Flash Forward

"Victor! Don't--"

But he did.

Thresher hit the dirt as the device detonated over the alien city. The cyborg was afraid, teribly afraid--

The vision ended.

Thresher recovered first, and triggered the alert. "Where the hell is Arsenal?" he thought.
"One kilowatt. Excellent work, Jennifer."

"Thanks, Doctor." Jolt was in a clinic on a rocky, rugged, and beautful island on the world Bestos. She lay on a hospital bed, her body covered in bioelectric sensors.

She had been there for some time. "You've been a great help. Have you heard from my agent?"

"I have good news and bad news. Command's gone to Victor. Entertainment Division says they need some fresh faces after what happened."

Jolt's face darkened.

The doctor continued. "But you have a spot on the team. You just need to adapt to the new situation. You need to learn to see yourself as others see you--"

She snapped awake. She was sitting in the command chair of the Nightstalker. All was well.

"What just happened?"

Thresher answered. "Some kind of hallucinogen gas. I've called red alert."

"Good. Well done."

She stroked the arms of her command chair, and glanced over to the Eye's station. The Eye lay on the ground, twitching.

Vertigo. Pain.

The Eye struggled to her feet. A cold steel grip grabbed the back of her neck, and slammed her head-first into a bulkhead. The mirrored implants covering her empty eye sockets shattered.

"Why am I blind? What happened to my amulet?" She panicked.

She felt the presence inside her mind. "You have no idea what that thing can do, do you? It can see far more than the present or the future."

The Eye tried to stand up again. "Why are you doing this?"

"I can't risk you exposing me. The stakes are too high."

She fell, and listened to the footsteps approach her, closing in for the kill.

Her mind wandered. Things didn't feel right -- this wasn't a premonition. What was it--

The bridge of the Nightstalker faded into view. She looked at her own face and sighed a relieved sigh when she saw that the implants covering her empty eye-sockets were still intact.

She curled up into a ball on the floor. Her amulet let her watch as Jolt stood up and approached her, and see the look of concern on her Captain's face.

"What happened?"

"Some kind of hallucination. We're--"

The door to the bridge opened, and Arsenal and Jinx entered. Arsenal spoke.

"Captain. Permission to bring a non-combatant on the bridge?"

Jolt looked at him skeptically.

"Why?"

"I didn't want to leave her alone." He paused for a beat. "It's not safe."

The Eye got up slowly and nodded to Jolt to show her that she wasn't hurt. Jolt started back to her command chair, looking at Arsenal and Jinx intently.

"All right. Anyone object?"

Thresher nodded his approval. The Eye scowled and said, "All right."

Jolt looked at the view-screen. The prospector module was still there. "All right. What do we do about this chunk of space junk?"

Thresher chimed in. "It's too big to put in the hold. We could tow it back to a station house--"

Jolt waved her hand dismissively. "Nah."

The Eye turned to face Jolt. "But it attacked us!"

Jolt rubbed the side of her head. "So let's shoot it and make it explode."

Threshed objected. "The Eye's got a point."

Jolt seemed annoyed. "I don't care. Explosion time."

The Eye armed a missile. "All right. On your command."

Jolt grinned. "Fire!"

A missile struck the prospector module, and it disappeared in a flash of light.

The Eye stated the obvious. "Target destroyed."

Jolt seemed satisfied. "Good."

She turned to Jinx and narrowed her eyes. "If you've got a moment -- I heard you found some anomalies in the cloned tissue we've acquired. I'd appreciate it if you ran a cross check with another sample."

Jinx blinked. "Um... sure."

Jolt smiled. "Good. Get you biopsy kit and a set of grounding cables. The next sample comes from me."

Free Falling

"You killed her."

Arsenal spoke slowly and without great emotion. His eyes narrowed, and he took a step back into a defensive stance.

Jinx look hurt. She reached out.

"I had to, Peter. It was self-defense."

"You won't get away with this. My team-mates will wake up soon. We'll take you down--"

He stopped short, and his hands shook.

"Please don't." Her voice was a whisper. "I've got a reason--"

"I don't care." Arsenal became angry. "You murdered someone in cold blood. That's pretty straightforward--"

Her eyes burned. "No, it isn't. Nothing is straightforward about this." Her pain turned to anger. "Why do you think you are here now? In this place, doing these things? Why?"

"It's a job."

"It's what someone told you to do because they're afraid. Afraid of you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Things are happening, Peter. The Corporation is getting ready for a war, and nobody knows if they're going to win. They're ready to try anything to beat the Reyll." Jinx became calmer as she spoke. Peter's hand stopped shaking, but the anger in his eyes was clear to see. "Right now, they're trying an experiment -- they've found a way to boost the powers of marginal super-beings to god-like levels by tapping in to our mythology. They're trying to turn our culture and history into a weapon--"

"So it's OK to murder someone who never did you any harm." His voice was low and steady; the mockery was delivered deadpan. "Because of some stupid conspiracy."

