Chapter 17 - Memento Mori - part 1

The Heavy Cruiser ISS Montreal was the pride of Commodore Gerrard's 21st System Defence fleet. At almost a kilometer long, it was a formidable piece of military technology, built at a time when pure, unadulterated, almost pornographic levels of firepower were expected to combat the perceived Khuvakian scourge and the now mostly forgotten border clashes with the Maruvians, which everyone at the time expected to be the next big war, but even Gerrard had to admit that his most prized possession was a little outdated. It was, if one was to be technical, a retrofitted Narwhal class cruiser and one that was approaching eighty years old at that. This ship had been laid down when his grandfather was a very young man, but it was still easily the most powerful ship in the 21st sector of Imperium space and by a considerable margin.

The Narwhal class held a few distinctions of its own, too. At the time of its production, it was the first heavy cruiser to sport its very own point defense system, albeit a crude, practically useless one before its recent upgrade. It was also the most heavily armed and armored cruiser ever constructed at the time, almost rivaling the battleships of that era. The armor on the Montreal was as thick as he was tall, and even he wasn't entirely, one-hundred percent sure exactly how many turrets it had in total. All in all, it was a kilometer's worth of gun-bristling, armor-plated, ion powered, human 'fuck you' to any hostile force that it encountered, and, as such, the Narwhal class heavy cruiser still held the record of the highest number of victorious combat engagements of any type of imperium ship, ever.

And now it was all his.

The Sys-Def branch of the military had a long and proud history of giving second leases on

life to ships deemed obsolete by the Imperium navy, often spending an eye-watering amount of credits on upgrading them to bring them into line with modern technology. For the Navy, it was cheaper and more efficient to simply design and then mass-produce a new line of warship, but the Sys-Def had neither the R&D facilities nor the drydock capacity to do more than just update whatever hand-me-downs the Navy tossed their way.

The Khuvakian wars, especially the appalling losses at Signus IV, had severely limited the number of ships that made it into Sys-Def fleets and vessels that were listed as mothballed before Gerrard's parents had been born were still forming the backbone of the System Defense forces' anti-piracy and stellar policing fleets. Of course, the core territories - especially around the leading trade and travel hubs of Earth and planets like Caledonia, Heredon, and New Atlantis - were the most prestigious of Sys-Def postings. As such, they received the lion's share of newer ships from the navy, but there was something to be said for commanding a fleet in the more distant, vastly more dangerous outer rim sectors.

Sectors like the 21st.

Piracy was rife out here, and not that piecemeal shit the core worlds had to contend with, either. Sector 21 didn't have to deal with the odd smuggler trying their luck against the defenses of the Hudson Expanse or trying to sneak some shady shit onto Earth Space Dock. No, out here, they had to deal with whole fleets of the little fuckers. From raiding parties hitting mining colonies and small settlements, to wolf-packs chasing, cornering, and then boarding the massive freighters that ferried goods back to the manufacturing centers of the Imperium, none of them shied away from a fight. When entire pirate factions grouped together into a single enormous fleet, they could render entire systems as no-go areas for months at a time, and whole Imperium battlegroups would be needed to clear them out by force. Gerrard and his fleet had seen more combat in the past year than the average core-world commodore would see in his entire career, but he held the honorable distinction of having never - never - needed to call in the navy to fix a problem he couldn't handle himself.

His tactics were ruthless, his focus unwavering, his opinions on piracy and the men who pursued it as a career were uncompromising, and his authority over the men under his command was absolute. He was a force to be reckoned with, and he knew it. The pirates stupid enough to operate under his sphere of control called him the Gator, after the ancient earth predator that could lay in wait for days, if necessary, before snapping his vicious jaws onto unsuspecting prey. His traps and his ability to predict the hyperspace vectors of pirate fleets were legendary, even if only to the pieces of pirate scum who managed to fall into his grasp.

Just like the fleet that was currently tumbling out of hyperspace in front of him.

Gerrard had never understood why his tactical acumen was such a revelation to his fellow fleet commanders; to him, it was eye-wateringly simple. Sensor pings had picked up a large fleet traveling through Hyperspace. He had managed to get into position ahead of them and launch interdiction buoys, and this fleet had flown right into them. It was common sense, but apparently, he was the only one capable of doing it. He'd had just enough time to empty his carriers of their boarding craft and marines and get them into position flanking the buoys before the fleet had been shot out of FTL, with the rest of his ships lying in wait to stop them from escaping. The fleet would hold the line while the boarding parties secured the enemy ships. Biggest ones first - because that is where the Pirate captains always were - and then everything else could be reduced to debris from range without any risk to his men. It was textbook.

"Tactical, report," the Commodore barked out across the bridge of the Montreal, his eyes glued to the main viewscreen and twinkling with barely concealed glee at another successfully laid trap.

"Sensor readings coming in now, Sir," The young man at the console called back as lines of information scrolled wildly across his screen. There was a pause before the rest of the reply came; hesitation was not a virtue that Gerrard tolerated, and he dragged his eyes away from the sights before his fleet in preparation for the withering glare he was about to throw in the direction of the younger lieutenant, but the look of confusion on the officers face gave him pause. "Err, Sir? I don't think this is a pirate fleet."

"What?"

"It's too big, Sir. There are colony ships, and... Jesus, they have a battle cruiser--a new class one that I've never seen before. I'm counting nineteen cruisers, ten of them heavies, and over thirty destroyers, three colony ships, and a single Battlecruiser."

That unwavering confidence that had marked Gerrard's career faltered for a moment. The only fleets that could have anything like that sort of composition belonged to the Navy, but there weren't supposed to be any naval fleets out here. Admirals weren't technically required to inform Sys-Def command of their paths through defended space, but they almost always did, if only to stop misunderstandings like these. It was a common courtesy, not to mention a professional one. The most infuriating part about it, though, was that he would be blamed for it. Some off-the-books or secret fleet maneuver heading to god-knows-where, intercepted by some bumbling Sys-Def hick who couldn't tell the difference between a pirate fleet and an Imperium one, despite the fact that, while they were in Hyperspace, nobody could!

"Ah, for fuck sake," He muttered through a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes now scanning over the outlines of the massive ships of this mystery fleet as they started to right themselves. "You're right; that's not a pirate fleet. Open a channel. I guess I'd better start making my apologies before we all get thrown in front of a court martial." There was a slight spattering of nervous chuckles around the bridge. His men were well aware of his intolerance for incompetence, but outside of that, they liked working under him. He was fair, level-headed, and good in a crisis, but he wasn't one to pass the buck. Somebody had screwed up, and it almost certainly wasn't Gerrard, but he would take it in the neck anyway; the idea that he could throw some lowly officer under the bus for this fuck up was one that simply wouldn't occur to him.

"Um, Sir?" The young woman manning the comms array frowned at her console. "They aren't responding, not on any of the official Imperium frequencies... and... none of the ships in that fleet have their transponders active. I can't even identify the names of the ships, let alone anyone on them."

Gerrard's brow furrowed a little deeper. It may not be a technical requirement to notify Sys-Def of fleet maneuvers in policed space, but deactivating a ship's transponder was a breach of regulations severe enough to land a captain in military prison for the better part of a decade. And it wasn't just a single captain, either. There were more than fifty of them out there, and each one of them was breaking one of the first laws of the Imperium Navy. Even if an Admiral ordered them to deactivate their transponders, they would be duty-bound to disobey without a specific order from Naval command, usually with a sign-off from the Minister of Defense himself, and those fleets - the black book, top secret ones - would sure as shit have told Sys-Def to not interfere with their travel.

A hundred different explanations raced through Gerrard's mind, each one less plausible than the one before it. An entire fleet taken by pirates? Despite the fact that no local pirate armada would even dare challenge even Gerrard's fleet, let alone that one? Impossible! A whole fleet mutinying and deserting? Slightly less ridiculous an idea, but not by much, and every Sys-Def fleet in the quadrant would be on the lookout for them. But a black ops fleet allowing itself to be interdicted this easily? That was a level of fuck-uppery that was so comically massive as to be almost dismissed out of hand... almost. "Get me through to Vice-Admiral Grant in fleet command," Gerrard finally ordered. "Maybe he'll know what the hell is going on."

The comm officer gave a curt nod and started tapping away at the icons on her terminal before, a few seconds later, the aged, weathered face of Vice-Admiral Sherman Grant appeared. Piercing grey eyes, a cropped head of snow-white hair... and a dyed blue beard. He looked like what he imagined a military careered Santa would look like after a weekend at the Burning Man festival. Jesus, Core World fashion was a minefield that even Gerrard knew to back the fuck away from.

"Gerrard," the man said gruffly. "What can I do for you?"

"Admiral, I have interdicted an unknown fleet, no active transponders, and no response to communications..."

"Pirates, obviously," the Vice-Admiral rolled his eyes. "Don't tell me you interrupted a briefing for that."

Gerrard clenched his jaw for a moment, "Sir, there are fifty ships in this fleet, including a modern Battlecruiser and three colony ships. There is no way they are pirates."

Grant straightened himself in his chair and frowned. "Impossible," he said after a few moments of scrolling through his terminal. "The only Colony ships on mission are being used for the Orpheus evacuation efforts, and they're a hundred light years from you."

"Well, with all due respect, Sir," Gerrard tried and failed to control the mounting frustration in his voice. "My sensors, my crew, and my own damned eyes are all telling me the same thing. Three colony ships, one battlecruiser, fifty-plus other ships, all of which vastly outclass their counterparts in my fleet. I am requesting that you contact the Naval liaison and ask if this is one of their off-the-books missions before this turns into a blue-on-blue incident."

"Sir..." The tactical officer interrupted, "They have raised shields and powered weapons."

"Shit, okay, gimme a minute," Grant nodded, overhearing the report and suddenly starting to take the situation a lot more seriously.

"Thank you, Sir," Gerrard almost growled before turning to the tactical officer. "Order the shuttles to start their approach, they can always be called off if this is a friendly fleet, but I don't want them hanging around with their dicks in the wind if this isn't what it seems."

The tactical officer nodded sharply and started relaying the orders and the Commodore watched as the tiny specs of silver in the peripheries of his screen started moving toward the fleet. God, he hoped that this wasn't some black op shit, as much as the alternative worried him. The last thing he needed was for body bags to be heading home after their own side killed them. "Tell all ships to raise shields and target the hostile fleet, larger ships first, but do not engage unless ordered to do so or unless fired upon first!"

"Sir! Their fleet is splitting," The tactical officer yelped, eyes wide with nervous energy. "Frigates and corvettes are moving to defend the colony ships, the rest of the fleet are powering engines straight toward us! They must've spotted the shuttles!"

The bridge crew knew what that meant as much as he did. If this was some black op fleet or anything that could be called even remotely 'friendly,' then they would have done the exact same thing the 21st Sys-Def fleet had done; they would have just sat there and stared at him until someone higher up made a decision on what happened next. For them to make any sort of move, defensive, offensive, or, in this case, both, could only mean one thing.

They were hostile.

"Shit! All cruisers target that battlecruiser." Gerrard ordered a heartbeat after receiving the report. "Destroyers, strip shields off the other ships as best you can. Tell those shuttles to haul ass; make sure they board the largest military vessels first!"

The comm channel suddenly reactivated, a frantic-looking Vice-Admiral Grant filling up the right-hand side of the view screen. "They're rebels!!" He almost screamed.

"What?!?"

"It's the rebel fleet that ambushed the Marines on Garros II. You need to withdraw!"

"Withdraw? I have active interdiction buoys out there; I can't withdraw!" Gerrard shouted back. "Why the fuck weren't we warned??"

"I don't know. That's an execution for later." Grant shook his suddenly pale head. "Three Navy battlegroups are converging on your position; the closest is eleven hours out. Can you hold them?"

"For eleven hours?!? Are you out of your fucking mind? No, not a chance! We won't last two if this turns into a firefight!"

"Then you need to scatter, fight, run, buy as much time as you can, and preserve as much of your force as..."

The screen went dead.

"Admiral?"

"Sir, comms are being jammed!" The suddenly very young-looking lieutenant practically screamed, her voice pitched much higher than normal with the fear coursing through her. Not just through her but through everyone.

Through him.

"Sir, We're being targeted!"

"Open a channel to the hostile fleet, all frequencies!" Gerrard barked.

"We can't, Sir. The jamming field won't allow any outgoing communications! We can't even relay orders to the rest of the fleet."

"Fuck! Okay, target the battlecruiser; when we fire, the rest of the fleet will follow suit."

"Commodore," the tactical officer looked up at him with an expression of sheer dread. "We are completely out of position for a defensive engagement. We won't be able to..."

"I know, son," Gerrard said, surprising himself with the calmness in his voice. A calmness not shared by any other part of his body. "We fight, or we die. Those are our only choices, at least until we can restore comms."

The tactical officer nodded, then turned back to his station. "Battlecruiser targeted, Sir. All weapons ready to fire."

"Okay, time to see if this old girl still has her bite... Fire!"

********

Crow. 7

Crow didn't enjoy sleep. It wasn't that he found it difficult to fall or stay asleep; it was more because he had lost the ability to dream, at least in the way that everyone else could dream-how he used to be able to dream. What he had now was something different; he either fell into a deep, dreamless sleep or - more often - he re-lived some of the more memorable parts of his life. The problem was that most of the more memorable parts of his time alive had not been pleasant. There was more warfare and fighting than he could ever hope to count, and none of those memories were particularly pleasant. Watching his men, his friends, his comrades, his brothers and sisters in arms die, over and over, for years, was an experience that left him haunted in more ways than one. Then, of course, there was the death of his wife, how she had died alone at the hands of some piece of shit company mercenary, how he had found his daughter cradling her mother's dead body, those lifeless eyes staring at the smoke-filled sky.

Nightmares were something that he was intimately familiar with, reliving the most challenging times of his life, again and again, made almost every single time he slept a living hell. So, for him to have a good night, reliving a good memory, was a rare treat that he had learned to revel in. This night had been one of the good ones, a particularly memorable night with his wife on one of the last days of their honeymoon some thirty years ago. Stephanie had been even more vigorous than normal on that night, and for years afterward, they had joked that it was the only time he hadn't been able to keep up with her, no matter how hard he tried. They had ended that night in a pile of sweaty, twisted limbs and rumbled sheets.

So, for him to be tossed out of bed, halfway through the best part of that memory, and dumped onto the floor as the ship lurched beneath his bunk was not only a less than spectacular way to wake up, it was being woken at the worst possible moment. He was seriously considering if he could get away with demoting the helmsman, just out of spite, but the wailing of the claxons and the flashing red light that suddenly illuminated his small cabin quickly brought him to his senses. He barely had his pants on and was carrying his officer's coat under his arm when he ran out of his cabin door and toward the command deck.

"Communication jammers are active, Admiral," the middle-aged lieutenant commander at the comm console reported as Crow rushed onto the bridge.

"Good, that will shut them up for a while. Will it hold?" Valdek replied with a feral glint behind his eyes.

"Not for long, Sir. Not if they know what they're doing."

"Let's not hold our breaths," Valdek nodded and turned back to the main viewscreen, "They'll fire soon, the flagship first - it will be one of the heavy cruisers - and then the others will follow suit," he said while apparently addressing the tactical officer to his right. "Whichever ship is the first to open fire, that is the one you target. Return fire immediately, everything we have, cripple her but don't destroy her."

"Understood, Sir."

"What's happening, Admiral?" Crow asked softly. Crow was a man used to being in the thick of the action, or at least in command of the thick of the action. But he was a terrestrial commander, he was grossly over his head when it came to massed fleet combat. Stellar warfare, in general, was a bit of a mystery to him; he just couldn't get his head around the three-dimensional aspect of it. That had been the reason he had given overall command to Admiral Valdek when it came to anything to do with the rebel armada. It was not a decision he had regretted, Valdek had perfectly predicted how the Imperium would react after the events of Vallen and had kept them one step ahead of the pursuing battlegroups ever since.

