Nexus: A Novel

By Mike Baron

“Brings [Baron’s] award-winning superhero to life in ways we haven’t seen before. Witty, profound, and deeply moving, this novel is serious science fiction.” —Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times–bestselling author
 
Nexus is the greatest avenger the galaxy has ever known. He has faced mass murderers and alien monsters.
 
But his power comes from an alien race with its own agenda. Is the mighty Nexus hero or pawn? Deliverer or destroyer?
 
Gourmando, the devourer of worlds, now has an appetite for Ylum, the home of Nexus.
 
How can one man, no matter how powerful, stop an entity that consumes whole planets?
 
Based on the bestselling comic book created by Mike Baron and Steve Rude, this is Nexus’s greatest adventure (for now, at least!).
 
“May be one of the finest examples of galaxy-spanning worldbuilding in science fiction. Add to that a compelling cast of characters, a flawless ear for dialogue, and a genuinely thrilling story, and the result is a truly brilliant book, full stop.” —James A. Owen, author of Secrets of the Dragon Riders

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781680572308

Book preview

Sprouts

Osceola was a tiny planet in a vast universe. It took light from Osceola thirty-three million years to reach Earth, or would have, if its light could reach Earth. But its light could not reach Earth because of intervening systems, radioactive clouds and black holes which either blocked light’s path or absorbed it. And even if that light did reach Earth, and there were Earthlings there to see it, they would only have seen a peculiar blue/green marble hanging against a black backdrop, with no sign of life.

When life appeared on Osceola, it grew at a phenomenal pace as if some intergalactic Johnny Appleseed had paused to sow the precious DNA. Were it possible for a human being to look at Osceola contemporaneously, he would have been astonished to learn that the period from which the first primitive, one-celled organisms appeared until civilization was a mere fifty millennia, or five miriaanum. Any astrologer, physicist, astrophysicist or anthropologist would tell you that is impossible.

But with intelligent design, it could be done.

Osceola had floated gray and inert for a billion years. Overnight, water, oxygen and carbon appeared. From there it was a mere hop, skip and a jump to the appearance of plankton-like plants, and from there, a swish and a whoosh to the first four-legged creature crawling out of the primordial muck. A mere thousand years until the appearance of a bipedal, opposing thumbs sentient, the first Osceolan. Osceolans were far from human, but there must have been something about the design that suited their planet. All that oxygen. All that water.

Society coalesced. And because the Osceolans weren’t human, they side-stepped a lot of the problems that have plagued humanity. Which is not to say they were without vices. But the wars that have plagued mankind failed to appear. Perhaps it was because Osceolan society was agricultural and built around communal property. Every time humanity tried communal property, it failed due to human nature. Greed, malice, envy and resentment. Pride of ownership.

The Osceolans had their failures, but greed, envy and resentment were not among them. Osceola never advanced to an industrial society, and many Osceolans died young for a variety of reasons, including unchecked disease and natural disaster. Nor were they saints. There were no great philanthropists or artists among them. They could be cruel, but more often their cruelty was obliviousness. They tended to be overly literal. Their imagination stopped at the end of the garden.

They worked their fields. Bitter root was edible, provided fiber, and could be used to make lightweight, malleable building materials. A day on Osceola lasted twenty-six Earth hours. They based their measurement of time on the length of the day, and rotation around their sun, which took two hundred and eighty-five Earth days. They had only two seasons, growing and not growing.

One day, early in the growing season, a young male wearing bitter root coveralls worked the bitter root field behind a beast that resembled a warthog, pulling a plow made from mined metal. Their metallurgy was crude, involving open-air hearths and the art of the blacksmith, but skilled artisans were able to bang out pretty much everything they needed. They had a few spears and swords for hunting and protection against wild animals, which included carnivorous cat-like creatures.

As the Osceolan guided his draft animal down the field, the creature came to a halt, pawed at the earth and snorted. The Osceolan, whom we shall call Maurice, found that the creature was staring intently at an unknown plant that grew before its eyes. It resembled a hair. A stiff bristle, not unlike those adorning his draft animal.

Maurice squatted and stared as the black hair wavered and advanced. There was something alien and unpleasant about its dark, whorled surface. Maurice picked up a twig and poked the spike at its base. It reacted violently, whipping around, striking Maurice’s wrist, leaving a red welt. It burst forth and advanced three feet in the air, causing Maurice to tumble backward, scramble to his feet, leave his plow away and run for the village.

