Starhawk (23 page)

Vanex studied the holo-girl capsule more intently now. It seemed bigger, more streamlined than the holo devices he'd been familiar with as a younger man. The encrypted hovering message ended: "Once you have summoned the sentinel, by your service to the Imperial Court, activate this device."

Vanex had to read the message over and over again; it seemed stranger each time. Why would someone in the Imperial Family want him to take a holo-girl trip? Did one of the four top Specials actually think he'd enjoy such a lusty getaway? Or was there another motive involved?

He didn't know. But orders were orders, and Vanex was nothing if not a loyal servant.

So he summoned the sentinal, then he flipped the switch at the top of the capsule and ...

The next thing he knew, he was standing on a beach. It stretched for miles in both directions. High cliffs marked the limits of the northern and southern horizons. A calm sea was before him.

This was a very beautiful place. The water was cobalt blue, the sky a lighter version of the same color. A huge, friendly, yellow sun was shining above; its rays felt warm and perfect. Behind him, a grove of multicolored trees danced slowly in the wind. The sand beneath his feet was made up of trillions of tiny gemstones of many, many different colors.

"My God," Vanex whispered. "They have certainly improved these things."

He took a deep breath and it was as if Life itself had entered his lungs. Suddenly he felt better in mind and body than he had in the last two hundred years.

He knelt to cup some water in to his hands, and his back did not creak in response. He touched the water to his lips and tasted a nectar more sweet, more golden than the best batch of slow-ship wine ever made. He sat down at the water's edge and stared out at the magnificent view. The crystal sea, the cliffs on either side of him. The flora gently swaying, the song of leaves pressing against leaves.

"Heavenly..." Vanex whispered.

Someone came up beside him. Vanex first saw two beautiful feet, toeing the sand. His eyes drifted up the well-curved ankles, the beautiful knees, the shapely thighs. A very brief piece of gold cloth covered the nether regions, but the hourglass shape'continued upward to a pair of gorgeous, small breasts only partially covered by long, flowing blond hair.

This was for him, Vanex knew. His holo-girl had arrived.

He shielded his eyes and looked up at her face—and nearly dropped dead right there, a very difficult thing to do, here in the thirty-fourth dimension.

His holo-girl was Princess Xara.

Vanex didn't expire, but he did become dizzy for a moment.

This had ceased to make all sense. Why would Xara, Daughter of O'Nay, be here? Dressed like a holo-girl?

"Because I need your help," Xara replied, answering his question.

She pulled Vanex to his feet.

"Have you ever seen anything like this before?" she asked the elderly engineer.

The old man sputtered in his reply. She had asked the right question, the wrong way.

"I mean," she amended. "Have you ever seen one of these dreams so detailed? So—perfect?"

Vanex looked around him. Again, it had been a long time since he'd been inside such a experience, but as he felt on first landing here, this one looked incredibly detailed and expansive. The dreams he'd taken so long ago usually provided little more than the requisite beach, the lapping water.

a comfortable place to lie down and have sex.

But this place was much more elaborate. The sky looked authentic, the sun did, too, in a way. The water was like an elixir, and you could actually see things over and beyond the trees: mountaintops, green valleys, flowing rivers.

In all it just looked bigger, more real.

Xara got him back to his senses.

"I am hoping that as an engineer, you might be able to grasp what I'm about to tell you."

"I'll try, my lady," he replied. "Though I must say, confusion reigns at the moment."

She spread her hands around her. "We have been fooled by these things for centuries," she said. "We have always been led to believe that this is all an elaborate illusion. A holographic program—and in the first models, it really seemed as if this was the case. But I am here to tell you a great secret that I have only learned recently myself. This is not an illusion. The thirty-fourth dimension is not a dimension at all, not in the sense that we know them. This is a real place. A very strange and little-studied place. Time has the appearance of standing still here for reasons we know nothing about. And nothing ever goes wrong here. Nothing..."

