Chapter 9 - A meeting of minds

Emma. 1

Jess was screaming. It was amazing how she could make it sound so real when Emma knew that it was anything but. As one of the best, most requested whores on the colony, Jess had a constant stream of men passing through their shared little apartment, and each of them paid an eye-watering amount of credits to get inside her. But god-damn, did that girl know how to put on a show. The headboard of her bed was knocking against the wall, and the fainter but growing grunts of her John were almost being drowned out as she screamed out the words that invariably hurried the whole process along.

"Oh fuck!" Jess's muffled voice sounded through the thin walls. "Fuck that big dick into my slutty teenaged cunt, use it; you paid for it, it's fucking yours! Do it, fucking dump that load into me, make me feel it, make me feel you cum, do it, baby, fucking ruin me!"

Jess watched too much porn.

Fortunately, it would seem that the men who paid for her company did too. Emma found it cringe-worthy. It was tacky, it was cheesy, and she couldn't imagine for the life of her how anybody could get off on something so obviously scripted... both the porn and Jess's panted tirade. She literally used those words, verbatim, on everyone. Of course, there was something to be said, Jess claimed, for the throes of passion. Seeing such a pretty face using such dirty words, the guy knowing where that mouth had been and what it was capable of. It was the loss of one's self into the fantasy, and although none of these guys ever made her climax, she enjoyed the fantasy almost as much as they did. Men didn't pay her for sex, she had said in one of her more thoughtful moments; they paid her for the fantasy, and then they paid her to leave. Or, more accurately - since Jess lived here - they paid for the ability to be able to leave, guilt-free.

That made less than no sense to Emma. It seemed to run contrary to everything she thought she knew about sex, love, or relationships.

But then, even Emma had to admit that she knew as close to nothing about those subjects as it was possible for her to know. Emma wasn't quite a virgin, but she may as well have been. She was nineteen, and one fumble with a former boyfriend a few years previously did not a woman make. It had been quick, it had been unsatisfying, it had been confusing, and it had been more than a little tainted by the fact that the boy in question - a boy she had convinced herself loved her - had scurried out of the room immediately afterwards, only to dump her the next day, then hook up with someone more... worldly... about a week later. That had been her last foray into the world of sexual adventure.

Jess had no such qualms. Her body count had been in the double figures long before she realized that men would pay good money - a lot of good money - to get access to her body. Jess had it all: she had the sultry good looks, the killer body, the overly healthy attitude toward sex, and the dirtiest mind of any woman Emma had ever met. More than that, Jess argued, her father had always told her that the key to a happy life was to find something she loved to do and then find a way to get paid for it. Emma doubted this was what the man had in mind, but Jess loved to fuck, and she sure as hell had found a way to make it pay.

Emma's own father had given rather different advice.

"There are two types of boys," her father had said, sitting her down one day to have his version of 'the talk' with her. At the time, she had wanted the ground to swallow her whole; she had been mortifyingly embarrassed, but the more time had gone on since that day, the more sense everything he had said now made. "There are real men, and there are dogs, players, fuck boys, or whatever you want to call them. Now, no real man is born that way; a real man is made. He is made through sacrifice, hard work, through investing time in himself and in the people around him. It is his mission, his purpose in life, to improve himself, and a real man will take you with him on that journey. He will look after you; he won't treat you like property, but you will be the most valuable thing in his life, and that is the way he will treat you. But a real man wants a good woman, and all women, at some point in their lives, want a real man.

"Fuck boys are the opposite. Either unwilling or unable to put the time or effort into improving themselves. They see dating as a game, and the only thing they are looking for is found in just one place.... Between your legs. They can be manipulative, abusive, inconsiderate, objectifying, and immature. It doesn't matter how good of a person they are; if they have never put the time in to build their own lives up, they cannot possibly know how to be a positive part of yours. They don't care if you are a good woman; they want to win the dating or the hook-up game and the prize for that victory is what is between your legs. Access to that, be it for one night or for years at a time, is the sum of their ambition. They will take a good woman, drag her down to their level, and then beat them into submission with experience.

"This is the main difference between men and women. To have any sort of value at all, a man has to earn it. Success, ambition, drive, maturity, life experience, the ability to provide. Women are born with value. A woman's sexuality is the highest of all prizes for a man, for any kind of man, and women come tailor-made to be everything a man could ever want. They come of age already in possession of their youth, their beauty, their femininity, their fertility, and their purity. I know it sounds awful, but no matter how evolved we think we are as human beings, we are still primal, instinctually driven creatures. Those are the women that men are biologically hardwired to desire because they are the ones most likely to continue his genetic line. But each time they give their sexuality to a man, it loses value."

"So, what?" the younger Emma had argued defiantly, railing against the misogynism she felt she was hearing. "I have to save myself for the right man? No sex before marriage? Should I prepare myself for a life in the kitchen, too?"

Her father shook his head. "No, those concepts are, thankfully, long gone. What I am saying is that you should be selective in who you give yourself to. You should wake up each morning, look in the mirror, and see yourself for what you are. Not some trophy housewife or some piece of arm candy, but a vibrant, intelligent, beautiful woman that any man in the entire galaxy would be lucky to get. So if any man is to get you, then he had better damned well be worth it. Because by giving yourself to any guy who shows you attention, all you are doing is cheapening the value that every man should aspire to be worthy of. The more you do it, the cheaper it gets, until the men out there who you deserve, the ones you will eventually want to be with, won't want something that everyone else has already been given for free.

"There are a million things that make a girl into a good woman, things she can do, just like men, to build herself up. Get your education, be the woman who challenges her man to be better, be able to match him, hell, beat him on an intellectual level. Find your passions and chase them with everything you have. Develop your sense of self, learn that there is a difference between being smart and being wise, that there is a difference between being hot and being beautiful, and that when it comes to a relationship, every single human being alive, men or women, are only the sum of what they can bring to the table. Beauty will never fade with age, hotness does, but beautiful women are born every day, you need to have more than that, and a man needs to be looking for more than that to deserve you."

"Aren't you supposed to be telling me to find love or something?" She had asked.

"Love is the most important and powerful thing on earth, Ems," he sighed, using the pet name he had given her as an infant. "But love comes later. This is just to start the relationship; this is to get the door open. Love is through the door, but it can and will remain sealed closed if both you and your future partner aren't careful now. And you deserve love.

"Every good, real man out there has been on a journey to build himself up for his entire life; he has built himself up to be a King of his own world. But contrary to what the magazines and the movies tell you, a King doesn't want a Princess; he wants a Queen. But even if you are a Queen in every single other way imaginable, no King is going to settle for a woman who gave away the most intrinsically valuable part of herself to anybody who caught her eye at the time."

"Jesus, Dad," she had groaned. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I am a man," he answered simply. "And I know how men think. More than that, I am the only man who is going to tell you the truth about this because I am the only man who is not going to try to manipulate or charm you into bed. One day, you will want to settle down, you'll want to find someone, and you will want to be happy; I'm giving you the one piece of advice that nobody else can."

"I'm not sure Mom would agree with that."

"Who do you think asked me to talk to you about it?" he'd shrugged. "When I met your mother, I was 32, and she was 26; she had been with three people before me."

"Oh, so she wasn't a good woman 'cause she'd given it away?" Emma snorted.

"Three men in eight years, assuming she started at 18, is not giving it away. That is being in a few relationships that she dedicated herself to, and they didn't work out. That is being selective. Your mom was 26 when we met, your aunt Kim was 22, and she had already fucked around with about 30 different guys. Tell me, what is the one thing that she always complains about now?"

Emma failed to stifle another groan as she thought about the long, wine-filled nights that she had been forced to listen to as her Aunt bitched to her mother. "That she can't find a good man and that the only men interested in her are only after one thing."

"She chased the cheap thrill. She lied, she cheated, she threw away the good men who were all around her because she wanted the next shiny object. Then, when her looks had dried up, and a new generation of easy women came along to replace her, she was left dealing with the consequences of her actions."

"But mom tells her that she'll find someone. So she's lying? To her own sister?"

"Yup. Because your Mom doesn't want to hurt her feelings by telling her the truth. She made stupid decisions, poor choices, and chased attention instead of affection. And now, real men won't take her seriously because she can never be his Queen. Sure, they'll fuck her; no single man is going to turn down free sex, but when it comes down to what she brings to the table, that is all she has, and it's all used up."

She had to admit, thinking about the miserable, lonely, bitter woman and then hearing her alcohol-fuelled recollections of her wilder, younger days, this was marking a morbid kind of sense. "So, what are you saying I should do?"

"Date, be normal, find happiness, just be selective. If you think a guy is only with you for sex, he probably is. If he ever says something like, "If you loved me, you will... whatever," dump him. Immediately!"

"But what if I really like him?"

"That's even more reason to get rid of him. If a man loves you how you will want him to love you, he will never ask you to do anything you aren't comfortable with. He will put you first. That goes for sex, that goes for being around heights, or closed spaces, or big crowds, or eating shellfish, or wearing the color yellow. It doesn't matter. If a guy is using the fact that you love him to make you do something you don't want to do, then he is manipulating you, and he needs to go."

"But if he's not doing all that, if he's treating me well, and I want to... you know?"

"Go for it, enjoy it, but take it seriously. Sex is wonderful; it is beautiful, and it's special. So treat it that way, have fun, learn what you like and don't like, decide where your boundaries are, and then stick to them. But only when you are ready for it and only when you want it. The right guy will wait because he will see you as the goal, not the sex. Then, when you're all grown up and want to settle down, you will have the men lining up to be with you, then you will be able to pick who you want to be with, and trust me, that is not a position many women find themselves in."

"What do you mean?"

