Storm Over Saturn (4 page)

Humanlike forms suddenly began rising from the wreck. They were wearing SF uniforms. Some were whole, others were skeletons. Hunter watched in dumb astonishment as they ascended into the filthy air. They were laughing at him, emitting the most outlandish shrieks. Crying for him to join them. It all coalesced into a weird chorus of screams and ethereal song.

Hunter began firing at them as well, but his rays were going right through their transparent bodies. This only made them howl at a more frightening volume. One moment, he felt like his eardrums were going to burst. In the next, it seemed like his entire head was going to explode. Louder… and louder… and
louder
…

Then came another flash of light. It caused him to blink. When he opened his eyes again, the spirits were gone.

He took a deep breath and tried to compose himself, but only rotten air entered his lungs. How much more of this could he take? He put his ray gun back into his holster and stumbled on his way.

These weren't the first ghosts he'd shot at since coming down here.

Beyond the wreck of the
JunoVox
, the terrain grew hilly again, then dipped into a gigantic ravine.

Hunter descended into the narrow valley almost without thinking, one foot in front of the other, a living ghost of sorts, trudging the haunted badlands. The vapors pouring out of the landscape down here were more putrid than the grounds above. The thick fog covered what was left of the sky overhead, nearly turning day into night.

He forged on, finding fields of wreckage every few miles, all of them from ships crashed here long ago. He passed more than a few ancient skeletons as well, preserved by all the formaldehyde-like gases hissing up around him. Always with death smiles on their faces, their fingers crooked in his direction, they were bidding him to sit and talk a while.

Back in his hero days, Hunter had displayed an amazing talent, in combat and out. It was a kind of natural long-range scanner—or
radar
, back in his previous life—that allowed him to sense flying machines heading in his direction long before they arrived. This feeling would come over him in the form of an electrical jolt running through his body, making the hair on the back of his head stand at attention. This sixth sense was always with him and had never let him down in the past. It was as normal a part of his makeup as breathing.

But not this time.

This time all he saw was a shadow. It came over him at first like a huge cloud, blotting out all that was left of the murky sunlight. He turned, slowly, and discovered an enormous starship hovering above him. No warning. No noise. No electrical jolt to the back of his head. Suddenly, it was just there.

Another vision, he was sure…

It was not shaped like a wedge as all Empire starships were. It didn't have a needle nose or a large ass end, and its canopy was not a bubble top, with a little city inside full of people meant to steer it. Nor was its fuselage white or blue or gray.

Rather it was gold. Pure gold, gleaming and brilliant even now, in the darkest of hours. And the ship was sleek, with flowing lines and sails that looked built for nothing less than to catch superneutrinos from the stars. It had wings and a large deck, and golden strings glistening from front to back. And it appeared that when it flew, even in space, men could still stand out on that deck and look over its sides and see where they were going and know where they'd been.

Hunter had been seeing weird things for weeks. This was one of the weirdest.

The ship slowly lowered itself and was soon right in front of him, huge and glittering, its underside not ten feet above the ground. Hunter reached out and touched its golden hull. It felt real, but of course, that was no proof.

The ship had three tall star masts. Two men were stationed in the tallest. One of them called down to him.

"Major Hunter, you are needed desperately… Can you come?"

Hunter froze in place. Again, he'd seen many strange things in his time in Purgatory. The gases, the flashes, the ghosts, and the wrecks. They'd all conspired to make him imagine things that weren't really there. On closer inspection, these people and this ship did resemble those belonging to his allies from the Seven Arm, the same group who'd tried to repuff this planet.

But were they real?

Or not?

He took out his ray gun and began to aim it. But in the next moment he decided that would do no good. Even if these were ghosts and they wanted him to go with them, how could that be any worse than what he was doing now?

