Chapter 7 - The Negotiator.

Laura. 8

She supposed she shouldn't have been surprised; a person's luck only stretched so far, and Commodore Hillman's hostile appearance in orbit - considering the size of the ship that had just torn a gouge out of the planet's surface, not to mention Guardian Wu's requisition of an Imperium Destroyer - seemed to be almost an inevitability. She wondered, for a moment, what could have happened if her Ancient companions hadn't shown up on the Atlas, leaving her and her Mariner brethren to scour the ship alone. She wasn't naive enough to think that a caravan of Mariner scientists being shuttled to the surface would have gone unnoticed, nor the constant stream of supplies that would be needed to keep them functional for however many... well... decades it would have taken to get a handle on the tech that this ship possessed. Then there was the matter of trying to get it all out. The chances of doing that undetected, let alone the long-term support effort by what was essentially an enemy of the Imperium in Imperium space, was so far-fetched as to be dismissed out of hand. Eventually, the Empire would have caught on to something happening, and this fleet would have shown up.

She had said before that, ship-for-ship, the Mariner fleet was among the most powerful of any known species in this part of space. The reason for that was two-fold. Most obvious was the technological boon reaped from the Primus. Even though Wu called the reverse engineering of vital ancient components "crude," he also called them effective. There was no way to replicate the materials or the power source needed to make a faithful like-for-like recreation of Ancient tech. Still, suitable alternative materials and power requirements produced better shields, improved sensors, upgraded engines, and more powerful weapons. It made a Mariner ship a force to be reckoned with. The second element of Mariner superiority came from the Mariners themselves. Generations in space had taught them to think in three dimensions, taking roll, pitch, and stellar conditions into account for almost everything as a matter of course, they navigated and flew by instinct, not by training. Humans manned imperium ships, and as skilled as they may be, they were simply not equipped to think in those terms, at least not instinctually. The things that came naturally to a Mariner pilot were part of a chain of processes to an Imperium officer, something they had to tick off a checklist that most of them didn't really understand. If two ships of equal size came face to face, the chances of an Imperium victory depended almost entirely on how much the Mariner crew fucked up.

It was, after all, a universal fact that wars were not necessarily won by the strongest side but by the side who fucked up the least and learned from their mistakes when they did.

However, the simple truth in this situation was that the Mariners would not have been facing Imperium ships head-on. The Imperium would have - and indeed had - sent an entire fleet. One mariner ship could take out an imperium ship with ease. Taking out seven Imperium ships was an entirely different proposition. Her eyes flicked to the sensor screen on the right side of the bridge. She still couldn't read the language scrolling across the display, but the extraordinarily detailed schematics of the ships in orbit made it very easy for her to identify their classifications. The Karachi was a light cruiser, a formidable ship on its own, and attached to it were four destroyers and two frigates. It would take a fleet of at least five Mariner destroyers to combat this fleet, and seeing five Mariner destroyers, the Imperium would have just called for reinforcements.

As unskilled as the humans were in terms of stellar navigation and combat, they made up for that with staggeringly high numbers of ships. The entire Mariner fleet would eventually have been dragged into the conflict to hold this position for any prolonged period of time, more and more of it being required to counter the increasing number of ships being thrown at them by the Imperium, and even then, it would eventually be destroyed by the endless waves of Imperium reinforcements. Imperium naval doctrine essentially boiled down to wars of attrition, which their almost bottomless pool of ships and personnel could always win. Saying that the Home Fleet could destroy Imperium forces at a rate of ten to one was not idle boasting; it was true, but in a large-scale battle like this one could turn out to be, they wouldn't be fighting at a ratio of ten to one; the imperium would outnumber them at something closer to thirty to one. Those were odds that not even Mariner superiority could overcome.

The Mariner high command would have known that, and the effort would have been abandoned long before it got that far, meaning the Atlas would have been abandoned, too. Understandably curious as to why a Mariner expedition was on the planet to begin with, the Imperium would have launched its own investigation, possibly found the Atlas for themselves, and even if they hadn't been able to recover it, their scientists would have started the same reverse engineering efforts the Mariners had carried out on the Primus, and the Mariners technological edge would have been wiped out practically overnight. More than that, the Atlas has something the Primus never did... Power! With those systems fully functional, it wasn't a massive leap of imagination to think that the Imperium's reverse-engineered components would be superior to the Mariner's simply because the technology they had studied had been in full working order.

Realistically, unless enormous and prohibitively counter-productive measures were taken to ensure secrecy, there was no feasible way for the Mariners to have benefited from the discovery in any meaningful way, not in her lifetime, at least.

It was starting to become more and more obvious why Lycander, the Commander of the Home Fleet and de facto leader of the Mariners, had been so eager to deal with her Ancient companions. If they could get the Atlas out of the ground - which they very clearly could - and were willing to trade for technical information, the whole problem could be neatly sidestepped, allowing both parties to benefit enormously.

But then, of course, Guinevere Hillman and her fucking fleet showed up.

Seven Imperium ships may not have sounded like something to be afraid of, at least not compared to the tales of battle groups consisting of hundreds of ships, but Laura knew how potent a force this could be. The two frigates were fast and would attempt to cut off flight vectors. One of those destroyers doubtlessly held a large-area interdiction device, and the rest would close in quickly to pummel an enemy ship with broadsides while the cruiser engaged with heavy weaponry from range. They were long-practiced, well-established, and highly predictable tactics, but there was no denying their effectiveness. The only way to really combat such a fleet maneuver was with brute strength and very few - if any - Mariner vessels were capable of standing against it single-handedly, at least not without taking severe amounts of damage.

But the Mariners weren't in the Atlas.

The casual way that Elijah had dismissed Commodore Hillman was as astonishing in its bravery as it was in its facetiousness. It was a level of insolence Laura doubted the commodore had ever experienced in her life. The only way he could have made it more disrespectful, dismissive, and flippant was if he had yawned at her.

It would have been funny, though.

Laura had known these two men for barely twelve hours, nowhere near long enough to establish anything like a trusting relationship with them. Yet, she found herself taking comfort in their confidence. They knew what this ship was capable of, at least in theory if not in practice, and seemed absolutely convinced that the threat from the Imperium fleet posed no danger. Considering where she was, there was only really one of two possibilities available to her: either they were right, or they were crazy. If they were right, she didn't have anything to worry about, and if they were crazy, she wouldn't be alive long enough for it to matter, so there was no point fretting over it.

With a shrug, she leaned back into the ridiculously comfortable chair and looked out of the main view screen. Having spent all her life in space, she'd had more experience with bridge chairs than any person should have, and this particular bridge chair had no business being this fucking comfortable. She wondered, for a moment, if she could convince the two men to let her take it to her ship to act as her new bed.

She chuckled to herself at the absurdity of her thoughts. She was currently in an Ancient Battleship, ascending through the sickly brown atmosphere of an Imperium planet, and about to potentially go into combat against a fair proportion of the 23rd Defence fleet. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it to normally make her very, very nervous. Not only was she not nervous, she was thinking about chairs. Under normal circumstances, she would be questioning her own craziness at that moment, but her normal circumstances must have been left in her other pants, or at least in that fucking atmospheric suit that was still laying in a crumpled heap by the outer hatch.

Before her eyes, banks of clouds zipped past the Atlas as it gained more and more altitude; the sky was starting to leak its brownness as the heavier compound - like air - grew thinner the higher they got. After only a minute or so of climbing - a feat that should have been simply impossible for a normal ship with engines this big, considering the speed that the compound cloud typically clogged them up - the sky resumed its natural azure hue, and the brilliance of the sun lit up the heavens in a way that only a Mariner could genuinely appreciate.

The brilliance of daytime, while annoying to things like body clocks, was a natural wonder that simply couldn't be replicated in space. It was light and heat, distorted and spectrally broadened by the Ozone layer, colored by nitrogen particles in the air it passed through, reflected inwards by the atmospheric bubble around the planet to make it seem more vibrant, and it bathed the planet in the most magnificent shades of blues. In space, it was a ball of fire in the center of a star system; it rarely provided enough light or warmth for anything and functioned as little more than an identificational or navigational marker for the system it sat in and the source of stellar winds and gravity fields. Laura hated being planetside for a whole host of reasons; not being able to see the stars was very high on that list. But occasionally... just occasionally... she withdrew her cynicism and sense of discomfort just long enough to be able to appreciate the astonishing beauty possible in an infinite universe. It was, after all, the dream of countless generations before her to watch that glorious blue sky slowly fade away to blackness as they finally left the planet's atmosphere, just as she was seeing now.

And then the moment was ruined by the bright red beam of an Imperium focused-laser cannon shot racing just above their bow.

Laura blinked away the sear of color on her retina, flashing a worried glance over to Wu and Elijah. "I believe that was a warning shot," Wu said glibly.

"Think we should respond?" Elijah chuckled back.

"I think it would be rude not to," the older man shrugged. "But you're in command."

The entire bridge suddenly flashed white, a glow that seemed to blind her for a few seconds before fading away, but this one didn't come from outside the ship as the first laser had; this one seemed to come from everywhere around her. She blinked again, this time in confusion, and looked around for a second before her eyes fell on the viewscreen.

It was different. The view of the outside had been broad and obstructed only by the very small amount of hull between the bridge windows and the vast expanse of space, maybe only a hundred feet or so. Now, however, there seemed to be miles of glossy gray hull between their vantage point and the front of the ship. "Err, what was that?" she asked cautiously.

"He transported us to the tactical bridge," Wu answered for a busy-looking Elijah.

"We have a combat bridge?" Laura balked. "Where?"

"Pretty close to the center of the ship," Wu shrugged. "The command deck is pretty exposed in a fight, and the views from there are not really helpful in combat, so he used the bridge's built-in matter transfer system to move us here. It's safer."

"So that is..." she nodded at the viewscreen.

"The view from external sensors and camera, yes. There is at least about four kilometers worth of superstructure between us and the hull in any direction."

Laura nodded, about to say something else, when movement on the screen made her freeze. Parts of the hull were peeling back, like sequins on a dress folding over themselves to expose a tiny section of the hull, or at least tiny in comparison to the rest of it. Laura had seen the research done on the Primus's weapon systems; she knew that they worked on a retractable turret design, but the Mariners had never been able to understand how the hull opened. Now, she was watching firsthand as numerous small sections retracted and about a dozen turrets rapidly grew out of the depressions. The chime of the comm frequency echoed around the bridge again, and Elijah opened the channel without waiting for either her or Wu to give input.

"Consider that your first and only warning," the furious-looking face of Commodore Hillman appeared on screen. "Power down your shields and your engines immediately."

"Hello again, Gwinny," Elijah gave her an impish smile. "I feel you are not grasping the situation you are in. If you could be so kind as to fuck off, I won't have to break your pretty little flotilla."

"I am a Commodore of the Imperium!" Hillman raged. "You will bow to the authority that the Emperor has placed in me and surrender your vessel immediately or..."

One of the turrets on the Atlas's port side topdeck fired. A blue ribbon of light flashed across the considerable distance between it and the nearest of the fleet's frigates, seeming to connect them together for a second before guttering out. Laura could only blink, aware of the burst of light over her vision and the stare at what was left of the Imperium ship. The Atlas's energy weapon - she had no idea what else to call it, having no idea how it worked - had cored through the front of the Frigate, turning the smallest of the Imperium ships into something that looked like a toilet roll tube. The ship just hung there for a moment before the catastrophic damage done to its systems allowed the power core to go critical, and the remains of the hulk disappeared inside a blinding white light as it exploded. There was nothing left of it when the light faded away.

