Arm The Homeless!

"He said what!?" The Eye was incredulous.

"He said M-Seven was arming the homeless population." Jolt led her team down the hallway to Demonslayer's holding cell.

"With what?" Thresher was also skeptical.

"He sent me a picture of one of the local hot rods with some guns stuck on the winglets. It looks really goofy." Jolt was almost laughing at the thought. "I let him go off for a while until he realizes what a dumb idea that is."

Something briefly bothered the Eye, but it passed as they came to Demonslayer's cell. A cop in armor stood guard, and relaxed visibly when Honor Guard showed up. He saluted.

"Captain Kelrast is inside with the prisoner."

"Relieved, trooper. We'll take over from here." Jolt watched as the cop walked back to his quarters. The door to Demonslayer's cell slid open, catching briefly before it opened all the way.

Jolt strode in, followed by The Eye and Thresher. Orest Kelrast sat in a folding chair at the foot of Demonslayer's bed; he looked at the heroes with a combination of weariness and wariness. Demonslayer lay on the bed, looking like a corpse at an open-casket funeral, covered by a plain brownish blanket.

"Captain Kelrast -- were you aware that a team of super-villains was active in the area?" Jolt fixed Orest with a withering glare.

"M-Seven's a charity, as far as I can tell. They made my job easier. They took care of the transients, and kept them out of our faces. We don't have the resources to deal with those druggies and losers out there." Kelrast was defiant.

Jolt continued. "We have reason to believe that there has been an unusual amount of pirate activity lately."

"Unusual? No way. A lot of ships pass through here -- and if you have a lot of ships, you get a lot of piracy. It's always been a problem. If the Fleet didn't expend all its resources patrolling the spaceport, there might be less pirate activity in orbit."

"Captain Kelrast, I have no choice but to place you under arrest for aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy --" Jolt was furious.

"What!? No way, I've got nothing to do with them!" Orest's resolve dissolved into animal panic. He stood and gestured frantically towards the Eye. "Why don't you let Psychic Chick over there read my mind -- I'm innocent!"

"The name's 'The Eye', and I'm afraid I can't do that. Probing minds is dangerous and error-prone -- and therefore forbidden, except under controlled conditions." The Eye kept her composure, but only barely.

"Don't worry, Orest Kelrast -- they're professionals at the interrogation centers. If you want your mind read, they'll do it right." Jolt took charge of the situation as Orest sank back into his chair. "You are, as of now, relieved of duty. Your replacement is on a dropship with re-inforcements in case Demonslayer's comrades attack."

Orest Kelrast, no longer Captain, shrunk into his chair and began to tremble slightly. "You can't do this to me...."

Thresher placed a hand on Orest's slumped shoulder. "We can, and we did. You hate your job, and you did it poorly. Consider this an intervention."

We're A Happy Family

Arsenal walked out into the impound yard and began to take stock of the captured vessels. One by one, he gestured towards the impounded space-ships and levitated them to an open patch of concrete. Soon he had a line of six nearly identical one-man vessels.

He retrieved his hand-held computer from his belt and began to examine the craft carefully. After a few moments, he began to disassemble two of them, taking pictures of their internal components with his computer's built-in camera.

The vessels were modular, constructed from bits and pieces linked together with general-purpose connectors. Additional, unused connectors were present in the interiors of the one-man space-ships; he was particularly interested in the connectors on the underside of the vessels' stubby wings.

His next stop was a battered, worn terminal in the hallway of the police station. He logged in with his Honor Guard credentials, and connected to the regional police blotter database. He sketched out a simple query on the terminal screen, and synced a table of ships recently lost to pirates in the Suburbia system to his hand-held.

He stopped for a moment when he saw the record for a freighter loaded with bug bombs, lost with all hands. It was flagged with a marker indicating suspected paranormal activity. He followed the key to a list of known paranormal operatives in the area.

Four hits came up -- Demonslayer, Killotron, Bearcat, and Jinx Bubastis had all been sighted repeatedly in the last five cycles. Demonslayer's picture had her in her exoskeleton with an extra pair of robotic arms that helped her wield her energy shield and sword. Arsenal briefly boggled at how different her normal M.O. was from the spellcaster his team had just fought. Recalling the immediate hits for munitions thefts, he knew Killotron would be fully armed, possibly with tacnukes. Jinx had attacked several ships, and there were forensic and psychic traces confirmed on several scuttled and looted cargo vessels. He glanced at Bearcat's picture and called Jolt.

