Gryphon didn't know how far word of whatever the hell he'd supposedly done on Musashi had spread - he'd maintained total radio silence since leaving the SDF-17 - but he figured that even if the news had reached this godsforsaken corner of the galaxy, the local authorities would be too inept and indolent to do anything about it. The Tion Hegemony had to be the galaxy's most pathetic interstellar polity. He had often wondered why it hadn't been conquered by its neighbors. Neither the Gamilons nor the Hutts, who were the de facto overlords of most of the Outer Rim Territories, would have had much trouble toppling or co-opting the weak Tion government. He supposed it was because there was nothing in the Hegemony either group wanted.

Either way, it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to give him trouble on remote, tranquil Rudrig. It wasn't even a planet that had much in the way of what passed for a military presence in the Tion Hegemony, being given over almost entirely to various functions having to do with the region's only postsecondary school, the University of Rudrig. Even so, he hadn't just flown into the only controlled spaceport on the planet and cheerfully announced his identity. Not with a thousand acres of nowhere conveniently located near one of the small farming communities that fed the university.

Moving with the mechanistic motions of a man whose brain is on autopilot, Gryphon climbed down from his Valkyrie, which was parked in GERWALK mode among some boulders in the lee of some hills outside of town, wrestled the Cyclone down from its storage compartment, and deployed the fighter's adaptive camouflage net. Then he opened the Cyclone up into motorcycle mode, flipped open the emergency cache on the back, and rummaged inside until he found the rain poncho. It wasn't a perfect disguise by any means, but it would at least keep people from seeing the name painted on his CVR-3's plastron.

He hadn't slept since leaving the SDF-17, and he had no real reason to stop here, other than the feeling that he simply couldn't go on. Already tired from the mission on Musashi and the baffling, horrifying whirlwind of hell that had followed it, he'd hit the wall hard after 72 hours of non-stop flight. If Zoner was really on his tail, if Kei was really on his tail, then he'd just have to deal with it.

Kei...

The thought of her, just then, just there, was enough to make him stumble as he tried to mount the Cyclone and fall, armored man and armored bike hitting the dusty ground in a clattering heap. Gryphon just lay there, one leg under the bike, curled up with his hands on his head, as everything he'd been walling off from his mind with a kind of hideous soul-blank fugitive fugue came crashing in on him at once. Had the world gone mad, or had he? Did he really remember Kei hurling hatred at him, trying to kill him? Zoner turning into an ice sculpture, giving him that horrible flat-eyed stare and ordering his arrest?

I changed the code. Your stuff is in room 498. I hope you fry you fucker. - Kei

Even now, some tiny part of his brain remarked with a tsk that she really should've put a comma in the last sentence. He hated that part of himself right now, but it wouldn't stop. Every time he pictured the line, his mind's eye stuck the comma in. Somehow it made the whole thing that much more terrible.

I hope you fry, you fucker.

Gryphon didn't know how long he lay there, curled up in the dust. Eventually, though, the emotional seizure seemed to pass. His body unbent, lying slack, and then he began to marshal his strength.

Get ahold of yourself, Ben, he told himself sternly. Crawling out from under the Cyclone, he righted it and climbed on, successfully this time. It's obvious what happened. Either everybody went crazy, you went crazy... or the fix is in. All you need to do is get some sleep, get your wits back about you, and you'll be able to figure out what happened. Hell, if Zoner or Kei do catch up with you, they'll have had time to calm down and get a grip as well, and they'll help you solve this.

He kept mulling it over as he rode out of the hills and picked up the paved road leading to the town. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the situation could be salvaged. He wasn't sure what the hell was happening, but if he just got a little breathing room and some rest, he became certain that he could figure it out.

You've been in worse spots, he told himself. Remember Acheron? You should've died there, but you didn't. Get your shit together, go back to Musashi, investigate. There's got to be evidence left in that school, whatever the hell happened. Find it, and then they'll have to listen to you.

