CHAPTER IV
No matter how gruelingly Buzz attempted to evade the crackling surge of energy, 42 belted full-on into it with a dreadful impact. The ship was sent hurtling down the hyperspeed passage into the opposite direction, where it bounced off from another swell, huge dents now decorating the blackened hull. At this point, the star cruiser's hyperdrive also gave in, while the whole tunnel around seemed to collapse in on itself.
This was a shame in a manner, as the minor but important warp drawing a slight detour past the perilous asteroid field of Theta Iota K7 had subsisted for hundreds of years without relapses. Almost nothing in this world, however, lasted forever.
Inside 42, the team shrieked with terror, as the ship spun like a hyperactive top in the fluctuations of the floundering, hissyfitting energy fields. Only a single thought filled Buzz's mind: The image of his dear crew plunging straight into that ghastly soup of exploding debris and needle-sharp rocks, ready to turn the toughest Rangers and their star cruisers into a floating mass of bloodstained scraps. This time, they most certainly were doomed. He had experienced the crumpling of a couple of 'stable' passages before—always a risky business—but never, ever like this.
Oh, if he only could reach the controls and do something...anything... However, the centrifugal force crushed him so heavily against the pilot seat's backrest that even breathing had become arduous, not to mention extending a whole arm towards the console. Nearby, someone moaned with abrupt nausea. Eyes watering, gritting his teeth, he tried to fight against the appalling weight squeezing him, imprisoning him into the blasted piece of space furniture, but it was of no avail.
Death would claim them briefly, no doubt about that.
Oh...he had always imagined that his passing—should the unfortunate event occur before a calm retirement in ripe, old age—would be girded by a golden aura of heroism. Falling down from a high cliff into a bottomless abyss, fatally wounded, his jetpack crushed, clutching at the robes of the vile emperor and dragging him along into the Inevitable...yes, thus it should have come to pass. Sometime later, a solemn brass band would parade through the streets of Capital Planet, the banners of Star Command billowing and snapping in the high wind, and his impressive eulogy along with the gospel of Emperor Zurg's utter defeat would be broadcast throughout the Galactic Alliance. Then, the crowds would cheer with tears of joy and sorrow glimmering in the corners of their eyes...
Buzz perked awake from the fantasy of a few heartbeats into an absolute silence. The vessel's insane bouncing and gyrating had ceased, and the rest of the team drooped in their seats, blinking and stirring weakly after the rumpus. Time around them, such as it were, appeared to slow down. Every movement became sluggish, as if in a slow-motion film. Sound still refused to enter the world. The captain attempted to speak, but globs of mere nothingness stumbled out of his mouth, his tongue feeling swollen and ears chockablock with emptiness.
His mind blazed with confusion and panic, yet he could clothe hardly any of it into the flesh of words and physical actions. Was he hallucinating? But his crew...surely they must have been sharing the bridge still with him...? Or were they simply all wide awake and zooming into the oblivion together?
Well, they told that just before crossing the border of life and eternity, one beheld a long tunnel with light blossoming at the end of it.
Light, bright light certainly now shone through the ship's windscreen, a deep azure shimmer stretching all over the horizon. Soon, an ocean of wavering blueness close over them like an infinite deluge, leaving them floating within a strange, bright void where the concept of time and distances seemingly became nullified. The nearest vibration of color outside the now inert 42 might have wallowed a hundred miles away, and the farthest a mere inch apart from the hull, or so it felt like. Order could establish its miserly monarchy solely within the realms of the cockpit, and even that was half submerged in the chaos of broken equipment and loose bits of paneling scattered across the floor.
Buzz flinched with surprise, as someone coughed. He had been so mystified by the events of the last minute—Or, had perhaps a whole hour or even a day floated by?—that his brain had never registered the return of sound, and...by the looks of it, normal movement. Grimacing at the unexpected stiffness in his neck, he turned to Mira. She was fast unbuckling her seatbelt with one hand and with the other pointing at...
To the right, something slithered in the vast azureness. Not one of those gentle gradients of blue, but something far more solid, something...
Slowly, everyone gathered around one of the side windows to gaze at the peculiar view. Despite the commonly chatterbox-y nature of Team Lightyear, nobody uttered so much as a squeak. Save for XR's caterpillars, which somehow had gotten partially stuck and now sounded like multiple mice being trodden on simultaneously.
