Returning to the States par avion from China, Max, Dr. McGreger, Danny, and "Number Nine" met in San Francisco with Sir Heathcliffe, Cara, Juliet, and United States Navy Commander Jack Perceval, who had just returned from Hawaii in First-Class Cunard Cruise Line accommodations, thanks to Cara's many contacts. When Commander Perceval's associate, Professor of Astrophysics, Professor Hollander, divulged, after a few too many drinks, that the United States Navy had developed a secret, automated, high-speed dirigible, Sir Heathcliffe, Cara and Juliet convinced him to show it to them.
Once Commander Perceval realized Professor Hollander's indiscretion, he set off, aided by Danny Mak, "Number Nine," and crack-shot Seaman First Class, Bucky Dougherty, to conduct some "damage management," only to arrive at the Naval Base to find the loosed dirigible breaking from its riggings and ascending skyward with the members of the Empire Club on board! Heroically boarding the airship, Commander Perceval and "Number Nine" found the craft wildly out of control and tearing apart in the atmosphere. As Commander Perceval strapped on a parachute to rescue Professor Hollander, who had fallen overboard, he directed the rest of the crew to an automated life boat of sorts, secreted in the hull of the dirigible. Jettisoning from the burning airship in the automated lifeboat, the Sir Heathcliffe, Dr. McGregor, Cara, Juliet and "Number Nine" found themselves ascending toward the stratosphere in what appeared to be a rocket ship out of Jules Verne's A Trip to the Moon. Before long, the crew found themselves hurling toward the fringe of the solar system . . .
Episode Twenty-Four: Starstruck Part II: At the Emperor's Whim
As their rocket ship jettisoned into unknown space, the unwitting crew searched the ship for supplies. Juliet found a weapons locker containing a variety of ray guns and pressure suits while Cara and "Number Nine" searched the engine room, which revealed a bizarre "engine" of glowing orbs from a technology they had never seen. Cara detected very strong psychometric traces in the engine room that told of great suffering, but she could not determine the precise nature of the tragedy or exactly who had endured it. "Number Nine" discovered a trap door in the floor of the engine room, but, when she descended into it, the transparent door of the chamber locked above her, and a stasis field enveloped her, freezing her in a catatonic sleep beneath the floor.
Meanwhile, in the cockpit, Sir Heathcliffe and Dr. McGreger examined the controls of the craft, obviously modified for human operation, and discovered a video screen on the console that responded to their touch. The screen displayed a map of a planetary system far away from Earth's solar system and never before seen by human eyes, labelled with strange cartouches containing a pictographic script. Each planetoid of the system had its own symbol. Disturbingly, the pictograph used to designate Earth was the symbol of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the swastika!
After surveying several planetoids in the system, and finding them most unpalatable, the rocket ship was intercepted by a fleet of starfaring vessels, which escorted the heroes to a planetoid known as Nexus, the self-proclaimed heart of the Nexian Empire. Among the welcoming party was a tall, gaunt six-armed nobleman surrounded by an entourage of one-eyed centaurs; intelligent apemen; reptilian humanoids; and an army of armored, four-armed guards. The nobleman introduced himself as Lord Chamberlain Rahl, his Royal Majesty's First Subject, and promptly announced that the heroes were now prisoners of the Emperor . . .
Episode Twenty-Five: Starstruck Part III: Escape from Nexus
After a long stay in a dank cell, the heroes were granted a rare audience with Emperor Halcius, a yellow-eyed, neckless monstrosity of a humanoid, whose series of chins rippled downward into a great bloated body bearing six stunted arms, and whose lipless mouth curled into a sneer as Lord Chamberlain Rahl and his armored, four-armed guards brought the Earthmen before him. Sir Heathcliffe attempted in vain to appeal to the Emperor's sense of comity for a fellow aristocrat, but soon found that the Emperor only recognized the noblesse of his own court, which, he boasted, ruled over an ever-expanding empire that comprised all of the planetoids in the system, and, he threatened, would soon consume Earth's solar system.
The empathic Emperor quickly sensed Cara's psychic abilities and, taking Sir Heathcliffe, Dr. McGreger and Juliet, in his thrall, he turning a handful of his own entranced subjects over to Cara and challenged her to a life-sized and lethal game of chess on the mottled tiles of his throne room floor. After a bloody battle, Cara turned her pieces on the Emperor himself, who was mortally wounded by his own enthralled subjects. The killing blow, however, was delivered by Lord Chamberlain Rahl himself, who took a ray gun to the prone Emperor's head and declared himself ruler of the galaxy. After Juliet took the signet ring from the finger of the dead Emperor, the heroes daringly escaped from the throne room with a motley band of galactic denizens, finally freed from the Emperor's psychic clutches, aiding the heroes' retreat from the horde of armored, four-armed imperial guards in pursuit.
Making their way back to the rocket, with the aid of Juliet's mystical Tibetan techniques of evasion, the heroes engaged the guards in a wild melée, taking two technicians as prisoners and gaining entry into the ship's cockpit. In a hurried escape, the crew jettisoned from the surface of Nexus into the black void of space, with little in the way of provisions or a plan . . .
