Once long ago and far, far from the world of Authoritarchs and Nebulancers and Aingylls, when she was only a young Offspring Warrior-Adept, her aging Battle Preceptor, named Venarkim Q'rothe, had warned her that her curiosity and wanderlust would be her undoing. He had said that, despite her best efforts and most careful planning, she would eventually become embroiled in a dangerous clash she had no chance of winning. Her boundless courage, despite her distaste for lesser biological species, and her sense of Righteousness would not allow her turn away when someone who could not protect themself needed her help. He worried she would sacrifice herself in the service of strangers who, though they would greatly respect her, would not be capable of truly loving her. He had expressed his sadness predicting she would die alone, die violently, among aliens, away from her Clan, from her friends and from her nation. When at last she came of age to leave her home, and to leave the Battle Academy where he'd shaped and honed her skills to the point she was a living weapon, where he'd raised her with the attentiveness a father would show his only daughter, Venarkim Q'rothe made her promise him one thing... and one thing only.

That she, as an Anistrophic Morph-Elf assassin, would meet her doom without regret and with her head held high.

She had assured him, nearly half a millenia past, that this was something she could -- and would -- do...

That promise loomed large.  It was beginning to look like today was the day she would finally fall.

She watched, staring past the immediate targets in front of her and she saw them descend from the inky deepness above the atmospheric band that delineated mere "Sky" from "the Great Beyond", eclipsing the illumination from the cold sun nearest the TimeSpace interval cuboid that comprised the area's group uncertainty facet. A raining torrent of alien humanoid foes. Something was very not right about all this... The War-Drones came on in wave after vicious wave, seemingly without end. There were easily three or four times as many of them as there were Aingylls in the Horde. Where would such a multitudinous force be billeted? From what massive warehouses and armories were so many troops equipped? And there was no trace of the mighty war vessel that would be needed to transport them across the Metaflow. How could that be? Before she had unexpectedly sacrificed herself, Qassudei Chyald had put several dozen of them to the sword, and she knew for a certainty that she herself had slain three or four dozen of them after that. Yet still more of them came, each drone a replication of the one before it, next to it, following it, all identical, and yet each one attacking with individualistic mannerisms that separated it from the others around it. The same, but not the same. And all the while, the pallid, gnomish androgynous, non-human Thing continued to watch inscrutably from its rocky perch... How could that be?

There was a sudden break, an unexpected interruption, in the oncoming surge of the bloodthirsty tide confronting her. The army of Sarkaufygan War-Drones momentarily relented, ceasing their rabid assault and shifting the somewhat chaotic configuration of their front line, the first three rows deep of them stepping away from the outermost edge of the Wall of Dead she had created. The act ran counter to the behavior she'd come to expect from them. The War-Drones were savage and wild creatures, not at all disciplined in their fighting strategies. They weren't soldiers. Neither were they trained mercenaries as she'd first expected. No, instead she'd discovered that they were a legion of homicidal psychotics, slaves to the impulse to vomit their limitless anger outwards in battle, loosely driven by some technological or telepathic extrasensory set of commands that overrode their free will. They were a swarm of wasps driven wild, attacking anything that did not look like it was a part of the hive. Whether they lived or died was inconsequential, they were a mass of bodies to be throne upon a pyre fueled by rage and hatred. It took her a long, confused moment to realize that what they did, they did en masse, as if possessed of a singular mind ---

An arrogant, powerful, and ruthlessly driven non-human intellect. The Thing, it had to be. The creature stirred, flowing like semi-organic sludge into torpid animation...

Fae'letha Thane drew in a deep breath, flexed her tired muscles, and waited, dreading whatever was to happen next.

Time. It was just a matter of time.

Time.

They were within the outer parameters of the Realm Differentius which was a Time-Space Lattice --- and Hellmarrow was a planeworld, existing along a branched-vector scalar path, just outside the larger topological space. The rules of normal linear chronometric egress did not apply in such a place. C didn't necessarily follow B and A. C occupied the same chronological periodicity as B and A, existing simultaneously in the same space, but phased slightly out of sync with its preceding neighbors in that zone. The battle-maddened army of Sarkaufygans were coming inwards, towards Hellmarrow's paraphysical borders. Paraphysical. Through Space, past separating vibratory walls and their ordered cyclical progressions. Inwards. Through Time. Not through Space, but through Time... into a place that fragmented sequential Time the way a crystal prism fragmented packets of visible light.

One becomes many. Many becomes a multitude. The limited troop complement of a single squadron swells to become an army. And the movements and actions of the individuals within the fragmented stream display the counter-intuitive random sequencing of multiple possibilities -- if external stimula is applied Like This and Here, then their response will likely be like That and There.

