The three men stayed frozen in place. All three knew pieces of the story Xara had just told them, though they hadn't been aware just how involved she was in the beginning of Hunter's quest.
"You did what you thought was a noble act," Calandrx finally told her. "Every person must know his past. You were just helping a lost soul find his home. It was an honorable thing to do."
"Besides, Hunter is very clever," Erx said. "Should someone catch up to him and return him for trial, he would very smartly argue his case. The worst sentence is not a foregone conclusion. Others have beaten it before."
"But you don't understand." Xara began sobbing again. "Those that are now in pursuit of him — their goal is not to bring him back for being AWOL. They are worried what he might uncover if he finds what he is looking for — and they will kill him before he does."
Now dead silence fell on the room. The Empire killing one of its own officers? Even the darkest elements of the imperial military were never accused of that.
They were all quiet for a very long time. The fire was roaring, but they barely felt its heat.
Finally Xara said, "There is really only one thing that can be done to help Hunter."
"Please my lady," Calandrx said. "Just tell us, and we will do it."
She looked at all three of them. At that moment, they would have jumped over the moon for her.
Well, almost…
"You must find him," she finally said to them.
All three were stunned.
Find Hunter? How?
Calandrx looked at the others. They appeared as shocked as he. Suddenly, this had changed from imperial hand-holding to… well, to what exactly?
They had no idea where Hunter was. And they knew there was a good chance Hunter didn't know where he was himself! He was most likely in some part of the Galaxy not under control of the Fourth Empire. And how does one exactly go about looking for a person out in the vast fringes of space? Especially one who probably doesn't want to be found?
But all three men were soldiers, and this was their Princess. They were supposed to do anything she asked, simply for the honor of it.
"But I'm afraid that this is a mission of desperation that I am sending you on," she said. "One fraught with danger for you as well."
"What do you mean, my lady?" Calandrx asked her.
"I've heard whisperings," she confessed. "And the things I hear are rather frightening. The foundation of the Empire itself may be at stake here. And that is not good for us, nor is it good for Hunter."
The three men weren't sure what she meant.
"You will not be the only ones looking for him," she explained again. "In fact, others have already gotten a head start."
She paused and wiped her eyes again.
"I can provide you with a fast ship," she finally resumed. "And safe passage through any sector of the reclaimed Galaxy. I can arrange for the best star charts. The best intelligence."
Suddenly it seemed as if the big room got a bit brighter, as if the Earth had just wobbled a bit on its axis. Calandrx began to say something but stopped. Erx and Berx bit their tongues as well.
A long pause.
"Just find him first… please." Xara told them.
The men bowed deeply. Rascals three.
"We will, my lady," Calandrx said, hiding a smile. "Or die trying…"
6
Hunter slipped the flying machine into orbit around the small planet, then reached back into his cockpit and shook Pater Tomm awake.
"Are we there yet?" the priest asked sleepily.
"If Klaaz's directions were right, this should be the place," Hunter replied.
The planet below was called Bazooms. It orbited a yellow star known simply as BDG, short for Big Dan's Girl. The star system was located roughly below the elbow of the Five-Arm, in an isolated sector of the fifth spiral known as the Twist.
They'd reached BDG about three hours after leaving the dirty snowball of Tonk. Once inside the system, it was not hard to locate the planet in question. BDG was a rather boring collection of uninhabited rocks orbiting a dull sun. Only Bazooms showed evidence of past life.
An ancient image called up on Hunter's quadtrol showed the planet once shimmered with the bright glow of circus colors: red, green, and yellow. Its atmosphere was once cobalt blue. Thousands of ultrabright beacons, not unlike the powerful zasers of Earth, had flashed crazily in all directions, their beams reaching beyond the edges of the star system.
At one time, Bazooms was a place to be. Essentially an orbiting brothel, the planet was once a very high-end resort where only the richest and most fortunate citizens could stay and play. All that had changed a few dozen centuries before — or at least that's what Hunter's hand-held quadtrol was saying. It predicted that Bazooms would be as dull and dark as everything else floating around the moribund system. The wash of time and events had passed this place by. Its current status was listed as "unknown."
A good place if someone wanted to hide out.
It took some digging during the first hour of the flight, but Tomm had managed to scan his own quadtrol's distant memory bubbles for information on Zarex Red.
And the Klaaz had been right again. Zarex Red was no ordinary arms runner. True, at one time, he'd provided weapons to literally thousands of warring parties all over the middle regions of the vast Five-Arm. In fact, about a hundred years before, Zarex Red had no less than sixteen planets stockpiled with his war-making merchandise. So many people wanted in on the dealing, his home-base solar system had been prone to space-traffic jams around its innermost orbits. War had been big business on the Five-Arm for centuries. At the peak of his career, Zarex was probably one of the biggest dealers on the entire Fringe.
But after he'd made his fortune, Zarex Red gave up his edgy life as an arms merchant and became, of all things, a deep-space explorer. Using his profits to finance numerous expeditions, he had visited the farthermost reaches of the outer Five-Arm, way out beyond the Last Star Fields, even beyond the Final Stream. The memory bubbles in Tomm's quadtrol claimed, insisted even, that Zarex had journeyed farther out on the Five-Arm than anyone else had ever dared.
Tomm's quadtrol also confirmed that Zarex Red was last reported to be living on Bazooms, "retired from all positions."
Now viewed from a lower orbit, the remains on Bazooms looked to be everything its name and reputation had implied. It was a small world, just a couple thousand miles or so in circumference, with rocky highlands north and south of a tropic equator. The two large landmasses were covered with hundreds of fantastically old structures. Palaces, resorts, casinos, sky-scraping hotels, not decayed, just abandoned. Cities once bathed in garish lights now unlit and dark. Thousands of artificial lakes, rivers, and lagoons, and one entire sea, dried up. Just about every square inch of level terrain had been taken up at one time with a hedonistic establishment of some kind. But now the planet appeared to be dead. Desolate. One big ghost town.
Yet, switching over to his long-range scanner, Hunter saw the barest glimmer of light coming from a spot on the larger of the two landmasses, just north of the equator. It came over as a patch of color in the otherwise gray background. There was a bit of life still left down there.
Or so it seemed.
Hunter set the flying machine's auto-scan on high, and after a few passes he got a closer blink on the life signs below. Nestled into the side of a high peak about two hundred miles north of the planet's equator was another palace of sorts, built with seven spires and a large artificial lake in the middle. Hunter booted his azimuth and was soon in a low orbit just ninety-five miles above this place. According to the scanner, only one life-form was left on Bazooms. All alone, right below them.