Chapter 4 - Change of plans

Laura. 2

To a Mariner, ship security was second nature. It had to be; Mariners were a nomadic space-born civilization who lived in flotillas of heavily modified starships rather than on planets. So defending those ships from harm, infiltration - or, in this case - outright theft wasn't simply a matter of skill; it was a necessity of existence. But Laura Dondarion, wandering the brown, dust-covered wasteland of Xnios, was a master of that craft even amongst her own people, and her ship - the Seren - was a fortress.

She had been on the planet for three days, and her ship had been left unoccupied and unprotected since the moment she had sealed it behind her. With the shattered remains of a civilization sprawled out around her, she found it hard to imagine that some poor, desperate fool hadn't tried to hijack it within half an hour of her leaving it.

But to get onto the Seren would require a feat of effort beyond the capabilities of even the Imperium's renowned ISD. Firstly, they would need her DNA to satisfy the standard issue palm reader. Then they would need to speak the password into a comm channel that only she had the frequency to; the password itself was a very complicated sentence in a very old dialect, of a very obscure language, that only a handful of mariners still used regularly enough to be able to pronounce the words.

In effect, the password was nonsense, which made it harder to guess, but basically could be roughly translated as "The grand oaken tree fits very nicely up the domesticated cat's ass, unless on a Tuesday when it sings too loudly. But if you pay the cheque, the dog will take over."

There were all sorts of vocal inclinations and quirks that communicated sarcasm and humor - a mistake in which would change the entire meaning of the word - designed as it had been to be communicated over audio-only comm frequencies before the development of visual communications and the use of facial expressions and body language. It was an extraordinarily difficult language to learn unless you had been brought up using it from childhood. To make matters worse for any would-be thief, the computer was programmed to only respond to Laura's own voice.

And if a potential thief kept poking at the system or made an attempt to hack it, there were a few point-defense lasers near the hatch - capable of swatting strike craft down like bugs - to convince them to go away... or, you know, shoot them if they didn't.

But let's say the thief got creative and decided to take the brute force approach and cut directly through the hull. If the security system at the main hatchway had not been deactivated, an intruder would find all manner of nasty surprises waiting for them. Forcefields and closed blast doors around critical compartments were pretty standard, as were the automated anti-personnel weapons in almost every room, but Laura had taken her precautions to a whole new level. The one she was most proud of was that for the entire time that the security system was active, the artificial gravity system built into her ship's deck plates would stay active...

At five hundred times the normal force of gravity.

If someone cut through the hull and climbed inside, their body would instantly weigh enough to crush them into jelly under the weight of their own skin. Their skull would weigh the equivalent of approximately a ton and would snap their spines like a toothpick, and every vein and blood vessel in their bodies would instantly burst as the blood within them was suddenly and violently yanked downwards, shortly before the blood vessels themselves. Unless they broke into her ship equipped with an exceptionally strong suit of powered armor with its own ridiculously strong anti-grav field built into it - which were actual things, just rarely seen outside specialist military units - the life expectancy of an intruder on the Seren would be measured in fractions of a second.

But assuming they got past that, managed to power down the security fields, cut through the blast doors, and made it onto the bridge, they would be faced with a similar puzzle to the one on the hatch, which, assuming they'd had to break into the bridge, to begin with, they clearly hadn't already cracked. This one was a different password in the same language, using only her voice while punching in a sixteen-digit code into the only holo-interface that would be powered up. The password, incidentally, was a detailed list of complaints Laura had about the cock of her ex-boyfriend, including a description of a rather unfortunately located mole.

To be honest, if they got past all of that without being killed, then they deserved to have the fucking ship, and she would have to try harder with the next one.

With all that in mind, it wasn't the security of her ship that had her feeling uneasy; it was the fact that she wasn't on it. For thousands of years, sailors have talked about having sea legs, and it was always a difficult concept for their mainly land-going contemporaries to understand. Basically, a ship moves on the water; the rougher the seas, the more it moves. Anyone forced to live on those ships for any period of time compensated for this by developing subtle but distinctive differences in the ways that they walked. They would keep their knees partially bent, for example, placing the strain of their body weight onto the muscles in their thighs rather than on their knees. This allowed them to maintain balance as the floor essentially moved beneath them. If, then, for whatever reason, a sailor was required to go ashore, this now habitual way of moving became a hindrance. The lack of movement in the ground, compared to the pitch and roll of a ship's deck, felt strange and uncomfortable, and - more urgently - the strain in the muscles of their thighs would actually cause physical discomfort. Sailors used to spending months, if not years, at sea found it difficult to sleep on dry land, and they found that being away from the sound of the ocean was distressing. There was a whole myriad of eccentricities that simply didn't translate between being on solid ground and being at sea.

Although it was not quite as acute now as it was back then, the same issues still applied. When her deck plates weren't squashing intruders, they were set at a few degrees of measurement lower than Earth's standard gravity; the air was recycled, and - no matter how subtle - the tiny vibrations that ran through a ship from even the most well-maintained engine caressed the bottom of her feet whenever she was onboard. A vibration too slight for almost any other race of people to detect was what lulled her to sleep at night. More than that, it was the sense of freedom that she missed. It was strange to think that she felt more claustrophobic on an open, desolate planet than she did locked inside the hull of a one-hundred-meter ship. But that ship had the entirety of the cosmos to wander. This planet, by comparison, was a spec of dust on the galactic breeze. Xnios had no vibration that ran through her feet; its gravity was a touch higher than Earth standard, and although the air in her environmental suit was still recycled, it was not in the same way as on her ship.

More than that, planet-dwelling people of almost every race instinctively thought in two dimensions. Forwards, backward, left, and right. Up and down were considerations, but most space-faring species couldn't naturally fly, so up and down were rarely taken into account. Mariners were born in three dimensions. They were born to thinking that way, to thinking of pitch and roll. Concepts like "up" didn't really translate, it was just another vector. It was evolution in its most basic form, and having one of those dimensions robbed from her made simply moving around a conscious and exhausting mental exercise. Those little things added together to make her a little antsy, but what really threw that up to the level of downright discomfort was one simple fact.

She couldn't see the stars.

The stars were everything. They were her light, her map, her guide, her home, and her destiny; she believed that with every fiber of her being. Her eyes had developed to see by the light of them, her body clock no longer relied on the passage of a sun to dictate her waking hours, constellations, old and new, were like lifelong companions, and she was able, with very few exceptions, to find her way back to the home fleet simply by looking for familiar groupings of stars. Yet every single time she was forced to make landfall on a planet, she knew she would spend part of that time being cut off from them by daylight, painting the sky - in most cases - with that sickening shade of blue. But Xnios was worse. That oppressive, wet-sand-colored cloud that smothered the entire planet didn't even give her the welcome relief of nighttime, and three solid days of it was more than enough time for her to feel the weight of their loss. It was like losing one of her senses, and she could feel it grating against her sanity.

It was little wonder that Mariners avoided prolonged periods of time planet-side wherever and whenever they could.

Still, she was here for a reason, and the expulsion - now that the relief effort had stalled - offered the perfect opportunity to carry out a mission that had been the wish of the council for centuries. The Imperium, predictably, had laid claim to the planet, loudly announcing that they had been the first to discover this paradisic oasis in the vast, barren expanse of stellar nothingness, but they had been wrong. Whether they knew that they were wrong or not was another matter, but the Mariners had stumbled across Xnios almost a century earlier, they just had no desire to colonize it, so they had charted it and moved on. They, however, had found the planet as the last major expulsion event was coming to an end. It hadn't been quite so paradisic then. It had taken the more cautious Mariner cartographers less than a few hours to determine the harmful properties of the last compound cloud, but they had detected something interesting.

If they had taken their chances with the diminishing cloud back then, they would have saved themselves - or more specifically, saved Laura - a whole lot of trouble. But of course, they had no idea what they had found all those centuries ago, just a strange, unexplained reading on topographical scans. As the centuries rolled on, later discoveries educated them as to what those first readings had meant, but by then, the Imperium colonization effort was well underway, and every Mariner alive knew the consequences of trespassing on Imperial worlds... those that didn't weren't alive anymore.

The Mariner home fleet, when taken together, was one of the most powerful fighting forces known to this part of the galaxy. Mariners were not naturally warlike; they didn't recognize - nor even really understand - a society's need to claim territory and had never been involved in anything that could be called a war. Their scientists and engineers were good, very good in some cases, but the astonishing levels of technological advancement they had achieved had very little to do with their research or their abilities. No, it all came from one activity.

Locating, exploring, and then... liberating... long-lost ancient data vaults.

Some people would call it looting, but those people were easily ignored. If they had the means and the inclination to hunt the quadrant for those vaults themselves, they would have done it too and used the technology for something a whole lot less innocuous than being able to live in space more safely.

The vast majority of the human population had no comprehension of the existence of this historical race, even those who did, knew extraordinarily little about them, and that included the Mariners. It was, in fact, the Mariners who made mankind's first discovery of an ancient artifact, and it wasn't in the glowing blue eyes of a child - that particular occurrence was so rare as to only have happened a few dozen known times in history - nor was it an accidental stumble over the sort of vault that Laura was hunting for now. It was a ship.

The odds of the Mariners accidentally coming across the ancient hulk were astronomical, the equivalent of finding a single grain of floating sand in the vastness of all Earth's oceans when you weren't even looking for it. Even that ship, named the "Primis" by the captain who found it, as huge as it was, was less than a speck of dust in comparison even only to the small sector of space in which it was found. The Imperium flagship - The Dreadnaught "Imperator" - was a not inconsiderable 5km in length. The Flagship of the Mariner's home fleet - A cobbled together, necessity-defined ship that could loosely be called a fleet carrier but was, in fact, a colony ship - was only a few hundred meters shorter than that, and she had heard of massive ships in the Khuvakian Empire that could reach up to 7km long. But the Primis had dwarfed them all. At 24km from bow to stern and 8km from port to starboard, it was a behemoth the likes of which had never been seen before or since.

Laura had spent incalculable hours of her childhood watching and rewatching the logs from that centuries-old find, marveling at the sheer scale of the gargantuan ship. Watching the recordings from the bridge of the first scouts to find it, its shadow blotting out the light of the stars as they approached, the cautious scans of the impenetrable, clearly ancient, potmarked, and pitted hull. The failed attempts to establish contact, and then, finally, as more and more of the Mariner fleet converged on the astonishing find before the first shuttles and their boarding parties inched courageously toward it.

Only to find it completely deserted.

Not even the bodies of the crew had been aboard. There was nothing.

It had taken more than seven years of scientists and engineers crawling throughout the derelict ship before they even managed to redirect power from their ships to it, finding its own power core completely indecipherable, another three before they managed to activate the computers, and then sixty more years of one dead end after another. What had stifled the Mariners so much had been the language found in those systems. Rather than the ancient language being as complicated as one would imagine for such a massively more advanced race, their language was startlingly simplistic, almost like it had devolved over time. Even now, centuries after finding the Primis, the Mariner scientists still couldn't find a spoken or written word for any systems on the ship more complicated than a chair, let alone a detailed description of how the enormous number of systems interacted with each other. It had taken decades of research for the current theory to evolve; that theory postulated that the ancients had developed a way to link their minds directly to the computer systems, allowing them to not only 'talk' to the ship but also to each other.