These were not ghosts. These combatants were not mirages. They were very real, physical manifestations of all the varied, living replications of the core group of Sarkaufygan War-Drones existing across the boundaries of TimeSpace.

Fae'letha Thane was fighting an endless army of streaming doppelganger reflections.

What was more, was that, given the realization he'd just made, Androkambryah could, at last, place the identify of the silent, darkly contemplative homunculus that sat on its floating pyramidal heap of weathered, aged stone. A Telequarian, specifically an Augmentor Telequarian. They were a unfriendly and misanthropic mutant species of Time Troll prone to living by their amoral mercenary wiles, selling use of their ultrahuman psycho-enervetic talents to temporarily bend and warp moderately large fields of MetaFlow Actuality to meet their clients' special, often illegal, needs. Androkambryah had encountered them on more than one occasion in the distant past, when there were many more of them abroad The Flow. That had been before the Authoritarchs brought Order to the Ventriculum's assorted contentious territorial populations, back when the organic peoples of The Flow derogatorily referred to the gnomish creatures as "Defyluhrs".

And, yes, the Overdyne-Suzerius of the Aingyllic Horde knew full well how to battle Defyluhrs.

Telepathically, he reached out with his mind, piercing the shimmering wall of vibratory anti-synchronicity enclosing he and the rest of the Horde, separating them from Fae'letha Thane. His consciousness became a bolt of energy carrying within it the essence of his intelligence and personality as his mind linked with hers.

"Listen, Sword-Mistress, listen! Feel my Presence. The legion of devils you battle are Time Replicants from a dozen or more dimensions! Do you hear, my Daughter? To continue your duel against them the way you do now will ensure defeat! THIS is the thing you must do to destroy them once and for all...!"

                                                                                        ***

Mune'stahr and Klauvane Tregg had burst through the vibratory membrane into the Qaan'Rai's supercarrier dimensional extrusion vessel.   There, they at last encountered Pylott and the rest of the Away Team. It provided them a brief moment of limited, though welcome, consolation given the brutal trials they'd been forced to overcome.

A sound resembling the raging screech of a thousand hunting raptors rained down from the gloom of the celestial firmament above... Mune'stahr and Pylott were surprised, and imbued with a buoyant flood of optimism, when they saw the chrome spherical shape of The Glide streaking across the captured ether inside the carrier craft.

NeeSharim was here with them.   The battle was not lost, only just begun...

And then everything changed.

Because when the battle weary, ragtag crew of The Glide at last re-united, the joy and relief of the moment was speedily stolen from them...

Everything had devolved into jumbledmessiness. Simultaneously occurringevents had crisscrossed and intersected, destabilizing any pretense at a planned linear scheme, whereby themission-sequence of the various players had metamorphosed into somethingresembling the Terran-Earth children's game of hopscotch... if hopscotch were being played by amegalomaniacal homicidal psychopath.

They were abducted. Taken. Just like that. No threats, no warning, without hesitation or remorse. They were simply yanked out from the Aggregotham Incendia's Undefined Provinces and shoved face first into the foulness of Kadaverign-Space.

The Metacosm fractured and Realities, freed from their anchors, lurched forward, violently overlapping one another as they sought to expand to fill the unexpected Voidal chasm, while Gravity dizzyingly severed its bonds and spit out the pummeled bodies of those creatures made from flesh. Breath was crushed from their lungs by a rolling wave of pressure that had abruptly yanked them from off from their feet to then unceremoniously slam them onto a massive medieval torture rack. Then there had immediately followed a sensation similar to that of the Torturer cranking the rack's ratchet mechanism handle to begin the agonizing process of relentlessly pulling their bodies apart. Then Reality reasserted its dominance and Gravity again actuated, energizing the spatial envelope into which they'd been stuffed.

The pliable, elastic TimeSpace field housed within the confines of the supercarrier had reached the apex of periodicity for its transitive-elongation and, like a rebounding spring or a distended balloon, it snapped back to its original physical/spatial dimensions.

They felt it. It had hurt. Badly. It had hurt like all Hell. The ache went right down to their bones, it was a hot and pulsing agony that suffused their very cellular structures.

And Lobarth Ceryndum was no longer anywhere near them. The imagery filling their blurred vision showed them that. They could feel it; their tactile sensations of touch unleashed on them a repellent feeling of corruption, contagion and decay. There was something vulgar and profane permeating the nuclear tapestry onto which they now trod. They could taste it in the tainted air that roughly filled their heaving lungs, dirtying them even from the inside as much as from out.