"XR! Don't ruin it!" someone whispered, half browned off.
"Hrmpf. Easy for you to order us techno-men around, flesh-legs. By the way, your knees sometimes make funny clicking noises, and still I never complain!"
"Shush, you two!"
Buzz found it extremely difficult to grasp the exact nature of the phenomenon, as he stagnated there, one hand resting on the windowpane. A boundless, gently sliding wall or perhaps a curtain of some sort filled the horizon, growing in and out of focus at random intervals. The smooth diamond pattern decorating its curving surface set it apart from the surroundings, yet...in an inexplicable way, its basic essence was one with the world outside, one with the nothingness...
An eternal, gentle blueness, where the serenity of utter nonexistence prevailed. No Zurg, no bloody battles with evil that always resurrected in a form or another, no matter how many times one smote it down, no troubles of the ordinary life ever again...
The immeasurable vastness seemed to suck all thought out of his mind. After a drawn-out patch, only a muzzy cloudlet of vague understanding had been left behind.
This thought, now resembling more a feeling or an instinct than a strain of active reasoning, hunkered somewhere near the bottomless well of the subconscious.
Was he supposed to do something...something...anything...what? Was he supposed to...why was he supposing anything?
What did anything matter, when he had finally reached this dreamy heartsease, this...
Yet, beneath everything, far beneath the fluffy layers of blue-white nirvana, something uncomfortable budged. Something so ancient it bore no feasible name in his perception, something that possessed a distinct intelligence of its own.
Perhaps this odd interception pushed him back towards the gates of reality, close enough to finally comprehend that a pair of fingers was making clicking noises inches away from his nose.
"Buzz! Snap out of it! Buzz!"
He shook his head and blinked hard a couple of times.
"I can't believe this! You were ogling at the view so intently I thought you'd petrified! You and Booster," Mira suspired vexedly, "It had a nastily soporific effect on me too, but...uh...I seem to have caught a headache and...eh...guess I just easily lost concentration."
Lightyear cast a side-look over her shoulder at the looming bulk of Booster. The Jo-Adian still swayed on the spot, nearly cross-eyed with daze, as if awakening from a long, deep sleep spent in the extravagant land of moonbeam-maned, flying unicorns and silver-armored knights so fair and beautiful one might have mistaken them for the princesses they were supposed to rescue.
Buzz let out a hissy groan through his teeth. "Craters. What...what in blazes is going on? While I admit to having seen things that indeed go bump in the eternal night of space, this-"
"...is heavily on the exotic side," XR continued. "Exxotic. I'd add a third x, if it didn't bring up certain...associations. Which I personally don't mind all that much, but you might. Anyway, remember what I mentioned earlier about the involvement of unusual dimensions? Now might be a good moment to count all our hitherto undiscovered parallel universes and glitches in the space-time continuum."
Mira cocked a miffed brow down at her comrade. "Very funny, XR. Come on, this is serious! First those...wobbles, then our ship gets wrecked, next the tunnel collapses, and now this...this...creepy hypnotizing wossname! Not to mention this bloody stupid headache. Wonder where I put my painkillers." Chewing on her lower lip, she scrabbled with one of the pockets of her utility belt. Out came, however, only a lumpy globule of stickiness that might once have been a fistful of candies, and a slightly used hanky. "Anyway, our bodies can't sustain themselves on pretty colors and sparklies. A way out of here must be found, wherever here exactly stands. We're already running low on rations and...well, let the list of mishaps write itself! And, yes, Buzz," she sighed as the captain was about to retort something, "I know you'll say this whole affair reeks of Zurg—although personally I think he, up close, smells a rather pleasant orchid-y type of perfume; probably uses scented detergent on his robes or something—but honestly-"
"Negative, ranger. I was trying to attract your attention in order for you to pay attention to...uh...never mind." Sometimes the ways even cavemen recognized turned out more efficient than fancy verbal expressions. He grasped Mira's shoulder, swung her about to face the void outside, and pointed.
