And how? Thinking too much about one thing was the surest way to go crazy, so in the end, it was just more logical for him to believe that everybody and everything in this universe were dead. And by some cruel twist of fate, he was put here, alone, with no explanation, the only one left in human creation. Doing his time in hell.
But now, in just two days, not one but two ships had come here. And suddenly everything had changed.
The universe was alive. Or this little part of it was.
At least now I have some proof, at least one question has been answered…
And he was happy — for a few moments, anyway. Because with life, one answer usually brought just another question. He was not alone; that was great. But would he ever be able to find someone, somewhere, who might be able to tell him who he was? And why he was here?
And did he really want to know?
These thoughts must have drifted into dreams, because when Hunter opened his eyes again, he found an enormous soldier standing in front of him. He towered over Hunter and was holding a huge weapon of some sort. The soldier was actually one of many; in fact, there were nearly a hundred soldiers crowding onto his roof. They had come out of nowhere. Literally.
They were all wearing dark gray combat uniforms and elaborate battle helmets. Through the tangle of space hats and ray guns, one soldier called for quiet and began reading from an ornamental scroll. The words were incomprehensible to Hunter; they were in an archaic Empire vernacular. He let the man finish, then turned to the nearest soldier.
“What did all that mean?” Hunter asked him.
The soldier replied: “Simple: You’ve been conscripted to the service of the Empire military forces.”
“Conscripted?” Hunter asked. “Do you mean…?”
“That’s correct, comrade,” the soldier said. “You’ve just been drafted.”
5
The trip to the Sileasian System took two Earth days.
The BonoVox covered more than four thousand light-years in that time, most of it while cruising in Supertime, the mysterious seventh dimension also known as “the Ethers.”
Under ideal conditions, a starship traveling in Supertime could traverse the Galaxy in less than a month.
Indeed, some Empire ships could reach speeds of two light-years a minute. They did this without having to go through black holes, white holes, wormholes, or any other deep-space exotica. All that was required was a properly tuned, properly powered propulsion core.
Just how the Empire’s starships were able to enter Supertime was a mystery — Erx and Berx were hardly alone in their lack of understanding of it. Something in the prop cores allowed the grand ships to cross into the seventh dimension and travel there with no more than the flip of a switch. But just how that miracle worked, and how the Big Generator was able to supply the massive amounts of power to make it happen, went beyond the faculties of most. The Imperial Family and the core of the Empire’s military elite knew the secret of the prop-cores; at least, that was the common assumption. After that, it was all magic as far as the citizens of the Galaxy were concerned.
Not that they ever got a taste of it. Supertime belonged to the Empire’s military class and their warships.
It was their superhighway to the stars. Everyone else, from the space merchants to the space pirates, had to use craft powered by ion-ballast engines. On their best day, these cramped, noisy vessels could travel at barely one-hundredth the speed of a prop core model starship, and then only with frequent refueling stops.
And they couldn’t crash through stars, either.
The Sileasian System was in a region of the Galaxy known as Slow Fringe 3, or sometimes, the Three-Arm.
This was the third arm of the Milky Way, counting clockwise from the Earth, and almost on the other side of the star system. It held comparatively few stars, just a few dozen million. Sileasia and its array of eleven planets was near the tip of the arm. It was a known haven for space pirates and bandits; their ilk had been terrorizing Slow Fringe 3 for more than a hundred years. In their bid to reclaim planets lost since the Third Empire’s downfall many centuries before, the imperial forces had spent the past two Earth years clearing out the Sileasian System, one planet at a time.
It had not been the cleanest of campaigns. Shortly after the onset of hostilities, the various Sileasian lawbreakers had banded together to create a substantial opposition army nearly three million strong.
They invaded nine of the eleven planets and held these worlds hostage against any Empire action. This made slow going for the Empire’s soldiers, slogging it out, one world at a time, trying to kill as many of the enemy as possible while attempting to keep civilian casualties low. It hadn’t always worked out that way. The death toll in two years of fighting already numbered in the billions.
Early on the third day, the BonoVox arrived off the seventh planet of Sileasia, a jungle world called Vines 67.
It was here that the Sileasian bandits had been waging a fierce guerrilla war against the Empire forces, specifically the two-million-man corps of Loy Staxx, a 141-year-old, highly decorated veteran of the Empire’s Space Navy. Staxx had chosen to take Vines 67 one continent at a time, a substantial chore, as there were only three major bodies of water on the planet, and together they barely made up 30 percent of its area.
Recapturing Vines 67 was important, though. It was the middle planet of the three the bandits still controlled. The original plan was to subdue Vines 67 and then use it as a jumping-off point for campaigns against the two remaining opposition worlds. But even with a vast array of supporting forces drawn from the previously reclaimed planets, Staxx and his men had found the jungle war against the homegrown bandits a slow, draining, and costly affair. After nearly half a year of trying, they were being relieved.
Star Commander Zap Multx was here to finish the job.
Hunter had been put into a small compartment in a section of the BonoVox known as the Lowers.
This place had a hovering bunk, a food tube, and a supply of “brain rings” for amusement, though Hunter didn’t have the slightest idea how to work the things.
He’d seen nothing else of the ship, having been beamed directly to this windowless billet after being “drafted.” Erx and Berx sent him a new set of clothes, including a plain gray spacesuit and a pair of boots. In an accompanying holo-message, they told him what Multx had told them: that Hunter had to be “processed” at a military facility planet “nearer to Earth.” The BonoVox had to make another stop first.
All that was fine with Hunter. It wasn’t what he imagined military life would be, but he had no complaints about his accommodations. His bunk was soft, and the food tube offered a bewildering array of fare.
And while he felt bad about leaving his flying machine behind, he didn’t miss life on Fools 6 at all. After spending so much time kicking around one of the Galaxy’s most dead-end planets, anything was an improvement.
Still, there was no getting around the fact that he was confined to a jail cell of sorts. The door to his compartment was sealed, and there was no unlocking mechanism on the inside. Why? He had a sense that he was being kept under wraps for some reason. As Erx and Berx explained it to him in their message, whenever the huge starship was about to enter a combat situation, all nonessential personnel had to be locked down in their berths, lest they see any of the Empire’s many secret weapons in action.