Jymmy's Space Cowboy: The Red Land

By James Earle

The far-flung imperial frontier is no place for greenhorns.

Two Toes, the renegade Tigerillian war chief, is off the reservation and slaughtering human settlers west of the Bloody Muddy. Only a half-grown boy with a heart full of vengeance and bottled lightning in both hands stands between the outlaw war chief and the rest of the western frontier.

But there are secrets about young Lightning Ryan Taylor that span the known universe. Secrets that have long been kept from young Ryan and that are about to catch up with him, whether he is ready for them or not. Dogged by a native prophecy from the day of his birth and the hardness of his frontier home world, Ryan must stop the renegade, still the wildfire of racial war, and reunite with the mother, whom he thought long dead.

Beware the line where science crosses back into magic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662426766

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Jymmy's Space Cowboy

The Red Land

James Earle

Copyright © 2021 James Earle

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-2675-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-2676-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Prologue

The magenta sky paled into a watery lavender hue, washed out by the dying of the blistering red star that hung low over the distant mountains. There were no clouds in the sharp bowl of the arching sky. Only the broader, brighter brushstrokes of rose-tinted pinks and the deeper burning crimsons splashed against that majestic canvas, like smears on stained glass. Cantonese was a desert world and saw little to no rain this far north. Scarlet smeared the distant mountaintops like bloody gore, reflected from the glacial ice capping the far, distant tors. Miles above the deep-purple rimrock, where the coldness of space froze the towering, craggy peaks, the glaciers hoarded the only source of fresh water that the imperial frontier ever saw. This far out on the fringes, wildness was a frontiersman’s constant companion.

Soon, with the falling of full night, the Cantonese night wind would begin shrieking through the rimrock canyons like a jilted banshee. There was no wind during the day. No breeze coming down from off the frozen glaciers to move the dead, still air. But at night, when the night winds howled down from off the distant mountains like a stalking fanger beast, the canyon country could turn alarmingly cold. What little moisture remained in the air after the star-blistered heat of the Cantonese day became a frosting of frozen dew, painting everything and anything not tucked safely away inside. A man’s own breath could chill his lungs in the Cantonese night.

More than one tenderfoot had pitched their camp in the low places of the desert, only to discover that it was their grave site at dawn.

The aged Spirit Singer Red Cloud lifted his white-whiskered muzzle into the dying light of a cruel and merciless red star. A member of the native Cantonese feline races, the Tigerillian holy man knew well the whims of his beloved Red Land. Tiger-striped, his orange-and-jet bands had long since taken on the whitening hairs of his venerable age, giving his beautiful coat a wizened accent. Now his nine-foot height was supported by a very rare and highly coveted oddity. Objects made of wood in the harsh Red Land were as rare as a werecat that was not totally stuck on itself.

While considered lucky by the many tribes, the werecats were still vain and arrogant little creatures. They were often as self-absorbed as the ugly and stupid little man-things that had so recently invaded the Jaguarian tribal nations. Red Cloud wished that they, too, were as rare as the six-foot length of stout oak now helping to support his hunched frame.

But alas, they had become all too common these days instead. Way too common for Red Cloud’s tastes. They bred like Brullian tripes trapped in a seed storage pit. And for all their puny and diminutive stature, they were surprisingly as fierce and as savage as a bite-crazed, foam-mouthed fanger beast. Which was exactly why he did not understand why his beloved goddess would place the fate of his entire world into the furless hands of one of these tailless star-beasts! And a mere tom-kit at that!

Red Cloud had been watching this small man-cub for the past five cycles. And he saw little in the kit to warrant the great goddess’s astonishing favor. But ever since he had awoken in terror from that strange and surreal dream, the star child had weighed heavily on his mind. The great goddess Alaphata had revealed to him in that strange and unsettling sleep vision that this star child kit was her chosen savior for the mighty Jag people. That she had wrapped him tightly within the warm, light cloak of her long fiery tail, just as surely as his destiny was intertwined within the tangled weave of the true people.

And if Red Cloud were to admit the truth of it, the little whelp was fearless. But he was also just so tiny! And even a little reckless.

While it was true that the Tay-lor family was at least trying to behave like true human beings, Red Cloud was still not so sure that he himself was really ready to fight the battle that lay ahead for him. He wanted to give his precious goddess what she asked of him. But no star-fallen, no-tail man-beast had ever been taken into one of the many tribes before as one of the true people. It was unheard of. And there would be resistance within the nine tribes from the start. None of the true people of the nine tribes would be eager to accept a human into their ranks.

