The Fourth Empire s-3

by Mack Maloney

  The only planet revolving around Starry Town's sun was the rundown, world of Megiddo. It was about one-third the size of Earth, a formerly-ringed gas giant reduced to its core by the Ancient Engineers thousands of years before and turned into a tropical paradise of sorts. Though it was a reclaimed gas bag, the surface of Megiddo was not smooth and uniform. Rather, it was pockmarked with faux river valleys and mountain ranges. Seven artificial seas dominated its equatorial regions; ice caps sat at its poles. It had one moon, Bad News 666, which was totally avoided because it contained a pyramid.

  Megiddo was a very odd place—skitt-zo was the word used in the old days. Sometime in the distant past, the planet must have served as a resort for the biggest wigs of the Moraz Star Cloud. It was studded with ancient villas and seaside resorts at the equator, winter chalets and burned-ice castles to the north. Many of these places had been reclaimed by some of the star cloud's quietly nefarious types, and so the idea of a floating paradise had persisted.

  But the planet was also the site of several huge ship repair facilities, more than a few hidden pirate bases and, to remove the last piece of glamour from the place, it was also home to the largest penitentiary in the star cloud. At Megiddo's south pole, there was a place called Big Rocks. Nearly 500,000 convicted criminals were kept here. Murderers and rapists mostly, they were the worst of this part of the Two Arm. All were facing execution.

  Megiddo also had a strategic value, simply because of its location. It was the last planet outbound before reaching Thirty Star Pass, the narrow space lane that went directly through an unusually tight band of thirty stars. After that, the Two Arm really began thinning out; the distances between star systems increased dramatically, and the number of those star systems and habitable planets in between decreased just as fast. The Fourth Empire rarely visited this part of the Milky Way; there was no reason to. Still, Megiddo was a crossroads of sorts and had been fought over many times in the Galaxy's long history. To someone coming down the Two Arm, it was the doorstep to the more populated middle part of the second swirl.

  And after that, it was only a three-day journey by Star-crasher to Earth itself.

  The capital of Megiddo was a place called Needle City.

  It was so named because the presidential palace was a sky needle built nearly three miles high. It looked down on an expansive beachfront city and could be seen on the other side of the Sea of Green, an esthetic preserved from the gas giant days, for which Needle City provided most of the western coastline.

  Needle City was a rowdy, frequently violent place, full of gambling dens, holo-girl palaces, and cloud bars. A poor man's Cubes, it was populated mostly by space punks who'd somehow come by enough aluminum chips to live here and not mind sucking in the occasional lungful of stray, leftover methane gas.

  It was also a place where an outlaw could lay low without much concern from the local authorities. The planet cops had their hands full keeping the lid on Big Rocks to the south and the string of pirate bases out west. Needle City was the least of their concerns. That's why it was known as a great hideout, somewhere to become anonymous until the heat cooled down.

  But now, the ships were leaving it in droves.

  Dressed in full regalia, Joxx beamed down directly to the spire that gave Needle City its name. Three of his best intelligence officers traveled with him.

  Their destination was the official residence of Alfx Sheez, presidential ruler of Megiddo. Sheez was a typical Two Arm politician. About 250 years old, overweight, and perpetually sweaty, he was also quite wealthy from the bribes and kickbacks that went along with having a half million dangerous criminals sitting on one part of his planet and a number of pirating groups residing on another. When Joxx and his entourage arrived in his huge office, Sheez was packing his bags with money.

  He barely looked up as the Solar Guards contingent materialized. He waved them away almost immediately.

  "Excuse me, oh exalted ones," Sheez said hurriedly. "But I don't have time for the Fourth Empire at the moment."

  He began emptying out his desk of coins and gemstones. In the background, several of his staff officers were doing the same thing.

  "The last ship of any size is leaving this dump in one hour, and I intend to be on it. So my apologies but—"

  "What is going on here?" Joxx roared at him.

  Sheez at last looked up at Joxx as if to say: Just how thick are you?