"Women control access to sex. They decide who gets it, when, why, and how much. Any girl... any girl... can walk into any bar, in any town, at any time of day or night, and is almost guaranteed to be able to find someone to fuck her. It's easy for them. Men can't do that; that is why they will take the free sex when it's offered but don't respect the women who offer it. But when the dust settles, and the woman grows up, when she wants to settle down, it is the man who decides who he wants to commit to; they control access to relationships, and a woman's past will play a big part in that. So if you are selective now, you won't only be safer, happier, and feel more fulfilled by any relationships you do have, but when you are looking for a life partner, your past can't be something you are judged by, but something you are desired for."

That conversation had happened a few years ago. Her father, ever the sage and worldly wise professor of human psychology, had retired with her mom to Capricorn, the paradise planet, leaving her with enough of his sizable retirement fund to get her settled on her own two feet. For a long time, his advice had made sense, but she could never really see how it fitted into her reality. But then she had decided to give her V-card to that boy. It had been a mistake, she was pretty sure she had known it was a mistake when she was making it. The whole thing had left her feeling cheap, used, and disrespected, and her father's words had come flooding back to her. Suddenly, they tied up perfectly with reality. She had been played, and she had fallen for it. After that, she followed his advice to the letter. She had been in a handful of short-lasting relationships, but the red flags he had told her to look out for had always reared their ugly heads, and she had cut them off before they ever got between her legs.

Then, she had met Jess. Jess was a wild child. They had first been introduced in college. Emma was aiming for medical school, and Jess was toying with the idea of going into childcare, two very different subjects requiring the same foundation academic credits. Jess had always been a party girl; she had been the center of attention in any social gathering she had been involved in, and Emma had been given a front-row seat to the deeper and deeper depths of her sexual adventurousness.

Literally, in some cases.

Jess had wholeheartedly agreed with the advice given by Emma's father. She hated the way men treated her. "Fuck meat," she called herself. "A hot piece of ass." It had made her very cynical when it came to relationships, let alone concepts such as love. Jess's attitude, however, was that the damage was already done, so why not milk it for as long as her looks and her vagina held out. And milking it was exactly what she had done. She made more money in a few weeks of sex work than anyone in the childcare profession could hope to earn in a year. As for her future happiness, that was a bridge Jess was content to burn when she came to it. Men would only ever see her as a whore, she had decided. Even if she packed up sticks and moved to a whole new planet, the only way she would be able to escape her life before her middle age would be to lie about it, and her reasoning is that what kind of relationship would it be if it was based on the lie she had been forced to give in order to start it.

The problem was Emma agreed with her. Jess was her best friend; she was like the sister she had never had. Born of very different lives in very different worlds, they had become the closest of friends under the most unlikely of circumstances. But Emma could admit that her appeal as a wife or even as a serious girlfriend was practically zero.

"Oh fuck yes!" her friend's howling voice echoed through the walls. "Dump that hot cum inside me, fuck baby, I can feel it; I can feel you filling me! God, I'm going to... fuck... I'm cumming!"

She wasn't—she wasn't even close. And the script that she had been screaming out a few times a day for the past year that Jess had been doing this, was predictable enough for Emma to mouth the words along to. That always made her giggle.

There were a few muffled grunts, a few quieter groans, and silence descended on the apartment. About ten minutes later, a set of footsteps echoed along the corridor outside Jess's room and then sheepishly out the front door. It would seem that this guy was done. If he was anything like the others, he had probably barely said more than a few words to Jess before dressing, paying up, and leaving. And just like that, she had made more creds than her work at the local clinic paid her in a week.

The world was crazy.

As the man was leaving the apartment, Emma listened as the shower in Jess's ensuite turned on, and - another ten minutes later - Jess stepped into the room wearing a robe and rubbing a towel through her hair. "I swear to god," she chuckled as she looked over at Emma. "The worst part of this job is the number of showers I have to take. My hair is fucked from all the washing it."

Emma smiled. She was curled up on their old but exquisitely comfortable sofa, reading a book. Well, she wasn't. She couldn't afford an actual paper book; those things cost a small fortune these days. She was reading a novel on her holo pad. "You know you can have a shower without washing your hair, right?"

"Depends where the guy cums," Jess winked back playfully to her. "How's the book?" She asked as she walked into the kitchen to grab a drink from the dispenser.

"Meh," Emma shrugged, putting the holo pad down. "It's the middle of the series, and this is the book that's setting up the next big event, so nothing is really happening, but it has all the stuff in it that gets important later."

"I'll wait for the movie," Jess smirked as she dropped down onto the other end of the sofa. "Any chance of going out for a drink tonight? I could do with getting out of here."

Jess was flitting. She did it quite a lot on days like today; she was bouncing very quickly from one subject to the next with barely a breath between. When Emma was first getting to know her, she had wrongly thought that it was a lack of interest in what she was saying and had taken offense on more than one occasion. But as their friendship had blossomed, she had learned differently. Jess was feeling antsy, probably because she hadn't been able to get herself off, and she was feeling frustrated. That last guy had been her third and final client of the day; she was probably aching in ways and in places that Emma could scarcely imagine, and she was - sexually speaking - wound as tight as a drum. Going out for drinks very often led to Jess finding someone to hook up with properly, just to get off. Not for money, not to give the guy what he wanted, but to get something for herself.

Emma didn't mind that, provided they did it back at the guy's place. As loud as Jess was when she was pretending to enjoy her sex with clients, she was really fucking loud when she was actually hitting her climax, and Emma needed her sleep. "Yeah, why not?" She smiled, tossing the now unneeded holo pad onto the side table and glancing over at the time.

"Yes!" Jess grinned. "That's my girl. Hey, you never know; maybe you will meet Mr. Right tonight."

"One can hope," Emma smiled back, loving her friend's youthful exuberance, enthusiasm, and general zest for life.

"Well, one would be ideal, but more than one can get awkward. There are too many legs involved."

"That is why humans made laser scalpels," Emma grinned, not rising to Jess's playful jibe. Jess threw her head back, laughing loud and long.

"Okay, I'm gonna go get ready. Meet here in half an hour?"

"Sounds good to me,"

Jess was on her feet and skipping out of the living room door before Emma could even pull herself off the sofa. She picked up the holo pad to safely stow it in her bedroom, ready for later, and walked to her own room. Closing the bedroom door behind her, Emma stopped to look herself over in the mirror.

Generally speaking, she was happy with what she saw. She was far from flawless, but - at least in her own opinion - those little imperfections added something to her overall look rather than detracted from them. She would never call herself hot - an opinion strongly and vehemently disputed by Jess and the occasional male suitor - but she was content to call herself pretty. Her long, flowing, blonde hair fell past her shoulder blades, and although she usually wore it in a loose, comfortable ponytail, she could tease it into waves, or curls, or some other fancy-worded style if she wanted. She had a cute nose, full lips, a nice smile, and a long, slender neck - perhaps a little too long. Her body was pretty nice, too; it had better be for the amount of torture she had put herself through to stay in shape. Her chest was about right for her frame, a little more than a handful, but not too big and not too small, and her hips flared out to just the right degree. She was short, too, which made her legs look a lot longer than they actually were.

But of everything about her, it was her eyes that she liked the most, and that was where most of the compliments about her appearance started. Deep, deep blue, almost endlessly so, there was an energy behind them; it was a hard description to pin down.

But sometimes, in the right light and from the right angle, when she was in the right mood.

They seemed to almost glow.

********

Laura. 10

For reasons that she couldn't quite put her finger on, the strangest thing about walking onto the bridge that morning was the fact that Elijah wasn't in the Captain's chair. She had no idea whatsoever why she found that odd; she had only seen him in it for about an hour the previous day, and yet he already seemed like he belonged there. The boy was young; she had no idea how many years he had under his belt, but it couldn't possibly be enough of them for him to seem perfectly at home in command of a vessel like the Atlas. And yet he did. This juxtaposition was more than a little jarring. In her experience, Captains attained their rank through knowledge and experience gathered over decades of service, and although Elijah had apparently downloaded both of these attributes from the ship itself, that didn't mean that he should look the part.

Except he did.

There was something about him, something she now realized was present in every Captain she had ever served under - at least the ones who had earned her respect. A confidence, a self-assuredness, a focus, a purpose, a commitment, a loyalty, and an honor. These men and women literally made the safety of their crew their personal responsibility, and although she had never seen it for herself, she had heard tales of spiraling depression visited upon Captains who had lost someone. It wasn't just responsibility; it was the highest of duties. There were things that this boy simply shouldn't have, yet he exuded them by the bucket load. She found herself drawn to his air of authority and ability. She should have been absolutely shitting herself the previous day when he had faced down a whole squadron of Imperium warships, and yet, she hadn't doubted Elijah's abilities for a moment. She had wondered what the ship was capable of; she had gawked in wide-eyed astonishment at the display of alien power, but she hadn't doubted the ship's captain for a single second.

That was odd.

Laura doubted everyone.

She worked alone. With the exception of a few years with the research team on the Primus, she had worked alone for most of her career. Being a Mariner almost automatically demanded service; everyone contributed to the greater whole, but the ways you could contribute were as vast and varied as they were in any other sort of society. There were ship engineers, there were hydroponics workers, there were teachers and nurses, and entertainers. Sure, some of the more mundane roles of a normal society, like interior decorators, weren't really a thing, but there was nothing at all stopping Laura from deciding to be a plumber. Making sure the toilets worked and the water flowed to the dispensers was as essential a role as the people who manned the fleet helms. But Laura liked the solitude, she liked the independence, she liked the responsibility and she was infinitely happier and more comfortable alone than she was in a crowded room. She had her mission, she had her orders, but as long as she got it done, she was left more or less to get on with things. On a day-to-day basis, she neither answered to anyone nor was she ever in a position where she had to trust her life or her safety to anyone else. More importantly, her solitude gave her two things that she was inordinately grateful to have: Her ship and the freedom to explore the stars. Never in her entire life had she wanted anything more than that, and she couldn't imagine any reality where she would willingly give it up.

So it was more than a little disconcerting, looking at the very young Elijah and seeing in him a man she would willingly follow. Someone she could already start to feel herself looking up to, but most of all, someone she could feel herself starting to trust.

