Planet America (2 page)

But the Princess raised her hand, freezing the soldiers in place. The man was wearing a long, brown cassock and a tight white collar around his neck. He looked up at the Princess, then bowed deeply. He was short, of middle age, probably close to 200 years old. His face was that of a weary man of faith caught in a very faithless part of the Galaxy.

Obviously, he was a priest.

"My apologies, your highness," he said now. "My friend and I are lost and we are seeking directions ..."

The Princess stared back at him, incredulous.

"You're looking for directions?"

"We are, your highness," the priest said, finally straightening from his deep bow. "We took a wrong turn at the last star system and..."

She raised her hand, cutting him off.

"Excuse me, Padre," she said through gritted teeth. "Perhaps you haven't noticed, but we are in sort of a
situation
here. This base, this entire moon, is about to be blown to kingdom come, if you will pardon the expression. So forgive me if I seem discourteous, but you could not have picked a worse place to stop and ask for directions!"

The priest just stared back at her. He didn't look surprised or frightened. Just perplexed.

"My lady, we had no idea..." he began to stutter in reply. "Our approach was extremely speedy, and it was difficult to see what was ..."

Just then, the mechanical voice blared throughout the chamber again.

"The battle star will be in position to fire in one minute and twenty-five seconds...."

The Princess's features dropped a mile, as if all the air had suddenly been let out of her. She was no less pretty. But tears had come to fill her eyes.

"We are but seconds away, Father," she whispered. "Then it will all be over."

"The battle star will be in position to fire in one minute, twenty seconds...."

The Princess looked down at the priest and added gloomily, "Perhaps your arrival here is the most opportune thing to happen. We all need some promise of salvation at this moment. Though I fear you might have come too late."

The priest glanced back at the strange craft he'd arrived in. Its pilot was looking out at him, his face barely visible beneath his enormous lightning bolt-adorned helmet. His body language seemed to be asking, "Just how lost
are
we?"

"One minute, fifteen seconds ..."

More tears came to the Princess's eyes. Her companions looked very dejected as well.

Yet the priest was able to muster a slight, if anxious, smile.

He took a step forward. "Your highness, as quickly as you can, please tell me the details of your situation here."

She started to bark back at him, but now it was his turn to interrupt. He raised his hand gently to her lips.

"No time for that, child," he said firmly. "Just tell me: Who is trying to annihilate you and why?"

The Princess paused, but only for a second. Then she began talking very rapidly, telling the priest that she and her subjects were rebelling against a vile, merciless imperial force that sought to rule this part of space. This enemy's ultimate weapon, a huge battle star nearly as big as the moon itself, would soon be in a position to fire its all-powerful death ray at them. This weapon was capable of destroying entire planets. This tiny moon would prove no match for it.

While all these words were spilling out, the priest was holding the Princess's hand and staring deeply into her eyes. He was looking for something behind the words, something deeper within. Just as the doomsday voice announced there was but one minute left before the base would be destroyed, the priest put his finger to the Princess's lips again.

"Enough, my child," he said. "I understand the situation now, and what's more, I believe you."

She stopped only long enough to catch her breath.

"And now you will perform the last rites?" she asked, a small measure of defiance returning to her voice.

The priest shook his head. "No, your highness," he said softly. "Now, I will attempt to save you."

He walked back to the strange spacecraft and had a hurried conversation with the pilot. The pilot shrugged twice and wearily adjusted his crash helmet. The priest stepped back from the craft, and the pilot lowered the canopy again. The pilot could be seen pushing some controls in front of him.

Then, suddenly, the craft disappeared.

Or at least that's what it looked like.

Actually, the odd flying machine had exited the base so quickly, it just seemed to disappear. Its speed was so swift, it couldn't be adequately measured or comprehended by the human brain. It was that fast. No one inside the chamber except the priest had ever seen anything like it. The Princess was especially stunned.

"Your friend has left you here? To die with us?" she asked the priest.

But he just shook his head. "No, your highness," he said. "In fact, he'll be right back..."

