Damned Among Angels, Call Us Outlaws...

A Prestor-Jonns & Frostmantul CROSSCOSM Adventure

by JosephArmstead

"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.

A flicker of movement to her left, about fifteen meters out at the 10 o'clock position... She unhesitatingly whipped the ion-pulse rifle in that direction and let fly another pair of sizzling energy bursts. She was rewarded by the thud of a body awkwardly striking the deck of the Spinship.

Time Paladin O'Shyrra Frostmantul, a Captain in the service of the "Dimensional Cosmos Hierarchal SpaceTime Force", or more commonly "the DSTF", didn't want to die in the fiery wreckage of a plummeting orbital base in the skies of the planet Olympagnia V, in MNGC 980-Sigma, better known to Multiverse cartographers as "the Achaean Galaxy".

Overall, the concept of death itself was only slightly troubling to her. She was an Arachnaevulpor, a non-human, alter-Terran life form and her kind did not so much "die" in the familiar human sense as enter a lengthy state of molecular torpor. Their societal structure was referred to as "The Assemblage" and, inasmuch they were a race of species-specific telepaths, meaning they only communicated telepathically with their own kind, the Arachnaevulpors did not identify themselves individually by use of names since they had no use for tracing their familial histories. They adopted the idea of distinctive identifying titles when they came into contact with human beings. Arachnaevulpors were civilized, intelligent insectoids, large geometrid worms with dual sets of arthropodite claw arms, from the enormous Ithaca Chasma trench on Saturn's ice moon of Tethys. As such, they could not normally live in oxygen-rich atmospheres nor could they exist in atmospheric pressures above one-third Terran Earth atmospheres (where one atmosphere was equal to 14.7 psi, so one-third a Terran atmosphere would equal 4.9 psi). So, to explore space and interact with the humans who shared their solar system, Arachnaevulpors wore mobile, intricately-articulated, robotic "exoframe skinsuits" when off-moon, away from Tethys. The skinsuits were bulletproof and knife blade-resistant as well as flame-proof and insulated from electromagnetic exposure. The exoframe skeletons beneath the epidermal exteriors of the skinsuits were muscularly as strong as three top-tier human athletes and reacted neuro-kinetically twice as quickly. O'Shyrra Frostmantul's artificial human female body was an articulated, 3D bio-printed, Vitruvian (Da Vinci-idealized morphological architecture), raven-tressed shell some 175 centimeters tall. She was, in many ways, immune to the most common forms of death encountered by biological humans.

Blaster fire from ion-based particle weaponry was, however, a major exception.

She needed Prestor-Jonns, her fellow Time Paladin, to get his hyper-muscular, gray-skinned ass in gear...

~~~~~

It had begun with a cosmic accident and then the madness had further blossomed with the invention of Von Houttengael's Quantum Injectors.

Located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter, outside the mapped scope of the Star Lanes' Supply Paths to and from Earth, Earth's Luna Major Base and of Mars' Nova Colony, Astro-Galactic Object Gurysmenko-Addison 615, a comet with a forward nucleus some nine kilometers in diameter, exploded. That explosion released a veritable mega-tsunami of highly-energetic, positronic heavy-nuclei radiation that attached itself to a titanium-vanadium space boulder the size of a football stadium and created a wormhole. Still referred to as "G-A 615", that boulder gravitationally anchored itself in space to the impact point where the energies from the explosion were still dancing and regenerating some seventeen years later.

During the latter six of those seventeen years, human beings had explored through unmanned space probes automated by artificial intelligences. On Earth, fascinated by the unprecedented celestial event, astrophysicist and astronautical engineer Doctor Edvard Alarick Von Houttengael developed and finalized his "Hinge-State Redshift Theory" which led to the creation of Von Houttengael's Quantum Injectors. In the most basic of terms, the Event Horizon surrounding G-A 615 could be used as a "door", an opening through and into the multi-faceted cosmic continuum beyond normal Einsteinian Space. With the utilization of the Quantum Injectors, positioned in geo-static orbit about the wormhole core, Humankind could travel to different dimensions, to different TimeSpace Planes of Reality.

Explorers actually observed what could and would happen to human civilization when moments both large and small in history were altered or omitted. They encountered colonies practicing strange human social structures and saw frightening mass migrations of advanced human populations across Space and Time where the idea of "Humanity" had gradually been redefined. The explorers were exposed to unified world empires where the concept of organic human Death was a hypothetical concept pondered by cannibalistic immortals. Entire galaxies were born and then died in the space of a dozen human heartbeats. Intelligent creatures made from living stone lived immobile, millenia-long lives, rooted in place, in the shadow of volcanoes thrice the size of Mount Everest, dreaming of the day when a torrential volcanic lava pool would overflow and burn them into soothing non-existence.

Things and places unimagined were suddenly revealed and a thousand longstanding assumptions and expectations about the nature of Existence were challenged.

The path to the Multiverse had been discovered... and it was then that a large, uncomprehending, reactionary section of Humankind lost its collective mind.

