On the viz screen was the message: "Engage immediately. Do not hesitate. Xara."
The soldier who took the device, read the viz message, and then watched as J'eevx faded away.
Only then did he look at what the ghost had given him.
It was a holo-girl capsule.
18
Needle City was in ruins.
Smoke and flames were everywhere. The Sea of Green was now a murky brown. High above, storm clouds were unleashing a torrential downpour on the devastated landscape, the first unscheduled rain the planet Megiddo had seen in more than a century. At some points up north, the poles had begun to melt.
Nowhere was the destruction more apparent than in the wreckage of the sky needle. What was once a three-mile-high tower was now a thousand-foot pile of rubble. Plumes of steam were exhaling from points all over the debris, interspersed with cracks of electricity and bursts of bright yellow sparks. The tower, like the city — like the entire planet — seemed dead, devoid of any life.
But deep within the ruins, one heart was still beating.
Joxx was alive.
He didn't know how. The tower had come crashing down around him, hundreds of thousands of tons of material falling about his head, but somehow he'd been spared. Was it because he'd been standing in the jail cell when the enormous structure collapsed? Was it just by luck that one huge jagged piece of melted rock fell this way, and a huge twisted girder fell that way, creating a shield that protected him from the rest of the collapsing structure? Was it simply fate? Or destiny?
Or was it because he was a Special, and escaping death by miraculous means just came along with the territory?
He didn't know.
But he could still feel every part of his body, and though he had some cuts and bruises, nothing was broken, nothing was numb, and even his hair had survived with a minimum of muss.
He still found himself buried beneath tons of rubble, however. Dark and craggy and filled with hissing power tubes and crackling electrical conduits, the debris was also being soaked by the nonstop deluge coming down from above.
As a result, it took Joxx nearly twelve hours to claw his way to daylight.
During the long climb out, one thought kept him going: / still have my secret weapon.
The Milky Way was a highly superstitious place. The farther one traveled out on the Fringe, the more superstitious people became.
Just what people considered bad luck was a list as endless as the number of different planets in the Milky Way itself. Launching depleted ships into a sun at the end of their lives was considered highly unlucky on just about every arm of the Fringe. Conversely, crashing a used-up ship into a graveyard planet was supposedly a guarantee of much good fortune. Slaying civilians during combat was frowned upon just about everywhere in the Galaxy, not so much for any humanitarian concerns but more out of the belief that it simply invited bad luck. In some star systems, being discourteous was considered unlucky, or looking at more than two suns at once, or being caught in the overlapping shadows of two moons. On Earth it was considered absolutely verboten to set foot on the mysterious, ancient bridges that crisscrossed the Mother Planet. On a planet called Xanez 6 in the Soltys Tri-star System, it was very bad luck to bathe while drunk. On Gallows 13 in the Masto-
Mattie Star System, it was considered very bad luck to blink your eyes while eating.
But there were some Galaxy-wide taboos, too, adhered to both by citizens of the most far-flung planets as well as those living cozily in the center of the Ball. By far, the strongest of these was the avoidance of any planet, moon or asteroid, that had a pyramid on it.
Just like the bridges on Earth and many, many more artifacts around the Milky Way, no one knew who built the pyramids or why'. They could be found in just about any part of the Galaxy; indeed, many had been discovered deep within mountains or at the bottom of ancient seas. That's how old some were.
The pyramids were probably the oldest artificial things in the Galaxy, older than any of the four Empires certainly. Those found on Earth had been dated to be at the very least 15,000 years old. But others uncovered throughout the Milky Way were much more ancient than that. Some appeared to be millions of years old.
No surprise, any researcher spouting such heretical facts usually found themselves very quickly out of favor with those who ruled the Fourth Empire. The official imperial line on the pyramids was that they were built sometime within the arc of the realm, for purposes yet to be determined; but this was nonsense, and everyone knew it. There was no rational explanation for the ancient structures and, because of the long-lasting belief that they radiated the darkest of bad luck even if one's eyes happen to gaze too long at one, everyone went to great lengths to avoid them completely.
Or at least that's what Joxx was banking on.
He'd reached the top of the pile of rubble, ironically just as the sun was setting on Megiddo.
The rain had finally stopped, but his eyes were still so filled with dust, his vision was blurry. He could see well enough, though, to realize the city around him was in ruins. Toppled buildings, devastated streets. Plumes of smoke billowing, and fires still raging everywhere.
Joxx was surprised to find no evidence of the space trucks his men had been flying in the last hours before the battle. An area close to the Needle down by the beach had been blasted out for the heavy-duty spacecraft to land, delivering the equipment from TW800. But there was no sign of them there now. No intact trucks, no wreckage either.
This meant only one thing: Joxx's men had quit the battlefield without him.
No search. No rescue effort.
They had left him behind for dead.
Of all the indignation he'd suffered during this endless day, that one cut the deepest.
Joxx was a Special, but he wasn't real good at what he was about to do. This would not deter him, though. He was so angry, so intense at the moment, he felt he could do this on willpower alone, and not necessarily by invoking some old trick known only to the Specials.
He stood at the peak of the highest twisted piece of what had been the sky needle and gazed hard at the rising moon. He suppressed a strange desire to begin howling at it. The last of the rain clouds were booming over the sea to the east. A bolt of lightning lit up the dismal scene for just a moment.
This enemy was good, Joxx thought. The strange invaders had bested him here, handing him the first two defeats in his career.
But they had made one big mistake: They'd left him alive.
And now, he was about to make them pay.
He snapped his fingers, and an instant later, he was sitting in the control room aboard the ShadoVox.
It smelled musty and was damp inside, but this did not bother him.
He sucked in a mouthful of air and let it out slowly. Outside the nearest porthole, he could see a set of craggy, lifeless mountains; through a portal next to it, the edge of the huge, deep crater in which Joxx had hidden his extraordinary warship. To its left, through the control room's arched superglass window, he could see, drifting in space
100,000 miles away, the still-burning planet of Megiddo.
Straight ahead, not five miles away, was the southern base of an ancient pyramid.
So, this was his ace in the hole. The secret known only to him. And he was very proud of it.