Chapter 5 - The dawn of intent

Adam. 3

It had been three days since the news had broken. Adam only usually came into the office for one or two days per week, working from home instead for the rest of it. It was a routine that had worked well for him - and more importantly, for his family - for the entire time he had been head of the ISD Investigation Division, and under normal circumstances, spending this amount of time in Caracas would have left him physically and mentally drained from the exertion of having to maintain his 'bad guy' facade for this long. But these were not normal circumstances.

Jenny had understood. She had been at his side through the entirety of his meteoric rise up the chain of command, and she knew most of the people in his inner circle as well as he did. So she had been just as heartbroken on learning of Frank's death as everyone else had been. She was an intelligent, observant woman, one who didn't need to have things spelled out for her to be able to read the context between the lines, and Adam's nightly preoccupation, his look of concern, and the fact that he was voluntarily choosing to head into the office every day was more than enough for her to understand that something was wrong with the whole situation, that Adam was heading up the investigation and was he was very worried about what he might find.

The girls had been less understanding. Lucy had cried, and Natasha - entering the dreaded teenaged phase of her adolescence, complete with the hormones and mood swings - had huffed and spent the last few evenings in her bedroom. They were used to having Daddy around, and with him not being able to give them even the simplest of explanations why he wasn't, they had taken it as a display that he didn't want to be anymore. That damned near broke him. It wasn't the first time he'd had to work so closely with his team, but the last time was when his daughters were too young to even notice and the hurt looks in their eyes when he had to cancel his plans had haunted every single spare thought he had.

Being preoccupied with thoughts of home, however, was less than conducive to an investigation of this seriousness. Still, they were thoughts he simply couldn't shake, even now as he re-read the preliminary findings from his team.

He sighed and leaned back into his chair before he reached into his pocket for his personal phone. The widespread use of comms channels had rendered the humble phone almost obsolete; comms channels were faster, had massively more bandwidth for the transfer of data, and were free. Phones were less so, even though they basically used the same frequencies. What all but the criminal element of the population didn't know, however, was that every single call made on every single comm channel was logged by one of the departments downstairs. On the other hand, it was fairly easy to modify this simple handset to be invisible to the network, and he had no intention of letting anyone... anyone at all... use his calls to find out where he and his family lived.

Some people would call him paranoid, or at least hypocritical, for taking precautions against the instruments of surveillance that he ran or for fearing the very agency he worked for, but their opinions meant less than nothing compared to the safety of his family. Perhaps they were precautions that would never prove needed; perhaps the "just in case" would never come to pass, but there was no way he was going to take that chance. Not with them.

He tapped a few buttons on the handset's screen - typing in the frequency number from memory - and held it to his ear. It only took a few moments for his wife to answer.

"Hey, you," Jenny's wonderful voice came through the earpiece. It was her standard greeting, one he had loved for the years she had used it, but that little surge of relief hit him extra hard today. She knew that if she was in trouble, and he happened to call, she was to answer the call with "Hey, Darling." He had never heard it yet, but with everything going on at the moment... he sighed and shook the thought off.

"Hey, babe," he smiled. "Just checking in."

"How's it going there?" her warm, affection-filled voice asked.

"Slowly," he answered. "It was never going to be quick, but... yeah."

"I just... can't believe he's gone." he sighed back.

"I'm sorry about all this," he sunk into his chair.

"Don't be," her voice came back quickly. "I know you have to be sure that it really was an accident, and I know what it's doing to you, not knowing. We'll be fine, and we'll still be here to make you feel better when this is all over."

"But, the girls..."

"Will be fine," she reassured him. "Adam, I love you, and I know you keep the details of your work secret from me to protect me. It's one of the things I love the most about you. But if you feel the need to protect me from them, then I can't imagine you ever wanting the girls to know."

"God, no," he answered without thinking.

"Then they are not ever going to be able to understand, my love. They have questions, and you can't answer them, so they are taking it personally. If it were about anything else, then I would feel the same way. They're just too young to understand."

"What about you?

There was a pause, "I know enough to understand why you can't tell me."

He huffed a sad laugh. "You missed your calling as a diplomat."

"I'm juggling two pre-pubescent girls and a sullen husband. I missed nothing," she laughed for a moment before her voice turned serious again. "I will admit, I sometimes wonder if you keep these things away from me because you're trying to protect me or because you don't trust me."

"Jenny, I..."

"I know," she cut him off. "They are fleeting thoughts when I miss you. And maybe this whole thing is making me see how much you feel you need to protect me from."

"What do you mean?"

Another pause. "You aren't sure if Frank's death was an accident, and if someone got to him, you are worried they could get to you... or to us. So you have to be sure." He tried to answer, but the words wouldn't come out. "I need to know, Adam," she said. "Not the details; I don't need to know what you do day-to-day, but I need to know that if you find something... less than ideal... you will do whatever it takes to keep our girls safe."

"Jenny, I don't think you know what you're asking," Adam finally answered after a brief, stunned pause.

"No, I don't," she said softly, the loving reassurance thick in her gentle voice. "And I don't need to know. But, whatever it is... whatever it takes..." the emphasis was clear, "... if you tell me that it was to keep our girls safe, I'll trust you."

He sighed and nodded, even though she couldn't see him. "You are the love of my life." he almost whispered into the phone.

"And you are my everything," her normal answer came back. "Are you going to be home for food tonight?"

He smiled at the rapid change of subject--a breeze of normality in these less-than-normal times. "Yeah, I should be if nothing new comes up."

"I'll make sure the girls are in a good mood when you get here, then."

"Thank you, love... for everything." he smiled.

"We are a team," he could hear the smile in her voice. "We're in this together."

"Always."

"See you later, hubs."

"Later, Wife." He chuckled at the nicknames they had used for each other since their wedding night twenty years earlier and disconnected the call.

He turned in his chair and looked out of the window and over the world beyond it. In keeping with his mood, the outskirts of Caracas we blanketed in grey, miserable-looking clouds today, the sort that threatened rain but could never summon up the enthusiasm to actually provide any. It was totally at odds with the feeling inside him. He wanted the raging storm; he craved the howling winds that would blow away the bullshit that was stacked so high; he wanted the lightning to banish the shadows from his sight and the rain to wash everything to the sea. Everything about this case was wrong.

Not because it was Frank, not because it was too close to home not to have him thinking about his family, but because it was wrong. None of his team had said anything, but they didn't need to; he could see it in their eyes. This had been a hit, not by some terrorist or rebel organization, not by some alien power, and not by some criminal enterprise. This had come from within. It had been done with just enough finesse to show that whoever had carried it out had known how the state really did its more underhanded business but lacked the experience and know-how to pull it off properly. They had missed things, little things, things that casual observers like the local Police force were in no way trained or equipped to detect.

Things that no professional would ever leave behind.

He turned his eyes back to his terminal and re-read the police report for at least the sixth time. He had to give them credit where it was due; they had been thorough, at least insofar as their legal abilities allowed them to be. They had immediately recognized the rarity of accidents like this; hovercars had all kinds of safety devices built into them to prevent their collision with damned near anything, especially pedestrians. At street level, they traveled five feet above the ground, meaning that the fender was head height for the vast majority of the adult population, and even an impact at moderate speeds proved fatal more often than not. The Ministry of Colonial Affairs could be argued to be an overly bureaucratic institution by almost anyone, but some of the laws they came out with were occasionally to the benefit of all of society, so making these safety measures compulsory in all hovercars alone should have stopped this kind of accident from being possible.

The only way Frank could have been killed by a car was if those devices had been faulty or purposefully disabled. One was a case of gross negligence, either by the car's owner or manufacturer - and the fact the driver had fled the scene certainly pointed to the former. The other was a simple case of murder. Disabling those devices had turned a hovercar into a three-ton blunt-force weapon, and the damage that Fender had done to Frank's head had been catastrophic.

But here was where the public knowledge faltered against that of the police, let alone the ISD. Another of the laws passed down by MoCA dictated that each car manufacturer put a special isotope into the paint of every single one of their models, each one differing slightly from the other. It meant that law enforcement agencies had the ability to identify the make and model of any vehicle involved in any form of accident. Safety measures had been implemented to prevent collisions, but it had been years before those measures bore fruit; in the meantime, analyzing paint transfer samples had been used to identify vehicles involved. That law had just never been repealed, even after it was no longer needed.

The car that had hit Frank, according to the autopsy report, would have been traveling at something close to fifty miles per hour, which was evidenced in dramatic fashion by the damage done to his skull. But it also meant that tiny flecks of paint had been transferred from the car and onto Frank's body by the violence of the impact. That paint had been analyzed and came back with a result: a late model, red, Bryham Dynamics GX-5. The simple next step was to scan through the security cameras in the area and track down any red GX-5s found near the scene of the crime around the time it happened.

Except there weren't any.

Not GX-5s. As one of the more popular vehicles on the market, there were probably dozens of them in the area. There were no cameras. That happened; contrary to popular opinion, the government didn't have every square inch of the globe under constant surveillance. People weren't that interesting, and the cost of implementing it, let alone manning it, was enormously prohibitive, but to have no cameras at all was a red flag. There were cameras everywhere, even if they didn't belong to the security services. Security cameras in businesses or watching people's homes, dash cams in the cars of other drivers, traffic and traffic-light cameras, the things were everywhere. Imagining that none of them picked up the collision itself was not a huge leap of imagination, but to not have anything at all in the entire area was inconceivable.

Frank wasn't killed out in the sticks. He wasn't like Adam, who lived in the middle of nowhere; Frank lived in Chicago, maybe not in the city center, but close enough to it to make a lack of cameras a laughably unlikely scenario. The police had caught onto that, too, but - unlike Adam - they had seen the hit coming at the exact time that the traffic management system was down for maintenance as an unfortunate coincidence. Adam wasn't naive enough to believe that coincidence never happened, but this certainly wasn't one of them. Frank lived in a highly populated, built-up area, and not a single camera from any business or public service had caught anything... To the police, that was just unlucky. To Adam, that was evidence that the drivers knew exactly where they were and planned their escape route accordingly. The ones that they couldn't avoid - traffic lights, for example - had been switched off under the guise of routine maintenance by someone with the power to do that.

And there really weren't many people with that sort of authority.

But this got him into the area of the law where the Police were vastly more limited in their abilities than the ISD. The independence of the judiciary was a cornerstone of modern society, and its primary function was to protect the people. Protect them from themselves, protect them from each other, and protect them from the government. This meant that to gain access to cameras owned by private citizens, the police needed a warrant. He could just imagine how that conversation would have gone between the police and the local circuit judge.

"We need access to the cameras of every private citizen within X amount of distance from the scene of the crime."

"Do you have reason to believe their cameras recorded the crime?"

"We don't know. That's why we need them."

"So you want access to the private data of X amount of citizens, and you don't even know if you are going to find anything. Are you even sure a crime took place? This could have been an accident."

"Umm... That is true, your honor. But the driver still fled the scene, so a crime was committed, even if the collision itself was an accident."

"Okay, and what route did the driver take to leave the area?"

"We don't know."

"Where was the suspect's car next picked up on cameras?"

"It wasn't."

"So you don't even know what direction the car traveled?? Meaning you want the camera footage from every citizen within a radius of X amount???"

"Yes, please."

"Nope, not gonna happen, government overreach and blah blah blah..."

