Then something even more remarkable happened. Empire troop shuttles were armed with only rudimentary ray guns. These were provided in the unlikely event that a bug was caught on the surface of a planet, alone, during an invasion and was forced to defend itself. The mysterious pilot was now firing these guns at the Blackship’s flight deck — indeed, he was coming down in a screaming dive and directing his twin beams at the vessel’s main control bubble. This seemed like madness! The shuttle’s small ray guns were designed to kill troops, not do battle against miles-long spaceships. Yet the shuttle unloaded on the Blackship’s command bubble and kept right on going, its guns full blast, making impacts all the way down the length of the attacking ship. Only after it delivered a concentrated barrage on the ship’s propulsion section did it turn up and away and climb again, a storm of Z beams following in its wake.
All this was happening so quickly, the men inside the Oculus didn’t realize that the Blackship’s command bubble had caught fire. Two of its tail fins were alight as well. Yet the shuttle had looped over the top of the BonoVox again and now was going into a second mad dive. Once again the Blackship began firing at it. Once again the shuttle dodged the stream of Z beams. The bug began twisting and turning in seemingly impossible maneuvers, yet remarkably its nose guns kept firing on target and without a hint of hesitation.
Finally one of its blasts found a significant mark. A lucky beam made its way through the Blackship’s hull and into the attacking ship’s own version of an Oculus. This one beam destroyed the Blackship’s entire sensor chamber. In one stroke, the vessel’s abilities to see and hear were gone, and its electrical systems began to short out. A violent explosion rocked the Blackship right behind its control bubble. This in turn caused a string of explosions all the way back to the Blackship’s hindquarters. The propulsion systems within began to disintegrate immediately, and the ship began losing speed. Suddenly there was a bright white flash, and then it was gone. The Blackship had been knocked out of Supertime.
But the drama was not over.
With their ship now gone, the several hundred spacemen it had dispensed to do battle against the BonoVox were suddenly all alone. They no longer had a ship to fight for. No one was around them now but the enemy.
Some of the attacking spacemen disengaged from hand-to-hand combat and flew back to the place where the Blackship had been. Others simply stopped fighting and hung motionless in space. It was clear they had no safe place to go. So, one by one, the enemy spacemen began shooting each other…
8
Hunter have never tasted Venusian wine before.
One sip though was enough to tell him that the slow-ship crap he’d been drinking back on Fools 6 tasted like bilge by comparison. This stuff felt like a cloud going down his throat. No bark. No bite. Yet the opiate effect was virtually the same.
“Refill, Mister Hunter?”
Before Hunter could reply, his goblet slowly refilled itself. He barely saw the hand of the invisible holo-servant pouring him another full measure while properly staying out of sight in some nearby dimension.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Hunter replied belatedly.
He was sitting in Multx’s vast private billet, a compartment directly behind the flight deck of the BonoVox. Erx and Berx were on hand as well. Sitting nearby, each had already drained his second glass of wine and was looking for more. They seemed a bit reluctant to look Hunter in the eye.
Hunter had never met Multx before. Perched behind his huge floating desk, the star commander seemed a bit larger than life at first. He looked twice the size of a normal man, with monstrous hands and enormous shoulders. Polished head, properly greased goatee, resplendent in his Space Navy uniform, he certainly looked the part of a famous starship captain.
But Multx also appeared a bit haggard at the moment. And who could blame him? His premonition of dire things a-coming had proved frighteningly accurate. Fewer than a dozen hours ago, his ship had narrowly escaped being captured by the swarm of spacemen from the Blackship. Only by Hunter’s quick action did the BonoVox survive. No one on board the Empire warship had ever seen anything remotely like the display Hunter had put on in dispatching the intruding vessel. Even the latest Empire starfighters would not take on a Blackship. Yet Hunter had done it in a lowly, barely armed shuttlecraft.
Even now, it didn’t seem possible…
Erx and Berx were trying to catch Multx’s eye, hoping he would order their glasses to be refilled. But the star commander’s attention was focused entirely on Hunter at the moment.
“Is it safe to say that you have a penchant for — how should I put it? — being where the action is, Mister Hunter?”
Hunter paused from taking another sip of wine.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir,” he finally replied.
Multx smiled wearily. “Well, just in the past few days, you rather dramatically rescued my two close friends here. Then you managed to get out of a very secure compartment to observe our most secret weapons in operation. Then… well, then you saved this ship from a catastrophe.”
Hunter gulped some wine down in earnest then said: “I was just trying to help.”
Multx thought about this for a moment, then snapped his fingers. A visual screen materialized out of nowhere.
“I see our ship physicians thoroughly examined you, Mr. Hunter,” he said, reading from the screen.
“Thankfully they confirmed that you are not a victim of amnesia or any other cranial trauma.”
“That’s good to know,” Hunter replied. “I think—”
“But our records confirm that you are not listed as a citizen of the Empire,” Multx went on. “Nor have you ever been a member of the Empire’s military before.”
“I believe that is true as well,” Hunter said.
Multx dispatched the floating screen and turned back to Hunter. “I know you don’t know where you came from,” he said. “Unless something has come back to you in the past few days?”
Hunter just shook his head. “I’ve thought about it more times than I can count, and not just over the past few days. In fact, I never stop thinking about it. But other than my name and the fact that I apparently have some kind of flying ability — I simply cannot remember anything else.”
“And it’s the same reply as to where you learned to fly like that?”
Hunter just nodded. “It is.”
Multx fiddled with his extra-long goatee hair for a moment.
“I am not a man without ego, Mister Hunter,” he said. “Yet in this matter, I can only speak the truth. You saved this ship. You saved my crew. You saved my career. But again, this puzzles me: Whatever possessed you to do what you did? Only a fool would have taken on a Blackship with nothing more than a troop shuttle. Why did you do it?”
Hunter shrugged. He could feel the cloud wine taking effect.
“Something inside just told me to do it,” he replied. “I started running; the next thing I knew I was in the shuttle and going outside. It was almost as if someone else were doing it — or that I was watching someone else do it. Beyond that…”
He let his voice trail off.
“Are you saying that ‘instinct’ played a role in this?” Multx asked him.