He had taken them away from the boundaries of the Universe they knew as home. They were now in HIS domain.

They were not on a planet or on an asteroid. Their surroundings resembled those features associated with a floating island. The group stood upon a vast arid plain resembling a high desert plateau, partially cradled by a blanket of fleecy clouds, with the plateau rimmed by a modest, craggy mountain chain that fell many kilometers down into a coastal valley paralleling a rocky shoreline on three sides. The sky above, if it could be called that, was a dome topping a wide and lonesome horizon, a vista imbued with a shining amber light. But it wasn't real. It was an illusion, a sensory projection created by their minds as their human sensory apparatus attempted to catalogue and define its surreal surroundings. What they actually occupied was the physical surface of a solidified conceptualization of a mathematical holomorphic function. A holomorphic function was defined as a generally structureless, complex-valued idealization of the interdependency of varying quantities for one or more complex differentiable variables spanning every point of a singular locational objective.

Beyond that was a staggeringly expansive, monumental membrane of what looked like leathery-textured, biological flesh intercut with pulsing veins and arteries through which some eldritch dark and disturbing liquid coursed. The towering vibrating membranous walls were slick, dappled with what looked to be sweat or drool. Everything looked feverish, as if suffering from infection.

The flesh surrounding the panorama was not a mathematical metaphor. And its architecture was definitely representative of a cage, as if they were inside the hollow of a gigantic living tumor.

Hellmarrow was thoroughly alien in its composition and not a place friendly to organic human-animate existence. It took no great leap of reason to conclude that anything and everything conscious and sentient that existed within its confines was very probably insane.

"Magnificent, is it not?" Taekonus Helmstrype's stentorian voice intoned. "It is a prodigious cathedral to deformity and aberration. Hearth and home to an immortal generation of conquering deities. Not contaminated by the foul blight of human civilization or its darksome beauty tainted by a woefully limited, human-centric sense of 'Order', as if the innate Chaos of such a vista was something which intelligent minds should shun. The singular purity of its unmatched malignancy is its beauty."

At the Qaan'Rai's booted feet lay the limp body of Infernyya Rebekkon. Wounded and unconscious, she had succumbed to the raw force of Helmstrype's alien tech-battlesuit and had reacted badly to the dimension-shifting transition from Lobarth Ceryndum and the Undefined Provinces. Several of the prehensile straps from the bottom-edges of Helmstrype's tunic languidly roamed across her prone figure, stroking her skin. The ebony, serpentine appendages moved with a coldly ophidian mind of their own.

Queen Rebekkon's hastily-created Seraphs, the mutated Manifold Predators now under her control, staggered about unsteadily, wandering in small circles, dazed and half-blind, as their overloaded nervous systems vainly tried to adapt to their new alien surroundings. They were impaired and partially hobbled, useless, fallen prey to the shortcomings of their species even after their transmutation -- Manifold Predators were physically, neurologically, tethered to their infradimensional MetaFlow environments. Forcibly and abruptly removing them from their native vibratory climature most often resulted in them experiencing a perceptual and cognitive breakdown. Despite the evolutionary upgrade she'd put them through, The Queen could not rely upon any aid from them in a battle against the Qaan'Rai.

Helmstrype stood overtop the dry gravel of the plateau on a worm-like, muscular protuberance made from some mutated organic tissue that swayed from side to side like the cowl of a cobra.  It appeared as though it obeyed his unspoken mental commands. While the group of humanoid abductees fought off the physical after-effects of sudden cross-planar transit, the Qaan'Rai spent a long moment studying them all, cataloguing their similarities as well as the differences demonstrated in their evolutionary variety. His eyes, through what little they could see of his face past his mechanized helmet, blazed. They were locked with ferocious intensity on the brawny figure of Opthas Kandyruu, the Warlord's gaze almost taunting the Black Sun Seraph.

The Qaan'Rai's bio-android Kahmuleon Armsmen, though androgynously-neutered in physique, presented ominous imagery inasmuch their presence resembled that of humanoid vultures awaiting a chance to feed upon wounded prey. The quartet of metalloid Armsmen stood astride small, single-user, mechanical aerial platforms and hovered above the ground forming a four-point, protective formation ringing Helmstrype.

The artificially-grown, bio-mech alterhuman Helmstrype had recently designated as the Aleph, the replacement lead-Armsman, hovered mid-air on the Qaan'Rai's right-hand side. The thrall's thickly-muscled arm was extended up and out as he held aloft the limp and battered form of Mondrum Fellmanghul, displaying the unconscious Cyonic Vamfyrr like a hunter's trophy.  It was shocking to see as exotic and physically intimidating a being as the Vamfyrr treated with such disregard and contempt.