Laura - no stranger to small-scale weapon exchanges between starships - was pretty sure her jaw was becoming intimately familiar with her lap.

"Please consider that my first and last warning, Commodore," Elijah finally spoke after a few moments of stunned silence on both bridges. There was no mistaking the hostility and menace in his voice this time. "Now, get out of my way before I warn the rest of your fleet."

Hillman, for her part, was just blinking at something to her right, her face drained of color. "Commodore, your orders!" a man's voice sounded from somewhere on the Imperium bridge.

"That shot cut right through her shields!" another voice said, "We need to withdraw and call for reinforcements!"

"For God's sake, Commodore, snap out of it!" the first voice shouted again. "What are your orders?!?"

Hillman blinked and looked back up at the screen. "This is not the last time you will be seeing me, traitor!" she growled at Elijah.

Elijah just smiled. "I hope, for your sake, that you're wrong."

The Commodore shivered with fury. "Alert the rest of the fleet," she growled. "All ships withdraw." The channel closed without another word, and they all watched in silence as the Imperium fleet came about and powered away in the opposite direction. The single remaining frigate took point as if desperate to escape the same fate as had befallen her sister ship. Elijah spun in his chair to face them.

"I thought that went well." he shrugged. "A bit of gunboat diplomacy."

"What the fuck was that thing?" Laura exclaimed, a hand vaguely gesturing to the retracting turrets on the screen.

"Inverted, phased particle cannon," Elijah smiled, tapping his finger on his helmet. "It's funny; I had no idea they existed until I put this thing on. But that is the lowest powered weapon of our loadout."

"The lowest?!?" Laura balked. "There are more powerful ones?"

"Yup," Elijah grinned. "The technical name for them doesn't really translate from our language to yours, though, but there are Sentinel Cannons and Arbitor Cannons, too. Those are our big guns. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure a shot from an Arbitor cannon would punch a hole through a space station."

Laura's mind felt like it was running out of her ears. "You... you just declared war on the Imperium. They're going to hunt you to the ends of the Galaxy," she murmured woefully.

"It was inevitable," Elijah nodded. "The Emperor will do anything to get his hands on technology like this. What do you think will happen if he succeeds?" Laura was in no state of mind to answer theoretical questions like that, and she looked up at Elijah almost hopelessly. "Endless war," he answered when she didn't. "Every neighboring species would be forced to bend the knee or be destroyed. As soon as the Atlas took off, this was always going to end in violence."

"So, what? What's your plan? Go to war with the entire Imperium?"

Elijah and Wu looked at each other for a moment before the younger man turned back to her. "Yeah, pretty much."

Laura opened her mouth, but the question died on her lips. For the first time in her adult life, she felt pathetically, dangerously out of her depth. The need for negotiations to go well with Lycnader and the Home Fleet was now more urgent than ever. The Mariners had, historically, kept out of all Imperium wars and just moved further out into unclaimed space every time a conflict threatened to catch up with them. But now they were anchored in place by the need to protect the Primus. If this part of the Galaxy was caught up in the inferno of large-scale galactic war, the Mariners could be forced to choose between standing and fighting to keep the Primus or retreating to safety without it.

"You could take what you want from the Mariners by force, couldn't you?" she whimpered, starting to see the danger.

"Of course," Elijah frowned.

"Then what's stopping you? How do I know I'm not just leading you to my home so you can destroy it?"

"Honor," Elijah shrugged. "There are things you don't understand, things that I didn't understand before I put this helmet on and downloaded the ship's archives." Laura blinked at that but decided it was a question for another day. "The Mariners have nothing to fear from us; if anything, we are on the same side. We just have the power to..." he paused for a second. "Let's just say, 'correct some historic wrongs.'" he gave her a pointed look before turning his attention back to the screen as the Atlas's engines powered up and it started to make its way toward the edge of the system.

"I... I don't understand." Laura finally said, her voice pleading for reassurance.

"I know," he smiled warmly at her. "Trust me, I know how much of a mind fuck this all is. I was a college student on Earth a week ago, and now I'm a Marshall. Everything will be fine, and no harm will come to you or your people. You have my word."

For reasons that Laura couldn't even begin to comprehend, his eyes and the sincerity of his voice made her feel better. She was trusting him with not only her own life, but the lives of every person in the fleet. They were her family, bonded by something more than just random genetics; they had a shared culture and a mutual purpose. She could put her life in the hands of any Mariner alive and know - categorically know - that they wouldn't betray her. It was an insular and vaguely xenophobic race, but it was hers, and every shred of meaning in her life came from them. And yet, Elijah's calm, soothing words were enough to banish the thought that she was bringing trouble to their airlock. She sighed and nodded, relaxing into her chair again and looking back at the screen. "Where's Hillman?"

"Shadowing us," Elijah shrugged. "They are just inside their sensor range, following us while sending frantic calls for reinforcements to Imperium Naval Command. They're planning to ambush us before we clear the gravity well." a small smile spread on his face. "Unfortunately for them, we'll be long gone by then." With a wink, the ship started to rumble, and her eyes automatically flicked to one of the displays on the opposite wall. The engines had been holding at about thirty percent power, a speed that the Imperium fleet was just about able to keep up with. With only a thought, Elijah ramped them up to closer to eighty percent. The Atlas seemed to surge forward, its velocity quickly matching, then overtaking, the top speed of a Marine strike fighter in only a few seconds. Traveling in-system at these sorts of speeds in anything bigger than a shuttle was - by everything her lifetime of training had taught her - tantamount to an attempt at suicide. Ships of any considerable size were simply incapable of maneuvering fast enough to avoid things that would reduce them to shrapnel. Yet, the soft, lazy banks and rolls of the ship - visible only by the orientation of planets and moons zipping past them - indicated that the Atlas was more than capable of doing something modern science considered impossible.

She could only smile at the thought of Hillman's face as all her devious plans fell apart, and her prize rocketed well beyond her sensor range and out of her grasp.

"ETA for the edge of the system: eighty-six minutes," Elijah announced without taking his eyes off the screen. Laura choked on her own tongue, under an hour and a half to make the trip that had taken her more than three days in the Seren. "Next stop: The Yridian Nebula. We should be there by the day after tomorrow." Laura groaned, too; that part of the journey through hyperspace had taken more than a week. Every single thing about this ship was just tormenting her with the prospects of technology to be unlocked.

She flicked her eyes down to her wrist-mounted computer; it was still maintaining its connection to the computer on the Seren, and the clock was still functioning perfectly. According to the time, and her body that was tied indelibly to it, it was approaching nine o'clock at night. So much had happened today. She had started the morning alone, trapped and getting increasingly worried about a long, drawn-out demise to starvation or dehydration. She had been... well, captured would be the accurate term to describe her interaction with Wu and Elijah, but it certainly didn't feel like that. She had met them, and a whole world of possibilities had opened up to her in a matter of hours. She had facilitated negotiations between the Ancients and the Mariners; she had watched the impossible as the massive ship had pulled itself out of the surface of Xnios. Then, she had witnessed the most terrifying display of raw firepower she had ever conceived of.

She was drained, her body and mind sapped of all but the most essential of energy. Everything about her felt heavy and sluggish; even keeping her head upright on her shoulders seemed to be demanding a totally unreasonable amount of effort, and now that the excitement of the day had died down, the soul-consuming weariness of it had well and truly caught up with her.

"So, err, do I go back to my ship to sleep?" she asked sheepishly, this time directing her question to Wu.

The older man blinked and looked at his own clock. "Oh wow, time really does fly when you're having fun. Yes, I think that would be appropriate for tonight; we can assign you quarters tomorrow to make things easier. Come on, I'll help you get back to the hangar bay." He smiled, stood from his chair, and waited for Laura to do the same before they both left the tactical bridge and headed for the nearest elevator... transporter... thing, giving Elijah a wave and a smile as she left.

********

Stevo. 20

Well, there was certainly something to be said for timing. They had been set a deadline of twenty-four hours to clear everything out of the base; they had managed it in twenty with the flotilla of rebel ships breaking orbit a full eight hours ahead of schedule. A few systems had been left online in the base, if only to give the impression that it was still manned and functional, but one of those systems had been the uplink to the grid of long-range sensor satellites dotted throughout the system. Twelve hours after they had left orbit, those sensors had picked up the massive Colossus Carrier group racing toward the planet. Traveling out of the system in the opposite direction, it was impossible for the Imperium fleet to pick up the retreating rebel one, but thanks to the uplink being broadcast to the command ship, the senior staff - Stevo included - were able to watch as the fleet approached.

Thirty-six hours after the last rebel stepped onto the evacuation ships, the first shot of the orbital bombardment smashed into the base. The security feed - the cameras monitoring the base and its surroundings - was another of the systems left active. Stevo wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not because it forced the entire staff to watch the frankly horrifying fate that befell the base and would have befallen them, too, if they had still been there.

There were, of course, three types of orbital bombardment. The first and the weakest - comparatively speaking - was the type of close artillery support that had been called down on the beach during the Marines' assault on it. High-powered, explosive ordinance of varying sizes and types, intended to royally fuck up the days of anyone within the blast zone. The second was the nuclear option, literally in many cases. It was the deployment of large-scale destructive ordinance - often thermonuclear in design - intended to render entire areas of the planet and the forces within them into radioactive balls of fire. Only the most heavily shielded of bunkers could survive one of those and it was very rare indeed that only one was used.

The final and most extreme option was what they were witnessing now. Most people, himself included, could never really grasp the true power of shipborne energy weaponry. To a Marine, either something could kill you, or it couldn't. How easily it could kill you wasn't really a factor. But to watch a few dozen of these beams smash into the surface at random places around the Island on which the rebel base was located was a lesson in the true meaning of firepower.

When all the fancy physics of the varying types of energy weapons were finished, they boiled down to one thing: heat. The heat delivered by a sustained burst from one of the battleships in orbit was enough to melt a fifty-meter-wide hole in the ground. The longer the burst went on, the deeper that hole was dug. At about a depth of twenty miles, a process that took a terrifyingly small number of minutes, the laser broke through the crust of the planet and into the mantle, releasing a huge amount of pressure and turning that fifty-meter-hole into an explosively powerful volcano. Except there wasn't only one of them. No less than forty of those lasers hit the surface, and every one of them had the same effect. With the tectonic plate on which the island sat fundamentally undermined, it started to break apart.

Stevo had seen a few holo-movies depicting that cliche end-of-the-world stuff; they usually involved the hero of the movie outrunning various amounts of lava and miraculously surviving, but this was nothing like that. The sea boiled, the land melted, the air caught fire, everything for thousands of miles in every direction was utterly destroyed, incinerated in minutes, and the fumes and toxic gasses released from those holes in the surface would blot out the sun and make the rest of the planet uninhabitable in a matter of weeks.

He had gone down to that planet in the dropships believing that the rebels had mixed themselves in with an established planetary population... he had believed that the planet was inhabited. He thanked whatever merciful gods he could think of that he had been wrong. The planet was deserted. The second prayer of thanks came after only a minute or two of watching the aftermath when the cameras and the uplink feeding the fleet their signal melted.

He slumped back into his chair and glanced around the room. General Crow looked as white as a sheet and he briefly considered if someone should be getting the man a bucket to throw up into. Colonel Michaels and Admiral Valdek - no doubt having witnessed this before, or at least being aware of what that kind of firepower could do - looked calmer, but not by much. There were a few other officers in the room, most of whom he didn't recognize, but his eyes finally fell on the distraught-looking - yet still somehow staggeringly beautiful - face of Silvia West. She was sitting right next to him, so it wasn't a stretch for him to find her in the crowd, but it did make it rather obvious that he was staring.

