Chapter 10 - Improvise, adapt, overcome.

Adam. 10

"Most esteemed members of the council," Adam bowed long and deep as he stood in the center of the Chambers of the Imperium high council. One seat was conspicuously empty. "Thank you for seeing me on such short notice."

"We are always grateful to our guardians in the ISD, Mister Doncaster," Joseph Bird, the minister of Public information - the propaganda agency - said on his right. The council was arranged around a hollow circle, each member sitting at their own curved bench, forming a ring, and all of them facing toward its center where Adam was standing. He supposed there was probably some sort of symbolism there, but it was lost on him. "Although it is well within the remit of the head of the ISD to call such a council meeting," Bird went on, "It is highly unusual."

"Yes," Adam nodded. "And if it were for any other circumstance, I would hesitate to trouble you. But unfortunately, this cannot wait."

Bird, suitably satisfied with the answer, nodded and gestured for him to continue.

"It is my sad and solemn duty to report to you that Sandra White, the Minister for Internal Security, is dead." He waited for the shocked gasps and dumbfounded looks to wash around the surviving council members before he continued. "Minister White, as you may or may not know - and as is the right for any member of this estimable body - was a very private person. For that reason, she refused the repeated requests made by my department to assign a security detail to her home, instead relying on..." Adam paused, making a show of choosing his words carefully, which, of course, he wasn't doing. He had rehearsed this speech a hundred times in the last twenty-four hours. "... private security contractors. Two of the men chosen to guard her estate were tied to the Dardanelles Crime Syndicate. Investigations are still ongoing, but it appears that an attempt was made to kidnap the Minister; she resisted and was killed as a result of her heroism."

Isagora Doukas, the Minister for Defense, made a noise that was half scoff and half scowl. "You are going to have to do much better than that!" He barked. "Start from the beginning!"

Adam, holding Doukas's eyes for long enough to convey the message that he was not a man easily intimidated, nodded and took a deep breath. "The ISD has been tasked with investigating any potential security breaches that led to the loss of the 381st Marine Division at Garros II..."

"What has that got to do with anything?!?" Doukas glared at him.

"If I am allowed to finish, I will tell you," Adam answered back, meeting and matching Doukas's stare. He waited in silence long enough for the Minister to wave a hand for him to continue. Still holding Doukas's eyes, he resumed his prepared monologue. "There were only two possible places the rebels could have acquired the information necessary to pull off an attack of this scale: internally or through hacking. As sickening as the idea of a traitor within our ranks is to all of us, it was a possibility that had to be looked into. Fortunately, everyone with access to that information has shown themselves to be beyond reproach."

"That is something, I suppose," Bird nodded, listening carefully.

"Indeed," Adam said, turning to face the man. "That left only the possibility that our security systems were infiltrated by an outside party. The number of people and organizations capable of doing that is extremely limited. But, for the sake of prudence, I made the decision to investigate all of them. It was while looking at the Dardenelles Syndicate that we discovered the plan to abduct Minister White."

"White was murdered by the same people who betrayed our Marines?" Jasmine Mavinda, the Minister for Health and Education, gasped.

"No. My apologies; I should have been clearer. The Syndicate, as far as we can tell at this time, had no involvement in what happened to the 381st Division. I merely gave this information to explain why we were looking at them at all."

"I see," Mavinda nodded, looking unsurprisingly relieved. "Please continue."

"The plot was very detailed; we knew the names of her guards and the names of the people who had ordered the operation, and also what the Minister's guards had been ordered to do. But it was also moving very rapidly, meaning there was very little time between the order being given and the Syndicate expecting it actually to happen. We tried making contact with Minister White..." Of course, they hadn't; they had killed her, but fabricating retroactive comms logs was child's play. "... but there was no response. Fearing that we were already too late, we contacted the Florence main Police Department and ordered them to surround the Minister's Estate. We considered ordering them to storm the compound, but the guards had been ordered to execute Minister White and then kill themselves if they thought they would be caught. So Florence PD was to establish a perimeter and detain anyone who left the estate, while also keeping out of sight. I personally led an infiltration team to storm the estate." That part had been true, sort of. The Florence PD really had been ordered to secure the estate about half an hour after he and Dom had put the bodies into position inside it. The pair had then just moved a few miles away, waited the appropriate amount of time, then came back. Flight logs and transponder codes for their shuttle were even easier to fabricate than comm logs, at least to him.

"Personally?" Bird tilted his head. "The head of the ISD putting himself in harm's way? Is that normal operating procedure?"

"No, of course not," Adam rolled his eyes. "But this wasn't some run-of-the-mill hostage situation, either. I have personally led countless such operations in the past, and if anything went wrong - as it ultimately did - the buck would stop with me regardless. So if that was the case, I would lead the mission personally to give it the greatest chance of success."

With something approaching an impressed look on his face, Bird nodded, and Adam was allowed to keep talking.

"It took less than twenty minutes for my team and I to reach the Minister's Estate, at which time we made entry. The guards were caught by surprise but opened fire as soon as they were confronted; both of them were killed, but..." he took another deep breath. "Minister White was already dead. She was found in her shower room. There were signs of a struggle, and she had been executed by a single laser shot to the head, but the estimated time of death suggests that she had been dead for an hour or more before we even became aware of the situation. There was never a chance that we would have made it in time."

There was silence in the council chambers for a few moments. Joseph Bird was the first to speak. "Do we know what the Syndicate wanted with her?"

Adam paused for a moment, another part of the act. He had predicted that question, too. "There is nothing specific in the information we have recovered so far, but the working theory is that she would either be ransomed back to the council or interrogated for classified information. Fortunately, the Minister was a woman of loyalty and integrity. It seems very unlikely that she gave them anything, and on learning that the plan wouldn't work, the guards were ordered to kill her."

"How can you be so sure?" Doukas asked, his voice a little calmer than it had been at the beginning of the meeting. "How do you know she didn't sing like a canary and then was killed to cover their tracks."

"Two reasons, Minister," Adam answered the once again expected question. "Firstly, there wasn't time. There were less than ninety minutes between the order being given and our arrival on the scene. It would have taken a lot longer than that for the guards to get anything useful out of Minister White. Second of all, the fact that the guards were still there. It is inconceivable that they would have attempted the interrogation at the estate when any number of Minister White's staff could have turned up and interrupted things. It is vastly more likely that they killed her in the attempt to secure her and were trying to cover their tracks when we found them."

Silence once again fell around the room. Adam waited for the inevitable. As predicted, it was the ever-hostile Doukas who finally gave it voice. "And what do you think your punishment should be for this failure?" He asked, trying to sound menacing while he drummed his fingers on the table.

"And what failure would that be?"

"The fucking Minister of Internal Security is dead!" he yelled, his face going red under the exertion. "Whose fault do you think that is?!?"

"Yours," Adam responded flatly.

Doukas spluttered so hard it seemed like he was going to choke on his own tongue.

"Mine?!?"

"Yes, yours. All of yours," Adam answered again. "I have been warning this council for years that your positions of power do not make you immune to the machinations of traitors and criminals; if anything, it makes you more vulnerable to them. I have requested - numerous times - to increase your security detail and to put your protection under the direct remit of the ISD, and repeatedly, you have refused. There is only one council member who has taken that advice, and that is Miss Mavinda. Each and every single one of you receives an average of thirty thousand death threats... per week, and that is the people who are dumb enough to tell us what the plans would be. There are countless more threats coming from people intelligent enough not to pre-warn us. Did you think they were all bluffing? Did you think that your position on the council made you immune to firearms or made your estates into impenetrable fortresses, or did you think you were untouchable simply by virtue of your position? Do you think - like Minister White clearly did - that having unvetted, untrained, and unaccountable private security companies guarding you somehow made you safer than loyal and able members of the ISD or the military? You were told - repeatedly - that this could happen, and you ignored it. The fault for this lies with Minister White and the rest of you who think you are above..." he almost said it, he very nearly said "above reproach," but stopped himself at the last minute. "... above the mortal dangers that all people in power face."

Doukas was clearly not a man used to being challenged. His eyes were bulging out of his head incredulously, and his face was red enough to make Adam wonder if he had burst a blood vessel. But Adam didn't care; Adam was a man who did the intimidating, he was practically immune to being on the receiving end. With Sandra White dead, he no longer answered to the council but directly to the Emperor, at least until a new Minister for Internal Security was selected. Until then, there was damn near nothing they could do to him. "Once again," he continued. "I strongly urge this council to heed the advice of the ISD and drastically increase your security details with guards from trustworthy agencies! There is zero doubt in my mind that this could all have been avoided if this advice had been given the serious consideration it should have been. Anything less than that, and the ISD is powerless to protect any of you from the same thing happening again."

Doukas looked like he was about to go nuclear, but a raised hand from Bird shut him up. "Given recent events and the fate of our fallen friend, we will certainly consider your recommendations, Mister Doncaster."

"Thank you, Minister."

"What are you going to do about the Syndicate responsible for this travesty?" Minister Mavinda asked after tensions seemed to settle a little.

"That is a decision for the council," Adam answered. "It is my recommendation that they be completely purged." Adam knew that those words could potentially doom hundreds, maybe thousands of people to death, but the Dardanelles Crime Syndicate was a cancer on the planet. Human trafficking, the smuggling of narcotics, dealing with harvested organs, prostitution, extortion, racketeering, kidnapping, stellar piracy; it was an organization with powerful friends that deserved merciless hell to be rained down on them. Adam wanted to see them wiped from the Earth, but those powerful friends were still around, despite the damning evidence that Adam had flawlessly fabricated... and one of them spoke up.

"Let's not be hasty with lethal consequences without due consideration, then," Marcus Bellford, the weasel-like Minister of Finance, chirped up. "The Syndicates, as distasteful as they are, provide a service that cannot be garnered through official means. Their methods disgust me, but they are effective at what they do, and they keep the coffers filled."

"Unless that's guarding you while you sleep," Adam added, holding the Minister's eyes. "The files containing categoric proof of this conspiracy will be sent to the entire council as soon as this meeting is finished. But I will leave their ultimate fate up to you."

Adam's eyes returned to Doukas. He was sure the aging council member would still be seething at Adam's insolence, but instead, he was gawking at Bellford as if the man had spontaneously grown a second head. "Are you fucking shitting me??" he raged. "They kill a member of this council, and you are worried about a few fucking credits?!?"

"Perfect, fight amongst yourselves like good little cretins," Adam thought to himself as he watched Bellford suddenly look very uncomfortable under the rest of the council's withering gaze. "Your time will come soon enough. I'll line each one of you up next to your friend for what you've done."