For her part, Ryujonin Worr's eyes swept the scene going from Helmstrype and his Kahmuleon Armsmen over to Pylott and The Glide's Away Team over to The Glide itself hovering in the distance above the horizon in the ether above them. She weighed her strategic offensive options as best she could. Her mind worked quickly with the limited information she'd been able to glean in the short time since Helmstrype had retracted the supercarrier and its interior bubble-world back into Kadaverign-Space. She had briefly blacked out, regaining consciousness within a heartbeat of graying out, and fought to suppress her alarm at her reaction to the transit. She felt disoriented and physically weak... Kadaverign-Space was apparently a place where her normally highly adaptive physiognomy fought to maintain its equilibrium.

The state of her physical equilibrium wasn't her main focus, however, as she spied the cybernetically-enhanced woman military officer standing alongside the Otherworlder referred to as "Pylott"... Ryujonin had not seen the woman in a long, long time, but she had reason never to forget her face, regardless how her body had been technologically augmented or re-architected.

Neuronia Singulareus.

She was here, in this place, now. It took all of the Cosmic Ronin's considerable powers of self-control to contain her immediate emotional response to actually being so close to the woman who had murdered her family.

No, actually that wasn't fair. THIS Neuronia Singulareus wasn't exactly the same as the person she knew. Ryujonin Worr was not a native of The Ventriculum. She was an Organyk from the Known Universe, on the other side of the Nexxion Jump Gate at the Superposed Manifold Wall. The Neuronia Singulareus with whom Ryujonin was intimately acquainted was born and bred in the celestial confines of Newtonian/Einsteinian External Space, where there were such objects as stars and planets and galaxies. THIS Neuronia Singulareus was a naval officer, a conscriptee of the Argossyan Naval Defense Force within the confines of an ocean of semi-sentient chronal liquidity, the omnidirectional fractal metaflow known as The Ventriculum. She was an extra-dimensional mirrored reflection, a doppelganger out-of-Time, of the hated person who had devastated Ryujonin's life. She wasn't a murderer --- yet. The crime hadn't as yet occured in this planar Reality.

But it was still hard to look at the woman and not surrender to the urge to kill her in the most painful way possible.

Ryujonin Worr relaxed her mind and body, her fist unclenching from around the tsuka, the grip, of the ion-powered katana sheathed over her shoulder.

She concentrated instead on the two Otherworlders, tech-armored Multiversal emigrees renowned for their vigilante activism throughout the phase-morphic cloud nebula called both "the Blue Ring" and "The Inter-Tangent Projective". They were named "Mune'stahr" and "Pylott" and they were aliens...

Looking up, Mune'stahr and Pylott could not help but notice that the motion of The Glide was creepingly slow, as if the huge shiftship were fighting its way through a heavily pressurized fluidic syrup that flowed in a direction opposite to its vector of approach. The gravitational forces of Time tides, the amplitude of the surge dependent on the random fluctuations of the tide's amphidromic harmonics.

NeeSharim was on the attack, coming for them, firing her powerful weaponry, but the Time tides were negating her efforts. The multiple particle beam blasts thinned and faded to nothingness. The Glide wouldn't be able to reach them before Helmstrype could harm them.

Helmstrype noticed Mune'stahr's attentive stare and followed his gaze. Upon seeing The Glide, he shook his head and sighed, saying:

"Certainly you have to know there's no hope of your intelligent, quasi-sentient vessel ever rescuing you before I execute my plan. The distance between the shiftship and where it is I am standing is not one of physical topography and distance, but instead a separation of mathematical linearity -- we're not in the same geometrical axiom, not inhabiting the same Euclidian planar dimension."

Half-turning away from the motley group, Helmstrype pointed out into the near distance to an area closer than the horizon, and he said, "Such diversification... Mutants and aliens, deviants and deformities..., Look at you. You have fooled yourselves into thinking you belong here, living and breeding and bioforming the depths of the Ventriculum. But you don't belong. I'm certain you have a thousand questions, but I have absolutely no interest in entertaining your curiosity. You are an annoying group of violence-addicted simians prone to interfering in affairs above your meager understanding. Whether or not you have any comprehension of what it is you're looking at is of little interest, and of even less benefit, to me. But I bear you no ill will, not even those of you who sought to betray me. Simply be assured that you are going to die here and that your deaths are not as a result of any enmity towards you and your kind. The truth of it is that you're simply too fragile to survive what it is that is about to happen."

