“How are you doing,” my mother back on Triton would sometimes ask me. I’d reply, “I’m doing a classic study in quiet desperation, or a quiet study in classic desperation.” After all, it’s really the same thing. “I miss you.”From the journal of Cyan Lianas, Col. Commander Tritonian Guard, IY 1437

Ok, it’s me again. I’m not writing about a fictional empire set in a technologically advanced future this time. Just me in the here and now. I thought I’d check in and give up an update.

It’s raining outside…a lot.

Work’s going relatively well, I just met with two nice ladies from a managed home healthcare program here in Abilene that think television advertising is just the thing to get the word out about the services they offer to the old and unhealthy. I agree with them and suggest they invest in some web advertising to reach the younger audiences that are in a position to seek help for their elderly relatives.

Whatever.

So I’ve got three clients now that are on the books back at the station, which means I can breath a sigh of relief, after all “…a salesman’s only worth the numbers he can bring into the office,” I’m told. As though it really means anything about the person because it of course doesn’t. Anything above zero makes my hire a worthwhile endeavor…I guess. Commodities and futures if you ask me.

Speaking of worthwhile endeavors, I’ve been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut lately. It’s something to do to pass the time, but I find myself attracted to the serious humor underlying the themes of his books; his commentary on American life in this post-modern world. His science-fiction undercurrent helps to ease me into this genre of storytelling since this time last week I was finishing up an ongoing series chronicling the cyclilcal nature of power, betrayal and war…set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” I went from Star Wars to Schlactenhauf Fünf, or Slaughterhouse Five in less than eighteen hours, talk about culture shock. Lightsabers and the Force to atom bombs and Allied Powers in less than a day. To be honest, the difference is almost negligible from a studied perspective.

I’m supplementing my daily Vonnegutian regiment with tales of Marvel’s recently-ended Civil War series, which I refused to buy as a real comics event and am now enjoying after the fact as a Trade Paperback investment. Hey, it’s all political commentary if you ask me. You see in Civil War, there’s a piece of passed legislation called the “Superhuman Registration Act.” which was supposed to remedy the poison of an accidental explosion killing about 612 innocents in Stamford, Connecticut by a group of poorly trained hero wannabe’s attempt to take down a group of supervillains trying to get by in obscurity there. Public outcry prompted congress to propose that all cape and maskers reveal their identity to the federal government and submit to formal training like Black Ops specialist or something like that by the stroke of midnight on a specific registration day. At 12:00:01, ante meridian all unregistered heroes would become enemy combabtants in their own country.

Sound familiar? It’s all political commentary of course if you ask me. Families are split because of the act, super teams like the Avengers are undermined by the lack of support of roughly half the current members and there you have it: a civil war of super hero scale complete with slogans like “disagreement is not disloyalty,” and “…not my country.”

It’s still raining outside. Whatever.

Jacen Solo, the little-publicized fictional son of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, aka Han and Leia Solo, became a monster comparable to his grandfather, the esteemed Lord Vader in only five books. It all started with a desire to bring order to a chaotic Galactic Alliance, the GA; and his belief in an idea of Absolutes. It continued with the development and implementation of a not-too-Secret Police to round up a group of dissenters suspected of terrorist action taken on Coruscant (the capitol planet of the GA.) Jacen Solo was its director. Let it be said that they weren’t too selective, they just rounded up anyone of a certain heritage or homeland living on Coruscant, regardless of any real connection to the bombing and water-supply posioning. Did I mention Jacen is a Jedi? Shouldn’t he of all beings understand that “disagreement is not disloyalty?” I guess not, “not in his galaxy,” anyway.

Jacen’s not a very perceptive or bright boy for all his knowledge and training if you ask me. Then again, I’m an American and I don’t consider us collectively to be very bright or perceptive if you were to ask me, which of course you didn’t.

Yes, it’s still fucking raining outside. Did you know that fuck is the only word in the English language that can be used that way? It’s really one damn versatile word. Try to use the noun form of any other verb, those are called gerunds by the way, in that sentence and you won’t sound too bright at all. “Yes, it’s still jumping raining outside.”

See what I mean?

Rachel ached from hours sitting in the same position at her console staring at various schemata. Her console, the most advanced and sophisticated money could buy, Phoenixfire money, dripped with statistical data streaming in from her think tank arrayed below her lab suite. Frankly, it was all becoming a numbers-blur to her.

“Maris, could you get me another cup of caffe, dark preferably?”

Maris, a humanoid service droid lifted on hovers a few centimeters off of the plush carpets and floated over to fix the requested drink. “Yes mistress.”

Rachel stood, stretched and popped her knuckles all in one uniform motion. She took a look at herself in the mirrored display and fretted with her hair, an unruly mess today; the lab’s humidity controls had been tampered with again. She diverted her attention from her appearance to the bay of research and development droids that filled the pit below her; at least they didn’t need sleep.