And no sooner were those words out of his mouth, when indeed, the strange aircraft zoomed back through the entrance portal and was again sitting on the launch ramp, no more than twenty feet away.

"
What sorcery is this
!" the Princess exploded.

Her security troops surrounded the aircraft in force this time. No less than six soldiers ran forward and grabbed the priest.

But then came the sound of an incredible explosion from above. Suddenly, the walls of the hidden base were shaking violently. The sky outside its portals turned fiery red. Billions of pieces of flaming material were streaking through the tiny moon's atmosphere, creating a spectacular if frightening light show. Then cheering could be heard from the hidden base's control center.

But what had happened?

The pilot climbed out of his spacecraft and approached the Princess. He bowed deeply as well, the proper thing to do in front of a princess—any princess.

"Your enemy is no more," the pilot announced bluntly. "You and your people are safe again."

The Princess remained frozen to the spot. She still wasn't getting the drift of all this. The pilot recognized her plight and reached into the breast pocket of his black flight suit. He came out with a viz disk.

"This will explain it all," he said.

But the Princess looked no more enlightened. She clapped her hands, and one of the chamber's robots raced over to her. She pushed the viz disk into a slot in its cranium. There was a click and a beep. Then a 3-D image sprang to life in midair about three feet from her deep brown eyes.

What the disk showed seemed to be impossible. It was a recording of a massive space battle, first involving up to fifty spacefighters, all of them belonging to the despised enemy of the rebels. This battle was being projected from the point of view of the very unusual winged and wheeled flying machine, its nose aglow with a bright red flame. Essentially, it showed a series of impossibly quick explosions; these were the enemy fighters simply blowing up as the strange flying machine twisted crazily through a small area of space just a hundred miles above the moon's surface. In the background, the black, grim-looking battle star was moving into position.

With the enemy fighters so quickly dispatched, the flying machine headed right toward the enormous ball of metal. Suddenly, it was flying through the battle star's canyon of external channels. At one point, the flying machine's nose lit up again. The rays it spewed forth went down one of the shafts adjacent to the battle star's main channel.

There was a bright flash, and the battle station was blown to bits. The explosion was so bright, it washed out the visuals for a few seconds. By the time the viz disk recovered, it was showing the strange winged craft entering the hidden chamber again. Then the disk went blank.

These images had lasted but a few seconds, and even then, it was evident that they had been slowed down to insure that they made some kind of sense.

Still it was not an easy thing for the Princess to comprehend.

"Again, what is this trickery?" she asked tartly. "This can not be real. The only possible explanation is that your flying machine is so fast it was able to destroy all of our enemy's fighters and the battle star in the barest fraction of a second."

The priest smiled and took her hand again. "That's exactly what happened, my dear," he said. "And actually in less than a thousandth of a second, as normally measured."

Just then, another announcement came over the hangar's audio system. The speaker's formerly morose tone had changed completely. It was confirming what the viz disk seemed to show. There were no more enemy fighters, no more enemy battle star. All space around the tiny moon was clear of adversaries, and the rebel squadron was returning intact as well. A great cheer went up around the chamber.

"But how?" the Princess asked, almost pleading with the pilot and the priest now. "You must tell me."

"I don't know myself, your highness," the pilot finally replied. "I am just grateful to be able to help your cause."

"But... you saved us all," she began stammering. "What payment could I possibly ..."

The priest stepped forward again. "As I said before," he began. "We were looking for directions."

The Princess shook her head and quickly called for the highest intelligence officer within the hidden war chamber. He arrived a few seconds later. After a quick chat with both the pilot and the priest, the intelligence man conjured up a satchel of old star charts and handed it to them.

And finally the Princess was smiling.

"I don't suppose you want to stick around and maybe have a glass of wine with me?" she asked the pilot.

The pilot's eyes went wide. He began to reply when the priest interrupted again.

"Many pardons, your grace," he said. "But we really do have a schedule to keep."

