Standing in the corner of the room was an even more gigantic figure: Zarex's robot, 33418. He was a danker, meaning a robot that possessed bare human characteristics: head, arms, legs, and torso. But he was ten feet tall, with the strength of a hundred men and possessing a destructo-ray beneath his eye visor that nearly equaled in power the six blasters mounted on Hunter's flying machine.
Despite the presence of so much muscle, Hunter didn't think the BMK commander looked very concerned. He was smiling, in fact, almost dissing them. This was a big mistake. For while just the sight of 33418 and Zarex was intimidating, Hunter knew the most dangerous person in the room was the priest, Pater Tomm. The cassock and collar hid many things, many of which Hunter nor anyone else were privy to. One they did know about was the blackjack Tomm always carried in his back pocket. Any adversary not meeting Tomm's expectations of cooperation risked having a meeting with this nasty little piece of iron.
"You claim there are more ruins underground," Tomm was saying to the captured officer now. "And yet you never bothered to go digging around, looking for any of them?"
Kyx just smirked again. "Father, I've been out here for three hundred years. Isolation dulls your curiosity, believe me."
Hunter winced at the officer's words. He saw Tomm's hand reach for his little black friend; the club was quickly twirling between his fingers. But the priest held back — at least for the moment.
Zarex took over. He put the bright light closer to Kyx's face.
"Do you know who the Solar Guards are?"
Kyx shook his head. "No…."
"Do you know where the Home Planets are?"
"Never heard of them…."
"When was the last time a ship docked here?"
Kyx pretended to think a moment. He was a bad actor.
"Sixty, maybe sixty-five years ago…" he finally replied. "And he landed here by mistake. An off-course ion mover. We collected a penalty fee and sent him on his way."
"Where do you keep your secure communications bubbles?"
Kyx just laughed again. "Communications bubbles? We don't have any. There's nothing important here. God, we haven't even got paid in more than fifty years."
Zarex came even closer to him now. "I'm very familiar with your organization," he huffed at him. "And pay or not, you can't tell me you don't know why you're out here."
Kyx felt a drop of sweat fall into his eye. "You have to believe me," he insisted. "We don't have any idea! I mean, my superiors told me that we were an advance base for some top secret operation, something that could happen at any time. But that was centuries ago — and no one here believes it, anyway. Look at us! Do we appear to be part of a top secret, top-priority operation to you?"
He laughed again. Subtle laughter.
"We've been stuck out here for almost a thousand years, waiting for something to happen," he said. Then he looked up at them and added, "But nothing ever does."
Erx stepped forward now. "How about that vault full of mind rings? Through your neglect, untold amounts of information has been lost."
The smirk left Kyx's face for a moment.
"Those trinkets were dead when I got here three centuries ago," he snapped back. "And if in fact that's all you came here for, well, I'm sorry, but you've embarked on a fool's mission. We have no mind rings here — none that still work, anyway."
At that moment, there was a knock at the door. Hunter reached over and opened it.
A huge UPF soldier came through and saluted smartly.
"All of the BMKs have been searched," he reported to Hunter. "None of them were carrying anything of interest— except these."
He handed Hunter a dozen holo-girl capsules. They were ancient. Hunter looked up at the soldier. "Nothing interesting at all?"
The soldier just shook his head. "I didn't think holo-girl technology was that old," he said, adding, "if you know what I mean."
The soldier saluted and left.
Hunter turned back to the others and just shrugged. The last hope that some of the BMK soldiers would be carrying mind rings of their own had now been dashed. At that moment, the energy seemed to drain from the room. The months of planning, and all that training! What do they do now? Go back?
Hunter looked up and saw that Kyx was smiling thinly at him. The BMK commander's twinkling mismatched eyes told the tale why. If Hunter and the others had intended to kill him, he would have been dead by now. He knew he was going to live through this, and he was happy about it. Happy — and smug.
"I assure you that I'll not say a word to my superiors about this little incident," Kyx began sarcastically. "You boys have a great future ahead of you, especially if you make the trip farther down the Two Arm. I understand it's very wild and uncivilized down there — a good place for your little army to make some real money."
Hunter handed the holo-girl capsules to Zarex and then walked over to Kyx. He looked right into the man's sneering eyes. He was gloating, true. But something else was hidden in there.
"Has anyone body-searched smiley here?" Hunter asked suddenly.
The grin quickly vanished from Kyx's face. Everyone in the room was back to looking at him.
"I don't believe we have," Zarex said slowly.
With that, he nodded to 33418. The giant robot stepped forward, lifted Kyx from his seat, and in one motion turned him upside down. Holding him by his ankles, he began shaking the BMK officer vigorously.
All kinds of stuff began falling from Kyx's pockets and under his shirt, things he'd managed to keep hidden while being frisked. Aluminum coins, miniflasks of slow-ship wine, a couple obviously newer holo-girl capsules. The last thing to come out was another kind of capsule. It was teardrop-shaped, slightly green in color, and maybe half again the size of the holo-girl devices.
It was a Twenty 'n Six, an old, rather simple transdimensional device that, when activated, could move just about anything into the mysterious twenty-sixth dimension, where it could be held in stasis until being recalled again. These mechanisms were created about two thousand years before as a tool for spies to condense purloined information or whatever else they were stealing. These days, they could be found in just about any corner of the Galaxy.
Hunter picked up the Twenty 'n Six and studied it for a moment. Then he held out his right hand and activated the Recall switch. A bright emerald beam spilled out of the capsule, forming a small cloud in Hunter's palm. There was a bright flash, and an instant later, the puff of smoke turned into a small glass box.
It was very, very cold and covered with a layer of green soot. As the others gathered around, Hunter scraped off some dust and they all peered in. Within the six-inch-by-six-inch square box there was a cloud of extremely thick white mist. Not like fog, more like a tiny gathering of cumulus, the making of a small storm, contained within the box.
Floating among the clouds was a shimmering gold mind ring.
2
This place was called Lookout Below.
It was the high mesa located about a mile south of the BMK base on Xronis Trey. The sheer sides of the huge formation provided the name. It was nearly a thousand-foot drop straight down off the south end, where only a hard landing on the flat, desert floor waited below.