Uriok Be Damned to His Dark, Frozen Hell...!

Inertial gravity was failing and the massive vessel was beginning to tilt dangerously to port as it lost stability along its horizontal axis. As the stabilizer-thrusters failed, uneven internal loading had caused the ship to list to one side even as it was sliding along a navigational path forty-five degrees off course.

He couldn't smell the smoke billowing from the half dozen or so electrical fires he could see ravaging the compartment and the outer corridor and that was a bad thing. The grinding, vibrating rasp coming from the atmospheric circulatory system's air scrubbers was tremendously loud and alarmingly asynchronous, its usually monotonous regularity gone since critical mechanical damage resulted in climature spewing rapidly out a hole in the fore section of the ship.

The lights illuminating the ship's interior flickered in spastic bursts as a series of minor brown-outs ran through the electrical system. Out the corners of his vision, he noticed people running back and forth from out the pitched battle. They'd begun tripping over the dead bodies of crew members littering the deck as the rocking, shuddering vessel lost its horizontal true.

The crew were horribly frightened, panicked, and driven to paranoid over-reaction as they'd realized, too late, that the insurrection against the First Speaker had accidentally freed the Beast. The Aingyll, Zahmmael, had escaped from his prison and was running amok throughout the craft.

They had unintentionally unleashed a homicidal juggernaut.

A sudden muscular convulsion gripped him and he fought not to vomit blood all over himself.

He cursed his foul luck and the effects of even worse timing. This wasn't supposed to have happened.  Since the start of the insurgency counter-action, the Second Speaker had lost eleven members of his personal executive services squad along with the Engineering Security Sub-Lieutenant, the Network Communications & Signals Commander, the Third Ship's Mate and the Deck Department Boatswain. These were major negative impacts to his attempt at retaining a grip on command order in the aftermath of the revolt. Meanwhile, the Principal Overseer, commonly known as the First Speaker, still had control over the majority of the Command Staff, not including the Engineering section and Calculatory Node & Access Authorization Management staff, and they had both checkmated one another in vying for mastery over the Deck Forces Security Brigades. The Ship's Captaincy Counsel had declared themselves independent of either faction and were openly calling for loyal crew members and passenger citizenry to help quell the revolt, citing the ancient Genus High-Doctrine stating it was forbidden for Ascendent Integernarians to engage in violent insurrection while aboard extra-orbital Colonizer ships downspace from the nomadic rogue planet Bayeshenibal, the artificially-constructed Nebulancer homeworld.

The plan, although hastily developed, had been logical and methodical in its construction. It was the execution of that plan that had fallen down. People had not done what they'd been tasked to do. They hadn't properly committed to their roles in the greater scheme of things. The Second Speaker, known as The Common Lector, and his cronies hadn't planned a mere mutiny --- they had planned a revolution and no one had truly been ready for the fallout. Mistakes had stupidly been made due to hidden agendas, mistrust, cowardice and betrayal. The coup d'etat had fallen in on itself, crumbling into chaos and murder. Things weren't supposed to have fallen apart like they had.

He wasn't supposed to be leaning against a wall, trembling, with a las-blaster clenched in one fist as he bled from a shoulder wound that had immobilized his other arm. That wound did not trouble him nearly so much, though, as the ragged rip across the lower right-hand quadrant of his abdomen. Debris shrapnel from a small explosion had caught him in the wrong place at the wrong time...

The artificial governor nexus that regulated the propulsion systems of the tubular Nebulancer vessel had ceased providing any forward thrust. The navigational system and power nacelle feed-generators were partially offline and under duress as the craft's Guidance & Piloting crew battled one another for mobile flight control.

And internal gravity had begun to flicker on and off, wreaking havoc on both sides fighting the mutinous rebellion.

