STARSCREAM: PROLOGUE

By DB Nova is property of Marvel Comics Novaverse615 created by BNB

Warning PG Rated

The Pillars of Creation. Beyond the Spiral Arm of the Milky Way.

The not too distant future.

There were fifty thousand voices in my head; courtesy of my direct neural interface. It's still an unsettling experience. I carried the Worldmind inside my head for nearly three years; far longer than the Gestalt ever wanted and far longer than I'd originally agreed. At least Worldmind utilized its consensus filter to communicate with me with one coherent voice which sounded like Ian MacKellan. I once asked how many separate personalities the super-computer's class-g collective matrix held. Worldmind said it was just under fifty million but that didn't take into account all the info it held on the known universe. So of course I asked how much that was and it replied its present storage capacity was one tredecillion; that's one followed by forty-two zeroes in case you want to know.
With the interface, which I'd christened Xander, it’s a question of concentration. I've gotta focus all the time, stay sharp and keep the psionic babbling down to a minimum. If I don't then it’s like having the entire fan base for the Jets screaming all at once because the home team is losing. Hearing the roar occasionally isn't bad but just imagine having that echoing in your mind, looping over an' over again. It'd drive anyone insane eventually. Of course that was the constant risk of keeping the whole Nova Force/Worldmind combo inside me. Inevitably, even with the Worldmind keeping everything in-check, the Force would've saturated my neurons an' flash-fired them, making me go gaga. So in the end, after constant badgering by Worldmind and having to face up to the present crisis, I opted for an upgrade. So far everything's been swell. Xander's more pleasant and easy goin' to work with, should be because I got to choose which personality engram to base its core program around. And I chose Tom Cruise because I liked Top Gun. With Xander, I can tune the babbling: tone it down to make it bearable when the Interface is on. Even when it's off, it’ll always be there; ticking away in the background of my mind. Its also acts as my access to Worldmind's extensive database and several dozen cool radio and teevee channels to boot, that's when I'm in the home system. I had to concentrate hard now, ignore what was happening around me for a moment and filter out from the neural back-wash which "voices" were the most important.
Concentrate.
There! I locked-onto the minds of my six Battalion Captains, pin-pointed their locations and opened my sub-etheric link (scramble band). I gave them a series of four sharp beeps to get their attention. Their faces appeared on my visor, each one in six separate windows while the central display continued to monitor the front an' what was happening across the pond. Hybelia. Quill. Vaughn. Ronan. Stark. ....and I kept forgetting the name of my sixth; probably because his true name was so farking unpronouncible! Dru was also there. She was my framii-charm. And luck was what I needed. They looked at me and waited. Each of them had determined expressions on their faces.