~~~~~

Asher Skuld watched Prestor-Jonns walk away from the downed carcasses of the Uncommoner Combat 'droids and Toadie-cultists with a sickened feeling that brought bile up into his throat. The fallen synthetic hunter-killer mercenaries looked as though they'd been caught in a mechanical hammer-press. Their body armor was broken and ruptured, their flesh was bruised and abraded, and, as was clearly illustrated by the awkward, appalling angles at which their limbs lay, their bones were badly broken. They hadn't been stopped or put down so much as punished. Blood was still dripping off from the big man's armored fists as he walked back to where Skuld had taken cover from the ion-pulse fire of the initial assault.

Skuld could tell from the big man's body language that the Terran-born, excommunicated former priest was seriously pissed off. Skuld, a part mutant-cyborg/part gene-grown contractor in the criminal underworld, was familiar with men like Prestor-Jonns, even though the Time Paladin was, even among others of his special breed, unique. He knew men like him to be the kind of stoic, naturally reticent, solitary knight-errant that smart people knew enough not to make angry. Prestor-Jonns wasn't a politician or a negotiator, neither a villain or a saint, nor was he particularly heroic or morally self-righteous, but he definitely was possessed of a personal code of conduct that did not tolerate or allow for that which he considered Evil to flourish. The Uncommoner Syndicate was in possession of a detailed dossier on the 'Lipse Dweller from Mars' Phobos-Unity Orbital Colony space station that mentioned his past life as a former ecclesiastical Vicar of "The Order of Octovaryus", in the MetaCosmic Veneration of the Hominine Apostecarium, better known as the "8th Unity". Prestor-Jonns had been the Vicar who'd stood up to the tyranny and homicidal chaos perpetrated by the Inner Belt Asteroid Pirates of the Terran System's circumstellar disc against the general populace of the Phobos Colony.

And doing that had required he kill quite a few people. The big man had done it without hesitation or remorse. A bastardized modernization of the Old Testament Bible's Book of Remembrance, specifically from Malachi 3:18, "Know Thou the difference between the Righteous and the Wicked" was a credo deeply ingrained in his personality. The Hominine Apostecarium had therefore been left with little choice other than to excommunicate him -- the solar system's government of the Terran AstroUnion could not tolerate blatant vigilantism, even from well-meaning holy men. But that same streak of righteous fury would eventually serve the blond, pale gray skinned, heavy-muscled, 196 centimeter-tall philosopher, mathematician and war historian quite well as an agent of the Dimensional Cosmos Hierarchal SpaceTime Force.

Pursued as they had been by murderous acolytes of the Church of the Almighty Toad King, that fury had certainly been central to helping keep Skuld alive. Over the past thirty-eight hours as they'd crossed from one dimensional universal platform to another, Prestor-Jonns and his alter-human partner, the Frostmantul woman, had fought pitched battles against both the cultists and the criminal underworld in their effort to get Skuld back to the AstroUnion.

The Church...

"Tomorrow's Only a Dream"... T - O - A - D. The Church was based around the premise that the Multiverse and all the separate Reality Spheroids, or "pocket universes", comprising it would eventually, inevitably collapse under the weight of its own complexity because the very concept of a "Multiverse" was averse to biological sentient, civilized Life's tendency towards "philopatry". Philopatry was the tendency of an organism to stay in or habitually return to a particular geophysical or geotemporal area. The causes of philopatry were considered to be numerous, but natal philopatry, where animals return to their birthplace to breed, was the most well known and most documented such cause.

So it was because humanoid sentient Life had partially rejected TimeSpace Philopatry by abandoning their parent universe, due to Humankind's newly-discovered ability to travel among the Reality Spheroids of the Multiverse through technological means, by use of Von Houttengael's Quantum Injectors, a major outcome of these new nomadic, multi-cosmic human migrations was the creation of an increasing species-wide genetic divergence and, ultimately, Alter-Speciation.