The groups' eyes were drawn to where Helmstrype pointed. It was a surging tidal morass, a geysering pool of some unidentifiable cosmic substance that was in the slow process of birthing a series of different sized glassy globes, starship-sized bubbles rising from an electrochemically interconverted froth, that rose a few dozen stories high into the thin atmosphere. The sight was staggering, nearly overpowering, making each observer feel small and insignificant. The surfaces of the globes vibrated at different frequencies, giving off a collective choral hum that resembled musical notes.

Though they could not quite put it into words, nor explicitly quantify it conceptually, each member of the group knew that which they were witnessing was the parturition of micro-universes. It was Celestial Teratogenesis, the bringing forth and discharging of what should have been new constituent units of the Multiverse. New galaxies, new stars and new worlds. But something was gravely wrong ... These things were mostly hollow or filled with ashen cinders. They realized they were an audience to the gestation and delivery of damaged, defective, stunted universes that would never grow or mature to sustain Life.

Stillborn Realities...

Seeing this, it was unexpectedly Klauvane Tregg who spoke first. "That's undoubtedly a Bauble Swarm. We must be standing at or very near the Multiversal Cascade Gyromatton. This is the Periodicity Wreath-Core that serves as Hellmarrow's heart. This is the source from which all the power in the Ventriculum flows."

"Ah, so one of the arrogant little simians reveals it has been exposed to a scrap of true knowledge," the Qaan'Rai remarked.

"You're the one who interrupted and stopped the Reset, the Ventriculum's normal structural re-ignition... You're going to blow out the heart of the Metaflow," Mune'stahr concluded, his voice muted as he grasped the enormity of Helmstrype's madness. "You're going to overwrite all the Ventriculum by forcing the Flow to stop and collapse in on itself, erasing its current state and flushing out all civilized development beyond what it originally had long ago..."

"A reboot to factory settings," Pylott said, her astonishment morphing into fear. "You'll erase the existence of tens of thousands of different organic civilizations and devolve the present evolutionary states of nearly as many more to near-prehistoric conditions. The peoples of the Ventriculum will lose the majority of their technological advances and the Metaflow's life-sustaining atmospherics will reset to inhospitably lethal conditions..."

"And you fussy, frenetically self-indulgent, walking, talking,relentlessly breeding bacteria will have finally been put in check," Helmstrype finished. "The Ventriculum will once again be clean."

The longish, angular face under the bone-white hyena half-mask, wrinkled into a sneer as he watched his words impact Mune'stahr, Pylott and their companions. His burgundy-tinted eyes peered from out his mask sparkling with a light that only hinted at the depths of his homicidal nihilism.

"Look upon this heart of darkness and despair," he said poisonously.

The Multiversal Cascade Gyromatton was a jumbo jetliner-sized tetradecagon, a polygon with fourteen flat, out-facing surfaces made of dense, ossified bone with each angle framed in oxidized, hammered brass. It was old, its otherwise smooth surface laced with multiple hairline fractures from which misty streams of particulate dust and ash rose against the downward pull of gravity. One could sense just from looking at it, that the mass of the primordial artifact exceeded tens of thousands of kilograms. The Gyromatton's orientation was at sixteen degrees from vertical with a westward tilt. It topped a seven story-high, three-pronged metal claw rooted in the bedrock of the dimensional plain's flesh-padded floor. And it spun in a ponderously slow counter-clockwise rotation that sent tremors through the ground. At irregular intervals, a handful of bright blue-green sparks, each the size of a melon, emitted messily from the Gyromatton's surface, flying outwards in hissing arcs to fade into nothingness before hitting the planar tundra's meaty soil.

"The Multiversal Cascade Gyromatton... Gods of the Void help us," Poli'Artta Ranzireth, standing shoulder to shoulder next to Pylott, breathed in a hoarse whisper, "The Arkyngale is insane."

"Heretic. Blasphemer. The time has come for you to DIE," Opthas Kandyruu growled darkly, his ire bolstered by pious indignation, as, without a moment's further consideration or hesitation, he launched himself at the Arkyngale Warlord, his cybernetic weapons systems' implants abruptly live and firing.

Concurrently, aboard The Glide...

Each shot fired from the emitters of The Glide's array of six variable-frequency, plasma bolt particle beam cannons carried a discharge of almost 22.6 giga-electron-volts with peak power of 420 millijoules of energy. Since energy is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force, those measurements revealed the power of the plasma bolt particle beams to each be capable of igniting and melting a third of a meter's thickness of titanium alloy in under half a second. That was a release of heat energy exceeding 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit every half-second concentrated into a beam the width of a twelve centimeter ball bearing. Traveling at an excess of 285,000 kilometers per second, that represented a physical impact for each plasma bolt approaching three hundred fifty thousand meter kilograms --- or seven thousand metric tons of TNT.

