#28 Moses Five

Moses Five

Once upon a time, everyone had heard of the fearless space bandit and freedom fighter Moses Five. His attacks to stop the villainous Vesper Geist from taking over the galaxy, and his expeditions to the edge of known space to conduct raids on the insectoid Spiddyocks were legendary. Sure, he flouted the law, but it was all for the best, and he was the hero people needed.

Finally, with a temporary dispensation from the Consortium of Free Systems, he participated on the decisive attack that defeated Vesper. Before they landed, she contacted Moses privately, and made him an offer of immortality if he merely held back behind Consortium forces. Moses Five bowed to no one, but especially not his oldest enemy, and he refused. He and the Consortium defeated Geist’s forces, but the woman herself disappeared. “Some sort of chronal anomaly” was the scientists’ best explanation. Shortly after that, Moses Five began having visions of his much older self in the future, and oddly enough, suddenly remembered having had them all of his life.

150 years later: the Consortium has expanded beyond the galaxy, and Moses Five is still out at the edges of it, in Outer Harappa, mostly in the Res Extensa, a bar run by humanoid hairless cats. When not lost in a fog of intoxicants and deja vu, he makes his money on this outlaw planet as an all-around fixer and low-rent “knuckle-duster”, hiring his skills out to the highest bidder. Bitter and broken-down, he dreams of his younger days, before a newly stable Consortium decided it no longer had a political incentive to tolerate popular bandits who would challenge its authority. Few remember his legend now, and some days he regrets not taking Vesper Geist up on her offer. But he hasn’t chosen to spend his last days in this forsaken rock on a whim – out at the edges of settled space, there are more chronal anomalies than elsewhere, and time tends to slip out of joint. When the nearby dying stars’ flare activity is high, his dreams of youth become far more vivid…

(Note: the idea of splitting the story between young and old bandit came from this post on Project Rooftop, where two guys submitted versions of the X-Men character Corsair, and Joel Priddy commented that it’d be cool to see a story split between the two submission. Four and a half years later, I haven’t forgotten that idea, and since I hadn’t seen anyone do something like it, I decided to put something together. I hadn’t seen that post since then until I went to find it today, and the similarities and differences between my versions and their much-better-drawn versions is interesting to me.)

Tags: bandit, freedom fighter, old, pirate, time

Category: 2011, Drama, Scifi