The GalaxSec base is also cleaned, all the unconscious people they find on board decontaminated and placed into holding cells. The scientists on board the Purgatory then proceed to have the time of their life. The sapients recovered from the GalaxSec base - several thousand specimens - show remarkable properties. They seem to be in an odd form of stasis, some previously unknown energy keeping them all in some kind of deep sleep. Luckily for the scientists, none of them even mutters the word mana, no matter what their instruments say. Especially the odd stacks of paper in humanoid shape and the two catatonic Shmees are of interest to the many labcoat clad individuals.
And then a single GalaxSec Constable Badge falls through the roiling atmosphere of Evengi Prime. It makes a short trail of plasma before it loses its momentum and starts fluttering down to the ground. There, it lands between some rocks and is quickly covered by sand. The minuscule blue glow it contains is swiftly hidden from sight by the enormous amounts of dust in the air.
The massive storms raging throughout the planet calm slowly, the disintegrated Histaff releasing its water and causing massive floods as the planet’s water cycle starts up again. Then, an unknown while later, the gigantic silhouettes of enormous ships hovering above come back together. Each vessel slowly slots back into place, the Purgatory reforming into a moon-sized sphere once again. It moves out slowly. The superheated plasma exhaust fumes aimed at the planet as the massive ship leaves is one last parting gift to the system it just decontaminated. The resulting chaos caused by the massive injection of hydrogen and oxygen atoms creates more wild weather. Once that calms down, the various eco packages left behind start releasing measured doses of complex wildlife into the water and dead soil, slowly yet surely bringing natural and beneficial life back to the dead planet.
And then, on an ordinary night, the stars split. Hair by hair, the twinkling lights high above warp and bend, making way for a vision of perfection. A goddess descends upon the earth, the face of an angel appears from a split waterfall of invisibility. Tying her hair into a ponytail with elegant and swift movements, she crouches down and digs into the dirt. Her nails are slim and cut rocks apart with ease, yet the shining badge she uncovers is handled with supreme softness and care.
“Come now, Douglas. Your crew is doing more than enough sleeping, time to wake up.” The goddess does not smile. She does not frown. The only animation of her face is a tic of annoyance as the badge does not answer. She then sees the slight glow of blue on the edges of the badge, and the light illuminates a small smile.
By the time Katare reaches her ship, she holds a skull with a GalaxSec badge on its forehead.
Epilogue – Teaser Chapter
“More food?” asks Douglas. He is a whole skeleton again, much to Katare’s obvious annoyance.
“No, you already ate over two decades’ worth of emergency rations. You do not need to eat more food.”
“Food,” nods the skeleton enthusiastically, ignoring every single word in her reply except the last one. Douglas looks around again, still not too sure what he feels about this entire place. The food is pretty good, if a bit band, but it helped him regenerate his bones something fierce. Other than that, Douglas doesn’t really think a lot of this place.
He is, he curiously finds, still sort of out of it. There had been an awful lot of darkness, after all. The sheer amount of nothingness that had been all around him was pretty bad at first. At the very least, it had allowed him to get to grips with everything that’d happened.
From the first step, he had ever taken, freshly reanimated by some necromancer, to his teleportation into outer space, to the slow crawl through a spaceship fragment. The trek through the spaceship had been interesting to revisit for the first couple of dozen times. SO many things make sense now that he’s had the time to think about them like a hundred times properly.
Then the planet where Katare’s position of unreliable sidekick had been replaced by Evot. And then he had found the two slimy things that make so much sense. So much sense. Just a few words and those two understood every single word and meaning he had meant, along with a lot that he had not thought of yet.
And now he is sitting on top of soft cushions, inside a small cramped space, some weird music playing from all around him. And Katare is back!
Well, Douglas thinks she is that odd human from back then. He isn’t completely sure, but he thinks he recognizes some things about her. She had a nose, and this sapient has a nose. Same with eyes, eyebrows, deep lines carved across the entire face in an oddly appealing way. He is not sure about the eyebrows, but at least Douglas recognizes the lines and eyes.
And the hair! Katare had changing hair, that is something he knows for sure. Hair that changes every second, patches of starlight and invisibly flowing through the fine threads.
“Stop eating the couch and listen to me already!”
Unable to blink, Douglas settles for just sheepishly looking up at Katare. Blue eyes, circular rotating rings forming a rather hypnotic sight look at him in a rather stern manner. “Couch?”