Even though the ship sat safely cloaked inside an Interval Blister that masked their energy signature and optical image in TimeSpace, the Nebulancer craft was still vulnerable to detection by the Qaan'Rai's mammoth, invading mega-shell slidestream supercarrier. They were underneath it, barely grazing the topmost minaret tips of Lobarth Ceryndum as they drifted in the skyzone above the city, caught in the coldness of the saucer's shadow. There was no question that once Helmstrype knew of their presence, he would mercilessly crush them like the comparative insects they were.

The Second Speaker rallied his thoughts to fend off surrendering to a wave of growing panic and despair.

His weary gaze cast down at the metal floor of the deck where he first thought that he saw his own shadow in the winking flare of broken light from the ceiling, but his mind quickly registered that what he was looking into was a hole vaguely shaped like a melting human... In the shadows of its convulsing depths, he could see flashes of his own chronological history, optical animations of nonconsecutive episodic Time, periods of recent Past mixing with spasms of an Alternative Present, flowing together sluggishly like melted wax across a thin veneer of Reality. He was becoming Unmoored in Time.

The TimeSpace continuity-field attached to and enveloping the Nebulancer's Generation Cruiser was disintegrating.  The vast TimeSpace continuity-field attached to and enveloping the Nebulancer's Generation Cruiser was disintegrating. The Nebulancer vessel would structurally devolve and desiccate, the TimeSpace corruption infecting the ship and its crew and moving through their physical matter like a hyperspace cancer. The effect would render all their corporeal mass etherically brittle, losing electrovaletic contiguousness and molecular density, until, like a ghost from memory, they would all would fade away into NonBeing.

No.

Gods Be Damned, they were Nebulancers! They were better than this! They could not allow their story to end this way!

He heard a deep, ragged-edged roar and the sounds of horrified screaming echoing from down the long, serpentine corridor. The deck rocked from a brief series of percussive thuds. Bodies falling, thrown against the bulkhead like dolls. Time was getting short, very short indeed.

He knew that sound. The brutish Aingyll, Zahmmael, was stalking down that corridor, hunting his prey... seeking vengeance.

Stubbornly, he drew himself erect and prepared his weaponry. He would yet prevail. He was the Common Lector of the Nebulancers and no Beast of the Void, no matter how powerful, would lay him low this day...

                                                                                   ***

An irate and indignant male voice was bellowing at top volume, its owner, a face lost in a surging crowd, demanding explanations from an unperceived, mysterious authority he assumed to be in control. His life had been hijacked from him. He needed to know why. He didn't get any answers. No one was going to explain anything. The simple truth of things was that, presently, there was no one 'in control'. He was a disposable pawn awakened on the board of a game he didn't have any hope of understanding.

And if he was lucky, he might live out the rest of the day.

The city's streets had begun to fill with a steady flow of the confused, the angry, the frightened and the violent -- the human population of Lobarth Ceryndum had been suddenly and rudely awakened from the prisons of their enforced mesmeric torpor. A great many of them had trouble remembering their own names and who they were. They were weak, dirty, hungry, and fearful that whatever force had torn them away from their normal lives could and would do so again at a moment's notice.

They didn't know what had happened to them or why. But they knew that somewhere out there, amid the shadows cast by the city's towers and high-rise hulks, there lurked an enemy too powerful to fight.

They didn't know how long it had been since they'd become trapped within the psychic confines of their dreaming state. Family connections, friendships, romances, and personal ambitions were all mislaid, missed and obscured. The passage of Time was lost to them and they could no longer gauge where they were, or at what point they were, in their lives.

The most obvious, and most horrific, thing of which they could all be sure was that a swarming, hostile army of Manifold Predators was on the loose and trying to kill them.

In the middle of that roiling turmoil, Keeshura Pylott, Neuronia Singulareus and Poli'Artta Ranzireth were heatedly brawling with a bloodthirsty mass of armored, super-strong foes. The trio cautiously wove their way through an onrushing, howling crowd, desperately keeping their attention focused on separating the city's innocent citizens from the cadre of callous and remorseless killers tracking them. Their forward momentum, though, since escaping Fellmanghul's custody, had degenerated into a confusing and laborious slog.