As he ran, other black spikes sprouted, swirling to a nonexistent breeze, striving for altitude. Maurice heard distant shouts from beyond a copse of trees. He ran and he ran, feeling his plasma pulse in his joints, his pumper redlining. Bursting through a patch of gorse, he saw the village, a modest and appealing set of circular stucco domiciles with peaked thatched roofs, in the distance. From the corner of his eye he saw others running toward town. Old Mosby from across the river. That Spatz kid from up the hill.

A wooden tower, the tallest building, rose sixty feet above the meadow at the main entrance. The great bell began to peel. The Council was calling for a town meeting. Maurice joined the river of Osceolans working their way through the town’s winding pathways toward the town hall, a great dome that could seat two hundred, off the town square. The dome, constructed of triangular sections, wore a dozen triangular windows like a crown. The windows were covered in transparent sylk harvested from nine-legged spiders found in warm, damp forests.

Osceola’s climate was fitful and unpredictable, affected as much by subterranean plasma and magnetism as by the atmosphere. Maurice ran into his neighbor Spacesworm outside the main entrance.

Hairs! Maurice said. Nasty stubble sprouting from the ground.

I hear ya, I hear ya, Spacesworm said as they went inside. About one hundred and fifty villagers squatted on the mats arranged in a semicircle before the speaker’s podium, set on a wood stage a foot off the ground. The atmosphere was humid and tense, a steady drone of conversation punctuated by barks and exhortations.

A blue feather bobbed above heads at the entrance as the Speaker made his way through the crowd. A committee of nine selected a new Speaker every fortnight. Four times a year, the villagers threw their chits into a hat. The Speaker drew nine chits and that was the new committee.

As the Speaker stepped up on the platform, old Phineax cupped his gnarled hands around his mouth.

WHAT THE HELL, Mr. Speaker! WHAT THE HELL!

The Speaker tamped down the din with his hands. I hear you, Phineax. May we have a little quiet? A little quiet please.

Maurice rose to his feet and cupped his mouth. QUIET!

The room fell into a faint crackle. The Speaker gripped the podium.

It’s about the hairs, isn’t it?

Old Phineax rose to his feet. WHAT THE HELL!

They’re all up in my fields! cried a farmer.

Maurice waved his arm. It scratched me! The shulang thing scratched me!

The Speaker pointed at Maurice. Get that checked out right now. Where’s Lorenz? Is Lorenz in here?

A thin female wearing a caftan waved her arm. Here I am.

Check out Maurice’s scratch, will you? Make certain he’s not going to suddenly give birth to a million spider babies.

Pause.

OR WORSE.

Lorenz motioned for Maurice to join her at the rim, beneath a beam of sunlight.

We are familiar with the plant, the Speaker said. "It does burst out from time to time, but never in such profusion. Previously, it was like a garbil leaping for a branch. Not quite able to get the altitude. But now the garbil has returned, more powerful than ever, and it has taken a running start, and it has reached the branch.

"The plant is impervious to cutting. It excretes a fungus that will eventually crowd out all other plant life. The only way we were able to examine this plant was when it died. Only then could we detach it from the soil and apply science. It breaks down into a nutrient-rich protein, but it is not a protein we can digest. It is not an Osceolan friendly food.

"Thus we must ask ourselves. Whence came this plant? Who eats this food? We are a small race on a small planet with limited resources. It is not always possible to record what has happened in the past, but there is one recurring legend, many moons ago, of a chromium alien slashing through the sky on a chromium platform, hand outstretched, dispensing spores which settle to the earth.

"There is a legend of an uber being, a living creature too vast for civilization. The largest living thing in the cosmos. A thing that dines on civilizations, indeed on whole planets. The planet is the protein, the civilization is the flavor.

And this creature employs a herald, a chromium alien who zips about on a platform, and his name is Gnosis. And his master’s name is Gourmando.

I’ve Had a Dream

Everybody started shouting. Even those who’d never heard those names knew of them, as some deep, atavistic sickness in the blood, a tribal memory, an ancient curse, a damnation hurled by an alien, implacable force.

Gourmando. The Devourer of Worlds.

The town erupted with questions, exhortations and curses. The Speaker tried to damp it down, but it was like a buzzherd stampede. He used the whistle. The sudden, piercing tone silenced the anxious crowd.

