by Mack Maloney
"I swear…"
Two strong hands jerked him to his feet. He was suddenly staring into the cold hard eyes of a REF
officer. This man looked slightly deranged to him. His red uniform was the color of blood.
"Then," the officer said to him, "how do you explain this?"
He was holding something up to Bonz's eyes. It took a moment for his vision to clear before he realized it was a small white device.
His family holo-cube…
Playing within was the preview image of his kids wearing their Space Forces uniforms with him, in his own medal-laden uniform, standing right beside them.
Bonz tried to say something but couldn't. At almost the same moment, other SG soldiers had found all the hidden switches in the control room and began activating them. The holographic blanket disappeared, and in seconds the small vessel reverted back to its real state, that of an unmistakable SF3 spy ship.
This was not good.
After a quick, hushed discussion among the SG soldiers, Bonz was marched in front of the rock wall next to the Zero Vox. He was ordered to remove his fake salva*r's flight suit, revealing his SF-issuefl bodx,ltK*jBgriyüraB$nz stood shivering in the early morning cold; already he was composing a message of protest he planned to send to SG headquarters as soon as he got out of this. There was much confusion around him now. The SG troops appeared very agitated, and their deep red uniforms seemed just too bizarre for words. Another officer appeared, and he began barking orders. A gaggle of SG soldiers standing twenty feet away from Bonz began spreading out in a ragged line. What were they doing? Forming an honor guard? Each man then raised his weapon toward him and twisted its power knob to on. That's when Bonz realized he was staring at a firing squad.
His heart froze. He tried to say something, but no words would come out. He was SF — and he'd been caught. But the SG weren't his enemies. They belonged to the same military, for God's sake. Was this some sort of a ruse, to make him talk?
Suddenly, the superior officer barked out another order, and the SG soldiers aimed their guns.
Before Bonz could react, the man gave the order to fire. Bonz saw the deadly green beams heading right for him. He let out a long cry — it was probably his wife's name. Then the rays hit him.
He looked down, in shock, to see a large, smoking hole in the center of his chest. He staggered forward, unable to catch his breath. Then he fell over.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
4
The Space Farces cargo ship, JunoVox, was passing twenty light-years from the bottom of the Moraz Star Cloud when it received the startling viz-screen transmission.
The message did not come in over the ship's primary communications array, nor did it appear on the vessel's secondary or auxiliary displays. It showed up — fuzzy, in black and white and full of static — on the ship's 2-IS, the internal imaging system that was essentially a closed-circuit broadcast of goings-on within the ship.
Why the stream of disturbing images appeared on the least advanced viz screen aboard the JunoVox was never really explained. Sometimes the cosmos did funny things. One thing was certain though: the primitive broadcast was coming from a very small viz camera located deep within the Moraz Star Cloud — and right in the middle of the Solar Guard's No-Fly Zone.
It was only by chance that the JunoVox was even in the area. It was returning to the One Arm after an extended re-supply mission to several SF posts out on the edge of the sixth swirl. It had been a long trip, and the crew of 500—pilots, techs, cargo masters, plus a company of 70 Space Marines— was anxious to get back to their home base and some long-overdue R and R. All that changed, though, when the weird images started blinking onto a small 2-IS screen located in the rear hold of the mile-long cargo ship.
It was one of the JunoVox's loading techs who saw the pictures first. He thought someone was playing a prank. The images seemed to show an SF officer being executed by a firing squad of Solar Guards. It was no secret that the SF and the SG were rivals. The two services never agreed on anything.
And should two opposing crews enter in the same saloon on some distant planet, after multipleingestion of slow-ship wine by both sides, it was not unheard of for a brawl or two to break out.
But actual murder between the rivals? That had never happened.
Until now.