  "Haven't you noticed that my entire planet is bugging out?" he replied acidly.

  "We've seen similar things all along the star belt," Joxx told him. "But why is it happening? Why the panic?"

  Sheez emptied a drawer full of holo-girl capsules into his bag.

  "A horde of marauders is making its way down the Two Arm," he told Joxx directly. "They've already conquered hundreds of sleazeball planets farther up, and they've been chasing the dregs of the galaxy in our direction… along with billions of refugees. Apparently there is no stopping these Huns. They have a huge army, at least a hundred ships, and have shown little mercy for anyone in their way. And this is probably the next place they will hit. I don't want to be around when that happens."

  He looked up at Joxx and added, "I suggest that you don't stick around, either."

  Joxx's intelligence officers exchanged a few worried looks. They were much farther up the Two Arm than they would have liked.

  Not so their boss.

  "We are here to represent the interests of the Emperor and the Fourth Empire," Joxx told Sheez. "These are matters that have some importance to us."

  He looked around at Sheez's staff officers. Several had already packed their bags and were blinking out without so much as a farewell.

  "Has anyone tried to stop these marauders, as you call them?"

  Sheez stuffed a stack of gold notes into his valise. "I don't know anvone so foolish." he said.

  "Who are they then?" Joxx asked him.

  The rotund president just shook his head as he sorted out bags of aluminum chips.

  "No one knows who they are, Joxx," he replied hastily. "But I can tell you who they are not."

  Joxx sat down in the nearest hovering chair. "Please, enlighten me," he said.

  "They are not some bunch of mooks, like the Banndx Gang, thrown together by an overachieving pirate leader," Sheez told him. "These people are organized, well-trained, millions in number, and very heavily armed. That equals unstoppable in my book. I've been through hundreds of pirate wars out here, and usually their alliances fade away just as soon as everyone's belly gets filled. This time it's different. This is not an army of thieves coming this way. They are doing this for reasons other than money. I hear they are actually leaving money behind. People like that scare me, frankly."

  He dumped a box of comet diamonds into his bag.

  Joxx eyed him queerly. "How is it that you have so much information on these marauders?"

  Sheez finally stopped packing, but just for a moment.

  "Because two days ago, someone who saw what was happening up there, crashed down here," he said. "He gave us the latest dope."

  Joxx was intrigued. "Who was he? One of our agents?"

  "He's no one to your liking, I'm sure of that."

  Joxx leaned forward and put his electric saber across Sheez's bag, effectively halting the packing process for good.

  "And why not?" Joxx asked him.

  "Because," Sheez replied. "He is an ion mover."

  9

  The northernmost regions of Meglddo were blanketed with two inches of dirty snow every day.

  Although this was supposed to be a polar region, the weather was fairly mild. If there were roughly five million people on Megiddo at any given time, not counting the inmates down south, about a third of them could be found within shouting distance of the north pole. Some of the grandest chalets in the north had survived the ages, and many were now owned by a Cosa Nostra of enterprising space trash.

  It was at one of these alpine resorts that the ion mover's star humper m
ade a crash landing.

  He came in on a X-66 pocket rocket. Or at least something built to look like an X-66. Five hundred feet long, two hundred feet at its widest, it was shaped like a wedge, of course, but was one of the smallest vessels flying. It had punctured the planet's puff with no problem, clipping two snow peaks on the way down. Slamming into a jagged ice field, it finally came to rest just a few feet away from the entrance to an immense resort owned by the Spuz-Nix, one of Megiddo's largest crime families.

  Security troops rushed to the scene and managed to pull the pilot out of the wreck before the subatomics blew it up for good. The guards brought the man to a small hospital within the resort, but the doctors refused to treat him; this, after the man confessed to being an ion mover, someone who made a living picking up ion waste from scattered spaceports and disposing of it, usually by blasting it into the nearest sun.