The truth was, Red Cloud knew that the councils of toms and the sisterhood of she-cats would resist the very idea of such a thing, fang and claw. And even with the spirit visions of the great goddess herself to aid him, Red Cloud knew that he had a hellacious battle ahead of him to turn young Ryan Tay-lor into a Tigerillian brave. But at five cycles, the time had come for the man-kit called Tay-lor to be introduced into the warrior societies. And a seasoned and well-proven hunter and brave must accept him as an apprentice first.

Ryan must earn his Jag name among the people. Only then could Red Cloud dedicate him to the great goddess’s purpose. Only then could he receive the secret name that the great goddess had whispered into Red Cloud’s tufted ear during his spirit vision. The name that was already the child’s own true name.

Alaphata’s Child!

*****

The venerable ronin Tanaka had forced his old bones to crouch down so that he would be at eye level with the ginger-haired boy. The lad’s ginger-colored hair was so much like the hair of his mother, the precious one. It had been pulled back into a thick braid and hung suspended between the child’s diminutive shoulder blades like a burnished copper tail. But it was the child’s eerie gray eyes that really betrayed his true heritage. The blood of imperial royalty flowed true within the boy’s veins.

The firstborn and only son of Angelina Constantine-Taylor, little Ryan, was the high emperor’s only true living heir. Not that the child himself knew anything about his true secret heritage. The precious one had deemed it unnecessary for her son to be aware of his vaulted status. Those titles that he might one day claim were far away from his native frontier home. Tanaka-san kept his own opinions on the matter to himself. It was not wise to question the precious one’s wisdom.

Once upon a time, before his precious one had found love, he had been a high-ranking officer within the Imperial Black Guard. A Gen, modified by the carefully guarded witch’s brew of the long-lost Gen masters, and sealed forever beneath the power of the emperor’s holy kiss. The precious one had been his charge. As was this small boy, now that he had come along. But even way out here on the forgotten fringes of the empire, Tanaka-san was not without his Black Guard honor.

A Chin-ese by birth, Tanaka had been dedicated to the imperial training facility on his home planet of Chi-Na at the customary age of five. Tanaka well knew his sworn duty to his imperial mistress. But out here on this harsh, fringe world planet, where barren rock lay tortured and tormented beneath a merciless red star and the sun-scorched sand was bleached of all color, the duty that he had once known in the halls of the imperial high court had evolved into something less clear-cut and clean.

No imperial had ever been given the mysterious secrets of their Gen-Guardians’ potent martial magic before. And in truth, Tanaka risked the wrath of his guild by teaching them to the young princeling now. But at the tender age of five, little Ryan was proving himself to be a very clever and natural young martial artist in training. One who was showing a surprising level of talent and skill for one so young.

Squatting down in front of the boy, ignoring the blistering heat and the protest of his old joints, Tanaka faced the boy princeling beneath the fading Cantonese daystar. The old and wizened ronin guardian lifted his most treasured possession from its resting place reverently, easing it from its habitual place of honor between his hunched shoulder blades. The bejeweled hilt sparkled in the dying starlight, the quantum crystal blade of the ancient, high-arcane artifact, concealing the true extent of the katana’s vast and great old age. Exactly how old the arcane blade was, not even Tanaka knew for sure. But compared to the few of the others that the wise old ronin had seen, his blade was far older than most.

Given to him on the first day of his dedication into the guildhall of the Black Guardians on Chi-Na, the ancient, high-arcane tech blade had weighed no more than a feather. Even in his five-year-old hands, the weapon had not been too heavy for Tanaka to lift with ease. That was why Tanaka knew now that it would not be too heavy for the boy prince to lift. He waited with quiet patience, with the ancient sword bridging the space between his upturned palms, wondering what little Ryan would do. He did not have long to wait.

*****

Little Ryan had always secretly marveled at the pure beauty of the venerable ronin’s ancient blade. But this was the first time that he had ever been allowed to touch it. Shyly at first, he stretched out his small hands, lightly brushing his childish fingertips over the jewel-encrusted hilt. A small tingling sensation leaped into his extended fingers before jolting recklessly upward into his diminutive five-year-old arm. Involuntarily, his slender fingers clamped closed around the hilt of the ancient crystal sword, his small grasp tightening against his will, forming a viselike grip that he did not have the strength or the will to break.

Unexpectedly, a storming surge of wild energy raced violently up his slender arm before arcing into his childish chest and slamming into his heart. Ryan gasped with startled surprise, breathless and panting, while his young eyes grew wild and round with innocent fright. The power of the ancient blade brought his heart to pounding against his rib cage, like the thundering talons of a wild Cantonese mustang racing in an untamed charge across the deep desert caprock.

*****

The blade named Justice did not know for sure just how long she had been slumbering this time. As a terribly ancient AI arcane artifact, from a lost and forgotten age, created for a very unique and specific purpose, the crystal blade of power could lay slumbering and dormant for centuries. Sleeping within the ethereal void of her own vast artificial consciousness. There were, in fact, very few things from the world of men that possessed the power to jolt her wide awake from her endless slumber with such suddenness.

