by Mack Maloney
But he had to keep going. He couldn't let any of them get by him. He kept firing and firing and firing.
But then, suddenly, he just stopped.
He literally put on the brakes and stopped his ship in mid-space — and thought a moment. Something was wrong here. This was almost too easy. The words of the Ancient Astronaut came back to him. The devils will use everything to get what they want: deception, distraction, deceit.
They will try to make the heroes fool themselves.
Hunter checked his timepiece.
Damn; the countdown had less than thirty seconds to go!
And that's when it hit him. These ships probably weren't carrying anybody. They were able to fire.
They were able to present themselves as targets. But they were a distraction.
And it had almost worked. The heroes had almost fooled themselves.
But not Hunter. He turned his ship 180 degrees and vengefully hit his power bar again. An instant later, he was screaming back to Zero Point.
There were twenty-four REF ships waiting there.
Some had flown through the schism just before it had closed; the rest had come up from Doomsday 212. All of them had their weapons systems cranked up to full power. All of them had their crews at battle stations. With the ships of the good forces off chasing the empty decoys from Hell, the REF ships were able to align themselves in four attack formations of six ships each. Their noses were pointing to a piece of space not far from where their portal to Hell had been sealed. This was the exact spot where the UPF fleet had disappeared just a little over a month ago.
This was where that same fleet was due to emerge.
The REF ships never saw Hunter coming.
Too intent on ambushing the UPF ships once they crossed over, their crews were distracted. They weren't paying attention to anything but the matter at hand. The gold F-Machine came upon them so suddenly, they didn't even move. One ship went up, hit by a massive Z-beam barrage on its control bubble. Another went up, hit by a murderous fusillade on its prop core. A third exploded, its aft section blown away from the rest of its gigantic body.
In five seconds, three ships were destroyed.
Trouble was, there were only twenty seconds to go.
Hunter twisted over and lined up another huge Red Ship. Another barrage from his Z beams; the ship was instantly a flaming hulk. He turned over again. The REF crews were reluctant to change their positions; they wanted to stay ready to pounce on the UPF ships as soon as they appeared. This made it easier for Hunter to pick them off. But it was more a matter of time now than numbers. He put the next ship in his sights and pushed his weapons bar. It went up in a flash.
Fifteen seconds to go — still nineteen REF ships lying in wait.
Hunter screamed through them again. Some were firing at him now, but he easily twisted through the scattered X beams.
He went after the ship closest to where the UPF would pop out. He drilled it stern to stern with his Z
guns. It split right down the middle and exploded.
Twelve seconds to go—
It was like target practice now, but Hunter could not stop time — at least not in this circumstance. It took him several precious seconds to nail a ship, and those seconds were running out. He couldn't possibly get them all.
Ten seconds to go…
He hit two ships at once, leaving his Z-beam guns engaged and slicing through a pair of monsters that had chosen to ride too close to one another.
Seven seconds to go…
Another quick blast, and Hunter took out what looked to be the REF command ship.
Five seconds…
Hunter hit his wide scan. There were still fifteen REF ships in wait.
Three seconds…
He'd done all he could.
Two seconds…
One…
Nothing happened.
There was no bright flash. There was no huge explosion.
No glorious parting of space and time. No tear at all.
The time had come and gone, and absolutely nothing at all had happened at Zero Point.
Thirty seconds went by.
Hunter was loitering just a few hundred miles away, watching it all on his wide-screen scan. A full minute passed. Still nothing. The REF ships stayed frozen in place, waiting for something, anything.
But nothing happened.
Hunter couldn't believe it. He checked his timepiece. Had it been set wrong? Obviously not, because the REF had lined up at the spot at the same time he determined the fleet would break through. Had Joxx's brave action sealed the portal from Heaven as well? Hunter's gut told him no. But now nearly three minutes had passed, and still there was no sign of the UPF ships.
Something must have gone wrong, he thought.
There was no other explanation.
This eventually dawned on the REF ships, too. Stunned into inaction for a few moments, they were beginning to stir again.
Had he thought longer about it, Hunter knew he could have predicted their actions. But now he watched in horror as they formed up into a single attack line, turned around, and headed right back down toward Doomsday 212.
Damn!
It was the other side of the coin again. The planet lay practically unprotected now, and these fifteen ships were loaded with weaponry. By using either orbital bombardment or firing their weapons down on the surface at full crank, they could complete the massacre of the millions of innocents still on the planet, along with the soldiers on the ground who were trying to help them.
Hunter desperately tore after them again. But they were no longer sitting still for him. He was moving fast, but they began moving fast, too. And even he couldn't shoot down fifteen Starcrashers at once. It became a numbers game again. While he was greasing half of them, the other half would be able to vaporize the planet in seconds, especially now that they no longer had any use for the people below as hostages. Hell, two Starcrashers could kill everyone on that planet in a matter of minutes. Or even just one, if it was left alone long enough.
Hunter was furious. At himself. At the situation. At the cosmos. It seemed no matter what he did, he just wasn't going to win this fight. He'd come back from Paradise, he'd traveled across the Galaxy. He'd been tempted with promises to return to the best parts of his life… and for what? An outcome like this?