“Maris, how many hours have I been at it today?”

“Fifteen hours, mistress. Perhaps you should take a break; maybe a relaxing antioxidant drink and a rest will reduce your stress levels and increase overall productivity.” Maris returned with a steaming mug of caffe prepared just the way Rachel liked it.

“There’s just one more thing I have to do for the day and after that I’ll take your advice.”

Almost like clockwork, the dark-tussled head of Arath Schiller appeared on her comm vidscreen. “Fisk, are you there?”

“Of course Mr. Schiller,” Rachel paused mid-sip. “You’d be wanting that progress report?”

“Yes, I have a presentation for the CEO tomorrow morning and I’d like to write up a full review for the week.”

Rachel tapped a few commands into her keyboard and hit the transmit key, “That should just about do it. The report should be in your data assistant with recommendations for increasing input-output efficiency.” Designing esoteric technology for industrial agencies was a painstakingly long and arduous process, but Rachel appreciated the hands-on approach Arath took to his job as project manager; it meant less red tape for her to go through to get what she needed.

“The simulator’s still running the energy node at 250% efficiency regardless of all modifications for the week; so it would take about the entire industrial complex’s daily energy output to light a utility glow-rod…for a few seconds; not good,” Rachel reported her synopsis of the week’s progress in lackluster tones.

Arath considered the numbers on his assistant before speaking. “Well, try to keep in mind that before we hired your team, the node was just a theory. We’ll get Minos Station up and running under its own power before too long.”

“Your enthusiasm only bolsters my own,” Rachel beamed enthusiasm outwardly, but all she felt was tired and a little amused at Arath’s youthful enthusiasm. He had no idea.

If you only knew. If you only knew!

A few seconds passed by after Arath signed off for the day when a faint signal from the inner-earpiece she wore chimed in her head signaling the completion of her daily download of all lab progress. She tapped in a secret sequence on her keyboard that sent the data-packet over an encrypted channel to her other boss.

Designing esoteric technology for industrial agencies was a very gratifying chore for her, but industrial espionage was her true calling and paid much better.

As Rachel Fisk pondered what to do next with her sudden free time, a text message scrolled across her comm screen.

THE ORO HAS DOCKED IN STATION DRY-DOCK BAY B-16.

It seemed today was going to be very interesting after all.

In between working incessantly and writing crappy space drama, I like to kick back and blog-lurk. That’s how one comes across jewels like Faggoty Attention!

Besides being uproariously funny, str8 boi’s HOT!

Minos was easy to find.

Using the Oro’s standard transponder signal, the bridge crew immediately received a likewise heavily encrypted reception signal with a flight trajectory that would lead them to Minos Station’s B-16 docking bay.

“Cyan,” Verdoux called from her sensor pod suspended a few meters above the deck. “We’re set to land in less than twelve minutes, but I have to say that something about this doesn’t feel right.” A growing alarm had crept into her senses since entering the Minos quadrant of the Belt Zone, almost as if some unseen hand were warning her and the ship back the way it had come. But there was nothing for her back on Ganymede. Not now.

Not all is as it seems.

Verdoux Kai is a young woman of Jovian extraction. Her dark auburn hair squarely accented smoldering facial features like her fierce chestnut-colored gaze that was amplified by tiny flecks of an almost incandescent violet; a trait inherited from her late father Meric Klaurin who passed just weeks before her birth on the lost Saturnian moon of Titan. Shortly after her birth, her mother Celeste Klaurin succumbed to labor injuries and since left in the care of the Klaurin’s closest family friend, Fei-Hon Kai.

The circumstances of her father’s death were kept a mystery to her. A simple spacer’s accident had claimed Meric’s life, along with the rest of his exploratory crew on the desolate abandoned moon and that was it. Fei-Hon had mentioned something about explosive decompression, but would grow irritable and upset whenever her curiosity piqued at the age of fifteen after years of taunting from fellow classmates who had proper mothers and fathers. Unlike them, institute staffers raised Verdoux and Au Pair droids saw to her every need as Fei-Hon busily established his grand vision of an Institute for the Future of Sol.

Verdoux had a grim understanding of death, its finality and its utter eventuality. After a lifetime of training to “improve today for a better tomorrow,” the school’s slogan, at the end of the day she sometimes wondered just what the point of it all was for if all there was in the end was something as mundane as explosive decompression waiting for you.

Staring down at her adoptive father’s remains, exactly two weeks before their arrival at Minos Station, she wondered at the pointlessness of an existence of servitude to a future that made this of her father.

Verdoux was asleep when the attack happened. It started with a trip of the mansion’s exterior alarms. She awoke with a start and reached out in the dark, almost as if grabbing something elusive and dreamlike. Pulling her hand back with nothing, she hopped out of bed and bounded out of her quarters, barely noting the odd violet embers cascading around her; she mistook them for remnants of dream.

