StarHawk (26 page)

So Hunter decided to pass over most of the “we are back” crap and cut right to the bone.

“I represent the Fourth Empire—let’s leave the details for later,” he said. “I mean, you’re obviously in a bind here.”

“How true,” Poolinex said, looking back at the map. “For even though you stopped those devils in their tracks, it was just a temporary solution. I expect they’ll batter us with artillery all night—and at first light, they’ll attack again. And once that army starts to move, and the monster tank as well… they’ll be unstoppable.”

All eyes were now locked on Hunter.

“So you’re from this Fourth Empire, did you call it?” one officer asked. “Does that mean you can help us?”

Another officer asked excitedly: “You have a warship in orbit? Troops that can come to our aid?”

Hunter felt his heart sink even farther. Yes, he had a ship. The
AeroVox
was parked up in orbit. And true, it was a warship and outfitted to carry a ten-thousand-man division of heavily armed X-Forces special operations soldiers.

But…

“Well, I do have a ship,” he finally confirmed.

The knot of men tightened around him.

“Yes… but?” Poolinex asked him.

Hunter began stuttering his reply when suddenly the door to the war room opened and two familiar faces were marched in. It was Erx and Berx, followed by a very confused Home Guard officer halfheartedly holding a ray gun on them.

For Hunter, they couldn’t have shown up at a better time.

“These are my colleagues,” he hurriedly told the Home Guard officers. “They’re the ones who launched the empty canister at the xarcus, the bluff that got it to stop in its tracks.”

The others in the room let out a great cheer. One look from Poolinex and the officer with the ray gun lowered his weapon and skulked out of the room. Hunter’s introductions were interrupted as another gigantic barrage of X beams hit the city.

“May I have a word with my men?” Hunter asked Poolinex.

“To set a strategy, you mean?” the Home Guard officer asked hopefully.

Hunter nodded uncertainly. Erx and Berx rolled their eyes.

“Yes, something like that,” Hunter mumbled in reply.

The Home Guard commander nodded and went back to his map. Hunter, Erx, and Berx shuffled through a side door and found themselves outside in a darkened corner of the ancient city square. Enemy X-beam blasts were rocking the buildings all around them.

“You guys didn’t happen to bring any wine down with you, I suppose?” Hunter asked them.

Erx and Berx shook their heads.

“We were hoping you did,” Erx said.

“I certainly could go for a belt right now,” Berx said.

“Bingo that,” Hunter agreed.

More X beams went over, landing deep inside the city. The resulting noise and pandemonium were tremendous.

“This is a real mess we’ve walked into!” Erx shouted above the commotion. “I’ve never seen a place so churned up with bodies and bones as that battlefield out there. Are you sure these people have been fighting for only a year?”

Hunter shrugged. “I’m not sure how long it’s been,” he replied gloomily. “But it can’t last much longer. These people don’t have a ghost of a chance, whether we’re here or not…”

And
that
was the catch.

Sure, they had a huge warship up in orbit, one that was built to carry a small army of X-Forces special operations troops and tons of sophisticated weapons. But because Hunter knew this flight to Zazu-Zazu would be completely unauthorized, they had left all those troops back on Guam 7, holding down the city of Nails. Nearly 350 light-years away.

For this little side trip, it was just he, Erx, and Berx.

“I don’t suppose either one of you wants to tell them that it’s just the three of us?” Hunter asked his colleagues. “That we don’t have anyone else with us?”

“Not me,” Erx replied. “I don’t have the heart.”

“Nor do I,” Berx added.

The three men grew quiet for a moment. They knew well the dangers of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—the banishment of Zap Multx and his men to the Ball being the most glaring illustration. But it wasn’t like they could just snap their fingers and make this all go away. Qez was facing an entire corps of soldiers plus the colossal tank. It was a hopeless situation—and now they were caught right in the middle of it.

“This was a mistake from the beginning,” Hunter murmured.

“We knew a war was going on here. To show up, so unprepared—and going against orders…”

He shook his head. He had let personal goals get ahead of his professional duty—with disastrous results.

In another place and another time, this would be known as a royal fuck-up.

Berx put his hand on Hunter’s shoulder.

“Don’t fret, Hawk,” he said. “We would have come to this blessed place eventually… I think.”

Another barrage of enemy fire went over the city.

“Has anyone properly inquired as to how these Nakkz characters were able to build such a behemoth?” Erx asked. “I would have thought that after an extended period of warfare on such an isolated world as this, the technology of the weaponry would have started to devolve, not get better.”

“That’s so true,” Berx said wearily. “If you leave two people fighting each other on a planet long enough, they’ll deteriorate to throwing stones at each other. So how did these mooks get to build such a huge weapon as that supertank?”

