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This gun opened up with one long, well-placed Z-beam blast. The bolt of artificial lightning tore across the battlefield and hit one of the Z charges placed in the river.

The charge went up — along with fifty pounds of extremely high-explosive superhelium gas. The result was an explosion equal in brightness to a ton of magnesium going off. The first blast detonated the dozens of other Z charges lining the river; the chain reaction brought yet another wall of white-hot flame down upon the lead elements of the advancing army.

A dozen Bolts were vaporized immediately, along with their crews. Several more were caught in the updraft of the inferno; they went screeching straight up into the smoky air, exploding in unison some five hundred feet above the river of fire.

Now the first of the ground troops stumbled into the river itself. These men were immolated by the hundreds; some were falling directly into the fire, others were running in fear, completely engulfed, touching off their comrades’ battlesuits with super-white-hot flames. Two more Bolts were disintegrated.

An ammunition supply went up somewhere. Enemy soldiers by the thousands were marching blindly into the mi-croholocaust.

The sheer number of dead finally extinguished the flames on Bloody Water. In all the tactic had killed more than a thousand of the enemy. But it had held him up barely five minutes, no more.

The gruesome advance continued.

The brigade’s strategy now was grimly simple: Start firing on the enemy troops as soon as they got within range, and keep firing until the power ammo ran out. After that, hand-to-hand fighting would undoubtedly ensue, but no one expected that to last very long. The second xarcus would arrive shortly after the thousands of enemy troops hit the defenders’ lines.

After that, it would be only a matter of time before the real slaughter began.

The enemy was soon just three miles from the brigade’s lines. The xarcus was about three miles behind them.

The ground was shaking now beneath the mercenaries’ boots — with every foot it traveled the xarcus sent out a tremor powerful enough to cause the walls of Qez to sway.

The brigade now brought every weapon it had forward. They were strung out along a main trench about two thousand feet long, again very close to the point they had christened Light Number One. The xarcus was heading directly toward the center of this line — with the main wall of Qez just half a mile beyond.

The huge saw was now moving at near-supersonic speed. It sounded much louder than the worst thunderstorms to sweep the tiny moon. The reverberations of blasters going off, explosions coming from the incendiary shells being fired from the walls of Qez, the howls coming from thousands of advancing Nakkz soldiers. These were things nightmares were made of. Real-life nightmares.

The Freedom Brigade had faced dire circumstances before, but none compared to this. There was no panic — no letting up of fire at all. But most of the mercenaries had come to accept this as the end. All that was left was to go down fighting.

“We must hope that future generations will speak well of what we do here!” one officer yelled up and down the trench, “and not forget that we made our last stand here.”

The enemy was now just two miles away. There was one last communication between the front line and the defenders inside Qez. The Home Guards realized that the brigade was gallantly providing them with a few more minutes of life — just enough to make peace with themselves before the bloodthirsty army and giant tank crushed their ancient city.

It was the most valiant of gestures imaginable.

“Be proud, brothers, for lives well led,” one Home Guard officer communicated out to the mercenaries’ line. “The freedom-loving people of Qez thank you.”

The enemy was now just a mile away.

It was getting more difficult to see the brigade’s lines from the ramparts of Qez. The smoke and dust kicked up from the approach of the huge army was obscuring the visibility more than any storm that had ever swept the tiny moon. Pervasive above it all was the now supersonic screeching of the gigantic saw, priming itself to cut through the battlements of the walled city.

More than four thousand Home Guard soldiers were lined along the top of this vast wall or at firing stations built into its midsection. Even with the constant roar of Z guns and fire shells going off and the sound of the gigantic saw blade, the Home Guard soldiers still could hear the wails coming from the thousands of citizens — women, elderly, children — huddled in the basements of the buildings deep in the center of Qez.

The men on the wall delivered as much fire as they could, aiming over the heads of the valiant mercenaries and cutting deep into the enemy ranks. The fire shells were particularly effective on the approaching troops, but their explosions were so intense, and the debris they caused so thick, they further obscured the battlefield.

The Home Guards still could see the flashes of the brigade’s Z-gun muzzles. And now fierce hand-to-hand fighting was taking place. Flashes of light could be seen reflecting off the electric swords of the mercenaries.

“They are displaying their colors!” someone up on the wall yelled. Sure enough, the brigade’s multicolored flag could now be seen flying above their position. Everyone knew this was the unit’s traditional signal that the end was near.

The Home Guard’s commanding officer, the man named Poolinex, was himself on the north wall, watching the grim events unfold.

His wife and children were back with the rest of the civilians, cowering in a basement somewhere, just as afraid of dying without him as he was without them.

He looked out beyond the battlefield, off to the far horizon. The moon was so small, the joke used to go, that if you looked hard enough in one direction, you would see the back of your own head.

“We are so tiny,” Poolinex whispered. “And we are at the last end of the Galaxy. Why would anyone want to destroy us?”

He felt a tug on his arm. He turned to see three young soldiers, one holding the flag of Qez. There were tears in their eyes.

“Shall we run up our own colors, commander?” one of the soldiers asked.

Poolinex looked back on the battlefield — the enemy was less than a mile away and had apparently overrun the Freedom Brigade’s lines with ease.

He finally nodded. It was time for them to face their Maker, too.

“Yes,” he said, “run it up the pole — for we have lost.”

But then, suddenly a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky.

It went right over the walled fortress, lighting up the dense and smoky battlefield. The crack it made was so loud, the crumbling walls of Qez shook yet again.

No sooner had this happened than a sheet of flame shot up from a point on the battlefield just in front of the brigade’s line. Gigantic bolts of Z beams cut through the thick smoke billowing above the intense fighting, and a series of massive explosions walked right up to the vanguard of the enemy force, disintegrating them by the hundreds. The noise from these Z-beam blasts was deafening — yet none of them was coming from the walls of Qez.

That’s when everyone realized that an aircraft of some kind was tearing through the air above the battlefield, firing a Z-beam cannon, and dropping high-explosive incendiary devices at the same time.

What madness was this?

On a world where nothing flew more than twenty feet off the ground, or any faster than five miles an hour, this airborne hellion was a frightening thing to behold. It was moving so fast and turning so sharply, soldiers on both sides stopped firing to stare up at it. The aircraft was sleek, sharp, all crazy angles with a brilliant color scheme. Its nose was lit up brilliantly — even in the confusion, the Home Guard soldiers could see six separate beams shooting out from the snout of this strange craft. It was traveling so fast it would have been impossible for the Nakkz troops to take a shot at it, never mind hit it.