She bypassed the suite of rooms where the institute’s temporary “guests” were staying, a straggly group of spacers who Fei-Hon trusted implicitly. She could sense them all soundly sleeping through the alarm; after all if their story was true, they had just traveled a third of the solar system with all but the hounds of Hades at their backs and were exhausted.

In their rooms, violet embers flicked from face to face, as if checking on them. One in particular…the one with the shock of black hair awoke with a start and reached out for a quickly fading ember, barely catching it before its warmth dissipated in his palm. He too could now hear the alarm and alerted the others, the Venusian and the pale Uranian who came to with dual-pistols drawn and leveled at her captain’s head.

Verdoux ran and ran toward the security bay, all the while a growing sense of dread settled like a weight in her core. Someone’s lifelight had just gone out. She didn’t know how, but she could feel it. She was nearing her father’s quarters when she saw a sickly waft of gray-black smoke break free from beneath his doorjamb. She let out a sob and reached for the door which responded in kind by bursting outward at her in a spray of synthwood splinters that hurt just as badly as realwood splinters. Her vision went violet.

Cyan was the next to arrive and was carrying with him a fire-extinguisher which he used to combat the growing flames licking the exterior walls of her father’s massive suite. Verdoux knew that many of his artifacts were extremely old and most of them, extremely flammable, but what could have caused the fire in the first place? In a daze she walked past the man frantically trying to control the blaze and progressed to the center of the carpeted room, to a pile of scorched fabric and carbon; all that was left of the late Fei-Hon Kai. A single window was open to the silken night sky.

The roar of nearby flames silenced then went out all together as the bereaved woman drank in their energy. Cyan stared in disbelief and oddly clamped a hand to his mouth suppressing the urge to cry out a warning as Verdoux sank to her knees and released that energy in a pulse-field of violet thunder, shattering everything worth shattering in the room and flinging the Oro’s captain like a rag-doll back toward the exit.

Still kneeling and still shrouded in a daze of grief, Verdoux saw something in the pile of remains. She grabbed it just before a danger sense told her to lay flat as soon as possible. Through the shattered bay windows overlooking the institute’s massive gardens, coherent beams of light poured into the suite, bathing everything in a sickly green glow. The beam’s contact points erupted into flames that started eating away at what was left of the room.

By this point Yura and Iris had reached the rooms of the late headmaster and were helping Cyan to his feet when they too flattened themselves against the smoke-filled carpets. In a gap of firing, Yura opened up with coherent light of her own spilling from twin light pistolas out of the windows. She was without a target, but her spirit was in the right place.

Whoever killed Master Kai was trying to make sure there were no surviving witnesses and was much better equipped. Cyan yanked Yura back to the floor just as a powerful blast of green light seared through the space where the Uranian’s head had been a second before.
Just then a voice over the institute comm alerted them to an escape route planned for emergencies and colored beacons alit in the dimmed hallways. Una, who also had quarters in the mansion’s dormitories then alerted local authorities and joined them on their escape path. It was sheer luck that it was Winter break and all the students had gone home earlier that week.

The crew of the Oro didn’t stop running until they were outside of Jovian space; in actuality they were still running from what happened not just on Miranda, but on Ganymede as well.

“There’s nothing for me back on Ganymede. Not now.” Verdoux said, fully out of her reverie and back in her sensor pod on the Oro’s bridge. She idly caressed the object retrieved from her father’s corpse, a mysterious crescent shaped piece of metal that gleamed violet at her touch.

Not all is as it seems.

Cyan Lianas by all appearances is a typical male of his species. Standing a little over six feet tall and of medium build he would blend easily into a crowd of other neptunians. One characteristic does stand out about him though, but could be passed off as aesthetically induced. A birthmark spanning both temples and the corona of his scalp discolors the hair growing there to a streak of jet black.

Most neptunians share an ancestry of mixed origins. The original colony was comprised of an even mix of Venusian, with their fair complexions and angular features, and the oldest tribe of Mercury; known for their rough and rakish good looks. After nearly one thousand years of Neptunian heritage, the phenotype has settled into a comfortable middle ground of dashing features, emeraldine hair and tallish heights, especially for the women. The most glamorous models of the empire’s fashion industry hail from the farthest colony.

Cyan carries another birthright all his own though. Underneath the average exterior a great power lies, growing stronger every day since leaving the Nereid asteroid archipelago at the outer fringes of Neptune’s gravity well some four months ago. But a small spark of it was always with him.

Since he was a child, he has possessed what’s whispered about as the Touch. The Touch is a superstitious term loaded with cultural memory older than the empire itself. It means something akin to telepathy, empathy and clairvoyance; the ability to sense information about people, places and objects from a distance; be it in the past, present or future.

