Battle at Zero Point s-4

by Mack Maloney

  Bonz drained his cocktail, double-checked the ship's con trols, then walked back to the crew quarters where the robots were on their chargers. He checked over the prop core; it wai running at such a low volume, the casing was barely warm He then calibrated the ship's hidden hum beam; once activated they would be fairly immune to any long-range deep space eavesdropping. Satisfied all was well, he returned to the füghi deck and locked the door behind him. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small white cube. It sparkled, emit-ting a tiny crackle of subelectricity. He set the cube on the battered control panel and tapped it once. There was a bright flash, and suddenly, three more people were in the control room with him.

  Or so it seemed. Immediately his eyes began to water. His nose felt funny, and a lump formed in his throat. They looked so real. They were smiling, and waving, and trying to get him to join them, even converse with him. But they were not real. This was a projection; an old 3-D holographic image loop of his family — his wife and two daughters in matching SF flight suits — posing at the top of a peak on Ganymeade. It was taken during a vacation to Saturn's rings. The last image of all of them together.

  The cube was actually filled with many holographs of his family; he was even in some of them, in uniform, his chest weighed down by all his medals. But this one Bonz liked the best. The girls, smiling and happy, his wife radiant. At just the right moment, he reached out and ran his finger down her face. She closed her eyes and smiled, just as she had that day so long ago.

  Like every mission in the past four decades, Bonz's family would be making this trip with him as well.

  It would take them five days to reach the bottom of the Two Arm. Another half-day's journey would get them to the edge of the Moraz Star Cloud.

  Bonz's mechanical crewmen passed the time playing end-less rounds of diceo. It was a three-dimensional game of chance in which markers could disappear into other dimen-sions at completely random and unexpected times. Huge swings of luck and money were frequent. Of course, the robots loved it. Most clankers were notorious gamblers, a quirk which, it was believed, had grown out of several thousand years of artificial intelligence being passed on to successive models and designs. The strange thing was, win or lose, the robots showed no emotion, no leaping about at gaining a big pot, no head-holding when a fortune in aluminum chips went down the drain. This gave the game a surreal edge, especially when the pots grew large and the tension in the air was thick.

  Bonz drifted in and out of the game; he was smart enough not to play for too long with any robot, and these four seemed very up on their diceo. He spent most of his time up on the flight deck, driving the ship, catching up on his sleep, and keeping an eye on what kind of ships were flying around them. He'd been briefed on the horde of refugees that had rolled down the Two Arm in front of the mysterious invaders; their first movements had been a harbinger of the bad things to come. From Bonz's vantage point now, it was clear this mass exodus had not yet stopped. If anything, it had become worse. The usually busy space lanes linking the Two Arm with the rest of the Galaxy were brutally congested due to the uncer-tainty pervading the second swirl in the wake of the short-lived invasion and the forced evacuation of planets inside the SG's forbidden zone.

  The rush of tens of thousands of ships an hour, hour after hour, became perversely fascinating to watch as the days wore on. Of course, all this traffic was heading away from the Two Arm, and in the opposite direction from Bonz. Millions were leaving the area — but for where? Worlds hundreds or thousands of light-years away? To find long-lost relatives and hope there was room to squeeze them in?

  Or maybe some of these people didn't have anywhere to go. Maybe some would be doomed to wander the stars forever. Suddenly the stability of the Empire — authoritarian as it was — seemed like some-thing that really was slipping away.

  A strange thing to miss, Bonz thought more than once.

  Even more disturbing were the large numbers of SG ships mixed in with this tidal wave of the displaced. If someone had told Bonz that every SG warship in the Galaxy was now trav-eling in the vicinity of the Two Arm, he would have been hard-pressed not to believe them. From massive Starcrashers to the smaller, swifter culverins, to supply ships, cargo ships, scout ships, and even prison ships, the SG vessels were either mixed in thick with the high-speed traffic jam of refugee ships—herding was once the term for it — or flying above it all in Supertime, as detected by the ZeroVox's top secret Ultra-Distance Scanners. In any case, the Solar Guards were every-where.

