This incident had a very demoralizing effect on the remaining flight crew, most of them feeling poorly in the first place with the smell and the slime on the deck. Whenever the ship would break back into the real dimension, crew members could be seen praying that it would remain there.
But then they would start to freak out whenever it was knocked back into the absolute darkness again.
And the troubles didn't end there.
Even worse, the circle ship was leaving a wake behind it, an unintentional contrail in space. It was made up of unidentifiable substrata debris, things more bizarre than quarks and quacks. Whatever it was, the trail was wide, white, almost phosphorescent — and visible from thousands of miles away. This was not something you wanted while trying to complete a very top secret, unauthorized mission.
The trail of debris at its brightest appeared just as the saucer was approaching the edge of the Star Trench. The plan had been to simply fly over the confluence of Empire ships, as at the time the saucer was thought to be invisible, at least to the standard Empire scanners. Plus this route was the most direct to their eventual target of Doomsday 212 farther up the Two Arm.
But just as the long, dual line of Empire warships appeared on the McLyx's long-range viz screen, the damn saucer popped back into reality and soared nearly the entire length of the Star Trench, exposing itself for all to see. McLyx watched in horror as his defensive weapons suite lit up with thousands of indications of both SG and SF ships turning on their X beams in anticipation of taking a shot at what, from their point of view, actually was an unidentified flying object. He knew speed alone could not save them, as some X beams could travel faster than a Starcrasher in Su-pertime. It was only by dumb luck that just as they'd made this great display in front of billions of witnesses on both sides, the balky saucer popped back into the Lost Dimension, disappearing in an instant.
That's when McLyx just put his head in his hands and moaned, "I should have known this was a bad idea."
Things were just as troubling down at the bottom of the saucer, the area that served as its bomb bay.
Located almost dead center on the underside of the bizarre craft, it was a large, boxy space enveloped in a triple force field. This was necessary, considering what was being carried down there.
It was a flying bomb. Twenty-five feet long, black, teardrop-shaped, it had four winglike fins on its back. Its warhead contained more than five tons of XWMD, the mega-toxin developed by the same beings who designed the saucer. The weapon was actually a gigantic spray bomb designed to ride through the high atmosphere, dispensing its poisons. It was so hazardous, three level-10 force fields were needed to prevent it from leaking.
The plan? To soak the planet of Doomsday 212 with the XWMD, effectively killing everything and everyone on it. Collateral damage? There would much of it. For as the polluted planet orbited its sun, it would leave a trail of the mega-toxin in its wake, and that would serve to eventually spread the alien poison over a large part of the heavily populated mid-Two Arm. Thousands of light-years of space would be uninhabitable for millions of years. This was how the SSG chose to send a message to anyone who would try to oppose them in their nascent, if less-than-secret, bid to take over the Empire. With this bomb, the course of the Milky Way would be changed forever.
But again, things were getting strange down in the bomb bay, too. Two crewmen were designated as the bomb security team. Their job was to watch over the big weapon and make sure that the three-layered force field's integrity stayed at 100 percent at all times. Should even one of the fields break down, it could spell disaster for the crew and the mission.
The two crewmen were stationed on a balcony twenty-five feet above the bomb bay, which looked down on the weapon itself. An opaque ion-lead shield had been placed in a hover over the bomb, this to help insure the top layer of the force field. In order to look at the bomb, then, the men had to move this shield out of the way, which they were under orders to do every five minutes. From their perspective, once the shield was moved, it was like looking down into a pool of slightly agitated water. While a single force field tended to distort all the light waves around it, giving whatever was being held in place a sort of shimmering look, three force fields stacked together gave the impression that the object they locked in appeared to be under water.
Or at least that's how it was supposed to look. Trouble was, sometimes when the crewmen looked down at their charge, they saw something other than the big black spray bomb. And what they saw instead made little sense.
One time they moved the shield, they saw not what looked like a pool of clear water but rather a pool of bilge. Another time they saw water but with human remains floating in it. Most disturbing, though, was when they moved the shield and saw not the spray bomb but a black-and-white image of twenty smaller explosive bombs, stacked in two racks. Below them was another colorless image, this of an ancient bombed-out city. Cement buildings in flames. Blocks upon blocks of devastation. Huge bomb craters. Bodies.
On seeing these things, the two crewmen, both astounded and frightened, would immediately close the shield, convinced they were losing their minds simultaneously. They would sweat out another five minutes before daring to open the ion door again. When they did, and the waterlike image with the spray bomb below it had returned, they would both breathe a sigh of relief.
"Damn blinks," one of them said, after seeing the hor-rific black-and-white vision. "They're going to drive me crazy before this is over."
"Where the hell are we?" McLyx heard himself bellowing.
It was impossible to tell. The windows in the circular flight deck seemed to be changing perspectives with each passing second. Popping back and forth between dimensions was the cause of the flickering look. This only added to the severe motion sickness that had now affected just about everyone on the bridge.
But the constant interdimensional shifting also made navigation nearly impossible. After the fiasco over the Star Trench, the saucer had apparently lost its way entirely. Worse, it was refusing to stay in the real dimension long enough for the navigators to get any true bearings. More than once, McLyx felt as if they were simply tumbling out of control.
The saucer finally shifted back the real world and held itself there. The navigation team went to work quickly, trying to get them a good spot before they were popped back into the black void of the Lost Dimension. It took more than a minute, but finally, the navigators got a fix on their position. They were about 500 light-years beyond the Star Trench and 350 beyond what was considered the SF's rear areas. This meant they were only about 200 light-years away from their target, Doomsday 212.
This report brought McLyx his first relief from gloom since they'd left Warehouse 066. He was even starting to fit into the commander's seat.
But then the string-comm panels came alive. Suddenly a stream of messages were flowing into the saucer. Messages that only McLyx, as commander of the mission, could reply to. But this made no sense. Not even the top men in the SSG knew this mission was happening. Its dump-off time had been kept a secret, even from them. And certainly no one in the Solar Guards High Command knew they were out here.