Fourth Wall Banger

James Brown examined the decision tree for the next "Honor Guard" story arc one more time. He did not like what he saw.

It was produced by the program SIMPLOT, an application used for a huge number of tasks -- managing risky investments, planning complex projects with potential contingencies, preparing threat analysis trees for distributed systems, or scripting interactive fiction with semi-autonomous actors. The program presented complex processes as a directed acyclic graph, and suggested new branches and nodes based on inferences from a domain-specific knowledge base using a simple, sub-sapient breadth-first autonomous cutting inference engine*.

His collaborator, Judas Montclair, had a bad habit of pruning interesting nodes from his decision trees. Not long ago, Judas had failed to account for the possibility that the Reyll heretic Demonslayer and her team of miscreants, M-Seven, would be able to mount an attack on the Corporate HQ, Sedgewick Station.

That mistake cost Judas two weeks of interrogation at the hands of Corporate intelligence.

He returned a shadow of his usual hedonistic self, a distracted nervous wreck who seemed to lose himself in terrible daydreams. James had done his best to cover for Judas, but James' work was itself time-consuming and exhausting -- he had to choose from and mix together streams from a plethora of recording devices into a visual narrative that would make sense to and hold the attention of a distracted, not terribly sober audience.

James had been doing his best to pick up the slack as Judas recovered. The decision trees Montclair was producing had become dangerously sparse, and James would sometimes go through them and add nodes to represent other possible chains of cause and effect, possibilities that Judas had precluded in the plans and projections that would influence the next several months of "Honor Guard" vids.

Some of this was a question of style. Judas liked letting the characters drive the story, and that often meant leaving them a great deal of autonomy. The result of these scripts were broad trees with few nodes and many branches. The fans seemed to like these free-wheeling plots, and giving the talent more freedom made "Honor Guard" feel relatively authentic.

The coming story was completely different. It was a graph like a map to a rail line, a straight path from plot point to plot point. Worse still, a number of the nodes were encrypted, and Jack couldn't even open them to suggest alternative story-lines. Poking through the meta-data for the nodes, Jack saw that they were asymmetrically encrypted with a public key used by the Grays, Corporate military intelligence.

The parts he could read worried him. Judas was making a dangerous series of assumptions, and the involvement with the Grays made Jack nervous. Jack had tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with his colleague, but Judas had always put him off.

Jack's communicator beeped. It was Judas. Jack was finally getting his chance to share his misgivings with Judas.

Judas' voice was slurred, and Jack could hear blaring pop music in the background. They arranged to meet at a nearby bar.

Jack took public transportation to the run down drinking establishment. Judas had obviously been drinking heavily, and sitting in a semi-private booth off to the side of the dark bar.

Jack sat down next to him with a tablet computer. "Judas, are you sure you're up to this?"

"Oh yes. Hell yes."

"I can't evaluate a lot of the nodes on this next script--"

"Not your concern, my boy. It's out of our hands."

"Judas, listen to me -- if you miss a possibility like last time, they'll take you in again. I need you in good shape if we're going to stay on schedule."

Judas did not listen to Jack. He thought about being taken in again, the woman doctor in her tight leather suit -- her huge quartet of breasts (surely implants) heaving as she applied the neural stimulator and Judas arched his back in pain -- and he had a sudden, adolescent flush of shame as he wondered if his colleague could see his erection.

"Judas? You've been spacing out like that a lot recently."

"Sorry." Judas pushed away from Jack and crossed his legs, resting his left foot on his right knee.

"I need you to look at this." Jack gestured towards the tablet with its stylus. "If I add a branch here, the graph won't terminate where we planned--"

Judas blinked his eyes, and slowly read the branch in tree. "Oh, no. She'll never do that. Being a super-heroine is much too important to her. She'd never risk it."

"Are you sure? If they talk, there's a non-zero probability that they'll never reach the nodes down here." Jack gestured at the encrypted nodes. "If they use a genetic screening to identify--"

"Don't be silly, Jack."

"Judas, I know what her mother was. If she goes after her father, the whole project is in danger--"

"Please, Jack. She likes being in charge too much. She'd never risk it."

Jack shook his head in exasperation. He wasn't getting through to Judas, and it frustrated him. "This script is a lot more linear than what I'm used to from you. What's going to happen?"

Judas smiled. "We're going to win, Jack. It's that simple."

Jack was annoyed enough that he left Judas behind to the throbbing music and went home.

Jack wished that he had felt like drinking with his colleague. He was going to have trouble getting to sleep tonight.

* Imagine a "mind mapping" package melded with a slightly cleverer version of Prolog. SIMPLOT is about as ubiquitous in the Corporation as Microsoft Excel in a modern computerized office on Earth.

Elsewhere

The mining town was in ruins. Fires burned on both sides of the main drag of the prefabricated shopping mall perched in a crater of a larger than average asteroid. Above them, the net-like satellite in synchronous orbit that confined the town's artificial gravity field glinted in the faint sun-light.

A massive figure grinned and cracked his knuckles as he bore down on Thresher. The cyborg stood his ground.

With a well-practiced movement, Thresher fired a tether at Leviathan.

On board the Nightstalker, the Eye was startled by a premonition. "Jolt? I'm gonna throttle up the engines. Now!"

"Everybody to stations! Here we go!" Jolt gripped the arms of the command chair.

Leviathan's arms were bound to his sides. He grabbed the trailing end of the tether daintily, looked at it, and began to laugh. Thresher fired the other end of the tether at a cable lying on the ground behind him.

Leviathan advanced -- and the cable suddenly pulled taut as the Nightstalker streaked overhead. His vast bulk was jerked off the surface of the asteroid into the vacuum of space.

Thresher waved as Leviathan disappeared in the black distance. He triggered his comm implants. "Any chance you can take me with you? I wanna see this."

A fraction of a second later, the cyborg hero dematerialized. Townspeople crawled from the rubble and set to work putting out the fires consuming precious oxygen.

The Nightstalker keel-hauled Leviathan far away from the mining colony.

Thresher entered the bridge, and say Leviathan's scowling face on the main monitors. "Reporting for duty, Captain."

"Take your station, Thresher." Jolt leaned back into the command chair. "We're about to release the tow line and throw him into the sun."

Victor looked up from the sensor console. "Captain? Asteroid 423 has just left its orbit. It's approaching our position at relativistic speed-"

Jolt smiled. "I'm picking up Arsenal's implants on the comms board. Looks like he remembered them this time."

The Eye looked up from her navigation console. "You're kidding me! Leviathan punched his head clean off!"

Jolt looked tense. "Come on guys. Enough distractions -- let's get turned around and send Lynnie on a vector into the sun."

The Eye laid in the new course, and the Nightstalker swung around on a course approaching the sun. On the big screen, Leviathan grimaced, and spat out two silent words into the vacuum of space.

Jolt thought for a moment. "What did he say? 'SCREW PHYSICS?'"

The Eye remarked, "I don't think that was 'screw'..."

Lights flickered as Leviathan relaxed the screen that protected normal space from his enormous gravitational field. The bridge of the star-ship shook.

Victor looked up from the engineering console. "Ma'am... hyperdrive is down. We're stuck on a course into the sun."

Jolt gritted her teeth. "Cut the damned tether. Try to get us some distance--"

"But that won't help us--" Victor stopped talking as Asteroid 423 loomed into the field of view. "Whoa."

The kilometer-wide rock slammed into Leviathan. The Nightstalker shuddered as his gravitational field fluctuated.

"Get that on screen!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Victor's fingers raced over his engineering console. "I think I have it--"

Leviathan lay face down in an impact crater on the surface of the asteroid. He picked himself up and dusted himself off.

A streak appeared over the truncated horizon, and set down just outside the crater. Two beams struck Leviathan in the chest, and the massive Fe Arran reeled as the two bolts lit up finger-tip sized patches on his invulnerable chest.

Arsenal's voice came in on the comms. "What's my output?"

Victor examined the sensor readouts. "You're at 2 megatons yield apiece. That won't--"

"Get ready for an emergency jump. I'm gonna tighten the focus and cross beams."

Victor's jaw dropped. He recovered in less than a second. "On it."

