What Joxx had done with all these weapons was turn the planet Megiddo into a fortress. Yet he'd arranged the blasters in such an ingenious way that he was essentially beckoning the enemy to attack him. A strange tactic, true, but no one questioned its inspiration. For while Joxx was preparing to go toe to toe with the invaders on the ground, with the brilliant defense plan he'd conjured up, there was a chance most of the enemy wouldn't even make it that far.
When this second message arrived aboard the ThunderVox, the rescue fleet was about thirty-nine hours away from Megiddo. But after digesting the report, the REF commander issued an order to his fleet: "Run all vessels at 110 percent power. If this results in a few power-string ruptures, then so be it. Our brother Joxx has marshaled a valiant defense of the Empire. We can't let a hero like that wait any longer than necessary."
Joxx knew about the Siege of Syracuse, the Battle for the Acre, and the encirclement at Bastogne.
Even as a child he'd studied ancient military texts, haunting the top secret information bubbles on Special Number One almost before he could talk. He'd absorbed bits and pieces of history that had survived the fall of three empires and a handful of Dark Ages in between, information forbidden to anyone who wasn't a Special. Some of it stretched all the way back to before men first left Earth for space. It was considered dangerous for an ordinary citizen to know such antediluvian things.
Joxx had learned much from these readings, but one fact had stuck with him from childhood: In any conflict, the smarter of the two opponents was almost guaranteed to win.
And for Joxx, knowing history was the same thing as being smart.
It was the ion mover who'd emphasized to Joxx that the invaders were using a blatant modus operandi whenever they attacked a planet.
First, they would make a sudden appearance in orbit, their warships literally surrounding the target planet. From this vantage point on high, they could launch Z-beam strikes at any large military targets they spotted below. Simultaneously, the invaders would land troops in the cities and countryside alike, to sow havoc and panic. Indeed, the prisoner said the invaders would routinely land forces all over the planet, engulfing it with their sudden frightening presence. Then these troops would converge on the objective's key targets and engage the defenders at close range. As most of their conquests had been sleazeball planets so far, with militaries sleeping or defenses nonexistent, the invaders had triumphed in this strategy every time.
The question for Joxx then had been this: How could he counter the enemy's extremely successful approach? He now had the huge confiscated arsenal at his disposal. How best could he deploy it?
A typical star commander would have placed the thousands of high-powered artillery weapons around the most important asset on the planet. In the case of Megiddo, this would mean digging in multiple rings of blasters around Needle City. These layers of shrinking defense lines would make it as difficult as possible for the invading sol-diers to reach the city and thus conquer the planet from the ground. In theory, anyway.
But Joxx was hardly typical. He knew when the enemy came, they would descend in shuttles — up to 5,000 or more, the prisoner had told him. In those shuttles would be as many as two million troops. A deep blaster defense around Needle City might be able to slow such an onslaught once it reached the ground, but Joxx knew it could not stop it, at least not long enough for the REF to arrive.
He had to do something different.
That's why he'd ordered the confiscated blasters to be installed not just around the city but at many other points around the tiny planet as well. Joxx's dispersal of the weapons was widespread across Megiddo's half-dozen continents. On top of the mountains in the north, throughout the valleys and rivers in the south, and on islands in the two huge seas at the equator, clusters of the blaster installations began popping up all over Megiddo.
This deployment would have seemed foolish, an unnecessary dilution of forces, but there was a method to Joxx's madness. The scattered blaster sites weren't really scattered at all. Joxx had linked them all to a central command system, which he'd designed himself, sitting alone atop the Needle City Tower, which was now his field headquarters. Simply put, the weapons were all wired together, and instead of being positioned as artillery pieces, their tubes had been pointed skyward. Once the invasion began, any blaster that had a clear line of sight to any of the enemy's shuttles would fire on them while they were still in the air. Once one weapon was fired, the entire network would open up, sending out streams of destructo-beams in all directions, a shotgun approach to thwarting the enemy's well-known planetwide engulfment tactic. As long as the system kept acquiring targets, it would keep firing, creating a virtual cloud of death rays to meet their opponent's rapidly falling invasion craft.
Essentially, Joxx had created a massive antiaircraft system, a concept that had somehow been lost in the mists of time. While setting up a few blaster weapons around a city or a castle to fire on flying objects was not exactly unheard of in some parts of the Galaxy, Joxx had nearly 25,000 weapons pointing skyward, all thinking with the same brain—his—and all operating on the same principle. The more invasion craft he could destroy descending through the atmosphere, the fewer he would have to deal with on the ground.
This innovative defense was also set up in depth. The first layer of weapons — they being about half of the single-tube Faster Blasters his troops had found — would be positioned to acquire and fire at the enemy invasion craft up to 400,000 feet or eighty miles high, almost as soon as they fell out of orbit. Those invaders who somehow made it through this first ring of fire would face several more thousand Faster Blasters, throwing up another storm of destructo-fire around 200,000 feet or forty miles high. A third layer — from the half-tube mortax blasters — would meet them at 55,000 feet, or about ten miles up. After that, the piece de resistance, the arrays of gigantic Master Blasters, would blanket the skies at twenty miles and below.
If any of the enemy still survived, if any actually made it through all that, Joxx had set up a dozen rings of blaster emplacements around Needle City, including more than a hundred Master Blasters in the downtown area alone.
And who would be manning all these weapons sites?
The 20,000-man crew of the ShadoVox, along with the 400,000 inmates still shivering down in Big Rocks.
Installing this system was a massive undertaking, one that had to be accomplished in less than a solar day. Joxx had used his starship's substantial transfer systems to get the purloined blasters and their crews in place around the planet; sheer manpower put the weapons in place. It was getting all of the weapons connected within his command matrix that took the most effort.
The problem was, Megiddo wasn't overflowing with all the controls and sensors needed for Joxx's dream of an all-planet defense to come true. But that's when his brilliance came into play again. Not everything Joxx had cobbled together for the defense of Megiddo had come from the planet itself. His troops had jumped over to the planetoid called TransWorld 800, the mostly automated advance SG supply base forty light-years away. Joxx had made the initial trip to TW800 himself. His first act was to declare the artificial moon under martial law, another formality, as most of the people on it were in the employ of the SG anyway. The main objective was to secure the materials needed for his defense system on Megiddo. In less than a half an Earth day, Joxx's troops had taken everything they could find from the storehouses on TW800 and had stripped its small fleet of cargo 'crashers as well, mostly of command and control gear needed for the alignment of Joxx's massive blaster deployment.