The cargo tech immediately called up to the bridge, at the same time punching commands into the primitive 2-IS system to record the puzzling images. Soon there were a half-dozen officers looking over his shoulder. The ship's communication section had already pinpointed the signals as coming from a dead-end Two Arm planet known as Doomsday 212. And even though the shaky transmission seemed to be showing the same sequence over and over again — it was thirty-five seconds long and depicted the SF man being gunned down and then two SG soldiers firing bursts into his head to make sure he was dead— it was being broadcast in real time.
"It's coming from a clanker's headset," one of the officers finally declared after watching the broadcast a dozen times. 'The robot recorded the sequence and jammed it on replay. See how the frame is slightly off-kilter? The clanker is probably lying on the ground nearby and adjusted its lens to the best vantage point it could get."
"Then, this is realT one of the other officers asked.
No one there could say it wasn't.
"The clanker is hip," the first officer said. "It's obviously sending out these images to let someone know what's happening up there."
"Solar Guards executing one of our guys?" the lowly cargo tech blurted out. "But why?"
No one had a good answer for that one, either.
At this point, the ship's commander, an SF colonel named Jeepz Mannx, arrived in the cargo hold.
Mannx was a 251-year-old veteran of the Space Forces and was known — as were many high-ranking SF officers — for his intense dislike of the Solar Guards.
Mannx watched the sequence several times, his anger building. Then he asked both the officers and the cargo tech if there was any way that the broadcast could be a mistake. He was assured that it could not. They had no idea who the SF officer was, or why the SG troops had murdered him, but the broadcast itself was definitely real.
" Those bastards…" Mannx whispered under his breath.
Then, suddenly, he was gone. Hurrying up to the bridge, he ordered his pilots to turn the huge cargo ship 120 degrees and set the controls for the heart of the Moraz Star Cloud, indeed to the very center of the SG's forbidden zone.
Next, he put out a high-priority call for any other SF ships in the region, telling them what he'd just seen and informing them that he was breaking course and heading for the scene of the incident "to assist our brother." He suggested they do likewise.
Then he called down to the billet where the ship's company of Space Marines was housed. He told their CO that his men should suit up for an "emergency rescue mission" and be ready for deployment, with weapons loaded, in fifteen minutes.
Two SF vessels received the JunoVox's emergency call.
One was the KongoVox, a scout ship heading in toward the One Arm shipyards for an overhaul after nearly two years out on patrol. The other ship was the VogelVox, a two-mile-long Space Navy Starcrasher. It had just left the Three Arm after battling space meres for the past six months.
The KongoVox was just twelve light-years from the JunoVox's position when the call came in. Its CO immediately turned back toward the Moraz Star Cloud and headed for the trouble area at top speed. The small ship was carrying just fifty crew members and no Space Marines, but at just 750 feet long, it held a formidable arsenal. This included an array of destructo-cannons in its nose and several long-distance, space-to-surface atomic missiles under its fuselage. Its navigation team reported they would arrive over Doomsday 212 approximately ten minutes after the Juno.
The much larger VogelVox was another fifty light-years removed from the edge of the No-Fly Zone; it would take about a half hour to make the outer reaches of the star cl
oud and another forty-five minutes to fly to Doomsday. The SF Star-crasher was a planet-assault vessel. It was heavily armed with space cannons, destructo-ray turrets, and myriad space-to-surface weapons. It was also carrying a brigade of regular SF infantry, battle-hardened soldiers who'd been doing search-and-destroy missions against the notorious Bad Moon Knights mercenary army for half a solar year.
As it was hurtling through space, the smaller scout ship, the KongoVox, exchanged several communication strings with the cargo ship JunoVox. In one of these strings, a facsimile of the mysterious transmission was beamed to the scout ship. For the first time, its crew saw the images of what appeared to be an execution of the Space Forces officer. Now they knew the reason the commander of the JunoVox had acted so quickly.
