The Dolphin Half Trilogy

[Bob McDob]

King Ghidorah's landmark Space Opera epic is now available for all of you to read. Enjoy.

Dolphin Half
And Behold, For My Bottle-Nose Shall Rend The Heavens
The Lament of the Cosmos

[Bob McDob]

Herbert Gould was not your ordinary man, nor was he your ordinary dolphin. Rather, he was a freakish hybrid of the two, spawned when his mother, a dolphin trainer, accidentally forgot to wear her wetsuit to work one morning. He was also not your ordinary physician, nor was he your ordinary carpenter. Rather, he was a crack Assault Suit pilot in the Black Crescent Legion, Lord Hyperion's elite God-Hammer unit. There were only twelve God-Hammers in the galaxy, and Gould was the greatest among them. That's not really saying much, though, since the God-Hammers really, really sucked, and being the greatest among them is like being the biggest cockroach in a burned-out crackhouse. Herbert Gould frowned as he ran through all this in his head.

"Man, I'm fucked," he thought. And he was right. Before him stood the towering black form of an Oblivion Commando, one of the most powerful warriors in the known universe. A man merged etherically with a black hole, an Oblivion Commando could turn a continent to dust in a matter of minutes, and speed off through the blackness of space at the speed of gravity itself to his next target. The man before Gould was their Captain, armored in a sleek, black-shelled Assault Suit, the rough equivalent of 600,000,000,000,002 of Gould's own mecha. Gould sighed.

"Tell us why we shouldn't kill you," demanded the Commando. They always referred to themselves in the plural, inferring their awesome power.

Gould swallowed. "I'm... the, uhh... last of my kind?" It was, in fact, a question.

"No, I don't think you are."

"Hey, I thought you guys always referred to yourselves in the third person!" The Commando responded by aiming his Forced Implosion Cannon directly between Gould's eyes, remarkable since they weren't actually visible from the outside of his bulky grey Assault Suit.

"Goodbye, Mr. Gould."

"Hey, how do you know my name?"

"We know everything," replied the faceless black shell.

"Oh? Then maybe you can tell me what that thing is over there," said Gould, pointing over the Oblivion Commando's shoulder, "It's been driving me crazy, not knowing and all."

The Commando turned his mechanized head to look. Gould screamed a battle cry and rushed him, slamming into the other mecha with tremendous force. As the two Assault Suits toppled over, Gould allowed himself to laugh. "I can't believe you fell for that one. You must be the stupidest motherfucker alive!" Gould shook his head and raised his Phase Disruptor knife, ready to drive it into his opponent's power core.

"Not really. We were just humoring you before the end. It's much more fun this way." The Oblivion Commando nonchalantly grabbed the wrist of Gould's suit and tore the arm clean off, throwing it several hundred yards away where it crumpled in a pile of dust.

"Mama..." whimpered Gould, but he knew she couldn't hear him. At that moment she was back on Earth, half a galaxy away, having sex with a dolphin.

The enemy grabbed Gould's suit by the shoulders and ripped it in half, snapping it straight down the middle. Gould tumbled out of the ruined mecha and onto the Oblivion Commando's suit, still lying on its back. In the heat of battle, the alien metal felt icy cold. As the enemy's arms came up to crush him, Herbert Gould felt a strange sensation in his body. It was a powerful, thrashing sensation, rippling up his spine. Gould felt the surging oceans against his skin, the waves against his body, the wind across his dorsal fin.

