“Mercs? On a mercy mission?” Blitz asked. “I’d say that was just about impossible.”
“Bingo that,” Rappz agreed.
“Believe what you will, gentlemen,” the priest said, “but that is the case. They are defending an outpost on a moon named Zazu-Zazu — it orbits the planet Jazz 33.”
“Jazz 33?” Rappz said. “Isn’t that in the Dead Gulch System?”
The priest nodded.
Rappz just shook his head. “Father, that’s the last system in the entire Galaxy. It’s the fringe of the Fringe. I mean, after Dead Gulch, you fall off the edge, don’t you?”
The priest drained another mug of ice water.
“You do,” he replied, wiping his chin. “But the concern would be the same if it were happening one star system over from here — or all the way back to the Ball. My friends have come up against some advanced technology. Very advanced. How they’ve been able to hold on this long is a miracle in itself.”
“So you’re saying there’s a little war going on out there?” Rappz asked.
“A most brutal little war,” the priest answered. “My friends are practically the sole defenders of about thirty thousand innocent civilians. The enemy has taken over two-thirds of this satellite — though no one can imagine why. It’s just a tiny rock in space. But we now fear he will soon launch a final attack — and then all will be lost. And that’s why I am here. There is no one else to help us. The moon’s people can’t afford any further mercenary groups — they aren’t able to pay my friends as it is.”
“That is a mission of mercy,” Blitz said, sipping his slow tea. “I’ve never met a merc who fought for free.”
“You don’t know my friends,” the priest replied.
Blitz looked at Rappz and just shrugged. “Well, do they need blaster rifles, Padre?” he asked. “Ray guns? Z-beam stuff?”
“All that and more,” the priest replied. “As I said, this enemy seems to have all kinds of strange weapons.
Certainly things I’ve never seen or heard of before.”
“Really? Like what?” Blitz asked.
The priest drank some more water.
“I have seen the aftereffects of these horrible things,” he replied slowly. “A man, hit with some kind of strange beam, turns into an X ray of himself. His bones and innards, visible through a thin veneer of very bloody skin. He can still walk, he can still talk — but he is dead nevertheless. I have witnessed more than one brave heart fade away like this, crying for his wife and children as his body slowly dissolved around him…”
Blitz and Rappz stopped sipping their tea. “I have never heard of such a weapon,” Blitz said. Rappz nodded in agreement.
“Another kind of ray seems to make a man’s bones grow grotesquely large,” the priest went on. “In just seconds, they burst out of the skin — and literally tear him apart.”
Again, Blitz and Rappz just shook their heads. “A very painful way to go,” Blitz said.
“Words cannot describe it,” the priest agreed. “And there are many more of these awful things. It’s almost as if the enemy is testing out these weapons — and my friends and the people they are protecting are the test subjects.”
“A very strange concept,” Blitz murmured, almost to himself. “Who are these folks your friends are fighting, Father?”
The priest shrugged uncertainly. “That’s another thing,” he said. “We don’t know.”
“Don’t know?” Blitz asked. “But how could that be? Everyone knows who they are fighting these days.
They might not know why. But they always know who.”
“And why are they making war in such a strange place anyway?” Rappz added. “I mean, no offense, Father, but I can’t think of anything in the Dead Gulch worth fighting about.”
“That’s exactly my point,” the priest said. “It’s a tiny moon with a tiny population, and all they want to do is farm their lands and be left alone — just as they’ve been doing for centuries. But just about a year ago, this massive army shows up and attacks these very peaceful people. No reason given. No prior communications, no threats. Nothing. Just a sudden surprise attack, a bolt out of nowhere.”
He drank another mug of water.
“Now we know the main enemy force is made up of mercenaries and pirate trash from nearby star systems,” he went on. “Real dregs — perhaps even friends of yours. They call themselves the Nakkz. But they are just the foot soldiers. We suspect others are actually orchestrating this war. It is the people supplying the Nakkz to attack us who are very mysterious indeed.”
“How so?” Rappz wanted to know.
“Well, we have never seen them, for one,” the priest said. “They have occasionally appeared out on the battlefield, observing their army of paid killers from afar. But they wear a very different type of combat gear — all black from head to toe — and they never seem to get into the fight directly. Subsequently, none has ever been taken alive. Nor have any of their bodies ever been recovered.”
“This is getting strange,” Rappz said.
“Too strange,” Blitz replied, pushing his tea away from him, a first.
“What do you mean?”
Blitz just shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that I keep hearing such weird things lately.”
“Like?”
“Well, there was the rumored Blackship-in-Supertime thing, for instance.”
“ ‘Rumored’ being the key word there,” Rappz said. “Anid I still don’t believe it for a second. But even if it were true, we live in a huge Galaxy. Strange things are bound to happen once in a while.”
“But there is ‘strange’ and then there is just plain ‘weird,’ ” Blitz said, pulling his chair a bit closer to the table.
“You’ll have to explain that, please,” Rappz told him.
Blitz lowered his voice. “A friend of mine saw some very unusual lights in the sky the other night,” he said in a whisper. “Above his château, out in the mountains. He said they were practically right on top of him.”
Rappz just laughed. “ ‘Lights in the sky?’ My brother, the Milky Way is alive with lights in the sky. I would be concerned if I didn’t see any lights in the sky.”
“But these weren’t typical lights,” Blitz shot back. “My friend said they were acting in a very unconventional manner. Moving incredibly fast, changing direction much quicker than anything we see flying these days. They also had the ability to blink out, just like that.”
“Blink out?” Rappz said. “Not even a Starcrasher can do that. What else?”
“Did you hear what happened on Xers 17, over in the Slow Freeze System?”
Rappz shrugged. “I know the place went belly up. Was it a volcano orgy or a star passing?”
“It burned,” Blitz said.
“You mean it ‘burned up,’ ” Rappz replied.
“No, I mean, everything on the surface of the planet was burned. Consumed. Immolated. The planet is still there, but everything and everybody on it got turned into cinders.”
Rappz pulled his substantial chin in thought. “An entire planet catching fire? Just like that? How?”
“They still don’t know,” Blitz said. “Only that it happened totally out of the blue — without warning.”
Rappz sipped his drink, but the worry lines stayed on his face. “Well, again, we live in big Galaxy — by sheer numbers alone, odd things will appear to happen. But that one — I agree, that is very odd. I mean, they can forecast a star passing a hundred years in advance.”