She paused. The President began fumbling for words.
"Do they come without warning?" he finally asked her. "These periodic apocalypses?"
The holo-spy's eyes began darting back and forth again. Accessing…
"One event triggers it," she said. "I am not programmed to know beyond that. It is a milestone, a technology advance of some kind. If anyone in this system manages to pass it, your doomsday is cued to strike. Automatically."
"But who is behind this?" the President demanded to know. "Who imposed such things on us?"
It was the most important question of all.
But the holo-spy just shook her head.
"I'm sorry I'm not programmed with more information on the subject. My memory circuits can't even tell me how / got here. My last activation was at a classified briefing regarding a combat-imminent situation within this system. I was told I'd be going into action on this planet. This could indicate that a battle was fought here several thousand years ago. An attempt to break you out. A futile one, for sure, though. Had it been successful, your civilization would have progressed to the point where you would have left this place a long time ago."
Silence descended on the Oval Office. If what the holograph was saying proved accurate, then the planet's culture, already a bit weird, would be turned completely on its head. But could this really be? Had the people of this planet been prisoners for more than three thousand years? Kept here by some unknown power, all without ever realizing it? Even worse, had someone not had the foresight, three millennia before, to carefully hide the artifacts that the CIA and others before them had uncovered, would all of this have been unknown to them forever?
It was a bit hard to swallow.
Finally, the President addressed the holo-spy directly.
"Are you asking me to believe that all this time someone has been watching us from… out there! Keeping us penned within an invisible jail? Anchored to this planet? For thousands of years? How would that be possible?"
The holo-girl began accessing again. Then she put her finger across the 3-D map and drew a series of circles above the planets that stretched to infinity. The meaning was clear. These were the mysterious heavenly bodies.
"That's what these things are for," she said simply.
Everyone shifted uncomfortably. The President looked up at Gordon.
"Do you know how to shut that thing off?" he asked. Gordon nodded to Zarex, who then leaned over and hit the control panel's deact panel. The holo-girl disappeared in a flash.
The room fell dead silent. The wind was suddenly howling outside. Rain was on its way.
"How much of this do you believe, Steve?" the President asked Gordon directly.
The CIA man replied, "By her own admission, she is a spy. It is an essential business of spies to spread lies. Believe me, I know. And it seems impossible to know where she came from, much beyond what she told us. So, she could be programmed to tell lies as easily as she could be to tell the truth. Even she wouldn't know the difference. But here's the problem: Her information is so grave, so dire, we must take even a suggestion of it seriously. Plus, it does fill in a lot of empty spaces in our past. And, according to our three new friends here, such shifting around of planets and stars is quite common. Everywhere else but here."
The President took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes.
"OK, Steve, I'll ask you this just one time: Do you really want me to believe such outrageous claims by a bunch of people dressed like comic book characters?"
Gordon did not hesitate.
"Yes sir," he said. "I do."
The President threw his glasses on the desk and ran a hand through his thinning, uncombed hair. He was extremely agitated now, for real.
"Well," he finally said. "Is there any way we can confirm any of this? Some way to check* it out? See if any of it is true?"
That's when Hunter stepped forward and spoke for the first time.
"Excuse me, sir," he said. "But I believe there is."
15
The place was called Andrews Field.
It was in a fairly isolated area just outside Washington, D.C., once a huge working farm, now abandoned. Hunter had been out here for two hours now, working on the flying machine with his electron torch. The idea he'd put forth to the President was simple: Let him leave the planet in his aircraft and investigate whether the holo-girl was telling the truth.
Weary and confused, the President agreed. His only caveat was that Hunter take off from a location that was isolated from public view. The last thing they needed now was more UFO stories in the newspapers. So Andrews Field was found and quickly cordoned off by armed CIA agents. That had been around four a.m.
It was now almost six. Hunter had watched the stars blink out above the field, and then the storm clouds started to gather. A convenient downpour would further mask his ascent, which was just minutes away. Though the woods were crawling with CIA agents, for the most part they left him alone to work. He'd reduced his cockpit back to its original proportions, before he'd taken to carrying Tomm, Zarex, and 33418 around with him. This enabled him to shave three feet off the fuselage and shorten his wingtips as well. He'd be battling winds and a lot of rain once he got aloft, "inclement weather," as Tomm had called it. The sleeker his plane's aerodynamic profile, the better. He'd also fabricated an oxygen tank and a breathing system, and, for the first time, there was a safety harness attached to his seat.
Hunter was taking these precautions because he was not intending to launch in his normal split-second fashion.
Why? Because of the "missing two seconds."
He had a theory as to why he'd caused time to stop twice that night back in Mayfield. Though it came to him after hearing the holo-girl's claims the second time around, the spark actually went back to his early days in the X-Forces. The key weapon in the Fourth Empire's vast inventory was the Time Shifter technology employed by the Kaon Bombardment ships. Once in orbit, they had the ability to literally freeze time on the battlefield below, allowing Empire troops to touch down and make quick work of their foes. During his short stint as an X-Forces officer, Hunter had heard someone mention that Time Shifters worked by encompassing their target inside a kind of bubble in which all time stopped. Be it a city or an enemy stronghold or even an entire planet. Once the enemy was vanquished, the bubble was dissolved, and time went back to normal.
The science of shifting was a closely held secret, possessed by the Fourth Empire alone. Hunter was now wondering if this technology and what the holo-spy called time bubbles were distantly related, similar somehow. Could a time bubble be an ancient form of time shifting, something left in place, rather than being dissipated once a battle was won? If so, would everything inside the bubble remain more or less frozen in time? Is that really what happened here on this tiny planet? According to the holo-spy, it was.
All mis led to a second question: What if a long-standing time bubble was disturbed in any way? How? By operating another time-shifting device within it. That's the other thing Hunter recalled someone mentioning to him. That shifting time inside time that's already been shifted was not a prudent thing to do. The person had said, "It can screw up a lot of things in a lot of different ways."
Trouble was, the propulsion unit for Hunter's flying machine was based on time-shifter technology. He didn't know how it worked exactly; no one did. But its critical components had come from a Kaon Bombardment ship he'd found crashed on Fools 6. The wreck proved to be a treasure trove of time-shifter secrets.