In the modern era such myths were usually dismissed as just that, old story fodder made up to give the things that go bump in the night some company. Wives’ Tales hundreds of years old mention the barbaric times of pre-empire in which those deemed to have the Touch in any of its many forms were incarcerated or hunted to nearly the point of extinction. Anyone claiming to have access to this mysterious inhuman ability in modernity was often proven to be charlatans and those that managed to avoid being exposed as fakes quickly disappeared from the public eye, never to be seen again.

Although Cyan had never been made aware of it, he would be considered by the Old Ones as so steeped in the Touch that it brims out of him and can be seen by the naked eye of anyone who knew what to look for.

Furthermore, those with this gift are inexorably drawn to people, places and things possessed of a similar exotic and powerful nature; like attracted to like. Never consciously aware of it, the Touch made a great impact on his personal associations, career ambitions and life goals.

The Touch even explains his strange reaction to a mysterious cube he discovered on his last away mission before Miranda, to the Nereids; a lifeless strand of space rock much like the asteroid collection the Oro was hurtling toward now at a small fraction of the speed of light.

“What do you mean, trap?” Cyan asked, tone inflected and dubious of the woman’s meaning.

“Just that. A trap. Left for us on Miranda by someone who can’t be looking out for our well-being,” Una said standing and indicating the state of gross disrepair the ship was in.”

“I was going through the ship’s repair records and found a heavily encrypted layer on the datastack that I broke earlier this morning. This ship was recently, as early as three weeks ago, upgraded with a Universal Nüne-Tech Accessible Interface.”

“In common-solarian, that would mean something bad…right,” Iris asked, barely understanding any of what Una had said.

Verdoux swung into view from above, sticking out but upside down from her tactical bay located in a blister pod a few meters off the bridge deck. “Nüne-Tech’s the latest Imperial overbrain hardware and wetware. I read an article about it months back. It’s supposed to revolutionize ship design, navigation and drive builds. I think it’s out of Mars,” she offered with a shrug. “I was learning its communications standards at institute up until two weeks ago.” Verdoux made a graceful mid-air flip and landed cat-like on the deck, catching a hydrospanner that had become dislodged by her maneuver from above. She smoothed her robes where they had bunched in her upside-down posture.

“Una, you should’ve told me this much sooner. I can talk to the Nüne-Tech overbrain, maybe un-package it and boot it up…get our QTLs working again,” Verdoux chided her professor. Up until two weeks ago, the two had had a completely academic relationship but circumstances on the capitol moon of the Jovian system, Ganymede had turned them into team mates, albeit a strained relationship had formed. Una found it difficult to look at Verdoux as anything more than a student of her flock; but now the young woman was showing great promise and resource. Una found it somewhat…upsetting, but she wasn’t sure why.

“Verdoux, you underestimate me. I wrote part of the communications algo-logs for Nüne. I can boot it up in my sleep,” Una exclaimed with a snort. “I’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with the developers who paid for my consultation project that kept me away from the Kai Institute last summer, you remember?”

“You said you were studying at the libraries of Chyron!” Verdoux said, shocked Una had kept up the pretense of her research on the outpost moon of Pluto. “All that talk of extra-solar signals was a big fat lie?”

“Well,” Una began, feeling the need to tap dance through this conversation to quickly bring it to a close. “Yes and no. Extra-solar signals were detected out at Chyron a year ago, but I had the datfiles sent to me while on Mars Centralis last summer.

“So now you’ve been to Mars,” Verdoux exclaimed again. “You said you’d take me as your assistant on your next Mars assignment. You’ve been promising for three years now. I guess a secret development agency for defense wetware would provide you with your own assistant though.”

Cyan busied himself at the helm until the conversation swung back around to the whole trap business.

“This is all very interesting ladies,” Iris said, bored. “What about the ship blowing up?”

“Not blowing up,” Una snapped at Iris. “It begs the question why the ship was fully fueled, re-commissioned with stealth status and given the most advanced overbrain and support hardware in the empire less than a week before little miss ship-thief here hot-wired it and crash landed a block from Mirandan Port Authority, which might I add, is the sole cause of half the on-board malfunctions we’ve experienced up here.”

“Okay, jeez…” Iris backed away, thinking it prudent to just let Una get on with what she was saying rather than engage her in yet another pointless argument about the morality or immorality of ship piracy. “I was just borrowing it,” she muttered defensively.

“We’d be munching brain in Reunion Plaza on Miranda Centralis right now if it weren’t for Iris’s ‘borrowing’ skills,” Cyan turned in his captain’s swivel chair, “Also, don’t forget about the erratic flight patterns of the interceptor squadron that was given orders to shoot us out of Mirandan airspace. The pilots all auto-ejected when they got within a half-kilometer of the ship; I’ve never seen anything like it in all my flying experience.”