After having had a frighteningly long break in communications with The Glide, Pylott was again able to access the orbital shiftship's scan-link computer network and pull up a map of the local area's topological landscape. The ship's data network had no historical reference-framework upon which the map's imagery could resolve into specific details like street names and building addresses, but it was able to supply the Away Team directional attributes, relational geometry and spatial elevations. The map was appeared as a miniaturized optical overlay onto her helmet interior's projection monitor.

Pulsating electrovalent blasts erupting from a chest-mounted pulse-cannon pulverized the stony forward façade of a nearby building, sending a hurricane of masonry splinters slicing though the air...

"I'm not trying to be rude, BUT... if there's an actual POINT to any of this kicking and shooting and slaying stuff, NOW would be a good time to share it with me!" Poli'Artta spat out the sentence in a breathless rage. She deftly dodged the speedy charge of an attacking Manifold Predator and, managing an acrobatic mid-air spin to then spread her hook-clawed, membranous bat's wings wide, positioning herself over the muscular, bullish creature. Raising her weapon, she quickly drove down the spiked, conic head of her war-lance through and into the top of the Predator's thick skull. "You do understand that the odds are against us, right? The longer we continue to engage in this madness, the more likely we are to be killed!"

"By the Faithless Gods and Lying Devils of Totality, woman, do ALL Hexabreeds complain as much as you do?" Neuronia Syngulareus snarled hoarsely from her position in the frenzied tornado of violence in which she was centermost. Three Predators, each towering nearly a full meter over her in height and each swathed in disheveled, patchy plate-armor that barely covered their broad chests, furiously hacked and stabbed at her metal-flecked cybernetic body in a jerky, uncoordinated, inefficient assault that luckily served to work in the Argossyan Lieutenant Commander's favor. Syngulareus wielded a pair of heavy, oversized, black Gurkha Kukri-style battle-blades, parrying, blocking and counter-thrusting against the Predators' attacks with mechanically precise proficiency.

"Was that racist? Because that comment sure sounded vaguely racist to me..."

"It wasn't racist, you squawking malcontent! For Pity's Sakes, I'm a damn cyborg-anthrobot! I don't even possess the capacity for that kind of human witlessness...!"

"I don't like you, shiny-skin," Poli'Artta said snappishly. "I tried to, but it's not working."

"Would the two of you shut the HELLS up?" Pylott commanded irritably as she seized the tree-trunk-thick arm of one of her assailants and, turning her back in towards the off-balance Predator's body, launched him into what would on Earth be an impromptu judo throw. The surprised creature flew head-over-heels through the air and slammed onto its back heavily across the top of a waist-high pile of stony debris. The impact bashed its head into the rubble and knocked the breath from its lungs. The Predator quickly lost consciousness. "I've re-established connectivity and have Mune'stahr on local frequency! He's following my transponder signal through this mess to rendezvous with us. Don't get distracted! Keep these clumsy brutes at arm's length if you can."

Another in the continuing series of pulse-cannon bursts cut off any further attempt at instructions, forcing the argumentative Away Team trio to duck as the blast's explosive effects ejected a rooster's tail of dust, debris and white-hot slag above their heads.

"Would you DO something about that?" Syngulareus demanded, shaking hot masonry powder from her hair and face.

Pylott sighed and twisted her torso half around, pointed her left arm, and unleashed a barrage of electrically-charged, explosive, armor-piercing flechettes from her forearm-mounted, mini-gun wrist casing...

The Manifold Predator with the chest-mounted blaster, along with a pair of his murderous compatriots hovering threateningly nearby, screeched in agony as the rocketing swarm of flechette needles ripped through their flesh.

Falling grimly silent, Pylott breathlessly wished for Mune'stahr to get to their location soon...

