Once his flight plan was set, he inched the throttles up a bit more. At 50 percent power, he watched the controls on his panel slowly begin to go backward. As before at this setting, he was getting ahead of himself in time. He nudged the throttle ahead a bit further, to about 60 percent power, unknown territory for him now. His panel indicators began flying backward now; meanwhile, the stars outside were beginning to blur. Another push forward; his eyes began to water. He touched his face and felt his beard — several weeks old now — start to retreat back into his skin. The hair on his head began getting shorter, too.
/ hope nothing else starts to shrink, he thought.
Another push forward. Seventy percent power. The atomic paint on his nose cone began getting wet and ripping off. Why? Because it was getting younger very quickly. And as a drying process was always ongoing, it was reversing itself. Or at least that's the only theory he could think up at the moment.
A push up to 80 percent. Now he was really into a bizarro situation. He was going so fast in space and time that his speed indicators actually showed him in the negative. He had no idea just how fast his velocity was, or even if velocity was the right word at this point. Whenever he would hit the quadtrol to ask this question, it would reply so strangely, he had to assume it was answering questions he had yet to ask it but would do so in the near future. At one point it read: " Saturn 5." At another, " F-4 Phantoms"
popped up. These things were vaguely familiar to him but disturbingly so. And what if he saw a readout that said: " Catastrophic flight termination," quadtrolese for " Blown to bitsT At this point, with all that was going on, he really preferred the cause of his demise to,come as a surprise.
So he stopped asking the quadtrol any more questions.
He pushed the throttle to 90 percent and suddenly found the control panel just a few millimeters from his nose. He wasn't leaning forward; actually, he was moving so fast, the atoms in his cockpit were stretching out, distorting themselves, trying to catch up with themselves. His cockpit glass became a mirror; he caught his reflection in it. It was frightening; he, too, was distorted: huge head, his helmet looking gigantic, while the rest of his frame was shrinking down to infinity. Whenever he moved his hands, it looked like he was stretching out for a mile or more, even though the real distance was just a couple feet at the most.
One final nudge — up to 95 percent. A glimpse at his reflection now showed a fantastic distortion; he didn't even seem real anymore. He was no longer flesh and blood; he looked more like an animated character, a drawing, in vivid reds, yellows, and blues, and absolutely two-dimensional, as if he were suddenly existing flat on a page. Even the strange voice in his ear was speechless on this new development. Three words somehow popped into his head though; he thought they might have come from somewhere way back in his childhood: comic book character.
That's what he looked like. At close to total power, that's what he'd become.
The Ball went by him in a blur.
Again, he'd never been anywhere near the center of the Galaxy before. And even though he was just skirting it, not going any closer than 200 light-years to what was considered its outer border, what he saw on his long-range scanners was fascinating in a strangely sad way. There were billions of star systems in there, but many of them were remarkably alike. Either one or two stars, all of approximately the same size, all with six to eight planets revolving in perfect orbits. He saw none of the celestial exotica one could find very readily out on the Fringe. No wild nebulas, no titanic multicolored gas clouds, no really weird things like triple-ringed planets or ocean worlds, or planets that were entirely sand or snow or jungle or metal. It was odd, because even though the vast majority of the Empire's citizens lived on the planets within the Ball, the place lacked any kind of character or personality. There was no sense of discovery here. No sense of wanting to see other things, other places, other people.
As he tore by, moving faster than fast, his mind, working on a strange kind of time delay, started musing about this center of the Empire. Did the people here even know about the UPF's invasion of the Two Arm? Had they ever heard of the mythical Home Planets? Or the lost race called the Americans?
Did the thought ever come to mind that all was not so perfect with the Imperial Court on Earth? What would be the reaction of the people who lived here if they ever found out that the Fourth Empire, like the Second, had been built and based on lies and deceit of, well, galactic proportions? Would it have an effect on them? Would it drive them to protest the Empire? To take up arms against it?
Looking at all those perfect little planets in their perfect little star systems as he flew by at about a billion miles an hour, the answer that came back to him was a distinct No.
He never thought he'd ever admit it, but for once he actually craved being out on the Fringe.
That's when he heard a voice in his ear say, " Remember Hawk, Earth is part of the Fringe, too.…"
Something strange — or strange in a different way — happened about halfway across the Galaxy.
Hunter had his string comm set on wide scan, meaning it would pick up anything within fifty light-years of his location at any given time. As he was flying so fast that location was changing with every microsecond, so he was essentially sweeping a large part of the Milky Way with this long-range communications device. The first few minutes into his dash across the Empire, he heard little more than star songs in his headset — the natural sounds of the stars as they revolved around the center of the Galaxy.
But suddenly, his string comm unit began screaming with trouble calls coming from both near and far.
There was so much of this panicked chatter on his headset, Hunter had a hard time determining who was doing the calling and what was happening to them. He was able to pick up some coherent words here and there. They spoke of horrific things: planets being attacked, ships being blown out of the skies, innocents being slaughtered, both in space and on planets. Some of these calls were coming from the Six and Five Arms; others were coming in from as far away as the Three and Nine Arms. It seemed as if the outer Galaxy was suddenly in the throes of something very wicked and evil. And the perpetrators weren't the usual gang of suspects like space pirates and outlaw meres. Nor were any of these calls linked to the fighting between the SG and SF. That war was still going nonstop, but those hostilities were not related to this. This horror was coming from somewhere else.
He listened to it all for about a minute, the only one link being that those doing the attacking were mysterious, unknown, and in many cases unseen.
Then suddenly it all went away. His headset returned to nothing more than the gentle sounds of the star music and the warm and fuzzy static coming from the Ball. Weird…
Finally, up ahead, Hunter saw the Seven Arm come into view.