Planet America (31 page)

But how could this be? She lived on what Planet America would become, four thousand years later. How could she be here, in the memory of this mind ring?

He tried to push his way through to her and succeeded in reaching the entrance to the gangway at the same time she did.

Their eyes met. Hers went very wide. Then came an astonished smile.

"
Hawk
?" she said. "Is that really you?"

"It's really me," he replied.

But just as he was about to reach for her, he found himself staring at an enormous blue screen instead. It stretched in every direction as far as he could see; its top literally went right up into the clouds.

Hunter thought his heart would stop beating right then and there. As part of the Earth Race, he'd had to penetrate several blue screens not unlike this one, and behind each he found a reality that was far stranger than anything he'd experienced since waking up on Fools 6. The mysterious blue screens were part of the obstacle course that made up a large portion of the Earth Race.

So what the hell is one of them doing here?

He put his hands up against it... and felt himself falling. He lost his balance, passed right through the screen, and hit his head on something very hard far below.

Flash!

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the floor of the intelligence vault on Moon 39. The mind ring was spinning across the floor away from him.

There were several techs staring into the vault now, quizzical looks on their faces. Hunter did not move. He was hoping they'd been alerted only by the sound of the mind ring hitting the floor, something that hadn't really happened yet.

Once they seemed satisfied that nothing was amiss inside the vault, the techs returned to their posts. Hunter slowly got to his feet, tried to shake the stars from his eyes, then put the mind ring back in its compartment, closed the door, and left.

He'd come within one inch of touching Ashley's face.

He staggered back out on the parade grounds and tried to get his bearings.

He knew he had to get going. On one level, the recon had been an outstanding success. Hunter was now very familiar with all the visible aspects of this army's capabilities. So he knew what they were: a quick-reaction space force, equipped with passable arms and a lot of transport. And he knew why they were here: as prison guards, just as the holo-spy had indicated.

The trouble was, he still didn't know
who
they were. He'd seen no flags or banners identifying the space corps by name nor any ship markings or weapons stamps stating exactly who they were. Again it was obvious the massive army was working undercover.

But it was important that Hunter ID them. For this he stole into one of the barracks nearby. An army was an army, no matter how well equipped, no matter how distant the garrison. With around-the-clock shifts, the legitimately ailing and the simply malingering, at any given time, about 20 percent of any force was usually asleep.

Hunter found the barracks he'd selected dotted with sleeping soldiers. He walked down the space between the hovering bunks looking for someone who appeared to be above the rank of space grunt. Finally, he came upon a cluster of floating beds that were larger, more comfortable, and more stable than the rest of the bunks.
Officer country
. Hunter thought correctly.

He idled up to one officer's personal effects box hovering right beside his bed. Slowly, carefully, Hunter waved its security halo away and reached down into the guy's stuff. He quickly came out with a subatomic knife. It was sealed inside a plastic air case and looked more like a ceremonial piece than a combat instrument.

Just what he was looking for.

He quickly stuffed the knife into his boot and backed out of the barracks. He found another somewhat remote piece of flat ground and summoned his flying machine from the Twenty 'n Six.

He climbed in and engaged his power systems. Only once he was sure that he would be able to get off the artificial moon did he take the knife out of his boot and remove it from its sheath.

He was looking for some kind of trademark or inscription on the blade. This army was expert in keeping a low profile as to who it really was. But sometimes officers slipped up and carried an instrument with markings from the actual unit.

And that was the case here; Hunter had picked the right pocket. There was an inscription across the blade that answered one question but also opened up about a million others.

The inscription was just three words, but Hunter felt his stomach twist itself a bit tighter when he read them. Who was the undercover army, waiting way out here for one false move by the people on the Home Planets?

Some unknown ancient order, nearly four thousand years old, the same age as the star system prison?

No.

The army of prison guards was actually none other than a large detachment of the Bad Moon Knights.

16

Hunter very carefully punched back into orbit around
Planet America and started the long plunge down.

He'd checked out the rest of the sentinel moons; they were just as lifeless as the ones he'd found before coming to Moon 39. Now he was anxious to get back on the ground and tell the others all that he'd discovered.

But as soon as he had cleared the top layers of America's atmosphere and gotten below the clouds, he was confronted with a startling sight: The planet was on fire. He could see hundreds of smoke plumes rising into the air all across the continent. On that part of the planet turned away from the sun, there were no lights, no signs of life below. Using his very rudimentary communications device, Hunter tried to raise someone at Andrews Field.

There was no reply.

He touched down in the rain a few minutes later, passing over many fires and collapsed roadways on his approach to Andrews Field.

He rolled to the end of the makeshift runway and was relieved to see Zarex and Pater Tomm waiting for him. Gordon was on hand as well, along with a squad of CIA agents (all of whom were talking on their cell phones) and a small convoy of black vans. But some of the agents looked as if they'd just gone through a war. They were sporting bandages on various parts of their bodies. Gordon himself was dabbing a head wound with a piece of gauze.

Hunter jumped from his plane and ran over to the group of walking wounded.

"What happened down here?" he asked them.

"Only a vision of doomsday," Tomm replied quickly. "Or about thirteen minutes of it, anyway."

"It was like the whole planet did a jig," Zarex confirmed. "Everything just started rocking and rolling, and it wouldn't stop. I've been through a lot in the past two hundred years, but that might have been the longest thirteen minutes of my life."

Gordon had it all written down in a hastily scrawled report, which was now getting smeared in the rain.

"The power blackouts came first," he told Hunter. 'Two short ones, about a minute apart. Then a few more, longer in duration. Then it seemed like the whole planet just started to shake. Up and down, back and forth. We were lying flat on the ground, yet at times I swear I was upside down."

