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structure. This place looked even older than the exterior of the building. It contained dozens of consoles and control boards and viz-screens, yet none appeared to have been activated in hundreds of years.
    Off to one side and up one level, there was a huge room featuring a thick, black, cast-ion door and surrounded by a deactivated ion fence. It was a vault, not unlike the one Hunter had broken into back on Moon 39. This is what Erx and Berx had brought him here to see.
    "There is a real mystery in there," Erx said to Hunter as they ascended the rampway to the huge compartment. "It is exactly what we had envisioned, yet just the opposite as well."
    Two UPF soldiers were guarding the entrance to the vault. But Hunter could see no excited movement inside, no signs of activity at all. This was not good.
    He followed Erx and Berx into the vault and quickly realized that any similarity between this safe and the one he'd visited on Moon 39 ended at the door. First of all, this place was nearly ten times larger. There were thousands upon thousands of floating shelves in here; all of them holding small glass boxes. There were also thousands of these glass boxes stacked in the corners and scattered around the floor. The vault on Moon 39 had been meticulously kept, pristine in atmosphere, with an aura almost like a church.
    This place looked like nothing less than frozen chaos.
    Within all these boxes was the real prize of Xronis Trey, the "jewels" Hunter and the others had come here for: mind rings. And at first it might have appeared they had found the holy grail of their mission. But something was very wrong here. While there were probably more than 100,000 rings in the vault, they had all been rendered useless. Not by an intentional act on the BMK's part to destroy information once the UPF attack had started; rather, the mind rings had deteriorated due to neglect.
    Mind rings were delicate things, and to be preserved, they had to be stored at a temperature close to absolute zero when not in use. Judging by the condition of the holding boxes as well as the vault itself, this had not been done here. Many of the jewel boxes were cracked and broken. Others had simply undergone a process of slow disintegration. Not one of them looked usable.
    "Our mistake was to assume these BMK mooks would adhere to some kind of military discipline out here," Berx said angrily. "Any commander worth his salt would have protected these things, even if all they contained was information about how to fix an environmental control cell."
    "But the mystery is this," Erx went on, picking up a handful of cracked boxes and looking at the dozens of broken and deteriorated rings inside. "We know there are two kinds of rings: intell rings, which are usually created by military types, and solo rings, which individuals use to record on their own.
    "For whatever reason, the majority of rings in here aren't military intell rings as we had envisioned. They are solo rings."
    Hunter examined a few of the deteriorated rings. They were gold in color. Intell rings were almost always silver.
    "But in any case," Erx said, dropping the glass cases to the floor with a mighty crash, "none of them work. We ran scans over this entire place. They're all dead. Their magic was lost a long time ago."
    Hunter felt his heart sink into his boots. He gloomily accepted Berx's offer of his flask and took a long, noisy slug of slow-ship wine. The thick liquor felt good going down his throat, but it did nothing to raise his spirits. It was like they were standing in a mausoleum: cold and dank, just not cold enough.
    He took one ring off a nearby shelf and slowly rolled it through his fingers.
    "My brothers," he said to Erx and Berx. "This was a long way to come for nothing."
     
    Captain Borx Kyx was sitting on a hovering chair, his hands fastened behind his back, a very bright light shining in his eyes.
    He didn't look 499 years old. He was a medium-sized individual, somewhat muscular, with a