Battle at Zero Point by Mack Maloney Page A

itself, as if it were an explosion in reverse motion. It sucked everything within a few hundred feet into a black hole that was created and then disappeared again, all in less than a heartbeat.
    The entire planet shook once; the impact of the crash was that terrific.
    The scout ship's survivors were now scattered along the route of its death plunge, many separated by a mile or more. The SG warship had pulled up violently so as not to get caught in the small holocaust resulting from the Kongo's crash.
    The big ship did not boot into Supertime and leave the scene, though. In another devilish, seemingly inexplicable act, the ship turned around and slowed down to the lowest crank power, just a few knots of forward motion. Its gunners began searching the valley floor for survivors who had ejected from the dying SF scout ship. On spotting any member of the Kongo crew, the SG gunners opened up without mercy.
    Unprotected and many of them injured from their quick ejection and violent landing, these hapless soldiers made easy pickings for the SG trigger men. Within a minute, two dozen had been blasted to bits.
    Now scan lights were beamed out of the bottom of the slow-moving SG warship, further helping the gunners target the Space Forces soldiers who had no means of escape and few places to hide. A total massacre seemed to be inevitable. That's when the SF Starcrasher VogelVox finally arrived on the scene.
    The SF warship had been following the outlandish, confusing, disturbing battle via its long-range viz scanners.
    The commanders of the two-mile-long aerial battleship didn't believe at first that those responsible for shooting down the JunoVox were in fact Solar Guards. It didn't make sense. Sure, the blistering conflict had flared up deep within the SG's unilateral forbidden zone, and indications were that the JunoVox had violated the SG's order and had dashed into the verboten area for reasons that seemed even stranger, the summary execution of an SF intell officer. But now, open conflict between the two services? It didn't seem real somehow.
    The No-Fly Zone was the talk of the Empire's military, of course. For the most part, it was viewed by the Space Forces as an example of butt covering by the SG after they had been bested by the mysterious invaders on the planet Megiddo and then apparently lied about destroying the enemy fleet. Perhaps the murdered intell officer had uncovered just that, and for whatever reason, the SG decided he had to die, never thinking that word of the outrageous execution would get out so fast. (In many ways then, a robot, not a human, was responsible for the fratricide that had already taken so many lives and was about to turn the Empire on its head.)
    What was clear was that SF troops were under attack, and the particularly vicious manner in which the SG warship had pursued the smaller scout ship and was gunning to death its helpless crew members on the ground only made the dangerous situation even worse.
    So it was both emotions and duty that propelled the commanders of the VogelVox into action.
    Again, it was a case of the people aboard the SG ship not considering themselves in a combat position. Its warship was still moving very slowly about 250 feet above the ground, picking off the survivors from the scout ship crash. It was not running its 360 scans—or if it was, no one was paying any attention to the scanning suite screens.
    Moving slowly, close to the ground, looking down and concentrating on small targets—there was no better way to set yourself up as a big, fat target.
    Had the JunoVox not been shot down so violently, there was a chance the commanders of the Vogel might have simply disabled the SG warship below them. But again, emotions were running high, and confusion was reigning now on several levels. In all this time, none of the SF ships had contacted SF headquarters on Earth to report what was going on; no one was quite sure what they would say. So the VogelVox's commanders descended