by Mack Maloney
"He's not only my best 'bot," Zarex told Hunter and Tomm, "but he's my bodyguard as well. I have found him extremely useful in the past. I would like him out of his box and at my side for the entire journey ahead. He might even come in handy for what is before us."
Hunter studied the robot standing just a few feet away. He was a danker, that is, a robot who had two arms, two legs, one head, and a body in the shape of an average man, but who made no pretense of looking like a human being, as some other more upscale robots did.
This danker's ID was 33418. Bright gold in color, he had an eerily blank face, a small speaker for a mouth, and a thick red visor that served as his visual system. He looked old and slow, and if the gun-shy explorer wanted him out 24/7, someone who would take up a lot of space, especially in flight.
"I'm not sure about this," Hunter started to say. "We can use your help where we are going, but—"
"He is an excellent pilot," Zarex said of the robot.
Hunter shrugged. "But my space craft is unique; I'm afraid I am the only one who can figure its controls."
"Well, he is also an outstanding navigator."
Hunter motioned to Pater Tomm. "The padre is one of the best. I would hate to see both their talents wasted by an overlapping of duties."
"But he's also a mechanic, a translator of odd tongues…"
Hunter just shook his head. "I can fix my own aircraft, and Pater Tomm speaks in many tongues."
But Zarex was determined. "At the very least, let me give you a demonstration," he said.
Finally, Hunter relented.
Zarex flashed a brief smile of victory, then snapped his fingers. A tiny control panel materialized out of nowhere. It was wobbly on arrival. Zarex touched the main bus, and the rest of the control panel lit up. Another panel touched, and the robot suddenly blinked to life. His arms tensed, the visor covering his mechanical eyes narrowed a bit. A soft whirring could be heard coming from its chest.
"Behold, my friends," Zarex said, pressing the first of the control panel's trio of red lights.
A small storm of sparks erupted beneath the robot's big metal feet. There was a loud bang and a mighty puff of smoke. Then, suddenly, the robot lifted off the ground and shot straight up at eye-blistering speed, deep into the very blue sky. The robot quickly reached a height of nearly two thousand feet, then very slowly turned over. Arms now tucked into his sides, his jaw sticking straight out, he began a dive so fast and so steep, he cracked the sound barrier, registering a boom that reverberated off the nearby mountains. The robot zoomed right past them, banked hard left, then leveled out about four feet above the ground. An instant later, he pulled up again and did a kind of power loop over the remains of the recently destroyed resort, very noisy, very smoky, but also very, very quickly. The robot was moving extremely fast, yet was taking turns and cutting angles with incredible finesse.
Zarex pushed the second red button and in a flash, the robot looped again, came screaming down at them, pulling up at the last possible instant before coming to a stop in the exact position and on the exact same spot he'd left just seconds before. Zarex pushed the third red button. Suddenly, the robot's head turned and his eye visor lifted up, revealing a deeply glowing red lens beneath. An incredibly bright beam of purple red light burst from the lens, traveled across the valley, over the resort's shattered wall to another rugged mountain range beyond, a distance of at least five miles, where it exploded just below the top of the highest peak.
Hunter looked at Tomm, then at the robot, and then at Tomm again. Their jaws were hanging open. They were simply astonished.
"On second thought," Hunter said to Zarex. "Let's take him."
7
Despite the great distances involved and the profusion of uncharted or lost planets in between, there was a strong tradition of oral myth among the peoples of the Five-Arm.
Almost all of the epics passed down through the centuries involved wars fought along the Fringe or up and down the Five-Arm itself. The greatest myths always involved the classic duel between hero and villain. Sometimes the conflict was between two planets, sometimes between entire star clusters, or even clusters of star clusters. But no matter how big or how small, the moral of the story, always hiding right below the surface, was that even in conflict, honor wins out. Not only do the good guys always triumph, they are always magnanimous in victory and quick when it came time to forgive their foe.
This was an odd song to sing in this fragment of space, where at any given moment as many as a million wars might be in progress. The absolutely forgiving nature of the mythical warriors was a universal mystery; such a code of honor certainly didn't exist on any grand scale in real life here. Those scholars who chose to ponder such things always came to the same conclusion: that the idea of people treating each other with honor was a notion that had been practiced sometime back through the ages, and was now ingrained, if obviously repressed, in every soul on the Five-Arm. This was proof, the great minds said, that sometime during a history now long past, things had been better for the human condition. Respect and dignity must have prevailed.
By far, the most oft-told story, the classic myth of honor, was the legend of the Great Michael. It always began with a small planet in a small, very isolated star system. As the story went, this planet, sometimes called Myx, was a world that had been fought over for centuries by two rival planets, usually called the Whites and the Grays. Myx was said to be thick with jewels, aluminum, the so-called good stuff, and both planets claimed it belonged to them. In the legend, the Whites were always the nobler of the two planets; they simply wanted to mine Myx just enough to keep their people fed, healthy, and happy. The Grays, on the other hand, wanted to rape the planet, using the money to buy weapons so they could overcome smaller, defenseless planets nearby and create an empire for themselves.
