Planet America (5 page)

Now, suddenly, Pater Tomm was at his side. More ion blasts came raining down on the courtyard.

"Do you know what's going on here, my brother?" the priest screamed in Hunter's ear.

Hunter began nodding frantically, pushing the priest down into the snow as another ion blast went off close by.

"These explosions are real... but the soldiers are fake!" he yelled back to the priest.

Even with a face full of slush, the padre managed a smile.

"You catch on very quickly my son," he yelled back. "Very quickly, indeed!"

They both scrambled to their feet and started running. There was a door about two hundred feet away from them; it led inside the ice fortress itself. They headed for it with all due haste. The explosions were still going off around them, and the soldiers were still firmly in place. But Hunter now was seeing that the debris and shrapnel being kicked up by the explosions was going right through the phalanx of frozen soldiers. In reality, this storm of high-speed, highly irradiated metals should have sliced right through the small legion, causing an ocean of blood and gore.

But that did not happen for one simple reason: These soldiers weren't soldiers at all. They were holograms. Projections. Fakes.

It took some more zigging and zagging, but finally the two men reached the relative safety of the huge door leading into the ice fort.

It was locked.

Tomm started pounding on the door. Another explosion went off close by. The door did not budge. More explosions, two of which were uncomfortably close. Tomm pounded louder, but again to no avail. Finally, Hunter drew out his blaster pistol and aimed it at the door's substantial lock. But before he could engage the trigger, Tomm reached up and pulled the barrel down.

"No, wait, my friend," he urged Hunter. "I'm sure they're just a little slow in answering the door."

Hunter started to protest, but then, sure enough, they saw the huge metal bolt running through the center of the lock begin to move slowly. Make that very slowly. It took what seemed like forever, but finally the lock sprang loose, and the door flew wide open. Hunter and Tomm tumbled inside.

No sooner did they regain their footing when another explosion went off close to where they'd been standing just seconds before. The huge door took most of the blast, but the concussion was enough to knock Hunter's crash helmet nearly halfway around his head. Temporarily blinded, he heard the huge door slam behind him.

He straightened his helmet to discover a dark figure was standing before them. They were in a vestibule of sorts, but it was nearly pitch black inside, so Hunter could only see an outline of this person. By the size of it though, he thought it had to be a child. But then a candle was lit, and by its light Hunter finally saw this person was actually a tiny, bent-over ancient-looking man wearing a garish red and yellow uniform, old, worn-down boots, a severely dented space helmet, and a frayed weapons belt, which held the most pathetically rusted sword imaginable.

Tomm immediately leaped forward and embraced the man. The old-timer did his best to return the gesture; he was actually trying to laugh with joy, but he had not yet caught enough of his breath to let out anything more than a gleeful wheeze. There was no doubt, though, that he was very happy to see Pater Tomm.

The priest turned back to Hunter and said, "Can you believe it? Here is the man himself! Answering his own door."

But Hunter was having a hard time processing this information.

"Do you mean?" he asked in a mumble. "That this is—"

"Yes!" Tomm shouted. "Behold the Great Klaaz!"

But this guy looked positively ancient. His beard was long enough to touch the frozen ground.

"Padre," Hunter replied. "Surely you must mean this is Klaaz's
grandfather
."

But Tomm waved his words away. "No, my brother," he said. "This is Klaaz himself!"

Hunter took another look at the very elderly, very broken-down soldier and uttered just one word: "
Damn
."

This is not what he had expected.

Klaaz was finally able to get some air into his frozen lungs.

'Tomm, my brother! Are you really here? Or am I dead and just dreaming?"

"I am here old friend." Tomm replied.

Klaaz wrapped the priest in a weak bear hug.

"We have waited too long for this moment!" he croaked. "You are not only my confessor, you are one of the bravest soul seekers of our times!"

Pater Tomm shook his head. "It is
you
who are the hero, Klaaz! Entire star systems speak your name in their histories. ..."

"I just did my job." Klaaz replied with a wink.

Pater Tomm opened his mouth to say something further, but a terrifying screech drowned him out. An ion shell had impacted right on the main door. The sudden green glow was a dead giveaway. That, and the ear-splitting noise.

