Pater Tomm opened his mouth to say something further, but a terrifying screech drowned him out. An ion shell had impacted right on the main door. The sudden green glow was a dead giveaway. That, and the ear-splitting noise.
"Quickly!" Klaaz said, although he began moving quite slowly. "We must get below!"
They made their way down a long, dark corridor that led deeper into the castle.
Hunter had never seen burned ice before; now it was all around him. Actually, they were blocks of ice saturated with gamma radiation, so much so they looked and felt like glass. The walls of the castle were made of huge blocks of the stuff. Each one appeared as if it had a faint yellow flame glowing from within, the eternal, if diminished by-product of the massive gamma bombardment. Though the decay of the fort's interior made the glowing blocks of ice look more like gigantic, dirty diamonds, the place must have been stunning when first built many centuries ago.
They eventually reached a kind of subchamber about five hundred feet below ground level. There was a dull lamp hovering near the ceiling here, and it was noticeably wanner. The Great Klaaz stopped, needing to catch a breath.
Tomm needed a break as well. He produced a flask of slow-ship wine and offered it to Klaaz. The old man took it without a moment's hesitation and nearly drained the vessel dry.
"So, you old dog!" Tomm yelled at Klaaz, retrieving what was left of his wine supply. "All the stories I have heard about you were true!"
The old man smiled widely, displaying a mouthful of cracked and yellowed teeth. "You know better than to believe more than half of them, Padre," he said with another wheeze. It was strange. Hunter couldn't recall ever seeing anyone so old so happy.
Klaaz pried the flask from Tomm's hands and drank once again.
"After all these years, dear brother," he said to the priest, "you have arrived at a very interesting moment!"
"You do seem to be in a sort of bind here, my friend," Tomm agreed.
Klaaz wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Obviously, a dire situation exists, Padre," he said. "The enemy beyond the walls number more than twenty thousand. They are a gang of the usual suspects: space pirates and no-goodnik meres who seek something that does not belong to them."
"How long has this been going on, my brother?"
"Centuries — or so it seems," Klaaz said with a cough. "You saw my holo-army. Impressive, no?"
"I've not seen such trickery in two centuries," Tomm replied diplomatically, "and I suspect it was an ancient strategy even back then."
"It was and still is," Klaaz admitted. "But in case you have not noticed, there is a bit of desperation in the air we are breathing."
Above them the sound of more blaster barrages could be heard landing inside the fort's high walls.
"But you've been able to hold out, my brother," Tomm said. "You must have some kind of brilliant defense in place—"
Klaaz cackled loudly.
"I have six power-gravity fields surrounding this place," he said. "And they are really the only reason the Huns haven't stormed the gates already. Trouble is, all six fields are degrading very rapidly. I mean, your craft had no problem getting through, did it?"
The priest shook his head solemnly. Klaaz shrugged again. "Their integrity must be worse than I thought."
Tomm let his friend drain the flask.
"My old chum," he said. "Those twenty thousand soldiers outside your wall. Why are they here? What could they possibly want? You? This castle?"
"Not me or the castle, Padre," Klaaz replied. "But the people I am protecting here."
Tomm did a double take. "People? What people? You mean you aren't out here alone, my brother?"
The twinkle returned to Klaaz's eye.
"Alone?" he asked with a wink. "Hardly…"
They resumed walking down the long, descending hallway, Klaaz moving slowly in a kind of staggering gait. The lower tube was lit by simple proton-decay lanterns. They provided just enough light to reveal that the walls of the tunnel were adorned with faded ice paintings of Tonk's golden age. One depicted the planet as being the brightest body on the entire Five-Arm, literally the center of a small universe. Another illustrated a huge battle between thousands of spaceships of all shapes and sizes, with those from Tonk winning mightily, of course. Judging by the murky detail and the porous nature of the burned ice wall, Hunter guessed the paintings were done even before Tonk's heyday, and that was at least two thousand years ago, probably more.
They finally reached the end of the hallway to find themselves stepping onto a somewhat rickety balcony; its supports were as rusty as Klaaz's sword. The balcony looked out on an enormous chamber. Also made of burned ice, it was nearly an eighth of a mile wide with a ceiling at least five hundred feet high, and no doubt reaching the bottom layer of the courtyard itself.
Sitting in the middle of this chamber was a spacecraft. Or at least that's what Hunter thought it was. Actually, he'd never seen anything like it before. It was long and slender; its sharpened nose nearly touched the roof of the huge chamber. It had rows of portholes running down one side and was standing on three huge fins. A vast network of scaffolding surrounded it, and it was draped in power cables and tattered golden sheets. A bubble of knowledge rose up from the deep recesses of his past life and told Hunter that this was an ancient combustible-fuel rocket he was looking at, a passenger carrier built at least three thousand years before, more probably closer to four. The pictures back in the tunnel were almost recent by comparison.
Scattered around the bottom of this rocket were hundreds of tiny white bubble-top living compartments, shelters more readily found outside in a temperate battle zone, not within a frozen, dilapidated enclosure. But this was not an army encampment they were looking down on. The people below were not soldiers. They were young women. All of them beautiful, all of them dressed in the barest of clothes. Torn gowns and ripped shorts mostly, some were wearing tops, many not, as if they were stranded on some uncharted tropical world and not inside a crumbling ice fort on a very chilly dead-end planet.
Hunter saw Tomm's face blush at the first sight of all this, and even his own chest was suddenly growing warm. Two thousand beautiful women, hiding way out here? It didn't seem possible.
Was there any chance he might be dreaming this? Hunter wondered.
The women below were very quietly going about the daily routines of life. Talking, walking, sitting, eating. The balcony was about fifty feet above the living level, and those women who saw Klaaz looking out at them waved vigorously to him. Many blew kisses. The old soldier pretended to catch each one and then smack it on his own lips.
"Behold these poor women," he said among these antics. "They are the survivors of a small star system called Mutaman-Younguska. It is but a hundred ten light-years from here. Or it used to be, for the Huns that now encircle us destroyed the system five years ago, killing the few soldiers it had and blowing up all but a prison planet. Their advance forces have been pursuing these females ever since."
Pater Tomm could barely speak — a rare occasion indeed.
"But… how did they wind up here? With you?" he finally managed to ask.
"Their ship landed here a year or so ago," the old soldier replied. "They'd heard the Klaaz was still here on Tonk and hoped that I could help them. Trouble was, the space scum arrived not two weeks later."
He paused a moment; the smile left his face.
"A sad vision, isn't it?" he asked wistfully. "Imagine what they thought when they saw that I was just an old man, practically marooned here myself, with a fortress built by the ancients crumbling around me? Of course that's probably what you thought on your own arrival as well."
"These people came in that… spacecraft?" Pater Tomm asked his friend incredulously. "It seems older than this castle!"