He slumped back against the wall, reached into his pocket, and came out with one of the apples. It was burning hot. He dropped it to the floor, but it bounced right back up and into his hand again.
Strange…
Why was there no light in his cell? Maybe there was a power problem on the ship itself. He retrieved the quadtrol again and asked how many people were on board. In typical quadtrol language, the reply came back: "Less than three." Besides himself, that meant only one other person. Was that possible?
He asked the quadtrol to gauge the condition of the ship. The reply was unsettling: "Overall integrity soon to fail."
Not good…
He asked the quadtrol why. This reply was startling: the ship was on a collision course with a class-M planet.
Hunter was beginning to think the quadtrol had become skewed in the crossover, too, though the devices were almost never wrong. He asked it a summary question: Was it true that there was one other person on board the ship, and that person was allowing it to crash into a planet?
The answer came back as yes.
Hunter put his back up against the damp wall again, trying to figure out exactly what this meant. He was locked in the cell, in complete darkness, as the ship, apparently with a mad-man at the helm, was heading right for a planet at close to Supertime speed.
Could it get any worse than that?
Almost unconsciously, he brought the apple up to his mouth and took a huge bite.
Good thing he brought them along, he thought. Wouldn't want to get hungry now.
The sixteen aluminum medals on the wall of the ShadoVox's luxurious command cabin had become tarnished.
They were hanging next to twelve jewel-encrusted swords; like the medals, they'd been awarded for bravery and valor. But they, too, were looking dull. Between the two largest swords was a once-brilliant star-pearl combat helmet, over-sized by one-third, as if the designer knew extra room would be needed to contain the owner's considerable ego. It was also showing the early signs of rust. Below the helmet, a pure white combat suit hung limply. The costume, once feared by many a foe, now looked curiously small and empty.
At one time, the trophies and the clothes were subjected to thrice-daily cleaning and repositioning, as their proud owner never wanted them to be a millimeter out of place. But now they were out of alignment, especially the medals. Any time the ShadoVox moved right or left, the medals would sway, but not in unison.
This was all that was left of the shrinking world of Joxx the Younger, son of the Supreme High Commander of the Solar Guards, nephew to the Great O'Nay, and at one time just three notches away from being Emperor of the Galaxy itself.
The musty control room was the brains of the most powerful, most advanced, most feared ship in all of the Solar Guards' space fleets. But now it was a mess. In the comers were piles of discarded transdermal injectors. On just about every flat surface, the tell tale leftover stains from a recently consumed pile of jamma, the highly addictive drug favored by the Empire's lower elements.
And sitting in the chair in the deck's observation bubble was Joxx himself, a pile of recent unwrapped jamma staring him in the face.
There was a time when Joxx had been considered the brightest star in the Empire's military. He bore chiseled good looks, a long mane of light-blond hair, and a natural swagger others would have died for.
Just thirty years old, he was a youngster compared to his relatives, those lucky enough to have the Holy Blood in their veins. Despite his young age, he was the most highly decorated field officer in the SG, indeed, in all of the Empire's forces. He had won hundreds of battles against renegade mercenary armies and outer Fringe space pirates. He had conquered not just individual star systems but entire star clusters.
In fact, Joxx and his super starship had never lost a battle.
Until recently, that is.
And while his close relatives would live to six or seven hundred years or even more if they played their cards right, at the moment, Joxx didn't look like he'd live to see another day.
Few knew what really happened to him after his failed attempt to stop the Two Arm invaders while defending the planet of Megiddo.
The official report, distributed to the masses, said Joxx had been kidnapped by the invaders, although briefly, and had somehow managed to escape from them. But three things were less well-known: that Joxx had been taken on a bizarre mind ring trip by Hawk Hunter during his short captivity, that Hunter was in fact the leader of the invaders, and that upon returning from the mind ring trip, Joxx was rescued by his own forces and Hunter was captured, imprisoned, and secretly sentenced to death.
But while all that was true, Joxx wasn't really sure he'd been rescued from anything. The mind ring trip Hunter had forced him to take had changed him in ways he'd never thought possible. Because of Hunter's manipulation of the rings' sequences, Joxx had been shown just how morally corrupt the Fourth Empire was and how deceitful and cruel the Second Empire had been as well. He'd also seen the direct line from that bloody, repressive second regime to the one presently in power, the seat from which he was but three heartbeats away. More chilling, he'd learned that the Emperor O'Nay was responsible for both the tyranny of the Second
Empire and the absolute authoritarianism of the present one. Or at least that's what the mind ring trip had led both Joxx and Hunter to believe.
If it was all true, then Joxx had been fooled, just as everyone in the ruling family had been fooled, as well as the citizens of the Empire itself. Fooled into thinking that the Empire had a divine right to claim everything and everybody in the Galaxy, no matter what the means were, simply because its leaders were so entitled, so enlightened, they could do no wrong.
But the dark truth, at least within the mind ring trip, told a different tale, rlt isaid the Empires had been set up and manipulated by forces way outside the normal realm of life. In fact, there was the possibility, this being the deepest, darkest secret, that those pulling the strings of the present galactic empire were not human at all.
Joxx had been on a vicious downward spiral since learning all this. First confronting his father and then refusing an audience with the Emperor, he'd gone on a jamma,bender that began with a crawl though the more notorious drug dens in Big Bright City. After meeting a witch who seemed to know more about him than he did himself, Joxx decided to return to the ShadoVox, which at the time was transporting Hunter to his execution site, and do the right thing.
In disguise and trying to remain inconspicuous, he was leaving from the main spaceport just outside Big Bright City, four pounds of jamma stuffed in his boots, when he had another strange encounter, this one with an Imperial Court spy. The man approached him just as Joxx was about to climb aboard a single-seat Swiper, a small ultraspeedy vessel about the size of a scout ship. The spy somehow knew what Joxx was about to do and said he had a way of making it go that much easier. The spy then handed Joxx a small package and told him to deliver it to the person he was setting out to see. Joxx did just as the spy told him. Reaching his old ship again via a series of quick shortcuts, the first thing Joxx did was visit Hunter in his jail cell at the bottom of the enormous vessel. Very few words were spoken to the heroic space pilot that day. Instead, Joxx just handed him the spy's package and left. The package turned out to contain the top secret Echo 999.9 holo-girl capsule.
When the guards checked the prison cell a short time later, Hunter was gone.
Life had become a day-to-day, minute-to-minute proposition for Joxx ever since this incident. In the past month he'd done little else but wander the star lanes aimlessly, mostly up and down the Four Arm, snorting jamma and trying to dream up the perfect demise for a fallen angel such as him.