Hunter just shrugged. It was a good question—one of many.

“Maybe they had help,” he said, in an offhand way. “Like those guys who attacked the
BonoVox
had help.”

Both Erx and Berx shivered at the thought.

“But help from whom?” Erx asked. “Who would be handing out this kind of superior technology way out here?”

Neither Hunter nor Berx replied. Neither wanted to go there.

Another barrage of enemy fire went streaking over the wall and came crashing down somewhere deep inside the city.

“Why didn’t the Zazus evacuate when they had the chance?”

Hunter shrugged glumly. “I can tell by the faces in there, running away just isn’t their style. Even if they had the transport out—which they clearly don’t.”

“But the women, the children, the old people,” Berx said, indicating the chaotic city behind them. “Our ship isn’t large enough to take even a third of them.”

They ducked as another barrage of X beams went overhead. Hunter turned back to them. “You know, it goes without saying that if you two beamed out right now and avoided this whole mess, I wouldn’t care a—”

Erx held his hand up and effectively shut Hunter off.

“And it goes without saying that we would never do that,” Erx replied. “We are officers in the service of our Emperor. We are here fighting for his interests—sort of. This is our job… not that he could ever stay awake long enough to appreciate it.”

Another barrage of X beams hit the north wall. This one was particularly powerful—so much so, the entire city began to shake. Worse yet, the sky above them was starting to lighten.

“But we must do something to help these poor souls,” Berx said.

Hunter thought for a long moment, then eyed his flying machine still sitting in the middle of the city square.

“Okay,” he finally said. “How about this: I’ll go after the xarcus…”

Erx and Berx just stared back at him, eyes wide.

“
You’ll what
?” Erx cried.

“Go after that tank…
alone
?” Berx pressed.

Hunter put on his crash helmet. “If I can just get inside the thing, maybe—”

Another furious barrage of X beams cut off his words. When they could speak again, Erx shouted to him:

“But what should we be doing while you are off on this mad quest?”

Hunter could almost hear the sound of the huge army stirring with the first rays of the dawn. When the light of the very quick day arrived, there was no doubt the Nakkz would finish their attack. And that meant that even if he managed to affect the xarcus, the bloodthirsty enemy would soon be coming right over the walls.

“Under the circumstances,” Hunter finally told them as he started off toward his flying machine, “I think it might be time to call for help.”

Hunter’s biggest challenge now was figuring out how much of a running start he would need.

He lifted off from the city square and went into a hover about fifty feet above the battered north wall. It seemed as if the entire population of the fortress city was watching him now, not just the people around the square. From the streets, from windows, from the tops of buildings. Even though the city was under heavy attack, word had spread fast about the strange visitors from outer space who were here to help them. Hunter spotted a handwritten sign on top of one building just off the square. Incredibly, it was a child who was holding it.

It read:
Save Us Angel
.

So much for no pressure
, he thought.

He slowly moved out over the wall until he had nothing facing him but the vast expanse of no-man’s-land itself. It was now about ten minutes before sunrise. He could see the huge army starting to move below.

The xarcus was alive, too, full of blinking lights and discharges of steam. He took a deep breath. The plan in his mind was so bare bones, he would need all the advantages he could get, and then some, if it had a chance of working.

He started his mental noodling. First he guessed the approximate distance from his present position to that of the stalled xarcus. Then he did a quick time-versus-speed calculation, factoring in the circumference of the tiny moon. Then he put his aircraft into a slow 180-degree turn until his nose was pointing in roughly the opposite direction. Then he tightened his seat belt until it nearly cut off his circulation, and he locked his chin strap.

I’ll try, kid
, he thought.

Then he pushed his throttles to full power and streaked away from the battlefield.

No time elapsed.

None at all. In the same moment that he was hovering above the walled city, he was also setting down atop the main turret of the colossal xarcus, this after going around the tiny moon in the opposite direction.

Hunter still didn’t know exactly how he was able to do this; he’d tried similar things since arriving on the Fringe, though not in situations as desperate as this, and it had worked every time. His best guess what that his flying machine could go so fast, he was literally able to arrive before himself—all that was needed was a good running start; thus his trip around the tiny satellite. He was still flesh and blood on arrival; he wasn’t transparent or in some other form, but he knew from past experience that he could not be seen.

He was simply here, and there, at the same time. And after he got what he wanted here, he would return very quickly to there and if he did this quickly enough, it would seem as if he hadn’t even left at all.

Or so he hoped.

He’d been banking on the Nakkz not posting guards at the top of the xarcus. Although he seemed to be invisible during these strange excursions, he’d never really figured if his flying machine seemed that way, too.