So finally he just raised his hands over his head and called up to them, 'Take me. If you must…"

The next thing he knew, Hunter was standing before a pale blue picket fence with red and pink roses growing all over it. Beyond the gate was a small cottage that looked like it was right off a greeting card from twenty-first-century Earth. Painted bright white with yellow trim, the cottage was highly picturesque, quaint almost. It, too, had flowers growing all around it; many climbing on trellises, others spilling out onto the well manicured lawn. Behind the house, two faint orbital rings gave the sky a soft glow forty degrees above the horizon. This haze radiated across the grass and the trees and the flowers. It all looked, well…
heavenly
.

Hunter picked up some dirt from near the fence and rolled it through his fingers. He sniffed it, then tasted it. It seemed real, just as everything around him seemed real. The ground, the air, the fauna were the exact opposite from where he'd just come. All indications were that then he was back in the repuffed part of Doomsday 212.

But he would have to be careful here.

He'd been fooled by these strange visions before.

Vision or not, he recognized this odd house. As unlikely as it seemed, the cottage served as the military field headquarters for Hunter's allies from the Seven Arm, the ultra-powerful Star Legion that, in whispers only, was also known as the long-lost Army of the Third Empire.

This cottage was a very secret place, as by ancient agreements, the Third Empire was not supposed to venture out of its enclave in the distant seventh swirl. As, too, the golden ship he'd encountered out in the badlands. (That type of ship was called a
galleonis
by some, for its resemblance to the ancient wooden ocean-sailing ships of Earth. Its proper name, however, was a StarLiner.) Until recently, its kind had not been seen in this part of the Galaxy in more than 1,000 years.

Not knowing what else to do, Hunter opened the gate, went up the path, and through the cottage's front door. There were no guards. The interior of the house was unusual, to say the least. Paint-by-number pictures hung above doorways, teakettle patterns adorned the walls. Narrow hallways. Low ceilings. Thick rugs on top of heavily varnished floors. And everywhere, furniture exclusively by Sears Roebuck. He knew these unlikely things made the powerful Star Legion members feel comfortable, simply because they reminded them of their real home, way out on the Seven Arm, so far away.

He walked into the main room of the tiny house. It, too, featured homey wallpaper, knickknacks, vases of fresh flowers. An impressive grandfather clock was ticking away in one corner. On one open windowsill sat a Westinghouse AM radio, turned on, but with its volume very low. In another corner was a Quasar TV that appeared older than the Galaxy itself. It was switched on, too, but its picture showed nothing but a test pattern.

At the center of the room was a large wooden table. A dozen men were sitting around it. They jumped to their feet when Hunter entered the room. Horribly ragged, his skin dirty, his mind still firing blanks, he felt foolish when they saluted him. He weakly returned the gesture, knowing they were horrified by his ghastly appearance.

He recognized these men, too. Six were commanders from the United Planets Forces, the military arm of the Home Planets, that being the extragalactic star system where Hunter had found the Last Americans and the other descendants of the dispossessed peoples of Earth. They were wearing the sand-and-red camouflage uniforms of the UPF; each had an American flag patch on his left shoulder. They'd traveled here from the Home Planets, their squadron of war ships arriving at the height of the Battle at Zero Point and helping to turn the tide against the devils of the rampaging REF—this, even as their predecessors, the 40,000 men of the First UPF fleet, had crossed over from Heaven at the climax of that same battle, and like Hunter's close friends, gave their souls in the titanic struggle that followed.

The other six men at the table were wearing the shiny gold uniform of the Star Legion. Like those he'd just encountered on the golden ship, they were large individuals with flowing hair and winged helmets. Each wore a slew of medals on a red sash across his chest and had a ceremonial sword at his side. Each man also had a slightly burned face, the telltale sign of long voyages in their magnificent golden starships.

Despite his schizo condition, Hunter was glad to see them. When he first arrived in the seventy-third century, with little more than the clothes on his back, he was quick to notice that he was different from everyone else. It wasn't clear just why at first. He looked the same, talked the same, walked the same. He was just
different
.

