Battle at Zero Point s-4

by Mack Maloney

  "If my guess is right, the REF will come back again and again to wreak havoc on everyone and everything, and they will continue to do so until they are stopped. And they must be stopped, or they will hold sway over everything for the next million years or so. They will spread so much evil that all of civilization will end — again. And it will have to start from scratch — again."

  The astronaut fell quiet once more. The nurses were beside themselves now, fretting and sobbing.

  They'd been through this before. That was obvious.

  "How long did you say before the rest of your fleet crosses over?" the astronaut finally asked Hunter.

  "We gave it one week," Hunter replied. He checked his watch. It was still counting down. "But now we are talking about less than five days."

  The astronaut rolled his eyes. "You could have given yourself a little more time. You know, built in some margin for error."

  Hunter just shrugged. "Who knew?"

  The astronaut thought for another long while.

  "Well, all this means that I will have to help you," he said finally. "And that it was a good and brave and a lucky thing that you managed to make it here, and that you proved yourself to be trustworthy.

  Tomm was wise to send you. Though he must have known that only the most precipitous and dire situation could make me get involved. But now that I am, we will have to move very quickly…"

  Hunter looked around the very spare room. Again the question came back to him. This was a very old guy in the care of two nurses. What could he possibly do?

  "I appreciate your advice and counsel," Hunter said. "But seriously, how can you help me?"

  The astronaut brightened a little, then waved his hand in an unusual fashion. "I will conjure up all the powers of the Third Empire, of course…"

  Hunter just shook his head. The Third Empire? What did that have to do with this? Of all the mysteries in the Galaxy, the Third Empire was one of the deepest. Almost no one knew anything about it, only that it disappeared into the void of time between the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Fourth, a span of at least two thousand years that had a number of smaller empires and several Dark Ages mixed in with it. That's why Hunter was surprised to even hear it brought up.

  "You actually know about the Third Empire?" he asked the astronaut.

  Everyone in the room laughed — the astronaut, the nurses. Everyone but Hunter.

  The astronaut nodded to one of the nurses. She led Hunter over to the nearest window, the one that looked out on the vast valley of fields and grass.

  Hunter couldn't believe his eyes. Where just moments before the sky had been empty, it was now filled with hundreds of ancient but powerful-looking starships. And the grassy fields that seemed to go for miles were now covered with formations of enormous soldiers; they also stretched for as far as the eye could see. All of this had suddenly appeared, with the wave of the ancient man's hand.

  "Behold the mythical Star Legion," the astronaut declared from his bed with no little delight. "But they are not so mythical, as you can see. They are the bravest soldiers in the history of creation. And they will help you in your fight."

  Hunter could barely speak.

  "So you do know the secret of the Third Empire?" he asked numbly.

  "The secret of the Third Empire?" the astronaut roared back. "My friend, we are the Third Empire!"

  Part Four

  War of the Angels

  19

  The three culverins breezed past the gauntlet of Solar Guards ships patrolling Earth orbit and fell easily through the atmosphere. Their destination was the floating city of Special Number One.

  The entire Solar System was under de facto martial law. The Solar Guards were stopping, searching, and arresting the crews of any unauthorized vessel found moving inside the Pluto Cloud. Yet this trio of ships flew on through all the warnings, defying orders to stop or be shot down, and landed in the middle of the vast Imperial Plaza, practically on the steps of the Imperial Palace itself.

  The three ships were immediately surrounded by SG shock troops — they had forcibly relieved the Imperial Guards of all their duties earlier that day. The Solar Guards blinked a number of heavy weapons to the scene, ready to blast to dust anyone who stepped off the ships. But there was an air of hesitation in their actions, too.

  The hatchways on all three ships opened, and eventually people came tumbling out. The SG troops raised their weapons but did not fire. The intruders were not soldiers intent on attacking them. These were Specials, the very close relatives of the Imperial Family. This particular gang of three hundred or so had been flying around the Solar System ever since Venus cleared out, and they'd quickly become bored. Absolutely nothing was happening on any of the other original planets. With nowhere else to go, they'd flown back to Earth, hoping to resume their revelry.

