Then the Great Michael — sometimes called Michael the Angel — arrived on the scene. He was King of the Whites, and after fighting one extremely brutal war, he declared he had a solution to the never-ending wheel of violence. Instead of training a new army for the inevitable next war against the Grays, Michael built an army of robots instead. They looked like humans, walked, talked, fought, and died like humans. But there were no beating hearts involved, and when the robots bled, it was liquefied hydraulic gas; it just looked like blood.
The robots were programmed for a maximum degree of aggressiveness. They were also given a degree of self-replication. (Robots had been building other robots for thousands of years across the Galaxy.) When the next war erupted, the Whites sent their kick-ass robots to battle, won big, and invaded the Gray planet to boot. That's when the Great Michael forgave his enemy, and then, in a bit of intrigue, left behind the secret for building the realistic combat robots. The Grays got the point. When the two planets went at it again, the Grays sent an army of robots, too, and after a century or so of combat, the war finally ended in a draw. By that time, both sides were loathe to commit any live soldiers to the morass, and a cycle of preserving life took hold.
But the story didn't end there. In almost every retelling of the myth, it was said the robots were still fighting on Myx, untold centuries later. Or more accurately, they periodically rose up from the wreckage of the war-torn planet and fought each other again and again and again, with undiminished ferocity, until all were destroyed and fell back into heaps of wreckage, to sleep until it was time to rise again. The robots served as ethereal reminders of the folly of war. Mechanical souls who came back from the dead, unstoppable in their mission, to fight over and over, victims of their own futility.
Robots as ghosts? It was a novel invention. But the myth had been retold many times in many variations among those ten million planets whose civilizations were aware of each other in the denser regions of the Five-Arm. It was supposed to serve as an enlightened morality play, something to remind the listener that peace among the stars was not a total impossibility.
But what people didn't know was that Myx was a real place, and that the planet could indeed be found very far out and very far away from the rest of the Five-Arm, and that it was a magical place as well, though not for reasons that were immediately apparent.
But where was it exactly? Only a handful of people in the entire Galaxy knew.
It just so happened that Zarex Red was one of them — or at least he thought he knew how to get here.
But as he told Hunter and Tomm, if they really wanted to find the Home Planets, they would have to find Myx first.
The voyage took almost a week.
The ghostly star system that held the mythical planet of Myx was almost fifteen thousand light-years away from Bazooms. Plus it was a trip that could not be done in a straight line. Space wasn't like that, not this far out on the Fringe. If the Fifth Arm was shaped like a slightly crooked arm, Bazooms was located just above the elbow. Tonk was just below. The moon of Zazu-Zazu, where Hunter first met Tomm and found the Freedom Brigade, was out on the tip of the outermost finger.
Myx was way out beyond the wrist, off the beaten track by nearly five hundred light-years. Zarex was fairly certain he could recall how to get there, but only by flying to a succession of isolated star systems, each one farther away from the other. Thus the trip featured long periods of streaking through absolutely empty space — or as absolutely empty as space could be.
The departure from Bazooms had not been immediate. Just as he had done when Pater Tomm joined him on the quest, Hunter made modifications to his flying machine in order to bring Zarex and his robot along. Wielding an electron torch like a painter wields a brush, Hunter elongated the flying machine's fuselage by six feet. Then he sculpted a flight compartment in this new space, one big enough to accommodate both Zarex's massive frame as well as his robot, 33418.
Hunter had also widened the plane's frame for two seats, two bunks, and more legroom. He added a superglass bubble on top to allow his friends to see where they were all going. Hunter programmed these changes into his electron torch's unlimited memory strings. This meant that with the mere push of a button and a steady hand, the aircraft could quickly revert back to its previous configuration.
They passed the six days of travel playing a game of chance Zarex had learned years before called Sh'exx. It involved a set of six dice played on a three-dimensional floating matrix. Randomly scattered within the matrix were a dozen tiny, temporary wormholes through which a player could lose his marker and as a result, his bet. As the location of the wormholes was always changing and always random, this was the ultimate game of chance. And of good timing. Just one day into the trip, Pater Tomm had lost all the money he had to his name to Zarex. By the third day, the priest had won it all back and had relieved Zarex of most of his aluminum chips as well. By the sixth day, Tomm was broke again. Zarex allowed 33418 to hold all his winnings.
Hunter spent most of the time driving the ship and taking in the sights along the way: blue stars, green stars, dead stars, and stars about to be born. They passed over, under, and through massive clouds of space dust, usually colored brilliant red or yellow, or sometimes, pure, angelic white.
One of the odd things about Hunter's flying machine and the way it quickly moved from one part of the Galaxy to another was that despite the incredible velocity, one could see other spaceships — both flying in Supertime and at the slower high warp ion speeds — as if they were going by them in slow motion. The laws of physics said that this was actually the opposite of what should be happening, and indeed, the same was not true for pilots of Empire Starcrashers. They went so fast, they could see only vessels that were also traveling like them, in Supertime. But Hunter had given up long ago trying to figure out why his craft acted the way it did. Sometimes he thought it might be better that he didn't know.
He kept a running count of other spacecraft he spotted during the journey, knowing that they could not see him. In six days, he counted just two dozen spacecraft, all of different sizes, all built in different variations of the triangular shape that permeated the Galaxy.
Each spaceship he saw was powered by ion-ballast engines and was not flying in Supertime, the mysterious extra dimensional star highway used exclusively by ships of the Fourth Empire. This was important information for Hunter. Should any member of the Empire's military cross paths with him out here, they would be duty bound to place him in chains and return him, if not to Earth, then to the closest imperial military post. This was something Hunter wanted to avoid at all costs, of course, so he was constantly on the lookout for ships of the Empire.
He saw none, though.
The one thing he had going in his favor was the near-total isolation of the part of the Galaxy he was flying in. The Five-Arm was considered isolated even by those people who lived there. Indeed, it was considered by many to be the last frontier of the Galaxy, the fringe beyond the fringe. Again, very few people out on the Five-Arm even knew of the existence of the Fourth Empire, or life on Earth, or even about Earth itself. For a ship as powerful as a massive Empire Starcrasher to suddenly arrive above their unsuspecting planet — well, of such things worldwide panics are made.
So Hunter knew if he did see an Empire ship cruising around out here, it would be a very unusual thing. That's why he kept his eyes open at all times.