The very little information that police could have found would have been blocked by the judge's fairly understandable duty to protect the people. What the police didn't understand, and possibly the judge didn't either, was all that nonsense about protecting the rights of the people was just that... nonsense. The people had no rights, at least none that protected them from the government, and the courts' only real purpose was to hand out pre-ordained sentences when police proved a crime, keep order in the courtroom, and - most importantly - provide a smokescreen behind which the people in power could do their work. The courts had no real, meaningful legal authority, their job was to distract the population away from the people who did.

People like Adam.

It had taken Steph - one of his more gifted technical analysts - less than an hour to hack into every private camera within ten city blocks of Frank's house, and by the time she had come back from making herself a coffee, the computer had already pulled up more than a hundred sightings of red GX-5s from their footage. Fifteen minutes later, she had identified the vehicle responsible and tracked it all the way out of the city before losing track of it in a real dead zone - another piece of information the drivers shouldn't have known. That is what Adam was staring at now--a still frame of the car that had killed a member of his inner circle, his friend.

The damage on the front passenger side bumper was obvious. Even the cheapest of cameras recorded in more than enough detail to be able to zoom in on the drivers' faces, but Adam's eyes were inevitably pulled to the mess on the front of the car. The indentations in the metalwork, the blood spatter... so much blood spatter... the skull fragments, and pieces of hair stuck to the car's shell. It was a gruesome reminder of the horrific nature of Frank's death. The only hollow consolation from all of it was the fact that the impact was clearly hard enough and fast enough to have killed him instantly. There would have been no pain. It wasn't much, but it was something.

Then, there were the faces of the two men inside the car. The windows had been tinted, but the computer had been able to get a good enough look at them to run the most advanced facial recognition programs. Ones that would cross reference them against every piece of official documentation on record and also against every other camera on the planet, only for that to come back with nothing. But nothing was something...

For those programs to come back empty meant only one thing. They had been deleted.

Being deleted was a term used by black ops agents. Adam himself had been deleted for years. It basically meant that every single time a computer picked up a deleted person's face from any source, that information was not recorded... At all. As far as any computer was concerned, it was not even a face. It didn't exist, and although the owner of said face would have had all the documents and paperwork needed to live a normal life, they were isolated from the system and had no bearing on real details at all. Adam's own passport, for example, would not link to his actual identification in any way whatsoever; it would only give enough information to get him through a customs check. If his face were picked up on a camera, as it had doubtlessly been hundreds of times just on the commute to work that morning, a search would bring up neither his real identification nor any reference to his fake passport or any other form of identification. It was a complete system wipe of anything even remotely connected to him... and apparently, the men in the car had been the recipients of the same treatment.

And therein lay the problem. There were only a few branches of government that could provide that level of hidden cover... and all of them were located in this building.

But ultimately, all of them answered to one person, the only person powerful enough to make Adam think that she had threatened him. Minister of Internal Security, Sandra White.

"What did you do, Frank?" He whispered to himself. He had personally ordered Frank to destroy the documents from his last investigation, and Frank was no idiot. He knew there would have been reasons for that order to be given and had worked in ISD long enough to understand that curiosity killed a hell of a lot bigger prey than cats. Adam found it utterly inconceivable that Frank would have ignored his order. So if he hadn't kept those files - and even an in-depth look on his system, part of the process of the investigation, had shown that he hadn't, nor did he have any other files on there he shouldn't have, nor was there even the slightest hint that he had sent anything to anybody else - then why had he been marked for death?

If Frank had been acting off-book, if he had been doing things he wasn't supposed to do, if he had been caught betraying or abusing his post, if he had committed treason against the Imperium, he would have understood the hit. He would have hated it, he would have been angry, he may have even been a little embarrassed, but he would have understood. But Adam had conducted the investigation in Frank's terminal personally. There was nothing there. As far as Adam could tell, Frank hadn't done anything wrong; he hadn't even accessed the files long enough to be suspected of memorizing them. Yet he was deemed as enough of a threat to be murdered. And that sent a whole new tendril of fear working up his spine.

Because if Frank could not be considered a liability, the only other explanation was that he had been considered an expendable but effective way to send a message.

There were not many possibilities when it came to guessing who the intended recipient of that message was.

He reached over and tapped the button for the intercom. "Gather the troops, Ben," he said to the still-distraught-looking man when he answered. "Same meeting room, one hour."

********

Laura 5.

She snarled in frustration at her wrist-mounted computer. Of all the things to go fucking wrong... here, of all places, after a discovery of this magnitude, why did it have to be her comms? She had spent a few hours hopping over the desiccated husks of the former crew, skipping giddily between one console after another, deciphering what little she could from the graphical representations of their systems, but it was enough to know that they were all not only active but in near pristine condition. Just to be absolutely sure, she had spent a day... an entire day... walking the full twenty-something kilometers to the bowels of the opposite end of the ship to check engineering - the ship itself was twenty-four kilometers long, but that in no way correlated to the length of the walk. Not a single hallway led straight from point A to point B, and she had no idea how long that actual journey was. Everything was working there, too. She couldn't even begin to understand how that was possible, not after the amount of time this ship must have been buried here, and yet they were.

It had also confirmed that slowly dawning realization that there was no way she could complete her mission, at least not alone. Her original mandate had been to enter the vault - the ship, in this case - before finding and extracting anything of value. Well, the entire ship was of such enormous value that leaving anything from the running lights to the reactor core was too stupid of a notion to entertain. Stripping it all out was also out of the question, even if it had been possible - which it wasn't - and moving the ship was beyond the capabilities of even the most highly acclaimed Mariner scientists, let alone her. And that was before the whole "Digging the thing out" part came into consideration. She was massively and woefully in over her head...

So, if Mohammed couldn't move the mountain...

Or at least that had been the plan. Her vambrace-mounted interface was linked to The Seren's ship-board computer, meaning that it was in continuous communication with her ship. From it, she could do everything from accessing her personal logs right up to entering commands into the ship nav computer and autopilot system. It should also have allowed her to use the Seren's powerful comms array.

But it wasn't.

To be accurate, her computer was allowing her to access the comms system, record a message, encrypt it, and then select a channel from her list of contacts within the Mariner high command to whom to send it, except whenever she tapped the icon to actually send the message, an error code that she had never seen before today would flash across the screen instead and the array would shut itself down.

To make matters worse, the computer was functioning well enough for her even to be able to look up what that error code meant, an act that left her with an even deeper frown of frustrated confusion on her face.

"Communication system not-responding"

"Of course, it's fucking responding!!" she screamed at it. "It let me record the message! It let me find the fleet commander's channel! You just won't send the fucking thing!!" The whole thing was getting more and more ridiculous. If the comms array weren't responding, she wouldn't have even been able to select that system from the main interface, let alone do anything else. More than that, if the comms system weren't working, the entire link between her personal computer and the ship would be non-functioning, and she wouldn't be able to do anything at all. She couldn't even blame the fact she was now several miles underground, and that was, somehow, blocking the signal... because, and she couldn't stress this enough, the computer was still fucking working!!

She growled again as the same error code reappeared on her screen. At this rate, she would be seeing that damned code in her dreams! Whatever the real cause of the system failure, she was being rapidly reminded of the fact that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it from here... Nothing, Nada, Sweet Fuck all! And it was pissing her off.

Not because there was nothing she could do about it - this wasn't the first time something had gone wrong with her ship while she had been away from it, and it was probably going to be an infuriatingly simple fix - It was more because she would have to trek all the way back to the hatch, another day's walk away, and then climb back to the tunnel, in that thrice-damned fucking suit, to get to the surface, board her ship and fix whatever the hell was going wrong so she could report her findings. All things considered, she would much rather the computer not be a total asshole and let her just do that from here.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fucking Fuck!" she grumbled to herself as she dropped her arm in frustration - the equivalent of throwing the computer at the wall if it hadn't been attached to her - took one more longing look at the happily humming equipment around her, turned, and stormed out of engineering.

Or at least she tried to. She frowned and looked at the door. Every single one of them had opened automatically for her as she approached before now and she was sure this one had done the same when she had arrived in engineering. But now it stayed defiantly closed. She reached out, tapped the icon beside the door, and watched it slide open. She stepped through it quickly, inexplicably concerned that it would change its mind before she made it over the threshold...

And tripped straight over a body on the ground outside the door.

She huffed out a grunt as she hit the deck plates, rolling over to look at the obstacle. She was damned near certain it hadn't been there when she arrived. There had been bodies everywhere on her trip down from the bridge; hundreds, maybe thousands of them dotted at various points along the hallway. Most had been on their own, but there had been groups of as many as eight of them in some places. Walking the length of the ship, not to mention her time surrounded by the former crew on the bridge and down here, had made her antsy. It was like walking through a crypt, and she just couldn't shake the feeling that she was being watched. But for the most part, she had gotten used to seeing them. That, however, didn't extend as far as literally having to step over one to get into engineering, which she would have had to do. Was she that blase about death to have forgotten individual bodies already?

Well, apparently, the answer to that was yes because the only other alternative was that the very, very dead body upped and put itself in her way while she was busy checking the reactor core. As creepy as this whole ship was, she wasn't about to start entertaining the existence of ghosts or fucking zombies.

She gave it a nudge with her foot, just in case.

Its arm fell off, but it otherwise remained completely dead.

Well, that was a relief. The day had started out so well with the vastness of the scale of her find, but the malfunctioning computer was the first in a growing list of things going wrong today. So far, that was limited to about eight hours of walking, putting on that fucking suit, climbing to the surface through that very claustrophobic tunnel, traversing the wreckage outside, through the compound cloud, climbing onto her ship, and finally troubleshooting the problem before she could make her call. Adding the presence of reanimated corpses would have been a step too far. She cocked another eyebrow at the dried out body, pulled herself back to her feet, and turned toward the hallway that would take her back to the hatch, letting out a long, weary sigh in the process.

Seriously, if she was assigned to this ship for any period of time during the inevitable research efforts, she was bringing her damned hoverbike.

********

Stevo. 19

He had been part of loading and unloading operations more times than he could count. From his first days of basic - a lifetime ago - when all the raw recruits had been transported en-masse to the Marine Corps training facility on the moon of Kefler VII, or for his first real deployment as part of the occupation force on Sigmus IV, to the much more recent loading operations that brought them here from Fort Fortitude. Being ferried into an atmosphere in a dropship was an exhilarating experience - unless you were doing it under fire, in which case it was beyond words like terrifying - but it never quite gave the sheer sense of scale of what he was looking at now.

Descending through the cloud banks and looming over the base was a flight of rebel cruisers. One of the first things he realized about space was that its enormity rarely gave a proper opportunity to appreciate scale. At six foot one, he was a pretty big guy, shorter and slighter than the mountain that was Mac, but big compared to most men. Next to a tank, however, at fourteen feet high and twenty-five long, he was much smaller. That tank could be carried under a dropship; those things were almost seventy feet in length, and that was about as big as his mind could fathom before the concepts became... theoretical.

The cruiser above him was a little shy of eight hundred meters long, more than 2600 feet to those who, like him, still thought in terms of feet and inches. That was enormous, by any stretch of the imagination, and to watch something almost a kilometer long sinking slowly and ominously out of the clouds was a sight he doubted he would ever get used to. What made it all the more perplexing was that compared to some of the other ships out there, that cruiser, like the two flanking it, was a minnow in a very large sea. The Goliath, for example - the heavy carrier that had shipped the Three-Eight-One to this planet - was more than four times its length and almost ten times its mass, even that was nowhere near as large as some of the monsters of the Imperium fleet.