  Their timing couldn't have been worse. Confusion had reigned atop the imperial aeropolis for days.

  Taking their emergency security edict to the extreme, the SG controlled all of Special Number One now, except for the northern tip, where a small army of Space Forces troops was still protecting the SF headquarters of Blue Rock. The two sides had been exchanging blaster fire off and on since that morning, and whispers of an SG coup were still thick in the air. Out among the stars, the war between the two military services was still going on, with rumors of atrocities happening all across the Galaxy. And with O'Nay reportedly riding around in a secret floating city up near the North Pole, there was a large power vacuum here, at the center of the Galaxy. It seemed inevitable that the Solar Guards would soon attempt to fill it

  But none of these things had any effect on the Specials. Intoxicated and jammed-up, most of them, they spilled out onto the concourse to the amazement of the grizzled Solar Guards. The SG had orders to shoot anyone deemed a security threat, but even the most hardened SG trooper would never fire on a Special. Not only was it against every imperial law imaginable, it was also considered extremely unlucky, as there was a belief that Specials couldn't really die, not completely anyway, and thus had the power to haunt a person forever.

  So the SG soldiers simply let them run wild.

  A few of this drunken, privileged group had a mission in mind, though. They had to find the Empress, their soul leader. They hadn't seen her since the evacuation of La-Shangri, and they knew starting a good rave would be impossible without her.

  So while the majority of new arrivals commenced frivolity in the imperial square, taunting and teasing the grim-faced SG troops surrounding them, a smaller contingent — three men, three women, all reeking of Holy Blood — headed for the Imperial bedrooms.

  They didn't encounter the usual battalion of House Guards at the palace's front door. In fact, the doors weren't even locked. The hallways within were dark, empty, cold. No body-guards, no servants, no spies. There was even some debris strewn about the imperial corridors. Signs of a hasty departure by many people were everywhere.

  The half-dozen Specials moved unchallenged through the long passageways until they reached the Empress's private quarters. They pushed in the door, expecting to find their shining light inside, surrounded by tankards of the best slow-ship wine — and maybe some jamma, too.

  But while they did find her, she was not bathing in a sea of intoxicants. Nor was she in any kind of racy party uniform. Instead, she was in her dreary sitting room, packing a trans-dimensional bag. What's more, she was wearing a kafka, a long, black ceremonial dress usually worn only in the unlikely event that someone in her immediate family was about to pass away.

  Her relatives were shocked to see her dressed like this.

  "Who is dying, my lady?" was the first question they asked her.

  She looked up at them for the first time. Her hair was tied back. She was not wearing makeup. She looked horribly plain. And for some reason, she had a drop of oil on her forehead.

  " 'Who is dying?' " she asked in reply. 'Take a look around you, you fools. The Empire is dying…"
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br />   Then she looked each of them up and down and added, "And you're all dying along with it."

  The revelers were stunned. This wasn't like her; she just wasn't herself. They tried to tell her so, even offering her some jamma. But the Empress wasn't listening. She was simply getting annoyed.

  "I have somewhere I have to go," she told them. "So, if you don't mind…"

  With the arch of her eyebrow, she indicated that they should all leave. But they were much too thick to get the hint.

  Instead, one relative begged her, "Please tell us where you are going—"

  "We will go with you," another pleaded. "We need to celebrate… something!"

  "I am going to the desert," the Empress told them harshly. "Alone."

  They were shocked. Going to the desert… alone? This seemed not only foolhardy but dangerous as well. There was no water out in the desert. And without water, the Empress could actually die — and this they could not allow. She was the center of their universe. If she disappeared, they all would.

  "But my lady," one asked her, "why would you want to go to such a horrible place?"

