The Revenant Collectives Trilogy Part 1 – Across The Starry Sea
“The Revenant Collectives are a band of space pirates that roam the lawless expanse of the Milky Way Galaxy between the Galactic Union and the Synod. Rumored to be based in the cosmically chaotic heliopause several light years outside the Outer Rim, they habitually target commercial ships owned by multinational companies that are connected to elite government officials, springing a trap at various trans-warp portals along major trade routes.
Having gained prominent notoriety from galactic law enforcement agencies for the past thirty years, their penchant for commandeering ships but leaving crews unharmed on nearby habitable planets after every raid had garnered respect and praises from both Non-Aligned Planetary Governments and other space pirates, as if they’ve observed some form of chivalrous code of ethics or the like! Nevertheless, there is a huge reward being put out by both the Galactic Union and the Synod for any information leading to their capture.
From rumor-choked websites all over the Galactic Interweb, The Revenant Collectives are said to have been founded by two humanoids: New Hesperion cyborg Rembrandt Roswell and his mysterious mentor Proscotra “Patrick” Escula, a Human/Pibian Hybrid said to be a hundred and fifty years old. Regarding the latter, the Pibian Planetary Government denied his existence, though he was responsible for most of the attacks on their commercial ships.
After years of sifting through various unsolicited sources, it is known that Rembrandt Roswell was born to be one of the high priests of a cybernetic religion centering around the worship of one (out of five) galactic super computer called “Mother Matrix”, but he was also reported to have perished in a solar flare accident five years prior to the formation of the Revenant Collectives! And the deeper one digs for truth the more outlandish stories concerning this space pirate would surface!
According to the Galactic Information Broker “The Watchers,” Rembrandt Roswell was also a Psi-Borg, a psychic cyborg unique to new Hesperion capable of doing miraculous things like reading people’s mind to blowing it up. Alas his kind had been long hunted down by “The Peacekeepers” (New Hesperion’s security elite led by its infamous cyborg General Edwards) by then—a sanctioned genocide unknown to the rest of the galactic public.
Through either karmic luck or sheer chance the wayward nineteen-year-old Rembrandt and the then deep-space miner Patrick Escula met for the first time on a far-flung slum of a planet, moments before he almost got arrested for blowing up the heads of dozens of anti-cyborg thugs in a local racial scuffle! Knowing his dangerous potential must be tempered with Patrick sent him to be cared for by “The Order of the Blessed”, a pacifist organization specialized in training psychic youths.
Rembrandt trained under the Order and came to serve the Galactic Union for a while, before he was allegedly defrocked after the Order discovered his involvement with a similar but darker organization called “Brotherhood Of The Mind-Benders”. From here the chronology got a little unclear, all up to the point where he reunited with Patrick Escula to begin a life of crime. They became very good at it and thus the Revenant Collectives was born!
Apart from the usual galactic buccaneering, the Revenant Collectives also offer their deep-space expertise to those in need of dirty deeds done quickly and clean at any price, where their high efficiency and cunningness is legendary among the denizens of the galactic underworld. And among their many clients is one high ranking military man from the Terran System known simply as “The Admiral”, the one that Rembrandt seems to have established a connection of sort.
And this relationship of theirs proved to be invaluable when a dark ancient fleet from the beginning of time, a compendium of monsters called the “Shudwa Dumanta Legion,” led by a masked humanoid in black wielding a glowing blood-red sword going by the name of Shaik The Fallen One, began making their clandestine existence known to the galactic public, bent on preventing some strange prophesy from being realized in the already divided galaxy!”
Read more about the Revenant Collectives and other tales of galaxy spanning adventures in my official, ongoing, science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called “THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
The Revenant Collectives Trilogy Part 2 – The Grave of Smiles
“A nearly empty pockets of galactic space in the heliopause region just outside the Outer Rim. A tranquil oasis in the middle of hellish gravity wells and evaporating black holes created from ancient galactic collisions. A place so hostile it never appeared on any galactic map! This is the Grave Of Smiles. A refuge for the downtrodden, the hopeless the helpless! Where those the galaxy deemed personae-non-grata but didn’t want to end it all yet would find a reason to live, to get back on their feet or to get back at the galaxy that mistreated them, getting even before moving on…
The place where the notorious pirate organization the Revenant Collectives came to call home!
Originally intended to be prospected for future premium quality crystal mining (spurned by numerous rumors claiming it to be littered with valuable trans-warp crystals namely Cryxillium, Terkadium and Encomium) a fledgling group of a thousand trained miners working for the Synod owned multinational corporation was sent to establish a base of operation over two hundred years ago. That group was never heard from again! From reports made by the Watchers it was confirmed that the region has more gravity wells and dying black holes than anticipated, making it almost impossible to set up business or even to explore, hence the plan was abandoned and that deep space tragedy was conveniently forgotten!
Alas several souls did survive that unimaginable cosmic doom…
For it would seem one of the fifteen doomed mining ships made it out of the cosmic chaos and crash landed onto a nearby asteroid; carrying over a hundred hardy souls that made it their home for several years, set up a nice outpost while harboring hopes that one day their employers would send up a ship to rescue them! There they continued with their intended work, amassed tons of cosmic wealth until one by one they painfully succumbed to starvation and madness! And among them was a seemingly human being with super intelligence and strange blue eyes that glow in the dark. A fellow miner who was also in charge of the ship’s communication, cartography and deep space navigation.
A man by the name of Proscotra “Patrick” Escula.