Most of the non-essential personnel had already been ferried by dropship to the waiting colony ships in orbit, huge passenger liners usually reserved for transporting the first few waves of colonists to a newly terraformed planet. He had actually been quite surprised that he hadn't been included among their number, but apparently, Captain West had taken his oath of service seriously and had put him to work.

The dropships were great for transporting people over short distances, and the colony ships were far too large to land safely, but as soon as a piece of equipment became too bulky to load onto one, they became useless. That was where he and the three cruisers came in; the equipment that couldn't be ferried up to the orbiting ships was to be loaded directly into the cavernous cargo bays of these warships - by hand, if necessary. Engineers and technicians had spent twenty-two of the last twenty-four hours dismantling as much essential equipment as they could before squads of clones hauled them out of the base.

He was there to make sure they left their cargo where they were supposed to and then make sure that the crews of the cruisers left nothing behind. Not that they were lazy or incompetent. But three separate crews? All it took was one of them to mistakenly believe that something was due to be loaded onto a different ship, and the crew of that ship disagreed, and before you knew it, something important had been left behind. So far, the loading area in front of him was filled with tons upon tons of weapon fabricators, battery pack chargers, large bore laser barrels, ground-based sensor relays, comm uplink broadcasters, base-shield generators, heavy lift equipment, a few dozen of the surviving strike craft - although he couldn't work out why they were not flying up themselves - two of the wreckages of the Marine tanks, and all manner of other equipment deemed vital to the war effort. Mulling around them all were a hundred or so clones turned manual laborers. This was going to be like herding cats, but he was a Marine sergeant; herding cats was half of the job.

He turned his eyes skyward again to watch as the cruisers maintained their descent. "Impressive, isn't it?" a man's voice called to him, raised over the growing noise of the starship engines. Stevo spun around to see who had spoken, only to find himself face-to-face with General Crow. He snapped to attention. "As you were, Sergeant," he smiled.

Stevo relaxed, then turned to look back up at the cruisers. These things were not over some distant part of the Island; they were immediately overhead and due to touch down in a landing zone a few hundred meters in front of him. Somehow, that made them look even bigger.

Each of them was shaped like a sort of segmented wedge. A curved nose at the bow and widening, if only by a few meters, before halting abruptly at the engines. Between those two points were three indentations where the hull bulged out a little before suddenly tapering back in again. It looked like three triangles had all merged together to form something longer and sturdier. With a dark matte grey hull, each of the looming cruisers seemed to grow larger as they neared the ground. "I'm not sure I'll ever get used to the sight, Sir," Stevo repeated his thoughts to the General.

"Hmmm," Crow smiled, his eyes following Stevo's to the sky. "I can't disagree with you there, son."

"Are you here to oversee the loading process, Sir?" The sergeant asked.

"Actually, I'm here to see you."

"Me?" Stevo blinked.

"I owe you an apology, Marine." The older man held his eyes.

"I'm... I'm not sure I follow, General."

"I have watched the recordings of your assault on the beach. I saw what happened to your squad." Crow had the good grace to wait for Stevo to wince at the memory. "I was the one who ordered the artillery strike, Sergeant. I killed your men."

Silence fell between the two, a quietness only drowned out but the rumbling of starship engines overhead. "Permission to speak freely, Sir." Stevo finally said, turning to face the general properly again when it became clear the old man wasn't going to say anything more.

"I insist on it."

"I appreciate the sentiment, but that is not your apology to give, Sir."

"Explain."

"We were at war. My men attacked that beach honorably, and your men defended it the same way. You did what you had to do to win, and we did the same. I can accept losing brothers and sisters to combat. It hurts, it really fucking hurts, but it comes with the territory, and neither of us are naive enough to think that they'll be the last people we lose before this is over. That's war. My men died with honor, fulfilling their oath... but unless you're about to tell me that it was you who betrayed them, then - with all due respect - I cannot accept an apology that robs them of the dignity of a heroic death."

"You think they died as heroes?"

"They died on their feet, weapon in hand, facing the enemy. What would you call it? I only hope that if my last moments have to come in this war, I meet them in the same way."

Crow nodded slowly, considering this. "How far will you go, then, to punish the people responsible for that betrayal?"

Stevo paused. He hadn't actually thought of that. "I am a Marine. I only have two reasons to fight: my brothers and my honor, and I won't sacrifice either of them, not for that asshole. I will not dishonor the memories of the people I have lost just to fulfill some vendetta." Crow was about to say something, but Stevo held his hand up to stop him. "However... If the chance comes to drive my knife through the Emperor's gullet, one that doesn't insult the fallen, I'm going to take it."

Crow nodded again. "Well, then, Mr Taylor," he stood a little taller. "There is only one thing left to do."

"Sir?"

"I hereby promote you to the rank of Captain. You will still answer to Captain West for the time being, but a proper assignment will be given to you when we reach our destination."

Stevo blinked. "I... I don't know what to say, Sir," he got the impression that this promotion was not an offer, but an order to be imposed on him whether he liked it or not. Meaning there was really only one way to answer it. "Thank you. I won't let you down."

The General stepped forward and offered him a hand. Stevo took it with a nod. "Get as much of our gear loaded up as possible, Captain," Crow said. "We can have a proper chat on the boat home. Although, at this rate, Captain West will be speaking to you first," he finished with a smile.

Stevo frowned and tilted his head. "I'm not following, Sir."

"Don't worry about it, Son. I'm sure she will bring you up to speed." There was a wry grin on his face as he about turned; he took a few steps before stopping and turning back to face Stevo. "Oh, one more thing, Captain."

"Yes, Sir?"

"Your friend, Corporal Vasquez, woke up while being loaded onto the hospital ship. One of our councilors has spoken to her and explained everything that happened. I imagine it would be no surprise to you to hear that she was... furious. She has asked to see you as soon as you get a moment. Thought you'd like to know sooner rather than later."

Stevo snorted. "Yeah, furious is probably a very polite understatement, General, but thank you for letting me know. That's really good news." He smiled, feeling a little of the tension leave his body for the first time since before they left the carrier for the beach. He had always known that the members of Bravo Squad were close, but not even he had realized how close until some of its members had been killed. "So, did I pass?"

"Pass? Pass what?" The General tilted his head at him.

"With all due respect, Sir, you didn't come all the way out here for an apology you knew I wouldn't accept, a promotion you could have done on the ship in a few hours, or news about Angel that could have been sent over comms. So I'm guessing this was some sort of test."

The cool look on his face slowly but steadily broke into a smile. "She said you were a smart one but also that I'd like you. Her judgment's as good as ever."

"Who did, Sir?"

The General chuckled as he turned around and started making his way back toward the main compound. "I'm afraid that's classified, Captain," he called back over his shoulder with a wave. "Keep up the good work."

********

Elijah. 3

Elijah was good at a lot of things; he was very good at a few things and truly exceptional at some, at least in his most humble opinion. Sleep, however, was not one of them. Each night, since he was a child, would go the same way: he would go to bed, understanding that he would need to sleep to have any chance of being alert and functional the next morning, he would do his meditations, he would quiet his mind, he would embrace the dark... and nothing would happen. He would end up staring at the ceiling of his quarters for a few hours until sleep finally caught up with him, only for the next morning to be a bleary-eyed, semi-conscious, barely coherent stumble into daytime, at least until he could find caffeine.

So you can imagine his surprise when he emerged from sleep's temperamental embrace, feeling completely refreshed, so much so that he briefly wondered if he had just experienced the best night's sleep of his life. He stretched in bed, letting the thin sheet slide down over his sculpted torso and cracked open an eyelid. The only thing worse - on most mornings - than waking up feeling like he had been asleep for about twenty whole minutes was getting blinded by the sun the moment he did. His refreshed surprise was replaced by confusion when his one peeking eye discovered that it was still dark.

His other eye opened, if only to confirm what the first one was telling him, and his head tilted up bravely to look at the window... only to find a matte grey, metallic-looking bulkhead where the pane of glass should have been. He frowned at it. A window not being where it was supposed to be seemed... odd.

His brow furrowed further. "I don't think this is my room..."

He let that thought percolate for what seemed a few minutes, although was probably less than a second or two before he shot up in bed "This is not my room!" he exclaimed at the darkness as he scrambled to pull the sheet over his inexplicably dressed lower half.

The door on the opposite corner of the room made a slight whooshing noise as it slid open, but Elijah's mind was already in defensive mode. His eyes shot over to the weapon rack above his desk, ready to lunge for one of the razer-sharp Danjas hanging on it, and perfectly willing to use one on the human-shaped shadow slipping quietly into the room. But it wasn't there.

"Of course, it's not there, dumbass!" his voice hissed in his head. "This isn't your room!"

"Good, you're awake," a staggeringly familiar yet obscenely unlikely voice echoed around the room, causing Elijah's thoughts to freeze in their tracks. His gaze slowly dragged over to the source of the voice and squinted as the hazy shape of Master Wu solidified before him. Flashes of memory started to come back to him: the darkness, the needle in his neck, his Mentor's voice echoing through his dreams. "Our time has run out. I am taking you from here before they can corrupt you and use you against us. All will be explained. No harm will come to you." Elijah had surrendered to that voice; he had given in. He had let himself go to the trust he had always implicitly held within his Master, and for a moment that seemed to stretch out interminably, they held each other's eyes.

One in confusion.

One in something comparable to paternal pride.

"Get dressed," Wu nodded toward the pile of clothes on a dresser close to the foot of his bed. "I will be waiting."

"Waiting where Sir?" Elijah asked, still rattling with that sense of disorientation. This was turning out to be a really weird morning. Wu didn't answer; he just turned on his heel and glided out of the door, and let the younger man watch it whoosh close behind him. Elijah just sat there; it was all he could do. In a whirlwind of mixed emotions, unanswered questions, and soul-consuming confusion, his mind worked frantically to try and make some sense of what was happening to him, and through it all, Wu's words in the darkness resounded through his head. "All will be explained."

Apparently, that was not all his mind was doing because before he knew it, he was dressed and walking out of his room... cabin... place where he woke up. He blinked as he looked around; he had been on enough ships in his relatively short life to recognize that he was on one now, rather than being on a planet. Ships, no matter how hard they may try, could never fully replicate the conditions of a world with as complex a life-support ecosystem as Earth. There were tiny differences in the pull of gravity, even if the deck plates were set to just the right conditions. The air was recycled, making it clean and sterile, but air on Earth was neither of those things; the smells of living on a planet were almost imperceptible to the people living on it until those scents were suddenly removed. More than that, the air on a planet moved. Wind, air currents, the softest of breezes; air could never completely match the rotation of the planet, and there were the same tiny, almost invisible differences between air on a planet and on a ship as there were with gravity. There was the slight, tingling vibration through his feet, the quiet hum of machinery in his ears, the dull echo of sound echoing off metal, all of it combined to tell him that he was no longer on a planet - which seemed odd considering he had gone to sleep on one. But mostly, the thing that told him he was now in space was the fact that he was staring at it through the porthole directly in front of his cabin door.

Hyperspace travel was a difficult concept for most people to get their heads around, but as an ancient, Elijah understood the science almost instinctively. An FTL drive did not push a ship through hyperspace, at least not technically. It actually performed two functions: the first was to use data from the Navigational computer to plot a course and then send a concentrated burst of... whatever energy it functioned on, and judging by the blue tint outside the porthole, this one ran off tachyons... in that direction. Tachyons, like lots of other types of particles, were able to be projected at huge multiples of the speed of light, but as they did, they formed something of a wake.