To make things even more confusing, she was starting to see other things as well. The authority he seemed to wear so easily looked good on him. It's not that she found him attractive; she was literally old enough to be his mother, but the simple fact was that there was something very alluring about a man able to take power in his stride and handle it so effortlessly.

"Marshal," Wu smiled over at his younger compatriot, hunched over a screen and scanning through endless reams of indecipherable gibberish on it, or at least indecipherable to her. "You're up early."

"Up?" Elijah turned to face them with a frown before glancing down at his vambrace-mounted computer, apparently checking the time. "Oh, yeah, it would seem so."

Wu's grin seemed to spread a little wider. "You've been here all night, haven't you?"

Elijah smiled bashfully but nodded. "I started reading through the archives, blinked, and you two were coming back."

Wu chuckled. "Time flies when you're having fun."

Laura watched the interaction with interest, but this time, her attention wasn't focused on the young, dashing Marshal but his seemingly ancient-beyond-measure companion. Wu's personality, his way of talking, and his entire demeanor seemed to jump to and from different extremes almost randomly. At one point, he could be serious and stony, like a wizened old professor; other times, he could be mischievous and teasing. Other times still he could vary between professional and paternal. There seemed to be no underlying character to the man, at least no further than his current mood dictated. It was oddly endearing. The only way she could describe it was that the man was... honest. Almost comically so.

"Hmm, yeah, apparently so." Elijah smiled and straightened himself up, sitting back from the monitor. Laura got the distinct impression that Elijah had been in that hunched-over position for hours and probably hadn't moved more than a few inches in that entire time.

"Anything you want to share with the class?" Wu asked, still grinning, as he dropped into the chair beside the captain's seat.

"Ermmm," Elijah answered in a long, drawn-out, higher-pitched tone, glancing back at the screen. "Yeah, but not yet. I haven't finished reading about it yet, and I'm not sure what to think about the information I do have."

"Sounds intriguing,"

"It really is," Elijah replied thoughtfully, his eyes drifting back to the screen for a moment before returning to the two of them. "It's giving me a lot to think about."

"So, umm," Laura interrupted as the conversation came to a screeching halt. Wu apparently chose not to probe further. "What's the plan for today?"

"We'll be hitting the edge of the system soon," Elijah said after a few seconds of staring into the middle distance, looking like he was interfacing with the information he was getting from the ship. "So aside from jumping to hyperspace once we're clear of the gravity wells... I don't have any. Is there anything you were hoping for?"

Laura blinked, not expecting to even be consulted, let alone outright asked. "I... hmmm," she hadn't actually thought of this when she had asked the question. She had expected to just be going along with whatever the two men were planning, being their 'guest' and all. "I suppose I would quite like to explore the Atlas. I mean, if that's okay?"

Wu looked over to Elijah. "I don't see why not; you aren't a prisoner here. The ship is yours to explore at your leisure."

"What about, I don't know, restricted areas?"

This time, Elijah glanced at Wu. She was starting - at least anecdotally - to get a handle on their relationship. Elijah was in command of the Atlas, but Wu was in charge of maintaining the ship and keeping it safe and in working order. It was Elijah's call, but Laura wandering around the ship was very much within Wu's area of responsibility. It was an odd way to work, but it did make a weird, if impractical, sort of sense. "Short of detonating an explosive, which we know you don't have," Wu shrugged. "I'm not sure you could do any harm to the ship's critical systems if you tried. The only question is, do you want to do it alone, or would you like some company?"

Her knee-jerk reaction was to say alone, but she hesitated. Firstly, there was the issue of navigating the ship when she didn't understand the language used to map it, including most of the buttons in the transporter room thing. Secondly, the parts she really wanted to explore were the parts of the Primus that were either sealed off - like the main hangar bay had been - or exploring systems that were never powered up, and nobody had any idea what they did. That orb thing in the center of the ship was a good example. For both of those missions to be anything close to productive, she would need someone to show her around and explain what those systems did. Besides, she was starting to like both of these men - Wu, with his mischievous yet wise Grandfather routine, and Elijah, the enigmatic leader. Spending time with either of them wouldn't be the worst thing in the world...

Which was even more odd of an odd feeling. She didn't think that way about anyone.

Fuck it. Whatever it was that was going on in her head; she decided that she might as well lean into it. Call it research. "Sure, some company would be great."

"I believe that is my area of expertise," Wu stood back up from his chair and nodded to her. "Marshall, are you planning on doing more reading? Or are you going to try to sleep for a little?"

Elijah seemed to consider this for a moment before checking the time again. "I need to jump the ship into hyperspace in a little under an hour, so I will read until then and get a little sleep afterward." His eyes kept drifting back to whatever it was he had been reading on the screen. Laura found herself becoming quite curious as to what had captured his attention so ravenously. This was a man in command of the single most powerful piece of technological engineering in the known galaxy, a man with the entire fate of every species in this part of space at his fingertips to mold, if he so decided, a man who could - if he decided - change the future of... well... everything, and he was engrossed to distraction in whatever was on that screen. Perhaps it was just the way Laura's mind worked, a function of her ever-present curiosity, but she was becoming increasingly curious about what it was.

Wu had sided up next to her and nudged her with an elbow as he grinned teasingly over toward Elijah. He was already back in the pits of his reading and had already resumed that hunched-over posture as... whatever it was... completely consumed his attention. No matter what it was, Wu obviously found the whole thing hilarious.

"Do you know what he's looking at?" she asked as they left the bridge.

"Nope," he shrugged. "Although, if I had to guess. I'd say he has found our history."

"Your what?"

"Our history," Wu repeated. "Everything that happened to the Ancients up until the point that they ascended."

"Wait... that actually happened??" Laura gawked at Wu as he pressed the button to open the transporter room. "I thought that was a Myth. Well, not a myth, but... you know... maybe just a theory about what happened to you all."

Wu squinted at her. "Of course, it happened. How else would you explain... all of this?" He waved his hand around at pretty much the entirety of Laura's existence for the past few days, not to mention the existence of the ship and the two men she was now sharing it with.

Laura scratched her head and chuckled to herself as she followed Wu through the parting door and into the transporter room. "Well, yeah, I guess when you put it like that. Is your history, I don't know, interesting enough to get him as engrossed as that?"

Wu threw his head back and laughed. "Oh, you have no idea. But I'm sure Elijah will share once he's got his head around it. It's a good thing he is processing it as an Ancient rather than a human. There are a few million years' worth of history in there, and I doubt he's had time to get to the really interesting stuff yet. It would take a literal lifetime for a human to learn it all."

That made sense; there were historians and archivists in the Mariner fleet who spent a lifetime studying the communiques and correspondences from only a few generations ago when the Mariners split from the rest of humanity. Studying the entirety of human history for only a few hundred thousand years before that was the purpose of countless historians humanity over. The prospect of having an entire extinct people's history at your fingertips must have been an awfully tempting proposition for someone like Elijah, who - by all accounts - had been thrust into that world at birth yet had only recently stepped up to the role. The possibility of being able to learn about the people who made him who he was, the potential answers or explanations about the life that lay before him, and literally where his DNA came from must have been an awfully enticing lure.

She nodded, letting those thoughts play out before realizing that Wu was just looking at her. She arched an eyebrow at him. "It's your tour, Miss Dondarion," he smirked. "What would you like to see first?"

"Oh," she blinked. They must have been standing in the transporter room outside the bridge for the last few minutes, her mind trying to make sense of things and him just watching her process. "Um... I wouldn't mind having a look around those ships in the hangar if that would be okay."

"Actually, I would like to have a look around them, too."

********

Adam. 8

Humans were strange creatures. He'd had this thought many times over the years in his line of work, and the longer he had done it, the more this theory had solidified in his mind. Children were honest, brutally, and simplistically honest. Either something hurt, or it didn't. A skinned knee would make them cry; an aching stomach would make them cry; a broken arm would make them cry. Pain hurt, and expressing that hurt was the only conceivable option for them.

Adults, as they grew older, seemed to develop an air of defiance when it came to pain. It was like they were trying to prove that they could take it to a world that generally didn't give a shit. He had personally watched men being worked over with steel pipes, being electrocuted, and being partially drowned, yet they had remained curiously tight-lipped. But yet, more often than not - at least in people not trained to take the pain - their cooperation seemed to come after a bit of a threshold.

Pain, as far as he could tell, came in a number of different types. Of course, pain was pain; some things hurt, and some other things hurt a lot, but the threshold always seemed to come after one of three points. Either it was a pain that their mind told them could threaten the function of their body, something that could actually kill them, despite them knowing that they were purposely being kept alive for information, or it was a pain that properly, permanently damaged the body, like having a few fingers cut off, but the main factor in getting someone to crack was their ability to see it.

Humans were very visual creatures. It was amazing to him how much damage and pain a person could withstand if it were invisible. That guy who had been tuned over by the steel pipe had arguably suffered significantly worse internal injuries than the guy who'd had his fingers cut off. Finger guy could live without a few digits, pipe guy would find it much harder to survive without a functioning liver. But the pipe guy couldn't see the damage; it was all too abstract, it was too theoretical. Sure, it hurt, it doubtlessly hurt a lot, but his mind was simply incapable of comprehending the idea that one of his internal organs was being smashed to a pulp, nor could it really grasp the consequences of that. Yet dragging a simple blade down the man's chest - arguably significantly less painful than having your kidneys burst by a Louisville slugger - had made the man fold like a wet paper bag. Why? Because he could see it. He could see the damage; he could see the consequence.

And seeing it made it real.