More than that, he had been able to immediately and perfectly sum up the dilemma facing the Orpheus relief fleet in a way that allowed Crow to believe that handing that problem off to the ancients had been the best and only option. But it did leave Crow at something of a loose end when it came to any sort of ship-to-ship combat, and being a loose end was something that Cornelius Crow was in no way used to. Valdek was the highest authority when it came to the fleet, but the Admiral had been given a very specific set of instructions as part of that command, and one of them had been to avoid a firefight unless it was absolutely unavoidable. So to see an Imperium fleet on the main screen and the Admiral seemingly taking the offensive was something that needed an explanation sooner rather than later.

"Ah, General, welcome to the party," Valdek looked over his shoulder at him with a grin. "Some Sys-Def commodore got lucky with a few interdiction mines, yanking us out of Hyperspace and into a very neat little trap. I don't think they are expecting us to shoot our way out of it, though."

"Is that wise? Shouldn't we try to escape?"

"Well, their interdiction buoys are still active, so we can't run. I didn't think that immediate surrender was quite your style, and sitting here and waiting to see how long those battlegroups take to get here didn't sound wise, either, so I thought it best to blast our way out of this little trap before they do the same to our fleet. Besides, some live fire training will be good for the crew. Oh, and we're about to be boarded, too."

Crow blinked. "Is... is that part of the plan?"

"Being boarded?" Valdek frowned. "I'm not sure that matters, General. We're being boarded whether it's part of the plan or not. Probably best to just deal with the problem before contemplating the grander questions of it all."

Crow blinked again. Valdek seemed like he was having a little too much fun with this, and anyone who took the lives of his men with any sort of cavalier attitude was someone who shouldn't ever be allowed to lead them. However, he had spent enough time with Valdek since he had joined the rebellion to know that the lives of his men were the one thing that the Admiral valued above anything else. Crow just had to assume that he was one of those rare people who genuinely relished being in combat. Crow had met them before, even if he wasn't one himself; they were the sort who became increasingly focused the more pressure was put on them, and there was no pressure heavier than leading men in combat. It was a battle of wits and cunning; everyone knew that Valdek was a grandmaster, and perhaps he was just reveling in the opportunity to flex his metaphorical muscles.

Valdek chuckled and nodded to the chair next to his. "Why don't you take a seat, Cornelius? The Colonel and your favorite Marine captain will take care of the boarding parties; we're currently rolling the ship to make sure they all dock in some nice, convenient locations for the Marines to mop them up, and while they are doing that, our big guns will be making a mess of their commodore's admittedly beautifully laid trap."

"You sound like you admire him," Crow frowned as he took his place in the XO's vacated seat.

Valdek shrugged, "It's not an easy thing to pull off, springing a trap like that. If we were pirates, we'd be fucked right about now; it's only because I helped design the protocol he is using that is keeping us from..."

"They're getting ready to fire, Sir!" The tactical officer interrupted his explanation.

Crow had just enough time to pull his eyes from Valdek and lock them onto the main viewscreen before the action erupted. The Sys-Def fleet was arrayed in a 'net' formation, a wall of evenly spaced ships resolutely facing the impending threat of the rebel armada. Though Crow was no expert on naval vessels--unable to dissect individual ship classes by their mere silhouettes--the sight before him was unmistakable. The enemy's larger behemoths huddled at the heart of the net, a concentration of power, while smaller, nimble ships flanked them, poised for flanking maneuvers.

Fractions of seconds stretched like an eternity as anticipation crackled in the air. From a solitary titan at almost the center of the formation--a colossal ship that dwarfed the rest--a pinprick of red preceded a brilliant ribbon of crimson light as the enemy flagship fired its first salvo. It streaked across the void, a harbinger of destruction, before crashing into the Hyperion's shields with a violent shudder. The impact resonated through the ship like a thunderclap, igniting a storm of adrenaline within Crow's veins. Of course, it wasn't just a single shot; it was just that the concentration of turrets on that massive ship was so close that all of the dozens of individual particle beams seemed to blur and blend into a single violent outpouring of power. Just as he processed the hit, the rest of the Imperium fleet joined the fray. A symphony of weaponry unleashed its fury and, in a testament to the skill of the enemy gunners-a skill Crow knew to be infinitely more difficult than terrestrial gunnery, every shot found its mark. Some ships had locked on to the Hyperion, but the majority targeted other rebel warships, their intentions clear: total annihilation of his armada.

"Four direct hits. Shields holding at ninety-three percent, Admiral," came Tactical's voice, cool yet charged with urgency. "The Griffon took fourteen hits; their shields are down to fifty-eight percent."

"Rotate that destroyer squadron to the center of the formation and order squadron six to take their places. Have all other ships reported in?"

"Yes, Sir. Their targets have been approved, and they are standing by."

"Okay then. On my mark."

Valdek turned to face Crow, his expression a feral blend of resolve and unyielding determination. The general had seen this look reflected on the faces of a thousand warriors on a thousand different battlefields--a chilling mixture of anticipation and zeal, a devotion to combat that thrummed in the very core of their beings. He was enjoying this.

At that moment, the tension was electric. The weight of every decision hung heavy in the air; each one had led them to this exact place at this exact moment. Crow had hoped to make it back to the Spiral Arm without a fight, but if it was going to happen, then the look of confident determination in his Admiral's eyes was precisely the one he would rather be seeing. The moment seemed like it was crackling with urgency and danger, as if the fabric of reality itself had drawn taut, waiting for the pivotal moment that would unleash chaos. Crow's heart raced; every second stretched, filled with the promise of violence, of sacrifice, and of glory amidst the maelstrom that was about to unfold.

"FIRE!" Valdek roared. The order, even though Crow knew it was coming, seemed to land like a physical blow, its echo bouncing off the walls of the bridge before, a second later, it was replaced by the high-pitched yelp of the Hyperion's own energy weapons being fired. For a very brief moment, the screen took on the visage of a tunnel of light, with dozens of individual lines of red light lancing across space toward their targets. At the same time, every other ship in the rebel armada opened fire, or at least the ones on the outer edges of the formation did. There didn't seem to be anywhere near as many of them as the Imperium had unleashed, but just like them, each of them found their mark.

"Target Shields down to thirty percent!" Tactical announced with that same ferocious glee as was in Valdek's voice. "Shields on two other enemy cruisers have collapsed!"

"Hit them again! Order Destroyers to switch targets at their discretion. Target those two Cruisers with the MAC guns!.... Fire at will!"

For a moment, for the briefest flashes of time, Crow's mind was transported back to a young private fighting beside him during one of the opening battles of the rebellion. They had been hunkered down behind a barricade on a battle-torn Cerberus street. Just like Valdek had done, a younger Colonel Crow had given the order to fire at will. The private, that same glint of passion in his young eyes, had turned to him with a grin and asked. "Will? Which one is Will? I've been shooting at Dave!" Crow hadn't seen the funny side at the time and couldn't laugh at the joke for years after that, not after finding the boy's laser-riddled body a few hours later. But for some reason, here, on the bridge of a battlecruiser, with his mind unable to contribute to the fight in any meaningful way, that was where it wandered to.

He chuckled just as the second salvo flashed across the screen and smashed into the enemy ships, followed a second later by the deep shudder of the MAC gun's vibrations jolting through the hull.

The rounds of the MAC guns thundered into the armored hulls of the two exposed cruisers, striking almost a thousand miles away, barely two seconds after they had been fired. The Loire, a light cruiser situated just to the right of center in the formation, bore the brunt of five MAC turrets from the Hyperion. The first hit slammed into the command deck with merciless precision, tearing a gaping hole the size of a small building through the outdated armor, slaughtering the ship's captain and his entire command staff in an instant. With their viewscreen having been replaced by the shattered remains of the pierced hull, the vacuum of space eagerly sucked their bodies into the abyss.

The shell exploded just a fraction of a second later, detonating after carving through half a dozen more bulkheads. The violence unleashed was unfathomable; the concussive blast radiated outward, flames from the antimatter explosion racing behind it through gangways and blasted rooms, obliterating everything in their path. Bodies of men, those unfortunate enough to be spared the instant vaporization, were hurled like leaves caught in a storm, crashing against unyielding titanium walls with sickening finality. It was carnage; hundreds of lives snuffed out in a singular, harrowing moment.

Fortunately for the remaining crew, they didn't have long to dwell on the horrific loss of their officers. Of the four other MAC shells that struck the ship, three detonated in less critical areas--a shell ravaging the deserted crew quarters, another detonating in the ship's empty gym, and the last wreaking havoc in the cargo hold. Although the structural damage was extensive and the casualties limited, it was the fifth shell that heralded the true demise of the sixty-two-year-old vessel.

This final shell punched through the lower section of the hull, a few dozen meters below the shattered command deck. It crashed into the engineering section, severing the main power feeds and annihilating nearly the entire crew stationed there; the very lifeblood of the ship's operation, and every life capable of repairing any of the ship's critical systems, snuffed out before they could react. An instant later, it barreled into the power core with brutal force, setting off a cataclysmic explosion.

To Crow's untrained eye, it appeared as if the Loire lurched backward, like a prize fighter caught off-guard, staggering from the strength of an unexpected hit. Then, almost in agonizing slow motion, the middle of the ship began to bulge, the hull straining to contain the insurmountable pressure inflicted upon it by the ruptured core. The tension reached a dizzying crescendo before it detonated in a violent release of energy.

In a blinding cataclysm, the Loire and its thousand-man crew disappeared, consumed by a colossal explosion that lit up the surrounding space like a distant supernova. Debris from the ship, pieces too small to be considered anything but shrapnel and none larger than a corvette, were hurled into the void, some colliding with nearby Imperium vessels and further damaging their already beleaguered shields.

The other cruiser didn't fare much better. The ISS Riga, another light cruiser, had surged its engines, desperately attempting to reposition itself after the devastating opening rebel salvo had stripped away its shields. Its Captain, facing the onslaught with wide eyes that had never witnessed such destructive force outside the confines of an academy classroom, was painfully aware of the grim reality: another hit would spell certain doom for his ship. As the Riga turned, it managed to rotate about thirty of the ordered ninety degrees--a well-timed maneuver that, while keeping the command deck out of the rebel's firing arc, also presented the ship's power core as a smaller target.

Yet even this fleeting hope was dashed as all five MAC rounds found their marks. The internal detonations were brutal, ripping through the exposed side of the vessel like a predator through flesh, laying waste to its vulnerable interior, and breaking its reinforced spine. Whole sections of the ship were viciously vented into the void of space, taking with them more than two-thirds of the crew--their lives extinguished in an excruciating long suffocation. Those men and women suffered immeasurably more than those killed in the shells' explosions. The ISS Riga, a veteran of the storied battle of Sigma VI, was effectively dead, left to roll under the tyrannical pull of its own momentum, a drifting husk in a vast darkness.

"Jesus," Crow murmured, his voice barely above a whisper, the horror unfolding before him almost too much to bear. The Con officer magnified the viewscreen, bringing the devastation into sharper focus as it zeroed in on each targeted cruiser. Crow couldn't help but gasp at the grotesque tableau that materialized before him--the silhouettes of hundreds of men and women appeared like helpless souls adrift against the backdrop of the raging inferno, their lifeless forms floating amidst the fiery wreckage.

He had always thought that fire couldn't burn in space; after all, there was no air to feed it. Yet, like so many others, he had overlooked the vital air reservoirs inside the ships themselves, and those sure as shit could burn. The fires wouldn't last long--maybe just a few agonizing minutes--but they were fiercely hungry and would burn nonetheless. The illumination they cast was a horrifying testament to the realities of war, a stark and ghastly light that framed the death of almost two thousand people who had lasted barely a few minutes into the battle.

Crow had seen war in all its terrifying iterations, and he had never been one to relish in the deaths of other people, not even if they were his enemy; they were still people, led to this fight by the true villains of this war: The Emperor and his treacherous cronies. The men and women on those ships had probably never lifted a finger against him or his people, and yet they were the ones paying the price. On the battlefield, when he was in command, he didn't have time to ponder the injustice of it all, the innocence - despite the allegiances - of the men he was killing, but now, with nothing else to do other than watch, he couldn't help it. Valdek, on the other hand, was in the position that Crow usually occupied. He didn't have time to take a moment for the fallen, even though some of those men may have once known his son - he had, after all, served and died with the 8th Sys-Def fleet at 16 Lyra. He was too busy with the rest of the battle, too busy trying to keep his own men from meeting the same fate.

The enemy fleet was still firing; only two of the forty or so ships in the Imperium fleet were taken out of action, and most of them were scoring direct hits on various ships in the rebel armada. He had no way of knowing for sure, but Crow had to assume that they were starting to do some significant damage. "Rotate squadrons again!" Valek barked, his own eyes on his console rather than the main view screen. "They're not concentrating fire; their shots are accurate but too sporadic to do any real damage! Are the flagship's shields down yet?"

"They're still up, Sir, but barely. They're on eight percent."

"You know what to do!"

"Aye, Sir, firing again!"

The screen zeroed in on the largest of the enemy ships, its turrets igniting with a fierce intensity, a heartbeat before the energy weapons from the Hyperion and several allied ships crashed into it. Crow's pulse quickened as he waited for the impending hit, the air thick with tension. Most of the enemy's shots veered wildly off-target, a chaotic ballet of confusion and terror that, Crow assumed, stemmed from crew panic--an instinctual response to the inferno of destruction erupting around them, and from the fact that the rebels were still charging heedlessly toward them.

The huge ship trembled under the brutal onslaught as the rebel guns found their mark; a deep shudder must have reverberated through its very hull as the Hyperion's unfathomably powerful particle beam turrets unleashed cataclysmic fury upon its shields.

The shields seemed to ripple, waves of color undulating across the dome at the bow of the ship, each surge growing successively brighter, building to a stunning climax. Then, with a sudden, violent release--like a bubble bursting--the shields collapsed. Crow's breath caught in his throat as he witnessed the moment unfold, knowing that the barrier protecting them was now shattered, exposing the ship to the full fury of combat.

Crow understood the limitations of energy weapons against the solid titanium armor of starships, yet even with this knowledge, he could see the devastating impact they had. The intense heat began to melt deep furrows into the hull, transforming the ship's once-proud exterior into a grotesque facsimile of a wounded face. The liquid metal twisted and reformed into hideous shapes, a mocking portrayal of the destruction enveloping them. As the beams moved away, the cold of space rushed in to siphon away the lingering heat, leaving behind eerie scars on the face of that once proud ship.

Another jolt jerked through the bridge as a few more of the enemy ships started to target the Hyperion. Flashes of light, followed by lances of color, seemed to be coming from dozens of points in the enemy formation, all of them hitting the enormous mass of the rebel battle cruiser as if they couldn't miss if they tried. "Shields are down to seventy percent, Sir. We have closed the distance to about half."

"Perfect," Valdek nodded calmly, yet that grim excitement still glinted in his eyes. "Deploy offensive pattern Delta-four."

"Sir?" The helmsman and tactical officer both blinked at him.

"You heard me. Relay the orders and make the maneuver."

"Aye, Sir. Splitting the fleet."

"What?" Crow gawked. "You're splitting the fleet??"

Valdek grinned. "Ever heard of crossing the T?" Crow shook his head. "Imagine a line of ships, all of them facing their powerful broadsides in your direction, but you can only head straight toward them, your own ships lined up to aim their broadsides at the enemy as we pass them. We would get obliterated before we even got close because they can hit us with all of their guns, but we can only hit them with our front facing turrets. That would be crossing the T, we are the vertical stalk, they are crossing it, textbook naval maneuver, and the position every fleet commander wants to get into. But here, we are facing each other. They can't turn to get their broadsides on us, not en masse, anyway, and we would only be able to hit about half of their fleet if we were to turn to cross them, and as soon as we flew past them, their broadsides would be on us... so..." he grinned a little wider. "We go up and over, rolling to shoot down onto them from above while the other half of our fleet does the same from below. They won't be able to move from a stationary position to counter us fast enough, but our momentum works in our favor. We will be able to hit them while they can't hit us. Fish in a barrel."

Crow shuddered inwardly. He had always assumed, as a terrestrial commander, that nothing was quite as savage as man-on-man, hand-to-hand combat, but he was starting to seriously question those beliefs. There was an intricacy to fleet combat, like a dance that had an infinite number of possible steps, each step a balance of the danger you were exposing your own fleet to, against the potential damage you could inflict on your enemy. The impersonal nature of it made him shudder, but it was the silence of it that really shook him to his core. Ground combat was loud, filled with gunfire and explosions and screams of battle, but in space, there was nothing. The light of ships being blown to pieces and entire crews being dragged out to space came with an eerie, ominous, terrifying quiet. It was like a holo-movie with the sound turned off. It made it so much harder to see these people as the enemy.

