by Mack Maloney
The remaining REF ship came back around but obviously, after seeing all this, wanted no further part of the attack. It turned first north, then west, avoiding the evacuation site altogether. Hunter twisted and turned and in seconds was just ten miles behind it. This was just what he wanted. He finally pushed his weapons panel and sent a very long stream of Z beams right into the REF ship's aft section — just nicking it, but on purpose.
Predictably, the REF ship went nose up and began climbing out of the atmosphere.
Hunter stayed right on its tail.
He followed the ship right up through orbit and beyond. The Starcrasher was damaged but not terribly, which had been his intention all along. Where would a damaged REF ship go if not back to its point of origin? He was hoping the wounded vessel would lead him to the spot in space where Zero Point existed.
He'd expected to trail the ship for at least a dozen light-years after leaving Doomsday 212, but then came his first surprise. The Starcrasher started slowing down not more than 10,000 miles out from the planet. Sure enough, his wide-screen scanner indicated a lot of subatomic activity in this area of space just in the past hour. Some of these telltale wakes even stopped right in midspace, and now the damaged Starcrasher was moving forward but at a crawl.
What more proof did he need?
He'd found Zero Point.
He checked his timepiece. It was now twenty-two minutes before the UPF crossover. He had to make contact with all his allies back on Doomsday 212. His guess was that many REF ships would start congregating in this area very soon. He and his friends had to be ready to do battle with these ships and defeat them before the unsuspecting fleet from Heaven tried to break through. Many refugees had been lifted off the planet below. Many more would eventually be rescued. But as horrible as it was, Doomsday 212 was just a sideshow now. The real battle would have to be fought here.
He closed in on the wounded REF ship. His plan was to shoot it up before it was actually able to escape. That would bring the number of REF ships down to just two dozen or so, manageable as his forces were now almost three times that number. He let go with a Z-beam barrage and…
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 i
t 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.
Or die trying.
And even that prospect wasn't so bad.
The first problem, though, was stopping the flow of ships coming from the schism. How does one go about binding a tear in the fabric of space/time? Did anyone know? The Creator included?
As this uncertain notion was going through his head, Hunter's comm set exploded in a great burst of static. Suddenly he was hearing not just one voice, but many. Real voices. Some were talking rapidly, some were screaming. Some were even laughing. Then through this storm of voices, he clearly heard someone shout, " Dear God— look at that!"
Instinct turned Hunter away from the schism to a point in space that was almost devoid of stars.
That's when he saw it. It was a huge starship. It was traveling very fast and heading right for the opening.
It was a Starcrasher — there was no doubt about mat. What's more, Hunter's scans told him that the ship's prop core was overheating manually and was about to blow. In other words, the ship was going to explode on purpose. What was happening here? Was the person driving the Starcrasher going to blow it up at the entrance to Hell? Was this an attempt to seal the schism with a prop-core implosion? What madman would do such a thing?
Hunter got his answer a moment later. His scans told the tale: The Starcrasher was an M-class, the biggest ever made. But unlike all other Starcrashers, this one was pure white, and was all smooth edges, and was more swept back than any other. By these things alone Hunter recognized it. There was only one like it in existence.
It was the ShadoVox.
And Joxx was at the controls.
How the fallen SG prince knew what was going on out here, Hunter would probably never know. He started to yell into his comm set; maybe there was a better way to do this. But it was too late.
The grand ship went right by him, its outer skin already turned deep blue, the sure sign that the prop core was going to blow. Joxx turned the ship just slightly, twisting through the stream of ships escaping the schism. A few tried to stop him by firing at him. A few even attempted to ram him. But Joxx got by them all.
He hit the schism at full Supertime speed but with a prop core that was 1/1000 of a second away from destabilization. The outcome was nothing less than apocalyptic. The ship blew up, or rather it disappeared into an enormous explosion an instant later. And an instant after that, the explosion turned in on itself. And with another blinding flash, the schism sealed up, and everything around it was gone. Just like that.
Then came a dreadful silence.
It was as if everything just stopped. The stars. The planets. His comm set. Life itself. A collective state of shock, silently exploded and moved like a nova, rushing by everybody and everything. Joxx was gone, and so was the entrance to Hell. At least temporarily.
Somehow Hunter thought to check his timepiece.
Nine minutes to go.
Then, just as suddenly, everything started moving again. The light returned. Ships were moving again.
Space was moving again.
The shock of what had just happened wore off, too. It was clear that by his action, Joxx has stemmed the tide, but there were so many devil ships now, even the combined force of Hunter, the Home Planets ships, the arms dealers' gunships, and the Sky Chiefs couldn't possibly engage them all. There were just too many of them. And now there was just eight minutes to go.
