Starhawk (30 page)

Then they started digging.

This began a very long section in Hunter's previous trips; he was able to cut out most of it, performing a kind of fast forward. Still, they watched the group of soldiers for quite a while as they hand dug a hole right on the edge of the bog to a depth of about ten feet. Then they pushed and pulled and somehow manipulated the huge gemstone to fall upright into this depression. They filled the hole back in, stamped down the edges, had another short prayer ceremony, and then jumped in their trucks. Indeed, they left the area with great haste.

Hunter and Joxx watched the convoy rumble back down the road, finally twisting around a bend and up and over the nearby hill. Hunter counted to five. That's when they saw an enormous cobalt bolt crack the sky and fall in the general direction the convoy was heading. Another two sec-onds passed, then came the thunderous sound of the convoy's guns firing back.

The firing went on like this for two minutes, before it finally died down, too.

Hunter knew they now had several minutes of isolation. He yanked Joxx up from the grass and without a word, they began splashing their way across the shallow bog, intent on getting to the deeper one.

On their arrival, Hunter let Joxx take in the surroundings. It was best that he get the next jolt of unreality on his own. The SG officer looked in all directions, drinking it in. Then his eyes fell on that part of the deep bog closest to the gemstone the soldiers had just erected.

That's when he first realized there was a hole in the water.

Literally...

It was probably two feet across. It went straight down into the dirty water, like an invisible shaft, creating a 360-degree waterfall with the rest of the bog water lapping over its sides.

Joxx gasped. "I've never seen such a thing. How could anyone manipulate Nature like that?"

Hunter shrugged. "Every era loses a few of its secrets before the next one takes its place. But more important, do you know what spot this place marks?"

Joxx was already nodding his head. "It is the exact place where we threw in one of those bodies. The first one. Michael. The older brother of Emperor Jimmy."

Joxx then dared to lean out over the edge of the bog and stare down into the hole in the water.

"Oh God," he gasped again. A great and horrible truth had suddenly come to him. "He's not down there anymore, is he?"

Hunter did nothing to indicate that Joxx was wrong.

"But we ourselves threw his body in here—more than a thousand years ago!"

Hunter said: "Take a look at that monument."

Joxx got back to his feet and scrambled over to the huge, recently planted gemstone. There was a plaque carved into it. Its words were both simple and clear.

It read: "
On this spot, Emperor Michael was raised from the dead and thus the Second Empire began
."

Joxx could hardly speak: "Raised from the dead?
For real
?"

"At least in the mind of the person who wrote this part of the ring trip," Hunter replied soberly.

"But, do you mean... a
resurrection
?" Again, Joxx could barely say the words.

Hunter just shook his head.

"I just don't know," he said.

Flash!

They walked for days.

Or at least Hunter had manipulated the mind ring trip to seem that way.

He had pointed them west, toward the ocean. The fighting had moved on long ago, so the roads were deserted. But the damp green fields on either side of them were covered with the unspeakable debris of war. There was wreckage as far as the eye could see, the devastation being even more apparent down here at ground level. Many huge tanks, their tracks broken or run out, their gun barrels bent or melted. Broken-down troop carriers, turned up like skyscrapers, twisted metal reaching for the sky. Even more monstrous weapons movers, some crushed, some torn apart as if by some giant's hand. Downed space fighters, enormous rocket-powered aircraft bombers, even a few gigantic ion-pulse starships could be seen among all this as many things had fallen from the sky, too. Everywhere were clouds of thick, black smoke, everywhere the stink of war.

And everywhere, too, was the human wreckage. Most of the fallen soldiers were little more than piles of dirty blue salt, though sometimes Hunter and Joxx would come upon several hundred silhouettes of either white or red, lined up, as if they had been executed en masse. But there were also the remains of those who had not been demolecularized as a means of death. No, many soldiers across the nightmarish landscape had been killed the old-fashioned way: torn apart, broken, or dismembered by fire blasts, subnuclear weapons, or super-high explosives. Skeletons, twisted in the most grotesque of death poses, many still with the skin burned to their bones, littered the roadways and the fields. Some appeared to be smiling at Hunter and Joxx as they trudged by. Others seemed to be beckoning to them.