Faint dots of light bloomed now through the flickering blueness, which had darkened into a smoky indigo while she had fronted the opposite direction. Even as she stared, open-mouthed, at the gently fading lozenges, the light of numerous other stars burst into the void, eventually spattering it with constellations run through by the shimmering belt of the Milky Way. Almost in front, the dipper asterism of Ursa Major motionlessly offered a scoopful of cold, black emptiness to distant, nebulous galaxies.
Silence.
A tiny meteoroid zoomed forth from the gloom and bounced off the windscreen with a small pok. The cockpit swam in the tremulous glow of XR's internal lights and the phosphorescence of the Ranger uniforms; the ship itself lay dark and comatose, save for two sluggishly blinking lights on the rear end of the console.
Again, the team stood transfixed for a good while, not daring stir, lest the universe might transform into a host of demented toucans and flap away. However, when the heavenly bodies merely pursued their age-old aim of appearing like fireflies glued to the insides of a gigantic umbrella—and thus over and over again fooling creatures of modest intelligence, newly emerged from the confines of protoplasm, into thinking about practically anything else than spheres of gas burning millions of light years away—the crewmembers tardily relaxed.
Feeling distinctly weak in the knees, Mira sat down. Some meters off, Buzz stared sharply at the outlines of far-off star clusters, and held out a hand just before the cockpit exploded into a hurricane of question marks and hesitant theories about what actually happened.
"I don't think...well. I don't think anyone can find the right answers just now, nor should we waste precious time on seeking them," he muttered, still frowning at the overhanging figure of Ursa Major. "It's more like what Mira said earlier: first we must discover our location and then wonder why we haven't turned into freely floating scraps of minced meat. That's the Ranger spirit; never lose your common sense in a tricky situation!"
Next to him, Mira coughed, her cheeks suddenly purpling. With a rather small voice she confessed, "Honestly...I...well. I...uh...believed we were going to...um...die. I wanted to distract myself with something and...um..."
"No need to explain yourself, Mira. I deem we all entertained such grim prospects for a while or two," the captain grunted. "Now onto more urgent matters. XR, can you access the coordinate signaling system? My wristcom stays completely blank, but you might have better luck with your devices of superior precision. Even a weak link ought to grant a succinct estimate of our position. In the meanwhile, let's take a look at poor ol' 42. Booster, Mira, check the hull for air leaks and anything else that might jeopardize our safety. Test your comlinks. Anything that could remedy this diabolic dilemma."
While the robot extracted a swarm of instruments out of his mid-locker and other lesser-known recesses, Buzz strode over to the pathetically pulsating lights, the ship's mere, frail signs of life.
"Hmh. Curious. The gravitation simulator purrs happily away, but the remaining vital functions...one couldn't find such a hush even in the dominion of the Alliance's sternest librarian." He bit his lip and tapped at the lower blue bioLED with the tip of one sausage-thick finger. "Well, the joys of staying upright certainly do surpass those of zero gravity, but this nastily manifests about some confounded calamity grievously plaguing the fusion cells..."
"Let's hope we're still grievously plagued by confounded calamities in the right alternate universe," XR commented from somewhere beneath the forest of antennae and madly whirling transceivers. "Or should I call it the original universe? On the other hand, to, say, Evil Buzz and his charming chums our homeverse would represent one of the alternate specimens, and some third or fourth or ynth might then again bask in the glory of its firstborn status. Anyway, we probably picked the one whose amoebas decided that the whole process of self-developing complex organs from scratch during the next couple of million years would sound too megalomaniac, and devolved back into free-floating atoms just for the sake of it! Seriously, I can't catch a single damn sign of intelligent life anywhere!"
"Always the most optimistic and persistent character, eh?" Mira snorted while inspecting her space suit for any damage. "Keep trying. Not even half a minute has passed, and you're already giving up?"
"How can you tell this universe shares our conception of time? A week might be stuffed into the span of our regular second, or we could be speeding backwards in time towards the efflorescence of dinosaurs! On the other hand, maybe we've ended up inside a loop-verse, where the happenings of a single day repeat themselves endlessly, humdrum, humdrum, everything spinning around the same axis of dreary dullness forevermore, the déjà-vu of a ten thousand déjà-vus-"
"XR! Stop that! We-" Mira's sentence however died on her lips. With a groan, she clamped both her hands on her forehead, and crumpled onto her knees.
