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 though. 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.
So the Love Rockets had been rebuilt and repowered just to do one thing: to use their combined strength to pull the line of combat robots across the great chasm, following the lonely blinking subspace radio orb that had been set up atop the highest spot on Space Dock #1, and hopefully arriving on Xronis Trey within forty-eight hours of the initial assault.
As it turned out, they arrived nearly ten hours ahead of schedule.
But it was a gloomy reception for them, to say the least.
Once the Love Rockets had been secured, the commander of each vessel rushed aboard the America, informed of the desperate situation in the starship's sick bay.
These two were also close friends of Hunter's. Their names were Calandrx and Klaaz. Hearing of the pilot's critical condition was a blow equal to both.
Calandrx had known Hunter a bit longer than Klaaz. Calandrx had won the famous Earth Race more than a century before, and it was he who steered Hunter through the dark intrigues of the most recent race, giving him the advice he needed to eventually triumph. When Hunter went missing after the battle on Zazu-Zazu, Princess Xara had summoned Calandrx, along with Erx and Berx, and asked that they go in search of the famous pilot. She had provided them with a tiny but Supertime-capable Empire ship. This eventually carried them to the Home Planets, where they arrived just in time to save Hunter's life by engaging in a shoot-out with a Solar Guards hit squad, also dispatched in a swift ship from Earth. Calandrx's almost mystical wisdom had gone a long way in the planning of the attack on Xronis Trey. It had provided him with the very things he'd been seeking since winning his own Earth Race: space flight, intrigue, and adventure. But arriving to find his good friend Hunter knocking on death's door deflated the 400-year-old pilot immediately.