These weren't men and women that Valek was fighting; they didn't have faces or families, histories or futures; they were just ships, hunks of metal that would sooner kill you than look at you given the chance. It made it almost easy to want to kill them first and not think about the people manning their posts inside them. Ships had limitations, weak spots, angles of fire, and thrust-to-mass ratios that governed exactly what they could do; Valdek was a master at using these factors against them, and - just as his reputation suggested - he was utterly ruthless.

Another violent shudder rippled through the Hyperion, although less pronounced than the last ones.

"Admiral, The Basilisk has lost shields!" Tactical shouted, interrupting Crow's thoughts. Valdek's eyes shot up immediately. "Imperium Destroyers are concentrating fire on her."

"Get her out of there! Tell the rest of her Squadron to block incoming fire if they have to!"

"Her engines are failing!"

"Shit. Get the rest of her squadron to move..."

The screen flashed to the rebel destroyer just as she started to break apart. Flames billowed out of dozens of holes in her hull; there was no smoke, though. That was something that struck Crow as odd, although it shouldn't have. The Basilisk's engines were sputtering, the light from them blinking on and off as the crew desperately tried to keep the ship moving, but it was clear they had been fighting a losing battle. A final MAC shell, not unlike the ones the Hyperion had used to disembowel those Imperium Cruisers so effortlessly, smashed into the side of the destroyer, neatly severing the bow of the crippled ship from the stern. The front section began to tumble away as the back - still holding the powercore and the semi-functioning engines - kept moving. The entire command staff could only watch in horror, just like, he assumed, the bridge crew of every other rebel vessel.

"How many people were on that ship?" Crow asked, his horrified voice barely above a whisper, breaking the stunned silence on the bridge.

"Three hundred and twenty-three," The XO answered after quickly checking his screen.

"I see life pods!" The Con officer suddenly announced, pointing frantically at the screen. Crow saw nothing.

"Task a squadron of Corvettes with retrieval, tell them to move fast. Hopefully, the enemy will be too busy with us to target them." Valdek ordered with a resigned sigh. "All ships," he slammed his finger onto the command console. "If you get below fifty percent shields, rotate to the center or the back of your fucking formation! They are going to target any ships with low shields, and we aren't close enough for our speed to impair their aim yet. Use your discretion. I would rather have a few less kills today and all our ships make it home than destroy their entire fleet and lose half of ours in the process. We will be jumping to hyperspace as soon as we are clear of the interdiction mines, anyway, so this is not a fight to the death! No fucking heroics!"

A series of affirmatives echoed back through the comm channel before Valdek shut it off. "How many enemy ships are down?" he asked.

"The two cruisers and a about a dozen destroyers are crippled or destroyed, sir"

"Good, maintain volume of fire. Where are those boarding shuttles?"

"Still on us, Sir. The first will be attached in a few minutes at this rate."

"How many?"

"Three-quarters of them followed us; the rest are split between the other cruisers."

Valdek nodded. "Inform the relevant captains to repel boarders," he said before spinning in his chair and looking at Michaels. "Are your boys ready for this?"

Michaels nodded with a predatory smirk. "Sys-Def marines are glorified cops. I'm not taking anything away from them, but they aren't a match for my boys. We're ready. Just tell me where and when, and I will relay the orders."

"If they want to surrender, let them," Crow added, giving Michaels a look that brooked no room for discussion. "They're following orders, just like you were."

"Understood, General. Quarter will be given if they ask for it." Michaels gave an approving smile before he turned and started talking into his comm unit.

"Okay," Valdek nodded before spinning back to his own console. "How is their flagship looking?"

The tactical officer, seemingly clairvoyantly understanding that he was being spoken to, answered almost instantly. "She's still going, Admiral. But her shields are gone."

Valdek nodded and leaned forward, peering closer at a vastly more magnified image of the enemy heavy cruiser on his console screen. "Target these coordinates; be sure not to miss."

"Sir, from this range, I could give their helmsman a shave."

"Money where your mouth is, Lieutenant Commander," Valdek smirked.

"Aye, Sir."

There was another jolt of vibration through the hull and into Crow's feet as the Hyperion's MAC guns fired again. A moment later, two points on the bow of the enemy flagship, on the bottom two corners of its face, seemed to crumple inwards, the shells coring deep into the Cruiser's superstructure before detonating. Both blew huge holes through the side of the ship, further along its prow, as the explosions blasted through the armor from within. It looked to Crow like the ship had been given two dimples on its scared face, followed by a set of jagged gills on its broad neck. The turrets that were preparing to fire again suddenly fell limp as the power to the ship cut out.

"Sir?" The Tactical officer blinked.

Valdek grinned a little wider. "Nice shooting." He nodded at the screen, "Narwhal class; they were decommissioned before my time, but I toured a few when I was in the academy. Their biggest weakness was their primary power couplings; one hit and the whole ship goes offline; only basic functions like life support, comms, and sensors would still be active. Pick a new target, Lieutenant Commander, and fire at your discretion. Let their Commodore watch."

The Tac Officer, seeming to swell with pride, nodded once, then went to work.

"Sir?" The Con turned around. "The first of the boarding shuttles are on their final approach."

"Relay their positions to Colonel Michaels as they dock, Lieutenant. Let's see how the Marines handle things."

The ship shuddered again, and then again, and then again, as the Tactical Officer started launching one round after another into the enemy fleet, a few of those shots were met, a few seconds later, with a distant explosion or the oscillating light of beleaguered shields. The con officer nodded with an "Aye, Sir" and then went back to work.

Crow could only watch, impotent and useless, as his men waged war around him and without him. He understood that this must've been how Valdek felt during the battle of the beach; the man had been like a caged animal, even knowing that the fight was a foregone conclusion. At the time, Crow had questioned the man's stomach for warfare, but now he was starting to understand him on a whole new level. They both were masters of their domain and when forced out of it, they were like a turtle on the top of a fence post.

They didn't understand how they got there.

There was no way they would have gotten there or even wanted to be there without someone else putting them there.

And they were totally beyond their ability to function while they were.

All they could do was sit there and try not to look as terrified as they felt.

Crow was not a fan of it. Not a fan at all.

********

Stevo. 27

"Alright, Marines," Stevo called out as he checked the battery pack's secured placement in the stock on his X1 battle rifle, his voice booming in the relative confines of the barracks he and his men were assembled in. "We've been given board and lodge by the rebels for weeks now, with nothing asked in return. Now is the time we earn our keep! Are you with me?"

A chorus of "Oorahs" roared back at him from the hundred or so men and women around him, this ship's portion of the 381's surviving marines. The other two hundred and something were spread out around other ships in the fleet; the Hyperion wasn't a carrier, nor a colony ship, nor was it a troop transport, so its capacity for carrying a large contingent of Marines was limited. That being said, more than a hundred battle-hardened, genetically and cybernetically enhanced warriors were more than enough soldiers to make sure that any men trying to wrestle control of this battlecruiser from its rightful owners were in for a very rough day.

Stevo had split his men into squads, the number wasn't even, but that seemed to work out even better than expected; it was rough, but it would work. "Squad two, you're defending the airlock on the portside bow, Squad three, you have starboard. Squad four, portside stern airlock, Squad five, starboard." The sergeants - recently promoted or pre-existing - all nodded and moved to join their men. "Squad six, you are defending the corridor outside the main command deck; you hold that position at all costs, do you understand?"

Sam Wooly, one of the men who had ended up in the same cell as Stevo immediately after their surrender to the rebels, recently promoted to the rank of sergeant and now given command of a squad of his own, nodded solemnly, but with a look of sheer will and determination in his eyes. "Nobody will get past us, Captain."

Stevo nodded back at him. "Squad seven, you are defending engineering and the powercore; the same orders apply: you hold to the last man."

"Got it, Captain," their sergeant said, a young woman who Stevo had only seen in passing before the events on Vallen. Stevo paused for a moment, looking up at the ceiling of the barracks as another series of shuddered vibrations from the ship's big guns rumbled through the room.

"Alright, Squad eight and nine, you are sweeping. The Colonel will direct you to any part of the ship that needs you, either to back up hard-pressed fireteams or if the Sys-Def marines make entry directly through the hull into an undefended area. My squad - number one, and actual..." the term given for the squad holding the highest-ranking officer in a company of marines "...will be doing the same." He waited for the series of nods, some nervous, some - like him - itching for some payback.

"That leaves Squad 10," he turned to Mac, Angel, and Ryan, the last surviving members of his old command, Bravo Squad, and the smallest team in the new roster. "You're being seconded to Vice-Admiral Abdul and the R&D team for the new strike craft, and yes, Mac, that includes Emylee. I don't need to tell you what happens if anyone gets through you and into that maintenance bay, do I?"

"Nah, ya don't, Cap," Mac held his eyes with easily the most determination of any of the assembled Marines. "Good luck ta any man try'n ta get through us!"

Ryan, who had been looking down at the prosthetic replacement for his lower left leg, watching it rotate just as his original foot had done before the battle on the beach, snorted out a laugh. "C'mon, Sarge, I mean, Cap. The big man has just started getting laid again. You could leave him there on his own and he'd still hold off the entire boarding party single-handedly. Never get between a giant and some puss..."

The huge hand of the equally huge Mac clamped down on his shoulder, causing Ryan to stop talking and look up with a cheeky grin at the hulking mountain of a man that was the Scottish heavy gunner. "Finish that sentence, Laddy; I dare ya. Noth'n stopping me ripping off yar new leg an' beat'n ya to death with it..." There was a friendly, humorous smile on his face, but one that wasn't completely devoid of warning. "Or, worse, I could tell Em what ya said."

"Woah, dude, too far." Ryan teased back. "She wouldn't kill me; she'd keep me alive! Jeez, I thought we were friends."

Angel, having had her ballistic sniper rifle replaced with the standard issue X-44, snorted out a laugh of her own. Laser fire, like the larger particle weapons being shot across the vacuum of space outside the hull, posed little threat to the armored bulkheads of a ship's interior, but the hypersonically propelled bullet of her sniper rifle could quite easily punch a hole through a wall and vent an entire section of the ship into the void. "Do it, Mac, tell her! Just, I don't know; wait til I'm close by with a holo-cam when you do. That shit would be hilarious!"

"I'm starting to think you don't like me anymore," Ryan pretended to sulk as Stevo chuckled along with the banter of his former squad.

"Anymore?" Angel grinned, "We never liked you. You were just good to have around when something heavy needed carrying."

Ryan wiggled his metallic foot at her. "Not anymore, I'm a cripple now. No more heavy lifting for me, and you have to be nice to me."

Mac heaved the enormous mass of his rotary cannon onto his shoulder and shrugged. "I nev'r got tha' memo, sorry. Besides, ya were never that good at lift'n heavy shit anyway."

"Alright, knock it off; heads in the game," Stevo silenced the teasing, although not without a smile. "You all know your orders?" He waited for the nine sets of affirmatives. "Any questions?"

"Rules of engagement, Sir?" A voice from the back of the crowd echoed over the gathering.

"Shoot to kill, assume all borders are hostile. But if they surrender, you hog-tie them, secure their weapons, and leave them on the deck for later, full quarter given. Also, any shuttles that stay attached to the hull, you are encouraged to secure the pilots and requisition the transport for the rebellion."

"Oh cool, a little piracy too, that's awesome!" Ryan grinned.

"It's not piracy, dumbass," Angel rolled her eyes.

"Of course it is," Ryan countered. "We are literally stealing the ships of another nation in contested space; what would you call it?"

Angel blinked. "Holy shit, you're right. That is awesome!" There was a pause as Angel and Ryan both noticed Stevo's face, waiting with no small lack of patience for them to finish. "Sorry, Cap."

"Okay, the Colonel will be in touch via comms and will redirect you if needed. No fucking around, move fast and don't let yourself get pinned down, but call it in if you need backup. I don't want any heroics, and..."

"We don't have permission to die!" Ryan, Mac, and Angel all simultaneously chorused to finish for him.

"Exactly," he chuckled. "Okay, Move out!"

********

"Ten seconds to contact," Michaels' voice came through the comms of Stevo's helmet.

"We're in position and ready, Sir," he replied, his voice calm and measured, exactly how he felt inside. This was what he did best; this was his happy place. He was hunting, and that meant that the rest of the battle being raged outside of the mighty armored hull was none of his concern. This was his own little slice of the action, and, as a Marine, that was all you could ever expect to get; you dealt with what was in front of you. You carried out your orders unless those orders changed, and you conducted yourself with honor. That was it. Everything else, the machinations of Admirals and Generals, the logistics, the strategies, the turrets on distant warships, the men and women fighting a different sort of fight in the ship's sickbay, all of it was important in its own right, but none of it was within his ability to control, and that meant that, for now, it wasn't his problem. His problem was the boarding shuttle with its thirty or so Sys-Def Marines about to attach itself to the Hyperion's upper airlock.

Stevo had been on a lot of ships in his time, some old, some newer, but the Hyperion was a battlecruiser that had been designed and built by the rebels from the keel up. He had to admit, whoever was on that design team had done a damned good job. He had always wondered why, when boarding an enemy ship, there were never any static defenses or defensive cover guarding the defending side of an airlock. It seemed like common sense to him, but no, in every boarding action he had taken part in over his long career, it had always been the same thing: men using corridor corners for cover or dragging impromptu, insufficient cover into the main airlock with them. The Hyperion, however, was different. Thick, strong, waist-high slabs of Titanium had slid up from concealed compartments in the deck to give his squad all the cover they could ask for: one of them directly in front of the airlock door and one on each side of it to set up a crossfire for anyone that managed to get past the fire from the first position.

Honestly, he had no idea how he would have even countered this setup either, other than the obvious "don't go through the airlock" approach. To be fair to them, the Sys-Def Marines wouldn't know they were there - the Marines, thought to be dead, or the cover itself - so it was a little easier to forgive them for walking into a trap so blindly. Still, though, it was going to be a very bad, albeit very short, day for the enemy soldiers.

"Three, two, one, contact," Michaels' voice came through the comm, the last word punctuated by a pronounced clunking sound and a slight jolt through the floor as the Sys-Def boarding shuttle latched its docking collar onto the outer side of the airlock. "Happy hunting, Marine."

"Wish you were here, Colonel," Stevo smiled into the comm, teasing the aging, injured Marine commander in that easy fashion that had come to define their new working relationship.

"Smartass,"

"And just think, Sir. In a few weeks, there will be hundreds of thousands of me."

"Now that's a sobering thought," Michaels groaned back, although Stevo knew the man well enough by now to be able to hear the smile in his voice. "Is it too early for me to just throw the towel in and retire?" He chuckled. The Colonel was a haggard, formal, battered Marine whose pride had been just as damaged as his body on that beach, but he was still a man. A man who had fought with every fiber of his being for a system that was perfectly willing to sacrifice him and the men under his command, now he was fighting for something altogether more understandable: revenge. It wasn't the most noble of causes, but it was one that Stevo could fully appreciate, and it was that mutual respect that had laid the foundations of what could be called the beginnings of a real friendship.

Stevo's thoughts were interrupted by the telltale hisses and twisted screeches of the airlock doors being forced open. There wasn't even the slightest attempt at a stealthy entry here; the Sys-Def Marines - doubtlessly having no idea what was waiting for them just a few feet away from them - were following standard boarding doctrine: get aboard as quickly and as violently as possible, shock the defenders into ineffectiveness, and seize control of the ship before the crew could rally to repel them. It was a sound concept, but it left no room for a sustained firefight against disciplined, motivated defenders, let alone ones who had the training, equipment, and experience to beat the Marines. They were about to walk into a slaughter, and for the life of him, Stevo couldn't bring himself to feel bad for them.

Until the moment that these men laid down their weapons, they were the enemy; they were a threat to the safety of everyone aboard the Hyperion, his people, one of which included Sylvia, someone he was rapidly developing genuine feelings for. So, until the very instant those weapons hit the deck and the hands that had been holding them reached for the stars, he would do what he had always been trained to do when facing an enemy: annihilate them with extreme, unbridled, unspeakable prejudice, and without a single shred of mercy.