Hybelia's gold and black armour reflected the reddish/green after-glow of the towering columns of cold gas and dust that spurted from the parent nebula. It was a spectacular sight that would soon be witness to one hell of a fight. I just hoped it would see our side achieve victory, but the odds were variable to say the least. Hybelia had proven himself to be a worthy member of our little band though his appointment to the Corps had been, to put it mildly, a major debating point. Peter thought I’d gone la la. They were war-criminals, fugitives from the Negative Zone. They committed acts of genocide under Annihilus banner. Kril cornered Hybelia on Omina Prime, deep inside the Ceded Territories. Kril assumed Hybelia was subjugating the population under Ravenous’ stranglehold. Turned out he was trying to liberate them. Kril gave them a warning, apparently using one of my more florid remarks as a means of keep them in check. When Hybelia ran into Consortium forces on Proycon Five, he’d fought them to a standstill. He was the only survivor of the massacre. He limped his way to our frontline, near death. I gave him sanctuary. Peter though he should been left to die, as he put it “a eye for an eye”. I pointed out that if Kril had given him a chance, then I would too. Besides, he had important tactical data on enemy movements and numbers; alive he could tell us what we needed to know. Dead; he’d be no use to anyone. Hybelia had undergone his rite of repentance and he now stood with me acting as my fourth hand. The Voltran had proven himself to be an effective B.C. and that to me was more than enough.
Wendell was, I suspected, still thinking about his resurrection though from what he told me he's gone though it several times already. There's always a period of re-adjustment when you come back from the dead, or wherever he'd been. He was simply glad to be back though he didn't expect to be thrown into the deep end so quickly. Then again none of us did but that's the universe for you. It doesn't "page" you every time the next crisis is around the corner, or what kinda major-league disaster is gonna upset the cosmic apple-cart. If we did know; well life would be farking dull!
Ronan looked tired. An' that was something of a rarity. I could see bags around his eyes. He'd been on the front line repeatedly during the Wave War; living' up to his Kree heritage, rousing the Kree battalions when pressing forward to engage the enemy an' ensure swift retreat to minimise casualties...and he'd done the same thing here. War was what the Kree were bred to do. They'd almost lost their purpose of existence thanks to the bugs but Ronan had, in the intervening years, fanned the flames once more. I once joked with Peter that when Terrans want to try and get some sleep they often count sheep jumping over a fence to make then drowsy. I suspected the Kree equivalent was shooting Skrulls through the head. We both laughed and then realized it was probably true. I'd visited the Hala Archives several times an' seen what Ronan had done in the past. My "brother" had more blood on his hands than I'd ever suspected. He was a wild-card; who'd fought the Fantastic Four and Avengers to a stand-still and yet to the Kree he was their adorned hero, now Emperor. Ronan was a valued ally but even he had limits. I still remembered how he flash-fired those Fiyeroians when they threatened to pull out from the United Front. He said it was a necessary act. I though it was $%%£ but he'd stood by it, I reluctantly supported it, and he an' K'lrt had joined forces; a Skrull and Kree, working together to overthrown an empire in chains. Who'd have thought that a Skrull and Kree would share the same room space? Not me. I’ve heard that they long since become drinking buddies. All that Xanth they consume; no wonder Ronan’s got bags under his eyes…
And what of Peter? I still can't get over looking at him without his cybernetic implants. He opted for a neural interface like mine long before I'd contemplated having a Xandarian/Kree symbiotic core interface spliced into my own pre-frontal lobe. The girls on Hala loved his new looks. Probably why he decided to open that bar. He'd kept bragging to me that he was keeping score as to how many Kree he could sleep with in one Kree year; that's six hundred and eighty nine days if you really wanna know. He'd kept edging me to join in but I'd refused. Besides I had my own personal relationships to keep me pre-occupied. Well, one relationship nowadays.
Dru looked weary too. She'd was ensuring that Medicom were keeping our soldiers on the line. I'd hadn't spent an evening with Dru for three weeks. Her life evolved around broken limbs; cloned body parts and pumping plasma into shattered bodies to keep them stable. Medicom had been moved back into geo-stationary orbit around Orienta so I'd only seen her face on my HUD. Her red auburn hair was almost as short as mine. Her face often showed signs of stress but every so often she'd flash a smile; her smile was so infectious. If there was one reason to ensure we won today was so that I could look forward to spending the night with Dru.
Stark's face I couldn't read. His face, his entire body for that matter, was concealed beneath a second skin of state-of-the-art armour composed of crystallized iron, enhanced by magnetic fields over several layers of a poly titanium/ admantiumn composite. Well, that was Worldmind's description of Stark's tin-suit. I couldn't see his eyes; they were hidden behind two glowing force fields that looked like two square stars. He hadn't taken off his armour since he arrived from Sol Three several days ago. Well, not any time he'd been in my company, or anyone else’s for that matter. I wonder how he dealt with coping with those awkward bodily acts that we have to occasionally go an' do. Maybe he kept a bottle inside his suit, just in case, an no I don't mean a bottle of Jack Daniels.
As for, well what was his name? Still can't pronounce it, let alone figure out what he/she/it was feeling cause there was still no way I could read any emotion on that face either. All I knew for sure was that he'd been an asset and that was enough.