Patrick Escula was the son of a Pibian Union Space Explorer Socotra Escula and his human partner Veronica Everly. Socotra was sentenced to death for mating outside his species but got a stay of execution due to his wife’s dying wish was to have the government spare her husband, since it was compulsory for them to grant a dying mother in labor anything she wished for. Thus upon her death, Socotra received a lifetime of house arrest, ending his dream for good! Albeit Patrick grew up under the tender loving care of his father, he was not allowed to mingle with society well until adulthood, when he was forced to choose either a house arrest or to leave the planet forever! He reluctantly chose the latter, left his poor father alone for the wide open galaxy and was not allowed back even to tend to his father’s funeral over a century later…
Realizing earlier on his “special” status would get him nowhere or even killed in the Galactic Union, he went on and pledged his allegiance to its governing rival the Synod, where his knack for cosmic mineralogy and deep space cartography earned him a top spot in the renowned “Decorum-58,” the only human owned mining corporation granted numerous privileges by both galactic governments, where he cut his teeth alongside hundreds of other miners but shunned the presence of other Pibians, preferring the company of humans though he retains his father’s language, culture and religion, as getting even with his father’s race was never far from his mind! Then one day he and hundreds of others received a news from their employers: a chance to strike it rich!
The mining expedition of fifteen registered industrial dreadnoughts left with much fanfare from the Synod Capitol, though each miner knew the risks involved were not exactly worth the price they paid, (cosmic mining is both dirty and dangerous) all agreed their hard-earned Credits would invariably redeem their pride and worth! But as far as the young human/Pibian hybrid was concerned, he merely wished to earn enough Credits to allow him to get back to his homeworld as a wealthy individual or at least, gain a citizenship, never knowing this coming journey would forever deter him from ever realizing it! When just hours after coming out of the trans-warp portal the entire expedition suddenly became a mere plaything for whatever forces at work in that part of the galaxy…
Waking up from stasis to find his ship aground, no contact with the rest of the fleet and far away from help, this is where he would encounter both the best and the worst of humanity during those fateful seven years, and also the fact a lot of his peers actually looked up to him, as the hundred-strong surviving miners made a place for themselves as if things went on according to plan. Even so optimism never put food on the table! As days became months, the colony broke down via infighting and starvation, when hope finally failed even the most logical would turn to animals! Patrick sadly departed on board the only working shuttle as the remaining survivors clawed each other to death, vowing to return to give them a proper burial.
As the stars in the sky have it Patrick found himself out of the turmoil by the skin of his teeth, only to discover that fateful tragedy had been largely forgotten, that his survival would only be conveniently downplayed by the Synod! This forced him to live off the grid for decades, wandering from system to system doing odd jobs from both clean and honest to dirty and cheap, descending deeper and deeper into the galactic underworld right up to that major turning point in his life! When during one of his sojourns he encountered a racial riot between humans and cyborgs that ended with one of the latter snapped, screamed through his glowing eyes then proceeded to blew up the heads of all the racists from where they stood, drenched the street with blood before passing out.
Patrick knew it there and then that he has to save that unconscious teenager (and risked his name being etched onto the galactic criminal records). So he snatched that hapless kid away amidst the arriving city sentinels, healed him via a skill he got from his father and forged a close friendship with that wayward, drug addicted misfit called Rembrandt Roswell, the last of the psychic cyborgs from New Hesperion on the run from a militia of his own kind—The Peacekeepers! From there the two would go on to have several outlandish adventures together, among them being run-ins with the monastic Order of the Blessed, the shady Dark Brotherhood of the Mind-Benders, mysterious band of refugees called the Sacred Survivors and of course that dark consortium of ancient, galaxy-hopping menace the Shudwa Dumanta Legion…”
Read more about the human/Pibian pirate elder Proscotra “Patrick” Escula, New Hesperion psychic cyborg and leader of the Revenant Collectives Rembrandt Roswell, Shaik The Fallen One and his primordial army of darkness the Shudwa Dumanta Legion and other galaxy spanning adventures in my official, ongoing, science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called “THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
Tales of The Golden Horde Chapter 1 – Champion Of The Light
“A man of few words and fewer clues as to who he really was, Saif Mintaka rose from obscurity to become a reluctant hero (a facet of a series of future cosmic events called the Final Prophecy) some sixty-five million years ago. Legend has it that he was a humanoid of a half-Graxian and half-Halunian descent, a prince who escaped the aristocratic life for a life of space adventure. He ran away from home at the tender age of seventeen and enlisted himself in the Terran System’s military called the Space Sentry Division. There he reinvented himself as a backwater kid trying to escape boredom and made a lot of friends whom he would spend a small part of his life having his much-needed adventure…
As the story goes, the Terran System had been involved in centuries long war with hostile alien beings from unknown origin (they were not part of the Galactic Union at this time) bent on taking over their ancestral planet Earth and were permanently docked right outside of the local heliopause, so it is up to the Space Sentries to keep them out of the Solar System. This war reached its peak when he was only twenty one years old and part of the elite section squad called the “Shark Rifle Star,” earning the rank of Second Lieutenant and a co-pilot to First Lieutenant Joque Stamika, a Graxian hotshot who would later play a part in the System’s proudest moment when it received a lifetime membership to the Galactic Union. The latter thinks highly of him though their friendship is forever tested…
Though the tension was at an all-time high since forever, Saif Mintaka found the military life much to his liking, so much so he would soon found himself in a romantic relationship with a Callisto native Ellina Racava, Terran System’s Space Marine recruit who, like him, was also of a royal lineage but abandoned her gilded cage for the wide open space. Their fiery passion equaled only to the fires of interstellar dogfights although their blissful relationship would not have a happy ending. Interestingly, this was also the time when Saif Mintaka started having visions of outlandish environments, music and people. It’s as if he’s been contacted by someone or something out of this world: something that would signal the coming of a cruel twist of fate in this Ganymedian soldier’s life…
