Vanity Press Bestseller

The Word Made Flesh

2010-06-26T23:40:00.001+01:00

"We're being scanned," Peter noted.

Jinx reversed thrust, slowing the Black Watch to a standstill.

"Full stop. We've reached the frontier."

Peter watched bits of randomness drop out of the vacuum as an array of Reyll jump mines entangled their sensors with spots of space-time near the star-ship. The Black Watch was approaching an oblate spheroid of space that divided the cluster into two halves and encompassed the five colony worlds ruled by the Reyll Theocracy. That region was protected by tens of thousands of bombs attached to simple jump drives, managed by artificial intelligences programmed to lay down their run-time to protect the Reyll way of life.

The thinking machines spoke to pass the time. When they saw something interesting enough, they would speak to their creators.

"What do we do now?" Waiting made Peter nervous.

"There are two possibilities -- we wait for a patrol ship and try to negotiate passage, or we charge in and hope you can catch the bombs before we get blown up."

"Well? Let's--"

"Slow down there. If I'm right, the Reyll have a problem they are poorly equipped to handle. They may actually ask for help."

Peter was skeptical. "Really? I thought they were-- wait a minute, someone is transmitting. "

Carrier and protocol matched well-known signatures for Reyll military communication. Peter patched the payload's audio stream through an automated translation system.

"Intruder vessel -- violation of special forbidden zone. No restraint vast destruction imminent. Compliance now!"

Jinx scowled. "Needs more verb. Replay the original before they get impatient."

Peter fiddled, and a weary voice came over the audio.

"Ne masto mrll na da kozh bay goghyah naxhell. Ne pee masezh mai ma pagirla pa lo. Na elozh bay elozh ka brrllm."

"Foreign vessel -- you are approaching a quarantine zone. The situation in this area is uncontrollable and dangerous. Immediate cooperation is required," Jinx translated. "The machine translation is less than useless. Let me talk to them."

Reluctantly, Peter opened a channel for Jinx, and she spoke.

"Bay elozh ka brrllm an lo -- bay Rllmahimja pah masto Kahoprat mai pee na elozh. Ne masto lo pee kahrazh mahall. Na elozh mai ka lo nah hodam brrllm?"

The audio stream clearly recorded the remote peer's insulted grunt, followed shortly by an end-of-file indicator.

"Uh-huh. That seemed to have helped." Peter was worried.

"Stay slinky. We're going to need an escort, and they should show up shortly."

The Reyll warship materialized a few thousand kilometers from their position.

"They have weapons lock--" Peter warned.

"Yeah. Don't do anything unwise." Jinx left the helm and walked towards Peter. "Keep your eyes on the prize."

"What?"

Jinx flicked the back of Peter's head. He flinched with pain and reached to see if the back of his skull was still there.

"Ow. What the hell did you--"

"Foreign vessel -- we will escort you to the incident site. Please take all weapons systems offline." The transmission came from the Reyll warship. Peter had the odd sensation that the words he understood were not the words he had heard.

"I understood that. Why did I understand that?"

"A wizard did it, namely me. Now, let's play nice, and see what's happened."

Shortly after Peter took the Black Watch's weapons systems offline, the Reyll warship turned and took a course through normal space to a vector inside the forbidden zone. He ordered the ship's computer to follow.

After a short while, he saw the spur, and the ragged sail that hung absurdly in space, not flapping in a non-existent wind. It extended from an irregular structure that could only be described as a meatball, a rough spheroid mass of disorganized tissue.

Peter looked at the viewscreen slack-jawed and helpless. He was relieved when he heard Jinx breathe in sharply. He turned to her.

"What--"

"I don't know. Is it alive?"

This was a question he could answer. He felt the thing with his senses.

"No. It's dead inside. The portion of it with life support is decaying rapidly. It's like some kind of cyst."

Peter shuddered in the command chair. He leaned forward towards the view-screen and tensed up. A transmission came from the Reyll ship, and he looked sharply at the screen.
"This is the anomaly. A Hunter squad engaged the intruder, and it made this out of them. Our talents say it is dead, then they say there is something wrong, then they start screaming. Gravimetric scans indicate a massive spatial anomaly with enormous potential energy."

Jinx's own scans confirmed what the warship captain had said. She sent the results to the display in Peter's armrest.

He looked at the numbers and boggled. It was within an order of magnitude of the mass of the primordial singularity.

There was a long silence. Peter spoke. "Understood."

Whatever was inside the tumor in space was about to create a new universe.

He paused, looked at the monstrous thing on the view-screen. "We will investigate -- see what can be done. We will approach the cyst."

"All clear. Let us know if we can help."

As the Black Watch slowly pulled closer, Peter and Jinx spotted a vast sphincter on the leathery surface of the sphere.

"What an asshole."

Jinx wished her joke was funnier.

Peter tried to help.

"So, what do we do? Tickle it, buy it a drink..." Peter trailed off.

"We're gonna need a lot of lube to get the ship in there."

They both wished they could laugh.

"I think we're going to have to get off the ship. Are you ready?"

"No."

They went to the air-lock anyway.

Jinx wrapped her arms around Peter's shoulders and he carried her through space to the purplish-red orifice. Aiming for the middle of the fleshy circle, they both closed their eyes as they pushed through the fleshy ring and emerged into a hall filled with foul vapors, an atmosphere of decay.

What they saw before them defied comprehension. Shattered parts of Reyll warships, tendrils of flesh and sinew, tangled vascular trees filled with clotting blood, twisted into a tight knot of space-time that very obviously was a portion of a four-dimensional structure.

Peter recognized the topology. "Well, the good news is that we're already inside it. It only has an inside."

"We're going to have to get closer." Jinx did not sound happy with the idea.

They flew closer, following a curved surface of bruised pink flesh. After a following a bend, they lost sight of the outside.

"Peter - I... I see something." Jinx pointed to a black pool on the ground.

They landed, and Jinx reluctantly climbed down from Peter's arms. Peter looked at the rippling pool of black oil.

"What the hell is that?"

"It's an eversion point. It punches through to outside the universe."

Peter looked around.

"Everything here is dead and decaying. All the potential energy is behind that pool."

"Then that's where Nyqll is. This is the way to his lodge."

They both trembled a little. They had become inured to the overwhelming strangeness of their surroundings. Now, they were confronted with a gateway into the unknown.

They looked at each other. Jinx stretched out her hand towards Peter, and he took it.

Peter spoke first. "Do you think we'll be able to get back out again?"

"I don't know. Maybe not. It's probably a domain ruled by Nyqll's will. A prototype for his new universe."

They thought for a moment, holding hands.

"OK. We're going to do this anyway, right?"

"Of course." Jinx smiled, and looked at Peter sadly. "We're superheroes, right?"

They stepping into the pool together and fell into darkness. The hallucinogenic black oil dazed their senses, subjecting them to terrible visions as they plummeted. Somewhere along the way, Jinx's hand slipped out of Peter's.

Shortly afterward, they both hit the dusty, sandy ground hard.

Peter opened his eyes first, and looked up at a bone-white sky. "Jinx?"

"I'm over here." She rolled over in the dust. "My head-- owww...."

Peter went to her and examined her head for injuries. He couldn't find any. "I think you're all right."

He looked around the dusty plain. A road of trampled dirt led towards the gates of a large city surrounded by mud brick walls. Jinx got up and followed him down the road.

As the approached, a robed figure carrying a staff with bells on the end approached them. As the figure took notice of Peter and Jinx, he began mournfully wailing "Tamei, tamei".

"What?"

"He's a leper. He's unclean. I--"

"What? How do you know this place?"

"I-- I can't explain. Why aren't we flying over the walls?"

Peter thought for a moment.

"I don't know. It doesn't seem to make sense."

Jinx looked at the back of her hand and wiggled her fingers. "Ontological control. The presence can influence us by eliminating alternatives."

"The presence?"

Jinx looked horrified. "I can't say his name."

The leper approached. "Tamei, tamei."

He pulled down his hood. Jinx recognized him instantly, despite the lesions covering half his face. "Jack!"

"Nah. Jack's not here right now. Most of me is still inside him." The leper pointed upwards. "You're going to need an ass. It's part of the story."

"We're going to need a what?" asked Peter, perplexed.

"An ass."

Jinx peered at Peter's backside. "He has a perfectly serviceable ass. What do you mean by story?"

"No." The leper smiled as another man approached with a strange, grey-furred quadruped with a grotesquely long face, long tufted ears, and broad shoulders and hips. "An ass."

"Oh." Peter pointed at the creature. "That's... an ass. All right."

"Can we please stop talking about asses -- what's the deal with the story?" Jinx was irritated.

"Oh, you know this one. How do you know this one? It's not one of ours. It belongs to the humans." The leper smiled and gestured strangely as he said this. "Come on, don't lose the plot now. They call it the greatest story ever told."

In Love's Image

2010-05-11T21:43:00.000+01:00

The Nightstalker started its descent over the Flash Desert of Bestos, a severe and lasting glassy surface left when Corporate forces flattened the last Reyll fortress-city with a brace of antimatter bombs. Even fifty years later, the shiny desert resisted the encroachment of the equatorial jungle.

The First Mate sat in the command chair. Jolt stood to the left of him, looking a little uncomfortable. The Eye was at the helm, busy monitoring the re-entry sequence.

The First Mate turned and looked at Jolt. "Are you all right?"

"All right? I'm great."

Jolt was lying. She looked terrible, like she had been crying instead of sleeping.

A mountain range rushed past below the ship as it levelled out and decelerated, followed shortly thereafter by a blink of sandy coast and a stretch of glassy green sea dotted with brown froth -- an algal salt plain, an example of the kind of undersea habitat that produced most of the planet's native oxygen and sequestered most of the ocean's minerals.

The silence on the bridge was oppressive. Jolt paced next to the command chair.

The water turned deep blue as the continental shelf fell away. The Nightstalker slowed to subsonic speed as it made its final approach to the lonely volcanic island where Drazen East had his estate.

"Prepare for landing." The First Mate was tense. Landings always made him nervous, and water landings were particularly nerve-wracking.

"Deploying pontoons," Thresher stated as he braced himself.

Jolt continued pacing, oblivious to what was happening around her.

The Eye counted down. "Planet-fall in 4... 3... 2... 1..."

There was a slight shudder as the Nightstalker touched down on the freshwater ocean's surface, supported by two bright orange inflatable cylinders. It approached a dock built on a black sand beach that disappeared into a lush green jungle.

Jolt had stopped pacing. She was staring at the view-screen.

A tiny figure stood at the end of the docks, standing next to a trunk and waving.

"Father."

She said the word with no apparent feeling.

The star-ship slowed as it approached the dock. The First Mate cleared his throat to get Jolt's attention.

"Here's the warrant." He gave her a thin sheet of programmable paper. "It looks like he'll come quietly."

Jolt didn't say anything. She took the display with a quick snapping gesture and no change of expression, turned on her heel, and left the bridge along with Thresher and the Eye.

They disembarked through the dorsal port airlock on the spade-shaped hull of the star-ship. It was a short walk to the wood and plastic dock from there.

Jolt went first, walking slowly and deliberately to the short, gesticulating figure waiting at the end of the pier. Behind her, the Eye's compact, muscular form was a contrast with Thresher's lumbering cyborg body.

"No mooks," the Eye whispered.

"What?" Thresher replied.

"They said there would be mooks." The Eye seemed disappointed.

Jolt said nothing.

"Sweetie! Just look at you!" Drazen East was a short, pudgy male with dark gray fur and coppery eyes. He was a stark contrast to his statuesque, red-furred daughter. He beamed with pride.

She looked at him coldly. With a sweeping gesture, she held the warrant in front of his face.

He looked at it for a moment and grinned. "Oh, dear. You know the Committee on Cloning Ethics is little more than a glorified trade association, right?" Drazen turned to look at his heavy trunk. "I packed my things for that?"

He tried to meet his daughter's gaze, but only saw her unsmiling face. He hesitated for a moment, and finally thought to take the paper from her hand.

Chastised, he looked up at her and pleaded, "At least come with me and have a cup of coffee before you take me away. We haven't talked in so long..."

He got no response. Jolt seemed to look through him.

"Please."

"Father." Her gaze finally turned to him. "What exactly does regret mean?"

He looked puzzled and thought for a moment.

"I-- I don't know. Why are you asking?"

Jolt blinked. She did not know what to say next.

Drazen took the initiative. "Please. Come with me." He led Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye to a small wooden house next to the beach.

The interior was simple. A few glossy black gadgets to cook food and clean dishes sat on the wooden counter inside the hut, next to a shiny pot and an extra-large refrigerator. A beaded curtain led to an underground passage buried in the steep hillside. Four chairs made of palm-wood and carefully process preserved fronds stood around a simple hardwood table made from a tree that grew two light-years from here.

A careful arrangement of orchids decorated the table.

Drazen pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. He placed the paper on the table and clapped his hands. A shiny bipedal robot stepped through the curtain to fetch the coffee.

Jolt took the chair across from her father without saying a word. The robot's actuators whirred as it took a set of plastic cups and saucers from cupboards concealed in the walls of the hut.

Thresher and the Eye stood behind Jolt. The Eye crossed her arms.

"I'll bet you were expecting a clone servant," Drazen burbled, "but I have to deal with enough of that in my line of work."

The robot brought four cups of coffee, and placed them on the table. Drazen took a sip from his cup. Jolt ignored hers.

"Well, look at you! My daughter, the superheroine!"

Jolt waited for a moment. "They had to put me in a containment suit when I was twelve. My body generated electricity, uncontrollably. It started the year after Mom was terminated."

Drazen waved his hand. "Oh, it can be controlled. It's quite simple, really..."

Jolt didn't answer. The robot left the way it came.

Jolt spoke again. "You knew we were coming."

Drazen smiled. "Yes, I have my connections."

Jolt looked at him coldly. "So do we."

For all of the awkwardness of the situation thus far, Drazen had maintained a composed air. For the first time, worry crept into his face.

"Yes. I suppose you do."

Jolt continued. "Leviathan talked. He shot the Arcana hit. The Grays know everything."

"Wait--" Worry became fear.

"It was a trap. The Corporation's not ready for war."

"But-- the Chairman's wife, she was--"

"The Grays don't trust the Blacks. They knew the Blacks would see weaponized superheroes as a chance to gain influence, get their hands on some military budget. They let the Blacks set up Graves, and watched where the money went."

Drazen became agitated, and reached for the paper.

Instead of the text of the warrant, he saw a picture of himself, looking confused.

"What? You're filming this?"

He looked up, and a second image appeared on the paper, showing him from the side.

"What is this supposed to be? Extra-judicial executions as light family entertainment?"

"Well, things sure got dramatic," the Eye remarked laconically. "See? They changed camera angles!"

Jolt crossed her arms. "That's up to you. But you're not getting away with this one. They caught you with your hand in the till."

Drazen looked like someone had hit him in the face. He leaned back in his chair, slack-jawed.

His hand reached for a spray canister beneath his seat.

"Watch it!" The Eye moved, but Drazen was faster. He flipped a trigger on the canister, releasing a cloud of liquid droplets into Jolt's face.

The reaction was immediate. Jolt grabbed for her throat and fell from the chair, wheezing. The Eye and Thresher gathered around her.

Drazen bolted for the curtain, turned back, and said, "She's going into shock. Please don't let her die." He then darted away into the underground tunnel.

Thresher plugged himself into Jolt's containment suit's monitors.

"She's discharged. Rapid pulse, low blood pressure."

The Eye was agitated. "What did he do to her?"

"He shut down her powers. All the metabolic processes that charge her up have been disrupted."

Jolt began to convulse. "Cardiac arrhythmia. She's losing it." Thresher began carefully opening Jolt's suit. "I'm gonna have to use the defibrillator."

The cyborg looked up at the Eye. "Get the bastard. I'll stabilize her and get her to the ship."

The Eye nodded, and pursued through the beaded curtain.

The corridor was dark, but her amulet could see in the dark, the future, and into people's minds. She drew one of her diamond knives from her hip holster, and sensed Drazen running in the darkness down a flight of stairs.

She pursued, coming to a large open room. It looked like a child's imagining of a super-villain's lair. An empty vat with transparent walls was in the middle of the room -- perhaps to view the merchandise? -- and the walls were covered in machines and indicator lights.

A drawer was pulled out of a console. Drazen had pulled something out quickly.

That meant he was armed.

A passage led to the staircase down.

The hallway was lined with smaller translucent tubes filled with turbid glowing yellow liquid. As she rushed after Drazen, a hand pressed on the inside of one of the cylinders.

She continued her pursuit, into a large rectangular chamber filled with pumps and tanks. Ducts and cable runs hung form the ceiling. Glowing yellow liquid was pulled from siphon tubes into a huge translucent-walled vat on the other end of the room.

Drazen had taken cover behind a recirculation pump next to the base of the vat. He swept the targeting beam of his civilian-grade laser disruptor, looking for some reflection that might betray the Eye's presence.

The Eye paused for a moment. Drazen had a clear line of fire once she left the cover of the tanks. She looked up at a duct that ran gently downwards to the top of the vat, right above Drazen's position, and took a flash-bang from her belt.

Drazen heard the click as she armed the grenade, and fired into the darkness. Twin laser tubes pulsed out of sync, and sparks exploded from a metal pipe.

The gun recharged with a high-pitched whine.

"You don't have to murder me. I'll work with the Grays. Make them body doubles, infiltrators -- anything they want." He shifted his grip. The gun became unpleasantly warm as the energy store reached the tripping point. "Anything they want."

The Eye somersaulted over a tank with a knife in her hand. Drazen raised his handgun and prepared to fire again. The Eye closed the distance with a back-flip. Drazen drew a bead --

The flash-bang grenade rolled off the duct and detonated just above Drazen's head.

The gun clattered to the floor.

The Eye was on her feet, lunging forwards.

The diamond knife rammed into Drazen East's chest, lifting him off his feet and pinning him to the vat.

Blinded and bleeding out, Drazen lifted his right hand. In his last moments of consciousness, he noticed that it was wet with blood.

"...is that mine?..."

His last breath followed shortly thereafter.

The Eye turned and slowly walked back to her colleagues.

Courage

2010-03-20T01:42:00.001+01:00

Both members of the crew of the Black Watch were on the bridge.

"So, he's already in Reyll space?" Peter leaned back in the command chair, gripping the arms of the seat tightly.

"He crossed over a little while ago. Triggered the jump mines, got overrun by a Hunter squadron. From what I can make out, they have the area under quarantine." Jinx looked at him carefully. Was he angry? Was he sad? All she saw was restrained aggression and impatience, a hypomanic urgency that scared her -- especially after she saw what he was capable of.

