Authors: Mack Maloney
But there was something inherently wrong about how the Nakkz soldiers were being dispatched without having a chance to fight back or maybe even run away. Wasn’t there?
That’s when another question popped into his head: If everything around him was frozen, why could he still move? Why was he not affected? He had no idea. Did it have to do with the creeps downstairs knocking him ahead in time? Or maybe whatever was allowing the killing angels to move freely through the battlefield was allowing him to remain unfrozen as well?
Or was he still stuck back in the second blue screen of the Earth Race, meaning nothing at all here was real?
Either way, he knew at last the terrible secret behind the Kaon Bombardment ship.
But who exactly was doing all the killing?
He turned his scanner back toward the battlefield below. He keyed in the telelens and zoomed right up to a group of soldiers who were cutting the throats of frozen Nakkz troops like a farmer would cut hay.
Closer still, and Hunter could see the insignia being worn by these ruthlessly efficient soldiers.
Two lightning bolts: the sign of the Solar Guards.
I should have known
, he thought grimly.
Get off this thing, Hawk… now
!
This time Hunter didn’t question his sanity or wonder just who the female voice in his ear belonged to.
His own inner sense was telling him the urgently whispered advice was right-on, no matter where it came from. He had to get off the xarcus.
He took the small box from his pocket, activated the twenty and six, and his flying machine appeared again. He quickly climbed inside and ran his power plant up to full throttle.
That’s when an enormous explosion went off right below his feet.
No time passed. None at all.
When the second sonic ripple went through Qez, it happened at the exact same moment as the first.
And just like that, everything started moving forward again.
“Time shifter!” Erx yelled to Berx as soon as they were able to talk again.
Thousands of soldiers had suddenly appeared around them. “Courtesy of our friends the Solar Guards,” Berx said bitterly.
They looked around them and saw the results of the horrifying slaughter. Dead Nakkz soldiers were simply everywhere—on the ramparts, hanging halfway off the wall, filling the city square below, covering the trenches out on the battlefield. Everywhere was the smell of new death.
Erx and Berx were stunned. Their lives had been saved, but they were repulsed by the means of their salvation. Some of the Solar Guards who had participated in the operation were standing nearby, cleaning the gore from their electric swords.
Erx grabbed one. “Who is your commanding officer?” he demanded of the man.
The soldier was at first startled, but then a cruel smile spread across his gnarled features.
“Look behind you,” was all he said for a reply.
The two explorers turned around and found a man of short stature in a shimmering Solar Guards officer’s uniform standing right behind them.
It was Jak Dazz, the Solar Guards’ first commander himself.
“Was all this really necessary, Dazz?” Erx screamed at him.
Dazz never stopped smiling. “What do you mean?” he asked with fake innocence. “You guys were crying for help, weren’t you? Why, I picked up the distress call myself.”
“But look at what you’ve done here!” Berx thundered at him. “Some of these men would have surrendered as soon as they saw the Kaon ship above them. You didn’t even give them that chance!”
Dazz just shook his head. “You two are getting a bit too old for this game,” he said snidely. “It’s war… you were losing. We came to your aid. And now you’re complaining? You’re lucky we were in the neighborhood.”
“You’re always in the neighborhood!” Berx yelled back.
With that, the explorer reared back and struck Dazz with a massive blow to the jaw. The SG first commander went sprawling backward, nearly falling over the railing of the battlement to the bloody city square below. Berx jumped on him and began pummeling him further before a squad of SG soldiers pulled him off their commander. But then Erx joined the fray and a full-blown fistfight broke out. More Solar Guards intervened, and soon Erx and Berx were being restrained.
Dazz picked himself back up and dusted himself off. He gave the signal to his men to let Erx and Berx go.
“Boy, are you guys excitable,” Dazz said, calmly lighting up an atomic cigar. “You’re getting to be pansies—soon enough you’ll be as bad as your weak-kneed cousins in the SF!”
That’s what really angered the two explorers. They knew for a fact that in most instances whenever the Space Forces used a Kaon ship, they would concentrate on one particular area and then ask for the surrender of those not involved. Though not without its bloody moments, this was a tactic that usually worked. The Solar Guards, on the other hand, never let such things as gallantry and being magnanimous get in the way of a good bloodbath. That was the major difference between the two rivals.
Both Erx and Berx lunged at Dazz again… but before his bodyguards could react, a tremendous explosion rocked the tiny moon—this was the biggest one yet. It was so powerful it sent just about everyone up on the ramparts sprawling—Erx, Berx, Dazz, SG soldiers, and Home Guard survivors.
