Battle at Zero Point (3 page)

Bonz recognized the man right away. It was Hawk Hunter.

"He's alive?"

The Secretary's right eyebrow went up. "We have reports that he just might be…"

Everyone in the Empire knew about Hawk Hunter. He was what space legends were made of. He'd been found living alone on a desolate planet at the far edge of the Galaxy about two years earlier. His origins were unknown, even to himself. There was one theory that said Hunter was from a different time period, thousands of years before, when a people known as Americans ruled much of Earth and led the first tentative steps into outer space. If so, Hunter would have been the first person to ever show up from the past—or the future, for that matter. At least the first that anyone knew about.

Whoever he was, and wherever he came from, Hunter was brought to Earth shortly after being found, and with his very bizarre but incredibly fast flying machine, won the illustrious Earth Race—in record time. As a result, he was lavished with riches and praise, given a commission and a ship's command in the Empire's forces.

Hunter went missing soon after his first mission, however, and it turned out, his disappearance was all part of a scheme he and Princess Xara had cooked up to allow him to search for the remnants of the people he called the "Last Americans." But the rumors had it mat shortly after Hunter went AWOL, he'd been tracked down and killed by an SG hit squad, all this taking place about a year before. Bonz was surprised to hear his name mentioned now.

"He found his lost relatives," the Secretary explained soberly. "Or so I was told. These Americans?

They were living on a planet so far off the star roads it isn't even in the Milky Way."

"Is that possible?" Bonz asked.

The Secretary's other eyebrow went up. It was the official line of the Fourth Empire that every inhabitable star system existed within the Milky Way, and that none could exist outside of it.

Furthermore, humans were the only intelligent life-form not just in the Galaxy but in the entire universe.

Therefore, all life had to exist
within
the confines of the Galaxy.

"I was at a cocktail party in the Imperial Palace not long ago," the Secretary went on. "A friend of mine was a bit into the cups and was more talkative than usual—a real departure for him, I might add. In any case—and remember, I'm telling you this thirdhand—this person claimed that Hunter not only located his Last Americans way out there, he also came across evidence that the Earth was stolen from these Americans and the other original peoples who lived here several thousand years ago. He came to believe that this rather sinister aspect of history was woven into the fabric of all four Empires, or at least the Second
and
the present one."

Bonz was thankful the hum beam was securely in place. Very little of the history of the empires had survived the handful of Dark Ages that separated the realms. In fact, very little was known about the Galaxy prior to the rise of the Fourth Empire. But still, such talk as this—even in idle conversation—was pure sedition and probably punishable by death.

The Secretary continued anyway: "And so, the story goes, it was from this knowledge that Hunter and some of his confederates—a pack of old-timers, so I'm told—somehow raised an army, launched the invasion of the Two Arm, defeated Joxx on Megiddo, and then stole the six cargo 'crashers from Trans World 800. It was only that they ran up against the REF and their antistarship weapons that they didn't march right up to the One Arm itself. Had that happened, who knows what could have come next…"

"Are you telling me the buzz around the Imperial Court is that
Hawk Hunter
was the leader of the invasion fleet?" Bonz asked incredulously.

His boss nodded.

"And that somehow Xara was involved with him?"

The Secretary nodded again. "We know they've had a liaison in the past. If it's still true today, then the Princess Herself is in league with these invaders. Not something we would normally expect from the daughter of the Emperor."

Bonz sat back in his chair. "Well, at least the story has a romantic spin to it," he said. "Who told you all this, if you don't mind me asking?"

The Secretary sat back in his chair as well. "An Imperial Court spy."

Bonz rolled his eyes. By strict definition, he was a military intelligence officer; he garnered information that might affect the Space Forces in time of war or peace. He was, in fact, a soldier first, a spy second.

The Imperial Court spies were different. They were civilians, strictly cloak-and-dagger types who were more interested in Palace intrigues than seeking out intelligence that might help the Empire. There was an unknown number of them, but certainly more than a hundred just here on Earth. They could usually be seen in their long capes and floppy black hats, skulking around the floating city's old section, entering or leaving the rambunctious Imperial Court by hidden doors, or deep in hushed conversations with the high court officers in the back rooms of the immense palace.

"Those guys spin more tales than witches these days," Bonz said.

The Secretary nodded. "But that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't true."

They both sipped their drinks in silence.

"What does Kid Joxx say about all this?" Bonz asked. "After all, he's supposedly in the middle of it."

The Secretary frowned, the most natural expression for him. "Young Joxx is not talking. In fact, we have information indicating he's been acting rather irrationally since all this occurred."

"Irrationally? How?"

"My source claimed he's been spotted carrying a silver dagger in his belt…"

Bonz gasped. A silver dagger was supposed to be the traditional weapon for would-be imperial assassins. Why would Joxx be carrying one of those?

