At precisely six a.m. that following morning, just as the fog was rising off the Plain of Stars, more than four thousand whistles went off at once.
It was enough to wake the dead.
Several good things had happened for the BMK during the night. The three hundred thousand-man Army Central corps had arrived. They'd encamped on the other side of Silverine Peak and had infiltrated onto the Plain of Stars throughout the night. The one hundred thousand men of Army South were just a few hours away as well.
It was also reported that the enemy's flying machine had been attacking targets over on Planet France for most of the night. The respite had been a help. It had allowed the fresh BMK troops to consolidate, get into position, eat a little, sleep a little.
Their main infantry troops, Army Central's sixteen divisions of foot soldiers, were now arrayed all along the Ghost River Valley, hidden behind the mountains of wreckage from the day before. The wreckage actually worked to their advantage, too. It had perfectly masked the assembling points for the soldiers throughout the night.
Set within Army Central's rank was a division of combat engineers. They would go out first, just before the main attack began, their goal being to reach the river and start zipping up their mobile field bridges. Leading the engineers across the wreckage-strewn killing ground would be the hapless, unarmed artillerymen.
On either side of the main line was the mounted infantry, combined about forty thousand strong, riding in heavily armored HVV hovercrafts that glided three feet above the ground. Behind them, a line of small single-tube blaster arrays, sometimes called Faster Blasters because they fired 0.983759 quicker than the big arrays. They, too, were towed on hovering platforms and could be ready to fire in seconds. Behind all this, eight more divisions — eighty thousand men — were held in reserve on the other side of the hill.
The blowing of the whistles meant troops forward.
The foot soldiers of Army Central beat their chests once, creating a thunderclap that echoed up and down the river valley. Then they started walking, slowly at first, but with each step picking up speed. The combat engineers broke ahead of their ranks and, pushing the unlucky artillerymen before them, scrambled through the still-burning wreckage, heading for the river. On the flanks, the motorized infantry began to move as well, the slight whirring made by every HVV creating a sound like the wind rushing through trees.
Breaking out of the wreckage, the trembling artillerymen unwillingly leading the way, the engineers were the first to see the enemy, waiting behind their lines, about a mile away. The glint of several thousand rifles pointing in their direction grew stronger with each second in the rising sun; meanwhile, the Master Blasters towering over everything had an illumination all their own.
Most of the wreckage from the day before had fallen close back to the ridge. The engineers would have preferred it if the debris led right up to the riverbank; the artillerymen heartily agreed. But, it was more or less a clear sail now up to the river— about five hundred feet of open ground. A perfect killing ground for the enemy troops. Crossing it would be a chore.
The engineers surged on, pushing the artillerymen in front of them, expecting the worst at any moment. Yet nothing came. The enemy did not shoot at them. This was strange. Certainly they could see them. Were they saving ammunition? Why? Master Blasters rarely ran out of power. And a single electron torch could produce a couple thousand bullets a minute. Why then were they holding their fire?
Whatever the reason, the engineers took advantage. They pushed the artillerymen aside now and ran full out for the eastern bank of the river. There were more than ten thousand CEs; each one seemed to reach the riverbank at the same time. Some dove right in the water, not quite believing they had made it this far without so much as a scratch.
Behind them was the tremendous noise of almost one hundred thousand soldiers now running at close to full speed, breathing in and out as one, racing for the riverbank just as the engineers had done before them. Many of the artillerymen were trampled to death in this stampede. Others just fell down, covered up, and hoped for the best.
The engineers crawled to the river's edge, now, about a six-foot drop from either bank. They quickly began unzipping their bridges. Basically, these were structures made of ions, which assembled themselves in a kind of hovering runway about twenty feet wide. Both ends of the near-invisible structure could move back and forth, absorbing as many soldiers as quickly as possible and carrying them across the divide. The engineers were able to deploy about four thousand bridges in a matter of seconds. Just seconds after that, the first of the infantry reached the riverbank and went charging across.
And that's when the Americans opened up.
It was the engineers, still lying low near the water's edge, who had the best look at the battle.
No sooner had the Army Central troops hit the bridges when all eight Master Blasters and thousands of rifles and machine guns opened up on them at once. The Americans' fusillade hit the BMK foot soldiers point-blank, head-on. The Master Blasters disintegrated all soldiers found within their beams. There were no bodies to trip over, just tiny piles of salt. But for those soldiers hit by the ballistic piece of metal called a bullet, death could be a horrible thing. Severed arms, legs, arteries. Hearts exploding, throats torn away, skulls blown off.
The roar of weapons and death quickly reached a crescendo and stayed there, nearly overwhelming everything else. The engineers remained below the riverbank, staying in place as ordered, and thankful for it. But then the bodies of those BMK soldiers hit by bullets just coming off the bridges began falling back into the Ghost River. Soon so many dead and wounded soldiers were hitting the water, the sound of their splashes almost overcame the ear-splitting blast of the enemy's multitubed master arrays.
Through all this, the CEs could hear other noises as well. The whooshing sound made by the 33418 danker strafing the length of the plain back and forth once again. Above that, the unmistakable screech of the enemy's magical flying machine. It had suddenly appeared overhead as well. The engineers could see it streak over the riverbank, back and forth, its nose blaster always open, always spewing six bright red beams. Sometimes flying right behind it, lower, slower, was the robot, destructo-rays from its eye blasters bouncing in every direction.
Five minutes, six minutes. Seven…
The BMK infantry kept coming, and the Americans kept firing. The dead soldiers were not falling back into the river so much any more only because a large wall of bodies was preventing the corpses from flopping backward any farther. The engineers could also hear the oddly calm whir of the HVVs. The hovercrafts would streak right over the river in formations of twos and threes, their smaller Faster Blasters firing full bore. But soon after the CEs lost sight of them, they would hear the sound of the hovercraft either being disintegrated or simply shot out of the sky.
In the midst of all this, some of the engineers saw something else. Through the smoke and fog of war, a strange craft popped in, just for a moment, above the battlefield. Unlike just about every other spacecraft in the Galaxy, this craft was not shaped like a triangle or a wedge. Instead, it was shaped like a saucer. It hovered high above the river for just a few seconds, wobbling a little bit as if whoever was inside was watching the battle and not quite believing what they were seeing.
Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the saucer-shaped craft blinked out.
All of the firing died down after that.