The prognosis is not good. No planet where these hairs thrived survives. Gourmando ate them. The more he eats, the more powerful he becomes. It is believed that he has thus far been confined to a dodecahedron in Sector AGB 1119.4. They say there’s an organic library that tunes into every advanced civilization throughout the galaxy, and that when a civilization dies, its collective memory flows to this library, and in this way, we have a record of what was lost. Of course it may just be apocryphal. I don’t know if I read it or dreamed it. I like to believe it’s true.

WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO? Phineax demanded to a chorus of yays and right ons.

We could look for another planet, the Speaker said.

NO WAY.

FAT CHANCE.

WE DON’T HAVE A SPACE FORCE.

WE DON’T HAVE SPACESHIPS.

The Speaker tamped. The crowd roiled.

We don’t have spaceships, he said, but the Heads do. We could hire them to move us.

Where to? Phineax said. Every decent planet is taken, and we would all die on the journey anyway, since it is bound to consume our lives and those of our children, yea, even unto the nineteenth generation.

Maurice listened intently as he crouched with Lorenz, who squeezed an unguent from a succulent on his scratch. The itching stopped. The crowd fulminated. Cries of despair and condemnation. Grudges surfaced, rivalries renewed. The prospect of imminent death focused their attention like a laser dot.

If we want to contact the Heads, we’ll have to start now. We’ll need to build a bonfire visible from twelve parsecs. That will require most of our harvest.

Fulminations erupted. An Osceolan who wore a costume designed to make him resemble a cucumber said, But we don’t know how long it will take! What if the rumors are false? What if there is no Gourmando? Has anyone seen this flying alien? And if it is real, how long will it take? Decades? Centuries? Millennia? How will our offspring survive if we squander their heritage on a fruitless gesture? What if we light the fire and the Heads don’t see it? What if they see it and ignore it? What if? That’s all I’m saying.

Screaming, admonitions, shouted exhortations.

The Speaker tamped.

DOWN, YE EATERS OF GRIBBLE! he thundered in a voice like grinding stones. WE WILL HAVE ORDER OR WE’LL HAVE NO BORDER!

The crowd crabbed down.

If we can get the bonfire going tonight, and the Heads see it, they’ll respond within a fortnight. The Heads are a reasonable people. Their leader is a reasonable personality. They can’t get enough of that peculiar little striated grape that grows along the river front. We have tons of the stuff. We’ll offer them the grapes.

A snort of disgust cracked the air as old Phineax rose to his feet. The Heads are an advanced technocratic race! You’re talking a multi-billion-unit maneuver and you expect them to accept grapes?

They really love those grapes, the Speaker said. And they’re a good bunch. It’s wrong to call them a race, since there are heads of many species.

Yes, Phineax said, but once they lose their bodies, they meld minds create a strong, homogenous unit. They might as well be a race.

No, they might as well not. You got your human heads. You got your Giz heads. You got your Thune heads. How is that a race?

They act in concert, do they not?

How is that a racial characteristic? the Speaker countered. You are a contentious bunch. Especially you, Phineax!

YOU NAUSEATE ME! Phineax charged.

AND YOU ME!

AND I YOU!

Wait a minute, trilled a female named Gunderson. Are we just going to give up our home without a fight? Just clear out? We might as well sprinkle the ground with piquant seasonings! Who is this Gourmando? How dare he! Is he a living creature? Doesn’t every living creature have a nemesis? The word life implies death! Every creature has its natural enemies. Where is Gourmando’s?

He’s not alive in the sense that you and I are alive. It’s erroneous to even refer to him as he. It is not appropriate. Racial memory tells us Gourmando appears as an armored biped, but it may be that each world it consumes sees it differently. It may appear as a swarm of stingers, or as a single jello-like blob. It may appear as a giant spike. But when I search my own racial memory, I see this giant, armored biped with massive headgear. Does anyone else see it?

Fingers touched temples. Osceolans oscillated in place, searching their racial memories. A little girl rose and solemnly stepped up on the stage. The Speaker pulled out a box for her to stand on as she took a crayon to a parchment and drew, tongue protruding. When she finished, she held it up and showed it around. Moans rumbled. People squeaked.

Yes! the Speaker said. That’s it!

I’ve seen it, someone said.

I’ve had nightmares about it.

Get thee behind me, Gourmando!

In theory, the Speaker said, "nothing lasts forever. In theory, every living creature has a natural enemy. In my dreams, Gourmando is older than our sun. We can’t understand its origins because we can’t understand it. It is alien. We have no common basis for understanding. We only understand that it feeds on whole worlds, and that Osceola is on the menu. It is possible that with the aid of psychedelics we might learn if it has an enemy, but if it has an enemy, where is it? Has not Gourmando already lasted a billion years? Even those advanced civilizations of which we know, those that wage war, have nothing that can withstand its might.