Thus resolved, Gryphon felt better as he rolled into the little farming town - there had been no sign on the road, so he had no idea of its name. He was still caught up in his ruminations and didn't notice the vibe in the town at first, but as he made his way toward the center, it began to sink in. People here seemed... nervous. Almost stunned, as if some important figure had recently died, or they'd just had news that this year's would be a bad harvest and hard times were ahead. They didn't look directly at him or each other.

He entered the town's central square and had a look around, then rode across the square toward the Holiday Inn. Not his favorite hotels in the galaxy, but it would do. He'd only be there long enough to get a shower and some rest before heading back to Musashi anyway. The Cyclone drew a few curious looks - apparently the locals didn't see motorcycles armed with obvious missile weapons very often - but no one seemed inclined to even look at his face.

He entered the lobby, automatically looking around as he did so. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for that weird, subdued, shell-shocked vibe. Gryphon hoped belatedly that he hadn't blundered into some kind of planetary coup in progress or something. All he needed was to have an encounter with members of some tinpot Revolutionary Guard right now. On the left side of the lobby was a coffee shop; straight ahead was the reception desk; on the right was a newsterm, its main display cycling through the front pages of the various newspages it carried. For whatever reason, the one being displayed when Gryphon looked at the terminal was in Italian.

IL WDF DISTRUTTO!!

Whaaaaaaat?



An hour later, he sat on the bed in the hotel's front corner room, printouts from the galaxy's newsfeeds scattered all around him, the Network 23 News playing on the holographic TV. He wasn't taking any of it in. His brain had locked up and stopped receiving new inputs after the fourth rewritten version of the same news story.

The SDF-17 attacked. In orbit over Musashi. Hours after he'd left. Minutes after Zoner had resigned from the WDF to follow him. Or possibly Yuri or Kei. He couldn't even fathom who was chasing whom. All that mattered was that the Wayward Son had been attacked. Destroyed. Not down with all hands, thank the gods, but many.

What followed was nearly as shocking. With both ships - the SDF-17 and a GENOM Star Destroyer so big Gryphon had at first taken its size for a misprint - destroyed and one of Musashi's three cities to boot, the United Galactica Assembly had wasted no time in pinning responsibility for the disaster on the Wedge Defense Force, nullifying the Pact Galactica, and declaring all the surviving Wedge Defenders outlaws. Gryphon sensed the hand of Largo in this. In all of it, but especially in the sudden political reversal that ensued as soon as the WDF was no longer able to defend itself.

Preliminary reports indicated that dozens of survivors of the event the press had already dubbed Sonfall had already been murdered - "killed while resisting arrest", the more state-aligned news sources put it - by bounty hunters and GENOM-backed death squads. They had scattered, heading for what had been friendly ports, running for what they thought was safe territory in order to catch their breath and regroup, and had run straight into the crosshairs. Some had been cut down by members of various local police and military forces they had thought were their friends, dying, no doubt, with looks of surprise mixed with a final, terrible understanding.

Numb and cold, feeling like the room was tilting, Gryphon wondered how many of his friends - if they had even been his friends at the end - were dead. There were few names mentioned in the papers. No mention of any of the members of his squadron, or of the Shadow Squad; no mention of Marty Rose or ReRob, Chris Meadows or Adam Johnson. One article said Zeta Cygni stood abandoned, the cities burned by GENOM, but there was some debate on other feedsites as to whether that were true.

The few names mentioned were bad enough. Jolly Roger Squadron had been wiped out covering Prometheus's escape from what Captain Hayes had thought was the safe port of Deralia. The WDF Deep Space Patrol ships Delphinus and Enterprise had vanished altogether; GENOM was claiming that Delphinus had been destroyed near Jyurai by a Star Destroyer battle group. So that was Rick and Roy, Rob and Aeka, who knew how many others, all dead, and the rest hunted.

And, buried deep at the bottom of one of the articles, Gryphon had found a trackback to an earlier article, one which was linked because it described what reporters now thought of as the true beginning of the story - the incident that had splintered the WDF's command staff and left the SDF-17 vulnerable to such a devastating sneak attack.

