by Mack Maloney
But try as they might, the Goth-Stars just couldn't get the Saints on the phone.
The comm officer checked their communicator readings; they all seemed to be in order. The problem was not on their end. The SpeedBalls were not as organized nor as disciplined as the Goths, so the glitch didn't come as a big surprise. Their main communicator screen could be down for a variety of reasons. Most likely the operator was drunk or asleep at the switch.
"Launch a probe," the Goth comm officer told his men. "Put a viz-screen bug inside it and buzz those jerks."
The underlings did as told. In seconds, a small rocket blasted off from the top of their comm shack and traveled twenty miles through the frigid wind and snow in just a few seconds. It was soon circling the main part of the SpeedBalls' base.
Or at least what used to be the SpeedBalls' base…
Because at the moment, it looked like nothing more than a string of big, black holes, slowly melting into the ice.
The comm officer stared at the viz screen; his jaw dropped to his chin.
"What the hell happened there?" he asked no one in particular. "Did those fools blow themselves up?"
Just as the comm officer turned to alert his superiors, another panel on his main communications screen started pulsating.
"What the hell is this?" one of his lowers remarked.
"Spill," the comm officer ordered him.
"It seems we have some kind of flying object, coming out of the west, with a trail originating not far from the Speedballs' position."
"A flying object?" the comm officer mouthed silently.
The man turned to him, his face a mask of confusion and concern. "Yes sir," he said. "It's going very fast, heading right for us."
Now this was odd. There were really only two kinds of flying objects in this part of the Fringe: the huge vessels that flew in space and smaller craft — space fighters, invasion shuttles, ships — which could fly inside an atmosphere, but never very fast.
Yet at that moment, something rather small yet very speedy was coming out of the black, frosty smoke that was once the location of their ally's main base. A similar object had been spotted fleeing the Goth's blaster units earlier in the day. But this time, the intent was unmistakably hostile.
A hostile threat from the air?
A strange thought came to the comm officer's mind. "Do we even have any weapons made to shoot down flying objects?" he asked.
The underlings looked at each other and did a group shrug.
The comm officer just shook his head. "I didn't think so," he said.
The Goth-Star front-line units occupied a mile-long, perfectly straight trench, carved out of the snow and ice about a mile south of the ice fort's front gate.
This trench was dotted with prefab combat dugouts, heated, self-sustaining units much more elaborate than anything found below Klaaz's dying fortress. Each of these units could house up to a hundred soldiers very comfortably. In between the snowball-like structures were the Master Blaster tubular arrays. Thirty-six in total, all of them were pointed at the ice fort, which dominated the horizon directly in front of them.
There was no such thing as a red alert for these front-line troops. They were responsible for little more than firing off their Master Blasters every hour or so and waiting for the eventual order to finally move on the ice fort en masse. They had no defensive weapons of any sort simply because they had no need for them. The weapons fire they'd faced coming from the ancient fortress had been inconsistent at best. It was the gravity shields that were keeping them out.
This lack of any true surface-to-air weaponry meant that when the object hurtling out of the west at them was first spotted, there was nothing any of the Goth-Star troops could do… except watch it approach.
It came barreling over the far horizon, a bright flash of red light, leaving a long trail of yellow sparks across the darkening sky.
The aircraft was of a very strange design. It did not look like a typical space fighter, the only other machine the Goth-Stars could compare it to. To their eyes, it looked more like a smaller version of a enormous battle cruiser, but even then, the resemblance was only fleeting.
The flying machine was rocketing along just fifty feet above the flat, frozen, snowy plain. The noise it was making was very bizarre in a world of silent propulsion devices; a sort of mechanical scream, it was deafening and extremely unnerving. The aircraft overflew the mile-long trench line once, wings tipped, as if it was looking for something. It appeared that two figures were riding inside the contraption, one sitting behind the other and looking out at them through a long, slender bubble-type glass top. After one long pass, the aircraft went into a violent, sweeping maneuver, boosting its power plants to ear-shattering speed and lining itself back up with the trench.