The easiest way of thinking of it was to imagine water and that, somehow, a solid brick wall had been launched through it at enormous speeds. The wall would create a bow wave - the compression of water, or the normal matter of space, in this case, in front of the wall - and a wave of choppy, thinner, turbulent water behind it. The water would be so busy trying to refill the void left by the wall that it was actually thinner and easier to travel through for a brief period of time after the wake had been created. This is what a hyperdrive engine did; it created that wake, that portion of destabilized space traveling at mind-numbing speeds.

The second role of an FTL drive was to surround the ship in a protective bubble that allowed it to not only enter the wake of that energy burst but also keep it safe from the turbulence inside it while tethering that bubble to the back of that energy burst. Ships didn't power through Hyperspace as much as they were dragged through it. To the people inside those ships, the view was quite spectacular. There were no stars zipping past, traveling so quickly that they formed lines across the vista of space; in fact, you could see nothing of actual space at all; the ship was literally no longer in the same dimension that space existed in. Instead, you were only able to see the internal edge of that tachyon wake.

Swirling vortices of different shades of blue, a tunnel of pure energy, racing in a blur past the portholes of the ship. From the bridge, looking out the front view screen, it looked like those colors grew out of a single infinitesimal point of pure white light and ballooned outwards to surround the ship. It was, in a word, stunning. From the sides, though - as he was seeing it now - it looked like an ocean of color rushing past his window.

He shook his head clear, pulling his attention away from the incredible sights through the porthole, and turned to look along the hallway. It ran in both directions, with the hallway itself occupying the outer part of the ship before the hull and the cabin on the inside, meaning that the old man could have gone in either direction.

Elijah took a deep breath, closed his eyes as he exhaled it slowly, and focused. This, like everything, was another test.

Air on a starship didn't move, at least not as it did on a planet; there were no external influences that would make it do so. There was no wind; there were no convection currents where some parts of the air were heated or cooled by, say, the sun or its proximity to land or water; there was also not enough air for it to have a great enough volume to act independently of a planet's gravity - in other words, it didn't have the momentum of being dragged around a spinning world to keep it moving. But that didn't mean that it was perfectly still, especially not when something - for example, a person - had recently moved through it. With such a lack of internal factors acting on it, the air would take longer to blend back into the background, ambient 'noise' of the rest of the atmosphere... Elijah had no idea how he knew this, he had never studied Aero or thermodynamics, and yet he did. With this understanding came an idea of what to look for, and Elijah's senses, honed and trained through almost two decades of practicing Uhmwaan, picked up these still-shifting air currents in a heartbeat.

With his eyes reopening, he followed them, turning to his left and heading down the corridor. After only a few dozen meters, pausing at and then passing a host of doorways along its path, he started picking up another thing that was different between life on a planet and life on a starship. With less air movement, scents didn't dissipate. Within a few minutes of leaving his cabin, he had already picked up the old Master's trail and could follow it easily. A few minutes later came the subtle sound of movement, probably too faint for the average human to pick up, but it was enough to give him pause at a large, double doorway about twenty meters before the corridor ended in a bank of elevators. A quick check confirmed that neither the scent, nor the shifting currents of air continued past this point either. With a soft smile of satisfaction and a sigh to steady himself, he stepped through the door.

Okay, even he half expected the room to be empty, but it wasn't. "Good," Wu nodded, not only confirming that this had, indeed, been a test but that it had been passed. "Please sit; I'm sure you have questions, and I have a lot to tell you before we reach our destination." he gestured to one of the empty chairs around a circular table, with him sitting on another. The room looked like an officer lounge, with sofas lining a few of the walls beneath long, rectangular windows and the swirling blue backdrop beyond it. There was a bar - or something that looked like a bar - on the right-hand side of the room and a small kitchenette at the other, with the door opening about halfway between them on the opposite wall to the windows. The table and his mentor were in the room's center. Elijah sat down, the two men staring at each other in silence for the longest moment.

"You were incorrect," Wu finally said, waiting for his student to tilt his head in response. "Your answer during training. You were incorrect about the nature of tyranny."

"Master?"

"Tyranny can come from any form of government or authority, and it has nothing to do with rights," he went on. "Tyranny occurs when a government relies on the fear of its people to stay in power, rather than their consent. That's it. Now, young one, I want you to think about how you reacted when I implied that the Emperor's rule was a tyrannical one."

Elijah was used to Wu's sometimes infuriating ways of making sure a lesson was learned. They would be enough to drive the most stoic and patient of students to madness, and Elijah had often wondered if this was intentional, a method of weeding out the student unworthy of the Grand Master. But over the years, he had come to see the method behind his madness. A question was never asked directly, at least not an important one. Instead, a statement was made, and the student was asked to think about it before giving their response or their counterpoint. It was rare indeed that a student gave a satisfactory answer on the first attempt - giving Grand Master Wu a reputation of being impossible to please - but that wasn't the point; the point was to get the student to think - Really think - about the subject. Given where he was, Elijah was starting to suspect he had been asleep for longer than a single night, but the time leading up to his sleep had been filled with nothing other than Wu's question about the Empire, and by the time he had surrendered to it - or been sedated - he was already convinced that his answer had been the wrong one.

Of course, why this subject was important enough to justify this little field trip was beyond him, but he was hopeful that, in his own roundabout way, Wu would enlighten him eventually.

If tradition was anything to go by, though, that could be some time away. In the meantime, the Master had given him something of a clue, and his perfect memory cast itself back to that conversation during their last training session.

"The rebels are traitors to the Imperium."... "They defied the will and the orders of the Emperor. They broke away from the Imperium."... "It is treason to even think of questioning Imperial will!"

Elijah frowned. In all the time he had spent thinking and rethinking the question, he had never really evaluated how he had answered it the first time around, only that Wu had been less than satisfied with it. But now that he did think about it, he had been nervous about answering, not because it had been a difficult question but because it was dangerous to openly criticize the Emperor. He remembered his nervous glances around the room, he remembered thinking about how much of a risk that sort of talk could be, and he remembered his shock, not at the question itself but that Wu would be reckless enough to ask it out loud in a relatively public space.

Which was exactly Wu's point.

"The imperium lies about its power, too," Elijah added, if only to show his Mentor that he had continued to think about the question.

"Why?"

Elijah paused for a second, something he perhaps should have done the first time around, and gave the idea time to form in his mind. "Ruling through fear needs two things," Elijah finally spoke again. "First is some form of threat, some... repercussions... to not falling in line, like the secret police or the ISD. The second is the illusion or the advertisement of power. Something that instills in the common person a sense that the Imperium is too big, too powerful to challenge, and then backs that up with the consequences of trying."

Wu was quiet for a few moments before he nodded. "Good, you are seeing it. But they are intelligent in their deception and very experienced. Can you think of any ways the Imperium has specifically lied about something?"

"I think I can, yes." Elijah nodded. He waited for Wu to gesture for him to continue. "The Imperium's military record, the victories they claim to have won. They were..." he paused, looking for the right word. "... they were bloodbaths. Pyrrhic victories at best. The ineptitude of command during some of those battles was astounding, yet they are presented as proof of Imperium might and the infallibility of the Emperor."

Wu cocked his head to the side. "How do you know the Emperor was involved?"

Elijah winced. "It's hard to put into words, Master. I studied the records, the maps, everything I could get my hands on. After a while, patterns started to emerge, like the same fingerprints on each set of orders given by someone who was either so inept as to rule them out for command or someone who wasn't seeing the battle with his own eyes. The only people who could possibly have issued orders to different fleets, fighting different battles in different parts of space, were the Minster of Defence and the Emperor himself. But the logs I studied all took place under the tenure of three different MOD Ministers, so it could only be the Emperor."

Wu had started to stroke his beard as he listened to Elijah speak, something approaching a gleam sparkling in his eyes. "You studied all the battles?"

"No, Sir. Only the Navy's ones, I... I never got around to studying the land battles."

"Interesting," the older man pondered. "Fleet battles and naval tactics intrigue you?"

"They do, Master," Elijah nodded.

Wu seemed to consider this for another few moments. "So, tell me. In your honest opinion, could you have done better?"

"In all but two of the battles I studied, had I been in command of the enemy fleets, I would have been victorious, yes."

Wu raised an eyebrow. "You war-gamed as the enemy?" He waited for Elijah's confirmation. "Why?"

"The... the deck was stacked too heavily in favor of the Imperium at the start of the battle, Master. The Imperium wins through sheer force of numbers and the willingness to accept massive losses. That felt... wrong. I..." Elijah scratched his head. "I wanted to see if I could win as the underdog."

"There was no challenge in it..." Wu clarified, again waiting for Elijah to nod. "And without a challenge, there can be no lesson, and with no gain of knowledge, there can be no growth. I seldom say this, young one, but I am impressed. Your commitment to bettering yourself is commendable."

"I... Thank you, Sir."

Wu took a deep breath and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers into a pyramid under his chin. "Do you understand who you are?"

Elijah squinted at the question. "I'm not sure I understand, Sir."

"You are Elijah, and you are an Ancient. Do you know what that means?"

Elijah squinted, hoping that it was a rhetorical question. His being Elijah and his being an ancient were, as far as he could tell, about the sum of it, with very little else to understand. Either that, or he didn't understand the question, and repeating the phrase "I don't understand" again seemed... embarrassing. Luckily, Wu seemed to take pity on him.

"Your character, your personality, your soul, the essence of who you are; no matter what fools and philosophers may choose to call it, yours is split in two. You straddle the boundaries between what is now and what once was, and yet you do it in perfectly balanced symbiosis. The "Elijah" part of you is shaped by the galaxy around you: what you see, what you feel, what you learn, and what you experience. But beneath that, underlying it all, is your ancient half. You know by now that a venerable race existed in this part of the galaxy when the earth was still a molten ball of rock, long before the development of the human species, and that they left behind their DNA to float on the cosmic winds."

Elijah nodded, "Yes, and that DNA was somehow absorbed into my mother before I was born."

Wu nodded. "The ancients found a way to encode their knowledge into those strands of DNA, a manipulation so intricate that it allowed two distinctive parts of you to exist simultaneously, a process that should drive someone to madness. This is, perhaps, not common knowledge, but common enough for the meaning of your blue eyes to be recognized by the Imperium..."

"And my parents murdered for it," Elijah added.

"Yes," Wu said after a short but meaningful pause while he held his eyes. "Another way they lied to you."

"Was it you? Were you involved?" Elijah asked, not really knowing what he would do or how he would feel if the answer was in the affirmative.

Wu shook his head. "You were three when I learned of your existence. It was far too late for me to help them or hide you."

"Hide me?"

Wu held his hand up, "We are getting a little ahead of ourselves; all will be explained. You have my word. But we will get to that in time," He waited for Elijah to nod and lean back into his chair a little. "Knowledge is a difficult thing to quantify," he continued. "It is a combination of the things you have learned, the context they were learned in, and, most importantly, your experience of using that knowledge. When the ancients encoded those strands of DNA, they had to find a balance between imbuing you with that experience without affecting your ability to acclimatize to the modern galaxy and live within it. However, the process wasn't perfect. Each of us has a varying degree of connection to the individual ancient their DNA came from. Some of us..."