"What's more," the Secretary went on quietly, "my source claims Hunter had actually been captured by the SG at one point in all this. But he went missing again, somehow managing to disappear from his jail cell at the bottom of an SG warship even as it was speeding to an isolated planet where he was due to be executed and buried in an unmarked grave."

"And Kid Joxx was involved in that?"

The Secretary drained the last of his drink. "It's a deep secret, but some people think the kid helped Hunter escape just hours before his execution. Just how Joxx aided him, we don't know, though we have one report that the jail cell Hunter was sitting in was at the bottom of Joxx's own ship, the
ShadoVox
. In any case, Kid Joxx has refused all orders and has dropped completely out of sight."

Another silence; the rain began beating against the windows again.

"Well, we are certainly living in interesting times," Bonz finally said. "Though I understand that was meant as a curse, thousands of years ago."

"You know how superstitious people are across the Empire," the Secretary told him. "Rumors are already rife that things are not right here on Earth, and especially within the Palace. As word travels around about these invaders and Hawk Hunter and the disappearance of Xara, people are going to start asking what it all means. And you know to at least a few hundred billion of our citizens, it will mean nothing less than the first step in the fall of the Empire."

"Ask anyone down on the street of any planet," Bonz replied soberly. "Chances are they will say that the cracks have been showing for some time now."

"Well, we just can't have that kind of thinking," the Secretary said sternly. "It's not good for any of us. We need to get at the truth—whatever it may be—and make an informed report to the Court. After all, that's our job, whether the SG likes it or not. But we have to gather the evidence quietly.
Very
quietly.

And that means someone has to infiltrate this No-Fly Zone and indeed set up a subatomic sweeper—and hopefully lead us to some answers."

He lowered his voice a notch. "We must find out three things: Did this battle take place out there or not? Is Princess Xara's disappearance connected with it somehow? And is this Hunter character involved in any of it? Again, we think it is wise to send someone out there and find out these things for ourselves."

He snapped his fingers, and a silver dish appeared in midair in front of him. On it lay a single bubble of clear fluid; a thought drop containing a multitude of information for anyone who put it on their tongue.

The Secretary directed the hovering dish across the desk, away from him.

Then he said, "And that someone, Mr. Bonz, is you."

The small starship named
ZemVax
left Earth just after midnight the following day.

It was 250 feet long and, just like everything else flying in the Galaxy these days, was shaped like a wedge. But while most ships leaving Earth were somewhat sleek and new, the
ZeroVox
was anything but. Its fuselage was dented and twisted. Its underbelly was patched with strips of atomic tape. Its bubble-top canopy was cracked and scratched. Even its stubby communications mast was leaning askew.

The ship's interior was no better. The rear quarter was home to a very elderly looking star engine, one that appeared, at first glance anyway, to be solely ion-ballast powered, as all civilian ships in the Galaxy were. While still extraordinarily fast, ion-powered vessels could travel at barely one-twentieth the speed of Supertime-capable Empire ships—and that was only with a very good power spike on a very good day. Not only did ion-ballast ships have to stop to refuel frequently, they also broke down a lot, especially when those power spikes gave out. This meant extremely long-distance interstellar travel was usually very uncomfortable in ion ships, or sometimes, if the distances were too great, virtually impossible.

The
ZeroVox
had a battered cargo compartment, a pathetically small crew quarters, and a laughably old flight deck. Small and smelly, with only one seat for the pilot, its flight control panels were flame-scarred and leaking bubble fluids. The deck's half-dozen portholes were scraped and dirty, the floor panels thick with metal shavings and yellow atomic cigar ash. Everything visible to the naked eye up here led to only one conclusion: the
ZeroVox
was a space truck, used for hauling things between the stars. And a very old space truck at that.

But on this tiny ship, all was not as it appeared.

Hidden beneath its cracked flight control panel was an array of incredibly advanced, ultra-long-distance sensors that were so sensitive they could spot an approaching ship from fifty light-years away, or roughly twice the distance of a typical LDS. Ensconced below the stained floor panels was an LS2 life-sign detector, which allowed the operator to search an entire planet for signs of human life including heartbeats, breathing patterns, voices, footfalls, even DNA samples blowing in the wind. In the ship's nose, twisted and battered though it was, sat a four-pack of so-called XZ guns so powerful, they could send a bolt of destructo-beams more than five light-years in any direction. And what seemed to be a broken-down ion-ballast engine in the back was actually hiding a tiny but powerful prop-core power unit beneath it. This meant the
ZeroVox
could actually fly in two ways: ion power or in Supertime at close to two light-years a minute.

The
ZeroVox
was not a space truck at all. It was a brilliantly disguised, heavily armed spy ship.

And sitting at the helm was the SF3 secret agent, Gym Bonz.