The WDF's executive officer, Commander Benjamin Hutchins (also known by his fighter pilot callsign, Gryphon), escaped from the SDF-17's brig - possibly with the aid of co-conspirators - and fled the ship several hours before the GENOM starship Executioner located and engaged the Wayward Son. Hutchins was being held on charges of mass murder after allegedly slaughtering a classroom full of primary-school students during a hostage rescue operation on the Musashi surface. There can be little doubt that the murders, which were caught on the school's security cameras and witnessed by Worlds Welfare Work Association Trouble Consultant Kei Morgan, were deliberate and sadistic, not the result of some accident during the rescue operation.

So that was why Kei freaked out, anyway. She thought she'd seen him murdering children. Truth was, he never made it to that classroom; Kei cut him off coming the other way and damn near blew him away. Which made the security footage... what, exactly?

Snarling, Gryphon crumpled the printout and hurled it across the room. What the fuck did it matter now?

The Wedge Defense Force was dead. Its flagship destroyed, a radioactive hulk scarring the surface of a planet he wished he had never heard of. Its survivors scattered to the far winds and hunted. They were all fugitives now, everyone who had worn the diamond and protected the galaxy with all the pride it implied. Largo had succeeded not only in destroying the WDF, but in destroying its legacy. The backfill sidebars in the papers were full of well-paid reporters and political figures being shocked, shocked at the WDF iniquities GENOM's "investigators" were "regretfully" "revealing". Many of the force's friends had turned against it, either because they feared GENOM or because they hadn't been such good friends after all, Gryphon couldn't tell which.

Only Salusia was really speaking up, and their voice didn't carry the weight in the UG Assembly that it once had. Their representatives found themselves marginalized, patronized, ignored. The only way they could redress the matter was to go to war with the whole damn galaxy, just about, and Gryphon knew Asrial was too smart to do that, no matter how much her heart might've wanted to. The survivors of the Wedge Defense Force were being thrown under the bus.

Gryphon drew his Gallant-H90 sidearm from its holster on his hip and regarded it for a few long moments.

I bet this thing can't even kill me, he thought with bitter amusement, but even as he did, he knew he wouldn't do it if it could. He had never approved of suicide. That was a coward's way out, Zoner's way out. He remembered how disgusted he used to get whenever Zoner would harp about how it was The Ultimate Choice and the one true freedom of all sentient beings. He'd usually kept quiet about it, concealing his disdain for the concept for friendship's sake. Right now, friendship seemed like such an alien concept that he gave it full rein.

No, fuck you, Zoner, he thought, putting the weapon away. I'm not going to make it that easy for you. Or for Kei. Where the fuck do the two of you get off, turning against me that fast? After all we've been through? All the times we've had to believe in each other to survive? You should have known better. Even if all your senses told you otherwise, you should have known better!

The sudden application of a boot to the door derailed that train of furious thought completely. Gryphon reacted automatically, before his conscious mind registered what was going on. He rolled sideways, away from the door, his right hand snatching his CVR helmet from the bedspread as he went. By the time he hit the floor, face down, he was already jamming the helmet on his head. Above him, he heard the sharp brrrup of a submachinegun, felt the bed vibrate against his shoulder as bullets ripped into the mattress.

He came up shooting, the beam of his Gallant catching the gunner high on the left side of the chest. The gunner, a human, yelled in pain and dismay, losing his balance. Another burst from his subgun tore into the ceiling, showering the room with chunks of plaster. Behind him, three more figures could be seen crowding toward the door. One of them shoved the reeling gunner out of the way and raised a metal tube to his shoulder. Cursing, Gryphon threw himself backward, shooting as he went. The return fire rattled the guy with the RPG; he fired low, hitting the floor, just as Gryphon's back hit the window. The explosion blew the armored Wedge Defender clear out of the hotel; he crashed to the ground outside, skidding, his CVR-3 throwing up sparks. Somehow he kept hold of his Gallant.