He reached out and rested his hand on her forearm, a gentle gesture designed to let her know that she wasn't alone in her shock at what they had just witnessed. Her head shot to the side to look at him before her eyes softened a little, and she smiled weakly, lifting her other hand to rest it on top of his, giving it a squeeze but making no attempt to move it.

"I feel I need to make something clear," Admiral Valdek spoke up after a few long minutes of hushed silence in the room. "One of the systems we left active at the base was the one that spread fake life signs around the planet. It is highly unlikely the Imperium realized they were false readings, meaning they just obliterated a planet they thought to be hostile, with however many millions of innocent civilians left on it. That is what we are fighting against, people, and if you think that they would hold their fire against a more established world, you are a fool. They will destroy anything in their path if it means victory, which means we need to lead their forces away from major population centers and be prepared to defend primary worlds to the death if needed. This is not going to be a quick or easy war, and they are not going to let us win without a fight. I need you all to remember what you have seen today because that is the price of defeat."

Stevo gulped. A few days ago, the notion that the military he had served for most of his life committing atrocities like this would have been laughable. Recent experience had taught him a very different lesson, though. They were monsters, they were...

He frowned as his father's voice echoed through his mind.

"I will not have a murderer living under this roof. Honor and Glory cannot be bought with the blood of innocents!"

At the time, those words had stunned Stevo to his core. They seemed to be contrary to the lifetime of pride that Stevo had held in his father's military record, the prestige and position his whole family had enjoyed because of that medal hung on the wall. So, for him to be so openly, extremely hostile to the idea of Stevo signing up in his father's footsteps had been more than a little confusing. It had rocked his world to its foundations. His father had flatly refused to speak to his son since, although, to be fair, Stevo had given up trying to reach out to the stubborn old bastard after the first few months of basic training. Now, however, he was starting to wonder what had happened to his father or what the old man knew that made him so aggressively opposed to the idea of service.

Did the vaunted Mark Taylor know something?

Did his father think he was dead?

He glanced over at Captain West again; her troubled face was still facing forward, digesting the thoughts that Valdek had put there. But her hand hadn't moved off his. It was an oddly jarring experience to have his thoughts jump so viscerally back to home. Was his father even still alive? Was his mother? Were his two younger sisters? He had cut them out of his life with all the savagery of a cornered, wounded animal and had barely looked back since. That was more than twenty years ago.

Suddenly, youthful pride, arrogance, stubbornness, and hurt feelings didn't seem all that important.

He frowned a little deeper and took a deep breath. It was an easy enough problem to solve if he could just get over himself for a few moments. His eyes flicked over to the Colonel. His father had earned his medal, his prestige, and - apparently - his loathing of the Marines on Sigmus IV. Stevo didn't know much about the Colonel, but he was almost certain that the man had been there too; maybe he knew something. He would go to speak with him once the meeting was over and see if any light could be shed on the situation.

It took a while, the entire time spent with the comfortingly warm hand of Silvias resting atop his. It was a quiet, contemplative, almost affectionate moment that, he had to admit, went some way to soothing the tempest of thoughts racing through his usually stoic mind. Finally, after what must have been at least another half an hour of quiet, murmured conversation between the respective members of the command staff, people started to file out.

"Can I catch up with you a little later?" Stevo whispered to Captain West. "I have to talk to the Colonel about something."

Silvia's eyes lit up for a moment, surprising Stevo with how much she looked like spending more time with him was something she would enjoy, but she composed herself quickly. "Is it something I could help with?"

Stevo opened his mouth to answer, but he froze, realizing he didn't really know the answer to it. Perhaps she could. Who his father was and the tenuous nature of their relationship, not to mention the reasons behind their estrangement, was not a secret; his squadmates already knew and he had no real objection to Silvia knowing too. For that matter, a thought occurred to him; he had no real idea how to contact him. Well, he did. His personal comms frequency wouldn't have changed, and he had that memorized from when he was a child. Still, he seriously doubted that a call coming from a rebel flotilla would be routed anywhere within Imperium territory without raising some alarms and slamming down some pretty hefty firewalls, not to mention the fact that the call could be traced and used to find the fleet. Jumping onto the nearest comm station and dialing home was not really an option, so perhaps Silvia would know of another, or at least know of someone who did. "Actually, you might. It's personal, though. Is that okay? I don't mind you being involved if you can help, but..."

"But you don't want to put pressure on me to help when it's not rebellion-related," she joked.

"Well, yeah, I guess when you put it like that," he chuckled.

She rolled her eyes teasingly and playfully, then pulled herself to her feet and joined him in his search for the Colonel. Luckily, the man wasn't hard to find. If it wasn't for his imposing presence, his salt and pepper hair, and his formidable mustache, the fact that he was the only person in a wheelchair in the entire room made him stand out in the crowd somewhat.

"Colonel, could I have a moment?" Stevo asked respectfully.

The older man turned and looked up at him, a spark of recognition and affection in his eyes. Michaels had taken a personal interest in all of the Marines who had survived the massacre, but although none of them held any ill will toward the officer, Stevo couldn't help but wonder if the Colonel blamed himself for the blood bath he had led the 381st into. "Is everything alright, Captain?"

"Yessir, this is... a personal matter."

"Say no more, Marine," The Colonel nodded as he looked around the still relatively crowded meeting room. "If you could assist a cantankerous, old cripple to his office, we can talk there."

Stevo snorted, "You're not that old, Sir."

Michaels laughed long and hard as the smiling Stevo started wheeling the man out of the room, with the chuckling Silvia walking next to them.

A few minutes later, Stevo wheeled Michaels into his office with Silvia following behind them. Positioned contently behind his desk, Michaels waited the few seconds for Stevo and West to take their seats on its opposite side before he spoke. "Tell me what is bothering you, Captain."

Stevo sighed, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Silvia was paying rapt attention, too. "It's my father, Sir. I think he knows something."

The Colonel frowned a little and tilted his head to the side. "Go on,"

Stevo sighed and glanced at Silvia, who gave him a reassuring nod in return before he relaxed back into his seat. Stevo told them everything, even the details he had left out of the story he had let slip to his friends. In this situation, holding things back when he needed answers seemed like a stupid idea. He told them about his father, about the prestige and the pride his family had always enjoyed thanks to the Taylor patriarch's "Hero of the Imperium" medal hanging on the wall. How he had been willing to talk, at length, about every part of his life in the corps except the battle that earned him that award, his brow furrowed as he relayed the story of his father's reaction to Stevo signing up, the words he had used, the look of disgust and horror on his father's face when he looked at his son, and how the older man had cut Stevo off with the callous precision of a master surgeon removing a tumor. But it was those words that had haunted him for all these years, ones that Stevo had never been able to reconcile with the life he thought his father had lived, nor the values he seemed to hold. The man had called him a murderer... well, not him, exactly, but the entire institution that Mark Taylor had served, and Stevo was about to; how none of it made even the remotest amount of sense in his eyes... until he had learned the truth about what had happened on the beach. "I just don't know, Sir. I could be grasping at straws; I could be putting two and two together and coming up with five, but his reaction to my signing up has bothered me for years, and I could never understand it. But now..."

"Now you're wondering if something happened to him, and he just kept it quiet," Michaels nodded sympathetically.

"Yeah, pretty much."

Michaels ran his hand over this graying beard and over his mouth before he sighed. "You said your father served on Sigmus IV?" Stevo nodded, "And because I was there, too, you are wondering if I can shed some light on the problem."

"That's about the sum of it, Sir, yes."

"I must admit, the name - Mark Taylor - does ring a bell, but my memory isn't what it used to be, and his name would have been everywhere if he were awarded a HOF medal." Michaels seemed to stare into space for a few moments. "What unit was he with?"

"The 43rd, Sir. 5th Regiment."

The wince on Michaels's face said it all. "He was in the first wave, then." This was already new information to Stevo, and he let the Colonel continue.``What do you know about Sigmus IV?"

"Not much, Sir, I did my rotation with the occupation forces, but nothing really happened. It was a quiet post. Nobody really spoke about the battle, and I never had the clearance to read the combat reports."

"Sigmus IV wasn't a battle," Michaels sighed heavily and leaned back into his chair, that far-away look resuming its hold over his eyes. "It was a footrace into the deepest pits of hell. It's hard to imagine these days; relations with the Khuvakians are relatively stable, but back then, we knew next to nothing about them, just that they were on a planet that was part of the Emperor's expansion plans. I don't think people can really appreciate how much of a shock it was for the Imperium; they were seen as monsters. Imagine a 12ft lizard, a cross between a standing crocodile and a fucking dinosaur, who could rip a man in half as easily as look at him, wearing incredibly tough body armor over their already tough hides and wielding plasma weaponry. The plasma cannons our heavy gunners use were reverse-engineered from their tech. We had ballistic weapons, some units had early... very early laser rifles that malfunctioned at least as often as they worked, and our armor was nothing like the stuff you are using now; I was a lieutenant back then, but our training was laughable compared to today, our command and control were lacking, or coms were intermittent at best, and our tactics could be accurately summed up as 'Brute force and optimism'. We had no business being there." He sighed and shook his head before continuing.

"We were told that the Khuvakians had invaded the planet specifically to halt our expansion, that it was the only strategically important and resource-rich world in that sector; we were told that their move was an act of war. Of course, that was bullshit. The Khuvkaian colony had been there for about three hundred years, it wasn't a big colony, but it sure as shit wasn't just an occupational garrison. It didn't matter, though; the Emperor wanted the planet for the Imperium, and the Navy was sent in. Valdek made his name there. He was only a fleet captain then, but the ISS Illustrious, the flagship, was destroyed in the opening salvos, killing the Admiral in command. Valdek rallied the survivors, reorganized them, and launched a surprise counterattack. I have no idea how he did it, but his fleet managed to destroy the Khuvakian flagship. With their leader dead, the Khuvakian command structure fell apart; it was a slaughter after that. Perhaps if he hadn't been so successful, the ground invasion would never have happened. But he was successful, and he'd discovered a flaw in the Khuvakian system: Kill the leaders, and the lower ranks are thrown into chaos. So, military intelligence, being the geniuses that they are, decided the ground attack should focus on the colonial capital - The most heavily defended point on the planet."

There was a pause as Michaels looked up into Stevo's eyes. "Your father was in the first wave of that assault," he said. "I'm not going to pretend to know every detail of what happened to them, I don't know, but I was in the second, and I saw what was left of them when we landed. You have to understand that it was a different time back then. We knew our tech wasn't at the same level as the enemy, so the Imperium did what it always does, it compensated by throwing numbers at the problem. The 381st had about 15,000 men in it because of the vastly increased amount of firepower each Marine was capable of. Your father's 43rd Division was closer to 70,000. The overall losses for the whole battle were something like eighty-four percent, but I guarantee that a huge number of those losses came from the 43rd. Most regiments were completely wiped out, not even any wounded. Those that survived, men like your father, their units were down to something close to ten percent strength. But tactics were different in other ways, too. In almost all ground battles, the General deployed with the troops. I don't..." he sighed again, "I don't know if this is true, but I heard rumors that the man in command of the 43rd, a guy named name General Lewis, panicked and only survived as long as he did by using his regiment as a human shield while he hid in a bunker. Throwing them at the Khuvakians in close-quarters combat that a marine would struggle to win now, let alone then. It was a bloodbath. Like I said, I don't know if it's true, but that was the rumor. He hid behind his men, and they were slaughtered so he and his inner command circle could survive."

