The Pandoran Age Chronicles Series

Kyllini Prime, Pleiades Cluster Snake eyes. Below us a world, a half finished dream deferred of a man long gone. A world first forgotten in the exigencies of the moment; a war, a stand, a victory-then time delays and some plans are not resumed. Oceans half filled, disputes among the worlds and still the half finished dream spun round its star, days upon years at the top of the Pleiades. Snakes eyes, here on this unfinished, neglected world, snake minds-Marauders far from the Galactic Core where no one suspected. Devious doings, here among the star systems of ordinary mankind which they, the mysterious half men of the Core seemed to have abandoned and preyed upon at the Galactic Center. Snake eyes in the Pleiades, below us hiding in plain sight of the worlds unawares. Our three ships, The Kanaafutra, The Serpentine, and The Mel's Monkey took orbit armed and ready but the snake eyes, assured of the derelict and unheralded nature of their hideout, seemed not to be watching. Something in the strange nature of the inhuman condition they had assumed gave us that much an edge; we had come to high orbit unrecognized and unchallenged....

Louis Silvera of the transport vessel La Sirena was awakened early on his shift by an emergency com from the bridge. All around his cabin were posters of various daring-do resort hotels across the colonies. Jump from Space at New Procyon. Swim the whales at Thander's down. Dance in New Cuba. He made his way out the cabin ignoring the collection of a bachelor's life. Holograms of Cuban dancing girls reached out from the walls as he made his way down the ship's halls, "Morning Capitan!" each said and blew him a kiss. "Turn off the holograms Artie or there is going to be trouble!" he bellowed, but the kisses followed him all the way to the bridge where a whole troop of them were dancing around Artie who had his feet up on the command console." Silvera slapped a toggle on the wall and the girls disappeared. Artie, however, remained, slightly perturbed. "What?" Silvera growled. Artie said nothing but touched some screens and diagrams came up all flat. "This is a full spread of the hypercasts we are receiving" he finally quipped. "De nada." Silvera tilted his head sarcastically and made a face, "Soooo-fix it. Don't wake me up for this shit and turn off the holo-girls in the hallways it doesn't cheer me up any more. I'm going back to bed" he said and turned to leave. "Not broken." Artie said quickly before Louis could escape. "Uhh, hello-it has to be broken or there would be some chatter on that screen. You know, a whole bunch of yapping lonely freighter pilots, advertisements for cheap resort hotels on obscure little asteroids, droning bull feathers cast about the universe aye? Fix it." "Not broken." Artie repeated. His eyes left the floor where they had been examining his boots which he had removed from the console. They met his Captain's face waiting for the implications to finally sink in. "So there's nobody broadcasting from the other side?" Silvera's eyes went dark.... The streets never looked as dangerous as they did this day. Anyone might be a kidnapper ready to abscond away with him for ransom. He passed the familiar taverns and heard familiar songs drifting through to the alleys and passageways. Perhaps the betrayers even now celebrated their evil act among those fellows. Millin climbed among some forlorn bell towers and slept. Alone, hungry and afraid, he watched the lake. Sooner or later a starship would port there. He would stow away on it.... Gravity simulators went wild on both ships. Every object not battened down went flying off in different directions. Borges was MERGED, "Spatial distortions! List to port hard; we've got anomalies out of smooth space! Jagged edged, moving, linear event horizons! Radiation flares, temperature contrasts, moving out full ahead!" For all the urgency in her voice she was steady. The crew watched as the universe ripped open. Boada groaned, "Tu Madre!" and plunged himself into a cannon cockpit. Amazingly, like two canyons of darkness and lightning springing out of a sea of normal space, a sputtering of white dwarfs and neutron stars the size of moonlets came lifting up like an eighteenth century balloon show. Comets and bits of asteroids, Predecessor station ruins, busted planets; a hurricane menagerie spilled before them. Twisting in the storm, their ships fought to maintain equilibrium. "What the devil is this?" Mel roared across the com...