He cleared his throat, granting Bellford a thoroughly undeserved reprieve from the collective scrutiny of the rest of the council. "As I'm sure you can all appreciate, this investigation, along with the continued efforts to find the source of the intelligence briefing that led to the massacre of the 381st, is the top priority for my division. I would be grateful if the council could inform me when you come to the decision regarding the Dardanelles Syndicate. Otherwise, I need to get back to my investigation."

Doukas and Bellford, each still trying valiantly to stare the other into submission, just grunted but didn't look his way. Bird was watching them with something close to a look of exasperation on his face, but he didn't answer either. It was only Mavinda who gave him the courtesy of a response. "Mister Doncaster, it fills me with pride and confidence to know that you are working to keep the Imperium secure in these difficult times. But please, I would request that you take no further actions like the one to lead the rescue of Minister White, it would be a staggering loss to this council and the people we lead to lose you to such... reckless bravery."

"I appreciate your concern, Minister."

"As I appreciate your diligence," she smiled. "I wonder - if it wouldn't be an imposition - if I could visit you at the ISD compound in a few days. There are things I would like to discuss with you regarding the security detail concerns you have raised."

Adam managed to stifle a frown. Although Jasmine Mavinda had been the only one of the council to accept the security changes, she hadn't exactly done so without protest and had never shown the slightest interest in speaking to him before. But still, a chance to speak to her may be a chance to get more information. "It would be my honor to host you, Minister," he replied with a short bow.

"Then I look forward to seeing you. I will have my office send an official request later today."

Adam nodded again and then vanished from view as the holographic conferencing program disconnected.

Stepping off the small podium in his office, he sighed, walked wearily around his desk, and dropped into his chair. The operation to construct the crime scene with Dom had been remarkably, almost comically easy. The irony was that it was so easy because the council had never heeded his years-old recommendations regarding their security detail. If they had, it wouldn't have made the operation impossible, but it would have made it infinitely more difficult. He and Dom had literally driven a panel van, with three bodies in the back, right up to her front door and unloaded them inside and into position without a single person even noticing them, let alone stopping them. They had dumped Sandra's body into her ensuite bathroom, the same place they had found her the previous day - intentionally dumped to make it look like she had fallen from a standing position - and then laid the guards out behind partial cover in the hallway, fired their weapons around a few times to simulate a short firefight, and then called it a job done. To be fair, they could have left the guards there all along, but there was no guarantee that nobody wouldn't have stopped by and raised the alarm while Adam was busy. There wasn't any need to fuck around with fake blood evidence, either. Close range laser fire usually flash-boiled blood into nothingness and cauterized the wounds to stop much more flowing out once the person was dead. Besides, only the ISD would ever see the actual crime scene pictures, and he would make sure no further questions were asked.

All in all, it had been a good, if massively disturbing, day's work.

"So, it's done," Dom asked. He had been sitting on the opposite desk chair the whole time and had heard everything with the council.

Adam looked at him for a moment before sighing again. This was the part he hadn't been looking forward to at all. He opened one of his desk drawers, reached inside, pulled out a laser pistol, and set it on the desk, resting his hand on top of it. Dom swallowed hard and looked at the weapon. "I want you to tell me what happens next," Adam finally said.

"I'm guessing that you kill me; I'm a witness, I know too much... I'm a loose end."

"Are you?"

"Sir?"

"Dom, you and I have done something together that is going to require a lifetime of unbreakable trust. You see, if you decide to have a change of heart tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or a decade down the road, what do you think will happen?"

"They'll kill you, for sure."

"Well, yes, obviously," Adam held the man's eyes. "Be more specific."

"I mean..." Dom frowned, "They would probably torture you some as well."

"No," Adam said after it was clear Dom was out of ideas. "I mean, yes, you're right, but you are missing the much bigger picture. First, they will want information on who else was involved. Considering you would be the one who told them, they would already know about you, but they would still want to be sure. They would torture me to find out. That torture wouldn't be waterboarding or pulling out fingernails; they would find my weak points and use them against me... that is my family. They would torture them, my wife, my children, and they would make me watch. They would assume that they wouldn't know anything; I'm not stupid enough to have told them; it would just be another way to punish me. I have seen it done, so you don't just have to take my word for it. They would skin them alive in front of my eyes; they would break every bone in their bodies, and they would bathe them in acid while injecting them with drugs to keep them alive, conscious, and feeling everything. I have heard those screams before, and there is no reality in which I would let that happen. They wouldn't stop at just my wife and children, though. Parents, Aunts, Uncles, Brothers, Sisters, Nephews, Nieces, Cousins, Friends, colleagues... they would go after everyone. Only after the last of them had been allowed to die in front of my eyes would they do the same to me. I don't care about me; I do care about them, and I will kill the Emperor himself before I allow that to happen to them.

"But here is the part you are missing. They would do the same to your family too, your friends, all of them, Everyone you have ever cared about. Even if you ran to them and told them everything... even if I told them you tried to stop me, which I wouldn't do. You were involved; you are guilty. Now, If you are the sort of man willing to sacrifice your family, let alone mine, I can just kill you here. Otherwise, you and I are going to have to come to some sort of agreement. So I will ask you again. Are you a loose end? Or are you an ally?"

Dom held his eye for a moment. "Permission to speak freely, Sir."

"I insist on it."

"You have read my file, right?"

"I have."

"So you know what I did before I joined the ISD."

Adam's eye twitched. That part had been expunged, but given what the man had been expected to do in his role for the Agency, he had assumed it was some sort of prison sentence. More than likely for some kind of violent offense. Having such a glaring hole in his knowledge about the man had been frustrating to Adam, but he had at least been able to ascertain that he didn't hold loyalties to anyone Adam would consider hostile.

"I was a Marine."

"There is no record of you having ever served in the military."

"Not under this name, no."

Adam clenched his jaw. That was a rookie mistake. Of course, the ISD gave him a new identity when they recruited him. Adam, having only worked there, had never needed one, but a fair number of black book operators had needed one just to get them through the door.

"What is your old name?"

"Domonic Matthews. Serial number Foxtrot, Four, zero, six, one, kilo, zulu one alpha."

Adam, keeping one eye on Dom and sliding the weapon a little further out of his reach, typed the name and service number into his computer. In an instant, a heavily redacted service record popped onto his screen. Of course, his Administrator level clearance did away with all the redactions, but there was no mistaking the man in the picture. He looked younger and smaller, and there was a pride behind his eyes, but it was definitely Dom. He scanned the man's file. Five years as an infantryman, then promoted to sergeant before being transferred to special forces, then more than three dozen successful missions, fourteen of which he had led. It wasn't a wildly impressive service record, but it certainly wasn't a bad one. It showed him to be a capable and trustworthy soldier, exactly the sort the ISD would have wanted to recruit, and no ties at all to any ciminal activity.

"What White and her people did to my team after the op to kill Frank was unforgivable, but..." Dom sighed, his shoulders slumping. "I am a Marine, Sir; it's who I am. I may not be in the corps anymore, but the corps is still part of me. I may never be able to walk into a vet bar and drink with my brothers, but they are my brothers nonetheless, and what those people did to them was worse. They just killed fifteen thousand of them on a whim. I am in this to the end, with or without your threats."

Adam held Dom's gaze for a few more moments before nodding and sliding the pistol over the desk to him. "We're in this together. We are going to have to rely on each other in a way that even the Marine Corps would consider excessive. Our trust in each other is going to have to be absolute. The stakes are too high." He nodded down at the gun. "You're going to need that; there's no telling if people are still after you for being part of the hit team."

"Thank you, Sir."

Adam laughed. "Don't thank me yet, Soldier. I have buried you up to your eyebrows in a whole heap of shit. There's no guarantee at all that we are getting out of this alive."

Dom nodded and took the weapon, barely giving it a glance as he tucked it into his pocket. "Sir?"

"Yes?"

"What the fuck are we going to do about Orpheus?"

Adam sighed again. "I have no idea. But we have to do something."

********

Almark. 12

Walking hurt, not as much as it had done a few days ago, but there was more than a little ache shooting through her legs and up into her spine every time she put her full weight onto either one of her legs. But she could do it. It was tolerable, and considering that the alternative was to have lost both of her legs completely - if she had survived at all - she was more than happy to deal with a little discomfort for a while.

At least, she hoped it was for a while. In the two weeks or so since the crash onto the beach, she had been able to see a marked improvement in her condition almost every day. From screaming, gut-wrenching agony, to intense pain, to moderate pain, to mild pain, to just aching discomfort, there had been a profound and consistent improvement in her condition every day, but that seemed to have tapered off, and the last few days had been the same. Dr Evans said that she would recover her full mobility with no lasting pain and that it would just take a little while longer, but Emylee wasn't afraid to admit that her confidence in that prognosis was starting to wane.

She had taken to the 'brute force and optimism' approach, forcing herself to walk a dozen laps of her room a few times a day; it wasn't quite as much of a 'smile through the pain' thing as it was a 'grit your teeth until a dentist yells at you, but get on with it' approach. Either way, it was working. Slowly, yes, but working nonetheless. Each lap of her room became a little faster and a little easier; her legs didn't feel like they were fighting her quite as much. It still hurt like a fucking bitch, but the ease of moving around was going a little way to countering her concern over the lingering pain.

Considering the number of people coming in and out of the hospital ward when she had still been in there, each of them dealing with varying degrees of missing limbs and each of them in a considerably worse condition than she was, she could easily take her current circumstances as a win.

Of course, she had other reasons to be happy, too. Things with Mac were going great. Better than great. It had taken him a little while to be convinced that she wasn't interested in him because of some misguided hero worship, nor was she trying to thank him for helping her so much. That had taken a few days, but the first time she had taken him into her mouth, moaning deeply at the feel of his fingers stroking through her hair, the feel of his prominent veins bulging against his considerable shaft, and - finally - the euphoric joy she felt at tasting her man for the first time as he grunted and twitched his release onto her tongue... yeah, he didn't seem so concerned after that.

Mac was... different from any other guy she had dated. By outward appearances, he was a meathead. A mountain of a man who looked like he hung around in dark alleys just so he could be the sort of guy you wouldn't want to bump into in one. He had the capacity for unspeakable violence; she had seen and heard about that much on the beach, and even other Marines - people who knew of Mac through reputation alone - treated him with an air of respect that was only reserved for the most capable of warriors. Only Stevo seemed to get more of that treatment. By the way he looked alone, he was the sort of guy who, had she seen him in a bar, she would have made a conscious effort to stay away from him.

And had she done so, she would have been a fucking idiot.

