Starhawk (2 page)

At this instant, the fireball came to a screeching halt. Suddenly it took on a definite shape. The soldiers were astonished to see that this was not some kind of apocalyptic angel above them but an aerial machine, one unlike any they'd ever laid eyes on. Just about everything flying in the Galaxy these days, big or small, was shaped like a wedge. Pointed nose up front, with huge quarters in back. Yet this craft was small, tube-shaped, with two stubby wings sticking out of its midsection, and a tail supporting two smaller wings on the back. It had a bubble-top canopy covering a cockpit that could hold one or maybe two people at the most. It appeared to be painted in splashes of colors and adorned with lightning bolts and stars on its wings.

It hovered, frozen in place, for a moment or two. It was almost as if someone inside was looking down at the troopers, studying their uniforms, their weapons, their numbers. Then there was another frightening screech, and the machine rocketed away again, banking sharply and heading toward the BMK base on the other side of the hill.

The frightened soldiers finally regained their feet. The effects of the slow-ship wine wore off quickly now as the elderly mercs tried to make some sense of what was going on. Then, from over the hill came the wail of a siren, a noise they'd heard only in drills and rarely in the last century.

The drunken soldiers all looked at each other, as if to say,
What does that sound mean again
?

Then it dawned on them. The siren was blown only in case of an emergency. This could only mean one thing: Their base was under attack.

The soldiers scrambled to the top of the hill to find the ungodly aerial machine had turned around again and was now sweeping through the valley that housed their base.

The facility sat at the edge of a huge, ancient crater, an impact made millions of years before. To the north there was nothing but wide open space. To the south, a vast desert that featured an enormous, solitary butte. To the east, beyond the five enormous, rusting space gantries, a half-dozen mountains ran for ten miles or so. To the west was a series of shallow hills, one of which bordered the small town where the Last Drop stood.

The flying machine was bearing down on the base's 2,500-foot deep-space antenna tower now—the BMK garrison's only link to the outside world. The winged devil screeched across the sky with the same ear-piercing sound, a stream of Z beams spilling out of six blasters attached to its nose. The craft twisted and turned like nothing these men had ever seen before, blasting away at the base's communication cell, shearing off the top of the tower and exploding it into a cascade of bright yellow sparks.

Then the mysterious craft disappeared again. Some of the soldiers thought it had blinked out, vanishing into another dimension. But others claimed it had simply accelerated very quickly and departed the area at incredibly high speed.

No matter. It was suddenly on them again, this time coming from the east. In one long, perfectly executed strafing run, its six blasters tore into the base's ammo dump, its food supply warehouse, and its mess hall, leaving a string of earsplitting explosions in its wake.

But at the same time, a new sound could be heard. The ground began rumbling just in front of the base's huge docking gantries, followed quickly by a massive explosion of dirt and rocks. From this small storm of yellow dust, a huge mechanical monster began to rise.

It was one of the base's recessed Z-gun platforms, part of the antiquated space-defense system. Breaking through the rocky crust of the planet's surface, the enormous platform rose to a height of five hundred feet, its multiple-tube Z guns swiveling in the direction of the bizarre spacefighter.

A cheer went up from the drunken mercs on the hill.

At last, they were fighting back.

But right away, problems arose. The base's huge gun platforms were completely automatic. Their robotic sensors were designed to identify hostile spacecraft many thousands of miles away, focus their targeting systems on the enemy, and then let loose with a stream of Z-beam fire that could prove deadly to even the largest of spaceships. Yet the mysterious craft attacking the base was minuscule compared to any vessel the guns had been built to destroy. What's more, it was capable of accelerating to speeds that the Z guns' targeting systems simply could not keep up with.

So once the flying machine pulled off a strafing run that had carved the base's barracks assembly in two, it veered left, directly toward the gun tower. The platform's Z-beam weapons saw it coming and fired once. A storm of the green destructo-ray flowed from the enormous tube and rocketed harmlessly off into space, missing the swiftly moving aircraft by nearly a half mile. The aircraft was traveling so fast, even the speed-of-light Z beam could not catch up to it.

