StarHawk (23 page)

With the commander watching over their shoulders and intoning the ancient instructions, the Freedom Brigade’s munitions officer carefully placed the material inside the container of manipulated water, then sealed the container via an electron torch, leaving an opening wide enough only for a thin piece of wire to poke out.

This, they understood, was a fuse of sorts.

The canister had been prepared—but now the Freedom Brigade had to come up with a way to deliver it.

The brigade’s combat engineers searched their databases, looking for a simple device that could be built quickly and still do the job. They finally constructed something they came to call “the throwing machine.”

It was made mostly of old superwood and metal alloys melded together by two of the six electron torches remaining inside Qez.

When it was finished, the device did look alarmingly simple. It sat up high on four large runners. It had one long arm, at the end of which was a huge wooden basket. Attached to the arm and leading to a massive claw in front was a huge spring. Made of recoiled metal strands, when this arm was pulled back, the spring was stretched almost beyond its limit—so much so that the coiled metal actually “sang,” it was so taut.

Though it looked completely alien to the Freedom Brigade troopers and anyone who saw it resting in Qez’s main square, its design had actually been around for thousands of years.

It was called a catapult.

The huge xarcus broke the horizon east of Qez just as the sun began to rise.

There were actually 42,525 Nakkz mercs stuffed inside the supertank; several hundred more piloted the huge weapon and watched over its controls. These crewmen were housed in an enormous control bubble located directly beneath the supertank’s massive cannon barrel. The bulk of the combat soldiers rode in the enormous passenger cabin, in the rear of the mover.

The xarcus was, no doubt, a splendid weapon of gargantuan proportions—yet no one inside the supertank knew how their side had come upon it. When their shadowy allies told the Nakkz that the giant xarcus would be just the weapon to give them a victory in the year-long war, there was no reason to doubt them. Shortly afterward the first components of the supertank suddenly began to materialize. They came out of the sky—literally—one piece at a time, arriving with a crack of thunder and hanging motionless in the air, until a few days or a few hours or even a few minutes later, another piece would arrive the same way and attach itself to the previous section. Then would come the relentless banging, the pounding, the nonstop racket as the huge machine was assembled by unseen hands. Reatomizing rays lit up both the day and the night. Strange, bendable metal could be seen melding together. The Nakkz did little more than sit by and watch.

It took several months, but finally the gigantic xarcus was complete. This came as a relief to the scores of Nakkz soldiers bivouacked around Holy Hell. The pounding and the banging had haunted them, too.

From their various scattered camps, they had watched as the pieces appeared, streaking in from a place that didn’t seem to be anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. The soldiers had gone off to battle every day and returned to see the huge tank that much closer to completion. If it hadn’t been for all the noise, it truly would have been an amazing sight to behold.

But as to who actually built the thing, the Nakkz had no idea—because when it really came down to it, the thing had built itself.

The xarcus had moved out of Holy Hell shortly after being spotted by the recon team from Qez.

Its deployment was just one aspect of a planned attack on the tiny moon’s last remaining stronghold. Big as it was, the xarcus still could move at about five miles an hour, and once it started rolling, it was just about impossible to stop. Leaving behind an imprint that was nearly a hundred feet deep, it had torn its way across the Xomme in less a half an Earth day.

Now, as the sun was rising, it had its target in sight.

The plan against Qez was fairly simple. Rather than use the huge cannon to destroy the city and its people in one long Z-beam blast, the xarcus would instead roll right up to the city gate, knock it down if necessary, and then unload its troops: twenty-five thousand men of a “destroyer division”—shock troops in a different day and age. The rest of the soldiers made up the “execution brigades.”

In conquering Qez, the Nakkz had only one order: Take no prisoners of any kind—civilian or military.

Prisoners were witnesses. And there could be no witnesses left after this attack.

Once Qez was in sight, the troops within the supertank suited up and prepared for jump-off.

