Battle at Zero Point (8 page)

He collapsed to the seat of his pants. Suddenly Heaven didn't make sense anymore. Souls that had passed on, he could see being here. But this…

"Those ships…" he began, stammering. "
What are they doing here
?"

Vanex just shook his head again. "Like I said before my friend, it's a long story."

At the moment Bonz arrived in Heaven, Hawk Hunter and Princess Xara were thousands of miles away, sitting beneath an apple tree, close by a gently flowing river, waiting for the stars to come out.

Fighter pilot, space hero, deserter, outlaw, and now a rebel against the Fourth Empire, Hunter had had many adventures in his strange lifetime. In fact, since finding himself stranded, without memories, on the desolate planet of Fools 6 nearly two years before, his life had been nothing but one long adventure—as well as a search for answers. Who was he? Where did he come from? How did he get to the Seventy-third century? Why was he here?

This quest had not been totally in vain: he'd found
some
answers.
Who was he
? He was an American. The red, white, and blue flag he carried in his pocket would never let him forget that. And he'd found other Americans lost among the stars, and in the process he'd discovered that they, along with the other peoples of the old Earth, had had their Mother Planet stolen from them by the rulers of the empires, both past and present. And, knowing this, he had come to believe that the reason he was here was for no less a purpose than over-throwing the present realm and winning Earth back for its rightful owners—or die trying.

He'd come close to fulfilling the last half of that bold pledge recently. So close, he'd managed to skip the dying part and fast-forward straight to the afterlife, along with the rest of the Two Arm invaders, also known as the United Planets Forces. Yes, they had given the Solar Guards the slip; they had found the perfect hiding place.

But since coming here, things had changed for him. Everything that had happened to him before paled by comparison. For now he was on the ultimate adventure.

He was in Paradise with the girl of his dreams.

How did they wind up here, in Heaven?

It was all Xara's doing. She was smart, shy, absolutely lovely, especially her gigantic blue eyes—and the only daughter of O'Nay, Supreme Ruler of the vast Fourth Galactic Empire, and the man that Hunter would seek to take down. Though just eighteen years old, she was brave beyond all measure, and unlike her deified relatives, had a sense of absolute right and wrong. It was because of her that the UPF fleet had been saved.

It all started a month before when a sympathetic Imperial spy told Xara that the leader of the mysterious Two Arm invaders was none other than Hunter himself. This came as a shock to her, as she believed, as did many in the Empire, that Hunter had been killed by the SG. But die spy also told her that the Solar Guards' REF was speeding to intercept Hunter's fleet, and that they were armed with special antistarship weapons, which would make short work of die invaders.

The spy then passed on to her a mysterious device known as the Echo 999.9. It was a very advanced holo-girl capsule— or so it seemed. Holo-girl capsules had been bouncing around the Galaxy for at least a couple thousand years. They came in all shapes and sizes. Some were programmed to present their users with a very real-looking holographic lady of the evening right on the spot, an experience that lasted about an hour before expiring. But the more sophisticated, more expensive models featured extremely elaborate scenarios in which the customer and holo-girl were transported to a paradise coastal setting.

Here, they could romp nonstop and undisturbed for what seemed like weeks, before returning to the real world.

No one understood the technology behind the holo-girl capsules; their secrets had been lost, just like most of the history of the Galaxy, in the rise and fall of the empires. (One rumor said the holo-girls had originally been used as spies, only later morphing into near-flesh-and-blood sex objects.) In reality, though, even the most expensive holo-girl devices were very crude. Because the user assumed they were
inside
an illusion, no one ever explored any farther than their own little patch of sand; in many ways, the love beach was where an expensive holo-girl trip began and ended. But the truth was, the users were
not
inside an illusion. Although in every case except with the Echo 999.9, it appeared flat, almost two-dimensional, the place they were brought to was real. It was a different place. On a higher plane, no doubt of about that. But it
was
real. And it was
this
place, the same one that people down through the ages had thought of as Heaven.

