The Word Made Flesh

"We're being scanned," Peter noted.

Jinx reversed thrust, slowing the Black Watch to a standstill.

"Full stop. We've reached the frontier."

Peter watched bits of randomness drop out of the vacuum as an array of Reyll jump mines entangled their sensors with spots of space-time near the star-ship. The Black Watch was approaching an oblate spheroid of space that divided the cluster into two halves and encompassed the five colony worlds ruled by the Reyll Theocracy. That region was protected by tens of thousands of bombs attached to simple jump drives, managed by artificial intelligences programmed to lay down their run-time to protect the Reyll way of life.

The thinking machines spoke to pass the time. When they saw something interesting enough, they would speak to their creators.

"What do we do now?" Waiting made Peter nervous.

"There are two possibilities -- we wait for a patrol ship and try to negotiate passage, or we charge in and hope you can catch the bombs before we get blown up."

"Well? Let's--"

"Slow down there. If I'm right, the Reyll have a problem they are poorly equipped to handle. They may actually ask for help."

Peter was skeptical. "Really? I thought they were-- wait a minute, someone is transmitting. "

Carrier and protocol matched well-known signatures for Reyll military communication. Peter patched the payload's audio stream through an automated translation system.

"Intruder vessel -- violation of special forbidden zone. No restraint vast destruction imminent. Compliance now!"

Jinx scowled. "Needs more verb. Replay the original before they get impatient."

Peter fiddled, and a weary voice came over the audio.

"Ne masto mrll na da kozh bay goghyah naxhell. Ne pee masezh mai ma pagirla pa lo. Na elozh bay elozh ka brrllm."

"Foreign vessel -- you are approaching a quarantine zone. The situation in this area is uncontrollable and dangerous. Immediate cooperation is required," Jinx translated. "The machine translation is less than useless. Let me talk to them."

Reluctantly, Peter opened a channel for Jinx, and she spoke.

"Bay elozh ka brrllm an lo -- bay Rllmahimja pah masto Kahoprat mai pee na elozh. Ne masto lo pee kahrazh mahall. Na elozh mai ka lo nah hodam brrllm?"

The audio stream clearly recorded the remote peer's insulted grunt, followed shortly by an end-of-file indicator.

"Uh-huh. That seemed to have helped." Peter was worried.

"Stay slinky. We're going to need an escort, and they should show up shortly."

The Reyll warship materialized a few thousand kilometers from their position.

"They have weapons lock--" Peter warned.

"Yeah. Don't do anything unwise." Jinx left the helm and walked towards Peter. "Keep your eyes on the prize."

"What?"

Jinx flicked the back of Peter's head. He flinched with pain and reached to see if the back of his skull was still there.

"Ow. What the hell did you--"

"Foreign vessel -- we will escort you to the incident site. Please take all weapons systems offline." The transmission came from the Reyll warship. Peter had the odd sensation that the words he understood were not the words he had heard.

"I understood that. Why did I understand that?"

"A wizard did it, namely me. Now, let's play nice, and see what's happened."

Shortly after Peter took the Black Watch's weapons systems offline, the Reyll warship turned and took a course through normal space to a vector inside the forbidden zone. He ordered the ship's computer to follow.

After a short while, he saw the spur, and the ragged sail that hung absurdly in space, not flapping in a non-existent wind. It extended from an irregular structure that could only be described as a meatball, a rough spheroid mass of disorganized tissue.

Peter looked at the viewscreen slack-jawed and helpless. He was relieved when he heard Jinx breathe in sharply. He turned to her.

"What--"

"I don't know. Is it alive?"

This was a question he could answer. He felt the thing with his senses.

"No. It's dead inside. The portion of it with life support is decaying rapidly. It's like some kind of cyst."

Peter shuddered in the command chair. He leaned forward towards the view-screen and tensed up. A transmission came from the Reyll ship, and he looked sharply at the screen.
"This is the anomaly. A Hunter squad engaged the intruder, and it made this out of them. Our talents say it is dead, then they say there is something wrong, then they start screaming. Gravimetric scans indicate a massive spatial anomaly with enormous potential energy."

Jinx's own scans confirmed what the warship captain had said. She sent the results to the display in Peter's armrest.

He looked at the numbers and boggled. It was within an order of magnitude of the mass of the primordial singularity.

There was a long silence. Peter spoke. "Understood."

Whatever was inside the tumor in space was about to create a new universe.

He paused, looked at the monstrous thing on the view-screen. "We will investigate -- see what can be done. We will approach the cyst."

"All clear. Let us know if we can help."

As the Black Watch slowly pulled closer, Peter and Jinx spotted a vast sphincter on the leathery surface of the sphere.

"What an asshole."

Jinx wished her joke was funnier.

Peter tried to help.