The door mechanism finally gave way to the efforts of the Sys-Def boarders and split apart, each half of it groaning as it slid into the doorway's alcove. The first Marine poked his head into the corridor, his face clearly visible through the transparent faceplate of his helmet. Stevo could plainly see the moment that he spotted him, the look of surprise and horror as the full measure of the danger he was in dawned on him, and the moment that a smoldering hole replaced his face after Stevo put a laser bolt through it. The Marine, his bodily control suddenly severed along with his brain stem, fell limply to the deck.

There was a pause, a pregnant moment where everyone in the airlock antechamber held their breaths, waiting for the storm to break. The Sys-Def Marines stared in shock at the lifeless body of their comrade on the floor, the non-cauterized blood from his wound pooling onto the deck, the rebel Marines - because now the first shot had been fired against the forces of the Imperium, that is what they were - waiting for the next target to present itself to their perfectly executed ambush.

None of them had to wait long.

A flashbang suddenly flew out of the airlock hatch, its metallic shell clattering against the equally metallic wall behind the waiting defenders before it exploded. Flashbangs, for the uninitiated, were an ancient yet still effective means of distracting, disorientating, and confusing an opponent. A loud bang, loud enough to rupture eardrums and partially deafen a victim, was coupled with a blindingly bright flash - hence the herculean efforts put into naming the device. Together, they left a recipient with ringing in their ears loud enough to drown out attempts at communication, not to mention hamper their equilibrium and balance, and a retinal burn in their vision sufficient enough to not only hinder the aiming of a weapon but seriously and negatively affect a person's eyesight for a dangerously long period of combat time. Stumbling around without their eyesight and a severe sense of vertigo, they would normally make for easy targets to an organized, prepared force.

...Normally.

Of course, Stevo and his squad were far from typical. Not only had their hearing and vision been cybernetically shielded from the effects of these devices, rendering them completely useless, but the advanced combat helmets--part of the newly designed armor systems they had been issued with before Vallen--were more than capable of countering the effects even if their augmentations couldn't.

What this meant was that when the Sys-Def Marines stormed out of the airlock, expecting to see a group of dazed, staggering, poorly trained crewmembers who had formed an impromptu defense, they were, instead, met with unfazed, heavily armed, heavily armored, perfectly positioned and perfectly prepared, battle-hardened Marines with some very itchy trigger fingers.

Twenty-seven members of the Sys-Def boarding party were dead in less than three seconds; their bodies-in no way adequately protected by their light naval armor-were turned into a patchwork of blasted laser holes and blood splatter in only a few heartbeats. Two managed to dive back into cover, both of them having learned sudden, but valuable life lessons about life expectancies when assaulting a defended position against an entrenched, superior force.

"You have ten seconds to throw down your weapons and surrender," Stevo called out, his voice steady, even as the air in his eyeline shimmered with the heat radiating from the barrel of his rifle. The tension in the space crackled like electricity, amplifying the weight of his words. "You can tell your pilot to come out as well. Comply, and you won't be harmed."

A heavy silence hung in the air, stretching painfully as they awaited a response. Finally, a nervous, trembling voice broke through the stillness. "How do we know you won't kill us as soon as we step out anyway?"

Stevo shrugged, even though he knew they couldn't see him. "You don't. But you do know what will happen if you refuse this one-time-only offer. Do you even know who you are fighting against?" His question hung between them like a challenge, daring them to reconsider their choices.

Another pause ensued, each second feeling like an eternity. "Well, you're clearly not pirates..."

"Your powers of deduction are astounding," Stevo replied, allowing the light chuckles of his squad to fade away. It was a moment of dark humor--one that emphasized the absurdity of the situation. "You have no idea, do you?"

"It doesn't matter. We were given orders. We follow our orders." The voice shook slightly, but there was a defiant edge to it, a stubborn refusal to back down regardless of the peril.

Stevo's sardonic laugh echoed in the stillness, sending a shiver through even his own body. "We were like that, once. Until we, like you, were ordered to basically commit suicide by an Imperium that would be more than happy to see us dead. Now we fight for a greater cause, and we're not afraid to claim what's ours."

"Oh yeah?" The voice of the self-appointed Sys-Def spokesman returned, dripping with sarcasm and bravado. "And what cause is that? Let me guess, you fight for yourselves, some bullshit about being free from the Imperium bootheel?" The words were bitter, laced with disbelief, but beneath the sarcasm lingered an unmistakable hint of fear--a fear of the unknown that they now faced.

Stevo's eyes narrowed slightly as he took in the defiance of their adversaries. This was no mindless drone, no mere soldier; this was a person holding onto their beliefs, albeit misguided. "Something like that," he responded, his tone shifting, now infused with passion. "We fight for every person the Imperium has crushed beneath its heel, you included. For the freedom to choose our own fate and protect those who can't protect themselves. You can join us, you can become a prisoner today, or you can perish with the System you blindly serve. The choice is yours, but it is the only choice you are going to get, and I am the only one giving you the honor of understanding that choice before sending you off to die."

"Jesus, you're rebels," the Marine gasped, the weight of realization crashing down upon him like a tidal wave. The shock in his voice was palpable, swirling with disbelief and a dawning fear. "You really expect us to trust you? After what you did to the Marines on Garros?"

"No, soldier," Stevo's voice resonated around the anteroom, firm and unwavering. "We *are* the Marines. The Imperium sent us to fucking die; they betrayed *us*." His words rang with a bitter truth, forged in the fires of betrayal and fury. "The rebels gave us the same choice we are offering you now. You are being lied to. Forget everything you think you know, and ask yourself two simple questions."

The tension thickened, every breath hanging in the air as the Marine braced himself for what was to come. Stevo's voice remained steady, threading through the silence with an urgency that commanded attention. "Firstly, what reason do I have to lie to you? We could toss a grenade in there with you and end this fight in a heartbeat. We don't need to convince you to come out; we have no reason to keep you alive except for the simple fact that we want to." Each word was a knife, cutting through the uncertainty and doubt swirling around them.

"Secondly," Stevo continued, his voice now sharper, almost a challenge, "what other choice do you have? It's either surrender or die." The gravity of his words settled like a stone in the pit of the Marine's stomach. Stevo leaned in closer, the connection crackling with intensity. "And your ten seconds were up a while ago!"

Stevo could have sworn he heard the Marine swallow hard, although he almost certainly hadn't. Throughout it all, his comm channel cackled in the background, sounding out the moments that the other squads of his command engaged the enemy.

"Contact, contact!! Squad four repelling boarders!"

"Contact, contact!! Squad two, engaging the enemy!"

"Squad eight, moving to intercept hostiles on deck four!"

The reports kept coming, but responding to them, coordinating them, and relaying information was Michaels' job. Stevo's job was to deal with these few men, either to get them to surrender or to finish the job his squad had so mercilessly begun. Either way, the threat would be eliminated. The seconds ticked by, each one seeming to count down to the moment that violence would be resumed, either here or somewhere else on the ship.

"Okay, we're coming out," The quivering, trembling voice of the Sys-Def Marine finally sounded from the airlock.

"Toss your weapons out first," Stevo shouted out the command as he and the rest of his squad trained their weapons on the opening. A few seconds later, two comparatively ancient models of battle rifles came tumbling through the gap between the doors. "Now, step out slowly, hands raised."

There were a few muffled scrapes of movement before the first Marine stepped out, his expression a mask of pale-faced terror, with his hands in the air. His body was covered by the blood splatter from one of his fallen friends. The second Marine moved out just behind him. Stevo had to admire the second man for making no attempt to stay behind the first, apparently using his partner as a human shield, as pointless as it would have been, hadn't even crossed the young man's mind. Behind them, and dressed in a standard issue flight suit, was the pilot. "Okay, that's far enough. Drop to your knees and lace your fingers behind your head. Three of my men will move to secure you; no harm will come to you."

The men all nodded before lowering themselves to their knees. The first Marine, possibly the one Stevo had been talking to, kept his eyes firmly fixed on the Rebel Marine Captain; the other two glanced frantically at the rest of Stevo's squad and at the shattered remains of the rest of their boarding party.

"Are you really the Marines from Garros?" The first man said as one of Stevo's troopers moved in with zip ties.

Stevo shook his head. "We were never on Garros; the massacre was on Vallen. Fifteen thousand of us landed on that beach, and a little over three hundred of us made it off. We made the right choice, and so have you."

The Marine nodded, his face not regaining any of the color it had so clearly lost. "What happens now?"

"You will be secured and left here. One of our teams will be by in a little while to take you to the brig. After that, we will tell you what's really going on, and we go from there"

"You're not going to kill us?" The pilot spoke up.

Stevo shook his head again. "No, what happens to you next is up to you. But you surrendered; I promised that no harm would come to you, and none will."

"Th... thank you," The pilot seemed to let out a breath he had been holding as he was lowered onto his stomach on the deck with his hands now secured behind his back.

"What about the others?" The first man asked, looking up at Stevo from the same position on the floor. "The other boarding parties, I mean."

"They will be given the same choice you were, so it depends on them."

"They don't know what they're walking into," the second man breathed heavily. "And some of them are special forces, they won't give up without a fight."

Stevo held the man's eye. The answer was clear, even if it wasn't said aloud.

Then they'll die.

********

Almark. 16

She'd never really considered it before. On a military vessel, especially one as powerful and important as the Hyperion, she had always assumed that all the personnel on board were also military. It had never occurred to her that the design team that she oversaw was made up entirely of civilians. Out of the thirty-odd people in the former maintenance hangar, only she and Vice-Admiral Abdul were military personnel, and as such, they were the only two who were armed. To be fair, she only had her sidearm, and as good of a shot as she may have been with it, holding off a horde of marauding boarders with it was not her idea of a good day, and she was as far from combat ready as she could imagine. She still struggled to walk without a limp, for fuck sake, and crouching down behind an overturned metal table beside Darius Abdul was not the most comfortable position she could think of to die in.

Still, if anyone walked through that door, she'd put a hole in them without hesitation.

The door to the bay hissed and slid open. The universe, it would seem, was not without a sense of ironic timing. She squinted down her sights at the three figures stepping through the breach, pointed the barrel at the closest one, and squeezed the trigger.

The kick from the sidearm was not as pronounced as she had expected, and the high-pitched "whump" noise it made, while loud, was not loud enough to drown out the last sound she expected to hear coming from the mystery figures entering the room.

"Acch! What tha' hell, Lass. Watch where yar shooting that thing! We're on yur side!"

Emylee blinked. "Mac?"

"Aye, it's me. Who'd ya think it would be?"

"The bad guys, obviously!" She barked back, equal parts relief and embarrassment flooding her system as, injured leg forgotten, she vaulted her makeshift barricade and threw herself into Mac's enormous, safe arms.

"Only a few weeks in, and she's trying to shoot you," Ryan chuckled beside them. "That sounds like trouble in paradise to me."

Angel slapped him around the back of his head and rolled her molten brown eyes. "Sys-Def Marines are being engaged all over the ship, but none have landed near here yet. We're here just in case."

"Glad to have you with us, Marines," Adbul smiled graciously as he joined them. "Two of us and our sidearms in a room full of civilians? I wasn't looking forward to the rest of my day."

Ryan arched an eyebrow and leaned to the side, looking past the rest of the group to the gathering of nervous-looking scientists and engineers cowering toward the back of the room. "Err, you know you guys are standing right in the middle of the kill zone, right?"

"What?" One of the women's trembling voices floated back to them.

"Well, if the bad guys come through this door, and to be fair, it's the only door in the room, you will be the first thing they see and the first thing they aim at. No cover either. Hiding in plain sight isn't really a thing in a firefight... so, err, full marks on that one."

"Oh... Wh... What... where should we go instead?"

"Anywhere that isn't there," Ryan shrugged, leaning back toward the group. "There, problem solved."

Emylee blinked at him. "How is the problem solved?"

He shrugged with a mischievous grin. "I dunno, but now they're gonna be too busy trying to work out angles of fire and looking for cover to bother you."

Emylee and Abdul both turned around, watching with something approaching pitying amusement as almost thirty fully grown adults, all of which could boast of being among the most intelligent people aboard, all played an impromptu game of hide-and-seek with the hangar's door.

Angel, rolling her eyes, slapped Ryan again.

"Hey, stop hitting the cripple!" he pouted, grumbling loudly.

Emylee chuckled softly at the Marine squad's antics, a warmth blooming inside her as she allowed herself to really feel Mac's presence. Just that, his being there, had a transformative effect on her, making her feel infinitely better just for having him by her side. Yet, it wasn't just the closeness of her lover, the knowledge that she wasn't alone, that made her feel better; it was the Marine in him. Mac was a gentle giant with her, radiating a softness that belied his imposing stature, a size made enormously more intimidating by the added bulk of his powered armor. He was tender, affectionate, and astoundingly kind--a paradox that shattered every preconceived notion she had ever held about a man like him. He was everything she had never dared to believe a man could be, a calm amid the storm and a balm to her frazzled nerves.

But to his enemies, Mac was something entirely different. To them, he was a force of nature, he didn't calm their storm, he was the storm, and that inspired pure dread in anyone stupid enough to stand against him. Willing and capable of unleashing extraordinary extremes of violence, he embodied a raw, primal power that sent shivers down the spines of his enemy for the brief time they lived after laying eyes on him. He was utterly without mercy, a relentless, ruthless predator honed to perfection. They would know that when Mac entered a fight, it wasn't just combat; it was an irreversible descent into chaos--a wake of destruction in his path that was all but certain.

Armed and trained to be lethal in every conceivable manner, Mac was the embodiment of a nightmare for his enemies. In the theater of conflict, he moved with a grace that belied his size, an eerie calmness, almost totally devoid of emotion masking his handsome face as he plied his savage trade. When he unleashed his fury, it was like a tempest, capable of dismantling even the most fortified foes with ruthless efficiency, and standing as a lone bulkwalk against the encroaching enemy tides. To confront him meant stepping into the eye of a hurricane, where the winds of destruction howled loudly, and the aftermath left nothing but desolation.

Emylee felt a protective thrill at the thought of his lurking danger, a reverberation of something primal that did things to her womanly center that she dare not tell anyone about other than him. Though he wore kindness like a shield, one he bore for a select few, she knew that beneath it lay a fierce warrior, one who would give anything and everything, every shred of himself, to do his duty and protect those he loved. Before, that was a sentiment reserved only for his team, but now... now that included her, and she had no words to convey just how safe that made her feel. Mac was the monster that the good guys called in when times got tough, and he was all hers. Safety and protection for her, unbridled wrath for those threatening her, and even as the crackles of radio reports sounded from the Vice-Admiral's comm feed-each telling the harrowing tale of combat-she found that she no longer felt afraid.

If anything, she felt sorry for any enemy Marines stupid enough to stumble into her lover's path. And it wasn't only him. Angel, for her quiet calmness and keen eyes, was just as lethal as Mac was, as graceful as she was deadly; and Ryan, despite his juvenile sense of humor, was as ferocious on the battlefield as any of them. Utterly fearless, completely without mercy for his enemy, and as loyal to his brothers and sisters in arms as any Marine she had ever encountered. The three of them together meant that the entire enemy fleet could offload their entire, combined crews, send them rampaging toward this hangar bay, and this fireteam could feasibly hold off the lot of them.

Yup, fireteam. She was dating a Marine. She had to learn the lingo.

She felt herself relaxing as Mac kept one of his arms around her. She would love to feel both of them holding her, but in his defense, his other hand was holding his massive cannon on his shoulder. But still, the effect was profound, and as she relaxed, she could feel the watching Vice-Admiral Adbul relaxing with her. Darius had never seen the Marines in action, not in any meaningful way, anyway. He had, apparently, seen some of the footage from the beach, but that hardly did their abilities justice. She, on the other hand, had been there during the battle. Sure, she had been flying above it, but she had certainly been watching.

"So, what's the plan?" Darius asked, turning back to the group after another glance over his shoulder to watch Kenneth, the formerly irate and power-hungry engineer, trying to turn a simple chair into a piece of usable cover. "Are you staying in the room with us, Or...?"

"No, we'll be out in the hallway," Angel answered. "Better sightlines, and we have this room as a fallback position if things get dicey."

