Mack Maloney
Storm Over Saturn
Part One
After the Flash
1
The KosmoVox was the second-fastest spaceship in the Galaxy.
It was a strange little craft belonging to the Earth Guard of the Fourth Galactic Empire. Like the Empire's mainline warships, they being the enormous two-mile-long Star-crashers, the KosmoVox was wedge-shaped, needle-nosed, and powered by a remarkable star engine known as a prop core. This allowed it to enter the seventh dimension and fly at a velocity known as Supertime. But while prop-core-equipped Starcrashers could travel at two light years a minute — traversing the Milky Way in one took less than a month — the KosmoVox could fly at nearly three light years a minute. This, even though the diminutive craft was only about one-hundredth the size of a monstrous Starcrasher.
No one knew who had built the KosmoVox or why it could go so fast. By twin sins of neglect and disinterest, much knowledge had been lost in the Fourth Empire over its seven centuries of expansion and dominance, including the secret of what made the prop cores work. The same held true for the KosmoVox. It was obviously a very old vessel, with bizarre nacelles and an overextended tail nearly belying its wedge shape. Yet it derived its power from the same source as the Empire's massive warships — the mysterious slab of black rock located in Earth's western desert known as the Big Generator — and could do just about everything they could do. It was just different, and no one had ever bothered to find out why.
An obscure war poem written in the early days of the empire speculated the KosmoVox had been built to transport spies around the Galaxy. As the official history of the realm only went back a couple hundred years, there was no way to verify this. But true or not, it was an appropriate backdrop for the KosmoVox's mission this night, as the lone person riding back in its passenger compartment was indeed an Imperial spy.
Nothing less than the fate of the Milky Way would soon be in his hands.
The Fourth Galactic Empire was on the verge of collapse. Its two main military arms, the Space Forces and the Solar Guards, had been fighting a brutal war against each other for the past three months. The hostilities had already taken more than one hundred million lives on both sides and destroyed thousands of Empire warships. While battles between the two services had been fought all over the Milky Way, the most significant combat had taken place inside the Two Arm, the second of the Galaxy's nine major arms, and just one over from the swirl that contained Earth itself. No less than seventeen major battles had taken place in the Two Arm, nightmarish clashes involving thousands of Starcrashers blasting away at each other with weapons of almost inconceivable power, this while vast armies of star troopers fought each other, hand-to-hand, across the airless battlefield of space.
Nowhere in the annals of human history had war been fought on such an immense scale.
Why the two services were fighting each other was both a simple and complex question.
The Solar Guards were essentially the military policemen of the Empire. Just 300 years old, their main responsibility was security within the Pluto Cloud, as the boundary of the Earth's Solar System was now called. However, through mostly nefarious means and a knack for holding political sway with the Emperor Himself, the SG had been able to spread its seamy influence throughout the Milky Way. This included eight of the Galaxy's nine major arms, its heavily populated center, and the area known as the Fringe, the outer ring of stars that served as the last frontier of the realm. To most eyes, the Solar Guards were thugs in uniforms, widely known for their heavy-handed tactics. Long on intimidation and indiscriminate use of force, they were roundly despised throughout the Galaxy.
On the other hand, the Space Forces were the Emperor's front-line military troops. With nearly thirty billion soldiers under arms, and millions of spacecraft in their employ, the SF was twice the size of the SG. Their specialty was invading and holding hostile planets. Space Forces troopers were well-trained, highly motivated, and very loyal to the Emperor. And as their roots went back to at least the beginning of the present Empire, its members considered themselves the real professionals of the Imperial armed forces. More often then not, they acted that way.
It was a difference in philosophy that lay at the heart of this internecine conflict. The Fourth Empire encompassed more than 100 billion star systems, 500 billion planets, and trillions of subjects. Three previous empires and several Dark Ages had passed since humans first left Mother Earth more than five thousand years before. During the First Empire just about every planet in the Milky Way, from the rocks to the gas giants, had been discovered, explored, terra-formed, and made part of the realm. But with three successive Imperial falls, billions of those planets became lost again, many not even realizing they were still part of a huge galactic empire. In fact, the inhabitants of some of these planets believed that life itself did not exist beyond their own atmospheres.
The current regime had reclaimed more than 85 percent of the Milky Way during its nearly seven centuries of absolute power. About a thousand additional planets were added every day — and this was where the clash in doctrine between the SF and the SG came in. Steeped in its jack-booted ways, the SG believed the best path to success was to reclaim these lost worlds as quickly as possible, no matter what the means. This included invading unsuspecting planets without prior warning, a hugely traumatic event for the inhabitants of the unlucky worlds. The Space Forces were dedicated to reclaiming every last planet for the Empire as well. But its leaders believed the best way to accomplish this was to go after the troublesome worlds first — those millions of Fringe planets inhabited by space pirates, criminals, tax dictators, and other interstellar lowlifes — and bring the more peaceful, law-abiding planets back in gradually.
So the dividing line between the two military branches was how humanely the Empire's expansion should be carried out; simple on the face of it, but complex when the myriad sociological, psychological, and especially political elements were added in. For the SG, it was all about galactic turf; for the SF, it was about respect, both on Mother Earth and throughout the cosmos. No one in the Imperial Court dared favor one service over the other, at least not in the light of day. And characteristically, the Emperor, the Supreme O'Nay, was mute on the subject. Thus, the fuse for this disastrous conflict had been smoldering for years.
Hostilities finally broke out when officers of the SG's elite Rapid Engagement Fleet discovered a Space Forces spy sent to the mid-Two Arm to investigate the mysterious activities of that special operations force. The SF man was captured on a barren and forbidding planet known as Doomsday 212 and summarily executed by the REF. When Space Forces ships rushed to the dying man's aid, they, too, were attacked by the REF. The SF returned fire, and just like that, three centuries of bitterness boiled over. The war was on.
Again, all this happened three months before. Now, after a major defeat during some very bizarre circumstances surrounding a second battle near Doomsday 212, the SG had ordered nearly all of its far flung fleet back to the One Arm, close to one million vessels. Most of these warships took up positions on the edge of the One Arm, along a line straddling the main star road leading to the original Solar
System and Earth itself. When this happened, the Space Forces recalled many of its ships, too. Soon nearly a million SF vessels were also in the area, many positioning themselves opposite the immense SG line, nose to nose with their adversaries. An apocalyptic battle seemed both imminent and inevitable.