"Dorsal fin!" he cried, and at once he knew. "Father!" he shouted towards the heavens, towards Earth, "I feel it! At last, I know what it is, I know what I am! I am a dolphin, son of the seas, and I am free!" With blue fire glowing in his eyes, he turned his head toward his foe. As the immense arms closed around him, a surging wave of power enveloped his body. He could feel it in his mind, a glorious reverbration growing and harmonizing in his dome-like forehead. At once he knew what it was, how it was to be a dolphin, the true power of the legacy he had carried in shame for so long. With a shrill whistle he fired a tremendous sonic blast from his forehead, the maximum output of his echolocation organs rippling through the air, slamming into the Oblivion Commando's Assault Suit, disintegrating its crushing arms and blasting its body wide open. The force of the Suit's explosion threw him clear of the blast, knocking him out. When he came to, the enemy suit was in ruins, just a hollowed-out smoldering husk. Gould, now confident and self-assured, looked up to the heavens, where, somewhere beyond the sky, his father smiled down on him with his bottle-nose. He took a deep breath and turned towards the dustoff zone when a black shape slammed into him, knocking him to the ground. He looked up to see the face of the Oblivion Commando snarling down at him, eyes black and empty, his soul having been long ago hollowed out by his union with the singularity.

"You... miserable... fuck..." growled the Commando, his voice rasping. Gould could see that the he was frightfully injured, seared by the explosion and shock wave, his body in tatters but still animated by the nightmarish force of the Hole. Gould could feel it throbbing, pulsing, raging inside what was left of the man's body. The Commando wrapped his fingers around Gould's throat.

"Do you know how angry you've made me?" rasped the... thing. It continued to strangle Gould, who could feel his life ebbing. "I've destroyed solar systems for less! After I've killed you, I'll shatter your miserable fucking planet to dust, but not before I've had my way with it. Maybe I'll rape every woman on the planet. One of them has to mean something to you. Maybe I'll just tear out the heart of every living thing I find, from the smallest insect to the largest whale! I'll make your world suffer for your insolence, your PRESUMPTION! YOU DARE TO INJURE ME! I AM INFINITY! I AM THE ULTIMATE END OF ALL WORLDS, ALL CREATION! I AM THE DEVOURER OF GOD!"

"Devour this!" cried Gould, sending his last surge of energy down through his chest into his lower half, where it exploded into the only thing he could now move. His giant, prehensile dolphin phallus tore through his flightsuit, thrusting up through his enemy's chest, piercing his heart. The nexus of their union torn asunder, the broken man and the black hole flashed forth into each other, the man's body exploding in a black cloud and being consumed by the singularity, which, now devoid of its dimensional anchor, flitted away back to its own realm, never to be seen again. Gould lay on the ground panting a long time.

At length he stood, rolling up his penis and stuffing it back into his pants. He once again gazed to the heavens.

"Thanks Dad!" he shouted, grinning.

[Singular Quartet]

Funny and disturbing.

I like.

[Bob McDob]

Here's Byydo's sequel. Personally, I think his writing's best with really short stories, but this one's good too. It's probably more scifi than the first one.

