Starhawk (19 page)

Joxx thought a moment. "Are you suggesting we go at it with them near the surface somewhere?"

The prisoner sipped the drink again. "Every adversary has a weakness. If you don't go out to meet them, then they must come here to meet you. At the very least, you can make that a painful experience for them."

"Are you saying that I lure them into an invasion?"

The prisoner just shrugged. "It's been done before," he said.

Joxx thought about this for a long time.

"Through either fate or design, these brilliant misfits have managed to isolate me out here," he finally began again, though he was talking more to himself than to the prisoner. "I have the most powerful warship in the Galaxy, yet we know this is one of their goals. And they are crafty. To capture an Empire Starcrasher, no doubt with the dream of carrying their insurgency through Supertime; I shudder at the repercussions of that! So it is my duty to conjure up another way that protects both my ship
and
the Empire— at least until help arrives."

"Is
this
a historical opportunity then?" the prisoner said with a weak grin.

Joxx just nodded, still in his own world. "So it may be," he whispered.

Silence fell again for a very long time. Finally, Joxx turned back to the prisoner.

"Is it true, ion mover?" he asked him softly. "Can you really see into the future?"

The prisoner stared back at Joxx for a moment.

Then he said, "This time, sire, I don't have to."

13

Earth, Atop Special Number One

The message bubbled up at Black Rock just after midnight.

As usual, there were very few people on duty at the massively imposing headquarters of the Solar Guards. Unlike their rivals the Space Forces, whose equally huge but more stylish headquarters (aka "Blue Rock"), could be found at the exact opposite end of the imperial floating city, SG officers out in space were not so fanatical about reporting every little tick and tock back to Earth. Considering the number of shadowy operations the SG was involved in at any given time, the unspoken rule throughout its corps was simple: always, the less said the better.

But this message, sent on a very high priority superstring matrix, was indeed an urgent one. It was from Joxx. He was finally reporting all that had happened to him since reaching the mid-Two Arm. The tidal wave of refugees, the panic on the planets he'd visited, the situation on Me-giddo, the fate of the mercenary fleet he'd conscripted. He also explained why he'd delayed in sending the report, which concluded that intelligence learned from a freelance operative indicated the mysterious raiders—Joxx still avoided using the word
invaders
—would most likely attack Megiddo within the next forty-eight hours.

The message further reported two actions Joxx was taking. First, he'd begun fortifying Megiddo in depth, requisitioning the needed materials from the local populace (what was left of them) as well as all other sources in the area, meager though they may be.

His second action was to request help be sent immediately. He was asking that the SG dispatch the Rapid Engagement Fleet to relieve his position. He said that with the fortifications he was putting in place, he was confident he would still be in command of the situation "when our glorious relief forces arrive."

He ended with a postscript stating that he would be slightly delayed in entering his wagers for the Earth Race.

It was only by fortune that an SG communication team was awake when the late-night message came in. Recognizing its importance right away, the team immediately deflected the bubble down to the Earth, where it traveled at Super-time speed to a villa located high on an artificial hill overlooking a beach that in very ancient times, was known as Day-toe-nee. This is where Joxx's mother and father lived.

The elder Joxx was awakened when the message interfered with a dream he was having about a strange type of creature that once prowled the waters near his home, eating everything in sight. Joxx Senior woke slowly; he had to twice revisit the message in his head before realizing its implications. His only son was in an unexpectedly dangerous predicament—a disastrous one, perhaps. And though he could see obvious attempts to understate his precarious position, calling for the Rapid Engagement Fleet was not something his son would do lightly.

Joxx Senior sat up in bed, trying not to wake his wife. He felt like a blaster bolt had hit him in the chest. What had started out as something of a whim, little more than an excuse for his son to go skylarking in space, had suddenly turned very serious. He closed his eyes and could hear the waves nosily crashing against the rocky, artificial coastline below.

Not a good omen.

He will miss the Earth Race again this year
, the old man thought.

