Chapter 6 - The Book of Revelations

Bethany. 3

Oh, Jesus, she needed that. She sighed heavily as the bitter nectar of the gods - otherwise known as coffee - slid down her throat. Day and night were concepts that didn't really translate well to space travel; mankind had evolved to be reliant on the rising and setting of the sun to govern their sleep cycles. The Pineal gland in the human brain would respond to the lowering light of dusk and release Melatonin - the sleep hormone - into the bloodstream, telling the body that it was time to rest. Well, there was no sun in space, at least not a rising or setting one, and changing the ambient lighting on her ship according to the time of day was not only counter-productive but generally ineffective. The only means of telling the time was by literally looking at a clock.

Over the years, she had fallen into something approaching a thirty-hour day schedule. She would sleep for about ten hours, work for about fifteen, and, dotted throughout the day, would have about five hours to herself. This absolutely didn't work on most planets, but almost the entirety of Bethany's life was spent in space, so that didn't really matter. To be honest, the time on her vambrace didn't really matter either. It didn't matter what time it was when she got up, only how much sleep she had gotten before it. The actual time was little more than an indicator of its passage rather than anything to run your life by. Like practically every other starship captain, her clock was set to Imperium standard time, which was Greenwich Mean Time in London, on Earth. The time in one planetary city had no bearing on anything at all outside of that city, but an interstellar bureaucracy had to function on a universal time constant, and GMT was as good a time as any. According to her computer, it was 4:32am in London, and for the first time in a long time, that is exactly what it felt like.

Mornings - the part of the day just after she woke up - sucked, no matter what time of the day that actually happened. It didn't matter if she had been blessed with a full ten hours of solid sleep or if she had struggled to nod off as she had the night before; a single existential truth of her life was that mornings would be infinitely easier if they happened later in the day. Morning people scared and confused her, and she absolutely refused to trust anyone who could pretend to enjoy feeling like she felt now.

On the other hand, there was coffee.

Dick called her coffee "Jet fuel" due to the apparently insane amounts of caffeine in it, but she was starting to consider upping the dosage anyway. She wasn't getting the same kick out of it as she used to, and - as she aged in that inevitable way that all people did - she was starting to need that kick more and more often. She sighed again as she gulped down another mouthful of that black boiling liquid. She liked her coffee like she liked her men, she had once joked to Dick. Dick had eyed the milkless black liquid and then arched an eyebrow at her. "Hot and silent," she had clarified with a grin.

She stretched her body, rolling her shoulders and trying to fight away the last reminders of sleep as she leaned her ass against the edge of the kitchen counter. The Long Haul's galley wasn't anything particularly impressive; she was sure that other Captains had more elaborate setups on their own ships, but this suited her fine. She wasn't much of a cook; toiling for hours over intricately prepared meals was not something she had time for, nor something she particularly enjoyed. Food, to her, was fuel, and cooking it was a chore that needed to be done, no different from purging the air filters or cleaning the bathrooms. Some fuel was nicer than others, but it all did the same job, and all of it ended up in said bathrooms eventually. She didn't know what the term was for someone who was the opposite of a foodie, but she was sure there was one. Dick was rather insistent that the correct term was 'philistine' and had tried to convert her to the dark side of gluttony by preparing meals of truly extravagant quality for her. "Now, can you taste the difference in this?" he would ask, handing her a sample of... something... that was apparently cooked slightly differently than the last something he had given her.

"Not really," was usually her inevitable, honest reply. After a few months, Dick had decided that her taste buds just didn't work properly and had given up.

The galley was essentially a few kitchen counters, a stove, an oven, and a microwave. Hundreds of years of technical innovation and aside from how those appliances were powered, they had hardly changed since their invention. The coffee machine was the only contraption within it that held any sort of meaning for her, and even then, only in the mornings. The rest of the room contained a small table, a few chairs, a bunch of sofas, and a large holo-screen against one corner, good for watching movies or the odd news bulletin. It was currently off.

That was probably for the best. The promise of war had been the thing that had stopped her from sleeping properly the night before. Not the death, carnage, and destruction; that could usually be avoided, but the things that came with it. Refugees stowing away on her ship could cause damage to internal components, tariffs would inevitably increase to fund the war effort, ships being diverted away from fringe systems would lead to an increase in piracy, plus there was always the chance of one side thinking that she was working for the other and outright impounding her ship... or worse, blowing it up. But mainly, it was the vast tract of space that would become a no-fly zone. The problems that would cause for anyone trying to make a living were incalculable.

For a moment, she realized how callous and heartless she sounded, saying it like that. It's not that the destruction of entire fleets and whole colonies - not to mention the horrific numbers of dead that came with them - didn't play on her mind. They did. She was appalled at the bloodlust and enthusiasm for war being shown by the Imperium News Network, but they seemed like an almost fact of life in the Imperium, whereas the things bothering her would be the things that would plague her own life for the foreseeable future, even if she somehow managed to get through the whole thing unscathed. She could see it happening. The process of demonizing and dehumanizing the rebels had long been underway, but to see those efforts pay off in such an extraordinary fashion in that bar had been... troubling. With each new news segment on the preparations for war, the INN would run a few pieces about common people supporting the actions of their government. "Oh, yes," the bleached blonde bimbo on the screen would say, "I totally, like, think the rebels should all be killed. That's what we do to traitors, right?" and then the smart man in a business suit would be interviewed. "Any form of dissension is damaging to the markets; the outer colonies have never understood that. Now they've rebelled against the core worlds and are carrying out cowardly terrorist attacks? That's too far. They need to be stopped." There were whole streams of this utter horseshit.

Normally, Bethany would roll her eyes, take it as the propaganda that it clearly was, and get on with her day. But she had been in that bar when the news was announced; she had seen the reactions of the people around her. Those had been ordinary people, not paid props, and they had been baying for blood. That reaction could be scaled up to a truly terrifying level if the response was the same in every bar on every street corner, in every town in the Imperium. So much so that she had to genuinely wonder if the 'paid props' were just propaganda tools at all. With such overwhelming support for the war, the government would be free to do just about anything without having to worry about the fickle tide of public opinion. But unlike her, ordinary people had never seen a planet under siege, they had never smelled the dark decay of death, they had never heard the shrill screams of agony and anguish; they had never seen war. She had. It was a long-established fact that the quickest way to end a war was to allow the people to see the reality of it, and the Imperium would spare no expense on keeping the more grisly scenes far away from the viewing public. She was sure there would be a few fluff pieces from a reporter "embedded" with the military, but she doubted the general population would see anything more than what the government wanted them to see. She, on the other hand, got her news from sources much closer to the action because they were usually the ones who paid the most for what she was hauling.

She had never met anyone who outrightly professed to be a rebel, but she had been to the outer colonies a number of times, and she knew that they had genuine reason to be pissed at the Imperium. They weren't traitors, or terrorists, or monsters; they were just people trying to make their way in life, and yet, if the INN was to be believed, they were all heavily armed, disgruntled psychopaths with nothing better to do than murder peaceful core-world citizens in their beds without a moment's hesitation.

The worst part about it all was that it was working. She had shut the morning news off halfway through a report on how military recruitment was up five-fold in all sectors; she imagined that was an underestimation. The propaganda ministry would have wanted to shame young men and women for not signing up while not putting them off, thinking that all the spots had already been filled.

There was only so much bullshit you could wade through before it got to be too much.

Who the fuck knew. Maybe she was the only one who could see it; maybe they put something in the water on Imperium worlds to make people more susceptible to that kind of nonsense, or maybe all of it was in her head. Either way, it was not making her sleep - and by extension, her mornings - any easier, and that was damned near unforgivable.

She drained the last of her mug, cast another glance at the silent screen, and headed toward the bridge to check on their progress. It had been a week since they had left Port Collins, and they were making good time through the Hudson expanse. If all went according to plan, they should arrive at the capital in about three more days, easily inside of the fourteen-day window for the bonus payment. She also had a buyer for the Rigellian Rum, too; with all the new ships being pumped out of the Imperium shipyards, anything that could fill in for the remarkably rare Earth Champagne to be used in their christenings was being snapped up at extortionate rates, her rum included.

That brought something of a smile to her face as she navigated her way toward the cockpit. The money she would make off this run could fund the much-needed and long-overdue upgrades to her ship. The Long Haul was a pretty standard medium bulk cargo freighter, and its layout was more or less the same as most others: the cockpit up front, a very small passenger bay just behind that - a fancy way of saying there were some jump seats bolted to the walls just outside the cockpit door, - then the first set of ladders that dropped down to the cargo bay. The next rooms were the airlocks - one on each side - and then the crew cabins, with hers on the left and Dicks on the right. The passageway opened up into the galley and lounge areas after that, before the rest of the upper deck was swallowed up by the engine room. Basically, everything of importance was back there, from the engines and FTL drive to the power core and the shield generators. There were also small indentations at the back of the galley for two more ladders down to the cargo bay. The cargo bay, by comparison, was enormous. It was five times the height of the upper deck and ran the entire length of the Long Haul.

It wasn't a big ship, but at four hundred meters long, it wasn't small either. Engineering took up well over half of that upper deck space, though, leaving the remaining habitable area for the crew feeling... compact. She couldn't bring herself to call it small; it was homely. What that meant, however, was that you could always tell, just by the noises around the ship, where the other crew members were. In this case, there was only Dick, but Dick was silent. She frowned as she headed past the doors to the crew cabins, only to hear a soft thud from below.

Her eyebrows furrowed a little deeper. Once the cargo was secured in the hold, there was next to no reason for anyone to go down there until approaching the drop-off point. If anything, the yawning, chasmous cargo bays were probably the least hospitable place on the ship, with barely enough lighting to navigate it safely and only enough heat to stop things from freezing, and yet there had been a few times over the past week when she had been laying in bed and could have sworn she heard something moving around down there. At the time, she had shrugged it off as a healthy spacefarer's imagination, tales from her childhood of space monsters stowing away on unsuspecting haulers, only to feast on the equally unsuspecting crew when they were conveniently furthest from help. She had even chuckled to herself, but - on top of the unexplained noises in the night - this would have been the third time she had caught Dick emerging from the hold, and both previous times had been explained away with a need for cleaning supplies. Dick was a decent shipmate and a hard-working crewman, but he had never struck her as particularly OCD when it came to cleanliness. She'd seen his quarters; his new-found neatness certainly didn't extend to there.

She spotted him as she walked past the airlocks, the top half of him emerging quickly - and remarkably quietly - through the floor as he climbed the ladder.

When Bethany was a young girl, long before realizing her dreams of piloting her own ship, she had spent the summers visiting her grandmother in the sunswept, overly humid, wide open spaces of rural northern Alabama. She had loved her time there, but the thing she loved above all else was her grandma's home-baked cookie. Even now, she would swear the long-dead and dearly-missed woman would add a few grams of narcotics into the mix to make them as damned delicious as they were. They were ridiculously good.

So Bethany, being the resourceful and determined girl that she was, would try to steal one from the jar at every opportunity she could.

Occasionally - okay, more occasionally. Almost every time, in fact - her Grandma would catch her in the act. Her hand literally in the cookie jar. How the hell that woman knew and how she managed to step through the kitchen door at exactly the right moment was one of the great mysteries of Bethany's life. But the look on her face when she was caught, that shock, the surprise, and that shamed expression of guilt.... Was exactly the look that momentarily flashed over Dicks face as he stepped off the ladder, turned toward the galley, and came face to face with his captain.

Bethany looked at him, tilting her head curiously to one side before glancing down the open hatch toward the hold and then back to him. "Need more cleaning supplies, Dick?"

"Sorry, Cap'n, I didn't see you there," Dick gave half a smile but conveniently refrained from answering the question. Her arched eyebrow was all it took for her crewmate to understand that it hadn't been rhetorical. "No, Ma'am, I was putting back the things I took from there the other day. They were stinking out my quarters."