Maybe this was how it was supposed to happen, he thought darkly. Maybe the bad side was supposed to win all the time. And maybe the rest of them had got it wrong a long time ago.
But no sooner had the thought traveled through his head when something very strange happened…
He was trailing behind the mob of REF ships, trying to figure out how he could possibly ping them all before they busted up the entire planet, when suddenly there was a tremendous burst of light and energy. It came from behind him, and he swore he could feel the light particles going right through him. It was more intense than any prop-core explosion, more intense than when he saw the portal to Hell open up. It was blinding, even though his eyes were turned away from it.
Though the Great Flash — as it would come to be known— lasted just a billionth of a second, at the same time, it seemed to last forever. In fact, it was one of those things that did not even happen within the illusion of ordinary time. It had happened on a different plane entirely.
At the same moment it hit, Hunter saw an REF ship directly in front of him falter and slide off to the side. It was as if its prop core had suddenly gone off-line. Yet he had not fired on it. It was going down on its own.
This wasn't so strange, he thought for an instant. After all, Starcrashers broke down, too. But then he saw the REF ship right beside it slide away as well. Its lights went out, its exhaust nozzles went black.
Then the ship in front of these two shut down. Then the one in front of that. And the one in front of that…
In the next instant it became very clear: all the REF ships were faltering. They weren't blowing up.
Their prop cores we
ren't going south and taking the entire ships with them. They were just running out of power. And there was only one way that could happen. Somehow, the Big Generator had just shut down.
And with no juice from the Big Generator, Hunter knew the REF ships could not fly. And that they were defenseless.
But so was he.
This was getting serious now.
The mob of huge but powerless REF ships was falling through the thin atmosphere of Doomsday 212, and Hunter was falling right behind them.
The surface was rushing up to meet him very quickly, and a few of the fifteen enormous Starcrashers in front of him were beginning to tumble out of control. They all hit the top of the planet's atmosphere at about the same time, causing a gigantic sonic boom. Seconds later, the bottom of his ship started to smolder; he was beginning to bum up on reentry. With all his strength, Hunter yanked back on his ship's controls and tried to flatten it out. But he was moving a dead stick.
He had only one option here.
He had to eject.
Below him, the REF ships were going down much quicker than he. Gravity and the movement of mass had taken over. But then the ships began purging themselves of the tons of superhydraulics that were the lifeblood of any Starcrasher. In doing so, at just the right time, it slowed their descent just enough that they were able to stabilize slightly before slamming into the surface below. So, instead of crashing, they came down extremely hard but in one piece. And as luck would have it, the first few to hit landed very close to a long stream of refugees that were making their way toward one of the evacuation sites. Even more incredibly, Hunter could see REF soldiers jumping out of their wrecked ships just seconds after they'd hit and starting to move toward the helpless and terrified refugees.
Hunter couldn't believe it. It seemed that no matter what happened, the bad side always came up with the advantage. At that moment a very disturbing thought went through his mind. Why not plow right into one of these ships? Aim his useless craft at one of the REF vessels and at least go out in a blaze of glory and take at least a few more of these bastards with him. If the bad side was fated to win all the time anyway — despite everything he and his friends sought to do— what was the point of it all? There was always going to be evil, and he and his friends were fools to think — to actually believe! — that they could ever change that.
So why not auger in? Then he could close his eyes and see the light and feel the warmth, and wake up on the beach again, and find Xara waiting for him.
He pondered all this for several long, painful seconds.
Then he thought, Too dramatic.
He yanked the ejection handle an instant later.
The canopy blew away in pieces; it shattered as opposed to coming off whole. Hunter was suddenly going facedown in a roaring wind. His airspeed had to be three hundred knots or more, especially in this thin upper atmosphere. His seat blew out next. He felt like someone had hit him in the ass with a hammer.
The violence associated with ejecting was incredible. He was tumbling now, just him, no warm ship to wrap around him anymore. Free-falling through the puny atmosphere of this long-lost, depleted planet.
What a strange place to be!
He heard a ruffling sound and then was jerked in a motion almost as violent as the ejection. Suddenly it seemed like he was flying in the opposite direction. He looked up and saw his chute starting to blossom. But again, this atmosphere was so weak he wondered if there was really enough air, way up here, to fill the chute completely. If not, he might have that glorious last crash yet. But eventually the chute did billow out — and just like that, he was floating again.
He looked down now and saw his aircraft spiraling away from him. His eyes watered up. It was as if someone had reached into his chest and tore his heart out. His machine had been with him a very long time. He had traveled billions of miles in it, across thousands of years. To part with it on this craphole of a planet was especially painful. He soon lost sight of it in a cloud of smoke coining up from below. He never heard the impact, never saw the flash.
And that was good. Maybe the only good thing that would happen to him this very long day.
He started falling very slowly now, and things took on a sort of dreamy quality — but not in a good way. He could see the refugees below him scatter as the REF ships banged in, all fifteen of them, on the same vast plain, a very unglamorous arrival.
