by Mack Maloney
Through the scarlet cloud, turning this way and that. The sky, spectacular. Throttles forward. Yes, everything is a blur. But life is not just about being good, it’s about being better. Right on time, the face appears on the clouds ahead. The red giant glows brighter. The clouds swirl. He sees her smile. He hears her laugh.
You must see this.
Then…
Suddenly Hunter was awake.
The ship’s Klaxons began blaring so loudly, he almost fell from his bunk. What was going on? They were twice as urgent as the day before. Was the ship about to fight another battle? So soon?
Now the lights inside his cell started flashing wildly. The thunder of boots running through the ship could be heard once again. Hunter was off his bunk and by the cell door in a flash. It did not dematerialize before his eyes this time. Rather it slid open cleanly. A security officer was standing on the other side.
Behind him, soldiers were rushing up and down the long corridor. Some were dressed in battle gear, some not.
“What’s happening?” Hunter yelled to the security man.
“Wake up, man!” the officer yelled back. “The ship is under attack! All prisoners are to report to the evacuation bay!”
Under attack?
“By who?” Hunter yelled at the security man, but the man was already gone, lost in the stream of troops.
Hunter tried to get his bearings. He wasn’t even sure what part of the ship he was in. The chaos of the passageway was only getting worse. Lights flashing, the Klaxons at earsplitting level. Soldiers pushing their way around each other, running in different directions.
Where the hell was the evacuation bay?
Hunter began moving with the stampede. He found his way to a balcony similar to the one from which he’d watched the attack on Vines 67. The vast war chamber lay in front of him once again. But something was wrong here. Soldiers seemed to be stumbling this way and that, floating, colliding, falling.
Gone was the choreography, gone were the fluidity and well-drilled movement. At best there was controlled pandemonium inside the war chamber. At worst, panic.
Some of the troop transports were floating at the top of the chamber, but the soldiers in motion were ignoring them. Instead, the troops were igniting their rocket packs and hurling themselves directly through the huge protective membrane and into the wilds of outer space beyond.
What was happening here? Hunter didn’t have a clue at first. Were these men abandoning ship?
Dozens of ship’s security men were rushing by him now, but none of them gave a second look. Hunter moved down the passageway to the nearest observation bubble. Beyond the glass was an even more fantastic sight!
Far from jumping ship, the stream of troopers leaving the BonoVox were meeting a stream of other spacemen heading in the opposite direction. These unknowns were coming from a huge ship that had materialized off the BonoVox’s starboard side, not two hundred yards away. This vessel was black, very sinister in appearance. While it was less sleek, less impressive than the BonoVox, it was bristling with small weapons and was dispensing armed spacemen as fast as the Empire ship could spit out soldiers to stop them.
Hundreds of soldiers began fighting within the small area between the ships. Some were shooting ray guns, others were engaged in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Space was suddenly filled with colors. The bright yellow of rocket packs. The deep red of ray gun blasts. Powerful beams from hundreds of weapons were streaking off in all directions. The sudden ferocity of the battle was simply mind-boggling.
Those hit directly by a ray gun blast found themselves propelled at high speed off into deep space, a gaping hole in their spacesuits, and leaving only a trail of blood bubbles behind. Others were simply exploding whenever an enemy ray gun blast hit their own weapons’ supply. A dark red mist was enveloping the fighting now. Hunter even thought he could hear men screaming as they fought and died out in the void.
Do something…
Hunter felt a strange sensation rise up from the back of his neck. It was coming from deep within his brain. A voice seemed to be speaking to him, riding billions of receptors to the base of his skull. The voice sounded very much like his own. The BonoVox was in danger. That meant he was in danger as well.
Do something…
The next thing Hunter knew, he was running.
Down the passageway, past the balcony, down a descent tube to the entrance to the vast war chamber itself. He jumped right through the force field protecting the main door. He found himself being lifted up to the chamber’s ceiling.
He began tumbling out of control almost immediately.
Head over heels, arms over legs. He tried to focus his attention on the closest troop bug; it was about two hundred feet above him, and indeed it was the only flying machine anywhere nearby.
He put his head down and his arms at his side, thinking this was the thing to do. It did cause him to pick up a great amount of speed very quickly. But then he had no idea how to stop. He wound up slamming hard into the nose of the troop shuttle and bouncing off. Tumbling down about a hundred feet, he regained his balance and went shooting upward again. Another hard collision with the transport’s nose.
Another ricochet. Another plunge downward. Dazed and battered, Hunter twisted himself over and finally managed to “swim” up to the bug and climb inside.
One step in and he realized he was no longer floating. The shuttlecraft had its own gravity. His knees and elbows severely banged up from his collisions with the craft, he painfully made his way up to the flight compartment and squeezed himself behind the bug’s control column.
The operations panel was a bewildering array of light switches and holographic buttons. Hunter had no idea what any of them did, so he just started pushing things. In seconds, the spacecraft began to shake and yaw.