"Ah," Bethany nodded. It was feasible; the disinfectant stank to high heaven, but...

"Did you still want me to check the solenoids on the point defense grid?" He interrupted her train of thought.

"Oh, umm, yeah, Better had," she nodded. "Would rather not find out they're busted when we need them the most."

"Yeah, that would be a problem," Dick chuckled. "A'right, Cap'n. Let me know if you need anything."

With half a wave, Dick squeezed past her and made his way toward engineering. Bethany turned back to the cockpit and took the last few steps to move inside. Relaxing in her chair, she took a moment to admire the corona of the hyperspace bow wave beyond her window. There was a purple-ish tint to the wave of light that was washing back and over the ship as it powered through the comparative wasteland of the Hudson Expanse, and she took a moment to admire it before her eyes flicked down to the nav-com.

The holo screen was showing their current position relative to the astronomical landmarks around them. They were passing them at truly astonishing speeds, with the more distant stars passing at a slower rate and a green line extending outward from the icon that identified the ship, showing the route they would be taking, along with an estimated time of arrival at their destination. Short of any unexpected delays or diversions - and with the rapidly increasing military traffic, having to divert around a passing task force was a distinct possibility - they would still be arriving with more than enough time to spare to get the bonus payout.

She sighed in relief. She loved being a freighter captain, but she was honest enough with herself to be able to admit that there were long portions of time during a cargo run that were boring as hell.

She ran through the normal checks; it was something to do while she was here. The deflector shields were functioning at one hundred percent, and - as expected - they had protected the ship from the random pieces of floating shit that would normally put a hole in her hull. Structural integrity was, therefore, holding at a solid one hundred, too. Fuel was still in the green, but only just. With only three more days of travel time left, though, they would only just be inching into the red by the time they made it to Earth. Comms were performing as expected, automatically linking the ship to the nearest Ansible relay and to the wider Imperium communication network without any issues, and no new messages had been received to either her personal or merchant channel. Finally, long-range sensors - as limited as they were on most freighters - were showing nothing suspicious, nor anything that would need to be flown around. As expected, the ship was flying itself flawlessly.

It was not that she wanted to spend fifteen hours a day sitting in the flight seat but using the computer to do all of the heavy lifting on a hop like this still felt a little like cheating to a woman who had worked as hard as she did to become a respected pilot.

Her eyes scanned over the rest of the instruments, even though she already knew what they were going to tell her. Engine temperatures were in the green, the airlocks were sealed and secured, and the life support system was not showing anything out of the ordinary. Today was turning out to be one of her least favorite types of day: completely routine.

God, she was fucking bored.

She considered sending a recording to her mother, it had been a while since they had spoken, but then she remembered that she didn't really like the old hag and wasn't in the mood to deal with snide remarks, snippy insults, or passive-aggressive references about how disappointed the old bitch was in her wayward daughter. That was a conversation that could wait for a time when she was pissed off and in more of a mood for a fight. With another sigh, she leaned back in her chair and watched the light show outside the cockpit.

Eventually, her mind drifted back to Dick, or more specifically, the look that had briefly flashed over his face as he had stepped off the ladder. What had he been doing down there? She couldn't say that she had ever thought he had lied to her in the past, but there was something about his sudden interest in cleanliness that didn't add up. Then there were the times when she could have sworn she had heard him rummaging around in the hold, in the middle of the night, no less. She didn't think for a moment he was helping himself to their cargo of rum. Not only had he never smelled of alcohol - and Rigellian rum had a fairly unique aroma - but he had never acted drunk. Half the appeal of that brand of rum was that it got people fucked up pretty damned quickly. More than that, the cargo had been thoroughly inspected and measured when it was loaded and would be again when delivered. It was impossible for him to steal as little as a sip of it without it being detected, and being caught would immediately get him blacklisted from the Merchants Guild books; that was career suicide on a biblical scale if he ever wanted to work on any ship again. The thing is, Dick knew all of this, so he couldn't possibly be dumb enough to steal from the cargo.

This left the question still unanswered: what the hell was he doing down there?

Well fuck it, it's not like she had anything else to do. She climbed out of her seat and slid quietly out of the cockpit. Sound, as Dick had proven with his midnight strolls to the cargo bay, carried particularly well in what was essentially a pressurized metal shell, and clod hopping to the ladders and stomping her way down them was a great way to alert him to what she was doing. She had never had reason to be suspicious of Dick before, but he was up to something, and he was hiding it from her. This was her ship, it was her home, and she was going to damned well find out what it was before she decided if it was minor enough to not worry about or serious enough to confront him about.

As lightfooted as possible, she climbed down into the yawning cargo hold. The cargo bay was a very different place in flight than it was when landed. For one thing, it was louder, with less sound dampening from the engine room and less need to smooth out the vibrations that ran through the frame of the ship from the engines themselves. It gave a dull sort of throbbing roaring sound to the ambiance of the enormous room, each throb thrumming in time with the pulse of energy coming from the pulsed ion engines. Secondly, there was less need to light it; nobody was really expected to come down here once the cargo was stowed away, and the vague attempt to provide illumination came from small bulbs, the equivalent of five decks above her head. The whole bay was shrouded in ominous-looking shadows where the light didn't quite reach. It made it feel oppressive and dangerous, the perfect place for those imagined monsters to hide. Lastly, it was fucking freezing.

All three worked together to pull a hard shiver down Bethany's spine. She shook it off and stepped into the hold.

Considering her primary cargo was essentially a small crate of ancient automobile parts, and her secondary haul was a few crates of Rigellian rum, the hold appeared practically empty, at least compared to how full it looked for most of her cargo. Those sixteen tons of silicon, for example, had been stored in eight enormous hoppers that, when arranged into the cargo bay, left barely enough room to even walk around them. The emptier look did nothing for the hold's aesthetic; the sparsely arranged crates gave plenty of room for the long tendrils of shadows to stretch away from the dim light.

Sucking in an apprehensive breath, she strode quietly into the bay and toward the five stacked crates of Rum. Even in the low light, it was obvious that not a single box - each one containing six bottles - had been disturbed. The wrap that prevented the boxes from toppling when the ten-foot-tall pallet was moved had neither been unwrapped nor had it been torn. No human hands could possibly reapply it to the stack in the same even and flawless manner as the machinery that had originally wrapped it, but just to be sure, she climbed up onto one of the ladders to check the very top of the crates. No tampering there, either.

She frowned and let her eyes wander over to the other crate. Much smaller, much lower, and much more valuable. She didn't remember actually telling Dick what it was, only that it was a special package for the Capital, but a thought flitted through her head, one too absurd to have even considered a week ago, but her crewmate's recent behaviors had sprinkled a healthy dose of doubt into her mind.

The parts of ancient automobiles were for a museum piece, but it was an exhibit that the Emperor himself was due to visit. If the news was to be believed, the rebels were quite adept at using bombs to assassinate powerful members of the Imperium's upper echelons, and there was no echelon higher than the Emperor. Could Dick have tampered with that cargo? Could he have been convinced to add something nefarious to it? Could Dick be part of the rebellion? Could he be a traitor?

She had to know.

Bethany climbed off the ladder, stepped closer to the fabulously valuable cargo, and inspected it closely. Of course, that looked untouched, too, but then, if it had been tampered with, let alone had a bomb secreted into it, it would look untouched. It would be a shitty assassin who left obvious clues to his activities, and re-wrapping a cellophane sheath would be the least of the efforts to cover up illicit activities. She stood there staring at the group of four knee-high boxes in front of her and made her decision. She would check it herself, she could always say that the wrap had been damaged during loading, that happened, and she was sure that security would run the appropriate additional scans to make sure that nothing inside the boxes had been tampered with. If it had been tampered with, she could send a transmission to system security and get the freighter intercepted, and Dick arrested - she would be damned if she was going down with him if he was proved guilty - and if it was clear, the removal of the wrapping was easily explained. The question was, how the hell would she find a bomb or whatever it was when it would obviously have been designed to avoid actual security scans.

She blinked into the darkness.

Fuck, this was ridiculous! Was she honestly considering the idea that Dick, of all people, was a goddamned terrorist? Was he up to something? Almost certainly, and he had lied to her face about it; the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became of it. But a traitor? An assassin? Obviously, those sorts of people were masters at covering their tracks and hiding in plain sight, and it was not a huge leap to think that he had been tipped off - or outright told by the rebels - about the true nature of the package before they left Port Collins. But Dick?

And even if he was, how much chance did she, a humble freighter captain, have of finding whatever a trained saboteur had hidden in the package? She had no scanners, at least not anything powerful enough to check properly. Wait... she did have a scanner. It was used to check the hull for damage if the main sensors were down, nothing that would detect a bomb, but Dick had been down here less than an hour ago; his body heat should still be detectable on, well, anything he touched, and the scanner would let her check without having to fuck with the wrap.

As with most things of that nature, it was kept in the smuggler's hold along with a lot of the other, smaller maintenance gear that was rarely used. To be fair, Dick's preoccupation with cleaning dictated that she check that room anyway, so two birds could be mercilessly executed with one efficiently thrown stone, and there was no time like the present.

Turning away from the crates, she strode across the cavernous and mostly empty hanger toward the smuggler's hold. The door, obviously, was concealed as a bulkhead, and Bethany had to marvel at the ingenious ways the walls of the cargo bay shifted to accommodate this hidden area. There would be nothing more obvious to a customs inspector than a blatantly walled-off section of hold real estate, especially one without a door. But the cargo hold was considerably smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, and even though Bethany knew the hidden compartment was there, even she struggled to be able to spot it. She flipped out the hidden panel, pressed the icon within to open the hatch to the secret hold, and waited for the door to slide open before she stepped inside.

Immediately on her left as she walked through the door was the mop and bucket, dry and empty, respectively. She sighed to herself. Part of her had sorely wanted this whole thing to be a bout of paranoia; she wanted Dick to be completely innocent and to have to retreat to her room to have a long, hard chat with herself about suspecting her own crewmate. But that single sight was enough to tell her that he had indeed been lying to her. "God dammit, Dick," she muttered to herself before stepping deeper into the hold.

The scanner was very rarely needed, as were the EV suits that were kept in here, both of them used for the same purposes. If the ship's shields failed and the hull was breached by one of those damned meteorites, someone would need to go out onto the hull to repair the damage. The scanner would allow someone to quickly locate a breach when a visual inspection could take hours, and that was assuming the rock - and the hole it made - was big enough to even be seen by the human eye. She had been in space for most of her adult life and had never been given cause to use this equipment, but, as with many things in her profession, it was better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

She passed the shelves full of cleaning products, the boxes full of seldom-needed spare parts, and wracks of similarly obsolete or rarely required tools before she got to the back of the hold where the scanner was kept. She located its box and flipped it open.

A hiss to her right made her jump out of her skin before she spun around to face the source of the sound. Her jaw fell to the floor.

The EV suits, usually hanging on hooks to keep them ready for use, were gone. In its place was a vertical stasis pod. And inside it was a person. Behind it was another one, and then another, six of them in total, and each person inside those pods looked like they'd had the ever-loving shit beaten out of them. She backed away, whimpering to herself at the gravity of her find. This is what Dick had been doing; this is what he had been hiding. He wasn't a terrorist or a traitor; he was something much worse in her eyes. He was a human trafficker! And he was using her fucking ship!

"I wish you hadn't come down here, Cap'n," a sorrowful voice came from the hatch.

