Company S.
5 total works
Meet Executive Facilitator General Labienus. He's used his immortal centuries to plot a complete takeover of the world since he was a young god-figure in Sumeria. In a meditative mood, he reviews his interesting career. He muses on his subversion of the Company black project ADONAI. He considers also Aegeus, his despised rival for power, who has discovered and captured a useful race of mortals known as Homo sapiens umbratilis; their unique talents may enable him to seize ultimate power. Labienus plans a double cross that will kill two birds with one stone: he will woo away Aegeus's promising protege, the Facilitator Victor, and at the same time dispose of a ghost from his own past who has become inconvenient.
Alec Checkerfield's piratical AI, Captain Morgan, has masterminded the rescue of Mendoza the botanist. It takes a lot to kill an immortal, and they tried hard to kill Mendoza, whose body is destroyed and whose memory has been nearly totally erased. She is grown a new body and raised to consciousness. The captain has also retrieved the personalities of her dead lovers, Nicholas and Edward, who are clones of Alec and now inhabit the same body as Alec, an uncomfortable symbiosis. Everyone's favourite immortal cyborg, Mendoza, and the three incarnations of her not-quite-human love, Nicholas/Bell-Fairfax/Alec are all together for the first time. And now they can really begin to fight back against The Company. "The Machines Child" is the one fans have been waiting for, the start of a complex and gripping war along the timelines.
In the Company, you're either a God or a Pawn, but sometimes you have to be both. These eight stories, reprinted for the first time, delve further into the history and exploits of the Company and its operatives, including Mendoza, Lewis, and Alec. The book opens with the novella, "To the Land Beyond the Sunset": starring Lewis and Mendoza, and involving a strange tribe in Bolivia whose members claim to be gods. Their ability to grow a small tropical paradise in the middle of the desert certainly seems godlike, and it's Mendoza's job to figure out their secret. "Standing in His Light" features Van Drouten and her role in the career of the artist Jan Vermeer. The story illustrates how, with a little help from the Company, lost masterpieces can be found (or created) easily. Other stories include the original novelette, "Hellfire at Twilight," that concludes the volume and tells of Lewis infiltrating the famous Hellfire Club in the England of the eighteenth century. This book is a compelling read for every Baker fan, and essential for Company addicts.
From idea to flesh to myth, this is the story of Alec Checkerfield: Seventh Earl of Finsbury, pirate, renegade, hero, anomaly, Mendoza's once and future love. Mendoza is a Preserver, sent back from the twenty-fourth century by Dr. Zeus, Incorporated-the Company-to recover things from the past which would otherwise be lost. She's a botanist, a good one. She's an immortal, indestructible cyborg. And she's a woman in love. In sixteenth century England, Mendoza fell for a native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality.He died a martyr's death, burned at the stake. In nineteenth century America, Mendoza fell for an eerily identical native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. When he died, she killed six men to avenge him. The Company didn't like that-bad for business. But she's immortal and indestructible, so they dumped her in the Back Way Back. Now, stranded 150,000 years in the past, there are no natives for Mendoza to fall in love with. She tends a garden of maize, and she pines for three thousand years for the man she lost twice.
Then, one day, out of the sky and out of the future comes a renegade, a time- faring pirate, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality. This is the beginning of the end.
Then, one day, out of the sky and out of the future comes a renegade, a time- faring pirate, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality. This is the beginning of the end.
You wouldn't take Lewis for an immortal cyborg: he looks like a dapper character from a Noel Coward play. And Joseph - short and stocky in his Armani suit, with a neatly trimmed black moustache and beard that give him a cheerfully villainous look - you'd never guess that his parents drew the Neolithic cave paintings in the Cevennes. What are these two operatives of the Company doing in an amusement arcade in San Francisco in 1996? They're looking for Mendoza, fellow cyborg of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, who has been banished Back Way Back. They're also trying to solve the mystery of her impossibly-reappearing mortal English lover. Soon they will begin uncovering some extremely hush-hush stuff about what the Company has been doing with the cyborgs it no longer wants in the field.