The Burning Void

by MisterFour

It is difficult to fight against anger, for man will
buy revenge with his very soul”

-Euriclydus 500 B.C.

Part 1= Want

The Morosmos was spiraling like a dying admantium colossus; it’s fragile orbit around the gas moon Zorathos decaying as it lost power, a gargantuan; plummeting slowly from the obsidian void into the green doom below it.

The moon Zorathos was composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and cyanide gas, except for a dense center of cooling nickel. Its magma core would burn out in only a handful of millennia. But now it’s gravity was killing the Morosmos, and all of the crew aboard the military capitol ship.

The vessel had sustained several crippling blows to its body. To Argentum Draconis, the ship resembled a sinking earth oil tanker, drifting from space, the damaged Quantum reactor engines exuding flames of brilliant silver-violet, a catastrophe dwarfed only by the conflict around it.

The Vacuum Dragoons had struck with little subtlety, it’s Electric Rapier divisions moving in like predatory beetles, attacking with brutal precision, bombing the Altec/Lansing Corporate platform into so much burning flotsam before the IK detachment assigned to guard it could bring themselves to react.

The Vacuum Dragon’s principle warship, The Hakken, had come out of subspace within miles of the platform, it’s Rapiers staying close to corona of its tachyon field. The gamble could have sent the entire war fleet into the bosom of the Zarathos, but the maneuver was as brilliant as it was malefic, and the pirates were milking their surprise with an evil fervor.

”We’re losing the Morosmos, we need to use the Carpathian’s tractor cannons to pull it out of there. Ghostriders, bring up the support!”

The Carpathian, it’s bulbous hull pocked by ordinance and debris from the reactor detonation when the platform had been disintegrated, began to maneuver like itself to render aid… it’s shields flickered, a milky neon blue, as The Hakken kept up it’s assault.

Argentum spotted a wing of Poseidon’s moving in to bomb the Vacuum Dragoon’s command vessel. Their silver and blue forms contrasted sharply with the oily black of The Hakken, resplendent and despicable as it’s Gotham reactor space turbines brought it closer, Dragoons buzzing like an angered hive of derridium/titanium insects, their plasma missiles firing sporadically. Argentum moved his Archangel to cover them, hand shaking as he transferred energy to his burners, hearing the drum and din of the furball around him.

He had counted nearly thirty ships when the engagement had begun, he could now only count fifteen. Some prescience told him that two of the Dragoons were moving in behind him, the HUD’s klaxon screaming missile lock warnings. He could hear the cymbal clash of plasma fire about him, and knew their missles were only nanoseconds away…

He veered and arced, countermeasures exploding like miniature suns about his ship. Two Electric Rapiers veered to his nine, on course for the Poseidon’s, their burners a luminescent inferno, twinning each other.

”All available forces to cover those bombers! I need a wing to assist!”

Wingleader Eldritch appeared on his HUD. ”Argentum, we’re tied up right now. We have our hands full saving the Morosmos. Your wing will have to cover them.”

”My wing is dead, Eldritch…”

He targeted the first Rapier with biomechanical precision, a cloud of missiles, like hornets of fire, turning the first into a nova of atomized material. His Deimos impacted against the second, twisting in a vertigo of physics as it’s shields crumpled like cellophane. It broke off, buzzing and wounded.

The explosion of the Rapier blinded him as he drifted threw it, microdebris plinking against his cockpit. His hands were an epileptic’s, quaking as he adjusted his flight path, realizing they were upon The Hakken.

Argentum realized dimly that someone aboard the Carpathian was giving trying to contact him. But the hideous magnificence of the command vessel, a metropolis of space, eclipsing thought and extinguishing all other sights and sounds save the sonic base rumble of the Poseidon’s afterburners…

The voice of their wing commander, TygerBlueEyes, broke through the hypnotism.

”Targeting their reactor systems now, Argentum.”

”Negative, target their engines instead, they are more vulnerable.”

”I don’t understand.”

”The Hakken is drifting too close to that damned moon. Smash their engines and those Vacuum Dragoon’s will have the same problem the Morosmos is having!”

”Affirmative.”

He veered and twisted, his engines like a banshee’s wail, firing on another Rapier that came into view. It’s pilot had broken off from the delta quadrant of the battle, sniffing for the bombers with it’s radar. Argentum gave it the last of his missiles, the pilot reacting, sliding and spinning despite it’s bulk as it attempted to use countermeasures, bringing it’s plasmas to bear. Argentum predicted the maneuver, firing his lasers to where the Dragoon would be, it’s shields glowing briefly in protest before it detonated like a blazing atomic flower.

Argentum could hear the grind and clamor of Helios detonations below and behind him. From his peripheral vision he could sense The Hakken twisting and lurching, it’s crippled engines unable to maintain it.

”Break off, TygerBlueEyes, break off!”

The Carpathian and the Morosmos seemed to grapple magnetically with each other, their non-Euclydian forms as black as antimatter against the corpselight green miasma that was the moon. He realized suddenly that the cockpit was ablaze, will-o-wisps like orange laser phantoms curving along it’s interior, burning his vision to scarlet.

He screamed, and screamed, and screamed-

…

In the Mordarium System there is the planet of Karr, a caramel orb hovering against the spatter of red and orange that is the outer edge of the goliath that is the Skaschere Nebula. Ringing it are the factories of the Hold of General Comerca, immense production stations clanking and groaning from their internal mechanics, grafted to vast meteors birthed at the dawn of time, blind, lumpen, silent and invulnerable menhirs of nickel and cosmic ore.

Comerca sat on a throne carved from a giant ruby that one his officers had discovered on a nearby asteroid. A cloned cheetah’s mane lay across it, black and orange fur against the multifaceted gem surface.

His court lay before him in the station’s inner chamber, guarded by his Praetorian slave retinue, men in las proof ceramite equipped with gyrojet hafted guisarmes. The rabble that he was presiding over consisted of more slaves, several mining barons, more than a few munition dukes, a handful of mercenary pilot’s, and perhaps forty representatives of the various manufacturing guilds within Comerca’s system, who really held no power whatsoever.

Comerca looked at the prisoner before him. Standing next to the sorry individual was his chief of police and galactic affairs, Fontaine. Comerca made eye contact briefly with the chief, and then eyed the crowd for his Officer of War, Cerene. Ah, yes, there she was, hair the color of ocean sapphires, eyes like oily mahogany…she took a sip of her Merlot, brushing a svelte hip seductively.

Comerca checked his reflection briefly in a mirror set within the throne for that purpose. Ah, yes, perfect. The prisoner shivered, his bulk quaking within his griseous radiation suit.

Comerca regarded him.

”Your name again?” His voice was sibilant and tonal within the inner chamber.

”P-Plebisa, your m-majestic greatness, I came here to trade, but I could scarcely afford your tariff’s. After the taxes that your wisdom levies, I would make no profit, and so I departed, but your squadrons surrounded me and executed my bodyguard before I could surrender. I could have tried to escape, but I decided to give up, to beg mercy…I have done no wrong…”

”Wrong!? WRONG!?” Comerca almost screamed. Ah yes, the court always loved that. Kept their blood from growing too thick. ”You are guilty of conspiracy, cur. You will not sell to the humble Comerca, yet you will do business with my enemies!? And that is not WRONG!?”

Plebisa trembled in his corpulescence, words tripping over themselves as Comerca fairly leapt from his throne, resplendent in his gold lame’ General’s uniform. He drew a gyrojet pistol from a vat-grown leather holster.

”Your majesty, that being the case, I will gladly sell all of my wares in exchange for my freedom. According to your laws, I can at least purchase bail…”

”You are correct, slave. So for ALL of your wares you can purchase bail for your criminal trial. And then you are absolutely free!”

Comerca loved this part. The crowd lost its mind, cheering his mercy. Ah, yes, he was munificent. He turned, half-bowing to Cerene. The jade walls of the room echoed with thunder. Plebisa seemed to almost melt. I am never coming through a Tach gate to here, again, he thought.

”But!” The voice of Comerca pierced the sounds of the hall. ”You must also answer for this crime, slave…”

Plebisa’s mouth and eyes widened almost simultaneously, blood flowing from his features, leaving them as pale as candle wax, yellowish under the sodium burners above. The hall went silent, save for the sounds of element conditioners.

”You are guilty of conspiracy, as well…no bail, no trial, no prison sentence, save the sentence of…” He leveled the gyrojet pistol, it’s chrome surface gleaming.

Plebisa almost fell over. ”Pleeeeease…pleeeeease…I am at your mercy, I am no spy…” The crowd murmured in appreciation over his tears.

Comerca checked his chronometer…oh, no, it is almost time for the duel…

He looked the merchant over.

”Run.” He whispered.

”What?” Plebisa said, not comprehending.

”Run!”

Plebisa staggered back, and then spun, arms out, for the crowd.

Comerca shot him through the neck, dowsing several dukes in gore.

The jade walls of the throne room thundered…

…

Argentum never remembered his dreams. He would perceive fragments upon awakening, so much mnemonic fluff, shredding upon consciousness.

He was looking upon Marie, as she slept. Her features gentle in sleep, the room silent, save for the rise and fall of her breathing. He lies on the bed next to her, and sets his hand on her face, cupping her cheek slightly. In her sleep, she smiles gently. That was eight years ago.

Now he was within the Tournament Colliseum of the Louvre’, in the Inner Fringe arena. Facing him on the piste’ was Allegro Tonagre, the reigning champion. His opponent saluted with his sabre, a slow, lazy T, in cursive. He could not see the audience, in his dreams they were so much murk, a watery expanse of faces. He saluted in kind, the sabre light in his gauntleted hand, as steady as the pyramids at Giza. He realized, just as Allegro moved across to him like a desert adder, that his hand was as sweatless and dry as baby powder within the gauntlet. He performed a stop hit, becoming one with the fight…that was twelve years ago.

Now it was ten years ago. He stood in the spacehold of the Galileo station, under the shadow of a Freighter. The experimental reactor of a nearby Pegasus detonates, and he and three others are bathed in the antiseptic glow of its explosion. Two scientists working on the vehicle are destroyed, becoming one with the silvery conflagration. Argentum wakes, a month later, completely unharmed. He had been in a coma, the doctors tell him.

The three who were standing near him, a lawyer, an actor, and a rookie bomber pilot, are both in an asylum on Luna, unable to see or formulate speech. The three use Braille to type nonsensical words into hospital monitors, faces slack in want of reason.

The images bleed together, figments of the subconscious, with no logic to bandage them apart.

…

Argent wakes to the pungent bleached scent of disinfectant and the serene bleeps of hospital circuitry. His mouth has a slick saccharine feeling to it, and the sheets seem over starched. He looks down for wounds.

There are none.

He sits up, his head numb, like when your foot falls asleep. A nurse walks in, her uniform a deep wine color, like the Aegean Sea in autumn. And he realizes he is aboard the Morosmos.

She checks his pulse, his eyes, his mouth…the usual medical routine.

”What happened?”

”We don’t know. You passed out and your craft went on autopilot. They brought you here, since the Carpathian was too damaged. You appear well. Life functions are normal.”

”We won, did we?”

She smiled.

”Well, if I am aboard, I would guess that we won.”

Same smile.

”I will get your uniform. We had them cleaned.” She said professionally.

She leaves, and Seraphim walks in, leisurely. Smiling as broad as the Mississippi, he extends a calloused hand. Argentum laughs, a laugh that possesses a deep, endearing quality to it.

”Where have you been?”

Seraphim is a husky, broad gentleman, with a mustache and stark white hair. His hair is all white, old white, but his mouth is full of mirth and his face is smooth, young looking.

”I have been…resting.” He has a German accent, his voice clipped, formal.

”I haven’t seen you since Galfried Quadrant, eight years ago. You get lost?”

”No, not lost…you won the fight?”

”Seems like it. What happened?”

”The bombers did the trick, and the Carpathian hit The Hakken with a lucky salvo. Sent it tumbling end over end into that green moon. Deep Radar shows fragments of it, no one has volunteered to salvage, and the Dragoon’s are scattered. There are more smashed Rapiers out there than are stars…”

”Damn.”

”They are having a party out in the lounge, they expect you.”

”God, yes. I need a drink. How is your collection?”

Seraphim eyes light up with pride. His collection of whiskeys is legendary.

”Still there…”

”Your niece?”

”16. Works for some science guild. I have her awards on my mantle.”

The nurse comes in and they fall silent. She hands Argent his clothes, a crisp bundle of blue and black. She is gone as soon as she left.

Argent dresses, washes his face, the steam from the sink obscuring his reflection and all he can see of his face his a misted outline. He fixes his hair, listening to Seraphim talk. He speaks about his farm, his hounds, the café’s in Berlin. His voice is like a grandfather’s, brimming with wisdom and affection. He was Argent’s first combat piloting instructor.

”I feel fine. A little disorientated. Let’s go.”

”No, I’ll catch up. I have to wrap up a few things in the Hangar Bay. Go ahead.”

Argentum stops in mid-stride. ”I’ll see you, right? We’ve got to catch up.”

Seraphim turns leisurely, hands in his pockets.

”Yes. Most certainly, young friend.”

Argent beams, as if he were eighteen again, and continues down the mirrored corridor. Faint cracks, evidence of the conflict fourteen hours ago, fragment his journey.

…

The Lounge of the Morosmos is composed of walnut paneling and rich, blue velvet. The furniture is a dark charcoal, and the music is pulsing, as electric and alive as the veterans gathered within. One is both deafened and blinded as they enter, phosphorescents from above dimmed to allow the customers a heart squeezing view of the Zarathos. It regards the ship like the swirling emerald eye of some stoic, distant god.

It feels like a hijacked New Vegas nightclub, engaged in a paroxysm of victory.

Every table is a discussion or conversation; every bottle opened a toast to deeds, to victory, to their survival. The tension of combat is replaced by a feeling of relief between the pilots.

TygerBlueEyes, Merlin and Rabid Chicken are at a table, trying to talk Rustbucket into one more. The RG pilot had stopped to refuel and had pitched in to help, the Morosmos reimbursing him all the same. The Tobasco in his Bloody Mary makes his eyebrows sweat, and he wipes his forehead with a table napkin.

The table sees Argentum and roars with joy.

He is trying to sit, but every hand extends itself to be shook, or claps him on the shoulder, or punches him in the arm…he feels his face almost crack with feeling.

”You son-of-a…!”

”Argent!”

”Sent those bastards crying home to momma…”

”Thank the Deity for Poseidons!”

”No, for Helios rockets!”

”Damn bloody bastards, bold, almost DESERVED to win…”

”Screw ‘em, they were no good.”

”Argentum! I’m buying you a drink!”

”No screw Sleeping Beauty! He’s buying the bar a ROUND!”

”HAHAHAHAHA!!!!”

Argent does not get to his table easily. Nor does he sit down easily. He has not had a drink, but he is intoxicated with the revelry, already.

The night turns, and becomes still in good feelings. As the music picks up, he wants to tell his table about seeing Seraphim, after so many years. He tells Rabid Chicken, but he is unable to hear Argent’s words, over the music, distracted as he is by Merlin’s cigar. Which is for the best. If Chicken would have heard him he would have told Argent the truth…a truth that occurs to Argent himself the next morning, as he recovers from the mother-in-law of all hangovers…that Seraphim died eight years ago, in the Galfried Quadrant.

…

Void Commander Red Storm had killed four men in duels. He had killed perhaps fifteen in combat, and some twenty-five more as a pilot. He had been fighting since he was sixteen, he was now twenty-six, and he faced an adversary that made his blood water in his veins. To him, this felt like the worst of all crucibles to be placed in.

TNN reporter Alyscia Wells had been a journalist since the age of eighteen. She had interviewed seventeen barons, thirty-six CEO’s, twenty-two pilots and countless officers. To her, it was Friday.

She set up the equipment deftly, with the precision of a surgeon. She sips some cranberry juice that had been proffered to her, and sits down, her nails and lipstick a matching titanium ice blue, her hair a creamy vanilla. Her uniform is a professional black, much like the cape that Red Storm wears. His own uniform is a majestic indigo.

His features are youthful, almost porcelain, and his hair is a dark mane the color of Cabernet Sauvignon. His eyebrows are arched and his expression is one of pride and subtle assertion.

The chamber is composed of crimson marble and charcoal-colored steel, the table between them the finest cloned walnut, onyx gems garnishing it like gleaming eyes.

The silence between him becomes as deep as an Idaho grain silo.

Her smile is warm and benevolent. ”I’ve never interviewed a warlord before.”

Red Storm’s features become one of equal warmth and benevolence. Their laughter is sudden and fills the chamber. Guards stationed outside wonder if they have become mad.

…

The epee’ of Comerca is a gold titanium alloy, and it arcs like a solar wind to parry the thrust to his face. His riposte is a blur, and then a beat and a disengage to stab at Fontaine’s left leg. Fontaine pivots crisply, one hand back, the thrust of his own epee’ clattering with finality upon the mask of Comerca. The combatants pause for a second.

”Game! You win.” Comerca said, saluting and bowing.

Off the stretch of olive that is the piste’, Cerene watches the two. Her features are impassive. She wears a dress of shimmering ocean green, the snowy polished marble walls of the chamber foiling it perfectly. Her lipstick is a blood, blood red.

”Fontaine, you are magnificent.” Harabec said, mopping his brow with a pasty gauntlet.

”No, your majesty, just well practiced.”

”Well, indeed.”

Fontaine has removed his own mask, and takes a glass of iced Vodka from a nearby attendant. The attendant’s face is impassive. Fontaine takes the drink down in one draught and hands the glass back to the attendant, who is wearing a tuxedo, and selects another blade, a sabre.

”Sire, I ask, why did you kill that insolent fat man?”

Comerca sets a hand of the thigh of Cerene. His other hand reaches out, and with perfect synchronization the attendant hands him a glass, similar to the one his sparring partner holds. ”Because, dear Fontaine, there is a spy on this station, and I am taking no chances. Perhaps that was him, perhaps that was not. But a show of force is sometimes in order, no?”

Fontaine’s face becomes a mottled violet. ”A spy? In OUR territory? Find him! Burn him out! Fodder for the clone vats!”

Comerca laughs, and Fontaine laughs as well. They have been consuming alcohol for some time, and now they are as drunk as a couple of Czars.

”No, no, no, my dear second-in-command, spies are to be expected.” He pauses, sipping his drink. ”I do not like them, but they are like ants at a picnic…when we assaulted the shipping fleet at Haljere’s, someone tipped them off. I have noticed odd communicae fluctuations, indicative of transmissions of an espionage nature. One was sent to Haljere, and another to Star Patrol, in New Vegas. Shortly thereafter one our pirate operations were shut down…there have been other events, and I see a pattern. I am working on a trap, a whip to snap at this gadfly…and then we shall bathe in his spinal fluid. Another game?”

”Of course.”

Comerca picks up his mask. ”Donnel, leave us.”

The attendant walks from the room, his face as expressionless and bland as balsa wood. The doors hiss like adders as they close behind him. His eyes are a pale green, shining in his face from the sodium burners above.

…

”Why did you go from being a pirate merc to where you are now, if you don’t mind my asking?’’ She gave a disarming smile.

”Because…it was the logical step. I desired civilization. Refinement. We had families among us, and they were tired of funerals.” Redstorm chose his words as carefully as a surgeon chooses his instruments. He had an accent that seemed vaguely Russian, old-Earth.

”But it was rather dramatic, was it not?”

”A conversion, but a private one. But regardless of my epiphanies, not a conversion that happens overnight for the rest of my people.”

”But you seem quite successful.”

”Because my people are all craftsmen. They have to be, out here, with so little resources, with life so dangerous. We were nomads, once. We do not raid now. Trade is our battle. But many…died so that we may desire peace.”

”Perfect.” Alyscia Wells begins to break down her equipment. ”You were perfect! The whole Fringe will know this side of you. An excellent story.”

Redstorm rises from his chair, his armor gleaming, the ceramite like an oil slick beneath the fluorescents.

Alyscia looks for a second at the hilt of the sabre he wears. He catches the stare, and she looks back at her equipment.

”Question?”

”Well…except for a few officers at ceremonies, I have never seen a person wear a sword…”

”Life is different, here. The sword is the secret to our success, although it is a bloody enigma, indeed.”

She smiles, her teeth like pearls. ”I don’t understand.”

His face seems older, somehow. We come from such different worlds, he thinks. ”Perhaps you would like to see our ships?”

”Yes, that would be interesting. I have heard other pilots talk about them…I have heard stories.”

”Then let’s see them.”

The scarlet hold that was the container of a majority of the Void Alliance fleet gathered it’s bloody glint from the peculiar nature of the ruby quartz fluorescents they manufactured for themselves. They glared above like red giants, bathing their light upon mechanic, merchant and pilot below.

Bell shaped mining Sumpsters sat next to the squared and domineering forms of Cargo Haulers. Some ships defied description, to Alyscia they appear as if they were fabricated from several vessels into one, with little concern for aesthetics. The limbs and organs of many spacecraft welded and bolted together in the name of function, alone.

There was a rough spirit of disorganization that permeated the hold. It was felt through all the senses- the sight of exhaust-stained men and women rubbing oil stained hands with iron ore colored rags, the sounds of molecular welders and metallic shouts, the scent of smoldering chrome and worksweat, the taste of rust and ozone that permeated the palate as if it were a welder’s sorbet, the spacecold feel that clung to the metals of the tools and ships, juxtaposed by the moisture of body or the eyebrow searing blast of engines and smelters- to Alyscia it was a stark contrast to the calm and cool corridors of her own work environment, back at TNN, as kinetic an element it could be near deadline.

But the frenzy, clang and clutter of it all came to a conspicuous end when RedStorm and Alyscia came upon the gold forms of the Shriekers- the name given to the fighters that composed a majority of the Void Alliance armament. They crouched like glittering ravens, immune to the chaos that afflicted the rest of the hold. There was a sanctified air, here, an expectant and holy atmosphere like the solemn spirit of a church…or a mausoleum.

On more than one craft was the dust of burnt incense, the spatter of blessing oil. My God, she thought. This is more than just military to them. They don’t just maintain their ships…they worship them.

RedStorm ushered her beneath the mechanical pinions of one of the slumbering craft. With a glove hand he indicated to a meter and a half ring that was beneath each and every one, glittering in the ruby light.

She beheld the razored teeth of the Shriekers underbelly, circling around like a chromed lamprey’s mouth.

…

The burning began two years ago, after Algere’s.

It had begun as a sweep and clean and became a war. Merc units, hired by pirates, to protect a cargo of stolen cloner vats, clashing with a full four wings of combined IK and RG forces. It was supposed to be simple, hull the fighters and take the freighters, but the Mercs had been an unexpected wild card.

Three wings lost on either side, and with no Tach gate in sight the Mercs had had no choice but to battle towards the embittered end…so furious were the assaults that the notion of quarter was lost and those attempting to escape the fray were shot just the same. Their comms had been silenced for the venture, and all protest would have been futile, besides.

He alone had emerged without a scratch. Some gore-stained zen had overtaken him, a pilot sympathetic response system coming online within the murky realms of his subconscious, and he had simply lost track of it all, just target, target, target…the opposing fighters becoming burning chrysanthemum’s of wreckage…both sides had been far too experienced to be destroyed right away.

He had emerged from his vessel, pilot suit reeking with the fear sweat of adrenaline, and had made it, somehow, to his room.

He had stared in the mirror, shower running until the steam bleared and obscured his features. His appearance becoming a phantom smudge, every nerve screaming and chattering in every molecule of his being.

His hands were shaking, he realized. A frenetic tension that surmounted the more he tried to restrain it, and then…the smoldering.

He saw blossoms of fire detonate across the freighter, it’s metal skin fragmenting in the void, forever. The thermal detonation of las, and the apocalyptic cacophony of torpedoes, the nerve-grating murder-wail of klaxon betraying the arrival of missiles. Death in a thousand electric forms, death squared, until the violence lost all meaning…a rage across his eyes, a sub-audible roar that eclipsed the sounds of the shower. Then the sulphuric smolder of burning…

A blossom of fire, no bigger than a pinecone, sat next to the sink, flickering against logic as it danced and jumped from the chrome of the counter.

He had threw a towel on it reflexively…in the precious oxygen atmosphere of a station fire is the Reaper’s very scythe…but another arc of fire stretched across the cold surface of the sink, and then vanished.

He had forgotten it’s dazzle, the steam of the shower cooling the thrum of twisted steel that fouled his senses.

A week later a radar grid had burned before him, and no one in the control room of the Creios Corporation had noticed. He had watched in silent wonder as the soft yellow of the mute flame radiated from the green monochrome of the Trinitron surface. He realized then that the fire burned for his eyes only, burned at the expense not of matter, but of sanity.

In time it had become an element he was accustomed to. The flames. A computer screen…a heap of clothes in the corner…the gloss black skin of an ink pin…the murky black contents of a coffee mug…the titanium edge of a Pegasus…in time he had come to regard it with some ironic humor as a lightshow, a personal, silent fireworks display.

And always there was the smell of sulfur, of exhaust and igniting polycarbon, snuffed by the darkness of space.

…

Do me a favor, will ya? Draw a square, about the size of a mousepad, or just use your mousepad.

Done? Good. That’s space. 2d will have to suffice, no prestidigitation to hover items indefinitely, here. Put a quarter in the right-hand uppermost corner. That’s the Mordarium system, where Comerca controls everything.

Put a matchbox in the center. That’s Phobos, a merchant base, also a Psychiatric Research Facility, and the last piece of civilization. Any craft coming from Mordarium would be heard well before it arrived, thanks to it’s Tachyon Fold Sensor array. But then, no one attacks this place, usually. Not a big chance of profit, most the time. This is a trading area for a lot of merchants…and a big Star Patrol Station. Besides, the Tach gates between Phobos and Mordarium don’t work.

To the left is an area about the size of a business card. That’s an industrial/military area, but now it’s being converted to a vast medical facility. They call it the Vault. A couple inches above that, place a dime. That’s Void Alliance territory. They mostly keep to themselves, but they have been branching out.

Then there is Gasdec/Phrenbol/Tlask, a corporate guild hidden within a gas nebula, up above that matchbox. Comerca does know it exists, but it is no prize. You have to have sophisticated components to get around, and everything here is to big to steal, to specialized to be of any use unless you know what you are doing.

None of this is really accurate. Everything is separated by light years (A distance which stretches and contracts like a band of rubber, but you have to have a handful of Phd.’s to understand THAT.) Space is like a fish tank, stations and facilities, moons and planets, all floating up and down and under and around each other in the cold intergalactic phlogiston of the universe.

Be sure to remember this all, there will be a quiz, later.

…

Part 2= Voodoo

Before.

Years earlier, a different time, and for him, a different name. He is a pilot, working for Mordarium. Bennet is next him, the co-pilot, and they are performing maneuvers outside Phlobos space. The Skaschere Nebula is before them…a burning cloud of ruddy-hued dust against the onyx beyond. Their ship is a Comet, a fighter-bomber of decades-old design. It’s copper colored surface is burnished and bright, the fires of it’s nuclear thrusters a marbled flare behind it.

”Mordarium is becoming stronger, without tyrants, Joey.”

”Tyrant? No one is a tyrant, here. I just think that Mordarium Space needs tougher leadership, that’s all. Comerca has the right personality…Mordarium has grown a little flabby in it’s Pax Romana…time to flex a little. Bora mining operations have already pushed into our own, and IK has fighters on our borders all the time, with impunity…”

Bennet’s usual upbeat mood is cynical, somehow. Scrolling code from the HUD reflects on his tired features. He is five years older than Joey. And he can see the pattern in the politics of Mordarium.

”Comerca’s proposals are ill-conceived. He has made promises that our resources cannot possibly match! He does not have our system’s best interests in mind, I feel it. We need to increase trade…to expand our relationships with other system’s, not expand the military…look at the Void Alliance…their insular attitudes have kept them sequestered into a mere sliver of the galaxy, with little resources to back any expansion.”

Joey scratches at his temple with his thumb. Youth fires his blood, conflict is a desirable thing, a noble thing. He is just a week from graduation from his training, and long hours in the sim chamber, digital guns blazing at digital targets, has made his head swim with possible glory. He looks at Bennet’s profile, seeing the concern etched in the older pilot’s features. Joey realizes he has known the older man almost ten years…Bennet saw combat once, and had never spoken of it. But whenever Joey sees the older pilot at his cups, and Bennet hears mention of Farhold, the battle he was in, the older pilot will silently toast dead comrades…his eyes light years away…

”Bennet, the mining guild is backing Comerca, the nobles are backing Comera, and the military is backing him…it is a sure sign. Comerca is a necessary aggression, just to keep the undesirables at bay. But even if he takes over, there are checks and balances to his power. He can be removed.”

Bennet smiles, the expression familiar to his countenance. ”Not all of the military backs Comerca, little cousin. Comerca knows this, and he is frightened by it.”

Joey looks at the binary on the HUD above, some silent, slim aspect of dread gnawing at his insides, only a little. He wants to ameliorate his friends fears with logic and common sense, but his tongue gropes for words that even Joey knows quite possible do not exist.

The comm gurgles and scratches, the signal torn to pieces by Skaschere.

”Comet 86, state your position?”

Bennet turns the ship towards Phlobos, his mind all pilot, now. ”We are returning from maneuvers, Base 7.”

”Excellent, Comet 86. 86 out.”

A month later. Comerca is the ruler of the Maderian System. His rise to power occurred swiftly, following the disappearance oh his rival, who is rumored to have gone traitor and fled to Bora territory. Joey is watching a vid of an accident that happened one hour ago. Fifty officers, returning from the Academy on Phlobos, are annihilated when a freak accident recalibrates their Tach drives and sends their ship into a sun. The investigation is swift: pilot error is the blame.

Two weeks later. The remaining military command of the Mordarian System is assembled in the hold of Comerca, aligned in rows of pleated uniforms, faces stern within the jade walls of the chamber glossy and cool, polished to reflect the light of the burners above.

Comerca walks the rows of the officers, his gold uniform fairly glowing, his step sure and precise. From the corner of his eye, Joey sees Bennet, the man’s face strangely peaceful, his eyes shining, as if he sees something the room that the others do not. As Comerca walks behind him, a still, fragile, triumphant shadow of a smile comes to his lips, and the ruler of the Mordorian System turns and draws his pistol with a smooth motion, executing Joey’s friend with a single shot to the base of Bennet’s neck.

No one moves. The room is as silent as an ossuary as attendants remove the remains. The dread clamps down on something vital inside Joey, a death grip. And he stares straight ahead, his posture perfect, as if pinioned by icy nails.

A score of weeks later. The pilot next to Joey is laughing. They are both flying a completely refurbished Warhammer, a mining design for deep-space travel, it’s cockpit rebuilt to hold two. The pilot is amused at the death of traitors, and he brays at the thought of the purged officers. The dread in Joey is long in the grave, replaced by a resolve of cold, smooth bones. He draws a gyrojet pistol with a smooth motion and places the barrel to the laughing man’s ear.

Hours later, he is in the reception area of a notorious bandit hold, deep in the fringe of Mordarian Space.

The mercenary has hair the color of salt and pepper. His mustache is as black as shoe polish.

He looks into the hollow eyes of the Mordarian Pilot before him. The pilot features seem strangely peaceful, a still, fragile, triumphant shadow of a smile across his features. The merc glances at the bloodied interior of the refurbished Warhammer, and back to the pilot.

”What is your name, young pilot?” His accent is very, very Slovak.

Joey meets his gaze.

”Give me a contract to sign.”

The Slav laughs. ”What kind?”

Joey looks at the bloody smear on the inside of his cockpit.

”I don’t care.”

Ten minutes later, he electronically signs a vidscreen with his new name. Five years pass, after that. By then, the bandit hold is completely gone, eradicated by Mordarian forces. The mercs scatter, only a handful still alive, including him.

Now.

DeathGiver looks into the steaming tan disc that is his coffee cup, at a table, alone, in a bar deep inside the research station of the Glasdec/Phrenbol/Tlask guild. He listens intently to a group of pilots speaking freely in Japanese next to him. They are confident that no one here knows the language. The music is too loud for most to hear, anyways. Their accent is Madorian, and he knows from their phrases that they are officers.

The cup burns in DeathGiver’s hand.

…

The funeral for the pilots and research personnel lost in the Altec/Lansing assault is done with little pomp or mawkish ceremony. The rooms floor is a grid of azure, cut by lines of gold etch. The walls are a gleaming dermoplast, the color of nickel. A vid screen four meters by four meters displays their respective names, lives, and deeds. A window above the assembled throng shows the vast expanse of space, stars glinting like pinheads of fire. The verdant moon of Zarathos casts an emerald radiance upon the mourning station.

Highlander, another pilot for RG, stands next to Rustbucket, at full attention. The gleaming polished surfaces of the tombs of the dead, ready to be spaced, are a glossy, rich black. Each on has a flag draped across it, Altec/Lansing or Iconina Knights, respectively.

A lone bagpiper plays ”Amazing Grace”. The dirge is natural, the product of ivories and leather, natural components and human breath, in stark contrast to the digital analog, chrome and plastic that everything in space seems composed of.

One by one the flags on the tombs are removed and folded with a religious attention to detail. Argentum holds one of them preciously, and hands it to the mother of one of the pilots. Her eyes are watered, red sores of grief. She places the cloth on her lap, and puts a hand upon it. She does not see Argentum salute her…she only sees a crib, in a corner, twenty years ago. The corners of her mouth crumble.

Highlander’s face is long and drawn. He watches as the ovoid structures of the tombs are loaded and launched. The sounds of the pipes remind him of his father, of a mountain of grass and a hand-carved gravestone, light years distant.

Aye, lads…he sighs to himself.

We die either very young, he thinks, or very, very, old.

…

Donnel walked down the corridor of the Hold of Comerca, his face suddenly the color of lowfat milk. He moves with a measured pace down the corridor, and drops off the silver tray in the kitchens. He stares into soapy water, and for no real reason, dips his hand into the tepid liquid, sifting, watching his reflection from behind the froth. He thinks of his parents, through the dizzy gravity of his thoughts, and he sees them briefly, in the burning void of the past.

Then he vomits into the water, and the murk becomes ensanguined.

Later, that night, beneath the din of machines, he lies curled up on his rubber cot, in the dark of his quarters. The nausea is a crushing yoke around his neck.

The Grid his up as always, stealthily siphoning electricity from the reactors of the hold. He looks at the holovid of his parents placed on a nearby cinder block. A drip of water dampens a corner of his cot.

There is a crack in his head, he feels, a crack that plunges in a numbing line from his brow to his breastbone. His pillow feels like a shelf of cold lead, and like last night, he cannot sleep.

Never write or record anything, he thinks. Memorize. Look at and photograph, with your mind. Attach the image to a familiar picture, a picture that is always there, your dog, your bedspread, your shoes. Now take the new image, the coordinates of a planned strike, and make it into an image, like a cartoon, a mandala. Alpha 23, Delta 45, Xerxes 0. A.D.X. 23-45-0. Never write anything down.

The letters and numbers become his father’s bracelet, before he was placed into the incinerators…

He has programmed the surge to spike it’s powers at the same time the defense array of the station come on line, to disguise itself. The coded signal will be sent to…

He feels the drug of sleep come upon him, from nowhere, from the mines of home, so long ago. His mother mends his rad suit. Rads. Killing rads.

…to the place he has been sending them for so very long, a place whose coordinates are unknown to himself, the last thing he ever forgot, it seemed. Once every other month, during a spike, he gets a simple piece of binary an affirmative, from a code unknown to all of the Madorians.

Such a silly word, he thinks, as the nausea evaporates for a while.

Morse.

…

Part 3= Want

RedStorm’s caped and ceramite-armoured form stands tall, next to the slim and shorter form of Alyscia. Her luggage and equipment hover on a grav-field next to each other. The grav-field of her private things is slightly damaged, and the bag wobbles a bit, irregularly.

”We have very little in the way of combat starships.” RedStorm is explaining a few details about VA tactics. ”But we have perfected the manufacture of las proof personal armour. We will land on the hull of larger craft, and use our ship’s nanomolecular razors to cut into the surface of a Capitol ship, we try to target the command sections, at the weakest parts of their hulls. The personnel are often not prepared for melee. In that manner we can quickly take the ships that are against us, with little damage to the valuable cargo or components. People will readily risk annihilation when fired upon by the heaviest of ship-to-ship weaponry, but such is not the case when the same person is confronted by a pistol…or a sword.” His voice is crisp, his dialect revealing itself more and more as he talks on, his form reflected slightly in the burnished gold walls of the pod.

”But they have firearms, correct?”

The galvanized doors of the pod open up. The corridor of the Main Traveler’s Hold is filled with non-military craft and personnel. The ships occasionally glide upwards to a smaller hold above, the dermoplast gates open and swallow the ships, spacing them with electric precision.

RedStorm taps the gleaming surface of his breastplate with a gloved finger.

”Few are prepared for us, my lady.”

They approach a freighter, an older transport, crudely painted a military avocado color, lumpen and powerfully built. It is a craft completely devoid of style, so as to maximize it’s substance. Systems and components of various dimensions and intent are fastened to it’s surface at irregular intervals. A few featureless workers, clad in orange workman’s uniforms, attend to the monstrosity.

”So…this is where we part, sir.” Alyscia paused as one of the workmen began to load her items into the freighter’s interior.

”No, I will be traveling with you part of the way, I have business to attend to at the edge of Alliance territory, and I would prefer to arrive without all the pomp and fanfare. Such theatrics can become quite gauche, excessively.”

He motions her in, and follows.

One of the workman meets his partner’s gaze for a fraction of a second. He receives a brief nod, in affirmation.

The three jumpsuited men take their respective places in the ship. A pilot, a co-pilot, and a systems attendee. Preparations are made, navigational directions are fed into the freighter’s mainframe. It’s engines come to life, they sound like the angered roars of Jurassic reptiles, deafening the area in the hold around it.

RedStorm is looking out one of the portals, watching the floor of the Hold drift away, below them. Alyscia looks at his profile for a second, and then stares at one of the workmen. His orange suit is bulky with equipment and various electrics. A port opens, appearing to Alyscia as if it were the door to a frozen meatlocker, colored a minty green. The workman steps through, and she can hear the crewman speaking to each other. There is an odd displaced feeling, as the artificial gravity presses upon her like a heavy rubber blanket. She knows then that the freighter has been spaced.

She drifts off, then, tired from the days events. She has much to do tomorrow, more interviews, research, some vidcom meetings…

She floats back and realizes that RedStorm is standing, it is maybe an hour later, and he is examining a coupling on the wall, his hand tracing the outline of a interior com unit that seems damaged, somehow.

And she realizes that a workman is beside her, a copper colored las pistol in his hand, pointing at her, a meter away.

And then the hand is on the floor, the man’s scream just beginning and RedStorm’s sabre point has gone through the man’s mouth…

The mint door hisses open and another crewman is entering…there is a blur of cloak and a scorching arc of las melts an area by her foot. She is picking up the pistol, somehow free of her seatbelt, the room is tumbling and rising, her legs are wobbly and far beneath her, fear filling her being with it’s watery presence…

The ship lurches and she realizes, almost stupidly, that she is in the cockpit of the craft, space is whirling in it’s windshield, HUD lights flickering like a Christmas parade, another worker is against the wall, fountaining blood from an arterial neck wound, he is almost touching the hem of her dress.

RedStorm and the worker are on the ground, RedStorm below, twisting in a frenetic maneuvering of limbs. She levels the pistol, screaming at herself inside, and RedStorm twists the man’s laspistol into it’s owners chest and pulls the trigger once, twice…

The detonations are hollow and disembodied in the lurching environment of the freighter.

