The trouble was, he still didn't know who they were. He'd seen no flags or banners identifying the space corps by name nor any ship markings or weapons stamps stating exactly who they were. Again it was obvious the massive army was working undercover.
But it was important that Hunter ID them. For this he stole into one of the barracks nearby. An army was an army, no matter how well equipped, no matter how distant the garrison. With around-the-clock shifts, the legitimately ailing and the simply malingering, at any given time, about 20 percent of any force was usually asleep.
Hunter found the barracks he'd selected dotted with sleeping soldiers. He walked down the space between the hovering bunks looking for someone who appeared to be above the rank of space grunt. Finally, he came upon a cluster of floating beds that were larger, more comfortable, and more stable than the rest of the bunks. Officer country. Hunter thought correctly.
He idled up to one officer's personal effects box hovering right beside his bed. Slowly, carefully, Hunter waved its security halo away and reached down into the guy's stuff. He quickly came out with a subatomic knife. It was sealed inside a plastic air case and looked more like a ceremonial piece than a combat instrument.
Just what he was looking for.
He quickly stuffed the knife into his boot and backed out of the barracks. He found another somewhat remote piece of flat ground and summoned his flying machine from the Twenty 'n Six.
He climbed in and engaged his power systems. Only once he was sure that he would be able to get off the artificial moon did he take the knife out of his boot and remove it from its sheath.
He was looking for some kind of trademark or inscription on the blade. This army was expert in keeping a low profile as to who it really was. But sometimes officers slipped up and carried an instrument with markings from the actual unit.
And that was the case here; Hunter had picked the right pocket. There was an inscription across the blade that answered one question but also opened up about a million others.
The inscription was just three words, but Hunter felt his stomach twist itself a bit tighter when he read them. Who was the undercover army, waiting way out here for one false move by the people on the Home Planets?
Some unknown ancient order, nearly four thousand years old, the same age as the star system prison?
No.
The army of prison guards was actually none other than a large detachment of the Bad Moon Knights.
16
Hunter very carefully punched back into orbit around Planet America and started the long plunge down.
He'd checked out the rest of the sentinel moons; they were just as lifeless as the ones he'd found before coming to Moon 39. Now he was anxious to get back on the ground and tell the others all that he'd discovered.
But as soon as he had cleared the top layers of America's atmosphere and gotten below the clouds, he was confronted with a startling sight: The planet was on fire. He could see hundreds of smoke plumes rising into the air all across the continent. On that part of the planet turned away from the sun, there were no lights, no signs of life below. Using his very rudimentary communications device, Hunter tried to raise someone at Andrews Field.
There was no reply.
He touched down in the rain a few minutes later, passing over many fires and collapsed roadways on his approach to Andrews Field.
He rolled to the end of the makeshift runway and was relieved to see Zarex and Pater Tomm waiting for him. Gordon was on hand as well, along with a squad of CIA agents (all of whom were talking on their cell phones) and a small convoy of black vans. But some of the agents looked as if they'd just gone through a war. They were sporting bandages on various parts of their bodies. Gordon himself was dabbing a head wound with a piece of gauze.
Hunter jumped from his plane and ran over to the group of walking wounded.
"What happened down here?" he asked them.
"Only a vision of doomsday," Tomm replied quickly. "Or about thirteen minutes of it, anyway."
"It was like the whole planet did a jig," Zarex confirmed. "Everything just started rocking and rolling, and it wouldn't stop. I've been through a lot in the past two hundred years, but that might have been the longest thirteen minutes of my life."
Gordon had it all written down in a hastily scrawled report, which was now getting smeared in the rain.
"The power blackouts came first," he told Hunter. 'Two short ones, about a minute apart. Then a few more, longer in duration. Then it seemed like the whole planet just started to shake. Up and down, back and forth. We were lying flat on the ground, yet at times I swear I was upside down."
The others nodded in painful agreement.
"And it lasted such a long time," Gordon continued, dabbing his head wound. "Once it finally stopped, the reports of damage started coming in a minute later, and they haven't stopped since."
He handed Hunter the written report. "It was just the damnedest thing, and it seemed to happen just a few seconds after you left."
Hunter just stood there, stunned, not quite believing what he was hearing. Could he be responsible for this? He quickly read the report. The bad stuff began happening just about a half minute after he'd reached orbit. There was one blackout followed quickly by several others. And these outages did not just happen in the vicinity of Andrews Field. They had rippled right across the continent.
The real shaking began about two minutes later and did not stop for thirteen long minutes. Again, the effect was felt right across the country. Not a quake, rather a gigantic disruption that, in Gordon's written words, felt "as if a giant's hand had picked us up and just started shaking." The worst of it came in the last three minutes.
Hunter began matching up the times of these events with his own activity. The first series of blackouts coincided with his initial engagement of ultradrive in space. The planet started shaking just as he'd begun his tour of the half-dozen Home Planets and continued when he'd zoomed out to where the sentinel moons lay. Then the real disruption began at the precise moment he'd gone into his time-busting spy mode, which, in real time down here must have taken about thirteen minutes. The trembling continued until the moment he kicked out of full ultraoverdrive and returned to America's orbit.
The numbers didn't lie. His takeoff had been okay. But every time he'd pushed his throttle into ultraspeed, the people back on Planet America had paid the price. Yet this didn't make any sense. Why would what he did out there affect what was happening back here, inside the planet's time bubble?
The ink on Gordon's report began running off the wet pages. Hunter was now soaked to the bone. Bad things happen when the ground shakes. Fires break out. Water mains crack. Electrical wires fall. How many had been killed? How many injured? It was almost too terrible for him to contemplate.
And most important, why did it happen?
Hunter and the others were whisked back to Weather Mountain.
For security reasons, they were put in three separate vans and driven by three different routes back to the CIA facility. Hunter surprised himself by falling asleep during his ride back. One moment they were pulling out of a muddy road near Andrews, the next, the van was flying through the front gate at Weather Mountain. The unexpected sleep had done him a favor. It had relieved him of thinking about the devastation he had just caused — at least for a little while.