Without genetic exchange, geographically/geotemporally and reproductively isolated populations had begun to undergo genetic drift, straying from their evolutionary templates. This was counter to the "Laws of Manifest Taxonomic Fidelity" as outlined in the Toadies' bible, more formally called "The Scrolls of Cladogenesis".

The heat of Prestor-Jonn's low baritone growl pulled Skuld from out his reverie. "'Toadies', who in hell would willingly call themselves 'toadies'? God, but I hate these bastards. At least those murderous psychos from the Uncommoner Syndicate have still managed to keep their self-respect... toadies."

The Time Paladin walked by Skuld and reached down to retrieve his non-cleared personal weapon-of-choice, a silvery-blue, one and a quarter meters-long, curved energy blade with a design that appeared descended from the lineage of a Nepalese talwar sword. He slid his gauntleted fist inside the protective basket-hilt guard which also served to house the weapon's power-level controls. The surface of the sword's long blade was inscribed with microcomputer circuit-board patterns, enwrapped in a durable protective transparent shell that ended just above the sweep of the blade's keen cutting edge. That edge was made from coherent light: it was a projected arc from an Ytterbium fiber laser. That finely sharpened and enhanced razor of light glowed a frosty white.

Skuld had seen Prestor-Jonns wield the blade in battle. It had simultaneously cut right through a protective magnetic repulsor-shield and a trauma-armor plackart worn over a kevlar hauberk as if the battle armor were flimsy cardboard. The weapon was clearly architected for an advanced level of efficient butchery.

And it took a certain kind of a man to wield it.

Even though the dour Time Paladin was protecting him, Skuld found himself more than a little uneasy in Prestor-Jonns' company. After all, he hadn't killed the team of assassins lying on the floor with his energy sword – he'd used his powerful, Chromium-vanadium steel encased fists instead.

"You ready? We need to hustle if we're going to make the rendezvous with Agent Frostmantul before the next group of hunters finds us," Prestor-Jonns said. It was clear from his tone that he didn't at all care what Skuld's answer would be. They were going to be on the move regardless. "Make sure you already have your phase shock-pistol drawn and powered to kill this time around. It's time you started pulling your weight."

The corridor in which they stood suddenly tilted as the Spinship rocked from port to starboard, the hull superstructure shuddering, visibly vibrating from the abrupt onset of stress. The two men could smell and taste a wave of smoke billowing down the passageway. Klaxons started ringing as the vessel's damage containment computer 'net issued integrity alarms.

Prestor-Jonns looked up through his faceplate's visor at the inner bulkhead along the corridor. It was obvious he didn't like what he was seeing. "This thing isn't going to last much longer. Let's go!"

PART TWO

The planet Olympagnia V, home of the "Grynndevul" race and the extra-dimensional "Ensyddions", was the fifth orbital body from the Red Sub-Giant star "Pahtrai" in the solar system referred to as the Peloponnezyan Sextet. Olympagnia V was not a very welcoming place for DSTF operatives or even for human beings in general. It was a Dark Zone. Dark Zones were places where the law enforcement capabilities of the DTSF were limited to "advisory" statuses allowing the agency and its operatives to work with the planet's local police and security forces. There were no extradition agreements existing between Olympagnia V and the Terran AstroUnion, so DTSF Away Missions were not allowed to physically retrieve suspected criminals and anti-human seditionists and terrorists without express permission from either the Grynndevul or the Ensyddion Justice & Safety Ministries.

Olympagnia V, in the Multiversal locale of Achaean Galaxy MNGC 980-Sigma, (where "MNGC" was an acronym for Multiversal New Galactic Catalogue, a catalogue of Interstellar Macrodimensional Plane deep-cosmos objects compiled by the Astronomical Encyclopedists & Cartographers Confederacy), had only recently ratified its treaties with the Terran AstroUnion, those treaties being contractual covenants covering recognition of the planet as a sovereign celestial entity, political non-aggression pacts, mercantile-focused trade agreements, and limited industrial technology trade accords. The planet had not agreed that any official from Terran-human Einsteinian Space was permitted to take a suspected criminal offworld.

From her Planar Horizon monitoring station at the Veilwarp MV Crosscosm Station named "Magellan-Janus", Vykerrina Goettyea, a Praudygeean Away Team Mission Controller, cursed under her breath. A Praudygeean was a cybernetically-enhanced, long-range telepath and telekinetic, capable of following the monitor-beacons implanted into the tactical body armor of Away Team agents. She was actively counting down the minutes until she'd be able to again hook into Trans-Horizon field-telemetry allowing her to physically track the locations of DSTF Paladins O'Shyrra Frostmantul and Ezekayal Prestor-Jonns. If the Grynndevuls or the Ensyddions decided the Paladins had broken any laws regarding their case work, then DSTF Mission Control wouldn't directly be able to render them any aid staying out from an alien prison in another dimension or in getting the hell out of that multiversal location and back home.