"What happened to him?" Silvia asked.

"Well, that's the thing," Michaels shrugged, "Nobody outside of the 43rd really knows. What I can tell you is that the second and third waves landed in very quick succession, much more rapidly than had been planned. Somehow, the first wave had held their ground in almost all the places they'd taken, but they were dangerously close to being overrun when my second wave got there. We managed to help them beat back the Khuvakian attack and were about to launch our counter-attack when General Lewis pulled rank. He said that the first wave had borne the brunt of the fighting, and they were the ones who should capture the city. I have no fucking idea how he managed it, but High Command agreed with him, and the first wave - maybe five thousand men left out of a force of seventy, all exhausted, low on ammo, low on rations and medical supplies, having spent hours in the heaviest fighting imaginable - took point as we assaulted the city. You can imagine how well that went. It wasn't only the 43rd in that first wave; the 2nd Marine Division and the 18th were in there too, and by the time the city fell..." A forlorn expression seemed to have taken up permanent residence on the Colonel's face as he sighed. "There's no other way to say it. The first wave was spent; they were barely functional as a fighting force after their losses, they were exhausted, a good percentage of them were wounded, they were outmanned, outgunned, and outclassed, and they were ordered to take the city... the 2nd Division was completely destroyed, wiped out to a man, the other two divisions didn't fare much better. I couldn't tell you the numbers off the top of my head, but there were maybe less than a hundred men left in each of them. Of course, the General survived, or at least he survived long enough to radio the capture of the city back to Command. The official story is that a sniper got him when they were clearing out the last of the Khuvakian defenders, but... again, there were rumors that his own men killed him. All I know for sure is that his body was never recovered; there was nothing left of it to bring home. He destroyed three whole divisions, more than 200,000 men, and a lot of them were killed to save his own skin and then to satisfy his ego."

"Jesus," Salvia had her hand over her mouth in shock as she listened. Stevo just sat there, trying to process. Thanks to recent events, he was intimately familiar with how raw the feeling of losing your friends to insane orders could be, and he could easily imagine the sense of anger at military command that could come from that if it were allowed to fester.

As his fathers very clearly had.

It had been only a few days since the assault on the beach, yet those few frantic minutes when the rebel artillery strike landed were still seared graphically into his mind. The flashes, the heat, the screams, the flying body parts, the look of serene composure on Rev's face and the look of abject terror on Dusky's... the death, so much death, the smell of it, the haunting sound of the groans from the wounded... it was never going to leave him. Fast forward a few decades, and he was more than capable of imagining the unspeakable loathing he would feel for the people who had gotten his brothers and sisters killed.

"There were six Hero of the Imperium medals awarded for actions that day," Michaels went on. "Far too few, considering the hell that we went through. Valdek got one, Lewis was awarded another posthumously, and obviously, one went to your father. But for him to be awarded that, above all the other acts of valor from that day, he must have been right in the thick of it. Like I said, I was in the second wave, and the fighting - even for us - was fucking savage. We lost over six hundred men in the first hour, more than eighteen thousand by the time the battle was won, and we knew we'd had it easy compared to the others. Everywhere we turned, they were there..."

"The Khuvakians?"

"Yeah, it was like they could sense what we were thinking; if we wanted to go left, we had to go through them. If we wanted to go right, they were there; we couldn't go forward, we couldn't retreat, we just had to stand and fight, and it was brutal. They dropped us into the most heavily defended point on the planet, and we were completely surrounded. If it wasn't for the fact that the first wave and the orbital bombardments had thinned their numbers so much, we would have had it much, much worse."

Stevo's jaw fell open, and Michaels frowned at it. "What?"

"They tried it there."

"Sorry?"

"Dropping Marine forces in to fight an impossible battle? The enemy seeming to know your every move? Sound familiar?"

"No, I don't think..." he paused. "No, it was just that we were surrounded and..." his frown grew on his face. "But they wanted the planet, why would they...." His eyes widened as they locked onto Stevo's. "Why would your father call them murderers? Calling them idiots, incompetent, or butchers, sure, I get that, and he would be right, but "murderers" implies intent. Like it was something done on purpose."

"The Khuvakians sued for peace after the battle; they withdrew to the current borders," Stevo went on. "There was no need to carry on the war. The Imperium had won; it gained control of the Sigmus system and the rest of that sector, but if you had lost..."

"Public outcry at the losses, demands for all-out war, Oh my god!" Silvia gasped.

The color seemed to have rapidly drained from Andre Michaels' face.

"Jesus, he knew," Stevo murmured. "All this time."

"Are you, um... Do you know how to contact your father?" the Colonel asked after a minute or two of hushed silence.

"I don't know, Sir," Stevo replied. "I think so, but it's been twenty years since I've tried. He could be dead for all I know." Suddenly, the stubbornness and pig-headedness that had served him so well in the military was feeling like more of a character flaw than a virtue.

The Colonel nodded slowly in understanding. "And that's what you came to see me. You can't contact him without putting the fleet at risk."

Stevo just nodded.

"Think you can help him out, Captain?" Michaels turned toward Silvia.

"It should be relatively straightforward, Colonel. I would be happy to help." She finished with something approaching an affectionate smile to her fellow Captain. Michaels smiled, too, recognizing the look for what it was, but Stevo was too distracted by his memories and was staring down at the desk.

"What... what do I say to him?" Stevo's mind was too busy elsewhere to notice. "He was right all along. I abandoned him; I abandoned all of them. His anger at the military, how viciously he reacted to my enlistment. The anger, the hurt, the threats, trying to scare me off joining up... All of it makes sense now. He knew what they were like, and he couldn't tell me."

"They would have killed him, and you, probably, if he had." Silvia sighed and nodded.

"So what do I say to him?"

"I'm afraid I can't help you with that part, son," The Colonel smiled sympathetically. "But he's your father; I'd bet money that he knew what unit you were with, and the holonet is saturated with news about what happened to the three-eight-one. I'm sure he'll be very happy to hear you're alive. After that... If he knows something, he can't talk about it over the comms, not openly."

"We can secure the channel," Silvia offered.

Michaels nodded his permission before continuing. "You need to try and get him to come to us. We can send someone to meet him outside the core worlds, but he needs to get through the Hudson expanse on his own; I'm sure we can help him out there, though."

"How?"

"The rebels have a network of spies and couriers feeding them vital resources and information. I'm sure one of them could get your family out of the core worlds safely."

"Would... Would he need to do that? I'm not sure he would be willing to leave his life on Caledonia."

"Look, if you are right, then he has been sitting on top of this secret for almost forty years; he has probably made his peace with what happened in order to keep his family safe. But if the Imperium has tried it again, and it almost killed his son? I'd wager his patience with them will have just about run dry, and he won't be able to get out of there fast enough."

"If he is still the way I remember him, he will want to move quickly."

"I can make arrangements for him immediately," Silvia added. "The rest of your family, too."

"Shit, I hadn't thought about them," Stevo murmured. "My sisters are all grown up now; they could have families of their own. They were only young when I left."

"I guess that's something to ask your Dad," Silvia smiled supportively. "Let me reach out to our contact in the Merchant's Guild and see if we can get them out here. Then I can set you up with a secure comms terminal."

"Thank you, Silvia. And you, Sir," he smiled at the Colonel.

The Colonel nodded his head, "Captain, you need to be prepared for how long a process this could be, and that is assuming your father wants to come here at all."

"I understand, Sir. Thank you."

"Good luck, Son. And thank you for coming to me with this; you've... given me a lot to think about. I may need to have a conversation with the Admiral about this."

********

An hour later, Captain West escorted him into the highly secure communications room of the fleet's command ship. The Hyperion was an impressive ship and one that Stevo would never have imagined being in the possession of rebel forces. It was a Battlecruiser and a pretty modern one at that. It held the lead position of the fleet of twelve cruisers - four of them heavy - twenty-one destroyers, and more than thirty frigates, all of them guarding the four colony ships that had been used to evacuate the men and materiel from the rebel base on Vallen. It was a formidable force, potentially enough to have overwhelmed and defeated the colossus battlegroup that had bombarded the now deserted base, but it would almost certainly have taken massive losses in that action. The choice to abandon the planet was a good one. These assets needed to be saved so they could be used properly when it mattered.

Every ship in the fleet, with the exception of the Hyperion, had deactivated its long-range communication array; they could communicate with each other just fine, but any attempt at sending a message any further than that was blocked. There was potential for those signals to be tracked by the Imperium and that was the last thing the rebels wanted. The Hyperion was the exception, but Admiral Valdek and General Crow had to authorize any transmission before it was made. Colonel Michaels, having gone to see both men immediately after his meeting with Stevo, had apparently convinced them of the Marine's plan.

It was because of the comms blackout that the room was under security lockdown. Three members of security were in the room with him and Silvia, and a bridge officer had been required to open the com-center's door; he would closely supervise the entire process and would lock the door again once it was over.

Of course, none of these things were even close to the forefront of Stevo's mind. He was about to contact his father for the first time in almost two decades.

"Are you ready?" Silvia asked gently.

"Not really," he huffed out a laugh, then smiled up at her gratefully. "Thank you for doing all of this, for helping me."

Her smile back was as beautiful as her blush was subtle, "You're welcome, Steve," she almost whispered. He didn't like being called Steve; it reminded him of home almost as much as Stephen did. His father was the only one who used his full name and Stevo had gone as far as correcting superior officers for trying to use it. But on her lips? Steve felt... right. "Do you want a few minutes?"

He shook his head. "It won't help. Best to just rip off the bandaid and get this done."

She nodded, leaned over him, and pressed the icon on the holo feed to open the channel.

Calling a person's residence was very different from opening a channel to a ship, for example, where someone was always manning the comm system. The chime would sound in the house, and the recipient of the call - assuming they were home - would need to walk to the nearest terminal to answer it. He knew this; this was a fact of life that he understood on a fundamental level, and yet the minute or so it took for the call to connect seemed to drag out for an eternity.

Suddenly, after more years than seemed possible, he was staring at the haggard, drawn face of his father.

The man blinked at the screen, his eyes widening in shock and then in something that looked an awful lot like relief before it grew more serious again. Mark Taylor was not a stupid man, and if Stevo's theory about his father's hostility toward the military was correct, the man was quickly putting the pieces together.

"Stephen?" he asked, a croak in his voice.

"Yeah, Dad. It's me."

"You're alive," he seemed to breathe out his relief at being able to say that aloud. "When I heard the news about your Division, I..." He stopped himself again, this time his face darkening, that same anger that had been there the last time Stevo had seen him exploding back onto his face. His lips snarled, and one side of his nose crinkled. "Is this channel secure?"

"It is."

"They did it again, didn't they?"

Stevo nodded sadly. "Yeah."

"So you know."

"I figured it out after they told us what had happened to the Three-Eight-One. Your reaction to me joining up was..."

"Extreme, I'm... I'm sorry, son."

"Justified," Stevo corrected him. "I never even imagined this could happen. A few of us survived. Our Colonel was one of them; he was in the second wave on Sigmus IV..." He waited for the inevitable, predictable lowering of his father's eyes and the shake of his head that signaled this was not a subject to be talked about. But Stevo persisted anyway. "We worked it out, the similarities between the two..."

"Massacres," Mark finished for him before taking a long and heavy breath. "What's his name?"

"The Colonel?"

"Yeah."

"Michaels... Andre Michaels, he said he was a lieutenant back then."

His father frowned in thought for a second before shaking his head. "I don't recognize the name, but it was a long time ago. My memory isn't what it used to be." There was another pause. "How bad was it?"

