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RYM: The Fine Edge Between Salvation and Oblivion

By Jason Rodencal

International waters between the United States and Bermuda, 3:10 A.M. local time:

Over the still, dark waters of the Atlantic, the sounds of turboprops filled the silence for miles around as a lone C-130 completed its slow banking into a new heading for Europe.

"We'll be over Bermuda in about 20 minutes," Captain Williams said as he finished entering new numbers into the flight computer, "Lt."

When no reply came, the pilot looked over to the co-pilot's seat to see a young man completely engrossed with a set of flight maps, planning several flight routes and calculating time and fuel requirements for each one.

"Robinson?"

The calling of his name caught the man's attention as he looked about the cabin with a confused look, only to see the pilot looking at him with an amused expression.

"I'm sorry, Captain…. I didn't hear you the first time…" Lt. Robinson said with an embarrassed look on his face.

"Let me guess, your first cross-Atlantic?"

"H-how did you know, Sir?" Robinson asked with a bit of shock.

Williams didn't answer as he chuckled quietly to himself and turned back towards the front of the cockpit, "It should be smooth flying all the way to France. Last set of charts didn't show anything to worry about on them, unless the triangle decides to get us," he said with a laugh.

"You don't really believe in all of that mumbo-jumbo, do you, Sir?" Robinson asked with a bit of skepticism.

"Son, when you've been flying across this oversized pond for as long as I have, you tend to see a few unexplainable things you your day…"

Just as the last word left the pilot's lips, the windshear warning buzzers began to sound.

"What the hell?!?" he yelled as he took the controls off of autopilot and began scanning the horizon for any sign of the turbulence the weather radar was supposedly picking up.

"This can't be right… I'm getting overspeed and stall warnings at the same time!" Robinson franticly said as he checked over the instruments as alarm after alarm began to trigger in sequence.

"Never mind those right now, I think we have bigger problems to worry about!" Williams said as he began to pull the plane hard to the right.

Robinson looked up to see right in front of the plane the sky actually beginning to ripple and shimmer before a huge ring of light ripped from the center of the disturbance, quickly expanding to a size at least twice as large as the plane.

"MY GOD!" he yelled as he took the flight controls in his hands to help Williams steer the huge plane.

"Mayday, mayday, this is Army cargo flight 322002 declaring an emergency…," Williams called out on the radio, only receive static on all of the channels, "Shit…. I think we're on our own for this one, the radio's dead."

The two men put the C-130 into almost a vertical bank to try and flight out of the path of the ring, only to watch the thing follow them degree for degree as they turned. Suddenly, the flight controls just stopped responding as the plane leveled out into a course straight into the heart of the unearthly light.

"Oh man, this can't be good…" was all Robinson could think to say as he let go of the dead controls.

Lightning began to arc out from the formation across the plane's body as a blue haze enveloped it. Every electrical instrument instantly went dead with the first arc as the rest of the functioning instruments went haywire. Williams and Robinson could only hold on for dear life as the plane began to violently shake with severe turbulence. The two men couldn't see where they were going as the nose of the plane stretched out for infinity into the haze and time seemed to slow almost to a standstill.

As quickly as it occurred, the plane suddenly returned to normal as all of the systems came back online one by one. The haze was beginning to dissipate as the number of lightning bolts began to drop. Through the haze, an outline of gray was beginning to steadily become more and more visible along the sides of the plane as black appeared in front and above them. The plane received one last jolt as a huge arc blasted over the outer body with a loud explosion only to find itself surrounded on both sides by huge walls of dark ice and aiming right towards where they met in a u-shaped end to the canyon.

The flight computer began to scream its terrain warning as Williams and Robinson pulled with all of their might back on the controls. The sound of stressing metal and whining engines filled the cockpit as the huge cargo carrier tried to bring it's nose up faster than it was ever designed to.

"Come on, baby, climb!!!!" Williams screamed as he put all of his strength into the controls.

"We're not going to clear!" Robinson yelled as the edge of the canyon grew at an alarming rate in front of them.

"Climb you hunk of metal!!!!!" Williams screamed at the top of his lungs as he jerked back the controls with one last burst of strength.