The last transmission the Kongo received from the Juno indicated the cargo ship had made orbit around Doomsday 212, and its scanners had found the area where the puzzling transmission was coming from. A long-range viz sweep of the terrain in question had provided two things. There was indeed a dead SF officer lying on the ground beside what appeared to be a SF3 intell ship; four partially disassembled clankers were lying close by. And, as had been speculated, the mysterious transmission was coming from one of these robots, the one farthermost from the ship. Its advanced AI had told it something was not right, and it had to do something about it. Broadcasting the grisly execution over and over again was its solution to the problem.
The crew of the Kongo then heard from the Juno that it was about to launch a ground team, when a concerned voice cut into the transmission. The voice quickly rose in tension, panic seeping in. Something was suddenly wrong aboard the JunoVox, but it wasn't clear just what. Colonel Mannx, the captain of the Juno, was heard ordering his communications officer to "hail the approaching ship — and fast!" A series of loud bangs was heard next. Then the transmission went dead.
The KongoVox arrived over Doomsday 212 ten minutes later.
The small scout ship immediately vectored to the place were the JunoVox had made its last transmission, an area about twelve degrees above the planet's equator on its current day side. This is where they found the cargo ship. It was scattered in pieces across five miles of Doomsday 212's rough terrain, burning fiercely. There were no life signs from below. It had been blown out of the sky.
Off in the distance the Kongo could see two SG Starcrashers leaving the area, moving slowly, almost leisurely as they climbed to orbit. Oddly, their hulls were glowing with a reddish hue. A scan of the two SG ships indicated that their weapons had just been fired and, by studying the leftover subatomic signature, proved beyond all doubt these weapons had just caused the destruction of the JunoVox.
The CO of the scout ship took about five seconds to make his decision. He instructed the ship's historian to get his visual and audio recorders rolling. Then he ordered his crew to battle stations. What happened next would be a matter of debate for some time to come.
What everyone agreed on is that the two SG warships had their scanning equipment on, but to forward-scan only. This was done usually as preparation for moving up to orbit, to look for any aerial obstacles that might cause a problem as a vessel prepared to kick into Supertime. But this was not a procedure used during combat or shortly afterward.
Were the SG crews feeling pumped up after what they'd just done? Had an adrenaline rush clouded-their actions? Or were they in shock? Too dazed to perform the rote duties of moving a two-mile-long warship away from a planet and prepare it for flight again in outer space?
There was no way to know.
Only one thing was clear: the SG crews in both ships had let their guard down.
They never saw die KongoVox coming.
* * *
The tiny SF scout ship had sixteen space cannons poking out of its nose and along the leading edge of its wedge-shaped body. One or two blasts from a space cannon — it was the equivalent in power to a land weapon known as a Faster Blaster — could have a devastating effect on an unprotected or unsuspecting target. An array of sixteen of the weapons could deliver a fusillade on the same destructive level as a small atomic bomb.
That's what hit the trailing edge of the second-in-line SG warship just as it was pointing its wedge nose up for the quick dash up to orbit. The Kongo let loose with a two-second bar-rage that sheared off one-third of the ship's aft section in a terrific, yellow blast. The SG vessel staggered for a moment and came to a halt in midair. Then, as if in slow motion, the huge ship turned over to starboard and went straight down on its back. It hit the ground with such an impact, it created a trio of mushroom clouds, each going off in succession, as the ship's prop core exploded and the debris fell into a singularity that opened and closed in the matter of microseconds.
Five hundred and seven people had been killed when the SG ships shot down the JunoVox just minutes before.
Now, more than eight thousand Solar Guards were dead, too.
The second SG ship had already jumped into Supertime; thirty seconds later, it was more than a light-year away.
But its CO, realizing what had just happened, quickly ordered the ship to turn about. Less than a minute after its sister ship had gone down, the second ship was streaking back through the atmosphere of Doomsday 212.