Those cannon blasts, discharging from six emitters, were capable of utterly destroying almost any physical mass within a range of 20 to 30 kilometers.

And yet, NeeSharim did not in any way consider The Glide to be a warship... To her reasoning, a warship was capable of decimating half an entire world, something half the size of the planet Mars, in a relatively small amount of time. If given an equal time period, The Glide was only capable of setting ablaze or pulverizing a single, medium-sized continental land mass. So, ultimately, NeeSharim did not consider The Glide's compliment of weaponry sufficient for long-term defense against the attack of an Arkyngale. She knew she could hurt the Qaan'Rai, probably very badly, but she seriously doubted she had enough firepower to kill him.

Not that any of it amounted to much at the immediate moment... due to Hellmarrow's permeative and extreme Time-Dilation field, none of the plasma bolt particle blasts were impacting their target. The beams were decaying while still in-transit. They weren't reaching Helmstrype at all.

A new strategy was desperately needed, but time to enact that plan was at a premium. Put bluntly, there was no Time. But what were her options?

There was the possibility her thinking was, perhaps, far too linear. After all, she didn't necessarily have to be the one to physically execute the plan.

An abrupt and painful flaring of brilliant light eclipsed her vision while a cold electric wave suffused her mind. A giant shadow eclipsed her consciousness as a corridor between Then and Now connected her with a sentience with no corporeal anchor. And just that suddenly, the voice of Auzymundyas, the Metapyrian Primun of the Antedyluviaks, filled the atmosphere of the ship's bridge. A heart's beat later, his three-dimensional image appeared, blinking into view.

"Your all-too-human surrender to feelings of vexation and wrath muddy your analytical capabilities," the ancient godling said. "It is one thing to be direct and passionate in the face of adversity. It is entirely another when passion makes you too dull-witted to act with the necessary lethal efficiency required. Do not adopt the less orderly and unproductive traits of your Organyk comrades, Treasured One."

'Treasured One'. Auzymundyas usually called her that when he was disappointed or exasperated with her. Caught off-guard, she wondered what it was she'd managed to overlook and its importance to her present circumstances. She also took note of the fact that his use of the term annoyed her -- before, whenever he'd called her that, she'd simply ignored the implied insult. But for some indefineable reason this time, she wasn't able to do so. She was shocked to realize his supercilious attitude was beginning to piss her off.

She decided there was a chance she was spending way too much time around humans...

"Time is of the essence here. Please speak plainly," she said aloud, working to keep her annoyance out from her vocal tone.

The Metapyrian Primun made a noise of disapproval and then said, "You are cybernetically linked, are you not, to the nano-active, exoskeletal bio-armor residing within the bodies of your human shipmates? And that cybernetic linkage has the capacity for dual path, transitive data modification tunneling through routing access control, does it not?"

"Yes."

"Well, isn't that the very same routing access protocol you use while aboard the main body of the master craft as you physically move locations within it? Within the confines of The Glide and you wish to effect repairs or make upgrades, don't you send both commands and software packages to targeted locations along a mod-tunnel?"

If she were capable of doing so, NeeSharim would have blushed from her embarrassment.

Yes. Yes, now that it had been put into words it was obvious.

"Resources and firepower," NeeSharim commented. "And a massive increase in specific gravity and mobile kinetic magnitude. Just what would be needed to counteract the Ultrahuman vitality and durability of an Arkyngale."

She realized the power of The Glide and its weapons systems needn't travel spatially to any particular geophysical location. Not when when such energy and structurally codified machine language data could be sent remotely along a robust, specified, transmission frequency.

"It pleases me to have been of service, Treasured One," Auzymundyas quipped dryly. "I yet foster hope you might actually develop a talent for critical thinking."

NeeSharim no longer bothered to hide her annoyance. Sighing, she said, "Goodbye, my Master."

The long-dead Antedyluviak Elder vanished from her mind and from her view.

With a thought, NeeSharim activated both her Void-Space extensible comm-link and the ship's long-range synchronized linkage control channel as she contacted Riktonn Mune'stahr.

"I'm not going to get there to help you. The chronometric continuum in this place is engineered to prevent it. No matter how much thrust I put into propulsion, the planar gravitational horizon won't allow me to get any closer than what you can see. He has manipulated Time itself to protect him..."

She heard Mune'stahr's disappointment as he answered and that sound, that mixture of dismay and distress wounded her.

"I wondered about that," he said. "I can clearly see the shiftcraft, but it's just hanging in the sky, never getting any closer. I'm betting the weaponry can't project an assault through that same field because of the chronometric continuum's effects. Damn! The amount of power he's using to manipulate sectional Time Placement must be immense!"

