Just then, another announcement came over the hangar's audio system. The speaker's formerly morose tone had changed completely. It was confirming what the viz disk seemed to show. There were no more enemy fighters, no more enemy battle star. All space around the tiny moon was clear of adversaries, and the rebel squadron was returning intact as well. A great cheer went up around the chamber.
"But how?" the Princess asked, almost pleading with the pilot and the priest now. "You must tell me."
"I don't know myself, your highness," the pilot finally replied. "I am just grateful to be able to help your cause."
"But… you saved us all," she began stammering. "What payment could I possibly…"
The priest stepped forward again. "As I said before," he began. "We were looking for directions."
The Princess shook her head and quickly called for the highest intelligence officer within the hidden war chamber. He arrived a few seconds later. After a quick chat with both the pilot and the priest, the intelligence man conjured up a satchel of old star charts and handed it to them.
And finally the Princess was smiling.
"I don't suppose you want to stick around and maybe have a glass of wine with me?" she asked the pilot.
The pilot's eyes went wide. He began to reply when the priest interrupted again.
"Many pardons, your grace," he said. "But we really do have a schedule to keep."
He began bowing as he was backing up, the pilot stumbling along behind him.
"But can't we stay, just for a drink?" the pilot was asking the priest.
The priest did not reply, he simply continued nudging the pilot back toward the strange flying machine.
"Well, at least ask her why that guy is wearing a hair suit," the pilot pleaded weakly with the priest, pointing to the strange figure standing mute behind the Princess.
"I will not," the priest shot back in reply. "Some things are best left unknown."
With that, they climbed back into the odd flying machine. There was a sudden glow from its engine compartment, and then it simply disappeared again.
The Princess blinked her eyes, the kid and the other guy did as well. The goon in the hair suit let out a loud, fake growl.
The Princess looked at the viz disk and just shook her head.
"Who were those guys?" she whispered.
2
No one knew why Hawk Hunter's flying machine went so fast.
Its design had come to him in a dream one night shortly after he found himself stranded on the planet called Fools 6. But while the fact that the craft looked like nothing else in the Galaxy might have been a function of his slumbering vision, why it could move the way it did was the result of pure chance — or coincidence — even though there were many learned minds scattered among the stars that would argue that these two things did not exist.
In order to power his flying machine, Hunter had hooked up a series of what he thought were identical energy transfer devices taken from an ancient Empire ship he'd found wrecked over the hill from his dwelling on Fools 6. The crashed vessel turned out to be a Kaon Bombardment ship, a frightening military vessel that had the capability to freeze time itself over a battlefield, allowing its troops to slay their enemies, literally at leisure.
Hunter's seemingly random mating of the Kaon ship's Time Shifter components to the business end of his machine's power plant gave it the ability to travel very, very fast. So fast, in fact, there was no way to measure its velocity in terms of distance traveled. It was better to simply measure it in terms of time elapsed, usually from here to there in a thousandth of a second.
But Hunter's flying machine was both mysterious and unique. Though only the size of a standard Empire spacefighter, it had interstellar capability, and they did not. In fact, Hunter's craft could travel faster between star systems than a gigantic Empire Starcrasher battle cruiser, and they were able to do it at a speed of two light-years a minute.
He and the priest — his name was Pater Tomm — were looking for a lost planet.
It was called Tonk. It was located in what was once known as the Zorro-Wilco star system. Hunter and Pater Tomm had spent the last six weeks working their way across the midsection of the Five-Arm, the fifth of the Galaxy's multiple spiraling arms, trying to find a way to this place. It was not an easy thing to do. This part of the Five-Arm was on the edge of the Fringe itself, that being the halo of outlying stars that, in many places, marked the farthermost reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. The midsection of the Five-Arm was particularly dangerous space to travel through. Considered almost desolate when compared to the massive clusters of stars closer to the center of the Galaxy, there were still tens of millions of systems out here, they supported hundreds of millions of planets, and many of those planets had people on them. Lots of people meant lots of opportunity for disagreements and war, and Hunter and Pater Tomm had seen their share of both on this journey.
In many places, way out here, war was simply a way of life. The recent dustup on the tiny jungle moon had hardly been an isolated incident. In the six weeks since the end of the noble but ultimately disastrous war on Zazu-Zazu, Hunter and Pater Tomm had found themselves involved in no less than a dozen other conflicts simply because many sectors of the space they were traveling through also served as interplanetary combat zones.
Most of these wars had a clear good guy and bad guy, and when the cause seemed just and the conflict unavoidable. Hunter and Pater Tomm had chosen sides and fought with the good guys. They did this in return for navigation data or information mat might bring them closer to the elusive stepping-stone of Tonk. These enlistments rarely lasted for more than a day. Once they'd signed on and Hunter was able to do his thing with his magnificent (some said enchanted) flying machine — well, the conflict was usually decided quickly thereafter, and always in the favor of their employers. And while Pater Tomm despised the notion that they were, in effect, serving as mercenaries, he knew this was a necessary evil if they wanted to find their way through this vast, troubled neighborhood of the Five-Arm and reach their first goal.
That Tonk was so damn hard to find was in itself very strange. It was once the most prominent planet in this part of space. At one time, Tonk had been a major spaceship rebuild-and-repair facility, boasting customers from thousands of light years around. Ship owners and government officials would wait up to a decade to have their massive ion-ballast space cruisers cored out, restored, and renovated on Tonk. At its peak, more than one hundred million people lived on the smallish planet, and every one of them was filthy rich. And how rich was that? At one point, the citizens had talked about reigniting Tonk's dying sun, a massive space engineering project. But alas, this proved too costly even for them. When the light from Tonk's sun eventually began to fade, just about everyone on the planet packed up and blasted off, heading for other, brighter places to live.
All that had been two thousand years ago. Tonk was so far off the beaten track now, it didn't even appear on any of the standard star charts, at least, none that Hunter and Pater Tomm had picked up in their six-week odyssey. It had simply become lost.
Finding Tonk was important, though. For it was here, Pater Tomm believed, a man lived who might know how they could get closer to their ultimate destination: the star system known as the Home Planets.
If it existed at all.
Shortly after leaving the jungle moon, they found their way to a desolate planet called Sigma-TKE.
It was second out from a dying white dwarf sun, the only puffed planet remaining in a small system of five. It was very out of the way, which was essential, because on top of everything else, Hunter was also a wanted man. He was AWOL from the Empire's military forces, and as an officer, the penalty for such a crime was banishment to some uncharted three-digit dimension, essentially a sentence worse than death.