"So, what do we do? Tickle it, buy it a drink..." Peter trailed off.

"We're gonna need a lot of lube to get the ship in there."

They both wished they could laugh.

"I think we're going to have to get off the ship. Are you ready?"

"No."

They went to the air-lock anyway.

Jinx wrapped her arms around Peter's shoulders and he carried her through space to the purplish-red orifice. Aiming for the middle of the fleshy circle, they both closed their eyes as they pushed through the fleshy ring and emerged into a hall filled with foul vapors, an atmosphere of decay.

What they saw before them defied comprehension. Shattered parts of Reyll warships, tendrils of flesh and sinew, tangled vascular trees filled with clotting blood, twisted into a tight knot of space-time that very obviously was a portion of a four-dimensional structure.

Peter recognized the topology. "Well, the good news is that we're already inside it. It only has an inside."

"We're going to have to get closer." Jinx did not sound happy with the idea.

They flew closer, following a curved surface of bruised pink flesh. After a following a bend, they lost sight of the outside.

"Peter - I... I see something." Jinx pointed to a black pool on the ground.

They landed, and Jinx reluctantly climbed down from Peter's arms. Peter looked at the rippling pool of black oil.

"What the hell is that?"

"It's an eversion point. It punches through to outside the universe."

Peter looked around.

"Everything here is dead and decaying. All the potential energy is behind that pool."

"Then that's where Nyqll is. This is the way to his lodge."

They both trembled a little. They had become inured to the overwhelming strangeness of their surroundings. Now, they were confronted with a gateway into the unknown.

They looked at each other. Jinx stretched out her hand towards Peter, and he took it.

Peter spoke first. "Do you think we'll be able to get back out again?"

"I don't know. Maybe not. It's probably a domain ruled by Nyqll's will. A prototype for his new universe."

They thought for a moment, holding hands.

"OK. We're going to do this anyway, right?"

"Of course." Jinx smiled, and looked at Peter sadly. "We're superheroes, right?"

They stepping into the pool together and fell into darkness. The hallucinogenic black oil dazed their senses, subjecting them to terrible visions as they plummeted. Somewhere along the way, Jinx's hand slipped out of Peter's.

Shortly afterward, they both hit the dusty, sandy ground hard.

Peter opened his eyes first, and looked up at a bone-white sky. "Jinx?"

"I'm over here." She rolled over in the dust. "My head-- owww...."

Peter went to her and examined her head for injuries. He couldn't find any. "I think you're all right."

He looked around the dusty plain. A road of trampled dirt led towards the gates of a large city surrounded by mud brick walls. Jinx got up and followed him down the road.

As the approached, a robed figure carrying a staff with bells on the end approached them. As the figure took notice of Peter and Jinx, he began mournfully wailing "Tamei, tamei".

"What?"

"He's a leper. He's unclean. I--"

"What? How do you know this place?"

"I-- I can't explain. Why aren't we flying over the walls?"

Peter thought for a moment.

"I don't know. It doesn't seem to make sense."

Jinx looked at the back of her hand and wiggled her fingers. "Ontological control. The presence can influence us by eliminating alternatives."

"The presence?"

Jinx looked horrified. "I can't say his name."

The leper approached. "Tamei, tamei."

He pulled down his hood. Jinx recognized him instantly, despite the lesions covering half his face. "Jack!"

"Nah. Jack's not here right now. Most of me is still inside him." The leper pointed upwards. "You're going to need an ass. It's part of the story."

"We're going to need a what?" asked Peter, perplexed.

"An ass."

Jinx peered at Peter's backside. "He has a perfectly serviceable ass. What do you mean by story?"

"No." The leper smiled as another man approached with a strange, grey-furred quadruped with a grotesquely long face, long tufted ears, and broad shoulders and hips. "An ass."

"Oh." Peter pointed at the creature. "That's... an ass. All right."

"Can we please stop talking about asses -- what's the deal with the story?" Jinx was irritated.

"Oh, you know this one. How do you know this one? It's not one of ours. It belongs to the humans." The leper smiled and gestured strangely as he said this. "Come on, don't lose the plot now. They call it the greatest story ever told."

In Love's Image

The Nightstalker started its descent over the Flash Desert of Bestos, a severe and lasting glassy surface left when Corporate forces flattened the last Reyll fortress-city with a brace of antimatter bombs. Even fifty years later, the shiny desert resisted the encroachment of the equatorial jungle.

The First Mate sat in the command chair. Jolt stood to the left of him, looking a little uncomfortable. The Eye was at the helm, busy monitoring the re-entry sequence.

The First Mate turned and looked at Jolt. "Are you all right?"

"All right? I'm great."

Jolt was lying. She looked terrible, like she had been crying instead of sleeping.