"She was a copy of me, turned into a leash for you. It's nice to have moral certainties, but you have to know what's going on before you apply them. And you don't, Peter."

Arsenal sank his head, and Jinx continued talking.

"You're not like your team-mates. There are a lot of people like us -- the really powerful super-beings. The walking weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later, they're going to use that potential -- and if you don't help me, they're going to twist you around into some kind of sick parody of an old poem because they think that will remind the Reyll of bad memories."

She touched his arm, and Peter looked up. His eyes were filled with skepticism. She kept talking.

"They're pushing OptCond real hard. They have this model of the mind, and it's simple-minded and wrong, but it kind of works. For them, a bad memory isn't something you learn from -- it's like a flaw in a diamond. A weak spot to be exploited."

"Who?" He sounded scared.

"The Grays. Corporate military intelligence. They aren't smart enough to know why that won't work, and they're not dumb enough to be afraid. But they have to do something to convince their bosses that we're going to win."

He sank his head again. "Why did you have to kill her?"

She touched his shoulder. "She wasn't real."

"I know. I knew." Peter looked ashamed.

"She was there to manipulate you. It's all about control. She was a terminal they could use to feed you instructions." Jinx tried to comfort him. "If you don't help me now, it's just going to get worse. One way or another, they're going to make us fight for them -- but if you don't help me now, you'll be fighting them as a brainwashed slave instead of a free man. Do you understand?"

He looked at her intently for a few seconds.

"I understand. And I believe you."

An announcement came over the intercom.

"ALL HANDS ON DECK. BATTLE STATIONS."

Last Caress

Arsenal smiled and looked at his restored hand.

"It worked."

Jinx touched him on his other forearm, and Arsenal looked up.

He beamed at Jinx, and felt like he had to say something.

"Thank you."

"Hey, you did all the work."

An announcement came over the ship's intercom. "All hands on deck."

They kissed, and Arsenal left.

Jinx watched the door to the stateroom slide closed. She smiled a little longer, then looked down.

Her expression darkened as she walked back to her workstation. She unlocked the screen, re-opened her lab notebook, and began to write.

"In theory, this should be a control group. In practice, I suspect that I am about to discover an unpleasant truth."

"One of the wiser teachings of OptCond is that it is vital to be aware of the truth, and to find a way to bring your existential needs in line with the reality of your situation. To find one's way, one must first know where one is. This sounds banal and obvious -- until one attempts to put it into practice."

"How does this apply to my situation?"

She paused for a moment, and looked terribly sad.

"My memories are incomplete. A number of OptCond exercises are intended to help students fully understand traumatic memories by attempting to attain complete closure on the situation surrounding those events. A series of carefully constructed leading questions stimulate the long-term memory to reconstruct vital details."

"In my case, these exercises have been uniformly unsuccessful. My memories of the distant past are dream-like, and missing the coherency and completeness of a holistic experience. This is in marked contrast to memories of more recent events."

"This strongly suggests that my memories of the distant past are implants."

"I recall being a frequent user of a device called a psychogram. A psychogram takes holographic images of the mental state of the user. In theory, psychogram recordings provide a complete model of a living mind. A clone brain of similar structure could be trained with psychogram recordings, producing a genetic copy with a personality structure and memories almost identical to the original subject."

"I strongly suspect that I am a clone of Jinx Bubastis, and that my incomplete memories are reconstructions of her personality based on psychogram recordings."

"Since creating a viable clone that believes itself to be an existing person is highly illegal, and since I have concrete evidence that a producer of non-standard clones is active, I need to consider the possibility that an assay of my genome will demonstrate that I, too, have the unusual forced-growth functional unit I found in the tissue samples Peter brought me."

"I also need to make plans for when the original Jinx shows up. I suspect that this is just a matter of time."

Jolt waited for a moment, sitting regally in her command chair, as Honor Guard assembled on the bridge of the Nightstalker.

The main screen was filled with a map of a few cubic light-years of space, strewn with a seven small, red marks. Jolt gestured towards the screen. "So -- the Eye and I have just completed an interrociter scan of all jump activity in nearby space. The results you see on the screen are all traces where we could not positively identify the entity entering or leaving hyperspace."

The crew examined the data on the screen. Six marks formed a more or less straight line. Jolt highlighted them with the controls in the arm of her chair.

"We believe that the entity we recently encountered is following this course."

