by Mack Maloney
As all this was happening, pure pandemonium broke out on top of Fire Rock Ridge.
The wreckage from the first space cruiser to go down was still exploding, raining pieces of flaming metal down upon those soldiers stuck on top of the cliff. Deaux's personal shuttle had taken off long ago, leaving all but his special security troops behind. This left the surviving soldiers on the ridge with only one option: They began withdrawing the only way possible, down a narrow truck path, which wound its way down the eastern side of the ridge. These troops were strafed endlessly by the 33418 danker on the way down, though. So much so, that when the majority of the six thousand or so soldiers reached the bottom of the ridge, they started walking east, away from the battlefield.
They had had enough.
It was just about this time that the shuttles sent back to get more troops from Saint Louis and other points east began returning.
They'd appeared above Fire Rock, hoping to set down on top of the ridge as before. But that was no longer viable; the ridge was a sea of flaming wreckage and bodies. Having no other choice, the shuttles began landing right on the Plain of Stars itself. At this point, two more of the stolen Master Blasters came on-line, and now four of the frightening weapons were firing point-blank on the deploying BMK troops. The turmoil that had racked Fire Rock Ridge had moved right down to the valley floor itself. The BMK soldiers from Moon 39 had never encountered anything like this before. They were used to invading helpless planets with little or no opposition at all. Now they were in the midst of what was called in ancient terms a VH-LZ: a very hot landing zone.
The shuttles themselves were nearly five hundred feet long, sleek, tubular, with many windows. Their landing systems were rudimentary, though. These vessels were built to do two things: take off and land. They weren't good at hovering or doing anything that required lateral flight. Their pilots were at a loss on how to find a safe place to set down among the Master Blaster beams, the thousands of battlefield casualties, the bodies, the fires, the smoke, and the wreckage of three enormous space cruisers.
The Plain of Stars was suddenly a very crowded place, and three hundred shuttles needed space to set down. The confusion on the battlefield had now taken over the air above. Shuttles began bumping into each other, then colliding. Some had already landed and were dispensing their one thousand-man contingents; some had not. There were more crashes. The air was filled with blaster bolts and gunfire. And just when it seemed it couldn't get any worse, the flying machine showed up again.
Where the BMK soldiers saw chaos and carnage, the aerial devil saw opportunity. Traveling at an insanely high speed, it wove its way in and out of the scattering shuttles, picking them off one by one with economical bursts from the six-ring blaster in its nose. Once the aircraft made its way down the length of the battlefield, it went into a screaming 180-degree turn and dove into the melee again. Hardly noticed in all the flame and smoke was the clanker, 33418, screaming along in an almost parallel course with the aircraft, firing at individual targets closer to the ground. The barrages from the stolen Master Blasters then doubled as the four remaining weapons came on-line.
It went on like this for what seemed forever. The flying machine and the clanker shooting at anything that moved, the Master Blasters pounding away at the already-burning space cruisers and the surviving airborne shuttles. BMK troops running for cover would find little but flame and destruction at every turn. Some of the more seasoned troops simply located the deepest hole they could crawl into and did so. Others panicked and tried to leave the battlefield altogether. Few of them made it.
The only reason it finally stopped was that about half the fleet of incoming shuttles saw the nightmare they were supposed to fly into and turned around before being sucked into the inferno. The blaster fire died down. The clanker departed the scene, streaking off to the west. The flying machine slowed its speed drastically and flew over the plain, surveying what had been wrought. Finally, it, too, departed the area, leaving behind one last bone-crushing sonic boom.
An eerie calm came over the battlefield now. The wreckage of the starcruisers and dozens of the big shuttles was stretched for seven miles in both directions. Fires everywhere burned out of control. The Ghost River was running with hydraulic oil and blood. The sun could barely poke through the clouds of smoke, it was so thick. Somewhere amid the wreckage, a Klaxon was blaring, with no one around to turn it off. Finally, one of the Master Blasters opened up again, sending a stream of lightning bolts into the vicinity of the noise, silencing it for good.
All was deathly quiet after that.
More than sixty-five thousand BMK soldiers lay dead on the Plain of Stars, killed in a battle that really wasn't a battle at all because the BMK never got to fire a shot. Sixty-five thousand men, lost in just a dozen minutes of confusing carnage. It was the worst death toll for any single action in the mercenaries' thousand-year history.
The trouble was, on Planet America alone, there were still four hundred thousand of them left.
26
High Noon
In the midst of the battle, Deaux's command shuttle had escaped to a mountaintop three miles north of the Ghost River Valley, a place called Silverine Peak.
Locked away inside his cabin now, thrown on his hovering bed, Deaux was still shaking from the events down on the Plain of Stars two hours before. His door was locked. He had a pillow over his face. His staff had wisely left him alone.
Attempting to land all of his troops at the same time, in the same place, under fire, had been a monumental blunder on his part. Six space cruisers lost, hundreds of shuttles destroyed, tens of thousands of troops killed. Sure, this was war. People die and things crash. But…
Not a shot fired in our own defense! Nothing at all was thrown in the enemy's direction!
