World Building - An image of Amuk-Yan: Ma'Rni Prision

This is an image of the prison asteroid where Zack is being held.  It is called Amak-Yan, which loosely translates to The Womb of Shadows.  It is one of a half dozen asteroid that the Ma'Rni, which are a humanoid cyborg mob-like society, use as part of their secret society's base of operations.  The Ma'Rni routinely capture, kidnap and attempts to reprogram influential individuals through torture and augmentation to gain their knowlege, secrets and compliance.  It is located in the asteroid belt of the Binary Azmathian System.

This images was created by:

 Brandon Koller in January of 2006.

First Draft - Escaping From the Ma'Rni Prision Asteroid

Zack began to regain consciousness trussed between two still fuzzy figures and being drug down a dimly light corridor.  He noticed the smells of harsh chemicals mingled with filth and refuge.  The deckplates were slick and appeared dank and degraded.  Zack’s neural processor was clearing its buffering and reinitiating his cybernetic limb controls.  The perceptible and uncontrollably twitching that always accompanied a buffer dump seemed to go unnoticed by the armored humanoids that were dragging him.  They seemed not to notices his large frame and the added weight that his dense molecular fiber limbs added to his body. 

The overload had occurred when the Ma’Rni boarding party’s stun weapon had hit him.  He assumed it had been a full charge but wasn’t sure because his systems were designed to utilize energy as an offensive weapon up to a point.  The fading effects allowed him to being focusing as they stopped in front of solid looking hatch.  Zack noticed the form to his right pull and manipulate a cube.  The door opened in an irising fashion receding into the walls ceiling and floor in a somewhat circular pattern.

Zack listened as they spoke.  The data packet the ship had transmitted during the initial hails for contact and boarding had proved to be a simple enough process for Zack’s hybrid neural processors to utilize.  Their voices were heavily mechanized, yet he recognized it as that of the banter of soldiers attending to menial labor.  The words however made no sense, it must be a different dialect or language all together.  He was certain they were human or closely related under their armor.  He remembered the face of the black robed man on the screen.  He had most definitely been human-like in many ways under his clearly augmented form.

His captors drug him across the threshold and roughly deposited him on the slime covered floor.  The both stepped back.  The dark cell’s door closed with a faint his and a clang as the metal seated itself in place.

The floor was cold and slick with sludge-like moisture of unknown origins that clung to his clothes and skin as Zack finally began to surface from the blackness inhabited his dreams.   The chaotic dream that kept repeating each time he closed his eyes.  The fiery princess and her pleas were fading and his mind began to take stock of his surroundings.  The voice in his head was insistent that he wakeup.  Then his nose was assaulted by the thick feted smell made him sick and caused his lungs to ache with each breath. Finally, as conscious thought returned Zack remembered the brutal events that had left him unconscious on the floor yet again. 

The cell door slid open on its multifaceted irising track.   Zack’s eyes slid open at the sound.  The Frankenstein monsters stood just inside the door of his prison cell again.   Zack looked at the two brutes and a frown crossed his face.

“It’s been a while boys! I had begun to think you had left me here to rot,” Zack said.

They both held their stun baton in their massive hands.  Both Mutt and Jeff, their real names Zack didn’t know.   They never spoke.  They held their stunners their eyes seemed to sparkle with the promise of brutal use.

“So glad you could stop by and play,” Zack said resigned to the beating to come and the pain to come.

The two stepped closer.  Their black long coats didn’t even ripple.  The smaller of the two struck him without a word of hesitation.  The voltage flowed. Zack instantly dropped to his knees.

The arcs of blue harnessed lightning jumped across his newly reconstructed neural pathways.  The burning and agony then vanished as Zack’s biofeedback loops triggered.  Zack’s eyes flared with intensity as he realized what his body was finally healed enough to respond as designed.  The voltage that arced now flowed into the filaments of his monomer muscles.  Zack felt instantly that the shunted potential energy was available to his hands.

Zack said, “Mutt! I am tired of this!”

Zack sprung from the deck and slammed the palm of his hand into Mutt’s boney chin.  The sparks that had once leapt from his stunner now completed a circuit and flowed into Mutt and he began to convulse as he dropped to the sludge covered deck.

Jeff instantly sprung forward and as his stunner made contact with Zack’s body the blue arcs flowed into him and Zack grinned.  The brutal impact wasn’t even felt, only the increased the potential energy.