Luckily, his hunch was right. There were no guards atop the monster’s huge turret when he arrived. He jumped out of his aircraft, quickly took out his quadtrol, set it on “high/special,” and beamed the flying machine into the twenty and six. He inserted the resulting box into his boot pocket and began his woefully improvised mission in earnest.

He carefully made his way to the edge of the turret, and fighting the fierce winds, looked down onto the body of the xarcus. The thing was so huge its control center looked like a small city in itself. The closest thing he could compare it to was the control bubble on a Starcrasher. On the largest ships, these could support five hundred crewmen or more. On the gigantic xarcus, he estimated that at least as many individuals were occupying the control deck.

But then he spotted a smaller bubble behind the larger one. It, too, appeared to be made of superglass, but its surface was tinted a very dark green, so dark he could not see into it. Why could this thing be?

Perhaps the
real
control center for the huge tank?

He made a note to find out.

Hunter moved to the center of the turret. The xarcus was half a mile wide; its girth was nearly half that of an L-Class Starcrasher. It needed every inch of that bulk to support the gigantic saw. The blade alone measured at least a quarter mile in length. Its teeth were easily fifty feet or more and extremely sharp.

Hanging out about two hundred feet in front of him now, this thing was frightening just to look at. Hunter couldn’t imagine what it would be like on the receiving end of its enormous, razor-sharp blades.

His quadtrol told him the entire assembly was made from reatomized steel—this meant it was practically impossible to disassemble, even with an electron torch. This was not good. Hunter was looking for a weak spot in order to somehow disable the massive war machine. The gigantic saw was not it.

He lowered himself down a long ladder, off the top of the turret to the frame of the xarcus below. He was still about twenty stories up and maybe a thousand feet away from the massive control bubble.

Again, there were no guards that he could see anywhere on this level. This was no surprise really. With an enormous machine such as this, there was no reason to guard it.

Or so the Nakkz thought.

After some searching around, Hunter finally located an unlocked hatchway and stole inside the machine itself. At first the passageway within looked like a crude version of one found on a Starcrasher. Long, narrow, seemingly endless. There were dozens of smaller doors running off of it, with simple illustrations indicating they all led to the machine’s power complex. This would have been a perfect place to look for a weak link—but there was a problem. All of these doors were not only locked, they were also melded shut, again with reatomized steel. Despite Hunter’s ability to pick just about any lock in the Galaxy, one pass of his quadtrol over the sealed latches told him that not even a blast from his Z-gun pistol would make a dent in them.

He moved on. This passageway took him past the machine’s war room, its officers’ barracks, its weapons magazine. All of them had locks made of reatomized steel; all of them were impossible to break open. He passed a number of crew members while walking through the ship; technicians all of them, they were hurrying this way and that, obviously focused on getting the huge tank moving again.

They could not see him, because for all intents and purposes, he was still hovering over the walled city of Qez. Still, by studying their faces, Hunter knew that everything the people in Qez feared about their enemy was probably true. Even the techs looked like they ate newborns for breakfast. Scraggly beards, unkempt hair, dressed in varying shades of black—they looked like tough customers. Again, this was not good. When the eggheads in the crew look like they could chew superglass, what did the combat troops look like?

He found out not a minute later.

He crept up on a section of the passageway that featured a huge slab of superglass, extending down one whole length of the hallway. Peering through this glass carefully—Hunter wasn’t sure if he could cast a reflection—he found himself looking down on a muster chamber so huge, it rivaled the one aboard the
BonoVox
.

Hunter felt his stomach hit his toes. He was looking on a barracks that at the moment held about thirty thousand soldiers. There were at least another forty thousand spread out on the battlefield between the xarcus and Qez. Seventy thousand troops? Against a little more than five thousand defending Qez? This last-ditch battle was more lopsided than he thought.

The sheer number brought up a question that had probably passed the lips of just about everyone connected with the defense of the tiny moon.
Why
? Why so many troops, why these gigantic war machines? Why the outlandish and intentionally cruel weaponry? Why all this—to take over a little rock spinning at the far end of the Galaxy?

Could it be the fact that Zazu-Zazu
was
the smallest thing on the farthest edge that made it so valuable?

Was there any way that idea could ever make sense?

Hunter didn’t know—and at the moment he knew it was best that he didn’t waste brain cells on the matter.

He moved on.

He continued walking the long passageway of the xarcus, looking for but never finding a vulnerable spot at which a bit of sabotage might have crippled the giant war machine. Any doorway that looked important was sporting a reatomized lock. He was sure that only the top officers had access to these places and that they were off-limits to the majority of Nakkz soldiers on board.