She is against the wall, minutes later, although to her it is almost an hour. RedStorm is at the controls, cursing the air, his motions jerky and abrupt. She realizes that her knuckles are ivory as they grip the laspistol, and that the pool of blood has spread across the expanse of the freighter’s cockpit, it searches and spreads like a living thing, running to the opposite wall, tentatively coming into contact with one of her shoes. She stares at it, coming back now, and she is shaking and nauseous, unable to let go of the pistol.

The freighter’s lumpen form maneuvers itself back the opposite way in which they came. RedStorm turns the chair around, the craft safely on autopilot, and looks at Alyscia. He looks at one of the bodies, and then the other. He rises up, and places the reporter into the co-pilot’s chair. He looks out at the cold fires that are the stars, aloft in the boundless welkin of space. He puts a gloved hand on her shoulder.

She holds the pistol the entire way home, and no one says a word.

…

Oddly enough, the private chambers of Comerca, supreme ruler of the Mordarium system, is not really that big at all. It is a warm, butterscotch colored den, with real rugs of actual bear fur. The furniture is pure, distilled, oak. The paintings are cold colored landscapes of brooding murk. You look at them, and you feel like space might feel…frozen, vast, mostly composed of vacuum.

Comerca, in a fit of facetious originality, framed a portal to the starry expanse of his portion of the universe. At casual observation one would think it is a picture, like the rest. Comerca stares out it, cigarette in hand, and listens to a digital analog recording of Leonard Cohen. He is thinking of nothing, of flight, of nucleostasis…who knows? His eyes are flat mirrors of cyanic gloss. Cerene’s nude form, her flesh like satin and talcum, graces the violet silk of his bedspread. She is asleep, but he is not. It is these long hours of non-night, knowing there is no dawn, adrift in his station, that he sees the pattern, the final blindness that erases the sight of confusion. His hands are like marble, they are organs of perfect nature, designed by their Artificer to do all that they are designed to do.

It is in moments like these, when his heart is a clenched fist in his chest, that he could probably perform neurosurgery on a microcephalic, without the aid of optical enhancement.

He thinks of his mother.

He thinks of tactical martial science.

He thinks of his Interceptor, in the aft hold of the station, and how there is a light dust present on the pilot’s seat.

He thinks of the Vault.

…

Fontaine likes to get elbow-deep.

He grafts a sheet of derridium to his Interceptor. He is naked to the waist, clad in denim breeches, covered in a patina of sweat. Workers from other ships respectfully hand him his tools. Always, always, he does his own maintenance on his ship. He had never intended to fly, only fix. He had only ever repaired them, maintained them. Then one day he realized that flying was second to the work he was used to doing. He knew it’s bones, it’s sinews, it’s viscerals…the use of the jumble of parts with its skin enclosing seemed second nature. In truth, he was not a bad pilot; most of his success came from his lack of training. It made his maneuvers unpredictable…and coupled with his experience it made him extraordinarily lethal. Of course, he had to be lethal; he was still alive, wasn’t he? There was no half-ways in space combat.

The vacuum environment of space suffered neither fools nor combat pilot error for very long. You had to be good, to be a space pilot. You had to be great, to be a combat pilot. You had to be somewhere between genius and psychotic, to be a combat pilot veteran.

The boss was planning something big, and whether it came in a week or a year, Fontaine wanted to be ready.

With the same slow and steady nerve that Macchiavelli probably possessed, Fontaine grafted another sheet of derridium to his Interceptor.

The little things were insipid and drenched with banality, to Fontaine. The big things promised immortality…personal Nirvana…glory.

Glory.

…

Argentum Draconis is not in the habit of great personal recollection. He sees it as a good and necessary thing, important for the production and manufacture of wisdom, but not incredibly necessary for day-to-day affairs.

He is sitting on a chair in a room set aside for him, deep inside the steel and solar paneled structures that is the Vault. The designer of the Vault had an angle, an insight into commercial profit that most military space station engineers lacked. He specifically designed the interior of the space station to resemble that of the Empire State Building, in New York City, in New York, during the 1950’s. It is all brass and walnut, carpets of rich scarlet, polished mirrors and plants contained in terra cotta pots. Even the numbers are the same art-deco style, italicized and also brass, with painted insets. The lamps are gold, with rich blue shades.

Rather than use the typical digital controls, the designer instead incorporated knobs and pullies and levers of ceramic into everything. To avoid anachronisms, obvious electronic devices are carefully concealed, behind curtains of cloned silk and and panels of walnut. The vidscreens, a perpetual and unavoidable phenomenon of the 24th century, are instead programmed to look like windows, revealing city scenes straight from a day (or night) in New York, autumn, 1953. The AI’s are in on the gag, too. If you wave at a person on the street, they will wave back, if you make eye contact, they will avert or match your gaze, depending on their station in life. Even the women, in their pleated poodle skirts, will demurely flirt with a uniformed pilot. There is traffic, Chevys, Fords, Motorcycles and bikes. Kids in Levi’s with ducktails, baseball caps backwards and playing cards taped to the spokes to rat-tat-tat as they cruise the sidewalks.

When there is event news or a station announcement, the scene splatters into a trillion polygons, reforming to show the chrome and dermoplast chromatics of TNN or station control. Tourists love that, too. The designer, a Scottish prodigy known for his love of Americana (as well as the occasional eccentric binge), wanted people to come from light-years away to see the masterpiece, so that the facility could charge credits and make money.

The whole station is in the midst of a complete reconfiguration, as it will be a hospital facility in a month or so. With the Void Alliance working so hard to begin trade with adjacent systems, there is little need for a military presence. The station is a buzz of leaving and arriving personnel.

Argentum is realizing that the past is rising unbidden in his mind, like a primordial beast surfacing from the briny fathoms. He finishes his report and goes to a window. For a few minutes he watches a few children exchange baseball cards in from of a soda shop, something stirring in his eyes. He touches the surface and it collapses like origami to reveal space. Zarathos is a green ember, miles upon miles away. The Hasphaestian form of the capital ship Morosmos floats to the left, actually dwarfed by the hulk that is the Vault.

He thinks of Marie, without meaning to do so.

He sees her at their first meeting, eyebrows knitted in concentration, poring over a holotext on Esphecian analog matrix convertors. She bites her lip, and Argentum, much younger, just graduated, his uniform crisp and starched, his hands unetched with years, melts inside. He walks across the café’ of some station, years away, feeling the ground rise beneath him.

He shaves with a straight edge razor, a ritual amongst IK pilots, and in the mirror he sees her, they are in a library in Sommoth, their continental breakfast sitting on trays of steel before them. They have not eaten, yet, so interested they are in the drinking of each others thoughts, each young lover nourished by the personality of the other. He cannot remember the conversation at all…just the musical roll and pitch of her voice, like a silver bell under starlight above.

He is staring into his closet, his derridium-skinned traveler chest on the carpeted floor. She is buying it for him, her credit card a wafer of ink-etched rose quartz. Her hair is a blue-black, cut in a bob, and his eyes drift to the nape of her neck, at the porcelain color of it. He is holding the ring that he is going to give her, tonight, at the 3rd annual IK pilot’s graduation ceremony. He had known her for three years, then.

He is taking an elevator to the docking bay of the Vault, but he is with her again, in a greenhouse on Kirosky Station. She had dropped a fern, and they are kneeled down on the faux-concrete floor, their hands covered in soil, plucking shards of glazed pottery from the fronds and roots. They are laughing, for no reason, perhaps, and she tells him that she is pregnant. Argentum draws her close, one hand reaching up to cup her cheek, holding her face, gently. He tells her that she is beautiful, that her eyes are limpid pools of indigo, and that they will name him Nicholas. Beneath the sweated plastic of the greenhouse canopy their bare forms intertwine and shudder.

Now Argentum is standing in front of his Archangel, the Cavalier, and he is not in the past, not in the present. His hands are beginning to twitch. Somewhere, in the powderblue corridors of a military installation on the other end of the galaxy, he is receiving news of a mercenary attack upon the Capitol ship Sagittarius. Marie was aboard, performing diagnostics upon one of the tachyon units. All hands are lost. She was 23.

Minutes later, while in space, the routine maneuvers are a blur of mind-numbing confusion. Commands are lost in the paroxysm of nauseous fear that overtakes his legs, his gut, his arms. His hands abruptly jolt and jangle like they are being electrocuted. The autopilot lands the craft with a spine-telescoping thud. He ascends the ladder of the Archangel, and all eyes in the titanium and ferroconcrete hangar are upon him. He is lurching, sweating, teeth bared in his helmet like a strychnine victim, and he claws at the neck of his pilot suit. His ears are deafened by unheard turbines, by nonexistent white light. The afterburners of a near-by Pegasus erupt with a steel whine, like the silvery conflagration within the Galileio station, and the bleached ceiling of the hangar above descends upon him, draining his world of color and silence.

…

A day after the incident, RedStorm is standing in the interior of the Main Traveler’s Hold. He is watching as some of his trusted pilot’s prepare a cruiser to bring Alyscia back to the new Medical Facility Vault for de-briefing by TNN. She stands in a crisp white reporter’s business uniform, uncertain of what to say.

”You saved my life.” She speaks, after a moment.

He looks almost sad, looking to the side, as if the proper answer was inscribed on the side of a nearby Void Alliance Pegasus. The crimson surface is so highly polished that it bloodily reflects the both of them.

”No, I endangered it. Those spies have probably been here for years, building up trust, and saw this as an opportunity. If I had not accompanied you, they would have done nothing…for a while. I owe you my deepest apologies.”

Without thinking, she touches his cape.

”Still, you were there…”

He looks at her, deeply, and the mechanical engineering din of the Hold fades away, slightly.

He is so beautiful, so…civilized and yet…uncivilized, she thinks.

I still miss you, my wife. He thinks. I honor thee…even in death, three years hence…

”You must go. Your ship is prepared. Thank you for the fame and promise your story will bring to us.”

He kisses her hand, like a bravo.

The flight back to the Vault is uneventful. Alyscia has her hands clasped in her lap. As she verbally composes a memo to TNN central control, her thumb rubs the back of her hand, where RedStorm was.

The LeighBrackett model of the Vargcraft Capitol Ship design is a model of energy efficiency and environmental stability. It is a deep space cruiser, capable of light jumps in a fraction of the time most Capitol Ships usually need, and it is designed to be both a vessel of combat, as well as a model of comfort.

The pilots on board are the elite of =RG=. Pilots spend years of their careers trying to get here. This particular Varcraft is called the Kreighund, and it performs the dubious role of patrolling the more unexplored regions of this part of the galaxy, doing jumps between Glasdec/Phrenbol/Tlask and the Vault.

Highlander looks at Rustbucket, then at Grimbrand. They are all in uniform, but they slouch in their chairs like old gunfighters, rank and protocol forgotten. Rustbucket finishes his report on the Altec/Lansing affair.

Their conference room is a private one that Highlander keeps set aside for his good friends. The furniture is oiled walnut, and it smells like lemon. The walls are a subdued blue color, with portraits and holovids of RG pilots and more than a few Starwoman Weekly models. Their bodies are lithe and supple, gracefully curved, usually leaning against a fighter. The table is an arc of steel, hovering in place, thanks to antigravs.

Highlander looks at Rustbucket, one eyebrow raised, an arch of hair that makes Rustbucket wonder if the Irish pilot possesses supernatural powers, as raised for as long as it is. Grimbrand is lost in calculations, poring over a Nilo-Omis laptop, complete with tach and satellite uplink. His glasses are anachronistic in this century. They are horn rimmed, German, and they cost more than Rustbucket makes in a week. The area in front of him is littered with program splicers, system redux analysis spectrometers (the good kind, not the ones made by Turks last year), a cup of nitrolite, some communication boxes, and 25 silvery data bundles, shaped like pens.

”Fine, fine, Rusty, I would have talked about it with you earlier, but I wanted to wait until we were here, not while there was a funeral being done. Ye did well, glad ye lived…bad straits, indeed.”

His eyebrow goes back to normal.

”We’ve just received command from Overlord himself, and council voted the decision in today. Ye know that Star Military is moving out of the Vault, right?”

Rustbucket grabs a croissant from a nearby plate and begins to nibble at one of it’s horns. ”Yes, who’s running it?”

”It’s being turned into a medical facility. We have been assigned to guard it by Overlord. The Krieghund is on course, now.”

”Why the change? Wasn’t that area a hotzone?” Rustbucket finishes the croissant with several quick bites, the tach jump a few days ago has made him famished.

”Was, but Star Patrol is next door, at Phobos, and the powers-that-be have decided that Star Patrol next to Star Military is redundant. Besides, Void Alliance has mellowed out, and are starting to engage in commercial enterprises. RG has been given this contract, and now I am going to make sure the Vault stays secure. But I need you to work with Grimbrand on intel, when we get there.”

”Intel? As long as I get to fly…”

Highlander eyed a bearclaw. Yer my breakfast, ya wee animal, he thought. ”I have to warn you, IK is on board. Overlord knows, and has insisted that we show him every courtesy.”

”Oh, Argentum? Rabid Chicken?”

Highlander noticed Grimbrand eyeing the pastry, and he takes it. ”Argentum has had some…psychological difficulties. They moved him to Phobos. Some sort of collapse. They have a Psych facility there; that should patch him up. No, the gent on board is an IK Dominion agent.”

Rustbucket listens to the way Highlander say ”board”. Baird. ”Dominion? Here? This is none of their business.”

”Perhaps I agree, but we have been sharing information back and forth with IK for quite some time. Quid pro quo. Mum’s the word, but you are going to be handed a measure of responsibility with a joint project between Overlord and Dominion that has been going on for quite some time. So get used to him, he is going to become your best friend.”

Grimbrand looked up from his calculations. The laptop lit his face with an amber glow. ”We need you to suggest an RG agent from that area, and we know that your specialty is knowing the location of our pilots at all times.” I wanted Jaycex, but he is still on leave. Who might you suggest for deep space duty? I’ll psych eval his profile, and if he fits in, we’ll ship him his orders. We need one tough mother, works with others, but no creampuffs. He needs to have a screw loose, maybe a little. A good pilot.”

Rustbucket finishes the croissant and looks down into the table, considering. His reflection is a silver blur on the surface of the table. From above, it looks like a steel crescent moon.

…

Part 4= Bad to the Bone

Devil walked around the corner and felt the impact. His left eye became an implosion of light, and he was knocked onto the floor.

The Casino Stations of New Vegas are posh, corridors of mirrored bronze and floors of ocean-colored faux marble. At every interval are posters and memorabilia of the swinger culture from Old Earth. Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra…martini glasses and art deco shakers. Holograms of Circus,Circus and The Sands. Warren Beatty as Bugsy Segal, monochromatic pictographs of old gangster vids.

Devil looks up, his vision a red fog. His shoulder bag is against the other wall, having been flung from him. He sees, through the ruddy filter before him, a big blur, a bald blur, and a short blur, but suddenly his head is a bowling ball of spent uranium.

His hearing, though, is perfect.

”Well, flyboy, not so funny now, right?” The bald blur.

He realizes he has been hit, hard. He starts to get up on all fours, and takes a kick in the ribs for his trouble. He feels a rib go and falls back on his side, hearing ugly laughs.

The voices warble a bit…maybe the big one speaks.

”Look, he’s an RG pilot!”

”Where’s you ship, flyboy?” The bald one’s voice has an Old Earth English accent. Clipped, almost formal. Devil thinks of a butler or something.

”Better yet, where’s our money?” The short one’s voice is deep, almost baritone.

”Get his gun.”

Devil waits until he feels a rough tug at his holster, and grabs the person tugging, the short one. Good. He pulls himself up sharply, feeling the yank at his belt. He begins to spin the guy around, and they both hit the side of a brass wall, into an Elvis portrait. The others are trying to get shots in, and Devil feels the pistol go loose. He knees the man once, twice, and feels the short guy grab his leg and pull back, the staircase yawning behind him.

Devil hops on one foot, spinning and flailing comically, both are off balance, and as the big one punches, the blow hits Devil’s shoulder and that knocks him back to the stairwell he had climbed up before he met the Welcoming Committee and their Secretary of Pugilistic Affairs. They both go over in a scramble of limbs.

Devil hears the pistol go clattering out, and he has a moment of clarity as both of them tumble down the stairs. He grabs the punk as they roll end over end, and lands on him at the end of their crashing descent.

Devil hears the thumpthumpthump as the two others pound down the stairs, and takes the opportunity to punch his wrestling partner hard, one, two, three, four, five, six…

For a moment he gets a glimpse of blood and teeth and gets hit again, maybe by the big one. He doesn’t feel the swat, he just knows it’s there, on the peripheral of his consciousness, and he hears from one of them say that they have his pistol. The corner of his forehead is a mad din of pain, far away. He ducks, rolls to the side, and uses the momentum to stagger to his feet, bringing his hands up to cover his face and head.

The big guy is roaring and throwing haymakers, and Devil feels a couple on his arms, shoulders, ear (THAT hurt) and grabs and locks on to his assailant, lunging forward and biting the big guy’s nose with a crunch of cartilage. There is a warm geyser on his face and he hears a screaming roar of pain from his partner. He applies a judicious head butt, once, twice, three times…and drops the guy to the bloody blue marbled floor.

The last man is pointing his own pistol at him, saying something about shooting.

Devil kicks the big one, a few times, and lurches over his body to the bald guy. The RG pilot sees that the man’s arms are cords of muscle, quaking vainly to pull the trigger.

Devil wheezes, hands resting on his knees, trying to get his lost breath. He looks up and sees a black and white Al Pacino, sitting on a throne in an office uniform of sorts. He saw that movie when he was a kid.

”DNA lock.”

”What?” The bald guy is trying to make the gyrojet pistol work, almost desperately.

”Coded sequence, reacts to touch, gotta be me to use it. High-tech, punk. Royal Guard don’t fool around.”

Devil ducks suddenly and punches the bald guy in the groin, and the winds up and hits him in the ear with his left, then uses his right to hit the other ear. The bald guy cough and gurgles and hits Devil in the jaw, going down, and Devil grabs him by his collar, running him headfirst into a picture of James Cagney. The idea is such a compelling one that he engages in the endeavor again, and feels the bald guy go limp after the second thud.

Cagney and Devil’s assailant go down, the square portrait covering half of the bald guy’s body.

Blue uniformed station security, alerted by complaints from a few guests, rush in at all sides, holding stunguns. Devil realizes the guys who just attacked him were the ones he got a lot of money from at the blackjack tables. He holds up his RG station i.d. badge.

Devil’s long black hair is matted and covered in sweat. His jeans are marked with blood, as are his snakeskin boots. His leather jacket has lost a few buttons, and his face looks like hamburger and feels like a catcher’s mitt of dull agony. His left eye is already sealed shut, and he can feel blood dripping from his lip, eye and forehead onto his favorite cotton t-shirt. He knows that he has broken two fingers, a knuckle, a rib, and possibly sprained his knee. His perceptions spin around him as if he were strapped to a centrifuge, and every sound has the volume turned up way too much.

Security grabs one of his arms and puts it behind his back to arrest him.

His wrist comm beeps.

”What!?” Devil snarls, holding it up to his battered mouth.

It’s Rustbucket.

…

DeathGiver spent a week following the three around, trying to put it all together. The Madorians are freewheelers, using limitless cred cards that are carved from iridium and etched with platinum. In drunken binges they discuss plans, maneuvers, something about the Vault.

From a glassed precipice overlooking the Glasdec/Phrenbol/Tlask shipping hangar, they negotiate prices for several medical frigates. Money exchanges hands in epic amounts.

Because medical frigates, DeathGiver knew, did not come cheap. Not only would you be paying for all of that life preserving technology, but you would have to pay a massive licensing fee to allow you too, know questions asked, be scanned and allowed to park into the emergency hold of any space station in this part of the galaxy, to avoid any possible loss of life. Security was ensured when a station scanned for essential medical components and automatic encrypted codes.

For a week it was wandering, passing up sweet deals to tail the trio. They stop and watch a hovering Star Patrol cruiser, it’s skin humming like a silver and aqua beetle’s exoskeleton. The craft bristles with new and forbidden tech, and the Madorian officers seem to grow silent in the face of it, as quiet as monks, communing with some Bodhisattva of space.

After a while he knew their patterns. The shipping yards, the military depots, the carrier frigates. On more than one occasion they discuss the significance of Phobos. As far as DeathGiver knows, Phobos is impenetrable. It is a fortress, guarding a psychiatric research facility of no value whatsoever. Between the Vault and the nebulae of Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask, any enterprising raider would have to go the long route, hulling lone smugglers and shipping fleets for real cargo. But he feels, in the suspicious regions of his mind, a riddle, a slippery mantra of warning.

The Hangar Bay Corridor of the corporate guild starbase was reserved primarily for cruisers, freighters, and sub-Capitol class ships. They float like blind, eyeless whales composted of derridium and corrugated admanitium, or hang solemnly like the sarcophagi of ancient, dead space gods. He sees the silver spindles of Azuran fighter-boats…the gold-hulled Gundrangs of the Void Alliance…the green hued oval shaped Phrendol Deep Space mission vessels…even a few battered and ruggedly designed Bora carriers. He felt so completely insignificant in the presence of them, as if he were some prophet from the Old Testament gazing upon the face of Jehovah. It was times like these, when he looked upon the cratered surface of Mars, or the cold and poisonous nitrogen seas of Pluto, or into the uncharted and unglimpsed vacuum regions of beyond-Fringe space, that he wondered if there was a purpose in it all, if there ever was a purpose, it there was a hand behind all of the design, or if the Designer ever existed…mankind following the pattern of survival/exploration/expansion/warfare over and over again, an eternal Moebius strip, an ancient MIDI synth audio proggie looped to play and end, only to play again.

Quite suddenly, and without warning, he missed his ex, Natalie. Ex was a strong word, but it was the only word that applied. They had seen each other for a little more than a year, and then that was it. She had never said why, and he was not the type to ask. Why now, he thought, did he even care? He had called her a month ago, but the connection between them had been pretty much dead on both ends. He could not even recall a single detail of their last conversation. It hardly even mattered, but he thought of her, just the same.

DeathGiver watched the medical frigates enter the containment hold of a Mordarion Deep-Space Freighter, and wondered at its significance.

…

Twilight Jack looked over the notes he had scribbled onto a digital notepad, and plunked away at his Bass, considering the math behind his music. His personal Pegasus was being repaired before him, the modification bay separated from the observation hold by three feet of plasteel. Workman spun and flipped in a ballet of zero g, etching couplings and plates of ionic shielding to the light interceptor’s titanium epidermis.

He plunked a note, thinking of what drumbeat might marry itself better to the overall feel of this dirge. Introspective, yet not mawkish…which way to go? He thought of the overall mood the lead synth could provoke from his audience. He thought of the particular and odd times his Muse saw fit to grace him.

RedStorm smoked a cigarette of Kava, staring out past the bay, past space, perhaps into any one of the three burning suns that lay within Void Alliance territory. The Mahingue, The Gorgon, and The Symm. He thought also of The Royal Guard, a clan that had once been an enemy.

”So what did the search turn up?” Twilight Jack asked, almost flippantly. He adjusted the settings on his instrument.

”The spies had been living there for almost three years. They infiltrated as mercenary pilots, acquired credentials necessary for a tentative Top Secret clearance, but instead decided to repair ships, retiring from military duty, except for occasional freighting runs. Their quarters were a hole in the wall area, sequestered from the rest of the station. They have been receiving intermittent commands from a source, always the Hydrosian Asteroid Field, always on the first of every month. And that is in three days…” RedStorm trailed off, considering his options.

”So why the silence? Wait for the transmission, trail it to it’s source, and capture the pilot. Make him talk. Threaten to space him. Why the hesitation?”

RedStorm turned and smirked. ”You know me to well.”

”I am the intelligence officer, here…as well as the only living Rock Star in the universe. Cyanic Nova Back and Forth sold more than 4 million analog cubes, and can be heard all the way to Earth. I also know that your mood is not from some regret for those spies.”

RedStorm checked his command update on his personal comm. ”I think that they were planning an attack on an RG base.”

”Are they not the enemy?”

Redstorm thought for a few seconds. ”No.”

”Then warn them.”

”They would not believe me. And-”

”-part of you does not want to, correct?”

”You are too intelligent, Jack.” Red Storm sat in one of the vinyl purple couches leaned forward, looking into the chocolate colored depths of his liquored coffee grog.

”It is no guarded secret that you have not forgiven them for Jajere Station.”

”I can respect the maneuver. We had been unusually hostile that year, and the Station was a logical departure point for an invasion fleet.”

Twilight Jack took a bottle of Tequlia and had a draught, gazing at his Pegasus. The workman loaded fresh Solarus Torpedo Cartridges. ”But you do not forgive them.”

”Damnnit, no I don’t. There were no munitions onboard that station. No ships, no military supplies of any kind. We lost sixty miners and science personnel officers, people who could not be replaced. I have not forgiven.” RedStorm felt a vise of fury grip his head.

”That is the past, Red. And consider this: what better way to patronize your past foes than by informing them of an unforeseen danger? Let us gather data, and then warn them of the impending doom, whatever form it might take.” He began to strum a requiem on his bass, plucking the notes from the environs of his mind, as would a child gather daisies from a field.

”How do you know they are going to invade?”

Twilight Jack pored over the notepad. ”The Mordarions are a kinetic people. Dictatorships must keep their inertia to survive, and Comerca is a survivalist. Besides, things have a tendency to work out that way.”

…

Argentum woke in sheets the color of the Texas desert, in the springtime. They had a striated, porous pattern to it, and he rubbed them with his fingers, expecting them to have the same sensation as sandstone.

A huge window of plasteel separated him from space outside. The room felt uncomfortable familiar, as if a team of interior decorators had done a thorough psychiatric archaeological dig and had made a room to fit the exact specifications of what conformed to his standards for a domicile. He could see bits of his style all around, down to the cobalt blue carpeting, the pictures of various galaxies, and a kitchen of white steel and chrome colored utensils. The lights were a soft honey color, soothing. There was even some gym equipment. And a full library of books he had read, or intended to read. A book on fencing, by Aldo Nadi, sat contentedly next to a Chinese Wok Cookbook. He then realized that the sheets were the same he had slept in during his stay in the Academy.

But underneath the meretricious gloss and décor, there was the indescribable feeling that this was a hotel, once inhabited by someone else, and the janitorial staff had not yet cleaned the place. He was suddenly consumed by the overwhelming urge to unpack.

”Computer, where am I?”

”You are in the Phobos Psychiatric Research Facility and Star Patrol Station, sector 225, floor 12, room 10, patient analysis.” The computer’s voice had a smarmy, icy attitude to it.

”Thank you, computer.”

Argentum looked around for a moment, still trying to collect his thoughts.

The door to the room, a rectangle of corrugated steel covered in rough eggshell colored plastic, slid open almost inaudibly, and a bearded man wearing a white station uniform walked in, smiling with an attitude of serene calm.

”Hello, I am Goldmark. Welcome to Phobos.”

Argentum was lead through a brief tour of the Research Facility, and the outer station of Star Patrol. He was shown the Gymnasium, the gardens and simm parks, the vid plasma, and all of the guest computer arrays. The shuttle hold was quite close to where Argentum was. Phobos Central was a dome of plasteel, heavily shielded, with a dramatic view of the surrounding system’s stars and galaxies. The whole station was composed of burnished steel, white ferroconcrete, and Caribbean blue tile. A constant theme of Uberfuturistic ran through the place. It seemed to Argentum as if the entire station had been made to look like the people of 20th Century Earth had wanted the future to look like; cold, clean, with as few earth tones as possible.

They both soon were at lunch, in the white tile and red seated restaurant of a Johnny Rocket’s, a cafeteria designed to appear as an Earthen 50’s fast food shop, only with fries of vat-grown potatoes and burgers of soy protein. Argentum realized then that he had never tasted ketchup before.

”I have noticed something about Phobos.” Argentum said.

”And that is?” Goldmark was scraping the last of a chocolate malt from a stainless steel cup with a plastic spoon.

”Star Patrol seems a little understaffed.”

Goldmark put the cup aside, wiping the spoon clean with a snow white embroidered napkin. ”Yes, they have had some difficulties, and they are still rerouting their resources, since the Vault is no longer going to be Star Military. Plus, they are performing an internalized audit, and the Psychiatric Research Facility is low priority, since we have little in the way of material and only a few medical freighters for starcraft.”

Argentum finished his lemon coke. ”Is Phobos planning on doing close work with the Vault?”

”In a sense, we always have, the Vault having been Star Military, and Phobos being Star Patrol. A lot of personnel allocation has been done between us.”

”So I am completely loony, right?”

The doctor drummed his fingers on the table for a few seconds, smiling with a comfortable demeanor.

”What do you know of psychology, Captain Draconis?”

”I majored in it at Oxford Station, before I went to the Academy. Call me Argentum.”

”Then I will spare you some of the rhetoric I would otherwise have to heap upon you. I am sure you know a little about microsociology as well, correct?”

”I know enough about labeling theory and the Stanford Prison Experiment to know what you are implying, doctor…”

”You are not insane. You are not suffering any nervous system tissue damage, no brain damage, no chemical imbalance, nothing in your history I perceive as being any sort of abnormal behavior…but your EEG is odd and you are a prime candidate for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. I have read your combat portfolio, and the phenomena that concerns me is the span of time between your combat missions.”

”What do you mean?”

The doctor wiped his beard. Argentum had guessed the doctor to be around 45, but his smooth, placid features made him look around a decade younger.

”I knew a man who ran a shipping company between Earth and most of the solar system. Never slept in the same bed twice, constantly on the move, no vacations. A shaker and a mover. Ate on the go, fed himself with one hand, steered with the other. People in the company called him ”The Apparatus”. Just kept moving. By the time he was 30, he was in charge of a dozen stations and twice that amount of shipping lines…used his saved up sick days and vacation time to buy stock in the company and own more than half of it. When you look at his work record, there are no gaps between assignments…just work, work, work.” Goldmark made a chopping motion with his right hand, across the table, and Argentum thought of an assembly line. ”Then one day he just shut down. Like a coma. When he came to a month later, he said that he was staring at the vid of his comp, and suddenly it was all black, like he had taken a nap. Stress, and he was not even a combat pilot. You show no break between your missions. No R&R, except for injuries. Not healthy. We ran your psych profile through a predictability drive, and it says suicide, in four years.”

Argentums laughed ironically. ”Hence my room being the way it is? Make me all comfy? No pattern displacement? Reminder of my past, recreation of continuity?”

Goldmark smiled contentedly, like a magician does when he shows you a bit of prestidigitation. ”Any other questions?”

”What does my EEG show?”

The doctor scratched at his beard. ”Truthfully? We don’t know, and that is saying something, considering where you are. I describe it in my journals as a sort of background fuzz, a static within your pattern.”

”So what’s the treatment?”

”Truthfully? I am going to assign you some hydrogenperoxithorminebartinol caps, for possible hallucinations, and a little barbiturate solution to help you sleep, if, and only if, you need it. We don’t want you to feel like a lab rat here, or a patient, per se. Take a vacation. Relax. Your rank affords you the entire base to look around in, including Star Patrol. More than I can say for myself. Explore.”

”What about flying?”

The doctor paid for the meals with a credit chip the color of amethyst. ”We will arrange to have your craft brought to you. When you are up to it, register yourself with Star Patrol. But I am not joking here, no combat missions. At all.”

Argentum thought of flying again, of seeing the universe in front of him, the cockpit glare of solar radiance, the feeling of being weightless, with wings of steel, aloft in the starred expanse…

He realized that his hands were quaking, the fingers like claws of flesh colored plastic, and he does not recognize the limbs as his own.

…

Alyscia hated vid meetings. To her it seemed oddly displaced, that this person was a entertainment vid, unreal, and the whole conversation was not taking place, but that she was alone, speaking to no one but herself. She had only been aboard the Vault for four hours, and she felt like a heap of soiled laundry.

The smooth features of her editor’s face came through perfectly on the Tach channel. Victor looked as sleek as always, a man in his 50’s, with silver hair and sharp black eyebrows. He had the appearance of a man constantly bemused by the events around him, and yet completely confident about his ability to handle triumph or tragedy, as the situation turned.

”The story on RedStorm is perfection, pure perfection. The broadcast scored a 81% approval rating, with a sweep of .90 throughout out 5,000 channels. VA is unexplored, and you just got an article that is new and solid. Your pay check has been digitally wired to you.”

”I…wow…thanks you…I.”

”No need, thank you.”

Alyscia’s head swam, things were going very nicely, indeed.

”However, as a result of your story, interest in space pilot’s is at an all-time high. Space sim games have gone up by 35%, viewers that are watching space pilot vids are up by 35%, and Star Patrol has received authorization from League Officials to buy more fighters. Recruitment for the various Academies has also gone up. You have started a craze, Alyscia. TNN is even buying rights for a Void Alliance Japanese anime show.”

Wow, she thought. If I am so brilliant, give me a raise.

”That’s swift. Good news, I don’t know what to…”

”Have you ever heard of a pilot from the Iconian Knights who goes by the callsign Argentum Draconis?”

Sounds like Latin, she thought.

”No.”

”He’s a lord within their clan, had some sort of accident, and is at Phobos. We want you to interview him, get his idea of what it’s like to be a combat pilot. Don’t reinvent the wheel, just the facts and a little observation for the audience.”

Phobos? She thought. Where is that?

”Hey, I’m on it.”

”We have wired you additional funds, to help things along. Treat yourself. Call me when you get there, but make sure it’s encrypted, I don’t want any other reporters trying to involve themselves in your story. Victor out.”

She stood there, feeling like she had won the lottery.

Shoes, she thought. I need more shoes. Have to impress…I’m big time, now.

She looked at her cooler, wondering what she would eat, and realized that she could dine at the finest restaurant in the base, with ruthless authority…

…

Reptile’s throat is as dry as Classic Russian prose, as if the dusts of a thousand chalkboards had been dumped into his gullet. All around him, in the velvet and dermoplast confines of the Phosphorous Mink, the only pilot bar in the Vault, there is an expectant quiet, as the lottery numbers scrolling across the amber monochrome marquis above finish their electric route.

He blinks through sweat and downs his Purple Grape Knee-High, counting and recounting the slim plastic rectangle in his hand.

00101897636475864 it says, confidently, cheerfully.

Again the amber marquis scrolls its message to the loyal wachers, and twenty-five sets of eyes scan their own numbers.

00101897…it says, then, 6364758…

”I’m rich! I won! I’m rich! F*ck-a-monkey I WON!” Reptile hears himself say.

The exultation from the bar can be heard all the way down to the mail lobby, and Reptile buys everyone a round.

…

Rustbucket watches the Vault loom closer, a stronghold in the black and gold starred tapestry of space. He is reminded of a shipyard, a dozen cruisers, frigates, carriers and jammers all suspended in close proximity to the military star base.

The IK Dominion officer is a mannequin, standing straight yet without stiffness, staring down at the command bridge of The Krieghund. His uniform is ink black, with only two silver buttons at his neck. He wears a laspistol on his hip, a silver ear comm., and a gold monocle in his left eye. Rustbucket thinks of how old he might be. His face is blank and relaxed, a portrait of predatorial contemplation. He wears gloves of black leather, and his collar is high, as if he is just a head, attached to a chrome chassis of steel servos and circuits, just remove the head and download. Doesn’t he ever blink?

Rustbucket gets tired of the quiet. ”How long have these transmissions been coming in?”

The Dominion’s voice is a low, as if he is accustomed to speaking carefully, and he moves his mouth very little when he talks. The accent is faintly Italian.

”For a few years, and only in brief signals, with vast gaps between transmissions. They are always accurate.”

”A spy?”

”Not one of ours.”

”Another clan’s, perhaps?”

The Dominion officer turns to stare at Rustbucket, smoothly, and his right eye blinks once. The monocle begins to glow and darken, faintly, like a pulse of bitmap and neon.

”I would know”.

The docking is uneventful.

…

Devil flew his modified Pegasus out of the Tach gate, all violent and lightning around him, to the cold silence that was the space around the Vault. From here he could see the traffic jam of freighters and other craft around the seven domes of galvanized admantium that was the former Star Military facility. Ion cannon projectors ringed the place, and the walls of it glowed with bays and windows, soft blue against the mirrored ferroconcrete. The Yard, an expanse of tubing and mechanics designed for Captiol ship parking, was bustling with activity. To merchants and traders, an impenetrable station such as this place was the perfect realm to do business…with taxes paid, with every transaction, to the Vault, of course.

Every time he came out of a Tach gate, after the fireworks and feeling of time distortion, he felt like a newbie again, a rookie. There was the magnetic rush and whirr of space folding and then he was solo again, an independent contractor…and then the mess with Phoenicia. At the event horizon of his memory, there was always the Sol Region in the Gemini Sector, and he was floated, battered, titanium hull pockmarked with laser fire. Some part of him, seven years later, was still amongst those ancient bits of iron and nickel, stone and stardust.

With RG he had found a place, a purpose, with all the benefits of clan membership, without the politics other places ended up giving you, as well. He had emerged, mangled, from that Tach gate long ago to the gates of the RG station, a lone sentinel of plasteel and cerramite on the fringe of an asteroid field.

Now, here he was, battered (well, physically, at least), emerging from a Tach gate, unto the bosom of another space station…

Devil gunned the burners of his Pegasus, feeling the freedom, the pulse, the electric hum of commerce and space around him, arcing up and around a plodding mining vessel, buzzing a merchant cargo carrier, drifting past the solemn ranks of Star Patrol ships, which buzzed past him like so many engined pinballs.

RG runs the place, now…Ha! Hard to believe we landed the contract for this fortress. Overlord must have sold his soul…I wonder if I can arrest people…

Devil’s pains had faded, after the fight. Bail paid, charges dropped, turned out the trio had a few prior convictions and a couple of outstanding warrants…maybe they were on a prison mining colony some place. The doctor’s had given him some derms, a few shots of boneglue, and a little metabolic enhancer to boot. Now Devil felt almost normal, but as hungry as a…

”I am going to eat three cloned lobsters. And some clam chowder. And real bread. Sourdough. And they better have Boddington’s Pub Ale on that garbage scow.”

He cranked up George Thoroughgood’s ”Bad to the Bone” on his fighter’s stereo, and thought of poker chips and garlic butter.

…

Grimbrand, Reptile, and Ice Cougar are sitting in the Phosphorous Mink. Reptile has been controlling his mania for a few days now, but he is starting to stretch at the seams from the good mood within himself. After checking his bank account, the numbers seemed surreal, so many zeroes that it made little sense. The top of his head is gone, he feels, and electricity springs forth, through his toes, and is converted by some biochemical process into a fireworks display of ambient light, which floods forth from the top of his skull, a aureole of indigo and platinum, the colors of his utter and inhuman glee.

Grimbrand’s mind boggles at the amount of money Reptile has.

Reptile lifts a drink, some ridiculously expensive kind with fruit, umbrellas, flags and several precious liquors, floating in a bowl-sized glass. He almost loses an eye from a straw as he tries to drink it. Grimbrand and Ice Cougar both have replicas of the libation before them.

Grimbrand speaks.

”Buy a ship.”

Reptile is beaming, feeling like some Chinese god of wealth. I am the money frog, he thinks.

”I did. I outfitted my arch, too.”

Ice Cougar orders buffalo wings. ”Buy a Capitol Ship.”

”I tried. I was going to fill it with Chiva’s and Starwoman Weekly models…turns out you gotta have a Megacorp license.”

Laughter.

