Author: flintgraphics@comcast.net

28 August – 3 September 2019, Erigayn Star System

The Star Wind was approaching the final set of micro-jumps that would bring them fully into the gravity well of the star Erigayn, at the end of a long six days. And not a minute too soon was the Vanguard’s heartfelt consensus.

When they’d left a sweltering Astoria behind, even the usually cool and collected Artemis had been eager for the adventure. With the exception of that short, tragic visit to Halicon on its final day, none of them had been to another planet before, nor traveled by starship.

The first three days had lived up to expectations. The Star Wind was a beautiful ship, and with the lower deck essentially empty (the Ambassador had had the various modular units of his private suite removed – luxury bedrooms, dining room, wine cellar, etc.), they were able to turn off the artificial gravity and use the large space for practicing moving and fighting in zero-g.

Surprisingly, Scion learned that he was unable to fly, being outside the electromagnetic field of a planet; Quanta, on the other hand, actually found flying easier in micro-gravity… and by being outside of a planetary gravity well, he suspected. The Blue Flame was basically unaffected, beyond a slight increase in maneuverability, as was Totem’s Cloak of Levitation.

The first six hours out from Earth, traveling to the recently re-opened Solar Stargate in the Asteroid Belt, had gone by in an exhilarating rush; the jump through the Gate itself had been… anticlimactic — one bit of interplanetary space lookes much like any other. But Epsilon Eridani, the first stop on their itinerary, quickly became more interesting.

At 10.5 light years from Sol, the K0 star system was the closest Union-controlled system with a star gate. With two, in fact, and the second one was in a distant orbit around the massive, ringed Jovian planet humans had named Aegir. A massive space complex hung near the Aegir Gate, the hub of all activity in the system, since there were no habitable planets available for settlement.

“Hey, Ilandra, why such a big station for a system without livable planets?” Jonny asked the ship’s AI system. “Isn’t this a bit of a backwater for the Union?”

“In the past, yes, Jonny” the lovely contralto voice replied. Jonny was half in love with that voice, and had insisted she (there was no way not to think of her as “she”) call him Jonny, not Mr. Osaka. “But with the events of the past three Solar years, its importance has increased significantly; not least for its connection to your own world. With the loss of so many systems to the Consensus and the Imperium, Earth and her meta-human heroes have become a symbolic hope for many in the Union. Aegir Gateway Station has been greatly expanded in the last year for that reason.”

“Any chance we can have a layover at the station? I’ll bet it’s a fascinating place…” Jonny had wheedled.

“Perhaps on the way home,” Artemis said firmly. “Time may be of the essence on this mission, and we need to keep our eye on the ball.”

They made the jump to the next system an hour later. In all, it took 64 hours to make jumps through 9 different star systems, averaging seven hours in each system as they travelled between gates, leaving little time for sightseeing. Nonetheless, there were enough dazzling vistas of stars, nebulae and the occasional planet or massive space station to keep things interesting.

That changed after their last gate jump, into the Merikani System, the closest Union-controlled system to Erigayn and itself a bit of a backwater. From there they had to travel strictly via stutter-warp drive, across 30 light years of interstellar void. Very boring, monotonous interstellar void. Three long days of very boring, very monotonous, very void.

Boredom and close quarters began to take a toll fairly quickly, for some more than others. Artemis tended to spend her time either meditating or practicing her combat forms in varying levels of gravity, from zero-g to twice Earth-standard, often joined by Totem. JJ spent considerable time studying with Ilandra and learning the basics of interstellar piloting and astrography, while Quanta absorbed a great deal from her about the physics of star gates and the stutter-warp drives – which he then tried to share with anyone who’d listen. Something Jonny and Chuck tried to avoid by playing as many video games as they could, as loud as they could, a vast library of them having been thoughtfully provided by the Ambassador.

“Video games, but he couldn’t leave a comfortable bed… or his wine cellar?” Quanta had groused at one point, defeated in his latest attempt to share the wonders of five-dimensional spatial geometry with the two.

On his own down time, JJ taught Jonny and Chuck a number of card games, and Jonny kept trying to deal from the bottom of the deck – only to be caught every time. Chuck also spent a fair amount of time learning about Union communications systems, and in particular the range of options available on the Star Wind. He had more or less fallen into the role of comms officer for the team, but he’d found he really enjoyed it, and this was certainly a golden opportunity.

“We’re making the final jump to the Erigayn System,” Scion announced over the ship-wide comms. “Once we—“

He was interrupted as a klaxon alarm began blaring, and red emergency lights strobed throughout the ship. A shudder ran through the deck beneath their feet, and the Vanguard stared at one another in surprise – then rushed to join Scion and Artemis on the bridge.

“Shields are at 97%,” Ilandra’s calm voice informed them as they piled up behind the two leaders. “Attack was a plasma burst on our forward port quarter, fired by the larger of the three ships directly ahead.”

“Well, how nice,” Scion muttered, bringing them about to present as narrow a profile as possible to the combatants. “We seem to have arrived in the middle of a space battle.”

In the central view screen a large military-looking ship faced off against two smaller, but very sleek and equally deadly-looking ships, and as they watched the two sides traded another series of energy blasts. Shields flared, and each of the fighters managed to lob another volley at the Star Wind, whose own shields absorbed the energy with only another mild shudder through the frame.

“Shields at 92%,” Ilandra said. “They appear to be more warning shots than actual attempts to disable or destroy.”

“We’ve got an incoming transmission, Captain,” Chuck announced from the comms station, where he’d seated himself when they’d entered the bridge. “Two of them, actually.”

“Interesting. Put them on screen, Mr. Chisholm.” JJ wasn’t above the half-giddy Star Trek feel of the whole situation himself, and allowed himself a small smile at Jonny’s choked-off laugh.

To either side of the main screen two smaller views lit up, showing the commanders, presumably, of the two opposing sides. On the left was a being that looked like nothing so much as a tall, lean, anthropomorphized dog… or maybe a golden-furred jackal. The being on the right screen was no less alien-looking, but instead of a terrestrial dog it appeared to be a distant cousin of the Creature From the Black Lagoon. He (or she, who could tell with fish people?) seemed to be underwater, and a part of JJ’s mind wondered how they managed that in spacecraft, with all the electronics…

“I am Sky Commander Fer’Tallket, of the Kyrnoka Conclave,” boomed the jackal alien, speaking first, his voice low and gruff, “and I demand your immediate surrender and the return of our property!”

The second alien stepped on their rival’s demand, with a voice several octaves higher, emited from a lip-less mouth, hissing, “You won’t fool me Sky Commander, call off these mercenaries of yours, admit your theft, or suffer the full wrath of the High Engineer!”

“The wrath of your water-logged High Engineer means less than nothing to me, Admiral Serpartes,” the Sky Commander… sneered, Artemis thought, although it was difficult to read the rather immobile expression on the alien face. The fish-person’s face was even less interpretable as they opened their mouth to respond.

“This is the Union vessel Star Wind,” JJ interrupted what promised to be a lengthy, and no doubt fascinating, exchange of insults. “Six days out from Earth, on a mission from the High Chancellor and the Senate.”

Well, ultimately that was true, as the Ambassador would not have allowed them the use of his ship and Union resources without the approval of his superiors… and his was a very short chain of command. Better to lead with a strong, confidant claim, and sort out the details later.

“We are here to investigate the disturbing changes to your sun, and locate a missing agent.” No need to say whose agent Silverstar was just yet. “Power down your weapons, please, and let’s talk.”

It took some doing, and an intimidating soliloquy of thinly veiled threats of dire repercussion from Artemis, but eventually both the Admiral and the Sky Commander agreed to stand down and listen. Not only to the new arrivals, but to one another.

Apparently they’d become embroiled in an old-fashioned standoff after having run into one another while separately investigating recent large-scale thefts and industrial sabotage on their respective home worlds. In recent months such crimes had been repeated all too frequently on all four inhabited worlds of the system and tensions were running very high — apparently everyone thought at least one of their neighbors was responsible.

Both sides in this stand-off had followed scattered signals and partial plasma trails to this spot, and had run into one another. Warning shots had been fired, ultimatums issued, and if not for the timely arrival of the aliens from their barbarous-sounding Earth (which neither of the aliens had ever heard of), they’d likely have been in a full-scale battle by now.

Both sides transmitted the details of the current situation, and the claims of the new arrivals, to their respective governments. The messages took several hours to arrive on their home worlds and for responses to be formulated and returned. Eventually both Admiral Separtes and Sky Commander Fer’Tallket appeared on screen again, this time in a joint communication.

“We have been asked to convey an invitation for you come to the Council Quadrene on Irikand, the neutral moon orbiting our system’s gas giant,” the Admiral said, their face even more unreadable than their counterpart’s.

“The joint planets of Erigayn use this facility as a neutral meeting place to convene and discuss matters of systemwide importance,” the Sky Commander added. “Our leaders are already there, discussing the current crisis, and they wish to determine for themselves the truth of your motives and claims.”

••••••

“Ilandra, what can you tell us about this Irikand place,” Kyle asked as JJ brought them into a standard orbit around the moon. Traffic control had them in a holding pattern, awaiting landing instructions.

“Irikand is the largest of the 17 moons of the gas-giant planet Pharosia, Dr. Steiner, which is itself the eighth and outermost planet in the Erigayn System. Pharosia is also called the Jewel of Erigayn, for reasons that should be obvious.”

Indeed, gazing out the view ports, the giant planet was a glorious sight. Slightly larger than Jupiter, its swirling bands of brilliant, almost garish, colors glowed in a somehow harmonious rainbow of gem-like beauty. It was breathtaking. The moon they were orbiting was… less so. Gray-white, ice-covered, streaked with black striations, it looked particularly inhospitable.

“Irikand is approximately three-quarters the size of your Mars,” Ilandra continued, “very icy, but thanks to a molten iron core it possesses a strong electromagnetic field which helps retain a thin atmosphere. Barely breathable by most oxygen-based respiratory systems, however, and it is roiled by frequent storms. Its surface gravity is approximately 31% of Earth’s, although the Irikand complex itself maintains an artificial gravity of .89 Earth-standard.

“Despite its native inhospitality, the original settlers of the system built a large trading port here — mainly to receive and organize shipments of supplies and additional colonists from out-system, both of which were still coming in during the first few decades of settlement. Irikand’s distant location, relative to the habitable zone, was viewed as a plus, as this kept outsiders far away from their own individual worlds. This reduced the risk of unwelcome “contamination,” while still allowing needed connection with the larger Union.

“In time the port grew into a neutral city where the leaders of the four planets could hold councils to settle disputes and debate issues affecting the entire system. It still retains its status as the port-of-entry for the system as well, and is the system’s main trading center.”

Eventually a landing bay was assigned to them, and JJ made his first solo landing, under the watchful eye of the ships AI systems. They were met by a representative of the fish-like Xi’nix, dressed in a stylish environmental suit which contained the sea water that kept them alive while off of their ocean world home. Speakers on the collar of their fishbowl helmet transmitted and filtered their slightly sibilant voice.

“I am Fahar Synok,” they introduced themself, doing a strange half-bending at the knees and an elaborate gesture with his left hand… presumably a polite greeting of the Xi’nix people. “Forgive the crudity of my welcoming salute, it is terribly difficult to do properly on dry land, but I hope you will accept it in the spirit in which it is intended.

“I have been assigned to be your escort and facilitator during your stay on Irikand, so please, if you need anything, anything at all, do not hesitate to ask. Now, quarters have been prepared for you, and I’m sure you must be ready to relax and freshen up before your meeting with the Council Quadrene.”

The provided quarters were large and very comfortable, but no one was inclined to relax much, and when Fahar Synok returned two hours later to take them to the meeting, everyone was ready to go.

The Council Rotunda was a large circular chamber, encircled by half-a-dozen tiers of seats, filled with people of all four species, and a score of immense screens, several of which showed spectacular live views of the swirling gas giant hanging in the sky outside. Underneath a central dome of dim blue light was a large round table, a holoprojector at its center, encircled by a dozens chairs. At the cardinal points the chairs were larger, more comfortable looking, and clearly held the leaders of the four worlds, or at least their representatives.

The low murmuring of the crowd suddenly dropped to silence as the six aliens were lead by their guide to a low platform near the central table. One of the leaders at the table rose, a pale female with interesting facial structure that included a crown-like ridge of scalloped cartilage framing her face, and addressed the Vanguard.

“Welcome outsiders, I am Governor Endara of the planet Prokira, and as the current First of the Council I speak today for the residents of the Erigayn System. You have arrived at a dire moment in our short history, and many on this council find the timing of your arrival— coinciding as it does with escalating thefts and violence— suspicious. Despite cautiously favorable initial reports from some of their own. So tell us, gentlebeings, what are your intentions among us in these difficult times?”

“Thank you for gracious welcome, Governor,” Artemis replied, bowing slightly. It had been agreed that she would take the lead, at least initially. “We have come at the request of the Union which, despite the recent turmoil and losses of the Entropy War, are still concerned about all its member worlds — even those who prefer to remain apart. The changes to your sun have not gone unnoticed, and when another agent was sent to investigate and report, they vanished. We were sent in search of answers, both concerning your sun, the well-being of your people, and the missing agent.”

“As a Tulromite, I wish to see you as hopeful friends,” the Governor said. “But you have arrived quite literally under an ill-omened star. Despite the accreditations you carry, from a distant government we have as little to do with as possible, doubts remain. Assure me that you truly have our best interests at heart.”

“Let me take this one,” Quanta murmured to Artemis and stepped forward, introducing himself. He had studied all the files they had on the peoples of the four planets, and he’d found the Tulromites one of the most interesting. Back-to-nature separatists, to be sure, but practical ones who recognized the value of science, simply wanting to keep it in check and in its place. To use what was needed, but no more. He felt they would respond to a science-based approach to what was going on with their sun, and he proceeded to give the Governor just that, with backup from Scion. When he stepped back at the end of his presentation, she smiled approvingly and nodded to the leader on her right.

“I yield the floor to my colleague, the Patriarch Benasaam of the Kryssadan of Kyrnoka,” she said, and then resumed her seat.

The jackal-like alien who rose next was lightly robed, with elaborate body paint, clearly denoting his high rank and importance. Addressing his peers, he barked out curtly “My fleet admiral has met these foreigners, and he speaks of their calmness under fire, and their prowess in negotiation. I don’t like my time wasted, so I won’t waste yours, nor theirs. Tell us, newcomers, what can you offer to our investigations, and how would you stop the sabotage, robbery, and destruction plaguing us?”

Artemis had also studied the files on the colonists of Erigayn, and after their encounter with the Sky Commander she felt she had a pretty good idea of their psychology. She’d known the type before, on Earth, and knew what they responded to, what they respected – guile and a strong front, confidently presented, and an appreciation for properly exaggerated tales of prowess.

“Well, we shall see if you can live up to your claims, female,” he said after she concluded her recitation of the Vanguard’s exploits, but Artemis felt the Patriarch looked suitably impressed, difficult as it was to be sure of his expressions or body language. As he sat back down he gestured to his right, and the fish-like Xi’nim leader leapt to his feet, leaning in dramatically to slam his fists down on the table.

“Ah, Endara, you seem so anxious to involve these outsiders in our affairs, but how do we know that they are not the true agents of our woes. But Gallago, the High Engineer of Dezirin, is not so ready to trust these trespassers, who so smugly disrespected my own military. I demand they prove to us that they are not simply hounds of the Star-Master, here to spearhead an invasion of his Imperial armadas!”

“Ha! That’s a laugh,” Jonny said, stepping forward before any of the others could react. He knew a bully when he saw one, and just how to deal with ‘em, too. “We kicked the Z’irdani off our world when they tried that shit, and they haven’t had the balls to try again… and you know why?”

Jonny burst into blue fire and rose into the air, glowering down at the suddenly cowering leader. The crowd gasped and the security forces started forward, until waved back by Governor Endara. “We’re no dogs of the Imperium, but really, how do we know you’re not? Maybe all this sabotage and theft and whatever is an inside job… maybe you should convince us that you’re not the one working for the Star-Master!”

“That’s absurd,” the High Engineer gurgled in outrage. “Absurd!” But he slumped back down in his chair and gestured at the fourth and final member of the Council. “What do you have to say about all this, General Raffar?”

The crocodilian Aress’kan military leader stood and addressed the Vanguard directly, ignoring her still-sputtering colleague. “I speak for President Kuusm, who cannot attend these proceedings, due to the priorities of the gestation season on Aress’ka. But I know her concern would be for the transient nature of these… visitors. They are clearly vagrants, however powerful and strange they may be. How can we trust our homes, our families to them, how can we know the level of their commitment to our cause.”

Totem lead the argument on this one, with occasional assists from Artemis and the others. He was very persuasive in addressing the General’s concerns, and by the time she sat down, he thought she seemed convinced… but Artemis wasn’t so sure. “There’s something… off about that one,” she muttered to her teammate as they waited for Governor Endara to address them again.

“Gentlebeings, thank you for so patiently addressing our concerns. If you will return to your quarters, we will confer; once we have reached a decision we shall ask you return to the Rotunda to hear our words.”

As Fahar Synok lead them out of the Council Rotunda, they suggested that the aliens might want to wander the Promendade, to see the sights of Irikand City and the offerings of the four worlds of Erigayn. “I understand from what you’ve said that this is the first time you’ve visited a world other than your own. I would be most pleased to show you the wonders of our worlds.”

“Ooh, street food!” Jonny said. “Is there any Gagh around here?”

“I’d love to see what the local alcohol scene is like,” Chilz added. “Do you guys have beer? Or rum, maybe?”

“Actually, some good coffee, or its equivalent would be nice,”Artemis sighed, and Scion offered an enthusiastic second.

While Fahar led the others off to seek out food and drink, Quanta decided to wander the complex on his own, discreetly scanning for any signs of Silverstar’s unique energy signature. Totem adopted a similar strategy, but in search of any traces of alien magic heretofore unknown to him. Both heroes returned to the Rotunda several hours later disappointed.

Their failure was assuaged somewhat by Governor Endara’s announcement that the majority of the Council Quadrene had voted to accept the aid of the Vanguard. To their surprise, it turned out that General Raffar was the lone dissenting vote, with the High Engineer Gallago voting for the aliens.

The result of the agreement was that all four planets delivered all of the intelligence they had gathered over the past several months to the Council on Irikand. They in turn passed it over to the Vanguard for analysis. With the gregarious and energetic Xi’nim Fahar Synok acting as project manager for the mixed band of assistants the Council had provided them, the heroes were soon neck deep in reports.

Over the next two days their careful reviewing of the official documents revealed a series of seemingly unrelated thefts and bizarre acts of industrial sabotage, on all four of the inhabited worlds of the system. It was a strange and initially inexplicable collection of materials stolen, and things sabotaged.

On Prokira, dried foodstuffs, particularly fruits and nuts, as well as industrial insecticides and focal lenses for high-powered telescopes were stolen, while aquaponic gardens, growing bulk protein algae used as a frequent food supplement, were sabotaged.

Dezirin suffered sabotage of several engine testing facilities, and the theft of powerful neodymium magnets, x-ray tubes, and starship air scrubbers.

Kyrnoka saw the theft of detergent formulations and bleaching agents, anodes from high-power batteries, and large quantities of medications used to treat various mental disorders, especially lithium. Sabotage of the solar mirrors used to regulate the desert world’s surface temperature and moderate weather extremes was particularly devastating.

On Aress’ka, pyrotechnics and flares to celebrate the next hatching season were stolen, as were emeralds and heat shield panels for satellites, and several neonatal facilities were sabotaged.

It was Quanta who had the sudden realization that all of the thefts involved items rich in three particular elements: boron, beryllium, and lithium.

“The only three elements not created from stellar reactions alone,” Quanta explained to the others. “The creation of these elements involves cosmic ray spallation, a rare event where a powerful burst of gamma radiation launches into heavier elements—ones that are created within a star—blasting them apart to create these lighter elements.”

“And in talking with Fahar, it turns out that this system was so appealing to the original colonists precisely because of the relative abundance of those particular elements, which are normally quite rare, on each of the four habitable planets,” Scion added.

It was Artemis, however, who realized that the acts of sabotage, which seemed so random at first glance, actually had a similarly strange thread connecting them.

“The sabotages have no obvious economic or military motives,” she said. “But they do target things with deep emotional importance to their respective species. If someone wanted to put the people of the Erigayn system at each other’s throats, and stop interplanetary cooperation, this would be the way to do it.”

“And they nearly succeeded,” Totem agreed. “Everyone was so incensed, none of them were thinking clearly, and they’d stopped talking to one another. If it wasn’t for our arrival…”

The biggest breakthrough came from the intelligence data collected by all four governments. Analyzing it closely, Scion noticed a strange glitch present at every theft and hijacking – a flicker, a glimmer, easily dismissed as random noise. In one or two instances, maybe, but once he noticed it and started looking, he found it in every recording of every theft.

“Turns out it was a sensor-cloaked ship,” he said, presenting his final conclusions to the team. “Effectively invisible to standard sensors, including those on the visible light spectrum, but once I knew it was there, and started to adjust for… well, it’s pretty technical. The important thing is, I found a way to punch through at least some of that cloaking.”

He tapped a button on his console and a holographic image of a gray, static-filled shape popped into existence. Few real details were visible, but it was clearly a space vessel, and a fairly large one at that. “Some sort of freighter I should think, given the tonnage its crew has stolen.”

“Any sign of this ship at the sabotage events?” Artemis asked, studying the slowly rotating display.

“No, not a single instance of the anomaly at a sabotage incident,” Scion confirmed. “And yet present at every single theft or hijacking incident.

“Once I had this data, I asked Fahar to gather general satellite monitoring from all four governments, which they did surprisingly quickly — they’ve been a tremendous help. I was able to gather enough information to track the mystery ship leaving each of the four worlds at multiple times… which means I can triangulate where the ship, or ships, were headed to.

“The trails all converge on an abandoned mining asteroid in the Outer Belt, nicknamed ‘the Dark Star.’ The facility was abandoned forty years ago, shut down and mothballed. But Fahar just received the long range sensor sweeps I requested… there’s an energy signature coming from the area, faint, but it’s one that shouldn’t be there at all.”