Sections of ice exploded around the front and sides of the cockpit as the belly of the plane slammed into the tip of the canyon wall. Screeching metal was all that could be heard as the bottom of the body carved a huge section out of the ice as the two men did all they could just to keep the plane under control from the collision and keep climbing out of danger.

The sound quickly died off as the plane eventually gained altitude into the night sky and the canyon grew smaller and smaller behind them, but when the worst seem to have been finally behind them, an explosion rocked the plane violently as they began to level out. The cockpit lit up like a Christmas tree, as both men looked in disbelief at the giant fireball their left wing had become.

"Oh, shit, #2's on fire! It must have taken a hit from some flying ice shards back there, shutting her down! Robinson, pull the extinguishers!" Williams screamed as he forced himself to finally look away from the chaos just outside his window.

Robinson began to franticly pull levers and switches as he tried to contain the fire as fast as he could. Slowly, but surely, the fireball began to shrink in size and eventually die off, leaving the engine nothing more than smoking wreckage.

Robinson let out a long sigh as he slumped down in his seat, the crisis seeming adverted for the time being. "Sir, what the hell is going on?? Where the hell did all this ice suddenly come from??" he asked the Captain as he looked out of his window at a vast frozen wasteland of ice drifts and glaciers only a few hundred feet below the plane.

"I-I don't know…" Williams said after a long silence, "Look, you've better get back in the hold and see what kind of damage we took from that hit. Something tells me that we're really on our own for this and with that heavy of a hit, we may need to find someplace to set down _very_ soon…" he said with a worried look on his face that just froze Robinson to his very core.

Robinson slowly undid his harness belt and slid his way out of the co-pilot's seat. He carefully made his way back to the cargo hold door and was horrified by the sight that laid before him as he opened the door and turned on the interior lighting. The entire floor of the cargo plane was buckled and warped as if Salvador Dali himself had created a living work of art from it, though, that didn't scare Robinson as much as the fact that there were visible lengths of material _missing_ from the floor and sides. Huge gashes ran through out the floor and disappeared underneath the cargo containers and alongside the bottom portions of the sides. The deafening sound of rushing air filled the entire cabin as small items that were shaken loose from the impact flew about or just simply fell out of the holes in the plane.

Robinson quickly took a mental assessment of the cargo hold and then slammed the door shut. The hold just wasn't a pretty picture that he cared to look at for too long… As he locked and sealed the door, Robinson called out over his shoulder to Williams, "Sir! Our belly's been shredded all to hell! I don't think we're going to be flight worth for too much longer with the size of some of the gaps in her!"

Williams let out a long drawn-out "Shit…" under his breath. "You better get back to your seat, Lt., and start helping me look for a place to set her down then…" he then said as he gently nosed the plane upward.

Robinson quickly seated himself down and picked up his radio headset as Williams slowly climbed a couple thousand feet skyward, trying to keep the stress on the plane as low as possible. Outside the plane's windows, nothing but dark waters and ice was all the two men could see until the world seemed to just disappear into the distant night horizon, even at their new height. It wasn't a promising situation and the both of them knew it…

With a the flicks of a few switches, Robinson turned on the radio and began to broadcast in the slim hope that maybe they could hopefully find some sort of help, "Mayday, mayday, mayday…. this is army cargo flight 322002 declaring an emergency situation. Anyone that can hear this broadcast, military or civilian, please respond! I repeat, _ANYONE_ that can hear this broadcast, military or civilian, _please_ respond! Our plane has been severely damaged in a collision and is in need of any capable landing site, over…"

For ten minutes straight, Robinson repeated that statement over and over on every possible channel the radio could broadcast on, including a few restricted channels meant solely for SAC and Air Force One. Still, not a single word ever returned on the airwaves and Robinson was beginning to believe none would probably ever come.

"It's no good, Sir, I can't get anything useful. Hell," he finally said as he looked out of the windows, "I can't even find a constellation I recognize to navigate off of. Call me crazy, but that doesn't even look like the right moon and when did the Earth have a black hole-like thing near it?"

"What the hell are you babbling about, Lt.?" Williams asked with an odd expression on his face.

