He yanked back on the throttles, returning to his slower cruising speed of two light-years a second.
Everything seemed to turn back in on itself again. He caught his reflection in the canopy a second time, and it appeared that he'd returned to his old self. He was three-dimensional again, and all the colors around him had toned back down. He checked all his vital parts, first on his body and then on his spacecraft. All were normal. He'd survived the mad dash, and his machine had survived, too. With the brief burst of horrible Mayday calls still ringing in his head, he finally asked the quadtrol a serious question: How long had it taken him to go from one side of the Galaxy to the other? At his normal cruising speed, it would have taken fourteen precious hours.
Now the answer came back: 14 minutes.
And his F-Machine wasn't even breathing hard.
Approaching the Seven Arm was not like coming up to the border of the Galaxy's other swirls. In most cases, there was a definable frontier that separated the beginning of an arm from the outer layers of the Ball.
The Seven Arm was different. There was no border, no immediate one, anyway. Here the stars simply petered out into a kind of no-man's-land, a twilight zone that stretched for more than a thousand light-years. No stars, no planets, nothing — just a total void. If one were flying in an ion-ballast ship, it would take a long, very lonely time to pass through here. Even in a Starcrasher, it would make for an uncomfortable nine-hour trip. Hunter pushed his throttle to 45 percent; he was hoping he could get through this in a matter of seconds.
Still, it was very odd. Whenever he had his ship going at faster than cruising speed, the sensation was one of the stars becoming streaks of light that passed all around in a fantastic light show, not unlike the visual while riding aboard a Star-crasher but much more intense. He'd just seen fourteen minutes of this in his sprint across the Milky Way.
Crossing the void, though, there was nothing really to hold on to. Any stars to be seen were very very faint, and the feeling he got was not of traveling through a piece of starless space but of falling into a deep pit of nothingness. With few frames of reference — combined with the effects of nearly double ultra-high speed — it suddenly became difficult to judge up from down, left from right, even though these things did not really exist in space.
The quadtrol had told him previously that there were standing orders for both SF and SG ships to avoid this place, simply because it was unsafe for normal passage. Hunter was beginning to think that maybe this wasn't the only reason the Empire never ventured here. The quadtrol had also told him that many spaceships had been lost in this void at the beginning of the Fourth Empire, and that the place had been considered unlucky or cursed since. As the people of the Galaxy were known to be very superstitious, one hint of any place bearing bad karma would be enough for it to be avoided en masse.
Difficult to transit and unlucky? No wonder no one ever came here.
He finally started to see the mass of the arm ahead of him, his equilibrium returning as the pinpricks of light turned into star clusters and then individual systems. He was now approaching the "crowded" part of the Seven Arm.
But immediately he knew something was wrong.
He called up several star maps from his flight bubblef showing this part of the Seven. The maps had come from the star charts he'd filched from the ShadoVox, and it would make sense that they would be extremely accurate, flawless even.
But this wasn't the case.
Hunter conjured up a floating screen that would serve to match up what was on the map with what he was seeing up ahead. That was the problem; there was no match. None of the star systems or their alignments looked like anything what he was viewing on the float screen. This didn't make sense. The charts were just a few years old, put together not from on-hand observation but through long-range scans from Earth, scans that were supposed to be accurate to the millimeter. Yet the stars in front of him weren't just out of alignment, their overall dispersal was different.
Everything moved inside the Galaxy. Stars, planets, moons— people. But nothing moved this fast.
Entire star systems didn't just change positions overnight. True, while the Galaxy had been settled for nearly 5,000 years, some parts had been lost as the empires fell and rose. But the Fourth Empire was on the verge of reclaiming nearly 90 percent of the inhabited planets these days, and it certainly had the technology to have the entire realm mapped.
The only logical conclusion: the official impeüal star charts were not only wrong, they'd been intentionally drawn that way.
He reached the first star system. It wasn't on the map. It was just the first place he came to. And here was another surprise.
He'd been led to believe that not only was the Seven Arm practically empty, it had never been settled by anyone in the first place. Yet this first system held a medium-size sun with seven planets going around it, and it was these worlds that told the strange tale. The F-Machine's ultrapower scanners showed the planets all to be empty. But just about every square inch of their surfaces appeared battle-scarred, horribly cratered, and torn apart. Ancient cities on every planet, bombed into dust. Man-made debris was everywhere. So much that rings of it were not only orbiting each planet, but massive clouds of the stuff were drifting throughout the system as well.
Hunter knew at least partly what had happened here; the devastation on the planets was the result of a titanic battle, fought a very long time ago. But what about the free-floating space junk? The stuff between the planets? He plugged his quadtrol into his long-range scanner and was soon reading information on sampled pieces of the debris. The initial indications showed they'd been floating around for a thousand years, maybe more.
A large chunk of junk came up on him. Hunter slowed his machine to a crawl. The piece of debris was about a half mile long and half again as wide. Metal in character. At least a thousand years old, so the quadtrol told him. The question was, what was it? Or, what had it been?
Hunter asked the quadtrol again. On his scanner screen, it presented three dozen holographic images, seemingly random pieces of space junk, coming together to reform their previously original state. What he saw was an enormous metal ball, 250 miles across, with several thousand mile-high spikes sticking out of it all over.
What the hell was this? It wasn't an artificial moon; it had never had an atmosphere. It wasn't any kind of battle station, for the same reason.
Then it came to him.
It was a space mine. A massive weapon built to explode should anything or anyone come near it. And there were millions of similar gigantic pieces for as far as his eyes could see. That's when the cold reality of the situation hit home. Millions of pieces of this kind of debris could only mean one thing: He was in a minefield.
A very large, very old one. One in which all the mines had exploded a long time ago, and no one had bothered to pick up the debris.
Or didn't want to.
He continued winding his way through the massive, jumbled cloud, going very, very slowly. He knew it would take him much longer to make it through the debris field than it did to fly the starless void preceding it. All the while, he was passing the system's outer planets, and each was like the one before it: battered, torn up, ancient cities reduced to sand.
Once out of the system, he was tempted to boot his throttle ahead a bit. But the ocean of wreckage went on unabated, and he had no choice but to continue weaving his way through it. Even as he saw the next star system come into view — it, too, was uncharted, or more accurately out of place on the star map — everywhere he looked were waves of space junk. Twisting and turning the flying machine around it was difficult, even for a skilled flier like himself. But one thing was clear: there was no way a typical Empire ship, military or civilian, could make it through, first because of the ancient minefield and now these bands of floating obstacles.