What good was he without it? The Flying Machine was as weirdly wonderful as he used to be. Designed from a dream and faster than anyone could comprehend, at cruising speed it could go two light years a second. It had taken him to places that existed only in the wildest of imaginations. It had vanquished many a foe, saved many a friend. If losing Xara and his compadres had torn out his heart, then losing his aircraft had ripped out his soul.
So he was out here, searching for that one last thing that might restore just a bit of what he once had. True, he'd seen it go down, seen it fall into the clouds of war as surely as he'd fallen into those of despair. But he never saw it crash, never heard the impact. So where was it now? Still burning at the bottom of a crater someplace? Scattered in microscopic fragments over a stretch of this phantasmic horizon?
He had to find out. For even if he was able to recover just a tiny piece of it, something to always carry in his pocket along with his battered American flag and the faded, well-worn picture of Dominique, the stunning beauty in his other life, then maybe the rest of his days could be saved from complete madness.
But searching for it was like searching for a loved one's body. You want to go on looking forever, but always in fear of what you might find.
Sleep came fitfully in this place, these miles of cosmic badlands that after so many days seemed vaguely familiar to him now. And frequently, where he lay down to rest here was not the place he woke up, another symptom, he supposed, of his mental drift.
Fully awake now, he crawled to the edge of the plateau and looked out over the precipice, expecting to see another stretch of ravaged land. But wait — something was different. The landscape below him was idyllic. Fields and valleys with gentle rivers curving through them. Small gatherings of trees, long grass swaying in the gentle breeze. A girl below, familiar in her cosmic beauty, was waving up at him… calling to him…
But then he blinked — and when he opened his eyes again, the girl and the trees and the fields were gone, and the landscape below had returned to something from a very bad dream. Hunter felt his stomach turn inside out. His head began to spin. Not again, he thought.
He'd been seeing visions like this for weeks now. The day before, he'd imagined a barrage of old-fashioned nuclear missiles crashing down on top of him, only to see them hit the ground like raindrops and disappear into tiny puddles. The day before that, a strange aircraft with a propeller and stubby wings and red ball insignias on its fuselage and tail dove out of the rising sun and tried shooting at him, only to have its bullets turn into flower blossoms the moment they touched his skin. And the day before that, he imagined he was trudging through deep snow, firing his gun at a huge moving structure that might have been an ancient radar station — on wheels. And the day before that, he thought he saw a huge battleship floating on what should have been a gently flowing stream. On and on, so many, he couldn't remember them all. Some lasting a mere second or two, others going on for hours. The common thread? Each hallucination began with a flash and ended with a blink.
Madness. What else could it be?
He looked back down into the valley now. Fires roaring out of control. Cracks in the surface spewing unimaginable vapors. Gigantic rocks shooting up like monster's teeth, saw blade sharp and black as a night without stars. Badlands, indeed. So much so, a sane man would have turned back long ago.
But staring into this particularly horrid part of 212's netherworld, Hunter knew it was where he had to go.
He found wreckage two hours later.
It was halfway across the killing plain, still smoking, surrounded by blue flames exploding up into violent flares, blinding his bloodshot eyes even from a mile away. The smell was awful. Burnt subatomics, scorched superglass, white-hot electron steel — but another smell, too. Again, burned flesh… And it was this stink that told Hunter this was not the holy grail he was seeking. This, and the fact the wreckage stretched on for nearly a half mile.
Not his cherished, lost Flying Machine, these were the remains of an Empire starship, one that had been driven by a prop core. It was dispersed, in pieces, around a huge crater. This was where the nuclear singularity had gone off, once the prop core died its quick, nasty death.
After much climbing and trudging through the smoky muck, he finally reached the largest piece of the wreck: the hind end of what had once been a Space Forces cargo ship. It towered over him. Hunter took out his quadtrol, the know-it-all device carried by just about everyone in the Galaxy. He asked it a simple question: what ship was this? The answer came back right away: JunoVox. Hunter knew the name; it was one of the first vessels shot down in the opening minutes of the war between the SF and the SG, the mighty conflict that had started here, above this hellish place.
"Fucking great…" he mumbled as he felt a little more mind juice run out of him. This was the thirty-third wreck he'd come upon in his quixotic search. Just his luck that Doomsday 212 had been a graveyard for crashed spaceships in the centuries past. There were wrecks everywhere.
In sheer frustration, he took out his ray gun and began firing at the carcass. Pieces of fuselage and pipes and su-perstrings and electron steel suddenly went flying in all directions. His barrage created more flame, more smoke, more stink, but it unleashed something else as well.
Humanlike forms suddenly began rising from the wreck. They were wearing SF uniforms. Some were whole, others were skeletons. Hunter watched in dumb astonishment as they ascended into the filthy air. They were laughing at him, emitting the most outlandish shrieks. Crying for him to join them. It all coalesced into a weird chorus of screams and ethereal song.
Hunter began firing at them as well, but his rays were going right through their transparent bodies. This only made them howl at a more frightening volume. One moment, he felt like his eardrums were going to burst. In the next, it seemed like his entire head was going to explode. Louder… and louder… and louder…
Then came another flash of light. It caused him to blink. When he opened his eyes again, the spirits were gone.
He took a deep breath and tried to compose himself, but only rotten air entered his lungs. How much more of this could he take? He put his ray gun back into his holster and stumbled on his way.
These weren't the first ghosts he'd shot at since coming down here.
Beyond the wreck of the JunoVox, the terrain grew hilly again, then dipped into a gigantic ravine.
Hunter descended into the narrow valley almost without thinking, one foot in front of the other, a living ghost of sorts, trudging the haunted badlands. The vapors pouring out of the landscape down here were more putrid than the grounds above. The thick fog covered what was left of the sky overhead, nearly turning day into night.
He forged on, finding fields of wreckage every few miles, all of them from ships crashed here long ago. He passed more than a few ancient skeletons as well, preserved by all the formaldehyde-like gases hissing up around him. Always with death smiles on their faces, their fingers crooked in his direction, they were bidding him to sit and talk a while.
Back in his hero days, Hunter had displayed an amazing talent, in combat and out. It was a kind of natural long-range scanner — or radar, back in his previous life — that allowed him to sense flying machines heading in his direction long before they arrived. This feeling would come over him in the form of an electrical jolt running through his body, making the hair on the back of his head stand at attention. This sixth sense was always with him and had never let him down in the past. It was as normal a part of his makeup as breathing.