A mountain range rushed past below the ship as it levelled out and decelerated, followed shortly thereafter by a blink of sandy coast and a stretch of glassy green sea dotted with brown froth -- an algal salt plain, an example of the kind of undersea habitat that produced most of the planet's native oxygen and sequestered most of the ocean's minerals.

The silence on the bridge was oppressive. Jolt paced next to the command chair.

The water turned deep blue as the continental shelf fell away. The Nightstalker slowed to subsonic speed as it made its final approach to the lonely volcanic island where Drazen East had his estate.

"Prepare for landing." The First Mate was tense. Landings always made him nervous, and water landings were particularly nerve-wracking.

"Deploying pontoons," Thresher stated as he braced himself.

Jolt continued pacing, oblivious to what was happening around her.

The Eye counted down. "Planet-fall in 4... 3... 2... 1..."

There was a slight shudder as the Nightstalker touched down on the freshwater ocean's surface, supported by two bright orange inflatable cylinders. It approached a dock built on a black sand beach that disappeared into a lush green jungle.

Jolt had stopped pacing. She was staring at the view-screen.

A tiny figure stood at the end of the docks, standing next to a trunk and waving.

"Father."

She said the word with no apparent feeling.

The star-ship slowed as it approached the dock. The First Mate cleared his throat to get Jolt's attention.

"Here's the warrant." He gave her a thin sheet of programmable paper. "It looks like he'll come quietly."

Jolt didn't say anything. She took the display with a quick snapping gesture and no change of expression, turned on her heel, and left the bridge along with Thresher and the Eye.

They disembarked through the dorsal port airlock on the spade-shaped hull of the star-ship. It was a short walk to the wood and plastic dock from there.

Jolt went first, walking slowly and deliberately to the short, gesticulating figure waiting at the end of the pier. Behind her, the Eye's compact, muscular form was a contrast with Thresher's lumbering cyborg body.

"No mooks," the Eye whispered.

"What?" Thresher replied.

"They said there would be mooks." The Eye seemed disappointed.

Jolt said nothing.

"Sweetie! Just look at you!" Drazen East was a short, pudgy male with dark gray fur and coppery eyes. He was a stark contrast to his statuesque, red-furred daughter. He beamed with pride.

She looked at him coldly. With a sweeping gesture, she held the warrant in front of his face.

He looked at it for a moment and grinned. "Oh, dear. You know the Committee on Cloning Ethics is little more than a glorified trade association, right?" Drazen turned to look at his heavy trunk. "I packed my things for that?"

He tried to meet his daughter's gaze, but only saw her unsmiling face. He hesitated for a moment, and finally thought to take the paper from her hand.

Chastised, he looked up at her and pleaded, "At least come with me and have a cup of coffee before you take me away. We haven't talked in so long..."

He got no response. Jolt seemed to look through him.

"Please."

"Father." Her gaze finally turned to him. "What exactly does regret mean?"

He looked puzzled and thought for a moment.

"I-- I don't know. Why are you asking?"

Jolt blinked. She did not know what to say next.

Drazen took the initiative. "Please. Come with me." He led Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye to a small wooden house next to the beach.

The interior was simple. A few glossy black gadgets to cook food and clean dishes sat on the wooden counter inside the hut, next to a shiny pot and an extra-large refrigerator. A beaded curtain led to an underground passage buried in the steep hillside. Four chairs made of palm-wood and carefully process preserved fronds stood around a simple hardwood table made from a tree that grew two light-years from here.

A careful arrangement of orchids decorated the table.

Drazen pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. He placed the paper on the table and clapped his hands. A shiny bipedal robot stepped through the curtain to fetch the coffee.

Jolt took the chair across from her father without saying a word. The robot's actuators whirred as it took a set of plastic cups and saucers from cupboards concealed in the walls of the hut.

Thresher and the Eye stood behind Jolt. The Eye crossed her arms.

"I'll bet you were expecting a clone servant," Drazen burbled, "but I have to deal with enough of that in my line of work."

The robot brought four cups of coffee, and placed them on the table. Drazen took a sip from his cup. Jolt ignored hers.

"Well, look at you! My daughter, the superheroine!"

Jolt waited for a moment. "They had to put me in a containment suit when I was twelve. My body generated electricity, uncontrollably. It started the year after Mom was terminated."

Drazen waved his hand. "Oh, it can be controlled. It's quite simple, really..."

Jolt didn't answer. The robot left the way it came.

Jolt spoke again. "You knew we were coming."

Drazen smiled. "Yes, I have my connections."

Jolt looked at him coldly. "So do we."

For all of the awkwardness of the situation thus far, Drazen had maintained a composed air. For the first time, worry crept into his face.

"Yes. I suppose you do."

