After several jumps through hyperspace to conceal their approach vectors, the Zozian fleets arrive in the Zernabian prison system! Dead ahead of the Temerity is the infamous prison planet where Zik encountered the Clonoids for the first time. Tanaka gets a tactical report from Francisco; their fleet, Blue Squad, has all arrived safely. The other Zozian fleets are also reporting in as they arrive, and the massive Kodiak 2 dominates the scene. The Zozian fleets outnumber the token Clonoid sentry, and their capital ship, while large, is dwarfed by the Kodiak 2.
Upon receiving a similar keep-away message as Defender Zik received when he stumbled on the system, his father Mitch takes to the radio. He announces to the Clonoids that the Zozians have arrived to offer transportation and safe harbor to anyone who wishes to leave the planet. The Zernabians respond with a terse warning, claiming that the slaves are owned by Queen Elcyra and any intruders will be fired upon. Taking the high road, Mitch retorts that there can be no legitimate claims of ownership by one sentient creature on another. The Zozians will not be dissuaded and leave the ball in the Clonoid’s court. Tanaka, of course, hopes they choose battle.
The answer is soon given in the form of a stream of massive plasma bolts from the Clonoid capital ship, which detonate on the hull of one of the Makwa corvettes escorting the Kodiak 2. Mitch gives the order to all Zozian fleets: Engage the enemy!
A gleeful Tanaka guns the engines, eager to catch up to the Sharktooth, who jumped ahead. The Battle of Prison Planet has begun!
A few hours later, the Temerity is screaming through space, heading back to Zoz. The injured are being looked after in the infirmary, and Defender Zik has gotten his suit cleaned up. He and Amelia are looking for Mikigaazo, to see how he feels about the Mikibot platform’s first real-world test. Despite the bot platform getting its head blown off, it still seems to have performed well, but Miki has the final say.
After looking throughout the ship, Amelia and Zik find Miki in the cargo hold. He’s crouched on the ground next to the two body bags containing the bodies of the ZEMM pilots who were killed by Morren. Zik calls out in a friendly way, but it’s quickly evident that Miki is having a hard time with something. Miki is trying to understand why he can no longer feel any energy from the two bodies in front of him.
Zik and Amelia explain that the two unfortunate souls have died. This is a new concept for Miki, who becomes alarmed at the prospect that every human will die eventually. Unwilling to fully accept being apart from his friends as an inevitability, Miki asks if a part of himself can remain with each of them all the time, so that he can absorb their energy and always remember it.
Honored to receive such a gift, the human pair agrees, although Zik advises Miki to be cautious about who he gives this gift to. Not all humans are worthy of such trust, and Miki agrees that the Jairians they encountered felt very different. He could sense the darkness in their hearts, and comments that each human is quite unique, something alien to this creature who can divide and recombine itself.
Amelia gives Miki a little hug and assures him she loves him. Miki comments that love is the best emotion he can sense from a human, and reciprocates the feeling.
And that’s a wrap, Defenders! We’ve come to the end of Episode 6: Apodian Ambush! I have some preparations to make before beginning Episode 7, including finding a new web host for the site. But keep an eye out, Zik fans, because The War Party will be coming at you soon!
Defender Zik calls for his crew to cease fire, recognizing Morren’s voice. He asks how in the world Morren could have survived their last encounter, which ended with Morren getting spaced with a broken visor! As it turns out, Jairian trooper uniforms have redundant visors for just such an emergency.
Morren sets out the situation for the Temerity team: he intends to kill them all! But to make it interesting, he’s placed the ZEMM flight crew at the top of the crater’s central peak, and he challenges Zik to try and make it to the top. He promises to free the hostages if Zik makes it.
An understandably skeptical Tanaka objects, saying that they can’t trust Morren to keep his word. But Morren doesn’t care, he holds all the cards! The hostages can just be eliminated right away. Zik hastily agrees to play Morren’s game, if only to buy the hostages more time.
Defender Zik and the intrepid crew of the Temerity arrives at Gamma Apodis 3 and scans its second moon for the crew of the captured ZEMM cargo vessel. But the evil Jairians have destroyed the ship! Trent asks why they keep doing that, when they could be salvaging the ships they capture. Defender Zik explains that the Jairians are obsessive about hiding themselves and striking from the shadows, and keeping the ships intact would allow the Zik to track them to their elusive base of operations.
As they approach the landing zone, Zik asks Francisco if there are any traces of the Jairians indicating where they might have gone, such as an ion trail. Francisco replies that yes, an ion trail exists, and it’s fresh enough to identify the type of vessel they used! Zik decides to let him and Amelia investigate the trail further, because it’s imperative that the Jairians are located in order to negotiate some kind of peace. The rest of the crew disembarks and examines the wreck of the transport vessel.