Vykerrina Goettyea wasn't going to let shit like that go down on her watch. She was bringing her people home, goddamn it.

Vykerrina's DSTF Ops-ACTINT (Actionable Intelligence) superiors were already fielding repeated stern requests for active SitRep statuses on agents-in-the-field from Olympagnia V's Ambassadorial Consulate of government law divisions. They knew something was up. They were aware of criminal Uncommoner Syndicate operations in their own sectors of MV Space and they knew most of that activity originated from or was directed from within the Terran AstroUnion.

What they didn't know was that Prestor-Jonns and Frostmantul had unofficial on-site support from an Insider, a double-agent of sorts who was an unequivocating enemy of the Church of the Almighty Toad and sympathetic to CrossCosm human interaction. That insider was an operative inside the Ensyddion's Special Protectorate Administration of Order. His name was Urzon Syreth. And, once several years Earth-time in the past, in her Academy days, he had been the Praudygeean's mentor and alter-human tradecraft instructor.

And that was a good thing. Prestor-Jonns and Frostmantul were going to need all the help they could get keeping Asher Skuld out of the murderous hands of Cearul Ulster Validossyan, the mega-billionaire better known as The Magestorykken. The Church was using Validossyan's criminal network and illegal technological resources in their efforts to capture or kill Skuld...

But Urzon Syreth, one of the strangest, most deadly law officers she'd ever met next to Ezekayal Prestor-Jonns, wasn't about to let that happen.

And neither was she.

Vykerrina mentally tapped into the CrossCosm data flow and initialized a session layer sub-presentation connection, reading live covert data transmissions streaming across the secured and crypto-coded SIGINT frequencies. It took a handful of very tense moments while she surreptitiously surfed the coherent, interplanetary digital micro-signals...

There. Back on-line. There they were. And it looked like they were in very serious trouble.

~~~~~

The high, keening squeal swiftly turned into a hollow hiss as the Ensyddion CrossCosm Constable slowly withdrew the hook-end of his Reaper-scythe sword from the punctured facial visor of the armored Uncommoner Syndicate trooper. The dead mercenary flopped limply to the deck, his las-rifle dropping from his lifeless fingers to clatter onto the metal flooring, and his body joined that of the other three now-inanimate hired killers who had failed in the pursuit of their prey.

"This is the first and the last time I will take a life for you," the raw-boned and gangly alien law officer said past his clenched fangs, his glowing eyes narrowed into downward-tilted triangular slits. "This extremity of violence is a human thing, a chaotic side effect of your presence in realms where you do not belong and are not welcome. The Special Protectorate Administration of Order defends the lives of sentient beings, alien or mutant or human, and the Oath we take as Sword-Priests will only tolerate the killing of another being when it is in the defense of others."

"Surely you can see that this wasn't our intent," O'Shyrra Frostmantul said, her argument both respectful and restrained. She was leaning against the inner bulkhead wall, quick-charging her weapon, standing next to a towering stack of interlocking plastic crates containing an assortment of ship's engine electrical components. "We were trying to prevent trouble. Time Paladins aren't soldiers. We, like you, are protectors, servants to the Greater Good. We came here on a very carefully and strictly-defined mission to retrieve a renegade, amoral criminal insurrectionist..."

"You came here because your undeclared war against the dual territorial expansions of the Uncommoner Syndicate and the Church of the Almighty Toad challenged the Terran AstroUnion's authority here on Olympagnia V. You are all fighting for ownership and control of territory that isn't rightfully yours," the Ensyddion law officer said with cutting bitterness. He leaned down closer to Frostmantul and, in his anger, the alien accent of his native tongue shading the phonems of Earth English, said, "Such arrogance. Whatever made you think we wanted ANY of your kind here?"

"Look, you, the proverbial genie is already out of the bottle. We can't undo First Contact between our respective species. And this isn't the time or place for this debate. Powerful, evil men like The Magestorykken, do not care about your politics nor about your nationalistic or racial purity. Men like that just want whatever it is they can take from you and your kind, moral and social consequences be damned," Frostmantul said harshly, her patience with the Ensyddion police man's viewpoint at an end. "The Magestorykken is your enemy, not the Terran AstroUnion and not us. Ultimately, it is to both your benefit and ours that he doesn't get his hands on Asher Skuld."

The grim, vulturine figure, cloaked in an ankle-length, long-sleeved kaftan of midnight-blue with jade green piping along the shoulders and arms and down the sides, shrugged discourteously. The sapphire blue-skinned Ensyddion was, like most his kind, a being with a narrow and elongated humanoid skeletal structure topped by an elliptical skull that held a pointed-featured, elfin face with slanted serpent-like yellow eyes. His cloak and thobe flowed in languid, liquidic ripples as his gaunt body moved. His torso was encased on the outside of his robes in a bronze-hued, sculpted-plate vest, similar to that of a Roman-style Praetorian Cuirass, and across that was a web-harness holding a long-barreled energy pistol in a holster. Standing next to O'Shyrra Frostmantul's sleek, athletically-idealized, sculpted form, he appeared to be a fierce representative from a barely civilized, technologically-unsophisticated culture. In fact, the truth was quite the opposite. The Ensyddion culture was highly technologically advanced and adept, several decades beyond the cutting edge borders of Terran AstroUnion sciences.

"You play the role well. The words seem to come easily. But don't portray yourself to be one of them. You only appear as they do because of the external skeletal sheathe you are forced to wear. The truth is that you are even LESS a human than I," Urzon Syreth said.

"How polite of you to point that out," Frostmantul replied. "Nonetheless, we need to work together to rendezvous with my partner, Inspector-Sergeant Prestor-Jonns. Asher Skuld is with him. They're both somewhere on this Spinship and there's a large, heavily-armed killsquad of Toadies in pursuit."

Urzon Syreth sighed and shook his head dolefully, staring down at the deck. "If that is what we must do, then that is what we must do. Do you have any way of isolating his current position or his last location?"

O'Shyrra Frostmantul nodded and waved the Ensyddion CrossCosm Constable in the direction of the sixth level mezzanine, towards which she'd already begun to jog.

