Space Fleet was going through its own shake-up and cleansing. It too was being reorganized in a way that encouraged more involvement and dedication. The self-image of the swaggering frontier lawman no longer would suffice. Not when slipshod adherence to regulations and indifference to suspicious activity--like requesting a cruiser be sent on a diplomatic mission to people who want nothing to do with us and who could possibly destroy us--was the result. The message was straightforward: Loyalty and commitment to the Rangers not only in body but in spirit as well must be paramount. If not, if you feel you might falter out of a lack of conviction, if you have doubts, then quit.

Without regret, Captain Brian Coary cut his leave short by a week. A landlubber he wasn't; he was a spacer through and through. Headquarters had requested he do so, nicely, of course, and he eagerly complied. With all the politics and positioning going on around him, he was glad to be heading out. The Edgar Poe had been refitted, its DNA-based computer systems upgraded, and its crew refreshed from the long shore leave. They too were anxious to hit the trail. It seemed a problem had developed on a mining colony in the star system Cronus in the Sagittarius Sector. Traveling through quantum space from Hawking-I would take less than a week; through ordinary spacetime, three years, give or take.

Cronus was an odd name for a star on the outskirts of expansion. Beyond, the uncharted territories began, only scout/recon ships had ventured further. The wastelands the region was called; hardly anyone cared what went on out there, but Space Fleet was expanding its influence. Civilization was coming, and they were bringing it. Lawlessness would not be tolerated.

The system was composed of four planets and assorted moons. Two large gas planets plied the outer reaches. In close to the M-class star a tiny ball of extremely hot rock and heavy metals raced about. The fourth, Rhea, about the size of Earth, lay in the habitable zone. Recently, terraforming had been declared officially completed; infrastructure construction and farming were now the focus, and activities were in full swing. Work drew professionals: engineers, computer specialists, city planners, medical personnel, every aspect of society building. Along with them came tradesmen to do the necessary hands-on skilled work, technicians and specialists in their own fields. And, of course, prostitutes, con-men, and drifters from all over the local galactic vicinity heard the news through their respective grapevines and poured in. Those who'd worked on the terraforming project found themselves unemployed; consequently, there was no shortage of laborers. Businesses, including bordellos and old-fashioned saloons, catering to the new arrivals sprang up like mushrooms. Some faded quickly, but most providing goods and services supporting the burgeoning population, by dint of expertise and not a little luck, positioned themselves to become permanent residents. An incipient society began to take shape. It was a wild time, the police had their hands full.

Rhea had one moon almost half its size. Towards the end of terraforming, those disintersted in society-building set up mining operations and moved onto it, trying their luck in the old-fashioned way. They called it Hades and rightfully so. It had something of an atmosphere and a grav field almost as strong as that of Rhea; although, a plausible explanation for this was not known in the beginning. In spite of the heavy concentration of metals present at its core, Hades didn't rotate; therefore, a protective magnetic field had to be artifically generated by equipment then available from the terraforming process on Rhea. They bought what they needed from the fledgling government at bargain prices, in desperate need of credits to float its growth.

Mining had been going on for years with little luck until, by accident, they struck it rich. Its porous, pock-marked surface hid pockets of the rarest of all minerals yet discovered, callasium. A thousand times denser than diamond, its intricate crystal configuration not only displays strange optic properties, but it also exerts a tangible gravitational effect on its immediate space. The government of Hawking-I had made serious investments in callasium mining operations on Hades and were conducting secret research at various locations around the planet. That may have had something to do with the sudden concern for the outpost colonies.

Throngs of outworlders flooded into Rhea, and with them came foreign and exotic illnesses, sleeping germs and viruses looking for receptive hosts. Traffic between the planet and the moon was brisk. Mooners took advantage of their brief time on Rhea by indulging in as much leisure activities as they could squeeze in. These were miners, a rough bunch who liked to party hard. So, that combined with the physical wear and tear of daily mining life, long hours under duress and danger, the body's defenses break down and people get sick. And if it's the contagious type, it can spread rapidly in close quarters where the air, though filtered, is continuously circulated. Then you have an epidemic that, because of locale, is impossible to get away from. They tried to keep it secret, knowing they'd be denied needed supplies. But as soon as news came explaining the slowdown in production, Rhea issued a quarantine on Hades. No one in, no one out; they were locked up. This, of course, put a crimp on the outflow of callasium; in fact, there wasn't any.

Hospital facilities on the mining colony were sparse at best; there was very little in the way of drugs stored as well, just the barest minimum. If something was serious enough to warrant surgery or regenerated body parts, they were transported to the home planet, at company expense. The cure for the disease wasting the colony, a far more virulent strain of diphtheria, was a combination of new and improved antibiotics and an antitoxin to neutralize (counteract) the toxin produced by the bacteria. The disease had cropped up on Rhea too, the likely point of origin. So, as they waited for more supplies of the needed medicines to arrive from the closest planets, what they could allocate for the mining colony was limited. Along with medical personnel, a shipment was sent. Unfortunately, the supply proved insufficient to treat the families of the miners. Entrepeneurial types saw a niche that needed filling. They set up pharm-labs in the country and manufactured medical supplies of questionable quality, then smuggled them into Hades to be sold on the black market as the bonafide articles. As a result, people were dying.

Security on Rhea amounted to a police force whose main focus was on managing the civilian population, protecting and serving, as it were. A tough, all-consuming job on a frontier planet. Customs had a few enforcement ships, and although of modest size and weaponry, had shown themselves to be effective; however, their technology was in serious need of an upgrade. Everything in or out went through them, ordinarily. But the border was extremely porous and, since the moon was first occupied, routes had been established as the optimal ones for bypassing inspections. In the ancient days on Earth, people engaged in such activity were called rum-runners.

Captain Coary's assignment was to shut them down, period. Using the sophisticated intruments onboard the Edgar Poe, which the local constabulary didn't have, Coary figured the job should be rather straightforward. As usual, he was given considerable leeway by Space Fleet on his methods for accomplishing said task. Tracking them in transit would be fairly simple. Each ship passing through customs was stamped magnetically with a registration code to match its identity. If a ship's transponder wasn't sending that code, it was an outlaw. Traffic in and out of Rhea was hectic on a good day, but, with an embargo in place and martial law the rule of the day, only emergency government medical ships would be traveling to the moon. Smugglers should be rather conspicuous.

Enroute, Coary held meetings with his senior staff concerning strategy and tactics. Counterfeit drugs that caused deaths were near the top of Coary's list of crimes against humanity. Shooting someone for a justifiable, personal reason was something he could understand and accept. But deceiving people into believing the drugs they're giving their children were safe and would cure whatever was completely inexcusable. The perpetrators would be found and brought to justice, or killed, he didn't care which.

On approach, his comm officer notified the appropriate government functionary of their arrival. After official greeting and authorization, the Edgar Poe assumed high orbit over the equator and proceeded to scan from pole to pole as they circumnavigated. Space Fleet had been sent samples of the counterfeit drugs along with the complaint and appeal for help while Coary was on leave; hence, the request to truncate it. The spectroscopic signatures of the chemicals comprising the drugs and their combinations had been profiled into the scanning array.

No sooner had they left the fringes of the capital city then the computer signaled a hit. In a wooded area, three buildings surrounded by a rock wall formed a compound. Smoke streamed out of a chimney of the largest, probably the factory. The comm officer notified customs, giving them the coordinates. They had ships and men with more serious weapons than the ground police, and they would probably take pleasure in destroying the contraband along with the compound. The customs people had the responsibility of protecting an entire planet from anything harmful that might come in and of regulating outbound traffic to the moon colony. Of late, they'd been very busy. Despite the embargo--no one wanted to go to a diseased-ridden moon anyway for any reason--the smugglers somehow got passed their surveillance buoys. Customs people among the outer planets were part marauders themselves. Ordinarily, they came from the military, but a stray Ranger wanting to go his own way could be found. They were a rough, no shit-taking bunch who didn't like to be outsmarted; it hurt their feelings. To have someone treat them with contempt was a serious mistake.

The Edgar Poe proceeded on with its rotation, passing the edge beyond which the moon was obscured, scanning every inch and cranny. Captain Coary had retired to his private sanctuary off-bridge; he was bored. After his encounter with the thought beings, this was painfully routine. He commed the scanning team to expand their search to the skys when they passed the point where the moon was visible. He had a feeling, if he was smuggling, he'd take off when the moon was on the opposite side of the planet. Another larger compound further north was spotted, the telltale sign of signature chemicals a blaring advertisement of their occupation. This too was called in. Customs would be busy on the ground today, distracted from surveilling space. The Edgar Poe informed them it would take up the slack for however long it took to wipe out the compounds and capture whoever they could, those that came peacefully, that is.

As they neared the horizon beyond which the moon would once again be visible, a ship, moving fast and low to the ground, appeared on radar. The Edgar Poe orbited above the lower traffic which concealed their presence, not that the crew of this low-flier would recognize a Space Ranger cruiser if they saw one. The captain resumed his command seat on the bridge and ordered an assault team readied. The ship could be anyone making a quick jump across land at tree-top level, but he had a hunch. They slowed to let the low-flier get ahead of them. Just before the horizon, it abruptly changed vector and passed through a hole in traffic, racing for outer space. Customs ships were busy on the other side of the planet; Coary suspected both compounds were in cahoots and notice of an attack on the first probably reached these guys. He watched the ship as it passed the surveillance buoys; the automatic sensors signaled its transponder, but no response came. An alarm was immediately radioed to customs headquarters, then relayed to the Edgar Poe as per agreement. Apparently, the ship was unregistered. Their course put them on a trajectory for the moon as well. That was all Coary needed.

The business of the cruisers was running down pirates; it was what they were originally designed for and their bread and butter operation. First step was to come alongside. With their speed and ability to travel through quantum space to emerge in ordinary spacetime wherever they wished, the pursuit part was not much of a challenge. And, it always took the pursued by surprise. Second step, make contact, inform them they were under arrest and to cut engines and prepare to be boarded. For serious offenders, this hardly ever worked. The worst prisons in the galaxy were on asteroids scattered about. They'd be put to work mining ordinary iron and copper without pay. It was a horrible existence but these were frontier days still and the law was harsh. Yet, even with the prospect of incareration on an unknown asteroid, there was no shortage of outlaws. It came with the territory.

Predictably, the tiny ship, no bigger than a scout/recon boat, made a break for open space. If they were capable of quark drive, they'd try to evade by dropping into quantum space. However, most ships of this type were designed for local transport. At top speed in ordinary spacetime, such a ship would take a day and a half to reach Hades from Rhea. The Edgar Poe could do it in mere minutes.

Step three: the assault team, already in a shuttle, was given the go-ahead as soon as the Edgar Poe matched their speed from above. That moment came, they launched, and after some high-speed maneuvering, magnetically docked to the exterior port. Cutting through, they entered and split up into two-man teams. Gunfire erupted, the searing sound of lasers and the poof-poof of pulse rifles reverberated throughout the hull. The Rangers proceeded with insect-like efficiency and by the book. It didn't last long. Survivors were put in restraints and the ship commandeered. The prisoners were moved to a cell on the Poe to be delivered to customs; they'd know what to do with them. The dead smugglers were unceremoniously tossed into space; burial at sea, they called it. Their bodies would be drawn towards the planet and burn up in the atmosphere; it saved cremation expenditures by customs. These men were loners; they had no families to notify. And besides, compassion for such was non-existent among the Rangers. No one on the Poe had been hit. It was a textbook operation.

They found crates of counterfeit drugs in the ship's hold. Coary ordered a thorough search for anything else of significance. They had time. The scanning team was still at work; it might be a long day.

The computer systems contained only the usual class of procedures necessary to run the ship; nonetheless, as per procedure, the contents of the gel-drives were downlinked to the Poe for further analysis. On the nav-computer, the coordinates of the drop-off point on the moon where delivery was to be made had been entered. That info was conveyed to the com-officer onboard the Poe who forwarded it to the authorities on the moon. Over and above smuggling and manufacturing of counterfeit drugs, mass muderers had no reason to expect due process; justice would prevail.

The assault team searched every conceivable hiding place, but nothing of note stood out. In the captain's quarters, however, after breaking through the flimsy firewall, they discovered cryptic image files on his private computer. The oldest was dated five of Rhea's days ago, the day they left Hawking-I. Additionally, hidden under a false bottom of a clothes drawer, secure in a radiation-proof, corbidium box, they discovered holocubes, three-dimensional videos. Over the past century, these had become the standard medium for sending personal messages, birthday greetings, news of family events, and such; in other words, there was nothing terribly remarkable about their presence per se. But their concealment was clearly suspicious. They bundled these together with what appeared to be knick-knacks or memorabilia and stored them on the shuttle. After an hour or so, the officer in charge of the operation informed the captain that everything of value was now in their possession, but they'd continue their investigation, looking for the unknown and prepared for the serendipitous.

Part of the team rejoined the shuttle and decoupled to escort the smuggler boat back to Customs Headquarters. While continuing to monitor airspace, the Poe would remain on station until their return. The computer equipment, holocubes, and assorted paraphenalia were laid out on the long table in the forensics lab. The files on the computer were of pictographs, twelve in total. Besides whatever each meant individually, their grouping, how they were arranged, was unique for each file. They therefore possessed a double meaning. The fact that each file, delineating an amalgam of pictographs, was three-dimensional increased the complexity and degree of connectivity exponentially, like the neurons of a brain. Poe's archives contained every language and dialect in the known inhabited worlds; this one, however, was not one of them. They were forwarded to Space Fleet Headquarters for more in-depth analysis. It was quite possible they didn't represent a language at all but were symbolic of something else, something arcane and original, perhaps an unknown mathematical form or an astronomical configuration yet undiscovered. In spite of the curiosity engendered by the enigmatic nature of these files, what drew most attention were the holocubes.

Only about one inch on a side, they were activated by insertion into a reader, an indented plastic base with two pinpoint, perpendicular laser beams aimed at the cube's center, a unit compact enough to fit in a jacket pocket. Then, you sat back and watched as a two-foot high hologram of the speaker and immediate surroundings played out. There were a dozen of them neatly arranged in the felt-lined box. Linguists, cryptographers, symbolicists, and others of assorted academic backgrounds comprised a team which studied every detail, taking notes, blending perceptions, clarifying words, noting nuance. Complementing this search, the archival computer examined the setting for local placement based on unversal cultural preferences. Given architectural and environmental consistencies and dissimilarities, where was the speaker when he made this vid? Each was identified through the Space Fleet database. Surprisingly, they were nothing more than petty criminals, thieves, highway men, con-artists. The web of information grew larger, and, as it did, more questions were generated. The vids were dated, the oldest, a month ago, the most recent, two weeks. Where are these people now? They must have something in common to be gathered together. What is it? What are their specialities? What are they up to?

The investigative team retired to the brain center, as it was called, to work it out, to sift through, to arrange and rearrange permutations of connections across time, space, and place against the background of the larger picture--what was happening on the particular world at the time of the recording? All twelve vids were scrutinized with meticulous care. With time and input from others of expertise in such fields as architecture, topography, cartography, a picture, developmental across time, began to appear on the wall-sized holoscreen as data was fed in.

In and of themselves, the messages contained nothing more than the usual pedestrian correspondence, superficially. But certain terms that showed up across all twelve struck a dissonant chord in the language experts--they didn't jibe with the character's background. These were therefore considered code for something linking them with the smuggler captain. Another curious fact was that each speaker was on a different planet at the time of recording; and that each planet was undergoing some form of turmoil that appeared to stem from internal issues caused by a diverse set of reasons, no two of which seemed to be connected.

