Chapter 3 - Fallout

Stevo. 15

"Sergeant, may I have a word, please?" The rebel corporal said politely as the force field that maintained their cell reactivated behind him.

Stevo glanced around the rest of the group. The shock of their recent revelations had abated somewhat, but that had only left the numbing sense of absolute betrayal gnawing quietly at them. Each of them hadn't just lost friends; they had lost people as close as brothers and sisters, thousands of them. Almost the entire division. It was nigh on impossible for any of them to think of anything else. Stevo nodded, pulled himself to his feet, and crossed the room to the guard.

"What can I do for you, Corporal?"

The man sighed, reaching up and unsnapping the clasps of his helmet before lifting it off his head. He had light, sandy-colored hair, a prominent, aquiline nose, a strong chin, and piercing grey eyes. He also wore an expression that made Stevo think that he was about to deliver news that would result in a punch that would rearrange said features.

"I'm sorry to say that the medical team hasn't updated the records yet; I don't have any more news about any of the names you gave me," he started. Stevo frowned. It wasn't great news, and he had hoped for something much better, but it was nowhere near bad enough news to explain his expression.

"I suspect there is going to be a 'but.'"

The Corporal grimaced. "I have been ordered..." he pinched his nose, took a deep breath, and looked up into Stevo's eyes. "There are survivors on the beach. Marines. They're refusing to surrender and are firing on anyone who gets near their hold-out position. They're making it impossible for us to recover the dead and wounded. We don't want any more casualties, but command is ordering us to hit them with artillery if we can't get them to stand down."

Stevo blinked at him. "You're asking me to help you convince them to surrender..." It wasn't a question.

The Corporal just nodded.

"You don't know Marines very well, do you, Son?"

"I know enough to understand that I am asking you to betray every oath and bond of brotherhood that you hold dear."

"You want me to ask fellow Marines to put down their weapons and surrender. I'd have more luck convincing them to execute their own mothers."

The guard sighed. "This room is monitored, obviously." He looked around, his eyes falling on the little boxes at the top of each of the room's corners. "Everything you and your people have been discussing has been monitored. We both know that you have worked out what really happened out there. We're not your enemies," he shook his head, his eyes imploringly holding Stevo's. "...and I don't want any more good men to die needlessly. I'm asking you to help me stop that from happening."

"Fuck," Stevo turned to glance back at the rest of the group. Despite the Corporal speaking quietly, it was a small room, and there were no other sounds to drown out the conversation. The other captives had heard everything. Each of them looked as conflicted about the request as he did, but it was Mac who stood first.

"Ya gotta do it, Sarge. Otherwise, they're just gonna die for those treacherous bastards. The imperium doesn't deserve their sacrifice, and it doesn't deserve your sense of honor."

Trust a fucking Scot to cut to the heart of the matter.

"We are Marines. We don't fight for a cause," Jennings added softly, standing up beside Mac. "We fight for the man beside us. We honor them, not the assholes who betrayed us."

Stevo's eye finally moved to Wooly. If anyone were going to provide a counter-argument, it would be him. The man lifted his gaze to meet Stevo's, and his expression turned to one of steely determination. "Too many have died already," he nodded. "I won't lose another brother for them. If you won't do it, I will."

"I'm going to need my armor," Stevo finally said as he turned back to the rebel corporal.

The man huffed out a sigh of relief and nodded. "That won't be a problem. If you could follow me, Sir."

"Don't call me 'Sir,' Corporal. I work for a living."

There was a tug of a smile pulling at the rebel's lips as the security field deactivated, and he gestured for Stevo to head out into the corridor. The sergeant cast a look back at Mac and the others before heading out.

"How many are there?" He asked after a few minutes of following the corporal's lead.

"I'm not sure. They're in heavy cover, so getting an accurate count has been difficult, but at least a dozen."

"Fuck, twelve pissed-off, and cornered Marines. No wonder you were having a hard time. Have you lost anyone?"

The corporal's mouth opened, but he frowned and closed it again. "There are things I'm not allowed to disclose," he started. "I think the Captain wanted to debrief you properly. If you don't mind, si... Sergeant, that should be a question for her."

"Hmmm. Guess we're sticking with 'cryptic' as today's theme then."

The rebel flashed an apologetic smile but said nothing.

After a few more turns and another few minutes of walking, Stevo was led past two armed guards and into what appeared to be a storeroom. Stevo had thought that their equipment was vastly superior to anything the rebels possessed - that had been based on the woefully inept training and laughable inferior armor used by the rebels on the beach. So he had assumed that their vastly more advanced equipment would have been treated as closely guarded research pieces. He had to admit that the stealth troops who had captured him had been using infiltrator gear, something he had only seen used by Imperium special forces. That had thrown something of a spanner into his theory, but stepping into the room to find dozens of complete sets of Marine armor casually stacked on shelves against each wall was still the last thing he expected.

"Over there," the corporal pointed to a familiar set on a shelf against the far wall. Stevo nodded and stepped into the room and up to it. Marine armor was personalized, not only to the body shape of the man wearing it but to his bio-electric field as well. It meant that, if captured, it would be almost impossible for it to be used by an enemy, but it also meant that Stevo couldn't just pick up any piece of armor; it had to be his own.

The armor was a fully encased body suit, meaning it couldn't just be clipped on but had to be stepped into, given time for the scanners to confirm that Stevo was the assigned user, and then it would seal him in, the rear of the suit folding closed around behind him. Stevo waited a few seconds for all this to happen, listening to the familiar whirs and clicks that pulled the various segments together and sealed them in place. It was a sound he had heard countless times before, the most recent being with the rest of his rifle squad on the carrier before the assault on the beach. He smiled to himself as he remembered it: Dusky teasingly flirting with Ryan, and Ryan doing his best to sound cool as he flirted back; she knew he didn't have a chance, he knew he didn't have a chance, the whole squad knew he didn't have a chance, but she would tease him mercilessly anyway. Back when he first joined the squad, he used to blush and get flustered at the relentless innuendos, but he had eventually started playing along and pushing the boundaries just as much as she did. Stevo dreaded to think what would have happened if one of the higher officers had walked in during the middle of that. Someone would have faced a disciplinary board... and it would have been worth it.

The day, a year or so ago, when Big G joined them, was one of the funniest memories Stevo had of his time with Bravo Squad. He and Mac had sat on one of the benches, listening to the increasingly racy and sexually laced banter between the two but watching Big G listen with rapidly widening eyes and an ever-falling jaw. He had then turned to Angel, who looked him in his eyes and, without a shred of the humor that the rest of the squad was displaying, told him that his balls were only liable to stay attached to the rest of him if he kept his own attempts at flirting to himself. She managed to keep that straight face, and not burst out laughing right up to the point when Big G turned as pale as a man of his color was capable of getting. Rev mockingly shook his head, said, "Y'all are going to hell," and laughed along. Mac had laughed so hard that he almost filled his armor's built-in waste system.

It was good to smile. It was nice to remember them, at least as they had been, and not for their last moments, and Stevo let the warmth and the fondness of the memory fill him as the armor sealed around him. It had been less than twenty-four hours since they had hit the beach, less again since his men - his friends - had been lost, and he knew that the grieving process hadn't even started properly yet, so a chance to smile at a memory that would soon be filled with the utter agony of loss was one he was happy to indulge in for a few moments.

Unfortunately, the moment came to an end with the hissing in his ears that told him the atmospheric seals had engaged, and the armor was good to go.

He turned back to the Corporal. "So, are you allowed to tell me your name?"

The rebel soldier frowned. "Actually, I'm not sure. I haven't been specifically ordered not to. It's Paul, Paul Matthews."

"Alright, then, Matthews. Lead the way."

With a nod, the younger man turned on his heel and led the Marine sergeant through the maze of corridors and to a large, reinforced door. It was a different one than the one they had entered the previous night - or the early hours of that morning, to be more accurate - not that Stevo could tell from the landscape on the other side of it, it had been shrouded in total darkness when he and Mac had arrived, but he certainly hadn't taken that route to the cell to get there.

The morning was in full swing, the sun well on its way toward its Zenith in the sky as Stevo was led out of the bunker and onto a small rise that looked out over the beach. It was a scene of total devastation. From this vantage point, it was possible, with little more than a lazy turn of his head, to take in the full dreadful, apocalyptic scene before him.

The beach was a blackened and burning patchwork of smashed trenches and smoldering craters. It was clear that this had once been a place of astonishing natural beauty, with its warm climate, its calm turquoise waters, and its gentle, refreshing breeze - the one that Stevo couldn't feel at all in his armor, but he could tell by the movement of the grass around his feet that it was there. Now, though, it looked like a sadistic maniac had spent hours torturing the face of the beach with a poorly wielded-blade. The remaining trenches scarred the landscape; burning tanks were still smoking closer to the waterline, and the odd wreckage of crashed aircraft littered the beach and rocked lazily in the shallows.

It took a few moments, but he finally found the spot on the enormous beach where he had been captured, the smoking remains of Almark's fighter giving it away, and the deceptively small column fort they had spent the night in a little way away from that. The beach, in its entirety, was enormous. More than twelve miles from end to end and facing the water, it was clear that they had come out of the base on the Western flank, the same flank he had attacked the day before. In his mind, the flight from the forward trenches that had ended in that column fort had taken them much further toward the center than it actually had. Between the crisscrossing trenches and the less-than-direct route they had taken through them, they had barely traveled a mile toward the center of the beach. The Eastern part of the beach, the direction he had been headed, stretched out into the hazy distance. Looking at it now, there was no way Mac, Angel, and he would ever have made it that far. Perhaps Emylee crashing, forcing them to hunker down and hold their ground, had saved their lives.

Matthews stayed respectfully quiet while Stevo took it in. "Were you out here yesterday?"

The corporal shook his head. "No, Sir, I was..." he frowned again, "Sorry, that is probably another one of those things the Captain will want to discuss with you." He turned to catch the disapproving look on Stevo's face. "Sorry... Sergeant," he corrected himself.

Stevo nodded. It was a fairly innocuous question, but Matthews was being careful; he couldn't be blamed for that. Stevo wanted information; knowledge was power in almost any part of life, even more so now, but it was clear he wasn't going to get it, and he didn't want to alienate his only point of contact by pushing it. "So, where are we headed?"

"Over there," Matthews pointed. Stevo followed his arm and gazed out over to the far right of the beach, the extreme western flank, the very ground Stevo had stormed during the battle. The surviving marines, by the looks of it, had taken refuge in one of the few surviving bunkers. It was a great defensive position, completely covered on most sides, except for some very easily defended doors, which led out into the equally defensible trenches and the main gun slit on the front. It was pretty big, but Stevo doubted it was large enough to hold a dozen Marines, not comfortably, anyway. If he were down there, he would have men in the trenches, too, protecting the flanks and acting as spotters for anyone approaching the blind angles of the bunker. A satchel charge against the back wall of the bunker's dome would be enough to bring the whole thing down on top of them, so men in the trenches would be needed to watch those approaches, and then more men would be needed to defend the spotters.

It was a good position; it would have been useless to him, though. He hadn't had the numbers to defend it properly, but a dozen cornered Marines? Yeah, that would be a very tough nut to crack.

"Alright, lead the way, I guess," he said, then let Matthews walk ahead of him, making a beeline for the closest entrance into the trench network. As the crow flew, it was probably about half a mile from the ridge to the bunker the Marines had occupied, but traveling the same distance through the warren-like trench network made that short journey take almost an hour, and by the time they got there, Stevo was completely disorientated. Eventually, though, the stooped Matthews stopped and turned back to face Stevo.

"This is the closest we can get without going all the way around to the other side," he said with a voice barely above a whisper. "They're about thirty meters that way," he nodded his head toward the sea. "I thought you'd appreciate being able to approach them in plain sight. Sneaking up on them seemed... unwise."

Stevo chuckled and nodded. "We'll make a Marine out of you yet, Corporal." He ignored the blinking expression on the rebel's face and craned his head to listen for any sort of movement or conversation from the Marine emplacement. "Do you have a white flag... and a stick?"

