The events within the game itself unfold over six stages as Ford pilots the Black Fly and travels to Jupiter, confronting powerful Nemesis ships along the way. In the final two stages, Ford breaches Nemesis itself, earning a crucial chance to defeat the invading forces once and for all. From this point, there are two possible endings: If the player gets a Game Over on the final stage, Ford's death incites a military coup d'état of the global government, and 20,000 Black Fly craft are dispatched to Nemesis's apparent origin point. Otherwise, Ford confronts the leader of Nemesis in a rapidly-shifting dimension, the battle apparently culminating with the Earth being split in two; it is left unclear as to whether the Earth's destruction and the events of the game as a whole ever actually occurred.