He stepped back, marveling at the light storm before him, feeling that he had seen it all somewhere before.
The two clouds of light cutting through the darkness were each comprised of billions of tiny particles, and where the two spirals touched, floating bands of deep crimson were overlaid with a silvery radiance.
The light wavered and flickered without a sound, exploding and imploding before him, and the dark void beyond told of the passage of infinite time.
That’s it!
For the first time, he understood the source of his fear. These are two spiral galaxies. They’re colliding.
One is the Milky Way, the other . . . Andromeda!
In his heart, he screamed. Each was comprised of one hundred billion stars, with diameters one hundred thousand light-years across and thicknesses of roughly fifteen thousand light-years. They were massive, and they should have been more than two million light-years distant from each other, but here before him the Milky Way and Andromeda were colliding.
A wave of fear crashed into him, and he reacted. His energy-flooded visual cortex was already overcapacity, but he left it that way, connecting it to a circuit breaker. He withdrew his limbs and hugged his knees to his chest, placing his head atop them; then he ceased to move, as if he were some inorganic object floating in space. His breathing and pulse stopped, his metabolism went into lockdown, and his mind became a void.
The lights burned more intensely, reflecting against the surface of his mind. He activated a tri-D sensor cell antenna array, silently racing to the far edges of the two galaxies—which by now had transformed into surging currents of pure energy. Still, he detected no presence there. Nothing existed in this void of energy and light. He compelled himself to keep looking, searching in between the stars, and still he found nothing.
Suddenly the great whorls of light began to melt, their cores becoming violent blazes that rapidly spread. Their energies formed concentric rings, extending in waves out into the darkness. The deep blue of those waves was so bright it hurt his eyes and made his heart grow cold. Over and over again they swept through the dark reaches of space. Finally, one of the waves broke into several pieces, each piece becoming a giant orb of light. Then the cluster of orbs shifted directions—and stopped, silent.
He wondered for a moment if he was dreaming. It would not have surprised him to learn that he still lay on his side in that pod in the frigid water, asleep. Vague memories of himself before he entered the pod swam beneath his consciousness, yet he had no idea what he might have been, or what he might have done. He could feel his confidence in his own identity slipping away. For the first time, a powerful feeling of loneliness gripped him.
What am I looking at? What does it mean? Am I dreaming?
Have I been flung to the end of worlds, where no other life remains? Is there no one here to fight by my side and no weapons with which to do battle?
What am I supposed to do?
He replayed the movements of the swirling lights in his mind, feeling cold sweat trickle down his skin. The orbs of light did not move; but they began to grow even brighter.
Get out!
Something screamed inside him, the sound echoing through his chest.
You are in danger there. Get out now!
Out? But that didn’t make sense. How would he get out of this confinement?
He felt something, somewhere inside him, despairing.
You are in danger. Get out now, the voice said with rising urgency. Your time is short. He felt his mind dry up like a pool in the desert, a surface crazed with sudden cracks. Death in the form of brilliant spirals of light swelled up from those cracks with frightening speed. The blazing orbs had grown to twice their original size.
It was at that moment that a memory came to him, an instant of clarity that had been lost to him until then. With a dark heart, he stared at the silent orbs of light, understanding that his own destruction was swiftly approaching.
By now, the whirling lights filled most of his vision, spreading ever more rapidly.
I can’t see them moving because they’re coming straight at me.
He was a target. The voice sounded once again in his mind.
Get out now!
The danger was now only an instant away. He turned and saw the hatchway behind him, a white window of light floating in the darkness. He ran toward it, fear swelling up behind him like a great wave. He ran with all his strength, leaping toward the portal.
An unknown force of incredible strength twisted and warped the dark space around him. Lines of light, like a web of occult electricity, pushed against his body. In the fraction of time that remained before the orbs overtook him he closed the impossible distance to the hatch.
He shot through the portal like a bullet, plunging down onto the sand. Then he rolled down the slope, dust rising in a cloud behind him. When he finally came to a stop, he lay there at the bottom of the valley, awaiting the next calamity.
Nothing happened. He extended his tri-D sensor cell antennae as far as he could but detected nothing approaching.
For a long while he lay as though dead, unable even to grasp his own situation. All he knew was that he was driven by an urgent need to reach the walled mirage on the horizon, and that on his way there he had encountered a strange enemy and only barely escaped its trap. That and one other thing. There was a strange voice inside his head that projected warnings into his mind and directed the actions of his body. All of these things were shrouded in mystery.
He picked himself up from the ground. Lifting his sand-covered head, he peered back at the silvery spacecraft. The hatch was still open, small and dark. He could not decide whether this was truly some trap of his enemy . . . or was in fact a vessel that somehow contained two entire spiral galaxies. He wondered if he should investigate its interior again or abandon it as the voice had directed him to do. Either way, he understood that the actions he took henceforth would be largely determined by the strange events he had experienced inside the spacecraft. The flickering presence of the enemy he felt within his mind frightened him almost beyond bearing.