Storm Over Saturn (23 page)

He was waiting for Annie when she came down, catching her before she bit the ground. She was wearing a combat suit not unlike his own now, but still she looked gorgeous. She stayed in his arms as he made his way to the spot where Zoloff eventually came down. The Mad Russian landed just like a pro. Just like that, the three of them were on the ground.

They rushed to the front door of the warehouse, Hunter giving the hatch a pass with his quadtrol. Not only were there no security devices in place, the door itself wasn't even locked. Taking advantage of this huge break, the three of them hurried inside.

The warehouse was indeed a monster. It was impossible to see the far end; it looked to be at least a half mile away. The ceiling, too, seemed to be so far above them, Hunter wouldn't have been surprised to see clouds forming somewhere overhead.

But there was something very strange about this place. All of them got it right away.

"It's empty," Hunter said.

A huge building like this, in an area on Saturn where space was premium, and there were no bubblers containing information bits for personnel files, no storage of weapons or ion nails. Just one big open building that seemed to stretch on forever.

"This is weird," Hunter said. They'd heard some very nasty stuff was going on in here, and yet the place was barren.

"And why did no one follow us in here?" Zoloff asked.

Another good question. Certainly any local SG troops, though mostly electric pencil pushers, would have no problem corralling them in here. And all those many SG ships that had shot at them all the way down. Why did they cut off their pursuit and not shoot at them once they were on the ground? What was wrong with this place? It was ahnost as if the SG themselves didn't want to come near it.

Suspicious, Hunter did an interior quadtrol check. The environmental controls at the moment were OK. However, there were what the device called "unacceptable residues" lingering in chambers deep underneath the warehouse. "Do not go anywhere near them," the quadtrol warned.

Alarmed now, Hunter asked the quadtrol to define these residues and why they were so unacceptable.

It took the device a long time to answer—always a bad sign. Finally it replied, "The residues are from a super-toxin previously unknown in the Galaxy."

Hunter was stunned by the reply. So were Zoloff and Annie, looking over his shoulder.

But there was more: 'This toxin in large quantities can only be labeled an XWMD."

"XWMD?" Hunter repeated the term. "I've never heard of it."

Zoloff shrugged. "Nor have I."

Hunter asked the quadtrol to explain. The reply this time was chilling. "XWMD is an abbreviation for extreme weapon of mass destruction."

Hunter looked at Zoloff, and Zoloff looked at Hunter. They both grabbed Annie.

"This is not good," Hunter whispered. "And it also means we can't stay in here very long."

"Five minutes is an acceptable limit," the quadtrol replied with an unsolicited piece of advice. "After that, exposure levels will slowly rise to critical."

They began walking quickly. Now that they were here, they at least had to see if anything was afoot. After about a minute, they spotted several large piles of litter scattered around center of the huge floor. Neutron wires, electron torches, ion bolts—construction materials. There were also many sections of disengaged staging lying about.

Zoloff the scientist came to the fore. "What were they building here?" he asked.

"It had to be a ship of some kind," Hunter replied. "Judging from all this stuff, maybe even two."

He swept his quadtrol around the area. "It wasn't a prop-core ship," he said. "There's absolutely no leftover subatomics in here. There's a lot of other weird stuff, but no subatomics. Anywhere."

He looked around, trying to conjure up a vision of what might have been built here.
Whatever they were, they're gone now
, he thought.
But when
?

He leaned down, felt the floor, and got his answer. It was still warm. "Gone—but not that long ago," he said.

He also noted that it appeared the builders had simply dropped their tools after they'd finished. Same with the staging involved. "And it was a big craft, whatever it was," he added.

Again, Zoloff could only agree. There were literally hundreds of electron torches and other hand tools and robotic-tools scattered about.

"But look at how the tools are dispersed," Hunter went on.

Zoloff didn't know what he meant at first. To him, it just looked like a mad scramble of workers had ensued after whatever they were working on was finally finished—with no need to clean up after themselves.

But Hunter saw something else.

He told Zoloff and Annie to join him in the middle of the huge floor. Then he faced Annie in one direction and Zoloff in another and told them to walk backward until they encountered a piece of staging or a pile of discarded tools. Hunter meanwhile walked backward in a third direction. Counting off their steps as they went, all three stopped at nearly the same moment, this after walking one hundred paces. Then they held their hands out from their sides and pointed to the person on either side of them.

The three of them stood there like this for a long moment. If they had truly walked to the limits of where the vessel had been built, thereby getting a rough outline of its shape, then what was constructed here had not been a typical wedge-shaped Empire design.

