PREVIEW: “ENTER THE COSMIC SPIRAL”

PROLOGUE

At the center of our galaxy came a crash that shook the very foundations of reality. Vibrations coursed their way throughout space and time like a tower experiencing an earthquake, ripping through unnatural boundaries as they gathered in strength. Though few could hear its silent and deafening call, a great death bell of wrath tolling, a call of danger from beyond, its chorus of asymmetric tones declared the start of a new age few living beings would survive.

Harmonized waves of energy pulsed out from Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, forces of gravity and intention and quantum fluctuation falling into conjunction like a puzzle solving in reverse, unlocking pathways to the knowledge of creation itself.

The many layers of reality peeled back, revealing a sea of possibility made of lightning and glass and horror.

They watched it unfold, suspended above the cosmological beast in their palace of eternal light, nine translucent faces, each different, each the same, attention focused on the devastation that was to be wrought. Though this cycle was nothing new, they’d seen a hundred or more, this one was different, and so they had prepared far more thoroughly than in any other cycle of recorded history.

“The spiral will spin,” one of them declares, its voice echoing against the walls of their palace. “The gates will open. We will admit the new and be revived. The worthy shall save themselves. The worthy shall become part of us.”

“Part of us,” the others replied.

Among the twelve platforms of the Never-Ending Halls, three of them were achingly empty, longing for someone to take their place, longing for someone to direct its power. All who stepped foot in this palace knew their right among the Ascended to call this home, to have raised their species into a greater reality in which they had defeated time and death, to become truly immortal, not just to survive an ordinary end.

“It is the hour,” one of them said, a clawed finger outstretched, pointing to the great expanse of stars spiraling out before them, space unbound by time. “Make your choices. Set them loose.”

A swarm of multi-tentacled beings appeared at the flanks of those gathered, their smooth faces mirroring that of one of the many god-like beings among the Ascended few.

“Initiators,” their kin called out, a cold sensation of pride in their tone. “Go now. Fulfill your purpose. Find the chosen. Let the Great Game begin.”

CHAPTER 1

As the shadowy forces of entropy and darkness sought to unravel me, my sweaty hands gripped tight to the controls and my cockpit shaking, all I could think was to never stop moving. It was sound advice, after all. Advice I’d heard a thousand times from a thousand people, and yet it always felt like an empty platitude, something we tell one another to make ourselves feel as if we’d done something to help when there was no true help to give. You know, platitudes like the standard “thoughts and prayers”, or “my heart is with you”. Saying them never changed a thing, not really, but hollow or not they were all we had to cling to when facing down overwhelming odds. Odds like I was facing now.

It was the year of our Divine Patarch, his majesty the Revere Sentori the Saint, Fire of Dawn, Echo of Time’s Birth, 25,642, and here I was, yet again, just a tiny white dot at the center of a boiling cauldron of interstellar conflict, one star fighter against a galaxy who sought to tear itself apart.

And for what did they all fight? For more power? It was already theirs. For glory? A subjective, human construct. For pleasure? How when they had already achieved the peak of decadence?

Which begged the deeper question: What were these cultists running from other than sanity?

I pushed the throttle forward and bared my teeth.

Shields at full.

Acceleration to maximum.

Missiles deployed.

One target down.

Two targets down.

Shrapnel tinkled against the cockpit window as the scanner swarmed with red dots.

More incoming.

Never stop moving. It didn’t matter in the moment, nor did any objective besides victory, but momentum was what was important. Experience told me that if you let off the heat, if you hesitated when the moment came, that it was an invitation for the enemy to rip you to pieces. And so, you kept pushing. Kept looking for the next target among an endless sea of black filled with laser fire and the release of cosmic magic.

Not that it was easy to forget all this when the voice in your head repeats the same five or six phrases over and over. And over.

Burn ahead! it said, voice echoing.

Keep your weapons hot!

Focus on the goal, ignore the chaos, ignore the danger all around you!

Take risks!