Mac was a mammoth of a man, god damn huge in every imaginable way. They had spent a night together a few days ago, just sitting on the sofa in his cabin and watching a holo-movie together. At some point, her hand had found its way into his. She had been so focused on how his hand seemed to effortlessly swallow hers in his gargantuan grip that she had completely lost her place in the movie. They were hands so big and so powerful that she wondered if he could actually crush a skull in their grip if he put his mind to it. Yet, he held her hand as if it were the most delicate and precious thing in his entire world. That was the part she would have missed out on.

For all his size, for all his strength, and for all his capability for violence, there was a gentleness about him that defied all first impressions. The only comparison she could think of was to picture Mac as a rampaging barbarian, kicking down the gates of ancient Rome and marauding through the streets, butchering enemy soldiers and tearing down buildings with equal ease, drenched in sweat and grime and the blood of his enemies... and then stopping, mid rampage, to pick a flower for her. His tenderness was completely at odds with everything else about his outward appearance, but the more time she spent with him, the more she realized that the tender side of Mac was the real side of him. It was guarded, buried deep inside him, probably as the result of some heartless bitch who had hurt him in the past, but it was there. And she totally fucking melted whenever he showed it to her.

After everything that had happened, the fate of her wing, the loss of her friends, the pain and the anguish of her injuries, the sting of betrayal by the Imperium... After all that shit, he made her feel safe. What had started out as a curious attraction had very quickly developed into something a lot more, not that she had the courage to give voice to that just yet. Telling a guy you were developing real feelings for him after less than a week would make her look fucking crazy. The funny part of it, though, is that she was starting to get those little sparks of jealousy brimming up inside her.

Mac was a good-looking man, not normally her type of man - she had never gone for the human mountains before - but he was undeniably a good-looking guy. There was a ruggedness about him, something extremely... masculine, and despite the fact that he was very obviously and adorably oblivious to the looks he was getting from the women around the ship, she wasn't. More than once, she had found herself glaring at some floozy who was giving him the "fuck me" eyes as Emylee pressed herself closer to her man. Mac, being about as male as it was possible for a man to be, was clueless. He literally had no idea what was going on with the women around him; it wasn't that he was used to the attention and could ignore it - one of the main reasons she avoided the alpha male types like him - he genuinely didn't have the slightest hint of a conception that it was happening at all.

She had tested it just to see if it was an act or not. They had been riding the elevator down to her cabin after a visit to Dr. Evans, and a startlingly attractive woman in a naval uniform that identified her as one of the ship's company - had been staring at him so hard that she was practically drooling. She had given Emylee a single dismissive glance before starting to preen; she had played with her hair, flicking it around a little; she had arched her back to thrust her chest out. Emylee wouldn't have been surprised if she had pretended to drop something so that she could bend over in front of him. After leaving the elevator and waiting for the doors to close behind them, she carefully asked her question. "She was pretty, wasn't she?"

His answer had been as genuine as it was heartwarming. "Hmm?" he looked back at the elevator doors. "Oh, sorry, babe, I didn't look. I was miles away." And rather than be a line, let alone a lie, she could tell that he really hadn't looked. He hadn't seen any of the woman's provocative display, and if he had, his brain just hadn't registered it.

Lap number ten of her cabin was completed with a smile on her face, and as they had done countless times over the past week, it was thoughts of Mac that had put that smile there. But, and there was always a but, she had other things to think about. Not necessarily more important than Mac, but certainly thoughts on a more serious topic.

The day she had been discharged from the hospital, she'd had a visitor, the last visitor she had ever expected to receive. The Quartermaster of the entire rebel navy. Why he had been on that ship, or even in the fleet, rather than being tucked away in some shipyard somewhere, was not a question she had thought to ask at the time, primarily because of the shock she had felt at the request he had made of her.

Darius Abdul held the rank of Vice Admiral and wore it with an air of confident, no-nonsense authority that few other high-ranking officers she had ever met managed to match. His eyes were hard and serious, his lips set into the thin grimace of a man who knew exactly how much weight was resting on his shoulders, and he had looked at her in a way that made her feel like he was peeling open her very soul.

The request, as unexpected as it had been, was fairly straightforward. Emylee had agreed to join the rebels. At the time, she hadn't considered the ramifications of that, or at least, she hadn't considered the ramifications that had for the rebels. Almark was one of the best pilots in the entire Marine Air Corps. That wasn't idle, prideful boasting; she was extraordinarily good at what she did. Emylee had expected the rebels to take advantage of that, give her another wing or something on that level, but no. What Vice Admiral Abdul had explained to her in no uncertain terms was that Emylee was not only now the best pilot in all of the Rebel military, but she also was the only surviving pilot of the attack, meaning that she had more experience, knowledge, and expertise of Imperium strike craft than anyone. This was a fount of knowledge that Abdul was more than a little interested in tapping into.

He wanted her to think of any and all limitations or weaknesses she considered present in the XF-18 Broadsword and its bomber variant, the XB-15 Longbow. Then - and this was the part that intrigued her, excited her, and terrified her in equal measure - he wanted her to be part of a design team that would lay the foundations for the next generation of rebel strike craft. She was going to be able to design her very own fighter!

It turned out that the rebel air wing had been made up of hobbled-together aircraft using the best knowledge and information available to the rebels at the time. The Imperium ariwing had lost coms and shields during the battle, yet had still managed to shoot down the rebels at a rate of almost five to one. If shields had remained intact, it was not unfair to assume that the Marine air wing would have obliterated the rebels with minimal losses. In this instance, the rebels had overwhelmed the Imperium by sheer weight of numbers, but the loss of the shields and comms was a trump card the rebellion almost certainly would never have again, so they would need an aircraft capable of going toe-to-toe with the Broadsword and having a good chance of winning. More than that, the rebel ground forces had been made up of barely trained flash clones, led by sporadic detachments of officers, and their losses had been enormous. Not that it mattered; the entire number could be replaced over a weekend, but the air forces had been manned by actual humans, and their losses had been almost total. Of course, the air forces assigned to defend the beach were nowhere near the entire sum of the pilots available to the rebels, but the ratio of losses, despite the massive advantages given to them for that battle, was far too high to be sustained over a drawn-out conflict, especially when those advantages would rarely, if ever, be able to be replicated. More importantly, the losses from the Air Force accounted for almost seventy-five percent of rebel losses - not counting the clones - for the entire battle.

She tried not to feel bad about that; those pilots were trying to kill her and succeeded in killing all but one of her friends, with Duck being murdered by traitors on the carrier. But still, she would be lying if she said she didn't regret their deaths.

However, when her mind wasn't consumed with thoughts of Mac, she was thinking about this problem. From the moment she had first taken to the air - or to space, to be more accurate - in her beloved Broadsword, she had been in love with the aircraft, but thinking about it objectively, it wasn't perfect. There were lots of little details that would give the aircraft a significant advantage over the current model if they were upgraded. Perhaps more surprisingly - and something she never thought she would ever be doing - she was thinking of ways to beat one, to counter wings of them, to use those weaknesses to utterly destroy the squadrons of broadswords in the clearly inevitable moment when she found herself on the opposite side of the battlefield from them.

Perhaps even more oddly, she was coming up with ideas that could actually work. Things that - if she was faced with during a battle - she would have trouble dealing with them, and not just a new generation of air superiority fighters. She had been a pilot for a little over ten years, graduating from flight school a few weeks after her 22nd birthday and now approaching her 33rd, but one of the things she found most tedious about her job - and for reasons she could never quite place - was the walk-around.

Maintenance personnel and deck crew were responsible for the repairing, maintaining, arming, and fueling of any military strike craft, but before Emylee was ever allowed even to start the engine, she had to perform her own visual check of all the major systems. It was only in the case of an emergency scramble that this duty was foregone. She was expected, no, required to have as much of a working knowledge of her aircraft as either the maintenance boys or the deck crew, and it was her responsibility to ensure that her fighter was in complete working order. If, for whatever reason, the strike craft suffered mechanical failure once airborne, it was on her head. As tedious and time consuming as this was, it had given her an astoundingly accurate working knowledge of all the systems in the Broadsword. From the anti-grav engines to the weapon targeting systems to the shield generators. She doubted she could actually build one; she had no idea how to fix any of the systems she identified as faulty, but she could certainly draw out a working diagram of how all of those systems fitted together and interacted with each other. Meaning that any improvements she came up with were solidly grounded in technical knowledge.

That was her task for the day. Vice Admiral Abdul had asked her to attend a convention of sorts; a sit down with engineers, designers, rebel pilots, and military analysts to start the process of designing at least one new strike craft as soon as possible, ideally new designs for a bomber, too, although her knowledge was significantly limited in that area, at least compared to the Broadsword. Once designs had been drawn up - and it was expected to take a good few weeks of design before that stage was reached - they would be transmitted to Fort Ironholm, one of the main rebel shipyards deep in secessionist territory, and a prototype would be ready within a jaw-droppingly short amount of time. Cue Emylee's next role as analyst and test pilot before general production could begin. She had heard once that the Broadsword had taken something like six years from design to general rollout; the rebels wanted her fighter to do the same in less than three months. Imperium bureaucracy was a pain in the ass at the best of times, and the military-industrial complex was an enormous, cumbersome beast that took an eternity to get moving; she had no doubt that this factored massively into the timescale of the Broadsword's development, but not by that much. Three months wasn't only eye-wateringly ambitious; it may very well have been impossible.

Lap twelve of her cabin was finally complete, and she blinked down at her legs. With thoughts of Mac and her apparent new role as strike craft designer, her mind had been far too occupied to think about the pain she should be feeling, meaning she didn't remember feeling any since she had started. She smiled to herself; perhaps there was some promise in this new job after all.

********

Stevo. 22

"Sir, with all due respect," Stevo squinted at General Crow, "Can you please run that by me again? I'm not quite sure I'm following."

The aging general leaned back in his chair, rolled his neck, and nodded. Stevo glanced to his side where Sylvia was sitting, looking just as confused as he was. On the opposite side of the long officer's table - not dissimilar to one used in the board exam he had taken to get his stripes - were General Crow, Colonel Michaels, and Admiral Valdek. All of them looked confident in what they had just said to him, but either he was going crazy, or they were.

"Captain, how long did it take for you to do your training? Not just your basic training but all of it. If you added it all up, how long do you think that took?"

Stevo blew a breath out of his puffed-out cheeks and flashed his eyebrows. That was a lot of math for this early in the morning. "I... umm... I guess if it were all added together, I'd have to say about eighteen months, maybe two years?"

Crow nodded again. "And what, in your opinion, is your greater strength? Your training or your combat and leadership experience?"

Okay, obviously a test of some sort, or the general was asking these questions to help Stevo understand his point because any officer worth a damn would know the answer to that question already. And if he didn't, he shouldn't be an officer. This was military training 101.