The realization of this idea had made Adam's work infinitely easier and had been one of many things that had propelled him up the ranks of the ISD. He became known as a man who could get things done. If he was being honest, though, he hated this part of the job; he hated causing pain; he wasn't the sort of person who took any sort of gratification out of it, either personal or professional. He hadn't ever considered the fact that he could make someone talk faster than any other person in all of the ISD as something to be proud of. It made him sick to his stomach. But it was the nature of the beast, and he had learned a long time ago that not even his dangerous-man act was enough to shield him from the guilt that came with it. No, to survive this with his sanity intact, he had to completely switch himself off. A total divorce of his personality from his surroundings. He wasn't angry, he wasn't righteous, he wasn't invested in the answers he was trying to get. When trying to extract information from a subject, he was just numb. He was functioning on autopilot. It was clinical, it was indifferent, it was procedural, and it wasn't personal.

Except, this time, it was. This wasn't an enemy of the state; this was an enemy of him, and he had no idea if the mental compartmentalization was going to hold up to that fact this time.

And there really was about to be a "this time."

Snatching the Minister of Internal Security had been almost comically easy. He had long been a proponent of the theory that the more power a person had, the more hubris came into play. They thought they were untouchable, so naturally, they assumed that nobody would ever try to touch them. His target lived in a very large and very isolated estate in Tuscany, and it had been guarded by only two security personnel. It was an almost laughably exposed position. Both guards were very well-paid and pretty capable men, but they were grossly outmatched by Adam and Dom. The guards also had some very shady records. They had each done some dark shit in their time, some of it under the protection of the ISD, but a lot of it as part of more criminal enterprises, and that was all the better. Both of them were now dead and were stashed in the trunk of Dom's car, a smoldering laser wound in each of them, execution style. Their bodies would make for decent enough scapegoats later.

The Minister herself had been stepping out of the shower when Adam had pressed the syringe of pentobarbital into her carotid artery. She hadn't made a sound and had been unconscious before her body had hit the floor.

Sandra White was awake now and was looking at him with an expression that somehow managed to be terrified, furious, indignant, and shocked all at the same time. It was like her mind couldn't work out which sentiment to focus on: the utter disbelief that he had the sheer, bloody-minded gall to do this to her, the Minister of Internal Security, with all the power, privilege, and personal protection of the Emperor himself that rank came with, or the fact that she was naked, tied to a chair in a dusty, grimy, abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere, watching a man she had seriously underestimated heating up a fire-poker with a blowtorch.

"Are you out of your fucking mind?" she screamed at him, and not for the first time either. "Do you know what is going to happen to you? What is going to happen to your family because of this?"

Adam's instinctive tense at the mention of his family never came. He had stepped outside himself, and thoughts of his family, of his girls, of the love, warmth, and meaning they gave to his life were waiting outside with the rest of his morality. Minister White wasn't looking at Adam the man, nor was she talking to him; Adam the man wasn't there. This was a different Adam; this one was darker, colder, and more detached. He was able to do things that ancient barbarians would have considered a step too far and still sleep perfectly well at night. It was the focused, intentional splitting of his personality, and as much as he hated the bad-guy persona he had crafted over the decades, this Adam was worse. This was Adam the monster. But for the first time ever, the monster felt justified in its release. The monster valued nothing; it loved nothing; it felt nothing... except for his family and the unreserved and fiery compulsion to protect them, to protect the only people on Earth whom he had ever loved. This woman had threatened them, and that made Monster Adam very, very angry.

Monster Adam didn't care about consequences, either. It gave less than a flying fuck about what would happen to him after it went through with this... as long as they were safe. He didn't matter, they did. They were everything; they were all there was, and he was nothing without them. Everything of any meaning he had ever had in his life was because of them. He would gladly give his life in a heartbeat if it meant saving them from pain. But, more importantly, he was more than willing to give Sandra's life for the same reason.

"Are you listening to me, you sniveling little shit?" She shrieked, clearly not used to being ignored. "I am going to..."

She was silenced by a mercilessly hard, back-handed swing of his right hand. He could almost hear the crack of her head whipping back as the back of his hand smashed into her face, and the momentum of the blow sent the chair tumbling backward, crashing Sandra onto the floor. It only took a few seconds for the ever-watchful Dom to step forward and lift it back up again.

He sighed and turned to face her. "What you need to understand, Minister," he said with an ominously and terrifyingly calm voice. "Is that nobody knows you are missing. When they discover you are missing, whose job would you say it is to look for you?"

Sandra's bleeding lips parted as she took this in but closed again as the truth of it registered in her mind. It was, of course, a carefully worded question: she wasn't going to be dead, only missing. Missing people could be found. He could tell that she still didn't quite believe that he would follow through with this; it was like the reality of her situation hadn't dawned on her yet. She thought he was bluffing. That was fine, though. As long as she held out any hope that she would be walking out of here alive, she would talk. People tended to get stubborn when faced with their own deaths. The trick was to push them right up to that point, then offer them a way out. All they had to do was tell him what he wanted to know.

"Now," he continued after waiting just long enough to confirm that her pointless, petulant little tirade had ended. "I am going to ask some questions. You are going to answer them. Once you have told me what I want to know, you and I are going to come to an understanding. If you don't give me what I want... well, let's just say that I have nowhere else to be for the next four weeks, and I can make sure this questioning lasts at least that long, and you will never be found until I decide to find you. Do you understand?"

"I'm not telling you anything!" she spat. "I would die first!"

The glowing hot tip of the poker hissed as he pressed it against her abdomen; the smell of burning flesh was already thick in the air before her agonized screams echoed through the room. "Let's not be hasty," he said, keeping the poker in place as she thrashed her body in a futile attempt to escape it. "Dying is something that can be very easily arranged if you want it. But I'm guessing that you place far too high a value on your life to throw it away over something as commonplace as information." He pulled the poker away, looking down at the sizzling, blistering scorch mark a few inches below her left breast. "Let's start with an easy one. Answer it..." he reached behind him and pulled out a medical case, opened it, and showed her the skin regeneration balm that would heal that wound completely in seconds, "...and the pain goes away. Refuse, and I put that poker somewhere a little more delicate." He left it to her imagination to decide where that was going to be.

She swallowed hard. She was taking him seriously now, but she didn't answer. She didn't refuse, either, though, and that was progress.

"Now, this is a question I am fairly certain I already know the answer to," his voice was still horrifyingly calm. "Or at least I know what answer you will give if you are trying to lie to me. So let's call this a test, an opportunity for you to earn some goodwill and avoid a lot of unnecessary pain." He waved the still-white-hot tip of the poker a few inches from her face for effect. The poker was crude; it was archaic, but there was something about it that evoked feelings of a bygone era when this sort of thing was more commonplace. It was a blunt-force object, metaphorically speaking, and it was barbaric. Any hunk of metal would have worked, but Monster Adam had always found the red-hot poker to be particularly effective. "I would like to know the real reason you had Frank Horrigan killed."

"That's what this is about?" Sandra gawked. The idea that something like this could be happening to her over someone as worthless as him seemed to shock her to her core. "You're throwing your life away over that."

"In part, yes." Adam shrugged. "And, for a moment, I am going to forgive the fact that you have answered a question with a question. You see, you killed Frank, and when I questioned you about it, you threatened my family. You are going through this because of that, but now I am curious about what is so important that you took it that far. So, once again... for the last time... why did you kill Frank Horrigan?"

"Fuck you! I'm not telling you..."

Another hiss and another scream burst into Adam's ears. Sandra may have tried to clamp her legs closed at the mention of somewhere more delicate to put that poker, but this was a marathon, not a sprint, and there were plenty of places on the body more sensitive to heat than others. Under the armpit, for example, where the poker was pressed now. Or, more accurately, the soft, nerve-filled patch of skin on the underside of her arm. He held her wide eyes as he held it there a little longer than necessary to prove the point.

"Okay, Okay, please, stop!" she screamed.

"That is the only question I will ask twice," he said, not removing the poker. "And this pain continues until you've answered it."

"I... fuck. Okay. I didn't kill him!" she screamed.

Adam paused and pulled the poker away. Eyeballing the heavily panting woman. "I get the impression that you don't mean that you didn't kill him; you got someone else to." Sandra shook her head. "Then who?"

"I... I Can't... I can't tell you."

Adam frowned. That was an odd way to phrase the answer. It was not that she wouldn't tell him, but she couldn't. There was only one reason for her to be tight-lipped now.

"The Emperor," Adam sighed, "The Emperor ordered his death."

Sandra's eyes shot open. She hadn't expected him to put it together that quickly. She made to say something, but one glance at the poker, still ready to be applied again, and her whole body slumped. She nodded her head.

Adam drummed his fingers against his chin. This changed things, not much, but enough to make him pause for a moment to consider it. "Did the Emperor order the deaths of the hit team, too?... lying now would be very unwise, Sandra."

She glanced at the poker again and shook her head. It wasn't much of an answer, but it was enough for Dom. He tensed visibly behind her, balling his fists up, but otherwise didn't move. Adam hadn't actually known for certain that his friends had been killed, but the pattern certainly fitted. "I was ordered to tie up loose ends." she finished with another sigh.

"Is that why you threatened my family?"

She hesitated. It was tiny, barely perceptible, but he spotted it. She nodded her head. A second later, another shriek of agony ripped through the warehouse as the poker was pressed to the inside of her thigh, a few inches above her right knee. "I told you that lying would be unwise, Sandra," he said levelly.

"I was embarrassed!" she howled. He pulled the poker away. "I set that op up to kill Horrigan. Yes, I was under orders, but I was proud of it. I thought of everything, and you saw through it immediately! I was fucking embarrassed, okay?"

"So why not just kill me, like you killed Frank?"

She laughed. A haggard, hacking, mocking sound that perfectly fitted the crazed look that had burst behind her eyes. "Because Frank was a nobody! You aren't. And more than that, I knew it wasn't only you who would have worked it out; it would have been your whole team. One death in the ISD is suspicious; killing all of you would have been a fucking purge! There would have been no way to keep that quiet!"

"That brings us nicely onto the why of it all, then, doesn't it?" Monster Adam said, starting a slow, stalking, predatory pace back and forth in front of his captive. "What did Frank find that was so dangerous?"

"I can't tell you that. They'll kill me!"

