Damned Among Angels, Call Us Outlaws...
A Prestor-Jonns & Frostmantul CROSSCOSM Adventure
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
-- Carl Sagan
"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."
-- Ray Bradbury
"From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom."
-- Nikola Tesla
PART ONE
Her emotions threatened to run wild as she finally was able to draw in a deep breath. She steeled herself against the ear-splitting clamor of the collapsing bulkheads in the aftermath of the two ships colliding. She rose unsteadily from the bowl of her transit-hop crater in the cracked and splintered deck of the Spinship's interior flight housing and quickly sighted on her pursuers. Five of them, armed and furious. Uncommoner Syndicate Combat Minions in full assault armor. Gritting her teeth against the relentlessly oppressive pull of heavy gravity, she raised the paired-muzzle of her long-bore, ion-pulse rifle and fired rapidly, once , thrice, five times.
Three men went down, but the third Uncommoner Combat android-mercenary only stumbled, his exo-suit's force shield absorbing the bulk of the white-hot ion-bursts. The fourth and fifth assailants were spun around by the concussive proximity waves from the trio of impacts, their armor's reactive laminate-circuitry spewing out small fountains of bright blue sparks.
She had to reluctantly admit to herself that the plan she had developed with her partner, Ezekayal Prestor-Jonns, wasn't even close to working. Everything had quickly fallen to hell the minute they'd stepped out from the gates of the CrossCosm Terminus. Their undercover contact on this Macrodimensional Actuality-Plane had already had her cover blown and Heironniea Balo, The Magestorykken's damn Grynndevul assassin, had enlisted a team of Combat Minions, autonomous android mercenary 'bots, from alien mutant Crime Boss Agamemnon Ferroneus to intercept her and Prestor-Jonns.
Damn it, this hunt-and-chase idiocy was wasting time. The proverbial clock was ticking, counting down, Time that was rapidly metamorphosing from standard linear progression into Multiversal chiral-funneling. It was draining away between the co-planar CrossCosm worlds that were explosively intersecting at LCL points, logarithmic conjoiner loops, all around them.
Where the hell was Prestor-Jonns? This battle-torn mess of a base was the rendezvous point. Ezekayal was supposed to be waiting for her with goddamned Asher Skuld in-tow. They needed to get out of the Achaean Galaxy before the goons of Agamemnon Ferroneus' criminal "Uncommonner Syndicate" cut off their escape to Kronus Perenna Base on Jupiter's 4th moon of Callisto, in that moon's Asgard Basin impact crater. Ferroneus' team of armored hunter-killer androids wouldn't be able to survive the CrossCosm shunt out from this cosmic bubble back to regular Hum-Org space now that she and Prestor-Jonns had destroyed their ARPkronal Bridge Integerrian unit. They had to move. They couldn't let Asher Skuld fall back into the hands of the Uncommoner Syndicate. The greedy, amoral Uncommoners were going to deliver him straight to The Magestorykken and the twisted, homicidal xeno-cultists of the Church of the Almighty Toad King.
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Lords & Ladies of the M'Verse: An Ooorah Anthology
Science FictionEach of the 100 stories featured herein will be set within a Universe of the writer's creation, all being a part of a larger, shared Multiverse. Writers have free reign to tell the story they wanna' tell and providing...
