Starhawk (29 page)

"That's really all I remember from that day. I recall the boys finding me not quite dead but not quite alive, either. They took me away, I recovered—somewhat—into what you see before you. But the gift I received that day has stayed with me. How to describe it? I don't really know. Any dream I have becomes a reality. I think it, and it is done. It's really as simple as that. And I've tried my best to use this knowledge, this power, this
blessing
for the good of everyone—not an easy task as I was not exactly a choirboy before all this took place. I'll tell you, my friends, the universe must truly be a random place, because if the stars were to pick a more unlikely candidate to build a Galactic Empire, it was me...."

A very long silence.

"So that is my sin," he said, tears welling up in his eyes. "That is what I felt the need to confess to you. I've been fomenting this lie for a thousand years. After I recovered and I began exercising the fantastic power that had been given to me, I became arrogant. I became vain. I convinced myself that it really
was
an angel that visited me. That I had indeed been touched by the finger of God. So that was the story that was created. But it simply was not true."

Hunter nudged Joxx, and both of them bowed.

"You are forgiven," Hunter said simply.

Another very long silence arrived. Awkward. Endless.

Finally, Emperor Jimmy spoke again: "Before that day in the hollow, I thought of myself as a freedom fighter. But back then most people had another word for it:
terrorist
. And that I was. Some of the acts I committed back then have haunted me every day of my very long, unnaturally extended life."

He wiped his eyes with some difficulty, but then the twinkle returned momentarily.

"But I'll be frank with you," he concluded. "As my past acts have dulled each day just a little bit, then I have also been visited by a ray of sunshine every day as well. More out of relief than triumph ..."

"And why is that?" Hunter prompted him again.

Emperor Jimmy smiled again. "That, of my three brothers, I was the one that was somehow chosen. Because if it had been one of the other two—well, let's just say, I shudder at the thought—"

"But what do you mean?" Joxx blurted out.

"How can I best explain it?" Jimmy replied. "My youngest brother was a strange fusion of myself and my older brother Michael. I'd like to think / was the brains of the outfit and that I had at least a little compassion in me. My older brother did not. He was all brawn and no brains, and he was a nasty sort, drunk or sober. And my youngest brother? He was both smart
and
nasty—the worst combination."

Jimmy smiled again, but this time he didn't seem so happy.

"God help me for saying this," he said reflectively. "But if it was one of them who'd been brought back to life, and not me... well, that would have been disastrous."

Flash!

Now, this one was tricky.

Hunter and Joxx next found themselves in a shuttle similar to the craft that had carried them from Peter's to New York.

But this buglike vessel was in much worse shape than that previous one; in fact, it was full of holes and was smoking heavily. And they were not just passengers this time. They were sitting at the flight controls and actually flying the thing.

It was also in the process of crashing.

Joxx was terrified—and Hunter couldn't blame him. He'd gone through this disturbing chapter many times before, and while he always managed to get by with just a few cuts and scrapes, there was no guarantee that the same outcome was assured this time in.

They were back over the so-called Emerald Isle, the place of the ambush, the place from which Emperor Jimmy had come. Hunter had determined that just about a year had passed since their meeting with the paralyzed ruler. In the thousand years since the ascendancy of the terrorist turned potentate, the Isle had become the cultural mecca of the Milky Way, just as Peter's had become its spiritual center and New York the hub of its political and military might. Indeed, the Isle had been turned into one great palace, with buildings from sea to sea that rivaled those of Peter's in grandeur and New York for sheer elegance. In the millennia of Jimmy's rule, the people who'd been born in this place had been treated like celebrities throughout the Galaxy. There was never any need for these people to buy a meal or a drink anywhere among the stars. They were oiled and fed for free, just as long as they reveled their hosts with tales of the green jewel and how, if you looked hard enough, you could see a pinpoint of green coming from their home at the far end of the Galaxy.

The Emerald Isle didn't look anything like that mythical place now. Now the island nation was one huge battlefield.

Hunter and Joxx were flying the shuttle above it, and even as his hands were gripping the steering yoke so hard they had turned bone white, Joxx couldn't help but notice the land below looked like a scene from hell.

