Battle at Zero Point by Mack Maloney

speeds, knowing their lives could be lost at any moment, the crew of the SF scout ship knew that after this, no matter how it turned out, nothing in the Empire would ever be the same again.
    Luck began running out for the KongoVox as the small scout ship approached an obscure mountain pass named, in the ancient language of the Galaxy, Mons d Sighs .
    It was essentially a natural stone bridge that connected two forbidding mountain peaks. The strange formation came up fast on the Kongo's pilots. In a split second they had to decide whether to go over this thing—and risk providing a clear shot by the fast-pursuing SG warship—or turn sideways and go under it. Their flight computer told them their clearance from fuselage to either wall could be measured in inches. Still, going low was a risk they had to take.
    The pilots punched in these desires, and the scout ship suddenly flipped over onto its side. At that same moment, the forward gunners on the SG ship let loose a barrage of Z beams from their nose-weapon array. These shots were fired too high. However, they hit the peak on one side of the stone bridge, instantly creating a rain of debris onto Mons d'Sighs . One huge boulder smashed into the ancient stone bridge, causing it to collapse onto the tail end of the fleeing KongoVox .
    The impact of tons of burning rock was catastrophic. Suddenly the scout ship was missing about 100 feet off its left-side aft quarter. It streaked out from under the collapsing stone bridge trailing a long tail of black smoke and flaming debris. The control ddck was in chaos: blinking lights, Klaxons blaring. The ship's prop core had been mortally wounded. Any disruption in power flowing through this mysterious drive device could only have disastrous consequences. As with the SG ship shot down just minutes before, whenever a prop core went dry, it tended to blow up with the force of several nuclear bombs and then collapse in on itself as it devolved into a self-made singularity. It was simply impossible for anyone on board to survive such a conflagration.
    But the crews of Space Forces scout ships were traditionally tough and resourceful. Their flight bubble was telling them their vessel would be airborne for just twenty-two seconds more, and then it would crash, with the prop core blowing up just eleven seconds later. Not a lot of time to think about anything but survival.
    So the crew began bailing out. At battle stations each person on board was strapped into a boost seat that would be ejected in times just like this. Panels on top of the ship began blowing off now, and these individual survival capsules commenced bursting through the openings. Each capsule was equipped with an escape rocket that could cany its occupant as far as five miles away. These rockets left a vivid yellow wake, so the display now coming from the crippled KongoVox was mucho spectacular when the huge flames pouring out of the back combined with the cascade of escape capsules firing off from the front and midsection.
    None of this stopped the SG gunners, though. They continued firing away, and some of their shots were hitting the escape capsules, vaporizing them instantly. The scout ship was losing speed as the prop core began dying in earnest, and thus the SG ship was gaining on it by the second. The two ships passed out of the vast Mons d'Sighs region and onto a flat, open terrain that stretched almost all the way to the dark section of the planet.
    As predicted, the scout ship began tumbling about seventeen seconds after being hit, and it crashed five seconds later. All but the captain and the two main pilots made it out alive; they had decided to go down with the ship, insuring that the rest of the crew at least had the chance to eject. The scout ship impacted on the long, straight, flat valley floor and went end over end for a mile before the prop core blew up. There was an enormous explosion accompanied by a nightmarish mushroom cloud, which then began falling in on