by Mack Maloney
Pater Tomm opened his mouth to say something further, but a terrifying screech drowned him out. An ion shell had impacted right on the main door. The sudden green glow was a dead giveaway. That, and the ear-splitting noise.
"Quickly!" Klaaz said, although he began moving quite slowly. "We must get below!"
They made their way down a long, dark corridor that led deeper into the castle.
Hunter had never seen burned ice before; now it was all around him. Actually, they were blocks of ice saturated with gamma radiation, so much so they looked and felt like glass. The walls of the castle were made of huge blocks of the stuff. Each one appeared as if it had a faint yellow flame glowing from within, the eternal, if diminished by-product of the massive gamma bombardment. Though the decay of the fort's interior made the glowing blocks of ice look more like gigantic, dirty diamonds, the place must have been stunning when first built many centuries ago.
They eventually reached a kind of subchamber about five hundred feet below ground level. There was a dull lamp hovering near the ceiling here, and it was noticeably wanner. The Great Klaaz stopped, needing to catch a breath.
Tomm needed a break as well. He produced a flask of slow-ship wine and offered it to Klaaz. The old man took it without a moment's hesitation and nearly drained the vessel dry.
"So, you old dog!" Tomm yelled at Klaaz, retrieving what was left of his wine supply. "All the stories I have heard about you were true!"
The old man smiled widely, displaying a mouthful of cracked and yellowed teeth. "You know better than to believe more than half of them, Padre," he said with another wheeze. It was strange. Hunter couldn't recall ever seeing anyone so old so happy.
Klaaz pried the flask from Tomm's hands and drank once again.
"After all these years, dear brother," he said to the priest, "you have arrived at a very interesting moment!"
"You do seem to be in a sort of bind here, my friend," Tomm agreed.
Klaaz wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Obviously, a dire situation exists, Padre," he said. "The enemy beyond the walls number more than twenty thousand. They are a gang of the usual suspects: space pirates and no-goodnik meres who seek something that does not belong to them."
"How long has this been going on, my brother?"
"Centuries — or so it seems," Klaaz said with a cough. "You saw my holo-army. Impressive, no?"
"I've not seen such trickery in two centuries," Tomm replied diplomatically, "and I suspect it was an ancient strategy even back then."
"It was and still is," Klaaz admitted. "But in case you have not noticed, there is a bit of desperation in the air we are breathing."
Above them the sound of more blaster barrages could be heard landing inside the fort's high walls.
"But you've been able to hold out, my brother," Tomm said. "You must have some kind of brilliant defense in place—"
Klaaz cackled loudly.
"I have six power-gravity fields surrounding this place," he said. "And they are really the only reason the Huns haven't stormed the gates already. Trouble is, all six fields are degrading very rapidly. I mean, your craft had no problem getting through, did it?"
The priest shook his head solemnly. Klaaz shrugged again. "Their integrity must be worse than I thought."
Tomm let his friend drain the flask.
"My old chum," he said. "Those twenty thousand soldiers outside your wall. Why are they here? What could they possibly want? You? This castle?"
"Not me or the castle, Padre," Klaaz replied. "But the people I am protecting here."
Tomm did a double take. "People? What people? You mean you aren't out here alone, my brother?"
The twinkle returned to Klaaz's eye.
"Alone?" he asked with a wink. "Hardly…"
They resumed walking down the long, descending hallway, Klaaz moving slowly in a kind of staggering gait. The lower tube was lit by simple proton-decay lanterns. They provided just enough light to reveal that the walls of the tunnel were adorned with faded ice paintings of Tonk's golden age. One depicted the planet as being the brightest body on the entire Five-Arm, literally the center of a small universe. Another illustrated a huge battle between thousands of spaceships of all shapes and sizes, with those from Tonk winning mightily, of course. Judging by the murky detail and the porous nature of the burned ice wall, Hunter guessed the paintings were done even before Tonk's heyday, and that was at least two thousand years ago, probably more.
