penalty of combat to the death… as always, but mages were exempt from that rule. She struggled with the pronunciation of some of the archaic words.
“Thou shalt delivereth the warlock Callum Cooper unto me afore the sun riseth on the morrow or I shalt crusheth thee neath mine boots. Short and to the point, I’m sure you’ll agree,” she said as she threw the scroll onto the floor at the general’s feet before struggling to mount the broomstick again without showing too much leg. Once she was ready, she flew back out of the window, trying a witchy cackle as she went that wasn’t as successful as she’d hoped.
It was an hour later when Major Ross knocked on the general’s door, opening it when he heard, “Enter!” from the other side. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Alcott-Browne looking like he’d never seen him before: he’d loosened his tie and taken his jacket off, a nearly full bottle of whisky lay on the desk as he downed his drink and took another glass from his drawer, pouring two generous measures, “Well?” He said, pushing one glass over to Ross as he signalled him to sit.
“No sign of Cooper anywhere,” he said, taking a sip.
“The Coward’s run away then, just as I thought he would!”
“Still, I don’t suppose it really matters,” Ross said, “she didn’t bring an army of a quarter of a million just to get one man. I don’t care how powerful he is, that’s just ridiculous. They’d still roll over us, even if we gave him up.
“I’ve just been talking to GHQ, they say that extraction isn’t on the cards,” Alcott-Browne said, his voice slurring after he drained his glass.
“Do you think the Sloane woman is right about this so-called goddess having close to 500,000 followers back in Edinburgh by now?” Ross said, before finishing his drink and putting it down for a refill as the general topped up his own, “That’s what they believe down south, they calculate that her thralls, as Sloane calls them, could run here in half-an-hour, if reinforcements are needed, which doesn’t seem likely,” Alcott-Browne said, taking another drink.
“And they went to great pains to point out that she hasn’t been wrong, yet,” he paused for a moment then laughed, “much as I hate to admit it, the coward Cooper was right about one thing, I was burying my head in the sand, reality was just too absurd for me to handle.”
“So they’re not going to help us?” Ross said, still waiting for a refill.
“I’ve been told that there aren’t enough soldiers left in the whole country to come to our aid, our orders are to stop them here, at all costs. Jesus Christ! Over 250,000 soldiers, each one the human equivalent of a Chieftain tank on legs, who the hell could stop that?”