Then it started shooting.
This was a new experience for the Goth-Star soldiers. Attack from low-flying, high-speed aircraft was something few soldiers on the Five-Arm or anywhere else in the Galaxy had faced before. The flying machine's nose seemed to explode in bright orange flame. What they didn't know was that this was a blaster — a six-barrel, airborne blaster — a weapon never conceived before. This stunned some of the soldiers so much, they didn't think to turn their own personal weapons toward the oncoming aircraft.
A big mistake…
The flying machine swept in on them, its nose gun dispensing short but lethal bursts of ultragamma energy. The six continuous blasts made a frightening rippling noise as they rushed through the frigid air, heading for their targets. Suddenly, housing units began blowing up all along the front line. Then the comm shacks, the power units, even the mess halls and latrines.
Meanwhile, the flying machine was gyrating all over the sky, spinning, tumbling, zooming left and right in the blink of an eye. It was moving so fast and so wildly, the Goth-Stars wouldn't have been able to hit it, even if they were hip to the concept of antiaircraft fire, which they weren't.
About four-fifths of the way down the line, the flying machine went into an incredibly sharp 180-degree turn, causing such a massive screech from it power plants, many soldiers still alive along the trench line felt their eardrums explode in a gush of blood. The aircraft's nose stopped firing. It seemed to be looking for something again. Suddenly, it swooped low on one of the largest Master Blaster arrays, a twelve-tube assembly located just about halfway down the mile-long trench. With another horrifying screech, the aircraft's nose lit up again and delivered a flood of ultragamma fire to the base of the multitubed blaster. There was a huge explosion — all but silent in the cold, arctic air — as the power units within the weapon began coming apart and falling into some unknown, three-digit dimension. The resulting collision of so much matter and antimatter (though only a spoonful) set off an explosion of such force, the tiny planet of Tonk was actually wobbled on its axis for a moment. The ball of flame and radiation that followed disintegrated everything within a quarter mile: snow, soldiers, weapons, everything.
But it did not end there. A river of lethal energy cells gushing from the tom-apart blaster array began spilling into the trench and racing in both directions, flooding into other troop quarters located nearby. Each time one of the snowball-shaped bivouacs would go up, it would issue a resounding pop and then be engulfed by a sharp greenish blue secondary explosion. These only added to the conflagration. In seconds, those that could still see realized the weird flying machine had just made a perfect shot on the exact weapons array that would cause the most devastation along the Goth-Stars' line. The machine's pilots were doing what seemed impossible: They were destroying both their huge guns and killing large numbers of the Goth-Stars' best front-line troops all in one fell swoop.
Nor was the flying machine through. It continued to sweep along the trench line, blaster beams spitting out of its nose, hitting smaller but no less lethal gun arrays. This was the last thing seen by many of the front-line meres: the strange aircraft, its nose aglow, hitting the blaster arrays, which in turn drowned an
yone in the vicinity in a burning soup of pure, liquid energy.
Finally, the flying machine looped again and did one more pass before rocketing off to the east. All that remained of the Goth-Stars' position was a series of big black holes, melting their way down into the snow and ice field: dead, just like those back at the SpeedBalls' devastated base. A few soldiers in the rear area survived the catastrophic attack, though many had gone into an immediate state of shock at the suddenness of the lightning-quick strafing run.
How could this be happening? Who was flying this strange machine? And why were they pissed at us?
These were questions that few would ever get the answers to. But the handful of survivors agreed on one thing: that the strange flying machine that had left such a swath of destruction seemed to be painted in a strange combination of colors not seen on the Five-Arm or in many parts of the entire Galaxy in a very, very long time. The strange craft, they would later swear, had been painted in red, white, and blue.
In its wake it had left more than five thousand Goth-Star special forces troops dead or dying and just about all of their front line weaponry damaged or destroyed.
