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THE PANDORAN AGE CHRONICLES: (HD)En Español. Trailer animatic: Crónicas de la E...

THE PANDORAN AGE CHRONICLES: (HD)En Español. Trailer animatic: Crónicas de la E...: !!Now, in Español!!

(HD)En Español. Trailer animatic: Crónicas de la Era de Pandora

!!Now, in Español!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8taT6qsMPN4

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the war in Heaven has begun....

THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN LEAVEL & THE TALONED SIRE

(excerpt from "Rise of the Taloned Sire" by Dante D'Anthony. Illustrations by Neil Thacker, Gabriel Montagudo, Roy Rudder, Mr. Jack, Stefano Tsai and Steve Allman). 

2

The Crash Trail

Rip, Sagittarius Arm, 4110. Screaming Ghost Lake.

    Violet and crystalline, stone stacks spread from horizon to horizon, jutting out from the hillside's slopes and the waters of Screaming Ghost Lake like ancient sentinels. Two small, green, evening moons accented the reflective surface, confusing the mirror smooth sheen of the loch, making it seem the very sky itself. It appeared to Vince Phalen his speedboat ran across a mirror of the heavens. He could see mossy objects beneath the surface; they made the waters particularly treacherous if one did not know where the shallows hid the submerged stacks. Lumbering mega-koi fish twirled slowly beneath the perfect surface of the water, swimming in the reflections of the stars. From an ornate leather case he pulled brass binoculars and ran a search over the waters and hillside.

    No sign of the coast guard.

    Vince set his binoculars down on the speedboat's elaborate fern-wood and bronze dash, and wiped sweat from his eyes. It wasn’t that hot. "Nerves" he said. That was all. Maybe merely the heat from the idling engine? He bit his lip and cursed himself for letting Andrew talk him into these "deliveries". He wiped sweat, and a stray strand of his long red hair from his face. Yet Charon and he had recently wed and winter was coming; he needed the money. If the coast guard caught him, he would be a decade in the stasis block.

    The Tunis mushrooms in the hold were illegal.

    He picked up the binoculars again and scanned the horizon. It was then that he saw what everyone else had missed since first fall. A long strait streak on the side of a distant hill.

    "The crash trail of a starship?" he whispered to himself. It was slashing the landscape, overgrown, but  clearly there. He changed the binoculars to infrared, clicked to high contrast. Something was there. If a ship had gone down hard with stasis shields at max, it could have torn up the side of the hill and left just such a feature. She would have banked and dug, leaving a mound. Stasis fields were notorious for the unpredictable way they  interacted with unstasised matter-each element and molecule reacting differently than similar combinations might  when impacting ordinary matter. At this distance and among the trees it could not be determined. However, he would come back. Momentary considerations were to get the mushrooms delivered. He recorded his position and moved the ornate drive lever forward to a steady cruise across the water.

    The oversize sweeping lines of the speedboat roared across the lake. He had an appointment at the docks of Herkiestown.

    There was no sign of the coastguard; even they avoided these stretches of lakes an inlets. Legends abounded about the "Screaming ghosts" of these lakes. For centuries. Vince, however, had been through them all  his life and hadn't seen so much as a newt much less a screaming ghost. He pressed onward. The sun was getting lower. "Screaming-ghost Lake my butt."

A wail came up slowly then and for an instant his mind hovered in a zone of unreality thinking the  sound  was the screaming ghost leering back at his comment. Then, small in the distance on the lake, he saw a  boat and realized it was the coastguard. He was plunging straight toward them. Instantly, he responded with a savage turn of the speedboat to a hard left and then, letting the boat heave to in the wake, made a determined throttle to the max.

    The speedboat now was lunging into its own wake from only a second before. It careened headlong back,  and  then off to the right a bit of the wake. He turned around and they were gaining. Still, they certainly could  not make him out yet to identify him. He would have to chance the shallows and the hollows.

    The coastguard boats were larger; they would draw deeper in the water. He swung his boat past a shoal and stack of violet and mauve quartz. Massive schools of fan rays reacted, and for a moment even the clear waters of the loch were a fog of them and he could not see the depths. The boat careened onward in its lunge past them. He narrowly missed a hulking arc of stone just beneath the surface and cursed aloud.

    A passage up ahead, a hollow. He knew it led through one of the frequent escarpments and fjords that cleft the thousand lakes and their gloomy hills. If he remembered correctly, there was so very many. He chanced it and slowed, eyeing the rocks, straddling the throttle with the whole of his body ready to pull back in an instant. He pressed his speed as fast he dared, not chancing a look back. Low branches of the ferns hung down.

    He zigged and zagged through the twisting cleft. The coastguard would not be much longer entering it  themselves, but he doubted they would pursue in such a shallow rock filled stretch. As it were, he was surprised to see them. Reaching the end of the cleft, he chanced back a look, and at that very moment the prow of the coastguards boat poked into view. Slamming the speedboat forward now was a gamble he had to take and he  broke for the deeper waters and swerved to the right behind the sheltering walls of the cliff side.

He had evaded them. They would not pursue through the rocky hollow in their larger boat. He made for his appointment in Herkiestown.

Cold night shot an eerie blue fog across the harbor by the time Vince approached the docks at Herkiestown.  Khitaman's Lantern, a tall white shaft of a lighthouse, flashed warning of the shoals. Beyond the lantern a thousand water ships crammed and docked. Muffled conversations snapped in the creeping cold; nobody's business, better not to hear some of the things being said. Rip was a world of villages and church bells peeling in the vineyards, but the cities of the inland seas,  Herkiestown,  Khita,  Blakeston,  and  Kroug-these  were  massive,  hulking  labyrinths  of Lakers and shanks.

The lantern's light swept a few starships water ported, glistening in the night-the Star Trading Guildsmen. They were given wide berth. Herkiestown took a measure of pride that Zola Mosey had originated the idea of the Guild at Herkiestown, but the denizens of that city had no illusions about the traders being sentimental. The Space Trade Guild's power now rivaled even the Imperials. In the intervening centuries  it  had  become  the   trade   guild  that  first  sustained  civilization  in  the  refugee "Outworlds", and then, in an irony of history not  lost on the trade guildsmen, the guild that controlled the flow of raw materials into the empire via the black market.

The  Imperials  command  economy  could  not  function  without  illegally  supplied  raw materials. Ayn Rand, the hero of the murdered Arcturians, had been right in that respect as well. Totalitarian governments expanded to the point where to function one had to break their law.

    Vince’s speedboat plied the oily blackness of the chilly waters, past the warehouses looming in the dark silhouetted by the brilliant blue star field poking through the wisps of fog. He was young, the vicissitudes of the galactic economy were mere abstractions in his mind. He focused on the dark water immediately in front of him. Flotsam and litter from a dozen continents floated in the inky blackness. Vince had seen corpses hauled out of the harbor in the bright light of early morning on past visits to Herkiestown. He wondered what unfortunates might lay there now.

    He came to a large open brick boathouse with elaborate corbelling and intricate weaves of interlaced  brickwork. A lean old figure in coveralls and a pointed cap stood stoking on an elaborate pipe. A scent floated down. It was Smitty.