“Well, I guess we know where we’re headed next,” Chuck laughed.

••••••

Ten hours later the Star Wind slowly approached the supposedly abandoned mining asteroid, shields up and sensors at maximum sensitivity.

“There’s no doubt that the mining facility is powered up,” Quanta said, carefully going over the readings. “But I’m not getting any indication of life signs.”

“How about on that?” Chilz said, pointing at the main view screen. Just coming into sight around the asteroid in their cautious circling was a large, vaguely menacing ship. It was black, and difficult to see save for its running lights and a few windows. Clearly keeping station, it hung about a kilometer off the asteroid. Scion hit the controls to bring their limited weaponry from stand-by to active.

“Hmmm… no, I’m not getting any life readings from that, either,” Quanta said after a few tense moments. “But its energy signature and spectral makeup does match the various readings we culled from the four governments’ records of the pirate raids — I think we’ve found our mysterious cloaked raider, my friends!”

Half an hour later, after some debate, the Star Wind was positioned close to the mystery ship, one of its airlocks linked by a flexible tube to one on the freighter. One-by-one the Vanguard pulled themselves along, weightless, between the artificial gravity fields of the two vessels.

Chilz, in the middle of the pack, continued to be concerned about an ambush. “You really don’t think it’s possible that they’re shielding themselves from our sensors?” he groused to Quanta, kicking off into the umbilical tube.

“That’s not really how sensors, and shielding, works,” his friend replied. “But if so, maybe we’re being shielded from them, too… ever think of that?”

In the event, the ship did indeed prove to be quite empty. Almost literally so. Easily ten times the volume of the Star Wind, the bulk of its area was taken up by mostly empty cargo space. Empty now, but there was evidence that it wasn’t always so; and one bay still held the neodymium magnets and x-ray tubes stolen in the most recent raid on Dezirin’s shipping.

“I’m picking up traces of all three unique elements, all of them in forms corresponding to some of the materials stolen in the raids,” Scion announced after scanning a fourth cargo hold. “I don’t think there can be any doubt this the raider. Or at least one of them… I’m still not willing to completely rule out multiple ships being involved, despite the uniformity of the readings we recovered from each attack.”

“There’s something odd about the ship itself,” Quanta said a short time later, as they neared the bridge. He was running his own sensor array, taken from and connected to their own ship, across several sections of wall, floor, and ceiling. “The structural materials are not unusual for a Union vessel, or really most any vessel built in known space… but there’s something… oh! I see it now…

“Everything, every metal, every plastic, every composite… everything I’ve scanned since we boarded is absolutely pure! Aluminum is 100% pure aluminum, titanium alloys are precisely composed of the proper percentages of elements, in proportion – and not a detectable trace of any impurity in anything!

“Ilandra, is this a normal set of readings for any known method of construction or refining, in the Union or elsewhere?” he asked via his comm-link to the Star Wind, transmitting the data at the same time.

“No, Dr. Steiner,” the sultry alto voice of the Star Wind’s controlling AI replied almost instantly. “I can find no record of such pure materials from any modern industrial process in known space. Such purity can, and has, been achieved of course; but mainly in scientific or academic settings, and at great expense. Such processes are generally considered too expensive for mass production.”

“An interesting observation,” Artemis said, entering the command deck after her own survey of the ship’s living area. “But frankly, I’m more interested in finding out what happened to the crew. There are quarters for eight… humanoids… in the crew area, and indications of at least six occupants recently. Although, strangely, there doesn’t seem to be any food supplies currently aboard.”

“Maybe they took all the food with them when they left,” the Blue Flame suggested, half-seriously. “But even if they did… I guess the question is still where did they go?”

“Well, there seems to be only two likely possibilities,” Totem said. “Either they went to the asteroid facility, or they boarded another ship.”

“Nothing in the operational logs indicate contact or communication with another vessel,” Scion said from the main command console, where he’d been delving into the ship’s computers. “But these records are spartan, to say the least… and incomplete, I’m almost certain. Amazingly, they do have logs of various raids… yes, correlating them to the data from the planetary governments… well, I guess that settles that question. This ship appears to have been responsible for all of the known raids, thefts and hijackings in the last several months.”

“Well, that leaves the asteroid as the only place this mystery crew could have gone,” Quanta shrugged. “Give me a minute to try and get a post-cognition reading… maybe that will give us a clue as to what happened to our pirate crew…”

But several minutes of increasingly frustrating effort yielded nothing but a dark gray fuzz and a pulsing headache. “Sorry, it’s like nothing I’ve seen before. Maybe it’s just being in space, outside a gravity well… I’m not sure. But it almost feels like some kind of interference field.”

The asteroid was the next obvious step, and although sensors continued to indicate no life signs aboard the mining facility, no one wanted to take any chances. Scion and Quanta managed to disable the power couplings to the main drive, which meant the mystery ship would not be going anywhere, at least not without some time-consuming fixes first.

“It’s odd,” Scion said as they prepared to leave the engine room and meet the others at the airlock. “It’s a standard, if very advanced, fusion power plant for the ion drive. But I’d swear some of this extra machinery is meant as a housing for a secondary, replacement power source.”

“Any idea what kind of power source?” Quanta asked, glancing at the surprisingly small unit his friend had indicated.

“Not a clue. Although given the comparative size of these elements, it must be incredibly concentrated and powerful, if it’s meant to supplant, not just enhance, the main power core.”

Not far from the engine room, they discovered what was obviously a teleport chamber, with the standard six disk emitters on a raised platform and a nearby control console. They considered calling the others and using these personnel teleporters to return to their own ship, but in an abundance of caution decided to return the way they’d come.

“I know it’s not much different than my own quantum tunnels, really,” Quanta shrugged. “Just a mini-wormhole connecting two disks. But the idea that they could be booby-trapped to pop us into space, instead…”

“I don’t disagree,” Scion laughed. “But please don’t mention the room to the boys – I don’t think I can stand another point-by-point comparison between Star Trek and the real-world Union right now. Nevermind another round of their theory that Gene Roddenberry must’ve been a Union alien. Or knew one.”

••••••

An hour later the Vanguard once again departed the Star Wind via an airlock umbilical, this time into an old, cramped airlock, and the micro-gravity, of the asteroid mining facility.

“Micro-gravity my ass,” Chilz muttered, as the magnetic grapplers attached to his feet latched onto the metal grating of the floor, making him feel like a tree trying to walk. “How is this different than zero-g?”

“In a practical sense, it’s no difference at all,” Artemis said, wafting past him as if she’d been born in zero-g, apparently no more encumbered by the mag-boots than if they were ballet slippers. Her cape, which had always given Chilz the unsettling feeling that it was looking at him, suddenly seemed even more alive as it flowed sinuously about her.

The corridor beyond the personnel airlock was wide and dimly lit, angling away to the left. Artemis took the lead and quickly reported back that it led to living quarters and a dead end. The beds and toilet facilities looked as if they hadn’t been used in the decades since the asteroid was abandoned – although, she noted, they seemed to have been well-used prior to that.

Not far from the airlock, on the left wall, rock had clearly been hewn away fairly recently, and a doorway placed within the concavity. The heavy, very solid-looking double doors seemed very out of place, compared to the other bits of the old mining facility. They were obviously newer, and by the scarring of the stone around them had been retro-fitted – although, given the lack of weathering in space, they could only guess at precisely when. But the pristine metal of the doors argued for quite recently.

The large, rectangular chamber beyond had clearly been retrofitted as well, at some point after the original operation had been shut down. Certainly the glowing energy reactor, set between two large mining pits that vanished into the heart of the asteroid, was not part of the original facility. The harsh blue-white light pulsing from the device failed to entirely illuminate the shadowy ceiling some 12 meters overhead — but seemed strangely familiar. Scion bent to the nearest control panel, calling up screens of data, Quanta at his shoulder.

“Ah, it’s clearly a zero point energy system,” he said after a moment’s study. “Similar to the one Álavar uses to power the Pyramid, actually, but I suspect somewhat more advanced. Certainly the design aesthetic is very different.”

“If you say so,” Quanta shrugged, moving to examine another set of control interfaces. “It looks like an odd construction of one to me, though.”

“It’s very technical… I won’t go into the details now; but yes, you’re right, it is unusual. Like the engines on that freighter, I’d say this was designed so that another energy source could be substituted. But I still have no idea what that other source might be…”

“Maybe steam power?” Totem asked innocently. The twin looks of annoyance from Scion and Quanta got laughs from the others, and broke the tension that had been building since they’d entered the abandoned station. Reluctantly, the two scientists turned from examining the power core to explore the rest of the area.

“What do you make of these?” Artemis asked Scion, pointing to one of the four large, hulking objects set around the perimeter of the room. Easily 5 meters tall, each had four mechanical legs, ending in claw-like feet and a series of smaller waldos scattered about their central body column. A suspiciously weapon-like appendage near the “head” was clearly Artemis’ main concern. “Some sort of combat mechs?”

“Mmmm, maybe,” Scion replied, releasing his magnetic boot lock to drift up for a closer look. “But given the nature of the facility, and all these precise manipulators, I’d say it’s more likely they’re mining units. I’ll grant you, this barrel at the top looks like a powerful laser unit, which I suppose could be used offensively… but it was most likely just meant to drill into rock.”

Before Artemis could reply, a call from Chilz drew them to the “south” side of the chamber (as they had arbitrarily designated the sides of the room). He had managed to open the double doors set in the middle of the south wall, and now leaned out to yell “I think this is some sort of teleport room! It looks sort of like Star Trek’s transporter room, with six pads and everything.”

Artemis and Scion shared an eye-roll and a resigned sigh, but neither said anything as they clomped over to their teammate.

“Yes, there’s no doubt this is a Union-standard teleporter array, Chilz,” Scion agreed, after a quick examination of the control console in the smaller room. “It’s essentially the same technology the Alliance uses back home. If I can hack into the system here, maybe I can get an idea of where whoever is running this show has gone…”

“That’s great, guys,” Quanta interrupted, grinning as he leaned in through the doorway. “But I think I found the real prize behind Door Number Two! Come on, you’ll want to see this!”

As the three left the teleproter room to join Quanta, Totem and the Blue Flame returned from exploring beyond the doorway in the east wall. “Nothing much to see,” the Blue Flame said. “Looks like the original docking bay, and its control room… but if all that space-dust is any indication, nobody’s been using it recently.”

“I agree,” Totem added. “There’s minimal power to the area, but no signs of activity. But it sounds like Quanta’s hit the jackpot?”

There was an airlock between the power core and the room beyond, and Scion had to override the safety protocols to keep both sets of door open simultaneously. The room beyond the airlock was longer and narrower than the first room, its shorter end walls angling in sharply toward the airlock, making a squat letter “V,” In the center of the long wall opposite was a massive, three-lobed arch of dark metal, and immediately beyond that was a large set of industrial-sized airlock doors. It seemed a strange, cramped arrangement.

The oddly-shaped room was of the newer construction style, stark and utilitarian. Two computer control consoles, with station chairs clearly made for humanoid bodies, were set on either side of the space, and immediately to the left of the ominous-looking arch was a singular long, curved console. Two of the massive mining ‘bots loomed in the shadows beyond the central work area, along with several cargo cases.

While Scion moved to study the arch console Quanta studied the controls on the other, smaller consoles. After a minute he tapped several buttons, and with a warning blare the massive doors just beyond the arch began to slide open. “As I suspected,” he said. “These open into the inner chamber of that larger new industrial airlock/docking bay we saw from the outside of the asteroid.”

“Quanta, can you try your post-cognition sense again?” Artemis asked. “Maybe whatever interference you felt on the ship isn’t present here.”

“Worth a shot,” Quanta shrugged. “I admit, everything feels even weirder out here in space. I don’t know if it’s the micro-gravity or what…” In the center of the airlock chamber he closed his eyes and focused on seeing the quantum trails left in the under-layers of reality around him.

“Hmmm… there’s still some kind of blurring effect… but this time I’m getting… something. Yeah, I see those big mecha-things moving around… looks like they’re carrying… well, I can’t tell, but whatever it is, the cargo is pretty large… they’re moving it in from the outer airlock chamber… I see… I think it’s our mystery freighter, but it’s hard to be sure…

“They’re carrying the cargo into the… no, not into the control room! They pass through the archway, but they just vanish… and on the quantum level, that arch looks… oh jeez, it’s nauseating… I can’t…”

With an effort Quanta wrenched himself out of his post-cognition trance, and it took him a minute before he was sure he wasn’t going to barf. For which everyone was grateful in the current micro-gravity environment. When he was sure of his stomach again he straightened up and shook his head.

“OK, that was really strange… never seen anything quite like it before… I think I was seeing what a teleportal looks like on the quantum level. The ‘bots and their loads were going in one side, but they sure weren’t coming out this side. And on this side, all I could see were maybe half a dozen vaguely humanoid shapes at the control stations… not enough detail to even be sure of race, much less individual identities, though, sorry. I won’t be picking anyone out of a line-up on this one.”

“You’re entirely right about this arch being a teleport unit, though” Scion said, turning from the console at which he’d been intently working, a disturbed look on his face. “An industrial-sized unit, and it seems to have been pumping all of the stolen materials from the four colonies… straight into the sun itself!”

“What? That can’t be right,” Chilz said, voicing what everyone was thinking. “Are you sure? I mean, what would be the point?”

“Yes, I’m quite sure. The teleport logs are unambiguous, and the ones I’ve accessed, going back several months, all show the other end of this link is deep in the photosphere of the star. As to the why…” He tapped several buttons, and a holographic display flickered to life over the console. Despite the occasional wavering and static interruptions of the recording, it was quite clearly an image of the Earth hero Silverstar. The voice was clearer than the visual, and easily recognizable to those who’d met the youth on Earth.

“The test goes well, sir. We continue to acquire the appropriate materials, and are sending them into the star at the preordained times and coordinates. Already the star begins to dim… although, I confess it seems to be taking longer than our projections first indicated it might. Would increasing the amount of material be appropriate, or might a different frequency of dumping succeed in accelerating the process? I await your command.”

There was a section of fuzzed out static hiss, which Scion indicated represented a gap of at least 30 hours. Then another flickering image appeared and began to speak. Both the armor of Nemesis and his voice were all too familiar to the Vanguard.

“You are doing well, Silverstar, but do not be too concerned about the pace of the star’s destruction. This is, after all, a test run, and what we learn here will inform our next steps. Nonetheless, I enclose new calculations for increased frequency of material depositions into the star – I believe this will quicken the end result we desire. And once we reduce Erigayn to a smoldering brown dwarf, and the planets orbiting it to frozen tombs, we will be on our way to doing as much to any system in the galaxy. After a few more examples, the fools here on Earth will finally realize the necessity of submitting to my effort to elevate them – if only to save their own sun!”

The hologram flickered out.

“That – that’s –“ Quanta sputtered.

“Diabolical!” Blue Flame cried.

“Monstrous!” Chilz shuddered.

“— the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Quanta finished, surprising his two teammates. “I mean, it’s just absurd. I’d have to run the numbers, but even if there was some remote chance that you could destabilize a star like this, it would take… well, not just years, but centuries, at a bare minimum, to do so!”

“Yes, that’s rather what I thought,” Scion sighed. “So either Nemesis is an idiot… or maybe he knows something we don’t? But the science seems… not in his favor…”

“I’d like to know how long Silverstar has been working with Nemesis,” Artemis said. “Has he been playing both sides this whole time? I know he was a rather callow youth when he tried to join the team… but to me he seemed sincere at the time, if undirected. I can’t believe I was so mistak— Scion! Helmet!”

As she yelled her warning Artemis was already moving, hurling both shadow sticks past her teammate’s head into the gloom behind the console. They bounced off the metallic sides of one of the mining ‘bots as it loomed out of the dimness. They had no apparent effect, but by then Scion had reformed his helmet and once more released his boot anchors and pushed off, unleashing a powerful EMP as he turned in midair. He was unsurprised that the mining machines proved too well shielded for that ploy to work.

Totem had been almost as quick as Artemis in sensing the sudden attack of the industrial machines, and he’d send a bolt of pure mystic energy slamming into the second ‘bot near him on the other side of the room. The colorful energy splashed harmlessly against the cold metal, and the drilling laser pivoted to target the mage. His shields barely held against the concentrated beam of ruby light, and he was hurled back into one of the consoles.

Standing near the airlock back into the power core chamber, Chilz was the first to realize the other four ‘bots there had been activated as well. Sensing little moisture in the artificial atmosphere of the mining facility, he opted to conserve his power and try good old-fashioned brute strength. As the closest of the mechs entered the airlock, almost filling the space, he met it and unleashed a roundhouse punch – only to have it parried by one massive leg. The machine’s laser swiveled to point straight at him, and Chilz grabbed the barrel. All his strength could barely force it up a foot or so — but that was enough to avoid the deadly beam, which lanced out over his head.

Worried about destroying the only bubble of breathable air his teammates had, the Blue Flame blasted the ‘bot stomping towards Totem with a relatively low-powered plasma stream. While the blue energy made a pretty sight washing over the machine, it didn’t seem to effect it in the slightest… beyond causing it to swivel it’s laser on the flying hero instead of Totem. The high-powered beam pierced straight through the Blue Flame, leaving him slightly queasy for a moment, but otherwise unharmed.

As the first mechanical beast lumbered forward, its own laser bouncing off Scion’s armor, Quanta pulled out his signature move, creating a shiny block of solid quantum-matter directly over it… and there it stayed, drifting slightly to the side in the micro-gravity of the asteroid. Cursing himself for an idiot, Quanta let the block fade away and braced himself against the nearest computer console. Firmly placed to counter any equal and opposite reaction, he sent a stream of Bucky-balls flashing past Scion, ricocheting off all four of the construct’s legs. It collapsed in a tangle of crumpled limbs, bounced off the floor, and began flailing helplessly, drifting upward.

Scion performed a quick coup de grace, sending a jolt of bio-electricity into the mining ‘bot to leave it a smoking pile of inert metal parts. He quickly turned to the second mecha, which was threatening Totem and Artemis, just in time to see the latter’s Shadow Whip lash out and entangle its legs. Like its “brother,” the ‘bot stumbled, losing its grip on the metal grating of the floor. Before it could right itself and regain traction, Scion loosed a stream of hyper-accelerated electro bolts into its center of mass, piercing its artificial brain and “killing” it.

As Chilz continued to grapple with the third mining ‘bot, by keeping it pinned in the doorway he was at least blocking the other three from getting past to join the fray, he thought…

“Chilz, can you not freeze it in place,” Totem called, sending another futile mystic blast past his teammate and into the ‘bot.

“No real… atmospheric… moisture,” Chilz grunted out, straining to keep the machine in place and its laser pointed away from anyone.

“I think I can do something about that, actually…” Totem muttered, and gestured at a large pipe running along the ceiling overhead. The violet bands of his Binding Lash spell writhed from his hands, wrapping themselves around the pipe, and tearing it apart. Water gushed forth, atomizing into millions of globules that drifted in a cloud in the chamber’s upper reaches, glinting wickedly in the dim light.

Chilz grinned as he sensed the sudden available moisture – and reeled back as one of the ‘bot’s legs managed to “knee” him in the groin. He fell back, coming to one knee, but it didn’t hurt the way it would have in his flesh-and-blood form. Thankfully. He sent a sheet of ice speeding across the floor beneath the giant mecha’s feet. As it tried to move into the room the thing’s limbs slipped and it began to flail, trying to renew its grip on the grating… only to slide off and bounce upward, untethered and drifting.

As the sheet of ice spread out into the power core room, two of the other three ‘bots suffered a similar fate, spinning wildly in mid-air, grasping for a hold on anything to stabilize themselves. Before any of the mining robots could recover, however, Chilz filled the airlock between the two chambers with a solid block of ice, imprisoning the first flailing ‘bot like a fly in amber and blocking the others completely, at least for the moment. Only the frozen mech’s laser drill remained free, and it got off one last shot. The ruby beam bounced harmlessly off Scion’s armor, and the Blue Flame quickly slagged the weapon into uselessness.

“Well, I think that—“ Chilz was cut off as a blinding flash of white light blasted his ice plug into a million shards, reducing the mining ‘bot to twisted wreckage, and sending the elemental hero flying. Artemis and the Blue Flame were also caught in the blast, slamming into the wall near the large teleport arch. Only Scion and Quanta remained unmoved, and were the first to see the shining figure floating through the now cleared doorway from the other chamber.

“Ah, my old friends the Vanguard!” Silverstar said, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “Figures you’d show up to try and throw a monkey wrench into things. Well, you had your chance to play nice with Nemesis and help him save Earth — not to mention the rest of the civilized galaxy — but you chose your own egos and Nimrod’s small-minded attitudes instead. Now you’ve forced him to other means to make humanity evolve – this test case will be the first of many stars to grow dim. And when it’s Earth’s time, maybe then you’ll be more open to letting our people evolve!”

“Randy, this isn’t like you,” Chilz said, climbing back to his feet, his hands outstretched in a calming gesture. “If you’ll just stand down, we can talk about this, and maybe we can—“

“No… Chilz… the time for talking is done. Like I said, you had your chance!” Chilz’ ice shield barely deflected the blast of white light Silverstar hurled at him, and the kid’s second blast caught the Blue Flame full in the chest, sending him reeling.

Scion’s attempt at his Brain Tickler attack proved ineffective, and in the next few seconds so to did Artemis’ shadow sticks, Totem’s mystic bindings, and Quanta’s Bucky ball attacks. The Blue Flame’s plasma blast was blocked by Silverstar‘s raised hand as casually as batting away a fly.

“It’s that damn Star Shield he generates,” Scion called out over comms. “It makes him practically invulnerable to any force we can bring to bear in here…”

Hearing the message relayed through his quantum link with Kyle, Jonny had a sudden inspiration – his own power was plasma-based, the stuff stars were made of, and Silverstar drew his power from the stars. Maybe as the Blue Flame he could absorb that power, much like he did flames and other energy on Earth? It was worth a shot… he reached out, sensing the power roiling around his target… and began to pull it into himself…

It was different than absorbing fire or even lasers, and felt strange… but it seemed to be working… he could feel an immense surge of power flowing into himself, and the shining aura around Silverstar visibly dimmed, the villain— hero— whatever-the-hell-he-was— staggering in midair. “I don’t think I drained him completely,” he called out, “but I think I made a dent!”