He hastily studied the control panel’s main 3-D screen. It seemed to offer a variety of options on what kind of controls he desired to fly the troop carrier. One icon presented a panel with the outlines of two hands. The fly-by-finger method — Hunter was not into that. Another offered a head ring, a band put around the head. Flying by brainwaves, he supposed. Again, not his thing.
He finally located an icon that most looked like the controls on his old flying machine. Basically a short stick for his right hand and a throttle bar for his left. He tapped this icon and instantly these controls appeared.
He quickly righted the spacecraft and then turned it around. He took it slowly and carefully at first, trying his best to avoid hitting any of the flying soldiers still rushing through the clear membrane to the battle beyond. When he saw a break in this stream, Hunter pushed the throttle bar ahead and suddenly found himself rocketing through the invisible portal and into space himself.
Now this was a strange situation for him. To the best of his knowledge, he’d never flown in space before.
It didn’t seem to be a problem, though. He was able to maneuver the awkward troop carrier through the swarm of battling spacemen, avoiding the never-ending streams of ray gun blasts coming at him from every direction. It was funny, though; Hunter wasn’t even trying hard. He was turning this way and that, but it was almost as if the controls were moving themselves. Or was something deep inside him moving them? If so, they were working perfectly every time. Hunter felt like he was just along for the ride.
And he noticed something else: At first glance, it seemed as if the battle between the two starships was taking place as they were hanging motionless in space. The truth was, they were both flying in Supertime.
The telltale sign was a slight blurring effect that surrounded everything and everyone, Hunter included.
Very strange…
Hunter finally cleared the ferocious battle and turned hard to port. Now he had a clear view of the situation. The BonoVox on his left, the unknown attacker on his right. The space between them still ablaze with vicious combat.
Two words popped into his head now, and they didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere
deeper than the top of his skull.
Now what?
Directly below the BonoVox’s vast bubble-top control room was another chamber.
Just as big, with twice the amount of machinery and apparatus, by tradition this place was known as the ship’s Oculus. Some believed the ancient name meant “the eyes.” If so, it was apt. From here the ship projected thousands of sensor rays into every dimension of space for one thousand light-years in all directions. This was where the ship was steered, where its speed was determined. The glassy control deck above was simply a window into this place. A small army of technicians lorded over innumerable monitoring stations here. Among other things, they could detect anything moving — man-made or not — for more than a billion miles away.
Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.
No one had seen this attacker coming, for one simple reason: There wasn’t supposed to be any enemy spacecraft in Supertime; only Empire spacecraft had the ability to cruise the Ethers. For all its magical machinery, whenever the BonoVox was in the seventh dimension, the Oculus was simply concerned with its navigation, and not scanning for enemy threats. That’s how the attacking spaceship was able to appear right alongside the Empire vessel and begin spitting out spacemen before anyone in the Oculus even knew what was going on.
Even worse, this was no ordinary warship off their starboard bow. This was a Blackship, a vessel used by Fringe pirates to pillage unsuspecting planets and attack commerce vessels in flight. By definition, its occupants were ruthless and fierce, and known to show their victims no mercy. How had such a ship gained entry into Supertime? No one in the Oculus had a clue, simply because nothing like this had ever happened before.
A kind of controlled chaos was sweeping the Oculus now. The BonoVox had fought in countless engagements in its long history. But the starship’s role in each of those battles was to provide purely offensive punch. The BonoVox attacked planets; it carried no defensive weapons of its own. So powerful was its vast arsenal that no weapon on board could be used against a target fewer than one hundred miles away. Using such a weapon would mean death to both the attacker and the target. The older class of Empire ships, those built more than three hundred years before, had carried self-protection systems. But as the techniques of using Supertime became more defined, and as the Empire strengthened its hold on the supertechnology, the need for such weaponry disappeared. The BonoVox carried no self-protection weapons because ship-to-ship duels were supposed to be a thing of the past.
But one was happening now — and it appeared the situation was growing more dire for the Empire vessel by the second. Reports flowing into the sensor center said that some enemy spacemen were close to reaching the hull of the BonoVox, intent on burning their way into the ship itself. The battle might soon be taking place inside the vessel. Fighting in the passageways? Battling enemy spacemen right on the control decks themselves? Absolutely no one on board the BonoVox was prepared for that.
But even among all this, something else very puzzling was happening out there. In addition to the sensors going crazy by continually detecting the marauding Blackship, the men in the Oculus saw that a third spacecraft had appeared on the scene. It was flying among the warring spacemen with considerable aplomb. It wasn’t another Blackship. It was far too small for that.
So what was it?
Instantly the sensor arrays identified this third object as one of the BonoVox’s own troop transports.
It was empty except for its pilot.
His identity was unknown.
What happened next was witnessed by most of the officers inside the Oculus, as well as those in the ship’s command center one deck up.
After hovering for a few moments on the edge of the mid-space battle, the small troop carrier began accelerating very quickly. In seconds it was flying much faster than its previously known top speed. It roared over the top of the BonoVox, climbed steeply, and then went into a mind-bending dive just above the bow of the Blackship. Just as quickly, a barrage of Z-beam blasts erupted from behind the enemy vessel’s control deck — unlike the BonoVox, the Blackship carried loads of self-protection weapons. But even though the Z-beam streams were many, the troop carrier began dodging them with astonishing agility.
