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.
As the elevator moved, Uhzaysuhl set about rearranging what was left of his damaged flight suit, readying the computerized integration circuitry through the torso-mounted command panel and his wrist gauntlets. He needed his defensive systems and weapons system up and running.
There was an abrupt, shocking jolt that almost threw him from his feet and the white light inside the elevator switched to blood-red, indicating the ship had taken yet more damage. Uhzaysuhl cursed and his pulse quickened. He didn't know what was going on out in the rest of the shiftcraft. It made him feel vulnerable. He hated feeling vulnerable.
In a few moments the elevator cabin jerked as his destination was reached. He fought a sudden wave of nausea, a remainder of the physical effects from leaving Ventriculum-space. He fought it back, gulping. A soft hum from his flight suit reassured him as his weapons system finally came online. The hydraulic doors slid open with a loud hiss and he peered out into a darkened, curved corridor where many of the ceiling light panels were broken or shorted out. Shadows lingered menacingly as the corridor swept away into the distance. Uhzaysuhl could hear the echoing, evenly paced, percussive sounds of metal on metal as something approached...
He raced aggressively towards the sound.
He abruptly drew up short and froze. What he saw shouldn't have been possible. No, no, not true. The ship had been breached and boarded. What he saw was all too possible now that he was outside the envelope of the Ventriculum.
Someone else was onboard the ship. There were two of them. They wore very sturdy looking, intricately designed armor. He could not help but notice there were small splotches of blood amid the gleam of the shining metal.
Seeing their weaponry, he slowed his own bolting charge through the ship's corridors and said aloud, "Hold! Wait a moment...!"
For their part, Mune'stahr and Pylott had desperately sought cover as the gigantic hull of The Glide smashed into the few remaining towers and minarets dominating the crumbling skyline of the embattled necropolis. A massive blast-wave of displaced air in front of the craft as it gradually materialized into Shi'draih-Hakaba's airspace created a pressurized tsunami of wind knocking down or flattening many of the antiquated edifices anywhere near the reinforced fortress-walls of the Duskhelm Priory. The pair had dodged deadly suppression fire from the Ashen Brood guardsmen manning the Priory's walls and ran up and along the paved wing wall and abutment of an arching, collapsed pedestrian bridge until the span devolved into a splinter formed of ruined masonry and frayed girders. There, Mune'stahr had turned to face the oncoming, virtual avalanche of corundum-coated, titanium plate and engaged the full complement of his exo-armor's remaining smart-targeting, shaped-charge, cluster-missiles.
Sixty of the oval-shaped projectiles had launched from his armor's back-mounted, over-the-shoulder fire-rack to punch into The Glide's hull while its protective force shield had been temporarily inoperative. A hole large enough to drive a herd of buffalo through had summarily appeared through a dense cloud of smoke, torn metal and charred slag.
Mune'stahr and Pylott had wasted little time in engaging their cybernetic muscular enhancements and leaping through space into that raged opening in the shiftcraft's bulkhead. They had charged unhesitatingly into the interior of the vessel.
"Stand down and identify yourself," Mune'stahr commanded. "You have invaded Emperium planetary space without sanctioned authorization. Your unlawful presence is counter to the sovereignty of the Omniperator Cosmoterius, His Imperialness the Lord Draggyn Han'Khainus-Galorketh, also known as The World-Father."
Uhzaysuhl shifted his weight ever so slightly, seeking better balance in preparation for possible combat. The muzzle of Mune-stahr's rifle shifted with him as the Star Legion SpecOps soldier sighted on the Pilgrim Prime.
"I wouldn't," a female voice warned in a hard, clipped tone.
Pylott ratcheted the ammunition power cells via the slides on her dual Rampager auto-repeater pistols.
"Move and you will die," she said. "Who are you?"
Uhzaysuhl gnashed his teeth, all too aware of the ticking of the clock. Time was not his friend.
"Who am I?" he answered through clenched teeth, "I am someone who doesn't have any damn time for this."
He ducked and lunged to one side as he simultaneously extended both his arms, activating his energy emitters, and let rip with a pair of destructive plasma force blasts.
* * *