Earth meant something else to him. Close to that part of his soul that had sent him on this strange quest, was the vision of the beautiful Xara, Princess of the Galaxy, and daughter of O'Nay, the Emperor himself. When he thought of Earth, he was really thinking of Xara. Her eyes. Her shape. Her hair. She, too, was a jewel, a living jewel from some fantastic diamond sun, a creature of startling beauty.
She had come into his life right after he'd won the famous Earth Race; at first it was to save him from the clutches of her rather dysfunctional family and later to help him take the first step in his search for someplace to call home. But faster than his flying machine could ever go, he had fallen for her and fallen hard. Space was curved, gravity could be a bitch, and he had been in love with Xara at first sight. These were the only three things Hunter was sure of these days. Everything else was really up for grabs.
He wondered what she was doing at that very moment. Was she asleep? Awake? Lying in the arms of another? Or was she staring up at the stars, just as he was doing? Might she be thinking about him, just as he was thinking about her? What were the chances of that?
He turned away from the moonlet parade and looked toward the thick band of stars that dominated the sky fifty degrees above the horizon. If he tried hard enough, would he be able to see right through the center of the Galaxy? Could he see beyond that brilliant clutter of a hundred billion stars, through its middle and clear to the other side? Because if he could, then somewhere way, way out there, was Earth. And that's where Xara was.
"By God's good grace!"
Hunter was awake in a shot. He sat bolt upright, his blaster pistol in hand, pointing in all directions at once.
"What is it?" he yelled, only to be surprised that it was light again, and that the night had gone and had taken the moonlets' light show with it. His face felt slightly warm; a very dull sun was peeking up over the horizon.
So much for not falling asleep…
And now Pater Tomm was standing before him, cassock dirty, collar unlatched, a wine-stained grin reflecting the early-morning light. The priest didn't smile very often. When he did, it was usually for good reason.
"Favorable news, Padre?" Hunter asked him now.
"Bingo that, my brother," the priest replied, holding up what must have been the oldest star chart of them all. "For I have found it. I finally know how to get to Tonk."
3
Hunter had never been to an 8-Ball system before.
These were collections of planets stuck orbiting a nearly depleted star, one that was just a step away from becoming a full-fledged black dwarf. There was precious little light in an 8-Ball system. Sometimes the illumination coming from any gas-giant planets on hand was a hundred times brighter than that being thrown off by the system's dying, shrinking sun. This, and the fact that the star could go nova at any moment and obliterate everything for millions of miles around, made 8-Balls very strange places to call home. Who lived in an 8-Ball system? Cutthroats, murderers, and criminals, mostly. Or people on the run. Or people who simply hated other people. Whatever the reason, living the 8-Ball life was not for the weak of heart.
This one was appropriately nicknamed Dim Bulb 3. It held thirteen planets. Three were gas giants; the rest were rocks. When the ancient puffers reached this part of the Galaxy thousands of years before, they'd apparently bypassed the sickly sun and engineered two of the giants to revolve on roughly parallel orbits. The intention was to give a semblance of daylight to the solid planets floating nearby, but it had been a halfhearted affair, even back then. As a result, the dim light from the coupled gas giants provided only half of what would be considered normal sunlight. This meant a system with lots of shadows, lots of murk, lots of places to hide. The fifth planet in this unsavory bunch was Tonk.
It was 238 light-years from Sigma-TKE to Dim Bulb 3. Hunter's flying machine covered the distance in just under two hours, using what he considered cruising speed: two light-years a minute, the same speed as an Empire Starcrasher at full throttle. While his speed could be unlimited — he really didn't know— he still had to consider the wear and tear on the rest of his craft. He figured if the empire ships held together at two light years a minute, there was a good chance his would too. Anything faster than that for extended periods of time tended to peel the paint off his rig.
They found Tonk right away and entered orbit around the gloomy little world. Its past glory long gone, Tonk was now a graveyard planet, a place where old spaceships came to die. Graveyard planets were the result of a strange space-faring custom. When an interstellar vessel came to the end of its useful life, there was really nothing else its owner could do but crash it into a planet or send it into a sun. Sending an old ship into a sun was considered very bad luck in just about every part of the Galaxy. On the Five-Arm it was almost never done. On the other hand, crashing dying ships onto a graveyard planet was a very strong tradition here. It was supposed to bring clusters of good luck. It also meant that the planet soon became a scrap heap for ion movers looking for cheap parts. These people were rarely model citizens, either.
So Hunter and Tomm were now orbiting a graveyard planet in an 8-Ball system; it really didn't get much more depressing than that. Hunter engaged his long-range acquisition systems and did a scan of Tonk's major hemispheres. The visuals began flowing back immediately. They said there were more than twenty-five thousand space wrecks on Tonk, most in advanced stages of atom decay. As the materials of an ion-ballast vessel slowly disintegrated, their molecules became so saturated with ultragamma radiation, a fine gray mist was produced. This fog tended to hang over everything. This was why Tonk was colored sickly gray. Gray air, gray skies, gray water running underground. Gray everywhere, dark and sooty, the color of nothing good.
And as if Tonk needed any further negative vibes, its puff was slowly leaking away, too. Several millennia of industrial fumes had defiled the original artificial atmosphere, and it had sprung many leaks over the last ten centuries. It was so bad now that when it rained, which was often, the precipitation came down not in water droplets but in dirty gray blobs.
Dirty gray blobs would not do the glossy finish of Hunter's sleek flying machine any good. Indeed, ultrafast spaceflight had given the strange, winged craft a glow of its own, one which he hoped to maintain.
But looking down on the poor excuse of a planet, Hunter's intuition hinted that messing up the buggy's finish might be the least of his problems here.
Oddly, it was on this dirty little speck that they hoped to find a man who could help them enormously on their quest.
His given name was the rather unwieldy Lezz Dezz-Klaaz, aka Son 99. But he was more famously known as the Great Klaaz. Klaaz was a fabled starship captain and interstellar hero. He'd roamed the Five-Arm for hundreds of years, lending his considerable talent for military strategy to the most noble causes. He'd led hundreds of campaigns, some of such breadth they involved defending entire star clusters against marauding armies of space pirates and vandals. He was recognized as a Marshal of Outer Space by the militaries of no less than three dozen planets. His image adorned the aluminum coins of seven star systems. His face appeared on the flags of several more.
Just barely out of the seminary, Tomm had served as chaplain for several of Klaaz's armies, and the two men had become close friends a couple centuries before. When his full-time fighting days finally ended, the Great Klaaz, always a man with stars in his eyes, bought into a very crazy notion: reviving Tonk to its former glory. The idea was to not only rebuild the planet's immense ion-revitalization bays, but to make Tonk the cultural, political, and military center of the mid-Five-Arm again — and try once more to reignite its sun. He joined a clutch of like-minded dreamers, but the task proved more difficult than sealing off a seventeen-star cluster from the Interstellar Huns. After just a few decades, the dreamers gave up and moved on — all except Klaaz.