II

A pair of bedraggled munitions loaders struggled with a gargantuan casket as if pooling their resources together in playing the part of Sisyphus dragging his boulder up a monolithic mountain. Jisha Moksha was the proposed figurehead of this follyful voyage; a prospect at which he gulped uncomfortably and wished he had quit the three year training program he had been close to completeing while he still had the chance. But things had not gone according to plan. Another six months and he'd have been ready, but time was one thing they didn't have. A formerlly unknown alien race called the Proteus had chosen an inoppertune moment to reveal themselves and raid a prominent research laboratory in Kobe; making off with the scematics for an advanced fusion gauge propulsion system which was supposed to have been fitted into the now hastily prepared government supercraft had the engineers ever had time to complete it. As it was, Vajra was a highly experiental space faring contraption, and even Moksha himself had never ventured on board the real thing. Simulations were uncannily accurate; they assured him; although when faced with the real thing, all else paled in comparison.

Vajra; shaped like a thin, taught spring with an arrowhead at one end and an inverted bottletop on the other; or perhaps more simply like a coiling corkscrew; was most definately the strangest but obstensibly most agile craft the world government had ever designed. Unfortunately, wether it worked or not would have to be tested in a genuine high speed persuit with the possibility of a frantic firefight scrawled onto the end of the vague mission briefing for good measure. Time was of the essence, which was why Moksha's deligent training had been cut short. He knew enough to get by, apparently, but if he wasn't even convinced, the morale of his crew would not likely be the highest imaginable; a fact which necessitated a certain amount of dishonesty on his part. While improvising cautiously, he would have to persuade them that he knew what he was doing, otherwise the whole bungled quest would fall flat on its face and the proverbial bad guys would get away with the loot.

Miranda Maya snarled at a brown overalled loader despite the clearly observable fact that he was far bigger than her, but that savage intention in her emerald green eyes made him scuttle away like a cockraoch from an exterminator; commiting to memmory the understanding that he had better not cross her path again lest he wished to permenently loose the use of any number of limbs and organs. She crossed her arms and silently refused to aid her would be collegues in getting this unlikely machine ship shape in time for takeoff. Chasing unknown extra terrestrials through the galaxy in a grotesque thing which bore the apperance of a black metal rattlesnake turned onto its frount then squashed by a steamroller while frolicing in a serpentine dreamland wasn't her idea of a well spent summer, but in truth she had little other options to choose from. Miranda; sarcastically nicknamed 'Merry' by those stupid enough to cross her for the sake of mere humour; was a ticking timebomb waiting to explode. She had only joined the Contingent to satisfy her unnervingly masculine drives. She had always had a short fuse, and when she flew off the handle; which was often and with only the slightest provocation; she had the tendancy to resort to undue violence.

She was born in Ayutthaya in what had once been Thailand, but saw her country ravaged by the last ditch war instigated by the Chinese Communists. With the emergence of a viable world government, the military regeime bordering the golden triangle had become the last of its kind on Earth, and in reality even the people of China themselves would have opted for a less agressive establishment had they been indulged with the chance. When China went on the warpath for the final time, invading armies swallowed up much of South East Asia in a matter of weeks using wepeons more civilised nations had agreed to ban years earlier.

Thailand was once such victim, and though she had only been young when the war had taken place, she had lived with the torment; it had moulded her; embittered her outlook on life. Things had improved when the invaders were driven out and world government finally achieved, but Miranda just had to get out. Fortunately, her mother had been Japanese, which qualified her to serve in Okinawa at the world's most renouned spacebound military agency. After the Chinese affair, conflict generally only threatened to take place between humankind and completely unrelated species.