    "Hey do, wharf rat. Staying long?" He asked amicably, knowing full well Vince never stayed long.

"No, Smitty, just paying a visit to a sick friend. Any news?" Vince asked.

"Hear tell there's two for one well drinks down at Raygun's Backstreet Bar. Hear too Andrew Deck was wondering when his speedboat was going to be returned. You take Screaming-ghost lake back?"

"Sounds like a plan. Yeah, I took the lake."

    "One of these days you're going to regret that path. 'Telling you Vince, something is wrong about that lake. Gave me a bad feeling ever since I was a kid."

    "Power of suggestion." Vince replied. "They tell you it's spooky, and so you feel spooky when you go there." Vince thought of the crash trail he believed he saw beneath the tree line, and smiled. No wonder no one had found it before.

    "That place is haunted I'm telling you. Take your boat through Fredonia bay, Silver Creek, Sunset Harbor. Been a trail of suicides and missing people around that lake since people fell onto this planet. I'm telling you."

    Vince and Smitty had attempted to hop one of the new fusion steamer trains out of Kroug city once, and watched all their carefully chosen souvenirs acquired in the night before go riding off without them when the train acquired speed much faster than they anticipated, and Vince had to jump back as Smitty could not get a handhold. "Smitty caution" was ever after deemed disreputable in Vince's mind.

    "I'll give it some thought." He paid a rental fee and secured the speedboat, added a friendly gratuity-more than he could afford-and broke off into a hearty swaggering stride to Central wharf and Raygun's Backstreet bar.

    Central wharf was a series of three-storey stone and brick buildings with walkways such that each level could  be accessed. It ran the full length of the harbor and its side branches wound similarly up various canals into the city.  One of the canals stretched beyond the city limits and giant grain elevators, off a couple hundred miles to Chester's falls. Central wharf was a city within a city. Lakers and canal men supplied a steady stream of customers to music emporiums, dance halls, houses of ill repute, gambling halls, and smoking dens. Phantasmagorical carnivalesque paintings and signs lined the buildings, some with holograms and occasional electrical and neon brought in from deep space, but mostly with gas light and lanterns.

    Further into the city the buildings were rising higher with more elaborate terracotta tracery, brass trolleys, theatres, and grand hotels. Here at the Central wharf, however, a back woods boy like Vince could stomp along the icy wrought iron walkways no silk tie required. A discordant array of music drifted across the wharf from half a dozen establishments. Closer to Raygun's he could hear The Voodoo Sailor's, the house band, metallic and pipe rhythms hammering at a high tempo.. They were playing "Famous blue raincoat" one of their headliners.

    Yusuf Greenberg was at the door. His boyish face smirked knowingly from beneath a tight mop of red curls, "Hey do, wharf rat. Five schillings." He was dressed entirely in green with a double-breasted coat and tails, a smokestack silk hat with silver filigree and a bulge in his vest that Vince was sure was loaded. His teeth were completely gold. His showed them conspicuously with a tight muscled jaw. Vince had seen him grab a man's wrist like lightning one time, quickly, even before Vince had seen the bloody knife the fellow had been sporting in his hand.

Vince could see the band at the back under the stage lights, through the door panes. The giant Drew Iko was belting out his lyrics with a mighty baritone while his massive hands caressed his holosynth strapped across his belly with a deft intelligent grace, "Star-rr-light ladies-"

    "Hey, Yusuf, good crowd tonight?"

"Just another night of trolls and lost sailors. Welcome aboard."

Vince paid the cover and stepped into the warmth and noise of the crowded Raygun's. Smells of perfume and food assaulted him with a mixture of jasmine and cinnamon, pepper, crab grease, alcohol and fern-rose petals.

    "Don't mess with no backwoods dreamer-"

"Hey Phalen! You ever finish that course on, what’d ya' say it was, hyper stream piloting?" One of the Lakers at the bar called over to Vince when he came in. The man was just off the water from a long ore ship and reveling in the idiosyncrasies of Herkiestown characters of whom Vince figured prominently. "I'll give you this kid; you got a big set of kahunas for that. Me, I'll take a water ship any day." He handed Vince a tall golden glass of fern mead.

Several of the patrons laughed.

    "You can take 'dem hyper streams, I like my space normal, thank you very much!" Someone else chimed in.

    "Finished a couple seasons back now, maybe six. Good course." Vince answered and took a seat by his  partner Andrew Deck. Andrew rolled his eyes. The Laker turned back to his fern mead.

    "Well it's old Vinny-always a tale or two, eh? Nothing like a low profile. And you're late." Andrew said and pushed him another drink of fern mead. "Any trouble?"

    "One patrol, I dodged them through a cleft. We're good. It's in my boots."

The door opened and four Coast guards came in. One of them looked right at Andrew. Another went over to the bartender asking questions. How long had Andrew been here? All day?

    He walked over, "Nice boat Deck," he said smiling. He let a silence weigh down with implications.  "First class ride, it is. Must have run a few pennies. Saw one similar out at Screaming Ghost Lake today. Wasn't in much of a mood to say hello. Bartender says you been here all day or I would have sworn it was your boat. I'm watching you, Deck."

    "Thanks. I try." Andrew smiled back, staring innocently, perfectly believable.

The guardsman looked at Vince. "Ahh, the illustrious Phalen. Any luck finding a job on a star yacht?”

    "Nothing yet. Seems pretty wrapped up."

"Well, there's so few star ships’ coming to Rip as is. It could be a long time before you get a spot, it's be pretty rare they need crew. Good luck though. Winter's coming."

    Winter's coming.

    "Times they are a changing, Officer Meyer. A hundred years ago we were virtually isolated out here in Sagittarius. The galactic economy is expanding again. There will be ships. A hundred years from now, you won't recognize this city," Vince replied.

The guardsman was already busy eyeing other patrons, "Yeah well, may be a hundred years before all that coursework you took does you any good at the rate, kid. In the mean time, stay away from spoiled rich youth with fancy boats," he said and moved along.

    Andrew scowled. "I am NOT rich."

    "Your family has done well, Andrew. From that Copper's view, you guys are rolling in it. “Deck dough” they used to call it back at the Hamlet school when we were little."

Andrew smirked in spite of himself. His long coat was a fine sheepskin patchwork with an oversize collar. His wide brimmed hat hung slung casually on a hook by their table and that too was sheepskin, with an expensive off world sash for a band. His shirt was a thick fern weave and his loose wide tie glimmered. Vince never did figure what it was made of, and did not want to be seen as too much the hick to ask. More and more off world products were finding their way to Rip these past years. The governments were even discussing the possible purchase of  orbiting satellites.

    Vince took a tug on his ale and thought of the crash trail he had seen out on the lakes. An intact engine would be worth a king’s ransom. He remembered the mushrooms in his boots. The Coastguards were so close. Andrew chimed in on some banality, and they finished a few more drafts before stepping out into the cold night and the dark streets.