"Bad. Really Bad... and a lot more blatant this time. They didn't want there to be any survivors."

"Then how are you..." Another wash of shock rippled over his face as the only possible answer to how he was still alive dawned on his father. But Stevo answered the question anyway.

"The rebels, they took us in."

"But they launched the ambush!"

"There was no ambush, Dad. The Navy sent us after the main rebel base. A full frontal assault, no cover, limited air support, and leaked the shutdown frequencies for our gear. Those of us who survived the fight were forced to surrender. That's when the rebels told us the truth."

Mark's jaw was hanging open, the color draining from his face before he swallowed hard. "Well, they certainly learned their lessons from Sigmus." he almost whispered. "How many... How many did you lose?"

Stevo brushed a thumb over his upper lip, anything to distract himself from saying the words he knew he had to say. "Ninety-eight percent."

If his father's jaw could hang open any further, it would have fallen off. "Jesus," he murmured. His mouth opened and closed a few times as questions grew and died on his lips. Stevo knew enough to keep quiet and let the man process. "Stevo, you're in danger. The only way I've gotten away with knowing what I know for so long is because we won and because I kept my mouth shut. I had to, for my family."

"I know, Dad. But..."

"You can't do that."

Stevo shook his head. "I watched them die, my men. I watched them being blown to pieces; I saw the fear in their eyes. If it was just a battle, it would hurt; if it was a massive fuck up by command, I would be pissed, but... to be intentionally sent to the slaughter... I can't let that go."

Something approaching a smile pulled at Mark's lips. "I wish I'd had that sort of conviction back when it mattered. I'm proud of you, Son. I'm... I'm sorry you had to learn things the hard way. For everything I said and the time that has passed, I would never wish that on anyone. But... I'm really glad you're okay. Your mother is going to be overjoyed."

"Does she still spread gossip like shit on a turnip field?"

Despite himself, Taylor Snr laughed. "Some things will never change."

"Then you can't tell her, Dad. Not yet."

"But..."

"Stop! You can't tell her. I'm supposed to be dead. If you know I'm alive, that threatens their story. You become a liability. You kept your secret for forty years, now you need to keep mine."

"Shit." Mark winced but nodded. "You're right, but I can't keep this from her forever. It would crush her."

"If I could arrange it, do you think you would be able to talk her into... a trip?"

Mark smirked a little. "She's been nagging me to take a vacation for a while. Would our destination be somewhere our noble and forthright government wouldn't approve of?"

Stevo smiled. For all his faults and despite the way things had been left, he had missed his father's sense of humor. "You could say that." Silvia cleared her throat from her place beside him and tapped her finger on her wrist. "Listen, Dad, we only have about thirty seconds left before I have to close the channel. Someone will be in contact soon. Do what they say, get everyone together, and they will get you out of there to safety. But Dad, you know things that the rebels will need to know, too. I know you don't like to talk about it..."

"Don't worry about that. If our family is safe, and it helps bring those murdering assholes down, I will tell them everything I know... and I will bring my proof with me."

"Wait... Proof? What proof?"

"I'm sorry, Steve," Silvia whispered. "Ten seconds left."

"Shit. Okay. We have a lot to catch up on, Dad. Listen out for the call, and I will see you soon."

"I love you, Son. I'm glad you're okay."

Stevo almost choked up but smiled and nodded. "I love..." The call disconnected.

He sat back in his seat and sighed heavily. He had imagined that conversation more times than he could count over the years, and not a single one of them had gone anywhere near that well. He and his father had been close as he grew up; that was one of the things that had made his reaction to his enlistment so jolting, but he was starting to appreciate the position his father had been in. He had been on the receiving end of Imperium treachery, yet telling anyone about it - even his own son - could have meant death for anyone and everyone he loved. The best he could hope for was to scare his son away from military service, and it had backfired spectacularly; he'd lost his son regardless. He had never imagined that conversation could go that well; perhaps the only reason it did was that Stevo could understand the reasons behind his reaction and because his father was possibly one of the few people alive who could truly grasp the full scale of the anger and hurt Stevo was feeling. Maybe there was hope for them yet.

Silvia, for her part, was watching him. A mix of affection and concern was etched into her features. "You okay?" she asked after a long few minutes of quiet between them.

"I don't know," he replied quietly. "I think so. I... That went very differently to how I had always imagined it."

"Thinking your son is dead, only to find out that he's not, is probably a good way to put all the other stuff into perspective."

Stevo chuckled despite the ache in his chest. "I guess so."

Silvia smiled before she looked over her shoulder and then back to him. "I think the bridge officer needs to lock up the coms-center," she said. "Want a drink?"

"God, yes," he laughed. "I need to check on Angel and Emylee, too," he smiled as he pulled himself out of his chair and rolled his neck.

"Great, I've got a good bottle in my office, unless... you want to hit the mess or something." She gave him a hopeful look that he had no idea how to translate.

"Your office sounds perfect." He smiled and let her lead him out of the room with a nod to the patiently waiting Lieutenant Commander.

A few minutes of quiet walking later, they were stepping into the elevator. The Hyperion was a big ship, the same size as one of the smaller classifications of battleship, so traversing the vessel almost always involved the use of elevators, but in this case, it was welcome.

Stevo cleared his throat as Silvia pressed the button for the relevant floor. "I... wanted to ask you something," he said with a nervous swallow, grateful that nobody else had followed them into the enclosed space of the lift.

"Sure," she said, turning her head to face him.

Stevo kept his eyes firmly fixed on the elevator doors. "It seems things are going pretty well for me today, so... now's as good a time as I'm going to get."

"Is that your question?" She chuckled.

Stevo smiled, took a deep breath, and looked into her endless cerulean eyes. "How inappropriate would it be if I said that I wanted to kiss you?"

Silvia just held his eyes for a moment and then turned her eyes back to the doors. "It would be very inappropriate..." she finally said. Stevo felt his stomach bottom out inside him. "...if all you were going to do was say it. It would be totally fine if you decided to actually kiss me." Her lips curled up into a smile.

Stevo blinked. Took a deep breath and hit the emergency stop button, then turned to face Silvia. She turned to face him, too, a flush on her cheeks as they held each other's eyes. It was a few seconds that seemed to stretch out beyond the physical confines of time itself, just a single, mutually shared moment... before they fell together, his hand coming to cup her cheek, hers wrapping around his neck as their lips pressed together to catapult that moment into the realms of timelessness.

********

Bethany. 6

She sighed in frustration as she looked at the display panel one more time. She could take apart her ship's engine in the dark, under fire, and put it back together again by touch alone, but this display wasn't on her engine; it was on a stasis pod. She could admit that mid-battle engine construction was not a skill that was required particularly often; if her ship's engine ever needed to be taken apart in the middle of an armed altercation, then its ability to function when she was finished would be drastically offset by the fact that the rest of her ship would consist of several thousand floating hunks of space debris, her and her engines amongst them. But she could do it, dammit!

So why, in the name of all things fuckity, was this stasis pod being so fucking stubborn? All she needed it to do was to stop.... Stasising and fucking open!

She swore at it again, she'd been doing that a lot over the past hour or so, and her language had gradually grown more colorful from fairly benign "God Dammits" to sentences that wouldn't just make a nun blush, it would make her keel over and die of a particularly lethal form of spontaneous combustion. So, deciding that shouting at it was proving to be a less-than-effective method of opening the pod, she chose to try something really novel and kicked it.

The clang of her steel toecaps ringing off the steel frame of the pod echoed loudly around the smuggler's hold, much more loudly than she was expecting. She looked up into the frozen face of the man inside with an exasperated sigh and let her shoulders slump. The man looked beaten half to death; his nose looked out of place, one of his eyes was tinted a nasty shade of gray, his cheeks looked battered and swollen, his entire face was covered in cuts and bruises, and the parts of his face that didn't look swollen, looked drawn and deathly hollow. The simple fact of the matter was that Dick may have been right. Stasis pods didn't actually freeze people; it just dropped their metabolic rate down to zero in a controlled fashion and somehow kept them there. As long as the man was put into the pod before brain death, it would keep him technically alive. Dick had said they were already dead; at the time, she had assumed that it was some equivalent of the Schrodinger's cat paradox, in that he would be dead immediately after the pod was opened, at the hands of whoever this cargo was intended for. But now that she thought about it, he could have meant that he was literally already dead and that the pod was the only thing keeping him technically alive. Bethany wasn't a doctor and could do nothing for the man in either case. She knew basic first aid, enough to bandage up bangs and scrapes she picked up during her work, but anything more than that was simply beyond her capabilities.

She needed help.

And that came with a whole different set of risks.

"Fuck!" She spat. Sighing heavily before she turned and headed out of the room. She took the first ladder up to the top deck, the one that brought her out into the galley rather than the one at the front of the ship, which linked to the port just behind the cockpit. She needed coffee. She'd been awake for barely three hours, and it was already turning out to be a really long fucking day. She tapped the button on the machine and waited for the dark nectar of the gods to fill the same cup she had drained earlier, then picked it up, took a large mouthful of liquid jet fuel, and headed toward the cockpit.

She looked at the coms interface. Realistically, she had two options, one was risky, the other was downright dangerous. The first option would be to contact the local sys-def force, the portion of the Imperium military responsible for policing this part of space. The Long Haul was just approaching the inner edge of the Hudson expanse now, so the local security forces would be much more proactive here. That was the dangerous part. If she contacted them, they would immediately rendezvous with her and confiscate the cargo; fine, that was what she expected, but the problem came if they decided that she was responsible for the contraband being on her ship in the first place. According to the letter of the law, a captain was personally responsible - and liable - for anything found on her ship. However, this usually only took effect if illicit cargo was found on an inspection. Her volunteering the information could go a long way in showing her willingness to cooperate and back up her story of having no idea until that morning. Moreover, they may be able to help the people in the pods in a way she certainly couldn't.

Her second option was to reach out to her contact in the Merchant's guild. She knew how that would go, though. She would complain - loudly and graphically - about having her ship used to smuggle contraband, how it broke the terms of their contract, and how she was generally more than a little annoyed about that. They would subtly suggest that she make the delivery and let the fee from that, plus a hefty compensation package be an apology from the guild for their part in what she was sure they would assert was an unintentional mistake. Failing that, they would suggest she jettison the cargo. No contraband on her ship, no problem. The logical part of her brain knew that was right. If this were a hold full of narcotics, they would already have been dumped out of the airlock, but they weren't... they were people, and as far as she knew, they were still alive. But to the guild, cargo was cargo. Carry it and make the delivery - in doing so, make a staggering amount of credits - or dump it, and the problem resolved itself. More than that, the more fuss she kicked up, the harder it could be - long term - for her to get the more lucrative contracts, and refusing to deliver the cargo would mean that the guild had broken their contract and would have to pay the full value of them to whoever took it out, meaning that Bethany would be responsible for a loss of revenue for an organization that cared about nothing else. Making a name for yourself as a troublemaker was not a whole lot better than being blackballed by them.

"Fuck!" She spat again. She opened the channel to the guild. If they couldn't give her a satisfactory resolution to her issue, she could always contact the system defense force after them.

Bob Geldof picked up the call after only a few moments. Bob was not a music aficionado; he simply couldn't wrap his head around the fact that he shared a name with the ancient earth singer-songwriter responsible for starting the renowned live aid movement. The charity event had gone on for a few hundred years after the man's death and was now a thing of legend. Bethany, on the other hand, knew all about the original Bob Geldof and took great pleasure in teasing her contact about it... or at least she would have, if he had actually understood any of them.

