Zarex took a sip of his drink; they all did.
"Besides," he continued, "why do you think / know how to get to them?"
"Because of your reputation," Pater Tomm replied simply. "That, and the fact that Klaaz told me you would."
Zarex looked down at the holy man and then shot back the rest of his drink. His defenses were crumbling.
He turned toward Hunter. "Your uniform, my friend, where does it come from? I'm not familiar with it."
"It belongs to my former employers," Hunter replied.
Zarex studied it a bit more closely. "A deserter, eh?"
Tomm began to say something, but Hunter raised his hand and cut him off. There was no need to avoid the truth here.
"That's exactly what I am," Hunter said. "And in my own defense, I believe I left for honorable reasons."
"That's what they all say," Zarex replied with a smirk.
He poured out three more drinks.
"And what would your business be in the Home Planets?" Zarex asked him pointedly. "If they exist, that is—"
Tomm slammed his glass on the bar hard enough to cut Zarex off in midsentence.
"We don't need that line again, brother," the priest said sternly. "We know they still exist."
Zarex looked down at the priest. "Really? And how, may I ask?"
"Because we saw their fighters in action," Hunter revealed. "On a world in the Dead Gulch System called Zazu-Zazu."
Zarex stopped pouring another drink in midflow. He was clearly shocked by this news.
"You saw them? When?"
"Six weeks past now," Pater Tomm said.
"Six weeks?" Zarex exclaimed. "My God, if you had said six years — or even sixty — I would have been surprised. But so recently? I mean, I really thought they'd all be gone by now. When I last heard of them, their ranks were nearly depleted, even then…"
Zarex resumed filling their glasses. He shook his head.
"The Dead Gulch System, you say? Way out there? What the hell were they doing so far from home?"
"They were there because it was a holy place for them," Tomm said. "A place that was very important to their history, their mythology. Their whole everything. They were protecting the people who had acted as caretakers for the place. I know this because I traveled there with them. I hooked up with them at a staging planet two systems over. They needed a chaplain, I was available. They were just very tight-lipped about their planet of origin at the time."
"But what happened to them then?" Zarex asked. "Surely these fighters could have told you the way home."
"They're all gone," Hunter told him quietly. "Killed in battle."
Silence in the room.
"Every last one of them?" Zarex asked in a whisper. "Are you sure?"
Hunter nodded. "We were there. We saw it."
Zarex just shook his head again. He had to take a moment to collect himself. It was obvious the news had hit an emotional chord within him.
"Poor bastards," he said finally with a tip of his glass. "Sorry for the language. Father… but if that really was the last of them, well, I'm afraid that's not a good thing for any of us. Our existence needs more people like them, not less."
Pater Tomm took this as his cue. "So the Home Planets do exist," he said. "You know it, we know it. Now, their soldiers are gone, but those they left behind might still remain. It is these people we want to find."
Zarex contemplated them both. "Again, may I ask why?"
"I think I might have family among them," Hunter replied. "That's the simple answer, anyway."
Tomm drained his drink. "So, is it time to get down to brass tacks?" he asked Zarex.
"I'm listening, Padre," the explorer replied.
Tomm retrieved a bag of aluminum coins from his pocket. It was their payment for a mercenary job they'd done shortly after leaving Zazu-Zazu. He held it out at arm's length, barely up to Zarex's chest.
"We like our privacy, too," the priest told him. "So just tell us how to get there, and we leave this bag behind as insurance that the secret dies with us."
Zarex eyed the bag, was tempted mightily, but then shook his head. "This goes beyond gratuities, father."
The priest patted him on the arm. "We mean these people no harm, brother. They want to stay hidden; we understand that. It's only dialogue that we seek."
"It's not as simple as that," Zarex said. "It's a very long journey just to get to the first step. And after that, it gets worse. Nearly impossible, in fact."
He poured them all another shot of wine.
"Believe me, I've had more than my share of such treacherous journeys, and frankly, my friends, they are not good for either heart or soul."
He drained his drink and capped the bottle. "So, I am sorry," he said. "But there's nothing I can do for you. Please give my regards to Klaaz when you see him again."
Suddenly, Hunter grabbed him by the wrist. "Don't move," he warned the explorer.
Even Tomm was shocked by this sudden departure of good form.
"Please, brother," he cautioned Hunter. "There are other ways to—"
But Hunter wasn't listening to him. His eyes were looking all the way to the left, and his ears were perked up. It was as if he was trying to hear something from very far away.
Zarex tried to untangle his arm, but Hunter was too strong for him.
"Listen," Hunter told them urgently. "We have to get out of here… immediately."
Zarex and Pater Tomm just stared back at him.
"What did you just say?" the priest asked him.
"I said we have to get out of this tower right now!"
But Zarex wouldn't budge. "What's got into you, man?" he roared at Hunter.
'Trust me," Hunter said, head still cocked skyward. "Something very bad is coming this way."
Pater Tomm needed no prodding; he was already convinced.
"Mr. Hunter has a way about these things," the priest said to Zarex. "We must go right now!"
Zarex did not argue any further. He gathered most of his holo-eggs and…
Flash!
They popped out a moment later, standing behind a huge boulder about a half mile from the resort's main gate. Zarex and Tomm were looking highly distressed and staring at Hunter, as if to ask him: Why?
They would know the answer in just a few seconds.
The missile had entered the BDG star system just three minutes before, and only an instant before Hunter's elevated senses detected it. As soon as he felt it, though, there was never any doubt where the missile was headed. How could he detect a missile from so far away with just his instincts? He didn't know. As Pater Tomm said, he just had a way with these things.
It came out of the blue sky with an ungodly roar, heading right at the resort's highest tower. The missile was a LR/ SDBM — a long-range space-deployed bombardment missile. It was an almost antique weapon closer in to the Ball, but still a formidable piece of hardware out here on the Fringe.
Two hundred feet long, with a squat fuselage and a triangular, almost arrowlike warhead on its tip, it was a weapon used centuries before to conduct massive bombardment of entire planets; indeed, a barrage of these missiles, hitting key strategic areas in unrelenting attack, could deplete a planet's global defenses in a matter of hours, softening it up for invasion from space.
But the real beauty of the LR/SDBM was its tactical capability. The missile could be programmed to seek out one particular spaceship or even one particular individual and then be set loose in space for days, months, years, even centuries, searching for its prey and reviving to active mode once it had been acquired.
Therefore it could take out whole populations in some cases— or just one man.
It was apparent that in this case, the missile had been looking for just one man.