"Ma'am, we have a problem. Our Demonslayer may be a fake."

"What?" Jolt seemed irritated.

"There are current surveillance camera records with sightings of Demonslayer, Bearcat, and Killotron, tons of pirate activity, missing nukes, paranormal activity in the system. I think something big is happening."

"What does this have to do with a fake Demonslayer?" Jolt was impatient.

"Demonslayer usually fights with a four-armed exoskeleton and magic weapons. There's paranormal pirate activity--"

"You think the old woman we have in holding is someone else?"

"It's possible. There's a whole team of them." Arsenal flipped through the records, reading quickly. "They call themselves M-Seven. Officially, they are a charitable organization operating homeless shelters in the area around the East Pole."

"You told me you would check in with the crew working on the Nighstalker. What are you doing?" Jolt was angry.

Arsenal shrunk back, rebuked.

"Why aren't you where you said you'd be?"

"I was examining the vessels in the impound yard."

"Why that?"

"They seem a little over-engineered to be hot rods." Arsenal was rather flustered.

"Uh-huh. Arsenal, normal men like big cars with big engines. It makes them feel important, and lets them go into orbit for jobs. Concentrate on finding out what you did to the Nightstalker instead of wasting our time like this. We'll confirm Demonslayer's identity and call for re-inforcements in the meantime. Jolt out."

"Understood. Arsenal out."

Arsenal pocketed his hand-held computer, shook his head, and headed out to the spaceport. As he came outside, he stopped a moment to watch the running lights of the traffic heading out to the orbital factories, circling until they received clearance for orbital insertion. The dance of the running lights fascinated him; he watched a small personal cargo vessel shoot up through the twilight skies, now only lightly streaked with clouds.

He continued to another low concrete bunker across the dusty courtyard. A cop in powered armor stood guard before the entrance; he recognized Arsenal and saluted.

Arsenal descended into a musty corridor whose ceiling was obscured by recently-repaired ductwork. Provisional lights clipped to the walls illuminated the way until he came to a brightly-lit atrium. In the corner, a clone was cleaning the floors; he looked up at Arsenal for a moment, showing a brief flash of recognition that vanished the moment Arsenal stepped into the brightly lit room. The clone returned to his chores.

Arsenal came to a door, which opened automatically. He entered a darkened office, lit by a pair of holographic displays showing various views of the Nightstalker.

The man behind the desk could have been Arsenal's twin brother. He was dressed in loose-fitting grey coveralls, and held up one hand as Arsenal entered the room.

Arsenal took the hint and waited at the corner of the desk as the Type 350 clone saved his work and looked up at his visitor. For a brief moment, Arsenal and the man behind the desk sized each other up, exchanging subtle cues of posture and patterns of eye contact in a fraction of a second, instinctual behavior conditioned in the clone vats. Preliminary handshake completed, they hastily introduced themselves, and the man at the desk rose a little from his seat and extended his hand. "Hello. I'm Randall Cat -- chief of operations at the shipyard here. You?"

Arsenal shook Randall's hand, and Randall sat back down. "My name is Peter Cat. I used to work on the plasma weapons design team, now I'm attached to Honor Guard, codename Arsenal."

Formalities satisfied, Randall leaned back and looked his twin brother in the eye. "So -- what can I do for you?"

"How's the Nighstalker looking?" Arsenal folded his hands in front of him, trying not to invade his colleague's work area any more than he absolutely had to.

"Great! I was expecting all kinds of battle damage, but it looks really good. The initial tests have all been positive. The only big anomaly is some missing time on the ship's log, so I'm having the staff run a burn-in cycle on the computers. Assuming nothing strange happens, you should be good to go in about ten standard hours."

"That's good." Arsenal smiled a little.

"What's wrong with your team-mates? They seem to think you sabotaged the ship."

Arsenal paused for a moment, and decided to change the subject. "Have you had a look at the ships in the impound yard?"

"We're understaffed and overworked out here. Until Captain Kelrast gives us a work order, my staff has enough to do as is." Randall seemed genuinely sorry, and gave Peter a second glance.

"I've taken some pictures of the hot-rods captured in raids -- the design is... interesting."

Randall smiled a little. "I'm curious. I can give you half an hour."

