It had been two months since the disappearance of Commander Fist. None of the SG crew had any clue as to his whereabouts. Checking through his personal logs revealed that he had been looking for some contract salvage work to supplement his SG income, but those logs abruptly ended after the mention of his last scheduled interview. There was no information found regarding the location. Somehow the text message logs for the last day he was around had been hacked and deleted. His personal comm device was used to track his last position, but the results of this were baffling and made no sense. The tracking data showed that he had gone to a derelict section of the city into an underground parking lot that had been abandoned for years.

The crew had scanned the area where he was last recorded with everything they could think of. Every spectrum of radiation was tested and only one minor blip showed up in the gamma frequency, but it was so minute it was barely perceptible. Xocnah wasn't willing to accept defeat, however, and kept going over the scans, hoping to find some small clue. That gamma blip was nagging at him. It had to be a clue. There had to be something there.

Xocnah called Major Rim down to the SG lab and they started working on trying to extend the scanning devices deeper into the gamma range. Rim had some ideas on how to increase the scanner's sensitivity. They spent several weeks tweaking and testing the device before they felt ready to return to the parking lot again. Along with the scanner, they would also bring a radiation emitter which Xocnah had theorized could be used to find any residual resonance frequencies in the area that might indicate evidence of material transit technology.

Reverend Funk, meanwhile, had been deep in meditation, attempting to establish metaspace links which might help him tap into Ugo's psychic frequency. Other than the residual traces in the SG headquarters, he could sense nothing and it was like Ugo simply ceased to exist. When Rim and Xocnah announced they were returning to the city's dead zone to do more scans, Funk knew he had to go as well and try to see if there was anything he could pick up.

The parking lot was in a sprawling city section which had become too toxic for regular inhabitants and was sectioned off from the main city. Only the poorest and the scummiest were found in the dead zone. Going into the area was always a risk. You always had to take extra precautions against theft and assault. When the team arrived, the lot looked just as it had all the other times they'd come down to check it out - barren and empty. Xocnah and Rim set up their gear while Funk patrolled the area attempting to tap into any psychic frequencies he could.

Xocnah got the scanner going and started to zero in on the gamma blip that he'd picked up earlier. As he began to fine tune the scanner, data being collected was being sent to the emitter device that Rim had set up. The device was being tuned to send on the same frequency as that being detected. Within a few minutes, a radiation beam was being directed at a spot on the wall near where Ugo's comm device was last detected. As the frequency began to narrow in, Reverend Funk suddenly collapsed on the ground, falling to his knees and grabbing at his head.

Rim immediately shut down the radiation transmitter while he and Xocnah rushed over to see if Funk was okay.

"No, no! Don't stop!" Funk said. "I can feel something. I'm not sure what it is, but that gamma frequency is triggering something. I'll be alright. Just keep going."

Rim started up the emitter again and kept it directed at the far wall of the garage. As Funk began to recover from the shock of tapping into whatever it is that was happening, Rim and Xocnah started to notice something happening on the wall. The concrete was starting to change colours and shimmer slightly. In a few moments, they could see a door begin to come into view. Soon after, the door seemed to fall away into a million shattered pieces to reveal a long corridor with a light at the end offering the only illumination.

"This is it, gentlemen." Rim pronounced. "Do we go down the rabbit hole?"

Xocnah replied, "This has got to be where he went. Whatever happened to him, the answer is down there. I'll activate a defence grid to protect the scanner and transmitter and lock the frequency to keep the portal open. That should ensure we can get out of there."

"Better send a report back to HQ." Said Rim. "We don't want them wondering what happened to us if we don't return. Galacticus is monitoring the switchboard today. I'll let him know what's going down."

The team gathered together at the passage entrance and looked at each other with a sense of concern and anxiety. Funk spoke, "We've all gone through the Solar Priest training regimen, so we know that we can count on each other if things get sketchy in there. Just remember to stay focused. I don't know what's in there, but I have a feeling it's not like anything we've encountered before and we're going to need all our wits about us. Are we ready?" Everyone nodded in the affirmative and they stepped into the portal.

The entrance corridor seemed to stretch on forever. There were no reference marks to indicate how far they'd gone nor how much further they had to go. It was all just glass smooth walls and floors and that all saturating light at the end somewhere down there. They just kept going and going. After some time, the intensity of the light began to increase. It eventually became so bright, it was nearly impossible to see anything beyond its glare. Then, quite suddenly, the light broke and, for a moment, all seemed dark.

As the crew's eyes began to adjust, they could see that they had passed through another portal. Looking back, they could see a long tunnel just like they had seen at the entrance with just a point of light at the end. As they regained their visual focus, they also felt an intense heat from ahead. Turning away from the portal, they saw it flowing in the distance. They were inside a massive cavern system and there was a flow of molten rock slowly winding its way through the emptiness.