Rather, it had been built as a circle. Or a saucer.

Zoloff eyes went wide as this finally sank in. "They built a craft that didn't need the Big Generator to fly fast," he said, repeating CX's words. "Something to deliver a devastating blow to Doomsday 212 and the mid-Two Arm. But obviously, they wouldn't waste their time building an ion ballast engine. They must have been building something else."

Hunter looked back at him grimly. "Or someone was building it for them."

He hurried over to Zoloff. "In the desert world attraction " he said, "I came into a room where there was a flying saucer-shaped vehicle. Those Spetsnaz soldiers wanted me to fly it, before the big gunfight broke out, that is."

Zoloff just laughed. "That was just a figment of my own imagination," he replied. "We were always hearing rumors from America that you had a real UFO hidden away in your Area 51. We, the great Soviet Union, did not have such a thing! But like all things American, we wanted one, too. We did not want to be left behind in the flying saucer gap. But again, it was just a fancy on my part. Our brave soldiers go in and try to steal the Americans' most treasured and secret possession. Thrills and spills result…"

Hunter had to laugh darkly at that last part. Those thrills and spills brought him to within an inch of losing his life, or so it seemed.

"But Doctor, here's the strange thing," he explained to Zoloff. "I've
seen
these saucers. Not just back from where I came from, but here, in this time period."

Zoloff was shocked, and it showed on his face. His eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open.

"Flying saucers? They exist?
For real
?" he gasped.

"I saw them during a battle for a tiny moon called Qez," Hunter revealed. "It was while I was looking for the Last Americans. This little moon way out on the end of the Five Arm, a place where you'd would fall off if you went any farther. The people there were at war with a very mysterious enemy. This enemy had weapons that went way beyond the scope of what the Empire has now. Huge moving forts. Frightening destracto-rays. And at least one flying saucer."

"Incredible!" Zoloff declared. Annie hugged Hunter tighter.

"I even found myself inside one of them," Hunter went on. "Just as it was trying to make its escape. It was a vile place within, as well as a place out of time. But I can tell you the technology employed by whoever owned it was frightening. And very, very advanced."

"But who were they?" Zoloff wanted to know.

Hunter hesitated, his mind bringing him back to that day and to a similar experience he'd lived through during a mind ring trip back to when the Empires first began. It was a concept so horrible, he really didn't like to dwell on it or even talk about it. But Zoloff deserved an answer.

"Frankly," he said, "it wasn't a question of who built these saucers—but
what
built them."

Now Zoloff's eyebrows shot up so fast, they nearly touched his hairpiece.

"You mean…?"

But these were the only words that came out before they heard a very loud bang from the far end of the warehouse. A small army of SG troops had needlessly blown the door off and were rushing toward them, dressed in biohazard suits.

"How are we going to get out of this?" Zoloff cried.

Hunter was stumped; strangely, they hadn't planned for this—and he really didn't know why. But it
was
quite a fix. They were stuck here, on a very hostile planet, surrounded by the enemy, who had finally decided to move in on them. And even if they were able by some miracle to get out of the huge building, they were still deep inside enemy territory, with millions of SG troops and thousands of armed ships all around them, and a long way from the dizzylando or any other safe harbor.

So how indeed were they going to get out of this?

That's when Hunter's hand went to his pocket, where he kept his flag, his picture of Dominique, and now Annie's note—and found something else: the Twenty 'n Six the Imperial spy had given him, a long time ago, in the living room of Star Legion's cottage.

"Stand back," he said. "I don't know what's in here, but it better be good."

He pushed the capsule's activation button, and suddenly a cloud of yellow smoke appeared in front of them. There was another bright flash, and when it died down, a spacecraft was sitting in front of them.

But not just an ordinary spacecraft.

It was about three times the size of Hunter's long-lost Flying Machine, and just a little smaller than a typical Imperial spacefighter. It was shaped like a wedge as most Empire ships were, but it had a very exaggerated tail, and its fuselage was segmented in highly stylized patterns. It was held together by proton bolts, a technology that had not been used for at least a millennia. A mild sizzling noise was coming from somewhere underneath its hood, the telltale sign of a prop core. No doubt about it, though, this vessel was very, very old.

Hunter was astounded. He could only imagine that this was the same spacecraft that had brought the Imperial spy to Doomsday 212—a vessel he then gave to Hunter as a lifeboat of sorts. But it was a very strange-looking contraption. "Have you ever seen anything like this?" he asked Zoloff.

The doctor got very excited. "Seen it?" he roared. "I built it! Many years ago."