Jolt continued. "Leviathan talked. He shot the Arcana hit. The Grays know everything."

"Wait--" Worry became fear.

"It was a trap. The Corporation's not ready for war."

"But-- the Chairman's wife, she was--"

"The Grays don't trust the Blacks. They knew the Blacks would see weaponized superheroes as a chance to gain influence, get their hands on some military budget. They let the Blacks set up Graves, and watched where the money went."

Drazen became agitated, and reached for the paper.

Instead of the text of the warrant, he saw a picture of himself, looking confused.

"What? You're filming this?"

He looked up, and a second image appeared on the paper, showing him from the side.

"What is this supposed to be? Extra-judicial executions as light family entertainment?"

"Well, things sure got dramatic," the Eye remarked laconically. "See? They changed camera angles!"

Jolt crossed her arms. "That's up to you. But you're not getting away with this one. They caught you with your hand in the till."

Drazen looked like someone had hit him in the face. He leaned back in his chair, slack-jawed.

His hand reached for a spray canister beneath his seat.

"Watch it!" The Eye moved, but Drazen was faster. He flipped a trigger on the canister, releasing a cloud of liquid droplets into Jolt's face.

The reaction was immediate. Jolt grabbed for her throat and fell from the chair, wheezing. The Eye and Thresher gathered around her.

Drazen bolted for the curtain, turned back, and said, "She's going into shock. Please don't let her die." He then darted away into the underground tunnel.

Thresher plugged himself into Jolt's containment suit's monitors.

"She's discharged. Rapid pulse, low blood pressure."

The Eye was agitated. "What did he do to her?"

"He shut down her powers. All the metabolic processes that charge her up have been disrupted."

Jolt began to convulse. "Cardiac arrhythmia. She's losing it." Thresher began carefully opening Jolt's suit. "I'm gonna have to use the defibrillator."

The cyborg looked up at the Eye. "Get the bastard. I'll stabilize her and get her to the ship."

The Eye nodded, and pursued through the beaded curtain.

The corridor was dark, but her amulet could see in the dark, the future, and into people's minds. She drew one of her diamond knives from her hip holster, and sensed Drazen running in the darkness down a flight of stairs.

She pursued, coming to a large open room. It looked like a child's imagining of a super-villain's lair. An empty vat with transparent walls was in the middle of the room -- perhaps to view the merchandise? -- and the walls were covered in machines and indicator lights.

A drawer was pulled out of a console. Drazen had pulled something out quickly.

That meant he was armed.

A passage led to the staircase down.

The hallway was lined with smaller translucent tubes filled with turbid glowing yellow liquid. As she rushed after Drazen, a hand pressed on the inside of one of the cylinders.

She continued her pursuit, into a large rectangular chamber filled with pumps and tanks. Ducts and cable runs hung form the ceiling. Glowing yellow liquid was pulled from siphon tubes into a huge translucent-walled vat on the other end of the room.

Drazen had taken cover behind a recirculation pump next to the base of the vat. He swept the targeting beam of his civilian-grade laser disruptor, looking for some reflection that might betray the Eye's presence.

The Eye paused for a moment. Drazen had a clear line of fire once she left the cover of the tanks. She looked up at a duct that ran gently downwards to the top of the vat, right above Drazen's position, and took a flash-bang from her belt.

Drazen heard the click as she armed the grenade, and fired into the darkness. Twin laser tubes pulsed out of sync, and sparks exploded from a metal pipe.

The gun recharged with a high-pitched whine.

"You don't have to murder me. I'll work with the Grays. Make them body doubles, infiltrators -- anything they want." He shifted his grip. The gun became unpleasantly warm as the energy store reached the tripping point. "Anything they want."

The Eye somersaulted over a tank with a knife in her hand. Drazen raised his handgun and prepared to fire again. The Eye closed the distance with a back-flip. Drazen drew a bead --

The flash-bang grenade rolled off the duct and detonated just above Drazen's head.

The gun clattered to the floor.

The Eye was on her feet, lunging forwards.

The diamond knife rammed into Drazen East's chest, lifting him off his feet and pinning him to the vat.

Blinded and bleeding out, Drazen lifted his right hand. In his last moments of consciousness, he noticed that it was wet with blood.

"...is that mine?..."

His last breath followed shortly thereafter.

The Eye turned and slowly walked back to her colleagues.

Courage

Both members of the crew of the Black Watch were on the bridge.

"So, he's already in Reyll space?" Peter leaned back in the command chair, gripping the arms of the seat tightly.

"He crossed over a little while ago. Triggered the jump mines, got overrun by a Hunter squadron. From what I can make out, they have the area under quarantine." Jinx looked at him carefully. Was he angry? Was he sad? All she saw was restrained aggression and impatience, a hypomanic urgency that scared her -- especially after she saw what he was capable of.

