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then find them he would.
    The rest of the thought drop consisted of a briefing on what else he had to do when he reached his secret destination. More specifically, it explained how the equipment packs hidden in the cargo hold would help him fulfill his bigger mission, looking for signs of the phantom battle. But these thoughts he would not have to access until the time came to put them into action. His brain work was done, at least for the time being.
    Bonz drained his cocktail, double-checked the ship's con trols, then walked back to the crew quarters where the robots were on their chargers. He checked over the prop core; it wai running at such a low volume, the casing was barely warm He then calibrated the ship's hidden hum beam; once activated they would be fairly immune to any long-range deep space eavesdropping. Satisfied all was well, he returned to the füghi deck and locked the door behind him. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small white cube. It sparkled, emit-ting a tiny crackle of subelectricity. He set the cube on the battered control panel and tapped it once. There was a bright flash, and suddenly, three more people were in the control room with him.
    Or so it seemed. Immediately his eyes began to water. His nose felt funny, and a lump formed in his throat. They looked so real. They were smiling, and waving, and trying to get him to join them, even converse with him. But they were not real. This was a projection; an old 3-D holographic image loop of his family—his wife and two daughters in matching SF flight suits—posing at the top of a peak on Ganymeade. It was taken during a vacation to Saturn's rings. The last image of all of them together.
    The cube was actually filled with many holographs of his family; he was even in some of them, in uniform, his chest weighed down by all his medals. But this one Bonz liked the best. The girls, smiling and happy, his wife radiant. At just the right moment, he reached out and ran his finger down her face. She closed her eyes and smiled, just as she had that day so long ago.
    Like every mission in the past four decades, Bonz's family would be making this trip with him as well.
    It would take them five days to reach the bottom of the Two Arm. Another half-day's journey would get them to the edge of the Moraz Star Cloud.
    Bonz's mechanical crewmen passed the time playing end-less rounds of diceo . It was a three-dimensional game of chance in which markers could disappear into other dimen-sions at completely random and unexpected times. Huge swings of luck and money were frequent. Of course, the robots loved it. Most clankers were notorious gamblers, a quirk which, it was believed, had grown out of several thousand years of artificial intelligence being passed on to successive models and designs. The strange thing was, win or lose, the robots showed no emotion, no leaping about at gaining a big pot, no head-holding when a fortune in aluminum chips went down the drain. This gave the game a surreal edge, especially when the pots grew large and the tension in the air was thick.
    Bonz drifted in and out of the game; he was smart enough not to play for too long with any robot, and these four seemed very up on their diceo . He spent most of his time up on the flight deck, driving the ship, catching up on his sleep, and keeping an eye on what kind of ships were flying around them. He'd been briefed on the horde of refugees that had rolled down the Two Arm in front of the mysterious invaders; their first movements had been a harbinger of the bad things to come. From Bonz's vantage point now, it was clear this mass exodus had not yet stopped. If anything, it had become worse. The usually busy space lanes linking the Two Arm with the rest of the Galaxy were brutally congested due to the uncer-tainty pervading the second swirl in the wake of the short-lived invasion and the forced evacuation of planets inside the SG's forbidden zone.
    The rush of tens of thousands of