But strangely, the two gigantic redeployments resulted not in an immediate engagement but in a standoff, what in the old days would have been called aphony war. There were two reasons why. Surely, both sides were battered and tired, in need of regrouping after nearly one hundred days of intense battle. But more disturbing, both sides were suffering from serious, if intermittent, power shortages. In fact, the entire Empire was suffering from a case of cosmic brownout.
This was a result of an event that had become known as the Great Flash. At just about the same time as the mysterious second battle near Doomsday 212 was being fought at a place in space called Zero Point, the entire Galaxy experienced a brief but frightening power outage. The blackout lasted just a few seconds, preceded by a burst of light that was seen Galaxy-wide. But because all power in the Empire was derived from the Big Generator, the outage affected everybody and everything in the Milky Way, from the smallest atomic lightbulb to the prop core aboard the Empire's largest warship.
There was no mystery as to what caused the Great Flash. O'Nay's wife, the Empress of the Galaxy, broke into the desert stronghold where the Big Generator was located and, using a concealed weapon, fired a neuron beam directly into the heart of the big black slab. A piece of the holy rock broke off, and the blackout came a nanosecond later. The damage might have been more extensive had the
Empress's ray gun not derived its power from its target; the gun shut down right away. Still, the Big Generator blinked, and everything went dark.
(What happened to the Empress after the attack was not so clear. Some reports said she was killed by a squad of Imperial eunuchs guarding the Big Generator. Others said the Empress took her own life, possibly by dagger, possibly by poison. She was dead however, though this was not widely known throughout the Empire. The eunuch guards who witnessed the incident were widely rumored to have been killed, too, via state-mandated euthanasia.)
The weirdness didn't end when the Galaxy's lights came back on. However slight, the damage to the mysterious power source was apparently the cause of some very strange things that had happened throughout the Empire since the Great Flash. Aftershocks of a sort, or so it was believed. Blinks is what people had begun calling them.
A Starcrasher belonging to the Expeditionary and Exploratory Forces, the third of the Empire's three major military arms, was flying in toward Earth after a long voyage up the very wild Five Arm. It was about to literally crash a star — that is, fly right through it, hence the big ships' name — when its prop core inexplicably popped, pushing the vessel back in time a little bit. This was a very dangerous moment, as going through the heart of a star at Super-time speed took precise calculations and expert steering. Momentum alone carried this particular ship through the star's nuclear fires, but there was extensive and baffling damage to the monstrous vessel upon coming out the other side. Besides blowing out nearly every string circuit on board, the ship's aft quarter had transformed itself into what appeared to be the gigantic tail section of an ancient
World War Two airplane known as a B-24. What's more, all of the massive weaponry inside the stricken Starcrasher had turned into salt — yes, salt. And for the remainder of the voyage home, the crew found themselves being trailed by strange green ghosts. More blinks: on the Three Arm, an artificial moon suddenly disappeared, only to reappear way over in the Six Arm. On the Nine Arm, a group of schoolchildren suddenly gained the ability to fly — by sprouting wings, at least for a few minutes. On the Four Arm, the entire water supply of a tiny planetoid turned itself into the ancient liquor known as bourboni—and then at the first sip, changed back to water again.
Before leaving Earth on this mission, the Imperial spy in the back of the KosmoVox had witnessed a blink himself. He'd been sitting inside a very tony cafe atop Special Number One, the Imperial Family's grand floating city, when suddenly all the lights went out. When they came back on seconds later, they were burning a fiery red, and everyone in the place had become transparent, turning into living, human skeletons. Several terrifying moments went by, then the lights went out again. They were glowing bright yellow when they came back on this time, and all the patrons had become hideous caricatures of themselves, complete with scarred faces, overgrown fingernails, and fanglike teeth. The lights went out a third time, only to come back on in deep orange. Shadows cast by this strange effect made it seem as if the caf6 and everyone in it were engulfed in flames. So many patrons panicked, the air was absolutely sizzling with people transporting themselves out of the place. Seconds later, the spy found himself sitting alone in what had been a very crowded room, his body whole and presentable again. The experience startled him greatly. It was crazy and very strange, but he was even more amazed at how the Big Generator, which controlled absolutely everything in the Galaxy, could create such bizarre events simply by being on the fritz. The words that came to his mind were prophetic: God is playing games with us.
These tales, along with millions of others, were running rampant throughout the Galaxy, which, everyone knew, was actually a surprisingly small neighborhood, prone to gossip and superstition. Some of these events must have had rational explanations, but many did not. Certainly not the incident the spy had witnessed in the posh cafe. No matter, everyone was blaming anything even remotely weird these days on the aftereffects of the Great Flash. And the blinks seemed to be growing in number by the hour.
No military commander in his right mind would go to war under such conditions, not when every subatomic connector, quick-quark portal, and intradimensional diode within his two-mile-long starship was powered by the suddenly quirky Big Generator. This was the main reason the two major space armies now faced each other along a front that stretched more than 500,000 miles.
It was the conventional belief that the blinks would settle down eventually, though, and everything would return to normal.
Then the terrible war could resume.
It took the KosmoVox twice as long as usual to leave the Solar System.
The enigmatic little ship encountered a storm of invisible turbulence just outside the orbit of Mars, a mysterious disturbance not picked up by its battery of flight sensors.
Passing by Jupiter, its compartment was suddenly filled with static, from the depths of which ancient rock 'n roll music could briefly be heard. On approaching Saturn, a strange mirage: so many Solar Guards supply ships were orbiting the great planet, they appeared to make up yet another ring. By contrast, the heavily populated Neptune and its coterie of colorful moons seemed all but abandoned.
More blinks, the spy thought, staring out his porthole in back. God is still fooling with us…
Very real, however, was the traffic jam of spaceships clogging up the approaches to a Solar Guards border checkpoint known as Saint Michael's Pass.
Thousands of vessels were backed up, trying to get through the enormous, midspace frontier crossing, each one subjected to a long, thorough and, more often than not, very stressful SG scanning. The Solar Guards had declared martial law within the Pluto Cloud weeks before, and this was one result of that decree. No one got in or out of the original Solar System without the SG inspecting every sub-atom in said person's body and ship.
Only by his special Imperial pass was the spy able to get the KosmoVox to the head of this line. And while the Imperial agent was supposed to be above such things, the gruff SG border troops insisted on probing his ship and its passengers not once but twice. Finding nothing, they were harshly sent on their way.