"Ma'am?" Arsenal tried to interrupt politely.

"Yes, Arsenal."

"I have a preliminary ID for the creature we encountered. It's called Nyqll."

"Nyqll? What the hell kind of name is that?" Jolt seemed irritated.

"An ancient mythological figure --" Arsenal continued, but stopped. Jolt's lack of interest was palpable. "-- an ancient god of meat."

"Huh. Well, whoever he is, he's heading for Reyll space. Not our problem."

Arsenal kept talking. "There's another thing -- the pilot and the passenger were some kind of non-standard clone."

Jolt looked irritated. "What do you mean, 'non-standard'?"

"Their genome includes forced-growth genes that are not used in clone lines produced by the Corporation."

Jolt shuddered for a barely perceptible instant.

"Yeah, well. Let's get back on track." Jolt quickly changed the subject. "We have a set of traces heading towards Reyll space -- and then we have this."

She pointed to a seventh marker on the map. "This in an anomalous inbound jump. It's probably unrelated to our current investigation, but it looks damned suspicious. Like the course a smuggler trying to go around the Reyll blockade would take."

The Reyll blockade was a thin cloud of jump-capable mines set after the Reyll Theocracy captured the Origin Pulsar. It effectively bisected the cluster, and prevented Corporate forces from directly attacking Reyll colony worlds. Ships trying to reach the Corporate colony worlds on the other side of the blockade would sometimes make jumps well outside the home cluster to avoid the deadly mines.

"But that's not in the--" The Eye stopped herself before mentioning the script.

Jolt turned to Arsenal. "What do you think?"

"I think the anomalous jump is suspicious."

"I agree. Let's check it out."

"But--" The Eye struggled for words.

"Nyqll is going where it's supposed to go. It's not our problem."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence on the bridge of the Nightstalker.

"Lay in a course to marker seven."

The Eye obediently entered the coordinates into the helm. "Aye-aye, Captain."

"Engage."

The Nightstalker materialized a few kilometers away from the jump site. A rectangular object floated in space, drifting near the point it entered normal space.

It looked like a shipping container with spidery landing legs and a series of hardpoints on the opposite side.

Jolt examined the image on the main viewscreen. "That looks like an exploration module. Where did that thing jump from?"

The Eye pulled up the data from the earlier exhaustive scan of hyperspace. "Well outside the cluster."

Jolt eyed Arsenal. "All right. Arsenal, get out there and check it out."

"Ma'am -- I've had bad luck with boxes lately. May I make a suggestion?"

"Go ahead."

"Why don't we try scanning it with the ship's sensors before sending me or Thresher over to inspect it? If there's something nasty waiting for us--"

Jolt nodded. "Good idea. Thresher, scan the interior of the vessel with the interocciter. Put it up on the main screen."

A large, pitch-black rectangle appeared on the main view-screen.

The Eye rubbed her temple. "That sure clears things up."

Arsenal looked intently at the screen. "What are the conditions inside? Temperature, pressure, ambient radiation..."

Thresher evaluated the data. "Temperature is about 100 degrees absolute. There's a few millibars of a nitrogen-oxygen mixture, and I'm picking up a neutron flux consistent with a small, sealed fission reactor."

Arsenal stared at a small spot on the screen. "Do you see that?"

Jolt rubbed her neck. "What?"

He pointed at a small, luminous patch on the interrocitor image. "That! Thresher, can you zoom in?"

"Just a sec."

The view-screen zoomed in on a ghostly blur. As the magnification increased, letters appeared.

"THE GAME you just lost it"

Thresher twitched as he processed incoming data. "What? I--"

Jolt looked irritated. "What is it?"

"Some kind of--" Thresher slumped over and fell to the ground.

"Something is happening." The Eye stood up.

Arsenal stared at the ghostly words on the screen. "It's--"

A can appeared on the bridge in a cloud of sparks, spraying a black vapor.

Jolt slumped back in her command chair, and her eyes rolled back. The Eye lost her balance and fell to the ground. Arsenal's knees buckled.

The lights went out, and emergency systems kicked in, bathing the bridge in red light.

Inside Arsenal's quarters, the lights flickered once more, then turned off. Jinx cursed as her workstation entered suspend mode and turned off. As she became aware of the darkness, her eyes widened with fear.

She froze. She knew she needed to find help, but terror numbed her mind. As she started to move, the screen of her workstation suddenly turned on, dimly illuminating the stateroom.

"What?"

A sing-song voice distorted by static came from the workstation's speakers. "I can see you."

The screen displayed static. A fuzzy form coalesced from the random noise. Jinx leaned closer to the screen as the form seemed to reach out to touch her.

Jinx composed herself as she stared at the screen.

