Planet America (14 page)

He kept a running count of other spacecraft he spotted during the journey, knowing that they could not see him. In six days, he counted just two dozen spacecraft, all of different sizes, all built in different variations of the triangular shape that permeated the Galaxy.

Each spaceship he saw was powered by ion-ballast engines and was not flying in Supertime, the mysterious extra dimensional star highway used exclusively by ships of the Fourth Empire. This was important information for Hunter. Should any member of the Empire's military cross paths with him out here, they would be duty bound to place him in chains and return him, if not to Earth, then to the closest imperial military post. This was something Hunter wanted to avoid at all costs, of course, so he was constantly on the lookout for ships of the Empire.

He saw none, though.

The one thing he had going in his favor was the near-total isolation of the part of the Galaxy he was flying in. The Five-Arm was considered isolated even by those people who lived there. Indeed, it was considered by many to be the last frontier of the Galaxy, the fringe beyond the fringe. Again, very few people out on the Five-Arm even knew of the existence of the Fourth Empire, or life on Earth, or even about Earth itself. For a ship as powerful as a massive Empire Starcrasher to suddenly arrive above their unsuspecting planet—well, of such things worldwide panics are made.

So Hunter knew if he did see an Empire ship cruising around out here, it would be a very unusual thing. That's why he kept his eyes open at all times.

They finally spotted Myx on the morning of the seventh day. It was a strange-looking place, the only world circling a yel-low blue star, which itself was the only star for light-years around. They were so far off the usual starways, it could be argued that this tiny system was not part of the Five-Arm at all. Its location also begged another question: If this was indeed the real Myx, where did the Whites and Grays come from?

Hunter drained off 99.999999018 percent of his speed and maneuvered the flying machine in toward the planet. A thick murk was rising into the atmosphere, nearly into orbit itself. The place looked shrouded in clouds, but in reality it was smoke. That was something else Zarex told them during the trip: Most of Myx was actually on fire.

"There are probably just a handful of people who know about this planet," Zarex said now, looking down at the absolutely weird world. "Of that handful, only a few are as crazy as me to fly all the way out here."

Tomm could only agree. "And I thought Zazu-Zazu was a lost rock," he said.

Hunter swooped beneath smoky cloud cover, leveled off at five hundred feet, and commenced his aerial recon. There really wasn't a lot of variation on the planet's surface, however. No matter what part of Myx they passed over, the scene was that of utter devastation. Entire cities, forests, valleys, mountains, all laid to waste. The wreckage of many giant weapons was also in evidence, including hundreds of ancient-looking multitubed blaster rays. They also sighted many large military installations; all of them blasted to bits. In many cases they were dotted with hundreds of solidified piles of white dust: incinerated soldiers that never even made it to the battlefield.

And everywhere were the robots.

From the highest mountains to the deepest valleys, in the heaviest debris of the cities and along the thousands of miles of front lines, there was the wreckage of millions of battle robots. It made the planet Tonk, which was strewn with thousands of junked ships, look like a tropical paradise by comparison.

It didn't take more than a few extremely low circumnavigations of the planet for the story to come together. This was hardly the battered but noble place described in the heroic myths. This was a dirty little planet, awash in destruction, centuries-old blood, and liquefied hydraulic gas. During his brief stint in the Empire's X-Forces, Hunter had seen many battle-scarred worlds, uncharted places that looked so uninviting, his recommendation back to Earth was simple: "Avoid until necessary."

Still, he'd seen nothing that compared to this.

And there was more: To make a very treacherous place even worse, the entire planet was sown with mines, trip wires, and other exotic booby traps. Hunter's sensors indicated millions of these devices in place, from pole to pole, east to west, all over the vast battlefield. One wrong move down there, a sneeze, a burp, a dropped quadtrol, could set off every implanted weapon within a half-mile radius of the act, causing a massive chain reaction that was more than enough to perforate the offending party until they were nothing more than a zillion little pieces of subatomic dust.

