Unknown Space. The Void-Skiff Medical Bay.Time: 12 Hours Post-Jump.Ethan did not awaken consciously in the gentle manner, but in a violent electrical shock.His biological lung was sucking in cold, sterile air with gasping. His cybernetic optic blazed blue, and flashed the instant error messages and warnings of critical damage into his brain. He attempted to sit forwards, but a couple of massive magnetic shackles kept his body even to the surgical table.Stay still, Lord Gear, said. The voice of the AI was coming out of the overhead speakers of the medical bay. Your body processes are in critical shock. Your artificial nervous system has been severely impaled by thermal damage.Ethan turned his head. The bruised heavy right side of his body. His left side of the body was like nothing.He looked down. Where his White Bio-Steel arm had been there was now a cauterized stump of merged metal and burnt flesh at his shoulder. The phantom agony was agonizing. He seemed to have metal fingers

The Scrapyard. Neutral Territory.Time: 50 Hours Post-Jump.Korvath was at the edge of the Fighting Pits, and his solid black eyes were looking up at the smoking rubble of his champion. The vultures of the crowd remained absolutely silent. They stared at the dead Scrap-Beast and the half-crippled human being in the oil-streaked dirt with one arm and no other.The Scrapyard pays its own debts, Korvath said, and his guttural voice boomed through the arena. "Give the meat his forge. And put the neutronium into his vehicle.Ethan was not here to make merry. He swung about and climbed the rusty iron staircase, now falling on each breath. The Blue Plasma Core flicked, and was a dying spark, which might soon vanish altogether.Elena was waiting at the top. She threw his heavy canvas jacket on his shoulders, taking care not to come near the burnt stump of his left arm.You are careless," Elena reproved him, but her hands were trembling with gratitude. You have nothing to do, Ethan, to prove.

Unknown Space. The Void-Skiff.Time: 60 Hours Post-Jump.The Void-Skiff was floating down through the dark, and the poisonous smog of the Scrapyard was long since forgotten. The temperature inside the cargo hold was barely above freezing. The ship was dying.Lord Gear had also sent all unnecessary power to the Singularity Drive and life support. The lights within the house were set so that they were in a low, economy amber tone. The atmospheric re-cyclers rattled on with a painful metallic rattle. The emergency shutters that closed the doors at the violated cargo bay creaked each time the ship changed its pitch.Elena was sitting in the cold steel deck with her hands in the open thorax of a cybernetic chest of Jarek. She was laboring in the blaze of a portable working lamp. She cut off burnt wires and entered fused logic boards, her fingers running with the desperate accuracy.Jarek was lying on his back with his huge optical sensor burning with a low, grey glow. He lacked his customa

The Domain of the Rider. The Obsidian Arena.Time: Irrelevant.There was no sound of a clash of the weapons. It caused a jolt of pure and contradictory truth.Ethan had thrown himself into his right arm with all the weight remaining. The ruby-red spike of the Dissonance Engine scraped his baton of polar ice along the Pale Rider. Jolts of opposing physical laws rained down on the black obsidian glass which lay beneath their feet. At the point where the red sparks fell the glass melted into tumultuous liquid. Where the starlight came, the floor had only to stop existing, and left areas of perennial nothingness.The Pale Rider did not strain. His porcelain mask stood as motionless as an expression of desperate, sweat-covered face of crippled hybrid in front of it.One stone against a tidal wave, you come, Pale Rider, said. His voice was right into the skull of Ethan, chilled and absolute.The Rider flicked his midnight wrist, and broke the weapon lock. The baton of the starlight fell dow

The Deep Null. The Shifting Wastes.Time: Unquantifiable.Ethan passed through the cemetery of reality. Each movement threw a jet of white porcelain and grey ash into the airless stagnant atmosphere. The sky was still a ceiling of dead statique, which did not give up any sun, or stars, nor even time.His physical body was a wreck taken to its extreme extent. His phantom pain in the left arm, in which he had cut off his shoulder, beat with a laborious, nauseating time. He held the heavy canvas jacket with his single right hand over his chest. He had to cover the spasming bloody storm of crimson and blue energy that was burning within his new Dissonance Core. His stomach-heart felt the crater of black neutronium which had merged with his sternum glowing with scorching heat to keep the freezing temperature of the dimension at bay.He was required to locate Elena and Jarek. The desperate thought died back in his head in a loud and frenzied flash. He pictured his mother's face. He could re