The Return of Santiago

PROLOGUE

Some people say he was killed by the Angel. Others say that Johnny One-Note gunned him down. Most think he died at the hands of Peacemaker MacDougal.

Nobody knows exactly when he met his fate, or where. It just slowly began dawning on his enemies—he didn't have any friends, not that anyone knew about—that he hadn't made any trouble for some time.

Now, that doesn't mean men weren't still killed and banks weren't still robbed and mining worlds weren't still plundered. After all, Santiago wasn't the only outlaw on the Inner Frontier; he was just the biggest—so big, some say, that his shadow blotted out the sun for miles around.

Long after the Angel and Johnny One-Note and Peacemaker MacDougal had all gone to their graves, men and women—and aliens—were still arguing about Santiago. Some held that he was just a man, a lot smarter and more ruthless than most, but a man nonetheless. Others said that he was a mutant possessed of extraordinary powers, or else how could he have held the Navy at bay for so many years? There were even a few who thought he was an alien, with undefined but awesome alien abilities.

There was no known holograph of him, no retinagram or fingerprint anywhere in the Democracy. There were a few eyewitness accounts, but they differed so much from each other than no one took any of them seriously. A long-dead thief who called himself the Jolly Swagman swore he was eleven feet three inches tall, with orange hair and blazing red eyes that had seen the inner sanctum of hell itself. A preacher named Father William claimed he was an alien who always wore a face mask because oxygen was poison to his system. Virtue MacKenzie, who wrote three books about him, never described him, and the only holograph she took was of the S-shaped scar on the back of his right hand. According to one description he was a purple-skinned alien with four arms. Another had him a mechanized, gleaming metal cyborg, no longer capable of any human emotion.

There was even a school of thought that argued that there never was a Santiago, that he was a merely a myth—but there were too many graveyards on too many worlds to lend any credence to that belief.

They say that Black Orpheus, the poet and balladeer who wandered the spaceways, writing his endless epic of the larger- than-life heroes, villains, adventurers and misfits that he found there, spent half a dozen verses of his Ballad of the Inner Frontier describing Santiago in detail, but those verses were never codified and were lost to posterity.

The one thing everyone agreed upon was that the last time he had manifested his presence was in the year 3301 of the Galactic Era, and with the passing decades it was generally assumed that Santiago, whoever or whatever he may have been, was dead.

Which simply goes to show, as has been shown so many times in the past, that a majority of the people can be wrong.

For in 3407 G.E., 106 years after he vanished, Santiago returned to the Inner Frontier, to once again juggle worlds and secrets as in days of old, to bring death to his enemies, to stride across the planets in all his former glory.

This is his story. But to fully understand it, we must begin with Danny Briggs (who is not to remain Danny Briggs for long), a simple thief, physically unimpressive, artistically wanting, morally ambiguous, a young man of seemingly unexceptional gifts and abilities, and yet destined to play a central role in the return of Santiago . . .