The Zygan Emprise: Renegade Paladins and Abyssal Redemption (64 page)

i
A primitive satellite
sent into space by the Soviet Union (a Russian empire) in 1957 that
launched the space race between the Soviets and the United States,
as well as the very first lame electric-techno song.

ii
They try to get you
with the classic paradox: You go back in time and keep your parents
from meeting, therefore you can’t be born; but if you can’t be
born, you can’t go back in time and keep your parents from meeting;
so you are born, and you go back in time, and so on. This is a
straw man, peeps. Just stay away from your parents and you’ll be
fine. Good advice for all teenagers, come to think of it.

iii
A tax auditor works
this way: You make a teeny tiny mistake on your math homework. The
math teacher makes you do the homework over, takes your allowance
for the next five years,
and
he confiscates your iPod and
your Wii. Evil, I tell you.

iv
Watchful Heuristic
Operation. In other words, they check our IDs.

v
Neuronal
Deoxyribonucleic Acid. (Say that tongue twister five times really
fast!)

vi
Okay, here’s the joke.
It’s as old as Homer himself, I think. They say that Homer was a
penname, a fake name used by the real “writer” of the epic poems
“The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” But, some Zygan history students
believe that the writer using the pseudonym Homer was really Homer
Simpson.

vii
A championship soccer
team from the city of Manchester, England.

viii
A cubit is a
primitive measure based on the distance between the hand and the
elbow as opposed to, say, a foot, which is based on … a foot.

ix
An undocumented
immigrant.

x
Ergal shields are localized impenetrable force fields;
smaller versions of the shield around Earth Core. We’d learned how
to install and uninstall them in our Advanced Ergal Thermodynamics
lab during our last month at Mingferplatoi Academy.

xi
Neural Inquiry. Off
the record, we call it Neural Interrogation. So, when a prisoner
has been NI’d, his information’s been directly downloaded from his
brain. Or, maybe our questioners just roughed him up a little…

xii
Kind of like a
wireless Internet audio stream with only a few accessible Web
sites. So, a whole family would have to sit around a
box—together!—and listen to “shows,” which sometimes lasted a
whole
hour
—yawn! Life was rough in your
great-grandparents’ day…

xiii
Krøneckðr is the
largest city on Delta II and the financial center of the Delta
planets in M82, an adjacent galaxy. Or so I’ve been told. Zygint
discourages its agents from visiting bacchanalian planets outside
Zygfed borders, especially if the agents are under eighteen.

xiv
Large sharp-clawed
feline creatures the size of a small human. They are found
throughout the universe, most commonly in roller derby arenas and
suburban high school in-crowds.

xv
A Madai septic
word.

xvi
Ethnic populations
on the planet Chronos.

xvii
Terrans can’t
pronounce it.

xviii
First introduced
to Earth by Hymenoptera from the planet Zom.

xix
Spud explained this
phrase to me later. It refers to Don Quixote’s fruitless quest,
where he mistakes a windmill for a giant and tries to joust with
the structure. It’s basically pursuing something futile. Heck, it
sounds like Quixote should’ve pursued a good optometrist. I mean,
giants and windmills look nothing alike, except on Anemomylos where
the windmills are five storeys tall and alive.

xx
Because the art was
so ugly, I couldn’t see any other reason for hanging it.

xxi
Actually, it isn’t
a joke. That’s what they really say in Greece.

xxii
I’ll explain
later. If you can’t wait—just check out John Milton’s
Paradise
Lost
.

xxiii
Her Kharybdian
name was, as close as I can pronounce it, Shfrsh. I named her the
Nautilus because she looked like the Nautilus. No, not the
cigar-shaped submarine in the Jules Verne story—the logarithmic
spiral of the cephalopod. Really a cool ship. I did tease Eikhus
once though and called him Captain Nemo. It took me a week to dry
off completely…

xxiv
A civilized Zygan
war tool. Rather than killing the enemy, you basically erase and
then re-boot their brains.

xxv
Twelve days in a
week and thirty-six hours in a day, of course.

xxvi
Bellatrix’s fifth
planet.

xxvii
A small shuttle
that can make it to Zyga on autopilot. In this case, a Trojan
hearse.

xxviii
When you’re
smalling, the whole world doesn’t small with you. So, Ergaling
helps you cross what are now long distances for people as tiny as
we were.

xxix
A Megaran fighting
move that you don’t want to be on the receiving end of. It hurts
like hell, literally.

xxx
Or rather, I
must’ve continued to micro until I was one fourth its size.

xxxi
Which reminds me
of the old limerick: There was a young lady named Bright, whose
speed was much faster than light, she set off one day, in a
relative way, and returned on the previous night. Don’t blame me—I
warned you it was old.

xxxii
The word means
“Charge!” Now!

xxxiii
God out of a
box. Literally, God out of a machine, but in ancient Greece and
Rome, a box was about as complex a machine as you could get. It was
lowered onto the stage and contained the image of a God, who served
to rescue the protagonist, or the plot, from destruction.

xxxiv
And the machine
is the universe…

xxxv
Catch our reruns
on the Singularity Channel, Fridays at 10 pm, 9 Central, or
streaming at SingularityTV.com. Season 2 starts in October!

xxxvi
You’d never guess
he was 138, Heron said.

xxxvii
The German
mathematician who co-discovered the Möbius strip, a half-twisted
paper strip whose ends are joined together to make a loop with one
infinite surface. Zygapedia has another citation for Johann Listing
as the strip’s other genius inventor. Personally, I would’ve called
it the Listing strip—it took me half an hour to find the umlaut for
Möbius in the Help Menu.

xxxviii
We sure dodged
a bullet. The farmer who saw the crushed wheat on his acreage the
next morning called it an alien crop circle. Imagine if people had
actually believed him!