That was the real problem here. The history books would paint him as a fool. The ledger books, too.
His career as a top commander, handed to him so easily, was finished.
Just when he had begun to like it, too.
The truth was, things were bad all over. All of the garrisoned cities in the East had been attacked by the enemy's flying machine at least twice just on this day alone. Indeed, it had been attacking them at least once a day just about all week. HVV parks, food warehouses, and ammo dumps were the targets of choice for the aerial devil. Slowly but surely, he was taking away the things an army depends on most.
Worse, and even stranger, the flying machine had been hitting targets on France all day, too. There was little doubt now; the two invaded planets were obviously in cahoots somehow. But no one within the BMK had really been able to make the connection. The fantastic flying machine had something to do with it, though. Why would it appear to aid the causes of both planets? And what drove the man who flew it? And where did he come from? Deaux's commanders had even produced a time line showing that, during the disaster on the Plain of Stars, whenever the red, white, and blue craft wasn't overhead shooting at them, it was off attacking targets in Saint Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. The plane was spotted moving at incredible speeds as it dashed back and forth between target areas. Add in the missions over France, and whatever time it took to fly between the two planets, and it was apparent that the flying machine had never stopped moving. Day and night, for nearly a week, it had been in the skies over both planets attacking the BMK with impunity.
"When he is not here, he is there," Deaux had murmured when shown the report. "But he is always somewhere."
Deaux had other problems, too. There were no more Master Blasters on Planet America — at least none in BMK hands. Deaux had foolishly dismissed the idea earlier of sending for six of the multitubed arrays from France. Now these weapons were hiding in caves near Paris for fear that if they moved, the enemy's secret weapon would find them and bomb them. Deaux did have several hundred smaller Faster Blasters on hand, but even put together, they didn't add up to one whole big boy.
The BMK in America was also running out of supplies. They'd been dwi
ndling rapidly even before the flying machine intensified its attacks. The BMK simply hadn't planned to be engaged for this long against opposition. Usually on these forays, the army came with enough stuff to last a week and a half. That's when the extermination squads were normally done with their work. The planet would be fried, and the troops would all return to Moon 39. Obviously, this campaign was going to take a little longer than that. But it was getting so bad, Deaux would have to order all his troops to half rations soon.
So he was feeling very low at this point, which made the message his officers came bearing such an unexpected surprise.
"The enemy wants to talk," one of the commanders told him, one of three who'd dared knock on his cabin door. "We've just pulled down a message string from them."
"Talk?" Deaux asked, not quite getting it. "Talk about what?"
"About this war," the lead officer said. "About the future of the conflict. It's called a truce meeting."
"But what is there to say?" Deaux asked them. "We all know what's happened so far."
"It's considered a very Five-Arm thing to do," the lead officer explained again. "Which makes us wonder exactly who we are fighting against over there. To talk to your opponent at a crucial point in the battle: Soldiers who are steeped in myth feel a sort of compulsion to do this. It's a ritual. But some valuable information can be gained from it, too."
Deaux was still confused. "Well, who goes to talk with them?"
"You do, sir," was the reply.
"Alone?"
"You can bring three warm bodies with you," he was told, "but no weapons of any kind. That's the tradition, and it's as old as the truce meeting itself. You will meet on a neutral spot at an agreed-upon location, under a green flag. As your advisers, we urge you to go and see what they have to say."
Deaux suddenly became excited. He sat up, wiped his eyes, and straightened his uniform.
"Is there a possibility they might want to surrender?" he asked his commanders.
The officers all shrugged.
"Anything is possible," the lead officer finally replied.
The truce meeting took place on another peak located halfway between Silverine and the Plain of Stars.
Deaux was transported to the summit by a specially adapted HVV. With him were three of his biggest bodyguards. None of them were carrying weapons. Deaux was holding a green flag.
He had assumed that four enemy soldiers would be on hand when he arrived. But instead, only one person was waiting for him at the top of the windblown peak. He was holding a green flag in one hand, a large brass cross in the other.
A priest…
Deaux climbed out of the HVV and walked to within six feet of the diminutive monk.
"Are you lost, Father?" Deaux asked him snidely.
The priest just shook his head slowly. The wind was making his cassock crack like a whip.
"I am the one they choose to speak to you," he said.
Deaux handed the green flag to one of his security men and imperiously snapped off his gloves.
"So then, speak, Father. I'm a very busy man."
"This war is unnecessary," the priest told him simply.
"And why is that?"
"Because it's not your battle to fight," the priest replied. "You've been duped. Whoever is paying you has made a fool of you and your men and has been for centuries."
The wind began howling now. Smoke from the battle scene below was wafting up toward them, swirling in the mountain crosswinds. It was suddenly very cold.
"Father, I'm sure you are a more learned person than me," Deaux said. "So forgive me, but I don't understand what you are talking about."
The priest finally lowered his green flag to the ground.