Herbert Gould, dolphin-man extraordinaire, squeezed the trigger on his flightstick. Silver beams lanced forth from the wings of his fighter. Ahead of him, in the void of space, an asteroid exploded.
“Boy, I can’t believe they’ve got me on asteroid duty again,” sighed Gould.
“I can!” shouted his robotic co-pilot.
“Shut the hell up!” Gould squeezed the trigger again, his shot glancing off the edge of a particularly shiny space rock.
“Nice shot, Chippy! Too bad this ain’t billiards, you stupid finback!” taunted the machine.
“I told you to stop calling me that!” Gould screamed. He thumbed another button; a slender dart shot past the cockpit, trailing blue fire. It struck the asteroid, obliterating it.
“Which one? Chippy or finback?” asked the robot. Gould yanked the stick back and to the side, spiraling the ship around to face another huge asteroid.
“BOTH OF THEM!” he screamed, slamming his fist down on the robot’s control panel. Actually, he missed the control panel—in his usual manner—and instead hit the ordinance panel. Several dozen missiles detached themselves from Gould’s wings and streaked off into the distance. They slammed into a small planetoid, blowing a big hole.
“Way to waste ammunition, Chippy!” the machine squawked, also in its usual manner. “Those missiles don’t grow back, you know.”
Gould gritted his conical teeth in agitation. Ever since he’d killed that Oblivion Commando he’d been regarded as some kind of popular hero by his people, humans and cetaceans alike. His mixed heritage, which had once been the source of his greatest shame, had since been embraced as a trend by members of both species, and fashionable individuals rushed to mimic the behaviors of their new counterparts. Dolphin-savvy humans had started to greet each other by waving their penises instead of hands, and impressionable dolphins began murdering each other for sport. Of course, since dead pop idols are bad for morale, the increasingly unbalanced Lord Hyperion had commanded that Gould should be kept as far from danger as possible, yet still retain his status as the Imperium’s greatest warrior. To this end, he issued a proclamation of war against the inhabitants of a small asteroid field in the vicinity of… well, it wasn’t really in the vicinity of anything. Not surprisingly, there was little objection from said inhabitants, due in large part to the fact that the only inhabitants of the asteroid field in question were, in fact, asteroids.
“I wish there was something to shoot at besides asteroids,” whined Gould.
“You could always shoot at that warship,” squawked the robot.
“What warship?”
“The one that’s boosting towards us at a quarter lightspeed.” Small arrows appeared on Gould’s head-up display, indicating a rapidly swelling gray bulge in the eternal night.
“OH SHIT!” cried Gould. The warship seemed to flow towards him, its form distorted by the high relativistic velocity at which it was traveling. Its image stabilized as it grew, a sign of rapid deceleration. Still, it grew larger.
And larger.
And larger. Soon it filled Gould’s entire view.
And still it grew, as though it would consume eternity.
Finally, it crept to a halt, its titanic form blotting out the stars. It loomed above Gould’s fighter, forming horizons on all sides. A detailed sensor return appeared on Gould’s main display, resolving into a wireframe image. Gould’s mouth fell open.
“oh…”
The IFF computer bleeped out a reading.
“…my…”
Gould’s co-pilot scanned the output. “Wow, how ‘bout that?” it said, impressed.
“…fucking…”
“Yep, no doubt about it. It’s the Ouroboros, all right.”
“…HOLY JESUS CHRIST FLYING THROUGH THE SKY ON MAGIC SHOES WITH LASERS FOR EYES AND A FLAMING TURBAN!!!!”
“What?”
“WHY THE FUCK IS A SHIP OF THE LINE HERE?!?!?!?!?”
“Why? Why not? Why are any of us here? Why are you hitting my panel?”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”