"Quickly!" Klaaz said, although he began moving quite slowly. "We must get below!"

They made their way down a long, dark corridor that led deeper into the castle.

Hunter had never seen burned ice before; now it was all around him. Actually, they were blocks of ice saturated with gamma radiation, so much so they looked and felt like glass. The walls of the castle were made of huge blocks of the stuff. Each one appeared as if it had a faint yellow flame glowing from within, the eternal, if diminished by-product of the massive gamma bombardment. Though the decay of the fort's interior made the glowing blocks of ice look more like gigantic, dirty diamonds, the place must have been stunning when first built many centuries ago.

They eventually reached a kind of subchamber about five hundred feet below ground level. There was a dull lamp hovering near the ceiling here, and it was noticeably wanner. The Great Klaaz stopped, needing to catch a breath.

Tomm needed a break as well. He produced a flask of slow-ship wine and offered it to Klaaz. The old man took it without a moment's hesitation and nearly drained the vessel dry.

"So, you old dog!" Tomm yelled at Klaaz, retrieving what was left of his wine supply. "All the stories I have heard about you were true!"

The old man smiled widely, displaying a mouthful of cracked and yellowed teeth. "You know better than to believe more than half of them, Padre," he said with another wheeze. It was strange. Hunter couldn't recall ever seeing anyone so old so happy.

Klaaz pried the flask from Tomm's hands and drank once again.

"After all these years, dear brother," he said to the priest, "you have arrived at a very interesting moment!"

"You do seem to be in a sort of bind here, my friend," Tomm agreed.

Klaaz wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Obviously, a dire situation exists, Padre," he said. "The enemy beyond the walls number more than twenty thousand. They are a gang of the usual suspects: space pirates and no-goodnik meres who seek something that does not belong to them."

"How long has this been going on, my brother?"

"Centuries—or so it seems," Klaaz said with a cough. "You saw my holo-army. Impressive, no?"

"I've not seen such trickery in two centuries," Tomm replied diplomatically, "and I suspect it was an ancient strategy even back then."

"It was and still is," Klaaz admitted. "But in case you have not noticed, there is a bit of desperation in the air we are breathing."

Above them the sound of more blaster barrages could be heard landing inside the fort's high walls.

"But you've been able to hold out, my brother," Tomm said. "You must have
some
kind of brilliant defense in place—"

Klaaz cackled loudly.

"I have six power-gravity fields surrounding this place," he said. "And they are really the only reason the Huns haven't stormed the gates already. Trouble is, all six fields are degrading very rapidly. I mean, your craft had no problem getting through, did it?"

The priest shook his head solemnly. Klaaz shrugged again. "Their integrity must be worse than I thought."

Tomm let his friend drain the flask.

"My old chum," he said. "Those twenty thousand soldiers outside your wall. Why are they here? What could they possibly want? You? This castle?"

"Not me or the castle, Padre," Klaaz replied. "But the people I am protecting here."

Tomm did a double take. "People? What people? You mean you aren't out here alone, my brother?"

The twinkle returned to Klaaz's eye.

"Alone?" he asked with a wink. "Hardly ..."

They resumed walking down the long, descending hallway, Klaaz moving slowly in a kind of staggering gait. The lower tube was lit by simple proton-decay lanterns. They provided just enough light to reveal that the walls of the tunnel were adorned with faded ice paintings of Tonk's golden age. One depicted the planet as being the brightest body on the entire Five-Arm, literally the center of a small universe. Another illustrated a huge battle between thousands of spaceships of all shapes and sizes, with those from Tonk winning mightily, of course. Judging by the murky detail and the porous nature of the burned ice wall, Hunter guessed the paintings were done even before Tonk's heyday, and that was at least two thousand years ago, probably more.

They finally reached the end of the hallway to find themselves stepping onto a somewhat rickety balcony; its supports were as rusty as Klaaz's sword. The balcony looked out on an enormous chamber. Also made of burned ice, it was nearly an eighth of a mile wide with a ceiling at least five hundred feet high, and no doubt reaching the bottom layer of the courtyard itself.

