by Mack Maloney
Dazz’s features went hard very quickly. A darkness came over his face. “What are you suggesting, Fyxx?”
“I’m suggesting that it is just about impossible to come across a working prop core,” Fyxx replied. “On the other hand, if someone gave them a spare and—”
Dazz’s face turned bright crimson.
“Are you insane?” he shouted up at Fyxx. “Are you implying that we gave these mooks a prop core and then hooked them up to the Big Gee?”
Multx spoke up. He was more furious than Fyxx.
“Who else could have done it, you little ass?” he shouted at Dazz.
Dazz took two steps toward the BonoVox commander.
“Look, just because you can’t read a long-range sensor array, don’t blame us!” he roared back at Multx.
Multx exploded. “How much did you sell it to them for, you midget turncoat?”
Dazz lunged at Multx. They didn’t come to blows only because Fyxx was able to catch the smaller man in midair. Still, the knot of opposing soldiers got tighter. Hands went to weapons. Dazz’s bodyguards were gigantic; all six were more than seven feet tall and packing serious ray gun heat. They began moving toward Fyxx.
That’s when Fyxx raised his hand and effectively silenced Multx.
“Be warned to stay cool here,” he said to all. “Everyone loses if things get out of hand.”
He set Dazz back on the floor. The SG commander took a breath and readjusted his clothes, but he was still red in the face.
“Tell your boy here not to go around accusing us of treason,” he told Fyxx, pointing at Multx. He took another breath. “Now look, we don’t agree on much of anything. But you guys can’t seriously think that we’d give prop core technology to a bunch of mooks on a Blackship. It would be disloyalty of the highest order, for God’s sake! And believe me, we’re not in the business of cutting our own throats.”
Fyxx looked Dazz straight in the eye. The SG high commander was saying the right words, but was he telling the truth?
“On your Oath of Honor,” Fyxx said to him slowly. “Do you swear you know nothing about this? And that no one under your command has been involved?”
“On my father’s Oath of Honor they did not,” Dazz replied caustically. “Can you make that same statement?”
“I can,” Fyxx replied without hesitation. “I would know, just as you would know…”
A silence now descended on the room. The air of tension changed. The two dozen men realized they might have an authentic mystery on their hands here. Everyone knew that prop core technology was the second-most-guarded secret in the Empire; only the inner workings of the Big Generator were more shrouded. If the Solar Guards didn’t give the prop core technology to the crew of the Blackship, then where did they get it?
Fyxx let down his bold front for a moment. So did Dazz.
“Every working prop core in the Space Forces is accounted for,” Fyxx told him. “We checked.
Double-checked. And triple-checked. Spares, front lines, from the fringe to the Ball. We know where every one of them is.”
Dazz relit his cigar. “And so do we,” he said. “And I’m sure your poor relations in the X-Forces have done the same thing.”
So they were stumped. Another silence came over the room. It lasted for more than a minute.
Fyxx finally spoke: “Okay, let’s say we make a deal.”
“Propose,” Dazz said.
“If I hear anything more about this, I will let you know,” Fyxx told the SG commander. “Will you do the same?”
Dazz thought a moment, then nodded. “Done…”
The two men almost shook hands. Another silence followed. Finally Fyxx gave the order for the hum beam to be turned off. The meeting was over.
Still wary, the two sides backed away from each other and began filing out of the building very slowly.
That’s when Dazz stopped.
“By the way, Skol, who are you picking in the Earth Race?” he asked the SF commander. “I hear there’s a couple of real freaks among the field.”
Fyxx just sniffed at him. “I don’t gamble,” he said.
Dazz snickered. He was back to his reptilian self again.
“Well, the way things are going,” he told Fyxx, “maybe you should start…”
12
Across the main canal and a few miles to the south of Sector Cello was an area known as New Brew.
No less thick of trees and hedgerows than Cello, New Brew at least had some roads running through it, and it was higher in elevation. On one of these roads was a house about an eighth of a mile from the top of a cliff.
