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Synopsis

Question #1: Are Jettero Heller and Countess Krak dead!? The answer could prove a shock to the system--the solar system, that is.

Heller, for his part, has been busy saving the world:

Global warming reversed. The energy crisis over. The greatest problems on Earth solved.

But saving the world is never easy.

He'll have to blast a gang of space pirates. He'll have to capture and control a black hole and set it up as an inexhaustible supply of sustainable energy. He'll have to undertake a journey to Saturn and back, a titanic chunk of ice in tow. And he'll have to confront and capture Soltan Gris.

Then comes the hard part. Heller is headed back to Voltar, where he uncovers the identity of the powerful figure behind the conspiracy to end all conspiracies. He's facing his deadliest nemesis yet, and before the intergalactic battle is over, the entire mission could end in Disaster.

Excerpt

PART SIXTY-TWO

To My Lord Turn, Justiciary of the Royal Courts and Prison, Government City, Planet Voltar, Voltar Confederacy

Your Lordship, Sir!

I, Soltan Gris, Grade Eleven General Services Officer, former Secondary Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Voltar Confederacy (All Hail His Royal Majesty Cling the Lofty and All of His Empire), am now forwarding the eighth and final part of my confession.

I will now be able to relate how it was that I came to be in your fine prison.

Your Lordship may have been shocked to learn that Fleet Officer Jettero Heller was killed at that roadhouse in Connecticut.

Yes, I ordered Agent Raht to kill him, but it was still Heller's fault. After all, he was the one who bought that desolated roadhouse where the Mafia once smuggled illegal liquor, who had befriended the old blind woman and who had posed as a "whitey engineer" for the Maysabongo delegation. He was the one who had hired those two deputy sheriffs and made them "Maysabongo Marines."

My reaction at the time was a strange sort of numbness. I had planned, plotted and dreamed of Heller's death for months and I should have been elated. But I wasn't, for some reason.

I also felt no joy when I watched Ahmed drop the poison-gas bomb down the air chute to the Countess Krak's cell.

My personal feelings did not deter me from my duty, however, when Agent Raht told me there were diamonds at the roadhouse. I had ordered Raht to kill Heller, and all the bungling idiot could do was whine about losing blood and bother me with radioed pleas for help. Typical riffraff. But when he said he had found a bag of diamonds, duty called.

So it was a definite pleasure to take Tug One from Afyon with Captain Stabb and his crew of Antimancos. The ship--Heller had named it the Prince Caucalsia--had been sitting dormant while Heller was in the United States. I figured it was only fitting that I visit his corpse in the very ship that he used to bring us to Earth. After all, that was when my troubles started.

I told the assassin pilots that they didn't have to worry--we weren't trying to escape the planet. (I never figured out who started that idea, but it is the sort of thing Lombar Hisst, as the head of the Apparatus, would have done.)

And speaking of assassins, it was a relief not to have to worry any more about the one that Lombar had assigned to kill me if I fouled up.

My plan was simple. We would go to Connecticut and pick up the diamonds, flash on down to Florida and wipe out Heller's antipollution plant, zip up to Detroit and bomb the Chryster plant where he was building the new carburetors, then come back to New York and blow up the Empire State Building. I could then tell Rockecenter that I had succeeded--that Heller was no longer a threat to his petroleum monopoly.

Then with one last load of Lombar's opium, I would return victorious to Voltar and become the head of the Apparatus.

And so it was as I kissed my dear Utanc goodbye.

Copyright © 1987 by L. Ron Hubbard

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