"Alex Mason & Dixon"

Billy Sodenholzer awoke with a start. Where am I, he would’ve said, ‘cept his mouth felt like cotton and his jaw muscles remained asleep. As his vision returned, his situation became clear - trapped in a small cell, gray walls, handcuffed to a chair.

This isn’t like when Mysterious Robo-Girl X handcuffed me…this could be trouble.

He tried to recall the previous night. Memories moved in slow-motion.

The Chicagoland parade, holding up that flag, pride swelling…

Celebrating the victory, and the end of Haraguchi’s internship, at a dive bar.

“Waddya gonna do now?” I asked.

“Go back to Tokyo,” he supposed. “Got some time before I’m hired full-time. See some old friends, I guess…”

A barroom brawl with sailors from a rival space-sloop…

I ended up wandering around the streets at night by myself, head full of electro-tequila…

“I heard you sell pies,” said a man in a trenchcoat, face shadowed by a brown fedora, standing in a dark alley.

“Yah, I sell pies,” I said, because smuggling pies off the sloop is what I do.

“I got a buyer,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. And I followed him deeper into the alleyway-

“Freeze!” he yelled. “I’m a cop!”

“Oh no!” Billy exclaimed. “The consequences of my own actions!”

Looks like his smuggling finally caught up to him - a human detective tracked him down, no less. He squirmed, trying to escape the long arm of the law, but he was handcuffed tight, and could only move the chair around just a little bit. His breathing came out ragged. Came out wrong, rather. Something was up with the air ‘round here. Almost as if the air wasn’t coming from a natural atmosphere…

Before Billy could entertain any spectacular plans of escape, three figures in the room stirred.

They had been there all along, waiting in the shadows for Billy to awaken. Two of them wore brown dusters over sheepskin vests, brown boots with spurs that went jingle-jangle-jingle, cowboy hats. Between the outfits and the atmosphere-

“Mars,” Billy realized. “I’m on Mars.”

The third figure was tall, gaunt, wearing a long black cloak over a gray flak jacket that bore his symbol - the head of a stag with a flaming red planet behind it.

Billy stared him down. “And you must be Stanislav Kajanas.”

The third man spoke matter-of-factly, montonely, all facts with little time to spare.

“That’s correct. And you are Billy Sodenholzer, deck officer aboard the Abrams A. Asskicker. Here’s what’s going to happen, Billy. Chicagoland police arrested you on smuggling charges. I used my connections to intervene and bring you here. Either you cooperate with us, or I return you to Chicagoland jail.”

Billy scoffed. “Yeah, right. Like I’d work with a Martian. You think I’m the first smuggler from the flotilla? Lawrence takes care of his own. Won’t be long ‘til he notices I’m gone. And once he finds me, I’ll tell him it was you and your Martians. There’ll be hell to pay.”

Kajanas crouched so he could speak eye-to-eye with Billy. “Oh, there’ll be hell to pay alright. I’ve already injected you with a truth serum. No such thing as a pure truth serum, but it’ll encourage you. Give in to that encouragement and I’ll guarantee your release. Don’t, and rot in jail. In either case, the serum will wipe your memories. You’ll remember this as little more than a murky dream.”

Kajanas now stood to full height, lone bulb flickering above him. “A test. What do you think of Amadeus Lawrence and the War on Nothing?”

“He’s a damn good man fighting a damn good cause,” Billy answered. “Feels pretty good, knowing I got an Earth flag and none you guys do. I’m a conqueror of the galaxy, dig, spreader of civilization. They say Eden’s all automated now, self-sustaining, but you need men like us to keep it going. I’m proud of being a warrior. And sure, maybe it’s because I don’t have pride in other things, like my commitment issues, which is why I prefer flings with robo-girls-”

Billy caught himself. His face felt warm from the truth serum.

Kajanas rubbed his chin. “Lawrence and I were almost friends once. A long, long time ago. But he can’t admit Martians are his better.”

“And wha? You can’t admit Earthlings are your equal?”

“No,” Kajanas simply said. “Earthlings are born in Eden. Martians are working to create theirs. Mars will be completely terra-formed within the decade. And when that happens, Earthlings will rush in and try to make it theirs when they’ve done nothing to earn that. Already, they’ve infested the government of Mars. The governors, officials, bureaucrats…President Vice-President and Lawrence have worked tirelessly to replace native Martians with Earthlings who’ve done nothing more than be born into wealth, ever since they arrested Secretary John Pillow on false corruption charges…”

The name Pillow rang a bell, but Billy couldn’t concentrate enough to connect some dots.

