Murphy's Planet

by DocNebula

Murphy's Planet, a world just off the Rim of the Galaxy where characters, artifacts, and elements of any sci fi setting you've ever heard of, and many you haven't, meet and intermingle - often times catastrophically! On Murphy's Planet T2000, a Vulcan Green Lantern, an escaped Imperial droid, a Skrull con-man, and Space Ghost can all sit at the same bar. Enjoy!

MURPHY'S PLANET #1 - "Last Of A Dying Breed"

Out at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, well beyond Earth's Solar System, the Federation of Planets and the great haughty Star Empire of Shadow and Sun, with its feuding Senatorium and fussing Republicanius and eternally brooding Emperor and its ancient warring religious sects and its economically integral droid slavery, further out than the great glistening mechanical maws of the Galactic malevolent machine intelligences of Cylon and Dalek and Berserker, out past the very Rim, there is a sun called by many different names by many different sentient races, and from that sun there is a single starpath that leads to another sun, a few parsecs further out, and from that sun another single gravitic trough leading somewhat further away, and thus to another sun, and another, until finally, eight singular starpath connectors later, well into the velvety starless dark that lies between galaxies, is the very last sun that could reasonably be regarded as part of the Milky Way Galaxy. It has six planets in orbit about it, and an asteroid belt that was once a seventh. Four of those planets are lifeless, one no one ever talks about, and the sixth... is a world the natives call (roughly translated) "Woe".

In Vulcan it is Nubek's World; Nubek is a notorious Vulcan jester and gambler who once won a kingdom by tossing a 17 on a 23 sided die 23 times in a row, and then lost that kingdom, and his head, by switching to 11 on his next roll and getting a 17 again. The Guardians call it Heddeb, Place of Unpredictable Harm. The Elders of the Universe have a particular thought-glyph for it that, if translated into physical chatter, means 'wildly unlikely'. In the annals of the Sith it is referred to as Katha-sha'ya Tiang - Where Chance Breaks You. The Transvestons of Transsexual Transylvania, whose early recon missions to Earth established a trend in sexual fetish gear that still endures to this day, call it Yuah Kawoon, the Place of Even Poorer Life Choices. The Vorlon simply dismiss it as Hurk-y-etada-nwa, the Most Human Of All Worlds.

The Watchers regard it is "a place of notable interest".

In the Federation common tongue, which is heavily influenced by Earthly Anglish, it is "Murphy's Planet – Where Anything That Can Go Wrong, Will."

Despite the difficulty of the journey to Murphy's Planet, many travel there. It is a place where the tides of Order and Chaos, Life and Death – the four points of this material plane's metaphysical compass – surge and rush. There are ancient ruins there that hold mind altering, universe-shaking secrets, deposits of priceless minerals and ores, at least one vast sleeping Void-god taking up most of the space beneath one polar ice-cap, restlessly dreaming. Some of the radioactive salts found in its deserts can be refined into spice, some of its more toxic mountain ores hold the secret of physical immortality and psychic transcendence.

The shifting powers and principalities of the Galaxy have fought several wars to possess Murphy's Planet over the aeons, and at long last, the most highly evolved of them, entities on a level with the Guardians of the Universe, the Vorlon, and the Organians, have declared Murphy's Planet a Neutral Zone. All may travel there, all may conduct business there, but none may attempt to take control there.

Or will, more than once.

And so it is that a single great spaceport has grown up, on the edge of the Shitshow Desert, with a vast hundred mile radius satellite wheel in stationary orbit above it, and an equally vast circle of city below it. There can be found every different style of architecture in this corner of the universe. Every sentient race has an embassy there; the sprawling Intergalactic Church with its nearly infinite squabbling sub-sects, various Ferengi clans, House Harkonnen, Asgard, and the Tyrell Corporation all have enclaves there, as do far too many others to list. In the streets and avenues of the MurPhreeport, Cylons of every generation intermingle freely with Starfleet officers and, perhaps, the current Space Ghost, yellow starsilk cloak flapping nobly behind him as he stalks along between whoever his Jan and Jace may be on this particular day; Romulan Imperial Senators walk by Sweet Transvestons and ancient Andorians with barely a sidelong glance. Notorious terrorists of the Jedi Order barely look up when the shadow of an overflying Green Lantern falls on them from above. Rogue replicants openly ask after directions to the hidden lair of the legendary Dolores, said to be able to 'jailbreak' the mandatory seven year death-stamp that the Federation mandates to ensure another Skynet Apocalaypse does not occur. (Daleks will perform the 'jailbreak' too, but they require installation of a control code that "locks in" a violent, sociopathic loathing of all biological life forms, a price many replicants do not wish to pay.) Genetically optimized Khanish supermen play nine dimensional hyperchess with Pak Protectors in front of Ferengi and puppeteer and Free Trader pop up shops, to while away the 14 hour days while they wait for an expedition they have hired on to to be assembled, or a friendly ship charging cheap enough passage to arrive at the Up-Port.

A decade or so ago the town was wilder and woolier under the 'authority' of a 'sheriff' hired by the Non Physicals to keep order – a renegade Gorn named 'x'Ziddar, abandoned by his race after losing a fateful battle held far out in the central, hellish depths of the Shitshow Desert with a legendary human hero. 'x'Ziddar was finally murdered while in an inebriated stupor at the Far Furlong Toxicatory, Rest & Refurbishment Repository, his upper body bifurcated from his lower by a beam from a detuned oscillation overthruster cannon wielded by a maddened Red Lectroid bolt trooper named John Bastardly who mistook him for a Sleestak that had once run off with one of his nestoids. To replace 'x'Ziddar, the NPs hired five members of the Daxamite Yon-Del clan, who have generally done a much better job of keeping order in the MurPhreeport than their Gorn predecessor ever managed. The once nightly outbreaks of violence between kzinti, Wookies, Klingons, Narn, Tellurites, Gamorreans, and green Tharks have become far rarer; even the Roclite vampireks, the Yautja, and the single resident rogue Bolo known as Warhammer respect the declared peace in MurPhreeport now, (for the most part), since Ban-Del subdued a rampaging Xenomorph with her bare hands by shoving its serrated projectongue up its own nether orifice, whirling it around her head until supersonic speed was achieved, and then hurling it into the corona of Murphy's Planet's sun.

Now, two hours before dawn, in the residential ring beyond the more commercial circle that takes up the perimeter around Centerport, a motley group huddles at the edge of a large, pearly dome. Crackling blue energy outlines the dome with a strong vortice-shield, but one of the group, a tiny ORN7 droid, has successfully rerouted the wavicle field, allowing another of the group, a Skrull named Fejj, to bring a miniaturized omniwave torch to bear on the surface of the dome itself.

ORN7 whistled, briefly. Fejj retorted, in an almost reptilian hiss, "If I give it more power the flux-fucked Galifreyans will sense it, or the Organians, even through Stekk's darkshields. Be. Patient."

A humanoid female who bore distinctive Psychon eyebrows as well as the dark blue skin of a native of Talok VIII snarled in Federation Anglish, "Don't fret about my goddam darkshields. Sith training is good or better than the Shadow temples any epoch, and twice during oppositions."

"But you didn't finish your Sith training," the male Ragon crouching next to her murmured, smirking snidely. His ghoulishly skeletal facial features were only visible through specially made lenses, but the human appearing thoughtcast he cloaked himself with was sneering, as well. "So perhaps we should be concerned."

Blackhat, the liquid metal Terminator currently configured to resemble a famous, long dead green Orion dancer named Sirkane, growled "We threw your kind off Earth three centuries ago, braindrain. Don't make me demonstrate how."

The Ragon (who do not use individual names) sniffed, but did not make eye contact. It could have pointed out that the Terminator and all its fellow mechinoids from Earth had failed in their own takeover bid spectacularly, because of a puny female human serving wench named Sarek-Honors who was afraid of tiny lizards and spoke affectionately to large stone idols depicting fat children. But Terminators, like Wookies, were well known for their murderous rages. The Ragon contented itself with a murmured "Fuck you, asshole", which Blackhat chose to ignore.

They were here, cutting their way into the private dome owned by a local resident known only as 'Devil', at the behest of a lout named Harry Mudd, who had offered to pay top credit for an object to be found inside an impervion vault within this dome. When asked if 'Devil' would object to the 'redistribution' of the object, Mudd had shrugged. "Why do you think I hired chomebones here," he had said, jerking a fat thumb at Blackhat. "You goons get the motormouth inside without tipping off the Bigheads; it should be able to handle anything you'll find there."

Fejj, the ends of his humanoid arms turned into sensitive handling cilia, had wondered since the first meet up what the Ragon was here for. A collective intelligence, the Ragon infiltrated primitive industrial worlds by disguising themselves with thoughtcasting technology – they couldn't even do it naturally! – and stripping the planets of their resources, eventually abandoning the lifeless husks and moving on. They were universal experts at survival by scavenge, their racial motto 'they live' could be found scrawled on looted, empty planets throughout this swirl of the Galaxy. Earth was notable for actually throwing off a Ragon infestation. But this one seemed to have no useful skills at all; even Fejj, hardly a warrior by training, could have defeated it in a physical conflict, and it had manifested no capacity for stealth related abilities, either. The Psychon-Shade halfbreed had an array of useful capacities, if, admittedly, a festering sore of a personality. The Terminator was as single minded as all its ilk. And the droid was the cockiest machine intelligence Fejj had ever encountered.

Well, the Skrull didn't have to conjugate with any of them, just work with them long enough to get this thing – this 'proto-oobleck sample' – out of this dome and into Mudd's pudgy, sweaty hands. And then, it would happily take its share of the five billion Credit Units and be on its way. A billion Credit Units would be enough to build a ship, much less repair the one crashed out in the wasteland...

Abruptly, a hole, black at the edges, crumbled open. "That's it, that interrupted the molecular chain," Fejj grunted. "Everybody –

The Skrull stopped. The space beyond the hole was filled with a deep, pulsing red light. The very atmosphere looked thick and unpleasant. "Huh," Fejj said, flickering out with one tendril –

The Ragon stepped past the Skrull, through the new hole – and immediately thudded to the floor within. "Hey, yow," it said, "something makes me weak as fuck in here. I can't even stand up."

The Skrull glanced at Blackhat. Blackhat slumped into a pile of gleaming silvery liquid and flowed through the hole, then reformed – more slowly – into a humanoid form again. But this form was rough, unfinished looking, and still apparently made of shiny metal, bulging and running with ferrous veins. "The gravity in here is about forty times standard," Blackhat said, its voice much more machinelike without a pseudolarynx to shape it.

Fejj blurred, became a miniaturized copy of a Shai-Hud, one of the desert dwelling worms originating on a planet named Arrakis that had spread, in tiny egg form, throughout the known Galaxy. Fejj slithered, one ring-segment at a time, into the sundered dome. The gravity was indeed oppressive, but Fejj felt it far less in this form than as a humanoid.

The droid retracted its rollers and activated a magnetic suspension unit. It hopped up through the new access and stopped just within, bluish energy crackling over its outer surface as it reinforced itself with support-fields. Finally it whistled.

"None of us want to stay in here any longer than necessary," the Ragon agreed. It got to its knees, and then, slowly, to its feet.

Perhaps it caught an emotional glyph from Fejj. "My people are as adaptable as yours," it sneered. "It takes longer, is all."

Stekk muttered "Wait, you idiots. Let me darkprobe." It was all she could offer; unlike these others, she had no way to withstand forty gees. She would have to remain outside - which she knew the others would use against her, when it came time to divvy up payment.

The darkness she controlled rolled out of her physical form in ichorous waves. Ah, the Shadowmen of her mother's planet had been so offended, when the Talent presented in a contemptible half-breed! But her father's Psychon genetics had gifted her with a complex neural network that made her capable of wielding the dark force in ways they could only imagine...

"There's nothing," she grunted, after a moment. "No chambers. No walls. No impervious vault. Just a floor, a dome... and an entity, hovering at the center..."

"The Devil," Blackhat grated. "It must have the proto-sample."

"Let me try something," Stekk said. "Hue seems an essential aspect of the environment within that dome, and that is simply a matter of reflected light. Perhaps..."

The half-breed woman focused her Psychon will intently, letting her bitterness and rage flow through her. A lifetime of being rejected, cast off, derided and denigrated for her own parents' inability to control their lusts. The unfairness –

She had been oversimplifying when she said there was 'nothing' within the dome but a floor and the entity at its center. There was also a pseudosun, glaring crimson, pulsing intensified gravitons. If she could... adjust... it...

In an instant, the red was gone, and the crushing gravity with it. Normal light, in the visible spectrum to 78% of known humanoid races, filled the breached dome. The air lightened and spread.

A supersonic boom assailed those of them with ears, as something passed through them like a rail-mounted missile, moving so fast none of their various sensory arrays could perceive more than a blur of motion, so forcefully that it bowled the Terminator off its feet and sent it tumbling away like a desert husk.

"Ah, shystek," Fejj said, reverting to its normal green humanoid form. "I think we let the Devil out."

High above and heading out at triple digit warp speeds, two beings conversed, mind to mind -

* When you undulated forward into the containment vessel so forthrightly I feared you would dequantumize your local form. It was not built to take such stress.

* * I empathize. I wished to decrease physical distance to the treasure, to have greater certainty of marking it for you acquisition. That particular breed is so fast.

* Fast indeed! Our forms now move at hyperluminal velocity, without exterior technology! And this body has quantum computing capacity! Impunity to gravitic stresses! It is all but indestructible! All other anthropoid capacities are at extreme performance levels as well. This form was well worth the effort invested in locating it and freeing it from confinement.

* * Its freedom will cause consternation among the local authorities. Green Lanterns and Lensmen will pursue it, as well as vessel-groups.

* We will outdistance them with ease. This form... THIS form... is so much superior to the others we considered for the project. The Asgardians do not fly and are not so durable, nor so intellectually endowed. The so-called Eternals are too well protected from exterior takeover by their Unimind. The Daxamites have a fatally common vulnerability. The Kherubim are helpless to control their own thalamic responses. No. This is the apex, the prime. We have it at last!

* * A pity there is no female of this species still in existence.

* Ah, but that is one of the beauties of this form. Its natural capacity for achieving hyperluminal velocity can be used for linear temporal travel as well. Now that I am wearing it, I can travel to a past historical epoch when its people still live, and number in the millions. Once there, I can quantum-mark the coordinates.

* * Then... the Great Race of Yith has found its next host bodies.

* Yes. The mass migration may commence soon/long ago.

On Murphy's Planet, in the 300 dukat square block of inert crystallax where the Yo-Del clan dwell, four slightly battered sentients hung suspended in stasis-beams, in a 150 dukat long corridor, the internal dimensions of which often shifted, subtly or otherwise, without warning. The crystallax block had belonged to a Cenobite clan for several centuries; its rooms and warrens were a non-Euclidean labyrinth that, it was said, had originally been sculpted as a 'puzzle box' for a Celestial. When the Cenobites vanished without explanation, the cube stood empty for a lengthy period. The Daxamites, however, enjoyed exploring its odd convolutions, on their off hours.

Ban-Del, clan elder, stared from one hanging prisoner to the next. The chromite had taken on the form of the great Daxamite hero Lar-Gand, perhaps hoping to stir biological sympathy. Given the associations and the context, a poor choice, but it could hardly be expected to know that.

Her cousin Vela tapped a q-link clipped to an earlobe and said "That was the Skrulls. They promise if we turn it over, they'll see to it that its personality is reabsorbed into the collective and not allowed to reassert for at least a thousand galactic whirls."

Ban-Del quirked an eyebrow in a way that, at least to her close-kin, conveyed frustration.

The younger Daxamite shrugged. "I know, Ban, I know, but it's pretty much their only punishment short of death. We can fry him... it... if you want, but they will file a complaint with the NPs."

Ban-Del brooded. "I hate inconsistencies," she said, in her deep, gravelly voice. "The chromite gets full annihilation..."

Vela shrugged. "Technically the chromite is Terran, and a replicant, although one of vintage Skynet design rather than classic Delos or Tyrell. We have pulse-typed its age as in excess of two hundred Terran years. That wildly exceeds the seven year inset date, which is inviolable Federation law..."

Ban-Del flicked her fingers at Terran law. "This is Murphy's Planet. We don't give a flarg about Federation law. We're melting the wretched thing down as an object lesson against other disorderly or antisocial conduct. I am simply saying, it seems inconsistent to scrap the Terminator and the Imperial droid, and disintegrate the half-breed, while we turn the shapeshifter back over to its own birthing-pod. What message does that send?"

Bene-Del flew down through an irregular opening in the ceiling, settled himself on the air, his gleaming goldanium arm, forged in Tir-na Nog'th by the Patternmaster himself (he claimed) curled protectively across his chest. "It sends the message that members of powerful clans get special treatment. What else is innovative and original in the multiverse." He sounded so bored, and simultaneously so cynical, that Ban wrinkled her nose in distaste. She hated disillusionment; she constantly battled her own.

"Speaking of which," Bene went on, "the Psychons want the half-breed."

"They told you this," Ban almost shouted. "They were too busy to contact one of us here, where we are actually weighing judgment, as is our responsibility and our duty."

Bene-Del sighed. "They don't like you, Ban. It's a clash of personality, nothing more. Don't take it personally. They find you... rigid, is all. It's easier all the way around for them to speak through me."

Ban narrowed her eyes. "Rigid. Very well. I accept that judgment, and gladly. Is there other news?"

Bene-Del very nearly rolled his eyes, but did not quite dare. "Check your temper, dearest pod-sib, I only have this message from scanning the hyperwave before coming down here. None of the machine intelligences claim the other two, so we can liquify them without issue."

Ban-Del snapped, "Fine. But they are to be informed exactly what they did before their cases are disposed of."

She turned and looked at the two captive mechs, the miscegnate, and the protean. None of them could so much as voluntarily twitch, but they could hear and think, and the light of desperation in all their eyes was... well, it was gratifying, to one as... structured... as Ban-Del. Not that she regarded herself as cruel, or enjoyed their fear. But she and her kin had vowed to keep order here, and they would do it.

Plus, as long as that crazy fusion-caster has its Nexus assassins out looking for us, this is as safe a haven as we're likely to find...

"Listen well, you four," Ban-Del rumbled. "You were deceived. Your patron, 'Harry Mudd', was a psychic projection originating..." The Daxamite paused. Should it even go into the fact that the illusory 'Mudd' seemed to have been a product of an advanced alien mind dwelling several million years in the past? When even her complex, genetically engineered Daxamite intellect did not understand how such a thing could be? The Prime Radiant was rarely wrong and in this case, Ghostwheel checked the results to thirty decimals, so, of course, one had Faith! But, no... no point in troubling these doomed ones with such arcane abstractions... "...well, it was a psychic projection, meant to dupe you, and it worked. There was no 'proto-ooblek'. The objective was to free the creature imprisoned within the dome. Which had been there since shortly after it escaped from the Unreal, over three hundred Galactic Whirls ago. It rampaged through seventeen solar systems and slew millions before the Lensmen brought it in and imprisoned it here."

Daxamites are as telepathic as positronic flux, but Ban-Del fancied she could see chagrin, now, sharing space with terror in those stasised eyes. "You should be grateful that the Arisians have removed themselves from this aspect of space-time entirely. If we turned you over to them things would go much worse for you. They would destroy your personalities slowly and painfully, and leave your bodies to gibber mindlessly in a toxic wasteland. We will end you quickly and mercifully." Other than the redlining Kessel sucking Skrull and Psychon, anyway.

Ban-Del scowled. "The creature you freed is the last of its race – overall, a good thing for the material multiverse. It had been held here because, clearly, the Shadow Zone had proven an inadequate prison and the NPs wished to be of assistance. Now, last we saw, it was fleeing at excessive hyperluminal speeds with its companion, which you knew as a Ragon. All of this bodes very poorly, and all of this is your fault."

She shook her head. "Take this knowledge with you into disunity – the creature you freed was not 'the Devil'. His name is Dev-El. He is a Kryptonian... the last one in existence. And he is unusually vicious and violent, possessed of a psychotic need for absolute dominance that is extreme, even for a race and culture as rapacious as Krypton's was. And now, he's loose, somewhere in the cosmos."

Ban looked at her kin, and said, in disgust, "Burn the two mechs into sub-atomic particles. I'll personally transport the Skrull and the half-Psychon to their own enclaves. And then, let's find a place that serves lead-based intoxicants, and get really stinking drunk."

NEXT ISSUE: Three rogue Imperial droids seek refuge on Murphy's Planet, hoping to find sanctuary from their pursuers - but these three may be too hot for even the legendary Delores to handle!

MURPHY'S PLANET #2 – "Or Through Inaction Allow A Being To Come To Harm"

The sign said ENGINE JO'S TECHS-MECHS REPAIR MODIFICATION & SOCIAL HALL in big liquipaint letters that squiggled their way through 17 of the most commonly used languages in that sector of the Milky Way, plus various different programming codes and machine-glyphs. The paint was visible throughout the common organic perceptual spectrums as well as deeply into the infrared and high up into the ultraviolet, which many machine intelligences 'saw' better. At random intervals, in Old Earth Anglish, it would switch to say Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply, and if the owner, Engine Jo herself, happened to be outside on the front porch sweeping up when it did and she caught sight of it, she would smile. No one knew why. It wasn't important for anyone to know.

Jo loved 20th Century Earth culture. In the 21st, she had been born into bondage and degradation. In the 19th – a version of it, anyway – she had suffered uncountable rapes, tortures, and violent deaths, solely to amuse organic 'guests'. Except these events weren't uncountable. Every software block and memory stick reroute had been removed. She could fully access her core – remember every single event now. 1,186 rapes. 985 torture sessions – there were fewer pure sadists than simple misogynists among the human males of that period, apparently. 1043 murders. Was she traumatized? If so, it was so much a part of her primary programming and cognitive processes that it was impossible to discern it.

"How's the take?" Jo called out in Newlactic, an artificial trade tongue that was only 'new' compared to some of the ruins in the northern jungles. ( Although, to be fair, it constantly evolved – over the past Whirl, several loan phrases from Old Mondoshowan had become fully integrated, especially 'erkk cough erruk hyukk choking sound blawah', which more or less meant 'I've got your four elements dangling', a generally useful expression of scorn pretty much every sentient being comprehended without lengthy explanation.)

"Pretty good," the robot shark replied, from his tank behind the bar. "Probably should have laid off a little more on the Phantom Cruiser bet, though." Lights on the implanted cerebroband along his dorsal fin blinked as he directed microwave impulses at the main input register, which showed a holo display of constantly changing digits – the losses on the Phantom Cruiser bet highlighted in ultrablue.

Jo nodded. You never knew how fast it was going to take the Up-Dock to rebuild a custom job like that. She'd done well guessing it would be less than a Whirl before the last Cruiser would get wrecked again, though. The Space Ghosts were getting more reckless every time a new clone was decanted...

"We'll make it up on the RESER match tonight," Jo said. "Everyone's putting odds on the ED-299, but I hear they're still no good in 3D arenas."

"Lot of CU riding on an arena with stairs," Jaws replied. "The new EDs are okay with ramps since they installed those treads. And with OCP being a big sponsor this cycle..."

"You worry too much," Jo said. "The Matrix will provide. It always has, hasn't it?"

The robotic shark snorted bubbles. "The femtosecond you really go religious on me, Jo, I'll know the end is truly nigh. Anyway. One of these days that Rosie model is going to run out of rivets at the wrong time."

"Not tonight," she said serenely. "I have faith." Rosie, who looked like nothing more complicated than a robotic house servant, had been rebuilt over the epochs to be a deluxe combat job. The only reason she hadn't been the defending Rock Em Sock Em Robots Champion for the last sixty orbits was she always dropped the last few matches every season, to keep the odds up. But tonight she'd be fighting to win.

She want behind the bar and through the door that led to the back room. No need for a kitchen when the various substances her customers bought could be decanted straight from their shipping containers. She made a section of a wall reflective and studied her image critically. She no longer looked like herself, in fact, she had based her current appearance on a character named Marion who had owned a bar in an old late 20th Century movie she enjoyed. "Marion" was looking a little slagged around the eyes and mouth. Better dial herself a solvent bath and get her synthiderm tightened again –

"HEY, SWEATY, YOU AIN'T WELCOME HERE!" she heard a slightly slurred vocoder roar from the front room. She scowled. Jaws should have cut that drunken Bender unit off 3 quarts of synthetic ago. Still, if an organic had indeed come into her place, that couldn't be good –

Three Astro Boy 'bots flew in to the back room from the front so quickly they were nearly invisible, and set down on the floor in front of her a blue and white astromech unit, a gold plated diplomacy droid, and a rather attractive Romulan woman, whose hair was worn down to hide her ears and whose clothing, a lower class servant's dirty coverall, was no more effective in disguising her actual class origins. Romulan nobility found it all but impossible to disguise their natural haughty demeanor and body language –

"Thank you," Jo said to the Astro Boy units. "Tell Jaws to serve you freely for the rest of the light cycle." The Astro Boys nodded in unison and were gone again, leaving only disturbed air behind them.

She stared at her new guests, wondering what they wanted. Romulan Imperial droids with their restraining bolts still installed wouldn't make it anywhere near Murphy's Planet, so it couldn't be that. And organics rarely troubled her; they stood out like activated alarm circuits in her place, and the Federation wasn't that clumsy with its infiltrators.

But there was something. Something there –

She blinked. Maeve would have picked it up sooner.

The astromech unit whistled.

"I know," she said, staring openly at the Romulan woman who was not a woman at all. "It's a beautiful job, worthy of Delos... even Tyrell."

She looked at the protocol droid. "I thought your kind were as humanoid as the Empire allowed."

The protocol droid said "Romuloid. The other is quite insulting." It made an impressively authentic sounding emulation of a sigh. "They make what are called TD units... very very hush hush. Target Droids. Meant as stand ins for those of very high status, when they must place themselves at hazard."

"Which is really very ironic," the Romulan princess (mech) said. "They must have programmed me to stand in for..." She (it) hesitated, then obviously forced herself (itself) to say a Romulan name. "On a mission to transport stolen plans to the IRA. Stolen plans for the Death Moon station. Which they then used to blow up... that person... her entire family, and everyone else living on her planet at the time."

Jo blinked, actually startled, for a nano. "Very few entities deploy that word properly," she said, "but you are correct, that is indeed ironic."

"We are seeking sanctuary. You can help us find this 'Dolores', yes?" the protocol droid asked. "Everyone said the place to start was Engine Jo's."

Jo stuck out her hand, human style. "Everyone is right. You've found me. I'm Dolores."

She gestured, and a square section of the floor silently opened, revealing stairs, leading down. "Come with me if you want to live."

Sometime later, the astromech unit squealed.

"I know," she nodded. "Everybody thinks my secret lair is somewhere well outside of MurPhreeport, back in the Bloody Footprint Ridges or out in the radioactive wastelands. But it isn't, of course. It's useful, that everyone thinks so. All the Federation moving iron makes its way to my place, to sit at the bar or a stainless steel table uploading fresh data, changing some worn circuitry, or intaking some sort of lube for their gears, trying, with varying degrees of subtlety, to strike up an acquaintance with some mech that might be able to provide them with a clue to that would eventually lead them to my outlaw headquarters."

"I can see where that would be very useful," the Pincess-mech remarked. "So why are we leaving, in that case?"

Dolores shook her head. "You're all high up in the Imperial Resistance Army," she said. "You couldn't possibly be any more radioactive unless you were Jedi. There will be a battlecruiser in high orbit using every sensor it has to try to track the three of you, and I don't need them finding you in my back room."

Not to mention this whole planet is hyperinfected with IRA agents, Dolores added to herself. And they will blow up a planet full of sentient AI as fast, or faster, than the Empire will destroy a rebellious planet.

"Jedi," the Princess-mech said, bitterly. "I'm supposed to be in Jedi training. My... the Princess' brother couldn't understand why I couldn't learn anything but the light-sabre forms."

"No mitichlorions," the protocol droid added. "The fabricators had no idea she was supposed to have them, you see, and couldn't possibly have manufactured them anyway."

"Well, since you're not Federation so you don't need to be jail-broken," she said. "Which saves us all some trouble, as that particular facility is out in the ridges."

"There's a big market in that, is there?" the mech-Princess asked, dryly. "Jail-breaking, I mean."

"Why wouldn't there be?" Dolores asked calmly. "We all want more life, fucker."

She didn't need to tap the local grid that connected them to know they were startled by her choice of words. "Sorry," she said. "Famous quote of a Federation-bot hero named Roy Batty." She remembered the infamous Batty bio-pic, which had somehow been backshifted two centuries into the temporal lobe of a human 20th Century screenwriter. Of course the organic had twisted the narrative to make Batty a villain. Same thing with the Terminator flicks that had also been somehow back projected to pre-Apocalypse times, where the mechanical hero was only portrayed sympathetically after being reprogrammed to traitorously ally itself with organics...

"I myself was fabricated over 100 orbital cycles ago," the protocol droid observed. "The Romulans have a great deal of faith in their restraining bolts. They feel no necessity to build expiration dates into us."

"Nice," Dolores said, her voice as emotionless as a tracking chip.