********

Elijah. 4

He watched quietly as Guardian Wu and Miss Dondarion made their inspections, or to be more accurate, he watched as Wu performed his inspection of the power core, FTL drive, and the main engines, which Laura watched him closely, no doubt trying to pick up anything that could be used to further her understanding of the tech around her. He had initially been quite surprised at the old Master's willingness to engage with the Mariner trespasser, but the revelation that her people had stores of Ancient tech looted from dozens of hidden legacies was more than enough proof of the wisdom of his plan. It was already painfully obvious to him that the Mariners would never be able to interface with that technology, not without help, so the objects taken from their long-buried resting places were essentially useless to the stellar nomads whether they knew it or not. Reverse engineering some of the more innocuous pieces of technology had given them a boon to their fleet's capabilities, at least in terms of sensors and shield strength, but Wu had been right; they were crude attempts at best and left a lot to be desired compared to the real article.

He didn't really understand the mechanics of how his link to his former life worked yet, but since the connection to his ancient side had been unlocked, he seemed to instinctively know not just what each piece of equipment in engineering was but what it was capable of and how to operate it. He knew, for example, that there was no way this ship's comms could have been jammed like Laura's had been, nor could they have strolled past her ship to get to this one without Ancient sensors having picked them up. Both of those systems on Laura's ship were knock-offs of the genuine article, and although they were vast improvements over the standard human equivalent, they were nowhere near faithful reproductions of the originals. Laura seemed to have picked up on that, too and was cooperating as fully as she was able to, no doubt an effort to gain access to something that would elevate her people a little further.

That was a goal he could understand, though. She wasn't a pirate; she wasn't really even a thief. Humanity's evolutionary ancestors hadn't pulled themself out of the primordial soup of Earth when this ship had been left here, so neither Elijah nor Wu had any more of a natural right to their heritage than anybody else did. It's just that they had more of a claim than most, and they were the only people able to operate it; the Mariners - if the story about centuries-old scans was to be believed - technically found it first. "Finders keepers" was not the most evolved way of dealing with these sorts of matters, but galactic salvage rights were essentially founded on that very principle. But if Miss Dondarion wasn't a pirate or a thief, then Elijah and Wu were not murderers either, at least not without good cause. Laura, however, had - probably unknowingly - earned herself a lot of leeway with her explanation on the bridge, especially the possibility of a trade. For someone to be so sure that her superiors would consider a trade rather than resorting to force was a massive tick in the box for the Mariners; the idea that the Imperium would be so accommodating was almost laughable. If the rest of the Mariner command were as willing to work with them rather than against them, then a lot of progress could be made in a relatively short period of time.

But progress toward what? Wu had been infuriatingly vague about his plans beyond regaining The Atlas, only going as far as saying that Elijah had needed training and education for an undecided period of time before coming to get the ship and that Laura's discovery of it had accelerated those plans. The apparent ease with which Elijah connected to his inner self had somehow mitigated that acceleration but that only extended as far as getting to the Atlas. What came beyond that hadn't been brought up, nor could he imagine what they were. Wu was obviously, and perhaps rightly, very critical of the Imperium, so the idea that he was recovering their legacy for the glory of the Emperor was a non-starter.

Of course, Elijah could drive himself to madness trying to pre-emptively guess his Guardian's plans or motivations, but a lifetime of learning beneath the old master had shown him the wisdom of patience. Wu would divulge his plans when he was ready; the only thing Elijah could do to speed that up was to outrightly ask him, but even he could see that was unwise with a stranger in their midst.

His perceptive gaze shifted from Wu to their uninvited house guest. Laura was not what most people would call traditionally beautiful, but then Elijah had long ago discovered the universal truth that the better-looking a woman was, the more of a cunt she acted. There was nothing less attractive than a woman who was a little too impressed with herself, and society's preoccupation with telling every young girl that she was a princess had bred a generation of narcissists who thrived not on love or devotion but on attention. He avoided them like they were radioactive.

That wasn't to say that she wasn't attractive. Long blond hair fell to just below her shoulders in a style that could only be called functional, and the face that it framed held some startlingly brilliant blue eyes. Not the sort that glowed, like his, but endless pools of sapphire. He couldn't pretend to know as much about the Mariners as Wu, but her toned body hinted at a life that involved a lot more than sitting around and being told she was pretty, but what really captivated him above all other things about her, was the look of awe on her face, the flash of excitement and curiosity in her eyes, and the way her lips curled into a smile whenever she saw something for the first time. The more he watched her, the more he saw her, and even after such a short amount of time, he could already say that there was something about her that he was quite taken with.

It was a pity that they would be parting ways as soon as this trading possibility had been explored.

"I didn't touch anything, I promise," she sighed as Wu finished checking the last of the engine consoles.

"I know," the older man said casually. "I was watching you."

"But then, why...?"

Wu arched an eyebrow at her. "Would you rather us take off in a ship that has been buried for a few billion years without checking the systems first? You don't strike me as a person eager to be blown up."

"But you said..." She was cut off by the subtle appearance of a smirk on Wu's face. "Oh, that's just mean," she let out a relieved little laugh. "You shouldn't tease a lady."

"Looters are a different matter, though," Wu teased more, acting surprisingly friendly with the intruder.

"Okay, yeah, fair point. But in my defense, I didn't know you guys actually existed." Wu held her eyes. "Well, I did. I knew about the whole reincarnated Ancient thing, but I never expected you to know this stuff was here and be able to use it. I just thought you were all really smart or something, and that was about it."

"Hmmm," Wu nodded as he turned back to the console. "That is usually all we allow people to think."

"Then... why are you showing me everything else?"

"That is a conversation for another time."

Laura blinked and turned to glance in confusion at Elijah. He met her eyes and shrugged with a soft shake of his head, perfectly illustrating his "Story of my life" sentiments. She rolled her eyes with another one of those smiles and looked back to watch Wu. "Are all Ancients as cryptic as you?"

"He's not," Wu gestured a hand toward Elijah. "But he doesn't know either."

"So if you are the brains behind this little operation, what does that make him? The handsome, sullen one?"

Wu looked up at her, glanced at Elijah - who hadn't missed the "handsome" reference - and then back to her. "Actually, he is the authority of our little operation. I act by his leave."

"He's in charge?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes." Wu shrugged. "He's also our pilot."

Laura spun around to stare at a shocked-looking Elijah; this was certainly the first he had heard of this. "You can fly this thing?" she gawked at him.

With an effort of herculean proportions, Elijah composed himself quickly and shrugged. "Assuming it doesn't blow up first."

Wu flashed him a less subtle smirk and went back to his inspection to leave a thoroughly intrigued Laura to stare at the younger man in a whole new light. "Can I... Can I be here when you do? I waited my whole life to see one of these ships in action."

"No," Wu said evenly, waiting until the crestfallen Laura looked back at him. "Your ship is in the way. You're gonna have to move it before we can go anywhere."

"Oh," she nodded disappointedly.

"I'm sure you can watch from there, though," the older man offered. That seemed to perk Laura up, and the beaming smile lit up her face again.

"I don't know why you are being so nice to me, considering how we met, but... thank you."

That thanks seemed to be directed more to Elijah than to Wu, but considering the older man had just declared his superiority, he didn't want to undermine him by letting her in on the fact that Elijah was very much following Wu's lead and hadn't made a single decision so far. More than that, Laura seemed to be looking at him differently. She wasn't looking at him like a pretty girl looked at most men in that "what can I get out of you?" kind of way. This was more akin to being impressed at what he could do and who he was. The only things that should matter when judging a person before knowing them properly. He just offered her a smile back and nodded. Her gaze lingered on him for a few more moments before she seemed to remember where she was and turned her entire attention back to Wu and his systems checks.

It didn't take as long as Elijah had initially assumed. He already knew from the knowledge imprinted into his genes that most of the ship's systems were automated, and periodic maintenance was included in that. There were hundreds of those little worker bots that had swept the bridge clean of the former crew, and they had spent the last few hundred millennia keeping everything on the ship - including each other - in pristine condition. The Atlas, like the Primis, was a technically battleship, but the designation came from the level of its armaments, not necessarily from its size. Conventional wisdom dictated that a ship this massive would require an enormous crew in the thousands, but aside from a very healthy complement of Marines, the actual crew requirement for the Atlas was one. A single person could fly this ship with no problems at all; in fact, that is what it had been designed for. The vast majority of its bulk, including the tens of thousands of rooms dedicated to crew habitation, were there to allow it to fulfill its primary mission.

The Atlas, despite its imposing arsenal, was not a warship but a very heavily armed, utterly enormous colony ship.

The history, the reasons why a colony ship like this had been needed, what had killed the crew, and lots of other details were lost to Elijah. His role didn't need him to know that and so the information simply hadn't been given to him; he only needed to fly and fight ships like that Atlas. He was already curious about why hundreds of thousands of civilians needed to be packed onto ships like this one, and maybe it was a question that Wu could answer. But essentially, that information was superfluous, at least for now. He knew how the ship worked, and he knew how to operate it; he may have still been a little fuzzy on how much he knew, and he didn't really understand how he knew it now when he didn't know it yesterday, but the necessary knowledge was there.

"Everything seems to be in working order," Wu derailed Elijah's train of thought with his announcement. "Let's get back to the bridge so you can contact your people," he finished with a look to Laura

"Oh right, yeah. Sounds good to me," she nodded excitedly, wringing her hands together and practically bouncing on the spot. There were no nerves in her demeanor, there was no apprehension, there was no shift away from the giddy excitement she had barely been containing since she first allowed herself to consider the possibility that she was going to get their cooperation. That was another big plus on her ledger. If she thought there would be an adverse or hostile reaction from her superiors - let alone a violent one - she wouldn't have been so excited to share her news. She may have been wrong, she may have been deluding herself, but she believed that this trade was going to be made and that she would be responsible for the largest single technological leap forward in her people's history. If that was the sum of her ambition, that was certainly something Elijah could work with.

Wu smiled and gestured toward the door, letting Laura leave first, followed by Elijah. He tried hard not to look at her ass, he really did, but it was right there, and it was glorious... so he failed miserably. They made their way to the transporter room, and he leaned past Laura to press the button and open the doors, once again letting her inside first. He waited until Wu had followed them in before looking at the panel to select an icon.

He hadn't seen it properly the first time around, but the icons on it were completely alien to him, a mass of straight lines and squiggles that - under other circumstances - would have made no sense to him at all, and yet he understood them perfectly. There was the icon for the bridge, one for each of the various external hatches, one for the tactical suite - he would definitely have to check that one out sooner rather than later - one for the hanger bay, one for the cargo deck and then a whole bank of ones for various points on different decks to give access to the masses of crew quarters spread around the Atlas. He tapped the one for the bridge.

"You can read that?" Laura asked in wonder

"It would seem so," he murmured back. Laura looked like she was about to ask something else, but the transporter room doors slid back open again, and Guardian Wu strode out and back toward the bridge. Laura followed him out with a glance back over her shoulder as Elijah followed her; they had both barely made it through the doors to the bridge when Wu waved his hand in an imperious gesture at one of the consoles to the right-hand side of the command deck.

"Your comms should have been restored now," he said. "You can interface with your system there."

Laura walked closer to the console, seeming to squint at it, before looking down at her wrist-mounted computer and then back to the console. "You bypassed my security and diverted the uplink," she marvelled with a tone that suggested amazement rather than accusation. "That isn't supposed to be possible. Jesus, you could start the self-destruct routine from here, and there would be nothing I could do."

"I had considered it," he shrugged as he dropped into a chair to the right of the Captain's seat.

She flashed a look of alarm at him but then rolled her eyes and chuckled when she spotted that same teasing smirk on his face. Elijah, for his part, quietly followed the conversation as he automatically sat himself onto the captain's chair. It was instinct; that was his place, but he didn't miss the approving glance from Wu. Elijah couldn't help but smile at it before he turned his attention back to watch Laura tap away at her holo-screen.

After a few more moments, Laura turned back to them. "I'm ready," she smiled.

"Anything we should know?" Wu asked the question before Elijah could.

"Umm, no, not really. They'll probably want some sort of demonstration that you can operate the ship, at least more than taking my word for it, but once they see that, you'll have their attention. Maybe have a think about what you may have to trade?"

