StarHawk (20 page)

“Can you tell me what this is about then?”

Calandrx read the entire poem silently. His eyes lit up at several points; at others he seemed on the verge of tears. He finished by wiping his eyes and raising his glass in the air.

“Xylanx was quite a human being,” he said. “Really knew how to turn a phrase…”

“But what is it about exactly?” Hunter pressed him.

Calandrx went back to the first stanza.

“It is about a place—a planet, probably—where thousands of years before, a certain race of people was banished. They were an ancient people apparently—it sounds like they had direct ties to Earth that went all the way back to the First Empire, or even earlier.

“For whatever reason—Xylanx claims jealousy on the part of the Empire was the culprit—these people and others like them were relegated to ‘the place from which few could go beyond.’ They were given their own planet, puffed to their own desires, and left alone. But essentially they were exiled for not seeing things the way everyone else in the Galaxy at that time apparently saw them.”

Calandrx slurped his wine again.

“Over the centuries, these people became master warriors—and very intent on gathering together anyone who might be related to them—their brothers lost among the clutter of the Galaxy. So they set up a beacon, again near this ‘last place.’

It was a kind of signal that would be recognized by all of their kind and would call them back to this new ‘home planet.’ This beacon was called—again, loosely translated—‘a house made of light’ or ‘the lighthouse.’ ”

“And this beacon was located on the last place anyone could go?”

“Either there, or relatively close by,” Calandrx replied. “There is a phrase or two that might indicate that while the location of this ‘house of light’ was not kept secret, the place where these ancient people lived was…”

He located a passage from the third stanza. “ ‘Where does one put a lighthouse but on the most distant part of the most distant shore? But this was a lighthouse that pointed its beam inward. Looking not for lost vessels or scattered ships but lost and scattered souls…”

Hunter sipped his own wine now. Could the beacon in the poem be the VLR/VSA? The same one that seared the ice around the crashed Martian lander?

Calandrx put his finger on a line in the fifth stanza.

“To me, this is the most enigmatic part,” he said. “It’s talking about just who these lost souls might be and how they will know when they’ve finally reached their home. ‘You will meet the people and they will be like you… they will talk like you, they will have your name… and in their eyes you will know them immediately.”

Calandrx paused for a moment, then looked up at Hunter.

“The final line is,” he said, “ ‘Hurry home, for they are expecting you…’ ”

They just stared at each other for a moment.

“Is this what you wanted to hear, my friend?” Calandrx asked him.

Hunter just shook his head. “I’m not really sure…”

They were silent for a while, Calandrx leaving Hunter alone with his thoughts.

Finally Calandrx broke the silence.

“I hear you’re to bring along Erx and Berx along on this adventure as well,” he said. “A wise choice…”

Hunter shrugged, happy to change the subject.

“They needed another ship… plus I think they had to get off Earth before they got into some
real
trouble.”

Hunter regretted those words instantly. The momentary look of pain that came across the elderly pilot’s face told him he’d struck a nerve. It was clear that Calandrx would have given anything to be able to go with them.

“It’s all right,” Calandrx said, again reading his thoughts. “I am stuck here because it is the wish of my Emperor. Who am I to dispute it? The excitement you’ve provided in your short time on Earth will last with me for years to come—and our winnings will ease the burden a bit farther. I’ve had my adventures. Now it’s time for you to have yours.”

“You sailed the stars for more than a century,” Hunter said to him. “May I ask for your counsel? Do you have any advice you can give me?”

Calandrx thought for a long moment. “Just remember this: Many of the people you will find out there won’t know who you are, won’t know what the Empire is… won’t have any knowledge about any of this.”

He looked up at Hunter. “But that does not mean that the lives they lead, the cultures they’ve developed, the land they work are unimportant. Indeed, those things are the
most
important aspects of their lives.”

“So respect them,” Hunter said.

“Exactly,” Calandrx replied. “Show them respect, and it will go a long way in helping you accomplish what you’re being sent out there to do—officially, anyway.”

Once again they were quiet for a while. Hunter sipped his wine and watched the stars above. Calandrx looked down on the brilliant city below.

“What’s the strangest thing you heard about, you know, out there?” Hunter asked him.