Then one day, a Space Sentry squad was ambushed by the faceless aliens while patrolling outside of Charon but they managed to send out a distress signal to the Terran System’s administration. Not too long afterwards, a large confrontation ensued between twenty thousand battle-ready human and relentless two hundred thousand alien ships, the likes of which was never seen before since this centuries old war started. And during this heated skirmish Saif Mintaka’s squad got decimated, his ship shot down, crash landed on Pluto…and straight into harm’s way! The aliens found and captured him a while later and, the next thing he knew, he found himself living through a nightmare of cruel experiments and horrid surgeries, intending to turn him into a super soldier…
Throughout those three long hellish years of ungodly pain and extreme agony he called out for help to the universe, over and over again as he watched his body being mutilated via every inhuman means possible. Then, in between remissions of pain, a psalm appeared in his mind, written and sung in words no longer spoken in the universe. Evidently during that fleeting moment someone or something from the cosmos had answered back, sent him that cryptic passage and prompted him to recite it over and over again. Thus as days became years, right up to the point when the heinous torture he endured neared its goal of turning him into a mindless killing machine, the alien fleet suffered an unimaginable defeat and ran away for good, but not before he was rescued from his cell and be brought safely back home…
Saif Mintaka awoke from his coma to rudely found out his girlfriend had moved on and his own government deemed him killed in the line of duty (just so they could study him for their own military means), his life is long over! Thus he decided to break out of the facility and, not long afterwards, the Terran System branded him an alien spy and a dangerous criminal fugitive, and they’ve been after him ever since. Fortunately for him he chanced upon the roving band of mysterious refugees called the Sacred Survivors not long after and, realizing he’s been chosen by the powers of their lost homeworld, took him in and made him one of them, enlightened him to their strange ways and also conferred him the celestial title “Champion Of The Light” preparing him to be the savior of both mankind and the universe…”
Read more about Saif Mintaka the introspective masked humanoid and other galaxy spanning adventures in my science fiction fantasy novel series “TALES FROM THE EMERALD WIND” and also my ongoing science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called “THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
Tears Of Mother Matrix
“A thousand years from today, thirteen massive ‘Deployment Ark’ starships, carrying each a million chosen men and women from Earth, departed from that troubled dirtball en route to the open sky for fresh new worlds. Each was a sophisticated technological wonder in its own right, carrying a piece of the planet in its cargo hold, numerous hard drives of memories of present day lives for future generations and hibernating pods so high-tech it basically made its occupant temporarily immortal. These were designed to withstand centuries of light-speed travelling and, due to its enormous daily multitasking; they were each helmed and controlled by a virtual supercomputer with near perfect sentience. And among them was a ship codenamed ‘Type Epsilon – Dark 63-B’, helmed by a feminine consciousness that called herself Mother Matrix.
As required by the migration mission, each of the inhabitants both human and robotic, were specifically programmed to be mentally linked to her so that she would be able to take care of them as they sleep. Evidently she developed a loving bond to each one of her charges as time progresses, and this proved to be vital for their survival, as thousands year old records showed later on. For not long after their departure from Earth—two hundred years to be exact—the expedition encountered turbulent galactic weather. That storm was so severe three ships were reportedly destroyed and five more ships couldn’t keep to their programmed route, ending up scattered all over the galaxy while the fate of the remaining five ships remained unknown.
Type Epsilon was one of the latter; having lost contact with the rest of the ships when its long-range communication towers got knocked out in the storm, its administrative system did the only logical thing—carry on with the expedition. For the next four thousand years she took care of things while her computing mind never stops processing. She started reviewing what she learned and, feeling sympathetic towards her cold, futureless droids, she looked up everything about human anatomy and physiology during all those long centuries to successfully create the first batch of trans-humans or cyborgs out of those droids just to keep her company. Towards the end of her celestial journey, she surprised even herself when she combined aspects of both her cybernetic and organic children and created the first superhuman, a ‘Neo Sapien’ named Anna Friday. Not only that, she also gave birth to two virtual children, which she named Odysseus and Perseus.
Four thousand years later, the ship landed on a planet in the Eridanus Constellation, a fertile world named ETP-567-GT—whom she later renamed New Hesperion—and all the humans under her care woke up to a wonderful start. That didn’t last long however, for a year later an alien race called the Smengvblin came and claimed it as theirs, and they were not happy with the encroachment! What happened next was the start of a brutal conflict (memorialized as the Crimson Sky Day) that claimed a lot of cyborg and Neo Sapien lives. The war was almost over when the aliens, trying to turn the tide around, bombarded the planet with biogenetic ordnances that made the super strong Neo Sapiens turned against both cyborgs and humans, starting another war just before another one could end. In desperation Mother Matrix sent out a distress signal to the cosmos and just before things got very bleak, when the Smengvblin army and the deranged Neo Sapiens were right at the gates of East Esplanade (the planet’s Capitol), the alien army was defeated by an unlikely ally—an alien supercomputer who had picked up her distress signals and incapacitated their war machines, giving enough time for Mother Matrix’s forces to lay them low and subdued her psychotic children, although some time would pass before they were completely cured…
She grieved at this tragedy while helping her children to pick up the pieces and rebuild, but alas friction developed between humans and cyborgs a hundred years later despite her best effort. And it got worse when someone from the cyborg side had sneaked into the ship’s crash site and messed around with her ‘Type Epsilon’ mental link-up hardware, psychically turning humans and cyborgs against each other and the first ‘Epsilon Call’ (human/cyborg civil war) erupted, claiming hundreds of lives from both sides of the family. Aided by the Neo Sapiens the war was painstaking brought under control, the corrupted hardware shut down and the crash site sealed, the perpetrator punished and a special security force called ‘The Peacekeepers’ were formed to maintain peaceful integrations and prevented both sides from going overboard ever again.
Then another interstellar conflict broke out three hundred years later when a rival supercomputer Rabar-Baiput jostled with Mother Matrix for more galactic bandwidths, resulted in him sending out his people to battle hers. This time the Peacekeepers were dispatched to the scene and saw total massacre for days that almost decided the winner to be the former when a lot of her cyborgs gone offline. Refusing to see more bloodshed Mother Matrix negotiated with Rabar-Baiput in cyberspace and reached a consensus, but not before she asked him to make it looked like her children were winning and the latter agreed. Thus New Hesperion rejoiced at this victory and things went back to normal soon after.
