Dante D'Anthony:Tales from the Pandoran Age

2012-01-22T07:08:00.001-08:00

The film project now has a Facebook fan page! It also references the proposed video game "Aircar tech Noir"(Artwork Steve Moore and Kai Boguschewski)Additionally a new design has come on board-Gabriel Montagudo and his retro aircar designs are ASTOUNDING!

Remember, you can get you kindle edition of the Pandoran War at Amazon.

The PANDORAN AGE CHRONICLES now available in eBook and paperback.

2011-04-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

An adventure across galactic civilization in the 4000’s.
Since the interstellar gateways have been created, they have been both a marvel and a curse. They are a marvel of technology, a curse of political contention. Plethoras of governments have been established throughout nearly a quarter of the galaxy since the advent of hyperdrives, yet only two truly matter. Firstly, the Transhuman Cyborgian Central Command Economies-CCCE. Mankind’s oldest civilization, CCCE is centered around Earth with their capital world at Deneb 4. Secondly, the Arcturian Republics: a few dozen worlds and worldlets.
The Arcturian Colonials defined the aspects of their era more than any of the galaxy's societies to that point; optimism, technology, and benevolent order. It shone in their architecture, which soared, their economies, which roared, and their sense of life with its easy freedoms. They achieved it without the all-encompassing grip of the Imperials and their Transhuman Overlords, the continual strife of the Oligarchies and Kingdoms, or the horrific mysticism of the Marauder Cult at the galactic core
And then, there is War. Refugees form desperate communities in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Galaxy-the Outworlders. The Galaxy then is in the midst of a strange Dark Age. A young Outworlder smuggler chances upon a derelict starship. A psychic Historian empath sees visions in the ruins of a spaceport. A fleet General finds inexplicable deletions from deep space logs. An upscale Art Dealer wakes from a cyberspace sentence to find her sentience inserted into a clone of herself-a thousand years after convicted for spying- the authorities this time want her services on a mission, offering full pardon.
Star Trade Guildsmen, Wildcat pilots, Transhuman Imperial Overlords ruling a hive mind, Syndicate Warlords-the usual suspects of Spacers and Art Deco androids. Hauling heavy-metal Star yachts through mysterious nebula, and dark Herculean stations-none of them expect to be pulled by fate into the center of an impending intergalalactic conflict seventy million years old, least of all with each other.
Yet the haunting evidence of extradimensional beings has been mounting for centuries. Now they are arriving in force, and a divided humanity is ill prepared.
The Pandoran Chronicles is a mix of genres with nods to some of the greats of Science Fiction. Asimov’s Galactic Empires and robots. H.P. Lovecraft’s extradimensional horrors. Stephen R. Donaldson’s grimy spacers in the Gap series, and Samuel R. Delany’s poetic mix of the mythological and Space opera.

The Derelict...

2011-04-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

Tales from the Pandoran Age: Rise of the Taloned Sire-2nd edition available for order or e-book!

2011-04-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

A revised and expanded edition of book one with all new Art by Neil Thacker.

The Arcturian Colonials defined the aspects of their era more than any of the galaxy's societies to that point; optimism, technology, and benevolent order. It shone in their architecture, which soared, their economies, which roared, and their sense of life with its easy freedoms. They achieved it without the all-encompassing grip of the Imperials and their Transhuman Overlords, the continual strife of the Oligarchies and Kingdoms, or the horrific mysticism of the Marauder Cult at the galactic core. Like a society of Ayn Rand characters, their achievements now seem the stuff of mythological greatness, and it is hard to remember they were mere mortals such as ourselves. Whether it be the incursions of the dark-matter beings from hyperspace, the resurgence of the ancient aliens, or the ravages of the pirate kingdoms and the mystery cults, we now live in a dark time, with Pandora's jar having been unsealed and its evils- death, disease, famine, war-streaming out upon mankind like hyper bogie banshees. We may ask, "How did we get here?" Again, it is the Arcturian Colonials that step on to the galactic stage…
-Winteroud Sole "The Arcturian Colonials, Objectivism in stone and Steel.”

1

Flight 1079 to New Procyon
Arcturian Colonies, New Galen Starport ruins, 4101
A stifling air hung over the ruins of the great starport. At the edge of the city, the psychic and his brass android clambered among the gullies which had twisted into being since the city's fall. The psychic, Winteroud Sole, paused for a moment and he whispered to himself a poem he had written, “A Psychic Empath? I'm a thing that rolls in ashes, dreams in shadow lands, drinks toasts with the dead; hears their shocked tears with each turning of derelict worlds spinning celestial threads crying, ‘Gone, gone, all... is...gone.’” Finishing his poetic mantra, he made a dashing turn of his head and forced a smile at his recording android. "We are all ruins and echoes" he said.
His android was a fabulous Art Deco retrofitted antique named in honor of Edward Gibbons, whose “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” Winteroud so admired. The android lamented, "Truly, a great burden you bear, but a great gift as well, Sir Sole. Find the vision and find the truth.” It lifted its art deco chromium chin in a parroting gesture of human fortitude.
They silently pressed onward, scaling the crest of a dusty ridge, negotiating its ragged geography which erosion had strewn before the towers’ once manicured and precious landscape architecture.

The sleek android recorded all: in infrared, in x-ray, magnetic, and gravitational fields. In the tortured, psychotic visions produced in the empath's mind. Beyond the battered and rusting spires of New Galen, dim in the sky, but enormous, stretched an orbiting Stellar Gateway. No lights shone of life there, but its machine perfection glimmered softly. It marshaled ready, untouched, unused for a millennium.
A dust devil swirled in the radioactive wind. Sheet metal groaned somewhere among the rusting geodesics and pylons

Here was the edge of things. The Gateway had been on the edge of Imperial borders: the starport on the periphery of the metropolis. The ruins were cast about with a cluttered parade of starliner space planes. The space planes loomed silent, stilled where they had been taxiing along the runways. Lined up and ready to make for to the stellar gateway or deep space. Winteroud glanced back-yes the gateway gleamed in its comfortable L-5 orbit, and New Galen’s single large moon beyond that. Nevertheless, the gateway was an ironic relic now.

For a moment, Sole’s empathic vision slammed him again, and he saw in his mind the starport as it was that day before its fall; the Stellar Gateway alive with color. The lights and convoys of ships there. Space liners and tugs, they were a smattering of sparkling diamonds. People. Life, superimposed over the ruins a vision of the living past. Space planes by the dozen moving in and out. Voices rose up, laughter, excitement.
He felt a searing disjoint as his mind entered quantum dimensions that were the source of the visions. He retched, coughed, bellowing, "No-oh”. He felt himself in two places at once, enormously distant places in spacetime connected through a continuum. He lunged forward. Gibbon broke his fall. The archeologist and his antique android paused in a scenario they had replayed many times, as Sole’s sixth sense made its ravaging way through his body.
Son of a wealthy scion from the water world Caldris, Winteroud had since childhood had these strange visions. Psychedelic, horrific, quantum echoes from the space-time continuum of the things that once were. So real the sledgehammer visions impact, Winteroud was often unsure exactly how much were echoes, and how much were actual entities. Were they trapped in a netherworld of quanta, peering out from some disjointed time loop that occasionally brushed back, scratching at the real universe repeatedly? Battering, scratching at him?
Suddenly he sees a soldier in a gas mask walking through flames: "HEAR ME, BOY! LISTEN!" The roaring of the firestorm. The slamming impact of air from explosions. Screaming, crying-always the screaming, the voices, the confusion in such places. Then, silence and carcinogenic dust.

Winteroud shook it off and glared at the burnt vestiges of the city. There was no one there. His awful empathic, psychic sense howled unmercifully through his mind a fluttering moth of an echo. He retched with it again in a painful involuntary outcry. Impressions assailed him again and again; lives of people who had lived here, like echoes on a holoscreen speaking unfinished phrases time, and again. Put the damn case in the suspensor field, Sasha-I need to get this heart tissue reworked or I’ll be flat on my-Mommy said I could get some sherbert-Hey Sundar, what’s with all the traffic coming out of the Gate-Hells bells, we’re taking fire! He steadied his resolve. Their faces flashed before him, reliving the moments of the attack on the city with a gruesome realism as if they were reaching out to him.
He saw searing blood and fury, fire and windstorm.
A woman lunges toward him desperate, "What is going on?" she howls.
"I am a scientist,” he whispers to himself, looking to his recording android. The android was astute enough to perceive Winteroud's anxiety at the visions in the ruins. The starport towered like stainless steel skeletons, witness to a crime of mass murder.
"Rather grim, Sir." The chromium skinned android offered coolly.
Through a broken plate glass window, he sees a pile of skeletons. Then they are people huddling together, survivors from the attack- "What really happened here?" Sole barked angrily. The people look at him, then they are bones again.
Even his droid understood the hyperbole. "We shall be the first to chronicle that assessment", it said in dry consolation. The official history had many holes. Sole's psychic visions plumbed the quantum echoes. They made no spin for the mysteries-they revealed. What was, was. They began down the other side of the ridge, toward the charcoal and seared hulks of the ruins. Winteroud Sole, Historian and Empath, girded his belly with courage. His android, E. Gibbon, cataloguing each moment they stepped in the hellish ruins, was sensing a new awareness forming in his sentience-a profound sense of pity for those extinguished here so long ago.
Winteroud could hear raindrops splashing were none fell. “It was raining that morning"... Purchase Your copy NOW, Buck!

The Pandoran War paperback is out!!!!!!!

2011-01-27T09:50:00.001-08:00

C o n t e n t s_____________
1. Amnesia
Uncharted Space, Far side of the Milky Way
2. Ring Around the Rosy
New Galen, Arcturian Space
3. Out of the Solar Wind & into a Rad box
Uncharted Space, far side of the Milky Way,
En route to the Pleiades
4. The Reckoning
Rip orbit, Sagittarius Arm
5. Walking after midnight
Deneb 4 Orion Arm
6. The Yellow jaguar
Rip, Sagittarius Arm
7. And you will know us by the trail of our dead
Chrysalis Isla, Orion Arm
8. Enter…Pandora
Rip, Sagittarius Arm
9. It aint over
Chrysalis Isla, the Pleiades
10. Hell rides
Phlegra Station. Echo Hercules Cluster

Buick MacColl: Hubble takes a Clear look at the Lagoon Nebula

2011-01-20T11:06:00.000-08:00

Buick MacColl: Hubble takes a Clear look at the Lagoon Nebula

International distribution for Tales from the Pandoran Age?

2011-01-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

There is some discussion with a comic company that is involved with some major new lines and distribution deals to Create Graphic novel/comics from the original "Tales from the Pandoran Age." This could be HUGE.

derelict end 6

2010-09-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

derelict 5

2010-09-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

derelict 4.wmv

2010-09-22T14:58:00.001-07:00

derelict 2

2010-09-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

flight 1079 6

2010-09-22T13:20:00.001-07:00

flight 1079 5d

2010-09-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

flight 1079 4b

2010-09-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

flight 1079 4a

2010-09-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

flight 1079 3

2010-09-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

flight 1079 2

2010-09-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

Flight 1079 1

2010-09-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

Pulp Magazines and the Way the Future Was 0001

2010-08-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

E-platforms and paperbacks!

2010-07-10T01:15:00.000-07:00

The paperback proof has arrived in Maimi! That will mean the paperback should be available for purchase next week. Additionally, we're now available on a number of eStores.

Pandoranwar.com

Smashwords! as a serial

Lebrary

and Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle as a serial

and an eLibrary listing.

Scott's Baal Baby takes to Space.

2010-07-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

First there was Neil Thacker's two d-vision

Then Scott McEwans 3-d model...