Leviathan bore down on Arsenal's position as the beams narrowed and slowly approached each other.

"What's he--"

"No time."

The beams touched. The energy flux in at the intersection point exceeded the Planck energy by several orders of magnitude, and space and time began to violently expand from the impact point.

As the Nightstalker dematerialized, a violent gravity wave disintegrated Asteroid 423.

The star-ship rematerialized not far from where it tried to escape the destruction.

"What just happened--"

"Just a minute, Ma'am."

"Did he just--"

"I have his signal."

"What!?"

Arsenal appeared on the screen, towing Leviathan's unconscious form from the turmoil of boulders converging on the former center of mass of Asteroid 423.

"He exceeded the maximum energy flux for a unit of space. Space-time exploded in Leviathan's face."

"Open the cargo bay doors." Jolt rubbed her forehead as she watched Arsenal drag the unconscious Leviathan towards the Nightstalker.

A moment later, Honor Guard gathered to watch as Arsenal dragged Leviathan into the hold.

"You- you did it. You knocked him out."

"Ma'am." Arsenal addressed Jolt. "I need to go back to the colony."

Jolt nodded. "I understand."

A few moments later, Arsenal touched down just outside the perimeter of a field hospital hastily erected to deal with the casualties of Leviathan's mindless rampage. He pushed through doctors and nurses, and headed towards a tent that had been turned into a field hospital.

Soon he found the one he was looking for.

"Come with me. You're not safe here."

Jinx looked up at him, holding a bundle of sterilizing gauze in her arms. "Give me a minute. These people need my help."

He smiled and nodded. "All right. What can I do?"

Jack In The Box

The planet was the fourth rock from a large orange sun. The blue seas surrounding the single continent spawned feathery white clouds that rushed over the yellow, brown, and purple terrain of the solitary land mass.

In the middle of the continent, on its highland plains, a ragged green dot marked the site of the ancient alien colony. There, transplanted flora from another world displaced the native, purple colored plant life.

Beneath the vast grassy knoll, gravimetric sensors detected a distinctive pattern of mass anomalies indicating a vast, spiderweb like structure of tunnels and chambers beneath the surface. Jack Graves looked thoughtfully at the display of the structure.

"Yes, that's just right."

"What is it?" Jinx asked.

Jack examined the floating holographic map closely, and began to explain what he saw.

"The best theory I've heard claims it was a transit system. The precursor to the black oil is white mist, which can form space-like paths through higher dimensions. The exotics would link the chambers here with destinations scattered all across the galaxy using bridges made of artificial reality. The black oil was a waste product, produced by the mist's reaction to untrained minds and the physical world. It drained into the underground reservoirs on the lower levels."

"So people would walk in to the chambers, enter something like a hyperspace shunt, and come out on another planet... fantastic." Jinx meant it, too. It was intergalactic space travel without the need to carry fuel or food or air, without star-ships forcing their way through the vastness of space.

"That's the theory. So, shall we get started?"

Jinx sat down at the command console and began the process of deploying and landing modules on the surface, near the center of the green spot on the planet. She sent down landing modules with with laboratories, drilling equipment, a field hospital, water storage, and a power plant around a grassy knoll near the entrance to the catacombs.

The process took a few hours. Jinx supervised the automated spacecraft and watched Jack Graves pack piles of hand-written notes, clothing, and a carefully sorted collection of ancient statues into travel containers inside his habitation module. He saluted the surveillance camera curtly and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Jinx instructed the computers in Jack's hab to set him down gently in the field of alien grass just outside the impromptu city she had just built. She saw the old man grin as the thrusters jerked his module away from the Apocalypse.

She reviewed the sensor feeds from the last cycle again. There was a signal there, a tiny speck of incredible mass that had been following them since they left the home cluster. It was too small to be a starship, and too massive to be natural.

She had some ideas who it might be, and had taken precautions. In a corner of each container, she hid supplies -- a miniature jump drive here, a thruster pack there, a solid-state fission reactor over there. It was her "Plan B", in case things got as ugly as she feared. She had a way off this far-away rock.

With some reluctance, she left the bridge and entered her own habitation module. Soon she was on her way to the middle of the great green spot of vegetation on the surface of tthe planet.

The next weeks were busy. The first step was to carefully coat the interiour surface of the drilling pipes they would use to harvest black oil from the underground chambers. Since black oil wasn't matter in any normal sense of the word, but rather solidified thought, the pipes had to be coated with a paint containing a miniscule amout of the oil, which would prevent the psychoactive "liquid" from escaping the apparatus. Parallel to this, Jack prepared his reaction vessel, a sphere with an interior coated with the same paint, which would serve as an artificial world for the reconstituted god-forms.

The next step was to prepare the first bore-holes and connect the coated pipes to the reaction vessel. Shortly after work began, a sinkhole appeared in the ground. Jinx sent Jack back to his habitation module and carefully examined the deep hole in the ground. The ceiling of an underground hall had collapsed, distrubed by the vibrations on the surface.

The underground chamber had been turned into an ossurary. In one corner Jinx saw a pile of vaguely spherical objects. She approached the pile carefully, and determined that they were colonist skulls -- flat-faced and round-headed. A tiny spur between the eyes suggested a pointed nose.

No black oil had leaked to the surface. As she went topside to give the all clear, she saw Jack's reaction vessel glint in the setting sun. The round vessel and the rectangular pump in front of the reaction chamber reminded her of the colonists' skulls.

Work continued. The sinkhole was surrounded with a fence of luminous tape, and the ground was soon covered with a maze of pipe leading to the three drilling stations. The derricks cast long shadows over the grassy knoll.

After several hours of work, Jinx and Jack decided that the network of pipes would be able to carry black oil to the reactor. They retreated to a sealed control center and sent the commands to activate the drilling stations.

The first borehole failed. Alams sounded as the black oil sublimated into mist as the drill approached the storage chamber. The second and third boreholes, however, drew the liquified reality from its reservoir and fed it to the pumps and pipes that would take it to the reactor.

Jinx and Jack remained inside the sealed control room until the last traces of the leak had dissipated. Both had gained a healthy respect for the dangerous properties of the black oil since the mission began, and neither wanted to risk a second exposure to the psychically toxic substance.

Jack arranged his catalog of long-forgotten idols and recordings of epic poetry while they waited. Jinx considered their situation, and decided to tell him what she had learned.

"Jack?"

"Yes, Jinx?"

"We're being watched."

"I know."

"Does the name Leviathan mean anything to you?"

"Leviathan? Lynnie Chelm? That's an odd choice for an agent..." Jack seemed worried.

"That's what I thought. You remember my vision, right?"

"Yes. The Corporation decided to turn the god-forms into weapons and send them against the Reyll. What's that have to do with anything?"

"Lynnie has always had contacts with the Grays. He's been working for the military intelligence since he started working as a super-villain. I don't want what I saw to become an accurate prediction of the future-"

Jack interrupted Jinx. "I'm sorry, but this experiment is too important to sabotage. The Corporation needs to discover what direction our spirituality would have developed without Reyll influence. Without this information, we won't know how to rebuild our culture once the Theocracy has been defeated. We won't have a plan for the future."

Jinx considered for a moment. "I understand. I just want you to know something - if Lynnie comes down here and tries to hijack your work, I won't be able to stop him. He's a walking black hole."

Jack looked at Jinx. "I see." He seemed disappointed, and Jinx wondered if Jack believed that she was unwilling to fight Leviathan.

They waited in silence until the all clear alarm sounded.

The work continued as the orange sun rose. Jack stayed inside the control room, relaying images of statues and artworks and recordings of poetry and epic stories to the receiving area of the reaction chamber. As Jinx teleported around the work area, checking the integrity of the pumps and seals, she felt the receiving area filling with information.

After exposure to Jack's data, the receiving chamber formed a negative image of the gods, monsters and heroes of the distant past. The next step was to expose this negative image to a large quantity of black oil, forming a positive echo of Fe Arran mythology inside the sealed reaction vessel.

Jinx was a sensitive mystic, and could feel the presences inside the chamber. As the sun set, she could sense the songs of the world she and Jack had created, and the whole work area was illuminated with a strange sort of ghostly light. Jack was exhausted and exalted by the work, and Jinx accompanied him through the radiant, pulsing darkness to his habitation module for a well-deserved nights' sleep. Jack turned and smiled at her as he stepped into the threshold of his hab.

