Authors: Mack Maloney
He wasted no more time. He put himself into the exact position as the first trip. Then he put the ring on the crown of his head. It quickly transformed to the optimum shape.
He tapped it into activation, sat back, and waited.
Flash!
The trip started much quicker this time.
The desolate valley filled in, the sky became bright blue. The clouds appeared and, in the distance, he saw the huge metropolis spring up, and then the large military base. The monstrous space gantries appeared on cue as well.
He checked his quadtrol. What year was he in? It was 3237, once again.
Hunter jumped to his feet. The idea here was to get moving as fast as possible.
He looked down at his clothes and saw he was wearing the same gaudy uniform again. Still no markings, no emblems. He took out his tiny pistol, pulled the trigger, and heard it fizzle again.
"Maybe it was just a toy all along," he thought, throwing the gun away.
No matter. He reached into his boot and came out with his own massive double-barreled ray gun. He checked its control panel and was relieved to see that it had passed through with him intact. He pressed the trigger; two very reassuring blasts of green fire spewed out. A nearby rock melted away.
This wasn't supposed to be happening, but it was. His shoulder and arm still hurt, his head still felt like someone was banging it with an electron hammer. That wasn't supposed to be happening either—but it was.
He pushed the ray gun's intensity drive up to 111 percent and then returned the weapon to his boot holster.
At least this time, he'd come prepared.
He moved down off the mesa via the same floating walkway, and in the same manner, mixed in with the crowd of workers.
As before, the sea of deportees was passing him on the left beyond the electric-blue fence. If anything, the faces of the dispossessed looked even gloomier than before. In fact, everything about this trip seemed darker so far, more uncertain than the first time. There was more static around the edges, too, and many of the colors were starting to skew. A very creepy feeling was now dominating the program.
Hunter pressed on.
He found himself being drawn back over to the crowd of soldiers huddled near the entryway to the building with the green door. Reality was really blurring within the program now—and inside his head as well. Before he could even think about it, he found himself pushing his way through the stream of workers again—they looked much dirtier this time—and walking up to the soldiers. Each one looked twice as large this time; their weapons were larger, too. Hunter did not hesitate. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the handful of coins, and slammed them into the wide-open palm of the nearest soldier.
The man literally picked him up and over the invisible barrier, setting him down with a crash on the restricted other side. Hunter did not react at all. He simply stood up and walked quickly over to the building with the green door.
As before, two workers were in line ahead of him. If anything, the room within looked even more dingy, the lines of young girls more frightened.
Hunter did not allow the first man to select his victim this time. Instead, he walked up to the man and dropped him with a fist to the face and a knee to the scrotum. Then he turned and did the same to the second guy, even before his first victim had hit the floor.
This time, a few screams came out of the crowd of captives, and this in turn woke the two soldiers lazing at the back. Hunter reached down and retrieved his double-barreled blaster. The soldiers made their way through the crowd of frightened girls and confronted him with very puzzled looks. Both were carrying not-so-puny blaster rifles.
"Who
are
you?" one asked him, legitimately confused. Hunter didn't say a word. He simply lifted his ray gun and fired off two blasts, one at each man's chest. The soldiers were stunned. They looked down at their bodies and saw a hole going right through them. Obviously, this type of thing had never happened in the program before.
It was darkly comical for a moment: the two soldiers, standing calmly, each with a gaping hole in his chest.
One managed to croak out, "This is not the way it is supposed to go...." Then both simply faded away, deleted by the program.
Hunter walked right through their bodies and kicked in the door to the adjacent room. Inside, there were dozens of floating beds. Only a few were occupied, each with a young prisoner and a guy in a worker's outfit. Hunter fired one blast from his ray gun into the ceiling. This got everyone's attention. Then he calmly picked off every worker inside the room, a total of seven, causing them to fade into oblivion. With that, the girls all fled to the larger room, Hunter close behind.
He rushed over and opened the huge gate that led back out to the tarmac. The long stream of deportees was passing by not a hundred yards away.
"Go!" Hunter yelled to the female prisoners, pointing toward the slow parade of humanity. "Find your parents, your relatives, your friends. Stay close to them, and you'll be all right... but hurry!"
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.
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.