14

As the stars would have it, the Solar Guards' Rapid Engagement Fleet had just crossed over from the Ball to the One Arm when it received the startling message from SG headquarters on Earth.

The communique was terse: The Empire was being invaded by a horde rushing down the Two Arm. Only Joxx the Younger and his starship stood in the way of these invaders and the heavily populated middle of the second swirl. Help was needed on a planet called Megiddo immediately.

Dire though it was, from the Solar Guards' point of view, the timing of this emergency was actually fortuitous. While the REF's main base was located just outside the orbit of Pluto, the thirty-six-ship contingent was rarely moored at its station. They were more likely to be off on secret missions or engaged in deep-space exercises somewhere in the darkest recesses of the Galaxy. In this case, the fleet was just returning from maneuvers on the Six Arm, its ships heading toward Earth, like everyone else, to get nearer to the home planet for the big race.

The top secret message had bubbled into their command vessel, the venerable
ThunderVox
, just as the fleet had reached the outer edge of the One Arm. Without hesita-tion, the ships turned long to starboard, an enormous maneuver that took all of six seconds to complete, and just like that, they were heading into the Two Arm. Their navigation masters plotted a new course: a tiny system sitting at the far end of the Moraz Star Cloud. Had the fleet left from its base closer to Earth, the trip would have taken nearly four days.

But now, at full cruising power, the three dozen ships could reach Megiddo in less than forty-eight hours.

The fleet's reason for being was evident by its name. If an SG unit got in trouble unexpectedly, the REF was rushed to the scene as a high-speed relief column. Their ships were among the fastest in the Galaxy; their soldiers quite possibly the best in the entire Empire military. They specialized in extracting friendly forces from the most difficult situations. Calling on the REF was the seventy-third-century equivalent to sending in the cavalry.

Each REF ship was a Starcrasher, of course. Two miles long, shaped as a gigantic wedge, and almost always flying in full battle dress, meaning each vessel was ready for deep space and ship-to-ship combat at a moment's notice. They carried hundreds of turrets along their great lengths, each one containing a massive three-tube Z gun. Hundreds of such turrets meant thousands of weapons on each ship. Added together, the three dozen ships packed an enormous punch.

In fleet-to-fleet engagements like the one anticipated now near Megiddo, the REF vessels would employ a darkly simple tactic: They would first spot the slower-moving ion-powered enemy ships from the invisible vantage point of Supertime. Then they would blink into real time, their ships arrayed in line abreast, quickly fire all their available guns, and then blink out again. The fusillade delivered by such a maneuver was so quick and so massive, it was bright enough to be seen millions of miles away. No enemy could escape unscathed from such an unexpected broadside, no matter how many ships they employed. After that, it was just a question of numbers; the SG vessels would repeat the tactic over and over again until the adversary was destroyed.

Each REF vessel also carried on board a division of Star Rangers, the SG's term for special operations troops. These soldiers were the most highly trained, highly motivated special operations troops in the Empire, a place overflowing with special units of all shapes and sizes. Even the rival Space Forces conceded the Star Rangers were better than any group they fielded. In fact, on several embarrassing occasions, the Star Rangers had even been called to aid SF troops who found themselves in trouble.

Strangely, though, the REF did not include a Kaon Bombardment ship in its makeup. The huge time-shifting vessels were usually too slow, too lumbering, and frankly, too complex to add to a rapid-action force. Besides, it was almost a sign of elan among the Star Rangers that they could take care of these brushfires without the advantage of having the battlefield literally frozen in time, allowing them to beam down to the planet in question and slay their enemies at their leisure.

No, the REF Star Rangers preferred to do battle with their enemies in real time.

The second message concerning the surprise invasion arrived aboard the
ThunderVox
about eight hours after the REF turned toward the Two Arm.