But one of the things that did possess that power, that ability to rouse her from even the deepest of dreamless slumber, was to be touched by a royal. And not just any ol’ common, mundane, pompous ass with a wide bottom and a pampered and privileged lifestyle, but a true royal, with a direct descendancy from one of the three ancient lines of the high houses that could rouse her in an instant. And Justice had just felt such a touch! It was the singularity-specific Gen-code of that noble linage, ID’ed clear down to its most base quantum cellular level, that had brought Justice suddenly wide awake with a start.

And not all the three lost lines held the same urgency for Justice. One noble lineage in particular held a peculiar power within her vast quantum matrix. It was the oldest and most revered of those three ancient great houses. The first to raise the mighty banner of the lost Quantum kings of old.

The lineage of the White Wizard Kings!

Long ago, in the quiet days before the terrible Dark Rising, the White Wizard King had reigned in peace and prosperity over the unified race of men. His was the rule that had been whispered to be the golden age of mankind. And the council of the White Wizards of Light, and first among them, who had sat upon the great Jeweled Throne of power, had all gathered together and created the great sword Justice for a single purpose.

Balance.

To counterbalance the dark and terrible power of the Black Book of Shadows. That foul and fell storehouse of dark and evil arcane technology created by the anarchist coven of dark wave magus known as the Black League of Night. The great black book was so full and foul with its secrets of the dark matter technological mysteries that it grew to threaten even the very existence of life itself. Concealed within its Cimmerian nanite pages were hidden the dark and terrible secrets of the black antimite. A cell-size microbot that was reputed to possess the power to give immortality to its host.

But that so-called gift of endless and eternal life was a lie. Once ingested, there was no warmth of human life left that remained within the dark matter antimite host. True life was systematically eradicated by the antimite, absorbed and supplanted, one cell at a time, until all that remained in the end was machine. A dark and terribly sentient machine still holding on to all the memories of the mage that the host had once been.

Machines hungering for the lost memory of the warmth of true human life. A memory that could only be revisited by the continuous ingesting of new raw and fresh genetic material. But the warmth they craved proved fleeting and temporary. And so it was that in the terrible days of the Dark Rising, the Vamperic horde was born. A vast and growing plague of life-starved machines, crazed into madness by their insatiable hunger of hot, living flesh. The infected feasted upon living in a cannibalistic orgy of gluttony and perversion, in turn infecting all those whom they did not kill.

They were frenzied for the warmth of life. And no living human being was safe from their terrible and ravenous hunger for that fleeting warmth. In less than a single decade, the first world of Mother Earth became a graveyard of savagely ingested corpses. In the end, only those who had escaped into the stars, braving the vast and boundless sea of the great frozen void, were spared from the ravenous perdition of the frenzied Vamperic horde. From the foul curse set loose upon the earth by the dark coven of night. From the fell slaves of the Black Book of Shadows.

And in a final act of desperation, the White Wizards of Light created the mighty and mysterious God-King nanites. It was from those powerful microbots that the ancient quantum crystal katana named Justice was born.

There was no malice intended in the way the ancient sword Justice poured the powerful God-King nanites into the living flesh-and-blood vessel of the five-year-old princeling called Ryan. She was simply formed herself from that same powerful and incredibly ancient, high-arcane technology. The makers of that incredibly powerful arcane tech were long since lost and forgotten. And Justice had no other way to communicate with the decedent of that ancient primary Gen-code, save to join with him. To bond.

The fact that she was formed from an incredibly rare and vastly ancient tech, long believed to be extinct, which was, in reality, a thousand times more powerful and potent than the modern-day imperial nanites that had been passed down to young Ryan, while he was still within his mother’s womb, had no bearing on the mighty swords’ need to bond to communicate. Nor were the less-evolved nanites of the current emperor’s kiss, even remotely able to resist the power of Justice’s vastly superior programming.

It was child’s play for the sword of power to use her own advanced matrix to simply rewrite the primitive and less-evolved programming software of the inferior imperial nanites, transforming them into her own image. Upgrading them into her own God-King specifications and merging them into the vast collective of her powerful AI consciousness. And it was in that moment that the young imperial princeling know as Ryan Taylor became the first human being in more than thirty thousand years, to possess the fully functional God-King nanites.

In a fainting swoon, the little boy, who had just been given an incredible gift, fell unconscious at Tanaka’s tabi-booted feet. The aged ronin guardian was alarmed when the child collapsed in front of him. His precious sword fell into the dust unheeded in his haste to pull young Ryan into his strong arms. Justice had never spoken to him in all the long years that he had carried her on his back. He had no knowledge of the blade’s sentience. Or of the part that he himself had just played in creating the Black Guardian’s foretold Quiet One.