Ice Cougar looked at the waitress who brought his wings. She seemed like a Valkrie, then, as she brought him the first food he had seen in half a day. He had flown here from Altec/Lansing, after pulling some maneuvers. Not a bad flight, saw some time distortions, rippling in the fabric of black, starry space. He had felt like the first Earth sailors must have felt, when they looked over the sides of their wooden-hulled craft and stared into the eyes of whales. He had felt alone, but in wonder, as if glimpsing the machinations of the mind of God. He smiles as the slim female, trying not to seem like a typical space jockey. She has freckles.

He ate at a wing. ”Grimbrand, who is the Dracula?”

”What?”

”The commissar with the IK tags.” Ice cougar said, looking Grimbrand in the eye.

”Classified.”

Reptile and Ice Cougar spoke simultaneously, as if they were in some script. ”Shut up.”

”No, it is. Classified. Code magenta. Can’t do it.”

Reptile leans in. ”Tell us. Come on.”

Ice Cougar adds to the pressure. ”Grim, you owe me. I have kicked down with the scuttlebutt on how many occasions?”

”You know what I like about Ancient Earth Pre-Indus River Civilization? It changes the conversation.”

Reptile groans pitifully, the alchohol making him feel like he is in zero g. ”Grim, tell us? Why is he here? Is this an IK convention?”

”Do you know they still haven’t deciphered the hieroglyphics at Mohenjo-Daro, and it’s still technically prehistoric, ‘cause they can’t read it, even though had a written language, the prerequisite for being historical?”

Ice Cougar is relentless. ”Grim! I lent you 3,000 creds, remember? I’ll give you a wing! C’mon, they’re spicy. I even got ranch dressing.”

Grim takes the bribe. ”I’m working on a project with IK, something to do with the Madorians…so maybe there will be some IK here, maybe not. Rustbucket is part of it. They’re sending Devil to some really remote station, not on the charts, middle of nowhere, doesn’t even have a name, not a Tach gate in sight. Apparently, been there some time…that’s it, o.k.?”

Reptile is satisfied with the dose of info. ”Devil, heh? Working on a secret project. Wow.”

…

Devil is reading a dossier on board the Krieghund, with Dominion, Highlander, and Rustbucket.

”So they just get messages, right? From nobody?” Devil looked around the room, his gaze settling on the IK Dominion whatever. What is that in his eye? Some sort of optic?

Highlander looks at Devil. Laddie’s face looks like a catcher’s mitt. Oughtta duck, the sod.

Dominion speaks. ”One of our craft discovered the signal by accident. Every once in a while we get information, about a raid, a munitions stockpile, a political maneuver…”

Rustbucket leapt in. ”The Madorians got beat a little, but they are not out of the game. They make a lot of money from some of their organized crime operations, and we are uncertain of their resources. Some reports have been given that their ships have been remodeled, and we know they still raid in deep space. Their territory has gotten wider, but they have been quiet, just recently. That means they are dangerous.”

Devil looked at his coffee. God, this stuff tastes like hot piss. ”I’ve fought them before. Not that good. Why don’t Star Patrol just organize a task force and blow the place up?”

Highlander spoke. ”Hard to invade a place like that. Home team has the advantage and all. Plus, Comerca is big on weapons platforms. Not a big enough threat, too. The Madorians are too tied in to their mining operations to want to invade, and wiping them out would not be cost effective for Star Patrol. Besides, they actually keep pirate activity down in some of their adjacent sectors.”

”O.k., so you want me to go to some remote-ass place and run the station? Why me?”

Dominion turned his iron gaze upon the RG pilot. ”You have certain traits in your psyche eval that is necessary for the success of this project. You will be paid-” The agent stopped and tilted his head, listening to his ear comm. ”-handsomely. With your choice of where you will be stationed, afterwards. Also, you will be in charge of a mixed contingent of Iconian Knights and Royal Guard.”

Boss some IK around? Be the head honcho? My own base? Hell, yeah.

”I’ll do it.”

Rustbucket smiled.

Three days and some hypersleep later, Devil is looking at the slow-spinning derridium top that is the station. His Pegasus has just left a small IK cruiser. Devil circles in, amazed by the utter lack of everything, just wide, vast space surrounding the remote base.

”Base? That thing is no bigger than a freighter! You couldn’t park three fighters in that hold! What the hell did I sign myself up for? Damnnit!”

His craft pivoted and spiraled closer to the station. It hung there, silver and chrome, against the long night of space.

…

Argentum awoke from a sensory deluge of fragmented morbid visuals. He tried to put them together, to weave a pattern from the pieces, but when he awoke they drifted away, to wait in the dark and lick their chops.

He sat upright for a few seconds, staring out his window at the space around the station. He could see the walls of Phobos, the fighter hold, the emerald greenhouses, the ugly barrels of the ion cannons, the silent monoliths that were the Star Patrol cruisers, effulgent and bristling with their advanced and secret technology.

Suddenly, for no real reason, he placed his hand upon the plasteel, fingers outstretched, seeing his reflection, a smear of flesh with black eyeholes.

He realized Seraphim was in a chair next to him.

Argentum stopped, hearing the buzz of distant electrics, the sound of afterburners, somewhere out in the starry night beyond.

”You’re dead.”

Seraphim frowned, almost as if he were embarrassed.

”Why are you here, Argentum?”

”Because I’m looney. Lost it. Toys in the attic. I’m a nutjob.”

Seraphim shook his head. ”No, Argentum. You’re perceptions are just on the wrong frequency. Like when you adjust your intercom between channels and you get that static. Only you can see the static, and that’s what is making you sick.”

”This can’t be happening. You died.”

”Yeah, I died. Goes with the job. But you didn’t. So quit holding on.”

Argentum turned his head, and the comm. goes off in the room.

Seraphim was gone.

Argentum blinked. Then he answered the comm.

”This is Argentum? What is it?” Looking up into the darkness, and the computer patches the signal through.

Some reporter named Alyscia.

…

The Nile was an Egyptian themed place, a bar and restaurant of black and gold flecked marble floors and walls, teak paneling and gold statuettes of Isis, Ra, and Anubis across from portraits of Cairo and hieroglyphics. Palm trees, coupled with the view of space above, made the customer feel as if they stepped in some bar in ”A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.”

Turkish coffee was the house special, served in brass demitasses. In the background, the sound of chanting and pipes could be heard. Separated from the clientele by a few centimeters of plasteel were sand aquariums of cobras, and the occasional scorpion.

The tables were also cloned teak, adorned with brass pepper grinders the size of your arm. They were ostentatious, covered in Arabic inscriptions. The silverware was also brass, with pharaohs for handles. The brass napkin holders resembled scarabs. A constant holotheme ran through the place, of Fakirs and various Islamic citizens in mufti. The women were exotic and mysterious, veiled and black-clad, with eyes the color of a Moroccan night. The holos were not intrusive; the figures crept in, out of the corner of your eye, and brought with them the scents of jasmine and myrrh.

She sat at a table, next to a coffin of Tutankhamon. Her hair was up in a bun, held in place by chopsticks. The dress was a deep magenta, matching her high heels. In front of her was a silver platter of date appetizers. She turned her head as Argentum entered.

He took in the place for a second, dizzied by a feeling almost akin to culture shock. The holos, at least, the phenomena of holos, seemed familiar after the Vault. But he had never seen a camel, before.

He wore his officer’s uniform, a formal flight suit composed of the deepest cobalt blue material. His officer bars were inconspicuous, and he had left the medals in an alligator skinned case under the bed. He felt on display, all of a sudden. Phobos personnel had never seen an IK officer in dress, before, and he could hear the sub audible commentary.

He noticed her across the room, and she smiled.

TNN EXCERPT<<<<<<<<<

INTERVIEW/ARGENTUM DRACONIS<<<<<<<<<

”THE/MAN/BEHIND/THE/UNIFORM”

ALYSCIA DEMORNAY/AUGUST/17/2367<<<<<<<<<

SYSTEM REPORT/TACH TRANSMISSION COMPLETE<<<<<<<<<

Why do some people become pilots?

Insanity? Look at Rabid Chicken. (Laughs) The need to do good, the myth perpetuated by novels and vids, the opportunity, the adrenaline…

But it’s dangerous, correct?

Long spans of boredom broken up by moments of intense fear. (Laughs.)

Are you treated differently?

Yes. Damn flyboy. I get that a lot. Really, it depends. You have to look at your career, at what contracts you except. Being a clanner helps, but I know some independent pilots, like Werewolf, who pride themselves on being able to do many different things out here. He is an operator, too. This is the Fringe, after all.

Why IK?

Why RG? Why UFO? Each clan has a personality, and something in that attracts a pilot…that and the benefits.

Your record is impressive. Breathtaking. To what do you owe your success?

I’m alive, and the people that I was contracted to protect or fight for are, as well. Beyond that, what’s a medal? When a Blast torpedo is closing, and you have no shields, or when you see the shells of broken starships littering a vacant section of space like the remnants of some galactic demolition derby, rank, medals, newspaper articles, fame…it all becomes insignificant. You can’t share that with anybody. I know better pilots, pilots who knew no fear, who were feared, and they are dead. I am not an ace, I just do not make mistakes, I have been told. A lot of fighting in space is capitalizing on the opponent’s errors.

You paint a gruesome portrait.

I don’t intend to. You just realize it, one day, that your entire life is standing on a hill of other’s lives and deaths…were they saved by you? Did you make them dead? It makes one philosophical…but I know some who just move on. It’s a job. They don’t wax poetic about it. They take the next contract. They are alive.

What else would you have been, if not a pilot?

A mechjock? (Laughs) An English professor, on Earth, in England or Canada. I don’t know.

Any advice for graduating pilots?

In five years half of a graduating class are dead, by pilot error, deep space phenomena, or combat. In ten you are either very good, or dead, and only 15% of the pilots that graduate survive a decade. There is no shame in taking an escort, rescue or transport job, as opposed to some combat mission that can leave you a slab of ice and dust in space. And invest in the future. One day, you will not fly anymore, and that day is not often prepared for.

TNN EXCERPT COMPLETE<<<<<<<<<

They stood alone, together, in an ivory colored corridor of Phobos. They were against the chrome railing, looking out at the Phobos Star Patrol Shipyard. The steel colored Star Patrol Cruisers, three of them, were docked alongside each other. They were like mute killer whales, waiting predatorily, whilst the smaller fish that were starships, freighters and transports swam by in the phlogiston.

”Why space?” He said.

”I was an astronomy major in college…lived on Earth all of my life. I always felt like I was missing the party, like life was up there, in those stars, stars I could never really see…then one day I packed for my last Spring break and went up there, near Saturn, as far as my money could take me. When I came back I realized that I could not see the universe through the planet’s atmosphere. I did writing as a hobby, for college, but I petitioned a Nuclear Forensics firm to be their field reporter. I did not have any real experience, but I worked my way up.”

Argentum watched as she downed the last of her champagne. A lock of hair had fallen across her face, and he wanted to brush it back for her. ”I have not seen Earth for a while. It seems like, months? Years? I was educated, here. Graduated here. Work is here…you just realize one day that your whole life is station to station, galaxy to galaxy, and dirt and sky seems boring.”

She found herself looking at his jawline, his hands.

”Any plans for tomorrow, Argentum?” She had said it before she realized it.

”No.”

…

Part 5= Roadhouse Blues

Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.

Rabid Chicken is flying his peg through the outer edge of a floating junk field, a cloud of twisted wreckage and assorted space debris: rusted starship hulls, shells of Capitol Ships, torn plasteel sheets, carcasses of freighters, and the blasted remnants of stations, their ferroconcrete walls hanging motionless, frozen in the void like so much galactic detritus, against the cold light of ancient stars.

Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.

This is the furthest edge of space, and Rabid had been patrolling this sector to investigate a few anomalies and to prepare the way for scavenger freighters, licensed by Star Patrol through Godcraft industries, to gather whatever raw material might be needed to replace the loss of the Berthold. He found a few Chimera Furies (a clan that had organized themselves from the few members of a corporate mercenary band, whose mother company had been bought out by Galspan) transporting essential components onto their ship illegally, and after communicating an amiable warning found himself, for all intents and purposes, jumped.

We’re going to the roadhouse we’re going to have a real…

His Cutlass flips lazily, maneuvering through a shattered Bora Capitol ship, the support frame a window into space, and he feels as if he is within the skeleton of an ancient whale. Then he is afterburning through a window, ruby arcs of lasers slicing the space around him.

…good time.

Three of ‘em. He thinks. Poor guys.

Let’s roll, baby roll…

He has split the comm. unit, one earpiece is blastin’ Jim Morrison, nearly 375 years old, old Earth music that Rabid has only recently discovered and has begun to explore with great zeal. The other ear is for general communications. He notified Star Patrol, but they are always slow.

He dives and loops, the physics forcing his spine back to the pilot seat, and rolls instinctively, wondering if their aim will improve. The Furies are flying refitted Orions, some armor stripped off to give ‘em more speed. A beep and a gargled hiss, and then Eldritch is patched through.

”R.C.?”

”Hey Eldritch, how’s the goat?”

The signal went bad for a second and Eldritch’s laugh sounded like grinded steel. One Fury circled in, ahead of it’s brothers, trying to surround the Cutlass. Rabid twisted and latted erratically, firing a plasma shot, twin burning suns smashing the shields of the Orion, twin rails following up, and the Furie became a supernova of metal and yellow flame. His missile warning sounds, and he can glimpse the neon streams of incoming swarms, he rolls again, afterburning behind the wreckage of a Galspan cruiser.

All night long…

R.C. slides and afterburns backwards, leaving a trail of glowing green ECM’s. There is more blaring harmonica and guitar, some vocals that get lost upon him, and he hears the Orion’s burn past. His Cutlass circles and loops again, latting to avoid more laser fire. His shields take a few hits, and Eldritch says=

”You gotta go to the Vault and get Argentum’s ship to Phobos.”

”Why? He too lazy?”

The night is for people who like to go down slow…

”He can’t, uh, fly right now.”

”He never could fly, ha ha!”

”Naw, he has had some problems. Command just wants you to bring his Archangel to him, along with a few knick knacks…you know Phobos, right?”

”Yeah, the nuthouse.”

R.C. burns between the two Orion’s, looping and twisting, the vulture form of the Cutlass in stark contrast to the sleek silver chassis of the Furies, and then he is above them, firing twin rails onto one. Eldritch says something, and another rail and the Orion rolls to the right, missiles streaming past the Cutlass, the pilot firing blindly. R.C. launches a torrent of plasma rockets, the explosion a brilliant yellow on all sides of him, particles of destroyed craft plinking off the Cutlass in staccato impacts.

”Save our city.”

”What?” R.C. says, confused.

Save our city.

”What?” Eldritch says, confused.

”Ah, it’s the music, nevermind.”

”Hey, turn it down, man, you sound like you’re in a dogfight.”

Give up your vows…

”Why, you getting horny? You’re gonna make the goats cry.”

For a heartbeat Rabid loses the last Orion, wondering if he ran off, and then there is the flicker at the corner of his eye, twin blast torpedoes, like gossamer electric soap bubbles, and he knows that the Fury had just made a slick, dumb luck, brilliant maneuver, blind fortune, really, firing blast torps at close range, with the Bora Capitol ship on his side so he can’t lat to escape. And the Orion is still firing, ruby arcs all around him, he is afterburning along the ruined ship’s side, the torps closing, too close now.

I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.

Countermeasures useless, just blow up the torps anyways…

The Cutlass adrift, and then rolling suddenly into the Bora Capitol ship, into an opening probably not big enough to allow him. There is the seething detonation of the torps, a wave of rads crumpling R.C.’s shields, and he fires plasma into the wall in front of him, flying thought the molten hull as the side of the Capitol ship is smashed asunder, sheets of it melting to slag. R.C. tumbles and jets to a halt, assessing damage.

The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.

”Yah it is.”

”What?” Eldritch is still there, his voice a scratchy electric hiss.

”I said I am on my way. Rabid out.”

He sees the Orion, gliding outside the Capitol ship. Rabid afterburns out, the rails a yellow line of kinetic force, punching through it’s damaged shields. The plasma rockets roar and explode, his last rail cleanly boring through the Gal chassis. Blinding lemon yellow light, the heat flash scalding all of the black void around it, and Rabid afterburns up and away, to avoid any collision with the wreckage of the Fury. Then there is the silence of the void, a starry curtain on all sides, the graveyard of stations and ships still and fragmented before him.

All night long…

Part 6= The Bird

The docking bay for the remote station was already crammed with three light interceptors, probably Pegs, Devil thought, and so he had to park in the visitor’s docking hold.

It was all a bleached white color, with couplings and tubing emerging and feeding from every possible direction. He searched for a portal into the station, unable to discern one because of the wires, tubes and assorted cargo cases and plastic storage units floating all around. He unbuckled himself from the cramped cockpit, the hatch opening. He began to float up, along with a coffe cup, some pens, a holoporn vid, and some titanium power tools.

”What the hell? Zero G??? What is this, the twenty-first century???”

A circular hatch opened above with a grinding dirge. A pudgy type in a flannel shirt, wearing blue jeans, floated and tumbled towards him, a belt of magnetic tools around his waste. He had a look of idiotic glee as he drifted to Devil’s cockpit. He put out his hand.

”Heya! Welcome! Welcome! Got any fresh vids? Music? It’s stagnant out here, man, really dry. You the new guy, right?”

The pudge pot began to rummage, in a polite manner, through Devil’s cockpit. For a second Devil thought of getting steamed, but realized he was floating in an uncontrollable spiral, out of control. His new companion drifted in a somersault and grabbed Devil, kicking up to the hatch from whence he had come. Devil realized that guy had a grip like a lobster.

”Who are you?”

”Dave, man. Dave. You Devil?”

”Ya.”

”Hey. Your face looks like a Canadian sunrise. You alright?” Dave said this with intense gravity, as if Devil’s mother had just died. His abrupt concern almost made crack up.

”I uh, zigged when I should have zagged…”

”Aw, man, ZAG next time, o.k.?”

…

Devil kicked and floated and pulled him up a corridor of more tubes, couplings, wires, and assorted bundles and plastic case duct taped and sometimes stapled to the wall. He wondered when the zero G would end.

Dave drifted ahead, occasionally snatching memos and assorted junk from the air. He plucked an apple and started to eat it, almost unconsciously. ”We don’t got G because we are really top secret. No excess energy or signals, that includes radiation and all Tach output. That’s why you had to take that Cap ship in…no Tach gates anywhere, man. If you flew it’d take you a week to get back. There’s a big belt of radiation out there, and it clouds our signal. No one knows, man. Big secret. We all keep it really quiet. Super spy stuff. Eyes only and all that. This is real deal espionage, man. But it’s stagnant, ya know. Stale. But we keep working…”

Dave opened a hatch and a roar of noise reached Devil, like a wall of din. The room had holovid posters and pictures of girls everywhere, on all sides, every wall almost layered. Another man in a pilot’s outfit, probably Chinese and also RG, tumbled in a circle, trying to catch bubbles of ale around him. A third pilot in a deep blue IK uniform was singing some Twilight Jack tune, spinning and occasionally opening a can of beer from the bandoleer of them he had around his waist, and using the spray to propel him backwards.

A fourth man, a black guy, wore old Earth World War II goggles on his head, IK tags around his neck, and a camo green athletic shirt. His pants were black, and he wore no shoes or socks. He had an ear comm. and a cybernetic arm, one of the old Swiss kind, all gold with titanium servos. He seemed to have a can of nitrolite attached by magnets to every point in his body. His lips were pulled back in a manic grin, most of his face shrouded by a Holo Unit, and on his back was a military gray laptop. He occasionally would hit some high score, his other hand working a control gauntlet, and spin around chaotically, whooping and saying, ”Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah doggie!!!” in a terrible Elvis impersonation. Devil noticed, on every wall, crowded by the posters, a big LCD vid screen. He realized that the music was some sort of synthetic phsychadelic, punctuated by wailing sax and drums pounding with a voodoo beat. Devil snatched a can of nitrolite from the air, not able to decide if he was going to drink it now or save it for later.

Dave twitched like an epileptic suddenly, and then froze in the air, having brought himself to a complete halt with his odd movements.

”First guy is RG Merchant. The IK with the beer is Circle 66, and the other IK with the arm is Mr. Mojo. We’re having a birthday party for Geode.”

”Where’s Geode?” Devil almost screamed, the nitrolite canister spraying open and sending him into one of the walls.

”Oh, he died. He stopped his ship out on maneuvers to adjust a thruster, and got hit by hard rads. Killed him really dead. Told him never to leave the ship out there, but he had a new space suit he wanted to try. Great guy, had an awesome vid collection. Sad, man.”

”You a pilot?”

”Ya.”

”What’s your callsign?”

”Uh, Dave.”

”What you fly?”

Dave beamed widely. His teeth were perfectly white, as if they had been bleached. He rolled and kicked, waving his arms to keep bubbles of beer and carbonated coffee from hitting his shirt.

”Claymore, man. I like room. Called me Big Bomber, but I am Dave, now. My real name is Bob Morgan.”

Devil coughed. ”Wait, your real name is Bob and you call yourself Dave?”

”Ya.”

”Why?”

”Uh, ‘cause Bob would be a dumb callsign…”

…

Comerca wore his white general’s uniform, and Cerene a similar outfit of black. Both were trimmed with gold. They were on factory #862, overlooking the coffee colored planet of Karr. The planet was inhospitable, but still a valuable stockpile of raw materials. The luxury level had been specifically polished and decorated for the arrival of the General, it’s gray marbled walls carved with the images of mythical beasts, unicorns, tengu and manticores. The carpet was a pale cream color, the doors decorated with the Mining Guild crest, a three-headed eagle, one claw holding a pick, the other a welding torch.

Comerca’s praetorian guard stood close by, their las-hafted guisarmes oily and lethal, under the jaundiced glow of the sodium burners. A plasteel window gave them their view.

The station magistrate, Fitzbalt, had an unctuous demeanor that had begun to grind on Comerca’s gears. He wore a splendid tuxedo, meticulously tailored, but his hair was slick with oil and nervous sweat. He rubbed his hands like a haggling fakir.

”Eh, would you gaze upon your munitions, most excellent General?”

”No. I would like more ginger ale, and I would like to see the finished interceptors.”

”Eh, they are not all finished, your magnificence. Our production line has suffered, eh, problems, and in order to create the finest possible ships for your majesty’s fleet we halted production to finish those repairs.” He smiled, his teeth crooked and off yellow. He squinted as if he were staring into a quasar.

”Then I shall look upon the finished interceptors, Magistrate Fitzbalt.”

”Of course, of course…”

The Interceptor Hangar was a great construct of derridium and plasteel, as silent and solemn as a cathedral. A few workmen in plastic ivory colored coats, their bald heads glinting with sweat, moved from ship to ship, palmtops glowing with a violet monochrome. They looked over each craft with meticulous diligence.

Comerca stood before the manifold ships that had been crafted for his military, ready to be used as he saw fit. Years of reducing private expenditures, years of cutting base defenses and spare part stockpile, years of careful economic practices to come to this moment. They were marvels of engineering, in their own way. A simple Dart chassis with Pegasus add-ons, unnecessary or redundant systems carefully removed or reworked to produce a craft that, although thinner in hull than the Pegasus, had a much more superior shields array. Ammunition holds had also been reduced accordingly, as the point in mind for their production was to create a craft of blitzkrieg, not long-drawn out combat. But the extra Deimos point more than made up for it. Even the profile had been reduced for superior dogfighting.

A pilot himself, Comerca knew well the weaknesses inherent in such a creation. He would still be flying in his own specifically outfitted Pegasus Interceptor. But their numbers and firepower would more than make up for any other failing, and Comerca was never much for sending military into long drawn out affairs, anyways.

Looking at the titanium, shark-like forms before him, their chassis a glossy black, Comerca thought of an array of obsidian colored metallic pinions in some great, lethal wing, attached to the falcon that was the Madorian military might, poised to descend upon the fleeing murine victims below it.

Cerene was not one to speak, often. ”Words are for fools…” she had one time said to Comerca. But now, the Praetorian guard yards behind, she spoke to her General and lover.

”They are perfect, Comerca. After the next ones are finished you will be suitably prepared for any purpose.” Her voice was a bolt of steel blue in the quiet of the Hangar. ”But I know you have something specific in mind.”

He turned, seeing her eyes gleam with the emotion of it. Admiration.

He drew her close, whispering.

”I remember you, fresh from the Alvaen massacres. You had gunned down civilians as part of the Madorian terror campaign to reduce the morale of those rebels, and I had watched from the Command Hangar, as the pilots had emerged from their craft, some faces hard, some faces weak and sallow from the brutality of it.”

Ah, yes, she had looked beautiful then, he thought. As she is now. Intelligent. Lethal.

”I saw you rise from your craft, and you had the look of a tigress. Of a killer. A reaver. I knew then that when I led, when at last I ruled, you would rule with me. I wanted you then…”

He drew her closer, into an embrace.

”…to keep my forces prepared, and my bed warm, and my nights warmer still.”

”Tell me.” She said, her voice a predatory hiss.

”Tonight. At dinner.”

Later, in a private dining room reserved for Madorian nobility, in a room of black glass and gold décor, with carpets of rich sable, a view of the Skaschere Nebula before them in all of it’s greatness. He sat back from his meal and toasted a glass of the finest Merlot in the factory’s cellar. She rose to stand with him, in a dress of shimmering white, cut boldly to pay homage to her sculpted physique. Her hair was a rich titanium, now, and it shone wonderfully in the starlight.

He poured her a glass of wine as well, and thought of how absolutely precise the moment had become like the intricate and complete internal components of a silver pocket watch. The amaranthine of the Skaschere before them as intensely perfect as the amaranthine passion between them.

And amidst the dying starlight he told her his plan, his opus…his revelation.

…

Donnel awoke, nights later, from nauseous dreams of painful lavender, violet-hued scenes of moonscapes under black space, of meteors floating like severed heads in zero g.

He vomited in the copper bucket next to his bed, and lay there for a second, listening to the languid drip of water from the ceiling, where it would pool on the floor and then drain into the bowels of the ancient station. He thought of water, draining…he was draining…

He awoke, and propped himself up, clearing his mind of the spinning, of the deep ache that had settled in over time into his depths, a sickness that would never go away, that would never get better, he knew.

Somehow he had come to the realization, months ago, that even if he were to turn from the dark and violent path he had stepped upon, it would not matter, as the damage was done. A crack that would never be repaired, but at the same time the thought had galvanized him; with no retreat, there would only be forward.

He looked at the pictures of his family by his bedside, of his mother, smiling, a mining cargo platform behind her. His father, holding Donnel’s sister in his bear- like arms. His father was a champion, in Donnel’s mind. A Viking, with the heart of a poet, he felt. But that was long ago.

The pictures lay next to stacks of diaries he had kept in those long, winding hours. He would study the Diamond Sutra, Exodus, Judges, the Tao-Te-Ching, Milton and St. Francis, gleaning strength from the words of men scratched distance centuries ago.

He cooked his breakfast by the smelter in the other room. He had tapped into the reactors and energy grid long ago, and with the proper reservations could probably go unnoticed, forever. The rads deep in this station were simply too strong, and so workmen avoided it, as did any station police. So he could stay in the dark, hidden.

Later, Donnel took a stick of the compound from the freeze unit and looked at it with a magnifier. It was like a piece of bronze, exceedingly heavy for it’s size. A derivative of the explosive his people had used.

He went across the rusted floor, silent save for the dull rattle of distant electrics, and realized that this was the moment. The final act. If this worked, this experiment he had been working on for a year, than it would be, quite simply, the start of the end. But those other possibilities, he knew, were long gone, sent by Shaitan to tempt him, he felt.

The drill was no bigger than his pinky finger, and he moved casually and with alacrity, an act he had long practiced in that darkened hold. Quickly, the drill searing into the glasteel sheet he had taken from a scrap pile weeks ago. Then the compound, followed by a thumbnail sized piece of reflectant…only severe inspection would show the finished piece to be anything other than a pockmark from a microparticle collision.

He stood back and held his breath, the nausea lurking like a blind, braying thing in the caverns of his guts. He twisted the drill in his hand, his thumb over the trigger, the device a slim stick of aluminum and plastic, save for a few micron-sized circuits. He knew the range was about five miles.

He thumbed the button and a few seconds followed…and then the muffled whump as the sheet split in twain.

Then the oxygen in the doomed craft would rush out, a reaction that would instantly and irrevocably space all within it. The crew, the passengers, anyone…dead.

He went over the schedules in his mind, knowing them by their very hour. He picked the date from the eighty he had stored in the pulsing canals of his mind.

Soon.

…

Alyscia spent most of the afternoon reviewing all of her journals. Her recorders lay in a pile next to a hairdryer and a tin of mints. TNN hummed from the vidscreen, showing a special on New Vegas.

She painted her nails, dyed her hair a rich auburn, and ordered room service while she followed the ripples of her interview with RedStorm as they spread across the pond that was the multimedia universe. In New Saipan, capes have become chic amongst the Space Baron Elite. Swords are in vogue, and stock in Italian Fencing Schools has risen by twenty percent. An Old Earth Style Japanese Anime vid show, based on Void Alliance, is being purchased by the Video Channel Consortium, and is slated for a winter release.

She thought of RedStorm, and then she thought of Argentum. Where was her mind, lately? Now she had a date, tonight. She had just leapt for it, without any logic whatsoever. Why? She had been propositioned, before. Countless times. And Alyscia had always turned down the idea for the sake of her career. But the evening with Argentum had been a blur, a whirl of Egyptian imagery and starlight, and now the interview was over, and she had a date.

She spent a few hours in communications with TNN on Mars City, Mars. Then rewriting the interview with Argentum Draconis.

Argentum Draconis…

Then an hour of her Vale Tudo workout, a regiment she had followed since the age of 19. Shower, then work at her long awaited novel, ”Glasnost”, a historical perspective. Then a few hours on some electronic tutorials, mostly Space Travel Science and Theorum.

She took a small nap, later, and dreamt of suns the color of alabaster, shining on a cyanic ocean, rolling onto platinum shores…

…

Bored, bored, bored.

Argentum worked in the gym for an hour, mostly weights and some boxing. Then he spent a few hours amidst the glass and ferroconcrete of the Mall, looking for nothing. Clothes, maybe…

Bored.

Lunch was Mandarin, mostly noodles and sliced chicken, mushrooms and onions. The waitress was probably Mandarin, herself. Her hair was a collection of jet and crimson spikes, contrasted by silver lipstick.

More reading. Some Latin translations; Francis Bacon, Umberto Eco, Marcus Aeralious…

He spent one long hour watching ships take off in the main commercial hold of Phobos. Business as usual, the various crafts hovering to the Spacing Hold, their pilots from across the galaxy, even the last of a few Star Military.

He gripped the steel bar in front of him as tightly as possible, to stop the shaking. He hoped no one noticed.

He thought about his own Archangel, somewhere back at the Vault, for a long hour, afterwards.

…

Dr. Goldman made a few phone calls, mostly to IK personnel. A slightly aloof group of individuals, but industry standard, as pilots went. Goldman did some more blood tests on Argentum’s sample, but nothing there, either.

He followed Argentum’s history dossier some more, with a psychologist’s perspective, searching for anomalies in the code. He finds a fragment, the edge of a fragment, really, like a piece of a hologram, gossamer and electric. Some experiment at Galileo.

He had a lunch of coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich, his palate the kind that still preferred the simple fare. More info from the Phobos database on Galileo, but a lot of classified material. Mostly vids and science notes he did not have the authorization to access.

Another call.

”Yes, this is a Dr. Goldmark of the Phobos research center, can I speak to Overlord Decon Frost? I was recommended by an Eldritch.”

…

Part 7= Blue Serge

Hydrosia, a stretch of space between Void Alliance and Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask. Named for the star Hydros, a great blue giant of nuclear fire, an aqua ember in all that velvet night.

The Hydrosian Asteroid Field, a belt of rock and galactic flotsam, an expanse of material, mostly iron, nickel and ancient mountainous forms, some dwarfing the peaks found on Earth or Mars. A capitol ship could get lost here, unnoticed next to the larger forms of meteors around it.

RedStorm had assembled only a few pilots for this mission. The most veteran of veterans. WitchKing, Dutch, ScadianWrath and Punisher, in Warhammers, loaded with firepower that could threaten the invulnerability of a capitol ship. They waited, comm. units silenced, hidden within the confines of a cavern of icy rock, probably millennia old.

RedStorm, Twilight Jack and Blackbolt sat opposite in space, flying Shriekers, attached magnetically to lumps of metallic cosmic ore, comm. units likewise silenced. They had been waiting for hours, powered down.

WitchKing began to wonder at the reasons for being here. Why the cloak and dagger at all? He checked his settings for the tenth time, monitored his ships power array, looked over weapons settings…they had left in the morning, early before the station had awoke. A journey of great speed, with a subspace communicae as bait being sent out on the frequencies the saboteurs had been using. Typical military operation, hurry up and wait.

The lack of comm. activity began to bother him. Too much silence. He resisted the urge to check his settings. Then he spotted a small carrier, no bigger in mass than half a dozen Claymores, surrounded by eight Electric Rapiers. They buzzed like cybernetic Japanese beetles, bristling with weaponry and ECM jammers. Vacuum Dragoons, he knew. Probably still seething at their defeat by IK and RG. A bandit unit from deep space, beyond Madoria, even. Their fighter/bombers were not the best, but they could turn on a dime, and had short ranged firepower that could allow a smart pilot to capitalize greatly on his enemy’s lax attitude at fighting so ponderous seeming a craft as the Electric Rapier.

They drifted closer, like bumblebees of derridium, sniffing for pollen on a Spring day. The carrier, ominous in it’s own right, hovered to a stop, it’s dirge-like Gotham reactors grinding to a halt.

WitchKing powered up and launched forward, afterburners grinding as it launched the Bora-made assault craft from the confines of the asteroid. He could hear the engines of Dutch and Punisher, behind him.

”Showtime.” He heard ScadianWrath say, over private comm.

”Keep cool.” Punisher responded.

RedStorm’s voice range out over wide communication channels.

”Dragoon’s, no one wants a fight. Surrender and power down your weapons for a trip back to Void Alliance space. We have reason to believe you are all accomplices in a conspiracy to disrupt Void Alliance security. Give up, come with us, and if you’re innocent than you’ll be home by tonight.”

”They’re not going to do it.” Dutch hissed over private comm.

”I’m scanning for other craft. Nothing out there, folks.” Blackbolt said.

WitchKing switched to plasma. Shields on those Rapiers are up, he thought. Dutch is right.

RedStorm watched the buzzing Rapier’s. Kept an eye on the carrier, too. ”Flank them, Jack.” He said over private comm.

”I could spread this tension over rye bread, RedStorm.” Jack said insouciantly. His Shrieker, a modified Pegasus chassis customized for Void Alliance use, moved into position, its ruby and metallic hull gleaming in the night.

The transmission from the carrier had an ugly veneer to it, under the harsh static of the Vacuum Dragoon’s comm. units. ”Powering down, we will accompany you to Void Alliance space.” RedStorm’s sensors picked up an energy flux coming from the carrier.

To WitchKing, it was like a hiccup, the same reflex’s that caused a person to drop a hot potato. An innocuous roll and lat, as Blackbolt’s Shrieker became atomized in a shudder of rending titanium. A blossom of pale yellow and blasted particles, and then he was watching the plasma missiles fly by, deadly weapons, launched by a Rapier. The carrier’s salvo of seven Deimos fired again at RedStorm, and then WitchKing was sliding under the carrier, spinning to look back, and all around him he could hear the bass rumble of ordinance and the bone jarring thrum of afterburners. The Rapier that had opened up on him was following, diving under the carrier, and then WitchKing fired a hail of plasma, spinning in a semicircle, the milky luminescence of it’s shields crumpling, and then the heat flash as his rails pulverized the vehicle to so much molten scrap, half of the Shrieker, sparking and smoking, flipping erratically into the carrier, which rocked slightly from the impact.

RedStorm latted erratically and opened fire on another Rapier that was targeting ScadianWrath. The Deimos from the carrier thundered again, but he was rolling now, the salvo ripping by. His blast torps detonated onto the systems array of the carrier, and he afterburned backwards, finishing the job on the Rapier, with ScadianWrath’s rails slicing through the flaming craft.

Twilight Jack looped around the back of the carrier, destroying the damaged weapons array, switching to target the engine components. His klaxon wailed and he latted hard right, leaving a wake of ECM’s. The Rapier’s plasma missiles flickered towards them, turning in dizzying spirals around the floating miniature suns. Jack moved in on the Rapier alongside Dutch, his Deimos sparking onto the shields until the Warhammer fired a volley of plasma rockets, detonating the craft like an old Earth powderkeg. It’s remains smoked past WitchKing, who, surrounded by two more, was flipping and circling in figure eights, too close for the Rapier’s missiles to target. Violet arcs of laser light pattered onto his shields, until with a final hard lat he demolished the smaller craft with a volley of plasma and a rail punch, the Rapier glowing like a quasar into a million fragments, it’s brother suddenly assailed by Punisher and RedStorm. He lost sight of the battle for a few seconds, as he afterburned away to avoid another plasma missile volley, fired blindly by one of the last Rapier’s. Its shields flickered from an assault by Jack and Dutch, and then he fired another rail battery, the Dragoon’s craft bursting asunder like the ones before it.

WitchKing looped and rolled, gathering his wits, coolly aware of another closing Rapier before Punisher and ScadianWrath transformed the craft into charred space flotsam with their rails. Twilight Jack’s peg nimbly avoided more laser fire, letting loose a volley of Tesla emps onto the carrier. The giant craft’s electrics flared and burned out suddenly, and it went dead in the void. The Rapier on Twilight Jack’s tail rolled in, taking shots from Jack’s own lasers, a rail battery from Dutch crippling it. WitchKing fired innocuously, scrapping the fighter/bomber from 10 clicks…

RedStorm flew through an explosion left by a Rapier, rolling as he did so, the plasma burning past his view, until he realized that the fight was over, in only a few short, andrenalized minute.

The carrier, helpless, rolling slightly from it’s own inertia, weightless and dead in the cold and silent night…

…

For Argentum, a few days past; his own miniature infinity.

He awoke one time, deep in the gulfs of night, the fluorescents of his room staying dim, creating blue shadows upon his shelves of books, his now-familiar (but weren’t they always familiar?) furniture, his computer monitors, the window into space.

He watched as a few Galspan carriers docked with Phobos, by the Star Patrol wing.

In the gloom of deep night, he recalled the dinners he had with Alyscia, the museum visit, the trip to the Phobos aquariums, the only deep space containments for non- cloned sea life. He recalled brilliantly hued Koi, dolphins playing and rolling in green eratz seas, octopi slithering across the stretch of plasteel, eyes meditative in their cold, alien wisdom…

Together they had viewed art and sculpture in route to Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask. He talked to her of Greek myth, of Titans, of the Fall of the House of Orestes, a stretch of centuries as a family rolled like a wounded animal in it’s own blood through untold Bacchalian winters, all from a curse inflicted by Hermes over a chariot race, the curse eventually lifted by Athena, the goddess of wisdom…

In the half light of candles at an Italian style café, he took her hand, watching the shades flicker and shift from the dancing candlelight, and drank deep of her words, her thoughts, her analysis on modern reporting or 23rd Century literature, of her work, of her…

He sat upright through all of these thoughts, thoughts that seemed alien somehow, useless somehow and yet valuable in their own sovereign nation, and watched a trio of Pegasi burn through the sea of night, rolling like dolphins in that blue and quiet welkin.

He watched the long hours stretch and unfold themselves; he watched Alyscia curl beside him and breathe softly in her sleep, probably dreaming of Earth summers and Saturn winters.

…

Devil was getting really tired of having to sleep in zero G.