Is now on it's first test animation....

Fifth Element Taxi Chase

2010-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Fifth Element

2010-07-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

2753 Productions

2010-07-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

Awesome Animation.

Chronos Productions struggles to launch...

2010-06-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

With a brilliant little team of animators, artists, writers, actors and more-Chronos seeks to take the Pandoran Age Universe to the media...here

The Pandoran War

2010-06-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

The derelict- "Tales from the Pandoran Age"

2010-06-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

pandoranwar.com

2010-06-04T09:40:00.001-07:00

The Pandoran War is finished-download links forthcoming ;)

Illustrated By Neil Thacker

Production Design By Neil Thacker

2010-03-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

“Keen are the arrows
of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, who feel that it is there.”
-Byron Shelly, “Skylark”

The Cyborgians fell out of hyper on the far side of the sun. They came up over its north pole in a daring frenzy firing matter cannon and disruptor beams all at once. They rode the edge of their own fire plowing through solar flares bigger than planets. The dogfighters engaged, plunging into the line of fire and sweeping above and below it on three vectors. One fell back and around swinging a deep spline path beneath the frigate and hammering it with gravity bombs...

Deneb 4

2010-01-06T13:58:00.000-08:00

Kai Boguschewski's Concept art of Deneb 4

Active partners sought for continued preproduction.

2009-12-31T07:19:00.000-08:00

Chronos Productions LLC is working on:

Screenplays developed from novels' proprietary characters for- initial CGI/live actor feature film (to be followed in series) and 12 screenplays for cable miniseries of same.
Storyboards for film (which will then be transfering into graphic novel format for publishing in subsequent book publishing division.
3 audio and ebooks with high flash website for internet marketing campaign.
Film distribution contract options.

This process is estimated to take nine months to a year out from the opening of Chronos office.

This is not an offer to sell securities: This is not a security, thus the securities rules noted above are not involved. Such business plans can be communicated to anyone (i.e., a general solicitation via the Internet is perfectly permissible with an active investor business plan). This outline is intended for information purposes only for ACTIVE investors.

For more information please contact pandoranage@live.com

Flight 107-9

2009-10-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

Joel Surachi narrating with Shane Morgan on music. From The audiobook.

4101 New Galen....

Character Design visualization of Winteroud Sole by Neil Thacker; New Galen Starport by Neil Thacker...

3196 New Galen....

The Derelict.....

2009-10-15T18:28:00.001-07:00

From the audio book....here.

A Multi-Media Project

2009-06-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

Chronos Productions is currently looking for animators to bring the Pandoran universe to the screens pandoranage@live.com

I am a thing that rolls in Ashes...

2008-06-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

The long dark age grinds on across the Milky Way. Republics and oligarchies, dictatorships and anarchies rise among the scattered systems beyond Earths ancient Cyrborgian overlords; demented beings entirely seduced by their virtual worlds. An unresolved mystery of a war a thousand years gone begins to unravel when a young smuggler crosses what appears to be an artifact from the war.

Soon, a group of wildcat smugglers operating on the fringes of society,
an underworld Boss, a fleet general, and a government overlord are thrown together in a series of tales that test their very souls. Thus a madman, a criminal, and a petty smuggler, each with their hand on the others throat, will try to sort out the mystery left behind by the war. Only the Overlord, knows its meaning. His response-illegal experiments on living people in a a deserted nebula. Here is the iron door slam of unexpected fate. The smooth flash of imperious desire-wars blind, churning march, and finally, Love and Friendship's sad bright shine of recognition as mankind steps into the intergalactic ring-winner take all…

1. Flight 107-9

An Empath? It’s a thing that rolls in ashes
Dreams in shadow lands
Drinks toasts with the dead
Hears their shocked tears with each turning
of derelict worlds spinning celestial threads
crying "Gone, gone, all... is...gone"

-Winteroud Sole, Caldris

New Galen 4101

Scaling the crest of a ragged, dusty ridge, Winteroud Sole glared at the burnt vestiges of the city. His awful empathic sense howled unmercifully through his mind. Impressions assailed him; lives of people who'd lived here like echoes on a holoscreen speaking unfinished phrases over and over. He steadied his resolve.
"I am a scientist” he whispered to himself. He looked to his recording driod, who, though not expensive, was astute enough to perceive Winterouds anxiety at the sight.
"Rather grim, Sir." The chromium skinned android offered coolly.
"What happened here?" Sole said involuntarily.
Even his droid understood the hyperbole. "We shall be the first to chronicle that assessment." it said in dry consolation.

New Galen 3197
Morning came up lazy and rainy at the airport as Dylan tossed himself into a window seat and ran sleepy fingers through his hair. He watched the star liners taxi back and forth along the runway. It was just another flight among hundreds...flight 107-9, to be precise, bound "out space"; the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy. All night the big shuttles had dropped passengers onto New Galen from the orbital Gateway. The passengers moved by the thousands to outbound ships not knowing that of all their days, and of all their trips, the coming day’s voyage was to be singular in kind...

Dylan glanced at a couple of stewardesses. They were two beauties animatedly talking politics. A tall blonde with a Slavic look about her was saying, "Since the Cyborgians’ meeting at Arcturus the whole schedule of the airline is turned upside down! Flipping metal-heads should stay back on Earth in their vats. My home-bot has been feeding my cat all week because I can't get back.”
Her companion, a perfectly formed brunette, replied, "Metal-heads! They won't be happy until they've got a gateway into every system and a database on every economy. They just can't stomach free trade!"
Dylan chuckled to himself; galactic civilization interferes with cat feedings. He read the hologram graphics glittering over the terminal:
New Galen Star Port, Gateway to the Galaxy.
He thought to himself: Just another flight.
A break in the clouds afforded him a view of the sky. Even at early morn he could see the glow and ring of the Gateway orbiting New Galen. It was huge, a quarter as large again as the planet it orbited. Dozens of Stations drifted around it; they were smaller rings and sparkling lights. If one looked closely massive star liners were discernable, appearing as from nothing through the gateway. Having traversed light years in moments they reached the borders of
one civilization and stepped in to another....

...The passengers were settled in and a steward was doing an age old puppet dance he’d recited a million times about star craft safety. “...and if the hull should be breached at any time in transit, emergency, stasis holds will protect you until such a time as help can arrive-you won’t even notice the passage of time, help will seem to appear instantaneously.”
Tunis chuckled. “What they don’t tell you is if help doesn’t ever arrive, that stasis shields can keep you frozen for a couple billion years.”

Dylan drifted off to sleep as the Lockheed Martin X-3000 whined into the friendly skies and then slid, turbo boosters stratocasting, into a widening spiral shot, for deep space. The X-3000 was a new liner, five decks high with three hyper drives. Her alloy hull incorporated millions of nanoscanners, solar and radiation power arrays, as well as magnetic and gravitational scatter fields for shielding. For all the impressive hardware, she took to the stars with the grace of a falcon; swift, smooth, and magnificent.

Copyright & Scene Design & illustration, Neil Thacker -Grafikeer-Canada

Arcturus: New Haven City 3197
David Omm looked out over the capitol city of the Arcturian Democratic Confederation with a strange fascination. Beyond his hotel balcony millions moved, thrived, and lived with only the most minimal of cyborg enhancements. It was terrifying for him to a degree; any madman without mental restraint programs might wield some weapon causing David destruction. Yet the thought of all those people operating on their own compulsions, without the steadying hand of the Hive Mind-what a brilliant, mad, careening chaos! That their “Democracies” flourished amazed him even more. Their economies were matched by no civilization man had created in the galaxy.
Hence David’s diplomatic mission. He represented the oldest of mankind’s Governments. Earth at its center (although no longer the capitol) had produced a medical science by the late twenty second century that was nothing short of miraculous. First had come man machine interfaces-the nervous system and the quantum computers could interact directly. Genetic enhancements at the cellular level had extended life indefinitely-for those that could afford it. Nano systems combined biotechnology with micro-mechanical systems that cleaned and enhanced internal organs, and even skin without the slightest infringement on ordinary human perception. In the passing centuries mankind had thus refined medical technologies and the human genome.
David was well over fifteen hundred years old, but his appearance was of a Grecian God. He stood lithe, tall, and eternally young. He almost pitied these “natural” humans with their minimal genetic enhancements. If pity could exist with fear and revulsion, then pity would describe his emotions. Yet they were too dangerous with their robust economies, unpredictable populations, and independent armed outposts. Most disconcerting, however, was their amazingly disciplined (with no hive mind!) and dedicated military.
“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” was their mantra, slung out at the universe with the conviction of religious zealots. David chuckled, more like: Madness! Disorder! Purposelessness! Hence their nickname among the Cyborgian High command-“wilds”. The contentions the wilds had against Gateway outposts to their civilization boggled the mind. That they preferred to endlessly rally about the dangers of deep space in their star ships was beyond normal Cyborgian comprehension.

Copyright & Scene Conceptual art Neil Thacker -Grafikeer-Canada

New Procyon 3197

.... Izzo was surprised code programming prepared when the liner was made powered up suddenly at the air corpsman’s signal. Then he remembered his flight training on martial law situations and knew he was now under the command of the dogfighter pilot
At last knowing the full scope of his situation, Izzo wasted no time swinging the ship into evasive pattern and reaccelerating from his cruising. Cooper watched every instrument hologram tach to the max on his visor. Word had it old boy Izzo had been quite a stunt pilot in his youth. That bit of trivia, batted around coffee lounges among the liner pilots for years, had just become very, very important.
Cooper almost smiled as he watched the liner do things he'd never seen a liner do before.
There were four dogfighters left against three Cyborgian attack ships. Izzo spun the liner in twisting splines avoiding laser shot that would have sliced the hull open if it hammered well enough. But the attack ships were preoccupied with the dogfighters and the shots weren't coming from their big guns.
Drifting and radioactive, an Arcturian battleship would soon plunge to New Procyon World. There was no one left alive there to worry over the collision. Izzo spotted a huge freighter, miraculously, that had pulled itself into a low orbit around a gas giant. It seemed to be biding it's time or waiting instructions before it made a hopeless break for hyper. If the dogfighters could harry the attack ships long enough, it might run free of the gas giant’s gravity well and run in hyper. This close to the planet the hyper streams would be a deadly riptide that would shatter any field manipulations it could construct.
"Liner 1079, this is Arcturian Air corps. We're on a coded channel. Follow my instructions exactly and there's a way out of this mess. We figured there’d be civies arriving in system so we've stayed as long as we could to help. I've lost all the men I can. Two of us will break engagement and spin out for the largest gas giant. A friendly ship is hiding there now. On my coordinates we all break into hyper and run. How you set for fuel?"
Izzo could hear instrument fire as the pilot spoke.
"Were good." Izzo looked at Cooper. "We're they sure this transmission was from the Arcturians? Cooper understood. He pointed to a holo: all the codes checked.
"What's your name Captain?"
"Izzo. You?'
"Kroug. Percival Kroug. Welcome to my nightmare, Captain Izzo."
Izzo guffawed. He was watching metal fatigue indicators rise.

2. THE CRASH TRAIL

Rip, Sagittarius Arm 4110.

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. Up from the shores into the lowland plains the settlements grew into hamlets and towns with vineyards and orchards with 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.
Vincent’s place was only nominally cleared and worked, with a view of the lakes in the distance.
"Damn it Vincent!" Scharon held the purse accusingly at him, "Shroom money! They catch you with those mushrooms and our child will be getting to know you from the stasis block. 'That's daddy dear, number five...he's time-frozen now, but when you're ten-" She handled the money with disgust as well as fascination.
There was a plague of snails that year chewing at crops across the northlands. It was a bitter year for many.

copyright set & character design, Mr. Jack

Vince set his gaze away. He took a long weary breath and said, "We've gone round this before. It's too late to get work in the mines. 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. Only winter promised the demise of the snails, a winter of want at that.
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 shrooms very high on the black market.
Scharon covered the glow tubes. "Never mind now. Come here." she said softly then.
Come love me.