But then, instead of lining up to do battle with the friendly forces, the great swarm of huge ships suddenly accelerated and began zooming off in all directions.
Hunter felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. This couldn't be happening. Those ships had to be filled with the inhabitants of the underworld, a great swarm that was now roaring off in every possible direction. Off to infect the entire Galaxy!
He just couldn't let that happen.
Hunter didn't even think about it. He began shouting orders into his comm set, and the crews of the friendly ships started reacting immediately. The combined fleet dispersed in seconds and took off, chasing the huge ships that had just escaped from Hell.
Hunter took off after the largest group of huge blunderbuss ships. There was three dozen of them, and they'd turned as one away from Zero Point and appeared to be heading down the Two Arm — and maybe toward Earth itself.
As he booted up to full power, his wide-screen scan began spitting out information on these strange vessels. They were capable of carrying more than 20,000 passengers; but at the moment the scan could not confirm that anyone human was aboard. In fact he could not detect any life signs on board at all. Do devils have a pulse? Hunter thought as he sped after them. Did he really want to know?
The scans were also telling him that despite what was inside, the weapons carried on the backs of these giants were very real. They were a huge version of an X-beam blaster gun, a combat weapon still used by some Fringe armies. A single bolt from one of these giants could destroy a good-size asteroid or even a small moon. A dozen direct hits could vaporize an entire planet.
But most disturbing of all, the scanner told him that these ships were powered by prop cores. This made no sense. As far as anyone knew, prop-core propulsion didn't come along until the beginning of the Fourth Empire. These ships were designed thousands of years before that. Was there a spaceship factory in Hell?
It was weird because as soon as Hunter received this startling information, the thirty-six ships suddenly accelerated up to almost Supertime speed. It was almost as if his thoughts had caused them to move even faster.
Hunter pushed his acceleration bar ahead, too. The chase was on.
It took only a few seconds for him to catch up with the three dozen ships. Their tight formation broke up immediately, and two fired their huge blasters at him as he streaked by. A twin storm of green bolts came right at him. They were gigantic and momentarily filled his entire field of vision. Hunter pushed his nose down and banked right, thus avoiding both titanic blasts. Still, they rocked his ship violently as they went by. Meanwhile, the huge fleet regrouped and just kept plowing forward.
Hunter pulled ahead, looped over, and came back at them head-on. He had to find a weak spot in these giants, and he had to do it quickly. He pushed his weapons power switch forward and ordered a blast at full power. Six streaks of Z beams exploded from his nose. He directed them at the ship in the vanguard of the fleet, aiming the barrage at its huge control bubble up front. The ship fired a gigantic blast at him; it went by him in a hu
ge flash. At the same moment, his Z beams tore into the ship's bridge.
Secondary explosions appeared an instant later, and then a massive blast went all the way down to its stern. The ship blew apart a moment later. Hunter had guessed right. The ship's power magazine was located right behind the bridge and just below the gun. He pushed his ship into ultraoverdrive. Now he knew how to destroy these behemoths.
Suddenly he was flying so fast, he was leaving a trail of red, white, and blue particles in his wake. He was spinning, twisting, looping, diving, climbing, and firing all at once. His hands and feet were moving like lightning. Right hand on the throttle, left hand on the joystick, he was lining up targets two or three ships ahead of the ones he was attacking. The storm of gigantic green destructo-beams were going past him in one long blur. He was avoiding all of them, but some residue bolts were exploding dangerously close to him. No matter. One well-placed blast, and he'd be washing up on the beach back in Heaven again. Or so he hoped.
He plunged on, defying every hurdle, avoiding every X-beam blast headed his way. With every ship blown up, he felt two sensations inside: simultaneous exhilaration with another victory accompanied by a slight pang of guilt that he might be killing up to 20,000 souls a pop. But were they souls xeally? Were they really human beings — just ones that had somehow come back from Hell? He'd seen what happened to his friends when they crossed over from Heaven. They'd become what, through the ages, people had called angels. Didn't it make sense then that any people occupying these ships would then be devils?
No matter. He sure wasn't going to stop one and find out
It went on like this for what seemed like forever. Hunter kept weaving his way through the loose formation and kept destroying targets. They weren't avoiding him exactly, but at times it seemed like the number of enemy ships was endless. He'd grease one, and it was as if two would take its place. He'd splash another one, and two more would pop up behind it. It was madness! And he'd become part of it.