During his days at the RG advanced training academy, he had spent hours in simulated zero G, mostly getting in and out of cockpits, refueling, refitting and basically getting used to stressful type movements without gravity, in the event of a catastrophic reactor failure the first thing to go would be the gravity. His favorite class had been the zero G combat course, he had a certificate of honorable mention of it, somewhere.

But this floating, tumbling and trying to sleep was for other maniacs. Hell, he was on a base full of ‘em. Dave was certainly a few torps shy of a salvo, and Merchant seemed to subsist on a steady diet of soy, beer, nitrolite and synthetic crab on rye crackers. He had boxes of the stuff. That Circle 66 guy never slept, and if he did, Devil never saw him. He drank pots of steaming coffee and often ate a sandwich with one hand while working with the other. He would spend his spare time watching old Earth Jet Li vids, attempting to decipher computer codes. He was Russian, apparently, straight from Moscow. Some of the cold of those Russian winters seemed to be steeped in his bones, as he would turn the air conditioning down increment by increment until the other guys, freezing, would insist that he turn it back to tolerably human levels.

Mr. Mojo was a gadget freak, and he did not stop with just his limb. One time, without any real warning, he grabbed Devil, took him to his vast assortment of cybernetics, and with great ceremony he described each and every one of his ten extra arms he kept in storage. Some Japanese Nikons, some Korean, and a few gold types made in New York City, on earth. He was apparently from New York, and rarely wore anything but his camo a-shirt or a Brooklyn High T-shirt.

Grabbing, that was the hardest to get used to. With the zero G, it was common to simply yank a person from mid-air, quite literally, and pull them to a halt or in the direction you wanted them to go.

Space runs were a seriously discussed event, long ours behind the cockpit, flitting about and hovering to pick up far flung transmissions, to be brought back and played over and over again, replicated and distributed to the media-starved crew.

Technically, Devil was in charge. He had full command over all of the tiny station, and all of the pass codes and keys. But they had such a perfect ballet going, in terms of duty assignments and other essential work, there seemed little reason to throw his weight around. If anything, he felt a little off the ball.

One time, performing diagnostics on the cold fusion nuclear core of the station, he had apologized to Mr. Mojo about his slowness.

Mr. Mojo smiled broadly and gestured all around with his cybernetic arm. Servos chimed sequentially in the prosthetic. ”Na problem, Devil-boy. We all a little slow, here, to begin with. Then in a week, it’ll be old hat. You’ll know it. Been here two months, I could build another one of these, and I did not really pay attention!”

Devil tossed a plastic box of routers to the larger man. ”What else are we doin’ after this?”

Mr. Mojo caught the box and tore the lid off easily with his cybernetic. ”You on break, I’m gonna check the weapons systems, reconfigure the blast torps.”

”Naw, I’m curious, I’ll go with ya.”

But a week or so later, he seemed to have a rhythm going, he felt the vibe in his bones. Work, sleep, eat, work, occasional R&R, maintain his Pegasus, and some forays out of the station to keep the skills honed and investigate the profoundly barren area around it.

Devil got tired of rolling around sleeplessly. He slipped a black pair of cotton gi pants and a Twilight Jack concert shirt and drifted down the central tube to the mess hall.

Mess hall is a dumb word for it. How about mess closet?

Merchant and Mr. Mojo were eating dinner, or breakfast, or whatever it was to them at the time. Devil knew instinctively that Circle 66 was at the communications relay, and Dave was either monitoring tachyon particle fluctuations, or performing maintenance duties, or both.

”Y’all are crazy, man.” Mr. Mojo said.

”Makes sense to me.” Merchant responded.

”What?” Devil said, trying to get the vacuum coffee dispenser to work. Breakfast would be microwaved containers of beef stroganoff.

”Merchant here just put into committee a theological apologetic that according to the Book, man has no right to be in space.”

”Soddam and Gommorah, I tell you.”

”Why?” Devil said, sipping his java.

”Because,” Merchant said, ”says in the Bible that God told man he was to have the Earth, and all it’s animals, and subdue it.”

Mr. Mojo took a swallow of nitrolite. ”Y’all are crazy, man.”

”-but it says nothing that man is to have the firmament, or space. So it’s off limits, we are not supposed to have it.”

”So what are we doing here, Merchant?” Devil asked, taking a bite of his food.

”Soddam and Gommorah, all mankind will get punished for it.”

”So what are you doing here, man? Isn’t that a sin?” Mr. Mojo punctuated his statement by stabbing the air with his spork.

”Get thee behind me, Satan.” Merchant laughed.

”I don’t have no truck with the New Testament, man. Keep the sequel to yourself.”

”What do you mean?” Devil asked.

Mr. Mojo produced a Star of David form his shirt, on the same chain as his dog tags. ”Old school Old Testament, man. I’m Jewish.”

Devil looked at him.

”What?” Mr. Mojo said. ”Brother can’t be one the chosen people?”

”A shalom alanka, man.” Devil said.

”No Muhammed either, man. Unless he’s Moses or Ezekiel, I don’t want to hear it.”

Merchant laughed. ”Why wouldn’t an African American be Jewish?”

”Wrong, man. I’m Earth American, but my family was French, and they are descended from Persians, who themselves were actually Moorish.”

Devil made a quizzical expression. ”So are you French-American, Persian-American, or Moorish-American?”

Mr. Mojo laughed. ”I’m Hassidic-Martian, motherf*cker! Red Kosher Planet, all the way!”

The three laughed.

A few hours later Devil was in the main station room, going over the weapon’s systems array with Circle 66.

The Russian was bobbing upside down, surround by couplings, wiring, floating tech tools, and assorted panels. Devil stared at the ten relay vidscreens than were placed all around the command chair.

”These are the blast torp launchers, these are the disruptors, this is the main Deimos array, and these are our Helios.

”Have you guys ever had to use them?”

Circle 66 was wearing some expensive European mirrorshades, with gold frames. Devil stared at the two images that stared back at him.

”No. No one knows we are here, and jammers keep us cloaked. No ship smaller than a carrier or capitol ship could make the journey here.”

”So what do we do if a capitol ship ends up on our doorstep?”

”Quite possibly, our their tach signature would alert us, giving us about fifteen minutes.”

”What good is that? Would we just fly away?”

”We are reimbursed quite nicely by our respective clans for the danger we face, out here.”

”Who knows we are out here?”

”Aside from Dominion, Highlander, Grimbrand and Rustbucket?”

”Ya.”

”No one.”

”What about the pilots who brought me here?”

”Jasper 7000’s. An emp pulse wiped their memory banks an hour after they dropped you off. Primary programming took over, they flew back home, and the ship’s digital logs were erased.”

”So if all goes to hell, how do we escape?”

”We are reimbursed quite nicely by our respective clans for the danger we face, out here.”

Devil blinked. ”Why did you join the military, Circle 66?”

”The last twenty-seven generations of my family have all been in the military.”

”So the entertainment industry was kind of not an option, right?”

Circle 66 braced himself against a wall and opened a can of carbonated nitrolite. He took a long draught from the fist-sized can.

”And miss out on all this?”

The pale neon of all the vidscreens, reflected in duplicate in his mirrorshades, as if they were vidscreens themselves.

…

It could only be said with absolute certainty that the mercenary group known as The Devil’s Fist existed on the very fringe of the Fringe, deep in holds sequestered from the rest of the galaxy, within a nebula whose radiation fried the system’s of any ship other than their own that ventured too near.

They were assassins and mercenaries, with a code of conduct that was nothing but arcane to any but themselves. It was known for certain that they hired from every part of the galaxy, but careful cosmetic (and more than a few across the galaxy whispered, psychological) manipulation kept their original identities secret. Most clans regarded them at the best as thugs, at the worst, terrorists.

Fontaine had a few descriptive words of his own.

”Atrocity! We are Madorians! We need not hire such debris!”

Both Fontaine and Comerca strode down the corridor, both dressed in their finest military uniforms to meet with the emissary. Comerca had gone with a more subdued black and scarlet, with sashes and medals. Fontaine’s was identical, save for his fully functional sabre. Both wore standard issue laspistols, holstered at their sides.

The hallway was composed of cool green marble and was lit by sodium burners. Praetorians flanked the sides of it at every twenty feet. The hallway led to a set of powered doors, which opened into the Diplomatic Hold, reserved for the purpose of greeting official visitors from other territories in this part of the Fringe but rarely used.

Comerca stopped and faced his second in command.

”No, it is not atrocity. It is business. We have other matters to attend to, and that means our forces divided cannot possibly hold back the garrisons at the vault for very long, so we need these mercenaries.”

”Enough of these mercenaries. I feel ill enough that we have hired those Vacuum Dragoons. The Devil’s Fist are another matter entirely. They are said to worship strange gods…perform mystic rites…ceremonies of blood and fire. I have only seen two in my life, but I have seen their ships often enough. They go beyond piracy, Your Majesty.”

”Don’t we? Aren’t we pirates? Any military of any nation in desperate times requisitions supplies for their purposes, in the name of the state. That is no different than piracy. Besides…whose lives would you prefer to risk? Our own pilots, or others paid enough to die in their stead?”

Comerca’s eyes glittered from the jaundiced light above.

”This is a desperate and questionable maneuver, but I see your logic.”

”Madoria is in the throes of desperate and questionable times, friend. Much of our treasuries have been depleted to perform the maneuver we have been planning, a maneuver that I have been calculating with great care, for a cause that will guarantee Madoria’s military supremacy for generations. We need these reavers.”

For a fraction of a second a thought bubbled up from the dank waters of Fontaine’s mind. Madoria’s? Or yours…?

The doors hissed open and they beheld the craft that belonged to the member of the notorious mercenary unit. It was as if the eternal night of space itself had birthed an Interceptor. A Pegasus modification, similar to the one’s the Void Alliance employed. With odd systems that Fontaine hardly recognized sequenced about it’s hull. Odd symbols the color of electrum crossed it’s frame at intervals.

Fontaine watched Comerca’s face. His countenance seemed suffused with some vast reservoir of confidence. Over his shoulder, the mechanics in the hold shifted nervously.

…

The four of them stood in the darkened space that was Comerca’s throne room. Comerca had cleared it out, save for his Ruby Throne and a glowing holomap of the galaxy. Principle on the map was the glowing projection of the Vault, like a floating fortress of derridium and plasteel. The glowing aqua colored orbs of the nearby Tach gates floated within the holo.

The hold was darkened and silent, save for their meeting. The room seemed larger, without all of the usual court. The lights had been dimmed to aid in viewing the holo, whose glow cast a lurid radiance upon them all.

For secrecy’s sake Comerca had dismissed the guards. An advisor had taken him aside and whispered that the emissary’s body seethed with cybernetics, but Comerca was unconcerned by the news.

Fontaine eyed the Merc. To Fontaine, the man seemed like something manufactured, not born. Black plastic and fabric pilot’s suit, covered in devices and gear. A high collar, concealing most of his neck. Gloves, high glossy boots, a helmet constructed of some plasteel like material, with a faceplate like a skull. Medals and insignias, alien to the three, adorned various portions of his suit. Various other decorum covered his outfit at intervals; skulls the size of a man’s thumb, arcane glyphs of black and gold, trophies of bits of smoldered metal, perhaps from ships. His skin was almost white, probably cosmetic cybernetic or maybe even nanotech. It shone almost like plastic in the luminescence. He was absolutely bald, and his eyes were the color of wet coal, no pupils. A smell exuded from him, a musky combination of pepper, gun oil, and cordite. Cerene found it hard to decide what the Merc was looking at. Indeed, he seemed to stare to the side of all of them, never looking any of them in the eye, but not averting his gaze. To Cerene, it seemed as if he was meditating. Comerca wondered at the properties of his eye’s mechanics.

”That is my plan, sir. I need your forces to cover mine, if it is too work.” Comerca offered the Merc some wine in a glass carved of a single emerald. He took it, looking at the item as if he were holding an unfamiliar artifact.

”You are trusting with me, General.” His voice had a deep, hollow, British accent to it.

”I have to be, we are to be partners, if you accept the contract.”

”Do you know our terms?”

”Yes, I am well familiar. You will not take contracts on religious vessels, non-Corp. civilians, medical personnel ships or Luddites, from what I know.”

”Or Star Patrol.”

”You will not have to fight Star Patrol, if all goes well.”

”Phobos will surely send aid.”

”True…”

”That is not a problem. We will not attack Star Patrol personnel, but we will defend ourselves. That is permitted.”

”That is fortunate.”

The Merc downed the glass in a single draught. Fontaine realized that the man never blinked, and it made him uneasy, in a small way.

”We will help your forces hit the base, and the ships around it. I have heard little news about the Vault. It is still a Star Military facility, I trust?”

Comerca’s eyes seemed to glitter in the light of the holo projection.

”…Yes.”

Fontaine spoke.

”You do not seem uneasy about the odds, sir.”

”We have fought Star Military before. Besides, your plan is rich with strategy. A blitzkrieg-a bloody, bloody, gambit. I find the poetry of it enticing. But why all of this, General?”

”I seek new technology, sir.”

”Yes, you Madorian’s have problems in that area, no?”

”What do you mean?”

”I mean that you excel in mass production and replication, but not creation. Why?”

Comerca blinked. He had never thought of it.

Cerene spoke.

”What of your organization, mercenary?”

”We create nothing. We only buy or steal. Mostly from other pirates.”

”You consider yourself pirates?”

The Merc looked at Cerene squarely, his eyes like black glass.

”We are a coalition of independent contractors who conduct business as fairly as possible, for money. No more, no less.”

”Rumors abound, sir, at your possible origins.” Cerene’s voice seemed full of curiosity.

The Merc‘s face registered absolutely no emotion whatsoever. He looked at Cerene squarely and then ever so slightly opened his mouth, a harsh electric gargle squelching from him, like static.

”This is SoulReamer zero-zero of the Devil’s Fist. I have gone over the contract, and my wing, as well as my associate’s wings, shall accept it. Please send the credit amount we discussed beforehand to our investors. Have an excellent evening, your majesty.”

Fontaine almost dropped his glass. Comerca seemed bemused, and he regarded the expression on Cerene. She didn’t flinch. A half-smile came to her lips.

The Merc’s head swiveled to regard Comerca. His voice resumed it’s original tone. ”This business meeting is concluded. Your information shall not be revealed to anyone, as per our agreement. Thank you for the wine, it had an unusual composition, and I admire the craftsmanship of the glass it came in.”

He turned and set the glass down on a nearby silver tray.

”I must now go to my ship. Preparations are to be made, if all is to be ready for your assault. I trust you have much to do as well.”

Comerca set his own glass on the tray as well. He turned the holo off, and the sodium burners cackled to life with a hiss of sulfur.

”Yes, mercenary. Thank you for a wonderful lesson in cybernetic enhancement. I was not aware of such technologies.”

The Merc laughed, his mouth opening slightly, his voice somehow deeper.

”It is an interesting story, one I would like to tell you. But not nearly as interesting as the story you are creating for your foes. Happy hunting, to you all.”

The Merc left the room, accompanied by an escort of Praetorians. He seemed to be unaware of them as they led the black clad man to his ship.

Comerca turned and looked at his companions. He beamed munificently.

”Let’s go view our new ships again, shall we?”

…

Argentum made breakfast with great verve, coffee bubbling from a nearby machine, the smell of warm butter permeating the air. His kitchen had all the tools he needed, spatulas, heaters, various bowls and plates. He mad pancakes, his personal favorite. The butter was cloned, but it seemed well enough.

He thought of the effects of the medication, and of his visits with Dr. Goldmark. They seemed almost idle, discussions of past events, remorse, worries, but nothing the doctor could really use. He asked once about the accident at Galileo, but Argentum could not really give him any information. He had only remembered the hazy silver light eclipsing everything…

Argentum had not seen any random fires for a while. Goldmark had asked about it, discussing with Argentum that the medication was undoubtedly doing its work. When asked about his dreams, Argentum could really give no answers…the medication made him slumber like the dead.

”I miss flying, though.” He said to Seraphim.

The old German nodded, almost sadly, seated at the table, a cup of coffee before him, steaming. He wore his IK uniform, the formal wear making his appearance all the more dignified.

”Than fly.”

Argentum’s hand shook perceptibly.

”See? I hate it. I can’t even think of it. I quake. It’s ridiculous.”

Seraphim smiled avuncularly.

”You can fly, you can. It is your state to fly. That is what you do. Few people know what they are meant to do. You have that.”

Argentum set himself up with a stack of pancakes. He applied the syrup sparingly.

”I feel so worthless, though. I can’t take a desk job. Never wanted that. I know what I can do. I feel stupid that I never really appreciated it before…”

”Even with modern medicine, with all of it’s chemicals, it’s cybernetics, it’s nanotechnology, it’s research…a man who does not want to live will die. Science will not fake it.”

Seraphim sipped his coffee, and continued.

”The same with psychotherapy. All the drugs, all the treatments…nothing. You must want to get better. But you are better. You know this. Yet you will not realize this. The mind affects the brain, mein wunderkind. But the brain affects the mind, as well.”

”Then what am I doing wrong?”

”Have you ever stared at the sun? One that is close? I did, one time. When I was young…I thought it was a coin, that I could take it. For days my eyes always could see it. A retinal after-image. It went away, eventually, but years later I would sometimes glimpse it, a faint disk, like a memory of the face of God. My mind would think that it was there, and my eyes had to follow suit.”

Argentum suddenly felt all of the hairs on his arms rise up, on his neck, his back. Every sound seemed muffled and distorted, like coming out of a drunken haze…everything recedes and then you are alert, sober…nauseous.

He turned around.

”I am crazy.”

The voice laughed.

”My poor reasoning friend. All of your education, all of your learning, and yet you fear. Fine then. I am not real. I am a temporary hallucination. Yes, I died. In the Galfried Quadrant. I was attacked by Madorians. I slagged many, but I perished, as did more than a few of my wing. A lot of them got home, though. I guess I am a hero. Not that it matters. Everyone dead is a hero, in a way. I killed how many?”

Argent shook a little.

”Twelve. There is a plaque commemorating it on the space station.”

”Ah. Vanity of vanities…all is vanity. Then I am a ghost. A spook. A hallucination. A figment. I am your imagination. I am your mind telling you that you are well, through the memories of a long lost friend. That will be it. Does it matter? I think not.”

Argent turned, his throat closing, his teeth rattling.

Seraphim sat there, as real as the coffee, as the smell of butter, as the glint of stars from the window behind him.

”You must know that you are well not only here, friend Argentum-”

He tapped his temple.

”-but here, as well.”

He tapped his heart.

The door beeped.

Argentum paused, and realized that Seraphim was gone.

He stood for a second, and leaned against the counter. Breathing deep. Exhaled.

He opened the door.

Rabid Chicken.

…

The Dragoon sat in the wooden chair, staring at them defiantly.

The room was little more than a cement hole, deep in The Main Hold of the Void Alliance. There was a sink, a drain, a table, some salt, some drugs, a steel toilet, and a sodium burner. The air smelled like damp fear.

WitchKing stared back at the man. The Dragoon was a tough looking man. Built like a pit bull, with rad scars on his face. They had taken off his shoes and shirt, leaving him in his pants. Additional scars tan across his body. One of his teeth were missing.

Twilight Jack and RedStorm stood next to WitchKing.

Long silence passed between them. The Dragoon spit on the floor at the Void Alliance pilot’s feet.

RedStorm’s back was turned to them all. He stared at the wall, as if the concrete was of great interest to him.

WitchKing spoke.

”We could not save your friends. Too late. The cyanide capsules proved lethal. Our doctor’s barely saved you. Cigarette?”

The man sneered.

Twilight Jack picked up a silver injection pistol from the table and gave the man a shot in his arm.

”What’s that for?” His voice sounded ugly and full of murder.

Jack spoke almost light-heartedly, as if he was a boy describing a vid he had seen.

”To keep you conscious. We need you awake.”

The Dragoon spit again.

”I will tell you nothing. I am prepared to die. We are trained to endure torture…I have been cut, beaten, had bones broken…I will tell you nothing. You waste your time.”

WitchKing’s expression did not change. He seemed bored.

”Tell us what Madoria has planned. You were just bag men, fair enough. Tell us. We can have you on a ship, with provisions, within a day. You were just doing a job, we all know that. We are all professionals here.”

”Ha!” The Dragoon laughed. It sounded like a mad dog’s bark. ”You have no choice. Law requires you must turn me over to Star Patrol. So do so. I do not care. We knew the equation when we signed up.”

It was Jack’s turn to laugh.

”Law? What is law? A collection of parables told by an Aesop who is an idiot, to an audience that does not care. Law is something people tell themselves exists. We are the Void Alliance. We make our own laws. Spies have no rights, and get no quarter. Give up. You lost. Tell us the big plan, the big hoo-rah, and I can write it down and we can call it a day.”

The Dragoon laughed again.

RedStorm turned and produced a gyrojet pistol. He shot the man’s foot off in an explosion of fragmented bone and red matter. The Dragoon’s face went white as sea foam, and then he gaped his mouth open too shriek, cut off as WitchKing briskly wrapped his mouth closed with duct tape. Then the tall pilot set down the tape and forced the Dragoon’s arm up, so his hand was revealed. RedStorm aimed at the limb as casually as one would point a remote control at a vidset.

Jack whispered in the man’s ear.

”Well, that’s about as good as it’s gonna get, dear boy. You win. Keep your trap shut. Your ship logs have enough communications for us to to piece together what’s going on. Now you have no choice, though. The tape is permabound. Molecular glue, need a torch to take it off. If you changed your mind, wouldn’t matter, removing it would take your face off, as well. This is just recess, since class is over. Blackbolt was a good friend of ours, and we have decided to celebrate his demise the way Blackbolt would have probably wanted us to.”

The Dragoon’s eyes were rolling eggs of agony. He quaked and made sounds in his throat, as if he were coughing.

WitchKing patted the man on the shoulder like a big brother.

”No words, mercenary! You were brave, we know that! Good job! Don’t worry about a thing, we will take it from here.”

RedStorm began to squeeze the trigger…

It was going to be a long day for everybody.

…

EZBOARD EXCERPT<<<<<<<<<

ICONIANKNIGHTSCOMMUNICATION<<<<<<<<<

”RABIDCHICKEN”/POST/678<<<<<<<<<

AUGUST/28/2367<<<<<<<<<

TOPIC/ARGENTUMDRACONIS<<<<<<<<<

hey everybody whats up I saw Argentum and I dropped off his arch like flying an albatross hate those things, prefer my peg, he said he is good, but he looked all shaky, don’t know man, hope he snaps out of it, he doesn’t need to be in the looney bin, haha, but really, I felt bad, like maybe he needed sleep or something, he says he will be out of it in no time, I only joke cause I know the guy, sound as a rock, right, I told him he needs to take a break, set the controls down, the clan will still be around but I dunno, looks like he wants to fly, hate to see anybody all messed up, think he needs just to lay off, ya know, get some shaved, you know what, ummm, good stuff, does a body good, hooray for boobies, seriously, send his some posts and call him, let him know the clan has his back, I am gonna hang out here and see those punks called star patrol none of them could take any of us, but they are boy scouts I guess, yeah, Argentum wants to come back, I am not worried but I am not gonna gnaw his leg off, no tittie bars here, hey Merlin I gave him his epee thing, big ol pig sticker, he was glad to have it back, good idea, felt like santa claus, ho ho ho, see ya’ll soon…

EXCERPT COMPLETE<<<<<<<<<

…

Part 8= Cowgirl

The Carpathian, fully repaired from the Vacuum Dragoon attack on the Altec/Lansing corporate platforms, hovered deep inside a gas nebula one light year from the Vault.

Stryder stood aboard the bridge command, watching the vast and carmine expanse of the gas nebula. The radiation hid the Carpathian from view of sensors and the like, at the sacrifice of preventing outside communications. Not that it mattered, the Carpathian had all that it needed. Inferno torps, magnetically guided typhoon missiles, a plethora of Deimos, quasar class particle projection cannons. Twenty IK starships slept within its admantium/derridium belly, and twenty pilots were aboard the Capitol class ship, one of the finest in the IK fleet. While not a technological marvel, at least, not compared to Star Patrol technology, it could still perform deep space voyages with tremendous ease. The Carpathian was also equipped with many redundant reactors and systems, for the sake of dependability. To Stryder, it was as much a home as his Pegasus or his home on Earth, his realm…his sanctum.

He glanced around the bridge. A big place, all chrome and faux brass, data and communications transmission screens at every turn. Three decks in the room alone, with steel IK symbols everywhere. Exposed rivets and couplings-no carpet or drapes here. No frills. To Stryder, it was as if the ship’s designers had ruthlessly scoured from their blueprints any notion that this was anything but a military ship. The dark décor of it focused it’s crew, kept them on track. Spartan, he thought. Down to the drab olive chairs and worktables. He put his attentions back on the data transmissions before him.

The Dominion officer’s report had been typical of the Covert Operations department of IK. A great deal of information, sparse in opinion or insight. Not that it needed to be. Stryder was prepared to formulate his own opinions.

He sipped his coffee. The ensign’s next to him worked with great zeal, and it suddenly annoyed him. Not that it was kiss-ass, just made him feel like he was out of place. Lances could bug the hell out of him, if they fawned all over high-ranking officers.

High-ranking…how many years had it been? No telling. He had been on the Carpathian, off and on, for five. He could remember ten with IK, before being assigned here. But it was all irrelevant. After light years, time did weird things, in an abstract, behind-the-scenes way. Too much thinking…sometimes things became so familiar that they were new again. Sometimes he looked at his Pegasus and felt like a Lance, the Overlord tags snapping him out of it.

He stared deeply into the screens of data before him. A Data Officer walked up to him and handed Stryder an info disk.

”Overlord Stryder, here is a complete list of all IK pilots within Vault space. Only a handful, I am afraid. Rabid Chicken was aboard Phobos, last he reported. As was Argentum. He is going through psychiatric treatment, however…should I take him off the list?”

The question irked Stryder. Argentum…God, what happened? Some sort of combat stress? Where were they all going? Space could do that, but the cold vacuum was enough, why kill the mind as well, when the environment was so tough to the human body?

”Yes…take him off. As long as he is a patient, he will not be flying, as far as I know.”

”Yes sir.”

Stryder began to examine the data before him again…but in an unfocused way…seeing not the whole of it, but the angles, the cracks in the structure of the information he had. Statistical inference from multiple sources; media, military or otherwise. To get the underlying spirit of the data…it’s Zen.

Old trick, to Stryder. He read all of the reports, from the commercial records, the seemingly random pirate attacks, the spikes and valleys of travel through the area, the sightings of possible deep space craft, the overview of Star Military leaving, the movement around adjacent sectors, especially near Madoria, the history of the region, TNN stories…nothing concrete, that you could grip and squeeze, but instinct had told him that conflict was like planetary seismic activity. You could almost sense it on a fundamental level, before the dogs started howling.

Data had become water, to the IK Overlord. Droplets of binary joining together to become vast oceans of information, with it’s currents, it’s eddies. There was an ebb and flow to it, if you read enough transmissions. The soft focus bringing out the background message…like a subliminal chanting from the Cathedrals of the Gods of War.

Or maybe you are too suspicious, you old space derelict.

No, he told himself. It’s called intuition. Foolish to ignore it.

”Knight Lucid, bring the Carpathian to the edge of the nebula. We are staying here for a few more weeks. Monitor transmissions around the Vault and Phobos, and update me every hour. News reports, open comm…anything. Tell the pilot’s to have their ships ready. No modifications. Any pilot who can’t get his craft out of here in five minutes loses r and r, got it?”

”Affirmative, sir.”

”More coffee, sir?” An Ensign next to him asked cheerily.

Stryder resisted the urge to throw the cup at the young man’s smiling head.

”No, Ensign, I will get it myself…I need to get away from this desk. Data headache.”

The vermilion mists of the nebula surrounding the Carpathian whirled silently, as it had done so for ten trillion years. The Carpathian was little more than a mote in the bloody folds of its ruddy expanse.

Argentum stood on a bridge within the central greenhouse of Phobos. A great domed construct, the roof an icy marine color, almost three miles of plants, trees, grasses and other foliage. Artificial breezes stirred the leaves of cloned oaks, maples and sycamores. Here and there he could see patients and personnel walking amongst the unexpected oasis of green in the ubertech that was the Phobos architecture.

He was wearing normal clothes, khakis, tennis shoes, gray sweater. He had thrown on a leather IK jacket to remind himself, but his uniform lay next to his flight leathers and helmet, in the steel trunk in his closet.

It had been good to see Rabid Chicken, to see one of his own, after so much time had spent away. He had been surprised to see his epee, after so long. The dueling sword was a precious object, given to him by his last instructor, before the man had died. The old maestro had passed away without children, and had given Argentum the blade from his deathbed.

He saw Alyscia walking towards him, across the bridge. It was cold in the greenhouse, but after years of living in artificial environments, some people liked that. She wore a gray sweater with a matching beret, and gold rimmed glasses.

She stood next to him now, and he smiled.

She smiled back.

They walked the length of the greenhouse, finally making their way to the vast rows of cherry trees. Pink blossoms floated like so much rain.

”What are you going to do now, Argentum?”

”I don’t know, really. If I can never fly again, then I will just work more with IK, or go corporate. I have money invested-” Nearby, beyond Alyscia’s shoulder, a tree began to burn. Argentum froze.

”I have to leave soon, Argentum. I don’t know if I will ever come back here.”

Argentum watched the flames dance along the branches and ignite its flowers one by one.

”I understand. You have been kept too long, and I know you are proud of the story. You mentioned that TNN wants to promote you.”

”I want to still stay in touch with you…”

”Of course. I will give you my number at IK central.”

”Argentum…”

”Yes?”

She looked at him for the longest moment. Behind her, the tree continued to blaze, while the petals fell around him.

”I have enjoyed being with you. You are one of the two most interesting people I have ever met. I never intended to be here this long. I want to stay, but my career is just beginning.”

A pause of silence between them.

”And mine is just ending.”

”You are a resourceful person, Argentum. I know you are not so simple that piloting is all you can do. I wish I knew more about what is happening…but I never wanted you to feel like you had to tell me. If you ever have to call…for any reason…”

He cupped her cheek slightly, looked at her, and thought of Marie. His mind felt as if it were lost in a gravity well from years ago, beyond time and, perhaps, space.

She smiled, and he kissed her, while the cherry blossoms fell around them.

…

Part 9

DeathGiver lost the three Madorian officers for a week, and that sent him into a panic he had not expected.

It had become an obsession, DeathGiver knew. He could not even place why. He knew where the Medical Vessels were going, and a little of what was intended for their use, but otherwise it wall all so much occult lore. But still he pursued…for what?

He sat in one of the Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask mallplexes, sipping coffee. He had done a few runs in the last few days, enough to pay the bills, nothing extreme. He knew that the Madorian Deep-Space Freighter had not moved from it’s docking port. It floated there in the cold vacuum, the medical freighters still within.

The Hangar Bay Corridor remains as active as it has always been.

”Because you hate them. You want revenge. You are tired of running, of being so purposeless.” He said out loud, to himself.

But that wasn’t entirely true.

Quite simply, DeathGiver was a mercenary, plain and simple. He stayed within the largely neutral environs of Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask because Star Patrol was not here, and neither was there a clan presence. He had black marks on his record with every single clan. If he flew to someplace like the Vault, he could be blasted on sight, if he was lucky, arrested for life. Those, he realized, were the facts. Which is why he remained here.

Why did Comerca want those medical freighters? The Madorians made their own, he had seen them. He largely forbade his own people from venturing outside Madorian space, most of Madoria’s commercial trade was controlled by the military. Why possess vessels that were far more expensive, with extensive hardwired encryption codes that were-

”-good at any starbase in the the galaxy. Without any questions asked. Flash your emergency signal and you got a back door right into the hospital facility. No civilized starbase, corporate, clan, commercial or military would deny a medical freighter access, due to the possible loss of life.”

Oh my God.

The hairs on the backs of his forearms stood straight up. The coffee suddenly tasted like spit and turpentine, and the room seemed to spin ever so slightly. It was suddenly all so clear, so perfect, so utterly apparent. All of those conversations, all of those overheard plans, plans he only half understood, a rubric spoken in Japanese, whose thaumaturgy was now, to Deathgiver, completely obvious. Damn.

He paid his bill. Going through options that he had.

Damn.

O.k. Could he tell the authorities, here? No, to the G/P/T corporate affiliates, the Madorians were just another client. No Star Patrol, no illegal sanctions, no trade embargo. And he was just another contract merc.

Walking through the mallplex, amidst plasteel and chrome, intoxicated by the smells of burnt krill, air conditioning, human bodies, cheap electrics, the scent of plastic and damp soil, under the archipelago of ferns and palm trees that made you almost forget you were in space, DeathGiver felt the first buzz of it.

Being watched.

He stopped and stared at the elevators, the escalators, the numbed faces of all the corporate worker drones…the blank expressions of the corporate cops. People who just lived here, for whatever purpose, day by day. Thanking God that pirates like DeathGiver used to be did not take it all over and steal whatever would fit into their freighters.

He spotted, only briefly, a man in a pilot’s suit with green hair, all spiked up, following behind at a measured walk. Or maybe he didn’t.

He picked up the pace a little. He could suddenly feel the eye of every possible optical tech, gazing upon him from six angles. Could the Madorians buy that? Could they buy off security?

He spent an hour cutting through the various facilities, areas that got more and more corporate as he ventured deeper into the starbase. He flashed his independent operative chip every once and a while.

Natalie. He had to speak to Natalie. He remembered that she worked in the acquisitions department for Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask.

He realized, suddenly, under the whirling holo of a fast food stand, next to an atm/macronet/comm console, that he had no weapons. You had to go black market to get those. In fact, he had not even seen a laspistol for a year, except for the stunguns that security carried.

Stupid, he thought. How could they know I was keeping track of them? I am just another merc, he thought…another face in the crowd. I’m being paranoid.

No, he answered himself. You’ve asked around. Not a lot, but enough. You’ve talked to bartenders, to bouncers, to some traders…they can all talk, be bought, be threatened…

No, those officers want to stay low. Whacking somebody could draw too much attention.

That’s why you wait until you are about to leave before you go whacking anybody.

He found her at ”The Mandarin”, a big Chinese food place that had been here since before G/P/T had bought the facility from a competitor years before DeathGiver had settled here. The place was all red silk and cloned teak, with designs of dragons, mythical heroes and the occasional gold Buddha. Neon blue Kanji juxtaposed with vids of old kung-fu movies. Holo-advertisements of Tao beer. Over the bar, Fong Sai Yuk was beating up some guys with broadswords, using an umbrella.

Truthfully, DeathGiver hated the place, too much like a nightclub.

She was sitting next to the remnants of her meal, probably chow mein and a grip of egg rolls. Her hair was still a brilliant corporate violet, matching her dress, her nails, her lipstick. She had a Glasdec tattoo just over her eyebrow, probably a promotion.

She froze when she saw him.

”Hey.” He said.

”Hey. Sit down.” She moved a bowl out of his way.

”They still payin’ you what you are worth?”

”Not that much. Enough. I got a transfer in a month. Maybe a moon, or even a planet.” She was still a little cold.

He loomed in a little.

”Natalie, I need your help. Seriously.”

Her eyes were a pale gold, fresh cyberoptics. Expensive; she carried the look well.

”Joey, I can’t help you anymore. You know that. I have a future, now.”

He glanced around the place…at the pillars, the mirrored Feng Shui icons. At the table next to him, a fat Tech was ordering orange chicken.

”Natalie, some people could get hurt. Really. I could get hurt.”

”Why do you suddenly care?”

”Natalie, why am I suddenly Adolf Hitler?”

”I read your bio in the Glasdec corporate database, ”DeathGiver”. I know your history.”

”You didn’t care before.”

”It matters now.”

”Natalie, listen…”

He told her it all…about Bennet. The Madorians. Where he came from. What he had done. He told her about the medical freighters, the officers, everything he could think of. He told her what he thought might happen.

She took it all in, drinking some jasmine tea. She seemed to soften a bit.

”Why do you care now?”

DeathGiver looked down at his hands. ”I don’t know. I got tired or something. I’m tired of the work I’m doing. I’m sick of this station. Then those Madorian officers were at my table, I started listening because I had not heard Japanese in a while, and I figured out who they were.”

”What if you’re wrong?”

”Then I fly to the Vault and waste my time. Who cares?”

”What if they try to arrest you?”

He looked at her, deep into the optics, past them, into Natalie’s soul, where he had been for so long.

”I can fly circles around them, Natalie.”

”Joey, I will look up what I can about those frigates. It shouldn’t be classified. I will call you when I find out what I can…here.”

She scribbled a name and address onto a napkin with a Glasdec pen.

”I know this guy, his name is Werewolf. He’s a merc too, but he does other things. He could know something, too. He owes me a favor. He’s into some business that is not so legal, here, understand? But he can help you.”

He took the napkin and folded it in half.

”Natty, thank you. Really.”

”Don’t call me that, please.” She closed her eyes.

DeathGiver got up. He took a look around, hating the place, suddenly. He hoped it all got bought out by a McDonald’s or something.

”Natalie, what happened?”

She wiped her hands with a lemon-scented napkin. ”I was young. New. You were this merc, this feared rebel…just like in the vids. I was excited by it. You were so dangerous or something. Then I realized that that was all you might be. It…scared me.”

He looked away, at the wall, the Buddha…anywhere else. ”Why didn’t you tell me?”

”I didn’t realize it, until after. I just never quite knew what to say. You wake up and just know things are wrong, but you don’t realize why until later. Life is like that. It sounds stupid, now, but I hated you for letting me go so easily…dumb, huh?”

He looked back at her. She suddenly looked so young in that moment, still just a kid, despite the tattoo, the eyes, the corporate garb.

”You can call me anytime, Natalie. But you don’t have to.”

”Bye Joey. I will look up those freighters, and tell you what I find.”

”I’m DeathGiver, Natalie. I’m a pilot, not some corporate fatcat. I may go someplace else, and take other jobs, but I am a pilot, take it or leave it, part of the package.”

Her pale gold eyes didn’t change.

”Take care of yourself, ok?” She said.

He headed back to the mall, to the pilot’s hangar. All of a sudden, the air smelled like foliage, people, and jasmine…and he hated the stench of it.

…

RedStorm and WitchKing stood in the elevator that would take them to the top floor of RedStorm’s stronghold. He had ordered all officers there, to prepare themselves for an extensive briefing.

WitchKing’s taller form was motionless, his face a mask of stoic indifference, his black hair and eyes giving him a sardonic air. The pilot was an aloof individual, even by Void Alliance command officer standards.

RedStorm spoke.

”Well…?”

”I think that a murderer like that is lucky to get off with only one foot and a fairly decent cybernetic. He is also lucky Twilight Jack was only joking. I would have preferred molecular glue, then a torch. That bag of filth is a pirate and a brutal thug, and deserves what Star Patrol is going to get him, and then some.”

RedStorm soaked it all in.

The door opened and they walked through the gilded corridors of the Void Alliance military sector.

”WitchKing, what do you think of the Royal Guard?”

The man stopped and looked at RedStorm.

”The enemy of my enemy is my friend, sir. Besides, we want the Void Alliance to be brought into the fold of the rest of the universe, what better way to do it than to save the Vault?”

”That thug could have been wrong…”

”Then we position a command wing and wait. We can monitor transmissions, and even plant Twilight Jack on board the Vault. Or we could tell RG…”

”That is what I am thinking.”

”But how…?”

”I have arranged a neutral and trusted party.”

”Who?”

They walked into jet and gold room of the command center of the Void Alliance, a massive room equipped with holos, vid screens from every possible point in the universe, transmission computers and other essential equipment. A plasteel window one hundred meters long swept around the room, giving it’s occupants a panoramic view of the Void Alliance sector.