"The refugees moved into the Sagittarius Spiral Arm in a disbelieving shock. Betrayed, starving, alone; middle-aged bankers and college kids stared at worlds they did not make, and so began the slow and tedious work of wrestling from those worlds a way to move forward. Children torn from ordinary family life and suddenly beset with Herculean tasks. Artists and construction workers, teachers and clerks, waiters and soldiers-all cast into strange scenarios where they were to begin again under the most daunting of circumstances. It was their defining moment when robbed of their birth rights and dispossessed of their homes, they found they were a right unto themselves and not the confine of a particular space. Their home but anywhere their feet would set. They became as platinum in their dogged will to survive." "The Marauders live at the core and worship the black hole at the center of the galaxy. That," he pointed in the direction of galactic center and Vince's faceplate ran through several imaging programs, "massive antimatter plume that shoots up from the center, that's their god, of sorts. "Nobody really knows, they don't make converts, they make sacrifices. Me, I think the Predecessors traveled through the event horizon at the center to some other universe. But I'll never follow to find out. Ha. Ha ha!" Vince had seen the plume when he first went into the Taloned Sire's sensory array. It was beautiful, a simple jet stream stretching for light years. It was the first thing he learned about in the piloting tapes. The plume; it functioned as the great navigational beacon of the galaxy. Such piloting courses leave out the details of Marauders, however. There should be an addendum: Sociopathic Raider Cultures presenting travel risks.They moved through the gloomy ship searching for Predecessor Booty.

The Swarm Consider an eyeball. Billions of years of years ago a few light sensitive cells on a mere blob of primordial protoplasm. Fast forward and we have two hundred million cells in one of nature's great visualizing tools hooked up to the brain, scanning the universe. Wonder then what other senses may have developed in the untold eons and the eleven dimensions. Wonder and worry. They might be watching us now. -Winteroud Sole, Caldris. General Ossa glared at the holos from spy ships for weeks. He'd seen every seedy O'Neil station port and every two bit ore hauler with bad registry in three systems. He had a team on it working round the clock. Nothing that indicated private navies. Nothing that even indicated a stray Guildsman trading without tariffs. Yet that wasn't his true concern. Yes, he would do his duty. Private armies were a bad thing. His real desire was another search, the search for the missing intergalactic matter signature signal that had been edited from the probe reports before it hit the hive mind. The ensign he'd assigned that covert research was standing before him now. Tamara Fortunato had grown up on Earth's moon in an industrial region humankind had occupied since the conquest of the solar system with sub-light drives. It was a world with traditions of mastering a complex artificial environment old as any, and people conditioned to subterfuge techno bureaucracies as a way of life. She was perfect. Ossa loved her for decades, but he was a general. That was that. "Ensign?" he queried. "Sir." She hesitated a moment and Ossa realized she was about to throw him a curve. "I tried eight-hundred different ways of getting at the data but it's locked up with overlord only security codes on every channel. I came in under a different auspice each time, but sooner or later a red flags going to go up-if it hasn't already-and the overlords are going to come after whoever is hacking the data." "Are you requesting we surrender?" He chuckled. "No Sir. I'm not. But on a hunch I thought maybe the matter we found out there was something we sent. I did a search of historic migration records and there was a colony ship-a huge one. It was sent out centuries ago. "About a hundred miles long, really an O'Neil station with mega drives strapped on the back. Religious fundamentalists-they wanted out of our galaxy completely because it was too darn sinful, Sir. So they left on a journey that will take an eon to finish." "The trajectory? That matter was coming towards the Milky Way, not away." Ossa knew she'd have an answer for him, but they had to run through this inquiry by the numbers. "That's correct, Sir. Its orientation was in the departure trajectory, only reversed. They turned around." "Too much of an assumption. I don't buy it. They turned around an ark ship a hundred Kilometers long and started coming back?" "I know it's a lot to buy. But I figured if they did turn around they might have had trouble, sent out a mayday. So I went through the files of guard satellites outside the Hercules cluster. One had record of a transmission but the codes were so old it hadn't translated them, simply filed. It was our mayday. I've managed to convert the file." She laid it on his desk. "Have you seen it?" "No sir." Ossa threw his hands up. "You never fail to amaze me, Ensign. Put it on." Nervously, she loaded the file and adjusted a flat screen projection. It showed the hull of an O'Neil ship. Several people in Eva Suits were walking along the outer hull as if on routine maintenance work. They were followed by a couple of auto bots hauling equipment. Suddenly one of the humans turned and seemed to look up. He stared for a moment and then began scrambling in a frenzy away from where he'd been...