The smuggler captain was in the brig, a survivor. He was brought into the interrogation room and strapped to a chair. The exec, conducting the questioning, confronted him on the meaning of the messages and what his relationship was with these other known criminals. As anticipated, his answers were unrecordable. The commander was not known for wasting time, especially when dealing with cold-blooded killers. They were in his house now, so they'd play by his rules. He ordered the neurowave frequency modulator, in the form of an organic-metal helmet with several tiny probes extending from its outer surface, placed on the smuggler's head, held stationary by a clamp on the back of the chair. It was not designed to inflict pain, torture had been abandoned centuries ago. It not only proved to be a less than fruitful technique for obtaining information, but also tended to exacerbate popular resistance to authority. The modulator worked on the subconscious level, translating ephemeral neural networks, actuated by underlying engrams, into resonant patterns of nodal concepts. The exec repeated his questions, framed, however, in a more insistent way.

Regardless of what the subject said, his mind couldn't help but speak the truth. The superposed waves were segemented into wave forms and translated based on common invariant engrams, commonly referred to as memes--units of cultural information. These structure a culture and are passed down through generations and ingrained from birth and a good indicator of upbringing, regardless of where that may have been. Psycholinguistics had come a long way in the past two hundred years. It was primarily a tool of social engineers, but local police applied it to ascertain the likelihood of criminal activity as well. It was structure they were interested in and not the labels that clothe it--words, images, language. Each set of planetary cultures on the stable frontier planets had been profiled. It was a question of matching known patterns with those evoked from an individual through interrogation or by other means, like the neuro-modulator.

The technician operating the modulator gestured to the commander. That was enough. The helmet was removed and the prisoner taken back to the brig. The computer did all the heavy lifting, performing comparative analysis, its extensive library of resources surpassing that of most civilized planets. Within moments, it spat out the result. He was from a planet on the other side of the border colonies, well-passed Hawking-I. What was he doing way over in this sector running illegal drugs?

The keywords common to each of the twelve messages were considered an encrypted code because, based on the cultural origins of each of the twelve, those words and terms were outside their stereotypical norms. To be fair and reasonable, it's just possible that each had received an education beyond the average, but the probability of that being the case for all twelve approached zero. Moreover, they had similar meanings. Experience had taught the Rangers that coincidences were few and hard to come by; the senior staff were convinced something on a vast scale was afoot, right under their nose.

Coary entered the brain room. On the screen was a three-dimensional chart of all the border planets from one end to the other, a squiggly curve running through two arms of the galaxy and concentric with the great black hub. He wanted to know what they had so far. The watermarks won the vids indicated the planet of origin for each. Twelve planets stretching across the panorama of worlds lit up with a single bright dot at their centers. Then lines were drawn connecting them. The analyst in charge of the investigation described the conditions on each planet when the particular message was transcribed; they were all undergoing internal convulsions of one sort or another. Was that a coincidence? Did these men have anything to do with instigating them? If so, what did it portend, if anything?

The keywords were permuted in every possible way, an anagram of ideas. Several appeared to make sense, but of what, they couldn't even guess. They were in need of a means to decrypt the apparently similar transmissions, a template that when imposed on all in the proper sequence would reveal their significance. Coary ordered the smuggler captain interrogated again. This time, direct questions concerning these messages would be asked. He wanted to know what was going on. Did his people cause the diphtheria epidemic on the moon? Was this a new criminal strategy? Cause mayhem and then capitalize on it? Or was that just an opportunistic sideshow, the tumult masking more nefarious deeds?

The shuttle returned from Rhea. Presently, an ensign entered the brain room carrying a satchel; its contents were spread on the table. Amongst some antique navigation intruments and a few other nondescript personal items was a sphere of what looked like a crystal ball about five inches in diameter. It was far heavier that it appeared. Analysis by x-ray fluorescence and the emission spectroscope determined that it was a highly polished callasium. Its interior was clouded and its surface displayed pictographs similar to the files. These were scanned into the main computer to be compared to the group. While awaiting the results, the lead analyst announced a breakthrough on the holocube messages.

The holoviewer, a three-foot cube of light, projected from the middle of the table. It'd been programmed to flag anomalous ideas, determined by joint consensus, and to compare them to others of a similar class. These keywords, though different on each, were initially believed to be a language, dead or alive. But when allowed to hover unconstrained by any known rules of grammar and syntax in the three-dimensional space of the holoviewer, and based on the viewer's topological equivalence criterion, they spontaneously organized node-for-node, revealing a pattern that seemed vaguely intelligible as a geometric construct, at least to a few.

To the astonishment of everyone present, when all twelve were placed into the same spatial environment, they automatically drew towards one another as though they had a life of their own and merged, forming a complex structure. Each individual message arranged itself congruently with respect to the others, but were deformed as the collection expanded away from the center with only the slightest of variance. In other words, they were all saying the same thing about something different. Words that could be synonyms drew together and overlapped, forming nodes or vertices, bifurcation points. One message comprised of twelve parts. One of the mathematicians blurted that it resembled a snapshot of an attractor; the vortices of which corresponding to the individual geometry of each message. What had been thought of earlier as mere filler content proved to be deliberate strings of words, edges joining key terms. From the assemblage of these component messages emerged a meta-message. They'd been ingeniously well-crafted, and no one believed any of these outlaws had the brains to pull it off.

While Coary and others--mathematicians, cryptographers, metalinguists--examined the floating configuration as it slowly turned, the computer signaled completion of its analysis.

The globe, with its assortment of designs, turned out to be the basis for the pictograph files--the key. The ship's computer (referred to warmly as Bertha) tended, naturally enough, towards mathematical concepts as a fundamental, archetypal approach to problem solving. As far as she was concerned, everything could be framed mathematically. Her artificial intelligence environment, facilitated and amplified by the DNA-gel architecture and unconstrained by preconceived notions, was able to draw plausible conclusions, to speculate.

To whit: After the pictographs were transliterated from their scroll style to rigid line drawings, and after ascertaining the bases vectors, each was put into a rough correspondence--a resemblance, really--with the geometric shape of a simplex--a two-dimensional, topological manifold--under considerable refinement. Even though the complete set didn't cover the sphere--empty spaces separating pics were at regular intervals--the diameter of the ball was shrunk until the pics/simplices touched along common edges; hence, the surface was able to be triangulated (albeit roughly) by a simplicial complex. It's geometric realization is called a polyhedron, an object the holoviewer was quite good at manipulating.

Moreover, because different scales of magnification disclosed repeats of the overall figure at the intersection nodes, each pictograph was mapped homeomorphically to the closest analogue of a two-D fractal, thereby rendering them multidimensional in scope. Furthermore, Bertha, after comparing all pic files for commonality, mapped these nodes to the neighborhoods of the barycentric coordinates--vertices--of a refined simplex; that is to say, congruently. Each aggregation of pics formed a different multidimensional simplicial complex, and each stood for a universe with different physical and psychic properties.

Once Bertha determined the original fractal of a given pic set, she was able to deduce the iterative equations that generated it. Running them over time, the others lined up sequentially in their proper order, evolving by stages and played out on the holoviewer in brilliant detail. The end result was a dynamic attractor corresponding to a simplicial complex corresponding to a set of pictographs corresponding to a specific parallel universe. Clear? The one on the globe depicted the features of our universe, our spacetime, a known configuration that acted as the generative basis for Bertha. Together they formed a symmetric set, a mosaic of infinite diversity, a meta-verse comprised of thirteen universes with ours at the center.

Coary left his team to speculate on the implications and barged into the interrogation room. He was upset and troubled. What had begun as a simple cops-and-robbers scenario was turning into a potentially major problem of unknown dimensions and unknown consequences. Something was going on of possible galactic significance and he intended to find out what. After reading synopses of the backgrounds of all twelve outlaws who appeared in the holovid messages, and including their guest, he found it impossible to believe that any of them or all of them together could've designed and fabricated what he'd already seen. They're just too damn dumb. Somebody else, somebody not to be taken lightly, was pulling the strings.

The smuggler captain was back in the chair with the neuro-modulator on his head; the exec sat across from him and the techie worked the machine, scrutinizing its readouts. Coary stood behind the exec and said, "We know there's something big going on that concerns you and your friends. From what we've learned so far, I don't see how a gang of outlaws with what they know, including you, for that matter, could possibly understand what they're in the middle of. Twelve other universes are depicted on those hologram files on your computer. Where did you get them and what is their purpose?" The captive said nothing, but the machine traced outlines of subconscious thought. "And the messages on the holovids we found in your quarters, they're obviously all connected, each a part of the whole. What does that completed message mean?" Again the machine sprang to life while the smuggler kept his mouth shut.

But he knew what they were doing, he'd heard about this tool the Ranger's had. Angry and frustrated, he finally said, "You'll never figure it out. Morons. I can tell you what's going on, what I know, doesn't matter now, you won't be able to stop it. It's too late." He seemed to calm, as though a load had been lifted. Coary ordered the modulator and the restraints removed. The smuggler requested coffee and a cigarette, Coary nodded to the guard by the door who left immediately. The smuggler rubbed his wrists and flexed his shoulders. In a quiet, strained tone of voice, he said, "A month ago I was on Beta Aphrodite, in the Orion Sector, just hanging out in the bars, visiting friends, when one night a man approached me, bought a drink and asked to talk, he had a job needed done and he'd heard about me. I was getting low on funds so I took his drink, we retired to a booth and he spelled out his proposition."

The guard returned, the smuggler gulped coffee, then lit up a cig and took a deep drag. He blew out the smoke with a sigh. Coary grew impatient, anger building. The smuggler picked up on it and continued. "I was a little drunk at the time so a lot of what he said sounded cazy, it didn't make sense, but he was buying, so I listened, waiting for him to get to the job part. He talked about callasium, its properties, how it can be used as a conduit between parallel universes. That's why I came here, not too long ago, to Rhea, to find out about this stuff first hand. But, it's not easy to come by, the government has it under lock and key, unless you go to Hades to work. Anyway, he said I needed to recruit twelve others, each would have to go to other planets he had listed. He gave it to me. I wouldn't be involved directly, I was the organizer, everybody contacted me. He told me he'd deliver twelve crystal balls, along with the one I'd hold, to be given to each of my colleagues."

He stopped to take a swig. Pressure built as though he was fighting inner restraints, while at the same time wanting to get it off his chest. Painful emotion flickered across his features. He looked off into the distance, passed the confines of the ship, absorbed in elsewhere. Coary wished he'd had the neuro-modulator attached; he would've liked to have known where he went and what he thought.

"Like I said, he talked crazy. I remember how he looked, his eyes, like cat's eyes. It didn't bother me. I've been around the outworlds all my life, seen stranger stuff than that. He was totally relaxed, sure of himself for looking the fancy way he did. Anyway, he went on about someone called the Dark Lord of the uncharted territories. I never heard of him and told him so. He smiled and said it didn't matter. I got the feeling he wanted to tell me more, bragging, you know, but held himself. Anyway, I went with him to a house near the edge of town where he gave me a box of those globes. I asked him which ones went to which planets. He said it didn't matter; together they'd form the necessary effect." He stopped and leaned back in the chair. More coffee was brought in; he lit another smoke.

The captain sat down near him and asked, "What about the mayhem on those planets, corresponding to when the messages were recorded. Is there a connection?"

The prisoner looked confused, uncertain. "Yes. When they happened, almost simultaneously, it made me wonder, so I went to the guy's house to confront him about it, but he was gone, moved out. I remembered, though, he'd told me something about how the callasium was able to open a portal between dimensions separating universes. Crazy talk. At the time, it just sounded like gibberish. But, now I can see, maybe, what he was..." He drifted off, deep in thought, his eyes glazing over.

"I used to work on supspace communications when I was in the service, so when he said this it stuck: he said the interference and instability created by the mingling of another universe with our own sends ripples outward and can cause people to act differently, lose control, so he said it was best if after we perfomed the job to leave the planet at soon as possible. It can even affect planets themselves, cause earthquakes, eruptions, storms, changes in weather patterns. I started to realize we'd been duped, all of us. We didn't read the fine print. Stealing, running a con, hijacking cargo, stuff like that I'm in for. But this, whole planets in turmoil, people's lives being torn apart, that's not my style. I thought there might be a connection, a coincidence with one or two you could accept, but the whole twelve? We were in over our heads."

"Oh," said Coary, acid in his tone. "Not your style? What about pushing counterfeit drugs on people, killing them that way?"

The prisoner stood abruptly, the guard moved forward. "That's not me," he said. "I carried that box of globes back to my room and contacted my friends to tell them of the job, what it pays. It sounded easy for the amount. Nobody asked any questions; nobody cared what the purpose was. It sounded dumb or sentimental, some alien belief or ritual. Nobody cared, the credits were too good. They were all in and told me where to send the globes, but before I did, I scanned the symbols on each into my computer. Why, I don't know; I wanted some kind of hold on cat's eyes and thought this might help. For days getting that together, I lived with that callasium, slept next to them. I felt a change come over me. I noticed I was being gruff and mean to people, even kids. But I figured it was just me getting my head into this new job, focusing. Next thing I know, I'm in with a bunch of lowlifes I ran into at this bar making and smuggling drugs to Hades."

Coary shrugged it off. "What did you think the job was about? Just go be a tourist on a planet with a globe in your bag? How stupid can you be? Didn't you dig deeper? Nobody pays someone a lot of credits for just showing up."

"I don't pry. I once flew a ship to a planet, out in the wastelands away from people, and destroyed it to make it look like it crashed for a client. Had no idea way, wasting a perfectly good ship, could only guess, didn't care. How I get jobs is by having a reputation for minding my own business."

"What happened next? What were they supposed to do once your colleagues got to their respective planets"

The prisoner changed subtly after his remembrance of being in the military. He relaxed and appeared older, a shift in identity had taken place. "They were to be buried at specific coordinates."

"What coordinates," demanded the captain.

"How the hell do I know? I didn't memorize them. I sent them off with the globes and the chants, whatever they were, and that's it. I saved the pics and the messages, both of which you have. The coordinates, I don't know."

"And what's the significance of the messages we found on the holocubes?"

"That was a crucial part of the deal. They were scripted. Each orb came with a speech that had to be precisely read over the spot where they were buried, and recorded as proof in order to get paid. They sent them to me. When I had them all, I contacted cat's eyes with the comm he gave me and we met at another house here on Rhea. He checked the cubes, then handed me a satchel of credits. I counted it, it was all there. I meant to confront him about the whole thing. What the frell were we doing? What was it all about, really? I think now he must've sensed it because he excused himself and went into another room. After awhile I got tired of waiting and went to go talk to him, but he was gone, vanished."

"What doya mean, vanished?"

"Disappeared. The room was closed to the outside, the one window was locked. I got spooked and left."

Coary leaned forward, "He's still on Rhea?"

"I don't know. After last time, I don't know."

"I want the address of the house where you met. And, if you would be so kind, a sketch of what he looked like."

The smuggler captain, hands folded, looking at the floor, nodded in the affirmative.