"Errr... let me go check."

Of all the things that had happened since he had been captured, Matthews turning around and running off, leaving Stevo - alone - thirty meters away from friendly forces, completely unguarded, was perhaps one of the strangest. There was literally nothing stopping him from rejoining the Marines and carrying on the fight; there was nothing stopping him from turning around and making a break for freedom - although there was admittedly nowhere for him to go. It was either an enormous lapse in judgment from the rebel corporal or a massive sign of trust... and Stevo couldn't work out which would be worse.

After a few minutes, Matthews returned and handed him a hastily constructed white flag, apparently not surprised in the slightest that Stevo was where he left him.

He decided against raising the issue and hoped it was the latter of the two options. "THIS IS MARINE SERGEANT STEVE TAYLOR, BRAVO SQUAD, ABLE COMPANY, 381st DIVISION. I AM COMING OUT, I AM ALONE... HOLD YOUR FIRE!" He called out, but no answer was forthcoming, so he looked back to Matthews, shrugged, and said, "Here goes nothing," before holding the flag up high, standing himself up straight, and hoisting his body up onto the beach.

The business ends of three battle rifles were the first things he saw. Fortunately, they weren't the last.

Behind each of the rifles were three suspicious-looking Marines. "Hold it. That's far enough," one of them said as he reached the halfway point between the two trenches. Stevo stopped walking. "Bravo Squad, you said? With Able company?"

"That's right, yes."

"What was the name of your comms operator?"

"Big G," Stevo answered without hesitation. "He was killed yesterday, right over there." He nodded off toward the waterline and the marble column they had used for cover.

"Wrong!" the Marine raised his rifle.

"No, it's not." The sergeant asserted firmly.

"Well, we picked up Bravo Squad's radio operator yesterday, and his name isn't Big T."

"G, asshole, Big G... wait... you picked him up yesterday?... Ryan?"

"Sarge, is that you?" a hauntingly familiar voice echoed from inside the bunker.

The emotion hit him like a truck, and Stevo felt his knees threaten to give out from under him. "Ryan?"

"Fuck, help me up, dammit. No, I don't care! I'll be able to tell you if he's legit with one god damned look!" the voice wafted over the sand. Suddenly, two heads ducked out of the bunker, one of them clearly helping to support the weight of the other. The face was instantly recognizable, as was the massive grin on the wayward Marine's face. "Hey, Sarge, the fuck have you been?"

The three Marines holding the rifles were barged out of the way, one of them sent sprawling to the ground as Stevo ran to the trench, jumped in, and wrapped his arms around his presumed-dead squad mate. It could only have lasted a few seconds, but they were amongst the most cathartic moments Stevo had ever experienced. He pulled back, holding Ryan's arms, looking him over to check that he was not only real but alright... missing leg notwithstanding.

"You're here, you're alive."

Ryan smiled and nodded. "Yeah, it got pretty hairy when that arty landed, but it all missed me. Some of these guys dragged my mangled ass with them when they were getting the hell out of dodge. What happened to you?"

Stevo's face fell. Ryan spotted it immediately. "Who?"

"Only Mac got out with me..." Stevo sighed and shook his head while watching the smile on Ryan's face crumble. "Angel was wounded; I don't know if she's gonna make it. Rev and Dusky... they're gone."

"Fuck," Ryan murmured as he dropped to the floor of the trench, holding his head in his hands. "I knew... when I saw the bombardment... I knew there wasn't much of a chance. But..."

"Yeah, I know." Stevo slumped onto the ground next to him, momentarily ignoring the surrounding group of stooped Marines.

The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes before one of the others spoke. "How did you get out? All our comms are still dead."

Stevo looked up at him and the hopeful faces of the other Marines, too. Looking around, it only took a few moments to realize that there were more than a dozen men here, closer to twenty by a quick count. He sighed deeply. "I didn't."

It took a few seconds. "You're with the rebels?!?" More than one rifle was raised in his direction. Even Ryan was looking at him incredulously. "After what they did to us?!?"

"Apparently so," he murmured. "We need to talk; there are things you need to know."

********

Bethany. 2

Modern medicine was a marvelous thing, especially when it came to the wonders of contraception. Young Tony had given her what she needed; he had been inexperienced, he had been clumsy, and he would have struggled to find her clit with a map and a tour guide, but what he lacked in know-how, he more than made up for in youthful enthusiasm, willingness to learn and stamina. Holy shit, so much fucking stamina. Four loads he had fucked into her... Four!... She hadn't had a guy last more than twice since she was a teenager, and every single one of those loads had been drained into her more than willing core. There was something about that feeling that just did things for her, and not having to worry about STDs or unwanted mini-Bethanys meant she could indulge whenever the opportunity arose. She could still feel that fullness now, his deposits still inside her. The dull throbbing ache in her nethers, the satisfying burn in her muscles after they had been pushed into positions she had only ever imagined, and the warm glow that only came with a good, satisfying fuck. Bethany had been with guys who knew what they were doing; she'd had some good sex in her time - more than her fair share of disappointments, but there were a few highlights in there, too - but the patience of showing the young border guard what to do and where the important spots were had more than paid off.

So much so that she almost felt a little guilty about sneaking out the next morning while he still slept, blissfully naked and unaware.

She chuckled to herself as she strode down the hotel corridor, pulling her leather pilot's jacket on as she did before pushing the call button and waiting for the elevator. Fucking elevators; why couldn't they be the recipient of some much-needed technical innovation? Aside from the replacement of pulleys and cables with magnets and anti-grav cyclics, they hadn't changed much in the past couple of centuries, a fact she was reminded of every single time she was forced to wait for one. She wasn't in a rush, she wasn't doing the walk of shame, and if Young Tony suddenly appeared behind her, she was sure it would be a fairly easy interaction, but this was a matter of principle. There was no need for her to wait, so she begrudged doing it.

There were always the stairs, but her principles only stretched so far.

In more time than she would have liked, the elevator had arrived, bearing her down the forty-something floors of the Collins' central hotel. It had deposited her into the lobby, and it had then gone about the rest of its day, leaving her to settle the bill and head out onto the street.

Whereas the Traders' Bazaar of Port Collins could have been an almost exact copy of any other marketplace in the Imperium, the entertainment district - like every other starport - was where the local population chose to express their uniqueness. A few city blocks filled with bars, clubs, restaurants, hotels, live music venues, parks, health spas, leisure facilities, gyms, firing ranges, and hookers. Where Port Collins differed from most of the other starports beyond the Hudson Expanse, however, was the pride the local people had in their city. It wasn't clean, at least not by the pristine, well-manicured, self-superior standards of most of the core worlds, but it wasn't a grimy, sleazy, dusty backwater either. The streets were wide and bright, trees lined the long thoroughfares, and even at this ungodly hour of the morning, teenagers were happily handing out flyers to the various bars that stayed open for the full twenty-seven hours of the day. The trash cans weren't overflowing but probably hadn't been emptied in the last day or two; graffiti - present in every settlement in the Imperium - was tackled well enough for it not to be everywhere but not well enough for it to have been removed completely. There were no gangs hassling the visitors, there was no readily obvious narcotic abuse on street corners, and she managed to walk the entire distance between the hotel and the mag-rail station without being asked for, nor offered, some description of sex act.

They were hardly the highest of standards by which to judge a place, but they worked for her. She had been required to do business in some truly awful places where the dregs of society seemed to congregate en masse. Far from being a group of people she could pity, they always appeared perfectly intent on killing themselves or each other with almost impressive regularity... at least more regularly than whichever service was responsible for collecting the bodies. Walking alone, at any time of the day, was practically guaranteed she be at least pickpocketed, if not openly mugged, and she would be able to count the number of times she was offered some sort of drugs or propositioned a back alley fumble in double figures before she had walked even half of this distance.

Port Collins was her kind of place. It didn't have the airs and graces, the pomposity, or that infuriating sense of smug superiority of the core worlds, and it didn't have the rampant crime and the stench of desperation of some of the more rim-ward planets. She couldn't speak to the rest of the world; she had never stepped outside the city that surrounded the Starport, but if the rest of Caspian III was as pleasant and down to earth as Port Collins, then it may be on the short list of places she could see herself retiring to.

The magnetically levitated train didn't take long to arrive, and she stepped onto it, checking the time on her wrist-mounted computer. Ocular implants would have been a more convenient way to maintain the uplink to the Long Haul, displaying the information at will in her field of vision. That is what Dick had. But the idea of someone fucking around with her eyeball sent a chill down her spine. She was just about running on schedule; it was her schedule, and there was no reason at all that it needed to be kept to the minute, but it was her own little way of maintaining some self-discipline when it was all too easy to get lazy when you were hundreds of lightyears from home. Besides, the same uplink told her that Dick was already at the ship, no doubt checking the cargo and the ship systems ready for their departure slot in an hour. She was sure he wouldn't have minded waiting if she was late for the time she had given him, but to her, that just felt rude.

The ride on the train was quiet, smooth, and quick, and it was barely even ten minutes until he stepped off into the Traders Bazaar. She briefly considered checking in with Usaf before she left, but he would have contacted her if any of the plans had changed or if there was a problem with the loading of the cargo. When it came to shipping goods across the length and breadth of the Imperium, no news was good news. Checking in with him, even just to say goodbye, would be an almost certain way to make herself late.

Without any more detours or delay, she worked her way through the massive emporium and back out to security. For reasons that were more than a little obvious, security was much lighter leaving a starport than it was when entering. All she had to do was notify the border authorities that she, her crew, and her ship would be leaving and that any contraband found on her ship after that point was not the responsibility of the Caspian III Port Authorities. It was all pretty straightforward, but dealing with the border guard did pull something of a smile onto her lips at the thought of the younger one, who was probably still naked in her hotel room. She didn't mind in the slightest if he chose to regale his colleagues with tales of the night she had given him, and she wondered - when told of his night - if this older guard would remember her.

The fleeting thought was interrupted by the go-ahead from the man, though, and she soon found herself striding across the docking zone in the pleasantly warm morning air and toward the Long Haul, the closest thing to home she had known in decades.

The cargo bay doors were wide open, but it looked like the loading crews had already finished securing her new cargo in the bay, leaving the exterior of the ship completely deserted. Stepping inside, she was surprised to see the door to the Smuggler's hold wide open, and - with a frown on her face - she headed straight over to it.

The smuggler's hold was exactly what it sounded like. It was a secret, hidden compartment within the cargo bay that could be used to smuggle contraband past sector security. Most freighters had one. Oddly, it wasn't illegal to have one installed, and most ship manufacturers openly and loudly declared their inclusion in the price of a ship. It was only ever illegal to use them for their intended function. They were usually shielded against scans, and unless a boarding customs agent knew where to look, They were very easy to miss. Of course, Bethany wasn't a smuggler, nor did she have any intention of changing that, but that meant that a fairly sized piece of real estate within her ship was currently a waste of space. So, being the resourceful, ingenious, and thorough captain that she was, she had found another use for it. It now served as the proud home of the ship's cleaning supplies.

She was just about to poke her head through the door when Dick stepped out carrying a mop. "Aaargh, Jesus, Cap'n! You almost gave me a heart attack!" He yelped as he almost jumped out of his skin.

Bethany probably shouldn't have laughed... but she did anyway.

"Spill something, Dick?" she chuckled at him.

"Huh?" he blinked down at the mop. "Oh, yeah, a coffee cup upstairs had a run-in with my ass as I was lugging my gear to my bunk. You're a bit early, aren't you?"

"Nope," she shook her head, "Our slot is in about twenty minutes."

Dick's eyes aimed off into the middle distance for a moment as he doubtlessly checked the time on his ocular interface. That chill predictably ran down her spine again. She couldn't help it. Someone had literally taken Dick's eyeball out to install a micro holo-emitter onto the back of it, then jammed the whole lot back in. He'd got it on the cheap, too, which somehow made the concept infinitely worse. "Well, shit. Time flies and all that. Guess the clean up will have to wait til later." He shrugged before turning around and disappearing back into the hold to stow the mop again.