One

The last name of Taylor was by no stretch of the imagination one of the oldest names upon the face of the Red Land. It was, in fact, hardly even known. And what was known about it was tainted by the outlaw brand. The rider in the battered, sweat-stained Stetson was more boy than man. But even at sixteen, young Ryan Taylor had already given that last name a repetition for the devil’s own danger, riding chain blue lightning. He had given the name a haunted taint, which hard men respected and bad men feared. Young Ryan Taylor had become a force of nature unto himself. A whirlwind with a blaster, where death and danger came from either hand.

His low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat shaded his eerie, imperial-gray eyes from the blistering red star above. In front of him, stretched out as far as the eye could see, rose the towering deep-purple walls of the canyon country. Landmarks that a body could trust were in short supply in the canyon caprock of the star-blistered northern continent. The spirit-wind of the Cantonese night lifted from the dry red dust at dusk, carrying with it a shroud of abrasive sand and grit from the dune country behind him.

Swirling clouds from the parched red land that were as dark and as thick as campfire coffee. Clouds that scoured the face of the hard purple granite with a mad sculptor’s insanity. Dust storms, as thick and as veiling as a painted lady’s bedroom’s curtains, could rage unabated from dusk till dawn.

During the day, the deep, dark purple of the towering canyon walls absorbed the red star’s grueling blaze and baked the bloody-red silt of the Red Land beneath a washed-out magenta sky. It made the frontier fringe world of Cantonese a dark land scorched by the baleful red star above. A star that hung suspended in the pale purple sky, like the menacing red eye of an angry and vengeful god. A harsh, unforgiving god set upon nothing more than retribution and punishment and pain. But it was a land that young Ryan Taylor had been born to.

And that cursed, godless land was as much a part of him now as were the eerie imperial-gray eyes that set him apart from the rest of the settler kind. Youth bought you no mercy on Cantonese. The young died just as swiftly as the old. Cantonese was a fringe world, on the very edge of hell itself. A place so far from the more civilized, high-level worlds of the Jeweled Empire that not even the emperor himself knew its name. The desert planet was a place to where outlaws fled and innocence was nothing but a bleak memory. A bleached-out, half-faded snapshot of things long lost and long forgotten.

Ryan lifted his hat and mopped the sweat from his man-boy brow with a damp denim sleeve. The furance-dry air made even a man’s sweat a precious commodity. His years in the Jag burrows had made him less queasy then most about recycling that precious moisture. Daytime travel in the deep desert was not a pastime for the faint of heart. The temperatures soared well above 120 in the shade. And the star-blistered, deep-purple granite absorbed more heat than the bloodred dust. Neither of which were kind to tenderfoots and greenhorns.

Out in the deepest desert, a man’s skull could cook his brain, like meat in an iron pot, long before the sun went down. Ryan dropped his low-crown hat back into place and, from the shade beneath its broad brim, surveyed his back trail with narrowed eyes. His guts were telling him that he was being tracked. By whom, he couldn’t say yet. Ryan loosed his blasters in their holsters again, feeling better at the touch of hard steel sliding easily between well-cured leather flaps.

Freckles snorted his impatience. The Cantonese mustang stallion pulled his bone-hard front talons through the sunbaked, hardpan clay, carving four long deep furrows the length of Ryan’s corded forearm into the bloody Red Land before quick-stepping nervously sideways to let Ryan know his displeasure.

Easy there, big fella, Ryan drawled quietly, giving the saber-fanged stud a few gentling pats on his rhino-hided neck.

Step easy, ol’ son.

Between Ryan and the soaring rimrock, squatting like frozen jet glaciers, lay the razor-sharp basaltic formations, or the lava-rock flows, hardened uncounted millima ago. And there, dominating the distant middle skyline, like bloody, broken fangs, rose the pale crimson sandstone spires of the mighty Dragon’s Hump. The Hump divided the vast Red Land between the barren, star-blistered bad lands to the south and the lofty Waterfall Mountains in the north.

Lightning Ryan Taylor brooded sullenly as he studied his back trail. He chewed upon his own private thoughts, like an old hound gnawing on a cast-off boot. High above, the magenta sky rippled with wraithlike motion. The blistering red star birthed these writhing, heat-born distortions, wringing the illusion of life from a tortured, sun-seared desert sky. Searing, shimmering heat waves, their undulation giving birth to the mirages of the deeper desert.

And out this far in the deep furance, there were always mirages. You could see things out this far that were actually many miles away from where you sat. Water holes that were mirrored in refracted light and star-born heat waves until they seemed to lurk just beyond your reach. They lured the tenderfoots out deeper and deeper into the tortured Red Land, promising them a cool drink. But in the end, they gave them only sun-madness instead. The mirages were a part of the wailing dead of Cantonese. A place where the angry spirits came to take their revenge upon the living. Where greenhorns looked their own death in the face.

