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 anyone 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.