    They walked quietly eyeing the alleys for jumpers. A faint snow was in the air but it melted when it hit the cobbles. The sky was tinged now with a yellow light-ever so faintly as the rings of Tyrin rose. Tyrin was the name given to the enormous gas giant Rip orbited. When it was risen, the night would come alive with a glow, and the hulking lake stone buildings would glimmer with the ornate etched patterns of centuries of craftsman in a bewitched golden sheen.

Andrew looked over at Vince and laughed, "Only you." He said. "What?"

"Trudging along with that bouncing walk like you was off to Sunday meeting, and pumpkin cakes after. They never know what hits them till you pull that left hook."

    He did have a good left hook.

    Vince never knew why he amused Andrew so much but he accepted it with a laugh. As out of place the woodsman was in the city, Andrew never knew him to lie, or back down from a fight. Still, for a smuggling partner he had picked one that stood out like a sore thumb anywhere, and everywhere. Probably so at Sunday meeting, and pumpkin cakes after, as well. One of a kind.  His lanky backwoods demeanor did, in fact, turn an occasional head. Nevertheless, he came through. When it was time to fight, he stepped right in like each battle his last stand, and each friend by his side his only friend. When the journey was long and arduous, he tied up his boot straps and set about it.

    They stopped at a big lake stone Inn with a glowing neon sign; The Yellow Jaguar. Simple blocks of tan sandstone. Vince banged on the door and a small view port popped open. There came a grunt of recognition. The door opened. Inside they were met by two enormous blue tattooed door men-Obscurofrioians. Noted for their  strength and obstinate nature, they came from  an  ice  world  where  the  original  settlers-refugees  like   Rip's-had   genetically  altered themselves to survive the cold. The tattoos were ice worm blood. As a right of passage, a boy went out on to the ice alone to lure an ice worm. Killing it, he would then cut out its spiny teeth and use them to tattoo paisley-like patterns of whorls on their face and upper body. The process began with mortal danger and ended with searing pain. The more intricate the pattern the more danger and pain one had endured. These were very intricate patterns.

    "She's upstairs," one of them growled. He had a short-gun strapped casually over his back. Imperial disser, it could disassemble molecules in seconds. Leave a boiling mass of radioactive goo. Someone had retrofitted it in  local polished beach wood with silver inlay. Customizing death-dealing with a personal, homegrown style.

    Vince and  Andrew  clambered  up  a  winding  stair  of  fern  runners,  worn  smooth  with indentations. They went up, and then through a series of locked chambers. Jane was waiting. An ancient prune of humble origins, she had amassed some wealth through patience and stealth, but hungered always for something more. She looked at Vince as if he brought fond memories of some studley beaux she had toyed with in her younger days.

    Jane's mouth creaked a sideways slant. Her ancient hair matted into a comical cap that clung to  her  head  like  a  pasted  thing.  Her  features  were  gnomish,  wrinkled,  peasant-like.  But something in her eyes hinted at other things, a sense of mastery and determination. They were beady blue marbles that once possessed an  ethereal, oriental beauty of curve and angle that could, if traced by a knowing geneticist, be determined to originate with the Mongol warriors sweeping through Eastern Europe, worlds and millennia away.

    "Ahh, dashing  Andrew,  and  the  handsome  Vincent,  welcome.  Sit  down.  Come.  Brave travelers, I trust you've brought me my goodies?" Her accents fell loud and high on the ends of words. Her bulbous nose rose with a snobbish gesture that was comical considering her humble background, but told of the character that drove her to amass her wealth.

    Vince and Andrew sat on the large overstuffed Ottomans. Vince reached into his boots and pulled out the packets of mushrooms from sewn compartments. The boots were hand tooled with fine designs by his wife-to-be,  Charon. They were mamonth leather, they would last two lifetimes. He set the mushrooms on a small coral table imported from one of the island worlds in the Pleiades.

    "Ohhh nice.” She said. "Yesss, a fine pickings this time. Tunis Shrooms. Bring a good price in the Empire these will." She eyed one of her men coldly, "Pay them!" she snapped.

    Two silk purses were handed over, one to Vince, one to Andrew. Jane never haggled over money. Haggling would have been beneath her. The two smugglers stayed with their old cohort for a time having tea and rum, making small talk over inane political events in the provinces. Vince's mind could think of nothing but his discovered crash trail.

    "Well then," Jane finally said, "You heroes’ best be off while Tyrin's high and the light is good. Winter's coming." She waved an ancient hand toward the door and one of her blue machos appeared to see them out. From a window, she peered at the street and watched them walk away.

    When she was young, she had a love that Vince reminded her of. He was a musician; they lived in a garret with a small fern garden on a balcony. She dropped him like a bad habit when she discovered the joys of fat old  businessmen and easy money, long black carriages stocked with  fine  liquors.  Handsome  top-coated  drivers  with  braided  leather  whips  snapping  at  the mamonths, off through the ice and snow to fine restaurants and luxury,  ease, splendor. The musician had gone mad when he found this out. He languished for a couple years,  drinking himself to oblivion and eventually dying one drunken night-kicked to death by the coastguard.

    He was weak, Jane thought, and found the destiny of the weak.

    She smiled her half smile at watching Vince and Andrew make their way up the street. Weakness was not one of those two's vices for certain. Word had it the two of them had taken on a small crowd at Squeezer Floyd's harbor bar, with Andrew knocking numbers out with single jabs, Vince straight-arming the original attacker back against a vehicle and banging his head into it repeatedly until Andrew finally grabbed him, and they both made off in the speedboat bleeding from broken bottles that had been slammed against them.

    Jane snickered. The stories that had come back regarding these two never seemed to end. Even the coast  guard was taking bets on their next appearances in town. No weakness there. Foolhardy  perhaps,  weak  no.  She  looked  at  the  mushrooms.  Wilderness,  icy  waters,  Coast Guards, and street gangs stood between her and the  Tunis Shrooms. Nevertheless, Vince and Andrew delivered.

Along the shores of the ten-thousand lakes, jutting peaks of quartz-like igneous rock cradled inlets and  fjords  where occasional settlements could be seen. Bright white clusters of stout buildings, spires and silos propping up above the greenery. Up from the shores into the lowland plains, the settlements grew into hamlets  and  towns, with vineyards and orchards from seeds brought long ago by the Star Trading Guild.       The  settlements faded off as the plains rose to highlands, and hills full of hollows, and gullies where miners mixed  shepherding on freshly cleared land which looked back again, down to the plains and the sea where the settlements were spread like toy villages, as seen from the high distance.

    Vincent’s place was only nominally cleared and worked. Where he had cut back the fern trees there broke a view of the sea stretching across the horizon like the end of the world in a crisp golden blue-green line.

    "Damn it Vincent!" Charon held the purse accusingly at him, "Tunis-Shroom money! They catch you with  those mushrooms and you'll be straight to the stasis block." She handled the money with disgust as well as fascination. Her small mouth drew firm in stern resolution, framed by a broad face, mildly tanned from this last of summer work. Her sleek brown hair swept a swift line diagonally across her forehead and back around her ear. She wore a woolen sweater with an intense indigo, spotted with iridescent designs of fruit.