"Any sign of mobilization? Are they--"

"No." Jinx took a second look at the sensor readouts at the helm station. "Not yet, anyway."

"I think I have a plan." Peter sat up straight. "But I need some advice."

"Of course." Jinx wanted to help.

"I want you to stay on the ship. Be ready to get the hell out if things go wrong, and keep your distance." Peter paused. "I'll close in and try to hit him with gravity-based attacks. Maybe do that inflation thing I did to Leviathan. If we're lucky, I'll manage to tear him apart before he kills me."

Jinx took a deep breath, and shook a little.

"That's a terrible plan."

"Well, I--"

"You don't understand." Jinx was afraid. "There's someone inside Nyqll. An innocent man. I was supposed to protect him."

"I think it's a little too late."

"I have to try. I promised him that."

There was a long pause. Something Jinx had said had changed Peter's mind. He looked at her for a while, and when she examined his face carefully, she saw something like a smile.

"All right. I understand."

He relaxed a little, and continued "So we need a better plan. Let me see..."

"Maybe I can help. I still have some of the black oil left."

"Use it as a weapon?" Peter grinned. "Yes!"

"No. I -- he was exposed to it. Maybe if you look at a sample--"

"Then I could figure out his weakness! Of course!"

He was still worryingly aggressive, but at least they were both on the same side. Jinx led him to the briefing room, and summoned her last dewar of black oil. Peter leaned forward towards the container as she carefully placed it on the table.

He seemed fascinated, and observed the dewar in silence for a long moment.

"Where did you get this stuff, Jinx?"

"Outside the cluster. A charming little world orbiting an orange star with a nameless crypt-city buried beneath a field of imported grass."

Peter looked at the dewar again.

"So, the planet wasn't just a radioactive lump of strange matter. That's... kind of surprising, actually." He paused. He was not looking at the dewar, but it was clear that he was sensing what was going on inside the container. His eyes would briefly close for a second or two, and twitch like someone having a vivid dream. "I can't sense the stuff directly. Too much magic. But what it's doing on a quantum level is really strange -- it reminds me of some theories about mirror matter."

"Mirror matter?"

"Matter is defined by a set of potentials. These potentials can be distinguished as quanta of various forces. These forces are interrelated, and only exist in certain configurations -- certain geometries, among other things." He paused.

"This stuff has a geometry that's a mirror image to the way ordinary matter is organized. It should be like a ghost to us, only interacting gravitationally."

Jinx thought for a moment. "Well, the story I heard is that this is some kind of waste product from an interstellar transit system. There was this white mist that would form bridges in space-time to far-away worlds. When the bridge collapsed, it left this stuff behind."

"A condensate. First it coated the travelers and created a environment they could handle -- then it peeled back off, turning itself inside out in the process." Peter leaned back in his chair. "It sounds plausible, at least. Wish it helped me beat Nyqll."

"You don't have to beat him, Peter." Jinx sat down next to him. "I know the name of the man inside that monster. I can pull him out."

Peter looked at her, and she felt something she was not expecting -- love and admiration, coming from him. He said, "I don't want Nyqll to hurt you."

"I know. You'll have to figure out how to pin him down and keep him busy."

"All right." His voice sounded a little more relaxed, but also frightened. "I'm so used to doing this alone."

"Yeah. That's why you get your ass kicked all the time."

The Paper Tiger

Executive Officer Franco had the helm of the Nightstalker.

He was alone on the bridge. Jolt had retired to her stateroom. The Eye and Thresher accompanied her.

This wasn't a time to leave her alone.

Franco pulled up the criminal records of Jolt's father, Drazen East. A long list of convictions, prison sentences commuted by powerful friends, shadowy connections to the Corporation's elite managers. His connections to the deep state had kept him free.

For a career criminal, East had done well for himself. His estate on Bestos was an island in a temperate fresh-water sea on the northern hemisphere. Many senior Corporate executives had smaller properties. The private spaceport was small, but large enough for the Nightstalker to land.

The twinge of resentment the combination of East's prosperity and criminal record kept Franco digging through the documentation. He had a list -- all the plaintiffs in the numerous criminal cases where Drazen East was a defendant. He had put together the data gathered from investigating the illegal clones together with a bibliography referencing previous cases.

It was simply a matter of running through the list and sending the documents. Routine police work.

The All-Org Ethics Bureau on Bestos replied first, with a nondescript form letter thanking Franco for bringing this matter to their attention. Franco suspected that a complaint wasn't going to be coming from them any time soon.

While he wondered what made them so hesitant to go after East, a second message came in, marked for urgent attention and counter-signed by the Adjudicator General of the Amalgamated Public Security Services.

