The Fourth Empire s-3

by Mack Maloney

  "I lost it…" Hunter shot back.

  "Lost it?" the second guard barked. "It's imprinted on the back of your head."

  At this point, Hunter decided to just walk away, hoping the guards would simply fade into the swirl of the mind ring trip.

  And that's what happened. But then the foreman was behind him again. This part of the program was persistent.

  "Hey, wait a minute!" the foreman yelled at him. "Who the hell are you, anyway?"

  Hunter turned around just as the foreman was pulling a huge ray gun from his belt.

  "No ID, in an unauthorized area," the foreman was growling. "You're a security risk. Probably one of them angels in disguise, I'll bet."

  Once again, Hunter just turned his back and tried to walk away, hoping the mind ring would absolve itself. But the foreman was suddenly right in front of him. And this time, he had his ray gun pointing directly between Hunter's eyes.

  "Move again, and you're dust," the foreman told Hunter.

  At that point, everything seemed to stand still. Hunter found himself studying the foreman's uniform. Black, shiny, with tiny double lightning bolts on the collar and on the sleeves. It was starting to look familiar….

  Back in the future, there were two major branches of the Fourth Empire's military: the Space Forces, which were the Empire's far-flung Army, Navy, and Air Service, and the Inner Defense Forces, the Emperor's vast and murky personal army, which was charged with protecting the original Solar System from the Pluto Cloud in, but in reality could be found in just about every corner of the Galaxy. They were also known as the Solar Guards.

  There were some very dark elements within the Solar Guards: Hunter knew this from personal experience as a hit team of Guardsmen had been dispatched from Earth to take him out just as he was leading the forces on Planet America to victory. It seemed crazy now — because the history books said the Solar Guards had only been in existence for only four hundred years or so — but this guy's uniform was starting to look like those worn by the SG.

  Hunter just couldn't resist challenging him. "Who do you work for?" he asked the foreman directly. "Who's your boss?"

  The foreman never replied. He just pulled his trigger. Hunter was able to dive away at the last moment; still, the blast hit him high on the left shoulder, throwing him back a good ten feet or more. He hit the ground hard, scattering those images around him. He knew in that instant that he was in big trouble. He could feel real pain in his shoulder; he was bleeding, too. This mind ring was corrupted beyond belief — and now the foreman was aiming his weapon again.

  Hunter went up to one knee, his shoulder felt like it was on fire. He reached across to his side holster and instantly, his gun was out and pointing at the foreman's chest. But then Hunter hesitated. Did he really want to shoot this guy? What consequences would result? Though the foreman had just shot him, the man wasn't real. Not really real. If Hunter fired back at him, he might wind up blowing a hole right through the program.

  But then the foreman fired again.

  Hunter actually saw the stream of fire coming right at him. He dove off to his left. The blast of green fire went right over his head. The foreman took two giant steps forward and aimed once again. This time, Hunter didn't blink. He raised his gun and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again. The gun fizzled.

  It was empty. Dead. Without a charge.

  The foreman fired again. Two blasts. One hit Hunter's right arm, knocking the useless gun from his hand. The other ricocheted off his dopey helmet. He felt like someone had dropped an asteroid on his head. He literally saw stars swirling before his eyes.

  The foreman aimed again. Hunter couldn't believe this was happening. He was now bleeding heavily, and it felt like life was just oozing out of him.

  And this next blast would be a death blow___

  But suddenly the foreman wasn't looking at him anymore. Instead, he was aiming at something — or somebody— over Hunter's right shoulder. An expression of complete shock had washed over the foreman's face.

  Then came a bright flash of green light, and the foreman's head disappeared in a cloud of subatomic dust.

  Everything went black after that.

  "Hawk? Can you hear me?"

  Hunter tried to open his eyes but couldn't. It was just too painful.

  Where was he? He knew he was flat out on his back. A couple sharp rocks were poking him in the kidneys. And the smell of burnt fabric was filling his nostrils. The mind ring was no longer around his head; he knew that as well. But the taste of metal and blood was thick in his mouth.

