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!?"