Cosmic Debris

Not long ago, he was the superhero Arsenal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What? What?!"

She closed her eyes, her face contorted with fury.

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

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

"STOP THAT!" Jinx was apoplectic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was defiant, and he was looking at her.

She switched the monitor off.

When Peter Met Jinx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where am I? What is this place?"

A distorted voice boomed through the mists.

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

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

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

To no avail.

The Hidden Base

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone had teleported into the room.

The Show Must Go On

The episode began, the well-known theme tune to "Honor Guard" played on your viewing device as a distant shot of the Nightstalker, recorded by an interrociter camera feeling reflected light from some three light years away on Sedgewick Station through a nanoscopic crack in hyperspace, zoomed in to show the stricken garden spade shaped vessel, and zoomed further to an airlock on the right side of the hull.

Thresher stepped out of the airlock and into deep space, extended his right arm, and fired a grabber on a trailing line from his bulky mechanical forearm. The spongy ball clung to the hull of the Nighstalker a few hundred meters ahead, where greebles sparked beneath a blackened and blasted section of grey hull plating.

He reeled in the line, pulling himself along the hull. In theory, Thresher could have used his thrusters to fly over to the damaged section, or simply walked along the hull. In practice, tethers looked cool and were marginally safer.

The cyborg approached the damaged section of hull. Neural impulses that, under more hospitable conditions, would have been speech were converted into data and sent back to the ship.

"Thresher here. I've got some serious arcing under this panel -- I don't think isolating the damaged conduit helped."

"Understood. I'll tell the Chief that the starboard control bus is flaky." It was Jolt's watch; she was on the bridge, coordinating repairs.

Thresher's metallic feet locked on to a section of undamaged hull and his mechanical left hand folded into his forearm and a chainsaw blade extended from the back of his hand. Working carefully, he used it to remove the brown and black mottled section of damaged hull, exposing a partially melted junction between two networks of conduits. Thresher surveyed the damage. "No way we're landing like this. These pretty sparks mean we're leaking gas."

"The only drydock in jump range is down Suburbia's gravity well. It's the East Pole or we spend the next weeks getting our sorry asses towed back to Sedgewick Station." The First Mate of the Nightstalker was a dashing young Fleet officer, one Benito Franco, fresh from the Executive Officers' Academy. His stentorian delivery of damage reports and gung-ho military attitude made him a significant supporting character.

He turned to Arsenal, who was sitting in a chair, reviewing his notes on a small handheld terminal. "Can you get us into the atmosphere with your force field?"

"Yes, sir, I can. The most conservative approach would be to provisionally patch the hull breaches and try to turn everything off in the damaged areas. I'll surround the Nightstalker with a screen and we'll do a simple powered descent in police airspace. That way, even if my screen should fail, we'd be able to make a controlled surface landing."

"Thresher says we have deep internal damage. Those pirates really kicked the crap out of the Nightstalker." Jolt was sitting in the command chair in the center of the bridge, which she turned to face Arsenal and the First Mate.

Jolt was a mutant -- the surface of her body produced vast amounts of static electricity. She wore a skintight matrix of actuators, sensors, and capacitors embedded in a suit that contained her electrical discharges and enhanced her strength and reflexes and powered an antigravity belt and thruster pack. She was a marvel of plastic surgery, an impossibly statuessque perennial pin-up, unapproachable and untouchable.

"I have another option. I believe I can patch the ship's state." Arsenal paged through his notes.

"What do you mean?" Jolt was impatient.

Arsenal continued. "Before Commander Cody commandeered the Nightstalker, I was practicing using my scanning powers on the ship. I discovered something interesting -- objects have a kind of suprisingly memorable being-song. If I can remember a little bit of the song, and play it back into the original matter, I can restore its previous thermodynamic state."

"Boo. Technobabble." Jolt shrugged.

Arsenal looked a little peeved. "I did my best to make it acessible. I originally wanted to call my object-memories a being equation I use to interpolate the state equation--"

"It doesn't help." Jolt drummed her gloved fingers on the armrest of the captain's chair.

Arsenal looked at his notes briefly, then looked up. "I can restore the ship to its state before it was commandeered."

"You're kidding!" Jolt looked surprised. "Well, why not? Let's give it a try!"

"There are risks. I've never patched state on anything as complex as the Nightstalker. I suggest we treat it as an emergency field repair, and have the ship thoroughly tested on the surface." Arsenal looked up from his notes.

"Sounds good. Do it now!" Jolt looked impatient.

"It might not work. The ship could be left in a state our technicians cannot repair." Arsenal flipped through his notes, desperately trying to summarize.

Jolt interrupted him, calling the Eye in engineering. "Hey, Eye! Are we gonna die in the next half-hour?"

The Eye appeared on the viewscreen. She was a lithe female with cream-colored fur. Her eye-sockets were covered with mirrored implants, and a large, oval amulet in the form of an eye was attached to her upper torso. "My sources say no."

Jolt turned to Arsenal. "Just do it."

"Very well." Arsenal fell into a trance.

The lights dimmed and then began to flicker madly. A strange, irregular vibration shook the starship. A few moments later, the lights went out.

Arsenal looked up from his chair, a somber look on his face. "Oh, crap."