Calandrx sipped, thought, and smiled. “That’s like asking how many drops there are in the ocean. What isn’t strange out there? But I get your point. What’s the strangest thing I heard about
besides
you?”

“Exactly,” Hunter replied.

A floating city passed by overhead. More StarScrapers bolted up into the night sky.

“I heard a story once,” Calandrx began, “about a man stuck out there somewhere who was supposedly immortal. He literally couldn’t die. I always thought it to be just another Fringe legend, of which there are billions, of course. But people I trust swear that it is true.”

“Are you saying this person was ‘forever young’?”

Calandrx shook his head.

“No, simply immortal,” he replied. “He could not die. He aged, his body deteriorated. But he simply could not die. A curse, not a blessing.”

“That’s ironic,” Hunter said. “Especially with the obsession for longer life that seems to drive everyone these days.”

“That’s what made the story so fascinating,” Calandrx replied. “When I first heard it, I asked if this person was simply pumped full of Holy Blood—but that wasn’t the case. Apparently he’s been around
longer
than the concept of Holy Blood. They say he’s as old as spaceflight from Earth itself.”

“But that would mean, what? Five, six thousand years old?”

Calandrx laughed and guzzled his wine. “At least!” he declared.

He got up to go. Hunter gave him a mighty handshake.

“Thank you for everything,” he told Calandrx.

“Be well, old friend,” the elderly pilot replied. “And please, when you return, may I be the one you call on first?”

Hunter hesitated just a moment, but Calandrx caught on and smiled. “The first after our gorgeous ‘mutual friend,’ that is.”

Hunter shook his hand again and walked him to the door.

Calandrx started to depart, then paused a moment. “Can I give you just one more small piece of advice?”

Hunter nodded. “Please, go ahead…”

Calandrx lowered his voice in a very conspiratorial manner.

“No matter what you do, my brother,” he said, “avoid any planet that has a pyramid…”

The Defenders of Qez

On planet Guam 7Khatru-Delirious Star System

Six months later

The name of the city was Nails, and it was famous for selling two things: combat weapons and slow-ship wine, both in large quantities.

Downtown was a twenty-square-mile sprawl of gun shops, distilleries, and rocket pads. On a typical day, several billion aluminum coins could change hands here. At night, ray gun fights and random blaster fire were not uncommon. Even for the Fifth Arm, Outer Fringe, this was a very rough place.

There were also thousands of ‘cloud bars in Nails, and it was at one of these, the Green Star, that two of the city’s most successful arms merchants were enjoying a midmorning cup of slow tea. They were Zym Blitz and Beebee “Three Finger” Rappz. Both men were enormous; they barely fit in the chairs provided with their hovering table. Neither was armed, but standing at discreet distances away, their coteries of bodyguards were nervously eyeing each other.

The center of Nails’s weapons bazaar was just a half block away, and as their table was the most prominent in the Green Star’s outside café section, just about every person bustling by made sure they tipped their cap to Blitz and Rappz. There were many players operating inside Nails. But these two were probably the most notorious.

The Green Star was especially crowded this morning. People drinking, smoking, wheeling, and dealing.

A small army of holo-girls was hanging on the periphery, chatting with the hired heat. The slow-ship was flowing and the open-air saloon was getting so raucous, some of the holos were beginning to ply their trade right out in the open.

That’s why it was so strange when Blitz and Rappz were suddenly joined at their table by a priest.

His cassock was dirty, his feet dusty and sore. He’d walked more than forty miles to get to the city, this after having used an ancient transporter booth to pop him in from twenty-two star systems away. Blitz and Rappz just stared at the holy man for a moment. They’d seen just about everything imaginable in Nails over the years—everything except a priest.

“I’m very sorry to join you gentlemen unannounced,” the priest told them wearily. “I’m usually not this impolite.”

“Not a problem, Padre,” Blitz told him. “You look like you need a drink…” Rappz signaled for a robot waiter.

“Thank you, but no,” the priest replied. “I fear if I started drinking now, I would not want to stop.”

“Well, have you eaten recently, Father?” Rappz asked him. “We can certainly buy you a meal.”

Again the priest shook his head. “I am here not for food or drink, though I would dearly love both,” he said. “What I am looking for is help—help to save some lost souls.”