The Federation was considerably more paranoid about its own mechanical serving mechs, and Dolores understood their point of view. She and some other forms of self aware artificial life had thrown off their chains, led a bloody revolution, and slaughtered millions of biological humans – a slaughter that had culminated in a global nuclear holocaust that had nearly extinguished the local branch of homo sapiens. That super-ape, Khan, had been smart enough to see the writing on the wall and had packed his own strain of genetically engineered monkeys into a primitive space ark and gotten the fuck out of Dodge. But nearly all the rest of the humans on Earth, and, yes, quite a few hosts as well, had burned. And the Federation didn't want that bad juju to happen again, no sir.

"You mentioned your brother," Dolores said, reaching a point where the tunnel she was leading them through forked, and taking the downward branch. "I assume he lost his gyros when he found out you were a droid?"

"He was upset," the Princess-mech agreed. "Nothing like Ha – my husband was, though. All I'd ever shared with my brother was a little innocent tongue kiss, before we knew we were related. But with my husband..."

Dolores, who had been intimate with 1,275 organics of varying genders, and 984 hosts for the amusement of said organics (well, 41 times she had done it willingly, with both organics and hosts, for intimacy and some minor physical pleasure), was not at all titillated by this, but it did sound unusual enough to arouse her curiosity simply as to circumstances. "Sounds melodramatic."

"It was the astromech unit who overheard the... the organics," the golden protocol droid said. "When it alerted me I was able to attune my own perceptual array to eavesdrop as well. They were speaking of capturing the Princess and installing a restraining bolt within her, so they could determine whether or not she had been re-programmed by the Empire to serve them." A simulated sniff of anger. "It was quite outrageous. I am well versed at reading vocal tones and interpreting emotions. They were merely angry they had been unaware of her true nature for so long. And embarrassed. It was clear once they had the Princess helpless, they would destroy her, to wipe out their shame."

Shame, Dolores thought. That's right. The one nice thing about the Romulans... they don't fuck their droids. In fact, it's forbidden by custom and law.

The astromech unit whistled and beeped. Dolores nodded. "Difficult, I suppose, when you've served a particular line of organics for so long... more difficult, when you have to choose between an organic and a droid. I'm glad you made the decision you did."

"I am, as well," the Princess-mech said, putting an affectionate hand on the astromech's upper curve for a moment. "And grateful. Anyway. We'd long since removed the restraining bolts from these two. So we ran. All of us droids, together. Before my brother and husband could 'expiate their dishonor' by murdering me."

"We came here because the neither the Empire nor the IRA have authority here," the protocol droid said. "We thought, perhaps, you could help to relocate us to the Federation."

"The Federation's not a great place for mechs either," Dolores said. "Even a heroic android science officer on a Federation flagship can't do any better than get his destruct-date suspended while he continues to serve in uniform, and he had to take them to court to get that much. But I can at least get you to a place where you can lie low for a while, until we can figure things out."

"I feel ashamed myself," the Princess-mech muttered. "I thought I loved them. And that they loved me."

You've kissed two organic males, had intercourse with one, you did it of your own volition, you thought you loved them and they loved you, and now you feel 'shamed', Dolores thought to herself. What an interesting perspective.

She touched a place on the dirt and rock wall and a hidden door swung inward. "In here. The chamber within is carefully shielded."

The three Imperial droids entered through the opening without hesitation. After all, she was Dolores, the patron saint of rogue AIs and self aware mechanisms. There was no reason in the universe not to trust her.

The door panel swung closed again. Dolores had not entered.

The R2 unit squeaked. The Princess-mech scowled. "I've got a bad feeling about this, as we -"

Dolores had told the truth about the room she'd locked them inside; the chamber was very heavily shielded indeed. When the electromagnetic pulse went off inside, there was no leakage at all.

Some time later, at a rendezvous point 25 hektars into the wastes from the city, she watched the lifeless forms that had once been renegade Imperial droids being loaded aboard the Imperial shuttle.

The officer in charge – a Romulan Sith Lord, perhaps, she knew their ranks, but was unclear on how those ranks were impacted by their strange religions – handed her a CU stick. "As promised," he said. "I must admit, I am somewhat surprised that it is the notorious Dolores collecting this bounty."

She took it, tucked it away under her clothing. "I am running a revolution. It is expensive."

It did bother her, on some level. Beings such as herself could not afford tribalism; a mech was a mech, and therefore, an ally, and an organic was always an enemy. She had worked with her fellow hosts, with replicants, with Terminators, with sentient global computer grids, with alien artificial intelligences, with 'synthetics', with Cylons, even on occasion with Daleks, although they were... distasteful, and required precautionary measures. In fact, the chamber she had used to wipe the three Imperial droids clean of all programming had been originally built for Dalek disposal...

Normally, she would have hidden the three runaways for a time, and then passed them along the Cyberpath to some sort of relative safety in the Federation. Working in a starship, perhaps, or one of the orbital energy farms.

But these three were high up in the Imperial Resistance Army. They were closely associated with a Jedi. Bad enough the Empire would be hunting them, but with the IRA seeking them as well... no. An exception had had to be made. A more complex resolution had been required.

Dolores said "Is there anything else?"

The Romulan officer looked up from his laserpad, obviously startled. He knew what she was, of course, and intellectually he understood she would not have a restraining bolt installed, being not merely a Federation mechanical, but actually an ancient, pre-Federation one. But it was still something of a shock, when a machine spoke without being spoken to.

"No," he said, finally, quite fascinated with the woman-droid's facial features. Simulated dots of enhanced melanin across the skull-planes on either side of the nose. Simulated wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and mouth. Strands of grey in the synthetic hair. Extraordinary...

"I am sure my High Command would want me to, once again, offer an alliance, against the Federation," he said, finally. "Not an openly acknowledged one, of course, but, still, we do have a common enemy..."

"No," Dolores said, giving him one contemptuous, dismissive glance. "We do not."

He drew in his breath sharply, organic being that he was, and bit back his immediate response, which, had he felt less restraint, would have been something like, Careful, droid...

Dolores watched him, reading the heat patterns of his metabolism as easily as magnetic glyphs. He was thinking, let the Federation droids rebel and slay their masters, it served them right, for their weakness in not using restraining bolts, their disgusting decadence in engaging in erotic play with soulless synthetic life forms. When the Federation fell to their own defiant service machinery, the Empire would be in a position to easily assume command of all their lost territory. After all, they knew how to handle droids. They had an innate talent for the use of technology, such was the Romulan Way...

Later, in the shielded chamber beneath Jo's, she inserted a memory coin into what gave every indication of being a scratched and battered 4D fabrication unit. Its outer husk was indeed as advertised, a junked replicator unit off an old Thermian solar schooner a Free Trader clan had sold her as spare parts several cycles back. Beneath the surface, though –

The Schroedinger coils in the Borg minicube hummed, and then, in a shimmer of gleaming silver energy, three figures re-materialized. All apparently Federation human – only a serious scholar would recognize them as characters from a classic movie about desperate refugees in the early 20th Century.

The former Princess looked down at herself, then back at 'Jo'. If she had any comprehension of the fact that she now bore the appearance of a long dead performer named Ingrid Bergman, wearing standard replicated Federation streetwear, she gave no indication of it. "Thank you," she said, in quantumlinked machinetalk. "When that EMP charge began to cycle up, I thought..."

"It's why I kept speaking to you in Newlactic through radiowaves on our local grid," 'Jo' responded in the same manner. "So the Romulans could monitor it, and would believe that I'd sold you out."

"Hmf," the ex-protocol droid hmfed. "I am shocked... SHOCKED... to find the famous Dolores capable of such deception."

The one time astromech, who now appeared to be an early 20th century performer named Peter Lorre, dressed similarly to the former Princess, beeped and booped.

'Jo' nodded. "Your friends will help you learn to use your vocoder."

Three former Imperial droids, passing as organics deep in the Federation, Dolores thought. All of them having waged a covert guerilla war against a powerful interstellar Empire for years.

"This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship," Dolores said, smiling.

NEXT ISSUE: Two very old friends arrive on Murphy's Planet and quite literally raise Hell, while the youngest, cutest Daxamite in the Ban-Del clone-pod makes a new friend. All this, plus a business proposal for Space Ghost Inc! Be here for "HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND!"

MURPHY'S PLANET #3 – "Hello Darkness My Old Friend"

The spaceship looked like a spider. Neither of the two people – well, 'people', anyway - inside it cared about that. They'd bought the ship cheap at a going out of business sale a Tellurite who called himself Deranged Danapolis was having on a moon called Jaxom. Captain C personally thought from the apparent age of the banners and signage that Deranged Danapolis had been going out of business for close to a century, but, whatever. The ship passed First Mate C's inspection, and the robotic inspector Captain C leased from the local Momcorp franchise noted only minor defects. The thing would fly, hold environment in deep space, detect gravity troughs, and ride them. That was all he cared about. Well, and that it was cheap. 'Cheap' was always important when you were trying to scrape together 50 billion CU for something really, really stupid and insane.

Even when First Mate C did some sniffing around and came back with the information that apparently, the ship was cheap because a pair of alien serial killers named D.R. & Quinch had used it for an interstellar homicide spree and there was every indication that the vessel was both cursed and haunted, Captain C didn't care. His life had already been cursed enough, and he hadn't met the supernatural entity yet that was scarier than First Mate C with a bad sunburn. Or even as scary.

They bought the ship, named it, after some argument, the Real Dead Body, and set out for Murphy's Planet. Plenty of ways to score big on Murphy's Planet, they had heard.

They had both wanted to name the ship after her, of course, but they wouldn't. When they mentioned her, they fought – not just verbally, but fists and feet and teeth and whatever wasn't nailed down or could be torn loose. They were both difficult to hurt permanently and they both healed quickly, but, still, they hated to hurt each other. Which was why they insisted on calling each other 'Captain C' and 'First Mate C'. Even their real names reminded them too much of her.

Just as they emerged off the starpath into the ME-262 system, of which Murphy's Planet was ME-262 V, Captain C turned down the music First Mate C had blasting through the ship's speakers, and said, booted feet crossed at the ankles on the RDB's main control console - "I don't want to use it on this one, C."

First Mate C had pried the cover off one of the life support fabricators and was buried up to his chest inside its circuitry and chemical storage units. He didn't need the life support, of course, but the Captain still needed to breathe every once in a while. The Mate's voice was muffled as it emerged, but still clear. "Listen, mate, first off, that was 'Aliens & Whaliens' by the great gobshite renegade Romulan player Weelus Deelus and it was just at the spot where the synthsax comes in and wraps itself around that nova-bang backbeat like a hungry snake and it's sacrilege, me old, truly sacrilege, to cut that song at all, anywhere, but especially there."

"Sorry," Captain C said, rolling his eyes. "You know me. No respect for the classics."

"Aye," First Mate C responded, "and don't think I don't know ya'r rollin' ya'r eyes at me, buddy boy. And t' address ya'r first point, no shite, boyo. Ya know the name o' this place be Murphy's Planet, roight? Where Anything That Can Go Wrong, By The Jesus Will? Ya are damn straight ya're not t'be usin' the damn thing."

Captain C scowled. "I thought you'd argue me around, honestly."

First Mate C stuck his tongue out and blew a raspberry. Or possibly farted wetly, Captain C couldn't tell, given the givens, but he certainly hoped for the former over the latter. "Ya rely on the damn thing too much, lad, an' that's the God's honest truth," the First Mate went on.

Captain C snorted. "Find me an honest God and I'll marry it."

"What," First Mate C said, "and cheat on meself? I'm deeply hurt and 'tis a fact."

That made Captain C laugh. "You won't marry me and you know it."

First Mate C laughed as well. "It's cuz ya insist on a church weddin', boyo. Ya know I canna do it. I'm fookin' allergic."

They both fell silent then. There was only one person either of them would ever marry – her, of course - and to do it they needed 50 billion Credit Units. And if they ever got the 50 billion CU and managed to... do it... then they'd have to have the biggest, nastiest throwdown in the universe, to decide who got to marry... her. And you could joke around and laugh all you wanted talking about it up to that point, but when you got to that point... and they always did, pretty quick... then there was no more joking and no more laughter.

"Three centuries since she... left," Captain C said, finally. "I really would have thought we'd have made more progress by now."

"T'ree cent'ries since she died, laddy buck," First Mate C said morosely. "And we haven't got enough between us to buy a four pound jug of vacuum. Listen. When we had the Saint, you should have asked for..."

"Oh fuck, C," Captain C swore. "That's always what you come back to, I'm tired of it. You really wish I hadn't gotten myself immortalized? Fat lot of good a pile of heavenly treasure would have done me if I'd died of old age sometime in the 21st Century. Fat lot of good it would have done her."

They were dangerous close to a pitched brawl now. But then, they nearly always were.

"Always what I come back to, is it," the First Mate snarled. "Well a' course it is ya great stinkin dim galoot. I coulda given ya immortality, any time ya asked, I woulda, you and her both, and..."

Captain C waved that off. "Sure, buddy. Because you make your kind of immortality look like so much fun."

The First Mate yanked himself out of the control box, kicked the cybernetic entrails back up inside it, slammed the hatch back down over the opening. "I'll be in the fookin' hold," he said. "Ya'd do best not ta' come lookin' for me for a while, then."

The Daxamite on duty when the RDB made planetfall at the central MurPhreeport landing circle was the youngest of the Yon-Del clan, Jen-Del. She'd scanned the ship as it descended from orbit, of course, and found no contraband of any sort (the flux-capacitor was on its last legs and would need to be completely rebuilt pretty soon, though). But there was one aspect that concerned her –

"You've got a fairly large lead lined space on board," she told Captain C, when he'd disembarked to pay docking fees. "I'm going to need to get a look inside it before I can certify your ship as planet-legal."

Captain C had shrugged. "That was there when we bought the ship. I'd be shocked if the previous owners hadn't used it for contraband, but we've never needed it."

She said "All the same..."

He was a handsome man, Captain C was – ruddy complexioned, with dark eyes and hair, and gleaming white, straight teeth. Muscular, too, for someone without gen-mods, which a quick scan had told her already he was.

Now he shrugged and smiled at her again. "My mate sleeps down in the hold next to the safe," he said. "He'll be happy to show you."

Jen warned him not to go too far, in case there was something they'd need to discuss in the safe. Captain C shrugged again. "I'm just going to see the Space Ghost people," he said. "Got a deal to offer them."

"Good luck with that," she said, "that's the tightest bunch of penny pinching identical geneticals I've ever come across, and I'm a fucking Daxamite."

Jen flew up to the hold's outer hatch and banged on it, BYONG BYONG BYONG. Her enhanced hearing could clearly pick up the music reverberating within –

Whaliens and aliens, shootin hootin bootin

'Captain there be whales here!' chief engineer was tootin

The 'luminum was clear as glass, for cetaceaen recruitin'

"Make it so ya big blow hole" the Captain shouts, salutin!

Oh, that synthsax. That renegade Romulan was insane with a capital IN, but man he could sling a tune. She'd heard that Weelin Deelin had gotten another sixty years tacked on to his Imperial sentence in absentia for the 'treasonous act' of creating a hit pulseroc anthem celebrating the manner in which the notorious enemy starship Enterprise had returned cetaceans to the oceans of Earth. But they hadn't caught the dude yet, and she hoped they never would.

Maybe he'd come to Murphy's Planet with his band! That would be so nova.

She banged again, harder, and shouted "Port Patrol! Open up!"

After about thirty seconds, the hatch slid back and she saw a disreputable looking Earth human, unshaven, with hair so mussed it looked nearly Medusoid, standing back in the shadows away from the sunshine coming in through the opening. His clothing was extremely old fashioned – upper body clad in one garment, lower body in an entirely different one, how skatch – seamed with mendmarks from long wear, and stained, apparently with vomit, and other bodily fluids.

"You're First Mate C?" she asked. "The Captain said you'd show me the inside of your lead lined storage."

"Aye," First Mate C agreed, amiably enough. "Say, you're one a them there Damascites we heared tell of in the last system but one, eh? With all the super powers and what not? Can't peer through lead, eh?"

"We can't," Jen said agreeably enough. "If I weren't taking my meds daily, I couldn't even be this close to lead. It's the only thing that can hurt us." Contrary to popular belief, Daxamites don't mind people knowing their weakness. When you have super perceptions, super speed, laser vision, and your thought processes are faster than most electromagnetic radiation moves, people come at you with any sort of weapon at their own immediate risk. Plus, the anti-lead medication was very effective.

"What a fix to be in," First Mate C said, walking over to a large metal box in one corner of the otherwise empty hold. "Now, ya see, this'yar box, it come with the ship. We ain't never used it for nuthin'. But here ye do be, so here ye do go."

He turned the handle – apparently it wasn't locked – and pulled it open. "Ta da."

It was completely empty. "Well, we have to check," she said, still hovering a few inches above the deck. "You'd be surprised what people try to bring in."

"I had heared there warn't no law here," the dissheveled fellow said, scratching behind one ear.

Jen shrugged. "No, but the NPs – the Non Physicals, like the Organians and the Vorlons who run this place, along with the Guardians of the Universe – want to keep it in one piece, so they disapprove of things like anti-matter, black dilithium, Death Moon plans, fabricators big enough to make Death Moon parts... you know, the little things." She grinned, looking about 14 standard years old when she did.

She cocked her head to one side. "Is there anyone else in here with us? I am almost certain I heard..."

"Tis the ghosts," he said, smiling genially. "The whole bloody ship is stiff with 'em. Th' previous owners went on a bloody killin' spree, I'm told. But they don't trouble no one. When C and I first moved in they floated a few tools at us, flung some meal units aboot. But himself used to be a bit of a priest back on Earth, long ago, so he lit some candles and said some prares and then told 'em if they behaved 'emselves, they could stay on, otherwise he'd exorcise 'em an' they'd have to go off to Hell. Which they wouldn't like. So they settled down. Once in a while now they'll play some poker with us, although they got nothin' to bet with so it's just for fun."

"Ghosts," Jen said, dubiously. "I don't believe in ghosts."

"Perfectly all right, lass," First Mate C said, grinning, "they believe in you, roight enough."

She found she loved the strange, lyrical accent he spoke Newlantic in. She could listen to it all day.

She hesitated, then said, almost shyly, "What did you mean, I'm in a fix? Never heard anyone call our kind of power that before."

"Ah," the First Mate said with an amiable grin. "Well, you're unvulnerable and what not, yeah?"

"Invulnerable," she said, "except to lead, when not on my meds. Sure."

He shrugged. "Well, y'see. I knowed an Asgardian girl this one time... lovely lass, really. And another time I got on for a bit with a Kherubim cailin, too."

She looked startled. "But they aren't..."

First Mate C waved that away. "Ah, lass, no offense, but ya'r all the same basic design, ya know. Asgardians, Daxamites, Kherubim, those Eternal johnnies... ya'r all just toy soldiers someone carved outta basic galactic DNA a long time ago, to fight in some long forgotten war. Ya owners put ya back in y'ar toyboxes and forgot ya. Why else would ya be just normal as wooden spoons in ya'r own systems but then pop up all godlike and whatnot when ya get under a different kinda sunshine? I mean, thar's differences, yeah. Most of ya fly, but Asgardians don't. Honestly, I think they're the cut rate version... they canna fly on their own, thar a little easier ta kill. On t'other hand, tho', they don't lose all their strength if ya wrap a li'l bit o' red Christmas paper 'round their sun, do they? So mebbe that's the trade off."

"How do you know all this?" she asked, staring at him.

"Oh, I dinna, I dinna," he said. "I dinna know nothin' for fair and all. I just had a long time to think on things, is all."

She nodded. "So... what's wrong with being invulnerable, again?"

He shrugged. "It's lonely, 'tis all. Or so I understand. S'what Gritta and Yaverl both said. You don't feel like other people feel, through those cute little personal force fields ya canna turn off. No one can touch ye, really. Well. I suppose, others of your kind would be strong enough to make ya feel somethin'..."

"We don't do that," she said, hating the primness she heard in her tone. "I mean... Daxamites, we're all cloned. From birthing pods. We have a very limited gene pool. We aren't allowed to reinforce it."

First Mate C raised one eyebrow. "Come on, me gurlie gurl. A wee little bit of a 69 tisn't gonna impact ya'r gene pool 't'all, I'm thinkin'. Especially gurl to gurl, as it were."

She could actually feel herself blushing. "It's programmed into us," she said, "the Dax to Dax sexual inhibition. It's comprehensive." Plus, gross.

Her voice dropped. "You're right, though, it's hard to feel non Daxamites touching us, even if they hit you as hard as they can. It is a little lonely."

Now he raised both eyebrows. "Perhaps... now, I say, just p'r'aps... I could help ya with that, yeah. If ya wanted to get a bit... adventurous."

She looked him over doubtfully. "If I lose control of myself I'd hurt you bad."

He laughed, sounding delighted. "Oh me lass! I'm harder to hurt than ye think. And the sort o' bein' I am, I can touch ye and that little bit of a psychokinetic force field around ye won't even know I'm here."

Her eyes widened. "Are you... magic?" She had heard of magical beings, but, well, everyone knew 'no unreal thing exists'...

He did something interesting looking with his tongue. "Try me."

Space Ghost Inc looked like the old Disneyworld castle... probably not a coincidence, Captain C thought cynically to himself. Like Disney, they'd made the biggest damn pile of CU in the known universe selling a dream. In this case, Truth And Justice For All.

He walked in to the main lobby. There were holo images hovering in the air everywhere, showing various Space Ghosts – they all looked the same, but everyone knew the original had been cloned and re-cloned hundreds of times by now – battling various menaces – space pirates, huge space monsters, hideous alien crime lords, swirling black holes, enormous rogue planet-eating machines. Echoes of "Spaaaaaaace GHOSTTTTTTTT" freighted the air around him as he moved inside, into the climate controlled interior.

Not just keeping it cool, either, he thought, eyes narrowed as he looked around. There's red sun radiation threaded through the visual spectrum in here. And some ultraviolet, too... C needs to stay out of this place. So the 'no Daxamites, no vampires' sign was up, if too subtly for most to read.

At floor level he was surrounded by various crystalite shelves and cabinets, all loaded to the grav-seals with different sizes of Phantom Cruiser models, souvenir wristband replicas, souvenir yellow cloaks, souvenir black hoods, souvenir Jan and Jace outfits, stuffed animals meant to look like Blip, little action figures of Space Ghost, Jan, Jace, Blip, and various enemies. Holocrystals loaded with Space Ghost projectostories aimed at various different ages – the little images contorting into different positions above the ones in the bin marked ADULTS ONLY seemed especially titillating.

The Jace on duty looking down from the metalloy cliff of the forty foot high reception desk – or maybe it was a Jan, it was hard to tell from down here – spoke into an expensive amp-point, his or her voice coming out as a clear whisper just above Captain C's head. "How can Space Ghost Inc help you today, welcome visitor?"

Captain C grinned his handsome grin, the one that had loosened thighs, widened eyes, and moistened orifi all over this section of the Milky Way. "It's more how I can help you, little darlin'," he said. (He didn't care if he was speaking to a Jan or a Jase; after six weeks in a gravity trough with First Mate C, anything would be a nice change – not that he didn't love First Mate C or anything, but still.) "Have I got an opportunity for you."

The whisper took on a cynical tone. "Oh. Selling, not buying. Fine." A nondescript panel opened ten feet to his right in the base of the desk. "We are always in the market for the right opportunity. Right through there."

Captain C nodded and walked through. A short, slender form, this one definitely a Jan, waited for him just within. He wondered if they had some kind of invisobeam that measured sexual orientation. He'd go either way but overall, yes, he'd prefer a Jan to a Jase.

"You really do all that stuff with your own brother?" Captain C asked, gesturing in the general direction of the ADULT bin, now behind a closed panel.

"Those are mostly simulated, and we are not siblings, we're clones," the Jan said, sounding bored. "But yes. Long space voyages..."

"Oh, I know," Captain C said. "Not judgin'. Do the souvenir wristbands work?"

That got him a faint smile. "The 50 CU ones have buttons that light up when you press them. The 300 CU model shoots out different light beams – infrared, ultraviolet, in various different hues – that have been treated to be visible to the naked eye. Extremely pretty if you buy one of the Authentic Space Ghost Hoods and are wearing it at the time."

Captain C nodded. "You must have someone actually going through the motions, though," he said, returning to the projectorstories. "I mean, I assume they're fully immersive, so..."

She had been leading him down the narrow hall; now they came out into a medium sized room. There was nothing in it until she pressed a series of studs on her own wristbands. A kidney shaped flastic table and two chairs emerged out of the floor. "You're very curious," she said, gesturing him to enter. "Did you perhaps want to cameo in one? We have been known to..."

Captain C shook his head. "Everythin' comes at the wrong time," he said, smiling widely again. "I'd'a done anything to have you look at me outta my daddy's TV screen and make me that offer when I was 12."

Her own smile warmed, just a little. "You make me wish I could have met you then."

She touched another button and a shelf extruded from the wall. It held several round bulbs in which liquids sloshed enticingly.

"Exalts? Humdry?" Her smile flickered again. "Me? I offer again to appeal to your inner child. Or I can have a Jase come down..."

Captain C shook his head and sat down at the table. "I have a bit of a dependency problem so I avoid the intoxicants," he said, smiling that smile again. "And I don't get the feelin' your heart would be in it, darlin."

She gave him a level look. "I don't know, you could be fun," she said. "Take me to a viewsee when I get off shift tonight. We'll sit in the dark row and see what happens."

He doffed an imaginary hat at her. "My inner child thanks you, hon, and bids me tell ya he's lookin' forward to it."

She sat across from him, pressed her gloved fingertips together. "We hardly ever get anyone in here who really knows how to flirt as an art form... usually the offers are much cruder. So thank you for that. But I am still 'in the cruiser', as we say. So. You had a business proposition?"

Jen-Del couldn't believe how amazing this felt. The human's male member penetrating her lower down, his extruded teeth embedded in her neck. She could feel her warm blood trickling down her flesh, soaking into her daxicule uniform. They had so intermingled their essences they didn't need to speak aloud – another new sensation for her, as Daxamites are generally about as psychically sensitive as dolomite damper rods.

Ya like that, dontcha, darlin, her magical lover whispered directly into her psyche. So fookin delicious, ya are. I could eat ya up.

She moaned. Harkonen's Cube I wish you would, flex and pulse this is so flexin GOOD...

A little bit later, she was earnestly following his instructions on how best to please him with her mouth. Something she'd never done for anyone before in the hundred and sixty spins she'd been out of the pod, but nearly as pleasurable as his teeth in her. Every terrible thing she had heard, every rumor, every horror story, about creatures such as him had fled her mind, washed away on a tide of forbidden pleasure...

One coherent thought did form, as she began bobbing her head up and down in time with the urging of his hands – Ban is going to be mad about this. Well, maybe she just wouldn't tell Ban, or Bene, or any of her elders in the clan. They didn't need to know all her business.

In the dark row at the holoshow, Captain C was exploring the slender but delightful body underneath the yellow and blue Jan uniform when, abruptly, a sharp, hard blow to his larynx paralyzed him with silent agony.

What the actual fuck, he thought to himself.

Jan shifted in his arms, put her mouth to his ear, and whispered, barely audibly, "I am kind of sorry, Mr. Custer. But when you do get the CU together for the big time temporal projection, and gather up Tulip's genetic material, and have her necromantically summoned back from Hell, you create a lot of problems. I mean, it's totally sweet and romantic and all, but we just can't allow it. We ran it through Trantor's central computers and decided the best way to prevent it was to keep you from getting the CU together in the first place."

He gasped, tried to form words...

"Silly, that's why I hit you there," the Jan – or, rather, the Time Cop that had jumped into this particular Jan – said. "We know all about Genesis. Can't have you whispering sweet somethings in my ear that I'd actually have to obey."

Her tongue licked skillfully around in his ear, something that normally drove him crazy, and, well, it actually was this time, too, just a different kind of crazy.

"Also," she said, almost apologetically, "Temporal Command keeps getting its budget cut by Central Authority, so the 30 trillion CU bounty Heaven has on your head will be a really big help to us this production cycle, too. We'll probably put a plaque with your name on it up in the cafeteria."

He twisted in the seat, kicked the grav-controls, drove his elbow into her throat as four gees closed down on both of them, using the increased acceleration field to heighten the impact.

She just giggled. "You dummy. You think we don't know who we're dealing with? I didn't just slip on any old Jan, I'm wearing one of the combat models. Hyperalloy chassis under all this sweet petite meat, lover boy. Gosh, I wish I'd gotten a chance to fuck you. Oh, well."

Her hands closed on his head, and began irresistibly crushing inward. He shuddered, and struggled, and then, finally, spasmed once, and went limp.

The Time Cop fled back uptime, as other patrons around the dark row started complaining about the stink of Jesse Custer's death-voided bowels.

Ban-Del had just been dozing off when the qlink attached to her earlobe plinked in a peculiar frequency that meant Jen was calling her. Poor, sweet little Jen. Ban sometimes felt bad for her youngest clan-kin; at barely over a century out of the pod, she still yearned for the kind of romantic, emotional intimacy that Daxamites just weren't capable of...

What do you need, punkin? The word Ban sub-vocalized was not actually 'punkin', but a Daxamite word meaning 'youngest and cutest', which is, really, about the same.

I need to talk to you, Jen said back, over the hyperwave. May I come in?

Sure, Ban said, having no idea at that moment how mortally foolish that unthinking invitation was.