It came from Joxx directly. It was lengthier and went into greater depth about his predicament, especially the failed attempt to stop the enemy with his fleet of conscripted ion-ballast warships. The message also documented specific steps the star hero had taken in the past solar day to fortify his position and blunt the invasion. Clearly, he'd been busy while waiting for help to arrive.

Joxx's first order was to declare martial law over Me-giddo, little more than a formality as 90 percent of the population was already gone. Next, he'd sent his starship troopers out to seize every combat weapon they could find on the tiny planet. Because of the surfeit of pirate groups, outlaws, and criminal families once residing on Megiddo, there was a substantial amount of weaponry to be found, most of it left behind in the huge planetwide bug out.

According to the communique, Joxx's troops had managed to collect a staggering 25,000 weapons, including more than 16,000 half-tube blasters, nearly 8,000 single-tube blasters, and an incredible 252 gigantic Master Blasters. This added up to a formidable arsenal on any battlefield. The half-tube blasters were handheld, one-man weapons; in the ancient days, they were called
mortax
. They could project a destructo-beam a distance of about twenty miles. A single-tube blaster, sometimes known as a Faster Blaster, could deliver a similar beam up to eighty miles in any direction. They needed at least a two-man crew to operate. Master Blasters were large arrays of Faster Blasters. While their range also topped out at around eighty miles, they could deliver tremendously wide fields of fire, especially at ranges below 40,000 feet.

What Joxx had done with all these weapons was turn the planet Megiddo into a fortress. Yet he'd arranged the blasters in such an ingenious way that he was essentially beckoning the enemy to attack him. A strange tactic, true, but no one questioned its inspiration. For while Joxx was preparing to go toe to toe with the invaders on the ground, with the brilliant defense plan he'd conjured up, there was a chance most of the enemy wouldn't even make it that far.

When this second message arrived aboard the
ThunderVox
, the rescue fleet was about thirty-nine hours away from Megiddo. But after digesting the report, the REF commander issued an order to his fleet: "Run all vessels at 110 percent power. If this results in a few power-string ruptures, then so be it. Our brother Joxx has marshaled a valiant defense of the Empire. We can't let a hero like that wait any longer than necessary."

Megiddo

Joxx knew about the Siege of Syracuse, the Battle for the Acre, and the encirclement at Bastogne.

Even as a child he'd studied ancient military texts, haunting the top secret information bubbles on Special Number One almost before he could talk. He'd absorbed bits and pieces of history that had survived the fall of three empires and a handful of Dark Ages in between, information forbidden to anyone who wasn't a Special. Some of it stretched all the way back to before men first left Earth for space. It was considered dangerous for an ordinary citizen to know such antediluvian things.

Joxx had learned much from these readings, but one fact had stuck with him from childhood: In any conflict, the smarter of the two opponents was almost guaranteed to win.

And for Joxx, knowing history was the same thing as being smart.

It was the ion mover who'd emphasized to Joxx that the invaders were using a blatant modus operandi whenever they attacked a planet.

First, they would make a sudden appearance in orbit, their warships literally surrounding the target planet. From this vantage point on high, they could launch Z-beam strikes at any large military targets they spotted below. Simultaneously, the invaders would land troops in the cities and countryside alike, to sow havoc and panic. Indeed, the prisoner said the invaders would routinely land forces all over the planet, engulfing it with their sudden frightening presence. Then these troops would converge on the objective's key targets and engage the defenders at close range. As most of their conquests had been sleazeball planets so far, with militaries sleeping or defenses nonexistent, the invaders had triumphed in this strategy every time.

The question for Joxx then had been this: How could he counter the enemy's extremely successful approach? He now had the huge confiscated arsenal at his disposal. How best could he deploy it?

A typical star commander would have placed the thousands of high-powered artillery weapons around the most important asset on the planet. In the case of Megiddo, this would mean digging in multiple rings of blasters around Needle City. These layers of shrinking defense lines would make it as difficult as possible for the invading sol-diers to reach the city and thus conquer the planet from the ground. In theory, anyway.