"I know who you are. I know. It's not his fault. He loves y--"

A pair of hands reached out from the darkness and seized her head in a ice-cold grip. She started to struggle, but her body went limp as her attacker snapped her neck with a quick twist.

The monitor went dark. The only sounds in the darkness were those of a body being dragged along the floor.

The refrigerator door opened and the light inside turned on. A small figure folded another small, lifeless figure into the compartment. The door closed again.

The lights flickered on again.

On the bridge, Arsenal, Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye slowly recovered from the crippling hallucinations that had briefly knocked them off their feet. Arsenal stood up shakily, gasping for air. He looked at his crew-mates, and saw that they were struggling to their feet.

He rushed out of the bridge to his quarters.

She stood in the stateroom, eyes burning.

"Jinx? Are you--"

"I'm doing great. Come here. I missed you."

He took a step towards her, and her arms wrapped around his chest.

She held him, and he felt her terrible strength. He tried to pull away, but she put a single finger over his lips.

"I need your help."

He looked over her shoulder at the refrigerator in the stateroom. The door was ajar. A thin trickle of blood from inside led to a red pool on the floor.

She whispered in his ear. "Don't cry out. We're going to save the universe."

Mirror Image

Arsenal sat down. The tissue sample cartridge poked out of the pocket of his lab coat and clattered to the floor.

"What's that?" Jinx sat cross-legged on the thinly carpeted floor. She was about to tell a story, but the noise distracted her.

"Oh!" He felt irritated with himself for forgetting. "It's a tissue sample from the space trike. I wanted you to see if it was like the samples from the crew."

"You'd better get that into the refrigerator. I'll run it up later."

Arsenal got to his feet, retrieving the cartridge from the floor as he stood up. "Where--?"

"It's the huge thing in the corner of the room."

The refrigerator was a large model, intended for the kitchen of a well-to-do family, vastly over-sized for a collection of tissue samples. Arsenal opened the door and deposited the sample next to the other ones. "Yeah. Nice and roomy."

Jinx shifted on the ground, making herself comfortable. "Yeah. Like some sort of really, really obvious product placement. Now, come here -- I have a story to tell you."

They sat on the thin carpet. Jinx began talking.

"It wasn't all that long ago that our ancestors were nomadic hunters. Three, four millenia ago?"

"What, on the homeworld?"

"Yes. Before we had all this." Jinx gestured around the room. "Before technology, back when symbols were only used for magic, not for keeping records. But not before history."

She paused for a moment.

"Oral records -- poems and songs -- survive from the archaic era. Back then, social organization was hardly more developed than a hunting pack, often led by individuals with remarkable abilities."

"Super-powered warlords."

"Yes. One of the longer story cycles was about the struggle between the great hunter Darneth and Nyqll, the river king. Nyqll built a walled city, and kept his meat in pens. He would send his soldiers out to burn the forest, and grow grain to feed his livestock. Over time, the grasp of Nyqll's burning hand reached Darneth's hunting grounds, and the two warlords began to fight."

"It sounds like Nyqll was ahead of his time."

"He was. Agriculture, slavery, docile livestock, and books of account -- all of this seemed like a perversion of nature to the ancients. Forcing flesh to submit to one man's will. For them, Nyqll was a monster, an enemy of freedom and righteousness."

"And they wrote the poems."

"Precisely. Their vision of the river valley king."

Arsenal tried rubbing the back of his neck, but stopped -- his left thumb was pointing the wrong way. "So that monster is a projection of some long-dead culture's rejection of the modern world."

"Not just any culture. The distant ancestors of the Reyll. They preserved the nomadic values of Darneth in their own moral code. He's not just some archaic political cartoon, he's a fundamental part of our sense of reality." She looked at Arsenal's ruined hand. "Give me your hand."

Arsenal hesitated a moment, then gave Jinx his left hand. She spoke.

"I can't shape your flesh, but you can."

He looked at her for a moment. "All right. All right."

She smiled and lifted up his forearm. "No use starting an operation without a plan. You need a mirror image of your left hand. How do you want to do that?"

"Turn it inside out."

"Kind of. You'll need to keep the nerves and the blood vessels attached. How do things look in there?"

He concentrated, probing his hand and wrist. "Twisted around. One half-turn to the left."

"And the tendons?"

"Straight ahead."

"Brace your arm. I'll talk you through it."

He lay on the floor, and braced his elbow on the floor. She lay down facing him, and looked at him. "Do you know what you have to do?"

He hesitated. "Yeah."

"I'll hold your arm steady. This is gonna hurt."

He swallowed. "Let's do it."

The flesh of his land became pliable like clay. His fingers became shorter.

