Chapter 8 - The apparatus of state.

Stevo 21.

There was a slight grunt that burst from his lips as Silvia pushed him back onto the sofa, but with her lips securely sealed on his, the sound that actually came out of him was rather muffled, to say the least.

They had made out like hormonal teenagers for the entire elevator ride. Fifteen decks worth of heavy breathing and enthusiastic tongue-play. It was passionate, it was heated, and it was something he could somehow tell she had been holding in for just as long as he had. The dinging of the elevator arriving at their level had forced them to part, their breathing still panted, and her cheeks - if not his as well - were more than a little flushed. Somehow, they had made the short walk from the elevator bank to the door to her office without drawing any undue attention from the dozen or so people in the corridor, and he had waited patiently for her to open the door and let him inside. But as soon as that door clicked shut in its frame, all bets were off. Silvia practically threw herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck and crushing her lips to his hard enough to make him think he would chip a tooth.

His hands had held onto the small of her back, but the feeling of her grinding herself against the fully masted bulge in his dress slacks made him catch on pretty quickly, and he allowed his hands to slide lower to her ass. The mewling moan she purred into his lips told him clearly that it was a gesture she wholeheartedly approved of. She started walking him backward toward the brown leather sofa that was behind him, waiting until the backs of his legs bumped into them before shoving him back onto it. Once again, she was on him in moments, climbing onto him and straddling a leg on either side of his, pressing her core against his bulge again and grinding her hips against his as she sealed her lips back to his.

Stevo was not a stranger to women. He had been a Marine in the Imperium, not a prisoner, and despite public pre-conceptions, he had neither been kept on some far-flung outpost nor had he been forbidden from taking leave to mix with the locals. With no family to go home to visit, his leave had often been spent bar-hopping in one of the leisure districts that invariably sprung up close to military bases the Empire over, and he had done pretty well for himself. Even going as far as scoring a few semi-long-term relationships.

But this was different. There was a fire and a passion in Silvia's touch and her kiss that he had never expected. It was like she had a fatal disease, and his lips held not only the cure but her only chance at getting it. Like a starved woman getting her first meal or a drowning woman being offered a liferaft. Stevo had been enamored by the woman from the moment he saw her, but he had never in his wildest dreams thought that the sentiment was mutual, let alone to this degree. This wasn't the cheap, meaningless fumble of a one-night stand, nor was it the passionate exploration of a quickly-building-quickly-dying fling; this was desire at its most fever-pitched. This was the very definition of passion, and every breath he exhaled was consumed by Silvia, just as every heated, panted breath from her lips was swallowed by his.

They kissed. They made out. They explored each other's painfully clothed bodies with their wandering, almost frantic hands. They consumed each other. They fed and fed on one another. Lips moving, tongues dancing, breaths shared, and - for a brief moment - two halves became one. It was more than Stevo ever imagined a kiss could be, so very much more.

Finally, the kiss broke, and Silvia rested her forehead against his. Her breath, like his, was hard and heavy; her chest was rising and falling with every inhalation, and that, in turn, seemed to drag the swell of her breasts over his. They were as close as it was possible for two people to get while still having their clothes on, and contrary to the frantic, throwing caution to the wind exuberance of his more youthful dalliances, Steve realized that there was nowhere in the entire stretches of the galaxy he would rather be. It took a moment for him to notice that they were staring into each other's eyes; he was literally getting lost in them. He had no idea if he had been gazing into those bottomless cerulean orbs for a few seconds or half an hour, but the only sound in the room was the rasping breaths both of them were sucking in and out.

"Jesus, I feel like a teenager," Silvia whispered. "Kisses aren't supposed to be this good."

"Nope, sorry," Stevo smiled up at her. "I don't remember them being this good, even when I was a teenager."

She chuckled, nodding her head in agreement. "God, it would be so easy to go further. But..."

"But...?"

"You know, first date rules and all that shit."

"Oh, so this is a date?" He gave her a lopsided grin.

"Don't make me pull rank, Captain."

"Yes, Ma'am." He smirked back at her, his eyes being pulled—as if by gravity—to those soft, pillowy lips.

"Yeah, so I'm gonna have to keep kissing you. Hope you don't mind," she purred with a radiant, beaming grin.

"Not at all, Ma'am," Stevo smirked back, his hand coming up to stroke her cheek. He pulled her a little closer, tipped his head back a little, and sealed her lips back onto his.

As soon as they joined, a mutual moan echoed around the room; it was like a sigh, an expression of sublime desire, a passion given to such a simple touch yet one that transcended time itself. Everything else evaporated. Existence, in all its glorious splendor, boiled away around them until only the two of them were left. Nothing else mattered; nothing else existed, just them, just the feel of each other under their fingertips and the taste of each other on their lips. Just their kiss.

His hands hooked onto the small of her back, not sexually, but tenderly and affectionately holding her against him. Her arms clung to his shoulder, one of her hands rubbing through his closely cropped hair. For a handful of minutes, ones that seemed like they stretched out for hours, There was only their kiss.

"I want you," She breathed as they broke apart.

"I want you," he said back. It wasn't the most original response, but why mess with perfection? The fire behind his eyes and the tone in his voice added more weight to that statement than any flowery string of words could.

"But..."

He silenced her with a soft, much shorter kiss before she could finish her sentence. "I want to take you out," he said, resting his forehead back against hers. "Here on the Hyperion, in some bar when we get planetside, out to a fancy restaurant, I will think of something, but... I... I like you, and I want to do this properly."

The smile on her face said it all. "I'd like that."

"Does that mean we have to stop now?"

"Fuck no," she laughed. "I like how your stubble feels on my skin, and I am going to stay here for as long as we can get away with."

"Excellent. I grew it myself," he chuckled as he brushed a few unruly locks of her hair behind her ear. She laughed loudly, like a release of building tension, before relaxing into his touch, leaning forward, and pressing her lips back to his.

********

Janus. 2

Now, Ellie had a nice set of tits. Not too big, not too small, the perfect amount of gravity defiance, and attached to a rather fetching rest of her body to boot. But tits were tits, and Janus loved them all. If she were ever asked - not that she ever was - Janus would say that she was bi-sexual but with a heavy, less-than-healthy leaning toward women. It wasn't the fact that she leaned toward women that was unhealthy; modern society had its flaws, of course, but discrimination based on sexual orientation was a thing of ancient history. No, the concern came from how heavily that lean was. Janus often wondered if there was something wrong with her. She had heard somewhere that a pedophile's sexual interest in minors was a result of an abnormality in the brain, that the sexual attraction first developed in childhood never matured as the rest of them did.

Biological imperative tailored sexual appetites to those most likely to produce offspring; it was the same mechanism that made some younger women attracted to older, successful men - ones who could provide for their children - and for older men to be attracted to younger, more fertile women, those more likely to continue their genetic line. In pedophiles, that neurochemical process was simply broken. Of course, that was a reason, not an excuse, and child molesters were, thankfully, chemically castrated as part of their punishment, usually only for the time of their incarceration before their justifiable execution.

It wasn't the same for her, obviously. She found any sexual desire aimed at children as repugnant as the next person, but the theory did make a certain kind of sense when it came to her little problem. Janus loved tits; she really fucking loved them; she loved them on a scale that could only be matched by teenaged, virgin males who wouldn't know what to do with a set of tits if they were slapping them around the face. It had long been known that the teenage boy's brain was so obsessed with breasts because of puberty. Huge amounts of growth hormones were flooding their system, the most their bodies had ever felt since infancy. But during infancy, that biological imperative for nourishment centered around breast milk. Ipso facto, the teenaged male brain - when suddenly finding itself flooded with a need to grow - reverted back to tits. It's just that mixed with the newly surging torrents of testosterone in the body, that obsession became sexual.

She couldn't help but wonder if something comparable had happened to her brain too, something locked in there, something that went wrong in her female brain that somehow gave her the same obsession with tits but without the testosterone to go with it. Because it was marrow-deep! There were moments in her little security booth, whiling away the hours of tedium, when all she could think of were those perfect mammaries in their endless variety. Nobody ever caught on to the fact that she held some of the finer specimens in her scanner for a few moments longer than necessary; they never seemed to check. She was a woman; women didn't do that sort of thing, whereas a man would be picked up on that shit after only a few instances. Sexual freedom and gender equality were cornerstones of modern society, but some double standards were probably never going to die off. Women got away with shit that men couldn't all the time. But, like any self-respecting feminist, she didn't care if it was fair or not as long as it benefited her.

For the moment, though, and in a massive break with tradition, her mind was focused on something other than Ellie's pert little chest. Eleanor Clark was, in a manner of speaking, Janus's commanding officer. Technically, the Border Control Agency was a law enforcement department rather than a military one, but like other law enforcement departments around the Imperium, it used a vaguely military ranking system. Janus herself was a sergeant; there were no privates in the BCA, nor were there corporals or the likes. There were officers, then sergeants, then lieutenants, then captains, and, finally, Commanders. Ellie was her Captain; she was responsible for the entire border control operation from the Orpheus VI space station. Her superior, the Commander, was like God: Eternally busy elsewhere and so never seen, but he was nominally in charge of all customs and border control for the entire system. It was extraordinarily rare for Captain Clark to close down all of the scanning booths - essentially shutting down the border - and it was never without reason. The last time had been to announce the investigation into her colleague who had allowed those spores through customs and caused the famine on the planet below.

"Alright, alright, settle down," The captain silenced the room of about one hundred and fifty border guards. "We have a lot to get through and not a lot of time to get through it, so if you all want to stop fucking around and take a seat, we can get on with it."

Janus smirked to herself at the grumblings of her fellow officers. None of them were complaining about a break away from the boredom of their day-to-day jobs, but none of them were looking forward to the queues of disgruntled, vocal civilians who - for some reason, thought that their wait was their fault - either.

Ellie waited for the general hubbub to die down to quiet before she took a deep breath and started to speak. "Okay, there is no easy way to say this, so I'm not going to try. In a few hours, a broadcast from the Planetary Governor will be shown on every channel in the system about the plan for Orpheus. I've already seen it, and I can guaran-fucking-tee that it is going to make our lives very difficult for the next few days at least. The decision has been made, given that you will be on the front lines of this, to show you the recording ahead of time. So, with that in mind, all overtime restrictions have been lifted, and - for at least the next week - base pay will be increased by half."

There was a soft, happy murmur around the room at the prospect of more money and the opportunity to get even more again. Janus, however, was just enough of a cynic to know that there was a 'but' coming.

