Battle at Zero Point (27 page)

"Because," he said finally, "Five thousand years ago, I was brought here for the same reason."

A long silence. The nurses were paying close attention to the conversation now.

The astronaut sipped his drink.

"And I will let you in on
my
whole story some other time," he said. "But at the moment, the reason you came here is more important. So, tell me again about this REF. There's something that really frightens me about them."

Hunter did as asked. He explained how at the height of the battle that never was, the United Planets fleet managed to disappear, only to find out that shortly afterward, the REF had disappeared as well.

Later on, the REF ships began showing up again, now painted red and apparently operating with little regard for SG headquarters or the Imperial Court back on Earth. Judging by their actions, their desire to create havoc and commit the utmost in cruelty seemed apparent.

The astronaut listened intently, becoming visibly upset when he heard further details about the REF's actions on
Doomsday 212
following Bonz's murder. He slumped farther into his pillows, pushing the drink away from him. The nurses were becoming uneasy, too. They didn't like seeing him this way.

'Tell me something," he finally said to Hunter. "Have you seen the madness yet?"

"Madness?" Hunter replied. "I think I've seen it everywhere since I was dropped into this place."

The astronaut shook his head. "No, I used the wrong term; of course you've seen madness here. It
is
everywhere. What I mean is, have you seen or heard of other acts of unspeakable cruelty, above and beyond the pale? Something like what the REF did to the helpless SF troopers on
Doomsday 212
after shooting down their ships?"

Hunter had to think. He'd been out of the loop so to speak for a month or so, so he wasn't privy to everything that had happened in the Galaxy while he was away. But there
was
that burst of panicky Maydays he'd heard during his dash across the Milky Way. From what he could determine, it seemed like innocent people both on planets and in ships were being killed, horribly, for no good reason. He told all this to the astronaut, and the old man became even more upset.

"This is the worst of all possible scenarios, I'm afraid," the man said gravely. "Can't you see what's happened?"

Hunter just shook his head. The nurses did, too.

"As you and your friends were so clever to find an escape door to Paradise," the astronaut began.

"The REF did the same thing—except they went in the
other
direction. You opened up a portal, a split in the fabric of space, and they were somehow able to take advantage of it, too. Or maybe they just fell into it and never told anybody in power after it happened."

Hunter needed a moment to connect the dots.

"Are you saying," he asked the astronaut. "That as we went to Heaven, they went…
to Hell
?"

"And found a way to come back," the astronaut nodded. "Just as you did."

Hunter's brain started doing a slow spin.

"Is… is that really possible?" he asked the astronaut.

"Why would you think it is impossible?" the man replied tersely. "Why do you think one place could exist, and not its opposite? You were in Paradise, correct? Where everything seemed good. Where there was no conflict, no need for anything negative. And I have the feeling that upon returning, some of that would travel back with you. In varying degrees, I suspect.

"But what you have to realize is that for a place so wonderful to exist, an opposite place would have to exist as well. And if a door opens to one place, then a door must open to the other. That's the dilemma, you see. Where a traveler to your place might see nothing but beauty and light and knowledge and passion, a traveler to the other place would see only the power that comes from evil. Pure evil. A very tempting thing, especially if you are predisposed to it, which I suspect these people in the REF were.

Ages ago, back on Earth, before we ever went to the stars, the yogis used to say that good and bad are actually two sides of the same thing. These two places—where you went and where they went—are the same idea, but exact opposites."

"Like matter and antimatter," one of the nurses said.

"Precisely, my dear," the astronaut replied. "And we—those of us who live here, within humanity, in the Galaxy, in the universe—are simply caught in the middle. It's been like that through the ages. And be advised: this has nothing to do with religion. The good place exists, the bad place exists, but their religious significance amounts to little more than a drop in an ocean. Religion is just the simplest way to explain something very complex, something that even the most advanced physics in the Galaxy today cannot begin to understand. But they are there. In the infinite number of planes that exist above and below this universe, these two are the ones right next door."

The astronaut shifted on his bed again.

"This is not good," he went on. "Something has been opened up here that cannot be so easily closed.

The madness— the
real evil madness
—is out. Again."

"So this sort of thing has happened before?" Hunter asked, not really sure he wanted to know the answer.

"Only all throughout history," was the astronaut's reply. "And I don't mean that dopey history back on Earth that barely went back ten thousand years. The history of the universe is as old as the universe itself.

Take a good look at one of those pyramids someday. Not the ones on Earth. I mean the ones they've found near the Ball, or on some of the real isolated moons on the Fringe. Some of those things are
billions
of years old. And someone had to build them back then, right?"

He let his voice trail off.

"So what can be done?" Hunter asked. "If what you say is true, this just got a lot bigger than merely my friends trying to get back across. And I'm only one person. It sounds like impossible odds."