  Many ion movers were drunkards, or mentally disturbed, or at least on their way to madness. Because they were soaked through with all kinds of nasty radiation, they were usually solitary beings, plying vast distances between star systems in their poky star trucks, collecting the most worthless material in the Galaxy.

  But many also possessed a strange power, a kind of dark clairvoyance. They had the ability to predict the near future, but only in the worst possible light. They could only foresee bad things, some in a manner so strong, it was said, they couldn't lie about their visions if they tried. Stories were told about ancient star commanders who would keep an ion mover locked up in a cage close by, simply so he could tell them when the battle was about to be lost. Just the presence of an ion mover during a conflict could throw an army's morale into a tailspin. Even holo-girls avoided them.

  Usually ion movers were very tight-lipped. This man was anything but. He didn't stop talking from the moment he was pulled from his crash to when the resort doctors reluctantly agreed to treat him. He was demanding an audience with the planet's highest officials, claiming he had some critical information to tell them. The future of the entire Two Arm depended on it.

  The doctors wanted no part of this, of course. The Families were getting ready to bug out of Megiddo, too. Had it been anyone else, they would have prescribed two blaster shots to the back of the head. But the truth was, when an ion mover claimed to be the bearer of news — any news— it was wise not to ignore him.

  So the chalet's security troops sent him south, to the planet intelligence center in Needle City. Here, he was cleaned up, given a cup of slow-ship wine, and then brought before President Sheez.

  He told Sheez his storv. which bv this time, confirmed every worst fear held by the rotund president and his men. Knowing that seats getting off Megiddo would really be at a premium now, even for the president, Sheez threw the ion mover in the jail located on the bottom floor of the needle and started making plans to clear out. He'd been behind bars ever since.

  But five minutes after Joxx's arrival on Megiddo, the prisoner found himself standing in Sheez's airy chamber once again.

  Joxx was sitting behind Sheez's desk now; his intelligence officers were sitting close by. Two guards deposited the prisoner before this panel, then quickly disappeared. The man was dirty, with long, matted hair and a scraggly beard. He was wearing a long, threadbare tunic that resembled a cargo sack. His face and hands still bore the cuts and bruises suffered in his crash landing. He seemed uncomfortable but not nervous.

  Joxx had never met an ion mover before, but he knew how to handle one, nevertheless. He stared at the man for a very long time then thundered, "Do you know who 1 am?"

  The prisoner just shrugged nonchalantly. "Are you some official from the Fourth Empire?"

  " 'Some official?' " Joxx mocked him. "I am hardly just 'some official.' "

  Joxx launched into a discourse about his favorite subject: himself. He detailed his various high commissions, his many space victories, his unique starship, and his very close relationship with the Emperor. The lecture lasted nearly ten minutes.

  Still, the prisoner didn't seem very impressed.

  "Why would such a bright star want to talk to someone like me?" he asked Joxx when it was over.

  "Because I hear you've come to this planet spouting outrageous nonsense," Joxx shot back at him harshly. "About marauders and such and instability farther up the arm. There are very busy, very important individuals on this planet, and your tall tales have sparked a major concern with them. So much so, that now I'm involved. My ship and my crew. It would be a big mistake to waste our time."

  "But I am not foolish enough to do that," the prisoner replied quickly. "I have done good business in this cluster before. I would never jeopardize that. But my fear is this: The news I have to report might mean none of us will ever do business here again. You, me, no one…"

  This was a strong statement — enough to give Joxx pause.

  "Tell your story then," Joxx finally told him.

  So the man did.

  He'd been hired to pick up a load of ion waste on a small planet farther up the star road called Sodom-Lite. This world was a combination space brothel and jam mecca, not an uncommon environment out beyond Thirty Star Pass. It took him two days to fill his ship's tanks with the ultrahazardous refuse and another day to get clearance for takeoff.

