ORIGINAL FICTION: "Whispers in the Void" by Keith Hamilton Cobb

new Nietzschean brethren, to be officially out of fashion. It was no less foolish of both parties not to see that the alliance could only ultimately work to the detriment of each than it was not to see the folly in the Treaty of Antares. It was as moronic of the high-minded Commonwealth to expect Nietzscheans to be anything but Nietzscheans as it was to expect Magog to be anything but Magog. Yet and still, the space of time wherein the Nietzschean diaspora had gone about the process of re-adjusting to the new rules was time enough for the High Guard to indoctrinate and absorb into its ranks a huge cross section of “evolving Nietzschean” troops, (not an Alpha or Dragonian in the lot we can be sure). It was a Nietzschean captain in command of a High Guard heavy cruiser called Lux Aeternus who accepted the surrender of Prides’ Provocateur and her crew. Not, however, before Suleiman dropped him to the deck with a fist to the face and sustained a Gauss Gun blast from a member of the boarding party that completely dismembered his left arm. It was an idiotic maneuver, to look at it from a point of Nietzschean purity, and one that rendered him an obvious inferiority for the rest of his days. It was a baldly un-Nietzschean action sprung from a primal Nietzschean mind set, for it was in keeping with the fidelity to his will that came exploding fist first out of his present state of confusion surprising everyone, himself included I presume. I am left to wonder if the High Guard captain, Suleiman, and those on their way home were three stages in the study of Nietzschean evolution in the age of The Great Systems Commonwealth. I believe Suleiman, sitting in the enemy brig nursing his wound, must have wondered as well.

He was held by the remaining High Guard forces for a brief time, but there was hardly any governmental structure left in place that might effectively try him for war crimes. Besides which, there were far more pressing matters that demanded the attention of the ragged remnants of the Argosy. The Magog swarmed unchecked into the post-Witchhead entropy and the bloodbath that ensued, I must guess, left the shattered Commonwealth wishing they could turn back the clock and rethink all things from the treaty onward. Whether or not this last is true, what cannot be argued is that the Human was grossly ill prepared to repel the onslaught of the septic and insatiable creatures with the protective apparatus of “The Great Parent” in such irreparable disarray. Nietzscheankind, on the other hand, seemed to all too efficiently revert immediately back to pride specific modes of defense, each unto itself, where the long dormant and quasi-dormant elements of their nature awoke with a vengeance to best protect them from anything and everything including each other. Pride rivalries long put aside were rekindled, and Nietzschean worlds, in a primal Nietzschean xenophobic hysteria, focused reborn and unadulterated Nietzschean viciousness and might on expanding their zones of comfort against Magog and all other comers else. The Drago-Kazov and the Jaguar Prides battled for supremacy. The Kodiak Pride, my people, who had always lived a distant third in the clan hierarchy, inexplicably abstained from the civil fray, triggering heated debate amongst themselves and among the Prides at large. It had been no secret for some time, and in fact, the focus of much interest and dialogue, that the Kodiak were changing. Certainly Suleiman could not have been the first to see it. “Weakening,” said the voices of many. “Growing” was the observation of a lesser school who, in their own evolution, may have been unwittingly influenced. Whatever the case, apparent to all observers was the fact that the days of the Kodiak as hunter-killers first and foremost were fading. In the company of a hundred or so million newly primalized Nietzscheans the observation could not have boded anything but ill.

To all the warring Prides the Progenitor’s remains were sacred. And so it was a mutually undisputed fact that for any to keep them in the midst of what promised to be a melee unrivalled in the annals of Nietzschean history meant risking the loss of them to all Nietzscheankind forever. In light