Two days came and went of cutting and hauling. 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 Scharon 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 were moving 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 trail like that. 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.
"Or worse, the border patrol will find the rest of the mushrooms."

3. All the King’s men
Deep void off Pleiades Cluster, 4110

copyright & lighting, & set manipulation Mr. Jack
When the vacuum seals and the scatter fields wheezed and whined down, Vince stepped out the door of his ship. The service deck was filled with staring faces. His reputation now preceded him. The young guildsman with the antique frigate. The one who solo piloted into a marauder array and glided out with the dust clouds and ashes and not a scratch him.
“He saved the refugees.” “Say he was backing up Elias the whole time. Yes, the Guildsmen take care of their own, you know.”
"Ships name?" One of the service techs was asking dryly.
"What?" Vince asked.
"You haven't logged your vessels name, sir." The tech made a face as if to say, "you know".
"Yesss...she's the Sire" he said softly. He remembered the mining lasers strapped to his hands like awful talons, "The Taloned Sire".
It was an odd sensation suddenly being so respected in the eyes of men. He'd spent the better part of his life suffering the contempt of fools for his ambitions. Now they were playing out. It was a pleasant, but hollow thing. Yet, it could be used to his advantage if he wasn't fool enough to start believing it all himself.
He'd found the frigate by mere chance.
He'd saved the refugees by mere necessity.
The techs stepped out of his way. They saw a hero; they saw the ship, a tall young guildsman who defied the odds. Vince thought: From dreamer to hero in one go.
He needed a drink.

Baal One, Pleiades Cluster

Sweating and breathing heavy, the soldier stared ahead, challenging all, and challenging nothing. The first sonic booms of the assault that battered the crater side all morning quieted suddenly. There would be more. Baal's unrelenting suns scorched the rubble and sand. Night was a chronological observation since this side of the planet always faced its suns. Sleep and rest escaped him.
Occasional violent smacks of small weapons fire shocked the silence, barely noticed. Brilliant red tracers sparkled in the searing light. Of the six or seven men in his platoon with any native combat intelligence, Sagamore was the best. He'd spent the formative years of his childhood in an industrial ghetto before Engineering College on a scholarship, which made him an educated thug, a wharf bull with brains.
His education told him, and his guts agreed, that the war was a meaningless political trump. It promised him nothing but an ignominious death. The Kingdom, perhaps even the King, was corrupt. Sagamore grumbled in the sand cursing the day he was born.
Somewhere a shield popped and another poor soul shrieked in agony.
Madness, Sagamore thought grimly. He lowered his gaze, like all his class he'd cherished the monarchy as champion of the small. Yet there was no justification for this carnage .None. Baal was a useless hunk of rock spinning around an unimportant star and no one had spent the time or money to make things otherwise for centuries.
Suddenly it was worth this?

copyright & Character design Mr. Jack
Crack! Crack! Dust, sonic booms.
More tracers. "Damn it!" He bellowed and rolled forward. He found a large boulder that shaded him and rested his weapon on the ground. His faceplate sights came on.
He looked out over the blistering fields of mica and igneous rubble. His pals from the base lay among the dead out there in cooked heaps. Some colandered by claymores, others boiled to exploding by disruptor fire. Their stench drifted back to him. They had died to blow open an enemy drop bunker that had landed the previous "day". Sagamore could see several of their corpses caught exposed on jutting rebar and busted astercrete. A wind caught them and limbs waved in the air. Hello, we are in Hell now. Come join us old friend, great fun. Always room for one more...

4. The Kith Blade
Copyright & Scene Design Neil Thacker -Grafikeer -Canada

"Obscuro Frio", so it is said, were the first words muttered by a Spanish speaking Arcturian as he stepped from a ruined starship and looked out at serrated glacial peaks stretching dark and magnificent in all directions. Refugees from the Arcturian genocidal wars, it was their last planet of call. There was no more fuel.
Literally Obscuro Frio means, "Darkness and cold". It was apt nomenclature. A dying sun cast an ugly light over ragged mountains. Even the remnant life left on that frozen hell of a world were ugly. Pumped up vermin that had managed to evolve when grander and higher life forms died away.
Osbcuro Frio Orbits a fading red giant at the end of its lifecycle. Eons had ebbed away in the sputtering twilight of that world before mankind stumbled off the refugee ships.
Amazingly, the indigenous life forms had been evolving right along with the slow and dreary death. How the life forms had survived the stars expansion was a matter of conjecture; a barely temperate zone at the poles, the crushing depths of dark seas? The stars retreating heat had been slow enough for the vermin to conquer again the icy globe. Snow spiders mimicked rubble to avoid ice worms that hid in the glacial rivers fearing sudden clouds of stoneflies that smelled them in search of a place to lay larva. It was a looters struggle for the last energies left of better days.
Someday the star would nova, but there was still an eon or two to play out.
The refugees fought a viscous battle for survival. Their solution to stay alive is a legendary testament to their will. Among the Out worlds, a story of overcoming unnatural odds is the first story of each place. But the Obscurofrioians story is the most arduous.
A young biologist was among those first refugees on Obscuro Frio. In order to survive the freezing temperatures, he altered the genetic makeup of everyone. They were dying. Then they were alive. It was cold. Then they ran out over the ice like it was grass. It was dark, and then they could see the heat of an ice worm on a moonless night.
The result of the genetic manipulations was a deep blue tone in the epidermis that for generations now has been a badge of honor among the Obscurofrioianns. They are perhaps the toughest of the Outworlders, a people who... From "Between the Cyborgian Empire and the Core Marauders: A survey of the Outworlds" -Winteroud Sole, Caldris.

Atlas Mountains, ObscuroFrio, Sagittarius Arm 4120
Aggregate ice lay in furrows along the edges of New Aiguilles Expupery range. Black stoneflies, long and waspish, flew in a maddening frenzy when the boy appeared. Hovering over a corpse, they were a cloud of sudden, surprising motion. The boy recognized the corpse immediately, it was his father.
Just like that, a glance, a moment, his life irretrievably diminished.
Swallowing hard, young Millin Quinoa pulled out his Kith blade from his long white boot and swung a full circle scanning for the murderers. They had gone, leaving the body exposed to the wildlife for food-an ultimate sign of contempt.
He stood among the flies, approached the body. The flies came at him to sting and lay larva but Millin swung his blades wide side and the crack of hard fly bodies smashing sent the whole buzzing mass away.
He took his fathers tools and small belongings as mementos, but it would be the flies that he would remember. Their buzzing calls like words from the dead.
ZZZZZZZ-Remember this!
Remember and be spared it.

OpaLocka's World 4121
A good slave he was not. Angering his master, Millin was thrown into a betting pit and chained to a giant slab of rusting iron. Behind a small gate at the other end of the pit a noise of baying ripjackles could be heard. They'd been starved for days readying them for the contest. A crowd of vulgar men and women waged their bets, howling with glee and bloodlust.
Lightning cracked in the distance. It had rained off and on since Millin arrived on this hothouse of a planet. He would be fighting in mud. They were betting on how long he would last before the ripjackles disemboweled him.
"And to the closest better on the lad’s time in the pit will go this fine Kith blade." The bet master held up Millin's finely jeweled blade. "But first, of course, he'll need it!" He laughed and tossed the blade down to Millin.
The crowd roared with laughter.
Millin picked up the muddy blade. "Moron's. Am I to die for the entertainment of morons?"
The bet master raised his hand for silence. "And time!" he shouted.
The gate dropped and the ripjackles shot out. Foolishly they charged right in. Millin took the heads of the first two, then a third.
"Ye-ah! Come on little doggies!" Millin shot back.
Newly aware that their prey wasn't defenseless, the remaining ripjackles circled in their way, darting in and out, snapping.
Millin slashed and twisted.
They took blood.
He took blood.
Still, it was only a matter of time. He was lasting much longer than any before him, so the crowd was loosing money and placing second bets hoping to win it back. There was a roar of calls and waving arms as the jackles nipped at the boy. Time and again the jackles came in only to be fought back.
Each time, however, with slightly less fervor.
Millin faded the circumference of his chain- a little at a time with each blade swing. Thus the jackles were tricked into misjudging his reach. On one of their lunges then he leapt out three steps farther that they anticipated and took another head.
Now the crowd was furious, amazed, and delighted all at once.
Millin was standing among the headless ripjackles when he ventured to kick one of their heavy bodies out to the other animals. They sniffed it. Cannibals they were not.
Worth a try, Millin thought.
His body ran with adrenaline, but his strength was still diminishing fast. It would be moments now, surely, and he would fall, ripped to pieces. His blue skin was covered with blood already. The crowd was in a frenzy. The lead jackle circled back, Millin lunged taking a piece of its throat. It came again driven by hunger, excited by the noise of the crowd.
Suddenly the noise quieted.
Millin saw a man approaching the ring of the pit riding a large animal. The man's face was scarred, and one sensed some immense sadness about him. The crowd seemed to know him. No one said a word when he rode his beast smoothly into the pit. He looked at the jackles; they growled but did not charge.
He looked at Millin, then at the crowd.
There was a long dreadful silence. Only the ripjackles bobbing heads and low baying broke the perfect stillness.
The man lifted a strange silvery pistol and the air flashed with a light.
Millin looked down and the chain was severed.
Everyone just stared.
Then Millin rushed the jackles in a furious sprint through the mud, his blade swinging a death song through the air, separating each beasts head from its bodyuntil there was only he standing before the unbelieving crowd who now backed away at the armed and unchained boy.
"All bets are off!" the bet master howled and Millin set out from the area with a shifty run. He came upon the man who'd helped him further down the road....

...In the coming years Millin would get to know his Captain well. Many things he would come to know, from the educational programs, and from growing up aboard ship. Yet when it came to Vince, it would always be a flash of light smashing a chain in a slave pit that Millin would remember.
Captain Leavel was the one who busted chains…

5. Riptide

CENTRAL GALACTIC REGION:
Tangeonprioc, 4185
Someone was asking a lot of questions down at the Corewinds Tavern.
Too many questions for Mel "No-Deal" DePaulo.
He took a long toke on a crystal water bong and watched the questioning figures in a mirror behind the long aluminum bar.
"Time to lift off this little corner of the multiverse." he said quietly to Roland Dansky, sitting beside him. Their ships, the Serpentine and Mel's Monkey, were sent an emergency departure signal-directly from Mel. "Nobody asks a lot of questions this close to the galactic core, Roland me boy. Too many highly prized minerals passing about. Too many Predecessor relics to be gotten."
Too little law.
If someone was snooping around it was personal. That meant a hit or a raid was coming. No chance for negotiations and no opportunities to cut a deal. Better to cut anchor instead. He and Roland made separate paths through the gardens and domes toward the station docks where their ships were bayed. Clambering into the airlock of the Mel's Monkey, Mel fumed, "Get the rest of the crews in here. We're leaving-now!"

copyright & Character design: Mr. Jack

When he reached his piloting seat he dropped in it like a shot of lead. He was raging as he began ship deliberations for departure.
The crews were pissed. The last Pilot was scrambling with keyboards and lockdown fields when the two ships paid port duty and swung hard out to space. Tangeonprioc's domes and craters fell away with unreasonable speed. Half the crews hadn't time to go cyber. On the main hologram the globe seemed to fall away like a toy, a mirage.
Now the crews were really pissed.
Yet Mel's attention never wavered from his MERGE helmet.