A man in a military officer’s uniform of a deep green and black looked up from a computer and stood to his full height, about as tall as WitchKing. He had stern features juxtaposed by an easy smile, a face that gave the viewer an impression of being both powerfully built and yet serenely meditative.

”WitchKing, I would like you to meet Deadmeat, of the Bora Coalition.”

…

Argentum stood in the Phobos shopping mall, within the nauseously enthusiastic confines of a Lucky Mart gift shop. Anime characters regarded him with myopically grinning faces, standing next to starcraft, transformable mecha or giant robots. He regarded a model of an Archangel, a beautiful craft of silver and blue. His own. He picked it up. He felt very lost at that point, gazing at the pilot within the cockpit.

”It’s for my nephew.” He told the sales clerk.

He walked through the cool environs of the mall, randomly picking up on the conversations around him. The noise in the back of his mind had started that morning, a background buzz, rising and falling within his skull. He had doubled his medication, but by noon it was stronger. Fear began to coalesce in his gut like an orb of barbed wire. He sipped from a can of nitrolite, but his spit tasted like chrome.

He walked in a cutlery shop, regarding the shining carbon woks up on the wall. He thought of buying a few instruments, maybe getting inventive that evening. Some rice wine, garlic, a little soy sauce…

Hungry, he bought some krill and crackers. The mall had a hum to it. A white noise created by the people, the sounds of distant voices, the footsteps and distant advertising vids. The noise in his head went up a notch.

He tilted his head back in the elevator, on his way back to his room. The noise was a living thing, now. A grating and grinding of gears in the engines of his mind. He felt his vision blurring, subtly. The red plastic buttons seemed to glow like missile lock on warnings.

Dr. Goldmark had left Phobos days ago. Something about a meeting with Overlord, the head of the Royal Guard. Argentum had asked him why.

Goldmark had stood in a beige sweater, wearing khaki’s and tennis shoes.

”I don’t know why, myself, Argentum. But I think it is a clue to your condition.”

The elevator glided to a stop. He closed his eyes, trying to will out the rising din within his skull. The doors hissed open, and Marie walked in.

He backed up slightly, realizing that it was not Marie, but a woman who could have almost been a perfect doppleganger. She was a little shorter, however. Her facial features slightly different. She smiled at Argentum and turned to regard the closing doors.

Argentum thought of how he had seen Seraphim, a few days ago. It did not make sense, it just made his flesh twitch at the thought of it. What was he doing?

The doors hissed open and she walked off. They stayed open for a beat, and closed shut behind her.

Later, in his room, he tried to block it out. He had put together the model briskly, with cybernetic precision. A few razors, some bonding glue, and voila’, an Archangel. He set it on the counter to dry.

The Vidscreen showed images from some anime on the Void Alliance. A cloaked RedStorm carved an evil robot in half with a glowing sonic sword, leaping spectacularly into a Pegasus cockpit, moments later.

He went over some flight notes…mostly old journals. He followed an entry, the date years older, some treatise about torp mechanics. His teeth began to rattle in his jaw…shaking, like his hands…

The noise in his head reached a fever pitch. He groped for the remote, one hand against his temple, his eyes screwed shut…he thumbed the wrong button, the screen fragmenting into a dozen smaller screens, each one a separate TNN station report. They spoke at once, the ache in his head magnifying the simultaneous channels. His hands began to shake and jump as if he were being electrocuted.

”Star Patrol recruitment for pilots is up by 25%…”

”…The new Pegasus interceptor will have variable thrusters, allowing for 15% more maneuverability…”

”Royal Guard command is pleased at the Vault system’s graphic user interface relays, allowing their pilots to…”

”…The cockpit of the Claymore is spacious, allowing it’s pilot a maximum perspective from where he sits. Systems lay within easy reach…”

”Pirate activity within the Omega quadrant is up by 30%, with sightings reported by both Star Patrol and Bora Coalition forces.”

”IK WANTS YOU! SIGN UP FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH A RECRUITER TODAY! OPPORTUNITY AWAITS!”

”ARCHANGEL PRODUCTION HAS INCREASED STEADILY OVER THE LAST FIVE YEARS, WITH ORDERS FROM VARIOUS CLANS STILL COMING IN…”

”…THE VOID ALLIANCE HAS A LONG HISTORY OF CONFLICT WITH THE ROYAL GUARD, AND SO THE RECENT PEACE AND TRADE PROPOSAL LEAVES AUTHORITIES SKEPTICAL AS TO WHAT REACTION THE CLAN WILL…”

”STAR PATROL HAS…”

”PILOTS…”

Argentum threw the laptop across the room, watching it turn end over end before it collided with the vid screen.

Most of the bookshelf was the next to go. It seemed like the right idea at the time. Flight manuals and some other works of literature went in all directions. He threw the shelf across the room.

Nothing really made sense, anymore. It was all just a kaleidoscope of images and memories…events and spans of time. They seemed to all be unrelated, and as he punched the refrigerator, snatched up his flight journals and threw them into the toilet, none of the events seemed to have any bearing whatsoever on the present. The present did not really matter anymore…just the noise in his head, a fever-pitch, a dirge without words or meaning. He spattered lighter fluid over the journals and watched them burn, realizing only then that he was sobbing, there was a maelstrom within him, it tore the fabric of his serenity in two.

He punched the mirror.

Once.

He thought of all the things he had lost to get this far, to be where he was now…

Twice.

He thought of the fifty ways Marie could have died aboard the Saggitarius. He thought of how useless it seemed to be.

Three times…the mirror spiderwebbing, his fist bleeding, stinging, the crack in the glass, the crack in his psychology…

Stupid. All so very stupid.

He stopped, looking into the sink, realizing his face was a mask of useless grief. What a dumb episode…for nothing. Nothing was changed or fixed. Nothing really mattered.

He sat down, his back against the wall, and put his face in his hands.

After a while, Argentum said, to no one in particular-

”I miss you, you know that? I really do. I don’t even know why. I don’t even want to think about why anymore. I have to…but I just…damnit.”

But that was just it. He didn’t have to do anything, and that’s what was driving him crazy…despite the fact the noise in his head had suddenly extinguished, just like the fire in the toilet when the overhead automatic sprinklers came on, dousing the flames, raining down on him…on his life.

…

DeathGiver walked from the mallplex to the contractor’s hanger, thinking. Glasded/Phrendol/Tlask had been built piece-by-piece, slowly, getting larger with every incarnation. It was a mish-mosh of different styles, almost four stations combined. Going from left to right you had the corporate sector, the reactor and essential facilities sector, the pilot hangars and production facilities, and finally the public stations, two of them side-by-side, cylinders of dermoplast and derridium married together by performance tubes. All made by Godcraft Industries, the premier Space Station manufacturer. Travel between the station sectors was mostly done through speedy walkways, escalators, and elevators.

Forty minutes later DeathGiver stood at the entrance ramp of the contractor’s hangar, into the empty space where his modified Pegasus used to sit. He could see sumpsters, Archangels, even a few Bora Maces…but no sign of his own craft.

He felt as if the bottom had been knocked out of his world.

He checked the hangar records, to see if his ship had moved to other facilities. The amber monochrome of the computer vidscreen told him nothing. He checked again, and felt it, the buzz, that prickly sensation on the back of your neck of being watched…

He took in his environment. Some corporate pilots, a handful of techs, some independent contractors, a few legal secretaries in electric blue plastic pants…a couple of Mod gangers, a tach scientist…

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a black jumpsuited pilot with green spiky hair, watching the hangar below, as if he were a predator regarding a grassy field from a powerline. The pilot had security tags and a copper-colored gyrojet pistol. But his eyes were icy…searching.

He ducked behind a group of corper pilot’s and followed them out. The corpers did not seem to notice him, and he matched their pace, resisting the urge to look behind. Every step, he felt as if he would feel a barrel poking into his back-

-or just feel the blast as it turned his spine into a charred hole one meter wide-

-or his head would just come off in a burning halo of microwaved matter…

The people only a few feet away seemed distant, as if he were surrounded by vid screens, the sounds of voices and footsteps echoing in an ominous hollow cadence from the dermoplast ceiling fifty meters above.

The trip to his quarters was both too long and too short.

…

DeathGiver stood in the hall. The chipped ferroconcrete walls on each side reflecting, slightly, the fluorescents from above. He felt rooted to the spot, as if he had been hooked up to an i.v. drip, loaded with freon. It spread from his veins into the rest of his body, replacing his warm blood with it’s syrupy coldness.

The door to his room was open. From his angle, he could actually see his table, loaded with a few flight vids. He couldn’t tell if anyone was in there for certain, but-

In ”DeathGiver-The Movie”, he would rush in and kung-fu everyone around him in an awesome display of pugilism. He would disarm his attackers, kicking and punching in a whirlwind of kinetic force. His old hapkido sifu would have been pleased.

But in ”DeathGiver-The Life”, he would walk in and get shot from two different angles. He had no idea who was in there, and even if he had been armed, he was not a maladroit.

He sighed, backed up, and grabbed an elevator, reviewing his options.

In an arcade a mile within the facility from his room, he used a public comm. unit to try to contact Natalie, but just got her answering service. Full of fear, sick with paranoia, he set his head against the chrome surface.

All about him he could see other people staring intently into the vid monitors, flying, blasting, shooting, or driving, depending on which game they were playing. In the shallow blue light of the arcade, their faces looked pale and inhuman, like neon reflected mannequins. He suddenly felt isolated. A nearby digital rocket explosion shocked him back to reality.

He had to move.

Werewolf apparently dwelled in the deeper public substations, mostly low-rent facilities. In some places DeathGiver could see rust, open panels, and occasional wiring. He had to step over more than a few meters of exposed coupling. A deep mechanical groaning could be heard behind the walls, deep within the station. Like the gears of a primordial clock.

Down here this deep, one could not tell if the station was in the process of repair of breakdown. Was it corrosion or expansion? The lights sometimes did not work, you occasionally had to step over puddles of coolant and other chemicals. Up and beyond humanity moved in it’s familiar circles. Down here, there was only the rats and the people who got left behind…or did not want to be found.

He checked the address twice, looking around at the KEEP OUT and CONSTRUCTION signs. G/P/T used sodium burners, this far below, and they flickered off and on, infrequently bathing the dun colored dermoplast in a garish light. DeathGiver stepped aside as a neon-orange construction ‘bot rolled by, carrying plastic and aluminum debris from a decade ago. It stopped, shuddered, broke out in an arcing display of ice-blue sparks, and continued on, treads shaking.

He knocked on a door the same color of a copper penny credit chip. It was polished to a burnished gloss, with a few chips and scratches here and there across it’s surface.

He looked up, into the face of a camera optic. It sat there, it’s cold, glassy eye reflecting the hall he stood in.

”Yes?” The voice was an electronic, almost sub-audible whisper.

”Uh, I’m here to see a Werewolf?”

”You DeathGiver?”

”Ya.”

The door hissed open.

DeathGiver waited, deciding.

”Come inside or go away.”

He decided.

The place was cluttered, disorganized…but immaculate. Every possible surface, as covered as it was in electrics and various components, was oiled, cleaned, polished or dusted. The faint smell of lemon and tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride clung to the air.

Werewolf was a big guy, wearing a long sleeved white business dress shirt and a black tie, decorated with gold kanji. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing beefy forearms, decorated in guild tattoos. His hair was the color of brown shoe polish, his knuckles scarred and burned, hear and there. He had a few of the same marks on his face, complete with a copper colored cybernetic eye, glowing a smoky green color, which took up a fifth of his face. The eye seemed to pulse a little.

DeathGiver could see all manner of devices and material. He felt like he was in a tech garage. Prosthetics, gears, cables, a canteen, a roll of derridium…

”You’re him.”

His voice sounded deep, but noncommittal. It gave and expected nothing.

Some titanium wire, steel speakers, a clock, some duct tape, plastic waste containers…

Werewolf seemed to be fiddling with a toaster. ”Whattya want, Mr. Giver?”

Spools of det cord, a machete, a double-barreled shotgun, a styrofoam head bearing a set of pilot’s goggles, an electric torch, some program splicers, a couple of sonic displacers…

”My bagel got stuck. I figured you’d show up, Mr. Giver.”

”I, uh, my ship is missing, and some people are trying to nail me.”

”Eh. What kind of people?”

”Don’t know, exactly. I need to find my ship.”

”These kind of people that you don’t know…are they corporate people? Star Patrol people? Independent contractors? Terrorists?”

”Madorians.”

Werewolf stopped and rubbed his jaw, and then put both his hands on the chrome table. DeathGiver noticed a door on the right side, covered in chipped avocado colored plastic.

”Natty didn’t mention that.”

Some circuit in DeathGiver sparked a little, but he kept his mouth shut.

”What’s wrong?”

Werewolf seemed to stare off a bit, and then came back.

”Nothing. I hate those guys. What’s wrong?”

”Someone stole my ship, and Madorians are after me.”

”Eh. The first I don’t know about, but the last, well, you can’t be that bad a guy, then. Let’s make some calls, shall we?”

Werewolf offered him some coffee, and then picked up a tach cellular and started dialing. DeathGiver half-listened, still discombobulated from his recent experiences…everything was unfocused, like he was looking at it all through a fishtank.

He heard Werewolf speak Russian, then Chinese, Mandarin probably, then some Martian trade language…kind of a Zimbabwe derivative. An hour later Werewolf said, ”@#%$.” And grabbed a racketball bag from the wall.

”How much is this all going to cost me?”

The cybernetic eye seemed to look him over once.

”Three large. For the whole package. Does not include shipping and handling.”

”What’s the whole package?”

The larger man pulled out a Fianchi military shotgun. He chambered a round, and set the weapon on the table. He tossed a gyrojet pistol from the bag at DeathGiver, who caught it reflexively.

DeathGiver tested the sight and checked the ammunition.

”Three thousand will cover a search-and-rescue, along with a possible shake-and-bake. Operators are standing by…”

…

An hour later, making their way through the darkness of the understation, bathed in the occasional halogen, DeathGiver fingered the microcomm plugged into his ear and began to really feel the Fear.

He had felt it before, long ago in that Warhammer, after Bennet had died. But he had only caught glimpses of it since then. Occasionally seeing it’s reflection in the eyes of his wingmen, or across the surface of star-filled space. But he had only ever seen the Fear, during the past few years…had it knocking on his door.

But now it was in his stomach, like a fiendish miasma. A watery adrenaline nausea, permeating his mental processes. The door was open and the Fear was inside. Hell, it had fixed a cup of coffee and was reading the damned newspaper…

”Still got that microcomm?” Werewolf asked.

”Yeah.”

”O.k., you speak normal, I won’t be able to hear you. You whisper, and the microcomm senses it and will send the signal. Something happens, we have to talk to each other, that’s what we are going to do…”

They turned a corner, and DeathGiver realized they were under the production facilities. He could see it in the design style that stayed true right to the roots in these big corporate stations. The particular cut of the rivet, the geometry of the iridium plating, the paint job, the occasional logo, the smell of the synthetics wafting down from the air conditioners above.

The came upon a security elevator and Werewolf punched in a code.

”This place is all business…even the underworld element…funny that the underworld is underground, right? Or at least not underground so much as underbelly, ha ha…” Werewolf’s laugh was a foreboding bark.

The elevators doors opened, basking them both in ice blue halogens.

”I got a few connections…that’s what I do, I give people the right numbers to call. When something happens, it ain’t random, ya know. Crime is just like corporate above ground business, ‘cept with the Triads or the Yaks or the Mafia they don’t fire you, they space you, dig?”

They began to ascend.

”Your ship didn’t just get randomly ganked…the Madorians are smart, they clipped your wings, first. Now they are just going to fan out until you show. We gotta get you outta here, but we gotta get your ship. If you jumped on a cruiser out of hear, that could still be potentially hazardous, and you want your ship, right?”

”Well-”

”Exactly. Ship theft is a big deal…anyone gets their Archangel lifted, they don’t want to spend all day trackin’ it down. Sammy grabbed it.”

”Who?”

”Ex-Sputznatz. He was quick, man, but he blew a deal and kind of lost heart, ten years ago. Now he works the Fringe of crime…mostly acquisitions with a little porn. He’ll nab a starship if the price is precise, though.”

The elevator stopped.

Werewolf turned and regarded DeathGiver with his bottle-green cybernetic.

”If I move, you move, dig? Stick with your hands, don’t pull that rocket launcher unless you need to. Sammy ain’t gonna let us waltz in with ordinance, anyhow…”

Sammy’s was on the edge of the production facilities in a faux office emblazoned with some smaller, sister company logo of Tlask, Inc. Werewolf walked in to a waiting room, mint covered walls and a black carpet, and knocked on the secretary’s screen. DeathGiver noticed a steel door on the right, with no visible way to open it.

Somewhere. A mic clicked.

”What?”

”Sammy, I got to talk biz.”

”What you want, Werewolf?”

”Listen, it’s big.”

Long silence.

”Ditch the artillery.”

Werewolf through the racquetball bag into a corner. DeathGiver followed suit.

The door slid open smoothly.

The microcomm in DeathGiver’s ear clicked.

”Stay cool…”

Sammy sat behind an eratz-redwood desk. Everything in the room seemed clean and artificial, down to the business posters, plastic plants and fish tank. The office was colored in chromes and violets, uber-chic business décor juxtaposed by psychologist waiting room style furniture, complete with throw pillows.

Sammy was a plain looking sort. Wiry black hair and eyebrows, with sepia colored eyes. He wore a coal colored Armani suit and an electric red tie. His hands were clasped in front of them, elbows on the desk, one arm sporting an adamantium Rolex. A bodyguard stood in the corner, wearing a suit the color of ferroconcrete. He had a chin that could probably dent a steel door. His eyes were narrow slits of menace.

Werewolf walked up to the desk, close to the bodyguard but disregarding him completely. DeathGiver met Sammy’s gaze for a few clicks and looked about the room, listening to the Russian that suddenly filled the air between the two men.

A few minutes of banter and the exchange heated up.

The bodyguard shifted his weight.

Werewolf stabbed the air with his finger, and then punched the desk with it, hard.

Sammy’s gaze was solid steel. He shook his head, and carefully produced from a nearby Ming vase a fistful of creds. He began to push the pile towards Werewolf.

The man turned, almost as if to leave.

His motions were a frenetic blur, and DeathGiver realized Werewolf had broken the bodyguard’s arm with a wet snap. Another motion, nothing wasted, and the bodyguard’s other arm was suddenly dislocated.

-the big man’s mouth opened to scream-

-and Werewolf was on the desk, half-crouching, and with a quick jerk he reached out and dislocated Sammy’s jaw. Sammy had reached for a weapon in the desk, but Werewolf had closed it, hard, probably breaking the Russian’s wrist.

The bodyguard lurched like a Frankenstein’s monster, not completely realizing his limbs were useless, and DeathGiver had glided across the short space of floor, his elbow colliding with the larger man’s nose. He completed the maneuver, whipping the bodyguard’s head back into the solid wall. Hard.

DeathGiver watched him slump.

”Now I know what you are thinking, Sammy…you still got a good arm. But you KNOW me, man…if I can touch you I can probably fix it so you don’t ever pull a trigger with that particular finger again…dig?”

Sammy’s eyes were wide with shock. His jaw just flopped slackly.

”Now…” Werewolf hissed, ”I want some facts. One finger for yes, two for no. Anything slippery and I am going to put you in a coma for a year, got it?”

Long pause. DeathGiver’s heart thumped against his ribs.

”Madorian’s, right?”

One finger.

”Offer you a lot?”

One finger.

”How much? Wait, don’t answer that…where’d they put it…let me guess…Northbay?”

Two Fingers.

”Blackdock?”

Two fingers.

”Damn. This could take all day…wait, public storage, right? Gave it a paint job?”

One finger.

”O.k., scribble the dock number and code sequence on the notepad, here. Don’t get squirrely with me. You try to stab me in the eye with that pen, I will find out about it, dig?”

Sweat was poring down from the wiry mess that was Sammy’s head. Drool began to puddle in his lap. His hands quaked.

Werewolf pocketed the slip.

”O.k., Sammy, I’d put your jaw back for you, but you would probably like me less than you already do. Besides, I don’t want you speaking to anyone for an hour or so, and that’s how long it will take a doc to put your jaw back into place. I know you are too stylish to go out in public like that, aren’t you?”

Sammy just glared at DeathGiver. He knew then, no matter what, he would not be back for a while, if he could help it.

”Now Sammy, I am not going to look stupid and threaten you anymore…I got my reasons, and my hate is not with you, it’s for the people who paid you. You got your money, you’re done, now you just have to drop out. I’m gonna owe you big, o.k.? I didn’t want to make a war of this. I am going to leave, and I am going to hope against hope you don’t blow me away when I go out the door…dig?”

One finger.

In the hall, moving at a brisk pace…

”How’d you do that?”

”I didn’t do anything, except get myself into serious difficulties.”

”But-”

”But nothing. I may have to clear out for a week or so. Here’s where your ship is.”

Werewolf gave DeathGiver the slip of paper.

DeathGiver took it. From the corner of the hall, a halogen sparked and went out, leaving the two in partial darkness.

The elevator ride back up seemed eternal. The Fear was a tide, rising, eternal, drowning DeathGiver in it’s chthonic eddies…

Werewolf jammed the stainless steel crescent that was the ”elevator stop” button. He crouched down and started to rummage through his racquetball bag. DeathGiver ducked down to look.

DeathGiver watched as Werewolf produced a palmtop computer and an odd looking box attached to a belt. The box was black and gold, an almost seamless titanium rectangle. Werewolf put it on.

”Now, we’ve gotta cross the station, and that means going into public, right? I am going to go first and get a ball rolling. Then, I am going to call for you. When I say walk, you walk, right? When I say left, you go left. Elevator…you go into an elevator. Just follow what I say and you will cross the station without getting atomized.”

”What about security?”

”They’ve been bought. They won’t shoot or arrest you, but they won’t dive in to help, either. For us, the station has no laws.”

”Damn.”

”Yes, damn. Now, give me twenty minutes or so. I am going to rig the elvator…things are going to get a little weird around you as your walking, o.k.? That’s me…you’ll see what I mean. Just keep moving, right?”

DeathGiver felt dizzy. He nodded, his throat as dry as sandstone.

”O.k., stay cool.”

The elvator doors opened and Werewolf walked into the cacophony of the human zoo that was the Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask public mall. After all those hours in the cramped underground, the noise of dense human population seemed overwhelming.

Then Werewolf was gone, the doors closing behind him.

DeathGiver leaned against the wall, realizing that he had to still call Natalie. Damn.

The twenty minutes were an eon, to the contract pilot. Twenty minutes of elevator darkness, of watching the garish light of those digital letters on the wall. His own heart was a thud, and he then realized that once he got in the ship, he had no idea where to go. He had planned to ambush the medical vessels, but now he had no idea what was waiting for him out in the nebula surrounding the titanic construct that was Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask. Getting off the station was not even assured.

DeathGiver looked at his chronometer.

4p.m., Universal Standard Time.

Deadmeat’s derridium BC watch read 4p.m.

He looked up from his chronometer.

He was on board the Vault, looking across the crescent that was the stainless steel table at Highlander and Rustbucket. The IK Dominion officer stood against the wall, scarcely moving.

Twilight Jack sat back in his chair, almost lounging, his feet up on the table. He realized that it was probably annoying Highlander, so he kept doing it.

Grimbrand sat at the computer, like a fortuneteller looking into a crystal ball, searching for occult and scarcely glimpsed auspices.

”It is an honor to have you here, Deadmeat.” Highlander said.

”It is an honor to be here, Highlander.” Deadmeat said.

”Congratulations on the Vault contract…you beat us out, I hear…” Deadmeat sipped a gold colored mug of black coffee.

”What brings you here, sir?”

Deadmeat looked around at the room, easing back, hands behind his head, an expression of utter confidence on his features. He told the Royal Guard members everything the Void Alliance knew, gleaned from the captured Madorian pilot. He talked about the suspected attack on the Vault, the offer of help…every detail. No one else spoke.

Highlander took all of it in carefully, measuring the words, his mind calculating behind his steady gaze.

IK Dominion touched a finger to his microcomm, speaking quietly.

Rustbucket spoke.

”So why is the rock star here?”

”He is an officer in the Void Alliance.” Deadmeat gestured to the young man sitting next to him.

”I knew it!” Said Grimbrand.

”I didn’t know that.” Said Rustbucket.

”We knew that.” Said the Dominion officer.

”Hey, what can I say? I’m famous.” Said Twilight Jack.

”This is a security breach.” Highlander said, throwing his pen onto the table so hard it bounced off towards the Dominion officer, who caught it deftly and set it on the edge of the same table it had bounced off of.

Deadmeat smiled, shaking his head.

”Gentlemen, the Void Alliance are your allies in this. That’s why I am here, to give our clan’s approval.”

”It’s worth something,” Highlander rose up, ”but the Void Alliance are-”

”Were.” Twilight Jack quickly interjected.

”-our enemies. He cannot be here.”

Twilight Jack put his hands behind his head, almost imitating Deadmeat. The BC officer realized this, and crossed his arms in front of him.

”Well, I was here six years ago, on the ”Glass Spider II” tour. And two years after that, on the ”Save the Multiverse” tour. Then two years ago for the one-shot gig to promote my single that was in that anime vid. I have been in this station more than you have, Highlander, sir. Besides, I got a show here in a few days.”

The tall man glared down at the musician/pilot/VA officer. Grimbrand waited for green death rays to shoot out of his eyes and turn the smaller man into guacamole.

”C’mon, man…what am I gonna do…blow the place up with my amplifier? I can be trusted, as can VA. That conflict was almost seven years ago. It’s over. Finished. I even brought my peg. I’m ready to party. VA is ready to party. But we don’t want you in a panic when our squads fly through to save the day. So relax.”

Highlander’s glare didn’t go away. ”As if the Royal Guard need your help?”

Twilight Jack crossed his arms. Deadmeat uncrossed his arms, suddenly self-conscious of where to put them. He began to put them behind his head, just as the rockstar started to once again put his own arms behind his back, making the BC pilot start to shift again until Twilight Jack leaned forward with sudden alacrity, putting his hands on the table.

”When was the last time your butt wiped the dust from your ship’s seat, Highlander?”

Highlander slapped his hands on the table, leaning forward as well.

”Do you MOCK me, sir!?”

”The wise man mocks the mocked, but the mocked man mocks the mocker.” Twilight Jack answered smoothly.

Highlander tilted his head. ”What-?”

Twilight Jack stood up. ”I’m KIDDING with you, Highlander! Because we’re allies, now. I know I am not wrong when I think that you are too intelligent to let valuable help slip away just when the most dangerous military might since the Nazi’s is gathering itself to invade, right? Or am I?”

Highlander sputtered. He sat down, drank his coffee, and looked at the Void Alliance officer.

”I’m not going to just polka into my interceptor and take on the entire base, man. Half the base, maybe, but-”

Deadmeat stood up, cutting Twilight Jack off.

”Highlander, you know me…you know my clan. This is solid. I promise you… Now shake, you old barnstormer!”

Highlander looked over at the Dominion officer.

”What does IK say to this?”

The officer’s voice was like a bolt of iron, piercing the tension.

”We will be here, as well, to support our allies. You have little to fear, sir.”

Highlander paused, frowned, shook Deadmeat’s hand, and then, reluctantly, Twilight Jack’s.

The rockstar produced a thin wafer of coded titanium.

”Look, Highlander, I even brought you a backstage pass!”

…

Part 10= Superstitious

”O.k., come out and steer to the left. I think station security is looking for you, but I am not sure…” Werewolf’s voice was a harsh electric whisper.

DeathGiver steeled himself, checked the comforting butt of the gyrojet pistol, and tried to ignore his heart thumping in his throat. The elevator doors hissed open, and he was standing in the melee that was the Mall.

Four nearby bearded Earth Iraqis argued in Arabic, all dressed in Mufti. They smelled like sweat, carbon, espresso and myrrh.

The air within the mall was an ion-charged haze. The station was busiest at these hours, as travelers and merchants, shoppers and independent contractors all flooded in to socialize, migrate, or ply their trade.

A Chinese corporate programmer wearing an electric blue plastic business suit drifted past DeathGiver, his eyes focused on unseen algorithms. The crowd swallowed him up. DeathGiver looked up to see the scarlet holo’s of the Cyanide Mary, a popular bar and hardware store. As he passed a Mongolian Market Cookery, his brows sweated from the pungent garlic miasma.

”Stop.” The voice in his ear said.

A nickel colored door slid open on DeathGiver’s right.

”Move.”

He stepped into a hallway that was deserted, the air smelling like burnt plastic and ammonia. The halogens were almost blinding, reflecting off the bleach colored tile. A security optic stared at him accusingly.

”Don’t worry, I looped it’s image sequence.”

DeathGiver’s footsteps echoed down the long hall.

”I just hacked the security channel. Their looking for you, but their orders are to observe and report. Odd.”

DeathGiver reached the end of the hall. The door before him was the color of cerramite. An elevator started to open on his right. He caught the barest glimpse of a suited security officer, and then the elevator doors abruptly closed.

”Damn, sorry.”

The door before DeathGiver slid open.

”O.k., abrupt right, then duck into the Laundromat.”

DeathGiver did so, passing a New Chiba City Clothing Emporium. Several prostitutes stared at him blankly, their hair a deep violet. All were sporting Phrendol holo-tats, guaranteeing a safe bill of health.

The backdoor of the Laundromat opened for him. He stepped in, suddenly bathed in fog clouds of steam. The people around him seemed like apparitions. He made his way through, avoiding their inquisitive gaze.

”O.k., right, duck into the nightclub. Use the bouncer entrance.”

The club’s door was as inconspicuous as possible. The hall was a griseous stretch of ferroconcrete. Music thumped ahead, at ear-splitting decibels. Another door hissed open.

”O.k., the signal is breaking up. Cut through, keep moving, go out the band exit. Anyone stops you, show them your gyrojet pistol. This route will keep you out of sight. We’re almost through.”

The night club was like an Amazon village, humid jungle-like heat, flash illumination and tables of neutron-hardened aluminum. The chairs and couches were cloned leather.

The dance floor was a single writhing mass of limbs and gyrating flesh. Eurogoths, New Space Punkers, Astro-Glammers, out of station corporates, Synth Addicts and the ever present opportunistic fugue movements of dealers. A group of Tlask University females, dressed in identical outfits of steel-colored vinyl walked by holding arms, their chain and leather boots going to their knees. Their eyes were glassy and barbiturate-tinged. He ducked past a few sunglassed DJ’s, their hair up and multicolored, like peacocks. An athletic student, rippling with steroid augmentation and grafted muscle, wearing a set of denim overalls, suddenly blocked DeathGiver’s pulse.

His eyes rolled spasmodically, and he smelled like cortisone.

”You’ve seen Judy!!?” His hand was a steel hydraulic claw on DeathGiver’s shoulder.

DeathGiver pointed randomly.

”Over there!” He shouted back, almost deafened by the music…something brand new, probably Martian Pop.

The ogre was gone. The crowd swallowed him up.

Werewolf’s voice came back abruptly.

”Change of plans, opposite team is in the building…cut through the bar…I’m going to make a diversion…”

The bar was filled with liquors, flagons of beer, artificial legal pharmaceuticals, and endless rows of nitrolite. DeathGiver steeped inside the bar.

Werewolf’s voice.

”Damn, on your six…f*ck!”

A bartender emerged from a back door, inside the bar, wearing Levi’s and a silver suitcoat, his bare chest gleaming in the neon. He began to speak to DeathGiver, when the lights cut out.

A moment of silence, only the music blaring frenetically, and then instant audio violence, punctuated by smashing glass and furniture breaking. An arm went around DeathGiver’s neck.

DeathGiver twisted and spun, grasping an elbow and a shirt color and sending the assailant into the blackness behind him.

Then the kitchen area, glass breaking and people on all sides, trying to leave. DeathGiver groped blindly, suddenly starting to panic in the humid darkness.

”F*ck!”

”Where are you?” Werewolf’s voice was funny, as if he was running.

”Kitchen…I think…I hear a dishwasher.”

A few breaths later, as DeathGiver groped his way through the darkness, the foggy green luminescence of an EXIT light came on. He went for it.

His hands felt a doorknob. Behind him, in the club, he could hear authoritative voices shouting commands. A woman screamed. Someone threw a bottle. Then the lights came on, and the music with it.

He walked down a badly maintained hall, filled with boxes, old couches, refrigerator sized amplifiers and stacks of posters. The air tasted damp, almost fecund with wet rot.

Another bouncer, built like a linebacker, stood by the door. He was heavy lidded, a veteran of countless ejections, undoubtedly. He carried a flashlight and a clipboard. His hair was very slick, put up in a pompadour.

”Sorry sir, wrong way. Please go around.” He stepped forward a bit.

DeathGiver’s nerves were twisted into dry, taunt knots. His knees felt wobbly. As the bouncer began to realize DeathGiver wasn’t leaving, he put the flashlight out, as if to prod DeathGiver into going away.

He pulled the gyrojet pistol.

The bouncer froze, eyes locked on the weapon.

”Make a hole or I put one in your chest.”

He half raised his arms and backed around, almost touching the wall. His mouth was open slightly, but his eyes stayed attached securely to the pistol.

”Relax, man, I’m station security, just go.”

DeathGiver wasn’t sure if the larger man believed him or not. It hardly mattered. He stepped through the door, almost forgetting to holster the pistol.

He saw two elevators, and realized he was probably in Mall Station Maintenance. One started to open, and then abruptly froze. DeathGiver caught a fleeting glimpse of a green janitor’s jumpsuit, and then the elevator went up.

The other elevator opened, and Werewolf was standing there, rubbing his temple with a thumb. His eyes were squinting, as if he was in pain.

”What’s wrong?”

”Headache. Anyone following you?”

Werewolf was carrying the palmtop in one hand.

”No.”

”Good for them. Let’s move, we’re going underground, again.”

This section was just as poorly maintained, the halogens flickering uncertainly, smooth ferroconcrete broken up by puddles of coolant and chemicals. Somewhere, a faucet dripped. Here and there were stacks of boxed servos and plates of metal. Every once in a while their feet kicked a rivet or a fuse the size of a soda can.

Werewolf’s phone chimed. He whipped it open instinctively.

”Yeah?”

Pause.

”O.k.”

He handed the phone to DeathGiver. It was Natalie.

”Joey, those medical frigates? They’re slated to leave in an hour. I tried to call you earlier, but the signal wouldn’t work.”

”Damn. Natalie, I got problems…I still have to get to my ship, and those Madorian’s might still be on me.”

”I think they are on to me, too. I keep seeing a guy in a pilot’s suit…has spiky hair…”

DeathGiver almost dropped the phone.

”Wait! Green!? Natalie, get the hell outta there, o.k.? Get the-”

He was talking to a dead line. It suddenly occurred to DeathGiver that they might have traced the signal, maybe they had been doing so for some time.

They left the phone sitting a puddle of ammonium.

”We have to go to her room, she’s just upstairs, Werewolf.”

”I know, but let’s take this access hall. Give me the pistol, if we run into security, just act like you’re a techie or something…”

DeathGiver threw the weapon into Werewolf’s racquetball bag.

The access hall was as decrepit as the other endless halls they had roamed during this entire run. They came to a split.

”I am going to cover our backs, you first.” Werewolf looked exhausted and completely on edge.”

DeathGiver entered the T shaped corridor, the smell of harsh chemical solvent threatening to suffocate him. For a second he saw a spark of exposed electrics down the hall, and then Werewolf had grasped his neck…

…there was a clever manipulation of nerve ending, like evil shiiatsu…

…and he realized that he was almost unconscious, or close to it, his head like a block of dense matter, heavier than his neck could support, he was slumping against the cerramite wall, hearing the Madorian-accented Japanese all around him.

Hands flipped him around, slamming him back. He felt a punch, his vision spinning.

Werewolf’s voice, ugly and full of something lethal.

”Here he is, all packaged and ready to go.”

”What about Station Security?”

Werewolf laughed.

”As blind as Luddites. I had to pull some smooth moves to get him here, had to avoid a lot of curious minds. I know you bought ‘em off, but I did not want any delays…I look forward to the second half of my creds.”

”You have earned them.”

DeathGiver twisted his head, seeing the amber monochrome of a cred counter get produced by the taller Madorian officer.

”You guys have spent a lot of money.”

”We need those vessels. We also want to cover up loose ends. Independent contractors can be…unpredictable.”

DeathGiver was hoisted and given another punch. His vision became a field of stars.

”What’s your plan? I am going back to my place to pay some debts.”

”We are going to walk down a bit and gut this trash. I have recently been informed that he is a defector…maybe even an anarchist against the State.”

”Old fashioned way…I like your style.”

DeathGiver’s mouth tasted like lead. His own voice felt displaced.

”You motherf*cker, you betrayed me…”

”Betrayed? I hardly know you! Besides, I was tired of being hunted by the Madorians…this was the best way to make some creds and cover my tail at the same time. An hour from now, while your leaking B positive all over the floor, I’ll be spending about a month in a New Las Vegas brothel.”

”What about Natalie?”

Brief pause. Werewolf hoisted his bag.

”Omelets and eggs, kids. Friends don’t quantify where I come from.”

The Madorian officer’s voice was brimming with predatorial intensity.

”Ah, the woman. She was not where you said you would be, Mr. Werewolf. But we tracked her elsewhere, using a simple phone trace. So it all worked out.”

There was a another brief pause, and Werewolf’s laugh filled the corridor.

”There ya go…all wrapped up like a Christmas present. Good luck gents, tell me how everything goes…”

The mercenary’s footsteps echoed away.

”I do not trust him.” One voice said, in heavy Madorian.

”It does not matter. He can make no profit from betraying us. Besides, we can always eliminate him later.”

They dragged him down the corridor, puddles of chemical and water splashing about them, although it was only an inch deep in places.

”What is a Christmas present?”

”I do not know.”

DeathGiver heard a click.

”Right here?” A third voice.

”No, about a block further. I don’t want anyone finding him for a while. We will dump him into a septic tank. He will die slowly, and then sink.”

Something in him was cold and bathed in fear. The deadened sensation was receding, but he wasn’t sure if he could take them. He didn’t know what to do…

They were standing near a railing, the station’s septic plant wash basin like a brown green oil waterfall thirty feet down. The air had a cool, foul miasma to it. He thought of fried grease.

”Here.”

”Goodbye, traitor. There is no escape from Madorian police justice.”

DeathGiver started to move-

-and the officer’s head came off in an explosion of bloodied matter, gore spraying the larger man, who drew a sonic pistol, stepping back, eyes wildly looking for his assailant…

The third man with the knife had froze in panic, stepping forward to render aid, disregarding DeathGiver, who spun in a fast circle, throwing everything he had into a shot to the man’s Adam’s apple, then to go for a desperate rush for the pistol.

Another blast, from a shotgun, and the sonic pistol dropped to the floor next to the body. The air was filled with the smoldering scent of cordite and scorched human hair.

The shot connected, a jolt running the length of DeathGiver’s arm, at the wrist. He was grabbing the knife arm, hooking it with his right hand and grabbing a fistful of the man’s hair with his right-

-completing the twist, pitching the remaining officer into the railing and over, his choking shout echoing with a splash, DeathGiver almost going over as well. The knife landed at DeathGiver’s feet. A hand grabbed his collar. He turned, throwing punches, panicked, nobody there-

”Hey! It’s me.”

”What-!?”

”Werewolf.”

The air melted and shimmered, like a dessert sirocco mirage, and then contorting in a twisting maelstrom of holographic polygons. Werewolf stood there, a palm to his forehead, blood running in thick ropes down his face from his nostrils.

