by Mack Maloney
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.
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.
From this vantage point, in the dim light of Xronis Trey's long afternoon, the isolated planet's sun Pepsicus appeared as a sad-eyed red ball sinking slowly into the south. It barely generated enough heat to keep itself going, never mind the three rocks that orbited it. One of those planets, Zinc & Tin, could also be seen from here. It hung about fifty degrees above the horizon, just to the left of the dying red star. It was a heavily cratered ball of dirty orange and musty green, the color of rust from a half million miles away.
One of the UPF space shuttles now sat atop the mesa. Erx and Berx were behind its controls: Zarex and Pater Tomm were out of the shuttle and standing close to the edge of the butte. Hunter was with them, looking out over the precipice as well. He was still in his flight suit, an oxygen supply tank on his back. He was not hooked up to his bubble-top space helmet, though. At the moment, he was breathing just fine, if a little anxiously.
In his hand he held the one last surviving mind ring, the one they found on Captain Kyx. It was marked simply: "Last Time Here." They had no idea what the title meant or what the ring contained or even if it contained anything at all. Mind rings could be strange things. They weren't always uniform and sometimes presented characteristics that could only be described as moody. The technology emerged around the year 3000 a.d., creators unknown, and had managed hang on through many galactic upheavals and at least three Dark Ages. While closer in toward the Ball, mind rings were considered ancient by now — thought drops had replaced them centuries before — billions of trillions of them were still floating around the fringes of the Milky Way.
This one was a solo ring, the kind created by individuals of their own accord, to keep personal recollections or to pass them on to others as a way of correspondence. That's really the only thing they knew about it.
"One last time, brother," Zarex asked Hunter now, surveying the rather bleak surroundings. "Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, one ring out of hundreds of thousands? There is no telling what it might hold."
"It must contain something unusual," Hunter replied. "There has to be a reason why Kyx held it so close to him. We have to take the chance that it might hold some information valuable to us. Even if it is just one clue — something that would make all our efforts just a little worthwhile at least."
"But are you sure this is where you want to be?" Zarex pressed him. "I've always thought mind ring manipulation should be done in a controlled environment."
Hunter just shook his head.
"Brother, for me this is a controlled environment," he said. "Empty. Lifeless. Not much to interfere with my other senses. My gut tells me I'll get a better reading if I do it this way. Out here and alone for a while."
Zarex just shrugged, and so did Tomm. That Hunter possessed a highly advanced form of extrasensory perception was a given to them now. They knew whenever their friend got a feeling in his gut — or in his head — it was best that they all just go along for the ride. His instincts were never wrong. Or at least not so far.
"There is a beauty to this place, I suppose," Tomm said with a sigh. "Being a long way from nowhere sometimes has its advantages."
"I guess we'll soon find out." Hunter said.
Tomm and Zarex shook his hand and then climbed back aboard the bulked-up shuttle.
"We will return for you in exactly one hour's time, my brother," Berx yelled from behind the controls. "Not a second more."
"But should you need us before that, just whistle," Erx added. "And we'll be here immediately."
Hunter saluted them and stood back as the shuttle's engines kicked in. The vehicle went straight up, very quickly, leaving a small storm of dust and pebbles behind. It turned 180 degrees about 500 feet up, then was gone in a flash.
Hunter looked around. The dull red sun, the dirty orange and green planet, a few stars, and the empty desert were all that was before him. He really was alone now.
He sat down on a flattened rock about ten feet from the edge and took out his quadtrol. "At least I think this is how it should be done," he mumbled to himself.
He took off his helmet and placed the ring on top of his head. It fell briefly to his nose before adapting to its most efficient size, about an inch above his ears. Hunter took a gulp of the thin air and then tapped the ring twice. This was the universal activation signal for mind rings.
He sat back against the rock and concentrated on the red ball of Pepsicus, hanging just above the far horizon. When he'd worn the mind ring inside the vault on Moon 39, the "trip" had begun right away. But more than a minute later, Hunter was still staring at the dying red star and feeling no effects at all.
What was wrong? Maybe the ring wasn't as good in quality as the one he'd used on Moon 39. Or maybe it, too, had lost its ion charge. Or its magic.
Or maybe it was just a little slow….
Hunter felt his eyes begin to water as he became mesmerized by the curious red sun. Did it seem a bit brighter all of a sudden? And maybe a little bigger? Was that a bit of warmth he was feeling on his face, carried there by a sudden breeze?
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.
Flash!
What was once a stark desert before him had suddenly turned into a lush river valley, with miles of emerald grass flowing like waves on an ocean. The sky above him was now cobalt blue. The ragged planet of Zinc & Tin, still visible, now shimmered like a rose-colored gemstone. The whole landscape of Xronis Trey had changed. Life seemed to be everywhere, basking in light from the rejuvenated sun.
Hunter breathed in. The air was thick and sweet.
Wow…
The mind ring had kicked in.
He studied his immediate surroundings. He was in the sam
e place, sitting atop the same butte, leaning against the same rock. He was dressed differently, though. He'd embarked on the mind ring trip wearing his flight suit; now he was dressed in a bright orange tunic, wide green pants, high white boots, and a helmet with a little circular antenna sticking out of it. It was a military uniform of some sort, but not one designed for combat. Though he was carrying a puny ray gun in a side holster, Hunter guessed he was supposed to be a worker, a drone. He quickly inspected every part of his new outfit but could find no badges, emblems, or insignias that might tell him exactly what army he was in. No matter, it was an outfit that would have looked ridiculous in any time or dimension.
He activated his quadtrol, the handheld device that just about everyone in the Galaxy carried. It could analyze anything, anytime, anywhere. He asked it what year he was in. The answer came back: approximately 3237 a.d.
Hunter just stared at the readout screen. He couldn't believe it. This was the same year the deportation of Earth had taken place. It was exactly where he wanted to be.
He checked with the quadtrol again, even though the devices were never wrong. What year was he in? The answer bounced back the same: 3237 a.d.
He almost didn't want to believe it, almost didn't want to be this lucky, because he knew astonishing luck could run in both directions. Maybe this meant something. Maybe the cosmos was doing him a huge favor here. Or maybe it was making him the butt of some huge cosmic joke. The question was, how soon would it be before he could tell?
A sudden deep roar filled his ears, breaking through his thoughts. He looked up to see an enormous spaceship passing overhead. It was moving very slowly and was so big, it blotted out all light from the crimson sun.
This vessel was more than a mile long, with a blunt snout, a bulbous midsection, and a slightly tapered tail holding four ridiculously small fins. The ship was painted bright green. It looked old and new at the same time.