The tank’s massive turret weapon was charged up, its gun crews called to battle stations in case they were needed. The xarcus was indeed the equivalent of a Starcrasher on treads, and getting its crew into its combat position was a long process because of the vast distances involved. Still, the super-tank was declared “ready for battle” just two hours after it had come within sight of its target.

By this time it was fewer than ten miles away from the city’s main gates.

Weapons fire from Qez started soon afterward.

Long-range Z-beam blasts and incendiary shells began raining out of the walled city; indeed, the fortress seemed to be on fire, so intense were the muzzle flashes and electrostatic discharges. And while most of the Z-beam blasts fell short, some of the fire shells managed to hit the xarcus, exploding on the massive treads or in front of the primary control bubble itself.

These hits created fires that burned hot and bright and could last a long time, but within the supertank itself, they were of no concern. There was no way fire alone could get through its massively thick skin.

The destroyer division and the execution brigades continued preparing for their attack; in fact, few of them even knew the supertank had come under attack.

Inside the control bubble, everything was going smoothly as well. The firing from Qez was getting more intense the closer the xarcus crept toward the fortress city. But just as the incendiary shells were of little concern, even a concentrated Z-beam attack on the xarcus would do only minor damage. The tank had been constructed of 100 percent re-atomized electron steel—even the superglass making up the control bubble was imbedded with the stuff.

Few things in nature could put a dent in it.

The xarcus had closed to within seven miles of Qez when the people in the control bubble noticed that their enemy’s defensive strategy was changing.

Instead of directing many random blasts at the supertank, the Z-beam fire coming out of Qez was now beginning to be concentrated. No longer trying to simply stop the huge war machine with thousands of individual hits, the defenders were all aiming at the same spot on the xarcus: a point about a hundred feet in front of the control bubble, where its gigantic chassis met the lower part of its superstructure. This switch in tactics was more of a surprise than a shock. There was nothing at that point of the tank’s enormous structure that could be fatally damaged, even by ten thousand blaster rifles hitting it at once.

The people in the control bubble even began to laugh at the odd but ultimately fruitless effort.

The xarcus was indeed unstoppable.

Just as their mysterious allies had said.

The walls of Qez were indeed on fire.

There were so many blaster rifles and ray guns going off, the static electricity was running throughout the fortification and searing any wires or hemp or flammable materials attached to or located near the wall.

A squad of Freedom Brigade soldiers was positioned at the highest point on the east rampart, their visual sensors trained on the approaching xarcus. Because of the noise coming from endless fusillades of Z-beam blasts by the city’s defenders, it was nearly impossible for these soldiers to communicate with colleagues down in the city square, where the throwing machine was located. So the two groups had worked out a crude language of hand signals in which to speak.

Though the soldiers up top were tracking the xarcus’s movements, it was lucky for them that the huge mover did not waver much from its dead-on westerly approach. If the huge machine turned either right or left, it was always a minor fluctuation. Still, whenever that happened, the soldiers up top would signal to their comrades surrounding the throwing machine. Using nothing more than musclepower, these soldiers would then push, pull, and drag the throwing machine into a new configuration.

This went on for nearly an hour, the defenders sending out long-range Z-gun blasts, the xarcus moving across the Xomme, unhindered, its huge army safe inside, ready to be called to the slaughter.

Then, just as the sun reached its highest point in the short day, the xarcus rolled out of a slight depression and began crawling up the slight incline known as Heartbreak Ridge. Upon getting this information from the soldiers up on the wall, the brigade’s weapons officer in charge of the throwing machine powered his ray gun down to its “dull fire” setting. Then he aimed its beam at the wire protruding from the little silver shell. It took a few moments but finally the wire began to glow.

Then he placed the magic canister inside the catapult’s bucket, which was stuffed with highly flammable materials, and ordered its massive arm drawn back.

It was now ready to fire.

The men inside the xarcus’s control bubble saw it first.