"There, about 10 o'clock high," Robinson said as he pointed out a front window.

Williams began to stretch his neck about as he looked upward. Far above the plane in the night sky was a shimmering black ring that took up a huge portion of the sky. What was scary about the ring wasn't the ring itself, but the fact that there was no light of any kind anywhere around the thing. No stars, no planets, no nothing….. "What the hell……" was all Williams could think of to say as he stared at the phenomenon.

Suddenly, a warning light lit up on the radio as it automatically changed frequencies to pick up an incoming transmission. Robinson instantly pulled on his headset and pushed the earpiece tighter against his ear and held up his hand in such a way, there was no mistaking its meaning of "hold that thought for one moment."

"Sounds like some sort of automated transmission… Might have tripped it with one of my broadcasts, but I can barely make anything out," Robinson said as he concentrated harder on trying to hear anything useful through the static and breakup the transmission was experiencing, "We… something, something… dead… heavy static… world… become… something, sounded like death… stay away… I can't make anything else out through the static, Sir."

"Oh, yea… that just bodes well for this entire situation, especially when the welcoming wagon says to stay away," Williams said as he looked out the window at the relatively ice-free waters below, "Looks like we're not going to find anything useful out this way. I'm going to do a 180 and hope those ice formations become larger eastward. Finding a large enough ice field may be our only hope of landing this bird safely."

"No argument from me, Sir," was all Robinson replied as Williams put the plane into a shallow bank and came about a full 180º.

After a little while, the ice flows steadily became thicker as the plane wobbly sliced through the night sky. Still, nothing looked promising to either man in terms of a landing sight as Williams coaxed the plane to a slightly higher altitude. Things were only beginning to look bleaker each minute they flew on, and that was before the radar suddenly came alive with a sole blip approaching their position at what had to be a supersonic speed.

"My, God… whatever that thing is, it has to be over a mile in size," Robinson said as he pointed to the large green blob quickly approaching the center of the radar screen.

"And its going to be right on top of us in a matter of seconds…" Williams said as he began to turn the plane onto a heading directly opposite of the incoming blip, "Hopefully, with us heading into it and with the speed that thing's traveling at, it should overshoot us and give us a chance to see just what the hell it is."

In a matter of seconds, a loud roaring sound could be heard even over the sound of three massive turboprops at full power. "Sounds like some kind of jet and a mighty big one at that," Williams shouted to Robinson over the noise.

Suddenly, the plane began to buck about as if it had flown through another plane's jetwash and Williams had to drop altitude and radically change direction to keep the plane stable.

"Did you see anything??" Williams said as he scanned the night sky for what ever could have actually made a plane as large as a c-130 jump.

"Nothing, Sir! How can something that size on the radar be so impossible to see?!?" Robinson said as he, too, began to look about, "Wait a minute, what happened to all the stars??"

Robinson leaned against his set of windows and squinted outward to try and see what had happened to the stars, only to quickly pull back with a horrified look on his face. The stars hadn't gone anywhere, they were just being blocked from view by what looked to be a giant hawk's wing. Williams had also notice the wing by about that time and both men visually followed the black monstrosity with their eyes to a larger central piece that was tipped in a solid v-shaped endpiece and a beak-like front-end.

"Oh, this is _not_ good…" Robinson said as Williams' jaw just dropped out of shock.

"Hang on, I'm going to put some distance between us and that _thing_," Williams said as he cinched his seat belts a little bit tighter after finally getting his jaw back up from the floor.

Williams quickly rolled into 90º knife-edge and cut the engine power by almost half. The results were almost instantaneous as the plane dropped a hundred feet in mere seconds from the sudden and complete lost of lift over the wings. The sounds of stressing metal and the 3 engines' whines from the sudden lateral stress filled the cockpit to a deafening level. It took all of Williams and Robinson's strength to pull the plane out of the deadly drop and as it leveled out, several loud pops could be heard throughout the plane.

"What the hell was that maneuver???" Robinson yelled as he fought to get his stomach back down where it belonged.

"Knife-edge drop. It's about the only maneuver these big birds have to dodge incoming missiles… it's also one of the most dangerous, which I'm sure you've figured out by now," Williams responded as he looked up through the window. "At least it worked."