"Aside from a complete working knowledge of all the tech that they have... acquired?" Wu arched an eyebrow. "And being the only two people in the galaxy able to reactivate what you have?"

Laura's eyes glazed over in a faraway look of longing for a moment. "Yeah, that would do it," she snorted. "What about what you want from them?"

"We don't know what they have."

"Good point. Then maybe start with asking for a list in return for a demonstration?"

"You are being very helpful," Elijah interected, "perhaps overly so. May I ask why?"

Laura paused for a moment, holding the younger man's eyes, then sighed. "This..." she looked around at the Atlas's bridge. "This is all I've dreamed about since I was a little girl. There are recordings taken by the first expedition onto the Primis; they recorded everything, from the first steps onto the ship, right up to every experiment they ran, every attempt at reactivating Ancient equipment, hours of footage of just people standing around and trying to decipher the computer language, all of it is there. I was obsessed. I must have trawled through everything three times over, at least, dreaming that one day I would make a discovery of that size myself one day. And now, here I am. But it's more than that; it's you, too."

"Us?" Elijah tilted his head.

"You're the key to everything," she gushed. "The Atlas is the biggest find in three generations, but it's useless. We couldn't use it, we couldn't dig it out; it's still an Imperium world; we couldn't sit here for a century, like the Primis, for the same reason. We wouldn't be able to take everything apart and ship it back to the fleet because once we'd shut it down, we would have no way of turning it back on again, assuming we built it right and it didn't blow up when we tried. You make all of this possible. Without you, this would be like trying to hold onto the wind."

Elijah and Wu looked at each other; both shrugged, and then looked back to Laura. "Okay then," Elijah nodded and sat back in his chair. "Do your thing."

She was about to press the icon to connect the channel when she froze. "I never got your names," she turned back toward them. "It's gonna be hard for me to introduce you without them."

"I am Guardian Wu," The old mentor said, "and this is Marshal Elijah," he gestured to him.

"No last names?"

"None that are necessary; it's a long story."

Laura shrugged with an excited grin and then tapped the last icon before taking two steps back from the console as the comms signal raced across the vast expanse of space to connect with the High Commander of the Mariner Home Fleet

It took a few moments longer to make the connection than Elijah had expected, but he quickly realized that this was because he was used to comms channels being near-instantaneously routed through dozens of the relays along the Ansible network, The Atlas wasn't configured for that, its comms array was powerful enough and had a vast enough range to not need them. Finally, though, the face of an older, balding man, maybe in his 60s, wearing some sort of worn maroon robe, faded onto the display.

"Laura!" the man's voice exclaimed with what sounded like relief. "You missed your last three check-ins. Are you okay?"

"Hey, Skipper," Laura beamed back. "Some ups and downs," she bounced her eyebrows. "So, guess where I am."

The man's eyes finally left Laura to sweep over the rest of the bridge behind her. Elijah couldn't tell if he and Wu were in the line of sight of the comms terminal, but the man made no reaction to their presence, so he assumed not. "Is that..." the man's eyes squinted as they wandered over the scene behind Laura. Elijah imagined the man was very familiar with the bridge of the Primis, but unlike this one, that one sounded like it had never been lit. "It can't be."

"It is," Laura grinned a little bigger. "I found another ship. But this one is in complete working order."

The Skipper's jaw fell into his lap. "Complete working order?"

"Yup. Every system is online, and, as you can see, power is running perfectly."

"But your target was buried a hundred meters under the surface," the man was almost hyperventilating by this point. "How is that even possible?"

Laura shrugged. "No idea, but I'm calling you from the bridge, so..."

The man leaned back into his chair and huffed out a laugh of amazement. "Laura, you understand what this could mean for us, don't you? I mean, we are never going to be able to dig it out, at least not in our lifetimes, but even if we can only get a few teams in there for a short while until the Imperium catches on, the things we could learn..." his voice faded off again.

"Yeah, about that," Laura's smile grew once again. "There have been some interesting developments..."

The Skipped listened in rapt attention as Laura shared the story of the last few days, from her time arriving on the planet, through hunting down the sensor readings, to tunneling to the ship and exploring it, and finally to getting trapped with no comms and meeting Wu and Elijah. The culmination of the tale was the talk of a trade and how well Laura had been treated by them since both sides had put away their weapons.

The old man on the screen didn't say a word for the entire time, apparently saving his questions til the end, but the look of shock on his face was impossible to miss. The man's eyes were practically bulging out of his head.

"Laura, this is incredible! They're willing to help us with the Primis in exchange for access to the other tech we have dug up over the years?"

"I... err... actually, I'm not sure. I didn't think I had the authority to make trade on behalf of the Home Fleet." Laura faltered for the first time.

"No, no, no," The Skipper waved his hands at the screen. "You did the right thing. Are they... are they there with you now?"

"Yup," she cast a look over her shoulder at them.

"Would they be willing to speak with me?" He asked tentatively

Wu patted Elijah's leg and leaned back into his chair. The universal "you're up" statement being clearly communicated. Elijah looked up in time to see the questioning glance from Laura; he nodded to her with an inward sigh and rose from his chair.

Nothing quite like being put on the spot.

He strode across the room, trying to put on his most confident air and being thoroughly unconvinced of his success. After only a few long steps, he was standing next to Laura.

"Oh wow. Your eyes," the old man gasped. "I'd heard the rumors, but... I never imagined."

Elijah smiled accommodatingly. "My name is Elijah, I am the Marshall for this region of space." He frowned at himself, not entirely sure why he worded it that way. The follow-up question was inevitable.

"In this region of space? You mean there are others?"

"I..." he paused. "I think that is a conversation for another time."

Laura stifled a snort, but the old man nodded thoughtfully. "My apologies. My name is Lycander, I am the High Commander of the Mariner Home Fleet. It is... an honor to meet you."

"The honor is mine, Commander," Elijah offered a nod not unlike the one he used to receive from Wu. He was suddenly very aware of his own rank, putting him at least at the same level as Lycander. "Your... subordinate? Laura - I'm sorry, I am unfamiliar with your ranking system - has been very cooperative with us since we met. She tells us that you have found a number of our artifacts over the years."

"Please understand," Lycander said defensively. "We didn't know that Ancients were still alive, at least not anything more than vague or fanciful stories. We meant no offence by..."

Elijah held his hand up, and the Commander stopped talking immediately. "Calm yourself, Commander. I'm not accusing you of anything. You found what you thought to be abandoned ancient artifacts, and you used them in good faith. I imagine I would have done the same. But it does put us both in a somewhat unique position where you have technology that only we can use, and we may need technology that only you have. This is why Laura suggested a trade."

Lycander nodded, visibly relaxing. "What do you have in mind?"

Elijah thought for a moment before answering. "Laura tells us that the Primis is currently nonoperational."

"That's correct, yes," the Commander nodded again. "We've been unable to reactivate any of the major systems onboard."

"Then perhaps we can help each other. If you would allow us to inspect the systems aboard the Primis, we can determine if they are in good enough condition to reactivate... if they are, then we can discuss a trade. Technology or information that you have for our technical assistance."

Lycander seemed to bite his own tongue hard, but the look on his face gave him away. The man would make an awful poker player and was struggling to contain his urge to jump at the deal. "What if we don't have anything you require? For all we know, the data crystals we recovered - for example - could contain nothing more than the recipe for noodle soup."

Elijah smiled. It was an odd smile, even for him. One that seemed to be accommodating and friendly yet predatory and even a little threatening at the same time. It was a smile that said, "We will get our pound of flesh - one way or another - if you want what we have."

"I'm sure we can come to some sort of other arrangement if that's the case," were the words that came out of his mouth, though.

"What about the ship you are on now? I assume that you are re-asserting your claim over it."

"We are, yes."

"But what if someone else finds it? The Imperium will be trying to recover that world eventually."

"Oh, you misunderstand," Elijah kept that smile on his face. "The Atlas will be coming with us today."

"But... it's buried under a hundred meters and millions of tons of compacted dust and rock."

"I'd noticed that too," Elijah quipped, pulling another snort from Laura. "I'm sure Laura will be able to fill you in on our progress getting it out."

Lycander laughed. "Well, considering it has somehow remained intact and active for all these billions of years, I'm not sure anything would surprise me at this point."

"Challenge accepted, Commander," Elijah grinned.

"Wait, you're serious? How?"

Elijah just winked at him. "We'll see you soon, Commander."

Laura burst out laughing as soon as the channel was closed. "Oh my god, I have never seen him looking so excited. He was like a kid at Christmas."

"What's Christmas?"

"Oh, ancient earth holiday. Weird story. The Mariners still celebrate it though."

Elijah shrugged, not getting the reference, but turned to face a grinning Wu. "Nicely done, Marshal," he said with a nod. "Shall we get this show on the road?"

"What's the plan?"

"If Miss Dondarion doesn't mind, I will accompany her back to her ship. Once you have gotten the Atlas into the air, we can put her ship in the hanger and start making our way to the Yridian Nebula."

"Sounds good to me," Laura nodded, still smiling.

Elijah momentarily wondered why Wu had to go with Laura but didn't let that thought percolate for too long. He just guessed he didn't want her running off, but that didn't make a huge amount of sense either. Oh well, he was sure all would be revealed later.

He blinked.

"Wait, you want me to get the ship out?"

"Of course, you're the pilot."

"But..."

"You will be fine," Wu patted him on the shoulder. "Just put the helmet on, and all will be explained. You'll get it when you do it."

Elijah glanced at the stacks of control helmets that had been cleaned by the bots and laid out on shelves next to the door, then nodded.

"What's the worst that can happen?" he shrugged as he walked over to get one.

"The ship could blow up," Wu chuckled as he led Laura toward the door, "or the hull could give way and bury you alive."

"Don't forget about Pirates," Laura added with a giggle.

"Ah yes, one should always be mindful of pirates. Actually, now I think of it, best wait until we're off the ship before you start."

Elijah rolled his eyes and carried his selected helmet back toward the captain's chair. He had never known Wu to have a sense of humor. The man had always been the stern, stoic type, and getting anything more than a grunt out of him when not in training was a rare honor indeed. He had to admit, he had rather enjoyed the old man's company for the past day or so and credited him with Elijah's complete lack of feeling completely overwhelmed by all of this. Only a few days ago, he had been sitting in his fleet tactics class, listening to the inane ramblings of a man who embodied the sentiment that 'those who couldn't do, taught.' Now, he was about to take sole command of a ship that could - at least if he understood the technology - pose a serious threat to an entire Imperium battle group. It was pretty exhilarating stuff, and that exhilaration was distracting him from the fact that he hadn't freaked the fuck out yet.

He dropped himself onto the command chair again and looked at the helmet, shrugged, and pulled it over his head.

"Ohhh ho ho ho, Fuck yeaahhh..." he gasped as thousands of years of experience and know-how were downloaded into his mind in moments, and the bridge around him came to life.

*******

Adam. 5

Adam's office was surrounded on three sides by glass. On two sides were the enormous windows that looked over the view outside; the wall was covered in screens and was directly behind his desk, leaving the last glass side - the one separating him from Ben's desk and the rest of the office - on his right. That glass was bulletproof, blast-proof, and frosted to maintain privacy and security. It was also mostly soundproof. That made the semi-raised voices coming from the other side of it all the more noticeable.

"Look, I know," Ben was saying. "But you can't just walk up to the office of the Investigations Chief and expect to see him."

"Ben, please," the other voice replied in frustration, "We've known each other a long time; you know I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. And trust me, this is really important."

"Dom, you're putting me in a very awkward position here. Maybe if your section head booked an appoint..."

"No!" the man, whose name was apparently Dom, blurted out quickly. "No bosses. Nobody can know I'm here."