Arsenal placed his hand-held computer on the desk, and Randall connected to it and began reviewing the holograms. Randall immediately fixated on the connectors under the winglets. "That looks like a weapons mount."

"That's what I thought, but it's a little out of my area."

Randall pointed at a series of small receptacles surrounding the connector. "Those are attachment points for a semi-articulated gun mount -- if it were for a storage battery or a cargo pod, they wouldn't bother putting them there."

Arsenal pulled up the cargo manifests of the ships recently lost to piracy. "Check this out. Recent losses include storage batteries, mini jump drives, a consignment of nuclear demolitions charges..."

Randall looked confused. "Bug bombs? Weird. Wouldn't be my first choice to arm a fighter."

Arsenal concurred. "Yeah, and they're no good for piracy -- who wants to loot a contaminated wreck?"

Randall frowned and looked at his desktop clock. "We don't have a whole lot of time. I'm going to make a few assumptions and see what I can put together with the stolen cargo and this spaceframe." Working together, they assembled the parts; Randall filled in the few unknowns from his considerable experience.

Randall leaned back in his chair and squinted at the hologram. "That's... not bad. It'd have about 75% of the specific impulse of a front-line fighter, which means it wouldn't be a sitting duck. It's not something I'd want to fly, but it wouldn't be completely useless in a dogfight."

"How much work would it take to get one of these armed and charged up?" Arsenal copied the simulation data to his hand-held.

"Not too much, the big problem is logistics and process. They'd need some manufacturing capability to make adaptors for the scavenged parts, and lots of space to do the assembly. Listen, I've got some test results coming in now. Can I keep a copy of your data to play with later?"

"Sure. I've got to check in with Jolt. Thanks for your time!" Arsenal left the office as Randall Cat fell back into his work. The junkyard star-fighter disappeared from the holographic displays, and the Nightstalker returned.

Arsenal proceeded back to the courtyard, striding quickly through the corridor until he reached the bunker exit. He tapped the cheap black plastic housing of his computer nervously.

"Jolt, Arsenal here. The Nightstalker will be ready in ten hours."

"That's nice. The woman we captured is Demonslayer, we've confirmed it. A dropship with reinforcements is on the way in case M-Seven tries to break her out."

"I'm going to send you a simulation I put together with the chief of staff -- I think they're building a fleet of star-fighters in the abandonded factories around here. I'd like to see if I can find any evidence around here."

"Good. I think we can manage, just make it quick. Jolt out."

Arsenal paused for a moment, relieved, before he took off into the sky, following the power conduits that stretched off into the distance.

Magnetic Girl Soldier

The corner of the bunker obviously belonged to a young girl. The bedroll was covered with clothes and overstuffed pillows, a mirror was propped against the wall, and an improvised dressing room made from a pair of curtains covered with pins and brooches was set up in the corner.

She walked out from behind her dressing screen, dressed in a simple, military-style body stocking made of brown-green fibers with the strength of steel. She looked at the mirror and frowned; her costume was, in fact, very ugly and drab.

She bore an unmistakable resemblance to Jolt; her fur and mane were the same auburn color, and her face had a similar bone structure.

Well out of her reach hung a black dress decorated with a huge reflective red five-pointed star on a hanger made of metal wire. She gestured towards the dress, and her green eyes began to glow.

The wire hanger resisted for a moment until the magnetic attraction of the young girl's outstretched palm pulled it off the hook on the wall and onto her hand. She relaxed, and her eyes stopped glowing. Her nimble fingers caught the hanger and the dress before it fell.

She pulled on her dress, pulled down on the hem, and looked at herself again in the mirror. She looked a little happier. She put on a pair of high, tight black leather combat boots with metal soles, laced them up, tied a short bright red cape around her neck, took a final look in the mirror, and smiled. She pulled her red hair into a top-knot, took one last look in the mirror, and smiled.

Her eyes glowed again, and she rose from the ground. Turning smartly, she levitated to her two comrades, waiting beneath an overhead light.

Bearcat and Killotron watched her hover towards them. Bearcat turned to Killotron.

"She ever fight before?"

"Yes, comrade, I fear she has."

The girl floated up to look her fellow soldiers in the eye. She pointed to herself and said. "Red Menace. Number Five."

Monkey Trick

The Eye, predictably, made the first move, continuing her tuck and roll while drawing two knives with diamond blades, found her feet and lunged for the hovering spellcaster. In the fraction of a second she was in mid-air, her precognitive senses registered the danger, but gravity and momentum had sealed her fate.

