The Fourth Empire s-3

by Mack Maloney

  This impact did more to startle the man than Hunter's right hook. He staggered backward again. This time, real-looking blood began spouting from his nose and mouth. He lunged for Hunter, who simply let go the heavy door again. It hit the foreman so hard, he fell backward, toppling to the hard floor with a thud.

  It was with that sound that Hunter took off. He was running now, across the concourse and up the walkway to the vault. Those images around him paused and pointed and stared, but no one tried to stop him. He reached the vault in just a matter of seconds, and this time his ray gun was out and ready for use. The two soldiers saw him approaching but looked at him more out of befuddlement than anything else. Running? Why was someone running up here? It did not compute.

  Hunter reached the rampway leading into the vault and, without stopping, squeezed off two blasts from his side arm. As with the guards in the holding area, these discharges both hit in midchest. The soldiers were startled— a little more than his previous two shooting victims. They raised their rifles and tried to take aim on him as he rushed by, but before they could activate their triggers, they did the quick fadeaway. Not killed, deleted.

  Hunter ran past them and into the vast vault. Now this place looked just as his real memory recalled it. Hundreds of floating shelves held tens of thousands of mind ring boxes. Each box held up to a hundred rings. He took down the closest box, peered inside, and saw the small cloud formation which indicated the rings were still alive. This part of his plan had worked!

  "Don't move!"

  Hunter froze. He recognized the voice by now. He looked up and saw the foreman, bloody nose and all, point-ing a very big ray gun at him. Hunter raised his own side arm in an instant.

  What followed was a two-way battle of ray gun fire. The foreman was shooting wildly at Hunter, the very deadly beams bouncing around the vault, hitting mind ring boxes and ricocheting with ear-splitting ferocity. Hunter was trying to somehow pump out his own ray gun blasts through this intense barrage. He was being hit all over, some just glancing blows, others direct blasts to his arms, legs, and body. He never stopped squeezing his trigger.

  This proved his undoing, though, as a ricochet blast bounced off the floor, off the ceiling, and then hit his right hand with a bright green flash. Hunter watched his gun melt away, wondering in that instant whether his fingers would go with it. They didn't, but now his weapon was useless and so was his hand.

  The foreman smiled cruelly. His prey was now defenseless, just the way he liked them. He took careful aim at Hunter — and there really was no place for the pilot to go, nothing behind which to seek cover. Like before, everything seemed to stand still for a moment, and Hunter's attention was riveted on the foreman's uniform. Damn, it looked like those worn by the Solar Guards. Not exactly, but very close.

  Everything started moving forward again. Hunter could almost hear the foreman's finger begin to squeeze his trigger. He could feel multiple wounds burning into his skin. In a last-ditch effort to avoid disaster, Hunter leaped forward and hit a big red button, which he hoped activated the vault door. But already he could see the tip of the foreman's ray gun start to sizzle; a fatal blast was just a microsecond away….

  Then, suddenly, the foreman had a hole blasted through his own chest. The man stood stunned, his ray gun still smoking, looking at the gaping maw in his upper torso.

  Hunter was just as stunned as he. The vault door was closing. The foreman just faded away, dropping his gun to the floor.

  The door finally slammed shut. Hunter fell to the vault floor, blood oozing from more than a dozen places.

  He was critically injured; he knew that.

  But he was not dead. Not yet, anyway, and all because just as before, someone within the mind ring trip had saved his life.

  It was Zarex's robot, the danker 33418, who found Hunter's burned and battered body atop the mesa.

  As soon as it was discovered that the pilot — and the mind ring — were missing, the UPF commanders immediately went into action. The entire planet was scanned, all the domes in the command cluster were searched, but there was little doubt where Hunter would go. That's why the robot was dispatched. The power packs on the soles of his feet could move him quicker than any jet pack or shuttle. He made the two-mile trip from the base to the mesa in less than twenty seconds.

  It wasn't a moment too soon.

  When the robot arrived, Hunter's uniform was almost totally engulfed in flame, boots and crash helmet included. It was only that the thin atmosphere discouraged extremely hot fires that the pilot wasn't totally consumed. The robot immediately covered him with a flame retardant he kept inside his massive utility belt. This single act saved Hunter's life — at least for a while.

  A shuttle bearing Zarex and Tomm arrived seconds later. The first thing they saw was a small storm of smoke rising from Hunter's smoldering body. They thought for certain he was dead, he looked that bad.

  They picked him up, put him in the shuttle, and instantly rocketed away up to orbit. Hunter's injuries were so severe this time, he had to be rushed to the emergency cube in the sick bay aboard the starship America.

  Hooked up to a life monitor during the frantic ten-minute trip, Hunter's body was showing only the barest of vital signs, and these were fading fast. He wasn't moving, his brain waves were all over the map, and he was still bleeding profusely.

  And try as they might, they just couldn't get the mind ring off his head.

  6

  Erx and Berx never heard the alert that Hunter was missing.

  They were still off on the eastern part of the base, supervising the blasting of the first mountain.