    One of these adventures he's not coming back, she mused, and I'll sit here by these windows until the fern trees grow back in the spaces he's cleared and the view of the sea turns to woods again.

    There was a plague of snails that year chewing at crops across the northlands. It was a bitter year for many.  Vince set his gaze away. He took a long weary breath and said, "We've gone round this before. It's too late in the season to get work in the mines, even if there was any. The new lasers the star traders have brought in have cut the need for miners in half. My father was lucky to keep work with that, handy with a beam they said. What do you want; I should end up like the old man and his father before him-subsistence and barter? Slave wages and a spit a dirt?" He sealed his lips tight; it was an old refrain.

    Sheep and potatoes, nutrient still-vats.

    Only winter promised the demise of the snails, a winter of want at that.

Fern oil burned a dewy spice to the room. Geometric patterns on wool coverlets. Patterns hand carved on the fern-wood furniture second-hand from shops in Herkiestown, hauled up with family on mamonths, patterns on  pattern, patterns in patterns. Holo-tapes Vince had collected since boyhood-stellar geography of the galaxy's far flung states, worlds and places far removed from this spiral arm of the galaxy, so as to seem mythical. Imbued with fantastical larger than life powers. Pictures and holograms of family and friends, and from Vincent-ancestors. Always for him distant times and people, places and principalities, loomed in his imagination important just for the  knowing though no useful thing could come of it. A breadless embellishment of life. "Give me the luxuries in life, and I will do without the necessities," he once told her. So it was coming to be.

    Her eyes looked around desperately as if the house could provide referee.

Charon's miniature boat collection sat lined up proudly above the hearth, her one indulgence and the reason she met him. Andrews boat out at Sunset bay had caught her eye, Vince then at the wheel.

She lowered her eyes to the carpets, then up at him again: so tall, so daringly mad, so like one of his holotape characters. So out of place in the quiet countryside of Rip, she thought.

   There was silence and the purse between them. Their enemy, their survival. They looked at it for a long  moment. Vince's lips bent upward forming a grim, sardonic smile. The snails had driven the price of mushrooms very high on the black market.

   Charon covered the glow tubes. "Never mind now. Come here." she said softly then.

   Come love me.

    Instead, he walked to the doorway and opened it to the star filled night. Tyrin had long since set. The Eagle nebula glimmered in the west and faintly, beyond that, the Orion Arm. Empires and glorious civilizations ancient  since the dawn of mankind. Far and away, gilded cities and space stations, the star lanes jammed with hyper yachts and lumbering star freighters.

    "If we could get off this backwater tumble of rubble and ferns-up there. Cherry-I just want something else for us besides these people and this place." he said coolly, as if it were not a plea, but a destiny.

    Charon's face grew leaden.

    That's what I'm afraid of, Charon thought. Stars and worlds away again. It was an aspect of his character that frightened her deeply. She didn't want to go live among the stars, she loved Rip and the fern forests. The endless hamlets twisting through the gullies and the lakes. She didn't know what he thought he saw among those points of light. She only knew it could take them from the only world she'd known. "Oh enough starlight!" she said, "Come here!" She patted their tall, high-backed bed. Its cushions and pillows laid orderly and inviting.

    The wind turned in a sudden icy curl before the house, thick with fern spores and the scent of snails. Thick with the patterns of ages before mankind had come. Relentless blind ages which known previously  only  the  savage  impulse  of  the  animals,  eat,  run.  Watch.  The  biomechanical clockwork aspects of the plants, shooting roots and tendrils into the soil, spores into the moon’s light.

    "Listen," he answered, “we'll be splashing at the beaches of Chrysalis Isla with all the Pleiades sparkling bluely above us. No winter there. Fly over to Deneb Four and look at a city that spans a globe, and rules the oldest empire know to man! Imagine-tens of billions of people on a single world, "

    "Yes Vince, the same Empire that nuked our ancestors in Arcturus and drove the rest as refugees to the out worlds." she said quietly.

    He gave her a look. "Charon, that was a thousand years ago." Vince thought it a virtue to embrace mankind as a whole; of course, mankind did not.

    "You're too open-minded for your own good. You'll always be an Outworlder in the Empire. What makes you think they'll ever bear you any good will? They say, in the inner Empire, the people receive impulses right into  their minds. How to feel, what to think-everything is top down. What do you think they'd do with a free spirit  like you? You're too good, Vince. But you're being naive. You think because they have advanced technologies they will have advanced moralities. You think it was a fluke what happened it in past? It was not. It's the  nature of humanity-evil, as well as good."

    "Charon, it's a galactic economy now. The peoples of the galaxy are more fluid now than before. Borders are soon to be things of the past." Even as he said it, he felt unease. Somehow, the underlying aspects of the premise seemed unworkable.

    "Noble aspirations; one galaxy, freedom of movement. It's an illusion, Vince, fed you by people who profit from the flow of labor. Rest assured, humans are territorial. They'll always be holding cards you don't see.  You go there, you'll be used by them merely to drive down the wages of their fellow citizens, who will hate  you  for it. Or you'll end up in the underground economy. You have a world. You have a place here."

    A yellow snail clung to a window. Its yellow underside ringed with violet. In truth it was not a snail at all, but when the refugees had come centuries before it looked like a snail, and so it was named. Vince drew a circle around it on the opposite side of the glass, dew made a drip at the base of his circle. He smiled and kissed her. Evil empires…it all sounded so preposterous. Wars had always happened. "I'm sure they're more sophisticated than that, my love. Enough politics."

    The wind came up again through the fern trees and blew against the house. It made a whistling sound. "Listen." he said, but said no more, only then he came to her silently, falling into the white softness of her arms. He imagined he could see the gold specs that sparkled in the blue of her eyes, but it was too dark. He pulled their goose down quilt over them and she cooed in  delight.  They  touched  each  other  tenderly,  pressing  in  the  elation  of  first  love,  rolling luxuriantly in its oblivions and ecstasies, until yesterday and tomorrow were no more, and there was only that moment, and each other.

    The snail perceived them as a turning mass of bright pink heat that tussled. It did not, however, perceive time, or timelessness.

    That night he dreamt of the crash trail. He walked along the scattered rocks of the trail until he came to its end. There he swept away a growth of Tunis mushrooms and lifted stones looking for the buried starship. He  spoke  to himself, "It's here, it's here, and it’s here!" Tyrin's rings glistened goldenly through the canopy of fern trees until the rocks too were golden. All around him gold, gold, piles of it he thrust to one side digging deeper ever deeper into gold looking for the golden ship. "It's here!'

    Charon was pulling his shoulder, “Vince! Vince!"

    He turned and saw walls, windows, furniture; their home. “You were dreaming, talking aloud. What were you dreaming of?" she asked.

    "Gold, a world of gold, and a starship." he mumbled and stretched. She had tea and biscuits ready. "A starship?" She forced a smile.

Steve Allman

    

He told her of his sighting of the crash trail from the lake the evening before. "Probably a pursuit frigate from the Arcturian war. It might have been shielded under stasis when it hit. Good chance there salvage there."

