Starhawk by Mack Maloney Page B

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