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 cloud 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.