A sharp-eyed Trent Quickdraw spots the crew of the transport in the distance, at the central peak of a nearby crater. Defender Zik tries to call out to them, but receives no response. This whole thing isn’t adding up, but since the Jairians seem to have left, Zik calls for the team to head over to the crew to see if they’re all right. Be he warns them to be cautious, because his instincts are telling him something’s not right!
After a few minutes, Defender Zik and the crew of the Temerity are on their way! Zik congratulates the team on an excellent scramble time, and lets them know that this time, it’s not a drill! There is a real mission afoot, with a good chance of combat! After months of playing cat-and-mouse with the elusive and violent communists, there’s finally an opportunity to confront them directly in an effort to foil their hijacking. Francisco locks in the navigation to Gamma Apodis, and they hit the hyperdrive! It’s go time!
The infirmary celebrations are interrupted by an urgent call for Defender Zik to come to the bridge of Bastion Station. Zik gives the Zernabian siblings a congratulations and hurried off to see what the problem is. On the bridge, he finds Gordon Mises, head of the Zik Enterprises Merchant Marine division, with a worried look on his face. One of their light transports has been hijacked, and Gordon’s daughter is among its crew!
Taking stock of the situation, Zik asks if Jolene has sent for Kodiak Search And Rescue. She replies that she has, but that all the Kodiak ships are otherwise engaged in a large fleet exercise to test their integration as a planetary defense force. Zik decides that they won’t pull any of James Anchor’s ships from that effort, and that they can handle it themselves in the Temerity. Gordon insists on coming along to help his daughter, and the crew of the Temerity is scrambled to their ship!
Welcome to Defender Zik Episode 6: Apodian Ambush!
Our story opens in the infirmary aboard Bastion Space Station, with Doctors Taylor and Rundenfurt having called a little reunion to share some test results. Zik and Vera are already present as Trent and Amelia arrive, and are asked to have a seat.
Vera takes the floor to explain some very important news the new arrivals. She’s been a surrogate mother to both of them, taking care of them since they came to her from separate prison camps a year apart. Watching them as they grew, Vera was always struck by how similar they were at times. She asked Doctor Taylor to check, and her suspicions were totally confirmed – Trent and Amelia are half-siblings!
Amelia squeals in delight at the news and grabs Trent. She gives her stunned brother a huge squeeze and a big kiss on the cheek. Now she understands the way she’s always loved him! And for Trent, this explains his constant awkwardness around her – loving her deeply, but feeling strange about romance.
Our hero Zik inquires as to how this could have happened. Vera explains, and with that, let’s have a…
DEFENDER ZIK LORE BREAK!
In the beginning of the Zernabian prison camps, couples who produced children were split up from each other. You see, Queen Elcyra understood that the family is the foundational unit of civilization, so she kept families from forming. The evil monarch did everything she could to remove her prisoners’ will to rebel.
At first, Elcyra only kept the remaining Zernabians around as a source of genetic material in case her Clonoids failed. But shortly after Amelia and Trent were born, she came to the conclusion that her backup genetic stock was no longer needed. Sadistically, instead of freeing her slaves, she decided to sterilize them and work them to death.
Zik plays for time, keeping Dr. Wagner talking so he can figure out how to get out of this jam. But the jam they’re in is worse than they imagined!
Wagner reveals that despite causing his aging to dramatically slow, he is now at the limits of his life. Since he can’t see all of time unfold by becoming immortal, he’ll bring the rest of the future to himself, quickly! The machine he’s built creates a singularity and channels the warping of space-time so that for everyone in its field, the entire rest of time rushes towards them quickly, allowing them to see everything! Wagner reasons that this expanded perception must enable total enlightenment of the soul.
Sensibly, Zik asks why Wagner can’t perform this time manipulation elsewhere, where it won’t encompass his entire home planet and its population. But Wagner’s ethos dictates that if you can raise someone to a higher level of enlightenment, it would be unenlightened to avoid doing so. To him, enlightenment can be bestowed, and should be, whether the recipient agrees or not, because they are yet too unenlightened to understand the gift they’re receiving.
With that, Wagner turns to his diabolical machine and begins the process! The equipment revs up with a noise Misha the gorillaur knows only too well, and she starts getting nervous. Zik tells Tanaka to get ready, because he has a plan to use that nervousness to help stop the experiment. But Tanaka isn’t totally on board! This time warp experiment can give him the ability to stop worrying about what to do next, and passively observe what arrives. It’s what he’s been doing since recovering from the Jairian attack on his clan, and this provides an easy escape from the pain. Zik counters that it’s not up to Wagner to make a decision that robs everyone of the right to determine their own destiny, and with that, he steels himself for action!