The others nodded in painful agreement.

"And it lasted such a long time," Gordon continued, dabbing his head wound. "Once it finally stopped, the reports of damage started coming in a minute later, and they haven't stopped since."

He handed Hunter the written report. "It was just the damnedest thing, and it seemed to happen just a few seconds after you left."

Hunter just stood there, stunned, not quite believing what he was hearing. Could he be responsible for this? He quickly read the report. The bad stuff began happening just about a half minute after he'd reached orbit. There was one blackout followed quickly by several others. And these outages did not just happen in the vicinity of Andrews Field. They had rippled right across the continent.

The real shaking began about two minutes later and did not stop for thirteen long minutes. Again, the effect was felt right across the country. Not a quake, rather a gigantic disruption that, in Gordon's written words, felt "as if a giant's hand had picked us up and just started shaking." The worst of it came in the last three minutes.

Hunter began matching up the times of these events with his own activity. The first series of blackouts coincided with his initial engagement of ultradrive in space. The planet started shaking just as he'd begun his tour of the half-dozen Home Planets and continued when he'd zoomed out to where the sentinel moons lay. Then the
real
disruption began at the precise moment he'd gone into his time-busting spy mode, which, in real time down here must have taken about thirteen minutes. The trembling continued until the moment he kicked out of full ultraoverdrive and returned to America's orbit.

The numbers didn't lie. His takeoff had been okay. But every time he'd pushed his throttle into ultraspeed, the people back on Planet America had paid the price. Yet this didn't make any sense. Why would what he did out there affect what was happening back here, inside the planet's time bubble?

The ink on Gordon's report began running off the wet pages. Hunter was now soaked to the bone. Bad things happen when the ground shakes. Fires break out. Water mains crack. Electrical wires fall. How many had been killed? How many injured? It was almost too terrible for him to contemplate.

And most important,
why
did it happen?

Hunter and the others were whisked back to Weather Mountain.

For security reasons, they were put in three separate vans and driven by three different routes back to the CIA facility. Hunter surprised himself by falling asleep during his ride back. One moment they were pulling out of a muddy road near Andrews, the next, the van was flying through the front gate at Weather Mountain. The unexpected sleep had done him a favor. It had relieved him of thinking about the devastation he had just caused—at least for a little while.

He was brought to the CIA "blue room" as they had taken to calling the huge conference room with all the blue lights. Two of Gordon's aides gave him a plate of hot food, which he wolfed down without even knowing what it was. When they inquired if he wanted coffee or a smoke, he asked for a bottle of Seagram's. After a hushed conversation, they brought him a glass of it instead.

He then asked for permission to speak to his two colleagues alone. More discussion. Gordon was contacted in the first aid room, where he was getting his head wound attended to. He told his aides to grant Hunter's wish. It made no difference. The blue room was thick with eavesdropping devices, anyway.

Tomm and Zarex were brought in, and a pot of coffee and a pack of Marlboros appeared soon after. Then the aides left them alone in the cavernous conference room. They sat huddled at the far end of the oval table, Tomm with his coffee, Zarex with his smokes, Hunter with his drink.

"Brothers, I felt we three should talk first," Hunter told them. "With what I have to report from my mission, I'm not sure our hosts can absorb it all at once."

"Bingo that," both men replied.

Hunter sipped his drink.

"But before we get into it," he went on, "I have something else I must reveal to you."

Tomm and Zarex looked back at him strangely. His voice was dead serious.

"I've been keeping something from you, brothers," Hunter began. "A deep secret that is crumbling just as fast as all the other secrets around us. I feel it is time for me to come clean."

He took a deep breath.

"Brothers, the Fourth Empire exists," he told them bluntly. "I know because I was once an officer in its exploratory corps."

Tomm and Zarex just stared back at him. Essentially, Hunter was telling them that one of the greatest myths of the Five-Arm—indeed of the entire Fringe itself—was in fact true. That a huge empire controlled most of the Milky Way and was expanding its realm by gobbling up more planets with each passing day. Tomm and Zarex had speculated about this before, of course, and about Hunter's mysterious nature as well. But never had they expected him to just come out and tell them.

"Are you sure about this, my son?" Tomm asked him. "And that you just didn't hit your head on reentry?"

Hunter smiled. "Sometimes, Padre, 1 wish that
was
the case."

He explained that he'd been reluctant to tell them of his origins before, because knowledge of the vast Fourth Empire had to be absorbed gradually, just as the people on this planet had to absorb that fact that die three of them had come from someplace else. But now that they knew, there was no sense holding anything back. So Hunter told them about the Fourth Empire itself. About Time Shifters and Kaon Bombardment ships, and how he wasn't exactly sure why his flying machine moved the way it did. He described the omnipotent power of the Big Generator and the fleets of Empire Starcrashers that traveled in the mysterious dimension called Supertime, and were many times faster than ion-ballast starships. He told them about his amnesiac origins, his home on Fools 6, his time as an Empire officer, his less-than-coincidental arrival on Zazu-Zazu.

When it was over, Hunter felt like a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

His two colleagues were quiet for a long time. Then Zarex reached across the table and shook his hand, nearly crushing Hunter's fingers in the process.

"Thank you, brother, for telling me," the muscle man said. "It makes my life so much more interesting to know that the
entire
galactic swirl is ringing with life."

Tomm leaned over as well, but instead of shaking Hunter's hand, he slapped his cheek none too lightly but in a priestly sort of way.

"I knew it all along, of course," he told Hunter dryly. "But thank you for confirming my suspicions."

Hunter took another drink of his Seagram's. He had about a half glass left and was already aching for more.

"So tell us, brother," Zarex urged him. "We can't take the suspense. What did you see up there?"