The captain rose, turned to the guard and said, "Get this man and the others something to eat." That's the most he would do. He was grateful for the cooperaton, much easier than tranliterating subconscious thought patterns, but, he couldn't forgive him for the deaths and suffering he and his men caused on Hades, and, apparently, elsewhere. He then left quickly for the brain center. The team was busy studying various shapes on the holoviewer. He told the investigator in charge what had transpired in the interrogation room; he wanted them to examine each cube where the messages were spoken. They already knew the border planets on which they were recorded; their topography was catalogued. As topological spaces, in particular, as manifolds, an atlas of charts covered the surface of each planet. Comparing the surrounding terrain of each holovid to these charts, the exact locations where the orbs were buried could be found. Bertha would do the heavy lifting.

He and science officer, Lieutenant Commander Aponi Brightfeather, went to the command center to contact Space Fleet Intelligence. Brightfeather summarized everything that had transpired thus far, emphasizing the salient points, adding that reports would be sent posthaste. The captain told them the gist of the interview with the smuggler; an official transcript would be forwarded. He had questions. Had they ever heard of this Dark Lord of the uncharted territories? What, in fact, did they know of that region? He wanted everything they had, relevant and seemingly irrelevant. He then inquired if they'd had any revelations about the pictographs. The head of intelligence turned it over to an excited analyst, eyes gleaming.

"Good morning, captain. Pleased to finally meet you; I've heard a lot about you." He waited for a response, none came. He continued, "What we found, captain, was that an archaeological expedition ventured into the uncharted zone at the time Rhea, Hawking-I and most of the other border planets were scarcely colonized, terraforming operations barely passed the incipient stage, so exploring further afield was merely a foray into other possible colonization sites. I mean, at one time this region was uncharted."

Intelligence analysts, Coary brooded, feel underappreciated, so when they get your full attention, they milk it. "Now, on a planet designated X-194--one of two residing in the habitable zone around an M-class star--their sensors picked up a signal, an intermittent sound like a bleeping sound, not natural. They surveyed it from orbit. The planet itself appeared uninhabited by anything except perhaps microbes; although they hadn't the time to test the soil. So, this was conjecture. No plant or animal life, a rocky, gravely desert. They found what appeared to be settlements up to small town size, all weathered away, fallen into ruin. They landed near a cluster of dwellings, the source of the signal, like a beacon, it'd been described--I remember reading that now--worn down to their base, made of some mud-like material. In the only building whose walls were still moderately intact, they found a tablet or book on a rock pedestal, the whole thing is made of a single chunk of rock. Quite impressive. Behind it sits a huge throne with an alien creature. I have pictures I'll send you. I've never seen anything like it and I've been doing this for years."

Coary and Brightfeather glanced at one another. "The figure is in a sitting position with the open book a few feet away, facing him at an angle like he was reading. On it, which I'll send you--fine detail considering the lighting--are runes, partitioned like paragraphs, six on the left and six on the right. After some image enhancements to compensate for weathering and time, they resemble quite conclusively the pictographs on those twelve spheres of callasium you have. Oh, and about that mineral. Surprisingly, we have very little on it. Its production has been given such a low profile, and the government won't offer much. I mean, we know they're heavily invested in those mines on Hades, but as far as the nature and purpose of their research goes, they've been nondisclosing. But that won't last for long. One way or another, we're going to find out what they've been up to. When we do, we'll forward whatever may be relevant."

He paused, his face reddening slightly, and said in a low tone, "As soon as we figure out what that is."

"And this Dark Lord character?"

"Yes, captain, we're on it."

Captain Coary had all he needed for the moment, thanked the smiling analyst, then turned off the viewer. He commed his exec and instructed that when the prisoner had finished with the sketch he was to dispatch a unit to the house where this cat's eyes entity had been and arrest him; he wanted him alive. However, he doubted he was still on Rhea, but a search of the house might turn something up. He sat back, lost in the colossal strangeness of it all. But after his encounter with the thought beings, he believed anything the universe was capable of would happen.

Pagan runes on a desolated planet, where once, well before the time of colonization of the outworlds, a rudimentary civilization thrived. What happened to them? The archaeological report from that time--two hundred years ago--had been sent to the ship's communications officer and forwarded to the command center. The captain and science officer studied it. No evidence of planetary disruption. No pollution, they weren't at the stage where they could bring any serious harm to the environment. Through various dating techniques on the existing structures, they were estimated to be at least twenty thousand solar years old. No evidence of asteroid collisions, major earthquakes, or volcanic activity from or geologically before that time disclosed itself after meticulous topographic scans of the surface down to a depth of a thousand meters.

The captain and Brightfeather examined the intelligence reports; occasionally, Coary asking his science officer for clarification. The twelve runes matched up with the twelve sets of pictographs. These, in turn, were indirectly mapped to topological spaces that represented unique parallel universes. But, why those and not others? And also, what's the significance of the thirteenth standing for our universe? And the recitation over the orbs, precise, almost mathematical. What did that conjure? How could speaking certain words in a certain sequence have any effect at all? Magic? Incantations? Were they dealing with shamans or wizards? What dimension of space and time was at play here and what danger did it hold? What the smuggler said about the disruptive, and apparently subconscious, effects on the minds of people and the planet itself did not bode well for the intentions of this Dark Lord. Who was he and what was he up to?

It would seem the location of the thirteenth globe didn't matter, Coary guessed; elsewise, why would it be sitting in the smuggler captain's quarters out in the open amongst a hodge-podge of memorabilia? Why? Wasn't it the center piece? Didn't it have to be in a special place in order for whatever to happen? Confounded, Coary and Brightfeather continued to pore over the reports, searching now, scrutinizing, for anything that might tell them which way to go.

The brain center informed him of a curious find, which, however, they were told flatly may mean absolutely nothing. They sent it to his viewer. The science officer interpreted it as best he could. What they discovered, or rather what Bertha discovered, was an ensemble of homotopic transformations (transition maps) linking the complexes, each representing a parallel universe, together as a web or network. At their interfaces, the interference signature of each interpenetrated seamlessly. Somehow, the mineral callasium acted as a conduit between the twelve alternate universes and ours. The scientists believed the array of pictographs on each had something to do with managing this dimensional transference, funneling these other worlds into ours, but they had no idea how. The globe was being analysed, the properties of the crystal were palpable from a distance. Its gravitational pull was intense though not dangerous by itself. Immersed in this bizarre yet mathematical milieu, energized by the challenge and the prospect of discovering an entirely novel aspect of reality, their intuition opened to ideas and threads of thought not ordinarily considered as rational science. Moreover, even though preoccupied as scientists, they were still Rangers and were spurred on by the unknown threat potential. It was time to think outside the box.

The incantations, as they were now being called, spoken over each orb were similar in the sense of congruent structure, but the sequence of sounds themselves were unique to each and may have resonated with the complex callasium crystal in a unique way, much like the expression of genes of a genome. Each cell contains the entire genome, but depending on the type of cell, regulatory genes control gene expression attuned to that particular cell. On the species level, when and for how long genes express themselves, either singly or in consort with others, determines the developmental outcome, the difference, morphologically, between animal species.

They were reaching for formal idea relationships in other fields, metaphors of logic, all the time aware that what they had before them obeyed no system of logic created by humans or any of the other humanoid species they'd run into in their exploration of parallel universes. Bertha incorporated systems from linear cause-effect to multidimensional convergence, deduction by denial of the negative, thought systems that allowed for more than one correct conclusion. She had them all under her chassis and used them all. But when confronted with an amorphous situation where the possibility of magic crossed with a technology beyond anything known, she became very human-like. She stopped moving and thinking and just stared. She held in her organic mind all the thousands of variables and sets of relations, all the geometric and topological lenses through which she cogitated, all the facts from the big picture down to the tinest detail, reducing ideas to their irreducible elements, and waited for the nonlinearity, at the heart of her artificial being, to initiate a proposal, a suggestion as to how to proceed. Something only Bertha could do.

Coary was notified that the locations where the globes of callasium had been buried were found. An image of each planet with the position marked appeared on the viewer. The captain didn't hesitate. He contacted Space Fleet immediately and informed them, passing on the pertinent reports. They, in turn, notified any Ranger contingent on or near those planets, including ships on regular patrols, to drop whatever they were doing and focus on this situation. Space Fleet had placed it at top priority, they were read in and recognized that something unknown was transpiring across the domain of the border planets from one end to the other that had to be considered a threat to all humans everywhere. It was vital that the orbs be collected, extreme caution was to be exercised in the process. There was no way of knowing how they might react or what effect digging them up might have.

Science officer Brightfeather expressed her concern, thinking that removal might be both rash and meaningless. Events could already be set in motion that no longer depended on the orbs or the pictographs, the incantaions having triggered an irresistable cascade of unstoppable occurrences. The exec entered. He handed the sketchpad with the drawing of the strange alien face to the captain. A facial recognition analysis through their database turned up nothing; it was then forwarded to headquarters for a more expansive search. An assault team had already left for the house on Rhea.

They sat quietly in the doldrums, everything that could be done was in motion. They acknowledged they didn't have a handle on whatever was going on; they didn't even know what was going on. Restrained inaction in the midst of potential calamity didn't sit well with the skipper; he hated it, hated waiting for something to happen in order to respond. That's not how you achieve control. He suggested they travel to that planet where the runes were discovered and examine it themselves, especially the throne room. They hadn't referred to it that way in their report, but that's how he saw it. An archaeological report captured only information pertaining to its field, its perceptual reality. Perhaps the eyes of the Rangers might see something different, a piece of the puzzle that could bring clarity. Obvious questions had gone unanswered. For instance, what happened to those people and the planet? The survey report stated only what they believe didn't happen. Searching the grounds in and around the settlements turned up no evidence of graves. Perhaps it was simply not their custom, choosing instead cremation. But then, who turned out the lights?

Grav-wave buoys were spread throughout the domain of the border worlds and beyond, enveloping the entire region, as a warning network; the possibility of sudden spikes in amplitude from a distant nova or a large, passing asteroid, or, the stuff of nightmares, a black hole that might disrupt navigation and endanger lives was ever-present. Reports from these were routinely and continually relayed to all ships simultaneously from Central Command on Hawking-I. The nav-officer monitored this information and when anomalies occurred, the nav-system flagged them. There wasn't much to do while on station: maintain distance and run systems diagnostics. Returning from a consult with the propulsions engineer, he was alarmed to see an alert notice of waves of unusual frequency, not coming from the deep-space buoys cocooning the inhabited planets, but emanating from within the perimeter of protected space. How long had that been going on? Immediately, he commed the captain and transferred the data to his screen and to the investigative team in the brain center.

It took only nanoseconds for Bertha to superimpose and orient the gravitational contours and back eddies onto the broad holoview chart of the twelve planets. Working backgrounds through the confluing interference patterns, she was able to pinpoint the epicenters. They fit congruently over the neighborhoods of the callasium-sphere coordinates on the twelve planets where, they were informed from headquarters, chaos and anarchy were spreading. No Ranger patrols had yet arrived at those locales. Coary worried that they might have their hands full with domestic problems and not have time for the orbs. Information on that part of the operation would be forwarded as soon as it comes in, he was told. It was important to know if digging them up had any noticeable effect or if it was even possible. The smuggler skipper had said it was too late to do anything about it, whatever it was, which, apparently, not even he knows.

Coary stopped his train of thought. If he doesn't know what this is all about, how does he know it's too late? He was hiding something. He read the transliteration interpretations by the modulator tech. Sifting through, with the assistance of Brightfeather, they noticed a common feature interpreted as a mixture of remorse, sadness, and longing, and beneath it all, an intense fear, whenever a question posed by the exec got close to the name of his homeworld or, for that matter, any other of the border worlds as a possible destination. But, if that was the case, why was he wasting time running counterfeit drugs? Did he need the extra credits or had he truly been corrupted by prolonged proximity to the globes of callasium?

The command center had gradually filled up with experts in various fields, the door was open. Members of the investigative team drifted about, brainstorming, engaged in rapid conversation in the halls, small gatherings forming and then fragmenting to form new groups. A practice they'd become accustomed to. Openly allowing their minds to cross-fertilize as they sought idea-constructs buried within the details, set to emerge if only captured in the right light.

Coary asked the exolinguist to corroborate what he thought he saw embedded in the patterns. Having conducted many an interrogation, the captain was quite familiar with these readouts in their raw form, like a geologist assessing the significance of strata. The added layer of transcription helped considerably. It seemed to him that the smuggler had a very intense urge to leave the entire domain of populated planets and was feeling the pain of it. He couldn't help but feel the loss. But what of remorse? Had he helped to put some sequence of events in motion that did not auger well for his homeworld? None of these considerations had any basis in fact or evidence, Coary realized, but based on experience they were more than just leaps of imagination and intuition.

Probing deeper, the exolinguist cited a set of contours that resonated thoughout all questions concerning the immediate future. Like, where were you and your cronies supposed to rendezvous? The smuggler balked at this, but the intrusive neuro-modulator traced the underlying thoughts. There wasn't intended to be a rendezvous. But, Coary thought, they wouldn't all opt to leave the domain of inhabited planets. For what? A life in the wild? Had they been paid that much? Would any amount of credits be enough for a man to leave his world and everyone he knows, to leave them to experience who knows what? And beyond that, quite possibly, to abandon and betray his entire world to some unknown calamity? No, he didn't see how all of them could fit that bill. Psychopaths with severe rejection and alienation damage, yeah, but profiles from headquarters didn't consider any of them to be more than ordinary criminals, thieves and con-artists, parasites nipping at the fringes of society. He surmised that they didn't know what the hell was going on anymore than he did and were probably home or on some party world, oblivious as to their part in whatever the big picture is.

They agreed: the smuggler wanted to get the hell out of the area completely and into the uncharted region. But why? Coary and the exec left for the brig; the smuggler captain was isolated. They entered his cell without guards and closed the door. Commander Stewart Owens, the executive officer, was a good six-foot-four and built like an iron miner. Captain Coary was a few inches shorter and not in the shape of his first officer; however, he made up for it by being ruthlessly direct.

Both stood while the prisoner sat on the edge of his bunk. "You have a name?" Coary asked.

The smuggler sensed a sea change. He glanced at one then the other and said, "Yeah. Demetri Conchenko, from Bakunin in the Centaurus Sector, originally."

His obstinance appeared dissipated with the reality of imprisonment. On the other hand, he'd been away from the callasium crystals for at least two weeks by the dates on the holocubes. If what he said about the corrosive effects caused by prolonged nearness to the combined strength of all twelve was true, perhaps it was wearing off, and clarity, to whatever degree he was capable of, had returned. What Coary saw was despair, but not for himself; he wanted to know the reason why.

A fatalist, thought Coary. Perfect. Wasting no time, he asked, "Why are you so eager to vacate the area?"

Demetri blanched as though a nerve'd been struck. He stood, put his hands in his pockets and paced. Turning towards the captain, he said, "The coordinates where the crystals were buried are weak points in the magnetosphere, neutral points where the field's intensity drops to zero, outgoing signals have minimal interference." The manner of his speaking, his enunciation, surprised the captain and first officer. It was like talking to a completey different person.

"Listen, Demetri, we want to know what's going on and we think you can help us. We also have a pretty strong idea that your wish is to be far away from this sector. Considering what you and your cohorts may have set in motion, wasting time smuggling phony drugs seems contradictory and petty. I don't care about your reasons for that, not anymore. I want to know what you and this cat's eyes character have done."