Zack spun in place, his foot contacting the knee of Jeff with an audible crack.  Jeff stumbled past Zack.  Zack then struck cobra like at the receding neck of the more massive of the two bullyboys.  The contact dropped Jeff almost instantly.

“You will not be dragging my unconscious body down the hall to your mistress this time boys!”, Zack exclaimed as he knelt to discover what else Jeff had on his person.  Zack took the stunner from Jeff’s now slack grip.  Zack reached into the pocket of Jeff’s black leather coat and retrieved the strange cube that they used to iris open the doors. 

“I have the cube,“ Zack said to the voice in his mind.

“Good! Now press the left to buttons in the following sequence,” the voice in his head responded.

First Draft - Exiting the H.A.M.S.T.E.R. Last Updated: 09/14/2016

The squad leader stood to the side of the ramp and gave the signal for the first of Sinclair's Raiders to exit the ramp of the hovering assault transport as the lush green and purple foliage of the jungle below batted to and fro in the vortex of four vectoring thrust engines above.  The relentless torrents of hot air not only forced it the thick liana to split, but  inflicted sufficient heat to cause the tops of the nearest trees to begin to wilt. He watched with an appraising eye as each of his team leaped out and then dropped into the heat of the jungle below using directive jets to land in a precise perimeter.  Then mere moments after they appeared upon the jungle floor as dark almost black silhouettes against the flowers and frawns one by one they vanished from sight in the millisecond flash that updated the  Chameleon Chromatic Perspective Projections Generators were switched into the active setting.  The dedicated camelion skin processors on-board the Mongoose Armor, that the Carver Corporation's Marine Contingent, gave it the stealthiest infra-red and visible light profiles of any weapons platform yet devised.  The company's armor wrights would be justifiably prideful if they knew in this one detail they had exceeded even the Tlasi at their height.

The squad leader stepped from the ramp where it hung above the canopy and moments later landed in a jet of compressed air that cushioned his armored fall to little more than he would have felt if he had jump down a half flight of stairs instead of the near 30 meter drop he had just completed.  Then he vanished into the deformed landing zone as his 'chameleon chrome'  updated and he signaled to the hovering H.A.M.S.T.E.R.; 

"All systems are green," he said into his mic.

"Roger! All green is varified.  Good hunting, Lieutenant!" the pilot responded in her thick Martian Irish brogue.

"Good hunting indeed!"  Lieutenant Sinclair replied, "Try to leave a few of the mange ridden nasties for me and mine."

The reply was filled with that lilt and humor that made all men smile, "Lieutenant, I kill'em as I find'em.  You just need to play the game better, if you want to play in the same league as the big girls!"

"I'll take that challenge Lieutenant Killafina," Jon replied, " you will owe me though!"

"Tin can bravado and testosterone is no match for a keen eye and a H.A.M.S.T.E.R.," she jabbed back.

He let the Killafina's last statement stand as he knew all too well the hell that was about to be unleashed when she finally settled down for her kind of fun.

Sinclair's squad's objective was clear and they all knew just how critical it was that they be in position before either the Ma’Rni Shock cyborgs or the Rocorian marines now confirmed from stealthed observation platforms to be working their way to the crashed site's coordinates.  Jon knew he had a narrow window to rendezvous with the Voiceless team and successfully conceal their ambush positions.  He figured at most the had an hour to cover the twenty miles of thick jungle, which on a good day was going to be no easy task.  His team's buzzers were going to be cutting a wide obvious track until the meat up with their native guide and his team.

He just hoped that the Intel Winnies had been correct when they told him not to worry about the obvious nature of their path from the drop zone.  The head Winnie had simply said,

"The Voiceless have better paths to the ancient site."

That was it, he refused to elaborate anymore than to tell him his old friend was supposed to meet him there and lead him in.  He wasn't sure why a voiceless traveling bard would have been selected for the task but the orders were clear on that point.  Jon didn't know what that meant and he only had 20 minutes to make it with his team to the way point. 

"We've got a mile to go and only minutes to get there people.  I want a single file line on Sergeant Major Martinez.  Move!"  he said.

"You heard the man, my bambinos! Line up and hold hands 'cuz I'm not going looking for any lost lambs today!", the SMaj's less than altruistic voice stated loud in each soldier's ear through the auditory implant, "We've bus to catch and we're already late!"

