Authors: Mack Maloney
In the midst of all this, some of the engineers saw something else. Through the smoke and fog of war, a strange craft popped in, just for a moment, above the battlefield. Unlike just about every other spacecraft in the Galaxy, this craft was not shaped like a triangle or a wedge. Instead, it was shaped like a saucer. It hovered high above the river for just a few seconds, wobbling a little bit as if whoever was inside was watching the battle and not quite believing what they were seeing.
Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the saucer-shaped craft blinked out.
All of the firing died down after that.
More than a minute of silence passed before the first few brave CEs dared to climb up and look over the riverbank to see what had happened.
Most would wish they hadn't.
What lay before them were the remains of Army Central's infantry divisions. Three miles in both direction lay piles of bodies, horribly shot up, among small hills of salt. Salt was also blowing in the wind.
No one was moving; only a few muffled cries could be heard. Smoke covered most of the battlefield, but behind the enemy's stone and wood lines, the glint of thousands of rifles still pointing eastward was quite evident. Five of the Master Blasters were on fire and smoking heavily; only three had survived the battle between them and their smaller cousins. The killing field was also littered with hundreds of crashed HVVs.
From what the engineers could see, not a single BMK soldier had made it to within ten feet of the enemy line.
The eerie astonishment of the scene was just as quickly broken by the sound of another muffled thunderclap. The engineers turned around to see another wave of BMK soldiers running right for them. It was Army Central Two, the eight reserve divisions that had been hiding behind the hill.
Eighty thousand soldiers, stretched along a seven-mile front, hit the ion bridges seconds later. The firing went up full roar again. The engineers fell back into the water. After all, this is where they were supposed to stay. In a replay of the carnage just minutes before, the flash of blaster beams and the rumble of gunfire mixed and rose as one into a deep, monstrous growl. The air was thick with spent cordite, disintegrated atoms, fresh blood.
This time, the bodies weren't piling up near the edge of the river as they had when the first wave charged into oblivion. Did this mean the reserve soldiers were going farther and possibly beginning to overwhelm the enemy's fortifications? Not one of the engineers dared stick his head up to find out.
There was no reason to look into Hell if you didn't have to.
At this moment, three miles away, the advance elements of Army South entered the Ghost River Valley. These soldiers were hardened veterans of numerous bloody campaigns, many of them on tough, mountainous planets. But they had never seen anything like this. The wreckage alone on the Plain of Stars seemed to stretch right up to the sky. Bodies and white splotches of burned salt were everywhere. Flames and smoke were so thick, they blotted out the sun. A death pall covered the east side of the valley.
To the west, over the river, was the enemy encampment and a fierce battle in progress. The Army South commanders trained their TVZs on the action. The BMK strategy was clear: The first wave of BMK soldiers had been essentially sacrificed to wear down the defenders. Then the reserves were thrown in, further weakening the American line. The reserve divisions were battling close but were not yet on the enemy's fortifications.
The Army South commanders knew this only meant one thing. They had arrived at precisely the right time.
They started rushing their troops forward. Troops normally used to marching into war were now stuffed onto overcrowded HVVs and sent speeding toward the battle. Somewhere up in the mountains to the east, they knew Deaux was looking down on them. First there was Army Central. Then Army Central Two. Now came Army South. One hundred thousand men hitting the line at just the right moment.
Of such things are victories won.
The first wave of Army South soldiers hit the wavering front line just seconds later. The wave of overcrowded HVVs streaked over the last of the reserve divisions and penetrated the enemy line itself. But there was a surprise waiting for them here. The American trenches were empty. The remaining Master Blasters were in flames, wrecked on purpose. The last of the American army was going over the hill to the west.
"Pursue them!" Deaux bellowed now from his position on high, his voice carrying over the battlefield via a sonic bell. "We've finally got them on the run!"
It was, of course, Deaux's hubris that had him send his army after the Americans.