  He finally managed to open his eyes and discovered that he was back on top of the butte. Four faces were staring down at him: Tomm, Zarex, Erx, and Berx.

  "Are you still with us, brother?" Tomm asked him uncertainly.

  Hunter tried to move his body. Every bone hurt.

  "You tell me," he finally gasped. "Am I still in one piece?"

  "That has yet to be determined," Erx murmured gravely.

  Hunter was lying next to the flattened rock, his arms and legs crumpled like a broken space doll. Berx lifted his head up and pressed a flask of slow-ship wine to his mouth. Hunter drank greedily.

  "What the hell happened to you?" Tomm exclaimed in a whisper.

  Hunter shook his head; even his eyelids hurt. "I'm not really sure…." was all he could reply.

  He drank some more wine, then in short bursts, he recounted watching Xronis Trey revert back to its previously lush state. The waving fields of grass. The pleasant blue sky. The bustling metropolis where now just the Last Drop stood, the sprawling base, its space docks soaring into the low-hanging clouds.

  More wine was poured into him. Hunter told diem about his stumbling upon the room behind the green door, the young female deportees, and how the workers had paid off the soldiers in order to take advantage of the situation.

  "That's why Kyx was hiding it," he went on, coughing out his words. "He used it over and over and over again because it was an easy way for him to find pleasure…."

  More wine. Hunter then told them about his encounter with the foreman, the man's Solar Guards-style uniform, and the one-sided gun battle that transpired.

  "But then something really strange happened," he concluded. "This guy was about to blast me again… and I think… I think someone shot him before he could shoot me…."

  Hunter paused and looked up at the four faces again. There was deep skepticism in all four. Even in his battered state, Hunter knew it was hard to blame them. Feeling pain? Fighting with images? Images coming to the rescue? These things just weren't supposed to happen inside mind rings.

  "But I am wounded," Hunter said to them suddenly, as a way to plead his case.

  They ripped off his tunic, looked at his shoulder, then his injured arm. Incredibly, real blood was flowing from both.

  The four men were astonished. Tomm examined the wounds closely. "This is outrageous! It appears you've actually sustained injuries within a mind ring…."

  "Or he could have been flailing about these sharp rocks, in the throes of the dastardly thing…." Zarex whispered in Tomm's ear.

  Tomm gave Zarex a very troubled look. The priest knew what he meant right away. Whatever the cause, Hunter's physical injuries were apparent. But could the mind trip have caused some mental damage as well?

  Berx had retrieved the ring, cast aside in the last moment of the mind trip.

  "This device must be so deteriorated, it's to the point of massively skewing the program," he said, studying the ring. "With the age of this thing, and the fact that Kyx went back there so many times, it may have lost its synaptic integrity."

  "Any guesses how that might have affected his perceptions?" Zarex asked.

  Berx just shrugged. He knew a bit about mind rings.

  "It could have been presenting him with an entirely skewed program," the cannonball spaceman replied. "Maybe one containing things he wanted to see… like the deportees, the Solar
Guards…"

  "Not a good situation for him or us," Erx added worriedly.

  "This thing is even more dangerous than we feared," Zarex said, taking the ring from Berx. "There's no way we can ever use it again. Not if this is the result."

  Hunter began to protest, but Tomm gently put his hand to the pilot's bloody lips. "Enough talk, brother," he told him. "We should have never left you out here in the first place. Now we must get you to the sick bay immediately."

  Erx and Berx lifted the injured pilot off the ground and started to carry him to the waiting shuttle. Through bleary eyes, Hunter spotted the six small mountains east of the BMK base.

  "In those…" he said, barely able to point with his one good hand. "We have to clear away the dirt that's covering them… and see what's hidden inside."

  His four friends looked at him with very grave concern now.

  "You have our promise, brother," Erx finally told him, as they placed him aboard the shuttlecraft. "While you go on the mend, we will move the mountains for you."

