4
The larger of the two armies beseiging Klaaz's ice fort was known as the Goth-Star BallBreakers.
Boasting more than ten thousand troops, the Goth-Stars held most of the territory south of the battered fortress. They had fielded an enormous arsenal of long-range Z-gun arrays, known appropriately enough as Master Blasters. These fierce weapons held up to ten laser-tube muzzles surrounded by dozens of diamond-studded firing rings that lit up like so many halos whenever the blaster mount was engaged. Weapons of this size could deliver massive amounts of destructive power; just how the fort's combined gravity shield had held up against them for so long was indeed a mystery. True, because of the frigid air above the isolated battlefield, it took each Master Blaster up to an hour to recharge sufficiently before firing again. But still, the siege had been going on for months.
The Goth-Stars were a quasi-mercenary army of space pirates. They were presently in league with another pirate army, the SpeedBall Saints, which was slowly battering the massive ice castle from the opposite side. It would be a fifty-fifty split once this long, drawn-out affair was over. This meant that the Goth-Stars would acquire approximately one thousand beautiful Mutaman-Younguska females to dispose of however they pleased.
The Goth-Stars were holding a line about a mile south of the ice fort. They had not allowed any food or supplies to reach the beleaguered castle in months. That by these actions hundreds of frightened, innocent people were suffering inside the fort had little bearing on the Goths. In fact, many of them liked the notion of keeping their victims helpless, simply by their whim, making the inevitable invasion of the huge structure even more exciting. After all, preying on the weak and defenseless was what being a space pirate was all about. Or so they thought.
The first real sign of trouble for the Goth-Stars came just as their front-line troops began reporting for evening chow.
Feeding thousands of hungry soldiers in arctic conditions was not an easy task. The power drain on the army's food replication units lasted for an hour or more sometimes, depending on just how hungry the horde was and how cold the weather might be outside. That's why most of the troops ate in shifts.
The top communications man for the Goth-Stars returned to his forward position after dinner to find his small corps of transmission operators looking perplexed. They were having trouble contacting their allies, the SpeedBall Saints. It was routine for the two armies to exchange targeting information before commencing the night's bombardment of the ice fort. A few stray blaster rounds could wreak havoc on a bivouacked army. This communication sought to eliminate any potential fuckups during the brief dark hours.
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.