He gritted his teeth, trying no to scream.

"Keep going."

He shuddered as he came to the long bones of his palm. Jinx held his forearm still.

A mirror image of his ruined hand now hung limply from the end of his forearm. Jinx took a breath. "You're going to need to sever the tendons, twist your hand back into position, and reattach them."

Arsenal was pale and breathing shallowly. "All right."

"Don't tense up."

"Let's get it over with."

She grabbed his wrist to help keep the tendons in place. "Now."

The pain was indescribable. His hand twisted around, and slowly rose back into position. "Hold on."

"Do it. Do it now."

Tendons reattached. Peter took a deep breath, and wiggled his fingers.

He smiled.

"It worked!"

The Burning Hand

Arsenal pulled on a white lab coat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets.

An attentive viewer might have noticed him relax and smile as he pulled on the utilitarian garment. It reminded him of what he was before the industrial accident that revealed his powers -- another mass-produced clone worker, trained as an engineer, type 350, lot 125, requisitioned for the development of plasma soliton weapons. Peter Cat, one of many.

Thresher -- a cyborg, and no stranger to violent dismemberment -- poked his head out of the cargo hold into the hallway.

"Hey, Arsenal! Can you give me a hand?"

Arsenal waited a half-second too long to pull his hands from his pockets and quipped flatly, "Yeah, I think I can spare one."

A recent mishap had resulted in him having two right hands.

The humor was marginal enough, but Arsenal fluffing his cue utterly ruined the joke. Most of the audience didn't think he had a sense of humor anyway, and this scene would do little to change their minds.

Thresher attempted to save the exchange with a forced chuckle, and they proceeded to the partially disassembled open-frame space-craft in the middle of the room.

"So, what do you make of it?" Arsenal stuck his hands back in his lab coat.

"It's got a power plant -- fairly conventional fission job -- but nothing that would explain the acceleration we saw when we were chasing it down." Thresher took a few steps around the ship, and pointed out one of the rear modules. "That looks like a thruster, but it isn't; it's some kind of resonant amplifier."

Arsenal looked under the ship, where some clear liquid was dripping on the floor. "Interesting. This looks like a closed-cycle life support system."

"Oh. Whoops. I sorta unplugged it from the power plant about an hour ago."

Arsenal followed a bus of pipes to a spherical module in the middle of the vessel, just below where the saddle was mounted. "The bus runs up to here." He paused for a moment, and stretched his subtle fields through the container. "There's about a kilo of organic matter inside the sphere."

Thresher extended a small circular saw from his cybernetic left forearm. "Should I open it up?"

Arsenal nodded. "Go for it. We need a tissue sample for ID."

Sparks flew with a grinding noise as Thresher opened up the spherical module. A sector of metal fell to the floor.

"Dude. That is nasty."

Arsenal swallowed. "A vat-grown brain. Probably telekinetic. I think we've found the thruster."

On the bridge, Jolt and the Eye watched a progress bar slowly extend from left to right on the main view-screen. It was very nearly full.

Jolt drummed her fingers on the armrest of the command chair. "Well, this is exciting."

"A broad sweep of all hyperspace jump activity in sensor range takes a while." The Eye was apologetic. "I'm sure it will be done soon."

"You think?"

"Yeah."

"Is that your professional opinion as a registered precognitive?"

"Sure."

The progress bar filled in another step. Now only a tiny sliver remained.

The Eye turned and smiled at Jolt. "See?"

Arsenal entered his quarters, holding a small cartridge with a tissue sample from the strange star-ship's dead brain.

Jinx had set up an effective improvised laboratory in his stateroom. She looked up from the screen of her workstation, which was connected to a humming box by a broad, rainbow-colored ribbon cable. "Hey. I think I have canonical sequences for Lowrider and Apostrophe Girl. Check this out."

Arsenal looked over her shoulder at the screen. "What am I seeing here?"

"It's a set of genes from a chromosomal insertion in both bodies. The sequences look almost like genes inserted in a force-growing process, but they don't match up with anything used in mainstream Corporate clone production."

"Is this from the tumor monsters?"

"Nope. The tumors show no signs of mutation or degradation from rapid mitosis, and match up perfectly with the samples from the corpses."

"That's crazy."

"That monster's got one funky cancerbeam." She looked into Arsenal's eyes. "How are you holding up, Peter?"

"It's my hand. I can't stand it any more."

"I understand. I wish I could help you." Jinx looked sad. "I used to be able to heal people. Shaping flesh is easy." She broke eye contact with him and looked down at the floor. "I'm so sorry."

"Listen, I'm going to try something crazy. If I blow myself up, I can patch my state and fix myself up."

"You're going to blow up?"