There were astonishing amounts of data on the computers, enough data to keep the average engineer busy for a dozen lifetimes, but all of it was in the form of random packets of seemingly untranslatable data packets. Some of them were clearly related to curtain systems, but with no way of deciphering this incredibly complicated computer language, it was impossible to know what it meant or even what it did. And everything was in that language, from the internal systems that ran the ship to the logs of the crew themselves. All of it was there, and every single byte of it was infuriatingly out of reach.

For all the decades of research done - culminating in the hulk being painstakingly towed to a nearby nebula to be hidden from other wandering eyes and the home fleet taking up a near-permanent residence around it - there was no shortage of things learned from the Primis. The extraordinarily resilient armor was made of a compound that Mariner scanners couldn't identify, the shields were based on a power source that couldn't be replicated, and the manufacturing process used in the energy-based weapon systems was detailed - presumably - in that incomprehensible language. The engines had never been able to be powered up, and neither had the ship's sensors. But all of these systems could be approximated, if not outrightly reverse-engineered - albeit with inferior materials and incomplete and, frankly, guessed manufacturing processes - but these admittedly substandard imitations of ancient technology had still made the Home fleet significantly more advanced than anything the Imperium could contend with.

The holy grail of these research efforts, however, was a way to translate the ancient computer language or at least a way to interface with their computers in a way that the Ancients themselves had done all those eons ago. With nothing even approximating this technology readily discoverable on the Primis itself, the search had to be extended. This hunt was based on a single irrefutable fact: almost all the ancient components were based on the same unidentifiable and unreplicable compound that was used in the hull. The Mariner scanners may not have been able to discern the elements or the manufacturing process used in its creation, but they were certainly able to gather an incredibly detailed reading of it...

A set of readings the Mariners had seen a few times before, including once, long ago, on Xnios.

That was Laura's mission. Now that Xnios had been all but abandoned, and now that the people living on the planet had more important things to contend with than a Mariner digging around in their territory, she was free to look for and attempt to enter the ancient vault.

Okay, to be clear, it wasn't really a vault; that is just what the Mariners had started calling them when the treasure trove of one-day-translatable data and lootable components was discovered in each of them. They had already found, excavated, and explored almost a score of these 'vaults' all over the space they had charted. Each time those readings were detected, a ship was sent to investigate. Sometimes it was a partially intact building, sometimes a crashed ship, all of them eroded by the unforgiving march of time and decayed by the natural forces found on almost all planets. But the things that had survived were invariably things that had been built to last, things that had been built to survive adversity, meaning that each of them had contained something that the ancients wanted to keep safe.

One building had been an underground research complex found almost a mile beneath the surface of a lifeless world; another building appeared to have been some sort of government center, closer to the surface - only buried by the sands of the now desert world on which it was located - but reinforced and hardened to a mind-blowing degree. The ships that had been found were never cargo freighters or smaller-class starships, either, but had been the remains of massive, almost Primis-sized warships. The impact craters those things had made when impacting the surface of their planets could be seen from orbit, and their death-fall may have even been what rendered those planets as barren and lifeless as they were now.

Laura's job was to find out which case was true for Xnios. If it were a deeply buried complex, then a whole excavation team would need to be brought in - which would cause its own problems, considering the compound cloud overhead and the dangers that wrought to starships entering the atmosphere. If, however, it was relatively near the surface, it could be possible for her to enter the 'vault' herself, recover what was inside, and then get off-world, with the local inhabitants being none-the-wiser.

She sighed and checked her vambrace-mounted computer again. The uplink to her ship's sensors told her that she was close, but how close was still something of a mystery as the compound cloud played havoc with short-ranged, narrower-banded, more detailed scans. She hadn't quite spent three days walking in circles, but it was pretty close, and that is certainly what she would tell people when she got home.

According to her scanners, the readings that signified her objective were - at that moment - about two hundred and fifty meters straight ahead of her and about eighty meters below her current elevation. Cool, except she had already been there, and when she checked her scanners directly above the point the vault should be, it told her it was where she stood now.

Laura grated her teeth - an act that made a very strange sound in the confines of her atmospheric suit's helmet - then shut off the computer, muttering obscenities about scanners, planets, and compound clouds as she looked around.

She was about thirty miles outside what could be considered the city limits of Merdian, on the edge of a ravine that overlooked a grand and presumably majestic river. She had no idea what the river was called, and she imagined that the people who had called this part of the world home had once considered the view from this settlement to be pretty spectacular. She didn't care; things like that were lost on a Mariner who spent their days looking at the astonishing swirls and colors of nebulae. But she doubted the people who lived here cared very much now either, at least if the ruins of the settlement were anything to go by. This little town had been utterly obliterated by either the earthquakes or the tsunamis that followed it. Only a handful of what must have been hundreds of buildings were still standing, and she trusted none of them to be structurally sound enough to enter. Every other building was just gone, leaving only the footprint of their foundations carved into the ground. The thought that anyone still living here had survived when those calamities hit was utterly unfathomable. If there were a list of people who called this place home before the Expulsion, the only ones still alive would have been the ones lucky enough to get off the planet before the quakes hit or the ones who had somehow made it to the higher ground of Meridian and then miraculously survived there instead. Because there sure as hell wasn't anyone around here now.

The terrain itself should have made the hunt for the vault reasonably straightforward. It was a broad, sweeping plain of relatively flat land that had been carved away by the river over millennia. It was, topographically speaking, comparable to the Grand Canyon on Earth, just not quite as big. The earthquakes, however, had torn huge rents into the ground, splitting the landscape with deep, scar-like cracks that made traversing it all the more difficult. To make matters worse, a lot of those cracks were spewing out hundreds of metric tons worth of the same compound that was currently fucking with her sensors and - judging by their readings - fucking with them even more. If that wasn't bad enough, the tsunami and the recession of the floods that had followed it looked to have washed away huge parts of the walls of the ravine on either side of the river. Normally, that would have been a good thing, it would mean less digging for her, but it had not only washed a considerable amount of the town away but had made the prospect of any descent into the canyon a very dangerous proposition. The ground in several spots was simply too undermined even to support her weight, let alone the weight of her digging gear. She doubted half of these house foundations would still be here in a few weeks as natural erosion finished what the calamity had started.

So... readings. There were three that she was dealing with. The first put her objective directly below where she was standing at that moment. The second reading was two hundred and fifty meters ahead of her, closer to the edge of the ravine and on the other side of the town. The third reading, predictably, was to her left, a spot in mid-air close to the other side of the ravine. Admittedly, that was a bit of an eyeballed guess; she had no way of crossing it at the moment, and the reading could possibly put that spot right on the opposite edge of it. But barely.

There were only two conceivable explanations. The first - and the one she was most inclined to go with - was that her scanners were fucked to the point of being useless. The compound cloud was putting so much shit into the air that the scanners were finding it hard to see through it with any sort of accuracy. It was like trying to look at something far away through a blizzard; you may get glimpses of it, but only through tiny gaps in the smothering snowfall. The compound cloud was - thanks to the new vents in the land - undeniably more dense here than it had been in the city.

The second option, one that an optimist would go with, was that the vault was fucking enormous - by far the largest that had ever been found - and the scan was simply picking up the edges of it. That meant that it was beneath the river at the bottom of the ravine.

But as she had already noted, that was what an optimist would think. Not a single person who knew Laura well would ever accuse her of being an optimist.

So, she was left with a choice, and neither option was a particularly good one. The first option was to make the thirty-mile trek back to the Meridian spaceport - a trek that was, literally, entirely uphill while wearing a full, heavy, and cumbersome atmospheric suit. That would take well over a day, would mean writing off the last three days as a loss and essentially starting again, either when she brought her ship closer to this site, hoping the scanners functioned better, or giving up and going home to come back another time with better equipment.

The second option was to find a way to make the climb down into the ravine and search the area no matter how ridiculously low the chances of finding anything would be. Optimistic or not, she could almost guarantee that her squadron commander would insist that she - or someone else - came back to search this area anyway, just in case. Plus, in that situation, she would have headed home empty-handed while her officers could possibly legitimately argue that she hadn't searched well enough.

When viewed like that, it wasn't much of a choice. "For fuck sake," she muttered to herself, picked up her pack, and headed west along the path of the river. She had spotted an uncompromised rocky outcropping about five kilometers downriver the day before, and if she were going to have to rappel down to the base of the ravine, then she would be damned if she was going to do it in a place that could get her killed. She simply didn't have the time, patience, or inclination to look for a better spot further east.

With the slightly brighter smudge in the brown sky setting behind her, she trudged onward toward her new goal.

********

Almark. 9

Pain is, generally speaking, relative. There are a lot of ways to mean that; there are the more obvious comparisons between, for example, a paper cut on your pinky and having your pinky cut the fuck off or between skinning your knee and having it crushed beneath the cockpit console of a crashed broadsword. But then there are the more subtle, nuanced comparisons. Emylee had struggled to comprehend the exact list of the things wrong with her - let alone their severity - even before she had passed out on the beach, and judging by the wave of nauseating agony that ripped through every inch of her body as awareness returned to her, she would have to guess at "a lot." But compared to the emotional and psychological turmoil running in circles around her mind, the physical pain was nothing.

There was no blissful moment before the memory came back, there was no gradual solidification of recollection, and there was no heartbreaking moment when it all came flooding back to her. Emylee had been in a fever dream of reliving the deaths of her squadron, over and over and over again, for the entire time she had been unconscious. It was flashbacks and fantastical last conversations, regrets of words not said and actions not taken; it was the frantic mental search for things she could have done differently while knowing that even if that search was successful, it was too late. There was no blissful escape into the void of unconsciousness for her. Her mind had not stopped working for however long she had been out for.

It had been torture.

A torture that was mercilessly and savagely continued, without a break, the moment that her eyes started to flutter open. The rhythmic beeping of the machine monitoring her vitals started to beep a little faster as the physical pain - which thankfully had been muted by her encounter with soporose - renounced itself with a vigor that quite literally left her breathless. The beeping rapidly grew in frequency, and after only a few more moments, alarms started to go off.

A few figures, all of them dressed in white, rushed over to her bed. "Okay, lovely," a gentle, reassuring woman's voice went a little way to calming Emylee. "Just breathe. I'm going to increase your pain medication, but I need you to try to breathe for me. Can you do that?"

If she was being honest, she wasn't sure. Breathing involved moving the muscles that controlled her lungs, which, in turn, would move her ribs, and those little bastards felt like someone had dropped a hover truck on them. But still, through a blinding pain which - she imagined - would make childbirth seem like a happy memory, she sucked in a groaned, agonizing breath... and it was only a groan because a scream of excruciating torment was just simply beyond her at that moment.

Somewhere in the hazy part of her mind, the part not overwhelmed by the flood of pain racing through it from every angle - internal, external, physical, emotional, and psychological - she felt the hypospray being pressed against the jugular vein in her neck, and the slightly cold sensation of some form of drugs being injected into her circulatory system. Less than a minute later, that same hazy part of her mind sang every praise of every mad genius who had ever played a part in the development of pain-management medication when the searing, blinding agony started to fade.

