Starhawk s-1 Page 11

  By its second century, the citizens had decided this was way too boring. The perks were increased, money was introduced as part of the first prize, and the winner was declared by the Emperor to be a Very Fortunate by law. The race pilots also were allowed to modify their aircraft after the discovery of a “nonrule” in the race’s regulations in about the year 7074. This created a sprint in technology among the participants that led to some mind-boggling speeds and finish times.

  Over the past century, the race had evolved even farther. The idea was still to go around the planet as fast as possible. But several decades before, the twist of the interdimensional obstacle course had been added. The twenty-five-thousand-mile race was still basically the same; it’s just that now, along the way, the competing pilots had to fly certain legs of it inside the thirteenth dimension, a place appropriately nicknamed “Bad Dream.”

  The interdimensional portals for this were articulated in the form of huge blue screens that came up fast and at unpredictable locations along the race course. The racers knew only that there would be three screens in all. What happened to them after they punched through one and gained the one-three was totally unpredictable. Nothing was stable inside Bad Dream; it was a mirror dimension ruled entirely by antilogic. Painful memories usually prevailed, though. It was possible for race pilots to refight some long-forgotten battle or to relive parts of their lives while traveling within. Even parts of previous lives could be dredged up. Or so it appeared. Though what happened inside the thirteen was usually wiped from the pilot’s memory as soon as he punched out, some racers carried bits of their experience out with them.

  Calandrx certainly had. In one of his punch-ins, he’d been jolted back to his first ever combat mission, an action against the fierce Ajax Tri-System pirates that had left everyone in Calandrx’s unit dead except himself. In the weird world of the thirteen, he’d had to dogfight the pirates all over again, in space, at what his brain considered faster-than-normal speed, all while his colleagues were dying around him in extremely slow motion. Thus their every cry had echoed through his headphones, and he’d heard every one of their last breaths again. And his three other punch-ins weren’t much better. To this day Calandrx maintained the only reason he won the race was that his interdimensional forays were actually milder than those of his fellow pilots, giving him the microsecond advantage needed to streak across the finish line just ahead of the pack.

  When it was over, Calandrx had said, he tended to remember only the skills he’d displayed in surviving the flight itself. But his message was clear: What went on inside the thirteen could do a real head number if the racer was not ready for it. Though he never said it aloud, Hunter shuddered to think that being assigned to this cold, dark, and weird place was a way of getting him prepared for what was about to come.

  But that certainly appeared to be the case.

  He climbed out of the cockpit now and began removing the fasteners that held his machine’s nose cone in place.

  Calandrx passed him a cup of slow-ship and they did a quick toast. “May I rephrase my last question?” he asked Hunter, draining his wine in one long gulp.

  “Sure. Go ahead…”

  “You say you want to do this,” Calandrx said with a drawl. “But can you tell me why you want to do it?”

  Hunter pulled the nose off his craft and confronted the gaggle of electronic stuff inside.

  “You mean other than the fact that if I didn’t do the race, I’d probably be a fifth-level recruit, cleaning the beam tubes on an S-Class cruiser by now?”

  “Yes, of course,” Calandrx said. “There always is a reason behind the reason…”

  Hunter began sorting out the mess of wires in the nose cone.

  “I just have a crazy notion, I suppose,” he said. “When I was back on Fools 6, I used to tell myself that if I ever got off the damn place, I’d do everything I could to find out who I was and where I came from.”

  “A noble ambition,” Calandrx said.

  Hunter stopped work for a moment and wiped his hands on the sides of his work uniform. “Well, what better way to find out if someone out there knows you than to take part in the biggest event in the Galaxy? You’ve told me that the winner’s name is on everyone’s lips the next morning, correct? Right across the Empire?”

  “Word true,” Calandrx replied.

  “Then it should come to the lips of someone who knows who I am — and why I got dumped on the last planet in the Galaxy you can hit before you fall off the edge.”

  Calandrx pulled his chin in thought. “Fascinating,” he said with a whisper. “And if no one steps forward to greet you, then that would mean you are from someplace else. Which would make you very unique indeed…”

  He let his voice trail off for a moment. Hunter went back to his nose cone.

  “This is shaping up not unlike some of the epics written about the great warriors of the First Empire,”

  Calandrx went on, pouring them another drink, “fighting not just to fight, but to win a noble cause. Going into the unknown, the uncharted, not just for the thrill, but also to learn something, to bring something back. The unselfish approach to heroics. It’s actually rather refreshing. Perhaps you are a reincarnation of one of these people of yore. Perhaps you were a great warrior in the First Empire, four thousand years ago, flying this very machine. Or something like it…”

  Hunter laughed. “I doubt that…”

  “Why so?”

  Hunter indicated the whole of his unusual aircraft. The walls began to scream again.

  “Look at this thing,” he said to Calandrx. “We know it can go fast. But does the design look only four thousand years old to you?”

  Calandrx scanned the strange aircraft up and down one more time, then nodded slowly.

  “You can bingo that, my brother,” he finally said. “It sure doesn’t.”