"Any sign of mobilization? Are they--"

"No." Jinx took a second look at the sensor readouts at the helm station. "Not yet, anyway."

"I think I have a plan." Peter sat up straight. "But I need some advice."

"Of course." Jinx wanted to help.

"I want you to stay on the ship. Be ready to get the hell out if things go wrong, and keep your distance." Peter paused. "I'll close in and try to hit him with gravity-based attacks. Maybe do that inflation thing I did to Leviathan. If we're lucky, I'll manage to tear him apart before he kills me."

Jinx took a deep breath, and shook a little.

"That's a terrible plan."

"Well, I--"

"You don't understand." Jinx was afraid. "There's someone inside Nyqll. An innocent man. I was supposed to protect him."

"I think it's a little too late."

"I have to try. I promised him that."

There was a long pause. Something Jinx had said had changed Peter's mind. He looked at her for a while, and when she examined his face carefully, she saw something like a smile.

"All right. I understand."

He relaxed a little, and continued "So we need a better plan. Let me see..."

"Maybe I can help. I still have some of the black oil left."

"Use it as a weapon?" Peter grinned. "Yes!"

"No. I -- he was exposed to it. Maybe if you look at a sample--"

"Then I could figure out his weakness! Of course!"

He was still worryingly aggressive, but at least they were both on the same side. Jinx led him to the briefing room, and summoned her last dewar of black oil. Peter leaned forward towards the container as she carefully placed it on the table.

He seemed fascinated, and observed the dewar in silence for a long moment.

"Where did you get this stuff, Jinx?"

"Outside the cluster. A charming little world orbiting an orange star with a nameless crypt-city buried beneath a field of imported grass."

Peter looked at the dewar again.

"So, the planet wasn't just a radioactive lump of strange matter. That's... kind of surprising, actually." He paused. He was not looking at the dewar, but it was clear that he was sensing what was going on inside the container. His eyes would briefly close for a second or two, and twitch like someone having a vivid dream. "I can't sense the stuff directly. Too much magic. But what it's doing on a quantum level is really strange -- it reminds me of some theories about mirror matter."

"Mirror matter?"

"Matter is defined by a set of potentials. These potentials can be distinguished as quanta of various forces. These forces are interrelated, and only exist in certain configurations -- certain geometries, among other things." He paused.

"This stuff has a geometry that's a mirror image to the way ordinary matter is organized. It should be like a ghost to us, only interacting gravitationally."

Jinx thought for a moment. "Well, the story I heard is that this is some kind of waste product from an interstellar transit system. There was this white mist that would form bridges in space-time to far-away worlds. When the bridge collapsed, it left this stuff behind."

"A condensate. First it coated the travelers and created a environment they could handle -- then it peeled back off, turning itself inside out in the process." Peter leaned back in his chair. "It sounds plausible, at least. Wish it helped me beat Nyqll."

"You don't have to beat him, Peter." Jinx sat down next to him. "I know the name of the man inside that monster. I can pull him out."

Peter looked at her, and she felt something she was not expecting -- love and admiration, coming from him. He said, "I don't want Nyqll to hurt you."

"I know. You'll have to figure out how to pin him down and keep him busy."

"All right." His voice sounded a little more relaxed, but also frightened. "I'm so used to doing this alone."

"Yeah. That's why you get your ass kicked all the time."

The Paper Tiger

2010-03-15T00:38:00.001+01:00

Executive Officer Franco had the helm of the Nightstalker.

He was alone on the bridge. Jolt had retired to her stateroom. The Eye and Thresher accompanied her.

This wasn't a time to leave her alone.

Franco pulled up the criminal records of Jolt's father, Drazen East. A long list of convictions, prison sentences commuted by powerful friends, shadowy connections to the Corporation's elite managers. His connections to the deep state had kept him free.

For a career criminal, East had done well for himself. His estate on Bestos was an island in a temperate fresh-water sea on the northern hemisphere. Many senior Corporate executives had smaller properties. The private spaceport was small, but large enough for the Nightstalker to land.

The twinge of resentment the combination of East's prosperity and criminal record kept Franco digging through the documentation. He had a list -- all the plaintiffs in the numerous criminal cases where Drazen East was a defendant. He had put together the data gathered from investigating the illegal clones together with a bibliography referencing previous cases.

It was simply a matter of running through the list and sending the documents. Routine police work.

The All-Org Ethics Bureau on Bestos replied first, with a nondescript form letter thanking Franco for bringing this matter to their attention. Franco suspected that a complaint wasn't going to be coming from them any time soon.

While he wondered what made them so hesitant to go after East, a second message came in, marked for urgent attention and counter-signed by the Adjudicator General of the Amalgamated Public Security Services.

It was a complaint, filed by the Committee on Cloning Ethics, with an attached warrant for Drazen East's immediate arrest.

"Gotcha."

Franco paged Jolt.

"What is it?" She sounded like she had been sobbing.

"We have a warrant. Let's get the bastard."

Miracles

2010-03-08T00:23:00.001+01:00

Jinx floated in deep vacuum. Her body had stopped metabolizing oxygen a few minutes ago.

She watched Peter as he floated in the void. Her mind had reached out to him, and recoiled as she felt the vast amounts of information flowing through his consciousness.

He was in a trance, a deep one. Two glowing balls of matter formed near him.

Matter and anti-matter. He was sorting virtual particles.

She was not scared by the void that surrounded them. She watched his mind, felt it racing, and rejoiced.

Something was happening.

She couldn't follow what he was doing, but she knew.

She watched him, felt around the edges of his mind -- and felt fear.

Her mind was powerful, a dreadful thing of parts that devoured souls. She could read a mind like a billboard, and a community of minds like a book. She had seen, contemplated, and done things that would break the strongest minds.

She watched something impossible. His mind was like a machine, a terrible all-consuming mechanism, a fever dream apparatus that grew twisting, turning, pulsing, and grinding until it consumed all of reality.

He was gambling with the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and winning handily. From nothing, there was something.

Ever increasing amounts of something condensed from nothingness.

She felt a thrill when he began synthesizing strangelets.

Dopants for a weak-force band-gap, they were the basis for neutrino circuitry.

Hours passed.

The anti-matter cloud collapsed. He has pressed it into a geometric point, constructing a tiny black hole that sputtered with decay radiation as he used it to stress the vacuum to create ever stranger constructs.

The structure beside it was no longer a cloud. Her suspicions were correct -- a spade-shaped starship took form next to the proton-sized gravitational singularity. The pieces fell into place.

The singularity boiled away, and the copy of the Nightstalker remained. He seemed to waken from his trance, and floated into the ship.

It approached her, and the outer door of an airlock opened.

She thought, "Stupid powerful." He had re-created what he had lost, when he could have made anything. The phrase seemed to fit.

She drifted into the ship, and the outer door closed. She braced for impact, and absorbed the impact of the drifting vessel.

Systems where slowly coming on-line. The inner door opened to a darkened corridor, but the lights turned on after she walked a few meters.

She readjusted to breathing, and approached the bridge.

The door opened automatically.

He was sitting in the command chair, and turned to face her.

"Welcome aboard." His voice was tired. He looked exhausted. "What do you want to call it?"

She very briefly considered saying something sarcastic. Part of her wanted to cut him down to size, reject the impossible thing she had just experienced.

"I-- I don't know." She thought for a moment. "The Black Watch?"

He smiled. "All right. I've generated a new key-pair. We'll be on-line in a few minutes. Wanna take helm?"

The banality of his request shocked her a little, but she had to admit that she was looking forward to piloting a copy of the Nightstalker.

She sat down at her station, and turned to him.

"You know -- if you're just going to make a copy of your old ship, you should do something to make it different. Like a different color or something."

His eyes narrowed. "Hmm. It is a pirate copy..."

He snapped his fingers. The hull turned black, except for a skull motif on the blade of the spade.

Jinx giggled.

Peter dead-panned, "It was that or flames."

They laughed for a few moments, and as they quieted down again, Peter slumped in the command chair.

Jinx became serious.

"So, what do we do now?"

Peter looked like he was about to fall asleep.

"Now?"

He paused for a beat.

"We find this god person and kick his ass."

Problems

2010-03-02T07:38:00.002+01:00

"They're just... floating in space." The Eye had just taken her position at the helm, and was scanning the immediate area around the Nightstalker.

"Get us the hell out of here. Before they decide to attack." Jolt sat down in the command chair.

"Destination?" Thresher plugged himself into the engineering console.

There was a long pause. Jolt rubbed her temples, as if she had a headache.

"Bestos 3."

"Bestos 3? " Thresher sounded skeptical.

"Yeah. We'll be landing on the surface." Jolt looked grim.

"They're still not doing anything."

"Are they dead?"

"No."

"Turn the ship around. Prepare for jump."

The engines engaged, and the Nightstalker entered hyperspace.

The bridge was quiet. Jolt looked like she was about to cry.

Thresher looked up from his panel. "Captain?"

"What?"

"We have a visitor. It's the First Mate."

Executive Officer Benito Franco was waiting in the antechamber to the bridge. He took a moment to arrange his mane as the door opened. He squared his shoulders and entered the bridge.

"What the hell is going on here?" Benito strutted toward the command chair.

Jolt sulked. "What are you talking about?" She tried to ignore the young officer.

"Was there a court-martial, and nobody invited me?"

There was a brief silence. Jolt turned her head and looked Benito in the eye.

"No. There was an immediate threat to the safety of the ship and its crew."

"Really."

"There was a murder on board."

"All right. That's a good reason -- which you could have presented at a military tribunal."

"I've got a right -- a right to protect my crew."

"From another crew member?"

"From anybody or anything."

Benito was cut short; he looked carefully at the woman sitting in the command chair. He took a deep breath.

"You're doing it wrong."

Jolt looked at him with a steady, unresponsive gaze. "Then someone will just have to file a complaint."

"Captain Jennifer East, the standard Military Contract allows me to take command of this vessel in the event the commanding officer is unable or unwilling to assume the responsibilities of command--"

"You little bastard." Jolt scowled at Benito. "You're invoking Executive Privilege? On me!?"

"Yes. I am in command of this vessel, effective now."

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye scowled at him, but Benito didn't back down.

"Now -- explain to me why we are flying to Bestos 3."

"My father. My father made the clones." Jolt stared Benito down. "He's been doing it for as long as I remember. He'll take bits and pieces and splice them together into whatever the customer wants. He took a dormant sample from one of the Seven Sisters--"

"Who?" Benito was listening carefully.

"A Reyll mutant-rights group. They tried to fight the prejudice against people born with a word of power encoded in their genes. He took a tissue sample from the Kebakika line, and cloned my mother."

Benito was shocked. "Isn't that illegal?"

"He was in and out of prison my whole life. That didn't stop the customers from coming."

Jolt paused for a moment and looked away. She held back tears.

When she looked at Benito again, her expression was hard and pitiless.

"So we're going to take that bastard down."

Does It Hurt You When I Do This?

2010-02-20T22:13:00.000+01:00

Jolt sat on a bed in sickbay and fidgeted. She was tense.

The door slid open, and Arsenal and Jinx walked in. Arsenal was carrying a heavy cable with two alligator clips, and Jinx carried a small plastic case.

"Captain? Are you ready?"

Jolt grimaced. "Sure. Make it quick." She stretched her arm towards Arsenal, and he clipped one end of the grounding cable to a metal stub on the sleeve of her costume. She inspected the connection, then pulled up the bottom of her shirt to expose her red-furred belly.

"Is that enough?"

Jinx glanced briefly at Jolt. "That will do."

Jinx opened the case and removed what appeared to be a coiled hose and set it on the table. The tip of one end of the hose was a shiny hollow spike of metal ringed with tiny cutting blades.

Jolt took a long look at the metal spike.

"Just a moment." Jinx retrieved a sample jar from the case, and affixed the other end of the hose to a plug on the jar's cap. She looked at Jolt with a sidelong glance. "I'll be taking a sample of your abdominal epithelial tissue. You might want some anesthetic."

Jolt nodded curtly. "Forget about it. I'm on duty, and need a clear head."

Jinx grinned evilly just out of Jolt's view. "This might sting a bit."

She pressed a button on the remote, and the plastic and steel-tipped plastic snake sprang to life. The tiny blades spun up with a high-pitched whine.

"Lie down and hold still." Jolt complied, stiffly and nervously.

Jolt's eyes widened as the device slithered towards her belly. The sound of tiny spinning blades rang in her ears. She clenched her fist as the snake-like apparatus reared back and struck.

The metal head bored into Jolt's belly, near her umbilical cord. She winced -- it hurt. The clear plastic tube of the device was colored red with a thin stream of blood. A few drops fell into the collection jar.

Jinx scowled. "Whoops."

Jolt fought her panic, clenched her teeth and arched her back. More blood spattered into the collection jar. Jinx maintained a forced neutral expression. "Stop that. I'll need you to hold still."

Arsenal scowled at Jinx, and whispered under his breath, "That's enough."

Jinx straightened up. "I'm in position now. Acquiring sample."

A tiny gobbet of epithelial tissue was chewed away by the endoscope, propelled down the tube, and deposited in the specimen jar.

Jolt looked like she wanted to cry.

"I'm pulling out now."

The endoscope withdrew, Jolt cried out in pain as it cauterized the wound in her belly. She curled up into a ball and scowled at Jinx.

Jinx detached the sample jar and walked towards Arsenal, who was also scowling. "Thank you for your cooperation, Captain. We'll get right on the analysis!"

"You do that." Jolt covered her oozing wound with her hand.

Arsenal looked helplessly at Jolt. "Do you need any help?"

"Get out." Jolt lay down on the bed. "I'll be fine."

A few moments later, in Arsenal's stateroom, Jinx started the analysis of the tissue sample. Arsenal stood, leaning against the bulkhead. He scowled and looked at the refrigerator.

"Done. This should be quick." She turned to Peter and noticed that he was ignoring her.

"What's wrong?"

"What did you think you were doing back there?"

"It was just a bit of fun."

"Fun?!" Peter was angry and hurt. "What, hurting people is 'fun' for you?"

"Hurting the deserving?" Jinx sneered. "Oh, yes."

"What did she do--"

"Come on, robot boy. Come out and say it. 'My boss is a bitch.' You can do that, can't you?" Jinx stared down Peter, until Peter turned away.

"You're all a bunch of self-righteous idiots," he mumbled. He turned to Jinx. "And that means you, too. You don't care who you hurt, or what you destroy, as long as it's you who comes out on top."

Jinx started to speak, but an increasingly angry Peter interrupted her.

"I know why she is the way she is. She's in charge, and that means that everyone is constantly second-guessing every decision she makes. She's responsible--"

Jinx interrupted him. "She makes bad decisions. And she hates you, Peter. You have no idea how much she hates you." Jinx stood up and took Peter's hand. "You're a disruption and an irritant. Your very existence undermines her, because you're powerful and competent and worst of all -- you make her look bad."

"Yeah, well -- let's talk about competence, shall we?" Peter looked sad and angry. "You discover some crack-brained plan to turn superheroes into living weapons, and what do you do about it? Did you ever actually talk to--"

"Shh. Why do you think I'm here?"

They both looked at the refrigerator. "She--"

"--was created to be a victim. I'm sorry."

"We need to get rid of the body."

"No." Jinx squeezed Peter's hand and looked sad. "I'm so sorry."

"What?"

"No matter what happens next, I want you to know something -- I may never become whatever you think a good person is, but I am trying to do the right thing."

Peter's doorbell chimed. "It's time," whispered Jinx.

He opened the door to his stateroom. Thresher's bulky cyborg body filled the door frame. The Eye and Jolt stood behind him. "Hey, bro. I heard yelling. How are you two doing?"

"Great, we're--"

"Mind if we come in?" asked the Eye.

"It's--" Peter stammered.

Thresher pushed past Peter, and took a long look around the stateroom. Jolt and the Eye followed.

Jinx sat down at the workstation and looked at the screen. "We're not quite done yet."

"Oh, really," Jolt remarked. "I can't wait to find out the results."

The Eye positioned herself between Peter and the refrigerator.

"I know -- I get us some brews while we wait." Thresher walked to the refrigerator and pulled the door open.

The corpse of Jinx's clone fell out of the compartment with a dull thump.

"Oh, now that's awkward," quipped the Eye.

Jolt approached Peter. She looked enraged. "What the hell, hero?"

"I--" Thresher came up behind the stammering Peter and pinned both his arms behind his back.

"I don't care. I think dealing with a woman was just a little too much for you. You lost your temper and killed her." Jolt wheeled around and pointed at Jinx, who looked up from her workstation. "And then you brought her back--"

"That's stupid! I can't resurrect the dead!"

Jolt closed in on Peter. "That's my problem with you. I have no idea what you're capable of."

"I didn't kill her."

"I don't care."

Jinx drummed her fingers on the desk in front of her. "I have the results. The Captain's sample is a fifty percent match--"

"Yes. That's right. I know who made those cloned demigods -- I know that sequence of forced-growth genes." Jolt bore down on Jinx, who recoiled. "Daddy grew mommy in a vat. All the other kids made fun of me--"

"What?" Peter tried to pull away from Thresher and was restrained.

"My daddy. It's my daddy. He made them." Jolt shook with rage, and turned to Peter. "I want you off my ship."

"I didn't--"

"I don't want to hear it. Murder and necromancy, on board my ship -- I don't care what you have to say. It doesn't mat--"

"Of course it matters," Peter complained, almost whispering.

"Let go of him." Jolt turned to face him, looking like she was ready to start a fight.

Peter turned around to look at Thresher as he let go of his arms. The cyborg's face was an expressionless mask.

Arsenal took a step forwards, facing Jolt.

"Go ahead. Do it."

Jolt delivered the challenge with a growl. She looked angry, angrier than Peter had ever seen her before.

"No." Peter's arms stayed by his side.

"I want you and your sex toy off my ship, now!"

"Who, me?" Jinx. "What did I ever do to you?" She sounded theatrically hurt.

A moment later, they stood in the threshold of the port airlock.

Peter was shaking. He was trying very hard not to be afraid.

Jinx seemed calm. She was still very obviously play-acting that she a clueless innocent.

"I've been fired...." Peter's head sank as he said the words.

"Worse things happen every day." Jinx smiled. "Maybe you can file a complaint when we get back to civilization."

"What's the matter with you?"

"Lots of things." She reached out to hold Peter's hand. "Like when I was out in that box, and it was so cold, and I started to forget what it was like to breathe... that messed me up."