She ran into a ward, a circle of symbols projected onto the ground by Demonslayer's will, that discharged their curse in a corona of coded light. Every nerve in the Eye's body registered pain; her muscles cramped, and she fell to the ground, writhing.

Demonslayer casually ignored the two lightning bolts that crackled past her head and turned to face Thresher. She floated towards him, her hands crackling with malign power. The running lights on Thresher's cyborg body flickered, dimmed, and went out. His internal stabilizing gyro kept him upright for a second before he tipped over to fall on his face. Another pair of lightning bolts whizzed past the hovering Demonslayer, struck her ship, and discharged into the ground. She turned to face down Jolt.

"You play at competence, Jolt -- in reality, you are a fool. You don't know how your powers work, do you? You can't hit me with your lightning because I'm not grounded."

A hand grabbed Demonslayer's left boot.

"What, like this?" said Arsenal, eyes closed, crawling on the ground. Demonslayer hissed as one of Jolt's bolts hit her dead-center, discharging into Arsenal's arm. She fell to the ground and collapsed.

Arsenal sat up and shook his smoking forearm. "Ow."

Demonslayer was lying, still and seemingly unconscious, on the ground. Jolt watched her carefully as Arsenal stood up and blinked his eyes. "Oh good. I can see. I'm gonna go reboot Thresher before he suffocates."

He walked over to his cybernetic comrade, opened a panel in Thresher's chest, and pressed the recessed reset button. Thresher's cybernetic body beeped once, and his running lights came back on.

Jolt scowled at the old woman lying on the ground before her, as the Eye rose to her feet and rubbed her neck.

Jolt said, "All right, let's get her into a holding cell."

A few moments later, Honor Guard met with Orest Kelrast in his office. The Captain was livid.

"What is the matter with you people? We're supposed to hold a spellcaster? How!?"

They were watching a view-screen provisionally attached to the stained grey wall with a few lumps of poisonous-looking neon blue putty. On the screen, Demonslayer lay motionless on a sick bed, dressed in a paper hospital robe. Around her bed, monitoring equipment relayed data to the base's computer systems. A small window inset into the video stream showed her psi activity, heart rate, and respiration, a gently fluctuating set of undulating lines.

The Eye looked at Demonslayer's vital signs and frowned. "I don't see any signs of shock. It looks like she's sleeping. Were there any electrical burns on her body?"

"Nope." Kelrast frowned. "Her skin-suit had a conductive layer. I don't think that lightning bolt did a thing to her."

Jolt looked annoyed. "What? But why did she go down?"

Kelrast snapped, "Who cares!? The problem is, what do we do when she wakes up?"

Arsenal looked at Kelrast coolly. "Let's sedate her and send her up to the star-port on a shuttle. They have proper holding cells and competent staff."

Kelrast's eyes narrowed and he scowled at Arsenal. Arsenal appeared completely oblivious to the fact that he had insulted the Captain. "You arrogant chunk of vat-meat, you're calling me incompetent! Get out of my office!"

Arsenal turned to Jolt. "I'm going to the shipyard, and see how the repairs are coming along."

Jolt nodded curtly, and Arsenal left. Kelrast settled back in his char and said, "Looks like you losers will be staying here and looking after your prisoner. Now get out!"

To Protect and to Serve

"Welcome to the East Pole. Hope you losers brought flashlights."

He was an old, overweight man with grey-flecked fur and a large chunk missing from his pointed right ear. A single gold tooth glittered from his mouth as he smiled a smile completely lacking in warmth and humor, but rich in contempt and mockery. He sat at his desk, covered with papers, before a stained grey wall.

Honor Guard stood in the office of Captain Orest Kelrast, chief of the police base where their vessel, the Nightstalker, was being repaired and tested.

"We haven't been briefed yet." Jolt took charge of the small, ramshackle office, crossing her arms. "What's the situation?"

"You're in the city that shouldn't be. We have two dozen troopers to handle a transient popluation of about 20,000. We've given up on doing much more than patrolling first-line installations." Captain Kelrast leaned back in his chair. "We have neither the staff or the inclination to do much more than that."

"I see." Jolt's eyes narrowed, her brow registered contempt.