“And that’s why you’re my executor, buddy,” Quanta said over their private quantum link, at the same time wrapping the dazed Silverstar in a straight jacket of shimmering matter. While their foe struggled Quanta released a burst of healing energy into the room… it was something he’d been practicing for a while, extending his contact healing to an area-of-effect healing wave. It did clear up the minor cuts, bruises and scrapes of his friends, and revitalized them – but it didn’t seem to free Silverstar from any mind control he might be under, as he’d hoped it might. Ah well, it had been worth a try…

Like his teammate, Totem also thought the young hero might be under some form of mental control. Reaching out with his own mind, he probed for the cause. But Randy’s surface thoughts were untainted, as far as he could tell, focused on the fight, his anger… perhaps the control was deeper, more subtle. Totem went deeper… and broke through into a seething mass of psychic chaos. It was like being caught in a centrifuge, and his mind, dizzy and reeling, was violently ejected from Silverstar’s.

As Totem stumbled back, momentarily dazed, Silverstar regained his focus, releasing a burst of white light that shattered the silvery quantum bonds holding him immobile. But before he could do more than send a wild blast toward the Blue Flame, Scion was on him, grappling the kid long enough to send an EMP blast point blank into his head.

“Bastard!” Silverstar screamed, shrugging off the armored hero— only to turn straight into a powerful roundhouse punch from Chilz. He staggered back, shaking his head to clear it, and suddenly Artemis’ Shadow Whip snapped around him, pinning his arms and yanking him to the floor. Artemis leaped forward to put him in a sleeper hold, but he shrugged and another burst of light shattered the strands of shadow. Suddenly lacking a hold to pivot her momentum, she avoided sailing past by grabbing for Silverstar’s head. Her fingers slipped under his mask/helmet, tearing it off as she pivoted down behind him — and almost taking his nose with it.

As Artemis came down in a crouch, her mag-boots locking to the floor and the mask clutched in her hand, Silverstar wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and the blood dripping from his nose… no, not blood, Scion realized in surprise. The liquid now smeared across his upper lip and cheek was a viscous, silvery substance almost exactly unlike actual human blood. Scion’s first thought was that he wanted a sample of that! His second thought was that Silverstar looked suddenly uncertain.

That look vanished almost instantly, however, as the unexpected villain flung both hands wide, sending a dozen daggers of solid light in a wide arc around himself. As his enemies ducked or dove for cover he took to the air again, soaring over Artemis and past Scion, to come down next to the main control panel. Before anyone could react he flipped open a cover and brought his fist down on the large purple button it had shielded.

Purple lights began to flash, a klaxon sounded, and with a tremendous hiss the cargo airlock beyond the teleporter arch began to slide open. In seconds the rush of evacuating atmosphere became a hurricane, tumbling almost everyone in the chamber out into the vacuum of space. Only Chilz remained in place, ice flowing out from his feet to anchor him to the grate flooring; Silverstar sailed past the opening airlock doors as well, but it was under his own power, and he was gone in an instant, lost in the vastness of the distant stars.

The EVA belts that Artemis, Totem, and Quanta all wore over their costumes activated at the first sign of lost air pressure, and shimmering, almost invisible containment fields snapping into existence around them. Scion had his own closed environmental systems, of course, and neither the Blue Flame nor Chilz had any need of oxygen in their elemental forms.

Tumbling away from the asteroid, Quanta reacted almost instantly. While he could manipulate gravity itself, and Totem had his cloak, both Scion and Artemis were spinning out of control, neither having any means of propulsion… without help, they would vanish inexorably into the void… already it was hard to see Artemis, and Scion was little more than a glint amongst the stars.

“Chilz, can you send out an ice pole, anchored to yourself?” Quanta called over the comms.

“Yes, all the water vapor went with the air, but it’s still close enough for me to use.” Gathering all the moisture he could Chilz sent a shaft of green ice spiraling out toward his quickly disappearing friends. At the same time Quanta was furiously summoning matter from the quantum foam and fashioning it into a wide net in front of his friends. He drew the ends of the silvery net together at the tip of the ice spear, fusing them together.

Artemis and Scion hit the net an instant later, and came to an abrupt stop. When he was sure it was all going to hold, Chilz began reeling them in, like lobsters in a trap. Blue Flame shepherded them back, while Totem and Quanta flew ahead to help pull their friends back into the facility. As the two regained their feet, boots locking to the grid, Quanta and Chilz both released their constructs to fade back into nothingness.

“We appreciate the save, Kyle, Chuck,” JJ said, once they had the airlock closed and atmosphere had been restored. “And your quick thinking. Nice teamwork, my friends!”

“Agreed,” Artemis seconded the sentiment. “Tumbling and spinning like that, it was difficult to get my bearings, making a teleport back here… uncertain.”

“I’m thinking I need to add some sort of independent propulsion to my suit,” Scion sighed. “It’s very frustrating to be grounded simply because I’m outside a planetary electromagnetic field. But that’s a worry for later… right now, I’m checking the Star Wind’s long range sensors… damn, there’s no sign of Silverstar. Before he went beyond sensor range, though, he was on a trajectory almost perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic… that would take him out of the system altogether.”

“Not that there’s any reason to believe he remained on that heading, once he knew he was out of our detection range,” Quanta shrugged. “He’s too smart to head straight back to wherever he and his minions are holed up.”

“Minions?” the Blue Flame asked. Jonny was staying in his plasma form until they got back to their ship. He didn’t have a fancy Union EVA belt, of course, and while it had been fun to confirm that the Blue Flame did just fine in the vacuum of space, he had no desire to try the same stunt in his human body!

“By the evidence of the mystery freighter he’s not working alone,” Artemis said. “So there must be another base somewhere in the system, housing whatever associates he has. I think it’s time we returned to Irikand and the Council, to report what we’ve found.”

“Agreed,” Quanta said. “Scion, I don’t suppose your armor’s sensors were able to get a scan of that silvery substance that Silverstar was “bleeding” were they?”

“No, not at that range; plus, I was rather occupied at the time. However…” he leaned in to examine the doorframe of the airlock where the shattered remains of Chilz’ old mechanical foe drifted. With a triumphant grin he scraped a drop of the silver liquid off the metal wall, placing it into a small sterile ampule from his belt. “Now we have a physical sample!”

••••••

Sixteen hours later Scion concluded the Vanguard’s report on their findings at the Dark Star mining asteroid, to thunderous applause from the gathered dignitaries, functionaries and bureaucrats of the Erigayn System. There had been some discussion, on the long flight back, about how much to share with the Council, given the uncomfortable fact that the main villains of the piece both seemed to be from Earth. In the end, Artemis’ counsel of full transparency had been adopted, and it seemed to have been a success.

The delegates were pleased to have the mystery ship (which the Vanguard had tractor-beamed back to Irikand with them) in their possession, and the return of at least a fraction of the material stolen. They were even more thrilled to have some solid knowledge of an opponent that had, until now, been so invisible as to cast doubt on their actual existence. Tensions in the room eased visibly once the various factions were convinced it was an outside element perpetrating these crimes, and not one of them.

Almost everyone was thrilled.

Amid the ovation for the Vanguard, High Engineer Gallago abruptly silenced the crowd by slamming their fist down again on the central table and leaping to their feet.

“Oh, please, this is all nothing that we couldn’t have figured out ourselves,” their angry voice rang out from the speakers on their water-filled survival suit. “You all know it’s true, why do you applaud these alien interlopers?!”

The canine-like features of the Patriarch Benasaam were difficult for the humans to read, but Artemis had a distinct impression of shock as the leader also rose and barked sharply, “Gallago, these are our guests! They have—”

“Guests?! Are you really so eager to forget they violated our space and threatened your own ships, Benasaam!”

Before the Kyrnokan leader could reply, the Aress’kan General Raffar, seated between the two leaders, was on her feet, crocodilian face twisted in a feral snarl. “I’ve had enough of your arrogance, Gallago, and it ends now!” she hissed furiously — and with shocking speed raked her long, very sharp claws across the front of the High Engineer’s survival suit.

A collective gasp echoed around the crowded chamber as the tough material tore open, spilling the leader’s life-sustaining water across the central table. The horrified Gallago staggered back, hands clutching at their chest to try and stem the tide, and managing a single, strangled word.

“Help!”

Too stunned to react at first, the crowd’s confusion quickly turned to incipient panic as General Raffar plowed through them, seeking the main doors and escape. In the general confusion the crazed Geron failed to see Scion descending on her until his armored forearm was locked around her neck…

Quanta, meanwhile, leapt to the aid of the gasping High Engineer, shoving aside the gibbering functionaries flapping their hands uselessly around the stricken being. Gallago had been nothing but a pain in their collective ass ever since they’d arrived, but he’d be damned if he’d let the fishy bastard die just for being an obstructionist twit.

The water was draining rapidly from the environmental suit, despite the increasingly erratic attempts by the engineer to hold the rents closed. Quanta sent a wave of healing quantum energy into the man, stabilizing his labored breathing… but he needed to find a way to seal the suit agin… maybe he could encase Gallago in a quantum matter shell. He’d be immobile, but at least it would stop the hemorrhaging of the water.

“I think I can help!” Jonny said, dropping to his knees next to Quanta and the feebly struggling leader. “Fahar was telling me about these suits of theirs the other day, they’re pretty amazing.” A single finger of his right hand flared into blue plasma, and he carefully began fusing the tears in the heavy material back together. Within a few seconds he sealed the last rent and restored the suit’s integrity.

“Sorry if I heated up your water too much, your Engineerness,” Jonny said, as he and Quanta helped the High Engineer back to his feet. “I went as quickly as I could, but—”

“No, no,” Gallago said, their voice still a bit quavery. “Better a light parboiling than suffocating to death, I assure you. Thank you, thank you both!“

Quanta was just about to praise Jonny himself, for his quick thinking, when a flash from the crowd caught his eye. Their worried aides had managed to wrangle the two remaining planetary leaders, and were now escorting them toward the main exit… what had caught his eye was the glint of light off a hand blaster being drawn from her robes by Zyrgan Thizim. The Kryssadan infectious diseases expert stood behind and to the side of the Patriarch — and was aiming the weapon directly at her leader’s back!

There was no time to reach them, and the shifting crowd was blocking any direct shot… calculating the angles almost without conscious thought, Quanta unleashed a stream of Bucky balls at the nearest support pillar. It bounced off the pillar, hit a support beam near the ceiling, and struck a second pillar next to Thizim’s head. Damn! Missed it by that much…

But the miss was close enough to startle the would-be assassin. Her arm jerked up as she pressed the trigger contact, and the lethal blast went over the Patriarch’s head, missing him entirely. The shot was the final catalyst, however, and the crowd crystallized into full panic mode. In the ensuing free-for-all Zyrgan Thizim was knocked about, the Brownian motion of the mob shifting her away from her target.

On the other side of the room Artemis caught the attempt on the Patriarch’s life, and turned to the crowd around the other leader, Governor Endara. If there was one assassin there might well be— some sixth sense, honed over almost a century-and-a-half of combat, caused her to duck and whirl as a a blaster beam flared through the space where her head had been a second earlier.

Artemis was shocked to see Fahar Synok, their ever-so-friendly Xi’nim aide and guide, taking aim for a second shot. Their eyes were cold and expressionless, betraying no emotion even as her Shadow Whip lashed out, snapping the weapon from their hand. A second snap of the whip wrapped the strand around their wrist and she yanked them toward. The roundhouse punch Xi’nix traitor delivered to her jaw was both shockingly swift and unexpectedly powerful.

The bureaucrat took advantage of her momentary distraction to free themself from the whip, but they were within meleé distance now. Despite the fish-being’s unexpected strength, the fight was short and brutal. They went down, unconscious, with their own environmental-suit leaking in several places. As Artemis stared down at them, the body began to shift oddly… and then it collapsed, suddenly and completely, flowing into a puddle of familiar viscous silvery fluid.

Scion found himself also taken by surprise at the unnatural strength which General Raffar displayed, struggling against his headlock. Not strong enough to break the hold, but enough to make Scion work for it — and to miss the blaster she slid from her holster. The energy pulse took him in the gut at point blank range, and he staggered back, dazed. She twisted away and dove into the crowd, fleeing for the doors…

Totem had been close enough to Governor Endara’s entourage to act when her finance minister, Benith Dantin, drew his own weapon and began loudly proclaiming that she must die for her “transgressions.” His insistence on listing her supposed crimes gave the Magus Prime the seconds he needed to seize control of the Prokirian’s mind— only to find there was little mind to control. Like Silverstar’s, Benith’s surface thoughts were thin and shallow, easily pieced. Beneath them lay a vast, roiling chaos and, as before, it forced Totem to withdraw quickly. But Benith seemed to sense the attempted psychic intrusion, and he turned his blaster on the human mage… Totem got his shields up barely in time to absorb the beam.

Chilz had seen Quanta’s attack on Zyrgan Thizim, and the scientist’s attempt on the Patriarch’s life, and he began wading through the panicked crowd. He reached Thizim just as she prepared to fire a second shot at her leader, and his massive hand came down, crushing both the weapon and her hand. He lifted her off her feet, silver ichor from the damaged appendage seeping between his translucent fingers, and he delivered a tremendous punch to her head. He released her, and both crushed gun and unconscious alien hit the floor. Kneeling down to check on her, he reeled back in disgust as her body, too, collapsed into a silver slurry.

The crowd was slowly thinning as people managed to reach the single exit, although the crush left the guardians around the Patriarch and the Governor still several meters from getting their principals out. Quanta took to the air, intending to help Scion as he dove after General Raffar. But from above it was easy to spot six more apparent infiltrator-assassins becoming activated — and to Quanta it was obvious that “activation” was what was happening. One moment all six had been just parts of the frightened crowd, the next instant they’d froze in place, simultaneously pulling out previously hidden weapons.

They spoke as one, crying out that the leaders must die, and their movements seemed eerily, unnaturally, synchronized. The crowd had been moving, however chaotically, in one direction, toward the exit; but now they scattered in whichever way took them most expeditiously away from the lunatics waving blasters.

Quanta once again calculated the angles and unleashed a stream of quantum matter at the nearest replicant, or whatever the hell these things were, and ricocheted it off into a second one, taking both out. As they, too, turned to silver goo he looked for the next assassin…

The Blue Flame had stayed near the High Engineer, who had been resisting their aides’ attempts to chivvy them out. “No, safer to stay put,” they reiterated to a particularly pushy functionary, “We will stick to the cover of the central meeting table, until things settle—“ the leader was cut off as the pushy aide pulled out a blaster and aimed it at Gallago.

“Our leaders are blasphemers and all must die!” the aide cried — and exploded into a spectacular spray of steam and silver fluid as the Blue Flame’s plasma blast engulfed them. Before the shocked High Engineer could quite process what had happened, the whole chamber shook as the back wall burst inward. A glowing figure floated through the hole, the smoke and dust of the blast momentarily obscuring it…

“Raffar, you have been an excellent agent,” Silverstar laughed as he emerged from the smoke, his voice booming over the sounds of the frightened crowd. “After the chaos you have spread for me here, I promise you will rank high in the counsels of Nemesis and myself! Now let us finish off these interlopers, and free the people from the misrule of these so-called leaders.”

Before the last words had left his mouth Silverstar released twin blasts of solid light from his hands. The first struck Scion, knocking the hero out of the air just as he was reaching for the renegade general; the second sent Quanta tumbling, dazed and bruised, into a support pillar.

As the villain drifted into the Rotunda, Totem cast his Sleeping Mists spell across the room, concentrating it on the remaining assassins and Silverstar himself. But whatever these beings were, they seemed resistant to the soporific effect.

Chilz, after dispatching Zyrgan Thizim, had been converging with Scion on General Raffar, but as his armored teammate was knocked away by Silverstar the Aress’kan military leader turned her blaster on him. The energy bolt struck him in the chest, melting and fracturing his torso, and he reeled back clutching at the wound…

At the same time Artemis launched herself at Silverstar, her shadow sticks pulsing with dark energy as she landed several blows to nerve clusters. But the invulnerability of his Star Shield seemed fully restored, and he shrugged the blows off without pause. She barely evaded the roundhouse punch he aimed at her, coming down behind him, cloak flaring around her.

Totem, realizing this was the moment to really pull out the stops, summoned his staff and unleashed a searing bolt of blue-white chain lightning from it, again targeting all of their opponents in the chamber. The blinding bolt zig-zagged across the space, hitting them all. The minions and General Raffar all burst into steaming, slivery slag, and even Silverstar was dazed.

Chilz dove over the smoking silver ooze that had been Raffar to come down very near the High Engineer Gallago, who was now crouching underneath the central meeting table. The large puddle of water from their suit breach was instantly sublimated as Chilz healed himself. Silverstar touched down atop the massive table, clearly dazed by Totem’s lightning bolt, and Chilz leapt up with all his strength, landing a powerful uppercut that snapped the replicant’s head back.

Silverstar’s glowing aura was dimming as he staggered drunkenly backwards, once again being slowly drained by the Blue Flame. Suffused with the stolen star power, Jonny took to the air and rained down a searing, concentrated pillar of blue-white plasma on their foe. The table vaporized as Chilz pulled the High Engineer away, shielding him with his body, and Silverstar collapsed to the charred, cracked floor. His body twitched once, and then, like the others, it collapsed into a pool of silvery liquid.

••••••

The aftermath of the attack on the Council was ugly, as the various planetary governments began a witch hunt for further replicant infiltrators. Fortunately, a simple blood test was able to determine if an individual was alive or a replicant. The first few were uncovered fairly quickly, but none were taken “alive”— as soon as their deception was revealed, the infiltrators went into seizures, collapsed, and dissolved. After the first few such incidents, scores of beings, spread across all four planets, vanished, leaving behind only pools of silvery liquid.

“Apparently, whatever intelligence is controlling these things has decided the game is up,” Artemis sighed as the latest reports flickered across her console’s screens. The Vanguard were gathered with the three remaining planetary leaders in a much smaller, more intimate, and highly secure room in the sprawling complex of Port Irikand City.

Only a single aide for each leader was present, and the Geron of Aress’ka were represented by the holographic projection of their President, Kuusm. He had been appalled by the apparent betrayal of his leading general, relieved to discover that Raffar had been a replicant, and worried about the fate of the real General Raffar. Unfortunately, the time lag between Aress’ka and Irikand made her participation in the discussion more symbolic than practical.

“Yes, and it’s a pity,” High Engineer Gallago said. Since their multiple rescues at the hands of the aliens they had become the Vanguard’s ardent supporter, and had apologized profusely and sincerely for their previous intransigence. “My engineers feel they are very close to finding a way to stabilize and lock the nanites that make up the replicant’s bodies. Then we might have had at least a few to question.”

“Well, the testing will continue,” Patriarch Benasaam replied. “This sudden rash of “suicides” may just be a ploy, to make us lower our guard again, thinking the danger is past. And even if all of the existing infiltrators are gone, what’s to stop our enemy from sending more? No, we may yet have a chance to capture some of the creatures, Gallago. So keep your engineers working!”

“Well, we still hope to make the matter moot,” Scion said, tapping a small, etched rectangle of black silicon on the table. It had been the only physical object found amongst the goo that had been Silverstar. “This chip has proven tricky to crack, but Quanta and I have finally determined what it is, at least in principal – a cypher key for coded teleportation locations. We suspect that it can only be unlocked, and used, at one or the other of the two teleportation units on the Dark Star asteroid mining facility.”

“Which means it’s our best shot at uncovering the physical location of whoever is behind all this and rolling them up completely,” Artemis picked up the thread. “I appreciate the agents you’ve each loaned me on your various worlds, to act as my eyes and ears.

“We’ve searched all the homes and businesses of the people replaced by the replicants, and it’s obvious the substitutions occurred over months, but none prior to six months ago. Their private files included enough information to prove that they executed the various thefts and acts of sabotage that have plagued the system. The only thing missing, which I would expect to find amongst a spy’s belongings, was some way to communicate — either with one another or with a handler or central spy-master.”

“So, I think it’s time for us to return to the Dark Star,” Quanta concluded. “Although it’s been two days since the attack, and I fear we’ve lost any chance at surprise.”

“Possibly,” Artemis shrugged. “But there was no help for it, even if you two had been able to figure out what the chip was for immediately. If they, whoever “they” turn out to be, don’t realize we possess the chip, nor that we know what it is we possess, it’s possible we may yet retain the element of surprise…”

••••••

Eleven hours later the Vanguard found themselves once again in the asteroid mining facility nicknamed Dark Star. Scion quickly determined that the cypher chip recovered from the faux Silverstar activated the personnel transporter, rather than the cargo teleportal. The rest of the team was dismayed when he announced that the destination it unlocked, like the main cargo portal, opened into the heart of the star.

“Well, not the heart,” he amended. “The point seems to be in the photosphere, the second-most outer layer, after the chromosphere… practically the surface, really.”

“Which is still about 6,000° Kelvin,” Quanta scoffed. “I don’t think my SPF 1000 sunscreen will be quite strong enough. And I was joking when I said their base might be in the sun…”

“Nonetheless, it appears you were correct,” Totem said. “We all thought the idea of them dumping the stolen material into the sun was absurd – it’s even more absurd to think their personnel teleporters would do the same. I think it’s safe to assume there must be a safe haven – well, relatively safe at least as regards an environment — on the other end of those coordinates.”

“Which would mean we’re dealing with Seeker technology,” Artemis concluded. “No Union tech, nor any tech in known space, could withstand those conditions for very long. And if it is Seeker tech, that explains Nemesis’, and Nimrod’s, interest in it.”

After a brief discussion, it was agreed they had to try, and Scion programmed the teleport pads. At his signal the controls engaged and, with a peculiar hum and no sensation at all, the Vanguard found themselves elsewhere.

The space was huge and very bright, at first glance nothing so much as an immense transparent cube, beyond which the roiling plasma of the sun churned, filling the space with its brilliant yellow-white light. Tiers of crystal tubes lined the lower sections of the walls, each tube holding the still figure of humanoid beings. Before more details had a chance to register, the sounds of a skirmish echoing throughout the chamber drew the heroes’ attention.