The plane was now slightly trailing the mammoth jet-hawk thing and low enough in altitude that the two men could see the entire width of the machine.

"Look at the size of those engines… God, there's six of the bastards," Robinson said as he pointed towards six glowing trails of blue ionized air coming from the two wings of the machine. "No wonder that thing could have just boomed up on us like it did."

"Well, if that things a plane of some sort, that might mean there's a pilot we could talk to. For all we know, he/she/it could have zeroed in on your last transmission to assist us. It doesn't look like it jockeying for an attack position."

"Understood, Sir," Robinson said as he picked up the radio mike once again. "Unidentified aircraft, this is Army cargo flight 322002 requesting radio contact. We are non-combatant and in need of immediate assistance, I repeat, we are non-combatant and in need of immediate assistance, over."

For almost a minute nothing came back on the airwaves, but then suddenly there came a loud burst of noise that made Robinson have to rip the earpiece from his head as sparks shot out from the radio. "_Jesus!!!_" he yelled as he threw down the headset and held onto his ears.

"Robinson, are you ok kid??" Williams yelled as he looked over at him.

"I think so… damn, that hurt!"

"What was that?"

"It was like some kind of frequency burst or something… it almost sounded like a rapid-fire stream of binary code," Robinson replied as he checked his hands for blood or any other fluid that might have been leaking from his ears after receiving such a shock to the system.

"We'll whatever it was, it was strong enough to zap the radio systems. I'm not going to take that as a good sign, so we're getting the hell out of here," Williams said as he throttled back the engines and pulled the plane into a tight bank. "We should be able to out-turn that oversized monstrosity without any problems."

"You'd like to think that…" Robinson said as he watched the jet-thing pull a high-g maneuver that would have turned any normal human pilot into jelly and quickly matched their turn degree for degree.

"Oh, this is definitely not good…"Williams softly said to no one in particular as he tried to gently coax the c-130 into a jinx maneuver, only to no avail as the hawk-shaped jet easily kept up with them turn for turn.

Try as they might, Williams and Robinson could not shake the black monster now chasing them, yet, not a single shot or warning of any kind came from the thing. This did not sit well with either man, but they didn't have much of a choice but to accept this little bit of reality. Without warning, though, the hawk-jet suddenly turned northward and roared away, its jet trails becoming brighter and louder ten-fold over. Williams and Robinson could only just stare in disbelief at the blue glow of the giant engines against the night sky, visible long after even the plane disappeared from visual range.

Robinson couldn't help but to stare into the distance, even when the last flicker of blue had vanished into the blackness of night. Why had the thing suddenly veered off like that? The whole situation felt wrong to him and in the back of his mind was a tiny voice telling him that he should turn south while they had the chance to. Robinson mentally agreed with the tiny voice and voiced his own suggestion to Williams.

"If that's things heading north, then maybe we should go south…" was all Williams replied as he rolled the plane into a southward heading. As the plane came about, the sound of stressing metal was becoming all to clear and frequent. "Not good… not good at all… I don't think we may have much time left with this poor bird. How are the rest of the engines holding out?"

"Everything looks normal, Power… Oil… Fuel… Uh, oh…" Robinson said as he looked over each of the instruments one by one.

"What the hell do you mean 'uh, oh'?!?"

Robinson looked out a side window to see an almost invisible mist coming from the wing and drop tanks. The spray was so fine, he would have probably never seen it unless he was actually searching for a problem within the fuel system like he was.

"Looks like we're slowly loosing fuel out of the right tanks. They must have taken some strikes from ice fragments we kicked up from the canyon lip."

"Damn…. All we can do is just hold this heading and pray we find land before she runs out of gas…"

"At least that thing's still heading back north by the looks of the radar," Robinson said as he tapped the radar screen with a knuckle.

"Be thankful for small miracles, but I think its going to take a mighty big one to save our asses now," Williams said as the plane flew on into the night, closely hugging the dark waters.

A dim sun began to rise on the left horizon just as they now could see their first glimpses of the land they were flying over since the first rays of daybreak.

