Thousands and thousands of ships, some of them carrying hundreds of smaller ships, are arranged in a grid for battle; they’re jumping into her land from a dozen different galaxies. She sees them crossing through hyperspace before forming up in the midlands—that part of the sideways cone where the snow flies. She sees them preparing to invade the Milky Way, sees them sliding through an open rift and out over a dry and dusty land. She sees death and destruction on a scale the universe normally reserves for the ends of time.

The old woman waits for the scene to change, for any indication that this is the future, but it remains solid. Unwavering. And in a land where things happened out of sequence, where cause and effect have to be re-learned, where it’s often impossible to distinguish what happened and in what order, she sees quite clearly that this has already begun.

“Mortimor!” she thinks. She focuses the word into the red band, sending it out to all the other paired bands, the devices that can inter-cept even the softest of thoughts through hyperspace and beyond.

“Pops, can you hear me?”

She waits.

If he can hear her, he doesn’t think it. The red band remains silent.

And so the woman known as the Bern Seer lies motionless on her leather saddle, zipping along just before the very edge of time. Ahead of her, a scene she once glimpsed with blind eyes plays out yet again, only clearer this time. The frightening visuals dominate her senses, downing out the other events taking place elsewhere. She’s left with only the Bern to watch.

And a lifetime of doubts, an eon of fears that she had seen incorrectly, or had started a panic over some fleeting dream, gradually washes away. Those old worries regarding her senility are driven off by a flood of the now. A flood of horror.

Countless years she has endured, waiting, living with the anxiety of having possibly been wrong.

And suffering the even worse terror that she may have been right.

Part XI – Worlds Apart

“It isn’t the distance that tears—
it’s what’s stretched between.”

~The Bern Seer~

1

“My name is Mortimor Fyde, son. Welcome to hyperspace.”

“Hello,” Cole asked out loud, “is anyone there?”

He shook his head. His thoughts were still rattled from the crash landing, his vision partially blinded from the harsh light outside. He knelt on the buried canopy of the stolen and upturned Firehawk and groped for the strange voices he thought he’d heard during the crash.