  With thirty minutes to go before race time, Calandrx was finally allowed to leave the subterranean holding bay.

  He had to make two substantial wagers, one for himself, one for his very unlucky friend Zap Multx. As the final minutes ticked away, the rules allowed for the contestant’s handlers to go free to do just such things. So he and Hunter made one last toast, and Calandrx promised him he’d be the first to greet him in the winner’s circle. Then they shook hands, a hole opened in the side of the bay, and Calandrx began the long climb up to the surface.

  In their six days together, he’d never told Hunter his theory on why he thought the flying machine was able to dash around the world in less time than it took to strike a match. They’d tried it just once in the garden that night. That’s all Calandrx needed to be convinced that Hunter’s aircraft was so speedy because of the black boxes he’d salvaged from the wreck of the Jupiterius 5. Just how Hunter knew to combine them to produce such vast amounts of propulsive power was still a mystery to both of them.

  Pure chance? A Galaxy-shaking revelation? A favor from God? There was no way to tell. Hunter had randomly connected the boxes from the Kaon Bombardment system, and the result was a velocity that seemed so fast it defied the definition of speed itself.

  There was a rub, though: The technology in those boxes made up one of the most closely guarded secrets in the realm, something right up there with the miracle of Supertime. As an officer of the Empire, Calandrx could not even speak of it, simply because discussing state secrets was an offense punishable by prison or even death.

  So instead he’d told Hunter, just as Erx and Berx had earlier, that in this world, some things were better off not being known or spoken about. There was no regulation that said the winning pilot had to reveal what he had under his hood, ever. Historically, many winners did not, adding an air of mystery to the proceedings that everyone just loved. Hunter could fly the race, win the race, and never have to tell anyone how he was able to do it. Already hip to the way the Empire protected its secrets, Hunter couldn’t disagree with the logic. True, they were as thick as thieves. But that didn’t mean anyone had
to know about it.

  And in his heart, Calandrx knew there was no real disloyalty in this act of disloyalty. Besides, he had ulterior motives that went deeper than his oath of honor or the politics of the bulging galactic empire. In his chest beat the heart of a poet. Of course, the Galaxy was lousy with poets, but Calandrx considered himself to be better than most. As such, his eyes were always open, looking for signs only a poet would recognize. The way a married woman smiles. The way the clouds formed over a sunset. The way the wind blows on the coldest, darkest night. Much about life could be told from these things and more. You just had to know how to look.

  He had been walking through downtown a few months before. It was a gray winter day, but with just the faintest whiff of spring in the air. He found himself on a nondescript street that was so old, its roadway was still made of bricks. It was in the least populated part of downtown downtown, over by the docks.

  On this street there was a wall, and on that wall someone had written something in dull red paint.

  Now, this was a strange thing because Calandrx had traveled the Galaxy for more than a century and in that time, he’d seen much graffiti. Some planets were absolutely covered with it. Some of it personal, some of it political; the farther one got away from Earth and out toward the Fringe, the more graphic and edgy the graffiti would become.

  But never in all his years had he seen graffiti here on Earth. He didn’t know why. Maybe because Earth was so damn clean and the people who lived here had it so damn easy, no one had ever come up with anything clever enough or poignant enough or obscene enough to scrawl on a wall.

  But one person had. And the message was so simple, it was actually a work of art, of politics, possibly even a piece of great literature.

  For on that wall, on the little barren street, in dull red paint, were written three words: Something is coming…

  What excitement ran through Calandrx when he saw that scrawl! He’d been waiting to read those very words ever since he’d won the Earth Race ninety-seven years ago — and maybe even before then. He knew history and he knew that empires not only rose and fell, they also changed in between. You just had to look for the signs. A Blackship in Supertime? A man from nowhere figures out one of the greatest secrets of the age… without even trying? Three words splashed on a wall on the most insignificant street in the heart of the Galaxy. Could this be the change in the wind he’d been yearning for it ever since the Emperor exiled him here on Earth?

  At that moment, he thought so. Because just like his anonymous tagger, he believed something was coming. It was, in fact, inevitable. And if the pilot in him wasn’t able to fly off this planet to go look for it, then the poet in him sure wanted to be here, on Earth, when that something finally arrived.

  * * *

  Its official name was the First Galactic Sporting Events Arena. To the Specials, it was the Holy Imperial Stadium of the Great O’Nay.

  To the citizens of Earth, it was simply the circus.

  It was an enormous structure, two miles long and a half mile across. The rows of seats went up nearly thirty stories. A small coral sea dominated the center; the track itself was layered with precious red-diamond Martian soil. Tens of thousands of flags flew from the arena’s spires.

  More than a million people could fit into this place, and on this warm sunny morning, every seat was taken. Several million more citizens were packed into the thousands of sports clubs and cloud holes surrounding the stadium. Trillions more were watching from all points across the Galaxy. The start of the Empire’s most sacred of sporting events was fewer than thirty minutes away.

  The sky above the circus was crowded as well. Thousands of air-chevys were circling the arena. Some were towing banners or laser messages; others were jockeying for coveted hovering spots. Farther up were the larger airships, military vessels of all sizes, from scout ships to huge V–Class battle cruisers.

