by Mack Maloney
“Well, then you did come to the right place, Padre,” Rappz said. “What type of weapons are you looking for?”
The priest shrugged. He wasn’t really sure.
“Well, weapons…” he said. “My friends are running out of just about everything…”
Blitz signaled for two more drinks. The robot waiter hurriedly refilled their teacups. “And get this man a pitcher of ice water,” Blitz ordered the robot.
Rappz pulled out his notebook and started with a clean page.
“Okay, Father, we understand that this is your first time buying guns,” he said. “So why don’t you just tell us the situation your friends have found themselves in and maybe we can figure out what they need.”
The pitcher of water arrived; the robot spilled a bit while setting it down on the table. Blitz responded by giving the robot a swift kick in the ass; the clang of boot-on-metal echoed throughout the busy saloon.
The priest brushed some spilled ice from his cassock, then poured himself a mug of water and drank from it greedily.
“My friends are mercenaries,” he said between gulps. “But they have found themselves on a mission of mercy…”
“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.”
“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 moon Zazu-Zazu
Orbiting planet Jazz 33
Dead Gulch Star System
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 elect
ron 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.
But there was an even more frightening aspect to discovering the monster. The Nakkz could never have built this colossus on their own. They were made up mostly of retread space pirates — fierce fighters, but definitely not a pool of any great thinkers.
How, then, had such a giant come into their possession?
However it happened, as the recon troops contemplated the gigantic xarcus on this awful morning, they knew there was no way they and their allies could put up a defense against it. Most of the conflict’s fighting had taken place in areas like the Xomme. On a few occasions the Nakkz had actually come within sight of the Qez. But these had been small and mostly symbolic victories. No matter where these breakthroughs took place, the enemy’s lengthy lines of communication and the atrocious conditions of the combat zone itself always forced them to withdraw eventually.
But now, with this huge weapon, all that was a thing of the past. The xarcus was itself a self-contained city. Once it made its way across the battlefield and reached the Zazu-Zazu defense line, there would be no way of stopping it. It could crash through the wall surrounding Qez at any point — that is, if it didn’t simply level it with its overwhelming weaponry first.
And once it got beyond Qez and into the countryside, it would just be hours before the rest of the tiny moon was conquered.
This would not be good. The Nakkz were well known for their brutal treatment of anyone living on or fighting for Zazu-Zazu. Soldiers or civilians, young or old, it seemed to be the intent of the Nakkz not only to conquer the small moon, but to wipe out its population as well. With a weapon of this magnitude, that terrible moment now seemed very close at hand.