"Yeah."

"Do me a favor and do it in the shower, OK?"

"OK." Peter walked towards the sealed bathing compartment and opened the door. "Wish me luck."

Jinx smiled weakly. "Good luck."

He closed the translucent door.

Jinx could not look away.

A moment later, there was a soft wet pop, and the inside of the door was covered in gore.

Jinx heaved, but could not vomit. She curled up into a ball and began sobbing uncontrollably.

She rolled on the floor for a few moments, and her spasms changed slowly from retching to simple sobbing.

Peter emerged from the shower compartment, and showed Jinx his palms.

"What the hell?"

She looked at his hands -- two copies of a right hand.

Her face moved from shock to calm.

"It's god power. Ontology control. Nyqll's corrupted your state equation."

"Who?"

"The burning hand." Jinx grasped Peter's hand. "Sit with me. I have a story to tell."

Hot Rods of the Gods

Across Corporate space, subscribers to the "Plan Nine" media feed sat down to watch the new episode of "Honor Guard", the continuing adventures of a super-powered space patrol.

A phrase from the theme music played, and the pre-title scene began.

Arsenal stood on the observation deck of the Nightstalker, looking out into space. His white-furred hands were clasped behind his back.

His captain, Jolt, approached him. Arsenal turned a little to face her. His eyes looked sad.

"Nice job on Leviathan back there." Jolt smiled a little. Arsenal looked like he could use some encouragement.

"Pity about the asteroid."

"Don't feel too bad. The explosion exposed the core, which should make it easier for the miners to get to the high-density goodies." Jolt examined Arsenal's face, but his expression was indecipherable to her. "How's Jinx doing?"

Arsenal frowned. "She won't leave our quarters. She's--"

Jolt rushed on to the important question. "What's her story?"

Arsenal looked at Jolt. "She claims that she had an OptCond practitioner perform an exorcism. Her powers and a good chunk of her memories are gone."

Jolt pinched her mouth together. "Why do you say 'claims'? I hope you didn't talk like that with her -- she needs your love and support right now."

"I understand, Captain. You're right. I need to take what she says at face value if she's going to get better."

Jolt laughed a little. "I said 'love and support', not a bunch of Optimizing Conditioning clap-trap."

Arsenal smiled. "You're a skeptic, too? That's reassuring. Jinx is a true believer -- she's convinced that the exercises help keep her hallucinations under control, but..."

Arsenal couldn't finish the sentence. He looked sad. He started to speak again. "...she's changed. She used to be fearless, and now she's terrified all the time. It's so sad."

Jolt looked down at the floor for a moment, hiding her face. Her mouth moved to say something, but she changed her mind. She looked up again, directly into Arsenal's eyes.

"She's done a lot of terrible things. She has a damned good reason to be afraid. You should accept that she needed to change."

Arsenal nodded. "Thank you, Captain."

Jolt tilted her head. "Uh-huh." She turned to Arsenal. "Get a move on, We've found the bogey."

"I'll see you on the bridge, ma'am."

The title credits rolled. These were the adventures of Honor Guard, a super-powered police unit responsible for keeping the peace in Corporate space. Short scenes depicted the core cast -- Jolt, the Captain, whose body generated vast amounts of static electricity, harness by her skin-tight cat-suit. Thresher, the living satellite, a fearsome space warrior cyborg. The Eye, precognitive acrobat and expert fighter with diamond knives, possessor of a magical amulet that grants her super-vision. Arsenal, unkillable energy manipulator only beginning to tap his vast abilities. Finally, their vessel, the Nightstalker, fastest corvette in the Corporate fleet.

Jolt entered the bridge of the Nightstalker, followed closely by Arsenal. A tiny dot was highlighted by a tracking reticule on the main view-screen. The Eye, sitting at helm, turned her head to talk to Jolt as she took her place in the captain's chair.

"We're on an intercept vector." The Eye made a small course correction as she talked to Jolt -- The Eye had a 360 degree field of vision, and looked at people more out of courtesy than necessity. "It's a small craft, under 2 tons displacement --"

Jolt interrupted the Eye. "Can we get an interrocitor fix? I want to see what we're dealing with."

"Working on it." Thresher was plugged in to the sensor console with thin cable running from the chest of his robot body. "Here we go."

The entire crew looked at the view-screen for a few moments in silence. The Eye finally broke the silence. "Now, that's something you don't see every day."

Jolt nodded. "Yes. Analysis?"

The view-screen displayed what appeared to be a motorized tricycle crudely adapted to space travel -- the wheels had been replaced with similarly sized thruster pods. The pilot, a scruffy-looking male, sat on the saddle of the space trike, grasping a pair of handle-bars. A single passenger, female, sat behind the pilot on the elongated saddle with her arms wrapped around the pilot's waist.

