If it was his job to find them, then find them he would.
The rest of the thought drop consisted of a briefing on what else he had to do when he reached his secret destination. More specifically, it explained how the equipment packs hidden in the cargo hold would help him fulfill his bigger mission, looking for signs of the phantom battle. But these thoughts he would not have to access until the time came to put them into action. His brain work was done, at least for the time being.
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.