The Fourth Empire s-3

by Mack Maloney

  At last he had a moment to catch his breath.

  He checked his instruments package and was relieved to see his flying machine had made it through the attack unscathed: no holes, no leaks, no power drains. All indications were that the surprise attack had gone well. There had been no KIAs reported among the invading forces. All of the major objectives had been taken, and it didn't appear that any kind of SOS had gone out from the seized base.

  Hunter took a deep gulp from his oxygen mask and let the air out slowly.

  So far, so good, he thought.

  Why was he here?

  He was still a fugitive from justice. Still AWOL from the Fourth Empire's X-Forces. Still a wanted man.

  But he was also still on his quest to find out who he was and how he'd come to be stranded on another very desolate planet, this one at the other end of the Galaxy, the only clue to his identity being his name tag and the red, white, and blue flag he'd found in his pocket.

  That had been about a year ago. Since being rescued from that planet, he'd wound up on Earth, where he used his remarkable flying machine to win the Earth Race and garner the tremendous fame and fortune that followed. This included a commission and his choice of any assignment within the Empire's vast military forces. With help from the Princess Xara, the beautiful daughter of O'Nay, the Emperor of the Galaxy Himself, Hunter chose the Empire's Exploratory and Expeditionary Forces — the X-Forces — and was sent on a mission that would bring him close to a near-mythical landmark, a place he knew only as the Lighthouse.

  This was important, because evidence long ago suppressed by O'Nay's Fourth Empire had indicated the flag Hunter had found in his pocket was actually the emblem of a place called America — and that he was in fact an American. The Lighthouse was a beacon of sorts that had been set up thousands of years before as a way to call every American lost and wandering in the Galaxy to come home. Hunter felt the tug and eventually found the place where the Lighthouse had once existed and there, the last of a small band of fighters called the Freedom Brigade. These fighters considered themselves Americans, too, and they set him off on a long search for their home planet, leaving all allegiance to the Empire behind.

  After a hazardous and, in some ways, magical journey, Hunter found himself in a star system that was not within the vast Milky Way but actually a great distance away, far beyond the Galaxy's boundaries, floating out in the inter-galactic void.

  This place was called the Home Planets. And it was here that Hunter found Planet America and 35 other planets representing the other countries and regions of what was once the real planet Earth. It didn't take long to discover that the Home Planets' system was actually a prison, a concentration camp in the sky, space-engineered thousands of years before to be the perfect jail. With the entire system locked inside an ancient time bubble, the people of the Home Planets had precious few clues as to where they had come from originally or who had chosen to lock them up so far away from home.

  It was only after the vast army of prison guards lording over this star system attacked Planet America and were defeated by Hunter and his allies did the Americans confirm that the Home Planets were populated by the descendants of the people who had inhabited Earth around the year 3200 a.d. — or 4,000 years before. They had been forcibly removed from Earth by parties still unknown and deported to the Home Planets.

  That's when Hunter realized that while Planet America was a place literally of his dreams, it wasn't his home, and it wasn't the home of anyone who lived there. For the descendants of the deportees, only Mother Earth was their rightful home, and it had been taken away from them.

  Hunter's pledge now — and the reason he was here, for this, the opening attack on this lonely little planet — was to get it back. Or die trying.

  It had taken months to implement the attack on Xronis Trey.

  Looking down on the dull yellow rock now, Hunter couldn't imagine a more unlikely target. They had come here from a long way away on little more than a hunch— an educated one, but a hunch nevertheless.

  Shortly before the war to free the Home Planets began, Hunter had broken into a top secret security vault on a world called Moon 39, the site of the prison guards' base. Within this vault he came upon a mind ring. This was a device that, when worn, would put the user into a virtual world to experience whatever had been loaded into the ring's memory strings.

  The ring gave Hunter a brief glimpse of the mass deportation from Earth. He found himself in the guise of a guard watching fleets of huge spaceships forcibly removing the peoples of the seven continents. The mind ring trip didn't last very long, but it was enough for Hunter to fit another piece into the puzzle that was the Home Planets system.