Demetri didn't hesitate, it was time. "The night he gave me the callasium globes, I could barely lift the satchel. He'd always been very grave, serious, almost funny, as though he was acting out some character he'd seen on a vid. But that night, he was excited, his cat's eyes gleamed. He never told me his name, I never asked. Sometimes, the less you know, the better. We sat in his house, scarcely furnished, a table and two hard chairs and a red rug. I got the feeling they were there when he moved in. I had a bottle. He never drank in the bar, but this time, he joined me. After a couple of drinks in silence, he smiled, a weird twisted grimace, actually, and began to talk. He was working for a man who called himself Dark Lord. I almost laughed again at the hushed tone he used when he said his name, like this guy was listening, but stifled it. He didn't seem like the joking type. He told me his people had discovered how to use callasium, how to design it, to act as a conduit for concentrating gravity at those places where they were to be buried. The speeches said over them effected a transformation in the crystal alignment to conform with that planet's field, so he said. This wasn't supposed to increase the gravity but rather interfere in a certain way to bring about hallucinations and mass confusion. But, he said between drinks--he was starting to slur--it would only be temporary. They were going to pull some big deal off on all twelve planets simultaneously while everything was in a state of chaos. He didn't mention the repercussions that might result from this short-term situation, however. I really don't think he cared."

"How were they supposed to withstand the effects?"

"They had some dampening device, a personal neutralizer. Generated a protective shield. He said he didn't have any to show me, maybe next time."

He walked over to his bunk and sat, lit a cigarette, and continued, "I went back to my room above the bar, put the satchel on the floor next to the bed, and thought about everything he'd told me. I didn't like the deal, too many lives, whole societies tampered with. It wasn't going to be harmless, that's for sure. It felt sloppy, not very professional. How could they know the problems they caused wouldn't interfere with their objective? Plus I had a strong feeling, an instinct, that he hadn't given me the straight skinnies. What could this Dark Lord person steal on barely civilized border planets? It was a cover for something. After I got paid, I got it in my head to leave the entire quadrant until it all blew over. I figured, if they failed, got caught--which seemed likely--I'd be in the cross-hairs for something way bigger than I had a right to be. And my family, on Bakunin, one of the twelve planets, they're in the middle of it. I warned them to leave but couldn't tell them why. I don't know if they did or not, we haven't been on good speaking terms of late. Anyway, that plan got short-circuited when I fell in with the smugglers."

Coary interjected, "Why do you have the thirteenth globe, what's its significance and how come it's not buried anywhere?"

He sat stiffly, put the butt out in his cup, and said, "I was supposed to bury it at a certain spot on Hawking-I and say words over it, the script. Cat's eyes made a point of it, how important that was. But I don't know how it's any different from the others."

"But you didn't. Why not?"

"It was too much. Disrupting Space Fleet Headquarters, the Council of Scientists, the archives from all the parallel world explorations, all that knowledge collected there, the whole planet, probably the best run of all the outworlds. I figured this Dark Lord wanted to knock out the Rangers, at least their central command structure. That would help them pull whatever it is. But I couldn't do it."

"What about the speech? Where's that?"

"In the base of the globe, a secret compartment, that's where it is, that's where they were all hidden." He paused to light another cig. "You know, I thought about it. I needed proof that the twelve had all been recited properly in order to get paid, but not mine. So maybe, I thought, if I didn't do it, they wouldn't know."

The exec said, "Maybe. But they don't sound like the type that appreciates being stiffed. Another good reason to leave the area."

Demetri looked up and nodded. He was suddenly exhausted, slumping forward. Coary told him he'd send food, then he and the exec left.

Back at command center they discussed Demetri's tale. Coary noted that he never mentioned anything about planet X-194, the supposed altar or the bizarre statue behind it. He wasn't exactly in the loop; at least, not the main one. Coary recalled that there were only twelve runes, so what was this thirteenth about? Did he really have to bury it on Hawking-I? Where, exactly, he didn't volunteer, maybe no place special. That part he could've made up, assuming the rest was true, to score points, pretending to care about Space Fleet Headquarters, the meta-library, parallel universe exploration. Maybe all that was needed, whether he was aware of it or not, was for it to remain in this region of the universe, somewhere, anywhere. It wasn't intended to draw another universe into our own, it is our own.Topologically, it was all the same.

He had a feeling it was all crap, that this cat's eyes fellow told Demetri a halfway believable story, throwing together ideas of an esoteric flavor--parallel universes emerging through a spherical clump of an unknown mineral, causing hallucinations and mental consternation--with the ordinary, everyday, graspable crime. The real truth lay elsewhere. You don't go to the trouble of fusing ancient pictographs, runes, that just happen to stand for modern-day mathematical representations of parallel universes, found on a mysterious, uninhabited planet, onto the rarest mineral known, possessing sketchy, barely understood and potentially dangerous properties, and activate it with an incantation, a spell, no less--origin unknown--in order to steal something. Fomenting political uprising with the idea of taking over, a super longshot, at best, isn't worth the trouble of dealing with these frontier towns. Nobody in his right mind wants that job; it falls on those with an almost religious fervor about colonization, creating a new world, an outpost of humanity expanding ever further into the galaxy. That kind of motivation isn't what one might expect from a Dark Lord.

A blinking green spot of light in the upper right corner of the viewer called for attention; a preliminary crystallography report appeared. Brightfeather scanned the several pages of technical data, complete with geometric diagrams: refractive index negative--total reflection; isometry group unknown--unit-cell defies classification under any of the seven lattice systems; symmetry of atomic array without defect at highest magnification; orientation of planes across all possible vector norms, remains stable under spectrographic phase transitions; identity maintained by activation of mirror refraction to compensate; point nodes arranged spherically, subgroups vibrate at varying specific frequencies--reasons unknown; resonance shift discontinuous--invariant by scale; diffraction patterns coherent--reflecting extreme density, etcetera. A metamaterial; consequently, its natural shape, size, geometry, orientation, and morphology are presently unknown. When she arrived at the summation, she brought it to the attention of the captain and exec, engaged in conversation.

The crystallographic analysis on the mineral callasium is incomplete. When run through the quantum displacement array, a black, void-like ball of space emerged at center. Increased magnitude to the quark dimension was insufficient to reveal its structure or contents. Likewise, a temporal phase reversal occurred at the transition boundary, suggesting a mechanical alteration has taken place. A 'hole' of indeterminate nature resides at the very core of the globe, possibly, most likely, designed to take advantage of the mineral's extreme gravitational properties. When scanned by the grav-wave resonator, a schematic displayed the crystal at the bottom of a well, resembling an electron, but exponentially smaller. Trajectories of lines of force bend parabolically, truncated at the boundary.

Coary sat back, ruminating; the overload of unresolved information had peaked. He contacted Space Fleet Intelligence. A receptionist appeared on the viewer. He asked to talk to the assistant chief. She told him he was in conference. He told her he was Captain Coary of the Edgar Poe and insisted on talking to him right now. She stared for a moment, then spoke into a device on her desk. Immediately, the face of the assistant appeared.

"Yes, captain, what can I do for you?"

Coary almost erupted but managed to restrain himself. "Are you aware of the situation out here? Have you been briefed?"

He seemed to take umbrage, then said, "Yes, of course we are. We're doing everything possible."

"That's not enough. I need information. First off, what's the status on the orbs? Do any of the Rangers stationed on the planets in question or those enroute have anything to report? Second, I want anything at all, anything from mythology and ancient texts to traffic violations, something about this Dark Lord character. Who is he and what's his reputation? Where does he come from, where might he be? And third, what have you found about the government's secret research on the mineral callasium? What is their primary interest in it? What do they wish to do with it? What special properties have they discovered? We need information, Chief. I'm sorry to be so brusk, but I have a strong feeling that shit's about to hit the fan. If we don't get a handle on it soon, whatever it is, it may be too late."

The assistant chief of intelligence stared hard. He had enough experience and familiarity with Captain Coary to know that he wouldn't be making a special request if it wasn't urgent. "We've had no information from anyone concerning the orbs. No Ranger contingent has arrived on location yet, if they had, they would've contacted us. Could be they've arrived at the planets but have run into difficulty with the locals. Your second request: We've found no record of anyone by the pseudonym Dark Lord, he's not in our databases. We can expand our search into other sectors through cooperation with those governments. But that'll take time."

"Forget that, chief. Instead, check out mythology, ancient history, legends of gods, esoteria, graphic novels, anything and everything. Contact the Council of Scientists, tell them who needs their help, they owe me. Get them on this, bring their expertise to bear. I have a feeling this Dark Lord is not from our spacetime."

The assistant chief of Intelligence stared dumbly into the viewer. "Where are we going with this, captain? I don't see the relevance."

"Please, just do it. In fact, see if you can find Professor Samuelson. I'd like to get him in on this too. Have him contact me directly, on a secure line."

The chief's eyes refocused, he suddenly saw where Coary was coming from. He too remembered the encounter with the thought beings; this could be something similar or much, much worse. "As far as your third request, material is hard to come by. The government refuses to cooperate, says the information on callasium is classified, highly sensitive. We're working on other means to procure it. We tried convincing them of the seriousness of the situation, but they don't see a threat, and, quite frankly, we don't have enough evidence right now to argue a proper case. We were waiting until we had complete reports; however, I understand that anything might be helpful. It's on its way, captain."

With that, Coary thanked him indifferently and ended the conversation. Requesting attention, he reiterated Demetri's story to the dozen or so scientists and specialists in their fields--Rangers all--grouped around the long conference table; diagrams, mandalas, equations, drawn and scrawled on sheets of synthetic paper spread across the black plastic surface. When he finished, for an impossibly long moment, they all just stared, then, almost as one, burst out laughing. That was all he needed; he decided not to wait.

He told Brightfeather to keep hounding Intelligence until they came through. He then contacted his assault team on Rhea. He asked about status. Cat's eyes was not home. The house was sparsely furnished--two chairs, a table, and a red rug. A bed and dresser--empty--were in the bedroom. The kitchen was bare, no evidence of having prepared meals. There wasn't a scrap of anything, except for one curious item tucked away in the corner of the top shelf in the bedroom closet--a folded piece of hemp or old paper with drawings of circles with lines connecting them. The assault team leader described them as appearing to be precisely arranged, not random scrawlings. He was ordered to return immediately with anything they could find; they were leaving this airspace.

He and Owens left for the bridge. On the way he commed the nav-officer to plot a course to the planet designated X-194; he'd find it in the archives. He wanted to know how long it would take to get there at max speed. In short order, the nav-officer informed him it would take approximately three hours through quantum space. As Coary stepped onto the bridge, he ordered him to initiate as soon as the surface detachment returned.

Glad to be doing something, Owens set about organizing a team for the surface walk. The planet was at the crux of the matter, he was convinced. His Ranger instincts told him a world-encompassing crime had been committed there, long, long ago, leaving no witnesses.

Sitting in his command chair, Coary brought up the archaeological report on the planet. It was two hundred years old. Hard to believe, he thought, the only report in existence and no one's been there since. Was there no follow up? No anthropological curiosity about the runes and how these people once lived? Why were they worshiping this strange-looking being? The overeager intelligence agent actually sent the picture; it was truly fanciful, thought Coary. Sitting on a high-backed throne carved out of solid limestone, according to the report. If standing, it'd be around nine feet tall with an additional two feet of curved horns, a pair. The face was difficult to make out, all protuberances had been worn away. A computer reconstruction showed humanoid features: deep-set eyes with a vertical line down the center, a large, straight nose, and wide mouth. Over the years across the galaxy, having seen the most unusual of creatures, he found nothing terribly alarming about it.

Could the planet possibly look the same? The same dead, barren, lifeless rock floating in space with a mysterious altar and statue still preserved? Everything eroded to rubble, yet twelve runes carved into the rock facing the statue at an angle, as though the creature was reading it, were still legible. Evidence, clues, traces of relevance might be completely erased by now. The report stated the worn dwellings were twenty thousand years old. But does that mean no one's rebuilt since then, highly unlikely, or that all living things, including people, came to an end at or near that time? Regardless, he refused to sit on his hands and wait for the bureaucratic intelligence arm of Space Fleet to get on top of it; that may never happen. His gut told him the key to this whole damn mish-mash was to be found on X-194, and he intended to track it down.

The assault team returned, their shuttle parked in the cargo bay. The nav-officer hit the switch, the quark drive came to life. Within moments, they were traveling through quantum space, all possible versions of the Edgar Poe traversing their separate trajectories, destination X-194. Three hours, thought Coary. What else do I need to know beforehand? A comm link lit up, he punched the key. The squad leader had turned in the parchment with the circles and lines drawn on it found in cat's eyes bedroom closet. The forensics team scanned it to Bertha without any instructions. They put it to her to fit it into the puzzle somewhere. The chief investigator told the captain he should come to the brain center to take a look. Coary replied he was on his way.

The holoviewer showed a wide panorama of the domain of inhabited border planets as they appear at present in relative position, he was told. The twelve planets where the orbs were buried were marked with dots of light, projected lines connected them, twelve lines for each one. It was a very complicated figure, evoking an image of the synaptic configuration of the brain. Coary stood taking it all in, trying to grasp the broad scope of his world in one gulp of thought. On a plane of imaginary glass in front of the three-dimensional depiction, the scaned image of the parchment drawings had been superimposed to scale. The chief investigator told Coary, "Watch this."

Slowly, the planets, and all else in the far-reaching volume of space, moved in their normal paths. When the simulation had arrived at how it will look two days from now--approximately: 0600--the circles and lines of the superimposed drawing matched perfectly with the arrangement of the twelve planets. Coary was stunned. Why had cat's eyes left the drawing in his house where it was sure to be found? Was it a reminder to him in his own geometric language, or was it intended to mislead? Could he have been careless, just this once? The brain trust were in agreement with the captain's insight: whatever is intended to happen, it would be then. Two days, 0600 hours. He needed to find the plug and pull it.

He suddenly felt exhausted, his energy dropped to the floor along with his concentration. He realized he'd been awake for nearly a day and hadn't eaten for longer than that. To be at his best when they arrived, he retired to his quarters to eat and take a nap. In moments, he was in dreamland. He was a kid again, playing in the backyard with his toy soldiers. The sun shone warmly on his back and neck. All was quiet, his family gone for the day, at work or on errands. The air was just the right temperature. In the midst of imaginary battles waged, he thought of his father, a man he'd never known or met, somewhere out there in the world or on some world, he didn't know. He fought the urge to cry as he sat back on his haunches. He would not cry, he promised himself. The dream shifted to his experience with the thought beings, only not the one that actually transpired. Coary sat in his command chair, the avatar stood before him as he did on the bridge that day. But the discussion they had wasn't repeated, not even a mis-remembered version of it. It was one of those dreams that feels tangibly real.

The thought being smiled and said, "We meet again, captain. Don't be surprised, dreamland is but an aspect of our world; through it, we can communicate. Out of curiosity, we've been watching proceedings; we often do without your knowledge. Because of our first and last meeting, I'm afraid we've become entangled by forces unknown to your species and, truthfully, beyond our control. Consequently, we see what you see.

"The matter recently occurring in your spacetime is of overriding concern to us. Long ago, before your species walked upright, a being of incredible power from the realm of dark matter set about conquering visible parallel universes. For reasons irrational, purpose unknown. He, I'll call this creature he for brevity's sake, has always been able to affect change in ordinary spacetime gravitationally, the other forces were as though nonexistent, invisible. He was content for billions of years with his role as the framework and organizer of all that can be seen. But his isolation and sense of betrayal, watching the multiverse evolve while he remained in the background, saddened him deeply. He lived with loneliness and became resentful. His agitation grew, his sense of confinement and rejection intensified until he realized a degree of energy that merged him with the other forces, opening a portal through the interceding layers of space and dimensions of time into the visible matter domain.

