Duty Calls

The bridge of the Nightstalker was quiet.

The bridge crew sat at their stations. Jolt sat in the command chair, following the event journals as they prepared to free themselves from the thin layer of radioactive cobalt coating the hull. Thresher's torso was duct-taped to a chair in front of the engineering station. Although he seemed to be grievously injured and unconscious, he had patched his robotic voluntary nervous system to his station's command interface. He was rerouting electrical power in the maze of conduits beneath the hull to align their magnetic fields precisely.

The Eye kept watch at the helm. The star-ship's short range sensors were almost useless due to the intensely radioactive film of metal that clung to the outside of the ship, but she was able to use the interrociter to get usable data to feed the fire control and tactical maneuver systems. This allowed the Nightstalker a zone of control covering 10,000 cubic kilometers of space. Since the Nightstalker was quite literally going nowhere anytime soon, this was enough to ensure that they didn't run into anything or anyone until the crisis was resolved.

The First Mate stood next to Jolt's command chair, and reviewed the project checklist on an overhead monitor.

Behind him, Thresher lifted his head and said, "Electrical conduits aligned."

The First Mate gave the cyborg a curt, telegenic nod, and checked the box on the touch-screen with grace and élan.

Executive Officer Benito Franco was the youngest officer ever commissioned by the Corporate Drama Academy. He and Jolt turned to each other, and Jolt gave the order.

"Energize." Powerful electrical currents created a powerful magnetic field that enveloped the entire hull. The cobalt was strongly magnetically permeable. Magnetic domains aligned, and the thin film was quickly magnetized.

Jolt turned around the other way to face Thresher. "How long will we need to magnetize the film?"

"Not very long at all. I think it will be ready in a few minutes." Despite missing the lower half of his cyborg body, Thresher seemed surprisingly lively. "Once it's magnetized, we can reverse the polarity and send pulses of current down the conduits in the opposite direction. The magnetic fields will repel, blasting the metal off the hull."

Jolt smiled at Thresher. "Great work! I'm proud of you guys."

The First Mate peered at the overhead monitor. "Captain, there's an incoming transmission, encrypted." He poked at the comms interface. "Key signature matches Arsenal."

Jolt turned towards the static-filled view-screen. "What? Didn't they find a body? Put this on the main screen."

Peter lay face-down on a bed, partially covered with a thin sheet. Jinx, dressed in a robe, sat down next to him and touched a spot on his back. Peter lifted his head, grinned and began to hum.

Jinx giggled and then gestured towards the end of the bed. "Hey, your encryption thingy finally finished handshaking. I think you have a connection to the Nightstalker."

Peter looked directly into the camera, and quickly leaped up. Thinking quickly, he just managed to cover himself a little with the sheet.

Jinx leaned back and waved at the camera. "Hiya, Sparky!"

Peter put himself together as best he could. He looked straight into the camera with an air of forced disinterest and saluted.

Jolt was not impressed. She sank into her captain's chair and rubbed her temples. The Eye and the First Mate gazed into the view-screen. The Eye's expression was a mixture of amusement and disgust. Thresher seemed consumed by vicarious embarrassment. The First Mate was simply dumbstruck.

"Arsenal here. Did you receive my message? We have a second image from a fighter simulator -- with a little luck, we should be able to reconstruct the attack plan by analyzing M-Seven's simulations."

Jolt looked at the view-screen through the corner of her eye. "What, that huge message that crashed my Inbox?"

"Yeah. That was an executable image of the simulators they used to train the fleet. I've lost my copy, but if you guys could sync with us, we might be able to re-construct the entire attack plan."

"We calculated where the fleet might re-materialize. Sedgewick Station is within the first standard deviation of the target distribution, so we're pretty sure they're going there." Jolt studiously avoided looking at the view-screen.

She turned to the slack-jawed First Mate. "Ben, open a data session."

"Yes, ma'am."

The sync operation quickly compared the images. Streams of data flowed to and from the Nightstalker and Jinx's ship. Jinx looked straight into the camera. "So, our ship has M-Seven livery. We can join up with the attackers--"

Jolt looked at Jinx with a withering glance, and interrupted her. "Did I ask you to speak? I don't remember asking you anything."

Peter spoke up. "It's a good idea. Once we know what they have planned, we might be able to disrupt their operations at a critical point. Attacking from surprise--"

"Yeah, that's not bad. We'll be there. You should try to land on the first wave and assist the defenders."

"Understood, Captain." Peter nodded. "We'll be in touch in a few hours once we've analyzed the composite image."

Jolt scowled at the screen. "Good. Put some clothes on next time. Close transmission."

The crew of the Nightstalker paused for a moment. Jolt then got out of the command chair and turned to her First Mate.

"Ben, you take over. I'm going to go soak my brain in warm soapy water."

Beyond Belief

Jinx looked down at her fists and laughed a little.

"Huh. You tagged out."

"Yep." Peter stood in front of her with his arms folded.

"It must be my charming personality." Jinx smiled at Peter in mock flirtation.

"I'm immune. Type 350 clones have extraordinarily low sex drives. Anyway, you ripped out my larynx with your -- uh -- sharp thing." Peter was a little taken aback, and rubbed his throat.

"It's a war spork. A weapon developed from a very old tool for skinning fresh kills." Jinx pulled the war spork from the inside of her jacket, and pointed to the parts of the weapon as she continued. "The spike penetrates the carcass, then you run it along the side to separate the skin and fat from the meat. You can then use the spoon part to scrape fat and muscle off the skin for curing."

"That was totally educational. Creepy, too."

"M-Seven, at your service. We're all about the old creepy stuff. There are some neat sword and spear-breaking techniques you can do with it." Jinx demonstrated a few quick strokes with the weapon. Peter kept his arms folded in front of him as Jinx stabbed the air.

Peter looked at Jinx. "Would you put that thing away?"

"Don't be scared -- it's just a tool. I put a whammy on it that attacked your nervous system. It's hard to defend yourself when you can't think or move -- not that that stopped you from trying."

"I did my best. It's hard to keep your balance when you can't feel anything."

"That's what I told the judge at my last drunk and disorderly trial." Jinx nodded towards the exit of the living area, and tucked her weapon back into her inside jacket pocket. "Let's take a look while we still have some time."

"Yeah, let's do that. I'm curious."

They walked into the courtyard, where a hole filled with ashes marked the location of a former fire pit. Peter looked into the hole filled with ashes as Jinx picked up a battered piece of colorful cardboard from the ground.

Jinx gestured to Peter. "Come here! They must be shutting down the training program -- this is one of the lottery cards they used to select new recruits."

Peter looked over Jinx's shoulder at the battered piece of cardboard marked with purple numbers. "A lottery?"

Classical lotteries, where prizes are simply given to those who had the dumb luck to have a certain number of matches to the randomly drawn numbers, were extremely uncommon. The most popular games were cumulative lotteries, where players collected matches from daily drawings and tried to place them in winning "hands" to claim prizes from the pot.

The lottery card was printed with a gaudy holographic pattern to discourage forgery and changing made bets. Based on a small section of the card, a lottery operator could uniquely identify it and its corresponding series of bets.

Jinx looked at Peter as he examined the matrix of numbers marked with stamps. She found that she could still read his face and imagine what was going on in his head simply by examining his expression. Discovering that she could, she did -- until she realized with a start that he was now looking at her with the same probing gaze.

They broke eye contact, and each took half-a-step away from the other in an attempt to re-assert their personal spaces. There was an awkward moment. Jinx's gaze sank to the dusty ground as she imagined for a moment what Peter must be thinking. Peter briefly seemed stunned, uncertain what to say or do next.

When he broke his silence, Jinx felt suddenly sad and ashamed. "Were you trying to do something to my mind?"

"No. Not anything paranormal, anyway." She stopped for a moment to push the shame from her mind. "I fed on your essence. I took into myself what makes you the person you are. This has some side effects. Right now, I feel a connection to you because we are looking at the same things, and responding to them in similar ways. This creates a context of shared feelings that--"

Jinx stopped, and was relieved when Peter continued her thought. "That enable us to connect emotionally? Have a relationship?"

The absurdity of what Peter said made her laugh a little inside. "Yeah. That's what normals feel when they fall in love. I told you that you shouldn't have come back."

"It's not voluntary, and that wasn't the first time." Peter seemed to relax a little. "I've been coming back from the dead pretty regularly since I discovered I had powers."

Jinx briefly considered the implications of what Peter said. "Does anyone know you're an immortal?"

"They must know. No one has ever asked me about it, though."

"Immortality really screws with people's heads. With a savings account and a couple of millennia you could end up owning the Corporation."

Peter looked at Jinx carefully. "What about you? You must be older than you look."

"It's complicated. This body was born about a century before the Last War on the Home-world."

"That's... three hundred years?"

"As long as I find souls to consume, I won't age or weaken." She felt ashamed. "It's not the same as immortality. Demons are parasites. As soon as the last sapient species goes extinct, our kind will perish."

Peter looked at Jinx's face and his mind wrestled with unaccustomed concepts. "Why do you look so sad?"

"This isn't how things are supposed to work. I hurt you and exploited you and--" Jinx discovered that talking about it made it worse.

Peter walked to her and took her hands. She looked into his eyes, and felt... something. She was having trouble giving it a name.

"They grew me in a vat, Jinx. I've been exploited since I was an embryo. It stopped hurting a long time ago."

His words comforted her, and she wondered why that was so. "We should go back to my ship, get drunk, and have meaningless sex. It's the only way to nip this in the bud. Discover the idol has feet of clay..."

"I have a better idea. Let's figure out where the fleet is going to attack, lay in a course, and then have drunken, meaningless sex."

She looked at him and they both smiled. "Gold star for robot boy..."

Silver Rocket

Jinx looked at the figure unexpectedly standing beside her. He was dressed in a nearly featureless slate grey unitard with a prominent insignia on his chest -- a stylized capital letter A in silver that vaguely resembled an old-style rocket with fins. His white furred face smiled at her, but his green eyes seemed to have trouble focussing.

"How the HELL did you just--"

"Woah. That was the edge of the freaking Universe! I fell off reality, and patched my state before I drifted into the void..." Arsenal paused for a moment, then gathered his wits and looked at Jinx. "...sorry if I'm rambling. I'm still adapting to time being all linear again."