None of them had any idea what was on the other side. The location of the American encampment had been selected just for that reason. The topography was such that there was no line of sight from the battlefield on the Plain of Stars to what lay beyond the hill.
What was on the other side was an old, abandoned highway bridge, about a half mile long, which crossed a large ravine. Its roadway then flowed down through a narrow pass and ended in a canyon known as Carson Sink. The canyon was about a half mile square.
Just as the first Army South soldiers reached the east end of the highway bridge, the last of the American soldiers were fleeing into the pass. The Army South troops charged across the bridge, many on HVV hovercrafts, many on foot, some officers literally pushing their soldiers through the gap. Once this massive pursuit was set in motion, there was no quick way to stop it or even slow it down. Obsessed with the high-speed movement of troops, it would be Army South's final undoing. They'd managed to move nearly one hundred thousand troops two miles over rough terrain, across a long bridge, and into the open area beyond in an astoundingly short amount of time.
Quite a feat—but that area beyond, Carson Sink, was surrounded by high cliffs. And as soon as the last BMK soldiers had streamed into it, the flying machine appeared overhead and bombed the pass, sealing the canyon.
It was a trap. And Army South had fallen right into it.
When Deaux arrived in the canyon in his customized shuttle craft, his officers greeted him with worried expressions and much nervousness. They knew they'd been fooled. The withdrawing Americans had simply rushed through their Twenty 'n Six field portal again, leaving the BMK soldiers in one of the most indefensible situations imaginable.
These officers had to explain this now to Deaux, but even before the words could come out of their mouths, there was a collected gasp from the thousands of troops milling nervously around them.
Everyone was looking up, pointing to the canyon ridge that surrounded them. Dark figures were appearing atop this high ground, groups of twos and threes popping in all along the line.
The daylight was still dim—it was not yet 7:30 in the morning—so it was nearly impossible to make out just who or what was staring down at them from these highlands. They appeared to be soldiers, but they weren't the ragtag American fighters. They were long gone. These soldiers were bearing huge combat weapons, and they themselves looked enormous.
And there were thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
Hundreds
of thousands. And more were popping in with each passing second.
Finally, Deaux was able to get a working TVZ scope and focused on the ridge closest to his position. That's when he realized these weren't soldiers at all. Not typical ones, anyway.
They were robots. Combat robots. The TVZ was telling him there were more than a half million of them encircling the canyon.
"So that's why the Americans didn't destroy the bridge," Deaux mumbled now, stepping back into his shuttle with a small coterie of security troops. He gave his shuttle pilot two thumbs up.
The pilot got the message right away. He engaged the shuttle's controls and they quickly lifted off, leaving nearly one hundred thousand BMK troops behind.
Clanker 33418 was standing at the top of the highest peak above Carson Sink, looking down into the canyon.
He was facing east. The sun was reflecting off his visor. He was slightly larger than the battle robots; he stood out among them all. On either side of him were two smaller, thicker 'bots. One was green, one black.
They were, of course, the dead souls of Myx, the ancient robots called back to life again and transported here by purely magical means. But this time they had been resurrected not to fight each other—a simple adjustment of the aggression programs—but those soldiers now caught in the canyon below. They were just waiting for the word to proceed. His chest whirring with all kinds of sounds now, 33418 lowered his head and did one final scan of the canyon. There were 99,416 individuals down there.
Every one of them had to be destroyed.
Clanker 33418 turned to the robot on his left, lifted his visor slightly, and sent a red beam into the smaller 'bot's viz lens. That robot shuddered a bit, then turned and transferred the same red beam to the robot on the right. This robot sent it on to two more. And they sent it to two more, and two more, over and over and over again, until in a chain reaction of red beams, the entire army of robots had been given their final orders.
With no ceremony, no hesitation, they began marching down into the canyon.
Pater Tomm and the poof popped in where 33418 had been standing moments before.
