The party was held at night in a brightly lit outdoor pavilion, under the same Milky Way seen from Earth, on a planet a hundred light years away from there. Sigma Cygni was a thriving Earth colony planet—as evidenced by the nearly two dozen teenagers gathered on the pavilion around a stage where a holographically transmitted concert had gotten under way.
Front and center of the assembled teens was the birthday girl, Tia herself. The kids swayed and shook and squealed and laughed, listening to the band whose performance came through the interstellar media relays from Mu Eridani IV, some twenty light years away. The band was all done up in lights: luminescent piping and patches on dark clothing and dark-colored instruments; a light that surged and pulsed and throbbed and strobed to match the riffs and rhythms they played. Tia, surrounded by girlfriends and flanked by boys half interested in the girls present (or each other) and half interested in the musicians, was as enraptured by the whole thing as she had expected to be when her father told her he was patching her party into the transmission of this show. She and her friends were getting a front row seat for something beamed from millions of kilometers away. The anticipation of it had been the talk of the young people of the colony for weeks. Tonight, Tia was not only the birthday girl; she was their heroine. And she was loving it.
That was when it all broke loose.
Right in the middle of a song, the holographic display rudely cut out. There was a nanosecond of stunned surprise, followed by kids leaning forward in their seats or leaping out of them and looking around, upset and annoyed, complaining loudly and trying to figure out what the problem was. Tia, completely flustered and utterly confused—to say nothing of embarrassed in front of her peers, looked for her father, whom she last saw hanging back behind at the end of the pavilion behind the group. He was nowhere to be found. Bewildered, dismayed, and worried, she called out, “Daddy?”
The next thing they knew, the Colonial alarm system went off, sounding even more raucous than their interrupted concert. The sound cut through the assembled young people like a knife of electricity. Some jumped, others yelped—and all of them turned in the direction of another sound coming out of the darkness.
It was the noise of whirring aircycle engines, the kind of flying motorbikes used by Colonial Security. Into the lights illuminating the pavilion came a figure on an aircycle—but this was no Security Officer. He was like nothing that any of them had ever seen. He wore some strange garment that covered him from head to feet, marked with odd patterns all over, and stained up and down with something the looked like a mix of mud and pond scum. The figure on the flying bike was shooting right at them, and Tia and her friends all scrambled and dove and ducked to get out of the way. The stranger would have flown right through the pavilion if three other aircycles had not come charging in from the opposite direction, cutting off his path. Riding these bikes were actual Colonial Security members, and from the look of them, they were ready for business. The oddly garbed stranger swerved over the seats, with kids screaming and shouting at the sight of him, and tried to speed off in another direction, but from the direction from which he came, three other officers on flying bikes came speeding in, and from two other directions still more arrived, hemming him in. By this time Tia and all of her friends were either hugging each other on the pavilion floor or crouching between the seats, and the entire scene was filled with the din of shouts and whirring engines.
Tia, in the midst of the upheaval, knelt down at the end of one row of seats, peering up at the stranger and around at the uniformed personnel closing in on him, then back at where her father had been and where he still had not returned. And again she cried, “Daddy!”
Other Security personnel, on foot, came running in, ordering Tia and the other young people to vacate the pavilion. They moved quickly, conducting the Chief’s daughter and her guests away from where they had been partying only moments ago. They led the kids out onto the grass about ten meters away and told them to stay down. The terrified youths did as they were told, but kept their eyes on the pavilion as the stranger and the uniformed personnel surrounding him hovered there in a stand-off. For a moment, nothing happened, and Tia and the others wondered why. Then, the officers surrounding their quarry began to back off until they reached positions just outside of the pavilion. The stranger, hovering over the seats and the stage, began to rear up on his stolen bike as if on horseback, and gave the distinct impression that he was ready to leap up and over his pursuers…
…until, as one, each of the officers’ bikes shot forth a small, shiny object, aimed into the area of the party. Tia heard someone—it must have been one of the uniformed personnel on foot—shout, “GET DOWN!” The young people all made themselves flat against the grass and instinctively covered their ears, barely muffling the hellish sound of the upheaval happening ten meters away.
The minutes that followed were a throbbing, pulsing blur. The sound of the explosion rang in Tia’s ears. She felt dizzy and shocked. With an officer’s help, she managed to rise wobbling to her feet. She checked around to see if any of her friends were hurt. Thankfully none of them were, but there was plenty of moaning and crying all around her. People were gasping and choking and hugging each other, and Tia hugged the ones nearest to her and cried with them. In the midst of everything, Tia tried to make sense of everything that had just happened. Who was this man in the strange body suit? What was he doing there? Why was Colonial Security chasing him and why did they see the need to use enough concussion grenades to demolish a multi-story building to bring him down? He could not possibly be alive after all that. Why did it take that much power to stop him? What would he have done if they could not?
She squinted in the direction of the rubble and debris-filled crater where her birthday party had been. Mighty plumes of dust rose from it like the vast columns of smoke from an incendiary bomb. The bike-riding officers had extended cables and hooks into the shattered and pulverized ruin of the pavilion and grabbed onto something, and were now dragging it clear. Tia braced herself and thought she should look away from what they were certainly going to produce from the wreckage of that awful violence. To be sure they were going to bring forth the mangled remains of the stranger.
Except that what they dragged onto the grass did not look at all mangled.
The bike-riding officers produced torchlights and shone them onto the prone figure. The stranger’s body was in one piece, his alien-looking garment stained and scuffed but completely undamaged. Not a bone of the body underneath that arcane-looking covering seemed to be broken. Tia blinked incredulously. What had started out shocking and terrifying had turned to something impossible.
The personnel on foot ordered the kids to stay back, and the personnel on floating bikes formed themselves into a cordon around the area where the stranger lay while those on foot went to examine their fallen quarry. In spite of orders, the kids, Tia foremost among them, moved in as close as they could to get as good a look as they could.
They heard the Security people saying things to each other and saying other things that must have been communications with other authorites—including, Tia was sure, her father, who had gone off somewhere before all this happened. She guessed his disappearance from the party must have had something to do with all this. Tia quietly watched, scarcely aware of her friends nearby, as the officers worked at the body in the grass and somehow managed to get the headpiece off of it. Now they would all see who it was who had crashed Tia’s celebration.
Even at a few meters’ distance, Tia could tell that the face lying in the grass was male, young, and incomparably handsome. It was, even from this far off, the most beautiful male face she had ever seen. And there was something more about it. There was a nobility about his features—nothing savage, nothing brutal. He looked almost like a prince out of an ancient storybook. Somehow, in spite of all the carnage and terror that this mystery man had brought into what was meant to be the most joyous night of Tia’s young life, he looked nothing at all like a monster or a menace—in fact, exactly the opposite.
Which begged the question even more: Who was he?