Thread:FleetCaptainT/@comment-27324808-20180216215801

62

 

 Heart hammering in his chest, Intrepid finalized the launch procedures and pulsed the throttle.  The rocket roared and threatened to take off.  “Get ready to do some shooting,” Intrepid said and disengaged the landing brake, then he and Kate were thrown into the backs of their seats as the rocket nosed up to the sky, the scar directly ahead and closing.  Between them and in, hundreds of Maelstrom landing craft, dragons, and the Darkitect.

 

 “Just focus on flying,” Kate said, and suddenly it all darkened.

 

 Fog filled the environment outside the windows, blocking all view of the Maelstrom, while rain plattered down in long drops.  Thunder rumbled blatantly close as lightning flashed around them, it hadn’t been raining a moment before, but still the rocket pushed itself higher.  Flashes of white and sparks of yellow indicated the moments Maelstrom landers were struck by the lightning and set aflame, their burn casting orange glows around the path of the rocket.  Dragon roars sounded miles away, and the battle was miles below and increasing.

 

 Intrepid turned off his earpiece, it had gone staticy in the deluge anyway.  The Nexus Force was managing, with extreme difficulty, to hold off the Maelstrom forces.  But he could not concern himself with that.  The scar in the sky was close, and he heard it before he saw it.  It was the sound of nothing.

 

 He must have blinked.  When he opened his eyes, he saw nothing either.

 

 He remembered this nothingness.  It was Unverse, the emptiness between Universes.  But he was still in the rocket.  He still felt the seat fabric behind him, and the faux leather briefcase leaning on his shin.  He clenched his fingers around the handle.  Then he heard a sound that he did not remember, something just outside comfortable hearing range, that if he strained to hear sounded like crackling radio static.

 

 Lines of visual noise come out of the blackness, static and gray, jagged and irregular, the effects of broken Unverse.

 

 Then he began to hear sounds that he did remember.  Soft, unintelligible hissings that in all the time he’d heard, he never understood... and a low droning roar like waves, crashing over and over.

 

 He ignored it.  He focused on doing his job.  Light seemed to work differently in Unverse so he felt blindly for the canopy latch and pushed it open.  There was no change in pressure.  The briefcase was still gripped in his left hand.  He heaved it up and out of the rocket, and in his mind’s eye pictured it floating into the abyss.  He had delivered it.  Now he had to get out, except he had not gotten in with an unverse manipulator that he could now tell to take him out.

 

 Then the whispers became louder, and another crack in unverse appeared.  It was strange, how spontaneous things were in this realm.  This crack was a different gray than the others, solid instead of stippled, and it was not jagged.

 

 Another pocket dimension? Intrepid thought.  The whispers seemed to separate as the line seemed to uncoil.  Then a light shone through, a whiteness that illuminated the interior of the rocket, and real sounds began to return.  The burn of the rocket’s engine.  Reality was leaking through... or they were leaking into reality.  He heard the sound of his breathing.  He heard the sound of Kate’s breathing.  He’d forgotten he was not alone in the rocket.

 

 The glow of the pocket dimension nearly entirely encompassed the rocket now.  He saw the colored lights of the instrument panel, the swirl of the canopy glass, droplets of water that had stuck to the rocket from the storm, now sliding off and falling to an unseen ground.

 

 He tuned in on the whispers again, except now they were words.

 

 Then reality came crashing through and the rocket split apart.  They was falling, like the water, through a gradient black and whiteness.  Grabbing his left arm was Kate.  And grabbing his right arm was Red.  In her other hand was an Unverse Manipulator.

 

 He felt whiplash as they were concussively yanked out of the pocket dimension and through unverse back to their original dimension.  After an amount of time he could not discern, he blinked and tried to sit up, but found he could not move.  There was a ringing in his ears that was slowly quieting, so he could hear someone yelling, “Don’t move your head!  Your neck is broken!”  Did thinking count as moving his head, he wondered, before dipping back into unconsciousness.

<ac_metadata title="Song of the Swans 62"> </ac_metadata>