Planet America s-2

by Mack Maloney

  Erx and Berx gave Calandrx the high sign now. The meaning was clear. It would be up to "Uncle Petz" to do the actual hand-holding. The pilot shrugged, then sat down next to Xara on the couch. And indeed, he took her hand in his. It felt incredibly soft.

  "May I ask you all a question?" she resumed with a sniff.

  All three men solemnly nodded yes.

  "Do you believe the notion that the farther we go out into the Galaxy, the more we will learn about the empires that have passed?"

  All three nodded, Calandrx with authority. "/ certainly do, my lady," he said.

  "Why do you believe so?" she asked.

  Calandrx shrugged — a bit impolite maybe. "Because it is true, my lady. The farther we look out there, the more we look back into time. The more we look, the more we find evidence of the three previous empires. Scant evidence, but evidence, nonetheless. With each planet that's reclaimed, we see the handiwork of our predecessors, their footprints in the dirt, their fingerprints on civilizations, some of whom haven't the slightest idea what went on in their history before. And neither do we, really. That's why it's so important."

  "But that's the problem, isn't it?" she asked with a sniff. "That as a race, in this time, this place in history, we are so obsessed with our past?"

  She addressed Calandrx directly. "I know that in addition to being a great warrior, Petz, you read the poets from the previous ages."

  Calandrx did a slight bow. "Reading and understanding are two different things, my lady—"

  "No need to be modest, Uncle," she said. "Just tell me: What do the poets say about this? Is our obsession with the ancients healthy? Is it just in our human nature to want to know? Or are we just like the adopted child, never resting until all is known— good or bad — about the past?"

  Calandrx just stared back at her for a long moment. He couldn't help it. He was more than mildly astonished that such a question would come from the lips of an Imperial Family member, a clan not exactly known for intellectual prowess.

  "Dear Princess, I believe the answer to your question lies somewhere in between," he said finally. "True, we may be obsessed, but it's still important to know."

  She dabbed her eyes again.

  "I agree," she said. "And that means that I single-handedly signed Hunter's death warrant."

  There was a real gush of tears now as Calandrx, Erx, and Berx exchanged worried glances. What was she talking about?

  More eye dabbing. "What I have to tell you cannot leave this room," she said, trying to rescue some mascara that was running down her cheek.

  "We promise," Calandrx said, squeezing her hand tighter.

  "I am the one responsible for Hawk being lost," she suddenly blurted out. "After he and I met, and he told me the few clues he had as to where he might have come from — before being found on that ridiculously desolate planet — I uncovered an emblem on an ancient spacecraft that was found many years ago deep in the ice up on Mars. It was the same design as the flag that Hunter always carries with him… You've seen his ancient piece of cloth?"

  All three men nodded. "The flag is a series of white and red stripes, with a field of stars set in blue," Calandrx said.

  "Yes, and so was this emblem that I showed to him," Xara went on. "And I told him something else as well — something that is such an Imperial secret, I'm not sure my father even knows."

  She took a deep breath.

  "Our scientists many years ago were able to interpret a slight burn mark that is evident on this spacecraft in the ice," she said. "They determined that it is the result of a very long-range scanning device which, if understood properly, would lead a person to a place called the 'lighthouse.' It was a beacon of sorts, calling all those once familiar with that flag to come home… That's where I think Hunter went. To find his lost home…"

  She looked at them, more tears about to cascade from her eyes.

  "Don't you see?" she said. "I'm the one who urged him to take the X-Forces' commission so he could go to deep space. 7 gave him the means by which he is now a fugitive. Now, if they catch him, he will be worse than dead — and it will be all my fault."

  The three men stayed frozen in place. All three knew pieces of the story Xara had just told them, though they hadn't been aware just how involved she was in the beginning of Hunter's quest.

  "You did what you thought was a noble act," Calandrx finally told her. "Every person must know his past. You were just helping a lost soul find his home. It was an honorable thing to do."