However, not everybody was happy about it…
For her decision to disguise the ceasefire as a hard-earned victory, she unknowingly irked her own son Perseus, thinking that his mother’s attempt at lying to her entire brood was illogical, ineffective, cowardly and could make her children develop a false sense of bravado in the future, possibly opening up avenues for them to become tyrants themselves! Unchecked, Perseus’ resentment towards his mother began to simmer within his virtual emotion chips, causing him to rebel against his mother and later threatens to supplant her as administrator of New Hesperion. Regrettably this culminated in the formation of the separatist ‘Diaboli Collectives’, formed after several altercations with his mother about her ineffectiveness pushed him to the edge, made him and his wife Lilith to declare their independence, causing his mother untold grief…
To the uninitiated, it would seem that the troubles of Mother Matrix showed little signs of diminishing. Nevertheless she picked herself up and put on a brave face as she watched over happenings on New Hesperion, nursing a broken heart. Understandably she was overjoyed when she received news that New Hesperion had gained a permanent membership in the coveted Union Of Planetary Governments Organization (Galactic Union for short) not too long after the interstellar conflict. Understandably she welcomed this respite, so much so that she didn’t mind seeing her children migrating for greener pastures in the Galactic Union, and also the fact that the decorated General Edwards, current leader of the powerful Peacekeepers, was an ambitious purist with a penchant for rounding up and deactivating ‘defective’ cyborg children in secret, all the while he was harboring dangerous dreams of supplanting the meatballs (slang for humans) as mankind’s ultimate stage in evolution.
Though fully occupied in taking care of the planet, Mother Matrix never stopped thinking and calculating; two things that would lead her to witness some outlandish goings-on in the universe that no mortal had ever seen and may never will. For among them, she had foreseen the coming of the Shudwa Dumanta Legion (Dark Legion) long before everyone else did, and also made contact with the mysterious band of roving aliens called the Sacred Survivors. That fact alone made her an unwitting participant in the cosmic tug-of-war between forces of Light and Darkness and, through them, she also learnt that her wayward son Perseus would one day become a champion of all that is good, as well as several of her cyborg children would go on to play key roles in the cosmic drama, one that would decide the fate of everything!
And for a moment, she hesitated…
Alas she had to put her hesitations aside as another trouble landed on her lap: a deranged human had somehow gained access to the crashed starship and reactivated the corruptive beacon, kick starting a second ‘Epsilon Call’ (human/cyborg civil war) that was bloodier and more violent than before with the involvement of The Peacekeepers. This was when the true nature of their decorated leader General Edwards a.k.a. Peacekeeper General was revealed. The power-hungry cyborg went into battle with the intention of bringing the war under control by any means but he seemed to be enjoying what he did, he did not care whom he crushed or which side he offed just as long as he gets the job done. His madness steadily reached new heights so much so that during the course of that two-year conflict, more and more of his men abandoned the General to side with the humans—even the Neo Sapiens were unnerved by his advances! Coupled with the fact that his all-cyborg military posse was very well equipped and the human forces very much divided, New Hesperion was doomed to implode into chaos that sees little hopes of ending…
The death of General Edwards by the hands of his own meatball college buddy General Dwight signaled the end of the two years long Epsilon Call and the death toll tallied at two million humans, one million cyborgs and one hundred thousand Neo Sapien casualties. The militant Peacekeepers were disbanded and court-martialed, and a new coalition government called the ‘Triarchy of Administration’ was formed to replace Mother Matrix as the sole administrator (of which she suggested it herself because she felt responsible for the tragedy). Though still grieving for her lost children, Mother Matrix spent the next six years trying desperately to persuade Perseus to come back to his senses, to stop dividing the cyborg kind via his ‘Diaboli Collectives’, his dangerous nerve war and, as the stars in the sky have it; he was finally captured and put into incarceration until he came to his senses. (His wife Lilith however, never repented).
Then the Dark Legion officially made their appearance known in the already divided galaxy, wreaking havoc and claimed to have planted spies everywhere inside both the Galactic Union and the Synod. But this one particular Chinese Triad leader had some very unusual ideas on how to address this burgeoning menace and, sensing that his plans might actually work, she decided to join Stanley Chan in defeating the Shudwa Dumanta Legion without causing much bloodshed. Using all her available cybernetic attributes, she also helped a certain son of a wanted space pirate to reunite with his father, and she even broke her own protocols by resurrecting an offline cyborg killed by a fusion bomb (undoubtedly planted by the Dark Legion) just to fulfill one former Dark Legionnaire’s wish in righting back the wrongs he did while being part of that galaxy-hopping forces of darkness.
And we now have come to the end of the saga of Mother Matrix and the beginning of the Golden Knight of The Cyberkind, a virtual warrior that will lead the battle for all goodhearted machines in the galaxy during the prophesied ‘Kal Merkaba’ phenomenon—when Shaik The Fallen One finally reached Earth for the celestial backdoor that will take him back to his homeworld of XNROE!”
Read more about Mother Matrix the supercomputer with a virtual heart of gold and other galaxy spanning adventures in my ongoing science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called “THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
The Revenant Collectives Trilogy Part 3 – Defeating The Dark Legion
“Looking back, the Revenant Collectives had had several peaceful decades of galactic plundering and making a name for themselves, dodging law enforcement agencies, endearing themselves to the downtrodden and exploring new sectors of space normal people wouldn’t tread without a triple layered force-field and high powered laser vapor grid. However the altruistic side of this band of space pirates is about to shine their brightest, thanks to efforts of this certain Chinese Triad Leader from a dump of a colony somewhere in the Horsehead Nebula by the name of Stanley Chan. Though a native of Xian Gan Prime, he always had eyes and ears on all things happening within the Earth Alliance government and, on this one particular day, he received the most shocking of news: one of the top ranking politicians is a Shudwa Dumanta Legion spy and he’s about to rendezvous with Shaik The Fallen One to give him some top secret information that will hasten his conquest of the planet.