"I'm sorry, Master," Elijah interrupted. "But... Us?"

Wu smiled, his faded grey eyes holding his as they slowly began to glow. Gradually turning that same luminescent blue that Elijah saw in the mirror every day. "Yes, young one... us. Each of us has a role, or at least our ancient progenitors did. Those roles are hard-wired into us, they determine how we are able to access our knowledge, and the stronger the strand of DNA that merged with ours, the more powerful the connection to that particular ancient. Your connection is particularly strong, especially for one so young. It took many decades of meditation for me to gain the sort of connection with my ancient side that you possess instinctively."

Elijah nodded, somehow understanding on the most fundamental level that everything he was being told was true. The slices of knowledge stitched into his very makeup allowed him to absorb this new information at frightening speeds and cross-reference it with what he already knew. "So, what is my role?"

"There were many strata of ancient society, and all of them, from highest to lowest, were equal, distinguishable only by the function they provided to society as a whole. A leader was no more or less important than a laborer; each was equally important to their civilization. But those roles were allocated based on aptitude, and that aptitude only grew as they lived an extremely long life of performing their role... their knowledge and abilities grew with their experience, and their physiology allowed all of that to be coded into their DNA. I am a guardian. That is my role. In ancient times, as far as I can tell, that equated to something akin to a bodyguard and mentor, a role I have - in part - continued in this life. But there was more to it than that. I am - or was - not a guardian of just a person, but of our way of life, of our secrets, of our technology, of our... legacy. In this life, that role has become something of a caretaker."

Elijah frowned. "A caretaker? Of what?"

Wu sighed, relaxing his finger pyramid, and sat back in his chair. "My original plan was to introduce you to this gradually, but unfortunately, events seem to have overtaken us. There is no simple way to put this, but relics - incredibly powerful relics - still remain from ancient times. Buried and hidden, waiting to be reunited with its owners. My role came with a distinct knowledge of where these relics were and how to maintain them, something that only someone like me - a guardian - would possess. Your role, if I am correct, is... different. I believe that you are a Marshall."

"What's a Marshall?" Elijah felt that shouldn't have been a question he needed to ask, yet Wu's cryptic silence after he dropped that nugget of information seemed to suggest otherwise.

"A Marshall is..." Wu paused to collect his thoughts and frame them in a way that the younger man would comprehend. "... Marshalls made the safety and security of the ancient civilization their personal responsibility. They were our defenders, our warriors, but also our leaders. The modern equivalents would be a cross between something like a Grand Admiral and a Politician, except... more. These are not easy concepts to translate to today's culture. Something like a Warrior King would be closer but without the crown or the country."

The terms 'Grand Admiral' and 'Politician' provoked the same reaction in Elijah as he would expect: namely, none at all. But 'Warrior King' was different. Something stirred in him. A will, a righteous determination, a profound, marrow-deep urge to see good triumph over evil, or at least the causes he determined to be good or evil. But at the same time, he could tell that Wu was wrong; perhaps the right phrase was that his knowledge was incomplete. A Marshall was an arbiter, a judge of the conduct of beings and societies, especially at times of conflict. His was the will that came down on one side to vanquish another; his loyalty lay not to a state, or a person, or even with a cause but to whichever side was in the right in any dispute.

"You feel it," Wu said while watching him intently. "You feel that connection to your role."

"Not a role," Elijah murmured as he lost himself in the new thoughts and sensations bubbling up from the depths of his DNA. "It's my purpose." Silence fell between them again, Wu giving Elijah the time he needed to process this new information before eventually speaking again.

"It took me decades of introspection to connect with my past life; you have managed it in ten minutes. I must say, young one, your capacity to impress me never ceases to amaze me."

Well, that sure-as-shit snapped Elijah out of his thoughts. Impressed? With him? When? He shook the thought clear and nodded respectfully. "Thank you, Master,"

"No, Young one, I am no longer your Master. Technically, I follow you now. But you may refer to me as... Mentor, or by the title of my own purpose." He finished with something Elijah never thought he would ever see out of the wizen old Grand Master: a deep, honorable bow. Not knowing what else to do, Elijah matched it, his head and his heart swimming with awe-struck pride.

"Perhaps all is not as dire as recent events have led me to believe," Wu pondered to himself.

"You said they had overtaken us. What did you mean by that?"

Wu sighed and settled back onto his chair again. "Several decades ago, I followed the knowledge in my mind to the planet of Xnios..." Of course, like everyone else, Elijah had heard of the cataclysm on that distant planet. Societal upheaval on a near empire-wide scale was not the sort of thing that a person could miss, especially when it came from such an unlikely source over such a short period of time. "...One of our ships, an ancient flagship called The Atlas, was left there in the final days of our civilization, purposefully buried under scores of compound cloud releases so it could remain hidden for us to find. There are two whole fleets in this part of the galaxy - scattered and waiting for us to reclaim - but the knowledge of their whereabouts is still... lost to me. The Atlas would have been our destination once your training and your connection were complete."

"But..."

"But... against all probability, the Atlas seems to have been discovered by an outsider."

"That sounds... less than ideal."

"I have been monitoring the situation on board. So far, only a single human seems to be there, and I have been working to slow her down, but it is only a matter of time before she calls her friends. But no, her arrival is very poorly timed, and we will have to rearrange our plans accordingly. I have already altered our course; we should arrive in system by this evening and make orbit by morning."

"Then what?"

"Then we reclaim what is ours."

"Using force?"

"I hope it doesn't come to that, Marshall," Wu sighed, using his title for the very first time. "But it cannot be ruled out until we can assess the situation on the ship. There is some very dangerous technology down there. In the wrong hands, it could be devastating."

Elijah nodded, "How have you slowed her down?"

"I jammed the comms on her ship, she has already tried calling for backup. She will have to leave the Atlas to go back to her own ship to remedy the problem." Elijah knew that glint in the old man's eyes well after all these years.

"And..."

"And she is going to find that the hatch that allowed her onto the ship won't let her back out again. At least not until we get there and discover her intentions."

********

Laura. 6

Her eye twitched as she looked at the door. It was closed, and for the life of her, she couldn't understand why. More than that, it appeared to be locked. After walking for hours, she just wasn't mentally capable of thinking clearly. The door had been open when she left it; the very unlikely chance that she had somehow wandered to a different door was ruled out by the fact that her atmospheric suit was still in a pile next to it where she'd left it, and she was almost certain that she hadn't accidentally touched anything that would have sealed it. More annoyingly, the red icon next to the door stubbornly refused to cooperate when prompted to open the fucking thing.

She growled at it.

It still refused to open.

There was more at stake than the simple matter of the door being closed, though. She couldn't imagine that this had anything to do with her comms issue; the rest of the computer working fine still ruled that out, but she had only packed five days' worth of food and water, and she was coming to the end of her second full day. It wasn't exactly urgent yet, and she could comfortably stretch that out longer, but there would come a point where she would run out. There were already a lot of sources of purified water on board; she even knew where they were, but the question was could she trust the water to be drinkable when it had been sitting there for a few million years? Starving to death was a shit way to go, but dying of dehydration was absolutely horrific, and given half a choice, she would rather avoid either.

She kicked the door in frustration.

It stubbornly continued to not open.

She huffed and dropped her pack onto the deck; a clang - almost as loud as the one her foot had made when impacting the door - reverberated down the hallway. The pack had started getting heavy a few hours ago, the weight having obviously not changed, but the drag of it had just increased with every one of its subtle movements as she had walked the last few miles of gangways. Who made a ship this fucking big, anyway? At least not without a way to travel around faster, and at twenty-four kilometers in a straight line - a straight line the hallways made no attempt to match - it could fit its own god damned rail line inside.

"Inconsiderate fucking ancient bastards," she muttered to herself, pulling a rolled-up sleeping mat out of her pack and laying it out on the floor. "Leaving the find of a lifetime just sitting here, then making me walk for fucking days around the thing, only to lock me in when I need to leave." She growled again, but this time refrained from kicking anything. She slid her boots off, peeled off her pants, leaving her only in a thin pair of cotton panties and her undershirt, and flopped down onto the mat just to the side of the door. It had been a long couple of days of arguably pointless walking; she had found a lot, or at least confirmed a lot, but in hindsight, she should have called for the science teams as soon as she realized what the vault was and that the power was on. Even if that is all it turned out to be, it still would have been a huge find, and it still would have needed more than her and the Seren to dismantle and extract.

The team would have been arriving as early as the evening of the next day if she had contacted them yesterday. Instead, she had managed to get herself trapped. She sighed heavily and tried to calm herself down by relaxing on the mat.

The only possibility that made sense to her was that she had either touched something or tripped something on the bridge, maybe some sort of security override thing, or perhaps, in opening the cavern to the air above, she had let in the compound cloud and the door had closed to keep out the harmful... whatever it was in the cloud that fucked people up, like a safety measure. That made sense, right? Her ship had something similar. The Seren wouldn't open the internal side of the airlock until the pressure chamber had been purged of harmful materials. That was a pretty fast process, though, and could be overridden fairly easily; maybe the override in this case was on the bridge. Technically, this was a hatch rather than an airlock, but that could be semantics to a species with enormously advanced tech, and now that she thought about it, the Primis didn't have anything that could be called a standard airlock either, which meant this ship probably didn't, considering they seemed to be sister ships. And if it was a security thing, then that should be expected. She was wandering around the ship uninvited, even if the entire crew was a little too deceased to extend that invitation.

She had a passing knowledge of the ancient written word, enough to pick out the more simple labels on ship systems, but on her first go around the bridge, she hadn't seen any. Admittedly, she hadn't looked; she had been far more preoccupied with the displays themselves and the many subsystems that each of them represented. The problem was that she didn't remember any display giving obvious details about internal security, nor could she read the more complex language to let her find one. The same went for atmospheric safety overrides. She imagined that would be part of the life support system, and she remembered that screen clearly, but it hadn't included anything obvious about locking the hatch. Once again, though, she hadn't been looking for it, so maybe she had missed it.

She sighed a little deeper, rolling onto her side and yanking her pack closer to act as a makeshift pillow. She needed to sleep; she was too tired to think about this properly, and every question that came to mind led her down a rabbit hole of a dozen more, none of which could be answered at the moment. She would need to approach the problem with fresh eyes in the morning. She relaxed, trying to clear her mind and get some sleep, concentrating instead on the soft hum of vibrations passing through the frame of the ship and gently rumbling the deck plates below her mat. There was something familiar about that, something comforting, something that reminded her of sleeping on the Seren or in her cabin on one of the enormous colony ships of the home fleet. Slowly, steadily, she allowed herself to succumb to the warm embrace of sleep.

She awoke a solid seven hours later, perhaps not quite feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but she was definitely feeling better than she had been the evening before. For a moment, she considered leaving her pack and her kit where it was, maybe turning the hatch's anteroom into something of a makeshift home base, but realistically, she needed to be on the bridge, and trekking back and forth just seemed like a waste of time. If she managed to open the doors, she could just leave, and if she couldn't get them open, then the chairs on the bridge were as comfortable a place as any to kill time until she starved to death and wandering back and forth to the hatch was pointless.

Like the man marooned on the island full of treasure, she could slowly drive herself crazy being so close to her life's obsession while it sat infuriatingly out of reach.

That was something to look forward to, at least.