Coming out of the flurry of Z-beam blasts streaking out from the east wall of Qez, a ball of fire suddenly appeared.

It went nearly straight up in the air, trailing a long plume of black smoke behind it. It reached its apex about three miles away, and maybe two thousand feet above the battlefield. It seemed to hover in the air for a moment; then it started coming down. As it did, bits of the fireball began breaking away, leaving individual smoke trails behind it. Within seconds, most of the fireball had been separated in this manner, and all that remained was a bright, shiny canister, tumbling end over end.

The canister finally landed not three hundred feet in front of the supertank. It went right through the large plastic X, into the recently dug hole. The canister struck the softened earth with such momentum, it continued another two hundred feet into the mud. Now came gales of laughter from those inside the primary control bubble. What was this pathetic attempt all about? To throw such a tiny weapon at such a massive war machine?

Coincidentally, the final ready-call for the Nakkz troops sounded throughout the xarcus at the exact moment the canister became lodged in the mud.

It detonated two seconds later.

***

No one peering out from the walls of Qez had ever seen a nuclear explosion before.

It was awesome—both in its strangeness and its size. In a world where Z beams essentially disintegrated things, and high-explosive fire simply burned its intended to a crisp, the magnitude of this blast was frightening. The mushroom cloud rising above the bloody mud of the Xomme, the smoke, dust, and debris obscuring all view on the eastern horizon—it all seemed unreal and dreamlike.

Not so the shock wave that hit the city’s walls seconds later, though. It was so intense, the walls began to shake and crack; the roofs on houses and buildings began to collapse. The ground literally began rolling.

For one terrifying moment it seemed as if the bomb would destroy all of Qez as well.

But the wind finally died down and the dust finally settled and the defenders of Qez were able to look out on the no-man’s-land and see just what the tiny canister had done.

The xarcus was so huge and constructed of such strengthened materials even a direct hit by a low-yield nuclear bomb might not have caused mortal damage. That’s why the Freedom Brigade had hurled the makeshift weapon not at the tank itself, but directly in front of it.

The explosion had created an enormously deep hole in the ground just a few feet ahead of the xarcus.

Like a Starcrasher or a huge oceangoing vessel, it was impossible for the supertank to stop in short order. Momentum alone carried it almost a quarter mile farther once the brakes were applied. With no way to stop in time, the huge mover began to plunge into the enormous crater left by the underground nuclear explosion. The right-side track was the first to go. It seemed to move in slow motion as it began grabbing nothing but air and smoke. The astonished Nakkz drivers inside the control bubble began pushing buttons and madly throwing levers, trying to prevent the supertank from toppling over—but the enormous tracks refused to stop moving. Its forward motion thus uncontrollable, the huge tank finally toppled into the gigantic bomb crater. The gun sticking out of its huge turret hit the ground first; it immediately split in two. The noise of this alone cracked around the moon like a massive rumble of thunder. With the barrel gone, the crumpling of the turret came next. Then the rest of the xarcus simply slammed down upon itself.

Now came another enormous explosion—the shock wave from this was as powerful as the initial nuclear blast itself. Chain reactions and short-circuiting began igniting anything remotely flammable inside the huge armored mover. There was another tremendous explosion. Then another. And another. The ground beneath Qez began shaking violently again as the gigantic tank went up in a huge ball of flame.

The fire was so quick and so intense, there was no way anyone inside could have gotten out alive.

A great cheer went up from the people of Qez. With little more than their ancient magic pellet, the Freedom Brigade had saved them from certain disaster.

Or so it seemed.

For no sooner had the dust settled from the xarcus’s explosion than a Home Guard soldier manning an outpost on the far corner of the city’s wall saw a glint of light off to the north.

Something is coming
, he thought.

He turned his long-range viz-scanner in that direction—and saw something that his eyes did not want to believe.

Out on the horizon, just breaking its way through smoke and dust, was another xarcus.

And it was heading right for Qez.