"Play the recording," she said heavily as she looked at one of her assistants at the back of the room. The assistant pressed something on a remote in her hand, and the room went dark before a large holo-screen—filling the entirety of the wall behind Captain Clark—flickered into life. The elderly, regal, totally fuck-muppetty face of Andrew Johnson, the Planetary Governor of Orpheus VI, appeared on the screen.

"My fellow colonists," he said in his deep, artificially imperious voice. Janus didn't need to have met the man to feel a deep and visceral loathing of everything he had done and everything he stood for. "The history of a people, the legacy of a world, are defined by only one thing: the challenges it has overcome to thrive. In that regard, the tale of Orpheus VI and her people has been one of the more exigent endeavors in the storied annals of the Imperium."

Yup, use big words to make yourself sound smart, asshole. That's not transparent at all

"Colonists such as us are a rare breed; we thrive in the face of adversity and charge head-long toward any challenge in our path rather than away from it as a lesser people might, and I know the fervor with which you all want to reclaim our planet from the blight inflicted upon us by those few incompetent or treasonous fools. I know my people, and I know that abandoning this planet is the last thing any of us want." A ripple of snickers echoed around the room. That was bullshit, and everyone knew it. Nobody... absolutely nobody... wanted to risk their lives to fight an already-lost battle against a fucking weed. Everyone who had been able to leave the planet under their own steam had already gone; those who were left were too destitute to follow them. An entire population was starving to deatth, and it seemed that only the stubbornness of people like this asshole were holding them there.

"However, realities must be faced, no matter how hard. The carefully crafted ecosystem needed to maintain our beloved colony... has collapsed. The planet's capacity to grow its own food - and thereby sustain the colony - is essentially gone. My expert advisors are all in agreement that Orpheus VI is no longer able to sustain human habitation. The cost in lives would be too high to continue the efforts to salvage our world in our lifetimes, not without countless people succumbing to starvation and disease."

Yeah, no shit, Einstein. They've been telling you that for months!

"So it is with a heavy heart and no small amount of reticence that I am forced to order the complete evacuation of the planet. The next relief convoy will arrive from our benefactors in the Core Worlds in the next few days and will contain enough supplies to tide us over while we are evacuating, but that will be the last one. Part of that convoy will contain enough colony ships to evacuate every last man, woman, and child out of danger."

A cheer went up around the room. Every man and woman listening to the broadcast had either already lost someone to the famine or was very close to losing someone soon. Almost all of them had family on the surface, and nobody was under any illusions as to how dire the situation was down there. Janus wasn't among them; she was still waiting for the 'but.'

"So, starting immediately, a shuttle service - provided free of charge to all Orpheus residents - will be running from every town and city, worldwide, up to the planetary space station..."

A groan replaced the cheer—that was the 'but.' Janus and her agency would need to process all four or five million people before they could embark on to the station. That would take weeks!

"... and from there, once the relief fleet has arrived, the first wave of our people will leave the system en route to the sector hub, from where transport to other parts of the Imperium can be obtained. Please leave personal belongings behind and take with you only what you can carry. Space on the transports will be limited, and it will take a few trips to complete the evacuation."

That "obtained" sounded an awful lot like "bought," and people who couldn't afford to get off-world in the first place wouldn't suddenly be able to cough up for private onward transport, would they, you clueless fucking dick!

"I want all of you, each citizen of our proud colony, to hold their heads high as we bid farewell to the world we have called home for most of our lives. You, me, all of us have given more in blood, sweat, and tears than could ever fairly be asked of us..."

No, just us, you fucking douche.

"... but fear not. It may not happen during our lifetimes, but the Office of Colonial Affairs will start the process of whole-scale eradication of the Mare's Tongue blight as soon as the last of our people have left. Please contact your local government representatives if you have any questions regarding these instructions. I will be leaving with the first wave to ensure the smooth relocation of our people from the sector hub."

Of course, you are, you odious little turd. Perhaps the evacuation might go smoother without you there to fuck it up like you have everything else.

"I want to thank you all and express my admiration for the spirit of the colonists of Orpheus, each and every one of you, and I will see you all on the other side of this. This is Governor Andrew Johnson, wishing you all a good evening, and a safe journey. Thank you, and good night."

There was silence in the room as the scheduled transmission faded away to nothing. There was a sense of stunned silence that permeated the atmosphere, not just at what Governor Johnson had said but how unbearably frantic their own lives would be for the foreseeable future.

"What... a prick!" A voice sounded from the other side of the room. A few people laughed, some nodded, and most stayed silent, but all of them agreed. This whole debacle had been botched from start to finish, and Johson was right up there at the top of the list of people who would be put up against a wall and shot if Janus ever had her own way.

"Alright, everyone," Ellie spoke again as the lights came back up. "As you can see, the shit show is about to start. That broadcast is due to air in about two hours, so we have until then to get everything set up, plus however long before the first shuttles arrive. Station security is being briefed at the same time we are, and additional manpower is being brought in from the system defense fleet and a few of the fleet cruisers. We are going to need to rope off some queuing lanes for every scanning booth. You are gonna want to get a good meal in before we re-open, too, and I would strongly recommend keeping a few nutribars handy. This is going to be a long few weeks, people. Any Questions?"

Most of the room was still a little shell shocked, though, and no questions were forthcoming. There wasn't really much to question; they would be doing their jobs as they always had done; there would just be a lot more people to process for the next few days. Janus thought the whole thing, as mismanaged and fucking predictable as it was, was pretty straightforward. And yet, despite the simplicity of their situation, one hand had risen into the air.

"Mike, go ahead," Ellie called out.

"What happens after?" A deep, baritone voice echoed around the room. "You know, after the evacuation. No colony means no border control, right? Are we getting canned?"

Okay, Janus was wrong, that was a damned good question, and every pair of eyes in the room flashed instantly and nervously to their commanding officer. "At the moment, I don't know," she answered with a sigh. "The planet is being closed down, but the station is staying here. It's still an important trading and refueling stop between the core and the outer ring, and there is going to be a pretty sizable terraforming operation here for a long time... but you're right. I imagine foot traffic will decrease dramatically. The BCA has posts all over the Imperium, and I'm sure we can get you transferred to other stations before we start thinking about redundancies. I can't promise your jobs are safe, but I think that it's much more likely that you can be transferred before getting canned."

Mike sighed and nodded, slumping back in his chair. He didn't look relieved, not even mollified; it looked like there would be a choice between staying and risking his job or keeping it and transferring somewhere new.

"Alright, people. You know what's coming. Let's make this happen. Dismissed." With the meeting ended, the sullen and solemn-looking group started filing out of the room.

On the face of it, it was a pretty straightforward choice: If you want to keep your job, get transferred, but many of the men and women in the room had, like Janus, been born and brought up on Orpheus VI, it was all they'd ever known. Moving away from that would be to move away from the friends and family who had always been a part of their lives. But then again, it sounded like those people would be moving away anyway; the question was, instead, could people keep their family and friends close when the inevitable happened? Straightforward decisions were rarely cut and dry once you dug down into them. The situation was a little less complicated for Janus, though. She didn't have family on the planet's surface. Her mother had died years ago, complications from liver cancer that had been caught way too late. Medical science could almost always beat any form of cancer these days, but a person still had to see a doctor to get a lump looked at, and she hadn't the money or the time to do it. By the time a doctor had been seen, it was too late. She was dead within three weeks. Her Dad, crushed by the grief of losing the love of his life, the guilt of not pushing her to see a doctor sooner, and surrounded by the ghost of his wife everywhere he looked, had left the planet. He was now living a quiet life away on Splanos II. Janus's younger sister, Steph, had gone with him.

Janus had stayed behind.

She had stayed behind for only one reason, and that reason was standing at the front of the room in a deliciously form-fitting uniform that concealed her lovely pert tits, answering questions about being canned.

Janus was the only one who was allowed to call the Captain "Ellie," a few people were close enough to her to be able to call her Eleanor when they were off duty, but not many, and her family and close friends just called her Elle. Ellie was something special and unique to Janus. In return, she called her babe, a term of endearment that sounded about as affectionate as a cheese grater on her ears when it came from anyone else, but from her lips, it was the sweetest sound imaginable. Their relationship was no secret; fraternization between the ranks may have been a big no-no in the military, but nobody really gave a shit in the BCA as long as that relationship didn't affect the work and there was no explicit favoritism shown. Still, during work hours, Janus was as deferential to her commanding officer as was expected, and Ellie treated her no differently than any of the other officers.

"McNamara," Eillie called as the rest of her team filtered out of the room, holding murmured conversations between them. Janues looked up at her Captain. "Can you hold on for a bit?"

"Sure thing, Cap." Janus smiled.

The two of them waited until the last of the BCA officers left the room and closed the door behind them. "So," Ellie started, nodding to the now blank holo-screen behind her. "Whadya think?"

"I think that asshole has two brain cells, and they're both fighting for third place." Janus shrugged, knowing that wasn't what Ellie was asking at all.

Her girlfriend snorted out a laugh and then rolled her eyes. God, Janus loved that laugh. "No, babe, what do you think about... after?"

"Ah, the whole 'to be or not to be... transferred' question," Janus nodded. "Not really an issue for me, is it?"

"What do you mean? It's your home."

"It was my mom's home. When she died... look, there's a reason Dad couldn't stay here, why he left, and I completely understand it. He needed to get away, and nobody could blame him for that."

Ellie did that adorable thing where she turned her eyes away, smiled brightly, and blushed a little. Even after all this time, she was under the impression that she was dating 'up.' Janus was a good-looking woman; nobody could argue with that, not even her, and she had spent years helping Ellie get over that mentality that Janus could do better than her. It was a notion that was so absurd as to be almost funny. Ellie was, without a doubt, the love of Janus's life, and it brought her no shame or self-consciousness to openly and freely admit that.

Of course, the fact that she had said those three words first was a source of endless teasing between the two women.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

Ellie shook her head. "Obviously, my family doesn't know yet, but when they do..."

"They're not gonna want to live on the station, long term." Ellie shook her head again, but this time, looked up uneasily into Janus's eyes. She was a complicated woman. When in her role as Captain, she was confident in her own skin, steadfast in her opinions, and completely unflappable in the face of adversity. But stripped of the veneer of her rank and the disguise of her uniform, she was still the same quietly nervous, unsure-of-herself girl that Janus had met all those years ago. "Any ideas where they'd want to go?"

