The Zygan Emprise: Renegade Paladins and Abyssal Redemption
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Nejinsen: The premier Zygan Medical Center, in the Zygan city of Aheya
Neurocache: The stored thoughts and memories of a lifetime
Omega Archon: The king of the Zygan Federation
Orion Alpha: The planetary home of the Madai assassins, a lizard-like species.
Pedagogue: Mingferplatoi Academy Professor
Plegma: A cloud-like nebula, home of the Syneph species.
Sentinel Corps: The elite Zygan Royal Guards
Sidon: A city in Ancient Phoenicia in the Middle East
Stun Gun: A Zygan weapon with multiple settings, including Stun and Kill. Stun freezes the target, Kill lasers the target to a crisp.
Syneph: A cloud-like being that can change shape and color.
Temporal Leap: Using an Ergal to go move around in time without looping—so you can return at any time, even before having “left”.
Thal: A Kharybdian dwelling
Thomeo: Orion style skyscrapers that look like giant inverted ice cream cones.
Time Loop: Using an Ergal to go into a different time and then return right after you left
X-fan: Use an Ergal to leave or disappear
Ytra: The home planet of the Meiotes.
Zyga: The home planet of the Zygan Federation
Zygfed: The Zygan Federation
Zygint: The Zygan Intelligence Agency
i A primitive satellite sent into space by the Soviet Union (a Russian empire) in 1957 that launched the space race between the Soviets and the United States, as well as the very first lame electric-techno song.
ii They try to get you with the classic paradox: You go back in time and keep your parents from meeting, therefore you can’t be born; but if you can’t be born, you can’t go back in time and keep your parents from meeting; so you are born, and you go back in time, and so on. This is a straw man, peeps. Just stay away from your parents and you’ll be fine. Good advice for all teenagers, come to think of it.
iii A tax auditor works this way: You make a teeny tiny mistake on your math homework. The math teacher makes you do the homework over, takes your allowance for the next five years, and he confiscates your iPod and your Wii. Evil, I tell you.
iv Watchful Heuristic Operation. In other words, they check our IDs.
v Neuronal Deoxyribonucleic Acid. (Say that tongue twister five times really fast!)
vi Okay, here’s the joke. It’s as old as Homer himself, I think. They say that Homer was a penname, a fake name used by the real “writer” of the epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” But, some Zygan history students believe that the writer using the pseudonym Homer was really Homer Simpson.
vii A championship soccer team from the city of Manchester, England.
viii A cubit is a primitive measure based on the distance between the hand and the elbow as opposed to, say, a foot, which is based on … a foot.
ix An undocumented immigrant.
xErgal shields are localized impenetrable force fields; smaller versions of the shield around Earth Core. We’d learned how to install and uninstall them in our Advanced Ergal Thermodynamics lab during our last month at Mingferplatoi Academy.
xi Neural Inquiry. Off the record, we call it Neural Interrogation. So, when a prisoner has been NI’d, his information’s been directly downloaded from his brain. Or, maybe our questioners just roughed him up a little…
xii Kind of like a wireless Internet audio stream with only a few accessible Web sites. So, a whole family would have to sit around a box—together!—and listen to “shows,” which sometimes lasted a whole hour—yawn! Life was rough in your great-grandparents’ day…
xiii Krøneckðr is the largest city on Delta II and the financial center of the Delta planets in M82, an adjacent galaxy. Or so I’ve been told. Zygint discourages its agents from visiting bacchanalian planets outside Zygfed borders, especially if the agents are under eighteen.
xiv Large sharp-clawed feline creatures the size of a small human. They are found throughout the universe, most commonly in roller derby arenas and suburban high school in-crowds.
xv A Madai septic word.
xvi Ethnic populations on the planet Chronos.
xvii Terrans can’t pronounce it.
xviii First introduced to Earth by Hymenoptera from the planet Zom.
xix Spud explained this phrase to me later. It refers to Don Quixote’s fruitless quest, where he mistakes a windmill for a giant and tries to joust with the structure. It’s basically pursuing something futile. Heck, it sounds like Quixote should’ve pursued a good optometrist. I mean, giants and windmills look nothing alike, except on Anemomylos where the windmills are five storeys tall and alive.
xx Because the art was so ugly, I couldn’t see any other reason for hanging it.
xxi Actually, it isn’t a joke. That’s what they really say in Greece.
xxii I’ll explain later. If you can’t wait—just check out John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
xxiii Her Kharybdian name was, as close as I can pronounce it, Shfrsh. I named her the Nautilus because she looked like the Nautilus. No, not the cigar-shaped submarine in the Jules Verne story—the logarithmic spiral of the cephalopod. Really a cool ship. I did tease Eikhus once though and called him Captain Nemo. It took me a week to dry off completely…
xxiv A civilized Zygan war tool. Rather than killing the enemy, you basically erase and then re-boot their brains.
xxv Twelve days in a week and thirty-six hours in a day, of course.
xxvi Bellatrix’s fifth planet.
xxvii A small shuttle that can make it to Zyga on autopilot. In this case, a Trojan hearse.
xxviii When you’re smalling, the whole world doesn’t small with you. So, Ergaling helps you cross what are now long distances for people as tiny as we were.
xxix A Megaran fighting move that you don’t want to be on the receiving end of. It hurts like hell, literally.
xxx Or rather, I must’ve continued to micro until I was one fourth its size.
xxxi Which reminds me of the old limerick: There was a young lady named Bright, whose speed was much faster than light, she set off one day, in a relative way, and returned on the previous night. Don’t blame me—I warned you it was old.
xxxiiThe word means “Charge!” Now!
xxxiii God out of a box. Literally, God out of a machine, but in ancient Greece and Rome, a box was about as complex a machine as you could get. It was lowered onto the stage and contained the image of a God, who served to rescue the protagonist, or the plot, from destruction.
xxxiv And the machine is the universe…
xxxv Catch our reruns on the Singularity Channel, Fridays at 10 pm, 9 Central, or streaming at SingularityTV.com. Season 2 starts in October!
xxxvi You’d never guess he was 138, Heron said.
xxxvii The German mathematician who co-discovered the Möbius strip, a half-twisted paper strip whose ends are joined together to make a loop with one infinite surface. Zygapedia has another citation for Johann Listing as the strip’s other genius inventor. Personally, I would’ve called it the Listing strip—it took me half an hour to find the umlaut for Möbius in the Help Menu.
xxxviii We sure dodged a bullet. The farmer who saw the crushed wheat on his acreage the next morning called it an alien crop circle. Imagine if people had actually believed him!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30