”You! But-”

”Yeah, I faked them. Plan was to get them in the open and take them out, but then Natalie called. I wanted to trap them, but then time ran out. After I left I bumped into one of the laughing boys. I started to move, but he gave me a good whack. Fast motherf*cker…glad he’s dead, now…I had the good sense to drag him with me and strangle him from the ground. No noise, that way. Then I threw on the holo-field and backtracked. We gotta go.”

”A field?”

”Yeah, Spetznatz special forces…you gotta take serious drugs to counteract the side effects, and after a half hour it feels like you have been kicked in the cerebellum by a f*cking Clydesdale…”

”Natalie! They’re going to get Natalie!”

”Move.”

The flight down the last half of the corridor was a painful blur. His head felt like a basketball and at one point Werewolf paused and threw up onto the chemical-soaked floor.

The elevator ride up was tense and desperate silence. Reflected in the mirrored chrome, DeathGiver and his companion looked like a couple of welterweight boxers who had fought thirteen rounds with a heavyweight and lost. As if to punctuate the thought, DeathGiver spat a tooth onto the platinum colored carpet of the elevator.

…

Part 11= Exit Music

Natalie’s apartment was, to DeathGiver, all experienced with the same perception that high-velocity racecar driver’s and star pilot’s see before and around them as they maneuver in their respective domains. High speed, extreme physics, pulse pounding forward momentum and yet everything happens…

…so…

…slowly, in increments, even. You know it’s happening too fast, but it is all so paced, pause/action/pause, and you are in too much of a hurry just as you are moving too slowly as you see it.

Or like watching a film reel by reel, each picture in the scene not quite bleeding together.

Pause.

Natalie’s door, kicked open.

Pause.

The vidscreen on, loud, blaring.

Pause.

The show on the vidscreen an advertisement for Nitrolite. New, improved, with 20% more caffeine and vanilla.

Pause.

Every drawer in the apartment pulled open, their contents torn out and spread wide, scattered across the confetti colored floor.

Pause.

The scent of Natalie’s perfume, like fresh oranges, the apartment like smelling like burnt coffee and fresh blood, the color of Natalie’s favorite lipstick. The same shade as a freshly clipped roses. DeathGiver thought of the smell of fresh paint, when he and Natalie had spent an afternoon painting the walls of her bathroom.

Pause.

The bed, completely dislocated, Natalie upon it, a pillow over her head, down feathers scattered like the contents of all of her apartment’s drawers, one arm draped off the bed, no movement, the color of fresh painted lipstick colored roses across the bed, Werewolf grabbing him backwards.

Pause.

”C’mon.”

”She…they…she’s…” His vision blurred and watered.

”I know, man, but we have to go.”

”But she could be…”

Werewolf’s voice was quiet in the silent room.

”You know that ain’t so, kid. We have to get you outta here…the people who did that want you gone, too. She’s…I’m sorry…”

The elevator, all brass and steel crescent buttons on faux redwood. Two corporate officer’s from Glasdec talked about a merger with some conglomerate.

DeathGiver looked up, feeling lost, feeling sick and drowned, his vision rainy and the halogens above becoming wet and out of focus, while the corporate officer’s blab on and Werewolf looks down, his jaw hardening, his brows beetling together.

He thinks about how it is all so appropriate.

The elevator.

Sinking, as far as he can go…and rising up…

…and Heaven help anyone on his grave.

…

Part 11

A while later they stood in the main hallway, the corridor of the public ship storage facilities of the Tlask Pan-System Corporation. Pilots, corporates, mercs and other independent contractors traveled to and fro through the ferroconcrete corridor, a realm largely inhabited by non-commercial civilians. In the corner, against a cement-colored wall, a nitrolite machine kept company next to a humming refrigerated protein vending unit. On one side DeathGiver could hear the sounds of ship maintenance and docking procedures, on the other side echoed the clairaudience of the Tlask main population sub-mall. There did not seem to be any security.

”Let’s go.” Werewolf said.

”I can take it from here.”

Werewolf paused, looking him over with that cybernetic eye.

”You sure?”

”Ya.” DeathGiver said, not sure about anything, anymore. He just seemed devoid of any thought or feeling that would have been familiar to him 24 hours ago. His life had bottomed out, it seemed. He was a big empty, a robot, running on some notion of instinct. He didn’t even have the foggiest notion what his next move was, after he got into his ship. The knife he had picked up from the floor of the septic plant washbasin rubbed against his lower back, where he had stashed it in his belt.

”Cool…cool…” Werewolf looked him over.

”What are you going to do, man?”

The larger pilot looked around for a long time, thinking.

”I am going to hit up New Las Vegas, set up some connections, cover my ass…I have a few hidey holes I can take advantage of.”

”Ya got my personal comm. i.d.?”

”Yes.”

”Look me up.”

”Roger that.”

They shook hands.

Werewolf stepped into the elevator, looking up, his battered and chemical stained racquetball bag hanging from one hand. The doors closed, and DeathGiver didn’t see him again for three years.

He felt a million years old, his head aching, his neurons numb and overused, tired in a way he had never been tired before. Tired of being tired.

He walked into the public hangar and glimpsed his Pegasus, gone from a black to a mint blue color, almost demurely parked next to an array of sumpsters and utility mechs. He saw a few pilots standing around, one of them with his back turned to DeathGiver, wearing a helmet and performing maintenance on a gunmetal gray Cutlass.

DeathGiver sighed, the floor beneath his soul falling out, plunging him into tenebrous depths…

He walked into the public mall and bought a large set of metallic gold shades, so large they covered most of his face. Then he bought a black and silver set of flight leathers, and blue-black hair dye. The store clerk said something, but it was all a blur of neon and styrene; ice blue digital numerals and rows of silent nanotechnological health products, in designer colors.

Somewhere, the echo of German, advertising cloned internal organs and skin tint.

He dyed his hair in a public restroom with a meticulous patience he had never thought possible, waiting five minutes as it set, and then through all of his old clothing and accumulated trash into a micro-disintegrator. It vanished into with a blinding white light.

He looked into the mirror and realized he did not recognize himself. He checked the knife, unconsciously.

The ferroconcrete corridor back to the public ship storage facilities ran on for miles, it seemed. He walked in, deafened by non-noise and his own pounding pulse, feeling like a puppet on invisible chains.

He stabbed the helmeted pilot in the back as hard as he ever could, between the fifth and sixth vertebrae, slamming the man up into the side of the Cutlass.

Somewhere, a woman screamed.

The pilot groped with one hand for the handle of the blade, his other hand against the ship. He made dry gasping sounds and DeathGiver pulled the man’s helmet off, revealing spikes of green hair. He pulled the man’s copper colored gyrojet pistol, the one he had recognized from before, and swung the helmet at the back of the pilot’s head, sending the man to the floor, face-first.

Two corporate pilots advanced, uncertain, their faces pale. DeathGiver turned his head and looked at them; through them…beyond them.

”He killed Natalie.” He said, to no one at all.

He aimed the gyrojet pistol at the back of the green-haired man’s head.

An hour later, in his Peg, traveling through the Tach gate to the nearest station, leaving Glasdec/Phrendol/Tlask behind him in an electric wash of tachyon particles, physics and light.

He thought of the fragrance of fresh cut roses.

He thought of the smell of ammonia.

He thought of the scent of jasmine.

He thought of the stench of human blood.

Part 12

Comerca stood in the Command Hangar of his Hold, overlooking Karr, the expanse of starred space enfolding the monolithic form of the factory station. A distance away, Cerene’s personal imperial transport vessel, emblazoned with the symbols of Madoria, prepared for departure, the station techs in their bulky rad suits shuffling out past armored Praetorians and the slim form of Cerene, herself. The crafts blazing engines prepared it for lift off…warning klaxons, announcing the preparations for spacing the ship, began to drone.

Fontaine looked out into the Skaschere Nebula, admired it’s silver and purple incandescence.

”Excellent choice, m’lord, to send Cerene herself to speed up planet resource production. We have been a little lax in applying punishment for tardy shipments, as of late. She should…inspire their efforts.”

”Yes, I felt so. With the invasion close at hand, we don’t want any snags. Without complete production cooperation, this will not work.”

”Will that technology be worth all of this, sir?”

Comerca sipped a glass of iced nitrolite, and expensive libation this far out into space.

”It will be worth it a thousand times, Fontaine. The ships themselves are worth all that we could possible sacrifice in their acquisition. The technology will put us far above any of the clans, if we successfully reproduce it, which we will. Improved science, munitions, shields, systems…this is the moment, Fontaine. I have calculated every conceivable maneuver, and this will work. That station is doomed, no matter how much our foes might consider themselves prepared for our onslaught. The Time of Madoria is now, and with this expression of force all of the pirate forces will join us. From here, we expand, until every station is ours, perhaps all the way to the very heart of the Void Alliance!”

Cerene’s Transport Vessel began to lift off, it’s low-yield thermal reactor engines filling the hold with a ruddy glow. To Fontaine, Comerca’s profiles appeared hellish in the flickering ruby-gold light. The doors of the bay opened, revealing space and all it’s stars, with the caramel orb that was Karr behind it. The Transport Vessel lifted off into space.

”What of the Royal Guard, your majesty? I have heard that they are contracted to maintain and protect the Vault.”

Comerca’s eyes were embers in the fading red glow.

”That pathetic clan with their blind ambitions of democracy is not even a threat to our plan. They are completely unaware of our true intentions…do you know they almost completely lack a command structure? How nadve! Based on notions of honor and respect…as if honor and respect come from someplace other than fear or the application of violence. They will call on Phobos for aid from Star Patrol, and then the Phoenix will draw closer. Predictably, they will believe it to be…eh?”

Comerca’s intentions drifted to the rectangle that was Cerene’s Transport, a black outline against the silver-violet burning streak that was the Skaschere. For a breath of time a tiny flare of orange light flashed at the front of the vessel, and then the front of the ship exploded in a horrible spray of metal, plasteel, and iced human remains…

Alarms sounded at every possible angle. Calls for medical vessels and rescue crews, hoarse shouts as emergency teams rushed to render aid.

But Comerca, his hands pressed against the cold plasteel, fingers spread apart, his very being frozen, twisted, split to the core, knew that it was too late…that it had always been too late…

…

There was nothing that could really be done, save to haul the carcass of the Transport back for examination. But Fontaine knew to move faster that that.

Fontaine had long known that when it came to long-range speculation and operations, Comerca was capable of a mindset that could last for years. Fontaine had not the patience for such a great span of time, when it came to action. He was more for the quick decision, the here and now.

He ordered everyone involved in any way with the Vessel arrested. He then ordered anyone who had been in the hold for the last 48 hours likewise arrested.

He retired Comerca to his quarters.

Of the fifty-six individuals, one was not to be found. But security camera logs were taken from their archives, and Fontaine himself followed the actions of the station techs. All of them had gone on to their assigned duties, save one.

Comerca, a month before, had noted odd transmission spikes at times, emanating from the Station. He had only recently worked to pinpoint it, and that was how Fontaine found Donnel.

He was poring over the energy matrix logs, the soot colored dermoplast computer consoles feeding him calculations and resource tracking sub-routines, and as he focused his attentions to station communications, he noticed the spike, more pronounced than any that had come from the station. Comerca had worked hours on the programming to get the reactors of the station to spike abnormally in the event of a long-space tachyon transmission. The trap had worked, and Fontaine deduced the connection between the sabotage of the Transport Vessel, and the abnormal reactor spike, a half an hour after the explosion.

…

He had known they would come.

Donnel had left the bulky rad suit in a restroom, and had detonated the compound with a simple touch of the circuit transmitter. It had almost been anti-climatic. Then he had moved with a measured pace down corridors of ferroconcrete to his quarters, his entire being suffused by an unexpected calm.

In the stainless steel mirror of the restroom, with ice-white halogens buzzing overhead, Donnel’s face looked placid; resolute.

He had made the last transmission almost haphazardly, knowing he could not afford to wait to disguise it, as he had to others. He had simply used up the last of the tachyon communication power cells in one last voice, one last warning, of an invasion that was, quite simply, not…

They had found him, knelt before the holos of his family, praying. Praetorians had come with gyrojet-hafted guisarmes and thickly built helmeted rad suits, with eyes like smoldering green, and had quickly taken him into custody.

He watched as they tore at the room, searching for records he had long-since confined to the furnaces. The smashed at his precious holos and had torn through every book, and then had questioned him, on the spot, their only answer his half-smile.

Then they set upon him with the hafts of their weapons, and the pain blackened his vision into a profound and nauseating silence.

…

Comerca emerged from his quarters, maddened by the smell of Cerene’s perfume, of her clothing, of the absence of her at every angle. He walked down the corridors of the hold to the deepest incarceration units, feeling as if he had been chiseled from vacuum-cold obsidian.

He had a guard executed for not saluting him properly.

Fontaine had retired to complete the final stages of the investigation. He had decided to leave the matter of Donnel to Comerca.

Comerca had attended many interrogations. He had seen strong men, men of great muscle and obdurate courage, broken within days by the combined drugs, lack of sleep and food, and routine beatings. Thus was how he had prevented many attempts at rebellion.

Comerca knew well the routine. The glares and sneers, the stubborn silence, the ramparts of will that the would-be insurrectors had all thought themselves safe behind…ultimately, they had all been broken, and on more than one occasion Comerca himself had done the breaking.

The door to the cell hissed open, revealing iron colored walls and a single wooden chair, with a mildewed drain underneath. An operation table sat nearby, with a hacksaw, straight razor, a canister of salt powder, a set of surgeons gloves, gasoline, an acetylene torch and a pair of brass knuckles. Water dripped from a nearby corner, and a guard stood at attention. Comerca dismissed the man.

Comerca had prepared himself for the confrontation. He allowed the guards to beat the man just enough, but not to fracture any bones larger than a finger, and to permit the man to be allowed to speak.

Then drugs were applied. Liberally.

Sleep and food were, of course, denied. Sub-sonics were blasted into the cell to prevent coherent thought, and of course environmental controls were manipulated to create an atmosphere of profound and damp cold so as to corrode any will the prisoner might have had.

Comerca drew succor from the twenty-four hours he had spent before entering the cell, knowing that the saboteur was only just realizing what suffering was. He had found proof of his suspicions in the trace amounts of ionized nitroglycerine compound that had been detected in the saboteur’s room, as well as on the right cuff of the discarded rad suit.

But now, looking at the prisoner, the whole scene was not what the General had expected. He had supposed he would see a tough looking soldier or mercenary, eyes glaring with brutal fearlessness. He had expected to see clan tattoos inked onto a military frame, rebellious despite the treatment.

Instead he looked upon the enfleshed bird bones of a thin, radiation scarred man, with bruised blue-black eyes and sickly colored skin. His ribs stood out sharply, and he looked like he would break like glass at the slightest violence. He looked down at the floor, almost ignoring Comerca. He shivered slightly, a quaking of frail, sweated limbs underneath the single dangling light bulb. Some blood on his lip, plum colored welts along his ribs, back and shins.

Comerca put on the surgeons gloves.

”Who do you work for?” His voice was hollow in the small room.

Nothing.

”Why did you commit this crime, cur?”

Quiet.

”You are quite guilty, you know. Admit to your guilt, slave, and reveal your companions, or this will all get much worse.”

Silence.

Comerca paced, feeling his blood start to rise.

”You cannot possibly believe what you-”

”You cannot possibly believe what you have done, General.”

The prisoner’s voice was frail in the cold of the room.

”What?”

Comerca stepped forward and punched, a swift right, rocking the man’s head left and back. Blood sprayed from his nose.

”What?”

Comerca forced the man’s head back, grabbing a handful of the salt powder and rubbed it over the man’s face, eliciting a sharp cry of pain.

”What rebel group do you work for?” Comerca’s voice was a dry hiss.

Nothing.

Comerca swung again, right, then left, and the man started to wail, and the wail turned into a choking laugh.

Comerca stepped back, blinking confusion.

”What is so funny?”

The man mumbled something incomprehensible, his voice soft.

”What, slave?”

The man looked up, squinting, his face still calm under the soft glow of the single bulb above them.

”There are no conspirators, General. Just me.”

”What!?’

”You have heard me, General.” His voice was still calm, still carefully measured.

”You admit to your crimes, then?”

”Yes, would you like to hear them all?”

”I-”

”I killed that witch, your majesty. I only regret that you were not aboard, as well.”

Comerca froze, eyes like blazing discs of rising fury.

”I killed many of your pilots, your majesty. I only apologize that I had not the mettle to kill them with my bare hands. I have never been a courageous man.”

Donnel’s voice was still calm, still measured.

Comerca swung again, then again, his fist hurting, and the man gasped, wheezing, blood dripping from cuts on his eye. A tooth tumbled from his mouth onto the cold cement floor.

”You are the one behind the odd tachyon transmissions?”

The man shrugged indifferently.

”Yes, although you detected them only last month. I have been doing this for several years.” Donnel’s voice was still quite calm.

”You lie.”

”About what, General? About for how long that I have been doing this? Or about being alone?”

Comerca blinked, disarmed, trying to compose himself.

”I want the names of all of your partners, and the codes by which you-”

”There are no other names, you simpering megalomaniac.” Donnel sounded as if he was speaking to a very small, unintelligent child. ”But I am tempted to remain silent, to let you bluster and puff ineffectually, thinking there are more of me, just to play upon your foolish paranoia…”

Comerca swung again. Donnel shook, the chair rocking with the shot, despite it being bolted to the floor. He spit and looked up, and then suddenly, laughed.

Comerca became flushed with a blazing bolt of incoherent fury.

”I can make you suffer, do you know that? I can make you-”

”Suffer? Suffer!? You can’t begin to understand the word. You can’t possibly comprehend the nature of it. You are a man, who has read great literature, and yet does not understand it in the slightest. Now you throw title of the book around, not realizing you are speaking to the author of the very work…”

Comerca stepped forward, one hand clutching the man’s hair in a fist, pulling his head back and throwing a handful of salt onto the man’s face.

Donnel howled.

”Give. Me. The. Names.”

Comerca’s voice was a strangling, gasping sound, each word like a steel bolt being riveted to an admantium plate.

Donnel laughed, almost insanely, his eyes screwed shut, face up to the ceiling.

”Nancy, my mother. Frederick, my father. Meredith, my sister. There are your names, you foul, pathetic abomination.”

”You…what…you…I…!!!” Comerca’s voice was unintelligible, words sinking into the depths of a deluge of mindless wrath. He staggered back, a man disbelieving, and then abruptly picked up the brass knuckles from the nearby table.

”All of my life I lived in an independent mining colony with a population of a thousand…we had existed there for generations, peaceful, free from strife and corporate influence…the old Madorian government respected our way of life…and then you took over.”

Comerca stood still, trembling…listening.

”After you rose to power, your vessels came and asked us to become an outpost for your military operations…we refused, but offered to share in trade and manufacturing resources…and then you assaulted our humble colony with soldiers and weapons…you killed peaceful citizens of our community, you killed my people, my friends, you killed my mother, my father, my sister…I hid within the walls of the station, watching as you disintegrated all evidence that my people had ever existed…I stowed myself aboard a cargo freighter that you sent to salvage all material that you stripped from the starbase, I hid aboard and found my way here…then I hid myself among the people here and learned how your security systems worked, I found holes in your computer systems…I found the room your guards raided and studied the machinations of your power grid and communications relays…I learned to send messages and I listened to your communications, to your officers gossiping in corridors or while resting. I found a job as a servant, a lowly manual labor technician and later registered myself as a citizen of Madoria. Then I sent out random signals away from this system, here, there, trying to find a response. I knew well what the radiation would do to me, that it would kill me, but whenever I felt weak, whenever I felt like I could not go on, I thought of my family, I thought of how your police shoved their bodies into our incinerators while you took all we had worked our lives for…then, one day, I found an answer, I do not know who they were, if they are a clan, if they are another government…but I began to feed them information, all that I could find…tachyon reports, military operations, supply runs…do you remember Gazpar? You sent your forces to raid a research facility, and found a whole legion of Neechi starships waiting. You expected to encounter light resistance, and instead your military force was completely decimated!”

Donnel laughed, continuing.

”That night, in the Main Hold Church, I lit three candles for my family, and snuffed twenty for the pilots who died…for the pilots I killed!”

Comerca was frozen in shocked silence.

”I kept my sport up, General…Haljere’s, where you sought to steal several clone vats from a nearby storage facility. I sent that signal to Star Patrol…Drascas, where you tried to hijack several munitions freighters…I sent that signal and later learned that several wings of IK forces sent your fleet home bleeding…I could name fifty such events in which you had plans to steal, to take, to plunder, to murder, to engage in your awful rapine operations only to be stopped by me, by the information that I stole from you…often I received signals in return, offering me salvation, rescue, but always I turned it down, so that I might damage thee…so that I might inflict wounds on thee, no matter how slight or large…and then one day I knew I was dying…I knew I was running out of time…I had wanted both of you to die on that Transport Vessel, General-”

Donnel’s voice rose in complete and total fury, he shook, teeth gnashing, eyes barely open, red spots of hate that stared into Comerca and through him like gamma rays…he strained at his bindings, the chains starting to snap, the chair coming unbolted from the floor below. He shivered, seeming larger, now…somehow no longer weak and sickly, but like a wraith, a specter of revenge…

”-but now you have lost, General, I may die but I know that I have TAKEN from you, that I have PUNISHED you, General, that though I may be killed my death is filled with purpose…while your whole life is spent uselessly, that someday the people you rule over will end your reign…”

Donnel hissed, spitting, all calm lost, all quiet burned up by an inferno of emotion that covered his skin in sweat as he shook, his voice a ghoul’s horrid wail, his face a mask of blood, of drooling, mindless, total and complete-

”I HATE YOU, COMERCA!!! I wish my love for my family had kept me alive, but in the end I was weak and my HATE FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE kept me alive, THE THOUGHT THAT I COULD CAUSE ONE MORE WOUND, ONE MORE WEEPING SCAR, that I could kill the one person YOU considered PRECIOUS IN YOUR WHOLE…MALIGN…REPUGNANT…!!!”

Comerca gripped the brass knuckles so tightly that he thought his hand would break or that the tendons in his arm would snap like dried rubber bands, and he swung, punching Donnel as hard as he could, and he was screaming, he was shouting as he swung again and again, the sound of ceramic shattering, of wet thuds that covered his face and the lightbulb above in spilt blood and shattering bone, he heard the guards come in from behind and he knew that he was foaming, lost, smashing as hard as he had ever struck a man before in his life over and over and over…

…

An hour later, Comerca lay on his bed, still trembling, tranquilizers and barbiturates running through his system. He looked up at the ceiling, and knew that there was no one else, no other conspirators…nothing.

Donnel’s room was sealed off behind several inches of rad-proof steel plate forever. Anything he had possessed was destroyed.

His cell was sprayed over with a firehose, cleaning the gore from the walls, to swirl down into the drain below forever.

The lightbulb was replaced.

Donnel’s body was declared far too irradiated for the safety of workers in the morgue. His corpse was declared a traitor and fed into an incinerator, much like the one his family had been placed in years before.

A day later, Fontaine declared the investigation into the matters concerning the death of Cerene quite settled.

A day or so after that Madorian Security Technicians were able to successfully trace the last signal sent by the traitor, Donnel.

…

Part 13= Gave up

Devil awoke to blaring station warning alarms, and felt the station rock to the horrifyingly familiar sound of blast torpedoes, detonating.

He through his bed bag aside as he rolled in the zero g of the station, slapping the comm. into his ear.

”-Madorian Light Hunter Interceptor, with a wing of Darts, six of them, Dave and Merchant intercepting-”

Mr. Mojo’s voice, even and calm, the sounds of computer signals and system launch coordinate codes.

Another blast, the room rocking, Devil throwing on his pilot suit, pulling his boots, looking around for his helmet. He patched through to Circle 66.

”Circle, talk to me!”

”Sorry, communications damaged, I could not patch through to you. This station is under attack by-”

A harsh gargle of static breaking up the communication. Devil heard the distinct sound of the station’s disruptors, firing from somewhere above. The lights of the station dimmed.

”-we have taken damage, hull integrity of the station compromised, Dave has engaged the Madorian Carrier, but-”

More static.

Devil kicked his way to the Main Station Room.

”Circle! Status!”

Circle was moving with complete precision, not in a hurry but not making mistakes. He transferred energy from the station targeting systems to the shields. Four different alarms blared around them. Another blast, sending sparks flying on all sides, the lights dimming and then going to emergency power supply, the dim light going to black, and then replaced by a smoky red filtering radiance.

Devil looked outside, seeing for the first time the predatory form of the Madorian Carrier/Interceptor, a light war vessel designed for catching slower Capitol Ships, usually in packs of three. Blossoms of orange fire burst across it’s brass colored derridium hull, and then it began to fragment, the blossoms becoming larger, and Devil realized that Dave had maneuvered his Claymore in close to attack the Carrier/Interceptor’s main engine array, the smaller heavy bomber retreating ponderously away from the Madorian Vessel. Ruby arcs of fire widened ominously as the Carrier/Interceptor began to go nova.

”Here.” Circle 66 through a laptop at Devil, who caught it, as the station shook spasmodically, a can of nitrolite bouncing off the RG pilot’s head.

”What-?”

”We received a communicae from our source hours before the Madorian’s arrived. They used the Nebula to hide their jump, but we caught a tach transmission and sent Merchant and Mr. Mojo to investigate. Then the Carrier-”

The Carrier detonated, finally, a glowing yellow wash of light impacting the station, and Devil caught a last glimpse of Dave’s wounded Claymore as it rolled and fragmented noiselessly in the silent vacuum, then the deafening sound of missile warning klaxons.

A flood of sparks washed over both of them, setting a nearby document on fire. Circle 66 caught it and crushed it out.

”Devil, you have to get this laptop out of here. I have put the entire tach transmission file on its drive. You have to move.”

”But, you have to…your ship is-”

”Destroyed. Helios took out the main docking hold.”

”My ship-”

”Is still in the visitor’s hold, but you have to get to it.”

The ruby colored illumination in the observation room dimmed, and then they both smelled burning plastic. The ships computer began to recite station evacuation direction procedures in a cold, feminine voice.

Devil looked down at the laptop in his hand, suddenly not knowing what it was, not quite understanding the whole situation, part of his mind in panic, the other part still asleep, and still another calmly putting together the plan to get out of here.

He spoke, but his voice felt distant and unreal.

”You could still get out. I still have my ship, and…”

Circle turned and took off his sunglasses, solemnly re-routing the stations reactor supply to the failing life support systems.

”Circle, c’mon, we have to-”

”What!? My Orion went up with the hold! Get out of here, damnit! What am I going to do, sit in your lap?”

Devil froze, hovering in the absence of gravity; this was not happening, this had not happened, this was-

Circle produced a laspistol and aimed it at Devil.

”Sir, evacuate this facility and save your life before I kill you, sir.”

Devil put on the helmet. He sealed it, in the event of the loss of station oxygen. He put the laptop under one arm.

”Circle, I’m sorry, man. I’m…sorry.”

Devil realized with a fragmented horror that the Russian was crying, his body quaking, and then seconds later the man snapped himself out of it and began to reprogram the stations dying computer grid, slowly, like an automaton, rerouting life support resources.

”Get out, comrade.”

Devil launched himself back to the corridor, looking back one last time to see the IK pilot staring stoically into a vid monitor, scrolling amber code reflecting off his features. Then a wash of sparks and oily smoke obscured him.

The flight down the corridor was almost impossible. Devil pulled his way through cables, coils of service couplings, assorted boxes and steel cubes of supplies. At one point the station began to vibrate rhythmically, a physical collapse that would have been bone-jarring if there had been gravity at all, and then Devil almost lost the laptop, it floated three meters, tumbling end over end, and he snapped an arm out as he propelled his body forward. He then realized that he was holding it with one gloved hand by the very corner, and that the part of the station that he was in had been spaced, as his suit’s environmental system abruptly came to life.

The visitor’s hold was a chaotic jumble of sparking coupling and open compartments, boxes of spare parts and assorted objects that had been stowed at various points along the hold and had come loose from all of the violence.

His peg was floating; on it’s side, and slowly turning towards open space.

Then his senses were smothered in raw, primordial fear as he kicked out, floating forever to the ship, knowing that all it would take was a single buffet to send him out into all that cold vacuum, all alone…or that his ship would tumble away at the last second, and he would die with the station-

Then he was holding onto the edge, the cockpit opening as he stowed the laptop behind the seat and then tried to get inside, his feet hitting the console.

He began to drift away.

He took a deep breath and tried again.

The cockpit closed slightly, and his head hit the side, knocking him back a little. From the corner of his vision he saw blinding silver light…a dogfight outside of the station…

Then he was sitting inside his cockpit, reflexively strapping himself in, the ship powering up, his computer HUD display flaring to life, the rumble of the peg’s engines a comfort behind him-

His shields came online, smacking debris away from the ship on all sides, he hit the afterburners and was propelled forward, rolling out into the space around the station, and he saw Merchant’s Pegasus go up in a ball of brilliant gold-orange flame.

Two Darts, definitely modifications, circling Mr. Mojo’s peg. He was staying close to them, firing into the flickering shields of one of them. Arcs of swarm missiles went narrowly past the light interceptor.

Devil afterburned to the fight.

”Got your back, buddy!”

Mr. Mojo came through on the VON.

”Devil! My shields are gone…losing life support.”

”On my way, hold on.”

The other Dart went wide, almost retreating from the fray. Devil closed the distance on the closer one…streams of swarm missiles flying past him, one of them skimming Mr. Mojo’s peg. Devil fired, watching as the violet bolts impacted with the Dart, and is disappeared in a conflagration of heat and disintegrating titanium.

Mr. Mojo’s voice came through again.

”Devil, I am power, hull depleting…watch out for that other Dart!”

Devil’s klaxons sounded, wailing like spoiled children, he began to fire ECM’s but too late, too late-

He twisted on the peg’s magnetic axis, panic gripping him, and then Mr. Mojo’s afterburners fired one last time, propelling his interceptor into the oncoming swarm, taking the shot for Devil, and then the blinding whiteness stealing all sight as the ship was consumed in silver fire-

Devil rolled, more missiles on their way, he fired ECM’s-

-impacts along his shields, the other swarm missiles circling the countermeasures-

-and he was going towards the Dart, firing, lasers impacting it’s shields in milky-blue distortions of light-

-they passed each other at mind numbing velocity, probably coming within a few feet of each other-

-then he was circling, realizing that he had almost lost shields. The Dart turned, trying to get a missile lock on Devil-

-and he was afterburning forward, lasers arcing in lines of blazing violet towards the other ship, swarms streaming towards him, past him, and the arcs became bursts of atomic fires as the Dart went up in a conflagration of rending components, the swarms flying harmlessly for kilometers into space.

Devil rolled and spun, and then slowed to a halt.

Miles away, the station flickered with a haunting, silver, almost beautiful radiance, a halo of light that expanded outward, like an atom bomb, and then it was stardust, just particles, and gone, like Dave, like Circle 66, like Merchant, like Mr. Mojo, and at that moment Devil realized that there was nothing around him for miles, for days, that he was alone, that space was all around, nothing for days…days…

Devil’s peg, floating; a silver blue speck in the silent void of infinite space.

…

Argentum had awaken, hours later, curled up on the floor of his room. He didn’t know how long he had slept.

He sat at the edge of his bed, expressionless, looking at the floor in front of him, thinking/not thinking.

He felt…emotionless? Like a stretch of silver sand on the cold, windless beach of an island in the middle of a vast, uncharted sea, waves crashing upon him, alone…

He cleaned the bathroom first, patiently, throwing away charred papers along with fragments of a few things he had destroyed. Then he showered, feeling numb, still, the hot water running around him, into the drain below, his toes pink against the bone white tile.

He dried up and shaved, slowly, the razor washing clean under the faucet, and then shaving cream, hot water and soap swirling…

He dressed, bandaged his hand, and cleaned the room. He collected the fragments of everything he had broken and placed them into a cardboard box.

He cleaned the kitchen, taking his time, no music, no vids, no noise, just numbing electric white noise. He didn’t think, didn’t measure the time around him, he just scrubbed away at the tile and counter, and then cleaned the remaining dishes.

He vacuumed.

Hours later, famished, he made soup.

Later, he sat on the edge of the bed again, the room around him as still, clean and orderly as a museum. He held his IK helmet in his hands, turning it end over end, looking at the clan symbol, as if he were looking at it through an electron microscope.

A few hours later, he stood in the Phobos station gymnasium, eyes closed, hearing the noises around him. He was dressed in his fencing outfit, the piste’ below him, underfoot, his practice epee in his gauntleted hand. He saluted and lunged, eyes still closed, the tip of the weapon connecting.

He opened his eyes, seeing the tip through the mesh of his mask, touching the coin sized circled that was the target area.

He smiled.

…

Part 12= Gimme Shelter

Reptile washed his face in the restroom and paused, watching the water drop into the sink.

He was very, very intoxicated. Epic levels of alcohol had run through his veins…Vikings in Valhalla didn’t drink like this.

The ”Fight For the Vault” Twilight Jack Tour had started with a bang, the crowd of seven hundred cramming the Vulodome concert hall to capacity, no seats, complete standing room, with a light from above washing the stage in cold white radiance.

Anticipation had been fierce, the media coverage almost intimidating, jumping on the celebrity with an almost fiendish aggressiveness, the Fringe Rock Star taking it all in stride.

Interviewed a day before, TNN reporter Jessica Marcup asked, ”Are you worried that the all these interviews will wear you out?”

”Hey,” Twilight Jack said, brimming with mirth. ”It’s not like the Madorians are invading, is it?”

Everyone laughed.

Reptile left the restroom, staggered, and then stopped, surrounded by throngs of tattooed pilots, armed station security, corporate suit types, slumming. Even a fair share of high ranking RG officers. He pushed his way to get a good view.

The air was tinged blue, and it smelled like hashish, tobacco, Jack Daniels and human sweat. There were voices on all sides of Reptile, as he met up with Rustbucket and Grimbrand.

Up above, a pretty blonde woman pulled her shirt up, revealing her bare chest to the screaming crowd.

”Holy Glowing Green Buddha, one little rock concert and the crowd turns into a bunch of unwashed Visigoths…” Grimbrand said.

”Can you blame them? This guy is bigger than Elvis!” Rustbucket said.

”Who’s Elvis?” Asked Reptile.

Grimbrand’s answer was consumed in a roar from the crowd as the lights went out, drenching the assembled throng in sable black, and then a single light shined down on the stage, bathing the form of Twilight Jack, dressed in a simple tuxedo with a red carnation (A stark contrast to his usual feathered and glitter-dusted glam outfits, to say the least). He beamed broadly, and then bowed to the assembled fans, who cheered and applauded with a thunderous cacophony.

”Hello everyone.” He said into the mic, half smiling.

More applause.

Twilight Jack had few traditions, when it came to his performances. He tried to change his image at every turn, with every album, his performance extending well beyond the stage and studio. The rock n’ roll magazine ”Oscillating Marble,” said that the music genius behind Twilight Jack’s success was not his embracing of a persona, but the manipulation of countless varied persona’s that kept his audiences interest.

But one tradition he strictly adhered to was to always open and close with a cover tribute…and fans the galaxy over placed bets on what those covers would be, because he never performed the same covers more than once.

His band came out, the drummer, Barton Zimatsu, and the already immortalized guitarist Austin Yuelum. The bass was last, a shy young man who called himself Flash Gordon.

Jack bowed to them as well, and in perfect synchronization they each put on a black pair of ray-bans.

Then the lights went out again.

Reptile’s head was whirling, the crowd adding to his intoxication. A young woman accidentally stepped on his foot, apologizing in the darkness. Then the lights blazed to life.

Twilight Jack opened with an old one from the Beastie Boys, ”Sabotage.” No one expected this, and the audience proceeded to absolutely lose their minds. At one point the song paused abruptly, and they froze, a half second, and then the crowd started to roar just as the bass line resumed and Jack jumped high, concluding the vocals with as much energy as he had started.

”Damn.” Grimbrand said simply.

Jack continued onward, going on a journey of careful and precise musical manipulation, bringing the audience by the sleeve with him.

He performed ”Socasta,” his personal tribute to a pilot who had died one hundred years ago, and then the screaming dirge, ”Abbatoir.”

”Griffin and the Metal Manticores of Fate,” was next, a fast and guitar heavy piece that completed avoided anything remotely synthetic, in favor of a meat and potatoes style of music that Jack usually avoided. Then ”Praxon” and the sister-song, ”Synthesis.”

”Synthesis” could easily be accused of being flat out boring, in terms of the simple arrangement of vocals and drums, but critics pointed out that the song was actually a well-designed acoustic sorbet, to clear the palate.

Then came the audio assault that was ”Titanium Wrap-a-Round,” a heavy synth number that pounding the listener into new heights of adrenaline highs. For this number Jack paused beforehand to remove his tie, and the female part of the audience screamed the way an ancient Roman audience at a gladiatorial match must have.

A short break, as the crowd chanted for ”Electrification,” Jack’s hit single that had heralded his one-man assault on the pillars of Punk Rock, but Jack teased the throng, taking them into the palm of his hand, lifting them up, and then went right into ”Prophet Seventeen.” While not nearly as lyrically poetic as his other hits such as ”Six-Gap,” and

”Saturnine,” ”Prophet Seventeen,” more than made up for the deficit by being completely formidable when it came to raw emotion, coupled with the voodoo drumbeat, steady guitar rhythm and genius synth ambient background beats.

Twilight Jack paused and ordered a martini. The crowd was on his side, he had bridged the important gap between the audience and the performer, the stage and the floor. It was a bridge that was as wide and inviting as the halcyon days of one’s youth…the eyes of a lover in the throes of passion, the remembrance of past glory and future power.

Jack consumed the martini with deliberate fervor, and then turned and bowed to Iocetta Von Hammerstein, of the Bora Coalition, a petite and accomplished opera singer from the colonies. She curtsied demurely, the crowd cheering for her. Then a roadie in a tuxedo came up carrying a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist.

With bated anticipation the audience watched as Jack pulled a key from a chain around his neck, and opened the case, pulling out a shining silver harmonica and holding it up triumphantly for all to see, as if it were a splinter from the Cross. The assembled men and women aboard the Vault who had come to see the famous musician cheered, their voices shaking the bolts off the walls.

The cover started with a haunting melody, the plunking of strings on the lead guitar as intoxicating as the demon-pipes of an efreeti in ”A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” Then a bone rattle and a haunting back beat, drawing the crowd in, the vocals, comforting, soothing-

”The storm is faded, louder and louder again, if I don’t get some shelter…ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away…”

Then Iocetta’s voice, together with Jack’s a warm blanket enfolding, embracing-

”All the children, it’s just a shout away, it’s just a shout away…all the children…it’s just a shout away…”

We see the crowd, below, humanity gathered for the purpose of mutual celebration, and our gaze is lifted…

…to Highlander, elsewhere on the station, personally overseeing the preparation of the Vault’s defenses. His face is intense with foreboding as he analyses possible routs of attack…

”See the fire is weakening, louder and louder today, burns like a brand new goblet…”

The Main Hangar of the Vault, the silver forms of Galspan Starships aligned in perfect rows, maintenance technicians checking shields and weapon systems…

”All the children, it’s just a shout away, it’s just…”

We see Stryder, light-years away, gazing out from the observation deck of the Carpathian. He is ordering the warcraft towards the Vault, and his face and the faces of his crew are bloody in the light of the nebula. He checks his personal chronometer, punching a coded sequence into a nearby computer.