Fire, smoke, the landscape thick with wreckage from some great calamity. Tracked weapons, huge troop movers, all kinds of flying machines, everything on the ground in pieces scattered as far as the eye could see. It seemed incomprehensible that something so beautiful could become so devastated in less than a year. But that's exactly what had happened.

Joxx quickly dragged his attention back to the matter at hand. This shuttle was crashing, and there didn't seem to be a lot they could do about it. Even worse, in the traveling compartment behind them was not a load of passengers or even soldiers, but the litters of the dead. That's when Joxx looked down at his uniform and realized that it had no places to input weapons or hook up communications devices or power supplies or jet packs, items essential for combat in these ancient days. Instead, the uniform had a plain white field imprinted on its front with a huge red cross in the middle.

"We're combat medics," Hunter yelled over to him. "Don't ask me why, but we are now known as The Knights of Malta."

"And we are crashing with a load of dead
into
the land of the dead?" Joxx screamed back at him.

Hunter could only nod grimly. "That's why this one is so tricky."

They fell below the thousand-foot mark. The sky all around them was filled with flash beams and aerial scatter bombs. The shuttle was mortally wounded, yet the people on the ground shooting at them seemed intent on making their end as painful as possible.

Two simultaneous explosions tore through the rear of the shuttle. The craft went nose over and began to plunge nearly straight down. Much smoke and fire was trailing in their wake. In the back, the load of bodies seemed to be groaning from the strain.

It was at this point in the trip that Hunter took in a deep breath ... and checked the time. In his many visits to this incident, he'd learned an important thing: because of the huge battle going on below them, a layer of heated thermal air was rising from the battlefield. This patch of hot air was lurking at about four hundred feet. It was not much, but Hunter knew from experience that if he pulled the shuttle up at just the right moment, it might provide them enough of a bump to put them into a more controllable position.

He did a slow countdown to 400 feet, the sky around them absolutely covered with antiaircraft explosions. Five hundred feet... 450 ... 425 ... Now!

Hunter violently yanked back on the control column, pulling the steering yoke back so far, it almost crushed his chest. Joxx was simply numb with terror. His hands were on his head, nearly ripping out his uncombed hair. To him, it seemed just impossible for the shuttle to remain in flight.

But slowly, surely, Hunter pulled the shuttle out of its death dive and began getting some air under it. The sky down here was filled not just with aerial scatter bombs now but also blasts from big guns firing long range below them. Still, the shuttle finally did level out, Hunter's muscles straining to their limit in pulling the aircraft back under control. But this did nothing to stop the fire that was consuming their aft power compartment. In fact, they had barely seconds of flying time left before the aircraft exploded in midair. So Hunter's last-ditch maneuver hadn't saved them, it simply gave them a few more moments to avoid a crash.

Hunter managed to get Joxx's hands back on his steering column, and together they turned the gravely wounded aircraft to the right. Jammed up against his side window, incredibly Joxx began picking up landmarks he recognized. The vast clover field, the serpentine road, the ditch where the Easter morning ambush had taken place, the thick woods beyond.

Hunter shouted to steer the craft straight again, and suddenly they were clipping off the tops of holly trees.

Hunter yelled one more time: "Pull...
now
!" And pull they did.

Two seconds later, the shuttle crashed into the bog just beyond Kelly's Hollow.

Joxx was knocked unconscious by the impact.

No matter. Hunter had been knocked cold many times at this point in his previous mind trips. He dragged Joxx from the wreckage now and did a quick job spraying wound-mender on a nasty head gash the SG officer had suffered in the soggy crash.

Then he carried Joxx across the shallow part of the bog to a grove of holly trees that was quite familiar from previous crash landings. Pushing him down into the knee-deep shave grass surrounding the trees, Hunter ripped the red cross from his chest and then got down low.

It was strangely quiet here, especially since all around them, the island nation was totally engulfed in war. Hunter had splashed across this brackish water to the grove of holly trees three dozen times before, always trying to get it right. Not once upon landing did he see anyone else within sight of the bogs or the hollow that lay beyond.