"He wished to know, to be all that he saw in visible spacetime's tangible panoply of forces. But he could aspire only to an artificial reality, the real forever eluding him, his consciousness still alone. Then the darkness that is his essence turned hateful; he decided that if he could not be part of that which descended from his being, he would change it to mirror himself. In order to do so, he exerted his influence to establish dominion over light by reorganizing the internal geometry of spacetimes. This rearrangement allows dark matter and visible matter to coexist in an altered hybrid space, thereby making it compatible with his own, and in the process. In the process, removing interfacial boundaries that define separate entities, from microbe to humanoid to star, while yet maintaining the tangible attributes of ordinary spacetime, an illusion to be sure, a facade of materiality, but one he accepts. His interest is in life-giving universes, feeding on the self-sustaining energy that pervades and animates every molecule.

"He attempted to do that with our universe. But, because the internal structure of ours is bound up with who we are, the matter we create is unsubstantial, as is his. He could not break our will and his attempts were thwarted. The psychic field predates dark matter; he learned this. We didn't stop there; we pursued him and entered his realm, encasing him in a cloud of thought energy. He is of dark matter, the essential substrate and skeleton of all universes and so cannot be dispersed into streams of incoherent energy except by an infusion of real spacetime forces; in effect, altering his identity to one of virtual spacetime, severing him from the source of his power. As we are of thought alone, we were not able to do that. However, we imprisoned him, confined him with layers of temporal dimensions from which he could not escape. Until now."

Coary's dream-self asked, "How?"

"His mind did not rest while captive; his will of darkness is ever in motion. He retracted his essence to the beginning of time and learned the secret of using it to create fractional spacial dimensions where none had existed. Thus, he countered the frequency of his bounds by crest and trough, they became transparent to him. Once freed, he restored his kingdom of twelve parallel universes. Revenge is on his mind, we can see. He wishes to conquer us, to enslave our thoughts to his will, to reform our world in his image."

"But why, then, bother with us? We have no quarrel with this guy."

"Experiments have been taking place on your homeworld of Hawking-I. Experiments that he finds threatening. The knowledge your scientists seek concerns using a certain transdimensional crystal to enter dark matter; they are close to achieving this goal. The Dark Lord fears invasion, fears that if that knowledge is learned, it may eventually pass to other universes.

"Gravity is all he knows, to conquer worlds, he must use other forces. In his own domain, he's vulnerable. If beings of light were to enter the realm of darkness, by their very presence they would create walls of space from the basic particle constituents by infusing electromagnetic properties into otherwise dead matter. He cannot survive in such an atmosphere, it would disintegrate his consciousness into countless shards and fragments of his former self and make it impossible for him to coalesce. Which is why, in order to exist in ordinary spacetime universes, he must transform them by imposing a geometry that alters their physical laws.

"The downside of this is that all life in the form of separate selfhood, as has been the case with the twelve, sadly, ends and is transmuted to a purely rational, singular consciousness devoid of body, of corporeality. He wishes to avenge his imprisonment, but first, he wants to conquer your world. Region by region. Once he's achieved a beachhead, so to speak, ripples of darkness and virtual reality will overwhelm the rest of your spacetime, expanding exponentially."

The degree of calm with which he simply stated this alarmed Coary almost as much as what he said. The end of all life in the universe, his universe? How can that be? He couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"I don't understand it," Coary responded from his command chair. "There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. We live in a small region of one between Earth and the Hub. And on one planet of that region, a group of scientists and researchers are experimenting with a mineral crystal that might enable entrance to this plane of dark matter you speak of. Surely, in this vast ocean of galaxies and stars and countless planets, others have discovered this mineral, or similar ones, and are pursuing the same ends. I can't believe we're alone in this."

The avatar simply said, "It would make no difference where he enters, the end result would be the same."

"Still, why go to so much trouble? Couldn't this Dark Lord find a simpler way of dealing with his problem? I mean, why so complicated? He took over those other universes on his own, why this elaborate scheme with the orbs and the planets where they're buried and the words spoken over them to trigger, what, the opening of portals? Why all that?"

"His prolonged confinement has weakened him, he needs replenishment and your universe is full to overflowing with life, rich in diversity and intensely energetic. Killing two birds, or actually, three, with one stone, as you say. He brings to bear as preparation the dark energy imbued into the structures of the twelve in order to send waves of darkness across your world. When they have joined in a mosaic of interference waves, a continuum of simulated harmony, he will enter through the thirteenth orb two of your days from now, when the proper incantation is spoken over it."

He paused as though humanely embarrassed. Then said quietly, "There's more to it, captain. Besides eliminating the threat, insignificant as it may seem to you, he knows our two worlds, our two universes, have been in contact. The telltale resonance frequencies echo down to the depths of the underlying dark matter. In other words, he ties us together."

That's great, thought Coary. We're friends now. Guilt by association. It'd been at least two months since his encounter with the thought beings, and in all that time, this was the first they've bothered to say hello. He didn't know it was possible, how could he? They've been watching? For how long? What, exactly? This was a rare and timely opportunity, he had to take advantage of it for all he could.

"What do you know of this cat's eyes figure, and how did this whole operation of burying globes of callasium on certain planets come about?"

"Sheets of dimensions lie as intermediaries between dark matter and that of ordinary visible spacetime. Creatures of a blend of both exist there. This cat's eyes character is one of them. He serves the Dark Lord, and it is he and his cohorts who devised the plan. They are skilled in the design of callasium, a material whose properties are well known to them. They shaped it to channel dark energy universes into yours. You won't find him, he's returned to his domain within the spatial elementals."

He was about to ask where this Dark Lord was and how to stop him, when his alarm went off, waking him instanly; the avatar reached out a hand as he faded away. His shirt was damp from perspiration, his muscles ached as though he'd been straining against an invisible force. He rose unsteadily, splashed water on his face, toweled off, then, hands trembling, made his way to the bridge. While enroute, he considered inducing sleep, but there was no guarantee the avatar would visit him in dreamland again.

When he arrived, he signaled to Owens and Brightfeather; they entered his personal conference room off-bridge. Unlike ordinary dreams that quickly fade like dew in the sun, he recalled most of the conversation, especially the salient points that had to do with things like the ultimate demise of all life in the cosmos. He summed up the gist of it. Both his exec and science officer were onboard during the encounter with the thought beings; so, they didn't doubt for a second what their captain was telling them. When he finished, they all sat in stunned silence. It was a lot to absorb. They had a mission now; one that was unequivocal: find this Dark Lord and eliminate him. Each visibly shifted gears, focusing wills and energies on the problem at hand.

The nav-officer commed in; they'd entered ordinary spacetime. Between them and X-194--the fourth planet from an unnamed M-class star--sat a warning buoy. It was of a type that had been decomissioned long before anyone onboard the Edgar Poe was born; in fact, before the Poe was born. The archives were searched, but no record of when it was put on station, or for what reason, was found. As they neared, the scratchy mechanical voice of the automatic proximity recording came on the emergency comm link: "Warning. Do not land on planet X-194. Contact Colonial Headquarters on Aphrodite Prime for details." The message began to repeat, Coary gave the cut signal.

As they held position, he requested Bertha to cross-reference the archaeological report with any mention of the name of the team's ship and any anomalous entries pertaining to X-194 in the log, and, with that, any reports from the old colonial days referencing an aborted investigation on X-194 during this time period. And also, what happened to the research team after X-194?

Coary rose to get a cup of coffee, his first of the day. He sipped it, savoring its warmth, its rich flavor, the weight and touch of the ceramic cup, his personal one from home. A flood of memories, of people and places, of wild adventures, and serene, peaceful nights on his deck in front of Lake Dyson, fluttered through his mind. He can't let it end.

Bertha, breathtaking as always, began her summation:

The reason the archaeological report is so superficial and scant is because they left X-194 before a thorough investigation could be completed. The log of the ship Mary Alice spoke of team members experiencing bouts of sudden blindness coupled with sensory deprivation as though adrift in empty space, then, just as abruptly, reemerging to where they'd been. For safety sake, suspecting a possible viral or microbial infection, we elected to cut our normal procedure short. We left a warning buoy in orbit and a follow-up report at Colonial Headquarters, Office of Uncharted Territories.

Supplement: After submitting our report to the Colonial Expeditionary Administration (CEA), we were instructed not to mention anything that transpired on X-194 until a full investigation could be completed.

No follow-up investigation was ever performed. No one has been to X-194 since.

There is no mention of any of the members listed on the report after this survey. They all retired from field service and went their separate ways.

Coary sat very still, Owens and Brightfeather rose to stand beside him. He slapped his hand on the table, then stood, bracketed by his two closest friends and most reliable crew. He commed the nav-officer and told him to assume low orbit over the location of the shrine of the Dark Lord. Using the now outdated coordinate system overlay, its position, found in the archaeological report, had already been read-in to his computer.

On the way to the shuttle, he handed a recording of his dream narrative to the chief investigator in the brain center, explaining briefly what it was. The analyst's eyes lit up; he, too, had been on the ship at that meeting. He called the others over as Coary left for the cargo bay. The team was ready, standing outside the shuttle. They didn't know, of course, about the captain's conversation in dreamland. He hesitated to tell them, the increased pressure might compromise their effectiveness. On the other hand, they needed to know the stakes, keeping them in the dark was wrong. And besides, being Rangers, the news would only serve to boost their concentration and galvanize their will. In fact, he decided, the whole crew should know, everybody needed to get involved. Not only were their lives on the line, but also the the fate of the universe. Could they handle it? Would anyone be overwhelmed to the point of paralysis? Would people despair, fold-up, withdraw, die? He had to find out, he needed them to be at their best, and if this didn't do it, he couldn't imagine what would.

He commed the brain center and instructed them to play his recording over the ship's communications network. But first, he made a ship-wide announcement introducing what they were about to hear. His entire crew knew of the thought beings, they'd been there.

Lieutenant Commander Seamus Finley, genius chief engineer and recently promoted, was left in command. On leave, he had time to refine the reverse-crystal alignment for the quark drive he'd fashioned with only ship's tools when they encountered the thought beings. It allows them--ship and crew--to pass through interstitial space into the void, falling through the cracks of spacetime, so to speak. Topologically, the mathematics of quantum space, the process entails retracting extension in space to a single point smaller than the Planck scale. At the time, they needed an emergency escape plan, and that was it. His invention was disseminated throughout the fleet. For that, he recieved a promotion.

On the way to X-194, Coary, Owens, Brightfeather and the team suited up. Supposedly, their scanners told them the atmosphere was within breathable parameters and the ground temperature was tolerable. But the captain still insisted they come protected and prepared for anything. As they neared the landing site, Coary tried to recall something the avatar said that went right by him at the time, preoccupied as he was with thoughts of the end of creation. Of its own accord, some piece of information buried in his memory struggled to surface. Something significant that had been initially ignored and glossed over. But it wouldn't come just yet, stress and the demands of leadership kept it at bay.

He discussed their mission with the team, hoping for insightful feedback. The star system consisted of six planets, two in the habitable zone, and of those, only this one was once inhabited. It had two moons, the smaller one, half the size, much further out, in sync with its larger cousin every three orbits. The planet itself was completely dead, nothing but a gravely, dusty expanse, leading up to rounded mounds off in the distance, once mountains. According to the report, the ruins were twenty-thousand years old. Whatever happened, cataclysmic as it appears, happened then.

Coary wondered what the people who lived there called their planet. And what they looked like. These were the uncharted territories when planets not much farther away were being colonized. Why, in the past two hundred years, had it not been explored and mapped out? Was it a policy issue with the Alliance of Colonial Planets? Why race out away from Earth to the beyond, and then stop at the now border planets? No follow-up investigation was ever performed, Bertha had said. Why not? Too busy at the time to run down rumors of strange planetary illnesses? Did they need to waste efforts pursuing it? Wouldn't it be easier to just check it off the list of potential homes?

Trying to fathom the bureaucratic mindset was an exhaustive exercise. More shenanigans were going on behind the scenes than anyone, with the possible exception of Bertha, could ever keep track of. A rational policy emerging from the chaos might offset the course of history and violate tradition. It was not worthwhile considering. That peculiarly human invention hadn't changed since time began. On the other hand, Coary thought, what if there was another reason that had nothing to do with bureaucracy?

They touched down a hundred meters away from the worn structure, what was left of it. It was the only thing on the plane; it stood out like a sailboat on the horizon. Coary momentarily thought of Lake Dyson and his many days sailing its vast blue-green waters. Part of him wished he was there now. Pictures that came with the report showed the walls still mostly intact, but the roof and all else had eroded away. In two hundred years, not much had changed. They approached cautiously, men with pulse rifles on the flanks. What value that would be was dubious, but it was protocol Coary had no intention of violating.

For a shrine, it wasn't all that impressive, thought Coary. In fact, it wasn't much bigger than a one-story house. Its humble appearance was accented by the mud-brick materials it was made of. When they were within twenty meters, Coary ordered them to encircle it, to look for anything unusual. No sounds, no call of birds or buzzing of insects, just careful footfalls on dusty ground. Directly behind the throne, the rock surface of the surrounding wall appeared younger than that adjacent. The radiometer put the adjacent rock at the age indicated in the report--twenty thousand years. However, this newer rock was only two hundred years, about the time of the expedition.

Fallen-down walls, only a few feet high, crumbling jaggedly along the top, contained the nine-foot-high chair of solid rock and the statue, with two-foot horns jutting out of its head, sitting in it, smoothed on all surfaces, but still largely intact. Before him on a rock pedestal was the stone replica of a massive book a good four-feet across. On its surface were inscribed the now familiar pictographs. Runes, magical symbols of dark matter universes, once filled with life, now infused with the essesnce of the Dark Lord, supposedly the being this statue represents. "But what is it doing here?" asked Coary into the suit mike. It was rhetorical, but it gave them something to start with.

No moss or anything resembling it grew on the rock. Nothing lived on the planet. Brightfeather remembered the intelligence agent saying they discovered an area of coherent radiation, a beacon, he called it. Nonetheless, after covering the planet from pole to pole, except for normal mineral decay and electron shifting, they found nothing, no mysterious signal, and their sensors were light years ahead of the archaeological ship's.

The team searched the structure, chair, and occupant in a different way than an archaeological survey group might. They looked for secret cubbyholes and buttons that might be embedded in the rock face, masked over by centuries of dirt and decay. The ruins had been unoccupied for twenty thousand years. Is there any sign of recent visitations? Brightfeather scanned the statue for any traces of radiation. The quantum spectroscope detected the usual amorphous wave patterns associated with degrading minerals, but behind the statue itself, between it and the chair, a spike of appreciable amplitude flickered across the screen. A power source, but of what?

Coary felt the presence of ambient energy moving about, like how the air feels before a thunder storm, tingly and acrid. Thinking they'd inadvertently triggered an alarm, he ordered his men to scan the area for anything that might look like security apparatus, something disguised. Brightfeather commed that the spike had become a wave, increasing in duration and intensity. Coary ordered everyone to fall back. The expanse of flat gravely plain was empty; nonetheless, they formed a security perimeter thirty meters away.

Brightfeather's readings indicated the newer wall material behind the throne had been molecularly altered from within, rejeuvenated as though set back in time to the present. But that present was about two hundred years ago, the time of the archaeological expedition. As far as the energy source, though radiating across all force frequencies, acts as though out of phase with our space, so its exact position is impossible to pinpoint.