  They'd been here for nearly seven hours. The spacemen weren't even bothering to block their ears anymore. The sonic gun had been firing away at the target, removing rocks and dirt and rearranging its craggy face one blast at a time. They were probably a hundred feet or more into the side of the mountain by now, and the hole itself was nearly five hundred feet across.

  But still they had found nothing but more rocks and dirt underneath.

  "It will be light soon," Berx said, as he passed his flask to Erx. Their slow-ship was slowly running out, too.

  Erx drank and then just shook his head. "A few more, my brother," he said. "When we see the first light of the sun, then we will call it quits.

  The weary UPF officer signaled his sergeant again, and the sonic gun delivered yet another massive blast to the side of the crumbling mountain. This blast didn't even shake up any dirt. There was no spray of rocks, no cloud of dust.

  "That was strange," the UPF officer mumbled. "Increase the charge," he told the sergeant.

  Another blast. Then another. Then another.

  Still, the face of the mountain stubbornly remained unchanged.

  Erx put the viz scope up to his eyes.

  This was an odd sight. It appeared the sonic gun had been able to blast its way through a good amount of rock and dirt but was now battering against something that looked akin to a mineral called iron-slate.

  Or maybe it was just iron.

  Erx, Berx, and the UPF officer were quickly away on their jet packs. They arrived at the base of the mountain seconds later. They were presented with a sheer face of a solid material, stone gray in color, buried very deeply into the side of the mountain. Berx flew up inside the hole and, with his electric sword, started pounding on the wall. A slight echo came back to them.

  All three just looked at each other, bewildered.

  "My God," Erx breathed. "Hawk was right."

  These strange mountains weren't mountains at all.

  It took no less than 150 more rounds from the sonic gun to finally break through what turned out to be a wall of reionized iron.

  The UPF blaster team then created a tunnel, which in turn revealed an ancient doorway. It was twenty feet high and more than half that wide.

  Moving through the buried portal, Erx, Berx, and the UPC disintegration squad found themselves inside a vast cavern, an enormous domed structu
re that had been encased in tons of dirt from the planet's frequent dust storms. Over the course of being battered for several thousand years, the gigantic structure had become part of the landscape.

  "I think we've seen this type of thing before," Erx said to Berx as they stumbled through the cavern — they had traveled in space together for more than a century. "Do you recall a world in the old Oshkosh-Sylesian System named Bynk? It had been a city-planet at one time, a metropolis that wrapped right around the planet. Then something hap-pened; the world was abandoned. The storms came, and the structures became one with the dirt.

  "I do recall Bynk," Berx replied. "But I have a feeling this place will be much different than that."

  The blaster crew quickly set up some dim, temporary lanterns, illuminating a small portion of the unnatural cave. It was clear this place was a warehouse of sorts. What they could see of the wall was lined with shelves, containers, row upon row, until they faded off into the darkness. A small network of jet tubes ran through the place like dried-up, cracked arteries. Tracks sunk into the cast iron floor told of an elaborate system of depositing whatever was kept here.

  The blaster team opened several random containers. They were about twenty by ten by ten and shaped like large coffins. And inside? Clothing: in the first container, shirts and jackets. Inside the second, hundreds of pairs of pants. Inside another, nothing but women's shoes. In another, men's boots. Many of these articles were made of woven natural fibers and even rubber, materials practically unknown these days.

  It was at that moment the blaster team activated a much larger bank of hovering lamps. For the first time, those inside could see just how big this place was. In a word, it was gigantic. They were actually on the upper level of a multilayered underground storage facility, a dome of now obvious design. And there were also tens of thousands— perhaps hundreds of thousands — of the dusty blue containers. Some were still up on the racks; others had fallen and smashed to the floor centuries ago.

  Everyone present shrank back a little. They suddenly realized this was a very eerie place.

  "Ghosts…" Erx whispered. "I can almost feel them."

  "You mean the things that ghosts once owned," Berx replied, his voice low as well. "I fear this place is haunted."

  As if to underscore that point, they both stumbled over one container that lay broken at their feet. It held not shoes or clothes or hats. It was filled with something else: toys.

  It was an American UPF lieutenant named Kennedy who was pulling watch duty atop Space Dock #1 when it happened.

  Sitting beside the blinking yellow orb, he'd just watched a two-ship formation of UPF corvettes sink over the horizon. He knew two more would soon be rising in the opposite direction. But for the moment, a brief one, the sky above him was clear.

  That's how it was that Kennedy saw them first. A very faint string of dim lights — that was his initial impression. Almost dreamlike. But the orb had commenced blinking rapidly, and soon enough, Kennedy knew this was no illusion.

  He wasn't sure what to do. The orb was blinking madly now — it was doing its job. He made a comm-cell call to Gordon's office up on America, as he'd been instructed to do, but strangely, there was no reply. The reason for this lonely duty was very, very top secret; Kennedy didn't want to broadcast any news on a cell that might have unwanted ears listening in. So he left a secure-bubble message for Gordon and then cranked up his viz scanner to full power and just watched.

  The lights came closer, and the string became longer, and soon they looked like a line of very bright, colorful stars riding along on a daisy chain, two larger, very bright lights out in front. Kennedy told his viz scanner to start recording everything. He knew the UPF commanders would want to see this.