In all his travels, real or imagined, Hunter had never seen anything so gruesome.

It was sunrise when they reached the cliffs of Moher.

They could hear the ocean crashing and the wind blowing, but the fog and smoke were so thick, it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front of them. Here at Moher, the sea had battered the land and won for thousands of years. Until the massive triad had been put in place, that is. Now the coastline was as straight as a razor, perfect and unending in both directions. But it was still a long drop down to the water. And the next stop after that was New York City, or thereabouts.

The cliffs were as deserted as the roads. But it was clear the path of destruction that had started at Kelly's Hollow an indeterminate amount of time before had gone right through here—and far beyond, as it turned out. For an especially stiff wind began to blow as if on cue, as Hunter knew it would, and suddenly they were able to see through the thick mist. Before them, a dozen gigantic structures appeared, stretching far out to sea. Dull gray, devoid of ornamentation, some of them still burning from battle damage, but most being intact, they ran atop the rough ocean waters all the way to the horizon and beyond.

They looked odd, especially from this vantage point, yet there was no doubt what they were.

Bridges.

"The forbidden spans..." Joxx breathed. "They originated here?"

Hunter had been surprised upon first seeing them, too.

Along the shoreline, the wreckage of dozens of enormous warships was also visible. They'd all been hit by cobalt bolts, and in some cases their remains were crashing up against the side of the gigantic bridges and the massive triad. Hunter knew a strange battle had been fought here. Between the people on the warships and the people on the bridges, both using and being hit by cobalt lightning bolts, fired by both sides from starships flying deep in space.

It was clear, too, that the people who built the bridges had bested those fighting on the warships. Through Hunter's talent at time-shortening the mind ring trip, he was presenting Joxx with the remains of a battle that had actually been fought months before. While the Isle was still being bombarded by isolated cobalt weapons flying in outer space, the war had moved on from there. And it was clear that it had moved across these huge bridges.

But how had the spans been built? Where did the material come from? The craftsmen? The designers?

There weren't any ...

They had not been needed.

"My God," Joxx said, collapsing to his knees at the edge of the cliff. "Electron torches! Real ones. That's obviously the key. They can take any atomic structure and combine it with another until it is strong enough to rival ion steel, the strongest material known in the Galaxy. And they can shape materials into any design wanted, then have the torches' brain come up with the best way to actually build it."

Electron torches building bridges? Why not? Warships can be hit and sunk; flying machines can be shot down. But bridges can be repaired, and with electron torches, they can be repaired very quickly, almost at split-second speed. Networks of tubes built into the center of the spans indicated some sort of high-speed transport system had been factored into the design as well. A troop transport equipped with an ion-powered engine could make it across the ocean to New York in the same amount of time as a shuttle flying over it: approximately seventeen minutes.

Joxx stared out at the wreckage and the bridges for a long time. "So they launched an invasion from here. It's certainly a novel way to get to the other side of the ocean."

"And start the disaster that Jimmy hoped would never happen," Hunter agreed.

"But why would anyone in their right mind want to dis-mantle what Emperor Jimmy had put together? For what reason? There were no wants. No problems at all. The Galaxy had been settled peacefully, and everyone was prosperous and free to do what they want.
Why ruin that
?"

A stiff, bitter wind blew off the ocean and began wearing down Hunter's face just as it had worn down the rocks here for ages.

"Why ruin it?" Hunter asked the question again. "Because you weren't the one running it.... You weren't the one in power. It's called
hubris
. Ever hear the word?"

Joxx didn't reply. He just sat down and stared at the destruction around him, the debris left behind after the invasion forces had departed.