"Bethany," Bob said, looking up at the screen from behind his desk. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you for a couple of days. Everything okay?"

"Hey, Peaches," she replied as politely as her current mood allowed. "No, not really. I'm starting to see why you don't like Mondays."

Bob's eye twitched. "But... it's Thursday."

"Whatever. Look, we have a problem, a really fucking big problem!"

Bob put down the holo pad in his hand and turned his entire attention to Bethany. "Go ahead, I'm listening."

"Well, it turns out that my former first mate managed to get hold of a contact from you duplicitous bastards to carry contraband - live fucking contraband - on my fucking ship! When I found out about it, the piece of shit mutinied and tried to kill me."

"Jesus, Beth," Bob muttered, his eyes turning to a screen to his right and typing commands furiously into the console. "You said he got a contract from us?"

"Yup."

"This is Richard Hopkins, right? He's listed on your crew manifest."

"That's him."

Bob's brow furrowed deeper. "Yes, I can see his contract here. He said he would be acquiring his own ship to make the run."

Bethany snorted. "No, more likely, he was planning to kill me all along and use mine. Or just not get caught and still use mine. I run a clean ship, Bob; you fuckers know that! Didn't anyone think to check he actually had a ship before awarding the contract?"

"Apparently not," Bob sighed. "Bethany, I can only offer my sincerest apologies on behalf of myself and of the guild."

"Oh, nonononono," she glared at him. "Don't think a "sorry" is gonna get you off that easily. He fucking mutinied, Bob. I had to flush that asshole out of the airlock!"

"Hmm, well, if he's dead, that saves me the job of blackballing him," he smiled sheepishly.

Bethany just glared back at him.

"Okay, I can see you're upset..."

"Upset?!?" She almost screamed at the console. "Bob, I am one call away from contacting Sys-def and handing it all over, along with the proof of where he got the contract. You are going to have to do a shit load better than that!"

"Now, Bethany," he said slowly. "Let's not do anything rash."

"Bob, I need you to clean that bureaucratic shit out of your ears and pay attention. My contract with you expressly forbids the transport of illegal cargo. You have broken that contract, meaning I am free to do whatever the fuck I want with what I have on board. I am heading to Earth, for fuck sake! What do you think the chances are that I don't get inspected before I get there? You assholes need to make this right, or I start making noise! I'm sure Dick had his contract for this bullshit in his quarters!"

Bob, apparently able to see that Bethany was in no mood to be messed around or easily placated, rubbed his hand over his face and turned back to his screen. "Okay, let's calm down for a moment, and I will see what I can do."

"Telling a pissed-off woman to calm down, you're a genius, Bob!" she said sarcastically before waving her hand at the screen for him to do whatever he needed to do.

It was a good ten minutes before either of them spoke again. "Okay, so..." Bob started. "I am assuming that suggesting you complete the transportation of the illicit cargo is out of the question."

"You are assuming correctly."

"And that dumping the cargo - being live humans - is equally off the table."

They were nothing if not predictable. Bethany just glared at him some more.

He nodded, "Okay, this is our suggestion. You contact Sys-Def and blame the whole thing on your former crewmate, leaving any and all mention of the Merchants Guild out of your report. They will almost certainly take possession of the cargo, meaning it is off your hands. We will transmit a sworn affidavit and a copy of your contract showing that you run a clean ship. That, along with the fact that you are volunteering yourself to the authorities, will be enough for them to let you carry on with your current run and complete your courier contract for us."

"And..."

"And in return for your... discretion in this matter," he continued. "We will double the fee from your run, pay you double the fee that the contraband would have been worth, and throw in an extra ten million credits as compensation."

Bethany tried hard to keep her mouth from falling open as she did the mental arithmetic. Three mil for her haul doubled to six million. Another six million for the contraband doubled to twelve, plus another ten million came to a staggering twenty-eight million credits. That was more than she could expect to make in a very, very good year. "That gets paid now, as in right-fucking-now, and I keep the credits from the buyer of my cargo," she growled, trying to keep the stunned shock out of her voice; that would push the number up to thirty-one million if she managed to make the deadline and still thirty if she didn't.

"Naturally," Bob nodded. "I'm authorized to transfer the credits immediately."

"Okay, I'll take the deal."

"Thank you, Bethany. We are very grateful for your understanding." Bob seemed to slump in relief. She didn't really understand the intricacies of how the Guild operated, but she got the impression that she had just saved them from a headache of monumental proportions. "While I have you, perhaps you could help me out."

Bethany snorted but didn't say anything. She just nodded at him to continue.

"We have received something of an unusual contract. A passenger transport from Caledonia to the other rim."

"What's so unusual about that?"

"There is no destination," he shrugged, "Apparently, that will be divulged after pick up."

"That sounds like contraband, Bob," Bethany rolled her eyes.

"Apparently not," he shook his head, "The lawyers have gone over it, and it's all above board. Just some rich dude who wants fast, private transport to somewhere that he doesn't want other people to know about."

"How rich are we talking?"

"Five mil, payable on completion."

Bethany whistled. This was turning out to be a very good year. Caledonia was not far from the Proxima V shipyards, and she was heading there after Earth to drop off her haul of Rum anyway. "Okay, but I want it stipulated in the contract that if this guy is running from the law or is a mob boss or something, I had no idea and am not liable for transporting him."

"That's fair," Bob nodded. "Can I send it over?"

"Yeah, I'll sign and pass it back after I've contacted Sys-Def."

"Thanks, Beth, you're a lifesaver."

"Alright, catch you later, Peaches."

"Why do you keep calling me that?"

She laughed. "Look it up, man." She said before flashing him a farewell smile and closing the channel. Okay, thirty-five million credits was a metric fuck ton of money; there was no way around that, and the people out there who said that money couldn't buy happiness simply didn't have the ambition or the drive to try. No, you couldn't go to your local store and pick up three packs of happiness, but what money could buy you was time, and it could buy you comfort. Time to spend on hobbies, time to spend not rushing around, time to establish and develop meaningful relationships, and time to enjoy them. It provided the means with which you could do things that you enjoyed, take trips, live in more comfort, and not spend another moment of your life wondering where the next meal was coming from or what would happen if a certain something in your home or on your ship needed to be repaired or replaced. It provided security, it alleviated stress, it made life easier, and an easier, more fulfilling life was certainly the quickest way to happiness. People who said that happiness couldn't be bought were either idiots or were shopping in the wrong stores. Thirty-five million was enough money for her to retire, had she wanted to. She didn't, but it could certainly upgrade, or even replace, the Long Haul for something that would make the parts of her own life that she did enjoy infinitely easier, more comfortable, and far more lucrative.

Suddenly, she had the urge to scour the holonet brochures for the hottest new ship on the market. But first, she had another call to make.

She took a deep breath to calm herself. The local security forces were not known for their humor, and calling in a report of discovered contraband, a report of mutiny, and reporting the death of Dick was not something to be done with a beaming smile on her face.

It took a lot longer than initially expected.

Finally, she had a hold of herself, pulled up the local comms directory, and hit the icon for the nearest Sys-Def buoy. After only a few seconds, the face of a middle-aged, gruff-looking man appeared on screen. "This is Captain Smith of the Imperium destroyer ISS Hendrix."

"Captain Bethany Jenson of the Freighter Long Haul, Captain. I need to report criminal activity on my ship."

The Captain raised an eyebrow and looked down at his console. "I have you on sensor's Long Haul. You are flagged as carrying special Cargo for Earth. Where is your escort?"

Bethany blinked. "Err, yes, Sir. That's right, but... escort? I wasn't aware I needed an escort."

The Captain frowned deeper. "All ships carrying cargo for the Imperial Palace are expected to have escorts and a security contingent on board to protect any goods meant for the Emperor."

Bethany decided to play dumb; most male captains already assumed that she was anyway. Besides, this really was the first that she had heard of this. "The Palace?" she stuttered, "The Emperor? But... My cargo is bound for a museum."

The Captain re-read whatever it was he was looking at with a frown before nodding. "Ah, yes. I can see the confusion, but an escort will still be needed. Maintain your speed and heading, and they will rendezvous with you in eighteen minutes."

"Err, okay. That's not a problem. Will they be able to help me out with the crime on my ship?"

The Captain paused for a moment as if he had forgotten about that. "What is the nature of the crime you are reporting?"

"One of my crew is transporting contraband, Sir. I run a clean vessel. When I confronted him, he mutinied and tried to kill me."

The Captain of the Hendrix, probably having heard such stories quite a lot in his job with Sys-Def, barely blinked. "Where is the responsible party now?"

"I spaced him."

"And the contraband?"

Bethany paused. "They're people, Sir, in Stasis pods. My former crewmate called them meat sacks."

That made the Captain wince. "Are they alive?"

"I... don't know," she answered honestly. "I don't know how to operate the pods to open them. But they look like they've had the shit beaten out of them."

"The transport of live human organs is an abhorrent practice, rightfully punishable by life imprisonment. You had no knowledge of this crime beforehand?"

"None, Sir. As I said, I run a clean ship. I am sending you the terms of my contract with the Merchant's Guild. It expressly forbids the transport of illicit items on my ship." She hit the relevant button and transmitted the file.

"Yes," he said slowly as he opened it and read it, "I can see you've also passed every inspection with flying colors. Okay, Captain Jenson, based on your report of this information and lack of any prior problems, I see no need to hold or charge you with anything, but your escort ships don't have the medical facilities on board to take possession of the contraband. For the safety of the people inside the pods, we will ask that you make no further attempt to open them and await inspection at Earth. I will also need to conduct an interview with you, and carry out a search of the guilty party's quarters."

"Inspection, Sir?"

"All ships carrying cargo for the Emperor are inspected before the goods are offloaded to make sure they haven't been tampered with."

"Ah, yeah, fair enough."

"I am the senior officer in the area, so I will rendezvous with you personally at Genesis Station to conduct the inspection and take your statement. Your flight plan shows you arriving at Earth in about four days?

"That's right, yes," She answered with a look down at the nav-com.

"Then The Hendrix will join your formation tomorrow evening for the last leg of the journey."

"Understood, Captain, I look forward to seeing you and putting all of this in my rearview."

"Thank you for your cooperation, Captain Jenson. This will all be over soon."

"Goodbye, Captain."

With a nod, he closed the channel. She sat back in her chair with a relieved sigh. That was remarkably less painful than she had expected. She let out another long breath. The people in the hold were safe; there was nothing more she could do for them, at least not until they made it to Earth. She wasn't going to be arrested, and she had made a fairly considerable fortune to boot. Aside from that nasty business with Dick trying to kill her and having to flush him out of the cargo bay, this had turned into a pretty good day.

She decided to reward herself for her efforts and pulled up her bank account on the holonet. As expected, it now bulged with the payout from Bob. Added together with her savings, there were now almost forty million credits in there. Add the payout for this delivery, plus the money from the rum and the job on Caledonia; she would have almost fifty million in the bank by the end of the month. She smiled to herself and navigated the holonet to the catalogs of the three biggest freighter designers in the core systems.

"Come to Mama," she purred as her eyes feasted on her potential new toys

********

Crow. 4

The glass trembled in his hand as he rested it back onto his desk. For once, he was grateful not to have the company of his daughter for this late-night drink. It was a subject that had him deeply conflicted; hearing how Captain Taylor's father hadn't ever spoken about the battle of Sigmus IV either was something of a comfort to him. At least it wasn't only him. It was a secret he had kept all his life. Mark Taylor had been there, Andre Michaels had been there, but so had he. He had kept that secret for forty years. But at the same time, his daughter was a soldier; she had even seen some combat - albeit on nowhere near the scale that he had - but a very large part of him still wanted to protect her from the darkest parts of the human condition. He could only imagine the look on her face if he chose to give her his side of the battle, the details of which - the dark, terrifying, brutally violent details - were scoured in perpetuity into his memory...