"I cannot counter it, at least not quickly enough to do you any good acting in either defense or offense. My monitoring shows that both your and Pylott's armor are being pressed towards their upwards stress limits..."    

He answered immediately. He sounded a little out of breath and more than a little tense. "You're Out-of-Phase, aren't you? I'll just bet the confined Time Dilation is preventing the ship's cannons from being effective inside the bubble-isolation field surrounding this place. So, alright then, what do you have for me? And keep it short, I'm busy trying to stay alive right now..."

"Affirmative on the Time Dilation restraint, but I have a work-around. By activating a configuration upgrade and a new-build architecture packet, I can transfer the power of the cannons into your armor," she answered quickly. "Moreover, I can condense and pass along The Glide's gravitic structural density and latent kinetic potentiality through the same frequency-band. This will effectively make YOU 'The Glide'. And the same Time Dilation effect making the weapons system useless from my location will prevent the Qaan'Rai's defensive armaments from blowing The Glide out of the sky, so I can supply you with whatever you need for as long as you'll need it -- at least until Taekonus Helmstrype figures out what we're doing and severs the transmission routing linkage."

"...Or, alternately, until the link circuitry burns out and overloads my nanite armor, setting me aflame and burning me alive," Mune'stahr quickly concluded.

"Your unflagging optimism is always so exhilarating in these situations," NeeSharim remarked.

"Well, I never knew you could DO something like that! This had better work, NeeSharim, because I can guarantee we won't get another chance at this," Mune'stahr said roughly.

"If it had no chance of working, I would never have wasted time suggesting it," the Synthautotron humanoid hybrid remarked irritably.

"I'd really like to know how I wound up interfacing with an A.I.-system as perpetually cranky as you," Mune'stahr muttered. "So, c'mon then, let's get this insanity started."

NeeSharim responded. "Transmitting...!"

                                                                                              ***

The brutality of the battle between Opthas Kandyruu and the Qaan'Rai generated a collection of thunderous after-effects that shook the Ether. Kandyruu's method of attack was barbarously simplistic: his pulse-engine propulsion system launched his five hundred and thirty kilogram armored body at the Arkyngale Warlord at a speed exceeding nine hundred kilometers an hour. Large as Kandyruu was, Helmstrype still towered head and shoulders over him and eclipsed the Black Sun Seraph's body-width by a third. The two of them collided with an impact that hammered a two meter-deep crated into the flesh-bedded floor of the planar tundra. The impact birthed a shockwave that expanded in a concussive circular fan that pummeled the steel-reinforced concrete barriers and the chrome-plated brass infrastructure of Helmstrype's portable fortress' obstacle walls like a bomb's blast. Kandyruu tried engaging the Arkyngale Warlord in hand-to-hand combat, but was continually frustrated by Helmstrype's lithe and fluid expertise in slipping the series of high-speed, power-enhanced kicks and punches thrown at him. The Warlord responded with windmilling, slashing arm strikes that wove a logarithmic equiangular spiral pattern in the air ... that pattern producing a lancing stream of speeding, green-tinted, concussive light blasts that struck Kandyruu like a fusillade of heat-seeking missiles. The Seraph nicknamed "Killer of Gods" was hard put to defnd against the assault and took a dozen direct hits that knocked him tumbling backwards. But even as he stumbled, Kandyruu's weapons system materialized a large sonic scimitar sword from his right fist and the Seraph cut at Helmstrype with a force-blade capable of ripping an inch wide swath through the dual-layers of the Warlord's armor's titanium metal shielding.

Meanwhile, the Kahmuleon Armsmen had engaged with Pylott and Poli'Artta Ranzireth, battering them with sizzling ion-particle blazer beams transmitting light packets carrying energy that spectacularly split the matrices of molecular matter asunder. The high-pitched screech of the beams as they punched through space was nearly deafening. Pylott's armor, fitted with a micro-shine epidermal layer that reflected the beams of most laser-based photon weaponry, deflected the blazer streaks away from her body, splitting the coherent beams into a scattered, kaleidoscopic spray of color. She returned fire with a spray of armor-piercing, rocket-propelled, plasteel-tipped death from her twin Rampager anti-personnel auto-repeater pistols. As she did so, Poli'Artta Ranzireth flew a seemingly erratic, but actually tightly-controlled flight pattern as if she were a hunting raptor, like a hawk on planet Earth, pursuing prey. Defying gravity, the Hexabreed warrior managed to use her powers of flight and aerial maneuverability to evade most the blazer fussilade while, in turn, strafing the Armsmen with her own portable particle beam sidearm.

