"So how long has it been?" he asked her. "One month… or ten years?"
She squeezed his hands in return. "Either way, it wasn't long enough, Hawk," she said, almost embarrassed. "That's the tragedy in all this. We could stay here for eternity. Instead, I'm losing you, probably forever. And if you succeed in your quest, then I lose my family."
She looked up, and Hunter could see the tears had started again. He tried to wipe them away.
"I'll come back," Hunter suddenly heard himself say, even as his heart was breaking inside. They both looked at each other, eyes misty. She knew better than to ask how. There was really only one other way to get to Heaven.
"I'll wait for you," she said, repeating a line from a poem she had written for him when he first left Earth on his quest to find the Lost Americans. "A million years, if I have to."
Hunter was trying his best to control his emotions, but it was a losing battle. His brain suddenly became saturated with the idea that he probably would never see her again, no matter what the cosmos had in store for him. One month or ten years? She was right; it hadn't nearly been long enough. And now, at this good-bye, he realized he didn't even have a holo-picture of her, nothing at all to remember her by.
She read his mind. She pointed to her heart. "In here, Hawk," she said. "No one leaves you if they live in your heart and mind. And no one dies; they move to the other side. I'll be here."
She leaned over and kissed him.
Then the Echo 999.9's time element finally ran out, and Hunter faded away.
Part Three
The Messengers
9
Solar Guards Sublieutenant Cronx had just gone off duty when the nightmare began.
He was a crew member of the SG Starcrasher StratoVox II. His position was second forward weapons officer, one of dozens aboard the ship. The StratoVox was a capital battle cruiser, and at 2.5 miles long, one of the largest space vessels in existence. It served as the flagship for Space Marshal Finn-Cool McLyx, a top Solar Guards commander, and a man known throughout the Empire for his heroism or his ruthlessness, depending on one's point of view Lieutenant Cronx had not been to sleep in one hundred hours. He'd been pulling triple shifts without the benefit of a wake-up drop or any other kind of metabolic inducer while filling in for other lowly officers in such diverse parts of the ship as the auxiliary power room, the master bilge compartment, and even the communications bubbler. The StratoVox had been running at battle stations for more than three weeks now, ever since it left its patrol on the Six Arm. The nonstop high alert had been an intense, tiring process for the entire crew.
Finally one of the snip's doctors encountered Cronx staggering down a passageway and ordered him to take some time off. Cronx was happy to comply. At the age of 201, he was getting too old for these things. He dragged himself to his quarters and was about to collapse on top his hovering bunk when a duty captain appeared at his billet door.
"Get to your primary battle station immediately!" this officer barked at him. "We are about to go into action…"
As he was saying this, battle-imminent sirens started up all over the immense ship. Cronx felt his stomach turn to stone. It was the moment he had been dreading since the ship left the Six Arm.
"Who is the enemy?" he half gasped,
The duty captain's face turned dark. "The Space Forces, of course!" he screamed. Then he disappeared.
Cronx stayed frozen to his spot. Circumstances had been building to this for three weeks, but it was no less distressing now to finally hear the words. Just about everyone aboard the StratoVox believed that their commanding officer, Finn-Cool McLyx, had gone mad a long time ago. Now they feared he was dragging them all down into his madness widi him.
McLyx was a tall, heavy, blustery man with a scar that ran from his right ear down to the center of his neck. His size alone was intimidating to friend and foe alike, and he was known to bully and even physically attack his superior officers. Past commanders had been booted out of the SG for lesser transgressions, but McLyx was a favorite of the Emperor. He was also in line to take over one of the top positions in Solar Guard Command someday. Not shy about anything, McLyx bragged endlessly that his was the biggest ship in the SG's fleet inventory.
He was also a master at invading unsuspecting backwater planets out on the Fringe and bringing them back into the Empire, whether they liked it or not. It was his jonzz, as the saying went, and he took perverted pleasure in swooping down upon these peaceful worlds, usually under the false pretense that outlaws were hiding among the population, and blasting anyone who stood in his way. In his long career, McLyx had reclaimed thousands of wayward planets in this manner, brutally suppressing any resistance to his ship and soldiers and reaping vast rewards of plunder that always accompanied the storm.
But McLyx reserved his special venom for the Space Forces. He absolutely detested the SF, from its top generals down to its lowliest privates. He hated everything the senior service stood for, especially the slower — some said more compassionate — way it went about reclaiming planets for the Empire. SG officers like McLyx had no time for the diplomacy-first methods used by the SF. Doing it his way was so much faster, not to mention more personally rewarding.
No surprise, McLyx was also a very wealthy man.
The StratoVox had been on patrol in the upper Six Arm when word of hostilities between the Space Forces and the Solar Guards reached the ship. Bits and pieces of news concerning the clash on Doomsday 212 trickled through first. But within hours, reports of all-out fighting between the two services were pouring into the StratoVox's communications center. Though the SF and SG had started fighting each other in many locations around the Galaxy, the communiques left no doubt that the heaviest combat was going on within the Two Arm's now-infamous No-Fly Zone.
The thought of the SF spilling SG blood made many hearts aboard the StratoVox race with both excitement and rage, especially among the battle staff. Adding fuel to the fire, the most outrageous reports — all unofficial — said the SF had somehow destroyed the SG's entire Rapid Engagement Fleet.
This rumor had started only because no one knew where the REF was at the moment. Originally comprising thirty-six ships and nearly a quarter million men, they had all but vanished shortly after the supposed battle against the Two Arm invaders, only to reappear and men vanish again immediately after the first shots had been fired on Doomsday 212. The subatomic wreckage of two REF ships was strewn across that depressing planet. But everyone was now asking: Where were the other thirty-four?
This was all too much for the highly aggressive McLyx to take. Just hours after the first report came in, he'd ordered his ship and its fleet of six attending battle cruisers to turn about and head for the Two Arm. Ignoring pleas from the Imperial Court on Earth to stay on station, the StratoVox and its sister ships rocketed toward the combat zone at all-out full Super-time speed.
The trip of nearly 80,000 light-years had taken three and a half weeks. In that time McLyx's renegade fleet had grown. By the time it left the Six Arm, his seven-ship squadron had been joined by three dozen more SG warships. Like McLyx, their commanders had chosen to ignore orders from Earth and had sought to join the fighting.
They picked up more and more SG ships as they skirted the edge of the Ball and dashed along the outskirts of the inner Fringe.