She rolled her eyes at herself as she packed her sleeping mat back away, pulled her pants back on, and tugged her boots back onto her feet; she was feeling particularly cynical and sarcastic today. It was funny how quickly the optimist in her vanished at the first sign of real opposition, but then that was something she had always known. Happy thoughts always took a back seat to sheer grit and determination when the going got tough.

Swinging the pack onto her back again, adjusting the shoulder straps, and fastening the clip around her waist, then she checked her wrist-mounted computer - partly to make sure it was securely attached and partly to check the comms again, with no joy, predictably - before she rolled her neck and started the hike to the bridge. She was a Mariner, she was the captain of a starship, she could cross hundreds of millions of miles in the blink of an eye, and yet she was reduced to walking like a fucking barbarian. All the technology in the world, all the modern conveniences, all the things that people in bygone eras could only dream about, and they all counted for shit the moment something went wrong.

If the ship was twenty-four kilometers long, the hatch was about 5 kilometers from the bow. The bridge, unimaginatively, was in a slightly protruding section of the hull above and set a little way back from the bow. It wasn't the furthest distance she'd had to walk recently, but it was still more than an hour, and that was without including those fucking stairs.

A thought occurred to her as she walked. There were a few sections of the Primis that had been rendered unexplorable by the closure of enormously strong blast doors. Not many of them, and none of those rooms seemed to be attached in any meaningful way to the main ship systems, so it had been assumed - like the elevators - that whatever was behind there had relied on power to work, so the research teams had left them be. If she was going to be stuck on the ship for a few more days until rescue could get there - assuming she could contact them - then maybe that was something to do to kill the time. There was a huge portion of the bowels of the Primis that had been inaccessible, so huge, in fact, that despite no evidence being found to support the theory, it had been assumed that the entire section had been damaged and lost its atmosphere to the vacuum of space. The rest of the ship had simply blocked off the section to maintain life support for the rest of it. There was no damage to the hull, though, not even a scratch, but nothing the researchers could do would get those doors open, and the hull itself - even internally - was far too strong to cut through. Running along about a third of the keel - the very underbelly of the ship - with very minimal power running to it, it was assumed that this section contained nothing more than more living quarters. With all the interesting stuff elsewhere on the ship, not too much attention was paid to this area. Assuming it was not sealed up here, Laura could possibly solve another mystery of the ancient starship while she waited for backup.

And then there were the rooms which had always seemed conspicuously absent on the Primis. The most obvious of these were any sort of hanger bay - anything bigger than a light cruiser had one these days - and anything that resembled an armory or magazine. Hangers were an essential part of modern starship operations, used to house craft capable of performing all manner of vital missions, from lightweight freight transport to orbital dropships to space-superiority fighters, and a starship as large as the Primis would - by all conventional wisdom - have the capacity and the requirement for all of them.

A magazine was a little more unlikely. Their function was to act as an armored room in which to store all the potentially explosive ordnance fired by ballistic - or at least ammo-consuming - weaponry. As far as anyone could tell, the Primis had neither, so its absence wasn't as much of a mystery, but in all the years the Mariners had explored that derelict hulk, not a single personal firearm had been found. Not one. For a ship clearly designed for battle, that seemed more than a little odd. There was a theory that there could have been an armory - a place to store all of these personal weapons - and that it was just in one of the sealed-off parts of the ship. The problem with that, though, was that the sealed-off sections were nowhere near any point of tactical importance. If the ship was boarded, there should have been some sort of weapons locker close to the bridge, engineering, and any other critically important part of the ship, allowing the crew to defend itself. The main armory should have been close to the main barracks, allowing soldiers to arm and armor themselves ready for a firefight, too, but although something resembling a barracks had been found, there was nothing to arm those ancient soldiers with what they needed to fight. They were perplexing problems, ones that kept Laura's mind blissfully occupied on the long trek toward the bridge.

She was aware - as all Mariners were - that they were, for lack of a better word, anthropomorphizing the Primis. Assigning human, or at least modern, characterizations to features on the ship and then wondering why a distinctly non-human design didn't fall completely into line with what they expected. The Hanger and the armory were perfect examples of that: Modern species used smaller ships and strike craft to fill certain roles in fleet maneuvers, and it was assumed that the ancients did as well - to be fair, the presence of a point defense network vaguely supported that. If fighters and bombers weren't a thing, why did the ancients have defenses against them? - so they expected to find a hanger, then got confused when they didn't. Every modern ship, including the Seren, had some form of secure weapon storage; finding a larger ship without at least one main armory was unheard of. Entire boarding access strategies were built around - or at least took into account - the need to isolate a defending crew from their weapons. The Primis was clearly a warship, so the concept that its crew would have no personal weapons seemed too ludicrous to even consider, and yet, there were none. One of the more accepted theories for that was that the crew had simply taken them with them when they abandoned the Primis, but although Laura had admittedly not outrightly looked for them, the crew obviously hadn't abandoned this ship, and yet she still hadn't seen any.

There were so many questions, and each answered one seemed to generate a few more to replace it. It was fascinating and infuriating and wonderful in equal parts and kept her mind busy for the entire time it took her to reach the staircase.

To be fair, stairs were assholes and were rather good at derailing a decent train of thought.

She grumbled; the muscles in her legs complained with each one of the hundreds of steps she was forced to climb. There probably weren't hundreds of them, but that is what it felt like, and after almost a week on this fucking planet, dealing with one fucking problem after another, she felt she had earned the right to complain about something, and the stairs were as good a thing as any.

Finally, her muscles screaming at her, her breath ragged, and sweat beading at her brow, she made it to the top of the stairs and leaned on her arm on the top of the guard rail. Forget gravity, forget heights, forget anything else in life that being a Mariner left you woefully unprepared for: Endurance exercise was now at the top of her list. And if she never saw another staircase for the rest of her natural life, she would still be annoyed at them.

After more minutes than she was comfortable admitting, and with her lungs no longer feeling like they were filled with molten lead, she straightened herself up, adjusted her pack on her back, and stepped toward the door to the bridge.

And nothing happened.

"Oh, you are shitting me!" she growled at it as it stubbornly refused to open. Her eyes shifted to the control panel, and she glared at the icon on it. "I don't want to shoot you," she snarled at the inanimate subsystem, "I really don't. But don't confuse unwillingness with inability! I don't want to, but I will if you don't fucking work!" She reached out and tapped her fingers over the hieroglyph. The door seemed to consider its options for an interminable half a second before it swooshed open. "Good choice," she muttered at it as she strode frustratedly onto the command deck. Something was seriously going out of its way to piss her off today.

She froze, spinning around and blinking at the door. If the reason the external hatch had sealed itself was due to her tripping some sort of automated security protocol, how could it possibly have allowed her onto the bridge, easily the most important room on the entire ship? That had to rule security out, didn't it? She could understand a safety feature sealing the hatch to keep out the more toxic and dangerous elements of the planet's compound cloud. That made total sense. But the one thing that had silently bothered her about the possibility of it being a security protocol was the fact that common sense dictated a code or some sort of override would be needed to reset it, and she simply didn't have one. Resetting an atmospheric safety switch wouldn't be easy; it would require finding, translating, and then operating the systems on the relevant system screen, something that could yet prove woefully beyond her, but unlike trying to magically conjure up a security override code, it wasn't impossible.

With a sigh of something akin to relief, she let her eyes sweep back over the bridge, and it didn't take long for her to find the graphical representation of what could only be the life support system. She headed over to it, stepping over no less than three dead bodies on her way, before studying the screen properly.

Now that she looked at it properly, there wasn't really anything to suggest that this was the life support system. The display showed two representations of the ship, one from the side and one from the top. The profile of the ship itself was instantly recognizable.

Like the Primis, this ship had a sleek, rounded bow, the lines from which swept back into a long outwardly tapering hull. Then, at the midpoint of the ship, it suddenly pinched back in again on a soft inward bulge. On the diagram, it looked pretty small, but having walked its length, she knew it to be several miles before the hull angled back outward again to continue its original line. The purpose of this indentation had never been discovered, but it gave the Primis a fairly unique profile. Finally, the main hull ended abruptly at the housing for four of the unbelievably massive engines. The rear quarter of the ship was flanked by two more sections of hull, one on each side and each one held two more engines. They resembled fins, but were rounder and the same thickness as the main hull at the rear and narrowed as it flowed forward. On a smaller ship, those fins would look like engine mounts with a convexed housing in front of it, but she knew that those secondary hulls were each eight kilometers in length.

It was the internal display that held her attention, though. A network of tiny white lines crossed over each other to form small, individual boxes, each one representing a single room on the ship. There were thousands of them, and this screen was essentially a map of a single deck. She couldn't quite work out which deck, only that it wasn't the one she was looking for, and there didn't seem to be any obvious way to scroll between them, but the whole thing was bathed in a slight green tint, indicating - she deduced - that life support was functioning properly. She shook her head in bewilderment as her eyes finally glided onto the scrolling mass of incomprehensible, indecipherable language. To her, it looked like a random collection of curved and straight lines, no different than what normal letters looked like in a human alphabet, except no two looked to be the same, and none of them was anything close to familiar.

She rolled her neck again. This ship, this planet, this situation; they were making her do that a lot these days. But she groaned softly as she felt the satisfying pops run through her neck and into the top of her spine. She took a step backward to be able to view the monitor as a whole; there was nothing obvious to indicate that something had been tripped, and the sealed hatch didn't seem to be shown on the deck the map was displaying. The backs of her legs brushed against something, and she turned to look at whatever it was.

The desiccated body didn't move; it just sat in the chair assigned to this console, but she looked at it properly anyway. There didn't seem to be any sort of clothing on the body, no hair, and its eyes were closed. She had already considered the problems of assigning human traits to non-human entities, but, to her, its face looked almost serene. The only thing that seemed out of place was the smooth, shiny, silver dome-like helmet wrapped around the body's skull.

She had noticed them before but hadn't paid them much mind. Now, however, an idea occurred to her, and she leaned forward to study it more closely. "It can't be," she mumbled to herself as she ran her finger over the surface of it, feeling the soft thrumming of power running through it. How it worked, or how it was powered, was beyond her, but if the theories about the ancients communicating directly to their ship were true, this would certainly be a way to do it. It took her a few moments to realize what it was she was looking at... This, if it was what she now thought it was, was the Holy Grail that Mariners had been hunting for decades. "Holy fucking shit!" she gasped, putting her hands on the helmet and yanking it upward.

The body's head came with it, but she was too excited to be grossed out; she just shook it a few times until the detached head slid out of its confinement and dropped to the floor with a thud. She took a deep breath, ignored that little voice at the back of her head that reminded her that a dead dude's head had literally just been in there, and lifted it toward her own.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," A voice echoed around the bridge.

Laura wasn't quite sure how to describe the sound that burst from her lips as her whole body seemed to jump about a foot out of its own skin. Some may have called it a yelp, others a scream; there may have even been a few misinformed bystanders who would have described it as an enthusiastic whimper. To her credit, she wasn't really paying attention to that. She was more concerned with making sure her skeleton was where it was supposed to be, immediately followed by looking to see who, on a completely deserted ship, had spoken to her.

Her eyes flashed to the source of the sound, the still-open bridge door, and the two men standing just inside it. One old - really, really fucking old - and the other considerably younger than even she was. As quickly as her eyes moved, her hands moved just as fast. She dropped the helmet, pulled her sidearm from its holster, and had it trained on the two men faster than any time she had managed on the gun range "Who are you, and what are you doing on my ship?" she blurted out, sounding a lot more authoritative than she actually felt.