  "That's not of your concern."

  "But how? How will you be going?"

  "By air car," was her surprising answer.

  Now her relatives were simply baffled. Did the Empress even know how to drive an air car?

  "But my lady, by air car, a trip to the desert will take days."

  "I know!' the Empress said.

  With that, she pushed past them and was gone.

  20

  Two miles away, on the ninety-ninth floor of the Space Forces headquarters building, the Secretary of SF Intelligence was also packing a bag.

  It was just a precaution, though. He'd told the SF troopers guarding the building that if the SG attempted to take over Blue Rock, then they would have to carry him out in a box. But this was a rare case of bluster from the Secretary. He was much too valuable to the SF to be skinned alive by the Solar Guards — and he knew it. There was an evacuation plan in place, and a space cruiser docked on the roof. Should the Huns make a grab for the rest of the aerial city, the Secretary would be the first one on that ship out.

  Until then, though, he vowed to pray over every piece of intelligence that came into the soaring building and, to the best of his ability, try to figure out what the hell was going on out there, among the stars.

  He'd just finished packing when the secure bubbler in the corner of his office came to life. It began spitting out the moming's SF3 intelligence summary, a compilation of field reports from across the Empire. The Secretary retrieved the viz doc, floated over to his desk, poured himself a shot of slow-ship, and then sat down to read. Usually the summary was dry and routine. But one look at the opening passage of this report told him it was a shocker.

  It detailed a number of horrifying incidents that had happened across the Galaxy in the last twenty-four hours — events of sheer madness that had been widely rumored across the Empire. An X-Forces ship in the Eight Arm came upon a convoy of transport vessels lying dead in space, covered with blaster burns and with huge holes torn in their fuselages. The convoy had been carrying more than 12,000 passengers, including many members of the SF Youth, future officers in the Space Forces.

  Everyone on board had been killed.

  An interstellar hospital at the bottom of the Three Arm had been evaporated by a gigantic blast from an X beam. More than 250,000 patients and nearly 20,000 doctors were inside the facility at the time.

  Now their bodies were floating in loose orbits around the point in space where the hospital had once been. There were no survivors.

  A huge agri-planet called Kansi One in the Nine Arm had been attacked by two warships using X-beam arrays. Each bolt had the force of one million thermonuclear strikes. The two ships vaporized all of the planet's farming complexes, destroying billions of tons of grain and foodstuffs. Not only would millions across the Galaxy face starvation because of this act of terror, the subatomic residue from the X-beam strike had poisoned the soil of Kansi One forever.

  The report went on and on and on. Attacks on isolated civilian ships, massacres in schools and orphanages, unprovoked bombardments of innocent worlds, some of which were unaware that the Empire even existed. There was little doubt who was behind these barbarities. So many people had reported seeing the REF's mysterious Red Ships before and after the attacks, they were too numerous to discount. And these weren't military strikes, the report concluded. Nor were they part of the interstellar war still going on between the SF and SG. Each incident seemed to have just one goal in mind: to be especially cruel to the especially helpless, to cause only misery and pain.

  The Secretary was both furious and baffled. Why was the breakaway SG unit doing these horrible things? How could the elite special operations group so suddenly turn into an army of bloodthirsty thugs?

  No one knew, certainly not the Imperial Court, nor the SF — not even the Solar Guards themselves. Of this last point the Secretary was sure. How? Because SF3 had been eavesdropping on SG string communications for decades. The Secretary frequently knew their high-priority orders before some of the people inside SG headquarters did. And he knew that not only had the REF stopped responding to orders from Black Rock weeks ago, Black Rock had no idea where the REF was at any given moment.

  Nor did SG Command have an explanation for the REF's ability to appear and then suddenly disappear apparently at whim, or for their unexplained thirst for innocent blood, or even why they murdered SF3 agent Gym Bonz on Doomsday 212 in the first place.

