Starhawk (35 page)

But everything had stopped.

Everything became frozen.

This was how Hunter arranged the ending of the long mind ring trip.

Joxx was stunned for a few moments, but he quickly caught on. He punched the dying guard one more time, though it was like hitting steel. Then he stood up and brushed himself off. He was bleeding from head to toe.

"Weren't you going to help me at all?" he asked Hunter.

Hunter ignored the question. Instead, he pointed to their mind rings. "We're coming to the climax of this trip. This is the end—except for two more scenes."

Joxx let out a long sigh of relief. "I am loath to admit it," he said, trying to wipe some of the blood from his eyes, "but I've seen some incredible things—an amazing history of what went before. Yet even still, I ask again the first question of this nightmare you've brought me on: How can the people running the Empire now—and the Emperor himself—be to blame for these things, as you claim? You have to admit yourself, the events you've shown me—though thoroughly tragic—all happened thousands of years removed from us."

It was the question Hunter was waiting for. He reached inside his pocket and came out with two more mind rings. He handed one to Joxx.

"Put this on," he told him.

Joxx looked back at him in horror.

"You want me to put on a mind ring while I'm already in a mind ring? It's impossible! It's dangerous.... It's ..."

Hunter didn't let him finish. He jammed the ring on Joxx's head.

"Believe me, it will be OK," he said. "I've become an expert in these things too."

Flash!

Joxx was still sweaty from his beating the man in the transfer station. And now suddenly, he was very cold.

He looked around for a few moments, totally confused.

"Here? Again?" he finally managed to say.

"I'm afraid so," Hunter told him.

They were back in Kelly's Hollow. It was the same morning as the ambush, but about an hour before the slaughter on Boxley Road. The sun had not yet come up, the skies were dreary and dull. Same scenario. Just told from a different perspective.

"But why? Why back to this point?" Joxx asked Hunter.

"Because there are two things here that probably wouldn't have made much sense if you had seen them before," Hunter explained. "It took me a half dozen trips to figure out exactly what I needed to see to make it come together, and still, it's a bit of a blur."

He turned Joxx around so he was facing toward the stream. Lying in the mud in the middle of the hollow was not the man-made pancake-with-wings that Emperor Jimmy had described to them. Instead, there was a much larger space vehicle, one with many blinking lights, weird hieroglyphics running all over it, and not just one but several multicolored auras surrounding it.

It was also shaped like a saucer.

Joxx nearly fell over again. "What the hell is that?"

He'd never seen a space vessel that hadn't been shaped like a wedge before. This thing looked frightening to him.

"Just keep watching," Hunter told him.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth when the hatch on the strange vehicle opened and two figures emerged. They were not human. They were small-framed, no more than four feet high, with large bulbous heads and long thin arms. They were wearing gold uniforms that glit-tered brightly, even in the dull morning light.

They glided over to the three bodies laying face-down in the mud and seemed to examine them for a moment. One of the creatures was carrying a small globe that was glowing with the same colors as those surrounding the saucer-shaped vehicle. With little fanfare, this creature directed a beam of light from the globe at each of the three bodies, enveloping them in a bright yellow light, but for only a moment or two. Then the creatures returned to their ship, closing the hatch silently behind them.

Joxx was simply astonished. His mouth was wide open, his face as white as his hair.

"Why do you taunt me with these demons?" he shouted at Hunter. "I've seen the horrors of the old days. I dare say
I'm
an expert in them now, with enough nightmares to last me several lifetimes. Why pull trickery on me at this point?"

"It's not trickery," Hunter replied. "Though believe me, I wish it was."

As they watched frozen at the edge of the stream, the saucer gave off a great flash of light—and then it was gone, straight up, into the early morning sky. Just like that.

Joxx fell to the seat of his pants, causing a mighty splash in the muddy water.

"What in
God's name
was that all about?" he whispered.

Hunter remained standing beside him. "The simplest answer? It's one more explanation of what happened here that day. The third one I came upon."