Or at least the physical pain did. Those mad geniuses had developed nothing injectable to help her combat the anguish still flooding through her memories. Tears of all descriptions started to flow down her face, forced from her eyes by a hundred different sources. She wanted to curl up and let the hole in her heart swallow her whole. She wanted to sob uncontrollably, she wanted to scream in rage at the fates and the men who had caused this to happen... she wanted to join her fallen wing. She wanted the darkness, she needed the oblivion and to succumb to the agony that had been caused on her watch.

She wanted to burn the Imperium to the ground and piss on the ashes.

The shock had worn off now; she was no longer feeling blindsided by the revelations that had hit her hard and fast during the battle; she understood what had happened. Maybe not the details, and certainly not the reasons behind their betrayal, but she understood that it had happened, and every one of the faces of her friends - their final moments seared forever onto her retina and into her mind - haunted her with demands for justice.

A low, deep growl rumbled from her chest, and the alarm on the machine started sounding again.

"I'm not going to pretend to know what you are going through," the soft voice said again. "But try to relax. You are safe, I promise."

Emylee's eyes snapped to the side, ready to bite the head off whoever had the gall to tell her to calm down, but the woman filling her vision caused her to pause. She was young, very young, probably in her early twenties at the absolute most. But more than that, there was something about the way she was looking at her. She was clearly in the rebel hospital, meaning that the woman was a rebel doctor, or nurse, or something, so Emylee half expected to see some hostility or disdain in her eyes, but there was none. Instead, they were filled with compassionate sympathy. Almark's anger petered out, and she tried to relax her body, focusing for the moment on simply breathing.

"How long?" she finally asked.

"The battle was two days ago," the nurse replied. "You've been through quite the ordeal, lovely."

"The others? Are they okay?" The medic frowned in confusion and tilted her head. "The people I was captured with, there were three others."

"Oh, I'm sorry, let me check for you." the woman nodded. She stood and moved to a console to the side of the bed, looking down at the holo-screen as she typed in her search queries. "Sergeant Steve Taylor and Private Dylan McCaffery are both fine. They are being held in a different part of the base, but I can ask if one of them can be brought to see you, maybe tomorrow, once you have had time to rest. Were they part of your unit?"

Emylee shook her head, a movement she instantly regretted. "No, I was a pilot; my whole wing is gone. Stevo and Mac..." she deduced who they were from their less than imaginative nicknames, "... they pulled me out of my fighter after I crashed." She frowned as she realized a name was missing. "What about Angel?"

The nurse turned back to the console. "Corporal Angel Vasquez..." the nurse winced. "She was wounded during her capture. She's here; she's a few rooms over, but she is still in an induced coma after her surgery."

"Wounded?!? How? We had surrendered!"

The nurse shook her head. "I'm sorry, I don't know. All I have are the lists."

"Is... is she okay?"

The nurse looked back at the screen. "Her wounds were very serious, but it looks like she is going to pull through." she nodded.

Emylee sighed in relief. There was something about Angel she had liked, something about the way she held herself, the way she spoke, and the respect that everyone around her seemed to hold for the Latina. She had seemed genuinely nice. Emylee sucked in a deep, steeling breath and turned her head to face the younger woman. "So come on then, let's have it. How fucked am I?"

The muscles on the side of the medic's face flexed a little as she took a breath of her own and turned to face her. "Straight to the point, I can respect that," she nodded. "I won't lie to you; you were in a very bad way. We didn't know what had happened to you to cause your injuries, but being in a powerful impact like a crash would explain them." Emylee nodded silently to indicate that the medical team's guess had been spot on. "You had four badly broken ribs; one of them had pierced your liver, another had lacerated your spleen, and both caused some pretty nasty internal bleeding. But it was your legs that were the real danger."

Both of them looked down at the outline of her legs beneath the hospital bed sheet.

"Crush injuries can be extremely dangerous," the medic went on. "When the bottoms of your legs were cut off from your blood supply, they started to basically die, releasing toxins into the blood trapped below the crush. When that crush was released - when you were pulled out of the wreckage - those toxins raced back to your heart and then to all of your other internal organs. Usually, that is enough to send you into shock, and death occurs within minutes."

"But, we were on the beach for hours."

"Yes, you were... in the cold," the nurse added. "You were also suffering from hypothermia. But that temperature drop forced your body to prioritize blood away from your extremities, which means that the blood wasn't picking up as many new toxins from your damaged legs. More than that, someone tied a tourniquet around each of your legs, very tightly and in exactly the right position."

"Mac..." Emylee nodded, her mind drifting back to the gentle giant who had kept her hydrated while the others stood guard.

"Well, Mac saved your life. You are a bonafide medical miracle. You should be dead. Those tourniquets delayed the onset of shock long enough for us to get you here before it was too late. But I'll be honest with you, it was close."

Emylee let out a quivering breath. Through all the thoughts of betrayal and loss, she hadn't really considered how close she had come to losing her own life. "So, what now?"

"Now, you need to give yourself time to heal. You had some pretty serious emergency surgery to repair the damage to your organs and to stop the internal bleeding, and your ribs have been reset. I imagine that's pretty painful, and moving around isn't going to be pleasant for at least a few weeks."

"What about my legs?"

"The toxins were flushed from your system; bone and muscle regeneration therapy have healed most of the damage, so you get to keep them for now," the nurse said with a smile. "But you are going to be off your feet for a while, and it's a long road ahead if you want to regain the same use of them that you had. But we'll keep you dosed up with all the good drugs while you get there."

Emylee nodded. "Thank you... I'm sorry, I didn't ask your name."

"It's Dr Evans, but everyone calls me Amy," Emylee frowned. "I know, you think I look too young to be a doctor," she winked with a grin. "Being with the rebels comes with a lot of benefits if you can overlook being bombed occasionally."

Emylee snorted out a laugh, winced in pain, coughed, winced again, and then groaned. Dr Evans looked at her sympathetically and reached over to the console she was attached to. "Let me up your meds a little so you can get some sleep."

Emylee was about to object, to say that she had been asleep for days and didn't need any more, but the young doctor was right. Just being awake and having this conversation - not to mention all the pain and anguish running through her body and through her mind - had taken it out of her. She was exhausted. The world was already starting to fade as she nodded her head and whispered her murmured thanks.

She was already asleep before she heard the doctor's maternal and gentle reply.

********

Stevo 18.

"By now, each of you has been told what happened," Captain West announced to the crowd of Marines gathered in what looked to be an old mess hall. He was leaning against one of the walls, watching from the side as the other inhabitants of his cell sat on chairs beside him. The other half of the room was filled with the men and women who had been hurt in the assault, and Stevo couldn't help but let his eyes wander over their various states of woundedness. A fairly large proportion of them were in wheelchairs, a few of them missing legs that had doubtlessly been blown off during the artillery strike, others just having them plastered and in traction. Lots more were on crutches, and he spotted the stoic-looking Ryan among them. The young Marine gave his sergeant a quick nod before turning his attention back to the Captain. There were also a lot of them with arms in plaster, held in slings hanging from their neck, or Marines with bandages over laser-shot wounds or wrapped around their heads. One poor woman seemed to have been blinded and was letting her head roll to the direction of the voice, her vacant eyes covered beneath the white-wrapped bandages. "I am here now to give you your options. But first, I want to introduce you to the base CO, General Cornelius Crow."

An older man looking to be in his late fifties strode out of one of the side doors and joined the beautiful captain at the front of the room.

To Stevo's surprise, or perhaps maybe not considering the reverence he had shown toward the captain the day before, every Marine who was able pulled themselves to his feet and snapped to attention. A few of them even flashed respectful, if automatic, salutes.

The General looked over the crowd. Stevo had never seen the man before this moment, yet even to him, the officer looked like he hadn't slept in days. His eyes lingered sadly on the wounded Marines to the right-hand side of the room. "As you were, Marines."

He waited for everyone to take their seats again. "I wish I could have met all of you under better circumstances," he said, making a conscious effort to stand taller. "What happened on the beach was a travesty and an unnecessary one at that. There has been enough bullshit and deceit in the last few weeks to last all of us a lifetime, so I'll cut straight to the point. The Imperium sent you to their deaths so they could justify a major escalation of their war with us, a war that they have been keeping from the people of the Imperium and even from most of their armed forces. They leaked your comm frequencies to us, along with your shield and power shut-off codes, and dared us to use them or be slaughtered in the assault, after which they would do the same thing in their next attack. For what little it is worth, I am truly sorry that it had to be you and that your men paid the price for the Emperor's betrayal," he paused to let the ripple of murmurs die down. "Each and every fallen Marine has been given a burial with full military honors, and a service will be held later today at the grave site for any of you who want to attend."

"Under normal circumstances," he went on, "I would be able to afford you the time and the respect to process these events in your own ways, but, unfortunately, that isn't an option." He stepped to the side and nodded to the Captain, who, in turn, tapped a few buttons on her wrist-mounted interface. A large holo-projection flickered into existence along the entirety of the back wall, and the familiar face of Imperial News Network's main anchor, Jeremy Freeman, stared back at them.

"A few days ago, we brought you the terrible news that the 381st Marine Division had been wiped out to a man while on training exercises on Garros II by rebels, cowardly using a weapon of mass destruction instead of facing them like men. News from the Ministry of Defence today confirmed that all fifteen thousand members of the Division were lost. A relief convoy sent to Garros II found no sign of rebels and was unable to recover the bodies of any of the Marines. The Minister of Defence had this to say on the steps of the Imperial Council Chamber in the Capital."

The picture faded to the beady and shrew-like face of Isagora Doukas. Stevo had never liked Doukas, he couldn't say why, not with any certainty, but there was something about the way the man held himself that seemed to clash violently with Stevo's Marine sense of honor. This was a man with no code. There was something about his eyes that told him that, but he stayed quiet and watched with everyone else as Doukas started talking.

"In response to this act of unparalleled aggression, carried out by criminals and traitors against the honorable men of the 381st Marine Division, the Emperor has issued an edict now brandishing this foolish and dangerous movement as an enemy of the state. Three task forces are to be assembled, then sent to find any rebel planetary or space facilities... and destroy them. The time for mercy and good faith negotiations is over; the rebels have ignored every attempt made to address any grievances they have and have instead chosen to start this conflict with an act of unimaginable barbarism. There is to be no amnesty for any member of this criminal organization, nor for anyone within the Imperium found to be aiding them. A full list of new security measures will come into place at midnight tonight, Imperial time, and can be found on the government's holo-net portal. That is all for now."

The holo screen shut off, and the General turned back to face the Marines in the room. "You know as well as I do that their story is a lie, but the part about the task forces was a lie as well. They were being assembled before you even left Spacedock. They obviously know we're here, and according to our sources, they will arrive in a little over a week. That means we can't be here when they do. For us, that is simple: we pack up and leave. For many of you, there is nothing simple about it. If you wish to stay behind, to rejoin the Imperium, after everything they have done, and knowing that your being alive is proof of their deception - and the potential danger that comes with that - then nobody here will stand in your way. You are free to leave at any point before we load onto the ships. If you want to come with us and be dropped off on some outer ring planet to live out your days keeping yourselves hidden from the Imperium, that is fine too; arrangements will be made."

