Hunter's heart started racing now. He'd seen such a ship before. In his previous mind ring experience back on Moon 39, during which he'd witnessed a tiny portion of the deportation of the Earthlings he'd seen if not this vessel, then many more just like it. It was onto these green monsters that the people of Earth were being herded for their final flight out. A dark sensation ran through him now, suddenly things weren't as bright as just a moment before. Joke or not, Hunter knew he was about to see things he could never, ever forget.
He turned to watch the green ship pass over and got another surprise. The tiny backwater base occupied by the BMK was now a massive, sprawling military facility. Weapons bunkers, spacecraft hangars, command and control buildings, troops and vehicles on the move everywhere. The base was so big it encompassed the mesa itself; a forest of deep space antennas was now in place up here. And even beyond the mesa, the base's perimeter seemed to stretch for miles.
Even more startling, there was a huge city located right next to the base. All soaring towers and floating structures, its skyways were filled with air cars, its streets bustling with thousands of people. Who would have guessed this? An overflowing metropolis in an area that now housed nothing more than the broken-down saloon called the Last Drop. An enormous military base where now there was little more than a few aging buildings and some very old mercs. How things had changed.
Hunter scrambled to the other side of the butte to get a better look at the huge base below.
The five space gantries were still in place. Standing tall and shiny now, they towered over the tallest buildings in the city next door. Five green ships were already in the gantries. All appeared to have just recently landed. Long lines of people were being herded out of these rocket ships, down a series of descending walkways to the ground below. Hunter snapped his fingers and was immediately holding a telescopic viz lens. He could see these people were all skinny, horribly underfed, their clothes hanging off them in tatters. There were mothers and kids and old people and youths. Middle-aged men, carrying elderly parents on their backs. Grandmothers clutching infants to their chests. Many were holding tightly onto bags no doubt containing what few possessions they owned. Every last one of them looked terrified and bewildered.
Once down on the ground, the lines of people converged into one long stream that led out of the landing area and into the heart of the base itself. Thousands of individuals made up this despondent flow of humanity. They were being force-marched by heavily armed guards toward the entrance of a gigantic dead-gray building located in the center of the huge expanded base; this area was condoned off by several security perimeters, rings of electric-blue fencing strung like barbed wire around a prison. The ominous box-like structure in the middle of all this was at least a half mile long, nearly half that wide. It looked like a warehouse with large openings at either end.
Hunter turned his viz scope toward the entry point of this building and saw squads of guards pushing people through. Men, women, children — everyone got the same rough treatment. He focused the viz scope on the opposite side of the building. The people coming out this end were no longer wearing their ragged clothes. Instead, they were dressed in dreary one-piece prison suits. Their heads had been shaved and their meager possessions were nowhere to be seen. Their demeanor was even gloomier than before.
Hunter felt his throat tighten up. His heart began pounding very fast. He knew who these people were. They were the people of Earth. His people. During the mind ring trip back on Moon 39, he had witnessed the front end of this atrocity, the herding of Earth's inhabitants on to the huge green ships. Now, purely by fate or just damn good luck, he found himself looking down on the next-to-last phase of this deportation: the final processing point. And he had no doubt where these unfortunates would be going from here.
After another half-mile walk under the hot, red sun, the deportees were being prodded into an enormous corral. Ion-powered sky lifts had been put in place at several points around this holding pen. These rocket-boosted elevator platforms had been used in the distant past to bring personnel and goods up to spaceships hovering several miles above the surface, thus saving the time and expense of bringing such huge vessels down to the ground. These particular sky lifts had been adapted to squeeze in as many as a thousand people at a time. Once full, the elevator would shoot straight up to a place beyond the clouds.
Squinting through his viz scope now, Hunter followed one power lift up until he saw it stop next to a vessel that was partially hidden by the puffy, fair-weather cumulus. These clouds moved just enough for Hunter to see the vessel was actually a space barge, a massive rectangular ship more commonly used to move iron ore and slag off of mining planets. These disgusting vehicles were now being loaded with the people of Earth. As soon as one was filled, another was moved in to take its place. Soon, a string of six of the gigantic vessels began climbing up into the stratosphere, being towed by an ancient-looking ion-ballast space tug.
Hunter's fists were tight with rage by now. His jaw felt locked in the clenched position. The direction taken by the barses was unmistakable. Thev were heading toward that empty piece of space, very far away, that contained the celestial prison known as the Home Planets.
He came down off the butte via a floating walkway on the north side. Many workers dressed just like him were walking along the extended concourse just below. They all looked to be in fine health up close, even a little overfed. There was an air of smugness and wealth down here, too. No one seemed to notice his arrival on level ground though. He immediately blended in.
He began walking, testing the new environment as he moved along with the crowd. A certain feeling of uneasiness had set in once he'd reached the ground. This was not like those times in the past when he'd performed his ten-minutes-from-now recon missions, when he became, in effect, invisible. No, this all felt real, and it looked real, too. But there was static crackling around the edges of the periphery, an indication of chronic mind ring overuse. This file corruption was giving everything a strangely flat, almost two-dimensional feel. It was as if Hunter could reach up to touch the sky and actually feel something hanging there. It was almost claustrophobic in a way. Even his thoughts seemed to become weighed down, his brain function dull and ordinary.
He had to keep reminding himself that these were someone else's perceptions he was living here, recorded for whatever reason on this particular day, so long ago. And that the mind ring program, this grandiose reenactment of real life, wasn't necessarily free of the personal kinks of someone else's mind. He knew there had to be some reason Captain Kyx had guarded this particular ring. The merc officer hadn't cared to answer that question once the device had been found on him. But clearly the BMK flunky was no history scholar. Something else was loaded on here, something more than the big ships, the misery of the disenfranchised, and the massive undertaking of shooting them all out of the Galaxy. Something else had whet Kyx's appetite in this strange world.
Hunter began walking at a quicker pace. The deportation station was located within a perimeter inside the base itself. A small army of heavily armed soldiers was standing near what looked to be an auxiliary entryway to the deportation area. Most of these soldiers were on the other side of a huge electric-blue fence, which demarcated the processing site from the rest of the base, but a few were on the outside as well.
Hunter didn't want to wander too close to these soldiers; he had to remain inconspicuous. Yet when he spotted a small building just on the other side of this isolated entrance — it was a strange little place, standing alone, with a bright green door — Hunter felt his legs start moving him in that direction. He tried to steer himself back into the stream of workers, but no matter what he did, he always found himself heading the other way. The desire to do so was overwhelming.