She waited for him outside. "So, Whadya get for us?" He asked as he stepped back out again, closing and sealing the door behind him before casting an eye over the featureless and anonymous stack of crates strapped down around the bay.

"Special delivery for the Capital," she answered as they both turned toward the ladder to the hab deck. "Got a few crates of Rigellian Rum to sweeten the deal, too."

"Nice," he nodded approvingly, "What's the price of the special cargo."

"Three," she smiled, waiting for him to whistle in appreciation, "Three-point-five if we can deliver within a fortnight."

"Three-point-five, plus the Rum?" his eyes almost fell out of his head as he gasped.

"Yup... If we make a speed run straight to the Capital."

"Two weeks..." Dick pondered, scratching the back of his head as they approached the ladder, and he let her climb first. "It'll be tight but should be manageable. Fuel may be an issue, though."

"Way ahead of you, got us completely filled up overnight."

Dick snorted a laugh as he started to climb the ladder after her. "I should've known. Jesus, Cap'n. You never cease to amaze."

She chuckled and offered a flamboyant, comical bow as they both stepped out onto the hab deck. "I'll take her up, get us out of system, and into hyperspace. Then, I want to have a look at the port sensor array. Think you can be at the stick in about three hours?"

"No problem at all."

"Thanks, Dick.

A wave over his shoulder was all she got in reply as he turned toward the crew compartment, leaving her to head in the opposite direction toward the cockpit.

Standard stellar vernacular dictated that it was, in fact, a cockpit rather than being able to accurately be called a bridge. Conventional wisdom would distinguish the two based on size, the number of crew stations, or any one of a number of separate factors, but Bethany was one of the few people she had met who knew the real difference.

In modern spacefaring, a human was rarely required to do most of the flying. She was needed to manually take off, but once she was out of the planet's gravity, the ship was more than capable of flying itself wherever she told it to. She was piloting it out of the system because she enjoyed doing it, not because she needed to. But technically, there were parts of the journey that did involve her direct intervention. She was both the captain and the pilot, and that was the point that made the distinction. A cockpit was where the ship was piloted by the vessel's commanding officer, no different from a strike pilots fighter, a bridge was where a captain instructed a crew to do that shit for them. If a starship had a bridge, then it was safe to assume that its captain rarely, if ever, laid a finger on any of the systems that flew it.

And Bethany couldn't imagine anything worse.

Some people tried being fancy by calling it a command deck, or a flight deck, or an ops center, or some other such bullshit, but Bethany preferred plain speech. It was a cockpit, and more importantly, it was her cockpit.

She dropped herself down onto the custom-made, ergonomic pilot seat and spun it around to face the instrument panel, reaching out to tap the icons on the holo-display that activated the comm system. "Port Collins flight control, this is the Long Haul, requesting permission to depart and a vector for orbital flight."

"Roger, Long Haul, Permission granted, a vector is being sent to your nav system. Safe travels, and thank you for visiting us."

"Thank you, control, and it was my pleasure," she chuckled back, again wondering if tales of her nocturnal marathon with Tony would reach as far as the flight controllers. She flicked off the comms and powered up the engine. God, she loved that feeling, that first rumble working its way through the ship's superstructure and into the base of her seat. There was a strong case to be made that female freighter captains would never have need of a vibrator as long as their ship's engines were working. The interior dampeners compensated for it the moment the landing struts left the ground, though, so it was a short-lived thrill, but a thrill nonetheless.

With the struts retracting back into the ship and the anti-grav thrusters online, she looked out of the cockpit to watch the sprawling starport of Port Collins start to sink away beneath her.

In only a few minutes, once a safe altitude had been reached, a holographic green line was painted onto her HUD by her nav-com, highlighting the approved flight path to get her into orbit. With a smile on her face, she ramped up the engines, set her fingers on the helm controls... and flew.

********

Stevo. 16

Twenty-three unarmed Marines followed Stevo out of the trenches and up onto the beach, each of them wearing the same look of shell shock and barely comprehending disbelief. Even Ryan, a man who must have been in astonishing amounts of pain after being lifted out of the trench and up onto the sand, but even the wince in his eyes was muted by the agony of being betrayed by everything he had ever held true. Somehow, the rest of the Marines had survived their ordeal unharmed; a combination of supremely durable powered armor, the most comprehensive genetic and cybernetic enhancements available to science, and the best training the Imperium was capable of providing had seen them through twenty-four hours that would have killed almost anyone else.

Matthews held up a hand as a signal to all of the other rebels in the area, and - as one - they lowered their weapons and started filing out to parts unknown. Most of them not even gracing the Marines with a suspicious glance. There were more than a few nervous glances between the group of Marines behind Stevo, though, despite them now seeing the hopelessness of their position and understanding that their only chance of survival was to give themselves up to the people they had been intent on killing less than an hour ago. Matthews himself climbed out of the trench, no small look of relief on his face, and met them halfway. "Thank you, gentlemen," he nodded gratefully, "Can I ask who is in command?"

"I guess he is," one of the Marines answered, nodding to Stevo. "Our Lieutenant was killed just before sundown. There is nobody here higher than a corporal."

Matthews nodded with a heavy sigh. "I'm sorry to hear that. Let's get you inside and get you some food. You will be kept in a secured room until you can be debriefed, but I have no doubt that is only temporary." It seemed that this was the point where he spotted Ryan's leg. "Jesus, MEDIC!"

"It's fine, I'd prefer to walk," Ryan forced a hollow smile onto his face.

"I'm sure you would, Marine," Matthews nodded, "But I bet your friends would prefer not to carry you... and your bleeding on my beach."

That seemed to pull a chuckle from a few of the newly captured men, and Ryan acquiesced after a look from the Sarge. "Alright, I guess I'll have to work on my hopping later"

"I don't know about that," the rebel corporal smiled, pulling up one of the legs of his pants and tapping the but of his rifle against the prosthetic where his leg should have been.

Ryan and Stevo both snorted out a laugh, memories of Ryan's remark to Angel the day before about beating her scores with a prosthetic filling their thoughts, before the reality of Angel's condition brought them crashing back down to earth again.

"I'd like to request that we all be kept together with the other prisoners from last night," Stevo finally said, fixing his eyes on Matthews.

The Corporal seemed to do a bit of mental arithmetic. "It will be a tight squeeze, especially if your wounded friends make a recovery, but I don't see why not. The same condition would apply, though. You will be responsible for them."

Stevo flashed a look over his shoulder at the group of men behind him - or, more accurately, the seventeen men and six women - before turning back to Matthews. "They are now under my command. I'll vouch for them."

Matthews nodded, "Then it's done. C'mon, your men must be freezing and in need of a good meal."

"So, does it always get that cold here overnight?" Ryan asked with a shiver at memories of the night.

"Actually, last night was pretty mild," Matthews answered as he turned to watch a group of medics running over. "It can get as low as negative twenty Celsius most nights."

"So, no midnight strolls then, got it." The wounded man joked.

"Or hops," one of his new friends quipped.

"Don't make me kick your ass, Donavan," Ryan laughed. "I still have one good leg."

Smiling quietly as he watched the interaction, Stevo couldn't help but be amazed at the stoicism and internal strength of these men. Each of them was feeling the same weight of events, the same profound sense of loss as he was; each of them was suffering in ways that were almost impossible to even quantify, let alone qualify into words, and yet each of them was doing their best to stay strong for the men and women around him. He had no doubt that when the sun went down tonight, not a single one of them would be sleeping, and - just like him - the weight of it all would break them sooner rather than later. There was a big difference between falling asleep and passing out, there was a big difference between nightmares and flashbacks, and there was a big difference between acting okay and actually being okay. They were differences that all of them were going to be intimately familiar with in time.

The group all waited for the Medics to arrive, setting their stretcher onto the ground before helping Ryan onto it, and then they lifted him between them, nodded to Matthews, and started making their way back to the base with Ryan offering a backward wave to the rest of them.

"You trained a good man there," one of the men, Donavan presumably, said to him as they all watched him go before setting off themselves. "Made us prop him up on the firing line so he could fight with the rest of us. He said he wasn't going to be a burden to anyone."

Stevo smiled, "That sounds about right," he nodded. "Hopefully, the medical team can fix him up quickly."

Donavan nodded as he put a hand on Stevo's arm, guiding him to slow down so that the two of them were at the back of the group and furthest away from Matthews. "Can we trust them?" He nodded toward the rebel Corporal up ahead.

Stevo sighed and then shrugged. "I don't know. All I know is that it was either die or surrender. They could've treated us... well, they could've treated us the way we would've treated them, but they haven't. At least not yet. They asked me to help you bring you in 'cause they didn't want you to die. If you didn't come in, they were going to drop arty on your heads. They didn't need to do that. And look around, we're hardly under armed guard. They say they are giving medical attention to our wounded, and they haven't done anything to make me not believe them. So far, I have to assume they are on the level. He said..." he nodded toward Matthews, "...that they aren't our enemies, and given what's happened to us, I'm wondering if I don't agree with him. At the very least, I think he believes that."

"How, though?" Donavan whispered. "Fuck, we must have killed hundreds of them last night."

"I know; it was the same for us. I don't know what to tell you, private, just that their CO wants to speak to me after all this, and Matthews up there was being careful about what he said until I had."

Donavan nodded. "How many others were taken prisoner?"

"I don't know. There were eight others in the room I was being held in, but I have no idea if there are other rooms."

Donavan seemed to choke back a sob. "The Three-Eight-One is gone, isn't it? I saw so many Marines being killed. I think I'm the only one left out of my unit."

Telling someone who had seen that much death among people he had been so close with to 'hold it together' was the last thing either of them wanted to hear because Stevo was right on the edge of that precipice himself. "I wish I could lie to you, Son," he finally said. "We lost a lot of people, most of them. The only reason I gave up as I did, the only reason I agreed to help the rebels with you, was so I could honor their memories and get some payback on the fuckers who got them killed."

Donavan nodded but didn't say anything more, his expression one of a man lost deep in thought, painful thoughts at that. Stevo patted him on the shoulder and walked in relative silence with the rest of the captives back across the beach and toward the base.

The journey back to the entrance - now that they hadn't needed to take the circuitous, covered route - took barely fifteen minutes, but it quickly became clear that a moderately sized group of rebel soldiers were congregating around the open portal, seemingly around a single, armored figure. The figure was talking, although they were much too far away for Stevo to be able to make out what was being said, but small groups of soldiers were breaking away from the group and heading off to some assigned task. By the time Stevo and the other captives were led there by Matthews, there was only one group left.

"... and make sure you check for wounded. I mean every body you find. You cannot even fathom the world of hurt you will be in if you leave a wounded man on this beach to die slowly. Do you understand?" The distinctly female voice ordered.

"Yes, Captain," one of the lower-ranked members of the group answered. "Understood."

Everyone waited for the last group to leave before the now-lone officer turned to face them. "Captain West," Matthews saluted.

West offered a salute back before turning to the Marines. "Thank you," she said to all of them. "I know it was not an easy decision to make, I want you to know that no harm will come to any of you. I would like to address you and all of the other survivors in a few hours, but in the meantime, the Corporal here will show you to your bunks."

The men and women around Stevo, still muted from their ordeal, all nodded, but said nothing as the Captain turned to Stevo himself. "You must be Sergeant Taylor."

"Yes, Ma'am," Stevo answered, almost automatically snapping to attention and saluting the higher-ranked officer.

If the voice hadn't given her gender away, the clearly feminine curves of her armor - very reminiscent of the armor the Marines were wearing - certainly did, but her face plate was as opaque as the men who had captured him the night before. "Walk with me, Sergeant. Your men will be in your barracks by the time you get back."