If they couldn’t get access to them, how could he?

His goal had been to find an Achilles’ heel in the gigantic tank. But from all appearances, the xarcus was invulnerable. It had no weak spots.

That is, until he found the green door.

It was strange because it was the only hatchway that was not sealed by a reatomized lock. Hunter came upon it, almost by accident, at the end of one particularly long passageway.

Unlike the rest of the huge tank, this hallway was dimly lit—so much so that when he reached the green door it was practically pitch black inside.

As soon as he touched the frame he knew there was something different about it. It was definitely metal, but it also gave way to the slightest pressure from his fingers. It was malleable, rubberlike—yet some kind of metal all the same.

He was amazed when he touched the bottom of the door with his boot that it partially swung open. He hesitated a moment, trying to estimate exactly where he was inside the gigantic xarcus. He retraced his route to get here; he’d walked a hell of a long way, but he stayed on the upper levels. Then it hit him. If his calculations were right, he was in the vicinity of the smaller, tinted control bubble he’d spotted when he first arrived.

Interesting…

The pliable material actually made it easy for him to fully push open the hatch door. Inside he was faced with another passageway, but instead of the straight hallways he’d been walking, this one curved to the left. It was very dark inside, and the predominant color was an odd coral blue. Even the smell inside here was different.

He raised his blaster rifle, an odd gesture for one reason. If he was in fact stuck in time a few seconds behind everyone else, did that mean his blaster wouldn’t work? He’d yet to try out that little experiment, to his regret now.

Still, pulling his weapon up to the fore gave him a shot of confidence. He walked slowly down the curving passageway. Its ceiling was a lot shorter than the rest of the tank. There were no doors or windows in here. Every once in a while he would stop and push his hand against the wall. It responded with the same rubbery sensation. He discovered some hieroglyphics written haphazardly along the wall. They seemed to be made up mostly of geometric shapes, possibly a code of some kind, though he couldn’t imagine anyone actually being able to understand it.

He kept walking, slowly, silently, his ears open for even the smallest sound.

Then, suddenly, the floor beneath his feet start to move. An immense vibration began shaking the rubbery walls of the dark passageway. At the same instant, noise began to grow from somewhere down below. It got louder and louder and the vibrations became more intense until they joined into one loud wave of ear-piercing noise and bone-rattling motion. It became so acute, Hunter had to throw himself against the soft metal wall just to stay on his feet.

What the hell is happening now
? he thought.

Then it hit him.

The xarcus was moving again.

The Nakkz commenced their attack just as the first rays of the sun lit up the horizon.

During the night, the enemy’s equivalent to a sapper unit had managed to infiltrate all the way up to the outskirts of Qez and install several combat field replicators. When first light broke, these devices were activated, producing hundreds of climbing tubes through which the Nakkz were able to reach the parapets on the north wall.

Within seconds the enemy soldiers began shooting up to the top of the wall and flooding over the battlements. Just about every man who could hold a weapon met them here, including Erx and Berx.

They were front and center on the parapet, firing their ray guns point blank in the face of every enemy soldier who tried to get over the wall in their sector.

The remaining Home Guards—about three thousand or so—plus militiamen and armed civilians were doing the same thing along the entire quarter-mile stretch of the north-side fortification. The Nakkz seemed to be startled by the size of the makeshift garrison and the ferocity of their defense. And while the climbing tubes essentially shot the attackers straight up to the thousand-foot height of the immense wall, they did need to use their hands to exit the transparent tube—and that’s when they proved most vulnerable. A direct ray blast to the head or shoulders of an attacker would usually disintegrate his entire body, letting the subatomic remains be carried away by the fierce morning wind. However effective this tactic was for the defenders, it also cleared the top of the tube and allowed the next Nakkz soldier to pop up.

It was Berx who realized that by doing this, the defenders were playing right into the enemy’s hands. The first wave was just to wear them down and deplete their ray gun power supplies.

“We’ve got to start stickin’ ‘em!” he began screaming. “Stick ‘em!
Stick
‘
em
.”

The trouble was, there was so much noise and commotion going on, few of the nearby defenders could hear him bellowing, and those who could, didn’t know what he was talking about.

So he showed them by example. Transferring his ray gun to his left hand, he drew his electric sword and began skewering the Nakkz soldiers appearing at the top of the tubes closest to him. By running these soldiers through with his blade, he left a gruesome, bloody body, which in turn blocked access to the next soldier coming up.

It was probably the screams of dying Nakkz that brought attention to Berx’s idea, for within seconds defenders up and down the ramparts were stabbing the attackers just as quickly as they were shooting them. Soon there were massive amounts of blood flowing down the outside face of the wall.