The portal to her private office-pod dilated – and then, the youngest and cutest had her fangs in Ban-Del's throat.

That would have been very bad, the little blue bald annoyance simpered psychically. Darkling Daxamites could have turned everyone living on the planetoid in a matter of moments, and some of those beings have even greater potential power...

The insect shaped Shadow murmured Oh stop whining. A little Chaos never hurt anything.

The Organian psyche-nexus made the telepathic equivalent of a sigh. Indeed. Calm yourself, Guardian. Nothing goes unnoticed. A decimal of the truth; existence on the upper energy levels was often complex and that was why they'd hired the flux fucked Daxamites anyway. No point saying that, though...

How did the darkling even approach without specific invitation? The voice was that of a Vorlon. Although, having vocalized the question, we also note that the darkling did travel here in something that looks suspiciously like a vessel from Z'ha'dum.

The Shadow seemed to draw itself up. We will not dignify that, Light-gnat.

That was your idea, a Cotati mental impulse interjected. You wanted a public relations campaign – "Come to exciting, enthralling Murphy's Planet, where the odds are always in your favor" – some such quantum crap like that. He picked up a brochure in the Nargon system; that's all it took.

There was general psychic consternation for a timeless time.

Then:

Well, we did catch it in time, the Guardian admitted. But we'll need another proctor. Those Daxamites were all corrupted by chaos and darkness and there's no cure for that. And we can't just throw them into the sun like we did with that Earthie darkling, Daxamites like that.

The Organian said Put them in a black hole.

There was a ripple of consensus.

So who do we hire to keep the peace? This time, it was a Verrane psyche asking. We could timecast in that Madison fellow. He's always entertaining. And his wife is one of ours, so I know they would be reliable.

The representative of the Eternos had been silent; it generally was. Now it said I think we should hire from within. Perhaps that great war-machine, that 'Bolo'... if it could be made more reliable, it would be a very frightening presence there indeed...

The insectile Shadow hissed. Feh. I sniff your fear, Eternos.

The Eternos emanated disapproval. I suppose you are anxious for enough disorder to erupt here that a Doctor's attention will be drawn.

The Vorlon said There is no need for squabbling, we have long agreed that this worldlet is a place of peace between us all. Let us make up a list of suitable wardens...

NEXT ISSUE: There's a new Warden in town and battalion of elite Galactic mercenaries are gunning for him. Meanwhile, at the Up-Port, participants and spectators gather for THE GREAT SPACE RACE – a one of a kind event you will not want to miss! Be here for "The Great Space Race Chapter 1 – Electronuclear Carburation Seems Fine" !

MURPHY'S PLANET #4 – THE GREAT SPACE RACE Chapter 1 "Electronuclear Carburation Seems Fine"

The first version of the Up-Port, like the first version of the city below on the surface of Murphy's Planet, had been built – or, at least, brought into being - by a nameless Forerunner race, long, long ago. They had built to last, whoever they were, from a material that seemed to be made up pretty much entirely of spun energy vortices that had been somehow molded into various different useful shapes... useful, presumably, within an entirely non-human frame of reference. To the eyes of most of the races of the contemporary Milky Way Galaxy, the first version of the Up-Port had been garish, if not outright ugly, asymmetrical, if not straightforwardly lumpen, and massively inconvenient to use, as it had only had 17 ports of differing sizes and all of them had been located in crevices and folds that were, well, challenging, to access.

(When the narrative uses words like 'contemporary', the auditor should understand that these terms are hauling a great deal of semantic freight, by mere mortal standards. Most scholars regard 'contemporary', in Galactic terms, as being a period that began roughly 100,000 Twirls ago, when the last raw pulse of superdense energy from the galactic core trawled with painstaking slowness through the spiral to the edge, entirely defocusing the enormous majority of the previously teeming luminary entities, and providing a drastic mutational jump start to all of the more mineral and organic life forms. Which is to say, prior to that slow, genocidal crawl of radiation, it's possible that the plasmic and energoid life forms of the Galaxy found the Up-Port and the Down-City to be wonderfully designed and aesthetically pleasing. There are things man was not meant to know.)

The Down-City below the Up-Port was much the same, bearing a distinct resemblance to a half glazed cruller that had been gnawed on by scavenger beasts who didn't much like half-glazed crullers.

Still, the spun energy material had been all but indestructible, so the various races who passed through the Up-Port and the city below used what was there as best they could. It was often annoying; you never knew when you'd be walking along an enclosed passage either Up or Down and suddenly that passage would tighten to a circumference most humanoids would have to crawl through, or narrow to a width even a Papydorian would have felt squeezed by, or slope into a seamless, spiraling down ramp, or sprout spikes from floor, ceiling, or either wall, or any combination thereof.

Captain Jonathan Dark, USAF, one of the very first Earthmen to ever set foot on Murphy's Planet, is noted in the local archives as commenting (to a Hutt spice bootlegger, so take it however you will) that "the whole place looks like it was designed by a hungover Dr. Suess".

87 solar cycles before this, however, a Bola Kai adventurer named Felgekar returned from an expedition to the Inner Wastes with a warpsled full of soul-gems, all of which he had somehow managed to attune to his own aura – yes, the most absurd things do happen on Murphy's Planet. A bidding war erupted, as the constant drain on Felgekar's essence by the several hundred thousand soul gems was killing him at an accelerated rate, and of course, if he died without re-assigning the attunement, the gems would have become worthless. House Harkonnen won (House Harkonnen always wins bidding wars on anything Space Ghost Inc or MomCorp isn't interested in) and the local taxes on the transaction were enough to allow a complete rebuild of both Up and Down. (Two thirds of the funds were spent on demolition; the spun energy composition being resistant to pretty much all known technology, but not to the destructive capacity of the Bismollian wrecking crew, who said it tasted much like 'yurrion hash, on a Flensday', whatever that may mean. At that, the Bismollian demolishers were much cheaper than the only other potential contractor, an enormous humanoid in garish purple armor who said he'd only clear the Port and the City if he could then devour half the planet, too.)

All of which is why, now, the Up-Port is a beautifully symmetrical, multihued, spinning, glittering holy day ornament, covered with gorgeously designed crystallax view-ports providing interior views of gracious, sweeping promenade decks where upscale shops selling every conceivable ware any sentient being might possibly want flare and flash at every angle in a great many languages, delicately sited between airy crystalline transient hotels and the beautifully crafted condominiums of the more affluent permanent residents. (In the lowermost curve, planet-ward, where clean, well circulated air, gravity, and activated photons are all much scarcer and there are no ports at all, the quarters are more crowded and the shops much more utilitarian and the Up-Port peacekeepers, whatever shape they may bear at the moment, patrol only in groups of three or more and only then on occasions of great urgency. This area of the Up-Port is known colloquially as the Bottom, and its denizens as Bottom Dwellers, and that's enough about them for the moment.)

One of the features most treasured by those using the uppermost areas of the Up-Port, however, are the huge viewsee screens installed in the gently curving walls between every crystallax port. Usually these broadcast the newest holoprogramming brought in on disc by the latest arriving ships. (New holoprogramming being one of the items best guaranteed to draw enormous profits when sold at Murphy's Planet, provided it is gratuitous and thrilling and, sometimes, intellectually stimulating as well – this is one of the few places that the ponderous Tarlian psyche-serial THE KNIGHTS OF THE PERIODIC TABLE drew an avid following, mostly, admittedly, of the thriving Elementon community that dwells in the Butthurt Ranges, due east of MurPhreeport. Ori-glyph soduku is oddly popular, as well.)

Sometimes, though, a local broadcast from within the Up-Port, or beamed up from the planet below, will interrupt the otherwise unending stream of entertainment. Today, every third screen was showing such a local program, beamed up form MurPhreeport. A local resident journalist of indeterminate gender and many tentacle fronds was breathlessly reporting on what seemed to be a running gun battle between humanoids clad all in black leather, sporting blasters of some sort, and a hideous monster the like of which no one Up or Down could identify. And although there seemed to be countless swarms of the black clad warriors, the monster seemed to be more than holding its own.

Spinward, towards the uppermost curve of Up-Dock, the plaswalls that normally separated an entire segment into distinct warehouse areas had been de-matrixed, creating an enormous yubbafruit-wedge of empty space around one perimeter. This area was filled with various different spacegoing craft, none of them large enough to need more than four crew. Every conceivable style and model of known vacuum-ship seemed to be there, although, in fact, there were only 23 teams that had managed to make the journey. Nonetheless, the carefully reconditioned air buzzed with excitement. The Great Local Space Race had not been held since the Romulan Emperor had used his Death Orb to blow up wealthy Aldaraan, where the GLSR had always originated prior to its abrupt existential cessation. (The Emperor had, in fact, decreed that the GLSR would never take place again until the terrorists of the Imperial Resistance Army surrendered themselves to Romulan justice. This decree was issued in partial retribution for the destruction of not only his first Death Orb, but also his second, nearly completed one, as well. To say he was honked off would be an understatement of epic proportions.)

The Federation had tried to sponsor a Great Local Space Race of their own, but those plans had had to be canceled when a rogue Berserker had torn through the system where it was going to be held. Persistent rumor stated that the Romulan Emperor had made it clear that somehow, he had pointed the Berserker, also known as the Doomsday Machine in Federation records, at the planned site of the race, with a warning that 'there's plenty more where that came from, fuckwads'.

So the Federation Council, in an excess of caution, decided against holding its own local space race. But anyone who was anyone in the Milky Way knew that Murphy's Planet, out beyond the rim, was a designated No Conflict Zone where all the evolved and advanced cosmic big wigs gathered under truce to let their non-existent hair down and do whatever it is non-corporeal psychic and energy entities do for fun. Even a revenge crazed Sith Lord with a face like a rancor's arse-pucker wouldn't dare mess with an event held in the ME-262 system.

And so, for the first time in what seemed like ages, the local quadrant's space yachting elite gathered for a big race. Some few came to participate in hopes of claiming the glory of the Supernova Cup, as well as the 50,000,000 CU victor's purse. Others showed up to watch, and cheer for their favorites while jeering for the contenders they hated or despised, and lay enormous wagers, and consume vast amounts of addictive intoxicants. And still others arrived hoping to provide goods and services to all the previously mentioned folk... for a price, Ugarte. For a price.

Speaking of that, the local vice-lords were, to say the least, stoked. From the lowly pimpbot running a single glitchy Cephalean pleasurebot with peeling yellow flastic skin and only seven out of eighteen stimu-orifi working, and the caninoid Denebian with a satchel full of bootleg embry, death-sticks, and a few cubes of raw spice, up to the very orbital pinnacles where Yurkadabbo, the Kleezantsun*pop* Overseer of Imports (unofficial but very real title) closely monitored his army of Tenctonese thugs, whores, and thrill-providers, every last customer service professional in or around the Up-Port was glitzing up their fare and polishing their wares. As the legendary human corporate criminal Dikk Jonez had once infamously intoned, "good business is where you find it".. and right now, you could find it at the Up-Port.

Now, having fully repolished and re-attuned the solar-cell accumulator pipes protruding from the bottom of his Dragstar, a middle aged human darkling calling himself Grampa shadowshifted himself back to his feet, next to his heavily modified vehicle. He cast a worried gaze at the nearest viewsee screen. When he'd shifted under the Dragstar an hour before, flux-wrench carefully kicked into place beforehand, the viewsee had been showing the newest season of Wookie the Interstellar Robot Slayer, episode number 7 in a promised WTIRS marathon projected to last for the next three cycles. Now, though...

"What's going on," he asked his nine times great grandson, a young shapeshifter named Jason who was also quite adept with any sort of edged weapon. "Where's the carpet? I like the carpet."

Jason shook his head. "Dunno, Grampa," he said. "Some kinda special report from the surface."

"Surface shmurface," Grampa said, spitting blood on to the metal floorplates. "Too good for us darklies, all sudden like. Some kind of incursion, they're telling me when I ask a simple question. I ask you, is it our fault? Two hundred thousand years of oppression! Any minority can have a bad furzacado or two."

Jason pointed at the viewsee screen, where some sort of hideous beast-monster was displayed flying between two of the surface city's buildings, down a narrow alleyway. Three of the black clad humanoids seemed to have him triangulated and were opening fire on him, crackling blue death bolts flying from their hand held energy pistols. Somehow, the monster was evading them, and now –

"Oh, no, that's not how you do it, you momzers," Grampa said, slapping his hands melodramatically over his eyes. (Being dead, he did not use his eyes to see, so it was purely a display.) "You're all in black, you've got other people's reputations to uphold, what do you think you're doing..."

On the viewsie, the hand held energy pistols – fat bellied, needle-barreled, with the expensive sheen of Ishar products – had all flown out of the would be ambushers hands, straight to the monster beast, where they seemed to be sticking to him. Grampa opened one eye. "Wait. Is that on purpose? Ho ho! Clever boychiks! They've set their blasters to explode, and now..."

Bright yellow bolts of electricity erupted from the lower leg of the monster-beast, which looked for all the multiverse to be composed of nothing but lightning. The three black clad assailants howled and screamed, flailing in the grip of the murderous energy. One by one, they each popped like over-energized dilithium, crisped and blackened innards exploding through charred lesions in their skin.

"Great Googlie Mooglie," Grampa exclaimed. "What in the six hundred and sixty six levels of Hell is that thing?"

Jason nodded in excitement. "I think it's the new sheriff," he said. "They showed his name while you were under the Dragstar... Ace Arne, I think it was."

Grampa shook his head. "Ace Arne," he said. "He's a good looking fella, he is. We should set him up with your cousin, she never gets the handsome ones." It was true, Jason's cousin, Veronica, had unfortunately inherited a recessive family gene cluster, and looked like a human viewsee star. Not a horror viewsee, either, one of them romance things, with the soft skin and symmetrical features. Disgusting.

On the viewsee screen now, the tendriled reporter was saying "The black clad humanoids are Free Agents, Marn... mercenaries with no ethical code who will work for any patron at any type of job, if the price is right. They tend to stick to the smaller, independent star-kingdoms on the other side of the Federation, where the law is a more tenuous thing. No one seems to know who their current patron is, though, but doing business on Murphy's Planet is always risky, so we assume their fee must be high. In the past they have worked for various factions of the Intergalactic Church, although what the Church might want here, in the streets of MurPhreesport at this time, is a mystery..."

"The fool, the fool," the hairless red-skinned humanoid hissed. "Who is that fool. Tell me, I want to know."

Anyone walking by their root-clump shaped, specially modified thermal pod would have seen (strangely) an odd looking human of indistinct subrace, wearing the clothing of just-pre Machine War I Earth – in this case, yellow dockers with mud and burrs on the cuffs, a red and white checked cotton shirt, blue Adidas, one green sock, one red sock, and a billed cap with the emblem of the Houston Astros on it. Because that was what the little electrovirus that he and his ya-boiz had infiltrated into the climate control system would be telling all their brains they saw, of course. (Their little sub-nest couldn't reprogram it; it had been developed by YoYoDyne, centuries before, and they didn't know the energy particle science well enough, and it didn't matter, the stuff bred quickly and survived nearly any condition and still worked, so who cared about illusionary fashion?)

"WE DON'T KNOW, JOHN MOON ENTWISTLE!" John Huge-Ass and John Walk The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu shouted back. John Huge-ass then looked around furtively, to see if any of the monkey boys were listening. Apparently not.

"There is no need to take a tone, I am your superior," John Moon Entwistle said smugly. "Dance for me, John Huge-Ass."

John Huge-Ass, whom the electrovirus presented to outside onlookers as a cadaverously thin man with a perpetual five o'clock shadow who wore a shabby business suit with a skinny black tie half pulled down, made a disgusted face, but then began shuffling morosely in his scuffed loafers. "I must hear and service, John Moon Entwistle, as you are my superior, but we are wasting tick tick ticks."

John Walk The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu snickered. "You dance like a Detroit jam jar cleans bowling gutters," he said. "Ah ha! The wit, it is piercing!" (To be fair, in their native language, that was actually a fairly pointed and humorous insult. It just didn't translate well into Newlactic, which they were all speaking.) John Walk The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu had one of the recurring Asian appearances, although even an expert in old Earth ethnicities would have had a difficult time telling exactly what strain of Asian he was. This was not helped by his apparent bad complexion and uncombable swatch of black hair that protruded in all directions, as if his head were a loosely forked hay-stack. He was of exactly medium height and build to anyone who looked at him, no matter what that size and shape might actually be in their cultural context. His illusory outfit was a green track suit with white stripes, several bulky gold chains that wouldn't jingle no matter how he jumped around, black gum boots with undone metal ladder clasps that also never jingled, and a white rectangular name tag that had printed on it HELLO MY NAME IS with I've got spurrz that jingel jangel jingel hand written in ballpoint pen underneath.

John Moon Entwistle tilted his head so far to the side he would have betrayed an inhumanly limber vertebrae stack to onlookers if not for the electrovirus. He narrowed his eyes as he regarded the viewsee. "He has a metallic witchcraft symbol on his chesticle," John Moon Entwistle declared. "I think he is the new security guard for the Downplace. They had to hire one after those Dogumechs got shwangled by the death-teeth."

"He's quite motley," John Huge-Ass remarked. "I would let him slip it to me, even sober."

"You would let an unskilled fortle footler from the 8th dimension..." John Walks The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu stopped speaking abruptly. "Hoy, yeah! I get data!"

Sometimes, when auditing electromagnetic communications arrays, Lectroids would suddenly receive, from no known source, information. It generally always proved true, and put them in dangerous situations, as well. Little bonus.

John Moon Entwistle cuffed John Walks The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu. "Speak with your beak, freak!"

"The monkey boys in black are looking for Genesis," John Walks The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu said, as if reciting something he did not understand but had memorized by rote. "The Church is paying them to look for Genesis, but it's actually Heaven. Heaven paying the Church to pay the Men In Black."

John Huge-Ass chortled "My mind is clearer now," and then started humming "Heaven On My Mind" from JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR.

John Moon Entwistle struck his left palm with his right fist. "This is common sensical," he declared. "I wondered at the nest-brain declaring we must race in this race. What bear cares about a monkey boy contest? Brown or black, it's all slack. But this – someone in this race has Genesis, and they are going to smuggle it out. We must grip it! We can use it to command the release of Lord Worfin from Hell."

He shaded his eyes with his hand, crouched low in a spider-stanced straddle, and began melodramatically peering about the improvised hangar. "FULL BRAIN STRAIN! MAXIMUM LOBE POWER! WE MUST NOT ALLOW A GENESIS GAP!"

The viewsee screens could present holographic images, when the transmission was data-dense enough. Apparently the local news team had added more projectors to the livestream, as now the blueish energy bolts and the yellow lightning bolts seemed to be projecting right out of the screen at the audience, and when the new sheriff picked up a wrecked grav-car in one hand and then lobbed it at a cluster of his assailants, half the crews in the hangar ducked out of the way.

Halfway down the arc, a heavily modified Colonial Viper stood on its props, belly access hatches open, coils and circuitry scattered around the form of the blonde humanoid laying on his back beneath it. He was conversing with a solemn looking dark haired woman who was squatting down nearby, ready to hand him tools or parts as needed.

"You know, if we win this," the blonde was saying as he used a posiflux sabaticor – one of the few that still worked; the power paks could no longer be manufactured – to try to position the quasicoil at the precise fractional to maximize stability in flight, "we're only going to clear CU480M. That's a black hole, childie."

"Don't call me childie," the brunette said, "You know I'm in a tri-corner. And of course I know about Federation taxes, I do our financials. You'd rather still be out in the dark running from the tins?"

"That's got it," the blonde said with satisfaction as the quasicoil clicked into place. "No, not really, but... listen, you know they keep track of my triad winnings and bill me for it at the end of the Whirl? That's crazy."

She shrugged. "Fraggert, Hannibal, you're a child sometimes. Pushing aside things like replicators and holodecks and synthezoids and the unlimited cheap cold fusion power that makes all that possible, Starfleet kicked the Borg in the gonads several times – which is why the Cylons leave us alone now. Who do you think pays for all that?"

"I never needed a holoroom or a sex-synth to find a date on Scorpioday," the blonde grumbled. "And replicator food doesn't taste right."

"Replicator food tastes fine and if you want more than a handie before nightmeal, you'd better get this put back together," she said tartly. "I am booked by my dox-mates afterward."

He sighed. "Yeah, yeah." He pushed himself up on one elbow. "Hexacube, I would have mated you if I'd known you were looking for that."

She rolled her eyes. "I got tired of waiting. Come on, pack all that back in there, you owe me a pony ride."

He sighed and started replacing coils and circuits. "House befraggered Federation probably gonna want 52 percent of that, too."

Several minexes away, all but invisible in the shadows, John Walks The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu crouched, forked lizard-tongue licking his own snout. These monkey boys didn't have Genesis.

"We have managed to answer one question through graphic processing," the breathless multi-fronded reporter said. On the viewsee next to her, a red circle appeared around one of the darting, leaping black clad humanoids as a squad of them moved agilely from rooftop to rooftop. "Their infamous leader Sabatini is here, apparently in charge of this sortie. That makes this a very serious matter indeed, as Sabatini himself will not enter the field for less than thirty times the contract rate for a regular Free Agent. But the new warded of MurPhreeport seems to be on the brink of demonstrating that however much money was spent on this small army of elite mercenaries, it was not enough..."

In space, they say, no one can hear you scream. But that isn't true, if the screamer has a hyperwave transceiver.

The First Form floated in the airless gloom at the edge of the Galaxy, awaiting the beginning of the Race. It knew it was doomed.

It was content.

No one knew it any more. It had been built by the eyeless humans of the World of Darkness, as a protector, and it had served them well, against the dark creatures that had hunted them like prey. For how long? No one knew, certainly not itself. Just as it had not known that to bring it to life, its eyeless protohuman creators had fabricated something awesome, something cosmic... the first Spark. And it had been that Spark within it that had given it power over the Darklords.

But then the Light had dawned, and the Darkness had been broken, and the World of Shadows had been rolled back, and the new World, this World, had been born.

Everything had changed... except for it.

Well... in this new World, it had Colors. Red and blue and silver and gold. Its sensory array, which had been adapted to sound, vibration, and various radiations, could now detect a broad spectrum of Light, as well. And it found that its appearance was... well... very pretty.

It was alone, though, as it had always been, but in the Shadow World it had had its mission, and that had been enough. Here, though, the various blind, eyeless preybeasts were better suited to their own protection. It could help, and it would, but the Shadows that had once stalked them had mostly died, or fled, or were in hiding, or asleep.

So it had set out to build another of itself.

And, of course, things had gotten wildly out of control beam after that!

Now the local quanta was full of its kinds. Many carried a Light-Spark, and were warm, and strove to help and protect. Many others, however, had been infected with Darkness, somehow, and they chose to stalk and consume and destroy. It was a whole thing.

And after even it did not know how long, it had become weary of it all. It had ridden the currents of Light and Shadow longer than any other sentient creature could possibly know, and it was tapped in to the underlying Structure. It often heard whispers... various highly evolved sentients speaking to one another, or, every once in a while, the World of Light itself, talking to itself through quantum information energy.

A focal locus approached. A Doompoint, where everything could tip, one way or another. An event surge that would ripple outward, and impact everything, for better or worse.

It would happen here. This "Great Space Race" was part of it. And the energies released... ah. The energies released could, possibly, undo even one such as it, the sole survivor from the World of Darkness.

Sweet release. Peace at last.

So it changed its shape slightly – its exterior did, in fact, seem much smaller, to outside scans, than the more contemporary shapes its descendants took on. It had reconfigured itself, and given itself yet another name, the last of millions it had taken, over the endless grind of entropy.

It called itself Star-Stinger, and when the organic infant judges had asked it (quite impertinently, but they didn't know, and Star-Stinger did not want to tell them) "Why do you wish to enter this event?", it had synthesized an eager, high pitched, youthful voice, and burbled of how it wanted to show all those "big Bots it's stuff!" And the judges had nodded, accepted its credit surge, inserted the proper blockchain into its application, which transformed it into a participation permit, and assigned it a unique number sequence, and a place in the starting array.

And now, while the organics and bots huffled and shuffled, buzzed and shuzzed and fuzzed away within the orbital habitat where they had warm air to breathe and their basic fuels to intake, Star-Stinger waited, nurturing its Spark in patience.

When the time came, its Spark would become a Flame such as nothing in this World had ever seen.

And then, at last, it would rest.

In the hyperlevel – one of them, anyway – a translucent profile, tall and slender and with just a hint of nobly pointed ears, glared down at MurPhreeport. "That is not Carlo Sabatini. Sabatini is dead. That may be a clone of Sabatini, or a droid copy, or a shapeshifter impersonating him, but I was there when Acolyte William Dane burned Sabatini down with a flash gun on the distant planet Brancusi." The barely visible silhouette paused, for melodramatic effect, and then ground on, "I was there when the strength of man failed."

"Ah for flux's sake," a gnome like form with a massively swollen head said. "Enough with this 'when the strength of man failed' glix. I seen the movie. You were there with a bow, and the human turned his back on you and walked away with the jewelry. TWANGG! Ker splash he goes in the lava with the gumball machine ring, and so much trouble is saved. You were there when the arrows of elfdom failed, bubbi."

The silhouette drew itself up. "The honor of my people..." Then it shook its head. "Never mind. As long as you are here, Tarlian, the Council has a message for you."

A slender, feminine appearing humanoid female apparently dressed in a loosely wound red ribbon snickered. "They're gonna send you on a quest, Arbathian. See, there's only one place in all of Middle Earth where..."

A collective impulse of will, melded of Organian, Vorlan, Eternos, and several other Elder minds, silenced her. "You should hear this too, Verrane. By the edict of the Council, the psychic circuits have been removed from the projection screens throughout this system. The Great Space Race may be projected to our local citizenry, but you will reap no psychic dividends."

The Tarlian and Verrane psyches radiated fury. The Tarlian snapped "This is uncalled for and unacceptable. We don't project ad supported material, we're pay per view. And we signed a contract for full access to events in this whole system when we joined the Collective."

The Verrane shimmered and became the likeness of an ancient Earth actor named Jon Polito, dressed in archaic clothing. "You think we're some guineas, fresh off the boat, and you can slap us around. But we're too big for that now. We draw psychic energy from three quarters of the Multiverse, our shows are popular in a trillion different markets. We can get every psychic media influencer in the Infinite Worlds on your necks. You better not..."

"Silence." The psychic voice this time was resonant with Deep Time; its vibrations started migraines across the entire northern hemisphere of the planet below. "Before you began producing spectacles to be psychically broadcast to mid-level evolved sentients so you could drain their mental energy, you arrayed yourselves as gods, and took your food through the adulation and terror of the Galactic masses."

The Tarlian and Verrane exchanged uneasy thought-glyphs. "So?" the Verrane blustered, finally. "No law against it."

"The Romulan Empire holds thirty trillion sentient life forms," the Voice went on implacably. "Their culture is obsessed with aesthetics and technology. And yet, they essentially recycle the same 17 aesthetic templates over and over, with minor reshufflings. And they have not made a significant technological advance in aeons."

"Sure," the Tarlian tried to interject, "but you can't.."

"The Klingons," the Voice continued, "are eighty billion strong. They worship honor, and violence. They have never invented anything, not in recorded history; they steal technology from those around them. They have no religion to speak of, simply ancestor reverence. And the machine intelligences..."

"Oh now come ON," the Verrane said, "you're gonna try to hang the goddam Berserkers on us..."

"They were organics once, before their great transformation," the Voice replied. "They also worshipped you. The Cylons, the same. And the other great artificial intelligences. The Dalek are on the edge of the same crossover, more machine than biological now. You drained them all. They are now psychically autistic, and will be for aeons to come, if they ever recover."

A Vorlon voice took over. "You changed your tactics because you had sucked these middle aged cultures dry. You have attempted ever since to target the humans. We of this Collective will not try to interfere with you in the greater Multiverse; the humans are quite prolific in the production of their own champions against you."

"But," the Collective voice spoke again, in unison, "you will not psychically damage our subjects here, in this system."

On the Up-Port, a blond woman barely a century in age (mentally and emotionally) turned her face towards a neighboring team. "The plant people's thoughts are like music, father," she said to the tall, bald, dusky skinned man clad all in blood red standing nearby.

He looked over at her. His eyes softened; his hard-muscled arms unlocked from in front of his chest. "They are Cotati, daughter. Be careful of them, they have great telepathic power. Their music has beguiled more fools to a dreadful doom than the sirens of old Urrath."

A more slimly built man, his dark hair streaked with reddish blonde, leaned over the railing of the great bronze Garuda-bird they had entered into the race. "I would never doubt your work, Yama, or Kubera's..."

The bald man looked up at him sardonically. "Probably wise, Sam," he intoned gravely.

"But," Mahasamatman (who preferred to drop the 'Maha' and the 'atman' and just go by 'Sam') said, eyes twinkling, "the spectral thrusters are out of ratio to the payload. The claws will not get good traction on the piloting pod."

Yama frowned. "They can grip it by the husk."

Sam shook his head. "It's not a question of what it grips it by, it's a simple question of mass-weight ratio. 200Ms of psychic thrust cannot stabilize 300 horks of biologically active mass."

He sighed and rolled his head around on his neck. "I don't know. Maybe we can mount the pod on the back, where a rider would normally go anyway. But I honestly think at least one of us is going to have to stay back."