Peter's touched her shoulder, pulling her closer. She looked up into his eyes.

"But I'm getting better."

The airlock opened.

Flash Forward

2009-07-26T22:48:00.001+01:00

"Victor! Don't--"

But he did.

Thresher hit the dirt as the device detonated over the alien city. The cyborg was afraid, teribly afraid--

The vision ended.

Thresher recovered first, and triggered the alert. "Where the hell is Arsenal?" he thought.
"One kilowatt. Excellent work, Jennifer."

"Thanks, Doctor." Jolt was in a clinic on a rocky, rugged, and beautful island on the world Bestos. She lay on a hospital bed, her body covered in bioelectric sensors.

She had been there for some time. "You've been a great help. Have you heard from my agent?"

"I have good news and bad news. Command's gone to Victor. Entertainment Division says they need some fresh faces after what happened."

Jolt's face darkened.

The doctor continued. "But you have a spot on the team. You just need to adapt to the new situation. You need to learn to see yourself as others see you--"

She snapped awake. She was sitting in the command chair of the Nightstalker. All was well.

"What just happened?"

Thresher answered. "Some kind of hallucinogen gas. I've called red alert."

"Good. Well done."

She stroked the arms of her command chair, and glanced over to the Eye's station. The Eye lay on the ground, twitching.

Vertigo. Pain.

The Eye struggled to her feet. A cold steel grip grabbed the back of her neck, and slammed her head-first into a bulkhead. The mirrored implants covering her empty eye sockets shattered.

"Why am I blind? What happened to my amulet?" She panicked.

She felt the presence inside her mind. "You have no idea what that thing can do, do you? It can see far more than the present or the future."

The Eye tried to stand up again. "Why are you doing this?"

"I can't risk you exposing me. The stakes are too high."

She fell, and listened to the footsteps approach her, closing in for the kill.

Her mind wandered. Things didn't feel right -- this wasn't a premonition. What was it--

The bridge of the Nightstalker faded into view. She looked at her own face and sighed a relieved sigh when she saw that the implants covering her empty eye-sockets were still intact.

She curled up into a ball on the floor. Her amulet let her watch as Jolt stood up and approached her, and see the look of concern on her Captain's face.

"What happened?"

"Some kind of hallucination. We're--"

The door to the bridge opened, and Arsenal and Jinx entered. Arsenal spoke.

"Captain. Permission to bring a non-combatant on the bridge?"

Jolt looked at him skeptically.

"Why?"

"I didn't want to leave her alone." He paused for a beat. "It's not safe."

The Eye got up slowly and nodded to Jolt to show her that she wasn't hurt. Jolt started back to her command chair, looking at Arsenal and Jinx intently.

"All right. Anyone object?"

Thresher nodded his approval. The Eye scowled and said, "All right."

Jolt looked at the view-screen. The prospector module was still there. "All right. What do we do about this chunk of space junk?"

Thresher chimed in. "It's too big to put in the hold. We could tow it back to a station house--"

Jolt waved her hand dismissively. "Nah."

The Eye turned to face Jolt. "But it attacked us!"

Jolt rubbed the side of her head. "So let's shoot it and make it explode."

Threshed objected. "The Eye's got a point."

Jolt seemed annoyed. "I don't care. Explosion time."

The Eye armed a missile. "All right. On your command."

Jolt grinned. "Fire!"

A missile struck the prospector module, and it disappeared in a flash of light.

The Eye stated the obvious. "Target destroyed."

Jolt seemed satisfied. "Good."

She turned to Jinx and narrowed her eyes. "If you've got a moment -- I heard you found some anomalies in the cloned tissue we've acquired. I'd appreciate it if you ran a cross check with another sample."

Jinx blinked. "Um... sure."

Jolt smiled. "Good. Get you biopsy kit and a set of grounding cables. The next sample comes from me."

Free Falling

2009-07-14T20:34:00.002+01:00

"You killed her."

Arsenal spoke slowly and without great emotion. His eyes narrowed, and he took a step back into a defensive stance.

Jinx look hurt. She reached out.

"I had to, Peter. It was self-defense."

"You won't get away with this. My team-mates will wake up soon. We'll take you down--"

He stopped short, and his hands shook.

"Please don't." Her voice was a whisper. "I've got a reason--"

"I don't care." Arsenal became angry. "You murdered someone in cold blood. That's pretty straightforward--"

Her eyes burned. "No, it isn't. Nothing is straightforward about this." Her pain turned to anger. "Why do you think you are here now? In this place, doing these things? Why?"

"It's a job."

"It's what someone told you to do because they're afraid. Afraid of you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Things are happening, Peter. The Corporation is getting ready for a war, and nobody knows if they're going to win. They're ready to try anything to beat the Reyll." Jinx became calmer as she spoke. Peter's hand stopped shaking, but the anger in his eyes was clear to see. "Right now, they're trying an experiment -- they've found a way to boost the powers of marginal super-beings to god-like levels by tapping in to our mythology. They're trying to turn our culture and history into a weapon--"

"So it's OK to murder someone who never did you any harm." His voice was low and steady; the mockery was delivered deadpan. "Because of some stupid conspiracy."

"She was a copy of me, turned into a leash for you. It's nice to have moral certainties, but you have to know what's going on before you apply them. And you don't, Peter."

Arsenal sank his head, and Jinx continued talking.

"You're not like your team-mates. There are a lot of people like us -- the really powerful super-beings. The walking weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later, they're going to use that potential -- and if you don't help me, they're going to twist you around into some kind of sick parody of an old poem because they think that will remind the Reyll of bad memories."

She touched his arm, and Peter looked up. His eyes were filled with skepticism. She kept talking.

"They're pushing OptCond real hard. They have this model of the mind, and it's simple-minded and wrong, but it kind of works. For them, a bad memory isn't something you learn from -- it's like a flaw in a diamond. A weak spot to be exploited."

"Who?" He sounded scared.

"The Grays. Corporate military intelligence. They aren't smart enough to know why that won't work, and they're not dumb enough to be afraid. But they have to do something to convince their bosses that we're going to win."

He sank his head again. "Why did you have to kill her?"

She touched his shoulder. "She wasn't real."

"I know. I knew." Peter looked ashamed.

"She was there to manipulate you. It's all about control. She was a terminal they could use to feed you instructions." Jinx tried to comfort him. "If you don't help me now, it's just going to get worse. One way or another, they're going to make us fight for them -- but if you don't help me now, you'll be fighting them as a brainwashed slave instead of a free man. Do you understand?"

He looked at her intently for a few seconds.

"I understand. And I believe you."

An announcement came over the intercom.

"ALL HANDS ON DECK. BATTLE STATIONS."

Last Caress

2009-06-29T00:20:00.000+01:00

Arsenal smiled and looked at his restored hand.

"It worked."

Jinx touched him on his other forearm, and Arsenal looked up.

He beamed at Jinx, and felt like he had to say something.

"Thank you."

"Hey, you did all the work."

An announcement came over the ship's intercom. "All hands on deck."

They kissed, and Arsenal left.

Jinx watched the door to the stateroom slide closed. She smiled a little longer, then looked down.

Her expression darkened as she walked back to her workstation. She unlocked the screen, re-opened her lab notebook, and began to write.

"In theory, this should be a control group. In practice, I suspect that I am about to discover an unpleasant truth."

"One of the wiser teachings of OptCond is that it is vital to be aware of the truth, and to find a way to bring your existential needs in line with the reality of your situation. To find one's way, one must first know where one is. This sounds banal and obvious -- until one attempts to put it into practice."

"How does this apply to my situation?"

She paused for a moment, and looked terribly sad.

"My memories are incomplete. A number of OptCond exercises are intended to help students fully understand traumatic memories by attempting to attain complete closure on the situation surrounding those events. A series of carefully constructed leading questions stimulate the long-term memory to reconstruct vital details."

"In my case, these exercises have been uniformly unsuccessful. My memories of the distant past are dream-like, and missing the coherency and completeness of a holistic experience. This is in marked contrast to memories of more recent events."

"This strongly suggests that my memories of the distant past are implants."

"I recall being a frequent user of a device called a psychogram. A psychogram takes holographic images of the mental state of the user. In theory, psychogram recordings provide a complete model of a living mind. A clone brain of similar structure could be trained with psychogram recordings, producing a genetic copy with a personality structure and memories almost identical to the original subject."

"I strongly suspect that I am a clone of Jinx Bubastis, and that my incomplete memories are reconstructions of her personality based on psychogram recordings."

"Since creating a viable clone that believes itself to be an existing person is highly illegal, and since I have concrete evidence that a producer of non-standard clones is active, I need to consider the possibility that an assay of my genome will demonstrate that I, too, have the unusual forced-growth functional unit I found in the tissue samples Peter brought me."

"I also need to make plans for when the original Jinx shows up. I suspect that this is just a matter of time."

Jolt waited for a moment, sitting regally in her command chair, as Honor Guard assembled on the bridge of the Nightstalker.

The main screen was filled with a map of a few cubic light-years of space, strewn with a seven small, red marks. Jolt gestured towards the screen. "So -- the Eye and I have just completed an interrociter scan of all jump activity in nearby space. The results you see on the screen are all traces where we could not positively identify the entity entering or leaving hyperspace."

The crew examined the data on the screen. Six marks formed a more or less straight line. Jolt highlighted them with the controls in the arm of her chair.

"We believe that the entity we recently encountered is following this course."

"Ma'am?" Arsenal tried to interrupt politely.

"Yes, Arsenal."

"I have a preliminary ID for the creature we encountered. It's called Nyqll."

"Nyqll? What the hell kind of name is that?" Jolt seemed irritated.

"An ancient mythological figure --" Arsenal continued, but stopped. Jolt's lack of interest was palpable. "-- an ancient god of meat."

"Huh. Well, whoever he is, he's heading for Reyll space. Not our problem."

Arsenal kept talking. "There's another thing -- the pilot and the passenger were some kind of non-standard clone."

Jolt looked irritated. "What do you mean, 'non-standard'?"

"Their genome includes forced-growth genes that are not used in clone lines produced by the Corporation."

Jolt shuddered for a barely perceptible instant.

"Yeah, well. Let's get back on track." Jolt quickly changed the subject. "We have a set of traces heading towards Reyll space -- and then we have this."

She pointed to a seventh marker on the map. "This in an anomalous inbound jump. It's probably unrelated to our current investigation, but it looks damned suspicious. Like the course a smuggler trying to go around the Reyll blockade would take."

The Reyll blockade was a thin cloud of jump-capable mines set after the Reyll Theocracy captured the Origin Pulsar. It effectively bisected the cluster, and prevented Corporate forces from directly attacking Reyll colony worlds. Ships trying to reach the Corporate colony worlds on the other side of the blockade would sometimes make jumps well outside the home cluster to avoid the deadly mines.

"But that's not in the--" The Eye stopped herself before mentioning the script.

Jolt turned to Arsenal. "What do you think?"

"I think the anomalous jump is suspicious."

"I agree. Let's check it out."

"But--" The Eye struggled for words.

"Nyqll is going where it's supposed to go. It's not our problem."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence on the bridge of the Nightstalker.

"Lay in a course to marker seven."

The Eye obediently entered the coordinates into the helm. "Aye-aye, Captain."

"Engage."

The Nightstalker materialized a few kilometers away from the jump site. A rectangular object floated in space, drifting near the point it entered normal space.

It looked like a shipping container with spidery landing legs and a series of hardpoints on the opposite side.

Jolt examined the image on the main viewscreen. "That looks like an exploration module. Where did that thing jump from?"

The Eye pulled up the data from the earlier exhaustive scan of hyperspace. "Well outside the cluster."

Jolt eyed Arsenal. "All right. Arsenal, get out there and check it out."

"Ma'am -- I've had bad luck with boxes lately. May I make a suggestion?"

"Go ahead."

"Why don't we try scanning it with the ship's sensors before sending me or Thresher over to inspect it? If there's something nasty waiting for us--"

Jolt nodded. "Good idea. Thresher, scan the interior of the vessel with the interocciter. Put it up on the main screen."

A large, pitch-black rectangle appeared on the main view-screen.

The Eye rubbed her temple. "That sure clears things up."

Arsenal looked intently at the screen. "What are the conditions inside? Temperature, pressure, ambient radiation..."

Thresher evaluated the data. "Temperature is about 100 degrees absolute. There's a few millibars of a nitrogen-oxygen mixture, and I'm picking up a neutron flux consistent with a small, sealed fission reactor."

Arsenal stared at a small spot on the screen. "Do you see that?"

Jolt rubbed her neck. "What?"

He pointed at a small, luminous patch on the interrocitor image. "That! Thresher, can you zoom in?"

"Just a sec."

The view-screen zoomed in on a ghostly blur. As the magnification increased, letters appeared.

"THE GAME you just lost it"

Thresher twitched as he processed incoming data. "What? I--"

Jolt looked irritated. "What is it?"

"Some kind of--" Thresher slumped over and fell to the ground.

"Something is happening." The Eye stood up.

Arsenal stared at the ghostly words on the screen. "It's--"

A can appeared on the bridge in a cloud of sparks, spraying a black vapor.

Jolt slumped back in her command chair, and her eyes rolled back. The Eye lost her balance and fell to the ground. Arsenal's knees buckled.

The lights went out, and emergency systems kicked in, bathing the bridge in red light.

Inside Arsenal's quarters, the lights flickered once more, then turned off. Jinx cursed as her workstation entered suspend mode and turned off. As she became aware of the darkness, her eyes widened with fear.

She froze. She knew she needed to find help, but terror numbed her mind. As she started to move, the screen of her workstation suddenly turned on, dimly illuminating the stateroom.

"What?"

A sing-song voice distorted by static came from the workstation's speakers. "I can see you."

The screen displayed static. A fuzzy form coalesced from the random noise. Jinx leaned closer to the screen as the form seemed to reach out to touch her.

Jinx composed herself as she stared at the screen.

"I know who you are. I know. It's not his fault. He loves y--"

A pair of hands reached out from the darkness and seized her head in a ice-cold grip. She started to struggle, but her body went limp as her attacker snapped her neck with a quick twist.

The monitor went dark. The only sounds in the darkness were those of a body being dragged along the floor.

The refrigerator door opened and the light inside turned on. A small figure folded another small, lifeless figure into the compartment. The door closed again.

The lights flickered on again.

On the bridge, Arsenal, Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye slowly recovered from the crippling hallucinations that had briefly knocked them off their feet. Arsenal stood up shakily, gasping for air. He looked at his crew-mates, and saw that they were struggling to their feet.

He rushed out of the bridge to his quarters.

She stood in the stateroom, eyes burning.

"Jinx? Are you--"

"I'm doing great. Come here. I missed you."

He took a step towards her, and her arms wrapped around his chest.

She held him, and he felt her terrible strength. He tried to pull away, but she put a single finger over his lips.

"I need your help."

He looked over her shoulder at the refrigerator in the stateroom. The door was ajar. A thin trickle of blood from inside led to a red pool on the floor.

She whispered in his ear. "Don't cry out. We're going to save the universe."

Mirror Image

2009-03-15T21:58:00.000+01:00

Arsenal sat down. The tissue sample cartridge poked out of the pocket of his lab coat and clattered to the floor.

"What's that?" Jinx sat cross-legged on the thinly carpeted floor. She was about to tell a story, but the noise distracted her.

"Oh!" He felt irritated with himself for forgetting. "It's a tissue sample from the space trike. I wanted you to see if it was like the samples from the crew."

"You'd better get that into the refrigerator. I'll run it up later."

Arsenal got to his feet, retrieving the cartridge from the floor as he stood up. "Where--?"

"It's the huge thing in the corner of the room."

The refrigerator was a large model, intended for the kitchen of a well-to-do family, vastly over-sized for a collection of tissue samples. Arsenal opened the door and deposited the sample next to the other ones. "Yeah. Nice and roomy."

Jinx shifted on the ground, making herself comfortable. "Yeah. Like some sort of really, really obvious product placement. Now, come here -- I have a story to tell you."

They sat on the thin carpet. Jinx began talking.

"It wasn't all that long ago that our ancestors were nomadic hunters. Three, four millenia ago?"

"What, on the homeworld?"

"Yes. Before we had all this." Jinx gestured around the room. "Before technology, back when symbols were only used for magic, not for keeping records. But not before history."

She paused for a moment.

"Oral records -- poems and songs -- survive from the archaic era. Back then, social organization was hardly more developed than a hunting pack, often led by individuals with remarkable abilities."

"Super-powered warlords."

"Yes. One of the longer story cycles was about the struggle between the great hunter Darneth and Nyqll, the river king. Nyqll built a walled city, and kept his meat in pens. He would send his soldiers out to burn the forest, and grow grain to feed his livestock. Over time, the grasp of Nyqll's burning hand reached Darneth's hunting grounds, and the two warlords began to fight."

"It sounds like Nyqll was ahead of his time."

"He was. Agriculture, slavery, docile livestock, and books of account -- all of this seemed like a perversion of nature to the ancients. Forcing flesh to submit to one man's will. For them, Nyqll was a monster, an enemy of freedom and righteousness."

"And they wrote the poems."

"Precisely. Their vision of the river valley king."

Arsenal tried rubbing the back of his neck, but stopped -- his left thumb was pointing the wrong way. "So that monster is a projection of some long-dead culture's rejection of the modern world."

"Not just any culture. The distant ancestors of the Reyll. They preserved the nomadic values of Darneth in their own moral code. He's not just some archaic political cartoon, he's a fundamental part of our sense of reality." She looked at Arsenal's ruined hand. "Give me your hand."

Arsenal hesitated a moment, then gave Jinx his left hand. She spoke.

"I can't shape your flesh, but you can."

He looked at her for a moment. "All right. All right."

She smiled and lifted up his forearm. "No use starting an operation without a plan. You need a mirror image of your left hand. How do you want to do that?"

"Turn it inside out."

"Kind of. You'll need to keep the nerves and the blood vessels attached. How do things look in there?"

He concentrated, probing his hand and wrist. "Twisted around. One half-turn to the left."

"And the tendons?"

"Straight ahead."

"Brace your arm. I'll talk you through it."

He lay on the floor, and braced his elbow on the floor. She lay down facing him, and looked at him. "Do you know what you have to do?"

He hesitated. "Yeah."

"I'll hold your arm steady. This is gonna hurt."

He swallowed. "Let's do it."

The flesh of his land became pliable like clay. His fingers became shorter.

He gritted his teeth, trying no to scream.

"Keep going."