Ellie seemed to think for a moment. "Dad was one of the first colonists born on Orpheus, did I ever tell you that?" she asked, waiting for Janus to nod before continuing. "Mom moved here with my grandparents when she was young, back in the colony rush era, but originally they were from Theolara. Mom still has family out there. If I had to guess, I'd say they'd choose to move there."

Janus nodded again. Of course, she'd heard of Theolara, but only in passing. She knew nothing specific about it as a place to live. With worlds in the imperium ranging from backwater hellholes to thriving paradises, any planet could easily fall anywhere on the spectrum between those two extremes. But, where there was a colonized planet, there were star ports and space stations, and those places always needed experienced border guards, so she wasn't worried about making a living when they got there. But seeing Ellie look so fucking cute, looking at her with those nervous, pleading eyes, was just too good an opportunity not to milk. "And you want to go with them?"

"I... yeah, I think I do, but..." Ellie let the sentence die on her lips.

"But what?" Janus was trying very hard to keep the teasing grin off her face.

"I... don't want... I don't want to go alone."

"You won't be alone. You just said your family will be there."

For a moment, Ellie looked like she had been slapped across the face. "Oh," she said, looking down at her feet.

"Unless I'm missing something," Janus added.

There must have been something in her voice, something that only Ellie would hear because her eyes shot back up in a flash. "Oh, you bitch!" She laughed, the tension evaporating from her face as soon as Janus let her teasing smile burst onto her lips. "You know I don't like it when you tease me," she pouted.

"Psssh, I know you well enough to know that you love me teasing you," Janus grinned. "I also know you are well aware that you don't even need to ask. I'm coming with you. Where I go, you go."

"I don't deserve you,"

"Yeah, well, you're stuck with me, so get used to it."

"I was planning on wearing that see-through negligee for you tonight, but if you're gonna tease me..." Ellie pretended to pout while also pulling her shoulders back to thrust her chest out a little more prominently, a move that she knew drove Janus crazy.

Janus groaned as the image of her girlfriend, standing before her in the flimsiest piece of sheer material known to ever cover the almighty breast, floated through her mind. "I could still make you go on your own."

Ellie giggled. Janus never giggled; it was like her mouth was incapable of forming the shape that would make that sound, but she fucking loved that giggle. "Okay," Ellie smiled demurely. "Then you'd better get back to your booth now that you have something to look forward to later."

"Oh, that's just cruel!" Janus pulled herself out of her seat and started making her way toward the door. "How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on anything now? This has to be against HR policy!" she joked as she winked over her shoulder to the still giggling Ellie. "Guess I'm just gonna have to spend my shift sitting in my soaked damned panties!"

"Have fun, babe." Eliie winked back before Janus opened the door and stepped out of the briefing room. Fuck sitting in wet panties; just that one mental image was enough to force her to walk back to her post in them.

********

Almark. 10

Pain is relative.

Of course, something can hurt, and other things hurt a lot, but there is always a part of your mind that - no matter how extreme the pain - is aware that you are at the limit of what you can take or if you can bumble through. Suffer enough of it over your life, and your mind starts comparing it to other things that have hurt in your past. For a lot of women, the obvious comparison is childbirth, universally agreed to be the single most painful experience a human can go through, even with the stupendous amount of drugs most women were getting during the ordeal.

Emylee wasn't one of those. She had no kids, nor did she have a long and storied history of pain to compare it to, so this pain was easily, and by far, the most torturous experience of her existence. The slightest amount of weight put onto her legs sent lances of pain ripping through her entire body. She couldn't decide if the pain burned or if it ached. If it stabbed, gnawed, or bit, and - if she was honest - she didn't really care. There was a distinct shortfall in the human language when it came to many things; nobody could ever describe something as complex as love with any sort of accuracy, and pain was another more than deserving addition to the list of feelings that words could never really convey.

Luckily, the expression of agony on her face, the sharp, ragged gasps for breath, and the more-than-occasional scream of pain were enough to let the people around her see that she was not doing well.

"I want the head of the bastard who shot me down on a fucking pike!" She spat, faltering on her feet and slumping to one side, only to feel her hands reflexively grasp onto one of the two parallel bars that ran horizontally on either side of her.

"That sort of thing is generally frowned upon," Dr Amy Evans quipped from her place beside her, an arm around her waist to help support her weight. "Even for savage rebels like us."

"Besides, didn't ya say yar wingman shot him doon?" Mac asked from the other side of her, his own much stronger arm doing most of the heavy lifting as he helped the Doc.

"Yeah, you're a little out of date for beheadings and pikes," Angel smirked at her from her spot perched on the edge of one of the beds in the rooms, her arm still in a sling and her shoulder covered in a thick layer of bandages. "Whadya think, Doc, French Revolutions the last time that pikes were used for decorative purposes?"

"Something like that," The Doc tried valiantly to stifle a chuckle but failed spectacularly. "That makes you about eight hundred years too late."

"Fine, I'll just beat the asshole to a pulp with his own shoes!" Almark growled.

"But he's already dead," Mac reminded her.

Emylee swung her head around and glared at the gentle giant of a man. "I didn't say anything about needing him alive when I whooped his ass!" she growled. Normally she would have been quite impressed with how menacing that growl sounded coming from one as small as her. But growling into the face of a man who towered over her by about two feet; it was almost comical. Still, he at least had the decency not to laugh in her face.

"Okay, I think that's enough for now, anyway," Amy said, gently tugging on her sides to lift her upright again.

"No!" Almark barked. "You said you want to see two lengths from me, and that's what I'm gonna fucking do!"

"Emylee, if you push yourself too much, you could do more harm than good." The Doc countered

"If you thought two lengths was pushing it, you wouldn't have suggested it!"

Doctor Evans sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, her eyes staying locked on the determined gaze of her patient. "Okay," she relented. "You've got three-quarters of a length to go. But you need to stop treating this like it's just another walk, like the ones you've been having your whole life. Your muscle, nervous, and skeletal structure have been completely rebuilt. For all intents and purposes, these are not the same legs you were born with, and learning to walk on them is going to take time. So stop rushing it!"

"Thank you!" Emylee huffed in exasperation. Doctors had a job to do; she knew that. The same could be said for nurses and physiotherapists and every other conceivable branch of the medical profession. But if there was one thing she fucking hated about them was their softly-softly, gently-genty, there-there approach to their patients. She wasn't a damned child, she was in a bad way, and bedside manners mattered less than fuck all to her if it meant not getting a straight answer out of one of them when it came to the road out of that condition. She wanted to be told things straight. She wanted the no-bullshit assessment and the clear-cut instructions. That worked on her. The touchy-feely approach did not and should only be used on women in labor and children. The last time she checked, she was neither of those things.

"Okay, fine. New legs, I can get behind that; the last ones were pretty fucked anyway, so why the hell not," she thought to herself as she looked down at her scared yet remarkably strong-looking legs. She gripped the bars tighter and, without relying on the readily available assistance from The Doc and Mac, pulled herself back into position and slowly... really fucking slowly... settled her weight back onto them.

The pain smashed into her again, and she braced herself for its severity to ratchet up until her legs crumpled beneath her, but that extreme never came. She cocked her head to the side and was frowning, now staring at a point on the far wall, as - for the first time since the crash - she held herself up using only her own strength. It hurt, it hurt a lot, but - with her mind doing that comparison thing already - it was nowhere near as bad as it had been when she had just tried to walk normally.

"That's it," Angel grinned at her. "I knew she'd get it. Mac, you owe me fifty creds!"

"What?" The big man frowned. "I specifically remember nae taking tha bet!"

"Shit, I was hoping you forgot," Angel smirked at him. A towel that had recently been draped over Mac's shoulder hit her in the face. "Okay, I deserved that," she laughed.

"Aye, just wait til our next sparring session, lassie. Then I'll show ya how much ya deserve!"

"Oooh, fighting talk," Angel grinned. "I beat you last time, big boy."

"Give yaself a round o'plause, lass," Mac smirked at her, then nodded to her slung arm. "Oh wait, ya can't!"

Angel burst into laughter, and Mac grinned back at her. "Oh, fuck, please, stop making me laugh!" Almark whimpered between giggles, her white-knuckled hands still desperately trying to keep her upright as her shoulders bounced. "Oh, holy fucking shitballs, it hurts." She laughed. "Talk to me about something else, God, anything. Take my mind off this! How's the Sarge?"

"Sarge is gone." Angel shrugged.

"Yup," Mac nodded. "Sarge is no more."

"What?!?" Almark gawked, looking incredulously at their nonchalant expressions.

"Aye, He's a Cap'n now," Mac smirked.

"Oh, you bastards," Emylee laughed again. "I thought you meant he was dead!"

Angel snorted out a laugh. "That fucker is unkillable! He's gonna outlive God!"

"Rumor is he's gonna be headin' up tha rebel ground forces when we get ta... wherever we're goin'."

"Oh?" Angel tilted her head. "I heard they were putting him in charge of training."

Mac seemed to scrunch up his face. "That seems like a bit of a waste of all his command an' battle experience, don't ya think? Especially with all his enhancements."

Angel just shrugged. "Just saying what I've heard, big man."

"What about you guys? What about all the marines?" Almark asked, paying rapt attention to the conversation.

"Dunno," Mac shrugged. "I mean, same logic applies to us, dunnit? We're enhanced and combat vets too, so I dun' nae think they'll keep us on tha sidelines."

"Yup, it'll be promotions and cushy offices all 'round," Angel rolled her eyes teasingly. "Just shoot me now. I want some payback before I get this ass behind a desk. Hey, talking about my ass, any news on Ryan, Doc?"

"Who?" Evans quirked an eyebrow.

"O'Malley, Ryan O'Malley," Mac clarified. "One of tha last boys brought off tha beach. Lost a leg?"

"Err, let me check," Amy answered, glancing at Mac to make sure he still had a good grip on Emylee before she stepped over to her terminal and pulled up his records. She was quiet for about a minute before she nodded. "Ah yes, got him. He needed a little surgery to clean up the damage done to his leg, but he had his new prosthetic fitted this morning. Looks like he's doing well."

"Well, shit," Angel huffed.

"What's wrong? I thought that would be good news," Amy asked in confusion.

Mac suddenly snorted out a laugh. "Last thing our lad said to her was tha he was gonna beat her training scores on a prosthetic. Looks like our man is gonna give it a go."

Angel grumbled something, but everyone in the room could see the pull of a smile at the corner of her lips. "Well, he always did like my ass, so he'd better get used to the view from back there."