  "Besides, Hunter is very clever," Erx said. "Should someone catch up to him and return him for trial, he would very smartly argue his case. The worst sentence is not a foregone conclusion. Others have beaten it before."

  "But you don't understand." Xara began sobbing again. "Those that are now in pursuit of him — their goal is not to bring him back for being AWOL. They are worried what he might uncover if he finds what he is looking for — and they will kill him before he does."

  Now dead silence fell on the room. The Empire killing one of its own officers? Even the darkest elements of the imperial military were never accused of that.

  They were all quiet for a very long time. The fire was roaring, but they barely felt its heat.

  Finally Xara said, "There is really only one thing that can be done to help Hunter."

  "Please my lady," Calandrx said. "Just tell us, and we will do it."

  She looked at all three of them. At that moment, they would have jumped over the moon for her.

  Well, almost…

  "You must find him," she finally said to them.

  All three were stunned.

  Find Hunter? How?

  Calandrx looked at the others. They appeared as shocked as he. Suddenly, this had changed from imperial hand-holding to… well, to what exactly?

  They had no idea where Hunter was. And they knew there was a good chance Hunter didn't know where he was himself! He was most likely in some part of the Galaxy not under control of the Fourth Empire. And how does one exactly go about looking for a person out in the vast fringes of space? Especially one who probably doesn't want to be found?

  But all three men were soldiers, and this was their Princess. They were supposed to do anything she asked, simply for the honor of it.

  "But I'm afraid that this is a mission of desperation that I am sending you on," she said. "One fraught with danger for you as well."

  "What do you mean, my lady?" Calandrx asked her.

  "I've heard whisperings," she confessed. "And the things I hear are rather frightening. The foundation of the Empire itself may be at stake here. And that is not good for us, nor is it good for Hunter."

  The three men weren't sure what she meant.

  "You will not be the only ones looking for him," she explained again. "In fact, others have already gotten a head start."

  She paused and wiped her eyes again.

  "I can provide you with a fast ship," she finally resumed. "And safe passage through any sector of the reclaimed Galaxy. I can arrange for the best star charts. The best intelligence."

  Suddenly it seemed as if the big room got a bit brighter, as if the Earth had just wobbled a bit on its axis. Calandrx began to say something but stopped. Erx and Berx bit their tongues as well.

  A long pause.

  "Just find him first… please." Xara told them.

  The men bowed deeply. Rascals three.

  "We will, my lady," Calandrx said, hiding a smile. "Or die trying…"

  6

  Hunter slipped the flying machine into orbit around the small planet, then reached back into his cockpit and shook Pater Tomm awake.

  "Are we there yet?" the priest asked sleepily.

  "If Klaaz's directions were right, this should be the place," Hunter replied.

  The planet below was called Bazooms. It orbited a yellow star known simply as BDG, short for Big Dan's Girl. The star system was located roughly below the elbow of the Five-Arm, in an isolated sector of the fifth spiral known as the Twis
t.

  They'd reached BDG about three hours after leaving the dirty snowball of Tonk. Once inside the system, it was not hard to locate the planet in question. BDG was a rather boring collection of uninhabited rocks orbiting a dull sun. Only Bazooms showed evidence of past life.

  An ancient image called up on Hunter's quadtrol showed the planet once shimmered with the bright glow of circus colors: red, green, and yellow. Its atmosphere was once cobalt blue. Thousands of ultrabright beacons, not unlike the powerful zasers of Earth, had flashed crazily in all directions, their beams reaching beyond the edges of the star system.

  At one time, Bazooms was a place to be. Essentially an orbiting brothel, the planet was once a very high-end resort where only the richest and most fortunate citizens could stay and play. All that had changed a few dozen centuries before — or at least that's what Hunter's hand-held quadtrol was saying. It predicted that Bazooms would be as dull and dark as everything else floating around the moribund system. The wash of time and events had passed this place by. Its current status was listed as "unknown."

  A good place if someone wanted to hide out.