With the sterile coffin like crate raised to an appropriate level up the heavy tread conveyor belt which led sussinctly up into the main cargo hold, Moksha scrubbed away a sheet of industrial grime and looked into the cold red eyes of the herculian automaton whose dosile sleep he had thoughtlessly disturbed and adressed the exausted shelf stackers who wished all the way that the thing had been constructed out of tinfoil rather than titanium. The robot was the first of a new batch; an Ushikawa model; top of its class, theoretically. Towering at eight feet and built like a Roman centurion, he was glad the beast couldn't work outside the confines of the ship. It just went dead in the outside world; its connection to the central computer severed. Lying there dull and lifeless it was really nothing more than a clumsy hunk of metal. When on line Moksha would be glad it was on his side; more than that; under his command. Welded onto the monster's brute like frame was a decorative metal suit of what appeared to be fuedal Japanese samurai armour doused in showy gold and silver lief. Its smooth, triangular face tapered at the chin where a long, gaping mouth like a tundric crevace came to a considered halt and its oval eyes buzzing with a scoulding red as if the standby button on an old video recorder, it offered neither comfort or personality. It was meant to have a virtual character; based on that of a legendary warrior who had been painstakingly reseacrhed and programmed in to the nerve centre of Vajra itself. a huge samurai sword fashioned out of some unbreakable metal hang at its side; a throwback to more cultured forms of warfare which in the android's dead hands would serve as more than simply an ornament. An impressive spectacle even before the on switch had been flicked, but Moksha hardly had a knack of looking on the bright side. "I hope that thing works." Hope; in such a situation; was just about all he had. "It's been tested" panted the foremost loader; which seemed like a remarkably succesful attempt to avoid the question.

By now Miranda was already cracking her knuckles and fuming like a bull surrounded by fire engines. She'd been minding her own business watching the quarrelsome entroage of stage hands staggering around with overloaded packages knowing like during the dying moments of a championship basketball game when you're just three points down, ever second counted; which would have made her feel guilty for not pulling her weight if only it wasn't the case that she really couldn't care less. Owain was one of the ship's dogsbodies; a gunman who would spend the next few days or weeks of his life couped up in the bowels of the ship with nothing for company but a similarly disgruntled workman he'd never met, a distinct absence of illumination and the perprtual hum of the mollycoddle machine's inner mechanics. Bizzarly jovial given his profession and noticably unhinged by his experiences in the Martian rebellion a decade ago, Owain had ignored his superior officer's advise that he should leave Miranda well alone, but true to form he had overstepped the mark; made some admitedly innocent reference to the importance of getting out into the vast hole called space in the swiftest time; and now felt forbodingly like a gnat between the bulls' horns.

Miranda; one side of her face swamped with a masklike tattoo sporting a gothic hald sun style design incorporating a jeering face in the centre; was restrained from decking her careless coworker and thus forcing him to combat not only bordom and clastrophobia but also a shattered jaw while jammed into that horrendous little bootroom of a space throughout the mission by the calm hand of the ship's first officer, whose mesmeric diligence woule often keep things together in the coming days. Miranda raised an eyebrow; she had never respected authority, and wouldn't have had any qualms about dishing out the same sort of punishment to those residing in the higher echelons of the command structure. In actuality, it was only her fighting skill; her inhuman ability to vent her brutal rage in a constructive; or rather deconstructive; manner which qualified her as a member of Vajra's crew in the first place. Given the immediacy of the situation, the powers that be had had to draw up a makeshift rota consisting of any able participants who happened to be present in the building at the time. In an ideal world, Miranda and the others would have been carefully trained well in advance, which in the fulness of time would have worn away her volotile edge. This wasn't an ideal world.

But having broken up the threatening storm in a teacup before the spoon had really stirred the poisonous concoxion inside, Phala Joriki thought twice about offering Miranda some tangible threat of impending court marshall in the light of her much documented reputation as a loose cannon. Words served only to irritate, so a cooling nod would have to do. She left the angered firebrand to wallow in her own bitterness with life itself and eased her way through scores of scrambling loaders who parted like jungle vines at the whim of an exlorer's machette. Respect gained through honest achievment and fear aquired through less subtle means often have the same effect.

"Jori." Moksha was still worrying about that ugly looking robot. "That Ushikawa unit..."

"Untested, I know; but what isn't?" Joriki was a necissary counter balance; she was the captain's opposite in so many ways that it was a miracle they got on so well. They had been through the same two and a half year training stint; the only members of the makeshift crew who had ever even sat in a simulator, let alone seen the blueprints of the ship or been aboard the thing. To Moksha all this was an ill advised venture; the government veering towards desperation as they relied almost solely on chance; praying reverently that the machine would even get off the ground in one piece. Wether it flew, wether it made it through the atmnosphere and wether it could actually catch the fast escaping thieves were other matters entirely. But to Joriki it was a test; an adventure. He supposed every coin had two faces.

