Mack Maloney - Star Hawk 04 by Battle at Zero Point

Author:Battle at Zero Point
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-30T21:30:04+00:00

All this was hell for a person like him. He was soldier, from a long line of soldiers. And he was loyal.

He believed so strongly in the Empire that, as a younger man, he’d had O’Nay’s face tattooed on his forearm. Being away from the battle, being denied the opportunity to defend the realm really was like death for him.

A very slow death.

Multx sat now in his grand room, the one that overlooked the waterfall and offered a view of all three levels of the lake. It was still early morning, but he was already into his second bottle of slow-ship wine.

Though he’d hardly been a teetotaler before his banishment to the Ball, he was a heavy drinker now. His cellars were filled with rare vintages of the popular star juice. But a year of chronic imbibing had done nothing to raise his spirits; actually, the opposite was true. In the past twelve months, he’d become a most melancholy man.

His work had always been his mistress. He was without a wife and already bored with the few eligible women of the dull little planet. He couldn’t even dream properly anymore. During the previous night he’d imagined a bright light hovering above the skylight over his bedroom canopy. This light grew so bright, he’d been unable to open his eyes for several minutes. What he was able to see looked like a string of slowly developing explosions, brilliant in red, but also in white and blue. When it all finally went away, Multx was left to lie in his sweaty bed, fully awake, to wonder what had happened. A flashback from some long-ago victory of his? Another catastrophe in the making in outer space? Or maybe a host of gob-lins had arrived to finally take him away. In any case, he never did get back to sleep. When the planet’s prime sun rose, he was up with it, drinking his breakfast of wine. By the time the second sun rose, he was close to finishing his second bottle.

He’d heard about the battles between the SG and SF, of course. Everyone in the Galaxy had by now.

They did not surprise him much. Multx had had his own run-ins with the Solar Guards, and he knew their leadership to be both deceitful and deceptive. Like many in the SF, he believed the Empire would have been better off without the junior service. But all this just made his forced retirement even worse. Had the incident with the Blackship never happened, he would have been right in the thick of this internecine conflict. And at that mo-ment he would have given just about anything, done just about anything, to be back in the fight again. Instead, he was here, looking out on an artificial lake with an artificial waterfall, early morning suns glistening off both, trying to pull the cork out of his third bottle of slow-ship wine.

It was strange then that just as the bottle’s stopper finally came loose, he looked up to see two men standing right in front of him.

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