Keep moving, the voice told him. Just keep moving…
They walked for another hour, making good progress, considering just about everyone was in need of food, water, and rest.
But the farther north they moved, the more violent the rumbling under their feet became — and more frequent. And soon enough smoke began appearing on the far horizon. Then they could see the glow of flames as well.
It soon became obvious something big was happening up over the next peak. Sheez picked out two young guys and sent them ahead to check it out. Meanwhile, he had the rest of the group lay low.
It took the two runners about a half hour to move up, see what was happening, and then run back to the group's position. When they reached Sheez again, they were both so excited and out breath, it was hard to get anything out of them at first.
Finally all one of them could say was, "Boss, you won't believe what's happening up there…"
It took Sheez just fifteen minutes to get up and over the line of hills, his suddenly energetic body moving quicker than ever before.
With each step, he heard more tremendous explosions and felt the ground literally quake beneath his feet. The sky ahead was incredibly bright with flame and flashes of light. There was so much smoke and dust in the air, he couldn't see anything else across the entire northern horizon.
Finally he reached the top of the peak and peered over the other side. And his young scout had been right. He didn't believe what he saw.
Sheez had never been a soldier. He'd never carried a weapon in combat, he'd never been on a real battlefield. Surely, he'd seen the results of battle. He'd witnessed the beginnings of the destruction of his planet Megiddo. But he was long gone before the hammer really came down.
That's why what he saw before him now was so astonishing.
It was a battle — at least that much was clear. The crisscross of blaster fire was blinding, the smoke and flying debris tremendous. There were ships of all shapes and sizes coming and going, explosions all around them in the air. But there were other ships firing at them, too, or sometimes firing at each other. It was confusion times ten. Times a hundred. Times a thousand.
Sheez had to clear the dust from his eyes. He tried to figure out who was fighting who and who was caught in the middle. It was very hard to do at first, but gradually things started coming together.
He was looking down on another immense valley. This one was long and rectangular, typical topography for Doomsday 212. In the middle of the valley was a huge circular trench— yes, a trench dug into the concrete surface of the dead, rocky planet. So what he was looking down at was a defense perimeter. But Sheez couldn't believe what else he saw. Inside the trenches were thousands of robots, huge mechanical men with huge blasters, seemingly firing in every direction. And these weren't ordinary clankers. Sheez recognized them. They were the robots of Myx.
He knew these tin men all too well. When the Two Arm invaders attacked Megiddo, they'd sent streams of the almost-invincible robots raining down on Joxx's defensive positions. The defending troops did their best to blast the flying robots out of the sky, but that proved impossible, as the robots would simply pull themselves back together again and fly away. As it turned out, their attack was actually a very successful effort to distract Joxx from the invaders' real objective: the artificial planetoid of TW800, where they managed to steal six cargo 'crashers. Nevertheless, Sheez knew what these monsters could do. But what the hell were they doing here? Certainly the Two Arm invaders weren't involved in this.
Or were they?
There was no way Sheez could tell how the robots had gotten to Doomsday, or who was controlling them or why. He could see that they were lined up shoulder to shoulder in the trenches and firing wildly out of the circle. And who were they firing at? Thousands — no, tens of thousands — of REF soldiers.
Entire armies of the enormous red-suited troops were trying breach the trench line. And the robots were doing everything they could to keep them out.
In the middle of this perimeter — the circle was probably a half mile in diameter at the most — Sheez saw a dozen or so strange starships, some on the ground, others hovering just above it. These ships appeared to be from another part of the Galaxy entirely. Even so, refugees were be being led into them.
That much Sheez could tell because at certain points around this huge battlefield, he could see streams of refugees pouring into the perimeter, somehow dodging all the blaster fire, the smoke and dust, and running right up to the waiting ships under the protection of the huge robots.
It was only then that it dawned on Sheez exactly what was going on here. This wasn't just a battle; it was an evacuation, a rescue effort. Just as the REF had dumped thousands of refugees onto Doomsday 212, and may have been dumping them still, probably to die, someone else was trying to lift them off and save their lives.
And even in the middle of all this — in his very dangerous position as it was all happening a relatively short distance from him — Sheez, former hustler, former crooked politician, former tin pot dictator, was struck by something.
He heard it come from his own lips; there was no voice whispering in his ear this time.
"Noble…" he said, uttering the word for the first time in his life. "What a Goddamn noble thing to do."
It was on its next pass through the No-Fly Zone that the SF stealth ship XenoVox finally got a close-up look at what was happening on Doomsday 212.
Flying within a hair's breadth of the planet, its crew discovered a ground battle had erupted in its northern hemisphere. It was so immense, the smoke and flame obscured even the Xeno's most powerful scanners, and they could usually see through just about anything.
Above the battlefield, there were ships going in and coming out; some were the same sorry vessels that had dropped the refugees onto the planet in the first place. But now they appeared to be under someone else's control. Even stranger, there were other ships involved here: the mysterious fleet of arms dealers and gunships the Xeno had detected flying in from the Five Arm earlier. Among them were the REF Red Ships, trying to fire on these disparate vessels. But somehow the arms dealers were also using their huge guns to protect the refugee ships leaving the planet's orbit.
None of this made sense to those aboard the spy ship. Was this small force of arms dealers from the faraway Five Arm actually taking on the renegade REF? As unlikely as it seemed, that appeared to be at least partly the case.
The Xeno dashed away from the area and was about to report these bizarre developments back to the Omega Force, when suddenly its ultra-long-range scanners started going crazy — again.
They had picked up something else very strange, not down on the planet or even inside the No-Fly Zone. This was coming from somewhere very, very far out.
The Xeno crew began triangulating, and soon their bubblers were telling them they had detected a number of starships heading down the Two Arm, moving toward the trouble zone at incredible speed.