By this time, the KongoVox had kicked up to about 5,000 feet and had turned back toward the wreckage of the JunoVox. It had its scanners on 360 and thus saw the other SG ship coming. The tables were turned now. The scout ship was smaller but no faster than the huge SG warship. It was the essence of all vessels powered by the Supertime-capable prop cores mat size and mass didn't matter. Everything moved the same, at the same top speed. The SG warship spotted the Kongo just as the Kongo's scanners lit up like a string of small suns. The scout ship turned one eighty, and its pilots booted into full crank, the highest speed a prop-core vessel could achieve within the atmosphere of a planet. The red SG warship turned six and went to full crank power as well.
The chase was on.
The only advantage the scout ship Kongo had was its physical size. It could go places the bigger SG ship could not.
Zipping up to orbit and spanking into Supertime was not an option for it, though. The dynamics said it would have to slow down ever so slightly to make the leap. When it did, the SG ship would have it at a disadvantage. Certain destruction would result.
No, the scout ship would have to use its diminutive size to get out of this one. And do so quickly.
The terrain of Doomsday 212 suddenly became its best ally, especially the craggy surface and the surfeit of valleys and mountain passes. The Kongo's pilots brought their ship down to just 200 feet off the deck and kicked in the vessel's terrain-avoidance system. This would allow it to keep that 200-foot cushion between it and any object in its path. Or at least that's how it was supposed to work.
The pursuing SG warship, however, had enormous arrays of sensors and tracking equipment; it did not lose sight of the scout ship for very long. The SG ship was also bristling with weapons, most of monstrous proportions and designed to do battle over great distances in space with ships almost as large but nowhere near as quick as she was.
These were the dreaded master Z-beam weapons. They could destroy a two-mile-long warship at distances up to 50,000 miles. The crimson SG ship now trained these night-marish giants on the fleeing scout ship and began blasting away with wild abandon. Overkill by any measure, but particularly hellish in this instance.
This torrent of destructo-rays made the fusillade that the scout ship had used to destroy the first SG ship look puny by comparison. The Kongo was twisting and turning through canyons, along valleys, up and over mountains, hitting hypersonic speeds, breaking the sound barrier with thunderous reports, the huge red behemoth not a half mile behind.
In this running barrage, mountains were disappearing, dry riverbeds were being blown to dust, buttes and mesas reduced to piles of subatomic glass crystals. And it went on like this for what seemed like a very long time, even though the chase became more d
esperate for the Kongo with each passing second.
There was only so long the scout could keep zigzagging before the gunners on the big ship would find their mark or, more likely, collapse an entire mountain on top of them.
The heat of battle is a funny thing, a different mind-set takes over, whether the combatants are throwing stones at each other or trading blasts of vaporizing Z beams. The politics of the person shooting at you takes second preference over the desire of saving your own skin. Still, it was not lost on anyone aboard the tiny SF scout ship, as it careened its way through miles-deep river valleys and over titanic mountain ranges, that the people shooting at them — the same people who had just destroyed one of their capital ships — were not supposed to be their enemies. In fact, technically at least, they were supposed to be brothers. They all belonged to the same military, the Imperial Forces, and were sworn to the common goal of fighting against the enemies of the Empire and bringing the words and vision of the Emperor to every corner of the Galaxy.
But this, this was both alarming and unprecedented. The two services had been barking at each other for nearly three centuries — but there was no turning back from this. More than 8,000 were already dead in the internecine battle, and still it was less than a half hour old. So even as they were racing along at top speeds, knowing their lives could be lost at any moment, the crew of the SF scout ship knew that after this, no matter how it turned out, nothing in the Empire would ever be the same again.
Luck began running out for the KongoVox as the small scout ship approached an obscure mountain pass named, in the ancient language of the Galaxy, Mons d Sighs.
It was essentially a natural stone bridge that connected two forbidding mountain peaks. The strange formation came up fast on the Kongo's pilots. In a split second they had to decide whether to go over this thing — and risk providing a clear shot by the fast-pursuing SG warship — or turn sideways and go under it. Their flight computer told them their clearance from fuselage to either wall could be measured in inches. Still, going low was a risk they had to take.