~~~~~

The Spinship, a dimension-hopping freighter, had originally been commissioned to carry a cargo of space platform building materials for a planned upgrade of the MVO, (multiversal-oceanic), CrossCosm Terminus Base's Omnidirector Antennae. Some five hundred and twenty meters long and thirty stories tall, the massive octagonal transit-craft had been constructed by a joint venture between the AstroUnion and the fledgling League of Multiversal Planar Nations. Asher Skuld, trying to escape his pursuers from Terran Einsteinian TimeSpace, had hidden aboard the vessel not realizing his physical body's Planar Vibrational Engrams betrayed his location to anyone familiar with CrossCosm tracking telemetry. He could not disguise himself as a native inhabitant of Interstellar Macrodimensional Plane 1322, a.k.a. the Achaean Galaxy of MNGC 980-Sigma. So, in very short order after having come to the realization he was no longer in standard human space, the Uncommoner Syndicate and the murderous Toadies were able to track him through to the Veilwarp Terminus on Olympagnia V. To make Skuld's futile attempts at stealth even less successful, the fifty-five hundred person crew of the Spinship "Kyroniqqa" had all been forced into shore-leave planetside because of a radiation leak in the ship's antiproton fusion engines. Skuld wound up being the only organic being aboard the Spinship and was thus, easy to find. Luckily, Ezekayal Prestor-Jonns had already been doggedly following his trail.

But when the embattled pair had reached the Spinship's MVO-Arc Viewer Observatory on the sixth deck level, none of that mattered.

Waiting for them were a team of five Uncommoner Syndicate contract killers and eight Toadie mercenaries led by The Magestorykken's most trusted and experienced assassin, the sadistic Grynndevul named Heironneia Balo.

"My old friend, Ezekayal Prestor-Jonns, DSTF Inspector-Sergeant, I should have known," the Grynndevul, a red-fleshed, eyeless, reptile-humanoid said tauntingly. Dressed in a shimmering metallic olive tunic, Heironnea Balo was a walking nightmare of morphological and taxonomic paradoxes. His deep voice sounded like a hundred fat wasps angrily buzzing in unison, caught inside a glass jar. In his six-fingered fist, he openly carried an Incinerator-class, Macro-beam hand cannon. "The AstroUnion lawdogs at Kronus Perenna Base would hardly trust anyone else to survive a gauntlet like the one you've run. Where's your insectoid partner, that delectable Arachnaevulpor parading about in her mannequin skinsuit?"