He shuddered as he came to the long bones of his palm. Jinx held his forearm still.

A mirror image of his ruined hand now hung limply from the end of his forearm. Jinx took a breath. "You're going to need to sever the tendons, twist your hand back into position, and reattach them."

Arsenal was pale and breathing shallowly. "All right."

"Don't tense up."

"Let's get it over with."

She grabbed his wrist to help keep the tendons in place. "Now."

The pain was indescribable. His hand twisted around, and slowly rose back into position. "Hold on."

"Do it. Do it now."

Tendons reattached. Peter took a deep breath, and wiggled his fingers.

He smiled.

"It worked!"

The Burning Hand

2009-03-08T22:44:00.001+01:00

Arsenal pulled on a white lab coat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets.

An attentive viewer might have noticed him relax and smile as he pulled on the utilitarian garment. It reminded him of what he was before the industrial accident that revealed his powers -- another mass-produced clone worker, trained as an engineer, type 350, lot 125, requisitioned for the development of plasma soliton weapons. Peter Cat, one of many.

Thresher -- a cyborg, and no stranger to violent dismemberment -- poked his head out of the cargo hold into the hallway.

"Hey, Arsenal! Can you give me a hand?"

Arsenal waited a half-second too long to pull his hands from his pockets and quipped flatly, "Yeah, I think I can spare one."

A recent mishap had resulted in him having two right hands.

The humor was marginal enough, but Arsenal fluffing his cue utterly ruined the joke. Most of the audience didn't think he had a sense of humor anyway, and this scene would do little to change their minds.

Thresher attempted to save the exchange with a forced chuckle, and they proceeded to the partially disassembled open-frame space-craft in the middle of the room.

"So, what do you make of it?" Arsenal stuck his hands back in his lab coat.

"It's got a power plant -- fairly conventional fission job -- but nothing that would explain the acceleration we saw when we were chasing it down." Thresher took a few steps around the ship, and pointed out one of the rear modules. "That looks like a thruster, but it isn't; it's some kind of resonant amplifier."

Arsenal looked under the ship, where some clear liquid was dripping on the floor. "Interesting. This looks like a closed-cycle life support system."

"Oh. Whoops. I sorta unplugged it from the power plant about an hour ago."

Arsenal followed a bus of pipes to a spherical module in the middle of the vessel, just below where the saddle was mounted. "The bus runs up to here." He paused for a moment, and stretched his subtle fields through the container. "There's about a kilo of organic matter inside the sphere."

Thresher extended a small circular saw from his cybernetic left forearm. "Should I open it up?"

Arsenal nodded. "Go for it. We need a tissue sample for ID."

Sparks flew with a grinding noise as Thresher opened up the spherical module. A sector of metal fell to the floor.

"Dude. That is nasty."

Arsenal swallowed. "A vat-grown brain. Probably telekinetic. I think we've found the thruster."

On the bridge, Jolt and the Eye watched a progress bar slowly extend from left to right on the main view-screen. It was very nearly full.

Jolt drummed her fingers on the armrest of the command chair. "Well, this is exciting."

"A broad sweep of all hyperspace jump activity in sensor range takes a while." The Eye was apologetic. "I'm sure it will be done soon."

"You think?"

"Yeah."

"Is that your professional opinion as a registered precognitive?"

"Sure."

The progress bar filled in another step. Now only a tiny sliver remained.

The Eye turned and smiled at Jolt. "See?"

Arsenal entered his quarters, holding a small cartridge with a tissue sample from the strange star-ship's dead brain.

Jinx had set up an effective improvised laboratory in his stateroom. She looked up from the screen of her workstation, which was connected to a humming box by a broad, rainbow-colored ribbon cable. "Hey. I think I have canonical sequences for Lowrider and Apostrophe Girl. Check this out."

Arsenal looked over her shoulder at the screen. "What am I seeing here?"

"It's a set of genes from a chromosomal insertion in both bodies. The sequences look almost like genes inserted in a force-growing process, but they don't match up with anything used in mainstream Corporate clone production."

"Is this from the tumor monsters?"

"Nope. The tumors show no signs of mutation or degradation from rapid mitosis, and match up perfectly with the samples from the corpses."

"That's crazy."

"That monster's got one funky cancerbeam." She looked into Arsenal's eyes. "How are you holding up, Peter?"

"It's my hand. I can't stand it any more."

"I understand. I wish I could help you." Jinx looked sad. "I used to be able to heal people. Shaping flesh is easy." She broke eye contact with him and looked down at the floor. "I'm so sorry."

"Listen, I'm going to try something crazy. If I blow myself up, I can patch my state and fix myself up."

"You're going to blow up?"

"Yeah."

"Do me a favor and do it in the shower, OK?"

"OK." Peter walked towards the sealed bathing compartment and opened the door. "Wish me luck."

Jinx smiled weakly. "Good luck."

He closed the translucent door.

Jinx could not look away.

A moment later, there was a soft wet pop, and the inside of the door was covered in gore.

Jinx heaved, but could not vomit. She curled up into a ball and began sobbing uncontrollably.

She rolled on the floor for a few moments, and her spasms changed slowly from retching to simple sobbing.

Peter emerged from the shower compartment, and showed Jinx his palms.

"What the hell?"

She looked at his hands -- two copies of a right hand.

Her face moved from shock to calm.

"It's god power. Ontology control. Nyqll's corrupted your state equation."

"Who?"

"The burning hand." Jinx grasped Peter's hand. "Sit with me. I have a story to tell."

Hot Rods of the Gods

2009-02-14T21:29:00.000+01:00

Across Corporate space, subscribers to the "Plan Nine" media feed sat down to watch the new episode of "Honor Guard", the continuing adventures of a super-powered space patrol.

A phrase from the theme music played, and the pre-title scene began.

Arsenal stood on the observation deck of the Nightstalker, looking out into space. His white-furred hands were clasped behind his back.

His captain, Jolt, approached him. Arsenal turned a little to face her. His eyes looked sad.

"Nice job on Leviathan back there." Jolt smiled a little. Arsenal looked like he could use some encouragement.

"Pity about the asteroid."

"Don't feel too bad. The explosion exposed the core, which should make it easier for the miners to get to the high-density goodies." Jolt examined Arsenal's face, but his expression was indecipherable to her. "How's Jinx doing?"

Arsenal frowned. "She won't leave our quarters. She's--"

Jolt rushed on to the important question. "What's her story?"

Arsenal looked at Jolt. "She claims that she had an OptCond practitioner perform an exorcism. Her powers and a good chunk of her memories are gone."

Jolt pinched her mouth together. "Why do you say 'claims'? I hope you didn't talk like that with her -- she needs your love and support right now."

"I understand, Captain. You're right. I need to take what she says at face value if she's going to get better."

Jolt laughed a little. "I said 'love and support', not a bunch of Optimizing Conditioning clap-trap."

Arsenal smiled. "You're a skeptic, too? That's reassuring. Jinx is a true believer -- she's convinced that the exercises help keep her hallucinations under control, but..."

Arsenal couldn't finish the sentence. He looked sad. He started to speak again. "...she's changed. She used to be fearless, and now she's terrified all the time. It's so sad."

Jolt looked down at the floor for a moment, hiding her face. Her mouth moved to say something, but she changed her mind. She looked up again, directly into Arsenal's eyes.

"She's done a lot of terrible things. She has a damned good reason to be afraid. You should accept that she needed to change."

Arsenal nodded. "Thank you, Captain."

Jolt tilted her head. "Uh-huh." She turned to Arsenal. "Get a move on, We've found the bogey."

"I'll see you on the bridge, ma'am."

The title credits rolled. These were the adventures of Honor Guard, a super-powered police unit responsible for keeping the peace in Corporate space. Short scenes depicted the core cast -- Jolt, the Captain, whose body generated vast amounts of static electricity, harness by her skin-tight cat-suit. Thresher, the living satellite, a fearsome space warrior cyborg. The Eye, precognitive acrobat and expert fighter with diamond knives, possessor of a magical amulet that grants her super-vision. Arsenal, unkillable energy manipulator only beginning to tap his vast abilities. Finally, their vessel, the Nightstalker, fastest corvette in the Corporate fleet.

Jolt entered the bridge of the Nightstalker, followed closely by Arsenal. A tiny dot was highlighted by a tracking reticule on the main view-screen. The Eye, sitting at helm, turned her head to talk to Jolt as she took her place in the captain's chair.

"We're on an intercept vector." The Eye made a small course correction as she talked to Jolt -- The Eye had a 360 degree field of vision, and looked at people more out of courtesy than necessity. "It's a small craft, under 2 tons displacement --"

Jolt interrupted the Eye. "Can we get an interrocitor fix? I want to see what we're dealing with."

"Working on it." Thresher was plugged in to the sensor console with thin cable running from the chest of his robot body. "Here we go."

The entire crew looked at the view-screen for a few moments in silence. The Eye finally broke the silence. "Now, that's something you don't see every day."

Jolt nodded. "Yes. Analysis?"

The view-screen displayed what appeared to be a motorized tricycle crudely adapted to space travel -- the wheels had been replaced with similarly sized thruster pods. The pilot, a scruffy-looking male, sat on the saddle of the space trike, grasping a pair of handle-bars. A single passenger, female, sat behind the pilot on the elongated saddle with her arms wrapped around the pilot's waist.

Arsenal spoke up. "Captain -- I think we can safely assume the crew is vacuum-proof. It is likely that one or both of them have powers."

Thresher looked up from the sensor read-outs. "The vessel doesn't have a transponder mounted, and its configuration doesn't match any known space-craft."

Jolt narrowed her eyes. "No transponder, eh? Like a pirate or a smuggler. I think we have probable cause for an inspection. Prepare for intercept!"

Hyper-thrusters engaged, and the Nightstalker skipped through hyperspace to a position a few hundred meters behind the strange vessel, emerging on a parallel course. The heads of the trike passengers pointed to the lower right quadrant of the view-screen. "Match their orientation and lock weapons!" Jolt commanded. "On my mark--"

There was a short moment of tense anticipation on the bridge.

"Do a barrel roll!"

The Nightstalker took a corkscrew trajectory around the space trike's vector. On the view-screen, the vessel rotated as the Nightstalker closed in.

"Still no response..."

"Activate the dome lights."

The space trike was illuminated by flashes of red and blue light from the Nightstalker's sirens. The female turned and tapped the pilot of the strange vessel on his shoulder. He then twisted the handlebars and turned away from the pursuit vector, accelerating rapidly.

"After them!"

"Wait a minute... their vector takes them into the gravity well of a nearby planet." The Eye brought up data on the planet on the main view-screen. "The vessel is decelerating. I think they're going to land."

"Pursue and land nearby."

The Eye proved to be right. The space trike landed at a point near the equator of a small, blue-green world with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, close to a automated filling station the Corporation had constructed on the world's surface. The planet's lack of a strong magnetic field and the periodic high-energy solar flares released by its sun had precluded further colonization. Frequent sterilization events had prevented native life from developing past algae, lichens and simple plants.

The Nightstalker set down on a field of fuzzy rocks behind the space trike landing site. A few simple flowers -- hardly more than colorful fronds -- poked up from the bed of lichen.

In the fore ready room, Jolt attached a grounding cable to a metal stud on her costume. Safely grounded, she peeled off her usual gloves, and replaced them with a pair studded with flat, shiny electrodes on the fingertips and knuckles. "All right, I'll start the questioning. I want the rest of you to cover me. Got it?"

The crew assented, and Jolt pulled a side-handle baton from an equipment locker. It was sheathed in insulating plastic and had a metal core and contacts on each end. She pointed one end of the baton at the grounding stud, and touched her thumb to the contact on the side handle. An arc of electricity jumped to the stud.

"Let's roll."

The pilot of the unknown vessel was busy picking almost-flowers. He was a rugged-looking type with a long black mane, dressed in leathers. His companion was a graceful female with golden fur, dressed in a simple white tunic. She smiled as she watched him put together his bouquet.

Arsenal and the Eye held back and took a position with a clear line of fire to the pair. Thresher continued a few steps, closing in to the range of his tether launchers, and moved out of Arsenal's kill zone.

Jolt closed in on the landing site. The pilot and his passenger smiled. He extended the bouquet of colorful fronds towards Jolt, and opened his mouth to speak.

Jolt interrupted him. "ID. NOW!"

The pilot smiled. "I am called Lowrider. Please accept--"

He looked into Jolt's eyes and stopped. His face looked crestfallen. Jolt repeated her demand.

"I want to see some identification. For both of you."

"As I said, I am called Lowrider."

The young woman in the white tunic also spoke. "And I am S'mb'lah. We come in peace to your mortal realm on a mission from the Most High--"

Jolt gave her a hard look. "Most High, huh? And how high are you two?"

S'mb'lah looked hurt and shocked. "Why so hostile? We--"

Jolt interrupted her. "You were about to fly into the Reyll blockade zone, with no transponder and no way to communicate with you. We're impounding your ship and taking you in."

Lowrider looked concerned, and took a step towards Jolt. "But you must let us complete our missARRGH!"

A shock from Jolt's baton interrupted his sentence. "ON THE GROUND, BOTH OF YOU! HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEADS!"

Lowrider writhed on the ground, and Jolt struck him again with her baton.

"Arsenal -- the girl -- now!" The Eye jabbed Arsenal with her elbow.

Arsenal complied. As the young woman brought her hands to her temples, a concussion bolt struck her in the face. The impact knocked her off her feet and bloodied her nose.

"BACKUP!" Jolt paced around the curled-up form of Lowrider. Thresher, Arsenal, and the Eye closed in.

She turned to face Arsenal. "Give their vessel a quick once-over. I don't want them smuggling weapons on the Nightstalker."

"Understood." He began examining the open-frame spacecraft, starting with the right rear pannier.

Thresher restrained the pilot and the passenger with his tethers while Arsenal worked. Arsenal examined two seemingly ordinary flight bags, one containing tolietries and a few neatly-folded white tunics, the other a fresh pair of leathers. An additional bag contained an inflatable tent.

"Find anything?" Jolt demanded impatiently.

"Not yet."

Arsenal walked to the other side of the space trike, and opened the left pannier. It was empty, except for a single, ornate box. "Wait a minute."

He extracted the heavy box from the cargo container. "It's a hammerspace box."

Jolt looked at him. "What?"

"A hyperspatial container. The inside is bigger than the outside. There could be anything in here."

Lowrider began to panic, and screamed, "You MUST NOT open it!"

"It's filled with EVIL!" the young woman piped in.

"I think you mean DRUGS," snarled Jolt. "Now SHUT UP!"

"I'm going to open it now." Arsenal took a few steps away from the landing site.

He held the box in his right hand, and flipped the latch holding the box closed with his left thumb.

His team-mates each took a step backwards.

The lid flipped open.

"Guys?" Arsenal was a little nervous. "I'm going to look inside now."

"You do that." Jolt took another step back.

"Oh NO!" The Eye screamed.

The opening began to vibrate, forming a sound like a word. "NNNNN...."

An instant later, a dark mass hurled itself out of the box, mantled in cold flame. Arsenal reflexively put his free hand up to shield himself.

Normally, Arsenal was invulnerable -- but this fire burned. He fell and screamed, "ARR!"

The dark mass stuck the ground and assumed the form of a five meter tall blue-furred monstrosity. Instead of a head, it had what looked like an old-fashioned animal trap. The vibrations became louder, and deepened. "MMMMMMM!"

The girl with too many apostrophes in her name writhed on the ground, yelling, "Now you've done it! NYQUIL IS FREE!"

Arsenal looked up at the blue-furred monstrosity. It was naked, and had no genitals. It took a step towards him.

The jaws of the trap opened, and a burning hand holding a gigantic eye rose from the torso of the dick-less abomination.

"ALL-WORLD-ALL-ONE-ALL-MINE!" The words echoed like a great brass gong. The burning eye-hand fixed its gaze on Lowrider, cowering before the evil god. Mystic flame burst from the eye-hand, and Lowrider writhed as his rib cage began to swell.

"EXCEPTIONS--"

Lowrider exploded as a vast tumorous mass consumed his chest.

"--NONE!"

Arsenal looked at his ruined hand. His fur and flesh had not burned -- instead, a tentacled thing was growing inside him. His forearm split open, and a deformed eye stared back at him through the gash in his corrupted flesh.

"ETERNALLY--"

He grit his teeth, and blasted off his left fore-arm. Behind him, the monstrous meat god turned its burning hand to the girl with too many apostrophes in her name.

"--NONE!"

Her skull exploded, and a tentacled thing skittered from the shattered remains into the underbrush. Arsenal cradled his amputated arm and activated his comms implant. "Captain -- get everybody clear, I'll try to keep him busy."

"ALL-ONE-FAITH-NEW-FLESH-ONE-MIND-ONE-HEART!"

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye retreated into the Nightstalker as Arsenal stood up slowly. The monster stared at the ruined bodies of his captors.

Arsenal concentrated for a moment as the Nightstalker'e engines spun up. The monster seemed oblivious. In a moment, Arsenal would restore his body's previous thermodynamic state -- good as new.

At least, that was how it was supposed to work. He looked down at the back of his hands, and both of his thumbs pointed left.

The burning hand turned towards him.

The Nightstalker, now hovering, brought its forward batteries to bear on the monster.

Arsenal took off as a beam of fire struck the ground.

The batteries discharged, striking the monster in its chest.

It absorbed the blasts, turning black as night.

No obvious effect. Not even the collateral damage one would expect from a point-blank main battery blast inside a planet's atmosphere. The monster had seemingly eaten the blasts.

Arsenal set down behind the monster. His mind raced. How could he--

The monster arched its back, and began to scream. Its body collapsed in upon itself, and it disappeared in an instant.

Arsenal set down and tried to get his bearings. He heard a skittering noise near the space trike.

A tentacled lump of pink-gray flesh shuddered as another lump of brick-red muscle thrust what was once an aorta between its hemispheres. Arsenal watched the two tumor-masses moved against each other rhythmically.

The pace of the copulating tumors quickened, and a ventricle spasmed in the thing that was once a heart.

Arsenal realized what he was looking at.

Stepping back, he did the only thing that seemed to make sense.

Kill it with fire.

Fourth Wall Banger

2008-11-13T15:25:00.001+01:00

James Brown examined the decision tree for the next "Honor Guard" story arc one more time. He did not like what he saw.

It was produced by the program SIMPLOT, an application used for a huge number of tasks -- managing risky investments, planning complex projects with potential contingencies, preparing threat analysis trees for distributed systems, or scripting interactive fiction with semi-autonomous actors. The program presented complex processes as a directed acyclic graph, and suggested new branches and nodes based on inferences from a domain-specific knowledge base using a simple, sub-sapient breadth-first autonomous cutting inference engine*.