    “That’s an old spook tale Vincent. It’s not real. Screaming ghosts. Lost frigate's." Charon looked pale.

    "You alright?" Vince asked.

    "The Arcturian war was a long time ago, Vince. What do you think would be left of a ship that crash landed?" she bit her biscuits nervously, afraid of what was coming next. So many of his schemes went unrewarded. Hyper yacht piloting courses, etc. Long hours, big dreams, empty pockets.

"If the shields held until the rubble settled on the frigate, the structural integrity of the ship itself would hold together under the mere weight of a few tons of ordinary matter.” He looked to her for confirmation she understood, but she was loathe of the conversation.

     “Ships like that are designed to withstand incredible forces even without force field shielding being activated. There could be any number of serviceable systems still in there. One drive unit would be worth a fortune out here in the Sagittarius Arm."

    So this is what that hyper yacht course brings us, Charon thought.

    "We could trade it for a small star boat good enough to get us to the Orion Arm. I could find a real job there. You could live a hundred stories in the air in a golden deco tower and watch the deep-space liners drift up to the stars. When you get tired of that we'll buy a cottage on a floating fishing  cooperative,  with  the  ring  nebula  shimmering  over  the  water  world  Thanjavur."  he enveloped his hands over hers with a kiss. He wanted to  go  on and on, his imagination, it seemed, was only limited by his need to breathe.

    "And if  pigs  had  wings." she  snapped  dryly.  "Aren't  we  in  enough  danger  with  you smuggling contraband into Herkiestown? Now you’re digging for buried starships?"

    "I can get the mining lasers from my father. I'll follow the crash trail to its end. If there is something there I'll know in a day or two. I'll find it." he said.

After breakfast and a bath he put on a fern-silk tunic and a wool vest with a colorful pattern trim, sheep leather pants and mamonth boots. He made for the door lest she confront him more, or more likely coo him into submission. Then he was gone.

    She looked with dread upon the meager provisions they had made for winter. Then her eyes fell upon the ceramic jar he had brought from Kroug City. It was packed with mushroom profits. Still, her dread did not abate.

    Even from the makeshift barn across the still stump-ridden clearing, Vince's large mamonth could sense his presence. It moaned a hoarse cry of approval at the coming of its' master. Vince rode his possessions as hard as he rode himself; mamonths had a taste for hard work. The animal took a delight in tasks other beasts would find  onerous. Neither the man nor the beast took thought for comfort or safety.

They were quite a pair.

    Mamonths evolved well for heavy labor and even heavier yokes. Their snouts were short and trunk like, their necks long and shoulders broad. Their even-length legs were sturdy and their three toed feet spread wide and firm. They had a resolute nature and a domesticity rare in the toss of worlds which humankind found in the early  spread through the galaxy. They had proved indispensable after the Arcturian wars when the refugees fell to Rip.

    Just as the care and breeding of horses and fostered a horse culture on Earth millennia before, so too mamonth  care and breeding was on Rip its own subculture. Vince, however, was ever cavalier with the animal. Rather  than adjust to the reality of it being a mamonth, Vince had always related to it as if it were just another person. A big, speechless, powerful person, who needed an extra bit of direction and occasionally a rider to provide it.

    "Morning to you Budzinski." Vince ran his hands over the big snout. “Once more, good friend, into the fray of work and sweat. Perhaps the last we'll share old boy-I got me a line a salvage job the like of which this  ball of fern trees and slate never saw."

Budzinski's eyes widened and his head bobbed up and down excitedly.

    "That's right, me bruddah from anuddah species, we're riding!" Vince said with pat and jumped into the saddle. He rode it easily out of the barn, the heavy mamonth feet crushing tiny fossils of shells in the crumbling  slate. He borrowed his fathers mining lasers and from there went forward headlong into the woods. By early evening with Rip's fat, pale sun lingering above and shining down through the trees, Vince had reached the crash trail.

    It occurred  to  him,  once  his  excitement  passed,  that  he  was  in  fact  camping  alone  at Screaming Ghost Lake.

     In the last light of day, he sat on his mamonth staring down at the giant gouge that stretched along the hillside. He pitched a simple camp and set to rest. Sleep came and swirled in his eyes; became a spin of rolling surf along a beach full of leaping dolphins and Boca-fish. Mer-people twirled in the water and the starlight singing. Then his dreams reeled on as dreams do, into other and other things. Dark things that crept up and peered at him, that ran back into the shadows should he turn and look toward them.

Nevertheless, there came no screaming.

   Morning broke the darkness, silent and bright, and he looked out upon dying ferns and frost, rolling hills of rock and shale. Winters coming. Somehow, he still remembered a warm sea. He was  at  the  crash  trail.  Inspecting  the  giant  gash  further  proved  he  was  on  to  something. Excitement built slowly up in him as his  mind careened with the potentialities of success. Finally, he was right! Although weather had worn away the  blue grey shale, it was apparent something unnatural had happened here in the distant past. How long?

The Arcturian wars.

    Vince could imagine the jet-black surface of the time stasis shields throwing off a red light as the starship  cometed down through the atmosphere. Something had gone wrong, and the shields must have remained locked.  A stray shot and the shields would have gone up automatically, freezing the ship in an impenetrable time bubble, utterly impervious to matter and energy.

    At the moment of impact tons of rubble could have been ejected into the sky and the ship ricocheted back into the air only to repeat its fall now with less force, leaving the giant furrow of the crash trail. The angle of inclination must have been such that the rebound was but a short, wild apogee; and then the trail. At the end of the trail a mound of stone. Budzinski snorted as Vince stared ahead blankly-the sudden rise of stone at the end trail, exactly as Vince imagined.

    "Easy Budz, you're reading my mind."

Vince was projecting. It was not excitement the animal had intoned with its moaning, but dread.

The mound seemed to speak to Vince. It was a promise and a Threat; you could be so right this time, or not.  Which is it boy? Budzinski stepped back a little, snorting. It considered the mound. Tall and leafy ferns grew there. To Vince the mound had shown evidence enough, as if a fresh crash cloud of dust floated over a tail vane sticking out.

    Gleefully he tied the mamonth, who eagerly grazed at the ferns. Vince set about building his mine at the foot of the mound. He worked franticly, steadily hour after hour, and the day sped by. He started up a small fusion  generator and rigged lamps above the designated dig spot. He plugged in his diggers, and placed his father’s clockwork silver lasers over his hands. Clumsily, as he had avoided mining with a distaste bordering on  foreboding all his life, he took to the stones now with a relish.

   He worked through the middle of the night, sweating in the cold, oblivious to his body's cries for rest. Tyrin's  yellow orb and rings dashed the fern-forest in a spectacular light, a solemn, tarnished, golden luminosity double  bathing the landscape. Tyrin was of a singular beauty in Rips star system, Vincent's favorite aspect of Rip's night sky. He came up from his digging to smile once at the familiar rings, and then he feverishly bent back to his labors.

    He had become oblivious to his pains or the exhaustion that lingered in his sweat and alternate cold. At  the end of each curved and bucketed digger was a short burst laser. The intensity, variation, and length adjusted to the type and quality of the rock dug through.

