Another touch, he was at nine thousand miles per hour.
Another, eleven thousand, then thirteen.
Hunter suddenly crossed his fingers. Another kiss of the throttle. Another deep breath. He was now going fifteen thousand miles per hour… straight up.
His machine was shaking violently now. Yes, he knew every bolt and seam in the aircraft, and at the moment, he imagined each and every one of them was coming undone. He'd come a long way just to break apart trying to get off this tiny little world. Is that the way it would be?
He held on, fingers still crossed, aircraft still shaking. Speed at seventeen thousand five hundred.
Then came a bright flash, and everything… just… slowed… down.
He was in orbit.
So far, so good.
He quickly killed the throttle and drifted up to an altitude of 110 miles. Then he turned his craft over.
The flying machine had been knocked around a lot lately. Bouncing back and forth between dimensions wasn't the best of situations for a complex piece of machinery. Sometimes what blinked into the twenty-sixth dimension wasn't always exactly what blinked back out. But plainly, his craft had survived the ordeal of his unconventional ascent. All the nuts and bolts were still together, and everything was still reading green.
Even better, puncturing the time bubble had apparently been effortless as well. Hunter had seen no indications that he'd physically broken through anything once he'd left the atmosphere. This seemed like a big relief, like one less thing to worry about.
He went completely upside down now, feet pointing toward all those stars. Below him, the little planet was turning very peacefully. This was Hunter's first glimpse of it from any great height. It surprised him how small it really was. Just one large landmass, the one he'd driven across not so long ago, surrounded by all that blue, sparkling water. He felt his heart thump twice. There hadn't been a dull moment since coming to this place, yet he'd enjoyed his time on the surface so far. Pretty girls. Cool cars. The open road. The Seagram's. From here, the planet didn't look like a place harboring so many dark secrets.
From here, it looked like an oasis in this vast, empty piece of space. Something warm in the endless, cold blackness. Despite all the drama, he liked it down there.
Planet America…
It was the next best thing to home.
But now it was on to the mission.
He turned the flying machine around and put the nose pointing up. Hanging at about the two o'clock position was this desolate system's rather wacky moon.
It was about one-fifth the size of the planet below, and Hunter guessed it was about sixty thousand miles out. He flicked his throttle, and an instant later was a thousand feet above the satellite's north pole. The glare from its white, powdery surface was so bright, Hunter had to lower his helmet visor again. The moon had a heavily cratered face and bore a striking resemblance to the Moon, Earth's sacred luna. But Hunter knew right away this satellite was a fake. It wasn't a natural body; it was manufactured. How could he be so sure? Because there was a visible wobble to its motion as it roared through space; it was also traveling at an unnaturally high speed. Both were clear indications of space engineering.
But strangest of all, the moon was not exactly orbiting the tiny planet of America. It just appeared that way.
Hunter steered around to the dark side of the moon, astonished at how fast the satellite was moving. Once in the moon's shadow, less the satellite's intense glare, he had a clearer view of the local solar neighborhood, and it turned out to be a very crowded place. This system did have more planets, just as the holo-spy had claimed. There were at least two dozen of them, and those were just the ones he could see. They were all different colors and sporting different types of terrain. But strangest of all, they were all floating in the same orbital plane.
Hunter began chasing the swiftly moving moon now, his sensors telling him that the satellite was actually locked into a preprogrammed path that brought it into orbit not just around Planet America, but around the other planets in the system as well. It would rise and fall on one planet, then dash along to the next planet in line, go into orbit, provide a moonrise and set for it, then move off again to the next planet and the next. His scanners confirmed the moon would complete this circuit of planets once every twenty-four hours. This meant it could be observed by every planet in the same way, just at different but predictable times, similar to the way that the Moon was observed from Earth. Again, an amazing if puzzling example of celestial manipulation.
Though Hunter knew time was of the essence, he couldn't resist doing a very quick recon of the system's other nearby planets. The next one over from America was snow-covered, not unlike Tonk. The next appeared to be half jungle, half desert. Next came a temperate, mountainous world. Then one that was green and blue like America, but instead of having a sea, it had one huge river running right through it. Conversely, the next planet in line was nearly all water, with a huge island stuck in the middle of its southern hemisphere.
The sixth planet over was the one that most resembled America. It, too, had an irregular landmass that stretched around its circumference, though north to south. It had lots of mountains, lots of rivers, and two smaller islands hanging off the northwestern portion of the mainland.
Hunter was able to fly close enough to these planets to con-firm that they, too, held life. There were cities and roadways and small towns and villages scattered all over the half-dozen worlds, even the polar one.
And the line of planets did not stop there. Based on the distances between these immediate bodies, quick calculations told him there might be as many as thirty-six planets revolving around the tiny star. All of them appeared to be orbiting just far enough away from the next so as not to be seen, big and bright, in the night sky, another startling feat of space engineering.
Hunter suppressed the urge to zigzag his way right around the inner system. Time was too important now. But he was able to look over the fantastic celestial display with a small measure of satisfaction.
Undoubtedly, these were the Home Planets.
I finally found them, he thought.
Another nudge of the throttle, and he was streaking toward the outer edge of the solar system, to where the so-called heavenly bodies lay.
Located about 700,000 miles out from the Home Planets, Hunter discovered on approach that these bodies were huge, at least five times larger than the planets orbiting closer in to the tiny yellow sun. Like the Home Planets, they all traveled along the same orbital plane, just farther out from the sun. This configuration made a ring that surrounded the inner ring of planets, not unlike a fence around a prison. Once again, the whole thing just screamed of massive space engineering, a gigantic project even by present day's standards. In fact, Hunter wondered if even the Fourth Empire would have the tools to take on such an endeavor today. Yet the Home Planets' system was at least three thousand five hundred years old.
He pulled back on the throttle and was quickly orbiting one of the heavenly bodies. The first thing he noticed was that body didn't look heavenly at all.
It was essentially just another fake moon. It had no topography to speak of, no terrain, mountains, or water. It was a big white globe wrapped in with what Hunter assumed was the ancient version of terranium, the artificial-yet-living fauna which covered many engineered planets, including Earth itself. Nothing was growing down on this surface, though. It was covered with craters. Hundreds of them pockmarked the powdery, lifeless surface.