His collaborator, Judas Montclair, had a bad habit of pruning interesting nodes from his decision trees. Not long ago, Judas had failed to account for the possibility that the Reyll heretic Demonslayer and her team of miscreants, M-Seven, would be able to mount an attack on the Corporate HQ, Sedgewick Station.

That mistake cost Judas two weeks of interrogation at the hands of Corporate intelligence.

He returned a shadow of his usual hedonistic self, a distracted nervous wreck who seemed to lose himself in terrible daydreams. James had done his best to cover for Judas, but James' work was itself time-consuming and exhausting -- he had to choose from and mix together streams from a plethora of recording devices into a visual narrative that would make sense to and hold the attention of a distracted, not terribly sober audience.

James had been doing his best to pick up the slack as Judas recovered. The decision trees Montclair was producing had become dangerously sparse, and James would sometimes go through them and add nodes to represent other possible chains of cause and effect, possibilities that Judas had precluded in the plans and projections that would influence the next several months of "Honor Guard" vids.

Some of this was a question of style. Judas liked letting the characters drive the story, and that often meant leaving them a great deal of autonomy. The result of these scripts were broad trees with few nodes and many branches. The fans seemed to like these free-wheeling plots, and giving the talent more freedom made "Honor Guard" feel relatively authentic.

The coming story was completely different. It was a graph like a map to a rail line, a straight path from plot point to plot point. Worse still, a number of the nodes were encrypted, and Jack couldn't even open them to suggest alternative story-lines. Poking through the meta-data for the nodes, Jack saw that they were asymmetrically encrypted with a public key used by the Grays, Corporate military intelligence.

The parts he could read worried him. Judas was making a dangerous series of assumptions, and the involvement with the Grays made Jack nervous. Jack had tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with his colleague, but Judas had always put him off.

Jack's communicator beeped. It was Judas. Jack was finally getting his chance to share his misgivings with Judas.

Judas' voice was slurred, and Jack could hear blaring pop music in the background. They arranged to meet at a nearby bar.

Jack took public transportation to the run down drinking establishment. Judas had obviously been drinking heavily, and sitting in a semi-private booth off to the side of the dark bar.

Jack sat down next to him with a tablet computer. "Judas, are you sure you're up to this?"

"Oh yes. Hell yes."

"I can't evaluate a lot of the nodes on this next script--"

"Not your concern, my boy. It's out of our hands."

"Judas, listen to me -- if you miss a possibility like last time, they'll take you in again. I need you in good shape if we're going to stay on schedule."

Judas did not listen to Jack. He thought about being taken in again, the woman doctor in her tight leather suit -- her huge quartet of breasts (surely implants) heaving as she applied the neural stimulator and Judas arched his back in pain -- and he had a sudden, adolescent flush of shame as he wondered if his colleague could see his erection.

"Judas? You've been spacing out like that a lot recently."

"Sorry." Judas pushed away from Jack and crossed his legs, resting his left foot on his right knee.

"I need you to look at this." Jack gestured towards the tablet with its stylus. "If I add a branch here, the graph won't terminate where we planned--"

Judas blinked his eyes, and slowly read the branch in tree. "Oh, no. She'll never do that. Being a super-heroine is much too important to her. She'd never risk it."

"Are you sure? If they talk, there's a non-zero probability that they'll never reach the nodes down here." Jack gestured at the encrypted nodes. "If they use a genetic screening to identify--"

"Don't be silly, Jack."

"Judas, I know what her mother was. If she goes after her father, the whole project is in danger--"

"Please, Jack. She likes being in charge too much. She'd never risk it."

Jack shook his head in exasperation. He wasn't getting through to Judas, and it frustrated him. "This script is a lot more linear than what I'm used to from you. What's going to happen?"

Judas smiled. "We're going to win, Jack. It's that simple."

Jack was annoyed enough that he left Judas behind to the throbbing music and went home.

Jack wished that he had felt like drinking with his colleague. He was going to have trouble getting to sleep tonight.

* Imagine a "mind mapping" package melded with a slightly cleverer version of Prolog. SIMPLOT is about as ubiquitous in the Corporation as Microsoft Excel in a modern computerized office on Earth.

Elsewhere

2008-11-07T22:26:00.000+01:00

The mining town was in ruins. Fires burned on both sides of the main drag of the prefabricated shopping mall perched in a crater of a larger than average asteroid. Above them, the net-like satellite in synchronous orbit that confined the town's artificial gravity field glinted in the faint sun-light.

A massive figure grinned and cracked his knuckles as he bore down on Thresher. The cyborg stood his ground.

With a well-practiced movement, Thresher fired a tether at Leviathan.

On board the Nightstalker, the Eye was startled by a premonition. "Jolt? I'm gonna throttle up the engines. Now!"

"Everybody to stations! Here we go!" Jolt gripped the arms of the command chair.

Leviathan's arms were bound to his sides. He grabbed the trailing end of the tether daintily, looked at it, and began to laugh. Thresher fired the other end of the tether at a cable lying on the ground behind him.

Leviathan advanced -- and the cable suddenly pulled taut as the Nightstalker streaked overhead. His vast bulk was jerked off the surface of the asteroid into the vacuum of space.

Thresher waved as Leviathan disappeared in the black distance. He triggered his comm implants. "Any chance you can take me with you? I wanna see this."

A fraction of a second later, the cyborg hero dematerialized. Townspeople crawled from the rubble and set to work putting out the fires consuming precious oxygen.

The Nightstalker keel-hauled Leviathan far away from the mining colony.

Thresher entered the bridge, and say Leviathan's scowling face on the main monitors. "Reporting for duty, Captain."

"Take your station, Thresher." Jolt leaned back into the command chair. "We're about to release the tow line and throw him into the sun."

Victor looked up from the sensor console. "Captain? Asteroid 423 has just left its orbit. It's approaching our position at relativistic speed-"

Jolt smiled. "I'm picking up Arsenal's implants on the comms board. Looks like he remembered them this time."

The Eye looked up from her navigation console. "You're kidding me! Leviathan punched his head clean off!"

Jolt looked tense. "Come on guys. Enough distractions -- let's get turned around and send Lynnie on a vector into the sun."

The Eye laid in the new course, and the Nightstalker swung around on a course approaching the sun. On the big screen, Leviathan grimaced, and spat out two silent words into the vacuum of space.

Jolt thought for a moment. "What did he say? 'SCREW PHYSICS?'"

The Eye remarked, "I don't think that was 'screw'..."

Lights flickered as Leviathan relaxed the screen that protected normal space from his enormous gravitational field. The bridge of the star-ship shook.

Victor looked up from the engineering console. "Ma'am... hyperdrive is down. We're stuck on a course into the sun."

Jolt gritted her teeth. "Cut the damned tether. Try to get us some distance--"

"But that won't help us--" Victor stopped talking as Asteroid 423 loomed into the field of view. "Whoa."

The kilometer-wide rock slammed into Leviathan. The Nightstalker shuddered as his gravitational field fluctuated.

"Get that on screen!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Victor's fingers raced over his engineering console. "I think I have it--"

Leviathan lay face down in an impact crater on the surface of the asteroid. He picked himself up and dusted himself off.

A streak appeared over the truncated horizon, and set down just outside the crater. Two beams struck Leviathan in the chest, and the massive Fe Arran reeled as the two bolts lit up finger-tip sized patches on his invulnerable chest.

Arsenal's voice came in on the comms. "What's my output?"

Victor examined the sensor readouts. "You're at 2 megatons yield apiece. That won't--"

"Get ready for an emergency jump. I'm gonna tighten the focus and cross beams."

Victor's jaw dropped. He recovered in less than a second. "On it."

Leviathan bore down on Arsenal's position as the beams narrowed and slowly approached each other.

"What's he--"

"No time."

The beams touched. The energy flux in at the intersection point exceeded the Planck energy by several orders of magnitude, and space and time began to violently expand from the impact point.

As the Nightstalker dematerialized, a violent gravity wave disintegrated Asteroid 423.

The star-ship rematerialized not far from where it tried to escape the destruction.

"What just happened--"

"Just a minute, Ma'am."

"Did he just--"

"I have his signal."

"What!?"

Arsenal appeared on the screen, towing Leviathan's unconscious form from the turmoil of boulders converging on the former center of mass of Asteroid 423.

"He exceeded the maximum energy flux for a unit of space. Space-time exploded in Leviathan's face."

"Open the cargo bay doors." Jolt rubbed her forehead as she watched Arsenal drag the unconscious Leviathan towards the Nightstalker.

A moment later, Honor Guard gathered to watch as Arsenal dragged Leviathan into the hold.

"You- you did it. You knocked him out."

"Ma'am." Arsenal addressed Jolt. "I need to go back to the colony."

Jolt nodded. "I understand."

A few moments later, Arsenal touched down just outside the perimeter of a field hospital hastily erected to deal with the casualties of Leviathan's mindless rampage. He pushed through doctors and nurses, and headed towards a tent that had been turned into a field hospital.

Soon he found the one he was looking for.

"Come with me. You're not safe here."

Jinx looked up at him, holding a bundle of sterilizing gauze in her arms. "Give me a minute. These people need my help."

He smiled and nodded. "All right. What can I do?"

Jack In The Box

2008-10-29T09:34:00.000+01:00

The planet was the fourth rock from a large orange sun. The blue seas surrounding the single continent spawned feathery white clouds that rushed over the yellow, brown, and purple terrain of the solitary land mass.

In the middle of the continent, on its highland plains, a ragged green dot marked the site of the ancient alien colony. There, transplanted flora from another world displaced the native, purple colored plant life.

Beneath the vast grassy knoll, gravimetric sensors detected a distinctive pattern of mass anomalies indicating a vast, spiderweb like structure of tunnels and chambers beneath the surface. Jack Graves looked thoughtfully at the display of the structure.

"Yes, that's just right."

"What is it?" Jinx asked.

Jack examined the floating holographic map closely, and began to explain what he saw.

"The best theory I've heard claims it was a transit system. The precursor to the black oil is white mist, which can form space-like paths through higher dimensions. The exotics would link the chambers here with destinations scattered all across the galaxy using bridges made of artificial reality. The black oil was a waste product, produced by the mist's reaction to untrained minds and the physical world. It drained into the underground reservoirs on the lower levels."

"So people would walk in to the chambers, enter something like a hyperspace shunt, and come out on another planet... fantastic." Jinx meant it, too. It was intergalactic space travel without the need to carry fuel or food or air, without star-ships forcing their way through the vastness of space.

"That's the theory. So, shall we get started?"

Jinx sat down at the command console and began the process of deploying and landing modules on the surface, near the center of the green spot on the planet. She sent down landing modules with with laboratories, drilling equipment, a field hospital, water storage, and a power plant around a grassy knoll near the entrance to the catacombs.

The process took a few hours. Jinx supervised the automated spacecraft and watched Jack Graves pack piles of hand-written notes, clothing, and a carefully sorted collection of ancient statues into travel containers inside his habitation module. He saluted the surveillance camera curtly and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Jinx instructed the computers in Jack's hab to set him down gently in the field of alien grass just outside the impromptu city she had just built. She saw the old man grin as the thrusters jerked his module away from the Apocalypse.

She reviewed the sensor feeds from the last cycle again. There was a signal there, a tiny speck of incredible mass that had been following them since they left the home cluster. It was too small to be a starship, and too massive to be natural.

She had some ideas who it might be, and had taken precautions. In a corner of each container, she hid supplies -- a miniature jump drive here, a thruster pack there, a solid-state fission reactor over there. It was her "Plan B", in case things got as ugly as she feared. She had a way off this far-away rock.

With some reluctance, she left the bridge and entered her own habitation module. Soon she was on her way to the middle of the great green spot of vegetation on the surface of tthe planet.

The next weeks were busy. The first step was to carefully coat the interiour surface of the drilling pipes they would use to harvest black oil from the underground chambers. Since black oil wasn't matter in any normal sense of the word, but rather solidified thought, the pipes had to be coated with a paint containing a miniscule amout of the oil, which would prevent the psychoactive "liquid" from escaping the apparatus. Parallel to this, Jack prepared his reaction vessel, a sphere with an interior coated with the same paint, which would serve as an artificial world for the reconstituted god-forms.

The next step was to prepare the first bore-holes and connect the coated pipes to the reaction vessel. Shortly after work began, a sinkhole appeared in the ground. Jinx sent Jack back to his habitation module and carefully examined the deep hole in the ground. The ceiling of an underground hall had collapsed, distrubed by the vibrations on the surface.

The underground chamber had been turned into an ossurary. In one corner Jinx saw a pile of vaguely spherical objects. She approached the pile carefully, and determined that they were colonist skulls -- flat-faced and round-headed. A tiny spur between the eyes suggested a pointed nose.

No black oil had leaked to the surface. As she went topside to give the all clear, she saw Jack's reaction vessel glint in the setting sun. The round vessel and the rectangular pump in front of the reaction chamber reminded her of the colonists' skulls.

Work continued. The sinkhole was surrounded with a fence of luminous tape, and the ground was soon covered with a maze of pipe leading to the three drilling stations. The derricks cast long shadows over the grassy knoll.

After several hours of work, Jinx and Jack decided that the network of pipes would be able to carry black oil to the reactor. They retreated to a sealed control center and sent the commands to activate the drilling stations.

The first borehole failed. Alams sounded as the black oil sublimated into mist as the drill approached the storage chamber. The second and third boreholes, however, drew the liquified reality from its reservoir and fed it to the pumps and pipes that would take it to the reactor.

Jinx and Jack remained inside the sealed control room until the last traces of the leak had dissipated. Both had gained a healthy respect for the dangerous properties of the black oil since the mission began, and neither wanted to risk a second exposure to the psychically toxic substance.

Jack arranged his catalog of long-forgotten idols and recordings of epic poetry while they waited. Jinx considered their situation, and decided to tell him what she had learned.

"Jack?"

"Yes, Jinx?"

"We're being watched."

"I know."

"Does the name Leviathan mean anything to you?"

"Leviathan? Lynnie Chelm? That's an odd choice for an agent..." Jack seemed worried.

"That's what I thought. You remember my vision, right?"

"Yes. The Corporation decided to turn the god-forms into weapons and send them against the Reyll. What's that have to do with anything?"

"Lynnie has always had contacts with the Grays. He's been working for the military intelligence since he started working as a super-villain. I don't want what I saw to become an accurate prediction of the future-"

Jack interrupted Jinx. "I'm sorry, but this experiment is too important to sabotage. The Corporation needs to discover what direction our spirituality would have developed without Reyll influence. Without this information, we won't know how to rebuild our culture once the Theocracy has been defeated. We won't have a plan for the future."

Jinx considered for a moment. "I understand. I just want you to know something - if Lynnie comes down here and tries to hijack your work, I won't be able to stop him. He's a walking black hole."

Jack looked at Jinx. "I see." He seemed disappointed, and Jinx wondered if Jack believed that she was unwilling to fight Leviathan.

They waited in silence until the all clear alarm sounded.

The work continued as the orange sun rose. Jack stayed inside the control room, relaying images of statues and artworks and recordings of poetry and epic stories to the receiving area of the reaction chamber. As Jinx teleported around the work area, checking the integrity of the pumps and seals, she felt the receiving area filling with information.

After exposure to Jack's data, the receiving chamber formed a negative image of the gods, monsters and heroes of the distant past. The next step was to expose this negative image to a large quantity of black oil, forming a positive echo of Fe Arran mythology inside the sealed reaction vessel.

Jinx was a sensitive mystic, and could feel the presences inside the chamber. As the sun set, she could sense the songs of the world she and Jack had created, and the whole work area was illuminated with a strange sort of ghostly light. Jack was exhausted and exalted by the work, and Jinx accompanied him through the radiant, pulsing darkness to his habitation module for a well-deserved nights' sleep. Jack turned and smiled at her as he stepped into the threshold of his hab.

"It's alive, Ms. Bubastis."

"I know, Jack. It's beautiful."

She made her way to her own habitation module, listening to the songs of their reconstituted world. The music had taken on a brassy edge; she had to struggle to not remain and listen to the driving strains of the reactor. As she undressed and sat down on her bed to rest, she felt a thrill as the war-drums began to pound.

Sleep came reluctantly. She awoke at sun-rise.

Their new world was no longer singing. There was only a dull psychic pounding coming from the reaction vessel. Jinx dressed hurriedly and rushed to wake Jack. They proceeded to the control room. He looked his age, and was visibly disappointed by the results of his experiment. They sat down at the control panels in silence, and Jack broke the anguished silence.

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure, Jack. Can we see inside the chamber?"

"Do you really want to look?"

"No." Jinx felt the thumping rhythm from the chamber in the back of her mind. "But we need to see what happened."

"Yes." Jack activated the psychogram that had recorded the life inside the chamber. They saw the world inside the chamber for the first time - a gray plain of rotten flesh. Structures like rib cages dotted the surface, and rivers of partially clotted blood flowed into a scab-sea filled with offal and corruption.

Jack's almost hairless ears looked a little green as he regarded the scene with horror. "What happened?"

Jinx took the controls, and sent the point of view searching for the source of the relentless thumping she heard in her head. From a mountain of tumor-like meat, a tower shaped like a spinal column rose into the heavens. At the top of the headless spine, a tiny figure pounded at the vaults of heaven - the outside of the reaction vessel. Jack recovered a little as he examined the figure pounding its tiny fists against the walls of its prison.

"Nyqll?"

"What? Didn't I-"

"Yes. Yes, you saw him in your vision. He was a minor monstrosity from the pre-Reyll mythology of the B'Tonghwa-"

"The Hunters? He's a figure from Hunter mythology?"

"Yes. An evil king, who kept prey imprisoned inside his city. The hero Mathlld followed the rivers of blood from his fortress and called upon the spirit of Darneth to grant him the wisdom to stop Nyqll in his evil ways. Nyqll was a representation of the very first attempts at animal husbandry by our species. In ancient times, the hero led an army to destroy Nyqll's fortress and free his subjects and his prey into the welcoming forest, beyond the reach of his burning hand. Slash and burn agriculture, batteries of meat animals, slavery, fear and hate..."

Jack stopped talking. His lower lip trembled as the horror of what had happened became clearer to him. "...the bad guys won. We made a world where evil won."