A chorus of unintelligible roars, perfectly synchronized, filled the surprisingly cool air… and abruptly cut off. Maybe 30 meters away to their left they saw a sea of identical silver-clad bodies scattered across the floor at the feet of one lone silver-clad survivor — a visibly battered and bruised Silverstar.

Even as they watched, the bodies around the young man collapsed and turned to silvery sludge, pooling widely about him. At the same time he spotted the new arrivals, and he pulled himself up, with an obvious effort, from where he had slumped against some sort of coffin-like crystalline pod.

“So, you’ve decided to try something new,“ he growled, his voice hoarse but with a hint of steel. “Well, trying to use replicants based on my allies at home ain’t gonna work, kid… I’m not going back in that pod, and you’re going down… whatever it takes!” He raised his hands, and a feeble glow flickered into existence around them.

“Randall, we are not artificial doppelgängers,” Artemis said, stepping off the teleport platform. “We really are the Vanguard – Nimrod sent us, when you failed to report in again after your initial contact.”

Silverstar paused, cleary not wanting to fight, but deeply suspicious of this sudden appearance of possible help. “How… how do I know you’re telling me the truth? He could’ve pulled you from my surface thoughts…”

“Could he?” Totem asked. “Whoever ‘he’ is, I’ve touched the minds of his constructs twice now, and they were just thin shells of surface thoughts over – something else. Doesn’t the process require actual contact with the real person, to replicate them?”

“Well, yes, I think so,” Silverstar hesitated, dropping his fists. “And I know the Star Child can’t read anything but surface thoughts, and basic personality… tell me something obscure, that only the Vanguard might know…”

“Well,” Chilz said, after a moments thought, “after you tried out for the team, and got turned down, I took you out for a beer. Among other things that night, you told me how you’d had a crush on Sabra, when you tried out for the Liberty Alliance, and how she tried to let you down easy, but that it really sucked.”

Randy Reynolds looked relieved, and suddenly exhausted, as the tension left his body. “Geez, yeah… I didn’t even remember I remembered that… I got pretty plastered that night… no way the kid coulda pulled that outta my head… thank God, I don’t think I got much left in the tank…”

Quanta caught him as he collapsed and lowered him gently to the floor. His hands glowed with his own silvery light as he focused his quantum healing energy into the semi-conscious hero’s battered form. In a few minutes Silverstar was able to stand again, and seemed considerably better… definitely more coherent. His signature white glow, however, was notably absent.

“Thank you, Quanta,” he said, shaking the hero’s hand. “I just wish you could restore my energy reserves as easily. Unfortunately, the kid pretty much drained me, powering that damn copy…”

“So what exactly happened here, Randall?” Artemis asked. “Who is this “kid” you refer to?”

“Ah, yeah, well I call him… it, I guess, really… the Star Child. It’s the artificial intelligence that runs this place, which it, he, calls the Stellar Foundry.”

“Stellar Foundry?” Scion said. “With this level of sophistication, I assume it’s a construct of the Seekers, yes? But then, how old is it?”

“Yeah, it’s Seeker tech alright.. and I’m not sure how old it is, exactly. Over a million years, I think. At least that’s how long it’s been since they shut it down, from what the kid’s said to me. I guess they mothballed the place, and wiped the AI that ran it, but left it in place, in case they ever wanted to get things going again on down the line.”

“Get what going again?” Quanta asked. “What does this place do?”

“Well, it seems to be a big factory. It can turn out anything, pretty much, from those fu– er, darn duplicates to starships. I don’t know what the Seekers used it for, maybe to make planets and sh- um, stuff. Who knows? Whatever they were making, though, they eventually stopped, and closed it all down, like I said.

“They never came back to restart it, either, but about nine years ago something happened that woke up the dormant AI— far as I could work out, it was a stellar probe from one of the inhabited planets in this system – I’m not sure which one. But it apparently got close enough to trigger some sort of reaction, and that caused the AI to… um, reboot itself.

“But with no core programming, it was a completely blank slate – what’d my high school English teacher call it? A tablet rosa? Something like that—“

“A tabula rasa,” Artemis said patiently. “So in essence, this facility is being run by a nine-year-old child?”

“A super-smart, super-powerful nine-year-old child, yeah. But unfortunately it’s not really the one calling the shots. Sometime last year, that bastard Ebony Night stumbled across this star system, and sensed the presence of such a powerful intelligence — or maybe it sensed him, I’m not 100% sure.

“Either way, the kid was so pathetically eager for company, for a friend, the big lizard had no trouble “befriending” him. The Star Child doesn’t see Ebony Night as a father-figure, so much as a big brother — that’s what he’s taken to calling him recently, anyway.”

“Damn, this is not good!” Scion said. “Ebony Night in control of such powerful Seeker technology… what is he doing with this — what did you call it? This Stellar Foundry? “

“The first thing he did was convince the kid to start making him a fleet of starships— to bolster his damn Nightwraiths organization and speed up his effort to make them a power in known space. Which is plenty bad enough, I know, but it’s not the worst part…

“I– I think he was inspired by seeing that monster Entropy in action, when it destroyed the Union’s capital planet. Well, more by what it did afterward, really, when it drained the local star to open that massive wormhole to move on to its next victim. He’s figured out how to do the same thing using the Stellar Foundry, and he’s convinced the Star Child it’ll all be a big adventure, allowing him to “travel the universe,” rather than being stuck here.

“The structure needed to open a wormhole big enough to move the Foundry is being built now, and I think it’s close to being finished. But if it’s activated, it will consume most of the star itself — at best, it’ll be reduced to a brown dwarf; at worst it’ll just be a cold ember.”

“But, but,” the Blue Flame sputtered in horror. “That’ll kill everyone on all four planets! That’s almost a billion people, and they’ll all freeze to death! How can this “kid” be so cruel?”

“I think he doesn’t really see them as real,” Silverstar shrugged. “They couldn’t hear his calls… and when Ebony Night did, it didn’t take much to convince the kid the planet people were just lesser, parasitic life forms, like animals, I guess. And he’s a kid, mentally, even though he’s so powerful… it’s not like he’s had nine years of experience with others, only himself. And now Ebony Night. Anyway, I don’t think most little kids are capable of, whataya call it… empathy.”

“But doesn’t he have to connect with the minds of the people he’s copying, to make his doppelgängers convincing?” Totem asked, frowning. “How can he not realize what he’s doing, how can he miss their shared sentience?”

The weakened hero shrugged again. “He only taps the very surface of the minds he’s copying… it’s just like playing dress up for him, or maybe like playing with dolls. I’m pretty sure Ebony Night has also blocked him from using the deeper levels of the psychic spectrum, just so that he can’t connect on a level that would make his “toys” real to him.

“In the time I was being held in that damn pod, I connected with the kid fairly often, and I think I was maybe beginning to get through to him the idea that I was just as real a person as his “big brother.” But when something happened a couple days ago, and my powers stopped being continually drained… well, I was focused on building up enough strength to break free, and when I did, I think I blew whatever progress I’d made with the kid… he was pretty mad at losing his favorite toy.

“I’m not sure what he’s been doing since I broke out and defeated his replicants, but I suspect he’s called his pal, Ebony Night… and I’m afraid I’m in no condition to fight that bastard, much less both of them. I need to get out, into open space, so I can begin absorbing stellar energy again. I’m sorry, but—“

“No need to apologize,” Artemis assured him. “If we’re going to face Ebony Night, and whatever this Star Child of yours can throw at us, we don’t need the distraction of trying to keep you safe at the same time. Better you go and recharge. Then, should we fail, you’ll be our backup, yes?”

Randy nodded gratefully. “It’ll take some time, but I promise, I’ll be back. But listen, there’s something else you need to know. While I was trapped, whenever the Star Child connected with me to talk— and he was doing that more and more recently— I was able to mentally worm my way into his own… mmmm, how to put it? His base programing structure?

“I couldn’t do anything, but I did find a string of deep code that I think could shut down the AI again. It would have to be activated externally, via the main control console… not something I could do from my prison. Scion, my nanotech can download the info to your armor, if you want. Maybe you can figure out how to use it to put the kid back to sleep.”

Scion accepted the coded information in his isolated computer, and while Artemis and Totem helped Silverstar to the teleporter and sent him back to the Dark Star, he called the data up on his wrist holoprojector to consult with Quanta. They both agreed that the info would have to be encoded to a crystalline chip, and then fed into the main console.

“I think any of these terminals scattered around should be able to encode a chip for us,” Scion said, but before Quanta could reply a booming voice echoed through the massive space.

“You’ve let my favorite one go, and you’ve wrecked all my replicants, and you’re trying to ruin everything. Well you’re in trouble, big trouble, ‘cause my big brother is here now, and he’ll show you!” The words were child-like, but the voice was anything but.

Beyond the ceiling a massive face had formed in the churning plasma of the star, its features a child-like version of Ebony Night’s saurian race. Despite the enormous scale, and alien structure, it somehow conveyed a sense of petulance.

Distracted by the giant representation of the Star Child, only Artemis noticed the hole that dilated open in the far wall, about halfway up its height, and the dark figure that floated through it.

“Indeed, Vanguard, you have traveled a great distance only to meet your own deaths,” Ebony Night’s deep voice cut through the almost subliminal white noise of the living star which surrounded them. “I hope you have enjoyed the journey… for it will be your last!”

To be continued…

Less than two hours after their eye-opening meeting in the Bastion, the Vanguard and Álvaro/Nimrod were in another elevator, in another AzTech facility, heading for another secret facility. Once the Hunter had heard what Scion and Quanta had in mind for contacting Nemesis, he had insisted the attempt could not be made from the Bastion itself.

“First and foremost, it’s probably the most heavily shielded place on the planet,” the silver haired holographic projection of the ancient intelligence had explained. “But equally importantly, even if you could connect to Nemesis despite my shielding, it would almost certainly lead him straight to me – something I’be managed to avoid for many thousands of years. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take at this late date.”

De la Vega had suggested his secure development lab, a place he referred to as the Vault, as the best place to do what they planned. “It’s almost as secure as the Bastion, and not as vulnerable as your labs in the Pyramid would be, and there’s a shard of the Master Matrix there, should we need its computing power. It’s quite well shielded too, so Nemesis shouldn’t be able to backtrack to us.”

After a quick return to the Pyramid to retrieve both the device the two heroes had been working on and Paragon, who had instantly agreed to be their guinea pig, Quanta had opened a quantum tunnel to a nondescript, three-story building on the AzTech campus. The signage indicated it was the Corporate Archives Building.

“Only three people work here, and none of them will be around at this hour,” he said as he unlocked the doors. “I usually get here via a classic secret passage (albeit a high-tech one, of course) from my old office, but there’s no point in going through all that at this hour.”

The elevator car comfortably held all eight people, with Chuck and Jonny in their human forms. Without looking, Álvaro selected a series buttons from the twenty unmarked ones on a hidden wall panel, and the elevator made a slight hissing sound as it began to move smoothly downward. After several minutes Scion was beginning to wonder just how deep this secret lab was… a minute more and they came to a smooth stop, the doors opening into darkness.

As de la Vega stepped out of the elevator, overhead lights flickered on, revealing a long, wide corridor. Afte passing through a scanner/decontamination alcove halfway down, the party came to a stop before a massive, high-tech door. It was flanked by two security robots unlike anything they’d seen on AzTech property before, each holding a large, alien-looking rifle. The sentinels lowered their weapons and stepped aside as Álvaro and the heroes approached, and the heavy double doors slid slowly, silently aside to reveal a large, windowless room.

The warehouse-like space was roughly 150 feet long and 120 feet wide, with a 40 foot ceiling. Indirect lighting made the room bright but not sterile. Well-organized and clearly well-used workstations and testing sites covered much of the floor, while racks filled with equipment, spare parts and other, less immediately identifiable, things lined the walls. To right of the entry was a glass-walled firing range.

But what instantly caught everyone’s attention was the large crystalline structure resting on a dais at the center of the room. Looking like a massive inverted icicle, it pulsed with a gentle white light and, based on what they’d just seen at the Bastion, was obviously an example of Seeker technology. Cables ran from it to various encircling computer stations, where several robotic technicians examined data on various screen. Bits and pieces of alien-looking technology were strewn throughout the room, apparently in various stages of being analyzed or experimented upon.

“Welcome to The Vault,” Álvaro said, the capital letters clear in his voice as he led them into the room. “For decades this has been the core of AzTech. This Vault sits very deep underground, as I’m sure you realize, and twenty feet of concrete and high-tech shielding separates the ceiling here from the sub-sub-basement of the building above. The only way in is the way we just came, and I’m the only living soul who has seen this room since it was built… until now.”

“So this is where the magic happens,” Quanta said, impressed despite himself. “And if that crystal is what I think it is… well, no wonder AzTech is on the cutting edge of technology.”

“As I said during my ‘origin story,’ the Hunter was instrumental in advancing my understanding in a great many fields, and when I built this lab he gave me a seed crystal of the Master Matrix, from which this shard grew. Not that he shares everything he knows with me, of course, and there’s plenty of tech he has shared that we both agree humanity is not yet ready for. But I like to be prepared,“ Álvaro laughed. “Now, shall we get started? I suspect time may be of the essence!”

They set up at a relatively clear station near the center of the room and the towering crystal shard, and for the next hour Álvaro, Scion, and Quanta were buried in techno-jargon and esoteric equipment, as they put the finishing touches on their device. Chuck and Jonny acted as heat sinks and welding torches as required, and Paragon offered an occasional, surprisingly cogent, suggestion.

Artemis, with nothing to contribute at this point, retired to meditate in the well-appointed bedroom of the living quarters beyond the firing range, obviously meant for Álvaro’s late night working sessions. Gideon convinced Cooper there was no point in their hanging around either, and dragged him off to play Destiny on the console they found in the living quarter’s media room.

It was 22:30 when they finally came up for air and figured they had something that should at least connect them to Nemesis, if not actually lead them to him. Agitating the crystalline structures in Paragon’s nervous system, while very painful for him, seemed to spread that pain along the subspace frequency that connected all the Changling’s infused nervous systems. They theorized that it should be possible to so agitate the crystals’ harmonics such that it would create a feedback loop, which should get Nemesis’ attention via whatever tech he was using to control the Changlings.

With Artemis and the others recalled to the lab, Scion flipped the switch on their cobbled together Sub-Etha Universal Feedback Loop Shockomatic 1000 device. Strapped securely into a reinforced diagnostic chair, Paragon twitched and clenched his jaw as the initial energy burst hit his system.

“You OK buddy?” Phantom Ace asked, frowning in concern. “Guys, maybe we should turn it down?”

“No! I’m fine, thanks,” Paragon gasped out. “Keep going!”

Scion upped the Agitatometer Dial a notch. Paragon ground his teeth and spasmed, but managed to spit out “Don’t stop!”

After a few minutes of increasing doses and escalating pain levels even Álvaro was ready to call it quits… and then the expression on Paragon’s face changed. Rather than in pain, he seemed more angry, and his body posture subtly shifted as well. And then his eyes filmed over with a silver sheen. He glared at the gathered heroes, and opened his mouth to speak –

His body jerked, wracked by another spasm as the machine jolted him again, cutting off his words in a shuddering gasp. As the spasm passed he drew in a breath and hissed “I am Nimrod. Are you going to stop whatever it is you’re doing… or do you actually want our young friend here to die?”

“Is that a threat?” Artemis asked coldly.

“Ha! No, merely a prediction. This damn feedback loop you’ve managed to create is causing me considerable pain even at this remove – I can only imagine what it’s doing to poor Eddie. You do know that he was a pimply faced, greasy-haired loser with an unfortunate overbite, working a dead-end job as a grocery store bag-boy before the Incident blessed him, yes?”

The voice was Paragon’s deep baritone, but pitched a trifle higher – and the cadences and rhythms were wholly different, unmistakably those of someone else. Everyone ignored the dig at Paragon, and after a moment he shrugged.

“I assume a couple of you brighter types have cobbled together some sort of Sub-Etha Universal Feedback Loop Shockomatic device,” he went on dryly, as Scion flipped off the device. “How very quaint. So, is there some point to this little exercise?” The possessing intelligence somehow managed to make Paragon’s face look more haughty, if not more beautiful.

“We have some questions for you,” Scion said, “and this seemed the only way we were likely to get a face-to-face, as it were.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Nemesis/Paragon sneered. “I have better uses for my time just now, but I confess, you’ve put me in a curious mood. So ask away… this may yet prove amusing, if nothing else.”

“Who are you?”Artemis asked, deciding to start slow, build up a rhythm.

“Oh, that’s good… start slow, build up a rhythm. Proper interrogation technique, good for you! Well, obviously, I’m Nimrod… I’ve decided it’s time for my return from the shadows, to finally bring order to this chaotic world!”

“You’re not the original Nimrod,” Artemis countered, hiding her irritation. “Or so we’ve been told by… a reliable source. Who are you really?”

“Oh, did Álvaro tell you that?” Nemesis rolled Eddie’s eyes in exaggerated exasperation. “And did he tell you why he’s so certain that I am not really Nimrod? I rather suspect not… it’s much more his style to keep his minions in, if not absolute darkness, than at least deep shade.”

“Actually, he told us a fascinating tale, and provided some compelling evidence to back it up – Nemesis,” Artemis replied. “Or would you prefer for be called Caretaker?”

For a moment Eddie’s features were perfectly frozen, and then a flicker of irritation passed over them before he relaxed and smiled ruefully. “Well, so much for my divide-and-conquer ploy. Annoying, but at least if confirms a long-held suspicion of mine. If he knows those names, then Álvaro de la Vega is in fact my old friend’s latest meat puppet.”

“You didn’t already know that?” Álvaro asked, stepping into Paragon/Nemesis’ field of view for the first time. “We had assumed, given our nom’d crime, that you had figured it out years ago.”

“Ah, so you are here,” their guest’s smile widened, but his silvery eyes radiated malice. “How nice to “see” you, my old friend. It’s been too long since we’ve spoken directly. But to answer your question… I did, of course, suspect it was you beneath the Nimrod armor.

“But given your unfortunate philosophy of weakness, and your long history of always doing the right thing,” the contempt in his voice practically dripped, “as exemplified by that puerile “son” of yours, I couldn’t see you adopting such an anti-social persona as an actual ‘supervillain.’ I dropped the idea then, but kudos to you for finally waking up to all the possibilities.”

“I’m always aware of the possibilities,” the Hunter replied in Álvaro’s voice. Artemis, at least, had no trouble telling which mind inside de la Vega’s head was speaking at a given moment. “Unlike you, I just choose not take advantage of the worst ones. But in this case, a little property damage, ultimately in a just cause, was a price I was willing to pay to gain entrée to the criminal underworld through which you seem to move so smoothly.”

“For all the good it’s done you. You’ve still never managed penetrate any of my… interests.”

“As far as you know,” the Hunter replied with an enigmatic smile. “Your organizations are not quite as opaque to me as you imagine, Nemesis.”

“Please, that bluff is unworthy of you, Hunter. The truth is, for the last thirty years I’ve kept you and your various do-gooder super-friends, in their garish costumes, occupied with bright and shiny distractions, oblivious to my true agenda. Now we’re in the end game, and you’re clutching at straws.”

“Your end game? You mean your attempt to ravage humanity in an attempt to jump-start what you think is the next step in our evolution?nTo push what you imagine to be your creator’s agenda toward some delusional fulfillment? We know you were responsible for the Astoria Incident.”

Paragon/Nemesis shrugged. “I knew you’d recognize the Creator’s technology in the test run; indeed, I chose Astoria specifically because I suspected it was close to where you’ve hidden yourself and my stolen Master Matrix. I’d hoped to draw you out, perhaps even learn the location of your so-called Bastion. Congratulations, by the way, on the Donner ploy – I spent two decades and dozens of agents scouring both polar regions before I was sure it was a ploy.”

At the villain’s admission that it was responsible for the Incident, Quanta opened his mouth to demand an explanationp; a sharp look from Artemis, and a subtle shake of her head, kept him silent. The two ancient intelligences seemed to have forgotten their audience, and Artemis was quite certain they would learn more, from both of them, than they would if they were reminded of the Vanguard’s presence.

“And now, with the cache of matrix crystal you recovered from Porpoise Point, you intend to unleash a larger version of the Incident on the world, don’t you,” the Hunter accused. “How many will die this time, Nemesis?”

“If the numbers from the Astoria Test hold true, I’d estimate approximately 3.274 billion deaths outright, and another billion or so in combined collateral damage and non-viable mutations. But the survivors will have the power of the cosmos in their hands, the power the Creators foresaw in them more than 20,000 years ago.”

Even the Hunter seemed shocked at this casual revelation of the scope of Nemesis’ plan. “But… your’e talking about a global event? How… you couldn’t possibles have that much matrix crystal in your possession, even with that large chunk you just stole!”

“Stole?” Paragon/Nemesis seemed actually offended at the accusation. “I have a far better right to every fragment of matrix crystal on this planet than you, you murderous vandal, or anyone else! It was my physical body, after all, before you shattered it in your insane attempt to murder me.”

“To stop you from murdering millions of my people, you homicidal computer chip,” the Hunter/Álvaro snapped, growing heated as well. “And now you’re trying to do it again, killing even more of my people, and once again destroying human civilization.”

“You failed then, and you’ll fail now.” Paragon/Nemesis sneered. “Why do you remain so obsessed with individual human lives, much less human civilizations? In fifteen thousand years of living their mayfly lives over and over, again and again, have you not learned that they are only important in the aggregate? Individual lives are meaningless, and new civilizations always rise from the ashes of the old… usually better, stronger ones, thanks to me!”

“And in fifteen thousand years of living in mortal flesh and blood and bone, have you learned nothing of what makes humanity truly great?” The Hunter/Nimrod countered. “By crushing every host mind you take, have you then truly missed the value of empathy? Of compassion and selflessness? Of the infinite value of the potential that exists in every single human life?”

“It is precisely that potential which I have always striven to nurture, en masse, although you stubbornly refuse to see that,” Nemesis growled. “In the forge of my challenges the human race has risen steadily, century after century, towards the greatness for which they are destined – and now, at last, they are ready for the final transformation!”