Rim checked his palm scanner and looked surprised by what he saw. "I think I understand what's happened. That corridor is a wormhole. The radiation frequency we aimed at it must be like some kind of activation key. It's amazing. It's totally stable. What I don't know is where it's taken us. I'd need to get on the surface to try to get a view of the stars to calibrate where we might be."

"Wherever we are," added Funk, "we need to keep going. I think we need to follow that lava flow. Something is drawing me downstream."

"Check this out!", exclaimed Xocnah. "It looks like a landing and a boat on the lava flow. It must be some kind of heat resistant material. I think we can use this to ride the lava flow downstream."

The crew carefully made their way out to the landing doc and onto the boat. The heat was intense, but the boat had some sort of shielding that kept it from being unbearable. Funk picked up a long barge pole and pushed the boat off from the dock. Once off, they began to drift downstream as the laval carried them along. After about an hour, another landing could be seen coming into view. The crew figured that this was likely the best option to follow. Funk's psychic casting seemed to support checking this out.

As the crew disembarked, they could see a passage a few yards away from the dock. It was dark and appeared to be much colder than the cave around the lava river. In fact, the temperature dropped off rapidly as they entered. There was very little light. Only a faint blue tinge and the walls appeared to be covered in ice. As they went deeper in, Xocnah came up close to the wall and squinted to try to get a better look. He brought his face close to the wall and then jumped back with a start!

"Fuck me! There's someone in there!" Xocnah blurted. He looked along the walls more closely. "Shit, there's a bunch of people in here. They look like they're all frozen. Are they alive?"

Rim took out his palm scanner and passed it over the walls. "They're all showing very low energy readings, but they are not dead. They look like they're in some kind of stasis. This must be some sort of storage facility."

Funk closed his eyes and rolled his head back. "Ugo is here. I can sense him." He kept his eyes closed, but reached out his hand. He turned slowly and moved a bit further down the corridor. "Here. Right here."

They all gathered around where Funk had gestured and looked closely into the icy walls. It was Commander Ugo.

"We've got to get him out of there." Said Rim. "I can use my portable laser cutter to cut through the ice, but I don't know if he'll be able to survive that kind of extraction. Whomever put him in here, they may have done it in a special way to prevent injury and we may trigger a premature revival before we can get him completely out of the suspension material."

"You're quite right about that." said a mysterious voice from behind.

The crew turned and saw a strange cloaked figure standing in the shadows. He was old and hunched over slightly. Slowly he stepped into the dim light so they could see him a bit more clearly.

He spoke again, "He's ready for the revolution now. They all are. I've been saving them all for the proper time. They are the Hunter's army. They are here for when the darkness comes and the void spreads across the stars. When the Hunter and his Solar Sister come, they will be ready. The sacred twins will bring them to the battle field."

The crew knew that the Hunter was dead and that he had passed his knowledge onto the Solar Priests of SG. They also knew that his twin sister was missing, lost among the whores of the galactic slave market. Funk explained to the old Hermit what had happened. He told of how the Hunter had been destroyed by the necrotizing virus on Corot 10 and how the Solar Sister had been lost by the clumsy nuns of Subra 7.

Funk elaborated, "The Hunter entrusted us four with the task of preparing for the void, but he was not able to give us all the information we need. Since we first met him, we have been trying to piece together the puzzle of the void matter so we can try to figure out what to do."

The Hermit spoke, "This must be why I was drawn to recruit your brother, Ugo. I have been assembling this army for centuries, training and then storing them, waiting for the Hunter and his sister to come and claim them. Yet I had no knowledge of their tragic fates. We must find the Solar Sister. She is our only hope. She is out there somewhere. I can feel it. But I cannot tell where."

Funk continued, "We must have our brother back with us to help find her. With the Hunter gone, we have been entrusted as his emissaries. We will come for your army when the time is right. But, for now, we must have Ugo returned to us in order to find the sister. He is one along with us who were the last to see the Hunter and receive his knowledge. We are all needed for this task."

With that, the Hermit took out a small control unit and deactivated the suspension field around Commander Ugo. The ice vaporized and Ugo slumped to the side as he began to regain consciousness. He was confused at first, but Reverend Funk explained what had happened. Once Ugo had fully recovered, the Hermit showed the crew a passage back to the wormhole entrance where they could return to Earth.

Before they entered the portal, the Hermit passed a small data crystal to Reverend Funk. Handing it to him he commented, "I don't know what's on here. It was given to me a long time ago and I was told to give it to the Hunter when he came to claim his army. Since that will never happen, I think I am intended to pass this to you. Perhaps you have the means to access it."

With that, the crew entered the wormhole portal and disappeared. The Hermit turned to return to his catacombs to tend to his army until they would be needed.