"It's alive, Ms. Bubastis."

"I know, Jack. It's beautiful."

She made her way to her own habitation module, listening to the songs of their reconstituted world. The music had taken on a brassy edge; she had to struggle to not remain and listen to the driving strains of the reactor. As she undressed and sat down on her bed to rest, she felt a thrill as the war-drums began to pound.

Sleep came reluctantly. She awoke at sun-rise.

Their new world was no longer singing. There was only a dull psychic pounding coming from the reaction vessel. Jinx dressed hurriedly and rushed to wake Jack. They proceeded to the control room. He looked his age, and was visibly disappointed by the results of his experiment. They sat down at the control panels in silence, and Jack broke the anguished silence.

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure, Jack. Can we see inside the chamber?"

"Do you really want to look?"

"No." Jinx felt the thumping rhythm from the chamber in the back of her mind. "But we need to see what happened."

"Yes." Jack activated the psychogram that had recorded the life inside the chamber. They saw the world inside the chamber for the first time - a gray plain of rotten flesh. Structures like rib cages dotted the surface, and rivers of partially clotted blood flowed into a scab-sea filled with offal and corruption.

Jack's almost hairless ears looked a little green as he regarded the scene with horror. "What happened?"

Jinx took the controls, and sent the point of view searching for the source of the relentless thumping she heard in her head. From a mountain of tumor-like meat, a tower shaped like a spinal column rose into the heavens. At the top of the headless spine, a tiny figure pounded at the vaults of heaven - the outside of the reaction vessel. Jack recovered a little as he examined the figure pounding its tiny fists against the walls of its prison.

"Nyqll?"

"What? Didn't I-"

"Yes. Yes, you saw him in your vision. He was a minor monstrosity from the pre-Reyll mythology of the B'Tonghwa-"

"The Hunters? He's a figure from Hunter mythology?"

"Yes. An evil king, who kept prey imprisoned inside his city. The hero Mathlld followed the rivers of blood from his fortress and called upon the spirit of Darneth to grant him the wisdom to stop Nyqll in his evil ways. Nyqll was a representation of the very first attempts at animal husbandry by our species. In ancient times, the hero led an army to destroy Nyqll's fortress and free his subjects and his prey into the welcoming forest, beyond the reach of his burning hand. Slash and burn agriculture, batteries of meat animals, slavery, fear and hate..."

Jack stopped talking. His lower lip trembled as the horror of what had happened became clearer to him. "...the bad guys won. We made a world where evil won."

Jinx watched the tiny, deformed figure pound against the thin coating isolating the inside of the reaction chamber from the outside world. The thing stopped, and turned to face the point of view displayed on the view-screen. Thinking quickly, Jinx pounded the button to cut the feed before she had to look into the depraved creature's eyes. She turned to face Jack.

"We can flush this, right? We can start over?"

"I... of course-"

Jack was interrupted by a sudden sharp seismic shock. Jinx spoke. "Leviathan. Lynnie just make planetfall."

Jack looked at her, eyes filled with fear. "You have to stop him. It wasn't meant to turn out like this."

Jinx fetched a large container from the corner of the room, and pulled out an ion driver. She slotted a power cell into the unwieldy gun. "I'll do what I can, Jack. I told you I can't stop him." She looked around for a moment for the gun's gas bottle. "You have any extra black oil lying around? This gun's not gonna do much to him, but the oil might."

Jack didn't hesitate, and pulled a small sealed flask from beneath his desk. "Can't you use you mental powers against him?"

Jinx carefully dispensed a small amount of the substance into the chamber of the ion driver. "Not really. He has gravity-based senses and his mind has collapsed into a monad hidden behind an event horizon. If we're lucky, some of the black oil will get through to his naked singularity, and we'll be able to get the hell out of here."

The ground began to shake. "Get some cover, Jack. He's gonna be on top of us in a minute."

Jinx teleported outside and turned to face the column of smoke that rose from an impact crater on the horizon. A green and brown cloud of dirt and shredded vegetation was barreling towards the grassy knoll.

Her mind began the Marksman's Mantra as pulled a lead on the dark figure rushing towards the site. She pressed the trigger, and a dirty bruise-colored fireball of plasma struck Leviathan in the chest.

His massive form stopped for a second. Jinx began to teleport to Jack, but felt a sudden, wrenching shock.

She rematerialized in front of Leviathan. He grinned broadly. "That was trippy."

Her world turned incandescent white an instant later as Leviathan struck her, sending her skipping along the ground. She skidded to a stop and lay in a crumpled, bloody heap, unable to move her legs. Leviathan closed in on the control room.

"Hello, Doctor Graves. Don't bother hiding. I need something from you."

She heard sheet metal tear like paper. "Oh! Bad idea, there, little buddy. Lemme help ya with that." Bones snapped, and Jack Graves screamed. "Hey, stop yelling! We're gonna have a little drink of that moonshine you two were brewing. Right this way, man." Jack moaned as Lynnie dragged him to the reaction vessel.

"OK, lemme get my shot glass."

Jinx felt a wave of terror as the reaction vessel opened. Jack tried to reason with Leviathan. "Don't do this. The experiment failed. We-"

"Naah. The experiment worked just fine, little guy. Here, bottoms up!"

Jinx's body was healing, but her legs were still numb and immobile. She heard a moment of struggle and felt a terrible panicked fear. Jack screamed and gurgled, fell to the ground and began to thrash.

There was a growling noise, a sub-bass throb, as a series of wet pops replaced Jack's struggling.

"Huh. That was some messed up-- WHOA! Down boy!"

A noise like fire. Lynnie screamed in pain. "OW! Get in the box! Get in the--"

There was an electric hum and a sucking noise. Jinx felt Lynnie's footfalls as he approached her position. She was still paralyzed.

Lynnie held a hammerspace box in one hand. Jinx could feel the malignant presence of Nyqll imprisoned inside the container. Lynnie looked down at Jinx.

"Hey, listen up. I could have pasted you back there, but I just gave ya a love tap. You'll get better. Plan for me is a mind-wipe and a nice cathartic rampage. You just lie there and heal, OK? See ya back in the cluster."

"...Lynnie? Destroy the box, Lynnie. You can't let that thing out..."

"Not my job. Be seeing ya!"

With a single leap, Lynnie propelled himself into orbit. The ground liquefied and collapsed, and Jinx was swallowed up, taken down into the ground where the dead things go.

Flight of the Apocalypse

The huge scout ship coalesced into empty space some hundred light-years outside the cluster whence it came. Relative to an observer in this section of barren vacuum, the flash of light from its de-materialization would arrive three weeks shy of one hundred years later.

The reactionless thrusters lit up, radiating waste heat into space, as the elongated star-ship began a series of adjustments from its departure vector, moving away from a heavily guarded intelligence outpost, to its arrival vector, which would insert the bulky vessel into orbit around a still distant terrestrial planet.

Jinx sat at the bridge and monitored the programmed series of thruster burns. Once in a while, she would glance at the displays for the sensor arrays. She hoped someone was watching, because her navigational choices were carefully chosen to reassure a worried observer.

Her passenger, Magus Jack Graves, had picked a call-sign for the ship's transponder: "The Apocalypse". That was the ship's name, encoded in a packet of identification data periodically sent to anyone in this frame of reference, or anyone observing through an interrociter. The packet did not just contain this name, but also the purpose of the voyage -- a terse bit-field, rarely used, signifying "scientific exploration" -- and its sponsoring organization -- in this case, the Entertainment Division of the all-encompassing Corporation.

She relished the oddness of this juxtaposition. Entertainment Division was all about selling known quantities at a low enough price to excuse the crappiness of much of its product. Scientific research was about finding the border between the known and the unknown. Then there were the uniforms.

The Corporate intelligence services had two official uniform colors -- gray and black. There was a well-established convention regarding the use of the two colors: mostly black uniforms represented organizations that regulated criminal activity, the black market, and counter-insurgency operations, while gray uniforms represented orgs that dealt with providing information for military strategy and diplomatic operations. Mixed colors were liaison officers, responsible for controlling the flow of information between the two factions, called the Grays and the Blacks.

