But not this time.
This time all he saw was a shadow. It came over him at first like a huge cloud, blotting out all that was left of the murky sunlight. He turned, slowly, and discovered an enormous starship hovering above him. No warning. No noise. No electrical jolt to the back of his head. Suddenly, it was just there.
Another vision, he was sure…
It was not shaped like a wedge as all Empire starships were. It didn't have a needle nose or a large ass end, and its canopy was not a bubble top, with a little city inside full of people meant to steer it. Nor was its fuselage white or blue or gray.
Rather it was gold. Pure gold, gleaming and brilliant even now, in the darkest of hours. And the ship was sleek, with flowing lines and sails that looked built for nothing less than to catch superneutrinos from the stars. It had wings and a large deck, and golden strings glistening from front to back. And it appeared that when it flew, even in space, men could still stand out on that deck and look over its sides and see where they were going and know where they'd been.
Hunter had been seeing weird things for weeks. This was one of the weirdest.
The ship slowly lowered itself and was soon right in front of him, huge and glittering, its underside not ten feet above the ground. Hunter reached out and touched its golden hull. It felt real, but of course, that was no proof.
The ship had three tall star masts. Two men were stationed in the tallest. One of them called down to him.
"Major Hunter, you are needed desperately… Can you come?"
Hunter froze in place. Again, he'd seen many strange things in his time in Purgatory. The gases, the flashes, the ghosts, and the wrecks. They'd all conspired to make him imagine things that weren't really there. On closer inspection, these people and this ship did resemble those belonging to his allies from the Seven Arm, the same group who'd tried to repuff this planet.
But were they real?
Or not?
He took out his ray gun and began to aim it. But in the next moment he decided that would do no good. Even if these were ghosts and they wanted him to go with them, how could that be any worse than what he was doing now?
So finally he just raised his hands over his head and called up to them, 'Take me. If you must…"
The next thing he knew, Hunter was standing before a pale blue picket fence with red and pink roses growing all over it. Beyond the gate was a small cottage that looked like it was right off a greeting card from twenty-first-century Earth. Painted bright white with yellow trim, the cottage was highly picturesque, quaint almost. It, too, had flowers growing all around it; many climbing on trellises, others spilling out onto the well manicured lawn. Behind the house, two faint orbital rings gave the sky a soft glow forty degrees above the horizon. This haze radiated across the grass and the trees and the flowers. It all looked, well… heavenly.
Hunter picked up some dirt from near the fence and rolled it through his fingers. He sniffed it, then tasted it. It seemed real, just as everything around him seemed real. The ground, the air, the fauna were the exact opposite from where he'd just come. All indications were that then he was back in the repuffed part of Doomsday 212.
But he would have to be careful here.
He'd been fooled by these strange visions before.
Vision or not, he recognized this odd house. As unlikely as it seemed, the cottage served as the military field headquarters for Hunter's allies from the Seven Arm, the ultra-powerful Star Legion that, in whispers only, was also known as the long-lost Army of the Third Empire.
This cottage was a very secret place, as by ancient agreements, the Third Empire was not supposed to venture out of its enclave in the distant seventh swirl. As, too, the golden ship he'd encountered out in the badlands. (That type of ship was called a galleonis by some, for its resemblance to the ancient wooden ocean-sailing ships of Earth. Its proper name, however, was a StarLiner.) Until recently, its kind had not been seen in this part of the Galaxy in more than 1,000 years.
Not knowing what else to do, Hunter opened the gate, went up the path, and through the cottage's front door. There were no guards. The interior of the house was unusual, to say the least. Paint-by-number pictures hung above doorways, teakettle patterns adorned the walls. Narrow hallways. Low ceilings. Thick rugs on top of heavily varnished floors. And everywhere, furniture exclusively by Sears Roebuck. He knew these unlikely things made the powerful Star Legion members feel comfortable, simply because they reminded them of their real home, way out on the Seven Arm, so far away.
He walked into the main room of the tiny house. It, too, featured homey wallpaper, knickknacks, vases of fresh flowers. An impressive grandfather clock was ticking away in one corner. On one open windowsill sat a Westinghouse AM radio, turned on, but with its volume very low. In another corner was a Quasar TV that appeared older than the Galaxy itself. It was switched on, too, but its picture showed nothing but a test pattern.
At the center of the room was a large wooden table. A dozen men were sitting around it. They jumped to their feet when Hunter entered the room. Horribly ragged, his skin dirty, his mind still firing blanks, he felt foolish when they saluted him. He weakly returned the gesture, knowing they were horrified by his ghastly appearance.
He recognized these men, too. Six were commanders from the United Planets Forces, the military arm of the Home Planets, that being the extragalactic star system where Hunter had found the Last Americans and the other descendants of the dispossessed peoples of Earth. They were wearing the sand-and-red camouflage uniforms of the UPF; each had an American flag patch on his left shoulder. They'd traveled here from the Home Planets, their squadron of war ships arriving at the height of the Battle at Zero Point and helping to turn the tide against the devils of the rampaging REF — this, even as their predecessors, the 40,000 men of the First UPF fleet, had crossed over from Heaven at the climax of that same battle, and like Hunter's close friends, gave their souls in the titanic struggle that followed.
The other six men at the table were wearing the shiny gold uniform of the Star Legion. Like those he'd just encountered on the golden ship, they were large individuals with flowing hair and winged helmets. Each wore a slew of medals on a red sash across his chest and had a ceremonial sword at his side. Each man also had a slightly burned face, the telltale sign of long voyages in their magnificent golden starships.
Despite his schizo condition, Hunter was glad to see them. When he first arrived in the seventy-third century, with little more than the clothes on his back, he was quick to notice that he was different from everyone else. It wasn't clear just why at first. He looked the same, talked the same, walked the same. He was just different.
This was strange because the modern seventy-third century human was, no argument, well-built, well-fed, and well-groomed. Handsomeness and beauty were the norm these days. But modern humans were also highly self-absorbed, highly pampered by the thousands of exotic conveniences of the day, and while educated, few seemed to be particularly brilliant. They were also pathological gossipmongers, extremely superstitious, and, almost to the last, obsessed with somehow getting a few drops of the Holy Blood in their veins so that they, like the Emporer O'Nay and The Specials back on Earth, could live up to eight or nine centuries, instead of just two or three.
It wasn't like that for the Star Legionnaires or for the inhabitants of the Home Planets, for that matter. They were more like Hunter — or better put, he was more like them. They thought in the same ways. They were curious. They questioned things. They questioned authority. While it was customary in the Galaxy for men to refer to each other as Brother, Hunter really did feel like these people were his brothers. In the past, upon meeting any one of them, he was always struck by the sensation that he'd known them all his life. And they felt the same way about him. They were people of the same blood.