Arsenal spoke up. "Captain -- I think we can safely assume the crew is vacuum-proof. It is likely that one or both of them have powers."

Thresher looked up from the sensor read-outs. "The vessel doesn't have a transponder mounted, and its configuration doesn't match any known space-craft."

Jolt narrowed her eyes. "No transponder, eh? Like a pirate or a smuggler. I think we have probable cause for an inspection. Prepare for intercept!"

Hyper-thrusters engaged, and the Nightstalker skipped through hyperspace to a position a few hundred meters behind the strange vessel, emerging on a parallel course. The heads of the trike passengers pointed to the lower right quadrant of the view-screen. "Match their orientation and lock weapons!" Jolt commanded. "On my mark--"

There was a short moment of tense anticipation on the bridge.

"Do a barrel roll!"

The Nightstalker took a corkscrew trajectory around the space trike's vector. On the view-screen, the vessel rotated as the Nightstalker closed in.

"Still no response..."

"Activate the dome lights."

The space trike was illuminated by flashes of red and blue light from the Nightstalker's sirens. The female turned and tapped the pilot of the strange vessel on his shoulder. He then twisted the handlebars and turned away from the pursuit vector, accelerating rapidly.

"After them!"

"Wait a minute... their vector takes them into the gravity well of a nearby planet." The Eye brought up data on the planet on the main view-screen. "The vessel is decelerating. I think they're going to land."

"Pursue and land nearby."

The Eye proved to be right. The space trike landed at a point near the equator of a small, blue-green world with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, close to a automated filling station the Corporation had constructed on the world's surface. The planet's lack of a strong magnetic field and the periodic high-energy solar flares released by its sun had precluded further colonization. Frequent sterilization events had prevented native life from developing past algae, lichens and simple plants.

The Nightstalker set down on a field of fuzzy rocks behind the space trike landing site. A few simple flowers -- hardly more than colorful fronds -- poked up from the bed of lichen.

In the fore ready room, Jolt attached a grounding cable to a metal stud on her costume. Safely grounded, she peeled off her usual gloves, and replaced them with a pair studded with flat, shiny electrodes on the fingertips and knuckles. "All right, I'll start the questioning. I want the rest of you to cover me. Got it?"

The crew assented, and Jolt pulled a side-handle baton from an equipment locker. It was sheathed in insulating plastic and had a metal core and contacts on each end. She pointed one end of the baton at the grounding stud, and touched her thumb to the contact on the side handle. An arc of electricity jumped to the stud.

"Let's roll."

The pilot of the unknown vessel was busy picking almost-flowers. He was a rugged-looking type with a long black mane, dressed in leathers. His companion was a graceful female with golden fur, dressed in a simple white tunic. She smiled as she watched him put together his bouquet.

Arsenal and the Eye held back and took a position with a clear line of fire to the pair. Thresher continued a few steps, closing in to the range of his tether launchers, and moved out of Arsenal's kill zone.

Jolt closed in on the landing site. The pilot and his passenger smiled. He extended the bouquet of colorful fronds towards Jolt, and opened his mouth to speak.

Jolt interrupted him. "ID. NOW!"

The pilot smiled. "I am called Lowrider. Please accept--"

He looked into Jolt's eyes and stopped. His face looked crestfallen. Jolt repeated her demand.

"I want to see some identification. For both of you."

"As I said, I am called Lowrider."

The young woman in the white tunic also spoke. "And I am S'mb'lah. We come in peace to your mortal realm on a mission from the Most High--"

Jolt gave her a hard look. "Most High, huh? And how high are you two?"

S'mb'lah looked hurt and shocked. "Why so hostile? We--"

Jolt interrupted her. "You were about to fly into the Reyll blockade zone, with no transponder and no way to communicate with you. We're impounding your ship and taking you in."

Lowrider looked concerned, and took a step towards Jolt. "But you must let us complete our missARRGH!"

A shock from Jolt's baton interrupted his sentence. "ON THE GROUND, BOTH OF YOU! HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEADS!"

Lowrider writhed on the ground, and Jolt struck him again with her baton.

"Arsenal -- the girl -- now!" The Eye jabbed Arsenal with her elbow.

Arsenal complied. As the young woman brought her hands to her temples, a concussion bolt struck her in the face. The impact knocked her off her feet and bloodied her nose.

"BACKUP!" Jolt paced around the curled-up form of Lowrider. Thresher, Arsenal, and the Eye closed in.

She turned to face Arsenal. "Give their vessel a quick once-over. I don't want them smuggling weapons on the Nightstalker."