"All very true," the astronaut replied. "But that doesn't mean you still can't beat them. The real problem is that I suspect the REF knows what you and your friends are up to. Don't ask me how, but I bet they do. So you'll have to be careful, too. Remember, when it comes to these sorts of things, there is nothing new under the stars. The evil ones may be devious, but it's only when things start turning against them that they become especially cruel. And they fear you and your friends because they must know you've been to the good place, and there is power in that alone. So, I predict, their first trick will be to put innocent souls in harm's way to counter anything you might try to do. They will be willing to kill millions, hell, billions to get what they want. And what will you do then, Mr. Superhero, if the choice is between billions losing their lives or you just backing away? Is it better for innocents to live in tyranny and evil than not at all?"

Another long silence. Hunter had no reply. The coffee machine started wheezing again.

"It would not shock me to learn that they are going back into their bag of dirty tricks right now," the astronaut went on. "Dreaming up something that everyone will fear is new but will also be something they've done, successfully, in the past. They are inscrutable, and they are probably getting help from somewhere else in the underworld. There are many kinds of devils down there. Trust me, I know about these things. Just because I've lived five thousand years doesn't mean I've spent all of that time lying here in bed. Yes… they will try to make you defeat yourself. They will try to use your good conscience against you. You must be ready for that."

He leaned back on his pillows, suddenly exhausted. "A big one is coming," he said. "A terrible battle that could have terrible consequences. Whether it was your doing or not— opening the way to the other sides—that was a huge mistake. And if you ever have the chance, I would look into exactly who the person was who provided you the means to get to Paradise, because, whether they knew it or not, they also allowed the REF to get to the other place. By doing so, they put in motion the terrible events that are approaching us now.

"If my guess is right, the REF will come back again and again to wreak havoc on everyone and everything, and they will continue to do so until they are stopped. And they
must
be stopped, or they will hold sway over everything for the next million years or so. They will spread so much evil that all of civilization will end—again. And it will have to start from scratch—again."

The astronaut fell quiet once more. The nurses were beside themselves now, fretting and sobbing.

They'd been through this before. That was obvious.

"How long did you say before the rest of your fleet crosses over?" the astronaut finally asked Hunter.

"We gave it one week," Hunter replied. He checked his watch. It was still counting down. "But now we are talking about less than five days."

The astronaut rolled his eyes. "You could have given yourself a little more time. You know, built in some margin for error."

Hunter just shrugged. "Who knew?"

The astronaut thought for another long while.

"Well, all this means that I will have to help you," he said finally. "And that it was a good and brave and a
lucky
thing that you managed to make it here, and that you proved yourself to be trustworthy.

Tomm was wise to send you. Though he must have known that only the most precipitous and dire situation could make me get involved. But now that I am, we will have to move very quickly…"

Hunter looked around the very spare room. Again the question came back to him. This was a very old guy in the care of two nurses. What could he possibly do?

"I appreciate your advice and counsel," Hunter said. "But seriously, how can
you
help me?"

The astronaut brightened a little, then waved his hand in an unusual fashion. "I will conjure up all the powers of the Third Empire, of course…"

Hunter just shook his head.
The Third Empire
? What did that have to do with this? Of all the mysteries in the Galaxy, the Third Empire was one of the deepest. Almost no one knew anything about it, only that it disappeared into the void of time between the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Fourth, a span of at least two thousand years that had a number of smaller empires and several Dark Ages mixed in with it. That's why Hunter was surprised to even hear it brought up.

"You actually
know
about the Third Empire?" he asked the astronaut.

Everyone in the room laughed—the astronaut, the nurses. Everyone but Hunter.

The astronaut nodded to one of the nurses. She led Hunter over to the nearest window, the one that looked out on the vast valley of fields and grass.

Hunter couldn't believe his eyes. Where just moments before the sky had been empty, it was now filled with hundreds of ancient but powerful-looking starships. And the grassy fields that seemed to go for miles were now covered with formations of enormous soldiers; they also stretched for as far as the eye could see. All of this had suddenly appeared, with the wave of the ancient man's hand.

"Behold the mythical Star Legion," the astronaut declared from his bed with no little delight. "But they are not so mythical, as you can see. They are the bravest soldiers in the history of creation. And they will help you in your fight."

Hunter could barely speak.

"So you
do
know the secret of the Third Empire?" he asked numbly.

"The secret of the Third Empire?" the astronaut roared back. "My friend, we
are
the Third Empire!"

War of the Angels

The three
culverins
breezed past the gauntlet of Solar Guards ships patrolling Earth orbit and fell easily through the atmosphere. Their destination was the floating city of Special Number One.

The entire Solar System was under
de facto
martial law. The Solar Guards were stopping, searching, and arresting the crews of any unauthorized vessel found moving inside the Pluto Cloud. Yet this trio of ships flew on through all the warnings, defying orders to stop or be shot down, and landed in the middle of the vast Imperial Plaza, practically on the steps of the Imperial Palace itself.