It was modest for a dwelling in this very exclusive area, so close to the largest, most important city in the Galaxy. The house was a simple ten-room affair — rustic, almost — with a large garden out back and a jungle of overgrown wisteria and regalia hiding it out front.
This place was cool and damp no matter how hot the engineers made the weather. The road running by the house was barely paved, the path leading up to its door was just dirt and small rocks. If the intention of the person who lived here was to be inconspicuous — hidden away, even — he had succeeded grandly.
It was raining now this dark night in Chesterwest, and the winds were blowing a little more than usual.
The knock came on the door just before midnight. Sitting by the light of many candles, reading his old battle reports, Petz Calandrx rose unsteadily and went to answer the door.
He was a short, elderly man, 222 years old. He had long white hair, no beard, a bright smile, and a tanned, leathery face, the signature of a veteran starfighter pilot. His house was filled with books, or what used to be called books. They were actually holographic re-creations of texts that had been all but lost after the Second Empire fell. Calandrx loved reading the classic poets of that epoch and considered himself a minor authority on the military history of the era as well — what little of it there was. Calandrx spent days on end reading his books, always by candlelight, soaking up everything he could, looking for the signs of what inevitably doomed that empire, then releasing some of it in an occasional burst of three-meter verse.
Few things could distract him from his avocation these days. A call for a favor from an old friend was one of them.
He opened the door and found three people standing on his stoop. All three were wearing the same nondescript garment, a hood and a long tunic with hoods pulled tight; they looked not unlike a trio of grim reapers. Each person was hiding his face.
Still, Calandrx could see a faint glow coming from beneath each hood. Indeed, there was a hazy aura surrounding all of the three figures. Calandrx smiled. Eudora’s Fire, they used to call it. He hadn’t seen it in many years.
He shook hands first with the person in the middle.
“It’s good to see you,” he told the visitor. “And good to touch the hand of someone who has just crashed a star.”
Hawk Hunter pulled back his hood.
“It’s good to be here, General Calandrx,” he replied. “And to shake hands with a true hero.”
Petz Calandrx was not just a poet and a scholar. He was also the winner of the 201st Earth Race, an event held ninety-seven years before.
He’d been a starship captain at the time, a position he’d held only a short time after moving up from starfighter duty. He’d been a minor hero in the realm before that, distinguishing himself in the fiercely contested Sygma Cloud wars. Calandrx had excelled in the “terrain-attack” role performed by the Empire’s starfighter units. A squadron under his command once strafed an entire planet — Zigamus 3—nonstop for more than an Earth day. Continuously ordering up weapons from their holo-systems, he and his eighteen aircraft put enough pressure on enough enemy strongholds to allow a rescue force to sweep down to the planet and extract millions of innocent civilians soon to be caught in the middle of the fighting.
This action won Calandrx several medals — and also made him a prime candidate for Earth Race 201. He won it in record ti
me. Showered with riches and acclaim, he became a huge celebrity throughout the Galaxy. For one Earth year, the name Calandrx was never far from the lips of the Empire’s seventy-five quadrillion citizens. He became so famous, in fact, that Emperor O’Nay decreed that Calandrx could never again travel in space — this on the off-chance that he might be killed in flight and thus put a tragic ending on a career that burned brighter than the stars in the Ball.
That was almost a century ago, and here was Calandrx, an intelligent hermit and still a prisoner of his own celebrity. Not many things made him happy. But at this moment, he was beside himself with joy.
These three people had crashed so many stars lately, they seemed to be glowing brighter than his candles.
The three of them trooped in, Hunter first, Erx and Berx right behind him. Of course, Erx and Berx had known Calandrx for more than eighty years.
He brought them immediately to his library and beheld them in the candlelight for a few moments. Sure enough, combined, the three of them were glowing brighter than twelve of his best wick and wax. At this, Calandrx could barely contain his delight.