"Any danger of that?" Adbul asked cautiously

"Of things getting dicy?" Angel asked, waiting for Abdul to nod before answering properly. "I don't know, probably not, but better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. Out in the corridor, we can see them coming from every direction, we can engage them at much greater distances and pin them down before they pose a threat to you and your people. We would probably only use the fallback position to reload or let shields recharge. If we stayed in here, there wouldn't be any respite from the fighting, they would all be pouring through the one door, and they would be just as likely to target your people as they would us. We could probably still hold them, but it would be much harder to avoid casualties."

Abdul was not a combat commander, but even he could see the logic of her plan. "It sounds like you have everything under control. Is there anything you need from us?"

Angel and Mac shared a glance. "With all due respect, Admiral. We need you to keep your people in check. If any of them panic, try to bolt, or get in our way during a firefight, things could get very, very bad, very,very quickly. For them and the rest of us."

"I won't let that happen, Sergeant," Abdul nodded solemnly.

"Oh yes, Sergeant!" Emylee suddenly beamed. "I haven't had a chance to congratulate you on your promotion yet, Angel. Mac told me when he told me about his."

"I bet you congratulated him," Ryan smirked, then ducked beneath another one of Angel's slaps, spinning on the spot and landing a slap of his own on Angel's ass. "Oof, buns of steel." He chuckled as he put some distance between himself and any retaliation from his squadmate.

"Better than a leg of steel," she shot back playfully

"Ouch!" Ryan clutched his heart as he laughed.

"Fireteam ten, this is Michaels, respond." The Colonel's voice came through the comms.

"This is ten, ready for orders," Angel answered as Mac's arm squeezed imperceptibly tighter around Emylee. She felt it and immediately knew what it meant: Danger was coming.

"Four boarding shuttles have breached the hull in the cargo hold on your deck. Squads eight and nine are engaged and cannot intercept them or assist you until they're clear; the enemy will be headed right for you. Squad one is en route but is on the top side of the ship; you will have to hold until the Captain can get there."

"How many are we talking about, Sir?"

"Approximately thirty per shuttle, so about one hundred and twenty, plus any other teams that arrive in the meantime."

"How long do we have?" Angel flashed a glance to Mac, and then to Ryan - who had immediately stopped fucking around and was already making for the door.

"ETA, about five minutes."

"We'll be ready, Colonel." Angel nodded to the rest of the team.

"Give them hell, Sergeant. Michaels out."

"They're coming straight through the hull?!?" Kenneth gawked, his head whipping around to look at the outer bulkhead behind him.

"Airlocks are blocked by the first wave of shuttles that our boys have taken over. They'll land wherever they can now and use explosives to breach the hull, but they'll be aiming for the bridge and main engineering." Angel explained as she unshouldered her weapon. "Cargo hold has the most real estate on the hull; it makes sense the majority of them would land there."

Kenneth didn't seem to be even remotely soothed by that information, but Angel looked like she couldn't have cared less about his feelings. Emylee's eyes were already moving to Mac, though. He had his serious face on, the one he always wore when dealing with military matters. Yet, the frown on his expression did nothing to dampen the safety she felt at his presence; if anything, now that he had his game face on, she knew that anyone coming for them was about to be met with a torrent of plasma fire and death. She neither envied them nor pitied them. "Guess it's time to work for your pay," She smiled up at him.

"Aye, Lassie," he chucked back. "Gotta bring home tha bacon for ma little lady."

"All yours," she whispered back, then added with a wider grin. "Have fun playing with your friends." It was a weird thing to say, but she was starting to understand the dark humor that came with being involved with not only a Marine but his entire squad.

Mac smiled a little wider and flashed her a wink as he released his arm from its place around her and leaned in to kiss her cheek. Then, after dropping his rotary cannon into his arms, he spun on his heels and followed the jogging Angel and Ryan toward the door.

********

Crow. 8

Another rebel destroyer succumbed to chaos; its mass sucked into the blinding light of its singularity core going critical. The explosion erupted with a cataclysmic ferocity, ripping apart the Adventurer's superstructure as if it were little more than fragile tissue paper. In an instant, the proud vessel, once a beacon of military prowess, was obliterated, reduced to a field of jagged, floating debris--twisted hunks of metal drifting aimlessly in the void, remnants of a doomed crew and shattered dreams.

The force of the explosion sent shockwaves radiating outward, thundering through the emptiness of space, the energy dissipating yet still devastatingly potent. Ships in proximity--two more destroyers and a light cruiser already bearing the scars of prior engagements--were slammed by the residual force, their failing shields flickering under the strain like dying stars. Alarms blared amidst the chaos, crewmen scrambling as they braced for impact. Fortunately, though their shields were battered, the vessels survived the onslaught--unscathed relative to the fate that had befallen the Adventurer, which had now vanished, taking with it all three hundred souls aboard. Their screams, hopes, and lives extinguished without ceremony echoed hauntingly in the minds of those who remained.

"Sir, the Warlock has lost its engines," the tactical officer barked out his urgent report, strain threading through his voice. The main viewscreen flickered to another part of the battle, revealing the stricken vessel--a sleek, hulking warship that had borne the brunt of the battle. Its imposing bulk had been valiantly thrust forward to shield the more vulnerable ships as they retreated into the comparative safety of the formation's heart.

The Warlock was a shadow of its former glory, scarred and battered. Blackened burns marked its reinforced hull like ghastly tattoos, the twisted metal repelling the merciless vacuum of space, while flames licked hungrily from puncture points, casting flickering shadows that danced across its war-torn surface. Yet the most glaring evidence of devastation lay at the ship's aft. Its colossal engines, once a proud testament to its power, had been explosively severed from the hull by a remarkably accurate MAC shell, now reduced to shattered fragments drifting away in the void, the debris glimmering eerily against the black backdrop of space.

Even as the ship's momentum propelled it forward, the Warlock fought valiantly to maintain stability. Its still-active retro thruster strained against the chaos, laboring heroically to keep the hulking mass level, to prevent it from spinning into the abyss. The struggle was palpable; it was as if the ship itself was defiantly refusing to succumb to the carnage, even as the horrors of battle played out around it. The crew within the Warlock braced themselves, knowing their predicament was desperate, yet clinging to the flickering light of hope amid the overwhelming darkness of war.

"Its gone," Valdek shook his head. "There is no way to repair that kind of damage and get it to hyperspace in the time we have left, let alone in the middle of a battle. Order the Warlock's crew to make for the lifeboats, and tell her Captain to scuttle the ship."

"Aye, Sir," the dejected looking comms officer replied before turning back to her console.

"Tactical, are we ready?"

"Almost, Admiral. Another thirty seconds and we will be ready to roll."

"Good, what's the status of the enemy fleet?"

"They've lost about forty percent of their ships, Sir, either crippled or destroyed, but they aren't targeting us any more, just as you predicted."

"Wait, what?" Crow blinked, trying to follow both the conversation and the tactics the admiral was using against the Sys-Def fleet. "How did you know they would stop shooting at us?"

"Contrary to what you may have experienced with them," Valdek said, his focus unwavering as he continued to face the screen, "most Imperium officers don't typically fire on their own men. When those first boarding shuttles connected with the hull, shooting at us, damaging the Hyperion or any other heavy cruiser they've boarded puts their own Marines in just as much danger as our crew. With communications down, they can't issue a retreat order or even get a status report. They have no choice but to assume that their Marines are engaged with ours, fighting to take control of the ship."

He took a breath, calculating the weight of their precarious situation. "If they fire on us with anything powerful enough to pierce our hull, they run the risk of venting their own soldiers into space. It's a risk they won't want to take. So, they'll inevitably switch their targets to non-boarded ships, eliminating the risk to their Marines, but also making sure that all the damage they have inflicted until now was a waste of time. They have to start again on a new target."

Valdek turned slightly now, his eyes narrowing as he assessed their surroundings. "But we're so close now, and the shifts in our vectors make us that much harder to hit. It's a risk, yes, but it also gives us an advantage. They'll have to be precise, and that's where their uncertainty can work in our favor."

There was palpable tension in the air, more than just from the stress and chaos of battle. Valdek knew the stakes were high; they were teetering on a knife's edge between chaos and a chance for survival. Yet, amidst the uncertainty, there was a flicker of determination, knowledge that their careful maneuvering could outsmart the very system that sought to defeat them.

"But, when they do hit..." Crow left the rest of his statement hanging as he nodded toward the image of the stricken Warlock still on the screen.

"Indeed," Valdek nodded, "Although, on the flip side..." The screen changed again, just as the deck plates vibrated from the Hyperion MAC guns firing once again, and the image of two Sys-Def destroyers lined up at an impossibly convenient angle filled the main viewer. The shells smashed into the first ship, neatly cleaving it in two before the rest of the shells plowed into the destroyer behind it, eviscerating it from the inside out as the shells detonated. The power on the second ship - visible as the two halves of the first ship tumbled away from each other under the momentum of the hits - guttered out, a steam-like haze seeming to spill from numerous impact craters along its hull. "We do more damage when we hit them, too, and they still haven't been able to get moving yet, so it's much easier for our gunners to hit them than it is for them to hit us."

"We're ready to roll, Sir!" The tactical officer interrupted the explanation.

"Ready to roll" was an expression Crow had heard countless times echoing across the din of countless battlefields. Each time, it had been a prelude to aggressive maneuvers, a rallying cry that signaled the dawn of an assault, the kind of battle cry that raised the spirits of men charged with pushing forward into the chaos of conflict. Yet here in the cold, unyielding expanse of space, he found himself pondering how that same phrase would translate into movement without the solid ground beneath them.

The memory floated to the surface of his mind, vivid and disquieting. The last time he had heard it being uttered had been by one of the commanders of the armored column moments before they landed on the beach. The scene replayed in haunting clarity: engines roaring, metal grinding against metal, the smell of smoke, and the cacophony of gunfire enveloping him. He remembered the exhilaration mixed with gut-wrenching dread as they prepared to charge into the fray. But that battle had turned into a bloodbath, the kind of hell one rarely escaped unscathed from.

He had never truly worked out how many men from the armored brigade had walked away from that day. All he knew for certain was that it was only a handful. Faces of friends and comrades lost to the chaos flashed through his mind, each one accompanied by the weight of their sacrifices. He felt fairly safe assuming that the man who had last uttered those words--full of bravado, eyeing the horizon with fierce determination--was now dead. It was a sobering thought.

The last thing Crow expected--though in the chaotic theater of space warfare, perhaps he should have anticipated it--was for the ship to actually start rolling. The Hyperion, the largest and most formidable presence on the battlefield, had borne the brunt of the enemy guns in its climb upwards against the intimidating face of the Sys-Def defensive wall formation. With half of the Rebel fleet trailing closely behind her, anticipation tinged the air as they approached the upper edge of the enemy's position.

In contrast, the other half of the fleet, spearheaded by a brace of heavy cruisers, executed a perfectly mirrored maneuver, plunging downwards to pass beneath the expansive shadow of the formation. This dual-pronged assault was a carefully orchestrated ballet of destruction, each ship moving with purpose as they rolled into position, aligning their massively powerful broadsides to bear down on the relatively undefended dorsal and keel flanks of the enemy fleet. One ship after another being put into the perfect firing position as they passed the frozen Sys-Def fleet.

The sight was both awe-inspiring and terrifying. Crow's heart raced as he took in the unfolding drama, a spectacular display of tactical genius put into motion. As their vessels turned, the shimmering hulls transformed into lethal weapons, primed and ready to unleash devastation upon the Sys-Def fleet that loomed before them.

Meanwhile, the Sys-Def ships appeared to just hang in place, caught in an unforgiving and perfectly executed pincer maneuver. With no targets in their arcs of fire and completely unable to pick up any sort of momentum to move from a standing start, they were powerless to respond, the hulls of their ships becoming mere silhouettes against the backdrop of space. Crow could almost feel their frustration in the stillness, the weight of their mounting dread palpable in the vacuum surrounding them.

The culmination of Valdek's strategic plan was prepared to unfurl before their eyes--an avalanche of firepower aimed squarely at their vulnerable flanks. There was a grim satisfaction in witnessing the execution of a plan that promised to turn the tide of battle. Yet, part of Crow couldn't shake the stark reality of it all: ships being reduced to debris, lives being lost, and the chaos that came with every calculated blow.

Then, as if his voice was the lightning that heralded the beginning of the mighty storm, Valdek gave the order. "All ships, let them have it!"

********

Commodore Gabriel Gerrard could only watch in horrified realization as the rebel plan unfolded in front of him. The Montreal, the ship that was his pride and joy, had been reduced to little more than a floating observer in the opening minutes of the battle. Getting power to any of the main ship's systems was something that would require a week in drydock, and that was being optimistic. It was hopelessly beyond the engineering teams aboard. The heavy cruiser's massive arsenal of turrets hung limply along the ship's sides, its once colossal engines were lifeless and silent, and even the lights on the bridge had flickered out, only to be replaced by the dull, ominous red glow of the emergency lighting. The command staff sat frozen, a dread-filled silence being the only thing that broke the terrifying silence They watched, powerless, while the rebels obliterated their fleet one ship after another.

The power of that battlecruiser was dizzying. It was state-of-the-art in every way that mattered and completely beyond the ability of the fleet to stop. The precision of its weapons, the strength of its shields, the power of its engines, all of it, it was like death itself was stalking the field of battle. The bridge crew could only watch in stunned, impotent shock as it led the rest of the rebel armada in the systematic dismantling of his own. What was worse, however, was the fact that Gerrard had been completely, woefully out-maneuvered by his adversary.

There was a small, a very small, consolation in the fact that Gerrard and his 21st defense fleet had been almost criminally uninformed about the identity of their adversaries before the battle commenced. Had he known who the enemy was, he doubted he would have risked his fleet in an open-pitched battle; he would have dropped off a bunch of interdiction mines in the rebel's path, over and over, until the main naval battlegroups arrived. But if he had been forced into a direct confrontation, he sure as shit wouldn't have laid out his fleet in a blocking formation; it was the worst possible setup to counter a superior force. There were ships on the outer edges of the formation that hadn't seen a single second of combat simply because they were too far away from it to be of any use and too far away to be of any threat to the rebels.

More than that, the Sys-Def ships couldn't move, at least not in any way that would have made a difference. The larger ships, the only ones that could have possibly played a large part in the battle, would have taken an age to get up to any sort of effective speed, and the smaller ships - the destroyers and frigates - that were able to power engines, break formation, and get into something of a better firing position were immediately targeted and mercilessly hammered by the rebels.

But none of his fleet captains were psychic. None of them knew who they were up against; the comms had been jammed before he'd had the chance to inform them. Even if they did know, there was no way to disseminate orders. Each captain, each ship, was either frozen in place, duking it out in a ruthless, unwinnable fight against superior forces, or they were desperately trying to move, and thereby drawing the attention of enemy gunners. And those fortunate few who did manage to get moving found themselves completely isolated, way out from the line, because every other captain had moved in a different direction.

It was pure chaos.

But now, as his viewscreen angled itself upward to follow the massive battle cruiser rolling to present broadsides to his battered fleet, he finally got it. At first, when the rebels powered engines, he had assumed they were going to try to punch right through the line; most of the other captains must have thought the same because all of them - or at least the ones who could still move - angled their ships a little to present their broadsides toward the front. This had worked for a little while, the shields on several enemy ships buckling, then collapsing, before the MAC guns tore into them. But that optimism had lasted only a few minutes before the fleet split. By then, it was too late.

Now they were stuck, every single surviving, functional ship facing completely the wrong way, not a single gun in the fleet able to target the rebels, and only one or two of the comparatively tiny frigates in anything close to a position to engage.

"My god," he heard himself whisper before he slammed his finger onto his command console. "All hands, brace for impact. Be prepared to abandon ship!"

No sooner than he had released his finger, the rebel battlecruiser opened fire.

He had thought, at the beginning of the battle, that the volume of fire that ship could produce just from its forward-facing turrets was one of the most impressive displays of military engineering that he had ever seen. Now, though, that professional admiration was being dwarfed by the instant horror he felt as he witnessed the full measure of its broadsides. There had been fourteen beams facing forward from that ship when they had first engaged the Montreal; his ship only had six, but no less than fifty brilliant beams of dazzling crimson lanced out of the Battlecruiser's flanks and smashed into the Sys-Def ranks.