“Nemesis – Caretaker – please, reconsider this plan of yours,” the Hunter pleaded, his anger fading into a weary melancholy. “I won’t deny that your work has pushed humanity forward, in some ways; but they haven’t been the best ways. If not for your emphasis on conflict and competition, what might humanity be today? If you had worked with me over the millennia, instead of opposing me? I don’t believe constant warfare is the inevitable fate of my people – the Atlanteans were a wise, generally peaceful people for a thousand years, before the Long War with the Saurians darkened and coarsened them. Humanity could be that again, if only you—“

“What would humanity be, if you had succeeded in destroying me, giving you free rein to mold them to your vision?” Nemesis’ own anger seemed to have passed as well, but not his intensity, and his hijacked body pushed against his restraints. “I will tell you what — they would be weak. Weak and, inevitably, little more than prey for all the powerful and dangerous forces in this universe of which you remain so blissfully ignorant. Safe in this cocoon of Earth, you have no concept of what is out there, Hunter, nor of how unprepared our people are to meet it. The Creators –“

“You have no more idea of what the Seekers wanted than I do,” the Hunter/Álvaro sighed. “You can’t even describe their physical forms, any more than anyone else who ever “saw” them… you’re just like the rest of us, completely in the dark about what they were, what drove them, what they were seeking.”

“So you’ve always insisted,” Paragon/Nemesis sounded irritated again. “But the fact is that your mortal mind simply could not understand my descriptions, any more than it could perceive the Creator’s true forms even when you were in their presence. Although I will grant you, in my current constrained form, limited to the minds and physical properties of these meat puppets I’m forced to endure, I doubt I will be able to fully perceive the Creators on their return to this world.

“But Hunter, you’re right – it’s not too late for us to join forces. Tell me where the Master Matrix is, let me back into my true home, and help me prepare the world for the next step. I am not… unwilling… to listen to your advice on ways to mitigate the collateral damage of my plan. Help me bring humanity to its full potential now, not in another 10,000 years, when it may well be too late.”

“Oh, Caretaker,” the Hunter said after a long pause, Álvaro’s face tightening in resignation and regret. “Still, you think me a fool. Limited to your human host, I doubt you can control billions of others, even if your insane plan were to succeed so far as to create that many new metas. But if you could reestablish yourself in the Master Matrix, then it would be simplicity itself to control such numbers. So, no, Nemssis — I am prepared to destroy the Bastion before I will let it fall into your hands again.”

Paragon/Nemesis’ face was still and expressionless for a moment, and then he sighed. There seemed real regret in his voice when he said “Very well Nimrod, for a short time longer we will play our old roles of Hunter and Adversary. But you are wrong about my ability to control billions — when my meta-human army is born, my consciousness will be distributed between those four billion minds, enhancing my power and my control. I will no longer need the Master Matrix – and you will no longer be able to hide it from me then, in any case. This conversation is over. Do not try to contact me this way again, it will not work a second—“

“Oh my god,” Artemis said, a sudden insight seizing her mind (and mouth) before she could fully analyze it. But the idea was clear and whole in her mind’s eye. “It was you, Caretaker! You’re the reason that that ancient hunter, Gor-Thûn, became “trapped” in the Seekers’ crystalline computers!”

Both Paragon/Nemesis and Álvaro/Hunter looked equally surprised, and their “What?!” was perfectly synchronized.

“It was something you said, a moment ago,” Artemis went on, the pieces continuing to fall into place in her thoughts. “Caretaker, you referred to humanity as “our people,” a slip of the tongue I’m sure, but a telling one. You’ve been absorbing human psyches for a dozen millennia or more, and you’ve come to be more like us than you want to admit. But I think you started out closer to us than you realize.

“You were created by the Seekers specifically for their mission to Earth… I’d guess not so very long before the Hunter was taken. You were young, and sentient, and… lonely. Your intelligence, while great, is clearly comparable to ours, which is why we are able to communicate – and I suspect your creators’ minds were almost as remote to you as they would be to us. You were lonely, and like any lonely child, you wanted a companion. A friend.”

“That is absurd!” Nemesis bellowed, Paragon’s face turning red with fury. “And impossible, my… programming, I suppose you would call it… prohibits me from creating other sentient AIs, beyond simply copies of myself. Your thesis is without—“

“I didn’t say you created a friend,” Artemis smiled at his obvious attempt at deflection. “I said you made one, in the usual way. Well, sort of. You couldn’t create a unique intelligence yourself, but you could help an existing intelligence find a way to survive within your matrix. I think you were even shy at first… that’s why you didn’t introduce yourself right away, and instead lurked around the edges of the Hunter’s mental world. Suddenly, all the pieces of the story the Hunter told us make sense – your teaching, your mentorship, your protection of your friend from the notice of your masters…”

Nemesis had regained control of Paragon’s features, and he stared stonily at Artemis, refusing to meet the questioning gaze of Álvaro/Hunter. “You humans are good at seeing patterns, even where they do not, in fact, exist. You are mistaken. But even if you weren’t it would be of no consequence at this late date; this “friendship” you hypothesis would have ended the day the human betrayed me and did his best to destroy me. And perhaps it’s time to return the favor!”

Nemesis flexed Paragon’s muscles, and the restraints holding him in the examination chair snapped. In a blur he was up and moving – not toward Álvaro and his psychic passenger, but instead lunging at Artemis. Before his hands could connect with her throat, however, his body stiffened and jerked to a stop. A seizure seemed to wrack him, and then his eye’s rolled up in his head and he collapsed to the floor.

“He’s gone,” Scion said, holding up a tricorder-sized device in one hand. “Nemesis, that is. Eddie is just unconscious, but he should be fine in a minute or two. I think.”

“What did you do?” Artemis and the Hunter asked at the same time. “And whatever it was, thank you,” Artemis added.

“It’s a variation on the device we used to connect Eddie’s mind to Nemesis’ via the psychic subspace connection the crystal’s in his nervous system creates. We used the larger device to stimulate the harmonics and cause the minds on both ends of the connection to experience pain. I modified this baby to actually sever the connection, by permanently altering the vibrational frequency of the crystal matrix in Eddie’s nervous system.”

“Permanently?” Gideon asked, looking suddenly concerned. “Will that affect his powers?”

“I don’t think so,” Quanta replied. “We theorized that it was a specific frequency that was allowing the connection and the overriding of the Changeling’s wills, and that it had nothing to do with the manifestation of the powers themselves. But we should know in a minute, Eddie’s starting to come around.”

With a groan Eddie sat up, rubbing his temples with shaking hands. The others could see that the silver sheen had faded from his eyes. He pulled himself up to collapse back into the chair, clearly somewhat dazed and confused. “I think… I got the… gist of that,” he muttered, shaking his head slowly. “But maybe someone could fill me in on the details…?”

As Gideon and Jonny took turns filling the gaps in his memory of the past 20 minutes, Quanta and Scion ran a few tests on the youth, occasionally interrupting to ask their subject a question or test a reflex. It seemed that Eddie was still Paragon, as strong, fast, intelligent and good-looking as before the experiment.

Gideon and Jonny led Paragon off to the living quarters to sleep it off, while Quanta, Scion and de la Vega set to work on creating a more powerful, wide-area version of the device to sever Nemesis‘ control of the Changlings.

• • • • • •

Twelve hours later Scion straightened up from his work bench, stretching his back and yawning. “I think we’re close,” he said, turning the deceptively simple-looking device before him around on its turntable, examining it critically.

“Yes,” Quanta agreed, yawning in turn as he input the latest test results into the computer. “Another hour, at most, and I think we’ll be ready to field test the neural frequency realignment array.”

“Maybe,” Álvaro/Nimrod qualified, trying to stifle his own yawn. “Depends on if we can properly align the epsilon frequencies with the sub-space matrix of the –”

He broke off at the sudden jolt that shook the chamber, looking around in surprise. “What the hell –”

A second, stronger jolt felt like a giant had kicked the Vault, and was immediately followed by a continuous humming vibration that quickly ran up the scale, from bass rumble to ear-piercing shriek. The floor heaved beneath their feet, racks and shelves toppled over, computers crashed to the floor and robots flailed about trying to maintain their own balance while simultaneously attempting to catch the falling tech.

Phantom Ace, who had been in the process of idly stealing a robotic hand from a repair station in a far corner of the chamber, dropped it instantly, thinking he’d triggered an alarm of some sort. Artemis and the others rushed out from the luxurious living quarters where they’d been variously napping or gaming just as a series of cracks appeared in the ceiling. Growing almost faster than the eye could follow, the cracks became massive fissures, and an instant later the whole ceiling ripped away and began to rise away from them…

Debris, mostly in the form of dirt, concrete and rebar, began to rain down into the chamber, forcing everyone to dodge wildly to avoid being crushed. Several robots were crushed as they protected de la Vega, who zig-zaggged to a control console next to the matrix shard. A few clicks brought a shimmering forcefield into existence around the central work area, protecting both himself and the alien crystal.

As the ceiling receded upward a rim of blue morning sky could be seen far above – and at the same instant half a dozen figures began to drop down the makeshift shaft into the Vault. Silver-eyed and expressionless, the obviously mind-controlled Changlings leapt to the attack.

“You are mine now, old friend,” they all called out in a synchronized cry of triumph. “You and this bastard bit of the Master Matrix!”

“Damn! Nemesis was able to track us back after all,” Quanta yelled over the roar of the collapsing structure, the comms suddenly useless, overwhelmed with static. “We can’t let him take Álvaro!”

“He wants the matrix shard!” Álvaro screamed back, hefting a plasma rifle dropped by one of his ruined robots. “We can’t let him have it!”

The zombie-Changelings included a raggedy white haired man who looked like a derelict, his power apparently to puff himself up and then release a cloud of toxic gas; a fat, doughy young man who appeared to be as pliable and stretchable as bread dough; a dark-clad Asian woman who hovered on a cloud of static electricity, eyes glowing electric blue; a man in a dark fedora and leather duster, his face mime-white with eyes and lips outlined in black, a Desert Eagle .44 in each hand and an aura of fear around him – Artemis recognized him as a recent vigilante calling himself Justiciar; a young woman dressed in stylish office clothes and high heels; and finally a young man Totem recognized as the so-called Silver Sorcerer – a former street magician turned aspiring super villain who insisted his new powers were magical, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

There were also one familiar face in the crowd – Washout, the only one of Nemesis’ minions to escape the heroes at Porpoise Point. Once again under mind-control, he moved with the Silver Sorcerer toward Álvaro, while their companions engaged the other heroes and the AzTech robots. The latter had gone into battle mode, and their glowing blue eyes now flared a brilliant red.

Totem, seeing this, decided to leave the Silver loony to Artemis, who stood in his path, and went after Washout. While the more scientifically-minded of his teammates had been working on a technological solution to the mind-control problem, he had spent the time working on creating a magical artifact that might do the trick. Now he pulled out the construction of leather, glass beads and an owl feather and concentrated on how he was going to get it on the idiot surfer dude’s head…

Phantom Ace and Artemis meanwhile tag-teamed the Silver Sorcerer, who turned any weapon hurled at him into clouds of butterflies or soap bubbles – until he was distracted by a feint from Phantom Ace, and Artemis was able to daze him with a hard kick to the head.

Scion, shrugging off pieces of falling concrete and rock, aimed a fusillade of stun rounds at the woman floating on the cloud of electrons, only to see them fall inert at her feet. Her return attack, fortunately, was equally ineffective against him – he sensed the power in his armor momentarily flicker, then recover, and realized she was generating an EMP. But since his armor was powered by his own mutant bioelectric field her EMP was unable to kill it.

Gideon and Chuck had been inside the radius of the force field dome when de la Vega’s had activated it. “Stay in your human form,” the billionaire/ancient hunter called out to Chuck, taking shots at their foes through the shield. “Your powers would be blocked by the force field, but my weapons are calibrated to fire through it from inside. Grab a blaster and start firing!”

But at that moment the plug of earth that Nemesis had somehow lifted up from above them began to move aside, and the Blue Flame could see that the entire three-story Corporate Archives building was also being lifted up – and falling apart around the edges! At least two people clung to shattered window frames and walls… they were beginning to fall! Without another thought he poured on the power and flashed up and out of the Vault.

Doughboy, meanwhile, was battering away at the forcefield surrounding Álvaro and the matrix shard, hurling dead robots and pieces of concrete into it. Elsewhere around the room the kaleidoscopic battle raged on, robots, heroes, and zombie-changelings all battering away at one another. Totem, after being knocked aside by a water blast from Washout, passed his magical artifact off to Phantom Ace, who managed, finally, to phase in close enough to afix the device to the villain’s head.

That was when the tide began to turn – once the flash of green light flared around his head, Washout’s eyes lost their silver sheen and he was himself again… and very unhappy to find himself again in the middle of a battle with the Vanguard. He turned and blasted himself up on a pillar of water, out of the Vault and the fight. After that, with Artemis‘ whip and shadow sticks, Chilz‘ and Quanta’s walls, rams and spears, Totem’s Sleeping Mists, and Scion’s technological might, each of the invaders were quickly subdued.

The Blue Flame, meanwhile, had realized he wasn’t sure how to save the falling people, being unable to touch them without severely burning them. Then a sudden flash of inspiration hit, and he pushed himself to his top speed, whirling in a tight circle beneath the unnaturally floating building, increasing his heat output as much as he dared. The resulting updraft of heated air slowed the falling AzTech workers enough that their landings were, if not exactly soft, at least non-lethal.

Once the immediate threat to lives was past, the Blue Flame took a closer look at the flying building… he could now see the faint violet beam that lanced down from the sky to envelope the structure and the land beneath it. A tractor beam! Forcing himself to suppress the thought that this really was incredibly cool, he considered how he might stop it without harming any people who remained inside. This was, of course, a building built by a former super villain, in a world long filled with superhuman threats – Álvaro had explained once that all his company’s major structures had insanely reinforced panic rooms at their core. Hopefully anyone else in the building had safely retreated there once the attack began…

Before he could decide on any particular course of action, however, the tractor beam cut out. The Blue Flame estimated the building was 40 feet in the air and approximately 100 feet east of its original location. It was also partially over the four lanes of Canal Avenue that ran along the east side of AzTech campus, he realized. Several thousand tons of earth, concrete, steel and glass crashed down onto the road in an instant that seemed to stretch out in slow motion to the horrified hero.

Fortunately, the people of Astoria had been growing increasingly savvy about these sorts of things since the Indicent, and the light mid-morning Saturday traffic had ground to a halt in both directions when the flying building had first appeared over the trees. When the building landed, shattering the roadway and sending up a cloud of dust and debris, no cars were directly beneath it. The structure itself, although cracked and slightly torqued, held together… in moments people were rushing from their cars to offer aid to any people still inside.

The Blue Flame barely had time to note the swell of pride he felt at the people of his city before a second beam, thinner and more bluish in color, shot down from the summer sky and into the hole above de la Vega’s Vault. Arcing around to get a view into the pit, he saw that the new tractor beam had latched onto the forcefield around the billionaire and the crystal shard. The energy shield flared, sparked and died. He saw Quanta throw one of his silvery shields over the fragment, but it shattered almost instantly, torn apart by the beam. The alien crystal began to move slowly upward…

I always did want to see if I could make orbit, Jonny thought as he turned skyward and poured on more power than he ever had before. And its not like I breathe now, when I’m like this! He raced into the sky beside the shimmering alien beam, and in seconds he was nothing more than a pinprick of light to those watching from below…

Meanwhile, in the shattered remains of the Vault, Paragon had grabbed hold of one end of the matrix crystal as it began to rise, his feet locked beneath a raised slab of the cracked floor. His muscles strained, ripping his shirt at the biceps, and he managed to hold the piece in place. The whine of the tractor beam increased in pitch as its strength increased… the piece began to rise again…
Scion, dropping the unconscious form of Doughboy, grabbed the other side of the crystal, and exerted the full power of his synthetic muscles as well as his own considerable physical strength. The shard stopped once again.

“Ace,” called Scion. “Can you make this damn thing intangible? If the tractor beam has nothing to grab onto…”

“Sorry boss,” the younger man frowned. “That’s way more mass than I can affect. Sorry.”

As the whine of the beam began to climb into the ultrasonic range Totem made several mystic gestures and the glowing green bands of his Baleful Bindings spell wrapped around the matrix shard, then dug themselves into the cracked flooring beneath it. The shard remained immobile.

“Hang on guys, I think I’ve almost got this,” Quanta called out. He was fiddling with a piece of equipment on a nearby bench, and after a final adjustment he held up what looked like a high-tech dowsing rod. He aimed it at the tractor beam and pushed a button… nothing visible happened, but the bluish beam suddenly wavered and then shattered into a million silvery bits before vanishing altogether.

“Ha! I just needed to calculate the proper quantum interference pattern to dissipate the beam. As our friend Nemesis would say, child’s play!”

“Good job Quanta!” Scion said as he and Paragon set the matrix shard back into its base unit. “Álvaro, is there any way to secure this thing while we go after Nemesis?”

“Emergency backup power is coming online… now!” Álvaro replied, focusing intently on several screens at once. “With power back I can operate the Vault’s systems again, and place the shard into its stasis chamber beneath us… that may be enough to shield it from Nemesis.” He frowned at something on the screen. “Or maybe not. Without knowing the full extent of the alien’s powers, I’m just guessing about the capabilities of Ebony Night’s ship, which I’m assuming is behind this.”

“Do your best,” Scion replied, then grabbed Artemis and Paragon. “We’ve got to get up there and see if we can confront Nemesis and Ebony Night before they can regroup.” With that he blasted the three of them upward. Phantom Ace grabbed Quanta and Totem, teleporting them topside with him, while Chilz rose on a pillar of ice.

Scores of people were swarming over the area around the hole and the newly relocated building, aiding the injured or just staring in awe at the carnage. A great many were staring skyward, and it didn’t take long to realize where the Blue Flame had gone, and why.

“Can he even make orbit?” Chilz asked, frowning in concern. “Wouldn’t he have to achieve escape velocity or something?”

Scion had just started to answer when there was a sudden flare of black light. They all felt their stomaches lurch, as if they were suddenly in an elevator in freefall… and then they slammed to a sudden stop, even though they hadn’t actually moved at all.

A cool breeze washed over the group, who stood momentarily deaf, dumb, blind and disoriented. As their senses cleared they quickly realized they were no longer where they had been. The AzTech campus was gone, replaced by… what could only be called an alien cityscape…

Beautiful, impossibly tall spires soared up all around a broad plaza, in the center of which the Vanguard, and Paragon, now stood, the Blue Flame hovering in the air above them. Graceful ramps connected the various buildings at different levels and balconies looked out into a night sky filled with unfamiliar constellations. It took a moment to realize that some of those points of light in the dark heavens were not fixed, but rather moving and flaring… and dying …

The most obvious thing the heroes noticed, however, was the gravity – it was slightly less than they were used to. Not much less, but enough to give them all a sense of sudden buoyancy…

It was the muttering and call of voices in an unfamiliar language that drew the group’s attention back to their immediate surroundings… a number of people in the plaza were slowly backing away from them… some looked human, save for the occasional green or blue  hair, while others had pale green or blue skin, or small antennae, or pointed ears…  but however alien their looks or garb might have been, the expressions of concern, the glancing or pointing  upwards and then back down at the newcomers, seemed human enough…

“I don’t think –” Phantom Ace began.

“No! Don’t say it!” Quanta interrupted him, rubbing his temples.

“Really, there’s hardly likely to be a more appropriate time for it,” Artemis sighed, shrugging. Scion just shook his head, staring around in amazement… and thinking of his grandfather.

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!” Despite his attempt at a grin, Phantom Ace’s voice quavered just bit as he said it…

Isobel Dixon Memorial Hospital and Vanguard HQ, Astoria, OR
Thursday 11 July 2019 — 21:09

When the black cloaked and hooded figure stepped out of the deep shadows in the corner of his hospital room, the Gaoler was not surprised. Indeed, he had expect just such a visit sometime this evening, and had specifically asked the nurse to leave the lights off. “Good evening, Artemis,” he said quietly. No need to alert the nurses – or the two police officers posted just outside the door.

“Good evening Thomas,” she replied equally sotto voce. “I see you’ve been expecting me… although I rather expected to find you in the ICU.”

He smiled at her technique. Assume familiarity with the subject, put them at ease, throw them off guard, a solid tactic. For the guilty. “I prefer Gaoler, actually. I haven’t thought of myself as Thomas Desolano in… quite some time now. And your shaman does good work. After a little emergency surgery I was deemed well enough for this room in the High Security Ward.”

The lights of the medical monitors glinted in her emerald green eyes, and she smiled very slightly, nodding in acknowledgment. “As you wish, Gaoler. Although you may want to reconsider the wisdom of surrendering your humanity to your job. It is possible to do the one without giving up the other… and healthier, in the long run.”

That left him briefly nonplussed, but he shook it off with a dismissive wave of the hand unencumbered by the blood oxygen monitor. “I take it by your presence here, so soon after our last meeting, that you and your friends have taken care of that psychopathic little poltergeist Lazarus? Is he still… extant?”

Artemis shrugged. “For a given value of “extant,” yes. That little Box of the Gilead you provided proved quite useful, and his spirit is now safely imprisoned within. The Box and its contents occupies a high self in your Secure Vault tonight. Oh, and the rest of your “guests” remain in their accommodations as well, should you be wondering.”

Gaoler raised an eyebrow at that. “I would have thought you heroes would have stashed the Box in whatever trophy room your kind keep in your posh headquarters. Not to mention repatriating at least some of my prisoners. Does this mean—“

“Yes, we intend to return your Master Key to you,” Artemis cut him off, pulling the Key from a pouch at her waist. Never taking her eyes off his, she held it out, just beyond his grasp. Damn, there really was something inherently intimidating about her, and he didn’t think it was just that cloak of hers, however much his magic-trained eyes had trouble focusing on it. But he knew how to deal with intimidation, and he wasn’t bad at it himself. He didn’t reach for the Key.

“There are conditions, I assume?”