Sitting in the middle of this chamber was a spacecraft. Or at least that's what Hunter thought it was. Actually, he'd never seen anything like it before. It was long and slender; its sharpened nose nearly touched the roof of the huge chamber. It had rows of portholes running down one side and was standing on three huge fins. A vast network of scaffolding surrounded it, and it was draped in power cables and tattered golden sheets. A bubble of knowledge rose up from the deep recesses of his past life and told Hunter that this was an ancient combustible-fuel rocket he was looking at, a passenger carrier built at least three thousand years before, more probably closer to four. The pictures back in the tunnel were almost recent by comparison.

Scattered around the bottom of this rocket were hundreds of tiny white bubble-top living compartments, shelters more readily found outside in a temperate battle zone, not within a frozen, dilapidated enclosure. But this was not an army encampment they were looking down on. The people below were not soldiers. They were young women. All of them beautiful, all of them dressed in the barest of clothes. Torn gowns and ripped shorts mostly, some were wearing tops, many not, as if they were stranded on some uncharted tropical world and not inside a crumbling ice fort on a very chilly dead-end planet.

Hunter saw Tomm's face blush at the first sight of all this, and even his own chest was suddenly growing warm. Two thousand beautiful women, hiding way out here? It didn't seem possible.

Was there any chance he might be dreaming this? Hunter wondered.

The women below were very quietly going about the daily routines of life. Talking, walking, sitting, eating. The balcony was about fifty feet above the living level, and those women who saw Klaaz looking out at them waved vigorously to him. Many blew kisses. The old soldier pretended to catch each one and then smack it on his own lips.

"Behold these poor women," he said among these antics. "They are the survivors of a small star system called Mutaman-Younguska. It is but a hundred ten light-years from here. Or it used to be, for the Huns that now encircle us destroyed the system five years ago, killing the few soldiers it had and blowing up all but a prison planet. Their advance forces have been pursuing these females ever since."

Pater Tomm could barely speak—a rare occasion indeed.

"But... how did they wind up here? With you?" he finally managed to ask.

"Their ship landed here a year or so ago," the old soldier replied. "They'd heard the Klaaz was still here on Tonk and hoped that I could help them. Trouble was, the space scum arrived not two weeks later."

He paused a moment; the smile left his face.

"A sad vision, isn't it?" he asked wistfully. "Imagine what they thought when they saw that I was just an old man, practically marooned here myself, with a fortress built by the ancients crumbling around me? Of course that's probably what you thought on your own arrival as well."

"These people came in that... spacecraft?" Pater Tomm asked his friend incredulously. "It seems older than this castle!"

"It might well be," Klaaz replied. "And there is a reason for that: Look at these women below. You will notice that they all possess great beauty. Mutaman-Younguska was well-known for this. Effects of a red sun, you see. Now, with all that beauty everywhere you looked, well, I guess building modern spacecraft just wasn't a priority."

"Yes. Why leave a planet so especially blessed?" Tomm blurted out, adding quickly: "Unless you had to ..."

"Exactly, Father," Klaaz said. "You see, the Huns got hip to Mutaman-Younguska and decided they wanted these girls simply for pleasure. They are being driven by ... what is the word for it?"

"Lust," Pater Tomm said. "It's as old as the hydrogen in the universe."

"Precisely," Klaaz said. "They are lustful. And they have not seen a real woman in decades, I suspect. That also fuels their passions. It's a bad combination, and these young women do not deserve such a fate. So here I am, trying my best to prevent it."

More girls waved. A ripple was going through the camp now, and more eyes went toward the balcony. This meant more air kisses sent Klaaz's way. He began the drill of catching them, when suddenly he stopped and realized that maybe not all of them were intended for him. It was at that moment that Klaaz's ancient eyes finally fell on Hunter. The old soldier screwed up his face in puzzlement. It was almost as if he was seeing the pilot for the first time.

"Excuse me, sir," he said. "Did I ever get your name?"

Tomm turned red again. He'd been impolite—unforgivable in some parts of the Galaxy.