Stevo turned and glanced back at the others. All of them looked nervous, but Donavan - who seemed to have taken on something of a leadership role despite not being the highest-ranked Marine in the group - gave him a small nod. "Yes, Ma'am," Stevo said, falling into step beside the captain as she turned on her heel and headed into the bunker.

Only a few meters into the bunker, where Stevo knew the path straight ahead took them back toward their cell, the Captain turned left onto another corridor and away from the others. The captain, he quickly realized, was giving him an appraising look, so, for reasons he couldn't quite understand, he reached up and unclasped his helmet before lifting it off his head. If there was trust to be earned here, then perhaps this was a good way to start.

The captain, apparently satisfied, seemed to return her focus to where she was going and, after a few more turns, stopped at a door, opened it, and gestured Stevo inside. It was an office like the hundreds of other military offices he had seen over the decades of his career. A simple yet functional wooden desk, nothing too ostentatious, a few placards and pictures on the wall, and a plant in the corner that may or may not have been made out of plastic.

Stevo didn't sit, not yet, at least. He knew better than to sit before a superior officer. There was a large part of him that, despite everything he had seen and everything he now knew, still wondered if he should be considering this woman an enemy, but respect from higher-ranking officers had been beaten into him - literally in some cases - for most of his life, and little gestures of deference like this were second nature now.

Captain West moved to the other side of the desk and paused, the slight tilt of her head showing that her gaze had fallen on the helmet tucked under Stevo's arm. After only a few moments, her shoulders relaxed, and she reached up to unsnap the clasps of her own, before lifting it off.

Stevo considered himself a good Marine, not just in terms of his combat ability but in the very nature of what separated a man from a Marine. There was a certain something about his beloved corps, the way a Marine handled themselves in all situations, an air of confidence and purpose, but also that little something else. That little something that was hard to pin down and put into words, but - essentially - it was the willingness to show respect to others, no matter their age, sex, race, creed, or any other factor, that made them different. All were equal and equally deserving of the simplest displays of common respect unless they outrightly showed him that they weren't.

So openly gawking at possibly the most beautiful member of the opposite sex that he had ever seen was, frankly, beneath him.

And yet, despite years upon long and arduous years of this mentality being drummed into him in every facet of his life, it took a considerable amount of conscious willpower not to let his jaw hit his armored boots.

Captain West was, in a word, astonishing!

Fiery copper hair spilled out of her helmet and down onto her shoulder blades, each of her long, luxurious tresses framing a pair of green eyes that almost seemed luminescent. Her alabaster skin was flawless and smooth, and her little button nose sat above a pair of glossy pouty lips. What made the vision all the more stunning was the fact that Stevo could tell that the Captain was not wearing a single lick of makeup. Stevo was not a ladies' man; like most men his age, he had done his time chasing women around the various bars near his postings when he was younger before he had settled into some decent, albeit doomed, long-term relationships a few times.

He had no idea if women found him attractive. He was one of those rare breeds of men who didn't really care either. He was himself; if a woman found that attractive, that was great, but if they didn't, he would go on about his day without giving them a second thought. Yes, he was able to look at a woman and appreciate her beauty, especially if that beauty came with a mind to match, but he couldn't remember the last time when simply laying eyes on a member of the opposite sex made him feel like he was a hormone addled teenager again.

The Captain noticed the look on his face; how could she not? But instead of being offended, or taking him to task over it, or even just raising an eyebrow, she blushed a little... actually blushed... and then cleared her throat. "Why don't you take a seat, Sergeant."

Stevo coughed, nodded, and pulled the chair out to sit before waiting for Captain West to do the same. "First things first. How are you being treated?"

"Given the circumstances, better than can be expected, Ma'am."

West nodded, turning and tapping on a few icons on her desk to bring up the holo-display built into it. "Is there anything you or your people need that hasn't been provided for you?"

Stevo opened his mouth but paused and looked down at his gauntleted hands. They were still stained with Angel's dried blood. "Corporal Matthews is trying to keep us up to date with the status of our wounded; that's been hugely appreciated," Stevo started, "The only thing I would ask for, in addition to the... kindness your people have shown us, is access to showers."

West frowned and tapped a few more icons, then rolled her eyes as she read something and nodded. "The cell you're being held in was only supposed to be a temporary holding area. The complications on the beach delayed you being moved to more permanent barracks. I'll make sure that's done once we've finished here."

"Thank you, Captain."

"What about food and water?"

"All provided, and my people have no complaints, although, as I'm sure you can imagine, not many of us have an appetite at the moment."

West sighed and leaned back in her chair and nodded again. "I'm sorry for your losses, Sergeant, truly. If there were any other way..."

Stevo nodded. "It has been a lot to take in, Ma'am. But I'm sorry for your losses as well." He didn't see the need to throw the gesture back in her face.

"Actually, our losses were very light," she shrugged. "Only thirty-two men at last count."

Stevo frowned. That couldn't be possible. He had personally killed at least double that number, not to mention the men gunned down by Mac and Angel on their flight from the front lines, nor the hundreds of rebel bodies he'd had to hop over while traversing the trenches. Even Ryan's group of Marines had talked about killing hundreds of them.

"Flash clones," West had mercy on the look of confusion on the sergeant's face. "We found out about the planned assault two weeks ago, plenty of time to grow a hundred thousand or so of them, give them some very basic training and put them to task on the beach. If you're talking about them, you guys almost wiped them out. Eighty-seven percent losses. I won't lie, you had us worried for a while there."

"That... explains a few things," Stevo pondered, thinking back at the woefully inept training displayed by the forces who had chased him and the surviving members of Bravo Squad through the trenches, not to mention their laughably inadequate equipment.

West stayed quiet for a little while, letting Stevo process before finally speaking up again. "I'm going to lay my cards on the table, Sergeant. I hope you will do me the courtesy of doing the same," She waited for Stevo to nod. "I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be in your position, you have been betrayed by everything you have ever known, and are now sitting in the office of someone you would have considered a sworn enemy less than a day ago. I don't envy your position. Unfortunately, the Imperium knows we are here. Their little ploy to escalate the war worked, I think we probably have less than a week before they are back with enough firepower to obliterate this whole Island from orbit... which means we can't be here when they do. I will be giving this choice to each of your men when I address them all later, but after everything I have seen from you since you were captured, I wanted to lay out your options for you one-on-one."

"I'm sorry, Ma'am," Stevo took advantage of the pause in her speech. "Everything you have seen from me?"

"Every single square inch of that beach was being recorded," she stated matter-of-factly. "I know you had the option of saving your own skin when that fighter crashed, I know you could have left the pilot to her fate both before and after you pulled her from the wreckage. We both know that holding position by those columns practically guaranteed the end of your escape plan. You were willing to sacrifice yourself for a stranger.

"Then, after you were captured, your first thoughts were for your wounded comrades, one of whom, I believe, was wounded after being captured..." Stevo nodded but didn't interrupt. "... I will be dealing with that personally. Then you kept the other Marines calm, while explaining the situation. And then you helped Matthews with our little problem on the beach. Every single decision you have made has been to save lives, even if it is at the cost of your own. I am going to be straight with you. We need people like you."

Stevo blinked. He hadn't been expecting a recruitment speech for a while yet although he guessed it would come eventually.

"But I know that will take some time to process. In the short term, the way I see it, you have three options. The first option is that you come with us when we evacuate this planet and agree to join us. The second option is to either come with us or stay on this planet without joining us. Try to blend in with the local population and hide from the Imperium. I won't lie; trying that on this planet would be difficult, but we could make arrangements for you when we are off-world, even if that means heading back into Imperium space and trying to stay hidden under their noses. The last option is to stay here and take your chances with the Imperium. I can't say for certain that they would kill you on sight, they may welcome you back with a hero's welcome, use you for propaganda purposes or something. But we both know what you know. I don't think I need to tell you what happens in the Imperium to people who know things that they shouldn't. Each of your men will have to make that choice for themselves, and - circumstances being what they are - none of you will have long to decide. In your case, though, I think you could be a valuable asset to our movement."

Stevo nodded slowly. He knew she wasn't expecting an answer now, but a single thought kept echoing through his mind. One that had first appeared the night before and had never really gone away since. His calm exterior and his ability to focus on the task at hand were all done in spite of - rather than as distractions from - that one overriding emotion...

The Three-Eight-One, Bravo Squad included, had been betrayed by the very people they had been sworn to serve. Someone was going to die for it. Justice for his fallen friends and comrades demanded nothing less.

"I would have a condition," Stevo finally answered as a blizzard of emotions washed in waves over his face.

"Go on," West prompted him to continue.

"If you look after my people, even the ones who decide not to join you, I would consider it a huge display of character, not just for your.... Movement, but for you personally. But my condition would be that you don't tell any of them what my decision is until they have made their own."

West nodded as he spoke. "As Matthews told you, we are not your enemies and your men will be treated as guests regardless of their decisions. But can I ask why?"

"Bravo Squad, the squad I led onto that beach, are as close to me as family. There were seven of us on that dropship, three were killed, two were wounded..."

"One being the woman shot by the men who captured you." West nodded, before turning back to her holo-display. "Angel Vasquez, right?" Stevo nodded before West looked back at her console. "There still isn't any update. The last one was hours ago, but I will send a runner to get more information for you."

"Thank you. My point, Captain, is that if they are told what my decision is, they will follow me. I don't even need to question that. No matter what they want, no matter what their own feelings on the matter are, they would follow my choice without question. So I don't want them to know what it is until they have made their decision independently of mine."

A small smile of admiration crept onto the Captain's lips. Stevo didn't see it, of course, but it was there. "You're a good man, Sergeant. Your men are fortunate to have you."

"Thank you, Ma'am. Permission to speak freely?"

"Of course."

Stevo let that look of cool, calm composure fade from his face for a moment, the look of righteous fury replacing it in a heartbeat. "Those bastards sent us to be slaughtered. I don't know why, and I don't really care; there is no reason they can give me that can justify the thousands of my brothers and sisters who were lost yesterday. You're right; you are not my enemy, the Imperium is! So if joining you is what I need to do to get some god damned justice, then tell me where I sign up!"

The smile on the Captain's face grew a little more. "I have to confirm it with General Crow, and I'm sure he will want to meet you before things can be made official, but I can't see that being a problem. So, Sergeant..." she stood and offered her hand, waiting for Stevo to match her and take it. "...Welcome to the rebellion."

********

Crow. 2

General Crow sighed heavily as he looked over the mass grave steadily being filled with one body after another. Each of them laid out and given the closest thing to full military honors his people could manage. It was the least that he could do for them, especially considering he was at least partially responsible for their lives being ended so brutally. This wasn't the dumping pit of a vanquished enemy; these men were not being buried to save his remaining forces from disease or a drop in morale, nor was this a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'; it was a genuine mass military grave. Each body was covered in a white sheet and laid out as respectfully as the state of their corpse allowed. There were no words to describe how much he hated the fact that, in many cases, they were burying little more than a collection of body parts.

Cornelius Crow wasn't his real name, of course. It was an alias, one that he had been living under for the past seventeen years, ever since the true nature of the Imperium and the crimes committed under its ever-watchful gaze became apparent. By his estimations, a government was not a huge amount different than the ranks of military command; crimes and actions carried out under their watch may not have had anything to do with them, they may have had no knowledge of it and may even have been in no position to stop it from happening, but it was still their responsibility, and when you got to the top of that chain, the buck stopped with you. How you dealt with those crimes said as much about you and your institution as it did about the crime itself and the society that had allowed it to happen.

Seeing the look on that little girl's face, the pure, uncomprehending terror in her eyes, her father - knowing what was happening, knowing what was coming - dedicating his last moments of life to soothing the fears of someone so innocent... it had haunted him. Then to watch the protests that grew in response to that travesty first be ignored, then condemned, then for those fucking bastards to order him to disperse the crowds with lethal force? No, that was too much; it was too far. It had unquestioningly shown him the character of the empire he had dedicated his life to serving, and that realization had made him sick to his stomach.