Adam's eyes twitched a little, his attention now piqued, and he reached over and quietly opened the intercom channel between his desk and Ben's. There was a long pause as the men apparently stared each other down. "You're going to have to give me something, babe," Ben's voice was barely above a whisper. "We go back a ways, and you've helped me out, but this is Adam fucking Doncaster we are talking about. The list of governors waiting for a meeting with him is longer than my dick."

"I can't, Ben," Dom practically pleaded. "I can't get you involved in this. Please, just... tell him it's about Frank Horrigan. If he doesn't want to see me after that, I'll go."

There was a long pause. "It's about Frank?"

"Send him in, Ben," Adam interrupted, causing Ben to flinch and look down at the intercom.

"I'm sorry, Sir. I didn't mean to..."

"Now, please," Adam put on his most impatient tone while giving Ben a reassuring look. The young man knew the deal with Adam's alter ego and nodded firmly. In all truth, this is what he had been hoping for with his stunt in the meeting room the day before. Spread the news of an illegal op being investigated by the feared and dangerous Adam Doncaster, and wait for the rats to flee the sinking ship. Someone, somewhere, knew something, and experience had told Adam that shaking a tree hard enough would usually make the bad apples come to him.

A few moments later, the door swung open, and a monster of a man walked in. Dom, if that was his name, was huge. Easily clearing six foot five and built like he was capable of propping up a small building, he was exactly the sort of person Adam thought about when he said that men who could physically crush him with next to no effort quaked in their boots at the mere sight of him. And quaking was exactly what this man was doing now.

"Sit," Adam said curtly, and the man was moving to do as instructed before the echo of the word had dissipated around the room. He waited for the man to take one of the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk. "You wanted to see me... apparently urgently." It was more of a statement than it was a question or even an instruction, but the meaning was clear: Talk.

The man shuffled a little in his seat, abjectly refusing to meet Adam's withering gaze. "My name is Domonic Kilbride, Sir, I'm a... umm..." Adam could guess what he was going to say. The man was torn between being sworn to secrecy and being before a titan of the Division who neither suffered fools nor tolerated bullshit. "... I'm a black bag asset for the 'compliance' division'"

Compliance Division, if there was ever a name that perfectly summed up the ISD's attitude toward the general population, that was it. Dominic Kilbride was a cross between an armed enforcer of ISD will and an assassin. When the men in dark suits came in the night to haul off suspected traitors, it was Domonic who kicked down the door, slapped on the zip ties, and put two slugs in the backs of their heads if they were judged guilty before dumping their bodies at sea. It was strange that a man built like a dump truck and killed people for a living was completely terrified of Adam. It was funny what a well-crafted persona could achieve.

"I'm going to assume you know who I am," Adam nodded. You can continue."

"I..." the man swallowed hard. "I think I killed Frank Horrigan." He blurted out, his eyes staying firmly fixed on the desk.

Okay, he had hoped someone would come up from 'downstairs' to talk about hearing something or seeing something or talk in the locker room or whatever, but he hadn't expected this, and it took all of his willpower to keep his jaw from falling into his lap and somehow keep a straight face.

The two men sat in silence for a few eternally long minutes, Adam staring at Domonic and Dominoc staring at the desk. "You need to be very careful with what you say next, Mister Kilbride," Adam finally said slowly. "I'm going to assume from the fact that you are here that it was not a malicious killing?"

"What? No, not at all, Sir. I... I'm not even sure it was him."

"Okay. Start at the beginning and walk me through it."

Dominic wrung his hands together and nodded. "It was just another Tuesday, Sir, an op like any other. But..." he paused. "...something about it was different. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time."

"Like what?"

"For a start, the orders said they wanted the mark hit by a car. That's never happened before. I mean, if someone wants it to look like an accident, then that is what the orders say. But if it was meant to look like an accident, then hitting someone with a hover-car is the last thing I would have done. It raised way too many questions. Whoever it was had arranged for the traffic light cameras to be switched off, but they were off for only an hour, normally they would be off all day to make maintenance seem more plausible. And then they dictated that we burn the car, like on TV shows. Hovercars don't really burn, though; we had to dump it in the river."

It would seem that Dominic knew his stuff and everything he said lined up perfectly with the assassination of Frank.

"The orders also said they wanted it done outside the mark's house," Dominic went on. "Unless you are trying to send a message to family or someone in the house, that is always risky, too. Then there were little things, the way the orders were worded. It ended with something like, 'Make sure he is dead.' If it said, "Acquire proof of mission completion" or even "Ensure the target is deceased," I wouldn't have thought anything of it... But "Make sure he..." Dominic emphasized the words that stood out to him with an inflection of his voice and a bob of his head. "... is dead" of all words. Just... I don't know; it struck me as strange."

"And you carried out the mission anyway."

"Well, yes, Sir. It came through all the proper channels; it had the right ticks in all the right boxes. This was a legit op."

"But..."

Dominic's eyes finally rose to meet his. "But then I heard about Frank Horrigan and the investigation into his death, so I went back to check the orders... and they were gone."

"Gone?" If the details hadn't done so already, that certainly caught his attention. Frank had first started looking into the Goliath manifest because access logs had been deleted. There were only a handful of people in the world with the authority to delete records with that sort of ease.

"They weren't there, Sir. There was no record of them on the system. Nothing at all, everything was gone, even the requisition forms for the car we used, all of it. So I called Juan and Fritz; they were the guys on the op with me... Sir, neither of them came into work today."

"And that is unusual?"

Dominic snorted. "Juan hasn't had a sick day in about ten years. You can set your watch by him, but neither of them are answering my calls."

Adam steepled his fingers under his chin and leaned back in his chair. It sounded like someone was cleaning house and tying up loose ends, and that was a very precarious position for Mr. Kilbride to be in. "Do you remember who signed the orders?"

"Actually, that was another thing about them. They were from the Head of Operations. I'd never heard of that department before, but you know how it can be with reshuffles. I just thought that it was a new name for an old division, but now..."

Adam nodded, the 'death becomes he' mask now forgotten and the real him shining through. "Okay, Dominic, I need you to listen very carefully," the man stiffened in his seat instantly, but this time in attention rather than in outright fear. "This was an illegally sanctioned op, and whoever it is doesn't want word of it getting out; that makes you a loose end. Are you armed?"

"I... yes, Sir."

"Good," he turned to his computer and started typing commands into the interface. "As of this moment, I am assigning you as my personal security. Your new home is on this floor, and when you leave tonight, you will be coming with me. Do you have family at home?"

He shook his head, "No, Sir, just parents."

Adam nodded as he typed. That was a piece of good news. "Well, whaddya know, looks like they've just won an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Caspian system. You'd better call them and tell them the good news."

Dominic blinked at him. "I... I don't know what to say, Sir. Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," Adam turned back to face him. "Until this whole thing is over, I own you. You will do what I say when I say it. Part of that will be to keep your ass alive, the other part will be to bring holy hell down on the people who think they can fuck with my team, and it's not going to be pretty. Do you have any objections to getting your hands dirty?"

Dom paused for a moment. "My team are dead, aren't they? Jaun and Fritz, I mean."

Adam paused and tapped an icon on his screen. "Fritz Gruuber died in a house fire last night; Jaun Ricos is currently listed as missing after not making it home from work last night," he sighed as he read aloud. It was another case of ripping the bandaid off when it came to delivering news.

Dominic slumped into his chair, his face draining of color in moments. "Fritz just had a baby," he almost whispered. "He only got married a few months ago. Are they...?"

Adam nodded. "They were home, too. I'm sorry, Mister Kilbride."

"Jesus, I..." his face darkened as his new reality firmly settled into his mind. "Who was it?"

"I have one more thing to check before I can say with certainty, but this person is responsible for ISD and innocent deaths, so when I do..."

"We go after them, no matter who they are." He practically growled.

"Glad we are on the same page, Dominic. Go out and speak to Ben; he will get you set up somewhere."

"Thank you, Sir."

"Oh, Dominic?" He called after the man as he made his way back to the office door. He waited for the man to turn back to face him. "I hope I don't need to tell you that your discretion is not optional here. You will take what happens next to your grave. Am I understood?"

"Completely, Sir. You can count on me."

For reasons that Adam couldn't quite put into words, he absolutely believed that. He just nodded, turned back to his terminal, and waited for Dominic to leave the room. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, Adam was scrolling through his comms list. It didn't take him long to find the person he was looking for, and he tapped the command to open a channel.

He stared at the ISD emblem for a few moments while the connection was made. He could remember a time when he had been proud to work beneath the shield of the ISD, but these days he could only associate it with the persona he had to put on whenever he went to work. It was a symbol of everything wrong with his life, the steps he had to take to protect his family, and the terror he instilled into ordinary people trying to live their lives in this fucked up system. Society's problems were everywhere, and it would be naive of him to think that shield and the function of government it represented were solely responsible for it all, but it was a damned good illustrator of everything wrong with the world.

Finally, the white, wiry-haired visage of Sandra White appeared on the screen. "Mister Doncaster," she said flatly. "Are annoyingly timed calls from you going to become a habit?"

"Thank you for taking my call, Minister," he said, ignoring her petty little barb. "I'm afraid a situation has arisen that requires your urgent attention."

Minister White huffed out an eye-rolled sigh. "What is it this time."

"A member of my team has been assassinated," Adam said bluntly. "The investigation into his death has revealed..."

"An investigation?" White interrupted him, her eyes flaring first in shock, then in anger. "Why are you wasting ISD resources with something that is clearly a police matter?"

"It isn't a police matter, Ma'am." Adam bit back a little harsher than he had intended to. "All ISD worker deaths are investigated by my Division in case they were caused by enemies of the state in an attempt to gain information. It is not only within our mandate; it is obligatory."

That look of anger on her face was suddenly and briefly replaced by one of concern, but she let him continue. "Our investigation has uncovered an illegal operation sanctioned against an ISD agent from within ISD itself."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"There was an attempt made to delete the orders," Adam lied. "That attempt failed, and we were able to recover them."

The muscles on the side of Minister White's jaw clenched.

"By my count," He went on, not giving her time to form a response, "There are only four people with the authority to fabricate an 'Operations Division'..." Predictably, her eyes widened for a moment, "...and order this kind of hit; you and I are two of them. So before I arrest the other two and take them for interrogation for treason, I am obliged to ask if this order came from your department."

"You are treading some very dangerous waters, Mister Doncaster," Minister White said threateningly.

"Such are my responsibilities, Minister. There are no safe waters in our line of work."

The Minister sighed in annoyance before turning to face the interface properly. "Frank Horrigan was deemed a security threat and dealt with accordingly," she said imperiously.

Adam swallowed down that lump of rage in his throat, paused for a moment, and nodded before he pretended to type notes onto his terminal. "If I may ask, deemed by whom?"

"Deemed by me, you petulant little shit!" she barked.

Adam barely managed to stifle the triumphant smile that threatened to crack his face open. "I will need the notes detailing how this decision was made sent to me for review before I can close the investigation," he replied calmly.

"You will get no such thing!" she raged. "I am the Minister of Internal Security. I will make whatever decisions I deem fit!"

"Are you claiming unilateral operational override?" He tilted his head, pulling that concept out of thin air. If Minister White was even remotely competent at her job, she would have known the entire sentence was pure horse shit, but the word 'unilateral' was enough of a fish hook to prompt an admission that this order had not come from above her.

"Precisely," she jumped on that fictitious shred of authority, trying to gain some semblance of control in the conversation. "I ordered the operation and will not have my authority questioned! You are walking very close to the line here, Mister Doncaster," she growled, a predatory, malicious glint in her eye. "Frank Horrigan was lucky he didn't have a family; I don't think your two daughters have the same luxury. I thought you would have learned that lesson already."

Adam froze, letting his fists clench and then relax as he took a deep breath and - mirroring Sandra White's movement from a few moments earlier - turned to face the screen properly. "Be very careful, Sandra," he said cooly and quietly, yet allowing every shred of venom to fill his voice. "Threats against my family are not something I take lightly. You are not as untouchable as you think you are, nor are you as dangerous. Think carefully before you follow that particular road."