Gathering all their resources, him and his old friend, Code Black Hacker (a dangerous class of IT saboteurs in the Galactic Union’s most wanted cybercriminals list) and another Triad leader Bonbon Hai formulated a plan to intercept that snitch, put everything on record and then put a bullet in that traitor’s head, for the said restricted information is a blueprint to a galaxy-hopping starship that both the Earth Alliance and the Galactic Union had developed—The Sign Of Shairo—and they are about to commence its construction soon. Shaik already knew why and where that starship is heading to and, realizing if it reaches the ‘Root of Laniakea’ before the ‘Kal Merkaba’ phenomenon begins, all his eons of careful planning will be for nothing! And since the galaxy is currently firewalled by five supercomputers (Mother Matrix is one of them) he has to procure those schematics via the old fashioned way—plant a spy in the government to find them and make him deliver them to him personally. And after doing that, he ordered his minions to at first cause trouble in the underbelly of that divided galaxy to allow his Legion’s activities to go unnoticed. Later on he would make the Dark Legion’s officially presence
known as their fated meeting drew near.
Rembrandt and Patrick knew about the existence of this Dark Legion several years back but they never knew how fast they gained a foothold in the galaxy until he met up with Stanley Chan. There Stanley Chan proposed to form an alliance to intercept the Earth Alliance traitor via a suicide squad made from both his Xian Gan Prime Triad and the Revenant Collectives, plus some help from a few of his friends from both the Galactic Union and the Synod. The space pirate duo were surprised at Mr. Chan’s humanistic side and, knowing the man knew what he is doing, they agreed to help him out of charity (piracy is a business after all). Thus with much difficulty, they managed to create not only the aforementioned squad but also an accompanying fleet of ships bound for the region just outside the galaxy, a realm of constant cosmic chaos (where matter and dark matter collides every second) where that meeting is to take place. Thus on that fateful day, a team made out of the Triad duo and company, a space marine force from the Earth Alliance, an elite militia from the Synod, two former soldiers of the Galactic Union, cyborgs from New Hesperion led by Mother Matrix, Saif Mintaka and a Psi-being from the Order of The Blessed, departed for the Outer Rim to rendezvous with Rembrandt and Patrick and volunteers from the Revenant Collectives. Alas, a month of violent galactic storms saw them unwillingly took up shelter on the galactic frontier planet Borobudor Fringe before a new launch window opened up and they resumed their journey. And what an eventful month that was!
The fatal attempt on the Supreme Chairman of the Galactic Union’s life while officiating the Galactic Union’s Founding Day celebration by an unknown fleet threw more than half of the galaxy into a time of uncertainty and power vacuum, with iron-clad curfew enforcements on all Union’s administrated systems and round-the-clock emergency patrols in every quadrant, it was a big inconvenience to both the galactic public as well as its dark underworld, where street protests and backstreet warfare became part of the daily news. This was when the panicked central government fell prey to hearsay and blamed the ‘previously non-existing’ Dark Legion behind the Chairman’s death, and all the sudden any unregistered cruisers and dreadnoughts were immediately considered a terrorist threat, busy interstellar trade routes reduced to a standstill, planetary economies plunged into recession and local governments lost control over their people. Few actually realized that the attack was orchestrated by the Dark Legion’s old adversary the Ephron Dantiaz Legion (the White Legion), risen from eons of obscurity as if guided by a sign and somehow gained full support from the governing rival (The Galactic Synod) to stem their dark counterpart’s advances. Shaik didn’t take this thing very well (because the Chairman himself was apparently one of his agents) and was forced to make his Dark Legion’s appearance earlier by confronting the White Legion in every sector of known space, angered by the fact they dared to ruin his plans and oblivious to the fact his fate is about to take on a turn to the worst real soon…
Barely a week had passed before the troubled government decided to do an impromptu general election, and both the news and its corresponding events affected the unlikely band of heroes differently. The previously cold relationship between Rembrandt and his estranged son Melvin seemed to have thawed out thanks to the help of his mentor Patrick. New Hesperion cyborg mercenary Remington Edwards began question his motivation when his only brother, City Sentinel Lieutenant Bradford, was killed in the line of duty (and was unknowingly brought back to life later on by Mother Matrix herself) by a fusion bomb planted by the Dark Legion’s unlikely agent—his own girlfriend. Saif Mintaka kept on traveling in and out of dimensions doing strange errands for the upcoming ‘Kal Merkaba’ event, even more so when his own protégé, City Sentinel/Guardian Captain Humoga Triakis went into a coma after surviving an ambush perpetrated by agents of the Dark Legion. The Human/Pibian hybrid and space pirate elder Patrick Escula faced a deep dilemma when his sworn enemy Purvustra Svem-Avika, a deranged Pibian sniper who blamed him for his girlfriend’s death and had been after his head for the past decade; came to him one day seeking help with his “otherworldly” problems. And the tank-bred Psi-being Gus Hanson begrudgingly accepted who he really is when his grandfather the Patriarch of the Blessed Order died and made him the only defender of all psychic beings in the universe called ‘The Golden Child of Future Past’. For the uninitiated it would seem that both the insignificant suicide squad and the galactic underworld alliance’s fate hang in the balance but in truth, it is not so…