Gould awoke, as if from a dream.
“What happened?” he asked, weakly.
“You were getting on my nerves, so I turned off your oxygen.”
“Can you do that?”
“You know, there’s this thing called ‘deductive reasoning’ you might want to look into.”
“Well, at least the ship wasn’t real.”
“Why would you think that?” asked the robot.
Gould looked up through his bubble canopy at the immense form of the Hyper-Dreadnaught. It was obscene in its scale; to build such a thing was the ultimate in hubris, a crime against the very gods themselves. With the resources used to build but one of the monstrosities, half a dozen space colonies could be constructed, housing nearly a billion people altogether. Three such vessels were known in existence, forming the vanguard of the Hyperdimensional Cataclysmic Armada, the vassal-army of Leviathan, the Great Old God of the all-consuming Singularities. Their goal was nothing less than the total destruction of all sentient life, for life birthed order from chaos, violating the sacred Entropy, upon which the appetites of the All-Eaters were gorged, but never sated. Of the men whose fate it was to meet the Hyper-Dreadnaughts in the fire of battle, but few still drew breath. The Quetzalcoatl, her blazing wings tearing space itself, had decimated the Combined Fleet betwixt Cygnus’ shimmering pinions. Her sister ship, twisting, incomprehensible Jormungand, her writhing helical form alive with storms of opalescent fury, sprang forth from the nothingness far above the frigid coasts of Asgard, third sphere in thrall of the Great Demon-Star, home to a billion men. Her hatred, palpable, a shard of ice, had splintered the world in an instant. Third of the great serpent furies, Ouroboros, the endless worm, was as the blade of death to the men of Earth; they knew not where her edge split air.
Herbert Gould knew where her edge split air. His console registered an incoming transmission.
Through his smudged video panel, Gould could see the inside of the Ouroboros’ bridge. Coalescent blackness, liquid in its totality, studded with instrument lights twinkling, gemlike, in hypnotic rhythm. Her Captain, eyeless beneath his broad visor, managed to glare through Gould’s soul nonetheless. He spoke through bared teeth.
“I don’t know how you found our secret advance base concealed in this asteroid field,” he growled, slowly and deliberately, “but I must congratulate you on a job well done. Your missile barrage struck just as our men were bringing their reactor core on-line. The blast was enough to throw the temporary shielding out of alignment and breach the reactor.” The Captain lowered his head. “In one shot you turned our base into a mausoleum.”
“Umm… I’m sorry?” croaked Gould, in a cold sweat. He suddenly longed for a herring. He cleared his throat, a dolphiny chirp.
The Captain froze. Slowly, cautiously, he tilted his head to the side. From his face, veiled in shadow from the wide, low brim of his towering cap, the white of an eye shone. It wavered in silent rage.
“You… It’s you… The fish-man… I should have known.” Pearlescent teeth once again bared under the visor. “You’re the one who killed Anubis, our greatest warrior. Hear you’re something of a hero among your people now… Well, hero, we’re all honored to meet you,” he taunted, with a sweeping gesture across the bridge, “And we’ll be even more honored to kill you.”
“But… but I…” Gould stammered. The display flickered and went black.
“Targeting sensors just painted us,” informed the robot.
“Wait… you see, I can explain all this…”
“Lock-on.”
“You see, it’s all very funny really,” stammered Gould, between terrified laughs, “Please don’t shoot us or else you won’t get to hear how funny it is, and you see it really is very amusing and all, since we didn’t actually mean, and you…”
“Missile launch, multiple warheads, impact in 25 seconds!”
“nyaaaaahhhhhhh…”
“Impact in 20 seconds!”
“Ahh! Countermeasures! Countermeasures!” Gould pounded the chaff button. Nothing happened. He thumbed the button several dozen more times in quick succession.
“Countermeasures aren’t working!” he shrieked.
“Quick!” shouted his robotic co-pilot, “Eject Eject Eject!”
“Good idea!” Gould grabbed the yellow-and-black-striped handle between his legs. Flattening his spine against the seat, he yanked the lever with all of his might. A loud “whump” sounded from behind him. His seat shuddered; bracing himself for the kick of the rockets, he straightened his neck, shutting his eyes and pressing his head against the padding of his seat back…
There was no feeling of motion, no vertebrae-cracking lurch of acceleration. He opened his eyes, one at a time.
Through the top of the bubble canopy he could see a small cylinder hurtling away from his fighter, trailing orange flame.
“What… what the hell?!” screamed Gould.
“Oh yeah,” came a voice, tinny and distant, over the comm system. Gould recognized his co-pilot’s synthesized voice. “I forgot to tell you. I had the maintenance bot take the rockets out of your seat and attach them to my processing core. Hope you don’t mind.”
“You traitor!” he screamed.
“Sooooorrrrrryyyyyyyyyy…” came the reply, fading away as the glow of the rockets faded into the distance.
Gould shifted his view to the pair of missiles. At this point he could almost see the warheads themselves, riding waves of cold blue flame. He hadn’t had it this bad since the Commando tore his arm off back there on the plains of the nameless world…
Wait… his arm?
“Oh yeah,” said Gould, “I have to arm the chaff pods before they’ll fire. Wonder how that slipped my mind?”
Gould flipped a small toggle; the countermeasure button lit up orange. He tapped it confidently. A pod fired out of his dorsal launch tubes, streaking away. It flawlessly mimicked the energy signature of his fighter, though amplifying it tenfold. He looked up, watching the pod spiral away through the night. He noticed it went in the same direction as the co-pilot.
Ahead of him, the missiles wavered in their course. They seemed to switch back and forth between the two contacts, growing ever closer as they did so. Finally, they veered up sharply and boosted off in the direction of the countermeasure pod. Gould could see them as they went by, uncomfortably close—sharp, angry triangles, backlit by their thruster wash. Their plasma trails filled Herbert’s cockpit with an eerie blue light, fading as they rocketed away.
“Hey, you dead yet?” came the co-pilot’s voice, through an amplified channel. “Something just hit me. You’re not doing anything funny down there, are you? Hang on a second while I get a light on it… Hey, that looks like a countermeasure pod. How’d you get ‘em working again? Hold on, there’s something else…” There was a long pause.
“YOU BASTARD! YOU BACKSTABBING SON OF A FISH-LOVING WHORE! HOW COULD YOU SHOOT A COUNTERMEASURE POD AT ME WHEN YOU KNEW THE MISSILES WOULD FOLLOW IT AND COME AFTER---”
Gould watched a brilliant point of light blossom in the distance, shimmering like morning dew. “Whoops,” he said.
“SYSTEM FAILURE,” came a new voice, bland and feminine, “RESTORING FROM LAST BACKUP.”
“Yow! Ugh, that’s uncomfortable. Hey, what happened?” asked the co-pilot. “How’d I get back here? I don’t remember anything after ejecting.”
“ Uhh, you, well, sort of got destroyed.”
“What? How?”
“Umm… A flying saucer shot you,” lied Gould, hiding his complicity.
“Shit! Was it the big one or the little one?”
“Little one.”
“DAMN!”
“Sorry”
“Don’t worry about it,” sighed the machine. “Hey, I figured out why we couldn’t launch the countermeasures…”
“Uhh… Don’t worry about it?” asked Gould.
“What? Why not? I guess you somehow took care of the missiles but it’s a sure bet they’ve got more left, and we won’t stay lucky forever…”
“We… That is, I… I-I’m sorry, but I… I… f-forgot to bring any, that’s it.”
“What? Hang on, lemmie check…”
Gould tried to loosen his collar, but found he was wearing a spacesuit on top of it.
“I’ll be damned, you’re right. The pod’s missing. Wonder why I didn’t notice it before.”
Gould opened his mouth to say something, but an incoming transmission cut him off. The Captain’s face, or at least what little of it was visible, appeared on the monitor.
“Nice trick with that spoofer, fish-man, holding off until it was too late for our guidance systems to recognize and correct for it…”
“What’s he talking about?” asked the robot.
“Ssssssshhhhh!” replied Gould.
“…But you’ve only bought yourself a few moments. I’m powering up the Ouroboros’ main guns. You have three minutes to make peace with whatever fish-god you worship.” The screen went black once more.
“M-Main guns…?” Gould stammered.
“Rumor has it they’re some kind of quantum inverters,” the robot answered, “but I’m not quite sure what that means. Whatever they are, they took out our base at Altair 3 in one hit.”
“They took out the whole base?”
“They took out the planet.”