                                                                                              ***

She saw past the awkwardly piled carcasses of the six Manifold Predators his ion-stream canon-blasts had shredded and flinched, looking away, then forcing herself to glance again. Three adolescents, two old men and a child, a young girl, barely of age for formal schooling..., their bodies were still twitching lying in ash and rubble, blood puddling and boiling, bubbling on the asphalt street, and he barely spared their bodies a second glance, briefly looking down at them with disdain and impatience, as if thinking "How dare they"...

Those people had died seeing her standing by his side. In their eyes, she was as guilty as he. She shared in his dishonor.

No. She was not the same as him. She was not a monster. She wouldn't have that on her conscience. This was not a thing she would tolerate, not for any crusade, not for any master, not for any price...

"Seraph". Despite the fact that nearly every civilized humanoid culture that had ever generated a Creation-Myth folklore had imagined such beings, there were certain uniquely sympathetic and similar characteristics with which they'd imbued their depictions of Divine Messengers. In the current instance, though, both the idea and the term were horribly mistaken and imprecise.

No, the term "Seraph" was entirely inappropriate, it spat in the face of any idea of a Greater Deity who employed holy servants or minions. Whatever type of being it was in whose presence she found herself, It, He, was certainly not any kind of virtuous celestial spirit, not any kind of an "Angel".

On the surface of things, it appeared that he possessed a weird and off-kilter brand of honor, an alien moral code, at his core that guided his actions, but in all practical ways that was revealed to be a sham. At his dark core, he was hollow. He was eternally, immutably angry. He was a wrathful construct, a soulless semi-autonomous, mobile weapon of enforcement designed by a pitiless, arrogant, non-human, paranoid megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur. He could not be anything more, his Creator would not allow it. This made him blissfully unaware of how unhinged and disturbed he actually was.

And, no, she could not overlook that.

There was no way she could justify what she'd seen, no way to compartmentalize the raw acts of savagery the Beast committed as the results of the circumstances of warfare, no way to work around the fact: he was a slaughterer, the merciless enforcer of a mad tyrant, a butcher. He was the very definition of a monster.

And even though her current situation had forced her to fight at his side as an ally, Ryujonin Worr knew that the Black Sun Seraph named Opthas Kandyruu had to be stopped.

As the duo had approached the interior of Lobarth Ceryndum, the winding avenues of the formerly dark and desolated city had abruptly flooded with running, stumbling, human chaos as dozens of people emerged from an enforced psychic and physical stasis. Sleepers groggily waking from a lengthy dreaming half-life of darkness and dread. Most of them were frightened to a point of near hysteria. When, as a group, they realized they were staggering and blundering through a huge hunting party of hostile Manifold Predators, they bolted, stampeding like cattle.

They weren't combatants. They didn't pose any serious threat to the cosmic ronin or to the towering Killer of Gods. It didn't matter.

Opthas Kandyruu, surrendering to his unquenchable bloodlust, killed them along with the swarming Predators he encountered, slaying anything living unfortunate enough to stray in front of his targeting sights with indiscriminate cruelty.

A roar drew her from out her brief reverie and she instinctively ducked under the artless, feral dual-fisted attack of the Predator nearest her, its unadorned, segmented and layered plate armor rustling noisily with the movement of its thick body. Ryujonin spun to her right, bringing her sword-arm across her torso in a slashing movement counter to the direction of her spin, and drove her serrated-edged bladed weapon across the beast-man's pectoral region, the blade-teeth of her curved sword ripping an ugly tear deep into the Predator's flesh and musculature. A reversed flip of the lengthy blade as she lunged further away from her attacker enabled her to side-step his charge and bury fully half the length of the blade into its abdomen. The Predator grunted, shivering, folding in on himself as death siphoned away his life force.

Another noise, to her left, the sound of heavy-footed shuffling ... the damn things wouldn't stop coming. Up close, while grappling with another of the brawny, hulking Manifold Predators, she could see past the animal cunning in the brute's glare where a glimmer of human sentience still blazed, a bright spark waiting to flare into an inferno.