The uniform they provided her was gray. The uniforms of the staff that helped prepare the Apocalypse were gray. Only a few officers observing the proceedings had black jackets. Presumably, they were the ones pressured into taking responsibility for the mission, under the aegis of Entertainment Division.

Jinx looked at the sensors again. She was certain they were being observed, possibly from quite close by. If only--

Her thoughts were interrupted by an alarm. She turned to the internal communications console, and saw Jack's panicked face. He screamed "Please, help me!".

"Jack, I'm here. What happened?" Jinx tried to look as relaxed and professional as she could, and it seemed to help Jack regain his composure.

"Some -- material -- I've been working with has escaped its containment field. Were you briefed about the black oil? Do you know anything about it?"

"No." Since all Jinx knew of "black oil" were half-truths, this was only half a lie. "We were carrying black oil?"

"In the laboratories. Fully compartmentalized. If I cannot escape under my own power, I want you to jettison Lab 15 and return to Corporate space. Do you understand?"

Something twisted in her gut. A part of her mind and heart had changed recently, and she did not want to change back.

"Don't be stupid, old man. I'll save you."

"You don't need to do this."

"And you wouldn't ask for help unless you needed it. Find somewhere safe, I'm on my way."

"Be careful."

Jinx took a moment to look at the ship's internal security console. The computer was set up to automatically record the subjective impressions of anyone entering Lab 15 with a psychogram. Reviewing the data stream for Magus Jack Graves, she discovered that he had a brief hallucination a few minutes ago, but was currently stable, if terrified.

She made telepathic contact with Graves. His mind was strong, and she was able to locate him in a corner of the laboratory. She picked a spot in front of him and teleported to his location.

"Hold still, Magus. I'll get us--"

"Behind you."

Jinx turned her head and saw thin black tendrils coalesce from the corners of the room. She took a step back and raised her arms, and the murky ectoplasm engulfed her.

Everything went white. She heard only her heartbeat. She--

She was somewhere else, levitating beside a monstrous armored creature as it climbed down a deep shaft. The Reyll had taken the God-forms and pithed them, creating robot-like slaves controlled by a pilot injected into the wound site. She had made the God-form whole again, whole enough to fight beside her as she descended into the core of the underground base.

(What the hell where am I why does this make sense what's going on my mind)

They descended into the final chamber, where the God-forms were born. Dark oil writhed over the lunar landscape of the underground cavern. One by one, the Corporation had turned their heroes into God-forms and sent them to destroy this underground womb. All had failed, even the monstrous thing Arsenal became. Jinx was the final gambit. She had infiltrated the base, made contact with the pilots and turned them against the operation. Now her target loomed before her.

(oh man I'm tripping balls this black oil is a hallucinogen this is so real it's inside my head)

Loud footsteps echoed through the underground cavern. Jinx looked behind her, and saw a second God-form charging towards her. With a gesture, she sent her pet cyborg deity to intercept the intruder.

She wondered if Nomi was inside. Poor, lost, sad little Nomi. Her God-form grappled with Jinx's.

(it's taking stuff from my head and completing it continuing closure keep it out don't get confused)

"What are you doing? Why!?" Nomi's voice echoed through the cavern.

"What I have to do. What I was sent to do. I'm going to free the captive God."

"How could you!? I-- trusted you!" The pain in Nomi's voice cut Jinx to the core. Nomi's God-form twisted her enemy's head around, and began to twist it. Jinx's God-form went limp as a series of soft pops came from its neck.

"How could you betray us? How could you betray me? I thought you--" Nomi's voice trailed off.

"I do, Nomi. But only one of our civilizations can survive--"

(oh hell she ATE Peter I saw her saw her eat his heart poor Peter keep it out maintain it's just part of the story ride it out)

Jinx approached the bound God-form, and she looked into its face. It wasn't the one she was expecting to see.

"What? Who -- it's not Darneth? It's... Nyqll?"

She began to laugh. She did not know the proper words of power to free the deity. Nomi's God-form closed in on her, and its armored fist snatched her from the air.

"Nomi -- you did it. Your people did it. Your kind will triumph. I'm so sorry."

"Jnnqae -- WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS?" Nomi was histrionic. Jinx felt the world fall away from her.

"Kill me, Nomi. Do it. It's the only freedom I'll ever know." Jinx felt the armored fist of the God-form close in on her, crushing her--

(it's over it's over Jinx this is Jack you're almost out of there follow me follow me it's Jack come on, come on)

Everything went white again, but then Jinx looked away from the light fixture and blinked her eyes. She drew a deep breath as she felt the crushing grip disappear.

"Jinx? Are you OK?"

"Jack? Is that you?"

"Can you teleport us to the bridge? It's important. There's more residue in this compartment--"

"Yeah, give me a second." Jinx touched the old man's shoulder and remembered the bridge. "Here we go."

They rematerialized in the bridge. Jack rushed to the console and jettisoned Lab 15. "Good riddance. I'll get a robot to do the assembly next time."

Jinx still felt a little disoriented. She checked her stream on the psychogram. "It got everything."

Jack rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "That's good. Listen, I want to give you the chance to vet the stream before we forward it to my handlers. If there's anything in there you don't want them to see."

Jinx thought for a moment. "That's decent of you, Jack. I'll think about it." She had more pressing concerns. "What did that stuff do to me? What was that?"

"The black oil. It's hard to explain. It's like liquid reality -- it took what it could find in your head and filled in the gaps, just like the real world would."

Jinx looked at Jack. "What the hell are we doing?"

The old man smiled. "Meddling with things no one was meant to know. Get some sleep, Jinx."

Submission

Jinx turned to look at the far end of the hangar, a good one and a half kilometers away. The ship stretched almost to the end of the huge open space.

She looked down at her PDA and scrolled through the pre-flight check-list she had bullied the hangar supervisor into giving her. The engines and fuel delivery entries were next, and there was absolutely no way she was going to walk.

She picked a particularly colorful greeble as a land-mark and teleported to the rear of the ship.

Immediately, alarms sounded, and red lights lit up along the length of the hangar. Jinx looked up and spotted a security camera floating nearby. She took a few steps towards the drone and waved.

The red lights and alarms continued as a squad of troopers in hard-suits approached. Jinx decided that putting her hands behind her head and smiling was probably the smartest thing to do.

As two troopers dropped on one knee and pulled up shoulder-mounted rail-guns, their sergeant approached her with obvious caution. Walking up to her carefully, he poked her in the left shoulder with a baton.

He spoke to her through his voice modulator. "Please refrain from teleporting in the future."

She looked into his helmet. The band of black plastic at eye level had two luminous eye-spots that regarded her with a stylized expression of disinterest. She wondered how frightened the trooper was.

"All right. Can you turn off the alarm?"

"Of course, ma'am." Even through the hard-suit, she could see the posture of the sergeant relax. He waved to his colleagues. "All clear."

The alarms stopped, and the red lights stopped pulsating. Everyone, Jinx included, breathed a sigh of relief. She lowered her arms and decided to push her luck.

"Can you guys get me a cart or something?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'll requisition you one immediately."

Jinx smiled as sincerely as she could. "Thank you."

The trooper and his colleagues loped away in their powered armor.

She grabbed a transponder and pointed it at an exterior airlock on the gigantic vessel. The red lights marking the corner of the exterior door blinked twice as she pressed the "unlock" button on the small black plastic device, and the door opened automatically.

She entered the airlock and closed the exterior door. The displays warned her that the interior was filled with pure xenon gas, and she had to confirm that she was willing to enter the compartment without a breathing apparatus. Further warnings reminded her of xenon's anesthetic properties, that the reactor was active and producing a hazardous neutron flux, and that the reaction chambers included fusion catalysts with very low nuclear binding energy. The ship's computers briefly considered her reckless disregard for her own safety, and asked her for a final confirmation, absolving the systems for any responsibility in the event of a fatal accident.

Jinx agreed. The interior door opened, and a few lights turned on, illuminating a hallway upholstered in orange, padded carpeting with ladder-like handholds in each corner. As she walked on down the hall, blue lights flashed inside her eyeballs. Evidently the computer wasn't kidding about high neutron flux.

