First off,
Here's the entire collection of Osiris episodes, if you're interested.
Second: This is a long-overdue installment. I've, ah, kind of been remiss in my sci-fi writing for the past couple of months. Hopefully, terrypinder and others will forgive me if I offer them up a new chapter or two. :)
Quick Intro for Newbies
About three thousand years from now, the long-exiled Empress Mercada, former ruler of an empire that started in Brazil and eventually encompassed through conquest or forced alliance most of the Earth, has returned to the worlds of Humanity to reclaim her place of power.
The only hitch is that the civilization that has risen in her stead doesn't like her very much, and has the means to oppose her, in spades.
So, she gets pals from beyond the Terremagne, as the new realm is called, people with technology significantly ahead of the curve, who have their own designs for Humanity, for which the Empress Mercada suits, at least for now.
Oh, and it gets even better: There's a third member of this infernal alliance, an immense, world-spanning, eons-old being called the Gorgon, that once so disliked the new Human settlers that it wiped them out. Digested them, more likely. Alas, it developed a taste for Humanity, and now wants to go get take-out across the stars.
And things were going so well for the bad guys, when suddenly, out of the blue the Empress gets a bad case of genetic collapse, a consequence of her rather vampiric means of living about three thousand years longer than customary, and while her top lieutenants, the half-virtual, half-real Furies, are fixing her up, an ancient enemy literally springs out of one of the bodies being prepared to fix up the Empress.
His name was once Damon; he once had a daughter named Alyssa. The Furies killed her. He's a bit pissed about that. Now he's similar in form to them, a volunteer in an ancient war between Brazil and the United States.
He has no name, just a classification, and a remnant of the man, the father, he once was. He is the Talon.
A Tale of Fury
Interspace: A domain that made virtual travel and material transmission of a limited sort possible, not only between cities on Earth but between the worlds of the Sol Origini system and beyond. It was, for about seven hundred years, the mode of commerce – and conflict – between the far-flung worlds of Humanity.
Within seconds of the Fury Anima’s conversion into the shipboard ether, the Talon was running for cover, doing what incidental damage that he could to surveillance nodes, especially those geared toward the prosecution of electronic threats such as himself. He could not hide his path from Anima, but he could introduce a degree of uncertainty as to his exact position, by creating a wide band of disruption wherever he went.
The Talon, the avatar who was once Damon Calland of the United States, volunteer in an especially horrid war between his country and the Empire of Brazil, cast about looking for an exit. Surely, somewhere, there was some bandwidth connecting this spacecraft with the rest of the cosmos. At an effective forward velocity of several thousand miles an hour, he went through the entire ship’s physical network in a matter of minutes. The ship’s ether was hermetically sealed, perhaps a lockdown just for his benefit. He was trapped. No matter; he was in striking distance of the Empress Mercada even now. Escape was of secondary importance.
The Talon had sought a personal vengeance on Mercada; however, there were other ways to skin a jaguar. The ghostly warrior-avatar pursued the options, one after another, then saw an opening – several hundred of them, actually.
Detonating the antimatter-spiked reaction drive was too obvious, and the same tech – tau manipulation -- that preserved both the Empress and her onboard cache of victims preserved Osiris from a matter-antimatter explosion. If the reactor ever went critical, even for a nanosecond, emergency systems would raise the tau factor into the billions, giving ship’s systems time to collapse the antimatter used on starships into quantum foam. No Star Trek-style gambits, here, Talon mused.
There were also no less than four overlapping tau safety buffers containing the main reactor.
However, the onboard arsenal of MAM missiles was conserved by less stringent mechanisms; the internal tau bottle containing the antimatter packet for each warhead, and a storage buffer surrounding the weapons pods scattered throughout the ship. The trick for most would-be thieves was that once a storage buffer was tampered with, the warheads were set to deactivate their charges, in effect becoming nothing more than very expensive, mean-looking paperweights.
However, most thieves weren’t capable of teleporting away masses of up to 40 kilograms, a power that both the Furies and the Talons shared.
A standard MAM warhead weighed 15 kilograms, most of it casing. The bomb's yield was adjustable; the lower limit was four hundred megatons.
One bomb is enough for all of us; the Talon mused.
The Talon continued to dart about the internal grid of the starship, playing for time to work out various details of his intended kamikaze run. However, in so doing, he had come across a Fury mnemonic node – an archive for the experiences of the three onboard avatars, all three of whom would in short order combine forces against him. It seemed a good idea to the Talon to learn what he could of his adversaries.
No, the being who was once a man named Damon swore, as the information swept through him. These three were the worst of the worst; the captains of their kind. Further, one among them had been the killer of his long-taken daughter Alyssa.
Almost instantly, he learned the details of his little girl’s fate, continuing his random darting through the ether of the ship.
_________________
It had been the one named Plantagene; she had had a list of terror targets that evening, one after the other. The assignment right after the taking of Alyssa Calland was a small boy who lived with his mother on the Moon, where she was a colony administrator for the New Commonwealth, an ally of the Americans at the time. Apparently, she was been an agent for the Empire, but had balked at an assignment. The Empress did not shine to being refused.
Plantagene had simply dropped Alyssa off right outside the clear glass of the city, in full sight of the administrator’s office, which boasted a wonderful view of the Lunar Appenine mountain range. Plantagene had knocked on the barrier glass, smiled sweetly, pointed to the dying girl, then vanished.
The administrator, Lisa Keane, was still screaming when the Fury reappeared outside, with her own son, Henry, grasped by the arm. to join Alyssa in the harsh light and hard vacuum of the Lunar afternoon.
The boy had not been killed; Plantagene’s final trick was to teleport into Administrator Keane’s office and leave the ruined wreck of her son wheezing uselessly on the floor.
“He can be fixed, this time,” Fury had warned. “If I should have to return, that will not be the case.”
“No...you want have to return...oh, Goddess...” Keane had fallen to her knees, and alternated because trying to reach out to her son and pulling her hands back, out of fear of causing him more damage.
Plantagene snorted contemptuously. “She is your goddess, indeed! Do not refuse her again.” Then the Fury had disappeared.
Not the least thought had ever again been given to the now-dead little girl on the far side of the barrier glass by her killer.
_________________
It had been a full simulation recording that was on file, as if one were there to witness the murders, part of a much larger trio of experiences. In a matter of moments, the Talon had snatched them all, and continued his flight through the walls of Osiris. What they knew, he would know, given time to assimilate and process the data; that was the nature of quantum-based existence: collecting data was the easy part.
The Talon felt emotions that avatars were officially incapable of: rage, despair, grief, anger. No, do not give in, he told himself. This atrocity, too, will be repaid with the destruction of Osiris. Thus, the Talon fought down the impulse to seek more personal retribution. Destroy the starship, and the Empress, her Furies, her remaining Cyberne, and whatever schemes she had to return to power would be ended for good.
Too much of Damon Calland remained to remain so dispassionate. He failed in the attempt to adhere to logic, and the impulse for vengeance prevailed. He would see at least one of the Fury, Platagene, destroyed first.