  So many SG ships made Bonz uneasy, especially when he seemed to be the only one heading toward the trouble zone and not moving away from it. At the moment, though, the SG appeared too preoccupied to notice one little old space truck going against the tide. Bonz could only hope it would stay that way until he got where he had to go.

  The days went on, and the one-way stream of space vessels did not abate.

  Until, that is, Bonz and his robots found themselves on the eve of the sixth day, at the foot of the Two Arm and about twelve hours from the edge of the Moraz Star Cloud. That's when the crowded space lanes suddenly dried up. A few strag-gling ships were still rushing by them in the opposite direction, but even that trickle petered out over the next few hours. When the sixth day finally arrived, no more ships — neither civilian nor SG — could be seen anywhere around them.

  It seemed as if Bonz and his tin men were out here all alone.

  Not a pleasant feeling.

  They reached die edge of the Moraz Star Cloud on the morning of the sixth day.

  The gigantic collection of star clusters stretched out before them like a brilliant, swirling ocean. Even the robots were impressed. This was one of the most beautiful parts of the Galaxy; some kind of celestial exotica could be seen wherever one looked. When the first explorers from Earth came here nearly 5,000 years before, they'd claimed that a strange but beautiful sound would envelop their ships — star music, they'd called it — and its resonance would stay with them even long after they left. But looking at the star cloud now, Bonz could hear nothing but silence. Dreadful silence. Strange things had been happening in those clusters of stars up ahead, so strange, even the star music had gone away.

  Sitting alone on the flight deck, Bonz mixed himself another cocktail, shook it vigorously, then downed it in one long gulp.

  Suddenly he couldn't wait to do the mission and get the hell back to Earth.

  After another six hours of travel, they reached the border of the No-Fly Zone.

  Once again, there were no ships around, either civilian or SG. Bonz could hear no chatter on Ms long-range comm sets, no indications at all that anyone was out here but him and his mechanical crew.

  Odd as it was, their apparent isolation was a good thing, at least for the moment, as the real talent of the ZeroVox was about to be put to the test. Bonz signaled the robots to tie down, then belted down himself into the tiny pilot's seat. He rechecked all his systems controls, and everything came back green.

  He snapped his fingers, and a small, hovering control panel came into view; it had a large red switch surrounded by several smaller ones. Bonz took a deep breath and then hit the red switch.

  The ship's tiny prop core instantly became hot, as it fully tapped into the omnipotent power of the Big Generator and allowed the ship to enter Supertime. Suddenly, the ZeroVox was moving at tremendous speed. The stars outside took on the look of long, straight lines, sparkling with dazzling colors. Within seconds they were deep inside the No-Fly Zone, trav-eling at blinding velocity. There was no need to steer or ma-neuver here. Bonz simply set the controls for the upper reaches of the Moraz Star Cloud and sat back to watch the light show. And what if he should find himself dead on the path of an approaching star, with little or no time to stop or alter course? No matter; the ship would go right through it with barely more than a ripple.

  That's why they called them Starcrashers.

  But only Empire ships could travel this interstellar highway, and this was
where the ZeroVox's ultra-long-distance scanners would come into play. Bonz knew these sensors were so juiced up, they would let him see an SG ship coming long before the SG ship would see him, an invaluable aid for what he was about to do. But suppose the forward scans did pick up an SG ship coining toward him, then what? Bonz would simply drop out of Supertime and look for someplace to hide, not that difficult out here. And if he was caught anyway? He would quickly boost power to the ship's holographic barriers, order the clankers to dummy up, and then assume the role of a slow-thinking captain of a lowly ion-ballast-powered vessel, who somehow never got the word about the imposition of SG's No-Fly Zone.

  As a veteran spy, Bonz knew playing dumb was a talent in itself.

  They passed several key star systems in their dash through the forbidden zone.