"But that was horrible!" Joxx cried. "Those .. . beings. The way they moved. The way the looked. They can't be real. Only humans inhabit the universe. That was established eons ago! So they had to be hallucinations. And therefore, this scenario must be a hallucination too. It
has
to be ..."

He looked up at Hunter hopefully. "Right?"

Hunter just shook his head.

"You tell me," he replied.

Joxx wiped a dirty hand across his dirty face. "Well, I'm sure the cardinals were lying to us," he began, still dazed from all that had happened in the past few moments. "All that crap about the angel and the enlightenment. But was Emperor Jimmy lying to us too? Why would he? What would be the point of it? He seemed sincere while debunking the angel story. Why just tell another lie instead?"

Joxx looked up at Hunter again. "Any chance that this third scenario is just a flaw in the mind ring program? Those creatures can't be real! Maybe the guy writing all this just screwed up, or got drunk or something."

Hunter stood mute.

"Because, if not," Joxx went on, "that would mean Jimmy wasn't enlightened by anything real. None of them were—not in the sense that everyone believed over the centuries. By this scenario, Jimmy's so-called 'great mind' didn't invent all those things that first made the Galaxy great. The secret to ion-power, the new longevity of humans, the puffing of the planets and God knows what else. Could it be that none of them sprouted miraculously from any human mind?"

He looked to where the saucer had just been—it was now just that familiar depression in the mud.

"Oh God, just the thought of it makes my skin crawl! That the beings who were flying that thing either intentionally or unintentionally seeded the Earth with their advanced technology. Could this be the true ring? Could it really have been
them
who gave us everything?"

Again he stared up at Hunter, as always, looking for the right answer. "Which one is true," he pleaded. "Please, good spirit, you must tell me. Nothing will make sense if you do not!"

"I can't," Hunter finally told Joxx. "Because I don't know, either."

The look of horror came across Joxx's face. "Then there's a chance that it's all been a fake," he whispered grimly. "A facade perpetrated by these strange beings and facilitated by the Emperors of the First and Second Empires. They made a pact with the devil—literally. If indeed the people riding that strange saucer believe in devils. There's a chance they were pulling the strings all along."

Joxx let a shudder rip through him. He was almost nauseous.

"
What are they
?" he asked, gagging on something. "Where are they from?"

Hunter just shook his head an gazed upon the place where the saucer had been.

"I've seen them before," he said. "It was on a place called Zazu-Zazu, a tiny moon way, way out on the Fringe. They were there or beings that looked just like them. They were trying like hell to take over that little moon at the furthest end of the Galaxy. I have no idea why or how. They were just so strange I've tried not to think about them. But all this will make that impossible forever."

He paused for a moment. He could hear the blokes' helicopter off in the distance.

"If we choose to believe this scenario," he went on. "Then I think we must also consider this: that these characters came back here and raised first Michael and then eventually the younger brother as well. Brought them both back, literally from the dead, at the time of their own choosing and then stood back and watched them change the Galaxy. If this is true, then it means these beings never really took their long slimy fingers out of it. They've been running things from behind the scenes, and the three brothers who were here that day must know that, because obviously all three dealt with them on some level, at some time."

He shook off a chill himself.

"But which scenario is true? The angel? The top secret aircraft? The flying disk?" He took a long look around the hollow. "I just don't know," he said.

Joxx suddenly scrambled to his feet.

"I'm hardly a humble person," he told Hunter, "but you've done both a terrible and a wonderful service to me here. My eyes have been opened like never before. Like I never believed they could be. And whatever happens from this point onwards, I guess I owe at least that to you... brother."

Then, very unexpectedly, he shook Hunter's hand. Hunter looked him right in the eye. He seemed sincere.

"Well then, now you know everything I know," Hunter told him. "Except for one last thing."

Flash!

They went forward about an hour.