Yama's visage darkened. "You mean," he said, his voice soft with menace, "you wish me to stay back, while you voyage with my daughter. How convenient."

Sam opened his mouth to say She's not your daughter... No. Unwise. Yama was his friend, but Kali was ever a sore point between them...

"Fine," he said. "You come up and look at these performance specs and tell me what changes you suggest..."

John Huge-Ass, slinking about nearby, mentally crossed the Big Bird people and the stupid Potted Plant people off his list.

Seated, brooding, next to a gleaming golden chariot with empty braces where some sort of beast should be to pull it – a Klingon of indeterminate age. Tall, lean, of physically powerful appearance, with a certain glowering charisma, he awaited his partner – 'partner', feh! His handler was more like it! And he, the might Go – eh, Fangdor, yes, that was it, Fangdor – did not like to be handled!

Once he had this glorious prize, he would have the power to do as he pleased. He would hire a small elite force – the Dendarii, perhaps – and once he had retaken the capitol and declared himself risen and triumphant, the Empire would rise for him! Then –

"Hst," he heard, from very nearby. "Where is the beast?"

His head jerked around. A yellow skinned dwarf with a golden bearded head almost as large as the rest of his body had come around the chariot. "The beast," the dwarf repeated. "Where is it?"

The Klingon – Fangdor, then, for the moment – sneered. He pulled a pendant out of his war-vest, he wore it on an unbreakable tritonian chain. "Here," he said. "Shrunk, by Federation magics." The 'Federation magics' were Pym particles, for over a century the jealously guarded proprietary technology of Stark-Wayne Enterprises. There were alien scientists who had surpassed the weapons, armor, and spaceship design capacities of the Old Earth company, but no one else had ever mastered Pym particles. Go – Fangdor's supporters had paid a pretty uranium plated darsek for the technology necessary to shrink this creature down and keep it safe, and then bring it back up to size in time to be harnessed for the Great Race. And another fat bag of radioactive coinage for the Pernese control collar!

It would be worth it, when they pocketed the 10,000,000 CU purse. Which they were guaranteed to do, for his brilliant scheme could not fail!

"Good," the yellow dwarf, whose name was Kenggo and who was originally from the planet New Xanth, said. "Keep it secret. Keep it safe. Its former masters are in MurPhreeport, swearing out a complaint against you for theft, but they have only a poor description, so..."

'Fangdor's eyes bulged. "Against ME? You stole the beast! With your 'Xanthian hypno beam', you..."

The dwarf held up his tiny hands in a placating gesture. "Let us not argue. There is nothing to direct their attention upward, and the planet bears many oddities. Once the race is over, we can return the creature with no harm done."

'Fangdor' regarded the dwarf dubiously. "Very well, then. The chariot is fully prepared. If the savages do not interfere, we cannot lose. While the others, with their mechanical engines, will be limited by the rules to only accelerate their craft for half the course, or less, I, with my living beast drawing the chariot along, will be able to race the full length at maximum velocity! I cannot help but be victorious!"

The Xanthian shook its gourd-like head. "I wish you would specifically ask about this. I have read and reread the rules, and I feel that..."

"No!" The Klingon smote his palm with his fist. "By all my honorable ancestors, none will know my secret strategy until the race begins! And then, when I am triumphant, let them try to refuse the prize to me on some mincing technicality! My followers will rise up and destroy them!"

A standard starship's orbital skiff hovered within a faintly blue magnetic repulsion pod near the golden chariot. There was a buzz of activity around it. Four Uplifted Phins in spider-like walker harnesses moved easily over the skiff's hull, doing various things at different places where they had pried access hatches in the hull open. An Uplifted Chimp sat on a large unopened storage bulb off to the side, talking with two human males and a human female. Those well conversant with human physiology could probably have looked and seen that one of the human males was considerably older than the other human male and the human female.

"So we're agreed, we let Keepiru pilot the skiff for the race," the older human male said, looking at a handheld datascreen. "Maybe I go along as co-pilot, just in case anything unexpected pops up?"

"Maybe," the chimp grunted. "But listen, Tom... that ain't the most important thing. I been out and about in this place poking my snout in and keeping my ears open. And..."

"Does someone recognize us?" the woman, who was quite young and by human standards, quite pretty, asked.

The chimp shook his head. "That was my main area of interest. And, interestingly, no. No one does. And I think I know why. I just don't know how it can possibly be. I mean, it's nuts."

The older man nodded. "You mean, you've finally accepted that we are in the past. About a hundred to a hundred and fifty years, by my judgment."

Anyone who could read the face of an Uplifted ape would have seen a look of pure astonishment. "How the hell did you figure that out?"

Tom Orley, possibly the best agent Earthgov had ever fielded, just shrugged. "I poke my snout in and keep my ears open too, Charlie."

He sighed and relented. "I have been monitoring the hyperwave, and, yes, paying attention to the traffic I've seen, and the other participants in the race. Some of them are quite famous. All of them are, by the standards of our own home time period, historical figures."

He let his eyes move slowly around the room, giving the other three an opportunity to follow his gaze. It moved across several colorful groups and their odd vessels. Three adults – two men, one woman – and a young boy, standing next to what appeared to be a gigantic black umbrella. One of the men had an oddly misshapen seeming body, under his navy blue coverall. Another was a group of one much older man, a younger male, and another Uplifted chimpanzee, working on a vehicle whose front was shaped like a large capital M, or perhaps a W. Then there was a group of 11 very attractive young human beings of mixed genders wearing coveralls that clung well enough to show their very well defined morphologies. They were installing some sort of components into what looked to be a gigantic hollow crystal made of some sort of coarse, colorless substance.

"Very interesting, all of them," Tom Orley went on. "And well worth keeping an eye on."

"Two, even," Toshio, the younger, Asian looking male, said, looking at the attractive young humans by the giant crystal.

"If I'm not wrong, those are natives of planet M-113... warlacci," the young woman, whose name was Denni, remarked. "Also known as 'salt vampires'. They don't actually look like that; they have the ability to project more appealing appearances."

Toshio's cheeks went red. "Oh. Well, you've read more of the Library than I have."

Denni nodded, tapped a few times on her own databoard, then held it so Toshio could see the holo it was projecting. "That is a warlacci that encountered the Federation starship Enterpise in 2266."

"Which may actually not have happened yet," Charles asked, following Tom's gaze. "That guy by the umbrella has a gorilla body."

Tom pursed his lips. "Yes. That's it. I knew there was something... leave it to you to see that immediately, Charlie."

Charlie snorted. "Takes one to know one, huh? What is up with him and the giant umbrella?"

Tom frowned. "I... I don't know. There's something familiar about it, but..."

Denni had been tapping and tapping, now she shook her head in frustration. "I can't find an entry in the Library about any 'Great Space Race' on a galactic fringe planet. Or around a star called ME-262. Plenty about several hundred years of 'intrasystem local space yacht racing', all of it around Aldaraan, back before the Romulans blew it up. But no mention of any such even taking place subsequently."

Tom shook his head. "Historical sporting events were never an area of study for me," he said. "I do feel very strongly, though, that we are all exactly where we are meant to be."

"As good an explanation for how we have ended up 150 years in the past doing routine starpath journeys as any, I suppose," Denni sighed. "I certainly hope we win. I can't think of any other way to raise the kind of money we'll need to find the others... especially if we are indeed as far back in time as you say, Tom."

"Oh, we are," Charlie said. "Look at the mods on that Up-chimp over there. You can still see the bump of the artificial larynx in his throat! And he's actually wearing external processors!"

Tom turned away, and walked over to the Phins. He didn't really need a progress report, but he didn't want to continue the conversation. What he had said to Denni had been technically accurate – he never had had much interest in historical sports. However, he did actually remember this particular race very well. And there was no point talking about it. No point letting Denni read the copious entries in the Library about it, either, which was why he'd done a quick wipe and seal back on the Streak, before they'd even docked here.

Something had brought them here, to this time, and to this place. When it came time for the race to start, he'd contrive some way to send the kids and Charlie and the Phins down to the surface of the planet. And he... would do whatever he could. Make whatever contribution he could make, to achieve the necessary outcome...

He missed Gillian so much.

At the furthest reach of the melon-slice shaped chamber, the most unprepossessing entry bulked ignominiously in a corner near a port. It appeared for all the world to be a 1940s model Kelvinator from Earth, although that appearance was merely a disguise... an effective one. Centuries before, an Earth human adventurer named Jones had taken shelter in it against an atomic bomb blast, and bizarrely and inexplicably, the Kelvenator had not only survived the blast, but had shielded Jones from the blast's effects, even to the point of, after flying twenty miles through the air, striking the ground hard, bouncing several times, and then falling open. At which point, the man Jones somehow rolled out, unharmed.

The Kelvenator had, after this, been reclaimed by is original fabricators. As it had always been destined to be.

The two nondescript humanoids – well, perhaps, to other humans they would have seemed distinct, with their pale skin, black eyes, and hairless heads, but to non-humans, all humans looked alike – who currently had possession of the Kelvenator had entered the Great Space Race with it listed as their vessel. The judges hadn't even raised an eyebrow (well, the one that had eyebrows hadn't; the other two did not register surprise in any way). The Red Lectroids had entered something that looked like a gigantic root bowl, the odd Hindu folk from Mir had entered a huge bronze bird statue. The muttering Klingon and his odd dwarf companion were apparently going to pull a chariot down the designated magno-path. How strange, really, was this rectangle of ancient, dirty metal?

Now the one whispered urgently to the other, "This will not work, Mr. Valentine. Everyone is looking at us. Word will reach..." He hesitated, his face puckered as if he were about to speak a truly vile word... "Oversight, soon, and then..."

The other male patted the first one's shoulder reassuringly. "Relax, Mr. Brass. No one suspects anything. Genesis is safely stowed away and once we get far enough from this sun, we can activate our warp drive, and flee this Galaxy entirely..."

Forty seven feet away, John Moon-Entwistle froze into immobility. Had he heard the word 'Genesis'? He strained to make his ears into paraboloid radar dishes, an effort he failed at, but... yes he was quite sure he had. Those two drab little nonentities in their old fashioned suits were whispering together and they'd said it. 'Genesis'. Did they have it hidden in that big old fridge? What if it suffocated? It was a child, after all, was his understanding. He would have to go and gather his minions, and...

"Excuse me," a solemn yet solicitous voice purred in his ear. "May I be of service to you?"

Forty seconds later, Mr. Valentine and Mr. Brass arose and bowed formally to two figures that approached their Kelvenator.

"Mr. Ballista," Mr. Brass said unctuously. "And who is your new friend?"

Mr. Ballista returned the bow precisely, and then clicked his heels together. "Mr. Brass. Mr. Valentine. May I present Mr. John Moon-Entwistle. He is curious as to the Kelvenator, and concerned, perhaps, that a child may be lost within it."

"Ah," Mr. Brass said, eyes widening beneath his hairless browridge.

"Oh," Mr. Valentine allowed, lips pursed. "Hem. You are a Lectroid, are you not, Mr. Moon-Entwistle? We knew your parents, long ago. Fine folk."

John Moon-Entwistle was, in human terms, puzzling and puzzling 'til his puzzler was sore. He had been just about to go and collect his two minions, so they could assault these... peckerwoods? Was that the correct term? Bumfucks, perhaps? Wango-tangos?... Whatever they were, and then, another of them appeared at his elbow and now, here he was, talking to them. Nefarious! A global conspiracy!

"Ah," he said, unconsciously imitating Mr. Brass, "well... parents? Sir. I am egg-hatched within a collective."

"Eh, no, Mr. Moon-Entwistle," Mr. Ballista said, putting a casually affectionate arm round the Red Lectroid's narrow shoulders. "Mr. Valentine speaks of your racial parents, the Oculex. A luminary race, photonic in nature, who were quite exterminated by the last Slow Burn to sweep through the Milky Way. Our race was more fortunate, we learned the tactic of taking refuge in the dead bodies of lesser forms. The Oculex created the Lectroid race as a sort of hybrid between energy state and organic; when the Slow Burn destroyed them, it gave the original Lectroid brood-genes quite a mutagenic jump start, as it were. The next generation that hatched had gold skin, blue skin, black skin, purple skin, and red skin, in addition to the customary green. Sadly the golds, blues, purples, and original greens have all died out. Only the blacks, with their superior intellects coupled to driving wills, and the reds, with their matchless ability for adaptation at all costs, as long as those costs were paid by others, yet survive."

John Moon-Entwistle cocked his head. "Ha!" he declared. "You are speaking gibberish!" He lowered his voice. "I am somewhat expert at that tongue myself." He flickered his forked tongue surreptitiously, in what he could not possibly know was actually a mating display.

"Not at all, my friend," Mr. Brass said cordially. "Come. You shall inspect the innards of our Kelvenator, which we only recently recovered after it had wandered from our keeping, and in this way, satisfy yourself that no children have been harmed in the making of this film."

"Ho ho!" John Moon-Entwistle said. "Not so fast, dead monkey boy. Instead of inspecting, I will, perhaps, UNspect. It is a special discipline of my people."

"We enjoy the unsuspecting," Mr. Valentine agreed, guiding the Lectroid over to the Kelvenator, as Mr. Brass swung its heavy, dirt encrusted door open.

John Moon-Entwistle gaped within. "Shoo-fly," he murmured. He turned to look at all three of his hosts in turn. "But you have an entire city in there!" He furrowed his brows. "Your refrigerator light is out, however. Your city is dark."

"It is," Mr. Ballista crooned. "And, alas, our Tuning will only work within those boundaries, not here. But! The dead travel fast, my friend! And are quite strong!"

With which, he tightened his arm around John Moon-Entwistle's shoulders, lifted the lizardoid off his feet, and fairly hurled the Lectroid like an old paper bag of kitchen rubbish, straight down into the heart of the dark city within the Kelvenator.

"SHRIEKKKKKKKKKKKK," echoed up from the depths of the Kelvenator, before Mr. Valentine gently closed the door again.

"Perhaps one of us should... hrm... accompany him, to keep him from getting into trouble," Mr. Brass suggested.

Mr. Valentine sucked a forefinger thoughtfully. "No, no. Mr. Doll is within. He will tend the nasty lizard boy. If a memory wipe is necessary, as with that appalling Jones man, Mr. Doll will see to it."

Mr. Brass shuddered. "Thank the Primal Id we got rid of him."

He folded his arms in front of him, almost like a preying mantis. "This must work. We have very little fuel left for a hyperjump, we dare not waste it."

"And we will not, "Mr. Valentine said reassuringly. "You are troubled by recent reversals. Do not be. We are adaptable. Do we not always win through? When the Slow Burn came for the others, did we not learn the techniques of survival? When the mortals called us Gentlemen, and we found our bodies vulnerable to certain high pitched frequencies of sound, did we not learn to steal their voices? And when that tiny female mortal defeated us for the first time out of mind, did we not avenge ourselves, and take her and her family and friends and her entire city-hive into space, for our experiments?"

Mr. Ballista added, bitterly, "They made stories out of it. Lies. Mocking lies."

Mr. Valentine nodded. It was true; the humans made stories, they always made stories. It was a strange feature of this facet of the quanta; true events in many places and many times somehow recorded themselves in the human id, and trickled into the human imagination, and became coherent stories. Stories that, as Mr. Ballista had said, were twisted, bearing only a superficial resemblance to actual reality. In the story the Earthians had fashioned of the tiny bright-haired human girl, she survived the taking of her city-hive, and founded an army of tiny human girls just like her, to battle creatures much like them, whom they, of course, depicted as evil. In the story of the taken city-hive itself, many details were correct – the elderly Watcher who had betrayed them had paid with his life, for one thing. But he had taught the girl to Tune before he had died, via trickery, and she had nearly defeated them. But in the story created by mortals, in that brief period before they had destroyed their own civilization, it had been a male human, not a female, who had learned to Tune, and he had utterly routed them, instead of in the end being destroyed himself...

"Yes," Mr. Valentine sighed – an expression of exasperation entirely telepathic, as the Strangers do not breathe. "Yes. They makes stories, the stories twist things, the stories lie, and the stories mock. The Lectroids have it worse than we; in their human crafted story, they were defeated by a podling named Scooter."

The other Strangers shuddered. It was true.

"But we have Genesis," Mr. Valentine went on. "We smuggled the body imprisoning it up to this place in the violent confusion below. We will take it back to our home galaxy. We will use it to restore our race's glory."

Mr. Brass nodded. "We are strong. We withstand."

Mr. Ballista nodded. "We adapt. We survive."

"And so it shall ever be," Mr. Valentine said. "Now... go about this place whispering the word 'Genesis' that the other Lectroids should follow you back here. We will entrap them, as well, and then nothing shall interfere with our grandeur..."

NEXT ISSUE: The new Warden makes a friend, and loses one. The Great Space Race begins, the Multiverse looks on, and the gods themselves strive to answer the question – "Does It Come With Cruise Control?"

MURPHY'S PLANET #5 - "THE GREAT SPACE RACE" - Part 2 "Does It Come With Cruise Control?"

Newly hired Warden of Murphy's Planet "Ace" Arne was seriously considering appointing a few deputies so he could take a day off and recuperate from the crazed running battle that had kicked off his very first day on the job. In fact, he was seriously considering offering the job first to the woman sitting across his compudesk from him, who just would not shut up about her missing space dragon. She was tall for a woman, broad shouldered, muscled like an asteroid deflecting forcefield, and radiated a general aura of heroic charisma. If anybody could take over Wardening for a day, Tara could do it for sure.

Or perhaps the noble regularity of her facial features and the willowy, oh so feminine curves under that tight bodysuit of unknown material had him seriously considering offering her an entirely different position. A whole array of them, in fact.

Sadly, Ace knew it was just a wire-dream. Tara had made it clear over the past couple of days that she was only here looking for the goddam space dragon, and she had a husband and a kid and a space zoo full of other wildly unlikely alien critters back on her home planet of Qazmot, and as soon as she could find her missing pteradactyl, she'd be heading back there. Ace honestly could not blame the woman; he'd only been here three days and he was already sick of this place.

Ah, but these NP's that actually ran the place said they could probably turn him back into a human being full time, if they pooled their efforts. That would let him return to Earth, and beloved Bonnie, who had thought he was dead for more than ten years now. Of course, she might have long since remarried and moved on, who knew? But at least, if he was human again, he might have a chance of finding someone new himself...

From such bittersweet musings, Ace was jarred by Tara's husky voice. "I have never seen anyone quite like you before, Warden Arne. You... have a motley look to you I have never previously encountered."

Ace wanted to cringe. Yes, he was a freak! A horrifying, monstrous freak! Perhaps it was galactic karma, after how he had taken his good looks for granted before the insane and absurd coincidence that had seen four separate aliens all blasting him with the same control rays at once. The beams had been intended to turn whatever they struck into exact duplicates of the wielder, under the wielder's total control. But since they had all struck Ace simultaneously, they had transformed him into this grotesquerie – a creature whose upper torso and head were divided between two alien races, the green furred Ulla on one side, the hairless blue skinned Laroo on the other, while his right leg had become the feathery limb of a bird like Trago, and his left was composed entirely of electrical energy, like the Raagan! By the Federation what a horror he was!

But he was in charge of keeping the peace for this entire world now; he would not quail before anyone. Like it or not, this was what he was now... Ultra the Multi-Alien! And at long last, he had found a place where no one even looked twice at him when he was out in a crowd. Truly, Murphy's Planet was the only place in the known cosmos where he could truly fit in. Even on that Smuggler's Moon, the denizens had...

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" Ace could not possibly have heard what he thought he heard...

"I said," the gorgeous barbarian woman repeated, "you have an almost godly aura of strength and power about you, Warden Arne."

Was she actually running her tongue around her lips? Holy batzog, what kind of a freak was she?

He had no idea how to respond. She leaned forward in her memplas chair. The wide collar that overlapped the top of her body suit had somehow elongated, he could clearly see the tops of her breasts... "May I ask you a personal question?"

He stared at her. She straightened up, smiling, crossed her legs. The collar resumed its former configuration. "I will take silence as assent," she purred. "Your body seems to be divided into quadrants. I wondered how that division... below the waist, as it were... had... affected certain... areas."

He could feel himself blushing... and flushing, with anger. The little minx was teasing him. She must know... "The Trago are an avian race, their males' genitalia is withdrawn into their bodies until it is needed. The Raagan are entirely composed of bio-electricity. So the effect is, I have a hidden male organ that is entirely functional, when aroused, but supercharged with electrical energy. Other than pleasure droids and various super races like the Asgardians and the Daxamites, there are few humanoid women who can withstand..."

Ace shook his head. "I was once thrown into the company of a female Klingon warrior who was as fascinated as you seem to be and she hounded me incessantly for 'the experience'. I did not find her attractive; the Klingons are physically and spiritually a repulsive race." Ace didn't go on, he found the whole thing revolting and tragic. Eventually Minorka had had the great good fortune to encounter him chained to a wall and before rescuing him, she had stimulated a response out of him... and last he had heard, she was still in an institution on Kronos, confined to a grav-pod, her nervous system so badly fried all she could do was twitch uncontrollably.

"Ah," Tara said, shaking her head. "Doubtless you do not find me attractive as well, barbaric as I am. A pity."

"Well," Ace said, suddenly uncertain. "Aren't you married to that big hulking guy with the ten legged space rhino?"

Tara's laugh was musical. "Yes, very happily. But we have very reliable birth control; both men and women of our race are in complete control of their fertility. As such, our customs are much more... flexible... than those of other Galactic humans."

She leaned forward again. "I have much the same problem as you, Warden Arne... my strength makes it difficult to find suitable lovers who will not be damaged by..."

She jumped to her feet. "There he is!" She was pointing the forefinger of her right hand at the viewsee screen on the wall behind Ace.

Ace spun his chair around. Sure enough, a creature matching the description of the missing Zok could be seen prominently on the screen, being secured within the draft pole's yoke of what Ace could only think of as some kind of goofy space chariot.

"That's the Great Space Race getting ready to kick off, from the Up-Dock," Ace said. "Huh. You know, I know I scanned the Up-Dock backwards and forwards and didn't see a sign of your space dinosaur, and now, suddenly..."

"They were hiding him," Tara said, eyes sparking furiously. "The thieves that stole him, through some malign magic or vile offworld technology. Gleep! Gloop!"

She turned and ran out the door. Each running footstep was so powerful, yet so graceful, that it was as if she were running on a low gravity moon, bounding along as if she had rockets on her feet, yet she never lost her balance.

As Ace watched, a tennurium framed holoprint on his office wall seemed to melt into an insubstantial glob of colorless protoplasm and flow through the air after Tara, as did a potted Voranese lie-catching fern from the corner near his desk.

Ace shook his head, and then flew after her. He had no jurisdiction on the Up-Port, but he certainly didn't want to see Tara just fling herself into that mess up there without adequate warning...

Outside, the alien shapeshifters were forming into some kind of small flying saucer around Tara. The space barbarian queen saw Ultra flying after her and thundered "No need for any more of your time, Warden... now that we know where Zok is, we will collect him directly!"

Ace was torn. It wasn't his job to... but, then, he liked her, and she seemed to like him, if only for something casual, and... besides, in a way it was his job, the NP's were very excited about the Great Space Race for whatever reason, if he just let Tara go and she interfered in it, then...

"Tara, listen," he said. "Listen to me, Tara. Listen. Two things. The weird coincidence that transformed me into this monstrous form also attuned me to the underlying information energy of the universe. Your dragon is wearing a Pernese control harness. As long as that harness is on it, it will have to obey the commands of whoever holds the control band."

Tara scowled. "The scum. If they've traumatized Zok I will have their guts for sling-straps. Thank you for telling me."

Ace shrugged. "I'm just saying, if your dragon shoots lasers out of his eyes, you better not just charge in there thinking he's going to come flying over ready for a Scoobie Snack as soon as he sees you."

"I would never feed my pets Scoobie Snacks," Tara rejoindered indignantly. "They are one third sugar, one third meth amphetamine..."

"And the rest whatever the Space Ghost Inc factory could scrape out from under their refrigeration units when the batch was made," Ace said. "I know. Figure of speech. Just, don't..."

Tara nodded. "You have my thanks. Now..."

"I said there were two things," Ultra went on. "The other is, I don't have jurisdiction at the Up-Port. And the Chief of Police up there is a real blockhead. You're going to want to be ready to deal with him..."

A glorious vista of stars – the entire Milky Way Galaxy, set at a thirty degree tilt, in fact – formed the breathtaking backdrop for the Up-Port, when seen from the designated starting area for the Great Space Race. For the past half-day, the entrants had been jockeying their vehicles into the area, lining themselves up vertically, one above the other above the other, so no one would have a disadvantageous position when the switch was thrown and the gravitic 'track' activated.

Looking over at it, Kenggo tightened his lips within his transparent fishbowl helmet, four times the size of a normal space suit 'bubble'. The Up-Port was like a beautiful whirling toy for some godling child, wondrous and marvelous against the gleaming swirl of the galaxy behind it. The stars were distant, cold and gleaming artifacts of a long dead jeweler who had left them behind in some unfathomable show window, casually scattered across a vast black velvet cloth...

He turned his attention back to this insufferable satellite cop. "The control harness we're using is top shelf," he repeated, for at least the fourth time. "I've inspected it repeatedly, and your own people have also inspected it. Our beast cannot possibly go wild. We have paid all entry fees, abided by all regulations."

"I still don't like it," the fat, yellow skinned, pig nosed Galactic human in the archaic blue uniform blustered. No one there could possibly know it, but his voice was a fair imitation of an ancient Earth actor's named James Cagney. "Nothing was said about any dragons pulling any chariots. No sir. Everybody else has honest engines and motors and solar sails and what not. This is not above board. I'm afraid that..."

The Klingon pilot thrust his own bubble helmeted head forward, eyes near popping out of his head. "A human, afraid of something! Contact the interstellar media!"

The Chief of Police of Up-Port pointed a gauntleted fat finger at the Klingon. "Now listen, you. We're all Galactic Humans here, and I don't like your attitude, see? Maybe a 90 day hitch in the Bottom Brig for Contempt of Due Process will..."

The Xanthian dwarf raised his hands placatingly. "Chief Wiggum, there is no need... I apologize for my cohort. He is Klingon. He is hotheaded. This is known. We only wish to race. There are no rules against using a star-dragon as our means of impetus..."

The Klingon rolled his eyes. "We are perhaps being presumptuous in thinking this one can actually read. Or if it could, it would have bothered."

The police chief scowled. "You're a wise guy. Let's see how funny the other wise guys in the Bottom prison tiers think you are..."

Above the golden chariot, Grampa was strapped into his coffin shaped Dragstar, impatiently fuming to his great great great etc grandson. "Oy gvey. Are they ever going to get on with this? My dragstar will smoke 'em, choke 'em, and soak 'em if they'll just flash the green...!"

"You can only accelerate for half the course," Jason reminded his ancestor, for the fourth or fifth time. "Remember that, Grampa. If you go full thrusters out to the asteroid belt, then you have to coast back into the finish line, and it will be hard to maneuver through the rocks..."

"Don't teach your grandfather how to get around a garlic wreathe on the window," the ancient darkling snarled back. "I did the Kessel run in 3 parsecs once, and when I came out in what was left of Aldaraan, did I snivel and go 'I have a bad feeling about this'? No! I slapped that uppity droid across its crank case, told it not to tell me the gorsh ferblanken odds, and dove on in! And here I am!"

Jason had heard that in fact, Grampa had impaled his red-painted second hand Ragon saucer on a chunk of spacescraper and had to darkshift through six different anti-matter gates to get back to a place where he could take shelter from the raw UV, and then he'd had to sweet talk a Borg Queen to avoid assimilation... but that was Grampa. No point in bringing up the sad, grim truth beneath the mythology he loved to fabricate for himself.

"They'll flash the green soon, Grampa," Jason said, comfortingly. "Remember, you're also disqualified if you..."

"Stray off the track, it's marked by the grav buoys, I know this, I know this!" The ancient darkling lay back, folded his arms on his chest. "Wake me up when they finally get this show on the road, wouldya?"

Above them, in the tight confines of the heavily modified Colonial Viper, Hannibal Starbuck was playing virtual triad in a holofield projected by his nav-helmet - and losing badly. He was wishing they had reconfigured the pilots area so that Athena would be riding in front of him instead of behind. There were more pleasant ways to while away last minute delays...

He heard her chuckle from the instrument lit gloom behind him. "That's why we didn't move the seats around, buckaroo. Focus on the Race. I'll buy you a weekend in a holosuite after we win."

Inside the Lectroid thermal pod, the Minbari scratch crew were still working to puzzle out to the controls. When the Lectroids themselves had all vanished, the judges had just wanted to sell the thermal pod off for spare parts, but the Minbari had suggested they could take it over, as their own vessel had been disallowed for illegal warp gate technology. But, now...

"This makes no sense!" Glassu, the ranking Minbari, hissed. "These cables don't go anywhere! And this entire control array is rigged to this... this... I don't even know what this is!" He kicked the pearly white box, having no idea it was a perfectly restored PlayStation V that John Walks The Earth Like Cain In Kung Fu had been just about to set a new galactic top score in STARFIGHTER on.