”…it’s just a shout away, it’s just a shout away…”

To Devil, huddled alone in the cockpit of his Pegasus on the long route home, the light of the laptop igniting his features. He’s going over the transmission, aghast at the design of the scheme drawn out before him, and his legs are cramped. It’s been a day now, and damage to his craft took out his communications. He wants to shave, to eat a hot meal, to stretch out on a feather bed, anything but sit cramped and ineffectual, miles deep into the starry void…

”See the storm is fading, louder and louder today…if I don’t get some shelter, ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away…”

Argentum is standing inside his quarters, eyes locked on the vid screen, epee in hand. He lunges suddenly, and then draws back, an epitome of precision, his face is icy with a perfect resolve, and then he lunges again, the tip passing through the handle of a coffee cup sitting on the counter, two meters away…

”All the children, it’s just a shout away, it’s just a shout away…”

Alyscia looks at her suitcases arranged perfectly on the table before her, in her own quarters. She wonders at the decision she has made, her career, the children she might not have, the look on Argentum’s face as the cherry blossoms fell around them…then she thinks of incense and the smell of incense and sacred oil spattered on rows of silent Void Alliance starships…she thinks of RedStorm in that freighter so long ago, now, the blood pooling on the floor behind him, the way he had stared out into those cold fires that were the stars…

”…it’s just a shout away, it’s just a shout away…”

To RedStorm, a cup of wine in his hand, looking at a table that is completely covered with maps of the Vault and various wing battle strategies. He looks out a nearby portal into all that black-blue vacuum, thinking of his long dead wife, thinking of the Madorian’s face when his foot came off in a splatter of bone and flesh, the blood pelting the walls about them, the sent of it blending with the acrid scent of cordite…

The music was there, a shadow, a wraith, a living, palatable thing, guided by Jack, it swirled around the crowd, an audio noose drawing them together, and then Iocetta steps forward, her dress magenta beneath the glow of fluorescents, and she is shrieking, maniacal, screaming/singing, eyes closed, her hands up in her hair…

”Rape, rape…it’s just a shout away…rape, rape, it’s just a shout away…

To Comerca, standing in his quarters far within Madoria, slowly gathering up all of Cerene’s belongings and burning them solemnly, they char and blister, like Donnel and his family did years before…Comerca’s face is a mask of unresolved grief, his eyes like blazing pits into an ancient and infernal realm.

”…rape, it’s just a shout away, it’s just a shout away…”

The harmonics blare as Jack punctuates the lyrics, eyes closed, enslaved by the music and the crowd as they are enslaved to him.

DeathGiver is on a mercenary depot station light-years away, watching as technicians load up his Pegasus with Tesla emp’s. The merchant is talking to him, and he is not listening, he is thinking of red paint, of the feel of the smoking gyrojet pistol, warm in his palm…

Then Jack is singing, empathetic, not to the crowd but as if to a person, that each individual in the audience is separate, and Jack is talking to them alone.

”I tell ya love, sister…it’s just a kiss away…”

Now he is a friend, promising the world.

”It’s just a kiss away…”

Then he is a lover, breathing the words desperately to a beautiful woman.

”It’s just a kiss away…”

A brutal foe, threatening extinction.

”It’s just a kiss away…”

A politician, running for re-election.

”It’s just a kiss away…”

Then he is a performer speaking lovingly to an audience…most of which probably won’t be around after Comerca invades the Vault. This is his last chance to say the things he won’t have time to say, later.

”Kiss away, kiss away, kiss away, kiss away…”

Then the music is over, the crowd is as silent as an open grave, and then the applause, like a tide of sound, clapping, screaming, howling, thunderous, overwhelming…

”Thank you!” Jack says, bowing to the audience, to his band, to Iocetta.

”Thank you very much…”

…

Comerca stood in the cool atmosphere of his gardens, looking out over the silent elms, oaks, aspens and pines. He looks down at the black and fragrant soil, at the nearby flowers, waving slightly in the artificial wind.

He can almost hear the shouting from where he is.

He is wearing his black and gold General’s uniform, with all of his rank and medals heavy on his chest. He stares out, looking at the white rose’s, petals anointed with dew. He selects one.

He looks at it, thinking, his face blank and expressionless. His eyes are deep and brimming with something burning, something like a fatal resolve. His hand seems distant and small, the rose unreal, like a hologram. He imagines Cerene, somewhere, walking through quiet, verdant gardens.

Earlier he had rose from sleep in his quarters and had looked out into space, trying to figure out where all of his dreams for the future had suddenly become so banal, idiotic and smeared in excrement.

He had stood, alone, in his throne room, gazing upon the solid piece of ruby, with the cloned cheetah skin across it, listening for echoes that were not there. He had glimpsed the message, briefly…the rubric of what was happening, what he had to learn, and then with a cough it had disintegrated, and he was blind to it…deaf to it, without eyes or ears, unable to hold what was happening, even if he had a million grasping limbs.

He followed the long corridor, the roar growing, past rows of silent Praetorians, his footsteps echoing upon ancient iron. He turns to a set of doors, and they open for him.

The animalistic roar of the assembled Madorian military might, the columns of smoking braziers, the thirty foot long black, white and red banners of the nation, the faces and uniforms forming one complete beast that Comerca knew Madoria was becoming, crying for truth, for blood, for smoke and darkness. The brass bands blaring triumphantly, their voices screaming, shrieking, saying his name, suffusing him with a black and terrible pride. This was his dream, his hideous, vicious, bold, total, absolute, birthed in blood, fire and the annihilation of countless human lives.

He stood in the face of it, the maniacal assembly, some three hundred strong, his heart thundering with the drums and harsh squelch of speakers reiterating the propaganda he had written months before for this moment, this…revelation.

Then, total, deafening, silence. The microphone stood, waiting for him, like the slim and boned outline of the boatman at the River Styx.

He stepped up to it, looking above him at the smoke stained dermoplast ceiling of the Grand Madorian Audience Chamber. His heart beat in his throat, and he wondered if it was so loud that the people would hear, would suddenly turn on him and tear him limb from-

Then he thought of Cerene, beside him, next to him, voiceless, courageous, an angel of destruction, holding the symbol of what Madoria would become, with one wing dipped in blood. Something in him twisted and hardened, and he was Comerca again, strong, again. He had seen the face of God, and now he was the artificer of his own bold future.

”My people-” He said.

The rolling thunder of one great beast, bellowing it’s declaration of war upon a doomed and ignorant galaxy, the smoke from it’s flaming breath blackening the void of space a blacker still.

…

Devil went in and out of consciousness, erratically, no longer sleep/non-sleep but a blend of the two. Long hours were spent between the opposite ends of the spectrum, but it was almost rest, almost being…

…somewhere else.

He wanted to be in a chair. A wooden chair. At a bar stool. In a frikkin’ bean bag, on an easy sofa recliner, in a swimming pool.

F*ck.

He stared at the plasteel before him, out into oncoming space.

Yer gonna snap, kid.

”No I’m not. This is nothing. I went through pilot boot camp. I did push ups in freezing rain and mud. There were times when I wished I could have hung out and just sat down like this.”

Yeah, but how do your legs feel?

”Good, so I can’t move them. Big deal.”

Bet you want to.

”Yeah, f*ck you.”

He exhausted the music, fast. He went over the laptop, but it was devoid of anything interesting, except for the transmission. There were journal entries, and he was tempted to read them, but it made him think of Circle 66, and Dave. It also made him think of Merchant and Mr. Mojo.

In the lonely cold void of where he was, inches of thin titanium and plasteel protecting him from the harsh vacuum of total night, he tried not to think of his lack of food, his shortage of recycled water, the growing terror of claustrophobia, the realization that there was no telling what damage had been done to his Pegasus, or when his computers might finally short out completely. He especially tried not to think of all of the horror stories pilot’s told each other, of ships blown off course by interstellar winds or sudden spikes of magnetic force…of deep space exploration vessels coming upon starships a century old, hovering like steel tombs in the ossuary of the universe, their occupants’ grinning skulls the only evidence of what had happened to send them there.

Devil looked in his right hand at the slim aluminum can of nitrolite, it’s label promising a caffeine and vitamin laden refreshment. He popped the lid and sipped.

The black vacuum pressing against the window of his cockpit.

Space.

Forever.

…

Part 13= Chickasaw

Eldritch got up from his bed and showered. Then he put on his flight suit, picking up his helmet.

He looked around at his room, at the paintings of Martian landscapes. Of Capitol Ships eclipsed by ancient silver suns. He suddenly forgot who he was, what he was doing, where he was, precisely.

Then there was the IK symbol, chrome shining under the halogens above, and he knew.

He was aboard the Carpathian, and they were on their way to the Vault.

He walked out into the corridor built of dermoplast and ferroconcrete and strode, helmet in hand, to the Starship Hanger Bay, where his Cutlass waited, gleaming copper in the ice white fluorescence.

Bloodstar passes by him, and for a fleeting second their hands slap together in a high five-

-and then it’s Bloodstar, marching, helmet in hand, fully suited, thinking of the fight ahead. He thinks of his Pegasus, of how every mission, every moment spent in training, every year of his life with IK, has come to this. He feels it, in his bones, in his neurons, that this is the final chapter in a conflict that stretches for lightyears. He thinks of his comrades, as he turns the corner, hearing the sounds of stamping feet, of distant commands, of the Carpathian going into full readiness. He walks to an elevator, and the doors open and Storm is there.

The elevator is swift, and neither speaks, lost in his own meditations. Then the doors of slide open. Bloodstar turns, and for a second both IK pilots shake hands, meeting the gaze of the other-

-and then Storm is out of the elevator, en route to the Starship Hangar Bay. He is breathing, steadily, calming his mind for the combat before him. He has done this a hundred times, looked into the faces of comrades before battle, seen the enemy die at lightspeeds, flesh and hull fragmenting out into the torturous physics of hard vacuum under the brutal administrations of his heavy lasers. It is not personal, it is not out of loathing or any real emotional catalyst. It is karma, it is because of who he is, and what he does. Then he sees TygerBlueEyes march past him. He salutes crisply, and the Overlord salutes back-

-and then it’s TygerBlueEyes, walking past Storm into the elevator to the Chow Hall, his step keeping perfect measure as he looks briefly at the helmet in his left gloved hand, the symbol of the Iconian Knights gleaming, he stops at the table where Rabid Chicken, Raverix and SuperFurryAnimal wait, their espresso before them in burnished steel demitasse cups.

He looks at them, at the empty walls of snow colored ferroconcrete, hearing the reactor hum of the Carpathian’s engines somewhere beyond.

He toasts.

They down their coffee in perfect synchronization, and then TygerBlueEyes walks around the table, clapping each of them on the shoulder. He shakes the hand of the new recruit SuperFurryAnimal, and for a brief second the leather of his glove contacts the young Knight’s hand-

-and then SuperFurryAnimal gets up, the assembled Ghostriders walking in formation out of the Chow Hall. They enter an elevator, and SuperFurryAnimal’s brow is knitted in concentration. His pulse is steady, bolts of adrenaline traveling from his spine down the length of his arms. He imagines his Warhammer, heavy with ordinance, the flare of it’s afterburners electric emerald in the jet cyanic fold of galactic night. He pulls two cigarettes from his flight suit and lights ‘em both, handing one to RabidChicken-

-who takes the burning object and puffs. The elevator doors open and he steps out, surrounded by his wing, and they march to the chrome and steel environs of the Observation and Operations Hold of the Carpathian. RabidChicken finishes the cigarette quickly, and reaches into a pocket. He punches a command code into the digital pad and the doors open up, revealing the Starship Hangar Bay of the Carpathian, and fifty assembled Iconian Knights, at attention, their ships behind them.

RabidChicken stands in front of his Pegasus, it’s wings gleaming titanium blue, a serene and deadly bird of prey. Beyond, he can see the broad forms of Phoenix Bombers, squat Poseidons, Cutlasses, Archangels…

Stryder steps out into the hold, standing before them, and each pilots pivots in place and salutes-

-Stryder salutes back, a snap, and then turns, the men and women of the Iconian Knights gathering themselves aboard their ships, the Carpathian exiting from it’s Tachyon Jump into Vault space, ships systems coming on line at once, the hum and wail of electrics and reactor engines. The walls above groan and tremble, as the entire hold is abruptly sucked free of all oxygen and atmosphere, the ships hovering and floating into the starred night sky.

…

Part 14= The Voyeur of Utter Destruction

”Lieutenant, report!”

Highlander stood aboard the Forward Command Observation Deck of the medical facility that was the Vault, looking out into the curtain of space. From here, he could see the domes of greenhouses, silent titanic cylinders of the Vault’s reactor systems, the steel teeth of the Vault that were it’s laser cannons and torpedo launchers. Several assembled wings of Royal Guard forces buzzed around the admantium bulk of the Quasar Class Starbase, and many other wings were in full readiness.

”Sir, we are getting massive subspace Tachyon readings…indeterminate fluctuations, probably a Capitol ship, maybe a few Carrier/Interceptors…”

Highlander looked at the steaming coffee cup in his hand, the multi-tiered chrome and dermoplast walls of the Deck rising up around him, filled with operational personnel, glowing computer grids, reactor defense stations, radar analyzers…

Those bastards are really going to do it. Void Alliance was right.

”Order all wings to stay close to the Vault. I don’t care what shows up, no one drifts alone. Our only edge against Capitol Ship firepower is the Vault’s own guns, remind them of that!”

Twilight Jack’s voice came through on the RG communications channel.

”I hope this wing is not offended when I leave to join the Void Alliance when they get here, Highlander.”

”Permission granted, Twilight Jack.”

Another Ensign.

”Sir, what about the Tach gates?”

Highlander made some calculations.

”Keep them ready. The Madorians expect them closed, and will probably just use the Tach Jumps from their Capitol Ships. We also have to keep the Phobos Tach gate open for Star Patrol reinforcements.”

”Sir, coded affirmative from RedStorm. He’s ready.”

”Excellent. Power the main weapon platforms, target anything out there, but don’t fire until my mark. Ready.”

Another Ensign reported.

”Sir, deep space relay stations have noticed multiple Tach jumps from Madorian sector. Unknown emanations, but large enough to warrant concern.”

”Of course. Notify Phobos. Boost Station Defence shields, and tell the civilian populations to remain quartered.”

The Deep Fringe Tach Gate, glowing like an icy neon violet and silver orb, suddenly flared as a few dozen craft emerged from it’s whirling light.

”Sir, twenty four ships, they look like Devil’s Fist, mercenaries, sir…”

”What? What do they want? Observation squadron, report!”

”Sir, they are not moving, they are just staying in formation, but I am picking up deep scans, particularly on our Medical Vessels. Our jammers aren’t working.”

Bloody devil’s…just what we need right now.

”No one move, might be a diversion. No hostile maneuvers.”

”Sir, the Carpathian just came out of a Tach jump. Standing by.”

”Good, tell them to hold back. Nothing hasty.”

Then the horizon of space became a silver line across his field of vision, like a fusion bomb, exploding quietly…

The light opened, alarm klaxon’s sounded at all sides. Wing reports came in, too fast for the communications personnel to relay.

Ten Carrier/Interceptors, Madorian, surrounding a Madorian Emporator Class Capitol Ship, ”The Heirophant.” Then, from the sides of the violet and gray craft, starships, like clouds of ravens, forming wings across the starred sky, tiny against the immense forms of the Capitol and Sub-Capitol Warcraft. The assembled fleet eclipsed the night behind them.

”Sir, the Heirophant is maneuvering into an attack position. It seems ridiculous, but, it appears to be on a collision course…”

Highlander watched a vidscreen magnification of the Capitol Ship, colossal, bristling with guns, laden with armor and triple enforced fields.

What was their game?

…

Reptile was inside his Archangel, the Vault behind him. Ahead, he could see the lethal outlines of the Devil’s Fist fleet, hovering…waiting.

To his left was Rustbucket, in his Orion, and to his right was Venomhawk, in an Archangel, as well. Taking up the rear was Grimbrand, in a Pegasus.

”Go for missile lock?” Venomhawk asked.

”Bad idea.” Said Reptile. ”Let them move first.”

”I’m going to open a communication to them.” Rustbucket said.

Pause.

”Nothing…they’re not jamming us, it’s as if they are not there…but my systems are showing a deep scan…like they’re looking for something…”

”Stay where you are…don’t move until they do…” Venomhawk didn’t like any of this.

…

Highlander did some calculations.

”Tell IK to engage the Heirophant, move wings one through six forward to engage…let’s test their resolve.”

Beyond, in space, the flares and arcs of ship to ship conflict, and the Nephilim that was the Heirophant, advancing…

…

Styder received the transmission.

”Open up, everything. Send the bombers with a fighter escort to take those Carrier/Interceptors. Don’t let those Darts get over to us. All guns on the Capitol Ship.”

The night became a broiling sea of weapons fire. A distance away, the wings of IK starships filled the sky like so many steel peregrines. Beyond that, the cyclopean forms of the Carrier/Interceptors, dwarfed by the metal titan that was the Heirophant. Stryder had never seen so many Sub-Capitol ships in one place before.

…

Highlander watched the glowing icons that were the wings of Madorian, IK and RG ships, converging upon each other. A larger icon, the Heirophant, with the Carpathian intercepting. Smaller icons that were the Carrier/Interceptors drifted closer, protectively.

”Sir…with the Devil’s Fist forces…we’re still not outnumbered…especially with the Void Alliance auxiliary force coming out of the Tach gate, now.”

”Aye, it’s those Carrier/Interceptors that could be a threat…but this attack makes no sense…proper tactics calls for softening up defense systems with fighter and bomber wings, and then closing with a Capitol ship…they are just asking to get shot to pieces…”

”Sir, we are receiving a transmission from the Devil’s Fist.”

”Send it through.”

”I have no choice, it’s breaking through our communications system defenses.”

”What!?”

A soft and sibilant voice, pregnant with foreboding, came through, drowning out all other communication transmissions.”

”This is SoulCutter Zero-One of the Devil’s Fist. Vault, what is your official capacity?”

Highlander paused, confused.

”This station is a medical research facility, sir. Our Tachyon signature should confirm it…this station has been recently converted from it’s former designation.”

Silence.

An Ensign looked up from the emerald glow of a vid screen.

”What’s that all about?”

…

Argentum Draconis looked outside the window of his room into space beyond. The chrome orb shapes of Star Patrol Interceptors, glittering under the light of a thousand distant stars, streaked out to the Vault Tach Gate.

”They looked like they were going to a battle.” He said to himself.

From another Tach gate, three medical vessels, graceless bricks of dermoplast marked with red crosses, emerged, and set course for Phobos.

At the last minute, one of their number broke course, heading for the Tachyon Gate the Interceptors had left from.

The two continued with their course…towards the Phobos Docking Station. Nearby, the black, blue and white of two Star Patrol Capitol Ships, unmanned for the past weeks awaiting repairs and relocation, sat inert, like slumbering Kraken in a star filled ocean.

Meanwhile, Argentum could see a TNN Traveler Freighter, blue with civilian reporter markings, lift off, and knew that Alyscia was aboard, heading for her new home.

The Medical vessels neared the Station, red and white lights blinking across their derridium skins.

…

Highlander found himself within the center of a veritable firestorm of reports.

”Sir! RG wings five and six have taken heavy casualties…they report that several of the Carrier/Interceptors have been destroyed, but-”

”…IK reports incredible resistance across the delta sector, with the Heirophant still closing…they can’t turn it away, despite the damage they have inflicted-”

”-the Madorian’s Darts seem to be a redesigned chassis, our pilots are reporting that the craft have an improved shield and afterburner design-”

”The Heirophant’s hull has lost 36% of it’s integrity, Commander. The Vault has taken damage to North and South reactor grid, with a loss of life support system wide…some of those Carrier/Interceptor’s have broken through, but the Void Alliance attaché is breaking off it’s assault on the Madorian fighter wings to intercept.”

The Heirophant was crippled, it’s weapons still firing at close proximity, mostly Improved Plasma Torps and Deimos…it’s engine systems were almost crushed, the once proud admantium armor pocked and blackened by the catastrophic damage inflicted upon it by the Carpathian. Highlander could see numerous lightning arcs across it’s chassis, evidence of reactor meltdown…surely their crew had to be mad to continue the fight? Small explosions appeared across it’s starboard side, with it’s port side a mass of flaming matter as the Carpathian continued to hull it with intense ferocity. Yet still it came closer…

Something primordial and blacker than fear started to turn inside Highlander’s stomach. He calculated it slowly, the events around slowing down to a complete and total horrifying standstill, like the way the gravity of a black hole affects light.

No. He thought. No, no, no, no, no…

…

DeathGiver emerged from the Tach gate in a blazing cyclone of physics and light.

He targeted the first medical vessel’s systems, looking desperately for the third.

”Star Patrol, this is independent pilot DeathGiver, those aren’t medical frigates! They are…”

There was a harsh squelch of audio feedback as his outgoing communications channel was ruthlessly jammed.

F*ck!!! He thought.

He charged his EMP’s and afterburned towards the back of the first medical vessel. Bolts of laser fire began to detonate upon the craft’s engines.

”Pilot, this is Star Patrol. You are under arrest. Power down your craft or face immediate termination.”

Look who’s talking. He thought.

The EMP’s arced and hit the frigate with a sound like distant thunder. The craft went dead, still drifting towards the hangar.

Damn. Too late. Too late.

Laser fire opened up the blue-black sky on all sides, the Star Patrol vessels maneuvering quickly upon DeathGiver’s postion.

He turned, afterburning between the three orb shaped vessels, and spun back, firing EMP’s into their ranks.

Two went dead in space, electrics flaring briefly before they began to float like so much jettisoned cargo.

He latted erratically, avoiding fire, and then banked hard, his shoulder hitting the side of the cockpit, converging upon the third frigate, which was nearing the Tach gate that led to the Vault.

He opened up with lasers and EMP’s, watching the missiles glide nimbly toward their mark. Laser fire came from behind, and he latted innocuously, avoiding it.

The Frigate stopped suddenly, and his computers showed massive energy fluctuations, and then it evaporated in a quasar of nuclear devastation, the Tach gate immolating to atomized particles.

DeathGiver had time enough to feel complete Fear, and then an invisible and Godlike hand snatched his peg and flung it, end over end, into the folds of the dark and distant void.

…

Argentum watched as the silvery-blue detonation eclipsed space, and then saw the other Medical Frigate drift closer to the principle reactors of the station. The first one had made it inside.

For a second he realized that he had just witnessed the flash of atomics, and then the second one went up, causing a swift chain reaction, and the Central Reactor Grid of the Star Patrol outpost went into complete meltdown, the lights of the station glowing brightly, pulsed, and died.

The darkness swallowed Argentum’s vision.

…

RabidChicken latted and performed a perfect slide, missiles exploding all around him. He targeted another Dart and fired, rolling, watching the bolts sizzle across the smaller craft’s shields. He spun end over end, watching SuperFurryAnimal’s rails cut another in half. He finished the job on his own Dart, the craft detonating, pieces of it flipping into space.

Eldritch swung and rolled, ravening laser energy tearing into his shields. The Darts were hard to hit, too slim a profile, but he took his time and fired plasmas in quick succession, following the shots with a quick rail.

The Dart became several tons of orange ionized plasma, washing the darkness of his cockpit in a blinding flare.

…

Highlander snapped out of it.

”Ensign, scan that Capitol Ship for lifeforms.”

The longest pause of Highlander’s life, then…

”Nothing, sir…there is nothing…the sensors must be malfunctioning.”

Highlander closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and then-

”Ensign.” He said, his voice meticulous and controlled. ”Evacuate decks thirteen through twenty-seven. Reroute power from the reactor grid to all outside systems, and brace for impact.”

”Brace for impact, sir?”

Highlander turned to answer, and the Heirophant hit the Vault with all the violence of infinity, of creation, of the Devil being hurled down by angels from Heaven itself. The atomics stored deep within the belly of the Capitol Ship went up in a deafening and catastrophic conflagration of liquefied admantium, the reactor grid of the Vault following suit, several nearby wings were engulfed in the horrendous detonation, the impact of the enormous craft crumpling miles of corrugated derridium and reinforced ceramite, the shipyard going up into a silver-white blast of rending debris, the base itself rocking on it’s magnetic axis, the Greenhouse Domes melting into so much scorched ferroconcrete and plasteel, hundreds of lives ending in a sudden and crushing collision of plasma and incomprehensible physics.

There was a flash of electrics overloading, the Vault’s systems reacting to the shock it’s designers had never foreseen, and then blackness bled out from the disintegrating reactor grid, eating up all of the ancient star base in a wash of anti-light.

Billowing orange-red storms of broiling plasma began to consume the area outside the impact like a living thing, consuming deck after deck, shorting out remaining systems, killing people inside with a sudden burst of rads, creeping through the once-proud ferroconcrete corridors and smashing apart the armored dermoplast by it’s very roots.

Around the dead station, the conflict reached a fever pitch.

The Madorian Capitol Ship, the ”Malefactor,” appeared from it’s Tach jump a few miles from the crippled Star Patrol outpost. It was a dreadnought, a fourth the size of the base, composed of reinforced derridium and armored panels of cerramite. It bristled with cannons, ablatives, redundant systems multiple sensor relays. Older than the Carpathian, it could still maneuver quite efficiently with it’s Gotham Reactor Engines.

A cloud of Madorian fighters streaked from it’s opening sides, setting course for the Star Patrol outpost. Elsewhere along the ship, Tractor Freighters, equipped for quickly pulling enormous masses, emerged, each escorted by an Interceptor wing.

Comerca looked at devastated Star Patrol base, and smiled.

”Fontaine, report.”

”We have placed thermal detonators alongside the corridors that attach to their Capitol Ships…Star Patrol is not aware of us, yet.”

”Good, I will order all wings to attack the base…get your troops aboard whatever craft you can find and send your signal to the Malefactor. I will order additional wings to provide cover. Luck to you.”

”As well. Fontaine out.”

Comerca could see the few remaining Star Patrol vessels drifting off from the base to meet them. He wondered if they had figured out that their communications to the Vault was being jammed on every channel, so as to insure success.

All for those ships. The legendary Star Patrol Capitol ships, filled to capacity with systems and technology far ahead of the majority of the universe. Comerca’s spies had reported months earlier two were to be repaired at Phobos, Star Patrol apparently confident that no one would dare to assault them, believing the Vault capable of coming to the rescue. Ah, no…not today.

”Wings, attack everything that is not Madorian. Hull them. We shall take claim their technology as our own and leave nothing but corpses in our wake, as a tribute to the future of Madoria. Let there be no mercy, no parley, no respite. On my mark, attack, attack, ATTACK!!!”

The Malefactor’s century old Bonemelter Class Guided Torpedo Cannons began to speak, their voice a hymn of utter annihilation to all they touched.

Comerca thought of Cerene, and hoped the anything living in the corridors of the Vault were just now drowning in a rising tide of spilt gore, spreading from the bodies of the dead…

…

RedStorm fired a torrent of Deimos at the Madorian Carrier/Interceptor, and then followed with Blast Torpedoes, watching as the weapons turned the craft into so much burning fragments. Several Darts were on his tail, but glancing at his radar, he could see that ScadianWrath, WitchKing and Twilight Jack were already making short work of the fighters, their blips disappearing from his scanner.

His missile warning klaxon sputtered to life. He twisted, ECM’s trailing behind, and fired, his Deimos tearing away the shields of the Dart. He rolled, latted, and afterburned past the Madorian fighter, who let loose a salvo of swarms, too late. Spinning on gyroscopic gravities, RedStorm fired again, and the Dart went up in a firestorm of rending matter.

Griffin Moone felt lasers impact along his rear shields. With practiced ease, he afterburned, reversing, and watched the Dart slide past. He fired his disruptors, and then followed up with Deimos, afterburning forward now, and emerged from the burning cloud of ionized particles that the Madorian fighter became. He rolled, flaming plasma swirling from the wings of his Pegasus, and targeted another.

…

Highlander got up from off the floor, the Vault shuddering like a living behemoth as back-up system reactors came on line. Computer systems brightened one by one, vidscreens flickering to life.

From every area of the Vault damage reports began to come in.

”Ensign, scramble all fighters and get them out of here. I want all Medical and Evac teams to move. Don’t give me the complete damage report, just set up triage stations and quarter off all spaced areas of the Vault. If the hull integrity is below seventy five percent on any quarter, cut it off and get Rescue Freighters to bear.”

”Aye-aye.”

”Status report! What’s going on out there!”

”Sir, the Void Alliance says they are wrapping up their sector. Rustbucket reports that the Devil’s Fist still hasn’t moved…should he attack?”

Before Highlander could answer, the entry doors into the Observation Deck hissed open and Devil stood there, barely, legs shaking and beard tangled and in disarray. He held a laptop above his head, one hand steadying himself, and to the crew below he resembled a Southern Baptist Preacher, or perhaps a Medieval Prophet of Doom, warning of the damnation of all men.

He coughed and choked, his voice a harsh and painful yell.

”It’s a diversion! The Madorians aren’t attacking the Vault, they want to steal the Star Patrol Capitol Ships…they’re attacking Phobos! THEY’RE ATTACKING PHOBOS!!!”

…

Rustbucket stayed where he was, his nerves and blood screaming, the conflict behind him escalating on his sensors and radar. Ahead of them, the Devil’s Fist detachment stood still, like predators, waiting.

Grimbrand came through on all channels.

”I’ve hacked their communications signal. I think they’re talking to Comerca.”

”Let me hear.”

A sibilant voice of dread hissed over the communications line.

”Comerca, this is SoulCutter Zero-One of the Devil’s Fist.”

”Yes?” His voice sounded distant, with the sounds of conflict beyond.

”I deeply apologize, but we cannot except this contract. I warned you that we will not fire upon medical vessels, facilities, or research stations…and the Vault is now a medical facility. Was this a crude attempt at a trick, perhaps?”

”Mercenary, you have been paid. I order you to engage.”

A long silence.

”I have just refunded you, Comerca, subtracting for travel expenses, of course. I am sorry for the inconvenience this might cause. Have a nice day.”

”MERCENARY! THIS IS AN ORDER!!!”

Reptile listened to all of this, and then jumped onto the line.

”Hey Devil’s Fist? Have I got a deal for you…since you came all this way, you want to make a million bucks!??”

…

Argentum stood in the dim glow of emergency power supply. He could smell smoke, and see the sparking ruin that was the Phobos Docking Station. Above and beyond, the lethal outline of a Madorian Capitol Ship cut a section of black form the starred fabric of space, and the vast and sable curtain of night that was the void seemed choked with starfighters.

The vidscreen in his room flared and began to transmit.

”Argentum…the base in being attacked…our transport freighter has been damaged…I can’t tell…”

No picture, just static. The signal broke up, and for a fleeting ten seconds Argentum could see Alyscia, trying to keep calm, her eyes gleaming with terror.

”They…(static)…but the captain thinks that he can move power to…(static)…I don’t know what…(static)…we need help, Argentum, we could lose life support at any…(static).”

Argentum waited, not knowing if that was the end of the signal, not knowing what the attack would do to the base, if help would arrive, if the Vault even knew. Then he went to the closet, in calm and absolute precision. His mind was buzzing, the buzz traveling down his spine, through his limbs, leaving the taste of charcoal in his mouth, filling him with the smell of smoldering titanium…

He turned, the room darkened, lit only by the glow of the sheet of fire the window of his room had become, where once it had been filled by space.

Behind him, the static of the vidscreen flickered, yellowing, then orange, then tinges of red, flaming, burning, the fire behind and in front of him.

He pulled his uniform from out of the closet, feeling half-asleep, feeling like his limbs were those of a corpse. The buzz was louder, it crushed his other thoughts. He stepped into the uniform, zipping the front up, and then pulling his flight gloves on.

He felt as if he was the character in a tragedy that had been written a thousand years ago, he was an actor, in a story, and these were not his limbs…

These were not his thoughts…

He wasn’t a pilot, he was pretending to be, that somewhere in front was the hush of an audience…

He held up his helmet, and his hands began to shake.

”No.” He said.

They twitched and convulsed, and he dropped his helmet.

The flames consuming the room, growing, flickering, the static harsh, in his mind, in his mind.

He sank to his knees, the black like a sheet of rain in his mind, washing his thoughts in brackish waters.

…and then…

He was looking at earth. At thick oily soil, and above him was space, and the shattered fragments of plasteel open to the vacuum.

Around him was a forest of blackened trees, all vegetation consumed, and he was in an arena of ash, of twisted and burnt corpses of oaks, sycamores, maples…

”Terrible, is it not?”

Argentum turned, and there was that sick, turned around feeling, this was not real, this was not real…

”Comerca did this. This is the Vault.”

”How-?”

”He rammed a Capitol Ship into it. With nukes inside, no less.”

”But…I’m…here.” Argentum looked at the vastness of space above him, he could see fighting, but it was too bright and yet too dark.”

”What is the problem, Argentum?”

He couldn’t see, not clearly. The helmet was heavy.

”I’m…I can’t fly, I have to save them, but I can’t fly.”

”Who? The girl? The base? They can take care of themselves, no?”

”I have to save…Seraphim, I have to get out there, but I am not well, still,”

Seraphim turned his back, walking away from Argentum.

”Bah. You make excuses. You are fine.”

Argentum looked around. Miles of wasteland, where once a forest had been.

He turned around to look at Seraphim.

They were aboard the Vault, on the command deck. All around him were walls of steel-colored dermoplast, vidscreens glowing, but an incredible emptiness, all around. There were no people.

”What-?”

Seraphim turned. He was wearing his IK uniform, the color of blood and jet, suddenly looking imposing, with his Overlord tags.

”What do you want, Argentum? A salve to heal your burn? A magical word to make it all…go away? Perhaps a rubric? I cannot do this. I cannot suddenly make your problem fix itself.”

”It is not your fault that I’m…”

”Say it. Say it, you son of a @#%$.”

”I am afraid.”

”Ha! The kid gets it.” Seraphim’s German was stronger, his accent more pronounced.

”I don’t know why.”

”You have always been afraid, Argentum. But courage is domination of fear, the controlling of fear…not the absence of fear. You hate yourself…”

”…because I think I am weak.”

”There.”

Argentum looked at the helmet, the IK symbol chrome in the glow of a hundred vidscreens, drawing him in.

Seraphim spoke.

”Look.”

He punched a button.

Argentum could see the cigar-shaped gold spindle that was the Saggitarius, aloft in space outside. It burned and crumpled, electric arcs flickering across it’s vast hull.

”Marie.”

”Yes.” Seraphim said. ”That is what happened.”

Argentum could see the violet and black of Madorian starfighters, flying away.

”I always blamed myself. I felt that Marie did.”

The smell of autumn grass. The sounds of horses. Still that whining pitch in his brain. His hands were on cold wood, he was standing on the porch of a ranch house, looking at the verdant hills, somewhere on Earth. Above, the blue vault that was the sun-lit sky.

”Why? You were not there. You did not know. If you did, you would have been there, and you would have been annihilated.”

Argentum set down the helmet and closed his eyes, the dull whine a rattle and hum in electric blur of his mental processes. He could smell coffee. Then the majestic heady aroma of cinnamon. He opened his eyes, and Seraphim was there, wearing overalls and a black-and-red flannel. He was smoking a pipe.

”Come in.”

Argentum followed Seraphim through a screen door. It creaked with a shrill tin voice.

They were in a kitchen, and he could smell cooked food, black coffee, the clean scent of soap.

”This is not real.”

Seraphim stood, smiling contentedly, next to an old women, who was also smiling, her hair in a bun, wearing a dress of egg blue. It matched the floor and curtains, and she wearing a pink apron.

”My wife, Michelle.”

”A pleasure to meet you, madam.”

”To you as well, sir.” She turned and went to the oven.

Seraphim walked and looked out a window upon the fields of cool sweet grass, upon horses and pastures of cows.

”Argentum. I believe you have had enough of this. It does not matter when, or where, or who died before all of this, but this problem, it is not you. It is not the pilot I trained. It is not the young man you once were, or the man you have become. I could tell you words of noble encouragement, I could fill your head with all of that gung-ho piss. But I will not. I will only tell you that your situation is artificial. It is over. You only hold on to it. It was real once, that is all. But now it is time to stop sifting through static in between. You have to choose a place, you have to decide where it is you will be.”

Argentum’s head was a sea of sparking ash-gray static.

Seraphim motioned towards the living room, a comfortable place of deep blue rugs, bookshelves of teak, potted gardenias and pictures of cowboys, with occasional pilot’s trophy’s here and there.

Marie stood, half smiling, her eyes deep and knowing.

Argentum could feel his heart freeze into a block of carbon-dioxide.

”Hello, Argent.” Her voice was a sweet song of hidden joy, like it always was.

His head was swimming. Still the noise, fading, like the end of a song, drifting, with sweet remembrance in it’s wake.

”Marie.”

And he was embracing her, kissing her, he was safe again, real again, he was not alone, and all of what was before was gone, he knew.

He was telling her he loved her, he was telling her everything he had felt, for all of these years.

They stepped back from each other, and from the glass behind he could feel, from the window, the cold flickering of (static) somewhere…he was drifiting…

”Argent, this is your son.”

He was so small, his eyes a pale blue, his chin like Argentum’s, sullen, intelligent features, with dark brown tousled hair.

Argentum felt something weeping inside of himself.

”Hey there, son…you look…you look amazing.”

The flickering. The buzz, receding, like the tide…like fathoms rushing in.

He could stay here. He could be here forever. He could have a seat, drink coffee, he could taste the cinnamon and apples in his mouth, but somewhere, somewhere else, he would cease to be. The static was in his ears, in his mouth, filling his being.

He looked at Marie, at her dark brown hair, at her pale blue eyes…at what he felt there, at…

”Marie. I-I have to go. There is somebody back there, a friend, and they need me. I miss you. I miss you more than I can…but…there is something I must do.”

She looked at him, and there was an eternal longing in her eyes. He felt it.

”I love you, Argentum.”

Argentum knelt down and put his hand under the boys chin, cupping it slightly. He kissed the boy on the forehead.

”Take care of your mother, boy.”

Then they were behind him. He was leaving them, and a feeble part of his being wailed and wanted to be there, wanted to hold on…

He opened the screen door and looked at where Seraphim was sitting at the table, constructing a model of an Archangel. He was wearing reading glasses, a cup of coffee sitting on the table next to him. He stopped and smiled at Argentum.

He was on the porch, he picked up the helmet from where he had set it down, and he was looking into it, into the IK symbol, the chrome boiling and fading in, like static.

…and he was standing in his room, the helmet in his hands.

The vidscreen was a window of static before him. He put his helmet on the shelf nearby, thinking. He felt electrified. He felt immediately aware of everything about him. He felt as if his mind was clear, so utterly quiet and clear…

He looked at his hands.

They were as steady as ten thousand tons of uranium, as railroad spikes driven unto the earth, as Easter Island statues. They were perfect instruments of flesh, blood and bone.

He thought of his Archangel, waiting.

He clenched them into solid fists.

…

He had grabbed the epee and his helmet and opened the door, almost walking into Goldmark.

The Doctor stepped back, stunned.

”Doctor.”

”Argentum, you have not been answering the comm…we have to evacuate.”

Argentum began to walk, back straight.

”Yes, Doctor. Let’s go.”

Goldmark was surprised. The pilot seemed, different, somehow. Like he was, certain, calm, he could not put his finger on it.

”You are going to your Archangel?” Goldmark said, catching up.

”Yes, sir.”

”Argentum, I have to tell you something…”

He told Argentum of what he had learned, of Galileo Station, and the experimental engine on the Pegasus. The scientists were trying to make a starfighter that could make a Tach jump by itself, by manipulating tachyon particles in a different way. But something went wrong.

They are moving briskly to the elevator, which will take them to the Phobos Rear Flight Hangar.