  It was either by fate or bad luck that the mind ring he'd chosen that day proved to be an anomaly. The mind rings they'd secured at the same location after the battle for Planet America had proved to be of little use; they'd mostly contained generic information on how to run the battery of monitoring devices found within the command room of the far-flung Moon 39 base. The one Hunter had selected — it had been kept in its own separate case — proved to be the only glimpse of something that had happened anywhere other than on Moon 39.

  But the experience had given Hunter an idea. Moving a vast quantity of people from Earth, which was located on the One Arm, to the tip of the Two Arm, and then across the huge, starless void to the Home Planets must have been an enormous undertaking four thousand years before. Had it been a nonstop trip? No one was sure what kind of space-travel technology was being used in 3200 a.d. Several Dark Ages had intervened since, and nearly all of the history from that time period was lost long ago. But it was certainly before the dawn of the Starcrashers and traveling in Su-pertime. The spaceships Hunter had seen in his brief mind ring trip had been enormous, bulbous, bullet-shaped vessels that showed no indication of being able to go very fast for very long.

  So perhaps there had been stops along the way. Maybe dozens, maybe just a few. Maybe just one. But if this was the case, then common sense dictated that one of these way stations would be located somewhere on the edge of the Galaxy closest to the far-off Home Planets system.

  Then there was the other important clue: the Moon 39 prison guards themselves, the ones the Americans defeated on Planet America. They weren't just a ragtag army of dopey mercs. In fact, they'd been a long-lost contingent of none other than the Bad Moon Knights, the same people who were sitting on Xronis Trey. Just like the inhabitants of the Home Planets, they, too, had been unwittingly caught inside a time bubble, which gave everyone within the mistaken illusion that time was moving at a crawl.

  Putting two and two together, Hunter and his allies came to this conclusion: that for the BMK prison guard contingent to have reached the Home Planets some 900 years before — indeed for anyone to reach the far-flung system— there must have been an advance base of some kind on the outer fringes of the Galaxy closest the Home Planets' position in the sky, a place from which to springboard for the very long voyage out. Xronis Trey was the last planet in the last star system on the end of the very isolated tip of the Two Arm. The Two Arm was the closest part of the Galaxy to the Home Planets, though still an enormous distance away. Therefore, any advance base was most likely located on Xronis Trey.

  And if there was a BMK base here, then there might be more information to be found as well, including more mind rings that could assist Hunter in the ultimate goal of uncovering who was responsible for the mass deportation of Earth in the first place.

  That's why Xronis Trey was chosen as their target.

  Hunter passed through the formation of blue and chrome spaceships now hanging in low orbit just over the horizon. That was another reason he was up here. He had to make sure all was right with them. too. He did quick fly-arounds of all six and found no external problems. No errant Z-beam flashes had reached them; all of their troop shuttles had departed without incident. Another breath of relief.

  The war to free the Home Planets had ended about hal
f a year before. Shortly after that, an army had been raised from the populations of the thirty-six formerly captive planets. These troops had trained on Planet America nonstop for two months, learning everything from heavy Z weapons operation to small-unit tactics. Eventually, the soldiers came together in a 40,000-man army crowned the UPF, for United Planets Forces. In reality, though, it was an American-led coalition. Their flag was the American flag.

  The six UPF spaceships were corvettes, small cruisers— or at least that had been their designation when they'd been built at least a thousand years before. The wedge-shaped ships looked so old because the BMK garrison from which they'd been taken had been first installed on Moon 39 sometime around the year 6350 A.D., nearly a millennia before. The corvettes didn't have any of the bells and whistles featured on contemporary ion-powered ships, and certainly none of the luxuries carried by Starcrashers, the top-of-the-line, two-mile-long, flying battleships flown by the Fourth Empire's space legions.