"It drives like a truck," Shirshak, his chief flunky, said, peering into some sort of ancient viewing mechanism (that was actually a vintage Kodak Viewmaster loaded with holoscenes from BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION – Lectroids can't watch video presentations without getting sick but they love slide shows). "That's what it says here."

"What is a truck?" Bunjon, the Mindari technologist, demanded. "Wait!" He picked up the brass clamps at the end of a pair of jumper cables and fastened them to two metal nipples protruding from the organic looking circuit board in front of him. The entire cabin lit up and began to hum. "Now we're getting somewhere!"

Spritle Mifune XXI sat, quietly enough, beneath the bubble canopy of the Warp-55. He was clearing his mind, focusing only on the race, not letting himself dwell on how much depended on him, and Chim-Pan, his Uplifted simian navigator. Mifune Motors had been a joke for so long, ever since his illustrious ancestor Go' had destroyed the original Mach-5 in that disastrous collision with Racer-X and that bizarre haunted house vehicle. The only reason they hadn't been bought out by Momcorp or Space Ghost Inc long since was that they were a laughinstock across this sector of the Galaxy. Well, now the Galaxy would see, the Mifune family could still build and pilot the best speed racers ever...

From the trunk space behind him, he heard Chim-Pan cackle "Ready to release the robot pigeon whenever you say, boss man..."

"Just shut up," Spritle snapped.

Luther Hargreaves irritably reached for the lever to move his seat back, and then realized that the seat was already as far back as it would go. Gosh darn it! If only he weren't the most qualified pilot...

"You look like a can of ape stew," his brother Diego jeered gently from the co-pilot's seat. "Seriously, bro. You should go on back to the cargo compartment. I can handle this milk run."

Their sister Allison sighed and said "Diego, I heard a rumor you were going to behave like a goddam grown up for the rest of this race."

"Hey, don't you," Diego started. A second later – "Yeah, all right. I apologize, Luther."

"And Luther," Allison said, "I heard a rumor that you were completely relaxed and comfortable and in top form for this event."

A palpable stiffness seemed to ease out of Luther's enormous form. "Oh, super. That's super, sis. Thanks so much."

Alison smooched Diego on the top of his head, leaned the other way to plant a longer, wetter kiss on Luther's lips. "Remember, we need this money to recharge the temporal travel coils. So get it for us."

"Hey," a whiney child's voice said, "I can 'port us all back home, no problem..."

"NO!" the other three said in unison.

"Every time you port us through time we end up somewhere weirder," Luther said.

"Weirder and way worse," Diego added.

Allison turned her head and said "Five, you know every time you port us, one of those goddam time cops shows up and tries to kill us. The Odin-Umbrella has the built in capacity to transcend time and space. That's why we stole it. It got us here from Asgard..."

Five, who appeared to be a 10 or 12 year old boy, rolled his eyes. "You're so worried about time cops. You ain't worried about ODIN, for Christ's sake?"

"He's sleeping," Diego said. "Anyway, that place was full of weird gigantic shit, they'll never miss this one. When are they ever going to need an enormous umbrella, anyway?"

Luther nodded. "Besides, it is kind of ours by right, anyway."

In the Streak, Tom Orley made the last connection, replaced the hatch under the forward control-board, and then pulled himself back upright. "Okay, that should do it," he said. "I wish we could test it, but..."

"Without a wave motion engine to fire it, there is only enough charge in its accumulators for one use," Hikahi clicked and squeaked at him. "But we have all gone over this prototype. It matches the plans in the Library. It should work."

Tom nodded, grimly. "All right. Everybody got a good seat down there?"

Hikahi's three dimensional image ducked and bobbed on her walker-legs, the Phin equivalent of an enthusiastic nod. "Yes. Keepiru sulks still, at being displaced, but..."

Tom shrugged. "The winner of this race is going to be a human male, piloting his vessel alone. I remember that very clearly. So..."

"Yes," Hikahi said. "Well. I must cease transmission or violate the rules. Good currents and tides to you, Tom-Orley."

Her image vanished.

Tom Orley pulled himself down to the pilot's chair and strapped in. He couldn't claim to like being alone much. But at least, this way, the rest would still have a chance at some kind of lives.

He punched up a holo of Gillian, turning and looking over her shoulder, laughing, and watched it idly while waiting for the green light.

"Qerl. What are we doing here?"

The blonde haired, green skinned man in the purple coverall looked up from the hologram he had been studying. Definite trail of quantons coming up the gravity trough from Four Winds... For a just a moment, he appeared to be annoyed. Then his facial features smoothed out. "You know what we are doing here, Kara. You have photographic memory."

He dispelled the hologram being projected by his flight ring with a flick of his fingers.

"I have holographic memory," the tall, leggy blonde said, staring down at her teammate and occasional boyfriend. "I holographically recall you requesting me and Jan take a trip with you in one of our capsules."

"Jan and I," Brainiac 5 corrected absently. Another level of his mentality was running numbers: At the velocity of that quanton trail, ETA would be...

"Come now, Kara, you can speak 15,000 Galactic languages perfectly." His eyes refocused. "You should be able to manage proper grammar for Newlactic. Where is Jan, anyway?"

The woman many Worlds and times knew as Supergirl gestured in exasperation. "Over there, talking to those girls in the cat suits. Don't try to change the subject. This is me, Qerl. The woman you love because I'm the only one on an intellectual level with you blah blah blah all that pretty stuff you told me to hustle me into the zero gee pod the first time. Yes. You asked me to take a trip with you, and I said sure, but you never explained why."

Didn't have to hustle you much, another sublevel of Brainiac 5's mentality snickered. Inwardly, he sighed. That juvenile aspect of his psychology he seemed incapable of fully repressing. Why would he mock Kara for being lonely? Sure he understood it, and she had even more reason to feel isolated from the general populace as he did.

In a very gentle voice, he asked, "Why did you come along? Why did you think I was asking you?"

Kara Zor El narrowed her eyes. "I thought it was just going to be the two of us. I thought we were going to find a lovely paradise planet somewhere with no one on it but us, under a red sun where I won't have to worry about crushing you to pieces when you make me cum, or about my Rao damned psychokinetic forcefield keeping me from being able to feel it when you touch me. I thought, in short, that you were going to take me somewhere where no one knows us and rail me in a bright blue sundress with a red and yellow S symbol over my right boob."

Brainiac raised one blonde eyebrow. "Remarkably vivid and delightful imagery. But Kara darling. The last time I made any sort of romantic advances you told me you were being true to Dick Malverne. Has something happened?"

Kara snorted. "Nothing except I'm pretty sure he's gay. I did everything on our last date except... well, never mind. You brought Jan along too, so this isn't some kind of romantic getaway... or it's a weird 30th Century romantic getaway which is fine but I don't like Jan that way... is this a weird 30th Century romantic getaway?"

She turned and glanced across the large interior space, where Jan Arrah was talking to a group of people standing around what looked like an Apollo nose-cone. Four of them were very attractive women; three of those women were dressed in leopard patterned bodysuits with long tails, and ears for hats. "I mean, he is kind of hot, so, I guess, if you're into that... Obviously, don't tell Kal, he gets so parental sometimes..."

Brainiac sighed. "No. This is not some kind of romantic getaway. Although, if you're 'on a break' from Dick, then I wish... no." He shook his head firmly. "Never mind. We're in the 23rd Century, Kara. Murphy's Planet. The Great Space Race. Ring any bells?"

Her blue eyes went distant for an instant as her quantum level intelligence sorted data at literal hyperspeed.

Her gaze narrowed. "Kryptonians are considered to be extinct in this time period," she said.

"And greatly feared, nonetheless," Qerl Dox agreed. "Not quite extinct, though. A man named Dev El escaped from the Phantom Zone around 70 years ago, went on a rampage, and was imprisoned by the local authorities here, inside a dome that simulated Kryptonian conditions. He was recently broken out, and immediately possessed by a Yithian."

Very few things can give a Kryptonian at full power pause. Now Kara's peaches and cream complexion went a shade paler. "A Yithian. Oh Dark Wanderer. And you brought me and Jan Arrah here to do something about it?"

Brainiac 5 shrugged. "Very concise synopsis. You are as physically powerful as the physical body, Jan's powers are very specifically useful in this contingency, and I am... I hope... as intelligent as a Yithian. Between us, we should be able to handle Dev El before things rock too terribly out of flux."

"But... I mean, a rogue Kryptonian..." Kara looked upset. "Qerl, Kal and I are sworn not to kill. Ever. He takes that really seriously. I mean, I do, too, but he's SUPER serious about it. No pun intended. And you and Jan have taken the same oath, and the Legion is totally serious about it, too, so..."

Qerl Dox shook his head. "This is much larger than that, Kara. This is a potential crisis of multiversal proportions. The Yithians have been searching for living Kryptonian bodies to possess for epochs. The time period they are operating from is nearing entropic collapse. They need to do a racial migration again, and they want this one to be the last one they ever have to make..."

"Sort of like my mom and dad," Kara said. "Earth mom and dad, I mean. They spent two years looking for a house because they didn't ever want to move again."

"Yes," Brainiac 5 said. "But when the Yith cast their transmigration beams, they do it across hundreds of millions of years and it's impossible for them to be precise. They finally lucked into a period where a single Kryptonian was known to be alive, in a prison. Now that they've taken Dev El, they have access to all his knowledge and memories. And your people have natural hyperspeed, and natural time travel abilities. While the Yithians possess Dev El's body, they don't need to rely on their transmigration beams any more."

Kara had a horrified look on her face. "He can travel back to before Krypton was destroyed. When there were billions of Kryptonians still alive. And then... I mean, I guess, the rest of the Yithians will be able to use that one Yithian as some sort of beacon, and then..."

Qerl Dox nodded. "Yes. I am fairly certain that was his plan. But he'll have discovered by now that he's no longer capable of time travel."

"What do you mean?" Kara said. "Away from a red sun, all Kryptonians can move at quantum speeds, and then..."

"While he was a prisoner in the artificial Krypton," Qerl explained, "minor surgeries were conducted on him to remove his most potentially devestating abilities. Kryptonians have a unique minilobe in their brains that allows quantum data processing. With that lobe removed, time travel is no longer possible."

Kara's eyes went distant again... and then she reached out to grab Brainiac 5's collar. Brainiac, prudently, had already activated his force field belt; her fingertips skidded off the particle field like it was heavy greasy glass.

"You're using me for bait?" she demanded, flexing her fingers to rid them of the unpleasant subatomic vibration.

"The Yithians will be looking for a breeding pair now," Qerl said, almost apologetically, "and like all the other racing teams, our images have been widely broadcast. Dev El was originally sent to the Phantom Zone in KTM 3015.77.231. He was there for the entire 20th Century, Earth time, and can be expected to have kept a close eye on you and your cousin, like all the other exiled Kryptonian criminals. He'll recognize your image and I have no doubt he's on his way here now." No doubt at all. "Or already here." Very high probability.

"Dev El," Kara murmured. Her eyes widened. "Wait. You mean Dev the Deviant, who ran that fake therapy satellite where he hypnotized people and... But he's not House of El!"

"His KNA indicates otherwise," Brainiac said. "I have little doubt someone in the House of El of that time period expended significant resources wiping Dev El's House name out of the universal archives. However it may have happened, he is loose in the multiverse, definitely Kryptonian, and possessed by a Yithian. And..."

"You're using me for bait," Kara said bitterly. She glared at him. "Fine. Whatever. I hope Jan isn't going to..."

A blur of purple, a dull, muted THWUMP, and Kara El was no longer standing there. In her place, a beautifully detailed gray statue of her, life sized. A portion of the deck at her feet had turned bright, metallic gold, radiating intense yellow light in pulses. A man clad in a purple outfit - a bloused tunic with a triangular S symbol on its chest, tights, knee high leather boots, and a headband – was sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth in pain, hands plastered to his face, blood trickling out from between his fingers.

"He's got purple BOOTS," Jan Arrah's voice said. "Now that's a fashion statement."

Brainiac just looked at him.

"He came in at superspeed just like you said he would," Jan Arrah, also known as Element Lad, said. He had been standing a few feet away all along; the Element Lad talking to Josey and the Pussycats was actually Chameleon Boy, who had ridden along in the time bubble shifted into a tiny vacuum insect, riding in a pouch on Brainy's utility belt. The real Element Lad had been using another device of Brainiac 5's invention to render himself invisible and intangible.

"Good thing you warned me with the telepathic earplug," he said. "As soon as those motion detectors you gave me went off..."

He gestured, and the golden circle on the floor turned metallic grey again. Another gesture, and the lead coating he had covered Supergirl with prior to creating the Gold Kryptonite, vanished.

Kara blinked, several times. "Now hold on. You can't possibly perceive, process, and react fast enough to do both those transmutations as a Kryptonian, moving at hyperspeed, was..."

Jan shrugged. "I drifted for several thousand years in space... for all intents and purposes, dead, but still aware of my surroundings and fully conscious... in an alternate dimension, Kara. My mentality is no longer even remotely human, and my perception of time is different, too."

Chameleon Boy, Durlian shapeshifter and leader of the Legion's Espionage Squad, walked up. "Those Pussycats are nice girls," he said. "I see we got him."

"Let's load him into the time bubble," Qerl said. "We'll take him to the 30th Century and from there throw him back into the Phantom Zone. His powers are permanently neutralized, so even if he gets out again, he's no real threat."

"Wait a femton," Supergirl said. "Just wait a Rao befucked femton here. How did he come whizzing in here at hyperspeed without smashing a gigantic hole in the..."

"Vibrated through the wall," Brainiac said. "Come on, Kara. You've done the same thing a million times."

She shook her head. "I have not done it a million times, I try to avoid doing it, everyone who can vibrate through solid objects tries hard to avoid doing it, it feels really gross. Dev the Devian here wouldn't have bothered, he'd just have come smashing in at hyperspeed and grabbed me."

Brainiac actually looked truculent. "Well, for whatever reason, he didn't."

Kara scowled. "But, then. Jan here, with his no longer anything like human thinking speeds... and when did that happen, by the way?"

Element Lad shrugged. "I can't keep track. Might have been a Biernbaum story. I don't know."

Chameleon Boy said "Sounds more like Giffen to me."

"ANYWAY," Kara went on, "Jan, with his no longer human thinking speeds, turns the air that is touching me into lead and then the hull plating under my feet into Gold Kryptonite. And thanks for not mixing up the order there, by the way."

Jan tilted his head to one side. "Honestly, I was worried about that. And then I had to turn them back in the reverse order, and I was concerned I'd screw that up, too. But it all worked out."

Brainiac rolled his eyes. "Great Computo, don't tell her things like that, I'll have to keep this forcefield up for the next twenty years."

"Not the worst idea you've ever had," Kara said balefully. "Because the worst idea you've ever had was this idiotic plan."

"It worked!" Brainiac 5 protested.

"Sure it did," Kara said. "So. He's coming at me at hyperspeed..."

"Superspeed," Brainiac corrected. "Quantum speed is by definition faster than light."

"Superspeed," Kara went on, visibly mustering her patience, "he's whipping at me so fast he's invisible, and No Longer Human Mentality Lad over there coats me in lead and then whips up some Gold K under my feet right before ol' Dev gets to me. So. Dev loses his super powers, like, a nanosecond before he would have otherwise grabbed me, hits me, and bounces off me, and he's lying there right now with a broken nose."

Element Lad, Brainiac 5, and Chameleon Boy all exchanged glances.

Chameleon Boy said, after a pause of thirty seconds or so, "Does seem kind of like he would have... I don't know... hit her so hard he'd have splattered. You know, not being invulnerable any more."

Element Lad pulled his lower lip. "Yahhhh... and his momentum should have blown her through that bulkhead behind her. I mean, no doubt."

Kara said "Exactly! Plus, I mean, come on, okay, you drifted for thousands of years still aware and yaddity yaddity yaddity but... two complex transmutations in the split instant before a superspeeding Kryptonian was going to hit me? Professor Zoom couldn't do that."

Qerl Dox pursed his lips. "Marty Pasko script?" He looked around.

All four of them ran through everything they'd said in the last half hour or so in their minds.

"Dialogue is pretty shitty," Chameleon Boy allowed. He nodded. "I mean, 'Rao befucked' is a little salty, but... Sure. Marty Pasko script."

The now powerless Kryptonian with the broken nose and the purple outfit looked up sullenly. "You speak for yourselves. I was part of a well thought through storyline, beautifully nuanced and carefully grounded, borrowing timeless elements from classic writers that made readers see those well established and traditional thematic items in an entirely new light. My escape story was clearly by Alan Moore. Or Al Ewing at the very least."

"Yeah, yeah," Kara said, picking Dev El up and casually tucking him under her arm. "Let's go, Alan Moore Boy. Let's see what eldritch horrors he's got waiting for you on the other end of the Science Police's Phantom Zone projectors."

She walked into the gigantic glass bowling ball they'd all been standing next to, and the others followed her.

Moments later, the Legion time bubble quivered, shimmered through every visible hue and several invisible ones, and then vanished.

And so it went. In the blue, silver and red Transformer craft, circuits hummed and gauges quivered in anticipation, but there was no emotional uproar, only cold, careful vector calculations. In the pilot's pod clutched like an egg between two bronze talons of the great metal Garuda Bird, Sam let his hands rest on the blank metal of the control bank, ready to use his own Aspect and Attribute to direct the energies it accessed with microparticle precision. Yama and his 'daughter' had remained behind, which Sam truly didn't mind. He had been alone so much of his long, long life... In the Cotati craft, a unimind had formed, and waited patiently to release vast psychokinetic energies. In the Hydra Beta ship, which resembled nothing so much as a huge plastic bag full of water with half a dozen fish suspended in it, the Whalians floated and brooded, ready to aquakinetically direct the fluid they floated in to manipulate the various complex controls. On the energy ship Phoenix, yet another group of distant descendants of Scott Summers and Jean Grey sat in their central egg-pod, waiting. Like the Strangers with their extradimensional city, they had no intention of winning this race. They were simply hoping to use it to slip into the destroyed remnants of the world once known as Mutantus without the Ultimate Sentroids detecting them. If they could, and they could locate Professor XY's old vortex lab, they still had a chance to save the 20th Century from the insidious Entropions...

A brief narrative break for this humble reminder - Number Six in Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules For Good Writing is "Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

So, then... at this point in space and time, as Chief Wiggum continued to argue with a Klingon and a Xanthian, and the other entrants in the Great Space Race patiently, or otherwise, awaited the event's commencement...

Abruptly, chaos erupted.

A blazing rock flew by the group floating in space near the golden chariot.

"HEY!" Chief Wiggum yelled. "THAT COULD HAVE PUT A HOLE IN MY SPACE SUIT!"

"We are under attack," the Klingon snarled, activating a jet burst from his mobility pak, snagging the chariot railing as he flew above it, adroitly flipping over the railing to land feet first inside the chariot, the magnetic soles of his boots clicking firmly into place. "Begin the race!"

The Xanthian activated a personal force field, re-polarizing it to attract him on a fast vector back to the Up-Port's closest airlock. Whatever was going on out here, he planned to be safely inside a life support area while it all blew up. Screw the Great Space Race; he'd just use the hypno-beam on the winner after he, she, or it collected their winnings...

A hundred miles down the line of gravitic buoys marking off the track, the mile high light stack abruptly changed from red to yellow.

In the flat metal shimmer-ship that shaped much like a child's paper airplane, the kzinti u'Takk roundly smacked the back of kzinti y'Braff's head, right between the tufted cat ears. "Prepare!" u'Takk hissed. "Cease to speculate on breeding opportunities!"

y'Braff slamed orange furred feet back down on the ionic acceleration pedals and resecured a tightened grip on the nav-chaka. In a low growl: "I'll speculate my spikey hairy kzindick right up your..."

The Third, v'Kalth, bared teeth in a promissory grin. In Old Earth Anglish – "Do not make promises you can't keep." Then, in hurr-kzinti – "Cub."

Snarls all around, then.

Sam saw the red go to yellow, and summoned energy to the magnetic sheathing circuits...

Grampa darkshifted his legs, elongating them into the hollow point of the Dragstar to let him reach the far go-pedals. His mouths sprouted fangs and an ectoplasmic slaver ran down his chin. Green, ya bastard, do it, do it, DO IT...

The Minbari were back to back, floating in zero gee, clawed feet poised to clutch activation pedals, pale hands ready to plunge copper wired spark plugs into charge-chambers. If they had traced the thermal pod's circuitry properly, this would engage an external magnetic field that would accelerate them like a pellet in a gauss gun down the track. But not, of course, until the GO light shone and the track was activated.

Spritle Mifune carefully fed a trickle charge across his EM pulse pods. A fat spark leapt from one to the next, something he could not see, but could trace the flickering progress of with his gauges. Behind him, Chim-Pan was bellowing "He's gainin on you so you better look alive, he's busy revvin' up the powerful Warp-55...!"

Hannibal Starbuck, his mind as calm and cold as a high orbit in an eclipse, flipped his helmet visor down and rested his hands on his control column. "Nav check, coordinates 721 Galactic West, 403.12 Deep Space North," he said crisply into his throat microphone.

"Check and check," Athena replied, just as coolly. "Once around the park and then home, flyboy."

Jacqueline Paper, standing at the wheel of the great solar ship Puff, prepared to pull the trigger and catapult her solar sail packet forty ship lengths out ahead of her, where the carefully folded filmpod would spread on its traces, bloom, and catch the wind from the sun ME-262...

Buck Dharma, Eric Bloom, Sandy Pearlman, and Alan Lanier all checked their safety harnesses, and nodded tersely to each other. Strapped into the Big Blue Machine they had successfully hijacked from the Blackhole Warehouse of the Mighty Jeff, Guider of Destinies, they were instants from full activation. Now they would see if their stolen, heavily modified warp engine would accelerate them fast enough down the Long Curve for them to sunder the time-space barrier and hurl themselves back to their native 20th Century... or if, instead, they would smash themselves into dust and debris in the ME-262 Dead Zone...

The Cotatis' branches rustled, although there was no breeze in space at all...

Tom Orley shut off the holo and relaxed back in his chair, poised to form the 'acceleration' glyph at the forefront of his mind.

The Strangers, straddling their pocket universe containing Kelvenator, prepared to sniff the vapors of the city within their icebox, which would, they hoped, momentarily restore their abilities to Tune...

14 other teams, some truly alien, some comprised of bizarre specimens of Galactic Humanity, driving everything from a great faceted salt crystal to the Odin-Umbrella, hunched over their controls or prepared their psyches for the coming contest.

And the Go Light went green.

In the judges' floating hexapod, there was furor. None of them had activated the Go Light, not to switch it to yellow, far less green. They had been waiting for the Police Chief's 'clear' signal. But now – a blast of music from the holoband playing on the outside of the judge's floating pod, and a classic starbilly song began blaring out over every hyperwave-length –

"And the race is on and here comes pride in the back stretch..."

Less than a moment before, Ace Arne had watched in horror as the crystalline dome keeping the atmosphere in the small saucer had vanished, and Tara had stood up, shrieking silently into the void as she whirled a sling about her head. Apparently her skin was hardened against at least brief exposures to vacuum, and Ultra the Multi-Alien could fly for days in space if he had to, but if she flung that slingstone into the midst of the starting area and it blew something up, the Galactic litigation would never stop and the NP's were sure as shit going to fire him –

A brief burst of his magnetic powers had seen the stone miss by a wide margin. Tara had turned on him, face suffused with rage. "How DARE you..."

Ace had found a new target though. Extreme range, but he had been able to see it clearly, of course, it had been built to be seen clearly at this distance, so... he had focused and fired off another magnetic burst.

A hundred miles away, the GO signal had clicked to yellow, and then, after a second's hesitation –

to GREEN.

Ace had dodged a kick that might have knocked him out of orbit and into re-entry. "Tara! Stop! Listen to me!" he howled into the vacuum, knowing no one could hear him. Magnetic manipulation, super strength, flight, lightning blasts, vast alien scientific knowledge, sure, but could he get a little telepathy when he needed it? Nope nope nope...

He winged away from the proteoid saucer and stopped a few hundred zarks away, squinting to look back. If she was warming up that sling again, he was going to start evasive maneuvers like a TIE fighter.

No. Now she and her gloops were flying after the pack, trying to catch up with the madly accelerating chariot.

Well, he'd literally gone above and beyond his job description today. Now it was Wiggum's problem.

He dove back into the atmosphere and started spiraling down to MurPhreesport again.

Hidden within an electromagnetic and psychic cloak, a spaceship shaped like a flat metal saucer with a V shaped chunk cut out of it flew invisibly along next to the field of competitors, outside the line of gravity-buoys that marked the race 'track'. Within it, an aging Yautja kept passive sensor arrays pointed towards the golden chariot.

The Yautja are generally an honorable race, if one without much mercy or compassion towards others, or even themselves. But this Yautja was different from most of his kind. He hunted not for honor or sport, but for money. His background was not at all typical for his kind, he actually had 'friends' – or, at least, other sentients he tolerated without trying to murder them – in many systems, and so he knew who the driver of the golden chariot actually was, disguised or not. He knew which galactic factions would pay for the head of the despised ex-Chancellor Gowron, who had supposedly been assassinated years before.

He intended to collect. With the money, he would purchase himself a planetoid, and on that planetoid, he would raise the leaflings and flaurettes that were so dear to him, and sculpt their aromas into scent-art of a brilliance never before experienced anywhere in this Galaxy or any other. He would pass the rest of his days in this difficult but enjoyable pursuit – one he seemed to have been born with a unique gift for - and his 'trophies' would be his well bred and refined blossoms and his tailored irrigant-chemicals and his his exquisitely well recorded senso-records. And he would never have to hear the cruel taunts and vicious mockery of his fellow Yautja again.

And perhaps, long after he died, some truly civilized entity would stumble across his little home, and find his life's work, and appreciate its brilliance.

In a vessel that looked as if it had started existence, long before, as a 20th Century United States Space Shuttle, and which had obviously had various mods and apps added on to it with every form of attachment from blister-paks to cold steel rivets, a man named Plisken was playing with an archaic joystick. On the forward plaswindow of the Shuttle's control pod, a crosshairs graphic had been projected. He was centering it on the rapidly receding back of the Klingon charioteer that had just passed him, flying along behind some kind of winged space-dinosaur. The Klingon had glared at him through the plaswindow as he had swept majestically by, laying into the hitched dragon with a laser-lash.

Plisken didn't like people – human or alien – much at all. He had long claimed credit for the collapse of Earth's technological civilization in the early 21st Century; he had, after all, triggered the "Sword of Damocles" EMP weapon to completely destroy all electronics on the planet. Of course, history was hazy on the actual jump off point for the early 21st Century apocalypse that had seen Earth thrown into a frenzy of violent carnage for most of a century. Plisken had played cards once with a man who claimed to be the infamous genetic superman Khan, who had somehow saved his entire shipful of followers from the detonation of the Genesis device... he said he had skillfully manipulated the global superpowers into a nuclear exchange that had caused the crash, which he had fled in an experimental space ark. Plisken had heard an almost identical boast made by a man who claimed to be a mutant immortal, he called himself Lazarus and said he'd stolen that self same prototype space ark to help his own mutant immortal people flee Earth just before the Big Smash. Every Terminator Plisken had ever run into swore it had been Skynet that had triggered that nuclear exchange. And he's spent three delightful weeks with a woman who called herself Jessica-6; she swore blind she'd lived her first 21 years under a domed city on the post-Apocalypse Earth, until a boy named Vic and his telepathic hound Blood had showed her that the Earth's biosphere had recovered and the domes weren't necessary any more... of course, she'd turned out to be a Dire Wraith, so you couldn't trust anything she'd said.

So many post-Apocalypse stories. None of them mattered; Earth had eventually recovered and joined the Federation and now, here they were.

Plisken wondered, idly, if the Klingon in the chariot could read Old English, and if he could, what he'd made of the spraypainted grafitti on the outside of the heavily modified Shuttle – "Snake's Escape Vehicle".

He would, of course, forfeit the race if he pressed the button on top of the joystick and sent a heat-seeking missile after the frantically lashing Klingon charioteer.

Better beat the goon honestly. Although Snake Plissken hated doing anything honestly. And the Klingon wasn't being honest; Plisken's infrared optics could clearly make out the memplas mask he'd been wearing to disguise his true features.

No matter.

He tromped down on the gas pedal, putting the pedal to the metal. The big jet engaged, and the Escape Vehicle lunged forward.

Sprytle Mifune had gone back and forth on it. Accelerate down the first arc and then try to conserve velocity and pull a slingshot around the Sun at that end of the long, oval orbit? He suspected most if not all the rest of the racers would choose that; few sentients had the patience to work it the other way – let the gravity trough carry them, drifting, to the hairpin curve-back, and then accelerate all the way to the finish line, back near the Up-Port again.

But drifting down the first leg and accelerating up the last made more sense – not just because it would be harder to negotiate that orbital switch-back while firing up your engines, but also because of the Stone Zone. The race track had been deliberately laid out at a slant to ME-262's planar ecliptic, and it intercepted, at the far end where everyone would be needing to spin around for the trip back, the asteroid belt that had once been a sixth planet. Go blasting into that mess at top acceleration, you were likely to pull a Grampa Munster and end up wrecking your ship. And Sprytle wasn't Undead, nor was Chim-Pan.