He paused, his tongue slipping out of his mouth to wet his lips. "But I know there are people in this room who fully grasp the betrayal that has happened here, I know they won't cast aside the loss of their brothers and sisters so easily. To you, I say this. There is a place for you in the rebellion. No matter if you are wounded or not, I will get you the justice you seek, or I will die trying, and you are more than welcome to join us. But that is a decision that can only come from each of you."

Silence fell on the room as Marines looked contemplatively at each other or lost in thought at the floor. "What about the more seriously wounded, the ones who aren't here now?" Stevo stood himself up straight and away from the wall.

The General turned to face him. "That's a good question, Sergeant, and thank you for asking it. Membership of the rebellion is, and has to be, an informed decision. There are several Marines still in a serious enough condition to have not regained consciousness yet; there are many more who are conscious but not well enough to be transported here. The latter of that group have each been given a holo-terminal that is presenting this meeting to them in their beds, and they are each being given the same choice as you. The former, however - the ones still unconscious - are going to have to be taken with us. We cannot leave them here without care; most of them wouldn't survive. But we also can't assume their consent either. So we will continue their care and present them with the second two of those three choices when they recover."

Stevo nodded, it was the answer he expected, but having a squad member in that group of people yet to regain consciousness, he wanted to be sure. "Thank you, General," he nodded.

"I would like to speak," A voice came from behind Stevo, from the doorway that led into the corridor from which he and his cellmates had entered. Every man in the room spun around to see who owned the familiar-sounding voice.

Colonel Michaels had seen better days. Having been in one of the tanks on the beach, Stevo had assumed that Michaels had been killed during the initial bombardment, but astonishingly, he seemed to have survived, if only barely. Sitting in a wheelchair, the Colonel's face was a patchwork of bruises and cuts, one of his eyes was partially bloodshot, both of his hands were wrapped in bandages, and one of his legs was missing from below the knee. Still though, despite being sitting and in such a clearly wounded state, the man still cut an impressive figure.

"Colonel Michaels," General Crow nodded a respectful bow. "I'm glad to see you have recovered. Please, speak freely."

The colonel was wheeled to the center of the room. Reaching to the side, the Colonel pulled a crutch from its holder attached to the side of his chair and drove the rubber end of it into the ground with a thud that echoed around the room.

Then, with a herculean show of strength and willpower, the one-legged Andre Michaels pulled himself out of his chair and, with the help of the crutch, up onto his feet... or foot.

He looked around the room. "I want to make something very clear to every Marine who can hear my voice!" he bellowed loudly. "We were betrayed. Fifteen thousand of your brothers and sisters are dead... Fifteen. Thousand. Of them... were lied to, disarmed in every meaningful way, and sent to be slaughtered by the very people we were sworn to serve! You already know that. What you may not know is that the pilots of our air support and the dropships we landed on were executed - to a man - when they returned to the carriers. I have heard the blocked transmissions myself. If there is any man or woman who thinks they can return to the Imperium, knowing what you know, and expect to be allowed off this planet alive, then you are a fool! There is no way the Emperor will allow the truth about what happened here to get out! If you don't want to fight, I understand. So much has been lost, and so many of our brothers and sisters are gone. There is no dishonor in living out the rest of your lives in peace, in their name. For what it is worth, though, I have chosen to join the rebellion and do what I can to avenge our fallen, and I would be honored to have any one of you fight by my side."

"As would I," the General nodded respectfully.

"As would I," the man pushing the wheelchair said loudly as the Colonel dropped back into it. Stevo, like every other Marine in the room, had been so transfixed by the Colonel's appearance that he hadn't paid any attention to the man pushing his wheelchair.

"Admiral Valdek," a series of hushed whispers floated around the room. "He's alive."

The murmurs of quiet conversation quickly filled the mess as the Colonel and Admiral Valdek joined the General at the front, falling into conversation. Stevo watched them quietly, only to find his own eyes drawn to Captain West... who happened, at that moment, to be looking right back at him. If he didn't know any better, he would say she blushed a little, but he offered her a small, respectful nod just in time to be interrupted by Mac.

"So that's what ya were talking to tha pretty Captain aboot then," he smirked at his Sergeant through his thick Scottish accent. "Are ya for the fightin', or nae?"

"Sorry, Mac. I can't tell you," Stevo answered. "This has to be a decision you make on your own."

"Aw, C'mon, Not even a clue?" the mountain of a man grinned at him.

Stevo turned to face him properly. "Dylan, what do you want to do?"

Mac allowed the smile on his face to fade away before he took a deep breath. "Honestly, I wanna find the Emperor and that Doukas wanka, and put their heads on pikes, then shit down their throats!"

Stevo nodded with a pat on his shoulder. "Then that is what you should do,"

"Aye, but will I be doing it without ya?"

"No... you won't," Stevo said quietly, "but you keep that shit to yourself until the others have made that decision for themselves. That includes Ryan and Angel when she wakes up."

Mac barked out a laugh. "Angel? Ya'd have to hold that girl back. She is gonna be fuckin' furious when she hears how high this all went." He turned and shouted at the top of his considerable-sized lungs into the room, "Fuck tha Emperor. They wanna war, We'll fuckn' give it to 'em! I stand with tha Colonel!"

A cheer from almost every other Marine in the room roared defiantly back in reply, including every one of the thirty people from the beach and from Ryan on the other side of the room. Stevo smiled to himself and let his eyes wander back to the flaming-haired Captain at the front. She seemed to be involved in the conversation between the three commanding officers, nodding away as she spoke. He could have tuned the crowds out, allowing him to listen in, and for a moment, he was tempted. But something stopped him. He knew almost nothing about her. He didn't know what sort of officer she was or how she had worked her way up the ranks, but at the same time, she was only a Captain and was commanding a conversation with a Colonel, a General, and an Admiral. People seemed to defer to her; they respected her, and they followed her. She was a leader.

And that was the sort of person Stevo could admire, even follow himself.

But god fucking damn, it was hard not to be distracted by the way she looked at him.

********

Laura 3.

One thing that being an exclusively space-dwelling society left you totally unprepared for was heights. It probably would have sounded like an odd statement to make to someone born and raised on a planet, considering a Mariner spent their lives dozens of miles above it and occasionally descended toward one in what was essentially a controlled fall. But that wasn't how it worked. Space had no concept of "down;" there was just movement in a different direction, and without "down," there could be no "how far down," let alone a "holy fucking shit, that is a really long way down!" Even the descent from orbit wasn't really a descent to a Mariner. It was just entering an atmosphere, and it felt no different to them than any other maneuver because they were doing it in a ship with a consistent pull of gravity from the deck plates. That lurching feeling you get when you are about to fall... it just didn't happen on a ship. There wasn't even a sense of tilting.

It was a subtle distinction but a profound one. To a Mariner, gravity was just another adjustable condition on a ship. It was a tool. It could be increased or lowered according to comfort, and it could even be turned off completely to aid with the movement of heavy equipment. There was never a point in a Mariner's existence, unlike people living on a planet where they were standing atop a tall place with nothing to stop them from falling and having to deal with the fact that, in a lot of cases, gravity was not their friend!

Planet-dwelling people dealt with that all the time, so much so that it had become instinctive. For any of them who doubted it, just ask them to stand on the viewing deck of a skyscraper and climb onto the edge. Watch how fast they would find something to hold on to. To them, that was the natural way to act. They knew, with every fiber of their being, that gravity would be perfectly happy to pull them violently back to the ground and kill them. Yes, obviously, a Mariner knew this too, but for them, having spent generations living an existence where the height you could fall was always limited by the height of the bulkhead above you, was rarely fatal and usually never any more serious than falling down a flight of stairs. That instinctive "oh shit" moment just didn't happen for them on an often enough basis for it to become part of their nature.

So when it did happen, it was a hell of a shock to the system.

It was about seventy meters to the bottom of the ravine, but to Laura, that was no different than seventy miles. She had never been this high up before, and on the few occasions where she could have said to have come close, she had not been expected to climb down it. She had done the holo-simulations, of course; that is how she had learned to rock-climb in the first place. But during those simulations, she had been instinctively aware that the deck plates, as disguised as they may have been, were only a few feet below her. If she fell, as she often did during those practices, there was no risk of harm. That was absolutely not the case now, and that "Oh shit" moment had hit hard!

Lying on her stomach so she could look out over the precipice, she was confronted with the startling reality that to complete her mission, she would need to climb down that and then - somehow, even more dauntingly - climb back out again

Well, that idea could fuck the fuck off! It could keep fucking off until it got somewhere else, and when it got there, she hoped someone would be kind enough to tell it to fuck off from there too. People could keep telling it to fuck off until the idea could get all the way back to her, just so she could tell it to fuck off again!

She went back and got her ship.

It took the whole god-damned day. It was long, it was hard, her suit was stifling and claustrophobic, it smelled in ways that a Mariner had to deal with even less regularly than gravity, and the entire fucking trek was uphill.... Although she will admit that she smiled a little when she found the remains of three partially vaporized people and a few bags of... stuff... outside her ship when she finally got there. Proof that people were still as predictable as always and, more importantly, her security systems still worked.

She dragged the bags into the cargo hold for later, locked the ship back up again, and went to bed.

By the time the sun had come back up, she was circling her ship around her target location and was spending a few more blissful and well-deserved minutes out of that fucking suit. The suit itself, incidentally, had been in the decontamination chamber since she had woken up.

Landing a ship of any size in the narrow confines of a place like a ravine was always a risky proposition, especially with a ship the size of hers. It wasn't necessarily a risk of hitting the sides - although for a lesser pilot, that would certainly be a consideration - the ravine was easily two hundred meters wide, and although the Seren was almost exactly one-hundred meters long, it was only twenty meters wide. Simply orienting it to face along the course of the river was more than enough to give her adequate room to land. The problem came from the thrusters.

Each time she feathered the flight stick, even for a course correction of a few degrees or a handful of inches, the relevant thrusters fired along her hull. Each one of those thrusters produced more jet wash than an ancient earth scram-jet engine, and that, in turn, caused massive localized air currents. Landing out in the open was fine; those currents dissipated pretty quickly, but landing in a confined space like this was the opposite. The wind blasts hit the walls of the ravine and then bounced back to buffet her ship, making her need to apply more force to the thrusters to hold her steady. Most dangerously, however, was the fact that every single Newton-meter of that wind force was being smashed into a ravine face that was already dangerously unstable. The slightest movement could cause a massive section to collapse. If she was lucky, that would only make digging into the vault harder... if she wasn't, a collapsing ravine face could bury the Seren along with it.

"Easy... Easy. Stay the fuck where you are, planet!" she murmured to nobody in particular. "Nothing to see here!" Jesus, what she wouldn't give for a good set of anti-gravity field emitters right now. She could drop like a stone and stop her ship from hitting the surface with little more than a gentle breeze. She could...

She blinked, then looked down at the scanners.

"Oh, for fuck sake!" She cut her engines, all of them, and put her shields up to maximum. The Seren was left to the tender mercies of the planet's gravity and dropped the last fifty meters. She clamped her hands onto the armrests, pressed her shoulder into her flight seat, and braced for impact.

