Apparently it wasn't the only gift we'd pulled out of Nordland. We'd gotten a set of shiny new weapons with our newly-outfitted mammoth, and someone had prepared an executive summery so we knew the rudiments of what was going on in them.

             It turned out that one of Edridge's major occupations... aside from going on secret missions that were related to the Kringle op... was directing the research team that studied how Kringle had made animals fly. Actually, I got the impression, from the way he talked to the people on his team, that he had only recently been promoted. But one thing you could say in favor of guys like Edridge was that they tended to take control of unfamiliar situations very rapidly. To the extent that I could tell, he seemed to be doing a competent job.

            A long time ago, I recalled Dorhaise proposing it was a modification of the animal's nervous system to allow for greater lifting capacity. Apparently, he had been half right. The elephant's nervous pathways were laced from top to bottom with a material that had been previously unknown to science.

            We didn't know what it was or how it was produced, but Nordland had been filled with the stuff, and tools for cutting and shaping it had evidently been left behind. It was super-dense, and superconducted at room temperature. But what was really odd was that it could also hold really a ridiculously strong permanent magnetic charge in a very tiny area. There had been physicists reporting back even while we were there, saying that they still couldn't match it to any known subatomic model. The fact that I'd seen a penny-sized chunk supporting what was supposedly a 100 Kg cube of iron had left more of an impression on me.

            Speaking of which...

            I shifted position, slightly. The new gun on my back was heavy. The engineers who had made it had really pushed the weight to the limit. I literally could not imagine carrying a heavier weapon into battle. But after ten minutes with it on the range, even I couldn't argue its utility in this mission.

            Locht was at the controls. Uncle Sam had modified the pilot's gondola considerably to accommodate the full team. As we dropped through the EMP shield, a red alarm on the control board started going.

            Locht looked at it.

            "Anti-air has been deployed. Ground-to-air missiles. I think they know that this elephant isn't legitimate."

            He pulled the mammoth into a fast dive towards the island. The G-forces pressed me backwards. I watched as two tiny streaks of fire passed by the windshield upwards, and realized that we had just barely dodged in front of the missiles.

            "Deploying countermeasures... now."

            There was a series of pops and two load explosions that rattled the gondola.

            A tiny green blip appeared on the screen. Balkans, who was copiloting, alerted Locht's attention to it. Locht glared at it for a moment, then half turned to speak to me.

            "Major Mesner, sir, I've found the entrance to the base. The bad news is, it's locked tight."

            I grimaced.

            "We knocked this thing into the bottom floor of Kringle's house at well over terminal velocity a few months ago, Locht. Is there a problem?

            Edridge held up a hand.

            "Major Mesner, with respect, yes there is. The armor on the mammoth is a good deal lighter now than it was then. We changed the induction method controlling the neuron-mediated levitation."

            I looked at him, goggle-eyed.

            "Why?"

            "Partially to increase efficiency. The extra material was shaved experimentation and our new weaponry. Also, the technology regulating the shock mediation was well beyond our current understanding."

            The ground loomed larger in the windscreen.

            "We really need to make a decision here, sir. I'm showing flak cannons heating up." said Locht, from the front.

            "Thank you, Locht. Edridge, you're talking around something, here."

            Edridge's eyes flickered downwards in embarrassment.

            "To be blunt, sir, we took it apart and couldn't put it back together. We did, however, load bombs onboard in an attempt to compensate."

            I pointed at him.

            "Next time, skip the bit about efficiency and start with that sentence," I said. "Locht?"

            "Way ahead of you, sir,", said Locht, flipping a switch. Something grey and rounded fired into the near distance and crashed into an otherwise innocuous-looking portion of island in a huge fireball.

            Behind us, the concussive thumps of flak cannons began to rumble across the sky.

            "Okay, this is going to be a slightly tricky maneuver. Everyone hold on tightly to something."

            And the mammoth flew, still trumpeting, through the flaming breach in the Easter Bunny's base.

*          *          *

            The mammoth landed with a colossal thump, denting the metal of the bay inwards with its sheer weight. The roof of the Gondola rose on a rear hinge like a jet fighter's windshield, and we piled out.

            Balkans dropped a rope ladder which we climbed down, in single file. The room was deceptively small. Probably the only things that could land and take off here were helicopters and small planes with VTOL.