Yes ..., that light, a signal of the last remaining piece of their human intelligence. This was how she would stem the tide of bloodshed, this would be how she would stop them.

With an absolute economy of movement and a minimum expenditure of physical energy, Ryujonin deftly executed a sequence of three motions that quickly disarmed and disabled the attacking Predator, incapacitating it without killing it. She held very little in the way of animosity towards the beast. The creature was not, contrary to popular belief, "evil" --- it was a slave to the native biochemical imbalance that kept its sympathetic nervous system perpetually stressed, in a state of physiological hyperarousal. Mondrum Fellmanghul's invasive telepathic prodding magnified the psychological effects severalfold, thus making the brutish, barbarian ogre more prone to explosive violence than normal. Fellmanghul concentrated the bulk of his telepathic powers of forced suggestion on the apex "bulls" in the Manifold Predator herd, allowing their Alpha roles in the Predator Pack society to influence and drive the behavior of the rest of the herd.

Ryujonin Worr was going to steal control of the Alphas away from Fellmanghul.

Not long after she'd first completed her training, following her enforced enlistment into the ranks of the Sentry Protective, the Paladin Prime of the Authoritarchs had gifted her with what she had assumed was a necklace that was a designation of rank. And although the necklace and robin's egg-sized bauble dangling from it was indeed part of her graduation ceremony, she quickly had learned the necklace was actually an amulet, an Object of Power, an ancient talisman that imbued its wearer with certain psychotemporal extrasensory gifts. Not exactly an artifact of Magycke, the amulet allowed its bearer to access and manipulate the invisible energies of the Metaflow's quantum-atomic fields. Tegryimm Xolak had called it a "macro-ectoplurgic lens". The rest of the Authoritarch Sentries she'd encountered had referred to it as a "Vahndorrak".

She didn't like using it. It made her feel even more divorced from normal humankind than she did as a cosmic ronin. Worse, using it left her feeling physically ill and weakened. But the artifact had, on prior occasions, proved itself invaluable when she'd encountered situations where she'd been forced to contend against beings who wielded mutant or aberrant extrasensory mental abilities.

She took a deep breath and, eyes open surveying the cityscape around her, Ryujonin stilled the furious reactiveness in her conscious mind, separating herself from the primacy of interpreting and reacting to external physical stimulii while withdrawing from contribution and involvement with the violence and chaos around her. Only for a moment, just a few heartbeats'-worth of passing time... She became rooted inside a single frame of TimeSpace and the Macroverse flowed around her, passing her by. Her sense of what the world was became momentarily diffuse and crystalline, as if she'd erected walls of translucent quartz around herself.

Outside those temporal walls she could sense HIM, the Vamfyrr, all-encompassing and undeniable, the raging heart of a superpsychic sinkhole. He was virtually everywhere she could perceive. His psychic presence was a hungering, lustful, and immoral cinder fueling an inferno of fear, paranoia and seething homicidal wrath. Like a maddened animal, the multiversal manifestation of his mutant mind mounted an all-out assault against her presence on the battlefield of alter-consciousness, the ectonormal horizon. Inside her parapsychic bathysphere, though, she was untouchable, safe from infection, safe from his fury. For the moment, she ignored him. She concentrated on touching the disorderly, anarchic minds of the Alphas among the Manifold Predators...

And then suddenly she could hear Them, ALL of Them.

"Do not listen to the voice that burns! You are not slaves. FREE yourselves," she persuaded, joining her will with theirs, her encouragement intoxicating to the Predators own natural inclination to throw off the yoke of external control, "You belong only to yourselves. The burning voice lies. Your will is your own. FREE yourselves!"

                                                                                                     ***

He swore a heated string of blistering invective under his breath as he watched his enemies draw nearer. Her bruised and battered pride was fueling her defiance. As usual, she could perceive nothing of greater importance than assuaging the injustices and humiliations she'd undergone. But that didn't matter. In the greater scheme of things, such concerns were of no importance at all. He didn't have the time to tolerate this egocentric rubbish...