The REF soldiers were flowing out of all the crumpled ships now. Even from this height, he could tell that the blood-suited soldiers would be especially rabid in what they were about to do. As far as Hunter could tell, these were the last of the SG's renegade special ops outfit, and yet he could almost predict their dark future. He had no doubts that they would get off this planet somehow, after their bloodlust was finally sated. Then they would get more ships and go to other places and continue to spread their brand of evil throughout the Galaxy. They would win… and keep winning, because that's just the way it was.
He'd given up trying to believe anything else.
But just then, there was another tremendous explosion high above him. He looked up and nearly relieved himself, so astonishing was the sight he saw. Right over his head, the sky was literally opening up. Not in spewing fire this time but with an onrush of gloriously white clouds. Behind them was an incredibly bright light. Impossibly bright. Yet it did not hurt his eyes.
Hunter blinked once, twice. But still the vision was there. It seemed real yet so unreal at the same time.
Coming through this hole in the sky now he saw eleven streaks of light. Behind them the most brilliant sun was shining. And that's when he realized what was happening here. He was looking at Paradise. He knew that sky, that sun, so well. And when the eleven streaks of light suddenly turned solid, he nearly wet himself again. It was the UPF fleet.
They were finally crossing over!
The REF soldiers below saw all this, too… and that's when things got a little weird.
Hunter thought that maybe he'd hit his head somewhere during the ejection, because suddenly the horde of REF soldiers on the ground started flying up to meet the UPF ships. Flying… with wings.
Then he looked up and saw UPF soldiers pouring out of the ships, which were right above him now.
They, too, had wings and were flying down from space to meet the ascending devils.
Then he put his eyes level again and knew what was happening. The great battle everyone was expecting was indeed going to take place. Not at Zero Point but here in the skies above Doomsday 212.
And he was going to be right in the middle of it.
The first wave of devils went zooming by him a moment later. An instant after that, Hunter was surrounded by men in white uniforms. These were UPF soldiers; there was no doubt about that. But just as Tomm and Calandrx and the others had been transformed by their crossover, so, too, had these men.
They were flying without the aid of propulsion units, and they were armed with little more than huge swords.
The two sides met head-on, and the battle was joined all around him. It was as if he wasn't really there. The fighting was instantly fierce, hand-to-hand, and brutal. He got to see some of the REF soldiers up close, and as angelic as the UPF soldiers had become, the REF soldiers had become just as ugly and disgusting. Several flew very close to him, their faces hideously distorted, their eyes red and filled with rage and hate. Their hands seemed deformed, too, as if it was impossible now for them to hold any kind of weapon save a huge sword.
All of these beings were moving incredibly fast — seeing him but avoiding him at the same time.
Meanwhile, he was twisting and turning in the chute, the cords were becoming tangled in the great whirlwind he'd found himself in. Great flashes of light were going off all around him, burning his already singed eyeballs. The flashes seemed both real and un-real, and it was only as he was passing out of the thick of the battle did he realize that each flash was created when one of the combatants was dispatched.
A
sword to the heart caused a silent, bright flare — and then there was nothing. No remains. No dust.
Nothing.
There would be no bodies left after this battle.
Hunter finally hit the ground — hard. His arrival scattered a group of refugees who'd been watching the battle above, too astounded to move. They took one look at him, though, and their mass paralysis was cured. All of them ran as fast as they could to get away from him.
He'd come down on top of a plateau of sorts, and it was windy up here. His chute dragged him for hundreds of feet, banging him up against many of the rocks strewn about the forbidding terrain. He finally released the straps, and the chute blew away. He fell backward, absolutely stunned, and watched in awe as the strange combat went on above him unabated. The white-suited soldiers continued to battle fiercely with the devils. He thought he could even see faces of people he recognized. Some of the combat was happening no more than 100 feet above him, or so it seemed.
He straggled to get to his feet. But then came another bright flash. It was so strong that it picked him up like a doll and blew him backward. He went flying over the edge of the plateau and fell for what seemed like a mile or two to the hard plain below. He hit with a great thud. Had he not been wearing his helmet, he would have surely cracked his skull open. As it was, he had a huge welt right in the middle of his forehead.
He rolled over and was flat out on his back again.
Dizzy.
Dazed.
Maybe even seeing things.
The ethereal fighting went on. Hunter saw it all — or at least he thought he did. At one point it seemed to be taking place just a few dozen feet above him. At other times, the combatants were battling each other in outer space. But for some reason, he could see that close up, too.
Then, for a little while, it seemed that he, too, was an angel and that he was in the middle of the great battle. That his friends Tomm, Calandrx, Erx, Berx, Klaaz, and Gordon were right beside him, and together they were battling furiously. Hunter and the others were fighting with huge swords, Tomm with his famous blackjack. And as they were slaying the REF soldiers, who really did look like devils now, Tomm and the others were telling him all kinds of things — infusing his brain with centuries' worth of knowledge. They finally told him how Zarex had died at the hands of the REF, and how by doing so, he'd really saved them all, but this Hunter did not understand, at least not yet. They told him how many people that day had simply done the right thing, and how that would help in the eventual victory. They even told him names of some of these people: SF officers, the anonymous arms dealers, even the guy Hunter had buried near the first evacuation site. Many heroes were made this day.