Hours slipped away.

    He pounded rock. He blasted rock.

Vince moved a substantial amount of stone when he finally decided to sleep. The golden-ringed gas giant had gone. The sun was rising among a toss of diamond stars. Charon tracked his mamonth from his fathers that morning and found him sleeping against the side of his beast. She thought: a boy and his dog. And their mining claim for buried starship engines. She laughed aloud.

    He woke with a start grabbing a pistol and pointed it at her. "Don't shoot!" She yelled, her eyes widening.

    He let the gun fall and dropped his back against Budzinski. The beast was unperturbed; it opened an eye, snorted once and fell back to sleep.

    "How did you find me?" He rasped, running his hands through his thick locks of burnished red hair. "Shit, Charon, don't sneak up on me like that!"

    She pointed to the ground and he saw his mamonth tracks among the ferns. "Your Dad pointed the way and Budzinski's clompers showed me the rest." She said. "What'd ya' think I was, the Coast Guard?"

His hands were shaking. His mother’s father had been a Postmaster in Kroug City; the pistol was an heirloom Vince had inherited. He brought it along "just in case".

There was an uncomfortable silence.

    "Sorry." She said dryly. "Next time I'll call first." She kicked him hard. "You could have killed me!"

He looked at the gun. Suddenly it was hideous. "My grandfather on my mother's side..."

    "I know. I know...Postmaster to the Rip system, Kroug City."

    She looked at his miserable condition. He was covered with welts and dirt. “Dang pistol probably wouldn't fire anyway. Here, I brought you some food. A real breakfast." She went to her mamonth and dug into the saddle packs. The packs inlay twisted and spiraled with designs reminiscent of originals lost when the Arcturian worlds were nuked, but lovingly reproduced by an art  student  from  the  original  starliner.  The  student  had  spent  the  rest  of  her  life  painstakingly recreating the lost patterns; they lived on across that world now, echoed and varied endlessly in the handiwork of future generations. Vince looked at their elaborate care. They matched  his boots-Charon's clan symbols.

    She came over and kissed his forehead, set the food beside him and waited for him to eat. After a while, he noticed her watching him silently, forlornly. With his mouth full he suddenly said, "Whaat?"

She stared a long moment, unsure how to say what she was thinking. Finally she said flatly, "It's Andrew."

They looked at each other. Vince chewed and wondered what had happened, he feared the worse the longer she delayed.

    "What happened to Andrew?"

    Her blue and gold eyes drilled at him accusingly.

    "He was killed." she whispered.

    The Coast Guard...

     "Well...how?" Vince’s eyes darkened and his thoughts ran wild with vengeance, then cooled.

She was delaying her responses for effect. She wanted this to sink deep in his mind and stay there. She looked away, angrily now, trying not to accuse him. "He drove his boat into the docks at Herkiestown.”

    "Border patrols?" Vince rasped.

    "Of course. They chased him and he eluded them among the boat traffic in the harbor for a while, then he bolted for the docks but he got too close- he was trying to shake them among the piers. Lee Anne came up the hill this morning and told me, she figured you’d want to know, how you and Andrew have been friends and all for so long."

    Nice boat Deck.

    I try.

    Vince shuddered and took a weary glance into the forest. If the Patrols found anything linking him to Andrew and the Tunis mushrooms, they would bring charges of conspiracy and smuggling. "They connect him to me?"

    Her look was feral, "No! The boat exploded. He was incinerated. Nobody knows why he ran, they're calling it  an inexplicable suicide but they're very suspicious obviously. They think he might have been drunk and panicked. They figure he just wanted to beat a long sentence in the stasis house."

    Andrew never panicked. He had nerves of ice.

    "Straight down! You bring anything to drink in that sack?" He and Andrew had faced death in a continuing  array of unlikely and preposterous situations. It stood next to them like a third wheel, always there, smiling. They knew it. They came to relish it. Eventually, the smiling third wheel would take one of them, or both. Now  it  had taken Andrew. Somehow, there was no surprise, no sadness, and no shock. The two of them had been riding the tiger for years.

    "Uh-huh. I figured as much." She felt into the saddle pack and drew out a jug of hard cider. Vince took it gratefully and swung back a long hard belt of five gulps only stopping to come up for air.

Her eyebrows shot up.

    He passed her the jug, "To Andrew."

    Andrew and his famous coats. His flamboyant bravado which he could somehow make slip away chameleon style and blend into a crowd like magic.

    She drank slowly. "Yeah, Andrew." Budzinski howled then, an unexpected commentator on the death of  poor  Andrew Deck. Charon's throat was tight with fear. Somehow, the animals groaning wail seemed to come from elsewhere than the quiet forest, somewhere deep and dark, and ever wrong. Her sense of dread crept up her toes and feet spreading gloom into her soul.

    This is madness, she thought bitterly to herself. Vince is acting like a maniac digging in the forest for starship salvage. Andy is dead. When winter is over, I will be stepping from the stasis house shamed as a fool who chose a fool. Have I loved a loon?

     "Something you want to say?" Vince asked through a strange grin. He could see despair wrangling through her features like a fern fire.

    "What could I say?" she drawled flatly.

    "Don't loose faith just yet. Deck lost his nerve. That’s why I did most of the running; he was never quite steely enough. He was good. Tough. Bold. But he couldn't keep it up forever.

    "Last night I reached a layer of stone that had been compacted vertically and at great temperature. It can't be much further 'till I reach the wall of the starship. The salvage rights will put you in a new house on the big hills of first fall before winter. After that, the stars."

   He kissed her with a flourish.

   Suddenly he did not seem so mad. The daring in his voice and the swagger in his eyes enthralled her. She chuckled a little; the chuckle bloomed into a small smile that held all the hope of youth and imminent victory. As for Andrew, her sadness was without blame. Surely he could have handled things differently? A stasis sentence for running Tunis shrooms wasn't worth dying over. He should have surrendered instead of going out in a blaze of glory.

   Two days came and went. Days of cutting and hauling stone. Inside, the mine was growing rooms and shafts. The central room seemed as big as a house. Vince began taking stimulants. He hadn't slept in twenty-six hours when Charon came next upon him.

He was covered with scratches and welts. His face was drawn back, pale, a skeleton's head. His hair was matted and filthy.

   His arms moved franticly, digging, pounding at the stone with a savage flail of lasers and elbows.

He was breathing hard and talking to himself. He didn't see her watching him.

She bit her fist and quietly began to cry, pushing herself to try and remember why she had ever loved him. How could she have loved this idiot who was digging in the middle of a forest for a starship?

   His ranting carried around the walls of stone to her.

"Gotta be here!" he was saying, "Where is it? Gotta be here! Stone! Stone! The compact layer-here-gotta be right here.

   "The trail! Only a ship makes a crash trail like that! This is Andrew putting some kind of jinx on me, I swear. Shit! I couldn't bear to put her in the stasis house this winter, oh God, not that. Oh please."

   He stopped. He seemed to come to some realization. He squatted on his parted knees in a swelter of heated mud and stone, his clothing tattered.