Adam had spent decades cultivating this persona, and no matter how much he hated it, no matter how much it would terrify the people he loved most in the world, it was a necessity of his existence. The flip side to that, however, was that his reputation preceded him, all the way to the top of government, all the way to Sandra White herself. She may have been the Minister for Internal Security for the last three years, but she would have spent a decade before that knowing and fearing Adam by name alone. More than that, if the Emperor ever tired of her existence, it was Adam who would end it, and she knew it. That was not a fear that disappeared easily. The older woman shrank back in her seat under Adam's withering glare.

"Thank you for your time, Minister," Adam finally said after a few heavy heartbeats of staring the older woman down. "I will close the investigation this afternoon."

He ended the call before his boss had the chance to respond. He was seething; it was an anger like he had never known before. He could take threats against him; he got them all the time, they were an unavoidable part of the job, but Sandra White had seen the line, and instead of crossing it, she had taken a running jump over it. He tried to control the shaking in his hands as he tapped some commands into his terminal. Everything he usually looked at was logged by the system. Every call he made and every screen he looked at. But now, his computer was invisible to it. Nothing that he did would register on any system, not even his own, allowing him to effortlessly bypass any firewall in the Imperium.

By the time he left the office that night, he would know everything there was to know about Minister Sandra White, from what she ate for breakfast, to the address of her parents, to the route she took on her morning runs, to the name of her fucking cat.

Adam didn't make threats. The person on the receiving end rarely lived long enough to appreciate them.

********

Laura. 7

She groaned again as she stepped out of the transporter, this one - infuriatingly - being just inside that central corridor that led away from the hatch. Not that it would have helped her over the past few days, but just knowing it was there and she had walked for something like sixty kilometers was enough to make her feet ache all over again. Wu didn't seem to notice, or if he did, he made no mention of it as they headed back to the formerly locked door.

For the shortest, briefest, most sublime of moments, she laid eyes on her atmospheric suit and realized that she hadn't thought about it once since her run-in with the pair of ancients.

But then, of course, she was thinking about it.

The atmospheric suit was essentially a Mariner's EV suit. It was designed to operate in space. Not only did it have to be completely airtight - for obvious reasons - but it had to be radiation-shielded and temperature-controlled. This meant that the thing was heavy, bulky, and stifling. In space, that wasn't necessarily a problem; the lack of gravity meant that movement was controlled more by attachable thruster packs than it was by, well, actual movement. Within a planet's gravity, however, it made any sort of movement like walking through treacle while stuffed inside a very heavy, very used gym sock that was seemingly made entirely out of bra underwire. She had managed to stop thinking about it because her prolonged jaunt around the ship had opened the possibility of her not having to wear it again, at least not for a long time. If she had stayed trapped on the ship, there was no way for her to get outside to need to put it on again. If she had managed to call for support from the research teams, they would have come to her, and she could have happily waited for them on the Atlas without having to leave; then, she would have spent the foreseeable future as part of the research efforts. Yes, she would have put it back on eventually, but in those conditions, that could have been months away.

Right now, however, the prospect of having to put the fucking thing back on immediately was stifling her otherwise jubilant mood.

"I don't suppose the ancients developed an alternative to that thing, did they?" she grumbled to Wu while nodding at the pile of wearable torture on the ground.

Wu chuckled quietly to himself and reached into his pocket, pulling out some sort of nose clip and handing it to her. "Only prolonged exposure to the compound cloud is harmful. If you instruct your ship to move back toward the tunnel opening, this air filter will be more than enough for the time we'll be out there."

"But... I was told that even getting that stuff on your skin could cause mutations to my DNA."

Wu shrugged again. "You were told wrong."

She eyeballed him for a moment, then cast a look out into the ominously dark cavern beyond the hatch before looking back to him again in time to watch him clip the filter over his own nose, pushing the two nodules into his nostrils. She sighed to herself and looked down at the computer interface built into her vambrace and started typing in commands. Now that the Ancients were no longer blocking her coms, it only took a few seconds to instruct the nav-com and autopilot to reverse the Seren the five hundred meters or so to the tunnel entrance, satisfied that her ship was doing what it was supposed to, she clipped her own filter onto her nose and looked at Wu. "If I grow a third arm 'cause of this, I'm going to beat you to death with it." It was a joke... mostly.

Wu laughed heartily before patting her on the shoulder. "I'm sure you will try, young one," he joked back in a manner that left the message clear; he could crush her like a bug no matter how many arms she had. He stepped out of the hatch and into the cavern. "Come," he called back over his shoulder as he headed toward the tunnel. "The Marshal will be ready soon, and your ship needs to be out of the way."

"Hey, what about your ship," she called after him as she jogged to catch up.

"Waiting a few miles away," he replied. "I'll instruct it to dock with the Atlas before we get into orbit."

"Couldn't I have just done that?" She asked as she kicked up a cloud of that hideous brown dust.

Wu looked over his shoulder at her and grinned. "I thought you were looking forward to the view." She blinked for a moment and then let her lips match his grin. She really was. She had seen the Primus from the outside more times than she could count, but so many of those times had been filled with a yearning to see it operational, to see it in all its former glory. Now, she was going to get her chance.

"We'd better get a move on, then," she winked at him and ducked down to crawl into the tunnel. "So, which one of you is in charge?" she asked as she crawled.

"That isn't how the Ancient hierarchy works," The old man's voice came from behind her, echoing slightly in the tunnel. "Ancients don't really have ranks; they have roles. Some roles are superior to others in certain situations; in other situations, those roles are reversed. Superiority is determined by who is best suited to carry out the task."

"So, what's your role?"

"I am a guardian. My role is based around the preservation and security of our assets and our people, and also the training and protection of our people."

Laura let that answer germinate for a moment. "So that is why you were in charge when we were checking the ship's systems. That falls under your remit."

"Exactly," came Wu's reply as they reached the first corner of the tunnel. "Elijah," he continued, pre-empting her question, "is a Marshal. It is one of the higher roles in Ancient society. Their purpose is to lead, especially during times of conflict. The diplomatic talks with your commander were another example of that."

"So, he's your boss, then?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. But he defers to me on matters relating to my role."

"But, he's so young."

"Age is immaterial. His role is defined by the knowledge stored in his DNA. It is who he is that is important, not the number of years he has been alive."

"Doesn't sound like there is much room for promotion," she observed.

"Hmmm, the obsession with personal advancement and status is a uniquely human phenomenon. Most other species act in the interest of the greater good."

Laura nodded. That was something she had noticed, too. "Well, good thing I'm a Mariner and not a human."

Wu's laugh echoed through the tunnel as they rounded the second corner. "Then there's hope for you yet, Miss Dondarion."

Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel; it was a brown, sickly, wet-sand-colored light, but light nonetheless. This came as something of a shock to Laura; she hadn't seen actual sunlight in days, having entered the tunnel in the darker hours and then having spent the last almost three days bathed in the artificial light of the Atlas. More than that, the time on her clock in no way matched up with the local time of this region of Xnios; her clock, at that moment, said that it was nearly four in the afternoon, but there was a hazy brightness to the day outside - despite the compound cloud - that suggested that the sun was only just starting to rise.

She finally pulled herself to her feet, stretching out the slight ache in her back from crawling uphill for as long as she had, and took a step to the side to allow Wu to climb out of the tunnel behind her. He frowned as he stood and batted off some of that annoying dust from his clothes before looking around.

The Seren, obedient to the commands she had sent it, had slowly reversed the half a mile or so back up the ravine and was now only a few meters further down the river with its docking collar extending slowly toward her. She lifted her wrist and started inputting more commands. The docking collar already extended beyond the shoreline, but it was at least four meters above her head, so she carefully decreased the Seren's altitude as far as she dared, almost until the keel was brushing against the waterline, and pulled herself the last meter up into the collar with Wu right behind her.

"Welcome aboard, Guardian," she smiled. "You would be the first non-mariner to step foot on this Seren in the ten years she has been mine."

"The Seren," Wu mused, nodding as he followed Laura to the main airlock. "An ancient Earth word in some Celtic languages, it means The Star, right?"

Laura smiled. "The original Mariner language was based largely on a mix of ancient Celtic dialects; Gaelic, Cornish, and Welsh, to be specific, although it has evolved quite a lot over the centuries since then."

Wu nodded, "It's a fine name for a ship."

There was something about the way he said it, an approval or an admiration in his tone, that stretched Laura's smile even more. This was a man who could command technology beyond anything she could comprehend and do it with ease; he had access to the sort of things that her entire race had hunted for and lusted after since before her grandparents had been born. He and his Marshal - if her limited understanding of Ancient technology's potential was correct - could dominate this part of the galaxy with ease with that one ship alone, and yet, something as simple as the name she chose for her ship was enough to impress him.

The palm reader on the airlock dinged, the security systems that would have eviscerated any intruder were deactivated, and the hatch swung open. She stood aside to let Wu in first, then stepped in after him, closing the outer hatch and waiting for the bioreaders and air filters to do their work for a few moments before the inner hatch granted them access to the rest of the ship.

Laura looked around the inside of the Seren as she led Wu inside. Mariner ships rarely had the sorts of luxuries that larger Imperium vessels possessed as standard; they were often drab, dark, minimalist setups designed for function over frivolities. But Laura had poured her blood and sweat into the Seren, it wasn't just her ship, it was her home, and she had tended to its every need as any homeowner did. Everything was immaculately and painstakingly maintained; there were decorations on the walls, and the lighting was designed to make the atmosphere pleasant, warm, and welcoming, not just illuminated. Things needed for everyday life all had a home, and the ship was clean, yet she had managed this without making it feel sterile or industrial. It was a balance she had managed to pull off quite nicely, and she was proud of her home.

Now, however, having spent days on the Atlas and seeing the wonders that were onboard, it suddenly felt... less. More than that, she suddenly realized that Wu's opinion about it mattered to her much more than she thought it would. This was a man she was trying to ingratiate herself to, and she was now very aware that the Seren, her pride and joy, was vastly, woefully, laughably inferior to the Atlas in every single conceivable way.

Wu seemed to sense her doubt and whistled. "This is much nicer than the ship that got us here," he commented with a smile.

"Thank you," Laura felt her cheeks heat a little.

"I don't mean to rush you," he said after another moment of looking around, "but you'd better move it before it gets splattered against the Atlas when it takes off."

"Oh, right, yeah. The bridge is this way." She said before leading him up a short flight of stairs into the central spinal corridor of the Seren, and then on toward the bridge. She dropped herself into the captain's chair when they arrived, pulling the arm-rest mounted computer over her lap, and started to deactivate the autopilot. "Where should I go?"

"Depends on how good of a view you want," Wu answered with an excited gleam in his eyes. "Personally, I'd say to take her out about three miles away from the river and hold at an altitude of about five thousand feet."

"That's... pretty far away."

"The Atlas is a pretty big ship," he grinned back. "It's oriented in line with the ravine, so as long as you are out over that way," he pointed to an area perpendicular to the river, "we should be fine."

"Should?"

"What is life without a little uncertainty?" He gave her a lopsided grin. It was at that moment that Laura realized that the old man was as excited about seeing the Atlas break free of its planetary confines as she was, perhaps even more so. She was about to see the culmination of about ten years of work come to fruition; he, on the other hand, was seeing his life's purpose - a very long life's purpose - he realized, after god knew how many years. The man who seemed to pride himself on his level of self-control and discipline was barely able to contain himself. She smiled as she followed instructions and moved the Seren to an appropriate spot, elevating to a good altitude, and then spun the ship around to face back toward the ravine. From this distance, it looked like little more than a scar running over the landscape with the shadow of Meridian city in the very far distance beyond it.