Banging the warp drive that close to the galactic core was painful on your neurons. When you got used to the pain, and you remembered you were running, then you were angry. When the anger passed, then there was fear. A creeping awful dread when you begin to wonder: What's behind us? Most of the time Mel was a weak leader. A whiney man- almost foolish in appearance. Yet underneath that gangling neurotic facade was a fiercely competent fighter, a shrewd soft sell. A battle hardened Captain. The crews knew it. If Mel was silent, in a hurry, and running, something bad was coming.

The two ships wailed in the fuming plasma streams funneling on a billion string courses through the hugeness that spread out and up from the galactic plume. Roland Dansky commanded the Serpentine. After a few grim hours of silence, he casted over in code. "Ughh-Mel?” Everybody's kind of curious. You got any idea what's this all about?"
"Nothing! Nothing big." Mel snapped. "We got a coded message from the Taloned Sire and the Loose Cannon. Says they want us downwind pronto in the rift void. No questions. Just watch our asses and drop all the gravity bombs we got in case anybody tails us. See? Now, no more transmissions for a while. Just burn those engines for what they're worth. The Sire will recompense us later.
"Now out for now. Till we're in sight of the big guns on the Sire, fly hard-out!"
Roland shut off his comm and stared for a grimy moment at the bulwark sides of the companion ship streaming in the red shift. Mel had just secretly told him several things, none of them good. First, there were no other ships waiting. The Taloned Sire and the Loose Cannon hadn't sent any messages. Second, neither ship had any gravity bombs in stock. It was a bad hand of poker Mel had just played.
Roland didn't believe that bluff would have fooled a dock hand.
The two ships broke through a veil nebula. The full brightness of the central region's gaseous, crowded mass of stars came up in view above them. It was like some primitive god raging with x-rays, spewing accretion matter streams and spattering shattered stars with tidal forces too rapid and complex for even the strongest onboard navigational computer to configure and visualize.
They rode the hyper storms. They trusted their intuition in spaces where there was nothing else. Days came and went. Silence from behind. The crews took shifts; Mel stayed on stimulants and never left his seat, refusing to come out of MERGE. Simone Borges tried to stay with him. She watched matter indicators till her hands shook. There was no keeping up with an old huffer like Mel. He could live on the stim. He'd replaced a couple of livers already. Borges found nothing outside but normal heavy freighters and metallic planetoids seared and bare. Tangeonprioc had been the only semblance of normalcy Borges had known in months. It was the closest thing to real civilization this close to the galactic core. Back in the Perseus Arm the civilized world would pay well for their cargoes. Out here, it was station law. You kept what you got with your guns and your wits....

Leyla Veronica lived with Vincent in a terraced apartment that hung, with thousands of others afforded shelter and shade, among sequoia-like arboriforms whose roots were twisted down and down into the soil since before the dawn of human flight. The towers and their hanging apartments had been magnificently commingled with the ancient trees with a minimum of environmental intrusion; one of the tenets of the NeoWrightians who'd settled the University world.They managed to slip humanity on that fair world gently; a velvet glove onto a soft hand...

...The candyapple red yacht darted out of hyper at the edge of the Luxus system flawlessly, almost recklessly. Its navigational coordinates had to be recent, fresh out of Deneb 4.It negotiated satellites and stations like there had been trial runs. There hadn't. The pilots were simply good, very good.System police barely had time to raise eyebrows and alerts.Then priorities override codes casted in.The yacht was permitted to continue toward the second planet without even having to register title.It broke atmosphere without hesitation, slowing only a little then, coasting toward the mirror seas.There wasn't a scratch on it.Obscenely expensive, seductively luxurious, the yacht was embossed with the name RIPTIDE in letters two meters high and either side.It looked frighteningly out of place when it water ported on the placid inland sea of Lake Lux. Yet there it was among a cache of small white in-system shuttles, tugs, transports and water ships.Vincent Leavel noticed the red yacht early that same morning from an elevated maglev train that ran along the waterfront.He smiled when he saw the Riptide's oversize hyper drives.The lines of the yacht were sleek, sexy, bent forward as if ready for action."Hot, quick, and easy." He whispered to himself...

6. Ossa

In the constructs of Deneb Four's cybernetic realms there existed places and beings only the human imagination had known before. Pure spiritual realities where only a thought was needed to make it so. The Cyborgian overlords romped in a universe of their own fashioning, but like Nebuchadnezzar before them they would find their idol had feet of clay.

-From the memoirs of Millin Quinoa,
Found on a scout ship crashed on ObscuroFrio

Orion Arm: Deneb 4 4217
Frigate class attack ship First Strike moved through the Denebian high command's Hyper Gateway coolly on impulse power, requiting controls to deep Cyborgian O’Neil monoliths and orbit net holos. Onboard, the ships officers were grimly silent; avoiding general Ossa's gaze in what had become an ugly ritual. Only the general knew what took place on these visits to the capitol world, yet the whole staff knew even the fierce and diamond hard general dreaded these meetings with a distaste that bordered on revulsion.
For general Vega Ossa, trips to the private realms of Omm 6X were unpleasant and incomprehensible. He knew the overlords were ancient, but their origins were privileged information. Anybody's guess. He only knew that the being he would observe, the halls he would traverse, and all Omm's attendants were not physically real. Yet their realities would be as consistent-and possibly fatal-as if their physical selves could be dragged away and weighed in real space.
This was no harmless dream.
For Ossa it was a nightmare. David Omm 6X was his direct superior, had been for several centuries. There appeared no end in sight for their association. It seemed to Ossa that Omm enjoyed the irony of their positions. Ossa had directed fleets into battle with pirates, he had engaged small packs of marauders in uncharted space, and he’d watched attack ships burning in the Crab Nebula a mere hundred meters from his own. But in the cyber world Omm was a demigod and Ossa a flea.
Omm would never let him forget it.
Flea, underling, peon.
Ossa registered in the main reception area of Fleet command and was called forward. The transition in the cyber holos would be imperceptible. He took a solemn glance out a magnificent portal at the capitals towers, perhaps his last?
The shimmering plastisteel and plexiturqouise ornamented structures loomed endlessly up and down, lost in the grey distances of sky and distant ground. They were vertical aqueducts and roads. Linear cities traversing planet to orbit without missing a beat.
Ancient gardens hung from their sides, cultivated since the dawn of the Space Ages.

Character design copyright Jason Wayne
"Walk this way please. Welcome to the Halls of Omm." A naked android styled female with long butterfly wings guided him in this time-someone’s idea of public art. Sometimes the Halls of Omm would be familiar, but as many times as not they would shift to strange caverns, unnerving walks on uncharted moons without atmospheres. One time he walked onto the surface of a balloon being on some Jovian world. Omm had looked over smiling. Ossa knew if he'd slipped off the balloon creature Omm would have let him fall through the eight hundred kilometer an hour methane winds until he reached the deep layers of the atmosphere and the gravity crushed him into the dark liquid metallic helium.
Anything was possible in Omm's game. Riding bareback with a stampeding herd of giant spiders, Omm had snickered, “It’s a tribute to my ex-wife. I call it ‘shopping with the sistahs’”.
Today it was, fortunately, the familiar hall Omm favored most-the luxurious baths of Carcalla, faithfully reproduced, Roman's and all. The Romans were sentient programs, Omm's companions. As Omm moved in an out of their virtual world, he was perceived by them as a god. Omm had once asked him,
"General, how do you know this world isn't real, and yours the phantasm?"
Ossa had felt a strange brew of doubt turn in his stomach. He'd pulled out the only defense he'd known in real war and Omm’s virtual nightmares; his ability to face uncertainty and possible death with an even calmness, even curiosity and sense of adventure. He just gave the demigod a rueful, knowing smile. He knew, at the bottom of things, Omm could never take the same dreadful defense that was, in the final analysis, no defense at all.

7. Harry's Tale.

Even the war had an end.
The soldiers came home to their various worlds to find the noble families rearranging the government though a series of judicial fiats that extended the powers of the Imperials to influence trade and commerce within the cluster. The King had been victorious in war, he soon lost the peace. Harry went back to his holo-painting and attended parties in a small circle of artists called "Nada" frequenting the penthouses a hundred stories up along Bicycle Bay.
There were Eighteenth century paintings on the walls along with Thirty-fifth century holos, retro droids of famous personages through history mingling in the crowd, and pretense so thick and mannered it had become an art form itself, the art form, Harry realized as he glared disdainfully about him.
As the party swirled, Barry Printzlau let his voice rise so that all might hear him,” They say the king is on Earth in Cordoba. He's the last of the line and he won't come back and lead against the domination of the noble families. The balance of power on Chrysalis Isla has tipped forever; no one will stand against the nobles now. The Monarchy has fallen for a piece of tail"
Harry spun toward the man with a platinum menace of an automaton. He grabbed the back of the man’s tunic and slammed him hard against the wall. Then he swung him to the edge of the balcony. "Speak against the King again in my presence. Do it now!"
Barry said nothing.
Everyone at the party was silent. None of them had ever seen a man struck in anger. Until now the brooding ex soldier and his tortured sweeps of action painting and flitting holo scenes where bits and pieces of men seemed to appear and disappear had all seemed fascinating. No longer. There was rabidness in his eyes and a hate in his white knuckles that filled the room with primeval dread.
A man who had been continually trying to organize a band, "Phoenix", wasn’t larger than Harry; he was dressed in a martial arts outfit with tattoos and leather. It was his party. Leaping with impish swiftness, moments after the fact, he reached Harry and placed a hold he'd learned in martial arts class on Harry's arms.
"Don't do it man, it aint worth it. Come on, let him go."
Harry thought about slamming them both, then felt the anger pass. He let go of Barry who ducked back into the party. Harry wanted nothing more to do with "Nada".
Harry’s current girlfriend walked up to him horrified. Her name was "Starpeace". Ever more Harry would refer to her as, "That Piece".
She looked at him a long moment silently for effect.
"You're really sick, you need help." She said. The next week she ended their tenuous relationship and started seeing that man without a band who called himself “Phoenix".

Harry started running hazardous waste disposal into Chrysalis Isla's Sun. The money was good and the work was dangerous, but it gave Harry a long missed sense of excitement he hadn't felt since the ground wars. It wasn't long before the profits from his work allowed him to buy his own ship. He would fly the hazardous waste right up to the coronal riptides where the heat and the gravitational forces might sheer his fusion drives into a million slices if he wasn't careful, then he would let the material drop into the star and feel his ship lunge outward with the loss of weight until space was cool again.
He met Sanitaria again at a benefit, she hadn't changed a bit. Her wealth had kept her perfect in the way only perfect wealth can. There were traces of worry on her face that evening that even beauty could not hide. Harry kissed her and reintroduced himself.
"Harry! Yes of course I remember you-long time now, how have you been faring?" she asked as he took her arm and walk along toward the outer decks of the water ship that hosted the benefit.
"Oh that’s wonderful, Sanitaria, wonderful. Work has been so busy-and I do love my work." he answered smiling. Money had kept him looking good too but there were evidences of age that the early years of his rise to power had left him, a line here and a feint scar there. He was wearing white again, with an Ahura-Mazda scale, pure scarlet and gold, poking up from his pocket.
"I love the Mazda scale," she said coyly, "did you think of me when you placed it there?"
"But of course, yes I did." He grinned hugely. She didn't believe him, but it was true. He had never forgotten the hurt her family’s rejection caused him. He had never forgiven them either for the part the played in the alliance against the king. His innocence and joy of life had died with so many of his comrades’ ludicrously defending Baal One and the King. He had thought of her, of all of them, every day of his life since the war.
"Oh now, Harry, you’re too good!" she laughed, "You haven't thought of me in ages." she laughed again, "Oh-too funny. Come; come by the railing with me. I'm very depressed as of late, my family is having a terrible row with the business and all. I need a diversion from it all and here you are, handsome, successful, and dashing as ever." she sighed.
They looked out over the sea and she remembered how he had stood so gallant in his uniform calling after her time and again from the rose garden. She remembered how it had seemed she could be free of her family and roam about the universe at will like an ordinary woman.
"But I have thought of you, Sanitaria." He said fingering the Mazda scale, peering at the waters. It was night and that meant only half the light of day in this part of the star cluster with the Pleiades glittering over the fluttering waves. She didn't know he was the cause of her family’s business troubles and neither did they. He was an aggressive trader and he had them cornered on the markets.
He was squeezing them slowly and he loved it. The feather scale in his pocket was a sort of trophy, an inside joke to himself.
"I've never stopped wanting such a one as you, Sanitaria-what sort of man could?" he said, and that too was true. However, he had stopped loving her a long time ago

They would be married just after the New Year.

