StarHawk (4 page)

“They’d skewer you on Earth, Zap,” Berx agreed. “If spinning art was known to be his offense, then the wives of every one of your superior officers will demand that you ride the Ball for the rest of your career.”

Multx shrugged and gave in again.

“Well, then this matter needs some constructive thinking,” he said. “Which is something I don’t have time for right now.”

He released the room from its hum-beam shield. Erx and Berx knew it was time to go.

“We sail in one quarter and five,” Multx told them. “I’m sure we can squeeze you two in someplace comfortable.”

“And our friend below?” Erx asked.

Multx continued stroking his beard.

“I’ll keep you informed of my plans,” he said.

Hunter had never seen anything like the
BonoVox
.

The gigantic starship seemed twice the length of the hulk on the other side of the mountain, and at least half again its width. And unlike that shipwreck, this vessel was covered with weaponry. Towering gun spires, ascending arrays of missile launchers, forests of Z-beam tubes and space-torpedo ports. There were thousands of weapons-systems modules attached to its hull, with thousands of portholes running between them. It looked chaotic and perverse. But it had an undeniable strange beauty, too, all 3.5 million tons of it.

And here it was, right above his house, floating as if it were light as a feather.

Sitting near the southern comer of his roof, Hunter had been staring up at the enormous starship since it arrived earlier that morning. He knew nothing would be the same after this. Many days and nights he’d spent gazing up at the star-filled sky, wondering if there was civilization out there, somewhere, in the Cosmos. He’d had his doubts. True, this planet was littered with space wrecks. But they were all so old and decayed, they seemed ancient. And why had no one ever come here to salvage them? And why couldn’t he see lights moving between the stars at night? Or any unnatural lights at all?

It was a strange yearning, this one he had. He could feel it either in his heart or his head, but it was always the same, a kind of frustrated anticipation. He was homesick—but he didn’t know where home was. He could wind up living a long life, but what good was that, if this was not the place he was supposed to be? No, there might be a difference between loneliness and being alone, but the end result was the same: The soul cries. It wants to move on. East, west, up, down. It didn’t matter. But to where?

And how? Thinking too much about one thing was the surest way to go crazy, so in the end, it was just more logical for him to believe that everybody and everything in this universe were dead. And by some cruel twist of fate, he was put here, alone, with no explanation, the only one left in human creation. Doing his time in hell.

But now, in just two days, not one but two ships had come here. And suddenly everything had changed.

The universe
was
alive. Or this little part of it was.

At least now I have some proof, at least one question has been answered…

And he was happy—for a few moments, anyway. Because with life, one answer usually brought just another question. He was not alone; that was great. But would he ever be able to find someone, somewhere, who might be able to tell him who he was? And why he was here?

And did he really want to know?

These thoughts must have drifted into dreams, because when Hunter opened his eyes again, he found an enormous soldier standing in front of him. He towered over Hunter and was holding a huge weapon of some sort. The soldier was actually one of many; in fact, there were nearly a hundred soldiers crowding onto his roof. They had come out of nowhere. Literally.

They were all wearing dark gray combat uniforms and elaborate battle helmets. Through the tangle of space hats and ray guns, one soldier called for quiet and began reading from an ornamental scroll. The words were incomprehensible to Hunter; they were in an archaic Empire vernacular. He let the man finish, then turned to the nearest soldier.

“What did all that mean?” Hunter asked him.

The soldier replied: “Simple: You’ve been conscripted to the service of the Empire military forces.”

“Conscripted?” Hunter asked. “Do you mean…?”

“That’s correct, comrade,” the soldier said. “You’ve just been drafted.”

The trip to the Sileasian System took two Earth days.

The
BonoVox
covered more than four thousand light-years in that time, most of it while cruising in Supertime, the mysterious seventh dimension also known as “the Ethers.”

Under ideal conditions, a starship traveling in Supertime could traverse the Galaxy in less than a month.

Indeed, some Empire ships could reach speeds of two light-years
a minute
. They did this without having to go through black holes, white holes, wormholes, or any other deep-space exotica. All that was required was a properly tuned, properly powered propulsion core.

Just how the Empire’s starships were able to enter Supertime
was
a mystery—Erx and Berx were hardly alone in their lack of understanding of it. Something in the prop cores allowed the grand ships to cross into the seventh dimension and travel there with no more than the flip of a switch. But just how that miracle worked, and how the Big Generator was able to supply the massive amounts of power to make it happen, went beyond the faculties of most. The Imperial Family and the core of the Empire’s military elite knew the secret of the prop-cores; at least, that was the common assumption. After that, it was all magic as far as the citizens of the Galaxy were concerned.

Not that they ever got a taste of it. Supertime belonged to the Empire’s military class and their warships.

It was their superhighway to the stars. Everyone else, from the space merchants to the space pirates, had to use craft powered by ion-ballast engines. On their best day, these cramped, noisy vessels could travel at barely one-hundredth the speed of a prop core model starship, and then only with frequent refueling stops.