Jinx watched the tiny, deformed figure pound against the thin coating isolating the inside of the reaction chamber from the outside world. The thing stopped, and turned to face the point of view displayed on the view-screen. Thinking quickly, Jinx pounded the button to cut the feed before she had to look into the depraved creature's eyes. She turned to face Jack.

"We can flush this, right? We can start over?"

"I... of course-"

Jack was interrupted by a sudden sharp seismic shock. Jinx spoke. "Leviathan. Lynnie just make planetfall."

Jack looked at her, eyes filled with fear. "You have to stop him. It wasn't meant to turn out like this."

Jinx fetched a large container from the corner of the room, and pulled out an ion driver. She slotted a power cell into the unwieldy gun. "I'll do what I can, Jack. I told you I can't stop him." She looked around for a moment for the gun's gas bottle. "You have any extra black oil lying around? This gun's not gonna do much to him, but the oil might."

Jack didn't hesitate, and pulled a small sealed flask from beneath his desk. "Can't you use you mental powers against him?"

Jinx carefully dispensed a small amount of the substance into the chamber of the ion driver. "Not really. He has gravity-based senses and his mind has collapsed into a monad hidden behind an event horizon. If we're lucky, some of the black oil will get through to his naked singularity, and we'll be able to get the hell out of here."

The ground began to shake. "Get some cover, Jack. He's gonna be on top of us in a minute."

Jinx teleported outside and turned to face the column of smoke that rose from an impact crater on the horizon. A green and brown cloud of dirt and shredded vegetation was barreling towards the grassy knoll.

Her mind began the Marksman's Mantra as pulled a lead on the dark figure rushing towards the site. She pressed the trigger, and a dirty bruise-colored fireball of plasma struck Leviathan in the chest.

His massive form stopped for a second. Jinx began to teleport to Jack, but felt a sudden, wrenching shock.

She rematerialized in front of Leviathan. He grinned broadly. "That was trippy."

Her world turned incandescent white an instant later as Leviathan struck her, sending her skipping along the ground. She skidded to a stop and lay in a crumpled, bloody heap, unable to move her legs. Leviathan closed in on the control room.

"Hello, Doctor Graves. Don't bother hiding. I need something from you."

She heard sheet metal tear like paper. "Oh! Bad idea, there, little buddy. Lemme help ya with that." Bones snapped, and Jack Graves screamed. "Hey, stop yelling! We're gonna have a little drink of that moonshine you two were brewing. Right this way, man." Jack moaned as Lynnie dragged him to the reaction vessel.

"OK, lemme get my shot glass."

Jinx felt a wave of terror as the reaction vessel opened. Jack tried to reason with Leviathan. "Don't do this. The experiment failed. We-"

"Naah. The experiment worked just fine, little guy. Here, bottoms up!"

Jinx's body was healing, but her legs were still numb and immobile. She heard a moment of struggle and felt a terrible panicked fear. Jack screamed and gurgled, fell to the ground and began to thrash.

There was a growling noise, a sub-bass throb, as a series of wet pops replaced Jack's struggling.

"Huh. That was some messed up-- WHOA! Down boy!"

A noise like fire. Lynnie screamed in pain. "OW! Get in the box! Get in the--"

There was an electric hum and a sucking noise. Jinx felt Lynnie's footfalls as he approached her position. She was still paralyzed.

Lynnie held a hammerspace box in one hand. Jinx could feel the malignant presence of Nyqll imprisoned inside the container. Lynnie looked down at Jinx.

"Hey, listen up. I could have pasted you back there, but I just gave ya a love tap. You'll get better. Plan for me is a mind-wipe and a nice cathartic rampage. You just lie there and heal, OK? See ya back in the cluster."

"...Lynnie? Destroy the box, Lynnie. You can't let that thing out..."

"Not my job. Be seeing ya!"

With a single leap, Lynnie propelled himself into orbit. The ground liquefied and collapsed, and Jinx was swallowed up, taken down into the ground where the dead things go.

Flight of the Apocalypse

2008-07-13T01:43:00.001+02:00

The huge scout ship coalesced into empty space some hundred light-years outside the cluster whence it came. Relative to an observer in this section of barren vacuum, the flash of light from its de-materialization would arrive three weeks shy of one hundred years later.

The reactionless thrusters lit up, radiating waste heat into space, as the elongated star-ship began a series of adjustments from its departure vector, moving away from a heavily guarded intelligence outpost, to its arrival vector, which would insert the bulky vessel into orbit around a still distant terrestrial planet.

Jinx sat at the bridge and monitored the programmed series of thruster burns. Once in a while, she would glance at the displays for the sensor arrays. She hoped someone was watching, because her navigational choices were carefully chosen to reassure a worried observer.

Her passenger, Magus Jack Graves, had picked a call-sign for the ship's transponder: "The Apocalypse". That was the ship's name, encoded in a packet of identification data periodically sent to anyone in this frame of reference, or anyone observing through an interrociter. The packet did not just contain this name, but also the purpose of the voyage -- a terse bit-field, rarely used, signifying "scientific exploration" -- and its sponsoring organization -- in this case, the Entertainment Division of the all-encompassing Corporation.

She relished the oddness of this juxtaposition. Entertainment Division was all about selling known quantities at a low enough price to excuse the crappiness of much of its product. Scientific research was about finding the border between the known and the unknown. Then there were the uniforms.

The Corporate intelligence services had two official uniform colors -- gray and black. There was a well-established convention regarding the use of the two colors: mostly black uniforms represented organizations that regulated criminal activity, the black market, and counter-insurgency operations, while gray uniforms represented orgs that dealt with providing information for military strategy and diplomatic operations. Mixed colors were liaison officers, responsible for controlling the flow of information between the two factions, called the Grays and the Blacks.

The uniform they provided her was gray. The uniforms of the staff that helped prepare the Apocalypse were gray. Only a few officers observing the proceedings had black jackets. Presumably, they were the ones pressured into taking responsibility for the mission, under the aegis of Entertainment Division.

Jinx looked at the sensors again. She was certain they were being observed, possibly from quite close by. If only--

Her thoughts were interrupted by an alarm. She turned to the internal communications console, and saw Jack's panicked face. He screamed "Please, help me!".

"Jack, I'm here. What happened?" Jinx tried to look as relaxed and professional as she could, and it seemed to help Jack regain his composure.

"Some -- material -- I've been working with has escaped its containment field. Were you briefed about the black oil? Do you know anything about it?"

"No." Since all Jinx knew of "black oil" were half-truths, this was only half a lie. "We were carrying black oil?"

"In the laboratories. Fully compartmentalized. If I cannot escape under my own power, I want you to jettison Lab 15 and return to Corporate space. Do you understand?"

Something twisted in her gut. A part of her mind and heart had changed recently, and she did not want to change back.

"Don't be stupid, old man. I'll save you."

"You don't need to do this."

"And you wouldn't ask for help unless you needed it. Find somewhere safe, I'm on my way."

"Be careful."

Jinx took a moment to look at the ship's internal security console. The computer was set up to automatically record the subjective impressions of anyone entering Lab 15 with a psychogram. Reviewing the data stream for Magus Jack Graves, she discovered that he had a brief hallucination a few minutes ago, but was currently stable, if terrified.

She made telepathic contact with Graves. His mind was strong, and she was able to locate him in a corner of the laboratory. She picked a spot in front of him and teleported to his location.

"Hold still, Magus. I'll get us--"

"Behind you."

Jinx turned her head and saw thin black tendrils coalesce from the corners of the room. She took a step back and raised her arms, and the murky ectoplasm engulfed her.

Everything went white. She heard only her heartbeat. She--

She was somewhere else, levitating beside a monstrous armored creature as it climbed down a deep shaft. The Reyll had taken the God-forms and pithed them, creating robot-like slaves controlled by a pilot injected into the wound site. She had made the God-form whole again, whole enough to fight beside her as she descended into the core of the underground base.

(What the hell where am I why does this make sense what's going on my mind)

They descended into the final chamber, where the God-forms were born. Dark oil writhed over the lunar landscape of the underground cavern. One by one, the Corporation had turned their heroes into God-forms and sent them to destroy this underground womb. All had failed, even the monstrous thing Arsenal became. Jinx was the final gambit. She had infiltrated the base, made contact with the pilots and turned them against the operation. Now her target loomed before her.

(oh man I'm tripping balls this black oil is a hallucinogen this is so real it's inside my head)

Loud footsteps echoed through the underground cavern. Jinx looked behind her, and saw a second God-form charging towards her. With a gesture, she sent her pet cyborg deity to intercept the intruder.

She wondered if Nomi was inside. Poor, lost, sad little Nomi. Her God-form grappled with Jinx's.

(it's taking stuff from my head and completing it continuing closure keep it out don't get confused)

"What are you doing? Why!?" Nomi's voice echoed through the cavern.

"What I have to do. What I was sent to do. I'm going to free the captive God."

"How could you!? I-- trusted you!" The pain in Nomi's voice cut Jinx to the core. Nomi's God-form twisted her enemy's head around, and began to twist it. Jinx's God-form went limp as a series of soft pops came from its neck.

"How could you betray us? How could you betray me? I thought you--" Nomi's voice trailed off.

"I do, Nomi. But only one of our civilizations can survive--"

(oh hell she ATE Peter I saw her saw her eat his heart poor Peter keep it out maintain it's just part of the story ride it out)

Jinx approached the bound God-form, and she looked into its face. It wasn't the one she was expecting to see.

"What? Who -- it's not Darneth? It's... Nyqll?"

She began to laugh. She did not know the proper words of power to free the deity. Nomi's God-form closed in on her, and its armored fist snatched her from the air.

"Nomi -- you did it. Your people did it. Your kind will triumph. I'm so sorry."

"Jnnqae -- WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS?" Nomi was histrionic. Jinx felt the world fall away from her.

"Kill me, Nomi. Do it. It's the only freedom I'll ever know." Jinx felt the armored fist of the God-form close in on her, crushing her--

(it's over it's over Jinx this is Jack you're almost out of there follow me follow me it's Jack come on, come on)

Everything went white again, but then Jinx looked away from the light fixture and blinked her eyes. She drew a deep breath as she felt the crushing grip disappear.

"Jinx? Are you OK?"

"Jack? Is that you?"

"Can you teleport us to the bridge? It's important. There's more residue in this compartment--"

"Yeah, give me a second." Jinx touched the old man's shoulder and remembered the bridge. "Here we go."

They rematerialized in the bridge. Jack rushed to the console and jettisoned Lab 15. "Good riddance. I'll get a robot to do the assembly next time."

Jinx still felt a little disoriented. She checked her stream on the psychogram. "It got everything."

Jack rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "That's good. Listen, I want to give you the chance to vet the stream before we forward it to my handlers. If there's anything in there you don't want them to see."

Jinx thought for a moment. "That's decent of you, Jack. I'll think about it." She had more pressing concerns. "What did that stuff do to me? What was that?"

"The black oil. It's hard to explain. It's like liquid reality -- it took what it could find in your head and filled in the gaps, just like the real world would."

Jinx looked at Jack. "What the hell are we doing?"

The old man smiled. "Meddling with things no one was meant to know. Get some sleep, Jinx."

Submission

2008-06-24T19:43:00.000+02:00

Jinx turned to look at the far end of the hangar, a good one and a half kilometers away. The ship stretched almost to the end of the huge open space.

She looked down at her PDA and scrolled through the pre-flight check-list she had bullied the hangar supervisor into giving her. The engines and fuel delivery entries were next, and there was absolutely no way she was going to walk.

She picked a particularly colorful greeble as a land-mark and teleported to the rear of the ship.

Immediately, alarms sounded, and red lights lit up along the length of the hangar. Jinx looked up and spotted a security camera floating nearby. She took a few steps towards the drone and waved.

The red lights and alarms continued as a squad of troopers in hard-suits approached. Jinx decided that putting her hands behind her head and smiling was probably the smartest thing to do.

As two troopers dropped on one knee and pulled up shoulder-mounted rail-guns, their sergeant approached her with obvious caution. Walking up to her carefully, he poked her in the left shoulder with a baton.

He spoke to her through his voice modulator. "Please refrain from teleporting in the future."

She looked into his helmet. The band of black plastic at eye level had two luminous eye-spots that regarded her with a stylized expression of disinterest. She wondered how frightened the trooper was.

"All right. Can you turn off the alarm?"

"Of course, ma'am." Even through the hard-suit, she could see the posture of the sergeant relax. He waved to his colleagues. "All clear."

The alarms stopped, and the red lights stopped pulsating. Everyone, Jinx included, breathed a sigh of relief. She lowered her arms and decided to push her luck.

"Can you guys get me a cart or something?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'll requisition you one immediately."

Jinx smiled as sincerely as she could. "Thank you."

The trooper and his colleagues loped away in their powered armor.

She grabbed a transponder and pointed it at an exterior airlock on the gigantic vessel. The red lights marking the corner of the exterior door blinked twice as she pressed the "unlock" button on the small black plastic device, and the door opened automatically.

She entered the airlock and closed the exterior door. The displays warned her that the interior was filled with pure xenon gas, and she had to confirm that she was willing to enter the compartment without a breathing apparatus. Further warnings reminded her of xenon's anesthetic properties, that the reactor was active and producing a hazardous neutron flux, and that the reaction chambers included fusion catalysts with very low nuclear binding energy. The ship's computers briefly considered her reckless disregard for her own safety, and asked her for a final confirmation, absolving the systems for any responsibility in the event of a fatal accident.

Jinx agreed. The interior door opened, and a few lights turned on, illuminating a hallway upholstered in orange, padded carpeting with ladder-like handholds in each corner. As she walked on down the hall, blue lights flashed inside her eyeballs. Evidently the computer wasn't kidding about high neutron flux.

She stilled her reflex to breathe. She was good for a few hours of activity in this environment, but it was ugly and oppressive enough that she wanted to get the check-list done as soon as possible. She worked quickly, and checked the pressure readouts. Stage one deuterium-tritium flow nominal. Stage two di-lithium flow nominal. Stage three carbon ion flow nominal.

She left, and the airlock decided not to give her any trouble on the way out. As normal pressure returned, she started to breathe again.

An old man sat in the passenger seat of the cart waiting for her as the exterior doors opened. Most of his mane had fallen out long ago, and his fur was streaked with gray. Nevertheless, he looked unnaturally energetic and trim. He smiled broadly at her, and spoke.

"Pleased to meet you! You are my pilot?"

"Yes, Magus Graves. The pleasure is all mine." She sat down on the driver's seat, and turned the cart back towards the habitation modules in the middle of the ship. She looked at her passenger as they drove towards the bulky structure.

"Have you ever been in deep space before?"

"No, ma'am, I haven't."

"Ah." Jinx thought that explained a lot. "This ship is an old long-range survey model. We can stay out for a couple of years with a full load of fuel and bio-mass."

The old man chuckled. "Too much is better than not enough."

Jinx couldn't think of anything to say in response. He continued to speak.

"I'm glad they picked someone competent to bring me out. You have my life in your hands."

"Thank you, Magus--"

"Call me Jack. I will be requiring assistance for a number of the experiments I wish to run, and I think you will do very nicely."

Jinx's copy of the mission briefing had not included these minor details. "What did you have in mind?"

Jack smiled beatifically. "We're going to resurrect dead gods."

Jinx was again at a loss for words, this time because she had too many questions that needed to be asked. She picked the best one.

"Why would you want to do that?"

"The Corporation needs to find a way to re-connect to our history, especially the period before the rise of the Reyll Theocracy. By studying ancient god-forms under controlled conditions, I hope to make a map of our deepest needs and desires, as expressed by our pagan pantheons."

The old man paused for a minute, and looked at Jinx intently. "It's art, for art's sake, and the culmination of a life-long dream."

Jinx stopped the cart in front of the habitation modules. However much she wanted to run away, she realized that this was something she wanted to see for herself.

She also knew that this mission was pretty much guaranteed to end badly.

She Fell Through The Plot Hole

2008-06-07T21:00:00.000+02:00

Jinx had her own corner of the holding cell.

In front of her bunk, a huge bruiser of a man lay on the floor with his hands clasped over his head, sobbing. He was remembering every bad thing he had ever done.

The other six prisoners in the holding cell were backed into the opposite corner, and looked at Jinx with a mixture of fear and respect. A guard came to the door, and triggered the lock. "Jinx Bubastis --"

He stopped as he saw the man crying on the floor. "What did you--"

"I didn't lay a finger on him."

The guard reached for his sidearm as Jinx approached the door. "Put that away. I've played nice with you guys. Someone wants to see me?"

The guard moved his hand from his holster and eyed Jinx warily. "Yeah. Right this way."

Jinx turned to the other prisoners. "Toodles, assholes."

As they walked down the hallway, the guard talked a little with Jinx. "Your visitor is someone important. They just spent half an hour chewing out my boss for putting you into gen pop."

"He wanted to humiliate me. Your boss is really into humiliation."

The guard did not respond. They walked down the hall in silence.

The guard gestured towards a door, and they stopped in front of it. Jinx turned towards the guard. "Take care of yourself." The guard held a card up to the electronic lock, and the door opened automatically. Jinx walked into the room.

A woman sat at the table, dressed in a gray business suit. Her fur was glossy black, and her golden eyes locked with Jinx's as she stood up and extended her hand.

Jinx accepted her hand, shook, and sat down across from her. "Pleased to meet you, Ms. Bubastis. My name is Lilandra Verisal, and I'm glad you've decided to accept our offer. Before we begin, I have some questions I need to ask you."

Jinx nodded. "All right."

Lilandra took a small tablet from her suit coat pocket and gestured at the device. "What role did you serve in the terrorist cell called M-Seven?"

"I was responsible for obtaining parts and munitions for the fighter fleet and provisioning the fire control systems."

Lilandra pushed the tablet towards Jinx. A list of star-ship registry data filled the small screen. "Please review this list -- are these the ships you attacked carrying out this mission?"

Jinx looked carefully at the list, scrolling around a little. "Yes, this looks complete."

"What role did you play in planning the attack?"

"I was given a laundry list of parts to obtain -- there were a number of components that could not be manufactured on Suburbia -- and told to keep an eye out for usable munitions. Demonslayer's main requirement was that the weapons have a radioactive payload. Once I obtained the bombs, I was tasked with preparing the fire control systems."

"I see. There were a large number of people involved in the conspiracy. Were you given any responsibility for routine operations?"

"Demonslayer would provide work details to help me unload captured cargo ships. It seemed to be some kind of forced labor arrangement for people who were discipline problems. Lots of drunks and druggies. She told them I was the devil, so they were all terrified of me. Other than that, I was mostly on my own."