Then the SMaj's suit started buzz sawing its way through the thick lianas and under growth leaving a swath of pulverized vegetation in her wake.  The neat thing about the buzzer was its ability to mimic a native creature's swath of breakage, which in this case she had set to the Horned Saber.  She set the pace and all that followed were hard pressed to keep up especially Private Nathan Wanzowski who walked in her wake and had the task of cutting down what his diminutive scaled leader missed.  Thus, by the time Lieutenant Sinclair and his twitching tale end Charley came through the well tramped path there was no need to cut anything.  Their sole task was to monitor the presence of the wary predator, known as Askarsa'berat; and called 'Horned Sabers' or 'Saber Toads' by the Terrans, because it looked like a cross between a Terran horned toad and a Saber-Toothed Tiger.  

Horned Sabers Toads were extremely dangerous to unarmored troops, but could only damage some of the more sensitive joints of the heavy Mongoose chameleon chromed armor.  They posed little danger to the armored marines of Sinclair's Raiders, but were always monitored.  They couldn't see to attack the team, beyond a vague sensed motion, but the creatures were highly territorial and were constantly fighting each other, as they redefined their territorial dominance.  This usually ended in the death of the defeated male, but occasionally the losing male would submit to the largers dominance and then run away to attempt to survive and find new territory. 

Horned Sabers Toads were often a challenge in the jungle because they viewed anything that wasn't prey as a challenge to their dominance of the territory.  Though the one that followed the team was of the more cautious variety and followed their path at a cautious distance.  It seemed to know there was something bigger passing through.  It followed the team to the edge of its territory where it stopped and watched in puzzlement at the passage of a mysteries of existence.

The chameleon chrome projectors flickered and passed images from side to side projecting the illusion of a patch of haze melting through the jungle whenever there was the slightest processing resolution error. This default error illusion worked extremely well in nearly all environments.  The system perfect when stationary, did occasionally flicker mist to cover unknown pixels.

Though Lieutenant Sinclair noted that there was precious little that could be done to mask the progress of the heavy combat armor that was the standard issue of the elite palace guard, assigned defended the heir of the Ta’Leni clan and her chosen Battle Lord Zack Carver. The swath of passage would indeed pass for a Saber Toad trail in a few days but it to anyone who observed the passage of the nothing but the occasional wisp of haze that snapped and buzzed its way through the jungle, there could be no mistaking the presence of the military grade light bending armor and he knew there was nothing to prevent that detail. Which is why the team moved in a fashion that would encourage that assumption by any off planet invasion force, that might come upon it later.

Camouflaging their approach to the ambush position Sinclair hoped they would achive the suprise needed to utterly decimate the team of cyborgs and their Rocorian lap dogs.  Their progress was easily tracked by the swath of destruction that made Sabers Toads seem small by comparison as it arrowed straight for the coordinates fed to them by the spy before his treachery was unmasked and executed.  Now that the Sinclair's Raiders were on the ground, the downed team stood a chance of to accomplish the mission before the cyborgs and wolves reached the abandon monastery.  They would not live to see their chaotic plan implemented, now that Lt. Sinclair and his team were in the jungle and on an intercept course to catch them from behind at the moment they were engaged by the deadly Lt. Simmons stationed on the ridge above and the ever deadly Lt. Killafina.

World Building - Inxter Corporation - Ragin' Fire H.A.M.S.T.E.R.

Here is a craft that is featured part of the coming chapters.  The Inxter Corporation's H.A.M.S.T.E.R. is a Heavy Assault Mobile Seige Tank (Extended Range) variant often called Ragin' Fire Hamster, Hell Hampst, Furball and the Spinning Wheel of Pain by those that know and love it.

My time helping out on Star Wars Deckplans over at the Star Wars Deckplan Alliance gave me an appreciation for turning words into images.  My additional love of drawing fantasy future technology lead me to begin the process of turning this ship into an RPG playable ship with a full SWDA styled deckplan.   

It began as this rough sketch in January of 2007:

Which I gradually worked to convert into a cleaned up version through February of 2007:

I then realized I needed a bit more detail inside the green outline and began focusing on that portion of the deckplan during 

Through out July and August of 2008 I worked back and forth with a few SWDA friends and had refined the internals of the "preposterous beast" as it was once called.  