The water from the river exploded in every direction as it was violently and suddenly displaced by a thousand tonnes of starship landing on it. But being a hundred meters from the ravine face in either direction and with a fairly strong current, the force of the wave was washed away and dissipated by the river itself before making much of an impact on the banks, and her shields happily and easily absorbed the impact. She would have saved herself a fair bit of trouble by checking the depth of the river earlier. At an eighth of a kilometer wide, with a strong current, and after the gouging out of its bed by the tsunami and receding flood waters, the river was more than deep enough not to worry about hitting the bottom of it. Getting out would be easy. Gun the engines and shoot out there as fast as her thrust could carry her; she couldn't care less if the ravine collapsed from the jet wash then, she would already be out of it.

Reactivating the thrusters just enough to lift the keel of the Seren out of the water and arrest its own reaction to the river's current, she then set the engines to hold it in place in the air, effectively hovering it above the fast-flowing water.

With a deep sigh, she unsnapped her safety harness and climbed out of the seat before heading back to the airlock to retrieve that god-awful suit.

Ten minutes later she was ready to go, suit on, pack on her back, and stepping into the airlock. Ships in space never really come completely alongside each other. It's not that it was physically impossible to attach two ships together directly by their airlocks; it was just that it was generally incredibly dangerous, and it was rarely, if ever, necessary. Every airlock on every ship she had ever heard of had a docking collar. This was an extendable, enclosed, airtight, and semi-flexible gangway that could stretch from one ship across the vacuum of space to join it to another. Or, in this case, reach out over the rapidly flowing waters of the river beneath her and onto the cliff face.

She was not thrilled by the idea of getting any more of that compound into her airlock - that shit was clearly dangerous - but considering she had already left the ship and then returned to it once already, it was probably a bit late to be worrying about that, but sighing anyway, she opened the airlock's hatch and stepped back out onto the planet.

Kicking her toes into the brown, dust-covered ground, she adjusted her pack on her shoulder, then rechecked her scanners. The ship had, in the very short time it was in the river, actually been washed about half a mile downstream, but the elevation reading was showing only a twenty meter difference between her current position and the nearest of those three vault readings.

The scene of utter devastation left behind by something like a tsunami was difficult to put into words without having seen it before, and it was even more difficult to anticipate if you were expected to walk through it. It was a big river, in terms of width, depth, and the speed of the current; it was not a body of water to be trifled with. The fact that it had carved this ravine into the landscape was proof enough of that. But as with many cases of natural erosion, it had been given some help. Wind and gravity had helped make the canyon wider at the top than it was at the bottom; all of that mass had fallen to the bottom of the ravine and formed fairly broad banks on each side of the river. But whereas the river itself was wide and fast-moving, it was relatively calm looking; it was serene even. It was totally at odds with the debris and wreckage deposited onto the banks by the tsunami and the receding flood waters, the river banks providing an apparently perfect spot for all that wreckage - the chucks of masonry from shattered buildings, wrecked hover cars, people's possessions, the remains of uprooted trees, the piles of earth that had recently collapsed from the ravine itself, even large parts of that washed away town - to end up. The hour spent traveling that half a mile was less about walking and more about climbing over, through, and around the broken remains of civilization that had been dumped here.

Finally, though, after countless times wondering why she hadn't simply backed her ship up a few hundred meters to bypass all of that unnecessarily expended effort, her computer beeped at her, alerting her to the fact that she was directly above one of those readings. She dumped her pack at her feet and took proper stock of her immediate surroundings.

A frown instantly appeared on her face.

There was a near-perfect circular break - for lack of a better term - in the carnage that had been dumped onto this part of the river. The wreckage and debris that littered both banks of the river literally just stopped, skipped about a hundred meters, and then started again. She could see the curvature of it with nothing more than a glance, and now she was looking more carefully; she could even make out little chunks of rock pressed against the wall of the ravine - rocks that at first glance may look like they were half buried within the wall itself - that were actually loose, just being held in place by some invisible source. And yet, according to her sensors, there was nothing there.

No energy readings,

No harmonic fluctuations,

Not even a break in the airflow over the area.

There was nothing, at least nothing that was detectable by the highly advanced sensors on her ship. Annoyingly, she hadn't looked over the edge of the canyon from the destroyed town directly above her - and looking at the walls of the ravine she would have been relying on to support her weight had she tried, she was happy she had noped out of that idea - but that aerial view of this location would have been able to give her a much better view of what she was dealing with.

Her mind was already working, though. Hypothesis and theories bubbling up, building higher, and then burning away as new ones grew to fill in the flaws of the ones that preceded them. The wreckage, the debris, the stuff carried along by the wave, would have been carried through this ravine at force, significantly more force than above the ravine. Enormous volumes of fast-moving water pressed into a confined space created pressure, a shit load of it. These chunks of broken buildings and the stalks of trees half the length of her ship would have been traveling along this canyon at hundreds of miles per hour. Fast speed meant more kinetic energy... and what was designed to suddenly absorb huge amounts of kinetic energy while letting slower, less energetic, safer matter - like her, for example, or the comparatively slow-moving water - pass through it?

"It's a shield," she murmured in wonder to herself. Her frown only deepened. If it was a shield, why weren't her sensors picking it up? And how the fuck was it being powered? If this really was an ancient vault of some description - and the readings she was getting certainly suggested it was - then it had been sitting here, buried, for countless millennia. How the fuck was the power still on for those shields to be active?

More importantly, if the power was still active, the power generation system that fed it must be, too. Decades of research on the Primis had been stymied by an inability to activate the ship's power; systems that were right there, under their fingertips, were still infuriatingly out of reach. If the power system in whatever was beneath her was still functional, it could give them everything they needed to know to send those research efforts through the bulkheads.

Suddenly, the extra effort was looking like it may start to pay off.

Heh. Maybe there was more optimist in her than she had thought.

The question, however, assuming that it was a shield, was why her sensors were only picking up three points of contact with the ancient material. Clearly, the shield itself was formed from a form of energy that the sensors couldn't detect. That would explain why they couldn't see the shield itself, and if they couldn't see the shield, then they couldn't see what was beneath it. Except they could. At three different points. One of which was only a few meters below her feet.

Speculation, as her father had taught her, was an unwinnable sport. If she wanted answers, she would need to go get them. And right now, after coming so far, and finally being in range of something that could truly be worth something meaningful, she really fucking wanted answers.

********

Harmonic laser tunneling was a slow, painstaking, and meticulous process. There were probably miners and archeologists all over inhabited space who would vehemently disagree with that, considering the alternative was digging by hand, but it was slow to her.

It was, essentially, an automated process by which a scanner drone the size of a standard Earth soccer ball was allowed to scan the composite ground in an area, determine the ideal path of mining - based on the user's target destination - and then automatically deploy its mining lasers to carve a tunnel toward it. Where objects, such as large, structurally essential rocks, could be avoided, the drone would tunnel around them, in cases where the ground was too weak to support mining without collapse, portable force shield emitters were deployed to bear the load, and the tunnel was only ever big enough for a single person to traverse while crawling, assuming that person was okay with small spaces and not in much of a hurry.

The point of it was to allow someone like Laura to gain access to underground positions, it was in no way suitable for mining or for excavating ruins. It was useless for digging out large quantities of rock, and it would, in no way, facilitate the amount of equipment that could potentially need to be removed from the vault if it was still functional. Besides, those shield emitters were good for a few days, maybe a week, but couldn't hold forever. Laser tunneling was a temporary measure that would allow her to reach the closest of those three points, and that was it. What happened when she got there was entirely down to her.

It took a little over six hours for the tunneling probe to do its thing, and the sun's light, what little there was of it through the cloud, was already beginning to fade. Considering the cloud blotted out a huge amount of that light to start with, it was as close to dusk as mattered - regardless of the time of day - by the time her computer told her that the probe had reached its destination. But tunnels were already dark. She could have been entering when the sun was at its apex in the sky, on a planet with a perfectly clear sky, and it still would have been pitch black in that tunnel, so there was no reason to let something like nighttime dissuade her from entering immediately; it would have been dark in there regardless, and those six hours had done nothing to calm her sense of building anticipation.

Dropping down to her hands and knees, she took a deep breath, secured her scanners, her tools, and her sidearm on her belt, and crawled into the opening.

The tunneling probe would find its own path from A to B, but it would take some rather obvious things into account while doing it. The most obvious was the fact tunneling straight down was not really an option. There had to be an incline, of course, but it had to be one navigable by a normal human without the use of climbing gear. In this case, that descending, twisting, and turning path was well over fifty meters long, and on your hands and knees, in the dark, with the walls pressing in around you, that was a pretty long way. Twenty meters on a fairly shallow gradient, a ninety-degree turn to the left, another twenty meters, albeit on a steeper downward slope and curving around various geological obstructions the probe decided to avoid, and then, finally, another left turn and another 10 meters, with the last of them leveling out to something close to a flat plane... and suddenly out into a vast, subterranean cavern.

Vast wasn't the word. The cavern was enormous. Stretching out into the darkness in all directions, only the floor, the ceiling, and the wall through which she had just entered were clear to her in the dull glow of her lantern. Even turning her light source to its highest possible, almost blinding setting, the shadows swallowed the illumination long before it defined the other walls in this huge cave. It wasn't the ceiling that held her attention, though, even though it was laced with an invisible force stopping the water flood through small cracks in the roof and holding back the river directly above... it was what was below it.

Half buried in the floor of the cavern, still looking in remarkably, impossibly good condition, considering the length of time it had been down here, was something that her young mind had committed to memory dozens and dozens of times over. It was the Primis. Or at least another ship of the same mammoth classification, and only the top few decks at that. But there was no mistaking it. The outline, the contours, the shape of it was so unique and so distinctive as to be immediately recognized by eyes who had wandered over those curves more times than could be counted.

And directly in front of her, at the point that her scanners were saying an ancient alien compound was present... was an open hatchway.

********

Crow. 3

Nodding goodbye to Michaels and Valdek, he watched the slightly younger man wheel the elder back into his room. Michaels' display before his men had been nothing short of inspiring, and coupled with that Scoittish-sounding warcry, he was now a little more confident that the surviving Marines would join their cause. But his display had exhausted him. Michaels, whether his soldier's pride was willing to admit it or not, had taken one hell of a beating during the battle, and he needed time to rest. Crow hoped that now his men had seen him, and he had given something to rally behind, that he would take the advice of the doctors and actually rest. He doubted it, but one could hope.

Valdek, the younger-looking of the two men - although he had no idea if he was actually younger - had been heartbroken and horrified to learn that it had been his oldest friend's division selected to attack the beach. He hadn't been able to stay in the command center for the invasion, and part of the reason Crow had been so hesitant to order the lethal bombardment was that there was no way to guarantee Michaels wouldn't be killed in it, and thereby alienating one of the rebellion's most gifted naval tacticians.

Of course, he didn't think for a moment that it wasn't intentional. He could only stop and admire the sheer scale of the Emperor's brilliance when it came to manipulative maneuvers like that. "Take the information we give you and win, ignore it, and be slaughtered, but if you do take it, the turncoat admiral's closest friend would almost certainly be killed in the process, thereby rendering the boon you gained from his joining your cause entirely moot". There was a certain malevolent genius behind those tactics, and even though he would never admit it, it scared Crow more than almost anything else. It was pure luck that Michaels hadn't been killed on the beach; the rebels had come terrifyingly close to walking straight into the Emperor's trap, even knowing it was there.