"Aye, I'm sure he's gon'be heartbroken." Mac laughed. "Anyway, Lass," he smiled at Emylee. "Looks like ya dunnit!"

"Done it?" Almark squinted, "Done what?"

Mac nodded down to her legs, and Emylee followed his gaze. She suddenly found herself speechless at the fact that they had somehow carried her the entire remaining length of the walkway while she had been focused on the Marines' conversation. She looked up, wide-eyed at the doctor, who was, in turn, looking back at her with a pride-filled smile. "I... I did it!" she exclaimed, her eyes moving in stunned disbelief back down to her legs. "I hardly felt that. Well, I did, but nothing like as bad as it was."

"You were taking it slow and not trying to power walk to prove a point," Amy smiled at her. "You've done amazingly well, but now it's time for you to rest."

No sooner had the words registered in Emylee's mind than a wave of fatigue washed over her. It wasn't a tiredness that made her feel she needed to sleep, but more like a sensation of being sapped of every ounce of energy held in her body. It was like she had been completely drained of all but the absolute minimum of her energy levels. She felt like she was suddenly running on empty, and right on cue, her legs started to wobble beneath her.

"Hey, I gotcha, lass," Mac said, his arm suddenly tightening around her waist and effectively supporting the entirety of her body weight, a feat that seemed about as effortless to him as picking up a doll. He carefully put his other arms behind her knees, and gently lifted her in the air. "Let's get ya ta bed. You've earned it."

"My hero," Emylee joked, making no attempt to carry her own weight or resist his offer of assistance. She looked up at his face as he gingerly carried her the few meters back to her bed and gently laid her down on it before adjusting the pillows behind her head. Mac was a mountain of a man, someone who would have been as at home on an ancient battlefield, swinging an axe into somebody's face as he would have been cosplaying as a small hill, yet there was a gentleness to him, a care to his touch, and a look in his eye when he glanced at her that had her female intuition singing to her. He liked her...

Her initial instinct was to let that "Oh shit" feeling build up in her, her mind automatically starting to think of ways to put him back into the friend zone with as little cruelty as possible, but something made her pause. Would something more with Mac be so bad? He didn't have those stereotypical good looks, but he was certainly handsome in his own way. There was a kindness and a tenderness behind his eyes, but more than that... she felt safe with him. In fact, she now realized, she had felt around him ever since the crash; he had been caring for her since he had arrived a few hours ago, he had cared for her on the beach, and - like the other marines who had rescued her - he had abjectly refused to leave her behind, even if it had meant his own life. Moreover, he'd had his arms around her for the entire time she had been doing her exercises, and not only had it not repulsed her in a way that only a stranger touching a woman could, but it had also felt.... Normal... natural... it had felt nice.

With a start, she realized she was staring at him, and it was in a way she hadn't stared at a man in a long time. Sure, Stevo was cute; he had those rugged, manly good looks, and she wouldn't say no to a night between the sheets with him, but Mac was... different. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she was looking at someone with a romantic interest.

Angel cleared her throat, and Emylee's eyes flicked over to her knowing smile. She flashed the downed pilot a wink and smirked a little wider. "I think I'm gonna go see how Ryan is getting on." She said.

"Oh," Mac answered, a notable and noticeable tint of disappointment in his voice. "Aye, a'right, I s'pose we'd better see how the lad is doin'"

"Oh no," Angel grinned back. "I can find my way there on my own. I think our damsel needs you more than hop along will."

"Huh?" Mac's look of confusion was as adorable as it was hilarious. It was another thing that endeared her to him. He liked her, sure, now that she could see it in his small glances, the harder it was to miss, and the more she wondered how she had missed it before, but that wasn't why he was helping her. He was doing it because he could. He expected nothing in return; it wasn't a way into her panties; he was able to help, so he did. That was it.

She wanted more of that; she wanted more than that. If there was the opposite of a red flag, this was it

"I'll Catch you two later," Angel said, flashing her another smiling wink. She stood and headed out of the room.

"Somethin's goin' on, I can tell." Mac squinted as the door swooshed closed behind Angel. Doc Evans giggled, too.

"I need to update the notes," she said, "I'll be back to check on you in a few hours."

Emylee nodded to her, the excitement of being alone with Mac—her new-found interest—already stirring in her chest as she turned back to look at him.

Mac was squinting at the departing Doc. "Errr, what just happened?" he asked slowly, his eyes finally dropping down to see the intensity of her own gaze.

"Mac, I..." she paused, trying to think of what to say. She'd never felt this level of nerves since she was a teenager, and it was oddly invigorating. "I wanted to say thank you," she finally said.

"Thank you?" he blinked at her. "For what?"

"For helping me," she answered. "On the beach, here, you've been... amazing."

"Oh, lass, it ain't..."

She didn't give him the chance to finish. "Mac, will you go out with me sometime?" she asked with a lot more nerves in her voice than she was expecting. Confidence had never been her problem, but she was vastly more used to being approached and couldn't remember the last time she had asked a guy out. "Once I get out of here, I mean."

"Ya don't need ta go oot with me to say thank ya, Em," he said carefully. It was also the first time he's used her name, something that sounded wonderful on his lips, in his voice, and with that accent.

"That's not..." she reached up and ran her fingers along his cheek, her hands laughably small compared to the side of his face. "I like you, Mac, and I think you like me, too." Mac swallowed hard, but—after a moment of silence—he nodded. "So when I'm back on my feet, I want you to take me out."

"I'd like that," he smiled wide at her. A smile she couldn't help but mirror back at him.

"Could you... Oh god, I am going to sound pathetic..." She shook her head, laughing at herself and her child-like nerves. "Get on the bed for me, will you? I need to rest, and I don't want you to leave."

Mac's smile grew even bigger, although she had no idea how that was possible, but he nodded and climbed onto the bed, hooking his arm around her and pulling her inclose to him. His fingers were running through her hair before she had even laid her head on his massive upper chest. "This is nice," she sighed contentedly. "A girl could get used to it."

"Plenty more where this comes from, darlin'." he smiled down at her.

Darling... it was one of those pet names that usually made her eyes roll, if not made her skin crawl, but just like her name, it just sounded... right... coming from him. "I'm sorry if I fall asleep on you, Mac. I'm pretty tired."

"Ya need ta rest, Lass; I'll be here when ya wake back up again."

"Thank you, babe." She sighed heavily, the lead weights attached to her eyelids growing heavier by the moment.

In only a few more breaths, she was asleep, leaving Mac's woefully ill-equipped male brain to try and process what had happened. But the smile on his face would tell whoever saw it three very clear things. Firstly, he was very happy with how his afternoon had turned out, and secondly, there was nowhere in the galaxy he would rather be. Mostly, though, he had just fallen in love with her calling him babe.

********

Laura. 9

It was the morning after the day before, and despite all expectations, Laura had slept like a log. Waking up in a puddle of one's own drool was never the most pleasant of experiences, but it did, at least, show that she had slept particularly heavily. Considering everything that had happened the day before, though, that was hardly surprising. It isn't often in one's existence that you could legitimately claim to have had your life turned upside down, but the previous day had held at least half a dozen such events. In only a single day, her life had gone from something she felt she had some semblance of control over to something more akin to a runaway rollercoaster: Ups, downs, twists, turns, and loops, all while struggling to hold down her lunch. It was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.

That feeling couldn't be summed up better than the view now laid out before her.

The Seren had been docked at the extreme end of the hangar bay, meaning that the ship was the only thing between her and the bulkhead. The neighboring booth was empty, so there was nothing to obstruct her view of the rest of the bay when she stepped out of The Seren's airlock and onto the metallic gangplank that separated the two berths.

Size is an interesting concept to try to quantify with words. The easiest thing for her to say about the size of the hangar bay was that it was easily big enough to house seven or eight entire Mariner Battleships with room to spare, but that would assume that someone knew how big one of those enormous ships was. The same logic applied to the Seren. There was enough room to fit several hundred of her ships inside the bay if packed in properly. The next option was to talk in measurements, but considering the opposite wall was so far away she could barely see it made that just as difficult. Eventually, her mind was forced to settle on something of an understated simplification.

The hanger bay was fucking massive!

There was no comparison in her encyclopedic knowledge of human construction, certainly nothing that she had seen with her own eyes. She imagined that if the combined internal dimensions of every ship in the entire Mariner Home Fleet had been enclosed in a single, enormous hull, it might... might... have matched this room in terms of sheer size. She had seen it briefly from the outside and knew that it took up a little over half of the full length of the Atlas's central hull, and it stretched the full width, meaning it must have measured about fifteen kilometers long and eight wide, basically big enough to contain a small city.

At first, Laura was taken aback by two things. The first was the obvious scale of the place—some things are just too big for the mind to fully comprehend. The second was the fact that she had already been in this room twice—once after docking The Seren and the other in a half-awake stupor on her return to her ship last night—and she had completely missed the view on both occasions. The shock of that revelation, however, was significantly overshadowed by a new piece of information.

The hanger wasn't empty.

Looking up and down, she could see that the hanger bay - at least this part of it - was split into levels, about nine of them that she could see. The Seren was moored on the third tier from the top, and Wu's requisitioned - or stolen - destroyer was in a berth directly below it. But off in the distance, she could make out the glistening silver hulls of other sleek, dangerous, predatory-looking ships moored up on different levels, plus a few bigger ones even further away that looked too large to fit into one of the berths that The Seren now occupied.

She couldn't even begin to guess how many ships could be held in here. Well over a hundred, just from a quick count of the births she could see. But that was the problem; she could see the ceiling of the bay above her, but the bottom of it was lost in the shadows below her, the darkness swallowing the light from the limited number of lamps dotted around the place. For all she knew, there could be a dozen more tiers beneath the ones she could see. More ships, too.

By standard classification doctrine, the Seren was a modified—meaning slightly enlarged—frigate. Wu's borrowed destroyer was about half as big again. But true to Imperium designs, it was a squat, ugly-looking thing with the hull holding more turrets than windows and painted in that odd, weathered iron color—a wholly unpleasant mix of dull grey and faded brown. The Seren was purple. She didn't know what possessed her to paint it that color, but she liked the look and had never been tempted to change it. Her ship had weapons, too, but they were a lot more subtle. The shapes of the ships in the distance, though - from the little she could make out this far away - looked nothing like she had ever seen before. Nor, surprisingly, did they look anything like the Atlas.