He had been given a choice, a profound yet very simple choice: Stay where he was, turn a blind eye to the atrocities being carried out, apparently in his name, and be complicit in them by inaction and association, or leave and join the rapidly growing movement to rid themselves of that despot.

There had not been a single day since then that had given him cause to regret his decision to leave the Imperium, not a single moment where he seriously thought that the cost of what he was engaged in outweighed the benefits of what he could possibly hope to achieve...

Until today.

The Imperial Marine Corps were among the most honorable and dedicated group of warriors ever to grace the long and lamentable history of human soldiery. There was a reason why the Emperor hadn't ordered them to slaughter civilians in the name of corporate profit and the maintenance of the so-called civil order; they would have told him where to go and how vigorously to fuck himself when he got there! He had been forced to rely on the 'men' of the colonial militias, barely more than bloodthirsty criminals in uniform. But, of course, that was the problem. And because the tyrant at the head of the Imperium couldn't rely on his best soldiers to carry out his orders without question, they were a liability. The news of the massacres - and there had been several after the incident - hadn't been kept quiet to keep the general population in line. No, it had been to protect the Emperor's illusion of honor so that the Imperial Marines and the men and women serving within its ranks wouldn't find out the sort of man they were being asked to kill and die for.

The Emperor was a monster in every conceivable meaning of the word, but he wasn't a stupid one. He knew that the Marines were sworn to protect the Imperium from any threats, even if that threat was coming from the top of the metaphorical food chain. The order to fire on civilians would have grossly offended the Marine's sense of honor, and they would have rebelled themselves before giving that up in the name of keeping one man in power. And as soon as he lost control of the Marines, he would lose the Navy, and as soon as he lost the Navy, he would lose his grip on power... and there was nothing more important to a monster than his grip on what made him powerful.

So what had the monster done? He had given the Marines a cause to rally behind: the loss of an entire one of their Divisions, an enemy so dangerous that they had become an existential threat to the Imperium and its people, one that needed to be destroyed. Neatly distracting them from the horrors being committed by the man they were sworn to. The men and women being buried today were rebels without ever knowing it; almost fifteen thousand of them had been sacrificed - slaughtered - just to sate that bastard's need to maintain power, and Crow had been the one to pull the trigger.

And he fucking hated himself for it.

He had spent all of the previous morning listening to the frantic, terrified, downright heroic last stands of the corpses in front of him. He had heard the pain and the panic and the shock of the pilots who made it back to the carriers only to be gunned down by people they thought had been their own. He had been put in an impossible position; he knew that! There was no way he could have chosen any other path, but he had forced himself to listen to those death screams, those pleas for support, the shock and the horror of seeing that final moment approaching in countless comms bursts that would go nowhere. He had made himself listen to them all, because someone had to honor the sacrifice these warriors made, and it sure as shit would never be the Imperium.

Rebels, one and all. The most courageous, most professional, most honorable fighting force that could be conceived of. Shining beacons of the humanity within the inhumanity of war. Each of them had given the last full measure of their devotion to a cause that they had believed in wholeheartedly, a cause that had callously betrayed them, a cause that never really existed in the first place. Each of them would almost certainly have joined him, standing and fighting by his side if they knew half the shit that he knew.

And he had been forced to kill them.

For a moment, he was reminded of an ancient earth poem by a man named Thomas Hardy. "Had he and I but met by some old ancient inn, We might sit down to wet right many a nipperkin. But arranged as infantry, and staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me and killed him in his place." The men he was burying could have been - should have been - friends; they should have brothers, comrades in arms and in cause. United in purpose, they would have brought an end to an institution responsible for the most human suffering since the Nazis. But instead, he was watching shovels full of sod and dirt being tossed atop men and women of singular and unquestionable valor.

Cornelius Crow: A name with no history and only the vaguest sense of a future, but a name with a cause. A name with a mission. The man behind the name, the life behind the man, they were ghosts. They were irrelevant. All that mattered was the cause, and lying before him was close to fifteen thousand more reasons - on top of the hundreds of thousands of others that came before - to see the cause through to the end.

Or die trying.

Only then could the name be allowed to die and the man behind it re-emerge.

Something popped in his hand, and he looked down at it. He had been clenching his fists so hard his knuckles had cracked under the pressure. The backs of his knuckles were white, and the indentation in his palm from his own nail was almost deep enough to draw blood.

But try as he might, he couldn't be in this place, with those bodies and those thoughts, and calm himself down. It was one or the other. So to hell with his knuckles, to hell with his palms, and to hell with the pain either would cause him later. Honor demanded he stay to give these soldiers a soldier's respect. Besides, a little pain never hurt anyone.

Pain was something he was uncommonly familiar with; pain of the heart from the things he had seen, things like this. But pain of the body, too. Time had withered and worn his once proud and strong bones, the last seventeen years infinitely more so than the forty years that had preceded it. He had known the pain of loss, the pain of defeat, the pain of broken bones, the pain of laser fire, and the pain of despair. He knew anguish and despondency as well as he knew his own shoe size, and yet he refused to bow to it. He refused to let the weight of his own turmoil bend him to its dark desires; he refused - abjectly and outrightly refused - to give in to the shadows that seemed to always surround him. Strength, he had long ago learned, was not about lifting the heaviest thing or throwing the hardest punch; it was the ability to hold that thing up, to take that punch, and to keep going anyway. To put one foot in front of the other despite all adversity and all the conspiracies of those who would see him fail.

The only weakness a man should ever fear, he told himself, was a weakness of spirit.

So there he remained, long into the lateness of the afternoon. Long after the sun had reached and then passed its zenith overhead, long after the warmth of the day was fought off by the coolness of the evening, and the light started to follow in its retreat. He watched silently, mournfully, and respectfully as one body after another was entrusted to this now most hallowed ground. Thousands upon thousands of times. Each of them a tragedy, each of them a waste, and each of them adding weight to the lodestone forever tethered to his chest. Theirs was a burden he bore with solemn pride; crippling in its weight, devastating in its meaning, yet each imbued with a sad sort of beauty. Theirs was a loss that would be forever remembered, a sacrifice revered as much as it was reviled, and a heroism that would inspire a revolution.

No, the Tyrant at the head of the Imperium snake was not a stupid man, but he was grossly shortsighted. He had taught Crow well that these sorts of crimes only escaped the scales of justice if they were kept away from the light. The colonies who had seen that little girl's face in the moments before her death, those who had heard what had happened to those poor people, had rebelled, almost to a soul. It was only the efforts made to stop the spread of that information that had halted the spread of rebellion. It was a lesson Crow had taken to heart, and he would personally ensure that everyone... everyone... heard what the God king of the Imperium did to his own people. Again, an old, ancient proverb from time immemorial whispered through his mind.

Beware of he who denies you access to knowledge. For in his heart, he already sees himself your Master.

********

Adam. 2

It was strange to think how technology had made life so much different from past generations. There were the obvious ways, of course; the harnessing of the gravimetric properties of singularities had brought almost free, practically limitless power to every city in the imperium. New methods of waste disposal had, over the course of centuries, reversed the calamity of climate change, and obviously, mankind had reached to the stars. But that wasn't what Adam was thinking about at that moment.

Adam was thinking about commuting.

A few hundred years ago, it would take the average citizen an hour to travel sixty or seventy miles. They were confined to the ground in all but the most exceptional cases and were, therefore, extremely limited - globally speaking - in where they were able to work. Their place of employment needed to be within a reasonable distance from home, or more often, home needed to be within a reasonable distance from their place of work. With new technology came new methods of travel, and Adam was marveling at one of those now.

He wasn't an engineer, he had no idea how a lot of these things worked, but he was more than able to see the benefits of them. One such piece of technology was a ship's deflector shields. He understood that they were there to stop a ship from being ripped apart by floating, near-invisible chunks of space rock; that is what they were designed to do, and, as far as he could tell, they did their jobs well. But at some point, some clever son-of-a-bitch had realized that they also worked really well at keeping a smaller ship safe from the heat of atmospheric re-entry.

Simply put, as far as his limited knowledge understood, as something traveled through the air, the drag of its mass passing through the air particles created resistance; the bigger that thing was, and the faster it was traveling, the more resistance it would suffer. That resistance translated rather spectacularly into heat. That was why meteors broke up in the earth's atmosphere usually before hitting the surface. Shooting stars were always a dazzling and stunning sight, but essentially, they were those little chunks of those space rocks burning up under the resistance from the air.

Mr - or Mrs - clever son-of-a-bitch, had worked out that a ship's deflector shields not only protected the hull from those space rocks but also from small amounts of energy - the kinetic energy from space rock impacts and from stellar radiation - and that a directed energy weapon broke through those shields by focusing a staggering amount of energy onto a single point on them, overloading the capacitors. Otherwise, the shields seemed to naturally - and quite accidentally - spread that heat, that energy, over the entire surface of the protective bubble and thus eased the load on the capacitors so much that they were able to tolerate the burden. How they made the leap from that to atmospheric re-entry was beyond him, but that is what happened.

Shields were added to even the smallest of stellar shuttles, allowing them to leave and, more importantly, re-enter a planet's atmosphere at will. A few hundred years ago, the heat now being deflected from Adam's shuttle by its shields would have warped and melted the hull and then flash-boiled the hundred or so people inside it in seconds. Now, he was perfectly safe. What this meant, in practical terms, was that most cities on Earth had a shuttle port that could put the equivalent of a busload of people into orbit. Being in orbit meant that shuttles could travel at something close to a hundred thousand miles an hour, which in turn meant that he could get to almost anywhere on the planet in less time than it would have taken his ancestors to travel less than a hundred miles.

Distance, it would seem, was relative.

The downside of this, however, was that everything was allowed to condense. In past generations, a massive bureaucratic entity like the Internal Security Division - or any other government agency, for that matter - would have had offices spread all over the place. A main office in some central, important location, and then satellite offices dotted around everywhere else. That was how it needed to be because getting from one place to another took time, so having people spread out meant they could react to crises easier and - thanks to the need to commute - could spread out and expand their potential labor pool.

New technology had nullified both of those necessities and so, like all other government agencies, not to mention corporate offices and the like, the ISD had all been condensed into a single, massive complex. The Internal Security Division, being a leviathan of the apparatus of the state, had a complex the size of a small city a few dozen miles outside of Caracas in what had once been known as Venezuela.

Adam lived in the Northern regions of Norway. Norway was cold, it was snowy, it was isolated, it was private, and he loved it. Caracas was hot and humid as hell, and the ISD complex was always teeming with people.

People, in Adams's estimations - especially lots of people crowded into small areas - were highly overrated and best avoided.

This was one of the reasons Adam liked to work from home. The most obvious reason was that Jenny, Natasha, and Lucy were there; the warmth they provided him could fight off the most bitter of northern winters, but the biggest reason was that here - in the fiery pits of hell or the closest thing he could imagine to it - he had to be "the boss." It was an act, a persona, that he had perfected over years of service, and he had to act like that to almost everyone.

He was the head of his division and had to be ruthless with the law, uncompromising with security, and utterly without mercy to anyone who violated either. His wife, the love of his life, knew what he did, but he never shared details. They would scare her. One of the biggest fears of his existence was that she or his daughters would learn what he did to keep them fed and clothed with a roof over their heads. Not the job title - that came with no small measure of prestige - but the things he had to do as part of his work. Adam was a realist, and he knew, without any shred of doubt, that he was personally responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of people. He had found information, he had pointed out the culprits, and those people - thanks to the darker elements of the ISD - had simply disappeared.

The boogeyman was real, and he answered to Adam.

Adam was a man whose mere presence in a room put fear in the hearts of the strongest and most powerful men in the Imperium. He was the man who not only watched over them while they slept but peered into the darkest corners of their lives, the deepest pits of humanity, and cast judgment. If you were judged to be law-abiding and sensitive to the security needs of the state, you were safe. If you weren't, there were a legion of men in dark suits at Adam's beck and call, and very unpleasant things would happen to you. The people who disappeared in the dead of night were rarely seen again, and their bodies were never found.