Defender Zik is led into the lab of the sinister Dr. Wagner, along with Tanaka, still held by Misha the gorillaur. The lab is full of strange equipment and a platform surrounded by large rings. Zik presses Wagner for information, hoping to buy time to prevent him from destroying the planet. But Wagner is unconcerned with the deaths of millions of Zozians, because he’s convinced he’s bestowing enlightenment instead. Zik calls him crazy.
That sets Wagner off on an angry rant about how much he contributed to the secretive Project Zoz that enabled humans to leave Earth and come to Zoz all those years ago. He continues that his new challenge has been unlocking the secrets of immortality, and amazes the others by revealing that he’s over a thousand years old already! An incredulous Tanaka asks how that’s possible, and Wagner replies that he did to himself what he’s done with everything he’s touched over the years: he repaired the flaws he perceived in the original design! Returning to the topic at hand, he promises the shocked duo enlightenment!
The gorillaurs force Defender Zik and Tanaka to the mysterious house, which sits in a patch of the jungle which is withered and dead looking. Waiting for them on the porch is an unexpected figure from Zoz history – Dr. Neil Wagner!
DEFENDER ZIK LORE BREAK!
A Brief History Of Dr. Neil Wagner
Dr. Wagner was born on Earth, in the United States, and traces his ancestry to Germany. He became involved in the secret Project Zoz, and his primary duty was to collect the DNA information and build the biological printer that would be needed to seed Earth life on the new Zozian home-world.
Before the launch of the Project Zoz colony ship, his deep genetic research brought many truths to his attention. He learned how to slow his own ageing process down dramatically, something he’s continued to improve over the centuries. Realizing that sharing this discovery could lead to chaos among the population of Earth, he hid it, not even informing the other members of Project Zoz.
During the trip to Zoz, the plan was for almost everyone to be in cryogenic stasis, and to have rotating caretakers spend five years awake each, ensuring that the ship systems did not become compromised on the centuries-long journey. Dr. Wagner, who was also integral to the design of the stasis system, offered to take the first shift, since that’s when most of the potential problems were anticipated to arise. He also ensured that his name was last in the rotation.
In this way, Wagner ensured that he could stay awake for the entire journey. There were no serious on-board problems for him to deal with, so he dedicated all his time to refining his anti-ageing process, continually extending his possible lifespan. He was after every scientists dream: unlimited time to unlock the mysteries of the universe!
He turned his attention to the genetic data he had collected for all the Earth life, making what he considered to be improvements. Some of the more delicate plants were made hardier. Mosquitos were refined to no longer desire human blood. Orcas would lose their cruelty. And then his highest achievement: the Chadee! Chimpanzees acquired a human level of intelligence, with various other improvements to allow speech and increased fine motor skills in their hands.
When it came time to look at his anti-ageing technology again, he began to scrutinize his own DNA in great detail, improving everything he could. One DNA segment puzzled him, as it seemed injected, and he reasoned it must have come from a virus. He then looked for the same sequence in the other sleeping humans, and he found it in very nearly everyone. So he fixed the problem in everyone he found it in (including several of Zik’s ancestors), without ever waking anyone up.
At the end of the trip, the other people scheduled to take a five-year supervisory shift were puzzled that they weren’t awoken. Individually, they approached Dr. Wagner, and he told them that he had re-jigged the duty roster so that fewer people would have to suffer what amounted to a five-year loss of life doing a boring and unnecessary job. Most reacted with skepticism, but turned their attention to the urgent and difficult task of terraforming their new home.
Then, as Zoz became populated with life, the Chadee were discovered. When Wagner’s upgrades were exposed, the rest of the Zozians were furious with him. During a private interrogation with the leaders of the project, Wagner boldly admitted to having meddled with the genes of everyone who had the genetic anomaly he’d fixed. The elders were stunned, shunned him forever, and agreed among themselves not to tell the Zozians about it until they were ready, because there was already great unease about the difficulty of settling Zoz at the time.
The secret of that genetic tinkering is still only known to a handful of elders, and debate continues among them whether to release the information publicly.
An astonished Zik asks how he could still be alive, since nearly two hundred years have passed since he was last heard from, and Wagner reveals that he has solved the problem of aging! Or rather, that he thought he had. Meanwhile, Wagner has questions of his own, specifically: what are Zik and Tanaka doing sneaking around on his island?
Zik explains their situation, which Wagner was aware of, and apologizes for trespassing, since he was unaware anyone lived here. Then Wagner decides to invite Defender Zik and Tanaka to witness the genesis of Wagner’s plan, which will kill everyone on Zoz, them included! An incredulous Zik follows him into the house…