"Your ship?" the old man replied so calmly it suggested he didn't realize he had a weapon pointed at him. "I'm afraid you are more lost than I imagined if you think this ship is yours. The Atlas is ours."

"The Atlas?"

"You not knowing the name of the ship you are trespassing on would suggest that it is, in fact, not yours. I suggest you leave while you can." The old man shrugged and held her eye.

"I'm the one with the gun here, Grandpa," she almost growled. "I could just shoot you and carry on with what I was doing."

"No, you couldn't."

"Couldn't I?"

The old man shook his head. "Give it a try, if you don't believe me."

"You want me to shoot you?"

"Shoot the bulkhead if you are concerned about my safety."

Seething in frustration, she adjusted her aim to a few inches beside the man's head, pointing the barrel at the wall next to the door, and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

She blinked at it. It was definitely, absolutely working when she left the Seren; there was no conceivable reason for it not to be functioning now. "Dampening field," the old man shrugged. "It doesn't affect mine, though," his eyes flicked up to the ceiling. Four... things... that could only be described as turrets - although their barrels were like nothing she had ever seen before, and they looked very, very dangerous - swung out of hidden ceiling compartments in each corner of the room and pointed straight at her. "Now, who are you, and what are you doing on our ship?"

Laura was many things. She was impatient, she was technically adept, she was damned near obsessed with the ancients, she was cynical, not optimistic, pretty unlucky - if recent events were anything to go by - and she made weird noises when frightened. She was not, however, someone who could be called stupid. These men, whoever they were, had gotten through the tunnel without alerting her ship's sensors, they had gained access to the hitherto sealed hatch, they had disabled her weapon without her even realizing it had happened, let alone knowing how, and - with that single flick of the eyes - had demonstrated a mastery of a technology she couldn't hope to understand. "You're ancients," she gasped, dropping her pistol and raising her hands as she finally spotted the distinctive glow of the younger man's blue eyes.

"And you are not," the old man said, his voice terrifyingly calm, a contradiction made no less profound by the most subtle hints of threat flowing beneath it. "Which begs the question, Who are you, and what are you doing on our ship... again... and how did you find it?"

"I'm... I'm a Mariner," she answered, "My name is Laura Dondarrion. The Home Fleet sent me to investigate the existence of a vault." Considering how vastly outgunned she appeared to be and her excitement at meeting no less than two living ancients - or at least the reincarnated versions of them - ancients who could potentially help the Mariners understand this long-forgotten technology, she couldn't see the benefit of acting belligerently.

The old man tilted his head, seeming to regard her in a slightly different light as he absorbed this information. He paused for a lot longer than seemed necessary before he nodded, and the turrets rotated back up into the ceiling. "Sit," he pointed to a chair that was currently filled with the remains of the ancient she had decapitated in her recent excitement.

"Umm..."

"You didn't look so squeamish when you were holding its head in your hands," the old man commented dryly. "But very well." His eyes flicked again. This time a small, waist-high door slid upwards in the wall to one side of the bridge and three small robots - each of them floating on anti-grav generators and looking vaguely humanoid - raced out and started to lift bodies out of seats and off the deck, secreting them away into the hole in the wall from whence they came.

Laura watched them in bemused fascination, as did the younger and quieter of the two men. The older man barely gave them a second glance. It didn't take long for them to be finished, though, and she looked around to find that the entire command deck was now completely corpse-free. She had to admit that the change did wonders for the general aesthetic.

The old man cleared his throat, and Laura blinked, realizing that she was still standing and the two men now had their entire attention fixed on her. She sat herself on the chair without any more hesitation. "What do the Mariners know of the Ancients?" he asked.

They say that the best form of defense is a good offense; in this situation, however, they would be idiots. The only form of defense she had was to cooperate fully, and she got the distinct impression from the hard edge of the older man's eyes that anything less would result in a prompt and terminal demonstration of what those turrets were capable of. Besides, there seemed to be something... reasonable, for want of a better word, about the man. Someone who would actually listen to what she wanted to say and someone who didn't intrinsically mean her harm. "Do you know who we are?"

"I know that you broke away from humanity before the Imperium was founded; now you consider yourselves nomads. I don't see how that answers my question."

"When we first went out on our own, all we wanted to do was explore. To see what was out there. We have been much further than any other human, and almost all of the territory claimed by the Imperium, we discovered decades, sometimes centuries, beforehand. We started picking up strange readings on planets we passed, but the source was always buried. We weren't equipped for - or even that interested in - mining operations, so aside from making records, we left them alone. Then, one day, about a century ago, the Mariners found a new signal, but this time, it was in space. Not something buried and forgotten, but a ship..." She noticed the slight raise of the older man's eyebrows at this, and she didn't miss the quick glance he shared with his younger and quieter counterpart. So she kept talking. "... It was the same as this one, we called it The Primis, but it was dead. Every system was offline, we couldn't reactivate the power core or any of the ship systems, and even though we could hook up individual computer terminals to portable power generators, your computer language was indecipherable."

"But you salvaged and reverse-engineered what you could," he said with less judgment than she was expecting. "Which would explain the unusually powerful sensors on your ship."

"That's right, yes. But it was the hull of the ship that led us here. When we scanned it, it gave us the same readings we had been finding throughout the space we had explored. So we went back to those places and dug up whatever was buried there. Sometimes it was a few data crystals in a buried building, sometimes it was a piece of equipment, all of it was...." she paused.

"I believe the word you are looking for is 'looted'..." the man nodded.

Laura winced but nodded. "We took it all back to the Home Fleet. The other ship, the Primis, we dragged to the Yridian Nebula to hide it from the Imperium."

The old man nodded slowly. "And you could never come to check the readings here on Xnios because it was a heavily colonized world deep in Imperium space... until the expulsion gave you an opening."

Laura just nodded.

"How many of these vaults have the Mariners uncovered?"

"I... I don't know. At least thirty. This was my first mission."

The old man ran his fingers through his beard, clearly pondering something. "So, you are currently on a ship you cannot control, let alone excavate, dealing with technology far beyond your comprehension, yet your people have acquired a great deal of it. Your attempts at reverse engineering it have been crude but effective, and you have been looking for a way to reactivate the ship you have, or even just interface with it. Does that sound about right?"

"I... umm... Yes, actually," Laura stammered. "If those helmet things are what I think they are, I'm not sure there is anything the Mariners wouldn't give you to get their hands on even one of them."

"They are, but that would be unwise."

"But we could help each other," Laura pleaded, starting to feel that uncomfortable sensation in the pit of her stomach at the idea of this opportunity passing her by.

"You misunderstand," the old man said. "Any non-Ancient who tries to interface with our systems with one of those helmets would face a very unpleasant end... almost immediately."

Shit. She hadn't thought of that. She assumed the research teams had at least considered it, but they hadn't told her - assumably because nobody had ever expected a find like this even to exist, let alone be discovered... and she damned near put one of those things on her head. She shuddered at the thought of how close she had come to her own death. There was a small part of her that wanted to think that the old man was full of shit, but there was something about him, something about the look in his eyes that told her that every word of his warning was true.

"A trade," she suddenly blurted out.

The older and younger men cast another look between the two. This time, it was the boy who gave a slight nod. Laura frowned at that but now was not the time to be analyzing the relationship between these two.

"A trade for what?"

"I..." fuck, she hadn't been prepared for follow-up questions. "I don't know. I don't know what they have, but I'm certain Home command would be willing to give you damned near anything short of the Primis itself, even if you could just reactive the power core."

"I suspect you don't have the authority to make that sort of offer."

"No, of course not," Laura shook her head. "But I can contact them. I was trying before you arrived, but by comms are..." A sudden realization dawned on her, "... that was you, wasn't it? You jammed my comms array," The old man nodded. Laura swallowed down the very obvious 'how' question and carried on. "If you could let me contact the fleet, I could explain the situation. They would certainly have the authority to discuss some sort of trade that could benefit everyone."

The old man was stoking his beard again, looking deep in thought. "I will consider it," he finally said. "Come with me."

"Wh... where are we going?"

"You have been poking around The Atlas for almost three days; I need to make sure you haven't touched anything important.

"Oh, sorry," she mumbled contritely

"We are going to engineering." the older man continued without acknowledgment.

Laura stifled the groan at the thought of that walk again, but not wanting to overplay the hand she seemed to have been dealt, she stood and followed the two men out of the room. Her legs were already starting to ache just at the thought of climbing down those fucking stairs again, so her heart leaped for joy when the old man led them past the stairs and to the bank of elevators.

She hadn't noticed it the first time; she had been too preoccupied with the gravity of her find, but the elevator doors seemed to be in the wrong place. On the lower level, the elevator doors had been in one wall, with the stairs cut into the wall to the right-hand side of them. As the stairs ascended, they made regular left-hand turns, meaning that the stairs should have been wrapped around the elevator shaft. But on the command level - just beyond the door to the bridge - the doors were directly opposite the end of the staircase. She frowned at them.

She frowned even deeper when the old man pushed the call button, and the elevator doors opened. She was certain, absolutely one-hundred-percent certain, that there had been a body in it last time. Perhaps those robot things had cleared it out of the elevators, too. She followed the two men in quietly and waited for the older man to press one of the icons. To her shame, she had been too preoccupied with the lack of corpse to see which one he had pressed. She mentally scolded herself as the doors closed.

Then squinted as they reopened again almost immediately.

The old man stepped out. The younger man followed. Both of them looked back at her expectantly. "Err..." she slurred, but her question died on her lips as - after stepping back out of the elevator - she realized that they were right next to the doors to engineering, having traveled the entire twenty-four-kilometer length of the ship in the blink of an eye "But... How?"

"Energy/Matter transfer," the old man shrugged as if it was the most obvious answer in the Galaxy.

Laura choked on her own saliva. "You have teleporters??"

The old man frowned at her. "No, we have Energy/Matter transformers"

"That's how you got into the ship, wasn't it? You... I don't know... beamed yourself into one of those things."

"From outside the ship?" the old man snorted. "Don't be ridiculous! The amount of things that could go wrong with something like that is staggering. You would end up being reconstituted as soup."

"Oh," Laura frowned, "yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. Wait, how did you get onto the ship then?"

"Through the door, how else?"

"But it was lock... that was you, too."

"You catch on quickly. Come along."

Laura, feeling somewhat deflated, followed them through the doors to engineering.

********

Adam. 4

Adam took a deep breath and looked around the room. His team had all assembled as ordered and were looking back at him with varying degrees of exhaustion. He hadn't been riding them particularly hard, at least no harder than any other day, but each of them knew the stakes involved in the investigation into Frank's death, and it seemed that they had - to a man - been burning the candle at both ends.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black disc, about half an inch tall and about three inches in diameter. Each member of his team knew what they were looking at, and all remained silent as he pressed his thumb into the indentation along one of its surfaces, waited for the little red light to appear, and tossed it onto the desk.

The device was staggeringly illegal in almost every part of Imperium society except this one. If he were caught with this little black disc in any other walk of life, he would be facing an automatic prison term of up to thirty years just for having it. The sentence would be considerably more if he were caught actually using it. It went against everything the Imperium valued... or at least everything the real, darker Imperium valued.

It was a jamming device.