“There are protocols in the Nüne wetware for scrambling enemy combatant overbrains, a hack that would give remote control to a Nüne-equipped pilot.” Una thought aloud, offering an explanation for a question that was never asked but thought communally.

“Presumably that could mean that a second overbrain, fully unpacked, could’ve performed the hack, giving you guys that wide open exit window that put you on the most optimal trajectory to reach Ganymede,” Verdoux gestured and a display panel on the exterior of her tactical bay lit with trajectory schemes. “I hope you don’t mind Cyan, but I took the liberty of downloading all pre-Ganymede flight reports into my bay for review. I felt I needed to catch up.”

Verdoux and Una were the most recent additions to the ship’s roster, and were gathered at just the right time. Their proficiency with general ship systems coupled with Cyan’s helmsman experience in the Tritonian Guard and supported by the competent hands and knowledge of a Mirandan engineer, the best in the empire, were the only things keeping the ship running right now.

Or was it?

“A third party intervention is the most likely explanation for your escape from Miranda. I spent a few minutes puzzling over the data about a week ago and just chalked it up to luck, but you’d have to be born on Selene’s lifeday to be that lucky.” Verdoux was referring to the Empress of Sol, Selene of the Long Life. By all appearances she never aged and is the only Solarian alive to have memory of what life was like before Stonerise, the date on which everything changed.

“That being said,” Una stepped up to the tactical display and turned to face the assembled audience. “Who or what herded us to Ganymede, and is it the same person responsible for our current frenzied flight to some rock in the middle of nowhere?”

“Not only that,” the Mirandan engineer Yura, a tall and lanky woman with chunks of dark hair that covered her eyes and coiled braids that framed her angular cheek bones, emerged from the now-functioning lift. She cleared her throat, phlegmy from her recent smoke break below deck. “…and if that person has anything to do with the murders on Miranda, I owe them a sound beating. Maybe more if the mood takes me.”

Anyone who knew the hard woman well enough knew that the mood usually did take her.

The Old Ones of Minos speak of a prophecy predicting the demise of our great ancient Solarian culture. It names you, Cyan Lianas of the Uprising Colony, as the one on which an empire’s destruction or ultimate salvation pivots.

Meet me on Minos and I will reveal myself to you. Keep your watch vigilant. Not all among you are who they seem. I would tell you more…but you’ll figure it out soon enough.

Cyan closed the encrypted message written in a curious script and dialect he knew was native to Triton, but unused for the better part of the century. It was like reading high literature from the pre-colonial days, conspiratorial and close like it was being whispered into his ear, the words warm, wet and somehow exciting. He clapped his personal data assistant shut.

“What do you think Una’s got going on in her bridge-lab?” Iris asked whilst picking through the littered corridor leading to the central lift of the Oro.

“She mentioned something about the ship she’s found out in her studies,” Cyan tapped the summons key on the lift, wincing at the unhealthy grind-chug of its failing upward conveyer beam. “Hopefully the good professor found a reset button to restore the old-girl to her pre-Rebellion glory.” With that final insult, the conveyor beam de-powered, leaving the lift plate mid-deck, useless to them for the time being.

“Now you’ve done it. Never speak of a lady’s age so dismissively,” Iris cooed caressing the summons button. “Nothing happened. I guess the old bag isn’t listening to us all the time.”

“I’m sorry,” Cyan genuflected in the fashion his mother taught him, now a relic habit of his youth. “I know not what I spaketh.” Cyan looked up at two open access hatches parallel to the lift’s shaft. “First one to the bridge gets a week’s personal mess hall duties for the other. Be mindful of that blue signal on the two hatches. What do they indicate?”

Iris swung lithely up onto the first rung and propelled herself further to a set of rungs nearly fifteen feet into the tight access way. “Gravity generators are malfunctioning, exercise caution in a zero G environment,” she rattled off from the ship’s diagnostic manual. “I’m going to become this ship’s best system’s expert you know…without turning into an Una-bot and I figure the best place to start was the ship’s learning annex.”

“Resourceful and smart,” Cyan said following Iris in his own access tube, hurtling up its length with the grace of a professional swimmer. Although Iris was fast, she wasn’t skilled enough in zero G to move fluidly, so she lost progress with small micro-corrections she constantly made to keep from banging into the tube siding or rungs. Cyan arrived at the closed terminus about a dozen seconds before he could hear Iris’s approach. There he floated, wanting to give her the win. After all, he was impressed with her progress not only in this small test, but several others he and Una had come up with to pull Iris out of the protective shell she constructed about a day off of Miranda.

She suffered from classic post-trauma shock, something that Cyan had seen in his fellow team mates in the Tritonian Guard after weeks of special training or on away missions to the Kuepier Belt, the farthest reach of the empire; a cold and lifeless place filled with the tossed-away leftovers of the solar system’s original building blocks.