Finally all the contestants for the empty Supreme Chairman of the Union’s seat had registered and shortlisted, with the vacant spot now hotly contested by two young politicians, twenty one year old Triakian galactic business mogul Kranov Charcharias (Humoga’s half-brother) and a twenty-six year old dark energy physicists Rmezon (no surname) evidently an agent of the Dark Legion sent by Shaik to take over the galaxy through political means. While most of the galactic eyes and ears were fixed onto the final day campaign between these two and (to a lesser extent) sporadic battles between the Dark and White Legion, the underworld alliance said their last goodbye to their loved ones prior to commencing the suicide mission. Remington was briefly united with his supposedly departed brother Gaius Bradford (thus rekindling his fighting spirit), Saif Mintaka formed an alliance with the spirit of a powerful prince during his many celestial travels, Union Army deserter and bomb expert Captain Tevork-Chi received news from his adopted son that their displaced race had just received a new planet, and the disassociating tank-bred Gus Hanson, mourning for his destroyed home world Haven-32B, found a reason to live again when he fell in love with another tank-bred while on Borobudor Fringe. And to top it all off, the Spokesperson of the Galactic Synod himself, Commodore Periz had agreed to join them, escorted by the Synod’s legendary military elite the ‘Pax Cabalis’ squad. As the heated campaign went on full-swing in the center of the Milky Way, the weary underworld alliance received news that they’ve been waiting for since forever: the month long galactic storm had dissipated and their launch window had been programmed and confirmed. Thus the fleet of Xian Gan Prime’s Stanley Chan, which consisted of two privately registered dreadnoughts with military grade trans-warp engine, a stealth cruiser with an Earth Alliance Marines logo and a Synod Class ‘diplomatic’ barge; departed from that frontier planet to meet up with the Revenant Collectives fleet of five souped-up destroyers and their infamous flagship “The Silenced Minstrel”, out near the heliopause. The confrontation was imminent…
The fleet arrived at the supposed rendezvous point of the Alliance mole and the Dark Legion, and rudely found out the traitor was none other than Earth’s Home Minister himself! Stanley Chan decided to get there before that politician does so that they could document the entire transaction and then disposes of both parties. They approached the site in stealth never realizing that Shaik the Fallen One had set a trap for them. Realizing this, the galactic supercomputer Mother Matrix quickly intervened, took over the cybernetic medium Melvin’s body and through him, she took control of the weapon turrets of the entire fleet. His father Rembrandt tried to stop him but Melvin was encased in an electrified force-field that nearly short-circuited him. The entire squad watched in horror as all the guns on each one of their ships aimed and fired upon both the Earth Alliance and the Dark Legion’s ship, blowing them up behind a fearsome blaze, and then the hapless cyborg fell weakly down the floor, where his father cradled him and Stanley Chan nearly put a bullet in Melvin’s head. Mother Matrix appeared out of the cyberspace for the first time and explained what she did, as she detected a fluctuation in the matter-dark matter equilibrium that suggested they were headed right into Shaik’s trap. Stanley Chan was placated by this and both ended up looking at the raging cosmic inferno for a moment before the entire squad got teleported into the Dark Energy Realm—and straight into the bridge of the Shudwa Dumanta Legion’s flagship itself! They awoke to find themselves in a vast, strangely lit hall filled with strange objects and intricate circuitry on every wall and even on the ceiling. Not soon after, an ominous red mist appeared out of nowhere and for the first time the identity of Shaik The Fallen One was made known to the universe, a humanoid in dark blue mask and poncho-like garment decorated with golden epaulettes, the all-too-sickening emblem of a flying black bird of prey lifting a sword while engulfed in a blazing fire (emblem of the Dark Legion) emblazoned proudly on his chest. A glowing red bladed sword floated effortlessly by his left side always within reach, and from his obsidian black visor aglow a pair of red eyes devoid of life! He grabbed hold of his sword, swished the red mist away and the confrontation began. Gus Hanson sealed him in a force-field generated by his psychic powers combined with a cybernetic field generator wielded by Bonbon Hai and Commodore Periz sealed his mouth via his own secret skill to prevent him from uttering any enchantments. Shaik the Fallen was understandably furious at this point; Gus grimaced in pain with each of the former’s hacking and slashing at his force-field and it wasn’t long before the Mad Wolf sprung loose and began to cast a powerful magick over the group. Saif Mintaka calmly drew out his sword, melded his powers with that of the dead prince and—to everyone’s horror—Stanley Chan confronted Shaik and lobbed a hand grenade full of the deadly Ofla Fever virus at him, and then he just stood there smiling as everyone in his team vanished from view via Saif Mintaka’s powers and right back onto Rembrandt’s starship, just in time to watch the formidable flagship of the Dark Legion erupted behind a catastrophic explosion. The starship then left for the nearest exit point of the Dark Energy realm for the Milky Way, leaving with a memory that will change their lives, forever…”
Read more about the Revenant Collectives and other galaxy spanning adventures in my ongoing science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called “THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
Tales of the Golden Horde Chapter 2 – Golden Knight of the Cyberkind
“The Golden Knight of the Cyberkind is one of the most difficult characters in the prophesied Golden Horde to describe in just a few words. Albeit at present the said chivalrous figure is that of Perseus-39DX, the son of New Hesperion’s Supercomputer Mother Matrix, Perseus however did not come to be the portended hero of future-fires by birth but rather, he was only a vessel, a cybernetic repository for an intricate algorithm that did not come from any part of the universe.
From an age before time began, there was a planet called XNROE, “The Place Where It All Began”, the sacred blueprint of the universe where The Creator first envisioned how every living thing that anyone had come to know would live, prosper and evolve. Alas, that world was troubled by three terrible wars almost from the get-go, a war fought using both magick and technology between two factions, the native pacifist and the troublesome demonic entities called the ‘Ja-annites’, whom were banished for constantly causing unrests and later came back to forcefully reclaim that planet as their own. That world eventually gained peace but at a cost of sacrificing itself for the creation of the universe; an event that was later known as The Big Bang.