“I stand alone,” continued Kajanas. “I’m the only native Martian left in the Martian government. The only opposition to Earth remaining. Earth fears us, tries to constrain us. My people are strong, energetic, brave. One Martian is worth ten Earthlings. We have the momentum. We’ll replace Earth as the strongest planet within the Human Union once the terra-forming is complete.”

Kajanas raised his arms. “And I’m the only one who stands against the current status of the War on Nothing. As centuries passed without war, the Human Union privatized the military to research companies, Pioneer Defense Contractors chief among them. I may be the Mars manager, but I play second fiddle to the executives on Earth. For those Earth executives, the galaxy is their private domain. There’s no oversight of which stars to siphon, which planets to destroy, where all that wealth goes. The people don’t have a say, either.”

“You sound like a Do-Nothing,” Billy interrupted.

That earned him a snort. “There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone. Ten times that number of planets. The conquest of a few is a small price to pay for the future. But the pace of conquest is hastening. There’s nobody to stop Lawrence and his cronies from destroying as much as they like. And nobody’s allowed Lawrence to destroy as much as he likes, either, except for the President and some Congressmen. A few hundred people out of a trillion. And a disproportionate amount of harvested resources remain in the hands of Lawrence, his veterans, and Congressmen. Resources that could help the rest of the galaxy. In the name of equity, fairness, and justice, I oppose the War on Nothing.”

Billy scoffed. “I guess the rumors of you being a Marsist-Leninist were true.”

Kajanas ignored him. He stared deep into Billy’s eyes. “What do you know about Project Pi?”

Raised eyebrow. “The wha?”

“No time for games.” Kajanas nodded at his men. A hologram appeared on one of the blank gray walls depicting a star system consisting of a red dwarf with three orbiting planets.

“This is the Scorpio-7 star system,” a cowboy-scientist explained. “Warp gates once connected it to the Solar System via wormhole.”

You know the deal when it comes to pocket dimensions - fold a piece of paper in half, stick a pencil through it, voila - you got a wormhole. ‘Course, the cowboy-scientist used much more fancy terminology.

“Uh-huh,” said Billy, not really following.

“However,” Kajanas said, taking over now. “You won’t find Scorpio-7 on official records anymore. It was deleted from the universal archives. My demands for an audit of the War information provided by Lawrence have gone unheeded in Congress.”

“Uh-huh,” said Billy, not really following.

The scientist adjusted the hologram. The warp gate in Scorpio-7 behaved strangely - it disconnected from the wormhole connecting it to the Solar System. Instead, that wormhole now formed a complex series of tunnels with nine other warp gates surrounding Scorpio-7.

In a flash, the ten warp gates activated. Then Scorpio-7 vanished entirely.

“Normally, pocket dimensions act as a thin tunnel connecting two distant points,” explained the scientist. “An underlayer to our universe, outside of our space-time. Instead, in Scorpio-7, that specific arrangement of wormholes submerged Scorpio-7 itself into a pocket dimension. They erased it from true existence. It’s gone. Poof. Replaced with the void. Nothing.”

“My intelligence network suggests this isn’t the first sector of the universe to disappear,” Kajanas added. “Lawrence is removing systems from the official records, erasing parts of the universe, expanding his War in Nothing into areas without the public’s knowledge, let alone consent. I’m not even sure if the President knows about it. His reasons for this ‘Project Pi’ of his are unknown. Tell us what you know, Billy.”

Billy stared at the darkened hologram, sweat on his face. “This is Lawrence’s doing? Are you sure? He’s a swell guy, and it makes me proud to be a supporter of his. T-This has to be because of your personal vendetta. You don’t care anything about humanity or the universe. You just want to bring Lawrence down.”

Kajanas offered a rare smile. “Who’s doing the interrogation here? Tell us what you know.”

Billy squirmed in his chair. “I don’t know anything, that’s the truth. Now let me go!”

“You’re a deck officer!” roared the third man. “Surely you must know something! Odd records, black-operations, off-the-record harvests?”

“I don’t know nothing!” Billy protested, not that he would say anything if he did.

But then something strange happened - a distant dream tugged at him, tangentially related, ‘cept it wasn’t a dream - it was a memory!

“I…I remember! It was Australia!”