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Chapter 10  

Interlude 10

In a place that contained neither time or space as organic beings understood them an entity stirred. To the extent it felt emotions as humans understood them it was annoyed. One of its servants had become too greedy, and had disobeyed the orders it had been given. Not only that but it had attracted attention to itself. The servant would have to be destroyed as an example to the other beings in the entity's service. More bothersome however was the fact that it's servant had attracted the attention of one of Those Who Must be Destroyed. Fortunately The One Who Must be Destroyed was young and inexperienced, there was a possibility it might not make the connection between servant and master By itself the other was not a threat even if it became aware of the entities presence, but it could alert others of it's kind to the entities activities in this plane of existence, and that would be awkward. Steps would have to be taken to remove the possible threat to the Great Work.

Alternity - Chapter 11

First Impressions

Time: CY 10090 AD June 5167
Location: Aboard the Andromeda Ascendant

chapter illustration Tyr Anasazi out of Victoria by Barbarossa was extremely uneasy. There were things about the Andromeda that made him nervous. After saving Captain Dylan in the warehouse, he had accepted an invitation to visit the Andromeda Ascendant. The captain had given him a tour of the ship, which had concluded on the command deck. Tyr had heard rumors of a High Guard starship and its captain that had returned, seemingly from the dead, and were attempting to recreate the old Systems Commonwealth, but he had dismissed them as wishful thinking by weak minded individuals who were hoping for a white knight to rescue them from their, usually self induced, misery. Now he was on board the same ghost ship with its captain and mismatched crew.

It was said captain and crew that made him edgy, especially the captain. The crew was 'interesting.' They were the original crew of the freighter that was now being used as the Andromeda's lighter. If they had been Nietzschean, he would have called them a down and out pride. After having ridden in the ship that they had previously called home and now seeing the Andromeda, it was obvious why they had attached themselves to the Andromeda.

The pride matriarch was the woman known as Beka Valentine. She was obviously in charge of the other two and their offspring, which was one of the things that was worrisome. In a crisis the boy and the girl would look to her for leadership rather than the Andromeda's captain. Such divided leadership could lead to catastrophe. The boy was annoying and belligerent; he obviously had a visceral dislike for Nietzscheans. The Valentine woman had explained that he had been born on Earth and had watched as his parents had been killed by members of the Drago-Kazov pride. That explained his belligerence and for the moment Tyr was willing to tolerate his insults. If he was successfully maintaining a ship that normally required a team of engineers to maintain, he was an engineer of extraordinary talent. The boy's mate was of a species Tyr had never encountered. She was more cordial than her partner, but since he knew nothing about her kind he was naturally suspicious of her. He was frankly astounded that the two of them had been able to produce a child. For a child of one year of age, she was walking remarkably well and seemed both alert and intelligent. He wondered if she would breed true or was a sterile mule.

The captain was the truly worrisome one. Tyr suspected that he was a raving lunatic driven mad by loss of his crew and the strangeness of the new universe he was in. Lunatics were unpredictable, and often dangerous if they felt their fantasies were being threatened. Still, he had been having some limited success in his endeavor, and more importantly from Tyr's point of view, he had a working warship, and Tyr had need of a working warship.

The warship itself was a technological wonder; far in advance anything he had seen before. An ambitious, intelligent man could do great things with such a ship. The computer controlling it was sentient, and apparently totally devoted to its commanding officer. Tyr wondered if it was personal loyalty to Captain Hunt or simply loyalty to its commanding officer. In either event the reason for its loyalty made little difference to him. It was a computer, and a computer could be reprogrammed.


Chapter 10