But unlike the police who investigated and judged the general population, Adam judged the officials who governed not only the police but every level of official in the Imperium; he judged the agencies who controlled the officials, and he judged the titans of government who ran the agencies. Fear was a very useful and very effective tactic in his role, and it was one that his persona had cultivated to truly staggering levels of efficiency. Only the people who worked directly with him were allowed to see through the mask; only they saw the man beneath the persona, and that was because they needed to trust him to back them up, not punish them for trivialities.

If they thought something was wrong, they came to him because it was his job to do something about it; they couldn't be afraid of his reaction to their findings. Everyone else, on the other hand, had legitimate reason to be afraid. Fear could potentially keep them alive, and if that fear kept them in line, even if only to avoid the uncompromising gaze of the head of the ISD's investigation branch, so much the better.

With that in mind, he rolled his neck as the shuttle touched down with its inevitable sharp jolt, put that scowl onto his face, stood from his seat, and marched toward the shuttle's hatch. Predictably, not a single other soul moved until he had passed, and nobody... nobody... made eye contact.

It would break Lucy's heart to see him like this.

He was already striding imperiously down the steps of the shuttle before the rest of the passengers were getting to their feet, brushing past a couple of flustered, nervous-looking dock workers and heading toward the main entrance of the complex.

Being recognized was not a problem for him; everyone in the ISD knew who he was by sight alone, and all but the newest or most ignorant knew him by reputation as well. Being recognized by him, on the other hand, was less of a desire by the worker drones; it meant you had done something very, very good or very, very bad. So, the shrinking hulk of a security guard - a man who would probably crush Adam in a physical confrontation - was an ominous sign to everyone around. The security guard in question had been loudly, publicly, and graphically re-educated by Adam a few weeks earlier for allowing him to pass through the scanners without being checked. Anyone could be impersonated, and holographic disguises were not only commonplace, they were getting increasingly more sophisticated, to the point that the ISD mandate was that everyone was checked, from the highest to the lowest. That included him. The security guard - probably as a gesture of respect - allowing him to pass through security unmolested was a huge breach of security, and Adam had not been gentle in reprimanding the man for it.

Fortunately for the security guard, it was a breach that warranted nothing more than a stern talking to and nothing more serious, but the lesson had been necessary, and - by the looks of things - it had been learned.

"Good Morning, Mr. Doncaster," the guard said, trying to hide the nerves in his voice.

"Morning, Tom," Adam nodded, intentionally adding an air of indifference to his own. Adam rarely forgot a name, no matter how much people like Tom hoped he would.

"Do you have any weapons on your person or in your bag, Sir?"

"I do not."

Tom nodded and gestured to a DNA reader. "If you could place your hand on that, please, Sir, and then step into the scanner."

Adam did as he was asked, the green strip of light sliding over the reader and cross-checking his full DNA profile against the one on the ISD's employee database before the whole screen flashed green, then he stepped into the scanner.

A few seconds later, the door on the other side of the scanner opened, and Adam was allowed to proceed into the main building. "Thank you, Sir. Have a nice d..."

Adam was gone before Tom had the chance to finish the sentence. He hated treating people like that; he hated the dismissive, dangerous, self-superior attitude he had to adopt every time he set foot inside this fucking place. He hated the fact that good men like Tom, men he would have happily sat down for a beer with in any other life, had good cause to be genuinely terrified of him. He hated that the simple crime of being good at his job had elevated him to the lofty heights he had achieved and had alienated all the people beneath him who helped him get there. He stood on the shoulders of good people, he knew it, and they knew it, and yet his position damned near forbade any of them from even acknowledging it.

He sighed to himself, one of those well-practiced gestures that anyone around him would mistake for mild irritation and impatience, and he arrived at the lift. Predictably, the group of people waiting in the lobby for it gave him the now obligatory double take, then gave him a wide berth. He didn't even grace them with a look in their direction.

He just tried not to think of Lucy and how utterly horrified she would be by the person he was pretending to be. He tried not to think of Natasha and the look that would wash over her face if she realized her Dad was one of the bad guys. But mostly, he tried not to think of Jenny. The fear he saw in the eyes of everyone around him was mercifully absent in hers... that changing would be a fate worse than death. Thoughts of them had no business in a place like this.

They were the light, and he worked in the darkness. Those were rightfully mutually exclusive concepts and mutually exclusive parts of his life.

By the time the elevator arrived, he had upgraded his little facade to include an impatient tap of his foot; it was enough to ensure that every man and woman brave enough to step onto that elevator with him was more than a little on edge.

The unwashed masses, the peons, the plebs, the useful idiots, the mob, these were things he had to repeat to himself, over and over in his head. They were not thoughts that came naturally to him, which meant maintaining this air of dangerous disdain relied on him maintaining his inner focus, and if he was being honest, that shit was exhausting.

Finally, after at least half a dozen stops on the way up the enormous main building, they finally got to the 91st floor, where his office and the cubicles of his inner circle were located. Over the general hubbub of work being done and conversations being held, he could hear Ben.

Ben was gay. Ben wasn't just gay, Ben was very gay. He was the kind of effeminate gay man who fully embraced his sexuality without giving a single flying fuck what anyone else thought of it. He was loud, he was uncompromising with his words in either praise or beratement, and he was as loyal as they came. Adam enjoyed Ben, there was nobody on earth who would hold a secret like Ben could and he fully epitomized the personality which made him an effective and brutal gatekeeper to his inner sanctum... and at that very moment, Ben was being Ben.

"I don't know who you think you are," a loud, female voice echoed over the bullpen - the name given to the banks of cubicles filled with his closest employees, "but you are going to tell me where he is, and if you don't tell me, I will have you fired by lunchtime!"

"Yeah, good luck with that, Sharon," Ben's calm but blistering retort came right behind the first voice, "He is not in the office, I don't know when he is due to arrive, and there is no reality on God's green earth that makes you entitled to know where he is when he isn't here. So you can wait like everyone else, you can be informed when he arrives and you can come back then, or you can not see him at all. But if you even try to enter his office without permission, I have those lovely men from security on speed dial and they will haul your ass out of here so fast it will knock those cheap highlights out of your hair."

Adam slowed down as he rounded the corner into the main pathway that led between the cubicles, and into Ben's eyeline. The man spotted him after only a few seconds but made no attempt to alert the bristling woman to his presence.

"What is your name?" She seethed

"Ben."

"Ben what?"

"Just Ben is fine. You don't need to know anything else about me."

"I don't need... do you have any idea who I am??"

"I know exactly who you are, Sharon. I play squash with your boss every Tuesday."

"You will call me Miss Vickers!"

"Yeah, I won't be doing that." Ben smiled a smile that made no attempt to reach his eyes. "Will there be anything else?"

"I'm not going anywhere until I see Adam, asshole"

"Adam?" Ben raised an eyebrow challengingly. "I'm familiar with everyone on a first-name basis with Mr Doncaster. You aren't one of them. You're not as important as you think you are, Sharon, you are a secretary, just like me. You have no power, you have no authority, and you are nowhere near high enough up the food chain to make demands here. Earning your bonuses under your boss's desk is too much of a cliche for it to get you through doors on the 91st floor."

With a shriek of infuriated indignation, the woman lunged over the desk and grabbed Ben by his immaculate tie.

"That would be a mistake,"

"What are you going to do, dickhead? Speed dial whoever's cock you're sucking in security and hope they get here in time to stop me putting you in your place?"

Ben smiled again. "You are getting skank on my tie," he retorted.

Sharon, apparently that was her name, swung her hand back. "Life will become very unpleasant for you if you follow through with that," Adam said loudly and in his most menacing tone.

Sharon froze, her shoulders hunching up defensively as the rest of her physically shrank. Ben's tie was released in a heartbeat and he casually tucked it back into his suit jacket. "Morning, Mr Doncaster," he smiled.

Sharon climbed back down off his desk and turned around. "Mr Doncaster..."

"I thought it was Adam," Ben remarked, making it very difficult for Adam to keep a straight face.

"Mr Doncaster, I have been waiting for almost..."

"Let me tell you what is going to happen now," Adam said, not giving the woman the chance to finish her sentence. "You're going to leave. If I see you on this floor again, I will classify you as a security risk for trying to gain unauthorized access to my office. You know what that means, don't you?" He waited for Sharon to gulp, and then to nod. "You are going to tell your boss, whoever he is, to report to me within the hour, to explain to me who the fuck you are, who the fuck you think you are, laying hands on my people, and present me with a very detailed and very creative plan on what he is going to do to reprimand you, or I will do that part for him. Then, and only then, can he tell me what it is he wants. Now, Is there any part of that you aren't clear on?"

"No, Mr Doncaster, Sir."

"Good, now get out!"

If it was possible for a human to leave a trail of fire in their wake as they fled the room, it would only have been marginally more comical than Sharon's flight from danger. Of course, Adam had no intention of following through with his threat, but his reputation for having done so in the past was enough to lend it weight.

"Bye Sharon, have a lovely day," Ben called after her.

Adam arched an eyebrow at him. "Sharon Vickers, secretary to the head of the Financial Fraud Division," Ben explained. "She's been blowing Mr Peters for about eight months now and thinks that's enough time to start pressuring poor Bob into leaving his wife. Silly girl."

"And what does Mrs Peters think of all this?"

"Oh you know her, She thinks it's hot." Ben shrugged

Adam snorted out a laugh. "Still kicking his ass at squash?"

"He's getting better, actually," Ben leaned back in his chair. "If he could be tempted to the dark side with me, I'm sure we could strengthen his wrist." Adam squinted at Ben's teasing smirk. "It's a gay joke, handsome, don't worry. How're Jenny and the kids?"

Adam laughed again, "They're good, Jenny sends her love. I'm supposed to properly berate you for not visiting lately, though."

"Oh, well then consider me suitably berated." Ben gave him a lopsided grin, "I'll try to get out to see them this weekend."

"Any messages?" Adam smiled.

"Sharon Vickers from Financial Fraud was looking for you," Ben smirked, "Otherwise, no. Oh, wait, actually, Steph down in HR wanted to inform you that Frank Horrigan hasn't come into the office, or signed into his terminal at home since the day before yesterday and doesn't have any leave booked. She wanted to know if he had been in contact."

Adam's smile was wiped from his face. He hadn't heard from Frank since his call, but that had been from the office. It wasn't like Frank to just not turn up. That cold flicker of fear crept down his spine again as he remembered the conversation that had immediately followed his last call with Frank. Adam was a dangerous man, but Sandra White, the Minister for Internal Security, was on a whole other level. He was the thing that went bump in the night, he was the monster that hid in the dark, but she was the thing that even the monsters were afraid of. "Send his contact details through to my terminal, and I'll try to get hold of him."

Ben, ever observant, spotted the shift in his expression instantly. "Is everything alright?"

"I hope so, Ben, but best not dwell on this conversation," He gave Ben a pointed look, one Ben had seen and understood many times before. One that reminded the younger man how dangerous the wrong information could be to people who weren't supposed to have it. It was a polite, and even caring way for Adam to silently say "Forget this conversation ever happened, for your own sake."

Ben swallowed hard but didn't press the matter. Ben had a great working relationship with everyone on the floor, and Frank was no exception. Adam didn't pretend to pay much attention to office gossip, but even he had heard how Ben had taken Frank - a much older, straight man - under his wing to teach him the mysteries of style and personal presentation that Ben seemed to understand by instinct. Frank, never a man too proud to admit he needed help, let alone refuse it when it was offered, had, by all accounts, thrown himself behind every one of Ben's suggestions. The goal being, as in all things, to get himself laid, if not just to live more healthily, but even Jenny had commented on how much better Frank had been looking after their last office gathering, so it had clearly been working. Ben, more than likely, would have considered Frank a friend, and one look at Adam's face was all the young man needed to know that his friend may be in trouble or worse, and yet asking questions about it, any question at all, could be enough to land Ben in that trouble, too.