Sadly, that is where this particular project has sat for the last eight years.  I have occasionally pulled it out with the intent to complete this project, but the little hands that are more important than this story have always had a larger claim on my time since then, either in the form of actual time requirements or in the form of a second job that ate all my spare time and then a few extra hours to boot.  I haven't cleared the deck yet to begin fully returning to the work of building the world of Azmathia in detail, but I am seeing signs that O' Dark thirty is a practical option for engaging in this creative endeavor.

General - What is this Blog About?

Azmathia, is the name of the central solar system in the Sci-Fi story I am developing.  The planet of Azmathia is the primary location though much will happen elsewhere; it is the nexus point for my entire story to revolve around.  Each of the political polities has a character or two who will share the stage and act in the light or the dark to bring about their deepest goals and desires.  The story is intended to be rich with character driven drama and layers of intrigue.  Some of this will be obvious in the shared posts and other wider plot intrigues and arcs will not be so obvious.    

I will be sharing the story, but along the way I will also discuss the details about the story and character sketches as well as drawings of the characters and creatures.  A few years ago I tried putting a forum together that was simply going to discuss the technology and science of the universe. Back then my primary efforts were being funneled into building the tech trees of the Azmathian Universe, and its exogenesis from our world of today.  I will be sharing the technology side of the story as I move through the story, you can think of these as the bonus features on a Blu-Ray DVD.

If you wish to share a comment on how a particular piece of technology should work or how you understand the physics of an object, just reply to the segement you are reading at the time and explain it in a polite fashion, I love reading other related links so pass them on.  In particular if you have knowlege of Aeronautical & Space Sciences as well as Gunsmithing, Physics, Geology, and Chemistry; and you have observed a gaff on my part feel free to tell me where I got it wrong. 

These are very broad discussion topics, which I hope will smooth the edges of my ignorance and hopefully enable me to early on correct the blatant pitfalls that I have observed in other Sci-Fi stories. 

Why am I asking for you help?  Let me ask you a few rhetorical questions to illustrate my reasoning for seeking your assistance in this manner. 

• Would the Master Chief Petty Officer ‘SPARTAN-117’ be anything special if he were not bio-enhanced as a Spartan II and arrayed for battle in MJOLNIR Armor toating a MA5B Rifle?
• Would we care as much about Han Solo without the Millennium Falcon? 
• If Serenity didn’t exist would we have had the interactions of Malcolm and his disparate crew on Firefly? 
• Who is Rick Hunter without a VF-1 Valkyrie? 
• However could Takeshi Kovacs survive stack intact, without a cool bio-engineered sleeve and a Nemex pistol in one hand and a nasty bio-disease encode Tebbit Knife in the other? 

My answer is rooted in the belief that these characters are given a greater vitality because of the technology that is at their disposal; thus part of my goal with this blog is to create a group of willing commentators, willing to share what they know to improve the story.

Some of these technology concepts and craft are going to be closely related to the near future, others are based upon the existence of "alien technologies" and hybrids of those technologies.  While it is true that I have ideas on how these "alien techs" work and interact with hybrid human systems, I do not expect you to "blindly" accept these concepts.  I encourage you to pick at them and tease out the good and the bad, and we can discuss them in further detail as needed. 

Feel free to point out things I have missed or ideas you think might work better.  I won’t promise that I will accept every ‘jot and tittle’, but ultimately I am seeking a balanced tech footprint to emerge from the coming discussions.  It is my desire to build a believable craft that is still at its core Sci-Fi and in possession of its own aura of “wicked-uber-coolness”.

And by the same token if there is a plot point you believe I have missed or painted poorly, I am interested in hearing why you feel that it should be other than as I have written it.  That doesn't mean I will change the section, but if your argument isn't petty or arbitrary; there is a strong likelihood that I will find a way to accommodate your critique.

MY ONLY RULES ARE THESE:

·         BE RESPECTFUL EACH OTHER AND YOUR BENEVOLENT DICTATOR (You can disagree without the use of insults or foul language.)

·         BE RESPECTFUL OF OTHERS WORK (If you are basing your comments upon research or imagery, done by another individual; Give them FULL CREDIT for their ideas and provide reference links or information as it is available.)

·         BE RESPECTFUL OF THIS CREATION (Theft of Artwork and content will be extremely frowned upon and where appropriate pursued.  This is after all is said and done for the purpose of refining my work.  I fully intend to follow my own rules on this as well, which means you will be given credit for what you influence.)

·         ABOVE ALL HAVE FUN!!!