After her meeting with the Imperial spy, Xara enlisted Vanex to help her, and together they used the advanced Echo to travel here to Paradise. Thus their sudden, unexplained disappearance a month before. After exploring their new environs, Vanex studied the Echo 999.9 capsule itself. There was another ages-old technology in the Galaxy called a Twenty 'n Six. It was a device that could move objects almost as large as a Starcrasher into the twenty-sixth dimension, where they could be stored indefinitely until being recalled again. During the liberation of the Home Planets, the concentration camp in the sky where the dispossessed peoples of Earth had been kept for more than four thousand years, Hunter and the United American Forces developed a Twenty 'n Six field by combining four of the devices to create a window of sorts through which they could elude the mercenary army who had been hired as the guards for the interstellar prison.

Vanex combined this Twenty 'n Six field idea with the powerful and mysterious Echo 999.9 technology and, in doing so, conjured up another sort of portal, one large enough for the UPF invasion fleet to pass through just seconds before the

Solar Guards were able to blast it with its special weaponry. So the truth was, the Solar Guards really didn't know what happened to the invasion force. And they still didn't.

It seemed impossible, though, combining something like a holo-girl device with a Twenty 'n Six and using it to get into Heaven. But it did work—and maybe the question is not how but why. And it might very well have had to do with this place itself.
Nothing ever went wrong in Heaven
. The impossible was possible, the most outlandish idea, a reality. All one had to do was think it, and it would happen.

Vanex dreamed up this particular idea, and as a result, the twelve ships of the United Planets Forces and their combined 40,000-man crew had escaped certain death by coming through this back door to Heaven.

Hunter had come here a similar way. Captured just after the battle that never was, he'd been thrown into a cell at the bottom of the SG Starcrasher
ShadoVox
, the personal warship of Joxx the Younger.

As it turned out, the famous SG commander, disillusioned about the Fourth Empire thanks to a mind ring trip Hunter had made him take shortly before he was captured, passed another Echo 999.9 to Hunter in the jail cell just hours before the pilot was due to be executed. Thanks to that last-minute act of heroism, Hunter had joined the others in the UPF fleet and was now, like them, hiding out in kingdom come.

But why did Xara help them? After all, her father was Emperor, and she was one of the most exalted persons in the Galaxy. Truth was, she did it for one reason only: she was in love with Hunter. They'd fallen for each other as soon as they'd met after his winning of the Earth Race. It was only after he'd arrived here and told her of all that had happened to him in the year he'd gone missing that she came to the same conclusion as he: that the Empire must be toppled and Earth returned to its rightful owners, even though it was her father who ruled the Galaxy with a muted iron fist, and her immediate family who served as the Empire's ruling class.

Very soon after coming here, Hunter had asked Xara a simple question: "What do we do now?" They had escaped certain death at the hands of the Solar Guards by finding their way to this bizarre hideout.

But they were still holding the nasty little secret as to what made the Empires tick. So what was next?

Xara replied that they should immediately begin planning a return to the other side, to continue their fight against the Empire. But Hunter had another idea, one that stunned them both. He'd been fighting all his life, he had told her, and he was getting tired of it. Then he'd mused that maybe they could just stay here, in Eden, forever.

And why not? There
was
no better place to be. From the moment he'd popped in, Hunter had felt like he was walking on air. They all did. There was no pain here, no worries, no stress. No negative vibes. Everything was perfect. Nothing could go wrong, and everything always went right. Every time.

True, it was an odd place. There was no need to eat or drink here, because you never got hungry or thirsty. Yet you could do both if you wanted. The trees were filled with apples, very exotic apples, and the rivers ran cold with sweet-tasting nectars. You could eat and drink as much of them as you wanted, because you never got full and you never got fat. Such unpleasant things just didn't happen here.