Despite his little girl being all grown up and potentially having to face her own savage war, those were memories he simply couldn't bring himself to share. He knew she would understand, he knew she wouldn't judge him, he knew she would see him as neither a monster nor a victim, but as a soldier... but he still couldn't talk about it.

Not really.

He had seen soldiers go through the agony of post-traumatic stress more times than he could count. He had watched good men fall to the demons that haunted them, yet he could never admit the times he had woken up in a cold sweat, the sheets torn and his voice hoarse from the screaming in his sleep. He couldn't tell people that sometimes - not often, but every now and then - he would see someone, just a random person, who looked just like a man or a woman he had watched die, and for those brief moments of staring, he was seeing their savage, barbaric deaths all over again.

There had been no clean deaths on Sigmus IV.

He could never tell his daughter, or anyone else for that matter, that the three days of battle on that planet had haunted him every single day since. There were moments when he couldn't close his eyes without seeing the incomprehensible brutality of that battle, men being bit in half, heads, arms, legs, flying through the air as one of those frenzied Khuvakian animals tore into groups of men... his men. The screams of men and women as they were cut down and then dragged - still alive - back to Khuvakian lines, where those screams were quickly and murderously silenced.

The sounds of bones crunching in monstrous jaws in the darkness as the fallen were eaten.

He had commanded the third wave. It was a small miracle that Colonel Michaels hadn't recognized him.

The Imperium forces, his marines, had run out of rations by the end of the first day; that's how long the idiots in charge had thought the battle would last. By the second day of hard fighting, they were exhausted. The enemy, on the other hand, had an almost limitless supply of fresh meat on the ground in the form of slain marines. They'd found a nest once, his headquarters regiment - or what was left of them - and had miraculously managed to clear it out with grenades without losing anyone. It was a hollowed-out cave in the side of a cliff face, a perfect place to take cover from the worst of the nightly attacks and to set up a command center from which to issue further orders..

Human bones, gnawed into matchwood by Khuvakian teeth, had been everywhere. One of his men had tried to count the skulls, just his own way of honoring the fallen. He had given up before he even got a third of the way through, his number already topping four hundred.

That was one of the many things that stood out. They were slaughtering the Khuvakians at an eye watering rate, but there always seemed to be more. They fought like demons in the day and were even more dangerous at night. Their hides could take a blistering amount of punishment before they went down, and their armor made that task as close to impossible as could be imagined. But for every Khuvakian that went down, he could take as many as ten Marines with him unless you killed them before they got close. It hadn't taken the men long to start picking up dropped plasma weapons; those were significantly more effective than their ballistic rifles and went a long way toward evening the odds... but the odds were still long.

These were not horror stories; they were not things he had heard of or things that had happened to someone else; these were things that he had seen with his own eyes. Things that had happened to people he knew. Things that had happened to him and to his friends.

Good Men, brothers, sisters, family in every way that mattered.

Killed. Dead. Gone forever.

He had tried, for so many years, to put the horror of that planet behind him. It was impossible to forget, but he had tried to make it something he could move on from. But today, listening to the Colonel's recount of his conversation with Captain Taylor, having those pieces fall so neatly into place, it had brought it all back so viscerally that it felt like he was still living through its immediate aftermath.

They had called it 'The Liberation of Sigmus IV.' It wasn't a liberation, it was a bloodbath, a needless one to satisfy the vanity of the Emperor at that. You can't liberate a place that was never yours to start with. Today, though, it had become something even worse, even if only to him: the first attempt at intentionally throwing men and women into the meat grinder to fan the flames of endless war. And now, the Imperium had done it again, more than once, according to Valdek, and he had lived through two of them. Michaels's experience on the beach had been horrific, but at least he had been unconscious for the vast majority of it. Crow had no such luxury on the dark, inhumanly hot and humid, swampy Sigmis IV. But whereas he had been forced to watch tactical maps of the battle for the beach, he had seen the tapes of Captain Taylor's experiences, all the senior staff had.

And he, more than most, knew precisely the sort of nightmares that would be plaguing that man's foreseeable future.

He did not envy him, nor did he envy the struggles yet to come.

There were things that Stevo would never be able to look at again without being reminded of the battle. He would never be able to see a beach, or a concrete pillar, or even one of those devastatingly powerful, verdant green plasma bombs - those had been another piece of tech acquired from the Khuvakians. It didn't matter how strong or stoic he was; he would be reminded each and every time. A flash here, a spark of memory there, a gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach as his mind correlated the thing he was looking at with the things he had seen. For Crow, it was the dark. Days on Sigmus IV had been horrific, but at least you could see the enemy coming, as unhelpful as that often turned out to be. The nights, the pitch black nights, were the thing of nightmares.

Sitting... waiting... listening to the bones of his fallen comrades snapping under the pressure of hungry Khuvakian jaws, waiting for the next attack to come, knowing it would come, and praying - as cravenly as he knew it to be - that it would come somewhere else.

Crow had never whispered another prayer for himself since.

He sighed as he drained the last of his tumbler into his throat, relishing and savoring the burn as he swallowed the smooth amber whiskey down. He stared at the bottle. That first drink had been in memory of Zoe Bennet, a young lance corporal. He could still remember - as clear as day - the look on her face when a Khuvakian Battlelord swung his powerful arm, topped with ten-inch long, razor-sharp talons, in her general direction and opened up her belly. It was a look of pure shock, utter disbelief that morphed so very quickly into one of agony and terror. She had tried to hold her own innards in as she crumbled to her knees. Crow had been twenty feet away, unloading bullet after bullet at the monster that was ripping apart the rest of her squad, but there were too many of his own men in the area to risk being liberal with his shooting. He had been aiming for the eyes - those bottomless, soulless, alien eyes - and he had missed. Perhaps if he had found his mark, Zoe would have lived; perhaps it was already too late for her, but he didn't. He had missed. And he was forced to watch - as her terrified eyes met his for the briefest of moments - before the enemy soldier skewered her through the back with his claws and dragged her away into the night to be eaten.

She had been alive; she had screamed as she disappeared into the darkness.

And then she had been silenced forever.

He poured out another glass and raised it in salute. This next one would be for Leighton Watkins, a Sergeant; he'd been luckier. He'd been on the receiving end of a violently swung Khuvakian tail. His armor and his chest had been caved in. He had been laying on the floor, gasping for breath, looking up at the savagery around him, before the same reptilian bastard had stamped his whole weight onto his head. It had burst open like a watermelon, killing him instantly.

His personal regiment - responsible for disseminating his orders and protecting him while he gave them - had gone into that battle with ten full platoons, seventeen hundred men. They'd left with forty-three, and he remembered the faces of every single one of the fallen.

Crow turned in his chair to stare out of the window into the vacuum of space beyond. He was grateful for the hyperdrive wake ripple around the ship; it cast a vibrant, shimmering blue light into his office.

It was so much better than the dark.

Crow didn't like the dark anymore. That was where memories lived.

********

Adam. 6

He had never felt anything like it. He had heard about it, of course; no parent hadn't, but this was his first experience of dealing with it so personally. It was a coil of fear clenching around his stomach, blocking his lungs, making every breath a ragged struggle for air. But above the fear, beyond it, within it, was the anger. Adam had cultivated his persona as a man to be feared over more than a decade, but even in his most threatening tirade, it had always been an act, he wasn't naturally an angry man.

So the undiluted, barely controllable rage that was now coursing through him was not as familiar a sensation to him as most people would assume.

It had been a few days since Dom had shared his information with him. The man was currently squirreled away somewhere secure and out of harm's way; Adam knew the value of having a completely off-the-books, black bag asset in his pocket. Today's revelations had only confirmed the wisdom of that decision. Dom wasn't just a tool that could be used anymore. He would be used. And sooner rather than later.

The day had started out as his office days always did. He had kissed Jenny goodbye, enjoyed what Lucy called a squeezy hug from his youngest daughter, and teased Tash by ruffling her immaculately prepared hair. He had boarded the shuttle, commuted from the frozen wilds of Northern Norway to the oppressively humid greenery of Caracus, looked suitably gruff and intimidating as he entered the ISD compound, made his way up to his floor, checked with Ben for any messages, sat down at his desk, opened his terminals... and then he had seen it.

A message from an anonymous source. Ten words... that's all it was.

"Be careful who you threaten. You have such lovely daughters."

Below them were two pictures, one of Lucy and one of Natasha, in the same clothes they had been wearing that morning as he said goodbye to them, taken as they hopped off the bus and walked towards their school buildings. They went to different schools; Natasha was older and halfway through high school, Lucy was in her final year of elementary school, and yet both of them had been photographed that very morning.

The message had come from an anonymous source, but it could only have been sent by one person. Not only that, had he only threatened one person recently, but it was the only person on Earth with the gall and the stupidity to actually think she had the ability to threaten him back.

Sandra White was a powerful woman, but her power was a product of her position. Nothing more. She hadn't earned it, she had never demonstrated it, she had never needed to go that far. Simply having the ear of the Emperor was enough for people to fear her, and she wielded that fear like a child with a big stick. Clumsy, untrained, lacking discipline, and with no real understanding of what that power was really capable of.

Adam was different. Adam was very different. Adam had cut his teeth in the darker parts of the world in which he lived; he understood Domonic because, many moons ago, he had been Domonic. He had taken people's lives, made them disappear, hunted for information, hidden it, and even fabricated it.

And he had been very, very good at his job. That was why he had been promoted so quickly through the ranks. He hated it, and he hated himself for doing it, more so for being good at it. But it made him understand something that Minister White seemed incapable of grasping. Fear was not power. Fear was a tool, no different than a rifle, or a hammer, or a screwdriver. It was what a craftsman used to get a job done.

And Adam was a master of his craft.

He'd told her. He had warned her. "Be very careful before you follow that road, Sandra. You are not as untouchable as you think you are, nor are you as dangerous." Only Sandra fucking White was conceited and self-important enough to see that as a challenge from a man with Adam's hard-earned reputation.

Well, it was a lesson she failed to learn. The second lesson would be infinitely harder for her to ignore: Adam didn't make idle threats. He was ready and willing to follow every single one of them through, even against the Minister of Internal Security. Now, after so blatantly threatening his daughters, it would be the last lesson the Minister would ever learn.

Nobody was above the wrath of a fearful father.

"Ben, my office, now, please." Adam barked out as he jammed his finger onto the intercom button. There was no need for a reply, the door to his office opened a few seconds later, and the immaculately presentable man stepped inside.

"Everything alright, Sir?" Ben's jovial, polite smile vanished as he saw the darkness on Adam's face.

"No, it's not," Adam replied, trying to keep the menacing growl out of his tone. He turned the screen of his terminal for Ben to be able to read it.

The young man's face paled in an instant before his eyes hardened. "Oh that stupid little bitch, she's lost her damned mind!" Ben made no attempt to hide his own growl. "Is that today?" Ben gestured toward the pictures.

Adam nodded slowly.

"Does this mean...?"

"Yeah," Adam nodded again, his fist curled into balls by his sides. "We put contingencies in place for a reason. We hoped they'd never be needed, but they are. You know what to do?"

"Get your girls somewhere safe. I know just the spot, Sir, totally off the grid. It's..."

