It read: Save Us Angel.
So much for no pressure, he thought.
He slowly moved out over the wall until he had nothing facing him but the vast expanse of no-man’s-land itself. It was now about ten minutes before sunrise. He could see the huge army starting to move below.
The xarcus was alive, too, full of blinking lights and discharges of steam. He took a deep breath. The plan in his mind was so bare bones, he would need all the advantages he could get, and then some, if it had a chance of working.
He started his mental noodling. First he guessed the approximate distance from his present position to that of the stalled xarcus. Then he did a quick time-versus-speed calculation, factoring in the circumference of the tiny moon. Then he put his aircraft into a slow 180-degree turn until his nose was pointing in roughly the opposite direction. Then he tightened his seat belt until it nearly cut off his circulation, and he locked his chin strap.
I’ll try, kid, he thought.
Then he pushed his throttles to full power and streaked away from the battlefield.
No time elapsed.
None at all. In the same moment that he was hovering above the walled city, he was also setting down atop the main turret of the colossal xarcus, this after going around the tiny moon in the opposite direction.
Hunter still didn’t know exactly how he was able to do this; he’d tried similar things since arriving on the Fringe, though not in situations as desperate as this, and it had worked every time. His best guess what that his flying machine could go so fast, he was literally able to arrive before himself — all that was needed was a good running start; thus his trip around the tiny satellite. He was still flesh and blood on arrival; he wasn’t transparent or in some other form, but he knew from past experience that he could not be seen.
He was simply here, and there, at the same time. And after he got what he wanted here, he would return very quickly to there and if he did this quickly enough, it would seem as if he hadn’t even left at all.
Or so he hoped.
He’d been banking on the Nakkz not posting guards at the top of the xarcus. Although he seemed to be invisible during these strange excursions, he’d never really figured if his flying machine seemed that way, too.
Luckily, his hunch was right. There were no guards atop the monster’s huge turret when he arrived. He jumped out of his aircraft, quickly took out his quadtrol, set it on “high/special,” and beamed the flying machine into the twenty and six. He inserted the resulting box into his boot pocket and began his woefully improvised mission in earnest.
He carefully made his way to the edge of the turret, and fighting the fierce winds, looked down onto the body of the xarcus. The thing was so huge its control center looked like a small city in itself. The closest thing he could compare it to was the control bubble on a Starcrasher. On the largest ships, these could support five hundred crewmen or more. On the gigantic xarcus, he estimated that at least as many individuals were occupying the control deck.
But then he spotted a smaller bubble behind the larger one. It, too, appeared to be made of superglass, but its surface was tinted a very dark green, so dark he could not see into it. Why could this thing be?
Perhaps the real control center for the huge tank?
He made a note to find out.
Hunter moved to the center of the turret. The xarcus was half a mile wide; its girth was nearly half that of an L–Class Starcrasher. It needed every inch of that bulk to support the gigantic saw. The blade alone measured at least a quarter mile in length. Its teeth were easily fifty feet or more and extremely sharp.
Hanging out about two hundred feet in front of him now, this thing was frightening just to look at. Hunter couldn’t imagine what it would be like on the receiving end of its enormous, razor-sharp blades.
His quadtrol told him the entire assembly was made from reatomized steel — this meant it was practically impossible to disassemble, even with an electron torch. This was not good. Hunter was looking for a weak spot in order to somehow disable the massive war machine. The gigantic saw was not it.
He lowered himself down a long ladder, off the top of the turret to the frame of the xarcus below. He was still about twenty stories up and maybe a thousand feet away from the massive control bubble.
Again, there were no guards that he could see anywhere on this level. This was no surprise really. With an enormous machine such as this, there was no reason to guard it.
Or so the Nakkz thought.
After some searching around, Hunter finally located an unlocked hatchway and stole inside the machine itself. At first the passageway within looked like a crude version of one found on a Starcrasher. Long, narrow, seemingly endless. There were dozens of smaller doors running off of it, with simple illustrations indicating they all led to the machine’s power complex. This would have been a perfect place to look for a weak link — but there was a problem. All of these doors were not only locked, they were also melded shut, again with reatomized steel. Despite Hunter’s ability to pick just about any lock in the Galaxy, one pass of his quadtrol over the sealed latches told him that not even a blast from his Z-gun pistol would make a dent in them.
He moved on. This passageway took him past the machine’s war room, its officers’ barracks, its weapons magazine. All of them had locks made of reatomized steel; all of them were impossible to break open. He passed a number of crew members while walking through the ship; technicians all of them, they were hurrying this way and that, obviously focused on getting the huge tank moving again.
They could not see him, because for all intents and purposes, he was still hovering over the walled city of Qez. Still, by studying their faces, Hunter knew that everything the people in Qez feared about their enemy was probably true. Even the techs looked like they ate newborns for breakfast. Scraggly beards, unkempt hair, dressed in varying shades of black — they looked like tough customers. Again, this was not good. When the eggheads in the crew look like they could chew superglass, what did the combat troops look like?
He found out not a minute later.
He crept up on a section of the passageway that featured a huge slab of superglass, extending down one whole length of the hallway. Peering through this glass carefully — Hunter wasn’t sure if he could cast a reflection — he found himself looking down on a muster chamber so huge, it rivaled the one aboard the BonoVox.
Hunter felt his stomach hit his toes. He was looking on a barracks that at the moment held about thirty thousand soldiers. There were at least another forty thousand spread out on the battlefield between the xarcus and Qez. Seventy thousand troops? Against a little more than five thousand defending Qez? This last-ditch battle was more lopsided than he thought.
The sheer number brought up a question that had probably passed the lips of just about everyone connected with the defense of the tiny moon. Why? Why so many troops, why these gigantic war machines? Why the outlandish and intentionally cruel weaponry? Why all this — to take over a little rock spinning at the far end of the Galaxy?
Could it be the fact that Zazu-Zazu was the smallest thing on the farthest edge that made it so valuable?
Was there any way that idea could ever make sense?
Hunter didn’t know — and at the moment he knew it was best that he didn’t waste brain cells on the matter.
He moved on.
He continued walking the long passageway of the xarcus, looking for but never finding a vulnerable spot at which a bit of sabotage might have crippled the giant war machine. Any doorway that looked important was sporting a reatomized lock. He was sure that only the top officers had access to these places and that they were off-limits to the majority of Nakkz soldiers on board.