"Listen, lady -- who is this dude?" A young man waved his plasma rifle in an unmistakable pantomine of taking aim.

Jinx stared the young man with the gun down. "It's a new ultra-realistic, semi-autonomous illusion spell I'm working on. This is supposed to be Arsenal --"

The young man looked at Arsenal. He let his rifle hang on its strap over his shoulder and rubbed his chin. "You messed up his costume. The real Arsenal doesn't have a chrome dick on his chest."

"That's not a penis! It's a silver rocket!" Arsenal was defensive, and pointed at his chest insignia.

"It totally looks like an erection, dude."

Jinx teleported inconspicuously beside the young man and squinted at Arsenal's chest. "That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?"

"Howcum it can talk?" The young man smiled.

"That's what I meant by semi-autonomous. I can use it to infiltrate Honor Guard." Peter seemed to understand what Jinx was playing at, and stood quietly in front of the other two.

"Cool." The soldier seemed impressed.

They both laughed, and Jinx's eyes locked for a fraction of a second with the young soldier's. This was enough for her mind to touch his with a numbing warmth. "You should lay off the paint fumes, son -- remember that one time you totally forgot you met me and I showed you this neat illusion?"

"Yeah, totally. I gotta get back on patrol."

"You do that." Jinx smiled sweetly at him, and closed the telepathic link. "Be seeing you!"

The soldier walked away. Jinx's face became hard as she swung back to face Peter.

"You can't do that! You SHOULDN'T do that --"

"Time comes all unravelled. I found an eigenstate before you beat me up and replicated it here."

"In a lame new costume with a stylized boner on your chest."

Peter rubbed the spot on the back of his neck where his communications implant used to be. "Stupid! I forgot my implants."

"Considering that you're deep in enemy territory, that's probably for the best. Let's get out of here!" Jinx turned to leave, peering back over her shoulder to see if Peter was following her.

He wasn't. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Jinx. "Wait a minute. I think I might want to beat you up and trash this terrorist base."

Jinx turned around and walked towards him. She held her fists in front of her.

"No, you won't. Tag me."

"What?"

"I want you to tag out. I can stop the operation in about a minute if I get in close enough to the fleet. Tag out -- this is my job."

"You're kidding me!"

"I'm serious. I promised you that before you died."

"But I came back!"

"I don't share your cavalier attitude towards death. Tag out."

Peter looked at Jinx's fists, hesitated for a moment, and tagged out.

Who Is Number Seven?

ONE is ALL, EACH and EVERY one
TWO has the DREAM that LEADS US ON
THREE is the BEAST that FIGHTS to SURVIVE
FOUR is the MACHINE that KEEPS US ALIVE
FIVE is the ANGEL that SEES US THROUGH
SIX is the DEVIL that GIVES HER DUE

WHO is NUMBER SEVEN?

Two minds shared one skull, looking at a garish, cheaply printed promotional poster for M-Seven. Jinx seized the moment when Peter weakened and began to feed on him. His thoughts and instinctual reactions began to flow into her. Pushing her psychic advantage, she dissolved the borders delimiting her inner world. His personality, stunned and dazed, could see what she saw, and feel what she felt.

The flow of energy never seemed to end. She felt intoxicated.

She walked into the common area of the refugee camp wearing a giddy smile. The residents ignored her, although a few of them gave her fearful looks and hurried away, carrying bundles full of their few personal possessions on their backs. One old-looking woman, mane streaked with grey, held her scrawny baby closer, and turned away to shield him from Jinx's gaze.

Jinx felt a surge of sentimental warmth as she realized that that woman and her child would likely have died were it not for the food and medicine secured by her recent raids on cargo ships. Her mind toyed with the unaccustomed emotion, and as she grasped it, she felt a certain sadness that the woman was afraid of her benefactor.

Everyone had left. She was -- or, more exactly, they were -- alone.

Peter's voice in her mental ear sounded drowsy, almost sedated. "Why are they scared of you?"

"They think I'm the devil."

"You aren't? I'm having trouble concentrating..." Peter's mental voice was weak.

"Don't be. I promised I'd prove you wrong, and I keep my promises." Jinx, on the other hand, seemed stronger than ever. She was animated -- she paced, pointed, and seemed enchanted by the world and the things in it.

"How's that coming?" Peter was tired, and seemed to be fading away.

"Poorly. Did you see how that poster just sort of jumped out at us when we walked into the living quarters? "

"Yeah. It was impossible to ignore."

"Well, look in the corners of the room." Jinx pointed to the tent poles holding up the walls to the sleeping area. Each had a polished circle carved into their shafts. "Little stylized eyes, watching everything you do. No dividing walls, no privacy." Jinx was agitated.

"I don't think I follow you."

"It's a conditioning chamber. The subject is either given a positive stimulus, or has a negative stimulus removed, and is placed in a controlled environment where they know they're being watched. In this case, by providing food and shelter, we lessen survival pressures. Then the subject is exposed to a stimulus -- like that poster. The result is a sensitization, an enhanced response."

"To what?"

"The poster asks, 'Who is Number Seven?'. The answer, implicitly, is 'You are'. Given a population that's already being selected by a hostile environment --"

"--you mean people who are used to starving on the street --"

"--you have a pretty good chance of finding people who can beat the odds, who have a little edge. Feed them, and tell them a story where they may be the hero, and you've got an organized mob, the nucleus of an army."

"So you agree with me? You agree that this operation is a real threat?" Peter was obviously weary, but seemed to recover a little strength as he saw his idea validated.

"I need to understand what you are thinking before I can tear it apart. There's some superficial evidence to support your point of view. In fact, I see evidence that Demonslayer is trying to sensitize people with unusual survival skills -- stuff like precognition and probability manipulation. Most people who have abilities like that never notice them, and they're common powers in the general population." Jinx twitched a little. An observer could be forgiven for thinking that she was high on cocaine or in the middle of a powerful manic episode.

"The idea that bad guys care about the truth is a new one on me."

"I do, and the buzz I'm getting from your life energy makes it easy and fun!"

"You suck." Peter paused for a little. "What about the consequences of your actions? Do you ever seek the truth about them?"

"Cognitive dissonance is a girls' best friend." Jinx was flippant.

"Cognitive dissonance isn't just for bad people. We're cops, and we're supposed to protect and help the innocent, right? Except actually doing the job means giving people a hard time -- even if they didn't do anything wrong." Peter's ebbing strength made him become reflective.

This carried over to Jinx, who paused her pacing for a moment of thought. "I don't think the problem is thinking social norms don't apply to you. I think the problem is thinking they don't apply to anyone."

"Anomie is a pretty word." Peter seemed to be falling asleep.

"Yes, but a terrible concept. I have to deal with people like that all the damned time, and it's tiring always having to watch your back." The thoughtful moment was persisting longer than Jinx had expected.

"It doesn't have to be that way."

"Oh really?"

"No. You can choose to deal with people who aren't like that."

This stopped Jinx cold. She suddenly felt very uncomfortable with herself.

"I'm a lion, seeking whom I may devour. How should someone like me survive in polite society?" Jinx's inner voice was sad.

"The same way the animal does -- by consuming the sick and the weak."

"You're not thinking clearly."

"No, I'm not. I'm just trying to understand what you are." They both paused for a long moment. "I can't hold on anymore. I think I'm ready to go."

"Just a minute. I'll help."

Inside Jinx's mindscape, the light had faded. Peter lay, emaciated and trembling, on the undefined ground. Jinx walked to him, and he struggled to lift his head to look at her.

Jinx's eyes glowed with a brilliant blue light. She knelt down to look at him. Peter was trembling. "I'm very weak. I'm not sure I can make it."

"You can. It's not that far." She felt sad, and did not know why.

Peter lay his head back on the ground. "I'm scared."

"It will be over soon."

"Promise me you'll stop Demonslayer's plan." Peter did not look at Jinx. He was trembling.

"I will. I swear it."

Peter rolled into a ball, and with great effort rolled over on all fours. He lifted his head and looked at the threshold into the eternal darkness.

"Thank you." His jaw set, and he dragged himself on his hands and knees over the threshold.

Jinx remained for a long moment, kneeling and looking into the abyss. She shook her head, rose to her feet, and re-entered the world of the living.

She opened her eyes, and saw a young man in ragged clothes point a plasma rifle at her. Jinx scowled at him. "Put that thing down."

"I heard voices." The young man was obviously nervous. "Who were you talking to?"

"Oh, that was just a magical excercise. It's like meditation, but out loud."

"Uh-huh. And who's that guy standing next to you?" The young man was suspicious.

Jinx looked to her left, and could not contain her shock.

"Please don't kill him." The man who shouldn't be there was whispering to her. Jinx recovered her composure.

"Oh, you SUCK!"

Delays and Revisions

Further episodes of the story are coming "Real Soon Now" (TM).

I hope this doesn't alienate the few people who are trying to follow the story, but I think it's necessary. Here's why:

I've gotten a fair number of words down, largely because I am essentially publishing first drafts. The point of this blog is to serve as a notebook for my development of this story. However, a story is an agglomeration of small points -- think of stacking grains of sand to build a sandcastle.

Right now, I've got my sandcastle about in the right shape, but the foundations need to be strengthened. There are stylistic problems with my first drafts that need to be fixed.

I welcome any suggestions.

In the meantime, I will make an effort to finish up the current story-line, and then turn to cleaning things up and making the earlier episodes more presentable.

Thanks!

Dead Reckoning

The cloud of fighters pulled away from the Nightstalker. Every second two or three would blink out of normal space-time.

"We only have a few minutes!" cried Jolt. "Thresher -- can we jump?"

"You don't want to follow them, do you?" The First Mate was alarmed.

Thresher checked his displays. "Hyperdrives are online, charge at 80 percent -- ready when you are."

Jolt turned to the First Mate. "No, following them would be suicide. We're going to acquire their hyper-vector!"

Turning back to look at The Eye, Jolt continued giving orders. "Eye -- take helm control. Pure evasive maneuvers, we're just taking pictures."

"I see." The First Mate paused and considered. "That's actually a good idea. We can narrow down the region of space they might re-appear. I'll paint them with our targeting computer -- then we can crunch the data." He took position on the weapons console.