  3

  What was left of the BMK officers' quarters had been turned into a makeshift jail.

  The eighty-eight remaining soldiers were divided into four holding cells; Kyx and his three surviving officers were confined to a fifth. This cell was located at the eastern end of what was once a fairly elaborate building called the superior billet, an extension of the command cluster. It had three small windows, now adorned with a latticework of reionized steel bars. These windows looked out onto the base's broken-down space gantries.

  Two of the invaders' starships sat in very low orbit overhead, reflecting the dull light of the setting red sun like a pair of tiny moons. The ships were actually moving very slowly across the sky, as Xronis Trey turned beneath them. But just as soon as this pair disappeared, another pair would appear over the horizon. This was how the invaders did it. Two of their starships were in sight overhead almost all the time.

  The last of the long sunset bathed the dilapidated space docks in dull crimson. The gantries were each 950 feet tall; it was not unusual for clouds to gather around their tops, even in this thin atmosphere. Each one looked like a gar-gantuan steel cage, a sky full of girders and trusses and spiraling passageways.

  Anyone moving around them on the ground looked very tiny by comparison.

  Captain Kyx was standing on the jail cell's bench, his chin pressed up against the window bars. His sneer was firmly set in place.

  "These invaders are such fools," he declared. "They give off this air of being invincible, but they are nowhere near as strong as they would have us think. They are not supermen. They might strut around like they have a million-man army, but gentlemen, we all know that those ships cannot be holding more than 40,000 men combined."

  His three junior officers were playing dice in a corner nearby. None looked up.

  But this did not deter Kyx. He hadn't stopped complaining since being incarcerated.

  "You know what I think?" he went on, talking only to himself. "I think they're a cult. A religious cult — zapheads we used to call them. You saw the priest. And those other strange characters. They all have stars in their eyes. But they are just a sad collection of deluded individuals who somehow, some way, excel in getting more dimwits to join their cause.

  "I mean, asking serious questions about the Home Planets? Pul-leeze. My father used to put me to bed with that fairy tale. Now these poor zapheads really believe that child's story is true."

  Again, the three officers playing dice did not respond in any way. Dissing Kyx with their silence had become a science for them by now. But they would have to agree with him on at least one point: The invaders were at no loss for curious behavior.

  Just why anyone would invade this long-lost rock was baffling enough. But since coming here, the invaders had been up to some very strange things. They seemed to be always searching for something — the buildings, the grounds, even in the Last Drop saloon over the hill. Searching, always — but for what?

  And though they had obviously succeeded in capturing the pathetic little space base, they seemed intent on keeping most of their troops up in the orbiting spacecraft. As if they planned on leaving as quickly as they had come.

  But there was no more mysterious behavior than their activity around Space Dock #1, the structure closest to the command cluster. Since arriving on Xronis Trey, the invaders had stationed a man at the very top of this tower. Reaching the perch by jet pack, this soldier would simply sit atop the highest girder, eyes apparently gazing out into deep space, a slowly blinking yellow orb at his side.

  What could he be looking for?

  "Why do they send someone up that space gantry every other hour?" Kyx started up again. "I'll tell you why: because they think it puts them closer to God. I guess spinning around in low orbit isn't enough. They have to have a man up there at all times, braving the elements. I guarantee you that man is praying as hard as he can. And if they all pray hard enough, God will send them an army of angels to get them out of this fix."

  Finally, one of the other officers piped up.

  "Maybe they are considering revitalizing the structure," he said.

  Kyx let out a guffaw. "Revitalizing it!" he laughed. "In God's name what for?"

  "Maybe to use it again for the reason it was intended," the officer shot back. 'To land more spaceships. Or to repair an old one, or perhaps even build a new one."

  Now another junior officer joined the discussion. "My theory all along is that they are a pirating crew in disguise, and all this odd behavior and questions about the Home Planets is just to distract us. I'll wager that they're establishing a base here from which to launch their own operations. And as it will be at least ten years before any of our superiors even know something has gone wrong, we are simply the losing pawns in their game."