It really was a fucked up society they lived in.

With a nervous knot wringing around his stomach, he patted Ben on the shoulder and then headed into the vaunted bastion of his office.

Adam spared a moment to take a breath and he looked around the room. The ISD complex was a set of five towers growing out of the sprawling lower-leveled complex around it. Most of the main buildings were barely fifteen stories tall, and the five towers seemed to reach into the heavens like a set of bristling glass and titanium fingers. Each of the towers was a different height, and like with all things in the Imperium, your position in the tower was a sign of the respect and prestige of your department. The ISD had many, many functions, but it was, at its heart, an investigative agency. Adam was the head of the investigations division, and therefore, on days Minister White wasn't here, he was the highest-ranking man in the complex. In the three years that Minister White had been at the head of the ISD, she had been to the offices twice, and one of those was her initial tour around the place. Adam's office was in the tallest tower, and only White's office, one floor above his own, was higher placed.

You would think that would entitle him to a grand, oak-covered, throne-room-like office that took up more space than was reasonable for any three others, and maybe it did. But he didn't want that. It was a waste. The only thing in his office that held any sort of comfort for him was his chair, an exact copy of the one at home. It wasn't its comfort that he valued it for, though; it was its links to his family. Adam was a man with no shortage of hostile or even professional enemies, and so having pictures of his family on display or any links to them proudly dotted around the office - as much as he would have loved that - was a risk he wasn't willing to take. Not even the ISDs main index had his real home address, and the only references in there to his wife and daughters were the fact that they existed. Everything else was kept private, only shared with the people on this floor whom he trusted, people he was sure couldn't be coerced into giving up his loved ones if times got tough.

The only other thing about this office that held any sort of meaning to Adam was the view. Ninety-one floors above the earth, the world yawned out of miles upon miles in every single direction, and almost all of it was viewable from his seat of power. Caracas may have been hot and humid, so much so that the temperature control systems struggled to maintain a climate he was more used to, but by god, it was beautiful. Adam didn't know, before taking in that view for the first time, that there were so many different and vibrant shades of green, nor did he realize the sky could be such a dazzling shade of blue or the sun so bright within it.

A chime from his desk pulled his mind back to the present. The icy grip on his stomach, having barely relaxed its hold on him, reasserted itself with a vengeance as he swiped his hands over a few hidden icons, and the holo-terminal hummed quietly into life. In only a few moments, he had opened the message from Ben and tapped on the icon sitting conveniently next to Frank's com channel identifier.

The display changed to the symbol of the ISD, a silver and black shield with their motto in Latin beneath it.

Semper Vigilans

Ever Watchful.

A tone played out through the system's speakers at the coms channel was connected and rang on the other end. For reasons that he couldn't quite put into words, he was already seriously doubting that Frank would be answering the call.

So it came as something of a surprise when the call connected.

Adam's eyebrows furrowed deeper for a moment as, rather than the portly, rather overweight face of Frank Horrigan, the face of an older, dishevelled-looking woman appeared through the feed.

"Err, Hello," Adam said politely. "I was looking for Frank Horrigan."

"You must be Mr. Doncaster," the woman said hoarsely. "Frank always spoke very highly of you." Adam didn't miss the use of the past tense, and those frigid fingers tightened their grip on his stomach. "Frank..." she choked back a sob, "Frank was killed yesterday. He was hit by a hover car on the street outside."

"Oh Jesus," Adam gasped. To the woman, it doubtlessly sounded like a muttering of shock and dismay, and perhaps she was right. But the reality was that hovercar accidents involving pedestrians were extraordinarily rare these days, and that gasp was a realization that Frank's death was almost certainly not an accident. "I am so sorry, Mrs..."

"Horrigan," she sighed. "I'm... I was... Frank's mother."

Adam blinked. The human mind was capable of some truly astonishing feats of tangential thinking, but the woman calling herself Mrs. Horrigan immediately had him thinking that Ben had been training a lothario in the ways of seduction when he was already married, and that thought had managed to fully compose itself in the fraction of a second it took before Mrs. Horrigan clarified that she was his mother. Thankfully, he recovered quickly. "I... I don't know what to say, Mrs Horrigan," Adam offered as gently as he could. "Frank was a hugely valuable member of my team, and he had a lot of friends here who will be heartbroken to hear this tragic news. He was... he was a good man."

The tears were streaming down her face now, and her shoulders were rocking with the silent sobs that she was barely containing. Adam was watching a woman's world collapsing around her; her child, her baby, her reason for being, had been killed, and Adam couldn't even begin to imagine what that must have done to the poor woman's soul, just like he couldn't imagine the pain he and Jenny would be in if something ever happened to one of their girls. "Thank you," she sobbed.

"Mrs Horrigan, I am going to send you my contact information," Adam went on, trying to compose himself. "If there is anything you need, anything at all, I don't care how small or insignificant it may be. I want you to get in touch, and I will do everything I can to help you through this awful time. Please, accept my sincere..." he stopped himself and sighed heavily. "I don't have words to tell you how sorry I am, how sorry all of us are, for Frank's loss. The world is a poorer place without him."

She tried to smile through her heart wrenching sobs. "I can see why he liked you so much, Mr Doncaster," she croaked. "Thank you. I... I think I will take you up on that. I... I have to go."

"Thank you for answering the call, Mrs Horrigan, Goodbye."

She nodded but said nothing else before closing the channel.

Adam sat there in shock for a few minutes, his mind racing through every single possibility that didn't involve Minister White being involved in Frank's death. There weren't many of them, and it was not like he could openly accuse a member of the high council of murder, even if he had irrefutable proof. Instead, he would have to jump through hoops and go through the motions of following protocol. An ISD agent had been killed; an investigation into his death would need to be opened to rule out foul play, even if he already knew that investigation would find nothing, and if it did, the culprit was untouchable.

"Fuck!" he spat before turning back to his terminal and putting an internal call through to Ben. "Rally the troops," he said when the younger man answered the call. "Meeting room two, ten minutes, no exceptions."

Given the way their last conversation had ended, Ben's concerned frown was hardly unexpected, but he followed his instructions with a brief "right away" and closed the call.

Adam turned his attention back toward the window and gazed out over the landscape. He had barely had time to organize his thoughts into something coherent, his mind thinking that maybe a minute or two had passed when his terminal chimed again, shocking him to see that he had been lost in thought for almost a quarter of an hour. "They're all ready for you, Sir," Ben's voice notified him.

"I'll be right there," Adam sighed heavily.

He shut off his terminal and headed out of his office, passing back along the gangway between the now deserted cubicles and hooking a right into the first and largest of the meeting rooms. The entire team, the whole floor, and some thirty-odd people were gathered inside. The dull murmur of conversation halted abruptly as soon as he stepped into the room.

"Thank you all for coming," Adam said, trying - and probably failing - to keep an air of professionalism in his tone. "I've just been made aware of a situation that I felt you all need to know about, and it is best you hear it from me," he waited for a few heartbeats to ensure that he had the undivided attention of everyone in the room. "Yesterday morning, Frank Horrigan was hit and killed by a hover car outside his residence."

It was brutal; it was maybe even a little heartless, but it was better to deliver the news as effectively as possible. Frank had been killed; he hadn't died in an accident like a bad fall down the stairs or a drunken stumble into a river, it hadn't been an illness or natural causes; he had been killed. Ripping off the bandaid in delivering the news like that would shock his subordinates into taking the situation that little more seriously. "I know some of you were close to him, and if you need a moment to process this, then you can take all the time you need," he flicked his eyes to an utterly devastated-looking Ben. He was barely holding it together. "But there are some very important factors that need to be considered here. Frank was one of us; he was a member of ISD, and that means we have to be absolutely certain that his death happened exactly how it appears to have happened. There can be no room for errors on this one. If this was an assassination made to look like an accident, I want to know about it!"

"What if it was?" A quivering voice of a woman at the back asked although he didn't see who it belonged to.

"Then we find out who is responsible, and we introduce them to the real meaning of the word 'agony.' Now, if any of you feel you were too close to Frank to be an impartial member of the investigation team, feel free to let me know. But if anyone wants to volunteer for this assignment, stand now."

The entire room, every single member of his division, stood as one. There wasn't a moment's hesitation from anyone, not even the people who were choking back the sobs and wiping away the streaming tears.

Adam nodded, a lump of his own getting in the way of the prideful swallow. "Frank would've been proud of all of you, as am I. I'll be forming a special unit, and let the members know their roles by the end of the day. Anyone not selected, please continue the work you are already doing; none of that becomes less important because of this. We honor Frank's memory by carrying on where he left off. Thank you, all of you. Take some time here to process."

With that, Adam turned and headed for the door.

"What about you, Sir?" Ben asked from his place against the far wall. The whole room turned to look at him.

"What about me?"

"Adam, you were as close to Frank as any of us. You need time to process, too." The drop in formalities was an intentional attempt to show the sincerity of his words. "Stay."

A ripple of nods washed over the people in the room. Adam smiled softly, looking down at the doorknob of the half-opened door in his hand. He pushed it closed again and moved to join his people.

********

Stevo. 17

Matthews walked silently beside him as he was escorted back to the holding area. Stevo, still processing the speed and the vehemence with which he had made his decision. He had thrown away a lifetime of loyalty and service in a heartbeat, but what shocked him more than that was the realization that he had meant it.

Every time he closed his eyes, he could still see the look on Dusky's face. The pain, the terror, and the stunned attempts to process what was happening to her in her eyes. All savagely cut off when that second plasma bomb blew her to pieces. Big G was dead, Rev was dead, Dusky was dead, Angel was wounded, and so was Ryan; his squad had been decimated. But that was combat! He couldn't hate - or even blame - the rebels for fighting back when his Marines were trying their utmost to wipe them out. There was a poetic sort of honor to be found in laying down your life in battle; it hurt, and the hole in the pit of his stomach was growing by the hour, but losses in combat came with the territory. No, what really pissed him off was that he and his people had been put in that position, betrayed, and then sent to their deaths, intentionally, by the very people he had served. The people who were supposed to have supported them and backed them up.

That was the deal! At least as far as he had always perceived it. The Marines would give them their honor, they would give the Imperium their lives in its defense if that was necessary, and in return, the Emperor would never ask of them a task that would tarnish their honor and would give the proper value to the lives being sacrificed in his name.

That deal hadn't just been broken; it had been smashed. And thousands upon thousands of his people, including close friends in his own squad, had been slaughtered for what he could only assume were the political motivations of some power-hungry cunt at the top of the metaphorical tree. The rebels had pulled the trigger, but they were fighting back; they were doing what they needed to do to survive an invasion launched against them, they were defending themselves against a force brought here specifically to kill every one of them, and there was no part of him that couldn't respect that.

Now, walking through those corridors and back toward his temporary cell, a sudden realization occurred to him. Even on the beach, even with the adrenaline of battle pumping through his veins, he had sworn vengeance against those responsible for the deaths of his men... and even then, he had known that wasn't the rebels.

Suddenly, the words screamed at him by his father all those years ago were starting to make sense. Perhaps the old bastard knew more than he let on. That was something else Stevo would have to find out eventually.

A ding sounded from the computer attached to Matthew's vambrace, and he slowed to look at it, forcing Stevo to drop his pace to match him. Both men still had their helmets off, so Stevo had a good view of the Corporal's face as his eyes scanned the text flowing over his display. Soon enough, though, a small smile crept onto his lips.

"The medical teams have updated the system," he said, looking back up at him. "Vasquez is out of surgery; she is still in a serious condition, but the docs think she is out of the woods."

The breath of relief that flowed out of Stevo's lungs was as profound as it was cathartic.

"Almark is doing well, too," Matthews went on, "She is in recovery, but the docs think she will be waking up soon. They are expecting a full recovery within a week or two. And your man, Ryan, has been accepted into processing. A few of the other names your people asked for have come back, too."