A worried frown had furrowed his brow as these thoughts rattled around the aging General's head while he was walking on autopilot beside the wonderfully capable captain.

Her smaller hand slipped into his and gave him a soft squeeze. Crow turned his head, noting the worried expression on her face, and answered it with a soft smile of her own. God, she was beautiful; she had always been beautiful.

So much like her mother.

"You okay there, old man?" she asked quietly, careful not to be overheard, even in the deserted hallway that led toward his office. Her hand was back out of his in only a few moments, but it had been a deeply appreciated gesture. Crow felt like the weight of the galaxy was resting firmly on his shoulders, and perhaps it was, but small moments like that reminded him what he was fighting for.

He nodded in response to her question but didn't say anything else as the Captain strode along next to him. Finally, they reached his office, and he opened the door to let her enter before he followed and closed the door behind them. Silvia was already pulling up a seat and settling down into it by the time Crow had rounded the desk and sat into his own chair. "How are you doing, Silly?" he asked with a contented sigh as the load was lifted from the soles of his feet and smiled at the nickname he knew she always outwardly hated. Of course, she would hate it if he stopped calling that even more; he knew it, she knew it, and she knew he knew it, but neither said a word about it.

"Doing pretty good, Dad," His daughter smiled back as she relaxed into her chair and crossed one of her long legs over the other while she absently fluffed her hair with one of her hands. "I think that went pretty well." She finished, nodding her head in the general direction that the mess hall would be in, give or take a few dozen walls.

Cornelius nodded, his hands coming up to loosen the top button of his formal military jacket. "So tell me about this Sergeant." He asked as he pulled two empty tumblers from his desk's top drawer and then a bottle of scotch from the second, keeping almost all of his concentration on her as he poured a few fingers' worth of the rich amber nectar into each glass.

It was subtle, and it was over as quickly as it had begun; it was a reaction he absolutely expected, having already seen it in the mess hall, but still would have missed it if he hadn't been paying such close attention. The slight flush of her cheeks, the dilating of her eyes, the soft, almost imperceptible intake of breath, and the faintest tug of a smile onto her lips. "He is on board," she nodded, smiling as she accepted the proffered glass. "I mean, you saw the footage from the beach; he's exactly the kind of soldier we're looking for. He was, by far, the most advanced of the Marines before the artillery hit, and when he was retreating, he fought his way through the clones like they were nothing."

"A good fighter then?"

Silvia let out a huffed laugh. "Put it this way, he's not someone I would have liked to have been up against."

Crow's eyebrow raised itself at that. It was high praise indeed. Silvia West - irrespective of paternal pride - was one of the most capable soldiers he had ever trained, and what inordinately little she lacked in combat skill, she more than made up for with tactical awareness and leadership ability. "Go through it with me," he sipped from his glass, his lips tightening over his teeth as the burn worked its way down his throat.

"It was instant, Dad." she started. "I mean, I'm quick, but I'm not that quick. As soon as his feet hit the sand, he was assessing. He made it to cover, lost one man KIA and one wounded in the process, but didn't crumble like a lot of the others..." he saw the slight flicker of regret in her eyes at that part, the same one he had been feeling so acutely since the event. "...he was looking. Straight away, he was looking. He spotted the cliffs immediately, and you can almost see him processing, wondering why we weren't using them to flank him. Even after his men were hit, he kept his cool. He rallied them and then advanced. Jesus, it was brutal, but it wasn't cruel. He did what he needed to do to achieve his objective without gloating over killing the clones. He came up with a strategy on the fly and executed it without any input from Command. In fact, the only two times he heard from his superiors actually slowed him down. One time was to bail out his own Captain, who managed to walk three squads into a crossfire, and the other was when Michaels ordered him to hold position for backup just before the ping. If it wasn't for those two, he may have even made it off the beach. But then..." she winced.

"The artillery hit." Crow nodded. He had seen enough of those recordings to know the carnage he had unleashed on those men and women.

"That... That was hard to watch." she nodded softly. "They were like family to him, Dad, and we killed them. It was the closest I saw him come to breaking."

"No," Crow shook his head. "I killed them."

Her eyes softened as she looked at him. She was perhaps the only person who knew how much of a toll that decision had taken on the aging officer. "You didn't have a choice, Dad."

"I know, I just..." he sighed. "It's okay. So how did he recover?"

"He didn't really. His squad rallied around him, the two surviving members, anyway." she looked lost in thought as she spoke. "I didn't watch many of the recordings, and all the ones I did watch showed Marines losing friends, but there was something about the way they were with him. It was like..." she frowned. "I don't know how to say it. It was like they would have ignored him if he ordered them to leave him there."

"So he's a leader?" Crow tilted his head a little as he kept his eyes on her.

"Yeah, he is... as opposed to just their sergeant. People respond to him, even after the beach." Her eyes were still fixed on some invisible spot on the desk and that smile had pulled a little more at the corner of her lips. "He calmed the marines in the cell; he seemed to be the only one who arrived, having worked out exactly what had happened. And then he went back out again to convince the last group to surrender."

"You like him..." he smiled at her. He didn't need much more convincing than the times he had caught her looking at him during the meeting, but he was getting it anyway.

"It's hard not, too," she answered, not quite realizing what her father meant. "He's friendly, respectful, professional, committed, and when he gave me his answer, he asked that his squad not be told until they had made their own. And then..." Her eyes raised to meet his, and she caught the subtle smirk on his lips. "Dad!!" She buried her face in her hands and laughed.

He chuckled, letting the smirk spread into a full grin as he took another sip. Silvia was many things: she was brilliant, she was resourceful, she was dedicated, and he loved her more than anything else in the galaxy. He would die for her in a heartbeat. She was not now, however, nor would she ever be, a good poker player.

"Nope!" she finally said, sitting herself up straight and trying to hide the embarrassed smile on her face, an effort completely undermined by a crimson blush of her pale cheeks that almost matched the color of her hair. She shuffled comically in her seat, flushing a little more at his teasing smile. "I'm a grown woman and a soldier. I'm too old to be teased about boys by my dad." she laughed, taking the first sip of her own drink, settling back into her chair, and eyeing him with a playful challenge, practically daring him to push the matter. He was more than aware she could turn this to his embarrassment if she wanted to.

He laughed back but then let his smile gradually fade from his lips. "He's a soldier, Silvia."

"So am I, Dad," she nodded. "I know the risks."

"Do you?" he asked rhetorically. "Because he's not just any soldier, is he? He will be one under my command."

"Nobody knows about us," she frowned. "I know you think me having your name rather than mom's would put a target on my back, but..."

Crow held his hand up. "It would put a target on your back, but that isn't what I meant." He sighed and reached up to massage the bridge of his nose for a moment. "I know you have only just met and we are talking about a whole bunch of 'what ifs' here, but let's say he likes you too, you get together, you go the whole distance, have kids and everything..."

"... Dad..." she groaned.

"Listen, Silvia. It may not be him, but if it is any soldier... 'cause you will meet someone one day, even if it's not him. What if he's killed? And what if..."

"What if you gave the order that got him killed..." She finished for him with a sigh of her own. "You think it would hurt us."

"Family is the most important thing in the world, Silly," he nodded. "I know how much losing your mom hurt you; how much more would that have hurt if I was the one who got her killed? Now, level that up. How would it affect us if I got your husband killed, the father of your children? How would they cope knowing I killed their dad."

"But it wouldn't have been you who got them killed; it would have been the enemy."

"You haven't been around much fighting yet, love. You haven't lost anyone, and I am grateful for that. But that will change eventually, and that sort of grief can do things to you; there is no telling where the blame will fall, and it's even harder on children." He sighed and looked into her eyes. "Look, if you like him, I won't stand in your way, not with him or anyone else; I trust your judgment. Just... be careful, please."

"I will, Dad. Just don't go sending him on any suicide missions if you don't have to. I kinda like him." she finished with a wink and a smile, trying to ease the tension that had unexpectedly built from their conversation. She chuckled at his groan, hoping she would spare him the locker room banter she had inevitably picked up from a lifetime around soldiers. "So, what's the plan with the evacuation?"

Grateful for the change of subject, he turned to activate his holo-terminal and flicked through the interface until he found the manifest for the operation. "Three requisitioned passenger liners will be able to provide enough space to get all personnel off-world, and we have a fully stocked hospital ship to move the wounded," he said as he read. "A support fleet of three battleships, two carriers, twelve cruisers, and twenty destroyers will be able to keep the Imperium off our backs if they get here sooner than expected."

Silvia, completely back into 'Captain mode,' seemed to be doing the mental arithmetic but nodded after a few moments. "If we start gathering personnel from outlying regions now and start disassembling vital equipment immediately, that should cut a good chunk of time out of the loading process. Do you think the fleet will be able to hold if the Imperium gets here early?"

"It depends on the size of their fleets," he answered solemnly. "But no, is the short answer. Not for long, anyway. The Emperor will be looking to make a statement and get a big early 'W' to avenge the slaughter of the 381st. He won't be fucking around, so we can almost guarantee that those task forces will each be huge compared to our fleet. At least that is Valdek's take on it."

"Any idea how long we'll have?"

Crow shook his head. "None. But the task forces were already being assembled when the Marines left Port Fortitude. We don't know how much progress they had made at that point, though. They could have been good to go back then, or they could have been a week away from being ready. I would normally say that the Imperium would wait until the news broke to disembark the fleet from port, to make a big spectacle of it or something, but they also said there were three task forces, and they would only need to make a publicity stunt out of one of them. Once they leave, it's about a five-day trip to get here from Fortitude, and it's been three days since the attack. It's speculation; they could be arriving right now or may not be getting here for another fortnight." He huffed and looked down at his now-empty glass with a hint of longing. "To be safe, I want all our personnel and as much of our gear as you can ready to go as soon as humanly possible. Get the tech teams started on wiping the network systems, leave medical til last. Get the demolition squads to start on rigging the base to blow, and start pulling as much of our tech as possible out of here as you can. All hands on deck for this one, Captain; our fleet should be here by noon tomorrow, and I want loading operations to be underway by twelve-oh-five, understood?"

Silvia nodded, downing the rest of her glass, and then stood from her seat. "I'll see to it personally, Sir," she said with a sharp salute.

"Thank you, Captain," he smiled back. "I'm proud of you."

"Try to sleep, Dad," her posture softening as she turned to get to her tasks. "I love you."

"Love you, too, Silly," he smiled back. "And if you get all of our shit out of here, I'll make sure you and Sergeant Taylor are sitting next to each other on the bus out of here."

She rolled her eyes but grinned as she looked over her shoulder. "When I get us out of here, I will be expecting us to be sharing a cabin and one single bed," she smirked teasingly at him.

Cornelius groaned as she left the room, chuckling to himself for a moment before his eyes drifted back to the interface. Thousands of men and women were counting on him and his daughter to get this right.

He just hoped they had enough time.