Joriki made her captain jump for a moment. She had lost an eye in a VR training mission which had been a little too real, and had it replaced with an electronic one; computerised devices possesing superior optical abilities than those she would reap from having a straight transplant. If ever the lights failed; which they were sure to on this glamourised lump of junk; she would be the only one who could see in the dark. But in the last few years he had spent with her preparing for this premature moment, he had failed to notice that that false eye was exactly the same model as those of the android, which perhaps made her assesment of it a tad biased. Jori was the only crew member of American origin. This was a predominently Japanese venture; the world government working as a series of co dependent states. The raw fact was that it was Okinawa which housed this experiemntal project, and there was hardly time to relocate to the possibly better equipped launch bays of Cape Canavril right now. She had spent most of her life in Hong Kong, and had been facinated by the glories of space since a child. She had been the first to sign up for this project; that was when she was a brash twenty one year old. Three years down the line and she was far more responsible, but not less enthusiastic. "Well if it's no good we can always switch it off, huh?" The deep, dizzying lapis lazuli tint of her natural eye reminded Moksha she was human afterall; a sobering thought when surrounded by such metalic monstrosities, although he wasn't good with people; especially those he didn't know, and as far as he knew, Jori was the only member of his crew he had met until today. Bad management, no doubt; hurried management.

Moksha nodded to each of his newly asigned recruits as they passed him on the runway; unsure of exactly how he should greet them. He had never taken a command before; in all honesty he wasn't ready. But he'd been landed with an insumountable task; one he could hardly turn down. If a hostile alien race was allowed to get away with one of humanity's most advanced techologies, it would be a death sentence for the species, and self preservation being the fundemental drive of humanity, survival itself persuaded him he had better grit his teeth and bear the agonies of both responsibility and forced communication with people he had never even met. Worse; he had to lead people he had never even met.

A collection of frosty grins, surrendering sighs and uncertain contemplative shakes of the head as each unknown face passed him by like those of mourners proceeding to the grave of a much loved martyred patriarch, Moksha was beginning to wish he had tossed a spanner into the works of the acursed machine while they were still hammering away at detatched fragments of it in various workshops located all over the known world. Apaya Tanha snarled purposefully as he sneaked on board like a stowaway fruitbat on a boatful of bananas. Miranda pushed past with her elbows. Owain tittered by like a kid on his first ever school trip outside the city. Karuna Camarina led her unsightly friend Lachesis past as if he was the star attraction in a freak show entering through the back entrance to ensure he wasn't mobbed by a highly unlikely troupe of fans. At least Moksha could blag his way out of formal introductions. he didn't know these people and afterall he was the commanding officer. If his ways were a lttle unorthodox, well; that was the way it went. But his strained smirk failed him and trailed away like the last drops of milk in the bottle. The next face was one he very bitterly recognised.

Sankappa Tithakara had been driven by chance rather than purpose into this jumbled mellee of aimless servicemen; her presence had been required as a medic to condition Vajra's healing hands, but the pressing nature of matters at hand had tempted the authorities to employ her on a more practical basis. She had spent the majority of her short eighteen years flitting from job to job; country to country; going wherever the wind took her. She had survived debilitating things; horrific things; and yet remained optomistic; accepting things as they were. In doing so, it is more often than not the good which is perceived. She passed a knowing look through a sheet like waterfall of jet black hair which as soon as as it caught his sight made the cowering captain shiver. She offered a generous smile to which he feined one in return but said nothing; cringing inside at the spectre of a past he had gone to great pains to conceal; promising himself at that moment that he would endevour to avoid running into her again throughout the duration of the mission. Captains thankfully have some luxuries; one is privacy. He saluted whole heartedly to a launch gaurd that everyone who was supposed to be on board had taken their seats; as far as he knew anyway; and took a long look up into the blank belt which held onto a sintiliating cluster of sprinkled stars as if they were a costly covey of crown jewels. At first he hoped he would one day see all this from a similar vantage point again, but then; remembering what a dreadful bane the last few year's work had been; amended his opinion.

Sample Story Three

CHARACTER PORTRAITS FOR CHARACTERS FROM 'THE COMPENDIUM'

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