It was too bad reality didn’t respond as if this were Aladdin and we’d found the magic lamp. Thinking something didn’t make it so when standing against a vast fleet of alien death-cultist. But someone had to stop them. Trillions of souls across an entire arm of the Milky Way Galaxy had suffered under their oppression. From slavery and indentureship, to dream monitoring, to public corporal punishment. Not to mention the pain farms. The Patarch’s authoritarianism had no bounds, leaving me the last defender of human rights.

Never stop moving.

My head throbbed to the beat of my heart, blood singing with fury, my star-forged light wing fighter powered by the might of gods and their divine will carved its way across the battlefield, burning holes through all who dared stand against me.

Today was the day when this was going to be their end. Today was when they went down. Because you know what’s worse than a bully? It’s a bully with a cause. A bully with friends. A bully who renegotiated reality to suit their purpose. That purpose could stem from a holy war, a righteous realignment of morals in society, or be as trite as revenge over a shitty childhood, but each deserved the same in repayment: Hot, fucking plasma.

“I’m about to slap you so hard you’re going to discorporate,” I grumbled, squeezing the trigger, releasing a stream of deadly intent as stars twinkled around the battlefield over Signa 7.

One of the enemy fighters before me peeled apart, its airfoils, useless in space, melting like wax as its reactor went critical, flashing like a miniature star before becoming nothing but dust.

One down, a hundred more to go. My ship’s AI companion and I twisted through the melee of the enemy fleet, out running their missiles, evading rail gun shots, reflecting energy beams into open space with barrel rolls, each maneuver as if our craft were a second skin and we were as talented at flying through this as Bruce Lee had been at doing Kung Fu.

Chaos calmed for a moment, and our objective was ahead. It was a massive mega-structure of black and red nano material floating above a shattered world, with lengths stretching for hundreds of miles among a field of obsidian rocks. Its design was reminiscent of Soviet era brutalist architecture with its strange geometric shapes, some tracts of it empty while some were smooth, peculiar windows and ports in rows that were too narrow or too large, evoking an overall sense of incredible weight and danger. This was where the consolidated power of the enemy lived, a citadel constructed over five hundred years and at the cost of millions of human slaves.

As my fighter burned towards an opening at the base of the structure along several fractal sections of rectangles, my ship’s AI let out an alarm informing me one of the Cult’s generals had taken to the field in their battleship.

I swung around, pointing my fighter towards the spiked battleship that had just appeared from warp, and kicked into afterburn, roaring right at it, my cockpit shaking as I traveled several hundred kilometers per second.

The citadel could wait. The Butcher of Arnok, captain of the Relegate, killer of worlds, had finally arrived.

“There you are,” I mumbled. It was time for that vessel’s power to be added to my own and the cosmic books be balanced.

The battleship sent me a hail, “Ahh, yes! I should have expected no less. It is you, Mitchell Prince, the slave boy come to get his revenge, cast out by his father for failing to live up to the teachings of His Majesty the All-Dark, taking hold of the forbidden knowledge to use against us. It is good that that whore of a mother of yours is dead. Perhaps her corruption will no longer spread among our kin. Watching her suffer was one of my greatest pleasures.”

“I’ll show you suffering,” I grumbled.

Its turrets spun in my direction, catching the light of a distant star upon its dark metal before opening fire, sending beams of energy in my direction. I power slid to the right, then curved down and twisted around, coming at it from the back, cutting a line of plasma down its starboard side that left red-hot gashes in their wake.

I tore its guns apart one at a time like a child with idle hands, reducing them to lumps of once complex components, weapons too slow to track something as small and swift as me. It was satisfying after all he had done. After the murder of the only one who had ever shown me even a semblance of love.

“No!” the Butcher of Arnok said. “This is not my end.”

The Relegate’s engines began to glow, and I unleashed everything I had in reserve, but it wasn’t enough. Seeing its predicament, seeing that it couldn’t take me head-to-head, its engines spooled up and it went to warp, escaping the battlefield, leaving a stream of blue lights in its wake.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I shouted, my game controller spinning off the side of my desk with a crash, fists slamming down on my keyboard in rapid succession. “He’s the rarest got damned spawn! Come on! He has the best drops! And he just…” My voice quieted to a whisper, “Got away. He got away.”

As had my little space fantasy.

Because reality? That pesky asshole.

It was back.