“My God, is that all you three have been doing? Crashing stars?”
“Sometimes it feels that way, old friend,” Erx said, shedding his disguise, if in fact a hood and tunic was a disguise. Anyone up to mischief these days always seemed to pick this combination of garb, as a way of blending in. Yet to say so was almost a cliché.
“Crashing isn’t what it used to be,” Berx said with false disinterest. “In fact, I’ve been finding it rather boring lately…”
Calandrx shook his fist in Berx’s face.
“If I hear one more word like that from you,” Calandrx scolded him, “I’ll knock you so hard into the fifth dimension, you’ll have to wait till next Tuesday for your ass to arrive. Crashing stars is an honor not shared by the vast majority of our galactic brothers and sisters. It’s a gift to be able do it. It must be appreciated as such.”
Berx laughed in his face. So did Erx. Only really old friends could treat each other this way.
“Do you have any slow-ship, Petz?” Erx asked him, walking to the blazing fireplace to warm his hands.
“Or have you graduated to that crap they sell on Neptune?”
Calandrx shuffled off to his liquor cabinet. It took up one entire wall of his reading room. Several rows were filled with slow-ship wine; others held some “Neptune crap.”
“Come, sit,” Calandrx bid them as he reached for his oldest bottle of slow. “Imagine my pleasure when I heard from Brother Multx and accepted his offer of intrigue.”
“Imagine our surprise when we found out you were his contact with the race committee,” Erx said. “I would have thought you were above such things, Petz. Gambling, subterfuge, and such?”
Calandrx was in the middle of filling their goblets with wine. He intentionally poured Erx but half a cup.
“Someday you’ll be planetbound, Erx,” Calandrx told him. “And then you’ll know the curse of getting no closer to the stars than looking up at them at night. When that day comes, I want to know how you’ll be amusing yourself.”
Erx thought about this for a moment. “I think ‘abusing’ myself is the more likely consequence.”
Berx nodded. “Bingo, that.”
Calandrx waved them off and turned to Hunter.
“They could probably behead him for it,” he began. “But Multx told me a bit about your skill in saving the BonoVox. You must have extraordinary pluck to face down a Blackship with a shuttlecraft. I’ve never heard of anything so deliciously mad.”
“If you mean ‘mad’ as being insane, I’m beginning to agree,” Hunter said, tasting his slow-ship wine.
“Do you want to hear about our crash on Fools 6?” Berx asked Calandrx with a straight face. The old pilot simply waved him off again. He was intent on asking Hunter all the questions.
“They say your flying ability was rather mind-boggling,” Calandrx said to him. “With a swiftness of maneuver not seen before. What are you hiding, my son? Were you trained by some anonymous master pilot? Someone who is no longer with us? Or perhaps you found a brain ring left over from the Third Empire. Containing long-lost starfighter techniques? Is that it?”
Hunter was used to hearing such questions now.
“Someday I hope I’ll remember,” he replied. “And when I do, I promise I’ll sit here and tell you everything.”
Calandrx smiled broadly. “Well said,” he declared, tapping Hunter’s kneecap with the butt of the wine bottle. “I will look forward to that day.”
They toasted and drank and Calandrx refilled their glasses. This time Erx got a full measure.
“Now for the matter at hand,” Calandry announced.
The three visitors pulled their chairs closer to Calandrx. There was no hum beam to rely on here.
“I have secured a position for you in the race,” the old pilot revealed. “It’s the thirteenth slot, the last one available, meaning you’ll be on the pole. But you will be entered without any qualifying stints or prerace interrogation. Your presence will be known to only a very few people until the day of the race itself.”
Hunter was stunned. This seemed to be everything that Multx could have wished for. He would not have to pre-qualify. He would not have to answer a million and one questions for race officials prior to the contest. It seemed too good to be true.
And, in a way, it was.