"Did you have any contact with Rrmu Kelbakika?"

"Who?"

"Red Menace. Young woman with electromagnetic powers?"

"No. I only ever saw her together with Demonslayer. She didn't look very happy."

"We captured her shortly after the attack. She indicated that she would be willing to defect."

Jinx's facial expression did not change. "She's pretty powerful. I didn't have much to do with her. I think she'd know more about the operations on Suburbia."

"Yes. We're hoping so. Please wait here, I need to talk to our lawyers." Lilandra walked out of the room, leaving Jinx sitting at the table.

Jinx leaned back in the plastic chair and waited. Her face was an expressionless mask. Her eyes scanned the room, and her head turned towards the far corner of the room. She pretended there was a hidden camera there, and stared into it's possibly non-existent lens with a neutral expression meant to be nonchalant while suggesting that she wasn't having any fun at all.

She held this expression for quite some time.

Lilandra returned and sat down at the table.

"Ms. Bubastis?"

"Yes?"

"First, thank you for your honest and accurate answers to our questions. Ms. Kelbakika and our own investigations have confirmed the correctness and completeness of your deposition. Now, for some bad news -- "

Lilandra looked at Jinx with a appraising eye. Jinx did her best to maintain her neutral expression.

"-- the Corporation is not prepared to offer you immunity to prosecution at this time. However, my working group is authorized to offer you a temporary position on a contract basis." Lilandra took her tablet from her pocket and pushed it towards Jinx.

"If you accept, and faithfully carry out your obligations, I may be able to convince Legal not to pursue further punitive actions against you. Please take a moment to review the terms and conditions." Lilandra gestured towards the tablet.

Jinx took the tablet and tried not to shake. She paged down a few times. "An escort mission?"

"Yes. Well outside Corporate space. Please note the non-disclosure clauses."

Jinx read, and put the tablet down.

"You have twenty--"

"I'll do it."

Post Mortem

2008-05-29T08:34:00.002+02:00

No, I haven't given up yet. There will be more.

You realize that some of this was pretty dire, right?

Definitely. Some wise guy once said that every wanna-be author has a few thousand bad pages that they just have to get out of their system before they can start writing the good stuff. I think that wise guy was right.

For what it's worth, I think the plotting, characterizations, and setting turned out the way I wanted. The problems I have are mostly technical issues with composition and pacing. The obvious conclusion is that I should plow ahead and start the next story arc. In the meantime, I've started to adapt what I've written thus far into a second draft in the form of a graphic novel script.

A big thank you to Jeremy Rizza for helping me get to the end of this story. Your encouragement made a big difference, and your criticism improved my prose.

(And, in case anyone was wondering what the deal was with the shopping mall security guard in "Beating the Odds", please have a look at the Shrine of the Mall Ninja. It's hilarious and horrifying.)

So, stay tuned. More picaresque adventures of dysfunctional heroes in a universe made of deconstructed pop sci-fi tropes are coming up, this time featuring Jack Kirby, "Inferno", and women and the refrigerators who love them.

Grudge Match

2008-04-15T11:34:00.002+02:00

The bulkhead glowed red, then white, then a shower of sparks shot from an incision in the metal. A chainsaw popped out of the rectangular hole in the metal door, and laboriusly cut down through the hinges, sending bits of molten metal skidding along the grav plates on the floor.

Cut from its hinges, the door fell to the floor, and Thresher walked into the hallway. "All right, all clear. Where's the welcoming committee?"

The Eye followed him closely. "Behind the next door, there's a cross hallway. Killotron on the right, Bearcat on the left."

Jolt took up the rear. She pulled a panel off the wall as they stopped in front of the next door. "OK, I can open this from our side. Anyone have any bright ideas what to do about the ambush?"

The Eye smiled, and began pulling flashbangs from her utility belt, and popping them up in the air with her other hand. Soon, she was juggling four of the small grenades with one hand, and she nodded curtly to Jolt as she switched over to a two-handed juggle. "Ready."

Thresher positioned himself just behind the door. "Ready."

Jolt touched the control panel, and the door opened. The Eye expertly tossed two flash-bangs to the left as the door was still half-open. A feral scream echoed through the hallway as the detonated in front of Bearcat. She bounced the second pair of grenades off the door frame, and they detonated in front of Killotron. Once the door was fully open, Thresher charged to the right as Killotron opened fire on him with his arm-mounted plasma blasters.

Jolt peeked around the corner, and aimed for the floor as Bearcat recovered from the flash-bangs. He was in mid-crouch as a lightning bolt struck the floor plate he was standing on, burning out the fuse and disabling the artificial gravity. He was in mid-jump, and suddenly finding his legs in free fall caused his spectacular leap to become a face-plant.

As he struggled to his feet, Jolt aimed carefully, and hit him square in the face with a lightning bolt. Bearcat fell to the ground, unconscious and smouldering.

Killotron's blasters left Thresher's armor pockmarked and smoking, but the cyborg continued his advance on the heavily-armed robot. Thresher's chainsaws were still out, and he gunned the motors as he lunged towards Killotron.

Thresher brought a chainsaw up to the robot's throat and started sawing through his neck, as he chopped off Killotron's left arm at the shoulder. The robot screamed as his mushroom cap shaped head was separated from his body.

As the smoke from the flash grenades began to settle, The Eye poked her head out into the hallway. "All clear?"

Jolt turned to her and gave her the thumbs-up. "All clear."

Killoton's body tried to crawl on its arm and legs, feeling around for its missing head.

The Eye pointed to the left. "This way."

On the other side of the Reyll warship, Demonslayer dragged Red Menace to the forward torpedo bay by her hair. The young girl was crying and sobbing, and tried to get to her feet and run away. Demonslayer slammed her into a bulkhead and beat her savagely with a wire coat hanger.

Red Menace wiped a trickle of blood from her nose, and glared at Demonslayer with hatred in her eyes as the older woman pointed to the torpedo tube. The young girl could have easily snatched the wire hanger from Demonslayer's hand and wrapped it around her neck.

Instead, she obeyed, climbing into the waiting tube, sobbing and crying.

Demonslayer had had a vision, and she saw what was coming. She went to a wall panel and signalled the bridge before stomping out of the room.

Arsenal rose over the curved horizon of the planet, approaching the Reyll warship. The front torpedo tube coughed as Red Menace was launched on an intercept course. Two streaks of light approached each other.

There was a flash of light when they met, and Red Menace's spark fell slowly to the surface of the planet below as Arsenal closed in on the warship.

He stopped abruptly, and a purple beam cut deeply into the right side of the ship, severing one of the engines.

Lights flickered inside as Demonslayer activated her combat pulpit in the port hangar. She swore, closed her eyes, and choked down the rage rising within her.

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye opened the door on the rear end of the hangar, and the Eye pointed at two large crates of spare parts placed just in front of the door. "Look out -- boss fight!"

Her prediction was confirmed a fraction of a second later. Demonslayer towered over them in her open-frame exoskeleton, and its eldritch transducers converted her words of power into a swarm of homing curses. Jolt and Thresher ducked behind the crate, as the Eye cartwheeled to avoid a swarm of deadly colored lights that followed her into a sunken repair bay.

Demonslayer took a thundering step forward, focussing her attention on the Eye. Behind her, the wall of the hangar began to glow.

In an instant, a crack opened, and the port side of the hangar bay peeled away from the ship, opening the huge chamber into space.

Demonslayer was blown out instantly, as Thresher activated the grippers on his replacement feet and hung on to Jolt. The Eye tried to grab the edge of the repair bay, but her fingers slipped.

Thinking quickly, Thresher shot a tether to her, and she grabbed it and held on for dear life as Arsenal flew in through the hole in the hull.

Arsenal saw the Eye struggle to keep her hold on the tether, and gestured towards the gash he had made in the warship. Like a film running backwards, the hull re-assembled itself, and the Eye fell to the floor, tumbling.

"Sorry about that." He touched down next to his team-mates. The Eye gave him a dirty look.

Jolt squinted at him, smirked, and said, "Be more careful next time. You can keep the new outfit."

The credits roll as the four heroes walk towards the bridge of the captured enemy warship.

Beating the Odds

2008-03-30T23:53:00.000+02:00

"Where's the first wave? What happened?"

"Calm down, kid. We all know what happened."

"Hope they got the job done."

"They're dead. They're all dead!"

The voice comms between ships in the cloud of improvised fighters were interrupted by a hail from the Reyll battleship that watched over them. An old woman's voice called out to the panicked pilots.

"It is done. Sedgewick Station's defense batteries are in chaos. Second wave, fall in and pull out!"

There was a moment of silence after Demonslayer spoke, and the first few fighters gathered for the second wave.

Inside Sedgewick Station, a semi-circle of troopers in powered armor aimed their cannon at the ship that just made an unauthorized landing at the air-docks. The commander turned on his suit's public address system and his amplified voice echoed in the hangar.

"COME OUT NOW WITH YOUR HANDS UP!"

A hatch opened beneath the skull-like armored carapace that covered the front compartment of the illegally parked star-ship. Peter and Jinx approached the soldiers, who lowered their weapons.

Peter waved casually at the troopers. "Arsenal, reporting for duty. Take us to the nearest civil defense base! The next wave is coming any moment now!"

Jinx tried to keep Peter between her and the soldiers. She peeked out from behind him as they were led away to the nearest base.

Half of the remaining fighters began their burn down the gravity well towards Sedgewick Station. Bob-Luke was nervous as the small ships crossed over the lowest point of their orbits and the space station rose suddenly over the horizon of the bombed-out planet beneath them.

The defensive batteries on the distant space station began to strobe erratically. A few of the lead fighters exploded violently, sending debris back down the gravity well and into the path of the oncoming fighters. Bob-Luke pulsed the lateral thrusters to avoid a large fragment of one of his comrades' engine pods. He realized that he was hyperventilating, and did his best to calm himself as he approached Sedgewick Station.

It was time to start decelerating, to prepare to land on Sedgewick Station and seek a conduit that would take him and his bug bombs to the core of the vast space station.

The command bunker was lit with red emergency lights. As Peter and Jinx entered the room, a few soldiers looked up from their screens and stared for a moment before returning to their monitors. The commanding officer walked towards Peter and saluted.

"What's the situation, soldier?"

Peter almost didn't let him finish the question. "We think they will attempt to fire a cobalt bomb at the bio-reactor in the middle of Big Rock. Their goal is to contaminate our supply of air and water, and force an evacuation of the Station."

The officer squinted. "So we can expect another wave, and they'll try to land." He paused for a fraction of a second, and turned to the soldiers working the monitors. "Tell the defensive batteries to concentrate fire on ships approaching landing areas or external structures."

Jinx spoke up. "I can remotely detonate the bombs. We can destroy the fighters before they get the chance to come too close, but we need some time to get the right equipment."

The commander gave Jinx an odd look. "Yeah. You guys go work on that."

Jinx seemed uncomfortable. She grabbed Peter's arm, and they teleported out of the cramped bunker into an open marketplace. Peter needed a second to get his bearings. "So, what do we need?"

Jinx narrowed her eyes. "A commerce terminal. Let's go."

She strode off towards a stand selling live snacks, and Peter followed.

Bob-Luke gunned his engines, decelerating rapidly. He had spotted a landing zone. Three of his comrades streaked ahead of him, and were cut down by the gunner protecting the private loading dock on Promenade Five, Sedgewick Station's largest shopping mall. Bob-Luke locked on to the gun emplacement, punched in a four-digit arming code, and fired one of his two missiles.

Dodging debris, he tried to match his vector to the station. Radiation alarms in his cockpit triggered as he passed through the plume of cobalt-contaminated dust rising from the former site of the defense battery. He needed an opening, and he needed it fast. The external door nearest the gun site was open a crack. He ignored the radiation alarms and slipped through the gap into the evacuated loading dock.

He cursed as his fighter suddenly jerked, caught in the acceleration field between a pair of gravity modulation plates. He was inside. He caught his breath, and silenced the radiation alarms. The pressure door to the stock room was directly ahead of him. He closed his eyes and gunned the engine.

The emergency balloons inflated a fraction of a second after he punched through the airlock. Employees scattered, flinging boxes of shoes and knocking over racks of clothing as Bob-Luke guided his fighter towards the store-front. Some future employee of the cycle hit the alarms.

At the other end of Promenade Five, a security guard driving a cart grumbled as he saw his call light flash. He grabbed his communicator, and his supervisor began screaming at him. It took him a second to realize that this was not a reprimand -- this was an emergency. A grin broke out on his face, as he realized that his time had come.

Long ago, he had saved a division head's nephew from a T-room encounter gone bad. In exchange for his discretion, he had been permitted to carry military-grade weaponry in case of grand theft or terrorist attack. He unlocked the gun box beneath the seat of his security cart, and gazed on his arsenal of weaponry -- a plasma assault rifle, a shoulder-fired rail-gun, a selection of 40mm shells.

It was time to lay his life on the line.

Peter and Jinx stood at the live snacks stand. Jinx took a bite of her mouse-in-a-bun and casually flipped over the commerce terminal to examine its card slot. Her eyes widened, and she poked Peter in the ribs with her elbow.

"What?"

Jinx swallowed. "It doesn't have a slot."

Peter looked irritated. "What?"

The man behind the stand grinned. "Everybody does certificate validation on-line. That's what the metro-net is for! Only hicks in the sticks use smart-cards!"

Peter rubbed his forehead. "Oh, crap."

Bob-Luke's fighter blasted through the storefront, scattering dresses and handbags into the main concourse. His vessel plowed through a stand selling sunglasses as it gained speed and hurtled through the shopping mall.

Bob-Luke goosed his engines and struggled to keep his fighter flying straight and level as it accelerated past the speed of sound. Behind him, he left a whirlwind of shattered storefronts, pieces of incautious and unlucky shoppers, and fragments of consumer products. He had covered slightly more than half the length of the concourse, and would be out of the mall in a matter of seconds.

The security guard's heart pounded as faced down the storm of death approaching him. He shouldered his rail-gun and fired a shot into the center of the maelstrom. The shell burst milliseconds later, releasing a cloud of flechettes.

The bow-shock from Bob-Luke's fighter caught them and they tumbled harmlessly into his slipstream. The security guard did not even have time to finish his curse as the shock wave pounded him into red paste and shattered the entrance doors leading to the parking lot.

Jinx and Peter had spent the last moments futilely attempting to find a commerce terminal that would take a smart card for certificate validation. Every newspaper stand, snack bar, and sidewalk musician on Sedgewick Station seemed to be using the metropolitan networks to do their transaction processing. Peter was exasperated as Jinx poked him in the arm.

"Maybe drugs are the answer."

Peter, nervous and irritated, snapped at Jinx. "What?!"

"See that kid on the corner -- the twitchy little punk trying to look cool?"

Peter became a little more thoughtful. "Yeah. Why?"

"He's nervous because he has a pocket full of shrooms and thinks you're going to bust him. I think he just bought them."

Peter looked at Jinx, and then at the kid, who broke into a panicked run. "Got it."

A moment later, Peter grabbed the young man by the lapels of his leather jacket and lifted him up to look him straight in the eyes. Jinx stifled a giggle as Peter growled, "Take me to your dealer!"

Bob-Luke blasted through the toll air-locks leading to the evacuated Number Ten Freeway, and continued his mad dash to the center of Big Rock. Commuters stuck in the chronic traffic jams flipped him off as he streaked past their bubbles of air and warmth.

Bob-Luke didn't notice. His eyes were focused straight ahead, and his reflexes were razor-sharp. He knew now that he was the one, and like a mantra, the phrase "I am Number Seven" ran through his mind. He grinned like a maniac.

Peter and Jinx re-materialized in the civil defense command center. On the big screen, the alarms caused by Bob-Luke's trail of destruction were the focus of attention. A chaos of voices tried to arrange a squad of troopers in hard-suits to erect a road-block.

Peter and Jinx approached a comms console, and were intercepted by a systems administrator. He looked at the offline commerce terminal, covered in psychedelic stickers, with manifest horror. "No. No, I'm not letting you plug that thing into my equipment. Do you know where it's been?"

Jinx looked at him with a cold fire in his eyes, and pulled his gaze into hers. In a deep voice, she muttered "Mind crush". The administrator slumped to the floor, and she turned to Peter. "I think you'd better stop that kid. He's getting close to the target."

Peter looked at the screen, and then at Jinx. "Can I trust you?"

She smiled. "No, not really. But I'll do what I said I'll do."

Peter thought for a moment, then rushed out the door to intercept Bob-Luke.

Demonslayer watched the ships return from the second wave, and with a silent gesture, gave the order to assemble a third wave. The possibility of success flickered on the edges of her perception, and she began to iterate through the stations of her master plan. She realized with a start that her information was incomplete. Her mind reached out.

Jinx was alone in a room filled with soldiers occupied with organizing the defense of Sedgewick Station. Next to her lay an unconscious system administrator, and before her was an open panel. As she reached out to grab a signal cable to a nearby transmitter, she noticed that the voices suddenly stopped, and that her arm was no longer moving.

A voice called to her in this moment of grotesquely dilated time. She smelled incense and heard the whirring of cooling fans.

"Very good, Number Six. You are in their nerve center."

The silence of the technicians behind her irritated Jinx. She plugged the transmission cable into the gaudily decorated commerce terminal. Her mind covered the action with a superficial layer of indignation.

"I see you've deigned to contact me personally. Don't forget your ablutions afterward, you self-righteous old--"

A voice began to enunciate a word behind her. She was relieved to feel some of the passage of time. The connection locked into place, and her hand moved slowly and deliberately towards her jacket pocket.

"You were one of us. You knew their ways and found the means to enact our plan. You are a part of the whole--"

"I've got a hole you can--"

"Spare me your juvenile provocations. We're on the same side, it says so in your contract."

Her hand moved so slowly. More morphemes dribbled out of mouths behind her at a maddeningly slow rate.

Demonslayer continued her mental intrusion. "Think of it. A perfect moment of chaos, and we can win. We'll be winners."

The smart card was in her hand. She looked away from it quickly before its significance entered her stream of consciousness.

Deep inside Jinx's mind, near the boundary between this world and eternity, something growled. Jinx's waking self briefly blinked out of existence, and it's voice boomed across the psychic link joining her with Demonslayer.

"LIFE IS NOT A GAME, YOU ARROGANT OLD BITCH."

Demonslayer's mind recoiled, and Jinx felt her perception of time return to normal. She inserted the smart card and double-checked her connections.

