Then he checked the readout screen again. The number of falling objects leaped to 22,000, then 25,000, then 28,000.
Then the number doubled.
Then it tripled.
Joxx looked around at the battery of technicians in place with him atop the needle. Each man appeared more confused than the next. When Joxx looked at the readout screen again, the number of falling objects had increased to more than 150,000!
Another panel pushed. The first targets were approaching the magic threshold of 400,000 feet. Joxx sent out the final order. All targets had been automatically acquired. The number was now approaching a quarter million. Finally, a site in the northwest mountains detected an object passing below 400,000 feet.
The gigantic network of blasters opened up just two seconds later.
Few words could adequately describe what happened next. Chaos. Panic. Aeronautical mayhem. All applied, but it was still so much more than that.
The skies all around Megiddo — day side and night — lit up in a tremendous flash of combined light as more than 25,000 blasters fired almost simultaneously. The combination of the energy and flash served to emblazon the skies with an illumination nearly three times that of the system's substantial yellow white sun.
This blinding fire continued for more than a minute. The sky brightened even further as the first cascades of objects passed below 200,000 feet. There were now more than a half million targets falling through the atmosphere all around Megiddo. Sheer numbers alone allowed many of the objects to make it through the first wall of blaster fire.
There were just too many of them for the combined tracking systems to lock on to, never mind try for a hit.
Nowhere was this rain of objects heavier than above Needle City itself.
The skies overhead the sprawling, beachfront metropolis were thick with blaster streaks, firing nonstop at the incoming targets. Joxx had stopped looking at his tracking readout screen; the number of falling images had ballooned to nearly 700,000 by now, inconceivable in Joxx's master plan. His anti-aircraft system was pounding away furiously, sending thousands of artificial lightning bolts skyward from all points around the globe. Were they hitting anything? It was impossible to tell. His acquisition screens were locked up tight, there were so many objects coming in his direction.
But then another strange thing happened. As Joxx stood over his control board, angry and baffled by what was going on, he happened to look up and out the needle's window. A ball of red light was coming at him at incredibly high speed, not from high in the atmosphere but directly across the Sea of Green.
Before Joxx's eyes could adequately tell his brain that something else had been added to the confusion, the ball of fire went right by the Needle, leaving behind a hypersonic boom that rocked the enormously tall structure to its foundations. Joxx was thrown to the floor, his head smashing into one of the viz screen monitors on the way down. He regained his feet, only to be slammed against the control board again.
The sky needle began swaying wildly and did not stop for ten long, frightening seconds. Then, no sooner had Joxx managed to finally get to his feet, when the fireball streaked by once again. It was going so fast now, it was just a blur.
"What the hell is that?" Joxx heard himself cry.
It was onto one of the largest blaster sites outside Needle City that this mysterious rain first touched down.
It was near a place called Pooks, on the other side of the world from Needle and just below the equator. The Anti-Aircraft battery was located at the peak of a 7,500-foot plateau known simply as the Rise. It was one of the highest elevations left on the dried-out former gas giant. That's why the strange deluge hit there first.
There was a massive number of gun emplacements atop the Rise, the largest collection by far in Megiddo's southern hemisphere. Joxx had seen fit to install no less than twenty Master Blasters on the Rise to be complemented by several hundred Faster Blasters and almost two thousand half-tube blasters, all of which had been aligned on long pickets of reionized steel.
These batteries had spotted the rain of strange objects at the same time as Joxx and everyone up north. It was just seconds later that the interconnected firing command went out. All of the long-range destructo-ray tubes on the Rise focused on one huge quadrant in the sky, some eighty miles up, and started blasting away.
But just as the other batteries had, they saw the swarm of bright streaks passing through this first fusillade with some ease, falling swiftly through the atmosphere at high speed and heading right for them. The second fusillade went out just a few moments later. Again, with barrels readjusted and bearings reset, the sky lit up like day from the combined barrage. But still the streaks of light kept falling through what would have seemed to be an impenetrable barrier of blaster power.
And now these things, whatever they were, had passed below 60,000 feet and were coming on fast. The commander of the batteries on top of the Rise quickly realized that as brilliant as Joxx's anti-aircraft system might have been, it was clear that there were so many of these falling objects and therefore so many possible targets, it was overloading the planetwide system on a massive scale, throwing it in pandemonium. It was also clear by now that these things weren't invasion shuttles. They were much smaller and moving way too quickly.
So the base commander yanked his system off-line and ordered the third barrage be fired manually, this one en-gaging the array of Master Blasters he had at his disposal. The fusillade was so powerful, the heat immediately ignited hundreds of fires in the thick jungles surrounding the installation. The Master Blasters were sending up rivers of highly charged electrical bolts; indeed, the whole sky was covered with them. Still, the majority of mysterious objects made it through all this as well. The weapons operators on the ground — condemned inmates all of them — just couldn't believe what they were seeing. How could anything get through such a thick curtain of death rays?
For many, those were the last thoughts they ever had.
The mystery objects came crashing down on them just ten seconds later.
Some of those on hand at first believed the objects were meteorites, as improbable as that might be.
They came down at incredibly high speed, trailing long red and green tails that exploded in a shower of deadly sparks whenever they hit. And they hit hard. The kinetic energy of these things was tremendous. All kinds of structures around the plateau base — towers, bunkers, vehicles, as well as the ring of blaster emplacements themselves— began to disappear in a cloud of dust and rock as the mysterious missiles came down. Most of the base was destroyed in seconds.
Those inmates caught out in the open never knew what hit them. Hundreds of direct hits resulted in quick explosions of bloody fog, then little else. Those under cover were astonished by what they saw next. Through the smoke and gristle, they realized that these things weren't missiles or meteorites or some kind of radically new bombardment weapon.
They were robots.
In the next minute, thousands of huge red and black battle robots rained down upon the hapless defenders at the Rise. In a way, the robots were like bombardment weapons as just one hitting the ground could cause massive amounts of damage.
But this was not the most astounding feature of the bi-zarre aerial attack. As the stunned defenders watched each robot annihilate itself on impact, the hundreds of its broken pieces would lie still on the ground for only a few moments before, like magic, they started converging on themselves. Even the pieces of debris following the blaster hits high up in the sky were coalescing once they came down. Gathering together in what seemed a defiance of all nature, the torn and shredded robot segments started a slow but steady process of reassembly.