“If we do not wipe out that jammer, Verlioze, we’ll lose this fight.”
“Shall we retreat, sir?” Balt suggested, his eyes narrowed pinpricks of feral intensity. Bombs erupted around us, though shields for now held.
Mong glared at him as if he were a poisonous toad. “I never retreat, Balt. Never. I win every battle I fight.”
“The losses, lord, they could be catastrophic.”
Mong’s hand came out and grabbed the lieutenant’s neck. Balt choked, clutching at Mong’s wrist. It was as if the lieutenant’d swallowed a lizard. “Catastrophic, yes, Balt. But risk is inevitable and to be expected. We will win this battle, as I said. Find those damn transmitters.” He threw Balt down.
“Take the ship to the nearest source,” the lieutenant croaked, massaging his reddening neck.
Another wing fighter caught in flames and disintegrated in atomic ruin.
Hadruk and Verlioze muttered, then Verlioze raised his voice in a hoarse bray, “Our fleet, lord. We cannot communicate with them! Do we just leave them here? Our last command was to attack with prejudice.”
Mong’s face remained impassive. I looked to see his reaction. He bared his teeth, then said in a dangerously low voice, “For all your sakes, where’s the exact source of those transmitters?”
The weapons master shook his head. Confusion clouded his face. “Sometimes they seem to come from Twidor’s Ghost Mare Valley, other times from Anxaste.”
“Triangulate! Send a probe in to investigate and fly back out. We can manually scan its databanks.”
“We’ve done that before, sir—”
“Do it again!” Mong snarled. “Wait! Scrap that idea! Bring Vulpin into Twidor’s Mare Valley. On the double!”
It was a gutsy move. We left the war front, unable to reach by signal the rest of the fleet. To Twidor we sped at full impulse, leaving the fleet behind to hold the line, or sink against the lockspring tide of resistance. In their glee at targeting Mong’s gigantic front line, the defenders failed to notice Vulpin’s absence.
Within moments, we were passing through the threadbare atmosphere of Melinar’s closest moon, skimming across the surface, a grey desolation of changeless hills and valleys. The ship roared across the pitted craters and low rises of crumbled rock and layers of moon dust.
Mong advanced to study the holo readout as if oblivious to the damage his shields had sustained. I wondered what went on in that rattrap mind of his.
“There! In that thin ring of boulders! I see a weak signal pulsing on the scanners.”
Hadruk, twisting about his stout, ape figure, said hoarsely, “Our probes must have missed it prior. That, or their signal is now operating at full strength and traceable. Helmsman, turn us about. Make another sweep!”
The 3D projection shifted to higher resolution. A clutch of displaced boulders rose on a low rise. A thin rod nestled inside, its tip poking above the cradle of its rocky protection.
“There’s an antenna! Are our weapons up?”
“Fareons are inoperable, sir, but traditional drop bombs are active.”
“Blast the transmitter to dust.”
“With pleasure,” Hadruk grunted.
The landscape incinerated below us and Mong stared in triumph. The ship soared upward into space. The communication static had diminished. Now only the thin garble of screams of dying men carried across the black gulfs.
“Move quickly!” Mong ordered. “To that shithole Anxaste. Since we can’t reach our scouts, impulse over to Anxaste.”
Vulpin’s heavy–duty Vega 8 impulse engines roared under our feet, bringing us to Anxaste, another dead satellite of Melinar—the place of the second illusive triangulated signal.
Sure enough, a high-energy transmitter lay cached within the rocks on some barren moon hill.
“Fire at will,” Mong bellowed.
I saw a mushroom cloud erupt on the desolate horizon. A dozen breaths tensed on the bridge. If they undermined the communication jammers, Melinar fate would be sealed…
Seconds passed and communications systems came online.
Mong’s lip curled in a vindictive leer and my heart plummeted. It was clear what would happen now—another world lost to Mong’s mad vision of galactic supremacy.
Orders were shouted across the com and traded across the air waves as Vulpin raced to the battle front.
It was as I feared, his ships, the bulk of which had survived the onslaught of the smaller forces, now united in full assault and communication, drove in a wedge, firing full on into the defending ships, which up till now had held the advantage. Mong’s remaining ships, some seven hundred strong, blasted a hole through the thin line of defense. A dozen assault fighters impulsed at max speed down toward the orange globe of defenseless Melinar. The defenders, stunned by the sudden downturn in fortune, brought their ships back to meet the strike. But fareon beams prevented them from making any difference.
I winced as a new contingent of Melinar and Vendecki ships ignited and blinked out of existence. Long range fareon beams made mincemeat of the underpowered craft, firing at double strength.
Our flagship rocked to gunfire, but Mong merely grunted. He knew that his shields, electro-juiced to the max and built for disaster, could dispel any threat. The rebel leader of the resistance, a large Melinarian cylindrical cone with wide brim and tapered stern, flared, its shields at capacity. A sudden red poof lit against the backdrop of stars and the ship disintegrated in a ruin of cinders and twisted metal.
Mong’s men on the bridge howled in triumph.
Mong forced me to watch that one-sided battle. The thousand ships he had assembled from lord knows where, all attacked in wide loops, evading fire or absorbing it with their electro-shielded armor, surrounding the relatively few dozen of remaining Melinarian craft. Nothing but wholesale slaughter. In his flagship Vulpin he oversaw the destruction, his muscled arms crossed on his barrel chest. As he barked orders to his crew, I saw a whole planet brought to its knees. Bombs fell on the cities of Jezuan and Narsilie—millions dead. Visuals showed green forests and parklands, tenements, roads,
