title: Astro City Vol. 14: Reflections
author:  Kurt Busiek 
description: "It's impossible not to smile." --IGN<br /><br />"<i>Astro City</i> reminds readers just how much fun Busiek and Anderson's series can be. It was absolutely worth the wait."--Comic Book Resources<br /><br />"I don't often realize how much I miss Astro City when it's gone until it comes back and sweeps me up again." <br />--MTV <br /><br />"The most interesting new game in town, as far as caped crusaders are concerned."--<i>The Washington Post</i><br /><br />"Comics just don't get much better than this."--<i>The Comics Buyers Guide</i><br /><br />"One of the most well-crafted, life-affirming, and exhilarating superhero comics in recent memory"--<i>The Comics Journal</i><br /><br />"A stunningly imaginative piece of work'--The Onion/A.V. Club
zlib_text: Technos
  #7 in the Dumarest series
  E.C. Tubb
  Chapter One
  AT NIGHT the streets of Clovis were twisting threads of shadowed
  mystery faced by high walls and shuttered windows, looping and curving
  as they followed the dictates of some ancient plan. The city itself was a
  place of brooding silence broken only by the sough of the wind from the
  plains beyond, the discordant chiming of prayer bells suspended from
  the peaked and gabled roofs. Pale lanterns hung like ghostly stars, their
  ineffectual light augmented by the haze from the landing field and the
  great floodlights of the workings to the north where men and machines
  tore into the planetary crust for the wealth buried deep; all was reflected
  from the lowering clouds in a dim and artificial moonlight.
  Dumarest paused as he reached an intersection, eyes watchful as he
  studied the streets curving to either side. They appeared deserted but
  that meant little; men could be lurking in the black mouths of doorways,
  the shadowed alleys, ready to l