She held up a holo-capsule in her hand. It was an exact copy of the one Vanex had used to get here.

"No one knows who invented these things," Xara went on. "Or how they work. Another thing lost in the haze of time. And the most elaborate ones—such as this one—put you here in such a way, it's almost completely different than the less-specialized devices. This is the most advanced type of holo-capsule in the Empire—and also the most mysterious. Its origins are so unknown, in fact, it is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the realm. There is a chance even my father knows nothing about this. Yet this device is now possibly the one thing that determines the course of the Empire from this moment forward."

Vanex still looked very confused.

"But these are all things that we must both learn together," Xara went on. "I have been here only a little while.

I have learned much in that time. But still have much to go".

She pointed to the line of mountains off to the west.

"Over there," she said to Vanex. "What is on the other side of those mountains? What lies beyond?"

Vanex could only shrug and shake his head.

"I have no idea, my lady," he said.

Xara pushed the hair from her eyes and started leading Vanex off the beach.

"Well, let's go then," she said. "You have to help me find out."

One Minute Later

The sentinel named J'eevx arrived aboard the cargo 'crasher
Resonance 133
to find the ship in chaos.

He was still invisible, still stuck in the sixth dimension, but he knew the ship was speeding through space near a point in the Two Arm known as Thirty Star Pass. He'd appeared at first in a passageway leading up to the vessel's control room. Hundreds of soldiers in odd tan-and-red-splotched uniforms were rushing all around him. They were tearing apart the inside of the ship, pulling the covers off the hundreds of sensor panels that lined the passageway leading to the main control room.

Each of these soldiers was bearing a quadtrol. They would tear off the cover to a sensor panel, take a quick reading, then alter the ion frequency of each sensor within. The problem was, there were thousands of sensor panels throughout the enormous vessel, each one with tens of thousands of individual sensors inside.

They are trying to change the electronic identity of the ship
, J'eevx knew for no apparent reason.
They are doing so before some unseen enemy destroys them. It is a race against time
.

This made no difference to him. In fact, he would have no memory of this at all once he'd blinked out and was lost forever. He was here to fulfill an order from Vanex, the imperial custodian, at the request of Princess Xara Herself. Nothing else had any meaning to him.

He had only two seconds to act. Two seconds to become whole and do what he had to do before fading away into eternity. He had to pick the right place and the right moment to spend those two precious seconds. Princess Xara's wishes demanded it.

He moved through the frenetic passageway and into the control room itself. It, too, was a scene of chaos. Every control panel in the compartment had been ripped apart, and more soldiers were altering the sensor frequencies with the quadtrols. But on the main projection screen, the sentinel saw something else. An enormous fleet of Solar Guard ships was approaching, in Supertime, and with huge weapons slung under their wedge bodies, weapons with bright red glowing warheads.

In this fragment of time, these things were clear to the sentinel: This desperate effort of the people on this ship would not be rewarded, because the fleet heading toward them was about to fire the huge, glowing red weapons at them.

J'eevx wondered if he had arrived too late.

Only a few people in the control room saw him when he blinked in. They were startled and froze in place—a typical reaction whenever a sentinel appeared unexpectedly. He had no time to waste. So he simply held out his hand and gave the object in it to the nearest man. Then he drew a line in the air in front of him and a viz screen with a message appeared. Unlike him, he knew this image would remain long after he was gone.

On the viz screen was the message: "
Engage immediately. Do not hesitate. Xara
."

The soldier who took the device, read the viz message, and then watched as J'eevx faded away.

Only then did he look at what the ghost had given him.

It was a holo-girl capsule.

18

Megiddo

Needle City was in ruins.

Smoke and flames were everywhere. The Sea of Green was now a murky brown. High above, storm clouds were unleashing a torrential downpour on the devastated landscape, the first unscheduled rain the planet Megiddo had seen in more than a century. At some points up north, the poles had begun to melt.

