THE VANG:
THE BATTLEMASTER
CHRISTOPHER ROWLEY
OUTMATCHED
With shocking suddenness, a bizarre creature dropped upon them from the ceiling. It was dark gray with pink streaks, and a beard of green polyps matted its chest region. It had two humanlike legs and a number of long, narrow tentacles.
The thing struck with the hardened tips of tentacles that stabbed flesh as effectively as spears. Men were eviscerated, beheaded, amputated of one or more limbs in a frenzied but brief struggle.
Then Janodo of the Gate hit it with a shotgun blast, in the chest, where green polyps were thick. Blood and fragments spattered the floor.
The men stepped back, expecting the thing to fall dead. With another loud hiss, it seized Janodo and bounded out of the cowshed.
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CHAPTER ONE
The universe is a thing of lacy textures, sudden explosions, cold vastness, frozen foams. On these insubstantial threads and tatters lost in the boundless void, primitive life survives by accident, a thing of the merest margins.
Through the slow tick of time, species have come and gone, their viability tested by climatic change, by asteroid impact, by evolutionary wedging.
The merest handful of species has ever risen beyond their evolutionary envelopes, the limited horizons of their home-worlds.
Of these, a tiny fraction have reached the stars.
In the midst of the fifty-fifth century of spaceflight, the third millennium of the ITAA Era, the human species, originating in the Sol system, was the dominant intelligence within the local galactic arm.
This position had been achieved, however, only through the lucky discovery of the Starhammer weapon. Without this technology bequeathed from an ancient war, the human species would never have broken free from the domination of the laowon, the other Orion-arm bipedal spacegoing species of this era.
However, the discovery of the Starhammer had brought humanity face-to-face with the terrible reason for the great machine's existence, the ancient enemy to all other life, the self-termed Gods of Axone-Neurone.
This complex and largely parasitic lifeform, which had been destroyed by the Starhammer builders in self-defense, was not yet entirely extinct.
A few fragments persisted. Fortunately interstellar space is so vast and empty that most derelicts from the ancient space-reefs of war were lost forever in the dark.
And yet, here, there, they offered a terrible threat, like mines waiting to explode upon the unwary.
In this, of course, we see no more than another roll of the cosmic dice. A form of evolutionary wedging on a galaxy-wide scale. This kind of life, or that; either was possible.
Two thousand years terrestrial standard had passed since the events on Planet Saskatch. Again the dice tumbled from the cup.
The door to doomsday opened a crack once more and went unnoticed. A bleak unsympathetic light flashed out to illumina...

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