He tells Argentum about the others. Their nervous systems had been, almost wiped clean, in a way. Recalibrated. He tells him how only recently, one week ago, they had come out of it, talking about how they had felt as if they were talking to old friends, to distant relatives. It was like being dead, they had said. Every once in a while they would come out of it, but then it was like static, a white noise, and then darkness…

Argentum listens, his senses acute and perfect. This part of the station is particularly quiet.

They stop in front of the elevator.

”Argentum.”

”Yes, Doctor?”

”How do you feel?”

Argentum turned and looked at Goldmark. He thought of Marie.

”I feel…perfect, Doctor.”

Goldmark looked at the IK pilot. Then he laughed.

They both laughed.

Then the elevator doors slid open and Fontaine was standing there, wearing a sabre and holding a gyrojet pistol. He pointed it at the two of them.

…

Highlander watched as several medial officers carried off Devil’s unconscious body. He turned to a nearby RG Intelligence Lieutenant, who was going over the laptop.

The battle continued to rampage across the miles of open space the Vault’s territory was heir to, outside. Emergency teams had scrambled to save the starbase, but nothing was left of the main reactors. Back up power could sustain life support indefinitely, but they only had fifteen more minutes of defense systems before…

”Well?” Highlander almost snarled, all patience completely gone.

”Yes, it checks out…and we are unable to contact Phobos…the Tach gate could have just malfunctioned.”

They both looked at each other.

Highlander froze briefly, and then nodded, ever so slowly, to the Lieutenant, who returned the nod with complete gravity.

The Lieutenant turned. Highlander, after a moment of silence, spoke.

”Ensign, battle report!”

…

Styder had watched with horror the collision between the Madorian Capitol Ship and the Vault. It had happened in utter slow motion, and he had never before witnessed such unparalleled destruction and yet had felt so helpless to prevent it.

The wave of hard rads had drowned the Carpathian’s radar in static, but it’s systems had swiftly recovered.

He looked over the wings on the battle com radar. Orange wings of RG fighters, accompanied by red for VA, blue for IK and now black, for Devil’s Fist.

The violet sigils that marked the forces of the Madorians were only now beginning to fall back, and he knew why. The Carrier/Interceptors had wreaked great havoc upon the combined forces, but DF wings seemed to be cleaning them up nicely…too nicely. He remembered to mention that to IK Dominion.

Now that the Carpathian no longer had to concentrate it’s fire on the Capitol Ship, he had plans.

”Sir, we have received a report from the Vault. Enormous casualties, loss of primary power, and only fifteen minutes or so of weapons systems. They will still have life support, but after that, they are defenseless.”

”Move the Carpathian between the Madorians and the Vault. That is a medical facility…that includes civilians. We die before they do, clear?”

The Ensign swallowed.

”Yes…sir.”

”Good. Clear all wings from sectors seven, eight and nine. Have them fall back to our mark. I want you to distribute fire to those vectors, but only at those Carrier/Interceptors.”

”Yes, sir.”

…

Rustbucket followed Venomhawk, Reptile and Grimbrand as they accompanied the Devil’s Fist forces to assault the main point of the Madorian Carrier/Interceptors. His radar was a sea of roaming dots…too many too count…to many ships…

They were confronted by a Madorian starfighters, and few seconds he was firing, whirling, missiles on all sides, the Darts moving like beads of mercury across a Teflon surface, trailing swarms at every turn.

He dropped ECM’s and sent a few of his own at one, then bringing his Deimos to bear on another. Then there was the electric impact of laser shots as one slung around his side, too fast, too fast, and then Reptile was to his side, his Deimos devastating the shields of the starfighter.

A Devil’s Fist Pegasus came out of nowhere, finishing the job on the Dart, only to be trailed by two more of the Madorian starfighters, who blazed across Rustbucket’s cockpit, only to be annihilated by missiles from Grimbrand and Venomhawk.

He swerved, latting hard left, watching the Devil’s Fist descend like a murder of crows upon the Carrier/Interceptors, who opened fire upon the mercenaries.

Space began to seethe with plasma rockets and laser fire.

…

The neon crimson of the Devil’s Fist’s HUD revealed to him the various systems of the Carrier/Interceptor. He targeted the life support first, letting loose with a single sunspot missile. It left a blazing blue arc as it found it’s target, and he switched to attack the weapons systems of the craft, knowing that soon the Madorians aboard would start to suffocate.

It made him smile, as his wing followed his mark, and all around him the singing guns of the Carrier/Interceptor died with a mechanical death rattle as sunspots from the wing destroyed the Madorians offensive capabilities.

He recalibrated his systems with relaxed ease. Today, he decided, was a good day…

…

Rabid Chicken circled his Pegasus and latted erratically, left/right/left, watching the Void Alliance forces clean up shop nicely on another Carrier/Interceptor. It went up in a coruscation of plasma rockets, swarms, and Deimos heavy laser impacts.

He swung around the rear of a Dart, stripping it’s shields from it bolt by crippling laser bolt. The pilot maneuvered helplessly, trying to find the IK pilot with his missile lock.

”Give it up, genius, that won’t work.” He said, killing his target with a salvo of Deimos, and then turned to two more that were converging to his position. His lasers opened up, swarms arcing like lines of gold across black space on all side and he flew behind them, Deimos detonations impacting upon their shields.

They turned to face him, circling on both sides.

Man, they had tough shields.

Pulse lasers began to hit his ship with the sound of countless neon percussions. He moved power from his afterburners to his shields, and slid away, turning in place, watching the electric soap bubbles that were his blast torps drift unerringly to detonate upon the Madorian starfighters.

Twin blossoms of orange fire, against the frozen vacuum of night.

…

RedStorm watched as the Void Alliance forces turned another group of Carrier/Interceptors into so much scrap. Then the Carpathian, a gargantuan, hovering protectively before the horrifically wounded Vault, it’s cannons opening up from across it’s surface to murder all it targeted. To RedStorm, it was looming before him, colossal, like the sarcophagi of an ancient and bloody god of conflict. The rest of the VA forces began to follow his mark.

He looked out across space, the entire are deluged by firepower, and now silent, save the torn and blackened flotsam and jetsam that was once men and starcraft.

It was so strangely peaceful now, in his sector, although he could still see the RG and DF forces in violent conflict far beyond. He turned and looked upon the broiling carnage the Heirophant had created when it had collided with the Vault.

Quite suddenly, a bolt of nuclear hot malevolence for the Madorians rose up into his throat, and he hoped there were more for him to thank for the gifts they had brought to the poor wretches aboard the medical facility below.

…

There was the briefest span of time, as the three of them both looked at each other, in complete shock, and then a blur and detonation as Goldmark knocked Argentum aside as he went for the man’s arm.

Argentum came to his senses, his helmet hitting the floor, and he was upon both of them, clawing at the Madorian officer’s face. Another detonation…

Then the Fontaine let go of the pistol, still held by the Doctor, and swung at Argentum with his left, a wild, off balance haymaker, and the IK officer was knocked back out of the elevator, sliding backwards across the slick cerramite floor.

He looked down at the corpse, a fat man, laying completely on his gyrojet pistol. Then he pulled his sabre and stepped out of the elevator, smiling as only some fell and chthonic apparition borne from the nightmares of serial killers burning in Hell, might. He waited as Argentum got to his feet, epee in hand.

A quiet, then, with only the distant rumbling of explosions far away.

Argentum realized the blade was in his hand. He shook the dizziness from the blow the Madorian had given him, and stepped back slightly.

”Who are you?”

He smiled.

”I am Fontaine, of the Madorian Imperial Forces under Comerca, who wants you dead.”

Argentum seemed baffled.

”You did all this just to kill me?”

The man laughed dryly, en guarde, edging forward slightly.

”Ah, no. We are here to steal those Star Patrol Capitol ships…no, I was part of the strike team sent to sabotage Phobos from within, and I noticed your name within the medical journals.”

”Why me?”

”You are Argentum Draconis, the hero of IK, and to bring my master your head would be a great honor…besides, I saw you fight Allegro Tonagre’ at the Louvre, and have ever since then wished to cross weapons with one such as you.”

Argentum edged forward as well, dropping into his own stance.

”If I remember correctly, I lost that match.”

”No, sir, you did not. The judges miscalculated completely, the idiot’s! You won, with a stop hit to Maestro Tonagre’s throat, an instant before he hit your wrist. From the point of view of a duelist, you would have lived, he would have not…”

”You would have really offered me a chance to duel?”

The Madorian motioned behind to a slim case behind him, lying against the side of the elevator.

”I brought an epee, but in actuality…I don’t really know…it does not matter.”

Fontaine noticed Argentum’s raised back heel.

”Ah! A student of Maestro Nadi! Have you ever fought a duel, sir?”

”No.”

Fontaine shrugged, completely relaxed.

”How unfortunate…I have fought thirteen and won them all…let us hope against a steep learning curve, shall we?”

-and then Fontaine was everywhere at once.

…

Comerca watched the skeleton crew of Star Patrol forces rise to meet his own. Already, his Tractor Freighters were moving into position to start to tug the Capitol Ship, his prize, to make a Tach jump back to Madorian space.

At this moment the Vault was probably completely unaware, busy as they were with his sport. The Heirophant, the Titan of Space, would be missed, but sacrifices were required. The Carrier/Interceptors were valuable, but he had instructed all commanders to fall back should casualties mount too considerably. The betrayal by the Devil’s Fist had not been expected, but he would take his vengeance upon them one day.

The Freighters maneuvered to tractor the Capitol ship he had planned so much for, had lost so much for, had bled so much for…now it was there…it was there.

Incoming fire from Star Patrol harried his forces. He watched as his craft closed in, swarm missiles filling the space between Phobos and his forces with streams of electrum colored radiance.

Star Patrol was by no means to be discounted, Comerca knew that. But his forces were blooded, experienced, brutal, and flying ships he had designed specifically for this operation. Then, of course, there was Comerca, himself.

He performed a slide maneuver, his speed around 2200 clicks, and flipped end over end, his lasers punching through the shields of the steel colored orb shaped machines. It’s pilot twisted his craft in place, but Comerca was a phantom, a will-o-wisp of titanium, firing behind the starcraft and collapsing it’s hull before the pilot could compensate by moving it’s energy to it’s shields.

He rolled and afterburned, turning backward to fire a salvo of swarms before engaging yet another Star Patrol vessel, sliding between it’s lasers and returning fire with his own.

He watched the blip disappear from his radar.

Another kill.

Ah, yes…

…

Fontaine opened with a moulinette meant to open up Argentum’s skull to the teeth, and then a blinding series of slashes to his opponent’s face and sword arm.

Long experience had taught Fontaine that a man with a slashed open face was quite open to a low-line attack. Besides, he liked to smash his way through his opponents defenses, battering them down, only to become surgical when it came to the kill.

Argentum fell back, beleaguered, and then returned with a stop hit to his opponents shoulder, which Fontaine barely parried. He attacked again, not even aiming, and then scarcely avoiding having a sabre gouge open his abdomen. A flash of steel and a jolt of pain, and Argentum realized his left shoulder had been cut. He went for a fleche, launching forward to impale Fontaine’s throat, and Fontaine side stepped nimbly, a whirl of motion, and Argentum realized that his leg was bleeding.

Argentum regrouped from his charge, spinning, boots squeaking on the ferroconcrete floor, and then attacked repeatedly. Fontaine parried in quarte and then in quinte, Argentum picking up speed with his assault. Then the Madorian officer performed a series of beats, sending the epee left and then right, finishing with a Satanic bind to draw the weapon as he stepped forward to take his opponents head off with a single stroke-

-Argentum ducked, a passato soto, other hand barely touching the station floor, his point one inch from Fontaine’s chest.

The Madorian officer stopped himself at the last possible increment, and then stood up and back, patting his hand with the flat of his sabre, smiling.

”Oh no, I don’t think so.”

Explosions detonated hollowly, somewhere in the facility. Argentum realized in that silence that everyone had long since evacuated this floor, and he was breathing heavily. His shoulder felt as if someone was pressing a piece of dry ice to his flesh. He resumed his stance, stepping back, injured leg shaking.

Fontaine dropped into his own, his point aiming for Argentum’s chin.

Argentum barely avoided the attack to his groin, the slash to his left flank, or the slash to his sword arm. He scarcely avoided having his face sliced open from the redoublement.

Another motion, and his other leg went numb, and then his boot went warm with his blood, probably filling it. Then Fontaine stepped back, accessing damage, and half lunged-

-Argentum turned his weapons point towards the floor, parrying and then binding in a maneuver that would have got him kicked out of every salle in the galaxy, a maneuver completely backwards from true form.

Fontaine began to pull his arm back, uncomprehending-

-and then Argentum closed the gap, grasping Fontaine’s wrist with his left, locking the stunned officer up.

Argentum’s epee clattered, Damascus steel on ferroconcrete, and he viciously head butted the bridge of Fontaine’s nose, locking with his right arm, grabbing a handful of Fontaine’s hair with his left hand.

They spun around, limbs and blade flung in a tornado of physics, and then Fontaine was pitched backwards, the back of his head thumping like a bag of wet clay onto the station floor.

He staggered up, teeth gritted, sabre clutched in a white knuckled grip, nose spouting-

-and Argentum’s epee went through Fontaine’s throat.

Blood, arcing in a crescent, black in the half-light of Phobos.

…

Stryder watched the radar vidscreen as the blips that were the combined wings of the DF, RG, VA and IK forces moved into position, near the Carpathian.

Higlander’s face appeared on a communications vidscreen.

”Will it work?” He said.

Stryder did some mental calculations.

”I think so…it worked for the Vacuum Dragoons…besides, we don’t have a choice, do we?”

”Agreed. As soon as you get a Tach communications channel open, give us a battle report, o.k., Stryder?”

”Yes sir.” Stryder answered, his pulse racing. This was going to be a gamble…

”All stations, prepare for jump.”

…

Part 14= Black Velveteen

After Fontaine died, Argentum dropped the epee and half crawled, half staggered, to where Goldmark was.

He turned the man over and knew instantly that Goldmark was dead.

He sighed, deeply.

Goldmark was carrying a personal med-kit, and Argentum used it. First the dermal stapler, then the plastiflesh, and finally a local anasthetic.

The pain was still there, but it was a below surface pain. As far as he could tell, his wounds did not handicap him.

He took Fontaine’s copper colored gyrojet pistol, wiping the blood from it. He set Goldmark’s body in the hall, placing his flight jacket respectfully over the man’s face.

The elevator took him down to the South Wing Storage Hangar, where his archangel had been for the last month.

The exhaustion from the fight receded, and he felt refreshed somehow, gazing upon the sleek outline of his ship, like a steel Cormorant poised in the silent, darkened hangar.

He set the remote to space the hold at his comm. signal, using command code Star Patrol had given him.

He put on his helmet.

He climbed aboard, strapping himself in.

He turned on the energy systems, feeling the ship hum along his spine. Like gravity.

There was the jolt as the hold spaced, and he was floating, weightless, the ships nose turning to face the widening rectangle of black and stars that was the space outside of Phobos, where Star Patrol was taking a beating from the Madorian forces.

He felt calm invade his being, a stillness surrounding and suffusing him.

He turned on his shields and transferred power to the sol array.

For a second in time, there was nothing, just the darkness of his cockpit, the realization that he was here, that he was where he belonged…

…then he was afterburning, and he was flying, in space, surrounded by it…one with it.

His sols were charged. He set course for the Frigate that Alyscia was on, and the Madorians that surrounded it.

…

Sparks exploded from an overhead console.

Alyscia stepped over a few unconscious corporate personnel, hearing the pilot shouting emergency procedures as he attempted to stabilize the ship.

Outside, she could hear the high pitched buzz of the Madorian Darts, coming in for another pass.

The Frigate was unarmed, but it was both heavily armored and heavily shielded. They had taken out the communications and most of the engine systems, and they were now simply just firing at the ship randomly, inflicting damage at will.

She stood at the doorway and braced herself as the whole vessel shook and rolled slightly.

”Where’s Star Patrol?” She tried to keep her voice calm, but she could hear her own fear under the words.

The pilot’s face was streaked with blood. The plasteel cockpit window was cracked. The HUD was a carnival of flashing lights and audio warning signal sounds.

”The escort they gave us is dead…who are you?”

”I’m-”

An explosion, somewhere in the back.

She realized she was lying flat, that the ship’s automated extinguishers were reacting, smoke and chemicals filling the air.

She realized, for the first real moment in her life, that she was about to die…

She looked out through the cracked cockpit…details came to her, for no reason, she suddenly knew that her mother’s birthday was in two days, and she had to still buy her a present. She realized she had left a hairbrush in her room on the Phobos, she realized that she still had to contact TNN about her book, and when it would be done, she still had to…

Two Darts were coming in at an attack vector, firing onto the Freighter, their lasers like fragments of rubies, splintering to fall upon the vessel she was upon, to render it’s skin asunder to the vacuum, she would die, everyone would die…

There was an arc of derridium and a blur of hazy electric blue light, and a Dart disappeared, leaving behind a spreading orange cloud of metal scrap.

The other Dart maneuvered to avoid the ship that was now turning to fire upon it, Deimos impacting upon it, the Dart’s shields a haze of milky light.

She saw the Archangel roll, almost freeze in space, and then it was gone, and another explosion sounded from somewhere out of view.

…

Argentum killed the second one and could see three Darts, their forms sleek and predatory in the satin jet that was the skin of space, firing on the hapless Freighter from it’s rear, not yet aware the IK pilot had destroyed two of their wing.

He flew along the Freighters side, using the ship as cover, and then up and across, dropping sol torpedoes on one while he fired on a second.

The sound of the Dart, detonating…

The Dart’s shields, flickering from the ravening impacts of his Deimos…

The other Dart afterburning away to a swing around…

He was rolling, spinning erratically, lasers splitting the night around him, he was firing on the already wounded Dart, his lasers like living things of energy, seeking the Madorian craft, rendering it to fragments and light.

His other sols, charging…

The last Dart, swinging around, streams of swarms leaving yellow lines like a net across the blue-black…

Then he was swinging past, magnetically charged solaris torpedoes reducing the Madorian starship to dust and shreds of burning titanium…

”Freighter, this is Argentum Draconis of the Iconian Knights. I will escort you back to Phobos.”

”Thanks buddy, the Tach gate went up and then-”

”I understand. But this is now a combat zone, and Star Patrol has it’s hands quite full. Phobos is not safe, but you will last longer in there than you will out here.”

”Thanks, buddy…hey, there’s a girl in here, name’s Alyscia? She says thanks.”

”Tell her…she is going to be safe.”

He looked out the cockpit to the ugly mass that was the Malefactor firing mercilessly upon the Star Patrol starbase. Phobos fairly shook from the destroyer class weapons smashing at it’s already ravaged frame. The marks from where the atomics had scarred it’s body were ferocious black scars marring it’s metal surface, smoking and blistering…

”Scratch that, Freighter…you had better move out farther into space and wait. Power down all of your systems and take yourself off radar, I don’t think Phobos is going to make it.”

Across the stars, the Star Patrol forces were getting stripped to the bone by the greater Madorian fleet…and the Malefactor was coming in behind them, it’s guns lighting the blackness for miles upon miles, blazing with immeasurable ferocity.

Argentum set course for the main body of the conflict.

…

Comerca was a blur, a bluish-silver haze leaving fire and shattered hulls in his wake. He could see on his radar the various wings under his command, outnumbering their aggressors, escorting the Star Patrol Capitol Ship to the designated jump point, and the whole while the Madorian commander would enter a fray here and there, a few shots as he conserved his precious resources and another starfighter would become one with the galactic dust and space wreckage…

He had carefully divided the forces he had available, and he knew that somewhere the Vault was burning, that the forces he had there were even now retreating back to Madoria, and the beleaguered clanners would be reeling, trying to use their intel and available communications to piece together the apparently senseless attack…until they noticed the hole in their transmission web where Phobos was supposed to be, and like so many spiders, investigate.

The black in between the Capitol Ship Malefactor and Phobos lit with gold and red weapons fire as the two structures laid waste to each other, but the Malefactor was still entirely unharmed, the Star Patrol fighters so involved in preventing their own destruction that they were unable to scramble available wings to eliminate the systems of the Malefactor and bring down it’s shield array.

…

Argentum rerouted all power into his weapons, keeping off the afterburners and using physics to speed him forward, hitting a wing of Madorian Darts from one side.

(It was as if his consciousness was focused-)

He hit one with a withering rain of laser fire, it afterburned away, it’s pilot panicking…

(A perfect and diamond hard clear thing-)

His sols detonating upon one, the two blue burning orbs falling upon the side of the slender vehicle as it became a haze of smoldering titanium…

(He was the wings, the lasers, the systems, it was all slow motion-)

Laser fire could be heard from all sides, he rolled and twisted, the slide allowing him to temporarily renounce the oaths of physics, he watched as the bursts of killing light fell upon the first Dart and it was gone…

(It was as if he could see the conflict from every angle-)

More Darts were on their way, the number he had been fighting trying to get a bead on him and avoid impacting with each other…

(He could tell from the thrum of engines to his left that it would fly over him, and the Dart in front of his Archangel would veer opposite-)

He flipped and latted hard, afterburning backwards at the last possible…

(His body was gone, his senses were freed from them, he was without corporeal form, it seemed-)

The rattle of particles from the death of one, the orange wash of detonation from another…

(…for a flash there was not even the awarness that he was one with the fight…)

He realized that he had died in increments over the years, and now he was replaced-

(Another dart collided with his sols, he sent lasers into one more…)

Corpuscle by corpuscle, neuron by neuron-

(His shields reacted briefly, he spun in place, recharging his sols and shot after shot…)

With circuits and perfect components, with light and electric current-

(The explosion all around, his vision a field of orange and black debris…)

His nervous system a wash of burning light-

(More darts upon him, no time, all time, no thinking, just rolling, his vision as if he were in the middle of a centrifuge…)

His mind an ember of freezing void-

(Another detonation, more laser fire, impacts along his shields on one side, his sols falling on another…)

“I have become Death-“

(Within inches of another starcraft, he sparred briefly with one, his lasers becoming larger burning holes upon it…)

“Destroyer-“

(His sols immolated another, but it was a flaming carcass behind him as his lasers turned a second Madorian starfighter into shattered components, and still another Dart rolled, trying to avoid Argentum’s lasers too late as he became a cloud of orange flame…)

“-the Shatterer of Worlds-“

…

Comerca watched as the single IK starship seemed to draw a net of maneuvers around his fighters, and then the net tightened, they were panicking, years of training and expiring sloughing away as they moved without pace or measure, dying.

Then space beyond began to convulse and ripple, like a tin pan of oil being rocked gently, and the IK Capitol Ship Carpathian, along with the few combined clan and DF forces following along on the corona of it’s tachyon field came into view, like a congress of stainless admantium avian predators falling upon murine prey in a starlit field.

”I want the status on the Star Patrol ship.”

”Almost, General, almost!”

”We will hold them off until then, but your time is limited.”

Comerca realized that there was still a chance, the forces converging upon his position were not as many as would be expected for a punitive force…his attack upon the Vault had not been without it’s effect.

The lumbering bulk of the Malefactor turned to confront the slimmer form of the Carpathian, and the vacuum between them became a single sheet of atomic fire and matter-blighting ordinance.

Argentum seemed to come out of it, the conflict on every side around him, the forces of the various clans…Void Alliance Ghost Cruisers, Devil’s Fist fighters, Royal Guard interceptors, and Iconian Knight starcraft wings hitting the larger assemble of Madorian military might like the impact of two sledge hammers, swung with titanic force.

Argentum swooped through the cold and starry void, drawing closer to the grotesque derridium hide of the Malefactor, it’s hull a seething cityscape of guns, systems, bridges and other components.

He knew from his familiarity with IK tactics that even now a wing was scrambling to take out the shield systems of the Madorian Capitol Ship.

A Madorian wing was scrambling to protect the rear of the steel gargantuan, and Argentum set course to intercept them.

…

Part 15= Moaner

Comerca took a deep breathe, eyes closed, and set his controls, filtering his mind from the cacophony of violence around him. Then he breathed out, eyes open, and spied the radar blip that was Argentum moving towards his Capitol Ship.

From the corner of his eye he took great pleasure in the fact that the Star Patrol ship was almost in position, and his own forces were a match for the combined clan detachment…besides, even now he looked upon the Carpathian, and noted black and smoldering evidence of recent damage across it’s once proud flank. His sensors showed the IK Capitol Ship’s shield systems were in tatters, most of it’s weapons silenced.

He smiled to himself, seeing Argentum’s starfighter coming nearer.

Ah, yes…

…

Argentum was just upon them, the light of the HUD like a Christmas Tree upon his helmet’s visor, his hands holding the controls like a lover’s hand, that electric calm still inside of him, when his missile warning klaxon wailed.

He fired ECM’s and latted hard, turning, and then the impact of the explosive projectiles upon his shields, and he was firing upon his aggressor with a pilot’s reflex, only seeing a flash of titanium/derridium before Comerca flipped past.

Argentum powered his back shields and kept up his lat, firing sporadically-

-Comerca seemed to almost sidestep the shots, his shields reeling from the hits Argentum had landed-

-the Archangel, rolling, firing, then the neon flash of sols-

-the Madorian Interceptor rolling as well, firing back, nimbly avoiding the killing energies of Argentum’s weapons-

-Argentum kept up the assault, latting opposite of Comerca and landing another shot-

-Comerca put his afterburner power into shields-

-Argentum put his shield power into weapons-

-and then Comerca blazed past Argentum, performing a lazy flip that seemed to fly through and around the laser blasts.

Then there was only the maneuvering, feeling the physics in his cockpit, pulling him into the ship, he rocked right, keeping his profile slim, the lasers from Comerca’s ship lighting the vacuum, then a barrel roll towards the smaller craft, firing.

Comerca slipped around the shots again, latting hard to move around to Argentum’s back, firing his own salvo that the IK pilot seemed to avoid at the barest possible second.

Then to Argentum, there was the momentary flicker of light as another slavo hit him square, his shields dropping, and then his sol array went up in a shower of components and sparks.

Argentum afterburned, closing the distance, seeing a momentary glance of the Carpathian firing a salvo of weapons fire into the Malefactor, the blinking and movements of wings destroying one another, the violence on all sides, without termination, his lasers crumpling Comerca’s shields-

-and then Comerca was gone, flying to the awe inspiring construct that was the Malefactor.

…

Comerca re-routed power. His missiles were gone, and that IK pilot had been better than he thought.

”Ah, Argentum Draconis…I know you, now…”

He checked his missiles. Gone.

Damn. When what was taking those freighters???

Then the horizon beyond the encroaching darkness that was the Malefactor lit silver and then white, an evil dawn, as the Capitol Ship made the jump.

He had won, he had won, he had won…

…

With a sinking soul Argentum watched the Capitol Ship bend space and fade off, escaping.

Comerca’s Pegasus fled away, and Argentum afterburned to catch up.

He flew around a weapons tower, his starfighter insignificant compared to the mass on all sides of him.

He began to scan for Comerca on his radar, the surface of the Capitol Ship a blur beneath and around him.

…

Eldritch’s rails punched a dart to flaming pieces as he escorted the bombers into position.

”Storm, talk to me, man.”

”Bloodstar has things wrapped up with his wing, I had trouble but those Void Alliance boys came out of nowhere with the assist…they can throw down, I tell you…”

”I’m following these RG blokes, we’re going to do a little bombing raid.”

”None too soon, the Carpathian is going to need several tons of replacement parts. The Devil’s Fist is defending it from attack by Madorian starfighters, but that Malefactor has mean guns.”

”Shoot, I got static-”

A wing of Darts and Pegasus interceptors fell upon the bombers.

Eldritch fired plasmas at one, sliding past to hit the Madorian craft at point blank range, his cockpit a bubble of flame and light…

…

With the towers and columns that was the Malefactor on all sides of him, Argentum was given a point of reference as he realized how fast he was truly going.

Then Comerca came from his left, flash of lasers, he didn’t catch whathad happened, but his shields were shredded away, his wing to his left pitted with damage.

Comerca was on his right, almost side by side, the walls of admantium around them-

-he could feel the pilot boring his eyes into him, almost see his helmet through the cockpit, a scant ten feet away-

-another arc of metal, and Comerca was parallel to his right, his laser systems had been hit, his HUD was blaring warnings, what the hell-

-Comerca leisurely transferred his dwindling power. The IK pilot was good, but like all the rest, confined by his training. He looked to his left, preparing to flip over the larger Archangel again-

-he’s flipping and sliding, afterburning at close quarters, Argentum thought. No one is that good, no one-

-he actually saw it again, the sudden turn, blaze of engines, the slide as he seemed suddenly immune to all physics, as if held by the hand of God, suspended and nose down, firing at point blank range, his lasers were gone in a flash of yellow light-

-Comerca ended the maneuver, looking to his right. He transferred power again, seeing the Archangel defenseless, his for the taking. He could see the pilot getting ready to maneuver, unable to comprehend how he was defeated so easily. Of course, he was Comerca, Emperor and General of Madoria, he could not be beaten, never…never…

-Argentum afterburned, the smaller Interceptor on his right blazing to catch up, he powered up the shields on his right, his weapons were gone, his hull integrity almost compromised, he could see looming twin towers of the Malefactors reactor array coming upon them-

-Comerca started to lat and flip, ready to fire-

-Argentum latted left into the smaller Pegasus Interceptor, they collided, his shields screaming, the corrugated admantium tower of the reactor array rushing to them, for a second Comerca almost regained control-

-then Argentum was between the constructs, past them, the Pegasus impacting into the reactor grid and it was utterly annihilated, an orange flash of titanium dust and atomic light-

-Argentum narrowly avoided colliding into a weapons array and afterburned out into space, the wreckage of the Madorian Commander’s Interceptor a blazing pyre on the vast metal hide of the Capitol Ship.

…

The Madorian fighters smashed into the wing of RG bombers, forcing the larger ships off course. Eldritch fired a barrage of plasma torpedoes into the shield systems, but incoming fire forced him to afterburn away so that he might maneuver, the shield systems array went past him, a pulsing, humming thing…

The Madorian pilot watched as his swarms sent the IK Cutlass into some evasive maneuvers, checking that the systems array was still operational-

-his expression becoming one of absolute shock as DeathGiver’s Pegasus came out of the black void above, his laserbolts disintegrating the starship-sized construct that was the Malefactor’s nerve center for it’s shields. It became a blazing corona of burning derridium.

”Yeah, that’s right, and f*ck you too.” DeathGiver said.

He fired on the Dart, his lasers crumpling the shields before Eldritch’s rails punched the craft into steel powder, it flipped away, exploding after a few seconds.

”Well done, pilot.” Eldritch said.

”Yes, but with the shields gone, we had better-”

”-I read you.”

Both starcraft left the cyclopean mass that was the Madorian Capitol Ship in their wake.

…

Stryder knew damage reports were coming in, a constant din of spaced decks, lost systems, compromised hull integrity transmissions, incoming fire peeling away layer by gossamer layer of shield energy, cracking through corrugated derridium armor to murder the men beneath…

”Sir, the Malefactor is still within optimal fire range, damage appears minimal, the RG bombers report heavy casualties…”

”Scramble another bomber wing.”

”There are none left.”

”Scramble a fighter wing.”

The Ensign dialed up another battle update and read it quickly.

”Sir, this report shows all wings are in heavy conflict…none are available…”

”Then maneuver the Carpathian to expose it’s least damaged side to the Malefactor and tell all decks to prepare for heavy fire.”

”The Devil’s Fist has offered to perform the run.”

Is there enough time? Stryder thought.

Then, beyond the conflict, towards the very rear of the Capitol Ship, he glimpsed small fires and the silver arc of system damage…across the tenebrous expanse of the Madorian vessel there was a flicker of shields evaporating.

”Concentrate all fire on the Malefactor’s main reactor grid.”

A fusillade of ordinance began to thunder across to impact upon the already weathered Capitol Ship.

…

Miles away from the ship, Argentum saw the complete death of the Madorian vessel, not the titanic displosion that he might have expected, but the sudden internal fulmination of the Capitol Ship from inside out…he imagined a Kraken, fathoms below under tenebrous depths suddenly mortally wounded, it’s life blood a fulgurous waft of nuclear disruption, the ship suddenly slowing and then turning blindly, rolling now, the electric arc of system by system shutdown until he could see the horrid rack and ruin where once was the proud and indomitable admantium surface…a sudden flare of fulgurous and internal burnout, and then it was silent, dead in the jet cerulean of the eternal and starred vacuum.

He powered down his dwindling systems, watching as the Madorian Darts, still deadly, still many in number, gathered and retreated to the tachyon gate, as a murder of crows evacuates corpse of some vast, dead creature. He could see the combined forces of IK, RG, VA and DF fall back as well, stunned by the sudden victory, to spent to follow…

The amaranthine flash of Time opening, and then the invading force was gone.

He leaned back, weary, his mind a stretch of fabric grown bleached and tattered.

It was over.

He was alive.

Everything had happened so fast, as if only a few moments ago he had been aloft in the emerald glow of the Zorathos, or had talked to Seraphim.

Now it was a dream within a dream, a vision that collapsed to imaginary ashes upon awakening, as if it never was, he was here, watching the solemn and silent starfighters turn for home, emergency crews beginning the work of repair and rescue, the scarlet glow of Phobos burning…as the Vault had burned.

There was only the silence and peace of immortal stars, twinkling, separated by innumerable light years, with only the atramentous stretch of the quiet reaches between.

…

Part 16= All I Want Is You

Dear Argentum,

I know it has been almost three years now. I do not want you to think I have forgotten anything, or what you did, or all the things that I never said to you before.

The Void Alliance is changing so fast, so much is going on, but I have found a home, here. Red and I work almost sixteen hours a day, but I am never tired, I always have this resevoir, as if I am in the right place, like a gyroscope, moving and yet still at rest.

Does that make sense?

I published our interview, got quite a lot of rave reviews. I hope you did not worry too much over the publicity, afterwards. I suppose after Phobos and the Madorian attack it was unavoidable.

I saw the Japanese animation vid show based on you. You look fabulous. I bought RedStorm the doll they made of him, and after I explained what it meant he laughed until he cried.

The Void Alliance is getting stronger, we are importing our first outer-system college base, as well as a wealth of new technologies. The universe around us has offered so much, Red said one time that he is so amazed people are coming here, artists, physicists, mathematicians, writers…people starting new lives here, just as we are starting new lives, ourselves.

I hope you are well. I heard of your promotion, and I was proud of you. I think of you often, and of how much I owe you, how much Red owes you. You will always have a place, here. Red has never met you, but when he speaks of you, it is of great favor, as if you were a brother.

I am happy, here. I have found that happiness is not some unreal bliss, but a continual realization that you are complete, you are where you are supposed to be.

I hope you have that too, Argentum.

Sincerely,

Alyscia Zarovich, of the Void Alliance

…

Dear friends and companions, fellow Knights of Iconia,

I, Argentun Draconis, and my fiancée, Kaylin Silver, would like to cordially invite you all to our wedding at the Iconian Flight Academy, one month from this day.

I hope you all will be there, as you have been in my heart and in my wishes, as Kaylin and I join together as man and wife.

We have much to catch up on, my good friends, and I hope to see all of you there.

Our love goes to you all, for the love you have returned, tenfold.

Sincerely,

Argentum and Kaylin Draconis

…

Part 17= Take My Picture

Devil stared at the obsidian block, dedicated to the Phobos/Vault Battle, that had happened three years before, a time now that seemed to stretch on without end.

He was standing under the twin suns that glowed warmly upon the golden agricultural fields of the fourth planet in the Carrinth System, a system which the Royal Guard were the guardians of.

There were fountains here as well, carved of ruby, with the names of the people who had served etched upon it’s surface.

The obsidian block was visited year round, by friends, by survivors, by officers of all the clans that had been there.

He watched as a few pilots, wearing their flight suits, helmets in one hand, would stare at one name, or leave a pin, a note, a few flowers or just stand, their eyes shimmering.

The fountains sparkled in the suns, the waters like diamonds, leaping in the air, adding to the peace and serenity of the monument.

A year ago, Madoria had planted a block of molecular-hardened titanium here as well, with the names of pilots of theirs who had died. Here and there, pilots ov various clans would separate and talk softly, shaking hands…

Eldritch and the Madorian Politician were both standing before a fountain, following the jade path that led to the end of the monument.

Devil listened to the Madorian, Frederick.

”Much has changed,” he said, his accent light in the summer afternoon. ”We have so much communication, so much to catch up on, we are so behind the rest of the universe.”

Eldritch sipped traced his fingers across the ruby surface upon a familiar name.

”But how did it happen so fast?”

The Madorian smiled broadly, lighting his pipe, the smile reaching the crinkles in his eyes.

”I was an engineer, assigned to strip the Star Patrol ship of it’s technology, and the most advanced system on it was it’s communication. Suddenly, we had a technology that was advanced and yet easily mass-produced. With Comerca gone, with the restrictions falling away, we suddenly all could communicate to the outside world, we could see their vid shows, their news, we were exposed at once to a culture of freedom and viewpoints never imagined.”

Devil spoke.

”And there was no going back?”

Frederick looked into the waters of the fountain, before he turned away to join his companions.

”There was no going back. We were wiser…”

Eldritch spoke.

”But what about your new government…surely it was a shock?”

The old man laughed, reminding Devil of his grandfather.

”Yes, but a good shock. Some say the new government is slow…but we are learning…there is so much to learn…but we want to learn everything, now.’

They came to the end of the jade path, the summer breezes cooling the air around them.

He saw a smaller block of titanium, upon which was a jumble of electrics and systems, covered in protective admantium, with a series of dates inscribed upon it.

”What’s that?” Eldritch asked.

”Those are the components of an old Madorian Communications Grid…this is a monument built by all of the clans who were involved in the event…but it is new.”

Devil’s voice felt odd in his throat.

”This is the monument built to the unknown man who provided both the Iconian Knights and the Royal guard with so much information during Comerca’s fascist regime. Those are the dates of the transmissions he sent, including the final date that led to all of those combined forces being there to combat Comerca…he is credited with saving countless lives, he is decorated by each of the clans…”

”Oh.” Eldritch said, visibally impressed. ”What was his name?”

Frederick looked down, sadly.

”There are no records of him…after the regime toppled, much history was lost…we only know that this was the communications grid he used.”

”He is a hero…” Devil said. ”That is enough.”

Eldritch nodded, then stared off, watching the miles of waving grain.

”Will both of you join me for lunch?” Frederick asked, putting out his pipe.

”Sure…I’m buying.” The two walked off. Eldritch turned and looked at Devil.

”Coming along?”

Devil looked at the monument, feeling old. He thought of Mr.Mojo, Circle 66, Dave and Merchant. It all seemed far away…he had only known them for a month but every morning he awoke he felt like he was shocked by the gravity, he expected to hear Mojo’s laugh or see Dave smile…that small outpost was still there, in his soul, and he was there, always…

”I’ll catch up.”

He stared at the parts. He wished they could speak, tell him who it was that had used them so, sending his voice out, lost and faceless into the vacuum, a long shot, and yet had saved so many.

Who were you?

What was your name?

Why did you do all that?

What happened to you?

You could have been saved over and over again…why did you stay?

But the parts were silent, the wind whistling through and across their admantine surface. There was only the whispers of grain, the bubbling of those ruby fountains, the summer air sweet and drenched in sunny calm.

The monument told him nothing.

He stood at attention, and saluted, staring at the final date of that conflict three years ago, the last in a long list.

He finished the salute and stepped back, turning reluctantly from the area, following the jade path, leaving the monument alone, steel against vast caramel fields of silent grasses, quiet.

The End.