With a gentle nudge in the ribs from the heel of his mustang-hide tabi boots, Ryan set Freckles to walking again. Whoever was trailing him, they were not native-born from the Red Land. They were sloppy, leaving a visible smear of bloody dust low against the pale purple sky. So it wasn’t Two Toes and his band of renegade Jags. No self-respecting Jag brave would ever be that obvious. Especially the wily ol’ Two Toes. For all his reign of bloody violence and butchery against the human settlers, the Tigerallian war chief was still pretty much a coward at heart. Sure, he was brave enough when he was surrounded by his war party and was attacking sleeping settlers and unarmed women and children in their sleep.

But for four long years, Ryan had been lighting the ritual challenge fire of the Jag nation, calling ol’ Two Toes out, Jag-style. But to no avail. The bravado of the braggart quelled when faced with confronting someone who was also warrior trained. It had gotten so embarrassing for the rest of the Jag tribes that none of the warriors of the people would join the renegade on his raids. Not even to hunt Ryan down. Two Toes had to face down Ryan alone, in honorable combat, and defeat the man-cub called Alaphata’s Child. The name that ol’ Two Toes coveted for himself.

It was true that there was a part of young Ryan that was as wild as the deep desert he haunted. A wildness that was fed by a slow, seething rage that had stripped away his humanity, taking it right down to its leanest veneer. Like his body itself, which was honed by all the unending hours that he had spent out within the harshest of environments the Jeweled Empire had to offer. Until nothing not absolutely essential to survival remained.

Like the Jags that were native to this star-scorched hell. Or like the fanger beasts or the serpent vines or the vicious sand vipers that lay quiet and deadly in the snow-white dunes, waiting for their moment to strike. Four long years alone in the deepest forge had turned a grieving boy into a powerful and patient predator of the desert world known as Cantonese. And a childhood spent growing up in the Jag burrows had stripped young Ryan down into a lean, mean fighting machine, as much a natural part of the brutal Red Land as any of those other dangers. Almost as though they were restless spirits, or the bitter ghosts of his personal dead come to haunt his mind’s eye, those memories were his only company. Either way, Ryan could not be fully sure whether the faint smudge he saw clinging now low on the distant horizon behind him were a desert sun-ghost or a real sign that his back trail was being dogged. But in the deeper desert of the harsh Red Land, it was ever prudent to be cautious.

Bushwhackers were as common as the mirages out here on the outlaw trails. And Ryan had become a known hunter of men. From time to time, the hunter did, indeed, become the hunted. And only his decision to hunt down the truly wicked and evil men haunting the vast frontier had left young Ryan with that thin veneer of humanity at all. It was what had kept his human side intact, if only barely.

Ghosting his way from shadow to shadow, beneath the shelves of thick purple granite, Ryan let Freckles find his own path. This hunt had lasted longer than most. There was no wind during the Cantonese day, so there was no faint breeze to bring scents to Ryan’s Jag-trained nostrils. But young Ryan’s eerie gray eyes and his sharp human ears were just as keen as his sense of smell. All of Ryan’s human senses had been sharpened by the many years that he had spent as a child living between the Fire Mountain burrows and his father’s Lazy-J Ranch.

Between the time that he had spent learning the arts of war under the warrior training of the wise and wily she-cat Jag subchief Knife Claws and that of the wise old Chin master on his father’s mustang ranch, the venerable Tanaka-san. Both had shared a hand in turning the young man-cub Ryan had been born as into the hardened man hunter that he had become. The speckled, piebald stud beneath Ryan’s rump moved with the silent grace and the unconscious stealth of a natural-born Cantonese predator. The mustang stallion’s freckle-spotted hide, which was as thick and as dense as any first-world rhino, had evolved untold millima ago to withstand the blistering heat of a baleful red star. Now it helped the stud to blend in and move through the light-dappled shadows beneath the heavy shelf rock as though the stallion was a part of the rimrock itself.

Riding easy in the saddle from a lifetime spent breaking and taming these powerful Cantonese predators, Ryan let his eerie gray eyes wander over the surrounding terrain. His Jag-trained gaze missed nothing. And his right hand was never far from the powerful blaster riding on his hip. Freckles wasn’t the only wild thing out here among the predator vines and thorny catus and the star-blistered shelf rock.

And while the trail of his quay had dropped off back around the blue sage fork, Ryan also knew that there just weren’t that many places this deep in the Cantonese desert that a gang of rowdy human outlaws would be likely to turn up. To the west were the Jag nations. And as mean and as bloody as Black Jack and his gang of ruthless cutthroats were, they would not be stupid enough to enter those lands willingly. Especially not with the murderous ol’ Two Toes off the rez and butchering humans left and right.