It blocked every single known communication frequency from being transmitted; more than that, if there were a recording device of any kind in the room, all it would pick up during this meeting would be white noise. It was the perfect device for making sure this meeting was not being listened in on. And to a government utterly obsessed with surveilling its own people at every opportunity it got, this device was the closest thing to a cardinal sin in existence.

He looked pointedly at the jammer, making sure everyone in attendance fully appreciated its meaning before he looked around the room again. "What I am about to say does not leave this room, am I clear?" He waited for the ripple of nods to die down. "It is now clear that Frank Horrigan was murdered..." he started, noting the pained expression on a few faces as his words confirmed what they had already been thinking. "... by someone in this building."

That gained a few more gaps of surprise.

"The only way that a hit like this could have been ordered is from someone high up, maybe not as high as a division chief, but these kinds of missions can't be approved by just anyone. Someone in this building killed our friend for no reason that I can possibly fathom, and that is something that I cannot leave unanswered. There will be justice for Frank, even if I have to get it myself.

"From this point onward, the investigation and its findings will be strictly off-book; I don't need to remind any of you of the risks involved if we are uncovered. So, if any of you want to bow out now, nobody will think any less of you, but make no mistake, we will be going far outside the remit of our mandate if you stay with me. Each of you could be charged with treason if we are caught."

He waited for someone to move, but nobody did. Once again, reminding him of the trust he had in every person who worked under him and the trust they had in him.

"What do you want us to do, Sir?" Ben asked from his seat.

"All of you have friends here, people who work in the shadier parts of our world. I want you to make it known that there is an investigation. Say it has been ordered from the top, say people are looking into you, say whatever you need to say to rattle some cages downstairs. We shake the tree, and we see what comes loose."

"You have a suspect," Ben tilted his head at him.

"I do," Adam answered after a pause. "But if the person responsible is who I think it was, we are going to need to be absolutely certain of their guilt before we act."

"Act... how?" Steph's tentative voice came from the opposite side of the room, and he turned his head to look at the ordinary appearance of the brilliant woman.

Adam looked her in the eyes, then again at everyone around the table... "Violently."

********

Histories and Lore

The military navies of all known species follow the same basic foundation, anecdotally known among knowledgeable fleet tacticians as "the circle of life." The theory of the circle is this: Every single class of ship, from the smallest to the grandest, has certain strengths that can be exploited - if used properly - to maximize the military effectiveness of the vessel. Conversely, every ship also has inherent weaknesses which, if not taken into account and guarded against, can leave even the most powerful of warships dangerously exposed to enemy action.

The circle, when written down, takes the form of - predictably - a circle, with each ship on the wheel being cumulatively more powerful than all the ships below it. Read from the weakest first, the order is "Carriers (or more accurately, their strike craft payload) - Corvettes - Frigates - Destroyers - Light Cruisers - Heavy Cruisers - Battlecruisers - and finally Battleships/Dreadnaughts." Each ship is considerably stronger than the ships beneath it on the wheel but is vulnerable to the ships above it. This should be most noteworthy in the relationship between Battleships and strikecraft. Battleships are vessels of truly enormous levels of power, able to utterly devastate enemy capital ships with their blistering array of heavy weapons, and dreadnaights are essentially just scaled-up versions of Battleships. But these weapons have - in most cases - come at the expense of any meaningful point defense system. Bombers, on the other hand, are arguably the weakest ship in any fleet. They are small and, therefore, lightly shielded, nowhere near as fast or agile as their fighter cousins, and are vulnerable to all but the heaviest and slowest of capital ship weapons. And within that statement lays the bomber's strengths. An exposed Battleship, with only powerful but slow-tracking weapons, has no defense against bombers, and if even a single flight of these strikecraft were allowed to make an attack run against an unsupported battleship, the cheapest, weakest unit on the board would obliterate the biggest and most powerful with almost comical ease.

It is for this reason that ships are assembled into fleets so that each ship can use its strengths to compensate for the weaknesses of others. It is an overlapping field of support that - at least in theory - should leave no part of it exposed and vulnerable.

Stikecraft are at the bottom of the pile. Fighters in space are essentially an extension of the point defense systems on capital ships. Their only function being to gain strike craft supremacy, sweeping the field of enemy fighters and bombers while simultaneously opening the way for friendly bombers. Bombers are able to fire torpedoes with enormous explosive warheads. Fast enough and heavy enough to punch through several feet of Titanium armor, they contain too much kinetic energy to pass unhindered through shields and, therefore, they can only be deployed against unshielded targets. However, the benefit of torpedoes is that they can be launched accurately from well outside point defense range. It should also be noted that, despite their impressive size, the carriers of most fleets are just that - carriers. With little to no offensive weaponry and only the point defense systems to keep it safe, these vessels' strengths lay entirely in the power of the air wings they could deploy. When attacked by almost any other classification of ship, even something as small as a frigate, they are in serious danger.

Corvettes, the next ship classification of ship, are dedicated gunboats. Slow, lightly shielded, and lacking in any sort of heavy weaponry, they are, instead, bristling with rapid-firing and fast-tracking turrets. These ships are designed with the sole purpose of bolstering a fleet's anti-strike craft capabilities and can often be found guarding the larger, slower, and more bomber-vulnerable ships such as carriers and battleships. It is not uncommon to find a score of these ships for every one of the larger classes. Corvettes are also the only ships that fall into neither the strike craft nor capital ship category but are nonetheless devastating against fighter and bomber wings when deployed effectively.

Frigates, the third spoke of the wheel, are fast, mobile picket ships. Like corvettes, their main role is to screen the rest of the fleet of strike craft; the main differences, however, come in both their maneuverability and their admittedly limited complement of heavier weapons. This means that it can stand toe to toe with some of the larger classes of ship, using its agility to offset its comparatively weaker shields and armor. When deployed against other capital ships, they will be used in teams or twos and threes and in singles when used in their anti-strikecraft role. This is also the main class used in minesweeping operations, able to target mines while being maneuverable enough to keep them out of danger. In broadly speaking terms, frigates are the first line of the fleet's defense.

Destroyers, spoke number four, are the smallest of what can be called a truly anti-capital ship vessel. In fleet formations, they are the second line of defense and are capable of fulfilling many different roles. They are considerably larger than frigates, slower but much more heavily armored and shielded. They also exchange a lot of the anti-strike fighter capabilities for dedicated anti-capital ship warfare; that is not to say that are not potent picket ships; they still have significantly more fast-tracking turrets than any of the larger classes. One of the primary strengths of a destroyer over any other ship is the fact that they are one of the only ship classes designed to operate outside of a fleet on solo missions as well. Whereas most of the cruiser models pack as much firepower into their frame as possible, most destroyers are fitted with extensive sensor suits, making them perfect early warning and threat identification assets to any fleet. Although utterly outclassed in almost every metric by the larger ships, destroyers are designed to fight in groups, concentrating fire onto a single target from so many different angles that even a much larger single ship would struggle to counter all of them. Destroyers also have the ability to be outfitted for special missions such as the bombardment of planets or minelaying operations. For this reason, these ships are extensively used to patrol the borders of most empires.

Light and heavy cruisers - numbers five and six on the wheel, respectively - are the real workhorses of the fleet. Part punch bag, part mobile weapons platforms, these ships are built with only a single purpose in mind: to fight. Essentially, both light and heavy cruisers fill the same rolls, the only distinction between them being one of size. Heavier cruisers have more of everything, more weapons, more armor, more shields, more mass - and hence lower manoverability. They are designed to take and dish out staggering degrees of punishment, bristling with heavy weapons; they are only outclassed in terms of raw firepower by the much larger battleships. Many fleet commanders, however, argue that cruisers are the more valuable ship, easily offsetting a battleship's superior firepower and protection with vastly superior speed and agility. Coupled with the fact that there are usually upwards of ten cruisers for every battleship in a fleet, these craft form the backbone of any naval force. Light cruisers are the only other class of ship, along with destroyers, regularly tasked with non-fleet related missions, whereas it is extremely rare to see a heavy cruiser outside of a fleet. Cruisers can also be considered the first line of dedicated offensive ships, with much of their mass committed to the larger, higher-powered weapons, and although they do have a point defense system, it is markedly weaker than that of destroyers. For that reason, it is common to see cruisers being guarded by destroyers or frigates while they move to engage the enemy capital ships. Offsetting this to some degree is the hugely increased armor and shield strength; these ships can still be vulnerable to bombers if left undefended.

Battlecruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts are, despite conventional wisdom, essentially three different variations of the same concept. Battleships have historically been the ultimate symbol of naval prestige and are basically floating barges of pure destruction. Double digits of feet in armor, shields more powerful than two or three cruisers combined, and enough weaponry to obliterate entire squadrons of enemy ships if they are used correctly, they are the ultimate sign of power on a battlefield. They are also incredibly vulnerable if used poorly. They are incredibly slow and maneuver - as one captain famously said - in the same way that bricks don't. With no point defense systems on the vast majority of models, they are completely reliant on other ships to provide protection. One common fleet tactic is to completely surround a group of battleships with the entirety of the friendly fleet, dedicating every other ship to the defense of these behemoths while the battleships themselves concentrate on blasting away - often very effectively - at the enemy fleet. Battlecruisers and dreadnoughts are essentially variations of this idea. Battlecruisers are the answer to the question: What would happen if you stripped out enough armor and shielding to make it comparable with a cruiser and dedicated all of that newly freed-up mass to engine power? Battlecruisers are astonishingly fast for their size and can still pack the same sort of firepower as a standard battleship, but all of the vulnerabilities present in battleships are amplified in battlecruisers. They are able to mitigate some of these weaknesses with dramatically improved mobility, but if the engines were to be damaged or a battlecruiser cornered, they are invariably torn to pieces.

Dreadnoughts are designed with the same sort of thinking as battlecruisers but reversed. Instead of stripping out armor to make room for engine power, Dreadnoughts are just given more over everything. They are essentially battleships on metabolic steroids. Every part of a battleship is exaggerated, including its actual frame - thereby making room for both more engines and more powerful armor - and its weapon load out. Dreadnoughts have become the ultimate symbol of naval power, able to take out entire squadrons from massive ranges with terrifying amounts of firepower; there is very little conventional ships can do against a fully operational dreadnought. Again, however, it can be incredibly vulnerable if isolated from the rest of its fleet. Although, in an upgrade from standard battleships, these huge vessels have been fitted with point defense systems, highly advanced ones in some cases, they are still incredibly slow-moving and immobile. Astonishingly powerful shields can keep a dreadnought in the fight for much longer than any other ship, but if those shields are knocked out for any reason, they become just as vulnerable to bombers and other threats as their smaller battleship cousins. They are also obscenely expensive. Even though one dreadnought could arguably be more powerful than two or three battleships, they cost upwards of five times the price. They are, therefore, primarily used as prestige pieces and are only thrown into frontline combat during the most massive of fleet engagements.

The number of ships in a fleet can vary massively, and it should be noted that due to the difficulty of detecting them at longer ranges, it is very rare that strike craft or corvettes are included in the number of ships in a fleet. A standard Imperium fleet may have a hundred ships in it, based around a core of five battleships. Larger fleets and task forces, however, can often come in many multiples of this number with the largest fleet ever assembled being the one used to smash the Khuvakian fleet in the battle of Sigmus IV. That fleet left port with a jaw-dropping eighteen hundred vessels, and despite an appalling loss rate of more than seventy-five percent, it managed to break the back of the Khuvakian navy and opened the path for the conquest of the entire western ring.