She stilled her reflex to breathe. She was good for a few hours of activity in this environment, but it was ugly and oppressive enough that she wanted to get the check-list done as soon as possible. She worked quickly, and checked the pressure readouts. Stage one deuterium-tritium flow nominal. Stage two di-lithium flow nominal. Stage three carbon ion flow nominal.

She left, and the airlock decided not to give her any trouble on the way out. As normal pressure returned, she started to breathe again.

An old man sat in the passenger seat of the cart waiting for her as the exterior doors opened. Most of his mane had fallen out long ago, and his fur was streaked with gray. Nevertheless, he looked unnaturally energetic and trim. He smiled broadly at her, and spoke.

"Pleased to meet you! You are my pilot?"

"Yes, Magus Graves. The pleasure is all mine." She sat down on the driver's seat, and turned the cart back towards the habitation modules in the middle of the ship. She looked at her passenger as they drove towards the bulky structure.

"Have you ever been in deep space before?"

"No, ma'am, I haven't."

"Ah." Jinx thought that explained a lot. "This ship is an old long-range survey model. We can stay out for a couple of years with a full load of fuel and bio-mass."

The old man chuckled. "Too much is better than not enough."

Jinx couldn't think of anything to say in response. He continued to speak.

"I'm glad they picked someone competent to bring me out. You have my life in your hands."

"Thank you, Magus--"

"Call me Jack. I will be requiring assistance for a number of the experiments I wish to run, and I think you will do very nicely."

Jinx's copy of the mission briefing had not included these minor details. "What did you have in mind?"

Jack smiled beatifically. "We're going to resurrect dead gods."

Jinx was again at a loss for words, this time because she had too many questions that needed to be asked. She picked the best one.

"Why would you want to do that?"

"The Corporation needs to find a way to re-connect to our history, especially the period before the rise of the Reyll Theocracy. By studying ancient god-forms under controlled conditions, I hope to make a map of our deepest needs and desires, as expressed by our pagan pantheons."

The old man paused for a minute, and looked at Jinx intently. "It's art, for art's sake, and the culmination of a life-long dream."

Jinx stopped the cart in front of the habitation modules. However much she wanted to run away, she realized that this was something she wanted to see for herself.

She also knew that this mission was pretty much guaranteed to end badly.

She Fell Through The Plot Hole

Jinx had her own corner of the holding cell.

In front of her bunk, a huge bruiser of a man lay on the floor with his hands clasped over his head, sobbing. He was remembering every bad thing he had ever done.

The other six prisoners in the holding cell were backed into the opposite corner, and looked at Jinx with a mixture of fear and respect. A guard came to the door, and triggered the lock. "Jinx Bubastis --"

He stopped as he saw the man crying on the floor. "What did you--"

"I didn't lay a finger on him."

The guard reached for his sidearm as Jinx approached the door. "Put that away. I've played nice with you guys. Someone wants to see me?"

The guard moved his hand from his holster and eyed Jinx warily. "Yeah. Right this way."

Jinx turned to the other prisoners. "Toodles, assholes."

As they walked down the hallway, the guard talked a little with Jinx. "Your visitor is someone important. They just spent half an hour chewing out my boss for putting you into gen pop."

"He wanted to humiliate me. Your boss is really into humiliation."

The guard did not respond. They walked down the hall in silence.

The guard gestured towards a door, and they stopped in front of it. Jinx turned towards the guard. "Take care of yourself." The guard held a card up to the electronic lock, and the door opened automatically. Jinx walked into the room.

A woman sat at the table, dressed in a gray business suit. Her fur was glossy black, and her golden eyes locked with Jinx's as she stood up and extended her hand.

Jinx accepted her hand, shook, and sat down across from her. "Pleased to meet you, Ms. Bubastis. My name is Lilandra Verisal, and I'm glad you've decided to accept our offer. Before we begin, I have some questions I need to ask you."

Jinx nodded. "All right."

Lilandra took a small tablet from her suit coat pocket and gestured at the device. "What role did you serve in the terrorist cell called M-Seven?"

"I was responsible for obtaining parts and munitions for the fighter fleet and provisioning the fire control systems."

Lilandra pushed the tablet towards Jinx. A list of star-ship registry data filled the small screen. "Please review this list -- are these the ships you attacked carrying out this mission?"

Jinx looked carefully at the list, scrolling around a little. "Yes, this looks complete."

"What role did you play in planning the attack?"

"I was given a laundry list of parts to obtain -- there were a number of components that could not be manufactured on Suburbia -- and told to keep an eye out for usable munitions. Demonslayer's main requirement was that the weapons have a radioactive payload. Once I obtained the bombs, I was tasked with preparing the fire control systems."

"I see. There were a large number of people involved in the conspiracy. Were you given any responsibility for routine operations?"

"Demonslayer would provide work details to help me unload captured cargo ships. It seemed to be some kind of forced labor arrangement for people who were discipline problems. Lots of drunks and druggies. She told them I was the devil, so they were all terrified of me. Other than that, I was mostly on my own."

"Did you have any contact with Rrmu Kelbakika?"

"Who?"

"Red Menace. Young woman with electromagnetic powers?"

"No. I only ever saw her together with Demonslayer. She didn't look very happy."

"We captured her shortly after the attack. She indicated that she would be willing to defect."

Jinx's facial expression did not change. "She's pretty powerful. I didn't have much to do with her. I think she'd know more about the operations on Suburbia."

"Yes. We're hoping so. Please wait here, I need to talk to our lawyers." Lilandra walked out of the room, leaving Jinx sitting at the table.

Jinx leaned back in the plastic chair and waited. Her face was an expressionless mask. Her eyes scanned the room, and her head turned towards the far corner of the room. She pretended there was a hidden camera there, and stared into it's possibly non-existent lens with a neutral expression meant to be nonchalant while suggesting that she wasn't having any fun at all.

She held this expression for quite some time.

Lilandra returned and sat down at the table.

"Ms. Bubastis?"

"Yes?"

"First, thank you for your honest and accurate answers to our questions. Ms. Kelbakika and our own investigations have confirmed the correctness and completeness of your deposition. Now, for some bad news -- "

Lilandra looked at Jinx with a appraising eye. Jinx did her best to maintain her neutral expression.

"-- the Corporation is not prepared to offer you immunity to prosecution at this time. However, my working group is authorized to offer you a temporary position on a contract basis." Lilandra took her tablet from her pocket and pushed it towards Jinx.

"If you accept, and faithfully carry out your obligations, I may be able to convince Legal not to pursue further punitive actions against you. Please take a moment to review the terms and conditions." Lilandra gestured towards the tablet.

Jinx took the tablet and tried not to shake. She paged down a few times. "An escort mission?"

"Yes. Well outside Corporate space. Please note the non-disclosure clauses."

Jinx read, and put the tablet down.

"You have twenty--"

"I'll do it."

Post Mortem

No, I haven't given up yet. There will be more.

You realize that some of this was pretty dire, right?

Definitely. Some wise guy once said that every wanna-be author has a few thousand bad pages that they just have to get out of their system before they can start writing the good stuff. I think that wise guy was right.

For what it's worth, I think the plotting, characterizations, and setting turned out the way I wanted. The problems I have are mostly technical issues with composition and pacing. The obvious conclusion is that I should plow ahead and start the next story arc. In the meantime, I've started to adapt what I've written thus far into a second draft in the form of a graphic novel script.

A big thank you to Jeremy Rizza for helping me get to the end of this story. Your encouragement made a big difference, and your criticism improved my prose.

(And, in case anyone was wondering what the deal was with the shopping mall security guard in "Beating the Odds", please have a look at the Shrine of the Mall Ninja. It's hilarious and horrifying.)

So, stay tuned. More picaresque adventures of dysfunctional heroes in a universe made of deconstructed pop sci-fi tropes are coming up, this time featuring Jack Kirby, "Inferno", and women and the refrigerators who love them.

Grudge Match

The bulkhead glowed red, then white, then a shower of sparks shot from an incision in the metal. A chainsaw popped out of the rectangular hole in the metal door, and laboriusly cut down through the hinges, sending bits of molten metal skidding along the grav plates on the floor.