They finally reached the end of the hallway to find themselves stepping onto a somewhat rickety balcony; its supports were as rusty as Klaaz's sword. The balcony looked out on an enormous chamber. Also made of burned ice, it was nearly an eighth of a mile wide with a ceiling at least five hundred feet high, and no doubt reaching the bottom layer of the courtyard itself.
Sitting in the middle of this chamber was a spacecraft. Or at least that's what Hunter thought it was. Actually, he'd never seen anything like it before. It was long and slender; its sharpened nose nearly touched the roof of the huge chamber. It had rows of portholes running down one side and was standing on three huge fins. A vast network of scaffolding surrounded it, and it was draped in power cables and tattered golden sheets. A bubble of knowledge rose up from the deep recesses of his past life and told Hunter that this was an ancient combustible-fuel rocket he was looking at, a passenger carrier built at least three thousand years before, more probably closer to four. The pictures back in the tunnel were almost recent by comparison.
Scattered around the bottom of this rocket were hundreds of tiny white bubble-top living compartments, shelters more readily found outside in a temperate battle zone, not within a frozen, dilapidated enclosure. But this was not an army encampment they were looking down on. The people below were not soldiers. They were young women. All of them beautiful, all of them dressed in the barest of clothes. Torn gowns and ripped shorts mostly, some were wearing tops, many not, as if they were stranded on some uncharted tropical world and not inside a crumbling ice fort on a very chilly dead-end planet.
Hunter saw Tomm's face blush at the first sight of all this, and even his own chest was suddenly growing warm. Two thousand beautiful women, hiding way out here? It didn't seem possible.
Was there any chance he might be dreaming this? Hunter wondered.
The women below were very quietly going about the daily routines of life. Talking, walking, sitting, eating. The balcony was about fifty feet above the living level, and those women who saw Klaaz looking out at them waved vigorously to him. Many blew kisses. The old soldier pretended to catch each one and then smack it on his own lips.
"Behold these poor women," he said among these antics. "They are the survivors of a small star system called Mutaman-Younguska. It is but a hundred ten light-years from here. Or it used to be, for the Huns that now encircle us destroyed the system five years ago, killing the few soldiers it had and blowing up all but a prison planet. Their advance forces have been pursuing these females ever since."
Pater Tomm could barely speak — a rare occasion indeed.
"But… how did they wind up here? With you?" he finally managed to ask.
"Their ship landed here a year or so ago," the old soldier replied. "They'd heard the Klaaz was still here on Tonk and hoped that I could help them. Trouble was, the space scum arrived not two weeks later."
He paused a moment; the smile left his face.
"A sad vision, isn't it?" he asked wistfully. "Imagine what they thought when they saw that I was just an old man, practically marooned here myself, with a fortress built by the ancients crumbling around me? Of course that's probably what you thought on your own arrival as well."
"These people came in that… spacecraft?" Pater Tomm asked his friend incredulously. "It seems older than this castle!"
"It might well be," Klaaz replied. "And there is a reason for that: Look at these women below. You will notice that they all possess great beauty. Mutaman-Younguska was well-known for this. Effects of a red sun, you see.
Now, with all that beauty everywhere you looked, well, I guess building modern spacecraft just wasn't a priority."
"Yes. Why leave a planet so especially blessed?" Tomm blurted out, adding quickly: "Unless you had to…"
"Exactly, Father," Klaaz said. "You see, the Huns got hip to Mutaman-Younguska and decided they wanted these girls simply for pleasure. They are being driven by… what is the word for it?"
"Lust," Pater Tomm said. "It's as old as the hydrogen in the universe."
"Precisely," Klaaz said. "They are lustful. And they have not seen a real woman in decades, I suspect. That also fuels their passions. It's a bad combination, and these young women do not deserve such a fate. So here I am, trying my best to prevent it."
More girls waved. A ripple was going through the camp now, and more eyes went toward the balcony. This meant more air kisses sent Klaaz's way. He began the drill of catching them, when suddenly he stopped and realized that maybe not all of them were intended for him. It was at that moment that Klaaz's ancient eyes finally fell on Hunter. The old soldier screwed up his face in puzzlement. It was almost as if he was seeing the pilot for the first time.