Some cultures believed the sparse halo of ice and rock surrounding the sun’s jewel collection to be haunted with the echoes of pre-empire civilization; the old ones. After the night of terror on Miranda, it had become easier to believe those old stories of ghosts and shuffling carcasses with a hunger for human flesh.

Iris had been behind the glow of a powerful energy field in a small Mirandan detention cell when the chemical attack hit. Luckily the room was negatively pressurized, so nothing larger than a nanometer could find its way into or out of the cell. Her guards turned quickly; the strange chemical agent acted fast, clawing red marks down their throats as the tissues beneath cauterized and became insensate. They slumped in their seats, spasmodically kicking their limbs and bleeding from nose, eye, ear and mouth. She watched terrified into silence, knees pulled up into a fetal position on the cell’s cot.

Then the guards got up and started toward her cell. She screamed then, but clamped down when the sound was met with hundreds of other similar ones emanating from the open door to the rest of the police facility. The dead guards turned, bloody snouts upturned tasting the air with new and heightened senses. They smelled fresh kill and loped out of the room toward it. They would be back when the facility personnel were finished off, this time joined by several dozen newly minted friends.

She regretted the decision she had made a week ago to slip the watchful eye of her father’s men and hitchhike her way to Ishtar from Neptune. They had skills and guns that would come in handy right now.

It was in that cell Yura and Cyan had found her nearly forty-eight hours later. They had to fight their way through several dozen throngs of the undead to get to the delirious girl’s cell; its energy field nearly depleted from the emergency fuel canister attached to it. The floor outside the protective cocoon was slicked with ichors and blood, the remains of several guards and unprotected civilians who were unfortunate enough to be outside of cells when the chemicals hit.

That same girl stood before Cyan right now on the bridge, hands on hips, expectantly waiting for Cyan’s brief reverie to end. “Napping on your feet, captain? My grand-Aunt Marie Chiveaux did that a lot before having to be cared for at the family retreat on Venus’s Ionian countryside.”

“I take my breakfast at 0600 before my diagnostics run of the ship, whey-toast, dry, honey on the side with fruit gellies…and caffe,” Iris said exuberantly.

“Yes ma’am,” Cyan replied. “Turn-down service for you as well?”

“That would be lovely,” Iris proceeded ahead of him down the gangway into the tactical bay which housed Una’s temporary workbench.

“Well hello Cyan, the Lady Iris.” Una said from her draftsman’s desk assembled from parts without looking up from a glow display affixed to the surface material.

“This ship was a trap,” the woman looked up finally after allowing sufficient pause for time to absorb the meaning of her words. Headdress amulets tinkered effervescently in the humming chamber.

Iris sat on a pallet of spare engine parts and ran through the tally-set displayed on her datapad. It was the third time she’d run the logistics count and was nearing the length of her patience with the dilapidated equipment. “I hate this detail…or assignment or whatever this is I’m doing,” she said with all the disdain she could muster. Barely sixteen, she had seen more of the empire than everyone on the small cruiser-class ship combined; something very few could claim traveling coach. Her father would only let her travel the solar system on one of the family yachts or when push came to shove, first-class conveyance.

A whoosh of incoming air and the cloying smell of wasted hydraulic fluid announced the entrance of someone into her personal hell of boredom. “Una, I promised you those reports by mid-morning, but this dumb counting machine…” she stopped mid-sentence. “You’re not Una.”

“You get a prize,” Cyan greeted her. “Reports?” Iris made the sign of the hex with ring, thumb and forefinger on the left hand; a not-too-nice habit she’d picked up on the rebel world of Miranda some two weeks prior.

“Let’s see,” Iris chewed the end of her stylus staring down into the grey slab of plastic spewing data out of its front face. “This number machine isn’t recognizing my allotment algorithms and I need a spa, one I care about and the other…ehh.”

“Cyan, can’t you just captain your way through this logistics problem? You’re an old space salt. I need out of this room. Una’s a slave master!”

“Iris, I’m thirty-two. I’m old enough to be your slightly older brother.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Iris pantomimed walking a cane toward him and handed Cyan her datapad. “Show me what you can do.”

“It’s called an educated guess,” Cyan swiped the datapad from Iris’s gloved hands caked with engine lubricant and set the scanning sensitivity to macro. “First off, you were stuck in micro-mode…perfect if you wanted to monitor rising CO₂ levels in the nutrient gellies from cellular degeneration. Vaping useless for aggregating unit supplies,” Cyan handed it back. “Now, do as I say and I’ll make an old space salt out of you yet.

“Charming, but I do need to show Una I’m no useless space-princess.” Taking the hunk of plastic, she hooked a strand of greasy, ink-shot blonde hair behind an ear and concentrated. “Gotcha, micro-mode bad. Now scanning at the unit level.”