Adam dropped down into a squat in front of her, making sure she was looking him right in the eyes before he spoke. "Sandra, what do you think I am going to do to you if you don't tell me? And I promise you, I can make it a lot worse on you than they would. If you tell me, I will make sure they never find out, and they will never harm you."

Another carefully worded statement was made no less true by the double meaning behind it—the double meaning that the Minister completely missed.

She seemed to consider this for a moment. Adam took the opportunity to click the blowtorch back on and bathed the already glowing tip of the poker in its blue flame. It wasn't necessary; the poker would hold its heat for a while yet. This was more for dramatic effect than anything else, but Sandra's widening eyes told him that the drama was working.

"Now, last chance before I move onto eyeballs."

"He... he saw the Quartermaster's report for the Goliath Carrier group," She sighed again

"Yes, the carrier group that transported the 381st Marines to Vallen, not to Garros II." Sandra cringed for a moment but then nodded. Adam smiled, a smile that was more menacing than reassuring. He glanced down at the glowing tip of the poker before shutting off the blowtorch. "In your own words, Minister."

"Do you have any idea how dangerous one of those reports is?"

"I feel you are answering a question with another question, but for the sake of argument, let's say that I don't."

"It has everything an enemy would need to defeat a Marine Division," She said, her head dropping as she spoke. "Including the shutdown codes for the tanks, the overload frequencies for the shields, and the jamming frequencies for the radios. With that information, you could completely isolate and destroy even the best of Marine forces."

Monster Adam was dark, malevolent, and violent, but bad-guy Adam was still in there somewhere and was paying rapt attention to the conversation. Still, it took him a few moments to grasp what Minister White was trying to tell him. "There was no ambush, was there?" Sandra slowly shook her head. "Tell me what really happened."

"The Emperor wanted to crush the rebellion, but it's much bigger than the public knows. A little battle where they were crushed wouldn't be enough. He needed to show they posed an existential threat without admitting that it had gotten out of hand."

"How big are we talking?"

Sandra winced again. "Almost the entire spiral arm."

"Jesus," Dom muttered from behind her.

"That's a pretty damned big rebellion, Sandra," Adam shook his head in astonishment. Despite his job and his position, he always knew that there were things above his pay grade, but he had never considered that those things could be this big. "Tell me about Vallen."

Sandra let out a deep breath, wincing again, but this time at the pain in her abdomen. "I... I don't know all the details; I wasn't one of the people who planned it, but... but there was a rebel base on the planet. We sent in the entire 381st to attack it. Except, we gave the rebels the information they needed to win, including exactly where the invasion force would make landfall."

"Why?"

"Because if they used that information and won, the Emperor would have all the reason he needed to declare total war and reclaim the lost territory."

"So this whole thing was to give the Emperor a justification for full-scale war?" Adam asked, scarcely believing what he was hearing. The whole thing was more insane than anything he had imagined; part of him considered for a moment that the Minister was just making shit up, but the story was too crazy for that. Nobody would make this up and expect it to be believed. Sometimes, the truth really was stranger than fiction. "And if the rebels didn't use the information?"

"Then their base would be crushed, and we would try it again on the next one. They could either use the information or die, one assault at a time."

"But..." Adam frowned. "If the idea was to do this over and over again until the rebels played along with your plan, how is that different from the total war you had planned?"

"We couldn't do it over and over again, not forever, anyway, not without alerting the public. It was a bluff. Do you have any idea how big the spiral arm is? It's more than 10% of the Imperium's populated planets, and all of them have completely seceded from the empire. Can we take that back? Sure, but not without a full military mobilization, and for that, we needed a justification."

"And one battle would give you that justification?"

Sandra shook her head. "It wasn't just one battle."

"What do you mean?"

"We did it at 16 Lyra, too." Adam frowned, racking his brain for any reference to that obscure system, before arching an eyebrow at Sandra to continue. She sighed again; she was doing that a lot. "We sent part of the 8th defense fleet to investigate a rebel fleet operating in that system, but there wasn't one; we made it up. While they were there, we ordered Admiral Wainwright to attack the fleet that was... our fleet... then presented the battle as a victory for our side but with the loss of..."

"All the ships that were sent to investigate the original, fake fleet."

Sandra nodded.

"Jesus," Adam murmured, shaking his head at the scale of things. He was starting to appreciate what was so important about that file for it to be killed over. If news of this got out... "Were there any others?"

Sandra paused with a frown. "Not that I know of, not in this war anyway. But I got the impression they had done something like this before," she pre-empted the next question before Adam had the chance to ask it. "I don't know where, or when, or how. Just that it had worked before, so they were doing it again."

Adam looked up at Dom. The mountain of a man was just standing there, his jaw hanging open in a very obvious display of the same shock that Adam was feeling. This was treason on a truly massive scale, yet, at the same time, was it really? Could the Emperor commit treason against himself? There was no notion of treason against the people in Imperium law, or even treason against the Imperium itself, only against the Emperor.

"What else?" he finally asked. He didn't know if there was anything else, but it never hurt to be sure.

Sandra hesitated for just long enough to tell Adam that there was more to the story, but this time, she didn't need another part of her to be cooked to loosen her lips. "The 381st wasn't chosen at random. They were chosen because they were enhanced."

Adam could hardly believe his ears at this point. There were some parts of this story that just... made sense in a sick kind of way. The idea that the Emperor had thrown away the lives of fifteen thousand men and women was shocking; of course, it was, but it was oddly true to character for him. It fitted. But the hype made about the enhancements of a few selected Marine divisions had been everywhere in the media for a while a few years prior. The eye-watering amount of credits spent on enhancing a single Marine division was more than the planetary budgets of some outer colony worlds. Throwing those men and women away was certainly out of character for an Emperor who valued nothing higher than the power those Divisions gave him. If the hype was to be believed, the enhancements given to those soldiers were enough to render every other infantry force in the galaxy almost obsolete... so why would he throw away his most powerful forces? Why not the shitty militia or the lowest-performing division? Why the best?

"You're going to have to explain this to me, Minister."

Sandra sighed again. To her, she was committing treason of the highest magnitude with every syllable that was forced out of her lips, and she knew it. But there was still something behind her eyes, not quite a defiance, but the firm belief that she would still come out on top. Of course, Adam had expected that. As far as the Minister knew, she would be getting out of there, at which point she would report all of this to the Emperor and Adam, his family, and everyone on his team in the ISD would be executed.

The Minister was wrong. But she didn't need to know that yet.

Adam was committed. To deal with the threat against his family, he had always known that he would need to go all the way, that there could be no chance that anybody could ever discover what had happened here. Anything short of complete and utter secrecy would spell doom for everyone he cared about. Adam had been the instrument of the Emperor's "justice" for long enough to know that the distinction between justice, revenge, and downright making an example of someone was one that the Emperor didn't seem to understand. His will was law, and attacking a member of his inner circle was tantamount to an attack on the God King himself.

Did he feel guilty about it? That was a complicated question. Monster Adam didn't give a shit; he didn't take any pleasure or feel any sense of righteousness from what he was doing to Sandra, nor what he knew would be inevitable later; he was just doing what he was good at. Bad-guy-Adam understood that while this whole endeavor may not have been strictly inevitable - he could have ignored the threat, for example - it was certainly necessary if he wanted to be completely certain of his family's safety. Jenny had told him to do whatever it took to keep their girls safe, and although he may very well have gone through with this even without her permission, her support gave him the resolve to see this through to the bitter end.

Good Adam, the real Adam, the man behind the mask; he was just trying not to picture the faces of his girls. Associating this image with theirs would be a scar that may never heal.

"I'm not a fan of waiting, Minister," he said cautioningly to his captive.

Another glance at the red hot tip of the poker seemed to make Sandra's decision for her. Die here slowly now, or deal with the consequences later. "There was an unexpected side-effect of the enhancements," she started, her shoulders drooping at the realization that her own cowardice and self-preservation instinct could so easily be triggered, replacing and undoing decades of loyal service to her patron. "All the physical and cognitive upgrades worked perfectly; everything was enhanced just as we were told they would be. But that also included the Marine's sense of honor. The Emperor wanted a force of brutal, unstoppable, obedient soldiers. Instead, he got a fighting force that may very well refuse any order that they felt dishonored their precious corps."

"Like firing on a rebellion made up of mostly civilians," Adam finished for her.

Sandra nodded.

"So, how did you get them to attack Vallen?"

Sandra's jaw clenched. "We told them that the rebels there were the ones responsible for the death of Admiral Valdek and that any civilians there were being held against their will."

"Were they?"

"I don't know. We couldn't even tell if there were any civilians there."

"No, I meant, were they the rebels responsible for the assassination of the Admiral?"

"Oh," Sandra swallowed hard and then shook her head again. "Valdek wasn't killed. He turned coat and joined the rebellion."

Adam, all three iterations of him, just blinked. The news of the Admiral's suspicious demise had been the talk of the Imperium a few months ago and had stayed in the media spotlight for weeks, but that wasn't why Adam was so shocked. He had personally led the investigation into the events, or at least the events that had been presented to him. He had spent weeks tirelessly combing through sensor information and communication logs, looking for anything that could have tipped the rebels off to the route that Valdek would have been taken to Orpheus IV at the head of a relief fleet. Of course, it had struck him as odd that he had been there, it had also struck him as odd that the remains of the ship Valdek had supposedly been on was found so far away from that route. The working theory was that Valdek had either pursued the rebels or tried to draw them away before being overwhelmed and his ship destroyed. Or at least, that had been the theory when no evidence of any treason had been found. "Why?"

"The operation in 16 Lyra," she said with another sigh. "It killed his son. The destroyed ships were meant to be filled with nobodies, people whose families didn't hold any political authority. Apparently, his son had transferred onto one of the ships a day or two before the battle and nobody noticed. We don't know how Valdek found out what really happened, but..."