  It took some digging during the first hour of the flight, but Tomm had managed to scan his own quadtrol's distant memory bubbles for information on Zarex Red.

  And the Klaaz had been right again. Zarex Red was no ordinary arms runner. True, at one time, he'd provided weapons to literally thousands of warring parties all over the middle regions of the vast Five-Arm. In fact, about a hundred years before, Zarex Red had no less than sixteen planets stockpiled with his war-making merchandise. So many people wanted in on the dealing, his home-base solar system had been prone to space-traffic jams around its innermost orbits. War had been big business on the Five-Arm for centuries. At the peak of his career, Zarex was probably one of the biggest dealers on the entire Fringe.

  But after he'd made his fortune, Zarex Red gave up his edgy life as an arms merchant and became, of all things, a deep-space explorer. Using his profits to finance numerous expeditions, he had visited the farthermost reaches of the outer Five-Arm, way out beyond the Last Star Fields, even beyond the Final Stream. The memory bubbles in Tomm's quadtrol claimed, insisted even, that Zarex had journeyed farther out on the Five-Arm than anyone else had ever dared.

  Tomm's quadtrol also confirmed that Zarex Red was last reported to be living on Bazooms, "retired from all positions."

  Now viewed from a lower orbit, the remains on Bazooms looked to be everything its name and reputation had implied. It was a small world, just a couple thousand miles or so in circumference, with rocky highlands north and south of a tropic equator. The two large landmasses were covered with hundreds of fantastically old structures. Palaces, resorts, casinos, sky-scraping hotels, not decayed, just abandoned. Cities once bathed in garish lights now unlit and dark. Thousands of artificial lakes, rivers, and lagoons, and one entire sea, dried up. Just about every square inch of level terrain had been taken up at one time with a hedonistic establishment of some kind. But now the planet appeared to be dead. Desolate. One big ghost town.

  Yet, switching over to his long-range scanner, Hunter saw the barest glimmer of light coming from a spot on the larger of the two landmasses, just north of the equator. It came over as a patch of color in the otherwise gray background. There was a bit of life still left down there.

  Or so it seemed.

  Hunter set the flying machine's auto-scan on high, and after a few passes he got a closer blink on the life signs below. Nestled into the side of a high peak about two hundred miles north of the planet's equator was another palace of sorts, built with seven spires and a large artificial lake in the middle. Hunter booted his azimuth and was soon in a low orbit just ninety-five miles above this place. According to the scanner, only one life-form was left on Bazooms. All alone, right below them.

  Hunter suggested Tomm strap down in his cramped jump seat; at the same time he ran a few environmental checks on the planet's climatic conditions. Unlike so many planets way out here, Bazooms's puff status was stable. The surface temperature was seventy-two degrees, the atmosphere itself was holding at a constant 92 percent. This meant the weather was fine and the air was good.

  But Hunter's instruments revealed an atmospheric oddity as well. Like every other planet and moon in the Galaxy, Bazooms's atmosphere was the essential mix of nitrogen and oxygen. But Hunter had also detected a trace of the gas nitrous oxide — laughing gas. In fact, back in the planet's heyday, there had been two facilities, one at each pole, pumping N2O into the atmosphere on a constant basis. Hunter had to laugh at this. Apparently, the people who ran this place felt that if the perfect weather, the landscape, and the palatial resorts weren't enough to please you, maybe the spiked atmosphere would.

  Breathe deep and go with the flow, Hunter thought now. Not bad advice…

  They finally burned in through the atmosphere, setting down on a flat piece of ground located right outside the main gates of the resort. But something was strange here. There was only sup-posed to be one person living down on the surface — Hunter's scanning devices had told him so. Yet they could hear the sound of many voices coming from the other side of the resort's wall. People talking, laughing, pealing with delight. The sound of water cascading, glasses clinking, the staccato popping of many slow-ship wine bottles coming to life. Music blaring — it was the unmistakable din of a 'cloud party in full blast.

