Battle at Zero Point (12 page)

Hunter took her hands and looked deep into those gigantic blue eyes. For the first time, he realized they were the same color as both the sky here and the cobalt blue ocean.

"So how long
has
it been?" he asked her. "One month… or ten years?"

She squeezed his hands in return. "Either way, it wasn't long enough, Hawk," she said, almost embarrassed. "That's the tragedy in all this. We could stay here for eternity. Instead, I'm losing you, probably forever. And if you succeed in your quest, then I lose my family."

She looked up, and Hunter could see the tears had started again. He tried to wipe them away.

"I'll come back," Hunter suddenly heard himself say, even as his heart was breaking inside. They both looked at each other, eyes misty. She knew better than to ask how. There was really only one other way to get to Heaven.

"I'll wait for you," she said, repeating a line from a poem she had written for him when he first left Earth on his quest to find the Lost Americans. "A million years, if I have to."

Hunter was trying his best to control his emotions, but it was a losing battle. His brain suddenly became saturated with the idea that he probably
would
never see her again, no matter what the cosmos had in store for him. One month or ten years? She was right; it hadn't nearly been long enough. And now, at this good-bye, he realized he didn't even have a holo-picture of her, nothing at all to remember her by.

She read his mind. She pointed to her heart. "In here, Hawk," she said. "No one leaves you if they live in your heart and mind. And no one dies; they move to the other side. I'll be here."

She leaned over and kissed him.

Then the Echo 999.9's time element finally ran out, and Hunter faded away.

The Messengers

Solar Guards Sublieutenant Cronx had just gone off duty when the nightmare began.

He was a crew member of the SG Starcrasher
StratoVox II
. His position was second forward weapons officer, one of dozens aboard the ship. The
StratoVox
was a capital battle cruiser, and at 2.5 miles long, one of the largest space vessels in existence. It served as the flagship for Space Marshal Finn-Cool McLyx, a top Solar Guards commander, and a man known throughout the Empire for his heroism or his ruthlessness, depending on one's point of view Lieutenant Cronx had not been to sleep in one hundred hours. He'd been pulling triple shifts without the benefit of a wake-up drop or any other kind of metabolic inducer while filling in for other lowly officers in such diverse parts of the ship as the auxiliary power room, the master bilge compartment, and even the communications bubbler. The
StratoVox
had been running at battle stations for more than three weeks now, ever since it left its patrol on the Six Arm. The nonstop high alert had been an intense, tiring process for the entire crew.

Finally one of the snip's doctors encountered Cronx staggering down a passageway and ordered him to take some time off. Cronx was happy to comply. At the age of 201, he was getting too old for these things. He dragged himself to his quarters and was about to collapse on top his hovering bunk when a duty captain appeared at his billet door.

"Get to your primary battle station immediately!" this officer barked at him. "We are about to go into action…"

As he was saying this, battle-imminent sirens started up all over the immense ship. Cronx felt his stomach turn to stone. It was the moment he had been dreading since the ship left the Six Arm.

"Who is the enemy?" he half gasped,

The duty captain's face turned dark. "The Space Forces, of course!" he screamed. Then he disappeared.

Cronx stayed frozen to his spot. Circumstances had been building to this for three weeks, but it was no less distressing now to finally hear the words. Just about everyone aboard the
StratoVox
believed that their commanding officer, Finn-Cool McLyx, had gone mad a long time ago. Now they feared he was dragging them all down into his madness widi him.

McLyx was a tall, heavy, blustery man with a scar that ran from his right ear down to the center of his neck. His size alone was intimidating to friend and foe alike, and he was known to bully and even physically attack his superior officers. Past commanders had been booted out of the SG for lesser transgressions, but McLyx was a favorite of the Emperor. He was also in line to take over one of the top positions in Solar Guard Command someday. Not shy about anything, McLyx bragged endlessly that his was the biggest ship in the SG's fleet inventory.

He was also a master at invading unsuspecting backwater planets out on the Fringe and bringing them back into the Empire, whether they liked it or not. It was his
jonzz
, as the saying went, and he took perverted pleasure in swooping down upon these peaceful worlds, usually under the false pretense that outlaws were hiding among the population, and blasting anyone who stood in his way. In his long career, McLyx had reclaimed thousands of wayward planets in this manner, brutally suppressing any resistance to his ship and soldiers and reaping vast rewards of plunder that always accompanied the storm.