Nowhere was the destruction more apparent than in the wreckage of the sky needle. What was once a three-mile-high tower was now a thousand-foot pile of rubble. Plumes of steam were exhaling from points all over the debris, interspersed with cracks of electricity and bursts of bright yellow sparks. The tower, like the city—like the entire planet—seemed dead, devoid of any life.

But deep within the ruins, one heart was still beating.

Joxx was alive.

He didn't know how. The tower had come crashing down around him, hundreds of thousands of tons of material falling about his head, but somehow he'd been spared. Was it because he'd been standing in the jail cell when the enormous structure collapsed? Was it just by luck that one huge jagged piece of melted rock fell this way, and a huge twisted girder fell that way, creating a shield that protected him from the rest of the collapsing structure? Was it simply fate? Or destiny?

Or was it because he was a Special, and escaping death by miraculous means just came along with the territory?

He didn't know.

But he could still feel every part of his body, and though he had some cuts and bruises, nothing was broken, nothing was numb, and even his hair had survived with a minimum of muss.

He still found himself buried beneath tons of rubble, however. Dark and craggy and filled with hissing power tubes and crackling electrical conduits, the debris was also being soaked by the nonstop deluge coming down from above.

As a result, it took Joxx nearly twelve hours to claw his way to daylight.

During the long climb out, one thought kept him going: /
still have my secret weapon
.

The Milky Way was a highly superstitious place. The farther one traveled out on the Fringe, the more superstitious people became.

Just what people considered bad luck was a list as endless as the number of different planets in the Milky Way itself. Launching depleted ships into a sun at the end of their lives was considered highly unlucky on just about every arm of the Fringe. Conversely, crashing a used-up ship into a graveyard planet was supposedly a guarantee of much good fortune. Slaying civilians during combat was frowned upon just about everywhere in the Galaxy, not so much for any humanitarian concerns but more out of the belief that it simply invited bad luck. In some star systems, being discourteous was considered unlucky, or looking at more than two suns at once, or being caught in the overlapping shadows of two moons. On Earth it was considered absolutely
verboten
to set foot on the mysterious, ancient bridges that crisscrossed the Mother Planet. On a planet called Xanez 6 in the Soltys Tri-star System, it was very bad luck to bathe while drunk. On Gallows 13 in the Masto-

Mattie Star System, it was considered very bad luck to blink your eyes while eating.

But there were some Galaxy-wide taboos, too, adhered to both by citizens of the most far-flung planets as well as those living cozily in the center of the Ball. By far, the strongest of these was the avoidance of any planet, moon or asteroid, that had a pyramid on it.

Just like the bridges on Earth and many, many more artifacts around the Milky Way, no one knew who built the pyramids or why'. They could be found in just about any part of the Galaxy; indeed, many had been discovered deep within mountains or at the bottom of ancient seas. That's how old some were.

The pyramids were probably the oldest artificial things in the Galaxy, older than any of the four Empires certainly. Those found on Earth had been dated to be at the very least 15,000 years old. But others uncovered throughout the Milky Way were much more ancient than that. Some appeared to be millions of years old.

No surprise, any researcher spouting such heretical facts usually found themselves very quickly out of favor with those who ruled the Fourth Empire. The official imperial line on the pyramids was that they were built sometime within the arc of the realm, for purposes yet to be determined; but this was nonsense, and everyone knew it. There was no rational explanation for the ancient structures and, because of the long-lasting belief that they radiated the darkest of bad luck even if one's eyes happen to gaze too long at one, everyone went to great lengths to avoid them completely.

Or at least that's what Joxx was banking on.

He'd reached the top of the pile of rubble, ironically just as the sun was setting on Megiddo.

The rain had finally stopped, but his eyes were still so filled with dust, his vision was blurry. He could see well enough, though, to realize the city around him was in ruins. Toppled buildings, devastated streets. Plumes of smoke billowing, and fires still raging everywhere.