Capital ship design and construction seemed to follow the same pattern in every spacefaring civilization; the actual look of the ships was pretty much the same; it was just the size and capabilities that changed between the classifications. An Imperium Dreadnaught didn't look that much different from the destroyer below her; it was just a lot bigger. A Maruvian corvette and a Maruvian cruiser, on paper, looked almost identical. So it was something of a surprise to see that the Ancient destroyers and cruisers in the distance - or that's what she assumed they were - looked nothing like the Ancient Behemoth they were being carried by. Although each of the other classifications of ship looked to be identical to the other ships of that class, they had nothing in common with each other, and the only characteristic they shared with the Atlas was the fact that they were all that sparkling, magnificent shade of silver.

"Impressive, is it not?" A voice sounded from behind her, making her damned near jump out of her own skin. She spun around to see the amused-looking face of Wu. How he had managed to sneak up on her without making the slightest sound on the metallic, grated walkway was simply beyond her, and yet, here he was.

"It's certainly something," Laura laughed at a glint in the old man's eyes that could only accurately be described as mischievous. "I've never seen anything like it, and those ships there..." she turned back and looked out over the cavernous vault of the hanger bay. The irony of her calling it that was not lost on her either.

"If our Marshal is correct, and I strongly suspect he is, The Atlas was a fleet carrier in a very literal sense of the word. It was designed to carry an entire fleet inside it, able to deploy it at a moment's notice. Ships more powerful than you could possibly comprehend. That, there," he pointed toward the smaller of the two types of Ancient ship that could be made out from where they stood. "That is a Valiant class destroyer; so far, I have counted eight of them in the hold, with room for more than a hundred more. Each one of them is built purely for combat, and they are ferociously powerful. The larger ship is a cruiser, a Mediator class. You would have to ask Elijah, but I am sure that two of those could easily match an entire Imperium battlegroup. We have two of them; the Atlas can hold twenty. Behind them, there are the moorings for Sovereign Class Battleships; we don't have any of those at the moment, but the Atlas can hold five of them, and each would be, easily, the most powerful starship in the known Galaxy, even more powerful than the Atlas."

Laura nodded; terms like "most powerful in the Galaxy" were just like "size" in that it was very hard for the human mind to wrap itself around the entirety of the concept. But holy shit, they were impressive.

"You understand why I am telling you this, no?"

Laura frowned and turned back to face the elderly man. "I... no, I don't know."

"The ship your people have, the Primus," Wu started. "It may be within our power to restart its systems for the Mariners, but you must understand by now that, at least for the foreseeable future, the ship will be useless to you. Accessing its systems with an interface helmet would instantly and horrifically kill any human who tried."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because your people have shown a remarkable ability to bypass the need for the helmets and access our systems, with power restored to the Primus, that task will become both larger and easier. It will be easier to access, but there will be a massively increased number of systems to access, understand, and then reverse engineer. We are offering to give your people that opportunity."

"But..." she waited for the inevitable.

"But, the same hazards to a human mind found on the Primus would be present in any ships its hold contains."

The realization dawned on Laura. "That is what you are going to ask for in return for restoring power to the Primus. You want all the ships in its hold. Because even if we have them, we won't be able to use them, at least not for a few decades."

"Do you think this is an unreasonable condition?"

"I... I'm not sure. On one hand, ships of that power could ensure the safety of the Mariner fleet forever, but on the other hand.... We can't use them,"

Wu nodded, his expression now serious, but his keen eyes peered out into the darkness of the hanger. Laura wondered, for a moment, if his Ancient eyes could see better or worse than her human ones.

"How can you control them?" Laura finally asked, her racing mind latching onto a single question in the maelstrom of thoughts storming through her head. "There are only two of you, and you said that only a Marshal can control a ship."

A smile, almost approving in nature, pulled at the corner of his lips. "I said only a Marshal can control a fleet. Each of those ships can be remotely operated over vast distances by Elijah from the Atlas."

"Oh," She felt she should have expected an answer like that. "But... why do you need such a powerful fleet?"

Wu sucked in a deep breath and turned back to face her. "Miss Dondarion, unfortunately, to answer that question would be to place in you, and your people, more trust than you have yet earned. Please do not take that as an insult. The Marshal and I would very much like our people to be friends, and I can promise you that we mean you no harm, no matter how the negotiations go. But there are things happening in the galaxy that will require that kind of force. Hopefully, soon, I will be permitted to tell you what they are and what our fleet would be used for."

"Permitted?" Laura tilted her head. "I assumed you were in charge."

"Assumptions are never a wise avenue of thought, my dear," Wu shook his head but let that smile return to his face. "I am Elijah's guide, but he outranks me. To put it in terms you would understand, he would be the man in charge of all Mariner fleets, even if there were a hundred of them."

"Like the Emperor?"

Wu scrunched up his nose for a moment, "No, more like..." he paused for a moment. "Imagine if the Emperor had to give up power to a separate commander-in-chief during times of war. That person would be a Marshal."

"And are you at war?"

"I'm afraid so, Miss Dondaron, I'm afraid so." Wu suddenly spun on his heels and headed toward a bank of elevator-like doors in the corner in front of the prow of the Seren. "Come, It is time for us to assign you proper quarters. Until such a time that we reach your fleet, you should consider yourself our guest."

Laura took one last look into the cavernous hanger bay before reluctantly following the old man. She had questions—so many questions—but she got the distinct impression that Wu had finished talking about that particular subject, and pushing the matter would not do her any favors.

Wu chivalrously allowed Laura to step into the transporter room first before following her inside, reaching over and pressing one of the buttons on the panel. She had been inside this thing a few times now, but she still couldn't make heads nor tails of which button took them to which place. There were over thirty icons available to be pressed, split into rows of five buttons, but common logic would dictate that those buttons would be broadly the same - with single differences based on which room they were in - between all the matter transporters, but as far as she could tell, they weren't. Laura had a good memory and a good eye for detail. She may have missed the icon for Engineering the one time they had gone there, but this was her third time heading to the bridge. Yet the icon seemed to be different every time Wu pressed it, or at least that's how it appeared to her.

"You, err, may need to show me how to use these transporter things if I am your guest," she said as she eyed the panel curiously.

Wu glanced over his shoulder at her, then back at the panel. "Oh, yes, of course." He pointed at the furthest icon to the right on the top row. "This is the icon for the forward bridge," he said before moving to another icon, "And this is the one for the battle bridge."

Urgh, of course, they'd been transported to a different part of the ship during the battle, which is why he'd used a different icon.

His finger moved again, this time to the second row and the button in the middle. "This is the hanger bay, and this one," he moved down a row again, this time to the button on the extreme left, "is for the command crew quarters, where we will all have our rooms."

She nodded and made a mental note. For some reason, being able to travel freely around the ship made her feel a little less like a prisoner, even though she would be hard-pressed to say she felt like one anyway.

"What are the rest of them?" she nodded to the other rows.

"Those are numbers," he said. "For a ship of the Atlas's size, only the important points of the ship have their own icons, the rest of it would need a person to put in the deck number and the section number, a bit like an address. But you must understand that using those would require a comprehensive knowledge of the layout of the ship. It is something a human would have to memorize, which would be difficult, but our kind have that information downloaded into our minds as soon as we put on one of the interface helmets."

"Ah, yeah, that makes sense." She nodded, realizing that exploring may have to wait. "So the first two rows are vital areas?"

"Indeed," he smiled, his fingers starting to work along the rows of icons that he hadn't already explained. "Cargo hold, crew mess hall, barracks, engineering, fabrication plant, stellar cartography, and the airlocks." he pointed to the last icon. "Although the airlocks and the cargo holds are a little more complicated because there is more than one of them, so you would need to tap that icon, then the numbers for whichever one you wanted. So, for example, the hatch where you entered is on the fourth deck, port side, forward. So you would need to press the airlock button first, then the deck number..." his finger gestured to a different icon. "...then the port side..." another icon, "... and then the forward section," his finger hovering over a final button. "I understand it is much simpler on the smaller ships. Perhaps we should go have a look when we have you settled," he grinned at her, a spark of excitement behind his elderly eyes.

Laura smiled widely and nodded before turning her attention back to the panel. "Why do the icons look different in every transporter room, though?"

Wu laughed, "They don't, my dear. Unfortunately, the human mind is, as you know, incapable of comprehending our language, your brain simply reads each icon as if it is the first time it is seeing it, meaning they always look like they have changed. I suspect that if power can be restored to the Primus, your Mariner friends would need to put post-it notes over the buttons to make them translatable."

Laura snorted out a laugh, an image of yellow squares of paper taped to each button wandering through her mind and the trouble someone would get into if a few of them disappeared or, knowing the sense of humor of some of her fleet mates, got switched around.

After another few moments of looking at the panel, she realized that Wu was waiting for her and that, as had happened every other time she had used the transporter room, they were already on a different part of the ship, and the door was open. She was still thinking of them as elevators; back when she was briefly helping the Mariner researchers on the Primus, it had always been assumed that they were elevators, at least by her. She had no idea if anyone else had noticed the out-of-place doors on the bridge compared to the ones at the bottoms of that flight of stairs or the apparent lack of elevator shafts, but her mind still seemed to want to wait for the elevator to move her to wherever she was going, and not instantly transport her there. Wu seemed to smile, somehow knowing what was on her mind. "It takes some getting used to, doesn't it?" he said as he stepped through the door and out into the corridor.

"Okay, so..." Wu gestured his arm to the corridor they had emerged into. "These are the command quarters." Funnily enough, this was the part of the Primus where all the research gear was usually stored, close to the forward bridge and only a single deck down. It looked very different with the lights on and not illuminated by those standing spotlights the Mariners used. Wu gestured to a door on the left, one she knew to be the largest of all of them. "This is the Marshal's room, and mine is opposite him," He pointed at the door on the right. "You can choose any of the others as yours."

Laura already knew that all of the other rooms, along with Wu's, were identical, just slightly bigger versions of the ones filling the rest of the ship, containing one of those strange octagonal platform things but, unlike the rest of the rooms, a workstation and desk too. Laura made for the closest door, the one next to Wu's. Again, unlike the ones on the Pimus that had needed to be forced open with a crowbar, this one slid open welcomingly and willingly. She was starting to wonder how much damage the Mariners had done to the Primus in their efforts to explore, access, and understand it. More importantly, she was wondering if that damage could ever be fully repaired. Had her people cannibalized their most prized possession for short-term gain, only to lose out on the chance of a much better future? She had never questioned the wisdom of their actions before now, but it was a question that was growing more and more relevant with every passing moment.