            I glanced back at the mammoth bomber. The wooly mammoth was unhurt, but clearly not interested in taking off again. It laid down, heavily. And as I watched it, I realized I was already making a rookie mistake. There was no reason to expect that the Rabbit would have any aircraft that conventional, was there?

            The most conspicuous thing was the lack of resistance. My men noticed it too.

            "They shot at us, so they knew we were coming in here. Where are they?" said Hawkins.

            "Good question." I replied.

            "Could it be an intentional tactic, sir?" suggested Freals. "This room looks like it's of minimal strategic importance, and we don't know the layout of their base. It might make sense for them to arrange an ambush for us when we leave."

            I considered this. "It's risky. Puts them on the defensive. But it's also possible. Proceed with extreme caution. Graile, can you get us out this door?"

            "If that control box on the wall is linked to a computer, than yes." He said, pulling out his mini-computer. This one was new. Due to some experiences on our last mission, he'd changed to a model that had EMP shielding all around its case. Caber, the infiltration specialist, dutifully sawed through the locks on the box with his mini-saw, and stood back as Graile went to work.

            We stacked up on either side of the door. A half-second later, it slid open.

            I expected a volley of fire, but there was nothing. I poked a mirror experimentally around the corner and saw that there was no volley of fire because there was no one to fire it.

            "Okay. We advance. Watch your backs, we can't let ourselves get outflanked. We're going to try to stay on the peripheral of the base, at least until we can find a map of some kind and asses the degree of resistance we're going to encounter. Then we'll reevaluate our approach. Clear?"

            Everyone nodded.

            "Good. Our watchwords here are going to be stealth and efficiency." I gestured with my the huge, heavy gun. It wasn't as easy as it looked.

            "So be very, very quiet. Rabbits are hunting us."

*          *          *

            It wasn't too long until we found out that the Rabbits were indeed setting up a trap. They had set it up in a T-shaped hallway, allowing them... as I suspected they might try to... to flank us.

            Strictly speaking, they succeeded at flanking us. What they failed to do was outflank us. If you're having trouble distinguishing the two, ask yourself, "have I been shot yet?". If the answer is no, then you have outflanked your target. Otherwise, you've done what the rabbits did, and walked out into the open in front of a heavily armed opponent who is expecting you.

            Perhaps the word "heavily armed" had never been more appropriate, but these guns were everything the shooting range had promised and more. You pointed at a target and it erupted into chunks before your eyes.

            Why? Because the properties of the material salvaged in Nordland had enabled the engineers to build a railgun on a scale never seen before. Their weight was almost entirely from a couple of square centimeters of the stuff, distributed throughout their frame. The stuff was that dense. Nearly everything else was shielding, because the magnetic field could pull metal from across the room without it.

             To make it so a human could fire it, its actual bullets were smaller than peas, but they had the same kinetic energy per unit area that a depleted-uranium tank-buster does. The bullets had so much energy, in fact, the air around them fluoresced with the sheer heat friction. The "muzzle flare" was easily three feet long. And boy, did that ever cause recoil. The thing was engineered strictly for very limited burst fire. Even with its enormous mass, the sheer speed of the bullets caused the strongest counter-momentum of any gun I'd fired.

            It all meant that the Rabbits got a very nasty surprise, when the ambush finally happened. I didn't get a good look at the first wave. They survived intact for a very tiny fraction of a second, before being reduced to a fine red mist and the a mish-mash of assorted tissues ground across the floor.

            The second wave fared a tiny bit better. They had been immediately behind the first. They had seen their comrades fall, but it had happened so fast that they were already stepping into the hallway before it dawned on them that this was certain death. This triggered the very beginnings of an attempt to get back out of the hallway, and therefore they arrived a little slower and lived slightly longer.

            The Hanau Epe looked like every Easter Bunny you've ever bitten the head off of, with some minor modifications which made their anatomy more similar to humans. The major difference was that they were armed to the buck teeth. A quick glance told me they were wearing a wide variety of guns, grenades, and knives. The rest of their attire consisted of extremely short cargo pants designed for their foreshortened legs, full military-style jackets, and berets. They didn't appear to wear boots of any kind. I wasn't surprised... they had such long feet that it wouldn't have been practical.