"Sir, I... I don't think that is how it works. They go hand-in-hand; you can't really have one without the other. Training is what will keep you alive and in the fight, but experience is where you learn how to put that training into practice. Experience turns training into muscle memory and instinct, tactical awareness, just the general ability to read a battlefield and make a decision, then act."

"That's precisely my point, Captain," Crow smiled. "So, let's talk about your experience. If you added up all of your combat hours... and I don't mean time in a combat zone, I mean time actually fighting... how much battle experience do you think you have?"

"Wow, um..." Stevo had to think about that. He knew the engagement durations of every battle he had been involved in, but it was still too fucking early to be doing math. "Approximately fifteen hundred hours, Sir. But I'm not one hundred percent sure of that."

"That's a lot of fighting, Captain." Crow looked impressed. Another glance at Silvia showed the same admiring look on her face, too. "How many of those were against us?"

"Just the twelve hours on the beach, Sir. Most of my combat experience has come from anti-piracy operations and both Khuvakian border conflicts since the war."

"If I may interject," Colonel Michaels spoke up.

"Of course,"

"All of those engagements took place before Serg... Captain Taylor was enhanced and joined the 381st Division. As part of that process, he was involved in several trial battles with conditions as close to real combat as possible. I can personally attest to their authenticity. There were more than four hundred hours of fighting there, too, but I doubt the Captain has included that in his calculations, meaning he has closer to two thousand hours of combat experience."

"That is an impressive number, Captain," Crow nodded. "Out of interest, how many do you have, Colonel?"

"About the same, if I have to guess," Micheals replied, "But over about four decades longer."

"I have served for about the same amount of time and have less than half of that." Crow nodded before turning back to the two Captains. "Captain West, care to share?"

"I have a little over two hundred, Sir," she said, looking somewhat embarrassed. She shouldn't feel that way, Stevo thought. Combat was hell, and it was almost inevitable that you lost friends or even just someone you knew in passing. As overwhelming victories as all of his battles had been before the beach, he'd never been in one that didn't have at least a few casualties on his side. Silvia had earned her stripes through being good at her job without the need to shoot at people, that was a far more impressive feat in Stevo's opinion.

"Now," Crow continued after a smile to Silvia, "We have all reviewed the footage from the battle; we know what you did, we know how you did it, and we know the calmness and clarity of mind that you did it with. That was one of the reasons you were promoted." Stevo made to speak, but the general held up his hand, and Stevo remained silent. "Before you say it, I know that your two corporals, McCaffery and Vasquez, performed equally as competently, and either of them would make excellent second options should you refuse our request, but you have the leadership qualities that they lack. But before we get into that, I would like to know what you thought about the men on the ground you were fighting against."

Stevo cringed inwardly; that was a loaded question. On the one hand, he didn't want to offend or annoy his superior officers by criticizing their forces. They had won, after all. But on the other hand, the rebel soldiers - flash-cloned as they may have been - were a joke. If it weren't for the loss of comms and shields, even after the artillery bombardment, they would have carved through them like a heated samurai sword through melted cheese. Their marksmanship skill was almost non-existent, their tactical awareness was laughable - they could, and should, have cut off his squad's retreat at any time, and didn't - and their armor... well, to say it was antiquated and woefully below par was an understatement of monumental proportions. Without the information given to them by the Imperium, the rebels wouldn't have stood a chance.

Crow smirked and chuckled. He'd seen the look. "Please speak freely, Captain; we already know the answer. Do you think they were an effective fighting force?"

"Err, again, Sir, with all due respect, no. They were... clueless. It was like they'd been shown how to pull the triggers on their weapons and then sent on their way with nothing more. There is no way we should have survived after the arty bombardment; our retreat should have been cut off almost immediately. They didn't have to worry about our shields either, so a few hits from small arms fire would have broken through our armor, and I don't think I was dinged more than a few times in the entire engagement. Their hit ratio must have been abysmal. No offense intended to whoever trained them, but Marines would have ended that invasion before it started."

"Our thoughts exactly, Captain. Would it surprise you to learn, then, that they weren't trained at all?"

"Sir?"

"We found out about the invasion plans, and we had to grow two hundred thousand soldiers in about three days. Although the base easily had the facilities to do that, we had no way of training them before you landed. We were barely able to equip them. They had the basic knowledge of their deployment positions and how to use their weapons and radios, but that was about it. This is why we are asking for your assistance."

Okay, that explained a few things, but the request itself still didn't make much sense. "I... I'm still not clear how I can help, Sir."

"How familiar are you with neural interface ports?" The General asked, leaning forward to put his elbows on the large table and his chin on his entwined fingers.

Ahhh, and there drops the other shoe.

"I am... fairly familiar with them," Stevo said slowly.

Either the General wanted to go on with his explanation regardless, or he didn't read the real hesitation in Stevo's voice correctly. Stevo knew exactly what they were, but the idea of someone jamming a data jack into his skull freaked him the fuck out.

"Growing flash clones is easy. A full-grown adult can be manufactured in one of those pods in about eight hours. Physically, they're no different from the average, homegrown person, biologically speaking. The days when a flash clone could only survive a day or two after incubation are long gone. But they only have the most basic intelligence in their heads, usually the ability to walk and move around, fine motor skills, and a moderate understanding of language. They can't speak, but they can understand verbal commands well enough to follow them. But training them into something recognizable as an effective soldier would take years. A lot of years. They have no concept of danger. For example, you must have noticed how they blindly chased after you during your retreat, not caring about the casualties they took."

Stevo nodded along; he already knew where this was going, but he answered anyway. "Yeah, they just kept... running into our fire."

"With a data port surgically installed on each of them, a process that can be carried out in less than an hour per soldier, we could upload everything they could ever need to know. Communication skills, danger awareness, common fucking sense... but more importantly, imagine everything you have ever learned about combat, every tiny nugget of information, a decade of training, years of experience, your instinct, your tactical awareness, your leadership abilities, all of it uploaded into them in an afternoon. We could have two million "you"s by the end of the week. Couple that with reverse-engineered and modified versions of your armor and our own adaptation of the X1 battle rifle, and we have the perfect fighting force. Enough to actually have a hope of defending ourselves during a ground invasion."

Stevo took a deep breath and nodded. Yes, okay, fine, that did make an awful lot of sense, but...

"Sir, I don't exactly know how to say this as articulately as I would like, but... if there are two million "me"s running around, what makes me who I am is basically lost. It's like the old saying: if everyone is evil, then nobody is. I'm not sure I want an army of clones running around with my memories in their heads."

Crow's smile, far from fading, seemed to grow even wider. "So what if I told you that your memories would stay entirely your own, that there would be no need to even copy them out of your mind, let alone share them with an army of clones? That everything that makes you you will be safe, sound, and untouched."

"I mean, are you telling me that?"

"Knowledge and memory are two very different things. You know how to use a screwdriver without any sort of memory of who taught you or of any of the other times you have used one. Your mind separates the lesson - the knowledge - from the event or the manner in which it was learned. All you need to do is to scale that up. You don't remember your marksmanship training every time you pick up a weapon; you just know what to do. When you hit a beach, the first thing you do is look for good cover while checking for threats of a possible flank. It's the same thing; you just do it, it has become part of your nature. It is that nature we are looking to copy, your knowledge, not your memories, and certainly not your personality."

Okay, that was a little different from what he had been thinking when the first proposition was made. He liked his mind; he had worked hard for it, it was his and he kept all his stuff in there. Besides, it happened to be the one his mother had given him. Sharing it with some random clone - let alone a few million of them - sounded more than a little horrific. But if the general was on the level - and he had no reason to think that he wasn't - then all of those concerns could be very neatly bypassed. Now he understood why General Crow had asked him how long his training had been and how much experience he had, he was trying to illustrate the point that to create a solider comparable to Stevo, they would need about five to ten years worth of training and simulations just to get them close. With the knowledge and know-how taken from Stevo, they could have a clone completely up to standard in an afternoon.

"May I ask a question?" Stevo finally said after the officers let him process his thoughts.

"Of course," Crow nodded.

"If..." Stevo frowned. Why the fuck did this meeting have to be held at 7am. His head didn't like functioning at 7 am. Mornings, in his opinion, would be much easier if they were later in the day. "...if my knowledge is used to churn out a few million soldiers just like me, what would my role be going forward? Would I be just another soldier?"

Crow snorted out a laugh. "God, no. We have an altogether different role for you in mind."

Stevo felt that it shouldn't have been a cliffhanger, so he waited and tried to be patient. It wasn't Crow who spoke up to answer him, but Michaels.

"Captain, what I am about to tell you is not any sort of classified information, but it is personal; I would ask you to keep it that way."

"Of course, Sir," Stevo answered with something like a confused frown on his face.

"The battle of the beach was the end for me. I was never enhanced the way you were. I was too old; they would have done more harm than good. I had some, but not all of them. My body is broken. It is very unlikely I will ever walk again, so although I can stay in a command position, my time leading from the front is over. I need to find a replacement that can lead ground forces on the ground." He raised his eyes and locked them with Stevos. "There is one detail the general left out of his explanation: You have a very tactical mind; I don't mean the awareness gained from experience and training, but something you were born with. It's an instinct to you; I know this because it is an instinct to me, too. Being able to function under pressure can be trained, and that will be passed onto the clones with the rest of your knowledge, but your calmness under fire, your ability to think rationally and logically, your ability to use your own initiative... these aren't things you got from training, they are part of who you are, which means they are things that can't be passed onto the clones. But it also makes you perfect to become my replacement."

"Replacement?? But you said..." Stevo blurted out. Michaels was like a father figure to everyone in the Division, and the shock of the colonel sounding like he was throwing in the towel was no gentle feeling.

"Don't worry; I'm not retiring," Michaels laughed. "But I will be taking on more of a headquarters role, dealing with overall strategy and the like, well away from the fighting. It would be difficult to defend a beachhead in a wheelchair. I need someone on the ground who can lead from the front, someone who can take my orders, look at the battlefield, and find the best way to make them work, or tell me straight when that isn't possible. I think you are that man."

"I... I don't know what to say. Thank you, Sir."

"It will mean another promotion for you, assuming you agree, of course," Crow added.

"But, I was only made Captain a few days ago," Stevo squinted back at the other man. This was a lot to take in before his morning coffee, and he was starting to wonder if that hadn't been intentional.

"And you will stay one for a while. But once the legions are organized and deployed, you will be elevated to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel."

"But..." He glanced to his side at the utterly thrilled-looking Silvia. "Sir, Captain West is senior; she should be offered this position first."

He swore that his girlfriend - was she his girlfriend? That was an interesting thought - actually swooned a little.

