Synopsis "Slow Comes the Dark Volume 3 Darkness Descends"
The fight for freedom from corporation control spreads to Ragnar-B, a remote world in the rim sector of Twillis, adjacent to the rebel Abelard Sector. On this world, the fight takes a wildly different turn. The three top CEOs of the three most powerful corporations, Galaxy Dynamics, General Robotics, and Galactic Electronics, have secretly built robot fighters, the "tin cans," or CAM (Cybernetic Android Mobile). However, their scheme is vastly worse than mere impervious fighting robots. They've developed the Shadow Maker system. When its rays hit a human being, it slowly turns the body into its constituent atoms and molecules, leaving a small pile of dust. Worse, via an ultra-high frequency ray in the kilo-yatta-hertz range, the spiritual beings, the personality, the person, the id, the ghost, or the soul, whatever you wish to call it, is pulled out of their disintegrating body and forced into one of these new robot bodies. Worse, via this same energy beam, the being is then forced to operate the robot shell and fight for the CEOs, killing other people on Ragnar-B. None can resist the CEOs' orders, because this blinding white energy delivers intense headaches until the being obeys their orders. As the story opens, Captain Janine Alouse and her platoon are fighting to protect some rare earth mines from the CAM attack. Meanwhile, the CEOs launch a massive attack using tens of thousands of these CAMs, many in one-man fighters, that magnetically grapple onto Ragnar-B's main battleship and then cut large holes in its hull, eventually decompressing the entire ship, killing all onboard. Captain Janine's half-sister, Dr. Alison Wade, an electronics genius, has been helping work on control circuitry for the CAMs and the Shadow Maker systems, though she had no idea of their intended use. However, when she attended a meeting with fifty others to gripe about the way that the corporations were treating everyone, she was captured and with genetic modification, turned into a UFB woman. What these three CEOs didn't know is that an ancient humaniform robot, that once went by the name Thanos Haides, had spent the last five hundred years completely rebuilding its body and was now "helping" them create these robots. Thanos prized Dr. Alison skills, and when she was genetically modified, he rescued her, brining him into his fold. Thanos had an entirely different plan for these robots and the human race! Follow the path that Ragnar-B took to gain its freedom from the corporations' yoke. Space war for Ragnar-B begins.
