Planet America (11 page)

The three men weren't sure what she meant.

"You will not be the only ones looking for him," she explained again. "In fact, others have already gotten a head start."

She paused and wiped her eyes again.

"I can provide you with a fast ship," she finally resumed. "And safe passage through any sector of the reclaimed Galaxy. I can arrange for the best star charts. The best intelligence."

Suddenly it seemed as if the big room got a bit brighter, as if the Earth had just wobbled a bit on its axis. Calandrx began to say something but stopped. Erx and Berx bit their tongues as well.

A long pause.

"Just find him first... please." Xara told them.

The men bowed deeply. Rascals three.

"We will, my lady," Calandrx said, hiding a smile. "Or die trying..."

6

Hunter slipped the flying machine into orbit around the
small planet, then reached back into his cockpit and shook Pater Tomm awake.

"Are we there yet?" the priest asked sleepily.

"If Klaaz's directions were right, this should be the place," Hunter replied.

The planet below was called Bazooms. It orbited a yellow star known simply as BDG, short for Big Dan's Girl. The star system was located roughly below the elbow of the Five-Arm, in an isolated sector of the fifth spiral known as the Twist.

They'd reached BDG about three hours after leaving the dirty snowball of Tonk. Once inside the system, it was not hard to locate the planet in question. BDG was a rather boring collection of uninhabited rocks orbiting a dull sun. Only Bazooms showed evidence of past life.

An ancient image called up on Hunter's quadtrol showed the planet once shimmered with the bright glow of circus colors: red, green, and yellow. Its atmosphere was once cobalt blue. Thousands of ultrabright beacons, not unlike the powerful zasers of Earth, had flashed crazily in all directions, their beams reaching beyond the edges of the star system.

At one time, Bazooms was a place to be. Essentially an orbiting brothel, the planet was once a very high-end resort where only the richest and most fortunate citizens could stay and play. All that had changed a few dozen centuries before—or at least that's what Hunter's hand-held quadtrol was saying. It predicted that Bazooms would be as dull and dark as everything else floating around the moribund system. The wash of time and events had passed this place by. Its current status was listed as "unknown."

A good place if someone wanted to hide out.

It took some digging during the first hour of the flight, but Tomm had managed to scan his own quadtrol's distant memory bubbles for information on Zarex Red.

And the Klaaz had been right again. Zarex Red was no ordinary arms runner. True, at one time, he'd provided weapons to literally thousands of warring parties all over the middle regions of the vast Five-Arm. In fact, about a hundred years before, Zarex Red had no less than sixteen planets stockpiled with his war-making merchandise. So many people wanted in on the dealing, his home-base solar system had been prone to space-traffic jams around its innermost orbits. War had been big business on the Five-Arm for centuries. At the peak of his career, Zarex was probably one of the biggest dealers on the entire Fringe.

But after he'd made his fortune, Zarex Red gave up his edgy life as an arms merchant and became, of all things, a deep-space explorer. Using his profits to finance numerous expeditions, he had visited the farthermost reaches of the outer Five-Arm, way out beyond the Last Star Fields, even beyond the Final Stream. The memory bubbles in Tomm's quadtrol claimed, insisted even, that Zarex had journeyed farther out on the Five-Arm than anyone else had ever dared.

Tomm's quadtrol also confirmed that Zarex Red was last reported to be living on Bazooms, "retired from all positions."

Now viewed from a lower orbit, the remains on Bazooms looked to be everything its name and reputation had implied. It was a small world, just a couple thousand miles or so in circumference, with rocky highlands north and south of a tropic equator. The two large landmasses were covered with hundreds of fantastically old structures. Palaces, resorts, casinos, sky-scraping hotels, not decayed, just abandoned. Cities once bathed in garish lights now unlit and dark. Thousands of artificial lakes, rivers, and lagoons, and one entire sea, dried up. Just about every square inch of level terrain had been taken up at one time with a hedonistic establishment of some kind. But now the planet appeared to be dead. Desolate. One big ghost town.