If the Heads will honor our marker, we will search for a new world. We must prepare to evacuate as soon as possible.

Wait, someone said from the rim, a single word darting through the hubbub like a bird darting through the shrub. All eyes turned toward the back where Maurice stood, his wrist bandaged.

I had a dream, he said, and stopped to clear his throat.

I HAD A DREAM! The room fell silent.

Come up here, Maurice, the Speaker said. Tell us your dream.

Maurice made his way through the crowd, accepted the Speaker’s hand in stepping up to the stage. The little girl solemnly shook his hand.

Maurice gripped the lectern. Have you heard of Nexus?

Bonfire

Headworld circled the star Advantage in the Triades Sector four hundred and fifty-six parsecs from Earth. It was an artificial world, cobbled together from bits and pieces of other worlds, wrecked space stations, junk. Each Head was a telepath, and when they joined minds, they became one of the most powerful forces in the universe, able to move planets by sheer force of will.

Clausius the Slaver created the original Heads as slave units to power his ships. Clausius had licensed a process that created powerful telepaths by decapitation. The Heads survived on tiny units providing oxygen to the brain while the bodies were recycled as pet food. Clausius linked them one to another like Christmas tree lights, and lashed them electronically to control them, rewarding them with rich virtual fantasies of which their whole selves could only dream. Some Heads found Clausius’ servitude preferable to autonomous life.

Clausius’ depredations made him persona non grata throughout the known universe, which sent him far afield in search of booty. Clausius was a pirate. Clausius craved power. He learned that many sentient creatures could generate telekinesis if separated from their host bodies. He hired doctors from the old Sov Empire to perform the operation. These doctors were masters of compartmentalization. Clausius rewarded them richly and they lived lives of sybaritic ease. Their virtual reality was such that many never emerged from the experience and were found dead of dehydration many moons after the fact. But by that time, they’d taught their techniques to Thunes, humans, and Giz types who performed the grisly operations on different races. The Giz would operate on Thunes and humans. The Thunes would operate on humans and Giz. And the humans would operate on humans, Giz and Thunes.

Clausius was at the peak of his powers when the rebellion began.

An online rebellion. Thousands of disembodied Heads, each sustained in its own personal biosphere, each supplied with its own fantasies in a failed effort to make them complacent, each devoting a portion of its brain to Clausius’ bidding. Tote that barge. Lift that bale. Implode that asteroid.

To fill his batteries, Clausius employed a dozen freebooters who roamed the space ways in search of fat private vessels filled with colonists or goods. Interstellars were the best, as they could yield thousands of savvy bipeds in suspended animation. It was one such interstellar, the Bonamici out of Son of New Caledonia, carrying twelve hundred colonists to Far Rockaway, a B class world in the Wiley Sector. Among the hopefuls lay one Raul DiGenero, a master chef by trade, who’d signed on to run the kitchen of a Courtyard by Marriott that was going up in the newly minted capital city of Durian.

The journey from Earth to Far Rockaway would have taken seventeen thousand years at the speed of light, but the Bonamici took advantage of the Adrian Berry System, by which an interstellar craft entered the gravitational field of a black hole at the rim to be instantly spewed out of a white hole some parsecs distant. Seldom did these journeys involve only one jump. A map of the universe looked like an English saddle. Although Man, Giz, Thune and Quatro had been mapping the cosmos ever since their eyes turned upward at night, little was known about the vast reaches of space. Inhabitable worlds comprised only .000000000000000000000076 per cent of known worlds. All mass taken together could still not be measured against the vastness of space.

Far Rockaway itself was the serendipitous result of a mission seeking a fresh route to the Sardonicles. Now Blaze Base, the commander of that mission, was hailed and reviled as a great explorer and base despoiler, having introduced Earth disease to the inhabitants of Far Rockaway.

The native inhabitants perished, the Hughes Corporation declared itself in sole possession of this shiny new world and began at once to terraform it into something profitable. Leases were let. Licenses were issued. Colonists were sought. Hughes offered a nine thousand credit signing bonus and an option to purchase a hectare of land.

The previous tenants left no sign. It was as if they had never existed.

It was toward this bucolic paradise the Bonamici streamed when Clausius’ lieutenant Igor Rouge intercepted the interstellar as it emerged from its white hole. Using telecasters, Rouge ensnared the ship in a telekinetic net, cut through the hull and took command. The captain and crew were confined to quarters. Rouge offered them the standard deal. Join or die. They joined.