It was a complaint, filed by the Committee on Cloning Ethics, with an attached warrant for Drazen East's immediate arrest.

"Gotcha."

Franco paged Jolt.

"What is it?" She sounded like she had been sobbing.

"We have a warrant. Let's get the bastard."

Miracles

Jinx floated in deep vacuum. Her body had stopped metabolizing oxygen a few minutes ago.

She watched Peter as he floated in the void. Her mind had reached out to him, and recoiled as she felt the vast amounts of information flowing through his consciousness.

He was in a trance, a deep one. Two glowing balls of matter formed near him.

Matter and anti-matter. He was sorting virtual particles.

She was not scared by the void that surrounded them. She watched his mind, felt it racing, and rejoiced.

Something was happening.

She couldn't follow what he was doing, but she knew.

She watched him, felt around the edges of his mind -- and felt fear.

Her mind was powerful, a dreadful thing of parts that devoured souls. She could read a mind like a billboard, and a community of minds like a book. She had seen, contemplated, and done things that would break the strongest minds.

She watched something impossible. His mind was like a machine, a terrible all-consuming mechanism, a fever dream apparatus that grew twisting, turning, pulsing, and grinding until it consumed all of reality.

He was gambling with the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and winning handily. From nothing, there was something.

Ever increasing amounts of something condensed from nothingness.

She felt a thrill when he began synthesizing strangelets.

Dopants for a weak-force band-gap, they were the basis for neutrino circuitry.

Hours passed.

The anti-matter cloud collapsed. He has pressed it into a geometric point, constructing a tiny black hole that sputtered with decay radiation as he used it to stress the vacuum to create ever stranger constructs.

The structure beside it was no longer a cloud. Her suspicions were correct -- a spade-shaped starship took form next to the proton-sized gravitational singularity. The pieces fell into place.

The singularity boiled away, and the copy of the Nightstalker remained. He seemed to waken from his trance, and floated into the ship.

It approached her, and the outer door of an airlock opened.

She thought, "Stupid powerful." He had re-created what he had lost, when he could have made anything. The phrase seemed to fit.

She drifted into the ship, and the outer door closed. She braced for impact, and absorbed the impact of the drifting vessel.

Systems where slowly coming on-line. The inner door opened to a darkened corridor, but the lights turned on after she walked a few meters.

She readjusted to breathing, and approached the bridge.

The door opened automatically.

He was sitting in the command chair, and turned to face her.

"Welcome aboard." His voice was tired. He looked exhausted. "What do you want to call it?"

She very briefly considered saying something sarcastic. Part of her wanted to cut him down to size, reject the impossible thing she had just experienced.

"I-- I don't know." She thought for a moment. "The Black Watch?"

He smiled. "All right. I've generated a new key-pair. We'll be on-line in a few minutes. Wanna take helm?"

The banality of his request shocked her a little, but she had to admit that she was looking forward to piloting a copy of the Nightstalker.

She sat down at her station, and turned to him.

"You know -- if you're just going to make a copy of your old ship, you should do something to make it different. Like a different color or something."

His eyes narrowed. "Hmm. It is a pirate copy..."

He snapped his fingers. The hull turned black, except for a skull motif on the blade of the spade.

Jinx giggled.

Peter dead-panned, "It was that or flames."

They laughed for a few moments, and as they quieted down again, Peter slumped in the command chair.

Jinx became serious.

"So, what do we do now?"

Peter looked like he was about to fall asleep.

"Now?"

He paused for a beat.

"We find this god person and kick his ass."

Problems

"They're just... floating in space." The Eye had just taken her position at the helm, and was scanning the immediate area around the Nightstalker.

"Get us the hell out of here. Before they decide to attack." Jolt sat down in the command chair.

"Destination?" Thresher plugged himself into the engineering console.

There was a long pause. Jolt rubbed her temples, as if she had a headache.

"Bestos 3."

"Bestos 3? " Thresher sounded skeptical.

"Yeah. We'll be landing on the surface." Jolt looked grim.

"They're still not doing anything."

"Are they dead?"

"No."

"Turn the ship around. Prepare for jump."

The engines engaged, and the Nightstalker entered hyperspace.

The bridge was quiet. Jolt looked like she was about to cry.

Thresher looked up from his panel. "Captain?"

"What?"

"We have a visitor. It's the First Mate."

Executive Officer Benito Franco was waiting in the antechamber to the bridge. He took a moment to arrange his mane as the door opened. He squared his shoulders and entered the bridge.

"What the hell is going on here?" Benito strutted toward the command chair.

Jolt sulked. "What are you talking about?" She tried to ignore the young officer.

"Was there a court-martial, and nobody invited me?"

There was a brief silence. Jolt turned her head and looked Benito in the eye.

"No. There was an immediate threat to the safety of the ship and its crew."