The Nightstalker peeled away from normal space, and entered hyperspace.

It was surrounded by a bubble of Euclidian 3-space, and moving in a region with at least 7 macroscopic dimensions. The ship's interocciter scanned the convoluted manifolds of hyperdimensional regions of equilibrium of gravitiational potentials, where similar bubbles enclosing the fleeing fighters could exist.

"Now entering the first valence. I have a drive signature! Power at 77%." Thresher monitored the ship's systems on his console.

Two bubbles of Euclidian space met and merged. The fighter blinked into and out of existence in front of the Nightstalker as the starship briefly matched the fighter's frame of reference.

"We got a lock-on! Keep going, we don't know if they're all going the same place!" The First Mate was excited.

"That was a good one. I have a full interocciter scan of the vessel." Thresher watched the data pump along a schematic progress bar from the front sensor array to the main computers.

Up left counter-clockwise an elongated bubble untwirled over a local vortex, surrounding a pair of fighters flying on the buddy system.

Shocked to see Corporate corvette spin into their context, the rear pilot, Bob-Luke, radioed his companion, Dworkin.

"Whoa! Look at that!"

Dworkin turned a key in his cramped cockpit and fumbled to enter a four-digit code on a small key-pad taped to the dashboard of his fighter. A cyan light lit by a display labelled "WARHEADS ARMED."

"Got a shot -- I'm taking it!" Dworkin's trigger finger twitched on the fighter's yoke.

Two missles steamed from the racks beneath the fighter's stubby wings. The flight path to the Nightstalker was short and straight, and the warheads detonated just behind the corvette.

A tiny nuclear charge detonated, and the pulse of radiation and neutron flux struck a thick layer of cobalt alloy, vaporizing it and transmuting the metal into a souce of bio-toxic gamma radiation. The explosion of super-heated plasma was not as brisant as a proper warhead for space combat, but the expanding wave of irradiated cobalt held on for considerably longer before decaying.

The idea behind a bug bomb is not to create a huge crater, but to spread a powerful yet short-lived gamma emitter over as broad an area as possible in on a planet with an atmosphere. In space, the plasma cloud spread and cooled quickly, attenuating the effect of the nuclear charge.

The shock waves impacted the Nightstalker, shaking the hull. A frost-like layer of radioactive cobalt alloy cooled and condensed onto the hull of the corvette, flash-frozen by the ship's shields.

"Dworkin? Are you all right?" Bob-Luke radioed his companion.

Dworkin smiled as the NIghtstalker struggled to stay in hyperspace. "Got the bastards! You go, farm boy! Make your momma proud."

"I ain't Number Seven, ma'am. Not even close." The young man sounded scared.

"Yes, you are, boy. You're the one..." Dworkin dropped out of hyperspace, leaving her wingman to continue to the target.

On the bridge of the Nightstalker, panic reigned. Thresher checked his displays.

"The data feed made it to the main computer before the rads scrambled our sensors. What a mess!" Thresher was secretly dreading the clean-up action that would come next. While he was largely radiation-proof, the clean-up and disposal protocols were arduous; it was going to be a very long extra-vehicular activity before their ship could return to settled space.

Jolt scowled as she sunk into the captain's chair. "Dammit, we've been slimed."

On the surface of Suburbia Prime, a small figure entered the courtyard of a hurriedly abandoned tent city. She looked down at her jacket.

She was wearing her M-Seven badge. She was Number Six. If anyone were still keeping lookout here, in this desolate former place of temporary industry, they might hold her for a friend and ally.

Jinx Bubastis proceeded into the courtyard, and passed by a still-smoldering firepit. Clothing and papers were blowing in the wind. A thread-bare baby doll lay in the dusty debris. Jinx looked at it, and felt a swell of memory.

She had been feeling strange since her encounter with Peter. Her powers were vastly reduced -- most of her abilities were locked up in the crude parody of the material world he had constructed in her mind. She was having difficulty concentrating, and suspected that Peter was having similar problems.

Under ordinary circumstances, she would banish the thoughts from her mind, but now her mind was not entirely her own, and she did not have the strength to push her thoughts and feelings away.

She looked at the doll, and remembered another camp, a long way from here. Her father had left an hour ago, gone to find wood for the cooking fire. She was playing with her battered doll when she heard a young hunter rushing into the camp. She threw the doll down into the dust, much like the one she was looking at now.

She did not understand what he was yelling. Behind him, two men carried a slumping form in a blanket.

She remembered being hungry, and followed them into the central clearing, hoping to get a slice of tongue from the hunters' kill. As she wobbled towards them on her little girl legs, they unwrapped the blanket.

It was not a carcass, but a corpse. Her father's chest had been torn open by shrapnel. Her hunger turned suddenly to horror, as she contemplated eating his tongue.

From inside her mind, Peter's voice begged quietly, "Make it stop. Make it stop..."

She pushed the memory away, and with it the protests of her prisoner. "Suck it up, vat-meat." The rage and shame from the memory gave her a renewed sense of focus.

Now she felt a strange sort of curiousity, a nervous, jittery drive to know. She remembered feelings like this, when she was studying sorcery, but this was different -- a heartfelt yearning for things to make sense, a joy in understanding. It was a strangely intoxicating and pleasant feeling.

She triggered the elevator to the underground warehouse. The lights went on, illuminating containers in neat rows. She opened one of them, and she felt a wave of excitement. Her incuriousity about her colleagues' plans seemed strange to her now.

Approaching the cubical console, she reached for the back and flipped the latches with an unfamiliar movement that was suddenly second nature to her. Detaching the storage module from the internal bus, she held it in her hand and smiled.

Soon, they would know for sure.

What Exactly Does Regret Mean?

Her bunk was cramped, but Jinx Bubastis had been in space so long that she felt uncomfortable in an open bed. Her quarters were orderly, yet cramped -- she used what little free room there was to store the cases for her recording equipment.

She rolled out of bed at lights-on, pulled on a robe over her nightshirt, and sat down at a table with a mirror and double-headed sonic brush. Jinx stuck the small head into her mouth and started to clean her teeth.

She saw Peter in the mirror, sitting on the case of her psychogram. She retrieved the remote control for the psychogram and started recording. "Good morning. You learn irritatingly quickly."

"You have to let me out."

"The way out is easy, but you're not going to like it. Let me finish brushing my teeth." Jinx took a swig of water between her cheek and gum and stuck the brush into the accumulated water. She swallowed and entered a trance, joining Peter in her mindscape.

The changes were subtle, but Jinx noticed them instantly. Instead of a dimensionless white space, Peter's prison had a clearly defined floor.

She looked at him, obviously puzzled. Peter explained, "I tried to reconfigure the environment into something I could work with. I've blasted my way out of extradimensional prisons before."

Jinx was agitated.

"Unfortunately, you stopped breathing for about a minute after I put this environment together. I didn't want to take any chances--" Peter seemed hopeless.

"You had the chance to kill me in my sleep and you didn't? Why?" Jinx was angry.

"Because it would be wrong." Peter seemed strengthened by saying this.

"I beat you up, tore out your throat, ate your soul and damned you to hell. I think you have the right to take vengeance." Jinx sneered.

"Then two people die instead of one." Peter stood his ground.

Jinx became angry. "I'm not a person, I'm a monster! Are you such a self-righteous moron you can't even pretend you value life?"

"I do value life--"

"If you aren't willing or able to exercise your rights, you might as well not have any. It's an empty pretense if you don't follow through."

"You want me to kill you?"

"I'd like to see you try."

"No. No, you seriously wouldn't. Because I can." A touch of fear crept into Peter's voice.

Jinx paused for a moment and felt the air surrounding her. Peter had bound vast amounts of ectoplasm together into a crude parody of matter. A rapid state transition could blast both of them apart.

"Like I said, there's another way out."

"You said I wouldn't like it." Peter was calm.

"You won't. Somewhere here is a threshold. You'll find it when you can imagine a world without you, but I very much doubt you are mentally and spiritually equipped to concieve of a world without your petty moral certainties--"

"What, over there?" Peter pointed to a grey curtain that stretched away in both directions into the ghostly mists.

Caught in the middle of her stream of invective, Jinx rallied in an instant. "You suck."

"I can't cross. I tried that first." Peter seemed nervous.

Jinx's momentum, first slowed, now stopped. She paused for a moment, and contemplated the situation, recognizing the stand-off. "It takes most people a long time before they can. Something's keeping you here."

"I... I have some unfinished business." Peter looked at Jinx.

"What?" Jinx was curious.

"I'm worried about the attack on Sedgewick Station..." Peter seemed uncomfortable, and uncertain how to continue.

Jinx tried for a few seconds to keep a straight face, but eventually burst out into laughter.

"You've got to be kidding me! You seriously think Team Evil's ill-conceived plan is going to mean a damned thing in the grand scheme of things? I think you're taking show-biz a little too seriously, man..."

"That's the thing. The scale of the operation was too large. They must have had some kind of logistical support--"

"Uh, yeah. That was my job. Seriously, if Demonslayer had anything planned after the fighters launched, she sure didn't tell anybody about it."

"But... why bother, then? Are you sure she had no plan?"

"Peter, it's... it's just a game. They blow stuff up, get a subcontractor to rebuild it -- it keeps the wheels turning. It doesn't mean a damend thing in the end. This time, they got rid of a bunch of bums without paying for relocation and rehab. It's not real."

"How can you be so sure, Jinx? I think your cynicism blinds you--"

"Lucky for me you're a rational being. I think I can prove your concerns unfounded. Just one little piece of evidence that it's all a scam, and you can go."

Jinx shook her head dismissively and disappeared.

She sat down on her bunk, looked in the mirror, and saw no Peter. She smiled, and paused the psychogram.

Follow The Leader

The Nightstalker and its six escorts accelerated in pursuit of the cloud of fighters. The Eye was on tactical, and reviewed the sensor reports.

"Five thousand, six hundred and forty-three marks, accelerating at eight standard gravities from Suburbia Prime. They're sticking together." The Eye paused for a moment, and a cloud of tiny false-color dots covered the bridge's main view-screen.

Jolt, sitting in the captain's chair, narrowed her eyes. "Their energy storage capacity is limited. If they're going to jump, they'll have to do it soon."