  "Either my scans are skewed," Hunter said to Tomm once they'd climbed out of the flying machine. "Or a couple hundred people in there just woke up from the dead."

  Tomm just shrugged. "Sometimes things aren't always as they appear," he said.

  There was another thing: The high-walled resort appeared much grander up close. From this perspective, just a hundred feet from the main gate, the seven towers spiraling above the resort seemed to reach into orbit themselves. The valley below them was shimmering in an amazing shade of green. The sky was an absolute crystal blue. Or was it?

  Pater Tomm took in a deep breath and smiled. So did Hunter.

  Suddenly the place looked even better.

  "Must be the air," the priest said with a laugh.

  Hunter secured the flying machine inside his Twenty 'n Six and they walked through the main gate of the resort.

  The place was buzzing with activity, contrary to what the scans had implied. There was a swimming pool the size of a small ocean just inside the gate. It was surrounded by a bevy of bathing beauties that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. Hunter and Tomm walked past the pool, not eliciting as much as a curious smirk from any within the curvaceous collective. Up the grand steps, they entered the expansive lobby of the resort's main tower. Like the pool, the lobby was jammed with hundreds of beautiful, young, scantily clad women.

  There was a huge floating desk in the middle of this hall; it seemed to be the center of this little universe. Six gorgeous women in white tunic uniforms were sitting behind it. Unlike the girls at the pool, they seemed aware that two oddly dressed strangers were suddenly among them. They eyed Hunter's unique Empire uniform first, then the priest's cassock and collar.

  "Are you two lost?" one of the females asked.

  Hunter began to say something when Tomm nudged him aside. "Let me handle this," he said.

  The priest studied each girl for a moment, then stood before a rather stunning blonde. Without a word, he reached across the desk and with the back of his hand, lightly stroked the skin above the girl's breasts. He let his fingers travel up to the nape of her neck, finally resting them on her cheek. The girl did not move; she did not object. She just sat there and smiled.

  "Exquisite work," Tomm whispered. "If only…"

  He turned back to Hunter, who was clearly puzzled.

  "Isn't that called 'copping a feel,' Padre?" Hunter asked him.

  Tomm just shrugged and turned back to the six girls. "We're looking for someone named Zarex Red."

  All six females laughed at once. "Sorry," one finally said. "He doesn't t
ake visitors."

  "So he is here then?" Tomm asked.

  "He is," another replied. "But he is a very busy man. We have instructions not to allow anyone to—"

  "You can counter those instructions," Tomm told the girl firmly. "Beam us up to his room right now — and that's an order."

  Without a moment's hesitation, she smiled and pushed a button.

  Flash!

  The next thing Hunter knew, he and Tomm had popped into the entranceway of an enormous three-tiered penthouse.

  It took him a moment to realize they were atop the resort's tallest spire. The room looked like a miniature palace. The main rooms were all circular and lined with windows throughout. Even the floor was made out of glass, creating the illusion that everything up here was just floating on air. No matter which way one turned, the view was awesome.

  They took a few tentative steps inside. The interior of the main room was as impressive as the view. There was lots of crystal. Lots of diamonds. And lots of girls. Some reclined on the dozens of couches strewn about the penthouse. Others sat on pillows on the floor. Still others simply floated around aimlessly, with little more to do than look beautiful.

  "I'll give him one thing," Hunter said, surveying the big room. "This guy knows how to hide out."

  Tomm just shrugged. "Remember, though, all might not be as it appears."

  "Yeah," Hunter replied. "You keep saying that."

  At the far end of the main room, a large veranda protruded mightily from the side of the tower. There was a floating couch located on this balcony, and it was surrounded by another dozen girls so gorgeous, they made all the beauties inside pale a bit in comparison, if that was possible.

  The balcony girls were in various stages of undress. Their undivided attention was being directed at the figure lying on the couch. Several girls were stroking his head, others his back, his chest, his legs. Still others were hovering around his nether regions.