There weren’t enough guns in the Black Water gang to face down that renegade horde. They would be hair for Two Toe’s war pony.

A small part of Ryan rode with his mind looking back. Back into the days that were four long years ago. Back to when his world still made sense. Back before the number of his dead had begun piling up on him. Before their faces had taken to crowding his mind, whenever he was riding the lonely places.

Like now.

But it was only a small part of his mind, way in the back, that ever went there. To that place where Ryan’s dead mingled with the living. To that place where Ryan kept the memory of Kate. And it was in that place where love and hate and vengeance and rage all came together to create a twisting dervish of powerful emotions that young Ryan had no words to let out.

The faces of his dead colliding with the faces of those few he secretly loved, like a tangled lariat with its loop squeezed tight around Ryan’s heart. He worried those thoughts like a sore tooth. They were the only company he had, besides the stud and the mare, when he was out this far, stalking the outlaw trail.

And Ryan did have dead of his own too. Dead that had been ripped from his life by the violence of cruel men and even crueler feline enemies. Enemies drunk on their own dark lust for power. And yes, there were a few dead by his own hand as well. Even now, four long, lonely years later, Ryan could still see the claw-mutilated corpse of his gentle, loving father staring up sightlessly into the pale magenta sky.

And he could see his ancient and boyishly worshiped guardian, the venerable ronin Tanaka-san; wise Tanaka-kissed, laid out in a circle of slain Jag warriors, defeated only by the sheer weight of their numbers. There had been no mark upon his lifeless body, save for the mortal death wound that had ended his life. An unspoken testament to the raw courage with which he had faced his enemies in the end. It was rare for a slain human to retain his scalp. Jags held great coup in the displaying of the colorful man-hair of their fallen enemies.

But Jags also respected courage and battle prowlness above all things. A naked, hairless no-tail, as old as Tanaka-kissed, taking down nine battle-hardened Tigerillian fighters in their prime, would have earned him a spirit song around the fires, Ryan knew. It was the greatest Jag honor a human could receive. And even though young Ryan Taylor was unaware of the fact, he, too, had already won that rather-dubious distinction for himself as well. More than once, in fact.

The harsh desert sun was sweltering, but young Ryan ignored it, with a focus and a grit that far exceeded his short sixteen years. He continued to watch his back trail from time to time and to brood, as far-riders are prone to do. His life alone as a deep-desert long-rider, following the outlaw trails, had developed Ryan’s ability to simply let the Red Land in. Turning his ability to adapt to the deeper desert into an unconscious reflex, an instinct that no longer required his conscious volition anymore.

Like a wild animal that was attuned to and was sensitive of its immediate natural environment. One that had become fully integrated into the wilderness around itself. Now, Ryan’s own ability to mentally shift through the subtle changes in the harsh Red Land had long since become instinctive and automatic. An unconscious continuation of the natural biological rhythm of the great circle of life all around him.

And a lifetime spent running around half-naked and wild through the Fire Mountain burrows, on the Flaming Mountain Reservation, as a child had only strengthened Ryan’s deep, instinctual connection to his beloved Red Land. Ryan was, in fact, the only naked no-tail, alive or dead, who had ever been adopted into a wild Jag tribe. There was no other man on all the face of Cantonese who could make such a boast.

And although Ryan himself seldom gave it even a moment’s thought anymore, it still made the growing legend of the lightning-fisted man-tracker he had become a favorite story among the settlers he protected. It was simply a part of Lightning Ryan’s life story. It was something unique, like the odd gray color of his eyes or the speckled war stallion he rode. But it was nothing more than that to young Ryan himself. And most of the time, not even that.

He was a ghost on the trail. A desert spirit to his enemies. He and the desert moved as one, the whispers said. But in truth, Ryan was little more than the natural by-product of the peculiar training he had received as a frontier boy growing up on the face of the harsh Red Land. And there was one other difference about young Ryan Taylor that not even he knew about. Ryan, you see, was an imperial.

In his veins ran the blood of the entitled. Blood that had proved the claim of ten thousand emperors, allowing them to take their seat upon a blood-drenched, high-tech throne. And while Ryan himself had no knowledge of this fact, it was that very ancient and venerated bloodline that had always given Ryan the necessary ability he needed to rise above the challenges that he faced growing up on a harsh and unforgiving frontier world.

The ability for his mortal human body to improvise and adapt beyond the norm. To improve itself both physically and mentally until he was equal to the levels of stress that he faced. It was this secret royal bloodline that gave Ryan his uncanny speed and strength. His desert-born cunning and superior predatory skills.

