"And why is that?" Hunter prompted him again.
Emperor Jimmy smiled again. "That, of my three brothers, I was the one that was somehow chosen. Because if it had been one of the other two — well, let's just say, I shudder at the thought—"
"But what do you mean?" Joxx blurted out.
"How can I best explain it?" Jimmy replied. "My youngest brother was a strange fusion of myself and my older brother Michael. I'd like to think / was the brains of the outfit and that I had at least a little compassion in me. My older brother did not. He was all brawn and no brains, and he was a nasty sort, drunk or sober. And my youngest brother? He was both smart and nasty — the worst combination."
Jimmy smiled again, but this time he didn't seem so happy.
"God help me for saying this," he said reflectively. "But if it was one of them who'd been brought back to life, and not me… well, that would have been disastrous."
Flash!
Now, this one was tricky.
Hunter and Joxx next found themselves in a shuttle similar to the craft that had carried them from Peter's to New York.
But this buglike vessel was in much worse shape than that previous one; in fact, it was full of holes and was smoking heavily. And they were not just passengers this time. They were sitting at the flight controls and actually flying the thing.
It was also in the process of crashing.
Joxx was terrified — and Hunter couldn't blame him. He'd gone through this disturbing chapter many times before, and while he always managed to get by with just a few cuts and scrapes, there was no guarantee that the same outcome was assured this time in.
They were back over the so-called Emerald Isle, the place of the ambush, the place from which Emperor Jimmy had come. Hunter had determined that just about a year had passed since their meeting with the paralyzed ruler. In the thousand years since the ascendancy of the terrorist turned potentate, the Isle had become the cultural mecca of the Milky Way, just as Peter's had become its spiritual center and New York the hub of its political and military might. Indeed, the Isle had been turned into one great palace, with buildings from sea to sea that rivaled those of Peter's in grandeur and New York for sheer elegance. In the millennia of Jimmy's rule, the people who'd been born in this place had been treated like celebrities throughout the Galaxy. There was never any need for these people to buy a meal or a drink anywhere among the stars. They were oiled and fed for free, just as long as they reveled their hosts with tales of the green jewel and how, if you looked hard enough, you could see a pinpoint of green coming from their home at the far end of the Galaxy.
The Emerald Isle didn't look anything like that mythical place now. Now the island nation was one huge battlefield.
Hunter and Joxx were flying the shuttle above it, and even as his hands were gripping the steering yoke so hard they had turned bone white, Joxx couldn't help but notice the land below looked like a scene from hell.
Fire, smoke, the landscape thick with wreckage from some great calamity. Tracked weapons, huge troop movers, all kinds of flying machines, everything on the ground in pieces scattered as far as the eye could see. It seemed incomprehensible that something so beautiful could become so devastated in less than a year. But that's exactly what had happened.
Joxx quickly dragged his attention back to the matter at hand. This shuttle was crashing, and there didn't seem to be a lot they could do about it. Even worse, in the traveling compartment behind them was not a load of passengers or even soldiers, but the litters of the dead. That's when Joxx looked down at his uniform and realized that it had no places to input weapons or hook up communications devices or power supplies or jet packs, items essential for combat in these ancient days. Instead, the uniform had a plain white field imprinted on its front with a huge red cross in the middle.
"We're combat medics," Hunter yelled over to him. "Don't ask me why, but we are now known as The Knights of Malta."
"And we are crashing with a load of dead into the land of the dead?" Joxx screamed back at him.
Hunter could only nod grimly. "That's why this one is so tricky."
They fell below the thousand-foot mark. The sky all around them was filled with flash beams and aerial scatter bombs. The shuttle was mortally wounded, yet the people on the ground shooting at them seemed intent on making their end as painful as possible.
Two simultaneous explosions tore through the rear of the shuttle. The craft went nose over and began to plunge nearly straight down. Much smoke and fire was trailing in their wake. In the back, the load of bodies seemed to be groaning from the strain.
It was at this point in the trip that Hunter took in a deep breath… and checked the time. In his many visits to this incident, he'd learned an important thing: because of the huge battle going on below them, a layer of heated thermal air was rising from the battlefield. This patch of hot air was lurking at about four hundred feet. It was not much, but Hunter knew from experience that if he pulled the shuttle up at just the right moment, it might provide them enough of a bump to put them into a more controllable position.
He did a slow countdown to 400 feet, the sky around them absolutely covered with antiaircraft explosions. Five hundred feet… 450… 425… Now!
Hunter violently yanked back on the control column, pulling the steering yoke back so far, it almost crushed his chest. Joxx was simply numb with terror. His hands were on his head, nearly ripping out his uncombed hair. To him, it seemed just impossible for the shuttle to remain in flight.
But slowly, surely, Hunter pulled the shuttle out of its death dive and began getting some air under it. The sky down here was filled not just with aerial scatter bombs now but also blasts from big guns firing long range below them. Still, the shuttle finally did level out, Hunter's muscles straining to their limit in pulling the aircraft back under control. But this did nothing to stop the fire that was consuming their aft power compartment. In fact, they had barely seconds of flying time left before the aircraft exploded in midair. So Hunter's last-ditch maneuver hadn't saved them, it simply gave them a few more moments to avoid a crash.
Hunter managed to get Joxx's hands back on his steering column, and together they turned the gravely wounded aircraft to the right. Jammed up against his side window, incredibly Joxx began picking up landmarks he recognized. The vast clover field, the serpentine road, the ditch where the Easter morning ambush had taken place, the thick woods beyond.
Hunter shouted to steer the craft straight again, and suddenly they were clipping off the tops of holly trees.
Hunter yelled one more time: "Pull… now!" And pull they did.
Two seconds later, the shuttle crashed into the bog just beyond Kelly's Hollow.
Joxx was knocked unconscious by the impact.
No matter. Hunter had been knocked cold many times at this point in his previous mind trips. He dragged Joxx from the wreckage now and did a quick job spraying wound-mender on a nasty head gash the SG officer had suffered in the soggy crash.
Then he carried Joxx across the shallow part of the bog to a grove of holly trees that was quite familiar from previous crash landings. Pushing him down into the knee-deep shave grass surrounding the trees, Hunter ripped the red cross from his chest and then got down low.
It was strangely quiet here, especially since all around them, the island nation was totally engulfed in war. Hunter had splashed across this brackish water to the grove of holly trees three dozen times before, always trying to get it right. Not once upon landing did he see anyone else within sight of the bogs or the hollow that lay beyond.