Put it all together—the remote location, the haunting myth, the layers of dangerous junk below—and Myx was probably the last place anyone would want to land. Throw in the millions of skeletons, well-preserved and bleached by cosmic rays, rivers that literally ran in the color of blood, the near-poisonous atmosphere and, for good measure, several pyramids that had been built eons ago—well, the result was probably the most inhospitable planet in the Galaxy.

Yet Zarex had been there once before and lived to tell the tale. He'd delivered a weapons load to the planet seventy years before, in the heyday of his arms-dealing career. At the time, his buyer was unknown to him, and the contract, for several thousand used blaster rifles, had been given to him after passing through more than a dozen separate hands.

He didn't stay around long enough to unravel the real secret of Myx. Per his buyer's instructions, he'd brought the arms cache down to a prearranged coordinate packaged in a Twenty 'n Six. Zarex waited not even a minute when the cache disappeared and his payment materialized. He left quickly after that, completing the strangest deal he'd ever done.

It was only later, while running blasters to one side in the brutal Bunker-Sabrini System civil war, that he learned exactly who his client that day was. One Rebel planet in the Bunker-S was holding out until reinforcements could fly in from the next system over. Royalist forces battered the planet for months, until the cavalry finally arrived and chased them away. When the victorious forces beamed down to the planet, they found all of its valiant defenders dead. One contingent had been made up of meres who, it had been whispered, were from "way, way out." On hearing this, Zarex visited the battleground, saw the bodies, and examined their combat weapons. They were from the load he'd dropped off on Myx just months before.

His buyer had been a battalion of the Freedom Brigade.

"But how can such a wretched place have a connection to the Home Planets?" Tomm asked Zarex, now that he'd had a good look at the place again.

"It's a hard question, with a hard answer, Padre," the explorer replied. "Perhaps whoever inhabits the Home Planets—if, in fact, they still exist—knows that this place is the most cursed rock on the Five-Arm, if not the whole Galaxy.

"Add in the whole mythological jumble about the place. At the very least, the person who put that juicy legend together wanted people to believe this planet was holy, scary, unlucky— all at once. Just further incentive to stay away should anyone happen to come upon it. In my mind, that all makes a perfect place to do supersecret things"

Tomm could barely look down at the planet now.

"Amen to that," he said.

Zero Degree Zero. That was the coordinate on Myx that Zarex had beamed down to that day many years ago.

This was a point, located in the western hemisphere, where legend said, the Whites and the Grays had maintained their longest front line, a twenty-five-mile stretch of territory that cut through a deep valley about midway across the planet's largest landmass.

It was no surprise that the ZDZ looked even more devastated than the rest of the planet, if that was possible. Bomb craters everywhere, wide swaths of blaster residue torn into the landscape. The region was extra thick with exotic booby traps. On the entire planet, this seemed to be the absolute worst place for anyone to want to land.

Yet this is where Zarex told them to go.

After circling the coordinate several times, Hunter's keen eye found a spot where he could set the flying machine down without disturbing any of the trip wires. This LZ was actually the highest elevation found in the vicinity of Zero Degree Zero. Not a hill, but the remains of mountain that had been caught in a massive cross fire of blasters ages ago, shearing off its summit.

Hunter landed close to the edge of the flattened-out peak and immediately checked the atmosphere with his environmental management systems. How the planet's puff was still intact was yet another mystery, but his gear said the air was still breathable, though barely so.

This didn't make what they saw outside any more appealing. The wreckage, the echoes of the carnage, the dreary overcast. The pyramids off in the distance. The vibe here was not good.

"Whose idea was this again?" Hunter asked as he gazed out at the endless miles of wreckage.

Both Pater Tomm and Zarex answered on cue, "
Yours
..."

Hunter just shook his head. "Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting."

He popped the canopy and gingerly climbed out of the flying machine. There was an eerie wind blowing across the ZDZ. It sounded like many voices crying at once. And no matter where Hunter looked, he saw nothing but destruction. Fires still bum-ing, devastated buildings, and tens of thousands of silhouettes of white soot. The ground, when you could see it between the robots, was stained mightily with blood.