In all, the attack had lasted just twenty seconds.
It took both Hunter and Tomm nearly five minutes to peel Klaaz out of the flying machine's tiny backseat.
Hunter had taken the old soldier along on the bombing mission ostensibly as his target designator, and it was the Klaaz who helped spot the main Master Blaster array whose destruction was the major goal of the lightning-quick raid. But Hunter had an ulterior motive for bringing Klaaz with him, one more subtle than target spotting.
When they finally closed the book on the Great Klaaz's life, Hunter wanted history to show that the ancient warrior had a hand in getting the refugees off Tonk. He felt it important that the hero's image remain intact, right till the end, if only because some kid might someday hear about Klaaz and want to be just like him. And that would be a good thing, especially in such a lawless part of the sky. To Hunter's mind, it was the least he could do.
There was no doubt that Klaaz had experienced the ride of his life to boot, laughing wildly the whole way. But the mind-boggling speed had pinned the old warrior against the rear of the temporary jump seat Hunter had installed in the aircraft to accommodate Pater Tomm. The old guy was wedged in so tight, it took Hunter and Tomm several minutes just to get his safety straps unfastened.
Finally, they were able to lift the old soldier out of the aircraft, the extraction being done in the middle of yet another raging snowstorm, but tellingly without the hassle of any bad-guy blaster bombardment. Through it all, Klaaz was crowing loudly, describing in startlingly accurate detail the jumble of maneuvers Hunter had performed during the bombing mission.
They carried him down into the rocket chamber, where a hero's welcome was waiting for him. Regaining his strength as soon as the first wave of applause hit him, Klaaz walked the last few feet from the tunnel to the balcony by himself, raising his arms in feeble but determined triumph. Many among the throng of beautiful women screamed back at him in appreciation; others wept softly. Klaaz had come through; it had taken him a while, but he'd delivered them from their enemies, just as he had promised.
Hunter was wise enough to stay several steps back in the darkened tunnel, allowing Klaaz to greet the beautiful refugees solus. This was Klaaz's moment. An old hero hearing the cheers again — that was the important thing. Only once did Klaaz turn around and look back at Tomm and Hunter, and that was just to give them a very sly wink.
The celebration would have to be a brief one, though. A clock was ticking here. The refugees' ship was powered by combustible fuel, which it burned in several huge motors; the resulting thrust would slowly push them to orbit. It was an ancient method of achieving spaceflight — workable, but fraught with complications and a far cry from the current technology, where a vessel, big or small, could get to space with the mere push of a button.
While it was true that Hunter's mission had wiped out a lot of the besieging forces outside the ice fort, there were still thousands of enemy troops in the area. As soon as they got over the shock of what just happened to their comrades, they would surely renew the bombardment on the ice fortress and maybe even launch their long-anticipated attack at last.
In other words, if the beautiful exiles from Mutaman-Younguska were ever going to get off Tonk and head for a planet paradise Klaaz had already picked out for them, now was the time to go.
Tomm had overseen the last-minute preparations for the spaceship's departure, including drawing down the battered gravity shield. But as the priest now related to Hunter, the upcoming launch would not be any simple thing. If the fuel got too cold, it wouldn't ignite and would ruin much of the ship's internal piping. If the fuel became too warm, due to attempts to keep it from freezing, it could blow up and take most of the ice fort with it. In other words, once the old bird's fuel tanks were full, it had to leave right away.
The fueling cycle was just about complete, Tomm reported. The top of the huge chamber had already been cut away, and the snow was falling in through the big hole. The chamber was getting cold and losing its rickety life-system integrity very quickly.
The ship had to go now.
Klaaz knew this.
He wrapped his arm around Pater Tomm and said, "Please my brother, come with us. You and Mr. Hawk would be like kings when we reach our new world. I mean no offense, but once we are settled, there will be two thousand very grateful beauties who will want…"
Tomm's face turned red on cue. "They'll need only one king, my friend," he said, tactfully interrupting the old soldier. "And Hawk and I have very pressing business elsewhere."
