09/27/21 Snippet, ETERNAL NIGHT OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

I am starting to become concerned about the ongoing lack of moon-beasts in this story.

Regular time hit Tobias like icewater in the brain; and the distraction almost killed him, too. It would have killed him, except that he had already fired the engines. If the hopper was pointing straight down… well, it was, that was all. A fireball would do the job of wrecking the monster’s day.

He was lucky: the hopper was theoretically pointing to the sky. And the monster was sufficiently present on this plane of existence that raw amounts of kinetic energy could hurt it terribly. But Tobias couldn’t hold onto the detachment he’d been using to keep from focusing on his enemy, and in that few moments of fusion flame and the liveliest awfulness the human got a full blast of the truly alien.

That malevolence! That calculated evil! — For this creature operated under its own rules, no matter that Tobias’s brain could no more process or comprehend the monster’s thought patterns than it could understand his. It was only barely self-aware, from one point of view. From another it had perfect knowledge of space, and possibly even time itself. Tobias swore afterward that the monster anticipated his moves, striving to avoid the hopper’s wild arcs of fusion flame before they even began.