And they couldn’t crash through stars, either.

The Sileasian System was in a region of the Galaxy known as Slow Fringe 3, or sometimes, the Three-Arm.

This was the third arm of the Milky Way, counting clockwise from the Earth, and almost on the other side of the star system. It held comparatively few stars, just a few dozen million. Sileasia and its array of eleven planets was near the tip of the arm. It was a known haven for space pirates and bandits; their ilk had been terrorizing Slow Fringe 3 for more than a hundred years. In their bid to reclaim planets lost since the Third Empire’s downfall many centuries before, the imperial forces had spent the past two Earth years clearing out the Sileasian System, one planet at a time.

It had not been the cleanest of campaigns. Shortly after the onset of hostilities, the various Sileasian lawbreakers had banded together to create a substantial opposition army nearly three million strong.

They invaded nine of the eleven planets and held these worlds hostage against any Empire action. This made slow going for the Empire’s soldiers, slogging it out, one world at a time, trying to kill as many of the enemy as possible while attempting to keep civilian casualties low. It hadn’t always worked out that way. The death toll in two years of fighting already numbered in the billions.

Early on the third day, the
BonoVox
arrived off the seventh planet of Sileasia, a jungle world called Vines 67.

It was here that the Sileasian bandits had been waging a fierce guerrilla war against the Empire forces, specifically the two-million-man corps of Loy Staxx, a 141-year-old, highly decorated veteran of the Empire’s Space Navy. Staxx had chosen to take Vines 67 one continent at a time, a substantial chore, as there were only three major bodies of water on the planet, and together they barely made up 30 percent of its area.

Recapturing Vines 67 was important, though. It was the middle planet of the three the bandits still controlled. The original plan was to subdue Vines 67 and then use it as a jumping-off point for campaigns against the two remaining opposition worlds. But even with a vast array of supporting forces drawn from the previously reclaimed planets, Staxx and his men had found the jungle war against the homegrown bandits a slow, draining, and costly affair. After nearly half a year of trying, they were being relieved.

Star Commander Zap Multx was here to finish the job.

Hunter had been put into a small compartment in a section of the
BonoVox
known as the Lowers.

This place had a hovering bunk, a food tube, and a supply of “brain rings” for amusement, though Hunter didn’t have the slightest idea how to work the things.

He’d seen nothing else of the ship, having been beamed directly to this windowless billet after being “drafted.” Erx and Berx sent him a new set of clothes, including a plain gray spacesuit and a pair of boots. In an accompanying holo-message, they told him what Multx had told them: that Hunter had to be “processed” at a military facility planet “nearer to Earth.” The
BonoVox
had to make another stop first.

All that was fine with Hunter. It wasn’t what he imagined military life would be, but he had no complaints about his accommodations. His bunk was soft, and the food tube offered a bewildering array of fare.

And while he felt bad about leaving his flying machine behind, he didn’t miss life on Fools 6 at all. After spending so much time kicking around one of the Galaxy’s most dead-end planets, anything was an improvement.

Still, there was no getting around the fact that he was confined to a jail cell of sorts. The door to his compartment was sealed, and there was no unlocking mechanism on the inside. Why? He had a sense that he was being kept under wraps for some reason. As Erx and Berx explained it to him in their message, whenever the huge starship was about to enter a combat situation, all nonessential personnel had to be locked down in their berths, lest they see any of the Empire’s many secret weapons in action.

“But how can any individual be ‘nonessential?’ ” Hunter had asked their holo-images, knowing full well they couldn’t respond. “I thought we were all supposed to be part of the same thing…”

The most spectacular part of the flight was when the
BonoVox
actually went
through
a star.

How was this possible? As with just about everything else related to travel in Supertime, no one on board was really sure. The explorers’ holo-message to him included one of the starship’s flight engineers explaining it this way: “Much of what appears to be present in the other known dimensions does not appear to be present in the seventh dimension. Therefore, why would we have a problem going through something that is not there?”

At the incredible speed of Supertime, going through stars that weren’t there was easier than going around them; star-crashing was simply a function of efficient transport. But the event was hardly routine.

Whenever the massive vessel crashed a star, everything and everybody aboard the ship would glow with an intense golden aura. This luminescence lasted for just 0.0002501 second—the amount of time it took the ship to pass through the star’s other-dimensional position in space. Then everything went back to normal again. It was superquick, but there was never any doubt whenever it happened. Even before the golden haze faded away, applause and cheering could be heard throughout the ship anytime the
BonoVox
made a crash.

It was early in the third day of the voyage when Klaxons began blaring throughout the massive starship.

The noise woke up Hunter immediately. He instinctively went to his compartment’s door. It was still sealed. But on the other side he could hear the unmistakable sound of many people moving at once.

Boots thudding along the passageway. Voices shouting through the pipes. The dark music of weapons and equipment clanging together.

Hunter had heard such sounds before…

He found himself wishing the door would open and allow him to see what was going on outside. An instant later, that’s exactly that happened. One moment the door was there, the next it wasn’t. It hadn’t slid open; rather it had disappeared, and then reappeared in the door slot.