"Mira!" those remaining upright exclaimed.
Both Buzz and XR dashed over to help their companion. When they gently pulled her into a sitting position, she lurched forwards again. This time, she threw fiercely up.
"Blast! Something's seriously wrong with her! Get the first-aid kit here, now! Mira, can you hear me?"
"Urrgghh...I...yuckgrrghplof..."
The captain carefully laid her down on one side, so that she would not inhale any liquids, should the nausea strike again. Her eyes were half-open, but the tight lines of her mouth and brows hinted about an internal pain she attempted to withhold.
"I...I think...I hit my head...worse than I...th-thought..." she mumbled while Buzz examined her pulse. "Y'know... When th...the ship kept shh...somersaulting."
"Worse than you thought?" Buzz sighed with mild exasperation. "Mira, Mira; albeit getting tossed around a lot, we aren't crash test dummies, only flesh and blood. Well, three of us, the very least. Nonetheless, you ought to have told you weren't feeling well! Craters, I did wonder about that unsettling paleness for a tad, and here you were ready to scuttle out into...well."
"Uh...it...didn't feel this b-bad...a second back. Just...some...dizziness and...uh. T-thought I could handle it..."
"The only thing you're going to handle now is sleep. We must re-sketch our plans and include a new shade of urgency. And you, you're to keep your...uh...paintbrushes locked firmly in the...drawer, in a manner of speaking. Understood? Keenness to confront the heat of action won't help you recover, y'know."
"Funny...you should say that," she smiled weakly. The captain averted answering, but in spite of the growing mist in her eyes, she was certain she breezily arrested an awkward grin spreading on his face.
Some minutes later, the Tangean princess reposed on the flat-laid copilot seat under a blanket, an injection needle taped to one arm and an infusion bottle lolling from a hook above. The medscanner had found no fractures, but the newly irrupted double vision rumored about a concussion. Either way, she was in no condition to pirouette from asteroid to asteroid in pursuit of space spooks, had Team Lightyear's existence suddenly turned into a mickeymousy adventure musical full of miraculous supernova fireworks, break-dancing star cruisers, and heroic solos about Incredible New Worlds and Finding My Destiny Beyond Infinity.
After some more tick-tack-tocks of the clock, Booster and Buzz egressed the cockpit, on a quest to discover whether the magic touch of a screwdriver might re-awaken the nigh-on kaput ship.
Hours passed. The star cruiser swam onwards ever so slowly in the great, gloomy ocean of the cosmos, perhaps trapped into the weak gravitational pull of some distant, unknown body. Pallid, greenish light poured into the inky void from the cockpit, yet the engines of Team Lightyear's trusty companion huddled cold and stagnant. Inside, XR crouched grumpily in one corner, holding aloft a couple of lusterlessly revolving antennae. This was mostly for show, as hitherto he had only managed to catch vatfuls of cosmic noise and the heartbeats of a couple of pulsars. Everyone's wristcoms appeared equally spiritless.
Mira slept on fidgetily. The sour stench of vomit wafted occasionally through the bridge; her condition had only worsened lately, her stomach permitting in only occasional sips of water.
At some point, the door to the cockpit slid quietly open. Buzz stepped through, peeling off a pair of insulated gloves from his hands, soon thereafter followed by Booster with a toolbox in the crook of one arm.
"Well..." the tired captain puffed, plonking down into his seat. "I fear we won't be blasting off to infinity and beyond in a while. The fusion matrix has busted, turbines four and five have molten down into shapeless clods, not to mention scores of other hardships like the battered hull... No life-threatening air leakages, though; the minor tears we at least were able to repair."
"The escape pod works," Booster added, "But...like we already talked back there, that won't bring us very far, unless we...uh...put ourselves into emergency hypersleep or something."
"Let's exclude that 'option' for now, and consider how we can depart this doggoned ditch of utter desolation too miserable for even worshippers of all things dark and doom-riddled like Zurg to use as nothing but a spare refuse dump! Craters."
Outside, the cold, soulless eyes of the stars stared down at the four stranded Rangers. A heavy silence fell into the sick-smelling room for a moment that felt all too stretched and funereal. The emergency lantern set on the floor flickered ominously, as if about to give up the ghost.