He was carrying a crew of four clankers with him, robots that resembled human beings, but just barely, in that they had two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head, all made of metal. Then-launch from Earth had gone off without a hitch. They had left from an isolated docking bay at the far end of Eff-Kay Jack, the enormous spaceport located next to Earth's capital, Big Bright City, and then fully kicked in the ion-ballast engine on leaving Earth's atmosphere. They were soon soaring past the Martian orbital plane.

While their destination was the mid-Two Arm, and specif-ically the Moraz Star Cloud, where the phantom battle sup-posedly took place, they would have to pass through the Pluto Cloud first. Made up of millions of artificial moons and heavily armed satellites stationed at roughly the same distance the ninth planet was from the Sun, the Pluto Cloud was a seventy-third-century version of a moat. No one got in or out of the Solar System, the Empire's inner sanctum, without passing through it and showing the proper authorization. Anyone caught trying to run the border crossing was usually executed on the spot.

This massive security swarm was under the command of the Solar Guards, and in this case, they usually did their jobs too well. The SG had a variety of ways to scan a ship, ID its passengers, rummage its cargo. One sniff of suspicion, and the SG border troops wouldn't think twice about tearing a ship apart, one electron bolt at a time. Even in the best of times, getting through their checkpoints could be troublesome. These days, it was bound to be more difficult.

Bonz was confident he could pull it off, however, though he knew he would have to be very careful.

Leaving the Solar System with his undercover identity already in place was es-sential to his mission. At the very least it would prevent an SG stealth beam from attaching itself to his tail, as might hap-pen if he'd passed through the Pluto Cloud in full SF uniform. But from all appearances, his ship was nothing more than a poky space lorry whose ID string would claim its one and only purpose was to pick up and deliver slow-ship wine to planets all around the Milky Way. All of the hidden exotic equipment was being concealed by holographic barrier beams, essentially modified spectrum rays that made things look like something they were not, from the subatomics up, and thus immune from most scanning units. Right down to the last detail, nothing on board the
Zero
could be linked back to SF3 or Bonz's true identity. He'd done this sort of thing many times before and had not been caught yet.

But shortly after passing through what was left of the as-teroid belt, Bonz realized his masquerade might not go as smoothly as he'd planned. He hadn't been out of the Solar System since returning to Earth from his last mission about six weeks before. He was noticing now that in just that short time, things had changed drastically in the solar neighborhood.

On a typical ride out from Earth, the casual traveler was likely to pass a steady stream of passenger-carrying space-ships, both military and civilian, moving between the Pluto Cloud and the mother planet. Some were on their way out of the Solar System; others were traveling within it. Supply ships of all sizes were also a common sight, as were private vessels belonging to higher-up government officials or even members of The Specials, as the very-extended Imperial Family were known. It was also not uncommon to encounter sightseeing ships taking well-heeled joyriders on the famous nine-planets-in-an-hour tour, a breakneck spin around the original worlds of the Solar System, all of them puffed and populated some 5,000 years before.

But Bonz saw none of this frivolity now. The interplanetary travel lanes beyond Mars were devoid of anything but Solar Guard warships. From scouting vessels to monstrous Star-crashers, they seemed to be everywhere. And these weren't just single SG vessels flying about. There were hundreds of them traveling in single- or double-line formations—convoys, moving back and forth between Earth and the outer reaches of the Solar System. Even more disturbing, these SG ships were flying in full battle dress, meaning their gun doors were open, and their weapons were exposed, as if they were going in to battle—or trying to look as intimidating as possible. If it was the latter, they were doing a good job of it.

Bonz steered
ZeroVox
past the Jupiter Loop and then closer to Saturn, a pang of grief catching in his throat as he zoomed by the tiny jewel moon of Titan, once his happy home. He was heading for one of the main Pluto Cloud checkpoints for leaving the Solar System, a gigantic confluence of SG garrison moons known as the Saint Golden's Gate. But now his ultra-long-distance scans were telling him there was a major tie-up of ships at this heavily used border crossing; the traffic jam stretched for thousands of miles in all directions. Bonz keyed into some string comm chatter coming from the area, and the conversations confirmed what he had initially feared: the SG was not only stopping and questioning every vessel com-mander entering or leaving the Solar System, they were ul-trascanning every ship, too. This was not good news.

They reached the Pluto Cloud about a half hour later, taking their place in the long line of outward-bound ships. The queue was moving very slowly; as he watched the search process on his long-range viz scanner Bonz could see why. Essentially every ship had to pass through a gigantic gold ring, nearly a half mile in circumference, that the SG had set up next to the Saint Golden's Gate checkpoint. This was the ultraring, and, it could see all. The SF3 technicians who had presented Bonz with the
ZeroVox
for this mission had assured him that the disguised vessel would be able to go through a typical SG security beam with no problem. But this huge ring was about one hundred times more powerful, more invasive mat the typ-ical SG scanner.