Then something even more remarkable happened. Empire troop shuttles were armed with only rudimentary ray guns. These were provided in the unlikely event that a bug was caught on the surface of a planet, alone, during an invasion and was forced to defend itself. The mysterious pilot was now firing these guns at the Blackship’s flight deck — indeed, he was coming down in a screaming dive and directing his twin beams at the vessel’s main control bubble. This seemed like madness! The shuttle’s small ray guns were designed to kill troops, not do battle against miles-long spaceships. Yet the shuttle unloaded on the Blackship’s command bubble and kept right on going, its guns full blast, making impacts all the way down the length of the attacking ship. Only after it delivered a concentrated barrage on the ship’s propulsion section did it turn up and away and climb again, a storm of Z beams following in its wake.
All this was happening so quickly, the men inside the Oculus didn’t realize that the Blackship’s command bubble had caught fire. Two of its tail fins were alight as well. Yet the shuttle had looped over the top of the BonoVox again and now was going into a second mad dive. Once again the Blackship began firing at it. Once again the shuttle dodged the stream of Z beams. The bug began twisting and turning in seemingly impossible maneuvers, yet remarkably its nose guns kept firing on target and without a hint of hesitation.
Finally one of its blasts found a significant mark. A lucky beam made its way through the Blackship’s hull and into the attacking ship’s own version of an Oculus. This one beam destroyed the Blackship’s entire sensor chamber. In one stroke, the vessel’s abilities to see and hear were gone, and its electrical systems began to short out. A violent explosion rocked the Blackship right behind its control bubble. This in turn caused a string of explosions all the way back to the Blackship’s hindquarters. The propulsion systems within began to disintegrate immediately, and the ship began losing speed. Suddenly there was a bright white flash, and then it was gone. The Blackship had been knocked out of Supertime.
But the drama was not over.
With their ship now gone, the several hundred spacemen it had dispensed to do battle against the BonoVox were suddenly all alone. They no longer had a ship to fight for. No one was around them now but the enemy.
Some of the attacking spacemen disengaged from hand-to-hand combat and flew back to the place where the Blackship had been. Others simply stopped fighting and hung motionless in space. It was clear they had no safe place to go. So, one by one, the enemy spacemen began shooting each other…
8
Hunter have never tasted Venusian wine before.
One sip though was enough to tell him that the slow-ship crap he’d been drinking back on Fools 6 tasted like bilge by comparison. This stuff felt like a cloud going down his throat. No bark. No bite. Yet the opiate effect was virtually the same.
“Refill, Mister Hunter?”
Before Hunter could reply, his goblet slowly refilled itself. He barely saw the hand of the invisible holo-servant pouring him another full measure while properly staying out of sight in some nearby dimension.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Hunter replied belatedly.
He was sitting in Multx’s vast private billet, a compartment directly behind the flight deck of the BonoVox. Erx and Berx were on hand as well. Sitting nearby, each had already drained his second glass of wine and was looking for more. They seemed a bit reluctant to look Hunter in the eye.
Hunter had never met Multx before. Perched behind his huge floating desk, the star commander seemed a bit larger than life at first. He looked twice the size of a normal man, with monstrous hands and enormous shoulders. Polished head, properly greased goatee, resplendent in his Space Navy uniform, he certainly looked the part of a famous starship captain
.
But Multx also appeared a bit haggard at the moment. And who could blame him? His premonition of dire things a-coming had proved frighteningly accurate. Fewer than a dozen hours ago, his ship had narrowly escaped being captured by the swarm of spacemen from the Blackship. Only by Hunter’s quick action did the BonoVox survive. No one on board the Empire warship had ever seen anything remotely like the display Hunter had put on in dispatching the intruding vessel. Even the latest Empire starfighters would not take on a Blackship. Yet Hunter had done it in a lowly, barely armed shuttlecraft.
Even now, it didn’t seem possible…
Erx and Berx were trying to catch Multx’s eye, hoping he would order their glasses to be refilled. But the star commander’s attention was focused entirely on Hunter at the moment.
“Is it safe to say that you have a penchant for — how should I put it? — being where the action is, Mister Hunter?”
Hunter paused from taking another sip of wine.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir,” he finally replied.
Multx smiled wearily. “Well, just in the past few days, you rather dramatically rescued my two close friends here. Then you managed to get out of a very secure compartment to observe our most secret weapons in operation. Then… well, then you saved this ship from a catastrophe.”
Hunter gulped some wine down in earnest then said: “I was just trying to help.”
Multx thought about this for a moment, then snapped his fingers. A visual screen materialized out of nowhere.
“I see our ship physicians thoroughly examined you, Mr. Hunter,” he said, reading from the screen.
“Thankfully they confirmed that you are not a victim of amnesia or any other cranial trauma.”
“That’s good to know,” Hunter replied. “I think—”
“But our records confirm that you are not listed as a citizen of the Empire,” Multx went on. “Nor have you ever been a member of the Empire’s military before.”