Episode Twenty-Six: Starstruck Part IV: Terror on Terminus
As the crew debated their course of action, a powerful vision assaulted Cara's psychic senses and superimposed itself over her surroundings. In the cockpit, she saw the ghostly image of the four-armed Dr. Zeron, the creator of the rocket ship, refusing to concede to the demands for surrender by the video image of a young Prime General Halcius, before he declared himself galactic Emperor. Unconsciously, Cara reiterated Dr. Zeron's exhortation to his crew that "We must go to Terminus!" and the heroes, recalling another foreboding land mass called "Terminus" off the coast of Washington D.C. from their earlier adventures, reluctantly complied with Cara's seemingly confident assurance, and set their course for the dead planetoid. Their route was not unhindered, however, as Sir Heathcliffe and Dr. McGreger assumed their battle stations in the rocket ship's gun turrets to fend off Nexian fighter vessels.
Meanwhile, the captive technicians in the engine room jettisoned into space the capsule containing the cryogenically preserved "Number Nine" and threatened to leave her behind as abandoned jetsam if the heroes did not release them. Juliet, using her uncanny, mystical Tibetan powers of infiltration and mind domination, turned into a shadow and slipped through the locked door of the engine room where she convinced the mutinying captives to retrieve "Number Nine" with an exterior grappling arm.
Still under Juliet's hypnotic thrall, the engineer helped the crew land the rocket ship on the interior surface of the hollow planetoid of Terminus, in which millions of honeycombed cavern faces were connected by networks of catwalks. As the heroes left their rocket ship, the catwalks began to retract from the cavern faces, and the crew members had to leap to the relative safety of the cavern apertures. If not for the assistance of Juliet and Dr. McGreger, one of the party's centaur-like companions would have fallen to his death. Instead, the ruckus of his rescue attracted the attention of a swarm of giant mechanical spiders that emerged from the darkness. The spiders knocked Juliet unconscious and she fell from her footing on the cliff face. Sir Heathcliffe, anchoring himself with a rope, leapt after Juliet and caught her before she disappeared into the abyss below. The group retreated and regrouped in the cavern, sealing the spiders out behind a large cavern door. Within the cavern chamber, they discovered the skeletal remains of one of the original crew members of Dr. Zeron's rocket ship. On his belt, the heroes found a homing device, which directed them deeper into the labyrinthine caverns . . .
Episode Twenty-Seven: Starstruck Part V: Dial G for Genocide
Reaching out with the tendrils of her mind, Cara found the mind of Dr. Zeron in a nightmarish dream state in which he stood in an endless graveyard despondently apologizing to each of the head stones. Delving further into the subterranean labyrinth, the heroes discovered a sarcophagus adorned with unfamiliar runes. Juliet's closer inspection triggered a sub-space portal which led her, Dr. McGreger, and Blor, the crew's simian companion, to a room containing six stasis cylinders. The only occupied cylinder contained the preserved four-armed body of Dr. Zeron. Juliet, activating a hidden latch on the signet ring she removed from the finger of the dead Emperor, revealed a three-pronged key which she used to release Dr. Zeron from the stasis chamber.
When he awoke, Dr. Zeron greeted his rescuers, and led them to a vast chamber that stretched beyond the horizon, filled with empty stasis tubes. Dr. Zeron lamented that all of his people, known as the Gaeans, were once preserved in these chambers, and wondered what had become of them. Slowly, the chilling prospect dawned upon Juliet, Dr. McGreger and their simian companion that the race of four-armed beings were enslaved - in body and mind - by the now-deceased Emperor Halcius, and then by Emperor Rahl, to serve as the armored guards of the Empire . . .
Episode Twenty-Eight: Starstruck Part VI: Rat Race
Under the direction of Dr. Zeron, the crew boarded their rocket ship and jettisoned into a nearby black hole, which transported them to Dr. Zeron's home planetoid, the central planetoid of the planetary system, where he assured the crew they could find food. Upon landing their craft, the crew encountered packs of spear-wielding, bipedal rat-kin, which Dr. Zeron explained were once domesticated pets of his people, but which had apparently since evolved into sentient creatures. Cara used her psychic abilities to communicate the concept of hunger to the rat-kin, and they led the crew to a fire pit, upon which a meaty carcass was roasting. As a gesture of good faith, Cara indulged in a taste of the main course, until Dr. McGreger pointed out that the carcass was, in fact, the remains of a dead starship pilot.
The crew loaded their rocket ship with fruit, and set their course for a planetoid on the periphery of the system that was home to a race of non-corporeal, electricity-based beings. After landing the rocket ship by a cave, Sir Heathcliffe found animal tracks leading into the cave. From the gaping maw of the cave, a net emerged, entangling Cara and dragging her into the darkness. Sir Heathcliffe and Dr. McGreger disentangled Cara from her fetters, and discovered, inside large, hairy bipeds, similar to the yeti the heroes had once encountered in the Mongolian mountains. Dr. Zeron informed the heroes that the yeti-like creatures served as biological hosts for the electrical beings, and Dr. McGreger offered the yeti-like beasts some of their newly acquired fruit as a peace offering. From a nearby stone pillar, an electrical charge leapt into the body of the crew's centaur-like companion, who then raised his lance and charged toward Dr. McGreger. As Dr. McGreger, using one of his many ancient martial arts of the Orient, effortlessly flipped the charging centaur to thwart his attack, the electrical charge jumped into the body of Dr. McGreger, who then passed it on to the yeti-like beast by touching the creature.