Near the center of Big Rock, Bob-Luke felt like his nerves were singing. The voice in his head had become a chorus. He knew he was the one, and that all the terrible long nights on the streets surrounding the East Pole had a meaning, and that meaning was the bomb that would force the Corporation to abandon its headquarters, all the Corporate big-wigs would get to see how it feels, and--

His thoughts were interrupted by an invisible wall. His fighter skidded along the bottom of the evacuated Freeway, and he wondered if he was dead yet. His canopy was cracked, and the air was leaking out, and something was walking towards him.

It pointed at him, there was a flash of light, and then Bob-Luke was dead.

Peter walked to the shattered star-fighter and looked at the missile beneath the buckled left front canard. He grasped the warhead, and the pins holding it onto the propulsion unit released. He held the bomb in his hand and examined it for a moment.

In the command center, Jinx's usual self looked up from her work. Her mind sent a last message through the fading mental link to Demonslayer. "...and as for our contract -- I resign!"

She typed in the PIN -- zero, eight, one, five.

The third wave was skimming over the atmosphere of the home world, on their way to render Sedgewick Station uninhabitable.

Peter saw a warning light blink on the spherical physics package. For a panicked millisecond, he cursed not knowing where he could get rid of the bomb.

Jinx pressed OK.

Debris and radioactive cobalt rained down into the ash-colored skies of a ruined world.

Peter thought for a moment, and the light went out.

On the bridge of the Reyll warship, Demonslayer was suddenly, unnaturally awake. She bolted up from her captain's chair, and stormed off to her quarters, bellowing.

Behind the warship, the Nightstalker emerged from hyperspace. A ventral airlock opened, and Thresher adjusted his position before firing a tether at the battleship. He reeled it in, pulling himself closer to the nearest airlock on the Reyll warship.

Peter poked his head into the command center, and casually tossed a metal ball to Jinx, who reflexively caught it. She started as soon as she realized that it was the physics package from Bob-Luke's last bug bomb.

He smiled at her. "Nice catch."

Jinx laughed nervously.

He gestured over his shoulder. "I've got to go. We've found Demonslayer's ship."

"Be careful." The words slipped out of Jinx before she knew what she was saying. Peter had already left.

Forward to Death

2008-01-06T22:59:00.000+01:00

Peter ducked as he entered the cramped state-room turned into an improvised laboratory. Jinx sat at a table, and pulled a plastic card bearing a printed circuit from a lime-green apparatus with a set of various-sized slots and a few indicator lights. She turned to face Peter as he came into the room.

"We're going to be joining the fleet soon." Peter looked around. "What are you doing?"

"Setting up a remote detonator for the bombs they're using." Jinx examined the card carefully.

"A remote detonator? How's that going to work?" Peter was curious.

"Getting the bombs was easy. The hard part was figuring out how to detonate them." Jinx played with the card.

"Right. You need an arming request that the warhead is willing to trust. So, how did you do that?" Peter crossed his arms in front of him.

"The bombs have a hard-wired set of trusted signers for arming requests. Fortunately for us bad guys, many of these signers have been compromised. This card contains a delegated signer signed by one of them."

"I think I understand. Using the signer on the card -- which you control -- you can send a request that references a trusted signer in the warhead."

"Right. This card looks like a delegate of a trusted signer as far as the warhead is concerned. The arming system is a modified commerce terminal that can use the card to construct the arming request. All they have to do is enter a PIN to arm their bombs." Jinx smiled with some satisfaction. "Come on, let's head to the bridge. I'm going to need to do some course adjustments to fit in with the fleet."

Jinx's ship tumbled through hyperspace. It was a heavily modified freighter, with surplus engines and guns retrofitted onto the ends of two wing-like spars. The bridge, in a forward-facing module, was covered by an improvised carapace painted with a fanged skull pattern. A dorsal fin bore M-Seven's ligature, the letter M with a lightning bolt for its right descender.

As space became less twisted and warped, and slowly transitioned to its more familiar pseudo-Euclidean geometry, the bubble of space surrounding the vessel began to merge with the cloud of home brew fighters, escorted and re-fueled by a score of Reyll battleships.

The bridge of the pirate ship was dark. Peter looked up at the monitor and saw that a new async message had been pushed to the makeshift fleet. He looked at the M-Seven logo dancing on his screen with some distaste.

"Mail from Number Two."

Jinx sat at the helm. Her body was tense, but her face was calm and concentrated. She adjusted her trim hyper-thrusters to join the cloud of attacking fighters. There was a long pause before she could answer Peter.

"Oh, joy. Demonslayer wants to inspire the troops. Put it on, we're gonna need a laugh."

Peter brought up the video stream on a secondary monitor. Demonslayer was no longer wearing her mask, and he could not help noticing how sad and worn her eyes looked.

"Comrades! Our moment has come. Now we join to excise the alien cancer. But do not be fooled -- it will be hard and bloody work. I shall not lie to you. Almost none of the first wave will survive the initial assault."

Jinx muttered, "Yeah, no shit," under her breath.

Demonslayer continued. "Cleave to the plan. The first wave will be of the unmarried and the orphaned. Only those whose death will not cause pain to the living. Their sacrifice will enable our victory. Our battleships will draw away any defenders in the system -- we shall then signal all wave leaders to begin the assault. Remain attentive, our time has come!"

Peter raised his eyebrows as the message suddenly ended. "I still can't believe the plan is to fly straight into Sedgewick Station's defensive batteries. Demonslayer's right -- they'll all be wiped out!" He watched a nearby battleship leave hyperspace.

Jinx thought for a moment. "Yeah. Hope your force-field powers are still working."

"Oh yes." Peter smiled, and noticed a new incoming communication, this one a live transmission. "They've sent the beacon for the first wave. Ready?"

Jinx's eye narrowed and she hunkered down in her pilot's chair. "Ready!"

They rematerialized in orbit around their species' former home world. Even from the distance, it was clear that the skies of Fe Arra were still choked with ash from fires that had been burning for over two hundred years. Sedgewick Station was on the opposite side of the planet.

Peter and Jinx followed the thousand fighters of the first wave as they dove down the gravity well. Much of the simulation they had studied had been practice scenarios for this run, an eccentric orbit that would take them down the gravity well to the edge of the home world's exosphere, and then back up, twisting upwards to Sedgewick Station.

They watched the planet turn from a disk to a horizon, with a cloud of fighters in front of them. Jinx turned to Peter. "Force screen?"

Peter nodded. "Way ahead of you." He looked at the comms console. "Message from the leader -- putting it on."

The leader of the first wave was an old man who was missing a good chunk out of his left ear. "All right, girls. Here we go. Close to 1500 klicks and let 'em eat both rockets. Spread out, don't bunch up or we're all dead. Full burn.... now!"

They watched the huge space station slowly rise over the curved horizon. It was far enough away that it still looked like a disk.

It took a second or two for the first bolts to reach the oncoming fighters. The tiny, lop-sided disk, slowly rising in the sky, pulsated with energy discharges. Peter watched as the defense batteries picked off the oncoming fighters. The casualties seemed to fall back -- the rest of the group were accelerating towards the station.

The fire from the station became more intense as the vessels approached. The station, in its current form, was dominated by two asteroids captured a century and a half ago. Silvery strips of superstructure bound the two round rocks together into a structure that resembled a cantaloupe duct-taped to a bowling ball.

Sensors on the surface of the station worked together to coordinate the fire of the defense batteries. The explosions from struck fighters became more frequent; now, dozens of fighters were dropping away from the wave each second, many burning or breaking up.

The old man would had led the charge was long dead, but another pilot crossed the 1500 klick line. He hurriedly punched in a four-digit code into a keyboard, and watched the "armed" indicators come on. He fired. Within seconds, more missiles joined his own, leaving behind steam-like trails of coolant as they approached the surface of the station.

Peter flinched as he watched a ragged cloud of a few hundred warheads approach Sedgewick Station.

The surface of the station was covered with tiny pin-pricks of light that kicked up plumes of debris. Suddenly, the fire from the station's defense batteries seemed to slow a little.

Jinx noticed Peter's discomfort. "There are hundreds of meters of rock between the surface and any residents. The point of the exercise is to gum up the sensor grids with radioactive cobalt long enough for the second and third waves to attempt a landing."

"Yeah." Peter still looked worried.

They came closer to the space station. The silvery bands holding the rocks together became complex structures of pipes and ducts. Jinx guided the ship into the dockyards, nestled between the two captured asteroids. With a few quick moves, she adjusted her ship's vector to match with the station's, and slowly maneuvered towards the disembarking area.

"Looks like Jolt told them about us." Peter seemed to relax a little as they entered the area between two huge artifical gravity plates. The pirate ship jerked, and began to gently fall. Jinx compensated with thrusters, and set down on an empty parking space.

Peter stood up, almost bumping his head on the low ceiling. He turned to Jinx, who seemed to shrink a little into her pilot's chair.

"Come on!"

"I can't believe I'm doing this." Jinx was shaking a little.

Peter took her hand. "But you are. It's time to be a hero. Let's go!"

Duty Calls

2007-12-16T11:07:00.000+01:00

The bridge of the Nightstalker was quiet.

The bridge crew sat at their stations. Jolt sat in the command chair, following the event journals as they prepared to free themselves from the thin layer of radioactive cobalt coating the hull. Thresher's torso was duct-taped to a chair in front of the engineering station. Although he seemed to be grievously injured and unconscious, he had patched his robotic voluntary nervous system to his station's command interface. He was rerouting electrical power in the maze of conduits beneath the hull to align their magnetic fields precisely.

The Eye kept watch at the helm. The star-ship's short range sensors were almost useless due to the intensely radioactive film of metal that clung to the outside of the ship, but she was able to use the interrociter to get usable data to feed the fire control and tactical maneuver systems. This allowed the Nightstalker a zone of control covering 10,000 cubic kilometers of space. Since the Nightstalker was quite literally going nowhere anytime soon, this was enough to ensure that they didn't run into anything or anyone until the crisis was resolved.

The First Mate stood next to Jolt's command chair, and reviewed the project checklist on an overhead monitor.

Behind him, Thresher lifted his head and said, "Electrical conduits aligned."

The First Mate gave the cyborg a curt, telegenic nod, and checked the box on the touch-screen with grace and élan.

Executive Officer Benito Franco was the youngest officer ever commissioned by the Corporate Drama Academy. He and Jolt turned to each other, and Jolt gave the order.

"Energize." Powerful electrical currents created a powerful magnetic field that enveloped the entire hull. The cobalt was strongly magnetically permeable. Magnetic domains aligned, and the thin film was quickly magnetized.

Jolt turned around the other way to face Thresher. "How long will we need to magnetize the film?"

"Not very long at all. I think it will be ready in a few minutes." Despite missing the lower half of his cyborg body, Thresher seemed surprisingly lively. "Once it's magnetized, we can reverse the polarity and send pulses of current down the conduits in the opposite direction. The magnetic fields will repel, blasting the metal off the hull."

Jolt smiled at Thresher. "Great work! I'm proud of you guys."

The First Mate peered at the overhead monitor. "Captain, there's an incoming transmission, encrypted." He poked at the comms interface. "Key signature matches Arsenal."

Jolt turned towards the static-filled view-screen. "What? Didn't they find a body? Put this on the main screen."

Peter lay face-down on a bed, partially covered with a thin sheet. Jinx, dressed in a robe, sat down next to him and touched a spot on his back. Peter lifted his head, grinned and began to hum.

Jinx giggled and then gestured towards the end of the bed. "Hey, your encryption thingy finally finished handshaking. I think you have a connection to the Nightstalker."

Peter looked directly into the camera, and quickly leaped up. Thinking quickly, he just managed to cover himself a little with the sheet.

Jinx leaned back and waved at the camera. "Hiya, Sparky!"

Peter put himself together as best he could. He looked straight into the camera with an air of forced disinterest and saluted.

Jolt was not impressed. She sank into her captain's chair and rubbed her temples. The Eye and the First Mate gazed into the view-screen. The Eye's expression was a mixture of amusement and disgust. Thresher seemed consumed by vicarious embarrassment. The First Mate was simply dumbstruck.

"Arsenal here. Did you receive my message? We have a second image from a fighter simulator -- with a little luck, we should be able to reconstruct the attack plan by analyzing M-Seven's simulations."

Jolt looked at the view-screen through the corner of her eye. "What, that huge message that crashed my Inbox?"

"Yeah. That was an executable image of the simulators they used to train the fleet. I've lost my copy, but if you guys could sync with us, we might be able to re-construct the entire attack plan."

"We calculated where the fleet might re-materialize. Sedgewick Station is within the first standard deviation of the target distribution, so we're pretty sure they're going there." Jolt studiously avoided looking at the view-screen.

She turned to the slack-jawed First Mate. "Ben, open a data session."

"Yes, ma'am."

The sync operation quickly compared the images. Streams of data flowed to and from the Nightstalker and Jinx's ship. Jinx looked straight into the camera. "So, our ship has M-Seven livery. We can join up with the attackers--"

Jolt looked at Jinx with a withering glance, and interrupted her. "Did I ask you to speak? I don't remember asking you anything."

Peter spoke up. "It's a good idea. Once we know what they have planned, we might be able to disrupt their operations at a critical point. Attacking from surprise--"

"Yeah, that's not bad. We'll be there. You should try to land on the first wave and assist the defenders."

"Understood, Captain." Peter nodded. "We'll be in touch in a few hours once we've analyzed the composite image."

Jolt scowled at the screen. "Good. Put some clothes on next time. Close transmission."

The crew of the Nightstalker paused for a moment. Jolt then got out of the command chair and turned to her First Mate.

"Ben, you take over. I'm going to go soak my brain in warm soapy water."

Beyond Belief

2007-12-09T12:32:00.000+01:00

Jinx looked down at her fists and laughed a little.

"Huh. You tagged out."

"Yep." Peter stood in front of her with his arms folded.

"It must be my charming personality." Jinx smiled at Peter in mock flirtation.

"I'm immune. Type 350 clones have extraordinarily low sex drives. Anyway, you ripped out my larynx with your -- uh -- sharp thing." Peter was a little taken aback, and rubbed his throat.

"It's a war spork. A weapon developed from a very old tool for skinning fresh kills." Jinx pulled the war spork from the inside of her jacket, and pointed to the parts of the weapon as she continued. "The spike penetrates the carcass, then you run it along the side to separate the skin and fat from the meat. You can then use the spoon part to scrape fat and muscle off the skin for curing."

"That was totally educational. Creepy, too."

"M-Seven, at your service. We're all about the old creepy stuff. There are some neat sword and spear-breaking techniques you can do with it." Jinx demonstrated a few quick strokes with the weapon. Peter kept his arms folded in front of him as Jinx stabbed the air.

Peter looked at Jinx. "Would you put that thing away?"

"Don't be scared -- it's just a tool. I put a whammy on it that attacked your nervous system. It's hard to defend yourself when you can't think or move -- not that that stopped you from trying."

"I did my best. It's hard to keep your balance when you can't feel anything."

"That's what I told the judge at my last drunk and disorderly trial." Jinx nodded towards the exit of the living area, and tucked her weapon back into her inside jacket pocket. "Let's take a look while we still have some time."

"Yeah, let's do that. I'm curious."

They walked into the courtyard, where a hole filled with ashes marked the location of a former fire pit. Peter looked into the hole filled with ashes as Jinx picked up a battered piece of colorful cardboard from the ground.

Jinx gestured to Peter. "Come here! They must be shutting down the training program -- this is one of the lottery cards they used to select new recruits."

Peter looked over Jinx's shoulder at the battered piece of cardboard marked with purple numbers. "A lottery?"

Classical lotteries, where prizes are simply given to those who had the dumb luck to have a certain number of matches to the randomly drawn numbers, were extremely uncommon. The most popular games were cumulative lotteries, where players collected matches from daily drawings and tried to place them in winning "hands" to claim prizes from the pot.

The lottery card was printed with a gaudy holographic pattern to discourage forgery and changing made bets. Based on a small section of the card, a lottery operator could uniquely identify it and its corresponding series of bets.

Jinx looked at Peter as he examined the matrix of numbers marked with stamps. She found that she could still read his face and imagine what was going on in his head simply by examining his expression. Discovering that she could, she did -- until she realized with a start that he was now looking at her with the same probing gaze.

They broke eye contact, and each took half-a-step away from the other in an attempt to re-assert their personal spaces. There was an awkward moment. Jinx's gaze sank to the dusty ground as she imagined for a moment what Peter must be thinking. Peter briefly seemed stunned, uncertain what to say or do next.

When he broke his silence, Jinx felt suddenly sad and ashamed. "Were you trying to do something to my mind?"

"No. Not anything paranormal, anyway." She stopped for a moment to push the shame from her mind. "I fed on your essence. I took into myself what makes you the person you are. This has some side effects. Right now, I feel a connection to you because we are looking at the same things, and responding to them in similar ways. This creates a context of shared feelings that--"

Jinx stopped, and was relieved when Peter continued her thought. "That enable us to connect emotionally? Have a relationship?"

The absurdity of what Peter said made her laugh a little inside. "Yeah. That's what normals feel when they fall in love. I told you that you shouldn't have come back."

"It's not voluntary, and that wasn't the first time." Peter seemed to relax a little. "I've been coming back from the dead pretty regularly since I discovered I had powers."

Jinx briefly considered the implications of what Peter said. "Does anyone know you're an immortal?"

"They must know. No one has ever asked me about it, though."

"Immortality really screws with people's heads. With a savings account and a couple of millennia you could end up owning the Corporation."

Peter looked at Jinx carefully. "What about you? You must be older than you look."

"It's complicated. This body was born about a century before the Last War on the Home-world."

"That's... three hundred years?"

"As long as I find souls to consume, I won't age or weaken." She felt ashamed. "It's not the same as immortality. Demons are parasites. As soon as the last sapient species goes extinct, our kind will perish."

Peter looked at Jinx's face and his mind wrestled with unaccustomed concepts. "Why do you look so sad?"

"This isn't how things are supposed to work. I hurt you and exploited you and--" Jinx discovered that talking about it made it worse.

Peter walked to her and took her hands. She looked into his eyes, and felt... something. She was having trouble giving it a name.

"They grew me in a vat, Jinx. I've been exploited since I was an embryo. It stopped hurting a long time ago."

His words comforted her, and she wondered why that was so. "We should go back to my ship, get drunk, and have meaningless sex. It's the only way to nip this in the bud. Discover the idol has feet of clay..."

"I have a better idea. Let's figure out where the fleet is going to attack, lay in a course, and then have drunken, meaningless sex."

She looked at him and they both smiled. "Gold star for robot boy..."