No sooner had they popped into view, when these starships began dispensing hundreds of shuttlecraft. At first, these shuttles looked no different than the standard model used throughout the Galaxy for centuries, essentially a long tube with legs. But very quickly, they showed themselves to be anything but ordinary.
The shuttles swooped down on the burning base and began adding barrages of blaster beams to the already smoldering rubble; indeed, each troop transport was lugging up to two dozen single-tube Z blasters, giving what had always been simply a transportation vehicle a very frightening and lethal pop. Shuttlecraft carrying more than one gun? That was a new one.
The bulked-up shuttles were now landing all over the base. No sooner would they hit the surface, when hundreds of soldiers began sprinting out of access doors lowered even prior to landing.
The drunken mercs watching all this from the crest of the hill couldn't believe their bleary eyes. They'd never seen soldiers move so fast. In seconds, there were at least a thousand troops running throughout the base, securing the few buildings left standing, and dashing up the side ramps, which led to the base's decaying power tower.
It took just a few more minutes for the invaders to reach the oblong bubble that served as a cap for the tower, using back-carried jet packs to carry them up the 750-foot structure. The flying machine returned one more time, doing a mind-numbing, dizzying victory roll above the burning base and past the seized power tower. A cheer went up from those invading soldiers on the ground. Peering up through the mist and the smoke, the stunned BMK mercs saw that the soldiers had raised a flag at the top of the tower.
Using their viz scanners at supertelescopic level, they were able to see this flag up close.
Full of stars and stripes, its colors were red, white, and blue.
Hawk Hunter put his flying machine on its tail and nudged the throttle forward 0.0001 of an inch. The aircraft rocketed up through the thin atmosphere of Xronis Trey, popping into space an instant later. He quickly tapped the throttle back to its original position and turned wings over. Just like that, he was upside down, in a low orbit above the tiny planet, looking down on the burning BMK base.
At last he had a moment to catch his breath.
He checked his instruments package and was relieved to see his flying machine had made it through the attack unscathed: no holes, no leaks, no power drains. All indications were that the surprise attack had gone well. There had been no KIAs reported among the invading forces. All of the major objectives had been taken, and it didn't appear that any kind of SOS had gone out from the seized base.
Hunter took a deep gulp from his oxygen mask and let the air out slowly.
So far, so good, he thought.
Why was he here?
He was still a fugitive from justice. Still AWOL from the Fourth Empire's X-Forces. Still a wanted man.
But he was also still on his quest to find out who he was and how he'd come to be stranded on another very desolate planet, this one at the other end of the Galaxy, the only clue to his identity being his name tag and the red, white, and blue flag he'd found in his pocket.
That had been about a year ago. Since being rescued from that planet, he'd wound up on Earth, where he used his remarkable flying machine to win the Earth Race and garner the tremendous fame and fortune that followed. This included a commission and his choice of any assignment within the Empire's vast military forces. With help from the Princess Xara, the beautiful daughter of O'Nay, the Emperor of the Galaxy Himself, Hunter chose the Empire's Exploratory and Expeditionary Forces — the X-Forces — and was sent on a mission that would bring him close to a near-mythical landmark, a place he knew only as the Lighthouse.
This was important, because evidence long ago suppressed by O'Nay's Fourth Empire had indicated the flag Hunter had found in his pocket was actually the emblem of a place called America — and that he was in fact an American. The Lighthouse was a beacon of sorts that had been set up thousands of years before as a way to call every American lost and wandering in the Galaxy to come home. Hunter felt the tug and eventually found the place where the Lighthouse had once existed and there, the last of a small band of fighters called the Freedom Brigade. These fighters considered themselves Americans, too, and they set him off on a long search for their home planet, leaving all allegiance to the Empire behind.
After a hazardous and, in some ways, magical journey, Hunter found himself in a star system that was not within the vast Milky Way but actually a great distance away, far beyond the Galaxy's boundaries, floating out in the inter-galactic void.
This place was called the Home Planets. And it was here that Hunter found Planet America and 35 other planets representing the other countries and regions of what was once the real planet Earth. It didn't take long to discover that the Home Planets' system was actually a prison, a concentration camp in the sky, space-engineered thousands of years before to be the perfect jail. With the entire system locked inside an ancient time bubble, the people of the Home Planets had precious few clues as to where they had come from originally or who had chosen to lock them up so far away from home.
It was only after the vast army of prison guards lording over this star system attacked Planet America and were defeated by Hunter and his allies did the Americans confirm that the Home Planets were populated by the descendants of the people who had inhabited Earth around the year 3200 a.d. — or 4,000 years before. They had been forcibly removed from Earth by parties still unknown and deported to the Home Planets.
That's when Hunter realized that while Planet America was a place literally of his dreams, it wasn't his home, and it wasn't the home of anyone who lived there. For the descendants of the deportees, only Mother Earth was their rightful home, and it had been taken away from them.
Hunter's pledge now — and the reason he was here, for this, the opening attack on this lonely little planet — was to get it back. Or die trying.
It had taken months to implement the attack on Xronis Trey.
Looking down on the dull yellow rock now, Hunter couldn't imagine a more unlikely target. They had come here from a long way away on little more than a hunch— an educated one, but a hunch nevertheless.
Shortly before the war to free the Home Planets began, Hunter had broken into a top secret security vault on a world called Moon 39, the site of the prison guards' base. Within this vault he came upon a mind ring. This was a device that, when worn, would put the user into a virtual world to experience whatever had been loaded into the ring's memory strings.
The ring gave Hunter a brief glimpse of the mass deportation from Earth. He found himself in the guise of a guard watching fleets of huge spaceships forcibly removing the peoples of the seven continents. The mind ring trip didn't last very long, but it was enough for Hunter to fit another piece into the puzzle that was the Home Planets system.
It was either by fate or bad luck that the mind ring he'd chosen that day proved to be an anomaly. The mind rings they'd secured at the same location after the battle for Planet America had proved to be of little use; they'd mostly contained generic information on how to run the battery of monitoring devices found within the command room of the far-flung Moon 39 base. The one Hunter had selected — it had been kept in its own separate case — proved to be the only glimpse of something that had happened anywhere other than on Moon 39.
But the experience had given Hunter an idea. Moving a vast quantity of people from Earth, which was located on the One Arm, to the tip of the Two Arm, and then across the huge, starless void to the Home Planets must have been an enormous undertaking four thousand years before. Had it been a nonstop trip? No one was sure what kind of space-travel technology was being used in 3200 a.d. Several Dark Ages had intervened since, and nearly all of the history from that time period was lost long ago. But it was certainly before the dawn of the Starcrashers and traveling in Su-pertime. The spaceships Hunter had seen in his brief mind ring trip had been enormous, bulbous, bullet-shaped vessels that showed no indication of being able to go very fast for very long.