As even the most rookie of cadets knew, energy weapons lost power as the range to their target increased but few truly grasped how much. Johannes Keppler, in the 1600's determined that radiation obeyed the inverse square law, particle beam weaponry being no exception. At a thousand miles - the initial range of this battle - energy weapons could cause huge amounts of damage to a target's shields and melt four-foot-deep furrows into solid titanium armor with ease. But the enemy battlecruiser and its fleet weren't at a range of a thousand miles anymore; its range to the upper ranks of the formation was probably less than ten. At ten miles the beams were ten thousand times more powerful. This was not a feat of superior engineering. It was simple, cold, hard, and brutal mathematics. So when the first blinding barrage of particle beams smashed into a trio of destroyers on the top rank, the effect was devastating.

Shields that could normally hold out for quite some time at a normal stand-off range blinked out in less than a second, and the power that could melt through the armor of a heavy cruiser did exactly that to the much weaker hulls of the smaller ships. In only a few seconds, the beams had burned enormous holes in the dorsal flanks of the three ships, incinerating everything inside as the environment inside the destroyers boiled the crew, before the beams blasted out of the bottom.

They were like tiny fish, skewered onto the end of a hunter's spear.

The beams didn't stop there though. They hit the next rank of ships, and the ones after that, and the ones after that, a rippling, progressive wave of destruction that obliterated almost a dozen ships in only a handful of seconds. Then the MAC guns fired. There had been ten of them on the front of the Battlecruiser, but its broadside must have had at least triple that amount.

Explosions detonated against the already weakened shields of more of Gerrard's ships. MAC shells were practically useless against shields under normal circumstances, but the sheer volume of them started to have an effect. Shield bubbles burst into glorious spectacles of oscillating light; some held, most didn't, and the same savage destruction that had befallen the first group of ships now repeated itself on the next ranks of his formation. Silent explosions flashed from everywhere on the viewscreen as one ship after another succumbed to the violence. A cruiser and four destroyers seemed to experience core ruptures at the same moment, five flashes of blinding light obscured his view of the destruction of his fleet for a few merciful seconds before the scene of carnage cleared up again. By then the other ships of the rebel fleet had gotten into position and were pounding his ships with their guns too. The gasps of horror seemed to come from everywhere around the bridge as the entire command staff watched the end of the 21st defense fleet with him.

Except for one person.

"Commodore," the young lieutenant finally screamed out from her Comm station, snapping his attention from the fray beyond the hull. "I have broken through the comm jammers!"

"What?" Gerrard sat up instantly. "Fuck, well done, Lieutenant. If we make it out of this, I'm putting you in for a commendation, and a promotion, fuck, anything you like! Open a channel, all frequencies!" He waited for a few seconds as she tapped frantically on her terminal before nodding. "This is Commodore Gabriel Gerrard to the rebel fleet; we surrender; we are standing down. Hold your fire, please!"

They were words he never expected to say to an enemy, words that had never crossed his mind before today, but now, after witnessing the destruction of almost his entire fleet, with the loss of thousands upon thousands of his men, it was his only option.

For a seemingly eternal few seconds, nothing happened, nothing except more energy and projectile weapons hammering his fleet's defenseless flanks, but then, the channel opened.

********

Crow. 9

"Hold your fire, please!" The commodore's voice echoed through the bridge. There was an air of desperation to it, a pleading edge that Crow never thought he would ever hear from an Imperium officer. Valdek was right, Crow's experience with the Imperium had skewed his perception of them, but that was because every one of them he had ever encountered-with perhaps the exception of Colonel Michaels and the Admiral himself-had all given him the same impression. They were ruthless, bloodthirsty murderers with only a passing acknowledgment of the distinction between military and civilian targets and an unwavering willingness to do whatever it took to win. He had seen battlefield commanders level entire cities and their innocent population in order to root out a handful of rebel fighters, he had heard the tales of systematic, random executions, and of course, everyone had seen the final moments of Jim Edwards and his daughter in the Morus mines.

To his mind, they were all the same. Sure, one could possibly argue-perhaps accurately-that those men had been company men, not imperium officers, but that logic was countered by asking where the companies recruited their officers from. All of them had been former Imperium military, and all of them were guilty enough to make killing them at the end of the war for the spiral arm an order that Crow had never once regretted giving.

But then he met Valdek and the Marines. For the life of him, no matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn't imagine either Andre Michaels or Steven Taylor ever carrying out the kind of atrocities that had started the rebellion. They were good men, honorable to a fault, and totally committed to maintaining that honor above all else. It was the abuse of that honor system and the criminal violation of it that had spurred the former Marines to join them, not the hunt for revenge or the promise of a better life. The Emperor had desecrated the very thing that had made Marines like them who they were, and for that, he would pay, or they would die trying.

So if Stevo and the Colonel were different sorts of men, perhaps there were others like them, too.

And that begged the question: what kind of man was Gabriel Gerrard? Was he pleading for his own life? Was he begging for the lives of his men? Was this a tactic meant to buy time and then strike back? Was this all part of a greater plan? He guessed he would find out soon enough.

"Open the channel," Valdek finally said after a few moments of consideration.

"Please, hold your fire," Gerrard repeated as the screen flickered to life and the haunted face of the enemy commodore filled the viewer. "I will hand myself over for arrest if you spare the rest of my..." The commodore blinked as his eyes met the Admiral's. "... Admiral Valdek? But... but... you're supposed to be dead! They said the rebels killed you!"

Valdek shrugged. "They say a lot of things; you know as well as I do that most of them aren't exactly true. You attacked my fleet, Commodore, and if these roles were reversed, would you offer me the mercy you are now asking for?"

The Commodore paused for a moment, and then seemed to visibly deflate. "No, and I would probably be executed for even considering it."

"Hmmm, at least you're honest. Let's try another test. How long until the Naval battlegroups arrive?"

"Umm..." The Commodore looked down at his console. "A little over ten hours."

Valdek flashed a look to the comms officer who had monitored the entire conversation between Gerrard and Vice-Admiral Sherman Grant, so he already knew the answer to that question. A quick nod was all the comm officer offered to confirm the Commodore's story. "Very good," Valdek smiled, leaning back into his command chair and examining the strained enemy officer a little more closely. "What are your terms, Commodore?"

"I will, um, I will surrender myself," The Commodore offered resignedly. "You can try me, execute me, whatever you need to do to compensate yourselves for any losses we have inflicted. All I ask is that you spare my crew. They were just following orders."

"By that logic, so were you," Valkek replied, his face impassive. "Besides, what use would a middling Sys-Def Commodore be to us? I mean no offence, but you didn't even know who we were when you interdicted us, so you aren't exactly a treasure trove of useful intelligence."

"Then... what do you want in exchange for ending the battle and sparing my men?"

Valdek paused for a moment, looking for all intents and purposes like he was seriously considering the question, but Crow knew the man better than that. He already had an answer, he already knew exactly what he wanted, and he was just making the Commodore sweat. The Admiral turned in his chair, giving a quick glance to Crow, one that Crow answered with a soft nod of his head. The Admiral was in charge here; he knew what a reasonable price would be. Crow didn't have the first idea, so he was happy to let the former Imperium Admiral take the lead. "I want your carriers," Valdek finally answered. "Both of them."

Gerrard blinked. "The crews will never give them up, and even if they did, the Imperium would have my head for it!"

"Well, there's an easy solution to that," Valdek shrugged. "Lie to them. They were perfectly willing to lie to you. How many men and women have lost their lives today because they couldn't be honest? The only people who know the terms of this accord are on your bridge; you can tell the Imperium whatever you like. Tell them they were crippled in the battle, abandoned by their crews, and we dragged them off. How will they know any different? We can even make it look good for the escaping crew and fire a few shots around the carriers so they back up your story. The alternative is that we destroy the rest of your fleet here and now, then take the carriers by force. Either way, we will have them. So what do you all say?"

Gerrard flashed his eyes around his bridge, meeting the haunted gaze of each officer before receiving a small nod from all of them. "Okay, we accept your terms, " he finally said.

"Excellent," Valdek smiled. "Now, there is the small issue of your boarding parties. Recall them, and we will be on our way. And no, before you ask, they aren't doing well. They have no hope of taking any of the ships they assaulted. If you don't withdraw them, you will be looking at a total loss."

Gerrard nodded eagerly, "I will contact them immediately." He turned to his comm officer, "Put me through to the Marine commander quickly."

"Aye, Sir, but it's audio only," a very relieved and rather pretty young lieutenant replied. Gerrard nodded, and the channel was opened without the one to Valdek being closed.

"Marine boarding parties, this is Commodore Gerrard. Get back to your shuttles and withdraw immediately."

There was another pause before a gravelly voice came back through the comms. "Who the fuck is this?"

"Captain Slade, this is Commodore Gerrard. I am ordering you to..."

"Yeah, I heard you," the Captain snorted. "Except there is no way on God's green Earth the Commodore would order a retreat, it's never happened, and wouldn't be happening today. Not against some fucking Pirate scum. Nice try though!"

"Captain, they're not pirates!" Gerrard barked, his eyes going wide. "They're..."

"Listen, Fuck nuts," the Marine Captain's sneering voice echoed through the comm channel. "Your mother was a whore, and your Daddy underpaid! You want me off your ship, try doing a better impression of my boss, or kick me off your ship yourself. You aren't fooling anyone! But don't worry your pretty little head, I'll be on your bridge soon enough, and we can have a little chat about the penalties for hijacking Imperium comm channels. See you soon, Princess!"

The line went dead.

Gerrard's eyes went wide as they flashed back to the screen and to Valdek. "Admiral, please, they don't..."

"Yes, Commodore, they do." Valdek sighed. "The Captain made his choice, and he's forced us to deal with the problem ourselves. If they surrender, we'll let them live. But if they don't..." he left the rest of the sentence unsaid. "Now, you still have the chance to salvage your fleet, but you'll have to sacrifice your carriers and your Marines."

"Fuck!" Gerrard spat before starting to plead again. "Please, Admiral, don't do this."

"Commodore, I need you to listen to me," Valdek leaned forward, his penetrating gaze boring into Gerrard with a merciless intensity. "They're going to die, some of them at least, but that was always going to be the case, that became inevitable the moment they boarded our ships. The only difference now is that you know about it, and may live long enough to mourn them. The only question you should be considering is whether you are willing to surrender your carriers and live to fight another day, or if we destroy the rest of your fleet, then take the carriers with us anyway."

Gerrard's mouth opened and closed a few times, his mind scrambling and failing to find words to change the reality of his situation. Finally, he slumped back into his chair. "You're a goddamned traitor, Valdek," he muttered after a few moments of quiet. "But I accept your terms."

Valdek nodded. "You know who wasn't a traitor?" He responded calmly. "My son. Lieutenant commander Danjel Valdek, ISS Birmingham, 8th Defence Fleet. Killed at Lyra 16. The Imperium told everyone that the rebels did that, but they didn't. It was the Emperor. He killed his own loyal men then lied about it to gain public sympathy for the war effort to retake the spiral arm, and my son, along with thousands of others, paid the price for his betrayal." The Commodore's eyes almost bugged out of his head as the Admiral spoke, and gasps of shock echoed around his bridge. "They were your people, too, and the Imperium killed them for a bit of PR. That's why I'm here, that's what I fight for, and that's what I fight against. You'd be wise to seriously reconsider your definition of a traitor if you want to survive this war. That goes for all of you. Tell your captains to abandon the carriers; they have fifteen minutes and then we take them by force. Valdek out."

The Admiral nodded once to the comm operator, and the channel was closed before Commodore Gerrard could reply. "Well, that went well," the Admiral let out a breath before turning to look at the Tactical officer. "Get us over to those carriers along with the other cruisers, make sure tractor beams are ready, and tell the colony ships and their escorts to jump to hyperspace on our previous heading when we do."

"Aye, Sir.

Valdek turned to Michaels. "How are our boys doing?"

"They're holding their own," the wheelchair-bound Colonel replied without looking up from his console. "About seventy of the shuttles docked with the Hyperion, deploying about two thousand Marines, but they were too spread out to be effective, and they couldn't get past our Marines. About half of the ones who have been engaged have been killed, the other half have surrendered. But Squad Ten, guarding Vice-Admiral Abdul's research team on Deck twelve..." Michaels looked up with a worried expression on his face. "They've got a whole lot of trouble heading their way."

To be continued...

Histories and Lore.

The Maruvians - Part 1

- - - FOR THE ATTENTION OF THE IMPERIUM HIGH COUNCIL, FOREIGN MINISTER. RESULTS OF COVERT ACTIONS: VISUAL RECORDS ACQUIRED FROM MARUVIAN EMBASSY ON PORT HARTFORD BOARDER STATION.- - - ***encoded priority one. Encryption Zulu-Zule-Alpha-one. Message transmitted***

Jararg Azul was entering his thirteenth decade of service to the Marivian empire and had the aches and pains in all the appropriate places to prove it. The squat, hairy, powerful body, so easily remembered in the prime of his youth, was now starting to show the telltale greying of the end of his mid-life years. His arms and legs, once so powerful, cracked and creaked with complaint at the slightest movement, and his back seemed to protest any activity that didn't solely include resting. It was, under normal circumstances, a mark of prestige to be entering the end of one's lifecycle, to be considered an elder - and a respected one at that - was, when it boiled down to it, the goal of every younger Maruvian.

But age, respect, prestige and the general reverence of his peers was the last thing on Jararg Azul's mind. The humans were at it again: minor, seemingly harmless incursions into the Empire's territory, ostensibly from navigation errors or crew mismanagement, all of them followed by a rapid reversal of the offending ship's course, a seemingly sincere apology, and promises of sharp reprimands for the ship's errant captain. It was a cycle of barnog shit that had played out time and time again since the establishment of the current borders of their respective Empires; humans would probe an area, test the response times of the local fleets, then pull back. Nothing extreme enough to provoke an aggressive response, but transparent enough - when looked at over the much longer life spans of the average Maruvian career - to be almost predictable. If the humans sensed weakness, there was a very real possibility that they would attempt to capitalize on it, and that could mean war.

It was Jararg's job to make sure that none was found. Not because he didn't think that war could be won, but because even that victory would come at the cost of countless lives, and the very real possibility that it wouldn't come at all.

He was just finishing reviewing the sensor logs for the third time, making sure that no comm buoys or sensor probes had been launched by the human encroachment, when the door to his office hissed open, and his counterpart in military command - Guttjar Klaan - stormed in.

Unlike Jararg, Guttjar was an insectoid, his mandibles clicking and the chitinous spines on the back of his carapace vibrating in a display that Jararg had come to understand as unconcealed irritation. The humans, of course, had no idea that the Maruvians were just the closest species to them in the Empire and, as such, the only one they had any contact with. In reality, the Empire was made up of hundreds of different species spanning tens of thousands of lightyears. It was only by a pure fluke of stellar geography that the border with humanity was small enough for only a single member species to share this border. They didn't have the slightest clue that the Ka'ar - the name of Guttjar's race - even existed, let alone the rest of the Empire. The humans only cared about what was right in front of them, so, for hundreds of years, the Empire had let them see exactly what they expected to.

A rapid series of clicks emanated from the throaxial chamber of Guttjar's upper body, a form of speech that Jararg would have no hope of understanding if it weren't for the translators permanently affixed to both of them. "They're doing it again!" Guttjar hissed. "Why do we allow such blatant transgressions into our territory?!? Does the council not know that this could be a prelude to an invasion?!?"

"They know," Jararg answered calmly. Patience and stoicism were the mark of his race, and, even by Marauvian standards, he was a level-headed male who never cracked under pressure, not from the humans, not from the military, not from councilors and delegates, and certainly not under pressure from hot-headed subordinates like Guttjar.

"Then why??" Guttjar's wings trembled in annoyance, sending a strange rustling sound bouncing off the spartan walls of his office. "We could crush them; we could be the ones lauded for expanding the Empire's reach! You and I! The humans are a century behind us in technology, and their puny fleets would stand no chance in open war. So why do we tolerate these insults like scared hatchlings?? Why don't we crush them like the vermin they are?? Tell me why, Jararg, make me understand!"