********

Laura. 4

Never meet your heroes, they say; never search for the fountain of youth, and only the fool would be foolish enough to lose themselves to the fool's errand. That last one had been her Grandmother's favorite play on words, and the old timer had plenty. These were little nuggets of advice she had heard for most of her life, and the sentient was sound for a Mariner: don't get so lost in the pursuit of a goal or in the emulation of another that you lose your course along the way, There was, after all, nothing more frightening to a Mariner than finding yourself lost with no bearing home.

Well, Laura had seen those courageous and intrepid scientists who had first dared to step through the airlock and into the eons-old ghost ship that had been the Primis. They were explorers, pioneers, and visionaries, the likes of which had not been seen in human history since Uri Gargaran first left the bosom of earth's atmosphere or Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on an astronomical body that was not the cradle of humanity, or Loraine Lambert made the first transition into superluminal travel. The men and women of the Mariner ship Artemis may never go down in the vaunted annals of human achievement, but they were her heroes, and at this moment, Laura was following, almost literally, in their footprints.

In much the same way as the crew of the Artemis had been her heroes, the Primis itself had been her Shangri-La. It was a vision of the future so tantalizingly close to being made manifest yet was so infuriatingly out of reach. Those first tentative steps made by the Mariner scientists had been like stepping into an ancient tomb, except there were no bodies. The seemingly endless corridors - that would eventually take more than four months to map comprehensively - stretched out forever into the darkness. Running lights that had once illuminated the ancient crew lined each corner of every hallway but had been mercilessly dormant as those explorers first ventured into the crypt. Even as a child, even watching those recordings more than a century after the fact, and watching them in the safety of her own cabin, even knowing exactly how that expedition had ended, even being able to see the shadowed outline of the Primis out of her porthole window, she still felt the cold tendrils of fearful apprehension coax the hairs on the back of her neck to stand tall.

And now she was doing it herself... but she was doing it entirely alone.

That, however, was where the parallels ended. The corridors did indeed stretch out into the distance, as they had done on the Primis; one to the left, one to the right, and another leading straight on from the small anteroom on the other side of the hatch, but rather than blanketed in bleak, ominous and foreboding darkness, they were bathed in perpetual white light.

There was no dust cloud down here; now that she thought about it, there had been a drastic drop in the particulates in the air, even on the surface, while inside the radius of the shields from this ship. So there was none of that sickly, muting brown covering the floors and clinging to the walls. Mariners were clean; they kept their ships to as high a degree of cleanliness and maintenance as possible, but even by their high standards, this ship looked to be pristine. Even though a huge chunk of it was buried - or perhaps smashed - beneath the surface of the cavern, it looked like this ship had just rolled off the assembly line. There was not a speck of dust - brown or otherwise - anywhere.

Somehow, that made the nerves worse, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up to pay attention. Just as they had done as a child when she had watched those recordings.

She knew where she was. Or at least, she knew the layout of the Primis down to each corridor intersection and every bulkhead; she could navigate the hallowed hallways of that ancient ship with her eyes closed. So, assuming this ship was an exact classification match rather than just one that shared aesthetic similarities, she knew where she was. That meant that the corridor to the left would take her toward the bow of the ship, a few decks below the bridge. The hallway to the right was a little more complicated, but if she wanted to get to engineering, that would be the way to go, although it would take a pretty long time to get there. The hallway straight ahead led to this deck's complement of cargo bays, as well as the main large-bore cargo elevator system.

One thing that was common to all ships of all modern species, in one form or another, was that a ship's crew complement was measured not by the number of workstations or even the necessary manpower needed to operate the various systems but by the number of beds. That seemed to be an almost universal fact. Even for the species of the cosmos who didn't use beds and used, for example, viscous hibernation sacks like the Khuvakians, it was still the only accurate way to make a crew count. The ancients, as far as anyone could tell, didn't have beds or anything even comparable to one. Rooms on the Primis that had been determined to be living or crew quarters had a single, hectagonal platform in the center of the room, with an indentation on each side, enough for one person to sit on each. Yet every workstation, including the captain's post, had a normal-looking chair for the user to sit on. It made deciphering the use of these large, strange, foot high, platforms something of an impossibility.

Without the means to count the beds, nobody had the slightest idea of the crew complement of one of these ships. In theory, each room with one of those square platforms could be a sort of bed, and one hypothesis was that it was some sort of anti-grav field emitter that would hold an occupant upright. Another was that it was some sort of communal sitting system. It was true that the indentations on each edge were comfortable sitting places for any humanoid to use. But there had been no bodies on the Primis, meaning no remains to simply count. Deducing the number of crew from the number of rooms with these small platforms still gave a conservative estimation of over a hundred thousand members, but if the second theory was correct, it could have been six times that number. That was assuming that the crew didn't sleep by rotation and that there was no limit to how many people used those platforms, meaning the ship's complement could have numbered in the millions. So even though the ship was vast beyond ease of comprehension, a huge proportion of that space - entire decks in many cases - was filled with row upon row of these simple, platform-containing rooms.

For her though, her destination was the bridge. It was clear that the power was still on, and walking the entire astounding distance through the rabbit warren like hallways of the ship would eventually be necessary to confirm the power core was, indeed, still miraculously functional after god knew how many millions or billions of years - rather than some sort of emergency back up - the bridge would allow her to get a better overall picture of the ship's condition. Assuming the layout was the same, that was still more than a four-mile hike.

With a frown of realization, she checked the computer on her wrist. The cavern had been sealed off from the outside world since before most galactic civilizations had even evolved, yet if the power system was working, then maybe...

A smile pulled at her lips. The oxygen recycling plant was still operational, too; the atmosphere on the ship was almost exactly the same mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide as found on most other planets, and only a few bars of barometric pressure less the Earth.

"Oh, thank the lord of fucks!" she groaned to herself. "If I never see an atmospheric suit for the rest of my life, I will still have nightmares about this one!"

She started to pull it off and set it on the floor inside the anteroom. Sighing contentedly at her first breath of fresh, clean, recycled air. Mariner ships had been using reverse-engineered copies of ancient oxygen reclamation equipment for decades, but considering how crisp and sterile the air down here seemed, something had clearly been lost in the translation. That thought only clouded her mind for a few moments, though, as more and more excitement built behind her ribs.

The optimist in her was well and truly off its leash now, and all manner of possibilities were starting to occur to her. The Primis's power reactor had been silent for millions of years before the first Mariners tried to reactivate it, but with less than the first idea of how to do that and no way to translate the systems that would tell them, they had been unable to properly study, let alone use, the vast majority of the ship's systems. Some things, like individual computer terminals, had been able to be powered up using portable generators - that is how the indecipherable language had been found in the first place - and other systems, like the sensors and the oxygen recycling plant, could be stripped out and taken apart without any real risk to the crew. But the power core was different. With no idea how it worked and with the massive and unstable forces usually involved in starship power generation, taking it apart could have caused an accident on a truly biblical scale. Understandably, with the likelihood of something going "boom," nobody had been stupid enough to start taking things apart without knowing how they worked or - in many cases - what they even were.

There was, for example, a very large piece of equipment located almost at the very center of the Primis. It was connected through a network of conduits directly to the hull, and these connections were regularly spaced every few hundred meters or so along the inside of the astonishingly massive outer shell of the Primis. Nobody had a clue what it did. They had never been able to activate it, and - unlike, say, the engines - there was no modern equivalent to draw comparisons to. The engines, for example, were massive; they ran on a source of power that couldn't be replicated, and without turning them on, it was extremely difficult to be certain of the physics they manipulated to make the ship move. But you only had to look at them to know they were engines; their placement, the way they were hooked up to the main reactor, even the look of them, they were obviously engines. The thing in the center of the ship, on the other hand, was a complete fucking mystery.

There were theories, of course. Everything ranging from an inertia-canceling gyroscope of epically advanced design, through the idea that it was some sort of separate and enormous sensor array that used the hull itself as a receiver, right through to the theory that it was some sort of backup to the main shields. But nobody knew, and because nobody knew - and because of the dangerous levels of radiation coming from inside it - nobody was particularly keen to start taking it apart. Not only in case it blew up and spread that troublesome radiation everywhere but because there was no guarantee that it could be put back together again in working order. They would, after all, only have one shot at it.

Well, not anymore, at least not if this find turned out to be the gold mine she was starting to think it was. Not only was there a spare piece of this machinery to replace the old one if it was damaged, but - with the power on in this ship - there was a good chance that they may finally find out what the thing did.

That was the tip of an extraordinarily large iceberg, and her mind was going through a spontaneously constructed mental checklist of all the different systems that could finally be studied in their full working order. The power core, obviously; the shields were clearly still active, as was the oxygen plant, and both of those were functioning differently than the reverse-engineered counterparts - her shields didn't make her ship invisible to scanners, for example, nor could they stop the flow of water. If they hadn't been copied as faithfully as first assumed, then perhaps the sensors or laser-focusing lenses in the reverse-engineered weapons hadn't been either.

The ship's computers were another possibility; there was no small school of thought that postulated that the language used within them was not undecipherable, it was just that the power used by the generators to activate those terminals had scrambled the data, rendering it useless, and that using the proper type of power generated by the ship's reactor could potentially solve that problem in one felled swoop. Of course, that theory, like so many others, had never been able to be tested... until now.

She almost skipped a step, practically dancing along the hallway toward the bridge. Her mind was working so fast with new ideas and possibilities occurring to her, one after another, that she completely lost track of time, only skidding to an excited stop when she got to the first flight of stairs up toward the bridge. The last few miles had gone by in a daze of excited anticipation.

She hooked her hand onto the guard rail and practically swung herself onto the first step before freezing.

Habit makes you do a lot of strange things. The fact that you had always done something forced you to keep doing it without even looking for an alternative. In this case, her time on the Primis had seen her make this same journey countless times, and in every one of those journeys, she had been forced to take the stairs. Twelve full decks worth of ascent, one step at a time. But, on the Primis, there had been no other option. Now, however, her eyes were fixed on a set of doors right next to the staircase that had never been used in all the years the Primis had been claimed.

"I can't be that lucky," she murmured to herself, stepping back off the bottom step and over to the elevator doors. Her hand nervously reached out and tapped the ancient rune on a silver panel beside the door, and she let out a squeak of excitement when a soft chime sounded around her. "Oh fuck, yeah!"

Her mind glossed over the fact that despite the amount of amazing, near-miraculous technology around her, she was still waiting for a damned elevator, and she bounced excitedly on the balls of her feet as she waited for it.

Finally, another soft chime echoed around the hallway, and with a near-silent whirring sound, the doors to the elevator slid apart.

Her excitement vanished in an instant.

There, on the floor of the elevator, withered, desiccated, and staring back at her with empty eyeless eyes, was a grey, startlingly well-preserved dead body.

Laura knew very little about human anatomy, and no human had ever seen the body of an ancient - and she had to assume that is what she was looking at - so a closer inspection, after she had gotten over the initial shock, revealed little more than the body was, in fact, dead.