"Excuse me, sir," he said. "Did I ever get your name?"
Tomm turned red again. He'd been impolite — unforgivable in some parts of the Galaxy.
"My apologies to you both," the priest said hastily. "This is my friend, Hawk Hunter. He is a pilot, as well as an.explorer… of sorts."
Klaaz was unimpressed. "That uniform," he said directly to Hunter. "It's an odd one. Under whose flag do you fight?"
"No one at present, sir," Hunter quickly replied.
But that wasn't nearly enough of an explanation for the Great Klaaz. He studied Hunter's garb even closer, causing Hunter to shift nervously. The mostly black flight suit was different from what billions of other soldiers across the Five-Arm wore. First of all, it wasn't frayed or dirty, and it didn't look dull. It was lined with emerald thread, except for red collar stitching, and overall, its material quality was very high end. (And a bit stylish, to use the ancient word for it.) But it could also take a blaster shot from twenty feet away and not even register a dent. Even closer in, such a shot might not be fatal, or at least that's what Hunter had been told by the Empire quartermasters the day he'd been fitted for it. It bore red shoulder epaulets and the four gold stars on its collar, ornaments very foreign in this part of the Galaxy. A cape could be pulled out of its shoulder seam for use in bad weather. The crossed double-X symbol of the Empire's Expeditionary and Exploratory Forces adorned its chest. The overly large, lightning-bolt trimmed crash helmet only added to the oddity.
"I knew of such a uniform many years ago," Klaaz told him now, from the end of a feebly pointing finger. "The man who wore it claimed that he was lost and that he was an officer in some great empire that ruled most of the known Galaxy from a tiny planet clear on the other side."
Klaaz's eyes narrowed on Hunter. It was Pater Tomm who shifted uncomfortably now.
"I do not know the man of whom you speak," Hunter stuttered in reply.
He didn't want to go any further with this. While local interplanetary contact was routine out here, the immense Fourth Empire was practically unknown on the Five-Arm. Much of the fifth spiral was considered yet-to-be-reclaimed territory by Imperial Earth, meaning no substantial contact had been made— yet. The stray visitor had been written and talked about down through the ages, but for the most part, many people on the Five-Arm thought life petered out somewhere near the boundary of their local super-cluster. Not unlike the Home Planets, if they'd ever heard of the Fourth Empire at all, it was through the telling of legends and myth.
This was one reason why Hunter had studiously avoided talking about the Empire with anyone he'd met out here. As an ex-officer in the Earth's advanced expeditionary forces, he knew the possible ramifications for a planet's population if they suddenly realized they were not alone in the Universe; that the Galaxy was totally inhabited and teeming with life. This was knowledge that had to be gradually absorbed. The sudden appearance of a stranger from outer space rarely sat well with a planet's collective psyche, especially one that didn't yet realize life existed beyond its own orbit. Panic, the collapse of religions and mores — when it happened, it usually wasn't very pretty. For all its faults, this was a matter still held with great concern by the Empire itself. First contact was something usually handled with great care.
In that regard, Hunter knew that any time he stepped on an isolated world out here, he was in fact an alien on that planet, with all the baggage that entailed. And of course, he did not want to call undue attention to himself, again just in case agents from that very real Empire had begun pursuing him. His trail was best left as cold as possible — reason three for keeping one's mouth shut. Though he had his suspicions, even Pater Tomm wasn't sure where Hunter was from. Not exactly, anyway. And that's the way Hunter wanted to keep it, at least for now. So his policy had been to keep his lips sealed shut and his eyes open.
Getting a new uniform someday would help, too.
Still, an uncomfortable moment hung in the air. It took Pater Tomm's quick interruption to break the spell.
"Brother Klaaz, you have a ship here. Why not simply pack up these beautiful unfortunates and blast off out of here?"
He indicated the very aged spacecraft.
"I mean, that craft is certainly old," Tomm went on. "But if it flies, then it is surely big enough for everyone to fit."