"Really."

"There was a murder on board."

"All right. That's a good reason -- which you could have presented at a military tribunal."

"I've got a right -- a right to protect my crew."

"From another crew member?"

"From anybody or anything."

Benito was cut short; he looked carefully at the woman sitting in the command chair. He took a deep breath.

"You're doing it wrong."

Jolt looked at him with a steady, unresponsive gaze. "Then someone will just have to file a complaint."

"Captain Jennifer East, the standard Military Contract allows me to take command of this vessel in the event the commanding officer is unable or unwilling to assume the responsibilities of command--"

"You little bastard." Jolt scowled at Benito. "You're invoking Executive Privilege? On me!?"

"Yes. I am in command of this vessel, effective now."

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye scowled at him, but Benito didn't back down.

"Now -- explain to me why we are flying to Bestos 3."

"My father. My father made the clones." Jolt stared Benito down. "He's been doing it for as long as I remember. He'll take bits and pieces and splice them together into whatever the customer wants. He took a dormant sample from one of the Seven Sisters--"

"Who?" Benito was listening carefully.

"A Reyll mutant-rights group. They tried to fight the prejudice against people born with a word of power encoded in their genes. He took a tissue sample from the Kebakika line, and cloned my mother."

Benito was shocked. "Isn't that illegal?"

"He was in and out of prison my whole life. That didn't stop the customers from coming."

Jolt paused for a moment and looked away. She held back tears.

When she looked at Benito again, her expression was hard and pitiless.

"So we're going to take that bastard down."

Does It Hurt You When I Do This?

Jolt sat on a bed in sickbay and fidgeted. She was tense.

The door slid open, and Arsenal and Jinx walked in. Arsenal was carrying a heavy cable with two alligator clips, and Jinx carried a small plastic case.

"Captain? Are you ready?"

Jolt grimaced. "Sure. Make it quick." She stretched her arm towards Arsenal, and he clipped one end of the grounding cable to a metal stub on the sleeve of her costume. She inspected the connection, then pulled up the bottom of her shirt to expose her red-furred belly.

"Is that enough?"

Jinx glanced briefly at Jolt. "That will do."

Jinx opened the case and removed what appeared to be a coiled hose and set it on the table. The tip of one end of the hose was a shiny hollow spike of metal ringed with tiny cutting blades.

Jolt took a long look at the metal spike.

"Just a moment." Jinx retrieved a sample jar from the case, and affixed the other end of the hose to a plug on the jar's cap. She looked at Jolt with a sidelong glance. "I'll be taking a sample of your abdominal epithelial tissue. You might want some anesthetic."

Jolt nodded curtly. "Forget about it. I'm on duty, and need a clear head."

Jinx grinned evilly just out of Jolt's view. "This might sting a bit."

She pressed a button on the remote, and the plastic and steel-tipped plastic snake sprang to life. The tiny blades spun up with a high-pitched whine.

"Lie down and hold still." Jolt complied, stiffly and nervously.

Jolt's eyes widened as the device slithered towards her belly. The sound of tiny spinning blades rang in her ears. She clenched her fist as the snake-like apparatus reared back and struck.

The metal head bored into Jolt's belly, near her umbilical cord. She winced -- it hurt. The clear plastic tube of the device was colored red with a thin stream of blood. A few drops fell into the collection jar.

Jinx scowled. "Whoops."

Jolt fought her panic, clenched her teeth and arched her back. More blood spattered into the collection jar. Jinx maintained a forced neutral expression. "Stop that. I'll need you to hold still."

Arsenal scowled at Jinx, and whispered under his breath, "That's enough."

Jinx straightened up. "I'm in position now. Acquiring sample."

A tiny gobbet of epithelial tissue was chewed away by the endoscope, propelled down the tube, and deposited in the specimen jar.

Jolt looked like she wanted to cry.

"I'm pulling out now."

The endoscope withdrew, Jolt cried out in pain as it cauterized the wound in her belly. She curled up into a ball and scowled at Jinx.

Jinx detached the sample jar and walked towards Arsenal, who was also scowling. "Thank you for your cooperation, Captain. We'll get right on the analysis!"

"You do that." Jolt covered her oozing wound with her hand.

Arsenal looked helplessly at Jolt. "Do you need any help?"

"Get out." Jolt lay down on the bed. "I'll be fine."

A few moments later, in Arsenal's stateroom, Jinx started the analysis of the tissue sample. Arsenal stood, leaning against the bulkhead. He scowled and looked at the refrigerator.

"Done. This should be quick." She turned to Peter and noticed that he was ignoring her.

"What's wrong?"

"What did you think you were doing back there?"

"It was just a bit of fun."

"Fun?!" Peter was angry and hurt. "What, hurting people is 'fun' for you?"