            All that was perfectly understandable, until you got the colors. Apparently the Rabbit preferred his soldiers to dress in extremely bright pastel colors. Evidently, he'd had some real difficulty choosing which ones, so the uniforms just used them all. The only possible way a rabbit would make for a difficult target would be by inducing blindness in a potential attacker.

            The guns, on the other hand, didn't have any fashion sense, and coated the walls with another layer of blood without any compunction at all.

            After a few complicated seconds, the sound of firing settled. There were shadows at both ends of the hall, so there were certainly still rabbits there, but they were apparently little less inclined to rush into the slaughter. My gun made a little whirring sound as the liquid-cooling coils jacketing the rails came online.

            "Stalemate." whispered Edridge, "We can't get out, they can't get in. We'll likely get a small breathing space here, sir, while we still have the advantage of superior firepower. But I would not recommend sticking around."

            I nodded, with a little relief. I wasn't sure about Edridge, but his assessment of the situation matched mine, for the moment.

            "Know any interesting facts about rabbits that will help us break this stalemate, Captain?"

            Edridge shook his head.

            "I'm afraid not, Major. But I can think of an obvious way that they might try to break the stalemate, from a purely tactical point of..."

            And then the grenade flew out from around the corner. For a brief, crystal clear moment, it seemed to hang in the air. It was shaped like a blue Easter egg, with little pink spots for the impact sensors.

            For a moment, I thought we'd bought it. I prepared to make a last ditch effort to jump on the grenade, almost automatically. I was in the right place, I was aimed at the right angle, and it was my duty to keep my men safe. But in these close quarters, I didn't know if it would change the outcome very much.

            Except that Edridge, who was also facing in the right direction, was pulling the trigger on his rail gun at the very moment the thought of jumping crossed my mind. And I realized that, even as he had been talking, he had been raising it. The gun was lined up beneath his eye now, and the grenade had barely left the hand of the rabbit throwing it. And now the gun jerked like an artillery cannon, and Edridge went splaying backwards, which is what happens if you fire a gun like that so far above your center of mass. But I was already en route for the place where the grenade would have been.

            There was an enormous, concussive explosion at the far end of the hall. I just barely got my face covered in time. The worst of the shrapnel went into my arm and body armor.

            Still, I stood up to find myself remarkably intact. Before the echoes had died, We'd been saved, in part, by the fact that the grenade had had a small charge so that it could be safely used indoors. Primarily, though, we had been saved by Edridge's shot.

             And whatever misgivings I had about his personal mannerisms, saving my life was a great way to earn my trust. I offered him a hand up, and winced a little as my muscle tensed against the tiny pieces of metal when he grabbed it. I looked him in the eye.

            "Nice shot. My daughter very nearly became an orphan there."

            "I saw." he said, grunting as he stood, "And if I had missed, that jump probably would have saved me. Shall we call it even?"

            I smirked, and turned to Thyger. Already I could hear voices down the hall and the crackle of radios. We'd survived by dint of an excellent shot taken in the heat of the moment. But the essence of coming out of engagements alive is not pushing your luck.

            "Thyger, we need to get out of this hall right now. Can you make me an exit?"

            He grinned.

            "I've got a shaped charge with that wall's name on it, sir. If I may speak freely, though, there are no guarantees that what's on the other side is a better option." he said, fishing in his jacket for one of the hundreds of little packets of wire and plastic explosive he carried with him.

            "We're dead if we stay here. If we get on the other side of that wall, we might be dead. I'll take my chances."

            He nodded, grimly. "Everyone stand well back." he warned, as he stuck the explosive to the wall.

            This blast was more contained than the blast from the grenade. It still caused a Hell of a concussive burst, but the wall took the worst of it.

            We didn't even wait to see what was beyond. We ran through the smoking hole. A second later, two more explosions emerged from the hallway behind us. Two grenades. One second later, and we'd have died for certain. There was a tremendous crunching as the hallway, weakened by our blowing a hole in the wall, caved in from the damage of the two grenades. At least we wouldn't be easy to follow.

            But where were we now? I got to my feet, and looked up at the high walls.

            And that was when the question of whether we were dead for going through the hole really came into play. Stacked on top of each other, in little transparent cubes as far as the eye could see, were thousands and thousands of peeps.