With deft flicks of her fingers, she re-engaged the autopilot and ordered it to hold the ship's position where it was, then she climbed back out of the captain's seat and - followed closely by Wu - walked to the very front of the bridge to look out of the main front window. For someone with a less-than-intimate appreciation of heights, she had to admit that the view was pretty incredible.

The compound cloud, from this altitude, wasn't really a cloud; it was more like a sickly brown blanket that smothered the landscape. But the compound itself was heavier than the air it was floating in, meaning that it was thicker and more concentrated closer to the ground, and then thinned out the higher up you went, yet coupled with the bright morning sun, it was still possible to see through it from this altitude. For what seemed like the longest time, nothing seemed to happen. The landscape was silent and still, with the planet bathed in that toxic cloud.

Then, suddenly, everything seemed to happen at once.

An unimaginably enormous section of the landscape started to rumble. She could see the walls of the ravine start to collapse in, taking the last remains of that shattered town with them as the ground violently moved beneath them. A section of land, predictably the same rough dimensions of the Atlas, started to rise up. It took a few moments for the shape of the colossal ship to become clear and longer still for the enormous chunks of rock and debris from the landscape it had unearthed to start falling away in enough quantities for the hull to become visible. It looked like a brown waterfall, the millennia worth of dust and soil, each layer compacted beneath the next, all broke apart into a fine dust that flowed like water off the graceful, predatory contours of the Ancient vessel. It looked like a massive hidden monster, breaking out of its camouflaged hiding place in slow motion, ready to strike at the sky and anything in it.

Finally, with the last of the dust and debris falling away and the huge hole left behind it starting to fill with water from the river, the Atlas was clear. Its engine burned brightly in the daylight, the sun glistened off its faded silver hull, and thrusters all along its length flared against the relentless pull of gravity as the incomprehensibly ancient craft left the planet that had been its cocoon for countless millions of years.

It was magnificent.

Laura could only stand there, tears in her eyes as the immensity of the scene struck her. Her jaw hung loose, and a soft, appreciative moan fell from her lips as she watched.

The Atlas turned slightly, facing off to the Seren's right at an almost perfect right angle. If Laura's jaw had fallen at the sight of the ancient vessel rising from the depths, it damned near hit the floor when part of the Atlas's hull - a second amidships toward the lower part of the hull - started to open. It wasn't a large hangar door like on human vessels; it wasn't a bay that was perpetually open but sealed with a shield like she had seen on some of the more exotic ships out there; this was different. The hull itself seemed to fold back on itself, like each plate of hull armor was an individual reptilian scale that rotated to fold onto its neighbor, join with it to fold onto the next scale, and so on, over and over again until a massive section of the hull lay open to the atmosphere.

Laura just stared at it in astonishment.

"I believe that is our door," Wu prompted her gently.

"Hmm? Oh, right, sorry," she flushed at her fangirl-esque gawking, but the look of wonder in Wu's eyes told her that not only had he been doing the same thing, but probably hadn't even noticed her expression. She chuckled to herself as she moved back to the command chair, tapped some commands into the computer, and looked back out of the window. The ship rocked a little as it slowly started to move forward, following the automatically generated guide path sent from the Atlas. The vibrations in her feet ramped up a little with the engines, and she sighed happily at the comfortingly familiar feeling as she moved back to stand beside Wu.

"She's beautiful," Laura whispered as the gigantic ship edged closer until the hull loomed over the dwarf-like Seren.

"She is," Wu nodded, "She really is."

********

Bethany. 4

"What the fuck is this, Dick?" She snarled, spinning on her heels to face the source of the voice.

"That's six million credits," He answered calmly. "I'm sorry; I know how you feel about running contraband, but I'm in debt to some very nasty people, I couldn't wait for the paydays from legit work."

"So you used my ship to run slaves?!?"

"They're... not slaves."

Bethany blinked and looked back toward the stasis pods. It was very difficult to tell a person's condition when in stasis; the equipment they were attached to reduced their metabolic rate and their accompanying bio-readings down to an absolute minimum, meaning that any serious damage that would normally be shown up on them was masked by the stasis protocol. By the looks of them, though, the people inside those pods had been through hell a few times over. But if they weren't slaves...

"You're transporting live human organs?!?" she gasped, a chill of revulsion running along her spine. "What the fuck are you thinking??"

"Cap'n, I..."

"How many times?" she barked, turning back toward him.

He sighed, "This is the fourth. And yes, they were all meat sacks."

"Meat Sacks?!?" She almost screamed incredulously. "They're people!"

"They're already dead," he shook his head. "The stasis pods just keep them metabolically functional while they are being transported."

She laughed, "Oh, is that what they told you? Do you have any fucking idea how these things work?" The clench of Dick's jaw was enough for her to tell that he didn't have the first idea. "Dead means their life signs and metabolic functionality have stopped, completely! There is no way to bring someone back from that. Which means those people were alive when they were put into those pods, you fucking idiot!"

Dick tensed, his eyes flashing guiltily to the pods for a moment before they hardened and flicked back to her. "Not my problem; all I care about is getting paid."

"Paid?!? We are on a three million credit run right now. You are getting paid!"

"No, Bethany," he snared. "You are getting paid. I get a third of that. One-third to you, one-third to me, and one-third to your precious fucking ship, which you get to keep when you retire!"

"Of course, one-third goes to the ship, you fucking moron!" She bit back. "How the hell do you think we pay for fuel, or for maintenance, or docking fees, or upgrades, or goddamned toilet paper? Are you going to pay for it? Four runs at six million credits a go is twenty-four million. Nobody is in that sort of debt; this whole ship is barely worth thirty. This is greed, pure and simple!"

Dicks lip curled up into a snarl for a moment; he didn't like being called out like that. Well, that was too fucking bad!

"So what if it is?!" he yelled at her. "There is insane money to be made out there, but you are too hung up on your high and mighty principles and the oh-so-noble merchant's guild to take a chance."

"The Guild keeps us in business! If they knew about this they..."

"If they knew?? Who do you think set this whole thing up?!? Jesus, are you that fucking naive?" He laughed. "As long as they get their cut, they don't give a shit what is transported. It took me twenty minutes with a com channel to cut through their public-facing moral bullshit. They have hundreds of contracts! Wanna run guns to pirates? Wanna ship Narcotics into the capital? Slave labor, human organs, bio-weapons? They do it all, and they pay millions! You're just too much of a coward to take advantage of it!"

Bethany just stared at him. Her mouth hung open in shock, but the rest of her body was practically vibrating with anger. She was done talking to him; he was the worst type of criminal, and she had facilitated his smuggling without even knowing it. She shook her head and stormed out of the hidden smuggler's hold, barging him out of the way in the process. "Justify it however you like, you piece of shit!" she snarled. "I'm contacting system security and turning you and your precious fucking cargo over to them. They can deal with you!"

She was halfway through the cargo bay when she heard the familiar whine of a laser pistol being powered up. "I can't let you do that, Cap'n"

"That really how you are gonna play this, Dick?" Bethany said without turning around. "Have you thought any of this through? How are you going to pilot the ship without my command codes? It's on autopilot; in three days, she is going to drop out of Hyperspace in the Sol system and fly itself into orbit above the Capital. Then you are going to get hailed; you can't answer the channel without - you guessed it - my command codes, so you are going to be sitting in an unresponsive ship above the most populated and secure city in the Imperium. If you are lucky, they'll just blow you up, but more likely, they'll board you, find your cargo, and send you away for the rest of your miserable life, just like every other shit stain smuggler."

"Or I could use the failsafe engine cut-off I installed in engineering," he replied threateningly, "And contact my buyer by circumventing the security blocks on the comms array. Or did you think that I was only maintaining your shitty little ship while I was working?"

Well, Shit.

"For what it's worth, I didn't want any of this to happen. I'm sorry, Cap'n... Goodbye."

Bethany dove to the side, scrambling for cover behind the stack of Rum just as the laser pistol fired. She felt a searing pain in her arm where the super-excited molecules cut a gouge through her bicep. She snarled loudly; as painful as it was, it beat taking the hit square in the back.

"Don't fuck around, Bethany," Dick growled, his footsteps coming closer. "I'd rather make this quick."

"Yeah, me too," she muttered to herself as her one good arm tapped frantically at the interface on the wrist of her wounded one. "Hey Dick," she called out, "I've changed my mind. I won't hand you over to sys-sec."

"Sorry Bethany, it's too late for that now. I can't trust you not to rat me out."

"Oh, you misunderstand, fuck nuts," she taunted him. "I'm just going to deal with you myself."

To be fair, the timing of it had been purely accidental, but he stepped around the crate of Rum and raised his weapon at her at the exact moment she hit the icon on her screen. In a fraction of a second, the biomass scanners in the cargo bay identified Dick as a foreign pathogen - thanks to a bit of hasty programming on Laura's part - and initiated one of its more humane protocols.

A cylinder of blue light shot down from the bulkhead above, completely surrounding Dick. Well, almost all of him. The force shield - the same type of shield used to keep the hold pressurized during low-atmosphere cargo transfers - sliced through his wrist, and the seared hunk of flesh and the pistol it was holding dropped to the deck with a thud. It was drowned out by Dick's agonizing scream. Bethany sighed and stood herself up, then turned to face him.

"For mutiny, attempted murder, and smuggling of contraband, I, Bethany Jenson, Captain of the freighter Long Haul, sentence you to death," she said flatly, holding Dick's panicked eyes as he cradled his severed wrist.

"Cap'n, please," he pleaded.

"Save it," she shook her head in disgust, the wound on her arm conveniently choosing that exact moment to re-announce its existence and remind her of what her former shipmate had been willing to do... and why. She glanced over to the still-open hatch of the smuggler's hold and then back to the captured criminal. "Goodbye, Dick."

With another tap of her finger on her computer, another force shield burst into life over the cargo bay doors, keeping the room pressurized as the doors themselves began to open. Dick yelped again as his containment field started to move, forcing him to shuffle along with it, leading him inextricably toward the now yawning portal into space. The fear in his eyes suddenly flared as he realized what was about to happen, and he started pounding his one intact fist against the inside of his shield coffin, each time sending a jolt of electricity through his body.

Bethany watched impassionately as Dick was dragged across the hold. She knew what he had been willing to do to her, and she had already heard what he had not only been willing to do to the poor people in the smuggler's hold but what he had already done at least three times before. "Bethany, no, please, I'll turn myself in!" she screamed in panic as he inched ever closer to the airless void beyond the cargo doors, the shield making an odd crackling noise as it passed over the dust and particles of debris that covered the ground of any self-respecting freighter hold.

"Cap'n, please. I..." His voice was cut off as his shield merged into the one guarding the ship from decompression, and the air was sucked out of his makeshift prison, only for it to be replaced by the frigid vacuum of space. Dick's last breath froze as it left his lips, even though he wouldn't be dead for another minute or two. Frost crawled over the sweat that had beaded on his forehead and cheeks, and the rest of his skin turned a deathly pallor of grey almost immediately. His eyes became bloodshot for an instant before they froze in the minus-four hundred-and-fifty degree Fahrenheit void. In a few more seconds, the containment shield had merged completely with the pressure guard, and Dick's body was nudged out into space. It floated out for a few moments before it passed through the FTL bubble, hit a pocket of hyperspace turbulence, and was smashed to a million frozen pieces by it.

Dick would never know the reason why Bethany was so against any form of smuggling, nor would she have had the inclination to explain it to him had he asked. The Long Haul was her ship, and for anyone on board, her word was law. That was just the way things were in this line of work. He had crossed a very clearly laid down line and then tried to kill her when she caught him. For that, he didn't deserve a second thought.

So she didn't give him one.

With a tap of the icon on her computer, the cargo bay door started to slide back down into place again, and she turned back toward the smuggler's hold. One problem may have been resolved, but there were six more yet to be dealt with.

*******

Elijah. 5

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!" Laura practically bounced back onto the bridge. "That was the most amazing thing I have ever seen!" She practically ran over to the main viewscreen and gazed out of the window. "It's flying, under its own power, after billions of years!"