A mile or so distant, what looked like the ruins of a small village rose above the plain. Coary ordered everyone back in the shuttle. They needed background information; something was going on here and their presence had been noticed. Was it a mechanical, automatic response as with the buoy, or was there a being of some kind behind it? They may have already tipped their hand. He'd been over his head before with the thought beings, helpless, defenseless. He didn't think this Dark Lord character would show the same indulgence as they had; he wished heartily to avoid finding out.

They flew over to the group of dwellings and approached the village. An ancient, indented road coursed through it. Covering both sides, they crept in. It felt like a cemetery to Coary. He whispered into his mike, "Do you sense that? That vibration? Where is it coming from?"

Members of the team searched the crumbled structures, looking for the serendipitous. It was what they didn't find that caught their attention. Inside, where people lived, there were no traces of any furniture, no wood chairs or tables or beds. Their civilization was at the rudimentary stage, agrarain, non-industrial. So, wood products--organic life--should be plentiful. Nothing carbon-based remained, however. No fibers or telltale signs of once living things.

They continued their investigation. At the middle of the village a broad area that could've been the town square covered a good hundred feet on a side. At its center stood a circle of rough-hewn rocks tumbled down. Once it had been the barrier for a well, now a hole in the ground with dirt at the bottom. They milled about, peering down side trails that led further into the village proper. Coary was debating whether or not to split the team up when Brightfeather pointed to a building off to the side; she held up her hand device to signal she had something. Coary motioned for Owens and told the rest to take up defensive positions.

The structure's walls stood a crumbly four feet or so, much more substantial than the rest of the town. An interior wall separated the front room from a rock stairway leading down. The three of them turned on their suit lights and carefully negotiated the worn steps. At the bottom, Owens tossed a grav-light into the darkness directly ahead, it hovered several feet from the floor. It was a large room dug out from the clay; the interior walls were smoothed as though sanded and brushed. Work benches of wood lined two walls. Nailed to the others were large sheets of some fibrous material, like hemp or papyrus, and on them were drawn pictographs that appeared to be the same language or, at least, the same type as that on the orbs of callasium. In the middle sat a square table, four feet on a side; on it was a clutter of unfamiliar objects that needed to be inspected one at a time.

After who the hell was this guy, the top question on all their minds was why is there organic material like wood and paper here but nowhere else? The contents of the room was somehow immune to whatever had sucked the planet dry of all organic matter. Coary commed for the scientists in the group to come down. A book on the table caught their eye, a diary or work log, thick and ancient. How it managed to survive in such good condition for the past 20,000 years was another mystery. The exolinguist and cryptographer pored over it, trying to decipher its intricate designs. Except for the tablet at the throne room, no other evidence of writing had been found. Concerned over the mysterious energy source back at the throne, Coary grew impatient. He had them scan the first several pages to Bertha.

The others studied the drawings on the wall-hangings and sifted through the collection of strange devices. A fist-sized ball of some pliable material, when squeezed, emited a bright light. When squeezed again, went out. They were tempted to cut into it with a laser knife, but Coary warned them off. They had no idea what would happen. Back at the lab they could examine its inners without surgery. A creature of sticks and twine about two-feet tall lay on the table, on its head were two small sticks. Was it a figure modeling the statue? Was it a puppet or doll? Did it have a purpose or was it just a child's plaything? They all agreed it represented this Dark Lord character in any event. Small piles of different types of rock dust lay in an orderly line beside wooden bowls; in them, granules from each pile were mixed together in varying combinations.

Finley commed the captain to report unusual energy fluctuations at the site of the throne. Coary told him to monitor it and keep in touch. He had a bad feeling and was tempted to abort the mission, but if he did, what then? They hadn't much time to waste and would accomplish nothing by running away. They had to see this through.

"Well, where's this energy source?" Coary asked Brightfeather, a tinge of irritation in his voice.

She replied calmly, unflappable to the end, "At first, the entire room, starting at the bottom of the stairs, was the source. A force field permeated the inner space. Not strong enough to keep anyone out, perhaps to keep something in or to act as a protection. I don't know. I assumed it was coming from the walls and floor and ceiling, something in the mud material. But no, the field itself is its own source, it's self-sustaining. However, now it's concentrated, captain."

She approached the back wall and had the wall-hanging removed. Behind it, a wood door with a recessed knob was set into the hard clay. Surprisingly, it opened easily on silent hinges. Inside was a square box with a lid that slid into grooves. She carried it to the table. It was smooth to the touch with no sign of temporal degradation. Tiny ideograms were inscribed over its entire surface. As everyone stood around the table gaping, she opened it. Inside, a flat piece of shell-like material rested on green felt. She picked it up. Underneath was a folded sheet of paper. On it were more pictographs, only these were stylized and arranged in lines like spokes on a wheel, intersecting at the single character of the horned stick figure. Brightfeather counted the filaments of symbols meeting at the Dark Lord, enclosed in a circle--there were twelve.

Finley came back with an update on the throne energy. "Random fluctuations have settled into a steady, stable frequency. Quantum readings indicate presence of callasium, spherical in shape."

"How did it get betwen the statue and the chair, into solid rock?" asked an incredulous Coary.

"Speculating on events. Do you mind, skipper?"

"No, please do. We need speculation right now."

"Okay, well, we don't fully comprehend its properties, but, for a mineral, it seems to have extraordinary malleability on the atomic level. Its lattice can be ordered to the degree that it can simulate a Bose-Einsten condensate and, possibly--I know this is a longshot--tunnel through solid rock as though a single electron."

But, wouldn't the temperature have to be absolute zero? I don't see how that could've been accomplished. How 'bout,..., what if the dark matter aspect or phase of this callasium, in its hybrid state, could be made dominant, completely enshrouding its visible matter properties?"

"You mean, somehow altering the quantum signature of the visible matter part to resonate identically, as wave forms, with the deeper tones of the dark matter?"

"Yeah, I think, if I follow what the hell you said. Using some piece of equipment then, like an antigrav control unit, could the mineral be pushed through the rock and positioned?"

"That's possible, I suppose; although, I'm not all that familiar with dark matter. On the other hand, suppose it was installed when they built the thing 20,000 plus years ago? Could they have known about callasium then? Two hundred years ago, the archaeological team somehow triggered this device, if that's what it is, in the same manner we did. Proximity sensors? I heard Brightfeather say the rock in the back wall directly behind the throne was revitalized about that time. I see a connection. In any event, it's there and vibrating steadily. May I make a suggestion, captain?"

"No. Thank's Finley. Keep an eye out on the rest of the planet as well. My quantum senses are picking up something nonlocal affecting the atmosphere."

He replied in the affirmative and keyed off.

Bertha was channeled through the comm link for everyone to hear, a protocol Coary had decided at the beginning. He wanted everyone involved. Bertha had determined that the ideograms covering the orbs of callasium were of the same language as those in the diary/log. Having deconstructed the already known pictographs, these additional ones were contributing to the development of a set of ideographic morphemes for the language used by these people--inferred--or, at least, by this person.

She said, "His early writings detail experiments with rare metals and organic material and include diary entries concerning incantations and spells for casting out evil spirits, for curing diseases, and sanctifying newborns. Based on a partial translation of the first several pages of the book, in my opinion, considering the probable degree of enlightenment of the average agrarian society, is that, in ancient Earth parlance, he would be considered a shaman. Most significantly, she continued, he mentions the Dark Lord, represented by an obvious pictograph of a stick figure of the statue. But only in passing as though he'd been around for some time prior to the author. I'm eager to see the whole book; it could tell the story of what happened here."

Coary agreed. Her eagerness was his urgency. He commed the guards, they had nothing to report, all seemed quiet. He asked Finley for status; he replied the situation at the throne remained constant; no indication of any macroscopic planetary activity as well. The weather people declared calm reigning over the entire planet. However, on the micro, they were picking up swirls of energy vortices scattered across the surface.

"Could be incipient tornadoes or sand storms, could be natural, but, coincidences make me extremely uncomfortable."

Coary felt it was a good time to regroup and reassess. He ordered everyone back to the shuttle. They took the wall-hangings, the stick figure, the box with the shell and paper inside, items and devices of possible value, and the diary which Coary took possession of. They cleared out by the numbers, retracing their steps, listening, taking readings as they went. Just before boarding, Brightfeather's personal warning device, set for low-frequency energy, reverberated with a humming sound. It had no point of origin, it appeared sonically everywhere at once. They left a visual transponder array, its camera capable of a 360 degree panorama, on the ground next to the ship. As a last thought, prompted by Brightfeather's warning device, a seismic recorder and transmitter were placed nearby.

After de-suiting, Coary and his team went immediately to the brain center. Objects were put on the table alongside those from the smuggler. Coary handed the diary to the chief investigator. He wanted Bertha to drop, or put on the back burner, whatever she was doing and translate it. Top priority. And when she was finished with that, he was to have the paper with the spoked wheel analyzed, not only for translation, but for significance of spatial arrangement. Why were these twelve filaments pointing at the Dark Lord? Any opinons. He had a hunch, an intuition; it was flooding in with a rush. He needed to assimilate it slowly, put all the puzzle pieces together one at a time. Finley updated him as to status and Coary relieved him. He sat brooding, trying to relax. A yeoman brought him a cup of coffee. In his command chair scanning the semicircle of intrumentation before him, centered by the viewscreen depicting the planet below, he was able to quiet his mind better than in some inner sanctum of solitude. It was his element that induced his sharpest thinking, he opened up to the inconceivable.

He sipped and listened to his crew go about their jobs. Their quiet efficiency and control reassured him. Muscle by muscle, he relaxed into his well-cushioned command chair. X-194 was entering its dark phase, night time for the ghosts of a civilization that once inhabited this world. Coary felt a deep sadness. Twenty thousand years ago something terrible happened, something that ripped life from this entire planet. It smelled of revenge to him; of payback for some grave offence. And there it was again. Something the thought being had said. It struggled to surface. ... he will enter through the thirteenth orb two of your days from now, when the incantation is spoken over it.

He sat up straight, almost spilling his coffee. But the thirteenth orb is here, on the Edgar Poe? He commed the brain center. He wanted to know where the orb was. He was told it was still in the chem lab undergoing tests. And where the incantation hidden in its base? They had it, laying on the table with all the other stuff. His exec was in the command center engaged in discussion with Star Fleet Intelligence. He commed the captain, telling him the Rangers were at the locations of the twelve orbs, in spite of problems with the locals. However, their instruments placed them near the centers of the planets, unreachable. Somehow, they sank of their own accord. They had their hands full with local disturbances, so didn't have the time to pursue it.

Coary said, "It doesn't matter. We don't need the orbs and besides, they did their job. They opened gates and destroying them won't close 'em. Meet me in the brain center."

The forensics lab (brain center) had side rooms for individual discussion and examination of evidence. The smuggler captain was brought in, a guard stood outside. The captain and exec sat across from him. Coary was fed up.

"Listen, dumb shit, you have no idea what you've been party to. The world's about to come to an end. All life in our universe gone forever. Now you're going to help us right now or I will personally throw you out the airlock."He paused to gain control. "What do you know about the thirteenth globe of callasium? Based on information we have so far, it's central to the success of the plot that's unfolding. Weren't you given specific instructions on what to do with it?"

The smuggler, taken aback, stammered at first, "I didn't know, but, that's why I questioned the whole operation. It seemed like too much just to steal. Cat's eyes told me to bury it on Hawking-I, like I said. But not to read the words over it until the morning of, oh shit, it wasn't a date, what good would that do, it was sunrise on the day of the world council meeting, when all the scientists get together in Stephanos. As far as my reckoning goes, that's tomorrow."

"But you chose not to. You see, captain, here's what I'm lookin' at. This orb and the chant over it are absolutely essential, the lynchpin, apparently, to bring an evil being called the Dark Lord into our universe. Yet you had it laying in your room with all your other junk. I don't get how this cat's eyes could've been so negligent and careless. In fact, if I was him, I'd of taken that responsibility on myself. Something is wrong here. I mean, suppose your ship malfunctioned and crashed or we blew you to smitherenes when you failed to stop. It'd be gone, destroyed. How could he have taken that chance? As it turned out, in fact, you decided not to do it, were busy running phony drugs, planned to vacate the entire sector. I'd like to point out that leaving the region would not've helped."

The comm link voice said it wished to enter. Of course. An analyst came in carrying the orb and the piece of paper with the incantaion on it that'd been in its base and laid them on the table. The smuggler jumped to his feet and clasped both hands on his head, his eyes bulged, about as inappropriate a reaction as Coary could imagine, given the circumstances.

He moaned in pain, the guard entered and moved towards him. Coary waved the guard off and stood. "Demetri," he called. "Demetri, what is it? Do you need medical help?"

Regaining control of himself, he stuttered, "It was in my head all along, all this time. This was the plan, his plan. He seared my mind with it. That night. In his house. Drinking. I left the room to take a piss. Something in my drink? An engram inducer? Why would he tell me that way, buried in my subconscious? Why tell me at all?"

He regained his composure, and staring at the orb as though an adversary, sat down. The guard and analyst left and closed the door. Demetri stared at them, his eyes as sharp and alert as a predator. "You're right, captain. If you were him, you'd take that responsibility on yourself. Well, that's exactly what he intends to do. But why plant that in my head? He was a strange creature, alien. I had the feeling he could read my mind, always knowing just what to say and when to say it."

"Plant what," demanded Coary, but with an undertone of compassion.

Demetri absently lit a cigarette. "This orb is meaningless. It doesn't matter where the orb is or if it's thrown into a star. The Hawking-I burial site is a decoy, misleading, intentionally. Somehow, osmosis, telepathy, drugs, an image was placed in my mind. I remember now, having dreams of this, only I thought they were nightmares from too much boozing."

Owens slapped his hand on the table, a resounding thud that brought the attention of the guard momentarily. "Talk!"

He took a drag, then said, "I saw an image of a huge, black chair with a high back. In it is this, I don't know what, tall horned thing, just sitting there. Cat's eyes is standing in front of him, smiling the way he did in his house that night. It made no sense, it didn't relate to anything we were doing, so I ignored it. I figured, with his mention of the Dark Lord, my mind manufactured a dream of him and this thing."

Coary brought up the archaeological report on the table-screen. He rifled through it for a picture of the throne, then spun the viewer for Demetri to see. He gasped in genuine shock. "That's it, that's exactly my dream." Pointing to a position between the podium of runes and the statue, he said, "Cat's eyes was standing right here, facing it. But, in the dream, I could see his face. So I must've been looking at him from the point of view of the statue. This is the Dark Lord guy, right?"

Coary nodded. Could the thought being have his information wrong? Does that seem likely? "Thanks, Demetri. It's almost as though cat's eyes anticipated your capture before you could complete your part. And if you had, it wouldn't have made any difference."

Demetri was led back to his cell, glad to be away from the glistening sphere of callasium. Owens asked, "Can we believe him? Should we? You said you recalled the thought being telling you the Dark Lord will enter through the thirteenth orb."

"Yes, but we identified this one as the thirteenth. Based on what? It was found in Demetri's quarters, laying in a pile of his personal junk."

"Based on it being the thirteenth," Owens replied, a little annoyed.

"Yeah, but suppose this one is just a decoy. And the one in the throne is the thirteenth."

"But the set of pictographs depicts our spacetime, our universe. Why go to the trouble of doing that? Why not just gibberish?"