  The most recent SF3 snooping had picked up a conversation inside Black Rock among the top SG officers on Earth. While it was clear by their nervous chatter that the Solar Guards were becoming overwhelmed by both their war against the SF and maintaining their martial law over the One Arm, one question that haunted the SG staff was especially telling: Where and when would their renegade REF strike next?

  There were twelve SG officers in the top-level meeting. Not one of them had a clue.

  The Secretary poured himself another drink. This time a strong one.

  In his centuries of working for SF Intelligence, he'd never faced a situation quite like this before.

  Strangeness was rarely in short supply in the Galaxy, but there seemed to be a surplus of it these days.

  Case in point: forty-eight hours before, he'd received a report from several SF ship commanders who had just fought in the huge battle against the Solar Guards up in the Two Arm. These men swore that at the height of that battle, they'd seen a ship suddenly appear amid the chaos. It hadn't come from Supertime, because they were all in Supertime when it materialized. Nor had it come from any of the other single-digit dimensions because it had left absolutely no sub-atomic wake. But the strangest thing was, the SF commanders insisted this ghostly vessel was actually the Resonance 133, one of the cargo 'crashers stolen by the Two Arm invaders in the same area just a month before, only to disappear with the rest of the invaders' fleet shortly afterward.

  The Secretary now reread this report as well as the long list of recent atrocities. What is really going on here? As if the Empire tearing itself apart wasn't bad enough, he now had dozens of inhuman brutalities taking place, plus a ghost ship suddenly appearing as if from nowhere.

  He sipped his drink, and suddenly his mind kicked into overdrive: Could there be a connection between all these things?

  He quickly called up every viz doc he'd received in the past five weeks, ever since the short-lived invasion of the Two Arm, and assembled them chronologically. The time line read like a bad novel. First, the rebel fleet invaded the Two Arm, defeated Joxx at Megiddo, and incurred the wrath of the REF.

  Then the invaders disappeared somewhere in the middle of the Moraz Cloud, after which the REF lied about destroying them. Soon after, the area was declared a No-Fly Zone, the REF disappeared as well, only to reappear, at least some of them, with their hulls painted red, to wreak havoc across the Milky Way. A war soon erupted be
tween the SF and the SG, and in the middle of a battle between the two services came this report that one of the rebel ships had suddenly reappeared out of nothingness.

  A question popped into the Secretary's head: Are the REF Red Ships appearing out of nothingness, too? From the same spot as this stolen rebel ship? Is that the reason the REF declared the No-Fly Zone in the first place?

  He snapped his fingers and called up a device known as the Fourth Analytic Bubbler, or more simply, the FAB4. This highly secret el tuti of bubblers could take in trillions and trillions of bits of information from all over the Empire and, in a microsecond, coalesce them into an information globule that was both concise and sensible. This gave it a kind of prescient quality.

  He asked the device a question: "Is there a connection between the No-Fly Zone and the REF's recent activities? In effect, is the REF using the No-Fly Zone as a safe haven from which to appear and disappear?"

  The answer took a long time to come back, but when it did, it read, " Possibly."

  The Secretary asked the FAB4 a second question: "Does the REF's recent atrocities have a goal in mind, or are they meant to simply inflict pain on innocents?"

  The answer that came back was surprising: " Both."

  A third question: "With the recent spate of atrocities in mind, would the REF strike again?"

  Definitely " Yes."

  "Is it possible to determine where in the Galaxy the REF would strike?"

  This time, a definitive "No." Just like the SG officers who had no idea they were being bugged, when it came to divining the REF's next victims, the FAB4 didn't have a clue, either.

  The Secretary hesitated a moment before he asked his last question. The FAB4 could be accessed from all over the Empire, and its use could be traced back to him. For this reason, he didn't want to leave the impression that he was beginning to panic or even becoming disloyal. But there was no way to put the words nicely, no way to finesse them or obscure their meaning. So he just took the direct approach. " Is the Empire in danger of collapse?"