"Jesus," Adam muttered, his good, bad, and monstrous side more than able to understand Valdek's reaction to the news that the Imperium had killed his son. Switching allegiances to the rebels would have been the least of Adam's retribution if the same had happened to him. He would have burned down the entire Imperium, dethroned the Emperor and all, on his way out the door. "What the fuck are you people playing at? You know, when all these fucking crazy ideas pop into your servile little minds, does it ever occur to you to just not do it? Maybe if you bastards actually governed the people, instead of fucking them over, there wouldn't even be a rebellion, then there would be no need for this war or the bullshit methods you are coming up with to justify one!" Adam growled as he stood back up, instantly resuming pacing, but this time, his Monster side was being held back by the rest of him. There was nothing it would love more, in that moment, than to peel this skin from Sandra's body, while keeping her awake to feel it. It wasn't just the fate of Valdek Jr. that had him so angry; it was the callous disregard for the people on the fleet, the Marines who had died, and basically, anyone else who wasn't of any value to the Imperial council. Those people were parents, siblings, partners, and children of people still alive to feel the heart-wrenching grief of their loss. They didn't die in some heroic, patriotic battle - not that it would have made a difference to most if they had - they had been sacrificed for the sake of the Emperor's vanity and wounded pride, and that was unforgivable.

Sandra just shrugged. Adam balled up his fists until the nails of his hand dug into the flesh of his palm, but he held himself in check.

"So what's the next step?" Adam asked once he finally had his incredulity in check. "What's the next atrocity you people are planning to justify this war? Are one of those battlegroups gonna be destroyed? Is there another Marine landing doomed to be slaughtered?"

Sandra shook her head, but there was something behind her eyes, something that told Adam that although he had missed the mark in his assumption of another betrayal of loyal Imperium soldiers, he hadn't missed by much.

The scream and the sizzle echoed through the deserted warehouse again as the glowing tip of the poker was pressed onto the side of her neck, just below her right ear. "Tell me!"

The blood-curdling scream that burst from her lips sent chills down Adam's spine for reasons far removed from Sandra's shrieks of pain. "Orpheus!"

********

Janus. 3

Janus was confused, and for once, it had nothing to do with tits.

It had been five days since the fuck-muppet Governor's broadcast and the start of the madness the BCA had been forced to endure since then, and two days since the relief fleet had arrived to start easing their burden. In five days, Janus and her team had processed more than half of the four million people who had still been on the surface of Orpheus IV, and in the two days since its arrival, half of those had already been moved to the fleet's enormous colony ships.

But it hadn't left.

That struck Janus as odd. First of all, she couldn't imagine the fleet was waiting to take everyone in one go. As massive as those four ships were - and they really were fucking gigantic - they didn't look big enough to hold a million people each. She had no idea if they actually could or not, and she supposed that it did make a sort of logistical sense to perform the entire evacuation in one fell swoop, but glancing out of the portside window of the space station at one of the impressive ships blotting out a significant portion of the view beyond, she had to wonder if a million people could fit onto it.

But assuming they could, the idea of shipping out the entire population in one go ran completely contrary to what Governor shit-for-brains had implied when he said that he would be leaving in the first wave. A "first" wave implied that there would be more of them following behind it. Unless, of course, he had got the fuck out of Dodge on a smaller, private flight, countless numbers of which had already left since his announcement. The fate of Governor more-bullshit-than-brains was none of her concern, though; cramming onto one of those gargantuan colony ships with Ellie and her entire planet-side family was.

She had done her research, or at least as much of it as she could fit into the brief moments of downtime that she had been able to get this week, and was now satisfied that Theolara would be a good place to settle down with her girlfriend. Theolara was a category one planet, meaning that when it had first been discovered - however many centuries ago - it had needed the bare minimum of terraforming and was already close to an Earth-like state. The only thing stopping it from being upgraded to one of the fabled "Gaia" class planets - planets that had been found to be almost pre-made for colonization - was its incredibly unfortunate position.

If "The arse end of the middle of nowhere" was a geographically defined area of a map, Theolara was smack bang in the center of it.

A series of unnavigable, radioactive, sensor-scrambling nebulae surrounded the approaches to the planet on two sides, and an honest-to-good black-fucking-hole was an alarmingly short distance outside the system on one of the other sides. To be fair, it was probably the black hole that had drawn in the nebula, but that was beside the point. More to the point was the vast, seemingly unending field of asteroids being drawn into it, too, that covered the approaches on the other three sides. To be fair, the asteroid field could have extended inside the nebulae, too, meaning the entire system sat in the middle of it, but nobody knew for sure; their sensors didn't work in it.

Although hundreds of years of lazy science fiction had convinced people that most asteroid fields were too dense to fly a ship larger than a shuttle through them, Janus knew that this was, like most things related to entertainment, total nonsense. Asteroid fields that were anything close to dense enough to affect stellar shipping simply didn't exist in nature. Most of the enormous hunks of rock floating around in those things were tens or hundreds of thousands of miles apart, and a ship's deflector shields were more than capable of batting away the dust that filled the gaps between them. No, the problem came from the fact that an oddly high number of the asteroids seemed to contain very high concentrations of Iron. This iron and the surveying of the asteroids for potential mining opportunities led to the planet being discovered in the first place. The issue for the planet, however, came from the fact that Iron is magnetic, and a strong enough magnetic field was indistinguishable to sensors from a gravity well, meaning that no ship was able to approach the system using their hyperspace engines. Whereas almost every other populated system in the Imperium could be traveled to freely, a ship being dumped out of hyperspace at the system's edge, Theolara's incredibly shitty position meant that the nearest demarcation point for superluminal travel was more than five days of sub-light flight time away from the planet.

Five days, five solid days, inside a tin can... with Eliie... and her tits.

Yup, she was looking forward to that part.

Of course, the colony ships wouldn't take them that far. The nearest place to the planet that the colony ships would be stopping was Port Texas, but getting a ship from there to Theolara was apparently pretty easy. It would just be expensive. On a much better note, however, was the fact that Theolara was the closest inhabited planet to Port Texas itself, meaning that the BCA was able to assign her and Ellie either there or to Theolara's own much smaller dedicated space station. Going on rotation at Port Texas for a few months before heading home to the planet for another few months wouldn't be the worst idea in the world; they even ran a shuttle service for employees. As long as she was with Ellie, she didn't really care. The only real downside to the whole thing was that Theorlara was on the opposite side of the galaxy to the Splanos system where her Dad and sister now lived. But then again, so was Orpheus. She was sure she would make time to visit them once she was situated and settled.

The planet itself was nice, but it wasn't the sort of planet with crystal clear, idyllic waters and white sandy beaches like Capricorn. Nor did it have the binary stars like Proxima Centauri, nor even the thriving, booming population in ultra-modern cities like most other Gaia class worlds. What it did have, however, was the closest thing to paradise that Janus could imagine: Hundreds of thousands of square miles of untouched, unspoiled, secluded wilderness.... Peace, quiet, relaxation, and more green than could be imagined in any direction, as far as the eye could see. She hated cities, hated them; there was nothing worse than being crammed into a few dozen square miles of urban hell-hole with however many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of other people. She hated the noise, she hated the hustle and bustle, and she hated the fact that everyone seemed to be in such a damned rush all the time; cities stressed her out, and she treated them in the same way she would treat a case of Maruvian flu... best avoided by any means necessary, and only worth risking for the shortest durations possible.

Also, vigorously washing your hands after even the mildest of contact.

Theolara didn't have anything that could accurately be called a city, it simply didn't have the population to need one. It was a pretty big planet, so even though there were as many people there as there had been on Orpheus, they were much more spread out. The largest settlement, by the rest of Imperium standards, could barely be called a large town. But even that was too large for her. If the population of a place could be measured in the mid-five digits or more, she didn't want to live there. That town, incidentally, was the one that had grown around the planet's one major starport - that was to be expected - but it also meant that if Janus and Ellie were to commute up to the space station for work or to Port Collins for deployment, they would need to visit that town quite regularly, if only to get their shuttle into orbit. All things considered, that was already too often.

She shook her head clear and chuckled to herself. They hadn't left yet; it was expected that the last passengers onto the Colony ships - herself and Ellie included - wouldn't be boarding for about another week. Then it would take another two weeks, minimum, until they would reach Theolara, and she was already complaining about the crowded towns she would refuse to live in. She just thanked her lucky stars that Ellie hated living in cities as much as she did. That being said, she had thoroughly enjoyed the last few nights with Ellie, laying naked in bed, her girlfriend's head on her chest and her long blonde hair teasing over her breasts as her own fingers slowly stroked over Ellie's, just talking, fantasizing about a life together that was waiting for them hundreds of lightyears away. Those memories pulled a soft, happy smile to her lips, and the thought of a lifetime with Ellie, living out the rest of their years in sublime, happy isolation, away from the unwashed masses - and propaganda bullshit, with their idiot leaders like Governor cock-womble - was the closest thing to paradise that she could imagine.             

"Just one more week to go," she thought to herself. "One more week, and all of this bullshit will be over."

Someone cleared their throat impatiently, dragging her back to the present moment and away from the delightful memory of having Ellie's tits in her hand. She turned to arch an eyebrow at the portly, sweating man drumming his fingers on the countertop of her booth. Happy that he had her attention, and without even the cursory manners of a greeting, he started dumping the paperwork and passes of his family onto the desk. Janus glanced over the rest of the small group, all of them looking as beleaguered with his attitude as she must have, but the wife was pretty enough. Her eyes fell to the woman's chest.

Perhaps she would need to stay in her scanner a little longer than the rest of them. Even if only to piss her husband off a little bit more.

When push came to shove, when the chips were down, when the world was at its bleakest, and when douchebags like this one ruined perfectly good moments, there were always tits.

********

Adam. 9

Adam was stunned. He had heard some truly horrifying things in his time, but he was pretty sure that this one topped them all. From terrorists who had planned to detonate a particularly nasty bio-weapon at the Capital's Unity Day parade to the utterly contemptible members of a smuggling ring who had surgically cut open children, hidden contraband inside their body cavities, and then marched them happily through customs, he thought he had seen and heard it all.

