"Attention, prey! You and the contents of your ships are now the property of warlord Velga! Power down your weapons and-"I ended the recording, the screen returning to a view of space in front of our craft, the bent and melted carcasses of a pirate fleet floating in the void. After we caused that mess we had fished out "the warlord Velga" and a few of her lieutenants - Velga was currently kneeling on the floor in front of me, bound hand and foot, not at all amused by the irony of her current

Chapter 1: Wherein the Premise is EstablishedThe troubling thing about reality is that the fundamental laws that govern it - the foundations for observing and understanding the universe around us - are prescriptive rather than descriptive. That is, they're not rules so much as explanations for why things have behaved the way they do up until this point. So should apples decide, after over three centuries of falling towards the Earth's center of mass around physicists, that they should hover in

Killian Samuels holstered his pulse pistol as he pushed the prone insectoid fugitive's face
into the ground with his boot. The criminal let out a chittering series of curses,
translated through subtitles to English phrases better left unsaid. Reaching for a pouch at
his belt, Samuels withdrew a short, thick rod, giving it a twist and causing several prongs
to swing out from the sides. With a snap of his wrist he whipped it down into their back
before stepping away, watching as a cracklin

The
CEO ran, panting, and the shadowy mass followed. She had made the
mistake of staying late to supervise the development crunch for their
latest title, and on her way through the lobby she spotted something
outside in the dim light. It was hard to discern, but when it simply
battered down the front doors she fled, deeper into the building's
interior. Its footsteps were heavy behind her, its body crashing
through furniture as it gave chase, and as her panic rose she found
herself running bli

"What
is -up-, epic gamers?" The blond, purple-eyed young man smiled,
making a finger gun gesture with one hand to the floating camera.
"It's ya boy, Cole Carter, off in another timeline. Now you're
probably wondering what's going on."
What
was going on was that Cole was lying down, propped up on his elbows.
His garishly loud shirt was open, draped across either side of him on
a surface that extended off-camera, matched his skin tone perfectly,
and merged with his body. &q

Mars.
From its first recorded sighting in ancient Egypt, it took nearly four thousand years before mankind was able to reach out to it, landing a surface probe that survived long enough to observe it up close. It was small and primitive by modern standards, its systems outclassed by mass-produced digital devices, but for the time it was another great step into the unknown.
As mankind's knowledge of the planet grew, so did its ambitions. In the early part of the twenty-first century, world gove

Eleven Yot-Fita knew she had a family, somewhere. She knew she had been given away by them, or taken, turned over to the Bureau of Defense as part of the Blood Tithe. Her growth had been accelerated, biological implants added, and her body altered on a genetic level: Denser bones and musculature, more efficient and redundant organs, and the russet skin and white hair distinctive of Ghilman soldiers. She was taught of war and the innumerable ways to wage it, and wage it she did, for over twent

Quinn didn't like space.
...well, that wasn't exactly true. "Space" was just the word used to describe the area between stars and planets. There wasn't anything there -to- dislike. It was more the things that went along with it, like overbearing silence and stifling isolation, where the closest thing to human contact that you'd experience for days at a time was a brief message through the comms.
She slumped in the pilot's seat, thinking back to her time at the state orphanage. It had been th