Determining how it died, how long it had been there, or what killed it, was way beyond her current skills. In fact, it was already becoming pretty clear that there would be very little looting of this vault, it would require a concerted effort on an even greater skill than the Primis to unlock its secrets. She had expected to find a half-destroyed building, pull out anything useful, and then leave; that is all she had been trained for. The vast majority of the things she had already deduced would require whole teams with vastly more expertise than she had to dissect, and it would take them decades.

This body was just one more thing to add to a growing catalog of things she would doubtlessly need help with.

She hadn't realized she was crouching over the body, her mind working frantically as her body, apparently moving on autopilot, had knelt to look at the corpse of the former crewmember. But now, with awareness snapping back to her, she stood herself back up straight again and let out a deep, sighed breath.

She turned and looked at the panel on the elevator's wall, reaching her hand out to press the relevant icon on the wall, but it froze in midair. The icons were in the same language used in the computer systems, and she had no idea which button to press to get her to the bridge.

For the briefest of moments, she felt something crawling down her spine. A feeling, a sensation, one that only the most superstitious of captains ever paid attention to... almost like something was watching her. But she shook it off quickly and looked down at her still outstretched hand.

Grumbling in frustration, she stepped back out of the elevator and started up the stairs, casting longing looks back to the elevator doors for as long as they were in view. It was twelve decks between her current deck and the bridge. It was a climb that had her itching in excitement only a few minutes ago, but the elevator had provided an alternative that - like the entirety of this vessel's sister ship - had remained almost comically out of reach. Now, each step on her ascent through the ship felt like torture.

One deck after another. One step after another. One deep, increasingly labored breath after another, each one marking her climb toward her objective. Seven decks to go. Five decks. Three, two, one more left... and then, finally, the bridge.

The large silver doors slid into recesses in the bulkheads, splitting as if the passage of unquantifiable amounts of time had not diminished the need for maintenance or moving parts. For a moment, she squinted at the icon that opened the door on the panel beside it, still a dozen feet away from her, but shrugged. Apparently, automatically opening doors were not a new invention, and absolutely staggering security concerns aside, this bridge had one.

The last in a long line of questions was short-lived, though, as her eyes fell upon the sight beyond those doors. A huge holographic representation of the planet and the system around it hovered in the air above and just in front of the captain's podium. Beneath it, and in front of the command chair, was a long, raised platform that led to the main viewscreen. On either side of that were dozens of terminals, each of them bright with light, power, and information flooding through their screens. Scores of displays lined the walls, and a few of them were decipherable just from the diagram-like representations of their systems. Hull integrity, displayed as an outline of the ship's hull from different angles, all in the green... which seemed odd considering a large part of the vessel was buried beneath the ground. Shield status illustrated by another green thrumming orb around the ship. Engine output currently set to idle. Life support covering all but a few sections of the ship in another soft green glow. Power systems, marked by a diagram of the reactor and a bar beside it, about twent-five percent full - the power output, she guessed. Sensor information displayed on another screen, the host of ships in orbit above the planet identified in staggering amounts of detail, including the closest: The Seren.

It was all here. It was everything she could possibly have dreamed of finding and more. Every system that had proven so infuriatingly cryptic to a century's worth of Mariner researchers and engineers was now powered up, active, and functional, as if the ship had been parked here waiting for them to find for all of this time. She felt her chest hollow itself, a lump forming in her throat at the unimaginable scale of her find. The last few days, the discomfort, even that fucking suit, all of it forgotten in an instant. Her life's work was coming to fruition before her very eyes.

And then her eyes started picking up other things, things that had never come in those moments she daydreamed about a find like this. Each of the dozen consoles was paired with a chair of the person meant to operate it... and each chair was filled with a body. There were bodies on the floor, bodies slumped over railings and leaned up against walls. Dozens of them, a hundred of them at least, each of them bathed in the soft glow of the bridge's lights and of the consoles they had once manned. Each of them grey. Withered by time, and lifeless.

And each of them wearing a small, metallic looking silver helmet on their heads.

********

What Laura's eyes missed, however, was a small, blinking light on the comms display on the other side of the bridge, not that she would have known what it meant even if she had spotted it. But several hundred light years away, an identical light started blinking on the comms unit of a different ship.

The bearded, aged-looking man piloting the ship frowned at it. His cerulean eyes staring at it in almost incredulity as the sheer impossibleness of its meaning quickly dawned on him. WIth a sigh, he cast his eyes up to one of the security monitors. His student was still sleeping in his cabin, having not woken in the entire time since the sedatives had been administered, and not during the secretive flight from the capital either. He watched the security monitor as the much younger man turned over in his sleep. Elijah was due to wake in a few hours.

But that blinking light meant that plans had to be changed. The man who had spent the better part of a century being known as Master Wu had hoped he had months, maybe years, to slowly introduce the boy to his true nature, to set him on the path that Wu had seen the moment he laid eyes on him. That light, an alarm from a ship that no other living soul was supposed to know existed, meant that his carefully laid plans were now in tatters.

He shifted his gaze back to the console, tapping in a series of complex commands and looked up as the Nav computer adjusted the ship's course. It would be another day before they arrived at Xnios, which meant that Wu had less than that time to prepare Elijah to be introduced not just to his nature, but to his birthright.

********

Histories and Lores

The council of ministers, or the high council in less formal terms, is the second highest power in the Imperium and perhaps the highest authority that the normal citizen will ever lay eyes on. There are nine seats on the council, eight ministers - each responsible for a different apparatus of the state - and the First Minister, who acts as a tiebreak during votes, and as representative of the council to the masses. Between them, they are the highest holders of power in human-controlled space. For all extents and purposes, they are the Imperium.

So apparent is this display of their power that some have theorized that the Emperor is little more than a figurehead or even that he doesn't exist at all. They, predictably, are wrong. The Emperor is very much real, although very few people are astute enough to recognize the tender ways in which he manipulates the strings of power. For those doubting his existence, one question is always enough to gain admission of their doubt... Who chooses the members of the High Council?

There is no political suffrage in the Imperium. The masses have some small measure of power over what happens on an extremely local level, but anything higher than a township is governed from the top. Ministers are not elected. There are no campaigns. There are no elections of any kind anywhere in the Imperium.

There are also no promotions. Although, in some cases, a career path that led to the high chambers can be tracked by those willing to look for it, this is rarely the case. The Ministers are literal nobodies one day, then the most powerful people in the Imperium the next, with no clear indication of how they got there or what qualifies them for their position. Outside of the conspiracy theorists, it is generally understood that each Minister is personally chosen by the Emperor. But how and from where is one of the greatest mysteries of modern human life.

The eight council seats are each determined by the facet of Imperium rule they govern. Each seat is essentially the head of the ministry that oversees the various branches of government. The Ministry of Defence oversees all aspects of the Imperium military, from the Navy, Marines, and the Colonial Militias, through funding and recruiting, logistics, production, and research. It is the entirety of the serving military and the military-industrial complex combined under a single umbrella. The Ministry of Colonial Affairs practically runs civilian life on any Imperium world, including Earth. Humanity still maintains a free market economy, so most of the day-to-day necessities of survival - from food and the mining of primary resources to the production of domestic and luxury goods - are, broadly speaking, dealt with privately. But the rules that govern that economy and the people living within it are dealt with by what is colloquially known as the Home Office. Everything from the port speeds of civilian star bases to the punishments handed out by the court system, to the construction of infrastructure, to the organization of supplies and establishment of new colonies. All of it comes from the MoCA.

The Minister of Internal Security oversees both the Civilian and Secret Police forces and is responsible for maintaining state secrets, of which there are a lot more than a few. They are also tasked with monitoring all of the other forms of government to make sure they fall in line with the Emperor's ideals. Almost every instance of treason in the civilian sphere has been investigated by the Ministry's primary apparatus: The Internal Security Division, or ISD.

If the Ministry for Internal Security monitors people's actions, the Ministry of Public Information attempts to influence the people's thoughts. By heavily monitoring and controlling the spread of information, as well as spinning a positive narrative on any piece of news that proves impossible to keep out of the public eye, they are in charge of disseminating propaganda throughout the Imperium, controlling information to the press, and juggling the often tricky, but necessary role of censorship.

The Minister of Finance is responsible for the setting of tax rates throughout the colonies. These include the duties paid in far-flung ports and tariffs levied on the export or import of all goods into the privately run free market. The Imperium has, over its history, set up a huge number of inter-species trade agreements, and those working on these trade routes have to pay their dues. The Financial Ministry is also responsible for regulating and overseeing the market itself, as well as collecting and enforcing the taxes levied on its citizens. The purse strings of the Imperium are controlled by the Minister of that office.

The Health and Education Ministry is technically part of the MoCA, but ceased answering directly to that Minister generations ago. One of the most simple facts of rule is that a healthy population is a happy population, and happy populations tend not to rebel. The flip side to this is that an educated population is significantly more likely to be dissatisfied with the status quo. So, the Education branch of this ministry was responsible for what could and couldn't be taught at any level of the education system. Any subjects deemed socially disruptive - philosophy, large parts of history, and many other social sciences - are banned and replaced by more 'productive and responsible' subject matter. Literature is treated to an equal amount of censorship; massive swaths of mankind's literary greatness are deemed a disruptive influence by the state and banned.

The last two Ministries are essentially different sides of the same coin. The Ministry of Alien Affairs, or the Foreign Office. It is split, at least in name and number of ministers, into two branches, each given equal representation on the council due to the vital function they are deemed to hold. The first is the foreign diplomatic service. Humanity has, on several occasions, found itself at war with one of its alien neighbors. But, for the most part, relations between humans and other alien empires have been fairly cordial, with peace treaties and trade agreements being formed and renewed at a startling pace, so much so that a whole government ministry had to be formed to handle these inter-species communications. The foreign office is also responsible for establishing, maintaining and staffing embassies on all friendly foreign worlds and the necessary communications of state with foreign embassies on human soil.

The second branch of the Foreign Ministry is the one that deals with intelligence gathering and espionage. It is, effectively, the foreign counterpart to the ISD; responsible for the gathering of as much intelligence and the spread of as much misinformation as possible - not to mention counter-intelligence operations. Regardless of the current diplomatic tensions between humanity and another race - ranging from openly friendly to downright hostile - every single one of the Imperium's stellar neighbors is expected to be watched, spied on, and fed only what the ministry wants them to know, while simultaneously trying to prevent other powers from doing the same to them.

No matter what happens anywhere in the Imperium or at what level of society it takes place, one of these Ministers can be said to be directly responsible. It is a system that works remarkably well, not just in terms of efficiency but of effectiveness. The overriding motivation of the council is that of control. Control through influence, control through the allocation of provisions of goods and services, but mostly, it is control through fear. Each of the Ministers is highly educated and have learned that a government that answers to its people will only survive for as long as the popular winds blow in their direction. A population who fears their government, on the other hand, will last forever. The quickest and easiest way of gaining and maintaining power is to violently and mercilessly eradicate anyone or anything that poses a threat to it.

Power is held with an iron fist, one that is as ruthless as it is uncompromising. Behind it all, standing in the shadows at the top of the pyramid, is the Emperor: a man so illusive and enigmatic that nobody, not even the High Council of Ministers, is entirely sure how he rose to power in the first place, let alone dare to challenge it. The Emperor only has two types of enemies: the ones who aren't dead yet... and the ones who are.