And then this sadistic little bitch had ruined it all by explaining, in fine, almost prideful detail, how she and her band of merry psychopaths planned to destroy the relief fleet leaving Orpheus with all four million souls on board, then blame the whole thing on the rebels. Adolf Hitler, one of history's most ruthless tyrants, had murdered four million Jews over the course of six years, and Josef Stalin had killed at least as many people - almost certainly a significant number more - over a similar time frame a few years earlier with his self-imposed famine and purges. These fucking monsters were planning on matching that in an afternoon. And not only were they completely remorseless about it, but Sandra White looked almost proud of how ingenious the solution to their problem was.

Apparently - and this was a mindset that Adam was completely failing to understand - the loss of the fleet at 16 Lyra and the deaths of the Marines at Vallen were military targets, and the Imperium wasn't quite seeing the enormous rise in enlistments that the Navy and Marines would need to fight this war. So, they decided to double down and use the same tactic, but on a civilian target instead. This was evil on a scale that Adam could barely comprehend.

There were rarely, if ever, cases in Adam's professional life where he genuinely believed that the person on the receiving end of one of his interrogations deserved what was happening to them; in the vast majority of instances, he thought his approach - as effective as it was - was probably a bit of overkill. The few cases that made him feel like they had it coming always stood out, and this one was no different. How people could devolve to such barbarity was something that not only never sat right with him, but it was something that his mind simply couldn't process. To be a good investigator, you had to learn to think like the people you were investigating; that was the most basic tenet of his profession. But this? Not in a million years and with unlimited resources could Adam have ever brought himself to think in that way. That wasn't Good Adam taking; even the monster inside him was taken aback by the sheer brutality of the minds needed to first come up with a plan like that, then think it was a viable option, and then actually go through with it. That sort of thinking was unfathomably alien to him, and for the briefest of moments, the shock of it all made his concentration slip.

He thought of home, his girls, and the cruelty of the world in which they unknowingly lived. And his heart broke for them.

For her part, Minister White had remained blissfully unburned for the entire time she had been speaking, and she had been speaking for a while. Isagora Doukas, the Minister for Defence, had first suggested the plan. The council had, by all accounts, been discussing what to do with the refugees from the failed colony when the man had snorted into laughter, only regaling the rest of the council with his dastardly plan once he had calmed himself down. To him, it was hitting two birds with one stone for the loss of only a few semi-valuable colony ships. It would answer the question of what to do with the Orpheans - the Orpheans Orphans; he had callously and mockingly called them - and thereby eliminating the burden they would put onto other, more established worlds. It would create the public outcry necessary to bolster recruitment numbers and justify not only the reclamation of the secessionist territory but the outright annihilation of the rebels.

Adam had no words, literally. He had fallen mute, unable to ask even the most basic of follow-up questions. The "Why" of it, as he had phrased it earlier, had been answered with a merciless, brutal form of logic that even his monster's mind was incapable of keeping up with. The numbers involved were simply impossible to wrap his head around; four million people were to be sacrificed in some political ploy to escalate a cause that was - as far as Adam could tell - already escalated more than enough. Four million people, four million people, it didn't matter how many times he said it, the number was just too big, it was impossible for the human mind to visualize that in terms that could be appreciated. The entire population of modern Detroit was about that many people, but that didn't make it any easier. Detroit, just like the similarly populous Caspian III, were places, not groups of people and nothing he could do could force his mind to think of them as one.

"I don't understand," Dom spoke for the first time since the interrogation had begun. "If the enhanced Marines won't follow orders that they find dishonorable, what is the Emperor planning to use to replace them? If you are talking about annihilating entire population centers, you would still need a military branch to do that; if not the Marines, then who?"

Adam gave him a grateful look and then turned back to the Minister. It was a bit of a shift of subject, but to be fair, there probably wasn't much more to say about the plan for the Orpheans. It was something he would need to give some thought to later. There was already the beginnings of a plan sparking at the back of Adam's imagination, but it would need a lot more fleshing out before he was willing to consider it a viable option. For the moment, he just looked expectantly at Sandra.

"They have been enhancing a few of the army regiments," she started.

"They?" Adam arched an eyebrow.

Sandra paused and then let out a breath. "We have been enhancing a few of the army regiments," she corrected.

"Why? You said the enhancements didn't work."

"They didn't work on the Marines; the mental upgrades went too far. We enhanced all of their minds instead of being selective about which parts. The army is being done... differently." She paused, but not because she was hesitant to give the answer, but more - it would seem - because she didn't quite understand the differences, or at least didn't know how to put it into words. "I'm not sure of the details. That is all being dealt with by Doukas; it makes them less intelligent and tactically aware than the Marines, but it makes them fanatically loyal to the Emperor. They will do anything they are ordered to do without question or hesitation. They are the perfect soldiers. Seven regiments are ready for combat; they will be deployed soon. The rebels won't stand a chance."

"You are endorsing genocide," Adam shook his head. "You almost sound proud."

"I serve and support my Emperor," Sandra held his eyes defiantly. "And I do so faithfully. Perhaps you should try it."

"Hmmm," Adam murmured, his mind was already elsewhere. "What is stopping the Emperor from using those soldiers on loyal citizens?" he pondered. "What is stopping them from being deployed to disperse lawful protests or act as a paramilitary policing force?"

Sandra's jaw clenched a little.

"Jesus, that is the plan, isn't it?"

"If we had a force like them, able to reimpose order on a treasonous civilian population, the rebellion would never have happened!" She barked back.

Adam just looked up at Dom; the bigger man shook his head and shrugged helplessly. Adam had expected to leave this interrogation finding out that Frank had just been killed because he had done something minor. He had expected to hear that his death was meant as a message, both of which he could have accepted. Pushing that to his family was a step too far and his initial assumption had been that it was an effort by the Minister to stamp her authority over him. But this? This was so much more; it was so much bigger, and it was so much worse. It was a conspiracy that stretched to the very top of the Imperium, one that threatened to turn the fragile balance of life in the Imperium into a brutal, potentially lethal dictatorship.

The time for burying his head in the sand, sitting back, and just doing his job was over. Adam would need to do something. This couldn't be allowed to happen.

"Alright," He said, standing back up and making eye contact with Sandra. "Thank you for your cooperation."

"Are you taking me home now?"

"No, you are too dangerous to be allowed to live."

"But..." her eyes widened.

Adam didn't give her the chance to finish the sentence. "And you threatened my family with armed men. That is something I will not let stand. Goodbye, Minister." In a single, deft, well-practiced series of movements, Adam pulled the laser pistol from the holster on his hip, pointed the barrel at the wide-eyed face of his captive, and pulled the trigger.

********

Histories and Lores.

The unlocking of the human genome in the late twentieth century was the cornerstone of modern bio-enhancement science. All those hundreds of years ago, the human genome project was a research tool, a method of understanding humanity on a much deeper, more fundamental level. However, the first practical application of this didn't come until several decades later in the medical field. Used to map genetic predisposition to certain ailments like various forms of cancer, Alzheimer's, and Autism, it was a tool used in preventative, predictive medicine. Over the course of centuries, the number of women, for example, who had pre-emptive, life-saving mastectomies or hysterectomies is beyond measure. Hundreds of millions of lives were saved from a scientifically measurable probability of cancer. Those cancers, if allowed to progress, almost certainly wouldn't have killed all of them, but it would have taken a staggering amount of lives long before their potential had been reached.

The actual targeted manipulation of human genetics took a few hundred years to become a scientific and technological reality. The problem put before genetic scientists was that it was very difficult, bordering on impossible, to pick out individual alterable genes that could be altered in such a way that would change something very specific about the target subject without changing something else. For example, changing a person's eye color was almost impossible to do without possibly affecting the size, shape, or functionality of the rest of the iris. Changing a person's eye color from blue to green could potentially blind them. It took generations and some pretty horrific gene manipulation crimes for lessons to be learned.

Over the course of several generations, a culture of "designer babies" is what finally perfected the process of individual gene mapping. Parents who wanted their children to be altered, in utero, to be stronger, smarter, better looking, free of genetic illness, or just generally better than they had been. Of course, the process had been outlawed, but that was no hindrance to rich or resourceful parents who either thought the law didn't apply to them or were determined to give their children the leg up that their parents never had.

The results were as disastrous as they were predictable.

It is estimated that somewhere in the region of 750,000 children, over the space of about 125 years, were born with catastrophic, life-altering birth defects; not the sort that would kill them before they were given a chance to live - those numbers were much higher but were never counted - but ones that forced the newborn child to live with the consequences of their parent's recklessness. The term "Thalidomide Children" was born in the later half of the twentieth century to describe the offspring of mothers who had been prescribed the anti-morning-sickness medication. This drug caused some truly horrendous defects in the limbs of developing fetuses, and although the disabilities of those children of the 1970s and 1980s were in no way the fault of the parents, the children born between 2410 and about 2540 absolutely were. The horrors of those generations were what prompted the Imperium Medical Research Institute to finally re-examine gene manipulations if only to ensure that the mistakes made with some of those poor children were never repeated again. If they could determine where the hack doctors went wrong, they could develop procedures to make sure that didn't happen in the future. It wasn't the most sound of medical practice, but the public outcry at the state of these children couldn't be ignored, and the prison sentences handed down to their parents did nothing to dissuade more people from trying.

More importantly, at least for the ruling elite of the Imperium, for every child that suffered unimaginable horrors thanks to failed manipulation of their genes, there was another case that had been a resounding success. A new class of genetically advanced children was rapidly spreading throughout the Imperium and getting more and more remarkable with every passing year.

The name of the first child who was successfully modified with genetic therapy has been lost to the flowing sands of time, but somewhere around the year 2560, the first repeatable alterations were made to unborn children. The "repeatable" part was the most important. The gene that was altered made the children grow a little faster than normal, resulting in them being, on average, six inches taller than the average human once they had reached maturity. There were about forty children given this alteration before the experiment was declared a success, and in a massive break with Imperium tradition, there were no cover-ups of catastrophic, embarrassing failures to go with it.