  More than a dozen floating cities were in the vicinity as well.

  Most of those on hand, both on the ground and hanging in the air above, were Very Fortunates, citizens with no real holy blood in them but who were close to the Imperial family nevertheless. That was the only way to secure a space in or above the circus on this, the biggest day of the year. Everyone here had some connection to the Specials.

  Well, almost everyone…

  Erx and Berx had no such pull. They had no seats, no confederates on the inside, not even a reserved place to stand. But this was not a problem. They were galactic explorers; they’d roamed the outer borders of the Fringe, fought in the interstellar wars, crashed a monstrously large spaceship and still come back for more. Negotiating a crowd of snobs was a piece of cake for them. After placing their bets, they’d slowly wormed their way through the throng, cajoling here, threatening there, until not ten minutes after their arrival, they’d secured a spot on the main track beam rail, close to the starting line itself.

  This was the place to be. All the action was here, practically at their fingertips. The beam rail was thick with track handlers, bookies, soldiers, priests, angels, space technicians, viz-screen engineers, and robots. Hundreds of beautiful women, some real, some not, were circulating about as well.

  Delighted with themselves and their location, Erx and Berx broke out flasks of slow-ship wine, did a quick toast, and began drinking heavily. They’d never been within a light-year of the Earth Race before, and both knew it was unlikely they would ever get this close again. It was important that they enjoy themselves. The weather was appropriately clear, the sky deep blue, with just a few clouds softening the warm glare of the sun. In a place where it was summer most of the time, these were still exceptional conditions. The metero engineers had done their jobs well.

  Time passed quickly. The crowd grew, the sky above the arena became more crowded. Just a few minutes before noon, Number One, the largest of all the floating cities, drifted over the stadium. A hush went through the crowd as the arena was enveloped by the Holy Shadow. A huge, gleaming review stand, known as the zadora, had slowly begun to materialize about halfway down the first leg of the track and not a hundred yards from where Erx and Berx stood. As it completed its pop-in, the arena was suddenly flooded with Earth Police. More than twenty thousand of the huge cops began appearing all over the stadium, and especially in the area surrounding the zadora. The ethereal bass music booming throughout the stadium faded away. A very special moment was at hand.

  Berx began gulping from his wine flask. “I’m not sure I’m high enough to handle this,” he said.

  Erx held his timepiece up to his bleary eyes; he could just barely read the numbers. “Well, drink up and get ready,” he told Berx. “It’s seven seconds to noon… five… four…”

  Both men took this as their cue to turn their eyes away from the gleaming zadora. Others around them did the same. At the exact moment the last second ticked down to noon, the arena was rocked by a huge thunderclap. A collective gasp came from the million-plus spectators. Those who dared to look saw a bright emerald beam begin to illuminate the review stand. The beam intensified until it was all but impossible to look at it. Then came an incredibly bright flash of light.

  An eyeblink later, a magnificent throne appeared on the top level of the zadora. Sitting on it was a man of undetermined age. He had a full white beard and very long white hair that fell past his shoulders. He was wearing a flowing emerald gown and had a gold-green miter on his head. In the center of the miter was the distorted image of a three-leaf green flower, the ancient symbol of the last three empires. This was O’Nay, supreme ruler of the Galaxy, Emperor of the Milky Way, the current god among men.

  The circus erupted in cheers and applause, shaking the arena to its substantial foundation. Lights flashed, flags waved, the booming music came back on louder than before. Overcome with emotion, some people fainted. Others cheered through finger-size voice amplifiers that were all the rage this year. This went on and on… and on. One minute, two minutes, five minutes, more. O’Nay made no notice of the c
rowd. He sat, looking straight ahead, expressionless, possibly oblivious, to what was going on around him. Only when he raised his right hand slightly did the throaty roar finally begin to die away.

  But not for long. Came the exact moment it reached its lowest ebb, there was another tremendous flash of light. This one was bright, eye-blinding yellow. It quickly faded to reveal that three more people had joined the Emperor on the reviewing stand. His wife, his son, and his gorgeous daughter were officially OTP — on the planet.

  The stadium erupted again. More lights, more music, more vapors. Though not quite the magnitude as before, this new round of cheering took another five minutes to subside. When relative silence returned, the Emperor raised his right hand again and, without any means of outward amplification needed, spoke four words that all could hear: “Let the race begin…”

  The voices of the one million began building again, like the low rumble of waves, a sea of anticipation.

  Erx and Berx opened another flask and drank another toast.

  “To our good fortune,” Berx proposed. “And the temporary bad luck of others.”

  “Bingo,” Erx replied.

  They drank the entire flask in no more than a dozen gulps.

  The music began blaring ever louder. Number One had moved away, and the arena was awash in bright sunlight once again. Holo-girls drifted by them as if carried on the wind. The air smelled of power, money, and sex.

  “Finally!” Erx exclaimed, turning Berx around and pointing him toward the far side of the arena. A gaggle of racers had floated onto the track and were making their way up to the starting line.

  “It’s showtime!” Berx yelled in response.