StarHawk (6 page)

All this was happening so quickly, the men inside the Oculus didn’t realize that the Blackship’s command bubble had caught fire. Two of its tail fins were alight as well. Yet the shuttle had looped over the top of the
BonoVox
again and now was going into a second mad dive. Once again the Blackship began firing at it. Once again the shuttle dodged the stream of Z beams. The bug began twisting and turning in seemingly impossible maneuvers, yet remarkably its nose guns kept firing on target and without a hint of hesitation.

Finally one of its blasts found a significant mark. A lucky beam made its way through the Blackship’s hull and into the attacking ship’s own version of an Oculus. This one beam destroyed the Blackship’s entire sensor chamber. In one stroke, the vessel’s abilities to see and hear were gone, and its electrical systems began to short out. A violent explosion rocked the Blackship right behind its control bubble. This in turn caused a string of explosions all the way back to the Blackship’s hindquarters. The propulsion systems within began to disintegrate immediately, and the ship began losing speed. Suddenly there was a bright white flash, and then it was gone. The Blackship had been knocked out of Supertime.

But the drama was not over.

With their ship now gone, the several hundred spacemen it had dispensed to do battle against the
BonoVox
were suddenly all alone. They no longer had a ship to fight for. No one was around them now but the enemy.

Some of the attacking spacemen disengaged from hand-to-hand combat and flew back to the place where the Blackship had been. Others simply stopped fighting and hung motionless in space. It was clear they had no safe place to go. So, one by one, the enemy spacemen began shooting each other…

Hunter have never tasted Venusian wine before.

One sip though was enough to tell him that the slow-ship crap he’d been drinking back on Fools 6 tasted like bilge by comparison. This stuff felt like a cloud going down his throat. No bark. No bite. Yet the opiate effect was virtually the same.

“Refill, Mister Hunter?”

Before Hunter could reply, his goblet slowly refilled itself. He barely saw the hand of the invisible holo-servant pouring him another full measure while properly staying out of sight in some nearby dimension.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Hunter replied belatedly.

He was sitting in Multx’s vast private billet, a compartment directly behind the flight deck of the
BonoVox
. Erx and Berx were on hand as well. Sitting nearby, each had already drained his second glass of wine and was looking for more. They seemed a bit reluctant to look Hunter in the eye.

Hunter had never met Multx before. Perched behind his huge floating desk, the star commander seemed a bit larger than life at first. He looked twice the size of a normal man, with monstrous hands and enormous shoulders. Polished head, properly greased goatee, resplendent in his Space Navy uniform, he certainly looked the part of a famous starship captain.

But Multx also appeared a bit haggard at the moment. And who could blame him? His premonition of dire things a-coming had proved frighteningly accurate. Fewer than a dozen hours ago, his ship had narrowly escaped being captured by the swarm of spacemen from the Blackship. Only by Hunter’s quick action did the
BonoVox
survive. No one on board the Empire warship had ever seen anything remotely like the display Hunter had put on in dispatching the intruding vessel. Even the latest Empire starfighters would not take on a Blackship. Yet Hunter had done it in a lowly, barely armed shuttlecraft.

Even now, it didn’t seem possible…

Erx and Berx were trying to catch Multx’s eye, hoping he would order their glasses to be refilled. But the star commander’s attention was focused entirely on Hunter at the moment.

“Is it safe to say that you have a penchant for—how should I put it?—being where the action is, Mister Hunter?”

Hunter paused from taking another sip of wine.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir,” he finally replied.

Multx smiled wearily. “Well, just in the past few days, you rather dramatically rescued my two close friends here. Then you managed to get out of a very secure compartment to observe our most secret weapons in operation. Then… well, then you saved this ship from a catastrophe.”

Hunter gulped some wine down in earnest then said: “I was just trying to help.”

Multx thought about this for a moment, then snapped his fingers. A visual screen materialized out of nowhere.

“I see our ship physicians thoroughly examined you, Mr. Hunter,” he said, reading from the screen.

“Thankfully they confirmed that you are not a victim of amnesia or any other cranial trauma.”

“That’s good to know,” Hunter replied. “I think—”

“But our records confirm that you are not listed as a citizen of the Empire,” Multx went on. “Nor have you ever been a member of the Empire’s military before.”

“I believe that is true as well,” Hunter said.

Multx dispatched the floating screen and turned back to Hunter. “I know you don’t know where you came from,” he said. “Unless something has come back to you in the past few days?”

Hunter just shook his head. “I’ve thought about it more times than I can count, and not just over the past few days. In fact, I never
stop
thinking about it. But other than my name and the fact that I apparently have some kind of flying ability—I simply cannot remember anything else.”

“And it’s the same reply as to where you learned to fly like that?”

