Flash!
Suddenly Hunter was blinded. His craft was thrown backward at an incredible rate of speed, spinning wildly out of control. He tried reaching out for his control panel, but the g-forces were too intense. He couldn't move his hands. He couldn't move his feet. He could barely breathe. He began punching his side panels, those controls closest to him. Auxiliary levers, power boosters, inertia dampeners — but nothing was responding. His craft sounded like it was about to come apart at the seams.
Somehow, he summoned up enough strength to lunge for the power bar. He found it and was just barely able to wrap two fingers around it. He was spinning even faster now and was close to blacking out — for good. He pushed the accelerator forward and clamped his foot on the right rudder, an old pilot's trick. He felt massive resistance, which meant he was nearing a point of gravity. He was finally able to jerk his helmet's visor down, and slowly his vision began to return. The first thing he saw was the scarred hulk of Doomsday 212 rushing up to meet him.
This was not good. He yanked back on his controller, boosted power even further, and slammed the right rudder down. Three eternally long seconds later, he somehow recovered flight. His ship skipped off the top of the planet's thin atmosphere and soared back into space. He caught his breath and checked his position. The controls said he'd been thrown nearly 10,000 miles in a matter of seconds. That seemed impossible. With shaking hands, he turned back toward Zero Point.
He pushed his accelerator up to ultraoverdrive, but no sooner did the power kick in when…
Flash!
Another massive explosion sent his craft reeling again. This time he began tumbling ass over end. With his visor down, he'd avoided the blindness from the first blast, but it also allowed him to see every light on his control panel blink off— and stay off. Extremely not good. He punched the flight board with his fist, and everything suddenly blinked back on. He pulled back on his power and managed to stop tumbling. Everything started working again a second later.
He breathed a sigh of relief and checked his boards. This time he'd been bounced 5,000 miles backward, again in a matter of seconds. Again, seemingly impossible. It was almost as if something was trying to keep him away from this piece of space — and maybe for good reason.
He turned back toward Zero Point once more, and that's when he saw the most disturbing sight of his life. The fabric of space and time was tearing itself in two, creating a huge, almost bloody gash, exactly where he had determined Zero Point to be. Though it was thousands of miles away, it seemed to be happening not 500 feet off the nose of his craft. Within the schism he saw the deepest red fire imaginable.
Deeper than the color of blood. This was a gush of flames, almost liquid fire, spewing out into space all around it. It was disturbing beyond words. He could feel the heat on his face. It felt as if it was burning right through to his bones. Even worse, he could smell it, impossible as mat might have been. It was in his oxygen system, in his hose, in his mask. The odor was sickening: dead flesh, vomit, putrid smoke, all mixed together. He suddenly felt like he was sucking all these things into his lungs. He began choking, losing his breath. Losing control of his spacecraft again.
He pulled back on his power, but his ship did not respond. He tried to will the illusion of suffocating away, but he couldn't. He was heading right for the schism at very high speed; it was sucking him in. The stench was becoming worse. He nearly ripped the mask from his face — sheer foolishness. But it felt as if Evil itself was entering his body through his lungs.
He closed his eyes, gripped the flight controller, and tried to go first left, then right. But again, the controls would not respond. He started to breathe deeply. Fight it. It was too painful. Don't be fooled by it. Several long seconds went by. He pushed the controls again, but once more, nothing happened.
Fight it. But how? Then it hit him. He thought of Paradise. He thought of the rivers and the lakes and the City of Smiles. He thought of the stars, and the beach, and the clear blue sky. He thought of Xara. It seemed to work. He pushed all the images of what he had just seen out of his head, and he began breathing again, deeply. The stink faded away. His heart settled down. His stomach stopped turning. He pushed his controls to starboard, and this time they went the way he wanted to go.
Then he took another deep breath and opened his eyes… but only to see something even more horrifying than before.
A deluge of warships was pouring out of the schism. Red Starcrashers bearing the unmistakable markings of the REF. Two of them, three, four, six, ten! Traveling incredibly fast. But behind them came a stream of other vessels. Huge blunderbuss ships, as large as Starcrashers but bulbous, bullet-shaped, with a blunt nose and ridiculously small fins in the back. And each one had an impossibly huge blaster on its back, running the length of the ship and attached by a series of concentric atomic rings. Like the REF vessels, these ships, too, were the color of blood.
Hunter couldn't believe it. He'd seen these types of starships before! A long time ago, when he took a mind ring trip that put him back when the evil Second Empire was in power, these monsters were the ships of the line. Crude and gigantic. And now they were spewing out of the huge tear, surrounded by flames that turned Hunter's stomach to salt just looking at them.
What was going on here? These ships were more than 4,000 years old. Were they missing ships?
Ships lost over the ages? Ships destroyed while doing battle with nefarious reasons in mind? Or had they simply fallen into the same hellish pit the REF had — several millennia ago?
Or was this all just a sick, distorted dream?
Whatever the case, Hunter hastily put out an SOS to Doomsday 212 below. Three dozen ships came off the planet, rushing to answer his call. They were beside him in an instant, almost too quickly, just impossibly fast. He didn't have to deliver the bad news to them; they could see it for themselves. No longer did they have just a couple dozen enemy ships to deal with. Now there were hundreds.
And those ships were still streaming out of the schism non-stop. In a way, they didn't look real. There were so many of them, it almost seemed like Hunter was looking at a viz-image loop playing over and over again. But once more, the words of the Ancient Astronaut came back to him. The bad side was trying to overwhelm them with madness — and at the moment, doing a very good job of it.
For one very revealing moment, Hunter wished, truly and deeply wished, that he had gone through that screen door of the house back on Far Planet. That he made his presence known to Dominique and that he could have washed his hands of all of this. It would have been the copout of the ages, and so much of what he wanted would have been lost. But still he was only one person, only one soul. There was only so much he could do. Sure, sometimes life forces you to be a hero. But that didn't mean you had to like it.
The moment of uncertainty passed as quickly as it came. There were other voices urging him on here; they had been since this whole crazy adventure started. In fact, there were so many of them now, he couldn't begin to separate one from the other. If he was back where he belonged — back in that world the man with the hole in his basement gave him the opportunity to return to — they would have surely put him in the booby hatch. That's how many voices he was hearing in his head these days.
So there was no sense in fighting it. Too many spirits were counting on him, both here and in other places. He had to do the right thing, whether he wanted to or not.