The craft's canopy suddenly opened. Underneath its flared lip they saw the spacecraft's name:
KosmoVox
.

"See!" Zoloff cried. "A fine Russian name!"

Hunter just stared back at him—but then they heard another loud boom come from the other end of the warehouse. The doors had opened down there, and they could see, though just barely, another small army of SG troops flooding in. They, too, were wearing protective bio suits and carrying huge hand weapons.

"I'll have to get the history lesson later," Hunter told Zoloff. "At the moment, I think it's time we got going."

They hastily climbed inside the
KosmoVox
. Hunter plunked himself down into the pilot's seat, Annie went to the floor beside him. The cockpit was as stylized as the exterior, yet one glance at the ship's controls told Hunter he could fly the thing. When it came to prop-core rigs, steering and throttles were the most important components a pilot had to pay attention to.

His eye was drawn to one gauge he knew was the vessel's velocity indicator. He was astonished to see it ran up to three light-years a minute—half again as fast as the speed attained by typical prop-core ships. Could this be possible? Could this ancient vessel be capable of outrunning other Empire craft?

"It sure can," came Zoloff's reply. "If it still works as it did, we can outrun anything the SG sends after us—with the right person behind the controls, that is."

Hunter scanned the controls one more time, then said, "I guess I'll have to do."

Hunter started the ship's prop core. It sizzled to life immediately (the mysterious star engines never really shut down). He looked out the cockpit window and saw the two hordes of SG getting even closer.

"Hang on," he said. 'Time to go…"

He hit the throttle, and with a great wash of g-forces, crashed the roof of the warehouse, rocketed up into the Saturn's sky, through its atmosphere, and quickly out beyond its rings.

This all happened in less than two seconds and at less than one-millionth of the little craft's top speed.

"Wow," Hunter breathed, as Annie hugged him and Zoloff did a little jig of glee.

Next to his Flying Machine, he'd never flown anything so fast.

SSG Commander Finn-Cool McLyx wished he'd brought a bottle of slow-ship wine with him.

Make that two bottles. Or maybe three.

What had he gotten himself into? He was sitting in a very cramped captain's chair, a seat made of materials unknown, slipping and sliding as he tried his best to stay in place. At the same time, he was holding his nose in an attempt to keep out the rank smell that was all around him. And then there was the lighting. It was flickering so much, his head was beginning to hurt.

He was looking out on a flight deck that faintly resembled one that might be found on an Empire warship. Not as big as the control room on a Starcrasher certainly, but similar in size to something aboard a culverin, as the Empire's smaller, sleeker space cruisers were called. All the essenrial controls for steering, communications, scanning, and propulsion were in the same places. And there was a deck crew of two dozen men watching over everything, just as on a culverin.

But this was no culverin they were riding in.

If only that was so
, McLyx had thought more than once.

No one really knew what the smell in here was or where it was coming from, but it was enough to make some of the crew gag. The floor was slippery, too, covered with some unidentifiable slime, making it hard for McLyx's men to move around.

Most troubling, though, the flight deck was not neatly squared off as it would be on a regular SG ship.

Instead, it was round.

McLyx was a tall, heavy, blustery man, easily recognizable by the scar that went from his right ear to center of his neck. Although he had been commanding their starships for nearly 300 years, McLyx was known among the regular Solar Guards as a very dangerous, almost psychotic individual. His last ship, the
StratoVox
, had been involved in a brutal battle against the Space Forces just after the beginning of the interservice war. Hundreds of Empire ships and millions of crew on both sides had been lost that day. McLyx was relieved of duty by SG Space Command shortly after the clash, charged with disobeying orders and recklessness. But soon after, he joined the SSG, where he was welcomed with open arms. His fanatical hatred for the Space Forces, and anyone else who would dare stand up to the SG, made him a natural for the quasi-secret organization. His undeniable skills as a top starship commander were also a big plus.

When the very top secret and very unauthorized Warehouse 066 mission came about, McLyx was the SSG's one and only choice to fly it.

McLyx didn't know who had built this circular ship exactly, or how. But he had a good idea its creators weren't human beings at all, but rather creatures who'd been floating around the periphery of the Fourth Empire, both in myth and in reality, for centuries. Their saucerlike ships had been spotted near many major battles over the years, and their presence felt or seen during the seamiest nights of the realm. Big heads, big eyes, small bodies. Disgusting to look at, or so McLyx had heard, they were also powerful and superintelligent and frightening. And now, after this, most likely ingrained forever in the workings of the SSG. Like unseen puppet masters dancing their marionettes, they seemed to be pulling the strings these days.