  Kyx laughed again. It was that cruel laugh of fake superiority he did so well.

  "Lieutenant!" he roared. "We are at the end of the Two Arm. There is no one out here to rape, no place out here to pillage or burn. There is no one out here to steal from. What space pirate in his right mind would set up a base out here?"

  The junior officer lowered his head, properly admonished. The others did, too. Kyx was right, a painful admission for all three.

  The commander turned back to the scene beyond the window, grabbing the bars as if he had enough strength to bend them.

  "And besides, they don't have nearly enough men to actually build a ship or even repair one," he went on in a loud voice. He shook his head in a very self-satisfied manner.

  "They might have big plans," he said, "but there is no way they can accomplish them. They lack manpower, and that means, eventually, they will lack willpower, too…. We all know it's a big Galaxy out there. Forty thousand troops can get swallowed up pretty quickly."

  The three junior officers went back to their game of dice.

  They really hated it when Kyx was right.

  At that moment, the floor of their cell began shaking. All four men froze. One of the junior officers was in the process of throwing the dice when the rumbling began. They all looked at each other. This was not the heart-stopping roar they'd heard in the opening moments of the attack earlier in the long day. Still, it unnerved them.

  "What the hell was that?" Kyx exclaimed.

  The cell shook again. "Maybe this dirty little place is finally doing itself in," one officer said, throwing the dice again.

  His companions just scoffed.

  "How many times do I have to tell you," one said, as they all felt the floor of the cell shake once again. "We will never be that lucky."

  "It seems to be coming from the mountains," Kyx noted, straining to see around the corner of the command cluster to the six mountains beyond. "Why would they be blowing holes out there?"

  None of his officers cared to reply. It was just one more odd thing the invaders seemed prone to do. The officers just went back to their game of chance.

  "Well, I for one am glad I am not
walking among them," Kyx went on again. "I'm glad I'm in jail. I hear that cult stuff can wear off on you. Just being around these types can make you stupid and prompt you into doing stupid things over and over and over again. And who needs that?"

  Again, none of his officers replied. They'd tuned him out completely now. The floor of the cell rumbled again. Overhead, two more of the invaders' spaceships came into view.

  Kyx sighed and unconsciously thrust his hand deep into his uniform's pocket. He hoped that miraculously the Twenty 'n Six holding his precious mind ring would be there.

  But there would be no miracles this night.

  At least not inside the tiny jail.

  Five Miles to the East

  Erx and Berx put their hands over their ears and nodded to the UPF officer standing next to them.

  The officer in turn gave a signal to a sergeant kneeling on the ground nearby. He was hovering over a small sonic-gun radio set. The weapon itself was set up about twenty feet away, its four legs sunk deeply into some recently melted rock.

  "Let it rip!" the officer told the sergeant.

  The man immediately pushed a button on the radio set. The gun ripped a sonic current through the air; it hit the side of the mountain about one thousand yards away not a second later. A huge explosion resulted as several tons of rocks and dirt were blasted to dust. The UPF officer then scanned the blast site with his viz scope.

  "Nothing…" he reported.

  Erx rolled his eyes and handed Berx a wine flask. Berx drank heartily.

  "Let's try it again," Erx told the UPF officer.

  Another blast, but with the same result. An explosion of dirt and rocks, another section of the mountain disappearing in a swirl of yellowish dust. But that was all.

  "Still nothing…" the officer reported.

  "Try it again," Erx told him.

  The rugged terrain east of the BMK base looked natural. Lots of rocks, lots of craters. The six small mountains meshed very well on this world's uneven terrain. At that moment, it really did seem unlikely they were anything but.

  The officer looked to Erx and Berx again. They reapplied their hands to their ears, and another sonic explosion went off. More yellow dirt, more craggy rocks. Another hole blasted in the side of the low cliff. But still, the place looked like a mountain.