Still, though, an idea, or maybe just the first sparks of a theory, was starting to build in the back of her mind. It was something she would need to discuss with Lycander before she gave it voice to anyone else.

Wu allowed her to step into the room first; the lights came on the instant she crossed the threshold. It still amazed her how.... Clean... the air tasted on the Atlas. Everywhere on the Primus held the distinct aroma of its age, not that anything was rusting away or breaking down; it's just that the air felt as ancient as it was. Here, though, with the atmospheric recyclers working properly, the air was as fresh as it could be imagined to be.

Looking around the room, seeing it was identical to the ones on the Primus, her eyes landed on the low, octagonal platform on the ground. It was white, and - again, unlike the ones on the Mariner version of this ship - a soft blue-lit line was inset an inch or so around the circumference of the top of the platform, an indicator that it was powered on.

"So this is your..." Wu said but stopped with a frown. "Well, I suppose the closest equivalent would be to say that it's your bed."

"Yeah, we guessed as much, but we couldn't work out how they functioned." Laura nodded, looking down at the thing.

"They are surprisingly simple to operate," he said, "And yet remarkably complex to explain. It would be easier to show you."

"Okay, I'm game," Laura shrugged.

"I thought you might be," Wu grinned. "Your sense of curiosity is... refreshing. Now, please stand on the platform." Laura stepped up onto it and turned to face him. "Oh, sorry, shoes and socks need to be off."

Laura chuckled but kicked them off without comment.

"Now, flex your toes like you are pressing them down into the surface of the pedestal"

The moment she did, a curtain of light—not unlike a security shield—burst out of that lit blue line that followed the edges of the platform and raised all the way to the ceiling. Gravity immediately ceased to exist within her little field, and she found herself floating an inch or two into the air. "Oh... oh wow," she gasped.

"It feels strange at first," Wu smiled as his eyes followed her upward. "But you will get used to it quite quickly. I must say, it is an extremely comfortable way to sleep. The field is big enough for two people and works on any sort of blankets or comforters you want to take in there with you. I am fairly convinced I will never be able to sleep without a pillow, and I am too old to try now."

"Oh shit, yeah. A girl could get used to this," Laura grinned as she stretched and moved her body around with just as much ease and comfort as she would in her own bed on The Seren. "But, err, how do I turn it off?"

"You don't. Goodbye," the old man said sharply, wiping Laura's smile off her face. Wu turned and took a step toward the door before turning back around and laughing at Laura's gaping face. "I'm sorry, that was too good of an opportunity to pass up. When you get to my age, you take every chance you can get to laugh at the expense of youth. Just flex your toes again, but hold them like it for about five seconds."

Laura, her heart returning to its proper place in her chest rather than lodged in her throat, flexed her toes and held them there until she felt herself being lowered back to the platform. "I'm gonna get you back for that," she grumbled good-humoredly.

"Oh please do," Wu grinned at her. "Young Elijah is always so serious."

********

Adam. 7

In times long past, security systems were based primarily on visuals, the most obvious being the security camera. It would record its surveillance of the limited area it was pointing at. Ironically, in this instance, those outdated systems were more secure than the ones that had replaced them.

With the invention of internal sensor grids, a few nodes could scan an entire building, but just like the sensors on a ship, it took in much more information. That information, for the sake of monitoring, could be rendered into a three-dimensional, holographic playback of a certain time in a certain part of the building and took down every detail from the visual look of a person, the DNA signature of the subject in question, the molecular composition of his or her clothes, their equipment, and even their breath. It could tell the species of dog whose shit the person had stepped. It was a remarkable system. Private residences still used cameras, as the investigation into Frank's death had proven. However, state buildings relied almost entirely on sensors.

But they weren't unbeatable.

Adam, for example, had been deleted. The scanner would pick him up, read his DNA, and then completely wipe itself of any trace of his being there. For anyone reviewing the logs of the building, he simply didn't exist; he was never there; the system hadn't just erased the record; it had never recorded it to start with. He was a ghost, and right now, that is exactly what he needed. But there were some parts of the building that still used those old-fashioned cameras, not many, and they were there to supplement the sensor grid rather than replace it, but one of those points was the main reception area.

Adam Doncaster was not a man who could move freely around the ISD facility without being noticed; his intimidating presence and fearsome reputation simply didn't allow it. That, under normal circumstances, would prove to be a problem when it came to his current activities. But it was far from one that couldn't be overcome with some clever, well-practiced manipulations of simple human nature. For Adam, there were two ways to leave the ISD compound. The first was with a stiff posture and a withering, gruff glare as he strode imperiously out of the main door. Everyone in his path would see him, and more than a few of them would remember him, so if an investigation were to somehow come back to him, it would be known pretty quickly - with or without the sensors - that he had left the building.

And there absolutely would be an investigation.

The second way was more subtle. Dressed down clothes, a ball cap, as he was wearing now, and using the service corridors of the building to leave through one of the side doors or the goods entrance. There were far fewer people around there.

Of course, if an investigation did find its way to tracking his movements, the first thing they would do was to establish the time that Adam had left the building. A crime was about to be committed, and although Adam doubted it would ever come back to him, it paid to be safe. At the time of the crime, as far as anyone knew, Adam was safely tucked in his office. Being the head of the ISD, his deletion would be accounted for, and those cameras would be checked, frame by frame, to pinpoint the exact time that Adam had departed for the day. And thanks to the insertion of some heavily yet seamlessly doctored footage, that is exactly what they would find. As far as the investigators would be concerned, Adam would leave the building at 18.26 and not, as had really happened, seven hours earlier.

It was a technique known by very few people but one that Adam had perfected over the years. Modern computers would very easily be able to spot any tampering with the video feeds of the reception. But that was the genius of his method; technically, the video hadn't been tampered with at all. At 18.23 that evening, a computer system combining the video feed and sensor readings from reception would record an eighteen-second burst of the hustle and bustle of people leaving the building. It would then render that into a perfectly recreated holographic playback and would insert an image of Adam walking across the foyer of the building, flashing a quick glance to Tom, the security guard, and then heading out the door. Then, a video of that holographic playback would be recorded, and that recording would seamlessly be uploaded onto the security servers.

Fortunately, there were far fewer security checks leaving the building than entering it. Evidence lockers and secure areas had their own security checks, but the main door was relatively easy to leave through, meaning there was no need to tamper with the records of his ID being scanned to leave the building.

So, assuming a worst-case scenario, an investigation team would try to pinpoint the time Adam had left the ISD headquarters, find that video, and see a recording of him striding formally out of the main door at precisely the moment he would say he had. The investigation, if they were worth a damn, would check to see if that footage had been doctored, and they would come up empty simply because it hadn't been. It was just a video taken of a hologram and not of the actual reception area. Even Tom would see that video and would confirm it had happened, as it had happened every day since his reprimand. The human mind was pretty creative when it came to filling in the blanks. He wouldn't remember seeing Adam - obviously, he hadn't been there - but he had seen him every other day, and that would be enough to trick his mind into thinking that day had been no different. The investigation - should there be one - would confirm that Adam couldn't possibly be involved in what was about to happen, not directly at least, and would move on.

Adam, when everything boiled down to its basics, was a student of human nature and a master of the manipulation of it. Wearing a janitor's beige overalls and a ball cap, he strode through the service corridors of the ISD complex carrying an empty bucket. The bucket was a prop; it was meaningless, it didn't even make any sense, but the odd worker using the stairwells or the hidden parts of the building to take their smoking breaks would be used to seeing janitors going about their business. They were beneath the attention of the self-important worker bees, barely warranting a single glance, let alone a second one. They would hear or see someone moving, expect to see a janitor as the source of it, turn, see a janitor, and not think anything more of it. With his ball cap pulled down low, they wouldn't register his face, and he could make it to the service entrance without a single person noticing. And if asked, the entire complement of his office would swear that Adam had spent the whole day in his office because none of them had noticed the janitor leaving either.

People were lazy. It was one of the things that Adam had learned very early in his career. If something looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then as far as the vast majority of people were concerned, it was a duck. Adam was not like most people; If it looked, walked, and quacked like a duck, he checked to make sure anyway. It was that attention to detail that had made him so good at his job, that and a very strong stomach, and it had propelled him up the ranks at a breakneck pace

More than ninety flights of stairs was a bit of a pain in the ass - not to mention the legs - but the elevator was too big of a risk to take. Being cornered in a six-foot box with someone made it infinitely more likely that he would be recognized.

Finally, though, after a grueling hour of stair descent, he made it into the loading dock area. Contrary to the expectations that came with its name, the loading dock was never particularly busy. It was used to transport evidence or equipment too large to go through the front doors and was rarely used outside of large-scale investigations. The only thing that really happened here was a general congregation of the real janitorial staff, a few of them huddling into small social circles and chatting about whatever it was that janitors and maintenance workers chatted about. None of them, not a single one, even looked up when he walked past them.

The ISD building was not a prison, and security was designed to keep people out, not keep them in, so the ease at which he bypassed that security was both slightly concerning and totally expected. Everyone just relied on the sensors to track the movements of people once they were inside, and although a fair number of people knew about the deletion of his presence on the grid, Adam was one of only a handful of people in all of humanity who knew how to track someone even after they had been erased. He knew all the others who did, and none of them would be approached to help in an investigation simply because Adam had gone to great lengths to not only keep their existence hidden but to keep them firmly onside. In Adam's learned and experienced estimations, it was utterly impossible for anybody - no matter how hard they looked - to prove he had left the building several hours before they thought he did.

And that was just how he wanted it.

He was barely halfway up the loading bay when - right on cue - a faded blue sedan descended from the skylanes and came to a halt in one of the loading bays. Adam didn't even break his stride as he opened the door and climbed in.

"Boss," the hulking mass of Dominic nodded to him as he shifted back into gear and pulled away again.

"Dom." Adam returned the stiff greeting. "Everything ready?"

"We're all set up and good to go."

"Good." Adam wasn't in the mood for idle chit-chat. He had too much on his mind. This whole situation had become a matter of life or death the moment Sandra White had threatened his family, but now it was something else entirely. In his own secret investigation into the Minister, he had found things that he strongly suspected were never supposed to be found. Things that Minister White would kill to keep secret. Things that had gotten Frank Horrigan murdered. Things that troubled Adam very, very deeply.