And that was strange. Because he knew this place was actually ground zero for nothing less than the fall of the First Galactic Empire.

Joxx was finally able to lift his head as the wound-healer spray took effect.

He pushed the tousled hair from his eyes and saw they were looking west, across a blanket bog to where the edge of Kelly's Hollow began. He knew this meant that about 150 feet to his right was the larger, deeper bog where he and Hunter had thrown in the two bodies during the scenario before the last.

To his mind, this was a queer place to return to, especially with the utter devastation all around them. Only the trees surrounding Kelly's Hollow seemed to be left standing for as far as he could see. Why had it been spared? And the deep bog before them? It, too, seemed remarkably preserved.

Hunter, of course, was reading his mind; it was easy, as the same questions had come to him when he first took this part of the patched-together mind trip.

The answer to why they were here came down the road just a few seconds later. It was an armored column containing twenty-two tracked vehicles. Five were extremely large and were carrying huge, triple-barreled guns inside turrets in the back. Two more were lugging what appeared to be a very primitive type of sonic gun. The fifteen other trucks were carrying soldiers and other people who were wearing uniforms but carried no weapons. Hunter had determined that these men were engineers.

The small convoy looked like it had just driven through hell, which, in a way, it had. Hunter knew, and Joxx could tell quickly, that these troops weren't just engaged in local combat with an unseen enemy. They were being attacked from outer space. Their vehicles and the men themselves were battered almost beyond belief; they were also surrounded by a very faint yet detectable yellow glow.

"Cobalt decay," Joxx whispered woozily. He knew this from his immersion in ancient warfare; it was something that Hunter came to figure out after the first dozen trips.

Cobalt decay was the residue of an incoming bolt of energy fired from a cobalt-ray blaster. This very powerful weapon appeared sometime before the mid-twenty-eighth century. If you were close enough to get the cloud of yellow dust on you and were still among the breathing, this meant that you'd somehow escaped death by the narrowest margins.

"So this is an interplanetary war?" Joxx said, pulling the weeds from his mouth. "I mean, someone must be shooting at them from way, way off. Cobalt batteries were almost exclusively used for very long-range bombardment. Close in, they might even blow a small planet apart."

The last truck in the convoy was carrying not an enormous weapon of some kind. Instead, it was pulling a trailer on which a very large, very heavy object was tied down and covered by a frayed atom-weave tarpaulin.

The convoy stopped right at the edge of the high bog, and the soldiers and engineers quickly jumped out. They hurriedly directed the truck pulling the weighty object up to the bog itself. This done, all of the soldiers and engineers stared into the bog for a moment, almost as if they were deep in prayer. This was still curious every time Hunter watched it. The little ceremony quickly over, the soldiers put their helmets back on and frantically went back to work. They uncovered the object on the back of the trailer truck, all while the gunners remaining on the huge escort tanks were turning in their turrets, waiting for the next bolt from the blue to come crashing down on them. If they saw a cobalt fusillade coming in and acted quickly enough, they might be able to deflect it with zaser beams, a sonic blast, or even some aerial scatter bombs. It was the seeing it first part that was difficult.

The heavy object was finally uncovered. Now Hunter and Joxx could see that it was a huge chunk of pure star crystal, gleaming like a billion diamonds fused together. It was a magnificent object, twenty feet high, five feet wide, and cut in an elegant if irregular shape. It was so brilliant, its shimmering managed to light up the very gloomy surroundings.

The soldiers didn't seem that impressed with it though; it was obvious that they wanted to get their work done and then get the hell out of the area, so they didn't wind up as small piles of blue cobalt dust. Using huge two-man anti-grav devices, the engineers were able to coax the enormous jewel off the trailer and to the muddy ground below. But now came the hard part. The antigrav movers refused to budge the huge piece of gleaming crystal once it was set on the ground, reason unknown. So each man in the column who was able quickly moved in, and together they picked up the huge stone. This took much effort, but the group was able to move the stone about ten or so feet and place it upright next to the edge of the bog.