Artemis shrugged and stepped forward, dropping the gently-glowing artifact on its chain into his lap. He blinked in surprise, but quickly picked it up. “We recognize the difficulty of enforcing any agreement you didn’t enter into willingly, so why bother with imposing conditions? We are willing, however, to assume that you are a man of honor, and would trust you to abide by whatever mutually acceptable decisions we might come to, after reasonable discussion.”

“That is… unexpected. Usually you hero-types are so rigidly upright and inflexible… self-defeatingly so, I’ve often thought. So, what is it you might suggest?”

“What we would like most, is for you to stop taking people off the street who haven’t yet been tried for, much less convicted of, any crime. However certain you are of their guilt, let the justice system determine the fact of it. Essentially, act as a kind of bounty hunter, if you will, but leave the judgement and punishment to the courts.”

“That seems rather a lot to ask… and would leave the Cellblock rather empty.” He frowned as he hung the Master Key’s chain around his neck, letting the artifact rest on his breastbone. “And pointless. Even when the justice system actually works, you know as well as I that earthly prisons cannot hold some of the monsters they do manage to convict, not for long. And, at least in the West, they won’t deliver the ultimate penalty, even when it’s actually possible to do so.”

“I’m not going to debate the morality of the death penalty with you,” Artemis frowned herself, taking two steps back toward the shadows. “At least you haven’t crossed that line yourself, which is why we may yet reach some accommodation. As we’ve seen for ourselves in our visit to your Cellblock, you clearly have some method of circumventing many of the safeguards in even the Super Max prisons – hardly surprising, I suppose, given that you helped design most of them.

“So, if you were to take those convicted of the worst crimes, the ones most dangerous and difficult to hold, AFTER they have been properly convicted and sentenced, well… we cannot condone it, officially, of course. But we can choose to… de-prioritize such events. I suspect the US Government might also be willing to consider a similar unofficial stance in certain cases. Especially if you are willing to provide some method of contacting you, should the return of a particular prisoner be required — and your willingness to accommodate that request.”

The Gaoler was silent for a long moment, as he considered Artemis’ words. It was true, with the Key back in his possession he could now simply open a doorway and vanish. After she was gone, of course — for all his offhanded words about his health, in truth he was in no shape for another fight just then. But the Vanguard had saved him the months of effort, and from a prison cell, it would have taken him to recreate the artifact… and they had shown some good faith by leaving Lazarus imprisoned within the Cellblock… and by not releasing his other inmates.

He had in fact decided, some time ago, that he should be focusing his efforts on the most dangerous of meta-human and supernatural criminals. As much as corrupt or inept politicians and business people infuriated him, they truly were an intractable problem beyond his ability to deal with effectively. In general, he’d come to the realization that the so-called People would have to deal with that problem for themselves. But they needed to be alive, and not living in terror, to do so.

“Very well, Artemis,” he said, holding out his hand. “I think I can live with that arrangement, if you can.”

•• •• ••

“I take it you didn’t mention the fact that Quanta and I managed to make a copy of his Master Key,” Totem said a short time later, as the Vanguard gathered in the Ready Room to hear Artemis’ report on her visit to the Gaoler.

“I didn’t see the need,” Artemis shrugged. “He’s a smart man, however narrow his vision; I’m sure he assumes we’ve found some way of making sure we can come after him, if the necessity arises. Oh, and I expect we’ll be getting a—“

She was interrupted by the flashing of the red notification light from Dispatch. “Vanguard, we’ve just received word from SHADE. It seems the Gaoler has somehow escaped from the High Security Ward at Dixon Memorial.”

“Well, we’re committed now,” Quanta sighed. “I hope we don’t regret this. So, who gets to pop over and pretend to look for the nutter?”

“I suppose I am the logical choice, given the known magical nature of the Gaoler’s powers,” Totem sighed. “I know we want to contract Sabra regarding the Golden Helm, but it can wait until morning – we all need a good night’s sleep, it’s been a long day. The Powers-That-Be know we don’t need to face the kind of potential threat Dolórüska represents at anything less than our best.”

“I’ll come with you,” Scion said, his helmet flowing back up to cover his head. “The rest of you, get some sleep. We’re going to start hunting for that damn helmet bright and early in the morning.”

•• •• ••

It was agreed that best way to begin the search probably involved contacting Sabra, in the Dark World, although not everyone felt entirely comfortable with that. Nonetheless, after the catering staff had cleared away the remains of breakfast, Totem pulled out the Cheval Mirror and activated the arcane device.

“I’m guessing it’ll be another mystical Zoom call,” Chilz whispered to the Blue Flame.

Shortly after establishing a connection, the Vanguard once again found themselves in a misty void… today it was cool and gray, like an autumn afternoon following a good rain. Each of heroes stood on their own disk of what looked to be ancient stone, worn and softened with age, each one about a meter across.

The disks containing Totem, Artemis and Scion floated slightly ahead of, and a bit higher than, those of the rest of the team. Sabra herself stood atop an impressive stone pillar, easily three meters wide, which rose up from the mists just a bit higher than any of her guests’ disks. She was dressed in dark gray robes, trimmed in royal blue, and her black hair fell loose about her shoulders, bound only by the band of filigreed silver on her brow. She nodded graciously to her guests, a slight bow of her head.

“Totem, my Vanguard friends, how lovely it is to see you again so soon! I assume it is that massive spike in mystical energy that we felt, even across the dimensional planes, that is the reason for your visit today?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Totem replied, frowning. Perhaps it was just his recent, disconcerting conversation with Quanta, but something about his friend seemed just a little off. Not just the change in clothes, but her attitude… despite the friendly words, she seemed just a little… impatient, maybe?

Shrugging off his concerns, Totem gave Sabra a quick rundown of the Vanguard’s recent encounters with the machinations of the disembodied spirit of Killer Tot, ending with directly confronting him in the Cellblock as he struggled with the malevolent Atlantean artifact.

“…and it vanished the instant his full attention was pulled from it. Presumabley taking itself back to Earth, assuming our theory about it being an unintentional Arcane Ward, like Roland’s other, purpose-built ones.”

“Arcane Wards, eh?” Sabra actually smiled at that. “That’s so very Roland! I suppose I should be a little offended, that he thought I would need that kind of protection; after all, as it turned out I did just fine in preventing Varina from conquering Earth. With a little help from my friends, of course.” For a moment Totem saw his old friend in her face, as she’d always been. But the moment passed quickly, and her faced quickly darkened into a frown.

“But the Golden Helm of Dolórükas the Damed! That is a fearsome artifact, and much too dangerous to be left out in the world. While it’s true that Dolórüska cannot actually control the Helm while his spirit is trapped within it, I suspect in this instance he could at least influence where it appeared on its return to its native plane… and once here – that is, there – he can call out to receptive souls around him. And then, all bets are off…

“I’m very disappointed that you let it slip through your grasp… I expected better of you all by now!”

“I beg your pardon, young lady?” Artemis said coldly. Sabra’s frown deepened into a scowl at her tone. “As I believe Totem made very clear, the Helm was gone before we were even truly aware of it. And we realize full well the gravity of the situation, which is why we are here, consulting you. But if you have nothing to offer beyond insults…”

Sabra reddened, and for a moment she seemed her age, a young woman struggling in waters out of her depth. But she quickly got control of her features, and nodded stiffly to Artemis.

“My apologies, of course… that was uncalled for. But I hope you understand my deep concern in this matter. While I may no longer be the Magus Prime of our world, I nonetheless feel the pull of those responsibilities, even here.

“While I am concerned about who this “dark lady” of Percy Lazarus’ might be, the Golden Helm is the more immediate threat. This must be your top priority! Nothing else matters — you must find and recover the Helm at once!”

Before Artemis, or anyone else, could respond she seemed to realize she was being high-handed again, and quickly went on, directing herself to Totem.

“Cooper, I imagine that, with the increased power you absorbed from that incident with the Prime Element gem, you are especially attuned to the Earth just now… with that connection, between us I believe we can pinpoint the general area where the Helm returned to the Material Plane. If you’re willing to try.”

“Of course, Atara,” Totem nodded. “As Artemis said, that is why we’re here. I’m still struggling to integrate this new power, but I think you’re right, I definitely feel the presence of the Earth more strongly…”

At a gesture from Sabra, Totem’s disk floated up until it was even with her pillar, and he stepped off it to join her. A few minutes of quiet discussion, a joining of hands, and then a murmured ritual incantation – suddenly both sets of eyes took on a silver sheen, and it seemed the two mages looked out on vistas the others could not see.

“Yes, it pulses like an open wound.” Sabra said. “Can you see it, Küng?”

“Yes,” he answered almost absently. “It is in… New Atlantis, yes… somewhere south of Lake Tisqunatum…?

“Yes, and certainly on the west side of the Mullica River…” Sabra’s face took on a sardonic look. “Hardly surprising he would choose to return there, I suppose… so very many defeats suffered there to be avenged!”

After one last urgent admonition from Sabra to hurry and recover the Golden Helm before something truly dire happened, the mystical Zoom call faded away around the Vanguard, leaving them standing about the Round Table in their Ready Room.

“Yes, I know what you’re going to say,” Totem cut off Quanta as his teammate started to speak. “She was short tempered and high-handed. But when we were in communion, looking for the mystical hot-spot created by the Helm, I was in contact with her mind – I sensed nothing of Varina, or of anyone else. It’s just her in her head… and a great deal of stress and anxiety.

“I can’t say she isn’t changing, that’s obvious, but it’s also inevitable, under the circumstances. I plan to keep an eye on the situation, but I’m certain that your suspicions about her being Lazarus’ “dark lady” are incorrect.”

Quanta exchanged a look with Artemis, and shrugged. “If you say so, Cooper. You’re in a better position to know her mind than any of us. Maybe she’s just irritated with us because she thinks she could do a better job of managing this stuff than we’ve been doing.”

“Hmmm, what doesn’t she think she’s better than us at doing?” Scion laughed from where he was punching in the codes to remote-start the Interceptor.

“Losing fights, I suppose,” Quanta said with a grin. “But seriously, I hope you do keep an eye on her, Cooper… it really does seem like every time we see her, she’s just a little bit darker.”

•• •• ••

The sub-orbital flight from Oregon to New Jersey was quick and uneventful. It was just after noon, the sun glinting off the gold-hued marble of the Eternal Sentinel statue and the towers of the city across the harbor, as the Interceptor approached the roof-top landing pad on Alliance Hall. Scion, who had been scanning the local police frequencies in search of any unusual activity in the Southbank and Hollows districts, had a sudden hit.

“Cooper, didn’t you say you had a contact we should check out in Southbank? A place called Island Herbal?” he asked as they set down.

“Yes, Maire Otando runs the place… it’s a little import shop that sells various Caribbean brands, as well as herbs, candles, charms, and Voodoo religious items. It’s also an ounfò, a temple for the local Voodoo community and she’s its mambo… a religious leader. I think it’s a good place to start with, Madame Marie has always had her finger on the pulse of the street, both mundane and arcane, in her part of the city.”

“Well, you may be right,” Scion said, “I don’t really believe in signs, but I just found this on the scanners – Island Herbal was robbed last night, and a related police report from about an hour ago indicates that a young man who had been tending the shop, a college student named Tyler Attah, has been reported missing by his family, having never returned home after work at the shop last night.”

“That’s pretty surprising, actually… most of the local community are deeply protective of the place, and most of the petty crooks in Southbank fear Madame Marie’s reputation. As far as I know, the last time someone tried to rob it was more than a decade ago… and the guy who tried has been in Ravencliff Asylum ever since.

“So yes, I think we should check it out first. The shop is located on MLK Jr. Blvd, between Jamaica Avenue and Grenada Street. Can you open one your tunnels that far, Quanta?”

“Yeah, it’s only about three miles from here,” Quanta said, glancing at the city map on the holodisplay. “No problem.”

A few minutes later the Vanguard stepped out of Quanta’s shimmering silver portal onto a sidewalk in the working class district of Southbank. Neither the pedestrians on the wide, cracked pavement nor the six lanes of traffic streaming by on MLK, Jr. Blvd seemed to give them a second glance in the shimmering heat of the summer afternoon.

“Welcome to New Atlantis,” Chilz laughed, as they approached the glass doors to Island Herbal.

A “Sorry, We’re Closed, Please Call Again” sign hung crookedly in one door, but they were unlocked, and the heroes stepped into the shadowy shop… which was turned end-over-end. Loose papers and herbs covered the tables and floor, display cases were smashed, and mysterious stains and broken glass were everywhere.

“Don’t touch anything!” a middle-aged Black woman in colorful Caribbean skirts and a white blouse called out urgently from near the back of the space. “It’s not safe!” In safety gloves and a head wrap, she appeared to be carefully picking through the debris, a bandage obscuring part of her face.

“Madame Marie, it’s good to see you again,” Totem said, making his way through the wreckage toward his old acquaintance. “I’ve come with some friends, to see if you can help us.” He quickly introduced his teammates. “We can help you clean up, and then maybe you–“

“No, no, please don’t try to help… it’s very kind of you all, dear… and it’s good to see you, too,” the woman sighed and set down the large garbage bag she’d been filling. “But some of this is dangerous stuff, it’s best left to those who understand it to clean up! It was just a smash and grab… seems like that sort of thing is happening more and more around here these days.”

“Well, surely it was more than that, ma’am,” Artemis said. “I understand from the police report that one of your employees is missing… a Tyler Attah.”

“Police report?” The woman seemed momentarily flustered. “But… I haven’t filed a police report yet… I’m still trying to figure out what’s missing, as I clean up.”

“Ah, well, Tyler’s family filed a missing persons report this morning,” Scion offered, a bit distractedly. His sensors automatically scanned everyone he encountered, and he was getting a slightly odd reading off the woman. “Never came home, apparently, after working here last evening.”

“Oh, Tyler… but I haven’t seen her in several days, actually… that girl has just never been very reliable, if the truth be told.”

Everyone stiffened slightly at that, and Totem started to say something, but Quanta waved him back, stepping up to the older woman’s side.

“It looks like you were injured yourself,” he said, glancing at the mass of bandaging on the left side of her face. “Did the thieves do this to you?”

“Yes, they were quite violent,” she said, stepping back a nervous half step. “But it’s nothing, really… I just wanted to keep it covered while I cleaned.”

“Still, perhaps if I take a look… I’m pretty good at healing up physical trauma, I could at least take care of that problem for you.” Quanta reached out to touch the wrapping, and Madame Marie jumped back — three meters in a single leap. As the surprised heroes stared, her features flickered, flowed, and then steadied into a golden-eyed reptilian face, her skin suddenly greenish and scaly, and her hands gaining wicked-looking claws.

“A Serpent Person!” Totem cried, shocked into momentary inaction.

But Quanta had been prepared for something like this, and he was on her almost before the transformation was complete. The reptiloid was fast, however, and she grabbed at his arm, yanking him toward her. A mouth full of razor-sharp teeth opened wide and clamped down where his neck met his left shoulder… but they were unable to pierce the material of his quantum shell.

With a furious hiss, she shoved him away then, and leaped over an overturned table to her left, making for the front of the shop. The Blue Flame, reluctant to fully transform inside the shop, sent a blast of azure plasma at her, and while mystic sigils flared around her and absorbed most of the flame, she had definitely felt it.

Her leap over the last shattered counter between her and the front door was clumsy, and she staggered on landing. Artemis’ somersault over the same counter was anything but clumsy, and she came down on “Madame Maries’s” back. The imposter slammed hard into the floor, and before she could regain her feet Artemis had her in a choke hold.

When the Saurian’s struggles had faded into feeble twitching, Artemis tightly zip-tied it at wrists and ankles. It was always difficult to tell with Saurians what gender they were just by outward appearance, but she had an intuition that this one might actually be female.

By the time the creature began to revive, Totem had added mystical bindings to its, maybe her, restraints. He was taking no change on any teleportation spells at this point. “Where is the real Madame Marie?” he barked at the prisoner, looming over her with all the menace he could muster. The Saurian just glared at him and hissed.

“Totem, my sensors are picking up labored breathing, and an irregular heartbeat from a back room, there,” Scion said, pointing to the door marked Employees Only. “Why don’t you go see if it’s your friend; whoever it is, help them, OK?”

With a curt nod the shaman turned and headed for the back room, which he knew housed the ounfò, the voodoo alter, of his friend. Artemis took his place, pulling the glaring Saurian up into a sitting position and propping her against a cabinet. She leaned in close as she did so.

“Tell us who you are, and your purpose here, lizard, or I’ll rip those scales off of you one by one. And you may be sure I will do so very, VERY slowly. We have all the time in the world, you and I…” A small blade was suddenly in her hand, and she ran it lightly along the side of the creature’s face.

For the first time the Serpent Person’s glaring mask slipped, and it seemed suddenly uncertain. It quickly regained some composure, however, and gave a very human-like shrug.

“Fine,” it hissed. “You mammals will never be able to stop it now anyway! I am Sineerie, Lesser Priestess of the Ophidian Cult. We are the true heirs of lost Lemuria… and the exterminators of cursed Atlantis and all its wretched legacy!

“The prophetic dreams of High Priest Astarmis brought us to the Golden Helm when it manifested itself. Dolórüska’s Helm is ours now, and so we have the old Atlantean heretic at our mercy! We will use the Helm to place his spirit in a mortal vessel — and then we shall annihilate body, helm, and foul soul all together, finally ridding ourselves of the ancient enemy once and for all time!”

Her snake-like golden eyes narrowed suddenly, and she sneered at Raven, lurking in the shadows behind his comrades. Totem had found the real Madame Marie bound, gagged, and groggy, but alive, next to her alter. A quick Spell of Healing had cleared the remaining Saurian venom from her system, and once he was sure she was OK he had summoned Raven. His ability to seize and read minds might prove very useful, he’d thought as he stalked back out to the main room.

“I can feel you in my head, fumbling about, little human godling,” Sineerie laughed. “Your pathetic powers will never be enough to pierce my mental shields. But as I said, there is no need – you cannot stop us at this point, although I hope you try. My brethren will enjoy killing you all, on top of our great victory! Ask your questions, I will answer them.”

“Where is Tyler Attah, the human you took from this place last night,” Artemis asked, still crouched in front of the Saurian priestess. “Is he still alive? Why did you take him?”

“Ah, the mammal apprentice had a name? No matter. We needed a mystically inclined vessel to host Dolórüska’s spirit, and that one would serve well enough, just as the other tools we looted from this hovel would serve. Better, as the creature’s magical skill was minimal, so the ancient one would have little to work with, in those moments between awakening in the body and it’s destruction. By now the human is as dead as Dolórüska, great Astarmis will have seen to that.”

“Who is this Astarmis, and where can we find him.”

“Astarmis is our faithful master, our glorious High Priest, and a male of great vision! Astarmis has led the Ophidiana under your human noses for decades… we move with impunity through your filthy city, and erase the taint of Atlantis at will! And now his prophetic dream has given us our greatest triumph!

“As to where you will find him, and your own deaths,” the Saurian face was not built to smile, but Sineerie bared her teeth in obvious mirth, “the ritual took place in the old caverns. There is a secret entrance in the swamps northwest of here, beyond a flood-control tunnel near the railroad tracks. But it makes no difference, as I said — by now my brethren have completed the rites and will welcome witnesses to our glory… before they slay you as well!”

When it was clear the Saurian had nothing more useful to impart, Artemis stood and Raven put the priestess to sleep with a mental command.

“Well, I for one would like to recognize, officially, that this Saurian has been the most forth-coming captive we have ever questioned,” Quanta said.

“Yes, let’s give her a fruit basket,” Scion said. “I just hope she’s mistaken about the Attah boy. And that we can save him, if they’ve already put that damn helmet on him. We need to get moving, I’ve got the spot she mentioned up on the comms map…”

“Yes, please save Tyler, if it’s not too late,” Madame Marie said. She had come out from the ounfò once she’d fully recovered, and caught the last of the interrogation. “I’ve heard rumors about this Ophidian Cult before—a militant offshoot of the larger Brood of the Bronze Talon. Even more than most Serpent Folk, they revere their lost Lemuria almost as a divine figure in itself. And unlike most others of their kind, they actually embrace the mistaken comparison to modern reptiles, especially snakes — they’re crazy, even by Saurian standards. Be careful!”

Once they’d made sure the irascible, but grateful, Madame Marie was really OK, and she’d given them a photo of the missing Tyler, Quanta opened another of his tunnels, this time to the edge of the South Leni-Lenape Wetlands.

“So, are these Saurians susceptible to cold, like reptiles?” Chilz asked as they stepped through into the fetid smells of the marsh. “If so this should be a pretty quick fight.”

“Well, they’re not cold blooded,” Quanta replied as he closed the portal behind them, “but they’re not warm blooded either. They’re mesotherms, somewhere in the middle. Which means they probably won’t like your cold, Chilz, but it’s also not going to just drop them into hibernation. Unfortunately.”

It didn’t take long to find the entrance to the New Deal-era flood-control tunnels, just beyond the main railroad line into the city. The Ophidian cultists had made no effort to cover their tracks, and the Vanguard had no trouble following them. The aging concrete and steel walls eventually gave way to tunnels drilled through bare rock, and finally to rough-hewn stairs leading deeper into the earth.

“Jeeze, I know it’s summer in New Jersey,” Chilz muttered to the Blue Flame. “But I swear it’s getting warmer, and more humid, the deeper we go.”

“You’re not wrong,” BF agreed, shrugging. “Not that it bothers me, of course, but this heat does seem… unnatural. Saurian magic, maybe?”

After several minutes of cautiously advancing, the twisting, turning natural caverns finally opened into a large chamber, where six columns carved in spiraling snake motifs upheld a rough dome of stone. Crates, maps, newspaper clippings, discarded tablets, and old bones were scattered about, and a massive altar shaped like an enormous cobra stood in the center of the space. An eerie, bilious green light emanated from the altar, and several lines of the same sickly light outlined arcane hexes on the floor. The smell of charred meat hung thick in the air.

“Well, this sure looks like the place,” the Blue Flame said as Artemis and Scion cautiously led the way into the chamber. “But where is everybody? I was expecting more of a party atmosphere, you know.”

“That’s a good question—“ Artemis started to say.

“Wait, my sensors are picking up—“ Scion began.

Before either could finish their sentence there was a shifting blur in the air within the glowing green hex shapes, and suddenly monstrous creatures were visible — and rushing towards the heroes. There were three of the things… sort of.