  The night before he was scheduled to depart, a mystery army appeared up in orbit. Suddenly people were running through the streets, crying that there were dozens of ships circling the planet, waiting to attack. Sure enough, within minutes, combat shuttles began raining down on the tiny world. All of the planet's military installations — manned primarily by hired space thugs — were quickly eliminated; all of the spaceports were overrun as well. Anyone who resisted was instantly dispatched by blaster beam. The marauders were bloodthirsty, vicious. Nothing could stand in their way. In less than a solar day, Sodom-Lite had fallen.

  The prisoner fled to the countryside that first night, along with many of the planet's urban residents. But while making his escape across an open field, he was snatched up by a squad of the mysterious soldiers, flying in one of their invasion shuttles. His abductors brought him aboard a star-ship parked up in orbit. The people controlling this ship made no bones about what they were up to. They were marching down the Two Arm and would zap anyone who interfered. As proof, they brought him to the star cabin of this ship and allowed him to look out on their fleet hanging in orbit nearby. He saw dozens of the battle-hardened ships, possibly as many as a hundred, all of them bulked up with long-range space weapons.

  "These people seemed absolutely fearless," the prisoner told Joxx now. "They bragged that their soldiers were the same way. Indeed, they showed me viz-screen evidence of other battles they'd fought and won against hundreds of sleaze planets farther up the arm. After seeing all that, there was little use in arguing with them."

  Joxx contemplated the man carefully. "Is it your claim, then, that these people are not some sort of space trash, out on a lark?"

  The prisoner almost laughed. "They are certainly not that, my lord," he replied. "They are an army. A very large one, a very well-armed one, and very organized. Their methods are brutal. And they are coming this way very fast."

  One of Joxx's intelligence officers spoke up: "Are you saying then that the Two Arm is being…"

  He couldn't quite say the word.

  "Invaded?" the prisoner said for him. "Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying…."

  The prisoner paused for a moment.

  "Something has been unleashed here that will be impossible to stuff back into the bottle," he told them. "It's so bad, I'm afraid to look into the future, though I know it is less than a few days away. I fear greatly what I will see. I've been shooting the Two Arm for nearly two centuries now, and I've never witnessed anything like this."

  He fell silent. His mouth seemed dry.

  'Two centuries?" Joxx asked him. "You don't look that old."

  The prisoner shrugged again. "A benefit of my profession, I suppose," he joked.

  Jox
x stared back at the man for a long time. The prisoner had indeed delivered some disturbing news, and the proof of it could be found in the massive evacuation happening throughout the star cloud. Finally he asked him, "But why did these invaders spare you? It's not like you're special or anything."

  "Because they wanted me to come down here and spread the news about them," he replied quickly. "They knew word of their actions would reach the Empire eventually. I

  believe their game is to challenge you. Taunt you. They even possess the desire to capture one of your ships."

  Joxx's jaw fell open.

  "Capture one of our ships?" he roared. The thought of someone capturing the ShadoVox literally made him feel ill. "How would you possibly know that?"

  The prisoner closed his eyes. It was almost as if he was trying not to speak.

  "Because, sire," he finally replied. "Those were their very words."

  The prisoner was taken back down to his jail cell.

  Joxx and his intelligence officers remained sitting around Sheez's floating desk. The intell men were looking very anxious.

  "So, do we choose to believe this man?" one asked Joxx now.

  Joxx's reply was emphatic: "We certainly do! I am an expert in these things. And I, for one, could see the truth in his eyes."

  "But it is just the word of one man," one of the other intell officers protested. "How do we know for sure what is happening farther up the Arm?"

  "He is one man who speaks for many," Joxx shot back, indicating the nonstop stream of escape vessels still rising from the planet. "And besides, there is no one left up there who could tell us anything different. My brothers, look at it this way: This man is actually a godsend for us. We know these crap movers have a dark little talent. They can predict the future in the harshest of destinies, a compulsion so strong they cannot even lie about it. Now, if we follow this man's word as truth, if we believe everything he tells us, then at the very least we can prepare ourselves to face the worst-case scenario."

  The three intelligence officers were stunned.