(Technically, it was impossible for such beings to exist. The sacred laws of the Fourth Empire stated that human beings were the only life forms in the Galaxy. These laws also decreed that no life could exist outside the Galaxy. Therefore, no other life forms except humans could exist anywhere. This was a dictate taken very seriously across the realm. In fact, it was against Empire law to even say the word
alien.)

Though in denial about their existence, at the same time McLyx knew dark deals had been made by people much higher up than him, and that it was not his place to question his superiors. The only thing important to him was that this craft could fly faster than anything in Supertime, and that it would be able to deliver a massively lethal weapon to the planet of Doomsday 212, a place the SSG was convinced housed an army of anti-Empire rebels, bandits, and criminals who were in league with the hated Space Forces.

What's more, this ship could do so without being detected by the SF, the regular SG, or anyone else in the Imperial armed forces.

For the bold raid to succeed, this was the only way.

The problem was, McLyx and his hand-picked SSG crew were having all kinds of trouble flying the strange circular craft.

They had been told it would be easy. There were no moving parts. They wouldn't have to worry about the craft's power plant, as it wasn't even on board the ship. It was somewhere else, in another time and reality—an idea much too complex for McLyx to understand.

The round ship was supposed to fly in another dimension; that was supposed to be its real magic. And not the seventh dimension, either, which was where Empire ships flew in Supertime. The saucers traveled upon another, completely different plane, in a four-digit dimension, also known as the Lost Dimension. The real saucers had used this fantastic highway for billions of years, or so the rumors said.

But something was wrong with this particular flying saucer. Since leaving Warehouse 066, the circular ship had refused to stay in the Lost Dimension for very long. Instead, it was bouncing back and forth between what McLyx and his crew considered their reality and that of the Lost Dimension. These jumps came with no warning and lasted unpredictable lengths of time, from just a few seconds to several minutes or more. The side effects were highly disturbing. A kind of ultra-motion sickness was the most prevalent. Extreme anxiety and almost near-fatal nausea were two others.

The saucer did, in fact, go very,
very
fast, but it proved for scary riding whenever it chose to remain inside the Lost Dimension. This place was a complete void: no stars, no planets, no celestial phenomena at all. Just unceasing blackness. With no frame of reference, no feeling of direction or speed or up or down, it was very disorienting to those on board, so much so, it drove two of McLyx's flight crew right over the edge. It happened the fifth time the ship unexpectedly jumped into the Lost Dimension. The pair began vomiting heavily and writhing around on the deck. They recovered temporarily when the ship slipped back to their reality. But when it crossed back over once again, the two crewmen simply went berserk. Alternately retching and convulsing, they screamed so loud and so long, they had to be stunned by McLyx's sergeant at arms, using a low-power setting on his ray gun. The two crewmen finally fell comatose, stiff and bleeding from the ears. Both had swallowed their tongues.

This incident had a very demoralizing effect on the remaining flight crew, most of them feeling poorly in the first place with the smell and the slime on the deck. Whenever the ship would break back into the real dimension, crew members could be seen praying that it would remain there.

But then they would start to freak out whenever it was knocked back into the absolute darkness again.

And the troubles didn't end there.

Even worse, the circle ship was leaving a wake behind it, an unintentional contrail in space. It was made up of unidentifiable substrata debris, things more bizarre than quarks and quacks. Whatever it was, the trail was wide, white, almost phosphorescent—and visible from thousands of miles away. This was not something you wanted while trying to complete a very top secret, unauthorized mission.

The trail of debris at its brightest appeared just as the saucer was approaching the edge of the Star Trench. The plan had been to simply fly over the confluence of Empire ships, as at the time the saucer was thought to be invisible, at least to the standard Empire scanners. Plus this route was the most direct to their eventual target of Doomsday 212 farther up the Two Arm.

But just as the long, dual line of Empire warships appeared on the McLyx's long-range viz screen, the damn saucer popped back into reality and soared nearly the entire length of the Star Trench, exposing itself for all to see. McLyx watched in horror as his defensive weapons suite lit up with thousands of indications of both SG and SF ships turning on their X beams in anticipation of taking a shot at what, from their point of view, actually
was
an unidentified flying object. He knew speed alone could not save them, as some X beams could travel faster than a Starcrasher in Su-pertime. It was only by dumb luck that just as they'd made this great display in front of billions of witnesses on both sides, the balky saucer popped back into the Lost Dimension, disappearing in an instant.

That's when McLyx just put his head in his hands and moaned, "I should have known this was a bad idea."

Things were just as troubling down at the bottom of the saucer, the area that served as its bomb bay.

