I came to, bound to a seat in the cockpit of a small rocket.

Now, this was hardly the first time someone had knocked me out and I awoke restrained in some way, but something about this time was different. I could not look around me, for a vice-like device had been attached to my seat, holding my head in place. Of course, my eyeballs still rolled freely, but this gave me little enough to see, as my seat was pushed very far forward on its track. In fact, my stomach pressed right up against the instrument panel. My hands, stranger still, were not tied to my sides, but instead held onto the flight controls, they felt as if they had been glued there.

In my feeble efforts to manipulate the course of the strange craft, I came to realize that I was in a weakened state, drugged probably, and that the set of controls I sat at were not engaged.

Someone else was flying the rocket.

As I blinked at a strange landscape, I decided that this rocket was laid out much like the one I served on with my friends. The real pilot probably sat next to me and probably contrived to keep out of my sight.

The landscape ahead was dominated by a sinister looking mountain, a black cropping of stone jaggedly defying a placid yellow sky. The flight of the rocket took me directly towards it.

I heard a slight sound beside me and the small sounds of hands on rocket controls.

“What am I doing here?” is what I wanted to say, but the drug, whatever it was, left me barely able to open my mouth, much less speak.

This was all more than I could understand. Even an evil hybrid like Lord Bowen let a man complain some while he kidnapped him. Why put me up front where I could see where I was bound? It seemed to me that you're average evil plotter would tie and blindfold his victim, probably in the hold of the rocket.

My head shifted slightly. Someone stood behind my seat and adjusted the restraints slightly. I felt a slight pain in my arm.

The mountain before me swam and I passed out once again.

My waking was to a kind of nightmare!

The scene before me was a landing field at the foot of the mountain. A slightly luminous gas crept out from crevasses in the dark rock all around. Men walked around the place, and those wore dark segmented armor that looked familiar in all the wrong ways.

I was among soldiers of the Satellite Lords!

No longer was I strapped to a chair, but I felt some kind of device holding me up. I moved along as if walking, but enough feeling remained in my tired body to know that my arms and legs hung limp. Someone must have been behind me, perhaps two men, holding me erect, like some puppet of flesh.

As I was made to move along a path, those that passed me mocked me like the devils they were. They nodded and smiled to me, in a mock friendship, and some even gave a kind of salute.

The path turned to a stone edifice like the mouth of a great beast, and through the teeth the passage lead below ground.

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My vision swam and the scene before me became a dungeon, blocks of underground cells, and in places, helpless half dead cosmic elves chained to the rock walls.

The path twisted and came to a place lit with electrical torches, and a table where several blue-gray Satellite Lords tortured a man with burning needles.

The scene filled me with sickness and horror, but I found I could not shut my eyes!

It must have been that glue they'd used to attach my hands to the controls before, perhaps they'd applied it to my eyelids.

Again, the scene made a change and I moved down a set of narrow stairs into a cave where the torches showed a single prisoner lying on the ground. It was an elf of Selenium, stripped, covered in lash marks, sweating and trembling. Yes, the heat must have been infernal, this place could only be hell!

The puppeteers behind me forced me closer, leaning over the still form. Someone flipped the elf over so that I could see his face.

It was none other than my Gnaro, my captain. The one of the floor was Tando Var!

I tried again to cry out or to speak, but the drug still held my tongue. Tears ran from my irritated eyes and sweat streamed down my brow.

The only mercy of the whole thing was that I could see he still breathed.

If I could just come back to myself long enough, to rip off my restraints and stand on my own two feet, I knew I would make these alien monsters pay. What terrible game were they playing? Why taunt me? Why not simply kill me, kill us both? What could I do against cold minds like these? If I could but move a finger.

The vice holding my head pivoted downward slightly, and a hand came up, a hand holding a weapon.

The weapon, I took to be a kind of raygun, although made in weird organic swirls, as if made from some kind of horn. It lifted and pointed down at Tando.

What was worse, though, was that I recognized the arm, the tanned flesh. Yes, that was my own right arm that held the weapon on my captain!

A panic shook me now: would they really force me to watch as they made me shoot my own guardian and friend?

My own finger tightened on the trigger, as if possessed of its own will!

Tando vanished, the dungeon vanished, and stars twinkled in my vision, a cold giddy sensation flowed through me. I felt my body drop on a hard floor of some kind and my joints all smarted as if someone was ripping them from the sockets.

I heard a loud pounding from someplace and voices.

I looked up and the star field remained, but quickly it shrank away, getting smaller.

The place was the suite of rooms back in the palace on Selenium, my aching body on the floor, not far from the bed, a silken sheet halfway around me. A slight chill had me, yet I was covered in sweat. I blinked, and my eyelids moved, up at the corner of the room where I had seen to curtain of night shrink away.

The pounding continued and I realized someone was at the door.

I answered and found a group of sentries, who immediately came into the room.

“Good morning?” I said dully.

Their leader said to me “We must search your rooms, Cylas Renford.”

“Certainly, but... oh, either I've had a nightmare or something is very wrong.”

“Something is wrong, we think your captain has been murdered.”

“I think I'm going to be sick.”

I dashed for a wash room and splashed water from the automatic basin on my face. In the mirror I could see red places on my face, on the back of each eyelid, as if something had been scraped away. I noticed similar signs of irritation on the palms of my hands.

“Sir!” Someone called out from the bedroom. “A weapon!”

I entered and saw him pull a raygun from the sheets. It was the same gun I had held on Tando in the nightmare! It was spattered with dried blood!