"At lest we now know the compass is still good. I'm going to gain some altitude just in case she'll have to glide in. How's the fuel holding out?" Williams said as he watched the sun rise over the distant horizon.

Quite some time ago Robinson had turned off the low fuel warning buzzers and now just kept a wary eye on the meters.

"Right drop tank's done for, the rest are below a 1/2. I'm suspecting there are leaks in them, too. There's no way we could have burned off that much fuel that fast. At this rate of consumption we've maybe got a few hours of flight time left, if that."

Williams looked out a window at the land below, "We'll have to keep going for as long as we can. No way we'll be able to land on that rocky mess below without getting shredded to bits."

The rocky coastline gave way to a small mountain chain as Williams pulled the plane to a higher altitude to clear the smaller peaks. The veteran pilot didn't like how the engines were obviously straining to make the simple climb, but there were no choices other than to go up or to crash. Robinson paid no attention to plane's problems, though, as he occupied his time trying to make a simple map, keeping tabs on airspeed and flight-time as he sketched a simple diagram of the terrain they flew over.

Williams tried kept the morning sun to his left as much as possible as they flew over the last of the mountain peaks and into open woodland country, shadowing a distant coastline that was just visible on his right hand side.

After a few hours of following the coastline in hopes of finding any city or signs of civilization, he then slowed the plane down to only a few knots over its stall speed and just began to circle about the area. Nothing could be seen that would have even remotely counted as a town and somehow, Williams just _knew_ in his gut that it was now a moot point to even bother trying and farther.

"God, I would have thought we would have seen something useful by now following the shore…." Williams said as he made one last look around the area through his windows at the forests below.

"This is probably our best bet for a landing spot, so keep your eyes peeled and yell if you spot anything useable. I don't know how much longer we'll be in the air, so you better make it fast," Williams said as he began to scan about the ground himself.

Robinson looked about and saw nothing but solid forest as far as his eyes could see, except for an odd shaped indentation to the tree line a few miles away.

"Sir, there's something at 9 o'clock to the nose, but I can't make out what it is at this distance."

"Good eyes, kid. By the looks of the shape, it might just very well be a road down there!"

Williams took the plane out of the bank and sped up towards the indentation in a wide curve so that they could fly straight over it for a visual pass. The closer they came, it was becoming more and more apparent that the indentation was indeed a road of some sort. Williams lined up for a parallel pass and dropped down to just above treetop level with the plane as he preformed the fly-by. As the C-130 roared by, they couldn't have been sure, but both Williams and Robinson could have sworn they saw people running from the road and hiding in the woods.

"Was it me, or did I just see a caravan of wagons back there on the road?" Robinson asked as he watched the road grow smaller behind them as the plane climbed upwards.

"Well, at least I now know it wasn't me that just saw that, too… Shit, this is not good. We can't land if there's people in the way."

"What about just landing on a different part?"

"Nice idea, but I lost the road in the trees. Thing just disappeared under the cover of those trees worse than San Francisco fog."

"But, I don't think we're going to have to worry about making a choice now," Williams said in a worried voice as the plane suddenly shuddered and dropped in altitude, "Looks like she's made it for us…"

To even the untrained ear, there's no mistaking the sound of a miss-firing engine, especially three massive turboprops. Williams and Robinson synched their harnesses tighter against their bodies as the plane's airspeed, altitude, and pitch all dropped in unison. All they could now do was keep the plane in a level glide and pray they hit a break in the trees, as the tops became ever so closer by the second.

"God save us…" were the last words from Williams' mouth as the nose just began to skim the forest canopy-top.

The plane's first impact sent it bouncing off of the tops of several large trees and beginning to roll sideways as it promptly came back down. The two men were jolted around like rag dolls as the right wing clipped a tree and brought the nose right down into the forest canopy. The sound of screaming metal and explosions drowned out another other sound the crash made as the body slammed into the ground on its side and plowed through the earth as tail and wing sections were shredded and ripped off. Tree branches tore at the cockpit and shattered the safety glass as the plane careened out of control through the forest. The last thing Robinson saw before blacking out was the plane sliding right into a huge tree nose first as the tail end lifted up then crashed back down from the sudden stop.