The people in the control bubble even began to laugh at the odd but ultimately fruitless effort.
The xarcus was indeed unstoppable.
Just as their mysterious allies had said.
The walls of Qez were indeed on fire.
There were so many blaster rifles and ray guns going off, the static electricity was running throughout the fortification and searing any wires or hemp or flammable materials attached to or located near the wall.
A squad of Freedom Brigade soldiers was positioned at the highest point on the east rampart, their visual sensors trained on the approaching xarcus. Because of the noise coming from endless fusillades of Z-beam blasts by the city’s defenders, it was nearly impossible for these soldiers to communicate with colleagues down in the city square, where the throwing machine was located. So the two groups had worked out a crude language of hand signals in which to speak.
Though the soldiers up top were tracking the xarcus’s movements, it was lucky for them that the huge mover did not waver much from its dead-on westerly approach. If the huge machine turned either right or left, it was always a minor fluctuation. Still, whenever that happened, the soldiers up top would signal to their comrades surrounding the throwing machine. Using nothing more than musclepower, these soldiers would then push, pull, and drag the throwing machine into a new configuration.
This went on for nearly an hour, the defenders sending out long-range Z-gun blasts, the xarcus moving across the Xomme, unhindered, its huge army safe inside, ready to be called to the slaughter.
Then, just as the sun reached its highest point in the short day, the xarcus rolled out of a slight depression and began crawling up the slight incline known as Heartbreak Ridge. Upon getting this information from the soldiers up on the wall, the brigade’s weapons officer in charge of the throwing machine powered his ray gun down to its “dull fire” setting. Then he aimed its beam at the wire protruding from the little silver shell. It took a few moments but finally the wire began to glow.
Then he placed the magic canister inside the catapult’s bucket, which was stuffed with highly flammable materials, and ordered its massive arm drawn back.
It was now ready to fire.
The men inside the xarcus’s control bubble saw it first.
Coming out of the flurry of Z-beam blasts streaking out from the east wall of Qez, a ball of fire suddenly appeared.
It went nearly straight up in the air, trailing a long plume of black smoke behind it. It reached its apex about three miles away, and maybe two thousand feet above the battlefield. It seemed to hover in the air for a moment; then it started coming down. As it did, bits of the fireball began breaking away, leaving individual smoke trails behind it. Within seconds, most of the fireball had been separated in this manner, and all that remained was a bright, shiny canister, tumbling end over end.
The canister finally landed not three hundred feet in front of the supertank. It went right through the large plastic X, into the recently dug hole. The canister struck the softened earth with such momentum, it continued another two hundred feet into the mud. Now came gales of laughter from those inside the primary control bubble. What was this pathetic attempt all about? To throw such a tiny weapon at such a massive war machine?
Coincidentally, the final ready-call for the Nakkz troops sounded throughout the xarcus at the exact moment the canister became lodged in the mud.
It detonated two seconds later.
No one peering out from the walls of Qez had ever seen a nuclear explosion before.
It was awesome — both in its strangeness and its size. In a world where Z beams essentially disintegrated things, and high-explosive fire simply burned its intended to a crisp, the magnitude of this blast was frightening. The mushroom cloud rising above the bloody mud of the Xomme, the smoke, dust, and debris obscuring all view on the eastern horizon — it all seemed unreal and dreamlike.
Not so the shock wave that hit the city’s walls seconds later, though. It was so intense, the walls began to shake and crack; the roofs on houses and buildings began to collapse. The ground literally began rolling.
For one terrifying moment it seemed as if the bomb would destroy all of Qez as well.
But the wind finally died down and the dust finally settled and the defenders of Qez were able to look out on the no-man’s-land and see just what the tiny canister had done.
The xarcus was so huge and constructed of such strengthened materials even a direct hit by a low-yield nuclear bomb might not have caused mortal damage. That’s why the Freedom Brigade had hurled the makeshift weapon not at the tank itself, but directly in front of it.
The explosion had created an enormously deep hole in the ground just a few feet ahead of the xarcus.
Like a Starcrasher or a huge oceangoing vessel, it was impossible for the supertank to stop in short order. Momentum alone carried it almost a quarter mile farther once the brakes were applied. With no way to stop in time, the huge mover began to plunge into the enormous crater left by the underground nuclear explosion. The right-side track was the first to go. It seemed to move in slow motion as it began grabbing nothing but air and smoke. The astonished Nakkz drivers inside the control bubble began pushing buttons and madly throwing levers, trying to prevent the supertank from toppling over — but the enormous tracks refused to stop moving. Its forward motion thus uncontrollable, the huge tank finally toppled into the gigantic bomb crater. The gun sticking out of its huge turret hit the ground first; it immediately split in two. The noise of this alone cracked around the moon like a massive rumble of thunder. With the barrel gone, the crumpling of the turret came next. Then the rest of the xarcus simply slammed down upon itself.
Now came another enormous explosion — the shock wave from this was as powerful as the initial nuclear blast itself. Chain reactions and short-circuiting began igniting anything remotely flammable inside the huge armored mover. There was another tremendous explosion. Then another. And another. The ground beneath Qez began shaking violently again as the gigantic tank went up in a huge ball of flame.
The fire was so quick and so intense, there was no way anyone inside could have gotten out alive.
A great cheer went up from the people of Qez. With little more than their ancient magic pellet, the Freedom Brigade had saved them from certain disaster.
Or so it seemed.
For no sooner had the dust settled from the xarcus’s explosion than a Home Guard soldier manning an outpost on the far corner of the city’s wall saw a glint of light off to the north.
Something is coming, he thought.
He turned his long-range viz-scanner in that direction — and saw something that his eyes did not want to believe.
Out on the horizon, just breaking its way through smoke and dust, was another xarcus.
And it was heading right for Qez.
25
Jubilation quickly turned to panic as word spread throughout Qez that a second xarcus was approaching.
The defenders of the embattled city rushed to positions along the north-facing wall. From here, the view of the second xarcus was all too clear. It was about a dozen miles away and tearing up the no-man’s-land at a slow but relentless pace.