“Eyeball it,” Cyan said simply as though that was enough information for her to complete the job. He knew it was, but offered her a little more. “Guesstimate the proportion of nutrient gellies to hydroglobules to dry bars to vegetable wafers and divide the macro-scan total by those numbers.”

“I didn’t know you could do that…without Una slipping a gear,” Iris said busily entering her guesstimates into the datapad. “I didn’t know about this macro mode either. How accurate is this?”

Cyan considered, “depends on how good at guessing you are I suppose. I’ve got about 96% accuracy against the Oro’s overbrain readouts. That is, back when it still worked for us and not the other way around.”

Somewhere deep beneath them in the engine-works, something slipped and screeched to a halt. The engine room’s illumination flickered then stabilized.

Iris swung a glow light into her fist from a too-big utility belt barely managing to hug the rubberized portion of her deck suit. “Ooh, touchy. You know Cyan I think this ship actually listens to us sometime.”

“All of the time, is what I’d bet on. Whatever’s the case, this space bucket’s getting us to Minos regardless of our QTL’s inoperative condition in record time,” Cyan said absentmindedly searching through a dry bar bin for an apple but there were nothing but peaches and figs. He hated figs. “Can you go ahead and deduct one unit from your dry bar number,” Cyan asked through the O his mouth made just before biting into the dry peach supplement.

“No problem. Now how do you go back on this thing?”

The air was still and cold in the darkened room. On a cot no bigger than the man atop it, something stirred. With a start, he woke reaching toward his chest and rested his hand on the top of a furry scalp. It meowed.

“Caliban you startled me,” the man said groggily sweeping his feet off the thin bedspread and onto the metal floor. “That time already?”

He made his way slowly across the seven feet or so to the small cabinet and undid the cloth and leather latch to get to a bag of Triton’s Best Tuna Surprises and dropped a few fishy-smelling gel cubes to the floor. Caliban, a young brown and gray tabby of about two years, leapt from the foot of the cot to the floor landing silently and crossed the short distance to the long-awaited breakfast.

“Increase by twelve lumens,” the man spoke aloud to no one in particular, but the room’s lighting obeyed and the light increased…drastically. Squinting against the sudden illumination, the man quickly ordered the light halved and the room’s shadows softened to a more suitable level of contrast. “Still hasn’t been properly calibrated.”

He stepped to the room’s back corner into his personal shower and shut the plastiglass door behind him. He activated the nozzle array, keeping clear of jets three and six, which refused to spray anything but an icy mix of personal cleaning fluid and frigid water, no doubt carried over a mis-directed conduit that ran close to the ship’s coolant lines. That would be fixed in the order of priority, there were other things to consider like artificial gravity on decks two and one or the ship’s secondary firing system…or the ship’s QTL drives, which would have came in handy in getting them to their destination in a fraction of the time.

Moments later he stepped out into the main chamber and was startled to see two sets of eyes quickly running the length of his naked body and averting them professionally. Vidscreens two and three were illuminated with the images of his communication’s specialist and professor-made-mechanic respectively.

“Captain Lianas,” said the woman on vidscreen one, “I need you on the bridge at your earliest convenience. There’s something interesting I discovered about the ship that may give us the upper hand on Minos. First, though I need you to fetch the princess from engineering where she’s no doubt lounging away the morning and bring her with you. If she’s to learn anything about this ship, she should be included in all future planning meetings.” The professor’s jeweled headdress made small tinkling, effervescent sounds as she moved forward to unceremoniously cut the live ship-to-ship feed. Vidscreen one returned to its perfunctory and unimaginative ship’s diagnostic screensaver, still mostly in the reds.

“Una was raised by robots,” the other image on vidscreen three chimed in. She was staring at nothing in particular somewhere north of the captain’s left shoulder, a slight blush cherried her face and went well with her chestnut-auburn hair. Something unmistakably interior colored the accenting of her words, making her sound nothing but Jovian every time she spoke.

“She is a robot,” Cyan joked as he finished dressing behind a privacy screen. “Any progress with sensor nodule eleven, we could be blasted out of the sky any minute.”
“No, there was a control panel overload in my sensor bay and I’ve been here with Yura working on that repair all morning,” she said, looking down beneath her console, no doubt checking something with her Mirandan assistant who had been with them ever since that fateful night of terror in Miranda Centralis; the night of walking dead.

“Oh, Cyan. That officer’s uniform has seen better days,” she said barely able to suppress a giggle. “I mean, epaulets are disgusting from an overall design perspective, nothing against Neptunian military ‘fashion,’ but they’re all scuffed and un-shiny!”

“Hey, it took me three years to earn these…disgusting things,” he flicked them off his uniform to make clinking sounds as they skidded across the floor. “They don’t call Neptunians the penultimate solarian separatist nation for nothing; our non-conformity is the only thing that draws us together.”