The blast came from the stalled xarcus. The huge tank seemed to be in its death throes. It was covered with thick blue and yellow flame—the heat was so intense, those on the wall could feel it several miles away. But then, just as it seemed the huge tank was going to self-destruct, something burst forth from its body, ripping a hole in its superstructure, right behind the main control bubble.
It was extremely bright, glowing. It rose unsteadily at first, but then seemed to gain momentum.
“
My God
!
What the hell is that
?” Dazz cried out.
The thing was so bright, they couldn’t even look at it.
“It’s the end of the world!” one of the Home Guards cried out.
Finally the bright light began to move, making it a bit easier to see. It was obviously a spacecraft of some kind—but it was shaped like nothing else ever seen in the Galaxy, at least not these days.
It was shaped like a disc. A saucer. It was bright white. As just about everyone in Qez stared in astonishment at the thing, the disc began revolving at an incredible speed. Then it began ascending, picking up speed with every nanosecond, until it was about a mile above the battlefield.
And then it blinked out.
It took them several minutes to revive Dazz.
The Solar Guards’ first commander had fainted dead away almost at the first sight of the strange spacecraft. Erx and Berx were not that far behind him. They had seen many strange things in their long careers of exploration, but never anything like this.
His men finally got Dazz back to his feet, but the man was still very shaky. He barked a bunch of orders to his lieutenants, who began blowing ceremonial battle horns always carried by the Solar Guards in combat. In seconds the SG troopers began popping out, returning to their ship still hovering right above Qez.
“Listen, you two mooks,” Dazz said to Erx and Berx, his voice still trembling, belying his gruff exterior, “if you’re both smarter than you look, you don’t say anything to anyone about what we just saw here. I don’t know who was responsible for all this—or why such weaponry was used to conquer a pisshole moon like this—but some things I don’t want to know. And neither do you.”
With that, Dazz pushed a button on his battle tunic… and quickly popped out himself.
Not a minute later, both the Solar Guards’ vessel and the Kaon Bombardment ship were gone, leaving the defenders of Qez alone again and safe, for the time being—but also knee deep in at least fifty thousand corpses that were in desperate need of burial.
The last time anyone saw Hunter, he was out on the battlefield going through the dead.
After getting off the xarcus just before it exploded and became transformed, he’d returned to Qez, stunned like the rest of them by the strange turn of events. But as startling as these things were, Hunter had something more important on his mind. He spoke extensively with Erx and Berx, who eventually returned to the
AeroVox
. Then he sought out the surviving Home Guard commanders and made one last attempt at trying to ascertain why he’d felt so compelled to come to this lonely moon that he would go against mission orders and all but ruin his brief career as a Starcrasher commander.
He’d sat with Poolinex and his lieutenants, listening to the rather unexciting history of the Zazu-Zazu, how its puffing was leaking away, and how its principal export was a substance called
oppie
, a main ingredient in slow-ship wine. The recounting was going absolutely nowhere until someone mentioned the estimated death toll of the war, a figure that included the number of mercenaries killed during the yearlong conflict.
When Hunter asked for details about the mercs, Poolinex showed surprise that he wasn’t aware of at least one of the groups.
“The ones who stayed with us to the end, you must have known about them,” Poolinex had told him.
“When you first appeared above the battlefield, you were bombing positions right in front of their lines.
You might even have saved a few of them, at least for a while.”
Hunter was more astonished than Poolinex upon hearing this news. When Hunter appeared at the scene, he’d started bombing and strafing under no set plan. Rather he’d gone where instinct and eyesight told him to go.
“What was the name of this merc group?” he asked Poolinex.
“The Freedom Brigade,” was the Home Guard commander’s reply.
Hunter left for the battlefield shortly after that.
He’d spent two hours going through the dead, searching for any survivors of the valiant mercenary group.
Two Home Guard soldiers were on hand, as was the priest. As a hot breeze blew across the plain, the soldiers were reading the roll of names belonging to their longtime allies, intoning each with a touch of reverence.
“Johnson… O’Leary… Mazzeti… Bryant… Noonan… Ignakowski… Carey… Cook… Baulis… Santoro… Mann… Bell… Jones… Wilson… Murphy… Kimball… Crabb… Fowler… Robinson…”
These names sounded odd in this world—not one of them ended with a
z
or an
x
. But to Hunter’s ears, they sounded strangely familiar—and more like his own name than any other he’d heard since finding himself on Fools 6.
He climbed out of the trench where the brigade had made its last stand and approached the priest.
“These men, Father,” Hunter asked him. “I understand they were not natives of this moon.”
The priest nodded gravely.
“They came here from afar to help,” he said. “They weren’t even getting paid. Rather they came because the people here were being attacked and were about to lose their freedom. They came here to protect this tiny rock because that’s what they’d done for centuries. And should there ever been any trouble here again, I have no doubt that more of them will arrive, and make the sacrifice this brave men did.”