8. The Derelict.

Hercules Cluster, 4211
Millin Quinoa, Memoirs entry 1017.

.....I've run some good runs with some big players, got the Sire. Yet even I sense the boots. I miss that can-do smile, that walk that's always weightless no matter what the G's.
I can still see him sitting up the big stack in a snow storm working the steel. Like he was playing cards, easy, steady.
Like you could throw the end of the multiverse at him and he'd snicker and start looking for loopholes. Crack open a can of synth, down it, and smack it up against some big mouths head.
All that, those days, those guys, good times compared to what was coming.
When I rounded the last of the shattered unformed webs of nebula and neutron star derelicts that skirted the darkness at the edge of the galaxy, I came up upon the big Hercules cluster. I could see the final void of intergalactic space just past the Echo City mines and the alloy camps of Phlegra station. Into that labyrinth of red and black smelters and dark skeletal forms looming against the void I shot. The casts then were nearly silent but for a maddening background of static and wailing signals like the ghosts of the Predecessors warning doom.
Empty casts, I knew what that would mean. Raiders and marauders taking out the cast relays with neutron cannon! Corpses and busted shields, empty silver starships drifting in the charcoal wastes, in the cold and radiation.
I booted some stim but my chemical plant was low. I had been manufacturing life-support for a long while without reconditioning. The station was near. I wasn't going to sweat it until the air got bad, if I still had light-years- then I'd worry.
Thought about looking through the wreckage and corpses to salvage, but I think that was just self abuse. At that time I'd been crewing alone for over a year, I needed company. Besides, the raiders surely picked through it all.
Past the wreckage, on to the station.
I lay awake in the stim glow when Phlegra's deep purple crescent finally loomed in my path and I could see the lights of the station spread across the dark side, I ported and locked it down in the mechanic's bay, registered, and slept in my cabin when the stim faded. A few days later when I awoke my life support had been scrubbed and the ships air was sweet as an alpine meadow on a big Alp O’Neill station. copyright Mr. Jack
I drifted down the alleys of the station over to “Bongo Joe's down the hatch" for a few drinks and news of the marauders. There was no news, which doesn't mean good news. Believe me, this far off the edge, every word for the Milky Way seems like a connection to a more solid reality. The most interesting thing at Bongo's that day was the condition of one of the pilots.
He was sledgehammer drunk and hotwired to the neurons. He stared straight ahead as if his merge helmet had malfunctioned and left him permanently trained on a quasar beacon .
"They'll be back." he said flatly, taking a long oblivious sip of his gin. "They'll be back." He was talking to no one in particular, but I felt like it was me he wanted to hear him. I was the choice of audience for the insane. The harbinger of madness that evening had chosen me as his disciple of doom.
I cursed at him under my breath. "Whacko pinhead drunks in every bar from the Tarantula Nebula to the Big Streak run."
"Whazat?" he chortled and raised his swollen head. "Nothing, nothing at all. Just you pipe down bonehead or I’ll contact Cyborg Central about your expired pilot’s licenses." I replied with a tone of belittlement.
"You too, blue face. And your sister! My licenses are up to date in every Respectable government in the galaxy. Some unrespectable ones too. And my credit jack has maxed the station bank. So who are you?" he snapped back from his worn face.
"CC doesn't give me no how-to anyway. More chip than dip."
He waited for expected abuse, but I have more pride than to banter with the likes of him. Usually I wouldn't be caught dead in a popped gravity bubble with him.
Suddenly the geezer pulls out a disruptor, an expensive silver job with an inlayed mother of pearl handle. That was worth big bucks. It made me wonder about him.
"Sit down and listen to Me." he said. I didn't recognize his accent from anywhere. After a while, pilots kind of lose touch with their roots and become, well, just themselves. Too convoluted by time and various perspectives of experience to really fit in anywhere but the stations.
That disser he's waving looks pretty well charged too.
"Yeah, sure old timer. Just put that piece away, okay?"
The pearl handled disser was too much. The derelict, wherever his origin, was Outworlder now. Must have made a fortune smuggling controlled substances into the command economies of the Cyborgian Empire. Or so I assumed. There were big scars on either side of his eyes, more on his forehead. Buggers been in a few scrapes. His jacket, I noted, like his disser, was top of the line. He needed a shave. On the jacket was an emblem; Turquoise Line. Earth based luxury ships. My assumptions wrong again, a liner captain? At one time. Now I'm downright curious.
"I was taking a Merc Sixty-two-thousand off the Tarantula Nebula to go over the galactic plane" he began, "I could see the big jet stream shooting out of the nuclear regions of the core. I'm up above the galactic clouds, the arched filaments are a shining, and I see the tilt of the disc. There are all the bright UV sources, the OB stars. Sub millimeter emissions from the cooler dust-you know. You know.
"The hyper stream is easier up there, fainter. Better for the old boats. Must have made that plunge, shee-it, fifty times if I made it once. It's quiet up there. If you've a mind to, you can look out over the arc of the stream and out to the fade between. That's the run I was making, ten years ago now.
"The Silurian Nebula was right in my flight path, but me, hey I'm a rational man. I don't buy in for old myths of ghost ships and lost star systems. I'm not about to recalibrate a half a million hyper stream calculations to avoid a grim spot on my galactic travels now, eh?"
He wiped at his sweaty face as if to clear away the present and peer into the spaces of the reported journey once more. He tugged on his gin....

9. Leon's Last Stand.

Ophelia’s World was terra-formed at the dawn at the space age. A mere fifty systems were settled then. She'd been a glorious achievement of planned cities and ornate white towers. Promenades stretched along semi-tropical gardens when the terra-formers finished. In the right place at the right time, industries piled on her continents one after the other, until for a time she rivaled even Deneb 4 as one of the galaxy’s finest worlds.
Her glimmering platinum spires flanked golden clockwork maglevs that spun silently past ladies in billowing gossamer gowns. Her name was tantamount in the settled worlds of humankind with reason and virtue, industry and progress. After 3127 the Arcturian wars cut off much of her trade and so began her slow and aching decline.
With time the Cyborgian Empire's only use of her was to house dissidents. Of course, the terra-forming monoliths installed centuries before were shut down then. The planets natural coldness returned. Ice formed on the multicolored croatans and frangipani, which shattered and lay still, frozen like lilies left to fester without even the dignity of raising a stink.

From the memoirs of Millin Quinoa, found in the ruins of a scout ship crash-landed on the ice fields of the Caliban Plateau, ObscuroFrio

copyright Mr. Jack
Ophelia’s World, Orion Arm 4212
The ship was coming.
Yes, right on schedule. Leon was going to stow away or die trying. From somewhere beyond the god-forsaken dirty grey of Ophelia’s pallid atmosphere, past that, yesss, beyond the junkyards of satellites and dreary stations...the ship was even now heaving into normal space. Lunging, blasting away from the hyper streams, coming to the prison world....coming to Ophelia.
Coming to Leon. Leon Percival Gambino-“wild dog extraordinaire”. He snickered at that, "Ha! Come to papa!” cackling to himself with a roaring madness born of glee at the prospect of freedom. He'd labored over his plans with devilish patience through endless bitter hours of lonely humiliation and regret. The ship was coming, yes, and when it came he was going to stow.
Fifty-thousand tons of interstellar freighters.
Drifting slowly down to the prison world, safe in a gravity bubble, yielding, descending like a dandelion seed cast out by a terra-forming bot. Down and down, unknowing of the eager little convict glaring back into the night waiting, hoping, longing desperately for the lights. Still hot from the ambient pressures which hyper streams leaked as it stringed through the void.
"Swirl the mesons boys, Leon's coming." The night was frigid and stinging.
Fifty thousand tons drifting, spinning, turning down. Down to the prison world.

The night side planet loomed. An ancient world all but abandoned by the Cyborgian Empire that had spawned it millennia before. Time had covered over from pole to pole with cities, towers, and factories. Kilometers high, kilometers deep, cities empty now but for a few ragged convicts interred here and there. They were Pirates, losers, loners; misfits not having earned a death sentence or a stasis block, just cast out of the way to go gracelessly in cold derelict cities.
They were Wildcat Out pilots, smugglers...
"Ophelia's world!" Mothers would curse at misbehaving children across half of civilized space. "Behave or they'll send you to Ophelia's world!” To live out your natural life among the ice and crying ghosts.
The wind turned in on a frigid hopeless night as Leon watched for the lights. The wind hooted its indifference. Fifty thousand tons of interstellar freighters sank beneath the clouds and continued its easy silent descent toward the icy seas where it would make water port.

"Right on time" Leon snapped excitedly as he saw the lights appear in the gloomy clouds above. "Tell me, tell me do-how lame can they think we are?" he asked aloud to the night, “a coherent landing schedule on a prison planet? Might as well send invitations. Blowfish brains and dancing dolphins!"

10. Mohanga River

Ophelia’s World, Perseus Arm, 4212

High, high above the airways
in the darkness alone with the silvery stars
long ago my heart moves back
to your soft face asleep in the clouds
high in the night above the airways
my love too late recalled
the deep azure night
where my spirit raged free
too late recalled the passing of our time
too late, my love, recalled.

Starpeace, "Never know what you got till it's gone"
Starky barky holos unlimited.

Copyright Dominique

...With the pilfered software in hand, he made his way through the vast and empty vaulted halls of the maglev station. Here the station opened into the Transportation building. The stonework above danced in white leaping pinwheels of lace terra-cotta patterns; abstracted galaxies. Beneath the repeated galaxies figures strode through a history of transportation with important purpose. Watching the ages reach their dull conclusion of abandonment and decay, he was gripped with a desolate sense of nihilism.
He peered outside. In the grim dark rattled a loose piece of metal, caught in a sudden wind. The wind passed and silence once again ruled the empty yards. Hulking maglevs sat undignified on the ground. Their levitation equipment deactivated even before the final closing of this world.
There was no sign of the Cyborgian patrols as he first stepped under the starlight dashing over the rows of barren maglev rails. He began his jaunt in earnest scanning the skies for the tell-tale glimmer of silent lights. There were none. No rhyme or reason to the Cyborgians enforcement of the restricted zones. He suspected the lower level Cyborgs of keeping the hive mind at minimum input while they ate doughnuts or slept on duty.
If he could make it across the Mohanga River he'd be clear. If not there'd be hell to pay and they might even begin fitting him with programming chips. It'd take some trumping, clearly unconstitutional even in Cyborgian space. But while the mass of population was diverted with their sensorama plays, their athletic contests, non-objective art, and their alternative lifestyle trivia fashions, the government had been disassembling their liberties for centuries like a slow irresistible tide. More importantly, it had shaped society in such a way that any real economic or personal freedoms would be unacceptable to the populace because they would introduce a level of uncertainty that would necessitate them living in the real world.
He passed out of the maglev yards and spindly ground car roads spun off in graceful arcs of bridges. The bridges still held their form after ages of ice storms; a testament to their engineers. He followed one of them, taking a different route back to the sea than the one he came. The snow was melting-Ophelia’s brief summer would be upon them soon. Some of the snow never did melt, and it was in those places, where year after year layers of ice formed, that it
was most dangerous to walk. Honeycombed beneath the ice could be other levels of the megalopolis. Not everything held up as well as the ground car bridges.
So he tried to follow the roads, trudging back along a slightly different route in case they followed his trail coming in. Now certainly paranoia was creeping into his brain. The Mohanga River marked the edge of the restricted zone along his new route. He need only make it to the river.