  It was almost as if someone had locked away six ships in a space hangar somewhere and left them alone for 1,000 years, which was not that far from the truth. They had been reconfigured a bit to make room for the 6500-man UPF space division that rode aboard each one. Their color schemes had been changed, too, so as not to look too much like BMK ships. No surprise that the Bad Moon Knights on Xronis Trey never realized the vessels attacking them were actually ships of their own. The new paint jobs had worked their magic perfectly.

  The journey to Xronis Trey had taken the small UPF fleet nearly four months. That was moving at top cruising speed and flying through an ocean of starless void. For the most part, the six ships performed well, though there had been a few hairy moments en route.

  But now they were here, and the first step had been taken.

  It was time to get on with the plan.

  Hunter waited for the tiny planet to turn beneath him again. Spotting the burning base once more, he put his nose down and dove back through the atmosphere.

  He reached the base a few seconds later, setting down next to one of the smoldering Z-gun platforms. Nearby, some BMK mercs were being marched across the tarmac by a squad of UPF troops. A holding bubble had been set up next to the base's command cluster. Each captured soldier was frisked, disarmed, and then incarcerated inside the bubble. Piles of confiscated weapons were growing all around the invisible jail.

  Hunter climbed out of his machine and made his way over to the smoking command cluster. Two men met him at the front door. They were Erx and Berx, the space pilots who'd rescued him from the isolated planet Fools 6 a year before. Built low.to the ground, with Berx being just slightly taller, they were two very powerful individuals sporting shaved heads and extremely long mustaches, in keeping with the style of the day. Like Hunter, both were officers in the X-Forces. But more recently, they had been sent by Princess Xara to search for Hunter after he went missing following the Battle of Zazu-Zazu, the location of the near-mythical Lighthouse. It was pure luck that Erx and Berx found Hunter when they did, as they arrived just in time to prevent him for being whacked by a hit squad sent out by his enemies back on Earth.

  In other words, Hunter owed his life to Erx and Berx— twice.

  He greeted them warmly. They were among the first UPF soldiers to land on the battered little planet. He was glad to see they were both still in one piece.

  "What were our casualties?" was the first thing Hunter asked them.

  "Only a few wounded," Erx reported. "None serious."

  Hunter indicated the holding cell full of BMK troops nearby. "And them?"

  "Eighteen killed," Berx said. "Eighteen souls the Galaxy is better off without."

  "How about their officers?" Hunter asked. "Did we find any?"

  "Four captured intact," Erx reported. "Including the base commander. He's being interrogated as we speak."

  Hunter clenched his fist in small triumph. This was good news. Securing the commander of this isolated outpost had been an important part of the master plan.

  "And how about the search?" Hunter asked them. "Have we found any 'jewels'?"

  Both Erx and Berx frowned, their long mustaches nearly dipping to the ground.

  "The news there is not so good," Erx finally replied.

  The BMK command cluster was a collection of geodesic domes arranged in a triangular fashion with each supporting the other by means of passageways and flying bridges. It was a very ancient design, which would turn out to be an important clue later on. Hunter had been careful not to hit the structure during his one-man air raid, but the brief fire-fight that followed the landing of the UPF troops had resulted in some damage, most of it from punctured superglass.

  Erx and Berx led him into the building and down one particularly debris-filled hallway. Passing by squads of UPF soldiers searching each system dome in the cluster, they soon arrived at a large amphitheater located in the center of the structure. This place looked even older than the exterior of the building. It contained dozens of consoles and control boards and viz-screens, yet none appeared to have been activated in hundreds of years.

  Off to one side and up one level, there was a huge room featuring a thick, black, cast-ion door and surrounded by a deactivated ion fence. It was a vault, not unlike the one Hunter had broken into back on Moon 39. This is what Erx and Berx had brought him here to see.

  "There is a real mystery in there," Erx said to Hunter as they ascended the rampway to the huge compartment. "It is exactly what we had envisioned, yet just the opposite as well."