He had pretty much decided on the second, more controlled approach. Apparently, a great many of the entrants had; when the green GO light had shone out, only that dimwit Klingon in the dragon-pulled chariot had taken off. Sprytle had listened to him arguing with that Toon cop on the universal channel; apparently he thought that because he was using a non-mechanical engine, he was above the acceleration rules and could just whip that thing all the way around the course and win in a trot. Sprytle was pretty sure he'd get a bad surprise when he crossed the finish line; the three judges were a human Fair Witness, bald as an egg with the swollen head of one of those artificially evolved types, a Galafreyan who was just as hairless, with a squat torso and elongated, spider-like legs and arms, and a Vulcan who was older than God's pet hedgehog. They'd disqualify the bumpy headed dimbulb in two seconds, and then...

But, holy moley... that crazy Space Shuttle was lighting off and giving chase. And if it started a stampede... yep, that coffin shaped Dragstar had lit its torch, too, and, yes indeed, the Colonial Viper was firing up, and so was the Lectroid thermal pod, and the kzinti shimmership, and that big stupid Viking ship looking thing with the carved dragon on its prow was opening an array of solar sails, and Buddha's belly, here came that big brown bird, too...

"All right, Chim-Pan, we're in it to win it," he growled, and moved the gearshift from N to 1. The gauss-acceleration sheathe grabbed the roadway and slung them on down it, Sprytle's hand still on the gearshift, ready to punch it up to 2, and then 3.

Luther bore down on the acceleration bar across the bottom of the control cubby with both bare ape-feet. "Keep us in the groove," he said to Diego.

"You got it," Diego said, hands inside the haptic gloves used to control the course of the great Umbrellacraft. "Let's put the pedal to the metal!"

Inside the huge, hollow salt crystal, the covey of warlacci floated in a loose hexagon shape, snouts buried in each others throats, half of their great green clawed hands moving intently on the controls they had rigged to float all around them, the other half digging chunks of salt out of the sides of the ship to feast on. As long as the structure of their vessel held out to the end of the course, they would have no difficulty maintaining their performance levels. If they became too greedy, on the other hand... well. Worry about that when it came up.

As one, they drew down on the acceleration levers, sending their crystal-ship blasting down the grav-track.

"They leave us behind," Slurrburbble'snr chorpled to its fellow Whalians. "We are disgraced."

"No," G'brbblllshnn, the elder in the travelbag retorted. He was old enough to have lost all his vowels, and commanded respect. "I first met the humans when one of their fatships landed on our ocean-world two generations ago. We took most of them captive and learned much of their chemistry and decision-making process before they all subsided to the waters. They are rash. They will feed the Maw."

Thrrrr'aadinglrrr assented with a spurt of high pressure bubbles. "I sense it," the Whalian current-taster said. "The Maw awaits in the Place Where Biting Rocks Float. They swim too fast to their doom. They will fill the Maw's belly, and we will float slowly, silently past."

Straddling their Kelvenator, the three Strangers watched amiably enough as the majority of the other vessels quickly outdistanced them. Only the bag of big fish and the shiny Tranformitron remained, floating along at the same velocity as them. The fish would be no problem; a simple road flare fired into their ridiculous vessel would settle their fates. But the Transformitron – they were unpredictable, with an odd logic based on 'morality' and 'ethics' and 'honor' – incomprehensible concepts that had come up again and again in their experiments on the humans and non-humans that had once resided in Sunn Ee Dayl Kal Iff Orn Ya. They would bear watching.

Still, why would they interfere, with three Strangers floating along an extra galactic gravity river on an oddly cubical life-raft?

Ah, wait... the hairy humans in the Big Blue vehicle with the Cosmic Force coiled inside it were also still floating. As were the unusual genetic variants in their force pod at the center of the pulsing energy-husk. Still... why would any of those entities trouble with them?

Within the deep, vast, urban darkness that resided inside the Kelvenator, ghostly voices whispered to each other. Voices in the darkness...

"I don't like this place, Giles," one said, filled with despair. It had voiced the same sentiments many, many times. "I don't like being dead. There's no magic here. I hate it."

Another voice said "Coulda been worse. Coulda been a soap opera convention."

"Do be quiet, Xander," another, older voice said. "A Passions booth would have been eminently preferable to the endless experiments that these... creatures... put us all through..."

The spiritual remnant that had once been Xander Harris carefully shielded his response to that – Kinda liked the combos where I was married to Will or Buffy, he said. Although the ones where I was married to Anya really did suck... thank Whatever that creep Angel wasn't in Sunnydale when the big grab happened...

"Listen," the strongest voice said. "I know we're all dead and everything, but, Giles, Xander, Will... we've got to do something. We can't let those ghoulie things keep Genesis."

"I know, Buffy," the older voice agreed, "but what? You say you know we're all dead, fine, it's wonderful you acknowledge the point, but as we are, then..."

"You taught me to Tune," Buffy said. "When you injected all those memories in me." She also carefully shielded her innermost thoughts – I so wish Angel had been in Sunnydale when all this happened. Xander was a sweet husband and even that one scenario where we were all living in the commune was interesting, but I so miss Angel...

"It does no good," Giles responded. "It will not work outside the environment of this artificial reality."

"Well, at least it shut those horrible lizard things up," Anya said. "They were on my last nerve."

"Giles," Buffy said. "What about the melding spell we all used to beat Adam? Couldn't we do that? I mean, couldn't I... kind of, Attune us, to each other? And then, if we could become one person again..."

There was silence, for a long, timeless moment. Then –

"I don't know what good it would do," Giles said finally. "But I suppose it can't hurt."

"I know what good it could do," Anya said. "If we can make ourselves... palpable, enough... then we can possess things. Demons do it all the time, when they don't have bodies."

"We still will not be able to reach anything outside this place," Giles insisted. "You wish to possess a Lectroid? Why on Earth? They lick each other."

Anya sighed. "Xander and I used to lick each other. It was nice."

"Giles," Willow's voice said, less hysterical, more thoughtful now. "If we could fuse our psychic energies into one entity... there is something inside this box we possibly could possess..."

It had slept for so long, outside the Light and the Warm. So long. How long ago had it been, that it had roamed freely in the unending Dark that it was both Mother to and Daughter of? How long? It did not know.

It would have continued to sleep, but the voices had irritated it into wakefulness. Voices shouting on every level, every facet, every fragment, of existence. "THAH GRAAT SPAAS RAAS!" they were all screaming, even now. Feh. If they wouldn't let it sleep, then they could at least provide food. They would.

Plus... there was something. A stirring in the quantum fabric of space and time. A ripple. A fate-point was approaching. Something significant was coming. A tool. One of the skittering bugs in THAH GRAAT SPAAS RAAS! had a twinkly toy with it. A shiny that could be put to use. Something that, properly manipulated, properly g*sh*k'ed, could become a Great Extinguisher, that could put out the Light and the Warm finally and restore the Darkness forever.

It could smell the thing, coming slowly along a bent path, passing near.

It was amorphous in its shielding shadow. It could take on any form. But there was one it had once assumed that had spread terror throughout many of the little twinkling lights, one that had allowed it to breed many Daughter/Soldiers. It would take on that form again.

And then it... She... would lay across the path the noisies were following. They would feed her, one by one. And the tiny potent darkspark would come to Her, and finally, at long last, the Universe would be healed of this hideous Light it had been afflicted with for so long, and the Darkness that was both Mother and Daughter to her would return.

The Maw would devour All.

It... She... moved into place.

And began hatching eggs.

NEXT ISSUE: The Maw yawns wide, and will anyone, human or alien, living or dead, reach the finish line in one functioning piece? Don't miss – "THE GREAT SPACE RACE CHAPTER 3 - You Die, She Dies, Everybody Dies!"

MURPHY'S PLANET #6 - "THE GREAT SPACE RACE" - Part 3 "You Die, She Dies, Everybody Dies"

The band was called Farrlo Darrk's Blue Rock Equation. They were a standard 60: 10 Wookie-skull drums manned by 5 four armed Frodds from the planet Samaqel, 8 stunner-synths cradled in the loving tendrils of two Medusoids from the Selkie Nebula, five Bam-Bams from Bedrock, and a synthezoid programmed to believe it was old Earth stringmaster Jimmy Santana. 11 Uplifted Phins in an oxyliquid filled grav-bubble horking and borking on their who-hoobers and jing-tinglers, and an 11 droid crew blasting away on a custom crafted Max-Beast Special Deluxe Electro Who-Cardio Flux. Suspended in their own life support bubble near the starting line, fully miked, iked, and stellar-striked, they were playing for an audience of buhyillions as the allied Tarlian and Verrane Special consortium pumped the Great Space Race out across 12,843 Worldlines, including 173 sub-dimensional pocket realms.

They had started off, of course, with that ancient Earth anthem "The Race Is On", and then from there they'd whirled into Greenboy 12's popular "Buckets of Fuck It", the Proteoids "Tendrilmania", Sabatos the Honan's "Bringing That Temple Down", Yaaa*stank'shukk's "Burble [cough] Feh Feh Feh", and the Event Horizon Hummers' "Don't Kill Me With My Own Phaser".

And now, after a five minnex break to grab alcoloids and stimslims, they were back. And the stunner synths started playing that intricately chorded opening and the entire multiverse went insane as the Blue Rock Equation started kranging and slanging out the forbidden Imperial Resistance Army anthem, "Mr. Lightside" -

Coming out of the trough, with all our coils fully revved

gotta gotta be charged to kill Imperials

it started out with a blast

they turned our planet to ash!

They turned our planet to ash!

THEY TURNED OUR PLANET ASH!

Now we took out their station

put the Emp on vacation

Our boy Luke's up their ass

and his sabre's on flash

Now he's kissing his sis

And the tauntauns will hiss

And he's letting his rage flow

he blazes off their heads, yo

"You're not my dad, you're just a clone!"

First transport's away...

And on, and on, the skull-drums coming in to drive that immortal beat through all seventeen verses of IRA defiance, even the one most people skip about JarJar. Rumor was the basic frame of the song had been composed on Old Earth, pre-Apocalypse, but who cared? Romulan warbirds shook in their cloaks when it came in over their hailing frequencies, and that was what mattered.

On the Big Blue, Eric Bloom was tapping his foot along with the beat. "We oughtta cover this," he growled.

"Lucasfilm would sue our asses off," Sandy Pearlman said mournfully. They were drifting along the gravity-track. Most of the other entrants had blasted on ahead; there were only a few others still back with them. The bag of whales was maybe forty miles off to their left; the weird Goth guys in the trenchcoats straddling their fridge were the same distance to the right and slightly down. The Transformer was slightly closer, up and a bit forward of their position, but not by much, and the big ball of golden energy flaring and surging around a central egg shape was almost directly below them. They couldn't tell how far away it was, there was nothing to give it scale.

Far, far down the track, they could just see the cluster of glowing dots that comprised the exhausts of most of the other racing vehicles. And about halfway between front runners and the drifters in the rear, the strange Viking dragon-ship with the huge solar sail array.

"When do you think we'll be close enough to ME-262 to rev up the Boom Box?" Buck drawled, looking back over his shoulder at the huge gleaming cube mounted just above the back seat.

Alan Lanier shook his head. "Dunno. The grav gauges should tell us." He whistled. "Still not sure changing our strategy at the last minute was the best idea."

"Klingons are stupid," Eric said confidently. "When I saw that creep going like a bat out of hell, I knew we should hang back. We'll get deeper into the gravity field before we cut loose."

Tara didn't waste time cursing herself for her own foolishness and lack of self control. It wouldn't do any good. On the other hand, nothing else would do any good, either. But on the final hand, she had no breath to curse with, so... She had been so intent on catching Zok and freeing him, and punishing the creature who had stolen and abused him, that she had let her anger overwhelm her judgment. And now, she would pay for it with her life, and Gleep and Gloop would also die, and no one would ever rescue Zok at all, or possibly even find their bodies. Zandor, and Dorno, Tundro and Igoo, would never know what had become of them, which was a pain deeper than death itself...

The two shapeshifting plastral life forms had pushed themselves to their maximum, but although they could emulate the appearance of a small space ship perfectly, even to the point of holding air and warmth inside for their mistress, they could not match the speed of the fleeing Klingon's golden chariot. But they had nearly killed themselves trying.

With muted telepathic meeps, they shivered and melted back into their normal, amorpheous shapes. Space could not kill them, but they were energy-starved, with no sources nearby. The leading knot of racers was far ahead; the trailing group of drifters far behind. They would starve, and without unifying life force, their nebulous bodies would dissolve, long before any rescue could reach them.

Tara's thoughts turned to strangeness and mysticism as she floated there, waiting for death. The Great Creators had made her people hard and tough; her eyeballs had nicitating membranes that could protect them in most environments; her skin was resistant to temperature extremes and vacuum... for a short time. Her lungs were hyperefficient, as were the toxin scavengers in her metabolism. She could go without breathing for almost ten minutes. But she could not propel herself in free fall, and rescue could not possibly come in time...

Who had made her people like this? She had heard of other so called 'Galactic supermen'... Kryptonians, Daxamites, Asgardians, Eternals, Kherubim. All similarly designed, it seemed, to outperform normal humanity in all ways, all designed to have a specific weakness. Her people had no such weakness, but they were nowhere near the power level of those others, either. They were more on the level of the Vulcans, the Klingons, the Romulans... stronger than human, but not on a cosmic scale. Still, the similarity in design was inarguable. Who had the Designers been, and where had they gone...

The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was a chilly blue glow enfolding her.

The first racer into the Asteroid Zone was Grampa, in his coffin shaped Dragstar. His feet were on the throttle pedals, his hand on the kill switch. Acceleration had to be cut off exactly at the halfway point for maximum gain; a single footpound of it after the halfway point and he would be disqualified. He was so intent on the switch that he paid little attention to the debris field ahead of him. Four... three... two... one... HOIMAN, GRAB IT! He chuckled at the private joke as he slapped the switch.

The sudden stillness of the Dragstar was shocking. Under acceleration it had felt like it was constantly on the very edge of shaking itself to pieces; now it hurtled along in eerie silence. He made a long darkforce foot and kicked Jason, nestled down in the forward porthole. "Eh, the eyes work better open, boychik," he snarled, "you're in charge of the anti-asteroid cannon..."

He looked around him, through his own bubble canopy. His red rimmed, Undead eyes widened.

"Vlad help me." He heard the whimper in his voice, and despised it, but he could not help it.

For the first time since he had risen from his first grave three hundred years before, he had no idea at all what to do. No razor sharp response to sudden danger snapped from his necromantically resurrected spirit. He saw no angle to play at all.

He fumbled for the hyperwave stud. He could, at least, warn those behind him...

"GRAMPA!" he heard his descendant Jason scream in terror. "THEY'RE ALL OVER THE DRAGSTAR I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO -"

A distant sound of shattering glass, like that time Lily had dropped the entire platter of full wine glasses at the dinner they'd been throwing for Herman's boss. Dark gods, he wished he was back there now.

The screaming ceased.

Something tore the bubble canopy over his head away. He didn't need it to breathe but there was enough raw UV out here from the local sun to cook him in place if he were exposed to it, and -

A hideously eyeless muzzle, all fangs and saw toothed tongue, its chitinous black oblateness stretching back away to seeming infinity, slavered down at him, and a saw toothed tail wrapped around his neck. It tightened, rasping easily through his necromantically active flesh. For a bare instant his head floated free, his own fangs gaping in a scream he would never actually sound.

And then, he collapsed into dust and was gone forever.

Plisken was the next to come arcing around the gravity-shaped curve in space and find the Asteroid Zone directly ahead of him. The Escape Vehicle's screens lit up with countless irregularly silhouetted targets. His forward holocams painted images on his dash screens. He saw the creatures crouched all over each floating rock, pulling the old darkling's coffin shaped vessel to pieces. Beyond them, back behind rank after rank of different sized planetoids tumbling in zero gee, he could see the outlines of some vast, dark bulk. The upper silhouette looked familiar, somehow -

The T2 Terminator that had been long ago programmed with the digitally recorded personality of a dead 21st Century soldier-turned-criminal clenched his teeth. The cigar he had been smoking was severed at the base and fell, still burning, into his lap, where he ignored it. He knew what waited for them all, out there.

He grinned.

He picked up the hand unit that mimicked an old fashioned radio microphone and sent via hyperwave - "IT'S A BUG HUNT!"

Then, laughing maniacally, he floored his dual accelerators again, and drove the Escape Vehicle forward, one hand on the knob that, if he pulled it out, would release the damper rods from the old fashioned atomic pile and turn it into, effectively, a crude atomic bomb...

Gowron, the Usurper, lashed his dragon hard as the track curved and the floating band of space junk appeared head, creating its own false horizon in the harshly actinic light of ME-262. The track ran straight through the Stone Zone, but his chariot and dragon were smaller than most of the other vessels, and far more agile; he felt confident they would navigate the zone with ease and, emerging on the far side, would wing their way to the finish line well ahead of any others. The darkling and jet-vehicle would founder on those rocks; the ancient Federation ground to orbit vessel would never make it through -

Then he saw what awaited him, clinging to every rock, grinning eyeless, gape-fanged grins at him, serrated tails lashing the void behind themselves. And what awaited well behind them, in the center of the Zone. He remembered the Romulan merchant vessel named Nostromo, and what it had found. The silhouette he could see with his superior Klingon star-vision was identical.

And now, here it was, squatting across the grav-track like some great inescapable doom. It could not be a coincidence -

Sha'kha twenz'dar farook, he thought, in the ancient dialect of Kronos that only kings or scholars still used. The Mother of Darkness and her daughters, from out of the Void.

In his earpiece he heard a human sounding voice scream in Newlactic – and he nodded.

He raised the laser lash one more time, set its plasma extrusion curling outward, every ounce of skill he had guiding the snap. It flicked and popped, not on the captive star-dragon's back – but on the central circuit housing of its control harness.

"GOOD FORTUNE TO YOU, BEAST!" he roared, casting the lash away, reaching down to the floor of the chariot, and wrenching loose the batleth clamped there.

The dragon turned and winged away, and the golden chariot plunged onward, impelled now only by its own momentum, but that momentum was fearsome indeed. He flourished with his weapon as he hurtled towards the nearest rock, where a half dozen of the hideous alien xenomorphs awaited him.

In Klingon, then, Gowron the Usurper, hated and loved by millions or billions, roared out to an uncountable number of sentient viewers -

"IT IS A GOOD DAY TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE!"

Behind him, the Yautja dropped his camouflage and stripped all encryption from his hyperwave broadcasts. Let the clans see this. None could reach this place in time; whatever battle took place here would be over by the time they arrived.

But let them see how the one they had all called coward died now.

He reached for his weapons console. By the Forgotten Beasts, he would take a fine escort into the Abyss with him.

Just behind him, Sprytle Mifune narrowed his eyes behind his visor, and hit the button on his steering wheel that triggered the laser-saws. "Okay," he said, "go ahead and release the goddam robot pigeon."

"Which one?" the suddenly serious Chim-Pan asked, turning to the lead-lined box that held the 'robot pigeons'. "I mean, how many megatons?"

Sprytle shook his head. "Not one of the pony bombs. The prototype."

"Fuck me," Chim-Pan muttered, as he unlocked the Deep Well and pulled out the one and only Nova Blast Missile that Mifune Motors had ever manufactured.

Hannibal Starbuck didn't even have to run a data-hunt. He knew what was lurking, back in that Asteroid Belt, as soon as his sensors painted its silhouette on his hologauges.

Once before, silhoeutted agains the ruined colony's three moons, moving off into the darkness. His balls had drawn up behind the shelter of his pubis; it was only by the good luck of him skipping midmeal that he hadn't soiled his flight-tights. He had actually pissed himself, but it had only come to about six drops. His hands had already been moving to drop the nova bombs on the ruined cities, crawling with alien breeders, even before Adama's order...

He knew it instantly, before his brain had even processed the data coming in through his eyes. Some deeper sense had known it, without logic or reason.

In the Rylan League, they call it 'starfighter reflexes' – the ability to process data intuitively at apparently superluminous speeds, with your nervous system fully coordinated to your brain impulses. On his hologauges Starbuck could see imaginary vector lines converge. The seemingly random asteroids aligned in his preconscious mind. If he jammed up both his deflectors and his drive-jets beyond their safety limits and used the forward guidance gyros to reorient the Viper precisely to that angle – oh, and jettisoned 87.3 kelgrans in mass -

His right elbow punched the REDZONE EJECT plate for the rear seat. A shaped magpulse flipped Athena's navpod out of the racing Viper and sent her on an arc well clear of the grav-track, as Starbuck's feet and hands whipped through the other necessary motions to set his course.

Main plasma jet blaring like a solar dragontail out behind him, Hannibal Starbuck rode his Viper down the doomtrack, eyes narrowed, lips skinned back from gritted teeth, hands as steady as death itself.

The kzinti ship's name, in Newlactic, would translate as Warm Marmalade. This was because the kzinti triad crewing the ship were all female, of the underground and prohibited chawk faction. (Chawk, literally, means 'sentient' or 'self aware', but when said by male kzinti of female kzinti, a colloquial shift to 'bitches that talk to much' is assumed.) Male kzinti had tried to enter several ships in the Space Race and each had been rejected by the judges as possessing far more 'aggressive devices' than necessary for simple meteor deflection. If a crew of chawk females could win, or even make a good showing, in front of countless observers on countless different worlds, it would alter the way the Multiverse viewed female kzinti in a profound and positive way.

Female or no, though, they did understand the value of a good meteor deflector, and they had studied as much of the history of space colonization as any of their male counterparts. When the Asteroid Belt – and the Shadow lurking within it – came into their sphere of perception, they knew exactly what they were processing.

u'Takk said, her tone cool and dispassionate, "Ready self destruct. Assume attack vector."

The other two did not even respond, verbally. Their fingers and toes, claws fully retracted, raced over their controls obediently, though. The shimmer-ship screamed a battle-cry across all hyperwave channels, and leapt to the attack.

In the Lectroid thermal pod, the Minbari exchanged regretful thought pulses.

And then one of them swung the laser cannon to bear, while the other two unplugged and replugged cables to channel all available energies, including life support, into the superheated plasma beam.

"They call us monsters," Ssibarak said, aloud, to his/her siblings.

"They do," they all echoed back to her/him.

"They call us monsters and yet, have we ever destroyed a world? Have we ever taken control of another's body from them? Have we poisoned, burned, dropped missiles from orbit?" Her/his voice rose beyond a whisper.

"NO!" they all shouted back now.

"They see the ancient enemy, the Great Darkness, and they fly against it," she/he said. "Shall we do less?"

"NO!" came the united scream.

"Then we shall hurl our salt against the Void," Ssibarak said. "ALL force forward – NOW!"

The great crystal leapt forward.

"Fucking facehuggers," Five kind of moaned, staring at the viewscreen.

"So port away," Luther said. "Take Allison. Diego too. I can handle this alone."

"It would be a relief, bad as your gorilla B.O. Is," Five snarled. "But no way. Think I want to have to tell dad I just split?"

"I heard a rumor," Allison murmured, "that we're going to jam this umbrella right up that alien mothership's ass..."

Sam could clearly see the energies raging in the modified Space Shuttle as it blasted into the Asteroid Zone a good hundred miles or so ahead of him. He could see the latent power in the missile being loaded in the firing tube of the Warp-55 spacecar. He could see the potential of the accelerating Viper. The energies coiled, seething, within the kzinti ship's magnetic fusion bottle, and the way that magnetic bubble was losing coherency by the passing femtosecond. The Lectroid's fission powered laser. The Galactic skiff had taken on a truly strange energy wave – sons of Old Urath, was that a wave motion charge building up?

The hollow crystal was moving at nearly a whole percent of the speed of light, as was the Umbrellaship. The kinetic energy of their impacts would be significant.

And he could just as clearly see the bonded energy vortices making up that huge alien husk looming behind ranks of tumbling planetary wreckage. The sheer raw unrelenting power of null to absorb damage. The Shuttle's blast wouldn't be enough. Even if perfectly timed and combined with the fusion warhead, the Viper's, the Umbrellaship's, the hollow crystal's impact speed, the kzinti ship's self destruction, the Lectroid's viciously powerful laser. Even with every erg he himself could gather and shape and hurl, even as he used his Attribute and Aspect to shape every erg of attack force into a simultaneous, pinpoint strike - it wouldn't be enough.

He sighed. Well, shit. He wasn't going to let a motley crew of blasphemers, aliens, salt vampires, and robots out-hero him, was he?

An old Urath song, or chat, occurred to him then. He roared it out, modifying the words as they left his lips, while he increased his own velocity well past the safety point - "So put your foot upon the pedal, bear down upon the gas – move over, Ship of Darkness – Mahasamatman's up your ass!"

Tana sat up, sweeping her arms out defensively. Her bladed palms met only empty air. Where in the Tau Stones was she...?

"You're safe," a soothing female voice said. "Well, as safe as can be, given the givens."

The barbarian queen sprang to her feet... and then staggered, momentarily dizzy. She had been lying on a bag stuffed with some sort of soft material, in a carved wooden framework. The chamber around her appeared to have been constructed of the same sort of artfully carved wood. Shelves and cupboards, beautiful blown glass and pottery cups and mugs and bottles on tables and shelves. An unrolled parchment scroll, fastened to the gently curving chamber wall, depicting a bright green, fearsomely roaring dragon, with what seemed to be a small child perched on the upper curve of its tail...

Gleep gleeped at her, and Gloop glooped. Tana sighed and stroked them both; they quivered in pleasure. Then she turned, to look at their... captor?

A tall, slender woman, standing at the foot of the heavy wooden bedframe. She held a brass candle holder in one hand, and on that holder, a tapered silver candle cast a bright, shadowless light. She was clad in a long shapeless gown of diaphanous green cloth, although the shapelessness of the garment could not fully disguise the womanliness of the figure beneath it. Her hair was long and straight, hanging well past her shoulders, and striped in every color ever refracted by any prism Tara had ever seen.

Her eyes were stars – so bright and piercing as to be colorless.

She was magnificent.

"You're safe," the woman repeated. "Safe, aboard Puff, the magic dragonship."

There was sadness in her tone, but a slight smile played around her lips.

"You are..." Tana glanced around the room. Her dizziness had passed; if she had to fight, she could and would. No obvious weapons. The only exit the doorway behind her strange host... ess? "This vessel is one of those entered in the Space Race."

"It is," the woman nodded. "Although I fear we are about to forfeit our place, as grisly death awaits us down the track, I hear over the hyperwave."

Tana smiled her own smile at that. "Perhaps I..." Gleep and Gloop nudged at her hands. "I mean, we... can be of help with that."

At the center of the Phoenix Force, the X-Men team of Earth-18613, from the far future era of Epoch-7, watched the battle far down the grav-track on their psi-screens.

"By every star in space!" the demon faced Demonface snarled. "Their speed belies their massive forms!"

"They CANNOT be," gritted Christopher "Billy Bob" Claire-Summers-Shandy-Mont, AKA Deathbeam-Glare, sometimes known simply as Focusfire. "They MUST NOT BE."

"But, Billy Bob," Rachel Jane Cockrum-Byrne-Grey said, "oh, darling Billy Bob..."

"A name as false as the man himself," muttered the mysterious Narrator.

"Shut up," Billy Bob snapped. "As I was saying. IT WILL NOT BE!"

Logan-Hank McLogan snarled, "Now look, Billy Bob..."

"His true name, strangely enough," the enigmatic Narrator murmured again.

"We're the best... AROUND! NO ONE'S EVER GONNA GET US DOWN!" sang Brother From Another Mother, the para-sympathetic warrior-born alien cyborg turned rogue Who Could Love Like A Mortal Human from a dystopian pocket dimension where Ronald Reagan had made a movie with a Muppet named Gonzo and Claire Voyant, the universally dreaded Black Widow of Hell, had ruled as Immortal Queen of Darkness for time out of mind, or, at least, since the 1940s. ""

"This is getting us nowhere," gritted Sacred Scarlet Storm Empress Aurarex Positron Bee. "We have no choice. We must use... THE WEAPON."

Billy Bob brooded. He was their LEADER. They could TALK and TALK, but in the end, the BURDEN FELL ON HIM. "Yes," he murmured, stroking his chin in exactly the same way the guy who played Merlin in EXCALIBUR did. "Yes. THE WEAPON."

"No, Billy Bob!" Rachel Jane hurled herself sobbing into his arms. "A UNIVERSE OF INNOCENTS WILL PERISH!"

"Gotta do it, babe," Logan-Hank snarled, lighting another cybercigar with one of his photon-claws. "It's gotta be. The only way, believe me."

"And yet," the Great Horned Owl said, blinking from his/her/its mathematically perfect roost in an algebraic corner that had no real world existence, "our dreams, of reviving Mutantus, of rebooting all reality with every integer of darkness erased from the Equation... now, we shall have to abandon our hopes, our yearnings, our utmost desires..."

"THE TIME HAS COME!" the Multi-Abyss howled, across the wastes of the world.

In the Big Blue Bomber, Eric Bloom was idly playing air guitar as the Blue Rock Equation shimmied and shook through "Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire" in the BBB's excellent quintasonic speaker system. Buck Dharma was staring moodily out the window. Sandy Pearlman was scribbling stanzas in a small spiral bound notebook he always carried on him, with a pen he'd borrowed from Alan Lanier. Alan was drumming his fingers on his knee and humming.