She regarded the cloud of mauve-colored dots. "Do we have fragment bombs?"

The Eye checked her armory display. "Yes, sir, we do."

"Give me a rack of torpedoes with frag bombs. Thresher, relay that to our wingmen. Let's take as many of them out as we can while they're still vulnerable."

Thresher was at the communications station. "Done. They'll fire at our command."

Jolt turned to the First Mate, who was standing beside her. "Fire at your discretion."

The First Mate tensed and turned to a console. "Transfer fire control now."

The Eye complied, tapping buttons on her tactical console. "Done."

The First Mate entered an attack plan, explaining as he manipulated the controls. "If I understand you correctly, Captain, you wish to deploy the bombs just in front of the leading edge of fighters, resulting in kinetic kills as the targets accelerate into the shrapnel."

Jolt nodded. "Precisely."

The First Mate consulted his display. "Between our launchers and the other six ships, we have forty warheads for the first salvo. All racks loaded -- firing."

From the sides of the blade of the spade-like Nightstalker, small cylinders rolled from the launcher racks on the side. The escorting corvettes, stubby cylinders with a pair of movable, wing-like struts with thrusters on the end mounted on one side next to a heavily-armored bridge module, fired more missiles into the cloud of ordnance from their single launcher racks opposite the bridge.

Computers traded targeting information, then the thrusters of the missiles ignited. A standing wave of neutrino pairs was constrained on one side by a nanoscopic gravity gradient, created by a thin film of stable strange matter. To oscillate at its desired wavelength, the standing wave had to attempt to push the barrier out of its frame of reference; the magnetic moment of the neutral gravity band gap skipping forwards through space-time generated blinding light and heat, which was conducted away from the apparatus by a cloud of vaporizing coolant. The missiles skipped forwards through space, leaving a trail of glowing gas.

An additional set of band gaps closed around the standing wave, this time producing thrust not in ordinary space-time, but in the curved and distorted dimensions of hyperspace. The missiles seemed to curve away as their thrust vectors were forced into a time-line with a non-zero imaginary component, disappearing from the local light-cone on a partially time-like path to their targets. This similarity to a naval torpedo, skimming under the surface of an ocean, led missiles with faster-than-light thrusters to be called "torpedoes".

The torpedoes completed their brief parabolic skip in imaginary time slightly ahead of the front of the cloud of fighters. A charge of chemical explosive sent kilogram-sized chunks of iron into a cloud of kinetic impactors.

The fighters were already traveling at a quarter of the speed of light, following a common vector out of the Suburbia system. The oncoming projectiles vaporized the few fighters that were struck; the survivors scattered, and the advance halted as the formation began to dissipate like a cloud.

Jolt watched the screen as the interrocitor observed the flashes of the exploding fighters. The computer collated the casualty figures to her command display. "Excellent. The first salvo literally decimated the targets -- 10 percent casualty rate."

Thresher, manning the communications station, registered hails from a group of a dozen torpedo frigates patrolling the Suburbia system. With the advance of the fighters temporarily halted by the barrage from the faster corvettes, these vessels could surround and bombard the cloud of small vessels, closing off the escape vectors for the small ships. "We have fire support -- I think we have them bottled up."

The Eye scowled. "Wait a minute -- something's coming!"

Twenty huge battleships materialized from deep hyperspace, re-entering normal space-time in a scattered cloud that rapidly approached the cloud of fighters. The neutral particle cannon of the Reyll war-ships fired.

The beams faded away, twisting away into hyperspace, and re-appeared as scorching beams of energy that struck the approaching corvettes. One bolt struck the Nightstalker amidships, disrupting the main power reactor. The Eye cut the throttle rather than deplete the ship's supply of stored energy, as did the other corvettes. "Twenty marks -- out of nowhere! Main power down, recovery in thirty seconds. Breaking off pursuit."

The surviving fighters -- some five thousand ships -- returned to their former vector, approaching the battleships. Jolt and the First Mate watched as the fighters triggered their jump drives and disappeared, one by one, from the screen.

Cosmic Debris

Not long ago, he was the superhero Arsenal.

Now he was Peter Cat, and he was falling through airless clouds that made his nerves tingle with a deadening chill over a landscape of gray stone. There was no air, and not need to breathe.

He looked down, and saw that he would not be dashed on the stony surface -- a tiny hole was directly below him. He was accelerating in the airless void. His gaze was fixated by the rapidly growing spot of darkness that approached at terrific velocity, growing into a chasm that swallowed the misty horizon as it flashed past.

He fell into the darkness, illuminated from above by a ray of light. The sides of the pit came into view, festooned with stalactites like the hairs inside the belly of a carnivorous plant, pointing down into the abyss.

A huge mass of jagged gray stone flitted past, a double-ended conical lozenge of rock floating in the air. As Peter gawked at the spike of stone rapidly receding into the tiny point of light that marked the entrance to the chasm, his peripheral vision picked up a hint of motion.

A manacle on a chain was approaching him, falling with him to match his velocity. His body was numb with dread. The manacle clamped on his left forearm.

Three further manacles clamped to his free arm and his legs. With a tremendous jerk, his fall came to a sudden, wrenching stop. Above him, the spike of gray stone, tiny in the distance, hovered unsupported in the airless mist.

The chains tightened, pulling him up as they were drawn taut. He was being lifted up, fist slowly, but ever quicker, and with a moment of sick panic he realized that he would be impaled on the pointed end of the lozenge of stone.

Peering over the edge was a dark figure with glowing blue eyes. She was looking at him, and her laughter echoed through the airless pit.

The incongruity shocked Peter for a moment, and with the shock, the feeling of dream paralysis faded. He concentrated, and tried to use his powers to free himself.

The laughter stopped. Everything faded to featureless white. The manacles disappeared.

Peter felt around himself with his hands, and determined that he was lying on his back on a plane invisible in a dimensionless white room. He opened his mouth, and tried to remember how to breathe.

Jinx sat in her recording studio, blinking her eyes, awake from her trance. The psychogram was still running, still recording her mental landscape to be sent to the Corporation's Entertainment Division, but she was no longer there, and sat for a moment in her chair before the mixing board, stunned and numb. With a start, she realized that the white image on the studio monitor was from the inside of her own head.

"What? What?!"

She closed her eyes, her face contorted with fury.

She re-appeared in the mind-scape, wielding a barbed whip. She strode towards Peter, who rolled over and tried to stand. "What did you just do!? Don't--" She lifted her arm to scourge him, and then --

Nothing. She blinked in her studio chair, but recovered quickly. Re-appearing again, she confronted Peter, who was standing unsteadily in the featureless mind-scape.

"STOP THAT!" Jinx was apoplectic.

"Why do you want to hurt me?" Peter was calm, but the horrors of the last few moments were rapidly catching up to him. The dimensionless, airless void made him dizzy.

"We've covered this. This is the afterlife--"

"--and I'm in Hell." Peter crossed his arms and turned away from Jinx. "No way. Not possible."

"Why would I lie?" Jinx stood, arms akimbo, and barely resisted the urge to strike Peter.

"Everybody knows that clones don't have souls. How can this be the afterlife if I don't have a soul?"

Jinx felt puzzled. "Who told you that? They deceive themselves to quiet a bad conscience."

"What?" The confidence Peter regained was fading quickly. He felt an emptiness in the pit of his stomach, and wished he could remember how it felt to vomit.

"Mortals like stories better than reality. When a soul rejoins eternity, it must be purged of the lying taint of self." Jinx spoke coldly, her words were muted in the not-air of the afterlife.

Peter's legs buckled beneath him, and his hands scoured the featureless surface he was standing on. He tried to retch, but had forgotten how, so he simply curled up into a ball.

"You have not answered my question." Jinx became stern. "How did you banish me?"

"I don't know... I just wanted to defend myself..."

"You tried to use your powers?" Jinx's eyes narrowed.

Peter lifted his head, scowled at Jinx, and rallied. He looked her in the eyes, pushed himself up, and began to laugh.

Jinx, enraged, lunged at him -- only to spend the next moment spasming in the chair of her recording studio. She leaned forward, eyes burning with rage, and confronted Peter, who was grinning uneasily.

He taunted her. "Well, how about that? The big bad demoness is powerless inside her own mind! I can send you away any time I like--"

"Laugh it up, mortal! Let's see if it's so funny after I leave you alone for ten thousand years!" She disappeared again, this time voluntarily.

Inside the studio, she turned off the monitor, paused the recorder, and then sat, concentrating, with a cruel smile on her face.

She remained sitting for a few moments, opened her eyes. She resumed recording, turning the monitor back on, and returned to her mind-scape.

"Not so funny now, eh?" She strode towards Peter.

Peter turned to face her -- unchanged. "What? When do the ten thousand years start?"

Jinx was caught flat-footed. "Umm... how?"

Peter seemed annoyed and confused. "You told me it would be ten thousand years, but you were only gone a few minutes."

She looked at him, and her expression changed. He had become something of a mystery to her. "You have some means of perceiving external time. That shouldn't work. Count the seconds until I return."

Jinx returned to the studio. As she looked into the monitor -- showing a feed from a realm inside her own mind -- she saw Peter standing in the featureless white room.

He was defiant, and he was looking at her.

She switched the monitor off.

Left Behind

A second episode, the theme music swells again and you're watching a pile of smoking rubble that used to be a fortified entrance to the East Pole police station on Suburbia.

Jolt was still looking at the skies as The Eye approached her. "Jolt? Are you all right?"

"What just happened?" Jolt turned to look at The Eye.

"It looks like M-Seven just launched their attack. We need to scramble!" The Eye was agitated.

"Where's Thresher?" Jolt turned back to the police station.

"I'm up here!" Thresher, lying on his chest, legless, peeked over the edge of the police station roof. "Don't worry about me, get after them!"

Jolt ran towards the smoking crater that used to be the entrance to the installation. "No way!"

She leaped into the air and flew up to Thresher's position. The cyborg had retracted his chainsaw; the bottom half of his body was missing. He pushed himself up and turned his head to look at Jolt, reaching for her with his right arm. She grabbed his extended hand and lifted it over her shoulder, supporting his torso with her other arm. "I'm not leaving a friend behind!"