Located almost dead center on the underside of the bizarre craft, it was a large, boxy space enveloped in a triple force field. This was necessary, considering what was being carried down there.

It was a flying bomb. Twenty-five feet long, black, teardrop-shaped, it had four winglike fins on its back. Its warhead contained more than five tons of XWMD, the mega-toxin developed by the same beings who designed the saucer. The weapon was actually a gigantic spray bomb designed to ride through the high atmosphere, dispensing its poisons. It was so hazardous, three level-10 force fields were needed to prevent it from leaking.

The plan? To soak the planet of Doomsday 212 with the XWMD, effectively killing everything and everyone on it. Collateral damage? There would much of it. For as the polluted planet orbited its sun, it would leave a trail of the mega-toxin in its wake, and that would serve to eventually spread the alien poison over a large part of the heavily populated mid-Two Arm. Thousands of light-years of space would be uninhabitable for millions of years. This was how the SSG chose to send a message to anyone who would try to oppose them in their nascent, if less-than-secret, bid to take over the Empire. With this bomb, the course of the Milky Way would be changed forever.

But again, things were getting strange down in the bomb bay, too. Two crewmen were designated as the bomb security team. Their job was to watch over the big weapon and make sure that the three-layered force field's integrity stayed at 100 percent at all times. Should even one of the fields break down, it could spell disaster for the crew and the mission.

The two crewmen were stationed on a balcony twenty-five feet above the bomb bay, which looked down on the weapon itself. An opaque ion-lead shield had been placed in a hover over the bomb, this to help insure the top layer of the force field. In order to look at the bomb, then, the men had to move this shield out of the way, which they were under orders to do every five minutes. From their perspective, once the shield was moved, it was like looking down into a pool of slightly agitated water. While a single force field tended to distort all the light waves around it, giving whatever was being held in place a sort of shimmering look, three force fields stacked together gave the impression that the object they locked in appeared to be under water.

Or at least that's how it was supposed to look. Trouble was, sometimes when the crewmen looked down at their charge, they saw something other than the big black spray bomb. And what they saw instead made little sense.

One time they moved the shield, they saw not what looked like a pool of clear water but rather a pool of bilge. Another time they saw water but with human remains floating in it. Most disturbing, though, was when they moved the shield and saw not the spray bomb but a black-and-white image of twenty smaller explosive bombs, stacked in two racks. Below them was another colorless image, this of an ancient bombed-out city. Cement buildings in flames. Blocks upon blocks of devastation. Huge bomb craters. Bodies.

On seeing these things, the two crewmen, both astounded and frightened, would immediately close the shield, convinced they were losing their minds simultaneously. They would sweat out another five minutes before daring to open the ion door again. When they did, and the waterlike image with the spray bomb below it had returned, they would both breathe a sigh of relief.

"Damn blinks," one of them said, after seeing the hor-rific black-and-white vision. "They're going to drive me crazy before this is over."

"Where the hell are we?" McLyx heard himself bellowing.

It was impossible to tell. The windows in the circular flight deck seemed to be changing perspectives with each passing second. Popping back and forth between dimensions was the cause of the flickering look. This only added to the severe motion sickness that had now affected just about everyone on the bridge.

But the constant interdimensional shifting also made navigation nearly impossible. After the fiasco over the Star Trench, the saucer had apparently lost its way entirely. Worse, it was refusing to stay in the real dimension long enough for the navigators to get any true bearings. More than once, McLyx felt as if they were simply tumbling out of control.

The saucer finally shifted back the real world and held itself there. The navigation team went to work quickly, trying to get them a good spot before they were popped back into the black void of the Lost Dimension. It took more than a minute, but finally, the navigators got a fix on their position. They were about 500 light-years beyond the Star Trench and 350 beyond what was considered the SF's rear areas. This meant they were only about 200 light-years away from their target, Doomsday 212.

This report brought McLyx his first relief from gloom since they'd left Warehouse 066. He was even starting to fit into the commander's seat.

But then the string-comm panels came alive. Suddenly a stream of messages were flowing into the saucer. Messages that only McLyx, as commander of the mission, could reply to. But this made no sense. Not even the top men in the SSG knew this mission was happening. Its dump-off time had been kept a secret, even from them. And certainly no one in the Solar Guards High Command knew they were out here.

So who was calling them? And why?

McLyx slipped out of his seat, nearly fell climbing down from his commander's perch, and then almost slipped a third time making his way over to the communications panel. The comm officers looked worried, distraught even. They'd heard the messages through their comm helmets, and there was no doubt they'd unnerved them. Both men had turned very pale.