The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART TWENTY-SIX

Uhzaysuhl slowly rose from the floor, gasping. His flight-suit was ripped, the flexible cable-bundles of neuro-links to his pilot's command chair were disconnected, the port-adapter couplings ripped apart. His vision was cloudy and unfocused. His head throbbed painfully and the muscles of his body were on fire from the sudden onslaught of involuntary contractions he'd experienced as The Glide had emerged from Ventriculum-space and into planar Relativistic-dimensionality.

He couldn't allow himself to stay here for long. It wasn't just so far as The Glide was concerned, but also meaning as far as his own dimensional physicality was concerned. He couldn't stay. He could not allow the quantum stream to try correcting itself after the shock of piercing the Veil wore off. Once the current physical universe registered his presence as a tangible, corporeal particle inserted into its matrix, it would try to lock him in, try to assimilate his matter into this vibrational medium and, being from an alien Reality, his atomic structure would have the wrong quantum signature. And then the countdown would begin as the current dimensional matrix tried to forcibly eject him.

Then, too, there was the matter of The Glide's pre-programmed synchronization with the Ventriculum's periodic cosmic dissolution to realign with the various Multiversal chronal corridors. It happened every five hundred and forty Earth-minutes. It could not be reset, transposed or reconditioned. It could not be paused. It could not be stopped.

And it had already been five hundred and twenty minutes since the last synchronization. Uhzaysuhl could not help but see the irony in his situation: he was quickly running out of time. There would be Hell to pay if it, the chronal realignment, were to happen while The Glide was here, in this universe.

The entire sector of space in which The Glide found itself, would wink out of existence, be dissolved, tearing another larger hole in the cosmic fabric of the Withered Land's solar system with no hope of physical reinstatement. Space would not reform, would not recreate itself. Everything would be permanently destroyed and a quantum matter-antimatter vacuum would remain. That vacuum would initiate a near instantaneous chain reaction of heretofore unknown and unprecedented lethal cosmic calamities.

Although none of that would be particularly germain if what Uhzaysuhl saw through his bridge's vid-screen was accurate. When the shiftcraft had first begun its breach into the Withered Land's Plane of Reality, what he'd seen could only have been described as sheerest madness unleashed: a towering, raging, giant humanoid of obviously alien origin astride the aged stone, mortar and steel ruins of a fallen city was defending itself from the relentless artillery assault of what looked to be a hybridized city-in-a-bottle, half-buried in the carapace of a colossal mechanical beetle.

To say that events were rapidly spinning out of control was an understatement.

Uhzaysuhl, frantic and desperate, was gambling incautiously with Time and Space itself in his audacious and frantic attempt to alter his own timeline and conquer his fate.

So when the colossal mechanized sphere bucked and shrieked like a living thing as the forward hemisphere's multispectral sensor array explosively imploded, the Prime Template Pilgrim's eyes widened as the first cold fingers of fear ran down his spine.

The hull of the mighty shiftship had been breached. The ship was being boarded.

Uhzaysuhl steadied himself and, stumbling as he dashed out from the command bridge, lunged out to the transversal elevator lobby. After entering the operator portal to one of the few undamaged cabin-units, he selected the path towards the sensor array's maintenance deck. A high-pitched keening whine as the elevator cabin quaked revealed to him that part of the vast spherical craft's internal transportation system was severely damaged. Nevertheless, after punching in the destination on the control panel, the cabin began to move through the spiraling, chambered structure of the elevator network's nautilus shell traffic path.