"Cheerful and cozy, isn't it? Like the birthday party of Mr. Undead Teddybear Lumpykins and his carnivorous zombie bunnies in that new Tam Brute-On film, only with less flying intestines and nails-on-blackboard music," XR harrumphed.
"One more of those highly inconsiderate interpellations and I shall strip you off your rank!" Buzz snarled, suddenly on his feet, his huge hands balled into trembling fists. "Look at us! We have a Ranger down, neither means nor materials to fix this deuced wreck of a ship, the food storages will soon be as empty as the skulls of Zurg's hornets—thanks to the bottomless appetite of certain unnamed crewmembers—and..."
Just as fast, his abrupt tirade abated down to a pathetic dribble of half-whispered apologies, as he spotted the owlish gazes of both XR and Booster. Despite still unable to focus properly, Mira listlessly opened her eyes, quite as baffled by this peculiar outburst as the others.
The captain massaged his temples and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Uh...I don't...I don't know what got into me...or perhaps I do. I haven't felt...well, felt the presence of death so close for years. Truly, Mira wasn't the only one hearing the approaching, chilly knelling of funeral bells out there. That blue void... Just the mere reminder of it somehow grates my nerves. I can't explain it. I keep thinking there's something I should recall or do, but...something's muddling my mentation big time. Uh...I can't even find the right words to express myself, can I? And now this on top of everything, with Zurg out there plotting his...ah...well, the usual."
Glumly, he plopped back down, and regarded his open palms and the thin lines furrowing the skin for a twinkling. It truly seemed that something had torn asunder his usual haughty tenacity, as even ranting about Zurg's everlasting nefariousness brought no satisfaction.
A small sigh lammed from his lips, and he turned to Mira.
"How are you feeling? Can you perhaps manage a chocolate bar yet?"
"Uh...no. No, definitely not yet. Maybe soon, but not...soon-soon. Ufffgh-"
She slunk back against the pillow from the previous half-sitting position, one sweaty and sapless hand pressed over her forehead.
"Uh...it's nothing more than the usual," she whispered after Buzz and Booster's alarmed yelps. "Honestly. I just sh-should keep my eyes shut. There's...uh...some ongoing feud between my guts and this new, dashing double-vision, and I wouldn't want to soil our furnishings any further. Y'know, my nose is working fine and all."
Booster gave a nervous chuckle, but soon adopted the erstwhile air of seriousness. "Uh...XR? Any luck with those coordinates? I mean...shouldn't there have been something by now? Unless we got dropped into that alternative university...um...thingummy."
"Nope," the robot answered. "I'm starting to wonder if we're sitting bottled in-between a handful of some dark, mysterious objects that block most incoming radio frequencies. Wouldn't be the first time, and ol' 42 has unquestionably taken a fancy on some body's gravity. With our luck, it'll be a black hole."
Buzz thumbed the cleft on his chin, and absently gazed at the exit leading further into the intestines of the vessel.
"We...may have to resort to the escape pod, if we want to find our way anywhere. It's just that oxygen will soon become a rare commodity in that cramped little jar, and I'm not risking such a gamble before Mira has recovered a bit. I...uaah..."
The sentence widened out into one massive yawn, which Buzz in vain attempted to stifle. On the other hand, Booster had been oscitating so hugely ever since the return that a small bear might have crawled into his mouth to hibernate comfortably.
Outside, the blackness pressed into the lonely star cruiser. Space never obeyed the rules of those home-sweet-home planets uncountable light years away, never painted the skies with the blazing oranges of gloaming, never nudged at the casual traveler towards the solace of a soft bed after a long, laborious day. Noon and midnight, morning and evening—meaningless balderdash in this never-ending murkiness.
"Maybe the Big Guy has the right idea," XR inclined his head towards the intermittently gaping cavern of a Jo-Adian gorge. "You did spend half an eternity in 42's belly, after all. Besides, Mira might really appreciate some peace and quiet. Note my empathetic concern for my fellow crewmembers and the entire lack of sarcasm in this suggestion."