The next alteration was more ambitious and much more valuable to the Imperium as a whole; it was the manipulation of the gene that was responsible for healing. Making someone immune to disease was an impossibility; that would require unborn children to be exposed to every toxin, poison, and disease known to man, and the chances of survival would be zero. Instead, the gene responsible for physical healing and another one responsible for the prevalence of white blood cells in the blood - not to mention their strength - were massively boosted. Short of having the actual bubonic plague injected into them, these children could fight off almost any illness they came into contact with. Putting children into a room filled with smallpox blankets and powdered Anthrax was, admittedly, risky, but to watch them walk out again, completely unharmed, was all the vindication the MRI needed. The same went for physical trauma; broken bones that would normally take months in plaster to reset would completely heal in only a few hours. Cuts and bruises would often heal up before the very eyes of the scientists, and even something as commonplace as food poisoning abjectly failed to have any sort of negative effect on these children.

Within thirty years, every child born within the Imperium was being given these gene alterations as part of their mother's normal prenatal care plans. It became as routine as taking folic acid supplements.

For the majority of the population, that was about as far as their experience with gene manipulation went, but there were always elements of society that had the means and motivations to want more. Rich people will always be rich people, and with the backing of the MRI, they started funding private research into other, more niche aspects of gene manipulation. The most common was to make their children smarter; that was no problem to the Imperium; intelligence in the upcoming generations was something that the state could use. There were modifications to increase physical strength, even beauty, and all of them were chased with an almost fanatical zeal by the scientists of the Medical Research Institute.

Of course, predictably, the other party interested in the long-term efficacy of this research was the Imperium itself. To be fair, many of their interests were grounded in purely altruistic reasoning. A population able to heal itself, and resistant to all but the most extreme forms of disease were much less of a burden on the already-strained health services, for example. But then, a person able to shrug off a gunshot wound had an altogether more practical purpose.

There was only one major problem. All the trials, experimentation, and, later, therapies were being conducted on unborn children. The Imperium didn't have the time or the patience to wait for two decades to see how many of these enhanced people enlisted in the military. They wanted a way to enhance serving soldiers... today! Thus was born the Naval Advancement Program, or NAP for short.

The name of the first successfully enhanced child may have been long forgotten if it was ever remembered to begin with, but the same was certainly not true for the first adult to go through the NAP. Major Arnold Le Clerc became something of a PR and marketing celebrity as the first adult to receive a full complement of military-grade enhancements shortly after the disastrous final battles of the Khuvakian war.

The list of enhancements he received was as long as it was revolutionary. Starting from the top of his body: His eyesight was improved by mixing the genes from a common housecat with his own, not only drastically increasing his ocular reflexes - the speed at which he could notice movement and focus his retinas - but also dramatically increasing his low light vision. He could see as well in almost complete darkness as he could in broad daylight. His hearing was increased as well, this time mixing in DNA from an English Owl to make the bones in his ears more sensitive and his auditory canal more complex. His reflexes were increased with the DNA from a trapdoor spider; this also increased the sensitivity of his skin and made him more aggressive in combat situations. His critical thinking and tactical awareness abilities were also massively increased, although this was done just by manipulating the human genes already in his head. His skin was toughened, making it more resistant to environmental factors like radiation, heat extremes, and things as simple as exposure to the sun for prolonged periods of time. He lost the ability to sweat, instead beeding heat through his lungs and exhaling on his breath.

His muscle density for almost every muscle group in the body, from his heart and diaphragm to his biceps and thigh muscles, was given a complete overhaul, mixing his genes with a refined version of those of the Western lowland Gorilla. Whereas a male Gorilla could lift four times his own body weight, Arnold Le Clerc could effortlessly bench press upwards of six times his own. His pain receptors were dulled, his metabolism was altered to let him go days without food with no loss of energy at all, and finally, his bioelectric rhythm was strengthened to make it compatible with the - as then - prototype versions of the new Armor systems being developed for ground infantry units. On top of his muscle density increases, his bone density was almost trippled as well. It didn't quite make his bones unbreakable, but it came pretty damn close.

From the moment of the first injection to the moment that Arnold Le Clerc stepped out of the research facility - a new man - took a total of about eight months. It was hardly the rapid advancement that the military had lusted after, especially considering that any new recruit going through the enhancement process would still need to be trained as an actual Marine before they were ready for service - that pushing the total time up to closer to a year - but any concerns or complaints were quickly quashed by the frankly staggering success of Arnold's upgrades. In hand-to-hand combat, he could take on more than twenty average human marines and win. Pound for pound, he was stronger than even a Khuvakina sentinel guard, hitherto the strongest and most dangerous single enemy combatant ever encountered by mankind.

There was, of course, a second parallel path of research being carried out by the military. Never ones to put all their eggs into a single basket, the alternative to the genetically enhanced soldier was the cybernetically augmented one. To be fair, the cybernetics program would have been a non-starter without the advancements in genetic manipulation. The military didn't want large, expensive, bulky pieces of powered armor, not even an exoskeleton; they wanted mechanical and electronic implants to be surgically grafted into a soldier's body. However, the trauma of those surgeries would have had a 99.6% fatality rate if it wasn't for the enhanced healing abilities and dulled pain receptors made possible by the gene therapy program and the MRI. After being given the initial enhancements to their healing - assuming a soldier hadn't received them at birth - the soldiers would go through some pretty drastic and horrific surgical procedures to cybernetically augment them.

Captain Sabastian Alonso was the first Soldier to receive the full upgrade package and would probably have been considered as much machine as he was man by the time the scientist and surgeons were finished with him. For the most part, he received the upgrades to the same body parts as Arnold Le Clerc, except in radically different ways. One of his eyes, for example, was removed and replaced with an ocular implant, which was essentially a miniaturized sensor suite. This allowed him to not only see almost perfectly in any light level but also see a vast swath of non-visible light spectrums, gave him the ability to see infrared radiation - body heat - track targets, and literally see around corners. The bones in his ear were coated in a very thin, very brittle layer of iron, making them vibrate more energetically in response to sound, drastically increasing his hearing. The rest of his bones, especially all of the major ones, were coated in the same Titanium/Ceramic polymer that was used in the new ground infantry armor systems, making them as resilient and resistant to damage as a fully geared-up soldier. Only the joints between bones were left uncoated, but those were augmented by a series of actuators in the legs, arms, hips, and shoulders, giving Alonso the ability to deadlift more than five times his body weight and run at speeds approaching thirty miles per hour for hours without fatiguing.

His adrenal gland was removed completely, replaced by a mechanical pump that allowed the body to be flushed with huge amounts of adrenaline and testosterone at jaw-dropping speeds. This not only increased his reaction times but also his aggression levels when activated. On top of this, an internal comms system was placed into one of his internal body cavities, with the auditory connection running to his ears and the visual one to his ocular implant, allowing him to maintain contact without the need for additional equipment. Perhaps most impressive of all his augments was the addition of an interface port at the base of his skull. This allowed knowledge and information to be downloaded directly into Alonso's brain, meaning that he could learn everything from how to operate a certain type of vehicle or weapon to the ability to speak a new language almost instantly, with that knowledge being lost as soon as the knowledge chip was removed, thereby eliminating the risk of overloading the memory and cognitive regions of his brain.

After much debate and an endless series of tests and trials, there was no clear advantage to either set of enhancements. Both of them performed equally well in many of the measurable criteria that the Navy was looking for, and for every aspect that one performed better in, the other would perform better in something else.

Finally, after months of consideration, a decision was made about the future enhancement doctrine of the NAP. Essentially, they would merge both systems into one. Gene therapy was slower, but vastly cheaper and much easier to mass-produce, meaning it could be rolled out to a lot of marines in a very short period of time. Some of the cybernetic augmentations were vastly superior to the biological ones but were much harder to implement on a large scale. The Adrenal pump and internal radio, for example, required very long and very complicated invasive surgeries. They weren't so much cost prohibitive - money wasn't really a factor - but the time each procedure took meant that instead of an eight-month turnaround for each soldier to be combat ready, they would be put into an ever-increasing queue to get their parts, meaning that it could take up to five years for an entire Division to become ready. On top of that, the adrenal booster, for all the surgical procedures necessary to install it, gave no significant advantage over the genetically enhanced gland that it would need to replace, and the internal radios were not necessary with ones being fitted inside the armor systems. On the other hand, the bone coating, the joint actuation, the ocular implant, and the brain interface port could be done on a much shorter timescale, often involving only an injection of flowmetal directly to the target bones. An eye could be taken out and replaced in an afternoon, for example. Only the augmentation of the joints would slow things down, but even then, not by much. These procedures would only push the time it would take a division to become fully operational from eight months to thirteen, and that was a trade-off the Navy was willing to accept.

The men and women created by the Naval Advancement Program were, by far, the most combat-capable soldiers ever seen by humanity. They were faster, stronger, more intelligent, and able to absorb enormous amounts of knowledge and learn more of it in frighteningly fast times. There were unexpected side effects, too. A soldier who had a natural predisposition towards leadership or tactical thinking had those attributes boosted to a staggering degree, making them immeasurably effective on the battlefield.

Twelve years after the commencement of the NAP, the 381st Marine Division was formed. Each member was hand picked from other Divisions, and unit cohesion was maintained by having entire squads kept together, augmented together, and then transplanted into the 381st. For the average soldier, the only thing that changed - aside from their obvious enhancements - was their chain of command and the insignia on their shoulder patches. Finally, the 381st was put through a series of trials. The most impressive of which was a simulated battle against no less than twenty-seven times their number of non-augmented army regiments. If it had been a real battle, the army would have lost somewhere close to 200,000 men.

For the loss of only four Marines.

And two of those had sacrificed themselves to rescue their comrades.