They rejoined The Eye in the courtyard, and proceeded to the barracks. In a room adjacent to the lockers a scout suit waited in its creche. Jolt had the arm and shoulder assembly unmounted and the breastplate opened, then carefully manhandled Thresher into the apparatus. The breastplate resealed and the spinal sensor array that would normally sync up with neural impulses in the lower back bound to Thresher's control bus.

Thresher stepped out of the creche, and walked in a circle to test his improvised legs. "Thanks a bunch, boss! Now let's get a move on!"

They strode purposefully towards the dry-docks, entering the underground complex leading to the landing bays. Rejoined by the crew of the Nightstalker, the First Mate turned to Jolt. "They found Arsenal's body at one of the blast sites. It appears he's dead."

"I was afraid of that." Jolt doubled her pace. "He has a bad habit of walking into ambushes."

They took their positions on the bridge of the corvette, strapped themselves into their chairs, and prepared for take-off.

The spade-shaped starship started with a jerk, hovered in the air for a moment, and then shot straight up into the air, blade first, leaving the stricken police star-port behind. The horizon curved beneath the Nightstalker as the sky went black.

Once retrieved, Arsenal's hand-held computer had already sent its final message. Jolt reviewed the simulation of the fighter and forwarded it to The Eye, who was at the helm. "Anything on sensors? Have the fighters jumped already?"

The Nightstalker was joined by a half-dozen other corvettes that were sweeping the space around Suburbia Prime for traces of the swarm of one-man star-ships. "Not yet. We've got them!"

"Initiate pursuit -- we're going hunting!" Jolt's eyes narrowed as she braced for acceleration.

Post Production

A large man sat in a darkened room, illuminated by a large view-screen.

His expression was haunted. On his lap sat a dog-eared script as he leaned back into his chair. On the floor in front of him was a red marker, cast to the floor in frustration half an hour ago.

Judas Montclair was not a happy man.

"Well, it still needs some cutting --" James Brown approached the shocked scriptwriter and sat down next to him. "-- but I thought the cliffhanger turned out nicely."

"...my script..." Judas Montclair's chin wobbled, as if he were about to begin sobbing.

"Entertainment Division is in a hurry, man. We've got to get this one done. They gave us two episodes, and they want the release to coincide with the news footage of repairs to Sedgewick Station." James Brown was excited, visibly looking forward to finishing the two-parter.

"...my script..." Judas looked down at a page covered with red markings. "...they completely ignored it..."

"It's cool! The second half really sells it. We're still here, right?" James was chipper.

Judas looked at James and frowned. "I swear she didn't tell me."

"You told me what Demonslayer was like. I'd have been amazed if she didn't shoot it."

Judas' gaze returned to the floor. "They're taking me in for interrogation. You know that, right?"

"Just tell them what you told me, man."

"I'm scared, James."

The doorbell rang, and James hit the lights. They were working in James' apartment. James Brown went to answer the door.

A tall, statuesque woman in a gray business suit greeted him, flashed an identity card in his face. "We're here for Judas."

James showed her in. "He's right this way."

Judas looked up at the woman. "Do I know you?"

She smiled. "No, but I know you. Let's get this over with." She grasped Judas by the shoulder and escorted him out to the hallway, where two goons in light powered armor were waiting.

She looked at the cowering script-writer, holding him in the spotlight of her smile. "Don't be nervous. You can trust me, I'm a doctor."

Inside the apartment, James Brown sat down at his editing console and got busy.

The Main Event

Bearcat, Red Menace, and Killotron closed in on the final concrete wall protecting the police base. Killotron stopped, and prepared himself to rake the top of the wall with plasma bolts from his forearm blasters, as Red Menace rose to cover the point position Bearcat was taking at the wall.

Bearcat tensed to leap over the wall as Red Menace rose into firing range.

Honor Guard was rushing in through the gap between the office installation and the inside of the wall. Thresher advanced, covered by a hovering Jolt guarded by The Eye, at her left.

Red Menace thrust her arm towards Thresher, and a small golden needle, made of a holmium alloy covered in a thin, shiny yellow oxide layer, trailing a hair-fine thread flew from her palm, wobbled for a moment, then shot out at hypersonic speed into Thresher's hip section.

The young girl triggered a Z-pinch. A powerful magnetic field contracted, driving a hundred billion amperes of current into its own induced field over the wire, which vaporized into a conductive plasma. Thresher's ceramic hips detonated, sending his legs and his torso flying -- resistance was, in this case, futile.

The air stank of ozone. Jolt rushed Red Menace, and jigged hastily to the side as Killotron locked his blasters on to her. Red Menace gestured towards Jolt, and a powerful magnetic flux built up around the flying heroine.

Jolt swerved suddenly in mid-air, tumbled drunkenly, and corkscrewed into the ground just inside the compound wall as her negatively-charged body was caught in Red Menace's magnetic flux.

Meanwhile, on the roof of the installation, Thresher double-checked his vital signs. The lower half of his cyborg body was missing, but his brain, liver, kidneys, heart and lungs were functioning again -- the magnetic pulse had briefly knocked out his life-support, but a watchdog system had brought it back on-line.

Red Menace rose into the air, and targeted the armored door of the installation with a second golden needle.

Thresher pushed himself over, onto his chest, and extended his forearms back to the battlefield. A chainsaw blade extended from his left forearm, and his gaze locked on to the hovering Red Menace. He dug the chainsaw into the gravelly roofing polymer and gunned the motor.

Another tearing blast of electricity vaporized the doors, blasting a hole into the front facade of the squat concrete building.

He skidded towards the edge of the roof, just before the wall of the smoldering crater in the front of the building, aiming his right forearm at Red Menace.

A tennis-ball sized lump of white fluff followed by a superconducting tether arced towards Red Menace. Caught in her magnetic field, the ball spun around the young girl soldier, wrapping her in a superconductive tether.

Red Menace fell from the sky from a height of about three meters. Flopping on the ground, she struggled with her bonds just outside the wall. The superconducting coil suppressed her magnetic fields and bound her tightly; the more she tried to use her powers to free herself, the tighter the tether would compress her magnetic field.

Thresher grinned at the edge of the building as The Eye glanced up to him. "Got her!"

Bearcat leapt down from the wall and confronted The Eye, who drew one of her diamond knives as she reached for a flash-bang from her utility belt. He lunged, and she leaped into the air above him, tossing a small canister in front of the feral monster's face.

It detonated, creating a halo of light around the beast's head for a fraction of a second before he fell on his face in the dusty courtyard. The Eye landed between Bearcat's splayed legs. Drawing her second knife, she hamstrung him with simultaneous thrusts.

"You... beat me." Bearcat gasped, writhing in pain on the ground.

"And people get on my case for stating the obvious." The Eye countered, and ran to the wall.

Killotron swept his guns over the edge of the wall as Red Menace continued to struggle with her cocoon of super-conductive tether. The Eye climbed up the wall, hanging over the inside edge. She reached into her utility belt and took a handful of flash-bangs.

She lobbed the bombs into a loose arc, scattering them in Killotron's field of vision. Five simultaneous flares of brilliant white light overloaded his visual receptors. Vaulting over the wall, she leaped into a roll that took her to the robot's feet. As she righted herself at the end of the roll, her legs pumped and drove her towards the momentarily confused Killotron.

She drove her left knife into Killotron's sensor array in his metallic mushroom-shaped head, which sparked and died. Killotron staggered and fell to his knees.

Inside the smoking crater where the doors of the police station had been, Demonslayer stood in her exoskeleton's pulpit-like cockpit. Her calves extended into the upper thighs of the bipedal apparatus, and her forearms slot into the biceps of the upper pair of a quartet of artificial arms.

She stepped forward towards the wall, and her right pair of arms brandished an enormous, T-shaped piece of metal. Demonslayer paused for a moment, and two meter long blade of pulsing ectoplasm formed from the artifact. She swung her out-sized energy blade at the wall, and the concrete exploded outwards, making her an improvised gate.

Demonslayer grabbed the softly moaning Bearcat by the scruff of his neck and dragged him towards The Eye and the blinded, sparking Killotron. She made a blocking gesture in The Eye's general direction with her free left pair of arms, and a wall of force swept The Eye off her feet.

"Come to my voice, Killotron! We are defeated." She turned to The Eye, who was struggling to her feet. "You're the winners. You won."

With three soft pops, Demonslayer and Bearcat, Killotron, and Red Menace were teleported from the battlefield.

Jolt came to slowly, and got to her feet hesitantly. She walked through the hole Demonslayer blasted through the wall to The Eye, who was pointing up into the sky.

Above them, first tens and then hundreds of lifted off from the twilight urban wasteland surrounding the police station. Jolt screamed.

"WHAT'S GOING ON? WHAT'S HAPPENING?"

The sky was thick with candy-colored fighters, lifting off into orbit.

When Peter Met Jinx

Arsenal flew up, heading for the surface from the underground chamber.

A cloud of sparks intercepted him. Jinx materialized in front of him, and grappled him in mid-air. They fell.

Arsenal had the presence of mind to throw his hand-held computer through an insubstantial spot on the ceiling as Jinx's hands reached to crush his windpipe.

In the instant before impact, Jinx dematerialized again, leaving Arsenal behind in a cloud of sparks. As Arsenal slowly stood up, the shipping container beside him was lifted up and slammed into the container on the other side, momentarily pinning him between them for a brief, painful second before he could become intangible.

He emerged, ghost-like, from the side of the container Jinx was using to crush him. Before she could react, he stuck her with a shock wave bolt, which sent her skittering across the floor. In the moment of respite, he gestured, and the lights went out.

Concentrating again, he lifted his right arm, and a ghostly beam of grayish light played through the pitch black hall. He swept the beam of X-Rays in a broad arc, stopping suddenly when a shower of sparks and an anomalous air current made it clear to him that Jinx had teleported again.

He flew towards the disturbance, continuing his barrage of ionizing radiation. He soon found himself in another section of the underground chamber, filled with tanks of hydrocarbon solvent surrounding an assembly bay brightly lit by lamps on stands.