Gould awoke, as if from a dream, again.
“You know, for a hero you sure have a lot of fainting spells,” said the robot.
“I’m not a hero!” whined Gould, “I’m just a regular guy!”
“You’ve got a blow-hole!”
“It’s really small! You can barely see it!”
“The point is, you’re not a regular person. You’ve got abilities most men only dream of...”
Gould looked at his reinforced codpiece and winced.
“…And you owe it, not only to yourself but to the world, to use them.”
“You know… I never thought of it like that… You’re ri-“
The robot burst into laughter.
“Hahahaha, yeah right! Who the hell do I think I’m kidding? You’re completely useless! Nobody dreams of being you! I mean, look at you! You’re half dolphin! Do you have any idea whatsoever how stupid that makes you look? Abilities? I don’t think ‘swallowing a whole kipper’ will get you inducted into the Justice League anytime soon, Chippy.”
“Shut up! I do so have special abilities!”
“Oh yeah? If you’re so fucking powerful, why don’t you just use your magic sonar to blow up that warship in front of us? Oh, and while you’re at it, go catch me a mackerel.” The robot laughed for a full minute.
Gould gritted his pointy teeth. “I’ll show you… I’ll take out that battleship all by myself! You’ll learn not to mock Herbert Gould, the most powerful dolphin in space!” Grould grabbed the flightstick and throttle, tendons bulging from his wrists. In his eyes, steely determination swirled, mercurial yet diamond-hard.