That was strange enough. But in the same brief instant, Hunter thought he saw the very faint image of a person standing right next to him. A hand passed through the space where the door had been. A voice whispered:
You must see this
…

Then the door just wasn’t there anymore.

And just as he thought, the hallway outside was filled with soldiers. They were members of Multx’s 23rd Special Operations Corps. Each trooper looked enormous. Their complex dark gray battle suits added about a foot to their height and at least a hundred pounds to their bulk. Each soldier was a self-contained war machine. His suit had plug-ins for various weapons. Each carried a large, tubular ray gun slung from his back, as well as a holster carrying two or three small blaster pistols. Life-support tubes ran up from each man’s breastplate into the oversized bubble-top battle helmet. Two tiny dishes on top of this helmet provided for communications.

The soldiers trooped past Hunter, paying him no attention, eyes forward, chins up.

They were real warriors, he thought. Determined. Brave. Smart…

He had served with men like this before…

The line of troopers finally disappeared through a hatch at the end of the passageway. The Klaxons were blaring at full peak now. Hunter could hear the sound of more footsteps moving on the decks above and below him. He had no doubt what was happening here. These soldiers were marching off to war.

He began walking down the empty passageway. The line of troopers had gone through a hatch to the right. Hunter’s instincts told him to keep walking straight. He reached a large doorway, opened the hatch, and stepped through.

He found himself on a glassed-in balcony; it looked out on an immense chamber deep within the ship.

What he saw here was unfathomable at first. There were thousands of troopers floating within this chamber. Each one was dressed in the same elaborate battle gear. There were also hundreds of small spacecraft hovering in rows near the top of the vast hall. These craft were long, glassy, and tube-shaped.

They had six gangling legs hanging off of them, and a huge bubble nose. For some reason, they were known as “bugs.”

Though it seemed very chaotic at first, Hunter soon came to realize the soldiers were floating up to these craft and climbing aboard. They were all moving very fast, yet no one was bumping into each other, or even coming close. As soon as a small troop shuttle was filled with soldiers, it would shoot off through a huge portal in the chamber wall, passing through an invisible membrane that protected those inside from the dangers of outer space. The whole affair was highly choreographed, highly drilled, well executed. The transports seem to hold about a hundred troops each. They were being spit out at a rate of about one every second.

Only after all of the transports had left the chamber did the Klaxons finally calm down. Hunter moved farther down the balcony and came upon a huge observation blister; it looked out onto the vastness of space beyond. From here Hunter could see the planet of Vines 67 below. It looked like a huge green ball dotted in a few places with patches of shimmering blue water.

The
BonoVox
was in a high orbit above the planet. The troop transports were lined up in columns just below the massive warship, obviously poised to invade this green world. Hunter looked to his left.

Another starship was parked in an orbit nearby. To his right, another ship came into view. Then another.

And another. He counted a dozen of the magnificent ships around the planet, and those were just the ones he could see.

This fleet was made up of Empire units occupying the already liberated planets in the Sileasian System.

The ships were identical in design to the
BonoVox
, but they were all about a third smaller in size, leaving no doubt which vessel was the flagship here. They were spitting out hundreds of troop transports as well.

Several thousand of the shuttles were lined up in huge phalanxes around the planet. Hunter guessed the invasion force totaled at least half a million men. Just getting them all together and in place was an astonishing feat of complexity and maneuver. They appeared ready to pounce at any moment.

Yet they were obviously waiting for something.

That’s when another ship appeared. It was different from the rest. Though built in the Empire’s standard triangular design, it wasn’t as sleek as the other starships, nor did it bear the multitude of planet-blasting weapons the other vessels carried. This one had a huge red bubble just aft of its forward flight compartment. This odd ship was hanging close to the
BonoVox’s
starboard side. It was not spewing out troop carriers.

Hunter studied this ship closely. It had a ghostly air about it, yet to his eyes, it was a familiar one as well.

Then it hit him. This starship was similar to the one sticking out of the ground back on Fools 6. What had Erx and Berx called it? A Kaon Bombardment ship?

Not a moment later, the red dome atop the strange ship began to glow. It became very bright very quickly. When it seemed it could get no more intense, a beam exploded from this cupola and traveled to the jungle planet below. It hit a spot just north of the equator, an area of exceptionally thick flora.

Suddenly it seemed as if a quarter of the entire planet were bathed in crimson. The thousands of troop transports took this as their cue and began falling down toward the planet. Hunter could see explosions on the planet’s surface. The glow from the neighboring ship intensified. He stared deep into the red dome and felt a chill go through him.

“
Comrade
?
What are you doing here
?”

Hunter spun around to find a huge individual standing right behind him. He was one of the
BonoVox’s
small army of on-board security troops. As Hunter tried to spit out an explanation, the security man raised a handheld device, pointed it at him, and pushed a button.

A moment later, Hunter found himself locked inside another compartment.

This one had bars he could see.