It was as much a distinction, defining who Ryan really was, as his eerie gray eyes were. Imperial gray eyes that separated him apart from the rest of the human pack on Cantonese. Human born but trained in the arts of war by two very distinct and different races. This was what had ensured that the boy bounty hunter known as Lightning Ryan Taylor was as far removed from the rest of the frontier folk as a werecat was from a Jag brave.

Ryan’s identity was defined by a lifetime of endless training. Some of it had been given to him by the wise but mysterious ronin Tanaka-san. Some had been pounded into Ryan by the warrior’s training he had received from the cunning old she-cat war chief Knife Claws. A merging of the strange and ancient fighting arts of the mysterious Gen Black Guard, carefully woven into the warrior training of the wily Jags. An odd blending that had been unheard of before the birth of the ginger-haired babe called Ryan.

Until two vastly different styles of martial war training became unexpectedly entangled in the mind and the body of one small boy. Not even Ryan himself could separate them one from the other any longer. Wild mountain Tigerallian warrior skills woven into the mysterious ancient Black Guard chi-magic, blended to form a style of unarmed and crystal-bladed sword combat that was now entirely new in a universe that was already old beyond ancient.

But as Ryan walked his proud Cantonese stud through the light-dappled shadows beneath the overhanging shelves of deep-purple granite, brooding his own lonely thoughts, he gave no thought to this odd blending. Instead, Ryan occasionally turned in his saddle to study his back trail, keeping track of the low thread of faint red dust clinging to the star-scorched Red Land. Because not even he fully realized just how truly unique and special he really was.

There were, you see, still pieces to the puzzle that were missing in Ryan’s mind. Knowledge that he did not yet possess. And it was all the things that young Ryan did not know about himself that were, even now, converging upon the tiny red ball of star-scorched earth to tear his world apart. Without knowing it, young Lightning Ryan Taylor had a secret. A powerful secret. One with the ability to change his life forever. And it was a secret that was so compelling, so seemingly impossible on a backward frontier world like Cantonese, that it was about to become center stage for a struggle of epic proportions.

As Freckles slipped from one pool of shade to the next, the blistering red star above slammed down onto the dark shelf rock with the force of a Wizard-Smith’s blast furance. But Ryan was no stranger to the weight of the grueling Cantonese sun. And this was his opportunity to get a jump on whoever was doggin’ his back trail. Soon the bloody star overhead would be way too fiery for most humans to risk exposure to its oppressive red glare. That was when Ryan would be able to get the drop on whoever was trailing him. To come around on their six and bring his blasters into play. It was time to make the hunters the hunted.

Ryan, totally unbeknownst to himself, was in fact the only living male heir to the intergalactic imperial emperor. The rightful prince apparent of the high-imperial Jeweled Throne! And yet as amazing as that revelation alone would have been to Ryan, it was not the deepest secret in the deck. As imperial tradition would have it, Ryan had indeed received his imperial birthright from his mother, while he was still within the womb. But that birthright had also been secretly, accidentally tainted, without anyone being the wiser. And it was this secret infection by the terribly ancient and long-forgotten God-King nanites, when Ryan was just five, that was the deepest heart of Ryan’s unrealized secret.

Freckles’s iron-hard talons scraped against the dark desert caprock, taking Ryan from sheltering shelf to shelf. Beyond the pools of Cimmerian blackness, the hostile Red Land waited to slay the foolish. Barrel catus and Tall Man Standing aimed their cruel, needle-sharp thorns outward like barb pinions, waiting to prick the unwary. The shorter barrel catus could poison the blood of anyone foolish enough to prick themselves in only a matter of hours. The heartier and much more robust Tall Man Standing would bring down a man in just a few minutes.

The ways of the Cantonese frontier, especially in the deeper desert, were a constant fight for survival. And the outlaw trails through the deepest desert were fraught with many perils, with death waiting at any bend in the path. Ryan crested a rise in the terraced shelves and marked in his mind the placement of the low thin haze in the distance. Whoever was trailing him was gaining on him now.

The God-King nanites were exceedingly rare and had long been thought to be extinct. Microscopic, cell-size bio-organic minibots, they had once, in the long-forgotten past, nearly brought the entire human race to the very brink of extinction! Powerful beyond the current ken of human understanding, the God-King nanites were the most potent and deadly high-arcane technology that the human race had ever created. Secretly, they had graced young Ryan with the strength and the necessary agility, with the stamina and physical endurance, to compete with a species of vastly stronger and more agile feline humanoids, when he was just a boy.

They granted Ryan the ability to survive against a race that was physically far stronger than their human counterparts. Infused within Ryan’s muscle and bone, these ancient but incredibly powerful, high-arcane microbots had made Ryan something more than human. They had made him a human Jag. A mortal man with the strength and stamina of a prime Jag warrior. And it was this unasked-for ancient tech that now gave Lightning Ryan Taylor his legendary speed with his hip guns. With the crystal katana and the transparent tanto blades.