Suddenly they were in the middle of the stream, standing over the second body. Just like the others, this person seemed quite dead and was wearing a cloth mask over his face. But now, there was a slight glow around him.

The lieutenants were nearby; they had already ordered Hunter and Joxx to dispose of the bodies, and indeed the ring travelers had already deposited the brother who they came to know as Michael into the deep, smelly bog.

They picked up the second rigid body now and, as before, lugged it up the steep rise and out toward the clearing where the great bog lay. But this time, Hunter told Joxx to stop for a moment. Making sure they were out of sight of the lieutenants, they lay the body down on a bed of leaves.

Then Hunter turned to Joxx.

"Your first and last question was this: How can I hold the people of the current Empire responsible for the sins of the past?"

Joxx nodded.

"And you agree that this person here is the youngest brother of the three as we have seen them, the same one who betrayed the 36 Coalition and all the peoples of Earth as well?

Again, Joxx agreed.

Hunter pointed to the man's mask. "Then take that off him, and your question will be answered."

Joxx hesitated a moment. His facial expression seemed to say:
Do I really want to know
? But finally he did as told. He pulled the mask from the body's face—and let out a cry that was heard all the way back to Kelly's Hollow.

The face was as rigid as the body—a look of uncertainty and fear etched on its features. And he appeared younger and more earthy looking.

But there was no mistaking who this was.

It was O'Nay Himself.

20

Flash!

They were back in the control room of the
ShadoVox
.

It seemed smoky and wet for some reason. A mist had filled it, too.

When Hunter came to, he was sitting in one of the command chairs, fingers grasping the armrests, eyes facing the access door. The first thing he looked for was the bulb next to the door panel. It was solid yellow and not blinking. This meant the door was still locked and had remained locked in the time he and Joxx had been on the mind ring trip.

Joxx was sitting in the seat opposite him. He looked as if he'd just crawled out of a high-speed space wreck. His uniform, torn and battered before, was now down to the atomic threads and sopping with sweat. He was slumped over in his seat, hands shaking, haircut ruined, his face buried in his chest. He was taking in deep gulps of air and letting them out slowly. Finally, he lifted his head.

"How long," he began gasping. "How long were we gone from this time frame?"

Hunter wasn't sure. That was one thing about mind rings, one could be gone a second, a minute, an hour, a month. Hunter managed to rub his hand across his grimy face. His beard, already coarse and erupting when he started this adventure, seemed just a bit more grown out now. His guess, they'd been gone just a few hours.

But what had happened in that time, back here in the real world?

"At the very least I feel compelled to call a truce," Joxx was beginning to say.

But at that moment, Hunter wasn't listening to him.

Something is wrong here....

He looked back at the access door just a second before the banging began. It grew louder by the instant. Someone on the other side was trying desperately to get in.

The last Hunter had seen of his colleagues, Erx and Berx, Calandrx, Zarex, Klaaz, and Gordon, they'd retreated into the next compartment over in the huge command bubble; this afer Hunter had put the mind ring around Joxx's head. Their job was to watch the door while Hunter brought the SG commander back through the ages. Was this them now? Trying to get back in?

Hunter didn't think so.

A moment later, a combination of ray-gun blasts and sheer muscle power broke the door down. A small army of dark figures flooded into the room.

Hunter just shook his head. He'd been right. They were not UPF soldiers, nor Erx and Berx and the rest of his gang.

They were Solar Guards.

Lots of them.

They took one look at Joxx and let out a great cheer.

"We have rescued our leader!" one man yelled, to the hurrahs of the others. "The Empire is well again! Joxx is alive!"

"What happened to the enemy fleet?" Joxx demanded of them, interrupting their celebration.

The guards hesitated a moment. "The invaders' fleet has been destroyed," one finally said, "and they are all dead."

Before Joxx could say anything else, his soldiers blinked him out to one of the Rapid Engagement Fleet Starcrashers in orbit above the tiny moon, Bad News 666.