Through its hulking host, the electrical being communicated with Dr. McGreger, who managed to explain that the heroes came to the planetoid to seek their help in overthrowing Emperor Rahl and freeing the denizens of the planetary system of his psychic control. The electrical beings agreed to help, explaining that the Imperials had been subjugating the electrical beings by kidnaping all of their corporeal hosts from the planetoid's surface. They also expressed dismay at the fact that the Imperium was exploiting the technology of the electrical beings by turning a long-range communication tower they had built into a device to transmit Emperor Rahl's hypnotic mind waves throughout the planetary system and, thus, control its denizens. With the help of the electrical beings, the heroes designed a plan in which they would transport the rat-kin to the planet's surface to serve as hosts, thus allowing the electrical beings to infiltrate their own tower, and deactivate it, thus freeing the galaxy from the Emperor's thrall . . .
Episode Twenty-Nine: Starstruck Part VII: The Journey Home
The crew of the rocket ship landed the vessel on the a red-orange planetoid of Strata, where a hulking tower loomed within the depths of a canyon that meandered through the planetoid's surface. As Sir Heathcliffe and Cara led the electrical beings, in their rat-kin hosts, in a surprise attack against the guards at the foot of the tower, Juliet and Blor, the crew's sentient, simian companion, ascended the tower, where they encountered Emperor Rahl, who lay in wait with an entourage of guards. Juliet and Blor engaged the Emperor and his entourage in a melée as Sir Heathcliffe and the rat-kin battled the guards at the foot of the tower in a bloody skirmish in the canyon below. Had Cara not been skulking in the nearby shadows with her ray gun, the giant, mechanical soldiers the guards released would have crushed Sir Heathcliffe underfoot as they had to many of the rat-kin who fought beside him. With a few clear shots, Cara downed the mechanical colossuses in the nick of time, enabling the rat-kin to infiltrate the tower and destroy the mind-controlling apparatuses therein.
Meanwhile, on the top of the tower, Juliet called upon her mystical powers, learned from the masters of Divinidon, in the heart of the Tibetan mountains, to animate her shadow and attack the Emperor and his remaining entourage before they could stop the rat-kin's infiltration. Noticing a three-pronged outlet in the breastplate of Emperor Rahl, Juliet activated the signet ring she looted from the corpse of Emperor Halcius, which extended three prongs from its surface. During the exchange of fisticuffs, Juliet inserted the pronged signet ring into Rahl's breastplate, which short-circuited the Emperor's power supply, disconnecting him from the power of the tower, and despoiling him of his mental hold over the throng of supersoldiers below. Mysteriously, however, the shadows around them animated as Juliet's shadow had, and turned against the Crimson Wraith, as did her own shadow as well! Desperately she fought them off while Blor grappled with the Emperor. As Juliet beat off the last of the shadow monsters, Blor lifted Emperor Rahl above his head, and threw him over the edge of the tower into the abyss of the canyon. The tower surged with the energy of the electrical beings and began to break apart. With no recourse left, Juliet and Blor leapt from the deadly heights of the tower, hand in forepaw, plummeting to their doom. Juliet's attempt to grab the tower's infrastructure slowed them down, but severely burned her hands and knocked her unconscious. Using his arboreal survival skills, Blor interposed himself between Juliet and the rapidly approaching surface of the planetoid, barely saving her from death. Blor, however, did not survive the fall. When Cara and Sir Heathcliffe found Juliet and the lifeless body of Blor, they discovered, clutched in the simian's forepaw, the Emperor's breastplate and signet ring, torn asunder from Rahl's chest in the melée.
With Rahl dead and the tower destroyed, the surviving Nexian guards were freed from their hypnotic trances, and, removing their armored helmets, revealed themselves to be the enslaved Gaeans, removed from the stasis chambers of Terminus and enslaved to serve the Empire. As they made their way back to the rocket ship, Cara, Sir Heathcliffe, and Juliet encountered Dr. Zeron's original crew of the rocket ship, newly freed from the Emperor's thrall. They led the crew to back to the rocket ship where they were united with Dr. Zeron, who, in return, brought them back to Earth. The crew agreed to leave "Number Nine" frozen in stasis until the rocket ship reached Earth, and vowed never to speak of this journey to anyone, especially "Number Nine."
Meanwhile, in a secluded military base in the heart of Nazi Germany, a lone, four-armed figure sat hunched over a morass of wires and circuitry. As the Nazi officer approached his prisoner and donned his Gaean-built telepathy helmet, he warned the Gaean to complete his project quickly, and noted that the Nazi government held the life of his mother as security. Somberly, the Gaean prisoner labored on, constructing a high-tech device of indeterminable power . . . and function . . .