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Prelude

Fine, fine.  

You call it a 'golden age'.  Thats Wokao.  Big smelly Wokao.  Those years were the years of a nervous peace.  A damn crazy peace.  Earth was all fine and dandy.  

But you know, a peace built on the back of suffering don't last long.  So Earth was all perfect, but all the people they didn't want were ignored.  The homeless, the poor, the cykes, the genehacked were shipped to the fekhole of Mars.

So it wasn't a golden age, and you know what?  They deserved what was coming to them.  All of 'em.  So if you want to understand the Last Renaissance, you need to start with the fekky life the Hemera Nyx was stuck in...



Chapter 1

SIGHTER: We're burning back to Mars.  We're gonna be out of range of GemSat and the Metanet soon.
FAILE: Fek.  I hate the interplanetary delay.  Too forsaken slow.
SIGHTER: Me too.  These nonvox messengers use the most nuked-up servers... Why is it vox gets all the speed anyhow?
FAILE: Nobody uses nonvox much anymore.
SIGHTER: Nuke.  I gotta go.  This faraj of a ship is shaking.  Sil probably needs me.
FAILE: Talk to yah next time your Earthside.
SIGHTER: Yah.
--Except from Messenger Transcripts, Server GemSat 52, Near-Lunar Orbit.




Somewhere in the Vacuum 'tween Mars and Earth; March 12th, 20 YU.

The rocking of the ship interrupted Benjamin Savka as he typed on his mark-seven Lark holoputer.  The Holos floating in circles around his head flashed as the power fluxuated throughout his small, cramp and rusted quarters.  The twenty-year-old cursed as he ended his chat over the Metanet.  He ran a hand in his thick brown hair, pulling a strand of hair from out of his eyes.

Then the comm panel attached to the thick rusted silksteel beeped.  A raspy, cocky voice buzzed from the panel, catching Benjamin's attention.  “Sighter!  I need you to get your nuking anal up here, amigo!”

That was Jeddaka Silva.  The old og liked to call Benjamin 'Sighter' some old reference the younger man didn't quite understand.  Savka assumed it referred to his little psychic abilities, but knowing Silva it was probably something much, much more dirty.  Most likely involving anal nuking a chicken.  “Whats going on?”

Silva paused for a moment before answering.  “Our humble fekheads from the other day have decided to nuke our anal.  They didn't appreciate our nuking them up.”

“You mean the Dominion transport from yesterday? Nuking-A!  I thought you said the Raddies wouldn't have a clue about us taking their hold!”  Savka replied.  They had stolen about a hundred tonage worth of goods from a Reformed Asian Dominion transport.  The Raddies were supposed to unaware of the whole deal.  “You sure its the Raddies?”

“Nuke yes!  Do you nukin' think I want the Nyx to get fekked up? Get  your anal up here, Sighter.  Haram, I need you to sight 'em for me.” Silva sounded angry and surprised.  Nyx was Silva's nickname for the Hemera Nyx, the name of their ship.  Or rather, Silva's ship.  Sighter turned off his holo and put a shirt on.  

“I'll be up there soon, keep your haram pants on, you old og.”  And with that, he turned off the comm panel.  Benjamin opened the door of quarters into corridor outside it.  The narrow catwalk in the corridor connected the cockpit at the front of the Hemera Nyx to the engines in the back.  In the middle it connected to the other rooms and airlocks throughout the spaceship.  The corridor was barely three feet across.

Sighter stepped into the corridor, and almost fell over the woman walking down it.  Sighter found himself looking down at the petite yet very angry look of Rae Borecky.  

“Get out of my way, Eyes.” She growled, her auburn locks in a tangle.  He quickly jumped out of the Ex-marine's warpath.  He shook his head as she marched angrily down toward the rear of the ship.

“Nuking Omnite,” He muttered.  Borecky was a ex-marine; formerly a member of the Omn-Quebec Regime's elite marine corps.  Sighter knew nothing about the Omn-Quebec regime, hell, no one did.  It was a closed tiny nation on Earth most people ignored, a isolationist little angry parcel of land.  

Benjamin sprinted up the catwalk of the corridor toward the Cockpit.  It wasn't far, but he felt himself become weightless for a moment as he crossed from the artificial gravity of the corridor to the cockpit's artificial gravity.  There was about a two foot space that one could cross and actually become weightless between the two fields.  It was a sort of threshold of zero gravity.

Sitting in a chair akin to a armchair, except most of the upholstery was long gone and almost all of the rusty silksteel was visible, was Jeddaka Silva. There were no windows of the space outside, and behind his chair was a pair of lawn chairs, bolted to the stained floor.  His chair sat in the front of a mess of floating flat holo images, each holo held a variety of images from the cameras from all over the ship.  

