What had happened here? This moon was built, no doubt, with grand ideas in mind. But it was dead.
No puff. No life.
Interesting…
Hunter decided to call this Moon 01.
His intention was to go right around the ring of sentinels. If everything went right, Moon 01 was where he would wind up at the end of the journey.
He kicked into ultradrive again and was soon passing close to the next moon in line, several million miles away. What he found here was more of the same. Both his eyes and his scanners told him that this was another huge, artificial world, built for some reason but apparently never occupied. Like the first one, it was hanging lifeless in space. And it was the same for the next eleven moons. There were mirror images of themselves, every one. Lifeless, deserted.
Then he came to Moon 13, and here he found another surprise. This satellite hadn't even been completed. The upper half of its northern hemisphere was missing. The massive networks of girders and floating pilings could clearly be seen beneath the thick fake crust. Hunter went down low and hovered above its surface for a moment, just long enough to see the great jagged edge and look down into the maw of gigantic support beams. Hundreds of ancient tools were lying about the powdery surface. A trail of them led up to the precipice itself.
They appeared as if they'd been dropped there suddenly and never touched again.
Hunter continued the ultraquick tour, coming upon more than two dozen sentinel moons that were less than complete. Indeed, some barely had their superstructures built.
As he passed by the empty moons with routine quickness now, the idea that these sentinels were manned by monsters, somehow gazing down on the Home Planets, ready to rain down all sorts of destruction, had proved to be a false one so far. The heavenly bodies seemed to be little more than a massive facade. Was that what the original builders had intended all along? To fabricate a bunch of empty moons and a bluff? Or had something happened in the distant past that had forced the abandon-ment of the sentinels? Or had they ever been occupied in the first place?
Then he came to Moon 39.
The first clue that something was different about this satellite appeared when his very-long-range environmental scans bounced back saying the place had a 99.99 percent puff. None of the previous sentinels had boasted any atmospheres at all. Yet his gear was telling him Moon 39 had breathable air, clouds, weather — and possibly, a whole lot more.
Hunter slipped into a very high orbit around the artificial satellite, jigging his throttle so he didn't stay in the same place too long. He didn't need his long-range scanners to see what was happening below him. The moon was definitely occupied. It had a gigantic military base located on its equator on the side facing the sun. This installation appeared large enough to house hundreds of thousands of personnel. The barracks alone stretched for miles in every direction. The base also had many spaceport facilities, at least a hundred launch platforms, with what appeared to be working spaceships in their bays. Two gigantic control towers provided the center of this enormous installation. Its airspace was thick with sky cars, combat patrol craft, even a few battle cruiser-class vessels lumbering about.
Hunter felt his heart drop to his boots. Any dreams that maybe the sentinels were just a hoax had now gone up in smoke. Just as the holo-spy had claimed, there was someone out here. A lot of someones. This base went on forever; some offshoots nearly wrapped themselves right around the artificial moon. Hunter asked his scanner to estimate how many soldiers the planet was holding. The answer came back: "one million, probably more." And just from what Hunter had seen, they had enough spacelift to pick them up and deliver them somewhere, if the need for that ever arose.
"Damn," Hunter whispered to himself. Home Planets was a solar prison.
And these were its prison guards.
So now what?
Hunter had the fleeting notion to attack the place. Lay waste to it just as he'd done back on Tonk. But right away, his instincts told him this was a very bad idea. First of all, it was biting off more than he could chew. This base was thousands of times larger than the enemy installations on Tonk. It would take him days of endless strafing just to try to get it all, something that whoever was below probably wouldn't sit still for. Plus he didn't know if any other moons down the line were occupied, or if these guys had any backup forces somewhere close by.
Besides, torching this place, even if he could do it, would not answer two really important questions: Who were these guys, and what did they really have to do with the imprisonment of Planet America?
No, this flight had not been intended as a combat mission; its aim was to recon and gather intelligence, and Hunter knew it was wise to just stick to the plan.
His job now was to get a closer look.
He'd put his time-advancing spy technique to the ultimate test only once before.
Back on Zazu-Zazu, while the final battle was taking place on the walls of the city of Qez, Hunter had flown superquick out to the enemy's huge battle tank, a monstrosity known as a xarcus. He'd traveled so fast between two points, he literally got ahead of himself in regular time. Operating within this twilight zone, he'd been able to land on the xarcus, penetrate its hull, and move around inside, seeing all, while not being seen.
It sounded fantastic and cool, but actually it wasn't. Walking around invisible in any enemy's camp was not a pleasant experience. The seeming impossibility of it all created a strong measure of doubt that it was even happening. This gave everything a sort of distorted, dreamlike quality, not a plus, considering the situation. There was further stomach tightening because of the feeling that at any moment, the natural law he was breaking would somehow whip itself back to shape and make him pay. By making him visible.
So the time-busting vanishing act was not something to be taken lightly. But Hunter knew it had to be done.
All he needed was a running start.
He whipped around the moon exactly one hundred times, throttle opened up to full ultraspeed overdrive, building up the momentum needed to get ahead of himself.
Once he'd become advanced in time, he floated in for a soft landing next to a small power station. The site was about a quarter mile from the hub of the vast military base and not far from the soaring twin towers that looked down upon it all.
Now he just waited. The inner base was mobbed with space soldiers and officers, some walking, some marching, some streaking by overhead in sky cars. Hunter sat perfectly still for what seemed to him to be more than a minute, watching as these troops passed by on all sides of him. From all indications, they could not see him. He finally popped the canopy, collected his blaster rifle and his ray gun, men jumped to the ground. Two soldiers passed right through his body, the final proof that he was invisible. His time-cheating technique had worked again.
The soldiers around him were wearing basic black combat uniforms, not unlike Hunter's own, but with tiny ornamental fins sprouting from each shoulder and a set of winglike projections on the back. The uniforms looked oddly out of date.
The personal weapons these troops were carrying with them seemed elderly, too. They looked like ray guns issued to the Fourth Empire's units several hundred years before. This did not mean they were any less deadly, though. Same for the literally thousands of battlefield weapons in evidence around the sprawling base. These included an incredible number of Master Blasters, smaller death-tube arrays, and even some antique sonic guns. All this made the pop guns employed by the bad guys back on Tonk look puny by comparison. And it was a lot of stuff for such an isolated place far beyond the edge of the Galaxy.