In a much greater hurry than we'd entered, we left the abandoned rocket.

We stood in the middle of the rocky flood-plane and looked around. The wood and the river seemed perfectly serene.

“I don't know,” I said, “but somehow I think they would have attacked us by now. Our ship is intact and the old rocket is just sitting here. Why isn't someone shooting? Do the Satellite Lords use tactics like that often?”

Tando shook his head “That's the strangest thing of all. They keep to their own methods usually, they don't use Earth machinery to do their work.”

“We can't just talk out here in the open,” Tsang said, “can't we continue this in the rocket? Maybe in the air?”

“We'll go to the rocket,” Tando answered, “at least for now. Remember, Tsang, you wanted to come along.”

As we walked back towards our ship, I chanced to glance across the water at a tangle of branches.

I pointed “Tando, everybody, look!”

Pointed directly at the derelict rocket were four ray-rifles, and holding the rifles were four skeletons. One was partly decimated, but other than that they were all still posed in death as they'd been in their last moments.

We got some floating packs from the ship, anti-gravity sacks that the Selenium folks use for short trips, and crossed the river with them.

There was a fifth body also a short distance back from the others, its raygun still in its hand.

Tando shook his head “Well, it was a trap, but it was a trap about a hundred years ago.”

“Can we tell who they were? What they were? Are those bones of men or Satellite Lords?” I asked.

“Could be either,” Tando said, “or both. When it comes to the bones there isn't much of a difference. I don't think they were members of Selenium, though, not to try something this desperate.”

“So whoever did this to them is long gone or long dead?”

One of the skulls exploded just then and a nearby branch split from raygun fire.

We all dropped into the dirt and drew our weapons. Wild shots came down all around us, some hitting the bones, others coming too close to our live flesh!

Tando shouted “Look! Up on that rock!”

I looked and saw an elf in a Selenium uniform like ours, looking pale, disheveled, and more than a little crazy. Most importantly, he was shooting at us.

“That's Novom!” Tando exclaimed. He shouted “Don't shoot, Novom! We're on your side, we just want to take you home!”

“Liar!” Novom shouted, shooting down at us again from his boulder perch. “I'm Lord Dromo and I have no home!”

We had to crawl into the thick of the branches then because he began to blow right through our cover.

“Who is Lord Dromo?” I demanded.

“A fictional character,” was Tando's reply, “that's just Novom. He's gone crazy or something!”

He jumped down from the boulder and ran towards our position.

“There has to be something we can do,” I said, “capture him alive?”

“Stun grenades, maybe.”

Xato tried just that, a gelatin pellet on his belt, all one had to do was puncture one end and toss it. A cloud of purple smoke resulted with a dull concussion, strong enough to knock out a full grown moose, or so I'm told.

The smoke cleared and Novom emerged, still running and in the other direction now!

“How is that possible?” Xato demanded.

“It must be some king of drug,” Tsang said, as baffled as the rest of us, “that's the only thing I can think that would keep a man running after one of those. But it must be something new.”

“We have to follow him.” Tando lead us through the woods after our fast running madman.

He ran us almost to exhaustion, through deep ravines, between closely grown copses of trees, and finally up a tall hill. Somehow he remained ahead of us, even as we climbed across the sharp tree-covered crest and down the other side.

None of us could guess what had happened to make Novom, by all accounts a good soldier and a good man, take leave of his senses. Something had come along to make him into some kind of murderous demon.

Considering the extraordinary nature of what had already occurred, perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised at what came next.

Maybe a hundred feet ahead of us, Novom ran directly towards a sheer cliff. It seemed he was hell bent on destroying himself. Suddenly a dark-colored rocket lifted into view, and waited at the cliff, the hatch open!

Without slowing down, Novom ran off the edge and flew into the portal of the ship, which closed and the craft took to the air.

We paused at another ledge, slightly above that from which the rocket had departed.

“Do you see that?” Tando said. “It's another Satellite Lord craft, altered with Earth parts just like the derelict!”

“That's not all,” Xato said, “it's coming back!”

A terrible onslaught of raygun fire pelted down at us from the strange ship.

We rolled for cover under heavy rocks and trees, barely escaping death! The ship moved quickly, circled, the peak of the hill and shot at us again from a fresh vantage point. We had to quickly shift our position as our original points of cover were pelted with rays.

The rocket buzzed out over the forest, winging out away from us.

Tando shouldered a ray-rifle and fired at the rocket as it began to turn for another attack. The enemy lazily returned fire, knowing full well they'd soon be out of our range. I tried a couple of chance shots with my raygun from behind a log, but it was no use.

“What in blazes just happened?” Tsang asked.

None of us had the answer.

We walked back to where the rocket waited and floated our way back across the river. Somehow I was the last one up the ramp, and that prove unlucky for me. The Satellite Lords were not idle in their patrols that day, as we found out when one of their ships swooped down out of the sky and dumped two bombs right beside us!

While I tried to get my balance and get inside, the rocket took to the air.

I grabbed ahold of one of the handles, trying to pull myself against the force of our sharp ascent, but another bomb chanced to go off them, and much closer. The shock of it rattled me right off of the speeding ship and sent me tumbling through the air!

I might have lied stunned for days after that, if the concussion hadn't blown me down into the water. Have you ever seen the expression on a wet pussycat? That's about how I felt just then.

“Darned falling suit, what good are you if I get tossed around like this?”

I couldn't tell where the rocket I belonged to had gone, but I sure knew where the enemy rocket was! He was after me now, not a sitting duck maybe, but a floating one caught in the current.

Bombs burst in the water and on the cliffs nearby. Finally one knocked over a big tree into the rapid water and I didn't miss my chance to get a ride on it.

The rapids had ahold of me then, and I saw the country change around me as I sped by it on my leafy boat.

The enemy rocket was really hot for me, he kept swooping in low and trying to burn me up with his rays.

I would have been done for if an even stranger thing hadn't happened: the dark hybrid ship that we'd seen hauling away Novom came around a cliff and dealt the enemy a kill shot.

If I'd been wearing a hat I'd have waved it at the ship.

Just then, though, I was more worried about keeping afloat in the white water around my log as I dashed down the rocky course. In fact, I think it might have shaken me right out of consciousness because I only came to my senses in a calm place further down.

I crawled to the bank and noticed two ships ahead of me on the shore. One was the Satellite Lords' vessel, cracked open on a huge boulder, belching smoke and dead bodies. The other was the dark colored hybrid ship, parked safely on old fashioned landing feet like the ones the Selenium men had used in my day.

I noticed that the Satellite Lords still wore strange insect-like armor over their bodies, but their faces were uncovered. They were humanoid, much like my new friends, but their skin was uniformly hued in a bluish gray.

Men in red leather wearing boots and shoulder pads marched out of the hybrid ship, all wearing helmets the same color. I watched baffled as they picked up the obviously very dead bodies of the Satellite Lords from the ground and hauled them back to their ship.

Did they mean to give the dead a proper burial? What could want from a corpse besides?

One of the red-dressed men pointed to where I lay and as they marched near me I passed out again.