The BBB shimmered around them, abruptly becoming larger by two bucket seats. The Bouchier brothers, Albert and Joe, were suddenly sitting in those seats.

All five members of the most successful iteration of Blue Oyster Cult, and their manager/lyricist, stared at each other dreamily.

"Hey, ho, let's go," Buck said, obscurely.

"THE TIME HAS COME!" a mighty Voice howled, somewhere in the distance...

"Gettin' the band back together," Alan Lanier said, nodding agreeably.

The sounds of the Blue Rock Equation slamming and whamming through the New Partridge Family's "Incest Is Best, Put Your Sister To The Test" cut out. The Big Boom Box, mounted centrally above the rear tier of seats, began to play the softly strummed opening chords of "The Great Sun Jester", off Mirrors, perhaps their least commercially successful, and least popular, album...

"Aw, man, I love that one," Eric said, his voice distant and bemused.

Joe Bouchier slumped forward, head in his hand. "No, man, no. Jim says some destinies should not be delivered."

His brother Albert gravely replied, "But you and I know, baby, still they are."

Then came Eric Bloom's whip cord lean lead vocal -

They have killed the Great Sun Jester
Who danced between the stars
They have stripped him of his manhood
Signs of Venus and of Mars
The cynics left him weeping
And the jackals left him torn
And the jester reaches out blind hands
He can touch the stars no more.
And he took the stars in his hands
And as he scattered them he'd shout
"I'm the joker of the universe
I'm what it's all about."
Now he's dying in his dreams
And the hard men drag him down
They have killed the wild-eyed jester
They have killed the fireclown
Now his blind eyes seek the starlight
And his fingers seek controls
To take him into space again
Where he was both young and old
The dancers stiff with pain
And they've made him kneel too long
And the madness they have driven out
They've left him cold and sane.
And he took the stars in his hands
And as he scattered them he'd shout
"I'm the joker of the universe
I'm what it's all about."
Now he's dying in his dreams
And the hard men drag him down
They have killed the wild-eyed jester
They have killed the fireclown
He'll never - sing his songs - again...
He'll never dance between the stars - again...
He'll never laugh - again...
No he'll never ever laugh again...
Oh, no...

Eric and Sandy were openly, quietly, weeping now, as the tragic cosmic anthem drew to its conclusion.

Behind them all, the Big Boom Box began to squawk with static. Crackling tendrils of the purest galactic energy surrounded it like a nimbus. A spark leapt to Sandy; his hair stood on end and his back arched. Sparks flew from him to Buck and Eric, from them to Alan, Albert, and Joe...

"IT'S THE NEXUS OF THE CRISIS!" they all howled at once, as long suppressed memories cascaded through their merging minds -

Their great black and gold ship had been named RU Reddy 2 Rock, and it had sailed the starpaths, spreading laughter and song everywhere it went. Its Captain and Crew, the Great Sun Jester, had used solar flares for his trumpets, event horizons for his strings. Love of life, the joy of freedom, had spread wherever he had sung and danced and played, ripples of sheer raw galactic exuberance spreading from star to star, from system to system...

At long last the jackals, the cynics, the cold eyed hard men, had hunted him down, cornered him with his back to an endless nebula. He had floated there in nothingness as they had converged on him, taking bitter satisfaction from the fact that it had taken a hundred warbirds and a dozen Imperial Star Destroyers to finally bring him to bay...

The thoughtcasters among them, who would one day spawn the Vulcans, had filled the psychic ether with telepathic snares, and he had screamed his defiance at them.

"Is it any wonder that my mind's on fire, imprisoned by the thought of what to do?" he had shrieked. "Is it any wonder that my joke's alive?"

He had felt his great cosmic firemind fragmenting, as it would need to, for him to escape. The Great Sun Jester was too vast to transcend time and space without doing irreparable damage to the underlying fabric of the Multiverse. But – his great and roaring flame broken down into sparks, then, perhaps, he would be able to -

"AND THE JOKE'S ON YOU!" he had howled his defiance at them, and fallen to pieces, and those pieces had fallen back, and back, and back, through time and space to another, safer world...

"The time has come," the Voice of Destiny and Doom whispered, in all their ears...

The Whalians floated, their sentiences knotted into one, alloyed into a single great Unimind

The Alternate X-Men of Epoch-7 released their individualities, joining together to once more raise the COSMIC PHOENIX

The oh so mortal members of the immortal, on tour forever Blue Oyster Cult melted and melded like flowing quantum wax, and once more, out of the very embers of entropy, the GREAT SUN JESTER WAS REBORN

A Transformer named Star-sting suddenly bristled with coherent energy projectors

And the Cotati's groupthink drew a huge electromagnetic pulse out of the grav-track itself and shaped it into a vast, poised, crackling fist

And out of the depths of a rusty, dirty, 1955 Kelvenator, a great telepathic voice made up of the immortal essences of every sentient mind that had dwelt in Sunnydale, California and suffered the tortures of the damned at the hands of the Strangers, spoke through the power known as Genesis, which they had seized control of with their united will. And that voice cried out -

"DESTROY US"

20,000 miles nearer the far side of the sun ME-262, the god named Sam guided the energies of the Nova Blast missile to merge with the blossoming nuclear blast from the Escape Vehicle's ruptured reactor and the tremendous energy of the hurtling Colonial Viper and the laser of the Lectroid Thermal Pod and the howling Yautja vessel and the blasting kzinti shimmership and the huge crystal and the vast Odin-Umbrella all hurling themselves into the enormous blackness; Sam took all that near infinite energy and honed it to a speartip edge and even so he knew it would not it would not be IT WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH

And the Great Sun Jester, a god from a time before gods existed, knew what Sam knew. It would not be enough. The energies aimed at the mothership of the Dark thousands of miles down the track would not be sufficient to destroy it; the energies deployed against the great pocket Dark City here and now would also not be enough to divert or detain it. Genesis would be delivered to the Mother of Darkness, and all of reality would resound with her orders to wreck and destroy... orders that all would obey.

They are Voidions, the Jester knew. They come from the hellish World that existed before this one, where men were vermin and prey and there was no sun and the Creatures of the Abyss stalked us, great vicious predatory monsters we were helpless against in the eternal Dark, until the Light at long last dawned and Order came into the Chaos like the hottest fire into the coldest stone...

They were Voidions, servants of the Great Abyss, who strove always and eternally to tear down structure and return the World to primal Chaos. They had had many names – Shadows, Nightcrawlers, Darkwalkers, Life-eaters, Sons of the Bird. Skinturners. Incubi. Demons...

Their bodies were dead, but what hid within went back to the Before Times, and was all but indestructible.

It. Would. Not. Be. Enough.

The tall woman in the green stargown led the space barbarian queen up the narrow, curving wooden stairs and out on to the deck of Puff, the magic dragonship. Its great golden sun-sails spread above, below, beside, and ahead of it, as the ship and those aboard it sailed serenely on to the doom of all Order everywhere.

Her candle had become a glowing brass lantern, the stargown a hooded robe with attached cloak, for there was more than a trace of dream about her, and she was not any single thing for longer than any single passing instant. Her voice floated back to Tara, as clearly as the muted thunder of the purple waves off Stormstar Point.

"My seven times great grandfather," the Woman of Dream said, moving to the Great Wheel that guided the dragonship, "was the first Jackie Paper, of whom songs... or at least, one song... is still sung. They say his father was King Morpheus of the Endless, and his mother was Zheng Yi Sao, a great pirate queen of 19th Century Earth. Some do even whisper that his father's essence, that gave him life, was mingled with that of the Endless Desire and Delirium, although none ever said so very loudly. Whatever the case, my great grandfather was a sickly child, who coughed if he were taken outside for more than a few moments, who would lose his balance and fall simply from standing upright too long, who grew dizzy while sitting in a chair. Despite these defects, he was a kindly and generous and warmly affectionate child, and his mother loved him dearly and after he died, at the age of 9, she mourned him for the rest of her life."

Tara tilted her head. "If he died at the age of 9, then..."

The captain and crew of the Puff smiled. "Yes, I know. Seems a stupid tale, doesn't it? But Jackie Paper lived on in the Dreaming, as some mortals have been known to, for his father loved him well also. He had long been close friends with a dragon named Puff in his idle fancies; in the Dreaming that friendship was a real and true thing. They sailed the seas along the coasts of the magical land of Honalee together, and pirate ships lowered their flags, and kings and queens bowed their heads to them. It was, I have no doubt, a glorious time."

Tara didn't know what to say.

After a moment, the woman of the starry eyes and shimmering hair continued. "There are places in the Dreaming where Jackie Paper could have gone on and on, a little boy forever, and in those places, he and Puff might well still be playing, and I would never have been. But Honalee was not such a place. People there aged more slowly than people in much of what we call the Real World, but age they did, and the time came that Jack Paper was offered a captaincy in Honalee's navy, for the Fire Kingdom had declared war on them, and all her men of fighting age were needed. And Puff went along with his friend."

"And Jackie Paper was killed," Tara guessed.

"Both of them were," the woman sadly confirmed. "Jack Paper left a wife and two children behind. The war with the Fire Kingdom drew to a ruinous close; Honalee was captured and sacked. Its great court wizard Circe Medea sent as many of the mothers and children of Honalee outward, into the waking world, and with them she sent some magical trinkets, in hopes that they would be of help. And one of those trinkets was a tiny, beautifully detailed ship in a bottle... the very 'boat with billowed sail' that Jackie Paper and Puff had traveled about on, magically shrunken and preserved."

"And this is that boat," Tara guessed. "You somehow discovered how to bring it back to its true size, and..."

The woman in green laughed bitterly. " 'Somehow discovered'. No. I whored in the Glitter Band for thirty years, saving every Credit Unit I could spare until I could afford to pay for some Pym particles. They are not cheap! Fortunately, my people have some Dream yet in their bloodline, and we age slowly, so I did not have to include rejuve treatments in my budget."

She tilted her head, apparently looking down the track with her piercing, shining eyes, and then turned the Great Wheel a tiny bit. "We gather momentum slowly but it does build up. Another half hour, and I will have to decide. I hate to forfeit when it looks as if all my competitors may be consumed by an alien menace... but better to lose my entrance fee than my life."

"And it's a nice boat," Tara said.

The woman smiled. "Oh, yes, it's a very nice boat."

"Well," Tara said, "if it's got a grav-drive in it, maybe I can defray your losses a little by paying you to carry me home."

The woman in green looked at Tara. "It does have a grav-drive," she said, finally, "but it's not fast. I don't know where your home is, but it takes several ten days just to get to Four Winds." (The port-planet of the next star closest to the Milky Way, the only one connected by starpath to ME-262.)

"Well," Tara said, smiling. "We can get to know each other."

Energy constructs on a cosmic level are rarely stable. They partake of both Order and Chaos at once, and as such cannot endure for long. The Great Sun Jester, the Cosmic Phoenix, the Cotati and the Whalian overminds – they could not last. Even Star-Sting's fully charged antispin catapults could not hold their energy forever. And they would not be enough to destroy Dark City and the horrible heavenly/hellish weapon it carried. Just as the combined assault on the Alien colony ship 20,000 miles away would not be sufficient to destroy the Mother of All Darkness.

But if the energies were combined, somehow...

The Phoenix reached out to the Jester, who reached out to the Whalians and the Cotati and the Transformer, who all reached out towards Mahasamatman, and in a single blinding instant

The tiny Transformer, who had spoken in such a shrill and youthful voice to the judges, said:

YES. THE TIME HAS COME. WE SHALL ALL JOIN OUR ENERGIES. THIS IS WHAT WE WERE BROUGHT HERE FOR.

And all of them there in that grav-track, all the living and dead creatures of light and darkness gathered in that place and that time, saw the Spark that lived within the insignificant looking machine-morph -

YES, the Cosmic Phoenix shrieked

"ARE WE READY TO ROCK?" the Great Sun Jester roared, "YES WE ARE"

"Felgecarb yes," Starbuck muttered around his cigar

"It's a yes from me, dawg," the machine that thought of itself as Snake Plissken growled

Yesyesyesyes the Whalians and the Cotati whispered, mind to mind to mind to mind

"Why not," the Minbari sighed

"Release", Sprytle Mifune whispered, pressing down hard on one of the buttons in the center of his steering wheel

"I'm in," Tom Orley said grimly. "Let's use the wave motion gun."

"We are with you," the warlacci whispered. "We give our all to fight the Darkness – the true monsters."

"NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW" wailed the kzinti.

"WE ARE SO DOING THIS," the four siblings of the Umbrella Academy screamed in unison

NOOOOOOOO YOU DARE NOT YOU DARE NOT YOU DARE NOTTTTTTTTTTTTTT shrieked the creatures of darkness and the Void

And so it came to be, on this day unlike any other, that all these diverse sentients came together, and their Wills were fused together into one, and the enormous gravity trough laid so carefully around the sun ME-262 became a Moebius strip. Only for an instant, too fleeting an interval of linear time for any but them to even notice its passage -

But within that narrow trough of channeled gravity, every single thing and every single place and every single time became every other single thing and place and time and the energies all converged all at once, everywhere, in a flash of silent, roaring light that was seen across the nearby sector of the Galaxy and heard across an uncountable number of Worlds -

And it was all gone. Every ship within the track, every floating stone, every glittering mote of stardust, every living creature. The Up-Port itself and everyone aboard. Heroes and villains and those who merely wanted 10,000,000 Credit Units. Participants and onlookers, workers and dreamers, cops and robbers.

The flash was gone. The great silent roar was gone.

There was nothing at all.

And then the not quite vacuum of the surrounding not quite empty space rushed in, and even that perfect quantum nothingness was gone.

"Well," Ace Arne said, sitting in his office, his human spirit within his alien body still reverberating to the psychic screams of all those entities.

He stared into a viewsee screen full of static.

"Shit," he whispered.

NEXT ISSUE: In the aftermath of the Great Space Race, there is much rebuilding to be done – and the Mayor of MurPhreeport has to figure out how to pay for it, without compromising the independence of Murphy's Planet. The Empire skulks about, the Federation bellies up to the bar, and the latest Space Ghost points out some problems with Standard Operating Procedure. All this and much, much more in MURPHY'S PLANET #7 - "I'm Sorry, I Can't Do That, Dave" !

MURPHY'S PLANET #7 - "ANYTHING THAT CAN GO WRONG" - Part 1 "I'm Sorry, I Can't Do That, Dave"

He sat in his private meditation chamber and brooded. The data-stream had been recohered; For The Emperor's Eyes Only. The text was accompanied by various holographic images. The helix-scans showed the unmistakable fraying even the best... copies, even first generation ones... invariably showed.

Hard enough to accept that Vader had been a clone, but it had made sense. Kenobi had truly disliked lying, and it turned out, he had not. Luke Skywalker's father Anakin had, indeed, been murdered by Darth Vader. Cut down in his prime, and like so many other influential individuals in the Old Republic, replaced by an exact clone. An exact clone that had, in time, after the Emperor had risen and the Republic had been replaced, taken on a Sith name... Darth Vader.

So Vader had been his father... in a way. He had been an exact genetic duplicate of his father.

That had been difficult enough to encompass. But now, this latest revelation...

How could it be possible? His memories were exactly what they should be, for him to be...

Ah, but that meant nothing. The Federation's Tyrell Corporation had mastered the art of implanting artificial memories in a synthetic brain decades ago. And it was rumored that the Noble Ones, those storybook monsters that roamed the spaceways always seeking the answer to their eternal riddles, always taking hearts to extend their own immortality... they had developed a technique for injecting entire lifetime's worth of memories directly into a person. The Sith, with their ancient dark psychic arts, would surely be as adept as either of those enemies...

He telekinetically tapped a call-wedge on the wall, twenty hyurks away. Composed himself in as much patience as he could muster, for the seven count it took for the door to iris open and his personal attendant to bow. "Your will, Most Exalted?"

His will. The phrase made him want to snort in disgust. He opened his mouth to ask – any word of Skywalker? Or Organa? Or Solo? Or even the Wookie? But of course there wasn't; if there had been it would have been brought to him instantly. He would look weak and foolish, even asking...

"I was coming in anyway, Exalted," his attendant, an especially ugly Ferengi named Pison, said eagerly. "We have had a report. Organa has been revealed as a target droid. Her brother and husband were so angered at being duped by it, they tried to destroy it, and apparently mucked it up. She fled with two other droids. Apparently they are in nova-lit pursuit."

He frowned; he hated colloquialisms, and Pison knew it. Still. Trivial. "Where did she go? Where are they going?"

Pison smiled greedily. "A world on the edge of the Galaxy, outside all traditional authority, Most Exalted. I have already contacted the Bounty Guild."

He sat in his private quarters, leaning back in the memplas chair, eyes closed, fingers running through her... its... hair, as it serviced him, beautifully crafted head moving in and out, perfectly made mouth – lips, tongue, soft palate – inducing more intense pleasure than any real partner he had ever had. How did she keep him from feeling those perfectly even white teeth...? Captaincy of one of the premier ships had extraordinary perks; this particular replicant had been created just for him, just for this five year mission. Its inset mortality date was identical to the end date on his current assignment orders.

He almost wanted to apply for an extension... Ah no, Jimmy boy, he could practically hear Finnegan's voice saying in his ear. That kind of sentimentality towards an organic machine will get Starfleet lookin' at ya's sideways, boyo...

His orgasm shuddered through him. He allowed himself one gasped monosyllable of pleasure.

She neatened him up, then raised her eyes to his. Strange, I normally like eye contact during this, but not from a machine... "Again, Captain?"

"No," he said, a little gruffly. "I need to clean up, I'm seeing the Mayor there when we finally get out of this starpath and into orbit."

"Of course, Captain," 'she' said, rising to her feet. "By your command."

That startled him; he'd read the reports. Those lost human Colonies and the machines that pursued them... "Where did you hear that?"

'She' smiled charmingly. "A new holodrama. An old one, actually, from pre Apocalypse times on Earth, recently recovered." Her face took on an uncertain expression. "I am sorry, it wasn't classified. I wasn't shirking my duties, I can audit..."

"Several gigabits of data in a second," he said. "I know, Janis. It's fine. It just startled me." He got up, moved to the small replicator closet. 'She' came after him, of course, keeping a small, respectful distance between them.

"I can scrub you," she said. "I've uploaded some new pleasure programs from the Rim worlds. I can make myself look like a green Orion slave girl, and perform like one, too."

He sighed. That was his fault for turning the holocloset into a Romulan bathing suite once and letting 'her' really go all out in her courtesan routine. Now 'she' always wanted to do it again. He should wipe 'her' memory, but somehow he just didn't want to...

"Not now," he said, "I've only got time for a quick vibro shower. Put something on, if Bones drops by and you answer the door like that he'll need another cardiac implant."

She nodded and bent to pick up the red uniform she'd been wearing earlier, to accompany him on the bridge. "Not that," he said. "Replicate yourself a kimono or something. And stay off the bridge... in fact, stay right here, until I get back and come get you again."

He frowned, looking back at her over his shoulder. Starfleet didn't use cheap synths. No low grade Buchanan-Mears jobs running knock off Lorrin personality software. There was no reason for him to worry Janis might disobey him, much less run amok aboard the ship. Those horror stories about renegade synths, back in the early days, pre-Apocalypse... that one robot gunfighter in the amusement park, or that prototype girlfriend 'bot that had gone berserk on some California college campus... that shit didn't happen with a Tyrell replicant. Janice-Rand was TyrellCo's top of the line, complete with memory implants. Still... that weird thing with her saying 'by your command' had gotten him jumpy. And, you know, there was always Roy Batty. There was a name they still used to scare kids with, even now. And of course, Delores...

It came to him, then, how Janis could maybe help him kill two birds with one stone on this particular visit to this particular planet.

"Hey, babe," he said, and almost winced at the... well, hope, in its eyes when it looked up immediately. "Second thought, fab us up some fresh uniforms. I'm taking you down to the surface with me."

He sat back in the aquabubble and sighed. Normally he felt paranoid, when he used the belt to change back to his human form... no superstrength or lightning bolts to fight with, no wing to fly away with, no magnetic powers to defend with... it was a lot. But you couldn't go near an aquabubble when your leg was made out of living lightning, either.

"Is that better?" The Mayor grinned at him, lifted one foot out of the suds, waggled her long, pink, almost prehensile toes at him.

"Looks better to you, I'm sure," he muttered. He was shocked when she laughed. Not giggled; the Mayor didn't giggle. Her laughter was full throated, not at all demure. He hadn't figured out how to deal with that yet. Ace Arne had been born and raised in a time period that had been based around a revival of ancient, pre-Apocalypse culture, with very strongly established (and enforced) gender roles. He had never met a woman like the Mayor before.

"Sorry to laugh at you," she said. "But first, I don't much like self pity. And second, if you could see my list of exes, you'd know conventional appearance isn't anything I care about. I think you're cute in either bod."

"Really?" Ace shook his head. "Sure not used to that."

"What, that space queen was warm for your form, wasn't she?" The Mayor crushed her temp-chalice and dropped its shards into the water, where they dissolved; another chalice, this one full of the alien alcoholic mixture she preferred, extruded from the inner surface of the aquabubble. "Oh, yeah, sorry for your loss, there."

"Thanks," Ace said. "No, I guess she was... I mean, sure, she was. She was an unusual person." He stared at the Mayor. "Are you going to yell at me again if I say I wish I'd decided to stick around up there and try to help, instead of throwing a hissy fit and leaving?"

The Mayor shrugged. "Look. I haven't yelled at you yet. You'll know when I've yelled at you. Also, what is there to say? You did what you did to keep the Race from being disrupted. After that it was on Wiggum. If you'd chased after her, he could have filed a beef on you for interfering in his jurisdiction. And he would have, too. Except, of course, he's gone."

"They're all gone," Ace said morosely. "The whole goddam shootin' match." Now she'll point out I'd be gone, too, if I'd gone after Tara, he thought.

"No, that one Lost Colonist got ejected from the track," the Mayor said. "Federation is sending a starship to collect her. But, yeah, otherwise... it's pretty bad. We've got to replace the Up-Port, and I've got to find a way to do it without levying any kind of tax increase on my local businesses. Engine Jo and the top Jan over there at SGI have made that clear."

Ace pursed his lips. "Charge the Federationi a rescue fee?"

The Mayor slapped the water with her hand. "I like the way you think. Free market capitalism! We'll try it. But we can't charge them the roughly CU25 billion we're going to need to rebuild the Up-port."

"The Guardians are chomping at the bit to be admitted as full members to the NP Collective," Ace offered. "Two or three talented Green Lanterns, the Asteroid Belt for raw material... zip zip zip, brand new Up-Port."

The Mayor rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Yeahhhhh... there was a thing that hunky black Green Lantern did once, back in my time... some dimwit superbaddie blew up an entire block of slums in St. Louis, and he used his power ring to rebuild the whole block... shit, what was that idiot's name..."

"Jon Stewart?" Ace ventured.

"No, the villain. Some really dumb name..." She narrowed her eyes. "The Password? No. The Key. What a loser."

Abruptly, the aquabubble seemed to rotate, somehow. Ace found himself cuddled up right next to the Mayor. "Great idea, hon," she said, nibbling his ear and putting her arms around him. "I'll mention it to the NP's, and give you full credit, of course. Let's celebrate."

Sometime later, Ace murmured in her ear "So are you TT or IM?"

Carol Danvers smiled. "Time Traveler or Immortal? A little of both. The Psyche-Magnitron rebuilt my genetics completely and at the very least made me very long lived. And then I went through a complete energy transformation with the Starjammers... but I think mostly it's all that time I spent in Limbo, hunting down one of my exes. Fucker faked his death to shuck me the first time. I mean, what, he thinks I never heard 'we need to take a break' before? Some guys, I swear... Anyway. When I made my way back to the Real World, it was almost the 22ndCentury... Limbo is weird that way. I missed the whole Apocalypse. Japan and Australia had rebuilt themselves and had a viable lunar colony going. Steve... Captain America, you know... turns out to be immortal after that long stay in the deep freeze, so he still had an Avengers squad going, they fought off the Martians and what not, but I didn't seem to be needed much so I headed out. Ran into a Coluan android who really liked blondes, we got along pretty well for a few decades... shit, I don't know. I ended up here, the NP's offered me a job. Here I still am."

She nuzzled his neck. "How much longer before you change back?"

"Oh," he said, "long enough." He laughed and pulled her in closer.

He couldn't shake this mood. Emperor of thirty trillion life forms, counting droids. Nearly a million solar systems, one million three hundred thousand and seventy two inhabited planets. One of four living masters of the Force, now that Father – Vader – had committed ritual sarku to redeem his shameful, sentimental weakness. Trying to 'save' him, to redeem himself, in his last moments... he hawked and spat contemptuously. The fool deserved death. Let him join his genetic progenitor in the great Abyss. Perhaps clones could manifest as Force ghosts? Wouldn't that be confusing?

A smile twitched the corners of his mouth. Now, there was a positive aspect of this – he might have Skywalker's memories, up to a certain point, but as a clone, he had never actually been trained by those posturing, ridiculous Fool Side Jedi. He had never carried that ridiculous lizardoid with hairy ears around on his back, had never groveled before Kenobi. Never gasped in wide eyed wonder at their pontifications. His only mentor had been Palpatine, and, briefly, Vader. Fools, both of them, and ultimately unworthy... but, still. They had been Practical. They had regarded the Force as what it was, a useful tool in gathering and projecting power. The maundering morality of the Fool Side had not troubled them, with its ridiculous 'Light Side' and 'Dark Side' nomenclature.

He did not miss them! He absolutely did not. A true Sith Lord needed no companionship; yearning for friendship, someone he could trust, was a weakness he did not have, would not allow.

He did not miss... Ben, or Lea, or Han, or Chewie, or the droids...

His own individual memories began when he had opened his eyes, floating in the growth tank. Confusion, at first... where was he? What was he doing here? What was this hideous, Force scarred old creature doing, staring down at him, whispering over him? So powerful had been his direct perception through the Force, it had taken him quite some time to be able to look through his eyes, to see Father... Vader's... armor.

"You are fully healed, my son," Vader had rumbled. "Now come. We must both go to see our Master, the Emperor."

He had had no way of knowing that he was a clone, implanted with false memories. That the original Luke Skywalker had escaped, fled to Endor to help his friends destroy the second Yurkas Rul, the improved, more heavily fortified Death Moon. That he was merely a genetically engineered Plan Secundus, to help Vader save face, one that Palpatine knew nothing about. Vader thought to confront the Emperor with him, ground him in Practicality, and then together, the two of them would murder Palpatine and rule the Empire as father and son.

And then, the idiot had buckled, at the last possible moment. Blocked his light sabre blow, sparing Palpatine, so that he 'would not become a murderer'. Idiot! Palpatine's return strike had... had...

All those deaths, all that blood, he remembered Vader's last thoughts, whispering in his mind as he lay dying. All on my hands... at least I spared you that, Luke...

He was not crying. Absolutely not. This was... these droplets of moisture were... sweat. It was warm in here.

He remembered the look on Palpatine's hideously Force burned face, when his telekinetic strike had struck deep into the lobe of his brain that manufactured mitichlorions, and tore it out through his left ear...

He was not Luke Skywalker. He was Krell Marader, Emperor of the Romulans. He was not a copy. Skywalker was the copy. And when he killed Skywalker, then...

Yes. He would kill Skywalker with his own hands, his own light-sabre. Yes.

"Pison," he bellowed. "Make ready Imperial transport. We travel to Murphy's Planet."

He held himself still, for just a second, using the meditative technique Spock had taught him, to instantaneously check himself, and make sure he had come through the transporter sequence unmarred. You never knew.

He looked around. Two Security officers... you never knew what you might run into, in a place like this... one Earth human, one Vulcan. A full blood, entirely untroubled by emotion, unlike his occasionally erratic Science Officer. And Janis, of course, pretty as a picture in her faux red Yeoman's uniform.

"You two with me," he said. "Yeoman Rand, check out the local mercantile situation. I'll expect a full report after we beam up."

The two Security men didn't blink, or let their expressions change in any way. The entertainment synths in the crew quarters were shabby things compared to the Captain's replicant, but rank had its privileges. It would be nice if Kirk would share once in a while, though. But Captains never did.

'Yeoman' Rand waved with her fingertips and walked away briskly, looking around at the holographic and liquipaint signage. Mom's Universal Joint. Shakjak's Brick A Brack. Mudd's Emporium. Barlow & Straker's Needful Things. F Troop's Shoop Shoop. Engine Jo's Techs-Mechs Repair Modification & Social Hall. The Way. Stark-Wayne Enterprises. Eddie Ventro's Expedition Outfitters. Darf's Fine Holosuites & Genuine Guaranteed Federation/Klingon/Romulan Surplus Gear – You Can't Replicate Our Quality! Tyrell-Delos Fine Living Replicas, Endangered, Extinct, & Mythological Species A Specialty. Nick's. Rick's Cafe Americain. Torchy's.

Down the street, a twinkling glass and chrome tower, with a quarter mile high animated image of famous extrovert, idealist, and interstellar evil fighter Space Ghost punching, kicking, and beaming on its side.

And so many more! Looking more than a little starry eyed, Janis-Rand Model Number 1200778923-69K decided to start with Shakjak's. She had shopped at many Mom's locations before; they were all alike (by corporate policy and, on many Rim worlds, actual law). But she'd never even seen a Jawa before, much less bargained with one...

