by Mack Maloney
“What… what are you doing?” he yelled at them.
One of the interlopers turned to him and said: “We must move this contraption so it is pointing north!”
Then the second spaceman was in the officer’s face. “We must shoot this thing at that monster out there! Quickly help us!”
But the officer didn’t budge — he wasn’t sure what to do. So he stated the obvious. Looking down at the two halves of the cylinder the men had carried with them, he said: “But that thing is empty! It’s not a superbomb like our friends just lit off!”
The two spacemen looked up at the officer and suddenly smiled.
“That’s true, my brother,” one said. “But the enemy does not know that!”
It took them all just a minute to turn the catapult the way the two spacemen wanted it. Then another minute or so was spent struggling to pull the huge, tightly sprung arm back.
More Home Guard soldiers jumped in, and the arm was finally locked into place and secured with a length of thick rope. The spacemen put the two halves of the empty cylinder together — it was actually a travel flask for slow-ship wine — and joined them with an electron torch. Then the empty container was dumped into the basket of the catapult and the line was severed.
The arm let go with a deafening whomp! The silver canister went flying into the air, quickly disappearing in the haze.
No sooner was the empty flask away when the two spacemen started to run toward an elevator that would bring them up to the top of the wall. But the Home Guard officer suddenly ordered his soldiers to grab them.
“You two stand fast!” the officer bellowed at them. “You must tell me who you are and what this is all about!”
That’s when one of the spacemen used his massive hand to crush slightly the fingers of the soldier who was holding him. The soldier quickly let go.
“There’s no time for that!” the spaceman yelled back at the officer. “We must get to the ramparts to see what is going to happen!”
With that, they sprinted away to the elevator, the officer and twenty confused soldiers following close behind.
The silver canister was just coming down from its extra-steep trajectory when this small party reached the top of the battlements.
They watched as the object rocketed through the murk of battle and landed about a thousand feet in front of the xarcus.
That’s when the most ungodly noise of all thundered across the devastated plain. It was the combination of a very loud explosion and an incredibly high-pitched screech. Suddenly the air was thick with the stink of metal grinding against metal. Electrical charges began dotting the smoky sky.
The screeching got louder and louder, for more than two minutes, until it finally exploded into one loud bang!
And then suddenly the ground wasn’t rumbling anymore. The air was no longer filled with the awful sound of the huge saw turning. In fact, if it was possible, a strange peace came over the battlefield.
Soldiers on both sides stopped firing their weapons. For a few precious seconds, something had happened here that had not happened in a very long time: It got quiet.
All eyes turned past the battle in the trenches, back over Bloody Water and across another two miles of the devastated battlefield to the xarcus.
That’s when it became apparent what had caused the ungodly noise: Simply put, someone inside the supertank had stepped on the brakes— hard—and the gigantic armored mover had slowly screeched to a most violent stop. Fires broke out beneath its enormous tracks. Smoke began billowing from its rear end. The saw was just spinning freely now, slowing down with every turn.
The two spacemen literally jumped for joy. They were shaking hands and congratulating themselves profusely. It came together slowly for the officer, but then it finally dawned on him what had happened.
The xarcus had been stopped.
But how?
“Don’t you get it, man?” one of the spacemen yelled at him. “Someone inside saw that canister coming and thought it was another superbomb! They couldn’t have stalled that thing quicker if they’d tried…”
The officer just stared back at them. “You mean… this was all… a bluff?”
But the spacemen were ignoring the officer by now and talking to each other. “We’ve got to figure it will take them at least a half hour to get that bastard up and running again.”
“Judging from the sound of all that grinding metal, I’d say more like an hour or more…”
“But that means we haven’t a moment to lose!”
That’s when the officer finally snapped. He pulled out his ray gun and pointed it the spacemen.
“Now you tell me,” he said through clenched teeth, “who the hell are you people?”
The spacemen smiled again, and the shorter of the two stepped forward.
“My apologies, sir,” he said. “My name is Erx. My friend here is Berx…”
But the officer was still stumped. “What I mean is,” he said with no little fluster, “what the hell are you doing here?”
At that moment the red, white, and blue flying machine roared over their heads and went into a hover mode above the city square.
Erx pointed up at the aircraft and told the officer: “Ask him.”
26
It all started with the dream.
On the first night aboard his ship, the AeroVox, during the first decent piece of slumber Hunter had had in weeks, a dream came to him vividly and real. He was above a beautiful countryside. Below he could see rivers, trees, golden fields that stretched for miles. Sometimes he would soar over small towns and even smaller villages. He could see people below, moving about, talking, laughing, living their lives, either unaware that he was above them or seeing him but not caring.
In his dream, he flew over this idyllic landscape — flying without his flying machine. No extending of arms as if they were wings. No noise. No means of forward propulsion. Just flying. He could see all this, smell it, even feel it, as clear as day. These were things like nothing he’d seen on Earth, but not completely different either; they were foreign, yet familiar.