News about the fate of the 381st Marine Division was everywhere; how could it not be? But with the investigation into Frank's death being at the forefront of his mind, Adam had barely given it more than a few moments of mournful acknowledgment. He had been vastly more concerned with what had started this series of events in the first place, what it was that was so important as to drive Sandra White to the madness of threatening his family. Normally, he wouldn't care. He would have just taken action and "removed" the threat. But this was the Minister of Internal Security; there was nothing to say that her actions hadn't been ordained by the council or even the Emperor himself, and that really was a risk not worth taking. Adam was more than capable of handling the Minister on his own; the entire council was an altogether different proposition, and defying the Emperor would be plain suicide. That meant he had to be completely one hundred percent sure of the reasons why Frank had been killed and his family threatened.

And wouldn't you know it, the alarm bells started sounding in his head with the very first document he opened, the one that had started all of this in the first place, the one that Frank had been investigating, and the ISD had been ordered to drop. The Quartermaster's report for the Goliath battlegroup.

Specifically, the battlegroup that had carried the 381st Marine division to the ill-fated training exercise.

That was one hell of a coincidence, right? The fact that it had been clandestinely opened less than twenty-four hours before disaster had struck the Marines? So he had dug a little deeper into it, and with every shovel-full of bullshit he waded through, the louder those alarm bells rang. There were lots of little things that didn't make sense, which, on their own, would account for nothing. But Adam was an investigator, individual details only mattered in so much as they added to the bigger picture, and when taken together, a very disturbing picture was beginning to be painted. There were small things, a flurry of last-minute crew transfers to the Goliath itself immediately before its departure. Not a big deal, but these people seemed to be hand-selected, former special forces soldiers brought in from every corner of the Imperium without the slightest hint of a pattern when it came to a unit of origin. It was like these men were requested by name for a job that the pre-existing crew was unsuitable for.

Then there was the comment from the Quartermaster that the air support wing was only at half strength, having only one detachment of fighters instead of two and no bombers at all. Again, nothing out of the ordinary, but still a very odd remark to make about a training exercise run. Why would the quartermaster be concerned about a lack of air cover for an exercise that seemingly didn't need any at all?

Finally, there was the installation of a tier alpha encryption suite into the Goliath's com's center. That level of encryption was above even that used by the ISD and was almost exclusively used to encrypt high-level government or imperial communiques. There was no conceivable reason for that piece of equipment to be installed on a carrier, let alone one whose sole job was to ferry a division of Marines on a training exercise.

On their own, those details were odd but otherwise meaningless. Taken together with what he already knew, though, things started to look a little different. Someone in the upper echelons of the government had accessed this file, and it could only be someone of that rank because only they had the clearance to get into that file without leaving a digital fingerprint. Adam had double-checked Frank's work, and he had been right; the file hadn't been accessed illicitly, nor had it been hacked. That narrowed down the list of possible candidates to maybe a hundred. But then there were the crew reassignments and the installation of encryption tech. That tech was only used to contact members of fleet command, the Imperial Council, or the Emperor himself. The list was down to about a dozen people if you discounted the ones simply incapable of either ordering that equipment upgrade or even receiving messages from it.

And then he remembered the look of shock and almost fear that flickered across Sandra White's face when she heard that this was the file being looked into. She knew something, and it had to do with this file. More than that, for that look of nervousness, however brief, to make an appearance at all, it must be something of truly enormous magnitude. She had ordered the death of an ISD agent; she had risked taking him on, head-on, no less. Adam was not an arrogant man, but he was acutely aware of his reputation from the painstaking efforts he had taken to hide his girls from it. He knew that she knew he could be a very dangerous man. To attack him so bluntly, even for someone as cocksure and self-superior as Minister White, would still be a hell of a risk unless the alternative - in this case, the contents of the file getting out - was much, much worse.

And then he had found it. Just one word.

Vallen.

The news had been playing on repeat for almost a week—interviews with surviving family members of the heroic 381st, pundit conjecture about how the rebels could have even known about the training exercise, let alone where- theories of the type of weapon that could have done the damage reported by the military. Hell, there were members of his own division who had been assigned to the military to investigate the possibility of a leak. It would almost certainly be a case he would have been involved with personally if the Frank situation hadn't happened. But there was one thing that had remained consistent.

The slaughter, according to the military, had taken place on Garros II.

But the Goliath had been bound for Vallen

This wasn't a com frequency number where a mistyped digit could put you in touch with the wrong person, or a mistyped character could alter a zipcode to an entirely different address. This was a planet, complete with nav-com coordinates, atmospheric information and details of surface conditions. Jesus, there was even a weather prediction for the area of operation. It wasn't like Vallen or Garros II were particularly close to each other for a simple mistake to have been made. Sure, they were in the same relative region of space but were more than forty lightyears apart. That wasn't exactly around the corner. This was an official document; getting a detail wrong on it, let alone one that big, it was... it was beyond even the most laughably unlikely theory.

That could only mean one thing: The story given to the media to report to the people?

It had been a lie.

That realization had broken the seal on that particular can of worms because the only question he could possibly come up with was, "Why?"

Why would the government cover up the location of an operation that cost twenty thousand lives? It couldn't possibly have been a training exercise, not with all the changes made to the fleet, and if it wasn't a training exercise, what happened? What got twenty thousand marines killed? What could be so bad that it needed to be covered up under the guise of an ambushed training op? But more than that, why was this file being accessed just twenty-four hours before the massacre took place?

It was too convoluted and went much too high for him to guess, even if they were educated guesses based on all the information he had in hand. Whatever it was in that file that White wanted to keep secret had put his family—his wife, his daughters, and his home—in harm's way, and one way or another, he was going to find out what it was.

And then end the threat once and for all.

Which was exactly where he was headed now.

He looked out of the window of the hovercar as Dom navigated it through the mid-morning traffic that invariably built up around any major city. Making the roadways three-dimensional and stretching them into the skies had been a good start, but the prevalence of car ownership had only increased with the years, and rush hour was as much a thing now as it always had been. The skyline of Caracas was clearly visible, even through the morning haze. The towering spires of skyscrapers were shadowed against the rising sun, but that wasn't what he was looking at. Truth be told, he wasn't looking at anything. His eyes were just wandering randomly as his mind drifted to home.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and redialled the number for his mailbox. It was a message he had already listened to twice that morning, and it had sent chills down his spine each time.

"Hey, boss," Ben's recorded, cheery voice warbled through the handset's speaker. "Just a quick update on the birthday bash thing. I've spoken to Jenny; she's packed and ready to go, so we will be heading out in a few minutes. Just a little heads up: there was an accident on Highway fourteen, so I'd recommend taking another route to the party if you can. The girls are all excited, but don't worry, everyone else still thinks I don't know about it, so I will make sure to act surprised when we get there. Otherwise, I will see you when you get here. Catch you later, Bossman."

It was code, of course. The general gist was that Ben had the girls, they were safe, and they were heading to wherever Ben had decided to hide them. But one phrase kept ringing in his head, over and over: "An accident on Highway fourteen."

Armed men had been somewhere near to the house, fourteen of them.... Fourteen of them! Ben had taken care of them, and no doubt, all of them comprised a mangled pile of laser-cored corpses somewhere out of sight. That much was clear from the "Take another route" part. But they had been there; it hadn't been a bluff. Sandra White, as untouchable as she may have appeared to the rest of the world, had threatened the lives of his family and, by all appearances, was prepared to follow through on it.

Each time he heard it, his resolve hardened. There were so many unanswered questions, there were so many things he didn't know, and so many things that could still go wrong. There may have been perfectly good explanations for all the things that didn't make sense to him, things he hadn't thought of or didn't have the clearance to know about. Sandra White could be in no way linked to what happened to the 381st, or she could have been acting on orders. Maybe that look of fear he had seen had, in fact, been one of shame.

She could have been just as innocent as he was - namely, not at all, but always acting on orders.

But then she put armed men outside his house.

Adam, contrary to his carefully fostered reputation, was not an unforgiving man. He had been in this line of work long enough to understand that, sometimes, some very distasteful things were asked of the people who worked there. He certainly had been; his ledger was far from clean. If that was all White was guilty of, he could have let it slide. He would have been furious at the murder of Frank Horrigan, but if White had been ordered to do it, then she was not directly responsible, and the only person above both of their paygrades was the Emperor himself. He was the only person capable of directing Frank's death unless the council made a unanimous decision. He would have been pissed if that was the case, but he would have understood.

That whole line of thinking was rendered completely and utterly moot the moment she threatened his family. Incompetent or criminal, it didn't matter. The moment she put armed men outside his home, she had sealed her fate.

It took less than twenty minutes for Dom to pull them off the highway and down onto the surface-level back streets, turning left and right, seemingly at random. But it wasn't random; his eyes were flicking up to check the rearview every handful of seconds, making sure they weren't being followed. Apparently satisfied after another fifteen minutes or so, he pulled the car into a small, private airfield on the outskirts of one of the city suburbs. Originally, back before the ISD complex had its own shuttle port, this was the main transit point for all the people commuting to the headquarters of the Intelligence and Security Agency. Times had changed since then, though, and the airfield was showing the signs of its age and its state of comparative abandonment. Windows were boarded up, and walls once proud with colorful paint were now flaking and weathered. Weeds were starting to grow through the cracks in the tarmac of the disused parts of the facility, and more than a few of the terminals and hangers looked like they had been closed permanently.

Yet, parked off to the right-hand side of what had once been the main concourse, a subtle grey shuttle stood fueled and ready. It was reminiscent of Earth's early space shuttles; it was just smaller and greyer, had stumpier, squared-off wings, and much more advanced-looking engines. Adam looked at it through the car window, then turned to nod at Dom before they both stepped out of the vehicle.

They rounded to the rear of the hover car and popped open the trunk. Inside was a sight that Adam had hoped he would never have to lay eyes on again. It was a simple, off-brown, waxed-canvas hold-all bag, its leather handles worn from overuse. It had been over a decade since Adam had seen it, a reminder of the days when his reputation had been earned in practice rather than by threats or intimidating promises. Despite all those long years, it was still too soon. Inside that bag was his former life, a time before Jen, before his daughters, before the warmth that had melted his icy exterior to let people in for the very first time. They were his "tools of the trade." Instruments that could redefine the meaning of human suffering in an afternoon.

He didn't think he would ever need them again.

Or, more accurately, he hoped he wouldn't. Some nightmares never really went away, and he had no immediate desire to establish new ones.