The corners of Buzz's mouth twitched downwards, but he left the remark astride the tip of his tongue crawl back into the mental box of ill-tempered interjections. With that, Team Lightyear ultimately decided to tuck themselves in. After a couple of minutes of plumping gel cushions and shuffling with blankets, Buzz dimmed down the lantern, and curled up into his seat.
Even later, perhaps after an hour or so of bootless listening of radio frequencies, XR's head nodded, and his eye sensors eclipsed in this deadening desolation seemingly devoid of life.
Mira's delirious mind wandered through the halls of pandemonium itself. Occasionally she found herself surrounded by short snatches of familiar nightmares that had followed her since childhood. Glimpses of her bygone mother sprawling immovable on a tousled bed, dark blood drip-drip-dripping on the floor with treacly slowness... Her teenage self staggering through heavy jungle growth, exhausted and panting, something unnamed on pursuit and ready to jump upon her from the shadow-mottled depths of green on the moment her strength gave in... A baby doll she had loathed as a four-year-old—complete with glassy, creepily staring eyes and lips all too crimson to fit its sallow complexion and puffy infant's cheeks—suddenly turning its head towards her with a haunting creak and blinking those unfocused, bulging orbs... Sporadically she found herself back in the blue nothingness, drifting through distances untold, the undulating pattern of lozenges always winding through the horizon, somehow virtually touchable and infinitely remote at the same time...
Now, the void had once again drawn her into its dismal cuddle. It, however, seemed that this journey had lasted much longer than before...and with this, coldness so piercing it felt like being skinned alive had followed, suddenly flooding over her in the manner of a raging tide. Saturated by this dreadful, stinging pain, she attempted to scream, tried to exorcise the raw agony through her throat, but no sound came out.
And...she could not breathe. She could not breathe, no matter how much she endeavored gasping and wheezing. The primeval frost had iced over her lungs and mouth; white hoar was creeping up her cheeks and crawling into her nose, reaching her eyes while the pain intensified into an almost solid being strangling her-
Mira flung herself up. Her insanely pounding heart seemed ready to explode through the ribcage, while hefty beads of sweat rolled down her face, tasting salty on her lips. It took a while to ease the ragged inhales and reassure the twanging lump it truly did not need to flee the trusty hostess of over a quarter of a century. When her mind had finally cleared a teensy bit, she sought for the familiar contours of the ship's console in the semi-gloom, the texture of the seat's padding...
...and found none. Dumbfounded, the princess stared down at the worn, almost black planks underneath her, beyond which curved...
She inhaled sharply, and almost jumped in fright at the resonance of her own voice. Obviously everything sounded unnaturally loud after the life-sucking void.
So...she was not in 42. This...she...she had to be still dreaming, hadn't she? The very least, she possessed no memory of ever stepping into this massive vault of burgundy-hued, slightly glowing stone. The proportions sang of a design intended for beings vastly past her rather slight figure: pillars as thick as old oaks tickled at the roots of bridge-like arches high above, and a chair the size of a weighty boulder sat against one wall constructed of blocks broad enough to encompass the floor of a regular Tangean room.
Was...was this really a dream? Frowning, she let her gaze sweep across the peculiar space. Where was everyone else? Certainly nobody or nothing had removed her Ranger's uniform, and...
She touched gingerly the back of her head. Yes, a throbbing lump gibbous'ed there, and the telltale headache jumped up and down in her attic, although not as ferociously as before. Her mind also felt oddly pellucid compared to the previous sensation of carrying a feather pillow inside her skull instead of brains. Neither did the world lurch back and forth, besides remaining clearly drawn without blurry edges or doubled lines.
Encouraged by the rejuvenation—even if still utterly befuddled by the abrupt emergence into this realm of gigantic dimensions—she started tottering across the vault. A figment of not, well...she could not just stick fast to this spot like some lump of old chewing gum. She had to find her teammates, or at least...urgh, yet another exit. The past few hours, or whatever time units they had been, had embraced nothing but peculiar spaces without plausible getaways and then suddenly finding yourself in some wholly different existence.
A dream inside another dream, perhaps? Or maybe even a meta-meta-dream, the utmost reality reigning somewhere within that collapsing hyperspace tunnel? She might well have lost consciousness sometime soon after crashing into the windscreen, and the hapless star cruiser would still tumble down the warp, her bruised body rolling to and fro somewhere inside...