"Don't..." Adam cut him off. "Don't tell me where. You know the score." The fewer people who knew, the better, and that included him.

Ben nodded. "I'll load up and pick up my weapons on the way out, Sir. I'll be with them in ninety minutes."

"Ben, this could be very dangerous."

The younger man held Adam's eyes with a level of resolve he seldom saw in people who knew what he was capable of. "Jenny, your girls, they are as close to me as family, Adam," Ben said resolutely. "I'll protect them with my life."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but... thank you."

With just a nod and not another word, Ben spun on his heels and headed out the door. Adam watched it close behind him. Ben was, in his own words, a bitch. He was loud and proud about his homosexuality and was about as effeminate as a man was capable of being. There was a softness to him, a harmlessness, an impression you got from his behavior that the man could rip you apart with his words, but there wasn't much more to him. Some stereotypes about gay men endured beyond all reasonable evidence to the contrary. But Adam knew better. Ben was a warrior. He had recruited the younger man straight out of black-ops, and although only Adam was privy to his service record, he knew that Ben was responsible for more completed missions than even Adam was. More than that, Adam trusted him. His cool, calm, "bitchy" exterior was as much an act as Adam's "bad guy" disguise. Beneath it all was a man who was more than capable of fighting toe to toe with some of the strongest, toughest, most dangerous men on earth, and if he said he would protect the girls, that is exactly what he would do.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone, hit the dial button, and waited for it to connect.

"Hey, you." Jenny's cheery voice poured through the call. "I don't usually get a call from you this early; what have you forgotten?" she joked.

"Hey darling," he replied carefully, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. Using the word 'darling' as his greeting was the first part of their code. "I need you to go to the store for me; I forgot Ben's birthday gift." Translation: shit is going down, you need to start packing, and Ben is coming to help you. He heard the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line.

"Oh, that was silly of you," her reply was as careful as his was. "Will there be a party?" She was asking if she needed to get the girls.

"Yeah, it's at his place, so they may need an early night." The code flowed as well as it should have done after all these years of practicing it. Jenny wasn't stupid; she may not have wanted to know the details of his work, but that didn't mean she was going to be left unprepared if the worst should happen, and he had just told her that she needed to get the girls from school, immediately, and that Ben would be taking her somewhere safe.

"It's tomorrow, isn't it?" she added a fake teasing tone to her voice. Tomorrow was another code word; it meant right the fuck now.

"Yeah, sorry, babe, things got away from me, and I totally forgot about it." That one was a bit of a lie; it usually meant there had been a security breach, and there was a chance that someone had his details. But there was no codeword for the fucking Minister of Internal Security directly threatening his family.

"How badly is the office teasing you?" Another fake tease in her voice She was asking if he was in direct danger.

"Oh, I'm on top of it; they don't know I've forgotten yet." He was fine and was dealing with the threat personally.

"Are you going to meet us there?" She asked, the code for 'How long will we be away?'

"I shouldn't be too late. I'm just getting things sorted on my end, and then I'll be with you. A few hours late at the most." Hours equaled days, but now she knew that it wasn't something that needed investigating, that he knew where the threat was coming from, and it would only take a few days to deal with.

"What about the dress code? Are your lovely ladies required to show up in their glad rags?" That one was her asking if they were staying at home or if they were being taken somewhere else.

"I'm pretty sure it's dressed to the nines," he answered. Telling her they would not be staying at home. "But Ben said he'd sent you the invite; the details should be on there.".... Ben knew where they were going, but he didn't, so he would tell her that part when he arrived.

"Alright, honey," she said, her voice as calm and collected as it had been in all their practices, but he could hear the slight edge, something that only he would hear after knowing her so well and for so long. "Don't be too late; you know the girls won't be able to enjoy themselves until you get there." She understood everything and was ready to move.

"Thanks, baby, I won't be too long, and I'll let you know if anything changes. I can't talk long; I have a meeting in about ninety minutes, and I have to get ready for it." ... She had ninety minutes to pack and be ready to move.

"Okay, baby. I'll see you soon. I love you."

"I love you, too, Jen."

The line went dead. The chances that anyone was listening in on that call were almost zero, but they weren't zero, and he wasn't willing to chance it. Ben was more than capable of getting to Norway undetected; he had as many aliases and disguises as Adam did and was just as proficient at using them. Jenny knew better than to contact anyone else, so news of her escape would only be possible if someone were directly watching the house. But considering the pictures had been taken this morning, someone watching the house was a distinct possibility. Ben would know that and would deal with them when he got there.

He couldn't think about that now. There was one universal truth in his line of work, the head of the snake was always the target. Sandra White had ordered those pictures taken, even if that was all she had ordered. If he wanted to make sure that was as far as her threat went, then she would have to go. Without follow-up orders from her, the rest of the operation would just stop, and people would be reassigned to other tasks.

He sat down on his chair and, as he often did in times of reflection, looked out over the landscape of Northern Venezuela through the expansive window in his office. This was the point of no return. If he backed down, maybe Sandra White would, too; maybe she would consider this a lesson learned and leave his family alone. But that was far too many maybes, and it was not a risk he was willing to take. Normally, a threat against him - usually from some do-gooder citizen - was dealt with as a matter of principle, but this was different. There was no principle here; there would be no semi-public retribution, and there would be no message. Sandra White had threatened the only people on earth whom Adam would willingly give up everything, his life included, to protect. She had made herself a danger to them, and dangers to his girls were not something he could ever allow to exist.

No, there would be no backing down. The Minister had stepped over the line, and Adam would personally make sure that it was the last step she ever made.

He sighed and reached for his phone again, dialing a much newer member of its contact list, and waited for it to connect.

"Dom," he said when the voice of the former agent answered the call. "It's time."

********

Histories and Lore.

Of all the things that could hinder interstellar flight, fuel - conveniently - isn't one of them. Almost every space faring species in our part of space has - through one method or another - discovered not only the prevalence of helium in gaseous stellar bodies but the ease with which it can be refined into a viable fuel source.

In the Sol system, there are four Gas Giants: Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, and like most Gas Giants found in the galaxy, they are made up almost entirely of a Hydrogen/Helium mix, making those two elements some of the most easily accessible in all of known space.

The process is relatively simple, at least once the initial infrastructure has been put into place. Massive orbital gas refineries are hung into orbit at very low altitudes around their respective gas giant, with a series of pipes - often a hundred miles long each - poking down into the swirling gasses of the planet. Through those pipes, millions of metric tonnes of gas are pulled into the refinery. In there, the hydrogen is separated out of the mix and released back into the planet, and the helium is processed into Helium-3, an extremely stable isotope capable of fueling nuclear fusion without any of the messy messing around with radiation.

From there, enormous fuel barges carry that fuel to distribution depots, where it is shipped to every corner of inhabited space. It is one of the mysteries of space travel that almost identical logistical systems have been set up by every space-faring race and had been long before they made contact with each other.

There is, of course, a downside. Nothing in the universe is truly limitless, there is a finite amount of Helium in any Gas Giant, no matter its size, even if that amount is of a staggeringly, eye-wateringly large volume. Eventually, it will run out. Jupiter, for example, is the largest planet in the Sol system. But just thanks to the astonishing amount of Helium pulled from its atmosphere, it has actually shrunk over the five hundred years it has been mined. Admittedly, a shrinkage in circumference of three meters is hardly something to panic about - and it must be noted that those three meters contained enough Helium to power every human-constructed ship to have ever existed in the last half a millennium - but it has shrunk. Eventually, it will run out.

Fortunately, at the current rate of expansion and ship construction, it is estimated that humanity still has a few million years before the Sol System runs dry, and it's not like there are no alternative fuel sources within easy reach. In fact, the inner edge of the Hudson expanse is littered with systems entirely filled with Gas Giants, a large number of them significantly bigger than Jupiter. Still, the eco-warriors are already starting to make a lot of noise - even going as far as threatening terrorist actions - over what they see as the potentially devastating results of changes made to the system's gravitational field, a theory that the gas barons - predictably - deny, and the government is ignoring.

But moving on.

What this refined gas does when it's in the engine of a ship depends entirely on the type of engine that ship uses. Ion/fusion drives, for example, burn the helium directly as a fuel source - creating millions of tiny nuclear detonations to propel the ship forward - whereas plasma-powered engines use the Helium to form a stable fusion reaction, siphoning off the plasma from the reactor to power the engines. The same can be said for a ship's retro thrusters; they just transfer the thrust from the engines themselves and divert them from the relevant port. It's only the hyperdrive core that runs independently of the fuel supply.

Hyperdrives work from the power generated by a powercore, which itself is usually an artificially created singularity whose magnetic field provides truly mind-numbing amounts of power. As a general rule, though, a hyperdrive has its own dedicated powercore, such are the energy requirements for such an advanced piece of equipment.

In its natural state, however, Helium-3 can be incredibly problematic. Blown by solar winds, the isotopes usually bounce harmlessly off the atmospheres of most habitable worlds. But stellar bodies without an atmosphere - Lunar, for example - are bombarded by it, saturating the surface of the planet. This accumulation then needs to be carefully cleared before any mining operations can commence. As stable an isotope as it is, it is not completely free of risk, and large accumulations of this run the risk of causing uncontrolled and massive thermo-nuclear explosions. For centuries, this was thought to be impossible until a mining disaster in the Lecetov system some two hundred years ago.

Rather than bore mining - where a relatively small shaft is cut into the surface of the planet, bypassing the accumulation of Helium-3 - the mining consortium granted license there opted to strip mine the planet of valuable Titanium deposits. Unfortunately, for both the consortium and the miners it employed - not to mention the planet itself - Lecetov VIII was surrounded by five gas giants and a particularly volatile sun. Millions of years of extreme solar winds had not only blown huge quantities of the isotope onto the planet's surface, but the radiation from the sun had ionized it.

With strip mining pushing that waste product into enormous piles, it was an accident waiting to happen. Concentrated in one place, crushed under its own weight by the planet's high gravity, and ionized by solar radiation, it became less and less stable by the day until one day - for reasons that are still a mystery - a cascading fusion reaction spontaneously occurred.

Lecetov VIII was obliterated. The explosion, which probably only started with a few isotopes, almost instantly spread to the rest of the planet's coating, engulfing the entire planet in a matter of moments. A single, planet-sized thermonuclear detonation, the largest in human history, reduced the world to rubble in an instant, killing the thirty-eight thousand miners working there in the process.

It is now generally understood that Lecetov VIII was an isolated and extreme occurrence, albeit one that nobody in the scientific community had ever imagined could happen. But the lessons were learned. Handling the clearance of Helium-3 is now one of the more expensive parts of any mining process.

In smaller, more common terms, Helium-3 is a nuisance for any terraforming efforts; it naturally repels oxygen. The first phase of any terraforming process is, essentially, an effort to inject so much oxygen into the subject planet's gravitational pull, that it forms an atmosphere. Helium-3 pushes that oxygen away. If the ground saturation is high enough, it can render that phase of the terraforming process almost impossible until the Helium-3 is removed which - on a planetary scale - is often too expensive and complicated to be considered.

Scaling this problem down, unshielded ships also have the potential to pick up significant quantities of Helium-3 on their hulls, prevention of this being one of the fundamental motivators for the development of deflector shields. It should not need to be explained what could happen to a ship if the very isotope burned in its engines is collected - in an unprotected manner - on its hull. Some of mankind's earliest space disasters - including the destruction of the Mars 4 colony ship, on route to Earth's nearest neighbor during its colonization efforts - have been attributed, theoretically at least, to this dangerous phenomenon.