He had two hours left when the blizzard hit.
copyright Mr. Jack

11. The boiler

...Bandor had never seen furious rage before. The figure in the holoscreen of Harry now was livid. He moved about the room like an experimental subject having a bad reaction to a new protein complex in his cerebrum.
"He's dead! He's alive! He's dead! He’s alive! What the hell is going on at that penal colony at Ophelia anyway? What it is a health club? They're roaming around the planet freely, making new friends!
“Look, Bandor, I set those smugglers up for public humiliation and incarceration. What happens? They become even more famous as rouge folk hero's than before. Now what's supposed to be a torturous penal colony becomes a place for them to regroup and build new alliances. This is not working according to my plan. You contact your people at CC and have them little pricks placed in the nastiest hard duty conceivable, see? I mean carcinogenic fibers, dirty black dust in the air to breathe, machinery so old there aren't replacement parts. Temperature extremes-danger, poison, and ugliness! Every day of their rotten lives!"
"Yes, yes. I'm sure that's workable." Bandor didn't understand the motivation of revenge yet, but he knew it was important to Harry that the convicts he'd set up suffer.
"I'll take care of the rest." Harry smiled.
"What do you mean?" Bandor was confused now.
"What I mean is enough games; I'm going to have the little pricks killed. Killed, killed, killed, killed, and killed some more until they’re fricking D-E-A-D dead! Dead for good, bye bye!"
Then the holo was gone. Bandor walked out of the holo room and stood at his directors desk. An ultra-steel wall in front of him opened over the research laboratories and he could look down on the workings there. Screens in his office showed details of various operations taking place. Regret welled up in him with each turn of the micro knife. Surely this was wrong. He remembered his days a simple clerk in the hive mind and the happy organized illusions CC had sent out about it's nature as a government; benevolent, purposeful, humane. A lie. The truth was this. People mattered not at all. They were things to be used, butchered, spent and forgotten. Bandor almost longed for the ignorance of the lie again. It was such a lovely deception. Regret filtered into fear-something was driving CC to this butchery, something they wouldn't even speak of. Wild humans believed in a higher being-a God thing. Of course they believed in an opposite of the God, a Devil thing. They had named this bizarre nebula after the Devil thing-Diablo. Bandor began to wonder at such notions. He began to know fear in new ways each day. Outside the base, slithering primitive creatures slashed in primordial forests and seas. They were enormous monstrosities with claws and scales. Devil things.
He shuddered.

.... In the darkness of the dirty factory Vince remembered all he had lost. The elegant parties, the spontaneous trips to crystal cities full of Art, music, and dance. Leyla's swift hair and bright eyes.
Leyla. How could I have let our wonderful dreams slip through my fingers? What is to become of you now?
The boiler was seven stories high. The were four of them in a row in this section of the plant, and several more in an adjacent section. From the dirty catwalks and metal railings where he stood he could see whole maglev trains parked in gargantuan rooms like toys.
Dirty fat pipes and crusty computer units hummed with the growling workings of mindless programs. His welding unit flashed brilliantly and the ancient wall of the boiler was revealed. Scribbled notes left by other works who knows when. Dust and rust.
Leyla’s memory was always next to him. Her laughter hung a bitter clarity in his mind. Where was she now? Did she live-had they moved her on? Did she lay broken and dead on a CC research table?
One of the insectoid computers, a pressure pump he figured, lifted a tired robotic head.
"Greetings good worker." It said.
Protocol from another era.
He winked and kept welding. His Cyborg attachments he threw on that morning were scanning for microscopic fissures and resetting the metals. It was a good six stories to the bottom-the most important thing to remember was footing.
There came a banging of corrugated metal loosed somewhere in the unforgiving weather of Ophelia’s winds. Vince heard it banging out his own culpability. If he had stayed on Luxus. If he had only stayed on Luxus. He would be there now developing some brilliant design for an Architectural masterpiece. He could crawl casually into her arms and make wild love to her.
Leyla-
The metal banged in the wind. A surreal metal voice clanging his guilt, a metallic guardian at the gates of hell saying to each who enter, "You did this to yourself." It wasn't the wind. The banging was in the boiler.

"Everybody down She's gunna blow!" Someone was screaming, pulling Vince out of his reverie.

Copyright & Concept illustration, Dominique -France

12. The Freighter
I heard a joke once about an ancient Earth institution called the Department Of Motor Vehicles. The "DMV" as it was called regulated ground cars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The joke was that, "here lie the origins of Cyborgian Central." The comparison was laughable, of course, but perhaps more true than the jester realized. For people living in that era, pleasing the various regulators of ground cars was crucial. It was an ugly little labyrinth of excise taxes, forms and nonsense that was always injudiciously applied. That early man-machine relationship was prophetic. By the beginning of the twenty-third century Cyborg implants were necessary for nearly all types of work. Little by little CC wound its way into every aspect of human work, human relations deriving from work, and ominously, trade. It was fortunate for humanity that nation states still existed on Earth at the time, and were sending out ships with the seeds of independent civilizations. Very fortunate…
-Winteroud Sole, Caldris

Copyright & Scene Design Dominique-France

He was being tailed.
He didn't know how much access they had to CC files. They might have complete satellite readout on his every movement. Or not. One thing was certain; they had a lot of pull or bull to be able to get on world at all. This was still a penal colony. Working to his advantage however would be CC's complete arrogance and indifference toward the prisoners in general. If a sharp, effective group of syndicate men wanted his head on a platter (and there was any number of reasons why they might-he only knew they did) they'd have to sort through CC slugs to get to him and that would slow anyone down.
"We got company from the syndicate. Meet me at the cascades." Vince kept the call short, he knew it was probably traced and bugged. Sag and Moss were there a few hours later. An old tourist attraction from the days of Ophelia’s grandeur, the cascades were a three kilometer drop where a number of rivers tumbled from one continental plate to another. A lot of ice had formed over time dragging several sections of old hotels into the ravine. Huge statues of lions were tumbled among the ruined structures so that to Vince it seemed as if the lions were battling amongst themselves and tearing the city down....

The ship was coming.
The meds hadn't had as long to heal up Vince but at least they'd gotten the chip out. From an abandoned building (not far from where Leon had watched) they observed the approach of the freighter. It was windy that night and the light of the ships were lost now and again with rushes of snow.
"Time." Sag said. The visors of their screen were counting down. In their homemade wet suits they looked like lizard men from a low budget horror holo. They clambered and waddled through the snow. The ship was taking to the water. They broke into a sprint, moving silently over the ice.
Numbers estimated to feild shutdown flashed in their eyes.
Only a moment to get through. Otherwise you’d be sliced in two, or exploded in a billion bits of fish food.
There was no time to consider alternatives. Ice and snow flew beneath their desperate feet. They pushed onward toward the water. The ship seemed immense now-had it been so long since they'd been close to one? A big black demon in a wet lair. Come and get me, fools.

The ice gave way under their combined weight. A moment of utter horrid darkness as they struggled to right themselves in the deadly water. Ice banged their ribs and limbs. Vince oriented himself toward the light of the ship.
He saw Sagamore. Where was Moss?
He dare not call out.
"Where's Moss?" Sag said through his teeth.
For a long unbelieving moment they watched the surface.
"No!" Vince dove to find her but the darkness was complete.
"Time Vinny. She's gone. We've got to go."
"We can't leave. She's got to be close."
"You've got a syndicate hit man tied up in her loft and a missing out pilot who could be on the bottom of this sea-we have to go now!" Sagamore grabbed him and tugged. They both went under for a moment.
"Thirty seconds, Vince. They got Leyla. Moss knew the risks."
Vince looked at the dark waters with an aching sadness not unfamiliar in his life.
If their estimates were wrong, they still could die too.
Vince turned to the freighter. Twenty-six seconds.

13. The Bounty hunter of Rigel 6.

...like the Roman Empire in its long fall, the Cyborgians hired muscle from the barbarians. Called “Sheriffs”, these mercenaries came from all walks of nasty life . Background checks were intentionally sketchy. Their presence among the outer republics chaffed at the populations. They were given wide berth as CC armed them well. When they committed crimes of their own apprehending bounty, CC would throw its hand up, "So sue them". One seeking reparations for overzealous, often violent Sheriffs, would soon learn the expense and Byzantine confusion of legal systems centuries in the making. It was a no loose proposition for CC. The sheriffs, desperate men with little fear, were more deadly than a score of Cyborgian police.

-Winteroud Sole Caldris

Rigel 6, 4217
He was a strange silent giant of a man. Even at the Sheriff Induction facilities he turned heads. His whole body was encased in grey animal hide of indeterminate origin. Only his deep-set blue eyes proved him human. His DNA scans showed no know previous arrests and his shaky identification papers passed him without too much trouble. The office workers were glad of his departure when they handed him his authorization discs and sent him packing for his CC hunter-ship. They stood staring when he made his way for the lift.
"That's one scary customer." One was saying.
"Thought I'd seen it all." another added. "I wouldn't want him snooping around after me. Sheriff 182-61, enjoy the ride."
"Yeah Buddy. You catch that outfit? What the flock was that stuff, human skin?"
"Petrified human skin?"
They chuckled and moved on to the next potential sheriff, a far less imposing character with mere tattoos and genetically altered teeth.

182-61 showed no emotion as the lift carried him down to the hunter-ship bay. They were single person crafts. Black and waspy, the hunter ships were deadly scouts. Nothing about them indicated grace; they looked like the innards of other ships without hulls. Endless antennae, weaponry, and other devices slapped together with complete disregard for appearance, and so they were. State of the art hunter killing hardware that would never make it to a consumer market and thus needed none of the styling of a hyper yacht, or even the voter appeal of military glamour. They looked like what they were-mechanistic predatory technology. Just the sight of one chilled nerves in hard men on dirty stations.
182-61 took a long glance, leaning back like an automaton psycho from a slasher sensorama. Without comment it seemed to win his approval. The ship and the sheriff were of like natures. Single-minded purpose, frightening resolve. No negotiations. No compromise. Business ends of an ugly business. He climbed aboard his new home with the ease of one raised on interstellar craft, ran through system checks smoothly. His new role as sheriff gave him access to the hive mind although he was an unborged outworlder. 182-61 didn't stay long, the hive mind and his didn't have a taste for each other...

