The only planet revolving around Starry Town's sun was the rundown, world of Megiddo. It was about one-third the size of Earth, a formerly-ringed gas giant reduced to its core by the Ancient Engineers thousands of years before and turned into a tropical paradise of sorts. Though it was a reclaimed gas bag, the surface of Megiddo was not smooth and uniform. Rather, it was pockmarked with faux river valleys and mountain ranges. Seven artificial seas dominated its equatorial regions; ice caps sat at its poles. It had one moon, Bad News 666, which was totally avoided because it contained a pyramid.
Megiddo was a very odd place—skitt-zo was the word used in the old days. Sometime in the distant past, the planet must have served as a resort for the biggest wigs of the Moraz Star Cloud. It was studded with ancient villas and seaside resorts at the equator, winter chalets and burned-ice castles to the north. Many of these places had been reclaimed by some of the star cloud's quietly nefarious types, and so the idea of a floating paradise had persisted.
But the planet was also the site of several huge ship repair facilities, more than a few hidden pirate bases and, to remove the last piece of glamour from the place, it was also home to the largest penitentiary in the star cloud. At Megiddo's south pole, there was a place called Big Rocks. Nearly 500,000 convicted criminals were kept here. Murderers and rapists mostly, they were the worst of this part of the Two Arm. All were facing execution.
Megiddo also had a strategic value, simply because of its location. It was the last planet outbound before reaching Thirty Star Pass, the narrow space lane that went directly through an unusually tight band of thirty stars. After that, the Two Arm really began thinning out; the distances between star systems increased dramatically, and the number of those star systems and habitable planets in between decreased just as fast. The Fourth Empire rarely visited this part of the Milky Way; there was no reason to. Still, Megiddo was a crossroads of sorts and had been fought over many times in the Galaxy's long history. To someone coming down the Two Arm, it was the doorstep to the more populated middle part of the second swirl.
And after that, it was only a three-day journey by Star-crasher to Earth itself.
The capital of Megiddo was a place called Needle City.
It was so named because the presidential palace was a sky needle built nearly three miles high. It looked down on an expansive beachfront city and could be seen on the other side of the Sea of Green, an esthetic preserved from the gas giant days, for which Needle City provided most of the western coastline.
Needle City was a rowdy, frequently violent place, full of gambling dens, holo-girl palaces, and cloud bars. A poor man's Cubes, it was populated mostly by space punks who'd somehow come by enough aluminum chips to live here and not mind sucking in the occasional lungful of stray, leftover methane gas.
It was also a place where an outlaw could lay low without much concern from the local authorities. The planet cops had their hands full keeping the lid on Big Rocks to the south and the string of pirate bases out west. Needle City was the least of their concerns. That's why it was known as a great hideout, somewhere to become anonymous until the heat cooled down.
But now, the ships were leaving it in droves.
Dressed in full regalia, Joxx beamed down directly to the spire that gave Needle City its name. Three of his best intelligence officers traveled with him.
Their destination was the official residence of Alfx Sheez, presidential ruler of Megiddo. Sheez was a typical Two Arm politician. About 250 years old, overweight, and perpetually sweaty, he was also quite wealthy from the bribes and kickbacks that went along with having a half million dangerous criminals sitting on one part of his planet and a number of pirating groups residing on another. When Joxx and his entourage arrived in his huge office, Sheez was packing his bags with money.
He barely looked up as the Solar Guards contingent materialized. He waved them away almost immediately.
"Excuse me, oh exalted ones," Sheez said hurriedly. "But I don't have time for the Fourth Empire at the moment."
He began emptying out his desk of coins and gemstones. In the background, several of his staff officers were doing the same thing.
"The last ship of any size is leaving this dump in one hour, and I intend to be on it. So my apologies but—"
"What is going on here?" Joxx roared at him.
Sheez at last looked up at Joxx as if to say: Just how thick are you?
"Haven't you noticed that my entire planet is bugging out?" he replied acidly.
"We've seen similar things all along the star belt," Joxx told him. "But why is it happening? Why the panic?"
Sheez emptied a drawer full of holo-girl capsules into his bag.
"A horde of marauders is making its way down the Two Arm," he told Joxx directly. "They've already conquered hundreds of sleazeball planets farther up, and they've been chasing the dregs of the galaxy in our direction… along with billions of refugees. Apparently there is no stopping these Huns. They have a huge army, at least a hundred ships, and have shown little mercy for anyone in their way. And this is probably the next place they will hit. I don't want to be around when that happens."
He looked up at Joxx and added, "I suggest that you don't stick around, either."
Joxx's intelligence officers exchanged a few worried looks. They were much farther up the Two Arm than they would have liked.
Not so their boss.
"We are here to represent the interests of the Emperor and the Fourth Empire," Joxx told Sheez. "These are matters that have some importance to us."
He looked around at Sheez's staff officers. Several had already packed their bags and were blinking out without so much as a farewell.
"Has anyone tried to stop these marauders, as you call them?"
Sheez stuffed a stack of gold notes into his valise. "I don't know anvone so foolish." he said.
"Who are they then?" Joxx asked him.
The rotund president just shook his head as he sorted out bags of aluminum chips.
"No one knows who they are, Joxx," he replied hastily. "But I can tell you who they are not."
Joxx sat down in the nearest hovering chair. "Please, enlighten me," he said.
"They are not some bunch of mooks, like the Banndx Gang, thrown together by an overachieving pirate leader," Sheez told him. "These people are organized, well-trained, millions in number, and very heavily armed. That equals unstoppable in my book. I've been through hundreds of pirate wars out here, and usually their alliances fade away just as soon as everyone's belly gets filled. This time it's different. This is not an army of thieves coming this way. They are doing this for reasons other than money. I hear they are actually leaving money behind. People like that scare me, frankly."
He dumped a box of comet diamonds into his bag.
Joxx eyed him queerly. "How is it that you have so much information on these marauders?"
Sheez finally stopped packing, but just for a moment.
"Because two days ago, someone who saw what was happening up there, crashed down here," he said. "He gave us the latest dope."
Joxx was intrigued. "Who was he? One of our agents?"
"He's no one to your liking, I'm sure of that."
Joxx leaned forward and put his electric saber across Sheez's bag, effectively halting the packing process for good.
"And why not?" Joxx asked him.
"Because," Sheez replied. "He is an ion mover."
9
The northernmost regions of Meglddo were blanketed with two inches of dirty snow every day.
Although this was supposed to be a polar region, the weather was fairly mild. If there were roughly five million people on Megiddo at any given time, not counting the inmates down south, about a third of them could be found within shouting distance of the north pole. Some of the grandest chalets in the north had survived the ages, and many were now owned by a Cosa Nostra of enterprising space trash.