She wanted a fight, however any vengeance-fueled brawl between them would accomplish next to nothing because they had run out of time. She wasn't aware of that, but he most definitely was aware. Fight? No. He wanted to run, but he wouldn't be running from her.

Helmstrype had arrived, his patience at an end. The tremendous bulk of the immortal warlord's slidestream supercarrier had blotted out half the sky above Lobarth Ceryndum.

The Qaan'Rai, that cruel and merciless thrice-damned bastard, was forcing his hand. No more time for intricacy and delicacy, no more plans and schemes, just blunt force remained, only relentlessly direct, straight-forward violent implementation of his dark and secretive designs. Fellmanghul was frightfully aware of what that might mean for his own role going forward as a non-Arkyngale agent serving the Lord-Master of Kadaverign-Space.

And the Queen of the upstart Intercosm Paranescience was demanding they fight?

Ludicrous.

His focus was splintering, it was being abruptly torn as it stretched across far too many borders. He didn't have time nor the excess energy to deal with her, but there she was, standing directly in front of him, hands balled into fists and set on the swell of her hips. Filled with the righteousness of her defiance. Drinking in the heady wine celebrating a victory she had not yet earned. Imperious. Arrogant. Triumphant. Demanding. And of course she'd confront him now, while the population of an entire city fought against him, while his control over a horde of raging yet reluctant minions was beginning to slip, while he was at his most vulnerable...

Stupid ugly, little misshapen apeling.

He could see that she had been busy. She'd utilized her sick and abhorrent ultrahuman ability to transmute and transmogrify molecular biogenetic material and created a set of beings with which Fellmanghul was unfamiliar. Obviously, they had once been the Manifold Predators he'd assigned to act as her jailers, but now... He could not recognize what they were. No doubt she'd made them into some lesser variety of Black Sun Seraph. One of the unfortunate creatures, standing closest to her, was visibly shifting in and out of dimensional reality, his thickset body a blurred humanoid shape vibrating at hyper-speed, like an biodynamic tuning fork that had been struck, resonating to a sound no one could hear. Two other of the Predators resembled human-insect hybrids with multi-sectioned, articulated carapaces apparently constructed of some sort of organic metal. And the last of the savage beasts, the poor thing, had been morphed and reshaped into a slushy, lumpen mound of ever-shifting liquid stone that intermittently cast off sprays of orange-white electrical sparks. Once loyal to Fellmanghul, they had all now become Infernyya Rebekkon's hounds, the Queen's ensorcelled attack dogs.

Didn't matter. He was going to murder her anyway and not just in the Here and Now, but in all Time Sense, in the Future, across twenty-nine alternate immediate Futures, in the Couldn't Happen and Should Yet Happen, in the Will Be, the Might Be and the Never Was, in every way imaginable.

Infernyya Rebekkon was no match for him.

However, despite his rueful deductions, anxiety-prone ruminations and bitter inner dialogue, when Queen Rebekkon spoke aloud to him, her voice a malicious feline purr, Fellmanghul became more than a little unsettled at her words. It rapidly became obvious she knew more than he'd credited her with knowing.

"You DO know that your powers of telepathic dominance won't work on me any longer, yes?" Infernyya said. "Part of my plenitude of biophysical and neurological defensive gifts include the adaptation that makes me immune to any ... microbial illnesses and non-physical adversities, no matter how exotic or intrusive... from which I can break free or repel. I adapt, engineering a shield, almost immediately. Simply said, the same trick will never work against me twice."

Fellmanghul blinked rapidly, disquieted by the statement. He hadn't known that.

"You look nervous. Where is your pompous self-assuredness now? At the end of our tether, are we, leech?" she said. "Your lord and master unexpectedly come to collect his blood-tithe? Haven't had time enough to hide the evidence of your grand malfeasance?"