The huge Z tube began moving again, but it was already too late. The winged craft let loose with a Z-beam barrage of its own, hitting the gun platform's hinged assembly squarely on the turning knuckle, effectively cutting it off at the knees. The platform hesitated for a moment, almost as if it was defying gravity, then came crashing down, slamming into the rocky surface with an explosion so violent, a tiny yellow mushroom cloud emerged from the impact.

But as this was happening, another of the base's gun platforms broke its way through to the surface. It reached its full extension much quicker than the first, its sensors locked on the previous action. It began firing off destructo-beams even before its supporting platform had locked in place.

The roar was tremendous, the emerald Z beams blinding to the unprotected eye, but again, it was a futile act. The flying machine simply turned itself over, deftly avoided the wash of deadly fire, and unleashed another staggering blast from the half-dozen guns in its nose. This barrage hit the top of the second gun platform, vaporizing the weapon in a huge ball of sickly orange flame. Like its predecessor, this platform came crashing down with such force, it caused a series of minor quakes around the tiny planet.

Undaunted, a third gun platform exploded from beneath the surface, then a fourth and a fifth. These huge weapons began firing almost randomly. Suddenly, the thin blue sky was filled with gigantic waves of incredibly powerful Z-beam blasts. It seemed almost impossible that anything could make its way through the wall of emerald fire, but somehow the attacker did just that. It emerged from the firestorm, twisting and turning on its stubby wings, weaving through the river of lethal rays with ease.

It let loose one barrage from its nose weapons, turned quickly to the left, fired off another, then turned again and let go with a third. In lightning quick succession, the three streams of fire found their marks on the three huge gun platforms, severing them all at the hinges. In a trio of successive impacts, the huge platforms came crashing down, sending another series of tremors around the planet.

The soldiers on the hill were all back down on the ground by now, breathing heavily in their oxygen masks, hugging the craggy surface for dear life. The sound of the attacker's power plant and the base's facilities being turned into subatomic dust had caused some of their ears to bleed. Their throats were hoarse from involuntary screams.

Finally, the space fighter left the scene, exiting the area with yet another earsplitting screech. A full minute of silence went by before a few brave souls took their heads out of the sand and actually looked up. Their eyes could not quite believe what they were seeing. Perhaps it was Doomsday after all.

The crater valley was a smoking ruin. The immense flaming wreckage of the five gun platforms was throwing tremendous clouds of smoke into the sky. Fires crackled everywhere. More than two-thirds of the base's structures were either flattened or engulfed in flames. After several thousand years of existence, the base had been practically destroyed in less than two minutes.

But even stranger things were to come.

Not a minute after the space fighter vanished, there came another flash of light above the base.

This one was bright red, blinding in intensity. It was followed quickly by five more. In a blink there were suddenly six enormous starships hovering over the smoldering base.

These ships looked old, like travelers from the past. They were about a quarter mile long, from the needle point to the back of the wedge. Their superstructures had a flared look that had gone out of style early in the last millennium. These ships had a gleaming quality though, deep-space blue with bright superchrome throughout. The weak sun was glinting off all this chrome, making the starships look deadly but dazzling at the same time.

No sooner had they popped into view, when these starships began dispensing hundreds of shuttlecraft. At first, these shuttles looked no different than the standard model used throughout the Galaxy for centuries, essentially a long tube with legs. But very quickly, they showed themselves to be anything but ordinary.

The shuttles swooped down on the burning base and began adding barrages of blaster beams to the already smoldering rubble; indeed, each troop transport was lugging up to two dozen single-tube Z blasters, giving what had always been simply a transportation vehicle a very frightening and lethal pop. Shuttlecraft carrying more than one gun? That
was
a new one.

The bulked-up shuttles were now landing all over the base. No sooner would they hit the surface, when hundreds of soldiers began sprinting out of access doors lowered even prior to landing.