Cut from its hinges, the door fell to the floor, and Thresher walked into the hallway. "All right, all clear. Where's the welcoming committee?"

The Eye followed him closely. "Behind the next door, there's a cross hallway. Killotron on the right, Bearcat on the left."

Jolt took up the rear. She pulled a panel off the wall as they stopped in front of the next door. "OK, I can open this from our side. Anyone have any bright ideas what to do about the ambush?"

The Eye smiled, and began pulling flashbangs from her utility belt, and popping them up in the air with her other hand. Soon, she was juggling four of the small grenades with one hand, and she nodded curtly to Jolt as she switched over to a two-handed juggle. "Ready."

Thresher positioned himself just behind the door. "Ready."

Jolt touched the control panel, and the door opened. The Eye expertly tossed two flash-bangs to the left as the door was still half-open. A feral scream echoed through the hallway as the detonated in front of Bearcat. She bounced the second pair of grenades off the door frame, and they detonated in front of Killotron. Once the door was fully open, Thresher charged to the right as Killotron opened fire on him with his arm-mounted plasma blasters.

Jolt peeked around the corner, and aimed for the floor as Bearcat recovered from the flash-bangs. He was in mid-crouch as a lightning bolt struck the floor plate he was standing on, burning out the fuse and disabling the artificial gravity. He was in mid-jump, and suddenly finding his legs in free fall caused his spectacular leap to become a face-plant.

As he struggled to his feet, Jolt aimed carefully, and hit him square in the face with a lightning bolt. Bearcat fell to the ground, unconscious and smouldering.

Killotron's blasters left Thresher's armor pockmarked and smoking, but the cyborg continued his advance on the heavily-armed robot. Thresher's chainsaws were still out, and he gunned the motors as he lunged towards Killotron.

Thresher brought a chainsaw up to the robot's throat and started sawing through his neck, as he chopped off Killotron's left arm at the shoulder. The robot screamed as his mushroom cap shaped head was separated from his body.

As the smoke from the flash grenades began to settle, The Eye poked her head out into the hallway. "All clear?"

Jolt turned to her and gave her the thumbs-up. "All clear."

Killoton's body tried to crawl on its arm and legs, feeling around for its missing head.

The Eye pointed to the left. "This way."

On the other side of the Reyll warship, Demonslayer dragged Red Menace to the forward torpedo bay by her hair. The young girl was crying and sobbing, and tried to get to her feet and run away. Demonslayer slammed her into a bulkhead and beat her savagely with a wire coat hanger.

Red Menace wiped a trickle of blood from her nose, and glared at Demonslayer with hatred in her eyes as the older woman pointed to the torpedo tube. The young girl could have easily snatched the wire hanger from Demonslayer's hand and wrapped it around her neck.

Instead, she obeyed, climbing into the waiting tube, sobbing and crying.

Demonslayer had had a vision, and she saw what was coming. She went to a wall panel and signalled the bridge before stomping out of the room.

Arsenal rose over the curved horizon of the planet, approaching the Reyll warship. The front torpedo tube coughed as Red Menace was launched on an intercept course. Two streaks of light approached each other.

There was a flash of light when they met, and Red Menace's spark fell slowly to the surface of the planet below as Arsenal closed in on the warship.

He stopped abruptly, and a purple beam cut deeply into the right side of the ship, severing one of the engines.

Lights flickered inside as Demonslayer activated her combat pulpit in the port hangar. She swore, closed her eyes, and choked down the rage rising within her.

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye opened the door on the rear end of the hangar, and the Eye pointed at two large crates of spare parts placed just in front of the door. "Look out -- boss fight!"

Her prediction was confirmed a fraction of a second later. Demonslayer towered over them in her open-frame exoskeleton, and its eldritch transducers converted her words of power into a swarm of homing curses. Jolt and Thresher ducked behind the crate, as the Eye cartwheeled to avoid a swarm of deadly colored lights that followed her into a sunken repair bay.

Demonslayer took a thundering step forward, focussing her attention on the Eye. Behind her, the wall of the hangar began to glow.

In an instant, a crack opened, and the port side of the hangar bay peeled away from the ship, opening the huge chamber into space.

Demonslayer was blown out instantly, as Thresher activated the grippers on his replacement feet and hung on to Jolt. The Eye tried to grab the edge of the repair bay, but her fingers slipped.

Thinking quickly, Thresher shot a tether to her, and she grabbed it and held on for dear life as Arsenal flew in through the hole in the hull.

Arsenal saw the Eye struggle to keep her hold on the tether, and gestured towards the gash he had made in the warship. Like a film running backwards, the hull re-assembled itself, and the Eye fell to the floor, tumbling.

"Sorry about that." He touched down next to his team-mates. The Eye gave him a dirty look.

Jolt squinted at him, smirked, and said, "Be more careful next time. You can keep the new outfit."

The credits roll as the four heroes walk towards the bridge of the captured enemy warship.

Beating the Odds

"Where's the first wave? What happened?"

"Calm down, kid. We all know what happened."

"Hope they got the job done."

"They're dead. They're all dead!"

The voice comms between ships in the cloud of improvised fighters were interrupted by a hail from the Reyll battleship that watched over them. An old woman's voice called out to the panicked pilots.

"It is done. Sedgewick Station's defense batteries are in chaos. Second wave, fall in and pull out!"

There was a moment of silence after Demonslayer spoke, and the first few fighters gathered for the second wave.

Inside Sedgewick Station, a semi-circle of troopers in powered armor aimed their cannon at the ship that just made an unauthorized landing at the air-docks. The commander turned on his suit's public address system and his amplified voice echoed in the hangar.

"COME OUT NOW WITH YOUR HANDS UP!"

A hatch opened beneath the skull-like armored carapace that covered the front compartment of the illegally parked star-ship. Peter and Jinx approached the soldiers, who lowered their weapons.

Peter waved casually at the troopers. "Arsenal, reporting for duty. Take us to the nearest civil defense base! The next wave is coming any moment now!"

Jinx tried to keep Peter between her and the soldiers. She peeked out from behind him as they were led away to the nearest base.

Half of the remaining fighters began their burn down the gravity well towards Sedgewick Station. Bob-Luke was nervous as the small ships crossed over the lowest point of their orbits and the space station rose suddenly over the horizon of the bombed-out planet beneath them.

The defensive batteries on the distant space station began to strobe erratically. A few of the lead fighters exploded violently, sending debris back down the gravity well and into the path of the oncoming fighters. Bob-Luke pulsed the lateral thrusters to avoid a large fragment of one of his comrades' engine pods. He realized that he was hyperventilating, and did his best to calm himself as he approached Sedgewick Station.

It was time to start decelerating, to prepare to land on Sedgewick Station and seek a conduit that would take him and his bug bombs to the core of the vast space station.

The command bunker was lit with red emergency lights. As Peter and Jinx entered the room, a few soldiers looked up from their screens and stared for a moment before returning to their monitors. The commanding officer walked towards Peter and saluted.

"What's the situation, soldier?"

Peter almost didn't let him finish the question. "We think they will attempt to fire a cobalt bomb at the bio-reactor in the middle of Big Rock. Their goal is to contaminate our supply of air and water, and force an evacuation of the Station."

The officer squinted. "So we can expect another wave, and they'll try to land." He paused for a fraction of a second, and turned to the soldiers working the monitors. "Tell the defensive batteries to concentrate fire on ships approaching landing areas or external structures."

Jinx spoke up. "I can remotely detonate the bombs. We can destroy the fighters before they get the chance to come too close, but we need some time to get the right equipment."

The commander gave Jinx an odd look. "Yeah. You guys go work on that."

Jinx seemed uncomfortable. She grabbed Peter's arm, and they teleported out of the cramped bunker into an open marketplace. Peter needed a second to get his bearings. "So, what do we need?"

Jinx narrowed her eyes. "A commerce terminal. Let's go."

She strode off towards a stand selling live snacks, and Peter followed.

