He began tumbling out of control almost immediately.
Head over heels, arms over legs. He tried to focus his attention on the closest troop bug; it was about two hundred feet above him, and indeed it was the only flying machine anywhere nearby.
He put his head down and his arms at his side, thinking this was the thing to do. It did cause him to pick up a great amount of speed very quickly. But then he had no idea how to stop. He wound up slamming hard into the nose of the troop shuttle and bouncing off. Tumbling down about a hundred feet, he regained his balance and went shooting upward again. Another hard collision with the transport’s nose.
Another ricochet. Another plunge downward. Dazed and battered, Hunter twisted himself over and finally managed to “swim” up to the bug and climb inside.
One step in and he realized he was no longer floating. The shuttlecraft had its own gravity. His knees and elbows severely banged up from his collisions with the craft, he painfully made his way up to the flight compartment and squeezed himself behind the bug’s control column.
The operations panel was a bewildering array of light switches and holographic buttons. Hunter had no idea what any of them did, so he just started pushing things. In seconds, the spacecraft began to shake and yaw.
He hastily studied the control panel’s main 3-D screen. It seemed to offer a variety of options on what kind of controls he desired to fly the troop carrier. One icon presented a panel with the outlines of two hands. The fly-by-finger method — Hunter was not into that. Another offered a head ring, a band put around the head. Flying by brainwaves, he supposed. Again, not his thing.
He finally located an icon that most looked like the controls on his old flying machine. Basically a short stick for his right hand and a throttle bar for his left. He tapped this icon and instantly these controls appeared.
He quickly righted the spacecraft and then turned it around. He took it slowly and carefully at first, trying his best to avoid hitting any of the flying soldiers still rushing through the clear membrane to the battle beyond. When he saw a break in this stream, Hunter pushed the throttle bar ahead and suddenly found himself rocketing through the invisible portal and into space himself.
Now this was a strange situation for him. To the best of his knowledge, he’d never flown in space before.
It didn’t seem to be a problem, though. He was able to maneuver the awkward troop carrier through the swarm of battling spacemen, avoiding the never-ending streams of ray gun blasts coming at him from every direction. It was funny, though; Hunter wasn’t even trying hard. He was turning this way and that, but it was almost as if the controls were moving themselves. Or was something deep inside him moving them? If so, they were working perfectly every time. Hunter felt like he was just along for the ride.
And he noticed something else: At first glance, it seemed as if the battle between the two starships was taking place as they were hanging motionless in space. The truth was, they were both flying in Supertime.
The telltale sign was a slight blurring effect that surrounded everything and everyone, Hunter included.
Very strange…
Hunter finally cleared the ferocious battle and turned hard to port. Now he had a clear view of the situation. The BonoVox on his left, the unknown attacker on his right. The space between them still ablaze with vicious combat.
Two words popped into his head now, and they didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere deeper than the top of his skull.
Now what?
Directly below the BonoVox’s vast bubble-top control room was another chamber.
Just as big, with twice the amount of machinery and apparatus, by tradition this place was known as the ship’s Oculus. Some believed the ancient name meant “the eyes.” If so, it was apt. From here the ship projected thousands of sensor rays into every dimension of space for one thousand light-years in all directions. This was where the ship was steered, where its speed was determined. The glassy control deck above was simply a window into this place. A small army of technicians lorded over innumerable monitoring stations here. Among other things, they could detect anything moving — man-made or not — for more than a billion miles away.
Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.
No one had seen this attacker coming, for one simple reason: There wasn’t supposed to be any enemy spacecraft in Supertime; only Empire spacecraft had the ability to cruise the Ethers. For all its magical machinery, whenever the BonoVox was in the seventh dimension, the Oculus was simply concerned with its navigation, and not scanning for enemy threats. That’s how the attacking spaceship was able to appear right alongside the Empire vessel and begin spitting out spacemen before anyone in the Oculus even knew what was going on.
Even worse, this was no ordinary warship off their starboard bow. This was a Blackship, a vessel used by Fringe pirates to pillage unsuspecting planets and attack commerce vessels in flight. By definition, its occupants were ruthless and fierce, and known to show their victims no mercy. How had such a ship gained entry into Supertime? No one in the Oculus had a clue, simply because nothing like this had ever happened before.
A kind of controlled chaos was sweeping the Oculus now. The BonoVox had fought in countless engagements in its long history. But the starship’s role in each of those battles was to provide purely offensive punch. The BonoVox attacked planets; it carried no defensive weapons of its own. So powerful was its vast arsenal that no weapon on board could be used against a target fewer than one hundred miles away. Using such a weapon would mean death to both the attacker and the target. The older class of Empire ships, those built more than three hundred years before, had carried self-protection systems. But as the techniques of using Supertime became more defined, and as the Empire strengthened its hold on the supertechnology, the need for such weaponry disappeared. The BonoVox carried no self-protection weapons because ship-to-ship duels were supposed to be a thing of the past.
But one was happening now — and it appeared the situation was growing more dire for the Empire vessel by the second. Reports flowing into the sensor center said that some enemy spacemen were close to reaching the hull of the BonoVox, intent on burning their way into the ship itself. The battle might soon be taking place inside the vessel. Fighting in the passageways? Battling enemy spacemen right on the control decks themselves? Absolutely no one on board the BonoVox was prepared for that.
But even among all this, something else very puzzling was happening out there. In addition to the sensors going crazy by continually detecting the marauding Blackship, the men in the Oculus saw that a third spacecraft had appeared on the scene. It was flying among the warring spacemen with considerable aplomb. It wasn’t another Blackship. It was far too small for that.
So what was it?
Instantly the sensor arrays identified this third object as one of the BonoVox’s own troop transports.
It was empty except for its pilot.
His identity was unknown.
What happened next was witnessed by most of the officers inside the Oculus, as well as those in the ship’s command center one deck up.
After hovering for a few moments on the edge of the mid-space battle, the small troop carrier began accelerating very quickly. In seconds it was flying much faster than its previously known top speed. It roared over the top of the BonoVox, climbed steeply, and then went into a mind-bending dive just above the bow of the Blackship. Just as quickly, a barrage of Z-beam blasts erupted from behind the enemy vessel’s control deck — unlike the BonoVox, the Blackship carried loads of self-protection weapons. But even though the Z-beam streams were many, the troop carrier began dodging them with astonishing agility.