"Over here, Grynndevul, over here with a little something to warm your heart in the cold deep of space."

Balo tilted his eyeless face, featureless except for a wide scythe-shaped mouthful of interlocked, crisscrossed, dagger-like fangs, up and to his right. From there he could, through use of the image-sensing ocular transducers in his skull, perceive Frostmantul and her long-bore, ion-pulse rifle.

He also noticed the cheerless, cadaverous specter of Urzon Syreth crouched a couple of dozen steps to Frostmantul's left. The Ensyddion CrossCosm Constable had leveled the sights of his own energy pistol down at Balo and his assault team.

"Oh my, and an Ensyddion marshal, too. How lovely," he hummed nastily. He paused a moment, as if entertaining a pleasingly pleasant daydream, before saying, "What do you say we all act like professionals? Surrender that Dual'Genist flesh-trash Skuld to me and we can postpone the settling of old accounts until a later, more opportune, time. This isn't personal. It's business. Agammemnon Ferronea's business. And that meatsack Skuld isn't worth further inconvenience to any of us."

"Not going to happen, Balo, and you know it," Prestor-Jonns said, his voice polar cold.

Balo nodded diffidently, almost as if he were bored. He slowly raised his empty, black-taloned hand and gestured. The shooting started instantaneously.

~~~~~

It was nearly four hours Earth Terran-time, before the AstroUnion rescue cruiser, an armored frigate, pulled alongside the hulk of the damaged, irradiated Spinship. The immense vessel was in position-synch anchor-orbit hovering nineteen hundred meters to port of and four hundred thirty meters above the Olympagnia V aerial CrossCosm Terminus.

Prestor-Jonns and Frostmantul were met by a small squad of Terran AstroUnion Star Marines and a trio of high-ranking representatives of the Dimensional Cosmos Hierarchal SpaceTime Force. The two exhausted Time Paladins surrendered a semi-conscious Asher Skuld over to a Star Marine Medivac team who, after treating the seared mess of his particle beam mutilated shoulder, starlifted him to the med-bay of the rescue cruiser. Urzon Syreth had decided it was best for all if his involvement remained a secret and chose to disappear from the battlezone before the Star Marines appeared. Wing-Commander Waldvern Wellingham and his Recovery & Retrieval Team grimly surveyed the battlezone that had formerly been the center-hull dock's loading hangar aboard the Spinship.

"This was not what we saw as the most optimal mission execution in this situation," the Wing-Commander, a short, thickish middle-aged naval space officer, said to Prestor-Jonns. "You're Time Paladins, not soldiers. This was supposed to be under-the-radar, low profile. This ain't low profile. You two tore this place all to hell."

"Sometimes police work, even in peace times, get a little messy, sir. The situation unexpectedly expanded a little beyond the prescribed mission parameters," Prestor-Jonns said diplomatically.

"Really, you think, Inspector-Sergeant?"

For the moment, Prestor-Jonns thought better of any further response.

"So anybody want to tell me WHY Asher Skuld was so damn important?" the Wing-Commander asked.

O'Shyrra Frostmantul answered. "One of the great mysteries of recent times centers around the founding of the Church of the Almighty Toad. There's a lot of recorded history concerning ecclesiastical development, socio-political impact and academic doctrines, but nothing specific about the actual founding of the religion, where it came from and how it spread among the colonies of the AstroUnion or even the name of its current leader."

"So?"

"So its very secrecy gives the Church a large part of its power. Not knowing who the Man-at-the-High-Altar is, who the Great Celestial Messenger is, makes this upstart religion mythic, larger than Life. Some would say larger than the Terran AstroUnion itself. So Asher Skuld knows who the head of the Church is. He knows the Grand Pontiff's name. More than that, Skuld knows that the Uncommoner Syndicate knows, too. The underworld legions of The Magestorykken apparently do not want that information shared with anyone."

Wing-Commander Wellingham drew in a deep breath. "Is this 'Man-At-the-High Altar', as you call him, a human being?"

"We don't know for sure. But Asher Skuld knows... and they know he knows and they know we have him," Prestor-Jonns said.

"Damn. This thing is just starting, isn't it?" the senior commissioned Star Marine officer said.

"I'd say that was an affirmative, sir," Prestor-Jonns said. "And that ain't good."

Wing-Commander Wellingham pursed his lips and stared off into the distance, eyes resting on the CrossCosm Terminus floating in the clouds.

"We were supposed to have come here as Angels", he thought, "But instead we're just Men, outlaws who have broken the sky."

THE END