Hunter just nodded. “It is.”

Multx fiddled with his extra-long goatee hair for a moment.

“I am not a man without ego, Mister Hunter,” he said. “Yet in this matter, I can only speak the truth. You saved this ship. You saved my crew. You saved my career. But again, this puzzles me: Whatever possessed you to do what you did? Only a fool would have taken on a Blackship with nothing more than a troop shuttle. Why did you do it?”

Hunter shrugged. He could feel the cloud wine taking effect.

“Something inside just
told
me to do it,” he replied. “I started running; the next thing I knew I was in the shuttle and going outside. It was almost as if someone else were doing it—or that I was
watching
someone else do it. Beyond that…”

He let his voice trail off.

“Are you saying that ‘instinct’ played a role in this?” Multx asked him.

Suddenly Erx and Berx were paying attention again.

“Now,
that’s
a word I have not heard spoken in at least a hundred years,” Berx said.

“If ‘instinct’ is the right term, I guess that would be correct,” Hunter replied. “Is that so unusual?”

Multx just shook his head. “You
really
are from someplace else,” he mumbled.

“What he’s trying to say is that ‘instinct’ is a very rare commodity these days,” Erx explained to him.

“Our social scientists claim it was bred out of the human race a long time ago. Even a touch of it should be considered a gift.”

“You, however, seem to possess it in spades,” Multx went on. “I have many soldiers under my command. I believe every one of them would gladly give his life if it meant saving one of his comrades or even an innocent civilian. But none of them would have done what you did today simply because… well, I just don’t think it would have dawned on them to do it.”

Hunter sipped from his goblet again. More clouds flowing down his gullet. He seemed to be getting both lighter and stronger by the moment.

“The Galaxy is actually a very small place, Mister Hunter,” Multx went on. “And any word of heroics spreads very fast. My report on this incident has already been flashed to Space Command headquarters.

Everything, including the fact that a Blackship somehow got into Supertime, is all regarded as top secret now. But I’m afraid it will be impossible to keep a lid on this thing forever. When word of what you did gets out, every one of my esteemed colleagues will inquire about your availability. I’m sure you would shoot right to the top of any admiral’s personal Air Guard squadron.”

“That would be quite a jump for someone who’s just been drafted,” Hunter told him.

“Well, yes,” Multx replied with a nervous grin. “But actually we think you have much more important things to do than that.”

“I do? Like what?”

Multx smiled for the first time in a long time.

“I’ve made arrangements for you to continue on to Earth as soon as we reach the Pluto Cloud,” he told Hunter. “I hope you don’t mind…”

Hunter nearly dropped his goblet.
Earth
? After what Erx and “Berx had told him about the exclusivity of the mother planet? Why would he be going there?

“I don’t understand,” he finally replied.

Multx checked to make sure the room’s hum beam was at full power. It was.

“Mister Hunter, you’ve never heard of the Earth Race, I suppose,” he asked.

Hunter could only shake his head no.

Multx glanced over at his coconspirators. Both Erx and Berx were trying very hard
not
to make eye contact with him now.

“Well, do either of you want to tell him?” Multx asked them wryly. “Or should I?”

Its official name was the Inner-System Defense Array.

It was made up of nearly one million man-made moons set in various configurations on the edges of the solar system. Most were orbiting the same distance out as the planet Pluto, thus the unofficial title of

“Pluto Cloud.”

Each moon served as a military garrison and a security checkpoint. The swarm enveloped the solar system within a perfect bubble, demarcating the inner sanctum of Earth, its planets, and the sun. In the days before the Ancients, the Pluto Cloud would have been considered the wall around the castle, the trench before the cave. No one got through without the proper connections.

Luckily, Zap Multx had connections.

This was how Hunter found himself on a hyper-shuttlecraft heading toward the holy inner planets.

No sooner had the
BonoVox
arrived here, at the gates of the stellar kingdom, than he’d been summoned from his old billet to the shuttle bay. Once there, he, Erx, and Berx were quietly put aboard Multx’s personal launch and sent on their way.

This region of space was literally jammed with starships. Most of them were military, but many cargo and scientific ships were on hand as well. One could hardly look in any direction without seeing several hundred spacecraft either docked or moving slowly about. All of them being scrutinized by security personnel. Yet the hyper-shuttle was allowed to pass through a gauntlet of robot guns and Z-beam platforms unencumbered.

Even the shuttle pilot was amazed. “I guess the magic word around here today is ‘Multx,’ ” he said.

“Bingo,” Erx and Berx agreed.

As luck would have it, an alignment of sorts was in the offing. The shuttle pilot was able to buzz all of the outer planets, a diversion that added only minutes to the length of their trip inward.

