Odd as it was, their apparent isolation was a good thing, at least for the moment, as the real talent of the ZeroVox was about to be put to the test. Bonz signaled the robots to tie down, then belted down himself into the tiny pilot's seat. He rechecked all his systems controls, and everything came back green.
He snapped his fingers, and a small, hovering control panel came into view; it had a large red switch surrounded by several smaller ones. Bonz took a deep breath and then hit the red switch.
The ship's tiny prop core instantly became hot, as it fully tapped into the omnipotent power of the Big Generator and allowed the ship to enter Supertime. Suddenly, the ZeroVox was moving at tremendous speed. The stars outside took on the look of long, straight lines, sparkling with dazzling colors. Within seconds they were deep inside the No-Fly Zone, trav-eling at blinding velocity. There was no need to steer or ma-neuver here. Bonz simply set the controls for the upper reaches of the Moraz Star Cloud and sat back to watch the light show. And what if he should find himself dead on the path of an approaching star, with little or no time to stop or alter course? No matter; the ship would go right through it with barely more than a ripple.
That's why they called them Starcrashers.
But only Empire ships could travel this interstellar highway, and this was where the ZeroVox's ultra-long-distance scanners would come into play. Bonz knew these sensors were so juiced up, they would let him see an SG ship coming long before the SG ship would see him, an invaluable aid for what he was about to do. But suppose the forward scans did pick up an SG ship coining toward him, then what? Bonz would simply drop out of Supertime and look for someplace to hide, not that difficult out here. And if he was caught anyway? He would quickly boost power to the ship's holographic barriers, order the clankers to dummy up, and then assume the role of a slow-thinking captain of a lowly ion-ballast-powered vessel, who somehow never got the word about the imposition of SG's No-Fly Zone.
As a veteran spy, Bonz knew playing dumb was a talent in itself.
They passed several key star systems in their dash through the forbidden zone.
One was Moog-SRX, with its one and only planet, the up-scale party world called Cubes. A favorite of Empire flight crews, Cubes featured thousands of drinking clubs, casinos, exotic eateries, and holo-girl houses. But the place was aban-doned now. Bonz had turned the life-sign detector on the planet and cranked it up to full power; he received not a single reading in return, not even a blip. On the viz screen, Cubes looked dead, lifeless. Certainly no Solar Guards or anyone in the Hunter-Calandrx Gang was anywhere near it.
Next they streaked by the Stygnus-Malone twin star system, a place also known as S&M-2. Thirteen planets orbited the binary suns; at one time they'd held more people than any other system in this part of the Two Arm. Bonz once again used the life-sign detector, this time to scour the entire star system; he was sure there were more than a few places for someone to hide on the thirteen different worlds. But again the scanner came up empty. It found no inhabitants, civilians, outlaws, Solar Guards, or missing princesses anywhere. He proceeded to his next station, a star system called Gyros 6. But it was more of the same here. Lifeless, deserted planets.
Next came the artificial moon, TransWorld 800, the place were the mystery invaders stole the six SG cargo 'crashers. It was basically a large silver ball with induced gravity, a bare atmosphere, and no vegetation, just hangars and bunkers. The Secretary had told Bonz he privately suspected the Hunter-Calandrx Gang might be using the big silver ball as a place to hide. But like everywhere else the ZeroVox had passed so far, TW800 was empty. No people, no cargo, no cargo ships. Just empty.
Bonz made another forty-four-light year leap, reaching the sys-tem known as Starry Town, the last populated area in the mid-Two Arm and very close to the infamous Thirty Star Pass. The only planet revolving around Starry Town's sun was Megiddo, the place where Kid Joxx had made his imaginative if mis-guided stand against the invaders. It was lifeless, too, but un-like the other empty planets, it was decimated as well. In fact, many parts of the planet were still billowing smoke, even now, more than a month after the titanic battle.
Bonz dropped out of Supertime and went into a low orbit around the planet. He scanned it top to bottom, and twice around the equator. The readings began flowing back imme-diately. No heartbeats, no voices, no breathing. Nothing but destruction — and lots of corpses. He couldn't imagine Xara or Hunter or anyone else ever wanting to come near this place. There was just too much death and misery here.
Plus, the smol-dering rock looked a little too much like the planet in system B-52 where his family had died. He didn't want to stick around here any longer than he had to.
He began to move the ship out of orbit, when suddenly every alarm on the flight deck went off.
The autopilot didn't even wait for him to react. It jerked the tiny ship out of orbit and engaged the prop core. Just like that, the ZeroVox was going top speed again, but the quick accel-eration lasted only a fraction of a second. Then the controls shut down, and just as suddenly, all was still again.
" What the hell was that?" Bonz yelled, surprised at the intensity of his own voice.
Alarmed, the robots had rushed into the control room and began praying over the ship's control panels.
"The collision-avoidance system engaged itself," one robot told him, his slightly effeminate, mechanical voice rising above a bit of static. "Had we left orbit by regular egress, we would have flown right into a debris cloud."
A debris cloud?
Bonz had to think a moment. His ship was small and quick, and unlike the gigantic Starcrashers he used to fly, debris clouds were usually not a problem because the autopilot would routinely find a pathway through them.
Unless the debris cloud was enormous… like from a gi-gantic space battle…
The robots gathered around the main sensor screen; Bonz preferred the bubble-top canopy window.
What he saw was just as astonishing whether on-screen or on eyeball.
It was indeed a debris cloud, one of enormous proportions. And it was wreckage, indeed from a battle in space. Scans told Bonz that he was looking at the remains of dozens of warships. They were all in pieces, large and small, floating en masse, like a ragged saturn ring around the ghost planet of Megiddo.
But there was an even more grisly aspect of this. There were bodies floating among the debris, too.
Lots of them. Bonz or-dered the scanners to magnify. The sensor screen was quickly filled with a cluster of these corpses. They were skeletons in spacesuits, moving aimlessly among the violently twisted pieces of reionized steel that were once spaceships. Bonz had never seen anything like it. Even the robots were shaken.
Could this really be it? he wondered now. Had they actually found what they'd come out here looking for? Had they found the remains of the mysterious invaders?
It took a few more moments for them to realize what they were looking at here, but then the answer came back as no. These were not the remains of the mystery battle between the invaders and the SG's Rapid Engagement Fleet. Rather, the scans told him this was the wreckage of the fleet Kid Joxx had patched together, with prisoners as the crews, to meet the in-vaders deep inside Thirty Star Pass, another battle few people back on Earth had heard about. The overriding clue: the amount of debris indicated at least 100 ships had been involved in whatever happened here, and probably as many as 120, many more than had been reported in the battle between the invaders and the SG.