The three ships were immediately surrounded by SG shock troops—they had forcibly relieved the Imperial Guards of all their duties earlier that day. The Solar Guards blinked a number of heavy weapons to the scene, ready to blast to dust anyone who stepped off the ships. But there was an air of hesitation in their actions, too.

The hatchways on all three ships opened, and eventually people came tumbling out. The SG troops raised their weapons but did not fire. The intruders were not soldiers intent on attacking them. These were Specials, the very close relatives of the Imperial Family. This particular gang of three hundred or so had been flying around the Solar System ever since Venus cleared out, and they'd quickly become bored. Absolutely nothing was happening on any of the other original planets. With nowhere else to go, they'd flown back to Earth, hoping to resume their revelry.

Their timing couldn't have been worse. Confusion had reigned atop the imperial aeropolis for days.

Taking their emergency security edict to the extreme, the SG controlled all of Special Number One now, except for the northern tip, where a small army of Space Forces troops was still protecting the SF headquarters of Blue Rock. The two sides had been exchanging blaster fire off and on since that morning, and whispers of an SG
coup
were still thick in the air. Out among the stars, the war between the two military services was still going on, with rumors of atrocities happening all across the Galaxy. And with O'Nay reportedly riding around in a secret floating city up near the North Pole, there was a large power vacuum here, at the center of the Galaxy. It seemed inevitable that the Solar Guards would soon attempt to fill it

But none of these things had any effect on the Specials. Intoxicated and jammed-up, most of them, they spilled out onto the concourse to the amazement of the grizzled Solar Guards. The SG had orders to shoot anyone deemed a security threat, but even the most hardened SG trooper would never fire on a Special. Not only was it against every imperial law imaginable, it was also considered extremely unlucky, as there was a belief that Specials couldn't really die, not completely anyway, and thus had the power to haunt a person forever.

So the SG soldiers simply let them run wild.

A few of this drunken, privileged group had a mission in mind, though. They had to find the Empress, their soul leader. They hadn't seen her since the evacuation of
La-Shangri
, and they knew starting a good rave would be impossible without her.

So while the majority of new arrivals commenced frivolity in the imperial square, taunting and teasing the grim-faced SG troops surrounding them, a smaller contingent—three men, three women, all reeking of Holy Blood—headed for the Imperial bedrooms.

They didn't encounter the usual battalion of House Guards at the palace's front door. In fact, the doors weren't even locked. The hallways within were dark, empty, cold. No body-guards, no servants, no spies. There was even some debris strewn about the imperial corridors. Signs of a hasty departure by many people were everywhere.

The half-dozen Specials moved unchallenged through the long passageways until they reached the Empress's private quarters. They pushed in the door, expecting to find their shining light inside, surrounded by tankards of the best slow-ship wine—and maybe some
jamma
, too.

But while they
did
find her, she was not bathing in a sea of intoxicants. Nor was she in any kind of racy party uniform. Instead, she was in her dreary sitting room, packing a trans-dimensional bag. What's more, she was wearing a
kafka
, a long, black ceremonial dress usually worn only in the unlikely event that someone in her immediate family was about to pass away.

Her relatives were shocked to see her dressed like this.

"Who is dying, my lady?" was the first question they asked her.

She looked up at them for the first time. Her hair was tied back. She was not wearing makeup. She looked horribly plain. And for some reason, she had a drop of oil on her forehead.

" 'Who is dying?' " she asked in reply. 'Take a look around you, you fools. The Empire is dying…"

Then she looked each of them up and down and added, "And you're all dying along with it."

The revelers were stunned. This wasn't like her; she just wasn't herself. They tried to tell her so, even offering her some
jamma
. But the Empress wasn't listening. She was simply getting annoyed.

"I have somewhere I have to go," she told them. "So, if you don't mind…"

With the arch of her eyebrow, she indicated that they should all leave. But they were much too thick to get the hint.

Instead, one relative begged her, "Please tell us where you are going—"

"We will go with you," another pleaded. "We need to celebrate…
something
!"

"I am going to the desert," the Empress told them harshly. "Alone."

They were shocked.
Going to the desert
…
alone
? This seemed not only foolhardy but dangerous as well. There was no water out in the desert. And without water, the Empress could actually die—and this they could not allow. She was the center of their universe. If she disappeared, they all would.

"But my lady," one asked her, "why would you want to go to such a horrible place?"

"That's not of your concern."

"But how? How will you be going?"

"By air car," was her surprising answer.

Now her relatives were simply baffled. Did the Empress even know how to drive an air car?

"But my lady, by air car, a trip to the desert will take days."

"I know!' the Empress said.

With that, she pushed past them and was gone.