Crow's smile seemed to grow a little wider; at this point, it looked like it would break his face if it got any bigger. "Captain West is a talented, dedicated, and very capable officer. But her skills lay elsewhere. The only reason we managed to equip and arm the clones you fought on the beach was because of her. She is a logistical genius and has organization skills that are unmatched anywhere in the rebellion. It may not be glamorous, but..."

"But amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics," Stevo nodded, giving Silvia a smile.

"Exactly. Silvia has already agreed to have her knowledge donated to the next generation of supply chiefs and quartermasters, but as with your tactical thinking, her organized and methodical mind is not something that can be learned. She will be put in charge of our entire logistics division once it has been set up properly." Crow's eyes met Silvia's. It would seem she hadn't been told that part when she had agreed to the port being installed, and the surprised gasp was as loud as it was adorable. "The only other person we are yet to have this conversation with is your friend, Flight Lieutenant Almark. We are hoping that she can give us what we need to make our next generation of pilots as skilled and as deadly as she is."

"Captain Taylor," Valdek spoke up for the first time since the meeting started. "What you must understand is that the rebellion is an idea; it is a principle. But the people carrying that idea are not soldiers. They are civilians; they are farmers, miners, and factory workers. They are poor, but they are honorable. They're not soldiers, and - if given the chance - we would like to keep it that way. You have been given a hell of a lot of information to process, and we don't expect an answer from you immediately. But I would like you to think of the people we will be defending while you're considering our offer."

"Yes, Sir. Thank you, Admiral. But..." he flicked a glance to Silvia, her eyes were sparkling. There was excitement and pride behind them. He already knew, from that one look, that she was more than willing to go through the procedure for the Logistics Division, so any concerns he may have had about how this would affect their relationship were calmed by the knowledge they would be in this together... which, in itself, was an odd way to think considering the novelty of their relationship so far. More than that, with his fears over losing himself to a bunch of mindless clones having been dissuaded and the promise of having a real, meaningful role in getting justice for his fallen brothers, he didn't feel like there was anything else to think about. "... I am ready to make my decision now."

"There's no rush, Captain."

"No, Sir, I understand that, but I believe in decisiveness. This will hasten the end of the war. I mean no disrespect to anyone in this room, nor to my fellow marines or your ground forces, but I am a damned good soldier. Soldiering is the only thing I know; I was born to it. If my knowledge and experience can help bring down the Emperor and avenge the three-eight-one, then I will repeat to you what I said to Captain West when she asked me to join you. I'm all in. You can jam one of those port things into my head."

General Crow huffed out a laugh and shook his head with an expression of admiration. "It is rare that someone surprises me, Captain, but you seem to manage it regularly. There is something else I thought you may want to know as well."

"Sir?"

"You weren't born with your sense of honor, nor your selflessness; those things were instilled into you, and - with your permission, of course - we think that our legions will be well served following your example. It will ensure that they are never used dishonorably nor in a manner that would bring shame to our cause. You have already shown yourself to be a man of integrity and fortitude, with those attributes instilled into our soldiers..." His smile grew, "... the Imperium is going to be in for a very hard time."

The three officers stood, prompting Stevo and Silvia to do the same. "Thank you, Captain," Crow said, offering a hand. Stevo took it and shook.

The Colonel was next. "I'm proud of you, son," he smiled.

"Thank you, Sir."

Finally, it was Valdek. "We will be working closely together in the future, Captain. I am looking forward to it."

"As am I, Sir."

"Report to medical at 1800, ship's time, Captain," Crow nodded.

"Yes, Sir."

With the meeting now obviously over, he turned toward the door; Silvia was waiting for him, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet and trying to contain the frantic excitement on her face. He opened the door to the board room and let her out before following after her. "So," he said with a smile.

He didn't get a chance to finish his sentence. He was going to ask her what she thought, or how she felt, or even what this meant for them in the long term, but his lips were sealed when Silvia threw herself into his arms, wrapped hers around his neck, and kissed him hard, in the middle of the corridor. "I'm so fucking proud of you," she gushed when she finally broke the kiss, ignoring the curious looks by the servicemen and women passing them in through the hallway. "You are going to be the backbone of our entire military! And commander of all ground forces? That is incredible; you are incredible. Holy fuck, that was amazing!"

"Let's not forget about our new logistical extraordinaires, following in the footsteps of a certain stunning and brilliant blonde captain," he chuckled as she grabbed his hand and led him along one of the hallways. "And the new head of the logistics branch of the rebel military."

"Oh my god, I know, right?" She was practically skipping down the corridor and dragging Stevo with him. "I can't believe it."

"Errm, out of interest, where are we going?" He asked after smiling at her euphoric face.

"Oh, we're going to my quarters to have sex. I know I said I wanted to wait, but... look,.." She stopped and faced him, that giddy excitement suddenly tinted with an edge of nervousness. "I like you... a lot... and I want to see where this goes. You and me, I mean."

Stevo couldn't keep the smile off his face. "The feeling is more than mutual."

"Then I don't see the need to wait. We need to celebrate, and I want to do it naked. Is that okay?"

"Gee, let me think," Stevo smirked.

Silvia giggled, tugged on his hand, and led onward toward her cabin.

********

Almark. 13

The room was huge, a repurposed maintenance bay, if she wasn't mistaken. Not a flight deck, the Battlecruiser Hyperion didn't have one, and it wasn't large enough to support more than one strike craft, but it was a hell of a lot bigger than anything that could be called a conference room. There must have been thirty people already there when she had entered and a few more had arrived not long after her, bringing that number closer to forty. But because it was a repurposed hanger, the walls, the deck plates, and the ceilings were all metallic, meaning that every voice bounced off every surface without seeming to lose any of its volume. Of course, because it was so loud, people had to basically shout to be heard, which, in turn, increased the volume even more. Those forty people in that room could rival a championship powerball game in terms of the sheer amount of noise that hit her like a wall once those doors closed behind her.

There was a table of sorts in the center of the room but no chairs. The table looked more like a design bench, which she supposed made sense, and was about waist high and would look enormous in any other room. It was the sort of bench that would normally be covered in tools, grease marks, discarded or soon-to-be-repaired strikecraft parts, and fucking enormous full-sized schematical drawings of whichever aircraft the deck crew was working on. She had seen countless numbers of them in her time aboard carriers and on airbases, but she had never really appreciated how huge they really were until now. Seriously, she half expected a lubricant-stained grunt to wander in, plasma cutter and wrench in hand, asking if he could have his shit back now and for everyone to fuck off so he could work in peace.

And, had that actually happened, she wouldn't have blamed him for a moment. From a single glance, it really did look like the clowns had taken over the circus.

Everyone was shouting increasingly louder to be heard in a room full of people who didn't seem to have any interest in listening to each other. The table itself was a mess of half-completed diagrams, discarded notes, and half-empty mugs of cold coffee. Some of the people were gathered in small groups, arguing amongst themselves; others were gathered in a single larger group around the table, trying valiantly to talk over each other, and a few people had either arrived late and didn't want to get involved in the verbal melee or had simply given up and retreated to one of the outer edges of the room. And from the odd fragments of conversation she could actually pick up, it didn't seem like people were even remotely on topic, at least not according to her understanding of why they were there. One group seemed - if she heard correctly - to be arguing over landing gear.

A hand tapped her on her shoulder and she spun around to find the exasperated face of Darius Abdul staring back at her with something approaching an apologetic smile on his face.

"Is it always like this?" Emylee asked

"Sorry?" he yelled back leaning in a little closer to her so he could hear her.

"I said," Emylee cringed as she immediately found herself joining the overwhelming chorus of voices shouting to be legible. "Is it always like this?"

"No idea," he shrugged. "This is the first I've been to for a while. I gave them an ultimatum last time I was here to work together and come up with something productive, or I would take control of the project and make them work together properly. This is what happens when civilians get involved in a military project. They think that everyone's opinions are equal. You're my trump card. Either they have solved the problem - or at least made good progress - or I put you in charge and enforce order so progress can be made."

Emylee looked back at the room with a grimace. "I'm not optimistic they've agreed on anything yet."

The Vice Admiral let his eyes wander over the crowd. A few people noticed him standing there and started to quiet down, but the vast majority of them kept up the din without the slightest notion that they were being watched. Abdul took a deep breath and turned back to her. "Okay then, time to get this show on the road. Are you ready?"

"I seriously doubt it."

"Sorry? I can barely hear myself think in here."

"I said after you, Admiral."

"Oh, right, thank you. But that, Lieutenant, will be the last time you refer to me by my rank." he winked at her with a secretive smile.

"Sir?"

"You'll see."

The Vice Admiral strode into the center of the room, stepping straight through the middle of one particular group of arguing... Engineers? Designers? Whoever the hell they were, and leaving them stuttering at the rudeness and abruptness of some people, until they realized who that person was, then fell silent. He reached the center of the room in only a few footsteps, picked up a mug, checked it was empty, and then slammed it down onto the table with enough force to shatter it into pieces. The room fell silent in an instant.

"Well, if this is what productivity looks like, then I'm starting to think that the entirety of human history has been doing it wrong."

He was met with a few sheepish gazes and more silence.

"No? Nothing? Excellent. Then you can show me what you have come up with in the month you've been at this."

More sheepish gazes, more silence, but also a few uncomfortable shuffles.

"Something, anything, a few god damned lines on a piece of paper, anything at all."

"Sir," a woman's voice on the opposite side of the table finally spoke up, but Emylee couldn't see her through the crowd. "You don't understand how complicated a process this is."

"Don't I?" The Vice Admiral had a no-nonsense edge to his eyes, but he had never come across as particularly stern or harsh in his mannerisms to Emylee. In fact, in the small number of times they had spoken before this meeting - the first to tell her about the project and his thoughts and the second to formally request her assistance - he had always been warm, polite, and even friendly. But if it was possible to make ice freeze into something more icy with a stare, that is what he shot across the room to the voice. "What ship are you on?"

"Um... the Hyperion... Sir."

"And where do you think it came from?"

"I... I assumed it was... requisitioned from the Imperium."

Emylee tried to stifle a chuckle. That was a not-too-subtle way of saying that it had been stolen, that the rebellion wasn't capable of designing, let alone building, something of this size and complexity. One look at the ship from the outside made it abundantly obvious to anyone with the slightest amount of knowledge that this was no Imperium ship.

"And that shows how little you understand. This ship was designed and built from the ground up at the Fort Ironholm shipyard under much worse conditions than this. Who do you think headed up that team?"

The woman chose not to say anything.