"Correct as usual, Padre," Klaaz sighed. "But you see, it's a question posed by an ancient discipline called Rocket Science. And it's a simple problem really: The ascent phase of that old stick is so slow, I just know we will be shot down in the first few seconds of flight. Alas, this has been my dilemma for months."
The old soldier pauseJfor a long breath, then went on:
"My instincts tell me I must somehow counterattack the two armies that encircle my position… or at least distract them long enough for that old buster to take off and have a chance to make it into orbit. But how can I do that? I just don't know. Moreover, the combined gravity-field shield surrounding the fort would have to be lowered at least a few minutes before I attempt the very slow, vertical takeoff. If I do that, we would leave ourselves wide open to attack and, well…"
He let his words drift off and looked up at the ice-glass ceiling way over his head. His eyes had misted over. Hunter took a deep breath and stretched to his full height. Klaaz was not a fake; he was an authentic hero, a man who'd saved literally billions of people on the Five-Arm from the hands of various interstellar scum. And even now, after a handful of centuries, he was still trying to do the right thing. He had no massive space fleet at his disposal this time though, no endless legions of space soldiers ready to follow him into battle. This time he was alone, on one of the crappiest planets in the Milky Way, with crude projections of empty holo-soldiers as his army, and a slowly draining gravity shield as his last defense.
It was no way to exit such an illustrious career.
Pater Tomm caught Hunter studying the old soldier.
The priest leaned over and whispered to the pilot, "At the moment, Klaaz needs our help more than we need his."
Hunter just nodded. "I know."
He put his hand on Klaaz's shoulder.
"If you leave our brother Tomm to get your rocket ship ready," he told the old warrior. "I'm sure you and I can take care of the rest."
4
The larger of the two armies beseiging Klaaz's ice fort was known as the Goth-Star BallBreakers.
Boasting more than ten thousand troops, the Goth-Stars held most of the territory south of the battered fortress. They had fielded an enormous arsenal of long-range Z-gun arrays, known appropriately enough as Master Blasters. These fierce weapons held up to ten laser-tube muzzles surrounded by dozens of diamond-studded firing rings that lit up like so many halos whenever the blaster mount was engaged. Weapons of this size could deliver massive amounts of destructive power; just how the fort's
combined gravity shield had held up against them for so long was indeed a mystery. True, because of the frigid air above the isolated battlefield, it took each Master Blaster up to an hour to recharge sufficiently before firing again. But still, the siege had been going on for months.
The Goth-Stars were a quasi-mercenary army of space pirates. They were presently in league with another pirate army, the SpeedBall Saints, which was slowly battering the massive ice castle from the opposite side. It would be a fifty-fifty split once this long, drawn-out affair was over. This meant that the Goth-Stars would acquire approximately one thousand beautiful Mutaman-Younguska females to dispose of however they pleased.
The Goth-Stars were holding a line about a mile south of the ice fort. They had not allowed any food or supplies to reach the beleaguered castle in months. That by these actions hundreds of frightened, innocent people were suffering inside the fort had little bearing on the Goths. In fact, many of them liked the notion of keeping their victims helpless, simply by their whim, making the inevitable invasion of the huge structure even more exciting. After all, preying on the weak and defenseless was what being a space pirate was all about. Or so they thought.
The first real sign of trouble for the Goth-Stars came just as their front-line troops began reporting for evening chow.
Feeding thousands of hungry soldiers in arctic conditions was not an easy task. The power drain on the army's food replication units lasted for an hour or more sometimes, depending on just how hungry the horde was and how cold the weather might be outside. That's why most of the troops ate in shifts.
The top communications man for the Goth-Stars returned to his forward position after dinner to find his small corps of transmission operators looking perplexed. They were having trouble contacting their allies, the SpeedBall Saints. It was routine for the two armies to exchange targeting information before commencing the night's bombardment of the ice fort. A few stray blaster rounds could wreak havoc on a bivouacked army. This communication sought to eliminate any potential fuckups during the brief dark hours.