The Cat's Paw Nebula, Scorpius. Harry Stark could smell the Cat's Paw Nebula long before he actually glided the Riptide out of hyper, easing back into normal space, and it was like a field of flowers. Of course, since everything one experiences in MERGE is a virtual construct, the gasses of the nebula could have been made to smell like anything. But the Riptide was a luxury yacht before it was refitted as Harry's private battlewagon, so the Cat's Paw smelled good-yacht owners don't take well to programmers who make the flight experience unpleasant. "If you can't be Goulet, don't play" the yacht salesman had explained. Harry had shrugged and bought the whole shipyard. NGC 6334, the Cat's Paw Nebula. Fifty light-years of some of the biggest star nurseries in the galaxy, toward the center, toward the core. He surveyed the broad sweep of gas and dust clouds with a run of different infrared and x-rays. He consulted the charts. He became familiar in more detail with the territory-as he had been doing in the long weeks of hyperspace. He looked at the big young stars- some ten times standard solar mass. He catalogued the accretion discs, proto-planets, heaving billows of nebula. Asteroid belts raw and red with impacts. The hunting ground. At the edges; shaken into coalescing by ancient interstellar shock waves, remnant Oort clouds of icy comets, dropping into the maelstrom of the star forming region from the distant blackness of the void again, following the complex vectors and apogees of a gravitational beehive. The boredom of hyper had been grueling-ever and always the same. The rush and bang of the early legs of the space journey eventually giving way to the uncompromising responsibilities of keeping the crate airworthy, staying alert, staying alive. Then the joy of arrival, the sense of accomplishment. Harry's head, deep in his MERGE helmet, bent forward unconsciously- arrival at the Cat's Paw wasn't the accomplishment of this mission. This was going to be a waste of mesons if he didn't take some prisoners. "Surfin' Safari!" Mustafa smacked Harry a high five as he came out of MERGE. "Cat's Paw is ours. Throw out a beacon with the Ahura Mazda flag. We're taking this nebula." Harry said casually. Snickers and guffaws from the crew. They think I'm kidding. "Go ahead, drop the beacon." He said. "The Pleiades too were a region like this once-not long ago in cosmic time. Today, the Marauders raid the burnished celestial wastelands. Today, the Bogies are creeping at our heels like emissaries of death-but this day will pass." He gave them a rakish glare of challenge, "We will take by storm, we will grind our enemies at our heels, and we will plant orchards of cherry blossoms on uncharted worlds- worlds which we will name." The bridge crew stared silently back. He returned the stare, "Hey man, we're making history here, write that down." The Riptide hit the nebula with a plasma shockwave slamming the gasses, a lightshow, a beacon, and a song broadcasting high and wide: My Maria. They had to look like a drunkard's dream to the Marauders, busting in noisy and oblivious like a twisted wealthy tourist too long removed and sheltered from the nature of reality. Just what Harry wanted them to look like; a fat huckleberry for easy picking on a sunny day.