Would
Zero
pass the test?

There was only one way to find out.

It took six long hours, but finally the
ZeroVox
reached the front of the line.

It was directed into the huge scanning ring, which had been set in place between two small artificial moons slightly beyond the Saint Golden's Gate. There were no less than 2,000 SG troops in the vicinity of the big scanner. Some were stationed in huge gun turrets on the two accompanying moons; others were manning the ultraring itself. Three SG
culverins
were also hovering nearby. This trio of small, swift warships was bristling with weapons, all of them pointed at a spot just be-yond the exit point from the ultraring. The message was clear: anyone not passing muster would be blasted first, with questions asked later.

Bonz moved his ship inside the ultraring and crossed his fingers. He was immediately hailed by the SG officer in charge of the border crossing, his gruff, booming voice suddenly ma-terializing inside the
ZeroVox's
flight compartment. The voice demanded to know who Bonz was and where he was going.

Bonz quickly keyed his intersystem communicator and iden-tified himself as a wine hauler; destination: a backwater binary system on the lower Three Arm. He was to pick up a load of gold slow-ship wine for immediate shipment back to Earth. It was as good a lie as any, and SF3 had given him proper string documentation to back up the cover story.

The SG officer accessed this documentation, then broke off the communications link. Bonz called back to the clankers and told them to get ready to be scanned. Two seconds later, a bright blue, ghostly light penetrated the hull of the ship. It began moving slowly from stem to stern. Bonz stayed glued to his seat and began thinking about a particularly unattractive but busty girl he knew out on the Three Arm.

She could drink him under the table and was a damn good cook. She would do anything for the right amount of slow-ship wine, and after all, that was his business. If only she took the time to wash her hair or actually bathe every once and a while…

The SG ultrascan could see, hear, and sense everything, in-cluding the thoughts of everyone on-board. It could penetrate every cell of a being, could capture memories, feelings, and inner thoughts.

It was intrusive, demeaning, and intimidating— the Solar Guards' usual way of saying hello. The mind-scan part was the most tricky, though; it could not be easily fooled. But Bonz had done this sort of thing before, and he was good at it. Not only could he will away any of his own personal thoughts, he had cultivated thoughts that would be in the head of a typical space trucker—thus the dream about the loose woman out on the Three Arm. But generating the appropriate amount of false memories was only half the trick here. Bonz also had to maintain a slight modicum of reluctance to the scan, a hint of holding something back, as just about anyone would. As for the four robots on board, they'd had their brains wiped clean before leaving Earth.

The scan finished its initial sweep, then disappeared. Bonz fought back an almost involuntary sigh of relief, a dangerous emotion had it happened just seconds before. The holo-barriers had held, thank God, and his mind games had worked, too. If not, a small army of SG troops would have beamed aboard already. He waited a few seconds, then another tremor shook the ship back to front. This was the passport EMP, a marker that indicated the ship had been cleared by the SG security people at the Pluto Cloud. Bonz did breathe a sigh of relief now. The booming voice invaded the flight deck once again, telling Bonz he was free to go and strongly suggested that he do so "with all haste."

Then, strangely, the voice added, "And if you see any of our SG brothers out where you're going, tell them we said hello."

'Tell them we said hello?" Bonz wondered aloud. What the hell did that mean?

This puzzled him, but not for very long. It would be dan-gerous to linger here any more than he had to. So he thanked the SG officer, killed the transmission, and yelled back to the clankers to hold on.

Then he hit the accelerator and left the SG checkpoint in a blur.

A few seconds later, the Solar System was far behind them.

Once he was certain no one was trailing him, Bonz settled down to begin the next part of his mission.

Working the few authentic controls on his dilapidated pilot's seat, he pushed his speed up slightly, though still only calling for a fraction of his available power. The idea was to ride on ion ballast until they got to the Two Arm, as traveling in Su-pertime in a space truck would tend to arouse suspicion, to say the least. Bonz inputted the set of coordinates SF3 wanted him to follow and then put the spy ship on automatic control. The new course would bring them right into the Moraz Star Cloud, which made up much of the mid-Two Arm, and then to the edge of the SG No-Fly Zone itself.

This done, Bonz poured himself a drink, shook it gently, and finally relaxed. The heavy lifting had been completed; now it was time to do his brain work. Among other things, the thought drop he'dingested back on Earth contained a secret file filled with memory images and dossiers on a very unusual group of people. Bonz sipped his cocktail, then leaned back in his squeaky flight chair, closed his eyes, and began access-ing this file. Hawk Hunter was the first image on the memory string. There was little information on the dashing yet enig-matic pilot that Bonz didn't already know. Indeed, at one point two years ago, Hunter was the best-known person in the Gal-axy, next to the members of the Imperial Family. It seemed back then,
everyone
knew
everything
about him. Bonz cer-tainly didn't have to dwell on him now.