Выбрать главу

Fyxx finally spoke: “Okay, let’s say we make a deal.”

“Propose,” Dazz said.

“If I hear anything more about this, I will let you know,” Fyxx told the SG commander. “Will you do the same?”

Dazz thought a moment, then nodded. “Done…”

The two men almost shook hands. Another silence followed. Finally Fyxx gave the order for the hum beam to be turned off. The meeting was over.

Still wary, the two sides backed away from each other and began filing out of the building very slowly.

That’s when Dazz stopped.

“By the way, Skol, who are you picking in the Earth Race?” he asked the SF commander. “I hear there’s a couple of real freaks among the field.”

Fyxx just sniffed at him. “I don’t gamble,” he said.

Dazz snickered. He was back to his reptilian self again.

“Well, the way things are going,” he told Fyxx, “maybe you should start…”

12

Across the main canal and a few miles to the south of Sector Cello was an area known as New Brew.

No less thick of trees and hedgerows than Cello, New Brew at least had some roads running through it, and it was higher in elevation. On one of these roads was a house about an eighth of a mile from the top of a cliff.

It was modest for a dwelling in this very exclusive area, so close to the largest, most important city in the Galaxy. The house was a simple ten-room affair — rustic, almost — with a large garden out back and a jungle of overgrown wisteria and regalia hiding it out front.

This place was cool and damp no matter how hot the engineers made the weather. The road running by the house was barely paved, the path leading up to its door was just dirt and small rocks. If the intention of the person who lived here was to be inconspicuous — hidden away, even — he had succeeded grandly.

It was raining now this dark night in Chesterwest, and the winds were blowing a little more than usual.

The knock came on the door just before midnight. Sitting by the light of many candles, reading his old battle reports, Petz Calandrx rose unsteadily and went to answer the door.

He was a short, elderly man, 222 years old. He had long white hair, no beard, a bright smile, and a tanned, leathery face, the signature of a veteran starfighter pilot. His house was filled with books, or what used to be called books. They were actually holographic re-creations of texts that had been all but lost after the Second Empire fell. Calandrx loved reading the classic poets of that epoch and considered himself a minor authority on the military history of the era as well — what little of it there was. Calandrx spent days on end reading his books, always by candlelight, soaking up everything he could, looking for the signs of what inevitably doomed that empire, then releasing some of it in an occasional burst of three-meter verse.

Few things could distract him from his avocation these days. A call for a favor from an old friend was one of them.

He opened the door and found three people standing on his stoop. All three were wearing the same nondescript garment, a hood and a long tunic with hoods pulled tight; they looked not unlike a trio of grim reapers. Each person was hiding his face.

Still, Calandrx could see a faint glow coming from beneath each hood. Indeed, there was a hazy aura surrounding all of the three figures. Calandrx smiled. Eudora’s Fire, they used to call it. He hadn’t seen it in many years.

He shook hands first with the person in the middle.

“It’s good to see you,” he told the visitor. “And good to touch the hand of someone who has just crashed a star.”

Hawk Hunter pulled back his hood.

“It’s good to be here, General Calandrx,” he replied. “And to shake hands with a true hero.”

Petz Calandrx was not just a poet and a scholar. He was also the winner of the 201st Earth Race, an event held ninety-seven years before.

He’d been a starship captain at the time, a position he’d held only a short time after moving up from starfighter duty. He’d been a minor hero in the realm before that, distinguishing himself in the fiercely contested Sygma Cloud wars. Calandrx had excelled in the “terrain-attack” role performed by the Empire’s starfighter units. A squadron under his command once strafed an entire planet — Zigamus 3—nonstop for more than an Earth day. Continuously ordering up weapons from their holo-systems, he and his eighteen aircraft put enough pressure on enough enemy strongholds to allow a rescue force to sweep down to the planet and extract millions of innocent civilians soon to be caught in the middle of the fighting.

This action won Calandrx several medals — and also made him a prime candidate for Earth Race 201. He won it in record time. Showered with riches and acclaim, he became a huge celebrity throughout the Galaxy. For one Earth year, the name Calandrx was never far from the lips of the Empire’s seventy-five quadrillion citizens. He became so famous, in fact, that Emperor O’Nay decreed that Calandrx could never again travel in space — this on the off-chance that he might be killed in flight and thus put a tragic ending on a career that burned brighter than the stars in the Ball.

That was almost a century ago, and here was Calandrx, an intelligent hermit and still a prisoner of his own celebrity. Not many things made him happy. But at this moment, he was beside himself with joy.

These three people had crashed so many stars lately, they seemed to be glowing brighter than his candles.

The three of them trooped in, Hunter first, Erx and Berx right behind him. Of course, Erx and Berx had known Calandrx for more than eighty years.

He brought them immediately to his library and beheld them in the candlelight for a few moments. Sure enough, combined, the three of them were glowing brighter than twelve of his best wick and wax. At this, Calandrx could barely contain his delight.

“My God, is that all you three have been doing? Crashing stars?”

“Sometimes it feels that way, old friend,” Erx said, shedding his disguise, if in fact a hood and tunic was a disguise. Anyone up to mischief these days always seemed to pick this combination of garb, as a way of blending in. Yet to say so was almost a cliché.

“Crashing isn’t what it used to be,” Berx said with false disinterest. “In fact, I’ve been finding it rather boring lately…”

Calandrx shook his fist in Berx’s face.

“If I hear one more word like that from you,” Calandrx scolded him, “I’ll knock you so hard into the fifth dimension, you’ll have to wait till next Tuesday for your ass to arrive. Crashing stars is an honor not shared by the vast majority of our galactic brothers and sisters. It’s a gift to be able do it. It must be appreciated as such.”

Berx laughed in his face. So did Erx. Only really old friends could treat each other this way.

“Do you have any slow-ship, Petz?” Erx asked him, walking to the blazing fireplace to warm his hands.

“Or have you graduated to that crap they sell on Neptune?”

Calandrx shuffled off to his liquor cabinet. It took up one entire wall of his reading room. Several rows were filled with slow-ship wine; others held some “Neptune crap.”

“Come, sit,” Calandrx bid them as he reached for his oldest bottle of slow. “Imagine my pleasure when I heard from Brother Multx and accepted his offer of intrigue.”

“Imagine our surprise when we found out you were his contact with the race committee,” Erx said. “I would have thought you were above such things, Petz. Gambling, subterfuge, and such?”

Calandrx was in the middle of filling their goblets with wine. He intentionally poured Erx but half a cup.

“Someday you’ll be planetbound, Erx,” Calandrx told him. “And then you’ll know the curse of getting no closer to the stars than looking up at them at night. When that day comes, I want to know how you’ll be amusing yourself.”