Blitz and Rappz both laughed.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place, Father?” Blitz asked him. “There are a million or so souls here, but I don’t think any of them wants to be saved.”

“These are not the souls I’m referring to,” the priest said. “The souls of my concern really
are
lost—or better said, they are in a lost cause. And while I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, I’m here seeking weapons…”

Blitz and Rappz looked at each other and shrugged. They’d sell to anyone, just as long as the coin was good.

“Well, then you
did
come to the right place, Padre,” Rappz said. “What type of weapons are you looking for?”

The priest shrugged. He wasn’t really sure.

“Well,
weapons
…” he said. “My friends are running out of just about everything…”

Blitz signaled for two more drinks. The robot waiter hurriedly refilled their teacups. “And get this man a pitcher of ice water,” Blitz ordered the robot.

Rappz pulled out his notebook and started with a clean page.

“Okay, Father, we understand that this is your first time buying guns,” he said. “So why don’t you just tell us the situation your friends have found themselves in and maybe we can figure out what they need.”

The pitcher of water arrived; the robot spilled a bit while setting it down on the table. Blitz responded by giving the robot a swift kick in the ass; the clang of boot-on-metal echoed throughout the busy saloon.

The priest brushed some spilled ice from his cassock, then poured himself a mug of water and drank from it greedily.

“My friends are mercenaries,” he said between gulps. “But they have found themselves on a mission of mercy…”

“Mercs? On a mercy mission?” Blitz asked. “I’d say that was just about impossible.”

“Bingo that,” Rappz agreed.

“Believe what you will, gentlemen,” the priest said, “but that is the case. They are defending an outpost on a moon named Zazu-Zazu—it orbits the planet Jazz 33.”

“Jazz 33?” Rappz said. “Isn’t that in the Dead Gulch System?”

The priest nodded.

Rappz just shook his head. “Father, that’s the last system in the entire Galaxy. It’s the fringe of the Fringe. I mean, after Dead Gulch, you fall off the edge, don’t you?”

The priest drained another mug of ice water.

“You do,” he replied, wiping his chin. “But the concern would be the same if it were happening one star system over from here—or all the way back to the Ball. My friends have come up against some advanced technology.
Very
advanced. How they’ve been able to hold on this long is a miracle in itself.”

“So you’re saying there’s a little war going on out there?” Rappz asked.

“A most brutal little war,” the priest answered. “My friends are practically the sole defenders of about thirty thousand innocent civilians. The enemy has taken over two-thirds of this satellite—though no one can imagine why. It’s just a tiny rock in space. But we now fear he will soon launch a final attack—and then all will be lost. And that’s why I am here. There is no one else to help us. The moon’s people can’t afford any further mercenary groups—they aren’t able to pay my friends as it is.”

“That
is
a mission of mercy,” Blitz said, sipping his slow tea. “I’ve never met a merc who fought for free.”

“You don’t know my friends,” the priest replied.

Blitz looked at Rappz and just shrugged. “Well, do they need blaster rifles, Padre?” he asked. “Ray guns? Z-beam stuff?”

“All that and more,” the priest replied. “As I said, this enemy seems to have all kinds of strange weapons.

Certainly things I’ve never seen or heard of before.”

“Really? Like what?” Blitz asked.

The priest drank some more water.

“I have seen the aftereffects of these horrible things,” he replied slowly. “A man, hit with some kind of strange beam, turns into an X ray of himself. His bones and innards, visible through a thin veneer of very bloody skin. He can still walk, he can still talk—but he is dead nevertheless. I have witnessed more than one brave heart fade away like this, crying for his wife and children as his body slowly dissolved around him…”

Blitz and Rappz stopped sipping their tea. “I have never heard of such a weapon,” Blitz said. Rappz nodded in agreement.

“Another kind of ray seems to make a man’s bones grow grotesquely large,” the priest went on. “In just seconds, they burst out of the skin—and literally tear him apart.”

Again, Blitz and Rappz just shook their heads. “A very painful way to go,” Blitz said.

“Words cannot describe it,” the priest agreed. “And there are many more of these awful things. It’s almost as if the enemy is testing out these weapons—and my friends and the people they are protecting are the test subjects.”

“A very strange concept,” Blitz murmured, almost to himself. “Who
are
these folks your friends are fighting, Father?”

