“Was all this really necessary, Dazz?” Erx screamed at him.
Dazz never stopped smiling. “What do you mean?” he asked with fake innocence. “You guys were crying for help, weren’t you? Why, I picked up the distress call myself.”
“But look at what you’ve done here!” Berx thundered at him. “Some of these men would have surrendered as soon as they saw the Kaon ship above them. You didn’t even give them that chance!”
Dazz just shook his head. “You two are getting a bit too old for this game,” he said snidely. “It’s war… you were losing. We came to your aid. And now you’re complaining? You’re lucky we were in the neighborhood.”
“You’re always in the neighborhood!” Berx yelled back.
With that, the explorer reared back and struck Dazz with a massive blow to the jaw. The SG first commander went sprawling backward, nearly falling over the railing of the battlement to the bloody city square below. Berx jumped on him and began pummeling him further before a squad of SG soldiers pulled him off their commander. But then Erx joined the fray and a full-blown fistfight broke out. More Solar Guards intervened, and soon Erx and Berx were being restrained.
Dazz picked himself back up and dusted himself off. He gave the signal to his men to let Erx and Berx go.
“Boy, are you guys excitable,” Dazz said, calmly lighting up an atomic cigar. “You’re getting to be pansies — soon enough you’ll be as bad as your weak-kneed cousins in the SF!”
That’s what really angered the two explorers. They knew for a fact that in most instances whenever the Space Forces used a Kaon ship, they would concentrate on one particular area and then ask for the surrender of those not involved. Though not without its bloody moments, this was a tactic that usually worked. The Solar Guards, on the other hand, never let such things as gallantry and being magnanimous get in the way of a good bloodbath. That was the major difference between the two rivals.
Both Erx and Berx lunged at Dazz again… but before his bodyguards could react, a tremendous explosion rocked the tiny moon — this was the biggest one yet. It was so powerful it sent just about everyone up on the ramparts sprawling — Erx, Berx, Dazz, SG soldiers, and Home Guard survivors.
The blast came from the stalled xarcus. The huge tank seemed to be in its death throes. It was covered with thick blue and yellow flame — the heat was so intense, those on the wall could feel it several miles away. But then, just as it seemed the huge tank was going to self-destruct, something burst forth from its body, ripping a hole in its superstructure, right behind the main control bubble.
It was extremely bright, glowing. It rose unsteadily at first, but then seemed to gain momentum.
“My God! What the hell is that?” Dazz cried out.
The thing was so bright, they couldn’t even look at it.
“It’s the end of the world!” one of the Home Guards cried out.
Finally the bright light began to move, making it a bit easier to see. It was obviously a spacecraft of some kind — but it was shaped like nothing else ever seen in the Galaxy, at least not these days.
It was shaped like a disc. A saucer. It was bright white. As just about everyone in Qez stared in astonishment at the thing, the disc began revolving at an incredible speed. Then it began ascending, picking up speed with every nanosecond, until it was about a mile above the battlefield.
And then it blinked out.
It took them several minutes to revive Dazz.
The Solar Guards’ first commander had fainted dead away almost at the first sight of the strange spacecraft. Erx and Berx were not that far behind him. They had seen many strange things in their long careers of exploration, but never anything like this.
His men finally got Dazz back to his feet, but the man was still very shaky. He barked a bunch of orders to his lieutenants, who began blowing ceremonial battle horns always carried by the Solar Guards in combat. In seconds the SG troopers began popping out, returning to their ship still hovering right above Qez.
“Listen, you two mooks,” Dazz said to Erx and Berx, his voice still trembling, belying his gruff exterior, “if you’re both smarter than you look, you don’t say anything to anyone about what we just saw here. I don’t know who was responsible for all this — or why such weaponry was used to conquer a pisshole moon like this — but some things I don’t want to know. And neither do you.”
With that, Dazz pushed a button on his battle tunic… and quickly popped out himself.
Not a minute later, both the Solar Guards’ vessel and the Kaon Bombardment ship were gone, leaving the defenders of Qez alone again and safe, for the time being — but also knee deep in at least fifty thousand corpses that were in desperate need of burial.
28
The last time anyone saw Hunter, he was out on the battlefield going through the dead.
After getting off the xarcus just before it exploded and became transformed, he’d returned to Qez, stunned like the rest of them by the strange turn of events. But as startling as these things were, Hunter had something more important on his mind. He spoke extensively with Erx and Berx, who eventually returned to the AeroVox. Then he sought out the surviving Home Guard commanders and made one last attempt at trying to ascertain why he’d felt so compelled to come to this lonely moon that he would go against mission orders and all but ruin his brief career as a Starcrasher commander.
He’d sat with Poolinex and his lieutenants, listening to the rather unexciting history of the Zazu-Zazu, how its puffing was leaking away, and how its principal export was a substance called oppie, a main ingredient in slow-ship wine. The recounting was going absolutely nowhere until someone mentioned the estimated death toll of the war, a figure that included the number of mercenaries killed during the yearlong conflict.
When Hunter asked for details about the mercs, Poolinex showed surprise that he wasn’t aware of at least one of the groups.
“The ones who stayed with us to the end, you must have known about them,” Poolinex had told him.
“When you first appeared above the battlefield, you were bombing positions right in front of their lines.
You might even have saved a few of them, at least for a while.”
Hunter was more astonished than Poolinex upon hearing this news. When Hunter appeared at the scene, he’d started bombing and strafing under no set plan. Rather he’d gone where instinct and eyesight told him to go.
“What was the name of this merc group?” he asked Poolinex.
“The Freedom Brigade,” was the Home Guard commander’s reply.
Hunter left for the battlefield shortly after that.
He’d spent two hours going through the dead, searching for any survivors of the valiant mercenary group.
Two Home Guard soldiers were on hand, as was the priest. As a hot breeze blew across the plain, the soldiers were reading the roll of names belonging to their longtime allies, intoning each with a touch of reverence.
“Johnson… O’Leary… Mazzeti… Bryant… Noonan… Ignakowski… Carey… Cook… Baulis… Santoro… Mann… Bell… Jones… Wilson… Murphy… Kimball… Crabb… Fowler… Robinson…”
These names sounded odd in this world — not one of them ended with a z or an x. But to Hunter’s ears, they sounded strangely familiar — and more like his own name than any other he’d heard since finding himself on Fools 6.
He climbed out of the trench where the brigade had made its last stand and approached the priest.
“These men, Father,” Hunter asked him. “I understand they were not natives of this moon.”