The Eye looked up suddenly, and tapped Jolt on the shoulder. In the distance, the report of a huge explosion was a messenger for a low rumbling that gently shook the floor of the squalid office.

Orest Kelrast looked unconcerned. "Wildcat demolitions. Pretty much all the buildings out here are condemned. Sometimes the squatters do the demolition for us."

Arsenal fixed his gaze on the Captain. "How often does this happen?"

The Captain squirmed a little. "About once every cycle. There's been a sharp up-swing since last cycle, too. Seems like every few hours, now."

"What about the squatters?" The Eye looked concerned.

"I'll go see if there are any injured." Arsenal looked up at the ceiling, then rose like a rocket, phasing through the ceiling.

"Hey! Watch it! I just had the roof fixed last week." Kelrast was startled and annoyed.

"Don't mind him. I've taken the liberty of making a copy of your recent police blotter. We'll be seeing you." Jolt turned to leave the office, and Thresher and the Eye followed.

"Listen, if you capes wanna swoop in and save the day, knock yourselves out. We could use the help." Kelrast sank into his chair as Thresher closed the door behind him.

Meanwhile, Arsenal spotted the rising plume of dust from the demolition. He paused for a moment, floating in mid-air, as his implant signalled an incoming transmission.

"Arsenal, this is Jolt. We're in the meeting room at the station. Let us know if you see anything."

"Jolt -- I've spotted the detonation site. No rescue beacons, but I've got a mark..."

A few blocks away, a candy-colored one-man spaceship with a huge spoiler took off on a low-altitude course.

"...intercepting, a one man spacecraft, no running beacons, no ID..." Arsenal picked a vector that would put him directly in front of the accelerating vessel.

The pilot spotted the flying super-hero, and pulled up sharply, gunning the engines. Arsenal adjusted his course. "...he's making a run for it!"

Arsenal pulled up behind the rising spaceship, gradually closing the distance as it tried to reach orbit. As he closed in on the vessel, the engines suddenly stopped. "I've shut down his drive. I'm taking him in!"

Arsenal grabbed the spoiler of the space-ship and maneuvered it into a gradual descent. Jolt radioed in, "All right. We'll meet you in the impound yard. Jolt over and out!"

Outside the base in the impound yard, a half-dozen ships very much like the one Arsenal slowly guided onto a free spot sat, rusting. Jolt stood, her fists sparking with a coronal discharge. The Eye stood close by her, as Thresher extended one of his chainsaws and radioed the vessel.

"Come out, kid, before I have to cut you out!"

The Eye dropped into a crouch, waiting to roll out of the line of sight. Jolt registered her alarm, and her laser ionizers powered up.

The canopy opened, and Honor Guard saw an old woman, wearing a mask with painted-on eyes. Arsenal descended to help her out of the vessel, and she gestured towards him, dismissively.

Arsenal fell to the ground, clutching his eyes. "I'm blind! I'm blind!"

The old woman rose in the air, her hands crackling with eldritch energy.

Demonslayer looked upon Honor Guard, and said --

"If you catch it, can you kill it?"

This Could Be Anywhere

The East Pole, now in crepuscular autumn light that would last for seven cycles, was a drab gray expanse of buildings, many abandoned, some hosting small packs of squatters who lit fires for cooking, warmth and light. The columns of smoke from their shelters rose straight up slowly to be driven away by the planetary jet stream.

The former site of a warehouse, long since burned to the ground, was now a collection of tents, forming a fragile sort of fortification. On the side facing the causeway, a half-dozen sleek space-craft were parked in front of the tent city, the vessels garishly decorated with bright, primary-color paint-jobs and huge spoilers.

A seventh vessel parked in the lot, and a young man in an improvised flight suit stepped out of the cockpit. He did not remove his helmet, and proceeded to the ring of gray-green tents.

Just inside the tents, a tattered collection of cast-off people slept on mats, as a huge view-screen blared a soap opera set in the prosperous and temperate equatorial regions of Suburbia, where the wealthy controlled vast manors and squabbled among themselves. On the walls were posters in primary colors, decorated with slogans like "PEOPLE ARE NOT PRODUCTS" and "LIVE AGAIN", stylized upraised fists, and a simple, squiggly sigil, an M and a 7, arranged to look as if the right descender on the M were a lightning bolt.

It was a simple logo; other posters encouraged residents of the shelter to spread the word by spray-painting it on abandonded buildings. Many had done exactly this.