  One was Moog-SRX, with its one and only planet, the up-scale party world called Cubes. A favorite of Empire flight crews, Cubes featured thousands of drinking clubs, casinos, exotic eateries, and holo-girl houses. But the place was aban-doned now. Bonz had turned the life-sign detector on the planet and cranked it up to full power; he received not a single reading in return, not even a blip. On the viz screen, Cubes looked dead, lifeless. Certainly no Solar Guards or anyone in the Hunter-Calandrx Gang was anywhere near it.

  Next they streaked by the Stygnus-Malone twin star system, a place also known as S&M-2. Thirteen planets orbited the binary suns; at one time they'd held more people than any other system in this part of the Two Arm. Bonz once again used the life-sign detector, this time to scour the entire star system; he was sure there were more than a few places for someone to hide on the thirteen different worlds. But again the scanner came up empty. It found no inhabitants, civilians, outlaws, Solar Guards, or missing princesses anywhere. He proceeded to his next station, a star system called Gyros 6. But it was more of the same here. Lifeless, deserted planets.

  Next came the artificial moon, TransWorld 800, the place were the mystery invaders stole the six SG cargo 'crashers. It was basically a large silver ball with induced gravity, a bare atmosphere, and no vegetation, just hangars and bunkers. The Secretary had told Bonz he privately suspected the Hunter-Calandrx Gang might be using the big silver ball as a place to hide. But like everywhere else the ZeroVox had passed so far, TW800 was empty. No people, no cargo, no cargo ships. Just empty.

  Bonz made another forty-four-light year leap, reaching the sys-tem known as Starry Town, the last populated area in the mid-Two Arm and very close to the infamous Thirty Star Pass. The only planet revolving around Starry Town's sun was Megiddo, the place where Kid Joxx had made his imaginative if mis-guided stand against the invaders. It was lifeless, too, but un-like the other empty planets, it was decimated as well. In fact, many parts of the planet were still billowing smoke, even now, more than a month after the titanic battle.

  Bonz dropped out of Supertime and went into a low orbit around the planet. He scanned it top to bottom, and twice around the equator. The readings began flowing back imme-diately. No heartbeats, no voices, no breathing. Nothing but destruction — and lots of corpses. He couldn't imagine Xara or Hunter or anyone else ever wanting to come near this place. There was just too much death and misery here.

  Plus, the smol-dering rock looked a little too much like the planet in system B-52 where his family had died. He didn't want to stick around here any longer than he had to.

  He began to move the ship out of orbit, when suddenly every alarm on the flight deck went off.

  The autopilot didn't even wait for him to react. It jerked the tiny ship out of orbit and engaged the prop core. Just like that, the ZeroVox was going top speed again, but the quick accel-eration lasted only a fraction of a second. Then the controls shut down, and just as suddenly, all was still again.

  " What the hell was that?" Bonz yelled, surprised at the intensity of his own voice.

  Alarmed, the robots had rushed into the control room and began praying over the ship's control panels.

  "The collision-avoidance system engaged itself," one robot told him, his slightly effeminate, mechanical voice rising above a bit of static. "Had we left orbit by regular egress, we would have flown right into a debris cloud."

  A debris cloud?

  Bonz had to think a moment. His ship was small and quick, and unlike the gigantic Starcrashers he used to fly, debris clouds were usually not a problem because the autopilot would routinely find a pathway through them.

  Unless the debris cloud was enormous… like from a gi-gantic space battle…

  The robots gathered around the main sensor screen; Bonz preferred the bubble-top canopy window.

  What he saw was just as astonishing whether on-screen or on eyeball.

  It was indeed a debris cloud, one of enormous proportions. And it was wreckage, indeed from a battle in space. Scans told Bonz that he was looking at the remains of dozens of warships. They were all in pieces, large and small, floating en masse, like a ragged saturn ring around the ghost planet of Megiddo.

  But there was an even more grisly aspect of this. There were bodies floating among the debris, too.

