StarHawk by Mack Maloney Page B

causing it to pulse with an odd emerald hue.
    “Brother Calandrx is correct,” Berx declared. “Whatever you are going to fly is here. Inside this tiny box.”
    Hunter looked to Erx; in this group he stood out as a beacon of reason.
    “ ‘Twenty and six’ is an archaic term for the twenty-sixth dimension,” Erx explained, taking the box from Berx. “Few people bother with any dimension beyond thirteen or fourteen these days, but this one has some fairly interesting properties.”
    “You can hide things there,” Calandrx said simply. “And no one will ever find them…”
    “Have you looked at what’s inside yet?” Erx asked the veteran space pilot.
    “I couldn’t bear to,” he said. “Not before you came.”
    He looked around his expansive library.
    “I don’t think I can retrieve it in here,” he said. “This room is just a bit too small and there might be a problem if I can’t get it to go back into the twenty-six again.”
    He stood up, drained his wine goblet, and announced, “So then, gentlemen—to the garden!”
    Calandrx’s garden was more like a small woods with a clearing in the middle.
    It was a rather large piece of real estate on what was actually a very crowded part of the planet—another benefit of winning his Earth Race so long ago. The trees ran on either side of the expansive lawn. Living sculptures and glowing plant pots dotted the top of the finely trimmed terranium grass.
    The four starmen staggered out to the side of an old weathered cottage that was tenuously attached to the main house.
    “Here, the perfect place,” Calandrx declared, placing the small green box down on the ground about fifty feet away from the rest of them. Above, the sky was dancing with color from all the StarScrapers in use down in central Big Bright City, twenty miles down the main canal.
    Once the green box had been put in position, Calandrx activated an electron torch and sent a long, thin beam of red light crashing into it. A small storm of sparks came cascading from the box. A strange mist filled the air. Then there was a sharp crack, and then a distinctive odor filled their nostrils.
    A moment later, the contents of the small box popped into their existence.
    “My God,” Calandrx said with a gasp. “ What is it ?”
    Hunter was stunned. Long, thin, rugged. A wing. A canopy. Wheels…
    It was his old flying machine.
    Erx and Berx began laughing.
    “Brother Multx!” Erx said, shaking his head. “Never at a loss for the dramatic!”
    “That old mutt,” Berx exclaimed. “Did he take it with us when we left Fools 6, or did he have someone go back to get it?”
    There was no answer to that question now—and frankly Hunter couldn’t have cared less about how Multx had been able to retrieve it. The important thing was this: His flying machine was here, and obviously it was what Hunter would pilot in the Earth Race.
    Once he had regained his composure, Calandrx began shivering with delight.
    “It’s such a beautiful machine!” he declared, approaching the strange craft and passing his hand along the underside of the fuselage. “It’s so not like the flying triangles everyone flies now. It’s so less boring.”
    He began walking the length of the aircraft, fascinated by its unusual design, its wings, its overall sleekness. When he arrived back where he’d started from, he could not stop shaking his head.
    “I’ve never seen such a machine as this, not while I was awake, anyway,” he said. “This thing is stunning.
    It looks like it should be flying, not like those cheese wedges the Empire insists on churning out.”
    Calandrx looked to the stars and began searching for the right words. “Your machine contains what no one else can see these days. There is a unique design here. A unique passion. This thing has… what is the word they used many years ago?”
    “ ‘Kick-ass’?” Erx offered.
    “ ‘Ballsy’?” Berx weighed in.
    Calandrx was shaking his head. “No, you dullards!”