Behind the last row of shipping containers, Jinx pulled out a war spork, a dagger-like piece of plastic tipped with two vicious spikes that extended forwards from a razor-sharp round head. It glowed with a dim, reddish aura. She readied herself for a fraction of a second as Arsenal approached her position, then disappeared in a shower of sparks.

She re-materialized directly in front of him, thrust her arm forward, driving the left spike of the war spork into Arsenal's throat. Red lightning cascaded over Arsenal's body. With a sudden jerk, she tore open his throat, and he fell, covered in red sparks that traced out the paths of his nervous system.

She stood and watched him bleed as the sparks died down. His eyes rolled into his head as the pool of blood became larger. She turned around and walked away slowly, returning the war spork to its scabbard.

A noise from behind startled her. She spun around, and saw Arsenal, the front of his uniform drenched in blood from his mangled throat, struggling to his feet. He seemed to be having problems standing up straight.

Jinx muttered a mundane and vulgar curse beneath her breath, and leapt forwards. Her shoulder rammed into his blood-stained chest, knocking both of them to the ground.

Arsenal, pinned beneath Jinx, struggled to move. She grabbed his jaw, forcing him to look into her eyes. "You're not what I call living, really. You should have stayed down."

Her mouth opened as Arsenal's half-focused eyes made contact with her gaze. A glowing blue mist rose from Arsenal's body, and Jinx breathed it in. As the last of the blue mist disappeared into her mouth, she rolled off him and clutched her belly. "It burns! It burns!"

She lay, rolled up into a ball of pain, until her mind regained control of her body.

She approached one of the barrels of solvent, punched a hole in the top with her bare hand, and picked it up, carrying it to where Arsenal's lifeless body lay. She poured the volatile, colorless liquid over him, retrieved a lighter from a pocket in her blood-stained jacket, and set his corpse on fire.

She disappeared in a shower of sparks as the flames grew higher, reappearing in what appeared to be a small, dark recording studio.

She sat down on her comfortable chair, in front of a desk filled with mixing boards and a single, cloudy orb that began to glow as her mind focused upon it. One of the monitors sprang to life, showing Arsenal walking, disoriented, though gray mists, dressed in a dark business suit, unbloodied and whole.

She pressed a few buttons on the console, and an orange light lit up behind her -- she was recording.

In the gray psychic wasteland, Arsenal looked up as a gargantuan, demonic image of Jinx, with eyes of flame, confronted him. He stood his ground.

"Where am I? What is this place?"

A distorted voice boomed through the mists.

"THIS IS THE AFTERLIFE -- AND YOU'RE IN HELL!"

The ground disappeared beneath Arsenal's feet, and he fell, screaming, into the darkness.

Outside the hidden base, a small computer beeped as it coupled with the short-range maintenance network of the power sub-station. A script ran, and the computer tried to find a relay to send its message.

To no avail.

Axle and Wheel

The perimeter alarms at the police station noticed the intruders as they approached, three marks, moving slowly and inexorably from the outer ring of sensors. Troopers rushed to their barracks and retrieved their suits of powered armor. Seventeen young men and women disappeared under shells of plastic and metal, pulled over-sized guns from gun racks, mustered into a four-by-four square as their commanding officer performed a last inspection before combat.

The three marks pulled closer.

Orest Kelrast, once a captain, sat sobbing in a folding chair, arms crossed on a cheap table, his head lying on his crossed forearms. He was too busy feeling sorry for himself to notice Demonslayer sit up in her bed and open her watery blue-grey eyes.

The monitor on the view-screen behind her was unchanged -- she was still asleep.

"Stop with the tears, it is unbecoming for thee." Demonslayer approached the table.

Orest looked up at her, his face stained with tears, his eyes filled with horror. "You're awake."

"No. Not really. There is a sense and logic to dreams. If you can dream awake, you learn when things need to happen."

Outside, five snipers took positions at the concrete wall surrounding the police station. They carried bazooka-sized long rifles, and covered the arc where the three were approaching.

Six troopers launched. Backpack thrusters activated -- the troopers flew in a ballistic arc towards the intruders.

Half-way to the targets, one of the trio -- Killotron -- raised his arms, as if to catch the inbound troopers. An improbable array of guns folded out from his robotic limbs, and began to fire, filling the sky with plasma blasts.

Two troopers were shredded instantly. Four landed, readied their over-sized guns.

Inside, Demonslayer sat at the table with Orest Kelrast, holding him transfixed in her watery yet firm gaze.

"As for you, Kelrast... you come from a military family, yes?"

"Yes. How did you--"

"Your name. Before the bombs burn the home-world, the knights of the dark wizards called themselves 'thralls' -- 'kel' in the old language -- of their dreadful masters. You, your father, your father's father -- you all have been sacrificing yourselves for evil men who would be gods."

Orest was silent. He straightened his back, tried to look Demonslayer in the eye. His face was stained with tears.

"They taught them honor, and pride, married them to the fairest women, sent them to die for their ambitions. They would die, alone and unmourned on the battlefield, once the people found the courage and wisdom to join together and take them down." Demonslayer continued.

"And now we come to you. You, sad little man, so unworthy of love. Nasty, needy little men like you don't deserve to be cared about. All you can do is make others suffer."

Kelrast sat, helpless. Demonslayer retrieved a vial from beneath the table.

"I kept this in case they sent me to one of the places they will be sending you. They will read your mind, discover you know nothing of value, and torture you until you think of a capital crime -- and then you will die, a traitor in disgrace. It is a poison. Embrace death that you may learn the value of life."

Orest Kelrast stared at the vial. His lower lip trembled.

Outside, the last of the troopers tried to bring his gun to bear as Bearcat leapt upon him. The monstrous atavism twisted the trooper's helmet back and forth until his gun arm went limp, wringing the trooper's neck beneath his articulated armor. Bearcat cast the trooper aside, turned to his comrades, and asked, "Gotta can openah?"

Inside, Orest Kelrast reached for the vial. His face had tightened, and he looked at Demonslayer intently.

Outside, the snipers fired. Flechette shells sped towards the trio of attackers, burst in mid-air, began to spread out into a deadly wall of needles -- then fell to the ground as Red Menace's eyes flashed a brilliant green.

The snipers chambered their second rounds.

Inside, Orest raised the vial to his lips, hesitated for a moment, and sent the contents flying into Demonslayer's face with a flick of his wrist. Demonslayer kicked the table, lifting it into the path of the liquid.

Outside, a rack of rockets extended from Killotron's back. "The virtue of a sniper is his aim / That every shot will fall the same / But in virtue's arms does vice lay / He doesn't think to move away!" Five guided missiles launched from the robot's back, twisting in the air, homing into the hardpoints on the final concrete wall. Five warheads detonated. Fortifications and snipers disappeared in a cloud of shrapnel.

"Yer poo-tree suckth," quipped Bearcat.

Inside, Orest Kelrast's death rattle echoed in the grim concrete room. Demonslayer stood, whispering killing words under her breath. On the far wall, her vital signs registered deep, relaxed sleep.

She gestured, and a large metal case appeared in the room in a cloud of mist. She opened it, and retrieved her weapons.

Outside, the trio approached the wall. Red Menace rose into the air, and, in her loudest voice and best Corporate, cried --

"CAN HAS DEMONSLAYER NOW!?"

The Hidden Base

Arsenal suspected that this last site might be the right one when he felt a ward spark as he approached the front gate. He checked his communications implant, but it didn't work at all.

He looked carefully at the front gate in the crumbling, three meter high concrete wall. He shook his head, and opened the latch slowly, letting the door swing open. His left hand was balled into a fist -- hovering next to it was a glowing ball of plasma. He closed his eyes, probing the facing corners on the other side of a concrete barrier wall with his powers, but there was nothing there for him to find. Bracing his left hand in his right like a pistol, he and his glowing ball of plasma entered the courtyard.

He walked slowly, taking even, regular steps, pausing to scan behind the irregular clumps of rubble that dotted the courtyard. After a few paces, he came to an area where the dirt and debris were noticeably less weathered. With his right hand, he triggered the sound recorder on his hand-held computer.

"Arsenal here. I found a site protected by a ward, which disabled my comms implants. It appears to be deserted, but there is evidence of recent activity. I see a depression in the ground, approximately the size of a shipping container."

His eyes traced a path scraped into the ground, as if someone or something had dragged the container to the middle of the courtyard. He examined the rough, dusty ground, and then concentrated for a few moments.

"It appears that shipping containers have been moved to an underground chamber. I believe that there is an elevator platform in the middle of the courtyard, and my scans indicate a large underground area, approximately the same size at the courtyard. Entering now."

He passed through the ground into complete darkness, quickly finding the chamber. Setting down in a clear area, he used his powers to probe the darkness. He used his powers to turn on the overhead lights, illuminating the chamber with a grid of overhead spotlights.

The room was filled with shipping containers; line-of-sight was limited, even with the illumination. Arsenal walked to one of the containers, found the consignment number, and checked the number on his hand-held.

"I've found a shipping container belonging to one of the lost vessels. It looks like stolen goods were processed here. I'm going to see what's inside."

Arsenal walked to the end of the container, concentrated, and the large metal door on the end swung open. He used the plasma ball near his left hand as a flashlight to illuminate the interior of the container. A mock-up of a cockpit sat between two large pads, connected by cables to a cubical white box, which was attached to a pair of tripod-mounted projectors in the lower corners of the far side of the container.

"It appears to be a flight simulator. I see a cockpit and control yoke between two accelerator pads, a holographic display, and a control computer. I'll try to find out what scenario they were running on the computer."

He extinguished the plasma ball, sat in the cockpit and looked at the while cube, concentrating. The model cockpit rose into the air as the accelerator pads flickered to life. The holographic projectors displayed the hazy gray-blue surface of a planet as the simulated vessel accelerated, pulling away into a higher orbit.

"I've patched the simulator's state. It's an orbital attack scenario. I'm recording this now. As you see, the tactical displays indicate that the fighter is approaching the target..."

A small dot rose above the horizon, and grew larger.

"Sedgewick Station. The Corporate HQ. They're going to attack Sedgewick Station."

A few moments later Arsenal emerged into the chamber. He took his hand-held, composed a message containing he data he had acquired, and then examined it carefully. He arranged to have the message sent to Jolt, and, after a moment's hesitation, Admiral Kelmorran, who was responsible for the garrison at Sedgewick Station.