Tomm, Zarex, and 33418 climbed down from the cockpit, and Hunter immediately put the flying machine into his Twenty 'n Six.

"Not exactly what I pictured from the fairy tale," Pater Tomm whispered, moving his hand from his forehead to his chest and then giving a tap to each shoulder.

They stood there, the four of them, for a very long time, not talking, letting it all sink in. The all-encompassing destruction under the blur of the dull blue sun became oddly fascinating after a while.

Hell
... That was the word that kept popping into Hunter's mind. If there really was a Hell somewhere, it had to look a lot like this.

They set up a small camp. Tomm produced some ancient fire, Zarex commanded 33418 to go on full-passive scan. The robot's head began swiveling back and forth. Even Hunter had to admit he felt better with the ten-foot mechanical man standing watch over them. This place was giving them all the creeps.

But no sooner had 33418 been activated when the usual hum coming from its chest suddenly skyrocketed in pitch. The danker walked to the edge of the precipice and stared down into the trench-filled valley. A beam shot out of his helmet visor and began actively scanning the battlefield below. Suddenly the robot pitched forward—it was almost as if he was throwing himself into the maw. But then the power jets in his boots ignited, and he was airborne a moment later. The three humans watched, mystified, as the danker flew to the deepest, foggiest part of the valley, eventually diving down and disappearing into the murk. He reappeared a moment later, shooting straight up for about one thousand feet, then curving over and coming in for a perfect landing not far from where he'd taken off.

He was carrying with him the remains of two battle robots. He dropped the wreckage at Zarex's feet.

"I think he's trying to tell you something," Hunter said.

"Or educate us," Pater Tomm added.

Zarex tugged at his woolly mane. "I should tell you I'm not the best when it comes to communicating with him," he admitted. "He understands our basic language, but he's so old, I think he was programmed in a more ancient version."

"Go ahead anyway," Hunter urged Zarex. "Encourage him."

Zarex shrugged and then said to the robot, "Ah, OK...
Proceed
. ..."

The clanker did not move.

"Ah,
carry on
?" Zarex tried again.

Still nothing.

'Try this," Hunter said. "
Engage
___"

The robot moved, but ever so slightly and only for an instant.

"Try it again, Hawk," Zarex told him.

Hunter cleared his throat and said even louder, "
Engage
!"

That did the trick. Twin beams suddenly erupted out of the clanker's visor, hitting the dead robots at his feet. Almost instantly, the two piles of wreckage began to move. Twin hums of electricity filled the air. Incredibly, the mechanical corpses were beginning to stir.

Pater Tomm's eyes went extra wide. "We might want to take a step back for this," he said.

All three did, and right before their eyes, the two robots began rebuilding themselves. First it was just a clink here, a clank there. Then an arm stretched out. Then a leg started coming together. The process began to speed up, and before they knew it, the two snarling, snorting robots had regained their full height, which was just a tad shorter than 33418 itself.

"So it is true!" Pater Tomm said with a gasp. "They
can
come back to life!"

Hunter and Zarex were just as startled as the priest.

"I've never... I mean I really didn't think..." Zarex began stuttering.

The battle robots stood about eight feet tall, looking fierce in their metal faces, their huge clamperlike hands, powerful torsos, and ridiculously muscular legs. They had a variety of weapons strapped to their belts and many more sprouting from their huge wrists and forearms. Further diluting the legend, neither robot was white or gray. In fact, one was deep black, the other dirty green.

In perfect synchronous movement, both robots coiled back, and after an instant or two of contemplation, lunged at each other with snarling ferocity. The humans quickly retreated even farther as the mechanical soldiers commenced to tear each other apart again. Few weapons came into play in the brief but brutal battle. It was simply massive force versus massive force. The robots pounded away at each other, creating huge dents and searing rips in their metallic fabric. And sure enough, they fought each other to an absolute draw. In less than thirty seconds, both robots had been reduced to piles of junk again.