   "Or worse, the border patrol will find the rest of the Tunis mushrooms."

   The last bit was too much for Charon. The irony of the border patrol coming upon this fool digging was outrageous. Disgusted, a fury rose up in her. Her eyes grew dark, face reddened and she yelled out at him, "Border patrol! You have got to be-"

    He turned, wildly then, delirious, lifting the cutting lasers around in a broad arc. They clicked on, reeling in an atomic power that sheered through the columns. She stared at him a moment realizing how close they had come to her. Then there came the sound of rocks slipping in an ugly grinding cascade.

    She folded like a rag doll, crushed as the rock ceiling collapsed.

    He screamed in jagged desperation, "Nooo!" and the howl reached from the bottom of deep time, growling in primitive rage, and all human regret followed after. A mass of stone slammed him, he saw a flash, felt himself crushed to the ground near her. He struggled shortly, dizzy, and then lunged at her in a bloody dive, tearing stone away from her. He felt for her pulse and it was not there. He pressed down on her chest in an attempt to resuscitate her, a  useless effort as her skull lay smashed.  Eventually,  he  stopped.  

   He  stood.  From  over  her,  he  stared  at  all  his  dreams remembered. She was crushed dead instantly. She would never know the shame of the stasis house. She would never hear the scornful words that she was the fool’s wife, or face the grim prospect of unending want. She was gone forever.

He loomed monstrous, shaking. Too late, he had snapped the lasers off. He fell to his knees, and hands still in the diggers, stroked her bloodied corpse in agony, longing, and confusion.

    Then he saw it.

Just below her twisted flesh where the lasers had cut away a few more centimeters of stone. There lay the prefect jet black of a stasis shield, barely discernable and glimmering beneath. The hull of a starship lay in the  stone. 

    He had been right all along. "Charon..." he said tenderly. Morosely, like an automaton, he gently carried  her aside. His expression was blank, stunned, ruined. He blasted away more stone, on and on until he had better part of a panel cleared. The ship  was  not  only  intact;  it  was  still  functioning,  aging  ever  so   imperceptibly   as  its malfunctioning stasis shield faded.

   It might have rested, sealed in the stone, until the end of time if he had not seen the crash trail. Somewhere inside that ship, a whole crew of Cyborgian Central Air Corps was time-frozen in a moment of a war long since  history. They had inadvertently just taken the last civilian casualty in the war. He found the emergency hatch  after a matter of mere hours. It protruded from the stasis field, surprisingly only slightly corroded. He ran his hands along its mechanism, felt it turn, press out, turn again. The stasis shield went down. He could hear the mighty rumble of the ships engines. They had not missed a beat in all the intervening centuries.

    He slipped into the hatch and made his way into the ship. The crew had been hunting down and killing his ancestors, in a string of cause and effect they had taken the life of Charon. He showed them no mercy. They were still the enemy. He wondered idly what he must have looked like to them, suddenly and inexplicably appearing on the deck garbed in the strangest of gear, slashing madly, covered with blood and mud.

     He was  fury.  He  was  the  unimaginably  perfect  blackness  of  space,  as  the  last  star  is extinguished, a  digit in a countdown to the other side of an event horizon. Amazingly, the welded cyborg aviators made no contest with him. They were all in some bizarre state of shock. Some were crying, some were shaking. A few just stared like scared rabbits. He slashed away, again and again. In the midst of it one of them stared cold into his eyes.

    There were legends of the ship that had gone down; straight down…

    “Kill me! Please,” the Cyborgian air corpsman pleaded. Vincent’s answer was a primitive visceral grunt and a lunge with his lasers. The Cyborgian's head spun away from his body with an expression of relief. They longed for death here, and it had not found them until now. Had they been conscious in some fashion during the intervening millennium since the war?

    What would it mean to sit frozen and insane, alive in the dark with one’s horror spinning round you?

    When they were all dead, he gathered the remains of Charon and put her in a freezer hold. He stripped the Cyborgian corpses of their helmets and gear, and shoved their bodies in a recycling unit. He loaded his fathers mining gear on Budzinski and slapped the beast, "Home!" he said. The mamonth snorted, it knew what to do.

    The beast took a last longing gaze through massive eyes and snorted. It was aware tumultuous events had transpired. Some primitive corner of its emotional constructs lamented for the human. The human who, even among such unsatisfied beings as humans were, was one to press ever deeper into the fernwood.

Alone in the huge frigate, entombed in the impacted shale, he walked the halls, marveling. The technology was  high Imperial era, much of it no longer commonly produced. The Empire, it turned out, had purchased much of its hardware in the years before the war from other societies, many of whom promptly collapsed after the Arcturian economies were blasted out of existence. He found the Captain's quarters. No surprise, they were little different from the rest of the crew. One thing the great Transhuman overlords had been was egalitarian in their treatment  of the masses beneath them, soldiers included.

He showered. Put on a red jumpsuit and realized they were a tad smaller than he was. He adjusted it best he could and walked the bloody halls of his new ship. He remembered his star yacht piloting and went to the bridge. It was an elegant sweep of streamlining, candy-apple red, burgundy and salmon, edged with poly color chrome, alive with holograms and lights. It seethed and  beckoned  like a  beautiful  sea  goddess.  On  the  other  hand,  was  it  the  space  fiend  himself crooning?

    He was no iconoclast, or worker rebel misled by some profiteering anarchist who despised machines. The machines could be used for evil or good, as the men who used them saw fit. Yet he hesitated, knowing these  machines were often sentient themselves. He held the MERGE helmet shortly in his hands uncertain of his  ability to master it. Another man would have run tests. Gone back to Herkiestown and gathered allies. Vince found he cared not whether the ship fried his brain, or obeyed his commands. Charon was dead. His life here was over. There were either the stars, or death.

    He smiled strangely then, a strangled empty gesture.

Snapping the MERGE helmet on, he braced himself for his mind to meld with the ships sensory system.  There came a soft, imperceptible shift, and he became aware of other things around the ship. He could feel tons of debris on the ships hull-it was a soft blanket of matter he could shake with a shrug. The knowledge was elating. Connected to the ship frigate, his mind rushed  with  a  manic  enthusiasm.  His  consciousness  soared  and  spun  into  the  navigational memory.

    He found the original approach to Rip. Replaying it, he saw the legends were true. The transport vessel-Arcturian star liner Rip Van Winkle-had been evading the frigate desperately. The star liner dodged with  dashing rolls and a sophisticated twisting of fields. Watching the ancient replay, Vince was astounded at the skill of Izzo. Everyone had seen the recordings from the liner's black box. Some had even made reconstructions of what he was seeing. However, he was the only human in centuries to witness the actual scene as viewed from the frigate. A sudden shot had appeared then-one of the dogfighters had hidden it among the twisting fields so the frigate could not detect it until too late. The shot slashed into the frigates sensory array.

    Nevertheless, there had been something else too; something that shocked the ship’s recording system into complete failure before one massive transcription into the hypercast codes to Deneb. Then the recorded memory stopped. Vince sat alone in the piloting cabin in wonder at the strangeness and the mingling of events far separated in time. He pulled his mind to the present.
    He had the ship.