“YES! The very cushion you are chewing on unselfishly is worth more than many spaceships. As my funds are limited at the moment, I would like to ask that you refrain from eating my Flarxian Hyper-Cashmere. That data crystal you just ate had some very rare and expensive Flartanxian flap po- Nevermind, you can have that one.”
“Okay.”
“So, as I was saying, I need you to get serious for a moment. We are in big trouble, and unless we do something drastic, we are all going to die.”
“No,” vocalized Douglas while idly rubbing the badge stuck in the middle of his forehead. He does wonder where his horn went. And the rest of his skull armor. And why his body, in general, feels so light. He’d really like some answers to those questions, as well as the matter of his bones being white instead of covered by metal.
“The Order is after me now, which is not great. I tried everything I could think of, but there are some things money can’t buy. Not like that’s a possibility for me at the moment anyway. Stop eating the couch, and don’t rip that fabric. I can buy your garden planet’s yearly output for the price of that pillow. Drop it.”
Realizing that he will be able to get a whole lot of food for the pillow, Douglas stuffs it into his chest cavity.
“And because the Order is after me, or at least their counter-intelligence agency is, they are now also after you! So we’ve just got to cooperate, else we both will end up dead.”
“Okay.”
“It’s good food you agree. This means that at the very least, you’re not dumb enough to be a totally lost cause. I also might have pissed off a few planetary militaries, but that’s such a minor annoyance in comparison to the Order, that it’s nearly sad. Still, the saddest part is that even those small fries are too much for us to cope with at the moment. That’s why I went to get you, and that’s why I want you to help me rob a museum or two.”
“Okay.”
“Wow, thanks, Douglas! I really thought that you also might have been one of the fake people-” Katare abruptly stops talking as she looks up for the first time in a while. She had been twiddling her thumbs and looking at the ground, her digits making sparks as they rub against each other, and leaving deep furrows into the metal chair she is sitting upon.
Now though, she is looking at Douglas with an open mouth. Douglas ignores her and just continue using the wonderful, wonderful Stone Moulding spell to slather a new layer of protective metal on his previous bones. Katare watching him work in mute silence as he scoops up handfuls of the metal bench before plastering it over his sternum.
“Could you stop destroying my ship?”
Something in her voice halts Douglas in his tracks. Instead of continuing his bone-protecting measures, he looks up at her and nearly flinches back.
“Why are you destroying my stuff?”
“I'm destroying your stuff??”
“Yes, you have just committed gross property damage.”
“I ha
ve just committed gross property damage?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine, but what are you going to do about it.”
“According to law…” The exact wording completely fails Douglas. His memory is pretty good, and he is sure that Evot told him this precise law a couple of times, but he just can’t recall.
“What law, Douglas?”
“Evot?”
“Who is Evot, Douglas?”
“Grey things?”
“What are grey things, Douglas?”
Douglas decides to shut up.
“You do not appreciate the gravity of this situation, do you? It seems like I will first have to impress upon you the gravity of this situation, don’t I?”
For some reason, Douglas feels like he is very much not in charge of this situation. “Yes?”
“Good. Then you can start repaying the damage you have done to my property by listening to what I have to say. You need to understand that I am in deep shit. And now, due to association, you are in deep shit. SO you will understand and then you will help me, alright?”
“Okay,” replies Douglas in a mousy tone.
“Good, then let’s start at the beginning! After you had prevented my head from freezing over, after you had forced us into the shitty homebrew of a boat, my daddy came for me! That should have been happy news, right? Well, that changed when I found out that my daddy had been putting me in cloned bodies, right? So after that, I think I went a bit mad. Not sure how, but anyway. When I woke up, I was a brain in a jar!”
Douglas knows enough about the part of the populace that identifies as female by this time to nod occasionally as Katare goes on a very long rant.
Afterword
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About Andries Louws
Andries Louws is an avid reader of fantasy, science fiction and pretty much everything interesting since a young age. He is still thankful to the nice ladies at the local library that let him check out all those violent action thrillers, epic fantasy books and encyclopaedias without enforcing age requirements. He also studied multimedia design and computer science while devouring as many novels, audiobooks, and video games as he could get his hands on. He then started writing his own stories after reading one too many badly translated Chinese novels and hasn't stopped since.