“By what bargain were you able to secure these advantages for us?” Erx asked. “We must be giving something away…”
Calandrx shot him a stern glance. “He will fly in the race, won’t he?”
“If you say so, brother,” Erx replied.
“And that’s the important thing, do you agree?”
Erx nodded uncertainly. “If you say so…”
Then Berx leaned over to him and stage-whispered one word: “Maccus.”
Erx thought about this for a moment, then shook his head. “Of course…”
But Hunter wasn’t really paying attention. He tended to agree with Calandrx. He could have cared less how he was able to enter the race, just as long as he could compete.
But he did have one big question. He was surprised that no one had brought it up before now.
“So I am in the contest,” he said. “But what will I be flying?”
Erx and Berx just looked at each other. They had just assumed Hunter would be driving a radically adapted star-fighter, like most of the other racers, maccus or not.
But apparently Multx had had something else in mind when he hatched this scheme — and Calandrx was in on it.
“My brother Zap has sent me the craft in which you will ride,” the old pilot said with a cackle.
Erx and Berx looked around them.
“It is here?” they asked at once.
“You have room for a starfighter in here?” Erx added.
“What’s up in your attic?” Berx demanded with a laugh.
Calandrx just looked at them and shook his head. “What’s up in your attic?” he asked Berx. “I told you two that you were spending way too much time out on the Fringe. It’s making you dumber, not smarter.”
“Who else said that to us recently?” Berx asked Erx.
Erx shrugged and sipped his wine.
“Beats me,” he replied.
Calandrx just shook his head, then reached inside his jacket pocket and came out with a tiny green box.
He held it up to the candlelight for all of them to see. It was glowing.
“Here is your vessel,” he told Hunter dramatically.
Hunter looked at the little box for a few moments.
“Either this wine is very good, or you’re holding a little box in you hand.”
Calandrx’s face wrinkled in a wide smile. “I believe them when they say you are not from around here.”
Erx and Berx sat forward a bit and studied the tiny box.
“My God, Petz, you’re suddenly trafficking in the tools of espionage,
too?” Erx said. “Spying, gambling? In the old days they’d call an intervention for you.”
Calandrx waved him away again. But Hunter was still confused. What was the tiny green box?
“It’s a ‘twenty and six,’ ” Berx said to him. “An old spy trick — but a good one.”
He picked up the box and held it before Hunter’s eyes. His crashn’ glow was causing it to pulse with an odd emerald hue.
“Brother Calandrx is correct,” Berx declared. “Whatever you are going to fly is here. Inside this tiny box.”
Hunter looked to Erx; in this group he stood out as a beacon of reason.
“ ‘Twenty and six’ is an archaic term for the twenty-sixth dimension,” Erx explained, taking the box from Berx. “Few people bother with any dimension beyond thirteen or fourteen these days, but this one has some fairly interesting properties.”
“You can hide things there,” Calandrx said simply. “And no one will ever find them…”
“Have you looked at what’s inside yet?” Erx asked the veteran space pilot.
“I couldn’t bear to,” he said. “Not before you came.”
He looked around his expansive library.
“I don’t think I can retrieve it in here,” he said. “This room is just a bit too small and there might be a problem if I can’t get it to go back into the twenty-six again.”
He stood up, drained his wine goblet, and announced, “So then, gentlemen — to the garden!”
Calandrx’s garden was more like a small woods with a clearing in the middle.
It was a rather large piece of real estate on what was actually a very crowded part of the planet — another benefit of winning his Earth Race so long ago. The trees ran on either side of the expansive lawn. Living sculptures and glowing plant pots dotted the top of the finely trimmed terranium grass.
The four starmen staggered out to the side of an old weathered cottage that was tenuously attached to the main house.
“Here, the perfect place,” Calandrx declared, placing the small green box down on the ground about fifty feet away from the rest of them. Above, the sky was dancing with color from all the StarScrapers in use down in central Big Bright City, twenty miles down the main canal.