The next thing he knew, he was on his back, his clothes on fire, a half dozen blaster holes burning through him.
A tremendous glow was suddenly all around him. On his hands, his body, in the very air itself. In saving his group one last time, he'd taken a fatal barrage himself. He tried to move but couldn't. He tried to speak, but no words would come out. His people were down, but he could also hear the sounds of the SG troops coming up to them, weapons crackling with power. His people would all be dead in a matter of seconds.
Damn! We came so far, only for it to end like this!
Sheez felt life itself slipping out of him. Tears rolling off his face, body going numb, he was looking straight up — and above him, saw a very strange sight.
It was a ship. A starship. But it was unlike any he'd ever seen.
It was not shaped like a wedge, as were all starships in the Fourth Empire. This vessel looked like an ancient sailing ship, bare images of which had survived over the ages. Things made of wood with great cloth sails that pushed them across the waves. It was strange the things one recalls before dying, but back then, Sheez knew they'd called these ships galleonis.
But this ship was in the air, and it was made of gold. And where once might have been sails of cloth were now sails of subatomic strings meshed together. And it was armed. Heavily armed. To his fading eyes, it seemed to carry more weapons than a Starcrasher, yet it was barely one-half the size.
For a moment he thought he was already dead and what he was seeing above him was a hallucination — a vision — before the darkness filled in.
But then a bright gold beam shot out of the bottom of the strange ship, and an instant later, an enormous soldier was standing over him. This soldier was encased in armor from head to foot. Gold armor. And he was carrying a huge gold weapon and wearing a huge gold helmet with flared-back wings.
Sheez was sure this was just another REF soldier, for some reason painted gold instead of red and riding in a strange old ship, and that with more strange gold soldiers and those soldiers already on the ground, they would brutally murder all his people.
But in the end, Sheez had it all wrong.
The next thing he knew, the gold soldier raised his enormous gold weapon and started firing at the REF troopers. Suddenly blaster bolts were going off all around him. Sheez heard more screams, but he couldn't tell if they were coming from his people or from someone else. He saw more soldiers dressed in gold armor materializing as if from nowhere. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Then more gold ships suddenly appeared overhead. More explosions. The ground beneath him lifted him up, it was moving so violently. All the while, the pain in his chest was getting worse and worse, until it stopped hurting altogether. It went on like this for what seemed like an eternity.
Then, just as quickly as it started, all the firing stopped. The explosions ended, and the smoke blew away. With his last ounce of strength, Sheez managed to look up. He saw before him an unbelievable sight: the field and the hills were littered with piles of dead REF soldiers. The two red Starcrashers were burning fiercely in the background. And he could see his column of people, all moving together, the soldiers in gold leading them off to the rescue site. Some of the refugees were waving goodbye to him; many were in tears.
Then the huge soldier in gold, the one who had first appeared nearby, knelt down beside him. He took off his helmet, and Sheez saw his face. And that was the one last shock of his life. Sheez recognized him.
Rugged, handsome, steely eyes, but still with a friendly face, he was the one person, more than any other, responsible for destroying Sheez's old planet of Megiddo. Yet he'd just saved his people. And Sheez even knew his name.
It was Hawk Hunter, leader of the rebel forces.
What the hell is he doing here?
Sheez grabbed his arm and spat out his last words.
"My people," he gasped, his voice fading. "Please…"
"Don't worry," Hunter told him. "They're safe now, every last one of them. Thanks to you…"
Sheez was fading fast. "And what about me?" he asked Hunter softly. "What will happen to me now?"
Hunter checked his wounds and knew it was amazing that Sheez had lasted this long.
"You're off to a better place," he said. "Believe me, I know."
Sheez looked up at him and suddenly realized he did believe him. A smile finally spread across his battered face. He closed his eyes.
And then he died.
24
The Empress landed her air car in the middle of the desert.
Or at least it looked like a desert. It was flat, for the most part, though there were some mountains directly to the west. It was dry and hot, too. But the sand beneath her feet was actually a mixture of tiny glass globules and not authentic silica.
She had never been here before. Still, she knew she was in the right place because way off on the horizon she could see a group of plain white structures built astride a huge dry lake bed. Even at this distance she could tell the buildings were absolutely ancient.
She would not need the air car from here.
Flash!
Suddenly she was standing at the front entrance of the largest building. A faded sign next to the door read: Domain 51.
Flash!
Now she was inside the building itself, looking down at the entrance to a huge amphitheater. There were dozens of soldiers in stark black uniforms standing at rigid attention around this sizable portal. The only means of illumination that she could see was by candles; there were hundreds of them everywhere.
Their flickering cast odd shadows on the Z-gun turrets built into the walls of this place.
Flash!
She was now inside the chamber itself. It, too, was lit only by candlelight. In the middle of the chamber was a huge black monolith. It was a hundred feet high and about half that measurement square.
It stood alone. A huge, seamless, impenetrable presence.
It was the Big Generator.
It, too, was guarded by an army of black-uniformed soldiers; these were the Sacred Guards. They were standing at attention in small groups scattered around the inner chamber. They did not seem to notice that the Empress was there. Not yet, anyway.
She had never seen it before. This big, ugly, holy thing. No sound was coming from it, as she had expected mere to be. Nor was there any means of access, or dials or switches or panel lights on the thing. There were no controls — at least none anywhere nearby.
This was strange because the Big Generator made everything possible in the Galaxy. The power it generated went everywhere and encompassed everything. It ran all of the Empire's spaceships. It ran the planets. It ran everything on the planets. From the dimmest panel bulb on the most distant world to the prop core of the largest Starcrasher, all energy in the Empire came from here.
The Empress moved down the aisle and finally caught the attention of the guards. They were startled to see her, to say the least. They were not aware of the particulars of what was happening back east or out in the Galaxy. They were mind-eunuchs. Their only role was to protect the Big Generator with their lives and not let anyone unauthorized near it.
But did this include members of the Imperial Family?
None of the guards was sure.
The captain of the guard gingerly approached the Empress just as she arrived at the electric railing that surrounded the Big Generator.
"My lady?" the man asked her. "Can I be of assistance?"