Yet again...something in this weird, castle-ish construction felt so utterly realistic. The way her steps echoed, the intricate carvings upon the stone—The likes of which she had never faced before: many-threaded knots weaving around snarling, many-toothed beasts and humanoid figures holding some kinds of...sticks? Spears? Swords?—the mellow, red light spilling from...
She halted, and stood stock still for a brief while, ears pricked and senses as alert as possible. This place was inhabited: she could distinguish faint noises issuing from the direction of the light: creaks, clinks of metal, and...more than one person speaking.
Well. A Space Ranger never sprang headlong into the arms of a host unknown, especially if crewless and equipped with a dull headache. She slid nigher to the wall on the tips of her toes, ready to ghost—only to discover that neither the stone nor the wood beneath yielded to her touch.
Well, well. Ghostproof, huh? That was surprising, as even Zurg's palace lacked this safety measure. Optionally some Grounders might lurk nearby, but...how likely would that be? They certainly never swelled to sizes fulfilling the purpose of this architecture, no matter how bigheaded in the literal meaning of the expression.
So, she might as well resort to the jolly ol' sidling tactics. Buzz had become the legend of his era without so-called superpowers, so she probably shouldn't always rely too much on the gifts of Tangean genetics.
The vault terminated into an arched doorway and a curving corridor beyond, from the other end of which the brighter light and sounds spilled forth. The dancing shadows hinted at the presence of an open fire. As quietly as possible, Mira slipped into the tunnel and stole along the right-hand side towards the brightness. Mountainous, hairy pelts hung on the walls on either side, in-between round, brightly painted disks she recognized as archaic hand-combat shields. Highly intrigued, she might have lingered there and studied the carefully crafted patterns further, but the desire to behold living beings after all those immeasurable stretches of emptiness allured her more.
Step after step, the noises gathered shape, but never true meaning. Two-three throaty, rumbling voices spoke an unfamiliar language, a ponderous gibberish laden with wide vowels and words so long and varied she scarcely could separate a full sentence from another. It took some time to negotiate the corridor on tiptoe, yet ultimately she reached the threshold of the hall beyond. There, by the doorframe, she had to stifle a gasp by clapping one hand firmly over her mouth.
Indeed, the tides of late had conveyed many sights inducing wonderment and fear, but this stood out as a unique specimen among the rest. Two monumental creatures...no, humanoids, Mira corrected herself, sat at the end of a long table, while an open firepit set in the floor nearby blazed snugly. She, however, could not be certain whether all the light actually emerged from the hole—the wildly red hair and beard of the outsized man closest to the entrance snaked and rippled like untamed flames. Funnily enough, his pale complexion and proportions almost matched those of Buzz, safe for longer, thicker legs, and the crucial aspect of being about fifteen feet tall. The second of his kin, white-haired and more ravaged in his humanlike face, sported a slimmer frame and an expression ready to curdle a cubic mile of fresh milk. In one hand, he held a horn brimful of foaming brew, while the other jabbed animatedly at something laid open on the table. Due to the awkward angle, Mira never caught the sight of it, but became almost mesmerized by the continuous up-and-down motion of his bristling brows set upon sockets utterly lacking eyeballs and instead aglow with a fierce, bluish flame.
Mira, a midget cowering in the shadow of the doorframe, gave an involuntary squeak when the old-timer slammed a fist the size of a gravestone against the table with a floor-shaking thwump. The visage of the redhead abruptly swung towards her, and her gaze locked with his deep crimson flare of a scowl.
Stiff as a frozen turnip, she dared not even blink, lest the unearthly being might attack with a means quite as eldritch as himself—like perhaps plunging a hand into those tempestuous curls and hurling a fiery hairball at her. Nonetheless, the man only measured her loftily up and down for a moment, after which pinpoints of bright orange flared up in the depths of his equally eyeball-less sockets.
Then...a rollercoaster ride of fleeting images pursued, imprisoning the Tangean into its stomach-churning pitches and plunges. These, however, were far more minatory than the early, disjointed fragments of familiar nightmares. One could deal with something that had tagged along with one's nightly wanderings for decades. One could not easily welcome a torrent of visions belonging to the more or less twisted mental canyons of a cult-status horror novelist.