"Answer me this," he began again. "When was the last time you were paid for this mission?"
Deaux didn't reply. Paid? He couldn't remember back that far.
The priest went on. "When was the last time you heard from your families? Or saw your superiors? You must have a command structure somewhere in the Galaxy. When did anyone from there visit you last?"
Again, Deaux could not reply. Besides Xirstix, he'd never seen any superior officers on the sentinel moon. For years the rumor around the base was that their superiors always visited in secret, which explained why they were never around. But Xirstix had once confided to him that it had been decades since the last real contact. Yet there was a reason for that: What they were doing out here was so secret, regular communication would have jeopardized the security of the mission. Or at least that's what Xirstix had been told.
"Don't you get it?" the priest asked him now. "Just like everyone else in this system, you're stuck inside a time bubble. You think you've been out here for just a few decades, but it's really been centuries. It is only noticeable to someone from the outside looking in. But take it from me, back where I'm from, those uniforms, those weapons, those little wings — they went out of date hundreds of years ago. The people who stuck you out here are probably all dead by now. Of old age, I'm sure. And that means there is no money waiting for you."
Deaux remained mute. His eyes darted back and forth, for him a sign that he was approaching something that passed as deep thought.
"I was told I'd be out here for fifty years," Deaux finally croaked. "I was told that it would be an isolated post, but I would be paid handsomely once my tour was done."
"Have you ever heard of Holy Blood, my son?"
Deaux shook his head no.
"It is a magical substance that keeps you alive a long time, so a friend of mine tells me," the priest said. "He thinks you were all given a bit of it and then sent way out here to serve for centuries, not decades."
"Nonsense!"
"Oh, really? Then why do you think they never came back to finish the other ninety-nine sentinel moons?"
Deaux was stopped dead in his tracks. He had no answer to that question.
"We could prove it to you, if you let us," the priest offered.
Deaux's face turned red. "I did not come up here to be educated by you," he snapped. "What you seem to forget here, Father, is, time bubble or not, I've got you at an advantage on the field — more than twenty to one! My job here is to crush you. That means you will be crushed."
"Even though there is a chance that what I've said here is correct? That you've in effect given up your lives out here? That your families are all dead? Your loved ones gone, assuming you even had loved ones? Think about it, man. It makes sense. Sure this is a secret place. Highly secret. It was built that way. And they didn't want anyone back there to know about it. They knew they had to keep their prisoners under lock and key, but they also had to keep the prison guards quiet, too. How best to do that than put them all in a time bubble and allow the years to pass like water dripping on stone. From that perspective, what's the point of all this?"
"What's the point?" Deaux roared back. "What do you want me to do? Just walk away, just on your say-so?"
"Yes! Exactly… Just walk away. Leave this planet. Leave the system. Pop out of the bubble and go do whatever it is you people insist on doing. No one will even know you've gone. Not for decades — and that's only assuming they'll actually come out here looking for you again someday, which they probably won't."
Deaux had had enough. He was starting to think too much, and it hurt. He wanted to go.
"Father, you are dulling my senses, and I have to be sharp for my victory celebration tomorrow. So my best to you and your Heavenly Creator or whoever, but I have things to do… "
The priest just shook his head sadly.
"Hear one more thing then," he said. "Honor binds me to tell you that my friends will have a secret weapon if and when you clash again. They will not hesitate to use it on you if you persist. This secret weapon will kill many of your soldiers. So many, that at the end of the day, it just won't be worth it for you."
"If your secret weapon is that flying maniac," Deaux retorted angrily. "We'll get around to destroying him eventually. I won't
lie and say that his attacks haven't been… noticed. But he can't do it alone."
A very dark moment came now. "That flying machine is a weapon of awesome standards," the priest replied sternly. "But that is not the secret weapon of which I speak. This is something more brutal, and for your men, unstoppable."
"Please," Deaux sniffed. "I have nearly a half million men still under my command. You have fifteen thousand, tops. Now, really, I thought you wanted to talk — not bluff."
"It is not a bluff. We want to make a deal. You and your army go back to where you came from. You leave us alone. We leave you alone. We never have to meet again."
Deaux couldn't help it; he laughed in the priest's face. Even his security guards were laughing.
"You're bold, if anything, Father. I have to give you that. But your friends have sent a fool in their place. No matter what mumbo jumbo you want to fill my head, the facts are still these: Your friends have the smaller army, it is their planet that has been invaded. Their cities are under our domination."
He signaled for the HVV to come and pick him up.
"I have more important things to do than stay up here talking to a delusional priest," he said.
The HVV appeared, and Deaux climbed aboard.
The priest called after him, "Just think of the lives you could save, my son. Please…"
But Deaux was already gone.
27
They mere called whistles.
They were an ancient device that would produce a shrill, piercing sound when manipulated by breath. Every BMK field commander carried one; so did every officer down to the rank of captain. Through the centuries, their predecessors had discovered that if one blew hard enough, the whistle's song could be heard above all types of battle.
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.