It was a magnificent dream to have, especially while flying in the stark beauty of Supertime, heading for the Outer Fringe. But the dream had a catch: Whenever he was in it, Hunter could not stop flying. The dream did not provide him with a hover mode. He had to keep moving, relishing the vision below, but never being able to stop and touch it. Never able to put his feet on the ground.
He came to realize, after having the strange dream every night for the first month the journey Outward, that this place he was flying over must have been his home.
The more times Hunter had the dream, the more elaborate it became.
Every once and a while he’d spot a flag down below that looked just like the one in his pocket.
Sometimes he thought he even saw the girl whose picture he carried with him. Blond, beautiful, she always seemed to be running through a field in slow motion. But again this blessing was a curse. Hunter never could stop long enough to see if the colors and patterns of the flag on the ground were exactly the same as the one in his pocket. He never could stop long enough to see if the girl running in slow motion through the field was the same girl in his faded photograph.
All he could do was look — and fly on.
Still, Hunter came to have a strange appreciation of the dream. Some nights he looked forward to having it. Some nights he went to his quarters early just so he could have it. It evolved to a point where he was sometimes able to slow his speed down to a crawl, almost a hover, and get to within a few feet of the surface.
But anytime he would try to touch the ground, he would suddenly find himself awake.
Then one night, the recurring dream took a very strange turn. He was flying as usual when he spotted the flag flying near the top of a pole in a small town square. And this time, when he tried to hover, he found he was actually able to stop. And when he tried to get close to the surface, he found he was actually able to land.
And upon touching his feet to the ground, he felt the same electric jolt as when he first stepped on Earth.
In the dream he ran up to the flagpole to find an elderly man hoisting up a multicolored ensign. This flag was exactly like the one Hunter carried in his pocket, exactly like the symbol he’d seen on the side of the failed Mars polar lander. Yet it was stained with blood.
And the man at the pole?
It was Calandrx.
“Am I finally home, my brother?” Hunter asked him.
Calandrx just smiled.
“You are very close,” he replied. “But she can tell you more.”
Hunter turned to see a blond girl running toward him from a nearby field. He resisted the temptation to run toward her and lift her up in a slow-motion embrace. Instead he studied her closely as she ran toward him. Yes, she had blond hair. Yes, she was beautiful.
But she was not the person whose picture he carried in his pocket. In fact, he knew who she was.
It was Xara.
She reached him, looked up at him, smiled, and hugged him tightly. He hugged her back.
Then she whispered in his ear: “The lighthouse is on the last place anyone can be…”
She laughed. Calandrx laughed. But when Hunter started to ask her for more information, she kissed him… and then he woke up.
The dream stopped coming to him after that.
Hunter and his crew reached the Fifth Arm of the Outer Fringe and wandered its vast expanse for the next five months.
He went about his mission of reclaiming planets for the Fourth Empire, but always with the ulterior motive of finding the lighthouse not very far from his mind. In that time, the AeroVox rediscovered sixteen new star systems and sixty-eight new worlds. With each new planet he popped into, either covertly or like a bolt from the blue, Hunter tried to feel the kinship bond with the inhabitants that seemed to be promised in the war poem. But though many of the people he met were gracious, hospitable, and friendly — that is, after they realized they were, in essence, being invaded from outer space — none of them looked like him, talked like him, or was anything at all similar to him. Without the dream to count on, it made for some long nights.
In that time, though, whenever they had a chance, Hunter, Erx, and Berx would pore over the ancient map, sometimes for hours on end, trying to translate more closely the sketchy, two-thousand-year-old data. All three had reread the war poem many times as well, trying to appreciate any subtleties they might have missed. They came to the conclusion that the lighthouse probably wasn’t a “house” as would normally be thought of, or some entity that somehow was made entirely of light. According to the best translation they could come up with, the lighthouse seemed to be more of a beacon, something to call “the lost souls” home. It was probably an automated device, constructed hundreds if not thousands of years before it struck the base of the Mars polar lander. There also was a good chance that it was no longer operating; one line in the poem suggested it had been shut down centuries before. This, too, could make Hunter’s nights seem endless.
Still his mission went on; he continued doing the job he’d been sent out here to do. They followed the reclamation list drawn up by the X-Forces high command, and for the most part, the AeroVox found and visited the planets on this list and more or less stuck to the timetable that went along with it. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was not. Many sectors in this part of the Outer Fringe, Fifth Arm, had not seen any Empire presence since the last Dark Age. Some people out here knew of the Empire only by word of mouth or rumors; others accepted it as fact. Still others didn’t even know space travel was possible or that the stars above them were inhabited and the Galaxy was teeming with life.
It was a strange time then. Hunter’s job during these months was essentially to be the first visitor from outer space some of these planets had seen in thousands of years. What an odd profession, to be the first “alien” to visit a world in several millennia. Sometimes the population reacted positively; sometimes not.
