Hunter folded his flying machine into a Twenty 'n Six and began walking. His ray gun was up and ready, only because it made him feel better. Could he actually fire his weapon effectively while operating inside the one-step-ahead situation? He didn't know. Though he'd exchanged gunfire inside the xarcus with some mysterious enemy troops, looking back on it, he believed that gun battle might have been fought in a different time or dimension entirely. His theory now was that yes, he could probably fire the handgun, but the deadly ray it emitted would most likely show up an hour or two later. He kept the gun up in front of him anyway.
He passed through the crowded administrative and control areas of the base, seeing lots but learning little about this powerful garrison army. Their uniforms bore no markings, and there were no flags or banners about. Obviously, the huge army was, in a sense, working undercover. He wandered through its transport yards, taking note of the hundreds of troop shuttles, gleaming under the weak yellow sun. These were not the Bugs he'd traveled in during his first trip on an Empire ship. Those little scooters could barely carry a hundred soldiers for a distance never exceeding the trip down from orbit. Though they looked dated as well, these shuttles could accommodate at least a thousand men each and were big enough to take them clear across a good-sized solar system. There was no doubt that these vessels could reach any of the Home Planets quickly and deliver an enormous space army to their surface, ready for battle.
Or was invasion force a better term?
He walked the length of the congested space launch farm. There were twelve gigantic docking ports here that could handle big ships, and hundreds of smaller pads where patrol craft and sky cars were maintained. At the end of this mile-long stretch of tarmac was a long, tubular building emitting a barely visible yet clearly sparkling stream of greenish mist. This was an ion-ballast works. While the much quicker technology of Supertime was used exclusively by Empire spacecraft, the vast majority of flying things in the Galaxy were powered by ion-ballast-fueled engines. This facility was big enough to provide plentiful energy for ion spacecraft of all sizes.
It was most interesting that every one of the large spacecraft bays was holding a vessel in stasis. Twelve bays, twelve ships. That probably meant there were no sizable spacecraft out patrolling in the star system somewhere. In fact, except for the small atmospheric craft and sky cars, it seemed to Hunter that much of this hardware had been sitting here, planet bound, for a long, long time.
Like a phantom, he moved around the base for the equivalent of a half hour, counting weapons, noting ammunition bunkers, estimating troop strength. He was gathering a lot of intelligence, some of it valuable, but Hunter was not yet satisfied. He'd confirmed that yes, the holo-spy was right, there was an enormous army out here, apparently poised to strike anywhere, at any time. But he still needed to know two important things: Who were these guys, and why were they out here? He couldn't leave until he found out.
He managed to locate the base's intelligence building. It was the structure with the highest number of communications bubblers on its roof. He passed through the main entrance with no problem and was soon standing in the central control room of the place. There were at least two hundred technicians at work here, monitoring various scanning arrays. At the center of the room there stood a large black box with a red light attached to its top and an enormous Klaxon protruding from its midsection.
Hunter approached the black box and, after studying its bare controls and eavesdropping on its attendant gang of techs, discovered that the monolith was actually a very simple warning device, one that would erupt whenever a certain kind of event was detected. A bank of thirty-six screens nearby told a further tale. This array of monitors was zoomed in on the Home Planets, one screen devoted to each of the three dozen worlds.
But what kind of event were they looking for?
Hunter studied the screen showing Planet America. It was just a static image of the green and blue ball, spinning through space. The attending devices didn't appear to be monitoring the planet's overall puff or working any kind of time bubble maintenance. Instead, the numbers running down the screen itself were labeled in various atmospheric measurements, such as air pressure, temperature, wind speed, and so on. The monitors seemed built to detect minute changes inside the atmospheres below.
One of a long line of light panel controllers was marked with an icon that Hunter interpreted to be the system's simulation. test. Without really thinking about it, he gave this button a push. Instantly, the live shot of Planet America turned into a lifelike graphic of the tiny world. The words: "Event Detection" began flashing on the screen. A tiny flash of bright light began rising from the landmass below. It grew brighter and brighter, a long smoky tail flowing from behind. The atmospheric readings running down the side of the screen — they, too, were part of the simulation — were going crazy. Several more warning flashes appeared. One said: "Event in Progress." Then the bright pinprick of light reached "orbit" around the graphic of the planet, and that's when the gigantic black box erupted with flashing red lights and skull-fracturing sound.
Hunter immediately cupped his ears and averted his eyes from the strobing light, but of course no one else in the room could see or hear any of it. In their reality, the simulated warning device hadn't gone off yet. And it probably wouldn't for at least another hour or so.
Hunter quickly released the sim panel button and the box stopped flashing and bleating. Everything went back to normal. It took a few moments for Hunter to get his senses back.
It had been painful to his cranium, but snooping in the right place had solved one mystery. These thirty-six arrays were looking for only one thing: evidence that any of the planets below was about to achieve spaceflight. If a successful launch was detected, the buzzer would blare and the blinding red light would flash until eyes hurt and ears began to bleed.
So this was actually a tripwire station, the means by which the mysterious celestial guards kept track of their unwitting prisoners below. There was beauty in the simplicity of this. How best do you keep prisoners in the prison? You monitor each planet around the clock, looking for the one sign that would indicate that the planet's inhabitants had reached the point of trying to get off, unintentionally trying to break out of jail. Then, presumably, boom). That's when the hammer came down.
Was this an explanation for the periodic disasters that had befallen Planet America every few centuries? The same apocalypses the holo-spy had warned them about? Was it simply part of the makeup of the people back there to try to escape their confines, unwittingly bringing catastrophe down on themselves? Could it be the same on the other planets as well?
Hunter was beginning to think so.
But why hadn't this gaggle of detectors spotted him leaving Planet America's atmosphere? Was it because his craft emitted things that these monitors could not detect?
He thought this as well.
Time to move on. He decided to find the most sensitive area of the entire intelligence complex, a place where all the top secrets would be stored. He eventually came upon a large vault, ironically on the top floor of the multistoried building. There were a dozen techs and several armed guards inside this secure room; the vault itself was open. Hunter simply walked inside.
The vault was eerily similar to the one under Weather Mountain. Lots of numbered doors containing pull-out drawers. But instead of holding artifacts, these drawers contained suspended droplets of liquid ether. One drop contained ten-to-the-twentieth-power bits of information. The drops were files; you put them on your tongue, and suddenly you knew their contents. Amazing technology, yet it was more than a thousand years old.