Klaaz finally accepted this. "But perhaps you will visit our world someday soon, when your business is complete?"
Tomm shook hands with him. "You have my word."
"Very well," Klaaz said with a clap of his hands. "Suffice to say, you have both helped us immensely. And as you can see, I will be departing soon. So please, if I can't convince you to come with us, at least tell me why you came here in the first place."
Hunter and Tomm just looked at each other. Their quest had nearly been forgotten in all the excitement.
"It's a simple thing, really," the priest replied to Klaaz.
The old soldier winked slyly. "I like simple," he said.
Tomm lowered his voice. "We want to get to the Home Planets. Do you know anyone who might know where they are?"
Klaaz laughed. He thought it was a joke. But as soon as he realized that Tomm and Hunter were serious, the grin disappeared.
"There are many people in this part of the Five-Arm who would blow a hole in you for asking that question," he said darkly. "Indeed, many believe those two words can bring the worst kind of luck, should they hear them spring from another's lips."
"As a priest, I am immune to such superstitions," Tomm finally replied.
Klaaz thought about this, then his smile returned. "I forgot that you possess supernatural powers, Father."
He tightened their little circle. "But if you really want an answer to your question," he said in an excited whisper, "you must find a man named Zarex Red. Ever hear of him?"
Tomm and Hunter shook their heads no.
"He's an interesting sort," Klaaz said. "A bit of a rogue. An arms merchant of great wealth and expertise. But a grand explorer as well. It has been said that Zarex Red has been to more uncharted places on the Five-Arm than anyone else."
"Where can he be found?" Hunter asked.
"Well, that's the question, my friend," Klaaz replied. "For Zarex has also probably made more enemies on the Five-Arm than anyone else — even me. So he keeps his movements very secret. However, the last I heard, he was hiding out on a place called Bazooms. Like I said, he's made his share of enemies along the way of his travels. But the bad guys who have been seeking him lately are a very relentless sort: brutal, intelligent, well-equipped."
Tomm looked at the old soldier strangely.
"There are not many bad guys out there fitting such a description," the priest said.
"Only one that I know of, old friend," Klaaz said soberly.
"The Bad Moon Knights? Really?"
Klaaz nodded. "I heard Zarex was running guns to some of their enemies, and well, I guess they figured it was wiser to get rid of him than battling those he'd armed."
Hunter asked, "Who are the Bad Moon Knights?"
"No one really knows," Klaaz told him. "They are very mysterious sorts. Been around for a number of centuries now. They seem to be content these days with taking over key parts of the Five-Arm, most of them closer to the Ball, and doing so whether the people on those planets have ever been contacted or not. But the BMK are also most brutal in their methods. Besides launching huge campaigns, usually against very weakened and unsuspecting targets, they have a penchant for carrying out personal vendettas. Once they conquer a region of space, they immediately hunt down the teachers, the heroes, the poets — and yes, even explorers and the like. Along those lines, they've been trying to find my friend Zarex for years. But only a few of us know where he is."
"Will he mind us coming to look for him?" Hunter asked.
"He won't mind if he knows I sent you," Klaaz replied. "I used to be one of his best customers."
He smiled again, and the teeth didn't seem as cracked this time.
"Though the sight of a priest coming toward him might scare him more than a fleet of Bad Moon Knights," he said.
Pater Tomm bowed again.
"It will not be the first time I've instilled such fear," he said with a straight face.
The old rocket ship lifted off five minutes later.
It left slowly, with a huge ball of fire and smoke. The noise from the takeoff was deafening — so much so that the inner walls of the ice fort began to shake and crumble. The scaffold tower, which was essential to the rocket's liftoff, was blasted away in this sudden storm of flame. On the ground where the rocket ship had once stood, a deep pool of quickly melting ice was forming.