As he scrambled to his feet, the three unwounded attackers - apparently wary of advancing into a structurally damaged blast zone - didn't follow. Gryphon figured he knew where they were going. Holstering the Gallant, he ran around the corner of the hotel and toward the street. Sure enough, three figures - two men and a woman - burst out of the hotel's front door just as he arrived in the parking area. He threw himself down as the woman and one of the men raked a parked car with E-11 blaster carbines. They probably couldn't penetrate his armor - certainly not the hard parts - but why take chances? Besides, the third guy was struggling to reload his RPG.

"Take out the Cyclone! Cut him off!" the woman barked to the RPG man. Gryphon bit off another curse, raised himself to elbows and knees, then got up onto his feet, trying to keep as low as possible as he sprinted for the end of the row. The RPG man fumbled with his second round, finally got it fitted, raised the tube. Gryphon put everything he had into a long, diving leap for the Cyclone. He hit it, half-straddling it, and knocked it down. The rocket whistled over, barely missing Gryphon's outside elbow, and plowed into a parked car behind him. Shrapnel and car parts clattered painfully against his back and helmet.

"Idiot!" the woman barked, smacking the RPG man on the back of his head. Gryphon got a leg under himself and shoved the Cyclone upright, thumbing the starter. The turbine kicked over and caught immediately. He cranked on the power and used the gyroscopic effect to get the bike the rest of the way upright and himself in the saddle, then punched a second thumb key. The Cyclone reared, boosting into the air, and reconfigured to battroid mode in moments. Gryphon leveled his left forearm at the RPG man. A targeting scope popped out of its shoulder compartment and swung in front of his facebowl.

"You want to try that again now?" he asked.

The RPG man fumbled to reload for a second, stared at the two capped missile tubes aimed straight for him, then dropped his weapon and ran. The other two, deprived of the only firepower they had with any chance of taking out a Cyclone battroid, followed.

Gryphon let them go. There wasn't anything to be gained by killing them, and after everything he'd just read, he'd had enough of death for today. Dropping to his knees, he released the Cyclone from his CVR-3, then stood up and pulled it into cycle mode again. In the street around him, people were timidly emerging from the cover they'd taken when the RPG man blew up the car. All were staring. Some were pointing and reaching for telephones. In the distance, Gryphon could hear sirens.

Time to go, he thought, and left town at top speed. No one tried to follow him.

His movements even more weary and mechanistic than they had been when he arrived, he stowed the Cyclone, secured the Valkyrie's camouflage net, and climbed back into the cockpit. He robotically secured his seat straps, lowered the canopy, and started powering up the fighter.

I didn't even get a shower, he thought bleakly.

Part of his mind was already working on an action plan. His first order of business was to find someplace to re-paint his fighter - and his CVR-3 and his Cyclone, come to that. That way he might at least not be recognized instantly, either as himself or as a Wedge Defender in general. He'd also have to line up a source for parts and supplies. He had to shake off whatever pursuit he might have, find a place to lie low for a while, make these arrangements, consider his next move. He'd never anticipated becoming a galactic fugitive, so he'd prepared no boltholes in advance. He was entirely on his own, making it up as he went along.

As night fell over the hills, he looked up through the Valkyrie's canopy at the darkening sky, watching the stars start to wink through the sky.

What the fuck am I going to do now?

Then, in this advanced state of exhaustion and despair, a hoarse voice swam into his ragged mind.

The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now... but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. Indeed. This is the moment of truth, that fine and fateful line between control and disaster.

Yes. Yes. There was one bastard in the universe who wouldn't have been touched by this madness, because he was insulated by a madness all his own. One place in the universe where Gryphon would be able to rest for a little while, take some lessons from a master of improvised reinvention, escape and evasion, high-speed defiant runs on the edge of total destruction. One chance for, if not salvation, at least acquiring the tools for survival until such time as salvation became feasible.

He opened the throttles for takeoff, switched to fighter mode, and left Rudrig behind. Next stop, Woody Creek.

Dr. Duke would know what to do.

"Where Were You When the Fun Stopped?" - an Exile Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas © 1971 by Hunter S. Thompson
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