“Well, uprising aside, that was all I had to report really. Oro is still defenseless from attack from aft, but no one’s used the Celian Spacelane for over a queen’s-age, so I don’t think it’s high priority. Now…this flaming mess,” she gestured to her console, still sparking in places under self-repair, “is another story altogether. I’ll see you up here in the mistress’s chambers in a few minutes.”

Keep your eyes peeled for the next installment!

The Extremists p.1 of 5 / Ed Brubaker, writer / Salvador Larroca, pencils

Synopsis

The Morlocks, a group of disfigured mutants that make their home in the sewers of New York, are apparently still alive even after the devastating effects of 2006’s M-Day, when 90% of Earth’s mutants were stripped of their X-gene, the genetic component that triggers superpower mutations in humans. Now led by the shapeshifting mutant, Masque, the Morlocks are apparently attemtping to bring a recently discovered prophecy to fruition first by ambushing two of their former members, Leech and Caliban who have come down into the tunnels to offer the Morlocks sanctuary above ground in the sunlight.

After incapacitating Caliban, Masque, Bliss and Erg abduct Leech and carry him deeper into the catacombs beneath NYC but not before Masque uses his powers to permanently disfigure and weaken Caliban and leave him to scurry to the aid of the X-Men; all apparently a part of the Morlock prophecy. [Small fact: the last time I read a story with Masque in it, he was an effeminate ring-leader of an elite underground gladiator club in Tokyo...no joking.]

Meanwhile at the X-Mansion in Westchester, New York…

Charles Xavier, one-time leader of the X-Men, is back from a mission in space in which he regained his amazing psychic abilities from contact with the reality-bending M’kran crystal. Intent on correcting some of his “past mistakes,” he uses the mutant-tracking machine Cerebra for the first time in months to attempt contact with a splinter team of X-Men still waging war in Shi’Ar space hundreds of light years away. Instead he learns of Caliban’s rapid approach toward the mansion and reads some of what transpired in the Morlock tunnels. He dispatches Nightcrawler to intercept Caliban before the O*N*E Sentinel guarding the mansion can interfere.

Out on the mansion grounds, X-Man Warpath and ex-Starjammer Hepzibah, an anthropomorphic cat…woman are interrupted in the middle of training by the tripping of the Sentinel’s perimeter alarms. They both reach Caliban before the Sentinel along with Kurt (Nightcrawler) who teleports Caliban to relative safety in the mansion’s sickbay. The Sentinel is about to retaliate when veteran X-Man Storm arrives after a long hiatus from the X-Books and intimidates the giant mechanised form with a flashy display of elemental power. She’s been summoned by Xavier to lead a small team (Warpath, Hepzibah and herself) into the NYC sewers to investigate what happened to Leech. Makes sense since over a decade before, Storm was the de facto leader of the Morlocks after defeating their previous leader Callisto.

Tensions rise between Charles and Valerie Cooper, director of the nation’s Office of National Emergency (think Homeland Security for mutant terrorists), when she questions the actions of his X-Men in harboring Caliban, a subject of interest to O*N*E due to suspicious mutant energy signatures emanating from the weakened mutant, Charles reacts diplomatically and wins the right to handle the problem himself. Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end for O*N*E’s involvement with the goings and comings of the X-Men.

Later in the Morlock Tunnels…

Masque, Bliss and Erg are joined by Skids (?!) and begin to argue over Masque’s directing of the Morlocks, claiming he’s being too harsh with Leech and that he harmed Caliban unnecessarily. Masque shrugs off the complaints, claiming everything he’s done was necessary for bringing about the Morlock prophecy. He then uses his powers to change Leech into something mysterious and new, also a part of this prophecy of theirs.

Commentary –

Brubaker’s previous storyline had the X-Men fighting up in space in an epic storyline that was supposed to change the status quo of the X-books…well, at least that was the goal. I don’t believe Brubaker’s strengths really lie in such a grand storyline because I found much of it drawn out and boring, but now that he’s back on planet earth (literally and figuratively) and dealing with more mundane things like Morlocks and sentinels I’m a lot more intrigued. Also, he writes a much stronger Xavier these days with clearer objectives in mind. He’s no longer so racked with guilt over the past that he can’t act. He may become a central character in the X-stories if he doesn’t get himself killed in the meantime!

Overall I enjoyed this issue and look forward to seeing the storyline through to the end.

Also, I’ve been in love with Larroca’s art since the days of X-Treme X-Men back in 2001-2003 and have really missed his work in these pages. His Storm and Rogue work have been some of the strongest for the characters in the last ten years and I look forward to seeing more of his stylized character designs in future issues. Plus, his colorist is amazing. I’ve never been unimpressed by anything in Larroca’s work!