"Yeah, didn't think you'd have the backbone to answer that after trying to blame my lack of knowledge for your ineptitude. This is very simple, ladies and gentlemen; you were given a task to do and were given a timescale in which to start making some progress. I wasn't expecting you to be finished; I wasn't expecting to walk in here today to find a fully fleshed out, prototype-ready schematic on the table, ready to go, but I was hoping for something! So... you have exactly thirty seconds to tell me that something has been achieved, anything, in the month you were given, and then show me what it is."

Crickets weren't a thing on starships, but still, the sentiment stood.

"Twenty..." Abdul counted down. Still, nobody spoke. "Ten..." The silence prevailed. "Yeah, I can't be bothered to wait for the dramatic, last-second, big reveal. So, I will take it that you have collectively managed to waste a month?" More nervous glances and uncomfortable glances around the room. "Excellent; now that point is proven, I am going to tell you what is going to happen next. I am going to take personal charge of this project, and delegate the lionshare of the design criteria work to my new expert here, The newly appointed Air Marshall Emylee Almark."

All eyes turned to her.

Emylee blinked. Not because of the new responsibilities, nor because of the piercing gaze of every eye in the room, but because of the rank she had used for her. She was a flight Lieutenant, she commanded a squadron. Above her was a wing commander; no prizes for guessing what they commanded. Senior to a wing commander was a Flight Leader, usually someone who held authority over all air wings in a fleet or at a base, and then finally, there was the Air Marshal. The Air Marshall was basically in charge of it all; they held command over the entire strike craft contingent of any military organization. They still answered to the navy, of course; strike craft were still a distant second to capital ships in terms of not only raw power but in financial investment and functioned as part of the naval service, so an Air Marshal still answered to the Admiralty, but they were the highest authority to anyone who even got to look at fighter on a regular professional basis.

She couldn't have heard that right, could she? He had said that it was the last time she would use his rank to address him, and this promotion did technically put them at the same level, but... holy fucking shit! Air Marshal? Her? That was... a lot.

After a few moments of probably looking more than a little dumbstruck and under the gaze of every pair of eyes in the room, she finally cleared her throat and nodded to the Vice Admiral.

"Now let me be clear here, people," Abdul went on. "You work for her, but you answer to me! The Air Marshal is a newly converted Marine Pilot with a comprehensive understanding of all Imperium strike craft, including, and especially, the venerated Broadsword. She is the only person in this room, or even in this fleet, with the ability to understand what will work and what will not. Her experience dictates which flaws in the Broadsword design are real and which are theoretical, and she probably has more than a few ideas on how to improve on the parts of its design that do work. If you do not like her suggestions or her response to your ideas, too-fucking-bad! If she says your idea wouldn't work, then it won't work, move on, and think of something else! Because I promise you, you will absolutely lose any pissing contest you get into with her!"

"From this point onward," he went on after giving the stunned crowd the opportunity to try to complain. "She is the project manager, and she answers only to me. She already knows the flaws in Imperium designs; your job is to help her fix them so our strikecraft are superior, that's it. Any of you are more than welcome to quit if you don't like the new arrangement, but anyone who comes to my door complaining that your ideas aren't being appreciated, or your genius is lost, or that it should be you in charge, will be fired, and so will anyone else trying the same thing behind you! One thing this last month has categorically proven is that the military should not be, and is not a democracy. You tried that, and you failed. This is a dictatorship, as in, the Air Marshal dictates the development path, and you people follow it. Are there any questions?"

There were a few more uncomfortable shuffles and the odd quiet murmur, but other than that, there was nothing.

"Excellent. Then I will leave you in her more than capable hands."

With that, and without waiting for a single acknowledgment, he turned and strode back toward Emylee. "I hear congratulations are in order," he smirked at her.

Emylee opened her mouth, but about ten different things tried to come out at once, resulting in exactly nothing coming out at all. She closed her mouth and took her breath. "I don't know what to say, Sir."

"Darius," he smiled. "We're technically the same rank now."

"Wow, that's... gonna take some getting used to," she shook her head in disbelief. "Any other surprises I should know about?"

"Actually yes, not so much a surprise, though, more of a request, but we can deal with that in a day or two. As for those lot," he tossed a thumb over his shoulder at the shell-shocked-looking crowd. "They needed the hard treatment; they've been fucking around for weeks in stupid little games to decide which of them is in charge. I haven't been coming to the meetings, but they've all been monitored. They were worse than useless when left to their own devices."

Emylee nodded absently, that had certainly been the impression she'd gotten when first entering the room.

"Now listen," Darius said after a moment. "You know your stuff, and you know your strike craft, something that none of this lot can say. You know where changes could be made, even if you don't know how to make them. That part is up to them. All you need to do is go through your list of design flaws with them, and they will take the tasks best suited to their field of expertise. Remember, you are the project manager, not a people manager on this. There is no need to coddle them. Your mission is to put together a design for a fighter that can stand toe-to-toe with the Broadsword and blow Longbows out of the sky, and to design a strike craft that can perform the same function as the Longbow without getting torn up by the Broadswords with quite as much ease. Understood?"

"Yes, Si... Darius."

"Great. Now, I have some real diplomacy to attend to. My wife has some new clothes and wants my honest opinion of how they look on her." he sighed deeply. "I swear, I promised not to lie to her in our vows, but I know a minefield when I see one, and 'Darling, you look like you're wearing a curtain that makes your ass look like a landing pad' is probably a good way to get myself divorced." He grinned and winked playfully at her before clapping his hand onto her arm. "Good luck, Air Marshal. I'm still not expecting miracles, but we are going to need something on paper within the month and a complete design as soon as humanly possible. This war isn't going to wait for any of us. You are the last person that needs to be reminded that lives depend on the outcome of this."

"Got it, boss," she said with a chuckle. She'd never been on a first-name basis with an Admiral before, but she had to admit. It was pretty fucking cool.

And she couldn't wait to tell Mac.

She stepped up to the head of the table. It was time to put on those big girl panties, suck it up, and play the part. She had led teams before, and as much as people said they hated the idea of public speaking, it was nowhere near as terrifying as leading men and women - friends - into combat. Anyone who thought that talking to strangers was even in the same category of fear as fighting for your life was not only an idiot but was apparently more than happy to advertise that idiocy - alongside their ignorance - to the rest of the world. She had managed to handle that fear on a terrifying number of occasions, so talking to a recently reprimanded design team was, in her humble opinion, fuck all by comparison.

She sucked in a deep breath, let her eyes wander over the various, now-quiet members of her new team, and spoke. "Okay, people, let's get to work."

********

Stevo. 23

Her top was over her head within seconds of the door swishing closed behind them, leaving her in her dress pants and a lace bra before her lips crashed back into his. There was a heat to her kiss, a passion, that same frantic need to have as much of their bodies touching as possible. All of her was pressed against him, the lace of her bra and her breasts contained within were crushed against his chest as both of their hands grabbed at the hem of his shirt and dragged it upwards. It felt almost like a form of torture to pull his lips away from hers so they could get his shirt over his head. Her hands left his to the task of tossing his shirt aside; they moved to his pants and started tugging to get the button open. Her fingers were deft; they were talented, but the bulge beneath was tenting the material taut, and it was taking some doing to pop the button through its hole. Making matters worse was the fact that she was walking backward, sightlessly pulling him toward her bed, every step making his pants a little tighter for a moment, which in turn made that button a little harder to pop open.

She growled a little and tugged hard. His pants loosened immediately, and a soft clatter of something small and metallic hitting the deck plate rattled around the room before his pants fell to his ankles. He stepped out of them, leaving him only in his tight boxers as his tongue danced with hers. He'd never had this before; he'd never felt this with another woman. Sure, those one-nighters and short-lived relationships had burned hot, but this was different. He couldn't quite place how, let alone form it into a coherent thought - and considering his hands were on the ass of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, his mind was busy elsewhere - but he knew that this was special. Life-alteringly so. In Silvia, he didn't see a girlfriend or even just a fuck-buddy; he saw a partner. It was a subtle distinction but a profound one. He'd never been a selfish lover, but he had never felt the urge to make a woman sing in pleasure like he felt right now.

Her arms had wrapped around his neck again, pulling her lips hungrily into his. He wanted to rip her pants off, too; he wanted to tear the clothes from her body and leave her presented to him, naked and ready. But at the same time, he wanted to draw this out; he wanted her anticipation and her hunger to build; he wanted all of her to crave the touch of all of him. His hand worked up her spine, his fingertips gliding over her skin and making her arch against him and purr into his lips before his fingers found the clasp of her bra. With a deft flick of his own, the unwanted garment fell loose between them.

Her lips were still crushed to his, their tongues performing that timeless duel when the backs of her legs bumped into the edge of her bed. Without breaking the kiss, he pressed forward, leaning onto her and slowly lowering her to the bed, sliding the straps of her bra over her arms as he did. With no small amount of reluctance, he parted his lips from hers and stood himself up, leaving her heaving and panting on the bed, her eyes locked onto him as he reached down and undid her pants. She lifted her hips for him without a second's hesitation, and he hooked his fingers into her pants and panties at the same time before slowly... torturously slowly... dragging them off her. It was like unwrapping the most priceless of gifts.

He groaned; he couldn't help it; the sound was out of his mouth without the slightest hint of conscious thought. It wasn't a compliment; it wasn't a sound meant to articulate his attraction to her, at least not an intentional one. It was purely an uncontrollable reaction to the sight in front of him. To say that she was the vision of everything he found beautiful in a woman was an understatement of criminal proportions. He had spent his whole life very firmly buying into the belief that nobody was flawless, that there was no such thing as perfection, but Silvia - lying naked on the bed before him - was enough to slap that idea out of his head with an extreme amount of prejudice. As astonishingly, startlingly beautiful as she had always been to him since the moment he laid eyes on her, seeing her naked, panting, and looking up at him in pure wanton need was enough to make him believe in a higher power because there was no fucking way that something as divine as this could have happened by accident.

He hadn't really paid much attention to what his hands were doing during those few seconds of staring, but a hungry gasp and a lustful coo pulled his mind back to the moment to find that his boxers were now halfway down his legs, and his cock - rigid, hard, and pulsing with every beat of his heart - was now standing proudly to attention in front of him. He smiled inwardly to himself. Those genetic modifications had done a lot of different things to his body, and the size of his manhood had grown just as noticeably as his intellect, but at that moment, it wasn't his mind that Silvia was purring at.

"I want you," he almost growled at her, his own need and lust building to fever-pitched levels inside him.

"Take me," was her husky reply.