But McLyx reserved his special venom for the Space Forces. He absolutely detested the SF, from its top generals down to its lowliest privates. He hated everything the senior service stood for, especially the slower—some said more compassionate—way it went about reclaiming planets for the Empire. SG officers like McLyx had no time for the diplomacy-first methods used by the SF. Doing it his way was so much faster, not to mention more personally rewarding.

No surprise, McLyx was also a very wealthy man.

The
StratoVox
had been on patrol in the upper Six Arm when word of hostilities between the Space Forces and the Solar Guards reached the ship. Bits and pieces of news concerning the clash on Doomsday 212 trickled through first. But within hours, reports of all-out fighting between the two services were pouring into the
StratoVox's
communications center. Though the SF and SG had started fighting each other in many locations around the Galaxy, the communiques left no doubt that the heaviest combat was going on within the Two Arm's now-infamous No-Fly Zone.

The thought of the SF spilling SG blood made many hearts aboard the
StratoVox
race with both excitement and rage, especially among the battle staff. Adding fuel to the fire, the most outrageous reports—all unofficial—said the SF had somehow destroyed the SG's entire Rapid Engagement Fleet.

This rumor had started only because no one knew where the REF was at the moment. Originally comprising thirty-six ships and nearly a quarter million men, they had all but vanished shortly after the supposed battle against the Two Arm invaders, only to reappear and men vanish again immediately after the first shots had been fired on Doomsday 212. The subatomic wreckage of two REF ships was strewn across that depressing planet. But everyone was now asking: Where were the other thirty-four?

This was all too much for the highly aggressive McLyx to take. Just hours after the first report came in, he'd ordered his ship and its fleet of six attending battle cruisers to turn about and head for the Two Arm. Ignoring pleas from the Imperial Court on Earth to stay on station, the
StratoVox
and its sister ships rocketed toward the combat zone at all-out full Super-time speed.

The trip of nearly 80,000 light-years had taken three and a half weeks. In that time McLyx's renegade fleet had grown. By the time it left the Six Arm, his seven-ship squadron had been joined by three dozen more SG warships. Like McLyx, their commanders had chosen to ignore orders from Earth and had sought to join the fighting.

They picked up more and more SG ships as they skirted the edge of the Ball and dashed along the outskirts of the inner Fringe.

By the time it reached the Two Arm, the impromptu battle group had swelled to more than seventy ships.

Several times over the past three weeks, Sublieutenant Cronx had stolen a precious few moments to make private-string contact with colleagues on Earth. This was how he'd received news—both confirmed and rumor—about what was happening both on the Mother Planet and throughout the rest of the Empire. None of these reports were good.

Fighting between the two services was spreading all over the Galaxy. Clashes on every arm had been confirmed. There had even been a skirmish inside the Ball, the ridiculously peaceful center of the Milky Way. Forces on both sides were ignoring all desist orders from Earth. Very hardline SG individuals were even attacking isolated SF installations out on the Fringe. The SF was retaliating in kind.

Everyone knew fighting between the two services would not lead to anything positive. It further weakened an Empire that some believed was already reaching its breaking point. A too-hasty expansion policy, roughshod treatment of its newest citizens out on the Fringe areas, and an overall elitist attitude that was simply repulsive on many, many levels were bad enough. To have a war
within
its vast military was simply disastrous.

But why were the hostilities continuing? With all the command structures that lorded over both services, wasn't there any way to get the two rivals to stop? Cronx's friends on Earth said no—and the reason was simple: the only person whose words would be heeded by both sides, the Emperor O'Nay Himself, was unavailable. Where was he? In his tower, the soaring spiral that dominated the floating city of Special Number One, deep in his prayer mode. The perpetually detached O'Nay entered these meditative states quite often, or at least his Imperial Guards claimed he did. Once he was in such a trance, it could last for days or even weeks*. And there were standing orders that he was not to be disturbed for anything.

His imperial bodyguards were obeying that order to the letter these days. So the internecine war was allowed to rage on.

Even worse, the SG had unilaterally declared a state of emergency within the Solar System. They'd flooded each of the original planets, from Mercury out to Pluto, with millions of regular SG troops.

They'd stopped just about all flights around the Solar System and had sealed off the Pluto Cloud as well.

They were even close to shutting down the entire One Arm. Cronx's friends described the situation as being no different than if the SG had declared martial law.

In the entire 600-plus-year history of the Fourth Empire, nothing like this had ever happened before.