Bob-Luke gunned his engines, decelerating rapidly. He had spotted a landing zone. Three of his comrades streaked ahead of him, and were cut down by the gunner protecting the private loading dock on Promenade Five, Sedgewick Station's largest shopping mall. Bob-Luke locked on to the gun emplacement, punched in a four-digit arming code, and fired one of his two missiles.

Dodging debris, he tried to match his vector to the station. Radiation alarms in his cockpit triggered as he passed through the plume of cobalt-contaminated dust rising from the former site of the defense battery. He needed an opening, and he needed it fast. The external door nearest the gun site was open a crack. He ignored the radiation alarms and slipped through the gap into the evacuated loading dock.

He cursed as his fighter suddenly jerked, caught in the acceleration field between a pair of gravity modulation plates. He was inside. He caught his breath, and silenced the radiation alarms. The pressure door to the stock room was directly ahead of him. He closed his eyes and gunned the engine.

The emergency balloons inflated a fraction of a second after he punched through the airlock. Employees scattered, flinging boxes of shoes and knocking over racks of clothing as Bob-Luke guided his fighter towards the store-front. Some future employee of the cycle hit the alarms.

At the other end of Promenade Five, a security guard driving a cart grumbled as he saw his call light flash. He grabbed his communicator, and his supervisor began screaming at him. It took him a second to realize that this was not a reprimand -- this was an emergency. A grin broke out on his face, as he realized that his time had come.

Long ago, he had saved a division head's nephew from a T-room encounter gone bad. In exchange for his discretion, he had been permitted to carry military-grade weaponry in case of grand theft or terrorist attack. He unlocked the gun box beneath the seat of his security cart, and gazed on his arsenal of weaponry -- a plasma assault rifle, a shoulder-fired rail-gun, a selection of 40mm shells.

It was time to lay his life on the line.

Peter and Jinx stood at the live snacks stand. Jinx took a bite of her mouse-in-a-bun and casually flipped over the commerce terminal to examine its card slot. Her eyes widened, and she poked Peter in the ribs with her elbow.

"What?"

Jinx swallowed. "It doesn't have a slot."

Peter looked irritated. "What?"

The man behind the stand grinned. "Everybody does certificate validation on-line. That's what the metro-net is for! Only hicks in the sticks use smart-cards!"

Peter rubbed his forehead. "Oh, crap."

Bob-Luke's fighter blasted through the storefront, scattering dresses and handbags into the main concourse. His vessel plowed through a stand selling sunglasses as it gained speed and hurtled through the shopping mall.

Bob-Luke goosed his engines and struggled to keep his fighter flying straight and level as it accelerated past the speed of sound. Behind him, he left a whirlwind of shattered storefronts, pieces of incautious and unlucky shoppers, and fragments of consumer products. He had covered slightly more than half the length of the concourse, and would be out of the mall in a matter of seconds.

The security guard's heart pounded as faced down the storm of death approaching him. He shouldered his rail-gun and fired a shot into the center of the maelstrom. The shell burst milliseconds later, releasing a cloud of flechettes.

The bow-shock from Bob-Luke's fighter caught them and they tumbled harmlessly into his slipstream. The security guard did not even have time to finish his curse as the shock wave pounded him into red paste and shattered the entrance doors leading to the parking lot.

Jinx and Peter had spent the last moments futilely attempting to find a commerce terminal that would take a smart card for certificate validation. Every newspaper stand, snack bar, and sidewalk musician on Sedgewick Station seemed to be using the metropolitan networks to do their transaction processing. Peter was exasperated as Jinx poked him in the arm.

"Maybe drugs are the answer."

Peter, nervous and irritated, snapped at Jinx. "What?!"

"See that kid on the corner -- the twitchy little punk trying to look cool?"

Peter became a little more thoughtful. "Yeah. Why?"

"He's nervous because he has a pocket full of shrooms and thinks you're going to bust him. I think he just bought them."

Peter looked at Jinx, and then at the kid, who broke into a panicked run. "Got it."

A moment later, Peter grabbed the young man by the lapels of his leather jacket and lifted him up to look him straight in the eyes. Jinx stifled a giggle as Peter growled, "Take me to your dealer!"

Bob-Luke blasted through the toll air-locks leading to the evacuated Number Ten Freeway, and continued his mad dash to the center of Big Rock. Commuters stuck in the chronic traffic jams flipped him off as he streaked past their bubbles of air and warmth.

Bob-Luke didn't notice. His eyes were focused straight ahead, and his reflexes were razor-sharp. He knew now that he was the one, and like a mantra, the phrase "I am Number Seven" ran through his mind. He grinned like a maniac.

Peter and Jinx re-materialized in the civil defense command center. On the big screen, the alarms caused by Bob-Luke's trail of destruction were the focus of attention. A chaos of voices tried to arrange a squad of troopers in hard-suits to erect a road-block.

Peter and Jinx approached a comms console, and were intercepted by a systems administrator. He looked at the offline commerce terminal, covered in psychedelic stickers, with manifest horror. "No. No, I'm not letting you plug that thing into my equipment. Do you know where it's been?"

Jinx looked at him with a cold fire in his eyes, and pulled his gaze into hers. In a deep voice, she muttered "Mind crush". The administrator slumped to the floor, and she turned to Peter. "I think you'd better stop that kid. He's getting close to the target."

Peter looked at the screen, and then at Jinx. "Can I trust you?"

She smiled. "No, not really. But I'll do what I said I'll do."

Peter thought for a moment, then rushed out the door to intercept Bob-Luke.

Demonslayer watched the ships return from the second wave, and with a silent gesture, gave the order to assemble a third wave. The possibility of success flickered on the edges of her perception, and she began to iterate through the stations of her master plan. She realized with a start that her information was incomplete. Her mind reached out.

Jinx was alone in a room filled with soldiers occupied with organizing the defense of Sedgewick Station. Next to her lay an unconscious system administrator, and before her was an open panel. As she reached out to grab a signal cable to a nearby transmitter, she noticed that the voices suddenly stopped, and that her arm was no longer moving.

A voice called to her in this moment of grotesquely dilated time. She smelled incense and heard the whirring of cooling fans.

"Very good, Number Six. You are in their nerve center."

The silence of the technicians behind her irritated Jinx. She plugged the transmission cable into the gaudily decorated commerce terminal. Her mind covered the action with a superficial layer of indignation.

"I see you've deigned to contact me personally. Don't forget your ablutions afterward, you self-righteous old--"

A voice began to enunciate a word behind her. She was relieved to feel some of the passage of time. The connection locked into place, and her hand moved slowly and deliberately towards her jacket pocket.

"You were one of us. You knew their ways and found the means to enact our plan. You are a part of the whole--"

"I've got a hole you can--"

"Spare me your juvenile provocations. We're on the same side, it says so in your contract."

Her hand moved so slowly. More morphemes dribbled out of mouths behind her at a maddeningly slow rate.

Demonslayer continued her mental intrusion. "Think of it. A perfect moment of chaos, and we can win. We'll be winners."

The smart card was in her hand. She looked away from it quickly before its significance entered her stream of consciousness.

Deep inside Jinx's mind, near the boundary between this world and eternity, something growled. Jinx's waking self briefly blinked out of existence, and it's voice boomed across the psychic link joining her with Demonslayer.

"LIFE IS NOT A GAME, YOU ARROGANT OLD BITCH."

Demonslayer's mind recoiled, and Jinx felt her perception of time return to normal. She inserted the smart card and double-checked her connections.

Near the center of Big Rock, Bob-Luke felt like his nerves were singing. The voice in his head had become a chorus. He knew he was the one, and that all the terrible long nights on the streets surrounding the East Pole had a meaning, and that meaning was the bomb that would force the Corporation to abandon its headquarters, all the Corporate big-wigs would get to see how it feels, and--

His thoughts were interrupted by an invisible wall. His fighter skidded along the bottom of the evacuated Freeway, and he wondered if he was dead yet. His canopy was cracked, and the air was leaking out, and something was walking towards him.

It pointed at him, there was a flash of light, and then Bob-Luke was dead.

Peter walked to the shattered star-fighter and looked at the missile beneath the buckled left front canard. He grasped the warhead, and the pins holding it onto the propulsion unit released. He held the bomb in his hand and examined it for a moment.

