"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.