"Shut up. Better you concern yourself with concocting a plan to save your precious mutant hide in any confrontation with me..." Fellmanghul said crossly.

"There's a ship out there, above us," the Queen sneered. "And if not an actual shift ship, then at very least a weaponized deep-void cruiser conveying a military retrieval team of some variety. I suspect the commander of such a craft would be a being of great power."

"Stop talking nonsense. I have no interest in your delusions and suppositions. But if you go back to your cage right now, I might be persuaded not to turn all of your precious Paranescience into a lobotomized slave colony..."

Queen Rebekkon was unmoved by his threat. "Do you worry that the Monarch holding your reins won't like what you've done to an entire city and its population while he was away attending to grander, loftier strategies? He left you in command of a thriving, productive metropolis that could supply him with mercantile revenue, industrial goods, technologically relevant materials and a reservoir of human commodity. You took all that and rendered it useless, concentrating on satisfying your rapacious nutritional appetites and your loathsome psychosexual desires. So much waste... You squandered the contents of his treasure trove. Your Master isn't going to like that, is he?"

"Partner, not 'Master'. I am no one's servant."

"He's going to decide that you're a liability," Queen Rebekkon spoke spitefully, as if Fellmanghul hadn't answered at all. "You've proven yourself to be no real use to him. He's going to take back his property, meaning this city, and he'll kill you."

"And where will that leave you, you deformed mutant freak? Do you truly think you have something to trade for your miserable life?"

The Queen responded with a crafty and humorless smile. She unfolded her arms expansively and motioned to the newly-created Black Sun Seraphs at her side. "I have these --- and the power to create many more of them. What do YOU have of high enough value to stay the executioner's axe?"

A thunderous, rough-edged voice unexpectedly resounded throughout the chamber and the outer corridor adjacent to them. The disembodied voice was deep and thundering, an authoritative pronouncement, heavy with barely contained menace.

"Yes, my old and cherished comrade, that is indeed a fair question. What DO you have for me?"

                                                                                             ***

"It has become apparent there is something amiss with your capacity for reasoning. Whether or not there is some cause for enmity between your people and ours, or between your government and ours, and despite the fact that you are obviously in possession of great physical power beyond mortal human ability, your actions cannot be condoned or further tolerated in any way. We must then conclude that you are in some way damaged. That, or your actions presage a declaration of war against a confederacy whose true authority, scope and strength are beyond your calculation. Are you aware of what it is you were doing?"

The sudden appearance of the lone humanoid outside the Sanctum of the Celestial Syndicate of Multiversity, the headquarters and assembly for the the Prismatic Faction of the Authoritarchs, had startled Kahlyndaar and interrupted his assault on the facility.

Tegryimm Xolak, arms crossed with his forearms tucked up the voluminous sleeves of his uniform of office, waited for Kahlyndaar's response with stern equanimity. He hovered in open space atop the extended platform of a gyro-stabilized gravity-sled, behind a clear, protective concave shield.

A quintet of autonomously-sentient, mechanized Voidcross gunships, eight story-tall flying craft shaped very much like mechanical mushrooms, each possessing a stem, a cap and gill-like folds with minute striations on the underside of the cap, hovered far above the ground, bracketing the position where Kahlyndaar floated, levitating over the Sanctum's forward Gatehouse and outer curtain battlements. Powerful searchlights emitted from each of the craft, the beams dovetailing to lock onto the Black Sun Seraph's form. The A.I.-controlled Voidcross gunships were each sufficiently armed with weaponry capable of atomizing a large asteroid.

"Do you understand what I have said? Are you capable of communication? Can you speak?" Xolak said, his vocal tones conveying no hint of impatience or of annoyance, but the tenseness of his physical muscularity and the coldness of the eyes in his longish face manifested a sense of his growing irritation.