As the prophesy goes almost all that was once XNROE perished in the fires of creation but saved one technological fragment of that world that seems to have survived. And this is the essence of the Golden Knight, a powerful virtual operating system that has the ability to regenerate any machinery, restore any corrupted software, rejuvenate damaged hardware, wipe out any malicious software and make any computing device to run in perpetuity with or without a power source. What’s more, it appears to have the same characteristic as an organic creature in the way that it not only has sentience but is also grows physically and mentally, evolves and learns all there is to learn and able to make decisions on its own. Furthermore, when it left the doomed planet, it was still in its infancy…
It landed in the Milky Way galaxy millions of years ago but somehow it contracted an illness along the way and it has been hibernating ever since. It was found by some tech scavengers later and had changed hands several hundred times until it came into possession of a certain Stanley Chan, a Chinese Triad Leader from a neutral human colony Xian Gan Prime. Mr Chan did not know what to do with it at first, but when the threat of the Shudwa Dumanta Legion reared its ugly head, this dormant hardware ultimately made its way into the hands of Mother Matrix. Immediately she realized that this weak cyber ‘child’ is not from this universe and, after several long periods spent in calculations, she came to a conclusion that this belongs to the lost world.
It will not be long before the people of that said planet would come to seek an audience with her…
From the moment he was conceived, Mother Matrix knew Perseus-39DX was not an ordinary cybernetic individual. He was caring and very much concerned over the wellbeing of not only the cyborgs but also the humans and the Neo Sapiens. And above all he values truth and honesty more than anything. He vehemently charged at the front line during the war with a ruthless alien race (later to be known as the Crimson Sky Day), oversaw the Peacekeeper’s deployment when his mother was at war with the Supercomputer Rabar-Baiput, and he was very much disappointed in his mother when she made a backroom deal with the latter to make the ending of that war looked like it was won by her forces. He never understood why Mother Matrix would lie to her own ward when the truth would have been better for the people of New Hesperion.
From that day onwards everything his mother did would always be brought to her attention and Mother Matrix eventually grew tired of her son questioning her every decision so much so that soon those discussions turned into arguments, one of which concerns the clandestine act of his mother’s favorite the Peacekeeper General rounding up cyborgs with unique traits (of which the latter casually labeled ‘defective’) into a top secret concentration camp to have them killed. He was appalled by this but he feigned ignorance well until the second ‘Epsilon Call’ (human/cyborg civil war) started and the maniacal General showed his true colors. Thus from the ashes of that tragic civil war Perseus-39DX and his wife Lilith-RX7B decided to disconnect from her and started a revolutionary movement called the ‘Diaboli Collectives’, intending to supplant Mother Matrix and form a new government via subversive actions that would go on for the next six years as New Hesperion tries to rebuild itself.
Perseus-39DX was finally captured after a long series of costly investigations and confrontations and he was placed under a house arrest inside a virtual sub-domain with maximum security surveillance sub-routines, the same year Stanley Chan discovered there is a traitor in his people’s original world. Mother Matrix took great care to bring him into the light and luck was on her side when she received that ancient computer system and, with some help from the people of XNROE, he came to his senses and decided to readdress his convictions, calling out for all his loyal followers to be reprogrammed and ready themselves for the Shudwa Dumanta threat. All seems well in the end it seems, but the future always mixes joy and sorrow…”
Read more about Perseus-39DX the reformed cyberwarrior and other galaxy spanning adventures in my ongoing science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called “THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
Tales From The Golden Horde Chapter 3 – Golden Child of the Future Past
“This past one year had been but a one weird journey after another for this certain tank-bred (manufactured) miner called Gus Hanson, a native of an Earth Alliance colony Haven-32B. Six years ago he wouldn’t even dream of dreaming something as outlandish as his present life but even till now he still can’t believe he’d been through it all. Manufactured straight off the biogenetics human service assembly line alongside his twin sister Helen (which is a strange but not uncommon anomaly within the breeding industry) he spent his one year of accelerated childhood feeling bored of the peaceful technocratic human colony life and looked forward to become a miner that he’d been programmed to, as his scientifically inclined twin was already offered a job in the planet’s astrophysics department as an assistant to a famous but unorthodox professor.
He left the planet soon after getting a five year contract of doing deep-space mining from both human and alien owned companies, garnered all kinds of working experience and after successfully completed his contract and amassed sizable amount of galactic credits from his monthly paychecks, he thought nothing other than to go back to his planet to spend time with his twin sister for a year before another contract is available for him. Unfortunately Haven 32-B blew up unexpectedly due to a rare stellar alignment phenomenon as he was working in the mines and he only found out about it while on transit, after reading all his unread emails from her. Feeling despaired and suddenly aimless Gus found himself jumping off the trans-warp shuttle halfway through the trip and ended up in Xian Gan Prime, an infamous travel stop human colony alongside the famous SM-22-B Galactic Expressway Intersection, where he’d just wander around trying to pick up the pieces and then maybe finding a way to reunite with his lost sister.
A sudden public disorder involving an attempted murder on one famous local hero, Triad Leader Stanley Chan, by a few masked men believed to be from the Union would definitely not make anyone’s day especially if one nearly became a collateral damage, but to Gus, who always knew he had a very strong gut feeling, that incident was actually a sign of things to come. And it came to him via an email concerning a job opening that sounded too good to be true, but he went on with it anyway. Later that night, in some busy back alley he met the guy who emailed him, an advanced mechanical engineer named James Levenstein and his cyborg partner Theodore Logan. It turned out that the offer was to assassinate Stanley Chan again but this time by order of the Earth Alliance; and a huge sum will be paid once the deed is done. Gus understandably opted out and Ted wanted to stop him but Jim warned him not to do anything, for he had read Gus’ mind and found out that the fleeing man was capable of killing people with just his mind, leaving Gus with a term (that will derail all of his life plans for good) burned permanently in his mind—a “Psi-Being”!
Gus was somewhat quite shaken by the experience and for long time he wondered what that meant. His questions were answered when he met a black robed, hooded stranger who identified himself as Dark Brother Esterminz, from a cult-like organization called Brotherhood of the Mind Benders. He told Gus that as strange as it may seem, that he was indeed a Psi-Being and capable of doing so much more than just killing people mentally and also how he came to be one. Esterminz told him that during the genetics mixing process that led to his birth someone inserted a DNA of a powerful Psi-Being into his batch and, originally only Helen were supposed to be born—his conception was an acceptable fluke! He also told Gus that him and the Patriarch were being hunted down by a galaxy hopping hostile alien monsters called the Shudwa Dumanta Legion (the Dark Legion) and that he must go to a certain sector of the Milky Way to train under a senior psychic elder known as the Patriarch, leader of a supposedly psychic research facility that was originally an ancient order of psychic warriors called “Order Of The Blessed”.