A burly, bear-like older male watched the shelter. He waved the young man thorough to the inner courtyard of the tent city.

The young man bowed his head as the tent flaps opened and he saw the communal fire-pit in the middle of the courtyard. Here the fellowship feasts were held, where the lost and the lonely taught and sang songs forgotten generations ago and learned the strange language still remembered in fragments by their great-grandparents.

He proceeded around the firepit, crossing it on the left side. A flap opened on the tent facing him, held by an absurdly large hand ending in triangular black claws.

While the guard in the common room was large, the guard in the temple was gigantic; if he were physically capable of standing fully erect for more than a few moments, he would have easily been twice the height of his colleague.

"Thu come inn. I am Bearcat. Da mithstresh ish waitling."

The monster's fangs gave his speech a lisping quality. His eyes were gentle, but his face was a rough parody of the young man's, with heavy brows and powerful jaw muscles. The young man hesitated for a moment, but quickly regained his composure and entered the tent.

Bearcat nodded directly to the camera, and the floor descended into a hangar-like undergound complex. It was dark, illuminated only by overhead spots. Outside a polka-dot grid of yellowish light, the hall was in deepest darkness.

A voice came from that darkness, speaking an alien tongue.

"Pee my nah ghey peh zhnolazh. Nah dey medzh yo nagada. Djodo mah ghey?"

Convenient sub titles were added in post-production.

(You are not the one, but you will do nicely. We are being watched, secrecy is paramount. Do you understand?)

The young man hesitated for a moment, and then spoke.

"Umm. Snow my a delidoh. Nop peh-ha..." The young man struggled to find a word, and before he could stop himself, he said "...umm."

(Yes, proceed. I am a carrier of a message. How can I -- yes, proceed.)

A light came on in the darkness. An old woman sat on a folding chair, wearing a remarkable hat; a skullcap of bone-colored cloth with a veil in the back and two flaps, flipped down over the eyes. The flaps were decorated with a simple, stylized pattern of an eye in black ink.

"It is regrettable that Corporate culture keeps you from your proper tongue. A better hesitation word is 'erm'. In addition, forgive me for not removing my hat. It is for dreamingfor which I sit in the dark. You, of course, need not remove yours."

The young man was chastened, and sunk his head. "I apologize, Demonslayer. Honor Guard is coming! They will be landing soon, near here."

"I am aware of this. Don't panic. It is not your concern." Demonslayer sat back in her chair.

As Bearcat came up behind the young man, a second form emerged from the darkness with heavy, metallic footsteps. It was a robot, a very large one, another parody of the Fe Arran form in shiny alloy, curves and angles.

Its had two glowing yellow lights where the eyes should have been; they glowed like a campfire, flickering to orange, and were strangely mesmerizing.

"Today I salute you, reckless youth facing death. Know now it awaits you, empty space takes your breath."

"Very pretty, Killotron. Now shut up before he wets himself." Demonslayer reclined back into a sleeping position. "Bearcat, see him out. Pleased to meet thee."

Approximately one thousand kilometers above their heads, the Nightstalker began its descent. The hull, for what it was worth, was pristine.

Jolt was still in command, and did her best not to look nervous. To her right, the First Mate scanned the rest of the crew. Thresher didn't need an acceleration chair, but the Eye and Arsenal did.

The Eye was optimistic, but Arsenal was badly shaken. He had restored the ship to its former state, but not completely; the state of the internal registers in the ship's computers no longer matched the data in memory. Every single system failed, nearly simultaneously.

Nearly everyone agreed that while the superficial damage was gone, the Nightstalker still needed some time planetside to ensure that critical systems were still working. Feeling guilty, Arsenal resolved that he would not make the same mistake again.

Suburbia loomed large below, and the sphere gradually became a horizon. A powered descent down a military corridor began, and the crew was tense.

It was over rather soon. The star-ship dove through the sheath of insubstantial flame, entered the frigid upper atmosphere, fell beneath the clouds decelerating as the planet's gravity began to clash with the artificial gravity aboard the Nightstalker.

A few moments later, the spade-shaped starship hovered over the military starbase, and, silently, descended to the cheers of a waiting fire crew.

"All crew, prepare to disembark." Jolt relaxed visibly, and Honor Guard filed out of the bridge to the dull gray landscape of urban ruin in which they would be spending the next cycle.

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."