He didn't need to be told twice and was moving in a heartbeat, climbing over her, pushing her legs open wider to expose her molten sex, her lips glistening with her own arousal, and her hips rolling upwards as she moved her legs to wrap around him. His lips pressed back to hers, her breasts crushed against the weight of his broad, hard chest again, and a deep, carnal groan was moaned from her lips to his and from his lips to hers as he finally sank every inch of himself into her.

"Oh fuck," she mewled from her throat as their kiss broke. Stevo wasn't quite that articulate, he was too lost in the feeling, in the sensation of her walls gripping his veined shaft. She was so hot, liquid wet, and he could feel the individual muscles inside her moving and contracting around him. The pleasure was too much for him to pull out words as concise or as well thought out as the second "oh fuck" that fell from Silvia's lips. His eyes were swimming, sensory overload from the enhanced sensitivity in every one of his nerves, but her eyes were locked onto him with laser focus, and she could clearly see every ripple of euphoric pleasure on his face.

And she was taking it all in. It was almost enough to throw him out of that moment of sublime sensation, just seeing her as enthralled in him, and in the moment as he was with her. He started to thrust, dragging himself painfully slowly out of her, making sure that both of them felt every bulging vein of his shaft running over the slick tightness of her inner wall, and then driving back into her hard. Her breasts bounced on her chest as she let out a grunt like the air was being fucked out of her lungs. Over and over, slowly out, and then a hard thrust back into her, his eyes never leaving hers as he gradually picked up the pace, each thrust coming a little quicker than the one before it, and building that rhythm into a steady, passionate fuck. The loud, wet slaps echoed around the room, and her legs tightened around him to lock him into her as his balls drummed out its own marching beat against her perfect, pert little ass. The moans and grunts, the little squeaks and the louder squeals were as intoxicating to him as they were sexy, and between each lustful moan was the heavy panting of her breath.

God, her breath, he could listen to it for eternity. There was no sound quite like it. The heavy suck in of air and the panting, quivering exhale, over and over, the perfect sound track to the rhythm of their joining. And that rhythm was getting fast, deeper and a little harder. "Oh yes, fuck, Steve, that's it, take me, baby. Fuck me. I feel you.. Fuck, right there!" her breathing started coming a little louder and faster after it was interrupted but her screamed voice.

"Fuck, Silvia, Jesus, you feel incredible."

"Yes, feel me baby, feel me around you, I want you to fill me, I want all of you into me... oh god, so good."

Stevo lifted himself up onto his arms, his hands planted into the bed on either side of her head, and started throwing his hips forward to drive every inch of his considerable length into her. The grunting, the moans, the wet slaps, all of them got louder and faster. Silvia's eyes opened wide, and her jaw hung open as her senses were assaulted by an unending stream of pleasure. From this new position, he could look into her eyes, he could watch that fuck flush spreading down her throat, and onto her chest, he could watch her pert, handful-sized breasts bounce and sway with every powerful thrust he drove into her. She was trying to fuck him back, trying to rock her hips back to meet every one of those strokes, Stevo had met his fair share of women who just laid there during sex, and Silvia sure as shit wasn't one of those. He imagined he would be in for the time of his life when she decided to ride him one day, but for the moment, that didn't matter. He used the movements of her body to angle his manhood to crash into her G Spot, every thrust driving her higher, building her towards that first titanic climax. He wanted to feel her spasm around him; he wanted to feel the tightening, convulsing muscles inside her; he wanted to feel her body trying to milk all of him into her. There was nothing more important to him in that moment than the need...the abject, all-consuming need... to fill her.

But not quite yet.

He dropped down onto her, her arms immediately wrapping around his neck to keep him close, and crushed her chest to his as her moaning, panting lips crashed into his. He reached down, pulling her legs a little higher onto his hip, roller open, and opening her up to him a little more. He was balls deep inside her on every stroke, and every one of the panted breaths was articulating that she was loving this just as much as he was. She was beyond speech now; to be fair, Stevo had barely been there at all; he was operating on pure instinct, snippets of information he had learned a lifetime ago as an adolescent boy, wanting to know what sex was really like, now bubbling back to the surface and showing him all the different signs to look for, all the different things to try, and how to mix and match them to make this as mind-blowing for her as it could possibly be. Stamina wasn't a problem, neither was 'longevity,' he could keep at this all night, but he was fairly sure, by this point, that going for that long may actually kill her. She was a babbling, sweating, frothy mess beneath him, and he was fucking into her with almost animalistic power and instinct.

Suddenly, her breath hitched, and a silent scream floated out of her gaping mouth on a long, haggard, quivering breath as she clamped onto him. Every part of her tensed, her abs flexed, her back and shoulders pulled themselves off the bed, and her legs started kicking spasmodically against the sex-heavy air as she came for him. Her eyes rolled a bit, that flush on her trembling tits grew bigger and darker, and his cock was soaked by the flood of juices that washed out of her.

Finally, after just enough time to start thinking that something might be wrong, she sucked that breath back in again, and her eyes snapped back to his. "Oh my fucking god! You made me cum; you made me fucking cum, please, fuck, please cum inside me; I need to feel you. I... fuuuuckkk!!!"

Stevo was still incapable of forming words; there may have been a grunt or maybe a groan, but a coherent series of sounds that could be construed as a recognizable word was simply beyond his abilities. It was a profound version of tunnel vision; it was the single-minded charge to a goal; it was the instinctive pursuit of mutual, shared pleasure, and it was building him. His thrusting became faster, less measured, less controlled, more frantic, and animalistic; his eyes flared wider, his grunts got louder, and his balls started to tighten as they beat against her clapping ass.

Harder and faster, deeper, and with less and less conscious control. He was driving every inch of him into her, every inch he could. He wanted her to feel everything, he wanted her to still be feeling it the next day. That dull, aching throb in her nethers that reminded her of him and their passion. But there was something different about the fire in her eyes now. It was enough to pull him out of his own bliss, and - although he didn't change anything about the way he was fucking into her - it made him focus on her gaze rather than the sublime vision of her body melting against his.

Suddenly, she moved. Pushing one leg up to press her foot against the bed, she half lifted, and half rolled to shove him off her and onto his back. For the briefest of moments, he wondered if something was wrong, if she was having regrets or at least wanted to stop, but the speed at which she swung her leg over him and mounted him silenced those doubts faster than they had arisen. He was still granite hard, his cock jutting out from his groin with the steely resolve of a parade ground flag pole... His little marine was standing at complete attention. She reached beneath her, nudged him into place, and, with a long, sultry, throaty moan, sunk herself back onto him and started to ride. The groan that rumbled out of his chest was the closest he could manage to an articulation of how good she felt. But it was the sight of her on top of him, her body bouncing, gyrating, and undulating with every deliberate movement that captivated him.

His hands moved to her hips; somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, he wanted to guide her up and down his length, but Silvia had other ideas... much, much better ideas. She took his hands, dragged them up her body, and pressed them against her breasts, holding them there for a few moments as her hands helped to prompt him into palming, cupping, and squeezing her swaying tits. They were the perfect size, amble teardrops on her chest capped with diamond-hard, light pink nipples, and a little more than could be fitted into his hands. His thumb rubbed over her nipple, pulling a heated gasp from her throat as she started to bounce a little harder and a little faster. The loud, wet slaps were echoing again, but this time it was her doing.

Stevo had never experienced this before, not even close. Even the women in his past who hadn't just laid there had never taken the initiative to give something back to him. Silvia was just the most gorgeous creature he had ever set eyes on. She was, by far, the best lover. She slid herself up and down his slick length, rolling her hips and squeezing her inner muscles with almost supernatural amounts of control, at least compared to Stevo, who could barely string a few syllables together. To his credit - or so his own mind told him - he had the wherewithal to not just lay there either, and he started to match her pace with long, deep, steady upward thrusts to her own. Silvia's head was thrown back; her eyes turned to the ceiling, which, in turn, did some pretty spectacular things to her chest, pushing them harder into Stevo's tender and passionate hands.

But he needed more; he needed to feel more of her; he needed to kiss her, taste her, bring her higher, repay - in some small way - the incredible sensation that she was giving to him. He sat himself up in a concerted clenching of his core muscles. That made his cock bounce hard against her G spot, but before Silvia had a chance to redirect her gaze to see what he was doing, his hands had moved to her ass to help her movements, his chest and mashed her breasts between them, and he had sealed his lips onto her glistening, seat-sheened throat. He kissed, he licked, he sucked, he raked his teeth gently over the throb of her pulse. Her moans and increasingly louder panted mewls vibrated the skin beneath his lips, while his own sounds of passion did the same from the outside in.

They moved together in perfect harmony. It was symmetry, it was a timeless dance that could only be possible between two people completely at ease with each other. He had fucked her, she had fucked him, but this was different. It was mutual, it was shared, it was as if they had become a single sexual being... they were one. It didn't take long for them both to reach that peak again, she screamed out into the now-hallowed air of her cabin, another wash of her juices soaking his swelling, bulging cock as her nails dug into his shoulders and he helped her bounce just that little bit harder to make him join her in the fall off the edge.

She felt it at the same time; she felt him hardening inside her as his cock pistoned into her, she felt the energetic bouncing of his shaft against her G spot, she felt the loss of his rhythm, she heard the deeper bass of his groans and the gravel behind his growls into her throat, and she finally regained the ability to speak... an ability long lost to Steve. "Yes. Baby, please, I want it, I want you, all of you, give it to me... please, fuckkkk!"

Stevo's world went white; the only sounds were the howls of pleasure from his lover, the inhuman-sounding grunts from his own chest, and the pulsing of blood rushing through his ears. Everything, his entire universe, condensed down to the indescribable pleasure of his release into his woman. He erupted into her, every spurt splashing into her walls hard enough to be certain that she felt all of them; every cannonade of his cum pulled another feral grunt from him and another scream or whimper of impassioned pleasure from him as she came hard around him, her walls spasming and contracting to milk every drop of him into her. And he really did give her every drop; he felt like his soul was being forced into her with his release, sucking every last ounce of his almost inexhaustible energy reserves out of him. But still, he couldn't stop. His hips thrust up into her, his hands bounced her onto him, their juices mixed, and every drop of him was forced deeper and deeper into her. His orgasm seemed to go on for an eternity as his lungs forgot how to work, and his heart felt like it was trying to beat its way through his ribs... Moreover, her heart seemed to be trying just as hard to meet his in the non-existent space between them.

Finally, spent and panting, his vision swimming and his head spinning, his breaths coming as hard and ragged as hers, his arms went limp, and like a fallen warrior, his body dropped, spent, back onto the bed. The body that had been honed for service, the body that had seen the harsh brutality of combat in a dozen furious battles, designed and engineered to be capable of prolonged, sustained savage violence, the body that had killed and seen friends killed around him, the body purposely made for service and sacrifice... had been tamed by the siren in his arms. Her body came down with him to lay atop him with a happy, satisfied smile on her face. Their lips came together again as they rode out the aftershocks of their incredible, enormous mutual climax, all of him given to all of her and all of her taken in return. For that short moment, they were one.

