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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!"
    "It might well be," Klaaz replied. "And there is a reason for that: Look at these women below. You will notice that they all possess great beauty. Mutaman-Younguska was well-known for this. Effects of a red sun, you see. Now, with all that beauty