They finally spotted Myx on the morning of the seventh day. It was a strange-looking place, the only world circling a yel-low blue star, which itself was the only star for light-years around. They were so far off the usual starways, it could be argued that this tiny system was not part of the Five-Arm at all. Its location also begged another question: If this was indeed the real Myx, where did the Whites and Grays come from?
Hunter drained off 99.999999018 percent of his speed and maneuvered the flying machine in toward the planet. A thick murk was rising into the atmosphere, nearly into orbit itself. The place looked shrouded in clouds, but in reality it was smoke. That was something else Zarex told them during the trip: Most of Myx was actually on fire.
"There are probably just a handful of people who know about this planet," Zarex said now, looking down at the absolutely weird world. "Of that handful, only a few are as crazy as me to fly all the way out here."
Tomm could only agree. "And I thought Zazu-Zazu was a lost rock," he said.
Hunter swooped beneath smoky cloud cover, leveled off at five hundred feet, and commenced his aerial recon. There really wasn't a lot of variation on the planet's surface, however. No matter what part of Myx they passed over, the scene was that of utter devastation. Entire cities, forests, valleys, mountains, all laid to waste. The wreckage of many giant weapons was also in evidence, including hundreds of ancient-looking multitubed blaster rays. They also sighted many large military installations; all of them blasted to bits. In many cases they were dotted with hundreds of solidified piles of white dust: incinerated soldiers that never even made it to the battlefield.
And everywhere were the robots.
From the highest mountains to the deepest valleys, in the heaviest debris of the cities and along the thousands of miles of front lines, there was the wreckage of millions of battle robots. It made the planet Tonk, which was strewn with thousands of junked ships, look like a tropical paradise by comparison.
It didn't take more than a few extremely low circumnavigations of the planet for the story to come together. This was hardly the battered but noble place described in the heroic myths. This was a dirty little planet, awash in destruction, centuries-old blood, and liquefied hydraulic gas. During his brief stint in the Empire's X-Forces, Hunter had seen many battle-scarred worlds, uncharted places that looked so uninviting, his recommendation back to Earth was simple: "Avoid until necessary."
Still, he'd seen nothing that compared to this.
And there was more: To make a very treacherous place even worse, the entire planet was sown with mines, trip wires, and other exotic booby traps. Hunter's sensors indicated millions of these devices in place, from pole to pole, east to west, all over the vast battlefield. One wrong move down there, a sneeze, a burp, a dropped quadtrol, could set off every implanted weapon within a half-mile radius of the act, causing a massive chain reaction that was more than enough to perforate the offending party until they were nothing more than a zillion little pieces of subatomic dust.
Put it all together — the remote location, the haunting myth, the layers of dangerous junk below — and Myx was probably the last place anyone would want to land. Throw in the millions of skeletons, well-preserved and bleached by cosmic rays, rivers that literally ran in the color of blood, the near-poisonous atmosphere and, for good measure, several pyramids that had been built eons ago — well, the result was probably the most inhospitable planet in the Galaxy.
Yet Zarex had been there once before and lived to tell the tale. He'd delivered a weapons load to the planet seventy years before, in the heyday of his arms-dealing career. At the time, his buyer was unknown to him, and the contract, for several thousand used blaster rifles, had been given to him after passing through more than a dozen separate hands.
He didn't stay around long enough to unravel the real secret of Myx. Per his buyer's instructions, he'd brought the arms cache down to a prearranged coordinate packaged in a Twenty 'n Six. Zarex waited not even a minute when the cache disappeared and his payment materialized. He left quickly after that, completing the strangest deal he'd ever done.
It was only later, while running blasters to one side in the brutal Bunker-Sabrini System civil war, that he learned exactly who his client that day was. One Rebel planet in the Bunker-S was holding out until reinforcements could fly in from the next system over. Royalist forces battered the planet for months, until the cavalry finally arrived and chased them away. When the victorious forces beamed down to the planet, they found all of its valiant defenders dead. One contingent had been made up of meres who, it had been whispered, were from "way, way out." On hearing this, Zarex visited the battleground, saw the bodies, and examined their combat weapons. They were from the load he'd dropped off on Myx just months before.
His buyer had been a battalion of the Freedom Brigade.
"But how can such a wretched place have a connection to the Home Planets?" Tomm asked Zarex, now that he'd had a good look at the place again.
"It's a hard question, with a hard answer, Padre," the explorer replied. "Perhaps whoever inhabits the Home Planets — if, in fact, they still exist — knows that this place is the most cursed rock on the Five-Arm, if not the whole Galaxy.
"Add in the whole mythological jumble about the place. At the very least, the person who put that juicy legend together wanted people to believe this planet was holy, scary, unlucky— all at once. Just further incentive to stay away should anyone happen to come upon it. In my mind, that all makes a perfect place to do supersecret things"
Tomm could barely look down at the planet now.
"Amen to that," he said.
Zero Degree Zero. That was the coordinate on Myx that Zarex had beamed down to that day many years ago.
This was a point, located in the western hemisphere, where legend said, the Whites and the Grays had maintained their longest front line, a twenty-five-mile stretch of territory that cut through a deep valley about midway across the planet's largest landmass.
It was no surprise that the ZDZ looked even more devastated than the rest of the planet, if that was possible. Bomb craters everywhere, wide swaths of blaster residue torn into the landscape. The region was extra thick with exotic booby traps. On the entire planet, this seemed to be the absolute worst place for anyone to want to land.
Yet this is where Zarex told them to go.
After circling the coordinate several times, Hunter's keen eye found a spot where he could set the flying machine down without disturbing any of the trip wires. This LZ was actually the highest elevation found in the vicinity of Zero Degree Zero. Not a hill, but the remains of mountain that had been caught in a massive cross fire of blasters ages ago, shearing off its summit.
Hunter landed close to the edge of the flattened-out peak and immediately checked the atmosphere with his environmental management systems. How the planet's puff was still intact was yet another mystery, but his gear said the air was still breathable, though barely so.
This didn't make what they saw outside any more appealing. The wreckage, the echoes of the carnage, the dreary overcast. The pyramids off in the distance. The vibe here was not good.
"Whose idea was this again?" Hunter asked as he gazed out at the endless miles of wreckage.
Both Pater Tomm and Zarex answered on cue, "Yours…"
Hunter just shook his head. "Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting."
He popped the canopy and gingerly climbed out of the flying machine. There was an eerie wind blowing across the ZDZ. It sounded like many voices crying at once. And no matter where Hunter looked, he saw nothing but destruction. Fires still bum-ing, devastated buildings, and tens of thousands of silhouettes of white soot. The ground, when you could see it between the robots, was stained mightily with blood.