For this spy mission to be a success, this was the only place to be.
It took more than four hours for Bonz and the clankers to maneuver the ship through the storm of orbiting fire rocks in order to get close enough to hand-scan the planet below. Their first priority was to find a safe place to set down.
A sanctuary of sorts was finally located under the face of a large mushroom-shaped butte about ten degrees above the dying planet's equator and on the side approaching morning. They could hide the ship here and hope to avoid any further encounters such as the one with the SG support ship just hours before. It was a wild ride down to the surface, but the ZeroVox landed smoothly enough, considering the terrain was so jagged and rocky. Now they got their first look at the planet from ground level. Bonz had never seen to a place like this. The landscape, so bare and barren. The sky, just brightening in the long dawn, was a palette of many odd colors — from the dim sun, to the leaks of bizarre leftover gases, to the never-ending meteor-like showers. It all combined for a kind of strange beauty, but forbidding as well.
In addition to all of Doomsday 212's bad points, it was also a graveyard planet, a place where old spaceships were crashed, on purpose, at the end of their useful lives. This was a custom throughout the Galaxy. Crashed ships could yield treasures big and small for salvage teams, and this was now the new disguise for the SF3 intelligence crew. It didn't take long for the robots to gather some nearby wreckage and scatter it around the ship and thus turn the spy ship's interior from space truck to typical-looking junker's scow. The dented, greasy controls, the busted seats, the busted windows — it was just another kind of mess, and not that much different from the space-truck mask. Thanks to the holographic barriers, the prop core became disguised again, this time to look, feel, and smell like a burned-out ion-ballast bolt bucket that seemed older than some stars. To make the ruse even more believable, Bonz tweaked the ion drive unit so it would appear to be horribly broken, as if it had been stuck in dead-drive for weeks.
The deception then was complete. Not only were they dirty dregs of the star roads now working salvage on a graveyard planet, they were stranded here as well.
Bonz locked in the ship's new holo-projections and then told the robots to set up the subatomic particle array, which was hidden in the cargo compartment. Nicknamed the Star Sweeper, the device was about six feet across and made of ion-gold. It looked like a huge musical instrument, which in ancient days was called a trumpeta. It was surrounded by a trio of small geodesic domes; they seemed to hover around it but were actually tied together by a network of extremely thin atomic strings.
The Star Sweeper had one very important function: it could detect a wide range of subatomic particles within a radius of one hundred light-years. These quicks, quarks, and snarks could tell many tales. First, because Empire ship propulsion units left subatomics in their wake, the sweeper could monitor the comings and goings of all SG ships inside the No-Fly Zone. Second, because the SG used communications string bubblers, which produced a subatomic particle known as a quick during operation, the Sweeper could eavesdrop on SG messages, too. But for this mission, it had a third most crucial capability: on its most advanced setting, the device could track the last flickers of subatomic decay, from Z-beam weapons residue, to quicks, to Starcrasher wakes, even if the leftover particles had already disappeared into other dimensions. By calculating backward to determine where this residue originated, the sweeper could detect activity from the past, as far back as two or three months under some conditions. In other words, if there had been a fierce battle fought out here between the Rapid Deployment Fleet and the mysterious invaders as the SG claimed, the Sweeper could look back in time and still find evidence of it.
It took about an hour to assemble the device, then the clankers commenced its deployment. A spot had been selected about 250 feet west of the ZeroVox's hiding place. The sweeper was light enough for two robots to carry. A third danker acted as a guide for the installation, while the fourth stayed on the lookout for any incoming fire rocks. Once the device was in place, Bonz flipped a switch in the control room, and an energy-scrambler bubble encompassed the unit. Essentially, this made the Sweeper invisible, unless someone was standing right next to it. This would also protect it from the ram of fire rocks coming down all over. This done, he switched the device on and ordered it to begin sweeping the No-Fly Zone. All of the relevant information would be dumped into the ZeroVox's tiny onboard bubbler for analysis later.
The installation complete, the clankers quickly returned to the ship, dodging fire rocks as they bounced along. Bonz was still wearing his torn and dirty flight suit. The robots took on their own greasy disguises as well. Then, with little else to do but wait, they set up a diceo board in the crew quarters. A fast and furious game started soon afterward.
Bonz watched the action for a little while but then returned to the control room and stretched out as best he could on his grubby little control seat.
It had been a hectic week.
But so far, so good.
Three days went by.
The clankers stayed in their quarters and played diceo, going outside to check on the Sweeper unit twice a day. Bonz remained in the control room most of the time, door usually closed, sometimes locked, monitoring the readouts from the surveillance unit and making sure his holographic projections stayed in place.
Time passed slowly. The diceo game proceeded unabated, with huge piles of aluminum coins moving back and forth across the table. Occasionally, the robots would hear voices coming from the control room; voices that did not belong to Bonz. Female voices. Sweet, haunting, and like the clankers themselves, slightly mechanical.
The robots were smart; they knew what was going on when they heard these things. Bonz had activated his family album holo-cube, and they were with him again, in there, moving about, talking, joking, laughing. Re-creating some long-lost time sequence they'd unintentionally acted out nearly a half century before, never realizing that they would be fated to re-create it over and over and over again.
At times like this, the clankers knew enough to leave the boss alone.
On the fourth day, the faraway sun had finally climbed above the horizon. Its pale light made this part of Doomsday 212 look even bleaker, yet more oddly beautiful, too. With the new light though, came a wind that swept across the barren terrain. It was strong enough to make some of the fire rocks fall sideways. A weird, haunting whistle also began to blow through the crags of the overhanging butte.
In the time they'd been here, the Sweeper had picked up absolutely nothing of interest. It had found no indications of subatomic battle debris. It had found no storm of communications chatter associated with huge battles. In fact, the detection monitors hadn't emitted so much as a burp on anything critical.
The numbers didn't lie: no great space battle had been fought anywhere near this part of the star cloud.
At least not the kind of battle the SG claimed.
But the Sweeper had found something even stranger — or, more accurately, didn't find something. In its three days of operation, it had not detected any vessels moving through the forbidden zone. No Empire ships, no ion-ballast vessels. In fact, there was no evidence of SG warships anywhere inside the No-Fly Zone, nor had any been in here recently.
This made no sense. Why would the SG go through the outrageous exercise of declaring the No-Fly Zone so they could study the aftereffects of this supposed great battle, and then not even fly in it themselves? And whereas the SF's information indicated that only the Solar Guards' Rapid Deployment Fleet would be allowed to operate in the forbidden zone, where were they, if they weren't here?