Storm Over Saturn

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The KosmoVox was the second-fastest spaceship in the Galaxy.

It was a strange little craft belonging to the Earth Guard of the Fourth Galactic Empire. Like the Empire's mainline warships, they being the enormous two-mile-long Star-crashers, the KosmoVox was wedge-shaped, needle-nosed, and powered by a remarkable star engine known as a prop core. This allowed it to enter the seventh dimension and fly at a velocity known as Supertime. But while prop-core-equipped Starcrashers could travel at two light years a minute — traversing the Milky Way in one took less than a month — the KosmoVox could fly at nearly three light years a minute. This, even though the diminutive craft was only about one-hundredth the size of a monstrous Starcrasher.

No one knew who had built the KosmoVox or why it could go so fast. By twin sins of neglect and disinterest, much knowledge had been lost in the Fourth Empire over its seven centuries of expansion and dominance, including the secret of what made the prop cores work. The same held true for the KosmoVox. It was obviously a very old vessel, with bizarre nacelles and an overextended tail nearly belying its wedge shape. Yet it derived its power from the same source as the Empire's massive warships — the mysterious slab of black rock located in Earth's western desert known as the Big Generator — and could do just about everything they could do. It was just different, and no one had ever bothered to find out why.

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