Bonz moved his ship inside the ultraring and crossed his fingers. He was immediately hailed by the SG officer in charge of the border crossing, his gruff, booming voice suddenly ma-terializing inside the ZeroVox's flight compartment. The voice demanded to know who Bonz was and where he was going.
Bonz quickly keyed his intersystem communicator and iden-tified himself as a wine hauler; destination: a backwater binary system on the lower Three Arm. He was to pick up a load of gold slow-ship wine for immediate shipment back to Earth. It was as good a lie as any, and SF3 had given him proper string documentation to back up the cover story.
The SG officer accessed this documentation, then broke off the communications link. Bonz called back to the clankers and told them to get ready to be scanned. Two seconds later, a bright blue, ghostly light penetrated the hull of the ship. It began moving slowly from stem to stern. Bonz stayed glued to his seat and began thinking about a particularly unattractive but busty girl he knew out on the Three Arm.
She could drink him under the table and was a damn good cook. She would do anything for the right amount of slow-ship wine, and after all, that was his business. If only she took the time to wash her hair or actually bathe every once and a while…
The SG ultrascan could see, hear, and sense everything, in-cluding the thoughts of everyone on-board. It could penetrate every cell of a being, could capture memories, feelings, and inner thoughts.
It was intrusive, demeaning, and intimidating— the Solar Guards' usual way of saying hello. The mind-scan part was the most tricky, though; it could not be easily fooled. But Bonz had done this sort of thing before, and he was good at it. Not only could he will away any of his own personal thoughts, he had cultivated thoughts that would be in the head of a typical space trucker — thus the dream about the loose woman out on the Three Arm. But generating the appropriate amount of false memories was only half the trick here. Bonz also had to maintain a slight modicum of reluctance to the scan, a hint of holding something back, as just about anyone would. As for the four robots on board, they'd had their brains wiped clean before leaving Earth.
The scan finished its initial sweep, then disappeared. Bonz fought back an almost involuntary sigh of relief, a dangerous emotion had it happened just seconds before. The holo-barriers had held, thank God, and his mind games had worked, too. If not, a small army of SG troops would have beamed aboard already. He waited a few seconds, then another tremor shook the ship back to front. This was the passport EMP, a marker that indicated the ship had been cleared by the SG security people at the Pluto Cloud. Bonz did breathe a sigh of relief now. The booming voice invaded the flight deck once again, telling Bonz he was free to go and strongly suggested that he do so "with all haste."
Then, strangely, the voice added, "And if you see any of our SG brothers out where you're going, tell them we said hello."
'Tell them we said hello?" Bonz wondered aloud. What the hell did that mean?
This puzzled him, but not for very long. It would be dan-gerous to linger here any more than he had to. So he thanked the SG officer, killed the transmission, and yelled back to the clankers to hold on.
Then he hit the accelerator and left the SG checkpoint in a blur.
A few seconds later, the Solar System was far behind them.
Once he was certain no one was trailing him, Bonz settled down to begin the next part of his mission.
Working the few authentic controls on his dilapidated pilot's seat, he pushed his speed up slightly, though still only calling for a fraction of his available power. The idea was to ride on ion ballast until they got to the Two Arm, as traveling in Su-pertime in a space truck would tend to arouse suspicion, to say the least. Bonz inputted the set of coordinates SF3 wanted him to follow and then put the spy ship on automatic control. The new course would bring them right into the Moraz Star Cloud, which made up much of the mid-Two Arm, and then to the edge of the SG No-Fly Zone itself.
This done, Bonz poured himself a drink, shook it gently, and finally relaxed. The heavy lifting had been completed; now it was time to do his brain work. Among other things, the thought drop he'dingested back on Earth contained a secret file filled with memory images and dossiers on a very unusual group of people. Bonz sipped his cocktail, then leaned back in his squeaky flight chair, closed his eyes, and began access-ing this file. Hawk Hunter was the first image on the memory string. There was little information on the dashing yet enig-matic pilot that Bonz didn't already know. Indeed, at one point two years ago, Hunter was the best-known person in the Gal-axy, next to the members of the Imperial Family. It seemed back then, everyone knew everything about him. Bonz cer-tainly didn't have to dwell on him now.
Next in the synapse line were two pilots named Erx and Berx. Famous officers of both the SF and the X-Forces, they were middle aged and looked like human boulders with arms, legs, and extremely long mustachios attached. These were the men who'd rescued Hunter from the isolated planet called Fools 6 and eventually brought him to Earth. They'd been sent back out to the edge of space about a year ago by Princess Xara to find Hunter again after he'd so mysteriously disap-peared, but they hadn't been heard from since, either.
Next came Petz Calandrx, the well-known space hero turned poet, who was both a personal friend of the Emperor and win-ner of the Earth Race more than a century before. He was a real oldster, rapidly approaching his fourth century. At one time, however, he'd been a brilliant soldier, and for a while, a regular on the Specials' ultraexclusive party list. He'd been sent with Erx and Berx on Xara's mission to rescue Hunter, only to go missing as well.
Then came a character named The Great Klaaz. Apparently a hero in the outer regions of the Fringe, this stooped and craggy old man was practically unknown to Earth's intelli-gence services. As he was approaching his sixth century, he seemed an unlikely candidate for what was afoot. Yet he, too, had apparently fallen in with Hunter and his band and was ¦ow wanted for questioning as well. After him came a short, mysterious, middle-aged man who went by the name Pater Tomm. Though he claimed to be a priest — and in the fuzzy mage provided to Bonz on the mind drop, he was sporting a long cassock and bowl haircut similar to those worn by those |«f a religious bent — he hardly looked the part. Tax enforcer land knucklebreaker was more like it. The last member of this Igroup was named Zarex Red, a gigantic individual with mus-Ides bulging everywhere and a costume that looked like some-thing out of a viz-screen movie. He was approaching his 150th year, Bonz estimated, and was known both for running weap-ons and discovering new or lost star systems out on the Fringe. He always traveled in the company of a huge robot.
Who were these people? They were as strange a collection of space rogues as Bonz had ever encountered, and most not so short on the tooth. Yet the SF3 believed this unlikely group was responsible for the mysterious invasion of the Two Arm and an equally mysterious disappearing act soon afterward. And because the people of the Empire were obsessed with putting a name on everything, a habit that was not discouraged inside the intelligence services, they had been christened by SF3 as The Hunter-Calandrx Gang, for their two most famous members.
In addition to his primary mission to the No-Fly Zone, Bonz was also supposed to look for this gang — or, more accurately, look for signs of them. Life clues, DNA debris, those sorts of things, anything that could place them at the scene of the crime, so to speak. He would also be searching for any clues to Princess Xara's whereabouts, and those of the Imperial Jan-itor, Vanex, though Bonz couldn't imagine them all being in the same place. No matter; it was all fine with him. Among his many undercover talents, he was also very adept at tracking down fugitives.