The unrealized tech impregnating his body had infused itself into his very DNA, subtly assisting the unconscious integration of Ryan’s sensory emersion into the natural biorhythm of his native environment in ways too numerous to count. Their response to his will was so thoroughly ingrained by now, so instantaneous and natural, that the marriage between the ancient, high-arcane technology and his flesh and bone had become as normal and as automatic for young Ryan as breathing. More so because that marriage between that lost technology and his human flesh had occurred without any conscious volition on Ryan’s part.

In every sense imaginable, Ryan’s hot flesh and the ancient, high-arcane tech had become one being, within the body of young Lightning Ryan Taylor. That powerful lost technology was now a deeply integrated part of young Ryan’s genetic helix code. The physical and mental changes wrought by the God-King nanites over the years could never be undone. The biological changes brought to bear within Ryan over the years could never be severed or broken.

Even now, Ryan could smell the hot, sun-scorched scent of the deep-purple granite. He slipped from Freckles’s broad back and dropped down until he was lying belly-down, with his nose lifted toward the blistering red star. His nostrils flared, becoming fully distended. The scent of the deep desert was almost a living thing in Ryan’s scent glands. His olfactory sensitivity was now equal, and even superior, to that of a warrior-trained Jag brave. There was no wind during the Cantonese day anywhere on the northern continent, but Ryan didn’t really need an errant breeze to bring him the close scents around him. The God-King nanites enhanced his sense of smell into that of a hunting predator.

Eyes that had narrowed themselves into a keener focus, seeking out the distance, caused the strange, cell-size nanite robots impregnated into every part of his flesh and bones to obey his unconscious, unspoken commands. For a brief moment, the eerie gray color of his irises took on a dull golden hue as the quantum-sensitive tech inside him surfaced to faintly betray its presence and enhance his vision. To help him pull in the distant low-hanging thread of bloodred dust he was watching, into a cleaner, closer picture.

The thread of dust that Ryan’s eyes pulled in betrayed a myriad of defining subtleties that no average human would have perceived with the naked eye. The hard golden hue that the ancient nanites flecked across the pale gray of his imperial irises granted them the same keen edge brightness that was equal to that of the fierce Cantonese kite. The desert world’s raptor bird of prey.

And the edge they gave his vision told young Ryan everything he needed to know for the moment about his pursuers. They moved forward with a dogging patience. A sure sign that at least one of them was most likely a Jag scout from Two Toe’s renegade band of bloodthirsty butchers.

Yet even with Ryan’s tech-assisted sight, there was still no way he could know for sure at this point just who was dogging his back trail. Only that there was probably at least one Jag behind him. Perhaps nothing more than a lone hunter who had accidentally stumbled onto Ryan’s trail while searching out his or her prey. Ryan felt fairly certain that he was dealing with a Jag, because the daystar was burning bright in the pale magenta sky and his tracker had not broken off their pursuit. And there was only one human on the face of the Red Land who would still be out and traveling at this time of day.

That human was Ryan.

Easing himself back from his belly and into the sliver of shade sheltering his stud and mare, Ryan chewed on what he had learned. There was way too much dust for it to be a single mustang-mounted brave. That much dust in the air hinted that there were at least three on his trail. Of course, a single wagon behind a team of dray dragons might put out the same sign. With no wind beneath the blistering Cantonese sun, everything stayed low to the ground.

With no breeze to give it lift, the thick red dust of the harsh Red Land was heavy and did not climb much above the height of a tall man. But wagons were human contraptions. And they moved slowly. Besides, Ryan was fairly certain that he would have heard any wagon long before now.

Ryan considered what he had learned, and it made no sense to his frontier mind. He racked his brain for an answer that fit into the pattern that he was seeing. It perplexed him, and that alone was enough to make Ryan wary. In the Red Land, nothing survived for long that behaved contrary to the nature of the deep desert. Above, the grueling red star slammed down onto the deep-purple rimrock and the hardpan of the desert soil, turning the air into shimmering waves of undulating furance blasts. Any greenhorn caught out there in the grip of that fiery furance had long since sent his spirit soaring off into the great alkaline bowl. That place where the dead of Cantonese gathered to mourn their foolishness.

And even a stupid dray dragon was smart enough to take shelter from the high-noon sun in the deep desert when the hand on the reins went slack. This far out, water was everything. Water was even more precious than gold or imperial silver this far out into the great Cantonese desert. Only a fool would try to homestead this far off the beaten trail, with no certainty of a permanent artesian wellhead. And out here, all the wellheads belonged to the Jags.

The puzzle perplexed young Ryan enough that it made him rise and walk to where the stallion stood waiting. Ryan quickly shucked his long gun from