Free Battle at Zero Point by Mack Maloney

the cargo tech if there was any way that the broadcast could be a mistake. He was assured that it could not. They had no idea who the SF officer was, or why the SG troops had murdered him, but the broadcast itself was definitely real.
    " Those bastards ..." Mannx whispered under his breath.
    Then, suddenly, he was gone. Hurrying up to the bridge, he ordered his pilots to turn the huge cargo ship 120 degrees and set the controls for the heart of the Moraz Star Cloud, indeed to the very center of the SG's forbidden zone.
    Next, he put out a high-priority call for any other SF ships in the region, telling them what he'd just seen and informing them that he was breaking course and heading for the scene of the incident "to assist our brother." He suggested they do likewise.
    Then he called down to the billet where the ship's company of Space Marines was housed. He told their CO that his men should suit up for an "emergency rescue mission" and be ready for deployment, with weapons loaded, in fifteen minutes.
    Two SF vessels received the JunoVox's emergency call.
    One was the KongoVox , a scout ship heading in toward the One Arm shipyards for an overhaul after nearly two years out on patrol. The other ship was the VogelVox , a two-mile-long Space Navy Starcrasher. It had just left the Three Arm after battling space meres for the past six months.
    The KongoVox was just twelve light-years from the JunoVox's position when the call came in. Its CO immediately turned back toward the Moraz Star Cloud and headed for the trouble area at top speed. The small ship was carrying just fifty crew members and no Space Marines, but at just 750 feet long, it held a formidable arsenal. This included an array of destructo-cannons in its nose and several long-distance, space-to-surface atomic missiles under its fuselage. Its navigation team reported they would arrive over Doomsday 212 approximately ten minutes after the Juno .
    The much larger VogelVox was another fifty light-years removed from the edge of the No-Fly Zone; it would take about a half hour to make the outer reaches of the star cloud and another forty-five minutes to fly to Doomsday. The SF Star-crasher was a planet-assault vessel. It was heavily armed with space cannons, destructo-ray turrets, and myriad space-to-surface weapons. It was also carrying a brigade of regular SF infantry, battle-hardened soldiers who'd been doing search-and-destroy missions against the notorious Bad Moon Knights mercenary army for half a solar year.
    As it was hurtling through space, the smaller scout ship, the KongoVox , exchanged several communication strings with the cargo ship JunoVox . In one of these strings, a facsimile of the mysterious transmission was beamed to the scout ship. For the first time, its crew saw the images of what appeared to be an execution of the Space Forces officer. Now they knew the reason the commander of the JunoVox had acted so quickly.
    The last transmission the Kongo received from the Juno indicated the cargo ship had made orbit around Doomsday 212, and its scanners had found the area where the puzzling transmission was coming from. A long-range viz sweep of the terrain in question had provided two things. There was indeed a dead SF officer lying on the ground beside what appeared to be a SF3 intell ship; four partially disassembled clankers were lying close by. And, as had been speculated, the mysterious transmission was coming from one of these robots, the one farthermost from the ship. Its advanced AI had told it something was not right, and it had to do something about it. Broadcasting the grisly execution over and over again was its solution to the problem.
    The crew of the Kongo then heard from the Juno that it was about to launch a ground team, when a concerned voice cut into the transmission. The voice quickly rose in tension, panic seeping in. Something was suddenly wrong aboard the JunoVox , but it wasn't clear just what. Colonel Mannx, the captain of the Juno , was