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About Mountaindale Press
Dakota and Danielle Krout, a husband and wife team, strive to create as well as publish excellent fantasy and science fiction novels. Self-publishing The Divine Dungeon: Dungeon Born in 2016 transformed their careers from Dakota’s military and programming background and Danielle’s Ph.D. in pharmacology to President and CEO, respectively, of a small press. Their goal is to share their success with other authors and provide captivating fiction to readers with the purpose of solidifying Mountaindale Press as the place ‘Where Fantasy Transforms Reality.’
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Appendix
Amalgamation – The larva stage of a Reworked, these slime beings slowly process bone and biologic matter.
Achnuu – Team-leader of the Ancheevi spec-ops team.
Ancheevi – One of the corporations covering a large chunk of the galaxy.
Behemoth – A reworked above a certain size. The exact definition is based on the context of an infection site.
Boat – Vehicle designation, all spaceships and transport vehicles capable of flight under a couple dozen meters in size can be called a boat.
Brickad Fekston – A heavy machinery and spacesuit manufacturer known for their rugged design and the bright yellow and black colour scheme they employ.
Calcinate – Magic term. Describes the process of turning air into earth by ripping the calx from it, turning it into rock.
Calx – Magic term. This is all matter that can't burn.
Capital – Vehicle designation. Describes all (space)ships above 10 kilometres in size.
CHCS Purgatory – A massive segmented, compounded, aggregate spaceship tasked with cleaning Histaff infected systems.
Corvette – Vehicle designation, corvettes are capable of (space)flight and up to 500 meters in size.
DeCalcinate – Magic term. Describes the process of turning earth into air.
DePhlogistonate – Magic term. Describes the process of turning water into air by activating the phlogiston in water, shaping it into a fireball.
Douglas – A simple skeleton summoned by some necromancer.
Evengi System – A solar system on the edge of the galaxy. Has been marked as a Histaff infected forbidden zone.
Evot – A normal office lady.
Fienak – Pressure cooked Eflec Specialist on the Ancheevi spec-ops team.
Finger spider – A Histaff infection beast. These small amalgamations of small limbs are used for cleaning and gathering.
Frigate – Vehicle designation. Describes all (space)ships between 500 meters and 10 kilometres in size.
GalaxNet – The galaxy-spanning internet.
GalaxSec – The galaxy-spanning policing force.
Gargantuan – A reworked above a certain size. This classification is given to mountain-sized Histaff.
Grandmaster – A charismatic man with a magnificent beard.
Hak-Nu – Ancheevi spec-ops, an avian type sapient encased in a mesh of floating wires.
Histaff – A bioengineered weapon lethal to nearly all known biological sapients. It melts all sapients and repurposes their biologic matter. All non-sapient beings are infected and modified.
Katarenin Auchinfon Peezes Tomat – A rich kid. She was taking a cryogenically frozen nap when Douglas started bothering her.
Kee – Sergeant third class, a mech-suit clad heavy weapons specialist on the Ancheevi spec-ops team.
Klattio – GalaxSec personnel of the invigilator rank. Similar to an office manager.
Littoral – Vehicle designation. Describes a ship capable and proficient in both space flight and atmospheric flight.
N’ghftog – A general items and space manufacturer than produces items with a distinct biological style and make.
Order – The organisation run by the Grandmaster, headquartered on the CHCS Purgatory.
Peezes – Another name or designation for the massive galaxy-spanning corporations.
Phlogiston – Magic term. This is all matter that can burn.
Phlogistonate – Magic term. Describes the process of turning air into water by ripping phlogiston - the matter flame is made out of - from water, shaping it into a fireball.
Reworked – An amalgamation that has had time t
o clad itself in a dense armour of bone. These beings come in all shapes and sizes and are the Histaff's main fighting force.
Sapient – A being that can think for itself. The border between animal, robot, construct and sapient is vague, lacking a general consensus.
Shmee Shmeela – A race of enigmatic four-armed, blue-skinned sapients known for their excellent computer skills and abysmal social savvy.
Shuttle – Small personnel transport, seats between one to a dozen.
Solan Peezes Tomat – A political and financial powerhouse, this old man owns a sizable chunk of the galaxy.
Spektar – Spec-ops arms and armaments manufacturer. Everything they produce is painted black.
Sub – Vehicle designation. Describes a ship that (technically) can enter and land inside an atmosphere.
Tomat – One of the corporations covering a large chunk of the galaxy, this one led by Solan Tomat.
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 37