"Hurting the deserving?" Jinx sneered. "Oh, yes."

"What did she do--"

"Come on, robot boy. Come out and say it. 'My boss is a bitch.' You can do that, can't you?" Jinx stared down Peter, until Peter turned away.

"You're all a bunch of self-righteous idiots," he mumbled. He turned to Jinx. "And that means you, too. You don't care who you hurt, or what you destroy, as long as it's you who comes out on top."

Jinx started to speak, but an increasingly angry Peter interrupted her.

"I know why she is the way she is. She's in charge, and that means that everyone is constantly second-guessing every decision she makes. She's responsible--"

Jinx interrupted him. "She makes bad decisions. And she hates you, Peter. You have no idea how much she hates you." Jinx stood up and took Peter's hand. "You're a disruption and an irritant. Your very existence undermines her, because you're powerful and competent and worst of all -- you make her look bad."

"Yeah, well -- let's talk about competence, shall we?" Peter looked sad and angry. "You discover some crack-brained plan to turn superheroes into living weapons, and what do you do about it? Did you ever actually talk to--"

"Shh. Why do you think I'm here?"

They both looked at the refrigerator. "She--"

"--was created to be a victim. I'm sorry."

"We need to get rid of the body."

"No." Jinx squeezed Peter's hand and looked sad. "I'm so sorry."

"What?"

"No matter what happens next, I want you to know something -- I may never become whatever you think a good person is, but I am trying to do the right thing."

Peter's doorbell chimed. "It's time," whispered Jinx.

He opened the door to his stateroom. Thresher's bulky cyborg body filled the door frame. The Eye and Jolt stood behind him. "Hey, bro. I heard yelling. How are you two doing?"

"Great, we're--"

"Mind if we come in?" asked the Eye.

"It's--" Peter stammered.

Thresher pushed past Peter, and took a long look around the stateroom. Jolt and the Eye followed.

Jinx sat down at the workstation and looked at the screen. "We're not quite done yet."

"Oh, really," Jolt remarked. "I can't wait to find out the results."

The Eye positioned herself between Peter and the refrigerator.

"I know -- I get us some brews while we wait." Thresher walked to the refrigerator and pulled the door open.

The corpse of Jinx's clone fell out of the compartment with a dull thump.

"Oh, now that's awkward," quipped the Eye.

Jolt approached Peter. She looked enraged. "What the hell, hero?"

"I--" Thresher came up behind the stammering Peter and pinned both his arms behind his back.

"I don't care. I think dealing with a woman was just a little too much for you. You lost your temper and killed her." Jolt wheeled around and pointed at Jinx, who looked up from her workstation. "And then you brought her back--"

"That's stupid! I can't resurrect the dead!"

Jolt closed in on Peter. "That's my problem with you. I have no idea what you're capable of."

"I didn't kill her."

"I don't care."

Jinx drummed her fingers on the desk in front of her. "I have the results. The Captain's sample is a fifty percent match--"

"Yes. That's right. I know who made those cloned demigods -- I know that sequence of forced-growth genes." Jolt bore down on Jinx, who recoiled. "Daddy grew mommy in a vat. All the other kids made fun of me--"

"What?" Peter tried to pull away from Thresher and was restrained.

"My daddy. It's my daddy. He made them." Jolt shook with rage, and turned to Peter. "I want you off my ship."

"I didn't--"

"I don't want to hear it. Murder and necromancy, on board my ship -- I don't care what you have to say. It doesn't mat--"

"Of course it matters," Peter complained, almost whispering.

"Let go of him." Jolt turned to face him, looking like she was ready to start a fight.

Peter turned around to look at Thresher as he let go of his arms. The cyborg's face was an expressionless mask.

Arsenal took a step forwards, facing Jolt.

"Go ahead. Do it."

Jolt delivered the challenge with a growl. She looked angry, angrier than Peter had ever seen her before.

"No." Peter's arms stayed by his side.

"I want you and your sex toy off my ship, now!"

"Who, me?" Jinx. "What did I ever do to you?" She sounded theatrically hurt.

A moment later, they stood in the threshold of the port airlock.

Peter was shaking. He was trying very hard not to be afraid.

Jinx seemed calm. She was still very obviously play-acting that she a clueless innocent.

"I've been fired...." Peter's head sank as he said the words.

"Worse things happen every day." Jinx smiled. "Maybe you can file a complaint when we get back to civilization."

"What's the matter with you?"

"Lots of things." She reached out to hold Peter's hand. "Like when I was out in that box, and it was so cold, and I started to forget what it was like to breathe... that messed me up."

Peter's touched her shoulder, pulling her closer. She looked up into his eyes.

"But I'm getting better."

The airlock opened.

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.

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?"