"A professional knows the importance of detail," countered the captain.

"Yes, but, cat's eyes couldn't know Demetri would be caught by us. He couldn't know what incredible lengths we'd go to in order to determine what the pictographs stood for. Or that we'd succeed. He couldn't know Demetri would spill his guts. He couldn't know we'd come into possession of this orb. As far as the pics go, cat's eyes also couldn't know that Demetri had scanned them to his computer. And without those and the holocube incantations to be said over them, any future knowledge of Demetri's capture would be meaningless, at least to him. We would've never known about the master plan, such as Demetri conceived it, even after his capture.

"He said he scanned them for insurance. But how does that give you insurance? Blackmail against throwing him under a bus if they got caught? What good would that do? Some random-looking sets of strange designs relating to what? They were evidence to further implicate him in a vast conspiracy, if it was ever found out, like it has."

"I think cat's eyes knew about the pics on the computer and Demetri's holding onto the holcubes after they served their purpose," said the captain, "and may have put the idea to scan them into his head along with what we just saw. How, I don't know. Telepathy? Resonant implantation? Cat's eyes told him just enough truth to make it sound real. Demetri had in mind some extravagant interplanetary bank job. That's what he was led to believe."

"It all sounds pretty far-fetched," commented Owens. "A combination of total luck and accidental discovery."

"Moreover, we would have to know that stopping the magical words from being uttered would undermine the Dark Lord's plan of conquest. Even Demetri didn't know that, he was in a whole other world altogether. What we found on his ship got us so far. Our brain trust and Bertha deduced what the pictographs represented, and Intelligence cross-referenced them with a few pictures of the runes from an old expedition report. Fine, but that left us stumped. It was my dream with the thought being that revealed the background and gave us the big picture. Cat's eyes had nothing to do with that.

"Nonetheless, he left that piece of paper with the circles and lines in his closet, sure to be found in the event we captured Demetri and pumped him for information, and not otherwise. Was that a mistake? It jibes with what the thought being said as well as what Demetri said about when the final nail was to be put in the coffin. But, I'd like to point out, not where. That was all our doing. We connected those dots."

"Right. That's true. Otherwise, our presence would've hinged on a series of accidents that led to Demetri recollecting, violently, apparently," said Owens.

"Yes, and if we didn't have a picture of the throne to show him, to jog his mind further, we wouldn't be sure we were in the right place. If cat's eyes put that image in his head, he would've had to have known about the archaeological expedition. Wouldn't he?"

"Not necessarily. It may be a very strong image in his own mind which, somehow, was imprinted on Demetri's"

"However it transpired, by intent or osmosis, cat's eyes gave him the orb along with the others; he kept it and didn't have to bury it until some time before tomorrow morning, 0600. I'm betting this orb's real and only purpose was to resonate with that memory inserted into Demetri's head, of cat's eyes performing the final ritual. Here, right below us. They are the masters of crystal design, the thought being said, something like that should be relatively simple. Demetri's drinking and sleeping with all thirteen crystals, he suppressed it, except in his dreams. Until now."

"Yes, but, we never would've found that drawing in cat's eyes house if we hadn't captured Demetri," rebutted Owens. "And that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been smuggling counterfeit diphtheria drugs--our reason for coming out here, remember--and tried to make his escape right under our nose. If we hadn't captured Demetri, we wouldn't be here now or even ever heard of planet X-194."

"I see your point, Stew. What we've arrived at hinges on Demetri, what was on his computer, the holocubes, and the archaeological report from two hundred years ago. One thing led to the other. But that's only on the surface and only gets us so far. It connects the runes on X-194 with the pics on Demetri's computer and what they stand for. It was the thought being who gave us the history of this Dark Lord and his motivation and how he planned on taking over our universe."

"Right. And here we are over X-194, specifically, the site of the throne of the Dark Lord, an embedded sphere of callasium inside it that seems to be coming to life as we speak." Owens paused, then said, "We were led here, deliberately, by arrangement."

Coary sat in silence for a moment. So many contingencies, serendipitous discoverires, and miraculous breakthroughs. Is cat's eyes a double agent, masking his true intentions from his employer so as not to suffer terrible consequences, yet trying to pass the word of impending doom--time and place--as secretively as he could? Could he have seen what was to happen and mentally coerced or manipulated Demetri into doing what he did? Had he been putting thoughts into Demetri's mind all along? The diphtheria scam? Escaping from Rhea when he did? Did he see it all? Or is he only partially responsible, gifted but only playing probabilites, and some other being entirely is at work behind the scenes?

"And if Demetri had gone through with it..."

"We'd never know," interrupted Owens. "He'd be waiting on Hawking-I for the right time to say the triggering speech, an unknown player in a plot to canabilize the entire universe including himself.

"It's occured to me, captain," Owens began in a more confidential tone, "that it might just be that our presence here has been orchestrated by someone else, someone in the background, another player we have yet to hear from. Someone more powerful than this Dark Lord."

"I've had the same thought, Stew. Consider: Would we have known about this some other way if we hadn't bumped into Demetri?"

The comm link buzzed. "Bertha has finished translating the diary. She has a report. Would you like to hear it?"

"Yes, by all means," the captain responded.

Bertha started off with, "Ideograms capture the essence of a universe like equations the essence of the physical laws that govern and shape the invariant symmetric features representing a universe. They are both symbol and substance, form and function."

"Please, Bertha, we haven't time for your philosophical flights," interjected Coary.

"Very well," she sounded miffed, if a vast artificial intelligence running in a DNA-gel environment could have its feelings hurt. "A brief synopsis follows," she said frostily. "The Dark Lord appeared to the shaman when his astral spirit entered that dimension or was open to it. He was offered a deal: Power over dark matter in exchange for pictographs depicting the essential ingredients and restructured geometry of his twelve dark universes, the source of his power. Naively, he agreed. One by one, he had the runes inscribed on stone tablets in front of a statue of the Dark Lord, which the people had built according to his specifications. The shaman was satisfied and used his new power to help his people in many ways. But, while immersed in dreamland one night, the Supreme Being, creator of this universe, came to him and warned him of the Dark Lord's true intention: to use the runes to bring him into this universe as a living being with his dark matter capabilities intact."

"The Supreme Being?" questioned Coary.

"Yes, that's how it's referenced in the diary. What its true nature might be is anybody's guess. May I go on?"

"Yes, well, please continue."

"How this was to be accomplished is unclear. Verbally reciting what the pictographs stand for, a language the sound of which, unfortunately, we have no knowledge, supposedly would suffice. After learning of the Dark Lord's intentions, he began experimenting with alternate timelines, phase transitions, projecting his astral self into other dimensions, traveling the spirit realm amongst what he calls the magical community. Based on his writings, members can be characterized as possessing special gifts enabling them to produce supernatural effects or control events in nature, not the least of which is being able to modulate consciousness frequency in order to move between dimensions of space and time. His main concern seems to be branching to an acceptable parallel universe or alternate timeline, depending on your point of view and understanding," an undertone of condescension sparked the air, "just prior to the Dark Lord's wrath, thus escaping total annihilation, thus saving all life on his home. In fact, the wall-hangings depict possible parallels.

"The shaman completed the last rune and inscribed it into the tablet. The Dark Lord was ready, but--here it gets a little sketchy--the shaman kept putting him off with excuses only he could know. Arrangements of constellations weren't quite right, the moons had to line up just so, harvest demands, epidemics that needed attending to. The Dark Lord became suspicious, the shaman could sense it. He wished to thwart his entrance into this realm; he was convinced the havoc he would cause would be on a cosmic scale. So, reversing the direction of the pictographs, all twelve, he devised a spell that would send him back to his plane of existence--dark matter. The drawing found in the box in his studio/work room has all the markings of this spell. I've only examined one of the sets thus far. Reversing the direction does not mean simply to write, and thus speak, the sequence of pictographs backwards. The sequence must be written in inverted fashion, from the insides out, so to speak, like the involute to an evolute. Inverted It would send him back to the dark realm and put an end to his intrusion.

"But unfortunately, the Dark Lord, ever the paranoid, searched his mind while he slept and uncovered the scheme. That was twenty thousand years ago. The shaman wrote: 'Great Father, protect us on our journey, and welcome us into your domain.' There were no further diary entries."

They sat, unable to speak. Time drifted by in a haze. What were they dealing with exactly? A powerful being of dark matter, a shaman capable of accessing other dimensions and casting spells and incantaions, a strange mineral with properties halfway between dark matter and the visible world. And this cat's eyes being from the space intermediate, a hybrid, serving the ends of the Dark Lord. Were they out of their league once again? Coary hoped not, but, time was running out and they had to come up with something.

Finley at the helm commed in. "Excuse me, sir, but you told me to let you know about any changes on the surface."

"Yes, commander, what's up?"

"The weather's increased intensity to a full-blown wind storm, sand and gravel flying everywhere. The uplink is holding steady, however. The seismometer is exhibiting a low rumble emanating from a couple of miles down. Cause unknown. Tectonic activity zero. I don't think another trip to the surface is advisable or even possible. And the callasium ball is radiating a steady stream of particles. They have mass and energy but don't fit the profile of any known species. I've managed to augment the visual sensor array, shifting the infrared to optical. We have the throne on viewscreen."

Coary keyed in the viewer. A large carved rock with sand swirling around it popped into sight, surrounded by a gravely plain, nothing visibly happening. "What if," he began, putting his palms together. "What if this cat's eyes creature was preparing for the invasion of our universe against his will, fearful of the consequences of his refusal? This Dark Lord character doesn't seem the type to have many friends. What if he did know the future. That would explain implanting the image of him in front of the throne into Demetri's subconscious. Dark matter does tend to permeate visible matter; he could've assimilated some subconscious thoughts that cat's eyes wanted him to know. We could've discovered it with the neuro modulator if we'd asked the right question. Or, if Demetri hadn't been so overcome by proximity to all the orbs at once, suppressing his memory, it may have surfaced long ago. Perhaps that's what cat's eyes wanted."

"Why didn't he just tell him? He didn't have to bring in the master plan."

"Tell him outright that he was the one to say the final incantation over another orb on such and such a planet and that his was a decoy intended only to remind him of that? Then everything that's happened wouldn't have. Demetri probably would've just thrown the orb away or sold the callasium. Maybe that's why he didn't intend to follow through. Somehow, suppressed though it was, he knew it was a waste of effort. Telling him would've spoiled a plan cat's eyes has. I see it now. This cat's eyes character left bread crumbs for us to follow. Clues to the time and place. This has to happen and we're supposed to be here."

"That's putting an awful lot of importance on something so risky, so tenuous as a buried thought in the mind of a drunk overcome by unknown effects of a rare mineral. It was purely accidental that Demetri happened to be here when the orb was brought in. What if that didn't happen? What if we'd blown them out of the sky?"

"Remember, Stew, we followed our noses here. We gathered all the information from forensics and Bertha and without any regard to this thirteenth orb, we were pushed in this direction--X-194. The thought being told me that cat's eyes had devised the plan, but not that he'd be here, just that he was going to speak over the thirteenth orb, which, we're still not sure, is not this one."

"This is driving me crazy," said Owens. "Let's get our priorities straight. Save the universe, then later we can sit around discussing the ins and outs."

"Agreed. And how do you recommend we do that?"

"Fire a maximum yield corbinite missile at the son of a bitch, blow it to tiny fragments, particles, pieces of empty space."

Coary studied his first officer and long time friend. He had little patience for the cautious approach, especially when the stakes were high. Coary, for his part, found himself thinking along the same lines.

"Okay, but before we try blowing up the planet, let's sum-up. What do we have? This cat's eyes creature is supposed to show up here, we think, to say his thing that will open the gate of hell and allow the Dark Lord, with the help of callasium, invade our space, riding the waves of his twelve dark universes already set in motion. Their gravity waves must not be sufficient to alter the geometry, just destabilize it like throwing stones in a pond, soften it up, make it more pliable, that's where his royal darkness comes in. But he can't do that unless he's present in the here and now, channeled through the dual-identitied callasium crystal, to become corporeal. So, we need to stop that. Simple enough, huh?"

"Right," replied Owens. "Simple."

They left the command center for the bridge, Coary relieved his chief engineer. The huge viewscreen showed the throne, engulfed in shearing sand. His communications officer said, "We've been monitoring proceedings back in the quadrant. Space Fleet says the gravity waves from all twelve planets have almost reached one another. By tomorrow morning, their interference waves will overlap, causing major disruptions region-wide. All shipping has been grounded. Asteroids are being watched extra carefully, their trajectories are sure to be affected. Rangers patrol the outback, ready to blow away or guide to a star any straying rocks."

Coary hadn't slept for a day and a half, but only a few hours remained. It was too late to try to check in with the thought being. He drank more coffee. In the optical spectrum he noticed a brightness coming from the general vicinity of the callasium. He switched to infrared. The sphere was radiating well beyond the limits of the tiny building. Shrouded by whirling sand, he barely noticed a lithe figure standing before the throne. He told his sensory data tech to focus in on that area and enhance the image. He wanted an optical picture. The best she could do was reveal an electric outline of whoever was standing there. And his back was to the camera.

Coary had a feeling, an instinct, a thought. He said to Owens sitting next to him, "Let's assume that this character is cat's eyes. Who else would it be? How he got here is unimportant. We've met beings with special dimensional and phase shifting capabilities, so we know he could've very well just appeared there out of the blue, or the dark, as it were. Emerging into our spacetime from the realm of dark matter the way we do from quantum space. Only without a ship. So let's infer he has special skills. Suppose he chooses to read his script before the time we've concluded is the moment the Dark Lord enters our world and proceeds to destroy it?"

The captain was speaking in a very calm, controlled voice with exaggerated enunciation as though lecturing to students at the academy. Owens knew from experience that this behavior always preceded a decisive act. Coary rose to pace the upper ring, examining instrument screens as he went. Passing his crew, loyal, smart, tough--Rangers. Most he'd known for years on the Edgar Poe, a few from other assignemnts. They knew the stakes and didn't falter. He couldn't let them down.

When he arrived at weapons station, he told the officer to arm a carbonite missile, one mile blast radius, aimed directly at the throne. In the tense, quiet atmosphere, everyone heard. Coary returned to his seat and stared at the optical picture of the throne with someone standing before it. He looked to Owens who nodded. He was about to give the order to fire when a thin, short, gnarly figure of a man dressed in leather abruptly appeared in front of him. He assumed it was the thought being, the avatar, but that couldn't be, he reminded himself, they lived elsewhere.

"Stop," the old man cried in a loud, clear voice. "Don't fire." Everyone around the ring turned to gape. Was this the Dark Lord? thought Coary. Not very intimidating.

"Who are you," the captain asked, wary of deceptive packaging and people who pop out of nowhere. "Are you a thought being?"

The visitor smiled, "Heavens no. We don't need them. Their childish antics have been undone, else we wouldn't be here."

"We? Could you elaborate on that? And you didn't answer my first question." Coary decided to take the initiative, materializing in your wheelhouse demands no less. And he was tired, he wanted to get to the bottom of it.

"Mind if I sit down?" he asked mildly, as though he'd been expected.

Coary gestured at the chair on his other side. The old man walked slowly to it and got comfortable.

