Hunter just shook his head.
"I just don't know," he said.
Flash!
They walked for days.
Or at least Hunter had manipulated the mind ring trip to seem that way.
He had pointed them west, toward the ocean. The fighting had moved on long ago, so the roads were deserted. But the damp green fields on either side of them were covered with the unspeakable debris of war. There was wreckage as far as the eye could see, the devastation being even more apparent down here at ground level. Many huge tanks, their tracks broken or run out, their gun barrels bent or melted. Broken-down troop carriers, turned up like skyscrapers, twisted metal reaching for the sky. Even more monstrous weapons movers, some crushed, some torn apart as if by some giant's hand. Downed space fighters, enormous rocket-powered aircraft bombers, even a few gigantic ion-pulse starships could be seen among all this as many things had fallen from the sky, too. Everywhere were clouds of thick, black smoke, everywhere the stink of war.
And everywhere, too, was the human wreckage. Most of the fallen soldiers were little more than piles of dirty blue salt, though sometimes Hunter and Joxx would come upon several hundred silhouettes of either white or red, lined up, as if they had been executed en masse. But there were also the remains of those who had not been demolecularized as a means of death. No, many soldiers across the nightmarish landscape had been killed the old-fashioned way: torn apart, broken, or dismembered by fire blasts, subnuclear weapons, or super-high explosives. Skeletons, twisted in the most grotesque of death poses, many still with the skin burned to their bones, littered the roadways and the fields. Some appeared to be smiling at Hunter and Joxx as they trudged by. Others seemed to be beckoning to them.
In all his travels, real or imagined, Hunter had never seen anything so gruesome.
It was sunrise when they reached the cliffs of Moher.
They could hear the ocean crashing and the wind blowing, but the fog and smoke were so thick, it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front of them. Here at Moher, the sea had battered the land and won for thousands of years. Until the massive triad had been put in place, that is. Now the coastline was as straight as a razor, perfect and unending in both directions. But it was still a long drop down to the water. And the next stop after that was New York City, or thereabouts.
The cliffs were as deserted as the roads. But it was clear the path of destruction that had started at Kelly's Hollow an indeterminate amount of time before had gone right through here — and far beyond, as it turned out. For an especially stiff wind began to blow as if on cue, as Hunter knew it would, and suddenly they were able to see through the thick mist. Before them, a dozen gigantic structures appeared, stretching far out to sea. Dull gray, devoid of ornamentation, some of them still burning from battle damage, but most being intact, they ran atop the rough ocean waters all the way to the horizon and beyond.
They looked odd, especially from this vantage point, yet there was no doubt what they were.
Bridges.
"The forbidden spans…" Joxx breathed. "They originated here?"
Hunter had been surprised upon first seeing them, too.
Along the shoreline, the wreckage of dozens of enormous warships was also visible. They'd all been hit by cobalt bolts, and in some cases their remains were crashing up against the side of the gigantic bridges and the massive triad. Hunter knew a strange battle had been fought here. Between the people on the warships and the people on the bridges, both using and being hit by cobalt lightning bolts, fired by both sides from starships flying deep in space.
It was clear, too, that the people who built the bridges had bested those fighting on the warships. Through Hunter's talent at time-shortening the mind ring trip, he was presenting Joxx with the remains of a battle that had actually been fought months before. While the Isle was still being bombarded by isolated cobalt weapons flying in outer space, the war had moved on from there. And it was clear that it had moved across these huge bridges.
But how had the spans been built? Where did the material come from? The craftsmen? The designers?
There weren't any…
They had not been needed.
"My God," Joxx said, collapsing to his knees at the edge of the cliff. "Electron torches! Real ones. That's obviously the key. They can take any atomic structure and combine it with another until it is strong enough to rival ion steel, the strongest material known in the Galaxy. And they can shape materials into any design wanted, then have the torches' brain come up with the best way to actually build it."
Electron torches building bridges? Why not? Warships can be hit and sunk; flying machines can be shot down. But bridges can be repaired, and with electron torches, they can be repaired very quickly, almost at split-second speed. Networks of tubes built into the center of the spans indicated some sort of high-speed transport system had been factored into the design as well. A troop transport equipped with an ion-powered engine could make it across the ocean to New York in the same amount of time as a shuttle flying over it: approximately seventeen minutes.
Joxx stared out at the wreckage and the bridges for a long time. "So they launched an invasion from here. It's certainly a novel way to get to the other side of the ocean."
"And start the disaster that Jimmy hoped would never happen," Hunter agreed.
"But why would anyone in their right mind want to dis-mantle what Emperor Jimmy had put together? For what reason? There were no wants. No problems at all. The Galaxy had been settled peacefully, and everyone was prosperous and free to do what they want. Why ruin that?"
A stiff, bitter wind blew off the ocean and began wearing down Hunter's face just as it had worn down the rocks here for ages.
"Why ruin it?" Hunter asked the question again. "Because you weren't the one running it…. You weren't the one in power. It's called hubris. Ever hear the word?"
Joxx didn't reply. He just sat down and stared at the destruction around him, the debris left behind after the invasion forces had departed.
"It's a campaign that will succeed beyond its creator's wildest dreams, I can tell you that," Hunter said, taking a soggy seat on the wet grass beside him. "There will be bitter fighting here on Earth and on just about every planet in the Galaxy. Nearly twenty years of it. Ever wonder why there is so little history left from this period? It's because all life, all culture, was almost totally destroyed.
"I've seen many of the battles within the mind rings. I was even involved in some of the fighting. It was brutal— and not something we have to revisit here, though maybe, at a future day it would be wise to. All you have to know is that Brother Michael won, because somehow he'd gained access to an army and, even more important, to a technology more powerful than what was currently available. This technology allowed him to build weapons, to fly in space faster, to build these bridges. That technology was the electron torch. That's all it took to overthrow the First Empire."
Another silence between them. The wind was howling now, the rain coming down in sheets.
"But how did he get himself out of that bog?" Joxx wondered aloud. "How was he able to bring himself back to life?"
Hunter didn't answer the question.
Instead he told Joxx, "Just hang on. We're going back across the Pond."
Flash!
The booty stretched on forever.
Miles of it. Stacks of it. Some of it packed inside airtight, deep-space containers, some of it lying broken and scattered on the ground. Jewels. Comet dust. Small meteorites made of solid gold. Coined money, sheets of shimmering aluminum, silver bars, tons of it, lying unattended. Tarnishing. Rusting. Melting away in the very hot sun.