Cannon On The Hills

It was a beautiful day. The sun shone off the river far below, making it shimmer red-gold, reflecting the setting sun. The hills were lit in similar hues, trees and grass mixing into harvest brown. And on the hills, long steel barrels glinted in the colors of the sunset.

There were four of them. They were cannon, of a sort, but they were to field cannon what the hummingbird is to the mythical roc. Each of them stretched half a mile, along the hillside, tunneling through or raised above the hill, straighter than an arrow. They fired only once every hour, on the hour - booming out in a rippling thunder, but men bustled around them constantly, cleaning them, loading in another of the five-foot shells, calibrating the barrels minutely to adjust for wind, target distance, the curvature of the Earth. The shells were works of art, designed to follow the spin of the rifling in the immense cannon as they were sped to several thousand mph by consecutive, precisely placed charges, and then to ignite steering rockets on their bases to land precisely on the target from a hundred miles away. Men rushed to deliver the last shells, firing as the sun set over the horizon. A rolling boom ushered it over, and twilight fell as the noise settled and the shells fell whistling through the sky.

Seven minutes and twenty-four seconds later, four shells screamed across the sky, rockets burning. They crashed into a fortress with five-foot-thick concrete walls, noses compressing and buckling as they crashed through. Jolting to a spinning stop, the shells blew three more, thinner walls before finally coming to a tumbling stop. The rockets ran out of fuel, and, slowly, the shells cracked open. Four men stepped out.

Their leader was dressed in full combat armor: Aluminium plate, reinforced with steel and ceramics, just like the rest of his men. A pistol hung at his hip, and he unsheathed a longsword from the baldric on his back as he unfolded himself from the cramped confines of the shell. His hair was black and greased, perfectly ordered. He called out to his men (where their shells had landed, feet or yards away) "All right! In and out, just like the nunnery in Vienna!" Lieutenant Commander Edward A. Zhang was in his element, and it was good.

The fortress was in utter disarray in the wake of the attack. Men ran everywhere, seeming to have no idea of what they should be doing. Some pointed at Zhang's men, but none took any action to stop them. They trotted onward in their shining aluminium plate, ignoring office mess and armories alike. After they'd climbed three stories by the stairways distributed unevenly across the fortress, someone had managed to coordinate well enough to try to stop them: a barricade of office furniture closed off the fourth floor stairway, manned by panicked looking soldiers. Edward's men approached them without concern, swords in hand. Some of the soldiers tried to stop them; lightning blasts crackled through the air, absorbed and grounded easily by the aluminum plate. Not one hair on Lieutenant Zhang's head was out of place as he vaulted the barricade and ran up the stairs three at a time.

Their objective was on the fifth floor. They burst into an office, ignoring the indignant secretary (who seemed not to realize that they were on the other side of the war) and, to the resident general's shock, lifted up his entire desk and carried it out of the room. Two of them jogged, still traveling upwards, carrying the massive desk - the other two, Lieutenant Zhang included, now held a sword in each hand.

Robots attacked, and were chopped to bits without difficulty.

On the roof, a large aircraft sat waiting, squatting on four piston-like legs. Zhang's team jogged in, still carrying the general's desk laden with papers. Zhang turned to look out the cargo hatch as he entered, posed dramatically in the evening light, armor gleaming magnificently; then he closed it with a swift gesture, and was lost to sight. The craft tensed, legs withdrawing, then leapt into the air as jets fired bursts of white-hot flame. Wings extended from the sides, and the troopship bellied out low over the outer wall, shooting a foot over the heads of the soldiers stationed there and then off into the gathering night.

It was increasingly clear, from the perspective of Edward A. Zhang's enemies, that something would have to be done about the cannons.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: It is actually utterly impossible to transport humans in such a manner. But it sounds just cool enough for me to write a story about it.