I could barely sleep that night.

The room felt cold to me, even though our window was shut tight and Tando and Tsang were piled close with me under a pile of silks and furs.

I kept tossing and turning and thinking.

Klyp was missing, Xato was in the hospital, and Edgetown suffered a siege such as no one had seen in over a century. I wondered how it would all end and whether we'd ever get home.

On leaving the hospital we invited Brago Var and Affens to come to the magic show with us again, but they'd said they'd seen it twice already. They'd seen it before with Yetta and Chahrah, their crewmen who'd cracked up.

I thought of the insect men who'd tried to kill me in the Candian woods, so long ago in the 19th century. I thought about how they obscured their bodies entirely with armor. The elves of Selenium went disguised as beasts, but the Satellite Lords of that age simply wore armor. They went into the wild with rayguns and killed what they found.

A siege wasn't just straight warfare, though, it was a tactic to wear down the mentality of the victim. These aliens wanted to wear us down until we were too weak to resist.

I jumped out of bed and donned my deerskin leggins and my breechcloth and grabbed my raygun.

“What are you doing?” Tando asked me, half asleep.

“I need to go someplace to think. Go back to sleep.”

Tando just nodded and hogged the parts of the blankets which were now free.

I went to the rocketport and walked around a little.

Being a big city, Edgetown has launches and landings all through the night, although the activity diminishes somewhat. I passed a few rocketmen and mechanics as I paced around, but mostly I was alone.

The rocketport had a few all night cafes and I stopped at one of these for a small snack. There's something about insomnia that always leaves me feeling half-starved.

For some reason I went into the hangar where our ship lay.

I just stood in the dark at first. In the shaft of light that fell on the rocket, I could see they'd already done a lot of work on it. Much of the armor was replaced and I spotted some new parts on the insides. I have never been terribly mechanical, but flying in war I had learned certain basics of the workings of our war rockets.

My eyes began to adjust to the darkness and I leaned against a wall that was bathed in shadow.

Everything that had happened still swam in my mind. Could it be that none of this meant anything? Was this war, or life itself, merely a series of disconnected incidents?

A slight sound, like someone setting a coffee pot down on a kitchen table, came to my ears from further back in the hangar. I glanced over, and in the dimness I perceived a figure standing over the work bench with the newly developed canisters resting on them. The man, very lithe looking, was covered over in mechanic's overalls.

“Working late?” I asked.

The man jumped, startled, and turned his heard. The light from outside glinted on the goggles.

The switch for the electric light was beside me and I tripped it.

In the light I saw that whoever this obscured body was, it was not the mechanic we'd met the other day. The hair that poked out through the top was not red but purple. The bigger clue being that this fellow had a bag in which he'd been stuffing the newly developed cylinders!

“Hey,” I said. “What are you...?”

He hurled a wrench at me and I just managed to duck as it crashed against the metal siding above my head. The thief took off running towards the back of the hangar and I ran after him.

My raygun sprang into my hand and I squeezed off a few shots, but this fellow moved like a scared rabbit.

The chase led on out the back, past pipes and mechanical works, down a shadowy utility stair that wound down the dark side of the rocketport. He was small and fast, but I was determined. I jumped whole flights of steps and pitted all my strength to catch up to him.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The stairs ended in a yard, closed off on all sides by sheds. I didn't see him and I was stumped until one of the doors banged shut. I thrust it open and saw the overalls discarded on the floor.

I looked around the dark storage shed and saw nothing.

Experimentally, I fired a potshot at the ceiling.

Someone yelped and a body ran past the dirty windows illuminated by street lights beyond. Then a door to the outside burst open and I made for it.

Out in the street I saw the fellow pass under a street light, his great speed taking him far out ahead. It was none other than Grothol's new assistant!

I pointed my raygun, but a car dashed out of an alley, right in front of him, and picked him up. I ran and fired at it, but did not manage to stop it. It sped on down the street and rounded a corner.

All of a sudden a big piece of the picture was clear to me and I wasn't about to keep it to myself.

I ran up to the small hotel room and there I saw a strange scene. Tando stood shaking his head and Tsang sat dejected looking and covered in dust. At first I couldn't figure out what it was all about.

“What happened?” I asked.

Tando pointed to a huge gaping hole in the wall behind the bed “Take a look.”

I looked at Tsang.

He shrugged “I was on the bed and I fell through the wall.”

“You pretty much jumped through the wall!” Tando shouted.

I stood on the bed and grabbed a lamp from the nightstand and held it up. There was a small room beyond, complete with wall-mounted electric lights and carpet.

I grabbed hold of Tsang and Tando “Come with me, there's something we have to do.”

“It wasn't my fault!” Tsang whined.

We went down to the desk and got the night manager and went with him up to Klyp's suite on the 20th floor.

We put the light on. The window was still open and there was still no sign of our friend.

The night manager looked down at the carpet “What the hell happened in here?”

I stood on the bed beside the wall panel “What are these panels that are in all the rooms?”

He shrugged “Extensions. A lot of them were walled off a long time ago. Edgetown was occupied by the enemy back then and people put in hiding places wherever they could.”

“Wait,” Tsang demanded. “You mean you keep our rooms this small on purpose?”

“It wasn't my idea. They're supposed to be unsafe or something. What's it all about?”

I found a loose edge on the panel and pulled on it with both hands, It came way and landed on the floor behind me.

In the dark space beyond, amidst bright white smudges, was our friend Klyp.

He was dead.

“Just who are you guys?” The manager demanded.

“We're rocketmen,” Tando explained. “We met this man at the port when we came in the other day. He was part of a magic show in town. He's been missing and we'd been looking for him.”

“Yeah, but why is he dead?”

“It's something to do with Grothol the Magnificent.” I said. “Just a few moments ago I caught his new assistant trying to steal the new invention at the hangar.”

Tando asked the manager “Did anybody come up here and see him, maybe the night before last?”

“No,” the man said. “But I did see him come back with somebody, someone wearing some kind of costume.”

“Did you see them leave again?” I asked.

The manager shook his head.

I went around the bend to the other side of the suite and looked out the window. I guess I half expected to see a killer lurking on the ledge or still floating before me in a floating-harness, but there was just the early morning skyline, the streets still nearly empty.

When I went back I saw Tando looking very sad, standing over Klyp. Tsang had a hand on Tando's shoulder “I'm sorry, Tando.”

We entered The Golden Bat with a group of well-armed city guards. Staff members were questioned and the identity and whereabouts of Grothol the Magnicent, but they were not much help. Nobody knew too much about Klyp, since he'd only worked two nights, but we learned that the new assistant was named Onix.

“What a strange name,” Tang said.

“I have another idea,” I said. I asked the man at the entrance for the guest book and I looked through the names. Klonax, Yetta, Chahrah, and some others who now shared a hospital room with Xato were on the list. Some of the fellows hadn't been so lucky, their crackups had resulted in deaths in aerial combat.

A sergeant and an officer accompanied me to the back of the stage and to Grothol's props.

A couple of men stood in front of the obelisk, barring our way.

“We need to see it,” the sergeant ordered. “One side, please.”

One of the men shook his head “This is a magic show. It is in the contract that none of the secrets of these illusions may be revealed.”

“That'd be fine, but there is something far more sinister going on here.”

I shouldered my way through them and handled the obelisk. It was made out of some kind of light wood. I grabbed a hammer from the prop bench and started to break it up, bringing protests from the stage crew.