She finally broke the kiss and, without making the slightest attempt to climb off him, just rested her head on her chest. His hands moved to stroke through her hair. They just lay there, basking in the presence of one another as his little marine finally fell to ease and retired from his post for the night, but happily staying inside the warm embrace of her.

A soft giggle escaped her lips and he looked down at her to find her gazing up at him. "Best. Date. Ever."

********

Histories and Lore

Humanity awoke from its slumber as a single-planet culture to find itself on the very outer edge of the galaxy spiral. Simplified wisdom said that, aside from a few large arms protruding from its edges, the galaxy is circular in shape, and for the most part, this is true. The reality is different. Dispersed at irregular intervals around its circumference are dozens, if not hundreds, of miniature spiral arms that reach out - to a much smaller degree- into the unfathomable vastness of deep space.

Not content with being strategically placed within the heart of the Hudson Expanse, Humanity found itself extraordinarily close to the point where one of these smaller arms intersected with the rest of the galactic disc, and as their territory expanded, it managed to completely encompass the joining of these two parts of the galactic mass, and therefore control the entirety of the arm itself.

It must be understood that although the arm was only joined to Imperium territory on one side, the other sides of it were bordered by deep space. Deep space is, for all intents and purposes, practically impossible to navigate with current technology. The only reason the caveat of "practically" has been added is because the Mariners have been known to travel through the uncharted regions of deep space without issue, although the methods by which they do this are known only to them. Every single other species close to the edge of the galactic disc has, at one time or another, made a concerted effort to expand, or at least explore, into the vast blackness of this void, and every expedition has either returned empty-handed or has not returned at all.

The Imperium has launched no less than seven coordinated, state-sponsored ventures into deep space; only two of them ever returned, and both of them were badly damaged, with their crews displaying varying levels of psychosis, most likely from a case of severe and prolonged sensory deprivation. The conditions of normal space, or at least space known and understood within the galactic disc, simply do not exist beyond it, and that can have some pretty profound psychological and physiological effects on the bodies and minds of any of the known galaxy-born sentient species. One of the most sought after pieces of information to any exploratory agency is how the Mariners managed to overcome this.

The problem is simple enough to define. Like normal space, the common misconception is that it is vast, black, and completely empty. We already know that this is demonstrably untrue, and many a vessel has been lost due to its crew not understanding this most basic of cartographical concepts. The same applies to deep space, the difference is that region really does have a complete absence of one of the galaxy's most obvious features. There is not a single star out there.

Stars provide a vital and irreplaceable function in space, not just for their obvious light and life-giving properties, but they are absolutely essential for a whole host of other stellar phenomena, phenomena that are fundamental to the successful navigation of space.

First of all, they provide fixed points of reference, not just to the eyes, but to ship-board sensors. Navigation systems rely almost entirely on them to be able to determine not only where that respective ship is but able to plot a path to wherever it needs to go. More than that, every other stellar body, from asteroid belts and black holes to clouds of dust and the routes of space lanes, are all plotted relative to the nearest star. Without those stars, navigation becomes more than extremely difficult; it becomes downright dangerous. But it goes further than that. Stars also provide the heavy lifting when it comes to the establishment of gravitational fields, which, in turn, pulls a super-luminal traveling ship out of hyperspace before it has an unfortunate encounter with a planet. Without that gravity well, a ship would have to rely on its sensors to detect any obstacles in its path when traveling faster than the speed of light, and the simple reality of modern technology is that there isn't even a theoretical sensor system that would come anywhere close to having an effective range great enough to manage blind, faster than light travel. Although deep space has a complete lack of stars, it had no shortage of wandering planets, comets, asteroid belts, dark-matter nebula, ion storms, and dust clouds to make even sub-luminal travel extraordinarily dangerous.

But stars perform other, less obvious functions when it comes to smaller stellar bodies. Almost every single naturally occurring thing in space is locked into some kind of orbit around at least one star. Those orbits can be massive; the comet Hyakutake, for example, orbits the Sol system's sun once every 70,000 years. But it still has a charted path. Its whereabouts can be pinpointed down to the meter at any given time, and knowing where something is is the first step in not flying into it. No matter how much you want to scale this down - to the swirling nebulae to clouds of dust, to actual inhabited planets - every single object in the heavens is mapped based on its relative position to the nearest star, but its movement - and nothing is stationary in space - is also governed by those same stars. With those stars absent in deep space, stellar bodies of every size - up to and including nomadic rogue planets - just wander randomly, meaning that the path taken without issue to a point within the void may not be as free of obstacles if you were to take the exact same path out again.

Dispersed amongst the causal randomness of the deep space hazards would be the wreckages of hundreds, maybe thousands of ships who all wanted to be the first to chart this hazardous region of the cosmos, their crews still entombed within their shattered carcasses. A lot of them were from those state-sponsored expeditions, but there have been countless private attempts over the generations, with very, very few of them being any more successful than the ones launched by the Imperium.

The moral of this story is that although the minor spiral arm controlled by humanity is only covered on one side, that happens to be the only side on which it can be accessed. With all of its other borders facing out into deep space, this region is a veritable natural fortress.

Of course, this has as many negative consequences for the region's inhabitants as positive ones. Being safe from conflict or raids from hostile parties - even piracy in the region is practically non-existent - is obviously a large tick in the positive column, but it also means that there has never been a need to establish any sort of permanent military or governmental presence in the area. No presence means no facilities; no facilities means no infrastructure, and no infrastructure means, in the vast majority of cases, abject poverty for the people living there, at least compared to the astonishing levels of comparative wealth enjoyed in the core systems.

During the initial expansion and colonization efforts, the Imperium followed the same doctrine that had served them so well for generations, with one significant exception. Planets able to be colonized were split into two main categories: planets fit for human habitation and planets rich with resources. The aforementioned exception was that the region was envisioned to be a mining hub, a region that would feed the Imperium's insatiable thrust for raw materials for generations to come; this meant that colonies would need to be established by private corporations with as little expense as possible. Habitable planets would receive very little, if any, terraforming efforts. Terraforming takes time, centuries in some cases, and nobody wanted to wait that long.

Obviously, terraforming plays a vital role in the establishment of sustainable colonies. Gaia-class planets are extremely hard to come by; even the category-one class planets were very rare, and - predictably - with corporations always thinking about the bottom line, an almost criminal level of funding was assigned to each of the words chosen to be colonized.

When considering whether a planet is fit for human habitation, surprisingly few criteria are taken into account: a breathable atmosphere, the presence of water, the availability of arable land to grow food, and a temperature range that wouldn't inconveniently kill off the population. That was pretty much it. The role of terraforming is to elevate those criteria from tolerable ranges to something more comfortable and sustainable. The presence of water, for example, is not a factor as rare as you may think, but needing to drill two miles into the planet's crust to get at it is not conducive to long-term colony growth. These were factors that the private corporations were allowed to bypass. The same went for a breathable atmosphere. If the air could be breathed, that was good enough. The compounds within it, or how difficult it was to breathe, were not concerns the companies were interested in. Housing could be fitted with air filtration systems, and people could just stay indoors; they were - after all - only there to work, and comfort was an expense the corporations weren't interested in paying.

Very quickly, a pattern started to emerge on the two dozen colony worlds established within the spiral arm. The most obvious was that the drilling and water treatment plants became the biggest and most important buildings within each colony. The second biggest was the hospital; not the mandated company hospital, of course, with its prohibitively high healthcare costs, but local, community-run clinics that catered to the myriad of health conditions that came from drinking polluted water, breathing semi-toxic air and dealing with the after-effects of the staggeringly high number of work-related accidents.

As bad as life was in the colonies, it was considerably worse on the mining planets. One such mine on Morus I, run by the Aquila mining corporation, eventually became the site of an event that sparked the outer world's rebellion.

The companies, however, ever the models of efficiency, recognized the need for some infrastructure to allow the region to function. After much debate, they decided to pool a portion of their resources to construct Port Ironholm - later reclassified as a Fort when occupied by the rebellion. Ironholm was, by any measure, massive. Easily, and by a large margin bigger than anything within the rest of Imperium space, it was designed to be a power house of starship construction. At first this was to construct the gargantuan freighters that would be needed to transport the mined and processed goods from the spiral arm to the core worlds to be sold. But the plan was always to switch to the production of military grade vessels once that need had been fulfilled. With that in mind, it was constructed with the ability to build entire fleets simultaneously. Its largest berths could assemble as many as twenty Shangri-La class battleships at the same time, and with the wealth of resources pulled from the mining worlds close at hand, it could effortlessly cater to the endless ambitions of the Imperium.

Constructed above the largest colony in the region, aptly named Cerberus - due to its parallels with the thing that defended hell in one of old Earth's religions - it became the political and industrial capital of the Spiral arm. To meet the vast labor requirements that such a shipyard would need, enormous and advanced flash cloning facilities were built on the space station, complete with the ability to install NAP-grade data chips into the brains of every clone grown on the facility. This meant that the million-strong workforce could be grown, enhanced, and put to work in any role, from Janitor to starship engineer, in only a matter of weeks.

Ever paranoid about the possibility of piracy - despite the incredibly low levels of criminal activity in the area - and the possibility that the Imperium would try to seize control of what was essentially an incredibly powerful military complex, the corporations constructed an elaborate, dense, and extremely powerful defensive grid around the station, and spreading out to the rest of the spiral arm. It was strong enough to make even a concerted foray by Imperium fleets a very risky and costly proposition.

For a number of decades, the companies that called the outer ring - named for the fact that they were on the outer part of the spiral disc rather than a ring around the core of the Imperium - felt safe in their absolute overlordship of the region. The population was kept in line through a policy of barbaric draconian laws that were ruthlessly enforced by an army of privately funded militias.

But, as with many people in that position, their comfort and feelings of safety made them blind or at least indifferent to the burning rage smoldering in the populations around them. And once news of the travesty on the Morus I mining outpost got out, the entire region exploded into rebellion. Every single one of the one hundred and seventy-six planets - colonies and mining outposts alike - joined the fight against the company's oppressive, exploitative rule. The defensive rings were useless against the murderous citizens already aboard the Ironholm station. It took all of three days to seize control of the station and its defense grids and to permanently banish the corporations back to an Imperium who had turned their backs on the disenfranchised population of the spiral arm.

Only one of two things would happen from that point onward: Either the spiral arm would become completely and forever independent, or the Imperium would have to take it back by force.