“The same with a volcano orgy,” Blitz said. “But Xers 17 went up. Just like that. And…”
Blitz hesitated for a moment.
“And?” Rappz prompted him.
“And,” Blitz said, lowering his voice almost below a whisper, “I heard that when the rescue forces finally got to the planet and went through the ashes, they found… a pyramid.”
Rappz dropped his glass and covered his ears. “My God, did you have to say that word? Isn’t it enough that you’ve ruined my morning with these strange tales? Now this? What am I to do with this blasphemer, Father?”
They turned back to the third chair at their table — but it was empty.
The priest had left a long time ago.
22
The recon team had been running all night.
Through the darkened trenches, over and around hundreds of dead bodies, some still crawling, some still breathing, the team made its way east, into enemy territory, moving quickly while they still had darkness in their favor.
The mysterious noises had stopped two days before. For the first time in months, no monstrous sounds echoed through the night, no dull mechanical thuds shook the ground below. The silence became deafening.
As soon as the noises ceased, palls of thick black smoke appeared on both the eastern and northern horizons. Whatever the enemy had been doing all this time, it was clear they had completed their task — and this did not portend well for the people of Zazu-Zazu.
In the year since the tiny moon was invaded, the territory held by its citizens had shrunk, until now only the fortress city of Qez and a handful of nearby villages and farms remained in friendly hands. With the much-feared final attack apparently imminent, all of the civilians from the surrounding countryside had sought refuge inside the high walls of Qez. This had caused the city’s population to nearly double in size.
Thirty thousand people were now crowded into the city. Together, they awaited their uncertain fate.
But what was coming exactly? That’s what the recon team had been dispatched to find out. There had been no time to plan their mission in advance. Zazu-Zazu was just nine hundred miles in circumference. It spun very quickly on its axis and so had extremely short days — just three hours of full daylight, followed by three hours of dull planetshine, followed by another three hours of absolute darkness. On Zazu-Zazu, sunrise lasted but a minute and then the day would rush toward the night, when the process would start all over again.
On this particular day, planet Jazz 33 would rise about three minutes after the quick sunset. This would set up a situation where the vast battlefield separating the warring parties would be dark enough to move through, yet faintly lit from the planetshine to let the recon soldiers see where they were going. Under the circumstances, these were the best conditions they could hope for.
As it was, the recon sortie was as close to a suicide mission as one could get. Heavy fighting all around the small moon had prevented such an undertaking as this before. But, perhaps not so surprisingly, as soon as the mysterious sounds stopped, so did all enemy attacks. That’s when finding out just what was going on over the horizon became a major priority.
So the recon had to be done — no one disputed that. But of the six mercenary groups left defending the city of Qez, only one offered to send men on this dangerous mission. That group was the Freedom Brigade, the friends of the priest. They were known in this part of the Outer Fringe as skillful, loyal, courageous — in short, the best troops money could buy.
But beyond that, the brigade had a traditional tie to the small moon of Zazu-Zazu. Indeed, they had provided security for its people for centuries, ever since their home planet established a “research station” on Zazu-Zazu sometimes during the reign of the Second Empire. When the moon was invaded a year before, the Freedom Brigade had been the first mercenary group to answer the call for help. Even in this isolated corner of the Galaxy, loyalty and honor were still held dear.
The five soldiers selected to go were among only ninety-nine men remaining from the brigade’s original contingent of 202. Like the several thousand other mercenaries hired to defend the people of Zazu-Zazu, the strange noises had haunted them, too. Even during some of the heaviest fighting, when tens of thousands of blaster shots filled the air, the mysterious pounding and clanging had rumbled like thunder above the fray. Grim curiosity alone would have been enough reason to send out the recon team.
But finding out why the noises had stopped would not be an easy thing to do. For the patrol to get close enough to enemy lines for a visual scan, they first had to cross the killing fields of the Xomme, nearly twenty miles of no-man’s-land that separated their lines from those of their enemy. This thick band of trenches, bomb craters, devastated towns, and mile upon mile of fiat desolation was the result of nearly one year of brutal warfare in a very small place.
Once the recon team navigated this nightmarish terrain and reached the enemy lines, they were to scan a place called Holy Hell. It was a three-sided valley anchored by small mountains to the north and south.
Holy Hell was a known troop-staging area of the enemy; indeed, most of the attacks by the Nakkz had originated from this place.
As such, just about everybody concerned was sure the mysterious noises were coming from there.
Despite being battered by a fierce storm most of the way, the recon team finally reached their objective six hours later.
Hurricanelike storms were routine on the small moon — some said this was because the satellite’s ancient puffing was slowly becoming undone. The recon team had been especially deluged during the final hour of their trek. And while the storm had hid its advance, it also had prevented them from clearly seeing into the pit at Holy Hell. Had they arrived under better climatic conditions, the team could have gathered what it needed and then started the long dash back home in the waning darkness. But this time the weather had screwed them.
Not that it made any difference, for when first light arrived and the recon troops saw what had been built inside Holy Hell, they knew two things immediately: It made no difference when they spotted this thing, and the people they were here to protect were doomed.
It was gleaming in the red light of the dreary dawn when they got their first good look at it.
They thought at first it was an enormous prop of some sort — maybe a religious symbol, though the Nakkz had hardly showed any signs of spirituality. It was only after the last of the rain and mist cleared and the recon soldiers could do a proper scan of the object that they realized to their great dismay that this thing was real.
It was a xarcus, a tracked armored vehicle that could carry men and weapons across a battlefield. During the year of warfare on Zazu-Zazu, hundreds of these armored movers had been used by both sides. But a typical xarcus was only twenty feet long by ten feet wide. This xarcus was a colossus. It was at least half a mile wide and a quarter of a mile high! Its dual tracks were enormous. There were thousands of Z guns sticking out of innumerable gun blisters pockmarking its body. An enormous Z-beam tube projected out of its massive turret; its barrel alone was at least a quarter of a mile long. Even worse, the colossus appeared to be constructed of reatomized electron steel. This meant it was virtually indestructible.
It seemed unbelievable at first, but the proof was in the viz-scan. Somehow the Nakkz had come upon an enormous weapon that could undoubtedly move many thousands of men at once, and had enough weapons to level Qez or any defensive position remaining along the defense line.