The battle below was just beginning. The robots were wading into the terrified soldiers, most of whom were too afraid to even raise their weapons and fire. Now the soldiers were being crushed, trampled, shot, electrocuted, and disintegrated in a disturbingly methodical manner. If for some reason one of the robots was hit just right by blaster fire and disabled, it took just a few seconds for it to rebuild itself and come back to life again. The robots had been designed for eternal combat. There was no stopping them. The BMK soldiers never had a chance.
Looking down on the bloodbath, the poof became quickly disgusted.
"To be involved in such an enterprise goes against my privilege as an eternal soul," she said. "And it is your fault, Father. I broke just about all the rules of Nature getting these gas cans here for you. And now they are participating in a slaughter."
"Think of it as a cleansing," Tomm told her. "Or the misery the people of this Galaxy will not have to endure now that these dark souls are being dispatched. 1 gave them their chance. I warned them of our secret weapon."
He took a drink from his flask. It contained only coffee, his new jones.
"Some things are just necessary, my child," he concluded.
The poof put her hands on her hips and began to glow red. She was wearing her jester's costume today.
"First of all, you can spare the 'child,' stuff from now on," she hissed at him. "I'm older than you by at least a couple eons."
Tomm just smiled. "Don't be so sure of that," he told her. "I stopped counting long ago."
They watched in silence for a few moments as the ring of robots closed in tighter around the shrinking mass of helpless soldiers. The physical aspect of the battle was overwhelming, with thousands of men and robots moving at once. The screams were bone-chilling, the crunch of robot steel against flesh and bone unnerving. Most of the BMK officers had fled to the center of the crowd, prolonging their lives by just a few more minutes but giving them witness to the slow horror that would eventually reach them, too. Some took their own lives instead; some shot comrades and then themselves. Some even dug holes in the ground and stuck their heads into them, one last act of madness.
The canyon's dusty surface was now soaked with blood.
"This deed will soon be done," the poof said. "But the demons we have let out of the bottle here will be impossible to stuff back in."
"Why are you so sure that they are demons?" Tomm asked her. "Maybe it's a squadron of angels that has been released. Or shouldn't I use that term, considering present company?"
"Don't be so dramatic, Father," the poof told him. "You can't possibly disagree that
all
of history is a painful march, good or bad, on both sides. It is. Believe me, I should know."
She began to cry softly. "That canyon is filled with a bit of history now. And something has been started here that won't stop. It's necessary, I suppose, for the people of this planet, of this system. Certainly they've been wronged. But what is to come will not be a peaceful enterprise."
Tomm just shook his head as the killing below approached its peak.
"I guess you're right." He sighed heavily.
"I'm always right," she said. "Just remember that."
It took more than an hour for it to be finally over.
Hunter wanted no part in watching it. He'd had enough of the killing, enough of all the death.
He set down on top of the devastated piece of high ground that was once Fire Rock Ridge, so weary he could barely climb out of his cockpit. He'd hadn't stopped driving bombing missions on Planet America or Planet France for nearly a week. Now all he wanted was a drink and to go to sleep.
He crawled underneath his aircraft into the shade, out of the bright, warm sun. He retrieved a flask from his boot pocket; it was filled with Seagram's. He uncorked it and downed the entire container in one long, noisy gulp. He felt the warm liquor burn its way down his throat, into his stomach, and then to all parts of his tired body. He'd been waiting for this moment for what seemed like forever. He lay back on the hard ground and started to close his eyes.
That's when he saw a small party of soldiers waving to him from the next peak over.
They were carrying a green flag.
It took Hunter twenty minutes to drunkenly climb up to the peak, his arms and legs weary, his throat dry. With the pint of whiskey still speeding its way through his veins, everything that happened next appeared to him in a kind of dreamy slow motion.
At the top of the peak, he found Deaux with three of his security men waiting for him. None of the guards appeared armed. Hunter had left his weapons back with his plane.