Lieutenant Cronx reached the
StratoVox's
flight deck to find the place in chaos: crewmen running everywhere, officers shouting orders above the wailing sirens, strobe lights flashing, bells ringing. Tension and anxiety were thick in the air.

The flight deck itself was supposed to be a monument to advanced Empire technology. It was contained within the ship's large, multitiered control bubble, which in turn was located near the forward point of the vessel's enormous wedge shape. The bubble was like a small city, large enough to hold 3,000 people. The bridge itself, it being on the highest level of this small metropolis, could hold more than 500 souls. It took all of these people, many serving in traditional if redundant capacities, to keep the ship running properly. Only this way could Starcrashers travel through space at speeds of one light-year every thirty seconds.

The situation up on the bridge was no better than the flight deck below. Cronx reached his station, an isolated seat located next to the lower echelon of pilots known as acolyte steering and directly behind the forward weapons array. A crew of sixteen was sitting in two semicircles around this array; their commanding officer was seated in an elaborate control chair hovering about eight feet above them. If anything happened to this primary weapons officer, it was Cronx's job to take his place.

Until then, Cronx would have a front-row seat for whatever was about to happen. His station was very close to the edge of the control room's immense bubble; it was barely an arm's length away. All Cronx had to do was turn to his right and look directly out into space.

The ship's enormous scanning screens were floating in front of him. These screens showed everyone what the "eyes" of the ship were seeing. And what they were seeing at the moment was very frightening.

The seventy-two SG ships, many of them two-mile-long battle cruisers, were running in their dark gray and black SG battle colors. The ships were spread out for as far as the long-range scanners could see. SG ships were so big, they rarely traveled in packs of more than a dozen or so. This, however, looked like a victory parade; they seemed to go on forever.

Trouble was, in (heir sights, dead ahead, was a fleet of SF ships that seemed to go on forever as well.

They were mostly battle cruisers, but several pocket cruisers, also known as
culverins
, were in evidence, too. There were six dozen SF ships in all, or exactly the same size as the SG fleet. And they were just 15,000 miles away.

This battle group had not been dispatched by Space Forces command. Instead, just like the SG force, it had collected itself over the past few weeks from disparate squadrons, called here at first upon hearing of the intense battles in and around the mid-Two Arm and then rushing to the aid of comrades asking for help. It had grown steadily over the turbulent weeks into the enormous numbers it boasted now.

Cronx had seen combat before. But like just about everyone else on board the
StratoVox
, his experiences had been against space pirates, mere armies, or other interstellar outlaws. Fights where the SG always came in with an overwhelming advantage in the number of ships, weapons, and of course, the ability to move in Supertime, which none of their opponents had.

But now, this… this was terrifying. The huge SG fleet was about to collide with an SF force equal both in size and capability. Both forces were flying in Supertime, both forces were armed with the same awesome weapons, and both were crewed with men of equal training and elan.

Cronx swallowed hard. He was about to witness one of the worst military disasters in the history of the Fourth Empire. Imperial warships were never meant to fight each other. They were designed with only two missions in mind: to bombard enemy planets and to fight in space against much slower enemy vessels. Taking on ion-powered ships was relatively easy. When flying in Supertime, Empire vessels could see their slower adversaries while knowing the enemy could not see them. All the Empire ship had to do was drop out of Supertime and unleash its weapons. It could be more like target practice than a battle.

Fighting an enemy in Supertime was totally different. First of all, your opponent could see you just as soon as you could see him. Not only did both sides have the same weapons and crews, they both had the same capabilities for maneuvering and stealth. Both were also capable of flying just as fast—and in Supertime that was close to 67 million miles per hour. Two Empire ships closing on one another then were doing so at 134 million miles per hour. Almost incomprehensible speed.

Nor did Empire ships carry any kind of deflection equipment, again because they were never made to fight each other. They had no shields to protect themselves from incoming fire, no energy-dispersal arrays to sap the lethality from an adversary's fusillade. The only defense they had against an all-Supertime fight was a tactic known as
popping
.

When Empire ships traveled in Supertime, they were moving not so much in physical space as they were in time. The prop core found on every Empire warship was fed by the Big Generator, the mysterious, omnipotent power source located in the western desert back on Earth. This unknown power enabled the vessel to enter the seventh dimension and move very quickly in time.

Empire commanders were told that should an enemy ship ever enter Supertime—theoretically an impossibility, though it had happened on at least one occasion—then one way to avoid their incoming barrages was to slow down a bit, not in space but in time, just as the enemy fusillade was on its way.