  The orb was blinking so rapidly now, it looked like it was producing a steady, constant beam of light. Suddenly, the string of colorful objects high overhead started blinking back. Kennedy almost grew giddy watching them. The orb saw the lights, and the lights saw the orb, and they had made a solid connection. The lights began moving even faster.

  Within a minute, they had entered orbit around Xronis Trey.

  Captain Kyx never knew why he'd woken up at that particular moment.

  He'd taken his sleep drop; by rights it should have laid him out for at least twelve hours straight, probably more.

  But now he was awake during what should have been a guaranteed slumber. He found himself sleepily walking over to the cell window and looking up.

  What he saw caused him to cry out loud enough to wake the three junior officers in the cell with him.

  Very quickly, all four of them were crowded at the cell window. What they saw made each man think he was still dreaming.

  High above the base they saw the long string of lights. To their eyes they seemed to stretch for thousands of miles, which in fact they did.

  The colorful lights seemed to be floating, wavering, almost similar to the effect of a borealis. A pair of larger, brighter lights was evident at the front of this string. They seemed to be moving under ion power.

  Then, without warning, as if someone had pushed a button or pulled a switch, the line of lights began breaking up. And these individual lights — there were tens of thousands of them — began floating down to the planet's surface.

  It took about a minute for some of them to come so close that the BMK officers could finally make out exactly what they were: robots… thousands of them.

  More accurately, they were the combat robots of Myx. They were landing everywhere, each one touching down with barely a thump. The long line of mechanical men— so instrumental in delivering the coup de gr&ce in the war on Planet America — had taken a bit longer to make the trip from the Home Planets to Xronis Trey. They were the top-secret second wave. But they'd made it finally, after a long, lonely voyage, each one connected by the head and feet to the one before and behind him, being towed by two makeshift ion-powered vessels once known as the Love Rockets.

  It took nearly an hour for all the robots to land. Still, the BMK officers never tore their eyes away from the cell window. They'd stopped counting them long ago, but by the time they were all down, the prisoners knew there were probably as many as a million of them. They covered the base, the hills to the west, and the deserts to the north and south. It made for a very baffling, almost scary sight.

  Finally, one of the junior officers just shook his head and went back to his floating bunk.

  "Well, Captain," he said to Kyx. "You said these invaders were nothing because they didn't have much of an army…"

  He let his words trail off, then lay back down.

  "Wrong again," he said.

  Hunter was dying.

  Brought directly to the emergency trauma section aboard the America, the doctors took one look at him and immediately called for Pater Tomm.

  That Hunter was in very bad shape was an understatement. He'd suffered many more wounds to his body, all of them more serious than those from his first mind ring trip. Even worse, his brain functions were extremely scrambled. The UPF doctors had not been able to lift the mind ring off his head. One surgeon even suggested that Hunter was still inside the mind trip and was intentionally resisting any efforts to take the ring off.

  If that was the case, there was nothing any of them could do. Any attempt to cut the ring off or remove it in any other way would likely prove fatal to him, or at least irreversibly injure his brain. The doctors patched his wounds and installed a healing aura around him, but these things could only do so much. After that, it really was out of their hands.

  Thus the call for Pater Tomm. At the moment, it appeared the only person who could do anything for Hunter was a priest.

  A bedside vigil began in his hospital room.

  Tomm, Gordon, and Zarex were there first. Erx and Berx had come in, bearing a box of ancient toys and reporting their startling find inside the faux mountain.

  Learning that Hunter had been right all along was of little comfort to his friends thou
gh. Even the arrival of their top secret second wave was no consolation. That Hunter was close to death was all too apparent. If and when the daring pilot died, it would be a very long trip back to the Home Planets.

  With all that was happening, few people noticed the two Love Rockets had docked alongside the starship America. If the UPF corvettes looked old and antiquated, these two vessels looked positively ancient. They were about one-fiftieth the size of a corvette and shaped not like a wedge but like a bullet with wings.

  The Love Rockets were actually built simultaneously back on the Home Planets, one on Planet America, the other on Planet France. It was their launching that had set the stage for the war against the BMK troops on Moon 39. Indeed, the French rocket's ascent was what triggered the Moon 39 invasion in the first place. The American rocket had been sent up as a ruse to trick the overextended Moon 39 forces to attack Planet America as well, laying the tracks for their defeat.

  The two old kickers had survived the ensuing hostilities, and while the UPF main fleet had been preparing for the long voyage to Xronis Trey, the Love Rockets had been completely overhauled. Much larger crew compartments were put on board, as well as space for supplies and deep space necessities. More important, small but powerful ion-ballast propulsion units were installed to replace the crude liquid-fuel engines. The Love Rockets could not go as fast as the corvettes, but then again, they didn't have to.

  The only qualification for their flight was once they began their own journey to the edge of the Two Arm, it would be almost impossible for them to stop. The string of one million robots, connected as they were, could only travel in one direction. Any twists or turns would have caused havoc and quite probably would have broken up the string. This would have resulted in losing some if not all of the mechanical men somewhere in the starless void in between.