Lisa was shocked by his words. And she had no doubt that he believed they were the truth.
"But where?" she asked him. "Where will this great battle take place?"
Klazz simply gestured over his shoulder to indicate a place far, far away.
"Closer to Earth than I ever thought I'd be," he told her.
Word soon flashed around the tiny planet that Klaaz had returned.
Within hours, authorities on each of the Home Planets had been apprised of the situation and the message he had brought.
The ships of the Second Fleet were being assembled on Planet America and Planet France, using components from all the other home worlds. Troops were training on Planets Pacifica, Africanus and Britannica. Of the twenty-eight ships under construction, two dozen were deemed spaceworthy. Each ship was built in the spitting image of the six original UPF vessels, which in turn were more than 1,000 years old. These new classics were blue and chrome like their predecessors but were carrying more modern star engines and room for nearly twice as many soldiers, many of whom doubled as members of the crew. Fully manned, the ships could put nearly a quarter of a million men on the field of battle.
But there was a problem.
The ships were powered by updated ion-ballast motors, fast but not Supertime fast. As the Home Planets were actually thousands of light-years outside the Galaxy, the trip by the first UPF fleet inward had taken six months — and that was just to the tip of the Two Arm. The voyage had strained the limits of those antique ships and just about expended their bingo fuel in the process. If the great battle was shaping up deep within the Milky Way, what good would the Second Fleet be if it arrived on the scene many months too late?
During the flurry of meetings Klaaz had with the leaders of the Home Planets, as well as the engineers and the crews of the new fleet themselves, this question came up time and time again. On each occasion, Klaaz replied, "Don't worry." Getting the ships where they had to go was his concern.
There was little fanfare when the new ships departed from their launch pads on Planets America and France.
Little time was available to plan anything more than a quick good-bye to the soldiers from their families and a universal, system-wide wish of Godspeed and good luck. The twenty-four ships made rendezvous in orbit around Planet America; here, they were checked out for spaceflight integrity. That they would be traveling much greater distances than had previously been thought had little bearing now.
As Klaaz had told the system's leaders, this was not something they had to worry about.
While the soldiers inside the ships acclimated themselves to life in space, a first for many of them, their commanders reviewed the information Klaaz had passed to them. The situation was simple enough. In its battles within the Galaxy, the UPF had made an archenemy in the Empire's military, most especially the Solar Guards, and even more especially the almost ghostly Rapid Engagement Fleet. This was the force the Second Fleet was expecting to fight way down in the middle of the Two Arm.
And they would be a formidable foe. The enemy force awaiting the fresh UPF troops might number anywhere from a half million to several billion men. The number of ships they might face could run into the millions as well. But Klaaz was also always quick to remind the new UPF commanders that their mission would be "blessed." And though he did not go into any details, Klaaz did say on many occasions that he was not using the word lightly and that it should not just be taken in a context of simply boosting morale.
The Second Fleet would literally be blessed. Their mission was for pure good, and its intentions were even grander than the recovery of Earth, though both goals, were still absolutely linked.
The UPF commanders didn't pretend to fully understand what Klaaz was telling them. They knew only that he was a great hero and that he was someone who would never steer them wrong.
In other words, they trusted him completely, a trait that was in drastically low supply among the stars these days.
The twenty-four ships all checked out within a few hours of reaching orbit around Planet America.
One good thing about the ships' design was their brilliant simplicity. They were essentially quarter-mile-long hulls with engines attached and soldiers inside. Fewer systems meant fewer things to go wrong. In no time at all, the fleet's commanders reported that they were ready to go.
Exactly what happened next would be spoken about for many years to come.
Klaaz was very well-known to the people of the mid-Five Arm. Over the centuries, he'd saved entire star clusters within the middle Five from marauding space meres and pirate groups. He was a marshal in many armies in that part of space; his face adorned the currency of more than a dozen star systems there. No surprise then that hundreds of stories about his adventures had been written, sung, and memorized. Heroic legends about the Great Klaaz had been passed down through generations on the Fifth Arm for several hundred years.
But the legend of Klaaz and the Second Fleet — true or not— would soon become the most famous of all.
It was witnessed by tens of thousands of people, yet the exact details of what occurred that day would never be very clear.
Shortly after the twenty-four UPF ships took to orbit, Klaaz suddenly disappeared. Though he was still in communication with the fleet commanders via string comm, even this was in question, as some claimed Klaaz wasn't actually talking through the ship communicators but that his voice was just appearing to be heard in this manner somehow.
Whatever the case, just minutes after the ships reported they were ready for deployment, a small object was sighted on the fleet's joint scanners coming up behind the UPF starship Missouri. Many people who saw it both on the viz scanners and with their own eyes said this was actually Klaaz, flying in space, without a spacesuit or oxygen or other extravehicular needs. It was said Klaaz came up on the tail of the huge warship, put his mighty hands beneath its center tail fins, and pushed it. The vessel rocketed away at an incredible speed, traveling much faster than in Supertime. Once the Missouri was gone, Klaaz flew up to the starship New Jersey and did the same thing. Then he went to the Arizona, then the Wisconsin, then the Oklahoma.
Within minutes, Klaaz had hurled all of the two dozen ships away at incomprehensible speed.
And just like that, the Second Fleet was gone.
No one would dispute that something very strange happened that day. Indeed, the UPF ships were gone from orbit, gone from the Home Planets system itself. But how? There was no way of telling that, because even though they tried for days, those back on the Home Planets were never able to establish string comm contact with the two dozen new ships.
As for Klaaz?
Shortly after the Second Fleet disappeared, they said, he vanished as well.
15
The castle mas filled with hundreds of beautiful women.
Blondes, brunettes, redheads. All of them were scantily clad; many were topless. Some were even real.
The castle was known as Ruby Ridge. It was located on a high cliff near the equator of a planet called Rocks 32. The mountainous, tropical world was a well-known gambling mecca in the upper Five Arm, a wild part of the Galaxy if there ever was one.
Rocks 32 was a sunny place for shady people. More than gambling went on here. Much more. The planet was a hotbed of drug dealing (jamma mostly), moving illegal slow-ship wine, and most of all, black market weapons trading, both buying and selling. The planet's police were all paid off; its politicians were, too. And while most of the people on Rocks 32 knew about the Fourth Empire, no imperial ship, whether it be SF, SG, or X-Forces, had been in the system in almost twenty years.