Rouge redirected the Bonamici to a free-floating factory which turned the unconscious passengers into telekinetic heads. The factory could handle a thousand a day, and it was some time before they got to Raul.

When he woke, he found that he was at one of his favorite fishing holes in the Dolemites above San Pellegrino, in the middle of Lake Marmastella, the gently rocking surface reflecting the azure sky, the snow-capped peaks, an eagle soaring high above, while his line trailed for trout. That was Raul’s reality for about twelve hours, until he realized that he was a disembodied head mounted on a platform inside a transparent hood looking out at row after row of similar heads, stretching off into infinity.

Raul shook his head to clear the cobwebs. He sat helmet by helmet with another head that wasn’t even a human. A monstrous, misshapen root-like apparatus with a single eye. Raul found that he could rotate his head merely by thinking about it and as he gazed in horror at his neighbor, the single yellow eye, the size of an egg yolk, pivoted toward him.

Feck, Raul said.

Shite, the cyclops replied.

What are we doing here? Raul said.

Feck if I know, the cyclops replied.

I’m Raul.

Flange.

Together, they figured it out. The drugs that kept most Heads complacent in their private realities had failed Raul, probably because he was a recovering alcoholic. And Raul’s clear vision had cut through his neighbor’s medications and infected him. It did not take long, using their telepathic powers, to learn their fate. The cyclops was a Quoncistador, a six-legged race.

Can you believe it? Flange said. I used to have six legs!

And you will again, by gar, Raul promised.

They tried to organize but drugs got in the way. At intervals, their captors swept their memories so that it was a struggle each day to remember their identities. There was no night and day, but an electronic simulation based on each species’ diurnal habits and personal preferences as stored in their genes.

It might have gone that way forever were it not for a fatal mistake. Clausius cut the head off a Thune named Judah Maccabee, attracting the attention of Nexus, a self-appointed cosmic avenger, who split Clausius’ world from stem to stern, freeing the Heads.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, they built Headworld. By linking minds, they could snatch asteroids out of the sky and pound them together like a child making a snowball. They harvested waste for fertilizer, cubic hectares of soil from a thousand worlds, riotous botany, but not much in the way of fauna. Headworld was an artificial world. It did not have the ecosystem to support vast species. It had spas, fine restaurants, museums, and night clubs. It was a popular honeymoon destination. Because of its size and remoteness, it was never very crowded.

Headworld’s main purpose was money. They weren’t in this for their health. No power in the galaxy could match them. Once those Heads got on it, fuggedaboudit. You may as well try and stop a bullet train with your hand. They played billiards with asteroids.

Here Raul sat when the news came that there was a bonfire on Osceola.

But wait a minute. If Raul was just a Head, how did he sit? He sat because after years of research, trial and error, the Heads had learned to regenerate their host bodies and experience life as they’d known it. They did it from DNA taken from the Head. Hair still grew. Plugged into their new bodies, they experienced every sensation they’d known before their conversion. They could levitate. Most preferred to leave the body behind, at least on Headworld, and buzz around from the neck up.

Raul relaxed in his free-floating lounger, feet up on his kidney-shaped, free-floating desk carved from a meteorite, and contemplated an offer from an orphanage to forage for forges in the fridge. It was a generous offer, and all the Heads had to do was build them a new orphanage. Raul had asked Arkitect to draw up plans. The orphanage would house five hundred from three species: human, Giz, and Thune. They lacked the equipment and training to take in Quatros, but Raul was thinking about setting up a separate orphanage across the street. They could field rival chess teams.

No football. Nobody liked football except for a handful of humans.

There he was. Raul. Floating in the air with his feet on a floating desk, when Flange zoomed in and hovered before him.

There’s a bonfire on Osceola, Flange said.

Headworld

Raul’s hand separated from his wrist and gestured. A lens appeared in the middle of the room, a view of the cosmos, a collection of planets. As the hand twisted, the view zoomed in on a gray/blue disc with a pin-prick orange flare. Closer and closer zoomed the lens until they were looking down from a distance of two hundred feet at a massive bonfire around which the Osceolans danced, leaping and spinning, jitterbugging, sweeping partners in the air and between their legs, forming a chorus line and snapping fingers.

Although Headworld and Osceola were separated by unimaginable time and distance, Raul and Flange heard the Osceolans singing That’s Entertainment via their telepathic abilities. Telepathy