Accompanied by another Psi-Being called Commander Jensen “Paladin” Macready, he came before the Patriarch, got initiated and that’s where he found out that he was actually the Patriarch’s grandson, a prophesied great psychic champion called “Golden Child Of Future Past”, and it’s true that the old one and his dark counterpart Esterminz didn’t originate from this universe but rather, the previous one, one that was destroyed by forces of darkness. Gus trained with the Order since that day and rose up the ranks quickly to become a civil agent of the Order, where his first task was to find the rogue Psi-Being and bring him back to the Order, and that person was none other than Jim Levenstein himself! He found Jim after some searching and the latter immediately challenged him to a sub-dimensional psychic sparring in the backstreets of Xian Gan Prime. Gus whittled him down good and knocked him unconscious for easy transporting, but not before Jim once again messed up Gus’ mind by saying that the Patriarch was also his grandfather and that they were actually brothers!
The Patriarch didn’t do much in alleviating his curiosity but Gus eventually found out that the old man put his son’s DNA into his own breeding tank and then purposely contacted the Dark Legion to have his son killed. Gus felt betrayed and hatched a plan to rescue Jim from the Order’s maximum security prison so he approached his brother’s distrustful partner Ted to present him his plans. Ted declined several times but after showing him Jim’s condition in his prison he agreed to help with Jim’s prison break by using a prototype high tech vehicle they’ve secretly worked on—a street bike that can jump into hyperspace. They managed to rescue Jim but Gus inadvertently tapped into his latent, uncontrollable psychic powers and ended up killing three-quarters of all his brethren by accident as they made their escape. Gus was in a really bad shape long after this event but Jim helped him get better…
And not a moment too soon!
For not too long afterwards Stanley Chan received news that there was a spy in the Earth Alliance government working for the Shudwa Dumanta Legion and he started going around looking for people willing to help him find that person and kill him before secret files containing information vital to destroying the Dark Legion fall into the hands of their leader Shaik The Fallen One. Gus ended up training under Esterminz to control his powerful, unstable psychic abilities while harboring intentions to make amends for all the innocent lives lost due to his inability to control his power, whereas the psychic soldier Commander MacReady had had to choose between allying himself with his childhood friend the infamously ruthless Psi-Corp leader General Lambert and helping the criminal Stanley Chan to deal with this Dark Legion’s menace via an underworld alliance with an equally infamous space pirate leader—and former Psi-Corp personnel—Rembrandt Roswell.
He chose the latter and the rabbit hole went deeper and deeper…
And there he was, grimacing in pain where he stood as he tried to incarcerate the Mad Wolf of the Dark Legion, the supposedly immortal being with god-like powers, via his powerful mind binding skill. He remembered what his dead grandfather told him about the source of power for all the psychics in this universe—the “Preseglin Daiti” Crystal—and that he is the chosen one to champion their cause so he momentarily found renewed strength to hold Shaik down as one of his team members scanned the sprawling flagship for their escape. Alas Shaik proved to be too strong for him and broke his psionic barrier apart before walking straight towards them, summoning up ominous magickal powers around him intending to wipe them out. Saif Mintaka then used his magick sword to cast a circle that will teleport them out of there and that’s when the most unthinkable happened—Stanley Chan walked out of the charging circle holding a hand grenade filled with the Ofla Fever virus, looked back and smiled as the rest of the team vanished from Shaik’s lair back to Rembrandt’s own flagship, shortly before Shaik’s enormous mothership erupted behind a terrifying nova. The space pirate flagship got out of the Dark Energy Realm and the team parted ways with a myriad of mixed feelings not long after…
Read more about Gus Hanson the Psi-Being tank-bred miner and other galaxy spanning adventures in my ongoing science-fiction/fantasy short-story Tumblr weblog called
“THE LONG WAY HOME.”
Fair Days Eternal!
Yours Truly
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ The Silenced Minstrel
THE CELESTIAL OFFERINGS:
01) Dark Algorithms
02) The Revenant Collectives Trilogy Part 1 – Across The Starry Sea
03) The Revenant Collectives Trilogy Part 2 – The Grave Of Smiles
04) The Revenant Collectives Trilogy Part 3 – Defeating The Dark Legion
05) Tears Of Mother Matrix
06) Tales From The Golden Horde – Champion Of The Light
07) Tales From The Golden Horde – Golden Knight Of The Cyberkind
08) Tales From The Golden Horde – Golden Child Of Future Past
09) Farewell My Indigo Child
10) Dark Algorithms – The Aftermath
Recorded in Sky Panacea Enterprise Production from May 2020 to September 2020
All songs written, produced, mixed and mastered by Saiful Nizam Shukor
Shadowed Grace’s “E-Bliss” album is recorded and produced using these equipment and software:
Roland Juno Di Synthesizer, Shure Headphones, Yamaha AG06 Mixing Console, Mackie Multimedia Monitor, Adobe Audition Sequencer, Acoustica Beatcraft Drums software, D’Addario Planet Waves Instrument Cables, Ibanez Ovation Acoustic Guitar, Yamaha Pacifica Electric Guitar, Squire Precision Electric Bass Guitar.
“This album is dedicated to all the Indigo Children, Diamond Children, Crystal Children, Light Workers, clairaudients, clairvoyants, clairsentients, claircognizants and the rest of the sensitives and universal souls who volunteered to have a human journey through this ever-darkening world. Keep on shining your innocent light my friends! Your time will come.”
Saiful Nizam Shukor @ Shadowed Grace @ Silenced Minstrel
September 13, 2020.
(P) 2020 Sky Panacea Enterprise.
