Planet America (39 page)

So the BMK troops could only watch helplessly as the strange flying machine began looping around the floundering starship, the deadly ray blasts from its nose never stopping for very long. It took only a few passes before something exploded on the , underbelly of the three thousand-foot-long ship. This was followed seconds later by another, even larger explosion on the top side of the gigantic vessel. The cruiser began wobbling in the air not a quarter mile above the battlefield. The mysterious aircraft delivered one long, final blaster barrage to the ship's bridge, then departed at very high speed to the west. A stream of soldiers began pouring out of one of the spacecruiser's jump ports. The ship had tried to unload its troops, even though it was under attack. But it was way too late for that.

There was another titanic explosion, and now the cruiser slowly began to turn over. Gushing huge sheets of flame and smoke, it went completely inverted and slammed into the ground right at the base of Fire Rock Ridge, killing all 11,500 troops on board plus more than four hundred BMK officers who had just climbed down from the ridge top.

Just seconds later, the second and third space cruisers popped in above the battlefield.

Their pilots did not dawdle as the first ship had. They set down immediately on the Plain of Stars, about a half mile east of the Ghost River, side by side. They opened all access ramps and soon thousands of BMK soldiers were streaming out of the starships, running for their lives. Then came another screech. The fourth space cruiser had blinked in. But now another thunderous blast, and the small red, white, and blue craft was back again.

It immediately went for the fourth space cruiser, still breaking out of its cloud about one thousand feet above the plain. The small flying machine hammered away at the bottom of the space cruiser with its six rings of blaster fire. Obviously, a vulnerable spot had been identified on the starship's underbelly. This time it took only two passes by the multicolored aircraft before the spacecruiser's aft section exploded, slamming the huge ship to the ground about a mile south of Fire Rock Ridge. This done, the flying machine whipped around, strafed the troops still pouring out of the two landed cruisers, then climbed straight up and disappeared from sight.

Somehow in the middle of this tumult, the fifth space cruiser arrived and set down about a mile north of the ridge. It began dispensing its troops, but at that exact moment, two of the eight stolen Master Blasters poking out of the enemy's front line became operational. Multitubed barrels level to the ground, their operators opened up on the troops streaming out of the fifth space cruiser. Hundreds of soldiers were vaporized in seconds. The cruiser itself took massive hits on its rear stabilizer legs. Both were blown away, causing the rear end of the huge ship to crumple to the ground. A huge fire broke out on the vessel's bridge, located in a bubble at the opposite end of the ship. A symphony of alarms could be heard going off within the cruiser now, like death bells, tolling away. Finally, the two forward landing struts collapsed as well, and the rest of the mortally wounded ship slammed into the ground.

The sixth space cruiser never appeared at all. It had been shot down by the ascending flying machine soon after entering the atmosphere.

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 dwindling 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.