It was only by luck that he saw the ship emerge from the crackle of bright white light — and it did not come out smoothly. Rather it came out sideways, as if it were out of control, which meant it wasn't dropping out of Supertime. It also seemed at first that this strange ship was on fire, its quarter deck ablaze in a deep orange glow. And Cronx swore he detected a noise when this vessel so suddenly came into view, though this would have been impossible as mere was no sound in space. But he was certain he heard a huge crack just a microsecond before the strange ship appeared.
How strange was this? A ship appearing out of nowhere, in the midst of this titanic battle, in the middle of the now-infamous No-Fly zone…
The mysterious vessel did not gain any sort of control after emerging from God knows where. It was careening all over the sky, just missing collisions with both SF and SG warships, but taking massive fusillades from both sides. Yet heavy electrical flashes could be seen going off inside as well, as if the vessel was undergoing a massive electrical storm within, even before it was hit and sent tumbling wildly all over space.
But then, everything got even stranger.
The StratoVox twisted this way, and the ghost ship twisted that, and suddenly they were heading right for each other. A call from the navigation team caused the StratoVox to veer out of the way at just the last moment. The mystery ship roared by them, not 1,000 yards off its starboard side, just seconds later.
It was so close, Cronx could read its serial numbers as it swept by.
And by this he was stunned.
" This is impossible.?" he shouted.
The ship's serial number was X3O499.
That number belonged to one of the six cargo 'crashers stolen by the Two Arm invaders, a ship the SG claimed it destroyed near this very spot in space, not a month ago…
The ship named the Resonance 133.
10
The gigantic crevice was located a mile south of the ancient pyramid. It was hidden from view on one side by a set of craggy mountains. On the other was a huge impact crater that, at two billion years, was nearly as old as the pyramid itself.
The crevice was virtually bottomless. It was 2,000 feet at its widest and three miles long. Streams of putrid gases, rising from geostrophic activities near this tiny moon's inner core, further obscured the immediate area. Long shadows from two nearby suns only added to the permanent murk.
There was no atmosphere here. This dirty little rock had been bypassed by the Ancient Engineers when they puffed the Galaxy thousands of years before simply because of the presence of the pyramid.
It was considered fatally bad luck — then and now — to set foot on any body that held a pyramid.
Problem was, there were many of them throughout the Galaxy.
The name of this moon was Bad News 666. It orbited the dead world of Megiddo. It was located just inside the No-Fly Zone, was home to the pyramid and the huge hole in the ground. For all these reasons, it was the perfect place to hide a starship.
This had been the first goal, to get to this place, the same forgotten rock where Joxx the Younger had hidden his super-starship, the ShadoVox, during the battle against the Two Arm invaders for Megiddo below. They knew the Starcrasher would fit into the crevice and would be covered by the gas plumes, the shadows, the forbidding terrain, and the curse of the pyramid. If they successfully passed through the Vanex Door and crossed over from Paradise, they agreed this was the first place they would go.
And this was where the Resonance 133 lay now.
That the ship appeared in the middle of one of the largest, most terrible battles ever fought in the history of the Empires — that was just an odd coincidence. That it had been hit many times with stray destructo-rays fired by both sides, mortally wounding it, well, that was a random event, too, part of the joke, so to speak. By all rights the ship should not have been able to fly after that, or even stay in one piece. But it did. That it reaehed here, the place it was supposed to go, without any of its power systems working, without any sort of flight controls intact, with a dead star engine and a blown prop core, that was near miraculous.
From the instant the ship had flown through the Vanex Door, Nature sought to rain nothing but chaos upon the Resonance 133.
An entire bus of control room string circuits burst the moment the ship left Paradise and entered the far side of the Twenty 'n Six field. A violent subatomic pulse went through the vessel 1/1,000,000,000 of a second later, killing all internal illumination, tanking the gravity screens, and knocking out both the primary and the secondary environmental systems. Everyone aboard should have died at that point. But they didn't.
It took the ship exactly thirty-three seconds to pass through the twenty-sixth dimension. Because the place was filled with ghouls and undead and the trash of an entire civilization floating in a kind of starless void, all kinds of debris slammed up against the huge vessel in that horrible half minute.
Then the big cargo ship finally popped out the other side, only to find itself in the middle of the historic battle. There were a series of mind-blowing concussions caused by the shock waves from the fighting; they battered the cargo 'crasher the instant it emerged. The two-mile-long ship then plowed its way through the storm of Z-beam fire, taking hundreds if not thousands of direct hits. It forged on, however, powerless, and quickly left the battle area, with no one in pursuit. It reached Bad News 666 just moments later.
The interior of the ship was still dark. There were only seven souls aboard now; they had left with eight. One hundred percent of the ship's internal systems were glitched for good. The only light within was pouring through the lower part of the ship's superglass bubble. It was coming from the reflection of the devastated world of Megiddo nearby.
But even the light from the dead planet had turned strangely golden.
They remained still in silence for hours, not believing what they were seeing, not believing what had happened to them as soon as they'd crossed over. It shouldn't have been that much of a surprise to them, though. It even made sense, in a way.
It wasn't just that the Resonance 133 flew here with no power, no controls, no good reason to do so.
The seven souls within had changed, too — radically. They looked different. Their bodies were different.
Their spirits were different. They didn't question it; they didn't have to. After a while, they knew the reason for their transformation. A child could have figured it out, though, could have told them it would happen. But the seven had been so caught up in everything else on the other side, the thought had never come to any of them that this might occur upon their return. And certainly not to Pater Tomm, who, of them all, should have been the expert on it.
Soon enough though, they'd begun to get used to it.
If that was possible.
"So, he was right," Tomm said finally, his voice cutting through the darkness of the ship's planning and control center.
"That the SF and SG were fighting each other?" Zarex said, his voice no longer booming. "Yes, he certainly was."
"Did anybody actually see him…?"
Everyone indicated no. Except Calandrx.