“Why did they first come here, Father?”
The priest let out a long sigh. “A reason lost in the mists of time, I’m afraid,” he said. “A legend, a myth…”
“Please, Father, tell me what you can,” Hunter implored him.
Again the priest sighed. “Several thousand years ago, as the story goes, the brigade’s predecessors came here to set up what they called a ‘research station.’ It was a beacon of some sort, something that was supposed to call all of their lost brothers home again…”
Hunter felt excitement welling up in his chest.
Could this be the lighthouse
?
“Where is this beacon? Where is its location?”
The priest shook his head. “I’m not sure anyone really knows now—it was built here so long ago, and so much time has passed. But it was somewhere on this hallowed ground. This place where the brigade chose to make their last stand…”
The priest wiped his tired eyes.
“No one was like them,” he said, his voice cracking. “I have provided comfort for many soldiers from many planets—but none were more valiant than they. I only wish I had some of their blood flowing in my veins…”
At that moment, they heard a shout above the wind.
“Padre!
Over here
.”
Several Home Guard medics were going through the bodies about a hundred feet away from the reading of the names.
“We have found one alive… but you must hurry!”
Hunter practically carried the elderly priest over the bloody trench to where the three medics had gathered. Sure enough, they were hovering over a man lying prone on the muddy ground.
He was part of the brigade; his green combat suit was a sure sign of this. He was clutching a bloody cloth to his chest. It was clear that he was close to taking his last breath.
It was McKay, the man who had survived the horrendous yet crucial recon mission to Holy Hell; the man who had promised that the brigade would stay in Qez when the rest of the mercenary groups opted to bug out.
The priest immediately went to one knee and began reciting prayers at breakneck speed. McKay was quickly fading from view, not a painless experience.
The priest touched his forehead with a spot of holy oil. That’s when the dying man opened his eyes to see Hunter looking down at him. Hunter’s strange uniform gave him away.
“So the Empire finally reached the end of the Galaxy?” McKay asked him weakly.
Hunter nodded, then knelt down beside him.
“The bastards,” McKay said with a painful laugh. “There are many people back where I’m from that long to see the day the Empire comes crashing down…”
“Can you tell me why you came here?” Hunter asked him.
McKay’s voice was barely audible. Hunter leaned down even closer, trying to hear every last word.
“They used to talk… about the signal,” McKay said. “The legend… back where I was from. The call for the brothers. It had gone unheeded for centuries… but we were bound by honor to protect this place and the people who lived here… so if any of our brothers answered the call… this place would be here, with these people…”
McKay coughed hard. Hunter looked up at the attending medics. One of them slowly shook his head.
“The beacon used to sweep the Galaxy and point to the place where we are all called back to,” McKay forged on bravely. “If you are hearing the call, my brother, then you must be one of us, too.”
He slowly let his fingers unwrap the bloody cloth. Hunter picked it up and unfurled it—and felt a lightning bolt run through his body. The flag was exactly like the one he kept in his pocket. All stars and stripes.
Then McKay indicated a safe bag attached to his belt. One of the medics retrieved it and handed it to Hunter.
McKay gestured for Hunter to reach inside. He came out with a glass globe just big enough to hold in one hand. It appeared at first to be made of superglass; Hunter could see clear through it.
But then McKay indicated that Hunter should hold the globe closer to him. Hunter placed it in front of the dying man’s lips. With just about all the energy he could muster, McKay blew on it slightly.
Suddenly the globe came to life. It began swirling with different colors—first reds, whites, and blues, but then mostly blues, with some yellows and greens. Right before Hunter’s eyes the glass globe magically became what appeared to be a shimmering blue planet. It seemed at first to be mostly made of water, but then one large landmass became crystallized. Its terrain was green and brown, and there seemed to be many lakes and rivers running through it.
Hunter stared at the holographic image of the planet. He realized that this image most closely resembled the Earth. But not exactly, for its coastlines were irregular, and there were no triads or ancient bridges.
There was something else about it—it actually looked
natural
. No jewel-like shine of the Earth, no gleam like Mars, or the scent of manufactured paradise, as on Venus.
No, this place seemed real.
Hunter looked down at the dying man again.
“Where is this planet?” he asked him.
But it was obvious that McKay didn’t have the strength to tell Hunter its location.
“It’s hidden beyond some forgotten stars,” McKay said with a cough. “Ask the padre… he can tell you what I mean…”
“But what is it called?” Hunter pressed him. “I must get to this place. Can you at least tell me its name?”
That’s when the faintest of smiles came to McKay’s face.
“Everyone just calls it ‘home,’ ” he said.