Pluto was burning bright green these days. The gas giants Neptune and Uranus were violet and cobalt blue. Jupiter and Saturn were like minisuns, fantastically multicolored, with hundreds of moons, most of them man-made, spinning around them. The asteroid belt had long ago been cleared away. Mars was now on its own, glowing like a neon-red sapphire, the warmth of the sun obvious on its face.

Then came Earth.

It was a diamond floating among brilliant stones. An enormous blue, shimmering jewel, outstanding against the blackness of space. Mouth agape, his nose nearly pressing against the shuttle’s main window, Hunter imagined he could see a white-hot glaze surrounding the planet, almost like a halo. There was no mistaking that one was in the presence of something great here. This place
looked
like the center of the Galaxy.

“The first spaceship left it five thousand, two hundred thirty-nine years ago,” Erx told him. “And that was only to orbit. A lot has happened since then. The first outward expansion. Puffing the planets. Three empires rise, three empires fall. Countless wars, civil conflicts, rebellions… you name it. And that’s just from the history we know about.”

Much of Earth’s surface was now covered with huge triangular sections known as triads; they were what made the home planet shine. Some of these massive sections measured more than one hundred miles in length. They were made of a superhard material known as terranium. Similar to electron steel, terranium was also able to feed an earthy crust and was thus amenable to growing flora.

The triads had been built more than two millennia before by the mysterious people known as the Ancient Engineers. Just why they chose to lay down these huge sections was lost in the haze of time. An attempt to reclaim surface area lost due to rising ocean levels was one guess. The triads covered more than half the planet and were arranged so that Earth now supported just two enormous continents—one in the east, the other in the west.

What remained of the oceans was in between. Water drained off from the poles traveled along huge canals that separated the triads in some places. Besides feeding the terranium, these artificial waterways also provided landing areas for some of the Empire’s largest starships. Another result of this massive engineering project was that every coastline on Earth was now uniform, every river and lake drawn perfectly straight.

The triads were connected by more than five thousand bridges. Some were thousands of miles long and linked the two continents at their closest points. But these spans were never used—at least not anymore.

They, too, were ancient, but unlike the triads, no one was quite sure who built them. All that was known was they’d appeared after the triads had been put in place and before the rise of the Third Empire. In any case, they were considered sacred and therefore off-limits to all.

Earth’s Moon still hung in the sky, bright as ever, a pearl orbiting a diamond. But it, too, was considered sacred and thus wisely avoided.

In fact, no one had set foot on the lunar satellite in more than three thousand years.

The hyper-shuttle spiraled down through Earth’s atmosphere now, heading toward an enormous city on the northeastern edge of the western continent.

A layer of perfectly shaped clouds seemed to be hovering above the center of this metropolis. On closer inspection, however, Hunter realized these really weren’t clouds at all.

They were floating cities.

“That’s where the Specials live,” Erx explained, sensing Hunter’s curiosity. “The Emperor and his immediate family live on that one right there—the one that’s so big, it’s hard to miss…”

The largest of the floating cities was about twenty miles below them. It looked like a huge castle in the sky. It had multiple spires, many glowing in very odd iridescent colors. Long, sloping passageways crisscrossed these spires like spiderwork. The airborne city was at least ten square miles in size. Other cities floating close to it were almost as large.

Because the floating cities were so big, and because they were more than a mile above Earth’s surface, condensation tended to gather underneath them, forming…
clouds
. This created the illusion that the cities were floating on the cumulus.

Beneath the floating palaces was Big Bright City. It went on forever. Tens of millions of structures, from superskyscrapers to shacks, hovering roadways, air-car tubes, water canals, flags, banners, arenas, thousands of monuments to the Emperor, enormous, skyward-pointing power grids—and lights. Lights everywhere! Burning brightly, day and night. All colors, all shades, all tones. Everything bathed in a muted neon glow to ensure than no one ever went to sleep. The city was so large, it took up nearly one tenth of the entire upper western continent.

On its very eastern edge, right before its last triad met the sea, was Effkay-Jack. It was a sprawling spaceport facility, boasting hundreds of launch and receiving stations, huge housing units for the Empire’s largest starships, its own weather control, and its own separate army. It was the largest spaceport in the Galaxy. On any given day more than fifty million people would pass through its portals.

The hyper-shuttle swooped down into one of them now and finally halted. Once the tiny vessel was recognized as the property of one of the most famous starship commanders in the Galaxy, it was surrounded by a small army of ground support personnel. One of them opened the main hatch, and Erx scrambled out; Berx followed close behind.

Now it was Hunter’s turn.

Yet he hesitated. This could be a special moment, he thought. It would be wise to remember it.

Finally he touched his boot heel to Earth. A jolt of electricity ran right through his body.

“What do you know about that?” he murmured.

I’ve been here before…