He began bowing as he was backing up, the pilot stumbling along behind him.

"But can't we stay, just for a drink?" the pilot was asking the priest.

The priest did not reply, he simply continued nudging the pilot back toward the strange flying machine.

"Well, at least ask her why that guy is wearing a hair suit," the pilot pleaded weakly with the priest, pointing to the strange figure standing mute behind the Princess.

"I will not," the priest shot back in reply. "Some things are best left unknown."

With that, they climbed back into the odd flying machine. There was a sudden glow from its engine compartment, and then it simply disappeared again.

The Princess blinked her eyes, the kid and the other guy did as well. The goon in the hair suit let out a loud, fake growl.

The Princess looked at the viz disk and just shook her head.

"Who
were
those guys?" she whispered.

2

No one
knew why Hawk Hunter's flying machine went so fast.

Its design had come to him in a dream one night shortly after he found himself stranded on the planet called Fools 6. But while the fact that the craft looked like nothing else in the Galaxy might have been a function of his slumbering vision, why it could move the way it did was the result of pure chance—or coincidence—even though there were many learned minds scattered among the stars that would argue that these two things did not exist.

In order to power his flying machine, Hunter had hooked up a series of what he thought were identical energy transfer devices taken from an ancient Empire ship he'd found wrecked over the hill from his dwelling on Fools 6. The crashed vessel turned out to be a Kaon Bombardment ship, a frightening military vessel that had the capability to freeze time itself over a battlefield, allowing its troops to slay their enemies, literally at leisure.

Hunter's seemingly random mating of the Kaon ship's Time Shifter components to the business end of his machine's power plant gave it the ability to travel very, very fast. So fast, in fact, there was no way to measure its velocity in terms of distance traveled. It was better to simply measure it in terms of time elapsed, usually from here to there in a thousandth of a second.

But Hunter's flying machine was both mysterious and unique. Though only the size of a standard Empire spacefighter, it had interstellar capability, and they did not. In fact, Hunter's craft could travel faster between star systems than a gigantic Empire Starcrasher battle cruiser, and they were able to do it at a speed of two light-years a minute.

He and the priest—his name was Pater Tomm—were looking for a lost planet.

It was called Tonk. It was located in what was once known as the Zorro-Wilco star system. Hunter and Pater Tomm had spent the last six weeks working their way across the midsection of the Five-Arm, the fifth of the Galaxy's multiple spiraling arms, trying to find a way to this place. It was not an easy thing to do. This part of the Five-Arm was on the edge of the Fringe itself, that being the halo of outlying stars that, in many places, marked the farthermost reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. The midsection of the Five-Arm was particularly dangerous space to travel through. Considered almost desolate when compared to the massive clusters of stars closer to the center of the Galaxy, there were still tens of millions of systems out here, they supported hundreds of millions of planets, and many of those planets had people on them. Lots of people meant lots of opportunity for disagreements and war, and Hunter and Pater Tomm had seen their share of both on this journey.

In many places, way out here, war was simply a way of life. The recent dustup on the tiny jungle moon had hardly been an isolated incident. In the six weeks since the end of the noble but ultimately disastrous war on Zazu-Zazu, Hunter and Pater Tomm had found themselves involved in no less than a dozen other conflicts simply because many sectors of the space they were traveling through also served as interplanetary combat zones.

Most of these wars had a clear good guy and bad guy, and when the cause seemed just and the conflict unavoidable. Hunter and Pater Tomm had chosen sides and fought with the good guys. They did this in return for navigation data or information mat might bring them closer to the elusive stepping-stone of Tonk. These enlistments rarely lasted for more than a day. Once they'd signed on and Hunter was able to do his thing with his magnificent (some said enchanted) flying machine—well, the conflict was usually decided quickly thereafter, and always in the favor of their employers. And while Pater Tomm despised the notion that they were, in effect, serving as mercenaries, he knew this was a necessary evil if they wanted to find their way through this vast, troubled neighborhood of the Five-Arm and reach their first goal.