The whole Empire-returning thing went so much easier when the populace had an inkling that they were not alone in the universe. Past contact that survived in history, or even crashed ships from previous empires, or even the early part of this one, could all soften the blow when the AeroVox suddenly appeared in orbit around their world.
In all, they been forced to intervene in three major wars and a handful of smaller ones. These campaigns rarely lasted more than a day or two after the AeroVox arrived, though.
There were ten thousand highly skilled and highly specialized X-Forces troops on board the starship.
Their firepower and combat technology were always vastly superior to that found on the planet in question, plus the troops were as much in the business of helping out populations of reclaimed planets as fighting them. Once it was determined which side was being oppressed in any conflict they came upon, the X-Forces troops would intervene on the side of the underdog, and the war would end soon after that.
They’d ridded half a dozen planets of space pirates and other assorted scum in this manner. Some of the fighting had been bitter, some relatively light. Some populations welcomed them with open arms, some were fearful, some panicked. But the social scientists and the diplomats assigned to Hunter’s ship were also top-notch. Through a combination of these efforts, most of the reclamation missions went smoothly.
Until they came to a planet called Guam 7.
This was a place where the Empire was known, a place that was supplying a good part of the Outer Fringe Fifth Arm with weapons to continue the thousands of wars being fought throughout the tens of thousands of star systems in the sector.
The AeroVox’s special ops soldiers seized the planet’s one and only major city — the place called Nails — without firing a shot. They quickly established martial law, ending the out-of-control weapons trade but allowing the distillation and distribution of slow-ship wine to continue.
In the course of this action, Hunter’s troops came upon two of the planet’s biggest weapons dealers.
During a routine interrogation these two men passed on their story about a strange conversation they’d had with a priest who was looking for weapons for a beleaguered band of mercenaries facing long odds in the most isolated point in the Galaxy: the Dead Gulch System. A fierce war was being fought on a tiny moon there, orbiting the last planet.
“The last place anyone could be…” was their direct quote.
Hunter immediately tried to locate the Dead Gulch star system, not an easy task in this part of the Galaxy.
Even the people in Nails weren’t exactly sure where it was. Finally Hunter’s men tracked down some other individuals who had spoken with the priest that day. They indicated the priest had traveled twenty-two star systems to get to Guam 7. Hunter went to the ancient maps again, started doing calculations, and eventually found it, the last place anyone could go before plunging into the forbidden depths of intergalactic space: the Dead Gulch system.
And here he found the last moon spinning around the last planet and discovered that the name of this place was Zazu-Zazu.
And that’s why he was here on this fateful day.
But just as in his dream, there was a catch…
By the time Hunter’s aircraft settled into a hover over the main square of Qez, a large crowd of astonished civilians had gathered below.
He lowered himself into the center of the square, inducing gasps from the crowd and sending some fleeing in panic. They had never seen a machine such as his before. Wings, wheels, a tail section, the long, sleek body bulked up by Z weapons and bomb racks— this was an alien craft to them.
Hunter touched the ground, felt only a slight electric jolt, then popped his canopy and climbed out. The crowd took a collective step backward. They had seen visitors from space before, both welcome and unwelcome, but no one who looked like him. In a place where bald was beautiful — at least for the male population — and thin wasn’t exactly in, Hunter’s overgrown
mane and lean physique marked him as different right away. But after bouncing around the Outer Fringe for the past few months, he was used to this reaction by now.
He scanned the faces in the crowd, trying to locate a high-ranking officer or someone in authority. Finally a man in a bright red uniform pushed his way through, followed by several heavily armed soldiers. Hunter saluted the officer, then held his hands out in front of him palms up, the traditional gesture of peace in the Galaxy. The officer looked wary but signaled his men to lower their weapons.
A fierce barrage of X-beam fire hit the north wall not a second later, sending the rest of the civilians scattering.
“We need to go somewhere and talk!” Hunter yelled to the officer in the midst of the confusion. “Right now.”
He was rushed to the nearby war room, dodging all kinds of flying debris as the Nakkz started pounding the city’s walls again. Their army might have been stalled, along with their supertank, but apparently this was not going to stop their long-range gunners from pummeling the city while their main forces regrouped.
About a dozen Home Guard officers were in the war room praying over a well-worn battle map when Hunter walked in. There were also some very nervous-looking civilians on hand, no doubt part of the city’s government. Every head turned and looked up at him as he entered, their eyes a mixture of weariness and surprise.
“This is the man who stopped the enemy’s attack,” the escorting officer told the group. “He has a fabulous machine parked right outside.”
Their faces brightened — he was undoubtedly their hero of the moment. But Hunter already knew that these were not the people he was looking for. Just like every other person he’d met out on the Fringe, they looked different from him. He felt no spark, no immediate sense of kinship with them.
His heart sank.
Another dead end.
Finally Poolinex, the top Home Guard officer, stepped forward. He thanked Hunter profusely for his actions above the battlefield just minutes before, but then asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Just who the hell are you?”