So many wars had been fought over Myx, eventually all the good stuff had been blasted away. Yet the wars continued simply because the animosity between the two rivals was so strong, the cycle could not be broken. Even though they were literally fighting over nothing, even though the aggressive Grays always lost, the conflicts went on. Millions would die, a temporary peace would ensue, only to end when the Grays attacked the Whites again a generation later.
Then the Great Michael — sometimes called Michael the Angel — arrived on the scene. He was King of the Whites, and after fighting one extremely brutal war, he declared he had a solution to the never-ending wheel of violence. Instead of training a new army for the inevitable next war against the Grays, Michael built an army of robots instead. They looked like humans, walked, talked, fought, and died like humans. But there were no beating hearts involved, and when the robots bled, it was liquefied hydraulic gas; it just looked like blood.
The robots were programmed for a maximum degree of aggressiveness. They were also given a degree of self-replication. (Robots had been building other robots for thousands of years across the Galaxy.) When the next war erupted, the Whites sent their kick-ass robots to battle, won big, and invaded the Gray planet to boot. That's when the Great Michael forgave his enemy, and then, in a bit of intrigue, left behind the secret for building the realistic combat robots. The Grays got the point. When the two planets went at it again, the Grays sent an army of robots, too, and after a century or so of combat, the war finally ended in a draw. By that time, both sides were loathe to commit any live soldiers to the morass, and a cycle of preserving life took hold.
But the story didn't end there. In almost every retelling of the myth, it was said the robots were still fighting on Myx, untold centuries later. Or more accurately, they periodically rose up from the wreckage of the war-torn planet and fought each other again and again and again, with undiminished ferocity, until all were destroyed and fell back into heaps of wreckage, to sleep until it was time to rise again. The robots served as ethereal reminders of the folly of war. Mechanical souls who came back from the dead, unstoppable in their mission, to fight over and over, victims of their
own futility.
Robots as ghosts? It was a novel invention. But the myth had been retold many times in many variations among those ten million planets whose civilizations were aware of each other in the denser regions of the Five-Arm. It was supposed to serve as an enlightened morality play, something to remind the listener that peace among the stars was not a total impossibility.
But what people didn't know was that Myx was a real place, and that the planet could indeed be found very far out and very far away from the rest of the Five-Arm, and that it was a magical place as well, though not for reasons that were immediately apparent.
But where was it exactly? Only a handful of people in the entire Galaxy knew.
It just so happened that Zarex Red was one of them — or at least he thought he knew how to get here.
But as he told Hunter and Tomm, if they really wanted to find the Home Planets, they would have to find Myx first.
The voyage took almost a week.
The ghostly star system that held the mythical planet of Myx was almost fifteen thousand light-years away from Bazooms. Plus it was a trip that could not be done in a straight line. Space wasn't like that, not this far out on the Fringe. If the Fifth Arm was shaped like a slightly crooked arm, Bazooms was located just above the elbow. Tonk was just below. The moon of Zazu-Zazu, where Hunter first met Tomm and found the Freedom Brigade, was out on the tip of the outermost finger.
Myx was way out beyond the wrist, off the beaten track by nearly five hundred light-years. Zarex was fairly certain he could recall how to get there, but only by flying to a succession of isolated star systems, each one farther away from the other. Thus the trip featured long periods of streaking through absolutely empty space — or as absolutely empty as space could be.
The departure from Bazooms had not been immediate. Just as he had done when Pater Tomm joined him on the quest, Hunter made modifications to his flying machine in order to bring Zarex and his robot along. Wielding an electron torch like a painter wields a brush, Hunter elongated the flying machine's fuselage by six feet. Then he sculpted a flight compartment in this new space, one big enough to accommodate both Zarex's massive frame as well as his robot, 33418.
Hunter had also widened the plane's frame for two seats, two bunks, and more legroom. He added a superglass bubble on top to allow his friends to see where they were all going. Hunter programmed these changes into his electron torch's unlimited memory strings. This meant that with the mere push of a button and a steady hand, the aircraft could quickly revert back to its previous configuration.
They passed the six days of travel playing a game of chance Zarex had learned years before called Sh'exx. It involved a set of six dice played on a three-dimensional floating matrix. Randomly scattered within the matrix were a dozen tiny, temporary wormholes through which a player could lose his marker and as a result, his bet. As the location of the wormholes was always changing and always random, this was the ultimate game of chance. And of good timing. Just one day into the trip, Pater Tomm had lost all the money he had to his name to Zarex. By the third day, the priest had won it all back and had relieved Zarex of most of his aluminum chips as well. By the sixth day, Tomm was broke again. Zarex allowed 33418 to hold all his winnings.
Hunter spent most of the time driving the ship and taking in the sights along the way: blue stars, green stars, dead stars, and stars about to be born. They passed over, under, and through massive clouds of space dust, usually colored brilliant red or yellow, or sometimes, pure, angelic white.
One of the odd things about Hunter's flying machine and the way it quickly moved from one part of the Galaxy to another was that despite the incredible velocity, one could see other spaceships — both flying in Supertime and at the slower high warp ion speeds — as if they were going by them in slow motion. The laws of physics said that this was actually the opposite of what should be happening, and indeed, the same was not true for pilots of Empire Starcrashers. They went so fast, they could see only vessels that were also traveling like them, in Supertime. But Hunter had given up long ago trying to figure out why his craft acted the way it did. Sometimes he thought it might be better that he didn't know.