This was strange because the modern seventy-third century human was, no argument, well-built, well-fed, and well-groomed. Handsomeness and beauty were the norm these days. But modern humans were also highly self-absorbed, highly pampered by the thousands of exotic conveniences of the day, and while educated, few seemed to be particularly brilliant. They were also pathological gossipmongers, extremely superstitious, and, almost to the last, obsessed with somehow getting a few drops of the Holy Blood in their veins so that they, like the Emporer O'Nay and The Specials back on Earth, could live up to eight or nine centuries, instead of just two or three.

It wasn't like that for the Star Legionnaires or for the inhabitants of the Home Planets, for that matter. They were more like Hunter—or better put,
he
was more like
them
. They thought in the same ways. They were curious. They questioned things. They questioned authority. While it was customary in the Galaxy for men to refer to each other as Brother, Hunter really did feel like these people were his brothers. In the past, upon meeting any one of them, he was always struck by the sensation that he'd known them all his life. And they felt the same way about him. They were people of the same blood.

The question was, would they really show up—this vivid, this real—in one of his manic visions?

There was an empty seat at the end of the dining table. Several of the men motioned Hunter toward it, but he hesitated. He'd worn his fingers raw pinching himself by now, trying to convince his mind and body that this was all real, and that just like seeing the girl earlier that day, and the many other visions he'd experienced, it wasn't all going to go away with another blink of the eyes.

The lead commander of the Star Legion was a man named Erikk. He was a huge, powerful individual, built along the same lines as Hunter's departed friend, Zarex Red. Erikk motioned to Hunter again.

"Hawk, please, sit with us," he said. "We have some very important things to discuss."

Hunter finally relented. Vision or not, he was exhausted. He collapsed into the empty seat.

Erikk spoke: "My friend, we would not have come out to get you unless it was extremely momentous. We know the search for your Flying Machine is important to you. But something has come up. Something rather frightening. I'll try to explain this situation as best as I can to you. But truthfully, I have trouble believing it myself."

The Legionnaire started talking about something being wrong with the Big Generator. Hunter heard mentions of the Empress, she being the wife of O'Nay and Xara's mother, and how she tried to damage the omnipotent power source and how that had created the Great Flash and how some really bad elements within the Solar Guards—they being the SSG—were trying to repair it in such a way that they would be able to have control over who got its awesome power and who didn't. Erikk talked nonstop for about ten minutes. Through it all, Hunter pretended to listen, pretended to be interested. But the story was so crazy and his condition so deteriorated, that with every word he was more convinced that this was indeed another grand illusion, and it would end, just as surely as all the others out in the badlands had ended, and he would be back, lying on the ground, sweating and nearly on fire.

He had to admit, though, that not all of it sounded insane. A few of these words made sense, especially about Xara's mother and her attempt to damage the big black rock, and her paying the price for such an act with her life. The Empress had indeed passed on. Hunter knew this because he'd been told on good authority—that being a
real
ghost—that she was now in Heaven with Xara. And he was also familiar with the episode Erikk was calling the Great Flash. It was the reason all the REF Starcrashers fell at a crucial time in the Zero Point battle—and was the reason his own beloved spacecraft went down as well.

But it was the part about repairing the Big Generator that was confusing him. Those particular words were going in one ear and out the other. Especially the ones about how the radicals of the SSG were trying to alter the Big Generator, to put them in a position to control the massive, all-reaching, awesome, power-producing device. Could that be possible?

Erikk ended the first part of his speech with a particularly ominous sentence: "The Special Solar Guards will either succeed in being able to control the Big Generator's power, or they will break it for good."

Delirious or not, Hunter felt a shudder go through him.

If the Big Generator went out for good, all means of power across the Galaxy would be gone. The blood of life for trillions of people would be no more. Cold homes. Cold bodies. No food. No warmth. No nothing. The Galaxy would go dark. God would be dead. And the Great Flash would be a blip on the screen compared to the Great Blackout. Such a thing would likely end most if not all life in the Milky Way.