“Well?” asked the robot, after a long, awkward pause.
“I forgot… My powers don’t work in outer space…” muttered Gould, sheepishly, still in the same pose.
“What?!”
“They… they’re sound based… sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum…”
“YOU’RE TOTALLY USELESS!”
“Wait! The superdensity lasers… They fire a cohesive photon beam, right? What if I use the photon beam as a carrier wave for my sonic blast?”
“That’s a good ide-- Wait! How’re you going to get the sound waves from your forehead to the gun barrels without blowing up the rest of the ship in the process?”
“I… don’t have an answer to that question…”
“Well, if you don’t try it we’re going to die anyway, so you might as well go ahead. Just lemmie back myself up again first.” The robot’s control panel flickered for a few seconds, then came back.
“Okay, you can go ahead and kill us now.”
Gould toggled his left MFD over to power control, channeling all reactor output directly to the main guns, bypassing shielding, main engines, and life support. To prevent a rupture from concussive overpressure, he set the life support system to suck most of the air out of the cockpit, relying on his suit’s internal oxygen supply. He pulled back on the stick; vernier thrusters raised the fighter’s nose to point directly at the underside of the massive vessel.
A humming reverberation rose; pale blue light emanated from behind Gould’s gold-tinted faceplate. He squeezed the trigger. Silver rays lanced out from his wingroots, leaping across the void. With a battle cry and a shrill whistle, Gould unleashed his aquatic fury, channeling it down through his seat, through the fuselage, and into the particle condensers of the guns. A pair of blue coronas, ethereal tsunamis, rippled down the beams, hurtling towards the monstrous warship. They slammed into the hull of the ship, unleashing terrifying power. Gould’s fighter felt as though it would explode in a shower of sub-atoms. Far in the distance, at the impact point, a small silver pod caught on fire and fell off the warship’s great hull.
Drained, Gould released the trigger, waiting for the explosion.
There was none.
For a long time, nothing happened. Gould flipped the power control back to its default settings. As he did so, the comm system sprang to life.
The Captain appeared on the screen.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“Oh… I guess it’s not important.” Gould started to cry.
“Whatever it is, stop it.”
“Yes sir.”
The Captain eyed him suspiciously.
“I’m locking a tractor beam on you in case you get any more funny ideas.” His image vanished.
From numerous points on the underside of the mighty ship, a series of faint green rays flickered to life. They shone down on Gould’s fighter, grappling it with extrapolations of the nuclear binding force. Higher up on the great vessel, gaping vents threw shimmering curtains of light into space—the vacuum-drain-fields of zero point generators, drawing elemental fire from the cosmic ether into the death-forges of Ouroboros’ quantum reactors.
“Estimate about 35 seconds before the main guns are powered up,” said the robot.
“What happens then?” asked Gould, nervously.
“The fuck you think happens then, asshole? We get blown the fuck up!”
“Well what the hell are we going to do?”
“Why the hell are you asking me? You got us into this mess, you get us out!”
“What? This is all your fault!”
“My fault?! You’re the idiot who blew up their base and pissed them off!”
“You made me do that!”
“Bullshit!”
“Like hell! You’re tied into the weapon systems too! You’re supposed to override accidental things like that!”
“If you think you’re gonna pin this one on me, Chippy, you got another thing coming!”
“I TOLD YOU,” screamed Gould, raising his fist, “DON’T CALL ME THAT!”
Gould slammed his fist down on the robot’s control panel. He missed.
“You idiot, what did you—”
Gould’s fighter abruptly fell out of existence.
Inside the fighter, lost in nothingness, Gould wondered what had become of his body. He looked down at his cockpit displays. They were still there, but all the colors were different; they were now completely new colors, ones that he had never seen and had no words for. He reached for his flightstick, but instead of his hand there was something else. A multitude of sounds assaulted him; wordless utterances of the void. Gould could feel a presence, immense and terrible, growing closer. He strained to see it but could not. Still, it grew closer, and closer, and closer.
It was here.
Suddenly, like a panther, it lunged.