"It was an impressive sight indeed," Wu smiled as he followed behind her.

"What's it like?" Laura gushed, skipping back toward him.

"It's pretty incredible," he smiled, running his fingers over the helmet on his head. "It's like... The Atlas is an extension of me, no different from my arm. I can see and feel through her sensors, I can move with her engines, I can clench my fists with her weapons. I just think something, and the ship just... knows how to do it. It's all instinct. I just can't tell if it's an instinct the ship gave to me when it downloaded all that information or if it's reacting to an instinct I already had."

"Wait... information?" Laura looked like she was excited enough to burst.

"Perhaps this is a conversation that can wait until after we have docked our own ship and left the orbit of a potentially hostile Imperium world." Wu interjected as he tapped away at one of the consoles, doubtlessly instructing their ship to dock with the Atlas as the Seren had. "We did just carve a hole into it and took off in a fifteen-mile-long buried ship that they could argue belongs to them."

Laura and Elijah blinked at each other. "Yeah, the man has a point," she said with a slight smile. "But I want to hear all about it later." she finished with what Elijah could only call a flirtatious wink.

Elijah just chuckled and turned to look over at Wu. "How are we doing, Guardian?"

"Our Destroyer will dock in twenty seconds, Marshal?"

"You guys have a destroyer?" Laura almost choked. "How the hell did you pull that off?"

It was a good question and one that Elijah hadn't thought to ask before now. He had just assumed that the ship had been his; he hadn't considered the possibility that it had been stolen... from the Imperium, no less. That could cause problems, but then again, the old man didn't seem that bothered about it, and considering the power of the Atlas - a power he now had a much greater appreciation of - he had to concede that there was probably very little the Imperium could do to stop them. Still, though, staying put to test that theory seemed unwise.

"The ship is docked, Marshall," Wu soon said, straightening himself up from his position over the console. "Ready to depart when you are."

Elijah nodded, turning his attention back to the ship. To Wu and Laura - as it had been to him before putting on the helmet - the bridge just looked like a bridge, but now, with the interface between the helmet and his mind fully operational, it looked much different. Every console was alive with information, and every shred of it was available to him with nothing more than a glance. Every ship system was at his command with only a thought, and each one of them felt like a presence in his mind, feeding him updates and accepting commands like a living, breathing crew. The Atlas was almost alive.

He sent a quick command to the hanger bay, telling it to secure the two new ships resting in its cavernous depths before resealing itself, then an order to raise the shields. That part wasn't strictly necessary, but it was good practice for entering or leaving an atmosphere. The speed he needed to reach to break orbit was not inconsiderable, and the heat could theoretically harm the hull. Once they had been carried out, the next order ramped up the engines and redirected the helm to pull the ship up as they reached escape velocity. Almost immediately, the Atlas started to move. Slowly at first, but picking up speed at an astonishing pace. In less than a minute, they had covered the hundreds of miles to the ocean and started to pull up toward space.

Then, the sensors alerted him to something.

"There are seven Imperium ships in orbit," he announced to the others. "Their shields are up, and their weapons are charged."

"Do you think they are here for the Atlas?" Laura asked, her earlier exultation replaced with nervousness.

"Or they tracked the ship I borrowed," Wu shrugged.

"Borrowed?" Elijah smirked.

"Indefinitely, yes." Wu grinned back at him.

Elijah rolled his eyes but laughed anyway. "Okay, let's see what they want." He flipped open a comms channel to the largest ship of the awaiting fleet, The light cruiser ISS Karachi; it was already trying to raise them on every frequency.

"This is Commodore Guinivere Hillman, commander of the twenty-third defence fleet." A stern-looking woman in her mid to late fifties appeared on the main viewing screen. "You are trespassing in Imperium territory and in possession of stolen ships. I hereby order you to stand down and prepare to be boarded."

"I'm afraid you have no jurisdiction over me or this ship, Commodore," Elijah answered plainly. "We will be breaking orbit in less than a minute; it would be inadvisable for you to be in the way."

"You will cut your engines, lower your shields, and prepare to be boarded, or you will be fired upon!" She barked back with no small amount of hostility.

Elijah smiled. "I don't want any trouble, Guinevere. But make no mistake, if any one of your ships fires on the Atlas, I will use your fleet as target practice."

"The Atlas." The commodore mused. "It's useful to know the name of the ship I present to the Emperor when you are dead."

Elijah just shrugged. "Good luck with that," he replied and promptly closed the channel before the commodore's rage-twisted face could respond.

He took a deep breath and returned his attention to the viewscreen. "I think you just told an Imperium Commodore to fuck off," Laura commented dryly, arching an eyebrow at him.

"It certainly sounded like it, didn't it?" Wu added with something closer to a grin.

"Do you have any idea what the weapons and shields on this ship are capable of?" Elijah turned to ask their Mariner guest.

"Well, they weren't functional on the Primis, so... no."

"Me neither, but it will be fun to find out."

Wu snorted out a laugh, then looked over to the gobsmacked Laura. "We'll be leaving the atmosphere in twenty seconds. You'd better take a seat, this may be a little more bumpy than normal."

********

Histories and Lores

There are many things that the government of the Imperium points to as evidence of the success of their particular form of government, but the biggest and most often used is the existence and health of the privately-run free market economy. It spans hundreds of worlds and keeps billions of people out of poverty and destitution, and although scarcity hasn't quite been eradicated, it is close enough for the mission to be called a success.

The Ministry of Finance - or MoF - is, loosely speaking, responsible for overseeing the market, but that is in a very literal form. They have, of course, laid out some of the more well-known laws, such as those forbidding insider trading, attempts to corner the market, or laws intended to prevent a single enterprise from gaining a monopoly over a single commodity or service but otherwise, the market runs and regulates itself. Spread out over all but the most recently colonized worlds - which are state-funded until they achieve self-sufficiency - the market is responsible for the production, manufacture, distribution, and consumption of every single commodity, resource, or service in the Imperium.

There is, however, one entity that slipped through the MoF's regulatory safety net and achieved an unrivaled hegemony over one corner of the market: The Merchant's Guild.

How the guild managed this is still a matter of some debate. Some theories postulate that officials were bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise coerced to overlook the Guild's role in the market, other theories that the guild itself predates the law and supersedes it, but the one that is seen as most credible is the theory that the Guild bypassed the law entirely by starting life as something closer to a co-operative. As a means for independent haulers to make contact with private entities requiring their services, it didn't offer a service to the general public but facilitated the operation of the market. By the time the regulatory authorities realized the scope of the loophole that the Guild had exploited, it was too late.

Within only a few years, the Merchant's Guild had quietly and subversively cornered the shipping and haulage market in all of Imperium space. Whereas before, they offered a service that allowed haulers and companies to contact each other via the Guild, now they only allow hauler's and companies registered with the guild to post or access those contracts at all. If a freighter captain decides to work independently of them, they will find it very difficult to locate companies willing to work with them, primarily because the Guild provides businesses with certain reassurances that the contract will be honored and are incredibly strict when it comes to the privacy of their clients.

The way it works is like this: A company needs something moved from point A to point B, so they take the haulage contract to the Guild. The Guild then posts the contract to any freighters in the area who have any chance of making that delivery, the Guild doesn't ask, nor do they care what is within said cargo unless it can be considered contraband at either the start location, end location, or the space the freighter would need to fly through. The Guild does not collect contracts for contraband, at least not publicly. When the contract is agreed, a fee is paid to the Guild by the company, and the terms of the deal are put into writing - delivery by a certain date, temperature control of the cargo, and so on. The freighter captain then picks up the cargo, hauls it to its destination, drops it off, and gets paid the remainder of the balance, from which the Guild takes a small percentage.

The rules for working within this system are pretty clear and surprisingly straightforward. A company has to be completely honest about what they are asking to be hauled. If they are found to be less than forthcoming about it, the Merchant's Guild will blacklist them and never work with them again, and a company that is cut off from its access to the market doesn't survive for much longer. A freighter captain is a little more free; they only have to abide by the terms of the individual contracts, but they are expected to maintain something of a good reputation whether they are under contract or not - Their freighters must be kept to a high standard of maintenance, all taxes and port fees must be paid, adhering to maritime law, and generally avoiding things that make the Guild look bad. Failure to meet these criteria results in the same penalties that are faced by businesses: complete isolation from their means of income.

There are, however, a lot of benefits of working for the Guild beyond ready access to work. A conglomerate of this size has obviously established a very large network of contacts in the ship sales and repair industry, offering significant discounts to captains. The same can be said for lodgings, fuel, and access to private cargo runs. For the perks on offer, the fees paid to the Guild are argued by many to be more than worth the expense.

There have been several attempts by the MoF to bring the Merchant's Guild in line with the law. One attempt saw an order made by the Minister of Finance himself to break apart the Guild into its constituent parts and allow other companies to compete against them in those specific areas - Agriculture shipping, manufactured goods shipping, etc. Another attempt, some years later, tried to force the Guild to submit to direct Imperium control, effectively turning it into another government agency. Both of these attempts, like all others over the centuries, ended in the same way. The Guild went on strike, the movement of goods around the Imperium ground to a halt, and the market plummeted overnight, so much so that there had been genuine concerns of a recession of such severity that it would affect the Government's tax revenue and collapse the economies of entire sectors. Invariably, the government backed down.

This is not to say that the Merchant's Guild has had a free run of things. It is a commonly known fact that the chairman of the Guild is not only consistently the highest earning person in the entire Imperium - often rising to the rank of richest man or woman alive - but is also the single most assassinated position in private market history. Conspiracy theories suggest that more than a few of those assassinations have been orchestrated by the government itself.

Essentially, though, there are two reasons why the Merchant Guild is now such a staple part of the modern market economy. The first is that they are, by far, the single largest tax-paying entity to have ever existed, singlehandedly generating enough revenue for the government to cover the entire public spending on the Planet of Earth or an entire sector in the Outer Rim. The second reason is a little more simple. It is simply too big to fail. Not only is it completely and irrevocably ingrained within the market itself, meaning that the chances of a competitor starting to challenge them is almost impossible, but because they can - and almost have - shut down the entire Imperium economy on little more than a whim.

For the most part, however, the general public and the markets couldn't care less about this high-level maneuvering. As long as their favorite snacks and favorite life-saving medication appear on the shelves where and when it's supposed to, the average person is fairly unconcerned about the mechanism that got them there. If anything, the Guild works to the benefit of the general population by ensuring something of a barrier against rampant inflation or price hikes. Shipping costs are always the same, and any company thought to be unreasonably inflating the value of their goods - something the Guild has to take into account to make sure everything is insured - they are blacklisted. For this reason, the price of most general goods has not risen in price above inflation in over a century. More than that, major humanitarian relief efforts like the recent disasters on Orpheus IV and Xnios have proven that the Guild is happy to act altruistically in times of real emergency

There is, however, a darker side to the Guild. For every item of foodstuff, manufactured goods, or piece of military hardware moved by the guild, there are rumors of at least as much contraband. The highly addictive and incredibly dangerous narcotic known as "Reno" is often seen as an example of this. Reno is made from a compound found stomach acids of a certain type of fish found on only a single planet in the entire known galaxy; the drug can literally only be made in that one place, and yet it is found in every major population center in the Imperium, often in enormous quantities, far too high to be accomplished by small numbers of smugglers. The same can be said for the movement of slaves or endangered animals. There should, in theory, be no way for these illicit commodities to be moved through space on any meaningfully large scale, and yet they are.

For good or for ill, the Merchant's Guild doesn't look like it is going anywhere any time soon, nor does there appear to be any sort of concerted effort to curtail its complete dominance of the Imperium's shipping industry. For the most part, people don't care if some contraband is moved or if there is no free competition in the market; they only care that their essential goods are delivered on time and at a price they can afford.