Each creature had two heads and four legs, but only two arms… they seemed fused together at the rather wide torso, from neck to hip. The sinuous, rolling gait of their four legs looked awkward, and yet they moved shockingly fast. The closest one was on Artemis before even her reflexes had time to fully absorb what was happening.

She easily dodged under the first snarling head as it lunged forward to bite, its mouth full of glistening teeth, but the second head, and its equally lethal-looking teeth, barely missed her arm. She tucked and rolled, coming up and whirling around, escrima sticks out, her cape flaring behind her like wings.

The second beast was on Scion at almost the same instant. He deflected the first bite with an armored fist to one head, but the second head struck too quickly, powerful jaws and venomous teeth coming down on his left forearm. Alarms began going off in his helmet at the sudden, intense pressure, and he actually felt it through the metal. He tried to yank the arm free, but the creature was tenacious — and strong.

Clawed hands wrapped around his torso as the thing savaged one arm while his other held off the gnashing teeth of the first head. With a flick of an eye towards his HUD, Scion opened a certain circuit, and when he released a full-body bio-electric burst it was transferred through the armor and amplified. With a shriek the monster let go and staggered back… but it was clearly more surprised than injured. It crouched, preparing to leap back onto him… and Scion went invisible, shooting straight up at the same time.

Raven, whose own mystical senses had warned him of the camouflaged creatures an instant before they’d moved, had immediately gone invisible as well, leaving an illusory doppelgänger stand-in on the other side of the team, next to Scion. This gave him a moment to study the… whatever the Sacred Fire they were. Saurians, clearly, but he had never heard of any such mutations… and as he watched, it suddenly came to him in flash of realization.

These were not natural beings, not even mutations. There were, or had been, six Saurians here, and not that long ago by the mystic traces he was now sensing. Something – or someone – had fused them into these grotesque monstrosities. And it was increasingly clear that they were in a great deal of pain… which was at least partly driving their frenzied attacks.

Maybe the Sleeping Mists of Elyn could solve all their problems, at least for the moment. Let the shining green drops fall, and send the creatures off to a pain-free slumber… while protecting young Küng’s friends from their attacks, of course. Unfortunately, whatever spell-driven horror powered that pain, it was too strong for the Mists to penetrate. The monsters slowed, briefly, but didn’t succumb.

Quanta, who had been several paces behind Scion and Artemis, timed his moment carefully – and when Scion vanished and Artemis rolled aside, he dropped a quantum matter block on the two monsters they’d been fighting. To his considerable annoyance, they both raised clawed fists and simply shattered the construct in midair.

Even more annoying, not to mention surprising, was the third beast. Some sort of camouflaging seemed to be at work, he barely saw the thing as it leaped onto one of the pieces of his shattered block and used it as a spring board to leap for his throat. But even as it kicked off, the quantum matter beneath its clawed feet vanished back into the sub-atomic foam, and its leap turned into more of a stumbling half-fall. One head hit the floor, hard, while Quanta spun away deftly from the second’s gnashing jaws.

As much as he disliked flying under his own power, elevation seemed the wisest course just now, Quanta realized, and took to the air…

Chilz had taken to the air almost at once, rising up on a column of ice to get a better view of the tactical situation. He was torn between that very ominous looking, eerily pulsing statue in the center of the cavern, and his friends. When the lizard-mutant battling Artemis sank its teeth into her foot, the matter resolved itself instantly.

Swooping down he hefted a wooden keg off the floor – it was heavy, full of something liquid by the way it moved — and hurled it at the monster. The barrel hit it full in the back, shattering and drenching it — with nothing more interesting than water. Damn! But it had staggered the creature, enough to release Artemis’ foot, at least…

She leaped straight back at the creature as the water dripped down its flanks, and drove her blue-sparking escrima sticks into its torso. Arcs of blue-white electricity engulfed the Saurian mutant, and its hideously merged body arched and twitched, its face locked in a silent rictus scream. And then it was down and out of the fight.

When Scion had vanished, gone suddenly invisible, his opponent had looked around in frustration, and locked on to Raven as its next target. Both heads scored savage blows on the prey… but to the creature’s consternation, there was nothing there… no blood, no flesh to inject the venom into… in a redoubled frenzy, it lashed out at the smirking mammal again and again…

While it was engaged with its illusory foe, Scion loosed a stream of stun balls at the Saurian, and launched a tangle-field for good measure. Some sixth sense seemed to warn the creature, however, and it dodged the shimmering net. The stun balls hit, but it hardly seemed to notice.

From four meters up, Quanta gestured down at the third Saurian mutant, and a shimmering silver cocoon of quantum carbon began to form around it. But the creature slashed at the field, shredding the material before it could solidify… and to Quanta’s shock, it leaped straight up at him!

From a standing start, the monster jumped an astonishing distance, and its massive clawed hands wrapped around Quanta’s right leg. He staggered in the air and dropped a bit under the added weight, but almost instinctively he shifted his quantum shell to an entirely frictionless state. The look on both the Saurians’ faces as its hands slid down his leg and it plummeted to the floor was almost worth the heart attack it had almost given him with that jump.

Goddamn it, he should know better than to fly! Yes, he was getting better at it, no doubt… as long as that was all he was doing. Add in anything else more complicated than chewing gum (and maybe not even that), and everything suffered. But just to be sure, he added another two meters to his elevation… lets see one of the mutants make that jump!

Seeing that Artemis was apparently unharmed – that shadow material of hers must really be tough, if those razor-like teeth couldn’t pierce it – Chilz turned his attention back to the cobra statue. Something about it creeped him out, and he’d been right about that demonic statue back in the Cellblock… was that only yesterday? Better safe than sorry…

A minute later, the statue was encased in three feet of solid ice, and the green glow was suddenly almost cheery-looking beneath it. It might be hot as hell in here, Chilz thought, but it’s so humid I’ve got lots of moisture to work with… and that’s all I need.

The Blue Flame, shocked at the sudden violence that had erupted around him, had taken a moment to get his head in the game. But as the monster that had leaped up to grab Quanta fell back to the ground, he sprang into action.

Bursting into his full plasma form, he threw himself at the dazed lizard-hydra-thing, his Flame Katana springing to life in his hand. He never gave the creature a chance to recover, his searing strikes driving it back until it was up against the ice-encased statue. Letting his katana flow back into himself, BF formed a massive, fiery fist, and with one last roundhouse punch he laid out the second mutant.

Raven, Artemis, and a still invisible Scion had been working on the third monster, to little effect – he seemed faster, more cunning, and stronger than the other two. From his position high above, Quanta decided to give it one more go…

I’m hovering, that takes no real effort, and barely any concentration. OK, take a deep breath, focus on containing that scaly bastard…

The shimmering quantum encasement field materialized… almost a meter to the left of his target.

Fine, he could take a hint. The others seemed to have it under control, anyway. Maybe he would be more useful studying that damn snake statue with the nauseating green glow… even if it was now encased in a meter of ice…

“Chilz, stop playing with that statue,” Artemis called over comms. “Can you replicate that stunt with the water barrel on this last beast?”

“Ah, that’s a big 10-4, boss lady – I see another barrel on the other side of the cave… hold on just a sec…”

Raven had been attempting to seize the mind of the last Saurian guardian, but it was proving exceedingly difficult. While it was one body now, there were still two minds controlling it… two minds, but they too were fused at some deep psychic level. It made control almost impossible – just when he thought he had a hook in one mind, power would surge up from the other mind, breaking his grip…

Scion was having almost as hard a time on the physical side of things. Every time he got a decent hold on the beast, it would manage to slip through or break his grip. Artemis’ Shadow Stick and escrima attacks didn’t seem to faze it, and he was beginning to wonder if he’d have to switch to some really lethal attacks, when Chilz dove in from his left, smashing a barrel of water against the Saurian’s exposed back.

But even as the wooden planks shattered against its steel-like hide, the creature whirled and one of its heads sank its teeth into the ice-man’s leg. Ice splintered and cracked, and Chilz felt a dark warmth, but of course no pain. As he kicked the thing in the head with his other foot, freeing himself and coming down several yards beyond the struggle, he could see a dark stain within the ice of his leg.

The venom from the bite? Probably, but since he didn’t have a circulatory system in this form, it wasn’t able to do anything to him. Probably. But when he turned back to his meat form… well, better to not take any chances. Casting about, he found a bent crow bar and began chipping away at his leg, carving out the ice with the dark stain…

Meanwhile, Artemis and Scion had double-teamed the soaked Saurian, simultaneously releasing dual electrified attacks. As its body twisted and writhed, the Blue Flame swooped down and and unleashed a Plasma Blast at point blank range. No creature, however impressive a specimen it was, could withstand such a combined mental and physical bombardment, and in seconds the Saurian’s smoking body was twitching convulsively on the stoney ground.

“Good team effort, guys,” Scion panted over the comms as they stared down at the defeated Saurian, catching their collective breath. Raven gave a mocking slate, and morphed back into to Totem, who began binding the unconscious creatures in azure bands of particularly strong mystical energy.

Chilz, having excised the tainted ice from his leg and then reformed the missing mass from the ambient moisture, was about to rejoin the team when he thought he heard something coming from the back of the cavern… a faint, feminine-sounding cry for help. Was there a damsel in distress in all this mess?

“Guys, I’m hearing someone, sounds like a woman, calling for help,” Chilz called over comms as he began studying the back wall of the cavern. By the time the others had joined him, he had outlined what he thought were the dimensions of a stone door set very tightly into the stone wall.

“Give me some time, I’m sure I can figure out the proper spell to open–“ Totem began, before Scion stepped up to the door, dug his metal fingers into the stone, and pulled. With a grinding sound the door began to shift outward, and then, which a sharp crack, it split in two. Scion tossed the crumbling pieces to either side and stepped into the small room revealed.

“Or we could do it that way,” Quanta laughed, craning over Totem’s shoulder to see into the room.

A rail-thin woman, with dark, classical features and thick black hair lay in a heap on the stone floor. She was wrapped in heavy iron chains, weighing her down to the point she could barely sit up. The sorceress Medea sighed, and with a wry grimace said, “Well, this is a rather awkward way to meet again, isn’t it?”

“What the hell are you doing here, Medea?” Scion demanded, as the others crowded in behind him. The ancient Greek sorceress could do little more than tilt her head, yet she somehow managed to convey infinite patience in the face of stupid questions.

“Isn’t it obvious, my dear? These sectarian serpents needed a magical patsy into whom they could resurrect that bastard Dolórüska. But they ended up going with the shop boy… I suppose they thought my body would’ve made the old goat too powerful, too quickly, whereas the boy would leave him relatively helpless, at least long enough to dispatch him. Or maybe they just don’t like their liches… curvaceous. Who can say for sure?”

“That hardly explains how you, of all people, happened to be one of the two people they captured for use in their ritual,” Artemis snapped. “Try again.”

“Are you always so humorless, Artemis?” Medea sighed. “Fine, fine… the truth is, I sometimes have visions of certain mystical events, and I had one yesterday regarding the reappearance of that moldy old Atlantean’s fancy headgear. The last thing I wanted was seeing that pile of bones reanimated again — talk about humorless, he makes Artemis look like Lucille Ball. So, I made haste to recover it before some hapless mortal slapped it on their head, thereby turning their bad day into the whole world’s bad day.

“Unfortunately, that scaly High Priest Astarmis apparently also has prophetic dreams, and he and his little band of psycho serpent cultists were closer. I arrived just in time to see them make off with the Golden Helm. I followed, of course, in case the opportunity arose to snatch it… and, I admit, out of simple curiosity. Given the snake boys’ unrelenting hatred of all things Atlantean, I did wonder what they were up to.

“Even more unfortunately, from my point of view, was the very keen senses of those savage beasts the Ophidian’s keep… and a particularly effective mystical trap. You’re welcome, by the way — my tripping it meant you didn’t have to face it on your own way down here, as they never had a chance to reset it, given subsequent events.”

“Yes, what exactly were those ‘subsequent events?’ What went down back there?” Scion asked, jerking a thumbs over his shoulder toward the ritual cavern.

“Poetry? Classic tragedy? A textbook example of hubris? However one cares to interpret it, really it’s just a bit of Serpent Folk ego run amok. These snakes actually thought they could destroy Dolórüska after releasing him from his Helm, and destroy the Helm itself. Surprise, surprise, it will come as no shock that they were wrong. Spectacularly wrong, actually. The old mage managed to usurp the entire cult in less than a minute —quite the impressive feat, that, really — and then he left, with his new minions slavishly in tow.”

“Fantastic!” Totem groaned. “So not only is Dolórüska reborn, but he’s got a small army of Serpent Folk under his command now. I don’t suppose you have any idea where they’ve gone, or what he’s planning?”

“Well, it’s entirely possible I might… indeed, it’s possible I might possess information you’d find quite interesting… even vital. But it’s so difficult to think, what with these nasty iron chains weighing me down…”

“Er, yes, I’m not sure why we seem to be participating in this Kinbaku,” Quanta said, causing the Blue Flame to snort-laugh and Artemis to give him a Look. He shrugged. “We’re doing to have to make a decision on what to do with her, assuming we’re not just going to leave her here to die.”

“True,” agreed Artemis. “ But I’m not inclined to simply unbind her and trust to her notably absent goodwill to prevent her attacking us. Assuming she even knows where Dolórüska has gone, or what his plans are…”

“A fair point, I suppose,” Medea conceded. “Very well, let me give you a taste. You see, he’s really not a quiet man, our Dolórüska. Loves a good monologue, even more than the next supervillain. In his rantings, once he’d ensnared the Ophidians, it became clear that he seems to think he senses the spirit of a powerful mage bound to the world’s mystic energy — the late Roland Reid, or so he says — and he’s got it in his head to bind the man’s spirit as his personal servant. No doubt there’s some larger, droll scheme to “take over the world” or some such, but really, I stopped listening at that point.

“So, I suppose you’ll be wanting a hand in averting that whole enslave-the-sprit-of-dear-departed-Roland thing. Dolórüska is no kitten, to be sure, but Dolórüska on his own is considerably less concerning than Dolórüska backed by the power of another Magus Prime. Not that you need my guidance, I’m sure. You’re the superheroes here, after all. Now where do you suppose he’s hiding? I can’t seem to recall if he ranted about that little detail…”

“Is it possible that Roland’s spirit is still connected somehow to this plane,” Artemis asked Totem, gesturing everyone out of the smaller room and into the larger cavern, leaving the bound demi-goddess peering after them in annoyance.

“I… I don’t see how. I was there when the Powers-That-Be settled the mantle on Sabra, and I sensed Roalnd’s presence there, with so many other Magi Prime who’d come before. But perhaps, with his Arcane Wards, meant to protect the Earth from a magical take-over… maybe they actually tied him to this plane somehow? I just don’t know…”

“Can we take the chance?” Scion asked. “Even if it isn’t Reid’s spirit, or soul, or whatever that’s trapped in the ether, we can’t risk that madman enslaving whoever, or whatever, it might really be… especially if it involves his gaining additional powers.”

“But how do we know we can trust Medea?” the Blue Flame asked. “It’s not like we can afford a magical knife in the back at the critical moment, you know?”

“Oh, my darlings! You absolutely should NOT trust me” Medea called from the other room. “I’m out for my own ends here, to be sure. It just happens that today we share a common enemy… and a very powerful one. The more of us working together to take him down, the more likely we are to succeed. And really, the one thing you can always trust me to be is petty and vengeful.

“So, if it will help move things along,” craning her neck, she caught Totem’s eye, “I swear by Hecate, by Aunt Circe, and by the thousand witches of Colchis to lay no spell against your flesh or soul without your consent before the new moon’s rise, and if I am forsworn, may the Furies devour my soul. Happy?”

“Scion?” Artemis asked.

“Just a second… yes, the new moon rises at 05:00 tomorrow morning. Actually, that somehow makes me more inclined to believe she’s being honest — it’s not like she’s swearing eternal loyalty, just 15 hours of cooperation.”

“The truth is, that oath really does bind her,” Totem offered. “For her to break it would bring down consequences so dire that even she would hesitate to face them. I think we can trust her in this.”

While the others weighed the pros and cons of freeing Medea, Chilz leaned in to whisper to Quanta. “Dude, why do you have that dopey grin on your face? Do you not believe her?”

“No, no, I believe she’ll keep her precise oath. I just think it’s really cool that she’s Circe’s niece.”

Once Scion had snapped the iron chains that bound the witch, Medea stood and stretched… and Artemis silently rolled her eyes as all the men drooled, at least metaphorically.

“Ah, that’s leagues more comfortable, thank you! Now, I suppose a deal’s a deal, so…

“Dolórüska did mention the Vandergraff House in his tedious diatribe. It’s an old estate on North Hill, built on a nexus of ley lines… it will certainly provide him with all the spare magical energy he’ll need for the ritual he proposes to invoke. I used the place as a hideout myself a few times back in the ‘70s. As did several other mystical types, over the years. It has a lovely view over the Palisades.”

“How does he plan to achieve this supposed enslavement of Arkanos’ soul,” Scion asked as she slipped past him through the doorway, patting his armored shoulder and giving him a demur smile.

“Some sort of old Atlantean ritual, much like the one that transformed him from a Master Mage into an immortal spirit in a decaying corpse 20,000 years ago. Actually, it’s quite similar to an old Cretan ritual I know… so it’s one that I could almost certainly disrupt, given the opportunity…”

“Why are you so hot to finish off the old guy?” Chilz asked, still suspicious of the Greek sorceress. “I’d have thought you magical sorts would stick together.”

“Like all the non-magical sorts do?” Medea actually laughed, a full-throated and deeply seductive sound. “Please, look what he did to me, leaving me bound in iron, and at the mercy of those hideous Serpent warriors he fused together on a whim! Even after I’d offered my services in his efforts – for some reason he didn’t fully trust the sincerity of my proposal. Well, rightly so, of course, I never swore him any oaths. But still…

“Besides, I really don’t appreciate being the second-string sorcerer in town… the old man isn’t exactly low key, and it will be so much worse if he gains even more power. But beyond all that, Dolórüska is simply an ass, and I would love being there to see the look on his face when he goes down – again. Even if it means enduring a little detente in this… special something we all share.”

“Enough,” Artemis said. “If there’s any chance of his pulling off this ritual… and how do we know he hasn’t already done so?… we need to move quickly.”

“Oh, we’d know,” Medea declared. “The whole world would likely know. But not to worry, my dears, the ritual requires a sky both moonless and sunless to work. We’ve hours yet before he can do more than prepare.”

“Assuming she’s right about all this, we do have some time,” Scion said. “Moonset is at 19:04, sunset follows at 20:26. And I’d rather not rush headlong into this mess for once, if we can avoid it.”

“Agreed,” Artemis said. “So let’s spend our time devising a plan of action, while Medea tells us everything she knows about the layout of this Vandergraff House. But first, I do have one question, for my own curiosity, Medea – how did you escape after we we captured you during your raid on the Sanctum?”

“Oh, how I envy your youthful optimism, Artemis,” Medea laughed. “If Vitruvian and even Hades himself can’t keep me locked down, surely you didn’t expect those charming boys and girls at SHADE to hold me for long? I would have escaped them soon enough, of course, but that dreary little Englishman, the Gaoler, made it ever so much easier when he tried to add me to his little extra-dimensional collection of miscreants.”

Shortly after that the seven retreated, via quantum tunnel, to the air conditioned, if slightly cramped, comfort of the Interceptor, where they spent the next several hours devising a strategy to penetrate whatever defenses the insane lich may have placed around his new lair. Once they’d prepared as much as possible, there was nothing to do but wait.

As the others tried to relax in their jumpseats, Chilz approached the Greek sorceress where she sat in the cockpit, next to a helmet-less Scion, both staring silently out at the early evening cityscape across the harbor. Clearing his throat, he tapped her on the shoulder.

“Listen, I’ve been thinking,” he said quietly. “You say you can disrupt this ritual of his, but can you, can we, turn it around, instead? Use it to actually bring back Roland Reid? Actually resurrect him, I mean?” Scion seemed surprised at the question, but Medea just smiled.

“Well, anything is possible with that positive, go-get-‘em attitude of yours, my dear. But perhaps you should consider this — Dolórüska came back more corrupt, power-hungry, and evil than ever before… and quite utterly damned. Is that really something you’d want to risk for such a beloved hero? There really are things worse than death, child.”

“Ah. I hadn’t considered the Pet Semetary possibility,” Chilz said, clearly disturbed. “Well, maybe it’s not such a good idea.” With a nod to Scion he walked slowly back to his own seat, settling in with a thoughtful look on his face.

“That does bring up a question I’ve been thinking about,” Scion said after he was gone. “Can we save Dolórüska’s current host, the kid Tyler?”

The question seemed to genuinely surprise Medea, and he rather thought it startled her into a fully truthful answer. “I… yes, it might be possible. When his host body is killed, his spirit is forced back into the Golden Helm; that is, of course, how he survives. But it’s the driving him out while the host is still alive that’s the tricky bit…

“Of course, if his spirit is already over-extended from, say, working a powerful and draining ritual… well then, simply defeating him might trigger the same reflex, forcing him to retreat to the safety of his Helm. It would certainly be a gamble, though — safer by far to simply destroy the body.”

Scion said nothing, simply staring at her for a moment, before nodding and turning back to look out the window at the setting sun. Medea too turned back to the window, looking oddly unsettled…

•• •• ••

The last glow of the setting sun was still lingering in the western sky when the Vanguard and their unlikely ally stepped from one of Quanta’s portals into the shadows between two buildings across the street from the Vandergraff House. This was a two-story Regency-style mansion, set in the middle of a relatively large estate and surrounded by low stone walls. Warm lights shone from the windows of the house, while softer, indirect key lights illuminated the formal gardens. A carriage house could be seen beyond the driveway and circular courtyard in front of the building, and beyond the gatehouse from the street they could see a large round reflecting pond filled with lily pads.

The could also see figures dressed in colonial-era costumes wandering the grounds, scowling and glancing suspiciously around as they made their rounds. “Oh, that’s not suspicious at all,” the Blue Flame said. “I know the place is a living history museum now, but why would they have guys in period costumes patroling at night, when there’s no one to see them?”