In the command center, Jinx's usual self looked up from her work. Her mind sent a last message through the fading mental link to Demonslayer. "...and as for our contract -- I resign!"

She typed in the PIN -- zero, eight, one, five.

The third wave was skimming over the atmosphere of the home world, on their way to render Sedgewick Station uninhabitable.

Peter saw a warning light blink on the spherical physics package. For a panicked millisecond, he cursed not knowing where he could get rid of the bomb.

Jinx pressed OK.

Debris and radioactive cobalt rained down into the ash-colored skies of a ruined world.

Peter thought for a moment, and the light went out.

On the bridge of the Reyll warship, Demonslayer was suddenly, unnaturally awake. She bolted up from her captain's chair, and stormed off to her quarters, bellowing.

Behind the warship, the Nightstalker emerged from hyperspace. A ventral airlock opened, and Thresher adjusted his position before firing a tether at the battleship. He reeled it in, pulling himself closer to the nearest airlock on the Reyll warship.

Peter poked his head into the command center, and casually tossed a metal ball to Jinx, who reflexively caught it. She started as soon as she realized that it was the physics package from Bob-Luke's last bug bomb.

He smiled at her. "Nice catch."

Jinx laughed nervously.

He gestured over his shoulder. "I've got to go. We've found Demonslayer's ship."

"Be careful." The words slipped out of Jinx before she knew what she was saying. Peter had already left.

Forward to Death

Peter ducked as he entered the cramped state-room turned into an improvised laboratory. Jinx sat at a table, and pulled a plastic card bearing a printed circuit from a lime-green apparatus with a set of various-sized slots and a few indicator lights. She turned to face Peter as he came into the room.

"We're going to be joining the fleet soon." Peter looked around. "What are you doing?"

"Setting up a remote detonator for the bombs they're using." Jinx examined the card carefully.

"A remote detonator? How's that going to work?" Peter was curious.

"Getting the bombs was easy. The hard part was figuring out how to detonate them." Jinx played with the card.

"Right. You need an arming request that the warhead is willing to trust. So, how did you do that?" Peter crossed his arms in front of him.

"The bombs have a hard-wired set of trusted signers for arming requests. Fortunately for us bad guys, many of these signers have been compromised. This card contains a delegated signer signed by one of them."

"I think I understand. Using the signer on the card -- which you control -- you can send a request that references a trusted signer in the warhead."

"Right. This card looks like a delegate of a trusted signer as far as the warhead is concerned. The arming system is a modified commerce terminal that can use the card to construct the arming request. All they have to do is enter a PIN to arm their bombs." Jinx smiled with some satisfaction. "Come on, let's head to the bridge. I'm going to need to do some course adjustments to fit in with the fleet."

Jinx's ship tumbled through hyperspace. It was a heavily modified freighter, with surplus engines and guns retrofitted onto the ends of two wing-like spars. The bridge, in a forward-facing module, was covered by an improvised carapace painted with a fanged skull pattern. A dorsal fin bore M-Seven's ligature, the letter M with a lightning bolt for its right descender.

As space became less twisted and warped, and slowly transitioned to its more familiar pseudo-Euclidean geometry, the bubble of space surrounding the vessel began to merge with the cloud of home brew fighters, escorted and re-fueled by a score of Reyll battleships.

The bridge of the pirate ship was dark. Peter looked up at the monitor and saw that a new async message had been pushed to the makeshift fleet. He looked at the M-Seven logo dancing on his screen with some distaste.

"Mail from Number Two."

Jinx sat at the helm. Her body was tense, but her face was calm and concentrated. She adjusted her trim hyper-thrusters to join the cloud of attacking fighters. There was a long pause before she could answer Peter.

"Oh, joy. Demonslayer wants to inspire the troops. Put it on, we're gonna need a laugh."

Peter brought up the video stream on a secondary monitor. Demonslayer was no longer wearing her mask, and he could not help noticing how sad and worn her eyes looked.

"Comrades! Our moment has come. Now we join to excise the alien cancer. But do not be fooled -- it will be hard and bloody work. I shall not lie to you. Almost none of the first wave will survive the initial assault."

Jinx muttered, "Yeah, no shit," under her breath.

Demonslayer continued. "Cleave to the plan. The first wave will be of the unmarried and the orphaned. Only those whose death will not cause pain to the living. Their sacrifice will enable our victory. Our battleships will draw away any defenders in the system -- we shall then signal all wave leaders to begin the assault. Remain attentive, our time has come!"

Peter raised his eyebrows as the message suddenly ended. "I still can't believe the plan is to fly straight into Sedgewick Station's defensive batteries. Demonslayer's right -- they'll all be wiped out!" He watched a nearby battleship leave hyperspace.

Jinx thought for a moment. "Yeah. Hope your force-field powers are still working."

"Oh yes." Peter smiled, and noticed a new incoming communication, this one a live transmission. "They've sent the beacon for the first wave. Ready?"

Jinx's eye narrowed and she hunkered down in her pilot's chair. "Ready!"

They rematerialized in orbit around their species' former home world. Even from the distance, it was clear that the skies of Fe Arra were still choked with ash from fires that had been burning for over two hundred years. Sedgewick Station was on the opposite side of the planet.

Peter and Jinx followed the thousand fighters of the first wave as they dove down the gravity well. Much of the simulation they had studied had been practice scenarios for this run, an eccentric orbit that would take them down the gravity well to the edge of the home world's exosphere, and then back up, twisting upwards to Sedgewick Station.

They watched the planet turn from a disk to a horizon, with a cloud of fighters in front of them. Jinx turned to Peter. "Force screen?"

Peter nodded. "Way ahead of you." He looked at the comms console. "Message from the leader -- putting it on."

The leader of the first wave was an old man who was missing a good chunk out of his left ear. "All right, girls. Here we go. Close to 1500 klicks and let 'em eat both rockets. Spread out, don't bunch up or we're all dead. Full burn.... now!"

They watched the huge space station slowly rise over the curved horizon. It was far enough away that it still looked like a disk.

It took a second or two for the first bolts to reach the oncoming fighters. The tiny, lop-sided disk, slowly rising in the sky, pulsated with energy discharges. Peter watched as the defense batteries picked off the oncoming fighters. The casualties seemed to fall back -- the rest of the group were accelerating towards the station.

The fire from the station became more intense as the vessels approached. The station, in its current form, was dominated by two asteroids captured a century and a half ago. Silvery strips of superstructure bound the two round rocks together into a structure that resembled a cantaloupe duct-taped to a bowling ball.

Sensors on the surface of the station worked together to coordinate the fire of the defense batteries. The explosions from struck fighters became more frequent; now, dozens of fighters were dropping away from the wave each second, many burning or breaking up.

The old man would had led the charge was long dead, but another pilot crossed the 1500 klick line. He hurriedly punched in a four-digit code into a keyboard, and watched the "armed" indicators come on. He fired. Within seconds, more missiles joined his own, leaving behind steam-like trails of coolant as they approached the surface of the station.

Peter flinched as he watched a ragged cloud of a few hundred warheads approach Sedgewick Station.

The surface of the station was covered with tiny pin-pricks of light that kicked up plumes of debris. Suddenly, the fire from the station's defense batteries seemed to slow a little.

Jinx noticed Peter's discomfort. "There are hundreds of meters of rock between the surface and any residents. The point of the exercise is to gum up the sensor grids with radioactive cobalt long enough for the second and third waves to attempt a landing."

"Yeah." Peter still looked worried.

They came closer to the space station. The silvery bands holding the rocks together became complex structures of pipes and ducts. Jinx guided the ship into the dockyards, nestled between the two captured asteroids. With a few quick moves, she adjusted her ship's vector to match with the station's, and slowly maneuvered towards the disembarking area.

"Looks like Jolt told them about us." Peter seemed to relax a little as they entered the area between two huge artifical gravity plates. The pirate ship jerked, and began to gently fall. Jinx compensated with thrusters, and set down on an empty parking space.

Peter stood up, almost bumping his head on the low ceiling. He turned to Jinx, who seemed to shrink a little into her pilot's chair.

"Come on!"

"I can't believe I'm doing this." Jinx was shaking a little.

Peter took her hand. "But you are. It's time to be a hero. Let's go!"