The FTL comms interface had been destroyed by the ward, but a short-range radio adapter was still working. He thought for a moment; there was a power distribution station nearby which offered an access point. He scripted for a few moments, arranging to have the message sent as soon as his hand-held could access a public network.

He looked up sharply as he finished the script -- there was a sudden change in air pressure in the underground chamber.

Someone had teleported into the room.

Arm The Homeless!

"He said what!?" The Eye was incredulous.

"He said M-Seven was arming the homeless population." Jolt led her team down the hallway to Demonslayer's holding cell.

"With what?" Thresher was also skeptical.

"He sent me a picture of one of the local hot rods with some guns stuck on the winglets. It looks really goofy." Jolt was almost laughing at the thought. "I let him go off for a while until he realizes what a dumb idea that is."

Something briefly bothered the Eye, but it passed as they came to Demonslayer's cell. A cop in armor stood guard, and relaxed visibly when Honor Guard showed up. He saluted.

"Captain Kelrast is inside with the prisoner."

"Relieved, trooper. We'll take over from here." Jolt watched as the cop walked back to his quarters. The door to Demonslayer's cell slid open, catching briefly before it opened all the way.

Jolt strode in, followed by The Eye and Thresher. Orest Kelrast sat in a folding chair at the foot of Demonslayer's bed; he looked at the heroes with a combination of weariness and wariness. Demonslayer lay on the bed, looking like a corpse at an open-casket funeral, covered by a plain brownish blanket.

"Captain Kelrast -- were you aware that a team of super-villains was active in the area?" Jolt fixed Orest with a withering glare.

"M-Seven's a charity, as far as I can tell. They made my job easier. They took care of the transients, and kept them out of our faces. We don't have the resources to deal with those druggies and losers out there." Kelrast was defiant.

Jolt continued. "We have reason to believe that there has been an unusual amount of pirate activity lately."

"Unusual? No way. A lot of ships pass through here -- and if you have a lot of ships, you get a lot of piracy. It's always been a problem. If the Fleet didn't expend all its resources patrolling the spaceport, there might be less pirate activity in orbit."

"Captain Kelrast, I have no choice but to place you under arrest for aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy --" Jolt was furious.

"What!? No way, I've got nothing to do with them!" Orest's resolve dissolved into animal panic. He stood and gestured frantically towards the Eye. "Why don't you let Psychic Chick over there read my mind -- I'm innocent!"

"The name's 'The Eye', and I'm afraid I can't do that. Probing minds is dangerous and error-prone -- and therefore forbidden, except under controlled conditions." The Eye kept her composure, but only barely.

"Don't worry, Orest Kelrast -- they're professionals at the interrogation centers. If you want your mind read, they'll do it right." Jolt took charge of the situation as Orest sank back into his chair. "You are, as of now, relieved of duty. Your replacement is on a dropship with re-inforcements in case Demonslayer's comrades attack."

Orest Kelrast, no longer Captain, shrunk into his chair and began to tremble slightly. "You can't do this to me...."

Thresher placed a hand on Orest's slumped shoulder. "We can, and we did. You hate your job, and you did it poorly. Consider this an intervention."

We're A Happy Family

Arsenal walked out into the impound yard and began to take stock of the captured vessels. One by one, he gestured towards the impounded space-ships and levitated them to an open patch of concrete. Soon he had a line of six nearly identical one-man vessels.

He retrieved his hand-held computer from his belt and began to examine the craft carefully. After a few moments, he began to disassemble two of them, taking pictures of their internal components with his computer's built-in camera.

The vessels were modular, constructed from bits and pieces linked together with general-purpose connectors. Additional, unused connectors were present in the interiors of the one-man space-ships; he was particularly interested in the connectors on the underside of the vessels' stubby wings.

His next stop was a battered, worn terminal in the hallway of the police station. He logged in with his Honor Guard credentials, and connected to the regional police blotter database. He sketched out a simple query on the terminal screen, and synced a table of ships recently lost to pirates in the Suburbia system to his hand-held.

He stopped for a moment when he saw the record for a freighter loaded with bug bombs, lost with all hands. It was flagged with a marker indicating suspected paranormal activity. He followed the key to a list of known paranormal operatives in the area.

Four hits came up -- Demonslayer, Killotron, Bearcat, and Jinx Bubastis had all been sighted repeatedly in the last five cycles. Demonslayer's picture had her in her exoskeleton with an extra pair of robotic arms that helped her wield her energy shield and sword. Arsenal briefly boggled at how different her normal M.O. was from the spellcaster his team had just fought. Recalling the immediate hits for munitions thefts, he knew Killotron would be fully armed, possibly with tacnukes. Jinx had attacked several ships, and there were forensic and psychic traces confirmed on several scuttled and looted cargo vessels. He glanced at Bearcat's picture and called Jolt.

"Ma'am, we have a problem. Our Demonslayer may be a fake."

"What?" Jolt seemed irritated.

"There are current surveillance camera records with sightings of Demonslayer, Bearcat, and Killotron, tons of pirate activity, missing nukes, paranormal activity in the system. I think something big is happening."

"What does this have to do with a fake Demonslayer?" Jolt was impatient.

"Demonslayer usually fights with a four-armed exoskeleton and magic weapons. There's paranormal pirate activity--"

"You think the old woman we have in holding is someone else?"

"It's possible. There's a whole team of them." Arsenal flipped through the records, reading quickly. "They call themselves M-Seven. Officially, they are a charitable organization operating homeless shelters in the area around the East Pole."

"You told me you would check in with the crew working on the Nighstalker. What are you doing?" Jolt was angry.

Arsenal shrunk back, rebuked.

"Why aren't you where you said you'd be?"

"I was examining the vessels in the impound yard."

"Why that?"

"They seem a little over-engineered to be hot rods." Arsenal was rather flustered.

"Uh-huh. Arsenal, normal men like big cars with big engines. It makes them feel important, and lets them go into orbit for jobs. Concentrate on finding out what you did to the Nightstalker instead of wasting our time like this. We'll confirm Demonslayer's identity and call for re-inforcements in the meantime. Jolt out."

"Understood. Arsenal out."

Arsenal pocketed his hand-held computer, shook his head, and headed out to the spaceport. As he came outside, he stopped a moment to watch the running lights of the traffic heading out to the orbital factories, circling until they received clearance for orbital insertion. The dance of the running lights fascinated him; he watched a small personal cargo vessel shoot up through the twilight skies, now only lightly streaked with clouds.

He continued to another low concrete bunker across the dusty courtyard. A cop in powered armor stood guard before the entrance; he recognized Arsenal and saluted.

Arsenal descended into a musty corridor whose ceiling was obscured by recently-repaired ductwork. Provisional lights clipped to the walls illuminated the way until he came to a brightly-lit atrium. In the corner, a clone was cleaning the floors; he looked up at Arsenal for a moment, showing a brief flash of recognition that vanished the moment Arsenal stepped into the brightly lit room. The clone returned to his chores.

Arsenal came to a door, which opened automatically. He entered a darkened office, lit by a pair of holographic displays showing various views of the Nightstalker.

The man behind the desk could have been Arsenal's twin brother. He was dressed in loose-fitting grey coveralls, and held up one hand as Arsenal entered the room.

Arsenal took the hint and waited at the corner of the desk as the Type 350 clone saved his work and looked up at his visitor. For a brief moment, Arsenal and the man behind the desk sized each other up, exchanging subtle cues of posture and patterns of eye contact in a fraction of a second, instinctual behavior conditioned in the clone vats. Preliminary handshake completed, they hastily introduced themselves, and the man at the desk rose a little from his seat and extended his hand. "Hello. I'm Randall Cat -- chief of operations at the shipyard here. You?"

Arsenal shook Randall's hand, and Randall sat back down. "My name is Peter Cat. I used to work on the plasma weapons design team, now I'm attached to Honor Guard, codename Arsenal."

Formalities satisfied, Randall leaned back and looked his twin brother in the eye. "So -- what can I do for you?"

"How's the Nighstalker looking?" Arsenal folded his hands in front of him, trying not to invade his colleague's work area any more than he absolutely had to.

"Great! I was expecting all kinds of battle damage, but it looks really good. The initial tests have all been positive. The only big anomaly is some missing time on the ship's log, so I'm having the staff run a burn-in cycle on the computers. Assuming nothing strange happens, you should be good to go in about ten standard hours."

"That's good." Arsenal smiled a little.

"What's wrong with your team-mates? They seem to think you sabotaged the ship."

Arsenal paused for a moment, and decided to change the subject. "Have you had a look at the ships in the impound yard?"

"We're understaffed and overworked out here. Until Captain Kelrast gives us a work order, my staff has enough to do as is." Randall seemed genuinely sorry, and gave Peter a second glance.

"I've taken some pictures of the hot-rods captured in raids -- the design is... interesting."

Randall smiled a little. "I'm curious. I can give you half an hour."

Arsenal placed his hand-held computer on the desk, and Randall connected to it and began reviewing the holograms. Randall immediately fixated on the connectors under the winglets. "That looks like a weapons mount."

"That's what I thought, but it's a little out of my area."

Randall pointed at a series of small receptacles surrounding the connector. "Those are attachment points for a semi-articulated gun mount -- if it were for a storage battery or a cargo pod, they wouldn't bother putting them there."

Arsenal pulled up the cargo manifests of the ships recently lost to piracy. "Check this out. Recent losses include storage batteries, mini jump drives, a consignment of nuclear demolitions charges..."

Randall looked confused. "Bug bombs? Weird. Wouldn't be my first choice to arm a fighter."

Arsenal concurred. "Yeah, and they're no good for piracy -- who wants to loot a contaminated wreck?"

Randall frowned and looked at his desktop clock. "We don't have a whole lot of time. I'm going to make a few assumptions and see what I can put together with the stolen cargo and this spaceframe." Working together, they assembled the parts; Randall filled in the few unknowns from his considerable experience.

Randall leaned back in his chair and squinted at the hologram. "That's... not bad. It'd have about 75% of the specific impulse of a front-line fighter, which means it wouldn't be a sitting duck. It's not something I'd want to fly, but it wouldn't be completely useless in a dogfight."

