Off to one side and up one level, there was a huge room featuring a thick, black, cast-ion door and surrounded by a deactivated ion fence. It was a vault, not unlike the one Hunter had broken into back on Moon 39. This is what Erx and Berx had brought him here to see.
"There is a real mystery in there," Erx said to Hunter as they ascended the rampway to the huge compartment. "It is exactly what we had envisioned, yet just the opposite as well."
Two UPF soldiers were guarding the entrance to the vault. But Hunter could see no excited movement inside, no signs of activity at all. This was not good.
He followed Erx and Berx into the vault and quickly realized that any similarity between this safe and the one he'd visited on Moon 39 ended at the door. First of all, this place was nearly ten times larger. There were thousands upon thousands of floating shelves in here; all of them holding small glass boxes. There were also thousands of these glass boxes stacked in the corners and scattered around the floor. The vault on Moon 39 had been meticulously kept, pristine in atmosphere, with an aura almost like a church.
This place looked like nothing less than frozen chaos.
Within all these boxes was the real prize of Xronis Trey, the "jewels" Hunter and the others had come here for: mind rings. And at first it might have appeared they had found the holy grail of their mission. But something was very wrong here. While there were probably more than 100,000 rings in the vault, they had all been rendered useless. Not by an intentional act on the BMK's part to destroy information once the UPF attack had started; rather, the mind rings had deteriorated due to neglect.
Mind rings were delicate things, and to be preserved, they had to be stored at a temperature close to absolute zero when not in use. Judging by the condition of the holding boxes as well as the vault itself, this had not been done here. Many of the jewel boxes were cracked and broken. Others had simply undergone a process of slow disintegration. Not one of them looked usable.
"Our mistake was to assume these BMK mooks would adhere to some kind of military discipline out here," Berx said angrily. "Any commander worth his salt would have protected these things, even if all they contained was information about how to fix an environmental control cell."
"But the mystery is this," Erx went on, picking up a handful of cracked boxes and looking at the dozens of broken and deteriorated rings inside. "We know there are two kinds of rings: intell rings, which are usually created by military types, and solo rings, which individuals use to record on their own.
"For whatever reason, the majority of rings in here aren't military intell rings as we had envisioned. They are solo rings."
Hunter examined a few of the deteriorated rings. They were gold in color. Intell rings were almost always silver.
"But in any case," Erx said, dropping the glass cases to the floor with a mighty crash, "none of them work. We ran scans over this entire place. They're all dead. Their magic was lost a long time ago."
Hunter felt his heart sink into his boots. He gloomily accepted Berx's offer of his flask and took a long, noisy slug of slow-ship wine. The thick liquor felt good going down his throat, but it did nothing to raise his spirits. It was like they were standing in a mausoleum: cold and dank, just not cold enough.
He took one ring off a nearby shelf and slowly rolled it through his fingers.
"My brothers," he said to Erx and Berx. "This was a long way to come for nothing."
Captain Borx Kyx was sitting on a hovering chair, his hands fastened behind his back, a very bright light shining in his eyes.
He didn't look 499 years old. He was a medium-sized individual, somewhat muscular, with a shaved head and impossibly long sideburns, the fashion of the Five Arm back in the last millennia. Battle scars on his face, especially around his mouth, had left him with a permanent sneer. His right eye was green, the left one was blue, with a tattoo of a teardrop beneath each one. Again, this sort of thing had been the rage on the fifth spiral way back in the mid-sixty-fifth century.
Kyx was the commanding officer of the BMK forces on Xronis Trey. He was the eldest soldier at the base, having flown out from the Five Arm as a lowly private 322 years before. His position here was more a tribute to his longevity than any leadership qualities. He'd simply outlived his superiors, moving up a step in rank every time one of them passed away. His men disliked him intensely. They suspected that he'd been hoarding all the best holo-girl programs from early on and that he'd stolen from them the only premium slow-ship wine replicater on the planet. He'd also forced the garrison to do the mandatory once-a-decade security drills. This amounted to little more than a few days of calisthenics and taking an inventory of all weapons and supplies. Still, in the eyes of his men, it made him the biggest SOB for light-years around.
Kyx and his junior officers had been rounded up within minutes of the surprise attack. They were brought to the infirmary, one of the few structures left intact around the base's command cluster, and given aid for their wounds. They were also relieved of their weapons and ID strings.
After quick examination of the officers' IDs, Kyx was identified as the top man and brought to a smaller room adjacent to the tiny hospital. This is where he was now.
To his eyes, these invaders were a strange lot. Their battle uniforms were not of any design Kyx had ever seen. They were sand colored, with indiscriminately placed blotches of dull red, black, and green. Their footwear was not the standard issue pointed-toe, thick-heeled spaceboot, but rather a heavy-soled canvas shoe with very high backs and laces keeping them on tight. The soldiers wore helmets that looked bulbous and uncomfortable, more like a distorted steel pot than the bubble-top combat hat wom by just about every soldier in this quarter of the Galaxy. Their weapons were odd, too: huge, double-barreled blaster rifles, with dual power packs hanging off each side. Every soldier was carrying an enormous ray gun as a side arm as well.
Were these mysterious soldiers space mercs? A rival outfit seeking to eliminate their competition? Kyx didn't think so. They just didn't have the demeanor of hired guns. And the strange vessels they'd arrived in. They seemed to be from an era even earlier than Kyx could remember — all except the bizarrely configured spacefighter that had torn up his base in just a couple minutes' time. Kyx had never seen anything like that.
Two dark figures were hovering over him now. And they were asking him very odd questions, over and over again.
"How long have the Bad Moon Knights occupied this base?" one voice barked at him.
Kyx could only offer a shrug in reply. "I already told you. I can only guess. Maybe eight hundred, nine hundred years."
"But it was here already before that? This base…"
Kyx just shrugged again. "Obviously, some of the structures here are much older than a thousand years. Some are ancient. Many ruins are supposed to be found underground."
"When was the last time you heard from your headquarters?"
Kyx laughed in their faces. "I can't remember back that far," he told them.
"And your mission here — what was it supposed to be?"
Kyx just laughed again. "Something tells me you know more about that than I do."
It was at this point Hunter, Erx, and Berx arrived in the interrogation room.
It was so dark inside, it took Hunter's eyes a moment to adjust. Standing on one side of Kyx was Pater Tomm, the priest who had served as chaplain for the Freedom Brigade during the climactic battle of Zazu-Zazu, home of the near-mythical Lighthouse. A diminutive, balding man always found in cassock and white collar, Tomm had led Hunter through the wilds of the Five Arm, helping him in his quest to find the Home Planets.
Beside the priest was Zarex Red. A giant of a man famous throughout the Five Arm both for his gun-running activities and his history-making deep-space explorations, he'd joined up with Hunter and Tomm halfway through their search for the Home Planets. Zarex was almost seven feet tall and had biceps so enormous, they split the sleeves of just about any piece of clothing he wore. His hair nearly reached the small of his back, of a fashion nowhere in the Galaxy. His rocky but handsome face was offset by large, inquisitive eyes.