Jararg sighed and finally looked up from the reports on his screen, leaning back in his chair and gesturing for the Ka'ar to sit. He waited the few seconds it took for Guttjar to huff - or the insectoid version of a huff - and to drop into the proffered chair. "Do you know the story of our first contact with the humans?" He finally asked.

"Of course," Guttjar nodded, his irritation not yet cooling. "The EDF Basroil incident. Everyone knows that."

Jararg smiled softly, a gesture that was no doubt completely lost on a member of a species incapable of interpreting Maruvian facial expressions. "No. That is the official record, but the real first contact took place eighty cycles earlier. It is required learning for all who serve in roles such as mine, but, on the whole, it is kept secret, albeit not a closely guarded one."

Guttjar's eyes narrowed, "Explain."

"I cannot," Jararg shrugged. "It is something that you need to see for yourself." He turned his gaze back to the screen of his console, tapping in a few commands to gain access to the Empire's encrypted Data Vaults, then another few commands to navigate to the relevant file, before he turned the screen to face his subordinate. "Here, watch."

********

The massive Galactic Empire ship dropped out of FTL at the very outer edges of the system, its bulk blotting out distant stars as it hung in the void. Its crew, seasoned veterans of exactly this sort of mission, were already scrambling to their posts, ready to carry out their duty before the tachyon bow wave had entirely dissipated.

There, in the distance, set against a backdrop of pure blackness, was a tiny blue-green orb.

"Target in sight," the sensor officer reported. "Minimal stellar traffic in the system, a single, medium-sized space station, and a few satellites in orbit, although most of them seem to be for communication purposes. Threat assessment is minimal."

Lord Tomeks straightened his ceremonial armor, a gesture practiced over hundreds of years of service in the Galatic Empire's military and from dozens of missions just like this one. The people of Earth, these humans, were going to be given the honor of becoming the newest member of the Empire, and he was to be the herald of the change. It was a duty he bore with pride as he had done on all of the expansion missions before it, and it was a duty that his predecessors had carried out with honor for the entire twelve thousand cycles of the Empire's history.

The message he would deliver to the Earthlings was a simple one: Bow to the Empire's strength and technological superiority or be destroyed. And for the privilege of receiving storied Galactic wisdom and guidance - not to mention their protection - the humans would need only deliver a yearly tribute of ten percent of their total harvested and manufactured resources and supply their benefactors with a steady stream of manual workers, equal in number to one-fifth of the yearly birthrate of their civilization. In about a century, when the Empire had recuperated the cost of absorbing their race, they would be permitted to apply for membership in the high council and become a full-fledged member of the Empire.

This process had been repeated more than a thousand times to more than a thousand people on more than a thousand worlds, and it was how the Empire grew.

For the longest time, knowledge of the humans' existence had eluded the Empire, isolated as their homeworld had been by the massive stretches of barren space that separated Earth from the rest of the galaxy. But recently, in the last fifty years or so, evidence of their presence had been detected, culminating in the establishment of the first human colony outside the region they called "The Hudson Expanse."

This new colony, New Atlantis--as the humans named it--was his target destination. He would relay his message to the local government, who would transmit it to Earth. Then, one of two things would happen: either the immediate surrender and subjugation of the human race or, like a few others over the years, their pathetic attempt at resistance.

Slavery, occupation, cultural obliteration; the rallying cries of those long-forlorn worlds had been as varied as the outcome of those conflicts wasn't. The longest occupation war to take control of a species' colonies had lasted just four months, cost the Empire a grand total of seventy three lives, and resulted in the almost complete eradication of the offending species. Now, the worlds that people had once called home now provided one hundred percent of its resources and every single one of its surviving population to the Empire, and no protection, guidance, or wisdom was ever needed in return, even if the Empire had to mine the resources themselves. Either way, the Empire grew, and the Empire profited.

He glanced in the direction of one of the crew stations, having no real idea if it was the correct one for his question or not. "Have we gained access to their data networks yet?"

"Yes, My Lord," someone at a different station responded. "Their data networks are primitive, but... expansive."

"Good," he nodded, "Start the download process, send everything to the Savants, then prepare the first transmission," Tomeks calmly ordered a different member of the ship's crew.

After a few minutes of pause, one of them answered, "We are ready to broadcast, My Lord. " Although Tomeks didn't pay attention to which one replied, he nodded, stood from his lordly throne, straightened his armor again, and began to speak. It was a speech he now knew by heart, transmitted to humans in the one universal language: Mathematical Binary, a language so simple that even the most primitive technologically capable people could decipher it.

"People of New Atlantis, Children of Earth, behold the Herald of the Change. I am Lord Tomeks. I come to you with glad tidings. Your people have been chosen to receive the rule and protection of the Galactic Empire. You will surrender your militaries immediately and submit to the authority of the Grand High Council, its military high command, and its glorious Emperor, or you will face eradication. History is being made this day; the choice of whether it marks a new era in your history or if it spells the end of your race lies entirely with you. You have one standard Galactic week to respond."

Tomeks nodded to the comm officer and the channel was closed. He rolled his neck, adjusted his armor again, and sat back down on his throne. He barely had time to get comfortable when the comm officer chittered in surprise. "My Lord, they are responding!"

"Already?" Tomeks surprise was evident by the squinting of his compound eyes, but he shrugged. "Put them through."

A moment later, a human-smooth but aged skin, greying hair on the top of his head, and a shorter lengthed bush of it around his small mouth-appeared on the screen. It was clear from his uniform that this was a member of the species military, a dark blue garment with, interestingly, the same display of rank on his lapels that the Galactic military used. Tomeks had no idea what rank the symbols on his shoulder denoted, but their placement was one of those curious coincidences that Tomeks had always found amusing.

"My name is Admiral George Hartford of the United Earth Navy," the man calmly said in perfect Galactic standard. "We have been expecting you."

Tomeks blinked, his four eyes shutting rapidly in confusion. How did this person know their language? And what did he mean when he said they were expected? And why in the name of the blazing suns was he so calm? No species he had ever heard of, let alone dealt with personally, had been so calm. There had always been panic, always confusion, always questions that led to pleading, then to begging, then to either acceptance or futile defiance. There was never-never- calmness.

Somewhere deep in the places that Galactic Lords didn't talk about, Tomeks felt a shiver run down his spine. This was not how things were supposed to go.

"I would like to extend an invitation to you, Lord Tomeks, as the diplomatic envoy of your Empire, to meet with us here on New Atlantis," the Admiral continued cooly. "You have my word that no harm will come to you or any of your esteemed entourage while you are in our care."

Tomeks stood again. He was starting to feel a little like a child's toy with all the ups and downs, and the surprise from the Admiral's response was still causing two of his three hearts to hammer nervously in his chest. Uncertainty, it would seem, was not a pleasant feeling to a Galactic Lord unused to feeling it. "Of course, Admiral. I accept your generous offer. I hope this meeting marks the start of a long and fruitful relationship between the Empire and its newest member.

The Admiral smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. Tomeks didn't have the slightest clue why this gesture made the unease in his chest jump to new heights, nor did he appreciate the second shiver that crawled its way down his spine. When the man spoke again, his voice was eerily level. So much so that the Galactic Lord briefly wondered if humans were one of the few species that didn't display emotion through inflections in their speech. More than that, there was a confidence about the way he held himself. This was not a man who was intimidated, let alone frightened for himself or his people at large. He was acting like this was just another day at the office: "Let us discuss our... future relations in person. We look forward to your arrival."

The channel closed as soon as the Admiral stopped speaking, causing another wave of surprised and confused looks to wash over the faces of the bridge crew. It was considered disrespectful to the point of insulting to end a communication with a higher-ranking member of the Galactic hierarchy, and there were few ranks higher than Lord. The lower-ranked person was expected to stay on the channel, awaiting permission to be dismissed or have the higher-ranked party close the channel for them. Anything less was considered a challenge to their authority. Of course, there was no way for the humans to have known that, but Tomeks had the distinct impression that they wouldn't have acted any differently if they did.

Thirty three hours later, Tomeks found himself sitting on one side of a grand conference table in a plainly decorated room much like the ones used for formal meetings at home. The humans had sent a set of landing coordinates shortly after their response to his opening ultimatum, coordinates for a military base in a sparsely populated region of the planet's northern hemisphere. There had been no fanfare upon his shuttles arrival, no grand spectacle, no armed and ready native soldiers, and no civilians of any kind. No apprehension, no fear, no panic, no excitement - although, admittedly, that last one was rare - just the Admiral and a small security detail waiting on the landing pad. Tomeks and his own platoon of guards were welcomed and then led into the base, through a series of corridors, and finally to this room where Hartford requested that he and Tomeks speak alone. Tomeks couldn't help but feel that unease grow at just how... casually the humans seemed to be acting.

Tomeks had received the initial report about the humans from the Savants. They had dissected the torrents of data taken from the local networks and given the Galactic Lord a summary of the information he needed: their level of technological development in relation to the Empire, their military capabilities, and some general details on subjects like humanity's preferred climate, their diet, physical attributes-both as soldiers and as manual laborers--and how to distinguish between the two sexes. Aside from an abnormally rapid rate of technological progression, there didn't seem to be anything remarkable about these primate-like people.

"Your race has achieved much in a short amount of time. It is impressive. " Tomeks said, trying to convey the appropriate amount of diplomacy while not sounding too condescending. "And that is to be applauded, but your technology is at least six centuries behind that of the Empire. The only option you have is to submit. Resistance is..."

Hartford held up his hand, silencing Tomeks with a single gesture. Nobody in all of Tomeks's long life had ever dared to interrupt a Galactic Lord. "We know that you have gained access to our networks," the Admiral said with that infuriatingly calm voice. "Your intrusion was detected the moment it happened. What you may not know, however, is that we used the same signal to access yours, that is how our translators learned your language. Your Empire is large, and it's advanced; that is... impressive," Tomeks didn't miss the use of the same condescending word. "You have conquered many worlds, many people, but none of them were humans, and I believe there are things you should know.

"You accessed our networks?!?" Tomeks gawked at the audacity of this man.

"We did. We thought it only fair, considering you accessed ours. Your people's history is fascinating, the parts our scientists have read so far, anyway. I suggest you read our history, especially our military history before we continue our dialogue."

Tomeks blinked again. "You expect me to delay the Empire's expansion into this region just so I can read your primitive battle accounts?"

The Admiral gave another one of those smiles, his eyes remaining firmly locked on the Galactic Lord. "Your civilization has fought seventeen major wars in the last thousand years. Yes, you have fought and won many individual battles, especially against those who resist your... generous terms, but prolonged, protracted, major wars? You have fought seventeen in the last millennia. Humans..." he paused, maintaining that steely eye-contact, "...have fought more than that in every single century of our recorded history. We have developed more weapons in the past twenty years than you have in the last two hundred. Yes, yours are more advanced, but our rate of advancement is much higher than yours, and it won't take us long to catch up." The screen on the wall behind Hartford flashed with images: ancient warriors wielding swords and shields, lines of men with rudimentary firearms, armored vehicles rolling over shattered battlefields, ships sailing over vast oceans, aircraft dropping bombs on cities, ballistic missiles roaring into space.

"This isn't a boast, Lord Tomeks," Hartford continued, his voice remaining steady, "it's a warning. Your Empire fights wars of conquest, and always against those who can't fight back. We fight wars for everything. Nationalism, resources, ideology, territory, pride, and we always... ALWAYS... fight back. We split the atom, mastered genetic engineering, developed advanced computing, not for progress-at least not at first--but to gain advantage in war."

Tomeks found himself listening intently. No species he had ever heard of, let alone encountered, had ever had such a history of violence and conflict. There was no defiance or desperation In Hartford's eyes, just a resolute certainty about the nature of his race compared to those the Empire had encountered in the past. It was like the Admiral simply knew something that Tomeks didn't; it just happened to be the war-like nature of his race.

"Return to your ship," Hartford finished. "Review our history. See who we are for yourself. Calculate the odds, then ask yourself... do you really want to fight against a species that turned its entire homeworld into a massive combat laboratory? A species that endures more conflict in one of our average lifetimes than your Empire has known in the last thousand years. Because I promise you, our resistance would be a lot more robust than anything you have encountered before."

"Admiral, that sounds dangerously like a threat."

"No, it's not a threat, not yet."

There was a long silence between the two representatives before Tomeks finally spoke. "So, you are choosing destruction."

"No, Lord Tomeks," there was that smile again, but this time, there was something else to it. A spark, a flicker, a hint of something predatory. It was as if these diminutive people were actually daring the Empire to attack. "We are leaving the choice with you. We are just making sure you have all the information you need before you make any... unfortunate and rash decisions. We will wait for your response, and please, take all the time you need."

Three days later, Tomeks-now with dark circles under his eyes and more stimulants in his system than he dared think about-stared at the glowing holo screen of his terminal. Under normal circumstances, he would have found the human... warning... amusing, perhaps even cute, in the self-destructive manner of children, but there was something about the way the Admiral had looked, about the way he had sounded; that cool, calm confidence, the way he held himself, and the glint behind his eyes. It had taken Tomeks a little while to figure out what was different about it, and the realization, once made, sent another wave of chills down his spine.

The human, in all the time of their interaction, had shown no fear.

None at all.

Every other species, even the ones who had recognized the need for Imperial rule, had shown varying degrees of blind panic after the initial broadcast was made, even if that panic was aimed solely at making sure that no offense was given to their new overlords. Even those few whose panic had died down relatively quickly were still consumed by an all-encompassing chaos as first their governments, then their population tried to come to grips with their new reality.

The humans hadn't shown any of these things. Which, in turn, brought Tomeks back to the very first thing Admiral Hartford had said to him:

We have been expecting you.

At first, after the initial confusion had faded, Tomeks had taken that statement as a bluff by the humans, a way of potentially throwing the Empire off-foot, a bit of manipulation to gain some sort of leverage in the negotiations to come. However, the more of the humans' history he read, the less of a bluff it seemed to be.

For three days straight-after slamming closed the signal that allowed the humans to hijack the Empire's data-jacking signal-he had been reviewing humanity's military history, information gained from downloading their data vaults, and what he discovered made his blood run cold.

"Computer," he barked into the quiet of the office, "replay summary of Earth's World Wars."

The computer chimed in acknowledgment of the command, a holographic display of images and visual clips starting to rotate in the air above him as the computer started its summary. "Three individual, single planet conflicts between members of the same species. The first lasted four locally timed years, the second lasted six years, and the third lasted three years. The First World War, marked by static defenses and attritional warfare, claimed the lives of approximately forty million people, both military and civilian. However, it must be noted that sickness and disease were responsible for a great many of these." Grainy images and videos of trench warfare, early chemical weapons, and primitive flying machines filled the air of the office. "The Second World War claimed the lives of between seventy and ninety million people with a much greater emphasis placed on atrocities against civilians and the attempted genocide of certain portions of the population. It also includes the development and first use of atomic weaponry." Images of both the means of war and the consequences of an event he had come to understand as 'the holocaust' replaced the images in front of him. "The Third World War was the shortest war, one that humanity had long believed would result in the destruction of their species through nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Although all three of these means were employed, humanity survived, but at the cost of almost one point eight billion lives. This conflict also includes the first instance of extra-atmospheric warfare in their history."

Tomeks eyes wandered over the images floating around him. Still, it wasn't the scenes of carnage, destruction, or death that left him reeling-he had, after all, overseen the annihilation of entire species, so burning cities and billions of dead were, to put it mildly, nothing special. What had surprised him, though, was the rate of technological advancement that had taken place during those few short years. "They went from piston aircraft to jet engines in only six years," he murmured, "How long was the fastest time any Imperial species' history to make the same advancement?"

"The Nom'sek took three hundred and twelve years to make the same leap," the computer responded. "Although it is important to note that humanity's first successful powered flight experiment took place forty-one years before the development of jet engines, not six."

"Oh, well, that makes it all fine then," Tomeks scoffed sarcastically. "Forty years to match a feat that took one of our most advanced races more than three centuries to achieve. Their level of advancement is astonishing. Overlay their rate of advancement with graphs of the Empire's major races during the same stage of development."