    It was a good frigate, built for the pressures and speeds of warfare. It lifted swiftly from the bottom of the  mound as if it were brushing of a stack of dried ferns. Vince was wild with delirium, compelled with bright fascination as the starship lifted with a whine above the lakes and Herkiestown in the far distance to the bewilderment of the people below.

    Somehow,  his  father  knew,  all  at  once,  the  connection  with  the  strange  starship  when Budzinski rode in to his spread loaded with the bloody mining gear. He could not know the whole story. Legend would have it later that Vincent and Charon flew off together after seizing a long stasised ship, which only he had discovered left over from the Arcturian wars.

    The real story, however, was Vince alone that day, riding with a crew of ghosts. Many months later in the void between the galactic arms it would occur to him to call up the name of the stolen frigate. It was a Sunrider 3062, long ago christened out of the Deneb industrial rings as "Lady Luck". Vince stared at the glowing name in  a long ironic silence. "Lady Luck." he whispered to the ghosts laughing all around him. The frigate leapt through the darkness for the better part of a light-year as Vincent's mad, loathsome laughter cackled with his tears and rage. However, just as the Cyborgian Air Corps' private war had held still, unseen and unnoted  within the walls of the frigate, sealed from the universe beyond, so the desperate laughter of the mad young pilot held within the hull, penetrating not at all to the hyperstreams of bent and twisted space...

Gabriel Montagudo & Stefano Tsai

3

All the King’s men

Deep void off Pleiades Cluster, 4110.

    It was a long nasty haul across the void...

    The resurrected ship was ancient, designed before the Arcturian wars. Most of Vince's flight training didn't apply. He figured things out by trial and error, while moving through Zero Space, fine tuning a MERGE piloting helmet as he went. There were the CC corpses he'd dispatched- they'd have been able to explain everything, but  he couldn’t have risked even a questioning before he killed them.

    In his fury, he had murdered them all, slashing riotously with his fathers mining lasers, spilling guts and entrails mixed with plastics and software from another era, another era when they had committed genocide against the ancestors of his people, against the Arcturian colonials. They had set them back to the Stone Age, the  refugees dispossessed of their birthrights, their civilization, their heritage. For one who had spent his entire life rather contemptuous of those who clung to the ancient animosities, he found himself suddenly thrust into the heat of that battle again. Charon had been killed and the cyborg astronauts were all about him, carried across time in the stasis field of the frigate, living proof of Charon's admonitions against the Imperials.

    He taught himself to fly the ship alone, building on rudimentary knowledge he possessed. He dare not run any instructional RNA programs, not yet anyway. Not until he was master of the ship. No matter, the void was big and empty, plenty of room for error. Nothing to hit, even his exploratory dips into the hyper gamma spaces lunged through the void between the spiral arms with a sort of careless abandon. The comets, asteroids, and systems in the void sparse enough to give him his playground, his school, and there he taught himself. He careened alone through the darkness. Just him, the ship, and space that matched geologic time with an uncompromising perfection. Here he learned the intricacies of his frigate.                                  
   He learned its ways, and he waited.

   Vince had his ship, and when the bitter, vicious, irony of what it had cost him wore off, his twisted, mad laughter sated, he found quiet sanity again. There were the hypercasts; he listened to the garble of a hundred  civilizations. The inane claptrap of lonely freighter pilots, virtreal stations that offered to fry your brains with ugly pleasures, and occasionally a fresh cast off some glistening new outpost light months away. 
     Along the Sagittarius Spiral Arm, the Outworlds for centuries soldiered on, struggling to build. In the Orion Spiral Arm however, civilizations had carried along much as before the Great Arcturian Wars. Many had faded with the loss of trade and technologies  from  the  robust  Arcturians.  

    The  Empire,  however,  seemed  eternal; corrupt, Byzantine, huge. Nevertheless, even the Empire had stalled after the Arcturian Wars. One could find the same aircars still produced  there in some places as before the wars. If examined, the current warships were no match even for the very frigate Vince now possessed.

    He pieced miscellaneous items of news together from the hypercasts. It seemed the king of the Pleiades star cluster was at war, and the Pleiades were his destination. A good place to show up with a warhorse star frigate in  mint condition, therefore, he would begin his career as a mercenary. Certainly, he could pack this ship with rouges ready for an opportunity to set about the war zone looking for merc gigs and glory.  The Pleiades were an independent kingdom, with an interesting history. The star cluster was only fifty million years old. When humanity’s first settlement ships had reached there, they found no worlds old enough  for life arisen yet beyond the stage of microbes. 
    Fisher Shea, an enterprising visionary, had come up with a plan to terraform dozens of worlds. He met opposition from every narrow-minded organization extant at that time. Environmentalists who insisted the microbes had rights, neo-religionists who insisted the star  cluster  was  sacred  and  inviolate,  and  corporations  who  wanted  centuries  of  piecemeal looting and discordant development that better to orchestrate  for graft and fraud. Shea had remained undeterred-a human dynamo even Ayn Rand would have paid homage to. He armed a fleet of privateers, and any of the interests from Earth that tried to scuttle and sabotage his efforts found themselves dealing with the business end of an energy cannon.

    Fisher Shea  built  his  kingdoms  and  they  became  the  luxury  playground  of  the  galaxy. Eventually, they built hundreds of terraformed worlds of islands, canals, balmy shallow seas, and brilliant, ultramodern towers. Those worlds gloried among a star cluster so crowded with suns that there was in all actually no night, only day, and a slightly less bright night of lesser suns. Empires and civilizations ever after turned, rose, fell, and transformed; the Kingdom of the Pleiades endured. Elegantly enduring at that, with a tan, a rum drink, and if need be a call to arms.

    His ship plummeted on, yet even the void between the spiral arms had an end. Vince came in high from his trajectory that had taken  his above the galactic plain. He dived into the Orion Spiral Arm from the hyperstreams.  Approaching  close  to  the  Pleiades,  the  gravity  tides  and  hyperstreams  were magnificent. Too much for him, his mind raced trying to balance flow systems, meson fields, Feynman drives. The star cluster roared more hugely with each  millisecond. He could see thousands of hypercasts like speckled static, countless warp trails-the traces of a  star  faring civilization, mere footprints in galactic surf.

    Suddenly then the ship came alive with matter indicators and distress signals, claxons and wailing alerts. Who could hail him? No one in the Pleiades cluster knew he existed. However, distress signals  had  not  changed  in  millennia.  S.O.S.  protocols  outlive  civilizations.  His  ship  was recognizing a distress signal. He brought his  fields down gently from hyperspace, reacquiring mass in a graceful arc. Still, he was too rough in reentry. He found himself blasted into normal space just under light speed. Two nearly vertical stasis fields ignited every ion in his path so that his dimensional reentry broadcasted with a flash of light that stretched, glowed, and trumpeted his appearance.

   For a split second, he marveled at the Pleiades beneath him, and then a shot crossed his bow...

THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN LEAVEL AND THE TALONED SIRE...

THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN LEAVEL