"Understood." He began examining the open-frame spacecraft, starting with the right rear pannier.

Thresher restrained the pilot and the passenger with his tethers while Arsenal worked. Arsenal examined two seemingly ordinary flight bags, one containing tolietries and a few neatly-folded white tunics, the other a fresh pair of leathers. An additional bag contained an inflatable tent.

"Find anything?" Jolt demanded impatiently.

"Not yet."

Arsenal walked to the other side of the space trike, and opened the left pannier. It was empty, except for a single, ornate box. "Wait a minute."

He extracted the heavy box from the cargo container. "It's a hammerspace box."

Jolt looked at him. "What?"

"A hyperspatial container. The inside is bigger than the outside. There could be anything in here."

Lowrider began to panic, and screamed, "You MUST NOT open it!"

"It's filled with EVIL!" the young woman piped in.

"I think you mean DRUGS," snarled Jolt. "Now SHUT UP!"

"I'm going to open it now." Arsenal took a few steps away from the landing site.

He held the box in his right hand, and flipped the latch holding the box closed with his left thumb.

His team-mates each took a step backwards.

The lid flipped open.

"Guys?" Arsenal was a little nervous. "I'm going to look inside now."

"You do that." Jolt took another step back.

"Oh NO!" The Eye screamed.

The opening began to vibrate, forming a sound like a word. "NNNNN...."

An instant later, a dark mass hurled itself out of the box, mantled in cold flame. Arsenal reflexively put his free hand up to shield himself.

Normally, Arsenal was invulnerable -- but this fire burned. He fell and screamed, "ARR!"

The dark mass stuck the ground and assumed the form of a five meter tall blue-furred monstrosity. Instead of a head, it had what looked like an old-fashioned animal trap. The vibrations became louder, and deepened. "MMMMMMM!"

The girl with too many apostrophes in her name writhed on the ground, yelling, "Now you've done it! NYQUIL IS FREE!"

Arsenal looked up at the blue-furred monstrosity. It was naked, and had no genitals. It took a step towards him.

The jaws of the trap opened, and a burning hand holding a gigantic eye rose from the torso of the dick-less abomination.

"ALL-WORLD-ALL-ONE-ALL-MINE!" The words echoed like a great brass gong. The burning eye-hand fixed its gaze on Lowrider, cowering before the evil god. Mystic flame burst from the eye-hand, and Lowrider writhed as his rib cage began to swell.

"EXCEPTIONS--"

Lowrider exploded as a vast tumorous mass consumed his chest.

"--NONE!"

Arsenal looked at his ruined hand. His fur and flesh had not burned -- instead, a tentacled thing was growing inside him. His forearm split open, and a deformed eye stared back at him through the gash in his corrupted flesh.

"ETERNALLY--"

He grit his teeth, and blasted off his left fore-arm. Behind him, the monstrous meat god turned its burning hand to the girl with too many apostrophes in her name.

"--NONE!"

Her skull exploded, and a tentacled thing skittered from the shattered remains into the underbrush. Arsenal cradled his amputated arm and activated his comms implant. "Captain -- get everybody clear, I'll try to keep him busy."

"ALL-ONE-FAITH-NEW-FLESH-ONE-MIND-ONE-HEART!"

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye retreated into the Nightstalker as Arsenal stood up slowly. The monster stared at the ruined bodies of his captors.

Arsenal concentrated for a moment as the Nightstalker'e engines spun up. The monster seemed oblivious. In a moment, Arsenal would restore his body's previous thermodynamic state -- good as new.

At least, that was how it was supposed to work. He looked down at the back of his hands, and both of his thumbs pointed left.

The burning hand turned towards him.

The Nightstalker, now hovering, brought its forward batteries to bear on the monster.

Arsenal took off as a beam of fire struck the ground.

The batteries discharged, striking the monster in its chest.

It absorbed the blasts, turning black as night.

No obvious effect. Not even the collateral damage one would expect from a point-blank main battery blast inside a planet's atmosphere. The monster had seemingly eaten the blasts.

Arsenal set down behind the monster. His mind raced. How could he--

The monster arched its back, and began to scream. Its body collapsed in upon itself, and it disappeared in an instant.

Arsenal set down and tried to get his bearings. He heard a skittering noise near the space trike.

A tentacled lump of pink-gray flesh shuddered as another lump of brick-red muscle thrust what was once an aorta between its hemispheres. Arsenal watched the two tumor-masses moved against each other rhythmically.

The pace of the copulating tumors quickened, and a ventricle spasmed in the thing that was once a heart.

Arsenal realized what he was looking at.

Stepping back, he did the only thing that seemed to make sense.

Kill it with fire.