Gould’s fighter leapt back into existence.
Slowly, gingerly, Gould opened his eyes, one at a time.
He was back in his fighter, back in space, once again in the living world. The Hyper-Dreadnaught was nowhere to be seen.
Haltingly, he withdrew his outstretched hand. Beneath it, he found the control panel of his faster-than-light drive.
“You know,” said the robot, its voice shaky, “There’s a reason you’re not supposed to activate the StarDrive without going into stasis first…”
“Where the hell were we?”
“Nowhere, and everywhere. Luckily we came back.”
“Where are we now? Where’s the Dreadnaught?”
“Well, the drive didn’t have a chance to power up first, so it probably just ran on whatever residual charge was left over in its capacitors. We didn’t go far. That planetoid’s still in front of us. The Dreadnaught should be right around here somewhere, and… I’ll be damned…”
“What? What is it?”
“Never seen anything like that before. Turn the ship around.”
Gould took the flightstick and yawed his fighter around 180o.
In the distance he could see the long, sleek form of the Hyper-Dreadnaught.
It was tied in a knot.
The bow was bent and twisted halfway back to the stern. The ship’s spine was clearly broken, and surging bolts of energy leapt across her hull. The whole ship looked somewhat like a giant floating fishhook.
“I wonder how we did that,” asked Gould.
The double-chirp of an incoming transmission sounded in the cockpit. Pulsating waves of snow filled the communications screen. At length the blur resolved itself into the face of the Captain. His hat was missing; now he glared at Gould through icy gray eyes. Behind him, the bridge of the Ouroboros was in the process of exploding.
“Sneaky bastard,” growled the Captain, “but well played. You knew our tractor beam was all but unbreakable… When you went to lightspeed your mass increased infinitely; we were powerless to hold you. The pull of our own tractor beams snapped our keel. Of course,” he continued, “You wouldn’t have been able to go to lightspeed at all if you hadn’t disabled our hyperspace jammers first.”
“When did we do that?” Gould asked the robot.
“Must’ve been your trick shot back there…”
“Congratulations, fish-man,” the Captain continued, “You’ve wrecked my ship and killed my crew. However,” he grinned, “we are not quite finished yet. My aft batteries are still functional, and are now fully charged. Lament, for you will feel the wrath of dead men.” His image faded out.
“Well, we almost made it,” sighed the robot.
Gould was silent. In the distance, the battered form of the warship, now rippling with explosions, began to shimmer. An unearthly glow arose around it, emanating from a point on its stern.
Suddenly, an immense beam, a perfect black core tinged with red, burst out from the broken vessel, hurtling toward Gould’s fighter.
Without warning, Herbert Gould ignited his fighter’s main engines. Streams of blue fire exploded from the thruster vents, the full cycling of atomic reheats.
“It’s not going to work,” said the robot, “they can correct for deflection…”
Gould ignored him. As the beam approached, he pulled the stick hard back with all his might, still leaning on the burners. He tapped his rudder pedal faintly.
The ebon rays of the Hyper-Dreadnaught’s Quantum Inversion Cannons cut a furrow of emptiness through space, darker than night. Gould’s fighter, a silver dolphin in the night, backflipped out of its way.
The warship’s computers tried to compensate, but could not follow the tiny vessel in its circular path. The ship disappeared behind its own plasma wash in endless loops; the machines could not find a point to aim at. The frightful black beams burned in the night, throbbed in fury, then faded away.
Gould burst out of the loop, rocketing away into the sky.
The Ouroboros’ beams swept through the night, having missed their mark. Far beyond, they struck the remains of the enemy base.
Half of the atoms in the planetoid’s core abruptly converted to antimatter.
The explosion could be seen for a dozen lightyears.
The Ouroborus, her strength long depleted, erupted into a ball of pure white flame.