Yet, switching over to his long-range scanner, Hunter saw the barest glimmer of light coming from a spot on the larger of the two landmasses, just north of the equator. It came over as a patch of color in the otherwise gray background. There was a bit of life still left down there.

Or so it seemed.

Hunter set the flying machine's auto-scan on high, and after a few passes he got a closer blink on the life signs below. Nestled into the side of a high peak about two hundred miles north of the planet's equator was another palace of sorts, built with seven spires and a large artificial lake in the middle. Hunter booted his azimuth and was soon in a low orbit just ninety-five miles above this place. According to the scanner, only one life-form was left on Bazooms. All alone, right below them.

Hunter suggested Tomm strap down in his cramped jump seat; at the same time he ran a few environmental checks on the planet's climatic conditions. Unlike so many planets way out here, Bazooms's puff status was stable. The surface temperature was seventy-two degrees, the atmosphere itself was holding at a constant 92 percent. This meant the weather was fine and the air was good.

But Hunter's instruments revealed an atmospheric oddity as well. Like every other planet and moon in the Galaxy, Bazooms's atmosphere was the essential mix of nitrogen and oxygen. But Hunter had also detected a trace of the gas nitrous oxide—laughing gas. In fact, back in the planet's heyday, there had been two facilities, one at each pole, pumping N
₂
O into the atmosphere on a constant basis. Hunter had to laugh at this. Apparently, the people who ran this place felt that if the perfect weather, the landscape, and the palatial resorts weren't enough to please you, maybe the spiked atmosphere would.

Breathe deep and go with the flow
, Hunter thought now.
Not bad advice
...

They finally burned in through the atmosphere, setting down on a flat piece of ground located right outside the main gates of the resort. But something was strange here. There was only sup-posed to be one person living down on the surface—Hunter's scanning devices had told him so. Yet they could hear the sound of many voices coming from the other side of the resort's wall. People talking, laughing, pealing with delight. The sound of water cascading, glasses clinking, the staccato popping of many slow-ship wine bottles coming to life. Music blaring—it was the unmistakable din of a 'cloud party in full blast.

"Either my scans are skewed," Hunter said to Tomm once they'd climbed out of the flying machine. "Or a couple hundred people in there just woke up from the dead."

Tomm just shrugged. "Sometimes things aren't always as they appear," he said.

There was another thing: The high-walled resort appeared much grander up close. From this perspective, just a hundred feet from the main gate, the seven towers spiraling above the resort seemed to reach into orbit themselves. The valley below them was shimmering in an amazing shade of green. The sky was an absolute crystal blue. Or was it?

Pater Tomm took in a deep breath and smiled. So did Hunter.

Suddenly the place looked even better.

"Must be the air," the priest said with a laugh.

Hunter secured the flying machine inside his Twenty 'n Six and they walked through the main gate of the resort.

The place was buzzing with activity, contrary to what the scans had implied. There was a swimming pool the size of a small ocean just inside the gate. It was surrounded by a bevy of bathing beauties that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. Hunter and Tomm walked past the pool, not eliciting as much as a curious smirk from any within the curvaceous collective. Up the grand steps, they entered the expansive lobby of the resort's main tower. Like the pool, the lobby was jammed with hundreds of beautiful, young, scantily clad women.

There was a huge floating desk in the middle of this hall; it seemed to be the center of this little universe. Six gorgeous women in white tunic uniforms were sitting behind it. Unlike the girls at the pool, they seemed aware that two oddly dressed strangers were suddenly among them. They eyed Hunter's unique Empire uniform first, then the priest's cassock and collar.

"Are you two lost?" one of the females asked.

Hunter began to say something when Tomm nudged him aside. "Let me handle this," he said.

The priest studied each girl for a moment, then stood before a rather stunning blonde. Without a word, he reached across the desk and with the back of his hand, lightly stroked the skin above the girl's breasts. He let his fingers travel up to the nape of her neck, finally resting them on her cheek. The girl did not move; she did not object. She just sat there and smiled.

"Exquisite work," Tomm whispered. "If only ..."

