Quote Originally Posted by Captain Morgan View Post
Actually, you might be right. I was reading the Surfer's monologue of "the hole they punched in space in their frantic effort to escape has frayed and split" as referring specifically to the dead refugees in front of him, as in they themselves had punched the hole in space. But it is possible Surfer was more referring to denizens of the Negative Zone in general having opened the portal. There were some refugee ships mentioned in the issue Annihlus opens the hole, so they might just be those folks.

And that would make more sense-- I scratched my head when I first read the Surfer issue, because the rando civilians having tech to get to the positive zone independently didn't make much sense given how big a deal the tech was in other issues. That might have been the same hole over in Nova-- time passing differently in the negative zone could mean that Void's confrontation with Beta Ray Bill might have happened after his confrontation with Nova-- potentially right after if he was chasing Richard through the portal.
The Annihilus portal Void messed with being the one Surfer witnessed also lines up with Surfer realizing it was an unsafe passageway. The Annihilus techies told him they should have run more safety testing due to being unstable, but they ran out of time to get to use it.