But he had told Dom to bring everything, and he had. The bag wasn't the only thing to be liberated from the car's trunk. Rifles, handguns, body armor, rope, cuffs, duct tape, and enough packages of pharmacological "interrogation aides" to make the ISD pharmacy green with envy. This wasn't going to be a pleasant afternoon, not for him and certainly not for Minister White, but she had crossed a line when she threatened his girls; she had started something that couldn't be undone.

In 49 BC, Julius Caesar was a rebel and a traitor to the Empire of Rome. In all of the city's long history to that point, and standing field army had never approached the city. It had been seen as a political threat against the republic. In early January of that year, Caesar led his army over the Rubicon River, the spiritual border of the city of Rome, starting a series of events that would see him crowned as Dictator and Emperor. And thus was coined the phrase "to cross the Rubicon." It meant to pass a point of no return, to commit an act that there was no coming back from. It was either onward to victory... or death. Sandra White had crossed her Rubicon when she threatened Adam's family. But he couldn't help but wonder if this was a crossing of his own.

His fingers ran over the bag's handle as Dom hoisted a different bag filled with weaponry and electronics onto his shoulder. Then, he waited for his boss. Adam caught the look, nodded, and hoisted the bag out of the trunk. He grabbed the armor bags, too, as Dom picked up the rest and turned toward the shuttle.

There was no going back now.

********

Histories and Lore

For countless centuries, mankind has used a humble compass - or more modern iterations of it - as a means of navigating the surface of our humanity's homeworld. The concept is simple: The magnetic field created by the planet's core intersects the little blue orb at two points, the north pole and the south. Technically speaking, the geographic north pole - the top of the planet Earth - is not quite in the same place as the magnetic north pole, and the same can be said for the south, but that is semantics. The point is that a needle inside a compass is always attracted to magnetic north, allowing its user to determine which way they are facing. Add in a measurement for distance traveled and the speed at which you are moving, and you have a basic understanding of rudimentary navigation methods.

This method, predictably, doesn't work in space.

Not only is there no centralized and universally detectable point that can be used to measure a constant bearing - i.e. there is no north in space - but compasses, or anything working on the principle of one, can only operate in two dimensions. It can only give you North, South, East or West. What it cannot give you is an up or down. In fact, up and down are such foreign concepts to human thinking that there weren't even globally recognized terms for them when humanity first left the embrace of our home system. That being the first time that destinations not on our orbital plane - a fancy way of saying something is above or below the Sol System - needed to be taken into account.

It was a college student, of all people, who came up with a fair and accepted way for these axes to be decided on when the map of Earth's local part of space was first being drawn. He suggested that since London's Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) would be adopted as the standard time throughout the fledgling race's stellar territories, the precise location of the planet at the exact second of the New Year in London, 2236 - the year humanity first developed ships capable of leaving the Sol System. From Earth's location, a straight line would be drawn through the sun and stretching out into the cosmos. That was "North," and it would sit on the top edge of any map. One hundred and eighty degrees behind it would be "South," and ninety degrees on either side would be "East'' and "West." Above and below were a lot less political; simply draw a line straight up from Magnetic North - as opposed to the slightly tilted geographical North - and that would give one of the axes for the third spatial dimension - Up, or Elevation as it became known - and, predictably, a line straight down from Earth's magnetic south pole would give down - or Depression. But considering the Earth was constantly moving, the nexus of these axes was shifted to the Sun, meaning that Sol became the literal center of humanity's Universe.

Any point in the galaxy could then be measured on what was, mathematically speaking, a three-dimensional plotting chart. Simply by measuring how far along the nearest three lines any given point was would give you three numbers. How far North or South, how far East or West, and its elevation above or depression below Earth it was. The first number was North/South; positive numbers indicated how far North, and negative numbers how far South. The second number was East and West, positive for the former and negative for the latter.

No prizes for guessing what the third number was.

Using this system, any point in the Galaxy could be accurately plotted relative to Earth. But therein lay the next problem: a ship, or any stellar body that was not at the center of the Sol system, had to know exactly where it was relative to the Sun in order for any of those coordinates to have any meaning. With that information - calculated by increasingly complex and accurate Navigational Computers - shortened to Nav-Coms - ships were able to plot a course between distance star systems with astonishing accuracy.

This new plotting system was also the basis on which stellar cartography became based. Maps of local and then increasingly distant space were populated at incredible speeds. A lot of the information was already available from humanity's eons-old obsession with the stars and astronomy, but ships were still sent to every neighboring star over the course of decades, mainly because Astronomy told scientists and cartographers a lot about the suns at those coordinates, but little to nothing about any planets orbiting them.

This period of time, when exploration and expansion into the cosmos were the primary reasons behind most of Mankind's space missions, is now called "The Giant Leap Forward," loosely based on Neil Armstrong's famous quote from the surface of Lunar.

Over the course of more than a century, the maps seemed to practically populate themselves as humanity reached ever deeper into the stars, until, that was, they bumped into the Hudson Expanse. It took mankind almost another eighty years to develop the hyperspace and sensor technology to be able to traverse this wasteland of barren rocks and dead worlds before their expansion could be continued on the other side. In the meantime, the home territories - or the "core worlds" as they came to be known - were being developed at an astonishing rate. The wave of migrants, looking for a new world to call home instead of the grossly overpopulated Earth, meant that wealth and resources were poured into this massive colonization effort on a scale that has not been even close to matched in the centuries since.

It was, however, in the expanses of space beyond the inner ring that mankind first encountered their first alien species. The story of that auspicious day is one for another time, but it is sufficient to say that humanity soon found out that numerous alien species could be found at varying distances, in all directions, around the space that we now call the Imperium. But again, to have any sort of understanding of the stellar geography of this part of the Galaxy, we must revert back to that first centuries-old method of defining direction.

The Maruvians were the first species encountered by Mankind. A squat, hairy, cautious race, their territory was vast, but their border with the Imperium was actually rather small, taking up a small slice of real estate on the North Eastern edge of human space at roughly the same elevation plane as Earth.

The Khuvakians were second. A fierce territorial reptilian race with whom humanity has clashed numerous times over the centuries since our first meeting. Their territory is less than half that of the Maruvians, but a lot of it is pressed tightly against the boundaries of the Imperium. Separated by a slither of diplomatically agreed open systems to act as a buffer zone, their territory stretches from the western edge of Maruvian space and almost all the way around the western edge of the Imperium before ending close to the southern point of our compass. It is also tall, towering over the Imperium and even lapping above it in a few spots while being just as deep.

Toward the east was something of an easier situation. As isolated by the Hudson Exanse as Earth had been, it was also as much of an impediment to the territorial expansion of the other races as it was to humans. It was also, fortunately, extremely strategically located. To the east, at least so far, was nothing. The end of the spiral arm of the galaxy with nothing but deep space beyond it. It was in these regions that the rebellion rose, and - beyond it and to the desolate sides of that arm - was where the Mariners made their home. As far as they were from any form of civilization, the latter weren't considered as much of a consideration by the Imperium after their original secession.

The situation beneath the Imperium was a lot more complicated, with two species of bitterly opposing ideologies waging a seemingly endless series of wars between them.

To the Northwest and below were the Malenites, one of the more interesting species in this part of space. Thousands of years ago, the Malenites had been the first, and hitherto only, known species to create a true artificial intelligence. Predictably, things had not gone well after that, and the AI had assumed control of the species' entire remotely operated fleet, waged a merciless, relentless war against its creators, and then enslaved them. It took three millenia for the Melenites to finally wrestle control back from their robotic overlords and destroy the rogue AI. After that, they banned any sort of advanced computing from their society. This highly advanced space-faring race essentially destroyed the entire mechanism that allowed them to construct, maintain, or even use the vast majority of their technology, and they regressed, technologically speaking, by centuries practically overnight.

In place of using computers, the Melenites focused inwards, training a sub-strata of their society in a method of highly efficient thought, specializing in advanced mathematics. These specialists essentially became biological computers, able to perform almost the same tasks as the previous generations' most advanced computers. The Cunians, as these people became known, became essential in the efforts to reclaim not only their space-faring heritage and their society's former glories but also reclaim and rebuild everything that had been lost in the cataclysmic war against their own AI.

The universe, being the cruel and random place it is, gave the Melenites the Eriliant Congress for a neighbor. Located on the SouthEastern part of the Imperium's underbelly, the Erilantan were almost the Antithesis of what the Melentits stood for. This is a society that wholeheartedly embraces technology. They are not, as would be predicted, a race of AI but rather a race of transferred intelligence. At some point after adolescence, an Erilantan's brain is placed into a robotic chassis, essentially granting them not only massively increased physical and cognitive abilities but as close to immortality as can be imagined. The Elriantans are one of the youngest of the stellar empires, their ascension into the heavens coming even later than humanity's, but - thanks to this enormously enhanced intellect and a complete lack of internal conflict - the rate of their technological advancement has been breathtaking. In only a few short decades, they have mastered the principles of advanced Hyperspeed theory, sensors, weapons, shielding, and ship design that took the Imperium almost two centuries.

Contrary to the Melenites' warnings, though, relations between the Elirantans and the rest of the galaxy have been nothing but peaceful. Their military doctrine is one purely of defense and exploration, which is fortunate for the excessively hostile Melenites because despite catastrophic losses in every military engagement they have initiated - and there is evidence that they have initiated them all - The Elirant Congress has not launched a single attack against their neighbors in return. Military strategists and planners are in disagreement about how much damage the Elirantans could do if they decided to change this non-aggressive policy. Some say they could overrun the entire Melenite Empire in as little as two weeks.

The others think it's closer to four.

The top of the Imperium, the part of space directly above human territory, is even more chaotic and complicated than its underbelly. There are no empires there, but dozens of space-capable species, too numerous to name in full. Some of them have grown their territory to encompass only a handful of systems, while others only control their own. According to the aforementioned military planners, this would be the ideal direction for the Imperium's next territorial expansion push. However, the amount of trade coming into and out of human space to these small, independent worlds is truly enormous, with some of the Imperium's most wealthy worlds relying almost exclusively on these trade routes for their income. If wealth breeds power, some of the most powerful humans alive are very keen not to alienate or outright annex their extremely lucrative partners.

Of all of these, it has been the recent war between the Khuvakians and the Imperium that has kept that species at the forefront of the human mindset. At the moment, an uneasy peace is being stringently observed by both sides, but everyone is in agreement.

It is a peace that is unlikely to last for long.