He turned back to Hunter, who was clearly puzzled.

"Isn't that called 'copping a feel,' Padre?" Hunter asked him.

Tomm just shrugged and turned back to the six girls. "We're looking for someone named Zarex Red."

All six females laughed at once. "Sorry," one finally said. "He doesn't take visitors."

"So he is here then?" Tomm asked.

"He is," another replied. "But he is a very busy man. We have instructions not to allow anyone to—"

"You can counter those instructions," Tomm told the girl firmly. "Beam us up to his room right now—and that's an order."

Without a moment's hesitation, she smiled and pushed a button.

Flash!

The next thing Hunter knew, he and Tomm had popped into the entranceway of an enormous three-tiered penthouse.

It took him a moment to realize they were atop the resort's tallest spire. The room looked like a miniature palace. The main rooms were all circular and lined with windows throughout. Even the floor was made out of glass, creating the illusion that everything up here was just floating on air. No matter which way one turned, the view was awesome.

They took a few tentative steps inside. The interior of the main room was as impressive as the view. There was lots of crystal. Lots of diamonds. And lots of girls. Some reclined on the dozens of couches strewn about the penthouse. Others sat on pillows on the floor. Still others simply floated around aimlessly, with little more to do than look beautiful.

"I'll give him one thing," Hunter said, surveying the big room. "This guy knows how to hide out."

Tomm just shrugged. "Remember, though, all might not be as it appears."

"Yeah," Hunter replied. "You keep saying that."

At the far end of the main room, a large veranda protruded mightily from the side of the tower. There was a floating couch located on this balcony, and it was surrounded by another dozen girls so gorgeous, they made all the beauties inside pale a bit in comparison, if that was possible.

The balcony girls were in various stages of undress. Their undivided attention was being directed at the figure lying on the couch. Several girls were stroking his head, others his back, his chest, his legs. Still others were hovering around his nether regions.

Eyes barely slits, catching some rays from the system's spunky sun, it was Zarex Red himself.

He was a large individual, muscular, brutish-looking, at least from this angle. He was probably 160 years old or so, no more than 170 certainly. Unlike the shaved-head-and-goatee look that was the rage throughout most of the Galaxy these days, Zarex had a head of wild and woolly dark red hair that reached past his shoulders. His face was clean shaven. He was wearing a standard space uniform that had been strategically ripped around the shoulders to emphasize his rock-hard biceps.

He was oblivious of the two visitors. Between the legion of preening angels and the concerted effort at getting tanned, Zarex's mind seemed to be taxed to its limit. Hunter and Tomm just sort of shrugged and stepped out onto the balcony. Though they appeared to be nearly a half mile above the planet's surface, only a mild breeze was blowing past them. The view was incredible.

Just like the girls inside the penthouse itself—indeed, just about every female they'd met so far—these new beauties flatly ignored them. In fact, they didn't even seem to be aware of their existence. Each was totally devoted to the job of comforting Zarex.

Finally, with no little drama, Tomm cleared his throat.

Zarex finally came to life, but just barely. He opened one of his eyes and took a look up at the priest.

"My God," he whispered. "I'm either dead or I'm dreaming. I mean... why would I imagine a priest suddenly standing on my balcony?"

"Because he is real," Tomm told him. "Unlike many other things around here."

Zarex still did not move a muscle, except the ones in his left eyelid and lips. "Maybe you're a ghost..." he mused. "One that will go away as soon as I take my next sip of wine...."

"Drink then to the honor of the Great Klaaz," Tomm told him right back. "He's the one who sent us to see you."

Both of Zarex's eyes managed to open now.

"My friend Klaaz sent a priest for me?" he asked with a gasp. "I'd say that is a scarier prospect than being visited by a ghost."

Tomm looked about the balcony; so did Hunter. To his eyes, it was a cluster of naked and near-naked breasts, some slightly moist, some gleaming in the sun. Still, the beauties seemed oblivious to everything except Zarex.

"You might find yourself dead or somewhere worse, should you ever have a power outage up here," Tomm told him in a very priestly tone.