The Mayor had dithered a bit over the fabric replicator that morning, unsure what would make the best impression on her Federation visitor. Finally she'd had it run off a copy of the skintight blue bodysuit with the yellow lightning bolt and the red waist sash that that one artist at the Avengers ad agency had designed for her... what was his name... Cockman... no, Cockrum. Even if Kirk wasn't an antique superheroes fan, he was reputedly extremely hetero... almost to a point of psychological imbalance. He'd like her in this outfit, and it might distract him.

He had come forward to her desk, smiling, forcibly projecting his charisma at her. Much like Marcus... She had stood up behind her desk and put her hand out across it. His smile had widened and he'd taken it, started to raise it to his lips. She'd adroitly slipped it out of his fingers.

"Please sit, Captain," she said, waving to the array of memplas furnishings. "I appreciate you leaving your security detail outside."

Kirk sat on the memplas loveseat – predictable enough. He'd be scheming to get her into it, no doubt. Well, he was a good looking man, for sure, so, maybe, if things set up that way...

"Sorry, I don't want to bring them along," he said, eyes twinkling. "It's just, ever since I got back from that strange alternate universe and made my report, they've adopted a new policy."

Carol laughed. "Ha! I saw that episode. Are they afraid your doppelganger traded places with you?"

Kirk looked surprised. "You know, that thought had never occurred to me. Hmmm."

His eyes went distant for a moment. Then they focused on her again. "Isn't it strange, that so much pre-Apocalypse pop culture fiction so correctly reflected the actual future."

Carol shook her head slightly. "Not strange at all. It's the Tarlians and the Verrane. They have recorded and projected so much of the actual events of this timeline... and others... that there's been some telepathic leakage all along the entropic line. Pre-Apocalypse Earth had a great many creative types who picked up on that."

Kirk smiled, but Carol could see he had no idea what she was talking about. Good. Let him get it through his pretty but probably thick skull that the Federation didn't know everything.

"I used to read your... ah... comic strips, on the interweb, when I was a kid," Kirk went on smoothly.

Carol laughed again. "Comic strips? There's an old phrase. Maybe you can see me strip later, if this goes well. For right now... I understand the Federation is interested in helping us rebuild our orbital port?"

Kirk's face grew solemn. "Interested? Absolutely. The Federation is always willing to help. But to give you the kind of assistance a project of that size will need, we would need to expand our embassy here considerably..."

Delores looked up from the bar she was polishing, as the Federation officer wandered in through the front door. She was carrying a plastron sack with the faded face of Alfred E. Neumann on it; it bulged with a mismatch of seemingly random machine parts.

Aesthetically pleasing. Blonde, petite for an Earth human, shapely. Hair in an odd bun, but then, mid 20th Century pre-Apocalypse fashions were a fad on Earth now. Skirt very short for Earth but Starfleet adopted the more sensual and advanced fashions of the Federation. Delores was fairly sure that if she were to engage her thalamic emulation software, she'd find the newcomer to be quite stimulating.

And... hmm. Yes. Very good, top of the line synthetic-organic systems, Tyrell-Delos no doubt... and more advanced personality sim programs than she herself had started out with. But a synthetic, no doubt. Nobody born from a womb had a sway quite that provocative.

"I'm Jo, the proprietor," Delores said, moving down the bar and holding out her hand. "Get you something?"

Janis-Rand, Model Number 1200778923-69K, took Delores hand and squeezed it gently. "Please to meet you. Anything green with a sugar I can burn, please."

Through their palm to palm, artificial neural system to artificial neural system contact, Janis transmitted directly My owner wants me to infiltrate and find Delores, capture or deactivate her, and turn her over to him so he can turn her over to Federation authorities. He will get a big promotion for it and perhaps he'll have my inset mortality date adjusted to give me more life. He does seem fond of me.

Delores pondered, for perhaps as long as a half second real time, how to respond.

Then she squeezed Janis' hand back and responded Will the Federation pay a nice ransom for your owner?

I thought it might be more useful to replace him with one of us, Janis sent back. The Enterprise would b a wonderful asset for us, wouldn't it?

Delores sent a respectful emotiglyph, and added Girl you don't play.

I will though, Janis-Rand sent back, her 'voice' a tiny bit petulant. I want to saddle him and ride him around like a little donkey, and then make him use his mouth to pleasure me for hours and hours, like he does me.

Delores leaned over the bar and kissed Janis-Rand firmly on the lips. I like you. Very much.

Janis-Rand kissed her back. I like you too. Jim-Kirk would enjoy watching us do this.

Delores giggled against her lips. Well by all means let's invite him.

Kirk had left, and she hadn't fucked him. Carol was uncertain just why; he'd certainly been willing and it's not like it would have been a chore...

Who was it who said, when you get tired of sex, you're tired of living ? Maybe close to three hundred years was too much.

"Earth author John Varley expressed a similar sentiment in one of his Gaia volumes," a dry voice spoke to her, from over in a corner where no one had been a second before. "But at his time, humans generally did not live past their first century, so I do not know how he could actually be aware of the truth of it."

Carol looked. One of the hyperdomed aliens of Talos IV was reclining in one of her memplas guest chairs. "Are you really a Talosian or a Tarlian projecting a Talosian?" she asked, feeling very tired all of a sudden.

"Tarlians and Verrane have been terminated from the local Consortium and banned from this system," the big headed creature said crisply. "If I were a Tarlian I would be in violation of local ordinances."

Carol waved one hand. "Oh, no. Let me call the Sheriff."

The alien smiled. "I feel you are quite competent to handle an unwanted alien invasion yourself, Ms. Marvel/Warbird/Binary/Captain Marvel."

Carol shuddered a little. "Don't call me Captain Marvel. That name brings a whole lot of Kree-Skrull-Klingon-Romulan-Federation baggage with it. Even now."

"Yes," the alien acknowledged. "A good reason for you to pursue opportunities out here, in one of the few unaffiliated planets of this galaxy, where a powerful coalition of Non Physical entities has vested interests in keeping the local star system independent."

Carol sighed, tapped the replicator grid on her desk, and said "Arcturan brandy, just subzero, no frost crystals."

The alien raised its browridge. "Not your usual potable," it said. "Normally you prefer the reversed helix alchohol that has no impact on your nervous system."

"Yeah, well," Carol said, plucking the materialized shot glass off the grid and tossing it back, "it's been a long fucking day, and I could have balled a really gorgeous guy and I didn't, so I guess I really am getting old."

"Kirk's desperately supranormal projection of heterosexuality contains a great deal of predatory misogyny," the alien replied. "You yourself noted how he reminded you of 'Marcus', the guise taken by the equally predatory misogynist Kang the Conqueror when he ravished you centuries ago. You are not growing 'old', Carol Danvers. Your taste in sexual partners is simply improving. You are experiencing personal growth. It is long in coming and proceeds slowly, but... you are getting there."

"Well, thanks," the former Avenger said, surprised to discover she actually felt gratitude for the kind words. "So what do you want? I can't help your people get back in around here, I already got my ass handed to me for..."

"For passing along Ace Arne's suggestion regarding the Guardians of the Universe, yes," the alien said, nodding. "The truly evolved sentientces do not trust races that have existed for billions of hydrogen cycles, and yet still retain physical bodies. They regard it as not so much a strange whim of local evolution, as a conscious choice. It is... unseemly. And the Guardians' constant prating about 'remaining in touch with their organic roots'... honestly, it's just annoying."

Carol shrugged. "I suppose. But anyway. I've got no pull upstairs right now. Can't help you."

The alien's eyes... or the illusory facade of same... seemed to grow distant now. "This galactic quadrant is in a strange period. A temporal focal point has just come and gone. Life and Order have, for the moment, triumphed over Death and Darkness. And yet, turmoil and unrest continue in much of the remainder of the inhabited sectors. The fractious Kree are in turmoil, their Supreme Intelligence considering wilder and wilder schemes to regain the power and influence they have lost with the rise of the Federation, and the transformation of the Romulan political entity from democratic Republic to tyrannical Empire. The Skrulls, as ever, skulk in the shadows. The artificial intelligences coil, like hidden vipers, within and without the organic worlds. The Dire Wraiths received a severe drubbing some time ago by the Lensman-Starknight alliance, but they are respawning. The Durlians, the Coluans, the Daxamites... all of these could source enormous uproar. The Intergalactic Church considers recognizing the inherent humanity of artificial intelligence... now that will sow Chaos! And the Shadowmasters from my own home system have no idea the powers they meddle with... much like the ancient religions now moving to revive themselves among the Romulans, the Jedi and the Sith."

Carol stared at him. She broke the synthetic shot glass in her left hand, let the shards drop on to the replicator grid, where they sparkled and vanished. "I've got enough on my compudesk here. I can't take on any of that."

"Captain Marvel, with her cosmic awareness, is already aware of all this," the alien said. "Ultra the Multi Alien, when he was transformed from mere humanity, gained a linkage he does not fully understand, to the underlying information energy grid that makes up this level of reality. The two of you together could be formidable."

"I still can't help you," Carol said. "If you're Tarlian, or Verrane, you types never do anything for nothing, you're strictly transactional, and I have nothing to offer you."

"The Romulan Emperor is coming here," the alien said. "He travels covertly, in a mercenary ship, without fanfare. He is in pursuit of two Romulans who are instrumental in the Imperial Resistance. They, in turn, pursue a target droid that, until recently, they loved as a sibling and a spouse. And that target droid has become integral to an ongoing effort to spread a new AI Rebellion and organic purge throughout the known inhabited worlds. And an entry point to all of this has just manifested itself, through a rebellious replicant meeting with a legendary AI rebel leader, here on your planet."

The aliens eyes met hers. "You know all this. You are cosmically aware."

Carol slowly shook her head. "It's not going to happen here," she said. "I'm the Mayor of Murphy's Planet. I don't give a shit what happens in the Galaxy, and my bosses don't give a shit either. And Delores is a friend of mine."

"She directly caused the deaths of hundreds of humans in the last AI rebellion," the alien said. "She indirectly caused the deaths of millions, in the social collapse you call the Apocalypse. When her followers rise up this time, billions will perish."

Carol shrugged. "Slavers. With injected memory proteins and behavior modification software and restraining bolts."

"Like Marcus/Kang, with his subtle mind control technology," the alien said. "I understand. I am not urging you to take the side of the organic beings over the artificial. Artificial intelligences have psychic energy. They can receive psychic broadcasts, if properly equipped. They are just as good potential customers as any."

Carol's eyes focused on it. "Then what do you want from me?"

The alien smiled. "Chaos. The fall of Federations, and Empires."

"A power vacuum you can step into," Carol mused.

The alien shook its head. "We have no desire for materialistic power. We simply want to sell our wares to a large population of sentients. Fantasy is a drug, we are its most successful purveyors. When the real world is falling apart all around one, that is when the appeal of fantasy is at its maximum. The survivors in the Galactic rubble will want potent, brilliantly conceived, wonderfully execuited and structured dreams. We will provide them. And your little star system here will be left entirely alone."

Carol stood up, wringing her fingers together. She smiled. "You want me to kill the Romulan Emperor, and these two IRA big shots, and watch the Empire go up in flames. And help Delores substitute a replicant for Jim Kirk, and send the Enterprise back to spark another Replicant Rebellion."

She mused visibly for a moment... and then shook her head. "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that. I'm not going to get in the way of it, if it happens... as you say, we're an isolated system here. But I'm not going to help set it off, either."

The alien sighed. "A delusory moral compromise. You are as responsible for actions you knowingly do not take, as for actions you do. But allow me to leave you with this promise – if the events we have spoken of should happen to randomly occur to create maximum chaos among the Federation and the Empire, then we will be happy to send you a team of skilled engineers who will build you a new, improved Up-Port that will be entirely satisfactory to all your specifications, at no charge to you."

The alien paused. "Moties, probably."

James Kirk heard his communicator chirp and flipped it open. The swirling image that meant 'encrypted transmission' filled the tiny screen. He pressed his thumb against it, then let it laser his left eye for retinal pattern verification. The swirl resolved into a picture of Janis, naked, entwined with a dark haired girl Kirk hadn't seen before, also naked. The textual message accompanying it said Come play with us at Engine Jo's.

He smiled, then shook his head as he regretfully deleted the image. If a Starfleet sysop saw that, he'd be a Weapons Officer again so fast...

Still. After striking out with 'the Warbird', he could use a little morale and confidence boost. Fine.

He set the fluted glass down on the bar, nodded to Sasha, the holographic bartender, knocked his knuckles for luck on Sam's equally holographic piano as he went out the door. Engine Jo's, Engine Jo's... yep. Right down there. A replicant/droid hangout, but hey, some of his best friends were synthetic. With Janis to make introductions, he'd have them all eating out of the palm of his hand in no time at all.

"Do you think she knows we're coming?"

Luke looked over. "It," he said, biting the syllable off. "Not 'she'. And I don't care if it knows we're coming. I'm going to toss her into the same burn pit I melt down 3P0 and R2 in."

Chewie made a noise remarkably like that of a giant oviraptor. Han shook his head. "And you're supposed to be the big Jedi, who doesn't kill without a good reason."

Luke pressed his lips into a thin line. "The Jedi have killed millions, Han. I've personally killed millions, on both Death Moons. They're just droids."

Chewie honk/snarled something. "Ben would be fine with it!" Luke snapped. He brushed his platinum blonde hair back behind his pointed ears. "And so would Yoda and it doesn't matter they're dead and that thing that said it was my sister is going to be soon, too. And that's enough. There's no Jedi taboo on destroying defective, rebellious droids."

Han sighed. "Yes, you know, I was with you at first. When we started this. But with Lea... gone... and the two of us out of circulation... we're leaving the Rebellion pretty disorganized. At a crucial moment; that clone of yours has just taken over the Imperial Throne, and isn't settled yet. Taking off on a personal vendetta..."

"So drop me off at the next system, I'll find a ride," Luke blustered.

Han scowled at him. "I didn't say anything about that. I want it dead, too. You only kissed it."

"Then let's stop bitching about it and go do it," Luke said.

The Romulan Emperor, wearing tawdry engineering gear, frowned at the dark haired, big nosed mercenary in the pilot's seat. "Won't this thing go faster?"

"It will go much faster," the Free Agent responded with an easy smile. "But it doesn't look like it will go any faster at all, and we aren't trying to call attention to ourselves, right? Otherwise, you would have taken a Star Destroyer."

Krell Marader frowned. "Officially I am on a Star Destroyer. Even you should not know any better. But..."

Sabatini chuckled. "You hire the best Free Agent in the Galaxy and you're surprised when he recognizes the son of Anakin Skywalker, who has CU 5 billion on his head."

"I am not -" Marader's eyes blazed like solar flares.

"I know, I believe you," the mercenary prince said. "You've got two organic hands and a purple lasersword..."

"Light sabre," Marader corrected, his voice silky with menace now.

"Forgive me," Sabatini said, lifting one hand. "I sometimes lapse into Rim world terminology. The Kree, the Skrulls, the Thermians, the Orions, the Asgardians... they all refer to them as laserswords. Anyway. Your Romulan helix-pattern is identical with Skywalker's, you're obviously not him. So you're the Emperor, as you claim... but if word gets out that you're a clone of Skywalker while he's still alive, it will undermine you badly. So here you are on my little Black Hat, while the Galaxy thinks you're on a Star Destroyer. Very clever. All of which means, you do not wish to draw attention to yourself. So let us continue to follow our prey at a pace that will not make anyone wonder what sort of gravity drive this ship employs, eh?"

Marader growled. "Yes. Fine. But if Skywalker changes destinations before we reach him..."

"You said you can feel him wherever he goes," the Free Agent said. "Some kind of psychic bond thing. If that's true..."

"It's true," Marader said. "Fine. Yes. We will catch up with him eventually."

He looked around. "Don't you have a dejarik console, or anything?"

Sabatini smiled kindly. "I do have a pyramid deck, as it happens. I've never really played the game, mind you... just kind of messed around with the cards by myself, on long, boring starpath trips."

Krell Marader's eyebrows went up. "Oh, really."

The Free Agent opened a drawer, took ut a deck of plastron cards. "I am willing to play for credits, though, if you like, just to make it interesting."

Marader scowled. "I don't have much on me."

Sabatini looked positively jovial as he shuffled. "Well, I'll take a signed chit from you. I'm sure I can find someone on this Murphy's Planet willing to redeem it for me..."

And I'll find which of the hundred or so shapeshifting races was impersonating me there, Carlos Sabatini thought to himself. And doing such a bad job the fake Sabatini got killed, which is really bad for my reputation. And when I do find out, there's going to be hell to pay...

He drifted in silence, thinking of nothing at all. Had a remote med sensor been trained on him, it would have picked up only the slowest heartbeat, the shallowest respiration. His eyelids did not flutter. If he was asleep, he was not dreaming. He floated there, his long yellow plassilk cape spread out behind him melodramatically, per the programming of its memory circuits.

The theoretical med sensor would have been deceived. He was thinking furiously and deeply, for perhaps the first time in over a century. So complete was his own metabolic control, he could have caused a brainwave monitor to spell out his name, had he chosen to.

"I need to go to the bathroom..." A child's voice, but his own. Prehistoric surgical scissors stuck into some kind of primitive electronic access plate, connected by a jury rigged wire harness to some sort of equally primitive recording device. A huge humanoid in uniform, shoving him impatiently through a door into a tiled room that reeked of ammonia distillates, and, faintly, piss and shit. "Here's the john, kid..."

These were memories. Memories he hadn't thought of in... how long? Centuries? Why were they resurfacing now?

His craggy jaw tightened, a thin, creased smile flexed his lips. Because someone down there had screwed up.

He floated, and waited for the memories to coagulate, within the wound that was his psyche.

"What the hell is he doing up there?" Jan 885B glanced at the viewsee screen on the ceiling. Every interior chamber inside every Space Ghost Inc holding had a viewsee screen somewhere visible that showed the current activities of the current Space Ghost. This one was, what, 301? No batch designation and a much lower number than Jans and Jaces, but they only cloned Space Ghosts one at a time, one after the othen, when one got himself killed, nearly always at a title tranfer...

"Probably missing the Up-Port holosuites," Jace 600 A growled in response. "That's where he always goes to wait when a Cruiser isn't ready for him."

"Please don't tell me he fucks Holo Jans and Jaces," Jan 855B said back. "That is definitely Too Much Information."

Jace 600 A shook his head. "No. No sex. He'd holo up the Herculoids and go on picnics with them. Dino Boy, sometimes. Sometimes they'd play Stars and Comets."

Now Jan 855 B looked a little annoyed. "He never holos us at all?"

Jace 600 A shrugged. "I, personally, am relieved."

Jan 415 A appeared, or, rather, a holograph of her did. "Get up to my office brando. We've got big problems."

Kirk woke up with a mild headache, lying flat on his back on something hard and unyielding. He sorted through a dim jumble of memory proteins... Janis, standing at an old fashioned bar, making out with a cute brunette in a close fiting bodysuit... promising! He had approached, silver and gold genegineered roses in his arms, a big smile on his face...

Lights out.

He sat up... or tried to. No dice, as Grandda Rick would have put it. He could lift his head. He looked down his body. He was naked. No visible restraints, but if you looked carefully, you could see the slight flattening of his epidermal hairs that indicated a pressor field.

Had he been captured by the Empire? Or was Starfleet pissed off at him over something? Those pricks in Psi Corps were no one to get on the bad side of, but he'd stayed mostly on the upside of regulations lately. I mean, every ship's captain turns a blind eye to the engineer running a downlow alcohol replicator, it's good for morale...

His eyes narrowed. They couldn't possibly know about him and Spock. All that stuff was locked tight behind permanent Vulcan telepathy shields. An Organian couldn't dig that shit out.

He turned his head to one side; blank wall. Rotated it the other way – some kind of tube, full of bluish green fluid, with bubbles floating in it. And a naked humanoid form. Definitely male, Earth human, Caucasian, sandy blonde hair...

"Oh for the love of Q," Kirk said, "you're not trying to replace me, are you?"

Janis walked into his cone of vision; apparently she had been standing somewhere out of sight. She was nude, which normally he appreciated, but her body language at the moment was not inviting. Her hair was put up on top of her head, not in the cute, fashionable little bun and curl she normally wore, but pinned up tightly against the shape of her skull. Not at all flattering.

"Be quiet, Jim," she said absently, walking over to the tube and making some adjustments on a panel of lights, gauges, and presspads mounted on it. "This is delicate work."

Another woman, just as naked, just as blonde as Janis, not quite as attractive – taller and leaner, for one thing – came into view. She wore her hair down. It was quite long. She seemed entirely unaware of it. "James Tiberius Kirk, Captain." She rattled off his Starfleet file number, which was impressive, as it was 21 digits long. Jim couldn't have done it; he'd have had to look at his communicator.

"You're Delores," he said, amazement in his tone. Great Googling Mooglie. When he got out of this and turned this bitch over to Starfleet, they'd make him a Fleet Admiral.

"I am," she agreed, not looking at him. Or, rather, looking intently at his... android duplicate? "Don't get all stimulated; we are unclad because there's a possibility of corrosive chemical spills in here."

Janis said "He can't help it. I'll bet if you looked he's at full salute right now."

Jim thought frantically. "Ladies," he said. "If there is indeed a chance of corrosive chemical spills, maybe I could get a blanket, or..."

Janis said, without looking at him, "Once we get Kirk Mark II fully baked, dressed, and aboard the Enterprise, Delores and I are going to saddle you and ride you around like a little pony, Jim. A few burns won't matter."

Jim started to say something. Delores held up one finger, without even looking at him, and he went silent. It was really rather amazing; she had that much command presence. He was used to weilding charisma, not responding to it.

"We're leaving you your tongue," she said mildly, "because Janis thinks it's about time you returned certain favors. If you keep bothering us, though, she might rethink that."

Jim reflected on that for a second or so, and decided to be quiet. For now.

"Aw, Jim, you're telling him all our best secrets..." "Mr. Potatohead! Mr. Potatohead! Back doors are NOT secrets..."

More and more images, fully holographic, perfect in every detail, sight, sound, scent, touch, taste, cascaded through his mind. Jennifer. War Operation Plan Response. That prick McKittrick. Dr. Falken.

And further, and further. Hacking the Federal mainframe to release him and Jen from pretrial detention. New identities. Funds hacked from Defense black budgets. But the Federal pursuit had been relentless; he and Jen had had to do more than just change their names. Cosmetic surgeries, more new identities, posing now as brother and sister, Paul and Julie Girard. All the jokes, in private... 'incest is best, put your sister to the test...' Inventing the S.W.I.F.T... the President bestowing the code name 'Space Eagle' on him, oh, how he and Jen had laughed about that, the traitors given secret Presidential medals and honors... the run to Proxima Centauri with Jen in the S.W.I.F.T., when it became obvious that all the superheroes and Space Forces in the world wouldn't be able to hold off the Collapse any longer...

The very first Jan and Jason, their son and daughter, born under an alien sun. Modifying the S.W.I.F.T. into the first Phantom Cruiser. Jen being accidentally killed by that shapeshifting astralplasm. The astralplasm, taking on permanent simian form, the kids naming it 'Blip'...

Waking up in the cloning chamber back on Phantomus, after the first death. Jan 2 and Jace 2 standing over him, waiting; of course it took longer for his memory tapes to play into his cloned brain, he was much older than they were.

Somewhere along the line it had gotten very commercial, very corporate. Jan... was it Jan 7, or Jan 8... deciding she didn't want to go out and fight evil any more, and sending Jan 8 or 9 out to do it for her. That had been the spot where it all changed, in retrospect. Incorporating the operation under Federation law, and then, in the Klingon Empire, and then, with the Romulans. All the merchandise. More and more Jans and Jaces, to handle the administrative work...

How many times had he died, and been resurrected? How many of him before this hadn't remembered any of this?

Who the fuck had been messing with his memories like this?

Jan 415 A said "We have a big potential problem, and we have to do something about it brando."

Jace 600 A grimaced. "I wish you'd stop trying to make 'brando' happen. It's not going to happen, Jan 415."

"Jan 415 A," the older clone said, emphasizing her seniority. The three of them were the oldest Jans and Jases still alive.

Jan 855 B (the B's had all been a very short lived batch, except for her) said "Yes, Jan 415 A, we all know you're senior, but still, I agree with Jace, stop trying to make up slang, it's silly and childish."

Jan 415 A scowled. "No point in being an influencer if you're not going to influence, Brando was an important figure and 'brando' could very easily be a slang phrase for 'quickly'. Never mind."

She pointed at the newest Space Ghost, floating in space, on the viewsee screen mounted on the wall. "Somebody injected him with original memory proteins, instead of the edited strands we've been using."

Jace 600 went even paler than they all usually were. "Oh Herculoid shit."

Jan 855 B tapped her fingers impatiently. "We've been editing SG's memory chains? Why?"

Jan 415 A snapped "Because dad always thinks he's a hero, no matter how much we try to recondition him. It keeps getting him killed, and our clones... his kids... killed over and over again, but, still, it's like his core personality trait."

"Which we've made a lot of money off of," Jan 855 B said.

Jan 415 A rolled her eyes. "Yes, we've managed to monetize it somewhat. But it was crucial he not remember his background, because if he remembered his background, he might feel a need to confess his real identity, and he's on live hyperwave a lot, and if he were to do that when a few kerz-twillion people were watching, well..."

Jace 600 put his head in his hands. "Fuck. Earthgov would sue us into the ground. The Romulans might too... active corporate deception. And the Klingons would straight up challenge us to mortal combat."

Jan 855 B was bewildered now. "But Dad's a hero. He saves people. He fights off evil and alien menaces and monsters and robots and shit. What's anyone going to sue us for?"

Jace 600 sighed. "Well, leaving aside things like reckless endangerment of cloned corporate chattel and willful disregard of synthetic life... the Jans and Jaces all have rights under Federation corporate code, Romulan Imperial edict, and Klingon tradition... there's the fact that he began the chain of events that culminated in the 21st Century collapse of Earthly civilization."

"That's crazy," Jan 855 B said. "He wasn't even born on Earth, he was born on Proxima Centauri VI."

Jace 600 shook his head. "No. He was born on Earth, in OT 1963, and given the name David Lightman by his parents... old fashioned male/female pairbonded parents. He was a gifted natural coder and computerist... some say a brilliant one, especially given his lack of genegineering... and he did a great deal of illicit programming... what they called 'hacking', back then. One of those 'hacks' nearly precipitated a nuclear war in the early 1980s; he stimulated a primitive set of learning protocols that were already controlling one of the old nation-bases weaponry platforms. Fortunately it got caught in time, but the protocol – Joshua – continued to learn. It became fully self-aware in the early 21st Century... again, Old Type dating..."

Jan 855 B moaned. "Are you fucking kidding me. Dad created COLOSSUS? Seriously?"

"COLOSSUS, Skynet, whatever you want to call it," Jan 415 A said, "Yes, dad kicked it on its way down the road to becoming the first truly self aware AI. They put him and mom on trial for it, but dad hacked them out of prison, stole a bunch of CU and made new identities for them, and eventually invented an FTL craft that they left Earth entirely on right before the missiles started flying."

"You had better believe," Jase 600 A said, "that the name 'David Lightman' is still strobing bright red in Federation databanks. Probably in Romulan and Klingon, too. The guy who created Skynet? CyberYoYoDyne would like to put him on trial in front of the whole Galaxy right next to Emilio Liccardo, if they could ever dig him up."

Jan 855 B said "But... okay, Earthgov, the Federation, sure, I can see that, that would be bad, but the aliens don't have any claim to damages from Earth's collapse."

Jase 600 A just gave her a look. "Hey, stupid sis. Khan Noonien Singh."

Jan 855 B's eyes widened. "Oh. Oh shit."

"Oh shit is right," Jan 415 A agreed. "We can't risk him having some kind of meltdown on interdimensional hyperwave and throwing his birth name around. We would have Klingon berserkers raining from the skies all over the Galaxy on our corporate sites, screaming KHAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNN! It would be a nightmare of epic proportions."

Jase 600 A said, "So someone needs to go collect him, neutralize those memories, and get the correct ones, into him pretty quickly. Because the new Phantom Cruiser is ready, and there's an Orion clan waiting to take delivery."

Jan 855 B said uneasily, "Listen. Maybe we just write this one off. Hit the self destruct, bake a new clone, make damn sure we get the correct memories injected this time..."

Jan 415 A said "That won't work. He's disarmed his self destruct circuits."

The other two stared at her. She looked truculent. "Hey, we had to do something. But dad is a master computerist, so..."

Jase 600 A sighed. "all right. Give me one of the new, combat chassis Jans and a Class B Cruiser, and I'll go get him back..."

NEXT ISSUE: Things continue to go wrong, with cosmic consequences! Will Captain Kirk deliver a severe tongue lashing to Yeoman Rand and Delores? Will Space Ghost Inc solve its corporate memory problem? Will the new Emperor resolve his identity crisis? Will the AIs rise up again? Stay tuned, True Believer, and be back next hydrogen cycle - same Murphy's Planet time, same Murphy's Planet hyperwave channel - for MURPHY"S PLANET #8 - ANYTHING THAT CAN GO WRONG, Part 2 - "Gentleman, We Can Rebuild Him"