On the other hand, Neuronia Singulareus' battle was strictly a terrestrial-based struggle. She found herself involved in a very unsophisticated slugging match against an Armsmen, taller and bulkier than her, pitting her own augmented cybernetic strength against the Kahmuleon biomech alterhuman's speed and musculature. They were very evenly matched strength-wise as opponents, but the Argossyan Navy Lieutenant Commander had great difficulty competing against the synthetic war-machine's tireless auto-robotic quickness. Luckily, Lt. Cmdr. Singulareus was quite adept in multiple disciplines of war-oriented martial arts and could counter most the Armsman's blows. Still, she was an enhanced cybernetic human and the pace of the fight was taking its toll. She was tiring, her defenses becoming sloppy as she avoided and deflected the hammering blows while the Armsman appeared to be unflaggingly inexhaustible.

Simultaneously, Ryujonin Worr was caught up in a nightmare for which she could have had no preparation. The Qaan'Rai had unleashed upon her a rare and unexpected opponent when Ryujonin had attempted to assault the Arkyngale Warlord whom she'd mistakenly assumed was distracted by Opthas Kandyruu's savage attack. She was faced with confronting a bloodthirsty Crosscosm Amoebyk Helmstrype had summoned from a Void-pocket. A four-legged, six tentacled, Eukaryotic Arsenobacterial insectoid hybrid, the parasitic predator was a creature of the nonviable vacuity that striped through the osmotic drift. Like some loathsome variety of carnivorous spider-squid, it existed in the rips and tears of null-space. Practically mindless, all it knew was hunger and rage, and the Amoebyk slavishly served whosoever provided it an endless supply of food. The creature was the size and mass of an Earth-born adult Brahma bull and had loose, gelatinous, muscular flesh that repaired itself from even ferociously deep wounds as quickly as the blink of an eye.

And Klauvane Tregg, battered, trembling and nearly overcome with despair, took in the spectacle with a growing sickness suffusing his heart and mind.

Accessing his extrasensory Astral Eye, he could see beyond the boundaries of this small tract of the immense Hellmarrow plain, saw the Great Accretion Scythe that separated Helmstrype's physical fortress from the rest of Kadaverign-Space, could see the Veil that established the confines of this Manifold-pocket...

And he saw a Horde of Celestial nomads caged by the Qaan'Rai's power. He saw Them, the Aingylls, he could see Androkambryah the Dissenter and he could see Fae'letha Thane and he could feel the desperation of their dangerous plight.

Tregg was a Reality Mage, a Temporal Chronodigitator. Protecting Reality, ALL Reality everywhere, was his both his spiritual focus and his duty. He could not idly stand by while the Cosmos devolved into barbarism. He had to act, somehow, someway. It was incumbent upon him, and on him alone, to set things right once more. His gaze settled on the massive Gyromatton and he suddenly knew what he had to do. The abrupt realization filled him with a rare calmness he'd only briefly experienced once before in his tumultuous life. Surrounded by war, he felt his very being flooded by a sensation of peacefulness.

Eight thousand, six hundred and twenty-six Earth-minutes, 517,560 seconds, over 6 days, had elapsed since the sixth dimensional, anti-osmorphic void had last synchronized itself..., the vast transpatial arterial aqueduct known as The Ventriculum had to be allowed to self-correct.

He had to re-energize the interdimensional dissolution and restart the Cosmic Countdown...

He had to.

Klauvane Tregg reached out, concentrating, extending his thickly muscled arms to point at the Gyromatton's motionless center, and he let loose a mighty volley of extrasensory telekinetic Magycke. He could feel it, feel its complex atomic structure, feel its cold antiquity and the ties of its celestial anchor. The Gyromatton was stubborn, hugely resistant, it did not want to be moved.

But then, with a shudder and a squeal that one felt rather than actually heard, it did, at last, move. Faster, then faster still. The Gyromatton spun...

Tick-tick-tick-tick. The Moment arrived. Tick-tock. Begin again...

Feeling impossibly flattened and compressed, Klauvane Tregg's last conscious sensation was the sound of Taekonus Helmstrype screaming, cursing, raging with murderous fury and hysterical disappointment.

...tick- ...

...blink...

No more thinking. No more anything.

And a swiring tidal wave of imploding TimeSpace engulfed the whole of Everything in a monumentally vast, closed spheroid of Trans-Space. Infinity held its breath and then, explosively exhaled. A hyper-gravitic, quantum ocean simply winked out of existence, restructuring itself and re-asserting its magneto-geometric position in interdimensional Existence, within the span of a single nanosecond.

The pain was unimaginable.