Damned Among Angels, Call Us Outlaws...

A Prestor-Jonns & Frostmantul CROSSCOSM Adventure

by JosephArmstead

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

-- Carl Sagan

"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."

-- Ray Bradbury

"From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom."

-- Nikola Tesla

PART ONE

Her emotions threatened to run wild as she finally was able to draw in a deep breath. She steeled herself against the ear-splitting clamor of the collapsing bulkheads in the aftermath of the two ships colliding. She rose unsteadily from the bowl of her transit-hop crater in the cracked and splintered deck of the Spinship's interior flight housing and quickly sighted on her pursuers. Five of them, armed and furious. Uncommoner Syndicate Combat Minions in full assault armor. Gritting her teeth against the relentlessly oppressive pull of heavy gravity, she raised the paired-muzzle of her long-bore, ion-pulse rifle and fired rapidly, once , thrice, five times.

Three men went down, but the third Uncommoner Combat android-mercenary only stumbled, his exo-suit's force shield absorbing the bulk of the white-hot ion-bursts. The fourth and fifth assailants were spun around by the concussive proximity waves from the trio of impacts, their armor's reactive laminate-circuitry spewing out small fountains of bright blue sparks.

She had to reluctantly admit to herself that the plan she had developed with her partner, Ezekayal Prestor-Jonns, wasn't even close to working. Everything had quickly fallen to hell the minute they'd stepped out from the gates of the CrossCosm Terminus. Their undercover contact on this Macrodimensional Actuality-Plane had already had her cover blown and Heironniea Balo, The Magestorykken's damn Grynndevul assassin, had enlisted a team of Combat Minions, autonomous android mercenary 'bots, from alien mutant Crime Boss Agamemnon Ferroneus to intercept her and Prestor-Jonns.

Damn it, this hunt-and-chase idiocy was wasting time. The proverbial clock was ticking, counting down, Time that was rapidly metamorphosing from standard linear progression into Multiversal chiral-funneling. It was draining away between the co-planar CrossCosm worlds that were explosively intersecting at LCL points, logarithmic conjoiner loops, all around them.

Where the hell was Prestor-Jonns? This battle-torn mess of a base was the rendezvous point. Ezekayal was supposed to be waiting for her with goddamned Asher Skuld in-tow. They needed to get out of the Achaean Galaxy before the goons of Agamemnon Ferroneus' criminal "Uncommonner Syndicate" cut off their escape to Kronus Perenna Base on Jupiter's 4th moon of Callisto, in that moon's Asgard Basin impact crater. Ferroneus' team of armored hunter-killer androids wouldn't be able to survive the CrossCosm shunt out from this cosmic bubble back to regular Hum-Org space now that she and Prestor-Jonns had destroyed their ARPkronal Bridge Integerrian unit. They had to move. They couldn't let Asher Skuld fall back into the hands of the Uncommoner Syndicate. The greedy, amoral Uncommoners were going to deliver him straight to The Magestorykken and the twisted, homicidal xeno-cultists of the Church of the Almighty Toad King.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~~~

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

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

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

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

The Church...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO

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

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

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

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

Vykerrina's DSTF Ops-ACTINT (Actionable Intelligence) superiors were already fielding repeated