The computer chimed again, and the images vanished. In their place, a single graph appeared above him. On it were various upwardly angled lines, dozens of them, all in different colors. He knew by heart which species were represented by each color, and his eye seemed to unconsciously wander to the off-purple line marking his own Maruvian race. Each of the Empire's races had its own strengths and weaknesses, but broadly speaking, they had all advanced to the age of interstellar travel at roughly the same rate, with only a few decades - maybe a century - of difference between them.

Then, the human line, a dark shade of blue, appeared on top of them. During the periods that mankind was at war, the line of their advancement was almost vertical. During the Second and Third World Wars, humans made more than a century and a half of Empire-equivalent progress in less than a decade. Medicine, propulsion, computing, communications, and, of course, weaponry all advanced at an eye-watering speed at a time when any other known species would have seen their rate of technological development slow down in favor of fighting the war at hand. But what was more worrying was that, in all three instances, humans in one region of the planet or another had started at least one new war within less than a decade of the last one being over, and that same near-vertical line resumed during those successive wars as well.

"Unguilded rocketry to ballistic missiles and tracking munitions in less than two decades. The splitting of the atom being used as a weapon coming years before it was used as a power source, and the dawn of computing coming as a code-breaking tool for military application a full decade before it was turned to civilian use. This... this can't be possible."

The swishing sound of his office door opening interrupted his thoughts as the ship's Savant-a Nom'Sek by the name of Thaum Vadan- strode in with the same worried expression on his face as Tomeks wore on his. Like all Imperial Savants, his brain had been enhanced by what the service called 'computational implants' that allowed them to interact with the ship's data core and analyze information at a massively increased rate, and the faint blue light glowing behind Thaum's eyes showed that his implants were working overtime. "My Lord," he said with a tremble in his voice, "you need to see this."

He blinked up at the ceiling, and the holographic graph that Tomeks had been studying was joined by dozens of other ones, each illustrating a different set of data and statistics. "Sir, their entire recorded history has been one endless cycle of war, peace, the development of new weapons, then a new war with the new technology, and - in many cases - those last two events are blurred. Almost every single meaningful technological advance in the last few thousand years has come as a direct result of war. The use of stone as a building material was first designed as a means of defensive fortifications. The development of maritime travel was initially envisioned as a means to raid foreign neighbors and transport troops to strategically important locations. Communications were enhanced to eliminate an enemy's ability to intercept them; even their medicine has, with only a few exceptions, been spearheaded by military necessity."

Tomeks tried to keep his expression calm as he listened to the ship's most advanced mind basically confirm what he had already been thinking.

"They have developed more types of warfare than we had ever imagined: guerilla warfare, psychological warfare, cyber warfare, electronic warfare, even economic war. Humans have developed so many different ways to fight that the Imperial military database had to invent twelve new categories just to classify them all."

"By the stars," Tomeks muttered.

"I'm sorry, my Lord, but there's more," Thaum continued breathlessly as Tomeks felt his primary heart sink further. "We accessed their entertainment archives. They had turned war into something called movies and video games. Their civilian population absorbs these tales of war, both real and imagined ones, as entertainment, and their children practice combat scenarios for fun. They have millions of books about war, a very large percentage of them fantasizing about wars with other species, and these books have been in existence for centuries before they left their own atmosphere. My Lord," he paused, his troubled eyes meeting Tomeks, "they study war like we study mathematics. They have turned it into a scientific obsession that consumes their entire culture."

Tomeks stood with a sigh, turning around and walking to his viewport. The view of the stars was impressive, but all he could focus on was the reflection of his own scared face in the plasma glass. "How many wars have they fought in total?"

"We..." Thaum cleared his throat. "We stopped counting at ten-thousand documented conflicts, that was nowhere near all of them, not even most of them, and that was only the wars they bothered recording. There is significant evidence of major, prolonged conflicts occurring either before the start of their written history or so long into their past that their records of them have been lost. There is not a single region of their planet, not one, that hasn't been the sight of at least one battle in history. There are multiple regions where the archeological remains of one battle are buried below one that came later, over and over, dozens of times, in some cases.

"Is there anything else," Tomeks asked during a pause in Thaum's monologue, hoping for one answer but having the distinct impression he would get another.

"Yes, My Lord," Thaum sighed. "Even during their brief periods of peace, they prepare for war. They have something called war games, massive military exercises involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers where they... practice, for lack of a better term, fighting against imagined enemies. Some of these exercises include fighting against other species, and a huge number of them include fighting a war where they are the less advanced side."

"What do you mean?"

"Every one of their soldiers is expected to be able to fight without the use of advanced weaponry or in scenarios where their imagined opponent has better weapons than they do. They practice fighting from a position of severe disadvantage, the aim being to be able to still function and, more importantly to us, resist when any other species we have encountered would have given up and sued for peace."

There was another one of those shivers again, the one that felt like cold human fingers crawling their way down his spine. His mind flashed back, as it had done so many times in the past three days, to the human Admiral Hartford. With a sudden, heart-stopping clarity, he realized that he hadn't been bluffing or trying to gain any sort of favorable position in the occupation negotiations; he had just been prepared. He was prepared because he had practiced for that moment of first contact with a potentially hostile species for years, and because he had known something that the Empire didn't: Humans were built for war in a way that no other species in the Empire could even comprehend, and that, if the fighting started, humans would not only resist, but they would use that fight to thrive.

Tomeks nodded, he didn't know what to say to that. "Is there more?" he asked again, and this time getting a much more merciful answer.

"Yes, Sir, there is lots more, but we still have mountains of data to process, and those were the most urgent points you needed to be aware of. My Lord, we have theorized about the existence of a warrior race, rather than just a warrior caste within a larger race, for generations. I think we may have found one."

"Send everything you have to the military council," he finally said. "They need to know what we are dealing with."

With a nod, Thaum spun on his heels and left the room. Tomeks turned back to the window, staring at the pale blue glow of New Atlantis in the distance, unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched in the same way that he was watching this tiny human colony world. For the first time in his life, perhaps for the first time in the life of any Imperial Lord, Tomeks found himself wondering if the Empire had encountered a species that they couldn't conquer. Not because the humans were stronger or more advanced but because they had turned their entire civilization into a weapon of war.

The hastily convened Imperial military council-assembled with just fourteen hours notice-had never been this quiet. Twenty-three of the Empire's strongest and most militarily advanced species gathered around a single colossal table, not unlike the one that Tomeks had been seated at on his visit to New Atlantis. The only real differences were both in terms of size - this one was much bigger - and color, with this table being made of a dark, onyx-like black mineral rather than the polished brown of some species of wood. The denizens of the table, however, were not concerned with the table itself but with the enormous holographic display rotating above it. The dim lighting of the room made their faces look like pale ghosts as the gravity of the information being given to them started to sink in.

General Mar'tol, another member of the Ka'ar species and the oldest member of the council - and therefore its leader and spokesman - finally broke the silence. "Play the combat simulation again." He ordered.

Thaum, sitting beside Lord Tomeks and attending the meeting via a holographic link from the New Atlantis system, obliged immediately. It was a scenario their best computers and best minds had created, using all the relevant data they had managed to process. It wasn't complete yet, but it wasn't like the scenario became kinder to the Empire the more information was added; if anything, the opposite was true. It was a scenario of a standard Imperial conquest fleet attacking not Earth but New Atlantis, a fact that should have immediately worried those council members watching. In the scenario, the humans didn't only resist; they didn't just fight back; they adapted, learning with each passing minute. Within the first day, they had captured working examples of Imperial weapons and shield emitters and within two weeks, had successfully reverse-engineered them. In only a month's worth of time since the first Imperial troops made landfall, the humans were already deploying adapted, sometimes improved versions of their equipment against them.

"Impossible!" one of the younger generals muttered. "Their response times are beyond anything our battle doctrine considers possible. No species can adapt that fast."

"The humans can," Tomeks responded through the holo-link. As a Lord, he was neither high-ranking enough to sit on the council nor was he technically part of the military at all. But as the ranking representative of the Empire in the system, his presence had been deemed a requirement. He had lost weight since his trip to the planet's surface, worry robbing him of his appetite, and the dark rings beneath his eyes denoted his abject lack of sleep since then, either. "Because they have been preparing for this for their entire existence. Look at their history. When they fought with swords, one side would immediately develop better armor, to match the first side's advancement with swords, meaning the first side would develop better swords. When they fought with ballistic firearms, they developed better armor than better firearms. Faster aircraft meant better anti-aircraft weaponry. Better missiles meant better anti-missile technology. Bioweapons were cured, chemical weapons counteracted, and they even developed protocols for continuing operations after a nuclear attack, which has actually happened on a few occasions. Every time one side created a new weapon, the other side immediately found a way to counter it, and a new, more advanced weapon took its place with the development of new tactics to use it."

The council kept watching as human warfare developed before their eyes. As the simulation progressed, other images of the same series of events, taking place countless times throughout history, joined them.

"But here is what makes the humans truly dangerous," Tomeks went on when no voice rose to challenge him. "During times of war, all other species get weaker. They lose resources; they lose the lives of people who are important to their technological advancement; they lose people who are vital for the function of their society, so much so that it can take generations for a species to recover from one. They even lose technology itself as working models are destroyed and the means to make more dies with their inventor. Humans," he paused, making sure to make eye contact with every general looking his way, "Humans get stronger. No matter how much damage is done to them, they thrive." The holographic images playing alongside the simulation changed, this time to show Thaum's graphs and statistical data. "During every period of warfare in their civilization, they have not only advanced at a faster rate than during their rare and brief times of peace, but they have also advanced at a rate that dwarves even the most remarkable of our golden ages. During their world wars, they advanced more than a century and a half's worth of our equivalent technology in barely a decade. Those numbers are typical, not the exception. Every major technological breakthrough in their history has come as a direct result of war, so much so that they even have a saying for it: 'Necessity is the mother of invention,' and there is no necessity greater than war, especially when it comes with the risk of their species annihilation."

General Mar'tol leaned forward, one of his four chitinous hands scratching the underside of his mandibles. "Surely they have weaknesses; every species does."

"They do, General," Tomeks nodded, "But it's not only one we couldn't use; it actually adds to their strength in cases like this. They fight amongst themselves constantly. This means that every battle plan isn't theoretical; it has been practiced and perfected. Every weapon has been tried and tested, and every tactic to maximize its effectiveness has been put into effect countless times. Everything has been tested; nothing is conceptual. More than that, it means that vast portions of their armed forces are battle-hardened veterans rather than inexperienced recruits."

Another of the lower-ranked generals spoke up. "What about our technology? We are centuries ahead of them. Surely, we would be able to defeat them long before they would be able to put these...advantages into practice."

Tomeks couldn't help but snort out a bitter, resigned laugh, but there was no humor in it. "Would we..." He nodded back to the simulation. "Every piece of technology we employed on the battlefield, no matter how advanced it is, would be captured by the humans and turned against us in weeks, perhaps even days. The gap between our technologies would be closed long before we completed our annexation of their species. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we won, that we landed on their planets and managed to complete our conquest. They would never stop learning, they would never stop resisting, they would never stop fighting, and it wouldn't take them long to not only master our technology but improve upon it."

"We could bombard them into submission from orbit," The same general countered.

"Could we?" Tomeks nodded to the simulation again. "Look closer. They have much fewer ships, yes, and their weapons, at the moment, are not as powerful as ours. But their military command centers are buried underground, beneath entire mountains, beneath the ocean, we couldn't hit them without a ground invasion. Even from orbit, even with every weapon we have, we couldn't hope to conquer any of their worlds without either destroying the planet - in which case, there is no benefit to taking it - or launching a ground invasion, which they would eventually beat. Moreover, their commanders train to fight against enemies with superior technology. Not only does every soldier know how to fight from a technologically inferior position, but they have something called asymmetric warfare, which specializes in tactics meant for just this sort of conflict. It is a strategy where the weaker force can prevail against a larger, stronger one by fighting with more determination, intelligence, and directing efforts against targets that would cause the most damage and disruption to their enemy. I hate to say it, but the list of potential targets that strategy contains includes ones that no Imperial battle doctrine has ever considered defending. We would need to divert enormous numbers of troops to the conflict just to defend every possible point of attack, and even then, they have backup plans for that. They have backup plans for their backup plans."

The council chamber, already quieter than it had ever been, seemed to somehow grow even quieter as understanding started to dawn on the assembled leaders. "There's more," Tomeks said softly, his voice sounding like a resounding boom in the tomb-like room. "Information that has only become clear in the last few hours. We accessed their classified data vaults," he nodded to Thaum, who dismissed the simulation and the statistical data, and replaced them with transcripts of some of humanity's most secret files. "They haven't just been practicing for a war against some random enemy. They have been preparing to fight a war specifically against us."

"What? How?" General Mar'tol gasped.

Tomeks nodded to a new image that appeared above the council table. It was grainy; it was far from clear, but it was immediately recognizable to any member of the Empire who saw it.

"Is that...?"

"One of our survey ships, yes," Tomeks nodded. "We found this in their most classified military networks. They detected it about fifty years ago on the edge of the barren region they know as The Hudson Expanse. They expanded to this new colony world anyway, knowing we were out here. They didn't panic, they didn't reach out in communication, they just studied us as best they could based on the brief observations they managed to get of us, and they waited. They have been preparing for this moment every single day since."

The silence around the council chamber was deafening. "That's... that's not possible," someone said, although Tomeks wasn't sure who. Like everyone else, his eyes were on the picture. "We would have detected them long before they detected us."

"And yet, we didn't, and they have this. Which means at least one of two possibilities is true. Either they have managed to adapt primitive technology that we wouldn't detect to the point that it can be used to spy on us, or..."

"Or what?" Someone else asked after a long pause.

"Or they have more advanced technology than we think, and they are just very good at hiding it." The implication seemed to hit the council like a physical blow. The Empire had always expanded in this manner, bringing massively more advanced technology to bear and then subjugating a race based on the threat of its use. On the comparatively few occasions when force had been required, the Empire had won simply by using their technology against a species that couldn't counter it. There were no tactics, no strategy, not even much in the way of battle experience. Just the use of overwhelming force and the battle was over, often in a matter of hours. The offending species would then be enslaved, separated, and their example used against the next planet.

But it was becoming increasingly clear that this approach wouldn't work on the humans, if anything, it would play straight into their hands.

"What are you saying?" General Mar'tol finally asked after an agonizingly long pause.

"I'm saying," Tomeks took a deep breath, "That if we go to war against the humans, we won't just be fighting against a primitive species. We would be going to war against a race that has been practicing and preparing for this moment since their earliest ancestors first looked to the stars, a race that lives and breathes for war, a race that uses conflict as its primary means of advancement, a race," his eyes went around the room again, "who would treat a war with us like sport. They are not afraid of us; they want us to attack; they want to show us what they can do..."

"Are you seriously suggesting that the Empire would be unable to absorb these primitives at all?" The second General scoffed, "Either peacefully or through conquest??

"I'm suggesting, General..." Tomeks answered carefully, "...that the humans will never be absorbed peacefully, and if we tried to force the issue, they would enjoy resisting."

"Nonsense!" General Mar'tol burst from his seat, pounding his clenched claws against its surface. "We are the Empire! No primitive species, no matter how warlike they claim to be, can hope to stand against us, even if they have managed to spy on us like cowards for fifty years! Have they indicated their intention to surrender and accept Galactic rule?" He asked Tomeks.

The Galactic Lord had been afraid of this. The Empire was nothing without its sense of identity, and a cornerstone of that identity was its pride. A thousand worlds had succumbed to its might, and humanity, with its primitive, ape-like warrior race, would be no exception. If they tried to be, an example would be made of them...

Or at least that was the wisdom of the General, a sentiment that seemed to be echoed by a few of the nodding heads around the table.

"No, General, they have not."

"Then the next step is to mobilize the military for conquest..." Mar'tol demanded. Tomeks sighed heavily; the council was actually going to advocate for war based entirely on pride and ego. But, what happened next took the Lord completely by surprise. "...However, before we do, it would be reckless to not at least consider the warnings presented here by Lord Tomeks." Tomeks blinked, each of his four eyes after another. His species never was any good at hiding their surprise with facial gestures like that one. "Galactic Lords are tasked with the expansion of our borders; their experience, insight, and advice are invaluable when dealing with new races. So... I propose we test the humans..."