  Two UPF soldiers were guarding the entrance to the vault. But Hunter could see no excited movement inside, no signs of activity at all. This was not good.

  He followed Erx and Berx into the vault and quickly realized that any similarity between this safe and the one he'd visited on Moon 39 ended at the door. First of all, this place was nearly ten times larger. There were thousands upon thousands of floating shelves in here; all of them holding small glass boxes. There were also thousands of these glass boxes stacked in the corners and scattered around the floor. The vault on Moon 39 had been meticulously kept, pristine in atmosphere, with an aura almost like a church.

  This place looked like nothing less than frozen chaos.

  Within all these boxes was the real prize of Xronis Trey, the "jewels" Hunter and the others had come here for: mind rings. And at first it might have appeared they had found the holy grail of their mission. But something was very wrong here. While there were probably more than 100,000 rings in the vault, they had all been rendered useless. Not by an intentional act on the BMK's part to destroy information once the UPF attack had started; rather, the mind rings had deteriorated due to neglect.

  Mind rings were delicate things, and to be preserved, they had to be stored at a temperature close to absolute zero when not in use. Judging by the condition of the holding boxes as well as the vault itself, this had not been done here. Many of the jewel boxes were cracked and broken. Others had simply undergone a process of slow disintegration. Not one of them looked usable.

  "Our mistake was to assume these BMK mooks would adhere to some kind of military discipline out here," Berx said angrily. "Any commander worth his salt would have protected these things, even if all they contained was information about how to fix an environmental control cell."

  "But the mystery is this," Erx went on, picking up a handful of cracked boxes and looking at the dozens of broken and deteriorated rings inside. "We know there are two kinds of rings: intell rings, which are usually created by military types, and solo rings, which individuals use to record on their own.

  "For whatever reason, the majority of rings in here aren't military intell rings as we had envisioned. They are solo rings."

  Hunter examined a few of the deteriorated rings. They were gold in color. Intell rings were almost always silver.

  "But in any case," Erx said, dropping the glass cases to the floor with a mighty crash, "none of them work. We ran scans over this entire place. They're all dead. Their magic w
as lost a long time ago."

  Hunter felt his heart sink into his boots. He gloomily accepted Berx's offer of his flask and took a long, noisy slug of slow-ship wine. The thick liquor felt good going down his throat, but it did nothing to raise his spirits. It was like they were standing in a mausoleum: cold and dank, just not cold enough.

  He took one ring off a nearby shelf and slowly rolled it through his fingers.

  "My brothers," he said to Erx and Berx. "This was a long way to come for nothing."

  Captain Borx Kyx was sitting on a hovering chair, his hands fastened behind his back, a very bright light shining in his eyes.

  He didn't look 499 years old. He was a medium-sized individual, somewhat muscular, with a shaved head and impossibly long sideburns, the fashion of the Five Arm back in the last millennia. Battle scars on his face, especially around his mouth, had left him with a permanent sneer. His right eye was green, the left one was blue, with a tattoo of a teardrop beneath each one. Again, this sort of thing had been the rage on the fifth spiral way back in the mid-sixty-fifth century.

  Kyx was the commanding officer of the BMK forces on Xronis Trey. He was the eldest soldier at the base, having flown out from the Five Arm as a lowly private 322 years before. His position here was more a tribute to his longevity than any leadership qualities. He'd simply outlived his superiors, moving up a step in rank every time one of them passed away. His men disliked him intensely. They suspected that he'd been hoarding all the best holo-girl programs from early on and that he'd stolen from them the only premium slow-ship wine replicater on the planet. He'd also forced the garrison to do the mandatory once-a-decade security drills. This amounted to little more than a few days of calisthenics and taking an inventory of all weapons and supplies. Still, in the eyes of his men, it made him the biggest SOB for light-years around.

  Kyx and his junior officers had been rounded up within minutes of the surprise attack. They were brought to the infirmary, one of the few structures left intact around the base's command cluster, and given aid for their wounds. They were also relieved of their weapons and ID strings.