The question was: How could they get down there to check it out?
No surprise, the Mad Russian had the answer.
Zoloff took some time punching more information into the creaking PC. Finally he hit the Enter button, and suddenly Hunter found himself standing on hard, dusty ground, with no grass to be seen or trees in sight. At first Hunter thought they'd beamed right down to Saturn's surface itself. But he wasn't that lucky.
He looked around and saw he was actually standing on the edge of an extremely long asphalt runway. In front of him was a large aircraft hangar, one of several in a row. He was suddenly very hot; he began to sweat. He sniffed the air and then felt a shiver go through him. That's when he realized where he was: back on the Alien Mystery World, the place where he'd almost been killed. This hangar was just one of many at the re-creation of the secret base known as Area 51.
Annie was right at his side again. She felt him tense up. Patting him gently on his arm, she said sweetly, "It's OK. It's all just make-believe."
Hunter could only shrug. "I hope so," he said.
Zoloff waved his hands again, and on cue the doors to the hangar in front of them opened. A very strange craft began rolling out as if under remote control. It was huge. It took about a minute, but finally, this vehicle stopped in front of them. Hunter stared up at it in awe. Zoloff seemed to delight in the amount of time it took for him take it in.
Strangely, it was a design Hunter recognized. Not for any kind of extraterrestrial vehicle, but as a jet fighter from way back on old Earth. It was painted green all over, with the requisite red star emblem on its wings and fuselage. It had a huge opening for a nose, a bubble-top canopy, a pair of extremely swept-back wings, and a high tail with smaller wings on top. It was a design that screamed 1940s Russia; it looked like it was going fast, even though it was standing still.
Hunter tried very hard to dredge up from his long lost memory just what this thing might be.
Then it hit him.
"It's a MiG," he said triumphantly. "A Soviet MiG-17."
Zoloff smacked him hard on the back. "Precisely!" he cried. "The best airplane in the world at one time. Fast, could climb very high. And stay up high, which gave it an advantage over American planes."
But this was no usual MiG fighter. Again, it was gigantic. The original MiG-17 was a one-seat, nimble jet airplane, thirty-five feet, nose to tail. This craft was ten times that size, nearly as big as an Empire culverin, a sort of patrol cruiser. Hunter had to admit the scaled-up fighter design made for a magnificent spacecraft. But it also looked very, very old.
"Where did this thing come from?" he asked Zoloff as the three of them began to walk around it, Annie right at Hunter's side. Obviously, he hadn't seen this contraption during his first visit to this place.
"I built it," Zoloff replied proudly. "Practically from scratch. I used to fly a seventeen when I was in our space program. It was a trainer craft by then, but speedy and great to drive."
"You built this? From memory?" Hunter asked with astonishment. That's how he'd put together his own Flying Machine when he first arrived in the seventy-third century. This was another link he had to the Ancient Cosmonaut.
"Yes, from my own brain cells," Zoloff revealed. "I knew nothing about how aircraft were built. I only knew how to fly them. But you have to remember, I've had a few thousand years down here by myself. I needed things other than the dizzylando to occupy my time. So when I created this desert world and this base, I started building this crea-ture as well. I always thought if I ever wanted to leave my precious moons, if just for a short flight to Saturn or Mars, this is what I'd do it in."
Hunter knew Zoloff was not exaggerating. The huge MiG was easily 2,000 years old. And while its design looked spectacular from one hundred feet away, up close, Hunter could see its fuselage was covered with hundreds of irregular ion-steel patches, thousands of uneven aluminum rivets, and more than a few dents and scrapes.
"Has it ever taken off?" Hunter asked Zoloff. "Has it ever left the ground?"
Zoloff just shook his head. "Nyet," he replied. "And it will not unless you tell me what I want to hear."
"And that is?"
Zoloff smiled and said to him, "Can you fly this thing?"
Hunter smiled, too, then just shrugged as he stepped over a small ocean of ion steering fluid dripping out of the right wing.
Zoloff added, "I mean, it's one way I know for us to get down to where we have to go… and we are rather pressed for time, wouldn't you say?"
Annie pulled Hunter to a stop and hugged him tightly.
"Can you do it, Hawk?" she asked him dramatically. "Can you?"
Hunter looked over the giant spacecraft again. One of its landing gear tires was nearly flat, and many of its cockpit windows were cracked or broken. And who knew what it looked like on the inside.
"Can I fly it?" he asked the question again. "I guess I can give it a try…"
There were more than a half billion SG troops on the surface of Saturn.
They were spread out all over the terra-formed planet, but most of them were armed with nothing more than an electric pen or a string bubbler. Saturn was the center of the Solar Guards' bureaucratic universe. All personnel changes, logistics files, and supply requests for the fifteen-billion strong Solar Guards emanated from here.
Just as much of Saturn's surface was covered with office buildings and warehouses, some more than ten miles long. Orbit around the huge planet was usually a very busy place as well. But most of the SG ships coming and going were cargo humpers, transition ships, or liaison vessels. It was a rare occasion that an SG warship came anywhere near Saturn. There was never any need.
So it was an extreme rarity that the planet's space traffic control station would get a report of a ship in trouble. Empire starships rarely crashed; they rarely even broke down. The only problem they could have was if something happened to the prop core; starved of the proper amount of power, the mysterious star engine could begin to fail, which would lead to a series of nuclear reactions, whereupon everything involved first blew up, then collapsed into nothingness. Never a pretty sight.
But at this moment the STC station was contemplating a report that a huge, unidentified ship had entered Saturn's atmosphere above the eastern hemisphere, that it was "nearly totally involved in flame" and coming down fast.
The control station put out an immediate string comm asking all ships in orbit around the huge planet to report their status. Within seconds, the space traffic controllers knew that none of the 50,000-plus SG ships circling the planet were having any problems.
Whose ship was crashing then?
Traffic control dispatched spacefighters to the area, this as a large unidentifiable object was picked up on its long-range scan arrays. It was no secret that SG space-fighters on Saturn were flown by second-echelon pilots: retirees, pilots who'd been injured, or men who were no longer fit for combat. Not exactly the cream of the SG's aerial crop.
A squadron of six of these needle-nosed fighters proceeded to the trouble zone, but at a leisurely pace. They knew if this was an Empire ship in trouble, its crew would simply eject in their safety capsules, and the ship would be directed to blow itself up. With Saturn's artificial atmosphere being more than 10,000 miles thick, just as long as the ship in trouble wasn't flying in Supertime, it would take a while for it to fall through that soup. So why hurry?
That attitude changed quickly, though, when the space-fighters arrived at their vector point. They immediately spotted the ship in question, and it was indeed in the process of crashing — or so it seemed. But it was not an Empire ship. What was it then? It was big and green and had wings. It was at least 350 feet long and had a wingspan of at least 200 feet. There was a full size flight deck under its bubble canopy and hatchways down near its nose that allowed the crew to climb in. There were gigantic red stars on its wings and its fuselage. None of the spacefighter pilots had ever seen anything like it.