.....They took a lift up to the roof. As they went Vince could see rows and rows of ships being worked on in the hangar. Up top Herb surveyed the delta and the canals with pride. "Don't imagine CC will take you alive next time, eh boys? Those snooping, taxing, metal-brained, plastic-dicked, retrofitted, spunk vermin."
"Easy Herb." From Vince.
"Cost me a fortune for an accountant slippery enough to go rounds with them."
"I can imagine. Not to cut to the quick, my friend, but we need a fast ship with reasonable cargo capacity so I can get back to earning some money." Vince said.
"Get back to smuggling you mean."
Sag raised his eyebrows. Then he smiled. "Yeah."
Herb scratched the back of his head in a timeless gesture. One hand was in his pocket; his ciggy was tucked in his lips jutting up. He considered the horizon for a moment and said, "Tell you what; I got this yacht just came in outta Kappa Crucis. One owner. An old Mercury Monterey Star cruiser. But first, let's eat. "
They walked over to a roof pavilion where a couple of droids labored over a stove near a cabana. Sag eyed the sky full of ships drifting up and down, air cars buzzing between. The canals were even more overloaded with traffic, gondolas, water ships, and houseboats. Fugitives they were then, hiding in plain sight.
After the meal they hopped into a small air car of old and very rare make. It alighted; they swung around and over several of the warehouses, herb filling them in on all the essentials of his operation. They moved through vast superstructures of water ships, past buildings whose crumbling limestone told of immense age, and finally into a smaller warehouse where rows of used yachts sat in dry-dock. Some were being reworked, the flash of welding arcs and lasers glittering. Men and women climbed like bugs over the sleek yachts.
Vince eyed them appreciatively. Most of the sportier models Herb could pass off on wannabees that clung to the fading glamour of their ancient youth with synthetics, surgery, or even vat grown clones of themselves. Not Vince. He was a hard spacer. He would know the show from the go.
Of course, when Vince saw the Monterey it was all over. Sag whistled.
"How'd you like to run your hands over those manifolds eh?" Vince whispered.

....Herb listened solemnly. “Hyper bogies huh? They’re out there, it’s true.”
Sag feigned disinterest and failed.
"Think of some fish fighting in a pond-well that would be humanity and the Arcturian genocide. The fish stir up and unusual amount of ripples on the water and attract a large nasty thing. I think the war attracted something ugly. Something wrong. I think that thing stuck it's snout in our pond to see what all the commotion was. I think it was so awful, so completely hideous that it shocked the sanity right out of the CC pilots. Snapped their minds like twigs." Vince looked frightening then. He looked like a man who'd held a dirty secret for a long time.
“Well Vince, if every failed stasis incident from the Arcturian wars is proof of a spooky, then you got lots of them things just sliding around the edge of our reality. Where they been ever since then?”
Herb cleared his throat. "Reinforcements. They’re standing down till the Calvary can come over the galactic halo and then they snuff out us savages.”
Vince and Sagamore both drew their eyes up to Herb.
Herb realized he had touched on something that pieced in a missing puzzle spot. The picture of everything changed now, if such was the case. The long Cyborgian peace since the Arcturian wars was just a lull before a real storm of devastation that kicked humanity off the top of the food chain.

“Well, that's some imagination you got there Vinny." he took a couple of steps away from the frozen CC pilots. No more running his hands over the gleaming surface of the stasis hold. “Let’s hope you’re wrong about that hyper bogie army then eh? Don’t do you much good to arm up against a force of hyper dimensional super beings that can drive you insane with just by showing their faces does it? Kind of like fighting a navy full of Medusa’s!”
Sag fixed a long stare on Vince. "You been smoking something without telling me?" then he looked at Herb, "Those are nice toys you got there old fella, but what we need is something to help the Mercury get past the security array at the Diablo nebula."
Good. Change the subject.
Stick your head in the sand.
Vince nodded, "Here here!"
Herb was undaunted. He looked out over the vast floor where his workmen inched over ships and engines of all makes and models. There were air cars and water ships, star yachts and in-system shuttles, even a Mag-lev. "Just wait a minute!" He grabbed his pack of cigs and pulled another one out as he broke into a determined stride. Vince and Sag followed.
They made their way down to a deeper level. There were several huge rocks in a corner together gathering dust.
"They're rocks." Sag said flatly. “It’s not good to land on planets riding rocks.”
Herb waved on a light and the walls in the corner let off a soft blue glow.
"No, they're military issue faux meteorites. Landers to sneak past satellite arrays. They're only good in systems with unusually high asteroid counts-like those in a nebula. They've got nano screens in the rock that shield against scans; send out false scan returns that show the rock solid. Most times the satellites are programmed not to fire on natural phenomenon such as asteroids or comets."
"Most times?" Sagamore folded his arms.
"Used to ride these bears down behind enemy lines myself when I was younger. Nothing like it."

....182-61 looked at the skinny old man with amusement, but not disdain. Aged and frail, Herb still exuded a fighter’s spirit. The sheriff knew authenticity when he saw it, in any guise. He also knew only his status as a sheriff protected him in realms such as this planet-labyrinths of stone and machine where anything might happen.
"Bounty hunter." Herb said quietly. "I should have figured as much. They've come and gone. You're too late." Herb glared at the ugly grey skin-suit covering the giant and the black array of insectoid Cyborg attachments. He'd never run up against a CC sheriff before. The combined weight of criminal ruthlessness and official authority was fearsome indeed. Even the steely nerves of the old solider began to crawl.
A strange laugh growled from beneath the skin-suit. The laughter continued; it turned Herbs stomach. The sheriff slowly removed his helmet revealing the face beneath.
Herbs eyes widened. "You!" he exclaimed.

14 Silurian World

Diablo Nebula, Siluria, 4217
"We're being followed." Sagamore groaned from hispiloting chair.
Around them, the hyper streams raged and fluxed. In its distance, Vince too could see a faint trace of a small ship. Ahead, the Silurian nebula was crouched black and spitting fields that conformed to no known theories.
"It could be a supply ship, maybe a merchant vessel."
"Want to lay odds it's a bounty hunter?" Sagamore snickered.
"Money's to tight to mention.” Vince declined. "But I'll hedge your bet is right with a little ruse of our own. Let’s break hyper, and make a big show of it."
Through the blur of hyper, beneath the gleam of the merge helmet, Vince saw Sagamore smile a wicked grin.
"What do you have in mind, Cappy?"

For a moment, all of space went null white, brighter than the edge of super-space. With it, every monitor and console on Bandor Base flashed wildly. Clerics and CC drones raged, suddenly macabre with pain, ripping off merge helmets, squealing like dying giant insects in slave pits of Opa-Locka's world. Before calming programs could respond they'd pulled relays from systems, shut down sensor arrays, and set off a thousand transmissions at once.
The gist of it was: "Huh?!"
Looking down on the chaos of his command rooms, Bandor scowled and filled with dread. This nebula was the bane of sanity. He switched to his private hyperlink with a CC station just off the nebula. "What's happening? This is
Bandor Base, we've gone blind. What is this?" He used CC short-speak.
The reply was garbled. Momentarily he heard, "Unknown."
Everything around here, "Unknown..."
He cursed a few expletives Harry had taught him.
The response was clearer this time, "Mr. Bandor, your exhibiting wild human tendencies. Perhaps you are reverting? An immersion in the will of the people may be beneficial at this time."
"Negative!" Bandor slapped back. The thought revolted him. "Too many unknowns. That would cause delayed response time. I need this autonomy to function. That light blast is perfect example of why I need to act independently. You couldn't determine its origin, could you?"
The came long pause. "We confirm rationale. Investigate light source. It could be a Paramon ship. Sources indicate three hundred and twelve possible known solutions that could cause such a flare."
Bandor saw data holos coming over the hyper cast consoles. One: a micro wormhole ingested by a neutron star. Two: derelict antimatter streams engaging an Oort comet.
He turned away as the third data holo rose on screen.
"We will investigate, Bandor out." He cut them off knowing full well that that too would send them calculating immersion procedures. He regretted it almost immediately, but his only role model among autonomous humans was Harry. Harry would have cut their throats for "shit's and giggles". Bandor thought (surprising himself): Wormhole my ass. That's human activity out there and they're not coming to study the fauna.

....They dropped out of hyper under stasis, re-attaining mass instantly and freezing time in a bubble that ignited the gaseous nebula around them for an 180,000 mile stretch, banging matter into antimatter and back again. Momentarily the stasis shields dropped and only their gravity bubble and a massive shot of magnetic field protected the Monterey as it careened toward Siluria.
Vince and Sagamore watched the field indicators pass maximum capacity and slowly ease into acceptable range.
"Now everybody knows we're here." Vince whispered.
Sagamore’s eyes drilled into his readouts with perfect concentration.
"Ba-boom!" Sagamore snapped. "We're clear, five, five, five."
They were a wall of fusion dust sparkling.
Immense wisps of the nebula ignited a flared out.
"Any more dense and we'd have ignited the whole firkin cloud." Sagamore scowled.
They slid the ships vanes out and looked around.
"Kind of like Theta Orionis." Vince offered.
"Yeah, but it's not. Look at them readouts.
The laws of physics were just suggestions. Nothing was right.
"If you're counting on our field manipulators navigating us through this mess, you'd better not do any close pass bys. Plot a course steering wide of any gravity wells, Cappy, I don't want to relocate here permanently."
"Use the ramjets and you won't have to worry field manipulators at all."
"But of course." Sag lit the jets.
"I’m Scanning for probes." Vince knew the place’s reputation left scanning equipment untrustworthy.
Their vision encompassed a wide sweep of the towering nebula.
"It’s a very big place.”

.....Harry watched the significance of Vince's willingness to die for others sink into Bandor’s awareness. Bandor was white with apprehension.
"This is irrational. He can't pit himself against CC and win. We'll squash him like an insect. I have a force garrisoned here." Bandor was shaking.
Harry laughed. "Now that's an ironic simile. Like an insect. You CC clones and your hardware. CC has adopted the strategies of the insect, not Leavel. Pathetic, puny, cheap, and inconsequential-he remains, still human. You're new at this human thing Bandor. He's old. Still a child by current lifespan standards, but old nonetheless.
"He's survived by his wits in hostile environments all his miserable life.
"If he's coming, you better have your men ready. I want that pawn back in my collection. If your men get him, don't destroy his corpse, I'll want to reanimate it and torture what's left. Nobody gets away from my machinations. Rip his genitals off and stuff them in his mouth, but I want the corpse for a party trophy.
"Have your men ready for anything. This weasel is slipperier than a greased whore in an oil bath. The syndicates are making bets all over the galaxy on whether I'll get him or not. Some are betting against me. I don't
like to loose money, Bandor."
The hologram faded. Harry always got the last word.
Bandor listened to Handel's Water Music, and knew fear...

....Vince sailed all that day, stopping only once to make a spear. Having speared a large fish he pulled the catamaran onto a small island and made camp, running the fish through a protein scanner to make sure it was edible. It was. Among
the foliage on the island he saw huge sculptures dead ringers for the T-rex things he'd seen earlier. He followed them along a path and found a temple. It could have been Angkor Watt. This was unexpected. Here was a discovery that should have been trumpeted across the galaxy. Yet CC had found reason to hide it with its "research" base.
What was behind their actions?

Nothing struck at him that night. He'd set up a motion detector and it remained silent. He'd curled up in a niche in the temple and slept soundly. He found fruit on the island, did more scans, found it was good. Soon he would have a repertoire of a diet assembled. He sailed again eastward for several days, repeating a routine much the same. On the afternoon of the fourth day he felt the
catamaran being bumped by something from underneath the water. It was the eurypterids creatures. They had massed for a kill.
Claws were coming at him from every direction, snapping with mechanical clinking and speed. He kicked them away and reached for his knife. There were four of them clambering on to the catamaran. Like they'd been waiting, sizing him up. Vince moved with lightning speed plunging the knife into midsections between their shells and kicking them back into the water oozing
brown body fluids. He was cursing at them all the while, slashing and howling a war song of expletives. The catamaran slammed onto a rock outcropping and lodged there. Vince took the opportunity to leap for safer ground. The eurypterids flung themselves about in the shallows; water scorpions from hell. He'd killed one of the things and the others were cannibalizing it, providing a distraction. Others were moving in snapping at one another in a feeding frenzy. Vince considered the plasma pistol a moment and thought better of it. A moment later he wished he had grabbed it. One of the T-rex things was standing behind him.