"My name is Simbottu. I am from far away now. You must have many questions. Let me explain and perhaps they'll be answered. We haven't much time." He pulled a pipe from his worn jacket and lit it, the smell was sweet and inoffensive. "You know of the Dark Lord and of what is about to happen. But only on the surface. You have my diary and have translated it into your words. Twenty thousand years ago, the Dark Lord and I had bargained. But in my eagerness to provide for my people, I didn't think it through. I had a vision that told me of his deceit, so I decided to undo what I had done in my naivete. But he discovered my plan and moved to destroy not only me but my entire planet, all my people and the animals, all living things, all life, to extinguish every trace. Such was his rage."

He paused to gander about at the bridge and puff on his pipe. He seemed to relax into the cushioned, high-backed chair. At ease in spite of the situation. Coary wasn't sure if that made him feel more or less secure. If this was the shaman, thought Coary, he was certainly well-preserved for his age.

"But before he could exact his revenge, I put our escape plan into effect. I had found, in my explorations of other temporal dimensions, another timeline that suited me. With the help of the Supreme Being, we shifted to another plane of existence, yet within this universe, our home. The Dark Lord's fury drove him insane. Unable to enter our universe as an individual corporeal being, his ultimate desire, he turned his wrath on the universe of the thought beings. Big mistake."

He stopped to stare at the viewscreen, the optical rendering aswirl in sand, yet standing before it the figure of a man was plainly visible. "He was constrained all these years, his heart grew darker still. With time, he neutralized the energy of those thoughts enwrapping him and devised a plan. He recruited the aid of the people who dwell between, they have no name. Knowing of the Dark Lord's hatred of me, the leader sought me out in our timeline through the channels that bind. He said he wished not to comply with the Lord, he wished not to have him loose again to terorize the multiverse and all that's contained within. But he had no choice, the hybrid dimensions are easily susceptible to absorption. All the pople and all the worlds were in danger of extermination. I told him of my reversal spell. Together we devised a plan."

The pleasant smoke of his pipe curled above his head and filtered out to the massive wheelhouse. Coary, anxiety dissipating, asked Simbottu if he'd like some ttea. He nodded and smiled, a yeoman brought two cups; Owens declined, focusing instead on studying this tiny man, but in a nonintrusive way.

He turned to the captain and said, "The Dark Lord must not be allowed to enter. But if we only block him, he'll find another way, and his anger will be terrible." He sipped ttea, his eyes sparkled, then he smiled at the captain and said, "You call him cat's eyes, my partner." He pointed at the screen. "That's him. What you have only guessed about him is close to the truth, but there is much more. But time is wasting, here's the plan.

"At the proper moment, he'll recite the final key to open the gate through which the Dark Lord will enter this spacetime and assume individual corporeality. His dream. Yet in possession of his space-transforming capabilities. This is when he is vulnerable, at that moment of incarnation. At that moment, I shall appear before the tablet of runes and speak the reversal spells, sending each dark universe he has unleashed back to its proper domain. When I finish, and all are gone, returned, then I will finish the Dark Lord forever.

"Our plan is not to only push him back into his realm but to extinguish his existence in all realms simultaneously, once and for all, thus liberating the twelve universes he conquered. They will eventually restore themselves as they were meant to be, healed of the imposed death of dark matter."

Coary didn't know what to say, at first. It took a few moments to absorb. Finally he said, "It sounds like you and your friend have it all figured out. So why in the hell are we here?"

Simbottu's wrinkled features tightened. "While I'm reciting the reversal spells, he can attack me with a single thought, stopping me before I've gotten very far. Obviously, a crucial time period. I must say them precisely and with the proper emphasis, else they won't work. In my travels through time and space, I've come to know of the Space Rangers and this ship through the thought beings. Your ship has powerful weaponry and tools. You wonder why you're here. Well, you've been brought here to perform a job. At the instant of his incarantion, he needs to be held in space, unable to exert any influence beyond his desired corporeal form. Surrounded by an envelope of quantum spatial elements oriented in a direction counter to his, will prevent his movement of either thought or body. That will give me the time to retract the twelve dark universes."

Coary was dumbfounded. He commed for his science officer, Brightfeather, and Finley, requesting their presence. They all retired to the off-bridge conference room to discuss it. Simbottu repeated what he said. How he even knew about such things should've surprised Coary, but it was too late, he was beyond that possibility. Brightfeather understood the principles but not how to implement them. How do you create a cloud of elemental spatial units and shoot it at a very tiny space from a ship hovering far above the planet?

Finley, ever the optimist, saw a use for his reverse-crystal invention. It was intended to retract spacetime to an area of space smaller than Planck scale, causing the ship to fall between the interstitial cracks into the primordial void, thus escaping the thought beings. But, fortunately, they never had to test it. He discussed it with Brightfeather. After a brief flurry of obscure techno-converstaion, an excited Finley announced he thought they could do it. Briefly, replacing the crystal in the auxiliary quark generator and then reversing the direction of flow, if they could aim it accurately, they could transmit a confined beam onto a limited spot.

Coary cringed noticeably. Assuming they could generate inversely-oriented spatial elementals, how would they be transmitted? He was afraid to ask. Effectively, because the Dark Lord's spacetime configuration would be that of this universe, what they'd be creating was anti-spacetime. Is that safe? Would it tear a hole in the fabric instead, unleashing all of dark matter? Or create a fairly large black hole, swallowing us and the star system to boot? But, as Simbottu said, time was running out.

He told Brightfeather and Finley to get on it; they left for the engine room. He turned to their visitor and said, "What else do you need?"

"You have the box with the reversal spell; that, I must have."

"Of course." he commed the brain center for the piece of parchment found in the box. "Why didn't you take it with you, to this new timeline?"

"I feared if I did, he could use it to track us. I left it here with a spell to keep it from deteriorating. Besides, captain, we are still below. When the Dark Lord moved to assimilate all life, he activated a phase transition into another timeline. He believed the resulting emptiness and desolation was his doing, but it is only an illusion of time displacment, counterfeit. We dared not shift back. Dark matter still roamed the planet in spite of his imprisonment. But now, we will rid our world of its deadly grip."

"What's the name of your planet?" asked Coary. "I felt awful that we only knew it as X-194."

"I can not speak it yet. Not yet." A look of reverance and nostalgia flickered across his weathered face.

The chief forensics investigator brought in the box, unannounced; they were past such protocol. News of the shaman had spread quickly through the ship. He informed the skipper that the entire brain trust was down in engineering helping Finley. Bertha was simulating various configurations, optimizing, working out calculations. Charmed and intrigued and brimming with questions, he took a chair next to the visitor. Simbottu opened the box and picked up the flat shell, held it to the light and whispered something. Then placed it carefully on the table. Not so gingerly, he pulled out the folded parchment and spread it on the table. The characters hadn't faded; in fact, they still held their crisp edges and subtle curls. He examined them one at a time as a physicist might when scrutinizing his equations, checking for contradictions, missing variables, completeness, errors. Satisfied, he refolded it and placed it in a leather pouch strapped diagonally across his chest.

The analyst was an avid anthropologist, among other things. The opportunity to interview the keeper of the culture of a civilization that, on record, at least, had passed into oblivion 20,000 years ago was a strong temptation, but given the circumstances, hardly seemed appropriate. How had he managed to stay alive all these years? What secrets does he possess about time travel? A world of questions would have to wait, probably forever.

Finley commed in to say they had a prototype and requested permission to test it on one of the village dwellings. Coary told him to get on with it and report back immediately after.

Three hours until the sun peeked over the mountains--approximately, 0600.

Coary asked the shaman why they didn't contact Space Fleet sooner so they could come up with a joint plan already in place. Simbottu smiled and said, "The Dark Lord's spies are everywhere. Cat's eyes, his movements, his conversations, his contacts were all no doubt observed. We had to wait until the last minute and hope that you and your people could pull it off." He smiled more broadly. Coary had the feeling he had something up his sleeve he wasn't going to reveal. Some backup plan. At least, he hoped that's why he was smiling.

Brightfeather commed in that after a few attempts, they succeeded in holding the cloud in a coherent volume of space, wrapping it in a magnetic field, equal to the size of the statue, if that, indeed, is how this Dark Lord looks.

Coary asked, "What did you use to project it?"

She replied, casually, "We converted the gamma ray canon. Some residual gamma particles from the inner surface might mix in with the spatial elementals, but I don't see that as a problem."

You hope, Coary muttered to himself as he keyed off. The time was nearing, Coary wanted to be in his command chair overseeing operations. The shaman expressed a desire to be alone to prepare himself. But first, he told the captain that when cat's eyes has completed speaking the runes, the Dark Lord will be manifest, corporeal in the sense of sharing a part of the nature of our spacetime. That is the moment to fire the canon. Cat's eyes will vanish from your screen and I will appear. In between that heart beat, you must restrain the Dark Lord. I will face the tablet and recite the counter spells for each. Then, if all has gone to plan, I will turn to face him to say the final word that will banish him to the realm of darkness for all time.

"When I am gone, that will be your signal to fire that missile and obliterate the infected stone and the sphere of callasium, closing the gate."

Both Owens and he understood and left for the bridge, leaving Simbottu to collect his thoughts and marshal his strength. The sand storm on the viewscreen had subsided. Cat's eyes was now clearly visible. He stood perfectly still, facing the throne, his tall lean figure draped by a long black robe evoked the image of a religious ceremony. Fatigued, Coary drifted off to days when a boy attending church with his mother and sister. Sometimes, a priest, kneeling on the bottom step of the altar, would periodically wave a coppery canister of smoking incense. He'd sit up close in order to smell its fragrant aroma; it soothed his nerves and opened him to his surroundings. Curious, he thought, the shaman's pipe smoke smelled remarkably similar.

"Captain, sir?" Owens was calling him. "Things are about to happen. Here, Brian, drink this." He handed him a cup of coffee.

After a few sips that cleared out the cobwebs, he focused his mind on the job at hand. "Finley, you and your gang, ready?"

"Yes sir. We have the throne in the cross-hairs."

"Remember now, when his royal darkness appears, he'll no doubt be in front of the statue. So be flexible and ready to adjust."

"Aye, aye, skipper."

Coary turned his attention to the main viewscreen, the storm was all but gone. A sidescreen held the image of the eastern horizon, the edge of sunlight brightening the sky as the planet turned, unaware of the event about to take place on its barren wasteland. As the whole bridge watched, cat's eyes turned towards the stone tablet of runes and began to read them off. Their angle was such that with the sand and gravel dissipated and resolution enhanced, thanks to Bertha, they could see his lips move and, strikingly, his yellow cat-like eyes. With each rune completed, the callasium sphere registered an exponential leap in energy across all scales, sending out waves of co-mingling order and disorder at the interface between the dark and visble universes.

After the sixth rune, cat's eyes sidestepped to begin the rest. He was a cool customer; Coary found himself wishing he'd known him; at least, what his real name was. He had to play it straight right to the end. Act as though bringing the Dark Lord into this time and space continuum, to wreak havoc and plunge it into a neverending emptiness of spirit and life, was all he lived for, his greatest moment, his destiny.

After the ninth rune, the callasium engulfed the entire throne with a bright light, luminous and shimmering. This was unexpected. To Cat's eyes too, apparently, as he turned his head to look over his shoulder. When he returned to the tablet, concern showed on his face. But not fear. Quickly now, he read the next two runes, one remained. A hole, black as night, appeared at the center of the throne, inside the callasium sphere. A three-dimensional image revealed it to be spiral-shaped, a funnel spinning madly. Cat's eyes grabbed the stone podium with both hands, his robe billowed outwardly towards the throne. His eyes showed anger and determination. He meant to complete his part even if it cost him his life. He recited the last rune slowly and deliberately, mouthing all the words that the pictographs stood for one at a time.

Finished, the brightness of the sphere was immediately enshrouded in darkness, a cloud, an outline of space where nothing was. Cat's eyes spun. Out of the blackness stepped an incredible figure, eight-feet tall with another two feet of horns. Holding his arms up to the morning sky, his face was twisted in a grimace through which he smiled.

"Finley," yelled the captain as he stood to approach the screen. Two things happened at once: a quivering envelope of quantum-space elementals, cohering in a magnetically sealed cocoon, enclosed the giant of darkness, and cat's eyes magically disappeared. As soon as Coary thought of the tiny shaman in the private conference room, he popped into view on screen, facing the tablet. The Dark Lord's countenance was a twisted mess of agony, hate, and hostility. He squirmed inside his restraints which buckled and snapped at random places.

"Finley, you're losng stability, firm it up, boost it, route the quark drive through the canon's firing unit."

Momentarily, like flicking a switch, the shroud tightened, its boundary now crisp and solid. Simbutto held the parchment above the runes and began to speak. As he completed one reversal spell after the other, the engraved pictographs vanished, leaving behind smooth, bare stone. The Dark Lord was furious. His facial features moved in contorted twitches as though a powerful wind was blowing him back.

Simbutto finished the last of the incanatations sending all twelve dark universe back where they came from. Instantly, their effects would be gone, allowing the normal gravity fields to reform as before. The shaman then faced the Dark Lord. They stood only a few feet apart, a gigantic ten-foot monster of hate and desolation and a short, grizzly, old man in leather clothes. The Dark Lord, surprise riddling his face, recognized Simbutto. His eyes narrowed with rage. He fought to free himself from his restraints, but without his dark-matter powers, he was helpless. Simbutto stepped closer and uttered the word Ajeebwa, the name of his planet, his people, and the god of Life three times. The Dark Lord's eyes widened as his corporeal self dissolved into an oily, black, irregular cloud of smeared anti-matter. The callasium sphere reshaped itself and funneled the Dark Lord's essence back to his own domain, forever compromised.

Simbutto turned to look up at the Edgar Poe. He smiled, held up a hand, then was gone. Without hesitation, Coary gave the order to fire. The corbinite missile obliterated everything for a mile in radius. When the dust cleared, in the bright morning sunlight, nothing but a large crater remained where the throne, podium, and tablet once stood. Shouts erupted on the brige and all through the ship. It would take time for them to comprehend fully what just transpired and their role in it, but for now, it was time to celebrate Ranger's style. Coary's wish was to get as far away from X-194 as possible, and immediately. He ordered the nav-officer to chart a course for Hawking-I and don't spare the horses.

He was starved and exhausted, the adrenaline rush quickly cascading. He handed the bridge over to the nav-officer, Owens needed sleep as badly as he. Coary retired to his quarters to grab a bite and to collapse into a heap of forgetfulness. He ordered food through the synthesizer and plopped onto his bunk. That was all it took. Within seconds he was in dreamland. He dreamed of going to the park with his girlfriend when he was in his early twenties. They would pretend to be other people, call each other by different names, walk on opposite sides of the street and then pretend to just meet. They played at life and lived it to the full, making it up as they went along. After years of happiness, it unraveled, his selfishness destroyed it. The dream changed. He was sitting on a cliff edge high above a bay, taking in the view, a view he never would've seen had he and his girlfriend not split up. He tossed in this dream state, it was uncomfortable. Abruptly, it changed again. Floating in empty black space, he heard a voice, a now familiar voice.

"Greetings, captain. I see you've been successful. The threat to us is gone, hopefully, forever. But we intend to keep watch. I must go see my old friend Simbutto and thank him. We've had many a splendid conversation over the millennia, or, what's millennia to you. As I am able to contact you on this plane, so will he from now on. You've made good friends, captain Coary. Don't blow it."

Coary meant to ask him who ran that show? How did that all come about? But the thought being was gone. Seconds passed as he drifted downward, crashing hard. He slept the sleep of the dead, snug in the embrace of his life-giving universe, his home.

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