Yet on it went...
She plummeted down a steep chasm with appalling speed, down towards a blue-lit cavern where something lay shackled on a great stone slab. A flashing glimpse of a countenance dreadfully burned, bits of bone peeking out from between slivers of blackened skin and muscle. The earth around shook and grumbled, and a raw, inhuman screech issued from the creature's gaping maw...which soon mingled with the almost ethereal sound of a masterly plucked, harp-like instrument cradled in the lap of an elderly, yet powerful man. The princess had no chance to register his bearings with greater detail, only that he sat atop a high pile of stones and resembled the two outsized characters by the hearth.
Again, the view flickered, dissolving into gray mist, out of which arose a slavering, growling mountain of briary hair. Sierras of teeth that would have satisfied the kinks of even the most extreme adventure-mountaineers filled its maw, and the reek of its rank breath, stinking of ancient rot and corruption, made her gag.
And then...the royal palace of Tangea weltering in a sea of snow, the storm-mantled sky spitting down fist-sized lumps of ice, raging winds tearing at the tops of the few dead trees still climbing above the surface... Capital Planet in an equal state of wintry turmoil, frozen bodies littering the Plaza of Alliance...
The universe reeled again, jostling the now almost dizzy Mira into a leaden, drizzly seascape. An army of colossal longships with towering prows hovered just above the frothing waves, while the vessel at the very front rose lurching into the air, its weirdly scaly broadside gleaming in the waxen light of storm lamps... A quirkily draped figure galloped across a glassy plane, pursued by...no, she could not make sense of the host as the vista imploded again, shoving a burning creature wielding a whip of fire onto the stage, now a foully grinning human man with long, black hair and a beard to match; those aged, keen features hauntingly familiar... The frost-bound Capital Planet again, its sun diminishing and turning bloody maroon...her father prostrating in a drift, inert and staring upwards with glassy, unseeing eyes...
No. No, no, no! NO, NO! She could not...she could not endure this any longer. The swerving ride awash with doom and fetidness had become simply too much. The taste of bile filled her mouth, the suddenly returned coldness was poisoning her blood; something hissed and scraped behind the ill-omened visions... With a huge effort, she tore her mind out of the chaos, forced it to barricade the images behind great gates of mental iron, compelled herself to recall that she truly lay injured somewhere, and was only dreaming.
Utter blackness enclosed her then, the screeches of beasts and wails of freezing aliens fading away. The scratching sound yet persisted, but that she could tolerate. The icy temperatures vanished into the newly emerged cozy, semi-dark warmth, and she felt something reassuring beneath her cheek.
The soft synthfiber fabric of the copilot seat cushion.
Mira almost wept with relief, when the somnolent cockpit of 42 swam into view. Every shape stood out slightly blurred or twofold, but she could not care less. She was still alive, alive! A giant castle had not swallowed her teammates, the universe had not turned into a raging winter non-wonderland, and...even the scraping had ceased.
Buzz and Booster snored soundly in their seats, and XR...well. Craters.
One would have thought robots stayed perky 25/8, but that little weirdo and his crooked circuits had certainly mastered every downside of organic sentience, hadn't he? An incurably sexist attitude. Bottomless resources for sardonic wisecracking. Sleeping on duty.
Nevertheless, flaws made one humane...in a manner of speaking. Perhaps the crooks and loops in the grand design also powered the bits concerned over compassion and...such whatsits.
The Ranger propped herself up on her elbows. Her monotonously pounding headache apparently still mingled with her reasoning, tarrying it and setting booby traps on the way, so that the thread of thought frequently got dropped down somewhere into the deep-red chasms of the spinal cord, and took its time to negotiate out.
This was probably the reason why she had not instantly perceived that something out-of-place still irritated her ears, something not exactly belonging to the soundscape of a stagnant ship.
What was that... A faint scritch-scratch sound?
Where was it coming from? It...
Only then did Mira raise her blurry gaze from the shadow-whelmed floor, and gawked, suddenly stumped, at the galley door. Slowly, meticulously, it was being pushed open.
Those dark, long fingers flexing and stealthily creeping in certainly did not belong to anyone—or anything—she could recognize.
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