Dante D'Anthony

15 The Swarm.
Consider an eyeball. Billions of years of years ago a few light sensitive cells on a mere blob of primordial protoplasm. Fast forward and we have two hundred million cells in one of natures great visualizing tools hooked up to the brain, scanning the universe. Wonder then what other senses may have developed in the untold eons and the eleven dimensions. Wonder and worry. They might be watching us now.
-Winteroud Sole, Caldris.

...Ocho's World Provincial Space 4217
General Ossa glared at the holos from spy ships for weeks. He'd seen every seedy O’Neil station port and every two bit ore hauler with bad registry in three systems. He had a team on it working round the clock. Nothing that indicated private navies. Nothing that even indicated a stray Guildsman trading without tariffs. Yet that wasn't his true concern. Yes, he would do his duty. Private armies were a bad thing. His real desire was another search, the search for the missing intergalactic matter signature signal that had been edited from the probe reports before it hit the hive mind.
The ensign he'd assigned that covert research was standing before him now. Tamara Fortunato had grown up on Earth's moon in an industrial region humankind had occupied since the conquest of the solar system with sub-light drives. It was a world with traditions of mastering a complex artificial environments old as any, and people conditioned to subterfuge techno bureaucracies as a way of life. She was perfect. Ossa loved her for decades, but he was a general. That was that....

Copyright & scene design Niel Thacker -Graphikeer -Canada

.... "That's correct, Sir. Its orientation was in the departure trajectory, only reversed. They turned around."
"Too much of an assumption. I don't buy it. They turned around an arc ship a hundred Kilometers long and started coming back?"
"I know it's a lot to buy. But I figured if they did turn around they might have had trouble, sent out a mayday. So I went through the files of guard satellites outside the Hercules cluster. One had record of a transmission but the codes were so old it hadn't translated them, simply filed. It was our mayday. I've managed to convert the file." She laid it on his desk.
"Have you seen it?"
"No sir."
Ossa threw his hands up. "You never fail to amaze me, Ensign. Put it on."
Nervously, she loaded the file and adjusted a flat screen projection. It showed the hull of an O’Neil ship. Several people in Eva Suits were walking along the outer hull as if on routine maintenance work. They were followed by a couple of auto bots hauling equipment. Suddenly one of the humans turned and seemed to look up. He stared for a moment and then began scrambling in a frenzy away from where he'd been. The others watched him for a few seconds and then began after him as if they were confused. Suddenly the image changed to a suit camera and the perspective was now one of the workmen's. You could see the fleeing individual swinging his arms as if to ward something off, but there was nothing there.
"So we got a worker bee who goes off the deep end staring at the intergalactic black." Ossa chirped cynically. "What's the big tie in with the Overlords?"
As if in answer, something appeared over the frenzied man. Like a door suddenly opened that hadn't been there before, a thing was there. An indeterminate mass of horror that sent adrenaline shooting through Ossa’s veins like ice water.
Fortunato muttered an expletive.
The thing gripped the worker and pulled him up like he was a mouse. He was spinning, changing. Exploding and bleeding, his arms and legs flailed in rapid ugly motions. Then he was being dragged through the "doorway". For a second one could see into the doorway. There were rows and rows of ugly black smudges curled away in lines. A swarm of them.
Ossa had seen men die in battle all his life. He'd never seen anyone in as much pure terror as was conveyed by the workman in that image.
The tape stopped.
Ossa and Fortunato looked at one another silently for a long moment.
"So the overlords finally found something nastier than them. Take that tape apart frame by frame and do an analysis. Find out as much about the bogey that snatched that workman as is possible. See if it even resembles any life forms we've encountered. I've got a months salary says it won't."
Fortunato was cold. Suddenly she was no longer on the top of the food chain, and she didn't like it. "Yes sir."
When she was gone General Ossa looked about his office as if its familiar accoutrements could somehow allay the images he'd just witnessed. His polished metal surfaces, the glowing gems of lights, leather sofas floating in repeller fields, a thirty-fifth century engraved laser pistol mounted on a wall; command perks that were now all taking on the aspect of a Neanderthal’s cave. Whatever had captured and killed that man in the tape did it in intergalactic space where nothing save dark matter and primordial hydrogen atoms existed for untold billions of years. It had preyed on a man riding the hull of a craft moving at super light speeds like it was fishing in a mountain pond. Then it had disappeared from the known universe like it was walking across a street.

Book two: Into the breach

Chapter 1: Amnesia
Where the hell is the crew?
Maximus Mercurio wiped a mass of blood and grime from his face and tried to orient himself in the steaming gangway of the small fighter. He found himself lying on a wall. The gravity bubble was off. There was, however, gravity. A rolling pull that pinned him to a portion of the gangway about a meter and a half off the floor.
We’re near a gravity well, he though suddenly, his compact round face glaring around in sudden understanding of danger. A world? Or worse.
By the sounds of the atmosphere blasting at the hull, we’re deep in a decaying orbit. Thick air, heavy gravity- it‘s a gas giant!
He sprung to his feet and steam-rollered toward the cockpit.
His mind reeled, taking in his situation. With the gravity bubble off it was only a matter of time before the pressures outside burned them up, crushed them, or sank them in a stream of metallic hydrogen.
Where the hell is the crew?!
Something had knocked him on his petard and cut his face open, rendering him unconscious. He had no memory of the event, bitch-bastard, fah-king aye! But someone’s going to pay with black and blue boo-tay! He balled his fists up and looked this way and that. The floor was a wall to his left. He cursed in three languages and continued down the gangway avoiding swinging doors now holes to a nasty fall.
Atmospherics were shot. Steam was blasting everywhere. Nobody was at the helm. Something had happened. Something bad.
There was a gutted corpse twisted on the “floor” in front of him as he made his way toward the piloting cabin. Uh-oh. Won’t be paying any boo-tay. Mercurio paused and put his back against plastisteel. He pulled out his disser, kept moving.
There came a groan of metal fatigue from the ships hull.
Ships sinking, fast.
The piloting cabin was empty. He glared at the room suspiciously with a sharp challenge but there were no takers. All the rats have jumped ship and I’m going to Davey Jones locker like a water ship made of cast iron.
He slipped on the piloting helmet and merged into the ships senses. The MERGE helmet replaced his sensations and perceptions with the neural net of the star craft.
Lightning! Miles of it, a sea of lightning shuddering in titanic waves and streams broken only by radio storms in sheer walls like mountains twirling. A falls of super dense helium glimmered from horizon to horizon, sweeping down to lower layers of the gas giants atmosphere. His fighter was being swept through the torrent of atmospheric currents with
increasing speed…

The system had been shut down. He reactivated it and watched as dozens of programs flashed to life. The gravity bubble eased into being, breaking his descent. Atmospherics, hull nano repair programs, drive systems, then navigationals-all systems returning to normalcy.
The fighter made upwards away from the maddening pressures. This deep in the planets atmosphere he was blind. He could be anywhere. Slowly he gained ever more altitude. The ships senses were starting to perceive things above the dense layers of hydrogen, helium, and lighting storms. Quasars, the galactic plume.
He was somewhere in uncharted space on the far side of the galactic core.
The ship wouldn’t have just powered down. There were protocol sequences. Someone had turned it off and left him laying in it dazed and bloodied falling to an ignoble an unknowable fate. Why hadn’t they just killed him?
The seas of ball lightning coalesced below him as the planet shrunk away in maddening slowness while the fighters programs continued to reboot. The seas were the swirling of Jovian stratospheres now. Above him the teeming stars and plasma of the atomic clouds roared their own fury. The galactic plume shown high; it was giving him the finger.
You too you wicked wench.
No sign of the crew. Abandoned ship? Somebody wanted him dead and this ship lost. No, not lost- eviscerated back into its primal elements like a thing returned to nature. So rarefied that nothing could ever be found of it.
Like a demon of undoing had carefully unraveled its elements and cast them into a six dimensional drain.
Maximus frowned. Where the hell had that thought come from? There would be boo-tay to pay! But who? Who would dare betray him? Not the gutted corpse in the gangway. That was a self inflicted wound. That one had gone down at his own hand rather than comply with the betrayers. No more Ray. Good man, have to be buried with honors when Max got back to-Max winced-where?
Who am I? I’m Maximus Mercurio. Two hundred pounds of unforgiving death dealing payback getting golden horned hellcat. Loyal unto death to Harold Stark, warlord extraordinaire, Don of the dark corps, avengers of the King. Never forgive. Never forget. Gangstas thuggies and smoogalas! Privateers, please.
Not one to be stilettoed in the solar plexus. No. No wonder they had to get rid of the body. But why hadn’t they offed him. Time? What would be their hurry out here in the big bad boonies? Or had they just gone yellow when the time for the dirty deed was done? Perhaps they wanted him to wake, dazed and amazed as the fighter imploded in the frozen metallic hydrogen. Having his last thoughts go something like: Drat, I’ve been boonswaggled!
Maximus sneered. No one in the dark corps would do it. There was someone else. Someone they’d come gunning for. Why was he out here anyway? His mind drew blank. They’d been on a mission, yess. Unusual-a Cyborgian general had gone rad, slipped the overlords command chain and was assembling his own alliances to fight some kind of new life form.
Max scanned the far horizons of his flight path for any evidence of other ship. Fleeing betrayers scooting back to whatever hovel betraying bitch-bastards go to. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing, not even an irregular wake in the zero wave cycle. Zip. He sneered at the magnificent galaxy spread out before him, the billions of stars, the plume. The aurora plasma streaming into the huge void. Smells like battery acid.
He slipped out of the MERGE helmet and the interior of the attack ship hummed back at him telling nothing. “Okay you little pecker heads. Let’s see what old Maximus can discover today.” he said to himself and set about looking for clues at the scene of the crime.

...The last of the pig-monkeys was howling as Babayaga ate its face and dropped its ugly little body back into the flat dimensions. She felt the thrill of its fear and stretched in delight at her feeling of superiority. She could see, far into the intergalactic black, the horde coming. A feast it would be! A whole galaxy of tasty little fearful beings. Ohhh the fears she had explored in the corners of their twisted little flatworld minds. Yumm, so good. Pathetic creatures.
Except the one. Aghh! Her anger raged around the dimensional curls and she rolled on over the flows of radiance seething, hating. No matter what corner of its brain she searched she found no fears to taste. The others, they were strong and she had to work to find the drug of fear. But that one, the strongest. Defeat haunted her.
He’d looked her square and kept coming! She remembered the bitter taste of his mind. It had repelled her. She couldn’t kill him, nor could she let him live to tell his tale. If the other pig-monkeys figured how he’d eluded death it would be a disaster for the horde.
With his little scooter raft scuttled into the belly of a gravity well she’d watched him sink to his doom. She shook a million black tentacles and felt the curling fronds of her proboscis. She needed rest after the feast. She felt electricity and ionic vibrations flow through her senses and lingered in the magnetosphere of a star for long lazy moments. The good plasmas and forces of a crowded galaxy soothed her hate and hunger after the long voyage across intergalactic space. Such life forms to feast on...