The drunken mercs watching all this from the crest of the hill couldn't believe their bleary eyes. They'd never seen soldiers move so fast. In seconds, there were at least a thousand troops running throughout the base, securing the few buildings left standing, and dashing up the side ramps, which led to the base's decaying power tower.

It took just a few more minutes for the invaders to reach the oblong bubble that served as a cap for the tower, using back-carried jet packs to carry them up the 750-foot structure. The flying machine returned one more time, doing a mind-numbing, dizzying victory roll above the burning base and past the seized power tower. A cheer went up from those invading soldiers on the ground. Peering up through the mist and the smoke, the stunned BMK mercs saw that the soldiers had raised a flag at the top of the tower.

Using their viz scanners at supertelescopic level, they were able to see this flag up close.

Full of stars and stripes, its colors were red, white, and blue.

Hawk Hunter put his flying machine on its tail and nudged the throttle forward 0.0001 of an inch. The aircraft rocketed up through the thin atmosphere of Xronis Trey, popping into space an instant later. He quickly tapped the throttle back to its original position and turned wings over. Just like that, he was upside down, in a low orbit above the tiny planet, looking down on the burning BMK base.

At last he had a moment to catch his breath.

He checked his instruments package and was relieved to see his flying machine had made it through the attack unscathed: no holes, no leaks, no power drains. All indications were that the surprise attack had gone well. There had been no KIAs reported among the invading forces. All of the major objectives had been taken, and it didn't appear that any kind of SOS had gone out from the seized base.

Hunter took a deep gulp from his oxygen mask and let the air out slowly.

So far, so good
, he thought.

Why was he here?

He was still a fugitive from justice. Still AWOL from the Fourth Empire's X-Forces. Still a wanted man.

But he was also still on his quest to find out who he was and how he'd come to be stranded on another very desolate planet, this one at the other end of the Galaxy, the only clue to his identity being his name tag and the red, white, and blue flag he'd found in his pocket.

That had been about a year ago. Since being rescued from that planet, he'd wound up on Earth, where he used his remarkable flying machine to win the Earth Race and garner the tremendous fame and fortune that followed. This included a commission and his choice of any assignment within the Empire's vast military forces. With help from the Princess Xara, the beautiful daughter of O'Nay, the Emperor of the Galaxy Himself, Hunter chose the Empire's Exploratory and Expeditionary Forces—the X-Forces—and was sent on a mission that would bring him close to a near-mythical landmark, a place he knew only as the Lighthouse.

This was important, because evidence long ago suppressed by O'Nay's Fourth Empire had indicated the flag Hunter had found in his pocket was actually the emblem of a place called America—and that he was in fact an American. The Lighthouse was a beacon of sorts that had been set up thousands of years before as a way to call every American lost and wandering in the Galaxy to come home. Hunter felt the tug and eventually found the place where the Lighthouse had once existed and there, the last of a small band of fighters called the Freedom Brigade. These fighters considered themselves Americans, too, and they set him off on a long search for their home planet, leaving all allegiance to the Empire behind.

After a hazardous and, in some ways, magical journey, Hunter found himself in a star system that was not within the vast Milky Way but actually a great distance away, far beyond the Galaxy's boundaries, floating out in the inter-galactic void.

This place was called the Home Planets. And it was here that Hunter found Planet America and 35 other planets representing the other countries and regions of what was once the real planet Earth. It didn't take long to discover that the Home Planets' system was actually a prison, a concentration camp in the sky, space-engineered thousands of years before to be the perfect jail. With the entire system locked inside an ancient time bubble, the people of the Home Planets had precious few clues as to where they had come from originally or who had chosen to lock them up so far away from home.

It was only after the vast army of prison guards lording over this star system attacked Planet America and were defeated by Hunter and his allies did the Americans confirm that the Home Planets were populated by the descendants of the people who had inhabited Earth around the year 3200 a.d.—or 4,000 years before. They had been forcibly removed from Earth by parties still unknown and deported to the Home Planets.