It took a few seconds to sink in, but finally the girls started streaming out of the building and melting into the long line of people moving toward the space barge power lifts. One stopped and gave Hunter a tearful hug. Another kissed him on the cheek. Her lips felt lifeless and cold.
"Hurry…" he urged them along, looking in all directions for any other soldiers but thankfully seeing none. "You'll be better off out there."
Once the room was cleared, Hunter closed the huge gate and then went back out the green door. He passed by the soldiers without a word and rejoined the stream of shift-changing workers. His heart was beating like a drum. Had he just done the right thing? Had he done anything at all?
He positioned himself deeper into the flow of workers and this time passed through the gate into the inner perimeter without a problem.
He walked quickly past the gaggle of jet tubes, confirming that the slimmer conduit through which all of the deportees' valuables were blowing — including many, many mind rings — was shooting directly into the command cluster itself.
There were no checkpoints, no guardhouses after this. Hunter walked right up to the front door of the cluster and stepped inside.
The place was bustling with activity. Soldiers, workers, and technicians crowded the passageways, each one in a great hurry to get someplace else. It surprised him, though it shouldn't have, that the interior of the building now looked less like a military control station and more like a bank. There were vaults everywhere; each geodesic dome held at least one. Within, he saw stacks of aluminum coins, jewels, the funny-looking paper money. The order and obvious efficiency of the entire operation was mind-boggling. He'd been right about one thing. These overlords were very methodical about stealing from their victims.
Hunter simply surrendered to the flow of workers and made his way to the center of the structure. He reached the main amphitheater with no problem, pausing at its huge glass door for a moment. Inside, he could see the usual mix of soldiers, workers, and technicians buzzing around — a strange sight because in his real memory, the amphitheater resembled a tomb. This place seemed to be the storage house for stolen items that were valuable but not necessarily used as currency. He saw stacks of expensive clothing for instance, projection machines, beautifully crafted musical instruments, works of art, some of it 3-D, some of it not. All these things were to be labeled, categorized, and stored away by the small army of blank-faced workers.
Across the concourse and up the second-story walkway, he could see the entrance to the mind ring vault. It, too, was alive with activity. He could see workers carrying trays containing mind rings up the walkway and into the vault. Judging from the telltale sparkle coming from each one, the rings were all still alive, just as he hoped. And judging from the care and almost reverence the workers were using in their transport, it was obvious that back here, in the year 3237 a.d., the collection of these rings had been of some importance. Again, it was a strange sensation, which clashed with Hunter's real memory of this place.
The vault was guarded with two heavily armed, ridiculously dressed soldiers. This didn't bother Hunter. He intended on approaching them carefully and low-key. But once he was close enough, he would pull out his ray gun and—
"Hey, what the hell are you doing now?"
Suddenly, someone grabbed Hunter's shoulder from behind. He spun about and found himself face-to-face with a very large, very sweaty person.
Damn…
It was the foreman.
In the next split second, Hunter vowed not to make the same mistake twice. He would not try to reason with this character, nor would he try to ignore him. He didn't have enough time to reach for his ray gun, however, so he sucker punched the foreman instead. His fist sank into the man's face like he was putting it in ice water. But it had the intended effect. The foreman staggered back, his eyes crossing then uncrossing themselves several times. When he recovered enough to focus back on Hunter, the pilot took one step inside of the amphitheater, pushing its heavy su-perglass door ahead of him. The foreman took a step forward as well, and Hunter let the door slam shut, hitting the man right in the face.
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.