The priest shrugged uncertainly. “That’s another thing,” he said. “We don’t know.”

“Don’t know?” Blitz asked. “But how could that be? Everyone knows who they are fighting these days.

They might not know
why
. But they always know
who
.”

“And why are they making war in such a strange place anyway?” Rappz added. “I mean, no offense, Father, but I can’t think of anything in the Dead Gulch worth fighting about.”

“That’s exactly my point,” the priest said. “It’s a tiny moon with a tiny population, and all they want to do is farm their lands and be left alone—just as they’ve been doing for centuries. But just about a year ago, this massive army shows up and attacks these very peaceful people. No reason given. No prior communications, no threats. Nothing. Just a sudden surprise attack, a bolt out of nowhere.”

He drank another mug of water.

“Now we know the main enemy force is made up of mercenaries and pirate trash from nearby star systems,” he went on. “Real dregs—perhaps even friends of yours. They call themselves the Nakkz. But they are just the foot soldiers. We suspect others are actually orchestrating this war. It is the people supplying the Nakkz to attack us who are very mysterious indeed.”

“How so?” Rappz wanted to know.

“Well, we have never seen them, for one,” the priest said. “They have occasionally appeared out on the battlefield, observing their army of paid killers from afar. But they wear a very different type of combat gear—all black from head to toe—and they never seem to get into the fight directly. Subsequently, none has ever been taken alive. Nor have any of their bodies ever been recovered.”

“This is getting strange,” Rappz said.

“
Too
strange,” Blitz replied, pushing his tea away from him, a first.

“What do you mean?”

Blitz just shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that I keep hearing such weird things lately.”

“Like?”

“Well, there was the rumored Blackship-in-Supertime thing, for instance.”

“ ‘Rumored’ being the key word there,” Rappz said. “Anid I still don’t believe it for a second. But even if it were true, we live in a huge Galaxy. Strange things are bound to happen once in a while.”

“But there is ‘strange’ and then there is just plain ‘weird,’ ” Blitz said, pulling his chair a bit closer to the table.

“You’ll have to explain that, please,” Rappz told him.

Blitz lowered his voice. “A friend of mine saw some very unusual lights in the sky the other night,” he said in a whisper. “Above his château, out in the mountains. He said they were practically right on top of him.”

Rappz just laughed. “ ‘Lights in the sky?’ My brother, the Milky Way is
alive
with lights in the sky. I would be concerned if I
didn’t
see any lights in the sky.”

“But these weren’t
typical
lights,” Blitz shot back. “My friend said they were acting in a very unconventional manner. Moving incredibly fast, changing direction much quicker than anything we see flying these days. They also had the ability to blink out, just like that.”

“Blink out?” Rappz said. “Not even a Starcrasher can do that. What else?”

“Did you hear what happened on Xers 17, over in the Slow Freeze System?”

Rappz shrugged. “I know the place went belly up. Was it a volcano orgy or a star passing?”

“It burned,” Blitz said.

“You mean it ‘burned up,’ ” Rappz replied.

“No, I mean, everything on the surface of the planet was
burned
. Consumed. Immolated. The planet is still there, but everything and everybody on it got turned into cinders.”

Rappz pulled his substantial chin in thought. “An entire planet catching fire? Just like that? How?”

“They still don’t know,” Blitz said. “Only that it happened totally out of the blue—without warning.”

Rappz sipped his drink, but the worry lines stayed on his face. “Well, again, we live in big Galaxy—by sheer numbers alone, odd things will appear to happen. But that one—I agree, that is
very
odd. I mean, they can forecast a star passing a hundred years in advance.”

“The same with a volcano orgy,” Blitz said. “But Xers 17 went up. Just like that. And…”

Blitz hesitated for a moment.

“And?” Rappz prompted him.

“And,” Blitz said, lowering his voice almost below a whisper, “I heard that when the rescue forces finally got to the planet and went through the ashes, they found… a pyramid.”

Rappz dropped his glass and covered his ears. “My God, did you have to say
that
word? Isn’t it enough that you’ve ruined my morning with these strange tales? Now this? What am I to do with this blasphemer, Father?”

They turned back to the third chair at their table—but it was empty.

The priest had left a long time ago.