He kept a running count of other spacecraft he spotted during the journey, knowing that they could not see him. In six days, he counted just two dozen spacecraft, all of different sizes, all built in different variations of the triangular shape that permeated the Galaxy.
Each spaceship he saw was powered by ion-ballast engines and was not flying in Supertime, the mysterious extra dimensional star highway used exclusively by ships of the Fourth Empire. This was important information for Hunter. Should any member of the Empire's military cross paths with him out here, they would be duty bound to place him in chains and return him, if not to Earth, then to the closest imperial military post. This was something Hunter wanted to avoid at all costs, of course, so he was constantly on the lookout for ships of the Empire.
He saw none, though.
The one thing he had going in his favor was the near-total isolation of the part of the Galaxy he was flying in. The Five-Arm was considered isolated even by those people who lived there. Indeed, it was considered by many to be the last frontier of the Galaxy, the fringe beyond the fringe. Again, very few people out on the Five-Arm even knew of the existence of the Fourth Empire, or life on Earth, or even about Earth itself. For a ship as powerful as a massive Empire Starcrasher to suddenly arrive above their unsuspecting planet — well, of such things worldwide panics are made.
So Hunter knew if he did see an Empire ship cruising around out here, it would be a very unusual thing. That's why he kept his eyes open at all times.
They finally spotted Myx on the morning of the seventh day. It was a strange-looking place, the only world circling a yel-low blue star, which itself was the only star for light-years around. They were so far off the usual starways, it could be argued that this tiny system was not part of the Five-Arm at all. Its location also begged another question: If this was indeed the real Myx, where did the Whites and Grays come from?
Hunter drained off 99.999999018 percent of his speed and maneuvered the flying machine in toward the planet. A thick murk was rising into the atmosphere, nearly into orbit itself. The place looked shrouded in clouds, but in reality it was smoke. That was something else Zarex told them during the trip: Most of Myx was actually on fire.
"There are probably just a handful of people who know about this planet," Zarex said now, looking down at the absolutely weird world. "Of that handful, only a few are as crazy as me to fly all the way out here."
Tomm could only agree. "And I thought Zazu-Zazu was a lost rock," he said.
Hunter swooped beneath smoky cloud cover, leveled off at five hundred feet, and commenced his aerial recon. There really wasn't a lot of variation on the planet's surface, however. No matter what part of Myx they passed over, the scene was that of utter devastation. Entire cities, forests, valleys, mountains, all laid to waste. The wreckage of many giant weapons was also in evidence, including hundreds of ancient-looking multitubed blaster rays. They also sighted many large military installations; all of them blasted to bits. In many cases they were dotted with hundreds of solidified piles of white dust: incinerated soldiers that never even made it to the battlefield.
And everywhere were the robots.
From the highest mountains to the deepest valleys, in the heaviest debris of the cities and along the thousands of miles of front lines, there was the wreckage of millions of battle robots. It made the planet Tonk, which was strewn with thousands of junked ships, look like a tropical paradise by comparison.
It didn't take more than a few extremely low circumnavigations of the planet for the story to come together. This was hardly the battered but noble place described in the heroic myths. This was a dirty little planet, awash in destruction, centuries-old blood, and liquefied hydraulic gas. During his brief stint in the Empire's X-Forces, Hunter had seen many battle-scarred worlds, uncharted places
that looked so uninviting, his recommendation back to Earth was simple: "Avoid until necessary."
Still, he'd seen nothing that compared to this.
And there was more: To make a very treacherous place even worse, the entire planet was sown with mines, trip wires, and other exotic booby traps. Hunter's sensors indicated millions of these devices in place, from pole to pole, east to west, all over the vast battlefield. One wrong move down there, a sneeze, a burp, a dropped quadtrol, could set off every implanted weapon within a half-mile radius of the act, causing a massive chain reaction that was more than enough to perforate the offending party until they were nothing more than a zillion little pieces of subatomic dust.
Put it all together — the remote location, the haunting myth, the layers of dangerous junk below — and Myx was probably the last place anyone would want to land. Throw in the millions of skeletons, well-preserved and bleached by cosmic rays, rivers that literally ran in the color of blood, the near-poisonous atmosphere and, for good measure, several pyramids that had been built eons ago — well, the result was probably the most inhospitable planet in the Galaxy.
Yet Zarex had been there once before and lived to tell the tale. He'd delivered a weapons load to the planet seventy years before, in the heyday of his arms-dealing career. At the time, his buyer was unknown to him, and the contract, for several thousand used blaster rifles, had been given to him after passing through more than a dozen separate hands.
He didn't stay around long enough to unravel the real secret of Myx. Per his buyer's instructions, he'd brought the arms cache down to a prearranged coordinate packaged in a Twenty 'n Six. Zarex waited not even a minute when the cache disappeared and his payment materialized. He left quickly after that, completing the strangest deal he'd ever done.