  Lots of them. Bonz or-dered the scanners to magnify. The sensor screen was quickly filled with a cluster of these corpses. They were skeletons in spacesuits, moving aimlessly among the violently twisted pieces of reionized steel that were once spaceships. Bonz had never seen anything like it. Even the robots were shaken.

  Could this really be it? he wondered now. Had they actually found what they'd come out here looking for? Had they found the remains of the mysterious invaders?

  It took a few more moments for them to realize what they were looking at here, but then the answer came back as no. These were not the remains of the mystery battle between the invaders and the SG's Rapid Engagement Fleet. Rather, the scans told him this was the wreckage of the fleet Kid Joxx had patched together, with prisoners as the crews, to meet the in-vaders deep inside Thirty Star Pass, another battle few people back on Earth had heard about. The overriding clue: the amount of debris indicated at least 100 ships had been involved in whatever happened here, and probably as many as 120, many more than had been reported in the battle between the invaders and the SG.

  It had simply taken the better part of a month for the de-bris — both human and metal — to make its way through Thirty

  Star Pass and reach Megiddo. It was now locked in eternal orbit around the devastated planet.

  "Rather appropriate," was how one of the robots put it. "Death above. Death below."

  Bonz could not disagree.

  They took a few more readings, and then Bonz prepared to bump the spy ship back up into Supertime. But suddenly, the bells and whistles started going off again.

  The ship's control panel lit up, this time with bright red and yellow lights. The Long-Distance Scan array was pulsating madly. The life-sign detectors were blaring, too. Even the long-range Z-beam gun in their nose clicked on.

  All this could only mean one thing: a ship was heading for them. An SG ship.

  Bonz almost laughed. Well, at least he knew all the spy equipment was actually working. He would have thought he'd run into at least a dozen SG vessels in the No-Fly Zone by this time. But it was almost as if the Solar Guards were taking their own no-fly edict to heart themselves. Until now, that is.

  Bonz magnified the LDS signal, expecting to get an indi-cation of an SG ship flying in Supertime but still some distance away; one that would simply pass on by. But he was in for a surprise: his scanner screen was telling him the SG ship was not flying in Supertime but rather was down here in regular time with them. In fact, it was coming right up on their tail.

  Bonz pushed his rear-projection viz-screen button, and there it was. It was a culverin, a kind of pocket cruiser, about three times the size of the ZeroVox. Oddly, it was not a type flown by the SG's Rapid Engagement Fleet; they only flew Star-crashers.

  Nevertheless, within seconds, it was flying right next to them.

  Bonz hurriedly initiated the holo-activa
te string to secure all his spy gear again, then pushed his engine's idle output down to near zero. This would, he hoped, mimic a faulty star engine. Next he climbed into a very dirty flight suit and called the robots forward. Just in time, too. The SG boarding party beamed over just seconds later. No hail, no prior warning.

  They were just suddenly there: six of them, all heavily armed.

  But these weren't regular SG troopers. Their uniforms were light brown as opposed to the black satin and red-trim outfits regular front-line SG troops wore. These men were SG support troops, soldiers who flew the repair ships, the ammo ships, and sometimes, the hospital ships. One was an officer.

  "We are authorized to destroy this ship and execute the crew," the officer said. "You have violated a standing military order by flying into this restricted area."

  Bonz stayed cool. Regular troops or not, the SG modus op-erandi was to always come on strong at first. These guys did not disappoint.

  "A million apologies, sir," Bonz replied. "But we did not fly into this area; we have been here since catastrophe struck Megiddo."

  The officer seemed baffled. "You were here… during the battle below?"

  "We were in the pass, but close by," Bonz lied. "All the subatomics skewed our power spike. We've fixed it as best we could and have been creeping along ever since. But it has been a long five weeks."

  The clankers began squeaking on cue. Suddenly it seemed as if all of them were in dire need of a good oiling. "As for any executions," Bonz went on. "I'm afraid I am the only mortal soul on board."

  The officer nodded to his soldiers, and they quickly went about searching the rear areas of the ship.