her own death. As Gideon and Lydia dodged debris from the base camp, Guidon exploded above them. The death of their battleship was so sudden and so complete they didn’t realize at first what had happened.
The remaining enemy vessel was placing laser shot after laser shot into the base camp from a half kilometer up, where the saucer had slowed almost to a hover to maintain altitude long enough to destroy the last remaining enemy colony.
The major glanced skyward at the spot where Guidon had vanished. He could see no debris remaining larger than a city block. But he did see the burning and smoldering Ranger as it majestically righted herself after receiving the near-death blows from Guidon ’s destruction. The reinforced armor of the smaller ship had peppered her hull with millions of particles as it exploded. The molten debris had set Ranger ’s two forward turrets afire before exploding outward and sending the crews of the four massive guns spinning into the cold death of space. Gideon gripped Lydia’s hand with first shock and then pride as Ranger fired her main engines and started her turn for the enemy saucer far below.
“She has no forward armament!” Lydia cried out.
Gideon looked at Ranger as she sped toward the enemy warship. The entire superstructure forward of her bridge was glowing red-hot from the dual assault of enemy fire and the brunt of Guidon ’s final death rattle.
“What is she doing?” Lydia asked.
“The only thing she can do. She’s going to ram the bastards.”
“He thinks the base is still intact. Can we call her off?”
“She’s doomed anyway. She’s hurt too badly,” Gideon said as he watched the terrible race far above him. Suicidal ventures were quickly becoming the norm of his civilization.
Lydia reached for the radio transmit button on her wrist and started calling frantically. The enemy saucer, apparently seeing the threat coming its way, had started to rise back into a higher orbit, blasting at the heavily damaged Ranger with her now retargeted lasers. Gideon looked down at the diminutive blonde, who had started crying as she failed to raise Ranger. The major reached out and pulled Lydia’s arm down. She struggled and fought with him, finally collapsing against his chest, shaking, giving in to the hopelessness of the situation. Gideon’s eyes went from the charging Ranger to the big blue planet below them. He shook his head and held Lydia closer just as Ranger slammed itself bow-on into the enemy saucer. The resulting explosion from the fuel and munitions of both vessels sent out debris in a deadly arc that smashed into the lunar surface, causing ten thousand small eruptions in the siltlike dust of the dead moon.
The final battle for his home world ended silently, with less than ten minutes from beginning to end. Over six thousand men and women had vanished in a final insanity-driven burst of mayhem.
Gideon let his knees fold. Both he and Lydia fell to the dusty surface and then they sat that way, holding each other for long minutes.
It was twenty minutes after the explosions subsided that Lydia stopped crying, and with effort raised her head. She saw the blue planet, which was just starting to set. Half the world was covered in fine white clouds and the other half lay in darkness. She turned away after a moment and clung to the major even tighter than before.
“What were they calling the planet?” she asked. “I mean, were they still going to use the same name as the one we were brought up with and learned in school?”
“As far as I know it was still the same,” Gideon answered. He looked at the blue planet, setting for the lunar day. He suddenly stood and pulled Lydia to her feet.
“Come on, we have a lot of work ahead of us! Those downed saucers might have those mechanical sons of bitches on them. Soon they’ll activate-and they don’t negotiate.”
Lydia didn’t question the large man as he pulled her along toward the crumbling crater where the science facility once sat. She did turn and watch the last of the blue planet sink away to nothing.
“We need to name our new home something, maybe the essence of what it really is,” Lydia said in her quiet and disillusioned state.
“We have to get there first, and then you can name it any damn thing you want.”
It was almost two full months after the last surviving members of the human race left for the new world below that the war pods embedded in the destroyed superstructures of the downed enemy saucers activated. They came alive only because their programmed brains hadn’t sensed any movement from the saucers that had crashed on the lunar surface. Designed as storm troopers for a race of cowardly yet advanced aggressors, the pods started dropping free of their modules into the lunar dust.
Only seventeen of the mechanical soldiers had survived the destruction of the saucers and their masters. Twelve of the ten-foot-diameter pods shot free of the mangled remains of the saucers and went to their programmed destination-the planet below. Their sensors immediately picked up advanced electrical sources that the primitive world should not have on its surface. They locked on to the signals and shot into space with fiery engine bursts, their destination Earth. The mechanical killers’ programmed orders from their masters were to eliminate the last vestiges of mankind.
The last five pods rolled out of the wreckage in ball form. Three started roving the lunar surface searching for the enemy they had been programmed to kill, while the other two rolled toward the last place their telemetry had told them humans had been-the crater. Each of the five pods, after not discovering their enemy, settled into the lunar dust, their mechanical bodies curled into fetal positions inside their shells. Their duty would be to wait, no matter how long, for man to return to the surface of the lunar world.
The minister of armaments for the Third Reich stood silently in front of the most powerful man in Nazi Germany other than the Fuhrer himself. The smallish, sheepish little man sat behind his desk with not so much as a single oiled hair out of place, and a uniform that had been recently cleaned and pressed. Even while his world was falling apart and burning around him, the small rat managed to maintain an air of superiority. The man behind the desk studied the last page in the brown folder that had been delivered to him only moments before. The reich minister for armament production, Albert Speer, stood waiting for a reaction by the former chicken farmer who was now serving as the head of the most powerful entity outside of the German army, the SS.
Heinrich Himmler adjusted his glasses as he read. When he was done he made a show of placing the paper perfectly in line with the previous pages of the report and then slowly closed the folder. He tapped the thick binder with a single finger as though he were coming to some monumental conclusion derived from careful thought. However much Himmler tried to disguise his demeanor, Speer knew the calculating little bastard did nothing, not even speak, without thoroughly thinking it through beforehand. The demonstration he was putting on, in the reich minister’s view, had become tiresome.
“I must say that I do not appreciate being hijacked on the way to the Reich Chancellery.”
Himmler smiled and looked toward Speer with a fatherly look. “Such a word-hijacked? I merely asked my men to inquire if you would join me before filing your report on Columbus prior to your presentation to the Fuhrer, just so we could chat awhile. And since so much of the operational success of this project has come from this office, I felt a briefing by you, to me, was not out of the question.”
Speer looked around the spartan office of this prolific mass murderer. He removed his brown saucer cap and placed it under his left arm, all the while feeling uncomfortable in the cold space of his surroundings. His discomfort was also due to his closeness to the chicken farmer-a nickname for Himmler that had caught on among the intellectuals of Hitler’s inner circle, a group that Speer knew was ever dwindling.
“I have ordered the excavation stopped, and for the site to be destroyed immediately, the remains of the artifacts buried,” Speer said, as defiantly and calmly as he could. He watched the practiced reaction of Himmler as the impish little man looked at him with a trace of a smile. “At least until we can negotiate our finds with the Allies. After all, I would rather think the Fuhrer would prefer not to have the artifacts fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, wouldn’t you?”
“So I have read in your report, Herr Reich Minister,” Himmler said, ignoring his statement about the Red Army. “I wonder if such an action is warranted at this time.”
