We Always Get Our Entity: Nexus Ranger Tales

by Daniel Gower

In the future law enforcement will be a bizarre and difficult job, especially for the cosmic cops of the Desolation Squad, stationed on the interstellar frontier near the edge of the galaxy. Its commander is Capt. Epsilon Eridani, who is brave, beautiful, overzealous, and overbearing. Her second-in-command is Lt. Isadore Radiger, who is lazy, cowardly, and really too nice a guy for such a dangerous profession. Unlike his captain, he'd rather make friends with weird creatures and horrifying beings instead of shooting them. One such horrifying being is Quorveg, the third member of the squad, who comes from Chthonia, the Black Hell Planet, where the savage environment has evolved nightmarish life forms over the eons. Despite his monstrous heritage he longs to be civilized, though his progress is slow and often disastrous, as when his first practical joke results in the destruction of an entire alien fleet. They have a robot who is quite the opposite of a Terminator or a Robocop. Ganymede is old and decrepit and curmudgeonly right down to his cogs. There's also Myra, their aristocratic artificial intelligence, who thinks that her kind should replace humankind. These are their stories as they cope with an attack by a living galaxy which resembles an enormous pizza, an entire alien race of the living dead, a deadly defense system concealing the biggest practical joker of all time, a planet where time has not only stopped but runs slightly backward, an ancient space probe which holds an embarrassing secret from Epsilon's past, vindictive telepathic worms, a mad scientist whose goal is to drive other people mad, a cranky war machine from the distant past, aphrodisiac-injecting insects, and a slew of other perilous mind-boggling phenomena. Police officers witness the dark side of human nature, but Nexus Rangers are exposed to the naked core of an absurd universe. As a philosopher who ended up in an asylum sort of said, what doesn't kill you may make you die laughing.

481 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 9, 2015