Before I spoke I glanced at the central display an' called up the long-range field array. It was a rotating octagonal grid divided into squares. Scattered on either end of the grid were red an' blue dots. Our troops were shaded blue, the enemy in red. If a kid looked at the display he'd think I was playing battleships, except when this game took place real lives were at risk, not imaginary ones. Both fleets had been gathering for several weeks.
When you see all those fancy sci-fi war films, or comics, they often show ships "jumping" in tandem when they dive into hyperspace or whatever kinda prop they use to travel from one point in space to another. In reality, that used to be quite impossible. You see Nav-Coms are good but they're not brilliant. Chances are if one vessel makes one transitional jump from point a to b; another ship may not make the same jump to the exact same location the first ship arrived at. As such individual fleet vessels, no matter what kinda purpose they served, military or commercial, could be scattered over several light-years and would take weeks, even months to rendezvous together.
On top of that, Einstein, that nutty professor with the weird hairdo, threw an extra spanner into the works; Time. Not only could vessels end up nowhere near each other; chances were they'd end up in different time periods. Nothing great I might add. Maybe a few hours into the future or several days into the past; in other words they had the potentiality to arrive before they'd left! Seriously! As time passed, advances in Nav-Com technology got around the fundamental flaws of translocation. Kree and Skrulls made the initial breakthroughs cause if they hadn't they'd would have been waging a forth dimensional war with no side ever hitting one of the other's ships. It would have been a war in slow-motion; by the time any side could've declared a victory their entire planetary economies would've collapsed, or their respective governments could've declared a truce or their home worlds would've ceased to exist because Galactus decided to have a take-away. Shi'ar got around the issue by creating fixed translocation points in key quadrants; stargates to you. More often than not, Kree, Skrull, even us Terrans, used them for their own purposes; intergalactic highways, hitching a ride to make carefully calculated and more precise jumps into enemy territories, or where less developed races could be conquered. The Shi'ar should've charged. They would have made a ££$% fortune! Xandarians got around the problem because Novas could generate their own gravemetric wormholes by using the Nova Force to "punch" through phasic-space and create link-nodes between designated co-ordinates, aided by a computer whose thought-processes boarded on the magical. Modern space-faring vessels had done the same; they called it lynch-pinning. However reliance on the Worldmind could've been a fatal flaw so Novas were trained to navigate; just like sailors on the open sea, they learned to navigate by the stars an constellations, recognizing the patterns and comparing them to known universal models. These days I know how to travel from Earth to Hala in less than twelve minutes without blinking; not bad for a kid that used to get lost every time he was sent on a errand by my Mom to take books back to the library.
I had all of this data crammed into my brain when I underwent full emersion subliminal training just before I took on the role of Commander of the United Front. I'd never had proper training before. Everything I'd learned; fighting, using my powers, I'd done myself. Practice they say makes a better hero. Maybe if I'd become an Avenger in Training could've helped. Cap did offer once an' foolishly I'd never took up his offer. Nova recruits were given basic subliminal exercises during their time at the academy; they'd learned not only combat techniques, defence, but all kinda Xandarian stuff. Music. Art. History. Worldmind didn't think I could cope with the full deal; that my poor Terran brain would've short-circuited or blown up. But I had insisted. I needed an edge against Annihilus and the Wave. So it agreed. It even recruited a three-dimensional archetype of Rhoman Dey, to give me extra lessons, that was in-between harsher regimes by Drax. But I proved Worldmind wrong. How I did what I did was/is still a miracle considering I was the kid who failed his mid-terms and later flunked any chance of going to college because I'd been too busy playing superhero. Perhaps if I'd had a super-computer in my head when I first became Nova, maybe I would' ve been the one with a top position at NASA; not Rob. The rest, as they say, is history.
But future history was on the line. Today we'd all know what kinda future lay ahead.
Separating each of the fronts was a zone some ten light-years across. The enemy was still there; protecting the nebula. Their numbers swelling, regrouping just on the other side of the vast twisting spires of hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen. I could see their huge immense vessels; ebon, living warships armed with enough combined firepower to annihilate a billion stars if they wanted to. Their generals were well behind, probably deciding which way to force our hand. They had over two-hundred billion troops. But if they had their way, if/when their doomsday device was switched on, we'd really be in the shit. No one could miss it; a vast ring with one quarter missing measuring a thousand kilometres across made from the very stuff that the nebula was composed of. It was still under-construction. It lacked power. If Worldmind was correct (and I'd learned to respect its sage advice, rather than spurn it these-days), and it was, what the consensus had analysed its function to be, well let's say things would get bad. Really bad. While it was incomplete we had a chance to stop this mess here an' now. I just hoped luck was on our side today.
I could also see Promethian. I couldn't still believe he existed at all though considering what I've seen an' been though since I got my powers; well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. He hovered a light-year in front of the enemy forward line, arms folded defiantly across his chest, his gold and black suit that mirrored my own mocked everything I stood for. I wondered what he was thinking. Whether our thoughts were the same? I had to make a decision about him, because while he remained on the other side he was an important cog in their war machine. I had to take him out. That was my priority in the battle to come. My cross to bear. I also noted that the lines of my forces were also in the process of forming rank. Six Groups; each containing fifty thousand soldiers. Kree. Spartoi. The race whose name I couldn't pronounce and the last of the fabled Xandarians. The Skrulls were no longer in any capability to aid us but at least the Spaceknights were here. They had been invaluable; after all they knew the enemy better than any of us, well had, until it turned out things were far more complicated than we all first assumed. At least during the Annihilation War it was a clear definition of who the enemy was after his forces had munched their way through several systems. But then again when you're a universal maniac, okay, correction: a trans-universal maniac you tend to announce your intentions in the loudest way possible. Not that what we thought Anni was actually up to turned out to be what he was really up to. It took a psychic to spill the beans and another megalomaniac to try an turn the tide but his own history got the better of him before he could do us all a favour and put an end to the conflict early on. Luckily, in the end the final coup-de-grace was down to yours truly. And I beat the odds and won. Praise aside, many good people lost their lives during the Annihilation war; things were never gonna be the same again but it didn't stop the most ardent of races trying to rebuild. But now everything was at risk again, just as it had been last year and here I am right in the thick of it again. Lucky Me! I'd thought the enemy we've been fighting for a year now had followed the same sorta route-map as Anni. They'd lead us astray; sent us down dead ends while making their moves elsewhere. Just like Anni. A lot of people I cared about have died because of their actions. Not just people. Entire planets. But then, just as you think you've figured them out, they threw a curveball. Several curveballs. Suddenly, it’s not just a trans-universal war. We realized it’s a multi-universal war. Other dimensions ended up getting pulled into this. Some had been allies of the enemy right from the start; keeping a low-profile till they were needed. Others have deliberated taking up arms and coming over to our side. We're still waiting for an answer. Whatever, one thing became clear as time elapsed; they'd been planning things for a hell of a long time.
Now I've drawn a line.
Let’s see if they'll cross it.

To be Continued....