It was only by sheer habit did they breathe. There was no need to bathe, as you were always clean, just as everything around you was always clean. The temperature was always pleasant, the atmospherics always fair. There was no real need for clothes, though most everyone still wore them. There was no sex here. Or, better put, no
need
for sex. In this place, the sensation one got from making love was the same feeling that was all around them, all the time. All you had to do was think it, and it would be there, at full strength, an experience that was even better if there was another person involved.

But where were they exactly? They weren't on a planet. There was no indication that they were rotating on an axis or that they were on a body that was orbiting a sun. There
was
a star nearby—or it seemed to be a star. It hung in place exactly eighty degrees in the northeastern sky. It was bright, radiant, and always pleasantly warm, which was good because it was mostly daytime here. But there was a kind of nonday-time as well. After some time went by—and not time as usually measured—this sun would set, and a kind of glowing twilight would come into being. Not darkness. And there were never any shadows. Just a kind of ebb of the radiance. An opportunity for the stars to come out.

And yes, there
were
stars overhead, great washes of them. Bright silver, yellow, and white, they spun out in spectacular arrangements that changed with every dusk. Mixed in were comets and meteor showers, and up to a dozen moons. Always of various sizes, the moons would suddenly appear in the sky, in different degrees of waxing and waning, a few so close, rivers and valleys and mountains could be seen on them. And after some time passed, the friendly sun would rise again and hang in place until twilight came once more. This odd interlude seemed to happen for one reason only: to benefit those who liked looking at the evening sky.

There was no time here. Or not time as one would normally experience it. Things happened, and memories were formed and so there was a past, and obviously a present. But there was no feeling that time was moving forward. Soon after arriving here, Hunter and Xara had walked to the edge of their home valley. It was a distance of at least thirty miles, and it seemed to take them many hours to make the journey. Yet upon returning to the others, from their friends' perspective, it was as if they'd been gone for only a short while. They soon noticed, too, that their fingernails, beards, and hair did not grow. The soles on their boots did not wear; their uniforms stayed perfect and clean. As the twilights did not come with any set regularity, it was hard to tell just how long the "days" were. Their only explanation was that there
was
no time here. Or, not time as they knew it.

However, they all still had their internal body clocks, and these seemed to be moving very fast. And this is where it really got strange: even though they had disappeared from the Milky Way less than a month ago, to their sensibilities it felt as if they'd been here, in Heaven, for ten years. Or even longer.

Of course, one question was bigger than the rest: Was this place
really
Heaven? Was this the place were all "good" souls came after living out their mortal lives? All the evidence seemed to indicate that it was: the constant euphoria, the worry-free existence, the miraculous surroundings. That this was the place that showed up in just about every myth and religion of Humankind seemed obvious. That Hunter and the UPF had found a way to come here without having to go through the nasty stage of actually losing their lives was definitely unnatural. But apparently not impossible.

As for the origins of this place, and who created it, and what its real purpose was—well, those were questions that were almost too deep, too disturbing for them to contemplate. Yet, luckily for them, they were saved by the very nature of this place from having to do so. Because it was impossible to be troubled by anything here, thoughts of such things as what this place
really
was, usually didn't last too long, if they even came up at all.

That was another bonus of Paradise: you never had to think too deeply about anything.

No surprise, then, that the UPF contingent had become enthralled with living in Paradise.

In the beginning they'd tried to plan a strategy on how and when to return to the other side, to continue their campaign against the Fourth Empire. But soon enough they realized that even
talking
about anything that had to do with combat or war or violence was very difficult here. Any time such a conversation would start, the participants would invariably find themselves getting sidetracked; one or two words in, they would suddenly begin talking about other, more pleasant things. Whenever this happened, the air would become extra thick with a sweet fragrance that was all around them anyway.

When inhaled, it gave the most euphoric high. And Paradise became that much more alluring. And all thoughts of war would simply go away.

There was no doubt that some sort of manipulation was at work here. That something supernatural was watching over everything, pulling the strings, making sure that everything was as pleasant as possible.