Stevo nodded, trying to control the quivering solace in his breath at the news. "Thank you, Corporal," he said, giving the man a pat on the shoulder. "That is amazing news. Please, if it's possible, pass my thanks on to the medical team."

"If I understand correctly, Si... Sergeant, you will be able to do that yourself soon enough,"

Stevo offered him a small grin and a soft nod, "Let's keep that to ourselves for now, Corporal, at least until the others have made their decision."

"If I may ask, then sergeant," Matthews said carefully. "If you have agreed to join us, why do you need an escort back to the barracks."

Stevo laughed, another odd feeling considering the thoughts on his mind. "That's very simple, my good man," he replied. "I don't know the way."

Mac, Jennings, Walker, Cameron, Wooly, Donavan, and all the others - both the Marines that had been here when he had been captured and the men and women recently taken from the beach - all rose to their feet as he was led into the cell, each of them looking at him with a mix of apprehension and relief.

"When you didn't come back..." Cameron softly said.

"Sorry, Sarge," Donavan offered. "We were separated so quickly after we got off the beach, I didn't know what to tell people when they asked where you were."

"It's okay, Private," Stevo smiled. "I'm fine. I just needed to have a chat with the garrison captain."

"All good, Sarge?" Mac asked in his strong Scottish accent.

"Yeah, everything's fine. Captain West wants to bring all the surviving Marines together soon to explain everything, so it's probably best if I leave the details up to her. But Matthews here has some news."

Every eye turned to the Corporal. He cleared his throat and then started repeating the names that he had been given by everyone in the room. Gasps of relief went up from most of the Marines as it was revealed that their comrades were alright and would be joining them when they were well enough until only Walker remained. Matthews turned to him. "Private Malcome Malone," he said, his face darkening as he spoke. "He was alive but unconscious when we found him. He seemed to have moved a fair distance away from where you were captured. The surgeons did their best, but I'm sorry to say the damage he suffered was too extensive. He died of his wounds about three hours ago. I'm sorry, Private."

Walker nodded and slumped mutely back onto his cot. Stevo didn't think he had been holding out much hope; in the same way, he hadn't held much out for Ryan, but not much hope was not the same as none at all, and to find out that a close friend was gone forever - that feeling of having the smallest shreds of hope extinguished - was still a soul-crushing experience. Cameron moved over and sat next to him, putting a comforting arm around him and resting it on his shoulder. There was no bravado here.There were no stiff upper lips or putting on of brave faces; everyone had lost people. Not a man or woman in the room considered themselves lucky not to be in Walker's position because all of them were in his position; it was just a matter of degrees. Walker's look of utter despondency was one that each of them would be matching soon enough.

"Wait..." Mac looked up as a thought suddenly occurred to him. "You said the Captain wants to gather all the Marines in one place," he looked at Stevo. "Isn't tha' tha people who are wounded and the people in this room? Or..." his eyes moved to Mathews, "...are there more survivors?"

Matthews shook his head. "I'm sorry, all of the Marines taken alive are either in this room or in medical. There is a holding cell there, too, but it is for the walking wounded who didn't need any further medical treatment, and that is where the rest of the captives will be released, too, once they are out of the hospital."

Stevo frowned, "Matthews, I believe the Private was asking how many people, in total, have survived from our Division."

"Oh," The Corporal looked flustered and then lifted the holo-display mounted on his wrist. "I'm not actually sure. Let me look." There was a hushed quietness in the room as the rebel corporal tapped on a few icons. "Okay, so there are thirty-one of you here, another twenty-five in the hospital's holding area, and two hundred and seventy-four still receiving treatment. So that's three hundred and twenty-six survivors."

The group of Marines looked around at each other. Like Stevo, they all seemed to have thought the division had been completely wiped out, with the exception of themselves and a handful being cared for by the doctors. The realization that there were more almost three companies worth of Marines still alive, assuming no more of them died of their wounds, was as much of a shock as the news about their friends. Soon, each of them, even Walker, was wearing something close to a relieved and hopeful smile.

"Oh, Mac," Stevo grinned, letting the short-lived euphoria of the news fill him to the core.

"Aye, Sarge?"

"Ryan made it. He was with this lot." He nodded to Donavan.

Mac blinked, looked at Donovan, then back to Stevo... and then burst out laughing. "Oh, tha' lucky ginger bast'rd! I'm gonna kill 'im!"

********

Histories and Lores.

To paraphrase a statement first written by the great and renowned Douglas Adams, space is big, really big! Space is incomprehensibly, mind-bogglingly vast. Even though those words were written centuries before man attained meaningful methods of interstellar travel, they are as true today as they always have been. The human mind, for the overwhelming majority of people, simply isn't capable of comprehending the sheer unimaginable scale of space, and that is before we factor in the reality that space extends for an infinite distance in every direction. To make this process simpler, we have developed the use of words like 'lightyears' as a newer measurement of distance. In reality, that isn't a measurement of distance at all, not in any quantifiable way; it is simply the distance something is able to travel in a year if traveling at exactly the speed of light, and even then, only the speed of certain spectrums of visible light.

The actual measurement doesn't make things any easier. A single light year is approximately six trillion miles. And there are four of them between the Sol system and the closest colonizable words in the Alpha Centauri system. Yet a trillion is still a number too large to really grasp unless it is put into terms people can relate to. For that, we use time. A million seconds is a little over eleven days, and a billion seconds is thirty-two years. Six trillion seconds ago, mankind was still drawing stick figures on the inside of cave walls, almost two hundred thousand years ago. And that is what is necessary to understand the distances involved in a single journey.

Methods of traversing these staggeringly massive distances are as complicated and intricate as you would imagine them to be, but essentially, they can be split into three distinct types. For the sake of avoiding a grotesquely detailed analysis of all types of engines, it will simply be said that there are many types of engines within each classification, and almost all of them work a little differently from each other.

The first, and possibly the most used - if least romantic - classification of engine, are the thrusters. Thrusters, as a general rule, redirect power away from the main engines to modules placed around the hull and allow the vessel, regardless of its size, to make controlled turns, rolls, and slides, and, perhaps most importantly, they are what allow a ship to slow itself down and eventually stop. With no resistance acting on the ship while in the vacuum of space, a ship, once at speed, would continue on its trajectory indefinitely without the ability to arrest its velocity. It would just keep going forever... or until it crashed into something. In the early days of spaceflight, this was achieved by venting controlled bursts of gas from ports at the front of the ship, but the development of superior engines made this process obsolete, replacing it with directed energy flow.

Thrusters are used in any type of movement the ship is required to perform that does not involve moving forward at speed. This would include docking maneuvers, maintaining port speeds, matching velocities of other vessels, and - in the case of smaller strike craft - massively increasing agility and precision flying capabilities. Thrusters are even used on larger classifications of warships to counteract the recoil of firing full broadsides of ballistic weaponry.

The second class of engine is most commonly grouped together under the classification of "sub-light or subluminal engines." There is an enormous amount of variety of engines within this classification, and each has its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages when compared to the others; in fact, it is generally possible to tell the age, the classification, and even the constructor-species of a ship by which type of engine it uses. Pulsed Ion Drives, Nuclear Fusion Drives, Plasma Drives, the list is huge, but, generally speaking, the huge glowing engines at the rear of almost all stellar craft are the sublight engines. They are the mechanisms by which a ship is accelerated and propelled forward. The speeds to which these engines can move a ship are, technically, only limited by the physical impossibility of accelerating to the speed of light, and cases of huge starships reaching 99% the speed of light are not only possible but commonplace. It is only the mass of the ship that has to be taken into account when calculating the rate of acceleration and - pursuant to the laws of the conservation of momentum - maneuvering. A Fleet carrier, for example, has the potential to be just as fast as a strike fighter; it would just take it much longer to reach that speed and be much more difficult to maneuver or slow down when it got there.

It is for this reason that almost every known spacefaring species has self-imposed speed restrictions on ships based on their mass. Some of stellar travel's most disastrous accidents, including the lunar collision of the Aurora Grey, came about when a sudden change of situation occurred before a large ship was capable of reacting to it. It was too big, and moving too fast to stop before hitting, or even maneuver away from, an unexpected obstruction. It is technically not a limitation in the thrusters to slow or alter the course of a ship that requires this speed restriction, but a limitation of scanners and navigational computers. Sensors simply don't have the detailed range to spot obstacles far enough in advance to allow some of the more massive ships to alter course before a collision.

The final and perhaps most romanticized classification of engines are the Hyperdrives, also known as FTL or super-luminal engines. There are literally thousands of different types of these devices, and none of them, by the most technical definitions, can be accurately called engines at all. Each of them, using various methods, alters the physical or dimensional properties of the ship and allows them to traverse the boundary into faster than light travel. The human variety, for example, surrounds the ship in an energy 'bubble' that temporarily allows it to ride the line between spatial dimensions and thus bypass the limitation on superluminal acceleration. The Maruvian FTL drives, on the other hand, bathe the vessel in tachyon particles that allow it to achieve the same thing, just on a vastly more energy-efficient level and without messing around with the complexities of trans-dimensional travel. It is these variations in energy efficiency that govern the velocities that these drives are capable of achieving.

These engines, however, are - almost without exception - subject to much more limitations than the other types. The main and most obvious of these limitations is the relativity between Hyperspace travel and astronomical gravitational bodies. Gravity wells, a phenomenon present in any stellar object of sufficient mass, have the potential to scramble the infinitely complex navigation calculations required to chart a course when traveling faster than light. At the very least - in human cases, at least - they can disrupt the hyperspace bubble and violently pull a ship out of FTL travel; the stress on the hull in this sort of incident is almost always catastrophic. In the cases of other species, it can cause a ship to veer wildly off course and, theoretically, end up anywhere.

To combat this, engine manufacturers have hard-wired fail safes into all of their drives to automatically - but safely - pull a ship out of hyperspace at the first sign of a gravity well in their paths. Incidentally, this is how military interdictions work. The creation of an artificial gravity well reading that forbids a ship from traveling close to it while in hyperspace. Interdiction beacons pull a ship out of hyperspace and prevent them from escaping again with anything other than their sub-light engines.

In more practical terms, the need to avoid gravity wells has resulted in two universally accepted truths of space travel. The first and most obvious is the inability to jump to or travel in hyperspace while within the confines of a star system. The planets and other stellar bodies, not to mention the star itself - each one forming its own gravity well - are simply too close for the nav computer to compensate for. The second, perhaps inevitable consequence of this has been the formation of official shipping lanes. These are set, predefined routes between the most heavily trafficked systems that have already been plotted to avoid all stellar gravity wells. There is - contrary to popular opinion - no real speed advantage to traveling along these lanes; instead, the advantage comes from being able to travel the full length of the shipping lane without having to leave hyperspace, as opposed to jumping from one gravity well to another, replotting a new course, and then jumping again.

For these reasons, all three engines are needed for effective space travel. The hyperdrive systems allow a ship to travel from the edge of one star system to the edge of the other at astonishing speeds. Those four lightyears between Alpha Centauri and Earth, for example, can now be navigated in as little as five hours. Once at the edge of the system, however, the hyperdrives are effectively useless, and a ship is forced to switch to its sublight engines, traveling toward its destination at hugely slower but vastly safer speeds. In many cases, this journey from the outer system to a colonized world close to its center can take longer than the dozens of light years already traveled. Once arriving at its destination, a ship would power down its engines and use its thrusters to slow itself down and maneuver itself either into orbit or into position to dock at a space station.

Taken together, these three systems have allowed humanity - not to mention every other species - to explore and colonize stars that are an unimaginable distance away from the cradle of our race, and without them, we would still be reduced to using sublight engines only and relying on cryostasis for any journey beyond the asteroid belt of the Sol System.

It is wise to note that in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Voyager space probe was launched. It took more than fifty years to leave the Sol System. Any ship traveling toward Alpha Centauri now passes by it within a few minutes of entering hyperspace, and most pilots barely give it a passing glance. But it is not expected to reach that system for another seven hundred years, despite having been launched more than five hundred years ago.