Gould opened his eyes. Before them he could see stars; not the stars of his homeworld but stars nonetheless.
“You blacked out pretty hard back there,” said the robot, “I thought maybe your brain exploded.”
“What happened? I don’t remember much…”
“You took out the Dreadnaught single-handedly. That base, too. Remind me never to doubt your dolphin powers again.”
“I guess we head home then, right?”
“Well… We would, but we sort of just burned up the last of our fuel outrunning the explosions.”
“Hmm.”
“I turned on the distress beacon. With any luck something’ll come by and pick us up.”
“I hope it’s something friendly.”
“Yeah, I… Wait a sec, I’m reading something already.”
“Really?” asked Gould, “Seems awfully quick...”
“Wow, I’ll be damned.”
“What is it?”
“You know how we could never figure out how the enemy’s super warships could contain all the energy they used? I mean, you can’t just take the energy required to disintegrate a planet and stick it into a nine-volt battery…”
“Yeah?” Gould felt nervous, again.
“Well, our scientists theorized that they used some kind of artificial black hole to hold the power in stasis, kind of like a dimensional capacitor of sorts.”
“And?”
“Well, here it comes.”

The sphere, a fragment of absolute blackness, hurtled through the night. It had survived the death throes of the mighty warship intact, as was its nature. It bent the surrounding space as it went by, pressing a bulge in the universe.
Herbert Gould watched the bulge pass noiselessly by his ship, blotting out stars as it did so.
“Whew, it missed.” said Gould, relieved. “That was a close one.”
The gravitational shadow of the singularity took hold of Gould’s ship and pulled it through the night.
“Uh-oh.”
Gould’s ship continued to accelerate.
“Umm… This is bad, right?” he asked.
The robot started to cry.
“Hey… Hey! Snap out of it!”
“Sorry,” said the robot. “Well, I have some good news, at least.”
“What’s that?”
“We didn’t pass the event horizon, and the hole is moving away from us faster than we’re moving towards it, so we’re not going to get sucked in.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
“Yeah… Uhh, I sort of have some bad news though…”
Gould swallowed. “Which is?”
“The black hole’s going to hit that big planet up ahead, and since we’re being pulled behind the black hole we’re going to hit that planet too, and since we don’t have any fuel left we can’t do anything about it”
Gould nearly fainted.
“Oh, wait. More good news!”
“What?” asked Gould.
“The spectrometer says that the planet up ahead’s mostly water.”
“How is that good news?”
“Well… You’re a dolphin, right? You can swim and stuff, right? You can land in the water without getting hurt, right?”
“NOT AT MACH 12!”
“Oh… Oh, I see. Hmm…” The robot stopped to process for several moments.
“I think,” he said at last, “we may be in trouble.”

[Dalton]

I seem to remember the name Byydo as a game reviewer from SomethingAwful.

[Bob McDob]

Yeah, Byydo's insane.

[Singular Quartet]

Yeah, Byydo's insane.

explains things, really.

[Dalton]

Yeah, Byydo's insane.

His review of Cho Aniki, the most homoerotic game ever made

[Bob McDob]

[11:33] <Cpl_Hades> Wait, Byydo did a review for Something Awful? http://www.somethingawful.co*/articles.php?a=38
[11:33] <LOAF> Yeah, Byydo was odd for a while.
[11:33] <LOAF> I mean bad odd, not normal odd.
[11:34] <Bob> There're a wide range of attacks and they're matched with a good, intuitive control scheme. However, most of the good points about the gameplay mechanics are balanced out by the fact that THE GAME IS FULL OF NAKED MEN. ALL THE MOVES INVOLVE SOME DEGREE OF IMPLIED SODOMY.
[11:34] <LOAF> Byydo died on a Thursday. It was the cancer. We buried him under his favorite tree. (The Northeastern Penistree) #19,113
[11:34] <SupaMario_> byydo did a lot of them
[11:34] <LOAF> The Book is so great.
[11:34] <SupaMario_> byydo was a really popular reviewer
[11:34] <LOAF> http://trelane.hamtwoslices.net/index.php?query=Byydo
[11:34] <SupaMario_> byydo got tons of fan mail
[11:34] <Bob> byydo should stop talking in the third person
[11:35] <SupaMario_> Bob should suck a dick
[11:35] <LOAF> Getting fan mail from Something Awful is like getting rabies from a car.