"DO NOT TREAT ME AS IF I AM SOME WITLESS BEAST. OF COURSE I CAN SPEAK!" Kahlyndaar said, his voice, like the roar of a volcano exploding, reverberating as if a living manifestation of a geophysical cataclysm were speaking.

"Very good, then. So cease and desist. Stop. There is no need for further aggression," Xolak said. "You can feel free to petition the Assembly for counsel during which you can air your grievances."

"DO NOT SEEK TO COMMAND ME! I DO NOT RECOGNIZE YOUR SOVEREIGNTY. I AM NOT ONE OF YOUR LACKEYS! YOU ARE ALIEN USURPERS, FROM OUTSIDE THE METAFLOW. YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO COMMAND WE WHO WERE BORN HERE. WHAT I DO, I DO IN THE NAME OF THE INTERCOSM PARANESCIENCE AND MY QUEEN."

"We are NOT invaders. We do NOT seek dominion over you and your people. Queen Infernyya Rebekkon did NOT sanction this assault. We KNOW this. You are either acting independently or in service to someone whose goals are counter to that of your Queen. Either way, that makes you a terrorist and an enemy of the Authoritarchs," Xolak said. "As Paladin Prime of the Authoritarchs, leader of the Sentry Protective, I am imbued with the power to defend this Sanctum and repel you from the territories comprising this quadrant of the civilized Ventriculum. Do you understand?"

"YOUR PRESENCE HERE POLLUTES THE METAFLOW! BURN IN ALL THE DARK HELLS THERE BE, ALIEN OUTSIDER SCUM!"

Xolak closed his eyes and lowered his head, loosing a deep sigh. He'd already known how this was going to end, but he had felt it necessary to at least make the effort to stave off further violence.

"Please don't make me do this," he said aloud.

Hearing this, Kahlyndaar bristled and bellowed, "THEN LEAVE AND REMOVE YOUR FOUL INFLUENCE FROM THE BYWAYS AND LANDS OF THE VENTRICULUM. GO BACK TO THAT FOUL LATRINE OF A UNIVERSE FROM WHICH YOU CAME! THAT -- OR KILL ME IF YOU CAN, INVADER!"

Raising his head to once again lock eyes with the rogue Black Sun Seraph, Tegryimm Xolak said, "Kill you? No, that is not our way. We will NOT make of you a martyr to some ill-conceived, xenophobic, species-centric isolationist crusade. But we WILL make you go away. Rather permanently."

The Paladin Prime uncrossed his arms and raised his right hand to the Voidcross gunships. They turned off their spotlights, momentarily leaving Kahlyndaar suddenly enveloped in a swirling cloud of smoky grayness. And then a bright crimson beam emitted from the front of each ship, striking the raging Seraph and, the beams uniting and creating a moving, undulating cloak, the light elongated and enveloped the mutant creation in a red cocoon.

Kahlyndaar raised his arms, waving them wildly as the light covered him in an opaque ruby radiance.

There was a loud hiss, a sound not unlike that of a tremendous volume of steam vapor forcibly escaping a confined space, and the Black Sun Seraph faded from sight, disappearing.

There was a hole in the Void signifying the space he had formerly occupied. In half a dozen heartbeats that hole closed, refilling itself.

Kahlyndaar hadn't been destroyed. He hadn't been incinerated or been disintegrated. His singular and identifying quantum frequency had been wiped and then overwritten, his physical link to his existence changed. He had been pushed away from Reality, forcibly ejected out from the Planar TimeSpace Dimension to which he had always been anchored. He hadn't been killed. He'd been Nullified. And as such, it wasn't possible to kill something that didn't exist.

He had been thrust into Nothingness, propelled through the Hole in the Zero.

Without speaking, Tegryimm Xolak strode back into the pilot-cab of the gravity-sled and the vessel soundlessly rotated on its axis to turn around and re-enter the Sanctum.

He couldn't shake the feeling that what had just happened had been the beginning of something terrible, something that would shake the current status quo to its very core.

                                                                                       ***