"How much work would it take to get one of these armed and charged up?" Arsenal copied the simulation data to his hand-held.

"Not too much, the big problem is logistics and process. They'd need some manufacturing capability to make adaptors for the scavenged parts, and lots of space to do the assembly. Listen, I've got some test results coming in now. Can I keep a copy of your data to play with later?"

"Sure. I've got to check in with Jolt. Thanks for your time!" Arsenal left the office as Randall Cat fell back into his work. The junkyard star-fighter disappeared from the holographic displays, and the Nightstalker returned.

Arsenal proceeded back to the courtyard, striding quickly through the corridor until he reached the bunker exit. He tapped the cheap black plastic housing of his computer nervously.

"Jolt, Arsenal here. The Nightstalker will be ready in ten hours."

"That's nice. The woman we captured is Demonslayer, we've confirmed it. A dropship with reinforcements is on the way in case M-Seven tries to break her out."

"I'm going to send you a simulation I put together with the chief of staff -- I think they're building a fleet of star-fighters in the abandonded factories around here. I'd like to see if I can find any evidence around here."

"Good. I think we can manage, just make it quick. Jolt out."

Arsenal paused for a moment, relieved, before he took off into the sky, following the power conduits that stretched off into the distance.

Magnetic Girl Soldier

The corner of the bunker obviously belonged to a young girl. The bedroll was covered with clothes and overstuffed pillows, a mirror was propped against the wall, and an improvised dressing room made from a pair of curtains covered with pins and brooches was set up in the corner.

She walked out from behind her dressing screen, dressed in a simple, military-style body stocking made of brown-green fibers with the strength of steel. She looked at the mirror and frowned; her costume was, in fact, very ugly and drab.

She bore an unmistakable resemblance to Jolt; her fur and mane were the same auburn color, and her face had a similar bone structure.

Well out of her reach hung a black dress decorated with a huge reflective red five-pointed star on a hanger made of metal wire. She gestured towards the dress, and her green eyes began to glow.

The wire hanger resisted for a moment until the magnetic attraction of the young girl's outstretched palm pulled it off the hook on the wall and onto her hand. She relaxed, and her eyes stopped glowing. Her nimble fingers caught the hanger and the dress before it fell.

She pulled on her dress, pulled down on the hem, and looked at herself again in the mirror. She looked a little happier. She put on a pair of high, tight black leather combat boots with metal soles, laced them up, tied a short bright red cape around her neck, took a final look in the mirror, and smiled. She pulled her red hair into a top-knot, took one last look in the mirror, and smiled.

Her eyes glowed again, and she rose from the ground. Turning smartly, she levitated to her two comrades, waiting beneath an overhead light.

Bearcat and Killotron watched her hover towards them. Bearcat turned to Killotron.

"She ever fight before?"

"Yes, comrade, I fear she has."

The girl floated up to look her fellow soldiers in the eye. She pointed to herself and said. "Red Menace. Number Five."

Monkey Trick

The Eye, predictably, made the first move, continuing her tuck and roll while drawing two knives with diamond blades, found her feet and lunged for the hovering spellcaster. In the fraction of a second she was in mid-air, her precognitive senses registered the danger, but gravity and momentum had sealed her fate.

She ran into a ward, a circle of symbols projected onto the ground by Demonslayer's will, that discharged their curse in a corona of coded light. Every nerve in the Eye's body registered pain; her muscles cramped, and she fell to the ground, writhing.

Demonslayer casually ignored the two lightning bolts that crackled past her head and turned to face Thresher. She floated towards him, her hands crackling with malign power. The running lights on Thresher's cyborg body flickered, dimmed, and went out. His internal stabilizing gyro kept him upright for a second before he tipped over to fall on his face. Another pair of lightning bolts whizzed past the hovering Demonslayer, struck her ship, and discharged into the ground. She turned to face down Jolt.

"You play at competence, Jolt -- in reality, you are a fool. You don't know how your powers work, do you? You can't hit me with your lightning because I'm not grounded."

A hand grabbed Demonslayer's left boot.

"What, like this?" said Arsenal, eyes closed, crawling on the ground. Demonslayer hissed as one of Jolt's bolts hit her dead-center, discharging into Arsenal's arm. She fell to the ground and collapsed.

Arsenal sat up and shook his smoking forearm. "Ow."

Demonslayer was lying, still and seemingly unconscious, on the ground. Jolt watched her carefully as Arsenal stood up and blinked his eyes. "Oh good. I can see. I'm gonna go reboot Thresher before he suffocates."

He walked over to his cybernetic comrade, opened a panel in Thresher's chest, and pressed the recessed reset button. Thresher's cybernetic body beeped once, and his running lights came back on.

Jolt scowled at the old woman lying on the ground before her, as the Eye rose to her feet and rubbed her neck.

Jolt said, "All right, let's get her into a holding cell."

A few moments later, Honor Guard met with Orest Kelrast in his office. The Captain was livid.

"What is the matter with you people? We're supposed to hold a spellcaster? How!?"

They were watching a view-screen provisionally attached to the stained grey wall with a few lumps of poisonous-looking neon blue putty. On the screen, Demonslayer lay motionless on a sick bed, dressed in a paper hospital robe. Around her bed, monitoring equipment relayed data to the base's computer systems. A small window inset into the video stream showed her psi activity, heart rate, and respiration, a gently fluctuating set of undulating lines.

The Eye looked at Demonslayer's vital signs and frowned. "I don't see any signs of shock. It looks like she's sleeping. Were there any electrical burns on her body?"

"Nope." Kelrast frowned. "Her skin-suit had a conductive layer. I don't think that lightning bolt did a thing to her."

Jolt looked annoyed. "What? But why did she go down?"

Kelrast snapped, "Who cares!? The problem is, what do we do when she wakes up?"

Arsenal looked at Kelrast coolly. "Let's sedate her and send her up to the star-port on a shuttle. They have proper holding cells and competent staff."

Kelrast's eyes narrowed and he scowled at Arsenal. Arsenal appeared completely oblivious to the fact that he had insulted the Captain. "You arrogant chunk of vat-meat, you're calling me incompetent! Get out of my office!"

Arsenal turned to Jolt. "I'm going to the shipyard, and see how the repairs are coming along."

Jolt nodded curtly, and Arsenal left. Kelrast settled back in his char and said, "Looks like you losers will be staying here and looking after your prisoner. Now get out!"

To Protect and to Serve

"Welcome to the East Pole. Hope you losers brought flashlights."

He was an old, overweight man with grey-flecked fur and a large chunk missing from his pointed right ear. A single gold tooth glittered from his mouth as he smiled a smile completely lacking in warmth and humor, but rich in contempt and mockery. He sat at his desk, covered with papers, before a stained grey wall.

Honor Guard stood in the office of Captain Orest Kelrast, chief of the police base where their vessel, the Nightstalker, was being repaired and tested.

"We haven't been briefed yet." Jolt took charge of the small, ramshackle office, crossing her arms. "What's the situation?"

"You're in the city that shouldn't be. We have two dozen troopers to handle a transient popluation of about 20,000. We've given up on doing much more than patrolling first-line installations." Captain Kelrast leaned back in his chair. "We have neither the staff or the inclination to do much more than that."

"I see." Jolt's eyes narrowed, her brow registered contempt.

The Eye looked up suddenly, and tapped Jolt on the shoulder. In the distance, the report of a huge explosion was a messenger for a low rumbling that gently shook the floor of the squalid office.

Orest Kelrast looked unconcerned. "Wildcat demolitions. Pretty much all the buildings out here are condemned. Sometimes the squatters do the demolition for us."

Arsenal fixed his gaze on the Captain. "How often does this happen?"

The Captain squirmed a little. "About once every cycle. There's been a sharp up-swing since last cycle, too. Seems like every few hours, now."

"What about the squatters?" The Eye looked concerned.

"I'll go see if there are any injured." Arsenal looked up at the ceiling, then rose like a rocket, phasing through the ceiling.

"Hey! Watch it! I just had the roof fixed last week." Kelrast was startled and annoyed.

"Don't mind him. I've taken the liberty of making a copy of your recent police blotter. We'll be seeing you." Jolt turned to leave the office, and Thresher and the Eye followed.

"Listen, if you capes wanna swoop in and save the day, knock yourselves out. We could use the help." Kelrast sank into his chair as Thresher closed the door behind him.

Meanwhile, Arsenal spotted the rising plume of dust from the demolition. He paused for a moment, floating in mid-air, as his implant signalled an incoming transmission.

"Arsenal, this is Jolt. We're in the meeting room at the station. Let us know if you see anything."

"Jolt -- I've spotted the detonation site. No rescue beacons, but I've got a mark..."

A few blocks away, a candy-colored one-man spaceship with a huge spoiler took off on a low-altitude course.

"...intercepting, a one man spacecraft, no running beacons, no ID..." Arsenal picked a vector that would put him directly in front of the accelerating vessel.

The pilot spotted the flying super-hero, and pulled up sharply, gunning the engines. Arsenal adjusted his course. "...he's making a run for it!"

Arsenal pulled up behind the rising spaceship, gradually closing the distance as it tried to reach orbit. As he closed in on the vessel, the engines suddenly stopped. "I've shut down his drive. I'm taking him in!"

Arsenal grabbed the spoiler of the space-ship and maneuvered it into a gradual descent. Jolt radioed in, "All right. We'll meet you in the impound yard. Jolt over and out!"

Outside the base in the impound yard, a half-dozen ships very much like the one Arsenal slowly guided onto a free spot sat, rusting. Jolt stood, her fists sparking with a coronal discharge. The Eye stood close by her, as Thresher extended one of his chainsaws and radioed the vessel.

"Come out, kid, before I have to cut you out!"

The Eye dropped into a crouch, waiting to roll out of the line of sight. Jolt registered her alarm, and her laser ionizers powered up.

The canopy opened, and Honor Guard saw an old woman, wearing a mask with painted-on eyes. Arsenal descended to help her out of the vessel, and she gestured towards him, dismissively.

Arsenal fell to the ground, clutching his eyes. "I'm blind! I'm blind!"

The old woman rose in the air, her hands crackling with eldritch energy.

Demonslayer looked upon Honor Guard, and said --

"If you catch it, can you kill it?"