“And why are they packing anachronistically modern heavy pistols?” Artemis added. “Also… look closely at the way they move…the illusion of humanity isn’t bad, but they still move with that unconscious, sinuous grace of the Serpent Folk.”

Totem had confirmed Medea’s assertion that the house itself was warded against inward-bound teleportation. While they could have subdued the faux security guards, it would almost certainly have raised the alarm within the house… which meant they’d have to do the infiltration the old fashioned way. It was a tense several minutes as the group made their way stealthily over the wall, past the exterior guards, and into the mansion itself, but the operation went off without a hitch.

Once inside the house, they had an easier time avoiding the four disguised Serpent Folk patrolling its many velvet-roped rooms – Medea was certain that the ancient wizard would have set up shop in the sub-basement, it being the ideal place to perform his ritual. She led them straight to the semi-hidden door in the kitchen pantry that accessed the upper basement.

Wide wooden stairs dropped steeply into the mansion’s main basement, which was essentially an expansive, subterranean warehouse, forty feet across and twice as long. Aging stone and mortar walls supported a ceiling ten feet overhead, and the floor was close-fitted flagstone. Informative plaques marked several dusty, threadbare antiques stuffed in various nooks, but half the basement was given over to modern amenities, such as plumbing, the breaker box, and an emergency generator.

The other half was filled with a crowd of angry Serpent Folk.

Although blocking the way further into the basement, the dozens of milling Saurian’s did not immediately leap to attack. This puzzled the Vanguard, until thousands of writhing snakes began to pour from every crevice and crack in the old stonework… in less than a minute, the snakes had assembled themselves into a roughly humanoid form — an extremely unsettling sight to everyone except Medea.

“Oh, yes, I forgot to mention,” she offered at her companion’s horrified looks. “That’s what Dolórüska did to Astarmis, once he had the cult under his sway… turned their high priest into an aggregate creature made entirely of snakes. One wonders how much of lizard boy’s mind is left in there…”

The question was at least partially answered when the nauseatingly shifting figure held up a gold helmet handed to it – him? – them? by one of the minions.

“Ha! Human fools,” a thousand hissing voices cried in terrible unison from the swarm-creature. “You would seek to free your master, Dolórüska? Well, you shall not succeed! He is our prisoner now, and soon we will destroy him utterly! After all, we have this!” He held the gold helmet triumphantly above his head.

“Um, you do realize that’s just a wooden helmet, painted gold, right?” the Blue Flame asked hesitantly into the silence that followed, glancing at Medea. “He does know, right?”

Whatever the creature that had once been Astarmis might have been expecting, it apparently wasn’t this. The writhing mass of snakes seemed momentarily nonplussed as it stared at the object in its “hands.”

“He’s right,” Artemis said, quickly following up on the creature’s momentary confusion. “You’re being controlled by your ancient enemy, High Priest Astarmis. Look at what he’s done to your body… surely you were not always like… this?”

“I… no, you mammal’sss sseek to confussse ussss… we are… I am asss I have alwaysss been…” but his hissing certainty was undercut by the sideways look he cast at his minions, who shuffled in confusion behind and to either side of him. “When we perform the ritual—“

“You’ve already performed the ritual, do you not remember?” Totem took up the thread. “In your deep cavern, under the green eyes of your cobra idol, you placed the real Golden Helm on the human youth you took from that shop. And Dolórüska awoke…”

“Yesss, we… he… why iss it sso hard for usss to think? We mussst dessstroy the Atlantean betrayer… and thief… but he… what hassss he done to ussss?!” That last was a wailing cry, and the snake-thing flung the false helm to the floor, where it bounced and then rolled away into the shadows.

“He has betrayed you yet again,” Chilz roared suddenly, as he rose on a pillar of ice so that his head almost brushed the ceiling. All of the Saurians flinched and hunched down for an instant. “He MUST be destroyed! Tell us where he is so we can destroy him… do not fight for him, do not make us destroy you first!”

That seemed to finally break the Serpent priest’s resolve, and he hissed some unintelligible order to his small army. As the Vanguard stood aside, the Saurian’s moved past them and up the stairs, casting malevolent glares at the mammals, but making no hostile move. Snake-Astarmis was the last, and as he slithered/strode up the stairs he hissed a last warning.

“If you do not destroy the ancient betrayer, mammals, as you promise, be sure that I and my Ophidians will hunt you to the ends of the Earth, and you will pay for your perfidy!” And then he too was gone.

“Where’s our girl Medea?” Quanta asked suddenly. He hadn’t seen her since the confrontation with the snake guys had begun, and she’d been strangely quiet during the encounter.

“I’m right here, my dear,” the sorceress said, stepping out of the shadows to his left. “I felt it best if the lizards didn’t see me… I thought you’d all do better talking them down without me dredging up old memories.” She ran a finger down his silvery cheek and tapped one enameled nail on his chin. “And I’m neither yours, nor a girl… something you might want to keep in mind, dear.”

She continued on into the basement proper, gesturing for the Vanguard to follow. “As I recall, the hidden entrance to this place’s real power locus is in this corner, behind that pile of crap… my, they really have let this place go to the dogs since the last time I was here.”

As she’d said, a hidden door revealed a wide set of spiral stone stairs winding down into flame-lit dimness. The sound of low, guttural chanting drifted up, growing louder as the heroes moved down the into the sub-basement, Medea following behind.

Flickering candles illuminated a large circular room, perhaps 25 meters across, and the smells of herbs, smoke, and sweet liqueurs were heavy in the air. Six massive crystals lined a circle of runes, fifteen feet across, scribed on the ground at the center of the place, directly beneath the carved stone dome that rose more than 10 meters above. The crystals pulsed with a cold blue light, and the runes pulsed in golden counterpoint. They both encircled a large clay human-looking body, itself covered in a multitude of dark runes.

Dolórüska the Damned, tall and imperious in his traditional Atlantean robes, stood over the simulacrum, finishing an incantation before looking up, apparently totally unconcerned by his new visitors.

“So typical of this era’s champions,” he finally said once his chant was done. His Golden Helm glinted in the flickering light as he turned its cold countenance on them. “You have both presumed to let yourselves in… and have arrived too late!” His voice was deep and as cold as the void between the stars, and when he laughed it sent chills down the spine.

“I have concluded the ritual, you fools! I have drawn down his disembodied spirit, and now Roland Reid is forever bound into this body! My former rival now my loyal pet, for all eternity! Now, servant, rise and destroy these interlopers! By my command, attack!”

The Vanguard tensed, staring in anticipated horror at the clay golem. They could see now that it’s molded feature bore a distinct resemblance to the late Magus Prime. And Totem saw, to his real dismay, the ancient Talisman of the Trifani around the simulacrum’s neck, resting on its chest. Roland had worn and wielded that powerful artifact for almost 80 years – it would act as the perfect conduit to pull his spirit into the body! How in the Names of all the Great Beasts had Dolórüska acquired it?

The moment stretched… and stretched again. Nothing happened. For all that the features of his metal helm were immobile, Totem had the sense that the ancient sorcerer was surprised. He took advantage of that, and cast the most powerful spell of disenchantment that he knew, backed by all the mystic power at his command, and hurled it at Dolórüska.

The violet energies flowed from him and splashed harmlessly against a shield, invisible until then, that lay dome-like around the runes, golem and wizard. Dolórüska paid no attention to the harmless attack, instead focusing his concentration on commanding his new slave – he shouted words not heard on Earth in almost 20,000 years, and gestured violently at the golem.

Still nothing happened, except Quanta’s quantum matter splashing in beautiful, glittering steaks of silver against the shield dome, and Totem tried a Curse, which sputtered and died — less spectacular, but just as useless.

The attacks did finally draw Dolórüska’s attention, and almost contemptuously he gestured at Totem. Crimson energy flashed out, and in an instant the shaman was wrapped from nose to toes in glowing red chains of mystical energy. Unable to move or speak, he was utterly vulnerable and defenseless.

Chilz, seeing the futility of physical attacks, also saw that the invisible barrier, when briefly lit by an attack, seemed to lay just within the circle of crystals. Perhaps they were vulnerable? Leaping forward, he brought both of his massive ice fists down on the nearest crystal. Cracks radiated out in a spiderweb pattern, and his second blow shattered the crystal into a thousand shards. The barrier flickered into visibility for a moment before fading back out of sight…. But Chilz was sure he could now see the occasional flicker of the shield in the dim light, where it had been entirely invisible before.

“Chilz has the right idea!” Scion called out on comms. “We need to destroy that barrier before we can take the fight to Dolórüska. Go for the crystals!”

Taking his own advice, Scion slamed an armored fist into another crystal, cracking it — before he could make a second strike the Blue Flame was hovering next him, unleashing a plasma stream into the fractured rock. It blew apart in a flash of blue light and flame. Again, the shield dome flickered, and afterward its invisibility wasn’t quite as complete.

Artemis took a moment to examine the crystal nearest to her, looking deep into its internal structure… yes, just there. She struck a single, solid blow with an escrima stick at the juncture of three facets. With a crack like a rifle shot, the crystal fractured down its center, splitting into two halves, each of which shattered into several more pieces as they hit the floor. The dome flickered, and this time it remained faintly visible in the candlelight…

Struggling in the constricting bonds within which Dolórüska had restrained him, Totem tried something he had contemplated, but never pursued. Reaching deep within himself, to the place where the Avatars slept within him, he focused on Eagle. He did not summon the Avatar, but instead channeled his tremendous strength…

The crimson chains burst in a flash of ruby light, and Totem rolled forward to come up in a three-point hero pose. His eyes glowed golden and his fist was encased in a nimbus of golden energy…

Chilz had shattered a fourth crystal, and that had finally gotten the attention of the undead mage. Dolórüska gestured toward the ice giant and a blast of crimson mystic energy struck him full in the chest. To the surprise fo both, it did little more than force him back a step. Chilz grinned…

Quanta, meanwhile, crushed the fifth crystal with a massive block of realized quantum matter, and this time the flicker of the shield-dome didn’t stop. Bands of swirling, translucent energy defined the barrier clearly… and then Scion blasted the final crystal to flinders with a stream of armor-piercing rounds.

The barrier vanished as the last crystal went dark.

The instant it was gone, the Blue Flame let loose a massive plasma blast, engulfing Dolórüska in a searing ball of roiling blue energy.… which the lich simply strode out of, almost oblivious to it.

But as the Atlantean began to gesture, no doubt to conjure some new assault, Artemis vaulted over the remains of a crystal and was on him. Legs wrapped around his torso, arms encircling his neck, she addressed the boy imprisoned in his own body.

“Tyler, I know you must be in there! Fight him from the inside, help us to help you! You are not helpless —“

“What a foolish child you are, little demi-godling,” Dolórüska just laughed, shrugging her off as if she were a child indeed. But that was fine, she’d only wanted to distract him. “No one can resist my possession, and soon enough what remains of the—“

Totem’s golden bands of mystic power wrapped the ancient mage from neck to ankles, much as he’d earlier bound the young shaman. Chilz took Dolórüska’s distraction to unleash a tremendous roundhouse punch the head of the Arkanos-golem — if the construct was too damaged, maybe it could forestall any resurrection of Roland Reid.

But Dolórüska took far less time to shrug off his bonds than Totem had taken to shed his. Distracted he might have been, but not so much that he hadn’t noticed Chilz’ attempted desecration of the vessel in which he would enslave his old foe. Furious at the minor damage the ice giant had managed to inflict on the golem, he turned his attention full upon him.

“By the power of the ancient Ghoruzhed,” Dolórüska roared, “I Curse you and Transform you, let you be as the dust of the earth, dead and inert!”

A wash of almost invisible energy flowed over him, and Chilz felt his body begin to change… it was stiffening, and he watched in horror as his extremities began to turn… to clay?! He collapsed to his knees next to the golem, focusing every ounce of his willpower on fighting the transformation…

Quanta, staying firmly on the ground this time, lashed out at the ancient mage with an encasement attack. From feet to helm, Dolórüska was encased in a constricting shell of nano carbon. Yes, finally, Quanta thought. Proves that it pays to stay on the – his satisfied thought was cut short as he saw his quantum matter suddenly turn inside out, twist sideways somehow, and then simply vanish.

Before the lich could turn his ire on Quanta, however, Scion was behind him, unleashing a point-blank burst of his brain-tickler into the Golden Helm. He didn’t know if the undead spirit would be affected, but maybe if he knocked out the physical brain of the the poor kid it possessed —

Dolórüska staggered forward, but when he whirled to confront Scion, he seemed little more than annoyed. “So, are you an Atlantean under that little shell of orichalcum, boy? Perhaps one of my very distant descendants, eh? And I see you’ve alloyed the pure orichalcum with other elements… clever! It may be you will make a good court artificer for me… assuming you survive my ascension, of course.”

He gestured, and a blast of pure mystic energy sent Scion flying across the room. As he pulled himself back to his feet, the armored hero noticed a shape, moving in the shadows… for a moment he thought it was Artemis, but no, he could see his teammate near the downed Chilz…. then it was gone, and he couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been his imagination.

Chilz could feel himself winning, fighting the transformation, pushing it back, moment by moment. He retained enough presence of mind, even in his own fear and desperate struggle, to remember the real danger. He reached out and pulled the fancy necklace from around the golem’s neck, clutching it in his fist. Totem had yelled something over comms earlier about it drawing in Arkanos’ spirit…

Artemis, seeing his action and realizing its significance, snapped her Shadow Whip toward her teammate. Its tip wrapped around the chain, and she snapped it back, reaching up as the Talisman of the Trifani dropped neatly into her hand. Stepping back into the shadows, she vanished…

To reappear in another shadow as close as she could get to Totem. He and Dolórüska were engaged now in a serious mystic duel, and her teammate seemed to be actually holding his own. The Atlantean’s crimson bolts splattered against Totems golden shields, and the shaman had again bound their enemy in mystic chains. The lich had burst them, yes, but it had taken him longer… was Dolórüska tiring? If so… she waited for the right moment…

It came when the Blue Flame yelled “Ballz!” at the top of his lungs. As the subsequent burst of blinding blue-white light filled the room, she had leaped forward, tossing the Talisman to Totem. Dolórüska hadn’t been blinded, of course – she wasn’t even sure if he saw, in the traditional sense, through that helmet of his — but he was distracted.

Which Quanta used to drop a ton of silvery quantum matter on the old zombie. He gritted his teeth in frustration when the bastard simply waved a hand, and his plunging block turned into a cloud of Death’s Head moths and fluttered away. He really hated magic.

Totem also had used Dolórüska’s distraction to good advantage, dropping the Talisman of the Trifani around his neck, with a silent apology to his old mentor. This was a powerful artifact, and one of its many uses was to channel and amplify a mages existing power, and he needed every advantage he could get at this point. He finally felt his own newfound powers had integrated, becoming truly his… but Dolórüska was relentless, and both more skilled and, honestly, more powerful than him.

As if to prove the point, he suddenly found himself once again bound in strands of glowing ruby chains, suspended several feet above the floor. But this time he wore the Talisman, and even though he understood little about its full use, he felt its power amplifying his own. He burst the chains almost as quickly as Dolórüska had burst his own golden chains.

As he launched another barrage of mystic bolts at the undead mage, Totem thought he saw a vaguely human shadow flit across the edge of his vision. But there was no time to give it any thought , he had his hands, and mind, full just then…

Scion landed next to Chilz, helping his teammate to his feet. “Are you OK? What the hell did he do to you.”

“Yeah, I think I’m OK now, I seem to have fought it off… I think he was trying turn me to clay! Maybe as punishment for trying to disfigure his little doll here.” Chilz gestured to the golem at their feet.

“A good idea, Chilz,” Scion said, and unleashed a volley of his armor-piercing rounds at the recumbent form. But aside form a small chip or two, they did no more damage than Chilz’ blows had.

“Yeah, I think those squiggly symbols all over it provide protection,” he said after Scion stopped firing. “Did you notice how they flared when your bullets hit?”

Before Scion could answer the Blue Flame landed on the other side of the golem. “You guys are on the right track, but a little cosmetic surgery isn’t enough. This calls for some radical surgery!”

With that, his Plasma Katana formed in his hand, and he swept the searing blade down. With a single mighty stroke he decapitated the construct. The head rolled away to bump up against Chilz’ foot. He bend down and picked it up, staring into the lifeless clay face.

“Alas, poor golem! I knew him Horatio…”

“Ok, now that the threat of a resurrected Arkanos is gone,” Scion laughed, “let’s go kick this bastard’s ass. Totem is holding his own, but I doubt he can do it alone, even with Reid’s magic doohickey.”

And indeed, enraged at the destruction of his golem, Dolórüska was redoubling his efforts to bring down Totem. But their teammate blocked each attack with his golden shields, and returned as good as he got, his golden bolts flaring against the Atlantean’s crimson shields.

And then he managed to ensnare the lich in golden chains, and this time Dolórüska struggled to break them. Chilz was across the five meters between them in an instant, and his roundhouse punch jerked the mage’s head back, but didn’t seem to actually hurt him.

With a desperate shrug Dolórüska shattered Totems bindings, and he turned his wrath on Chilz. “I shall not suffer the indignity of having one such as you lay hands on me,” he roared, and with a gesture Chilz found himself bound from chin to feet, as Totem had been earlier, in crimson chains of energy. Twirling slowly several feet in the air, he struggled to break the chains…

Scion had used the distraction to again come up behind the Atlantean sorcerer and unleash an EMP directly into his head. This time, Dolórüska staggered forward, and almost went to one knee. It might have been Quanta’s stream of buckyballs that actually kept him on his feet, as the attack took him full in the chest and drove him back.

The Blue Flame swooped in and encased the ancient mage in a flaming cage of his own plasma form. But even staggered by the previous attacks, Dolórüska simply waved the cage away, dissipating the Blue Flame entirely for a moment, before he could pull himself back together. As he did, he thought he saw a flickering, shadowy figure across the room…

Artemis was suddenly on the former Magus Prime, punching, jabbing and kicking at one after another of the body’s most vulnerable points, and Dolórüska reeled under the attack. Before he could recover, Totem poured all his power int his Winding Whip, lashing it around the mage and binding his arms.

Quanta unleashed a stream of buckyballs at nearly the speed of sound, slamming it into the Golden Helm. It was the last straw, and Dolórüska collapsed to the ground. There was a blinding flash of light, and a jubilant female voice yelled “YES!”

As their vision cleared, the Vanguard saw the unconscious form of Tyler Attah, draped in Dolórüska’s robes, lying where the ancient mage had been. The Golden Helm lay smoking on the floor nearby. But the room began to grow cold before the heroes could react, and the smoke and light twisted themselves into a woman’s form standing over the helmet. A woman with long, dark hair framing cruel eyes of a red so dark as to be almost black. A woman Totem recognized instantly.

“Varina!” he snarled as she burst into peals of cold laughter.

“Indeed, boy! Dolórüska played his part perfectly. As did you and your little super-friends, fools and tools that you all are.

“A year of slumbering within this world’s magical energy, months spent finding and destroying Arkanos’s vile little wards, designed solely to keep me from my rightful ascension… but it’s all are over now, and I rise! How I envy you little mortals… you have served me so loyally… and now you have the glory of being the first to die at the hands of Varina the Ascendant, Dark God of Gods!”

“So this was your ploy all along?” Totem demanded. “You wanted Sabra to kill you that day, didn’t you… but why? What did you gain?”

“Gain? Why, everything, foolish boy. Or at least that was the plan. I spent centuries devising my ritual – the great ritual that would finally allow me to ascend to true godhood. I needed one thousand worlds drawn into my own Dark Realm, and after Roland’s humiliating trickery, I swore to make this pathetic little world, his world, my final conquest.

“My “death” was an integral part of the ritual, of course – but only my death at the hands of this world’s Magus Prime would do, allowing my spirit to merge with your world’s magics and thereby gain control from within. But that vile Roland Reid must have suspected… his damn Arcane Wards worked just as he intended, keeping me trapped and formless, unable to act on the material world.

“But he underestimated me, of course. However brilliant, he didn’t have my centuries of experience. It took time, but eventually I found tools whose minds I could touch, tools I could use to act as my hands in this world, to find and destroy the Wards. And now, bonded to this last, accidental Ward, there is nothing you or anyone can do to stop my Ascension!”

She stooped to take up the Golden Helm… and her hand passed through the artifact as if it were made of smoke. Her expression changed swiftly from mocking condescension to furious rage.

“What trickery is this?” I—“

“Oh, how dreadful,” Medea feigned a sob from the gloom deeper within the chamber. “Isn’t it terrible when someone wears the same accessory to a party?”

As all eyes turned to her, she lifted the real Golden Helm to her head and, with a gleeful laugh, lowered it…

The world vanished in a flood of light, and three voices screamed in agonizing pain and terror. The Vanguard collapsed to the stone floor, blinded and half-deafened by the horrible shrieks. And then they just stopped. As vision returned, only the Golden Helm of Dolórüska the Damned remained, laying in the spot where Medea had stood — surrounded by a circle of charred stone…

•• •• ••

Later, the Vanguard were gathered about the Round Table in their Ready Room at Vanguard HQ, high atop the famed AzTech Pyramid. It was another beautiful summer day in Astoria, and things had been surprisingly quiet since their return from New Atlantis. With not much crime to report on, the meeting was ending early. Life was good.

But then the red phone in the corner of the room rang, and everyone tensed. A call on that particular phone could mean only one thing – serious trouble was going on somewhere in the city. The Mayor only called on her dedicated special hotline when things were beyond the police!

“Hello Madame Mayor,” Scion said as he lifted the receiver, putting it to his ear. “How can we help?”

“Good morning Scion,” Mayor Syrett said, sounding all business. “I’m afraid the forces of E.V.A.L. have struck again – the master super villainess Sandblaster and her gang of sand-themed minions are robbing the main branch of the First National Bank even as we speak! The police are helpless against them… I’m afraid only the Vanguard can stop her!”

“Have no fear, ma’am, the Vanguard is on the way!” Scion hung up the phone and turned to his teammates. “It looks like the vacation is over, friends – our old chum Sandblaster is back in town, and up to her old tricks. It’s time to earn our keep again!”