Clairissa Maggio, archaeological log. 3983, New Galen Ruins. The Arcturian O’Neal station is a testament to that culture’s space engineering. Fifty kilometers long, the station had apparently been the largest settlement in system, and directed high energy farming from a solar panel array. The array, of some note in archaeological architectural circles for some time, remains still, in various conditions, a matrix of panels encompassing a full inner orbit of the star, its Herculean scale remains impressive; one more testament to the greatness of the ancients and that era. No modern array equals it size in any of the Republics and Kingdoms, save Imperial CCCE of course. Yet the O’Neal station was not the only find, and from here luck turns to legend; a Sunrider war frigate is lodged in the side. It is a timely find as well. The two-artifact menagerie’s decaying orbit would reach a soft cloud corona sometime in the near future, and with the hull breach, caused by that long ago Sunrider impact, not even the hard shielded O’Neal Station could shelter the plethora of artifacts inside. Apparently, the Sunrider had careened into the hull of the O’Neal. The Sunrider’s Stasis Shields had flashed on and off, moving through the O’Neal first like butter, the ragged ultra-steel against ragged ultra-steel. Back and forth, again and again in a matter of seconds. The interlocked ultra-steel then held like a stinger, while the entire atmospherics on the interior of the O’Neal bled out furiously to space, rushing over the sleek black and silver lines of the frigate. We’re not sure why the other environmental habitat compartments in the O’Neal Station were breached, nor, at the end of the expedition, what was the predication of the welded CCCE Cyborg pilot’s plunge into the station. Further examination will surely provide the answers. The breech safeguards should have preserved them. We have found no intact environmental compartments yet. Conceivably, in a colony station of this size and sophistication, biome environment compartments could still contain living forests. Fauna and ecosystems thriving, unseen by human eyes for centuries, the life support still servicing away soft rains and light. Now that would be all the stars in a jewel box, aye! Ha! My Archaeological Avarice is showing! Kunisada has taken a strong dislike to the frigate, an almost obsessive aversion, even for a head of expedition security. “The greatest technologies of an era, mostly unmatched and forgotten,” he said grimly with his thousand-yard stare, “all in the service of death. Feels like death still abides here. Great Space Ghost, what the technological systems on that Sunrider will be worth to the reverse engineering departments of numerous corporate interests...”

They were waiting for us when we dropped out of hyperspace, I could sense them then, a dirty little swarm, and sickeningly the most frightening thing was they had once been human. Klaxons hammered my ears and my empathic senses were then overwhelmed-the strange Marauders minds, with their ugly snake eye stares hammering my mind, then the sudden tussle of twenty hard core air men their adrenaline and training kicking in with a slam. "This is not a drill!" Coco-butter Parsons howled but the air men's boots were already banging steel, half of them at their guns. We were sitting ducks and there were a dozen Marauder ships, easy. Particle beam fire slashed away at our ship, the KanaaFutura. The Marauders doubtless had never seen a Caldris Royal Navy warship here at the Galactic Core, even through their snake infected minds I could sense a huge wave of surprise come back as we took their fire and the mighty KanaaFutura rose through the maelstrom of ionized particles and maligned atomic clouds her guns announcing payback. Nobody missed and the Marauder shielding, magnetized ore layered over their giant ramjets, began to strip away in a fireworks show such that the demonic, snaky victimizers were revealed for the devil they were, squealing and riding fire with the hellish super-massive black hole and its light-years of swirling accretion disk as their background. Still, no one stopped firing on either side and we rode the streams in a twirling death volley of destruction. Hammerstein, impossibly, was cursing and longing for a gun port... Three weeks earlier: Hammerstein was now about to break protocol with the Royal police confidentiality. At length the platoon of Rangers took up a nervous formation in the hold. Coco, Tokushima, and I stood to his side-none of us any more informed than the platoon at that moment. Something in Hammerstein's bearing changed; memories were flooding his mind and body now. Stances: attention, at ease, parade rest. His mind swept back through the years to a sun burnt lot and he was a ridiculously young recruit keeping his fingers and thumbs-just so-his heels and toes-just so-his knees bent in the slightest. He walked up to the platoon, getting right in their faces, "Are you ASHAMED to be under the command of an old fart retiree like me who isn't even Navy any more? I'll give you a shot, right now, every last one of you city sissies, one after the other, and I'll injure your sorry selves before we go on the mission. Go ahead. The cameras are off." There were no takers. He couldn't know, but I could. They all somehow knew he could take them, by force of personality, if not by sheer strength. "Okay, good. You're smarter than you look. Now, since the cameras are off-and yes, I learned that trick in basic training, or I wouldn't have gotten my blue cord, I'm going to fill you in on the mission. In full, for real, and no cards in my pocket. You break faith with me, and you break faith with your platoon because what you are about to hear is not supposed to be told to you, according to my superiors. However, I am not about to fly in to harm's way with my superiors, but with you. We are going to the Core. There are no recognized governments in the Core, only Warlords, Marauders, ghosts, and bones. We are The Law, the arm of the Royal family, Justice and Honor, and we now ride into the belly of The Devil." The rush of pride that swept the platoon was like a wave of metallic hydrogen deep in a gas giants dark seas, lit with a million square miles of lightning; death before dishonor. Duty. Joy. Purpose. "Now, I'm going to tell you why." They barely breathed.