"It's a campaign that will succeed beyond its creator's wildest dreams, I can tell you that," Hunter said, taking a soggy seat on the wet grass beside him. "There will be bitter fighting here on Earth and on just about every planet in the Galaxy. Nearly twenty years of it. Ever wonder why there is so little history left from this period? It's because all life, all culture, was almost totally destroyed.

"I've seen many of the battles within the mind rings. I was even involved in some of the fighting. It was brutal— and not something we have to revisit here, though maybe, at a future day it would be wise to. All you have to know is that Brother Michael won, because somehow he'd gained access to an army and, even more important, to a technology more powerful than what was currently available. This technology allowed him to build weapons, to fly in space faster, to build these bridges. That technology was the electron torch. That's all it took to overthrow the First Empire."

Another silence between them. The wind was howling now, the rain coming down in sheets.

"But how did he get himself out of that bog?" Joxx wondered aloud. "How was he able to bring himself back to life?"

Hunter didn't answer the question.

Instead he told Joxx, "Just hang on. We're going back across the Pond."

Flash!

The booty stretched on forever.

Miles of it. Stacks of it. Some of it packed inside airtight, deep-space containers, some of it lying broken and scattered on the ground. Jewels. Comet dust. Small meteorites made of solid gold. Coined money, sheets of shimmering aluminum, silver bars, tons of it, lying unattended. Tarnishing. Rusting. Melting away in the very hot sun.

The plunder wasn't made up solely of precious metal and stones. There were millions of pieces of artwork, 3-D sculpture, and holographic reliefs. Some of these objects were more than two thousand years old. Some were ancient before humans ever went into space. Most of it, too, was withering away in the brutal heat.

The holding area for this tiny universe of spoils was an island so large it was once called Long Island. It was located just east of New York, one hundred miles long, twenty miles wide, hundreds of square miles. To say every foot of it was covered with some sort of boodle, paid as a tax, taken as part of a fine, or simply taken, was not an overstatement. The truth was, the looters were running out of space to put their loot. The soldiers of the fledgling Second Empire had done their jobs too well.

The means by which all this ill-gotten gain made it to Mother Earth was, of course, by spaceship. In this era, the first year of the Second Empire, the first spaceships made by electron torches had appeared. They were enormous, clumsy, sometimes dangerous vessels. They needed a large area to land in, required many hours of maintenance, and had a tendency to blow up on takeoff if their delicate early-model ion-ballast engines were not stoked correctly. Few were built to the same standard, but most were 2,500 feet in length, bulbous and bullet-shaped, weighed more than 500,000 tons, and carried enormous amounts of raw ion-ballast fuel. If one lit off incorrectly, the resulting explosion usually obliterated a good chunk of real estate around its takeoff spot. Anyone within a mile of the blast usually went up with it.

This shaky fleet built by the crude craftsmen of the early Second Empire grew exponentially as more planets were reclaimed after the fierce civil war, and more electron torches got into the hands of people just learning how to use them. There were at least a million ships operating inside the One Arm alone. Many more were flying around the Galaxy, full of imperial soldiers terrorizing the locals, plundering entire star systems, spreading fear, causing instability.

Rape, on a galactic scale.

This was the first legacy of the new Emperor, the man that just about everyone had taken to calling Brother Michael.

The miles of largesse ended, so to speak, at the huge arena recently built near the eastern edge of the monstrous, un-scrubbed city of New York.

The arena was meant to fit about a hundred thousand comfortably. There were nearly twice that number jammed into it on this grimly historic day. Most of them were intoxicated on something. Clouds of
can-can
hung over the oval stadium. Wine was spilling everywhere. The distinctively sour smell of
jamma
sweat was much in evidence, too. These were the most important people on the planet, the most bloodthirsty commanders of the recently concluded galactic civil war. Uneducated except in the ways of murder and mayhem, they came out of the celestial woodwork once Michael had made his call to arms against Emperor Jimmy simply on the claim that he was "too weak" to rule the Galaxy. Having emerged victorious but no less brutal, these neo-barbarians were now the elite of the newly formed Second Empire.