Bonz just laughed again, even though the old guy was beginning to give him the creeps.
"Are you saying the Two Arm invaders are alive and hiding out here?"
Vanex nodded.
"Here …in Heaven?"
Vanex nodded again.
Bonz was speechless. If he was to believe the Imperial Janitor, then he was dead — and in Paradise.
And the invaders were here also, but they and Vanex were still alive.
It didn't make any sense.
"I know it sounds strange," Vanex went on. "And it is a very long story, but everyone you were looking for is here. These people. Hawk Hunter. Princess Xara. Myself. We simply found a way to get to this place without losing our lives."
"But that's ridiculous!" Bonz erupted. "What you're saying goes against everything in nature… It's impossible to believe you, and I don't believe you. I'm dead. You're dead. They're dead. Goodbye!"
He began walking back to his family; they were still all smiles, and lingering nearby.
But Vanex grabbed him by the arm again.
"Let me show you one more thing, then," he told Bonz.
Before waiting for a reply, he tugged Bonz around to the other side of the hill, leaving his family behind. Now they were looking into a different part of the valley. And that's when Bonz got the second shock of his afterlife: hanging about 250 feet above the ground were twelve enormous spaceships. Six antique, chrome-plated cruisers and six Empire cargo 'crashers floating next to a huge assembly of girders and wires. Bonz couldn't believe his eyes. It was the invasion fleet that had disappeared — the mysterious vessels he'd been sent out to the Two Arm to find!
He collapsed to the seat of his pants. Suddenly Heaven didn't make sense anymore. Souls that had passed on, he could see being here. But this…
"Those ships…" he began, stammering. " What are they doing here?"
Vanex just shook his head again. "Like I said before my friend, it's a long story."
6
At the moment Bonz arrived in Heaven, Hawk Hunter and Princess Xara were thousands of miles away, sitting beneath an apple tree, close by a gently flowing river, waiting for the stars to come out.
Fighter pilot, space hero, deserter, outlaw, and now a rebel against the Fourth Empire, Hunter had had many adventures in his strange lifetime. In fact, since finding himself stranded, without memories, on the desolate planet of Fools 6 nearly two years before, his life had been nothing but one long adventure — as well as a search for answers. Who was he? Where did he come from? How did he get to the Seventy-third century? Why was he here?
This quest had not been totally in vain: he'd found some answers. Who was he? He was an American. The red, white, and blue flag he carried in his pocket would never let him forget that. And he'd found other Americans lost among the stars, and in the process he'd discovered that they, along with the other peoples of the old Earth, had had their Mother Planet stolen from them by the rulers of the empires, both past and present. And, knowing this, he had come to believe that the reason he was here was for no less a purpose than over-throwing the present realm and winning Earth back for its rightful owners — or die trying.
He'd come close to fulfilling the last half of that bold pledge recently. So close, he'd managed to skip the dying part and fast-forward straight to the afterlife, along with the rest of the Two Arm invaders, also known as the United Planets Forces. Yes, they had given the Solar Guards the slip; they had found the perfect hiding place.
But since coming here, things had changed for him. Everything that had happened to him before paled by comparison. For now he was on the ultimate adventure.
He was in Paradise with the girl of his dreams.
How did they wind up here, in Heaven?
It was all Xara's doing. She was smart, shy, absolutely lovely, especially her gigantic blue eyes — and the only daughter of O'Nay, Supreme Ruler of the vast Fourth Galactic Empire, and the man that Hunter would seek to take down. Though just eighteen years old, she was brave beyond all measure, and unlike her deified relatives, had a sense of absolute right and wrong. It was because of her that the UPF fleet had been saved.
It all started a month before when a sympathetic Imperial spy told Xara that the leader of the mysterious Two Arm invaders was none other than Hunter himself. This came as a shock to her, as she believed, as did many in the Empire, that Hunter had been killed by the SG. But die spy also told her that the Solar Guards' REF was speeding to intercept Hunter's fleet, and that they were armed with special antistarship weapons, which would make short work of die invaders.
The spy then passed on to her a mysterious device known as the Echo 999.9. It was a very advanced holo-girl capsule— or so it seemed. Holo-girl capsules had been bouncing around the Galaxy for at least a couple thousand years. They came in all shapes and sizes. Some were programmed to present their users with a very real-looking holographic lady of the evening right on the spot, an experience that lasted about an hour before expiring. But the more sophisticated, more expensive models featured extremely elaborate scenarios in which the customer and holo-girl were transported to a paradise coastal setting.
Here, they could romp nonstop and undisturbed for what seemed like weeks, before returning to the real world.
No one understood the technology behind the holo-girl capsules; their secrets had been lost, just like most of the history of the Galaxy, in the rise and fall of the empires. (One rumor said the holo-girls had originally been used as spies, only later morphing into near-flesh-and-blood sex objects.) In reality, though, even the most expensive holo-girl devices were very crude. Because the user assumed they were inside an illusion, no one ever explored any farther than their own little patch of sand; in many ways, the love beach was where an expensive holo-girl trip began and ended. But the truth was, the users were not inside an illusion. Although in every case except with the Echo 999.9, it appeared flat, almost two-dimensional, the place they were brought to was real. It was a different place. On a higher plane, no doubt of about that. But it was real. And it was this place, the same one that people down through the ages had thought of as Heaven.
After her meeting with the Imperial spy, Xara enlisted Vanex to help her, and together they used the advanced Echo to travel here to Paradise. Thus their sudden, unexplained disappearance a month before. After exploring their new environs, Vanex studied the Echo 999.9 capsule itself. There was another ages-old technology in the Galaxy called a Twenty 'n Six. It was a device that could move objects almost as large as a Starcrasher into the twenty-sixth dimension, where they could be stored indefinitely until being recalled again. During the liberation of the Home Planets, the concentration camp in the sky where the dispossessed peoples of Earth had been kept for more than four thousand years, Hunter and the United American Forces developed a Twenty 'n Six field by combining four of the devices to create a window of sorts through which they could elude the mercenary army who had been hired as the guards for the interstellar prison.
Vanex combined this Twenty 'n Six field idea with the powerful and mysterious Echo 999.9 technology and, in doing so, conjured up another sort of portal, one large enough for the UPF invasion fleet to pass through just seconds before the
Solar Guards were able to blast it with its special weaponry. So the truth was, the Solar Guards really didn't know what happened to the invasion force. And they still didn't.