“Not good, brother!” Berx yelled to Erx.
“Bingo that!” Erx yelled back.
Another explosion. The wall shook beneath their feet. The Nakkz had now gained an opening in the east wall as well. They were being met there only by wounded Home Guards. The screams of these helpless men being slaughtered echoed throughout the ancient city square.
In the midst of this chaos a young Home Guard soldier stumbled up to Erx and Berx. He was bleeding in too many places to count. His eyes already looked dead.
His lips could barely move, but he mumbled something very chilling to the two explorers in the midst of the hand-to-hand fighting.
“Is your friend ever coming back?” he asked.
With that, both explorers looked up to see that the image of Hunter’s flying machine had finally disappeared.
Another huge explosion — but this one came from several miles out on the battlefield, from the xarcus itself. The slumbering giant was suddenly moving again. And so was its enormous saw.
Berx threw two enemy soldiers over the side of the wall and looked down at the battlefield. The waves of Nakkz soldiers looked like a thick cloud of smoke again. Not only were they blanketing the battlefield, even more were pouring out of the rear of the xarcus even as the huge weapon began to creep forward again.
Suddenly a barrage of ray gun fire exploded on the ramparts just behind Erx and Berx. The explorers turned to see that Nakkz soldiers were now climbing up to the top of the wall from the inside of the city just as thousands of their comrades were doing the same thing from without.
Suddenly, just like that, the three thousand or so defenders still alive on the wall were surrounded.
And the xarcus was getting closer.
The first of the Nakkz to reach the wall from the inside were battling Home Guards not a hundred yards away from Erx and Berx now. The situation was so desperate, the defenders were using the butts of their blaster rifles against the X-beam weapons being fired by the enemy.
The two explorers Erx and Berx just looked at each other — and then shook hands. It was the same ritual they had performed so long ago when their ship was in the process of crashing on Fools 6.
“See you on the other side, my brother,” Erx told his longtime friend.
“Bingo…” Berx replied.
The Nakkz were now swarming up both sides of the wall. The explorers were scavenging among the dead Home Guards, looking for usable ray guns. A huge X-beam blast went off not ten feet away from them. It threw both men hard against the concrete battlement. Another barrage exploded just above them, showering them with nasty subatomic debris. Still another blast went off just on the other side of the parapet. This, too, covered them with subatomic shrapnel. Off in the distance, the xarcus was now just five miles away.
“If there is another side…” Erx mumbled to himself.
Then… suddenly, it seemed as if the sky itself exploded, it became very dark, almost pitch black. Both men were sure this was the end of the world — or at least their part in it. But then they looked up to see that a gigantic spaceship had appeared over the battlefield. It was an enormous vessel, at least two miles long.
Before either man could say a word, another monstrous spaceship exploded upon the scene. It, too, was gigantic.
Then at the same moment, a soldier in a very sinister all-black uniform was standing in front of them.
He’d just popped in. He raised his visor and said: “Relax, you two. Help is on the way.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a sonic ripple went through everything and everybody within a five-mile radius of Qez.
And then everything… just… stopped.
The xarcus had ceased moving again.
There was no screeching of brakes this time, no stink of metal-on-metal, no half mile of ground churning until its momentum finally eased up.
No; this time it just… stopped. As had everything else.
Hunter was still flat against the curving wall, trying to keep his balance when the vibrations that had been so acute suddenly disappeared. One second, everything was shaking so badly he thought the heels on his boots would come off; the next, everything became frighteningly still.
What happened?
He steeled himself and took a step out from the wall, surprised that he was able to maintain his footing.
He stopped and listened — there was not a sound coming from anywhere.
He began walking again. Farther down the hallway, he came upon another green door. He raised the barrel of his blaster rifle, then toed the door open… and that’s when the real trouble began.
He was staring into a very strange, dark, and… well, creepy control room. It was cramped, oval-shaped, and stuffed with very odd, almost unrecognizable metallic gizmos that seemed to be alive as well. They were full of tubes and glands, and everything seemed to be pumping and spurting weird liquids. The smell was overwhelming and awful. Sections of the floor seemed to be covered with an equivalent of human vomit. Hunter felt his stomach turn upside down. In his worst nightmares, he’d never imagined a place as disturbing as this.
The second he broke the threshold, he was hit by a bright yellow beam. It struck him with the force of a full-power Z-gun blast. He dropped to the floor — hard. His body began trembling uncontrollably. His bones felt as if they were about to burst right out of him. The screeching in his ears was deafening. He looked at his hands and was astonished to see his veins and muscles and bones clearly through his skin, which was suddenly transparent. He closed his eyes. The pain was unbearable; it felt like he was being ripped in two from the inside out.
But then, not a moment later, everything returned to normal. Or somewhat normal. The intense pain was gone. The screeching in his ears disappeared. He looked at his hands and — thank God! — could not see his bones.
But then he realized something. He was no longer in his one-second-ahead mode; he could tell because he could feel his heart beating again, a sure giveaway. Whatever the yellow ray was, it had not killed him; rather it had knocked him back into regular time. And that meant that anyone he could see on this ship, could see him.
And at the moment, he was looking at about twenty individuals… and they were looking right back at him.
They were all wearing black spacesuits, with visors pulled down so it was impossible to see their faces.
They look familiar, Hawk?
He had no idea who these characters were, but if they were inside the xarcus, they were the enemy. So he raised his blaster and sprayed the room with Z beams. He took out two of the black-suited spacemen before any of them had a chance to react. Another blast from his rifle — two more went down. Now the others began moving in many different directions at once. They didn’t seem to be running, exactly—scurrying would be a better word for it, their stubby arms flapping wildly. Hunter cut down three more.
But then the two closest to him raised their hands and simply pointed at him. He hit the deck just an instant before a fusillade of X beams went over his head.
What the hell was that? These guys didn’t need weapons to fire X beams?
He popped up over a console and let loose another spray from his blaster. Four more of them went down — but another group pointed their fingers at him, and the X-beam barrage that came back at him was twice as powerful as the one before.
Hunter rolled again, went to his knees, fired, rolled, fired, and rolled again. He did this several times, hitting targets while avoiding the vomitlike pools. The return fire gradually decreased until finally there was none at all. Everything became quiet again.