Then the troopers returned to Qez.
The plan revolved around a tiny piece of material that by tradition the commander of the Freedom Brigade carried with him in a twenty and six.
Just what this material was called or why, when manipulated properly by an electron torch, it produced the reaction it did, had been lost in the mists of time. The lost technology had not been tried in centuries, at least not that anyone could remember.
But work began in haste now to prepare the mysterious element after it had been recalled from the twenty-sixth dimension by the Freedom Brigade’s commander. When it arrived, the material was found to be cast in the form of a tiny cylinder; it was no bigger than a man’s thumb. The ancient procedure called for the material to be placed in a metal container, which was then to be filled with what was known as “unbalanced water”—water in which some of the oxygen had been extracted, leaving an “unbalanced” amount of hydrogen behind.
With the commander watching over their shoulders and intoning the ancient instructions, the Freedom Brigade’s munitions officer carefully placed the material inside the container of manipulated water, then sealed the container via an electron torch, leaving an opening wide enough only for a thin piece of wire to poke out.
This, they understood, was a fuse of sorts.
The canister had been prepared — but now the Freedom Brigade had to come up with a way to deliver it.
The brigade’s combat engineers searched their databases, looking for a simple device that could be built quickly and still do the job. They finally constructed something they came to call “the throwing machine.”
It was made mostly of old superwood and metal alloys melded together by two of the six electron torches remaining inside Qez.
When it was finished, the device did look alarmingly simple. It sat up high on four large runners. It had one long arm, at the end of which was a huge wooden basket. Attached to the arm and leading to a massive claw in front was a huge spring. Made of recoiled metal strands, when this arm was pulled back, the spring was stretched almost beyond its limit — so much so that the coiled metal actually “sang,” it was so taut.
Though it looked completely alien to the Freedom Brigade troopers and anyone who saw it resting in Qez’s main square, its design had actually been around for thousands of years.
It was called a catapult.
24
The huge xarcus broke the horizon east of Qez just as the sun began to rise.
There were actually 42,525 Nakkz mercs stuffed inside the supertank; several hundred more piloted the huge weapon and watched over its controls. These crewmen were housed in an enormous control bubble located directly beneath the supertank’s massive cannon barrel. The bulk of the combat soldiers rode in the enormous passenger cabin, in the rear of the mover.
The xarcus was, no doubt, a splendid weapon of gargantuan proportions — yet no one inside the supertank knew how their side had come upon it. When their shadowy allies told the Nakkz that the giant xarcus would be just the weapon to give them a victory in the year-long war, there was no reason to doubt them. Shortly afterward the first components of the supertank suddenly began to materialize. They came out of the sky — literally — one piece at a time, arriving with a crack of thunder and hanging motionless in the air, until a few days or a few hours or even a few minutes later, another piece would arrive the same way and attach itself to the previous section. Then would come the relentless banging, the pounding, the nonstop racket as the huge machine was assembled by unseen hands. Reatomizing rays lit up both the day and the night. Strange, bendable metal could be seen melding together. The Nakkz did little more than sit by and watch.
It took several months, but finally the gigantic xarcus was complete. This came as a relief to the scores of Nakkz soldiers bivouacked around Holy Hell. The pounding and the banging had haunted them, too.
From their various scattered camps, they had watched as the pieces appeared, streaking in from a place that didn’t seem to be anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. The soldiers had gone off to battle every day and returned to see the huge tank that much closer to completion. If it hadn’t been for all the noise, it truly would have been an amazing sight to behold.
But as to who actually built the thing, the Nakkz had no idea — because when it really came down to it, the thing had built itself.
The xarcus had moved out of Holy Hell shortly after being spotted by the recon team from Qez.
Its deployment was just one aspect of a planned attack on the tiny moon’s last remaining stronghold. Big as it was, the xarcus still could move at about five miles an hour, and once it started rolling, it was just about impossible to stop. Leaving behind an imprint that was nearly a hundred feet deep, it had torn its way across the Xomme in less a half an Earth day.
Now, as the sun was rising, it had its target in sight.
The plan against Qez was fairly simple. Rather than use the huge cannon to destroy the city and its people in one long Z-beam blast, the xarcus would instead roll right up to the city gate, knock it down if necessary, and then unload its troops: twenty-five thousand men of a “destroyer division”—shock troops in a different day and age. The rest of the soldiers made up the “execution brigades.”
In conquering Qez, the Nakkz had only one order: Take no prisoners of any kind — civilian or military.
Prisoners were witnesses. And there could be no witnesses left after this attack.
Once Qez was in sight, the troops within the supertank suited up and prepared for jump-off.
The tank’s massive turret weapon was charged up, its gun crews called to battle stations in case they were needed. The xarcus was indeed the equivalent of a Starcrasher on treads, and getting its crew into its combat position was a long process because of the vast distances involved. Still, the super-tank was declared “ready for battle” just two hours after it had come within sight of its target.
By this time it was fewer than ten miles away from the city’s main gates.
Weapons fire from Qez started soon afterward.
Long-range Z-beam blasts and incendiary shells began raining out of the walled city; indeed, the fortress seemed to be on fire, so intense were the muzzle flashes and electrostatic discharges. And while most of the Z-beam blasts fell short, some of the fire shells managed to hit the xarcus, exploding on the massive treads or in front of the primary control bubble itself.
These hits created fires that burned hot and bright and could last a long time, but within the supertank itself, they were of no concern. There was no way fire alone could get through its massively thick skin.
The destroyer division and the execution brigades continued preparing for their attack; in fact, few of them even knew the supertank had come under attack.
Inside the control bubble, everything was going smoothly as well. The firing from Qez was getting more intense the closer the xarcus crept toward the fortress city. But just as the incendiary shells were of little concern, even a concentrated Z-beam attack on the xarcus would do only minor damage. The tank had been constructed of 100 percent re-atomized electron steel — even the superglass making up the control bubble was imbedded with the stuff.
Few things in nature could put a dent in it.
The xarcus had closed to within seven miles of Qez when the people in the control bubble noticed that their enemy’s defensive strategy was changing.
Instead of directing many random blasts at the supertank, the Z-beam fire coming out of Qez was now beginning to be concentrated. No longer trying to simply stop the huge war machine with thousands of individual hits, the defenders were all aiming at the same spot on the xarcus: a point about a hundred feet in front of the control bubble, where its gigantic chassis met the lower part of its superstructure. This switch in tactics was more of a surprise than a shock. There was nothing at that point of the tank’s enormous structure that could be fatally damaged, even by ten thousand blaster rifles hitting it at once.