Also before Silva's throne was a mess of wires, fuses, buttons and a variety of levers, most of which had varying forms of stickers on them.  Each sticker had a different position from the Kama Sutra, yoga, tai chi and the waltz.  Jeddaka Silva himself was not out of place in the narrow cockpit.  

The right half of the black-skinned man was heavily scarred, something he never talked about.  His other half of his body, his 'pretty half' as Jeddaka put it, was tattooed heavily with a variety of beautiful, yet naked women riding various dragons.  His fierce hazel eyes looked from screen to screen as Sighter sat down in one of the lawn chairs behind him.   

“I'm here.” Sighter's voice caused Silva to jump a tiny bit, but the older man still managed to attempt to disguise his surprise as a clever move on his part.  

Silva turned and gave Sighter a quick affirmative look and turned back to the holo images floating in front of him.  He pointed at a black image to the right of his head.  “They shot our nuking anal cams, amigo.  The Ogs got us blind.  And I think they're about to nuke us a new fekhole.”

“Thats just bleedy pretty, Sil.” Sighter sighed and got ready for it.

“I need you to use your pretty little brain power and go get me a nuking location on the sons of soabi once they get tired of talkin' to me.” Silva smiled as he spoke.  Sighter cocked a eyebrow in curiosity.

“What did you say?” The younger pale-skinned man asked.

“Nothin' more than describing their mothers' tiny vaginas.  The usual pretty stuff.”  Silva gave Ben a big smile as he flicked a button.  “Give me a direction so I can tell where to turn our cams on the nukers.”

“Sure, sure.” Sighter closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment.



Rae Borecky squeezed through the tiny access tube to the small railgun turret on the belly of the Hemera Nyx.  The Omnite woman was petite and wore her short hair with pride.  Right now she was cursing with pride about the cheap nature of Silva and his ship's access tubes.  

“Fek, Sil, hows about a damn tube wider than a foot?”  The Ex-marine barely fit in the narrow tube, let alone maneuver down it.  The tube was outside most of the Nyx's gravity fields, so she had weightlessness to work with in addition to lack of space.  Not to mention Borecky was pretty sure this turret closed off from the air processors, so her mild feeling of claustrophobia was rising.

She managed to get into the tiny seat of the turret.  Borecky warmed up the rail gun.  She tried to get the holo screens of the turret online.  After ten seconds of giving her some static and a loading sign, the holo image gave her something to look at.  

The petite woman could see the the tip of the railgun, as well as a shot of the belly of the ship that made it appear as though it were the ground.  Borecky could make out in the distance the tiny gray dot of the moon outlined with blue.  As for the people trying to kill them, she saw nothing but empty space.

“I got nothing to nukin' shoot, Sil,” She growled into the comm.  “I'd like to know that I at least got to look at my killers before you get me nukin gunted over.”

The comm gave her static as Silva replied.  “Hold on Wrecker, Sighter's on it... I'll get you a nice view of their fekhole, ok?”

“Fine.” The Ex-marine growled.  She studied the star field in front of her and hoped for some action soon.  



Ben looked outward.  Or rather, his mind did.  His eyes were closed, yet in his mind he perceived everything as though his eyeballs had been removed from his skull.  The young man concentrated, moving his second sight, his tiny psychic extrasensory perception outward.  

He drifted passed the walls of the Hemera Nyx.  Sighter moved more and more outward, until he saw their ship as a whole.  The Nyx looked like a flying, windowless brick of metal.  The stars and space around it bent a little under the power of the Ion Induction Drive.  A single dome on the top of the ship near the back and six smaller gray metallic blocks were attached to the bottom of the ship.  These blocks were the cargo holds they'd stolen from the Raddies.

Sighter looked around the Nyx, trying to find their attacker.  He looked up, left, right and behind the tiny minute-man class spaceship.  Nothing.  He looked downward.  Downward and a bit to a angle was the Raddie ship.  A Reformed Asian Dominion standard cargo ship, it wasn't much different from the Hemera Nyx, except it had the flag of the RAD emblazoned on the front of its hull.  It looked like it was getting ready to charge their ship. He decided to inform Silva of their 'friends' location.  “They're below us and a little behind...”

“Oh is it amigo? Very dandy...” Sighter heard Silva reply in acknowledgment.  He also heard him start to flick switches and adjust holo images.  Silva was getting ready to move the ship in a better position for Borecky.  Ben felt the ship move, then-

“FEK!”  Silva shouted, his voice almost drowned out over the sound of a explosion in the background.